Artforum, May 2006

I WAS SURPRISED to learn from Claire Bishop (“The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum, February 2006) that “polit­ic­ally engaged” col­lab­or­at­ive art prac­tice con­sti­tutes today’s avant-garde. A more meas­ured assess­ment might recog­nize a con­tinuüm of col­lab­or­at­ive and “rela­tional” prac­tices, ran­ging from the work of biennial-circuit stal­warts like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Santiago Sierra to that of more overtly act­iv­ist but less vis­ible groups such as Ala Plastica, Park Fiction, and Platform. The gen­eral dis­com­fort of main­stream art crit­ics and insti­tu­tions with polit­ic­ally engaged art is long– stand­ing (con­sider Douglas Crimp’s break with October in the early ‘90s over his interest in AIDS-activist groups). This dis­com­fort is evid­ent in Bishop’s own essay. She begins by offer­ing an olive branch of recon­cili­ation to “act­iv­ists who reject aes­thetic ques­tions as syn­onym­ous with cul­tural hier­archy and the mar­ket,” but one would be hard pressed to find many con­tem­por­ary artists or crit­ics involved with polit­ic­ally engaged prac­tice who would espouse such a simplistic pos­i­tion. Her com­plaint about the “stan­doff” between “aes­thetes” and “act­iv­ists” not­with­stand­ing, Bishop her­self does much to encour­age it, end­ing her essay by dis­miss­ing act­iv­ist art en masse as “polit­ic­ally cor­rect,” “Platonic,” and even “Christian.” All that is lack­ing in this rather puzz­ling lit­any are accus­a­tions of child abuse and the club­bing of baby seals. This is hardly the kind of thing likely to encour­age a con­vivial rap­proche­ment. Rather than a con­tinuüm of col­lab­or­at­ive prac­tices, Bishop seems determ­ined to enforce a fixed and rigid bound­ary between “aes­thetic” pro­jects (“pro­voc­at­ive,” “uncom­fort­able,” and “mul­tilayered”) and act­iv­ist works (“pre­dict­able,” “bene­vol­ent,” and “inef­fec­tual”). Thus, in her cri­tique of Nicolas Bourriaud, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” pub­lished in the November 2004 issue of October, Bishop reas­sures her read­ers: “I am not sug­gest­ing that rela­tional art­works need to develop a greater social conscious–by mak­ing pin­board works about inter­na­tional ter­ror­ism, for example, or giv­ing free cur­ries to refugees.” For Bishop, art can become legit­im­ately “polit­ical” only indir­ectly, by expos­ing the lim­its and con­tra­dic­tions of polit­ical dis­course itself (the viol­ent exclu­sions impli­cit in demo­cratic con­sensus, for example) from the quasi-detached per­spect­ive of the artist. In this view, artists who choose to work in alli­ance with spe­cific col­lect­ives, social move­ments, or polit­ical struggles will inev­it­ably be con­signed to dec­or­at­ing floats for the annual May Day parade. Without the detach­ment and autonomy of con­ven­tional art to insu­late them, they are doomed to “rep­res­ent,” in the most naïve and facile man­ner pos­sible, a given polit­ical issue or con­stitu­ency. This detach­ment is neces­sary because art is con­stantly in danger of being sub­sumed to the con­di­tion of con­sumer cul­ture or “enter­tain­ment” (cul­tural forms pre­dic­ated on immer­sion rather than on a recon­dite crit­ical dis­tance). Instead of sedu­cing view­ers, the artist’s task is to hold them at arm’s length, incul­cat­ing a skep­tical dis­tance that par­al­lels the insight provided by crit­ical the­ory into the con­tin­gency of social and polit­ical meaning.

What Bishop seeks is an art prac­tice that will con­tinu­ally reaf­firm and flat­ter her self– per­cep­tion as an acute critic, “decod­ing” or unrav­el­ing a given video install­a­tion, per­form­ance, or film, play­ing at her­men­eutic self-discovery like Freud’s infant grand­son in a game of “fort” and “da.” In addi­tion to nat­ur­al­iz­ing decon­struct­ive inter­pret­a­tion as the only appro­pri­ate met­ric for aes­thetic exper­i­ence, this approach places the artist in a pos­i­tion of eth­ical over­sight, unveil­ing or reveal­ing the con­tin­gency of sys­tems of mean­ing that the viewer would oth­er­wise sub­mit to without think­ing. The viewer, in short, can’t be trus­ted. Bishop’s deep sus­pi­cion of art prac­tices that sur­render some autonomy to col­lab­or­at­ors and that involve the artist dir­ectly in the (always already com­prom­ised) mach­in­a­tions of polit­ical struggles. In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Duke Univeristy Press, 2003), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a use­ful inter­pret­a­tion of the rhet­oric of expos­ure in her ana­lysis of the “para­noid con­sensus” that has come to dom­in­ate con­tem­por­ary crit­ical the­ory informed by struc­tur­al­ism, psy­cho­ana­lysis, and Marxism. Based in part on the his­tor­ical iden­ti­fic­a­tion of crit­ical the­ory with the act of reveal­ing the (struc­tural) determ­in­ants that pat­tern our per­cep­tion of real­ity, the para­noid approach obsess­ively repeats the ges­ture of “unveil­ing hid­den viol­ence” to a benumbed or dis­be­liev­ing world. As enabling and neces­sary as it is to probe beneath the sur­face of appear­ance and to identify unac­know­ledged forms of power, the para­noid approach, in Sedgwick’s view, attrib­utes an almost mys­tical agency to the act of rev­el­a­tion in and of itself. As she writes:

