Cudgel, Out of the Bag

Originally published in 1999 in the first issue of k-bulletin, a magazine self-published by the collective Labor k3000 of which she was a member, “Knüppel aus dem Sack” (Cudgel, Out of the Bag) is the first in an occasional series by and about the artist, curator, and researcher Marion von Osten (1963–2020). With both humor and urgency, the essay gives a sense of the stakes in the 1990s in von Osten’s artistic and discursive context, where cultural production was a means of creating social infrastructures, whether to articulate a feminist critique and produce discourse even when not considered part of an artist’s given role, or to question the division of labor by traversing theory, art, critique, design, and other forms of practice. These matters informed von Osten’s work as curator at the Shedhalle Zurich from 1996 to 1998, where she (co-)curated exhibitions such as “Sex and Space” (1996) and “MoneyNations” (1998), and would remain relevant throughout her career.

—Jonas von Lenthe

***

I wasn’t told many fairy tales as a child. The fairy-tale vinyl record had come into fashion, so rather than wait for daddy to tell me “Sleeping Beauty,” I was usually in front of our record player’s built-in speakers listening to the narrator’s fine voice. When a fairy tale was told “for real,” it was a defining event. This is why the “Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was” gave me weeks of nightmares. Another tale whose title I can never recall became an obsession for the rest of my childhood—and voilà, it lingers even today. There’s a guy in that tale who, for reasons I no longer remember, had a cudgel hidden in a bag. And when he exclaimed, “Cudgel, out of the bag,” the cudgel actually jumped from the bag and clobbered those who were after him or wished to hurt him.

I think it was the same guy who could also make a donkey shit gold ducat coins. This fairy-tale Mr. Hyde was actually a good poor fellow whom life—that is, the world as it is and the powers that be—had ridden pretty hard. Someone who didn’t stand a chance. The cudgel, the ducat donkey, and something else (check your own Brothers Grimm edition) gave this person power that his social and economic situation wouldn’t have provided. At an adolescent age soaked in philosophical intensity, I contemplated the subject from every angle. What might the “cudgel in the bag” stand for? How might I myself, who felt profoundly misunderstood, possess such an instrument? Drifting into sleep, I imagined myself having powers to give my teachers, parents, brother, and his dumb friends a good tongue-lashing.

Just before my eighteenth birthday, my grandfather, who had told me this tale, let me in on the story behind it. His own grandfather, it turned out, had told him the same tale, but with an additional piece of information: in the nineteenth century, socialists fighting in the streets of the Ruhr had adopted “Cudgel, out the bag” as a rallying cry. My grandfather also told me he had witnessed such street fighting as a little boy. His own grandfather had pulled out a wooden slat with a long nail sticking out and laid into a policeman’s horse until the animal, panicked and bleeding, threw off its rider. My grandfather’s vivid recollection of that story had an effect on me similar to the one that the “Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was” had years earlier. It fascinated me.

Eighteen years later, I’m pondering the metaphor of the “cudgel” for a different reason. We’re at one of the magazine projects initiated by women artists, or, more properly put, women cultural producers. Since k-bulletin proposes to approach the field of visual art from a fresh critical angle, I asked myself: What subjectivity is associated with editing an oppositional magazine, and with critical writing? If the idea of the homemade magazine has made a comeback and more people around me are doing layout with vintage illustrations, I personally have no objection at all. But what to make of the criticism that “critical cultural praxis” practitioners exist primarily within texts? Has the critic-journalist emerged as a role model in this scene, or are we seeing a different mode of production?

Homme de Lettre

“At long last, someone picks up the bullhorn he has invented to speak truth to power.” The critic’s gesture of “telling it like it is” (denouncing systemic ills and outlining alternatives) resembles my childhood fairy tale. In the tale, that gesture wields money and weapons to benefit people in a Machiavellian power grab; the production of oppositional media, by contrast, emulates the tradition of the classic intellectual that flourished in late nineteenth-century France. The Dreyfus affair marked the birth of this new subjectivity of the intellectual—personified by the artist-writer Émile Zola—who dared to intervene into government affairs. Shortly before, Gustave Courbet and the Commune had toppled monuments; now the Dreyfus scandal and Zola’s protest created a new figure, one who transformed the gesture of destructive rebellion into the oppositional homme de lettre’s pen.

