Responding to a Clickbait Manifesto

I wrote a piece in Cultured Magazine

For those just joining this story, I suggest you read Dean Kissick’s piece in Harpers first. You can find that here:

The Painted Protest

I, in turn, wrote a response in Cultured Magazine as a part of their endeavor, The Critics’ Table, a new place for Art Criticism. In an effort to pay their writers more equitably, Cultured has made this particular part of the magazine subscription only, so the piece is behind a paywall. I’m excerpting the piece here.

Here is how my piece begins:

Hermann Nitsch, Schüttbild, 1962. All images courtesy the Nitsch Foundation and Pace.

It was as a student at a Christian boy’s school in Oxford, England, that the critic Dean Kissick was first exposed to the work of Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch. Kissick fondly recalls the documentation of one of Nitsch’s Das Orgien Mysterien Theater (Theater of Orgies and Mystery) performances, describing naked participants in the Austrian countryside “wrapped in white sheets, soaked in the blood of cows they had sacrificed, performing rituals in their commune.” This is how, he explains, he came to understand Modernist transgression. Nitsch’s productions “had nothing to do with personal identity or the imparting of information,” Kissick insists. “They were, rather, attempts to leave social norms and Apollonian rationality behind and to embrace Dionysian chaos.”

As if to transgress conventional art writing decorum, Kissick begins his Harper’s debut, “The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art” (the 174-year-old magazine’s December cover story) with an unsettling personal tragedy, telling readers of the day his mother lost both her legs. She was run over by a bus while on her way to the Barbican Art Gallery, where she had planned to see “Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art”—the exhibition that serves as Kissick’s first case study on the precipitous decline of contemporary art in the past decade.

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The meandering text, with its scattershot construction, ill-defined terms, and succession of straw-man arguments, is difficult to summarize briefly, but at the heart of it lies Kissick’s resentment for art “about identity,” its perceived claims to social transformation, and the increased attention given to artists of marginalized backgrounds. It seems written from the perspective of someone who has endured the arrows of woke puritanism for too long and has the bravery to declare enough is enough.

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The rightward drift exposed by the public applause for Kissick’s piece can’t be viewed separately from its larger culture-war context. It’s Ron DeSantis’s world now: Even Democrats blame their epic losses on, of all things, the defense of trans rights. Following book-banning campaigns and attacks on “critical race theory”—which has been cast by Republicans as a conspiracy to make white children feel ashamed—Trump has promised his aggrieved supporters that he will punish schools and institutions he sees as "too woke."

It’s an old story. Backlash has followed each moment of Black social gain, from the post-Civil War era to the election of Barack Obama. An oft-repeated question from the “post-racial” Obama years was something to the effect of: How can racism exist when a Black man holds the highest office in the land?

Kissick, for his part, asks: “When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized?” According to his logic, the existence of such exhibitions proves their existence is not needed; marginalized artists now “speak for the cultural mainstream, backed by institutional authority. The project of centering the previously excluded has been completed.” Out of context, the statement might read as satire—it’s not.

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The critique is exhaustingly familiar. Hysteria over the loss of the canon still plagues universities, but the panic began much earlier. From the ’60s onward, politicians and strategists have sounded the alarm over the contestation of “traditional” values on campuses, warning that it threatens to reach the larger population. Enter the ’80s term "political correctness." Here was a label conservative thinkers could weaponize against their invented left-wing “thought police.” Today, politicians call it “woke.” Art critics and leftist poseurs call it “identity politics.” Its purpose, whether conscious or not, remains consistent. It casts those who agitate for social change as the real conservatives—censorial, prudish, doctrinaire. And those who uphold anti-woke orthodoxies are the rebels.

We see that Great Art needs a good old-fashioned universal subject paired with an air of rebellion—such as in the oeuvre of Nitsch. His work, as Kissick puts it, "had nothing to do with personal identity." But let’s pause for a moment. Nitsch was born in Vienna in 1938, the year of Austria’s annexation by Hitler; and lived as a young child in the city through more than 50 Allied bombing raids during World War II. His father died in Russia, fighting for Germany, which Nitsch said had a profound impact on him. I would argue that his art is laden with identity. It’s a European, generational identity, formed by—among other things—trauma and guilt. His art derives from the innovations of his German predecessors. Nitsch worked in the 19th-century traditions of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and drew upon Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory.

There is an identitarian absolution granted to white artists that is rarely extended to artists of color. If I were to make a performance that drew from Indian history and related it to Bharata Muni’s ancient text on theater, it would go without saying that I was producing identity-based work in Kissick’s view—even if my performance didn’t begin or end with those cultural references. Nitsch, and so many other white artists, somehow pass through the gauntlet of identity untouched. Free from context, from history, from “difference,” their art is boundless in meaning. Such a reading of Nitsch's transgressive work—of anyone’s work—is like pushing away the food on the table to eat from your ass instead.

-Ajay Kurian

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