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sible to ascertain and discuss Lurie’s bizarre oeuvre. Therefore, even before
its qualities become identifiable, the oeuvre withdraws into the
grand “NO!”
While manifestoes proclaiming the end of art enter into the cycle of
merely defining art in another way and do not strive to do away with artistic
practice in any way, here the radical negation is apparently taken at
its word. But this is also only partially true, since Lurie and the NO!art artists
continued to work within the space of art and insofar never left art.
Nonetheless, their programmatic quality remains specifically the interruption
of a canon, since attempts to canonize Lurie as “Auschwitz Art”
also fail in that they do not engage with his works on a representative
level, but rather create a kind of hidden object game in the curious mass
of objets trouvés between little porno images and concentration camp
symbols in which motifs, forms, and techniques reciprocally become
paradoxes of themselves. In Minima Moralia Adorno describes the hollowing-out
of the canon from the inside: “To be within tradition used to
mean: to experience the work of art as something sanctioned, valid: to
participate through it in all the reactions of those who had seen it previously.
Once this falls away, the work is exposed in its nakedness and fallibility.
The plot, from a ritual, becomes idiocy, the music, from a canon of
significant figures flat and stale. It is really no longer so beautiful.” 02 And
with this Adorno meant the operetta Die Fledermaus, the seeing of
which once denoted to boys the threshold of the canon of adults.
This is also how viewers experience Lurie’s work, “[i]t is really no longer
so beautiful” to see the collage techniques of the modern era combined
with concentration camp and porno motifs; the Surrealist merging of violence
and sexuality lacks the anarchistic innocence of the conspirators
of connoisseurs, who knew how to read the symbols in the canon of the
Freudian theory of culture. The irruption of other, banally direct pictorial
worlds, of historical spheres of experience in Lurie’s collages is an act of
exposing, a scandal in art that is (truly) “no longer so beautiful.”
Adorno only wanted to conceive of the abolition of the canon dialectically,
when he wrote in Aesthetic Theory: “This involves a negative canon,
a set of prohibitions against what the modern has disavowed in experience
and technique; and such determinate negation is virtually the canon
of what is to be done.” 03
The case of Lurie marks the beginning of a canon of art that no longer
wants to be art, yet still is. After the seventies, when he did not exhibit
for ten years, in 1988 this brings Lurie back into the contemporaneity of
art movements that share the impetus to negate art without ceasing to
continue making art. The crisis from which the radical negation follows
has, however, now become a specific understanding of art that has be-
02
THEODOR W.
ADORNO
“In nuce,” in: id.,
Minima Moralia:
Reflections from
Damaged Life, trans. E.
F. N. Jephcott, London/
New York: Verso, 2005,
p. 223.
03
THEODOR W.
ADORNO
Aesthetic Theory, trans.
Robert Hullot-Kentor,
London: Continuum,
1997, p. 46.
Boris Lurie’s NO!art and the Canon