The Art of

122
03
Translated from
BORIS LURIE
“Anmerkungen zu
Kunst und Leben,“ in:
Neue Gesellschaft für
bildende Kunst, ed.
NO!art, Berlin: nGbK,
1995, p. 119–128,
esp. 123.
made him reject the path that the photograph suggests, we find four answers:
the meaninglessness inherent in consumer society; the economization
of art in this social context; the symbiotic links between avant-garde
artists, gallery owners, museums, and investment-oriented collectors as
well as their impact on the public appreciation of “good art” and “good artists”;
and finally, the amalgamation of Pop art and the American sense of
importance and superiority in a political-national as well as a cultural respect.
NO!art is the direct response to this art- and sociocritical diagnosis. It signifies
an attempt to save art from art in what is at first glance the unaesthetic,
the ugly, and the obscene, on the level of the material as well as of form
and content. “Where is the grand artistic act? Not necessarily, hardly, rarely
in so-called art. The ‘art’ hides itself outside.” 03
For Lurie, this understanding of art as NO!art, which recognizably continues
the romantic tradition, had tangible, practical consequences. Firstly, he
refused—all his life—to abandon his works to the market. Instead of selling
them, he made a living by speculating on the stock market. Art is art, money
is money, stocks and shares are stocks and shares. Merging art and business
is betrayal. Secondly, from the mid-fifties onwards, he understood artistic
work more and more as a collective process of group creativity, as—in
the dual sense of the word—the product of a network of like-minded artist
friends who created NO!art using completely different means and thus produced
an alternative world in nuce to objectionable facticity. NO!art is radically
performative, people would say today. His intense collaboration with
Stanley Fischer and Sam Goodman, with whom he founded the March
Group in 1959, is exemplary of this. Thirdly, he hoped that art in a non-affirmative,
non-commercial sense could perhaps be protected by those on
the periphery, those who rejected the mainstream, self-confident outsiders,
and others excluded from society. In this context Lurie spoke of the
“Lumpenproletariat.” But it would be reducing the significance of this term
in Lurie’s usage to see it as no more than a naïve legacy of the post-Marxist
search for the revolutionary subject in society. When Lurie speaks of the
“Lumpenproletariat” or the “lumpenproletarian” as the subject of art, this
has at least two meanings, regardless of the term’s somewhat sensational
quality. In the first place, he means social and artistic milieus that are not
prepared to settle for the role of the knave tolerated or even desired by the
culture industry and do not confuse this role with the true avant-garde.
“Hordes of aspirants come to the meccas of Soho and the Lower East
Side. . . . Galleries blossom and wither en masse. The newborn artist likes to
be seen, almost like a Pop star. Yet the guys and gals are sorely tortured.
The cost of living is very high: one needs nearly $800 a month to rent a studio
or an apartment in the Lower East Side, and then more for food and
clothes, and for entertainment, of course. In the new cafés, a hamburger
VOLKHARD KNIGGE