Aesthetics in a TIME

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Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 4, July, 2009, 421433

Third TextISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2009)http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09528820903007701

Aesthetics in a Time ofEmergency

Malcolm Miles

A POINT OF DEPARTURE

According to a recent report in the financial pages of a national newspa-per, ethical investment groups and campaigners using a stake in BP togain a dissenting voice at its annual meeting criticised the companysexploration of oil sands in Canada and its investment in Iraq. Among thedissenters was Greg Muttitt, from the Platform human rights group.

1

But Platform is an artists collective, not a campaigning group. Yet, blur-ring the distinction between art and campaigning, they use creativeprocesses of democratic engagement to advance social and ecologicaljustice.

2

This goes beyond precedents such as Joseph Beuyss campaignfor direct democracy, in which Beuys was careful to retain his identity asan artist to guard his autonomy. I wonder whether the distinctionbetween art and campaigning matters, and whether anything is lost if thedivide between art and politics is abandoned.

There are two contexts for my speculation. The first is a shift to apolitics of single-issue campaigning, as in anti-roads protest in the1990s, when conventional politics is seen as void of real possibilities forchange. Jacques Rancire describes the void as a denial of the right toexpression of grievance in equality and openness, replaced today by thetechniques of presentation, data and the consensus of the centre-right.

3

This is the putative end of politics, enforced in the terms of consumer-ism. Haunting the site said to have been vacated by politics is the all too

real spectre of the security state a wild zone of power.4

This is seenby Kate Soper as a state of permanent war when she argues for a moreexplicit cultural representation of the non-puritanical but at the sametime anti-consumerist political imaginary from which to understandwhat a counter- or post-consumerist order might look like. 5

The second context is cultural productions shift from bounded cate-gories such as painting and sculpture to a liquidity in which the bordersof art, architecture, fashion, design, advertising, entertainment and newsare no longer policed. This offers new possibilities, but their exploitationmay affirm the status quo, meshing art further into the mechanisms of

1. Terry Macalister, Invest inIraq and you repeat pastmistakes, investors tell BPboard, Guardian

, 18 April2008, p 29

2. Available online at http://www.platformlondon.org(accessed 28 August 2008)

3. Jacques Rancire, On theShores of Politics

, Verso,London, 2007, p 98 (firstpublished as Aux bords dupolitique

, Paris, Editions

Osiris, 1992)4. Susan Buck-Morss, A

Global Public Sphere?,Radical Philosophy

, 111,January/February, 2002,p 6

5. K Soper, The Awfulness ofthe Actual: Counter-Consumerism in a NewAge of War, RadicalPhilosophy

, 135, January/February 2006, pp 4, 7


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consumerism. In the 1990s, Martha Rosler wrote of arts merging intothe entertainment industry when the anti-institutional revolt of the1970s failed.

6

Seeing arts role in gentrification in New Yorks SoHo, herresponse was to represent homelessness in a SoHo gallery.

7

This stillremains a representation of an issue in the genre of art, not its experi-ence. And this is an insoluble problem, negotiated within a specific if

mutable syntax and vocabulary of art. The task, for Rancire, is toexamine the interactions and exchanges which occur in contemporaryart. And my task here is to consider positions in the writing of NicolasBourriaud,

8

Claire Bishop

9

and Grant Kester,

10

and in Rancires work.I preface this with a brief description of the work of two artists collec-tives, Platform in London and Ala Plstica in Argentina. Turning toWalter Benjamins The Author as Producer,

11

I ask if Benjamin offers amore radical solution. I ask, too, whether there is an exit from modern-isms cycles of departures from a mainstream adept at subsuming alldepartures from it or if the art on which Bourriaud, Kester and Bishopcomment is another departure, soon to be subsumed like all the rest.I turn to Rancires relational aesthetics,

12

asking if it offers an exit from

the circle in a space between aesthetics and politics, or not.

AGAINST THE GRAIN

Since the 1990s, groups such as Platform, Ala Plstica and others haveworked in a space between art and processes of social determination.This runs against the grain of cultural expediency in which artaddresses socioeconomic problems deriving from other areas of policy

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in retrieving arts critical function. Platform and Ala Plstica adoptdifferent approaches: Platform retaining more of arts autonomy, as in

the idea of the incidental artist (who tends to be the dclass artist), andAla Plstica entering situations shaped as much by local publics as bythemselves. There are overlaps, but the collectives seem to represent thepossibilities of provocation and co-production.

