"Buchloh has inherited both Adorno’s orthodox supreme court of judgment and the melancholic falling away from meaning in Benjamin’s treatment of allegory as the central elements of Frankfurt School religiosity—not to say mysticism. To these we can also add messianism, which is likewise explicit in Benjamin and implicit in Adorno. The question of whether art offers the hope of salvation and redemption from capitalism’s sinful totality is still the question for Buchloh. While he constantly denies art’s claims to exclusivity and brilliance by locating it within the process of social production and reproduction, it is nevertheless impossible to mistake the passion in his judgments or the depth of his disappointment in the failure of the avant-garde to perform its historical task of exodus.
But this is not all that Buchloh has learned from the Frankfurt School: he has also mastered the art of locating cultural products within the overall system of production predominating in a given society. For example, he brilliantly shows the connection between the poetics of conceptualism and economic administration in “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions.” No method could be more relevant today, but perhaps using it effectively requires criticizing the messianic aspects of the Frankfurt School legacy as well: not only the longing for a supreme historical teleology, but the corresponding revolutionary melancholy, and the resulting privilege granted to art over other human practices.
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In these circumstances we can draw a contradictory lesson from Buchloh’s book. On the one hand, as Buchloh teaches—and following the legacy of the Frankfurt School—we should not relegate the structures of art production to oblivion; we should not indulge in childish rapture over the very fact of access to utterance. At the same time, pace Buchloh, we should not let negative theology enchant us; we cannot be paralyzed by a spiritual mourning for art’s ultimate mission as evinced by the historical austerity of the avant-garde. Instead, the question, as ever, becomes: How can we proceed to speak within the real of our current moment, here and now, without being overly flattered by our own articulations or indulging any unnecessary illusions about their place in the political economy? What does the desire for art look like, under the circumstances? An unequivocal, universal, and seamless answer to these questions is impossible."
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/a-farewell-to-totality/
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