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Theory, Culture & Society
DOI: 10.1177/0263276407071579
2007; 24; 117Theory Culture Society
Zygmunt Bauman
Liquid Arts
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Liquid Arts
Zygmunt Bauman
I
T IS only right and proper to address the story of liquid modernity through
the extraordinary work and creative life of Gustav Metzger ­ a great artist
and philosopher of art in his own right. Imagine any society as a huge
room, with a lot of furniture, wallpapers, pictures on the walls, implements,
all sorts ­ dark corners, nooks and crannies, and also very many doors which
lead into this room. Imagine also that there is an electrical switch next to
every door, but each one switches on lights of different colour. As every
practising photographer knows only too well, if you use colour filters,
particularly in black-and-white photography, the results will differ depending
on which colour filter you have used. Some elements of the picture which
were in shadow suddenly jump into focus; and some others, which were
brightly lit, disappear from view. Each time you enter the same room you
have a slightly different picture depending through which door you enter.
So I shall use the door of art, and through that will try to have a look at
liquid modern society, bearing in mind Metzger's comment from many years
ago, that art arises from the feeling and the knowledge that the line between
a generative and destructive reality is paper-thin. Metzger also said that the
disposal of the components is considered from the earliest design stage. He
said this with reference to his project with the huge plaster canvases:1 losing
their contents slowly, one by one. Their disposal is already contained in the
original design.
In order to update my knowledge about the state of art today, I visited
Paris: where else? Where the last word, the state-of-the-art of art, is on
display, including a number of interesting things which bear directly on our
topic. First, Jacques Villeglé: I never heard about him before, but in Paris
he was everywhere. In every significant, snobbish, posh, prestigious art
gallery along Rue de la Seine, Rue Jacob. He was also in Centre Pompidou,
and he was on display at the big art fair at the Louvre Carousel: in total at
least ten huge canvases. What are all these canvases about? He just goes
around Paris with a camera and takes pictures of billboards or the empty
 Theory, Culture & Society 2007 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 24(1): 117­126
DOI: 10.1177/0263276407071579
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walls which have already been filled in a city which is bursting with information
and uses every vacant place to locate it. The walls that gape from
Villeglé's canvasses pasted over the gallery walls are the city walls, those
living and constantly updated records of the eminently modern art ­ the art
of modern living. They are the very places where the blatant or surreptitious,
but always inexorable labour of living can be found, revealed,
recorded and then transferred inside to museum walls to be reincarnated as
works of art. Villeglé's objects are boards customized to carry public notices
and announcements, posters and advertisements; or just the stretches of
walls that separate and hide private residences and commercial rows ­ those
plots of brickwork whose pristine blandness had been a challenge and a
temptation for the printers, distributors and hangers of bills, a temptation
impossible to resist in a postmodern city filled to the brim with sights and
sounds vying for attention. (Are not the posters the weeds of the information
society that invade each and any root-free scrap of soil? Are they not the
weeds in the gardens of communication? Are not the blank walls the
updated version of that `voiď which all nature, in this case the nature of
information society ­ abhors?)
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What do we see on all these pictures? They have titles such as
Boulevard Marne, Rue de Zirco, Haussman Mallsherbes, Rue Littré and so
on. They are called after the various places in Paris where the photographs
were taken, but they are all remarkably similar. They are just posters
fighting for space, and they can gain space only by destroying other posters.
So what you see there are just scraps hanging in the air, half-finished
sentences, sentences without beginning, lips open to a silent shout; faces
with one eye or one ear, creation and destruction going hand in hand. This
nature morte, this still life of the billboards, is in fact full of life. What you
see is the struggle for attention which can only be achieved by death, by
destruction of someone else fighting for exactly the same thing. All these
huge canvases by Jacques Villeglé actually are records of a history which
proceeds by shredding its traces. History is a factory of waste. It is neither
creation nor destruction; neither learning nor genuine forgetting; just living
evidence of the futility of such distinctions. Nothing is born here to live long
and nothing dies.