Platforms core members, Jane Trowell, James Marriott and DanGretton, decided in the 1990s to work within their home territory ofLondon, practically and critically. In one project, they drew public atten-tion to the neglected tributaries of the Thames and installed a turbine onthe Wandle to provide electricity for the music room of a local school.More polemically, they involved design students at a south Londoncollege in the production of a solar- and pedal-powered vehicle for streetvideo the Agitpod. And, in 1996 and 1997, Platform produced a spoof

newspaper, Ignite

, with news of the oil industry not published by main-stream papers, distributed at mainline stations. Trowell now takes guidedwalks in central London, tracing past and present stories of global tradein corporate buildings; Gretton investigates the psychology of manage-ment in a polemical comparison of the Holocaust (taken as industrialisedannihilation) with the global oil industry (for both of which, in view ofthe remoteness of decision-making which costs lives, he uses the termdesk-killing); Marriott leads narrated walks in Londons financial zone,

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inviting individuals in more or less equal numbers from art and fieldssuch as campaigning, journalism and financial analysis, ending in groupdiscussion. His aim is to interrogate the layered complicity of consumers

6. Martha Rosler, Place,Position, Power, Politics,in ed C Becker, TheSubversive Imagination:Artists, Society, and SocialResponsibility

, Routledge,New York, 1994,pp 5576

7. B, Wallis, ed, If You LivedHere: The City in Art,Theory, and SocialActivism: A Project byMartha Rosler

, Seattle,WA, Bay Press, 1995

8. Nicolas Bourriaud,

Relational Aesthetics

, LesPresses du Rel, Paris,2002 (first published asEsthtique relationelle

,Dijon, Les Presses du Rel,1998)

9. C Bishop, ed,Participation

, MIT Press,Cambridge, MA, 2006

10. Grant Kester,ConversationPieces: Community andCommunication in ModernArt

, Berkeley, University ofCalifornia Press, 2004

11. Walter Benjamin, TheAuthor as Producer, inUnderstanding Brecht

,Verso, London, 1998

12. Jacques Rancires, ThePolitics of Aesthetics

,Continuum, London, 2004(first published as LePartage du Sensible:Esthtiques et Politique

, LaFabrique-Editions, Paris,2000); Problems andTransformations in CriticalArt, in Bishop,Participation

, op cit, pp

8393, trans Bishop, (firstpublished in Malaise danslEsthtique

, EditionsGalile, Paris, 2004)

13. George Ydice, TheExpediency of Culture:Uses of Culture in theGlobal Era

, DukeUniversity Press, Durham,NC, 2003, pp 939

14. I took part in one of thesewalks, on 28 October2004.


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and de-centred global companies in oils social and ecological impacts.His findings inform the narratives of his walks, a series of web videos,and (with Muttitt) published reports. The press report cited aboveimplies a blurring of art and campaigning which, if accurate, denotes ashift of Platforms position. In 1997 anti-roads campaign group ReclaimThe Streets

15

produced the spoof paper Evading Standards

, using

Platforms facilities, which was subsequently disowned by Platform.

16

Reclaim the Streets used non-violent direct action, and perhaps Platformcould not follow them there. Today, Platform fuse the transformativepower of art with the tangible goals of campaigning.

17

Marriott isrelaxed about being called a member of a human rights group, describinghimself as working in the city.

18

Ala Plstica work locally, seeking to intervene when a community orecology is threatened (often by global factors), and linking to existingnetworks (as The Art of Change did in Londons Docklands).

19

In 1995,Ala Plstica worked with botanist Nuncia Tur to aid the restoration of acoastal area near Punta Lara on the La Plata river, using emergent plantspecies such as reeds (which create new terrain through sedimentation).

Alejandro Meitin and Silvina Babich state:

The study of the extraordinary propagation system of the reed from itssubterranean rhizomes allowed us to activate the metaphor ofrhizomic expansion and of the emergence of a series of interconnectedexercises bent on sustaining threatened socio-natural systems, each ofthem connected with the cultural and biophysical ecology of the area.

20

The material imbricates the metaphorical. The spread of rhizomes islikened to that of critical attitudes in what Ala Plstica see as a slow typeof activism, bearing on social, economic and environmental issuesemerging from the community, as promoters of a self-organizing

dynamic.

21

The tools include dialogue, photography and mapping. Theaim is to defy institutional authority and mobilise new forms of collec-tive action and creativity to challenge the unidirectional mode ofperceiving reality.

22

This may produce a solar panel or a plant nursery,but also solidarity that is, a realisation that by acting collectivelypeople can empower themselves.

Ala Plsticas approach echoes Paulo Freires pedagogy, evolved inadult literacy education in Brazil in the 1960s. Freire writes:

Educands recognize themselves as such by cognizing subjects discover-ing that they are capable of knowing in which process they alsobecome critical significators educands need to become educands by

assuming themselves, taking themselves as cognizing subjects, and not asan object upon which the discourse of the educator impinges.

23

The link between knowledge and power neither of which is donated can be understood today, within Freires post-colonial framework, infields such as radical development work and political ecology.

24

In the fieldof liberation ecology, for example, Richard Peet and Michael Watts askif discourse theory can recover the voices of colonized peoples.

25

Theycite Alain Touraine to the effect that society is a field of action in whichthe passage between formations allows the entry of social movementswith transformative capabilities.

