Policing an art world under siege
Introduction
“The Moment
that an artist takes notice of what other people want and tries to supply the
demand, he ceases to be an artist.” Oscar Wilde (Ross, 1969, volume 8, p. 300).
I will
introduce the ideas of art theorists Kester Grant and Clare Bishop in
connection with Relational Aesthetics. The nuances of their positions are
central for making sense of the range of mainstream and unconventional art
practice happening inside and outside the gallery setting, in collaborative or
socially engaged practice, and in biennales worldwide. I will be making
critical and conscious use of case studies to illumine the debate.
Wochenklausur and Occupy Museums illustrate the thinking of Kester, while the
work of Jeremy Deller and Mark Wallinger fall more within a Bishop-like model
of what good art should be. Kester
argues in favour of the ethical component of such practices while Bishop wishes
to keep it out, defending the autonomy of the artist within the art world.
Bishop upholds the status quo of contemporary art today
though widening its boundaries to subsume the politically engaged; Kester evangelises
the word of the ‘dialogical’ with the promise of freedom from fixed identities
and official discourse. Both believe passionately in their causes and argue
them out for others to grasp their arguments. Wochenklausur are using art(‘s
capital) for micro change, Deller and Wallinger simply confront us with the
human predicament, while Occupy Museums want to turn the system upside down. I
will deal humorously at times with these tight polarities, as Matthew Collings would
say, “just to let in some air”. I will be
asking if ethics and aesthetics are really at war, considering the potential of
art to give power to the people, and question who is deserving of the title of
‘advance guard’ in the art world today. I will argue that the positions of Kester and Bishop are not as
polarised as their rhetoric might imply, and question the soundness of linear
thinking.
Chapter One: The Bishop and Kester skirmish
A disagreement between Kester and Bishop happened in 2006 in Art Forum
XLIV, No. 6, February 2006. Things got pretty heated. The tension between them,
in the spat that occurred in the letters pages is a good place to clarify their
respective stances around Relational Aesthetics. Their differences bring out
the potentials and limitations in critical art thinking today. So much is at
play here, not least of all the underlying political persuasion of our
theorists that underlies aesthetic questions. To put things in political
context, up front, Bishop says:
“My
view is inevitably influenced by living in the U.K., where New Labour have for
the last nine years instrumentalised art to fulfil policies of social
inclusion–a cost-effective way of justifying public spending on the arts while
diverting attention away from the structural causes of decreased social
participation…In this context it is crucial for art practices to tread a
careful line between social intervention and autonomy, since demonstrable
outcomes are rapidly co-opted by the state. Temporary Services once asked me
which was worse: to be instrumentalised by the state or by the art market. I’m
afraid I think it’s the former.” (Roche, 2011).
Bishop’s reason for provoking hostilities
with ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’ was her aversion for
the “sacrifice of the aesthetic at the altar
of social change,” [quoting Rancière]. (Bishop,
2006a, p. 179). She insists art must remain in the context of the
gallery stronghold without the interference of the “ethical turn” (Bishop, 2006a, p. 179). The
wrong turn for her in recent decades in art theory has been the change of
course to emphasise “process over product” (Bishop, 2006, p. 184) in critiquing
collaboration. She vehemently defends the aesthetic position, accusing Kester
of “treating communication as an aesthetic form” (Bishop, p.181), an affront to
real art. The socially engaged is welcome so long as it swears loyalty to
mainstream values. Kester’s sin, for Bishop, is to pass off a palliative for
social ills for art that threatens to “untangle the knot” of “art’s autonomy”. She
undermines Kester’s utopian yearnings which she terms “the blurring of art and
life”. (Bishop, 2006a, p. 183). Thus
Bishop seeks to police a clear boundary between culture and social
transformation.
What is good art for Bishop? It must be
deeply symbolic, demanding the ability to think in terms of “contradictions” complex
“artistic gestures that shuttle between sense and nonsense”, with “multiple
interpretations” that zap one into a new way of being. If it doesn’t fulfil
these criteria, it is “pleasantly innocuous” or “bland” art in her judgement. (Bishop,
2006a, p 182). What gets up her nose is that the socially engaged is “exempt
from criticism” because it relies on “ethical judgements of working procedure
and intentionality.” (Bishop, 2006a, p. 181). Not what are should be about, at
all. (Bishop, 2006a, p. 181). Bishop, like
Wilde, argues that when art is judged by its “social impact”, seeking to supply
the demand, it ceases to be art.
Chapter Two: The Battle of Orgreave
This work by Jeremy Deller is a re-enactment of the show during the
miners’ strike in 1984. “Social
reality must be fused with carefully calculated artifice”, according to Bishop
and this is accomplished, according to her critique, in the Battle of Orgreave. (Bishop, 2006a, p.
