Diedrich Diederichsen

Entrepreneur, Dictator, Journalist – Models of Artists and their Utopias

It is a given that — independently of any political orientation, even independently of any orientation toward the political — the topic of the utopia seems to enjoy great popularity as a subject of the visual arts. The motif of political utopia in the work of Elke Marhöfer would be the starting and end point of several reflections on the question. Continually recurring themes of her work are, first, historical and contemporary protagonists striving for fundamentally different lives; then the intersection of the artistically motivated and politically motivated efforts of this kind; and, finally, the existentialist components: to what extent someone risks his life (or another’s) or stakes his own body. What is meant here is not so much the category of the victim or of victimization, which plays a large and often unpleasant role in the history of political-existentialist groups, but rather much more a term of comparison for political and cultural action in the tradition of Fluxus and Performance Art: the body, one’s own body, as medium and material. Marhöfer’s ways of working with it range from collective experiments and paraphrases of the stations of the Red Army Fraction or the hippie movement in connection with Paul Thek, all the way to nutritional experiments on her own body in reference to political hunger strikes and the “dietetics” of the duo L.A. Raeven.
With an eye to the history of this context, one has to favor various distinctions and call on them repeatedly, even if the strands picked out by the distinctions continually reentangle themselves. And here would be, first, the pure utopia understood in political terms, which uses ever more creative and artistic means to present and even to constitute itself, thus encouraging the possibility of itself being taken for an artistic effort. Secondly, one has to distinguish these from the artistic conjunctions that strive for a different life but without understanding this politically, rather only using art to find a place to enact the utopian non-place. . For only the particular mode that is art can already speak, now, about this other world. A third strand would ultimately have to do with the utopia of art becoming real; whatever the art happens to be, common to the advocates of this utopianism is the idea that an art become real would be a realized utopia.
In the 20th century, the complex of utopia in art was discussed primarily alongside this paradigm, which sees the utopian moment in art above all in its (supposed) ability to actually transform reality. Utopia as realized art: art was not only thought capable of the politically technical capacities of changing actual conditions, but above all given the task of creating models of ideal conditions. Brotherhoods, circles, communities. Monte Verita, Ugrino, George-Kreis, Big Sur. These projects get mentioned in connection with the avant-gardes and their notions of realizing art, whether through revolutionaries or through architects and applied designers, and also with the works of the so-called art of living (which in most cases are actually classic Gesamtkunstwerke), deriving from the avant-gardes that emerged in the recent past (Beuys – Mühl – Nitsch, etc.) and are usually sorted into the continuity of left-wing and social-revolutionary utopian practice.
Against this history, I would argue for two earlier and more fundamental models as decisive for utopian thought in art. And regarding the notions of realization described above, I would classify them even there, that is above all in the second notion, as Gesamtkunstwerk, thereby setting these practices loose from left-wing avant-gardes and describing them as ambivalent practices that can be entered from the right or the left.
The three aforementioned ways of cabling art to utopia, program to realization have to be preceded by something else: namely the observation that, on the structural level, art in and of itself, at least the autonomous art of the bourgeois era, has seemed related in principle to a zone of the utopian and of the better life. This is what first needs to be retraced in order to reconstruct the interrelations between the individual types of the utopian moment in art.
First I will attend to the question of which structural moment articulates the subject of utopia. I will describe two models – the entrepreneurial artist and the Gesamtkunstwerk artist – as forerunners and then question the situation of the energetic production model of these artists in the enlightened present, since ultimately both are models of productivity through misjudgment. In the end I will try to shed some light on the question of which relation currently holds between thematic and structural utopias.