26

Similarly, as Arturo Escobar writes:

15. D Wall, Earth First! Andthe Anti-Roads Movement

,Routledge, London, 1999,pp 878, 1278; T Jordan,Activism! Direct Action,Hacktivism and the FutureOf Society

, Reaktion

Books, London, 2002,pp 605, 6972

16. Annotation to draft of asection of my doctoralthesis, 1999; see alsoMalcolm Miles, UrbanAvant-Gardes: Art,Architecture and Change

,Routledge, London, 2004,pp 195203

17. Available online at http://www.platformlondon.org(accessed 28 August 2008)

18. Informal conversation with

James Marriott, Bay HorseInn, Totnes, 9 April 2008

19. Peter Dunn and LoraineLeeson, The Art of Changein Docklands, in Mappingthe Futures: LocalCultures, Global Change

,eds John Bird, BarryCurtis, Tim Putnam, GRobertson, and LisaTickner, Routledge,London, 1993, pp 13649

20. J F Sternad, interviewtranscript, available onlineat http://www.latinart.com/transcript.cfm?id=88(accessed 19 August 2008)

21. Ibid

22. Ibid

23. P Freire, Pedagogy ofHope

, trans Robert Barr,Continuum, London,2002, p 37

24. R Keil, D V J Bell, P Penzand L Fawcett, eds,Political Ecology: Globaland Local

, Routledge,

London, 1998

25. Richard Peet and MichaelWatts, eds, LiberationEcologies: Environment,Development, SocialMovements

, Routledge,London, 1996, p 15

26. Ibid, p 32, citing AlainTouraine, An Introductionto The Study of SocialMovements, SocialResearch

, 52:4, winter1985, pp 74987


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we need new narratives of life and culture. These narratives will likelybe hybrids of sorts; they will arise from the mediations that local culturesare able to effect on the discourses and practices of nature, capital, andmodernity. This is a collective task that perhaps only social movementsare in a position to advance. The task entails the construction of collec-tive identities, as well as struggles over the redefinition of the boundariesbetween nature and culture.

27

Superficially, such arguments suggest an art of empowerment. ButEscobar means by culture not art, but the articulation of shared valuesin everyday lives. To conflate the two senses of the term as oftenhappens in culturally led urban redevelopment

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is likely to mean that,if art adopts everyday cultures, they bear an alterity as foil for arts priv-ileged status. That status is affirmed when art by non-artists, in commu-nity arts in the 1970s or participatory art now, is criticised as lackingaesthetic quality. This relies on a definition of aesthetic quality. Usuallythis is stated in universal terms such as innovation and excellence,reflecting a consensus parallel to the political consensus perceived by

Rancire of dealers, curators, critics and artists successful in its termsas to what constitutes contemporary art. The consensus (and the artmarket it informs) can incorporate almost any departure or rejection,including anti-art and graffiti, as in Tate Moderns 2008 summer show,

Street Art

, in which the museums exterior walls carry graffiti in differ-ent styles.

29

OVER THERE

I move to a comparison of the critical tactics adopted by Kester in

Conversation Pieces

, Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics

, and Bishop in

Participation

. Kester and Bourriaud introduce art in gallery and non-gallery sites. Kester cites WochenKlausur, a Vienna-based collectiveworking in non-gallery spaces; and Adrian Pipers use of artworldsettings. Bourriaud focuses on installation art, situating it in an avant-garde trajectory beginning with Dada, in a caf in Zrich. Bishopincludes texts by artists ranging from Allan Kaprow to Joseph Beuys,Jeremy Deller and Rirkrit Tiravanija, aiming for a balanced selection,again spread from the gallery to the street. If the site is unimportant,however, the trajectories cited differ. For Bourriaud, contemporary artextends modernism: It is not modernity that is dead, but its idealisticand teleological version.

30

Bishop establishes participatory art as follow-ing from Paris Dada: a series of manifestations that sought to involve

the citys public

31

and seeks a critical revision of modernism, not itsabandonment on the shores of activism. For Kester, the criterion fordialogic art is the engagement of publics who co-define its agenda. Butdialogic art is art not activism, using arts liminality to suspend routine.Hence, WochenKlausurs Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women

(19941995) brought together sex-workers, journalists, activists andlocal politicians in dialogues on boats on Lake Zurich. It led to provisionof a hostel for sex-workers

32

but, for Kester, the legacy is insight intohow aesthetic experience challenges systems of knowledge.

33

This canhappen in an artworld setting too, when Adrian Piper, an artist of lightcolour often seen as white, hands out a card saying, I am black. I am

27. A Escobar, ConstructingNature: Elements for apoststructural politicalecology, in Peet andWatts, LiberationEcologies

, op cit, p 65

28. See M Miles,Interruptions: Testing theRhetoric of Culturally LedUrban Development,Urban Studies

, 42:5/6,May 2005, pp 889911

29. Available online at http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/streetart(accessed 19 August 2008);see also T Cresswell, InPlace Out of Place:Geography, Ideology, and

Transgression

, Universityof Minnesota Press,Minneapolis, 1996, pp 3161 on graffiti and the NewYork artworld in the 1970s

30. Bourriaud, RelationalAesthetics

, op cit, p 13

31. Bishop, Participation

, opcit, p 10

32. Kester, ConversationPieces

, op cit, p 2

33. Ibid, p 3


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sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with thatracist remark.

34

This draws attention to the issue of voluntarism: WochenKlausurinvite the voluntary input of co-producers, and Piper responds to thosewho volunteer racist attitudes. I read both as reliant on the status of art.For Bourriaud, the status of the artist enables provocation in installation

art, or in works which begin in sites of public access but are documentedfor subsequent exhibition. To give two cases: Gabriel Orozco slung ahammock in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York(1993); and Jens Haaning read jokes in Turkish through a loudspeakerin a Copenhagen square (1994). In the latter, Bourriaud sees a micro-community of exiles united by collective laughter.