183). She considers Deller’s work the “epitome of participatory art” (Bishop,
2012, p. 30), packed with symbolic power and strength—a testimony to ongoing
class strife: “hovering uneasily between menacing violence and family
entertainment”. There is no simple message or social function here, according
to Bishop. It is not reduced to “a simple message or social function.” (Bishop,
2006b, p. 32). It is deliciously rich in contradictions: the “convergence of
emotions…provoked memories of pain, camaraderie, defeat, the excitement of
conflict.” An ethical approach would have got in the way of its political
power. When the social and the artistic marry, the:
intersubjective relations are not an end
in themselves but rather serve to unfold a more complex knot of concerns about
pleasure, visibility, engagement, and the conventions of social interaction.
(Bishop, 2006a, p. 183).
Kester, in the spat, condemned
Bishop for her self-congratulatory need to crack codes of ambiguity, of her
“self-perception as an acute art critic, ‘decoding’ or unravelling a given
video, installation, performance, or film, playing at hermeneutic
self-discovery…” (Kester, 2006). The naïve public, Kester argues ironically,
depend on this decoding for a true apprehension of the worth of a work, and for
it to have impact. He disagrees with Bishop’s idea that “politically engaged’
collaborative art practice constitutes today’s avant-garde.” (Kester, 2006, p.
22). For Kester, this kind of work “can
become legitimately political only indirectly by exposing the limits and
contradictions of the political discourse itself.” (Kester, 2006, p. 22). Kester is not seeking to exclude
Deller from claiming avant-garde status; he is rejecting Bishop’s claim of
exclusivity, seeking to exclude “activists who reject aesthetic questions.”
(Kester, 2006, p. 22). He argues for “rapprochement”,
a more inclusive recognition of “a continuum of collaborative and ‘relational’
practices”.
There is corroboration for
the Kester’s “indirectly political” claim in the critique of the New York Times
writer, Negar Azimi. He argues that institutional historical critiques such the Battle of Orgreave “offer impassioned arguments on safe subjects…” (Azimi, 2011)—safe history
where the artist is carefully to buffered from political fallout.
Kester believes historical engaged works within
contemporary art “lead to the sedation of our aesthetic and critical appetites,”
more flattering of “Deller’s oft-cited 2004 contribution to Manifesta 5 (the European Biennial of Contemporary art) that had
activist balls. Deller invited all manner of
alternative societies to march through San Sebastian’s streets,” being direct political
and real-time social engagement.
Bishop continues: “the inclusion of these societies
[Sealed Knot et al.] symbolically elevated the events at Orgreave to the status
of English history.” (Bishop, 2006a, p.183). Isn’t she praising up an event
that is already is in-deller-bly engraved
in the British psyche as the bitterest industrial dispute in British history. She contrasts the Battle’s “disruptive specificity” (characteristic of what for her
is the avant-garde) with Kester’s “generalised set of moral precepts”--an art
naively prostituted or instrumentalised to achieving social ends. (Bishop, 2006a,
p. 182). She sees Kester’s aesthetics as
something like a service-oriented neo-liberalism, or a smoke screen of
misguidedness for it: the real aesthetic power of art to awaken the viewer is dissipated
by Kester’s “politically correct” do-gooding.
For this reason she has emphasised treading a fine line between this and
autonomy.
For Bishop, Artsblog might illustrate this misguidedness. The blog opens
with:
Evaluating the social and aesthetic
efficacy of arts and social justice work requires disrupting mainstream
evaluation practices that distort—or even undermine—the connections among art,
culture, and social justice.
For Bishop, ‘social inclusion’ brings up the the idea of state
agenda usurping art’s true power, while for Kester-like Artsblog it might mean freedom from the discrimination of the
corporate art institutions.
The kind of
disruption she is talking about, then, causes an awakening in the viewer like
the young lady illustrated in William
Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, 1853. We see an epiphany that breaks the chains
of exploitation of the gentleman over his working class mistress. But if the painter were patronised by the
gent and painted for fame and fortune, as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood did,
then the institutional critique is
subsumed back into the system.”
(Azimi, 2011), as Kester might agree.
For Bishop, this is an
old argument, and she doesn’t buy it: “believers are activists who reject aesthetic questions as
synonymous with cultural hierarchy and the market.” She denounces social intervention, outside of the
gallery discourse, as “a Platonic regime in which art is valued for its
truthfulness…” (Bishop, 2006a, p. 183).
