Since the beginning of the decade, much art has become artistic again. Meaning, it has ceased to be about itself or some designated topic. Art has shed the self-consciousness of the avant-garde tradition, instead veering towards traditional media, towards expression. What happened to Sturtevant, the Pictures Generation, Institutional Critique, exasperated professors will ask of their millennial – and younger – students, who, in their turn, are investing in a historical continuity beyond modernism, in sincerity, even spirituality.
Spirituality, I think, is the point on which the current generational divide turns. For millennials, the state is no longer a viable religion, as it was for our parents – neither is socialism, formalism, or deconstruction – and within a decade identity politics, too, has been exhausted, yielding only the dogmatism of religion without any of its existential depth. As I wrote last year in an essay for Kunstkritikk, criticality is, by now, its own form of capitalist kitsch, and this to the point that even turns towards embodiment or affect have felt like intellectual contrivances rather than art. Criticality is a press release, a funding application; it is less likely to make a work of art more complex than more legible, digestible, and sellable.
While, in my previous treatise, I partly lamented this new art’s departure from more overtly intellectual traditions – as well as its seeming lack of criteria – I also suggested that it might present critics with a chance to stake more definite claims. My intention here is to be less on the fence. Quality, now that I’ve thought about it, is in fact even less of a mystery when it comes to artistic art than that of the schools of information or attitude, where discourse and networks often act as smoke-screens. Given its less intellectually convoluted relation to its own medium – indeed, to the notion of art-making altogether – artistic art offers a moment of ontological simplicity in which to consider what we want and need from art, and how our lives with and within it can become meaningful and sustainable. And here I do not mean ecologically but existentially; I mean recovering a way of relating to our experiences and creativity that is not extractivist.
The answer to these questions may be summed up in what I will call mood. Mood is art’s excess – in the best of cases a kind of helpless secretion – and this is the basic measure of the quality of a work of artistic art. Mood situates you, undoes you for a moment, and even reflects its glow onto works from avant-garde traditions, emphasising their emotional score and showing us what we have forgotten. That is to say, what made them art in the first place.
The artists that I will mention as examples – Jason Dodge, Tolia Astakhishvili, TARWUK, Vera Palme, and James Richards – are not all millennials, and as such are also not obvious exponents of the more recent turn towards the artistic. Rather, I believe their works are exemplary of what a more sensual, immediate, and alive kind of art can be. An art that posits an, on a human level, richer alternative to spectacle and newness. But mood is also a way of seeing, a certain sensitivity in the way of treating objects and spaces. It is in the uncompromising precision of Susanne Pfeffer’s curation at Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt; in the inherently spiritual modus of Cologne’s museum of catholic art, Kolumba; and in the special signature evident in Fatima Hellberg’s programme at the Bonner Kunstverein.
I take my title from the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl’s 1899 paper Die Stimmung als Inhalt der Modernen Kunst, the English translation of which settles on the admittedly much flatter “mood as content.” It is important, then, to loop in the German Stimmung, which evokes voice, tune, and attunement, as well asatmosphere and resonance. As instruments are tuned in concert, Stimmung is relational. As a philosophical concept, it can be traced back to early nineteenth-century Romantic thought, which began to dismantle a clear distinction between object and subject, understanding mood both as the property of objects – say, a landscape – as well as the receptivity of a subject – their “being in tune” with that landscape, a state not of mindless passive immersion, but of heightened awareness.
Sticking to Riegl’s phrase also requires us to make a distinction between situations where mood is content – that is, a constitutive factor, at once practice and outcome – and where it is employed merely as method, what I qualified above as a form of styling. Mood is not the umber-coloured interior design art that circulates on Instagram. In considering the English word ‘content’ as it is used precisely in relation to social mediae, we might even say that in this case mood overrides content. Mood is not information, and has nothing to teach; it is a battle between mind and body, which neither has won. It is not aura, which, as Benjamin argued, is parasitical, an effect of fetishisation, but energy self-sufficient.
What we register as mood is the totality of an object’s presence – a presence that necessarily also makes demands of our own. It is not that the artwork cannot tell us of anything outside itself, but that the friction it produces between object and subject manifests as its core property. This means that where mood is content there can be no “about” – what has turned so much critical art into a farce. It also means that any language present does not serve as context or meta-text, but is folded into a whole in the face of which language has long fallen short. Where there is no “about” there can also be no explanation; mood, then, is a question to writers, too, as to what a more meaningful way of relating art to language might be.