35

He argues thataudiences are drawn into such ludic work like participants in festivitiesso that, the aura of art no longer lies in the hinter-world represented bythe work so much as in, the temporary collective form that it producesby being put on show.

36

This at first resembles a position advanced byKaprow in 1966, that the audience of passive artworld spectators shouldbe removed from happenings and participants be drawn to events as

meaningful activity (to which non-artists bring freedom from the habit-ual responses of a professional training, like non-professional actors onstage).

37

But while Kaprow leaves art and its aura behind, Bourriaudretains the concept of aura. Arts community effect occurs in art space,but not in corporate phenomena which too often act as a disguise for die-hard forms of conservatism.

38

Oddly, he ignores the anti-consumer-ist aspect in non-gallery art deriving from conceptual arts refusal of theobject in the 1960s and since. Even more oddly because it conflatesconceptual frameworks with campaigns he includes feminism, anti-racism and environmentalism in his denigration of what he calls lobbygroups. The avant-garde project of changing the world, admittedly a

failure, is thus discarded for the modest intention of inhabiting the world(as it is) in a better way.

39

This may be sensible, but perhaps for otherpragmatic reasons. The art cited by Bourriaud is contained in the sphereof inter-human relations.

40

This is not interaction between a spectatorand an artwork but between viewers, as may occur in installations likeTiravanijas One Revolution Per Minute

(1996), where spectators wereinvited to read or eat together. Rancire cites Bourriaud, that by offer-ing small services, the artist repairs the weaknesses in the social bond

41

and perceives here a slippage between arts polemical role and itscommunitarian vocation: the artist-collector institutes a space of recep-tion to engage the passer-by in an unexpected relationship.

42

This is notan invitation to festivity but a visualised critique of a society in which

excess of things is the sign for a lack of connections between people.Kesters interest is in intersections of, rather than slippages between,

art and non-art, following the efforts of artists such as Kaprow to mergeart into everyday life. Kester mentions the work of Jay Koh as creating adiscursive exchange as an antidote to the violence of economicexchange in ET-Exchanging Thought

, in Chiang Mai, Thailand (19951996).

43

Objects were contributed by artists from the affluent andmajority worlds, exchanged with objects brought by local people. Kesterrefuses to align this work with Tiravanijas installations. To be dialogic,the latter would have involved taking the time to learn what washappening in the neighbourhood around the gallery in which his work

34. A Piper, My Calling (Card)#1

, 1986, illustrated inGrant Kester, ConversationPieces: Community andCommunication in ModernArt

, op cit, fig 13, p 72


, p 17

36. Ibid, p 61

37. Alan Kaprow, Notes onthe Elimination of theAudience, in Bishop,Participation

, op cit, p 103(first published in AKaprow, Assemblages,Environments andHappenings

, Abrams, NewYork, 1966), pp 1878,1958

38. Ibid


, p 13

40. Ibid, p 43

41. Ibid, citing Bourriaud,Esthetique relationelle

,p 37

42. Rancire, Problems andtransformations in CriticalArt, op cit, p 90

43. Kester, ConversationPieces

, op cit, p 105


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was installed.

44

Kester admits the communitys voice is not alwaysheard but argues that a moment of transference can occur, creating amoral equivalence between the artist and community members.

45

Thisassumes a great deal, and, for me, Kester stretches the credibility of hiscase when he extends the definition of a moral equivalence beyond expe-riences such as migration to include disconnected life events. For

instance, he cites an account of a project with homeless women in whichartist Hope Sandrows moment of transference is said to have occurredwhen two years work was destroyed in an accident, curtailing hercareer.

46

This is a world away from Freires idea that people are empow-ered by finding content in their own experiences.

More to the point here might be an instance rejected by Bishop as apropagandistic display of collective life in service of a regime sublatingindividualism: the re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace inPetrograd (1920).

47

Many spectators may have been in the streets duringthe original storming in 1917. The re-enactment may have involved10,000 actors from the Red Army and Navy,

48

directed by N N Yevreinov,working with ten theatre directors, using three stages, a connecting bridge

to street level, and cinematic projection onto windows above.

49

ForCatherine Cooke, participation in street performances was habitual, inthe everyday life of a Russian, rooted in traditions of religious dramati-sation, processing of icons and the re-staging of state events such as coro-nations in provincial sites.50 Agitprop is an extension of this genre for aradically different content. The spectators are not the co-producers of there-enactment, yet their engagement may have resembled that of peoplewho abuse public monuments when a regime falls. Such acts are symbolicre-enactments of the shift of power which enables them to take place:cultural production between politics, art and everyday life. Re-enactmentsenable a collective celebration of a shared historically redefining narrative,

according to a well-known script either staged or spontaneous. They arenot categorised as art, and may be closer to carnival which turns theworld upside down in the liminal space of a day.

