Sampling the globe

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Daniel Birnbaum

In an old issue of October that I happen to find on the shelves of About Cafe, Hal Foster argues that we can properly understand the "Duchamp effect" only in terms of the temporality of trauma. Avant-garde art, and not only that of Duchamp, was never historically effective or fully significant in its initial incarnation, says Foster, because it constituted a traumatic break with the past and, as trauma, can be comprehended only through repetition and delay. Freud described this temporal phenomenon as Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action. The traumatic event is never perceived as present, as something happening right now, but registered only after the fact, according to a rule of necessary delay. But event if we accept this analysis of certain psychopathological structures, what gives us the right to apply it to collective developments such as art movements--specifically, to the recent vicissitudes of the avant-garde? Foster poses this very question but then throws his hands up: Since "this analogy to the individual subject is all but structural to historical studies," he concedes, shouldn't we at least make sure we use the most sophisticated theory of the mind available? That to him means a Freudian--or, perhaps, Lacanian--theory of the subject as characterized by the essential nonidentity of traumatic temporality, where "before and after, cause and effect, origin and repetition" are overturned. And while we may want to reject the notion of a collective historical subject, we all know that the temporality of art isn't linear but characterized by precisely these sorts of repetitions and syncopations, detours, and delays. Sometimes the real revolutions in art remain invisible until they are long over, and the subterranean shock waves can travel for generations.

"If I'd gone ahead and died ten years ago, I'd probably be a cult figure today," reads the first sentence of Warhol's POPism. In a world where surface is the only thing that matters, even death is reduced to the level of a glamour effect or a celebrity stunt. Warhol's wish to be reincarnated as a jewel on Liz Taylor's finger is pretty far from the idea of the return of the Real (where the real is understood as traumatic). So is Warhol all about surface? Should his "There's nothing behind it" be taken seriously, or, on the contrary, are his works dark political allegories of American culture, and, as such, do they really enact a kind of engaged realism? In one of the most sophisticated essays on Warhol I know of, Foster answers: both. In "The Return of the Real" (1996) he argues that Warhol's "Death in America" series of the mid-'60s should be read as both simulacral and referential, both complacent and critical. Again, the key concept is that of the trauma. Warhol's art is a kind of traumatic realism, and his cult of the machine, his compulsion for repetition, and his cultivation of meaningless monotony are sure signs that the subject here in question is in a state of shock. In Lacanian theory there are two kinds of repetition: the return on the level of the symptom and the return of the traumatic Real itself. In Warhol's own view, the very idea of a symptom is suspect since it depends on a deeper realm hidden beneath the surface of the visible. Everything's visible, Warhol would have insisted; behind this shining surface of glamorous effects lies ... nothing.