Bishop’ethics
seem more derived from psychoanalysis with its tragic dimension
of analytic experience, “confronting with the
darker, more painfully complicated considerations of our predicament.” Psychoanalysis and analytical psychology,
influencing many aesthetes, deal with the ‘shadow’ side of the human unconscious—alerting
us to the enemy of our lower selves. From a Jungian perspective an artist might
be worthy of the epithet “bearer of insight”, so long as fully analysed. (Bishop, 2006a, p. 182).
Chapter Three: The Spoils of War
One of Kester’s grievances with Bishop is
her unwillingness to “surrender autonomy to collaborators and involve the
artist directly in…the machinations of political struggles.” (Kester, 2006, p. 22).
Kester distains her taste for an art
that, by nature, can be political only indirectly “by exposing the limits and
contradictions of the political discourse itself”, (Kester, 2006, p.
22). For him, challenging the structure of oppression at a safe distance is cowardly
and often linked to careerist production, in the “dehumanizing regime of the assembly line”. (Kester, 2004 p. 27). Kester questions if work
of this kind succeeds in its goal of catalysing public outrage of a supposedly
unawakened viewer. This wreckage of a car bomb found a resting place at the
Imperial War Museum after failing to win the vote at the National to go on a
plinth in Trafalgar Square, according to Jonathan Jones of the Guardian. (Jones, 2008). Although praising the work as history,
he agrees with Kester in principle, with an accusation of redundancy: the work
was “trite” and “obvious”. “Everyone knows the invasion of Iraq was a
catastrophe. A lot of people ‘know’ Blair is a war criminal, or even ‘know’ the
British government murdered a scientist.” A good
moment to introduce one of Kester’s favourite case studies in Conversation Pieces, whose keynote is
serving the people.
Chapter Four:
Wochenklausur
Close to my heart, too, are Wochenklaur, an Austrian art
collective developing projects internationally, claiming realistic
goals. This group no longer have any ideological ambition to change the world
into a Social Plastic, but just to make a difference, to empower the most
disadvantaged, without overestimating their own capabilities.
Artists rebelling
against the mainstream aesthetic, they are intent on using the “capital
inherent in the art world” (Wochenklausur, 2014a) for social change and they
have been doing it in any way they can for the last 22 years. They steal from
the rich and give to the poor, their small unit battle tactics include
shoot-and-scoot, tell-the-truth-and-run, exploding norms, the occasional
deception (or expedient measures), and, most importantly, dialogue. They tell me they find cooperation with
most everyone they encounter within the institutions. They are mainly hindered
by aesthetes wanting to argue the ontic question of art qua art J (Wochenklausur,
2014a).
They vigourously support their status as artists (they are
often accused of being social workers) with a claim of lineage from the militaristic
branch of the avant-garde, the Constructivist movement. (Wochenklausur, n.d.a). They are inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky's
declaration: 'the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes', as artists
and designers participated in public life during the Russian Civil War (Lodder,
1983, p. 48). This is echoed in Kester’s: “Traditional
art materials of marble, canvas or pigment were replaced by ‘socio-political
relationships’” in reference to Wochenklausur’s socio-dialogical methodology.
(Kester, 2004, p.3). Constructivists were notable in modernism for making
the viewer an active participant in art, and for their transdisciplinarity: they
influenced architecture , theatre, film, dance, fashion and design. Kester argued in Artforum that “a continuum of collaborative and
‘relational’ practices” constitutes the real avant-garde, that must include
activists dismissed by Bishop “en masse as “politically correct”, ‘Platonic’
and even ‘Christian’”, “activists who reject aesthetic questions.” (Kester,
2006, p.22). Kester approves of Wochenklausur in the way that Bishop approves
of Deller.
In Intervention
to aid Drug-Addicted Women—Boat
Colloquies (Kester 2004, p.2) the artists acted as advocates for those
without a voice of their own. In other interventions they form a
“transdisciplinary group, including the specialists needed, and beneficiaries”,
according to Martina Reuters of the group (Lee, 2015). They brought together a group of Zurich
politicians, journalists, prostitutes, a police commissioner, city councillors
and activists to make an intervention in homelessness, during a three week
series of boat trips on Lake Zurich, where they were able to dialogue in a way
not possible within the institutions:
…in the
ritualistic context of an art event, with their statements insulated from
direct media scrutiny, they were able to communicate outside the rhetorical
demands of their official status…and were able to reach a consensus for the
creation of a boarding house… (Kester, 2004, p.2).
Martina said that Wochenklausur have been
successful because of artist freedom from the hierarchy within. Here, Zurich
politicians had been loath to comment on the issue for fear of being
misconstrued. She adds, “It is often better not to know about the hierarchy to
be free to take the necessary steps with our fresh vision. People within the
institution are bound by the steps that lead up to the top.” (Lee, 2015). In dialogical terms it:
help[s] us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fixed
identities and official discourse and the perceived inevitability of partisan
political conflict. The questions that are raised by these projects have a
broader cultural and political resonance as well. (Kester, 2004, p. 8).