Bishop mentions Brechts songs as disrupting the narrative plot andAntonin Artauds Theatre of Cruelty linking avant-garde art and theatre:In this framework, physical involvement is considered an essentialprecursor to social change.51 She anthologises Jeremy Dellers descrip-tion of his filmed re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave (2002),52 but inthe face of reality televisions engagement of a mass audience, she assertsthat As an artistic medium participation is arguably no more intrinsi-cally political than any other.53 Perhaps she could equally say (butdoes not) that the artists privileged status offers no guarantee of critical-

ity. The question is to what extent art enables a sense of agency, and byimplication whether the divide between artist and public equates to therelations of social production and economic exchange. Can these too beimagined in new ways? If this is utopian, an anticipatory glimpse of sucha leap may be viable.

ART AND EMERGENCY

In Paris on 27 April 1934, Benjamin addressed a meeting of writersorganised by the Communist Party, two months after Fascists staged

44. Ibid, p 1107

45. Ibid, p 149

46. Ibid, citing A Wolper,Making Art, ReclaimingLives: The Artist andHomeless Collaborative,in N Felshin, But Is It Art?,Bay Press, Seattle, 1995,p 259

47. Bishop, Participation, opcit, p 10

48. Bishop states 8000,Participation, op cit, p 10,citing F Deak, RussianMass Spectacles, DramaReview, 19:2, June 1975,pp 722

49. Interview with N NYevreinov, Zhizn iskustria(Life of Art), pp 5967, pp301, September 1920, inStreet Art of theRevolution: Festivals andCelebrations in Russia,191833, eds VladimirTolstoy, Irina Bibikova andCathereine Cooke, Thames& Hudson, London, 1990,pp 13940

50. C Cooke, The Artists areMobilized, in Street Art ofthe Russian Revolution, op

cit, p 3551. Bishop, Participation, op

cit, p 11

52. J Deller, The Battle ofOrgreave, in Bishop,Participation, op cit, pp1467 (from JamesLingwood and MichaelMorris, Off Limits: 40Artangel Projects, Merrell,London, 2002, pp 905)

53. Bishop, Participation, opcit, p 12


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attacks in which more than a thousand people were injured and fifteenwere killed.54 In this time of emergency, the issue of commitment wasforemost. Benjamin argues, the dialectical treatment of this problemrequires that literature must be inserted into the context of living socialrelations.55 To write about politics is inadequate; writers must nowinsert themselves within its means of production. This is, I think, equiva-

lent to workers taking over the means of industrial production (as inRussia in 1917). The divide between production and reception iscollapsed, so that readers become writers and, Authority to write is nolonger founded in a specialist training but in a polytechnical one sobecomes common property.56This is the technique, in a more loadedsense than the word has in English, of the Soviet press of the 1930s inwhich readers letters had a prominent place. Benjamin plays on words:The reader is always prepared to become a writer who describes orprescribes,57and cites Soviet writer Sergey Tretyakovs work in collec-tive agriculture at the Communist Lighthouse Commune in 1928, takingpart in everyday actions such as calling mass meetings, collecting fordown-payments on tractors, and introducing radio and travelling film

shows.58 In the second part of his paper Benjamin examines Brechtswork, but the co-production techniques of the Soviet press remain amodel for the production relations of writing. To me, they are as rele-vant for relational art, illuminating Beuyss idea that everyone has thecapacity to use a creative imagination socially.

Esther Leslie summarises that for Benjamin, Art can be prefigurativeof social and technical relations and that if an author uses art as arealm for templates of new patterns of technical arrangements theauthor becomes a producer.59This could almost describe the work ofWochenKlausur and questions the avant-garde retention of an authorialvoice, and Bourriauds retention of arts aura. Benjamin was a practical

producer, giving radio talks and organising writers workshops.60

AsLeslie writes, For Benjamin, properly political art is concerned withreception effects, generated by modes of production that provide condi-tions for consumers to become producers.61The intervention here isin the conditions so that if art does not change the world it still inflects or makes visible in certain ways by which people are conditioned, interms of dialectical materialism and in which they can intervene.

An implication, from Herbert Marcuses idea of society as a work ofart,62 is that in the better world produced incrementally through suchinflections, art is no longer a specialism and becomes the creativity ofeveryday lives. Beuyss idea of a society in which everyone is an artist in which people creatively imagine new social as well as aesthetic forms

proposed in his Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum atDocumenta V (1972) is an invitation to create such an inflection. Beuyssaw ways to direct democracy in referenda, constitutional change andfree education at all levels.63 In a tripartite model of autonomous art,democratic law and a move to an economy of need rather than accumu-lation, Beuys relied on modern arts claim to autonomy while subvert-ing it in the open studio. This may be a paradox, or what Rancirereads as arts inability to function in the terms of its own logic. Artwithdraws from control by the established social order but its interven-tion is coded, in the case of Documenta, in the terms of an internationalart show.

