About the term of art and “Clockwork Orange” (1971) by Stanley Kubrick
Red — blue — red. These three colors violently penetrate into the eyes of the spectators together with the first sounds of the soundtrack coming from “Ludwig von”. This music and the colors pierce the quiet darkness of the cinema hall as if with a knife. At that moment, you know that phrases like “it was good” or “I didn’t like it” will sound far too bland after the movie is over. They will dissolve in the cold air outside Berlin’s Zeughaus cinema and do nothing to the reputation of the director and his most popular film. Because Kubrick and his “Clockwork Orange” are firmly inscribed in the canon of film, music and art history. Why? That is exactly why I am writing this text, in which I would like to clarify something not only about his film, but about the concept and term of art.
1. About the term of art
The literary scholar Susanne Kaul and the film theorist Jean-Pierre Palmier wrote a monograph on Kubrick’s films, which I borrowed from the Grimm Center of Berlin in the hope of explaining the film’s contexts and plot in case some questions or scenes remained unanswered, as was the case after “Space Odyssey”. Instead, the monograph, along with the film, became a stumbling block by selling the violence as something artistic. This shows that the concept of art is extremely unprotected and weak, and is therefore abused far too often. This happens especially in cases where one can only do something with the works, (museum) objects, videos or films because someone once called them “art”. Now they are part of private collections and we look at them impressed and think we don’t understand anything about the art world. Therefore, the question “or can it go away?” is added to the expression “this is art.” People stop trying to understand art. At the same time, however, the language used nowadays when talking about art is so vague and abstract that this impression is only reinforced. Conclusion: one stops understanding art because one no longer knows what art is. You see the slow-motion videos or installations in the exhibitions, read these abstracts and complicated texts about them and seem to be in the dark. At the same time, however, one wants to be or seem educated and, despite everything, visits the (contemporary) exhibitions in which one again understands nothing. Art thus completely loses its original meaning as an aesthetic object that (best of all) makes you think and becomes a synonym of unclear chaos.
2. Villains (or artists?)
This term of art was also used by the two literary and film scholars Susanne Kaul and Jean-Pierre Palmier in their strategy to defend “Clockwork Orange” by emphasizing the aestheticization of violence, which Kubrick is accused of for understandable reasons. They write that the main protagonist “Alex appears more as an artist (…) than as a villain” (Kaul / Palmer 2010, p. 58). Objection: Already in the first shot of the film we see this evil eye with the false eyelashes on the right side. The asymmetry that only emphasizes the “abnormal” in this look. The lascivious decor of the milk bar, the innocent white contrasts with the sculptures of women with their legs spread for the villains (or artists?) to enjoy their milk drink full of drugs. After that, the click of four young men dressed in white feel ready to perform their violent deeds. I won’t go into details any longer and allow myself a generalization: everything that follows is violence. First Kubrick depicts the four Boys randomly beating, robbing and raping people, and that in front of all the beautiful interiors stylishly furnished by Kubrick. Then Alex kills a woman with a sculpture in the shape of a penis and himself becomes a victim of the state system, in which “evil” (or artistic?) is trained away from him in prison. According to his own wish, he gets into an “improvement program” for prisoners. His eyes are kept open with the help of a device while he sits in the cinema and is shown the atrocities — rape, fascism, death. He feels sick in the cinema, but he has to watch. A doctor drips a liquid into his eyes to keep them from drying out.
The scene is horrific, yet it is so hard to miss the resemblance to the real spectators in the cinema. While a river of violence plays out on the screen, our eyes are kept open with the colors, music and futuristic interiors. We must stay awake to absorb the evil. The effect is the same as Alex’s: a spitting reflex kicks in. We feel sick to our stomach. We hate and are very fascinated at the same time. However, just as with Alex, the evil is not exorcised from us. Because after the experiment with cinema violence Alex doesn’t get better thoughts, he still wants to kill and rape, but he can’t, because a physical reflex comes out — he gets sick.
So Alex goes from being a perpetrator to a victim, first because of the state that created the violent improvement program, then because of the doctors who carried out the program, and finally because of society itself, which drives Alex to suicide at the next opportunity. In the end, everything turns out all right — the state acknowledges that it did violence to the killer and Alex is “cured back.” “I was cured allright,” is his final word before the screen turns red again.
3. Causes for reflection and reconsideration of art definition
Whether this was art? More like an experiment on the audience. Do I feel like a victim? No. As a perpetrator? If the perpetrator is also the one who just watches and does nothing, then yes. But those who call violence art are certainly victims, in my opinion, because they can no longer distinguish evil from good. When violence becomes art, it (violence) is shamelessly justified. It is a sign that we should rethink the term of art and not just obediently accept it when it is shown in the cinema, in private collections and museums, or even made available in a monograph of the Grimm Center. And I’m not just talking about Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange”, but also thousands of films available on Netflix and other similar platforms that emit an even more blatant violence, naked, covered with nothing, not one with the geometric interiors from the seventies.
