(2 of 4)
Why did this happen? Those interested in the fate of the avant-garde should reflect on a Viennese artist named Rudolf Schwarzkogler. His achievement (and limited though it may be, it cannot be taken from him; he died, a martyr to his art, in 1969 at the age of 29) was to become the Vincent Van Gogh of body art. As every moviegoer knows, Van Gogh once cut off his ear and presented it to a whore. Schwarzkogler seems to have deduced that what really counts is not the application of paint, but the removal of surplus flesh. So he proceeded, inch by inch, to amputate his own penis, while a photographer recorded the act as an art event. In 1972, the resulting prints were reverently exhibited in that biennial motor show of Western art, Documenta 5 at Kassel. Successive acts of self-amputation finally did Schwarzkogler in.
Resurrected though incomplete, Schwarzkogler has entered the pantheon along with such living eminences of the Viennese imagination as Hermann Nitsch (whose ritual, the Orgies Mysteries Theatre performed in New York last month, consists of covering himself, a room and everyone in range with animal blood and guts) and Arnulf Rainer (whose act is to truss himself, like a plucked hen, in thongs and twine, have photos taken, and smear the prints with black paint).
No doubt it could be argued by the proponents of body art (a form of expression whereby the artist's body becomes, as it were, the subject and object of the artwork) that Schwarzkogler's self-editing was not indulgent but brave, taking the audience's castration fears and reducing them to their most threatening quiddity. That the man was clearly as mad as a hatter, sick beyond rebuke, is not thought important: wasn't Van Gogh crazy too? But Schwarzkogler's gesture has a certain emblematic value. Having nothing to say, and nowhere to go but further out, he lopped himself and called it art. The politics of experience give way to the poetics of impotence. Farewell, Jasper; hullo, Rudolf!
The idea of an avant-garde art was predicated on the belief that artists, as social outsiders, could see further than insiders; that radical change in language (either oral or visual) could accompany, and even help cause, similar changes in life. To keep renewing the contract of language, so that it could handle fresh and difficult experience—such was the hope of the avantgarde, from Courbet to Breton and beyond. And the hope needed certain conditions of nourishment. First, there had to be something to say, some proposition about experience, and this entailed a rigorous sense, among artists, of the use of their art. Art needed to be a necessary channel of information. Otherwise, why should changing it matter? Second, art required a delicate, exact sense of its own distance from society, so as not to be co-opted. And third, there had to be a strict faculty of judgment about one's responsibilities to language. Newness for its own sake lay on the periphery, not the center, of the avantgarde.