Artists Remake the World: A Contemporary Art Manifesto 9780300266290, 9780300275186

Citation preview

ARTISTS REMAKE THE WORLD A Contemporary Art Manifesto

Vid Simoniti

Yale University Press New Haven and London

Copyright © 2023 Vid Simoniti All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. All reasonable efforts have been made to provide accurate sources for all images that appear in this book. Any discrepancies or omissions will be rectified in future editions. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] yalebooks.com Europe Office: [email protected] yalebooks.co.uk Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942013 ISBN 978-0-300-26629-0 eISBN 978-0-300-27518-6 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4.

When and How Contemporary Art Became Political Realism for Our Time: On Art and Truth Utility and Utopia: On Socially Engaged Art Worldmaking: On the Role of Aesthetics in Political Art

vii 1 13 29 54 80

Plates section 5. Spectacle and Surveillance: On Art in the Internet Age 6. Creativity in the Face of Extinction:   On Art and Climate Change 7. Remaking the World’s Hinges

104 128

Notes Further Reading Image Credits Index

176 198 202 205

154

AC K N OW L E D G E M E N TS

This book began its life as a lecture series and a podcast, both of which were entitled Art Against the World. For two years (2016–17) I taught a course on visual art from 1945 to 1989 at the history of art department at the University of Cambridge, and while the period investigated was earlier than the subject of this book, teaching the course helped me crystallise the questions explored here, as well as delve into their historical background. I am grateful to students who helped me think through the material, and colleagues (especially Rosalind Polly Blakesley, Alyce Mahon and John David Rhodes) who guided me in that first teaching role. In 2019, I repurposed that title for a podcast I hosted in collaboration with the Liverpool Biennial. Conducting in-depth interviews with ten artists, several of whom feature in this book, afforded me invaluable insights into artistic practice today; I am grateful to them for their time, and to curators Manuela Moscoso and Je Yun Moon for conceiving the idea with me. Most of the research and writing took place after I took up a lectureship at the philosophy department at the University of Liverpool, where I’ve benefited from many constructive conversations with colleagues at the university and at cultural institutions in the city. Special thanks go to Mariama Attah, Angela Becher, Katherine Furman, Laura Gow, Natalie Hanna, Robin McKenna, Elena Musi, Sam Solnick, Yiota Vassilopoulou and Rachael Wiseman. I thank my students for often being the first sounding board for many ideas, especially on the Art, Philosophy and Cultural Institutions MA that I have been running; and my head of department, Michael Hauskeller, for supporting interdisciplinary work as well as my

viii

Acknowledgements

application for sabbatical leave, during which the bulk of the book was written. Part of that leave was spent writing in the snowy idyll at Uppsala University; I am thankful to Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann for inviting me, and to her colleagues, especially Axel Rudolphi and Nicholas Wiltsher, for the stimulating and welcoming environment. While writing is itself a lonely vocation, it is born of many voices and there are innumerable friends and colleagues to whom I am indebted for feedback on chapters, invitations to speak at seminars, help on various aspects of research, collaborations, mentorship, or simply illuminating conversations. Among them let me express my gratitude to Uri Agnon, Claire Anscomb, Allan Antliff, Melia Belli Bose, Anastasia Berg, Nicola Brandt, Joseph Browning, Elisa Caldarola, Deborah Casewell, Peter Dennis, James Fox, Louise Hanson, Rhiannon Harries, Sarah Hegenbart, Nicola Kozicharow, Morgan Labar, Paul Linton, Eleanor Lischka, Catalina Lozano, Eleanor Mills, Julia Mintzer, Charles Ogilvie, Asya Passinsky, James Pearson, John David Rhodes, Sam Rose, Helen Sims-Williams, Maja Smrekar, Maarten Steenhagen, Sonja Vilč and Naomi Vogt, as well as my PhD students Harry Drummond and Lauren Stephens. Robyn Read allowed some of the thoughts in Chapter 6 to be heard on BBC Radio 3 before they found their way into this book. The Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park Foundation in Canada has nourished my work since sponsoring my fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge in 2015–18; I would like to acknowledge the memory and friendship of Jeffrey, and the continuing great work that Betty Kennedy, Karun Koernig and Charo Neville do at the Foundation. Jason Gaiger and Hanneke Grootenboer, who supervised my doctorate, have remained models of scholarship across philosophy and history of art; their insights have found their way into this book in many ways. The artists who feature in this book must naturally have my deep gratitude too, for the thought-provoking work they have created and, in many cases, for sharing their perspectives with me in conversation. I thank them, as well as the staff at all the galleries

Acknowledgements

ix

and museums who have assisted me with image permissions and captions. Among my readers, my deepest appreciation is reserved for composer Matthew Shlomowitz, who has shared his discerning commentary on every part of the text. Two anonymous reviewers must be thanked for being all a writer could wish for: precise in their suggestions, thorough in their attention and generous in sharing their knowledge. At Yale University Press, Sophie Neve has steered the book from the first ideas to completion with attentiveness and lucidity; I thank her here, and also Heather McCallum, for inviting me to the project and helping me shape the initial concept into its present structure. Of course, I could not have written this book – or indeed done much of anything else in my life – without the care and love of my parents, grandparents, my sister, my wonderful friends. Special gratitude goes to my partner Scott, for bringing me tea and whisky while I typed away late into the night, expanding my horizons on art and music, and reminding me that there is life beyond the writing desk. Finally, I wish to recognise two philosophers who have inspired my thought in these pages in different but profound ways. Adrian Piper is, for me, the most rewarding thinker among conceptual artists of the first generation, not only because of the intellectual charge of her art, but also for being the only conceptualist to expand her vision into a comprehensive, important and still underappreciated philosophical system. I’ve been immensely lucky to be able to draw on her advice and friendship over the years, as well as be inspired by her work. Michael Tanner, whom I met at Cambridge as a postdoc scuttling uncertainly between philosophy and history of art, cast a new charm over my appreciation of both, with his immense erudition and with that rare ability to capture both the effervescence and depth of whatever subject he discusses. Artistic idioms explored in these pages will not necessarily all be close to him, but our long discussions of philosophy, music, film and literature have certainly helped me to see contemporary art, too, more clearly.

INTRODUCTION

I

f I try to recall early experiences when works of art changed the way I saw the world, I often do not remember who the artists were. There was one time in my early twenties – I had just finished my undergraduate studies and visited Berlin for the first time – when a more adventurous friend of mine, who had spent a bitter winter rummaging in the pockets of the city’s counterculture while living in a squat on Köpenicker Strasse, took me to an art exhibition in an empty brewery in the Friedrichshain district. What exactly was shown there, as opposed to at other spaces I eventually discovered around the city, I also do not recall, but the mixed impressions in my memory include: a wedding dress soaked in blood-red paint; taxidermied animals – I remember an eagle, a deer and some squirrels – dressed up as if they were going to a rave; and, at a different exhibition, some melancholy watercolours, showing online dating profiles of queer men. The exhilaration that such experiences of art then presented, tied up as they were with discovering new people, a new city, new lifestyles, connected to a hunch which would have lingered in my consciousness from younger days still. Like the moment when a child discovers a magical land behind some coats hanging in the old wardrobe, this world of art suddenly made real the small childhood hope that a crack in a mundane existence can open and reveal an entirely new reality. For me, back then, it was contemporary art, techno and literature – for somebody else, at a different time and place, it might have been hip hop, or graphic novels, or Woodstock, or perhaps a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. In this book I try to make sense of something like that feeling: that art offers the piercing realisation that another life, another

2

artists remake the world

existence, is possible, that through art we momentarily remake the world as we know it. The context in which this transformative power is explored is not one of escapism, however. Works of contemporary art today are rarely concerned with strangeness or wonder for their own sake; more often, they try to imagine alternative ways of viewing society, or reshape our responses to pressing political issues of the day. Among the artworks we will encounter on the pages below there is an outdoor installation of life jackets that points to the experience of refugees crossing the Aegean Sea (Ai Weiwei), a series of bas-reliefs that refer to exploitative mining of rare metals (Sammy Baloji), an AI program that highlights the racial bias in artificial intelligence engineering (Stephanie Dinkins), and a video piece which explores the monetising tactics employed by social media corporations (Hito Steyerl). In their specificity, the themes of these artworks might initially seem more appropriate as subject matter for journalism or academic writing, and yet, art as a form of political commentary has by now firmly established itself as the predominant direction in the contemporary artworld. The question this art invites us to answer is not, how can art help us escape the world, but rather: what can art do to change it? The argument I try to develop in the book is that the experience of art unhinges us from the usual ways of thinking and doing things, and thereby pushes us beyond the political status quo. There is, however, a deep paradox at the heart of political contemporary art, which such an argument must negotiate. Of all the arts – music, plays, novels, television series, computer games and so forth – contemporary exhibition-based art seems the most politically involved, yet its production can feel forbiddingly abstruse, experimental, hard to access, inward looking, even elitist. As I was writing this book, I felt this paradox most keenly through the contrasting responses I received when discussing it with people inside the artworld, and with those outside it. When I told curators, artists and art historians that I was writing on the relationship between contemporary art and politics, this topic often struck them as almost embarrassingly broad. The

Introduction

3

artworld is awash with ever-evolving approaches to political theory and practice – from critical race theory to ecofeminism, from Occupy to climate justice, from utilitarianism to accelerationism – and so the attempt to climb up to some vantage point from which to survey the relationship between art and politics, in general, seemed weirdly unspecific. Yet, speaking to those with a keen interest in politics, but no specific interest in art – journalists, activists, scientists, civil servants, students, workers, pensioners – the topic appeared strange for another reason. In the first few decades of the twenty-first century, climate change emerged as a clear existential threat, the West kept waging its interventionist wars, the digital transformation enabled grassroots movements to demand social justice (#metoo, #BlackLivesMatter) and democratisation (Arab Spring, Hong Kong Umbrella movement), Russia invaded Ukraine. It is quite possible to discuss all these topics without invoking contemporary art at all. These issues are difficult enough as they are; so why would we need art – indeed, an art form as rarefied as that at home in galleries and museums – to reflect on them? What point is there to artistic experimentation at a moment when the challenges before us seem to call for clear answers and determined action? A much-beloved adage about contemporary art is that, these days, anything at all can be art. Walk into a gallery and you might find not a sculpture or a painting, but instead policemen on horseback exercising crowd control (Tania Bruguera, Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008), a restaurant serving ecologically sourced food (Jorge Menna Barreto, Restauro, 2016), or, in the museum courtyard, melting blocks of ice, carved off the coast of Greenland (Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing, Ice Watch, 2014). More than a century has passed since Marcel Duchamp proposed entering an upturned urinal into an exhibition and calling it Fountain; since then, artists seem to have been experimenting with such a variety of approaches that it by now seems quite impossible to define art by reference to any specific medium.1 And yet, contemporary art is not quite as free of identity

4

artists remake the world

as this unbridled freedom might suggest. While contemporary artists like those mentioned above often swap between media – from, for instance, video to installation, or from installation to participatory art – without anyone batting an eyelid, it would be quite surprising if they were to suddenly give up the often politically inflected ideas that define their work. As I describe in Chapter 1, the interdisciplinary, politicised art of the present has developed from the peculiar clash of artistic experimentation and political commitment, and a distinct new critical artworld that has arisen to accommodate this art. Yet, if we might almost describe our time as a golden age for political art, the very meaning of the adjective ‘political’ with respect to art remains surprisingly unclarified. Political art appears in the gallery setting and in street protests, as anarchic participatory projects or as beautiful figurative paintings, and political views in art may be expressed forcefully, or enigmatically. As I was ordering the material for this book into chapters, I therefore soon discarded the initial idea of organising the material by political agenda, into categories such as feminist art, anti-racist art, art about globalisation and so forth. This would have resulted in a survey, which would not allow me to investigate art’s specific contribution to the political process. Instead, I propose to order our investigation of political art by the type of political process that contemporary artists participate in, by three different ways of understanding what politics itself is in capitalist democracies today. Firstly, we might conceive of politics as discourse in the public sphere: that is, the debate and exchange of opinions between citizens, the goal of which is to arrive at a shared understanding of facts, and a shared direction for policy.2 The political artist here is one who engages in art as a contribution to a debate, often from within the art gallery: the artist might portray an injustice, articulate a problem or direct the public’s gaze towards an overlooked corner of society. Consider the installation and video 77sqm_9:26min (2017) by the collective Forensic Architecture, displayed at the documenta 13 exhibition in Kassel (Plate 2). This work is a mesmerising, carefully

Introduction

5

narrated reconstruction of a crime scene. The art and research collective performed their own investigation of the murder of a young man of Turkish heritage in Kassel, after the police had failed to properly clarify it. While shown inside the exhibition hall, the work was clearly situated in the public debate in Germany at the time: a debate about the police’s failure to properly investigate a series of racially motivated murders, and about the broader implications for systemic racism in the country. As I argue in Chapter 2, such explicitly investigative art has enjoyed great prominence in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. While its concern with truthfulness will be familiar from the long lineage of artistic realism – we might think of the French Realists of the nineteenth century, such as Gustave Courbet, who attempted to awaken the conscience in their bourgeois public by depicting scenes of rural poverty – artistic truth-speaking attains a new urgency in our own time, in the period of disinformation and demagogy, which has become known colloquially as the ‘post-truth’ era. Here, the question of art’s contribution to politics becomes tied to the resurgence of artistic ideals like objectivity, rationality and impartiality. Still, as art becomes evidence-driven, we must ask: is objectivity the only way of coming to comprehend uncomfortable realities, or are there other paths to understanding that art might offer? Secondly, we might think of the political sphere as consisting not only of discourse, but also of action. Dissatisfied with the limits of persuasion, in recent decades several artists have incorporated activism and audience participation into their artistic practice. Kateřina Šedá, for instance, has worked with a village community to synchronise their actions into a choreographed sequence of actions, where for one day the villagers attended to every aspect of their weekend chores together (There Is Nothing There, 2003, Plate 7). The piece here is not designed so much as a ‘message’, but as an immediate change in the participants’ lives: here, a closer sense of community in a disinvested part of the rural Czech Republic. Such ‘socially engaged art’ is perhaps one of the most written-about genres since

6

artists remake the world

the 1990s, and it exists along several gradations – from audience participation to artistic activism – all of which, however, conceive of the political nature of art as pertaining to the direct effect such art can have for the lives of people who encounter it. In Chapter 3, I argue that socially engaged artistic projects seek to break the spell of democratic deficit and citizen inactivity by promising change in the here and now. This new way of doing art, however, also forces us to reconsider whether political art can retain its separate identity, or whether it must be ultimately assimilated into ‘ordinary’, non-art forms of social activism. The third way of understanding the ‘political’ in art that I propose focuses on changes less overt than those of either discourse or action: the shaping of a shared vision that we can call worldmaking.3 Since the second half of the twentieth century, many societies have undergone seismic changes with regard to gender roles, centrality of religion, racial and ethnic relations, or perception of LGBT lives, but these political changes cannot be attributed solely to law or even to policy, and often have had as much to do with a subtler reorganisation of values and perceptions, much of it perpetuated through cultural production. When today an artist like Naomi Rincón Gallardo produces a set of fantastical performances that combine Indigenous Mexican mythology with a queer countercultural aesthetic (Plate 15), she seems to engage in just such worldmaking: an attempt to reorganise her audience’s way of perceiving the world, so that queer and Indigenous lives suddenly become more central and valued. In Chapter 4, I explore the way artistic worldmaking is today used to articulate new ideals of social justice, often through a surprising resurgence of figurative art and storytelling. As I argue, the unique task of art here is not merely to articulate new values, but also to create a critical distance from the empty aesthetics of progressiveness, so readily emulated in corporate and official cultures. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 propose a taxonomy of political art relative to certain crises in democratic politics: of finding a shared notion of truth in the face of disinformation and polarisation; of participation

Introduction

7

in the face of unequal access to power; and of finding shared values in a fragmented and unequal society. While contemporary art responds to these crises in ways that are new, the very nature of democracy has always been entwined with them, and so the three types of political artworks – realist, activist and worldmaking – extend beyond our immediate timeframe into earlier periods. In Chapters 5 and 6, I turn to two crises that are new to our time, and that promise to rewrite the very conditions of what we count as political. In Chapter 5, I consider art of the internet age, where algorithmic transformation of the public sphere has threatened to reshape the nature of democracy as we know it. In Chapter 6, I explore artistic responses to climate change. In Naomi Klein’s memorable characterisation, climate change ‘changes everything’:4 and so, it requires new forms of art-making because this crisis requires not only changes within individual societies, but also a radical shift in the global political and economic systems. Across the chapters I articulate a few responses to the question ‘what can art contribute to politics?’, at least some of which it might be helpful to set out in advance. The history of visual art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is often told as a conflict between the competing forces of artistic autonomy and political commitment.5 Autonomy stands for artistic ‘self-rule’, the ideal of art responding to its own laws (think l’art pour l’art, decadence, formalism, abstraction); political commitment speaks to various ways in which artists have attempted to intervene in the social world (think Realism, Dadaism, Fluxus, feminist art). Today, political commitment seems to have decisively won over autonomy in contemporary art, and sometimes in a rather extreme way: because contemporary art is free from all constraint (since it can be ‘anything at all’), artists are always tempted by the possibility of a full assimilation of their work into another field of activity. The most radical artists we will encounter in this book have thereby become almost indistinguishable from ‘mere’ journalists, protesters, researchers or community organisers,

8

artists remake the world

and this assimilation of art to recognisable political activities is often guided by the desire to be ‘more’ politically relevant. Unnerved with aesthetics and the ambiguity of art, politicised artists begin to present sheer facts in the gallery space. Then, frustrated by the ineffectualness of stating facts, they turn towards the seemingly more immediate expression of political demands through protest. And finally, since protest seems to only reach the ears of the already converted, artists depart the artworld in search of communities outside, beginning to organise workshops for the disenfranchised sectors of society. To remake the world ‘more’ directly, artists begin to double as activists, fundraisers and even technology developers. I am somewhat sceptical of this direction of travel in contemporary art: a direction towards an increasingly utilitarian conception of art, whereby good art is whatever has the biggest (usually meaning ‘measurable’) impact. Cuban artist Tania Bruguera sums up this tendency in her manifesto for Arte Útil (useful art), and is one of the most articulate defenders of this view; many cultural institutions today take up a similar approach, turning artists into social improvers for the communities they serve.6 My objections to this position do not stem from worries about art’s definition (I do not think there can be any limitations on what counts as art), nor from a reactionary denial of art’s right to be political (I stand with W.E.B. Du Bois, who claimed already in the early twentieth century that all art possesses sociopolitical content).7 My argument against political art’s assimilation to utility and impact instead stems from the worry that, by approaching activities that already exist, artists invite comparison not just with other artworks, but precisely with those activities they emulate. Socially engaged art ought to be compared with what social workers in non-governmental organisations are doing; artistic research with academic research; artistic activism with the tactics of non-art activists. And when we make that comparison, by and large, artistic achievements seem somewhat second-rate. There are some notable exceptions that I discuss, but generally we could say: if your political aim is impact here and now, you should become

Introduction

9

an NGO volunteer, a human rights lawyer, a trade unionist or a political party member. Becoming a socially engaged artist presents only an unnecessary detour. This argument, of course, is a negative one: it says what art cannot do, or cannot do so well. But I do not formulate the argument simply to beat the (often well-intentioned) artists and museums with it, but rather to circumscribe the terrain within which a positive argument can be made. To answer the question ‘what can art do for politics?’, we need to understand political success as something richer than the mere utilitarian measure of impact, and we also need an account of art that is a little meatier than ‘anything at all’. Searching for such a philosophy, I propose to think of art as an act beyond the ordinary, as a thought that in its very form exists against the world as we know it. To make this a little more concrete, recall that politics in democratic capitalism is governed not only by expectations of impact, but also by other ideals. In the realm of political debate, for instance, we value objectivity: speaking with clear conclusions, literal meaning, seriousness. In the realm of culture, we expect democratic values like equality, diversity and personal liberty to be reflected back at us in advertising, television shows and pop songs. Such are some of the expectations that make up the ‘ordinary’ sphere of democratic capitalist politics, the horizon against which political conversations are supposed to unfold.8 What is special about art is that it forms an exceptional space in which our rationalistic, impact-driven and value-abiding ideals of politics can partially break down. In art, we suddenly enter into fiction, whimsy, inconclusiveness, uselessness, humour, self-contradiction, darkness. And so, it is by focusing on such departures from the ordinary that we can make our difficult question more manageable. ‘What can art contribute to politics?’ is not a question we can answer with a single sentence. We must, instead, capture whatever is distinct about art’s otherworldly thinking in specific cases, and then ask what does that weird departure do, what can it allow us to think, that mainstream discourse is not yet able to articulate.

10

artists remake the world

Here is one quick example – one hunch – to be elaborated later. Consider, for instance, one rather strange feature of art: its inconclusiveness. When politicians in the public sphere try to persuade each other about why some policy is good or bad, we expect them to make well-structured arguments with clear conclusions. What is the point of agitating for change, if you do not clearly state what you want? And yet artists, on the other hand, expend much trouble on guarding against such obviousness: on sustaining tension, multiple threads, of stopping just short of the final ‘therefore’. To think about what art might contribute to politics, we must therefore consider what the benefit of such inconclusiveness might be. One advantage, for instance, might be that inconclusiveness allows us to come together to consider issues, the explicit invocation of which would cause immediate polarisation. Another might be that it allows artists to keep in view great harms that are too awful to state directly. As citizens of democratic capitalism, we are often so deeply complicit in horrors that we can perhaps only look at them obliquely: in ‘ordinary’ discourse they too quickly dissolve into an unproductive struggle.9 Art, in other words, can help us achieve a kind of looking, a kind of understanding, which is necessary for political progress, and yet is not easily achieved under the political system as we find it. This is merely a snippet of the kind of approach I will be pursuing in this book, but I hope a general structure can be seen: the goal is to find elements that are distinctive of what art can give us, not by becoming as impactful as possible, but by precisely removing itself from the usual political horizons of capitalist democracy. Art is an experimental form of politics. Apart from inconclusiveness, there are of course many more departures from the ordinary in the artists’ arsenal: from pleasure to self-contradiction, from fantasy to allegory, from transgression to irony. Some of these, as we shall see, unite contemporary artists with their predecessors; some need to be invented to respond to the political needs of the day. While I hope to show such works can be radical in their political content, I am clearly led towards a preference for a certain kind of political

Introduction

11

art among the options existing today: art that inserts complexity into our political lives. Because I do advocate for such works, I was eventually convinced to adopt the somewhat startling subtitle for the book – ‘a contemporary art manifesto’ – even though the book is of course not a short call to arms, as was the case with famous Futurist, Surrealist and other artistic manifestos. Unlike these texts, I do not prescribe a single programme in art, but I try to justify contemporary art as an experimental form of thought and perception, against expectations that art should result in immediate social change. The artistic process of the world’s remaking is a more strenuous, dynamic, even painful, process of unhinging our usual ways of doing and thinking. As the philosophically minded reader will undoubtedly have noticed by this point, any arguments I can offer here cannot but arise out of a conversation with a long line of philosophers, critics and artists who have tried to negotiate the knotty relationship between art and politics. In view of the complexity of this academic terrain, I try to strike a balance between presenting arguments without unnecessary jargon, but also revealing my indebtedness to particular thinkers. Philosophers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, bell hooks, Adrian Piper and Cora Diamond are relied on to clarify certain positions, but in hoping to make the book relatively succinct, I gloss over academic debates concerning the interpretation of canonical philosophical figures. Similarly, the lively discussion that has emerged in the more specialised field of contemporary art, conducted between artists, critics and art historians, is evoked when required, but often synthesised. I can only hope that scholarly readers will find that my simplifications lack detail, rather than sense. In the concluding Chapter 7, I attempt to clarify my preferred position in a more philosophical idiom, especially in relation to the work of Adorno, Rancière and Piper. In shaping my argument I focus on the context of exhibitions in capitalist democracies (the internal dynamics of authoritarian regimes

12

artists remake the world

require a different characterisation of art’s role and power), and in doing so I rely on the work of about thirty artists, mostly active in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. I have attempted to arrive at a selection of artists balanced by region, ethnicity, gender and political experience, but I have inevitably and regrettably had to omit many artists whose work I find compelling (the deletions file for this study is at least as long as the book). I encourage the reader to seek out the books and exhibitions referred to in the notes and Further Reading section, to find further relevant artists working today. Another limitation of my prose that bears mentioning is that I inevitably possess only limited or distant involvement in several of the political struggles I narrate. I am not harmed by the oppression of the Chinese government in the same way as Ai Weiwei is, and cannot draw on first-hand experience of anti-Black racism which Alberta Whittle explores in her video works. I can only hope that my writing amplifies others’ voices in such cases. Finally, the polemical nature of the central question – what can art do for politics? – means that this book contains both enthusiasm for the art of today, and criticism of some approaches. Among these, I only discuss by name the artists whose work I respect even while finding it worthy of critique. If I give examples of artistic practice that I think are more deeply misguided, I have anonymised and changed the details to avoid identification. The contemporary artworld is full of contradictions – it contains pretentiousness, sloppy thinking and opportunistic posturing, at least in equal measure as it contains inspiration and vision – but precisely because of these contradictions, art shown in exhibitions remains such an interesting art form to think with. Ultimately, however, I try to build a case for art, not against it. While art is no panacea for all our problems, I hope to show that art represents a distinct form of thought: it creates cracks in what may otherwise seem like an inexorable system, and sometimes even allows us to glimpse possibilities for repairing the world.

Chapter one

When and How Contemporary Art Became Political

O

f all the palaces that symbolise the prestige of old European empires – the Louvre in Paris, the Winter Palace in St Petersburg or Buckingham Palace in London – Schloss Belvedere in Vienna is probably the sweetest. Its marzipan-like swirls and sugar-white statuary coalesce in that distinctive symmetry that makes the best Baroque buildings look like both a princely residence and a culinary delicacy. However, in the summer of 2016, visitors to this palace, now a museum and an art gallery, were greeted by a rather sombre art installation on the pond outside: on the tranquil water surface, there were gathered 1,500 life jackets. Floating in circular formations, they appeared as strange aquatic blooms at the height of summer. Called F. Lotus (2016), the installation was created by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: a product of the studio that he had set up on the Greek island of Lesbos, where many refugees were stranded, while waiting for European states to decide whether they were going to be allowed to continue their passage to the continent (Plate 1). Even a casual visitor could not have missed the stringent message of Ai’s work. The year before, in the continuing refugee crisis, more than a million people arrived in Europe via the Aegean Sea, most of them fleeing the civil war in Syria. Austria, like many European states, shut its borders in the ensuing anti-migrant panic,

14

artists remake the world

contravening the principle of free movement in the European Union; by contrast, her neighbour Germany accepted 1 million refugees, in a gesture that bypassed the EU principle of claiming asylum in the first country of arrival. The life jackets, so closely associated with the death toll at sea, placed next to one of Austria’s most prestigious cultural monuments, could not fail to send a clear reprimand. And yet, one might worry that it is precisely the context of an art exhibition that makes the message itself less effective. After all, what could be more pleasant than strolling up to the Belvedere, viewing a famous artist’s work, perhaps exchanging a few worried words on the state of world politics, and then enjoying a nice ice cream in the sun? While some press received Ai’s installation positively, the artworld’s potential hypocrisy was called out by anonymous online forum participants, whose (as usual) disparaging comments nestled at the bottom of the news reports, complaining that art lovers were yet again shedding crocodile tears over a political crisis, without doing much to counter it.1 Such disputes are often at the core of the reception of contemporary art. Viewed one way, art seems to be playing its time-honoured role of holding up a mirror to society; from another angle, it seems to be preaching to the converted, or, worse, enables a grotesque ritual through which a privileged social class absolve themselves of their guilt. To reflect on the role that contemporary art might play in political life in the twenty-first century, we must inevitably arrive at perspectives beyond art itself: we must question who wields power in contemporary capitalist democracies, who is speaking to whom, whether art should try to change people’s minds or rather deepen their understanding of political issues. In this chapter, I will first consider art within its context of galleries and museums and ask how this world – the artworld – has come to conceive of itself not simply as a space for aesthetic enjoyment, but as a public forum for debating the kind of society we want to live in.

When and How Contemporary Art Became Political

15

W h at I s ( Co n t e m p o r a ry ) Art? The term ‘contemporary art’ is terribly ambiguous. In one sense, the term ‘contemporary’ means simply contemporaneous, and, like the word ‘modern’ (derived from the Latin modo, meaning ‘just now’), has an indexical meaning, pointing to the time of the utterance. Michelangelo’s sculptures were in this sense contemporary in the 1500s, Berthe Morisot’s paintings in the 1800s and Ai Weiwei’s installations in the early 2000s. Within academic art historical scholarship, however, such terms have also become associated with specific art historical periods. The early modern period is often equated with the art made between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries; modern art tends to be dated 1860s–1960s; postmodern art 1960s–1990s; while contemporary art is either seen as co-extensive with postmodern art (1960s onwards) or denotes a later, post-Cold War period (from the 1990s onwards).2 It is surely unfortunate that all these designations are just variations on terms meaning ‘now’. But they have come to help art historians and museum custodians to separate works within collections, often tracing breaks in the materials used in artistic production. The third meaning of the term ‘contemporary art’, however, denotes not merely the period but the type of art produced. If someone asks ‘Do you like contemporary art?’ they do not mean just any watercolour of a sunset that happens to have been painted since the 1960s. Instead, the term is here associated with more experimental, exhibition-based practices, which include painting and sculpture, but importantly also stretch to installation, perform­ance, social practice, textual art, digital art and a host of other genres, organised around concerns ranging from the purely aesthetic to the weightily political.3 This multiplicity of media and genres associated with the visual arts since the 1960s has contributed to the difficulty of defining the term ‘art’ itself. Today, art can be something as physical and massive as Ai Weiwei’s installation Straight (2008–12),

16

artists remake the world

which consists of 90 tonnes of steel (Plate 4); or something as intangible as Stephanie Dinkins’ artificial intelligence computer program, used to simulate her family’s oral history (Not the Only One, 2018, Plate 21). Contemporary art might be a figurative painting that recalls the techniques of the high Renaissance, like Lina Iris Viktor’s canvases adorned with 24-carat gold leaf (Fourth, 2018, Plate 12); or a grassroots social action, like Tania Bruguera’s participatory work Immigrant Movement International (2011–15, Plate 8). This extreme fluidity of medium seems to set art produced for galleries and museums apart from the other arts today. A novel, feature film, television series or hip hop album might also contain a great deal of experimentation, of course, but they remain confined to the comparably robust boundaries of medium and genre. A mainstream filmmaker might make a film about artificial intelligence, but she will not write an AI program and call that her film; a hip hop artist might be deeply socially engaged, but she will not organise a march and proclaim that to be her album. Contemporary artists that we will encounter in this book can, and do, take such liberties. Seemingly at home in all media and none, they adapt their tools freely to the issues they address, curiously capable of incorporating non-artistic disciplines and approaches as they see fit.4 The shape-shifting freedom that we find in exhibition-based art today has a fairly clear historical starting point: as one dating of the term ‘contemporary’ suggests, this is the great explosion of experimentation in the visual arts in the 1950s and 1960s, which included happenings, Pop Art, performance, installation, video art, land art, Conceptual Art and various hard-to-define mixtures of the above. In the ensuing decades, artists previously trained as painters, sculptors and printmakers abandoned their traditional skills in favour of conceptual approaches – the so called ‘deskilling’ process in art schools – and became the open-ended, maverick combiners of disciplines that we know today.5 As the medium-specific craft became less important, so alternative definitions of art began to

When and How Contemporary Art Became Political

17

emerge. For philosopher Arthur Danto, art was defined by the ‘artworld’: art is any object, the meaning of which can be decoded by those critics, curators and historians appropriately inculcated in the history and theory of art.6 Art historian Rosalind Krauss offered the concept of the ‘expanded field’ of art to describe much the same situation. Krauss legitimated the great proliferation of new forms by describing them as genealogically and structurally related to older forms like sculpture or architecture; she saw each new form (like ‘site-construction’) as a move made possible in the logical space opened by previous art forms.7 The philosophical account puzzled over by theorists like Danto and Krauss ultimately points to the ‘institutional’ definition of art: something is art if art historians, curators, artists and other members of art institutions accept it to be such.8 The institutional definition of art of course feels like a sophist’s trick: it tells us that art is what is found in galleries, museums and art history books, but not why we should put these things there. The definition does not answer the deeper desire to know what it is, in the first place, that makes art interesting, that unites this disparate field around something of value to human life. As our starting point, however, an institutional definition will have to suffice. My scope in this book will be art, which is made within the network of museums, galleries, biennial exhibitions, art schools and art press. Our temporal range will largely be restricted to the first decades of the twenty-first century, though in important ways just mentioned, the approaches of artists active in our own period reach back to the 1960s. I will sometimes use the term exhibitionbased art to refer to this production: even though contemporary art often breaks free of the exhibition hall, it still draws on funds and recognition from institutions like galleries and museums. In the final chapter, however, I will return to the question ‘what is art’, and attempt a hopefully more satisfying definition, which does not just grope at art’s scope, but at least raises our sights to its essence.

18

artists remake the world

The Bi rt h o f P o l i t i ci s e d E x h i bi t i o n - Ba s e d A rt If you had been a part of the late 1960s New York art scene and knew where to look for hip new works, you might have wandered down to the opening night of the young art dealer Seth Siegelaub’s exhibition, held 5–31 January 1969 in a disused office space, a few blocks down from the Museum of Modern Art.9 The exhibition itself would be, provocatively, untitled and, more provocatively, contained nothing visually stimulating. There was a hidden transmitter broadcasting an imperceptible radio signal (by Robert Barry); some newspaper adverts, stuck to the wall (by Joseph Kosuth); and a discoloured stain, which had been created by the artist pouring some bleach onto the carpet (by Lawrence Weiner). The most physical piece was a heap of sawdust (by Douglas Huebler), which the gallery receptionist was instructed to photograph at half-hour intervals on the opening night. Without much to look at, you might instead notice some familiar faces: perhaps an artist known for drawing criss-crossed patterns on walls with his pencil (Sol LeWitt), or the sharp-penned critic who a year prior described this newest craze for ‘Conceptual Art’ as comparable in its ‘sparseness and austerity’ to ‘the best of painting and sculpture at the moment’ (Lucy Lippard).10 Perhaps you’d remember the receptionist photographing the sawdust (Adrian Piper); a few months later you might recognise her performing her own piece about internal states of consciousness, blindfolded, at Max’s Kansas City, the artists’ favourite haunt. If you had brought with you that morning’s copy of the New York Times, and opened its arts pages at a quiet moment, you might think that the new year’s wishes printed there had already been fulfilled: ‘may far-out artists drive their critics mad’ wrote one critic, while a patron wished for ‘even greater provocation and controversy in art’.11 This tight-knit artworld was awash with possibilities and ideas: these were the hot young things following in the footsteps of John Cage’s esoteric philosophies and Andy Warhol’s fame, with the memory of how

When and How Contemporary Art Became Political

19

Jackson Pollock made serious money by ‘inventing’ action painting in the previous decade still very much alive. The explosion of artistic experimentation, well underway by the late 1960s, corresponded to the credo of political freedom – Woodstock, hippies, sexual revolution, psychedelics – of that decade. But it was only at the very end of the decade that the experimental New York artworld became explicitly ‘politicised’, as is evident from testimonies by figures like Lippard and Piper.12 Events like the assassination of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King (April 1968), the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War (November 1969) and the Kent State shootings of students protesting the war (May 1970) provoked many young people into an open rebellion against the establishment, creating a generation who began to perceive their capitalist homeland not as the bulwark of freedom, but as an imperialist aggressor. By 1969­–70, many New York artists had joined trade unions like the newly established Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC),13 and joined regular protests against the war. Yet the work that these artists were making did not immediately reflect this change. So, in 1970, when Siegelaub’s protégés received the greatest accolade of the New York artworld, a full show at the Museum of Modern Art, the curator Kynaston McShine filled the catalogue pages with pictures of protests and of the war, asking ‘What can you as a young artist do that seems relevant and meaningful?’14 But the exhibition itself contained almost no reference to current events by New York artists (foreign artists, who had politicised somewhat earlier, such as the Brazilian Cildo Meireles or German Hans Haacke, made more explicitly political works). Joseph Kosuth, Lucy Lippard and Carl Andre – all active AWC members – submitted, respectively, a meditation on linguistic reference, a riddling text about absence, and concrete poetry. Hilton Kramer, a conservative art critic, mocked: ‘The “relevant and meaningful” thing to do in the face of this grave political crisis is, apparently, [… to] go to town with the Xerox machine, collect a lot of pointless photographic junk, listen to a poem on the telephone, or simply go to sleep.’15

20

artists remake the world

I narrate these events in some detail because, while the beginnings of politicised, post-conceptual art in 1960s–1970s New York City have been much written about, the sheer paradox of that birth is often underappreciated. On the one hand, we have an artworld in many respects brilliant, but revelling in pleasures utterly abstruse and self-absorbed. As American art critic Susan Sontag wrote in 1965: ‘The most interesting and creative art of our time is not open to the generally educated; it demands special effort; it speaks a specialized language.’16 On the other hand, there are the mass political movements – anti-war, civil rights and feminist – that led a generation to reject the chief tenets of their society. Both the artistic and political identities were strongly felt by artworld participants of the time, but the obvious tension between them could not be easily negotiated, and so, for many, the two simply became equated. Visual artists, of course, had been socially engaged many times before – we may think of William Hogarth’s moralistic prints condemning marriage for money or the drinking of gin (1730s–1740s); of Eugène Delacroix’s idealisation of the July Revolution in Liberty Leading the People (1830); of Käthe Kollwitz’s etchings of labourers’ plight (1890s–1930s); of Pablo Picasso’s condemnation of war atrocities in Guernica (1937) – but these are all figurative works, instantly comprehensible in their denunciation of evils or glorification of the good. In the New York of the late 1960s, we have a confluence of two entirely different principles: art at its most intellectually difficult becomes the expression of a mass, anti-establishment political sensibility. No wonder aesthetic conservatives like Kramer had enjoyed themselves so much at this new art’s expense. The consequences of this paradoxical equation, of this squaring of a circle, have been long-lasting and, crucially, define the art of our own time. How art is now written about by both historians and critics is perhaps the clearest indication of this influence. Take the work of Sol LeWitt, who in the 1960s became famous for his conceptual wall drawings, whereby he specified a simple design (such as ‘vertical lines not touching’), and then had it executed onto the walls

When and How Contemporary Art Became Political

21

of patrons’ houses or in galleries. In his long career, LeWitt created increasingly elaborate patterns, compared his process to the formal complexity of Bach’s music,17 and made no connection between his art and his politics. Even though this work lacks any explicitly political subject matter, however, one art historian, writing in the early 2000s, finds LeWitt’s work to contain a subversion of capitalism because the artist ‘reappropriates a mode of operation from the world of industrial capital and distorts it, defamiliarizes it, and puts it to a different use’.18 For another commentator, LeWitt’s wall drawings represented an anti-establishment spirit because the wall ‘is open to anyone with a can of spray paint, far more democratic than a canvas’;19 for a third, LeWitt champions ‘equality, accessibility, open exchange and public space’;20 for a fourth, the ‘radical contingency and oppositionality of LeWitt’s practice […] points to an alternative model of democracy’.21 LeWitt’s art of creating gentle, imaginative abstract patterns suddenly becomes, in some strange way, a call for a revolution. In the decades following the conflation of experimental art and political engagement, the main task for art historians and critics pouring out of graduate schools would be to keep squaring the circle: to preserve the formalist sophistication of art while contortedly alluding to a radical, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment political stance. As the American critic Hal Foster once suggested, the writing of his generation preserved the ‘difficulty and distinction’ of high modernist art while the ‘radical rhetoric compensated a little for lost activism’.22 Today we find such wishful thinking perpetuated in what we might call ‘wall label politics’: when an artist’s practice makes no political reading available to the observer, but where a curatorial text or an artist’s statement, attached to the work, alludes to politics.23 Into the 1970s and beyond, however, artistic practice did change, and increasingly came to incorporate overt political messaging. This new work utilised the expanded toolkit developed in the 1960s – conceptual art, performance, participatory art, installation, institutional critique, land art and so forth – but explicitly thematised power structures, gender and racial inequality, consumerism, Cold War conflicts,

22

artists remake the world

corporate greed and other social topics. Artists like Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, Rasheed Araeen, Hans Haacke, Suzanne Lacy, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Félix González-Torres, Harun Farocki and Lorna Simpson, to name a few, formed the new canon of this brand of critical postmodernism, and, as can be seen from this list, women artists and artists of colour often led the way. By the time we arrive in the new millennium, this next phase of work, formally experimental and politically explicit, was beginning to be recognised as one legitimate language of critical art, and it set the scene for the twenty-first-century departures that will preoccupy us in the following chapters. Importantly, practices from the late 1960s to the 1990s pioneered the interdisciplinary modes of contemporary art, whereby artists would no longer be constrained by any one medium, but freely borrowed from other fields of discourse: be it Joseph Beuys mixing art with philosophy and sociology, Jasia Reichardt curating an entire exhibition on art and the emerging field of cybernetics, John Latham and Barbara Steveni sending artists on placements within industry, or Suzanne Lacy incorporating social action into her performances.24 Despite art’s openness to political message and life outside the gallery, however, the contradictory spirit that attended the birth of contemporary art was never fully banished, and must be kept in mind as we proceed. Even as we stand by the pond showing Ai Weiwei’s work in 2016, we can hear it hovering above the water surface, murmuring its objections. Who is this art for? What can it achieve? What links artistic experimentation and political engagement?