Their radical origins can be traced back
to the Viennese Secession in 1992, when Wolfgang Zinggl, an art critic, (who is
today leads Wochenklausur) attacked the idea that an aesthetic art object could
really bring social amelioration. He was invited to do better. “Eleven weeks later a mobile ambulance for
homeless people with no costs for the concerned started its duty and is until
today serving people with no insurance in Vienna.” (Wochenklausur, 2014b).
Bishop files Wochenklausur under “believers” who, like the government
policy she despises, “prioritises social effect over considerations of artistic
quality.” (Bishop, 2006a, p. 180). For Kester they his ideal of
the creative avant-garde, just with a “more convivial relationship to the
viewer” than her version, and demonstrate the complexity you would expect from
good art (Kester, 2004, p.26). Just as Wochenklausur are unshakeable in their
status as artists, so Kester has unbendingly argued for the mainstream validation
of dialogical practice until today.
The avant-garde defined by Bishop is, for
Wochenklausur, as for Kester, more about the map and not the territory: a
gallery simulation. There is nothing more creative, as well as radical, than getting
out there, and effecting grass roots change. Kester calls our attention back to
the 19th century (Kester, 2004, pp. 31-36), when there was a break with the earlier
enlightenment thinking that valued communication in art (according to Kant,
Wolff, and Hume) in the open-ended pedagogical exchanges of the social life of
the drawing room, governed by discursive ethics. With the in the Victorian era
the avant-garde, he says, was a noble cause seeking to sever the viewer from
the objectification of a dehumanising rise of profit-driven materialism and
positivism to return to communion with the soul of humanity. They were mainly identified,
he maintains, with revolutionary working class causes, as champions of
egalitarianism. With the rise of the mass market, a tension arose, with “the
idea of the malevolent Other” of kitsch and mass culture. Here, the drive to
freedom led by the avant-garde was put on hold to defend art from the assault
of billboards, advertising, Hollywood…Inward exaltation was cultivated by the
Pre-Raphaelites, for example, as a defence of beauty against this assault. “An
untrammelled imagination and a fiercely defended sense of individual vision are
the last redoubts against a conformist and utilitarian bourgeois culture.”
(Kester, 2004, p. 25). By the time of the impressionists, only a handful of
viewers were considered worthy according to their inner vision, a refined
visuality devoid of ethics. Kester, with this argument, associates Bishop with
capitalism and implies she has had police training from Greenberg, who abhorred
the kitsch of the media that corrupted the taste of the masses. Here began “a
concern with policing the boundaries between true art and kitsch…” (Kester,
2004, p. 36),
Kester
defends collaborative practice from Bishop’s readiness to “revert to the
nuclear option of challenging the ontic status of art qua art” on this basis. Thus
he seeks to undermine Bishop’s argument to discredit what she considers kitsch
as a “foil”, when she typically compares the “complex ‘aesthetic’ unfavourably
to the “unsophisticated Other” of socially engaged art. (Kester, 2006, p. 26). In
this account of the avant-garde, Kester seeks validity for his continued
discourse within art theory and defends his champion of collective dialogue, Wochenklausur,
who he describes as a vanguard group, creatively dealing in complexity and
diversity, confronting the neo-liberation values of today.
He
cites the process in Boat Colloquies, to
support this argument of complexity, which demonstrates persuasive power, the
challenging of stereotypes, dialogue, consensus, goodwill, modelling right
human relations, the ability to creatively mobilise a wide cross-section of
society, and so forth. From 1990s until today artistic expression
seems to have forked into market-oriented production and the socially
responsible. Wochenklausur have responded to this situation courageously, and
call on others (artist or non-artist) to choose the red pill or the blue: “to
get involved in the cooperative shaping of society or the satisfaction of
leisure time needs.” (Wochenklausur, 2014b). Kester argues that
“challenging the definition of art is the essence of the modernist project.”
(Kester 2004, p. 43).
Chapter Five: Disruption in
Peru
By way of primary
research, I would like to cite an example from my own repertoire of Kester-like
interventions, which took place in Peru in 2007. (Palomino, 2007). “The context
of art offers advantages when action involves circumventing social and
bureaucratic hierarchies and quickly mobilising people…” (Wochenklausur, n.d.b).
Having never heard of Kester at this time, I find now his open-ended thinking enlightening.
He says that he developed his dialogical model “through ongoing conversations
with artists, activists…that has taught him about the possibilities for art and
to see art history in a different way.” (Kester, 2004, p. 191). His framework
does help this project, in retrospect, to find a place in the art world with
integrity.
