Conceptual Mystique in Late Modernity, Part 2, by Adam Lehrer
In the second part of a two part series, Adam Lehrer finds the cultivation mystique in the deliberate shaping of the artist's public facing persona
Alas, it seems clear to me that holding onto cult appeal or anonymity is not the way to actually evoke mystique in the modern world. No, the artist hiding his identity is not the most potent method – the artist creating distance between himself and a PUBLIC identity, or personage, is. The importance of Warhol only grows clearer as the simulacra ceases ever more to have anything in common with what we’d normally associate with reality, whatever the fuck that is. Warhol’s screenprints of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and others never focused on the private lives of these stars, of their REAL identities, but instead remained consumed with their images – the public life of the star IS the star. There’s nothing to puncture in the paintings and excavate the interiority of the subject; no, all the meaning is itself in the construct of “the star”.
“Warhol’s paintings are at odds with the popular mythology according to which a star’s ‘true’ identity lies trapped within a public image,” writes art historian Cécile Whiting. For Warhol, there was no intrigue in “the truth behind the image.” All the truth, instead, is the image. The image is the content. It is the art. Warhol explored this very concept best in the construction of his own public image, creating The Factory and cultivating a band of misfits around him to lend his image the whiff of eccentricity and freedom. The image of the artist IS the artist and the art and the discourse around the art. Never mind the fact that Warhol was actually a Catholic homebody who lived a fastidious lifestyle. It didn’t matter. We believed in Warhol: the mad genius, the artist, the image.
Marshall McLuhan believed that advertising was the greatest art form of the 20th Century, and it’s clear that Warhol largely agreed with him. Because Warhol wasn’t just an artist, but an Ad Man who was able to shape, manipulate, and sell the concept of himself as an artist in the public square. Bowie, of course, followed this path better than anyone in the art world, treating his public persona as a mutable shapeshifter that he personally engineered and reverse engineered over and over: David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke and so forth. We were always less interested in Bowie the private person than in the public projections of Bowie’s versions of himself. “I viewed Bowie, who became one of the foundational creators of performance art, as having taken the next major step past Warhol in art history,” says Camille Paglia, accurately, after the artist’s death.
And as the television age faded and digital media flourished, the creation of mystique would only become more fueled by an artist’s ability to create distance between himself and the public self. Ask yourself: who are the most important artists of the 21st Century? I’ll assume that one of the first names to come to mind would be Kanye West, which of course would be correct. Kanye has been famous for, god knows how fucking long… Since I was a sophomore in high school. 2004. Can you believe that? And back then, as The College Dropout was released and made Kanye an instant super celebrity, I still didn’t quite understand what the big deal was. There was no doubt the man was a rarefied hip-hop hit maker, but the aesthetic of it didn’t quite click with me. It lacked the urban dada collagist aesthetic of Wu Tang and the meditative darkness of Mobb Deep and the sociopathic edgelordery of Geto Boys. Kanye, from my perspective, had more in common with Common or Lupe Fiasco and their uplifting “spiritually conscious” rap. Yuck. The man was indeed a great producer, but it wasn’t my thing. And then, for every year that would follow, Kanye became only more fascinating.
“George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” The interruption of Taylor Swift’s MTV acceptance speech. Disorienting, stream of consciousness interviews. Power struggles with corporate behemoths from Nike to Adidas. The creation of a luxury sportswear and sneaker line once estimated to be worth billions of dollars. The ambition and confidence of Kanye is astounding; it’s like the man has a supernatural ability to make his own dreams come true. In an era when celebrities were protected beneath entire infrastructures of loyal agents and publicists, Kanye offered up his celebrity like a sacrifice on the alter.
The albums got weirder, and weirder. It seemed a cultural provocateur with this kind of universally recognizable platform was a truly contemporary prospect, and it only got more exciting as Kanye’s ambition broadened and his contempt hardened. Kanye developed an uncanny understanding of the power of his own fame, and increasingly he seemed to treat his own fame and massive cultural appeal as the raw material of his own conceptual art practice. With each album came a new version of Kanye the spectacle. With each cycle of his work this public facing Kanye would challenge the hierarchy of the culture industries ever more.
My understanding of Kanye’s genius was solidified with the release of 808z and Heartbreaks, which saw the artist resorting to the innovative use of auto-tuner to transform his tone deaf singing voice into an instrument capable of expressing the deep mourning and regret he felt after the passing of his mother Donda and replacing the high-fi pop rap production of earlier albums with crackling synths and lush atmospheres that recall Ultravox, This Mortal Coil and even Death in June more than they do the popular rap of that moment. The fact that 808z became the most influential album on the 2010s rap and RandB that followed, from Drake to Future, is only further evidence of Kanye’s gifts.
Kanye used the following album, 2011’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, to remind people that he was the greatest living producer of popular music. This cultivated good will that he would, fascinatingly, disrupt entirely with 2013’s masterful Yeezus – the moment that Kanye would start to more consciously play with his public fame as a conceptual art practice.
