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Political Art Without Artists?

by Nicole Demby

 “The scene changes to an empty room. Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village schoolteacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess.” 

So Susan Sontag depicts the abandonment of poetry, philosophy, and art by these disciplines’ greatest luminaries in The Aesthetics of Silence. Faced with the limitations of art’s materiality, she explains, artists try to negate art, driven to silence by art’s incapacity to achieve transcendence. Something akin to this solemn scene could describe the current state of contemporary art, as droves of artists, curators, and institutions forsake art for social practice in the face of art’s perceived limitations.

While artists since the avant-garde have pushed the boundaries of what can be considered art, the adoption of social practice by artists and art institutions has ensured that the art and life debate rages stronger than ever. Art historians recount with a sense of absurdity the many monikers used to refer to this socially-engaged contemporary art. The art that constitutes this social turn is referred to alternately as dialogic, littoral, engaged, participatory, community-based, collaborative, interventionist, research-based, or simply as social practice. All these terms denote artists engaging a wide range of political and pseudo-political activity, almost always by providing a forum for some kind of participation or community engagement. Sometimes this engagement is more recognizable as art while other times the ontological status of a project is more difficult to assess.

This past spring, Creative Time stoked the flames of the debate surrounding this art when the organization began a series of programming leading up to an exhibition entitled Living as Form. This programming started with talks addressing socially-engaged art by contemporary art-historian Claire Bishop, geopolitical theorist Brian Holmes, and Creative Time’s chief curator and organizer of Living as Form, Nato Thompson. These presentations led up to an exhibition that opens this weekend at the Historic Essex Street Market and features booths devoted to over one-hundred socially engaged projects. Creative Time is presenting six newly commissioned projects throughout lower Manhattan. This coincides with the third Creative Time Summit, an annual conference that “brings together different cultural producers to discuss their work addressing contemporary political issues.”[1]

Though billed as art projects, the entities represented at the exhibition and in the accompanying catalogue will include not only work by artists and political pranksters like the Yes Men, but also agents of more traditional social activism: NGO’s, as well as “non-authored phenomena” like Wikileaks and even the street parties that erupted in Brooklyn after Barack Obama won the 2008 election. Despite this provocation, the curatorial statement for Living as Form doesn’t attempt to place the exhibition firmly on either side of the art or life debate. Though the question of how to regard these projects was addressed by the lecturers, Creative Time’s only stated intentions are to present a survey of twenty years of “cultural activity” that “blurs the forms of art and everyday life, emphasizing participation, dialogue, and community engagement.” As Thompson gleefully told the audience during his presentation, after asking them if they desired answers to the conceptual conundrums surrounding social practice: “I’m just here to cause problems!” Summing up Creative Time’s critical disposition in mounting Living As Form, he adopted a quote from none other than Donald Rumsfeld: “If you have a problem, make it bigger.”

Living as Form is symptomatic of a readiness amongst curators and institutions not only to support art that is socially engaged, but to include non-art phenomena within art shows, museums, and publications. While each new inclusion sparks heated debate over whether or not the included phenomena constitutes art, what is conspicuously lacking is a critical discussion about why these institutions are so eager to position themselves in relation to political modes of cultural production that fall outside of art.

Art is inherently political. Good art contains an inherent ambiguity related to its dissociation from standard forms of rationality. Art has the capacity, as Jacques Rancière explains, to produce a “double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification.”[2] Rather than its total commensurability with political activism, Rancière’s explication of this “double effect” underscores that it is precisely its unique ontological status as something distinct from life that enables art to reconfigure what we are capable of seeing and feeling, and thus, to be political. Yet as art’s incapacity to escape the social and economic order dictated by global capitalism becomes ever-more evident, its ability to maintain the critical space necessary to produce political effects becomes increasingly tenuous. Instead of pushing to discover new ways in which art can subvert from within the immanent clutches of neoliberalism, however, curators and institutions are increasingly looking for their subversive fix outside of the aesthetical realm of art.

