I.D.E.A.
Informed Discussion Engagement Area

From time to time, the New Art Examiner gets a piece that is not strictly a review. This forum allows for an individual author to expound on a certain topic that is related to the visual arts without the constraint of a formal article or review.

A few weeks before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the hosts of the Red Scare podcast wanted the audience at the School of Visual Arts Theatre in Manhattan to know that they were drunk.

Anna Khachiyan explained why she and her co-host, Dasha Nekrasova, were qualified to comment on contemporary art. “As art hoes, you’re in touch with artists. You’re in touch with collectors, art handlers,” she said.

        The duo had joined art critic Dean Kissick to discuss his Harper’s Magazine essay, “The Painted Protest.” Its title recalled Tom Wolfe’s 1975 book savaging the art critics of his day, “The Painted Word,” itself excerpted in Harper’s.

        While Wolfe took aim at an establishment top-heavy with theory at the expense of art, Kissick speaks into a void of serious experimental thought. In his telling, contemporary art—art delivered from modernism into the enchanted labyrinth of postmodernism—had reached a cul-de-sac. What seemed like an endless universe of possibilities had shrunk to tedious, identity-driven narratives, motivated by various flavors of indigenous nostalgia, dully recapitulated by descriptions on the gallery wall.

        For Kissick, a few creators—Rember Yahuarcani and Susanne Wenger—had blown the windows off with new, hybrid forms—showed you the stars again. Most, though, stuck to the script. “I have seen too many shows which have the same basic premise,” he told the Red Scare girls. “It doesn’t feel that urgent”—Dasha took drags off her vape.

        I showed up minutes before the panel started, hustling up Eighth Avenue from Penn Station. New York is the best, perhaps the only place offline where I could assess the “Art Right,” first at the SVA Theatre, and later at the National Futurist Party in Brooklyn.

        On the SVA Theatre stage, there was a lot more provocation than thoroughgoing right-wing sentiment or, for Kissick, what seemed to be the real enemy—formal conservatism.

        Anna of the Red Scare girls pushed back against the claim that social justice ideology has stultified art, linking it instead to competition on the Internet and social media.

        The art world, Kissick said, is no longer a source of guiding narratives; today it’s “downstream of Internet discourse” on social justice. He comes close to calling Louis Fratino kitsch. He reassures his audience that no great white male artists are waiting in the wings.

        Kissick’s salvos against nostalgia seem rather wedded to his own nostalgia, though not for some variant of western traditionalism or high modernist discipline. He misses the contemporary scene of fifteen years ago—a freer and easier postmodernism, too inventive to settle for pastiche, too expansive and questioning for solemn adherence to progressive verities.

        It’s of a piece with the vision of architect Robert Venturi, for whom “messy vitality” bested “obvious unity.” “Everywhere, except in architecture, complexity and contradiction have been acknowledged,” Venturi wrote in 1966, setting himself against Mies van der Rohe and other high priests of architectural modernism.

        In 1970s Las Vegas, spiritual antecedent to the grotesquely commercial, dopamine-inflaming Internet of today, he found vitality in what he called an “architecture of inclusion.” Visually discordant signs and casinos hang together in an order embracing seeming opposites—”continuity and discontinuity, going and stopping, clarity and ambiguity, cooperation and competition, the community and rugged individualism.”

        Venturi contrasts the radical break—Le Corbusier’s Paris Plan, or what he doesn’t cite, the Italian city of Latina, created by the fascists after they drained the Pontine Marshes—with his “more tolerant way” to architectural revolution—“to question how we look at things.”

        The Harper’s talk opened with an AI-generated song about Kissick: mildly funny, postmodern play, a rhizome of the Internet that found its way to the stage. Another, slightly edgy choice for the listener to “dirtbag left” podcasts; another tendency to be tolerated, Karl Popper’s paradox under no great strain.