54. Esther Leslie, WalterBenjamin: OverpoweringConformism, Pluto Press,London, 2002, p 123

55. Walter Benjamin, TheAuthor as Producer, in

Understanding Brecht,Verso, London, 2003, p 87(first published as Versucheber Brecht, Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp, 1966)

56. Benjamin, The Author asProducer, op cit, p 90

57. Ibid, p 90 ; Schreibender(one who writes),Beschreibender(whodescribes),Vorschreibender(whoprescribes) translatorsnote, p 90

58. Benjamin The Author asProducer, op cit, p 88

59. Leslie, Walter Benjamin,op cit, pp 923

60. Ibid, p 94

61. Ibid, p 96

62. H Marcuse, Liberationfrom the Affluent Society,in The Dialectics ofLiberation, ed D Cooper,Penguin, Harmondsworth,1968, pp 17592

63. C Bodenmann-Ritter,Every Man An Artist:Talks at Documenta V byJoseph Beuys, inJosephBeuys: The reader, edsClaudia Mesch and ViolaMichely, MIT Press,Cambridge MA, 2007, pp18997; see also C Mesch,Institutionalizing SocialSculpture: Beuys, in Officefor Direct Democracythrough Referendum,Installation (1972), in thesame volume, pp 198217


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This limited freedom of arts potential, stated by Marcuse in TheAesthetic Dimension, is justified by the absence of conditions for realpolitical change. Asking how art conveys alterity, Marcuse argues that itis not a matter of style, of finding a previously unoccupied terrain orarbitrary novelty, but of a transmission of cultural material in a sharedvocabulary:

And no matter how much art overturns the ordinary meanings of wordsand images, the transfiguration is still that of a given material. This is thecase even when the words are broken This limitation of aestheticautonomy is the condition under which art can become a social factor.64

Art is inevitably complicit, even when it is engaged. But the familiar isestranged, and aesthetic transformation becomes indictment,65a meansto glimpse liberation. In the heady atmosphere of 1967, Marcuseproposed a society as a work of art, as the most Utopian, the most radicalpossibility of liberation today.66Henri Lefebvre found him too depen-dent on aesthetics, in the midst of a general strike of ten million workers

in Paris in May 1968.67For Lefebvre, the activities of the Situationistsdemonstrated arts tendency to marginalisation, as if occupying a posi-tion outside the political, even though the tactics used were politicised.But Lefebvres relations with the Situationists had become strained by1968 (as theirs with him), while a more formative influence may havebeen his early study of Dada. But then perhaps contemporary art createsas rarefied a terrain as, say, Symbolism in the 1890s, from which ordinarylife is elsewhere (or faraway, in the exotic and utopian). Faced with theputative end of politics, however, a claim to non-complicity might mosteffectively be made via arts autonomy, even in some circumstances itsmarginality in relation to dominant structures (including arts institu-tions). That autonomy, though, is constructed in a cycle of arts perma-nent renewal, as each movement succeeds the last and is in turn absorbedinto the relentless mainstream.

DEPARTURES AND RETURNS

Arts special status, its validity as art, which means its validation by artsformal and informal institutions, underpins the modernist trajectory ofsuccessive departure and reintegration since the Secessions of the 1890s.This trajectory was re-formulated as a reductionist art history, culminat-ing in 1960s formalism, by Clement Greenberg. In his essay Avant-Garde

and Kitsch (1939),68Greenberg erroneously takes a work by Russiannineteenth-century artist Ilya Repin as a case of Socialist Realism to equatethe passive reception he supposes for Repins work with that of a Westernmass public looking at mass kitsch culture. The avant-garde must keep artmoving as the only defence against kitsch, in a permanent emergence ofthe new. The difficulty, Greenberg observes, is that the avant-garde is inthrall to elites, while its outputs are meaningless to a mass public nurturedon kitsch, yet the elite also disowns the avant-garde: Since the avant-gardeforms the only living culture we now have, the survival in the near futureof culture is thus threatened.69Ultimately, Greenberg expresses the hopethat, Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable

64. Marcuse, The AestheticDimension, Beacon Press,Bosto, MA, 1978, pp 401

65. Ibid, p 45

66. Marcuse, Liberation fromthe Affluent Society, opcit, p 185

67. Henri Lefebvre,Conversation avec HenriLefebvre, Messidor, Paris,1991, p 70, cited in AndyMerrifield, Henri Lefebvre:

A Critical Introduction,Routledge, London, 2006,pp 256

68. C Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, inPerceptions andJudgments, 19391944:Collected Essays andCriticism, vol 1, Universityof Chicago Press, Chicago,1988, pp 522

69. Greenberg, Avant-Gardeand Kitsch, op cit, p 11


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of producing becomes a threat to its own existence.70New culturalforms corrode the society under whose auspices they are produced aninversion of the idea that the art market corrodes all refusals of its terms.

Greenbergs essay, setting aside the comments on Repin, revolvesaround the model of a trajectory and the claim that arts vitality is itsdeparture from the mainstream. The function of Greenbergs art criti-

cism in the 1960s was to validate such departures as new art, the mostrecent phase of the mainstream. It is hard to see how Bourriauds criticalproject is other than similarly prescriptive, proposing installation art asthe new engagement, the new emergent form, unless that kind of artsubverts the cycle of permanent departure by making a leap to a newfunction for art denied by his retention of arts aura and, potentially,abolition of the category art. Yet Kesters attempt to construct a newcritical terrain for an art of co-production, of transference as he puts it,could be read either as this termination of arts specialism, or as a casefor another departure which he sees as not returning to the mainstream.Is this viable? Is Kester claiming the status of a historian describing thisfracture, or that of a critic advocating it? These are rhetorical questions

and could be applied to my own writing here. But what emerges fromthem is a realisation that contemporary arts claimed transitional zonebetween art and politics is a form of the aporia previously articulated byMarcuse and by T W Adorno in Aesthetic Theory71that arts social andaesthetic dimensions are mutually disabling. Or, to state this anotherway, the two dimensions are polarities of an axis of creative discourse,not an oppositional duality. If then, to apply this, the exit from the circleof arts departures is in a mass creativity, when the use of the creativeimagination permeates everyday life, the category of art ceases to beuseful. The leap breaks the circle by discarding the terms in which thecircle exists.