In June, the Grazer Kunstverein – moodily directed by Tom Engels – opened an untitled exhibition by Jason Dodge, the US-born artist and, importantly, sometimes poet. Untitled, or rather, as the exhibition text read: “the title of his exhibition is the collection of images that accompanies it. Three images of a red eye, split, side by side.” Dodge covered the floor in wet sheets of plastic, and mindfully, almost nervously arranged objects – branches, building materials, trash, and lights – hovering on the edge of their own presence. Like cautiously treading through a haiku, or the parallel world of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979), logic and causality, in Dodge, appear suspended in favour of a complex interplay between perception, subjectivity, and language.
Though immersive in this way, the art of mood is a far cry from the outsized science experiments of the great studio artists of the 2000s (Olafur Eliasson, Tomas Saraceno, Alicja Kwade, Carsten Höller). And likewise from the current tendency within institutions to cover a space in expensive exhibition design – shocking amounts of colourful wall-to-wall carpets and theatre light – that has the unfortunate side effect of reducing the artworks to props. Commissioned on the occasion of (and with funding related to) the European football championship, Marianna Simnett’s elaborate multi-media installation, on view this summer at Hamburger Bahnhof, is one case in point. Where Simnett’s early videos convey strong, even if repulsive, affect, when roped into an entertainment-industrial chain of supply and demand, the result was a senseless spectacle of about-ness that primarily testified to an overworked artist and a bloated budget.
Mood cannot be achieved through styling, but sets a higher bar reached only through comprehensive creative, intellectual, and personal engagement. As was evident in Dodge’s Graz show, for instance, it is rather a matter of uncovering the potential of what’s already there. Mood rolls back art’s professionalisation because it demands something that it would require structural changes in order to buy: presence, sensitivity, and time.
For this reason, the artist of mood most likely needs another source of income, just as the curator cannot meaningfully churn out six shows a year. Mood, then, is for the most part too demanding to be commercially or institutionally viable: at the MMK in Frankfurt, exhibitions have been delayed and catalogues are years in the making, and at Bonner Kunstverein the team brings sleeping bags to the openings so they can help clean up early the next day, a beautiful circumstance that, Hellberg knows, cannot be counted upon, but must develop organically.
With mood as benchmark, one does not make a career as an artist, curator, or writer – one makes a life. For sure, this poses a structural challenge in an art world already too determined by class, but it also puts an end to a certain gaslighting within the industry as to what is actually possible, as well as to soul-destroying misunderstandings about what art is and should do. Instead, mood both asks and answers the existential question of what this is all for.
Mood is a spatial concept; it changes the temperature of a room and fills it in the way that music or light does. As such, it is not possible to turn away from. This means that it does not consist of parts, but always exists as a whole. Tolia Astakhishvili – whose practice had been developing with zen-like steadiness for more than twenty years when it erupted in no less than four institutional solo shows since 2023, the latest at Sculpture Center in New York – is a master of this form.
Astakhishvili’s walls and partitions function at once as storage, stage and hiding place for hoarded objects, other people’s art, twisted drawings, and strange sounds, swallow their surroundings. The wall labels, the plug sockets, even the green lights of emergency exits are engulfed by her world. Hard as viewers will try – taking dozens of photos of myriad details and, unable to choose, dumping them all, Facebook style, onto Instagram – Astakhishvili’s works are impossible to capture. Their logic is fractal: you see the whole even in the part, but you cannot take it with you.
In this way, the art of mood circumvents the raison of much new performance art, as I’ve written elsewhere, staged as box-ticking spectacles of attendance to be subsequently fetishised as fragments on social media. In a moment when so much art is produced through reverse engineering – starting with the press release and then working backwards – that mood cannot be contained in an object, image, or text, but makes irrefutable demands on both your presence and your attunement renders its art more intrinsically political than that, which would declare its intentions at the door.
We might also say that the art of mood is anti-Pop: it is neither affirmative, nor interested in being liked. And yet, it enchants. It takes aspects of life as we know it and makes them less palatable, more distant, and more perverse, by integrating them into the totality of its atmosphere. We see, suddenly, the ancient quality of things. Through mood, objects do not become reified – as in Pop art, even if self-consciously so – but evasive, as if dissolved.