Th e A rt wo r l d a s a P u bl i c Fo ru m Contemporary exhibition-based art, as we noted above, is defined by the artworld: the people who decide what is in and what is out. Up until the 1960s, visual art consisted largely of irreplaceable, one-off creations like paintings and sculptures, and the artworld

When and How Contemporary Art Became Political

23

that surrounded them was thus in large part made up of collectors, patrons, auction houses and commercial galleries. Critical analyses of the artworld therefore often centred on art’s domicile in this world of private luxury. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard, writing in the 1970s, memorably analysed contemporary artworks as fetishised commodities for the wealthy, whose sole purpose is that the mega-rich can demonstrate their status to each other by spending money on, essentially, worthless objects. In this damning analysis, the ugliness and banality of much contemporary art is in fact an advantage: the more uninteresting the object in itself, the more delicious is the glory that surrounds the purchaser at the time of spending a vast sum. All that really matters is the provenance, the name (the brand) of the artist in question.25 Baudrillard’s analysis, unkind as it is, strikes me as still largely correct insofar as we seek to explain the aesthetic and intellectual nullity of contemporary art associated with vast wealth. Thus, a dead calf in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst has sold for about £10 million, while his ashtrays overflowing with real cigarette butts (in an edition of 1,500) sell for a few thousand apiece. There clearly is nothing especially valuable about an ashtray, other than the fetishised value associated with possessing ‘a Hirst’. Indeed, the only part where Baudrillard is mistaken is that these objects might not even be that expensive for their buyers: to a billionaire who can easily afford to spend $80 million a year, a $10 million artwork is proportionally about as valuable as a $250 framed print from a department store is to a middle-class person with an annual luxury budget of $2,000. So, these things are part fetish objects, part oligarch’s knick-knacks. Slowly but steadily since the 1960s, however, an alternative artworld has developed, in which art’s status is no longer solely that of a commodity but rather that of an inquiry. Populated by curators, artists, critics and academics, rather than collectors and dealers, this relatively new artworld is supported within the ecosystem of public museums, large-scale biennial exhibitions and academia; and while its separation from the commercial artworld has not been a clean

24

artists remake the world

cut, the significance of its rise is considerable. Crucially, the 1990s and 2000s saw an accelerated spread of large-scale exhibitions across the globe; these have often been referred to as ‘biennials’ because they are mostly scheduled to happen every two years. There are now more than 200 such biennials across the world, including in Gwangju, Istanbul, Jakarta, Liverpool, Havana, São Paulo, Chennai and many other cities.26 While the original and still most famous biennial is the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, where painting and sculpture have been traditionally exhibited in national pavilions, the new generation of large-scale exhibitions has been more closely modelled on documenta, held in the German city of Kassel every five years, which since Harald Szeemann’s influential edition of 1972 has existed as a forum for discussing social issues of the day.27 Into the 1990s, within a post-Cold War global landscape, similar exhibitions were being created all over the world, intending to provide stimulating experiences for both the local population and international visitors. The biennial curators began to increasingly sponsor artworks that were no longer one-off luxury items to be bought and sold, but rather artistic projects: impermanent installations, durational and participatory works. Some of these were purely visual spectacles, but due to the public-facing nature of these exhibitions, biennials have often fostered works that inquired into social issues. This can be clearly evidenced by some of the recent biennial themes: the 2012 Berlin Biennale, entitled Forget Fear, explored themes of social participation, especially as a response to the Occupy movement; the Jogja Biennale in Yogyakarta, 2015, entitled Hacking Conflict, featured artistic practices that explored ‘speculations and conflicts surrounding the desire for democracy, autonomy and power’; while the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York promised ‘a profound consideration of race, gender, and equity; and explorations of the vulnerability of the body’.28 In recent decades, public galleries and museums have also increasingly conformed to the expectation that art should inquire into social and political issues. In the marketing copy of British public

When and How Contemporary Art Became Political

25

galleries, for instance, we can readily find descriptions like: ‘animations and portraits that explore the increasingly profound influence [technological giants] have on our lives in the age of “Big Data”’;29 ‘the contesting of traditionally predominant narratives by previously marginalised voices’;30 or references to objects whose ‘scars can hint at the violence of the object’s separation from its homeland – a separation that parallels experiences of migration and diaspora’.31 There are no comprehensive empirical studies of the thematic trends in contemporary art institutions, but some such formula for describing art seems to have become de rigueur by at least the 2000s: a verb that denotes an inquiry (such as ‘explores’, ‘investigates’, ‘conveys’ …) coupled with a recognisably sociopolitical theme (‘identity’, ‘capitalism’, ‘privilege’ …). All this suggests a significant art historical development. From the late 1960s to the early twenty-first century there emerges a new artworld, which we might describe as the artworld of the public forum: a place where diverse audiences should come together to look at art and, through that experience, reflect on, or even debate, issues facing them as a society. That is not to say, of course, that the old, commercial artworld despaired over by Baudrillard has disappeared. Commercial art fairs, auction houses, private collectors all continue to participate in their bonfire of vanities, and that strange activity continues to intersect with the artworld of the public forum.32 This odd overlap is especially keenly felt in the United States, where wealthy collectors and corporate representatives are more likely to exercise influence (and sit on the boards of ) public-facing museums.33 Yet, while the two artworlds coincide, they cannot be said to be one and the same. In earlier eras, most artworks simply could not be separated from their status as luxuries: that was the unfortunate ontological predicament of painting and sculpture. Politically committed painters from Gustave Courbet to Pablo Picasso had to contend with the fact that ultimately their creations were one-off marvels accessible to the wealthy few. Today, serious, politically engaged artists have more options. Some, like Ai Weiwei, might indeed support themselves

26

artists remake the world

through the creation of luxury commodities – Ai’s studio produces vases, prints and sculptures, ranging from a few thousand to a few million dollars in price – but these artists’ most widely discussed pieces tend to be impermanent, participatory works, or public installations (like the one at Belvedere). Indeed, we might say that an artist like Ai Weiwei supports himself through saleable merchandise, and then uses it to make art for public discourse. More often, however, political artists today do not sell at all, but exist as ‘conceptual entrepreneurs’ – to use artist Martine Syms’s phrase – whereby they make their livelihood from academic posts, public commissions, research grants and other revenue streams created around the ideas they wish to explore.34 An art viewer interested in being intellectually challenged can today for the most part ignore the items for sale at the Frieze art fair or in Sotheby’s auction house, and focus on what is shown in public exhibitions, just as anybody interested in the intellectual content of novels, films or music can largely ignore the market for signed first editions, film merchandise or diamond-encrusted collectors’ vinyl plates. With the rise of the artworld as a public forum, visual art has therefore, at least in part, dispelled the curse of the fetishised object, which for so long was the unusual predicament it had to put up with among the arts. The challenges for the public forum faced by contemporary art are therefore elsewhere, and more similar to other spaces where people come together to exchange ideas. Like newspapers, television, the internet and academia, the public forum of art is also shot through with various economic interests, ideological agendas and structural inequities, which determine what and who is heard. These agendas might indeed be commercial (private galleries pushing their artists, or corporations sitting on museum boards), but they just as easily grow out of informal networks (curators showing artists they went to school with). Barriers to access might mirror broader social disadvantage (of ethnicity, race, gender, geographical margins and socioeconomic background), though patterns of opportunity can be rearranged to serve public agendas (arts-funding

When and How Contemporary Art Became Political

27

bodies can prioritise values of inclusivity and diversity). While it is sometimes presupposed that the public forum of exhibitions and museums is primarily accessed by economic elites, this is also not entirely correct. Recent analyses of social class in the United Kingdom, for instance, indeed find strong correspondence between economic prosperity and engagement with ‘highbrow’ culture; but on the other hand, the social classes that are counted as belonging to this relatively economically well-off segment make up more than 50 per cent of the population.35 The most engaged audiences of art exhibitions tend to consist of economically well-situated, educated, urban or commuter parts of society, but as many as 20 per cent of the UK population had visited an exhibition of some kind in the past year. Visual art audiences also tend to be younger than audiences for the other arts, and tend to mirror the ethnic composition of the country better.36 So, while the new artworld is by no means fully representative of society, its audience also does not simply correspond to the old preconception of a tiny bourgeois elite. If the artworld is a public forum, it is not a perfectly balanced idealisation of the Greek agora, but rather reflects modern democracies’ socially, economically and culturally fragmented nature. The rise of the artworld as a public forum is also not limited to the wealthy nations of the Global North, as the spread of the biennial system demonstrates. The global biennial system since the 1990s has led to greater platforms for artists from South America, Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. In a highly Anglophone-centric place like the United Kingdom or United States, it seems easier today to come across a voice from, say, Indonesia, Poland or Argentina in a public gallery than in the commercial cinema or on Netflix.37 Nevertheless, the spirit of free expression presupposed by the public forum does not carry everywhere equally. Artists exhibiting in capitalist democracies are not hindered by the obstructions faced within artworlds in autocracies like Russia or China. Thus, the global-facing Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, founded by the oligarch Dasha Zhukova, might present a thought-provoking show about

28

artists remake the world

climate change (The Coming World, 2019), but no artist in Russia can be critical of Putin’s authoritarian regime without suffering severe consequences. While I will present an international rostrum of artists in the pages below, my focus will be on artworlds within capitalist democracies; the forms of expression under the conditions of authoritarianism are too different to examine fully here. With these qualifications in place, if we look at the contemporary global artworld today, we more or less find a world in which the dreams of those earlier avant-gardes, of the politicised artists of the 1960s, appear to have been fulfilled. Indeed, never before have exhibition-based artists had access to such a broad range of exhibition spaces, all of which are asking them to be critical of the society they live in. Even an art gallery as disposed towards unadulterated pleasure as the Belvedere palace now presents social critique on its doorstep. True, this world might still be primarily accessed by the economic middle class, but it is doing its best to expand, to include a variety of voices, and to respond to global events with urgency. If art has at long last shaken off the golden yoke of the auction house and transformed itself into a space for democratic debate, however, then this transformation begets its own questions. While it is easy to demonstrate the relevance of politics to art, it is harder to show the relevance of art to politics. After all, we already have a variety of ways to debate the issues that face us: journalism, activism, university campuses, party politics, social media. The question ‘What does art offer politics?’ must today be asked, therefore, not simply by analysing the artist’s intention, their reception within the artworld or their relationship to art institutions or art historical precedents. The question implies the need to conduct a test of comparison. We should compare art to other public fora, to other modes of contributing to political life that are available within capitalist democracy. Can art offer anything that other types of discourse or action cannot? What does the installation of refugee jackets outside the Belvedere do for politics that other forms of political activity do not already accomplish?

Chapter two

Realism for Our Time On Art and Truth

T h e M o s t I m p o rta nt A rt wo rk W a s E vi d e nce

T

he documenta exhibition, which takes place in the German city of Kassel every five years, is a monumental event. Sprawling over several venues, it takes at least two or three days to see the entirety of it, and with its reputation for politically inflected and serious work, it requires close attention from its visitors. The 2017 edition was no different. The head curator Adam Szymczyk sought out art that spoke to the political turmoil of those years – including the European refugee crisis and the austerity measures in Greece – and many artworks on display were text-heavy and interpretationally demanding pieces. ‘The degree to which [art] works can be measured by the kind of debate it produces, which doesn’t require a blunt political statement,’ Szymczyk said in an interview. ‘The object can be enigmatic.’1 Towards the end of my first day there, somewhat worn out by five hours of viewing enigmatic pieces, I happened upon the video installation 77sqm_9:26min (2017) by the London-based collective Forensic Architecture. It was tucked away in a brutalist building that formerly housed Kassel’s post office, a little walk away from the main venues. At first, I saw no reason why there should be such a bubble of interest around this

30

artists remake the world

work specifically. Presented as a three-channel video installation facing a concrete bench, the work had the same austere look as many others here, with information swishing across the screen and a long curatorial text pinned to the wall. And yet, the torpor of the all-day viewing seemed to lift; all the headphones were taken up by unusually animated visitors, and I had to wait some time for my turn to view the piece (Plate 2). The video showed an investigation into the murder of Halit Yozgat, a young German man of Turkish heritage. Yozgat’s killing in 2006 was one in a series of ten racist murders in Germany, conducted by an underground neo-Nazi terrorist group. The motivation for the murders came to light only in 2011 (six years before the documenta exhibition), as did the failure of the police forces to properly connect and investigate them. These events shook Germany; at the time of the exhibition, multiple parliamentary investigations and a trial of the remaining neo-Nazi associates were ongoing. Created in collaboration with a civil rights initiative, the Society of Friends of Halit, the video by Forensic Architecture was a kind of civic counter-investigation.2 It questioned one particular part of the official account, a testimony by a German secret service agent, Andreas Temme, who was present at the time of Yozgat’s murder, in the cybercafé where the young man was working. Across the three video channels, we see a careful reconstruction of the time and place of the murder: the crucial 9:26 minutes and 77 square metres, referenced in the title. We see 3D modelling of the smoke (seen in Plate 2) and sound of the fired gun, the precise movements of customers, a reconstruction of the possible angles at which the victim’s body might have fallen. We see computer-animated reconstructions, live actor re-enactments, diagrams. The calm male voiceover of the video narrates all the meticulous examinations conducted to test whether Temme would have noticed the murder from the cybercafé booth he was in. The conclusion is clear: the secret agent must have been present during the murder and a witness to it. Something in the official story was not right.

Realism for Our Time

31

Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1967, with a glance towards totalitarian regimes: ‘Only where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle […] can truthfulness as such, unsupported by the distorting forces of power and interest, become a political factor of the first order.’3 In democracies too, we might add, public pursuit of facts becomes politically important whenever trust in institutions like the courts, police, media and legislature declines. The detective work by Forensic Architecture at documenta did not impress merely in its German context, where the crit­ ical public had long been outraged by the failures of the state in preventing the neo-Nazi cell’s murders. The work also impressed because, in the late 2010s, truthfulness was under a renewed threat in democracies worldwide. By the time of the Kassel exhibition in 2017, terms like ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ had risen to prominence, especially in reference to the disinformation utilised in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the United States (2016), as well as in relation to social media disinformation more broadly (as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 5). Against this backdrop, the sheer precision with which these artist-researchers weighed evidence seemed to reaffirm the importance of truthfulness in politics. ‘The most important piece is not an artwork,’ wrote one reviewer, Hili Perlson, in reference to documenta 14, ‘it’s evidence.’4 In the years that followed, the work of Forensic Architecture received recognition from many important art institutions and was nominated for the UK’s Turner Prize for visual arts. While the group self-describe as an interdisciplinary research agency rather than an art collective, their success in the artworld seemed to announce a departure from the enigmatic objects of contemporary art; instead, these works presented rational inquiry itself as an engrossing event. Such was the enthusiasm that I, too, felt for this work at documenta 14. And yet, the very success of Forensic Architecture in an art context may also fill us with a certain crawling unease. Here, the path towards truth is charted in a manner that is empirical,

32

artists remake the world

impersonal, even clinical, and so we might wonder whether those more familiar artistic tropes – multi-layered meanings, ambiguity, metaphor – have not, perhaps, become obsolete. To play the role of truth-seekers in democratic politics, should all artists present carefully weighed evidence? And if so, should artists evolve away from the making of art altogether? In this chapter, I will consider the relationship between art and truth, at a time when the truth-based discourse in democracy has come under renewed pressure. As we shall see, the turn towards objectivity in art during the 2010s broke with the previously dominant tradition of critical postmodernism. With the rise of objectivity, however, artists face a new problem of art’s assimilation to non-art modes of inquiry: art becomes indistinguishable from modes such as journalism or academic research. Can we make room within this new realism for more recognisably artistic forms, for inconclusiveness, subjectivity or poetics?

Th e R e t u r n o f R e a l is m In French painting of the nineteenth century, realism became defined as the search not only for painterly verisimilitude but also for truth of a social kind. Proponents of realism like Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet wanted to show, without sentimentality or adornment, those scenes which the bourgeois artistic salon had hitherto avoided, especially urban and rural poverty.5 The realist impulse, then, is not only an impulse to show reality without affectation, but also to uncover those realities that are occluded by the political order. Into the twentieth century, the realist spirit was carried on by documentary photography and film. In the politicised artworld of our recent history, however, the realist tradition was briefly but importantly interrupted. From the 1970s to the 1990s, that period of experimentation in political art that prefigures our own, politically engaged artists understood realism to be a rather

Realism for Our Time

33

naive school of thought, and were more concerned with unmasking the power structures that underlie our systems of representation. ‘Critical postmodernism’ is one label that has been affixed to this tradition.6 The photographic series The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75) by American artist Martha Rosler is a good example (Plate 3). In the series Rosler depicted the Bowery, a street in New York notorious for its destitution and homelessness, but which by the 1970s had become almost a clichéd destination for photojournalists who wanted to document the inequalities of American society. Rosler is highly critical of the tradition of humanist, naively realist photography: ‘Documentary, as we know it, carries (old) information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful.’7 Photographs of privation, of war zones, of humanitarian disasters tug at the heartstrings of the viewers, but these uncomfortable truths had long been defanged by the general spectacle of mass media. Instead of participating in what she saw as such failure of representation, Rosler’s The Bowery set out to be ‘a work of refusal’.8 Omitting people, Rosler photographed bottles and other detritus of alcohol abuse, and then juxtaposed these pictures with text panels containing synonyms for the word ‘drunk’ (‘soused’, ‘sloshed’ and so forth). As the photographs invite the viewer in, the text seems to push us out, and we are supposed to become aware of how our grasp on reality is structured around clichés. For Rosler, the dominant uses of images and text in mass media perpetuate the ‘cultural myth of objectivity (transparency, unmediatedness)’;9 the job of the artist is to reveal the ideological structure of that false vision. Rosler’s critique of the documentary is one of the many ways in which artists of critical postmodernism, in the 1970s and 80s, were demonstrating the limits of representational systems.10 Artists were taking photographs of photographs (Sherrie Levine), parodying the clichés of the film camera (Cindy Sherman), appropriating the language of advertising (Barbara Kruger), riffing on art

34

artists remake the world

historical quotation (Jeff Wall), clashing text with image (Lorna Simpson); and these examples are limited to New York, then still very much the central stage of contemporary art discourse. This distrust of representation unfolded against the background of a broader sceptical philosophy, which was first articulated by French post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva or Jean Baudrillard, then permeated humanities departments in much of the Anglophone world (where it became known as ‘theory’), and eventually became a kind of unconscious background to advanced art-making in most art schools. While these intellectual agendas of post-structuralism were diverse, one strand that arguably united them into a tradition was precisely the way in which post-structuralist authors held empirical or objective descriptions of the world in suspicion. The alleged transparency of documentary photography, the empiricism of natural sciences, the careful organisation of museum collections: all forms of organising knowledge, which presupposed that we can impartially capture some independently existing reality, could be accused of perpetuating old power relations, and had to be subverted through oblique means – deconstruction, irony, subversion. The critically postmodern project in visual arts, to put it in its most general form, was less about stating what is wrong with the world, and more about complexly wriggling one’s way out of a corrupt system of signs. Never represent social ills; always question the system that represents them. Works like those of Forensic Architecture that have gained prominence during the 2010s, however, represent a certain clear break from such postmodernism. The art-makers here do not question empirical methods, but rather apply them completely unironically and with meticulous precision. This turn towards objectivity can, in fact, be observed in many artistic practices in recent decades. One popular approach has included artists appropriating commercial and military technologies to produce images, such as drone-produced images, Google StreetView, machine-legible images and other such

Realism for Our Time

35

‘operational’ images of contemporary computerised capitalism.11 For example, American artist Andrew Norman Wilson’s series ScanOps (2012) centres on a selection of scans taken from the massive Google Books project, an ongoing attempt by the tech giant to digitise all books from public libraries. Wilson scoured the Google database for ‘failed’ scans, in which the hands of Google’s workers were accidentally shown. These glimpses of hidden, lower-paid labour show that most hands have darker skin; in Wilson’s works, the scanned pages become evidence of the tech giants’ reliance on existing racial hierarchies in the Californian labour economy.12 Presentation of data is another objective method artists use. Spanish artist Joana Moll’s wall installation Inanimate Species (2022), for instance, consists of 19,125 pinned images, each about the size of a stamp. At first, each stamp seems to show a speck of shiny, green and yellow material, but as we approach, we can see that some of these images show insects, and that others show microchips. As you move along the installation and look closely, you begin to discern how images of insects are slowly being displaced by microchips: the technological world pushes out the natural one. This is no artist’s invention, though, as the two sets of images correspond to real data on insects and microchips since 1971.13 Artists’ use of empirical methods might also include archival work – not for subverting the archival gaze as a postmodernist might have done, but to find evidence. American artist Sadie Barnette’s series of works, My Father’s FBI File (2017–), is based on more than 500 pages of files that Bernadette obtained through freedom of information requests from FBI, and which document the surveillance of Barnette’s father in the 1960s and 1970s, while he was a member of the Black Panther party in Los Angeles. In one version of the installation, shown in an exhibition called Evidentiary Realism, the artist hung these documents on the gallery walls and only slightly modified them, decorating them with globules of pink paint and stickers. These cutesy decorations look like little fireworks of joy, emitted as the documents are saved from their bureaucratic obscurity into a public display.14

36

artists remake the world

Archives, data, documents, forensics: artists are here cast in the role of investigators, embracing empirical methods which would have been quite foreign to their postmodern predecessors. That is not to say that these new realists are entirely accepting of the dominant systems of knowledge: they are often performing counterinvestigations, to use a Forensic Architecture phrase,15 uncovering information occluded by mainstream institutions. While suspicious of power’s grasp on knowledge, they do not, however, doubt the tried and tested methods by which knowledge itself is produced. While such interdisciplinary work has a longer history within the artworld,16 one motivator for the recent turn to empirical methods and objectivity, specifically, might be identified with a political shift on the Left in the early 2000s, the time of American- and Britishled wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when opposition to these wars often took the form of unmasking the deceptions of the invading governments. The unsubstantiated claims that Iraq had held weapons of mass destruction (the main excuse for the 2003 invasion) and the leaked information of human rights abuses by Western forces (such as the Abu Ghraib photographs of 2004) were some examples of what became seen as the Western allies’ lies and double standards. A generation of influential artists returned to documentary idioms, and in their installations and videos practised art as a kind of exposé: of hidden military technologies, of Guantanamo Bay, of wartime abuses of various kinds (the work of Coco Fusco, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Alfredo Jaar and Martha Rosler herself is representative here).17 By the later 2010s, as mentioned, concerns around ‘post-truth’ politics galvanised by social media and new populist demagogues gave these objective approaches a renewed urgency. By 2019, artist and curator Paolo Cirio went as far as to say that postmodernist approaches and post-structuralist philosophies, so long influential in the artworld, have completely lost their legitimacy; instead, Cirio calls for artists to make use of satellite imagery, data mining, artificial intelligence analysis and other empirical methods, proposing the label of ‘evidentiary realism’ for this new departure.18

Realism for Our Time

37

The turning of contemporary art towards objectivity can also be found beyond the hard core of these evidence-driven practices, among some of the most well-known, politically engaged artists of the mainstream artworld. Take, for instance, Ai Weiwei’s installation Straight (2008–12), which could be seen in London at the Royal Academy during the artist’s 2015 retrospective (Plate 4). The work commemorates the horrendous Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which killed some 85,000 people, including 5,000 schoolchildren. The installation consists of 150 rods of rebar, which were supposed to reinforce school buildings, but which failed during the earthquake. Each rod had been straightened by hand by members of Ai’s team, and here they are laid atop each other, in a manner that visually recalls fault lines in the Earth. The work is consistent with Ai’s status as a speaker of unpleasant truths – a tendency in his work we already encountered in the last chapter, in the installation F. Lotus (2016) – and Straight is, like many of his works, critical of state authorities. Indeed, Ai played a proactive role in assembling the facts that led to this work. In the wake of the earthquake, the Chinese Communist Party sought to conceal the corruption in the construction industry which contributed to the high death toll; Ai’s team, at a considerable risk to the artist, conducted research into the event on the ground, obviating official channels.19 In the installation itself, the artist’s investigation is precisioned into a visual testament: the bars themselves are evidence of what had happened, while the easy visual metaphor of the fault lines in the Earth points to the disaster. What makes the work so emotionally impactful, it seems, is how straightforwardly it confronts the viewer with a fact. While a work like Ai’s does not stage the evidence-gathering in the way that the Forensic Architecture video does, it nevertheless likewise testifies to the waning of postmodernism as the main framework for understanding the relationship between contemporary art and truth. The artist is not so much positioned as a critic of a system of representation, but as a researcher and an impartial deliverer of clearly presented facts. Be it corruption in China, the

38

artists remake the world

failings of the police in Germany, the hiring practices at Google, the perishing of insect species or the historic surveillance by the FBI, artists today conduct inquiries into highly specific subjects, comparable in their rigour to the work undertaken by academics or investigative journalists. Like most realists before them, today’s investigative artists have little time for aesthetic fancy or fantasy: an equanimous, clear and penetrating approach seems to be called for instead.

Th e P ro b l e m o f A rt i s t i c A s sim il atio n Art’s shift towards objectivity undoubtedly gives artists a renewed sense of purpose within the public sphere. Yet I have also mentioned a sense of anxiety that works like those of Forensic Architecture may occasion: a feeling that these works displace more ‘artistic’ approaches within the art gallery space. Now we are in a position to articulate this anxiety more constructively. We might name the problem that gives rise to the anxiety ‘the problem of artistic assimilation’.20 The problem arises when an artistic practice borrows so many aspects from a non-art field that the artworks become indistinguishable from an achievement in that target field. Works of evidentiary realism borrow their method­ ologies from disciplines like investigative journalism, forensics or academic research, and so we might begin to evaluate them with standards of achievement familiar from those fields. Is what we have learnt from these works correct? How do these findings compare to what other investigators and experts have to say? The assimilation of art to such investigative practices, however, begins to suggest a tacit acceptance of the superiority of these objective modes of discourse over traditionally artistic ones. If the best way of articulating uncomfortable truths is through such objective and accessible means – the gathering of evidence, succinct presentation, the testing of hypotheses and so forth – then, we might think, this is not only

Realism for Our Time

39

a reason to be excited about newly realist artworks, but a reason to ultimately assimilate art to investigative journalism, academic research and other modes of objective discourse. As an analogy, consider that both a car and a horse-drawn carriage get you from A to B, but the car is simply a superior technology; and so carriages soon become phased out. The lesson of art’s turn to objectivity may be that, at long last, artworld participants have realised that their activities belong to an obsolete cultural techn­ē, an old way of conveying social facts, for the purpose of which much better forms of discourse exist already. Instead of merely celebrating a group like Forensic Architecture within the artworld, we should encourage a gradual transformation of the arts into interdisciplinary investigative journalism or academia proper, and reshape our biennials and art institutions to become public-facing forums, where such work is disseminated and debated. Of course, as noted above, not all investigative artworks today exhibit a complete assimilation to objective modes of discourse. As we saw with the example of Ai Weiwei, there is still much that is recognisably artistic there: there is the sculpture of steel bars, impressively arranged to resemble a symbolically significant form of broken earth. And yet the cognitive value of the artwork – its value insofar as its truth-telling function is concerned – seems to inhere in its objective features. We come to understand something about the Sichuan earthquake not because the sculpture is beautifully arranged, but because the steel bars are evidence, because Ai’s team undertook research on the ground and because the text panel is informative. The more poetic features are, we might worry, the packaging: the ornamental additions to the horse-drawn carriage, still outpaced by the car. My suggestion here is, of course, a provocation, but one that might help us illustrate that the recent evolution of political art towards objectivity comprises more than just a return to artistic realism. It leads us to a serious new problem for art’s identity: what exactly is it, if anything, that distinguishes art from journalism and empirical research?

40

artists remake the world

An interesting suggestion comes from Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller who, in setting out the philosophy of Forensic Architecture, propose an approach they call ‘investigative aesthetics’. As they point out, the term ‘aiesthesis’ became associated with art only in the eighteenth century, but before then had a broader meaning in the original Greek, denoting both ‘sensing’ (perceiving) and ‘sense-making’ (interpreting). Therefore, they claim, the task shared between art and the sciences has always been that of heightening our senses. The Forensic Architecture approach, they insist, is not that of positivist, objectivist gathering of data, but what they call ‘hyper-aestheticization’, or the adding up of various senses and perceptions, even those of non-human participants, such as instruments. Just as a Cubist painting incorporates all perspectives at once, so Forensic Architecture combine perspectives of instruments, researchers, designers, lawyers and many others.21 Unfortunately, however, Weizman and Fuller’s clever re-definition of ‘aesthetics’ does not solve the problem. If we define ‘aesthetics’ (or any other word) so broadly that it includes all recording, perceiving and interpreting, then almost any mental interaction with the world will be ‘aesthetic’. And to say that their work departs from positivism because it includes a variety of perspectives (even the non-human perspectives of instruments) is really just a fancy way of saying that instruments are used by researchers who create the reports, and that these researchers have various disciplinary backgrounds. Ultimately, the work of Forensic Architecture is highly consistent with objective and positivist methods, because these projects seek to put forward coherent, rationally argued, evidence-driven, clear narratives of events as they happened. Their works ought to be judged, therefore, by the same rigorous standards for gathering evidence as applied to investigative journalism.22 The question of whether art should resist assimilation to purely empirical methods is, then, not an easy one to solve. To begin tackling it, we must look harder at what we might mean by ‘objectivity’ or ‘artistry’, and look to artists whose work lies beyond the neat binary of these terms.

Realism for Our Time

41

P o e t i cs a n d O b j e ct i v it y The of 72 Project (2012) by Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson consists of seventy-three images, each of which contains a blackand-white portrait photograph of a man. The men’s faces have been cut out from their background, and collaged into an arrangement of fabrics, floral wrapping paper fragments and rhinestones, laid atop a paisley-patterned bandana (Plate 5). The photographs have been sourced from online criminal databases; they are all men who have at some point found themselves in conflict with the law, but the artist has restored their anonymity by covering half their faces with a bandana-like piece of fabric. While the materials with which they are adorned suggest a certain naïveté – they might have emerged from a schoolgirl’s haberdashery drawer – their arrangement alludes to a religious icon or a prayer card, each man’s head enveloped in a halo-like circle.23 Patterson’s of 72 Project, like the other works we have considered so far, is an investigation into a politically charged, violent event, which shook her society. In 2010 an armed conflict took place in the Tivoli Gardens neighbourhood in Kingston, Jamaica. The drug lord Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, having fallen out with his political sponsors, was about to be extradited to the United States, but had barricaded himself within Tivoli Gardens, protected by hundreds of gunmen. The government deployed more than 1,000 police and military personnel in the ensuing confrontation. Two police stations were burnt down, mortars were fired into the community, more than 4,000 men were unlawfully detained and at least 70 civilians were reported killed.24 As the news was unfolding on Jamaican television at the time, Patterson was shocked not only by the violence, but also by how the news reports described the seventy-two (or later seventy-three) victims as just gunmen fighting for Coke, rather than Jamaican citizens with a right to due process of law. In making the work, Patterson felt that these victims of violence (who, according to some sources at the time, included at least one woman) deserved

42

artists remake the world

more than the anonymity of the news report. ‘They were deserving’, as she put it to me in an interview, ‘of dignity.’25 Patterson’s work is continuous with the recent realist tendency of inquiring into specific, politically painful events, and yet it also clearly departs from objective genres of representation. A Forensic Architecture-style investigation, we might imagine, would have resulted in a minute-by-minute understanding of the events. We would perhaps get more clarity on how the government overstepped the law in killing these citizens, or learn of the social factors contributing to the violence. Patterson’s work seeks to overcome a different obstacle to our way of thinking: not the lack of information, but what we might call the ‘essentialisation’ of these individuals, the tendency of reducing people to types. The human tendency to ‘reduce a complex singularity of the other’s properties to an oversimplified but conceptually manageable subset’26 is, as philosopher Adrian Piper puts it, a virtually inescapable part of the human psyche; yet this is something that art can try to push against. Patterson invests the viewer in her subjects’ singularity, while seeking to guard against false presuppositions of familiarity. By contrast, in Forensic Architecture’s video 77sqm_9:26min, Halit Yozgat must remain invisible as an individual, precisely because anything else would detract from the impartiality of the investigation. Objectivity adds information; Patterson’s approach emphasises the subjecthood of the persons involved. Comparing Patterson’s work to that of Forensic Architecture allows us to observe that the distinction between objectivity and art is not a binary. Objectivity is not a yes/no quality that some text or artwork either has or does not have: objectivity is a collection of features, which can come together or come apart. The ‘objective’ styles of academia or journalism typically value, for instance, an impartial and impersonal tone of voice, clarity of expression, literal meaning, accessibility of language, clearly (even formally) stated arguments, and definitive conclusions. More ‘artistic’ modes can, in opposition, permit idiosyncratically personal style, and subjective

Realism for Our Time

43

point of view. They permit ambiguity instead of clarity, hermeticism in place of accessibility, allegory and symbolism instead of literalism, unconnected impressions instead of argumentative structure, and inconclusiveness in place of clear endings. But such oppositions are matters of degree, rather than of sharp division. In this way, Patterson’s work has some ‘objective’ features which would not be out of place in a piece of journalism or sociological research: her systematic usage of criminal databases to source the portraits, a text panel that factually explains the real event. But Patterson’s work (like Ai Weiwei’s installation Straight) includes features we would only rarely find in a work of journalism or science, such as her luxuriation in the prettiness of the pictures, or her deliberate blurring of fiction and fact. What matters for us here is that when it comes to our expect­ ations around truth and knowledge, modernity is the era in which the preferred modes of communicating have drifted unmistakably towards markers of objectivity. In natural sciences, objectivity became understood as the mechanical capture of reality with minimum interference from the human agent.27 In writing, objectivity became conceived of as the elimination of the personal viewpoint, and became dominant across academia, with the treatise and the research paper replacing more ‘literary’ forms like the essay, aphorisms or the philosophical dialogue.28 In politics, objectivity became a hallmark of political speech in functional democracies: both in the ideal of impartiality in the speech of judges and journalists, and the avoidance of rhetorical trickery more broadly. As philosopher Jürgen Habermas memorably put it, the ideal speech situation in a democracy is one in which ‘the structure of [the participants’] communication rules out all external or internal coercion other than the force of the better argument’.29 However, while we can admit there is value to objectivity in science, philosophy and democratic politics alike, we can also suggest that, in certain instances, truth will be better grasped precisely when we at least partially retreat from objectivity.

44

artists remake the world

To return to Ebony G. Patterson’s work, the news report on the Tivoli Gardens incursion that Patterson had witnessed smoothed over its complex social background in part because a news item must simplify, even at the cost of reducing people to some shorthand essence. On the news, we speak of protesters, of victims, of soldiers, of members of this or that ethnicity. Even a more in-depth sociology report into the populations of ‘garrison towns’ like Tivoli Gardens – which might explain how these communities are themselves victims of inequality, police harassment and corruption – would still of necessity deal in generalities.30 What slips from view here is one aspect of reality. Objectivity, so necessary to elucidate one part of the situation, makes it difficult to recall another part: that these people have complex histories, personalities, circumstances. To restore that fact to view, the artist must depart from the objective voice of the news report. Patterson chooses to do so by drawing on her previous portraits of gang members in Jamaica; she imbues them with a flamboyant, even queer, sensibility, softening the fear these men might inspire and suggesting more complex internal worlds within. The most interesting choice by the artist, however, is the contradiction that she builds into the centre of the work: hers is an attempt to rescue these men from anonymity, but in fact the ‘portraits’ are not of the seventy-two victims at all, but images of people with criminal records found online.31 In looking at them, the viewer is invited to contemplate the individuality of those killed, but we also run up against the realisation that they are only accessible to us through these fictionalised photographs of men in bandanas. We seek to see dignity, but also collide with our own preconceptions and limitations. If we somewhat schematically separate artistic (ambiguity, levity, hermeticism, allegory, inconclusiveness …) and objective (clarity, seriousness, accessibility, literalness, conclusiveness …) features of discourse, we might then speculate that each carries distinct advantages when it comes to the pursuit of understanding. To put

Realism for Our Time

45

this another way, we might say that, in the public sphere, thought faces a variety of obstacles.32 Sometimes the obstacle to thought is the unavailability of evidence, and then objective features will likely be the most useful. But other realisations are obscured by different obstacles. If the obstacle we face is a tendency to reduce subjects to their social type then a certain ‘non-objective’, poetic focus on individuals, or application of an idiosyncratic personal style, such as we find in Patterson’s work, may get us further. What, if anything, will get us closer to understanding in any specific situation is an open question. There is no mechanical recipe that an artist can follow, but we shall have more to say on these different modes of investigation in the chapters to come. For now, we can identify something like a general shape of the approach we could take in response to our problem of assimilation. To resist assimilation of art into mere investigative journalism, we should ask what kind of departures from objectivity can offer the mind a way forward, precisely in those situations where objectivity creates blockages, misunderstanding or confusion. Here we can begin to see how objective discourse and art do not compete at precisely the same game: they are not like a car compared to a horse-drawn carriage, but more like different tools, used to dislodge different problems that we encounter on a path to understanding in a politically charged situation. And so, we no longer face a binary decision between being ‘pro’ objectivity or ‘pro’ art; political discourse requires a plurality of approaches. We can safely reject both the extreme versions of critical postmodernism – where any claim to truth and objectivity is seen as ideologically corrupt – and a blind empiricism, for which only an objectivity modelled on empirical sciences will deliver understanding. A struggle for political progress requires clear-sighted, objective and impartial speech in the public sphere, but we can nevertheless clip the wings of objectivity in admitting that there are some obstacles to thought, which we can only overcome with more creative, artistic approaches.

46

artists remake the world

Th ough ts W i t h o u t Co n clu s io ns We can test the proposed view here by considering one common feature by which art departs from objectivity: art’s inconclusivity. A journalistic piece, a judgment of the courts or an academic essay all drive towards a final statement to be taken on board: in conclusion, this is the fact you should believe. Works of Forensic Architecture, and others in the evidentiary realism tendency, exhibit a similar conclusive structure. But often, artworks stop short of serving such take-away points. Returning to Ai Weiwei’s work, Straight, with its haunting reference to earthquake victims, we can note that unlike a report, the artist’s choices do not drive towards one clear conclusion. Why, for instance, have the bars been straightened, as opposed to left curved? What does the title Straight allude to? What exactly is the significance of the work being so enormous? Perhaps the hard work of straightening so many bars is supposed to recall the magnitude of the tragedy – as if to say that no amount of effort is going to return the lives lost. Or perhaps the act of straightening the bars reminds us of a cover-up, of the government’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the corruptive construction practices. We can construct such interpretations. But if in an objective genre every element of the argument unambiguously builds towards a conclusion, the poetic work has an open-ended, inconclusive structure, which allows us to move between such potentially contrasting end points of meaning. To defend inconclusiveness in art, we must first grapple with its opposite in the objective genre: we must first consider what possible disadvantages to thought there might be in texts that have conclusions, that spell out the final proposition to be believed. Poetic inconclusiveness has been known by many names across modernity. John Keats, thinking most likely of his own Romantic contemporaries, has described it as the poet’s ‘negative capability’: ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.33 Roland Barthes, seeking to describe the laws of the ‘classic’ (nineteenth-century)

Realism for Our Time

47

literary text in his analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, picks up on the last sentence of the novella – ‘And the marquise remained pensive’ – to frame ‘pensiveness’ as that open-ended property of literature, the puzzle that withholds final meaning, and which suggests an unexplored and potentially endless depth to what we have just read.34 In reference to conceptual art, Sianne Ngai has described how in contemporary art we use the aesthetic category of ‘interesting’ to say that a work provokes many reflections, provokes our interest, but does not yet invite a determinate statement.35 Inconclusiveness has many flavours (and degrees), and it is by no means found in all art: artworks that point to a clear ‘moral of the story’ have a conclusive structure, as do, as we have seen above, works of evidentiary realism. Still, deliberate inconclusiveness is a feature common in art while it is abhorred by all genres of objectivity (news reports, academic essays, et cetera): after all, a clear conclusion is an invitation to believe and – even if expressed merely as a probability of a proposition being true – seems indispensable to any inquiry. What, then, could an artwork pursuing a political truth gain by resisting a conclusion, by denying us the final ‘therefore’? Philosopher Cora Diamond offers one way of exploring this idea through her concept of the ‘difficulty of reality’, a notion which, suitably enough, Diamond develops during her reflections on a dispute between the merits of philosophy and literature.36 The difficulty of reality is a kind of lived aporia, a moment when we find something disturbing because it resists our attempts at grasping it rationally: ‘To appreciate the difficulty is to feel oneself being shouldered out of how one thinks, how one is apparently supposed to think, or to have a sense of the inability of thought to encompass what it is attempting to reach.’37 The examples of the difficulty of reality that Diamond discusses are diverse. They include sudden realisations of mortality, beauty, kindness and of social indifference to destruction: the difficult reality, it seems, can be produced by anything that suggests the world is no longer captured by the conceptual categories we have employed so far. Faced with a difficulty

48

artists remake the world

of reality, according to Diamond, we have two options. We might ‘deflect’ the difficulty into a mere intellectual puzzle, something to be solved by just thinking long and hard about it. Or we might stay with the difficulty, contemplate its presence. The first option involves drawing concrete conclusions, but this will feel inadequate, or too quick. Conclusions do not always illuminate but can here push us into a state of banality. Faced with the Sichuan disaster, we might say ‘what has happened is a tragedy on an unprecedented scale’, but the moment we utter such conclusions, we feel we have already betrayed the significance of the event: a little like when we attempt to sum up some inescapable fact of human existence with a platitude (‘we all die one day’, ‘love hurts’). The idea of the difficulty of reality suggests that there are some situations where it is hard to do justice to our experience by stating what is there. Here, the appropriate achievement for our thought seems to consist in not offering conclusions, and instead circling the matter at hand, remaining with the situation. Diamond’s surprising idea can be understood as the claim that in these rare but important situations, our mind will reflect reality more accurately if it stops itself from stating it. It must do something else. The reason why difficulties of reality arise may vary: we can feel powerless in the face of a fact, or it may be too painful to look at. In the case of an authoritarian, undemocratic state, such as China, inconclusiveness can play the further function of making public criticisms veiled and therefore acceptable; though in Ai’s case his criticisms have often been direct and he has met with correspondingly harsh consequences.38 In the context of Ai’s exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, however, the condemnation of the Chinese government of course causes no political discomfort. Here, instead, the inconclusiveness seems to play the role of allowing the visitor to consider the tragedy, despite their inability to do anything about it. The reason why reaching for a conclusion seems unfitting – ‘how dreadful! All that corruption which caused the loss of life’ – derives from the feeling that, in uttering the claim, I seem to be simply

Realism for Our Time

49

adding the earthquake to a long list of terrible things happening in the world. The inconclusive structure of the artwork is what allows me to shift between its different meanings while keeping the reality of the event in mind, and therefore not cheapen its magnitude by stating it. Within the democratic public sphere, this experience of the difficulty of reality – when objectively structured thoughts seem to miss something important – often attaches to a relationship between freedom, powerlessness and complicity. In a democracy, citizens are (comparatively) free to speak their minds, and so can in principle draw any conclusion or call for any action they like. Because of this, however, the personal moral obligation to act upon one’s beliefs feels stronger: well, if you feel this way, why don’t you do something about it? And that is so even when personal agency is in fact limited. The lack of agency derives in part from structural reasons of late capitalism: as one much-cited study concluded, ‘economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence’.39 In capitalist democracies we all seem to be Cassandras, with unprecedented access to information, but with little agency in the face of corporate power, state bureaucracy or sheer inertia. However, another, more worrying reason may also explain the feeling of powerlessness: not the inability to act, but an unwillingness to see, a kind of complicity or akrasia (moral laziness), which prevents us from going as far as our own reasoning will take us. To make this claim concrete, consider, as our final example of artistic departures from objectivity, a work by Kiluanji Kia Henda. Kia Henda is an Angolan artist whose work often comments on political culture in Angola, but who, when exhibiting in Europe, also makes work that thematises Europe’s relationship to African immigration.40 For instance, Kia Henda’s installation The Isle of Venus (2018), shown in 2020 at a solo exhibition in Belgium,41 consists of

50

artists remake the world

a platform, upon which the artist arranged a set of small, roughly 10-inch-high reproductions of famous European statues: these are the bookcase ornament versions of the Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s David, which you might buy in a museum shop (Plate 6). These replicas are displayed on concrete blocks – forming an ‘island’ in the middle of the gallery – but each is covered in a shiny, colourful substance; upon closer inspection, we see that these are condoms. The effect is humorous: here’s a clash of the tasteful nudity of the sculptures and the prosaic sexual usefulness of the condoms, and some of the statues’ hands are now comically struggling to break free of the latex. Turning around, however, we notice that the ‘island’ is surrounded by photographs of the sea, each of which has large black rectangles within it. These photographs show migrant boats crossing the Mediterranean, with the boats blacked out. The reference to the European migrant crisis changes the meaning of the installation when we return to it. The condoms are not just a humorous reference to holiday sex, but now look like visions of sterility, of the European fantasy of purity and a fear of ‘mixing’ with migrant populations. The crisis depicted in the work is another difficulty of reality where the usual ways of thinking appear to give up: between 2014 and 2022, more than 20,000 people died or disappeared trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.42 This cruel fact is partly the result of ‘fortress Europe’ policies, such as Italy’s 2014 discontinuation of the search-and-rescue operations at sea.43 While alluding to these facts, Kia Henda’s investigation maintains an inconclusive structure: it does not add information about, say, legacies of colonialism or European politics to explain the situation, and it does not suggest specific solutions. Indeed, we may speculate the work is directed at those European visitors that already think they sympathise with the plight of migrants: those visitors who experience a kind of useless liberal guilt, who might offer vague demands that someone somewhere should do something about this, but whose protest, ultimately, has an end result similar to outright denial. The political reality here is difficult not (only) because it would demand

Realism for Our Time

51

such a radical change in European immigration policy that any one individual may feel powerless to affect it, but also because seriously thinking through this political reality leads citizens to moral demands that, ultimately, most of us are in fact too weak, too self-interested or simply too preoccupied to meet. A work like Kia Henda’s enters at this point of exhaustion, where objective-style arguments broadcast through the channels of daily politics occasion only a shamefaced looking away. The inconclusiveness of the work, the shifting between interpretations, and even its humour, allow the viewer to contemplate the tragedy, without, for once, reaching for their usual disingenuous deflections. One might object that art’s inconclusive approach here is defeatist, or that it mollifies a cowardly or self-interested public. Such art, it may be felt, is not pushing the message strongly enough: we need facts, shock, strident speech, anything that will jump us into action. But recall our point about pluralism: what mode of discourse, if anything, will create a change in thought and behaviour, is an open question.44 The body politic is made up of individuals imperfectly disposed to pursue justice, and the obstacles to thought are multiple: ignorance, selfishness and ideology, yes, but also lack of energy, lack of time, lack of an alternative conceptual framework. When bombardment with facts and impassioned appeals to action both become derailed through exhaustion, we may need to invent other forms of discourse, so that the difficult realities do not slip from view. Art, we might therefore suggest, complements objective forms of discourse by allowing us to stay with the difficulty, just when we have developed too many defence mechanisms to confront it directly.

