Melbourne Reading
Friday 29 November, 6-8pm, MSDx Room 241
Last reminder for this event occurring this Friday in Melbourne, at the Melbourne School of Design, where I’ll be teaching History & Theory from 2025.
Below is a (currently deleted) preamble to what I’ll be reading, which is in progress.
Australian art critic Robert Hughes’ eight-part documentary series and accompanying book The Shock of the New hints with the word “shock” at the relevance of provocation to the diagrammatic century of art framed from 1880 until the series release and book’s publication in 1980. The era in which we live is not one where anyone’s likely to be provoked by suggestion that a urinal might be a sculptural art object, or that a black or white square might make for a profound painting. Other forms of artistic provocation have been defunded: David Lynch can’t even get films financed these days, a contemporary Pasolini would have even less success. This culture—in which there’s next-to-no likelihood of being provoked by the form of a painting, sculpture, film, novel, poem, or piece of architecture—is one in which provocation tends to be of an obviously polemical nature. Kanye West’s music in-itself provokes no one—he has to talk about Jews to achieve effects once produced through musical innovation alone. Polemical provocation has become a dominant artform for a culture in which everything is didactic, where culture itself tends towards a form of cultural criticism, however poor.
Any real political programme will inevitably prove provocative to some, but the artist-provocateur provokes for the sake of provocation. Politics is not its game, nor its end, though political polemics, at this stage of culture, prove most provocative, so long as they disregard bread-and-butter politics, which prove insufficiently inflammatory. Kant wrote in The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 that “Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.” Perhaps this is the age, or culture, of provocation, for which internet is a natural environment.
One problem of a culture in which polemical provocation (which is to say supposedly political provocation) is its primary artform, is an assumption that all artists are politicians, that their work is the stuff of politics. The truth is that avant-gardism—or anything invoking its spirit—is not of much use or relevance to political mass movements in-themselves. This diagnosis has been made recently, and was argued by Clement Greenberg in his 1939 essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ via which we can think of pure provocation, or provocation for provocation’s sake, as an autonomous project, as the “medium-specific” approach of contemporary artist-provocateurs; our edgelord-avant-gardists and transgressives (transgression = provocation in the register of morality).
Like most controversial, polarising, provocative figures, Tucker Carlson has been named many things: a populist, horseshoe syncretist, fascist, Nazi (this one ringing particularly loud after Tucker’s 2024 interview with Wikipedia page reader and holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper), socialist, neoliberal, neocon, MAGA-communist (another group of three headed cow artist-provocateurs), antisemite, etc.
This long list of labels speaks to Tucker’s possession of an important artistic trait: political ambiguity; an increasing attention deficit to the boring unaesthetic realities of actual politics (refer for example to Tucker’s episode with Larry Sinclair). Tucker’s career is long and varied, but he has always been a writer, an artist at heart. The argument here is that cabin-era Tucker is primarily an artist provocateur, for whom artistic provocation is more important than politics. Formally, his artistic provocation—which we’ll call Tuckercore—will be argued as Cottagecore + Bertolt Brecht's alienation effect.
“Brechtian,” like “Kafkaesque” and “Lynchian,” is thrown around often. If the colloquial Kafkaesque simply means a kind of bureaucratic alienation, Lynchian equating a deadpan American dream-logic, then the colloquial Brechtian label often refers to anything—typically in film or television nowadays—that engages in meta-reference to itself as an artistic construction. This shorthand use of “Brechtian” tends to make it functionally, ahistorically and annoyingly, synonymous with terms like postmodern, meta, and metamodern. This use of Brechtian refers to Brecht's alienation effect (verfremdungseffekt/V-effekt); a socialist modernist avant-garde technique for destroying the illusions of bourgeois theatre and its opiate forms like melodrama and Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk. The alienation effect of what Brecht would later refer to as his dialectical theatre was supposed to antagonise, provoke, not mystify or entertain.
The tendency for the term Brechtian to be trans-historicised beyond Brecht's particular historical frame might have less to do with a low-level of common literacy of early-to-mid 20th Century Marxist debates in aesthetics and more to do with the fact that the alienation effect—as with a variety of other once-avant-garde modernist techniques—were long ago incorporated however crudely into various grades of popular culture. This leads to a situation in which Brecht, like Kafka, is both everywhere and nowhere. This makes the label of Brechtian both tantalisingly easy and frustratingly difficult.
Nevertheless, Tucker Carlson might fit the bill…
…to be continued…