But the leap is never made. The permanence of departures prevailseven for radical alternatives to the dominant structure. The location ofrelational aesthetics as a new critical term appears then to be in a zonebetween viability and non-viability, between engagement and the disen-gagement, by which it is both enabled and limited.

RELATIONAL AESTHETICS

For Bourriaud, Contemporary art is definitely developing a politicalproject when it endeavours to move into the relational realm.72 Hedefines relational aesthetics as Aesthetic theory consisting in judging

artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent,produce or prompt73and calls on the authority of Marx and Althusserto say the world consists of random encounters echoed in arts chancemeetings of signs and forms.74For Bourriaud, in his own account, instal-lation art in particular produces a new sense of connectivity, notbetween the spectator and the work as in a conventional model of recep-tion, but between observers themselves although encounters of eachother there may be random. If, then, a difficulty in Kesters position isthat art addresses the needs of citizens in an art which might be taken asa substitute for the provisions of a welfare state, substituting therapy forautonomy, the difficulty in Bourriauds position is that access to the

70. Ibid, p 22

71. T W Adorno, AestheticTheory, Athlone, London,1997 (first published asAesthetische Theorie,Frankfurt-am-Main,Suhrkamp, 1970)

72. Bourriaud, RelationalAesthetics, op cit, p 17

73. Ibid, p 112

74. Ibid, p 110; Bourriaud hasin mind Althussers latework see p 18 andquotes Althusser to theeffect that the city is now astate of encounter imposedon people L Althusser,Ecrits philosophiques etpolitiques, Editions Stock-IMEC, Paris, 1995, p 557,in Bourriaud, RelationalAesthetics, op cit, p 15


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encounters he envisages is likely to be restricted to the existing publicsfor contemporary art. For some members of this set of publics, the expe-rience of art may be predictable, located in the contemporary equivalentof modernisms value-free space as constituted by the sites in which suchart was and is shown. If, as Bourriaud seems to claim, art differs fromthe ever-present noise of mass media, and has a ludic aspect, it achieves

this by its separation from the wider world. But could the ludic not bepresent there as well?

Kester draws the term dialogical art from Mikhail Bakhtin for whomliterature offers dialogic encounters producing new insights: ideasemerge between speakers and not in the utterances of individuals. Thisdepends on an equality of voices which Rancire sees erased in contem-porary politics and I think implies a suspension of the artists claim tospecial insight, or an orchestration of the work reliant on it. Kestercomplains that such practices are criticized for being unaesthetic forneedlessly suppressing visual gratification.75 But this seems to saymerely that such work is not reintegrated into the trajectory of modernart, the terms of which are aesthetic. Kester claims the status of art for

this work, all his examples presented not as social or political activism but as works of art,76but simultaneously rejects the terms on whichart is validated. To me, as an academic working only in theory, the ques-tion as to whether an intervention is art is not interesting. I am drawnmore to Marriotts ease when Platform is called a human rights group(above). It seems more interesting to observe, as Rancire advises, whatan intervention does, how it is received by the publics it creates, and towhat if any extent it states or tacitly implies a political position orprogramme. Is co-produced art, for example, an enactment of directdemocracy?

Rancire outlines three cultural forms at the end of politics: art which

is not art but historical documentation; art which asserts a presence asrefusal of the ubiquitous devaluation of imagery in mass media; and artwhich trades on metaphor, playing on ambiguity and ambivalence (towhich I would add irony). These are ways of coupling and uncouplingthe power of showing and the power of signifying ,77yet none canfunction, Rancire says, in the terms of its own logic. Presence becomespresentation, and ambivalence which plays with consumerism tends to arelease from seriousness when, Rancire remarks:

The procedures of cutting and humour [from cinema] have themselvesbecome the stock-in-trade of advertising, the means by which it generatesboth adoration of its icons and the positive attitude towards them createdby the very possibility of ironizing it.78

Perhaps Rancires concept of critical art is purposively embedded in thisintractable difficulty (or axis of creative discourse): critical art intendsto raise consciousness of the mechanisms of domination in order to turnthe spectator into a conscious agent in the transformation of theworld.79 That consciousness alone is not enough, however: exploitedpeople have rarely had the need to have the laws of exploitationexplained to them.80Rancire states the problem as follows:

In this vicious circle of critical art we generally see proof that aestheticsand politics cant go together. It would be more fair, however, to recognize

75. Kester, ConversationPieces, op cit, p 10

76. Ibid, p 11

77. Jacques Rancire, TheFuture of the Image, Verso,London, 2007, p 26 (firstpublished as Le Dessin desImages, Paris, Editions LaFabrique, 2003)

