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Reification and the Consciousness of the Artist: Georg Lukács and Contemporary Art

Lecture
Art Theory and Cultural Studies
Schillerplatz 3
1010 Vienna
M13a

Lecture by Tyrus Miller, University of California, Irvine as part of the series Kunstsoziologie heute organized by Jens Kastner.

As a theorist and critic of literature, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács was best known for his advocacy of a “critical realism” based on 19th-century canons, which he posited as a “third way” beyond the divide between Western modernism and Eastern socialist realism. With the end of the Cold War, the emergence of new forms of art practice, and new concerns in the arts, Lukács would at first glance seem to have little of relevance to say to contemporary artists and art theorists. Yet increasingly, Lukács is finding a new resonance today, as indicated, for instance, by the 2010 exhibition in Budapest entitled Intervention into the Georg Lukács Archive and the 2019 Steirischer Herbst program Grand Hotel Abyss, which took its title from an essay of Lukács from the 1930s and included the installation The Life and Adventures of GL by curators Ekaterina Degot, David Riff, and Livia Páldi.

I will consider one element of this contemporary interest, focused on the questions Lukács raised in his classic History and Class Consciousness one hundred years ago about “reification” (becoming-thinglike) as a social process within capitalism and its effects on consciousness, experience, and knowledge. I will discuss a range of recent theoretical works taking up Lukács’s ideas and applying them to contemporary culture, including Anita Chari’s discussion of contemporary art’s critique of neoliberalism, Kevin Floyd’s and José Estaban Muñoz’s exploration of reification in queer culture, Timothy Bewes’s association of reification and “late capitalist” culture, and Paolo Virno’s provocative “In Praise of Reification,” in which he separates out the connection of reification and fetishism, finding in reification—including the thingliness of artworks—positive capacities to highlight new forms of relation. I’ll then progress to discussion of Lukács’s contemporary presence in works including those of artists László Lakner and Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi, documentary filmmaker Sotirios Bekas, and the artists featured in the two exhibits mentioned above.