With mood as prism, quality names the ability of a work to profoundly mystify or unsettle our view onto reality. With regards, for instance to the problematic presence of a painting by Vera Palme, I would use a word like transubstantiation. A Palme painting changes the temperature of a room. Another keyword with which I associate mood is aporia – a profound experience of internal contradiction or doubt. But though mood shares such spiritual vocabulary with religion, it is ontologically impossible for the art of mood to be dogmatic or missionary. Unlike much of the supposedly secular, and in fact highly protestant, theme-art we’ve endured over the last decades, it does not offer redemption. (It seems to me that, if the denouncement of spirituality in art had the purpose of steering clear of moralising propaganda, the sacrifice has largely been in vain.)
Where mood is concerned, what appears as the outcome is but a pause in the flow of practice. The films of James Richards are exemplary in this regard. Over the last fifteen years, the Welsh artist has developed a special form of poetic mix-taping, whereby videos appear as carefully composed extractions from an incessant process of collecting and manipulating footage. To consider the works from this perspective is also to try and distance oneself from the system in which even films such as Richards’s, trash sculptures like Dodge’s, or world-building exercises like Astakhishvili’s, after all, do eventually circulate as capitalist fetish objects.
For mood is antithetical to fetish; the object quite simply does not exist in any substantial way outside of its immediate context. Here again it opposes Pop art and even Institutional Critique in refuting interest in its own circulation. The fetish aspect is a structural problem. But the value of the work of art is what appears in the moment of its creation and transports through the vehicle of mood to the viewers – not what ends up parked in a free port. Mood, then, does not have politics, but it is political because, on an ontological level, it de-centres commodity fetishism and individual authorship.
TARWUK is a duo from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Their name means nothing, but looks like it might, and the titles of their works are the same. Language, in TARWUK, is a type of hallucination. Their work begins from this place of dissolved belonging, blurred subjectivities. Mood is, in this way, beyond personality and identity; it addresses the nature of subjectivity, the conditions of existence. I wrote about their exhibition at Halle für Kunst Steiermark in Graz last year as a “confrontation with the monstrosity of selfhood breaking out of its confines; selfhood confronted with itself.”
This description is quite literal: humanoid sculptures between degeneration and apotropaic magic. Ritual has no small part in TARWUK’s practice, where paintings often come together during collaborative full moon seances; sculptures are assembled from highway debris ceremoniously collected as though offerings from the gods. There is humour here – certainly an element of the carnivalesque – and yet no distance. What we experience with them is not a posture, not the evocation of a discourse, say, of the occult or mystical, but something very real and, in its own way, incredibly intense.
During her tenure at Bonner Kunstverein, Fatima Hellberg has been an exponent of High Mood with solos by Tolia Astakhishvili and Michael Kleine, as well as, for instance in her 2021 exhibition with David Medalla, showing how mood lies dormant even in practices widely curated to a different pitch. Likewise, the recent group exhibition It Is Light evidenced that mood is always a case of the curator meeting the artist halfway.
It Is Light juxtaposed the violently sexual, deeply disturbing paintings and sculptures by the late outsider artist Blalla W. Hallmann with contemporary artists such as James T. Hong, Camilla Wills, and Ada Frände, a persona Hellberg has developed in collaboration with her mother, the Swedish artist Annika Eriksson. Elsewhere, Hong’s videos, for instance, could have read as a disenchanted deadpan, but within the moody holding environment facilitated by Hellberg they achieved an unnerving, almost melancholic, facetiousness. In Hellberg’s hands, the rooms became as if enveloped by a thin sheet of film, and everything in them, though at times wildly disparate, somehow of a piece.
In good curating – that is, curating understood as a form of art, rather than one of admin or networking – we see practices deadened by the didactics of institutional art history become suddenly invigorated, charged with spirit and a moving and unruly sense of humanity. What is revealed through this course is that such spirituality is the outcome of a way of relating that takes mood as both its content and its infrastructure.
Mood is not intellectual, but immediate; there is nothing to understand, and yet it is demanding. Mood is ambivalence. But that mood is not primarily cerebral does not mean that it does not read, only that the curriculum has changed. Artists, critics, and curators have long been preoccupied with Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Sara Ahmed, and Bruno Latour as well as, more recently, theorists of witchcraft, Afrofuturism, ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene. Now most people’s money, it seems, is on technology as next in the art world’s rotation of “turns” – a desperate last-ditch effort in the direction of newness.
I, for one, hope it will be mood, that is to say: the art itself, what it does to us. An outrageous thought, but one that would usher in a different reading list: philosophies of perception, resonance, presence and attunement; poetries of disintegration, survival, and cruelty – the stuff that artistic art is made of. Mood, in this regard, could be construed as a literary turn, only one that would paradoxically seem to require less language, less talking, less writing – and, crucially, less art.