T h e A rt i s t’s S k i l l Since the 2000s, as we saw in this chapter, a return to realism in the arts has yet again positioned artists as speakers of politically uncomfortable truths. Yet realism does not always have to mean a

52

artists remake the world

total assimilation of art to journalism, or the abandonment of more artistic forms. Just as the everyday political negotiation between people can range from rational argumentation to passionate address, from seriousness to humorous teasing, public discourse requires a plurality of modes of communication: the task of art, we might say, is to invent and explore these possibilities. These departures from objectivity are a matter of judgement and skill; the political artist’s effort, like the effort of any thinker, will show in their attempt to structure the audience’s intellectual encounter with the work. An artwork’s inconclusive structure, for instance, is not a simple matter of ‘raising questions’, as the artworld cliché goes, or letting a few threads of thought hang around unfinished. Inconclusivity which does not simply fall apart as incomprehensibility or boredom is hard to achieve. Ebony G. Patterson talks about engrossing her viewers with the prettiness of her work: ‘I think of the work as the flower and the [viewers] as the bees, and [think] what is the lure that sucks the viewer in and holds them in place.’45 Kiluanji Kia Henda speaks of humour as playing a compar­ able role: ‘The humour appears in some of my works as a delicate way to talk about things that can be seen as painful or disgusting, but we cannot divert our look from it. It’s a kind of a trap to bring people to a healthy confrontation with our conflictual existence.’46 The artist’s choices can be successful or not; the humour and the prettiness, for example, can keep the gravity of a situation in view without cheapening it, or they can be misjudged. Any persuasive political art, in its combination of objective and artistic features, requires the artist to find common ground with the audience and anticipate how potential viewers will interact with the work. In each case, creation of an inconclusive structure requires skill just as much as shaping a persuasive argument does. The return to objectivity in contemporary art need not then lead to an abandonment of the approaches which for now I have tentatively called ‘artistic’: these, too, have their own complementary role to play in the democratic discourse. But before we can think

Realism for Our Time

53

that contemporary art has been fully vindicated, we must admit that our discussion has so far operated within a certain idealised situation. We have imagined a work in a gallery, approached by a lone viewer, who communes with the work, and then departs from it with their mind somewhat changed. But you could certainly object that such a gallery encounter has serious limits. The people who access these gallery experiences are inevitably drawn from audiences already interested in art and politics. There is no guarantee that their ruminations will lead to actual change. And if art seeks only to change minds, you might think that process is too slow to ascribe real political value to it; the urgent crises of today require not discourse but action. Such qualms have in fact animated many contemporary artists to give up on gallery-based art altogether, and it is to these practices that we turn next.

Chapter three

Utility and Utopia On Socially Engaged Art

O

n one sunny Saturday in May 2003, the 300 or so inhabitants of Ponětovice, a small Czech village, woke up – all at the same time. Then, they all went shopping at the same time, opened their windows at the same time, and swept their porches at the same time. They all enjoyed dumplings in tomato sauce for lunch, worked in the garden, gathered for a beer in the afternoon, watched the news in their living rooms, and went to bed at 10 p.m. – again, all adhering to the same schedule. It was not easy for the artist, Kateřina Šedá, to convince the villagers to synchronise their actions for a day. And yet when they finally agreed to participate in her social game, entitled There Is Nothing There (Plate 7), she hoped that they would notice that, in fact, there is something there, that all excitement does not just take place in big cities far away from them. Even their little village had an intriguing kind of life to it. When we say that art might be ‘political’, what do we mean? As we saw in the last chapter, one possibility is to understand art’s contribution to politics as political discourse: revealing and discussing uncomfortable truths that the artist believes the society must face. But, we might think, that is not enough. It is too sluggish, investing too much hope in the established democratic system; too much hope, also, that the audiences who wander into a gallery are going to do something about the issues they encounter. Stephen

Utility and Utopia

55

Duncombe and Steve Lambert, two New York-based art-activists, put their preferred alternative succinctly: ‘The point of political art is not to represent the world but to act within it.’1 The truly political artist, they go on to say, should not court the gallery audiences but instead engage a much broader demographic: communities, people in the street, activists, the public at large. A similar philosophy may extend even to the less activist, more participatory works like Kateřina Šedá’s: here is an artist ‘remaking’ the world not in the sense of communicating a message, but by making a tangible change in her audience’s lives. Since at least the 1990s many interlocking labels have been used to designate such approaches – ‘new genre public art’, ‘community-based art’, ‘social practice’, ‘useful art’, ‘participatory art’ – all referring to practices where the artists are organising people in order to achieve concrete sociopolitical aims. In these works of ‘socially engaged art’, to use the label that has perhaps stuck the most, artists no longer make objects, but projects, and their work no longer primarily takes place in the gallery, but within the broader space that a community inhabits. Artists’ desire for unmediated engagement with society has a long history. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Berlin Dadaists created strident political photomontages to criticise the decaying Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism; in the newly constituted Soviet Union, at around the same time, Constructivists and Productivists attempted to create an entirely new proletarian culture; in the 1960s, AfricanAmerican collectives like AfriCOBRA produced posters and murals to support the civil rights struggle. There are many ways in which art can burst out of the gallery and into a political movement. Into the 1990s and beyond, however, socially engaged art became less like a spontaneous response to political developments, and more like a recognisable art genre. Suzanne Lacy, a pioneer of the genre whose work began in the 1970s, might today get sponsored by an arts agency to organise a mass gathering of 2,500 women to sit in groups in Brooklyn, where they discuss their experiences (Between the Door and the Street, 2013). Brazilian artist Jorge Menna Barreto

56

artists remake the world

can work with agroforestry farmers in Brazil to open a vegan restaurant at the São Paulo Biennial (Restauro, 2016). Assemble, an artist-architectural collective, worked with residents in Liverpool to refurbish derelict housing into a community centre, while the Array collective in Northern Ireland put together costumed performances for various political marches: both collectives won the Turner prize, the United Kingdom’s most prestigious award for contemporary art, in 2015 and 2021 respectively. Unlike previous politicised avantgardes, socially engaged artists today can rely on the full backing of the artworld establishment. The politics of socially engaged art have been much debated, and are more diverse than they might at first appear: while all these artists understand politics as having to do with action rather than discourse, their actions might have quite disparate goals. Here, I will investigate three distinct positions which have crystallised within these art practices. The first position understands the politics of socially engaged art as the politics of utility: art should aim to create immediate and measurable positive change within society. The second position aligns art, instead, with the ambition for systemic change: embedded within protest movements, artists should help to dismantle the operating principles of capitalism itself. Finally, the third position emphasises the aesthetic aspects of such art, and asks whether there might not be something, after all, that art could contribute to politics while retaining its identity as art.

U s e fu l A rt Cuban artist Tania Bruguera initially became famous within the artworld for her provocative and uncompromising performances. For one, she stood with a lamb cadaver hanging from her neck, in order to draw attention to the historic oppression of Indigenous peoples in Cuba (Burden of Guilt, 1997); for another, she instructed mounted police to use crowd control techniques on a (willing) audience at

Utility and Utopia

57

Tate Modern to demonstrate the dynamics of police power (Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008). But when she was invited to New York by the arts agency Creative Time in 2011, she wanted to do something that would not only represent political themes, but make a difference in the world.2 Bruguera set out to organise a global political movement for migrants, but decided to start small, by working closely with one group, a predominantly Spanish-speaking migrant community in the neighbourhood of Corona, Queens. Initially, Bruguera was shadowing local politicians and lived on a minimal wage among the migrant families. Later, she began co-organising workshops: these included computer literacy classes, a poetry marathon and helping with college applications. Looking at any of the images documenting Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International (2010–15), we can sense the no frills approach: in one image, an aerobics instructor leader looks over her shoulder, while a group of women perform jumping jacks (Plate 8). There is nothing mystifying, nothing ‘artsy’ here: just honest, positive change in the lives of those who need it. During this time, Bruguera came to call her approach Arte Útil (useful art): ‘Change, for Arte Útil[,] does not occur in people’s psychology, but in their concrete reality. Arte Útil is not to “look at” or to “be at” but to “do something with”.’3 She was interested in ‘practical, beneficial outcomes’, in ‘replacing authors with initiators and spectators with users’. 4 Bruguera’s writing on usefulness sets out one tendency within recent socially engaged art: achieving measurable change in the lives of disadvantaged communities. Several projects we have mentioned above – by Suzanne Lacy, Jorge Menna Barreto or the Assemble collective – clearly fall into this category. Today, most museums and biennial exhibitions will sponsor at least one or two such projects alongside their usual offering. For instance, in 2010 Liverpool Biennial commissioned Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk to create a collective-run bakery in a low-income neighbourhood (2up2down, 2010–12); the 2017 Venice Biennale featured Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, primarily known for his impressive light

58

artists remake the world

installations, who led workshops for refugees making handmade lamps, the sale of which raised funds for charity (Green Light project, 2017). Socially useful artists might also create new technologies: Slovenian artist-architect Marjetica Potrč worked with communities without access to water in Caracas, Venezuela, to design a waterfree toilet (Marjetica Potrč, Dry Toilet, 2003), while Olafur Eliasson also authored another lamp project, a solar-powered reading light in the shape of a sunflower, intended for areas of the world without electricity (Olafur Eliasson’s Little Sun, 2012–ongoing). So, are such projects art? Bruguera has held onto the term ‘art’ with some conviction, describing her work as evolving from previous avant-garde traditions.5 Other artists do not seem to mind too much either way: Eliasson’s Little Sun was referred to as a work of art when launched at Tate Modern but the artist’s website now describes it simply as a ‘project’.6 As we saw in Chapter 1, today it is hard to justify any overly strict policing of what might or might not be art. Calling Potrč’s dry toilet art can hardly be any more scandalous today than, say, the inclusion of Marcel Duchamp’s upturned urinal into the artworld was a hundred years earlier. If useful art projects confound us, then, this cannot simply be because of their status as art, but rather because they seem to require an entirely new set of criteria by which they are to be evaluated. We cannot unpick an aerobics workshop for its formal interest, or a dry toilet for its complex political message. The real revolution of socially engaged art, therefore, is in the rewriting of criteria for good art, which now appear neither aesthetic nor intellectual, but distinctly ethical. Ethics, at its broadest, is the domain that governs how we should behave towards others – especially other humans – though there is considerable disagreement as to what this might mean when applied to social art practice. One popular option has been to focus on the ethics of the relationship between the artist and the participants. For instance, the process of creating Tania Bruguera’s work in Queens seems egalitarian and inclusive: Bruguera did much to experience the situation of the

Utility and Utopia

59

people she worked with, her workshops were produced through continuous consultation, and she eventually handed over the project to a council of volunteers, which transformed it into a community centre, Centro Corona.7 Here we have the sort of relationship that art historian Grant Kester has praised as ‘dialogic’, whereby the artwork arises from a two-way interaction, and the artist holds no superiority over the participant.8 We might contrast such a project with a case where a superstar artist descends upon a community with a preconceived idea: perhaps Olafur Eliasson’s Green Light lamps seem to have been a little bit like that. Here the artist appears more like a benign deity, distributing gifts to those in need, before disappearing again into his realm of artistic remoteness. Whatever the benefits, we might feel there is something unethical, or at least patronising, about such a vertical relationship between the artist and the participant. And yet, the nature of relationships clearly cannot be the only criterion for socially engaged art. After all, we might imagine a perfectly egalitarian art project, where everybody felt wonderfully respected and included, but the end result of which would consist simply of some privileged people enjoying a nice dinner together. Such a criticism was often levied against the work that curator Nicolas Bourriaud described as ‘relational aesthetics’, an often-cited example of which are artist Rikrit Tiravanija’s dinner parties for the generally well-heeled artworld participants, which Tiravanija described as in themselves works of art.9 Ethics calls for something more than good relations, and that something more has been understood by many artists to mean a positive difference to people’s lives. Bruguera, for instance, calls for ‘concrete beneficial outcomes’ and using ‘art as a tool’ in achieving them.10 Thus, her project improved the life conditions for the migrant community in the Corona neighbourhood, and Bruguera’s hope was that the project would be replicated worldwide. Other projects also have the ambition of scale: Olafur Eliasson’s Little Sun website claims that 869,000 products were distributed in regions without electricity as

60

artists remake the world

of 2021.11 One of its stated aims is not only the embracing of green energy, but also children’s education: as suggested by the website, the Little Sun lamp has enabled ‘139,000,000 extra study hours for school children living without electricity’.12 We might say, then, that socially engaged art is to be evaluated along two ethical criteria: firstly, whether the relationships in the project conformed to political virtues like inclusivity, dialogue and equality; secondly, by measuring the positive consequences the project had for a particular community. Philosophers would describe the first criterion as stemming from virtue ethics, the second from consequentialism.13 Some artists (such as Bruguera) seem to emphasise both criteria; others (such as Eliasson, or Duncombe and Lambert cited above) appear more drawn towards the consequences. But either way, within this entirely ethical, pragmatic standard of artistic value we seem to arrive at the next logical step in historical avantgardes’ journey towards a political purpose. When assessing art, considerations about intellectual complexities and aesthetics fall away, discarded like an empty pupa, out of which a winged vision of ‘actual’ social change flies forth. At around the same time as debates about useful art were unfolding in the artworld, an interestingly similar movement developed in academic philosophy, likewise concerned with transforming our lives to maximise their ethical impact: a movement that became known as ‘effective altruism’. These philosophers – the most visible proponents include Peter Singer and William MacAskill – belong to the utilitarian school of ethics, which is one type of consequentialism: the view that ethical actions should always aim for those consequences that maximise the amount of well-being in the world. Applying that logic to charitable giving to begin with, effective altruists became frustrated by the amount of inefficiency they saw in the charity sector. One of MacAskill’s examples of such inefficiency is the Roundabout PlayPump project in the late 1990s: an ingenious playground installation, a merry-go-round, which doubled as a water-pumping mechanism. Intended to transform the toil of

Utility and Utopia

61

gathering water into a children’s game, the project was endorsed by celebrities, raised millions of dollars, and was installed in several African regions suffering from water shortage. Unfortunately, the PlayPump not only turned out to be more expensive to install and maintain than regular pumps, it also detracted funds from already existing charitable initiatives.14 If we want to do good, MacAskill suggests, we should channel our efforts away from such attentiongrabbing projects and towards the maximally efficient ones. This logic took MacAskill and other effective altruists towards increasingly controversial suggestions: thinking of efficiency as the number of lives saved per dollar invested, he recommended, for instance, that talented graduates abstain from the NGO sector and instead get high-paid careers as investment bankers or lawyers, and then donate their salaries to the most efficient charities, such as medical charities in the developing world.15 Effective altruists have been criticised as ascribing all ethical agency to high-net-worth individuals who possess the most resources, and therefore for being insensitive to the structural injustices that the global capitalist system perpetuates. And yet, the first step in their logic is hard to resist and seems similar to that of socially engaged artists like Tania Bruguera. If your goal is ethical impact – whether globally, or just in your neighbourhood – you should not simply do good; you should compare different alternatives available to you, and pick the one that achieves the most. The appeal of both effective altruism and ‘useful art’ stems from their response to the feeling of powerlessness, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, characterises the predicament of most citizens under democratic capitalism. In the face of seemingly intransigent laws of capital, which syphon all individual effort into a system that ultimately benefits economic elites at the top, both movements promise reform from within, delivering life-changing consequences for those at the bottom of the system, not in some hard-to-attain post-capitalist future, but in the here and now. And yet, considering the two movements side by side reveals that it is precisely by rigorously applying socially engaged artists’ own criterion

62

artists remake the world

of impact that these artists’ ethical outputs begin to look dubious. Tania Bruguera’s project, as we saw, attempted to improve the lives of immigrants in New York, and it appears to have done so; yet, how successful is it when we compare it to other similar initiatives outside the artworld?16 In New York, for instance, there are several larger organisations already working on behalf of migrants (such as New York Immigration Coalition, the Door or Safe Passage): these reunite families, campaign for fair working conditions and provide legal aid. There are local organisations, too, such as Latin Women in Action, which has provided medical, legal and educational services in the Corona neighbourhood for thirty years. These organisations all appear more established and successful than Bruguera’s offering. For the years 2015–22, I could not find Bruguera’s project listed in the relevant directories of immigrant services in New York, and comparing the workshops listed on the Immigrant Movement International website with these organisations reveals a rather paltry offering.17 What then, from the point of artistic ‘usefulness’, justifies Bruguera starting a new initiative, rather than joining an already successful one? Or take Olafur Eliasson’s Little Sun, the lovely, sunflower-shaped lamp, about which one reviewer gushed: ‘If Olafur Eliasson can enlighten those of us who have time and resources to devote to art, well and good; but if he can literally enlighten places of darkness, that must be more valuable.’18 Perhaps, but how does his work compare to similar initiatives? The Moser lamp, a contraption made of water, bleach and a plastic bottle, can be installed on corrugated metal roofs to provide light indoors. This patent-free invention of the Brazilian mechanic Alfredo Moser has been enthusiastically taken up by communities in electricity-poor areas worldwide, especially in the Philippines.19 As we saw, another stated aim of Little Sun is to aid children’s education (as a reading lamp), but when we put this into the context of the highest-rated educational charities, like Save the Children, we realise that such charities actually focus on educational materials, literacy programmes or nutrition. The lack of reading lamps does not appear to be the biggest problem here.20

Utility and Utopia

63

Indeed, the idea of a lamp stems from Eliasson’s prior artistic interest in light, rather than a comparative analysis of all available options. Usefulness, then, is an exacting criterion. We might not agree with effective altruists that ethics equals impact, but if we do, then surely measuring impact requires such comparisons. If so, artists and art institutions, it seems, will only rarely be able to deliver the transparency and efficiency comparable with the established NGO sector. Admittedly, some projects of useful art might pass even such a comparative test. Where the work is undertaken by an artist or an institution permanently embedded within the community they serve, they might know the community well enough to pick out optimum solutions (the work of American artist Theaster Gates may be one such example). For many ‘useful’ artists, however, the spectre of the Roundabout PlayPump looms large. Under the rigorous criterion of impact, socially engaged art projects, while well-meaning, often appear as if they would have been better executed by someone who is not an artist at all. Or, to run the argument in the other direction: if anything can be art, then museums bent on ethical impact should pour their resources into Save the Children, or into independent grassroots innovators like Alfredo Moser, rather than into the comparably less sociopolitically impactful artists like Bruguera and Eliasson. Of course, if this sounds like an argument ad absurdum, it suggests we should look for other models of socially engaged art.

A rt f o r S y s t e m i c Ch ange Socially engaged art of the ‘useful’ variety can be critiqued by its own criterion of efficiency, but critics further along the Left have attacked it on other grounds, those of complicity with the system. For art historian Larne Abse Gogarty, for instance, ‘we can see the fetishisation of usefulness as emerging from a desire that […] seeks to “mirror” and thus exceed the workings of state and capital’.21 Useful art, on Abse Gogarty’s analysis, resuscitates the life of citizens

64

artists remake the world

left behind by the capitalist machine, but thereby simply remakes them into workers and consumers. Instead of collaboration with the dominant politico-economic system, the implication seems to be that artists should decisively break with it. Systemic change is, of course, a tall order. Luckily, art need not go at it alone, but can join those political movements that already have change in their sights. Here we arrive at a combination of art and activism – ‘artivism’ as these practices are sometimes called – which we might distinguish from useful arts in that its proponents do not invent improvements to society, but rather embed themselves into an extant activist moment. A particularly instructive confluence of contemporary art and activism flourished at the time of Occupy, the global protest movement of 2011–12, which opposed economic inequality under the neoliberal financial system. I was a student at the time and I well remember how, as I was growing into a political consciousness, all conversations about politics suddenly shifted: the obscene greed of bankers was thrown into focus after the recession of 2008, revealing to many more than just those on the traditional Left how the global financial world order serves the interests of a small minority. The shift felt seismic in a similar way to how, a few years later, #metoo and Black Lives Matter reoriented political conversations towards injustices structured around gender and race. The first and symbolically most significant Occupy protest was Occupy Wall Street in New York City, and artists were at the centre of that occupation from its very inception. The event sometimes credited with sparking Occupy Wall Street was itself the publication of an image: an online poster/meme created by the Canadian activist design agency Adbusters (Plate 9).22 It shows a graceful ballerina, balancing atop the Charging Bull statue, which stands in the middle of New York’s financial district and has long been synonymous with Wall Street’s relentless drive for profit. Like a modern-day Marianne, the dancer is leading a group of protesters, who are running towards the viewer through what appears to be a cloud of teargas. Underneath the photomontage, itself a technique

Utility and Utopia

65

associated with political art from Dadaism to Soviet agitprop, was a hashtag, #OccupyWallStreet, and an invitation ‘September 17th. Bring a tent’. The image was released in July 2011 and went viral, but it might not have been acted upon had it not been for a group of artists and activists, gathered around the alternative arts space at 16 Beaver Street, itself only a few blocks away from the Charging Bull statue. Inspired by the Arab Spring protests earlier that year, these were among the first to start the occupation in September, and as they were joined by others, the Zuccotti Park near Wall Street became an impromptu encampment, where between 5,000 and 15,000 demonstrators gathered day and night, demanding an end to corporate greed. As Occupy sojourner and art historian Yates McKee emphasises in his account, the camp itself became something like an extended work of process art, its carnivalesque aesthetic leading to much visual, musical and publishing activity.23 Protest signs were displayed on a pavement gallery, showcasing an ever-changing display. Self-published zines and journals were produced, including visuals from illustrator Molly Crabapple and contemporary artist Paul Chan. One spontaneously formed collective brought along a powerful projector, dubbed ‘the Illuminator’, which projected the sign ‘99%’ onto a corporate building, quoting the circular signal from Batman and evoking Occupy’s best-known chant, ‘we are the 99%’. There were playful interventions, like ‘Occupy Legoland’, with activists building a miniature version of Zuccotti Park. After the encampment was disbanded two months into its existence, the creative endeavours continued, accompanying protests around the city. During one protest in March 2012, a theatre group staged a rap battle between protesters and protesters-dressed-as-police, while for a May Day parade, a puppetry group created a maypole, where each of the ribbons had grievances against the financial class written on them.24 Activist art is distinct from its ‘useful art’ cousin not only in being organically linked to activism, but also in being inherently connected to anti-systemic demands. Activist art politics does not

66

artists remake the world

propose incremental improvements, but is conceived of as a struggle of the powerless against the powerful: the ‘99%’ against the financial oligarchy (as with Occupy), Black Americans and allies struggling against systemic racism and police brutality (Black Lives Matter), or humanity itself pitted against the capitalist machine burning fossil fuels (Extinction Rebellion). The system against which activists struggle can therefore be many things – entrenched prejudice, the economic system, authoritarian oppression, colonial rule, corruption. As such, activism is of course not the exclusive domain of any one political persuasion (it can come from the Right as much as from the Left), and can stem from chauvinism, hatred or ignorance (as with the alt-right movement in America) just as it can from a desire for emancipation. Disturbing established powers, activist movements often walk the edges of legality, and, depending on the response of the state, can expose the protesters’ bodies, or even lives, to risk. Activist art, therefore, cannot be located within the cultural sites of the establishment, but rather where ‘the people’ are, be it in ‘the street’ or, increasingly, online. Activist art stands in a complex relationship to exhibitions-based political art, one which we ought to consider. Galleries, biennials and museums often take up anti-systemic rhetoric (as we saw in Chapter 1), and even open their doors to anti-systemic activism and protest. For instance, the 2012 edition of the Berlin Biennale was dedicated entirely to activist art projects, many of which stemmed from Occupy. The 2021 Turner Prize in Britain, as mentioned, was won by the Array collective, known for their carnivalesque pieces accompanying women’s rights, LGBT and anti-austerity protests, from a list of nominees consisting solely of activist collectives. Foreseeing and encouraging this tendency, Yates McKee writes that museums and galleries should be transformed to ‘support the flourishing of autonomous, movement-based artistic infrastructures’,25 while artist-critic Jonas Staal has even called for art schools to become ‘propaganda studies’ departments, in order to ‘reclaim the means of reality production’.26 For these critics, the task of establishment art,

Utility and Utopia

67

therefore, is to evolve itself into a framework supporting broader anti-systemic initiatives. If museums and galleries are serious about values like equality, freedom and inclusivity, these critical voices suggest, then they should offer their resources to political movements that pursue those values through the radical upending of systemic oppression and injustice. Such proposals will of course be uncomfortable to anyone who thinks that political neutrality of cultural institutions is itself of value in a democracy, though such qualms are unlikely to convince critics like McKee and Staal. Conducting anti-systemic politics presupposes a certain mistrust of the supposed neutrality of the usual public sphere in democratic capitalism (it is seen as rigged by corporate or class interest, or simply by prejudice) and, precisely for that reason, activism advocates for change by other means, like protest. Of course, those suspicions are often very well justified. The question for us to consider, then, is not whether anti-systemic activism is itself justified (of course it can be), but rather whether such activism benefits from artistic involvement, and from the involvement of contemporary artists in particular. That the answer here is affirmative is far from clear. Firstly, while activist art clearly provides protests with some energy and buoyancy, it seems doubtful whether art is quite as important for political movements as it is made out to be. McKee’s history of Occupy Wall Street puts artists centre-stage, but many other sociological and first-person accounts barely mention artistic production; issues like organising, goals, tactics seemed much more central.27 Even the importance of the dancing ballerina image has been doubted, some observers maintaining that the hashtag – #occupy­wallstreet – was much more important.28 Secondly, we might wonder to what extent activist art requires creativity as opposed to just time-honoured motivational formulae. After all, drums, chants, hand-made signs, the carrying of effigies are a constant in protests of all stripes. A truly committed artist-activist might therefore not need to choose the experimental artworld for inspiration, but rather

68

artists remake the world

adopt easily understood, traditional idioms. Lenin, for instance, begrudgingly tolerated artistic avant-gardes in the early years of the Bolshevik revolution, but thought that monumental propaganda, banners and rousing songs were more effective. As he put it once to Clara Zetkin: ‘Why turn away from beauty, and discard it […] just because it is “old”? Why worship the new as the god to be obeyed, just because it is the “new”? That is nonsense, sheer nonsense.’29 Proponents of activist art in the contemporary artworld must therefore do more than simply aver that their art is the most politically relevant (of all the arts), simply because it is the most radical in its anti-systemic stance. They must explain what importance art possesses, if any, for the politics that they themselves subscribe to. At street protests, for instance, it is clear that artistic activity can perform several functions – chanting reinforces the message, drumming bolsters morale, the carnival provides a moment of relief or joy, subversive acts draw attention. But those functions involve tried-and-tested formulae at least as much as they need specifically artistic creativity.30 In order to demonstrate the need for artistic creativity for activism, however, we could focus on a political function that we might call conceptual clarification of the movement. Take, for instance, the Pussyhat project, initiated by artist Jayna Zweiman and screenwriter Krista Suh in the United States, to coincide with the Women’s March 2017, which followed the inauguration of Donald Trump as president.31 The Trump campaign was noted for its misogynist rhetoric: one well-known incident surrounded a leaked tape from 2005, in which Trump had made vulgar comments about non-consensual touching of women, advising another man to ‘grab ’em by the pussy’. Zweiman and Suh reclaimed the word by producing a visual pun: knitting a distinctive pink hat with little cat ears. The idea took off among various knitting circles, and when it came to the protest, a sea of women, all wearing the distinctive Pussyhat, could be seen marching in unison. Here, the hat signals a joint purpose as well as offers some joyful relief. What made the Pussyhat especially popular

Utility and Utopia

69

with wearers, we might speculate, is also that, as a visual idea, it helped to clarify what kind of an initiative the Women’s March 2017 was. Playful and friendly, the hat seems to describe the movement as a broad-church initiative: in other words, it presents anti-misogyny as a mainstream, widely acceptable ideal. Conceptual clarification through activist art can happen in various ways, both for mainstream and radical demands. Death imagery in Extinction Rebellion protests – such as a large skeleton called ‘Bones’ that is brought along to protests, and mass ‘die-ins’ staged in public places – has cemented the association between the movement and humanity’s survival, drawing on a history of similar tactics, notably by ACT UP, who have protested inadequate responses to the AIDS crisis since the 1980s.32 Black Lives Matter protest imagery during the 2019–20 protests focused on two visual keystones: power signifiers like a raised fist, and murals of specific individuals killed by the police (especially George Floyd and Breonna Taylor). Through these visuals, the movement clarified its continuity with historical Black Power protest, as well as underscored the humanity of the victims.33 And such clarification may happen in the field of the culture industry, as much as on the street itself, as when the lyrics of US rapper Kendrick Lamar’s song ‘Alright’ were chanted by Black Lives Matter protesters, facing down police at the 2014 Ferguson protests.34 However, as political movements gather momentum and begin to radiate outwards towards mainstream culture, such artistic creativity tends to solidify into recognised symbolic acts. In this way, for instance, footballers in England take the knee to signal their opposition to systemic racism, and wear rainbow-coloured shoelaces to show opposition to homophobia.35 We might hazard the thought that when an anti-systemic political movement shifts from activism towards reform, its aesthetic requirements will also change: creativity becomes perhaps less important, and symbolic co-option by various social institutions, from football to political parties, via easily legible symbols, becomes more central. Indeed,

70

artists remake the world

at this stage, we might argue, specific legal and policy demands become much more important than any cultural expression at all. In this way, we might reserve the value of visual creativity for anti-systemic political movements in their initial stage, when they still lack broader support, institutional structure and levers of power. In art historian T.J. Demos’ words, this is the moment of ‘beautiful trouble’, whereby ‘aesthetic pleasure is wedded to politically directed disobedience guided by ethical conviction and radical demands’.36 It is at this stage that political energy can produce an effervescence of cultural forms, which undoubtedly deserve our admiration (and should, therefore, be studied by art historians and collected by museums). The claim that remains harder to argue for, however, is that specifically experimental or avant-gardist contemporary art has any great relevance for this stage of anti-systemic politics. If anti-systemic politics only relies on activism in its initial phase, and if the role of activism is both to clarify its message and build support, then that must surely happen through easily legible artistic production (clothes, murals, symbols, street art, signs, chants, slogans, parades). Any avant-gardist departure from that direction will appear increasingly removed from systemic change itself, as will those artworld values like ambiguity, metaphor or complexity. The more complex and elaborate art gets, and the more institutionalised within the art school, the gallery and the museum, the harder it seems to demonstrate its utility for activism itself.37 And so, we might think, protesters do not really need galleries, museums and art schools, the takeover of which is insisted on by theorists like McKee and Staal. Creative visual production of protest movements, in all their glorious organic growth, may be remarkable, but it grows, above all, in the domain of the largely anonymous producers of ephemeral imagery, in the street and online. Artists, art theorists and curators gathered around biennials and art schools may certainly obtain some radical street cred by participating in protest art, but the revolution, to return to Lenin’s remarks, can equally well happen without them.

Utility and Utopia

71

Se a rch i n g fo r A rt in So ci a l ly E n g ag e d Art Within the artworld, proponents of socially engaged art of both the useful and activist varieties advocate for a transformation of contemporary art into a new form, into an avant-garde art form more relevant to the political sphere. And yet, so far it may seem that these art practices can only with difficulty be thought of as a transformation into a new form, and instead result in a replacement of art with already familiar activities: social work or protest-based visual culture. Both of these are of course important, and indeed, can be exhilarating in their possibilities. The somewhat disappointing realisation therefore lies not with this end point itself, but rather with the thought that, since art becomes replaced with something familiar, the politicised artist’s very starting point in the experimental, gallery-based artworld might have been a mistake. If your primary vocation is to help people, we might say, save yourself the strange, tortuous path charted by the ‘useful’ artists – just become a social worker, a human rights lawyer or a volunteer. To contribute to a system-shattering protest movement, do not bother occupying biennials and art schools in London and Berlin: just go on protests, organise, build a movement. Run away from art school, from art theory, shut this book: the vicissitudes of contemporary art will but ill prepare you for the politically most impactful life. The temptation of political art today to assimilate to another sphere of activity, as we already saw with investigative art in the previous chapter, therefore does not simply point to the question of whether artists should join political movements (of course – why not!), but rather forces us to reconsider whether there is any political value to art at its point of difference from other political activities. And it could be that, as far as politics is concerned, art is simply an irrelevant field. Politics is about persuasion, tactics, maximisation of outcomes; and so it is activities specialised in achieving those

72

artists remake the world

ends that best serve politics. To make room for art, then, we might have to describe the political life as something other than just the most efficient pursuit of social goals. We might then reflect on art as we already find it – art conceived of as the search for difficult, complex, extraordinary experiences – and ask how such art might contribute to a political life conceived of as a more intricate mixture of activity, thought and experience. To make a first foray into this philosophically challenging territory, let us stage our first encounter with an old and contentious term that might capture some of that complexity: aesthetics. A qualified return to aesthetics in the context of socially engaged art has been argued for by art historian Claire Bishop, perhaps the most influential critic writing on this subject. Bishop rejects the assessment of socially engaged works purely on the basis of ethical impact – for similar reasons to those we have considered so far – and instead maintains that ‘it is also crucial to discuss, analyse and compare this work critically as art, since this is the institutional field in which it is endorsed and disseminated’.38 One relevant criterion she underscores is the aesthetic experience understood as ‘an autonomous regime of experience that is not reducible to logic, reason or morality’.39 However, Bishop’s writing on the topic then takes a somewhat surprising turn. We usually associate the term ‘aesthetics’ with beauty, but Bishop gives special prominence to those participatory works of art that are not necessarily beautiful, but rather deliberately transgressive or disturbing. Consider one work evoked in Bishop’s narrative, the German artist Christoph Schlingensief ’s project Foreigners out! / Please love Austria (2000).40 The artist recruited a group of asylum seekers to inhabit a living container in the middle of Vienna for six days, in a social experiment that emulated the reality TV show Big Brother. In a grisly twist, the public could vote the contestants out of the container – and thereby out of the country – one by one, with the winner promised a cash prize and a visa through marriage to an Austrian citizen. Schlingensief, long an enfant terrible of the

Utility and Utopia

73

German-speaking art scene, staged his provocation at the time of high tensions in Austrian migrant policy: the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) had just celebrated an electoral success on a populist, anti-foreigner agenda, and had, for the first time, joined a government coalition. Schlingensief ’s container inevitably drew strong responses. Some FPÖ officials were outraged that their posters had been placed on the container, and threatened a lawsuit. Some activists on the Left took exception to the treatment of migrants and attempted to liberate them. Schlingensief himself sat by the container and challenged passers-by, often deliberately offending them or comparing current Austrian policy with Nazi Germany. The contrast to the useful or protest-based works of socially engaged art is clear enough. Schlingensief ’s intervention has no immediate (positive) consequences: it does not repair society, help the asylum seekers, or build a protest movement. Instead, the event creates an ethical transgression, which, like a vortex in the midst of public life, sucks everybody in society into its centrifuge, enforcing commentary from all sides. Such ‘antagonistic’ works, as Bishop has called them,41 certainly raise a lot of questions. There is the ethical question of artistic permissibility. Has the artist subjected the asylum seekers to an undignified or even dangerous situation; and can such treatment ever be justified by whatever value the work has as art? Chroniclers of the performance suggest that Schlingensief hired amateur actors, who may or may not have been asylum seekers themselves, to perform the role. As in much of Schlingensief ’s work, a deliberate blurring of fact and fiction makes it difficult to disentangle the ethics of the situation.42 Secondly, however, there is the mystery of the aesthetic value of the project: what is such a work supposed to achieve artistically, and what makes it, at least potentially, good art? One idea explored by Bishop is that these kinds of works draw attention to the true contradictions within society: ‘The disturbing lesson […] is that an artistic representation of detention has more power to attract dissensus than an actual

74

artists remake the world

institution of detention.’43 The role of art, then, might be both to raise awareness of the paradoxes in everyday politics, and to provide us with moments of conflict through which democracy might be properly reinvigorated. Bishop’s view has become associated with ‘aesthetics’ due to her usage of the term in Artificial Hells, but her focus on antagonism and provocation eventually takes us down a different path of inquiry. Artistic transgression, while a highly interesting subject (to which I will return in the next two chapters), is not specific to participatory art. Transgression can occur through purely symbolic acts, such as the desecration of a religious symbol (as in Andres Serrano’s notorious Piss Christ, 1987) or self-harm (as in Petr Pavlensky’s act of sewing his lips together in Seam, 2012). Such transgression, however, is not obviously connected to ‘aesthetics’, which Bishop sometimes invokes in relation to participatory art but does not yet give a full account of.44 So, let us take a few steps back and start with a more basic, perhaps even naive proposal: that aesthetic experience in art has to do with the creation of experiences that are in some sense extraordinary. This is what distinguishes art from mere action, and this is what we should investigate, if we want insight into the role of artistry in social engagement. There are many such elements of extraordinary and complex experience in Schlingensief ’s work, for sure: the mixing of reality and appearance, the dark subversion of the Big Brother scenario. But there also exist other, less exploitative ways of creating something out of the ordinary. To think through the role that the aesthetic might play in socially engaged work, consider, as our final example, the artistic practice of Bangladeshi artist Dilara Begum Jolly. Begum Jolly’s work often explores women’s labour, and in her exhibition Threads of Testimony (2014), she reflected on the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Dhaka, Bangladesh: the worst textile factory disaster in history, in which a building housing several garment factories collapsed, killing more than a thousand workers, mostly young women. In the immediate

Utility and Utopia

75

aftermath of the disaster, victims’ families, activists and volunteers scoured the site for survivors. As recounted by art historian Melia Belli Bose, Begum Jolly was one of several artists among these early responders, and one of several whose artworks later reflected on the disaster.45 In Threads of Testimony, a multi-room exhibition of textiles, works on paper and installation, Begum Jolly’s visual starting point is the simple, black-and-white posters which the victims’ families had placed around the city, in the hope of finding their lost daughters. Transferring the young women’s photographs onto prints, canvases and textiles, Begum Jolly gives them an ethereal, mournful quality. This peace is disturbed with the final installation. Here, a large table is set as if for a dinner party, but with dishes and cutlery made of plastic resin, into which Begum Jolly incorporates various personal effects, which she had recovered from the site of the disaster. Hair clips, safety pins, even strands of the victims’ hair are visible within the clear material, and the missing person posters are incorporated into the place mats (Plate 10). The artist then invited several factory managers to this ghoulish ‘dinner party’: one of them showed up, but left enraged as soon as he realised the nature of the invitation.46 To an outside observer, Begum Jolly’s work will appear primarily as a public condemnation of the garment industry. And rightly so: the factories in the structurally unsafe Rana Plaza building produced clothes for many Western brands, and the disaster must be seen as a symptom of grotesque global greed, as well as of local corruption.47 However, we must also try to think of the work from the perspective of those most closely involved with the disaster. In that context, the work is primarily one of mourning – sharing that function with funerary memorials – but it is also a work that is highly idiosyncratic in organising that experience. The artist creates a display that has its own narrative structure and emotional valences. What would it be like for a volunteer from Rana Plaza to recognise, say, a woman’s comb in the installation, reminding them of searching around the debris? What would it be like for one

76

artists remake the world

of the family members – whose permission Begum Jolly obtained for the use of their daughters’ images – to see that macabre table? We cannot answer any of those questions definitively; such experiences of the work are only accessible to those involved in the disaster. But the intended experience seems not to be purely one of activism or agitation: it is intentionally complex, laced with associations, allowing for emotions to come into shape without fully resolving them. Take one of the dining plates, which has a woman’s comb embedded in it: a work both beautiful and so pitilessly cruel, a mundane object, which, if we imagine handling it, could lead us to think of the lost life, of the painful anonymity of that fate, of what the factory manager, faced with a proposal to dine off it, should feel. That intended complexity of experience is what might lead us to describe the work, using our not yet fully defined term, as ‘aesthetic’. What might lead us to describe it as ‘socially engaged’ is simply that here the artist has strived to make such complex experiences available not to some ‘universal viewer’, but to a particular socially impacted group. The complexity grew out of the artist’s close link to these people, from their concerns, with their consent, and, to an extent, with their collaboration.48 We can here begin to offer a third answer to the question of what socially engaged art can contribute to politics. The artwork here is not socially engaged in the sense that it would contribute decisively to systemic change, but in that it builds complex engagement (something only art can do, or something that art can do especially well) in a socially specific setting. Socially engaged art is then less like an action, and more like a folk poem: complex in its artistry but arising out of and for a specific community. Like a folk poem, or a song, or a religious symbol, the work addresses itself to a crisis, but temporarily lets its spectators step out of their struggle, rather than persist inside it. The experience it offers is a crafted, deliberate confrontation with a set of feelings and thoughts, which are not entirely resolved, but which the audience can begin

Utility and Utopia

77

to grapple with. That is not to say that resoluteness is not necessary, or that change is not necessary – they are – but rather that political life also needs such moments of staying with the complexity of one’s experience, such moments of meditation. We will have to dig deeper into this description of the ‘aesthetic’ in the chapters to come (for now it simply means complexity, distance and reflection). But for now, we can say that socially engaged art is perhaps simply art which creates the opportunity for complex reflection in response to specific crises, and for specific communities. It is still art, but art where it is needed.

P ol i t i ca l , M o re P o l i t ical, M o s t P o l i t i ca l Art’s desire for immediate social relevance has led the makers of recent art towards ever more involved, ever more pragmatic activities. They thereby fulfil a long-nurtured dream of committed avant-gardes for the complete merging of art with (political) life. Philosopher Walter Benjamin, whose 1934 essay ‘The Author as Producer’ is often invoked in these discussions, already imagined the ideal politicised author as one seamlessly inhabiting the revolutionary proletariat. Merely depicting the proletariat, merely ‘siding’ with them, Benjamin claimed, was not enough; what the politicised author needed to do was to dismantle the bourgeois artistic form, like the novel, so that literary writing, in its very mode of production, would merge with the proletarian revolution. ‘There were not always novels in the past,’ wrote Benjamin, ‘and there will not always have to be.’49 In the Soviet Union, the ‘operating writer’ does not write novels, but edits the kolkhoz newspaper, calls mass meetings, inspects reading rooms. This ‘mighty recasting of literary forms’ 50 would make the proletarian writer into an altogether different beast, whose ‘mission is not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively’.51

78

artists remake the world

We witness a similar hankering for total relevance in politicised artists nearly a hundred years later, in our own time. Being ‘political’ is here conceived as a matter of degree, where, at one end, we might have ‘mere’ speech about political issues and, at the other, material changes brought about by action. The artist who acts is thought of as more political, by that token, than the one who merely speaks; and the artist who fully inhabits the struggle as perhaps the most political of them all. Such a logic, as I tried to argue in this chapter, ultimately does not lead to an account of political art, but recommends the assimilation of art to already available modes of political struggle. Of course, if we only value political efficiency, such a logic is entirely legitimate: nobody should be forced to be an artist, rather than, say, an NGO worker or a revolutionary. But, as I have tried to show, there might also be political value to more complex, more distinctly poetic forms of expression. After all, extraordinary, thrilling or puzzling experiences have not been produced only by the old ‘bourgeois’ forms like the novel or easel painting that Benjamin was so embarrassed about: they have been produced throughout history, in all social groups and classes, and today flourish in the football stadium, church choirs or on Netflix, no less so than in opera houses or art galleries. For an artist to be socially engaged, we might therefore think, they need not give up on art as something unusual or extraordin­ ary or impractical, they must rather think carefully about whose experience the art grows from, about how to open their art to a particular audience. Begum Jolly’s piece, created in collaboration with a specific grieving community, attempts to do so. Kateřina Šedá’s intervention in the small Czech village seems to be cut from that cloth too. Whether or not Šedá’s action delivered some measurable benefit to the community, her project seems ingenious because it provides an extraordinary, curious experience through which to reflect on one’s mode of life. Art’s difference from the ordinary is therefore that point of difference we must insist on to demonstrate art’s relevance to political

Utility and Utopia

79

life. (The logic is indeed quite simple: to demonstrate the interest of any x, you must discover what is distinctive about x.) Creating distance from objective modes of reasoning, as we saw in Chapter 2, is one such point of artistic distinction. Creating extraordinary spaces of reflection for different communities is another. But to insist on art’s difference from the ordinary now compels us to dig deeper into that contentious old term – the ‘aesthetic’ – at which so far we have only briefly glanced.