“I AM A GOD,” declared Kanye on that album. Predictably, Christians and haters alike took issue with the megalomania, but the artist’s egotistic declaration was entirely accurate. In the 2010s, the internet WAS religion. It still is. And Kanye, as a celebrity with a supernatural ability to generate headlines and command the attention of the algorithm, is a god of that religion. It was also during this phase of Kanye’s career that the artist took a more oppositional stance against the culture. Angered by his work in the fashion industry in which he found himself perpetually denied proper roles in design even when brands were all too happy to use his name and ideas to sell product, he started aiming his schizoid logic and pseudo philosophical musings at the hypocrisies of industry.
“I told you who I thought I was,” said Kanye to Zane Lowe. “A GOD!”
With every year, Kanye’s statements and antics became more and more unhinged until he became nothing less than a kind of super famous body without organs. He married and started a family with the world’s most famous reality star. He had a pill addled nervous breakdown and publicly struggled against handlers over medicating him. He, when no other artist in the world would, publicly supported Donald Trump. He ran for fucking president. And finally, this year, he leaned publicly into JQ conspiracy, aiming his anger and contempt at Jewish people and their perceived stranglehold over industry. The man who achieved everything was now torching all that he’d built, all for the sake of discourse and art. Many think Kanye has actually gone insane, but I know the truth: all great conceptual artists are a little insane, but know how to weaponize their madness. Kanye knows what he’s doing every step of the way. Consider the way that he wears masks in interviews, almost as if consciously cuing conspiracy theorists to wonder if it’s really him speaking. Kanye is our Artaud, mad and brilliant, but on a scale of global recognition. It’s amazing. Watch the Alex Jones interview again. Over and over, Jones and his low IQ rightoid co-hosts continuously try to get Kanye to be their monkey and espouse their talking points: “This isn’t antisemitism or racism,” says Ali Alexander. “It’s about free speech.”
“I like Nazis though,” says Kanye, nonchalantly.
Kanye’s triggering declaration of appreciation for the Nazis is a multi-level performance. On one hand, he refuses to be the black dude right wing spokesman that these guys are desperate for him to be (proving that right wingers are as brainwashed by liberal race politics as anyone else is.) Furthermore, he expresses real frustration with the limitations of his platform and those who impose those limitations, forcing a universal conversation around a topic that would otherwise be left forever unstated. Finally, Kanye’s real genius is in presenting a star of his titanic stature — he is one of the most famous artists in the history of the world — that is so willing to cross the threshold of taboo. Kanye treats his celebrity as a paintbrush, if not a weapon, to create a spectacle that drives and shapes the discourse. His techniques are not too far off from those of Vito Acconci or Chris Burden who disrupted the banality of life through interjections of performance. He is also clearly influenced by Andy Kaufman — Kanye has even expressed appreciation of the late comic and performance artist on several occasions — in the way he wields his celebrity as a bomb from which he can detonate the walls that line the spectacle. The difference is the Internet, which allows Kanye to reverberate throughout the entire world at the speed of data. You see, Kanye doesn’t need anonymity to cultivate mystique; on the contrary, it is Kanye’s recognition of the power of his fame from which he creates a new kind of mystique.
David Lynch, who has over the course of the 21st Century made one of its best films in Mulholland Dr. and one of the most astoundingly vast works of moving image art all together in Twin Peaks: The Return, deliberately cultivates a persona of Midwestern affability and almost dopey charm that directly contradicts the surreal and expressive darkness of his art, only heightening pop cultural intrigue around his work. Lynch often gives very banal, almost naive sounding answers to questions directed at him. When asked about titling Mulholland Dr, Lynch said: “It was just those words: ‘Mulholland Drive’. When you say some words, pictures form.”
Lynch’s easygoing, American grandpa demeanor is, of course, a smokescreen. It cultivates the idea that he’s just a sincere man tapping into a shallow reservoir of feeling. But the reality is that Lynch is a genius and understands the modern world in a manner that is vast and specific. Lynch’s role as FBI bureau chief Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks is a mirror of his role as an artist: a simple man wading through darkness and looking for some semblance of light. Lynch’s work often addresses the modern world in ways that critics often miss. The Return, for all its ambiguity and surrealism, is clearly dealing with the effect of technology and postmodernity on the small town. It is about the death of a classic idea of America: the 1950s, community, family, the white picket fence. The image of America that we still had, however occulted, as late as when I was born in the 1980s. In the show, Twin Peaks no longer exists. The town and those like it were once the save havens from the encroaching processes of postmodernity – respites from the ugliness of digital singularity where warmth, neighborliness, love and coffee are still valued. In The Return, however, there is no Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is but one location against many others: Vegas, New York, New Mexico, and otherwise. Lynch’s persona then is an act of conceptual evasion from which the artist can further obfuscate critical narratives and dialogues surrounding him. By being so utterly NORMAL, he makes his art all the more complex and, yes, mysterious. He indeed performs the Americana in his public life that his art mourns the death of.