Regarding structural utopias, the life of the artist is still, as always, held to be desirable. One generally thinks of it in connection with the absence of all compulsion. Naturally, this is a myth of bohemia that no one, when directly asked, believes in anymore, but it still determines a lot of activity. This has to do with the fact that the lack of external compulsion in art is often put forward as a generally appreciable and understandable reason: bohemian slacking, everyone understands that; that is certain to find popular approval. I’d like to have it so good. Who can blame them. If you’ve ever worked and don’t try to get out of it. . .At the same time, if you speak to students who have chosen to study an artistic subject, for example, a different aspect is much more highly valued: the absence of any outer intellectual control. It is less a matter of escaping from work into red wine and luxury; more a matter of independence, taking up a profession where I’m the boss. Budding artists often respond pragmatically to the question of what they’ll do if it doesn’t work out with painting or directing films: “I’ll go into advertising,” immediately adding, “and start my own business!”
One acts sensibly, it’s generally believed, in working for oneself and not for a so-called employer. An artist is no longer the poster child of insanity, but rather of working for oneself, and is thereby the model of the free entrepreneur as has been recognized in recent decades by the left-wing critics of Post-Fordism as well as the art departments of entrepreneurial organizations and large companies. But to understand and accept this parallel, one has to equate the irrational and unjustifiable goal of his artist’s crazy activity, as thought in the cliché of the artist, with the goal of making money or making a profit. In the latter case, it is an equally crazy and unjustifiable goal that one can only set, like the obsession of an artist. Or rather: the obsession is a trivial detail that can change, and only a reactionary art critic overrates individual, concrete obsession. Much more important, and of decisive significance for the individual artist, is the system of working through and carrying out the obsession, and it is only in the variations between these systems that can one find something interesting and relevant to say about the individual differences among such obsessive artists. But just as the artist was a socially accepted form of lunacy, so is “entrepreneur” the name the acceptance of the fundamentally completely insane goal of profit for its own sake. One could distinguish between good and bad kinds of craziness, since often nowadays one is a friend of rationality or irrationality only to the extent that either serves to justify whatever one favors. What the two have in common beyond theevaluation of their activity, however, is that neither serves any collective goal of humanity in an ordinary sense: the entrepreneur doesn’t have the goal of furthering the well-being of all, the (autonomous) artist doesn’t have the goal of spreading beauty and intelligence in general, rather both of them follow an individual goal. Bourgeois society appreciates individual goals, but only their individual form. What it doesn’t appreciate is the connection of a goal (which would have to be rational and good for all) with radical individuality. It can only tolerate this via the ideology that radical self-interest converts to the common good at some point. The entrepreneur who doesn’t need the confrontation takes on this ideology; the artist rejects it, but generally accepts being received within a cultural framework that represents just this.
Historically, the genealogy of artistic autonomy is directly connected with artist’s transformation from a craftsman dependent on commissions to an entrepreneur producing for the free market and working with a certain number of employees. Art became autonomous at that moment when the artist no longer worked according to an individual’s taste and desires, but for the abstraction of a commissioning patron represented by the market. What it is like to work for an abstraction? Why is it so desirable and does it have to do with the often-vowed freedom of the free entrepreneur? In which case it would be the mere power of letting others work for me – no matter what they do for me. They work for me and I work for the abstraction of the commissioning customer, for the market. Certain named and physically present dependents are here with me under my command. They’re under my control. They give me assurance and a foothold in a certain form of collectivity which is very convenient for me. And before me, but before only me lies, as wide as the ocean we cross to foreign continents, the market. An endless and formless yet lively and turbulent surface with soft swells and ruffled waves.
Now I set something upon the ocean. The ocean washes it around, breaks upon it. It goes under, resurfaces, changes form, retains form, gets wet and soaked-through, remains dry and stays afloat. You don’t know in advance, but everything seems like an accomplishment to you. For you have now set form into this great, sublime market. You have made a concrete mark in the abstract wasteland. Gradually a territory emerges around our deeds: schools of thought, concepts, historical narratives, points of reference. A fruitful march wrung from the ocean. Future artists no longer have the same moments of sublimity.