Chapter four

Worldmaking On the Role of Aesthetics in Political Art My t h , F a n ta s y, P l e a s u re

A

s I entered the exhibition In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery in London (2022), that odd little preposition at the beginning of the show’s title – ‘in’ – immediately struck me as apt. We are here fully inside a cohesive, dazzling, imaginative world, which is to say, outside the world as we knew it. American artist Nick Cave’s mannequins open the show. These full-body costumes, named ‘soundsuits’ after the sound they make while worn, include one that is studded with silvery sequins and has multi-coloured synthetic hair protruding from a gigantic hoodie, looking like a benign cyclops on his way to a disco (Soundsuit, 2014). Up the stairs, Kenyan-born American artist Wangechi Mutu shows sculptures and collages drawing on East African folklore. There is a statue of a female form, with a star-shaped head protruding upwards, both vulnerable and terrifying (The Backoff Dance, 2021, Plate 11). Further along, Liberian-British artist Lina Iris Viktor portrays herself as the Libyan Sibyl, the mythological prophetess, in photographs richly adorned with blue and red gouaches and 24-carat gold paint (Fourth, 2018, Plate 12). Even when we reach works that explicitly reference violence and tragedy – Sedrick Chisom’s post-apocalyptic paintings, or Kara Walker’s instantly

Worldmaking

81

recognisable shadow-puppets, both of which reference American racist brutality – there is an otherworldly imagination at work, which envelops the grave subject matter.1 While there is a politically serious kernel to these works, the viewer’s experience is nevertheless firmly linked to pleasure. One reviewer called the works ‘majestic and inexorable’; another described the exhibition as ‘a magnificent experience, spectacular from first to last’; while a third praised its aesthetic of ‘ornamentation and adornment, visual fabulousness and flair’.2 Let us look more closely at Wangechi Mutu’s sculpture (Plate 11). There is something grotesque about the deformations of the body, about the collections of white shells encrusted in groups, almost like writhing infestations. The figure appears to have been cut down, but then again, it might be kneeling in prayer, or dancing, its gaze turning upwards, where it explodes in a crown of fibreglass hair. The viewer’s pleasure here comes not from agreeableness, but from the strangeness and creativity: there is storytelling here, mythology, something we can hope to decipher. Mutu, as we learn from the accompanying materials, is concerned in her work with the objectification of a Black woman’s body; and the title’s reference to a ‘back off dance’ suggests the figure is reclaiming space for itself. A negative reality gives rise to a free play of imagination. And this is the case with other works too. Lina Iris Viktor’s luxurious self-portraits as the Sibyl allude to transatlantic slavery, which was said to be foretold by this mythical prophetess, in a nineteenth-century retelling of the story. Nick Cave started making his soundsuits in 1991 in response to the police murder of a young African-American man, Rodney King: the suits cover the whole body and so, symbolically at least, shield the wearer from harm. How could such beauty, fable and fantasy constitute an adequate political response to these negative realities? Ekow Eshun, the exhibition’s curator, situates the exhibition in ‘the era of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter’, and suggests its shift towards imagination ‘offers a thrilling invitation to embrace fantasy as a zone

82

artists remake the world

of creative and cultural liberation’.3 If this is so, however, we must immediately notice that fantasy offers a different path to politics than the works we have considered in this book so far. Like the evidence-driven art we encountered in Chapter 2, the artworks in In the Black Fantastic might point to uncomfortable political truths, but they do so more obliquely, only rarely citing facts or specific events. Instead, they offer fiction, allusion, allegory. What they share with the works of Chapter 3 is that we might associate them with a political movement (‘the time of Black Lives Matter’, as Eshun puts it), but the works do not step outside the gallery to join it. So, should one believe Eshun when he proclaims that, here, fantasy ‘has nothing to do with escapism’?4 More broadly: can the beautiful, fantastical or aesthetic idioms in art ever be fully in the service of political aims? While the relationship between art and politics has been the central theme of this book, we have so far only glanced at one problematic term: the aesthetic. The term has become used in so many different ways that it has become almost useless, but in this chapter, I will try to repurpose it in the sense given to it in the philosophical tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where it described a specific form of pleasure. I will argue that aesthetic experience in contemporary art has a constructive role to play in what I will call ‘worldmaking’: the reorganisation of how the audience interpret their social world. In developing such visions, contemporary art plays an experimental role in preparing the ground for later social change. After affirming the connection between aesthetics and politics in this way, however, we must also consider objections that arise for aesthetic artworks in the capitalist context, where any expression of a political ideal can quickly become a mere lifestyle choice. To resist becoming a lifestyle, artists who exploit aesthetics and pleasure must also perform ‘world-unmaking’: the transgressive, negative or ethically ambiguous artistic visions which unhinge the hidden flaws in our ways of organising reality.

Worldmaking

83

Worldmaking Within the first decades of the twenty-first century, a loose but noticeable thread has appeared in the art critical vocabulary to describe the use of myth, fabulation, speculative fiction and cosmology in art: worldmaking. For example, ‘alternative worldmaking’ is a phrase used by cultural scholar Jayna Brown to describe Black diasporic speculative art and science fiction;5 the creation of ‘counterworlds’ is how artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo describes her insertions of Mesoamerican Indigenous myth into videos and installations;6 ‘worlding’ is the term used by the philosopher Donna Haraway to describe how science-fiction and art can propose various new political visions.7 The origins of such terms in the art writing and scholarship of the 2010s and 2020s appear to be quite diverse. We might find here an echo of ‘world-building’ in fantasy and science fiction: the process of explaining the rules of the fictional universe to the reader.8 We may also trace these terms to the recent critical theory interest in Indigenous and Native cosmologies,9 as well as to a return within Western academic philosophy to ontology, that is, the traditional philosophical study of the nature of existence.10 Rather than a tightly defined term, ‘worldmaking’ then appears as a manner of speaking about art that has recently been formed from dispersed influences. For now, we might distil from these art critical discussions a particular intuition: that artistic fiction – possibly highly fantastic, speculative or mythological fiction – should play a role in expressing the interest of disenfranchised communities, including people of colour and Indigenous peoples. To be clearer on the role that such artistic practices can play in the political process, let me focus on one particular account of ‘worldmaking’ – the American philosopher Nelson Goodman’s now somewhat forgotten definition of this concept. Goodman, who was active in the analytic tradition from the 1940s to the 1980s, did not have much to say on the political role of art (his initial specialisations were logic and philosophy of science), but he

84

artists remake the world

did offer a fascinating account of how artworks describe the world. Artworks, thought Goodman, are unlike declarative sentences in that they do not make statements about the world, but they organise our experience of it. They do so through exemplification: ‘Serving as samples of, and thereby focusing attention upon, certain […] shared or shareable forms, colors, feelings, such works induce reorganization of our accustomed world in accordance with these features.’11 A picture of a car need not refer to any particular car, neither does it claim that such a car exists. But when painted in a particular way – say, in a Futurist style – the picture may alert us to some features of the world which we should look out for: the speed of urban life, for example. Style therefore matters a lot more than subject matter for Goodman; and, he thought, it is through such stylistic organisation that artworks create systems for understanding our environment.12 Different aspects of the world now strike us as worthy of attention, different connections as more salient. And while Goodman does not refer to fantastical fiction especially, we may see how his account easily explains its value. Even works with the most fantastical subject matter can reorganise our perception in the here and now. The entirely fictional and fantastical figures shown at the In the Black Fantastic exhibition can make the actual social situation of the African diaspora now appear more important or magnificent, more deserving of centrality within the shared culture. The idea that artworks offer something like such a lens for organising experience has been explored many times in philosophy. For instance, as distinct as the following thinkers may be, we find the idea explored in what the critic John Berger called a ‘way of seeing’,13 Jacques Rancière ‘the distribution of the sensible’14 and, as we saw above, in what Donna Haraway calls ‘worlding’. By reorganising perception, art becomes relevant to politics in a manner that separates it quite sharply both from overt political discussion and from activism. This can perhaps best be illustrated by examples from which we have some historical distance. Consider David Hockney’s painting Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966), a painting that won

Worldmaking

85

the John Moores Painting Prize in Liverpool in 1967 and helped to cement the painter’s reputation (Plate 13). In the canvas, a young man is shown hoisting himself out of the swimming pool. Shown from the back, his tanned back and buttocks are in the very centre of the composition, just above the electric shimmer of the swimming pool, painted in Hockney’s trademark white and red squiggly lines. The homoerotic charge in the painting was clearly at odds with social views in Britain at the time. Gay sex was only decriminalised in 1967 (and only partly), and of course was far from being accepted.15 Yet this clash between the painting and the social attitudes does not derive from any statement the painting makes. The picture contains no commentary on current events, and no argument for the acceptance of homosexuality. Rather, the painting organises the perceptible world in such a way that gay desire appears salient. This painting is a sample by which to look at the world (to adopt Goodman’s term); it redistributes the sensible in a way that makes gay desire worthy of attention (to adopt Rancière’s term). The world the artist ‘makes’ is one in which gay life is something positive, alluring, perhaps melancholy; but it is no longer just a barely tolerated perversion. Let us, then, define artistic worldmaking as just such an attempt to influence how our shared information in the world is organised. Worldmaking through art involves making images that shape our cognitive habits: it is art’s way of suggesting a pattern of thought about what appears normal, what appears salient, and how we are moved to evaluate and explain phenomena. The work allows the viewer to try on such a set of dispositions. I can look away from the Hockney canvas and recognise gay desire as important or even valid. I can leave the In the Black Fantastic exhibition and a part of it sticks with me, as I contemplate Black life or experience in British culture. I will refer to such a set of cognitive dispositions suggested by an artwork as a ‘worldview’ or a ‘manifest world’: the world as it appears to us to be.16 ‘Counterworlds’ may then be thought of as cognitive patterns that clash with the socially dominant patterns of thought. Hockney’s sunlit, Elysian painting, in which gay desire is

86

artists remake the world

purged of contempt or persecution, certainly clashed with the overall outlook in society at the time. Worldmaking is then also not limited to science-fiction: it can occur through any representational form of art, which succeeds in guiding the viewer’s system of perceiving the world in a distinct manner. Artistic worldmaking is important because political process is not merely an arena where views are deliberated, nor merely one in which actions are performed, but also a space in which a shared manifest world, a shared way of looking, is negotiated. If we switch to the American context of the 1960s and 1970s, roughly contemporaneous with Hockney, we may think of feminist artists (Carolee Schneemann, Judy Chicago …), or of painters around the Black Power movement (Faith Ringgold, Wadsworth Jarrell …), as some of those who articulated a more assertive vision for women and people of colour in their society. We might also recall the term ‘oppositional gaze’, coined by bell hooks within Black feminist theory to signify a defiant looking back, to describe this process of emancipatory perception.17 Here, we can think of exhibition-based arts as the more experimental space within the broader culture, wherein new counterworlds can be first articulated. Hockney’s vision of gay desire as something acceptable or beautiful, shared by a relatively small audience in the 1960s, of course had become much more commonplace in Britain by the 2010s, and is now reflected in mainstream film, music and television. It would be hard to explain the astounding shift in the political and legal status of queer people in most democratic countries over the last half a century without invoking that broader shift of sensibilities in cultural production. A similar story, with variations, can be told about the change in social and political attitudes towards other traditionally disenfranchised groups – women, people of colour, ethnic and religious minorities – whose ongoing process for civic status has animated the history of civil rights in democracies of the twentieth century. And while it would be overblown to say that any one artwork, such as Hockney’s painting, changed the course of these histories, or even changed the

Worldmaking

87

minds of everyone who looked at it, we can identify the important role for the arts in taking the initial steps of that process. For the moment, then, let us hold onto this model of worldmaking: the arts can articulate an emancipatory way of seeing, which can proliferate through increasingly broad avenues of culture, and thereby lay the ground for changes in policy, social relations and the law. Artistic articulation of worldview is not merely a manner of asserting one set of values against another, but is more often a case of inventing a new way of organising perception. Hockney’s vision of queer desire was remarkable because it was not yet readily available in the culture. In recent decades, we can observe a comparable need for creativity, for instance, in the work of artists who assert their Indigenous and Native heritages in an often uncertain or hostile environment. Nahua and Mexican artist Fernando Palma Rodríguez, for example, revives Aztec deities and myth through manipulation of animatronic objects. Soldado (‘soldier’, 2001) is a small robot made of discarded materials, metal parts and a cardboard head, composed to resemble a coyote (Plate 14). Attached to electrical wires, it marches forwards, but can never truly move, as it is tethered by a rope to another strange constellation of objects. At Palma Rodríguez’s exhibition in Los Angeles (House of Gaga, 2018), Soldado was accompanied by other automata, such as a sacrificial stone slab with a face of a goddess with a robotic hand holding a chair (Coatlicue / Xipetotec, 2018), or three figures made of palm mats and cables, their hands extended as if in conversation (Los nahuales, 2017). Palma Rodríguez’s worldmaking tallies with his efforts to preserve Indigenous Nahuatl language and culture in the modern age – together with his relatives, he also runs an educational non-governmental organisation teaching Nahuatl language – but it is the specific creative choices he makes that are remarkable.18 An ancient culture, long oppressed under colonialism, cannot simply be rebooted; the work is not some neo-nationalist attempt to rebuild an Aztec temple. Instead, these scraps of modern life animated by the spirits of old deities appear awkward, as if the

88

artists remake the world

artist is negotiating a cultural vision that is affirmative, but also careful and melancholy. We can compare Palma Rodríguez’s work with that of Naomi Rincón Gallardo, who likewise inserts Mesoamerican myth into her works (both artists exhibited at the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022), but combines these with elements of feminist and queer counterculture. Rincón Gallardo’s The Formaldehyde Trip (2017) is a multi-channel video installation and performance series. In fragmentary videos, we see characters in carnivalesque costumes, travelling across a river under the protection of a gigantic puppet; this is an axolotl, a nearly extinct, endemic salamander species significant in Aztec myth (Plate 15). The central figure is Alberta ‘Bety’ Cariño, an activist for the rights of Mexico’s Indigenous people, who was killed by a paramilitary group in 2010. The video fragments imagine Cariño’s journey into the underworld. The painful reference point aligns the work with a political struggle of Indigenous people in Mexico against extractive industries, but here the struggle is given a specific, fantastical lens. Compared to Palma Rodríguez’s work, Rincón Gallardo’s casts the struggle of Indigenous peoples in Mexico as more explicitly aligned with the rights of non-human beings (represented by the axolotl), and with a queer, post-patriarchal, feminist understanding of the self (suggested through the joyful, extraordinary and humorous personages in the video). That is not to say that the visions of these artists are opposed to each other. My point is simply that envisioning any emancipatory way of seeing the world requires invention and creativity; and it is the specific choices of the artists that give that vision its distinct direction. Whether through fantasy, myth-making or storytelling, artistic visions represent the experimental part of the political process, which may lead to a more equitable society. Yet before we can be fully satisfied with such an account of artistic worldmaking, we must consider at least two objections that readily arise. First, my account has so far had little to say about the artistic accomplishment of these artists; and so one might worry that we have simply reduced

Worldmaking

89

art to the expression of certain positive values. Even bell hooks, one of the most politically activist writers on art, has written that simply categorising images into those expressive of ethically ‘good’ or ‘bad’ social positions diminishes them: ‘How can we truly see, experience, and appreciate all that may be present in any work of art if our only concern is whether it shows us a positive or negative image?’19 A picture of children of different ethnicities holding hands also expresses a positive value: is there any difference between such a cliché and impressive works of art? And secondly, we must confront the possibility that even the most inspiring artistic visions allow our institutions to merely perform inclusivity, while leaving systemic problems and inequalities unaddressed. The worry here is similar to the scepticism about cultural institutions expressed by some socially engaged artists encountered in the last chapter. When Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s animatronics are encountered among the glitz of the Venice Biennale, one could feel that even the most emancipatory artworks can be used by the broader system to cover up indifference and inertia, whether in cultural institutions or in the society at large.

A est h e t i c E x pe r i e n ce and Reo rg a n i s i n g P e rce p t io n You walk into a gallery and come across an installation. It consists of false pearls, stamps, fairy lights and other small items, some of which are suspended on interlocked strings while others are plastered onto small, silvery, abstract sculptures. The label on the wall informs you that the work is called Weaving the Other, and elaborates that ‘in their critical art practice, the artist combines aspects of installation, weaving, sound work and intertextuality to think subversive positions of race, migration and sexuality’. The items on the strings, we are told, are taken from the various places where the artist has lived their itinerant life, and the practice of weaving them

90

artists remake the world

together is inspired by a traditional weaving technique somewhere in the Global South. The interlocking strings, we are told, ‘evoke the migratory routes that connect the subaltern global citizens, and their layered stories of conflict, resilience and resistance’. I have changed some of the details and the name of the work, since it is not my intention to single out one artist for criticism: but something like this scenario offers a fairly typical, disappointing encounter in contemporary art, and captures the kind of case our objections above point to. The work purportedly addresses an important political theme and, from that perspective, can be categorised as politically progressive. But how the work communicates its message is what we might call mere wall label politicking: the work’s meaning is accessible only through the curator-speak on the wall, which in vaguely theoretical language (the use of the verb ‘think’ without a preposition is one favourite) declares what issues the artwork is meant to be addressing. In wall label politicking, verbs denoting inquiry (‘thinks’, or ‘explores’, or ‘evokes’, or ‘investigates’…) often conceal an entirely arbitrary connection between the symbol and the referent. I am not here attacking the labour of art interpretation, nor abstraction as such, both of which can be important and difficult to do well. Rather, it is that, in this cheap version of art politics, the only mental operation left for the viewer to perform is to acknowledge that something in the artwork (such as the weaving pattern) refers to something outside it (such as migration). But there is nothing, in either the work or the label, which would reorganise the viewer’s perception of the world; nothing that would amount to viewing, say, migration or migrants differently. After all, what we see are a few inoffensive, silvery sculptures, perhaps with a few ‘significant’ materials thrown in. The politics of the work begin and end here with the statement of intent. While this might justify the inclusion of the work in a museum collection, it adds little to political discourse.20 As dissatisfying as such works can be, their failure can help us more precisely determine what distinguishes mere political signalling

Worldmaking

91

from genuine attempts at worldmaking. One element of that difference, I would suggest, is aesthetic experience. But before defining this historically unstable and much-abused philosophical term, let me first try to draw out the contrast between wall label politics and worldmaking in one of the examples we have encountered so far. Let us look again at one of Lina Iris Viktor’s mixed-media works from the series A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred, which appeared in the In the Black Fantastic exhibition (Plate 12). This work comes from a series of eleven painted-on photographs, which show the artist as the Libyan Sibyl, a figure from Greek antiquity. There is a specific pleasure that a work like this offers: a pleasure that derives from following the work’s internal structure. In the fourth picture of the series, we see the Sibyl standing, her face an onyx-black mask, against a background of gold, blue and red symbols, holding an open book. As I try to piece together what all this might mean, I might delight in recognising parts of the artist’s concept in the painting (the book presumably contains her prophecy), and I might pause at the parts that seem significant but remain mysterious to me (such as the flower in the Sibyl’s hands, repeated across the series). There is an excitement in this mental process, a little similar to the pleasure of deciphering a Renaissance painting. In my exploration, I am also guided by materials external to the work. The wall text informs me that nineteenth-century slavery abolitionists adapted the legend of the Libyan Sibyl, having her foretell the disaster of American slavery, and likening her to the abolitionist Sojourner Truth.21 Later, Liberia, the West African country of the artist’s origin, was colonised by freed African-Americans who, however, went on to commit the crime of slavery against the indigenous population. But these bits of information do not suggest one-on-one correspondences within the painting; they are the context that lets me figure out my own, more open-ended interpretation. I may notice that the Libyan Sibyl has become the Liberian Sibyl (‘sibylla liberica’ written in golden letters; I might notice the Liberian flag in the upper right corner), but is she foretelling liberation or a tragedy? The black-and-white

92

artists remake the world

foliage in the bottom right corner: is it a window onto paradise, or a misconception of Africa that informed the American colonial project? We might describe what is going on between Viktor’s painting and me here as an ‘aesthetic experience’. Admittedly, since its origins in eighteenth-century German philosophy, this term has come to designate a myriad of unrelated things, from style (the ‘punk aesthetic’, the ‘manga aesthetic’) to bodily appearance (‘aesthetic dentistry’, ‘aesthetic surgery’). Here I am using the term in the sense closer to Immanuel Kant’s understanding of the aesthetic, which is that aesthetic experience is a pleasure that arises from the free, playful activity of our mental capacities.22 Aesthetic experience happens when the mind follows the work’s internal structure: puzzling at the meaning of symbols, observing the interplay of forms, perhaps when following twists in a story or noticing an unresolved melody in a piece of music.23 In the case of Viktor’s painting, there is a lot of such play for my mind to undertake; in the case of our Weaving the Other installation, there is little, because I am simply told what it is supposed to mean. While the latter might look pretty (what Kant calls ‘agreeable’),24 it is aesthetically poor in just the same way that an advertisement showing children holding hands (which symbolises something like ‘world peace’) is aesthetically poor. There is nothing there for the viewer to mentally play with; all the viewer can do is acknowledge the intended meaning.25 Aesthetic experience is therefore not the experience of something looking ‘nice’ or ‘pleasant’ at all. Aesthetics can even involve objects we might call ‘ugly’ (incongruous, grotesque, strange): what matters is the profundity of engagement, the joy of figuring out the purpose of each of the work’s elements and how it all hangs together. Aesthetic experience is then the kind of pleasure that involves the intellect, though not in any way exclusive to ‘high’ art or formalism. It can be found in the intrigue of a plot twist in a folk tale; in the mystery of symbols in a religious ritual; in the complexity of an ending in a television series; in the strange significance of sampling

Worldmaking

93

of an older tune in a new electronic track; in an unexpected lyric of a pop song. The free play of the ‘mind’ here is simply the joy of the thought process which the artwork provides us with: the sense of a purposeful structure in the work, which the viewer can explore.26 The crucial suggestion I want to make, however, is that aesthetic pleasure is precisely that which enables artistic worldmaking to take place. The artistically exciting work preoccupies the viewer in an absorbing mental process, and that is what leads them to organise information differently. The artistically disappointing works, meanwhile, merely stand for a certain political message, much like a traffic sign might stand for telling you to stop. In the case of Viktor’s series, for example, I might not think at all about the work’s (political) ‘message’; I might simply enjoy myself as I contemplate the mystery of the symbols, but that is what gives a particular feel to how I am engaging with the history of Black diaspora. If I were asked to look away from the painting and to go on telling that history, I would have a sense of how to continue. This would not be a wretched or self-pitying story, but rather tragic, epic, exalted; a history populated with mythical prophetesses and grave decisions, with gold and with colour, rather than with suffering and subjugation. While I am aesthetically absorbed in Viktor’s paintings, the greater change, the artist’s re-arrangement of my perception of Black history, occurs, as it were, stealthily, in the corner of my eye. With a work like Weaving the Other, or with an advertisement showing children linking hands, there is no world for me to enter in the same way, precisely because the artwork itself offers no pleasurable depth. The aesthetic experience is that glue which momentarily renders the artist’s worldview the viewer’s own. It might well be that Viktor’s paintings don’t do it for you: perhaps you just don’t connect with the style, or you are not familiar enough with the histories they show to access their content. How and when we undergo aesthetic experience depends on the viewer’s interests, prior knowledge, even temperament; and no artwork is going to be successful with every possible viewer. The extent to

94

artists remake the world

which a work is successful, however, depends on artistic skill. The artist must know how to feed the audience just enough information and enough mystery to keep them involved; she must know how to exploit the principles of story, or form, or drama, or symbolism, to keep them mentally occupied. But to the extent that a work does succeed in absorbing you – when you are really ‘into’ an artwork, to use the informative colloquialism – then this is precisely what makes you see the world on the work’s terms, even if only momentarily. Pleasure, then, is necessary for worldmaking. Artistic skill, to continue the argument, is relevant to politics in just this way: the ability to engross the viewer in the aesthetic experience of the work is precisely what enables a reorganisation of experience. Art, in this sense, contains a different form of persuasion than one that proceeds by arguments. While fantasy and science fiction are of course not the only paths towards aesthetic experience, we can nevertheless now say a bit more about their appeal for the artists in the 2010s and 2020s, who have been concerned with the politics of recognition for people of colour, Indigenous people, queer people and other disenfranchised groups. The artist will find it relatively easier to involve her viewers in an aesthetic experience, that playful absorption into the work, when they are familiar with how to go about contemplating the work, when they already know the conventions of interpretation and genre that the artwork incorporates. Into the 2000s, fantasy and sci-fi have become ubiquitous genres in popular mainstream media and are therefore one way of securing the viewer’s engagement, a common language between the artist and her audience. As curator of In the Black Fantastic Ekow Eshun puts it, ‘thanks to the wild popularity of superhero movies and TV shows like Game of Thrones, fantasy has become the dominant cultural language of our times’.27 While artists like Viktor, Mutu or Rodríguez have been able to draw on rich traditions of Indigenous storytelling and Black diasporic speculative fiction such as Afrofuturism,28 their works also have a certain broad legibility, because their audiences have been reared on the mainstream

Worldmaking

95

fantasy spectacles like X-Men, Black Panther or Lord of the Rings. It is also against this culture industry background that the presence of Aztec myths in Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s automata adds to their intrigue; or that Kenyan folklore in Wangechi Mutu’s portraits of mythical seawater women may feel accessible to her audiences. In other words, if an artist’s goal is to create counter-cultural worldviews (a new way of organising experience), the artist must rely on at least some well-established common ground with the audience. It is for the same reason that we notice among these recent politic­ ally committed artists not just a return to fantasy and mythology, but even a more general return to almost pre-modernist, intuitive, ‘organic’ genres: we will find here fairly little abstract sculpture and conceptual art, and much more in terms of figurative painting, portraiture and storytelling.29 Such a return in recent political art to aesthetics, absorption, fable, mythologies and figurative art, we can now see, does not amount to escapism, nor to traditionalism for its own sake. They are the means through which the artist can entangle the viewer into a new vision, a way of seeing in which previously disenfranchised lives can hopefully flourish.

Ma kin g W o r l d s a n d U n m a king The m My narrative so far might suggest that artistic worldmaking is always a constructive and affirmative process. But, of course, not all visions are emancipatory: aesthetic engagement can just as readily organise the world in a manner that is oppressive or ethically suspect. The worry that art might ‘seduce’ us into some politically and morally corrupt worldview has therefore arisen in various political contexts – historically and today – and provided the grounds for censorship. Within the context of capitalist democracies, where censorship is still comparably minimal, however, another worry is more important: that even the most politically uplifting worldviews might be guilty of superficiality. Through culture it is easy, indeed too easy,

96

artists remake the world

to embrace an emancipatory political outlook, while leaving the deeper structure of a political system unexamined. A Che Guevara T-shirt may give its wearer a sense of anti-establishment rebellion without offering much reflection on the system of commerce it is a part of; an audacious girl band can give the listener a sense of female empowerment, but its lyrics might not afford much thought on the world she lives in. Exhibition-based artworks might likewise offer a thrilling vision of freedom, while allowing us to pass over more specific, more critical reflections on the world we find ourselves in. We can easily imagine a Sunday trip to the galleries to gawk at the newest emancipatory art, before returning to business as usual; or a super-rich collector buying one of these pieces in a blue-chip gallery, without reflecting on the broader hierarchies of extreme wealth and poverty that such a transaction is a part of. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it in their famous take-down of the American consumer culture, writing in the 1940s: ‘All are free to dance and amuse themselves […] But freedom to choose an ideology, which always reflects economic coercion, everywhere proves to be freedom to be the same.’30 To attend to this objection – the second of the two I raised – we must therefore insert our discussion into the social context where artistic worldmaking takes place. This context is broader than just that of the art market. Even though the art market wields a significant influence in contemporary art, that influence is not total, as we saw in Chapter 1, and is counterbalanced to an extent by the work of independent art criticism, academia, public commissions and so forth. The context we should consider is broader: it is the public sphere in capitalist democracies, where the shared manifest world is negotiated through the totality of visual culture we are exposed to, including the arts, film, music, fashion, advertising and so on. What is important to note here is that, in the context of free enterprise, even the worldviews that are quite at odds with the dominant political distribution of power, or even at odds with dominant societal values, can exist as vehicles of the culture industry.

Worldmaking

97

In this sense, contemporary capitalist democracies are quite unlike authoritarian regimes (such as contemporary Russia, Iran or China), where the expression of moral or political worldviews through the arts is tightly policed by the state. Most democracies today also do not exhibit what is called (following Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci) a cultural hegemony, where a single cultural outlook would be enforced by an unofficial network of church, education and media.31 While some capitalist democracies may exhibit elements of the hegemony in subsections of the society – we may think of Hindu nationalism in parts of India or Evangelical Christian populism in parts of the United States – most are today closer to what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described as ‘liquid modernity’: a situation where different worldviews are freely expressed by the culture industry, and citizens can dip in and out of these as they please.32 A citizen in the United States, Germany, Japan, Argentina or Chile today can be a radical progressive in her early twenties and a traditionalist by her mid-thirties; she can be an eco-warrior spiritualist during her early morning yoga routine, and a hardened business executive in the afternoon. Different sociopolitical outlooks are entered as lifestyles – like dyeing your hair green, or wearing a tie – through which both group identities and commercial products are devised. As Bauman writes, ‘the culture of liquid modernity has no “populace” to enlighten or ennoble; it does, however, have clients to seduce’.33 Each product of the culture industry, artworks not exempted, may therefore quickly seem less like a route to emancipation and more like an illusion, which distracts the viewer from studying the power relations within the society. Such a critique, articulated by a long line of critical theorists from Adorno to Bauman, today still rings true, especially when commercial interest disguises itself in the sheep’s clothing of counterculture. In its most pessimistic formulation, this line of criticism therefore gives up on art and culture as positive political forces altogether. As virtually every kind of cultural worldmaking is enabled by some combination of state funds or

98

artists remake the world

commercial capital, it is always possible to perceive any work as complicit with the system that ultimately enables it. Here I wish to pursue a less pessimistic option, formulating this criticism not as an insurmountable obstacle, but rather as a dilemma that exists for artistic expression in capitalist democracies. On the one hand, artistic and cultural worldmaking within ‘the system’ is necessary to create a more equitable society. As said, it is difficult to imagine the considerable progress in the cultural position of women, gay people and ethnic minorities within capitalist democracies since the 1950s, without taking into account the change in representation of these groups within the arts and culture. In our own time, even cultural products as commercialised as Disney and Marvel blockbusters can have a positive impact when they embrace more diverse casting practices, thereby enabling a generation to see themselves represented in superheroes and fairy tales.34 Adorno and Horkheimer, then, were wrong to think that the culture industry plays a wholly negative role, or that it creates merely an illusion of freedom. Yet there is another horn to the dilemma. Precisely because such visions are so affirmative, they risk softening the critical stance towards the overall political and economic system that produces them. Progressive outlooks in Marvel or Disney get the entire system off the hook; we can watch Pocahontas or Black Panther and, feeling uplifted by them, now feel that the problems of racial inequality have dissolved. It is no different with the works of exhibition-based art. Progressive worldmaking, while necessary, also always runs the risk that we will mistake acts of cultural imagination for the totality of political change that is needed. The path out of the dilemma is therefore not to give up on artistic worldmaking altogether, but to think of worldmaking as a dynamic process. The artist must imagine a set of values without thereby quelling the spirit of critique. As important as it is to give an account of worldmaking, therefore, it is just as important to imagine what we might call world ‘unmaking’: the path towards feeling uncomfortable, not at home, in the modes of seeing we inhabit.35

Worldmaking

99

On a closer look, many of the artworks in an exhibition-based artworld attempt to stage precisely such discomfort. Let me introduce a new example: a work that we might at first glance label as difficult and even transgressive. Slovenian artist Maja Smrekar is one of the artists today attempting to formulate an emancipatory vision for non-human animals: imagining worlds in which nonhuman species are not seen just as a resource, but rather as our extended family, or kin (echoing Donna Haraway’s injunction to ‘make kin, not babies’).36 In Smrekar’s artistic imagination, such a world is largely portrayed positively, and yet it is also often shot through with discomfort and ethical ambiguity (Plate 16). In her tetralogy K-9_topology (2014–17), for instance, the artist creates performances and biotechnological interventions on the theme of the millennia-long relationship between dogs and humans. For the first work, Ecce Canis (2014), Smrekar worked with bioengineers to extract serotonin molecules from her body and combine them with those of her dogs. The resulting synthetic molecule forms the basis of a perfume, which the audience members can smell as they crawl through a tunnel padded with animal furs. The narrative structure of her works, relayed through text and voiceover, involves an episode from Smrekar’s rural upbringing when, as a girl, she could hear the killing of a pig and, frightened by the noise, ran home to huddle with her dog, hiding under a blanket of animal fur. While the world Smrekar envisions in her installations and performances is one of a deep bond between humans and non-humans, forged out of a joint fear of death, her works become increasingly provocative: she lies naked on the stage while wolves and dogs lick starch off her body (I Hunt Nature and Culture Hunts Me, 2014); she feeds her breastmilk to a puppy (Hybrid Family, 2016); finally, she has her egg cells extracted and conjoined with a nucleus of a dog cell, suggesting a fantasy of the two merging (ARTE_mis, 2017). Smrekar’s vision is not a rose-tinted picture of the perfect co­­ existence of humans and non-humans; she is no Disney princess frolicking with animals. The moments of excess within the work

100

artists remake the world

balance the moments of warmth; we are intrigued and repulsed with equal force. Smrekar’s work is firmly within the tradition of artistic transgression – we may think of Marina Abramović’s selfendangering performances, or Robert Mapplethorpe’s sadomaso­ chistic photographs, or Christoph Schlingensief ’s antagonistic participatory works (discussed in the previous chapter) – whereby the artist offends against some commonly held moral sensibility. As we look away from the work, an entirely new, closer relationship with non-humans may seem possible; but equally, the uncomfortable moments in the work, like the artist’s obsessive attempt to hybridise her cells with her dog’s in ARTE_mis (the surrounding installation contains a creepy nursery room), prevent any easy identification with that future vision. We are given not easy belief, but an ethical knot, which, if we were to begin to tug at it, might make the entire vision unravel. Distinguishing themselves from mere fantasies of ethical harmony in the official culture, critical world-makers must therefore also unmake the worlds they make; they do not merely create a positive new vision, but also show its fragility or limits. Let us look again at Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s set of videos and performative screenings, The Formaldehyde Trip (2017), which imagine the journeying into the afterlife of Bety Cariño, the murdered Indigenous rights and food sovereignty activist (Plate 15).37 A casual viewer first happening upon The Formaldehyde Trip in San Francisco or Innsbruck, where the work was shown, would probably not immediately register Cariño’s story within it; instead, they would likely be struck by the work’s tumult, otherworldliness and joy. Each video segment is almost like a music video, in which we see costumed personages – one with a neon pink painted face and a silvery hat that resembles breasts, another with luminous nipple-tassels – strutting around, cooking, frolicking in mud, dancing. Sung poetry tracks meander between lo-fi disco and punk: in the lyrics, we catch references to Indigenous myth or queer desire. Gradually, the viewer might cotton onto the deeper layers of the narrative, such as the appearance of

Worldmaking

101

Alexander von Humboldt, the eighteenth-century German geographer, who captured axolotl specimens, and now appears to be tripping in a formaldehyde-induced dream. But if left only with this feverish collage of impressions, a careless viewer might have mistaken the exhibit for merely asserting a certain queer aesthetic (by now made mainstream in such television fixtures as RuPaul’s Drag Race). Importantly, however, there is an element that punctures any such illusion. In one, and only one, of the video segments, all this dreamy fabulation is suspended. The screen goes dark and we hear a recording of a speech by Bety Cariño, which she gave in 2009, denouncing the murder of activist Mariano Abarca. Abarca was killed, allegedly by associates or sympathisers of the Canadian company Blackfire Exploration, whose mining plans in Mexico he was protesting. Cariño’s articulate, impassioned call against the state and corporate destruction of Indigenous lives rings out at this crucial moment in the piece. She herself was murdered only a few months after making the speech, by a militia allied to the Oaxaca state government. Moments of such world ‘unmaking’ in art – such punctures of the manifest world created by the artwork – are similar to what the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht already called an estrangement effect (Verfremdungseffekt): the breaking of the fourth wall in theatre, to remind the audience that what they see is fiction, and thereby require them to perform a critical appraisal of its power.38 In contemporary art, such opportunities for a moment of questioning arrive in many other ways too: by breaking up storytelling with an incursion of real-life struggle (as in Rincón Gallardo’s work), in the ethical ambiguity of the artist’s actions (as in Smrekar’s work), in the uncanny appearance of half-alive objects (in Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s animatronics). An artist may also turn the tables on the viewer, recalling their potential complicity in extant power relations. For instance, at the opening of a gallery exhibition in London, where Wangechi Mutu first exhibited her work with motifs from the East African nguva myth (Plate 11), the audience were also asked to eat

102

artists remake the world

chocolates in the shape of these mermaid-like creatures, and post the images on Instagram.39 Suddenly, another reading of Mutu’s work becomes available: the audiences, the gallery, perhaps even the artist herself, are all part of an economic arrangement, where objectification of Black women’s bodies is part of a path towards success and self-promotion. We can accept Mutu’s vision, but only if we reflect on the ambiguous role that we, as viewers, might be playing within it. The work of artists like Smrekar, Palma Rodríguez, Viktor, Rincón Gallardo and Mutu – diverse as they are in their political contexts and artistic media – show us that worldmaking is a task that requires an interplay of vision and distance, and that is because in democratic capitalism even progressive outlooks can quickly become mere opportunism. After all, it is all too easy to imagine a society in which the culture constantly celebrates inclusive values – Disney’s now ethnically diverse cast of princesses, the rainbow flags that businesses hang in their shop windows for Pride – but leaves behind any inquiry into the inequitable (global) power structures that can underwrite such celebrations. For the emancipatory, worldmaking artist to become more than a harbinger of democracy’s official culture, the artist must create seams in which worldmaking falls apart, reminding us that any vision requires doubt, that any assertion of value can obscure unperceived flaws.

Th ree M o d e l s o f P o l i t i c al Art Within the last three chapters, I have considered three broad turns in contemporary exhibition-based art in the early twenty-first century: a turn towards evidence-based art, towards socially engaged art and, in this chapter, towards ‘worldmaking’ through myth, fantasy and fabulation. While these three developments do not exhaust the breadth of contemporary political art in recent decades, they help us reflect on three ways to understand the political process in our time,

Worldmaking

103

and the role that art may play within it. As we saw in Chapter 2, the realist and evidence-based art conceives of politics as discourse; these works draw into light the uncomfortable truths that require a redistribution of power or a redress of an injustice. In Chapter 3, various forms of socially engaged art conceive of politics as action; allying the artist to the activist and the social worker, they attempt to mobilise and bring about change. But in this chapter, we have studied a form of social engagement that may at first glance seem less tangible and immediate: politics as the creation of a shared manifest world, that is, the shared mode of perceiving, organising and evaluating information. Political accomplishment for these artists constitutes neither a direct commentary on a political situation, nor mobilisation for a particular cause, but rather a different form of ‘remaking’ the world, that is, an attempt to reconfigure the shared ways of seeing. Admittedly, in reshaping social worldviews, contemporary exhibition-based artworks wield less influence than various forms of popular mass culture – film, television series, popular music – but from within their culturally niche position they can propose ways of worldmaking that are more experimental and daring than what would have been possible to accomplish within the cultural mainstream. Of course, all forms of worldmaking exist in a context, and, as we saw, there are many reasons within contemporary democracies why even the most emancipatory vision of the world can become a mere corporate advertisement, an easy ‘like’ on social media, a change to a company’s branding, a new fashionable posture to adopt. The self-critical consciousness preserved in works of art is therefore at least as important as the worldview they can articulate. It is hard to strike the right balance – to find a vision between naïveté and cynicism – and doing so requires an awareness of the broader infrastructure within which social communication takes place. In the twenty-first century that infrastructure has, however, itself changed: it has become digital.

P L AT E S S E C T I O N

1. Ai Weiwei, F. Lotus, 2016. Life jackets on water. Installation view from Ai Weiwei: translocation: transformation, Belvedere 21, Vienna, 14 July–20 November 2016. Dimensions variable.

2. Forensic Architecture, 77sqm_9:26 min (part of The Murder of Halit Yozgat), 2017. Three-channel video installation (still showing digital re-enactment and fluid dynamics modelling).

3. Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive

Systems, 1974–75. Two of forty-five gelatin silver prints on twenty-four black boards. Each framed board 25.4 × 55.9 cm.

4. Ai Weiwei, Straight, 2008– 12. Reinforcing steel bars. Dimensions variable.

5. Ebony G. Patterson, of 72 Project, 2012. Mixed media hand-embellished works, including photographic reproduction, rhinestones, embroidery, fabric trimmings and appliques, all contained in the original cloth-covered portfolio (showing detail: image 41 of 73). Each image on a bandana, ranging from 53 x 53 cm to 61 x 61 cm.

6. Kiluanji Kia Henda, The Isle of Venus, 2018. Bricks, statues, condoms, boxes, speakers, photomontages. Dimensions variable.

7. Kateřina Šedá, There Is Nothing There, 2003. Annotated documentation photographs of a participatory work.

8. Immigrant Movement International, 2010–ongoing, initiated by Tania Bruguera. Photograph showing Women’s Health group, Mujeres en Movimiento, exercise classes in Corona Plaza (led by Veronica Ramirez), 2014.

9. Occupy Wall Street, 2011. Poster designed by Will Brown for Adbusters.

10. Dilara Begum Jolly, Threads of Testimony, 2014. Multi-media exhibition. A view of an installation, consisting of a table and plates (moulded resin encasing found objects).

11. Wangechi Mutu, The Backoff

Dance, 2021. Soil, charcoal, paper pulp, wood glue, wood, shell, coral bean, hair, dead base rock, gourd, brass bead, horn, plastic crystal, spray paint. 179 × 87 × 103 cm.

12. Lina Iris Viktor, Fourth (from the series A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred ), 2017–18. 24-carat gold, acrylic, ink, gouache, copolymer resin, print on cotton rag paper (unique). 132.1 × 101.6 cm.

13. David Hockney, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, 1966. Acrylic on canvas. 152 × 152 cm.

14. Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Soldado, 2001. Wooden structure, electronic circuits, sensors and software. Dimensions variable.

15. Naomi Rincón Gallardo, The Formaldehyde Trip, 2017. Series of videos and performative screenings (showing a production still).

16. Maja Smrekar, I Hunt Nature and Culture Hunts Me (from the series K-9_topology), 2014. Performance with wolves and wolf-dogs.

17. Ryan Trecartin, P.opular S.ky (section ish) (from the series Trillogy Comp), 2009. Digital video (showing video still at 11:45).

18. Amalia Ulman, Excellences and Perfections, 2014. Instagram updates (showing update from 5 September 2014).

19. Zach Blas, Fag Face Scanning Station, from the project Facial Weaponization Suite, 2013. Masks made from painted, vacuum-formed recycled polyethylene terephthalate; community workshops and performances. Photograph showing a workshop at Christopher Street West Pride Festival, 8 June 2013, West Hollywood, CA.

20. Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2019. Two colour photographs from the series.

21. Stephanie Dinkins, Not the Only One (V1. Beta 2), 2018. Deep Learning AI, computer, arduino, sensors, electronics, black glass sculpture. 46 × 46 cm.

22. Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Singlechannel high-definition video (23 minutes), environment, luminescent EL grid, beach chairs (showing a video still).

23. Rimini Protokoll, win > < win, 2017. Installation view from Eco-Visionaries: Confronting a Planet in a State of Emergency, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 23 November 2019–23 February 2020.

24. Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing, Ice Watch, 2014. Twelve ice blocks, Place du Panthéon, Paris, 2015.

25. Alberta Whittle, Between a Whisper and a Cry, 2019. HD video (41 minutes; showing a film still).

26. Sammy Baloji, Sociétés secrètes, 2015. Scarification on bas-relief copper plate (showing installation detail). Each 29.7 × 42 cm.

27. Maurice Mbikayi, Self-portrait 3, 2015. C-print. 56 × 81 cm.

28. Bani Abidi, The Man Who Could Split a Hair, from the series

A Man Who… after Ilya Kabakov’s ‘The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment’, 2015. Watercolour on paper. 22 cm × 28 cm.

Chapter five

Spectacle and Surveillance On Art in the Internet Age W h at Do e s t h e I n t e r n e t Fe e l Lik e ?

W

hen I first saw a work by the American artist Ryan Trecartin in July 2010, I felt like a pneumatic drill entered my head. It bored into some terrifying part of my mind that I only then realised existed, but which – it began to seem clear – would soon remain the only part that any of us had left. This video was P.opular S.ky (section ish) (2009, Plate 17). Forty-five minutes long, the work looks like a YouTube diary, charting the lives of a group of friends, but seen through a psychedelic prism that has jumbled all plot and dialogue. The performers are all heavily made up in drag; their gender-ambiguous voices are distorted with a high-pitch filter. They strut around a shopping mall, place bids on art, get into fights, pose for selfies. The dialogue, largely nonsensical, is delivered with the emotional tones of reality television. ‘Go make some new people!’ exults one of them in the tone of a catty putdown; ‘I’m totally against destination as a concept,’ pouts another. Scenes follow each other at a disorienting pace, and corporate logos and computer-generated graphics bounce across the screen, but despite this parade of visual noise, the video is hypnotic. When I left the room, dazed and slightly nauseous, the strange pleasure of the work began to seem familiar. It had that same sense of disappeared time, of sensory overload,

Spectacle and Surveillance

105

which we feel after bingeing on social media and internet content. It was as if Trecartin had intuited the secret formula of perceptual and affective change that keeps us hooked to our screens, and then exploded our digital addictions into their full, monstrous form.1 Ryan Trecartin’s work is representative of a tendency that has been referred to as ‘post-internet art’, denoting exhibition-based art which attempts to replicate the phenomenology (the look and the feel) of the new internet age.2 In 1997, 2 per cent of the world’s population were internet users (9 per cent in OECD countries), which rose to 15 per cent in 2005 (52 per cent in OECD countries) and 63 per cent by 2021 (90 per cent in developed economies).3 Google launched in 2000, YouTube in 2005, Facebook in 2006, Twitter in 2006. iPhone (the first smartphone) was released in 2007, soon followed by apps like Grindr (2009), Instagram (2010) and Tinder (2012). These brand names might remind us how the proliferation of the internet changed many aspects of everyday life: how we look up facts, organise our social life, present ourselves to society or access entertainment. These changes went hand in hand with the development of a new economic model, which imposed a very specific way of how information would be circulated and amplified. Social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff has used the rather threatening but appropriate term ‘surveillance capitalism’ to describe this shift.4 The business model of the dominant digital platforms like Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), Alphabet (Google, YouTube) and to an extent Amazon is not to sell their users access to information, but rather to extract behavioural information from them, utilise that information to steer users’ attention, and then sell that nudging power to the highest bidder. When we like, swipe, click and emote online, a mass of information about ourselves is appropriated by big tech companies – about what makes us happy, angry, sad – and this information is then used to keep us engrossed online. Coupled with certain technological advancements, such as faster and smaller processors, which have enabled users to live their lives perpetually online through their smartphones, and machine-learning

106

artists remake the world

artificial intelligence, which has enabled big tech companies to crunch huge amounts of data about their users, this economic model has had far-reaching and often unforeseen consequences. The addictiveness of new digital platforms has arguably contributed to a rise in mental health problems,5 while the public sphere has become more polarised and given rise to extreme and undemocratic positions.6 The political significance of Web 2.0 – the name sometimes given to the commercialised internet of social media and digital platforms dominant since the mid-2000s – is not like the rise of a new political movement which artists can react to; it is a change in the constituting foundations of capitalist democracies. If art, as we have seen in previous chapters, can unveil uncomfortable truths in the public forum, align with protest movements or attempt to alter shared patterns of perception, with the internet, it is the very rules of how such political change unfolds that have been rewritten. And so political art, too, is thrown into a state of uncertainty. Who cares, we might say, about documentary precision and the truth-telling of evidentiary realism (Chapter 2) when people get their information from social media, leading them to believe that vaccines contain microchips or that the world is run by lizards? What is the use of artistic complexity to counteract the culture industry (Chapter 4), when the attention span of most of us has been engineered down to a few seconds? Political art, as we shall see, responded to such challenges in many ways but, as I will argue, it is its insistence on artistic difference, its departure from thinking-as-usual, that allows the viewer to reflect on the deep challenges of the internet age.

