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