The Art of

140
04
BORIS LURIE
“Violence without
Caprice in No!art,”
Leonardo 7 (1974)
p. 344.
come immanently exhausted. It is therefore a crisis of aesthetics and to
a lesser extent also a crisis of history. Lurie broke into this new canon of
the present from two sides: from the immanent side of a negation of art
as a canon and from the external side of the formation of a new canon
that makes reference to historical and contemporary reality.
In his response to a critic who precociously endeavored to belittle the
gesture of negation with which the NO!art group got itself noticed as a
childish, rejectionist attitude toward the impositions of a world that
called for constructive criticism and not the gimmicks of old and new
avant-gardists, Lurie stressed the violent and crude nature of the caesuras,
which he does not see as foreign to history in any way, but rather as
embedded in it: “‘So the NOs are not news!’ the author states, citing the
late Roman theater, which had violated social taboos, and ‘the boulevardiers
of Paris, who framed and applauded the Dada manifesto over
half-a-century ago.’ Pattern-breaking art has re-occurred since the caveman
and will continue to reoccur—and it will continue to be ‘news’ on
each reoccurrence, for the reoccurrences are rare indeed and always violent
but never capricious!” 04
The peculiar race between historical-real and artistic outbreaks of violence
creates a resonance space in which art appears to be an additional
voice commenting on the spread of the canon of real violence: not as a
representation or imitation, but rather as an echo or scream, as a caricature-like
shadow cast by real heaps of corpses. In NO!art, the surrealistic
image of the female body as a twofold symbol adapted from the psychoanalysis-derived
thesis of the convergence of Eros and the death
drive is no longer able to become myth. “It is really no longer so beautiful”
is followed not by the eroticizing of death but rather by the destruction
of Eros: the splayed legs of the women’s bodies on the black-andwhite
porno photos, the squeezed together breasts, the skull-like grimaces
that confront viewers and fix them with dead eyes, coagulate into
ciphers of bodies that no longer seem to promise anything. They have
been sucked dry, and the sensuality shown seems to be a contortion, a
deformation of desire that has become irreal. The obscene portions in
Lurie’s images are not frivolous or even capricious portents of eroticization,
but rather the abandoning of it. Another NO! in the image that depletes
the pornographic context from which they arise. It would nevertheless
be wrong to contest the autonomy of this manifold NO! (addressed
to National Socialism, to capitalism, et cetera). They are also
dialectic NO!s, in the sense of Adorno’s canon of the excluded. What is
excluded is the body connected with the person sensorimotorically; the
holistic unity of body and mind is severed. Lurie evokes this compulsive
severing of the connection between language and “balls” that aspires to
GERTRUD KOCH