Iro n y a n d T r a n s g re s s io n I saw Trecartin’s video at an exhibition in 2010; by the middle of the decade, both Web 2.0 and post-internet art had already reached a kind of apogee. This could be seen perhaps most clearly at the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016), curated by the DIS collective from New York. In

Spectacle and Surveillance

107

bright, sunlit galleries, you could wonder through a sparkling world filled with the internet’s banalities and irreverence. In one room, there was an installation of department store mannequins, their plastic limbs arranged as if they were taking sexually explicit selfies (Anna Uddenberg, Transit Mode, 2014–16). At an entrance to another gallery, there towered a gigantic cardboard cut-out of the singer Rihanna, but with her smiling face Photoshopped onto her chest: this was both a visual quotation of the mythical headless people in medieval manuscripts, and a nod to the wacky ‘randomness’ of online memes (Juan Sebastián Peláez, Ewaipanoma (Rihanna), 2016). Artist Amalia Ulman was represented by a work called Privilege (2015), but she became famous the year before by making arguably the first Instagram-based artwork (Excellences and Perfections, 2014, Plate 18): she documented her life as a would-be influencer, complete with aspirational selfies, inspirational quotes and a mental breakdown, before revealing to her 80,000 followers that it was all just a performance. Trecartin was represented at the Biennale, of course, as were many of the other artists associated with the post-internet aesthetic at that time, such as Katja Novitskova, Babak Radboy, Jon Rafman, Wu Tsang, Andrew Norman Wilson and Camille Henrot. These artists were all drawing on a deep-going change in mass culture. The cultural consumer between the 1960s and early 2000s was typically cast as a couch potato, passively receiving the flow of images emanating from the home television set. In the final decade of television’s reign, David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest (1996) told a story of a video tape so entertaining that its viewers would eventually die from lacking the will to do anything else but watch it. In his essay on television, ‘E Unibus Pluram’, Wallace writes: ‘Television’s biggest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving.’7 As the internet stepped in to become the preeminent mass medium, however, that logic of spectacle changed. Yes, as Ryan Trecartin’s video showed, its effects were still hypnotic, but the online cultural consumers were not passive. As the works

108

artists remake the world

at the Berlin Biennale revealed, internet producer-consumers (‘pro­ sumers’ for short) became frenetically active, always searching, sharing, reacting, commenting, posting. Editorially controlled content of television and printed media has been displaced by amateur production: selfies, memes and Instagram reels. The spectacle of mass culture was no longer ‘the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity’,8 as Guy Debord wrote in his Society of the Spectacle (1967), but more like the flickering lights of a city at night: the beeps and notifications, which compel us into constant interaction. If the role of art is to scrutinise mass culture, then we can distinguish two main approaches that post-internet artists have taken. The more common, softer approach has been that of appropriating internet visual culture, but lacing it with a degree of distance and irony. Such ironic mimicry, a staple of contemporary art since the 1960s, is most familiar from Pop Art of the 1960s; we can see it, for instance, in the way in which Andy Warhol imitated images from advertising (Campbell’s soup) and celebrity culture (Marilyn Monroe), but repeated them serially so as to reveal both their charm and their banality. In a comparable manner, Juan Sebastián Peláez’s eccentric headless photomontages in the Ewaipanoma series mimicked the cut-and-paste aesthetic of internet culture, while accentuating its absurdity, and – by combining Caribbean and Latin American celebrities with a traditional European image of exotic otherness – could be read as perhaps smuggling in a political point. Amalia Ulman’s Instagram performance Excellences and Perfections appropriated the Instagram visual style of young women influencers, but again in a heightened manner that revealed the self-exploitation which social media can induce in young women in particular (Plate 18). The DIS collective’s curated collection of artist-produced stock images, DIS Images (2013), reproduced the clean, inoffensive, generic aesthetic of the corporate internet, but again the artists made these images just slightly more sexually suggestive or strange, presumably to reveal their artificiality. These ironic appropriations of internet visual styles (memes, Instagram, stock images) revealed that the internet was now

Spectacle and Surveillance

109

no longer that niche space of quirky creativity it might have been in the 1990s, but rather an increasingly homogeneous culture shaped by a corporate will. As with Pop Art, however, ironic mimicry is a form of critique that fully acknowledges the seduction of the culture it portrays: Ulman’s performance is clever, but her pictures exude the same titillation, the same dark fascination as ‘real’ Instagrammers’ posts. If irony in post-internet art heightened the superficial, Apollonian surface of the internet as an immaterial dreamworld, the second approach magnified the internet’s darker, Dionysian impulses. We may see this approach in the artworks by Ryan Trecartin and his frequent collaborator Lizzy Fitch: while appropriating elements of internet culture, the artists create not a seductive surface, but a barely endurable experience of being bombarded with digital content. The way coherence and reason are denied in these works has less in common with Pop Art and shares more with those avant-gardes like Dada, the Surrealists or Fluxus, who saw art as a way of accessing a transgressive limit-experience, to use a term first theorised by Georges Bataille, a sojourner to the Surrealists: an intense, anarchic and often erotically driven dissolution of the rational subject.9 Consider for instance this excerpt from the manifesto of the Berlin branch of Dada from 1918: ‘Life appears as a simultaneous muddle of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified into Dadaist art, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality.’10 This would be a fitting description of how, a hundred years later, Trecartin and Fitch overwhelm the viewers with an explosion of the visual culture that forms the new everyday – icons, images, words, texts, notifications. As with previous artistic explorations of the limit-experience, sexual desire features heavily in transgression. In Canadian artist Jon Rafman’s video work Dream Journal (2016) we see a high-paced parade of computer-animated graphics, based on the artist’s erotic dreams and nightmares. In his video Still Life (Beta Male) (2009), there is a similar melange of pornography, fetish and violence, presented from the perspective of an obese, bedroom-dwelling,

110

artists remake the world

chain-smoking nerd. The internet logic of supplying ever more stimulating, ever more instantaneous pleasures leads to a transform­ ation of desire into the solipsism of a perpetual onanist. Feminist artists like Canadian Jennifer Chan utilised some of that same chaotic presentation to show the cost of that logic for women. In her desktop wallpaper piece Body Party (2015), Chan collages together headless naked male torsos found online: a writhing pit of male flesh inverts the gaze that women’s bodies become subjected to through the unprecedented access to pornography. While these artworks seem to revel in a digitised blend of violence and sexuality, however, they are neither fully nihilistic, nor exclusively critical of the internet. Like Dadaists or Surrealists before them, some of these artists show how new and perhaps even positive values might arise out of the limit-experience. Trecartin and Fitch’s films, while utterly chaotic and overwhelming to watch, nevertheless seem to contain something constructive by tapping into the fluid and non-binary conceptions of gender and sexuality that flourished online in the 2010s. Arguably, the 2010s shift in the understanding of queer sexuality and gender would not have happened were it not for the extensive peer-to-peer contact online, where gender could be discussed in ways unmediated by the strictures of editorial mass media, as well, perhaps, as the newfound ability of users to live out new identities through virtual avatars. The characters in their films, which Trecartin has described as ‘gender indifferent’, constantly subvert expectations of gendered (and sometimes of racialised) appearance.11 So, while transgressive chaos in these videos might at first appear as simply heightening the banality of the internet, they also suggest a kind of utopian postgender and post-racial society emerging from it. One criticism levied at post-internet art, particularly in the wake of the Berlin Biennale 2016, was that these artists merely replicated the pleasures of the digital sphere in a gallery environment,12 but I think the best case to be made for the value of these works is that they attempted to create a kind of critical mindset around the new internet visual culture as they found it. In their ironic and appropriative

Spectacle and Surveillance

111

mode, the best of these artists showed us how the internet was quickly becoming a place of commercialised uniformity; in their transgressive mode, they charted its nihilism and perhaps even its liberating potential. However, while the post-internet approaches may have still seemed valid by the summer of 2016, the next few months brought into focus a different side to the internet culture, especially in the light of the United States presidential election. Donald Trump’s victory and subsequent presidency not only revealed the new possibilities of political propaganda in the internet age, but also brought to popular attention the way in which reactionary political subcultures had been able to proliferate online, often under the radar of mainstream politics. In the American context, the most extreme of these became known as the ‘alt-right’ – denoting the openly neo-fascist, white nationalist or Western-supremacist ideologies – but other related subcultures included the misogynist ‘manosphere’ community which promoted hyper-traditional, premodern gender roles or, more recently, the conspiracy group QAnon, with their own assortment of wacky and xenophobic beliefs. In the late 2010s, these more bizarre subcultures overlapped with the rise of nationalist–populist movements, such as Trump’s, and also those of Narendra Modi in India (elected 2014, 2019), Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (2018) and, unelected as president but consistently secondplaced, Marine Le Pen in France (2017, 2022).13 What is most surprising from the standpoint of art’s relation to politics, however, is that the online visual production accompanying this shift seemed to thrive on precisely those subversive modes of transgression and irony which had long been associated with progressive arts. Consider for instance a video called With Open Gates: The forced collective suicide of European nations, released in 2015, one of the many deeply xenophobic and anti-immigrant videos that you could find on YouTube at the time, coinciding with the European refugee crisis. The video is a collage of different scenes found online; these show groups of people, some engaged in public unrest, some shouting, some moving across roads or fields, and most of whom

112

artists remake the world

appear to be African or Middle Eastern men. The scenes follow each other in dizzying succession, and are underscored with a rousing techno track. The closing scenes show talking heads who interpret the 2015 refugee crisis as a Jewish conspiracy to destabilise Europe.14 Within the old editor-led media regime of the 1980s or 1990s (for all of its imperfections), it would have been hard to imagine an openly racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracy video like With Open Gates gaining such prominence. In the internet of the 2010s, it could be placed on YouTube (as remains the case on social media with much extremist content), where its algorithms continued recommending it to viewers. After it was featured on the far-right website Breitbart, the video went viral, amassing millions of views. If we ask why it was so successful, however, we must surely also look to its transgressive aesthetic. The video is not a standard piece of expository propaganda, but an explosion of forms, a cacophony of voices, an appropriation of found footage and a high-intensity delivery, all of which might remind us of post-internet artists.15 Here, too, there is a transgressive limit-experience of sorts, an overwhelming of rationality with sensory content. Meanwhile, another important far-right genre in this period was the ironic alt-right meme, thriving on forums like 4chan.16 Pepe the Frog was perhaps the most famous of these: this googly-eyed cartoon character was posted all over the mainstream web as a signal of a kind of bemused randomness typical of online communication, but was then appropriated by far-right trolls, who equipped Pepe with symbols like the swastika and KKK hoods. Blending humour with extremism, the meme could therefore become a way to signal white supremacist allegiance under the cover of mere jokiness. Countering perceived ‘political correctness’ of the liberal mainstream, these memes thrived on the internet culture of irreverence, and threatened to make far-right ideologies acceptable by dressing them with mass cultural references from computer games, pornography and internet in-jokes. Angela Nagle, who authored one of the first write-ups of these reactionary subcultures (Kill All Normies, 2017), even suggested

Spectacle and Surveillance

113

that this new aesthetic of far-right irony and transgression had its roots in the Leftist countercultures of the 1960s, which, for Nagle, normalised the denigration of liberal values, and was finally reactivated by the nihilistic far right.17 We might disagree with Nagle’s causal explanation: it seems more likely that transgressive aesthetics flourished in far-right online spaces because attention-based distribution of content favours outrage, rather than because of a history of nonconformist culture coming from the artistic Left. What seems correct, though, is the observation that the new reactionary internet subcultures indeed embraced transgression and irony and aimed at destroying the liberal-democratic values which they so despised.18 So far in this book we have considered artists whose political aims, while diverse, are generally compatible with egalitarian and democratic values. Yet, there is nothing in the form of political art itself which necessitates any particular political angle: there is no reason why artistic irony and transgression, for instance, could not be employed to further an anti-democratic agenda. Anti-democratic internet-based visual production therefore raises several more philosophical questions for political art, the first of which we might call the question of aesthetic complicity. If a particular aesthetic strategy (here, irony and transgression) is embraced by politically unpalatable forces, does that suggest such strategies can no longer have a proper place in the (politically progressive) arts? Art historian Cadence Kinsey identifies something like this line of thinking behind the gradual demise of post-internet art after 2016.19 Soon after the end of the 9th Berlin Biennale, it became clear to the broader public that the internet was not just the daft merry-go-round of influencers and online shopping, but above all a field of new culture wars, which threatened to rewrite the democratic consensus, and would soon erupt into real violence. Kinsey accordingly ends her history of the movement in 2016. In contradistinction to post-internet art’s aesthetic of transgression and irony, we might also think of the more strident, unironic tone of several online-driven grassroots movements, such as #metoo (viral in 2017), Fridays for Future (c. 2019)

114

artists remake the world

or #BlackLivesMatter (since 2013, and with renewed global impetus since 2020, following George Floyd’s death), all of which had their own online visual cultures.20 Within this new political ecosystem, more earnest aesthetics came to codify progressive movements, while irony and transgression became more readily associated with the (anti-democratic) reaction. All this may lead us to dismiss postinternet art as guilty by aesthetic complicity, a little like, not so long ago, critics on the Left would dismiss any neo-classical aesthetics as irredeemably corrupt for its historical association with colonialism and empire.21 Aesthetic complicity is only a problem, however, when artists are not aware what secondary meaning their works might accrue in virtue of the chosen aesthetic: in the hands of a skilful artist, any artistic style (even neo-classicism) can be put to diverse political ends. The bigger issue raised by the parallel between post-internet art and alt-right visual culture is specific to irony and transgression: when are these strategies viable in political art? The lesson here is that everything depends on the broader context. The early twentiethcentury transgressive performances – such as those of the Dadaist Hugo Ball, whose cabarets included mooing, hiccupping and nonsensical language – were performed at a time when a nationalistic Europe justified its destructive wars through an official culture of progress and harmony. Similarly, irony was an effective tool of dissident artists in Eastern Europe under Communism, precisely because irony destabilised an official culture of cheerful, earnest progress, which disguised underlying inequality and oppression.22 But the public sphere in the age of the internet no longer exhibits any such hegemonic culture, and whatever remnants of cultural consensus might have persisted through the age of television are well and truly gone. Instead, the public sphere is already, we might say, Dadaistic; it already resembles a muddle of noise, recognisable in the vulgarity, extremism and inanity of speech online, and more broadly evidenced in the viciousness of the online culture wars, in the trolling and harassment, polarisation and toxicity. If irony

Spectacle and Surveillance

115

and transgression, as the hallowed modes of contemporary art, no longer seem effective in this context, it is because power is no longer entwined with stable cultural channels reinforcing a single worldview. By contrast, transgression still seems vital in more regimented societies: in China, for instance, some artists continue to employ post-internet strategies – such as Miao Ying (Chinternet Plus, 2016; Pilgrimage into Walden XII, 2021) – and seem relevant precisely because the Chinese internet is tightly controlled by an authoritarian regime. Meanwhile, the logic of the online public sphere in capitalist democracies has fragmented into a set of intense culture wars unfolding in their own bubbles, while real power, as we shall see, appears to be held elsewhere.

H ack i n g Walking into the installation of Italian artist Paolo Cirio’s Sociality (2018), we enter a work that is diametrically opposite in tone to the sensory overload of post-internet artists. First shown at the Strasbourg Biennale, in a small gallery space, the work’s installation consisted of simple black-and-white posters, covering the gallery walls from floor to ceiling. Each poster showed a technical-sounding phrase, such as ‘display visibility based on eye convergence’ or ‘method for modification of anti-social behavior’, superimposed on diagrams, abstracted faces, arrows or flowcharts. These texts and diagrams, the visitors would learn, were excerpts from new social media patents: algorithms, procedures or technical solutions of how to manage and monetise users’ interactions online. We have already encountered Cirio as the proponent of ‘evidentiary realism’ (Chapter 2); here, his attention to data and evidence turns towards the logic structuring the new internet capitalism. The posters on Cirio’s walls are the paper trail of a vast industry, which remains largely hidden from the view of social media users. From capturing data on our phones, to better face-recognition, to new ways of identifying socially unacceptable

116

artists remake the world

behaviour, these patents reveal internet ‘sociality’ as a carefully managed process designed to make all human interactions measurable and controllable.23 The behaviourist psychological model, in particular as developed by American psychologist B.F. Skinner, conceptualises human behaviour as a series of inputs and outputs, the law-like relation between which can be studied without any attention given to the subjective, ‘inner’ experience of the subject. As Shoshana Zuboff has demonstrated, behaviourist psychology informs the business model of platforms like Google or Facebook.24 These companies can extract extraordinary amounts of personal data from their users, which they can use to then nudge our behaviour. This includes everything from the little red notification bubbles on our smartphone apps, which compel us to interact with our phone for a little longer, to, more worryingly, algorithmic suggestion of the kind of content that will most likely keep us engrossed, regardless of how divisive, harmful or false it might be. Public understanding of these backend operations of internet giants was heightened in the wake of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018–19, when it emerged that Facebook allowed millions of its users’ profiles to be used to develop targeted adverts for various political campaigns, including Donald Trump’s and, to a degree, the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom. Aside from the possibility of misusing private data for political ends, however, it became clear that the enormous power big tech companies wield is in no way subject to democratic control.25 These developments have suggested a new approach for the artists responding to the internet. If we saw that post-internet artists largely focused on the internet’s visual culture (memes, new subcultures, viral videos), another option would be to intervene in the technological mechanisms that sustained this culture, or what we might call the internet’s infrastructure. This mode of artistic appropriation of internet-related technologies has its own longer tradition, stretching at least to the Net.art movement of the 1990s and early 2000s.26 Net.art was a loosely connected international group, whose

Spectacle and Surveillance

117

interventions in the early World Wide Web included, for instance, an artist creating a subversive eBay listing to sell his ‘blackness’ (Keith and Mendi Obadike, Blackness for Sale, 2001) and an artist collective experimenting with hacking attacks to create a form of digital protest against the websites of the Mexican government (Electronic Disturbance Theater collective, FloodNet, 1998), as well as more poetic web-based works, such as Olia Lialina’s webpage art, which utilised early HTML capabilities to create lyrical narratives (My Boyfriend Came Back From the War, 1996). In emerging histories of internet-based art, a distinction is sometimes drawn between this earlier Net.art movement, within which artists are said to have been using the internet as a medium, and the later post-internet art, which we have discussed above, and which is more often described as artists making gallery-based art about the internet.27 However, art historical movements often have to do more with social networks of artists than with clear-cut differences in approach. The appropriation of internet technologies as a medium can also be found beyond Net.art into the art of the 2010s and later. Paolo Cirio’s Sociality, for instance, uses an adapted, ‘hacked’ version of Google’s patent search tool to find those social media patents which attempt to control users’ behaviour. Here a technology (Google’s patent search) is adapted for a function going beyond the company’s goals (revealing its own potential for manipulation). For another example of such artistic manipulation of technology, consider American artist Zach Blas, whose project Facial Weaponization Suite (2012–14) consists of a recursive machine learning algorithm intervention and resulted in a series of wear­ able, 3D-printed masks (Plate 19). These look like vaguely human, pixellated, pink blobs, with bulbous outgrowths in places where you would expect eyes and ears. These have been designed by Blas in response to the growing ability of artificial intelligence to recognise and analyse people’s faces, and in particular in response to one study that suggested software could soon be used to identify people’s sexuality from their photographs.28 In response, one of

118

artists remake the world

Blas’ masks is an amalgamation of many queer men’s photographs, but deliberately jumbled up into unrecognisable forms so that a computer algorithm would not be able to recognise these as faces. In the workshops accompanying the work, participants could don these masks, their amorphous shapes emphasising that, in order to escape ever-increasing surveillance, we may have to inhabit such inhuman disguises. Notably, the masks themselves were produced using biometric data and AI: technology is here ‘subverted’ in the service of emancipation rather than control.29 The power of creative artistic misuse of these technologies, I would like to suggest, resides in the ability of art to make these technologies seem arbitrary and alien. Within attention-based capitalism, the new power of the internet corporations has derived largely from their ability to make their version of the internet seem seamless and natural, as if no alternatives to it could exist. Creating software that is able to recognise faces is presented as an unavoidable technological development, as are the various attention-sapping mechanisms on all devices. Whatever the social change wrought by these technologies, democratic decision-making plays no role in selecting them; they are presented as a natural outgrowth of technological progress. That is just what phones are like! In this sense, it is relevant that Blas uses the artificial intelligence algorithms in his work, rather than merely representing them; and it is relevant that Cirio uses a hacked version of the Google patent search to reveal how capitalism has developed technologies to extract information from users. Other creative misuses of internet-adjacent technologies in the arts have included artists working with webcam streams (Petra Cortright), chat roulette (Jennifer Chan), Second Life (Skawennati), Instagram filters (Keiken collective), app design (Amalia Ulman) or artificial intelligence language software (Stephanie Dinkins). By putting these technologies to ends they were not initially designed for, these artists may remind us of hackers in the expanded sense that theorist McKenzie Wark has given to the term. In her book A Hacker Manifesto (2004), Wark paints a picture of the late capitalist

Spectacle and Surveillance

119

information age, in which capitalists seek to commodify information, and hackers experiment with informational forms to create new worlds.30 What this art can achieve, similarly, is not only to make the viewers more aware of the technologies that structure their online experience, but also to unhinge the normal: demonstrate that things could be otherwise, that a different internet infrastructure from the one prescribed is possible. Still, one might object that the works of some of these artistscum-hackers illustrate political and technological phenomena, but do so in a way that requires no significantly artistic activity. We have already encountered this problem several times as the problem of assimilation: art becomes assimilated into some non-art field of knowledge or activity, so that it seems wholly replaceable by it (see Chapter 2). As we have seen, however, art can avoid becoming replaceable by non-art activities, as long as it mixes its borrowings from non-art fields with something of its own: its own departure from the ‘objective’ (scientific, purely research-driven) modes of presentation. Art can add an interpretative structure through which audiences can connect some technological phenomenon to their own lived experience. As audience members, we do not need merely to become aware of the technological infrastructure governing our lives, but also need to be able to connect these issues to our immediate concerns. This is something that can be achieved by those more familiarly ‘artistic’ elements like narrative, dramatic structure or interpretative openness. To see what it might look like for a work to both undertake this hacking approach and begin to translate technology into a culturally shared experience, let us consider Stephanie Dinkins’ Not the Only One (2018, Plate 21). The work is presented as a seashell-shaped sculpture with faces of Dinkins’ family members embossed on its surface, standing on a pedestal in a gallery setting. Within the seashell are a microphone and a speaker that connect to an artificial intelligence program designed by Dinkins, which has been trained on a body of interviews with her family members: African-American

120

artists remake the world

women, whose experiences and stories Dinkins seeks to preserve as a digital archive. Audience members can ask a question of the shell, and the shell will respond; in principle, the program should reproduce the sort of response that Dinkins’ family members would give. Dinkins’ artwork, like Blas’ or Cirio’s, is an intervention into an internet-adjacent technology. The recursive artificial intelligence algorithms that the work uses have a multitude of applications, from the processing of user data to face recognition. But these programs depend on the datasets on which they are trained, and so they can easily reproduce human biases. For instance, algorithmic recognition of faces has been known to misrecognise Black faces, when those algorithms are trained on white face datasets.31 Countering such trends by employing the algorithm to retain a personal history of an African-American family, Dinkins’ intervention exemplifies an unorthodox use of the same technology, preserving voices and cultural identities that are at risk of marginalisation through that same technological development. The spectator’s first impression of Not the Only One is not so much as a piece of technology, but as an object with a story (of a woman trying to preserve her family history), with easily graspable existential resonances (persistence of a loved one beyond death) and a curious aesthetic form. It is as if the shell had imbibed a ghost, the remnants of personality taken from Dinkins’ family, and now continues to preserve their voice, opinions and way of being. The imperfections and the glitchiness of the work are important here too: because the shell does not yet answer perfectly, the effect is one of uncanny approximations of humanity. In other words, if the task of the artwork is to unhinge the perception of technology as something self-evident, Dinkins’ work seems to accomplish this not only by hacking the technology, but also by enveloping it into a narrative, in this case, about the preservation of memory beyond mortality. It is in departing from the purely objective rhetorical mode of explaining the technology and its political flaws that the work distinguishes itself from being a mere piece of engineering or commentary.

Spectacle and Surveillance

121

C o mp lex it y a n d t h e R u i n s of Tho u ght Writing for Artforum in 2012, critic and art historian Claire Bishop suggested that contemporary art had not yet adequately responded to the challenges of the digital revolution. ‘While many artists use digital technology,’ she wrote, ‘how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital?’32 Bishop acknowledged that there are several ‘new media artists’ who specialise in working with digital media – into this category we can count the artistic hackers we have just discussed – but Bishop wanted to know why, in her view, the ‘mainstream’ artworld ‘declines to speak overtly about the conditions of living in and through new media’.33 The article provoked some furious responses: if Bishop was genuinely interested in artistic responses to the digital, why did she then insist on ignoring the ‘new media’ approaches?34 But there is perhaps a less divisive way of formulating Bishop’s question. Namely, we can acknowledge that there are benefits to artists using digital technologies – as we have just seen – but still wonder whether there is not also something that the more straightforwardly artistic approaches can contribute. For instance, can the genres of photography, sculpture, painting, installation or video help us think through the challenges of the internet revolution since the 2010s? Indian photographer Sohrab Hura’s project The Coast (2019) is a photographic series documenting a religious festival at an unspecified village along the south coast of India (Plate 20). The photographs show scenes of celebration and also of violence: a child is seen raising a rock, poised to hit his companion on the head; a man’s head peers playfully from behind a woman; a heavily made-up youth grins in the dark; an animal is caged; a man appears covered in blood. The festival, we are told, involves a masquerade, so we are never quite sure if what we see is reality or masks, something accentuated by Hura’s play with occasional perspectival illusions (as in the artwork shown here). This unstable balance between fiction and reality is enhanced by visual parallels: we see a ‘headless’ woman and a woman ‘holding’

122

artists remake the world

a detached man’s head, a man blind in one eye and a dog similarly blinded, play-fighting among children and possibly real fighting among adults. In the gallery installation version of the work, the photographs are also shown as a video projection, the conclusion of which offers a key to their interpretation. At an increasing pace, the video shows Hura’s photographs of the masquerade, but then gradually displaces them with images that he had gathered from Indian WhatsApp groups and news websites. These are memes, photographs, short videos; often violent, they include a phone video of a migrant worker being hanged, and of an alleged rapist beaten to death, but here shown at a speed that eludes comprehension. This is no longer staged but real violence, begotten of the lifeblood of the new media landscape. The Coast is to be understood in the light of the election and subsequent premiership of Narendra Modi in 2014, whose Hindu populist nationalist platform benefited from the way ethnic and religious divisions were inflamed by social media, and especially by the sharing of images on WhatsApp.35 The photographs are accompanied by a surrealist short story (which Hura reads out in the video version) and which points to this political context. The story describes a woman, who has had her head stolen by a jealous lover, and who assuages her loneliness by buying a parrot from a fortune teller; but the fortune teller sells her a crow and explains the ruse by maintaining that the parrot has a cold. An ‘idiot photographer’ passes through the town and wants to photograph the marvellous woman and other strange sights he sees. It is not difficult to interpret the woman as a stand-in for the electorate, the fortune teller’s ruse for the promises of superstition and religion, and the ‘idiot photographer’ for the intellectuals who observe this turn of events. (These correspondences are confirmed by Hura in interviews, and they are easy enough to piece together, especially for viewers familiar with the Indian context.) The whole fictional space of The Coast becomes an allegory for a society driven by prevarication and superstition, teetering on the brink of a violent eruption.

Spectacle and Surveillance

123

Hura’s case is interesting for us because, instead of inhabiting digital technology as a medium, his work grapples with the political consequences of that technology through an older medium: analogue photography. As Hura put it to me in an interview, the role played by photographs in society no longer seemed clear to him after he was confronted with the images circulated on WhatsApp groups in India; exhibiting their own logic, these false, incendiary and often highly brutal images have perpetuated much sectarian, anti-Muslim violence in the country.36 Hura’s retreat into photography points to the kind of approach Bishop’s critical remarks may have asked for: here, the social transformations are reflected on through an interpretatively open artistic form. In taking this approach, Hura is not alone within the exhibition-based artworld. For instance, in Sondra Perry’s installation with video, Typhoon Coming On (2016/18, various versions), a water-resistance rowing machine seems to become a meta­­phor for digital labour, while a transformed scan of J.M.W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship gestures at continued racialised violence in the digital sphere.37 But for a closer look, we might also consider the German artist Hito Steyerl, who has produced perhaps the most well-received body of work on the subject of internet economy; like Hura, Steyerl has emerged from a generation of artists who had struggled with the paradoxes of documentary image-making. Her Factory of the Sun (2015), first shown in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015, is displayed within a viewing environment painted like a silver-and-blue matrix, evocative of the holodeck from the classic TV series Star Trek (Plate 22). The viewers recline in deck chairs and then view a twenty-three-minute film. The disjointed futuristic narrative involves a factory that produces light through its workers’ dancing, an assassin drone sponsored by the Deutsche Bank, and a group of resistance fighters. As in Hura’s work there is a mixing of the fictional and real here: while entirely fantastical, the film prominently features a real YouTube dancer, whose dance moves Steyerl has rendered, through a motion-capture studio, into digital avatars. This is a standard technique used in the

124

artists remake the world

production of computer games and films: but here, motion-capture becomes a metaphor for the way in which social media algorithms already capture all of their users’ affects and movements, and turn them into profit. As the presence of the real YouTuber reminds us, the line between self-realisation and exploitation is blurred in the online economy. The real workers in the factory of the sun are all of us, the users, whose seemingly leisurely activity of scrolling, liking and commenting performs free labour of information-gathering for the technological giants. If we look closer at Hura’s and Steyerl’s works, we might describe both as not simply ‘artistic’ in some general sense. Rather, they retreat from objective discourse in the particular decision to abandon literal meaning for a specific, well-established (even antiquated) poetic form: allegorical image making.38 An allegory is a rhetorical mode that organises two sets of meanings in parallel with each other: a literal narrative or picture on one side (such as the headless woman) corresponds to an arbitrary referent on the other (the electorate). Still, this is not the allegory of fully fixed symbolic conventions, but comes closer to allegory as an open interpretative structure. We might invoke here Walter Benjamin’s claim that ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.’39 Rather than offer simple correspondences (dove means peace, for example), complex allegories array a set of images and symbols, but, like with physical ruins of lost civilisations, these are mere fragments pregnant with meaning, where the key of unlocking them is only partly recovered. In Hura’s work, and in Steyerl’s, something similar occurs: the artistry consists of creating just enough symbolic correspondence so that we can begin to unveil within their images a metaphor for the ecstasies, violence and economic extraction in the new, digital political landscape. And so we might ask again: what is the use of making such art – art in its interpretatively demanding, allegorical mode – in revealing the political and economic features of surveillance capitalism? To answer this question, we must again compare art not just with other

Spectacle and Surveillance

125

artworks, but also with modes of discourse found in the political discourse outside it. Here, the relevant comparison is precisely the public sphere online, from which, we might say, the allegorical mode of interpretation could not be more different. The content distributed online – be it videos or memes, fake news images or scenes of violence – clamours for our attention: look at this, share this, this is happening, this is urgent. Digital content platforms put users into a mental state similar to the ‘ludic loop’ of playing games, which comes through constantly interacting with content in some manner (liking, scrolling, sharing, posting), and being rewarded through basic positive reinforcement (likes, replies, new content). While there is ongoing debate about the degree to which such mechanisms are addictive in themselves,40 they certainly put the viewer into a particular frame of mind when interpreting content. As philosopher C. Thi Nguyen puts it, communication online becomes gamified, where we chase ‘points’ in the form of likes and engagement, and assess others’ success based on the engagement they receive. Our chief reactions to content involve either in-group agreement (resulting in echo chambers), or out-group hatred (resulting in what Nguyen and Bekka Williams have called ‘moral outrage porn’).41 While not every experience online need be like this, of course, the point is that the default interpretative state encouraged by digital platforms does not emphasise looking for nuance, or seeing things in their complexity. Instead, we are encouraged to scroll past everything that is boring or difficult, and to amplify (by clicking, sharing …) everything that excites intense but binary responses: adorable/outrageous, attractive/ disgusting, loveable/fearful, good/evil. This gamified interpretation of content is therefore diametrically opposed to the complex cognitive performance required of us by art. Sohrab Hura’s The Coast comments on political violence on WhatsApp, and Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun condemns extraction of information by big tech, but, importantly, both works require profoundly ‘offline’ modes of interpretation to reveal their meaning: open-ended analysis, rather than a binary emotional response. If

126

artists remake the world

Sohrab Hura had attacked the rising nationalist sentiment in India with the bile that is characteristic of internet discourse, his work would have simply remained within that polarising logic (denounced or lauded); but instead, the allegorical structure of these works suspends the viewer in a protracted process of interpretation. That is not to say that the message of the work is diluted, but that the message is conveyed in a manner that does not encourage affective side-taking through outrage or sentimentality. While works such as Hura’s and Steyerl’s may at first glance therefore seem oddly removed from their subject matter, or too ‘artistic’ to make a real difference, they in fact reflectively distance us from the polarising structure of surveillance capitalism. To return to our question – what is it that art as art can do to reflect on the digital revolution? – the answer requires us to think through the nature of the public sphere that art exists in: polarisation, banalisation of disagreement and targeted manipulation characterise the public sphere under surveillance capitalism. Art cannot banish these forms or overcome them; existing within the gallery, it does not enter the fray of politics. Instead, as a model of interpretative complexity and nuance, art can remake the logic of the public sphere in its very form, reminding us that there continues to exist another and more careful kind of thinking.

Th e P ub l ic S ph e re a ft e r t h e Inte r ne t Digitalisation has changed all aspects of modernity: the nature of capital, labour, leisure and – the theme focused on in this chapter – the nature of the democratic public sphere. Initially, democratic governments were slow to properly understand these changes, but in the early 2020s, we are beginning to see attempts at challenging the prevailing paradigm, at least in some parts of the world. At the time of writing, legislation is being proposed to exercise democratic control over the algorithmic distribution of content in the United

Spectacle and Surveillance

127

States, United Kingdom and European Union; the most ambitious of these proposals, the EU’s Digital Services Act of 2022, would require platforms like Facebook and Google to open their algorithms to third-party researchers, submit to independent auditors and, crucially, take responsibility for systemic risks such as amplification of hatred and disinformation. In Taiwan, there have been experiments in social platforms that use machine learning to create democratic consensus rather than polarisation, as with the experimental platform Pol.is, used to successfully mediate a range of civic issues, such as a dispute between Uber and traditional taxi drivers.42 However, the disinformation and polarisation amplified by the internet also persist. If the internet represents a revolution in how democracy is conducted, it is a revolution that is still playing out. In light of these changes, the role of exhibition-based art may well appear marginal, and its reach into politics small. Visual culture that plays a role in daily politics unfolds through memes, viral videos, peer-to-peer networks and algorithmic distribution, rather than through the kinds of artworks we have been discussing. As the underlying infrastructure of the internet changes through technology or regulation, so new forms of conducting public discourse will proclaim themselves as the new normal: whether as an extreme version of free speech, or a new brutality of language, or the demonisation of opponents, or perhaps, let us hope, some more constructive forms of public discourse. Art cannot hope to reach this broad public sphere directly; its experimental design of necessity limits its reach and its audience. But as an activity that is marginal, and as an experience that is exceptional, art can clarify these forms of discourse, make them appear strange or remind us that other ways of thought are possible. By insisting on what is distinct about it, art’s role continues to be that of an experimental branch of political thought: the kind of thought which, as we shall now see, remains pertinent even at the time of the greatest emergency.

Chapter six

Creativity in the Face of Extinction On Art and Climate Change

T h e I n evi ta b l e

T

he translucent white hats pulsated, gliding in and out of the field of vision, receding into the darkness and resurfacing again. The English word ‘jellyfish’ does not quite capture the ethereal, silent danger of these stinging organisms. Instead, I think of them in my mother tongue, Slovenian, where they are known (as indeed in several other languages) as medusae because their tentacled forms look like ghostly impressions of the snake-haired monster slain by Perseus. My childhood fear of getting stung while swimming was therefore always tinged with a slightly mystical foreboding. In this instance, the medusae were safely kept in a dark water tank, part of the art installation win > < win (2017) by the German artist collective Rimini Protokoll (Plate 23). In a small visitor group, we watched these deceptively beautiful clouds while listening to a voiceover on the headphones, which explained how jellyfish are one of the few species that benefit from human-caused climate change. As the seas are getting warmer, more acidic and more deprived of oxygen, jellyfish are getting bigger and more numerous. As the global climate crisis develops, threatening the lives of many human communities, these

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

129

simple organisms will thrive, their bulbous forms quietly moving through warm water, for a dumb and meaningless eternity. As the lights in the room shifted, it became apparent the room operated with double-mirrored walls, and that there was another visitor group sitting across from us. We first contemplated a reflection of ourselves on the glass of the tanks, then the jellyfish in the tanks, and finally the next visitor group, who were still laughing and pointing at their own reflection, not having yet grasped the work’s meaning.1 What does it mean to contemplate your own extinction? The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote that art should show us suffering without a thrill and death without consolation, but that contemplating death sincerely is one of the hardest things to do in art.2 Our instinctive response to death is not contemplation at all: it is fear, or denial, or at least looking away. Like the face of Medusa, which Perseus observed in a reflection of his mirrored shield, death must therefore be contemplated obliquely: and a death in art is often adorned with a moral lesson, or poetic justice, or religious consolation, all of which are what Murdoch called ‘a tendency to conceal death and chance by the invention of forms’.3 The Rimini Protokoll installation felt so compelling, though, because it contained artistic form, but afforded no sentimentality. The only relief to the viewer was provided by the deadpan jokes played on the audience: such as the realisation that while you were happily waving at your own reflection as instructed by the voiceover, you were really performing the part of clueless humanity for another visitor group. ‘Please leave without speaking and as fast as possible,’ ran the final instruction issued to the audience. The grim vision of win > < win is in line with current modelling of the effects of climate change. As an abstraction used to communicate this staggering reality, degrees Celsius are often used. After the United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow in 2021, the news was that instead of a temperature rise ‘well below 2°C by 2100’, which was the aim stated in the Paris Agreement of 2016, the United Nations predicted that the commitments agreed by sovereign

130

artists remake the world

nations at Glasgow, if delivered, would put us on track for a warming of 2.4°C.4 The abstraction is unfortunate, because this just does not sound so bad: a 2°C change in our lived experience is barely noticeable, and a 0.4°C difference even less so. However, what these global averages really denote is best thought of as scenarios of what a future life on Earth could look like. The scenarios are difficult to model with complete certainty, but the scientific consensus – represented as the reports to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change – paints a bleak picture.5 In the early 2020s, we stand at 1.2°C above pre-industrial averages, and most of that warming has occurred in the last thirty-five years. Today much of the world already experiences a fossil-fuel-caused dystopia. Five million people die each year from heat-related causes; and one study estimates that up to 35 per cent of all global heatwave deaths can already be ascribed to anthropogenic climate change.6 The number and intensity of wildfires has doubled in some areas like the United States; the Australian fires of 2020 killed or harmed no fewer than 3 billion animals.7 According to the IPCC report, ‘millions of people’ have already been exposed to ‘acute food insecurity and reduced water security’, ‘occurrence of climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseases has increased’, and climate change has caused displacement, damage to infrastructure and poverty in many areas.8 Due to fossil fuel emissions already locked in the atmosphere, the effects of which we do not yet feel, this situation is inevitably going to get worse. According to the ‘2°C world by 2100’ scenario – now inevitable, barring radical action – we will see effects such as the submerging of some low-lying islands and coastal regions, the high-tide battering of many more, extreme weather events like hurricanes becoming commonplace in some geographies, killer heatwaves extended, uninhabitable dead zones on land and in sea becoming larger, crop yields smaller, tropical diseases more widespread.9 It is important to note that even the 2.4°C scenario is based on policy targets; given the policies actually implemented, however, the Climate Action Tracker think tank predicts a rise of 2.7°C by the year 2100, which

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

131

would make these scenarios comparably more horrific.10 While modelling beyond the arbitrary limits of the year 2100 is rarely attempted,11 there is of course no divine intervention that would stop global warming once a certain year or average temperature is reached, spiralling us towards scenarios of 3°C and above, which, in scientific literature, appear nightmarish, regardless of whether they would in fact end all human life. And yet, greenhouse gases are not just being added to the atmosphere globally, but are being added at increasing rates. The much-coveted ‘drop in emissions’, such as briefly happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, simply means a bit less was added than the year before. Debating a mere reduction of the rate at which carbon is being added feels like moving towards a fire and discussing whether we should sprint or jog. As Iris Murdoch observed, contemplating death is difficult: we always try to insert a deflection of some kind. It is much the same with the unfolding climate disaster. Perhaps, we think, the heroes of this story could cheat death by moving to another planet; or perhaps they will reverse their fortunes at the last moment through some great feat of scientific ingenuity. Such fantasies do not merely amount to wishful thinking but also ignore the disproportionate effects of climate change on the poor and disadvantaged parts of the world. The challenge that climate change poses to cultural production, then, is to find those artistic visions that would allow us to keep the disaster fully in view, resist despair and make-believe alike, and perhaps even imagine solutions. It is a tall order, of course. How, then, might art help us see the disaster truly without getting crushed; or even envision solutions without indulging in a fantasy?