The universal intellectual as society’s corrector allowed many activists, mostly men, to write with the tacit understanding that there would always be a clearly defined addressee for their ideas. This figure was wedded to the notion of the unity of state and people, the great mission of popular education, and parliamentarism. The conception of the public sphere associated with this subjectivity returns in avant-garde models, particularly in manifesto writing. The self-appointed leadership of the one who “tells it like it is” spawned the editorial and the essay as new literary forms and brought with it the dedicated design of textual and visual information (newspapers as well as agitprop trains—the itinerant media of the Russian Revolution). Those tasks in turn put new creative professions on the map: the typesetter and the typographer (now merged in desktop publishing), the illustrator, the photojournalist, and the graphic artist (now the digital image editor).

After World War II, the role of the universal intellectual expanded beyond the writer’s desk to include politically engaged public figures with specific dissident identities (see Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, et al.).

Foul Language

Decades later, by the time of the post-’68 generation, the analytical thinker no longer seemed revolutionary. Or rather, the gestures of the universal intellectual and the paradigm of Enlightenment realism curdled into models of consensus and academic routine. Beginning in the late 1970s, the pop-star poet, drawing from Artaud and Rimbaud and Zola, supplanted the analytical “mind.” This shift can be seen as a reappropriation of language: speech acts could not be legitimized solely by schoolmasterly or avuncular displays of knowledge.

In the late seventies theorists championed the idea of “foul language,” recoding meanings as direct action to undercut the “Enlightenment” project and its institutional codification. These approaches must be seen as an immediate reaction to efforts to render counter-information as power, which gained wide currency during the revolts of 1968. Such efforts, in striving to disseminate “more truthful and correct” information, rested on the same Enlightenment foundation as the bourgeois media and institutions they critiqued. And events had demonstrated that the circulation of “better” knowledge alone didn’t change society.

Radio Alice and Italian operaismo of the late seventies, Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols in England, and many others countered with two strategies: First, social change would be achieved by addressing primarily a specific scene (one’s own milieu, one’s hometown) rather than a mass, let alone the people (the workers). And two, they recognized that speech acts were always also acts of self-empowerment, and so a more radical self-empowerment would mean that even those with no solid place in the education system (unemployed teenagers, bad students) could take advantage of various languages. That’s why provocative actions—Johnny Rotten’s “God Save the Queen” on television, playing guitar with just two chords, pirate radio stations—took aim at the heart of the bourgeoisie’s knowledge distribution. “Telling it like it is” now no longer spoke to a broad consensus, and instead aimed to transgress it. The provocateur model was soon picked up in fine art as well. Painting oneself jerking off at the movies, licking the guitar, and the like were desperate attempts to translate foul language and shocking breaches of convention into the visual register.

David Wojnarowicz in 1988.

The badly behaved pop star or artist had heavy connotations of masculinity, and in the eighties his ambivalence proved to be his undoing amid society’s contradictions. By the end of the decade, women weren’t the only ones getting fed up with this hero of self-legitimization; so were people who saw how issues like AIDS were being used to justify public discrimination against same-sex lifestyles or how racism spreading through everyday life (in Germany) was escalating into arson and murder. More was at stake than foul language: this was plainly about dirty politics.

Theory, Text, Layout, Shedhalle

Very basically, I would try to identify theory as the attempt to stop looking for meaning in the object and instead consider the production and reception of that object to be crucial. In the perspective of theory, any reality is always also an effect of the discourse. Once a discursive fact has been created, it has palpable real effects.

—Isabelle Graw

What Isabelle Graw, editor of Texte zur Kunst, said in “Für Theorie,” a talk she delivered at the “First Congress for the Defense against Counter-Revolutionary Evil” in 1993, is representative of an entire generation that was re-politicized in the late eighties and early nineties and took possession of theory not as an academic project but as a practice of independent thinking. This homegrown theory production (or appropriation of theory) is bound up with a new conception of the subject: its protagonist is not a scene, proxy, or medium awaiting inscription, i.e., a victim of social relations who shouts “Fuck you!” under duress. They understand themselves to be an agent and political subject for whom subjectivity—their gender, cultural, or ethnic difference—isn’t a given. The form of the self, like the interpretive grid patterns of class, race, and gender, was deconstructed to reveal a social, political, and cultural construction and its performance: the daily iteration of the experience and enactment of unvarying discursive arrangements and roles, of the significance of institutions as well as legal texts and government structures for the maintenance of differences. French poststructuralism and the writings of Judith Butler and Donna Haraway empowered a number of groups, led by women and homosexuals, to conceive of themselves as “speakers” and “theorists” even when they had no academic training. Again, the foremost concern was to de-hierarchize the distribution of knowledge.