The para­noid trust in expos­ure seem­ingly depends … on an infin­ite reser­voir of naïveté in those who make up the audi­ence for these  unveil­ings. What is the basis for assum­ing that it will sur­prise or  dis­turb, never mind motiv­ate, any­one to learn that a given social mani­fest­a­tion is arti­fi­cial, self-contradictory, imit­at­ive, phant­as­matic or even violent?

As Sedgwick notes, the nor­mal­iz­a­tion of para­noid know­ing as a model for cre­at­ive and intel­lec­tual prac­tice has entailed “a cer­tain dis­ar­tic­u­la­tion, dis­avowal, and mis­recog­ni­tion of other ways of know­ing, ways less ori­ented around sus­pi­cion.” Sedgwick jux­ta­poses para­noid know­ing (in which “expos­ure in and of itself is assigned a cru­cial oper­at­ive power”) with repar­at­ive know­ing, which is driven by the desire to ameli­or­ate or give pleas­ure. As she argues, this repar­at­ive atti­tude is intol­er­able to the para­noid, who views any attempt to work pro­duct­ively within a given sys­tem of mean­ing as unfor­giv­ably naïve and com­pli­cit; a belief author­ized by the paranoid’s “con­temp­tu­ous assump­tion that the one thing lack­ing for global revolu­tion, explo­sion of gender roles, or whatever, is people’s (that is, other people’s) hav­ing the pain­ful effects of their oppres­sion, poverty, or deluded­ness, suf­fi­ciently exacer­bated to make the pain con­scious (as if oth­er­wise it wouldn’t have been) and intolerable.”

As delight­ful as it is to hear yet another dis­quis­i­tion on the glor­ies of The Battle of Orgreave, 2001, or Dogville (2003), a more com­plete account of col­lab­or­at­ive art must begin with some meas­ured reflec­tion on the diversity of prac­tices encom­passed by that term. And it must include a more sub­stant­ive ana­lysis of pre­cisely the con­cepts that Bishop aban­dons to ad hom­inem cliché: “act­iv­ism,” “polit­ical engage­ment,” and the aes­thetic itself. On one level Bishop’s dis­com­fort with act­iv­ist art is typ­ical of post-cold war intel­lec­tu­als embar­rassed by work that evokes left­ist ideals. At the same time, I think there’s some­thing more at stake in her obvi­ous revul­sion (the low­est circle of hell in her essay is reserved for “the com­munity arts tra­di­tion”). It would seem, after all, to be rel­at­ively uncon­tro­ver­sial to loc­ate the rela­tional pro­jects she embraces (those of Sierra, Carsten Holler, or Jeremy Deller) on a con­tinuüm with socially engaged pro­jects that employ pro­cesses of col­lab­or­at­ive inter­ac­tion. However, act­iv­ist work trig­gers a kind of sac­ri­fi­cial response for Bishop, as if to even acknow­ledge this work as “art” some­how threatens the legit­im­acy of the prac­tices that she does sup­port. A reduct­ive ver­sion of engaged or act­iv­ist art (“free cur­ries for refugees”) thus func­tions as a neces­sary foil, rep­res­ent­ing the abject, unsoph­ist­ic­ated Other to the com­plex “aes­thetic” works of which she approves. This isn’t to say that there is no reason to inter­rog­ate activist-art prac­tices, but only to ques­tion the read­i­ness with which crit­ics like Bishop revert to the nuc­lear option of chal­len­ging the ontic status of this work as art qua art. While oth­er­wise quite keen to ques­tion the lim­its of dis­curs­ive sys­tems of mean­ing in her cri­ti­cism, she exhib­its an unseemly enthu­si­asm for poli­cing the bound­ar­ies of legit­im­ate art prac­tice. Rather than deplor­ing the fact that some con­tem­por­ary artists refuse to make the “right” kinds of work, she might con­sider the “uncom­fort­able” pos­sib­il­ity that her own ver­sion of the aes­thetic is simply one among many.

–Grant Kester, San Diego, CA