Between Discipline and a Hard Place: The Value of Contemporary Art 9781350100480, 9781350100497, 9781350100510, 9781350100473

Citation preview

Between Discipline and a Hard Place

Also Available at Bloomsbury This Is Not Art: Activism and Other ‘Not-Art’, Alana Jelinek Art as Human Practice: An Aesthetics, Georg W. Bertram Surpassing Modernity: Ambivalence in Art, Politics and Society, Andrew McNamara Techne Theory: A New Language for Art, Henry Staten Laruelle and Art: The Aesthetics of Non-Philosophy, Jonathan Fardy

Between Discipline and a Hard Place The Value of Contemporary Art

Alana Jelinek

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Alana Jelinek, 2020 Copyright illustrations © 2020 Suzanne van Rossenberg Alana Jelinek has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Steve Cole / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jelinek, Alana, author. Title: Between discipline and a hard place : the value of contemporary art / Alana Jelinek. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020015204 (print) | LCCN 2020015205 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350100497 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350100480 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350100473 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350100503 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern–21st century–Philosophy. Classification: LCC N6497 .J444 2020 (print) | LCC N6497 (ebook) | DDC 701–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015204 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015205 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0048-0 PB: 978-1-3501-0049-7 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0047-3 eBook: 978-1-3501-0050-3 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

Lists of illustrations Acknowledgements

viii x

1 First things first … Summary First things first … Art within neoliberalism Art as knowledge The personal is political Parameters, or what I’m trying to do Meaning-making The power of metaphor

1 1 2 4 10 11 17 21 24

2 What is art? Summary What is art? Artists and audiences A history of definitions of art Art as defined by art historians Anthropology and art Art and philosophy The art world

29 29 30 33 36 43 48 52

3 Why discipline? Summary Why discipline? Neoliberal and liberal culture Disciplines, elites and pluralism

57 57 59 62 65

C O N T E N T S



Elites and expertise Communities and status

67 70

4 Art: A knowledge-forming discipline Summary Art: A knowledge-forming discipline Knowledge Adisciplinarity (=without or not discipline) Art Not art Academia Art and truth Knowledge Art knowledge and truth Concluding

77 77 79 81 82 84 91 94 95 97 103 105

5

107 108 110 112 115 120

Corporate censorship Corporate censorship Not censorship but something else: The art world Not censorship but something else: The market (Corporate) censorship The self-censoring artist

6 Art in society Summary Art in Society Aesthetics Art and truth Complexity, nuance and truth Falsifiability, truth and democracy

125 125 126 128 132 135 139

7 Politics, ethics and art Summary Politics, ethics and art Politics as democracy

147 147 148 154 vi

C O N T E N T S 

Ethics Ethics and politics It’s ethics and not morality Art, representation and ethics

159 163 169 171

8 Art and the other Summary Art and the Other Ethics, the other and universities Non-artist others: Sci–art and community art When artists write as artists

177 177 178 181 188 196

9 Ecology Summary Not genius, ecology Genius Art ecologically understood Types of art history: Population view Types of art history: Community view Types of art history: Examples of ecological narrations of art history   Other types of change Not a teleology

203 203 205 205 211 216 216

Notes Bibliography Index

232 259 275

vii

219 224 226

Lists of illustrations

1

Suzanne van Rossenberg, Diversifying Knowledge Produced by Art (2019). Digital image 2 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Being an Artist #1 (2019). Digital image 3 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Acknowledging Art as a Social Practice (2019). Digital image 4 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Theorizing the Plurality (and Reality) of Vested Interests in Defining Art (2019). Digital image 5 Suzanne van Rossenberg, What’s your Strategy for Enabling Plurality in Hegemonic Culture? (2019). Digital image 6 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Being an Artist #2 (2019). Digital image 7 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Distinguishing between Art and Art Censorship (2019). Digital image 8 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Being an Artist #3 (2019). Digital image 9 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Falsifying This Cartoon’s Knowledge Production (2019). Digital image 10 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Searching for the Right Balance between Art, Ethics and Politics (2019). Digital image 11 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Being an Artist #4 (2019). Digital image 12 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Oops (2019). Digital image

20 27 45

54

61 93 120 124 141

158 168 180

LIST S OF ILLUSTR ATIONS

13 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Ecology Terms – Population, Community, Ecosystem, Biosphere (2019). Digital image 215 14 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Finding Modern Art in the History of Life (2019). Digital image 225 15 Suzanne van Rossenberg, The End (2019). Digital image231

ix

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge in the first place the University of Hertfordshire which has afforded me time to research and write this book as a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow since December 2017. I would like to thank Róisín Kennedy and Riann Coulter for allowing me to republish ‘Corporate Censorship’ here. The chapter was originally commissioned in response to the thought-provoking session they convened for the Association of Art Historians (AAH) conference in 2012, and first published in 2019 in Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork (Eds Róisín Kennedy and Riann Coulter, I.B. Tauris). I would also like to thank Suzanne van Rossenberg for her illustrations. I met her at later AAH conference in 2019, and realized my search for an illustrator was over. Not only does her doctoral research dovetail into my own research interests in the role and value of art in society, but she is an illustrator eager to work with me on this project. All illustrations are licensed for reproduction in this book. Suzanne van Rossenberg retains ownership of all illustrations. As always, I owe a debt of gratitude to Philosopher of Aesthetics, Prof. Derek Matravers, who keeps me on my toes by gently interrogating my assumptions and introducing me to rigorous thinkers that help me to think more clearly. Also I owe a debt of gratitude to all the various social anthropologists I have worked with, including Tim Ingold, Anna Karina Hermkens, Wayne Modest and Nicholas Thomas, and especially those who are are now my friends. You know who you are, but I want to mention, in particular, Jen Clarke, Katherine Dow, Mark Elliott, Lucie Carreau and Fanny Wonu Veys.

