The Art of

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good chance of asserting itself, even behind the backs of the actors—
but the final word is not always the most interesting, apart from the fact
that it must lead to a self-contradiction within the hermeneutic circle.
What therefore exists is at least the gesture of the pamphlet, of interruption.
Historically, 1945 was such an interruption, and seen by many as a caesura—from
Theodor W. Adorno to Gilles Deleuze, reflection on the rupture
in history was central, even if with very different consequences. As
a result of the events of World War II and the destruction with which it
overran the world, Deleuze saw the matter-of-factness with which we
see ourselves as belonging to the world as a break, as a rift that also
thrust itself between the cinema and its audience. The cinema consequently
assumed the space within which it once again became possible
to tentatively divine this bond to the world. Adorno, in contrast, banished
any thought of a resilient bond to the uncertain fate of a message
in a bottle of art. Although this gesture of sealing art off did not remain
isolated, no canon came to be derived from it, except in philosophy,
where Adorno’s aesthetics bear canonical traits. Art, on the other hand,
can operate outside or beneath the canon, to which experts then attempt
to relate it.
01
ADRIAN DANNATT,
“JUST SAY,” in: John
Wronoski et al., eds.
Boris Lurie NO!, Boris
Lurie Foundation at the
Chelsea Art Museum,
New York, 2011, p. 25.
A Case of Negation
To the question of whether he could imagine writing a text for the catalogue
of exhibition being planned on the work of Boris Lurie—a representative
of the NO!art group—an expert on modern and contemporary
art replied to me that he could not. It was not that he was not familiar
with Lurie or would strictly reject his art, but his work unsettled him and
left him at a loss, therefore possibly also without words. The NO!art
movement, which arose at the end of the fifties and was present until
into the seventies, alongside Fluxus and at a massive remove from the
Warholian Pop empires, was distinguished by its radical negation. A catalogue
text from 2011 states: “NO! The sheer pleasure of the word itself,
so relatively rarely deployed in public discourse yet so continual in our
everyday lives. No, no, no, no! The beauty of the word in all its formal aspects,
its simplicity and elegance, those two letters that follow each other
in the alphabet, those close-linked lexical neighbors, here isolated and
underscored, standing alone in all their proud disdain, minimal kick. What
other adjoining letters of the alphabet make up so resonant and strong,
so essential, a word?” 01
Was Lurie’s program of “NO!art after Auschwitz” therefore a success?
What would speak in favor of this is the fact that it is obviously difficult
to establish links to an existing discourse on whose basis it would be pos-
GERTRUD KOCH