Beginning with 2005’s Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis has written himself into his novels as their protagonist. The characters he creates are always versions of himself that, while similar to the writer in question, differ in specific ways, almost as if Bret is using the novel as ways to imagine other ways in which his life could have played out. In Lunar Park, for instance, Bret is not an aging gay man but instead married to a woman and raising two children. The story becomes a vintage Stephen King ghost story but ultimately functions as a metafiction in which Bret explores his own issues with his own father and fatherhood as a concept by trying to recreate the failures of his own father through the projection of himself in the book. It’s rather fascinating.
Bret’s new novel, The Shards, stretches this concept further. This book finds Bret looking back on his senior year of high school, when he allegedly became convinced that a classmate of his, Robert Mallory, was a serial killer. The Trawler. Now, of course we know on some level intuitively that this is a highly fictionalized account of the artist’s youth, but sometimes it’s hard to say. Even more brilliantly, Ellis annotated the book as he wrote it for paying patrons of his popular podcast. So, we are listening to Bret read this book in a manner that sounds like a guy simply recounting memories. The effect was disorienting, haunting, and rather brilliant. Here, we have a writer using himself, or what can best be described as “the meme” of his self, to further mythologize the arc and depth of his career. Without his towering infamy and long literary renown, it wouldn’t work. But, the reality is: the name “Bret Easton Ellis” has a meaning and carries baggage. As he’s gotten older, Ellis seems more fascinating in manipulating that baggage to position his own persona in a liminal space between fact and fiction. 40 years into his career, he’s one of the few remaining major literary figures with pop cultural appeal.
Even on a smaller scale, there are visual artists playing around with this kind of approach. The Berlin-based, Swiss conceptual artist Julian-Jakob Kneer, for instance, often projects his public self as a kind of evil doppelgänger. It is still him. His name is attached to the work, but still there are shrouds of mystery that surround him which he infuses with various pop culture and celebrity mythos to intensify the otherwise singular allure of an artwork with the multitudes of digital and celebrity culture. In a 2022 exhibition at Blue Velvet Projects in Switzerland, Shooting Star, Kneer meta-fictionally re-imagines himself as a faceless culture vulture, using the show’s press release to weave an elaborate narrative about this digital projection of his subjectivity.
Tabloids and celebrity culture were his only natural food. This little hobby was time consuming. Sometimes, he loved to play the bogeyman-twin in Placebo outfits. Demi, Kanye, Hailey or the video-diary of Ricardo Lopez filming himself in his room, obese and haggard, selfhating to the point of suicide and preparing an acid explosive for Bjork’s face constituted his notable video-regime.
The exhibition itself creates a space that recalls the black lodge of Twin Peaks: curtains and mirrors. The in-between space, performance to performance. Perhaps Kneer picked up on the arguable subtext of Twin Peaks: a show that has been argued to be a television series about the corrosive effects of television itself. I believe that Kneer is similarly exploring the corrosive effects of an entertainment obsessed, digitally propelled society on the concept of the artist. But he doesn’t wince in the face of this prospect, he leans into it. He recognizes the bare reality of our social relations and what mediates them and becomes a kind of Situationist psychogeographer of digital tabloid media. This kind of practice necessitates a public image, but Kneer’s artistic value is in the perverting of that image. When he wears a mask — sometimes it’s a Joker mask sometimes it’s an unsettlingly banal skin shield or whatever (Julian wears a mask so often that when we finally met in person after talking online for years, I didn’t even know who he was until he said so) — he isn’t concealing his identity, but shaping the ways in which we perceive that identity. Perhaps because of all of this, Kneer is one of the contemporary artists who I find myself most enthusiastically engaged with. It’s utterly contemporary.
And this is why I operate beneath the banner of the Counter-Agency of the Avant-Garde. It would be dishonest for me to downplay the importance that my digital avatar has held in giving me my platform as an artist, but I do remain conscious about this kind of culture’s limitations. But by working beneath the banner of a conceptual thesis or a mission, if you will, I am able to imbue my work with a kind of allure or cohesive suggestive meaning. I have no interest in my own anonymity, I’m far too narcissistic to not take credit for the things I’ve said and created. I do, however, stress the need to create a distance between the “true” self, and the self that we project into the mainframe of the culture. That self is “you,” of course, it is your subjectivity. But it is the “you” shaped and manipulated by that subjectivity. If you can control the meaning of your public image to any degree, then you have taken some measure of control back over your art in a culture that is otherwise pulverized by chaos and confusion. By absorbing fiction into your truth, you have cultivated a mystique. Use it, and use it wisely.
ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. “Marilyn Monroe” by Warhol
2. Kanye West at DONDA release
3. David Lynch and Miguel Ferrer in Twin Peaks: The Return
4. Bret Easton Ellis
5. Art by Julian-Jakob Kneer
Oh hell yes. Fucking amazing piece of writing.