Is the connection we’re automatically used to drawing, when it comes to the vocation and even the very form of living of the free artist – between self-determination, inner freedom and sensible production -- nothing other than the simple opposite of dependent occupational production? And thus not a utopian production, but simply entrepreneurial production – the wild, adventurous, and yet at the same time well-supported sailing on the great, abstract sublimity of the market, of its incalculable immensity, the massive number of its participants, etc.?
Or are there other ways to reconstruct this utopian content? It is no wonder that the particular freedom brought by “for the market” in contrast to “for the commissioning patron” quickly shifted into a disillusioned “just for the market.” The market no longer embodied the impenetrably dangerous and tempting abstraction, but rather the calculable. Working for the market became cheap, because the market’s principle became cheap production. The market lost its aura of unpredictability and great challenge and shrank down to exactly what was familiar. Other challenges had to be summoned for artists.
Artists who resolutely wanted to be more than mere entrepreneurs can be found among the Gesamtkunstwerk artists since Wagner and Skrjabin. Their territory is the whole world. They want, at the very least, new states, they want to totalize art’s claim to validity. This is not simply the elevation of the old entrepreneurial artist to state-artist; rather it has to do with the invention of a new sort of kick for artists. This kick is the shift from the thrills of conquest and access to the immersive thrills of dictatorship.
The classic entrepreneurial artist is Columbus, I have already hinted at this with my ocean metaphors. He ploughs through the abstraction of the market, but he’s not clearly distinct from it. He wants to overcome, not to unite or meld himself with what is to be ploughed through. His type rather has nightmarish fantasies dealing with his blending into the market, with sinking into the cheap, the calculable, but also with drowning, with swallowing oneself and with being swallowed by the formless, abject masses upon which he sails, to which he exposes himself but which controls in all their otherness in order to hold them at a distance.
The protomodern Gesamtkunstwerk artists function almost antithetically. Their total states of art are also phallic fantasies of control, which, however, spill over into their opposite in becoming total. This is completely clear to the participants, they thematize this. Seventy-five percent of Wagner deals with immersive death wishes of being devoured, or being able to die. In being swallowed. The Gesamtkunstwerk is about the fact that the price of total control, of the total state, of the sect-culture embracing all areas of life, consists in the tragic and necessary downfall within these sects. And this itself is desired. To put a fine point on the matter, one could map the two models of artist mentioned so far onto the models of entrepreneur and Hitler. As success-oriented adventure and death drive .
Now even if it weren’t to some extent unsatisfying for the actual artists that their framework can only oscillate between these two poles, it would be completely inadmissible to draw conclusions about the subjectivity of actual artists, as artists in an evaluative sense, from the — entirely virtual — fulfillment of the imaginary goals of the artist model--and of course there are a few other models. You can hold many things against Wagner: but he wasn’t Hitler. And the early, classical autonomous artists were, where possible, in fact actual entrepreneurs. And the entrepreneurial model of an adventurous journey on the ocean of the abstract was only one – a thoroughly dominant one, but still only one – notion of audience, effect and competition. My decisive point with the representation of both these utopian and energetic models of artistic production and artistic wishes is just that it is constitutive of them that they are not fulfilled. And that they only need such brute and primitive pictures, because they concern activities that precisely — constitutionally — do not violate the boundaries that they have to picture to themselves as violable. They negotiate the infulfillability, the distance between the adventure and the practice, in different ways.
For me the decisive question that arises in this context, in the face of the utopia discussion found in Elke Marhöfer’s work, is the question of which role this description occupies for artist-models that inhabit the lucid present. What would an artistic practice that is enlightened about artist-models and the way they function still have to do with the Gesamtkunstwerk-like necessary misrecognition of the symbolic and the as-if character of art or as permanent suffering on it? Does such a practice also have to energetically nourish itself from the structurally determined stranded dependence of artists on the insurmountable but productively misunderstood border between life and art? Does the energy-model of this running against the wall of art remain sustainable when one can take a look down from above at the artist running against the wall?
