PARTISAN REVIEW
217
of profit-taking. Oldenburg mocks the absurdity of inflated official
rhethoric with
his
grandiose forms. His art resembles giant toys - a
constant reminder of the infantilism of the society in which the artist
is forced to function. The ineffectuality of protest today creates a more
profound crisis than that experienced prior to the present.
Conceptual art aims to deprive the public of art as commodity.
Depriving the parent of the desired object is the typical infantile
ftrategy; and the infantilism of conceptual art should be evident. It is
also a strategy doomed to failure, because it presumes that society is
still acting
in loco parentis
with regard to its wayward artists: that
it in fact feels the absence of the art object as a deprivation. Yet there
is no evidence to cause us to believe art is missed: what
is
missed is
the amusement provided by art.
We are confronted now with artistic attitudes fonnulated not in
terms of the disgust of Brecht, but the disgust of Beckett. In the
world of Dada and Brecht, the world is garbage. But garbage for
an artist like Schwitters is imbued with channing nostalgia - the past
is in pieces, but nevertheless we may still reconstruct the fragments.
In the world of Beckett, the garbage cans of
Endgame
are filled not
with the Merz scraps of dead civilizations, but with empty human
beings. Humanity, not merely its cultural artifacts, has become gar–
bage. This is the deepest pessimism, an eschatalogical view no longer
relieved by the possibilities of millenarian fantasies of redemption.
In these circumstances art is conceived not as a form of protest, but
as a form of pathology.
In this case, the emphasis on the play element, on the ephemeral
as opposed to the experimental, leads to a redefinition of art not as
a specific kind of object but as non-goal-oriented behavior. In these
terms, art is no longer involved with any fixed objective, but with
acting out various antiauthoritarian strategies. New categories of the
forbidden must be located, not in protest against institutions or value
systems, but in terms of overtly pathological behavior. The following
description of a performance of the Viennese artist Hermann Nitch's
Orgies-Mysteries Theatre at The Kitchen last December advertises
the worth of Mr. Nitch's work on the basis that "his abreaction
theatre was cause for trial and prison sentences for offending the
public and for blasphemy." Mr. Nitch, according to his publicist, "is
working with very essential materials, like flesh, and blood and brains.