In 2009 I had
experienced a 7.9 magnitude earthquake while in Lima. As a creative response I
went to the earthquake zone 3 days after the quake, heard the stories of
survivors and surveyed the damage to buildings around Ica. I visited the state
rescue services, architects and attended a seminar at the College of Engineers
in Ica on reinforcement and repair techniques of earthquake damaged earth
buildings. I soon realised that this information would only be transmitted to
those who could afford it. So I decided to build a model earthquake proof house
with 2 colleagues to encourage local people to keep building in earth. Without
earth building reinforcement knowledge, victims of the quake (“damnificados”) were too
afraid to rebuild with earth, and the alternative was to borrow from the
government to buy expensive and less ecological bricks and cement, with the
prospect of the poor remaining in tents for several years. I got sponsorship
from a local mayor to build an anti-seismic earth house
built house. We gave capacity building workshops in the area and I did an
appearance on Ica TV. The dialogical aesthetic
intervention, as Kester describes, invariably begins with dialogue in the
community where it is produced, with an idea emerging from the conversation,
learning the context of the people, their needs and skills, through active listening
to “maximise the collective creative potential of a given constituency or
site.” (Kester, 2004, p. 25).
Chapter Six: Parliament Square
Another
of my experiences of a Kesterian intervention was the Parliament Square protest
later immortalised by Mark Walliger in State
Britain in 2007 (Bois et al., 2008), perhaps relevant to an understanding
of the disagreements between Bishop and Kester. Wallinger, according to his
interview, expressed anger at the illegal Iraq war. Bishop, in her anthology, Participation.
Documents of Contemporary Art 2006 lauds such works that since the 60s have “appropriated social forms as
a way to bring art closer to everyday life,” (Bishop, 2006b p. 15), thus
arguing for authority to remain in the institution.
Brian Haw on Parliament Square Mark
Wallinger in the Tate Britain
She adds: “I believe in the continued value of disruption,
with all its philosophical anthihumanism as a form of resistance to
instrumental rationality as a source of transformation.” (Bishop, 2006a, p. 181). Here again she preaches her ethics.
But there is no evidence that Haw’s “instrumental rationality”, in his encampment
from 2001 to 2005 was any
less transformative than Wallinger’s so-called radical avant-garde creation.
Haw’s was certainly more cost-effective disruption: the price tag for the State
Britain critique of the government’s erosion of civil liberties and the
banning of protest in Whitehall and Parliament Square was £90,000, and took 15
people six months to recreate.
Amy Iggulden of the Telegraph argues that State Britain is not worthy: “It doesn't
tell anyone anything they don't know. It offers no new evidence for debate, no
new insight into the reality of war on the ground.” (Iggulden, 2007). Such a judgement lends support to the view that the gallery artist works from a safer place, from a
position of superiority and often has others do all the donkey work. I never saw Brian Haw with his hands in his
pockets during my time on Parliament Square. One might suspect
WaIlinger of
careerist use of easy cultural capital here that earned him his
second Turner Prize nomination Wallinger
‘making’ art based on another’s ‘actual’ protest.
Bishop’s condemns Kester for his “populist
approach” that rejects this idea of the artist’s superiority over the audience.
(Bishop, 2006a). State Britian arguably shows the gallery
artist’s impotence rather than his real disruptive power. Increased publicity
certainly did no harm to the anti-war movement, but the years of personal
sacrifice Haw spent braving the elements and the attacks make his work no less
noble or effective. Interestingly, we see here a crossover from ‘Kesterian’ art
to ‘Bishoparian’ in the same subject matter (a public protest coming to rest in
a gallery) that makes one question the absoluteness of the positions held by
our theorists.
Dialogue, Kester explains, is inherent in
the engaged art form itself (which is certainly true of Haw’s art-activism) in
contrast to the often dialogue-provoking character of the resolved art object
represented here by State Britain. Wallinger’s
and Haw’s work, again, clearly have characteristics of both. (Bishop, 2012, p.
8). Wochenklausur sum it up nicely: “Art can perform many functions…and the many functions are also enmeshed in one another.”
(Wochenklausur, 2014b).
Having spent time
with Brian on Parliament Square in 2010, I was arrested and thrown into a
police cell for protesting the Afghanistan war on the Cenotaph the day before
Remembrance Day in 2008 under the “One Kilometer Exclusion Zone” in Whitehall
and Parliament Square. It was a peaceful silent protest with 2 fellow activists
from Parliament Square (one of whom studied art
and politics at Goldsmiths). That same morning, I was banned from
Haw’s side of the Square by Brian and his close circle who, in a most paranoid
manner, accused one of my co-activists of being a policewoman. According to
Wallinger, he too was initially told to “piss off” by Haw, wary of journalists
and the police. Wallinger rejoiced that Haw had been taken more seriously after
the Tate showing, and that his message was more widely disseminated, empowering
“one man alone against the world”, who had been dismissed by the Guardian and labelled an eccentric.