Nat u re a n d t h e A rts : E mergen c y, S o l i d a r i t y, I n t e rve ntio n Artistic responses to climate change are rooted in the historical links between art and environmentalism. As the environmental movement

132

artists remake the world

gained strength in the second half of the twentieth century, artists were among those who responded to the pangs of our ecological conscience. The German artist Joseph Beuys concluded his artistic path with the project 7000 Oak Trees (1982), for which he planned to have this many trees planted around the world, starting with the documenta exhibition in Kassel. In 1992, Hungarian-American artist Agnes Denes went a few trees further in her work Tree Mountain. She organised for 11,000 pine trees to be planted on a disused mining site in Finland, following a precise spiral pattern of the artist’s design. The first generation of environmentalist artists, such as Beuys, Denes, Alan Sonfist, Mel Chin and the couple Helen and Newton Harrison, often intervened into landscape, returning it to a more pristine or positively modified state. Into the 1990s and 2000s, environmental contemporary art or ‘eco art’, as it is sometimes more snappily referred to, came to embrace a variety of approaches, from landscape intervention to artistic collaborations with scientists, educational projects and gallery-based installation. What unites these approaches now is a thematic concern with environmental damage and remediation, rather than a specific medium. Since the 2000s, the focus has been especially on the climate crisis; and the offerings of eco art are now regularly staged in a myriad of themed exhibitions. To take just Rimini Protokoll’s win > < win, for instance, it could be seen in exhibitions such as After the End of the World (CCCB, Barcelona, 2017), Eco-visionaries (Royal Academy of Art, London, 2019) and The Coming World (Garage, Moscow, 2019). Eco art today, then, is a widely practised and indeed established genre, within which we might distinguish three dominant artistic approaches: artists trying to instil a sense of emergency in their audiences, create a sense of solidarity with non-human nature, or impress the audience with human ingenuity in finding solutions. First consider a work like Ice Watch (2014), by the DanishIcelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and geoscientist Minik Rosing (Plate 24). The work consisted of eighty tonnes of ice, which Eliasson arranged to be carved off a glacier in Greenland and transported to

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

133

Europe. The work was repeated several times, in Copenhagen, Paris and London, the Paris version coinciding with the UN Climate Change Conference (2015). For each version, the boulders were arranged in a circle and illuminated by dramatic lighting. The documentary photographs show visitors in winter clothes hugging these gleaming ice blocks: perhaps to protect them, perhaps to say goodbye. The presentation is a technologically remarkable piece of stage-management; the message of disappearing ice is impactful and unambiguous. The atmospheric lighting of the ice may evoke themes of light and nature that Eliasson is known for. Timed to coincide with key events in the international negotiation of climate change policy, the work bridges the abstract presentation of climate data and complexity of science, here distilling all that information into an easily legible moment of the unfolding destruction. Emergency-inducing works like Eliasson’s attempt to make tangible the climate disaster in the here and now. In a comparable move, the artist Angela Palmer has transported ten rainforest tree stumps to Europe and displayed them in public squares, also on the occasion of the UN Climate Change Conference (Ghost Forest, 2009). Part of the shock of these works resides in their ethical transgression: fossil fuels are burnt to transport the ice or the dead trees, and it is that wanton expenditure of resources (still negligible in the grand scheme of climate change) which helps to create a sense of outrage. This might be necessary because, as philosopher Santiago Zabala notes, the specific problem of climate change is precisely the ‘absence of an emergency’, the seeming continuation of life as normal, which the artist should disrupt.12 Because the progress towards destruction in climate change is slower than the modern attention span can register – because the violence here is ‘slow violence’, to use Rob Nixon’s concept13 – the first task of art might be to speed up the viewers’ perception of time, in other words, to insert us into the more immediate, affective experience of an emergency. Still, it seems questionable to me as to whether art can truly sustain a sense of emergency, since the very emotional structure of emergencies tends

134

artists remake the world

to be fleeting. That worry is compounded when the visual language of emergencies itself becomes ossified, even clichéd. For instance, aside from Eliasson, the melting ice trope has been used by several other artists (Néle Azevedo and Wayne Binitie, among others), and the display of dead or dying trees is at least as common (for example in the work of Mark Dion, Maya Lin, Michael Sailstorfer). Indeed, in their rather majestic depictions of destruction, such works have even been attacked as ‘disaster pornography’: a release of emotional energy for the viewer that we enjoy rather than problematise.14 Like images of ‘prettified death’ that Iris Murdoch worried about, like a death of a diva in an opera, the melting boulder of ice allows the viewers to dwell on the emotional impact of its demise, but in a manner sweetly isolated from the sphere of action. While emergency-raising artworks specialise in evoking primarily negative emotions – anxiety, fear, outrage – a different emphasis in recent ecological art has been on the more positive feelings of solidarity with natural environments. American artists and twin sisters Christine and Margaret Wertheim are the co-creators of Crochet Coral Reef (2005–ongoing), a project for which the artists and volunteers create crocheted sculptures that resemble coral threatened by the warming oceans. The emphasis in the work, however, is not on death and destruction, but on the potential of connectedness, persistence and collaboration. It is no coincidence that the Wertheims have picked crocheting, a craft traditionally associated with women’s work and rekindled by feminist artistic collectives: the Wertheims gesture at the potential of grassroots action and use the events to educate participants on the harms visited upon the living coral by climate change. Philosopher Donna Haraway, their occasional collaborator, has described the project as involving ‘artscience-activist worldings’: ‘the makers of the reef practise multi­ species becoming-with to cultivate the capacity to respond, [which we might call] response-ability’.15 Haraway herself has influentially suggested that humanity should ‘make kin’ with other species, that is, forge family-like bonds with the non-human life forms existing

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

135

on Earth. Crochet Coral Reef can be understood as attempting to foster just such a sense of cross-species empathy. The idea of engendering empathy and solidarity with the nonhuman has been popular in artworld-adjacent academia, with another influential philosopher, Timothy Morton, stating that ‘ecologically explicit art is simply art that brings this solidarity with the nonhuman to the foreground’.16 For Morton, even Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch succeeds at stimulating a form of solidarity with the melting ice. The project of prioritising kinship with the morethan-human world has important precedent in several Indigenous cosmologies,17 and has also been explored by some contemporary artists drawing on Indigenous heritage. Anishinaabe and Canadian filmmaker Lisa Jackson’s virtual reality immersive artwork Biidaaban: First Light (2018) imagines Toronto through an Indigenous-futurist vision where human and non-human life can coexist. Ngarluma and Australian artist Tyson Mowarin has created an art PC game, Thalu: Dreamtime Is Now (2019), which enables the player to enter the world of Ngarluma (Indigenous Australian) ancestors, acting out the protection of traditional land against the encroachment of mining. However, it is important here to distinguish works like the Wertheims’, which attempt to create a sense of solidarity with the non-human with explicitly ecological intention, from those that use relationships between humans and non-humans as a starting point for experimental worldmaking for cultural heritages and communities under pressure. The indubitable importance of the latter should not automatically lead us to suppose the efficiency of the former. Human empathy is a fickle thing: even whatever empathy we manage to feel towards our human kin has not prevented the entire human history being one of mutual exploitation and persecution. Extending empathy to the coral reef might not in fact end up doing much for the coral either. (In this sense, artistic explorations that emphasise the uncomfortable relationship with non-human animals, as by Maja Smrekar that I discuss in Chapter 4, seems less naive to me.)

136

artists remake the world

Aside from the paradigms of eco-emergency and eco-solidarity, the third dominant form of art among recent artists working on ecological themes is what we might call ‘intervention-based’ art, which often arises out of collaboration with scientists or engineers. These works carry on the mantle of nature-reclamation artworks like those of Agnes Denes, in that they imagine ways in which humans might mitigate the harms of environmental damage they have wrought. Some of these are project-based works, such as Jorge Menna Barreto’s Restauro (2016) – a restaurant serving food produced in collaboration with rainforest-friendly agro-forestry farms – or Walking Forest (2018–ongoing) by Ruth Ben-Tovim, Anne-Marie Culhane, Lucy Neal and Shelley Castle, which is a reforesting project, the seeds of which derive from an arboretum planted by early-twentieth-century women activists. Other artists imagine technological solutions, such as The Intelligent Guerilla Beehive (2016–ongoing) by AnneMarie Maes, or Pollinator Pathmaker (2021) by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, both of which double as artworks and technological solutions for aiding declining bee populations.18 Taken together, these new approaches to ecology in art give one answer to the challenge that climate change poses to cultural production. The three types of ecological art considered here take declining nature as their subject matter – represented as ice, trees, coral, animals, or other parts of the non-human wilderness – and then they attempt to reform the viewers’ attitudes towards it. We, the ungrateful children of Earth, first realise our wrongdoing (emergency), then re-calibrate our solidarity with our more-than-human brethren (kin-making), and finally do something about it (solutions). The role envisaged here for art is carefully optimistic. As Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of the most influential curators today and co-editor of a book called 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, put it in a radio interview, ‘images have an impact on dreams, and dreams have an impact on actions’, with artists leading the path towards a ‘new planetary visualisation of the embeddedness and co-dependency of our species’.19 The role of art here can be seen as participating in a

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

137

more productive form of ‘worldmaking’: an attempt to reorganise the viewers’ cognitive and emotional habits in a way that might lead us out of the climate crisis.

The P a r a d ox o f A rt a bo u t Natu re Contemporary art is not alone in reshaping our attitudes towards the non-human world, and we find many similar strategies employed in mainstream cultural production: in nature documentaries, advertising and feature films. British documentary-maker David Attenborough’s series Blue Planet II (2017) is an interplay of ecoemergency and eco-solidarity of sorts: we fall in love with the creatures inhabiting our oceans, and we despair as they are suffocated by plastic pollution. American nature photographer James Balog’s Chasing Ice (2012) used time-lapse photography to dramatically capture the melting and calving of ice in Greenland, eliciting a similar effect to Eliasson’s Ice Watch. And undoubtedly, such cultural production can change our attitudes to nature, if by ‘nature’ we mean oceans, forests, polar caps and their non-human inhabitants. Blue Planet II has been credited with changing British consumers’ attitudes to plastic, and while attributing such an effect to single works can be hard to establish, it seems undeniable that the public understanding of environmental crises is largely bound up with visual representations of harms to non-human nature. As psychological studies have found, when most people think of ‘environmental crisis’, they most likely imagine polar bears on depleted ice sheets, the burning rainforest or rubbish patches in the ocean.20 Still, we might doubt the relevance of cultural worldmaking, which focuses on the natural world – whether in exhibition-based art or in film and television – and we might doubt it on grounds of both sentimentality and inefficiency. Images of disaster, as mentioned, create a sense of impotence and dark fascination rather than point towards solutions. Attempts at creating a sense of solidarity

138

artists remake the world

and making kin, meanwhile, might leave one with a sense of hidden anthropomorphism, of a sentimental indulgence that does not yet acknowledge the systemic causes of the disaster. Crocheting the coral reef or dragging boulders of ice to European cities may occasion an outpouring of sympathy for these entities, but the worry is that we are behaving a little like those well-heeled Victorian readers of Charles Dickens, who shed tears at the misfortunes of orphaned children, but did not reflect on how their own lifestyles might have contributed to the deprivation. Depictions of nature in art have also been criticised for visually deepening the fantasies of pristine jungles and rainforests; and these may be uncomfort­ ably close to a colonialist gaze, which portrayed such territories as conveniently empty of human life and ready for plundering. For instance, Canadian First Nations (Cree) artist Kent Monkman has explicitly criticised colonialist landscape traditions in his satirical re-appropriations of nineteenth-century European settler paintings of the Americas.21 It is important to note that such arguments have arisen within the artworld itself, and have created a rich and complex set of positions. But if we were to concentrate the complaints against eco art’s focus on the natural world into a single objection, it would run like this: depictions of nature simply target the wrong part of the cultural imagination. Environmental destruction and the climate catastrophe require radical changes to the economy of fossil-fuel-emitting nations: to areas such as construction, agriculture, transportation, trade. The warming temperatures do impact the ‘natural’ world of non-human wild animals and plants; and yet, in the cultural imaginary, the causes of climate change are quite separated from images of nature. Boarding an easyJet plane for a holiday occupies a different part of our sensibility than do forests, corals, bees and icebergs. We might know they are connected, of course, but they do not inhabit the same way of seeing, the same manifest reality. The climate crisis harms nature, but paradoxically, the change required in our shared way of seeing need not involve any

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

139

change in social attitudes towards the natural world. We could stop emissions without changing our attitudes towards melting ice-caps and bleached coral reefs one jot; what matters much more is how we feel about water boilers, cement factories, oil pipelines, the basic laws of capitalist economy. None of this is to suggest that there can be no interesting art involving nature; indeed, the themes of nature in art have long been both intellectually stimulating and profound. But to the extent that we are interested in the relevance of artistic worldmaking to the climate crisis – that is, to the extent that we think art could productively change audiences’ interpretation of the world – then we must more tightly connect artistic worldmaking with actual politics and economics of climate change: with people and power relations among them, with corporations, with what we see as luxuries and what we see as ordinary consumption, and with the socioeconomic systems that have their basis in the burning of fossil fuels. So, what are our options here? One entirely legitimate possibility would be to align artistic production more closely to antisystemic, goal-oriented climate activism: the process of directly persuading fellow citizens and putting pressure on those in power. For instance, artistic manifestations have been important to the Extinction Rebellion movement of the late 2010s: in Chapter 3, I mentioned the ‘die-in’ performances and their street theatre campaigns that drew the attention of mass media, and perhaps contributed to creating a platform for discussing environmental policy. Within the artworld, several collectives, such as Liberate Tate in the UK, have focused their campaigns on institutional critique, demanding an end of artworld-sponsorship by fossil-fuel corporations like BP. We have already studied the intersections of art and activism in Chapter 3, so I will not consider these forms of ecologically activist art in greater detail here, important though they are.22 Instead, I will explore what pathways are open for gallery-based contemporary art in meaningfully responding to the challenge of climate disaster.

140

artists remake the world

Rep re s e n t i n g Cl i m at e Ju s tice Between a Whisper and a Cry (2019) by Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle is a forty-one-minute video piece and installation, within which each chapter is associated with one of the months in the Caribbean hurricane season. The work is structured as a string of allegorical scenes, which are not linked in a strict narrative. In the June sequence, we see a dancer (Divine Tasinda), wearing a sailor’s outfit, dancing across the ornate, wood-panelled room of Glasgow City Chambers, to a song by the Sun Ra Arkestra (Plate 25). August is represented by a scene with the artist herself, standing at the helm of a wooden boat, sailing with her arms out-stretched, offering choreographed gestures to the sun. The September sequence shows a religious celebration in a Spiritual Baptist church in Barbados, with participants dancing joyously, all dressed in white and gold. Some sequences are visually doubled up or mirrored, others are interspersed with archival footage. Visual references are repeated and multiplied, layered into dense symbols to be deciphered, and yet there are enough textual clues that a clear argument begins to emerge. The video opens with a long quotation from Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, which relates the sequences – filmed in Glasgow, Barbados and Senegal – to the triangular transatlantic slave trade, which between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries transported some 15 million enslaved people from Africa to the Americas. Against this cruel legacy, the dancing sequences show the resilience and brilliance of Black diasporic cultures, and the musical soundtrack reveals connections between their traditions. What disrupts that optimistic reading, however, is the periodic insertion of other imagery: newscast infographics of hurricanes in the Caribbean – abstract, swirling blue-and-red shapes that travel across the map – and shots of a rising, foaming sea. Whittle’s work focuses on the political aspects of the climate crisis, in the sense that it inscribes what might seem like scenes of natural destruction (hurricanes) into a narrative about harms caused

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

141

by one group of people to another. Indeed, the climate catastrophe is not affecting everybody in the world equally. Humid areas close to the equator are already more prone to floods and unbearable temperature rises; intensified storm seasons threaten the Caribbean and Southeast Asia; rising sea levels endanger low-lying island states; in terms of projected infectious diseases, economic impact, famine and struggle for resources, regions in sub-Saharan Africa are predicted to do the worst. Meanwhile, between 1850 and 2020, the United States and Europe have been responsible for roughly 43 per cent of all CO2 emissions, but are among the best prepared to deal with the consequences. Countries like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Russia have also become major contributors, and, unlike the United States and Europe, are not decreasing emissions: China is now emitting more than the EU and US combined in absolute terms, and its consumption of greenhouse gases per capita outstrips some Western countries like France.23 Whittle’s narrative, in which the disaster experienced by the African diaspora in the Caribbean runs in parallel to the history of transatlantic slavery, is therefore apt: this is no natural disaster, or a disaster caused by ‘humanity’ at large. It is above all a disaster visited by one group of people upon another. Climate justice is the concern with unequal responsibilities for, and outcomes of, climate change to different peoples and beings in the world; and as a topic it has become of rising importance in recent contemporary art.24 If we ask ourselves how climate change is represented in our manifest world (the world as we experience it) then it is easy to see why this shift is important. Watching the news, we might be in principle aware that the climate disasters occur in different parts of the world with varying intensities, but the causal link between who caused the disaster and who is experiencing it is not woven into our daily lives. When a citizen in the Global North takes a flight or decides on whether to buy a beef or vegan burger, they might be aware of consequences for the environment (polar bears, ice-caps, fish in the ocean) but they do not think of their choices as perpetuating an inequality comparable to the slave trade.

142

artists remake the world

(Indeed, the thought is as far from our minds as the connection to American slavery might have been to a nineteenth-century European wearing a cotton shirt.) If, as in previous chapters, we think of art as an experimental arm of political thinking, then we might think that art could be one of the places in which that necessary realignment could begin to happen. Declaration of moral inequities and political calamities does not, of course, distinguish art from other modes of communication available: from reportage, polemics, opinion pieces. And so, if we are looking for a specific role for art to play, we can think back to a concept we have already encountered: what philosopher Cora Diamond has called the ‘difficulty of reality’, something we can know to be true, but which is utterly out of kilter with our ordinary way of thinking and doing, and which we therefore cannot easily accommodate in our usual way of life.25 The distinct advantage of art, as I argued in Chapter 2, is that we can retain such difficulties in view. The interpretative puzzle of the artwork keeps the viewer’s mind circling around the difficulty, with realisation appearing in and out of focus, as if in the corner of one’s eye. Consider here another artist, Sammy Baloji, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose work touches on the political realities of the climate crisis. In Baloji’s installation Sociétés secrètes (2015), the artist displays bas-relief copper plates, roughly A3 in size, each showing a decorative pattern of indentations (Plate 26). Bumps and lines criss-cross the reddish lustre of the copper sheet, but the meaning of these compositions is not immediately clear. Only by perusing the archival material exhibited nearby does the viewer learn that these are skin-scarification patterns, practised in some Congolese communities during the colonial era, and that Belgian colonisers perceived these scarifications as a secret code of insubordination. Simultaneously, the texts accompanying the display make us aware that the continued mining in DRC is driven in part by climate change mitigation in the West: copper is used in solar panels and wind turbines, while cobalt is an ingredient in car batteries. With this information, the meaning of the copper plates poses an interpretative task to the viewer. Baloji

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

143

could be celebrating the history of anti-colonial resistance, showing us a luminous proof of a culture that persists through a form of artistic trace. Or these could be more tragic items, an imprint of a human body on a natural resource – copper – which continues to bring the Congolese suffering. The effect is comparable to how in Alberta Whittle’s video, interpretative tasks are posed by certain repeated visual motifs, such as certain dance gestures, mirrored by the dancer Divine Tasinda, the artist herself, and in archival footage incorporated from across the Black diaspora. Such interpretative activity is familiar enough within the more complex forms of contemporary art we have already encountered: it structures what we have called the ‘aesthetic experience’ of the work. While it might seem incongruous to call works as negative in subject matter as Whittle’s and Baloji’s ‘aesthetic’, this is what they are in the sense that they provide opportunities for the viewer to become engrossed in the internal structure of the work. That is what distinguishes the work from, say, the objective tone of scientific data, or from the impassioned speech of activism; and while those registers of political discourse certainly have their own roles to play, there is a need here, too, to provide an opportunity to contemplate the difficulty indirectly. Deep moral calamities in which we are ourselves implicated cannot long be beheld directly; like one’s own death – like the face of Medusa – we can only look at them obliquely. The political nature of the present climate disaster is such that each of us who is a beneficiary of the global fossil-fuel-enabled economy must understand his or her position as ultimately enabled by another’s suffering; and this realisation is, ultimately, extremely hard to accept. The crushing guilt we might feel might recall the old wisdom of Silenus, invoked by Friedrich Nietzsche to sum up the most pessimistic outlook on human life: ‘What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die.’26 And not only would such a realisation simply be too much to bear: little that is productive could stem from such overbearing guilt. Like with terrifying news

144

artists remake the world

reports, in everyday life we must deflect such difficulties of reality (as a psychological imperative of preserving our own sanity): shrug, or slip into some platitude, or make a gallows-humour joke of it, or outright deny responsibility, and keep going. Art, on the other hand, can make the difficulty remain without being so cheapened, made bearable by the aesthetic engrossment. In the installation of Alberta Whittle’s Between a Whisper and a Cry, metal chains weave around the floor, reminiscent of the chains of the enslaved peoples traded across the Atlantic: these chains might just brush against the foot of the viewer as they sit down to watch. Like other contemporary artists, Whittle and Baloji must here strike a balance between obviousness and suggestion: their task is not to prettify the disaster, not to petrify the viewer, but to use the suspended mode of looking, enabling the viewer to face up to it. The structure we are describing here is not new. Artworks’ semantic density, the experience that comes with their interpretative difficulty, has allowed audiences across different societies to contemplate the un-contemplatable in their artworks. Allegories have been used to represent the mystery of the divine in painting, metaphors to obscure the nature of love in lyrical poetry. All occupy the viewer’s mind while a potentially overwhelming realisation lurks in the background. The challenge for contemporary exhibition-based art is simply that the difficulty of climate injustice is less familiar, and so these works must perform the double labour of establishing facts and finding the required interpretative puzzle. Whittle’s and Baloji’s works deal with two not often addressed political aspects of the global climate disaster: the inequitable burden visited upon African and African diaspora peoples (Whittle), and the unethical extraction of materials used in the transition to electric vehicles (Baloji). Given how complex and poorly understood the politics of climate disaster are in the public consciousness, there are many more political elements for artists to bring to light. Whittle and Baloji deal with political mechanisms that bring suffering to the geographical areas that are close to them (Barbados and DR Congo), but we might

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

145

wonder what a similar degree of artistic scrutiny would show, when directed at the relations and behaviour of those who are comparably more powerful in staying the wheels of destruction. Here, too, guilt and responsibility are not equally proportioned. How many in the Global North, for instance, know to what extent their governments have been lowering emissions; or which companies use their lobbying efforts to resist reform; or the emissions cost of the meat-eating diet; or to what extent cooperation with authoritarian governments like China and Russia has perpetuated the burning of fossil fuels? The choice here is not between aesthetics and politics: rather, the aesthetic achievement consists of the difficult task of keeping such realities in view without activating the shut-down mechanisms that they so readily trigger.

T h e P i pe l i n e f ro m Wo r l d m a k i n g to P o licy Let us then imagine a hypothetical situation, in which the artworks that foreground the power relations behind the climate disaster have already been successful. In this world, a deeper understanding of the political nature of climate change has been widely adopted into the mainstream cultural production; they have seeped into the shared cultural consciousness. The inhabitants of this world no longer conceive of climate change as a case of a generic greedy ‘humankind’ harming a generic ‘nature’, but as a geopolitical problem involving unequal harms and responsibilities. This world might have a better grasp on reality, but a question still unanswered in it is how its inhabitants conceive of the pathways of their society towards appropriate political action: how they envisage solutions. Here we need to think back to the relationship between art, culture and political change that we have already encountered in previous chapters. As we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, to speak of pathways of political change in a democracy is not merely to speak of

146

artists remake the world

individuals making demands for change, but rather also of cultural conceivability for legal or political changes. For instance, in relation to the huge shift in LGBT legislation in several democracies in the period since roughly the 1970s, it was only a small part of the population that played an active, motivated role as activists struggling for change. This minority struggle, however, has unfolded against a much broader shift in how the nature of gender, sex and love came to be perceived – so that when legal reform was proposed, the broader electorate was either comfortable enough to vote it through, or sufficiently neutral to not oppose it. That is the aspect of political change in which cultural production, and art as its experimental forerunner, can play a role. When we think of art’s relationship to political change, we therefore need not think of immediate impact, but rather of art envisioning the kind of cultural shift, the kind of future ‘worldmaking’, which is necessary for better political relations to come into play. To simplify the argument I made in Chapter 4: LGBT artists of earlier decades may not have had an immediate social impact, but they envisaged a way of looking, which, when taken up by popular culture (television, pop songs, mainstream films) eventually prepared the ground for reform.27 We should not overstate the case for cultural change in politics, however, nor, therefore, the case for art. One might think that a big difference between, say, LGBT legislation and climate change solutions is that the policies impacting the latter are too technical and too complex to register at the level of culture. A useful comparison here is the gradual closing of the ozone hole, from the mid-1980s to the present day, which remains one of the greatest regulatory successes in international environmental policy. The depletion of the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from harmful radiation, was the result of specific chemicals (mainly chlorofluorocarbons), which were used in various products, from hairspray to refrigerators. After their harmful effects were ascertained, these chemicals were rapidly removed from industry globally, in an effort consisting of international negotiations, and of concerted scientific work, which

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

147

found suitable industrial alternatives to these chemicals.28 The arts and culture probably played little to no role in this process. Growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, I can certainly remember reports about the ozone hole, but I cannot think of any important cultural production on the topic. Similarly, one might think that what really matters for climate change mitigation are political decisions pertaining to decarbonisation timelines, carbon tax, debates about whether gas is a good halfway fuel between coal and green energy, about the role of nuclear energy, and so forth: and those topics may be hard to translate into the broader culture. LGBT political issues (or the rights of women, or of ethnic minorities …) pertain to the personal sphere of individuals, and so can be expressed culturally: a love story about two women is easier to imagine than a story about carbon tax. The argument for the arts emerges, however, once we acknowledge that there is in fact a hard cultural wall for policy change within fossil-fuel-consuming countries. Let us consider some of the recent successes in lowering carbon emissions. The United Kingdom has one of the best records in the world for reducing its territorial CO2 emissions, which were lowered by nearly 30 per cent between 2010 and 2020.29 This has been largely achieved through improving energy efficiency and by abandoning coal in favour of less harmful fossil fuels like gas and (to a lesser extent) renewables. Arguably, these changes did not impact the general lifestyle of British citizenconsumers, and they certainly did not require a great shift in their cultural outlook. They are comparable to policies like mandating energy-efficient lightbulbs or plastic-free straws, which required only moderate adaptations in behaviour. However, reaching net zero globally and quickly will require much more radical steps. Remember that global emissions must start falling immediately and reach net zero by 2050 – but currently global emissions are increasing and are projected to be much the same or higher in 2050. One hard limitation here involves expectations of what the ordinary good life looks like, what appears ‘radical’ and what does not. To take a

148

artists remake the world

straightforward example, livestock is estimated to account for some 14 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, so eliminating or greatly reducing meat consumption (especially beef ) would have clear positive consequences.30 Yet placing severe limitations on meat consumption would seem to most citizen-consumers today not just unnecessary, but downright crazy, indeed, as crazy as proposing gay marriage might have seemed in the mid-twentieth century. The known world here hits against the hard limits of the manifest world: what we rationally know would be the logical thing to do hits up against what culturally seems like the conceivable thing to do. And so, the necessary reduction of emissions indeed requires deep cultural change. Limits on air travel, unprecedented green investment into developing nations by developed economies, legal demands on heat insulation, retrofitting rather than building new buildings, perhaps a tax on meat consumption: all such solutions would require a deeply imbibed understanding of climate change causes and solutions by electorates, but also the willingness of citizenconsumers to call for, or at least accept, such laws and regulations. The necessary cultural shift would therefore require us to see anew our patterns of production and consumption: from buildings, clothing, food and electronics, to travel, heating and waste. A new ideal of the good life is needed. A speculative question for artists, the engineers of future cultural sensibilities, is therefore this: could we imagine not just a general increase of ‘green’ rhetoric, but also a concerted study of the specific policies by artists? Could we imagine a knowledge pipeline leading from the necessary policies to artistic worldmaking, so that artistic worldmaking could in turn prepare the ground for the policy? Congolese artist Maurice Mbikayi uses e-waste materials in his sculptures, videos and performances in a way that may lead us to explore this possibility. In one striking image we see the artist sitting atop a towering mound of discarded screens, cables, speakers, joysticks and other digital detritus, dressed in a curious costume. His black redingote, walking stick, top hat, white

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

149

breeches and shoes are all constructed using the keys of computer keyboards (Plate 27). His stockings, clashingly colourful, are woven from computer cables. Mbikayi’s ‘techno dandy’ concept draws on La Sape, the longstanding Congolese subculture of dressing in haute couture, dandyish or flamboyant styles, which originated as a subversion of European clothing in the colonial era, and was later revived as a means of asserting the wearer’s dignity against the deprivation of urban areas.31 Out of such reference points, Mbikayi has conjured an entire aesthetic universe: performances, sculptures, photographs and installations, where confident aesthetic self-expression is created out of the waste materials that underpin the computer industry. Here, waste materials are recycled into a spectacle of archaic glamour, but with a strange contradiction at its heart. On the one hand, this is a liberating act of self-expression in the face of economic and political adversity, extended from sapeur and Skhothane subcultures.32 On the other, a suspicion seems to fall upon these materials. As with Sammy Baloji’s copper reliefs, the texts exhibited alongside Mbikayi’s artworks invite the viewers to understand the economic pathways these materials travel. Just as the materials necessary for the engineering of computers and smartphones are often mined in Africa, Africa is also the destination for much toxic electronic waste from richer countries. In Mbikayi’s visions, this waste is made into adornment, but equally, our adornments are shown as waste. Like Whittle’s and Baloji’s works discussed above, Mbikayi’s artistic approach is removed from documentary, photojournalistic or propagandist modes of address. The work is not trying to motivate the viewer to stop their usage of everyday electronic items, or to make the environmental cost of these items explicit. Mbikayi’s photographs – cleanly shot, approaching the aesthetic of a fashion editorial – can be contrasted with National Geographic-style reportage on e-waste dumping grounds in Africa. If you look up images from the Agbogbloshie waste district in Ghana, you find terrifying scenes of young people and children burning toxic e-waste; these images

150

artists remake the world

importantly inform, but again evoke a sense of a humanitarian emergency. Instead, Mbikayi’s art works to shift the perception of our everyday more subtly. The artist does not dwell on the wretchedness of African countries as the recipients of this waste; out of digital debris, there arises a belle-époque lady’s dress, a mask and a hooped skirt, various sculptures, baby clothing, a performance of a bandaged figure riding a horse through the city. And yet, the viewer might emerge from the work beholding their own everyday electronics differently – for instance, I might think about the origin and ultimate destination of the keyboard I am writing these words with, or of the phone you might be reading these words on. Mbikayi’s work casts suspicion upon the everyday, the ordinary. Of course, by itself, this work cannot remake the world: art is only ever the suggestion for worldmaking, a momentarily different way of organising information. The interesting question, though, is whether such a fleeting experience could become extended, whether it might become a part of a common cultural code. In today’s mainstream visual culture we will look in vain for such a critical gaze: lead characters in our films and TV series, however socially conscious they might be, are not shown gazing suspiciously at their keyboards, phones, cars or boilers. Within exhibition-based art, however, there are already several artists whose work might begin to offer some such alternative mode of perception. American artist Mary Mattingly, in a series of works from the early 2010s called House and Universe, took the majority of her possessions, arranged them into piles and bound them with rope, so as to form large boulders. The artist would then live with only a small bag of her things, but meanwhile, she would drag her boulders across New York City in performances that emphasised the weight of all this accumulated stuff. She then photographed them in symbolically suggestive settings, such as perched atop a naked human form. Finnish artist Niina Uusitalo’s video Coming off Fossil Fuels (2022) offers a similarly melancholy take on overconsumption, though more directly linked to climate change. The video shows the various

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

151

enjoyable pursuits, such as driving her car as the sun is setting, while in a voiceover she narrates her relationship to fossil fuels as addiction; this is counterposed with seductive shots of petroleum or coal, portraying these raw materials as addictive substances like alcohol or drugs. Chinese performance artist Brother Nut has created a curious intervention, Project Dust (2015), for which he vacuumed Beijing smog for a hundred days and then made a brick out of the particulate matter he collected. Here, the realisation of environmental degradation is both absurd and derived from something ordinary, like a walk around the city. Some of these works might be thought of as coming to terms with what scholar Stephanie LeMenager described as petromelancholia: the separation from the comforts associated with petroleum-fuelled lifestyles.33 Others may have to do with extending the viewers’ understanding of their ordinary lives as dependent on extractive capitalism which plunders territories beyond their immediate lived environment. They all work to destabilise the lie of innocent pleasure that pervades our experience of daily consumerism. In offering such rearrangements of our perception, such experiments in worldmaking, there are limits to what art can do, and we ought not to overestimate its power, or set the bar for its success too high. A single artwork, as I have been arguing throughout this book, should not be judged for the measurable impact it might or might not have. Instead, contemporary exhibition-based art can be thought of as an experiment in a new communal sensibility, an attempt at a new manifest world. To appreciate a work by Maurice Mbikayi or Mary Mattingly, the appropriate question to ask is not whether audience members have been immediately persuaded of something – they most likely have not – but rather, whether these works offer a new way of perceiving our everyday lives in such a way that we would be more likely to permit radical incisions into it. What kind of politics might become possible, what kind of policy enforceable, in a culture where mainstream films, music, TV, Netflix series, treated extractivist consumption in everyday lives with the same suspicion

152

artists remake the world

we find in these artworks? And what kind of visions must artists still propose, to make that pipeline from worldmaking to policy at least something that can be imagined? The artwork creates a blueprint for a different manifest world, and therein lies their contribution to politics. The creation of that world, however, lies beyond the artwork itself.

B et we e n Vi s i o n s a n d A c tio ns As we think through the connection between art and the climate crisis engulfing the world, several chasms become apparent. At one side is the artwork, offering a fleeting experimental vision to those who can make it to the gallery; on the other side, the crisis, with its demand for facts, for organising, for canvassing, for action. The ruminative, symbolically dense works that I have been describing feel very different from the urgency of the unfolding disaster, which requires vast new coalitions to band together and accomplish a total reorientation of the global political and economic system. The link between contemporary exhibition-based art and environmental politics, therefore, cannot be one of immediate impact. But the role art might play for the present challenge is nevertheless important, given the immensity of the cultural change that is required for radical policies to become possible. Like a thought experiment, art’s role is to imagine a new manifest world: one in which citizen-consumers’ everyday experiences appear shot through with an understanding that the climate catastrophe is a political problem, and in which our everyday production and consumption habits begin to gleam with an understanding of their true cost. There are many blind spots, many deficiencies of vision, which artists could address. For instance, what would it be like to create artworks that confront us with the cost of emissions of livestock, while bypassing the deflection mechanisms of feeling like we are being preached to? What would it take for the sense of luxury

Creativity in the Face of Extinction

153

around overseas travel to shift, in the same way that, for instance, perceptions around smoking have shifted? To accomplish this, artists must become as deliberate and well informed as the complexity of climate change policy demands. But it is a distinct advantage of the experimental nature of contemporary art that it can attempt such visions, where mainstream cultural production does not yet know how to proceed, nor is willing to take the risk. These may seem like strangely prosaic requests for contemporary art, but that might be precisely because we still lack a cultural language which could allow us to prescribe the kind of vision, the kind of worldmaking, which would match the political needs before us. Global climate change is a crisis structured around a rift between the facts established by science, which require effort to uncover and to understand, and the familiar, everyday world as it appears to us to be. We will need all the imagination we can muster to close this gap between the known and the manifest worlds.

Chapter seven

Remaking the World’s Hinges L oo king F o rwa rd , L o o k i ng B ack

P

akistani artist Bani Abidi works in video, installation and other media, but one of her perhaps most immediately affecting works is a series of watercolours, The Man Who… (2015). Each work is an illustration of a man plucked from the Guinness Book of World Records: ‘the man who walked in circles for three months’ paces hurriedly; ‘the man who clapped for 97 hours’ stands upright, in a suit and tie, his hands half-parted; ‘the man who could split a hair’ stares intently at something invisible between his fingers (Plate 28). Abidi’s work casts a wry look at the nationalism she encounters on the Indian subcontinent; as she explains, the men all attempted not only to set records, but to write history as the first Pakistani or the first Indian person who attained that particular achievement. Like much of the art considered in this book, Abidi’s work points towards specific political circumstances, but it also has a kind of translatability; it reaches beyond itself into circumstances past and present. The title of her watercolours recalls the installation by the Ukrainian-American artist Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1985), which poked fun at the space-flying missions of the economically crippled Soviet Union. Kabakov’s installation showed a bedroom decorated with Soviet space propaganda posters, with an odd, homemade catapult contraption hung to the wall, and a large hole in the ceiling. It was

Remaking the World’s Hinges

155

as if the man had shot himself into space, leaving only his slippers behind. A different time, a different place, but here is the kind of glory-seeking that Abidi ridicules in the nationalisms of her own time. Like Kabakov’s work, however, Abidi’s can quickly turn from humorous to foreboding: in another watercolour series, entitled The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared (2019/21), she shows various media personalities who disappeared in Pakistan, likely murdered for their oppositional political beliefs. A portrait of a man, mouth open in conversation, appears four times. In each iteration the watercolours are more washed out; the man fades into nothingness. Just as Kabakov could not have predicted, in 1985, that a Pakistani artist would find resonances with his work thirty-five years later, we cannot say what resonances Abidi’s watercolours might have in our own future. Could places where individuals’ liberty is today taken for granted, in the future recognise their own reality in the watercolours of a disappearing man? Might places where liberty is today under threat, in the future see Abidi’s watercolours as mere documents of a half-forgotten past? One danger of writing a book, the subject matter of which runs up to the moment of writing (I write these lines in December 2022, and some of the exhibitions discussed in previous chapters are but a few months old), is that there might be events around the corner that force you to rethink your narratives. Ways of life that seem innocent today may tomorrow be recognised as perpetrating injustice; injustices that loom large in the public psyche today may become buried under the rubble of indifference or violence. Art can transcend its time by becoming a symbol of something other than what it originally intended to represent, but writing, more definitive in its pronouncements, is sooner held hostage by history’s unfolding. Today we feel that uncertainty acutely. If at the beginning of the twenty-first century that now much-maligned term, ‘the end of history’, was resuscitated to describe the pax Americana – the spread of a human-faced capitalism under the eyes of a benign hegemon – the last two decades revealed continued ideological

156

artists remake the world

conflict and exploitation, and brought to attention the rapidly unfolding climate disaster. Whatever we can say about the nature of politics, and political art, now carries an uncertain expiry date. Still, unlike art, writing must confine itself to certainties, to the here and now, to the manageable. So, in this concluding chapter, I wish to gather some of the threads of this book together, and – at the risk of becoming a little like Bani Abidi’s man who would split a hair – offer some concrete answers to the questions with which we began the inquiry. In capitalist democracies, at least as we know them today, what is it that art can do for politics?

‘Wh at I s A rt ? ’ : A S e co nd A t t e m p t at t h e Q u e s t io n Given the unstable forms of contemporary art – its protean shapeshifting between forms as diverse as evidence gathering, socially engaged practice and installation, as well as the traditional forms of painting and sculpture – a niggling doubt might persist about the story I have told so far: namely, in what sense are all these things gathered here ‘art’? What do they even have in common? In Chapter 1, I began our investigation with a stop-gap answer, with a reliance on the ‘institutional theory’ of art: art is whatever is agreed to be art by curators, artists, art historians and other participants in the artworld. This definition is worryingly circular (but what makes the artworld the art world?) and fails to explain why we value art: what is it that makes art feel like a calling, that makes it stand apart from seemingly less profound leisure activities like pigeon fancying or baking competitions. Alternatively, one might express disdain for the project of defining art altogether, pointing out that previous definitions (via ‘medium’, or ‘aesthetic experience’) have tended to prioritise the European canon or to exclude crafts traditionally practised by women. Still, the question ‘what is art?’ remains tantalising, not because we would want to police the borders of the artworld,

Remaking the World’s Hinges

157

but because we want to capture what makes our encounters with art worthwhile. Why publicly fund art, why teach it in schools, why include it in our conversations about society? Why do this rather than something else? In re-approaching the question, then, I would like to suggest that the works gathered in this book do thrust one aspect of art’s essence to the fore that goes beyond their institutional affiliation. In all of them, we can begin to discern art as a strange state of going against the grain, as standing apart from the world as we usually find it. Ebony G. Patterson conducts an investigation into the circumstances of the killings during the Tivoli Gardens unrest in Kingston, but goes against the cold objectivity and anonymity of the television reports by focusing on the dignity of those affected (Chapter 2, Plate 5). Sohrab Hura’s photographs are an allegorical study of political discourse on social media in India, but it is precisely their allegorical form that requires slow interpretive unpicking, and is therefore at odds with the frenzied, quick production of meaning online (Chapter 5, Plate 20). The affirmative view of Black women subjects expressed in Wangechi Mutu’s mythology-inspired works stands apart not only from the objectification of women’s bodies in pop culture, but also from the saccharine, superficial endorsements of diversity in it (Chapter 4, Plate 11). If there is a common approach to these diverse works, it is one of tweaking the usual rules of perception; it is the messing up of protocols that usually govern our thinking. This does not mean that art is merely disruption for its own sake, or mere novelty. Art is like an attempt to create a parallel course, to remake the ‘hinges’ on which our interaction with the world turns. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, writing in the final years of his life (1950–51), compared the basic assumption of how we interact with the world to a door’s hinges: ‘[…] the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn’.1 When I conduct an investigation, I presuppose what a search for truth

158

artists remake the world

looks like; when I talk to a friend, I make presuppositions about how human psychology works; when you throw me a ball to catch, I presuppose gravity won’t suddenly reverse. These presuppositions are not explicit beliefs, but a way in which I go about things. At least one part of art’s essence might be the attempt to ‘remake’ the world, not by changing its inventory, but by replacing these hinges, the fundamentals by which we perceive, interact with, think through our environment. To give this thought a little more precision, let me consider the work of another philosopher, indeed a philosopher-artist, Adrian Piper, who, uniquely among the first-generation (1960s and 1970s) conceptual artists, also created a philosophical system, summed up in her magnum opus Rationality and the Structure of the Self. 2 Piper’s account tells a particular story of what human rationality is. Her view is descended from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in that she thinks our minds necessarily strive for coherence and consistency of experience. This rational drive is the basis of science and politics alike, enabling us to find consensus with other human beings; but, for Piper, that same rationalising principle also leads us to taxonomise others, to objectify them into easily digestible stereotypes. Reason is both our salvation and our curse.3 Therefore, what is crucial for coming to a correct understanding of the world and other people is not only the application of reason, but also the very difficult, even painful practice of having one’s own reasoning thrown open by ‘anomalies’ that we encounter. For Piper, art is one of the ways in which we can do so, because, as she says, contemporary art ‘offers a deliberate and paradigmatic experience of a theoretical anomaly’.4 In art, perception is rejigged, psychology made alien, the gravity suddenly reversed. We may think here of how Impressionism or Cubism, say, suddenly push against the limits of what counted as perception of ordinary objects, or of conceptual artworks in the 1960s and 1970s, which confounded the viewer’s expectation of what an object even is.5 Indeed, we may recognise Piper’s description as illuminating art beyond matters of perception. The sense of

Remaking the World’s Hinges

159

art unhinging your usual mode of reasoning can be experienced, say, if you are an atheist listening to Bach’s St Matthew Passion and suddenly experience something like religious wonder, or if you are a cheerful optimist reading Baudelaire’s poetry and find yourself seeing the world as a place both sickening and seductive. Piper’s account does not simply suggest that art might make you more open-minded, but that opening up the structuring principles of rationality (what we might call its ‘hinges’) is inherently hard, and, as she emphasises, doing so can put at risk the very coherence of our being.6 Art, we might then suggest, is that specialised, rare method through which we escape our own patterns of thought, however temporarily. If we run with this hunch for the moment, then contemporary art practices in this book present us with an especially interesting case. As we saw, contemporary exhibition-based art, when compared to other arts today, is the least stable in its medium. A novel, a television series or a pop song may try to achieve other­ worldly breaks in our usual consciousness in many ways, which include playing with expectations of genre and medium: these are the ‘anomalies’ that, with the best art, we may experience as so intensely original. The contemporary exhibition-based artist, by contrast, is a kind of magpie when it comes to their medium. Stephanie Dinkins might make an artificial intelligence program, but add to it elements of storytelling; Ryan Trecartin uses all the idioms of new online visual culture but remixes it into a barely endurable cacophony (both discussed in Chapter 6). Contemporary art blends itself into investigative journalism, archival work, history, philosophy, various forms of the culture industry and many other fields. And so we could almost say that the ‘medium’ of contemporary art consists of other disciplines of thought.7 While all the arts might then aim for remaking the hinges on which our thought turns, contemporary art often does so by introducing distancing twists to a series of familiar pursuits that exist outside art. Contemporary artists who work with investigative and

160

artists remake the world

archival practices may depart from the strictly objective features of discourse, by introducing into their work open-endedness instead of clear conclusions, symbolism and allegory instead of literal meaning, or the collaging of disparate elements instead of linear thinking (Chapter 2). Those who create participatory projects may differentiate themselves from social work by departing from mere utility, and instead inserting complex contemplation and aesthetic experience into specific communities (Chapter 3). And those who attempt to create new visions of society – what I called ‘worldmaking’ – can differentiate themselves from the culture industry by puncturing pleasurable fantasies with elements of criticism or doubt in their work (Chapter 4). Art is ‘weird’ investigations, ‘weird’ activism, ‘weird’ culture industry: and it is in their departures from their target activities that artists can achieve that sense of wonder, that sense that politics can be thought differently. So, if art is the experience of thinking against the grain of reason, if it is the unhinging of the world from the usual tracks of thought, then contemporary, exhibition-based art can be defined as one of its subsets, which possesses no medium or convention of its own, but instead attempts such an opening up of reason by disrupting already established disciplines of thought and action.8 For this reason, contemporary art often succeeds and fails in ways that are a little different from other art forms today. Whereas a mediocre mainstream film or a music album may feel bland or hackneyed (it may be well-crafted but has failed to produce something extra­ ordinary), a mediocre work of contemporary art fails in different ways. It can assimilate itself too closely to the discipline it targets: mediocre socially engaged art becomes just average social work, mediocre conceptual art just second-rate philosophising, mediocre computer art just glitchy programming. Or mediocre contemporary art can depart so far from established principles of thought that it feels too confusing even for an effortful viewer to understand. And yet, when contemporary art succeeds, it can achieve something extraordinary, showing us how our ways of thinking and acting

Remaking the World’s Hinges

161

could be different not only in their content but also in their very form. Suddenly, we gain distance from thinking patterns that we thought were so self-evidently correct.