Another great artist who is shown widely in Paris today is Manolo
Valdes. Valdes obsessively paints one thing: a face, always the same face.
Bauman ­ Liquid Arts 119
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I use the word `paints', but I am conscious that it is difficult to use this word.
He produces a composition; a collage, an aggregate of fragments, all put
together. But what is remarkable about Manolo Valdes is that his canvases
are made of sheets of Hessian ­ a canvas made of jute or hemp. Valdes'
collages have been laboriously patched together, layer by layer, from bits
and pieces of hessian ­ some dyed, some unashamedly of the erstwhile
blandness of jute or hemp; some primed to be painted over, some already
shedding crumbs of the dried-up paint with which they had been overlaid
before. Or have they rather been torn apart from a canvas already complete,
seamless, whole and wholesome? Patches are poorly glued ­ loose ends
hang in the air ­ but again it is anything but clear whether they are about
to be pressed to the other cuttings beneath, or are in the course of getting
unstuck and coming off. Are these collages caught in-the-process-ofcreation,
or are they rather in a state of advanced decomposition? Are these
bits and pieces of hessian still-not-fixed, or already-un-fixed? Fresh and
immature, or used-up and putrescent? They are, again, like in Villeglé's
photographs, hanging in the air. So is it aller or retour? Is it on the way up
or on the way down? The question which these pictures are shouting, and
to which they also provide the answer, is ­ you cannot tell. There is no
difference between creation and destruction. They are two processes which
depend on the time when you take the snapshot; looked this way or the other,
but in fact they amount very much to the same.
The third artist is Herman Braun-Vega. Braun-Vega paints impossible
encounters; that is not his phrase, but I impute it to him. He is a realistic,
even naturalistic painter of sorts. He presents one picture in which the
Velasquez nude is in the company of Picasso's Demoiselles ďAvignon; and
they are both watched by a Paris policeman in full 21st-century uniform.
There is Pope Pius IX reading a newspaper with a recent pronouncement
of Jean-Paul II. No wonder he looks sad when reading that. Then you have
Bruegheľs jolly peasants cavorting in a state-of-the-art nouvelle cuisine
restaurant. These impossible encounters are composed of fragments; wellknown
fragments but taken at random, almost, from all sorts of historical
eras and put together in quite a comfortable cohabitation. It is very much
like the entry to the new shopping malls in Leeds; where you rub shoulders
with a mass of people of all sorts of shades and forms. Now what BraunVega
actually shows us is that these impossible encounters are actually
natural encounters. That life and death, in other words, have lost their
meaning-bestowing distinctions. Death was defined as something irrevocable,
something which cannot be changed: you cannot be restored to the previous
state. Now that is no longer true. The dead are undead. There are pop stars
and athletes who jump from nowhere into the centre of public attention for
a short time and then disappear from view completely; but they are not dead,
they are somewhere in cold storage. They could be picked up at any time
and brought back in a completely different context.
I consider these three artists to be representative of the liquid modern
era. They are and do representative art of the liquid modern era; in which
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time flows, but no longer marches on. There is constant change, but no
finishing point; a sequence of incessant new beginnings, in which, as Gustav
Metzger told us many years ago, the final disposal of the object is already
built in, as part of the original design of the work.
Liquid modernity may be characterized as a state in which the important
oppositions which constituted the framework of early, solid modernity
have been cancelled: oppositions between creative and destructive arts,
between learning and forgetting, between forward and backward steps. The
pointer has been removed from the arrow of time; so you have an arrow, but
without a pointer.
