Kanye, Leos, And A New Pop Cultural Situationism (?), Part 1, by Adam Lehrer
Adam Lehrer critiques Kanye West's DONDA and Leos Carax's Annette, and wonders aloud if they are embodying of a new Situationism.
Our central idea is that of the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality – Guy Debord
I told you who I thought I was: A GOD – Kanye West
Cinema is a territory. It exists outside of movies. It’s a place I live in. It’s a way of seeings things, of experiencing life – Leos Carax
While I could exhaust myself listing out the various films, records, shows, paintings, sculptures, and otherwise that prove exceptions to a general rule, I think we can agree that art production has been depressingly unmoving for a long time. Almost out of habit, I still fill my skull with countless new cultural products, but something about the way that art is dispersed (rapidly, instantaneously, omnipotently) dilutes my enthusiasm. Nothing sticks. I may have listened to a new album yesterday that I loved (which I did, in fact, it was the new record The Divine Punishment by the freaked out Canadian black/death metal band Antediluvian, a wild ride), but I feel no compulsion to listen nor lingering attachment to it today. This is, undoubtedly, an entirely different cultural engagement than that which I demonstrated as a younger man. My enthusiasm for art was boundless then – when I became attached to a work of culture, it was to a near obsessive degree. When I first watched Twin Peaks, for instance, it was within a month that I had bought the DVD for each film that David Lynch had ever made. When I discovered the writing of Norman Mailer, I spent months devouring everything the great man had ever put to page. Art, for better or worse, had the capacity to change me. I long for that feeling, but it’s largely lost to me now.
I don’t like referencing Adorno (the negative dialectic is just too much of a bummer and never made much sense to me) but here I have to concede that his and Horkeimer’s Culture Industry thesis has proven partially prophetic as we’ve moved through the 21st Century. “The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims.” But what Adorno failed to predict was that it wouldn’t just be “mass culture” that would have the effect of hypnotizing the masses into complacency (he did, after all, make clear delineation between “good” and “bad” art), turning them into vapid, digital lotus eating zombies, but that avant-garde cultural products would also be reduced to disposable rubble by the social processes from which they now emerge. It’s something to do with the sheer volume of culture produced, you see? To be engaged with literature, art, music, film or otherwise in 2021 is to be so exhausted by it all that even the most interesting works of art fail to register as personally meaningful for any length of time. By the time that I’ve digested and come to admire, say, a work of music, there have already been 10 new albums sent to me by Apple Music and Bandcamp. In contrast to previous eras up until the end of the 20th Century, it’s nigh impossible to identify a historical mood in our culture. History, or even a temporal signature, has disappeared. For two decades, we’ve been absent a recognizable historical aesthetic or atmosphere. Everything is happening at the same time. It’s more than just hauntology or the “temporal loop” of cultural stagnation. It’s an amorphous blob of stuff that we are too depressed, too alienated, and too enraged to even engage with. Everything is nothing. We live in a void that nevertheless suffocates – like coach class on a sold-out Southwest airline flight. There’s no leg room. There’s no space to breathe, let alone fall in love with a work of art.
So what to do when every work of art, good or not, is liquidated into a black ocean of apathy and stillness? Debord and his cohort in the Situationists, of course, tried to tell us decades ago that art could no longer have meaning in a society of capital accumulation so immense that it becomes an image. The only creative act then, according to Debord and his crew, is in the construction of situations that would lead to what he called a “unitary urbanism”: “It must include the creation of new forms and the détournement of previous forms of architecture, urbanism, poetry and cinema,” writes Debord. “But it can no longer correspond to any of the traditional aesthetic categories.”
Setting aside Debord and the Situationists’ concerns with using the situation as a way of manifesting a revolutionary class consciousness (given that that is surely not the goal of either of the artists I’m about to mention), it’s interesting to me that Debord’s thesis of the situation holds more weight now, in liquid society, than it did in either the postmodernism from which Baudrillard theorized “the simulacra” (in 1981) or the late modernism from which Debord theorized “the spectacle” (in 1967). It seems that our political economy’s social relations have evolved to a state of contradiction and pandemonium beyond that of the simulacra (and WAY beyond that of the spectacle) — or “the replacing of truth and meaning with “the truth” of signs and symbols — and into something even more despairingly puzzling and malevolent [insert the self-disemboweling fox that Willem Dafoe comes across in the woods in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: “Chaos Reigns”]. Instead, we now continuously deconstruct and recode those signs in real time, and the simulation of reality that emerges from the process never remains fixed enough to understand it as such. We are inside the fission of the atom, and all culture is disintegrated when subsumed beneath its heat blast. Shape is reduced to formless matter, color becomes grey scale. This chaotic society produces so much art, ideas, and products, and yet none of it seems to stand out as singular or important. Everything, tragically, is nothing.
Two recent art works, or perhaps I should refer to them as “events,” were injected into the public consciousness over the last two months. They are, ironically, both deeply flawed works of art. I am referring to Kanye West’s new record DONDA and Leos Carax’s new musical tragicomic film Annette. Intriguingly, when I apply the full extent of my critical rigor to the bare creative products themselves, I would rank Kanye’s record and Leos’ movie amongst the worst projects of both of the great artists’ careers. There is, undoubtedly, seismic ambition in both of these projects. But ambition, like a wormhole, can so often absorb the faculties we need as artists to edit our work and make the creative decisions that are necessary to temper our worst tendencies. For better or for worse, it appears that both Leos and Kanye have both either lost those faculties, or perhaps purposefully shed them in favor of finding a new creative disposition that possibly can better address the contradictions of the culture we inhabit. But taking the place of their once obsessive focus is a freewheeling, experimental, and joyous desire to disrupt the pop cultural paradigm. Leos and Kanye have attempted to create new forms that can emerge from the simulation of life as projected by mass media, that make use of various traditional aesthetic forms while simultaneously attempting (and possibly succeeding at) to transcend those forms. Leos and Kanye are no less interested in the creation of art products than they are in the construction of situations.
READ PART 2 HERE
IMAGES:
1. Guy Debord
2. Norman Mailer
3. Theodor Adorno
4. Collage by Debord
5. film still from Antichrist
6. Leos Carax
7. Kanye West