This review, by a new contributor at artcritical, is published on the 50th anniversary of the death of Adorno, August 6, 2019

Academic, stuffy, German – Theodor W. Adorno has become emblematic of a certain sense of unfeeling in art. He was critical of TV, partial to Schoenberg, and aggrieved by the crassness of life in exile in 1940s America. Some of his students, infatuated with the youthful spontaneity of 1968, supposed that Adorno represented the old institutions that continued into post-war Europe, seeing his criticisms of mass culture being ‘pre-digested’ as identical to the conservative dismissal of contemporary art, culture, and even values. Determined to take action, they scrawled ‘If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease’ on the blackboard. Three of them surrounded him and exposed their breasts as others handed out leaflets proclaiming, ‘Adorno as an institution is dead.’ Adorno would confide in Max Horkheimer, writing: ‘To have picked me of all people, I who have always spoken out against every type of erotic repression and sexual taboo!’

It is here, then, that we arrive at Aesthetics, a book that immediately appears to confirm this suspicion of conservatism; with lectures on Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics, the enlightenment, Bach, beauty, ‘sensual immediacy’, Jugendstil, they hardly relay the sense of urgency felt in Europe in 1968. Published as part of a series of Adorno’s lectures ranging from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to topics as broad as metaphysics or history and freedom, Aesthetics works both as an introduction to his final work, Aesthetic Theory, and an exhaustive look at aesthetics itself. But to make the assumption that these lectures on aesthetics or any other book in this series are conservative in their approach would be to make the same mistake as those students, who praised youthfulness and energy above everything.

One of the first points that Adorno stresses is that art criticism is not confined to the history of art. It is not something that is exclusive to the classics but must necessarily come up against the most contemporary artwork. Adorno is then able to discern antagonisms crucial to art beyond movements themselves in ways that surpass writers like John Berger who came after him. For while Berger looks at art’s necessary social content, Adorno is able to recognise not only the social content of art but its historical content and ideals – whether through the technique of its form or its rebellious spirit – and tie this to the contradictions internal to art as that which is necessarily excluded from it.

Recognizing that classical sculpture ‘showed no trace whatsoever’ of this exclusion, however, one student questioned whether this was the case for all forms of art. But this exclusion should not be taken as a literal and material exclusion. ‘This aspect can potentially lie in the principles of artistic design. […] [I]t may even crawl away and entrench itself behind the choice of any objects at all.’ Classical sculpture, as an art form that ‘flourished in the classical Athenian city-state, connected the urban citizens to the extent that it incorporated, one could say, the protest against the harming of the human body within the civil process of life. It is certainly true that the free citizens of Athens at that time did not perform manual labour themselves, and that they consequently remained free of the bodily deformations that the work process so easily inflicts on other humans.’ Art in Hellenistic society was informed by the ideal of the human body and its form in its essential embodiments – the form of the athlete in Discolobus, or beauty in Venus de’ Medici – but this ideal necessarily excludes the foundation of Athenian society as a slave society. Embodied in its art was the contradiction between that ideal and the material it necessarily obscured to achieve that form, and so the concrete form itself becomes mediated by this exclusion.

And so, while Berger can lament Jean-François Millet’s peasants as an overlooked subject in European art history, Adorno is able to relate art to its totality; its colour, its subject, object, composition, not as a mechanical application of the golden mean, not as subject to rationality but a rationality itself that nevertheless relates to what is external to it. ‘[A]nd the relationship between these … aspects keep changing at every stage of art history.’ Aesthetics demonstrates Adorno’s approach to form and social content that separates him from other critics, historians, and philosophers, providing an essential framework to understand art in its development from classical to modern art. This is felt most keenly when discussing the fact that art’s fate is not sealed through rebuttals but a ‘strange antiquation’, or the injustice of rendering the horrors of the Third Reich in a crude mimetic conception of art. Soon, any resemblance to the repressive institutions of post-war Europe is exposed as merely a passing one.

Theodore W. Adorno, Aesthetics. [Translation of Ästhetic (1958/50).] , Eberhard Ortland (Editor), Wieland Hoban (Translator).  Polity Press, ISBN 9780745679402. $69.95hb; $28.95, pb; $15.19 Kindle edition.