Now, a self-education and elucidation on the part of artists about the myth of the artist has been underway since the 1960s at the latest. This process is aimed at tracking down the unconscious or barely conscious mechanisms that trace back to adventure-, entrepreneur- and dictator-models of the artist in the artistic practice itself. Yet here there are two important inconsistencies. First, it is often not clear if the critique underlying these processes is actually directed against the model (although this is not constitutionally realized) or against constitutionally being bracketed in (or against being bracketed in ). Or against both. Ultimately, in the case of some experimental protocols, one could make allowances for the fact that they not only did not want to realize a particular something, but that they also wanted to realize a particular something else. Ultimately one could also say that the process of self-enlightenment, which did not and does not (or doesn’t always) take place in the bracketed-in mode of art, itself represents another model of overstepping the boundaries of art into life.
To the extent that artists help themselves to communicative institutions and channels that serve the model of clear text or the speech act (journalism, academia, the public political space, etc.) — to this extent they once more effectively overstep the boundary that the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and the Rembrandtian entrepreneurship wanted to transcend. For exactly this successful overstepping deflates the production of strange ideal selves. It succeeds in doing what its predecessors failed to do. Although it thereby merges entirely into the societal institution that such art makes use of, which then ceases to be art. This would realize the utopia internal to art — of crossing the border all the way to life, but it would no longer have anything to do with art as a center of power, the power of inhabiting counterpositions (even if these counterpositions often have nothing to do with societal utopia, but rather only function as sectors of development of what is already extant). It would abandon itself as art — thereby abandoning a mode that is structurally committed to utopia. It would be thrown back onto the concrete contents of the particular societal utopia. Now you would have to found a party.
Nowadays it is the spectacular, newly arrived Biennale-art that has discovered utopia, not as a structural moment but as content, as a slogan clearly displayed in the middle of everything. Apart from the quality of the individual contributions, projects such as Utopia Station have discovered utopia as a sweeping and comfortably progressive label for art, involving very little commitment. This discourse gently and vaguely docks on a discourse of innovation carried over onto society. Artists have ideas, so they should also be able to imagine society’s future.
Thus the fact that utopia is structurally connected with art, which became a generally known fact through the artists’ self-enlightenment, is used as a kind of imperative to demand artists’ submission under a structural misunderstanding — to demand that the commitment to utopia, the commitment to the wild, intense other life should also politely concern itself with stylish and easily accessible ideas. As strongly as our narcissism, especially artistic narcissism, commits us to utopian living, just as strongly does it help itself to the traditional commitment to utopia found in the artist’s role´.
The idea of liberating oneself from the inner energy-models through maximum self-education about them has led to the fact that one has to completely abandon art as a power source of counterpositions or let it degenerate into the accessible narcissistic production of compulsion to happiness, the utopia shifted into the personal, the post-Fordist obligation to reliably produce one’s own happiness in order to better sell oneself and not burden the state (or art).
Yet one could also, and I see this in works of the artist discussed here, take up the conditions of an art turned potentially journalistic and no longer functioning as if speaking and, parallel to this but not structurally bound to it, work with the artistic utopianism that wins displacement behavior, megalomania and Wagnerian desire from the lack of compulsion and of determinate form of living and working conditions, but which, on the level of content and conscious decisions, no longer believes in these energies and doesn’t consider them hierarchically superior. Yet at the same time without denying that they exist. They thank, their existence, exactly those conditions that want to leave utopia behind – and, for their force, the production nonetheless resumed. The decisive point is that it isn’t from this production in and of itself, but rather from that which one has learned about the production through self-enlightenment — on the journalistic level, so to speak — it is from this that one deduces which goals this production or art could have.

Diedrich Diederichsen has acted as an editor of music journals (Sounds, Spex) in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, a university teacher in disciplines such as art history, musicology, applied theater studies and communication design. Recent publications include 2000 Schallplatten (2000), Sexbeat (2002), Musikzimmer (2005). Diederichsen teaches in Stuttgart and lives in Berlin, where he is a freelance writer for publications including TEXTE ZUR KUNST, Theater heute, Tagesspiegel and tageszeitung.