This outward turn is characterized most obviously by an exhibition like Living as Form, in which curators adhere to the model of a more standard exhibition by selecting non-art phenomena to be displayed. Yet as we shall see, art never provides a neutral setting for these entities; even as a mere forum for discussion the art world often transmogrifies political matters, tending to see real world events and phenomena through the lens of art. Lastly, this outward-glancing trend is evident in a conspicuous new kind of museum programming inflected by the relational aesthetics first described by Nicolas Bourriaud, one that takes the form of the laboratory, the festival, or the hub, and encompasses within its subject matter a wide range of non-art disciplines.

Art historical discourses surrounding social practice often contextualize political and cultural phenomena with the aim of underscoring their affinity with political art. Social Practice 101 always begins with a literal or proverbial slide show that depicts the artistic avant-garde and the political avant- garde as two sides of the same coin (a problematic and reductive depiction as Claire Bishop pointed out in her Living As Form lecture, given that strategies of participation similar to those of the historic avant- garde were employed by both the political left and the political right). While this narrative picks up on the theatricality and spectacle of historical events such as the Paris Commune and the protests of 1968, it is often centered around the beginning of the anti-globalization movement in the 90’s, with the protests revolving around the WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle in 1999 and the rise of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico.[3]

With its hordes of costumed protesters performing antics such as using trebuchets to hurl stuffed animals over a fence erected by police, and with the myriad vintage-seeming posed photographs of its masked leader Subcomandante Marcos smoking his ubiquitous pipe, these anti-globalization activities are undeniably artistic. They suggest that given the contingency of neoliberalism on individuals performing roles that can be reduced to marketing statistics[4], the performative link between art and political subversion may be more important than ever. Yet despite the artistic quality of these activities, what sometimes gets lost, shrouded by art-world enthusiasm is that each of political action was undertaken with specific political aims. These narratives tend to simplistically conflate events occurring in different countries that emerged in response to different circumstances by focusing too exclusively on their spectacular, namely artistic, quality. The incorporation of these events into art-historical discourses has been too starry-eyed, too ready to point to the aesthetic ruptures they cause without looking at them within an appropriate political or economic framework. A more recent example of the uncritical embrace of non-art political phenomena by the art world is the recent enthusiasm for Wikileaks among its ranks. Outside of the realm of art the classified-data-releasing organization has been the subject of much charged discussion over its practices. While a lot of this discussion questions the ethical and political implications of Wikileaks’ release of classifies information, in recent months much of it has revolved around Julian Assange, the organization’s CEO. Though regarded by many in the hacking community as a hero, after accounts of his dealings with the media and the accusations of his sexual misconduct in Sweden, Assange’s character now seems questionable to many, even to those who support Wikileaks’s activity.

None of these contentious issues seem to affect the ubiquitous and remarkably influential curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in his interview with Assange recently published in the e-flux journal. Obrist gently prods Assange into soliloquy with short, neutral questions and often forgoes questions entirely to make brief and affirming expansions on what Assange says. One would have hoped that someone as culturally- engaged as Obrist would question Assange more assiduously, perhaps pressing him on some of the controversies surrounding Wikileaks such as the incarceration of Bradley Manning or concerns for the security of those implicated in the cables. Obrist’s meekness becomes even more striking in the second part of the interview when he plays Assange video questions submitted by artists and collectives, including Paul Chan, Superflex, and Martha Rosler. It is only these artists who finally raise issues such as Manning’s incarceration, Assange’s decision to assume the spotlight as the head of Wikileaks, and question the soundness of hazy political and intellectual philosophy. Why is it that Obrist, a crucial figure in promoting art that engages the political, can’t ask Assange a single critical question? While the artists in the interview are trenchant and demanding in their questions, Obrist provides a mere platform for Assange. One only wishes that the artists themselves had been physically present instead of just Obrist to press further on Assange’s answers to these questions.

