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hopeful intent. Instead of learning to love artworks in the avant-garde tradition, we need to learn to be shocked by them again so as not to steal from them their raison d’être. The concept of the waning of shock is an ideology antagonistic to the aims and values of the Avant Garde which has penetrated the cultural heritage of the Avant Garde. Widespread embarrassment with the idea of shock in art confirms that the old cultural order has gained an ideological upper hand on these matters. But it ought to be clear that no world that suffers such a litany of horrors as ours can justify the argument that its art should be free of shock. There is something truly scandalous about the declaration of the waning of shock and the concomitant idea of the shock of the new. To be or to become insensitive to that which shocks may demonstrate our cosmopolitan sophistication but it also dehumanises. Consider genocide or female genital mutilation: if such practices become more common or we become more aware of them, we should not become more blasé toward them, but increasingly shocked. Shock is an ethical response to inhumanity; boredom is an inhuman response to shocking events. And this is not only true for major horrors such as genocide, but remains true for the inhumanity of the everyday such as domestic violence, casual racism, bureaucratic indifference, institutionalised homophobia, and so on. We should preserve our shock at the sight of all these commonplace horrors as if we were preserving and protecting our very humanity. Shock is the best first response we have to inhumanity. Instead of anticipating the waning of such shock and cultivating a blank response where others would be shocked, the more responsible task would be to cultivate the ability to remain shocked despite the familiarity and repetition of the provocations we witness. Shock registers pain in a damaged world and the world becomes no less damaged because we develop the ability not to be shocked by it. Shock is an indicator of our shared frailty and our common fate as a species. Shock humanises, whereas awe dehumanises. An aesthetics of shock is the cultural equivalent of the ethics of care. ‘What kind of civilization is it’, Richard Sheppard writes in reference to Dada in his recent book Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism, 2000, ‘that gets worked up about the ultimately insignificant antics, provocations, and obscenities of a few anarchic bohémiens, while tolerating a war that had caused millions of deaths and untold suffering, great cities full of poverty, vice, violence, and crime, and régimes in which the worst seemed able to rise to the top?’ No avantgardist shock comes close to the truly shocking nature of war, famine, prejudice, exploitation, corruption and abuse. Our struggle against injustice and inhumanity begins with our shock at the outrages in the world. Shock in art is an echo of that shock. The old order of art ought to feel threatened by avant-garde shock, as should the moral gatekeepers of polite society. The idea that shock in art is a trivialisation of high culture has its inverse equivalent, namely that the aestheticist academy trivialises the values and effects of shock in art and shock full stop. ❚

Francis Picabia La femme blonde/La Blonde 1942

no longer shock us, we can certainly come to recognise something unnerving, uncomfortable and even unpleasant in them. Learning to see how and why the first generation who saw Picasso’s nudes in the style of African masks have found them shocking is part of the process of learning to see the paintings fully. To acknowledge the persistence of shock, therefore, is to attend to such works with a keener eye than that dulled by repetition, as well as to credit them for the innovations that they produced, not least when those innovations have stuck and become generally accepted. Where, at the moment, there is only neglect, denial and weariness, an aesthetics of shock in contemporary art and the reclamation of shock from historical works and strategies that have become familiar can be achieved by developing an attentiveness to shock. To shrug off the shock in avant-garde works – including learning to love them – is to develop a certain specific blindness to them. This is why Duchamp was deeply frustrated by the acceptance of the readymades as beautiful art objects. To take the shock away from the readymades and judge them as beautiful is simply to admire them as everyday objects, not factoring in how they rupture and defy the border between art and non-art. If we are no longer shocked by the provocations of the Avant Garde, then we have become blind to its caustic, defiant, subversive and

DAVE BEECH

is an artist and lectures at Chelsea College

of Art.

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