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A cursory glance at Michael Berryhill’s paintings could lead to a mistake on the order of confusing fiberglass insulation with cotton candy. So beware of complacency induced by pastel colors, sensuous surfaces and snarky titles. Something disturbing may be lurking behind the cheerful ambiguities in the nine new paintings and vitrine of drawings in his new show at Kansas Gallery.

Saturn n Son (all 2014), a play on words of the ‘70s sitcom Sanford and Son, is the title of two initially puzzling paintings in Kansas’s rear room. Layered in mostly blues and rusty browns, they seem to represent an indistinct, non-descript figure, which could be a piece of disintegrated statuary, bent over in some kind of activity. Without knowing the title, the activity could range from manual labor to microscopic examination.

However anyone who has a passing acquaintance with art history will immediately recognize the Saturn in the title as the one Goya depicts devouring his son. Which of course makes the figure in Berryhill’s painting discernable as Goya’s wild-eyed, child-eating demon, and Berryhill’s resonances with Goya more obvious. The TV show reference emphasizes a bit of campy goofiness in the Goya seen from the present, despite the horrific subject matter, and conveys a spirit of ambivalence that permeates this work.

Berryhill is not ambivalent about his ambition however. Though modest in scale, the paintings use expensive, thick-weave linen, a high culture archival maneuver that serves to offset some of the low culture references, and telegraphs his seriousness. Berryhill nods to not only Goya, but Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard, as well as his contemporaries, such as Dana Schutz. He places himself in an early modernist painting tradition that, despite an apparently abstract affect, is always representational in its ultimate methods.

The major ambivalences in this show concern the perception of the imagery and how important it is to decipher it. Berryhill presents his subjects theatrically with proscenium-like verticals as quotation marks and a shallow horizontal strip at the bottom that stages each event. The grain of the linen, and small, dry brushstrokes allow Berryhill to use a halftone-like layering process, producing a surface of fuzzy colors and figure-ground inversions. The results are images seeming indefinite, corroded, or out of focus.

Like the wordplay of his titles, each of Berryhill’s paintings involves some kind of visual misreading or multiplicity of meaning. Indeed the very title of the exhibition, Beggars Blanket, is an obvious reference to the 1968 Rolling Stones album, Beggar’s Banquet, replacing a humble repast with an inadequate fuzzy fabric (the canvases themselves?).

How we respond then is always dependent on how easily one psychologically negotiates the frustration of not being able to resolve the paintings into coherent images.

Some viewers will simply accept the work as abstract and just appreciate the sensuous, warm and fuzzy mood it projects, which can lead to overlooking a reference to parental cannibalism. But the sustained attention required of viewers to parse partial bits of imagery in hopes of a deeper comprehension carries a risk for the artist. Too much unresolved ambiguity, coupled with a flippant title, like Axis of Easel, might interfere with the painting attaining memorability, and the futility of finding resolution could overwhelm the artist-viewer bond.

Long Long, Gone Gone, a painting with fairly straightforward imagery, is a great ploy to engage one in the work’s hermeneutics as well as a direct statement of Berryhill’s themes. This painting depicts the back of a longhaired person, left hand to brow in a peering-off-into-the-distance gesture, and with a parrot on the right shoulder.

The formal ambiguities are easy to parse, but their metaphorical implications give the painting gravitas. The airy blue background, grading from ultramarine to cerulean, can be either sky or sea, or both, and the blue reappears at the bottom to frame the bust of a figure, who, given the layered hairdo and delicate wrist is probably meant to be seen as female. Or the bottom strip might indicate that the figure is submerged to her chest in water. To her chest that is, if the patterned rectangular shape spanning the canvas is her back, and not in fact the back of a couch. The parrot, as signifier of both imitation and piracy, is depicted as a degraded representation. The searching gesture, which echoes our own concentration of looking, seems futile because nothing can be deciphered from the scumbled brushstrokes that represent the distance.

The title, Long Long, Gone Gone, can represent not only our own fruitless attempts to find meaning in Berryhill’s paintings, but perhaps an elegy for the past itself — a recognition that painting has departed as the major vehicle for conveying cultural meaning. Despite the rigor and purpose that Berryhill brings to his paintings, there is also a sophisticated understanding of that ship having already sailed, and we peer desperately at its surface, trying to understand why it exists, trusting only our own perceptions, Flaubert’s stuffed parrot squawking useless artspeak at our shoulder.

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