This problematically uncritical curatorial enthusiasm for politics is also apparent in the prevalence of museum programming that includes individuals and groups working in non-art professional fields. This type programming, exemplified by the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for The New City held in May and the current BMW Guggenheim Lab on the Lower East Side, often takes the form of the laboratories or “hubs” that include panel discussions, screenings, workshops, and other inventive programming. Despite slight degrees of difference in the subject matter addressed, the aim of these programs is always remarkably similar: to create as space for dialogue and debate and to promote “the exploration of new ideas, experimentation, and ultimately the creation of forward-thinking solutions.”[5]

The Festival of Ideas presented an impressive line-up of participants and events held throughout the city, hosted by galleries, organizations, stores, and restaurants. Highlights included a keynote address by the architect Rem Koolhaas and symposia drawing together technology experts, architects, politicians, and artists to discuss themes pertaining to “The Heterogeneous City”, “The Networked City”, “The Reconfigured City”, and “The Sustainable City”. The festival culminated in a “streetfest” involving local businesses and grassroots organizations[6] and Flash:Light, a nighttime display of moving murals projected onto building fronts along the Bowery.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab currently occupies a formerly empty lot at Houston St. and Second Avenue on the Lower East Side. It is a “mobile laboratory”, a series of three pop-up structures that will be erected for a period of two years in nine different cities around the world. The Lab’s aim sounds familiar: “Part urban think tank, part community center and public gathering space, the BMW Guggenheim Lab is conceived to engage public discourse in cities around the world.” The theme of the Lab’s first instantiation in New York is “Confronting Comfort”. The series of programs are occurring within it allege to address the notion of comfort in the city, responsiveness of urban space to citizens needs, and issues of sustainability. These programs are impressive displays of meticulous organizing. They are often highly participatory and do manage to incorporate diverse audiences into their programming. Moreover, they tend to present and place into dialogue a number of fascinating speakers. Yet these exhibitions are also problematic. Despite their good intentions, they tend to provide forums for business interests small and large to easily affiliate themselves with a seemingly progressive cause.[7] There is also a striking similarity between their organizational logic, aims, and visual design, with that of branding and corporate innovation strategies, emblems of the co-option of creative labor by big businesses that forward the neo-liberalized globalization these museum programs stake themselves against. Additionally, by virtue of the presence of these mainstream purveyors of culture in the gentrified though still economically diverse Lower East Side, these exhibitions undoubtedly advance the very gentrification they adopt as thematic content. Most troubling, however, is that it remains to be seen whether these festivals, labs, and hubs have any real political effect after the laboratories are deconstructed and the festival booths are taken down. Dialogue’s political merits are clear, yet bringing together different progressive cultural producers does not necessarily do anything to advance their projects, and partaking in these kinds of programs does not necessarily lead participants to become any more socially engaged.

My aim is not condemn these curatorial efforts, but rather to question the increasing desire on the part of museums to incorporate an ever wider range of cultural activities into their programming and to determine the types of relationships this incorporation creates between the institution and this cultural activity. Through these programs, institutions make art answerable to the standards of politics. They place themselves in the ring of the political—one primarily concerned with affecting real, observable change—without undertaking any real political aims and without producing a set of criteria for measuring the progressive change they’re meant to produce. Moreover these laboratories do little to progress the curatorial paradigm, as evinced by the repetitiveness of the rhetoric that surrounds them. Whether or not these programs have any real political merit, what is certain is that when museums mount them they are adopting a trendy set of practices and a superficial lexicon of progress. With each new laboratory or hub it becomes increasingly apparent that while the content may be fresh, the package is stale.