A rt i s t i c A u to n o m y and P o l i t i ca l Co m m i t m ent In the Introduction to this book I mentioned that the experimental nature of contemporary art is often understood against the background of a longer history of artistic avant-gardes, a history animated by the old tension between two principles: that art exists for its own sake (artistic autonomy) and, conversely, that art should serve social, political and ethical causes (art’s political commitment). Philosopher Jacques Rancière has even characterised the history of art since the end of the eighteenth century as a series of ‘emplotments’ of artistic autonomy (self-rule) and heteronomy (its rule by other domains).9 Indeed, an appropriately simplified history of Western art of this period might even be constructed as a kind of ping-pong between the two principles. Romantics subject their lives to the exulted laws of art; realists turn their uncompromising gaze away from art and towards social problems; aesthetes and decadents proclaim their total indifference to social mores; exponents of the Arts and Crafts want to keep beauty but make it socially useful; Dadaists destroy beauty and commit themselves to action; and so on, and so forth. Contemporary art, which blends into investigatory journalism, environmentalist activism or artificial intelligence algorithms, but seeks to retain a sense of separate identity too, can be seen as continuing that uneasy balance, as existing in a ‘value conflict’, as philosopher Jason Gaiger puts it, between an artistic calling and broader relevance to the world.10 It is from within this tension that we should ask what contemporary art contributes to politics. One outcome of the tension that emerges in contemporary art is, as we saw, what could be called ‘radical heteronomy’, or the

162

artists remake the world

total subordination of art to political ends. Socially engaged art, such as Tania Bruguera’s ‘useful art’ (Chapter 3) – whereby the artist ceases to obey any artistic constraints and produces community workshops, social amelioration projects and the like – is one outcome of this tendency. Such socially engaged art projects are certainly philosophically interesting – an extreme case of art becoming action – yet, as an artistic position, I have argued that such work ultimately succumbs to its own paradoxical nature. To Claire Bishop’s demand for artistic criteria and Jacques Rancière’s own complaint that socially engaged art ‘risks becoming a parody of its alleged efficacy’,11 I have added my argument against assimilation: any artist who fully assimilates her practice to existent disciplines of knowledge or action should be compared to successful projects within those disciplines. Relatively few artists are equipped to pass such a comparison favourably; as we saw with Bruguera’s workshops aiding immigrant communities, there have been other non-governmental projects out there, which seem to achieve artists’ social goals more successfully than artists themselves could. There are exceptions to this rule: Forensic Architecture, discussed in Chapter 2, are certainly impressive as investigative researchers by the very standards of that field. But unless artists double up their skill set in the target discipline in this manner we often have little reason to think that artists should be better equipped to perform the work of specialists in charitable organisations, universities, research centres or social services. When radically heteronomous, art risks becoming an insignificant version of what already exists. That is not to say that there is no direct social utility to art, even when we conceive of ‘utility’, crudely, as an immediate and measurable improvement of individuals’ welfare. On the contrary, there might be plenty of politically instrumental reasons to employ artistic activities in the service of social amelioration; it is just that there is no need to be very avant-garde about it. For instance, choral singing or dancing certainly appear to have many benefits for participants’

Remaking the World’s Hinges

163

psychological well-being,12 and various important skills might be associated with playing classical music instruments, as demonstrated in the Venezuelan public programme El Sistema.13 I have also discussed the utility of art for social protests, where art can unify the crowd or clarify the protesters’ message. But here we are speaking of participation in valuable but traditional artistic idioms (choral and classical music, protest song), rather than the opposite suggestion of Bruguera’s Arte Útil, namely that the avant-garde artists should somehow transform their activities not into those of a folk artist, but into those of a social worker. The puzzle of contemporary art’s contribution to the political process therefore remains. Before I synthesise some of the thoughts I have developed in this book, let me offer a comparison with two other philosophical precursors (whose work has been bubbling underneath the service of the preceding chapters). Among the many philosophical articulations of the relationship between art and politics, two have been arguably the most influential within the Western artworld: the philosophies of Theodor Adorno and of Jacques Rancière. Adorno, one of the main contributors to the Frankfurt School of critical theory, shaped his philosophy both as a defence of modernist ‘high art’ of the early twentieth century, and as a response to what he saw as the regressive force of the capitalist ‘culture industry’ (the term which he coined together with Max Horkheimer, already briefly discussed in Chapter 4). However, in his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno also offers an explicit defence of the sociopolitical importance of art. Here, he argues that the political relevance of art coincides precisely with what, intuitively, we might think of as art’s least socially relevant aspect: its impenetrability, difficulty and the exploration of art’s own laws.14 The modernist artists whom Adorno foregrounds in his work all push against the constitutive limits of their art forms (Picasso against pictorial representation; Kafka against realism; Schoenberg against tonal music), but what matters for Adorno is not only the unhinging

164

artists remake the world

of standard thinking (as we saw with Piper), but especially a kind of negativity and difficulty of modernism, which Adorno thought embodies a kind of critical attitude much better than any political message in art can. Unlike Piper, Adorno rejects any explicit political commitment in art, and was, for instance, highly disparaging of protest music and protest art of the 1960s. Even the Beatles represented a kind of regressive kitsch which, according to Adorno, could not hope to change the system that he saw it to be a part of.15 Any protest in the hands of the culture industry for Adorno turns into yet another commodity: ‘give peace a chance’, we might say, soon becomes a matter of emblazoned T-shirts and peace-sign key rings. The experience of autonomous, difficult art embodies critical consciousness precisely because, in its difficulty, it cannot be so easily flattened into the pleasure-giving object. Listening to Arnold Schoenberg’s dissonant, atonal music repels both pleasure and interpretation, and thereby rejects the instrumentalist, oppressive form of thinking which for Adorno is the driving engine of both twentieth-century totalitarianisms and capitalism.16 As is summed up in the famous passage: ‘By crystallizing in itself […] something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as “socially useful”, [modern art] criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it.’17 To put it in a bite-sized simplification that Adorno would surely abhor: the complexity of modern art helps us resist the stupidity enforced on us by capitalism. Like Adorno, Rancière is dismissive of explicitly political content in art, which he associates with the ‘pedagogic’ model, or artists telling audiences what to think.18 He likewise valorises the autonomous artistic tradition, developed since the eighteenth century in what he calls ‘the aesthetic regime’ of art. Where Rancière departs from Adorno is that he emphasises not modern art’s inherent negativity (difficulty), but what Rancière sees as modern art’s radically egalitarian thrust. For Rancière, as art becomes independent of church and state, it begins to focus on appearance alone (‘the

Remaking the World’s Hinges

165

distribution of the sensible’), with the result that now anything can be portrayed as aesthetically interesting: ‘for abstract painting to appear, it is necessary that the subject matter in painting be considered a matter of indifference […] painting a cook with her kitchen utensils was as noble as painting a general on a battlefield’.19 He notices the same process in literature. Madame Bovary, a key text for Rancière, is said by him to draw its political significance from Flaubert’s ‘equality of style’, in which each sentence is given equal intensity, regardless of whether it describes heroic acts, blades of grass or the adulterous affairs of a country-doctor’s wife.20 Rancière then compares this aesthetic equality with radical modern demands for political equality, such as when the previously disenfranchised (women, ethnic and racial minorities, the poor …) demand rights and visibility by proclaiming themselves as part of ‘the people’. For Rancière, the aesthetic artwork and egalitarian protests both create what he calls ‘dissensus’, by which he means the breaking down of the established order of social perception, the decomposition of what seemed like a proper order of things.21 Just as radical demands for equality involve inclusion of subjects previously excluded from the established order, so aesthetic indifference to subject matter suggests a radical equality of all elements. Modernist art is inherently egalitarian because it makes all elements shine with equal beauty, regardless of what they are. Both philosophers achieve something genuinely difficult, indeed totally audacious, in their systems. They square a radical political outlook – anti-capitalism for Adorno, egalitarianism for Rancière – with the insistence that it is art at its most autonomous that connects to that goal. High art, so often dismissed as little more than the status-signifier of the rich,22 now becomes precisely what allows us to resist capitalism’s self-reproduction and inequality! Of course, if true, that would be rather nice for those of us who quite like ‘high’ art and also subscribe to egalitarian political ideals. But to avoid the charge of wishful thinking, I think we must go a little further than both philosophers in our theorising. While both are inspirational,

166

artists remake the world

I think neither yet sufficiently explains the relationship between art and the more ordinary ways of doing politics and even accomplishing political change in the world as we find it. Here it is worth pointing out that both Adorno and Rancière are highly sceptical of any possibility of political change within democratic capitalism, stemming, in part, from the Marxist framework of their philosophies. Adorno perceives the conditions for life under democratic capitalism as the ultimate outcome of Enlightenment thinking, and, more or less, as an utter moral and cultural disaster. His project is therefore mostly critical: he diagnoses that catastrophe, rather than proposes political reform or steps towards systemic change. Rancière’s political philosophy, on the other hand, is more closely tied to his positive experience of the May ’68 cultural revolts in France, and his ensuing scepticism of representational and deliberative democracy. In this spirit, he largely dismisses ideas of building ‘consensus’ through debate in the public sphere in democracies; it is only in the ‘dissensus’ of mass protest and art that true politics can happen.23 Now, there are of course many reasons to be sceptical about capitalist democracies today: public discourse is corrupted by demagogy, change is suffocated by corporate lobbies, the culture industry turns the citizenry into short-sighted, pleasure-seeking drones. But still, it seems defeatist to think that nothing ever changes, or that there is no difference between autocratic regimes and democracies. For all its faults, the suited machinery of democracy (parliamentarians, civil servants, lobby groups) clearly does carry out reforms, for better or for worse. The peaceful co-­ existence of nations within the European Union, the gradual closing of the ozone hole and various Green New Deal initiatives would not have happened without such efforts. Single-issue activism may seem hopeless in the face of systemic intransigence, but protest can spark turning points: Extinction Rebellion, #metoo or Black Lives Matter seem like recent cases in point. And the culture industry may indeed primarily serve capital, but it nevertheless reconfigures

Remaking the World’s Hinges

167

the shared space of values in remarkable (and often positive) ways. The greater visibility and dignity of women, ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+ people in many democracies, however belated and imperfect, is surely tied in with the work of popular music or television (just think of Beyoncé!). None of these remarks are meant to stand as some advert for demo­­cratic capitalism: the excesses, failures and wrongdoing committed in its name are documented extensively by the artists discussed in this book. There are of course also many important differences between individual democratic systems. The larger point is this: Adorno and Rancière’s view of art as redemptory is based on the idea that the usual routes to political change do not work. Therefore, if you think that there are some paths towards positive change available under the system you live in (be it through discourse, activism or popular culture worldmaking), then to that extent the Adorno– Rancière story is going to sound less convincing. An active citizen looking to improve society through volunteering, party politics, campaigning, activism or popular culture is surely not utterly deluded; and if they are not, then it may sound hollow to them to say that really it is only by enrolling in the study of high modernist art that they can hope to do something of political value. Or more precisely: the connection between these two aspects of their lives – their political engagement and their study of art – has not yet been made fully clear by Adorno and Rancière. In the case of Adorno, it is the complexity of the art object alone, regardless of political message, which is supposed to be of critical value; in the case of Rancière, there is a somewhat mysterious analogy between the aesthetic and political indifference to hierarchy. But how, our active citizen will insist, do these pronouncements connect to an artwork that quite explicitly addresses, say, climate change or racism? And how does such an artwork assist, or not assist, that particular struggle of mine? There is a piece of the puzzle still missing: to clarify the political nature of contemporary art, we must more precisely chart art’s relationship to political processes as we already find them.

168

artists remake the world

A rt i n t h e P o l i t i ca l S phe re As I have been arguing throughout the book, we can understand ‘politics’ in capitalist democracies as a conjunction of three inter­­ relating fields: public discourse, direct action and ‘worldmaking’, that is, the process of shaping shared values and perceptions.24 In situating the activities of the contemporary artist in relation to these three spheres, we must emphasise political content of art more than either Adorno or Rancière does – as is the case with the artists studied in this book. We can borrow the philosophers’ emphasis on the autonomy of art, its unwillingness to pander to either immediate utility or mere entertainment. But art’s autonomy and distance, I would like to suggest, has nothing to do with the removal of political subject matter. It has to do with art’s form: the alien shape, the strange twists that art imposes on our ordinary forms of thinking about political issues. Contemporary art is just like ordinary political discourse until it unexpectedly slips into a deliberate self-contradiction; it is just like an ordinary piece of activism until it surprisingly becomes an allegorical performance; it is just like a piece of worldmaking on mainstream television, until it introduces a strange doubt and discomfort into itself. Art, therefore, is not a complete alternative to the dominant forms of politics in democratic capitalism, but more like their shadowy sojourner. Art stands not in total opposition, but askance to politics-as-usual. To consider how that might be, let me indulge in some more broad-brushed philosophical scene-painting. If we were to describe philosophical attitudes towards deliberative democracy under capitalism in the twentieth century, we can speak of a certain great schism: between philosophers who extolled rational deliberation as the best tool for political emancipation (we may think of theorists of public reason, like John Rawls and the early work of Jürgen Habermas, as well as liberals, utilitarians and most analytic philosophers), and those who have treated rational deliberation as irredeemably corrupted by power relations (broadly

Remaking the World’s Hinges

169

speaking, critics of the Enlightenment, including critical theorists and post-structuralists, from Theodor Adorno to Jacques Derrida, and from Michel Foucault to Judith Butler). The first option usually leaves little room for art, the second sometimes invests art with much hope (this might be one of the reasons for the preference for so-called ‘continental’ philosophy among artists). But between these extremes we might chart a middle path: a pluralist position, in which both art and reason play a role. As we saw above, among philosophers, Adrian Piper has seen perhaps most clearly that human rationality both leads us to recognise the universality of others’ demands, and can also become a tool of oppression.25 Within the political sphere as we know it in democratic capitalism, the patiently ‘objective’ style of discourse – clarity, impartiality, seriousness – often is extremely valuable. We disparage vulgar demagogues as anti-democratic precisely because they offend against these standards of reason, objectivity and civility. And yet, a beautifully clear and calmly presented argument can also lead to oppression, obfuscation or misunderstanding. A bully can use argumentation to subjugate; in an emotionally raw situation, objectivity can seem cruelly detached; overly detailed analysis can ignore the big picture. If that is right, we should not imagine the ideal political situation as a cult of reason, but neither should we completely repudiate it. Instead, we can say that politics requires a plurality of approaches that are mutually complementary. Art, we might then suggest, enters precisely where deliberative democratic reason collides with its limitations.26 To make this more concrete, let me revisit some of the artworks that I have introduced in previous chapters. Recall Sohrab Hura’s allegorical photographs (Plate 20, Chapter 5), which allow the audience to think through the serious violence perpetrated via social media in India, but through a complex allegory that is itself removed from the ordinary discourse of daily politics. When we are strongly entrenched in our views, even clearly and calmly formulated arguments often become useless. Indeed, we see this most clearly online:

170

artists remake the world

in highly polarised debates, people tend to speak past each other, even if they all think they conform to the standards of civility and objectivity. Social psychologists have even found that when people are presented with evidence that conflicts with their party-political loyalty, they are more likely to resist it, if the evidence is ‘objectively’ presented. This ‘backfire effect’ occurs when we double down on our resistance precisely when we fear that, rationally, the opponent might be winning the argument.27 An artist, on the other hand, can choose to deal with a politically difficult matter without even making the opposition between arguments explicit. In art such as this, we can afford to be open-minded about the topic precisely because we are not in a frame of mind where we worry ‘whose side’ we are on. The very complexity of art overcomes polarisation, better than the ideal of objective reason can. Or secondly, let me again bring to mind Kiluanji Kia Henda’s meditation on the disastrous immigration politics in Europe, his installation The Isle of Venus, in which the viewer can shift from one often-humorous element to another, only occasionally recalling the horror of the deaths at sea (Plate 6, Chapter 2). This may be contrasted with how objective reasoning in political discourse forces us to follow arguments through: argumentation is organised from premises to conclusions, but if those conclusions are unpleasant (perhaps they make us feel guilty or powerless), this can lead us to an unhelpful dodge of responsibility. The objective style of reasoning can lead to what philosopher Cora Diamond has called ‘deflection’: detachment from the difficult subject precisely in stating it.28 ‘Yes, absolutely, what is happening on European shores is just terrible; oh yes, we ought to do something about it. So, anyway, what are we having for lunch …?’ Art is not necessarily better at getting us to ‘act’, but it at least lets us meditate on difficulties of our political space by fixing our gaze on them, then letting them bubble underneath the surface of consciousness, employing irony, or double meaning, to keep them at least still in view, without demeaning them with inadequacy and insincerity.

Remaking the World’s Hinges

171

Thirdly, consider that deliberative and objective forms of discourse often require a kind of single-minded purity of the speaker, because, ideally, the person relaying an argument should also embody their message in their actions. The ideal political agent is therefore often a hero who fully embodies her beliefs; but, on the flip side, for that very reason, the public sphere often consists of personal attacks on people, rather than a debate of their views. Establishing whether so-and-so is really a fascist, or a communist, or a hypocrite, or… is one typical form of degraded public discourse. An artist can afford to emphasise the complexity of our political situation better than the speech of politicians or activists, because artists are not condemned to maintaining such a semblance of purity. Recall, for instance, Maja Smrekar’s performance art around our relationship with other species inhabiting the planet: by playing out a highly peculiar, at times loving and at times darkly obsessive family drama (Plate 16, Chapter 4), she can explore how difficult it is to depart from exploitation of animals precisely because her acts and pronouncement happen under the veil of fiction and ambiguity provided by art. These are some examples drawn from the preceding chapters, from which a general shape of art’s place in the political life can emerge. Art’s departures from the dominant forms of politics target precisely those obstacles to thinking which dominant forms of discourse cannot yet overcome by themselves. Where polarisation leaves us unable to contemplate a topic without bile, art’s complexity can shift us beyond the us-versus-them dynamic. Where uncomfortable truths become too much to contemplate directly, art can keep them present in the corner of our eye. Where the demand for ethical purity renders politics into a simplified battle of good versus evil, art can emphasise the complexity of the issues at hand. This list, of course, is not exhaustive. We might add, for instance, art’s ability to imagine our future relationship to habits of consumption (Chapter 6), or to puncture the smugness of democracy’s official culture with acts of transgression (Chapter 4). But the overall point is that contemporary

172

artists remake the world

art enters at those junctures where our ordinary modes of thinking have been exhausted; and it is by insisting on its own identity, by drawing on devices specific to art, that it can shape thoughts in ways a journalist, scientist, activist or politician cannot as easily achieve. We might compare, here, art to philosophy in that art is likewise an experimental form of cognition, removed from the immediate fray of politics. However, while philosophy in many ways represents a crystallisation of the ideal of deliberative democracy – aiming for a pure, objective presentation of arguments, which of course are but rarely found in ‘real life’ political discourse – art works in the opposite manner: it unhinges, rather than crystallises, the shape of rationality as we know it. Art’s possibility of remaking the world does not reside in art’s political stance, nor in tangible, measurable difference. The possibility resides in art’s ‘againstness’, its ability to be a way of thinking removed from the usual, to be that pocket of life where we go to indulge in another way of organising experience. But what proof is there – one might still demand – that all this will make a positive change? Art may make us, like philosophy, into more complex thinkers, but will this save lives, give people jobs and repair the environment? Are people who walk into galleries ‘persuaded’ by the work; do they emerge with their political views changed? Restricting our understanding of social and political change to the immediately measurable in this way, however, betrays a certain lack of imagination. If one truly wanted to measure, empirically, the difference that the arts, or indeed any other exchange of ideas, make to political life, we would have to do a lot more than give out audience questionnaires after exhibitions. To measure the ‘impact’ of such things, we would have to consider change over a long period, and take into account the whole unpredictable flow of cultural history. The only valid experiment of this nature would perhaps involve two parallel societies, equal in all respects, except that one of them is devoid of artistic production; we could then see whether the society free of art was better or worse off in some

Remaking the World’s Hinges

173

way. Lacking this possibility, we can only look to our own experience for confirmation (are we richer for our experience of art?) and to the cultural changes as revealed by history. There, it would be hard to imagine the significant political change in the realms of multiculturalism, racial relations, women’s rights or gay rights in modern democracies, without invoking the change in cultural production, which in many cases was prefigured precisely in works of art. The effects of individual artworks may be complex and finegrained, but this does nothing to undermine the need for artistic production, just as the fine-grained nature of individual thoughts does not undermine the need for thinking itself. If art’s role in the political process is then that of a complex kind of cognition, one might still object that this means only a limited segment of the demographic will have the resources and leisure to participate in such thinking.29 But once we conceive of art as a form of inquiry, as a way of thinking about the future of society, then the argument begins to point the other way. Artistic reflection is to be seen as a good in itself, and so governments have a reason to support the arts in their complexity, and to promulgate them in education. To be cut off from the arts is to be cut off from an opportunity to think about the wide-ranging conversation about what the good life and society are.

Co d a If somebody were to look at Bani Abidi’s watercolours, or at other artworks gathered in this book, twenty years from now, or even a century from now, what would they see? While I was writing up much of the research for this book in the summer of 2022, I sat in the usually temperate Liverpool, but with an icepack on my head and my feet in a water-filled bucket, staving off the heatwave outside. Meanwhile, fires engulfed seaside resorts in Europe and the Americas; electricity had to be rationed in China due to heatwaves;

174

artists remake the world

floods made 2 million people homeless in Pakistan; droughts sent tens of thousands to their deaths in Somalia. In Australia’s summer earlier that year, 3 billion animals were burnt alive in the fires. The climate disaster, the final embodiment of the greed of industrialised empires, is unfolding at an unchecked pace. The value of the democratic political system, indeed the value of human reason, must turn on its ability to rise to this challenge. And yet, for many (me included) life goes on as before. People complain about the weather, yes, but also about minor political scandals, and then it is winter, and we forget. Every now and again, for now shielded from the worst, we might have the time to wander into an exhibition, or to read a book of poetry. The ‘world’ that art seeks to remake is the ordinary way of things – the preordained, the self-evident, the normal – our regular way of proceeding. In most capitalist democracies in the early twenty-first century, this world consists of much that may help us overcome the challenges before us. This world contains the value that many place on rational inquiry, objectivity and science; it consists of the celebration of values like equality and liberty; it consists of many attempts to correct injustices; it consists of the ability to pick up a banner and protest; it consists of the idea that the society should strive to be a good place for all its citizens to live in. But this world also contains the inability to think beyond the current economic system; of the self-evident desirability of our lifestyles and accumulation of wealth; of the seemingly obvious moral difference between humans and nonhuman animals; of the seemingly obvious moral priority of citizens over non-citizens; of the ordinary news cycle that prioritises the immediate over the important; of the inability to create a vision of progress that would not involve the burning of fossil fuels. These are the rules of the game, the flawed hinges on which the world turns, the horizon of our paths to political action and to life. A revolutionary would dismantle the hinges at the risk of chaos of the unknown; a pessimist will shut their eyes and give

Remaking the World’s Hinges

175

in to the inevitable; the pragmatist will play within the rules and salvage what can be salvaged. Art, the impractical but far-seeing witness, floats above these battlefields – a fleeting hallucination, a moment of respite – but offers the murmur that life, that the world, can be otherwise.

NOTES

I ntrodu cti on 1 Writing in 1999, art historian Rosalind Krauss already expressed an

unease about using the word ‘medium’ in relation to art at all, even as she proclaimed art to have entered the ‘post-medium condition’. Rosalind E. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 5–7. 2 Theory of democratic deliberation has become central to political philosophy through the work of John Rawls (in his writing on ‘public reason’) and Jürgen Habermas (in his theory of ‘communicative action’). For an entry into this by-now vast terrain of theory, see The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 3 For the origins of the term ‘worldmaking’, and especially its link to Nelson Goodman’s philosophy, see Chapter 4. 4 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (London: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 5 See e.g. Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). I return to the autonomy/commitment tension in Chapter 7. 6 Tania Bruguera, ‘Reflexions on Arte Útil (Useful Art)’, http://www. taniabruguera.com/cms/592-0-Reflexions+on+Arte+til+Useful+Art.htm (accessed 1 November 2022). See Chapter 3, pp. 56–63. 7 Du Bois’ more provocative formulation was that all art is ‘propaganda’. W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘Criteria of Negro Art’, The Crisis 32, no. 6 (1926): 290–7. 8 In philosophy, this ‘ordinary’ sphere of democratic politics has been much analysed, from John Rawls to Jürgen Habermas’ work on public reason, Theodor Adorno’s on the culture industry, or Jacques Rancière’s on political ‘consensus’. Several of these will be discussed at greater length in chapters to come, but see especially Chapters 2 and 7. 9 See Chapter 2, pp. 49ff.

Notes

177

1 . W hen and H ow Contem p o ra ry Art B ecam e Pol i ti cal 1 See, for example, the mixed coverage and commentary in Anne Katrin

Feßler, ‘Ai Weiwei: Die tragischen Blüten der Kunst’, Der Standard, 13 July 2016, https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000041039723/ai-weiweidietragischen-blueten-der-kunst (accessed 1 October 2022). 2 For a discussion of periodisation, see Charles Harrison, ‘Modernism’, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 188–201 at 189–93. 3 See Hal Foster et al., ‘Questionnaire on “the Contemporary”’, October 130 (2009): 3–124. 4 Vid Simoniti, ‘Transfiguration of a Discipline: What Is the Point of Interdisciplinarity in Contemporary Art?’, in Involvierte Autonomie, ed. Birgit Eusterschulte and Christian Krüger (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022), 205–24. 5 For a long view of deskilling, see John Roberts, ‘Art after Deskilling’, Historical Materialism 18, no. 2 (2010): 77–96. For a definition of contemporary art that centres on the legacy of conceptual art, see Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 18–21. 6 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), especially 82–83, 146–48. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 35–7, 195. 7 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (1979): 31–44. 8 In philosophy of art, we may more precisely speak of ‘procedural’ definitions of art, which include ‘institutional’ and ‘historical’ definitions. See Catharine Abell, ‘Art: What It Is and Why It Matters’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53, no. 3 (2012): 671–91 at 673–5. 9 The guest list and other details are taken from the Seth Siegelaub Papers, Reference I.A.40, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. See also Seth Siegelaub, January 5-311969, exhibition catalogue, https://www. primaryinformation.org/files/january1969.pdf (accessed 1 November 2022). 1 0 Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’ [1968], in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 46–50 at 49.

178

Notes

1 1 Grace Glueck, ‘May Your New Year Be Arty’, New York Times, 5 January

1969: D28, https://search.proquest.com/docview/118774168 (accessed 1 November 2022). 1 2 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 141–3; Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), vol. 1: 223–32. 1 3 These processes are meticulously documented in Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers. 1 4 Kynaston McShine, Information (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 138. 1 5 Hilton Kramer, ‘Miracles, “Information”, “Recommended Reading”’, New York Times, 12 July 1970: 87. 1 6 Susan Sontag, ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’ [1965], in Susan Sontag, Essays of the 1960s & 70s (New York: Library of America, 2013), 276. 1 7 Patsy Norvell, ‘Interview with Sol Lewitt (June 12, 1969)’, in Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, Lewitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, and Weiner, ed. Patsy Norvell and Alexander Alberro (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 112–23 at 118. 1 8 Jonathan Flatley, ‘Art Machine’, in Sol Lewitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, ed. Nicholas Baume (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 83–101 at 98. 1 9 Kirsten Swenson, Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol Lewitt, and the 1960s (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 146. 2 0 Gary Garrels, ‘Sol LeWitt: An Introduction’, in Sol Lewitt: A Retrospective, ed. Gary Garrels (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 23. 2 1 Anna Lovatt, ‘For an Adversarial Lewitt’, in Sol Lewitt: Structures, 1965– 2006, ed. Nicholas Baume (New York: Public Art Fund in association with Yale University Press, 2011), 64–83 at 67. 2 2 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), xiv. 2 3 For more on wall label politics, see Chapter 4, p. 90. 2 4 For a history of interdisciplinarity of art in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, see Art and Knowledge after 1900: Interactions Between Modern Art and Thought, ed. James Fox and Vid Simoniti (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023). 2 5 Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), 116–18.

Notes

179

2 6 Biennial Foundation, ‘Directory of Biennials’, 2022, https://

biennialfoundation.org/network/biennial-map/ (accessed 1 October 2022). 2 7 Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta:

The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (Chichester: Blackwell, 2016). 2 8 See the descriptions on these exhibitions’ websites: Berlin Biennale, ‘7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art’, 2012, https://www.berlinbiennale. de/en/biennalen/22/forget-fear (accessed 1 October 2022); South-South Art, ‘Biennale Jogja XIII Equator #3’, 2015, https://south-south.art/ biennale/biennale-jogja-xiii-equator/ (accessed 1 October 2022); Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, ‘Curatorial Statement’, Whitney Biennial, 2019, https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2019-biennial#exhibition-tertiary (accessed 1 October 2022). 2 9 Ikon Gallery Birmingham, Langlands & Bell. Internet Giants: Masters of the Universe, exhibition text, 2018, https://www.ikon-gallery.org/exhibition/ internet-giants-masters-of-the-universe (accessed 1 October 2022). 3 0 FACT Liverpool, States of Play: Roleplay Reality, exhibition text, 2018, https://www.fact.co.uk/event/states-of-play-roleplay-reality (accessed 1 October 2022). 3 1 Hepworth Wakefield, Emii Alrai: A Core of Scar, exhibition text, 2018, https://hepworthwakefield.org/whats-on/emii-alrai-future-collectcommission/ (accessed 1 October 2022). 3 2 Malcolm Bull, ‘The Two Economies of World Art’, in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris (London: Blackwell, 2011), 179–90. 3 3 Nizan Shaked, Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). 3 4 Emily McDermott, ‘The Conceptual Entrepreneur: Interview with Martine Syms’, Interview, 29 December 2015, https://www.interviewmagazine. com/art/martine-syms-16-faces-of-2016 (accessed 1 October 2022). 3 5 Mike Savage et al., ‘A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment’, Sociology 47, no. 2 (2013): 219–50. 3 6 Note that this data is for visual arts, rather than contemporary art specifically. See two reports: Audience Agency, Audiences for Visual Arts, 2019, https://www.theaudienceagency.org/resources/audience-reportaudiences-for-visual-arts (accessed 1 October 2022); and Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, Taking Part, Focus on: Arts 2016/17, 2018, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/740256/April_2018_Arts_Focus_report_ revised.pdf (accessed 1 October 2022).

180

Notes

3 7 For discussion of the positive and negative effects of globalisation through

the biennial system, see Gardner and Green, Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta, 241–70.

2 . R e a l i s m f or Ou r Ti m e: On Art a n d Truth 1 Michelle Kuo, ‘Interview with Adam Szymczyk’, Artforum, April 2017,

https://www.artforum.com/print/201704/documenta-14-67184 (accessed 1 August 2022). 2 ‘The Murder of Halit Yozgat’, Forensic Architecture, 2017, https://forensicarchitecture.org/investigation/the-murder-of-halit-yozgat (accessed 1 August 2022). 3 Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’ [1967], in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (London: Penguin, 2000), 545–75 at 564. 4 Hili Perlson, ‘The Most Important Piece at documenta 14 in Kassel Is Not an Artwork. It’s Evidence’, Artnet News, 8 June 2017, https://news.artnet. com/art-world/documenta-14-kassel-forensic-nsu-trial-984701 (accessed 1 August 2022). 5 A good guide remains Linda Nochlin, Realism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). 6 Hal Foster speaks of ‘postmodernism of resistance’ as distinct from ‘postmodernism of reaction’. Hal Foster, ‘Introduction’, in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 2002) at xii–xiii. 7 Martha Rosler, ‘In, around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)’ [1981], in Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 151–206 at 179. 8 Ibid., 191. 9 Ibid., 188. 1 0 The group of critics gathered around the October journal has been especially influential in interpreting postmodern art as reifying and fragmenting our systems of signs. See, for instance: Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), Chapter 3. 1 1 Filmmaker Harun Farocki originated the term ‘operative images’. Harun Farocki, ‘Phantom Images’, Public, no. 29 (2004): 12–22 at 17. 1 2 Andrew Norman Wilson, ‘Scan Ops’, 2012, http://www. andrewnormanwilson.com/ScanOps.html (accessed 1 August 2022).

Notes

181

1 3 Joanna Moll, ‘Inanimate Species’, 2022, https://www.janavirgin.com/

INANIMATESPECIES/inanimate_works.html (accessed 1 August 2022). 1 4 ‘Sadie Barnette, My Father’s FBI File, Project 4, 2017’, Evidentiary Realism,

https://www.evidentiaryrealism.net/my-fathers-fbi-file-project-4/ (accessed 1 August 2022). 1 5 Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (London: Verso, 2021). 1 6 Catherine Spencer, Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 1 7 Julian Stallabrass, ‘Contentious Relations: Art and Documentary’, in Documentary, ed. Julian Stallabrass (London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2013), 12–21. 1 8 Paolo Cirio, ed., Evidentiary Realism: Investigative, Forensic and Documentary Artworks (Berlin: Nome, 2019). 1 9 For further context on Ai’s project, see Bin Xu, ‘Commemorating a Difficult Disaster: Naturalizing and Denaturalizing the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake in China’, Memory Studies 11, no. 4 (2018): 483–97. 2 0 Vid Simoniti, ‘Transfiguration of a Discipline: What Is the Point of Interdisciplinarity in Contemporary Art?’, in Involvierte Autonomie, ed. Birgit Eusterschulte and Christian Krüger (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022), 205–24 at 220–1. 2 1 Fuller and Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics, 34–5 and passim. 2 2 Some critics have complained that Forensic Architecture have relied on fuzzy evidence in some of their work. I did not find this to be the case with The Murder of Halit Yozgat but it is an important criticism to consider. See Emily Watlington, ‘When Does Artistic Research Become Fake News? Forensic Architecture Keeps Dodging the Question’, Art in America, 15 March 2023, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/forensicarchitecture-fake-news-1234661013/ (accessed 20 March 2023). 2 3 The work was also published as Ebony G. Patterson, ‘The of 72 Project’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2012): 119–38. 2 4 Stephen Cordner et al., ‘The West Kingston/Tivoli Gardens Incursion in Kingston, Jamaica’, Academic Forensic Pathology 7, no. 3 (2017): 390–414. 2 5 Vid Simoniti (host), ‘Violence (Episode 2)’, 11 March 2021, podcast Art Against the World, published by Liverpool Biennial and University of Liverpool, https://liverpoolbiennial2021.com/programme/art-against-theworld/ (accessed 5 May 2023). 2 6 Adrian M.S. Piper, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, vol. 2: A Kantian Conception (Berlin: APRA Foundation Berlin, 2013), 422.

182

Notes

2 7 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Princeton, NJ: Zone

Books, 2010). 2 8 Vittorio Hösle, The Philosophical Dialogue: A Poetics and a Hermeneutics,

trans. Steven Rendall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 4–44. 2 9 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 88–9. 3 0 Yonique Campbell and Colin Clarke, ‘The Garrison Community in Kingston and Its Implications for Violence, Policing, De Facto Rights, and Security in Jamaica’, in Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: Subnational Structures, Institutions, and Clientelistic Networks, ed. Tina Hilgers and Laura Macdonald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 93–111. 3 1 Simoniti, ‘Violence (Episode 2)’. 3 2 For further philosophical context see Vid Simoniti, ‘Art as Political Discourse’, British Journal of Aesthetics 64, no. 4 (2021): 559–74. 3 3 John Keats, ‘Letter to George and Thomas Keats’ [1817], in H. Forman (ed.), The Letters of John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 57. 3 4 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Blackwell, 1974), 216– 17. Barthes’ theory is elaborated for visual art by Hanneke Grootenboer, ‘The Pensive Image: On Thought in Jan van Huysum’s Still Life Paintings’, Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 1 (2011): 13–30 at 15. 3 5 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 3 6 Cora Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’, in Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Stanley Cavell et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 43–90. 3 7 Ibid., 58. 3 8 See ‘Ai Weiwei in Hospital after Police Brutality’, Frieze, 16 September 2009, https://www.frieze.com/article/ai-weiwei-hospital-after-policebrutality (accessed 31 August 2022). 3 9 Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens’, Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81. 4 0 Nicola Brandt, Landscapes Between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Performance and Video Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 151–63.

Notes

183

4 1 Kiluanji Kia Henda, 21 February–28 June 2020, Museum Leuven,

documented at https://mleuven.prezly.com/m-presents-first-belgian-soloshow-by-kiluanji-kia-henda (accessed 1 August 2022). 4 2 The data is available at the Missing Migrants project website, https:// missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean (accessed 1 August 2022). 4 3 Stefania Panebianco, ‘The EU and Migration in the Mediterranean: EU Borders’ Control by Proxy’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48, no. 6 (2022): 1398–416. 4 4 Social psychologists are beginning to study how non-objective approaches, such as humour, can help shift challenging political conversations. See for instance Nimrod Nir and Eran Halperin, ‘Effects of Humor on Intergroup Communication in Intractable Conflicts: Using Humor in an Intergroup Appeal Facilitates Stronger Agreement Between Groups and a Greater Willingness to Compromise’, Political Psychology 40, no. 3 (2019): 467–85. 4 5 Simoniti, ‘Violence (Episode 2)’, 15:44. 4 6 Kim Knoppers, ‘Interview with Kiluanji Kia Henda’, Foam, 20 May 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20220809230330/http://www.foam.org:80/ talent/spotlight/interview-with-kiluanji-kia-henda (accessed 1 August 2022).

3. U t i li t y a nd U topi a: On Soci al ly E n gage d A rt 1 Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert, ‘An Open Letter to Critics

Writing about Political Art’, Center for Artistic Activism, 2012, https:// c4aa.org/2012/10/an-open-letter-to-critics-writing-about-political-art (accessed 1 November 2022). 2 ‘Immigrant Movement International’, 2011, http://immigrant-movement. us/ (accessed 1 November 2022). 3 Paul O’Neill et al., ‘Tania Bruguera (an Interview)’, BOMB, no. 128 (2014): 124–33 at 133. 4 ‘Arte Útil’, https://www.arte-util.org/about/colophon/ (accessed 1 November 2022). 5 Kathy Noble, ‘Useful Art (an Interview with Tania Bruguera)’, Frieze, no. 144 (2012). 6 ‘Little Sun’, http://littlesun.org (accessed 1 November 2022). 7 ‘Immigrant Movement International’, Queens Museum, https:// queensmuseum.org/program/immigrant-movement-international-2/ (accessed 1 November 2022). 8 Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

184

Notes

9 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002). 1 0 O’Neill et al., ‘Tania Bruguera (an Interview)’, 133. 1 1 ‘Little Sun’, http://littlesun.com/impact/ (accessed 10 November 2022). 1 2 ‘Little Sun’, https://littlesun.org/impact/ (accessed 7 December 2022). 1 3 I have previously described the second criterion as the ‘pragmatic account’

of artistic value. Vid Simoniti, ‘Assessing Socially Engaged Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76, no. 1 (2018): 71–82 at 75. 1 4 William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 1–6. 1 5 Ibid., 202–7. 1 6 As Claire Bishop rightly complains: ‘The aspiration is always to move beyond art, but never to the point of comparison with comparable projects in the social domain.’ Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 19. 1 7 For some sources, see: New York State Education Department, A Guide to Community-Based Organizations for Immigrants (New York City), 2019, http://www.nysed.gov/bilingual-ed/guide-community-based-organizationsimmigrants (accessed 1 November 2022); Queens Immigration Task Force Directory of Services 2018, 2018, http://www.queensbp.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/09/Queens-Immigration-Task-Force-Directoryof-Services-2018.pdf (accessed 1 November 2022). 1 8 Judith Flanders, ‘Fiat Lux (Review of Olafur Eliasson’s Little Sun)’, Times Literary Supplement, August 17 & 24, no. 5707/8 (2012): 19. 1 9 Gibby Zobel, ‘Alfredo Moser: Bottle Light Inventor Proud to Be Poor’, BBC News Magazine, 13 August 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ magazine-23536914 (accessed 1 November 2022). 2 0 See ‘Child Rights Resource Centre’, Save the Children, https:// resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/ (accessed 3 March 2023). 2 1 Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘“Usefulness” in Contemporary Art and Politics’, Third Text 31, no. 1 (2017): 1–16 at 12. 2 2 For an analysis of the image, see Agata A. Lisiak, ‘Women in Recent Revolutionary Iconography’, paper presented at the What Do Ideas Do? IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conference, Vienna, 2014. 2 3 Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London: Verso, 2017), 93–134. 2 4 Ibid. See also Emily Welty, ‘The Art of Nonviolence: The Adaptations and Improvisations of Occupy Wall Street’, in Occupying Political Science: The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World, ed. Emily Welty et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 89–116 at 103–5.

Notes

185

2 5 McKee, Strike Art, 242. 2 6 Jonas Staal, Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2019), 189. 2 7 For instance, the following books make only cursory references to art:

Sarah van Gelder, ed., This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011); Sanford Schram, The Return of Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism, Precarity, Occupy (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2022). 2 8 Michael Bierut, ‘The Poster That Launched a Movement (Or Not)’, Design Observer, 30 April 2012, https://designobserver.com/feature/the-posterthat-launched-a-movement-or-not/32588 (accessed 1 November 2022). 2 9 Quoted in Annette T. Rubinstein, ‘Lenin on Literature, Language, and Censorship’, Science & Society 59, no. 3 (1995): 368–83 at 377. 3 0 For other functions of ‘culture’ in social movements, see T.V. Reed, The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 299–300. 3 1 ‘Pussyhat Project’, 2020, https://www.pussyhatproject.com/ (accessed 1 November 2022). The Feminist Caucus at the 75th American Society of Aesthetics conference (2017) held a panel where the project was discussed. For the rich feminist protest art tradition see, e.g., Cornelia H. Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 3 2 See T.J. Demos, ‘Climate Control: From Emergency to Emergence’, e-flux, no. 104 (2019). 3 3 Lindsey D. Vance and Jordan S. Potash, ‘Black Lives Matter Protest Art: Uncovering Explicit and Implicit Emotions through Thematic Analysis’, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 28, no. 1 (2022): 121. 3 4 Christopher J. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 35–8. 3 5 T.V. Reed has described the deradicalisation of movements as they enter the mainstream as the paradox of diffusion and defusion. Reed, The Art of Protest, 313. 3 6 T.J. Demos, ‘The Great Transition: The Arts and Radical System Change’, e-flux, Accumulation (April 2017): 170. 3 7 For a possible response to my line of argument here, see Uri Agnon, ‘On Political Audiences: An Argument in Favour of Preaching to the Choir’, Tempo 75, no. 296 (2021): 57–70. 3 8 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 13. 3 9 Ibid., 18.

186

Notes

4 0 Ibid., 280–3. 4 1 Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, no. 110

(2004): 51–79. Bishop’s 2012 book (Artificial Hells) presents a different position, but still focuses on antagonistic works in the concluding chapters (see notes above). 4 2 Matthias Lilienthal and Claus Philipp, Schlingensiefs Ausländer Raus: Bitte Liebt Österreich – Dokumentation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000). 4 3 Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, 283. The word ‘dissensus’ is associated with the philosophy of Jacques Rancière, whom Bishop also cites, though in a different context. I return to Rancière in Chapter 7. 4 4 Bishop defines the ‘aesthetic’ as ‘not reducible to logic, reason or morality’ (p. 18), though this of course describes what aesthetics is not. See Bishop, Artificial Hells, 25–9. 4 5 Melia Belli Bose, ‘Made in Rana Plaza: Dilara Begum Jolly’s Garment Factory-Themed Art’, in Threads of Globalization: Fashion, Textiles, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Asia, ed. Melia Belli Bose (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming). 4 6 Ibid. 4 7 Ibid. 4 8 For a complementary analysis see Sarah Hegenbart, ‘The Participatory Art Museum: Approached from a Philosophical Perspective’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79 (2016): 319–39. 4 9 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Howard Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 768–82 at 771. 5 0 Ibid. 5 1 Ibid., 770.

4 . W or l dm aki ng: On th e R o le o f A esth eti cs i n Pol i ti cal A rt 1 For the exhibition catalogue see Ekow Eshun, In the Black Fantastic

(London: Hayward Gallery and Thames & Hudson, 2022). 2 Jackie Wullschläger, ‘In the Black Fantastic at Hayward Gallery review’,

Financial Times, 2 July 2022. Laura Cumming, ‘In the Black Fantastic review’, Observer, 3 July 2022. Alastair Sooke, ‘In the Black Fantastic review’, Telegraph, 28 June 2022. 3 Ekow Eshun, ‘Introduction’, In the Black Fantastic (gallery guide booklet) (London: Hayward Gallery, 2022), not paginated.