This “revolution” of the conception of subjectivity around 1990 also spawned new techniques of representation, methods of production, and literary and visual forms as well as new critical and artistic positions.

Their objective was to understand the art system as part of social reality and find ways to address its power structure. This undertaking, which also entailed trying to shape what culture at large might be, prompted forms of self-organization as well as exhibitions that solicited debate on substantive sociopolitical concerns and provided platforms for speakers from outside the art field. No longer content with their traditional role, artists in the nineties became actively involved as critics, mediators, and organizers, exploding the (art) system’s rigid division of labor. Instead of pursuing individual creative achievements, they devised various strategies of collective and collaborative work, in record labels, groups, bands, temporary project-based coalitions, or creative contexts established for the longer term (Berlin’s Schröderstraße, etc.). In methodological terms, they tied in with discussions that had already been developed in feminist theory and other left-wing settings and sought to break up hierarchical labor relations. Magazine projects like Berlin’s A.N.Y.P. and ArtFan, or Vor der Information out of Vienna, though quite different in terms of content and visual design, are characteristic examples of producers’ new understanding of subjectivity and the new field of praxis they charted for themselves.

For exhibitions, production practices evolved on the level of aesthetics—as in “context art” and “institutional critique” or formats akin to cultural studies—that “stopp[ed] looking for meaning in the object and instead consider[ed] the production and reception of that object to be crucial,” a mode of representation reminiscent of textual publications. Layout—the art of combining text and image—as well as a newfound love of typography and, last but not least, the “notes and files” aesthetic for which Zurich’s Shedhalle became famous in the mid-nineties integrated the interrelation between theory and production as such into the display, making it part of an overall exhibition layout.

Cassandra in Crisis

These practices yielded forms of presentation and representation that were subsequently used as a wedge; they were variously panned, dismissed as incomprehensible, overly intellectual, didactic, not “art” enough, not “well made,” or nonetheless given the stamp of approval (and marketability) by galleries and institutions.

Critics of Shedhalle and similar institutions’ overly textual aesthetic and the resulting “service look” assume that different cultural artifacts (exhibitions, books, magazines) require fundamentally different methods of production and patterns of reception. The argument that “I don’t read in an exhibition, I prefer to read a book at home” is oblivious to the fact that the “books” on display didn’t actually exist as books available to read at home; they presented views that were primarily illegitimate and incompatible with bourgeois knowledge production. Such critics moreover insist that reading text differs entirely from looking at pictures, a claim impossible to substantiate outside biological models, and willfully blind to the performative and discursive malleability of those learned behaviors (reading at home and looking at art). Then, too, a specific idea of what constitutes a proper exhibition maintains belief in the existence of autonomous visual works as well as universal art spaces, and ignores the social, economic, and political interactions occurring in these “spaces” (institutions, art magazines, homegrown projects) that shape any setting or cultural object. The dualistic perspective in which production yields either text or visuals ignores the fact that any cultural object must be visually mediated to enter circulation and is moreover tied to social contexts. A text, too, is a result of visual design, i.e., ultimately an artifact. With a magazine, for example, the content and what the eye sees are as inseparable from each other as from its authors—those who write for it and those who do the layout and design. The handling of text and image is always embedded in a social sphere (scene) and its evaluative canon; it is there that the material becomes relevant in the first place. The fact that the production of an exhibition, or a magazine, is more than its final form has been most evident when producers have established lasting collaborative formats. That’s why I think it would be interesting in the future to examine the extent to which a predominantly performative praxis recaptures the resulting product, and what that implies for the product itself and for our engagement with it.

