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A lot of art these days seems allegorical, involving fragmentary or elliptical narratives and suggestions of metaphoric and metonymic reference (often relating to youth cultures, mass media and/or Modern, conceptual and abject art histories). These allegorical tendencies function differently than the ones discussed by Craig Owens in his essay The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism of 1980.(1) Artists currently form practices after the contestation of institutional adherence to the various concerns of critical theories. They are navigating in a squall of re-evaluative (and often ambiguous) directives.
Perhaps it is worthwhile to briefly consider historical uses of allegory in order to differentiate the present situation from previous ones. Allegory has been used as a means of sustaining the institutional markers of societal belief when the literal import of their systems of representation have been discredited (consider, for instance, the reading of a religious text as historical record being eclipsed by a reading of the text as parable). It has also been employed as a means of rarification in the accessibility and comprehension of bases of knowledge. Allegorical painting after the advent of the mercantile classes in Western Europe attests to this, as do the various narrative strategies of advertising and publicity that continue to develop in their sophistication to this day. Postmodern allegoricising, as described by Owens, seems preoccupied with revealing an entropic state of collapse rather than a recuperation of power relations as they are cited in the construction of meaning and the dissemination of knowledge. There is a questioning of the idea of reference.
For Owens the allegorical reveals what is lacking or has been lost by pointing to its absence. Its model is that of the palimpsest. This model consistently adheres to Jacques Derrida’s notion of differance. A search for an originary meaning (being basely equivalent to what Edmund Husserl calls the essence of a thing) is carried out through a pursuit of its trace in other things (different things) creating a constant state of deferral. A typically postmodern way of manifesting this in an artwork is through the appropriation, recombination and subsequent fragmentation of pre-existing signifiers. Determinations of narrative meaning are contained within states of instability or unraveling.
There is a cultural turn still playing itself out that makes Owens’ prescriptive ideas about allegory seem in some ways unapplicable to the art of the present. The relevance of Hal Foster’s assertion that the allegorical impulse Owens writes about becomes "conventionalist" by the mid-1980s (a mannerist trope and commodity fetish) is also displaced by this change.(2) The ideologically critical, neo-avant gardist ambitions often associated with the journal October have been repeatedly posited as an institutionally entrenched, authoritatively parental force to be reconsidered, modified, challenged, escaped from or usurped. Locally this phenomenon may be familiar in relation to artists, critics and curators motivated by a desire to generate an identity constructed in part by a kind of generational succession (particularly in relation to Vancouver’s "photo-conceptual school") during the 1990s.
This situation might be considered an allegorical process in and of itself—piling up ruination and loss as identities and motivations are reconstructed, covered over or overlapped. But to do so is at odds with an avoidance of critical theory as a means of inquiry—an avoidance prevalent since the 1990s. In some respects the 6: New Vancouver Modern exhibition held at the Belkin gallery in 1998 serves as an example of this. In the show’s catalogue Patrik Andersson and Shannon Oksanen explain:
In Vancouver, as in other major centers, it is becoming increasingly apparent that a new generation of artists has emerged carrying with it a distinctly new look. The artists presented in "6: New Vancouver Modern" exhibit a social and aesthetic attitude that refuses to put on the straight jacket provided by academicized criticality Instead, there is a tendency to go beyond a normalized moral strenuousness (3)
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A year earlier, John Roberts writes about new British artists in a manner which seems to mirror their sentiments:
In the hands of some, the dumb routines, behaving badly and cheesiness have a specific aim: to unsettle the bureaucratic smoothness of critical postmodernism, particularly now that it has become the official ideology of our wider digital culture. (4)
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Or Gallery curator Reid Shier has recently explained what the previous two texts infer in their order of publication and similar sentiments:
The artists in "6" . . . taking their cues from Los Angeles and London, imagined new perspectives on what it meant to live in Vancouver while establishing a place in the international artworld. (5)
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If we look to these texts as fragment-like symptoms of an allegorical process, we might ask ourselves what is lacking in them. What absences are present? In doing so many questions are raised that wouldn’t be otherwise: What constitutes and legitimizes an international (universal?) art world that one must find a place in? Has this issue been resolved since the arguable dissolution of the New York-centred vertical Modernist concentration of the late 1960s? Whose interests are served by it? Is this the only game in town for new Vancouver based artists? Are conflations or equivalencies being made between careerist positioning, the professionalization of artistic practice and what directs/motivates artists activities "in the studio"?
How might the allegorical tendencies of new artists be characterized under the continuing fall-out of this cultural turn and its unresolved issues? If Owens’ conception of allegorical art practices is an institutionalized norm that has been questioned for the last decade or so as part of the "radical expectations and conformities of the critical postmodernisms emanating from New York" (6) allegory must now be speaking in other terms, particularly for artists who do not want to be associated with institutionalized rhetoric.