The three artists I have mentioned are not alone. They represent a very
widespread tendency in contemporary art; different from the art of the old
era, of which Hannah Arendt spoke, for example. For Arendt, you could
recognize a great work of art by its ability to arouse the same sort of emotions
and artistic experiences as it did several centuries ago. Instead of that, these
artists of the liquid modern era concentrate on short-lived events; events
which it is known in advance will be short-lived, so that the event of art, rather
than the work of art, will come to the end very soon. So these installations are
Bauman ­ Liquid Arts 121
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happenings, which are construed and put together only for the duration of the
exhibition, after which they will be dismantled and disappear. Or they create
artworks which are guaranteed to be exposed to the vagaries of inclement
climate and so slowly disintegrate. The artists select materials for their
artwork that are deliberately frail and friable, unlike the old artists who
actually looked for the secrets of paints and materials that would last forever.
As de Kooning suggested, `content is a glimpse' (1992: 90); and quite
recently Yves Michaud, whom I consider to be the greatest contemporary
theorist of art, summed it all up, saying that `we live today in a space in
which the aesthetic celebrates its ultimate triumph by being emptied of
works of arť (2003). So you have aesthetics permeating every nook and
cranny of our world, while the work of art has disappeared from this world.
I had the first inkling of it when travelling, through Nrland, the northernmost
part of Norway. There were sculptures put in the wilderness, in most
unexpected places, by the greatest sculptors of the contemporary world.
They were well paid to do so, and one installation particularly relevant to
our subject was made by Gediminas Urbonas, the Lithuanian sculptor, who
put four containers in a very monotonous, very dreary, northern landscape,
on the slope of a hill overlooking the road. The containers were of considerable
height, so virtually every passing driver stopped, and people climbed
the hill to see what was in the containers. In three containers there were
objects. In one a regular objet ďart, in another a ready-made object and
in another a bizarre found object; and the fourth container was empty. Now
the interesting point was that the lingering crowds were largely gathered
around the fourth container, which was empty. They were liberating the
meaning of emptiness, they were liberating the ultimate destination of
artwork.2
I think that one can say, in a very drastic simplification, that in the
liquid modern world, the solidity of things and human bonds is resented as
a threat. This is the big difference between the solid stage of modernity and
the liquid stage of modernity. Not many years ago, the major concern of still
solid or nostalgically solid modernity was: the centre doesn't hold. I would
suggest that liquid modernity has changed so that it resents the centre as
such. In the cacophony of sounds and the hubbub of sights ­ a kaleidoscope
of constant change ­ there is no centre around which things could condense,
solidify and settle.
If you look through the glossy magazines or the equally glossy attachments
to even the most serious newspapers, you will see that every issue
offers a variety of advice regarding what you must do, what you must have,
what you must wear and so on. But often, immediately on the next page,
there is advice of a different kind: what is out, what must be discarded.
Liquid modernity is a condition in which the distance, and the time span,
between novelty and waste, between the origin and the dumping ground,
have been drastically shortened. The result is a convergence into a single
act of destructive creation or creative destruction. It reminds me of one of
the invisible cities of the great Italian writer, Italo Calvino (1974), the one
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he called Leonia. The opulence of the residents of Leonia is measured not
so much by the things that each day are manufactured, bought and sold, but
rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new.
The joy of getting rid of, discarding and dumping, is Leonia's true passion.
This applies to the things that we use, buy and cherish, only to dump
them without compunction or regret when more glittering prizes come
around. Once they have been displaced it becomes shameful to be seen with
such items. This disposability also applies to humans. If this seems hard to
grasp then watch, as most of the dwellers of Earth do, the most popular
television shows today, the so-called `reality' shows: Big Brother, The
Weakest Link, Survivor, Pop Idol. People are glued to the screen because
they recognize their own experience, the secret of their own condition, their
secret fears and nightmares. All these shows are public rehearsals of
disposal; the disposability of humans and things. They are actually put in
the same position, part of the same process.