I can testify that Haw’s work did indeed “challenge fixed or conventional meanings
without dividing [his] audience into philistines and cognoscenti”, (Kester,
2004, p. 22) exemplifying one of Kester’s main points of difference with
Bishop.
Chapter Seven:
Occupy Museums
“Boycotting
everything is no longer an option; the strikes and protests will be included,
too. The system is resistant. Moving against the stream is a problem, for it
goes in every direction.” (Gillick, 2011).
Strategies
Occupy Museums are activists with a
vision of macro change with sights on the art world. They see themselves at
war, and employ the traditional offensive accessories such as the siege engine,
the battering ram and the Trojan horse. No doubt new recruits have learned much
from old campaigner Lucy Lippard, whose handbook on art activism “Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power”,
gives stratetegies of cultural resistance dating from the Regan era. Debate has
gone on ever since if activist art really does subvert the idea of an art
object, or is itself ultimately subsumed. “Activist art, is not a genre, not an
‘ism’, but is rather an engagement in social issues and social change through a
great variety of methods and mediums.” (Sheikh, 2009). Lippard, a heroine of
collectivism, inspired activists to rally together, making them believe change
can only happen through a movement.
In 2012 Occupy activists gathered in
Kassel, Germany to lay siege to Documenta 13, and the 7th Berlin
Biennale. The impact of the
intervention led an Art Monthly
commentator to say that it “could herald the end of the art system as we know it.” (Fowkes et al., 2012).
At Documenta 13, their
guerrilla encampment was declared as “a total work of art” by the consensus of
the Occupy Museums group. They had graphitised white tents with the iniquities
of the establishment, which gained their Trojan horse admittance into the inner
circle of e Kassel art establishment. They were then able
to continue their usual technique of propaganda and self-promotion with insider power, they hoped.
Their aim was to proclaim their cause to a wider art audience to raise a larger
army:
We must bring together wider communities that usually do not
hang out together in the art world, and change the class and race segregation
that we see in culture, even if this takes lots of work and lots of sacrifice… (Berlin
Biennale, 2012).
Ethical power relations
Kester speaks of the
Relational Aesthetics of “being-outside-of-self” in which participants think,
act and feel beyond their a priori roles and identities” (Kester 2004, p.155),
and this is precisely what Occupy Museums sought to do: “It would be
cool for the MoMA director to join us in an open conversation …because then we
could find out—outside the power relations—what they think as individuals. (Berlin Biennale, 2012). Like Wochenklausur
they actively seek to break down the barriers to social transformation of the
old paradigms. (Berlin Biennale, 2012).
Occupy
rejected the temptation to make any demands in Berlin, though after the
curators positioned them as a “human zoo”, (Maak,
cited in Loewe, 2015) they did make
demands of the curators in an attempt to retain political autonomy in a press
release:
More than halfway into the 7th Berlin Biennale for
Contemporary Art, the invited global movements have challenged the hierarchical
structure of the Biennale, initiating a move toward horizontality—the now
described ‘former-curators’…the director-curators denied the status of becoming
expected stars. (Hal, [1996: 198], cited in Frascina, 2013).
Kester
points to the tendency of activists to reject the binary opposites in pursuit
of a third way, “in denuded post-structuralism that makes an artist’s
transgression of social and cultural boundaries as inherently libertory.”
(Kester, 2004, p. 130). In this way they attempted to resist being subsumed, to
be able to stimulate the public to become active participants in their cause
rather than the passive spectator (such as the zoo-goer) that capitalism
typically produces.
Consensus
One of the successful characteristics of
groups like Wochenklausur and Occupy Museums is their consensus making. Wochenklausur
told me: “It has a lot to do with participation and how to create a movement in
a stucked situation and also about common decision making.” (Wochenklausur, 2014a).
Occupy Museums say
they are beginning to unmask a cultural system of inequality and
exploitation which has ancient roots…working together to replace the exchange
of capital with a creative exchange for and by the 99 %, fighting for art
as a necessity and not a luxury. “without
[groups like] Occupy Museums
from New York, is it unlikely that the issues of art and power raised by the
Biennale would have been articulated so effectively.” (Fowkes, 2012).