Perhaps, if Modern progression or linearity has been replaced by a deconstructive reflex, allegory can no longer function as a means of communicating loss or absence in time. It has no way of pointing to what is lacking because the present never leaves us. What remains as "material" is a kind of informed archeology of culture as it was before the end of History. In its most degraded forms this may appear as a performative declaration of connoisseurship vis a vis earnestly romantic or shrewdly calculated evocations of subcultural marginalia, including the visual arts. There is also the possible repetition of structural models which might, through re-contextualisation, evacuate originary historical circumstances and socio-political intentions. There is no melancholic reflection and this is particularly at odds with Walter Benjamin’s ideas about allegory—ideas that Owens looks to repeatedly.
For Benjamin allegory necessitates the passage of time. Without progression there cannot be displacement, erasure or loss and the build up of ruin/detritus (generating the model of the palimpsest). Benjamin clearly demonstrates this dependency on the Modern model of linear time in his tale of the angel of history:
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (7)
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Imagine that this angel has been stopped dead—fossilized just below the surface of an unending horizontal plain where many strange excavations are underway. Who hysterically mourns the corpse they discover there and who perversely collects body parts as curios and paper weights?
This notion of the end, as it has been applied to history, ideology and art, suggests the impossibility of recognizing the remains of Benjamin’s angel. And yet the psychoanalytic categorizations of the hysterical and perverse are easily projected upon those who discover him despite being bound up in all of these "ends". As a concrete linguistic system embodied in the work of Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis represents a meta-narrative replete with truth claims. The symbolic order of language as a model of consciousness/unconsciousness and its incumbent terminology assemble a grid of explanation ripe for deconstruction. Yet it remains. Psychoanalysis, like allegory, deflects dismissals of its validity. They both attempt to assimilate the interests behind suchcharges. Allegory posits challengers as characters within its labyrinth of plots. Psychoanalysis tries to subject naysayers to the status of patients, hoping to envelope them in the folds of its labyrinth-like analyses. Slavoj Zizek’s writings continually display this ability. Zizek’s popularity with readers is generated in part by the ease with which they can project his psychoanalytical framings upon what is familiar to them (if he doesn’t do so himself with his numerous citing of popular culture). In relation to this discussion, his conception of the contemporary subject as perverse or hysterical can be used to characterize the "artist subject." He also helps clarify hysteria and perversion as terms through his contextualization of them:
The question of how we are to hystericize the subject caught in the closed loop of perversion (how we are to inculcate the dimension of lack and questioning in him) becomes more urgent in view of today’s political scene: the subject of late capitalist relations is perverse, while the ‘democratic subject’ (the mode of subjectivity implied by the modern democracy) is inherently hysterical (the abstract citizen correlative to the empty place of Power). In other words, the relationship between the bourgeois caught up in market mechanisms and the citoyen engaged in the universal political sphere is, in its subjective economy, the relationship between perversion and hysteria. (8)
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Zizek doesn’t answer the question he draws attention to at the beginning of the above passage. He directs us like psychoanalytic treatment directs a patient, continually deferring arrival at the answer while professing to be its only means of extraction—i.e.: "I never understood how far away I was from getting straightened out until I saw my analyst. It’s been fifteen years since our first appointment and I need the treatment now more than ever!"
Psychoanalysis and Marxism no longer move freely within the academy but continue to be utilized as tools (often in combination) by both art producers and critics as a means of assessing the intentions, effects and values of others’ activities within cultural production. In their respective goals of the "talking cure" and an ideal society, they demand a subjectivity that is morally constructed in the present (or at the very least informed) despite their "deaths" through their failures and collapse as totalizing systems applied to the Real historically. Why should anyone "do the right thing" under their prescribed conditions now? Is it possible to have an impetus for artistic practice grounded in an ethics that is not compromised by inherent contradictions?
Perhaps asking such questions illuminates the crisis of theory artists deal with presently. Rather than using the digressive activity of allegory as a means of countering Modern claims of universal truths and originary meanings (the critical function Owens prescribes), its states of deferral and complication might operate as an index of response to the now completely unobtainable position of a morally-motivated Modern subjectivity. To psychoanalytically categorize the allegoricizing artist of today may require recognizing that one is shut out from a subject position in historical time (Modernity), even as an antagonistic critic. It is hard to imagine willing participation in such a train of thought considering the cultural climate these days. Still, what if allegoricizing tendencies are framed in such a manner? Is there a hysterical artist motivated by the traumatic loss of this subjectivity and a perverse artist for whom this loss provides a freedom of indiscriminate pleasures? Such a categorical framing (no matter how problematic) is capable of making us consider what we might otherwise be oblivious to—what the current situation lacks.
1. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism" October #12 (Spring 1980), 67–86, and #13 (Summer 1980), 59–80.
2. See the conclusion of Foster’s essay "The Passion of the Sign" Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 71–98.
3. Patrik Andersson and Shannon Oksanen, "Expo Research" 6: New Vancouver Modern (Vancouver: The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1997), 30.
4. John Roberts, "Mad For It! Philistinism, the Everyday and the New British Art" Third Text #35 (Summer 1996), 35.
5. Reid Shier, "Hunchback Modern: The Art of Geoffrey Farmer" Canadian Art (Summer 2001), 47.
6. Roberts, 29.
7. Walter Benjamin "Theses On the Philosophy of History" reprinted in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257–8.
8. Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 248.
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