Los Angeles exemplifies this knack for taking today's fame and turning
it into tomorrow's forgotten fad. A large architectural company in Los
Angeles, Marmol Radziner and Associates, did something extremely
unusual for Los Angeles. They took a house built in 1946 ­ and since then,
of course, changed and rebuilt and rehashed and overhauled again and
again. The house, recently owned by Barry Manilow, was restored to its
original 1946 condition. Unexpectedly it became a tremendous success, and
Marmol Radziner became an extremely profitable architectural company,
with people queuing to get their services. Recently, Marmol Radziner were
interviewed, and they said that they were subscribing to a romantic notion;
the dream of creating something timeless. And they explained: what we
dream of is to build beautiful buildings that will still be standing in twenty
years' time. That is the meaning of timelessness (see Ogundenhim, 2003).
Our society is often termed a consumer society, but we tend to understand
consumerism in the wrong way. Our imagination is still in the grips
of a tradition which we vaguely remember from our youth or from old stories.
Consumerism is assumed to mean greed for acquisition; the wish to
accumulate things, to have more and more. Is this still true? It now seems
that it is the rapidity, the promptness of disposing of things, which is the
secret of contemporary consumerism: not accumulation, not acquisition, but
change. Disposing of things which were there before, replacing them with
other, newer things. You would have to search quite hard to find any
advertisement for a product which recommends it for its durability. The only
products advertised for their durability, for their virtual indestructibility, are
recording tapes and recording disks; but their indestructibility is not an
argument against them. On the contrary, it is in their favour; what it promises
is that you can go on and on erasing your past recordings and putting new
recordings in their place.
Liquid modern life is a daily rehearsal of universal transience. Today's
useful and indispensable objects, with few and possibly no exceptions, are
tomorrow's waste. Everything is disposable, nothing is truly necessary,
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nothing is irreplaceable. Everything is born engraved with the brand of
death. Everything is offered with a use-by date attached. All things, born
or made, human or not, are until further notice dispensable. Paraphrasing
an old and famous statement, I would say that a spectre hovers over the
liquid modern world, over its denizens and all their labours and creations;
and that is the spectre of redundancy.
So, running after things, catching them in full flight when still fresh
and fragrant, is in. Settling for what is there already is out. Harvard Business
School professor John Kotter advises his readers to avoid being entangled
in long-term employment of the so-called `tenure track' (1995: 159).
Developing institutional loyalty and becoming too tightly engrossed in any
given job for a long time to come is ill-advised when, as he says, business
concepts, product designs, competitor intelligence, capital equipment and
all kinds of knowledge have shorter life-spans. As Alberto Melucci used to
say ­ `We are plagued by the fragility of the presentness which calls for a
firm foundation where none exists' (1996: 43ff).3 When contemplating
change we are always torn between desire and fear, between anticipation
and uncertainty.
Having briefly and superficially looked at art in the face of liquid
modernity, we can return to art to understand it better. Philosophers of art
have always struggled with the problem of beauty. The idea of beauty was at
the centre of aesthetics. Philosophers of art, however much they differed and
quarrelled about virtually every other aspect, agreed that beauty is something
altogether distinct from ephemeral fads. Beauty is something very nearly
immortal; certainly very long-lived. You recognize beauty by its enduring lifespan;
and also by its claim to universal validity. So beauty is both timeless
and universal. Philosophers try to answer the question: `What is beauty
about?' The ideas and descriptions which crop up most often are those of
harmony, proportion, symmetry, order and suchlike. They all share something
in common, and they suggest very much the same thing now as in the time of
the Renaissance, as Leone Battista Alberti suggested when he defined the
idea of perfection. According to Alberti, perfection is a state in which any
and every further change would be change for the worse. So perfection is the
product of change which itself eliminates the need and desirability for any
further change. So the end product, the ideal destination of all change, of all
creation, is the end of creation, is the end of change. This is the state of perfection
in which nothing could be further improved, and every attempt to tinker
with what exists will result in adverse effects. When you look at the classical
modern, modernist, art you will see the very clear traces of this sort of
tendency and understanding of the purpose of artistic creation. Look at the
canvases of Mondrian, Matisse, Arp or Rothko. They tried to achieve the final,
the ultimate composition, in which nothing can be improved. Take the
Dancers of Matisse, for example, cut out each figure separately and try to
arrange them in a different order. You will see that every other arrangement
is inferior to the one that Matisse presented. The same applies to Mondrian.