The examples underscore that there are two aspects of the social turn. On the one hand, artists are making art in the vein of social practice and leaving critics to argue over the implications. On the other, institutions and organizations are using curation in an attempt to position art in relation to progressive movements outside the arts. Yet as the contrast between the artists’ interrogations of Julian Assange and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s lack of criticality underscores, when an artist engages with politics and when a curator does, this engagement has fundamentally different implications. When artists incorporate political content or strategies into their artwork, this act is twofold; it is both a specific engagement with a certain issue or set of issues as well as a gesture that either intentionally or unintentionally raises reflexive questions about the relation of art to the political. When a curator promotes non-art phenomena, she engages primarily with the latter. The curatorial act of incorporation is one of contextualizing, of framing the incorporated content in such a way that relates the curator to the real substance of this content only vicariously.

In his essay Art Without Artists?, Anton Vidokle laments how the rising power of curators in contemporary art leaches power from artists. He recounts the controversy surrounding the curator Roger Buergel’s inclusion of the chef Ferran Adria in Documenta 12 as an example of a curator overstepping his curatorial bounds. Such inclusion, he argues, as well as the increasing popularity of spaces and installations designed by curators within museums, art fairs, and galleries (here Vidokle mentions the archive-cum-art installation “Curating Degree Zero Archive”), becomes an act of artistic production that supplants the production of artists themselves.[8]

While the title of Vidokle’s essay asks whether this kind of contemporary curation has countenanced art without artists, we must also ask a related question: has the incorporation of politically-engaged cultural production and social phenomena by curators working for arts institutions and organizations created a political art space without artists? Just as for Vidokle, the notion of an art without artists is incredibly problematic, so too is the designation of political entities as art by curators. While art and politics are undeniably related in a cultural landscape in which radical activity on both fronts borrows from and reinforces the other, our ability to recognize the artistic attributes of a political organization or action shouldn’t hinder our capacity to judge it primarily according to political rather than aesthetic criteria. There’s a difference between calling a protest theatrical and calling it theater; claiming the latter distracts us from gaging activism’s effectiveness qua activism.

It is a fallacy that reflects a lack of creativity for curators to assume that the only way of providing political art programming is to put socially-engaged art on display or to forgo this art entirely in favor of the non-art practices it is kindred to. In The Expediency of Culture, George Yúdice juxtaposes the stated political and community-generating effects of inSITE, a biennial in the San Diego-Tijuana border region for which artists produce site-specific works, with the complex system of both cooperative and antagonistic relations that the logistical process of mounting inSITE forges. He suggests that perhaps the most honest and politically-progressive thing that institutions like biennials can do is to turn their curatorial lens on the complicated relations implicit in their own creation. As he says:

“this machinery or archeology, to use Foucault’s term for showing how a system of statements works, will help us understand how inSITE patches together a heterogeneity of discourses and practices that produce subject positions and in doing so is itself a social intervention. It is for this reason that I advocate examining the organization of inSITE, and indeed suggest that inSITE reveal its own operations as part of its display, not simply as a form of institutional critique but for the purposes of devising plans for action.”[9]

In the fall of 2010, Exit Art produced Alternative Histories, an exhibition and an accompanying series of events that examined the history of artist-run and alternative art spaces, collectives, and publications in New York City. The gallery put up a sprawling visual display of posters and other ephemera from the history of the alternative spaces. It also included a reading room comprised of a mammoth table laden with interviews, documents and written histories of each venture. The symposia brought together influential individuals behind both iconic and emerging alternative spaces. Like the Festival of Ideas for The New City, Alternative Spaces coincided with a range of relevant programming in other alternative spaces throughout the city. The Alternative Histories exhibition was just as sprawling, dialogue-friendly, and relevant to diverse subsets of the population as either the New Museum festival of the BMW Guggenheim Lab. Yet instead of questing outside of art for content it could assume, Exit Art found a compelling way to to engage issues such as the shifting urban landscape and progressive community development within the history of art itself. The institutions represented in Alternative Histories and the gallery that hosted the show are all non-profit endeavors and thus immune from many of the inevitable conundrums that arise when large institutions mount social programming. Yet Alternative Histories still provides a helpful model for how other organizations can think through alternatives to the status quo and encourage new progressive developments without co-opting the activity of other cultural spheres. It assuages fears that any exhibition or program that reflexively examines how art’s political consequences in contemporary culture will necessarily result in critical paralysis, mired in art’s own entrenchment within the systems of global capital.