78. Rancire, The Future of theImage, op cit, p 28

79. Rancire, Problems andTransformations in CriticalArt, op cit, p 83

80. Ibid


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the plurality of ways in which they are linked. On the one hand, politics isnot a simple sphere of action that comes after the aesthetic revelation ofthe state of things. It has its own aesthetic: its ways of dissensually invent-ing scenes and characters, of manifestations and statements different fromthe inventions of art and sometimes even opposed to them. On the otherhand, aesthetics has its own politics, or rather its own tension between twoopposed politics: between the logic of art that becomes life at the price of

abolishing itself as art; and the logic of art that does politics on the explicitcondition of not doing it at all.81

Critical art negotiates the tensions. Brecht, for example, produces doublemeaning in ordinary things cauliflowers in Arturo Ui to draw outcontradictions in capitalism. The radical strangeness of the aestheticobject is vital to a micro-politics of art.82This takes the form of shocktactics in Andy Warhols soup cans, or Hans Haackes labels announcingthe investment status of exhibits in the art museum, and KrzysztofWodiczkos projections of homeless figures onto public monuments. Orshock is a displacing humour, taking art from critique to play, mergingart in consumer-culture while retaining art-status in defence againstexactly this absorption. Another mode is the artists inventory or assem-blage of everyday or incidental things. Rancire writes:

In this logic, the artist is at once an archivist of collective life and thecollector, witness to a shared ability. Because the inventory, whichevidences the potential of objects and images collective history, bybringing closer the art of the sculptor and that of the rag-and-bone man,shows in this way the relationship between the inventive gesture of artand the multiplicity of inventions of the arts of doing and arts ofliving83

A third mode is the art-encounter, as in Tiravanijas work in which

Haaning is also mentioned. Here, art goes beyond conceptualist rejectionof the object (inevitably a commodity) to a void in social relations (thenon-connectivity to which Bourriaud refers). Yet if art can spark recog-nition of a lack of connection, it equally states awareness that art cannotfill the gap. So, critical art:

must borrow the connections that provoke political intelligibility fromthe blurry zone between art and other spheres. And it must borrow thesense of sensible heterogeneity that feeds the political energies of refusalfrom isolation of the work of art. Its this negotiation that permits theformation of combinations of elements capable of speaking twice: fromtheir readability and from their unreadability.84

The double-take is characteristic of Rancires writing. He argues that acommitted artist may choose a fragmented language to denote theworlds disorder, or, citing Otto Dix and George Grosz, play on modesof dehumanisation a universe where human beings drift betweenmarionettes, masks, and skeletons.85But to juxtapose the masks withthe system reproducing their inhumanity can be called reactionarynihilism.86 He concludes that political art negotiates a duality of ashock to the system and a sense of the uncanny. Art intervenes betweenthe readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensibleform of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all

81. Ibid

82. Rancire, Problems andTransformations in CriticalArt, op cit, p 86

83. Ibid, p 89

84. Ibid, p 84

85. Rancire, The Politics ofAesthetics, op cit, p 61

86. Ibid


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political meaning.87This is postmodern disillusion, the wit and ironywhich invite the spectator into the contradictions of capitalism. But itremains art, not politics. If art has a political function if this is anappropriate question it is in its contradistinction from the closures ofpolitical life.

CODA

In Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Benjamin writes, thestate of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.88

The writers task is to create a real state of emergency demonstratingrealitys irrationality. I am not sure if this can appropriately be applied toinstallation art or relational aesthetics, or if the irony attendant on mostcases of critical art is overpowering. The emergency is of a different kindnow than in Benjamins time, anyway. I venture no conclusion but end as

87. Ibid, p 63

88. Walter Benjamin, Theseson the Philosophy ofHistory, Illuminations,Fontana, London, p 259

Terrorist: get him!, poster, Lisbon, 2003, photo: Malcolm Miles


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I began with a newspaper report, on Guggenheims theanyspacewhatevershow:

Thanks to the artist Carsten Hller, you can get your own hotel room fortwo at the Guggenheim Hllers work is fully equipped for overnightguests, who will have full access to the exhibition at night but be on fullview to the public during the day. Guests will also have to pay Forthe shows curator the work is a great example of how Carsten isinterested in engaging the viewer in the very realization of [the]artwork.89

Rancire writes that spectators may need to be told that, in the spacethey are about to enter, they will learn anew how to see and to put theflood of media messages that usually captivates them at a distance.90

The flow of media images outside the gallery, meanwhile, is continu-ously interrupted, re-contextualised and evacuated of meaning. Asevidence of a more real state of emergency, in Benjamins terms, I cite aposter which appeared briefly in Lisbon in 2003 depicting George WBush under the text I translate loosely from Portuguese: Terrorist: gethim. The urgency of its message appears incompatible with the diver-sionary tactic of Hllers adventure in art as the ultimate-ironic lifestyle-consumerism (or perhaps I take both too literally).1 Terrorist:gethim!,poster, Lisbon,2003,photo:MalcolmMiles

89. A Room for Two at the

Guggenheim, Guardian,27 August 2008, G2, p 29

90. Rancire, The Future of theImage, op cit, p 28


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Aesthetics in a TIME