Take his rectangular figures of different colours, cut and separate them, and
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try to rearrange them. You will see that all other arrangements are again
inferior, less aesthetically satisfying. Once you reach perfection the world
comes to a standstill. There is nothing else to do, and nothing will change.
But we are all liquid modern; and so perfection, in which everything will
be evermore the same, is not an ideal, it is a nightmare.
So the idea of beauty which guided the art of the solid modern era is
in a deep crisis, because there is this apprehension of stagnation: the end
of change; the end of novelty; the end of experience; the end of adventure.
This gives weight to and also explains my earlier statement, namely that you
have a situation where you have aesthetics saturating the world in which we
live, but no object of art, no works of art. There are still some around, but
their place is in the museum; and I suggest that what graveyards are to living
humans, museums are to the life of art. They are selected places, which are
visited by selected people on selected occasions. They are also removed
from the hurly-burly of daily life. In museums, just as in cemeteries, one
doesn't talk loudly, one doesn't eat, one doesn't drink, one doesn't run or
touch the objects of the visit. One rehearses by mimicry the stillness of the
exhibit. The context of daily life is different: unlike the cemeteries, it is the
stage of shouting and running. Unlike the museum, it is the site of aesthetics,
not objects of art. Frailty and transience are the names of the game played
there. Michaud writes of the `new regime of attention which privileges
scanning over reading and deciphering over meanings' (2003: 120­1). The
image is fluid and mobile, less a spectacle or a datum than an element of a
chain of action; a reallocation of images.
To conclude, this reallocation of images from the centre of attention
to irrelevance and virtually invisibility ­ the portable refuse bin of attention
­ is random. I will give you just one final example, an installation called
The Promised Land in an art gallery in Copenhagen. It consisted of a series
of television screens put in a very nice arrangement; rising, enlarging,
getting smaller and so on. And what was shown on every television screen
was just the inscription, `The Promised Lanď. I found this installation very
thoughtful and thought-provoking, and I stopped to think about the meaning
of it, what message it conveyed. My interest was enhanced by the fact that,
at the end of this row of television screens, there was a broom and a bucket
standing in a corner at the end of the whole series. But before I had time
to think through the meaning of this part of the installation, a lady cleaner
came to collect her tools, the broom and the bucket, which she had put in
the corner for the duration of the coffee break.
Notes
1. This refers to Auto-Destructive Art, a term invented by Gustav Metzger in the
1960s. The summer 1962 issue of Ark carried his article `Machine, Auto-creative
and Auto-destructive Arť. It is exemplified in his work starting in the late 1950s,
where he would spray acid onto sheets of nylon as a protest against nuclear weapons.
This caused the nylon to change shapes, until it was all consumed. The work was
simultaneously auto-creative and auto-destructive.
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2. Robert Rauschenberg, the famous American artist, once erased a few of his
colleague de Kooning's sketches and put them on sale alongside the original
sketches; the erased and complete.
3. This is an extended version of the Italian original published in 1991 under the
title Il gioco delľio.
References
Calvino, I. (1974) Invisible Cities. London: Vintage.
de Kooning, W. (1992) Écrits et propos. Paris: Éditions de ľEnsb-a.
Kotter, J. (1995) The New Rules. New York: Dutton.
Melucci, A. (1996) The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Michaud, Y. (2003) ĽArt  ľ état gazeux: essai sur le triomphe de ľesthétique. Paris:
Stock.
Ogundenhin, M. (2003) `California Dreams', Observer Magazine 12 Jan.: 36­7.
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