*****

        Through the cloud of sidewalk cigarette smoke, one train, then another, then a short night walk to an undisclosed location in Brooklyn. The kids, and many few middle-aged adults, were playing with ideas.

        Deep inside a church, underneath a balustrade, Rachel Haywire was hosting the National Futurist Party’s Manifesto Salon. It doubled as the pre-launch party for Haywire’s new Chelsea art gallery, Fiume—” a Futurist space heralding in a new rising class of artists for the regime ahead.”

        Before I showed up, a Fiume artist, Canadian painter and X shit-poster Giovanni Pennachietti, delivered remarks by video, the projector magnifying his fez to the size of a clerestory window.

        Drinks, food, a few dozen people. More drinks meant more courage to read manifestos from the balustrade, sometimes in pinched tones, at other times in bursts of thunder. On average, the crowd was further to the right than the audience at the SVA Theatre, or perhaps just less beholden to residual late-20^th-century pieties. Less white, more autistic; still, not so far removed from the Red Scare universe.

        Writer Nic Dolinger declaimed humorously on a few themes, including the annexation of Greenland. He compared the party to an early punk show where everyone who attended went on to found a band.

        If there’s visceral and deeply felt nostalgia in this world, it’s for an older era of right-wing creativity online. On a more conceptual and theoretical level, there’s a search for grounding in early twentieth century modernism.

        In 1919, the eponymous Fiume was occupied in 1919 by a playwright, poet, and aristocratic aviator, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who influenced both Benito Mussolini and esotericist Julius Evola, who looked down on fascism from the right. That same year, Filippo Marinetti, creator of the Futurist Manifesto, co-authored the Fascist Manifesto.

        Irony and ideological play—the things that separate shit-posters, and shit-posting politicians, from their deadly earnest victims—dominated the atmosphere. Someone joining from afar read the Dadaist Manifesto, a product of the Left and of the same postwar turbulence that yielded fascism; at one point, the screen froze up. Another person delivered a Franz von Papen speech critical of national socialism in an over-the-top, Bavarian beer hall mode. Someone told me they voted for Harris.

        One man read from the Book of Jeremiah, telling the audience it was the only manifesto they’d ever need. In that house of worship on that night, the appeal felt out of place, though not the less true or false.

        All in all, there was more of Venturi than van der Rohe under the balustrade—fitting for a scene that can only be understood after too many hours online, where all forms flirt with hybridity, where exhaustion with the purported end of history and genuine political convictions bleed in and out of each other, where the action still happens, where day never breaks.

        And so, in the half-drunk afterglow on my slow train home, the stakes still seemed too low.

        Does anyone really want to hoist themselves out of the warm bath: choice, optionality, a free and unmistakably postmodern marketplace of radical positions? Fiume, now Croatia’s Rijeka, is losing people; Vegas, founded in a desert and then super-charged by gangsters, is still growing.

        Does it feel urgent?

        The scene, such as it is, may be most comfortable as a social club, alternately fighting, and thriving on, real or imagined progressive consternation, while insulating itself from less sophisticated fellow travelers. Elsewhere online, neoliberal kitsch and right-wing “slopulism” may continue to suppurate from their respective cultural orifices. The Red Scare vocal fry may continue to issue from laptop speakers. Nothing may ever happen, at least anytime soon.

        Some things could change. The visual artists and writers could cultivate more and better critics, though the reflexive and unflinching pugnacity of message board culture has seeded healthy instincts in some. At any rate, the best know that solemn, ultra-didactic works foreclose possibilities beyond themselves.

        Nothing ever happens until it does.

        In New York, nerve center of the present order, whatever’s happening in small and scattered circles feeds an intuition.

        Only something on the right—something apart from self-conscious conservatism and, if not humorless, fully redeemed from irony—stands a chance of penetrating the labyrinth.

        It might or might not be a worthy goal. It might show you the stars, or maybe the blazing sun.

“Mist and dreams / play around us, until the beloved returns and charges us with life and spirit.”

Erik Orup is a writer. He is extremely online.