Notes

187

4 Ibid. 5 Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 6, 12. 6 Beatriz Lemos, ‘Naomi Rincón Gallardo’, 11th Berlin Biennale of

Contemporary Art, 2020, https://11.berlinbiennale.de/participants/naomirincon-gallardo (accessed 1 November 2022). 7 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 13, 40, 72. Haraway uses the term in a loose way; sometimes it also seems to mean ‘a cultural outlook’ (55–7) or even an ‘art project’ (71–2). 8 See also C. Jerng Mark, Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 14–21. 9 See for instance Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible, trans. David Frye (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 1 0 Bruno Latour’s writing on the Gaia theory, Jane Bennett’s theory of ‘vibrant matter’, Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’ and Graham Harman’s ‘object-oriented ontology’ have all been influential in the artworld recently. For reflections see Emily Apter et al., ‘A Questionnaire on Materialisms’, October 155, Winter (2016): 3–110. 1 1 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Hassocks: Harvester, 1978), 105. 1 2 Ibid., 23–40. 1 3 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1973). 1 4 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). See Chapter 7 for further discussion of Rancière’s aesthetics. 1 5 For social context, see Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, revised edition (London: Quartet Books, 2016). 1 6 My usage of ‘manifest’ here corresponds to Wilfred Sellars’ use of ‘manifest image’, to mean the world made sense of by culturally situated beings, rather than through natural science. See Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Bestiary of the Manifest Image’, in Scientific Metaphysics, ed. D. Ross, J. Ladyman and H. Kincaid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 1 7 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992). 1 8 ‘Fernando Palma Rodríguez – “There’s no room for ghosts”’, Tate Gallery, 6 May 2022, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/fernando-palma-

188

Notes

rodriguez-30826/fernando-palma-rodr%C3%ADguez-theres-no-roomfor-ghosts (accessed 1 November 2022). 1 9 bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: New Press, 1995), 8. hooks is here writing on the positive and negative images of Black lives in American art. 2 0 This tendency in contemporary art has led several critics to dismiss the entire field as intellectually empty. See e.g. James O. Young, Art and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2001), 135ff. 2 1 Eshun, In the Black Fantastic, 27–8. 2 2 Kant describes aesthetic judgement as one where ‘the powers of cognition are […] in a free play, since no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition’. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 217 (original pagination). 2 3 Kant largely focuses on symbols and forms. To speak of aesthetic experience in relation to literature or music is an expansion of the Kantian account, which we can find, for instance, in Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy. 2 4 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 205–7. 2 5 Enlightenment aesthetic philosophy has been criticised, but also reappropriated, by critical traditions; I tend towards the latter option. For important feminist contributions to this middle way, see Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, ed. Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995). 2 6 This process of playful interpretation is akin to Kant’s famous diagnosis of beauty: ‘Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end [Zweck, that is, end or purpose].’ (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 236.) In that sense, Kant’s beauty has nothing to do with prettiness, and much more with a sense of meaningfulness. Things appear as if they are there for a purpose, even if an actual (ethical or natural) purpose is lacking. 2 7 Eshun, In the Black Fantastic, 55. 2 8 The long and varied history of Afrofuturism is the best-known of these traditions. For a summary, see e.g. Charles E. Jones and Reynaldo Anderson ‘Introduction’, in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, ed. Charles E. Jones and Reynaldo Anderson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). For a recent account of related movements see Alice Ming Wai Jim, ‘Ethnic Futurisms and Contemporary Art’, in Art and Knowledge after 1900, ed. James Fox and Vid Simoniti (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023).

Notes

189

2 9 ‘Organic’ as a term describing the (pre-modernist) arts striving for a

sense of naturalness or wholeness can be found in Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 55–60. 3 0 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 135–6. 3 1 For a clear account of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony see Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 3 2 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). 3 3 Zygmunt Bauman, Culture in a Liquid Modern World (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 16. 3 4 For a psychological study of this phenomenon in the context of the United States see Alice E. Hall, ‘Audience Responses to Diverse Superheroes: The Roles of Gender and Race in Forging Connections with Media Characters in Superhero Franchise Films’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 16 (2022): 414–25. 3 5 Adorno, among the philosophers, has done perhaps the most to theorise the importance of such dissonance in art, though not in a manner that is fully satisfying. I return to this in Chapter 7. 3 6 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 5–6 and passim. Smrekar often explicitly refers to Haraway in her work, e.g. Maja Smrekar, ARTE_mis (exhibition text), Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 16 March–7 April 2017. 3 7 Naomi Rincón Gallardo, ‘The Formaldehyde Trip: A Mythical/Critical (under)World-Making Dedicated to Bety Carino’, Journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association 4 (2018): 39–74. 3 8 Bertolt Brecht, ‘On Chinese Acting’, trans. Eric Bentley, Tulane Drama Review 6, no. 1 (1961): 130–6. 3 9 The Instagramming action was reported by several participants, e.g. KV Squad, ‘Wangechi Mutu Wants You to Bite Her Chocolate Mermaids’, Kenyanvibe (2014), https://www.kenyanvibe.com/wangechi-mutu-wantsyou-to-bite-her-chocolate-mermaids/ (accessed 5 May 2023).

5 . S pectacl e and Su rvei l l a n ce : O n Art i n th e I nter net A ge 1 I first saw the work at the Liverpool Biennial 2010. The video is available

online: Ryan Trecartin, ‘P.opular S.ky (section ish)’, 2009, https://vimeo. com/8719269 (accessed 1 June 2022).

190

Notes

2 For histories of the movement see Melissa Gronlund, Contemporary Art

and Digital Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); Cadence Kinsey, Walled Gardens: Autonomy, Automation and Art after the Internet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 3 Statistics obtained from OECD, ‘Information and Communication Technology (ICT)’, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1787/04df17c2-en (accessed 2 June 2022) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 2022, https://www.itu.int/itu-d/sites/statistics/ (accessed 2 June 2022). ‘Developed economies’ refers to the United Nations statistical category. The ITU is a United Nations agency. 4 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019). 5 Elia Abi-Jaoude, Karline Treurnicht Naylor and Antonio Pignatiello, ‘Smartphones, Social Media Use and Youth Mental Health’, Canadian Medical Association Journal 192, no. 6 (2020): E136–E41. 6 Ibid. 7 David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (1993): 151–94 at 163. 8 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 1992), 10 (§13). 9 For an informative history of the artistic search for transgressive experience see Alyce Mahon, The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). For more parallels on art of the digital age and the avant-gardes, see Dada Data: Contemporary Art Practice in the Era of Post-Truth Politics, ed. Sarah Hegenbart and Mara-Johanna Kölmel (London: Bloomsbury, 2023). 1 0 Quoted in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 106. 1 1 ‘Ryan Trecartin Interview: The Safe Space of Movies’, Louisiana Channel, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdmItKVe2rU (accessed 1 June 2022). On racial fluidity in Trecartin’s work see Gronlund, Contemporary Art and Digital Culture, 157–61. 1 2 Kinsey, Walled Gardens, 53–7. 1 3 For an international overview, see Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media, ed. Samuel C. Woolley and Philip N. Howard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 1 4 The video is still available online, and is critically documented here: Philip Kleinfeld, ‘Calling Bullshit on the Anti-Refugee Video Taking the Internet

Notes

191

by Storm’, Vice UK, 27 November 2015, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/ article/ppx4kg/with-open-gates-the-forced-collective-suicide-of-europeannations-debunked-938 (accessed 1 June 2022). 1 5 For more on this parallel see Vid Simoniti, ‘Post-Internet Art and the AltRight Visual Culture’, in Hegenbart and Kölmel, Dada Data, 246–60. 1 6 See e.g. Savvas Zannettou et al., ‘On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities’, paper presented at the Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018 (2018), https://doi. org/10.1145/3278532.3278550. 1 7 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (London: Zero Books, 2017), 28–31. 1 8 For more on the ideologies of the reactionary subcultures, see Nicholas Michelsen and Pablo de Orellana, ‘Pessimism and the Alt-Right: Knowledge, Power, Race and Time’, in Pessimism in International Relations, ed. Tim Stevens and Nicholas Michelsen (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020), 119–36. 1 9 Kinsey, Walled Gardens, 23–4. 2 0 For a literature review of social science studies that demonstrate links between social media use, protests and other political effects see Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Maria Petrova and Ruben Enikolopov, ‘Political Effects of the Internet and Social Media’, Annual Review of Economics 12, no. 1 (2020): 415–38. 2 1 See Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘Coherence and Complicity: On the Wholeness of Post-Internet Aesthetic’, paper presented at BAK basis voor actuele kunst conference (17 March 2018), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1UaJyokkC6g (accessed 1 June 2022). A curious case of altright culture’s incursion into the London artworld is also discussed by Abse Gogarty in Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘The Art Right’, Art Monthly, no. 405 (2017): 6–10. 2 2 For one comparative study see Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak, ‘American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West’, Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 179–221. 2 3 The web version of the work is available as Sociality Today, http://sociality. today (accessed 1 June 2022). 2 4 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 292–327. 2 5 Ibid., 180. 2 6 For a history of the movement see Rachel Greene, Internet Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004).

192

Notes

2 7 Gronlund, Contemporary Art and Digital Culture, 8–11. 2 8 The plausibility of these studies has been questioned, but even an inaccurate

technology that promises to draw conclusions from physiognomy could have negative consequences. See Blaise Agüera y Arcas et al., ‘Do Algorithms Reveal Sexual Orientation or Just Expose Our Stereotypes?’ Medium, 11 January 2018, https://medium.com/@blaisea/do-algorithms-reveal-sexualorientation-or-just-expose-our-stereotypes-d998fafdf477 (accessed 1 June 2023). 2 9 Zach Blas, ‘Contra-internet Aesthetics’, in You Are Here: Art after the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (Manchester: Home and Space, 2015), 86–98 at 90. 3 0 McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 3 1 For an interdisciplinary survey see Eirini Ntoutsi et al., ‘Bias in DataDriven Artificial Intelligence Systems – An Introductory Survey’, WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 10, no. 3 (2020): e1356. 3 2 Claire Bishop, ‘Digital Divide and the New Media’ [2012], in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 337–51 at 336. 3 3 Ibid., 349. 3 4 Some of these responses are discussed by Bishop at a later postscript; see ibid., 353–5. 3 5 See my interview with Hura: Vid Simoniti (host), ‘Violence (Episode 2)’, 11 March 2021, podcast Art Against the World, published by Liverpool Biennial and University of Liverpool, https://liverpoolbiennial2021.com/ programme/art-against-the-world/ (accessed 5 May 2023). 3 6 Ibid. For context, see Shakuntala Banaji and Ram Bhat, ‘WhatsApp Vigilantes: An Exploration of Citizen Reception and Circulation of WhatsApp Misinformation Linked to Mob Violence in India’, report, Department of Media and Communications, LSE, 2018, https://eprints. lse.ac.uk/104316/ (accessed 5 May 2023). 3 7 Seb Franklin, The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 120. 3 8 For a division between ‘objective’ and ‘artistic’ discourse, see Chapter 2, pp. 42–43. 3 9 Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 178. 4 0 A recent survey of empirical evidence found only limited evidence to support negative psychological effects of social media on young people:

Notes

193

Betul Keles, Niall McCrae and Annmarie Grealish, ‘A Systematic Review: The Influence of Social Media on Depression, Anxiety and Psychological Distress in Adolescents’, International Journal of Adolescence and Youth 25, no. 1 (2020): 79–93. 4 1 C. Thi Nguyen, ‘How Twitter Gamifies Communication’, in Applied Epistemology, ed. J. Lackey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams, ‘Moral Outrage Porn’, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 18 (2020): 147. 4 2 Carl Miller, ‘Taiwan Is Making Democracy Work Again. It’s Time We Paid Attention’, Wired, 26 November 2019, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ taiwan-democracy-social-media (accessed 6 June 2022).

6 . C reat i v i t y i n th e F ace of Extin ctio n : O n Art and Cl i m ate Ch an ge 1 In his review of the exhibition, Sam Solnick is also reminded of the link

between jellyfish and the Gorgon Medusa: Sam Solnick, ‘Can Artists and Designers Help Save the World?’, RA Magazine (Winter 2019), 59–64. 2 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), 85. 3 Ibid. 4 Fiona Harvey, ‘Cop26: World on Track for Disastrous Heating of More than 2.4C, Says Key Report’, Guardian, 9 November 2021, https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/09/cop26-sets-coursefor-disastrous-heating-of-more-than-24c-says-key-report (accessed 1 November 2022). 5 The data presented here is current as of the Sixth Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (2021–22). IPCC, ‘Summary for Policymakers. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’, in Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, IPCC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 6 Ana Maria Vicedo-Cabrera et al., ‘The Burden of Heat-Related Mortality Attributable to Recent Human-Induced Climate Change’, Nature Climate Change 11, no. 6 (2021): 492–500. 7 On wildfires and climate change see the webpage of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions: https://www.c2es.org/content/wildfires-and-climatechange/ (accessed 1 November 2022). 8 IPCC, ‘Summary for Policymakers (Group II)’, B.1.3, B.1.4.

194

Notes

9 Ibid, B.4 and B.5. 1 0 https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/ (accessed 1

November 2022). 1 1 Cf. Christopher Lyon et al., ‘Climate Change Research and Action Must

Look Beyond 2100’, Global Change Biology 28, no. 2 (2022): 349–61. 1 2 Santiago Zabala, Why Only Art Can Save Us (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2017), 66–85, 119–26. 1 3 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 1 4 For a clear summary of such arguments see Duncan Stewart and Taylor Johnson, ‘Complicating Aesthetic Environmentalism: Four Criticisms of Aesthetic Motivations for Environmental Action’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76, no. 4 (2018): 441–51. 1 5 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 78–9. 1 6 Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 72–3. 1 7 Kyle Whyte, ‘Against Crisis Epistemology’, in Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, ed. A. Moreton-Robinson et al. (London: Routledge, 2021), 52–64. 1 8 Artist Rasheed Araeen, in his solutions-oriented approach, went as far as to suggest artists should focus on making desalination plants. There are parallels here with ‘useful art’ that we encountered in Chapter 3. Rasheed Araeen, ‘Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century’, Third Text 23, no. 5 (2009): 679–84. 1 9 Sofie Vilcins (producer), ‘Can Artists Save the Planet?’, Free Thinking (radio programme), BBC Radio 3, 3 June 2021, 34:20, https://www.bbc.co.uk/ sounds/play/m000wlkc (accessed 1 August 2022). 2 0 See Betsy Lehman et al., ‘Affective Images of Climate Change’, Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019). 2 1 On Indigenous reinterpretations of landscape art, see Mark Cheetham, Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ’60s (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2019), 72–89. 2 2 See T.J. Demos, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 2 3 The numbers here are given for CO2 emissions; they vary if we take all greenhouse gas emissions into account. For data of emission by country see Carbon Atlas, http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/en/CO2-emissions. For infographics showing vulnerability to climate change see the Notre Dame

Notes

195

Global Adaptation Initiative, https://gain.nd.edu/our-work/country-index/ and the Climate Impact Lab, https://impactlab.org/map/ (all accessed 1 November 2022). For the data and leads to further studies see the IPCC report, ‘Summary for Policymakers (Working Group II)’, especially section B.2, 14–15. 2 4 Several up-to-date studies can be found in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, ed. T.J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott and Subhankar Banerjee (London: Routledge, 2021). 2 5 See my discussion in Chapter 2, pp. 47–49, and Cora Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’, in Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Stanley Cavell et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 43–90. 2 6 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), §3. 2 7 See my discussion in Chapter 4, pp. 84–87. 2 8 Tina Birmpili, ‘Montreal Protocol at 30: The Governance Structure, the Evolution, and the Kigali Amendment’, Comptes Rendus Geoscience 350, no. 7 (2018): 425–31. 2 9 Anne Owen, ‘Why the UK’s Carbon Footprint is Decreasing’, Carbon Brief, 8 May 2019, https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-ukscarbon-footprint-is-decreasing/ (accessed 1 November 2022). 3 0 Pierre J. Gerber et al., Tackling Climate Change through Livestock: A Global Assessment of Emissions and Mitigation Opportunities (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2013), 15. 3 1 Nomusa Makhubu, ‘Capturing Nature: Eco-Justice in African Art’, in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, ed. T.J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott and Subhankar Banerjee (London: Routledge, 2021), 282–94 at 287–9. 32 Sapeur and Skhothane are respectively, the Congolese La Sape tradition mentioned earlier, and the showmanship lifestyle in South African townships. 3 3 Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

7 . R em aki ng th e Wor l d’s Hin ge s 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), §341

(emphasis in the original).

196

Notes

2 Adrian M.S. Piper, Rationality and the Structure of the Self (Berlin: APRA

Foundation Berlin, 2013). 3 This is my interpretation of Piper’s account of ‘pseudo-rationality’; see

especially ibid., vol. 2, 289–96, 312–16. 4 Ibid., vol. 2, 461. 5 Cf. ibid., vol. 2, 460–4. 6 See her work on ‘pseudo-rationality’, note 3 above. 7 See discussion in Chapter 1, p. 17. 8 These definitions, a philosopher will be quick to notice, do not provide necessary and sufficient conditions for concepts of ‘art’ and ‘contemporary art’. They rather articulate what we might call an aspirational necessary condition: what we look for in art. 9 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy’, New Left Review 14 (2002): 133–51. 1 0 Jason Gaiger, ‘Value Conflict and the Autonomy of Art’, in Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy, ed. Owen Hulatt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 65–88 at 83. 1 1 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 148. 1 2 Genevieve A. Dingle et al., ‘“To Be Heard”: The Social and Mental Health Benefits of Choir Singing for Disadvantaged Adults’, Psychology of Music 41, no. 4 (2013): 405–21. 1 3 Maria Majno, ‘From the Model of El Sistema in Venezuela to Current Applications: Learning and Integration through Collective Music Education’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1252, no. 1 (2012): 56–64. Other researchers have questioned the efficiency of El Sistema. 1 4 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), especially 127–30, 225–61. 1 5 On the Beatles see Theodor W. Adorno and Peter von Haselberg, ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness (Interview, 1965)’, Telos 56 (June 1983) at 100–1. On kitsch see also Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 315. 1 6 For more on interpreting this key issue in Adorno’s aesthetic theory see Owen Hulatt, ‘Critique through Autonomy: Of Monads and Mediation in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, in Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy, ed. Owen Hulatt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 1 7 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 225–6. 1 8 Rancière, Dissensus, 136.

Notes

197

1 9 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible,

trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 54. 2 0 Ibid., 53, 55–6. 2 1 Rancière, Dissensus, 139–48. 2 2 Pierre Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital is the locus classicus here. Pierre

Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, [1979] 2010). 2 3 See his definitions of ‘politics’ especially in ‘Ten Theses on Politics’ in Rancière, Dissensus, 27–44, especially 38–9. 2 4 Here, the Nelson Goodman-inspired concept of ‘worldmaking’, as I present it, should be compared with Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (le partage du sensible). The latter Rancière defines as ‘the implicit law that defines the forms of partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed’ (Rancière, Dissensus, 36), which indeed sounds similar. But Rancière’s work then focuses on the allegedly egalitarian distribution of the sensible in the ‘aesthetic regime’ and ‘dissensus’ of modern art. What I have in mind is, rather, the more general organisation of perception, in terms of salience, emotional valences or values (e.g. a conservative versus progressive outlook on sexuality, or environment, or religion, or …). And this latter shift can clearly happen through the culture industry as much as through art. See Chapter 4. 2 5 See note 3 above. 2 6 Again, this position is inspired by Adrian Piper’s work. See Vid Simoniti, ‘Art as Political Discourse’, British Journal of Aesthetics 64, no. 4 (2021): 559–74. 2 7 Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, ‘When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions’, Political Behavior 32, no. 2 (2010): 303–30. 2 8 See Chapter 2, pp. 47–48. 2 9 See Chapter 1 for discussion of art’s audiences, p. 27.

FURTHER READING

The political subjects dealt with by contemporary art are diverse, and therefore an extended bibliography for this book could be very long. To assist the readers rather than confound them, I have limited myself to up to around seven suggestions per chapter. These are a mix of introductions, academic histories of art, philosophical treatises, and a few shorter but provocative pieces.

P h i lo s o ph i es of (Contem pora ry ) A rt Irvin, Sherri. Immaterial: A Philosophy of Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Osborne, Peter. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso, 2013. Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. Shiner, Larry. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Taylor, Paul C. Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. Zabala, Santiago. Why Only Art Can Save Us. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

R eal i sm , Ev i dence, Truth Cirio, Paolo, ed. Evidentiary Realism: Investigative, Forensic and Documentary Artworks. Berlin: Nome, 2019. Fuller, Matthew and Eyal Weizman. Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth. London: Verso, 2021.

Further Reading

199

Higgins, Eliot. We Are Bellingcat. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Keenan, Thomas and Eyal Weizman. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. Rini, Regina. ‘Fake News and Partisan Epistemology’, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27, no. 2 (2017): E-43-E-64. Woolley, Samuel C. and Philip N. Howard, eds. Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Zabala, Santiago. Being at Large. Montreal: McGill University Press, 2020.

Soci al ly Engaged Art Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002. Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in Public Art. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT, 2000. Jacob, Mary Jane, Michael Brenson, and Eva M. Olson. Culture in Action. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. McKee, Yates. Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition. London: Verso, 2017. Reed, T.V. The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present. Second edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Wor l dm aki ng Brown, Jayna. Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Escobar, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Translated by David Frye. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Eshun, Kodwo. ‘Further Considerations on Afrofuturism’. CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 287–302. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Harvester Studies in Philosophy. Hassocks: Harvester, 1978. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

200

Further Reading

Jones, Charles E. and Reynaldo Anderson, eds. Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. London: Penguin, 2020.

A rt i n th e I nter net Age Gronlund, Melissa. Contemporary Art and Digital Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Hegenbart, Sarah and Mara-Johanna Kölmel, eds. Dada Data: Contemporary Art Practice in the Era of Post-Truth Politics. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. Kholeif, Omar, ed. You Are Here: Art after the Internet. Manchester: Home and Space, 2015. Kinsey, Cadence. Walled Gardens: Autonomy, Automation and Art after the Internet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Marwick, Alice and Rebecca Lewis. Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online [report]. New York: Data and Society Research Institute, 2017. Mina, An Xiao. Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power. London: Penguin, 2019. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books, 2019.

A rt, En v i ronm ental i sm and Cl i mate Cha n ge Boetzkes, Amanda. Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Cheetham, Mark. Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ’60s. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019. Demos, T.J., Emily Eliza Scott and Subhankar Banerjee, eds. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change. London: Routledge, 2021. Demos, T.J. Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. London: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Further Reading

201

Whyte, Kyle. ‘Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene’. English Language Notes 55, no. 1 (2017): 153–62. Among various useful websites tracking the climate crisis, two that I have found among the most useful are https://climateactiontracker.org/global/ temperatures/ and https://www.carbonbrief.org/

IMAGE CREDITS

1 Ai Weiwei, F. Lotus, 2016. Installation view from Ai Weiwei: translocation:

transformation, Belvedere 21, 14 July–20 November 2016. © Ai Weiwei Studio. Photograph credit: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna. Courtesy of the artist, Belvedere, and Lisson Gallery. 2 Forensic Architecture, 77sqm_9:26 min (part of The Murder of Halit Yozgat), 2017. Three-channel video installation (still showing digital re-enactment and fluid dynamics modelling). © Forensic Architecture. 3 Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974–75. Two of forty-five gelatin silver prints on twenty-four black boards. Each framed board 25.4 × 55.9 cm. © Martha Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. 4 Ai Weiwei, Straight, 2008–12. Reinforcing steel bars. Dimensions variable. © Ai Weiwei Studio. Photograph credit: © Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer Marcus J Leith. Courtesy of the artist and the Royal Academy of Arts. 5 Ebony G. Patterson, of 72 Project (detail), 2012. Mixed media handembellished works, including photographic reproduction, rhinestones, embroidery, fabric trimmings and appliques, all contained in the original cloth-covered portfolio (image 41 of 73). Each image on a bandana, ranging from 53 × 53 cm to 61 × 61 cm. © Ebony G. Patterson. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery. 6 Kiluanji Kia Henda, The Isle of Venus, 2018. Installation view from Kiluanji Kia Henda, M Leuven, 2020. Bricks, statues, condoms, boxes, speakers, photomontages. © Kiluanji Kia Henda. Photograph credit: Miles Fishler / © M Leuven. Courtesy of the artist and M Leuven. 7 Kateřina Šedá, There Is Nothing There, 2003. Annotated documentation photographs of a participatory work. Photograph credit: Vít Klusák, Kateřina Šedá. © Kateřina Šedá. Courtesy of the artist. 8 Tania Bruguera, Immigrant Movement International, 2010–ongoing. Women’s Health group, Mujeres en Movimiento, exercise classes in Corona Plaza (led by Veronica Ramirez), 2014. Photograph credit: © Queens Museum, New York. 9 Will Brown, Occupy Wall Street poster for Adbusters, 2011. © Adbusters.

Image Credits

203

1 0 Dilara Begum Jolly, Threads of Testimony, 2014. Multi-media exhibition.

A view of an installation, consisting of a table and plates (moulded resin encasing found objects). © Dilara Begum Jolly. Courtesy of the artist. 1 1 Wangechi Mutu, The Backoff Dance, 2021. Soil, charcoal, paper pulp, wood glue, wood, shell, coral bean, hair, dead base rock, gourd, brass bead, horn, plastic crystal, spray paint. 179 × 87 × 103 cm. © Wangechi Mutu. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro, London. 1 2 Lina Iris Viktor, Fourth (from the series A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred), 2017–18. 24-carat gold, acrylic, ink, gouache, copolymer resin, print on cotton rag paper (unique). 132.1 × 101.6 cm. © Lina Iris Viktor. Courtesy of the artist and LGDR. 1 3 David Hockney, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, 1966. Acrylic on canvas. 152 × 152 cm. © David Hockney. Photograph credit: Richard Schmidt. Collection Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. 1 4 Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Soldado, 2001. Wooden structure, electronic circuits, sensors and software. Dimensions variable. © Fernando Palma Rodríguez. Courtesy of the artist and Gaga, Mexico City and Los Angeles. 1 5 Naomi Rincón Gallardo, The Formaldehyde Trip, 2017. Series of videos and performative screenings. Production still: Fabiola Torres Alzaga. © Naomi Rincón Gallardo. Courtesy of the artist. 1 6 Maja Smrekar, I Hunt Nature and Culture Hunts Me (from the series K-9_topology), 2014. Performance with wolves and wolf-dogs. Produced by Kapelica Gallery / Kersnikova Institute (Slovenia) and Rencontres Bandits-Mages (France); a collaboration with JACANA Wildlife Studios. Photograph credit: Amar Belmabrouk. © Maja Smrekar. Courtesy of the artist. 1 7 Ryan Trecartin, P.opular S.ky (section ish) (from the series Trill-ogy Comp), 2009. Digital video (showing video still at 11:45). © Ryan Trecartin. Courtesy of the artist. 1 8 Amalia Ulman, Excellences and Perfections, 2014. Instagram updates (showing update from 5 September 2014). © Amalia Ulman. Courtesy of the artist. 1 9 Zach Blas, Fag Face Scanning Station, from the project Facial Weaponization Suite, 2013. Masks made from painted, vacuumformed recycled polyethylene terephthalate; community workshops and performances. Showing Fag Face Scanning Station, reclaim:pride with the ONE Archives and RECAPS Magazine, Christopher Street West Pride Festival, 8 June 2013, West Hollywood, CA. © Zach Blas. Courtesy of the artist.

204

Image Credits

2 0 Sohrab Hura, two images from The Coast series, published in Sohrab Hura,

The Coast: Twelve Parallel Short Stories, Ugly Dog Publications, 2019. Colour photography. © Sohrab Hura. Courtesy of the artist. 2 1 Stephanie Dinkins, Not the Only One (V1. Beta 2), 2018. Deep Learning AI, computer, arduino, sensors, electronics, black glass sculpture. 46 × 46 cm. © Stephanie Dinkins. Courtesy of the artist. 2 2 Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Single-channel high-definition video (23 minutes), environment, luminescent EL grid, beach chairs (showing a video still). Image © CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Image courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin / Paris / Seoul. 2 3 Rimini Protokoll, win > < win, 2017. Installation view from Eco-Visionaries: Confronting a Planet in a State of Emergency, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 23 November 2019–23 February 2020. Photograph credit: © David Parry / Royal Academy of Arts, London. Courtesy of Rimini Protokoll. 2 4 Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing, Ice Watch, 2014. Twelve ice blocks, Place du Panthéon, Paris, 2015. Photograph credit: Martin Argyroglo. © 2014 Olafur Eliasson. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. 2 5 Alberta Whittle, Between a Whisper and a Cry, 2019. HD video (41 minutes; showing a film still). © Alberta Whittle. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage. Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow, 2023. 2 6 Sammy Baloji, Sociétés secrètes, 2015. Scarification on eight bas-relief copper plates. Each 29.7 × 42 cm (installation detail). Fabrication: Dinanderie / Zouak, Morocco. © Sammy Baloji. Courtesy of the artist and the Axis Gallery. 2 7 Maurice Mbikayi, Self-portrait 3, 2015. C-print. 56 × 81 cm. © Maurice Mbikayi. Courtesy of the artist and the ARTCO Gallery. 2 8 Bani Abidi, The Man Who Could Split a Hair, from the series A Man Who… after Ilya Kabakov’s ‘The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment’, 2015. Watercolour on paper. 22 × 28 cm. © Bani Abidi. Courtesy of the artist.

INDEX

Abidi, Bani The Man Who…, 154, 155, 173 Abse Gogarty, Larne, 63–4 activist art ACT UP, 69 art for systemic change, 64–70 artistic creativity and, 67–8, 70 conceptual clarification, 68–70 in cultural institutions, 66–7, 70 eco art and, 134–5 exhibition-based art and, 66–7 Occupy movement and, 64–5, 66, 67 within the political sphere, 5–6 politics of, 65–6 the Pussyhat project, 68–9 see also socially engaged art Adbusters, 64–5 Adorno, Theodor, 10, 96, 97, 163, 165–9 aesthetic experience aesthetic complicity of postinternet art, 113, 114 of antagonistic artworks, 72–4 artistic skill and, 93–4 contemporary art and, 82, 84–5, 143 definition, 92–93 of the In the Black Fantastic exhibition, 81–2, 84, 85, 91–2, 93, 94

investigative aesthetics, 40 perception and, 89–95 as pleasure, 82, 92–4 role of myth and fantasy, 81–2, 83, 88, 94–5 of socially engaged art, 71–7 superficiality and anti-systemic rhetoric and, 95–6 term, 82, 92–3 of transgressive art, 72–4, 100 worldmaking art, 83–9, 93–5 world(un)making art, 98–102 Ai Weiwei, 12 commercial artworld and, 25–6 F. Lotus, 2, 13–14, 22, 26, 37 Straight, 15–16, 37, 39, 43, 46, 48–9 allegory, 10, 123, 144 Andre, Carl, 19 Araeen, Rasheed, 22 Arendt, Hannah, 11, 31 Array collective, 56, 66 art artistic autonomy, 7, 161–7, 168 as a challenge to standard forms of thinking, 157–61, 164, 171–2 death portrayed in, 129, 131, 134

206

Index

definition, 17, 156–7 periods of, 15 see also contemporary art artistic skill activist art and, 67–8 aesthetic experience and, 93–4 within realist art, 51–3 in worldmaking art, 88–9 Assemble collective, 56, 57 Baloji, Sammy Sociétés secrètes, 2, 142–3, 144, 149 Barthes, Roland, 34, 46–7 Baudrillard, Jean, 23, 25, 34 Bauman, Zygmunt, 97 Begum Jolly, Dilara Threads of Testimony, 74–6, 78 Benjamin, Walter, 77, 124 Berger, John, 84 Barnette, Sadie, 35 Beuys, Joseph, 22, 132 biennial exhibitions anti-systemic rhetoric, 24, 66, 70 global spread of, 23–4, 27 Occupy movement, 24, 66 post-internet art, 106–8, 113 socially engaged art, 57–8, 88, 89 Bishop, Claire, 72, 73–4, 121, 123, 162 Black Lives Matter movement, 64, 66, 69, 81, 82, 114, 166 Blas, Zach Facial Weaponization Suite, 117–18 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 59 Brown, Jayna, 83

Bruguera, Tania Arte Útil (useful art) manifesto, 8, 57, 162, 163 Burden of Guilt, 56 ethical considerations, 59, 60, 61, 62 Immigrant Movement International, 16, 57, 58–9, 62 socially engaged art, 56–7, 58 Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 3, 56–7 capitalism culture industry of capitalist democracies, 95–8, 102 internet capitalism, 115–16 Occupy movement and, 64–5 surveillance capitalism, 105–6 Cariño, Alberta ‘Bety,’ 88, 100–1 Cave, Nick, 80, 81 Chan, Jennifer, 110, 118 Chan, Paul, 65 Cirio, Paolo, 36 Sociality, 115–16, 117, 118 climate change art’s role in policy change, 146–51 artistic responses to, 7, 131–2, 136–7, 152–3 difficulty of reality concept and, 142–4, 173–4 global inequalities, 141 modelling the effects of, 129–31 win > < win (Rimini Protokoll), 128–9, 132 see also eco art climate justice, 140, 141–5, 149 consequentialism, 60 contemporary art the aesthetic experience and, 82, 84–5, 143

Index art criticism and, 20–1 art-politics relationship, 2–4, 7–9, 145–51, 161–7 assimilation to utility, 8–9, 162–3 as a challenge to standard forms of thinking, 157–61, 164, 171–2 definition, 17, 156–7 global art market, 22–3, 96 inconclusiveness of, 10, 46–7, 48–51, 52 interdisciplinarity of, 3–4, 15–17, 22 in the public forum, 24–7 term, 15 transformative power of, 1–2 Courbet, Gustave, 5, 25, 32 Crabapple, Molly, 65 critical postmodernism, 33–4 Dadaism, 7, 55, 65, 109, 114, 161 Danto, Arthur, 17 democracy anti-democratic artistic expression, 113 art and political change, 145–51 art in the political sphere, 168–74 culture industry of capitalist democracies, 95–8, 102 democratic control in the digital world, 125–6 democratic values, 9 difficulty of reality concept and, 49 truth’s political importance, 31, 32 Demos, T.J., 70

207

Denes, Agnes, 132, 136 Derrida, Jacques, 34, 169 Diamond, Cora, 11, 47, 142, 170 difficulty of reality, 47–8, 142–4 digital technology allegorical image making, 123, 125 anti-democratic artistic expression, 113 artistic challenges of, 121–6 artistic manipulation of technology, 115–20 behavioural psychology and, 116 The Coast (Hura), 157, 169–70 far-right irony and transgression, 111–13, 114 gamification of online culture, 125 internet capitalism, 115–16 internet-based art, 117 new media artists, 121 political significance, 106 public sphere online, 125–6 reactionary political subcultures, 111–12 rise of online culture, 105–6, 107–8 social media disinformation, 31, 106, 122 With Open Gates: The forced collective suicide of European nations, 111–12 see also post-internet art Dinkins, Stephanie AI programming, 2, 118, 159 Not the Only One, 16, 119–20 DIS collective, 106–7, 108 documenta exhibitions, Kassel, 4–5, 24, 29, 30, 31, 132

208

Index

documentary Blue Planet II, 137 ecological messages, 137 as exposé, 36 paradoxes of documentary image-making, 123 tradition of in realist art, 32, 33, 34 see also investigative art Du Bois, W.E.B., 8, 11 Duchamp, Marcel, 3, 58 Duncombe, Stephen, 55, 60 eco art in documentaries, 137 emergence of, 131–2 emergency-inducing works, 132–4 intervention-based art, 132, 136 paradox of artistic representations of nature, 137–9 solidarity with the non-human, 132, 134 effective altruism, 60–1, 63 Eliasson, Olafur Green Light, 57–8, 59 Ice Watch, 3, 132–3, 135, 137 Little Sun, 58, 59–60, 62–3 environmental art, 131–2 Eshun, Ekow, 81, 82, 94 ethics of antagonistic artworks, 72–4 and artistic merit in worldmaking art, 88–9 consequentialism, 60 effective altruism, 60–1, 63 Roundabout PlayPump project, 60–1, 63 of socially engaged art, 58–63, 72, 162

virtue ethics, 60 e-waste in Africa, 148, 50 exhibition-based art anti-systemic rhetoric and, 24, 66–7, 70, 89–90, 96, 97 the artworld as a public forum, 24–7 audiences for, 27, 53 commercial artworld and, 22–3, 25, 96 contrasted with activist art, 66–7 environmental politics and, 150–3 the gallery encounter, 53 multi-media of, 159 in 1960s–70s New York City, 18–20 politicisation of, 18–22, 28 term, 17 worldmaking art, 86 see also biennial exhibitions; contemporary art Extinction Rebellion, 66, 69, 166 fantasy, 10, 81–2, 83, 88, 94–5 Farocki, Harun, 22, 36 feminist art Body Party (Chan), 110 Crochet Coral Reef (the Wertheims), 134–5 Threads of Testimony (Begum Jolly), 74–6, 78 of Wangechi Mutu, 80, 81, 94, 95, 101–2, 157 Fitch, Lizzy, 109, 110 Forensic Architecture 77sqm_9:26min, 4–5, 29–31, 34, 42 objectivity and, 42, 46

Index philosophy, 39, 40, 162 Foster, Hal, 21 Fuller, Matthew, 40 Gaiger, Jason, 161 Goodman, Nelson, 83–4, 85 Gramsci, Antonio, 11, 97 Haacke, Hans, 19, 22 Habermas, Jürgen, 43, 168 Haraway, Donna, 83, 84, 99, 134–5 Heeswijk, Jeanne van, 57 Hirst, Damien, 23 Hockney, David Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, 84–6, 87 Holzer, Jenny, 22 hooks, bell, 11, 86, 89 Horkheimer, Max, 96, 97 Hura, Sohrab The Coast, 121–3, 124, 125–6, 157, 169–70 Indigenous activism animatronics by Palma Rodríguez, 87–8, 89, 94, 95, 101 The Formaldehyde Trip (Gallardo), 6, 83, 88, 100–1 the non-human in Indigenous cosmologies, 135 worldmaking art, 6, 83, 87–8, 94–5, 100–1 internet-based art, 117 investigative art 77sqm_9:26min (Forensic Architecture), 4–5, 29–31, 34, 42 assimilation into non-art practices, 38–40, 45, 51–2, 71 investigative aesthetics, 40

209 objectivity and, 38–40, 42, 159–60 realist art as, 36–8 Straight (Ai), 15–16, 37, 39, 43, 46, 48–9

Jackson, Lisa, 135 Kabakov, Ilya, 154–5 Kant, Immanuel, 92, 158 Kester, Grant, 59 Kia Henda, Kiluanji The Isle of Venus, 49–51, 52, 170 Kinsey, Cadence, 113 Klein, Naomi, 7 Kosuth, Joseph, 18, 19 Kramer, Hilton, 19, 20 Krauss, Rosalind, 17 Kruger, Barbara, 22, 33 Lacy, Suzanne, 22, 55, 57 Lambert, Steve, 55, 60 Lenin, Vladimir, 68, 70 LeWitt, Sol, 18, 20–1 LGBTQ+ policy and activism, 85–86, 146 see also queer counterculture Lippard, Lucy, 18, 19 MacAskill, William, 60–1, 63 McKee, Yates, 65, 66, 70 Mattingly, Mary, 150 Mbikayi, Maurice, 148–9 #metoo movement, 64, 113, 166 Menna Barreto, Jorge Restauro, 3, 55–6, 57, 136 migration Immigrant Movement International (Bruguera), 16, 57, 58–9, 62

210

Index

The Isle of Venus (Kia Henda), 49–51, 52, 170 see also refugees Millet, Jean-François, 32 Moll, Joana, 35 Morton, Timothy, 135 Moser, Alfredo, 62, 63 Mowarin, Tyson, 135 Murdoch, Iris, 129, 131, 134 Mutu, Wangechi, 80, 81, 94, 95, 101–2, 157 Nagle, Angela, 112–13 nationalist-populist movements, 111 Net.art movement, 116–17 Ngai, Sianne, 47 Nguyen, C. Thi, 125 non-human worlds in eco art, 134–5 in Indigenous cosmologies, 135 K-9_topology (Smrekar), 99–100, 101, 170 Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 136 Occupy movement, 24, 64–5, 66, 67 ozone hole, 146–7 Palma Rodríguez, Fernando, 87–8, 89, 94, 95, 101 Palmer, Angela, 133 Patterson, Ebony G. of 72 Project, 41–2, 43, 44, 52, 157 Peláez, Juan Sebastián, 107, 108 Perry, Sondra, 123 Picasso, Pablo, 20, 25 Piper, Adrian, 11, 18, 22, 42, 158–9, 164, 169

political art activism of, 5–6 art criticism and, 20–1 artistic worldmaking and, 6, 85–6 assimilation into non-art practices, 8–9, 38–40, 71–2, 162 assimilation to utility, 8–9, 71–7, 160 concept, 4 forms of, 4–7 the politicised author, 77 as a spectrum, 78 see also activist art; realist art; socially engaged art; worldmaking art post-internet art aesthetic complicity, 113, 114 definition, 105 demise of, 113 examination of mass culture, 107–8 ironic mimicry, 108–9, 110–11, 114 at the 9th Berlin Biennale, 106–8, 113 P.opular S.ky (section ish) (Trecartin), 104–5, 107, 109, 110 transgressive art forms, 109–11, 114–15 post-structuralism, 34, 36 Potrč, Marjetica, 58 queer counterculture, 6, 86–7, 88, 94, 100–1, 110 Facial Weaponization Suite (Blas), 117–18 The Formaldehyde Trip (Rincón Gallardo), 88, 100–1

Index race In the Black Fantastic exhibition, 80–2, 84, 85, 91–2, 93, 94 Black feminism, 86 racial hierarchies in the labour economy, 35 in Whittle’s work, 140, 141, 143, 144 Rafman, Jon, 109–10 Rancière, Jacques, 11, 84, 85, 161, 162, 163, 164–6, 167, 168 realist art archival work, 35 assimilation of art into investigative practices, 38–40, 45, 51–2, 71 conclusive tendencies, 46 critical postmodernism, 22, 32, 33–4, 37 difficulty of reality concept and, 47–51 evidentiary realism, 36, 38 as investigative art, 36–8 objective turn in, 32, 34–7, 38–40, 42, 52–3 objectivity-subjectivity dialectic, 41–5 post-structuralism and, 34, 36 school of, 32–3 refugees F. Lotus (Ai), 2, 13–14, 22, 26, 37 Foreigners out! / Please love Austria (Schlingenseif ), 72–3, 100 With Open Gates: The forced collective suicide of European nations, 111–12 see also migration

211

Rimini Protokoll win > < win, 128–9, 132 Rincón Gallardo, Naomi The Formaldehyde Trip, 6, 83, 88, 100–1 Rosing, Minik Ice Watch, 3, 132–3, 135, 137 Rosler, Martha, 22, 36 The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 33 Šedá, Kateřina There Is Nothing There, 5–6, 54, 55, 78 Schlingensief, Christoph, 72–3, 100 Schloss Belvedere, Vienna, 13–14, 26, 28 Siegelaub, Seth, 18, 19 Singer, Peter, 60 Skinner, B.F., 116 Smrekar, Maja K-9_topology, 99–100, 101, 170 socially engaged art aesthetics of, 71–7 at biennials, 57–8, 88, 89 concept of, 54–5, 76–7 ethical context of, 58–63, 72, 162 history of, 55–6 systemic change motivations, 63–70, 145–6 There Is Nothing There (Šedá), 5–6, 54, 55, 78 as useful art, 56–64, 71, 162–3 see also activist art; Bruguera, Tania Sontag, Susan, 20 Staal, Jonas, 66, 67, 70

212

Index

Steyerl, Hito, 2 Factory of the Sun, 123–4, 125–6 Suh, Krista, 68–9 Szymczyk, Adam, 29

Viktor, Lina Iris A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred, 16, 80, 81, 91–2, 93

Tiravanija, Rikrit, 59 transgression aesthetic experience and, 72–4, 100 artistic tradition of, 109 emergency-inducing eco art, 133–4 far-right irony and transgression, 111–13, 114 gender expectations, 110 in post-internet art, 109–11, 114–15 sexual desire in, 109–10 Trecartin, Ryan P.opular S.ky (section ish), 104–5, 107, 109, 110, 159 Trump, Donald, 31, 68, 111, 116 truth art-truth relationship, 31–2 objectivity and, 43 in political art, 5 political importance, 31 post-truth, 31, 36 social media disinformation, 31, 106, 122 see also investigative art; realist art Turner Prize, 31, 56, 66

wall label politicking, 90–1 Wallace, David Foster, 107 Wark, McKenzie, 118–19 Weizman, Eyal, 40 Wertheim, Christine and Margaret, 134–5 Whittle, Alberta, 12 Between a Whisper and a Cry, 140, 141, 143, 144, 149 Wilson, Andrew Norman, 35 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 157 worldmaking art aesthetic experience, 83–9, 93–5 art and political change, 145–52, 173–5 within the culture industry, 95–8, 102 ethics of artistic merit, 88–9 Indigenous lives, 87–8, 94–5, 100–1 in political art, 6, 85–6 term, 83–4, 85–6 wall label politicking and, 90–1 world(un)making art, 98–102

Ulman, Amalia app design, 118 Excellences and Perfections, 107–9, 108, 109, 111 Uusitalo, Niina, 150–1

Ying, Miao, 115 Zabala, Santiago, 133 Zuboff, Shoshana, 105, 116 Zweiman, Jayna, 68–9