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Making difference: Homi K. Bhabha on the legacy of the culture wars - Writing the '80s
ArtForum, April, 2003
"Catch the spirit of the decade?" she said. "Like how?"
"Maybe," I urged her, pouring some fizzy water, "just think back..."
At first it was easy. Dates. Times. Places. Facts. The whole Afghanistan business started with the Soviet invasion in December and Zbigniew Brzezinski exhorting the mujahideen in the early 'Sos to fight back in the name of their God. The space shuttle Columbia was launched in '81 followed some years later by the Challenger disaster--shades of our times. Qaddafi was the much feared terrorist czar of those days, the pre-Sadaam on everybody's wanted list. In presidential parlance, we had much to fear from the "evil empire" (1983) rather than the "axis of evil" (2002). And, on the domestic front, the meteoric rise in the ownership of telephone answering machines (from 2 percent of the American population in '8o to 2.5 percent in '89) did much more to affirm Baudrillard's reflections on the simulacral surfaces of postmodern life than the weighty scribes who popularized prosthetic personhood in the pages of Artforum.
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"Bottled water took off like crazy in the early '80s," she said, high on the game of guessing, her face distorted in the soft curves of the Perrier flask (the Absolut icon of the '80s), her aquatic voice rising from behind the vitrine as if she were lip-synching (an '8os fad) a refrain that came from far away and long ago... "And remember all that 'gaze' stuff? The male gaze...and the gaze of the Other...until we were all eyeless in Gaza..." We went back and forth a little on the importance (and import) of French thought--Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan, Foucault--crossing the Atlantic like a message in a bottle (hermetic, hieratic) until the genie of critical theory escaped into the very air itself and was reborn as "cultural studies," "theory," "media studies." Mixed messages as macaronic as Barthesian mythologies. Which led us to observe that while wine and milk were, to Barthes, national totems, he was all but silent on water, the medium of illusion and transition. Deceptively transparent, almost glassy, water d istorts the senses; it is the source of life and succor, but it is also the destructive element that throws you off balance. Water suspends reality. There was definitely something about Perrier.
And then it came to her like a flash. "People didn't drink water-they drank Perrier." Water diviner. It was the label that signified the sign of the times, as Tom Wolfe had so ably detected in Bonfire of the Vanities, that encyclopedia of an age of simulacral futures and bonds and derivatives that "insulated" (Wolfe's word) the Masters of the Universe from the stenches and "trenches of the urban wars": "himself, with his noble head, his Yale chin, his big frame, and his $1,800 British suit, the angel's father, a man of parts." And lables--Jeff Koons's Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-Off), 1985 comes immediately to mind-were also the legends that some in the art world lived by:
Klaus Otmann: How do you see advertisement?
Koons: It's basically the medium that defines people's perceptions of the world, of life itself, how to interact with others. The media defines reality. Just yesterday we met some friends. We were celebrating and I stated to them: "Here's to good friends!" It was like living in an ad. It was wonderful, a wonderful moment. We were right there living in the reality of our media.'
Recalling the '8os brings another kind of labeling to mind. It is the decade most readily tagged with terms associated with the culture wars-political correctness, the politics of identity, the postmodern, the postcolonial. The Eighties Club, a website devoted to the period, remembers only too well that "conservatives felt the nation had veered too far left since the '60s and hoped that Reagan's election heralded their victory in the 'culture wars.' Many were disappointed with the results by the decade's end." The culture wars were a consequence of the conservative fear that the liberal left had staged a bloodless coup on campuses, in the media, and in the art world. In The Closing of the American Mind (1987) Allan Bloom attacked the "spiritual detumescence" of the Academy populated by students and professors enslaved to sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll; Roger Kimball took on the "tenured radicals" while Hilton Kramer punctured public intellectuals, and between them this redoubtable duo tilted at the winds of change with such regularity that despite their healthy provocation they were in danger of sounding like windbags of woe. But there was a gale blowing in the direction of "differences," and the museum and the art world were protagonists in this cultural display: "Difference: On Representation and Sexuality" (1984-85) and "The Decade Show" (1990) in New York, "Magiciens de la Terre" (1989) in Paris, and "America: Bride of the Sun" (1992) in Antwerp were only the most prominent exhibitions born of this impulse. To interrogate "identity" rather than assert its inviolability represented the best version of this minoritarian move. Identity art could, of course, be dogmatic and declarative in a way that was too desperate to become truly resonant. But the desire to open up issues of "subjectivity" as they were expressed in the pluralist political culture of the '80s also gave rise to enigmatic and exploratory artistic practices. Adrian Piper, for example, was famously intolerant of stereotypical images even when thei r content was politically progressive, because they often led to identitarian assertions of nationalism and separatism. Anish Kapoor rejected images altogether in favor of an elusive quest for sculptural transformations that delved deep into the cultural traditions of the "void"--sacred and secular--to rise with new insights on the profound surfaces of perception and personhood. And a bit later, Damien Hirst's early vitrine pieces--sharks and sheep pickled in formaldehyde--turned a demonic eye on the "Englishness" of still-life traditions, while also riffing on the iconic, allegorical works of the Pre-Raphaelites (e.g., William Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat, 1854-56). What was ignored in the ire of the culture wars has, on reflection, become its major contribution: a concept of cultural community based on shared and negotiated affiliations.
