Géza Perneczky:
Kapituláció a szabadság
elõtt
(Capitulation to Freedom)
Budapest: Jelenkor,1995, 196 pp.
Perneczky's latest volume is made of two independent, though thematically related essays: "Mûvészet alkonyatkor" ( Art at Twilight ) and "Kapituláció a szabadság elõtt" ( Capitulation to Freedom ). The two titles are at once informative and misleading. They are informative in that they suggest that the book will be about the "end of art"&emdash;the devaluation and obsolescence of the art of this current fin-de-siècle and of art criticism and art theory. They are misleading in that they raise the expectation that the reader will be treated to a systematic interpretation of art's much-advertised demise. Not that there's no system in Perneczky's approach. But there's no systematic argumentation, nor is there a clear and consistent frame of reference or terminology. What we have is asides, oblique hints at possible conclusions, lengthy digressions and the recurrence of the same set of adjectives. The essays derive their coherence from the organic nature of Perneczky's personal vision, rather than from some manifest logic. It is not so much the end of art that is at issue, as why Géza Perneczky thinks it is time to hit an apocalyptic note.
[...]
If art is vitality, and embodies the power of the mythical and the erotic, then reflection is the very death of art. Perneczky's effortless prose communicates an apocalyptic vision.
The last pages of "Art at Twilight" take stock of where contemporary culture can go from here, and sound a warning. The main dangers: uniformization, which threatens to overwhelm even alternative art, which has become as "schematic as prefab housing", composed as it, too, is of "prefabricated elements"; politics, which warps the mind and soul even at the micro-level (the experiences of the past five years are mirrored here: the naive intellectual's disillusionment with political involvement); and a ghetto mentality: culture's becoming a subculture, "the danger of losing even what little power one has to influence economic and political developments", with nothing gained, for subcultures can no more escape the media's exploitation and the uniformization of mass culture than the cultural mainstream (p. 44). What we like to call an "alternative" lifestyle, Perneczky points out, is more like an "alternating" lifestyle: "What at first glance we perceived as an age of eclectic abundance and of boundless reflection turns out, on closer inspection, to be something else: an almost compulsive need to continually change tastes and milieus, a lifestyle of transitive cultural peregrination" (p. 46). Instead of a personal culture, thus, we have the personality assuming one after another of the various accessible cultures: "Living in multi-cultural space, we build ourselves a world of illusions, even as we extinguish the light of the primary reflexes without which there is no life.... A more homogeneous space also means homogeneous values. All this destroys the more profound levels of traditional culture, the sensitivity to life-and-death issues, the millennia-old techniques of ethics, magic, catharsis and salvation, to each his own.... One might say that our recourse in the face of this dazzling kaleidoscope is no more and no less than little more naiveté, and, I'm embarrassed to say it, a little more sincerity perhaps, and just a wee bit of "partiality" in the best sense of the term" (p. 50-51).
Let he, who can, laugh at this moralistic nostalgia; for my part, I can't help agreeing with every word of it. But I am not so sure that Perneczky is right when he says: "The public does not run after good art. The public has triumphed; conformity, the Sunday, prevails" (p. 52). I fear that we ourselves are the public, we are the Sunday conformists. It is we who have won (and let everyone take this as he will: everyone has won, save perhaps a few diehard Western Marxists); pity us if you can. But to return to Perneczky's curious sociology: Particularly as compared to Victor Burgin, Perneczky's use of the terms "bourgeois" and "petit-bourgeois" is highly idiosyncratic, denoting as it does everything that Perneczky thinks is wrong with art. And one's bewilderment only grows when with great deliberation Perneczky calls Duchamp&emdash;the forefather of Fluxus, Neo-Dada, and contemporary conceptual art and object art&emdash;an amateur who could never break free of his bourgeois heritage. A gentrified dandy, he practically calls him, a man whose Nude Descending a Staircase was his one and only brush with art, and who otherwise was no more than a passive warrior of personal freedom and indolence.
[...]
By resisting the temptation to make statements, Duchamp merely assisted in a process, even as he would have assisted in a process had he been more forthcoming, for it was only in France that his more complex and esoteric comments and notes were heard with any real attention. What is considered art, and in what sense, is something that the artist himself has no control over; this, as Duchamp's case makes so very obvious, is in the hands of the interpreters and mediators of art. Which is not to say that the "Sunday art lovers" have won. The victors are not the "petty bourgeois" gallery goers&emdash;if I understand what Perneczky means by this&emdash;for what they get to see in the museums is not what they fancy; likely as not, they can't even understand when they are being made fun of in the esoteric language of the new art. What has won out is the new forms of publicity, which control our access to the various forms of art, and thus ultimately control art itself. I suspect that many a time, the theoretical aspect of an artistic oeuvre comes to dominate not so much because the artist himself considers it to be of such importance, but because this is the aspect most easily verbalized and mediated through the new channels of publicity.
Duchamp's conduct and comments seem to fit the framework of contemporary reception aesthetics so perfectly that one can't help suspecting that here too, we are dealing with the inevitable interference of interpretation, which has blithely foisted its frame of reference upon the fact of Duchamp's silence. Not that it matters, either way. As Duchamp himself noted in a letter written in the latter part of his life: a work of art is entirely the work of its viewers or readers, whose approval, or disapproval, keeps it alive.15
[...]
We can only conclude that we are living a finale without an end. We live in the shadow of a perpetually postponed and so ever less likely, yet more and more imminent-seeming apocalypse, as indeed people did at the end of the last millennium. The optimists have been talking about the death of art for the past forty years, while the pessimists (or conservatives, like Arnold Gehlen) put its demise as far back as a hundred years ago. And yet, art is with us still. The thought that it soon might not be gives us a narcissistic thrill comparable to the delights of art, so much so that we hardly even notice the death throes of the object of our delight.
Perneczky's narrative&emdash;unlike Belting's or Burgin's&emdash;offers no new methodological conclusions. What Perneczky does is to introduce his reader to an age; more exactly, he conjures up a certain picture of the age, a feat of magic in no way inferior to any performance of Yves Klein's. Whether we agree with him or not, as a literary essay, Perneczky's book offers more than the rigorous theoretical works. Still, when it comes to the end of art, I, personally, would rather read precise analyses proposing concrete alternatives than sensitive visions of the impending apocalypse. Perhaps it's the life instinct in me, the impulse whose disappearance Perneczky so much laments.