Government is under suspicion:
Kester and Bishop both work have gripes about it, and both live within in American(ised)
societies which thrive economically but not so well socially. One might wonder
if the vehemence of their arguments has something to do with this frustration. Occupy might prefer the term social justice to social change, the
latter now so often used by the socially
engaged; they might argue that this word smacks of the agendas of the
‘establishment.’ “Vote for Change” was the British Conservative party slogan for
the 2010 general election. (Stratton, 2010). It contrasts strongly with the
solidarity internet meme coined in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street and associated protests, that
caught the imagination of the world.
The dangers
“Cultural politics is being transformed by processes of
corporate globalization” described by Naomi Klein in No Logo (1999). In characterizing Documenta 13 (2012), for example,
Julian Stallabrass identified a ‘radical camouflage’ of art practices that
barely concealed a large ‘business enterprise’ closely ‘connected to the
commercial art world’ accompanied by a curator ‘armoured with an elaborate
theoretical mysticism’ veiling ‘the deep contradictions between art’s ethos and
its business model’” (Stallabrass, cited in Frascina, 2013).
Curatorial co-opting of the activists was motivated, perhaps,
like Occupy Museums, by the need to generate publicity and could have resulted,
in this digital age, in the counter strategy of their own digital Trojan horse: one purporting
to cleanse the system of viruses, but instead infecting it. It is the kind of paradox of a Disneyland that relieves the masses from
the pressures of predatory capitalism, but leads to increasing its power over
us. The poor activist is potentially duped into complicity, of unwittingly
selling out.
Bishop welcomes the relinquishing of
political power in favour of the aesthetic.
(Bishop, 2012, p. 8). In the
widening of mainstream boundaries the socially engaged candidate has a place
within. Should Occupy have entered? Kester doesn’t give political advice in
Artforum in 2006. One wonders if this is the start
of a showdown with the vested interests that will lead to global equality, or
another failed uprising.
There are precedents
for success in the Magna Carta, the French Revolution, the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights and so on, and the challenge is more pressingly global now. Occupy
Museums are free enough of petty bourgeois aspirations to refuse Jeff Koons as
a role model, at least. But Occupy Museums at Kassel and Berlin, according to
Sebastian Loewe in 2015, “are two watershed
events that mark the decline of the movement”, citing evidence that the movement has come to an end in the
west. (Graeber, 2014). We shall see.
Conclusion
All of our protagonists express scepticism of the motivating
forces of art in the establishment, its mass media reduction to socio and
radical-chic, its role in legitimising the status of the 1%, the degeneration
into entertainment and naughtiness (not
even culture), of an arguably inward looking establishment.
I have argued that the terms “ethics” and “instrumentalisation”
as used by Bishop lack the specificity to be able to use them as absolutes for
making a linear differential diagnosis between aesthetic and socially engaged
art practice. Many so-called aesthetes have ethical motivation and expression. Bishop might be accused of attempting to use the terms to disconnect art from
questions about its socio-political reality.
Just
as Kester and Bishop are both talking ethics, they are equally, perhaps, trying
to exorcise this contradiction. “Rancière emphasizes contradiction as the basis
of the political potential of collaborative work, whilst at the same time
demonstrating that both Bishop and Kester try to expel this contradiction from
their arguments thereby neutralizing its
political potential (my italics).” (Charnley, 2011, p. 37).
Art theory,
like politics, swings between binary opposites and, like British politics, no honest
reliable third way has yet been found. Perhaps we should turn to a more
unconventional but often more enlightening critic, Matthew Collings for a way
forward. “Critic David Sylvester put it very well, in a review of Blimey,
when he said: ‘One of [Collings's] great strengths is his insistence that in
art things are not either/or but both/and. He is constantly aware that
something can be basically flawed, can be pretentious, even a little bit
phoney, but can still have artistic power.’" (Gauntlett, 2002).
What light does Colling’s argument shed on Bishop and
Kester’s? Funnily enough, in cutting edge ideas discussed in the Aesthetics of Sustainability, Kagan
identifies paradigms that transcend “simple binary logic to think in terms of
either/or”. He favours “attention to the multiple forms and scales of otherness,
and to the properties and boundaries marking oneself from others” in a paradigm
of “complexity”. (Kagan, 2011, p. 385). He examines certain philosophical
frameworks for making sense of reality such as the scientific, before
generalising plausibly to the art world. He characterises the older philosophical
isolationist paradigm that fails to admit complexity as a “gloomy,
anti-aspirational focus on limits and restrictions” (Kagan, 2011, p. 385). He
cites the quanta energy of Max Planck, who introduced a new logic at the nano-physical
level. “It is a constitutional disorder, part[…] of order and organisation,
while being neither order nor organisation! [It] is a disorder which, instead
of weakening, creates.” Being insights into the nature of quantum reality (the
foundations of all phenomena and our shared
reality) they may be signposts for a shift in consciousness in all fields of
human endeavour. Kester and Bishop are undoubtedly working on introducing a new
logic to their field(s) too.