Critics of “critical cultural praxis” appear to have dismissed the fact that, at least until the mid-nineties, exhibition projects inspired by a probing study of subject positions outlined by gender theory “not only considered the semantics of ‘gender,’ but also sought to pinpoint where gender became reality or induced real effects” (Graw, “Für Theorie”). Artists, then, have also had to face the reality that feminist projects were associated for years with embodiment, spirituality, warmth, materiality. A feminine aesthetic of sensuality and vividness had become ingrained in art and the reception of feminist positions. Subjectivity, emotion, and expression were the registers of social articulation that women in art had to work with. When the new feminist movement that arose in the early nineties repudiated these ideas, it did so for good reasons, both political and formal. The new subject positions enabled its exponents to rework and appropriate conceptualism, which had been dominated by men, and leave the sewing room of difference behind. Meanwhile, their practices challenged the hegemonic bourgeois and Eurocentric definitions of art and culture and the related insistence that a cultural product could be assessed based on purely formal criteria.

With its contributions to a feminist history in the nineties, Shedhalle’s cultural project coincided with these developments, committing itself to them and helping to shape them. In the past several years, the Shedhalle team has analyzed, discussed, and revised the formats and methods of exhibition-making and the uses of theory, text, and layout. Critical responses have failed to keep up; from Die Beute to Jungle World, reviewers still point to the same aesthetics of education and didacticism without noticing how the exhibition formats have changed.

It makes me wonder what actually made a ring binder, a photocopier, or a flyer in an art institution provoke such vitriol. The flyer, at least, has been recognized as a cultural and aesthetic object, which it hadn’t been before. The ring binder and the copier were only briefly in the “wrong” place, not at the university or in the critics’ private study. Though the schoolroom aesthetic got on my nerves too, the act of publishing knowledge and references in a setting far from any tradition of privileged knowledge needs to be understood as the simple opposite of the schoolroom.

Meanwhile, the institutionalization of this approach, its consolidation in a habitus, merits far more scrutiny.

The critics who write more than anyone and made careers out of raising their avuncular fingers in admonition—in short, “knowing better”—need to confront the question: Which “didactic” or “educational” gesture underpins their own lifting of the veil to reveal an undertaking that has “long foundered”? As the nineties draw to an end, it may be time to ask whether texts, theses, and reviews should be shaping the discourse. If artists and critics today associate contentions over the “political” in art with the medium of published writing rather than with their own practices, then a shift has occurred in which writing becomes more important than any other form of cultural production or articulation. The ubiquitous “Have you read what this or that person has written about this or that issue?” not only dominates the debate around dissident approaches, but also plays into the hands of those who preserve the simplistic belief in the text-image antithesis, and by extension the division between intellectual labor and manual labor.

In this way, criticism of exhibitions that grapple with theoretical or political questions can now claim to “hit the nail on the head” when faulting those projects with “preaching to the choir.” Not a single line is wasted on noting that the modus operandi of art magazines and the art market is exactly the same. In this way, the allegation of “self-referentiality” leveled against grassroots or collectively organized projects restores to the traditional channels for visual art—the art space and the art magazine—the aura of the universal public sphere.

I’m not defending the “oppositional” element’s systemic immanence, nor am I against the freedom to critique—on the contrary! The problem emerges when the accusation of being “not familiar with the issue” leads people whose viewpoints are actually not far apart to adopt defensive postures, degenerating self-empowerment into a zero-sum game of small distinctions. These nocturnal “cudgel” fantasies (materialized the next morning as the laptop keyboard) destroy the very cultural environments that are vital for discussing concerns and developing methodological innovations. Such environments are what foster mutual interest and what you might call “good moments,” which, at least in my experience developing exhibition and event projects, lay the foundation for the trust necessary for engaging with one another’s ideas. That’s why we need to take a closer look at what various oppositional practices actually accomplish, asking, for example, how “being focused on oneself”––once a conscious political stance of workerist movements––has come to be such an offense. This includes the question of whom we are addressing and where we eventually want to be—especially if we don’t want it to be the teachers’ lounge.

Beyond their physical appearance, cultural productions always have a performative significance for social contexts. The genesis of a homemade magazine like Zurich’s k-bulletin is inseparable from the social and discursive space that gave rise to it. At the very least, such modes of production create a place where “good moments” can occur, where we can think about images and writing as mediums of critical engagement between producers—instead of relishing every opportunity to call our cudgels out the bag. Even editing a magazine, commonly considered a text-heavy business, isn’t done entirely on writing desks.