In an age when it’s so easy to show our affinity for something by simply re-blogging it, re-Tweeting it, or “liking” it on Facebook, we must be careful to distinguish between easy endorsement as a means of self-promotion by proxy, and actual, sustained engagement. Though it may seem progressive, a desire to adopt commendable political practices betrays a weakness in the arts, a parasitism driven by a lack of faith in the subversive potential of aesthetics. In her Living as Form speech, Claire Bishop criticizes socially-engaged art that abandons the Rancièrian double effect of art for a more straight-forward political approach. This art, she says, denies art its capacity to produce a uniquely aesthetic political effect by emphasizing tension and ambiguity, rather than the cohesion and transparency generally advocated by non-art social engagement. It adopts political-seeming strategies while often absolving itself of the responsibility of activists to follow through on these strategies to produce change. These criticisms ring doubly true when curators and institutions, the very actors charged with promoting art and contextualizing it in within society, incorporate political phenomena into their programs and exhibitions. With this incorporation, the realm of art becomes nothing but a showcase for progressive political activity without engaging with the specific content of this activity. This incorporation reveals an art trying to be political by association rather than facing tough questions about what its unique role in bettering society should be.

If the art Sontag described recognized the shortcomings of its own materiality and sought to negate itself, what we are witnessing in contemporary art today is a false modesty, a thinly-veiled self-importance. When art seeks to incorporate non-art phenomena it does not eliminate itself; it expands. It implies itself as the natural cultural home of these phenomena, thus undermining the realm of politics. Rather than feeling the limits of achieving any kind of transcendence through art, when are subsumes the political as its own promotes itself as the only transcendent cultural space.

The recent, overwhelming enthusiasm of curators, critics, and institutions for political and socially-engaged art might lead the casual observer to believe that this art constitutes all art production today. Yet the contemporary art landscape is actually a fragmented one, polarized between those artists who still make things for the sake of making things, and those artists who, to quote the artist Jeremy Deller, “make things happen”. What exhibitions such as Living As Form do is shift this latter pole even further from the aesthetic, exacerbating this fragmentation and precluding an art that at once embraces both its aesthetic qualities and its political capacity. As Claire Bishop rightly points out, it is certainly not in anyone’s best interest for politics to become the exclusive provenance of art. What we need are people who can recognize real effectiveness in politics and also the uniquely political nature of aesthetics—people who can think critically about how politics and aesthetics can be pushed forward, each according to its own merits.

—

[1] http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2011/livingasform/about.htm

[2] The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, (Continuüm, 2004)

[3] Nato Thomspson’s Living as Form speech is a prime example of such a narrative.

[4] In Empire, the 2001 book canonical in globalization studies, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri use Foucault’s notion of biopower to forward the concept of Empire, a contemporary form of imperialism in which capital is no longer confined to material goods, but rather characterized by “social production” generated by networks of human communication. According to Hardt and Negri, this commodification of the social relationships that constitute the everyday activities of individuals is the means by which Empire controls every aspect of individual life.

[5] http://www.guggenheim.org/guggenheim-foundation/collaborations/bmw-guggenheim

[6] These local business tended to be geared towards the kimchi and kombucha-consuming, screen-printed totebags carrying crowd. Conspicuously absent were any business representatives from the immediate block or from neighboring Chinatown.

[7] For example, one of the events at the Festival of Ideas for The New City was devoted to Audi’s “Audi Urban Future Initiative”.

[8] http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/136

Nicole Demby is a critic and artist living in Brooklyn.  She is interested in existing and potential relationships between contemporary art, everyday life, and culture at large.  She is currently running Private Praxis, a “conceptual art therapy” practice, out of her studio in Gowanus, and is in the midst of launching Dyad, an online journal focusing on acts of translation, reperformance, and processes of collaboration.