It is plausible that Bishop, in thinking inwardly and symbolically in terms of “contradictions” and
“complex artistic gestures that shuttle between sense and nonsense”, with
“multiple interpretations” that “recalibrate our perception”, (Bishop,
2006a, p. 183) is expressing the similar
principles—in the parallel and symbolic world of aesthetics. Kester, too, expands
his analysis into more complexity in his more recent book (Kester, 2011),
showing signs of non-linear thinking. He carries on the momentum outwardly
and globally, even seeking to cover the aesthetic of the NGO, “attempting to
complicate the discussion of social practice” (Landgrajf, 2012), in a broadening
overview of the continuum of
collaborative art. But quantum physics and cybernetics, for example, now
belittle any problem solving not based on systems
thinking, disdaining even multi-disciplinarity for its limitations.
As it stands, our protagonists rigorously mark themselves
off from each other: Wochenklausur are categorical in denouncing art as “the
satisfaction of leisure needs”; Bishop can’t stomach the ‘ethical turn’, the
‘Christian’ or ‘social inclusion’; Kester (although arguing for recognition of
the diversity of practices) remains keen to subvert the individualism
predominant in the mainstream; Occupy are inclusive in the sense that anyone
can enter, but oppositional in their worldview.
The art world
has certainly widened since the 60s with participatory and collective practices
becoming increasingly common and acceptable, but the politics around them stays
polarised and often reductionist, as the gap between rich and poor widens. “The combined wealth of the richest 1 percent will overtake
that of the other 99 percent of people next year unless the current trend of
rising inequality is checked.” (Oxfam, 2015).
According to the New
York Times, Christie’s, has for the first time sold a billion dollars of art in a week. (Reyburn, 2015). Market forces are certainly
pulling increasingly in various directions along the various socio-political streams.
It is to be seen in what direction these artistic currents will take us. Sacha
Kagan in ‘the Aesthetics of sustainability’ warns:
If the art world is being divided and polarized into
highly antagonist groups its existence in its current form is endangered (and
it may then either split up into a number of diverging art worlds, or
successfully repress antagonistic groups, or itself cease to exist). (Kagan, p.
448).
No
one knows if it will become more polyarchic or hegemonic, he says. He progressively
advocates for art and culture as a valuable component in sustainable
development (Kagan, 2015, p. 13). Paul O’brien goes further to emphasise the
context of impending ecological disaster which should condition all debates on
art, culture and politics:
“The idea of aesthetic autonomy may
evoke the genial image of Oscar Wilde, but in the era of global warming it may
also conjure up the ghost of Nero.” (O’brien, 2008).
This year looks like being the
hottest year on record by
some distance. The UN Climate Change Conference COP21
December begins on 30
November to try to avert catastrophic and irreversible climate changes. But
there is hope: “There is more political and creative will to find solutions
than ever before”, according to Manuel
Pulgar-Vidal, environment minister of Peru. (Harvey, 2015)
But with French
bans on activism due to security fears through the recent events in Paris, 200,000
people from 130 NGOs will be excluded from pressuring for strong action. (Harvey,
2015) One of the parallel events permitted, is the brand new Place To B, a new
paradigm international media and civil society advance guard headquarters
evolving out of the radical Fresh Air Centre created at the Copenhagen summit:
The Bella Center [Scandinavia's largest centre] was the monolithic representation of
The Old Way -- slow, unresponsive and bureaucratic. TckTckTck made space
available to bloggers, journalists and NGOs, live streaming briefings, video
editing set-up, drop-in talks by people like Kumi Naidoo, the head of
Greenpeace, panels with Naomi Klein, Andrew Revkin and George Monbiot, Happy
Hour sponsored by the UN Foundation….Movers and shakers wanted to stop by and
reach that audience…fantastic journalists and activists. (Mogus, 2015)
Kester’s, in speaking of
Wochenklausur’s intervention in Boat
Colloquies, (Kester, 2004, p. 111) praises this new paradigm of
communication, quite unlike the “antagonistic communication” of the separative old
institutions—the same might well be applicable to Place To B, we shall see…
Perhaps
emphasising similarities and embracing the complexity of new paradigms in the
global context, at the same time celebrating diversity, is the only way to
transcend separation. What better place for our protagonists to talk it out than in Montmartre cafés with the new
intelligentsia. After all, we all work in
some way for the common good and hold a common belief in the capital inherent
in art. Who says that artists of all shapes and sizes cannot together play an
important role in saving the world? See you at COP 21!
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