ACKNOWLED GEMENT S

In addition, there are all the other friends, and friends who are like family. It is a truism that many people are required to create a supportive environment in order to create anything, including a book. This is no exception.

xi

xii

1 First things first …

Summary This book overall is an attempt at persuading fellow artists that it is in our interest that we consider what we do in disciplinary terms, that we regard art as a discipline akin to any other knowledge-forming discipline. This argument lies in sharp distinction with how we have been thinking about art for the past 150 years. For 150 years, since Romanticism, art has been understood and valued as a form of self-expression and most definitely not as knowledge producing. Simultaneously, and particularly throughout the Modernist period of the twentieth century, art was imagined at the vanguard of society, leading society into a better world from an imaginary front. At the turn of the twenty-first century, this seems to have changed. Instead of performing artistic and social ideals, artists have adopted neoliberal norms as our own, while also complaining of the ills of neoliberal capitalism, despairing of the accelerated and unmitigated form of global neoliberal capitalism that produces precarious labour conditions and extremely unequal distributions in wealth and opportunities. We complain yet, simultaneously we betray many of the values underpinning neoliberalism, including being popular, accepting metrics for analysing our value(s), and the idea that the market is the rightful arbiter of taste. Even the very definition of art has now been left to the market. Between Discipline and a Hard Place is written to counter these neoliberal norms, as a proposal for the idea of discipline as a strategy for disrupting neoliberalism from within.

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Embracing disciplinarity is not to ignore the critique put forward by Michel Foucault and others. Instead, this book is a proposal to build on critiques of Discipline in the Modern era, and create a form of self-conscious and performed discipline as a strategic way of navigating a world characterized by the almost ubiquitous internalization of neoliberal values. However, this proposal is more than strategic. The idea that art is knowledge-producing is also true. Art practice operates just as any other disciplinary knowledge system does and it behoves artists – all of us, inclusively – to acknowledge this. What gets in the way of artists owning the fact that we create knowledge is that historically, since Modernity, the definition of knowledge has been limited to a narrow one, confined to scientific norms. The narrowing of knowledge is a product of the Modern discipline. With Postmodernism we have learnt to see that, in reality, knowledge is achieved in many modalities. Art is one of these many modalities. It turns out that art is nothing like that described by the majority of art historians or philosophers.

First things first … I have written Between Discipline and a Hard Place in order to consolidate arguments made in my previous monograph This Is Not Art (2013) to build on them and to respond to the interesting and relevant criticisms of that book. At that time I proposed the idea of disciplinarity strategically. Since then, I have realized that understanding art as a knowledge-forming discipline is more than strategic. It is also true. Thinking about art in disciplinary terms goes beyond simply strategizing ways of navigating an art world characterized by its internalization of neoliberal* values. The various interconnecting essays here describe in greater detail how art is a knowledge-forming discipline akin to any other knowledgeforming discipline and they describe the type of knowledge that art can be said to produce. Between Discipline and a Hard Place 2

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

ends with a proposal for a completely different paradigm from the progressivist one that dogs the history of art despite decades-long critique of the notion of progress. *The term neoliberalism here means the ideology that markets provide most efficiently all that individuals need in society and it is the latest form of capitalism. Discussion about the value of the type of knowledge that universities produce has informed my thinking on the question of art as a knowledge-forming discipline.1 It is apparent to me that if art departments in universities understand our position as similar to the rest of the knowledge-forming disciplines found in universities, similar to the rest of the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences, we would be better placed to make strategic alliances, lobbying in common terms and expressing our common value to a wider public and to government. Instead, artists and artists who teach in universities refuse commonality. We imagine ourselves as exceptional: we come from the anti-discipline, radical tradition of the Art School, not the conformist university or the practical polytechnic. We refuse the concept of expertise. We are not experts in our field, but something else. The history of Art Schools, pre-existing university art departments, leads us to believe an art education is distinct from a university one. But we no longer have the luxury of positioning ourselves as unlearning, anti-discipline, anti-expert, as if expertise lies elsewhere. It is highly disingenuous given that art is taught in universities and that art practice is a valid methodology for research funded by Research Councils and a valid outcome of research when assessing research excellence in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. More importantly, the anti-discipline position does a disservice to what we do as artists. Ultimately, it undermines our value. Artists have a knowledge base and an expertise, which is thrown into relief particularly in inter- and multi-disciplinary collaborations and whenever we work outside the art institutions, in ‘the community’. Teaching undergraduates, and also graduates who come from a non-art discipline, be it design, psychology or 3

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

chemistry, it is apparent that a great deal of time and energy is required to help the student ‘think like an artist’, to move beyond the design paradigm of outcomes and servicing a client’s vision, the utilitarian, positivist experiments of the sciences or the illustrative impetus of most high school art. Perhaps an overblown phrase ‘thinking like an artist’ is meaningful, and it goes beyond Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’* or the embodied, tacit knowledge described by anthropologists such as Tim Ingold and Trevor Marchand. It is at the heart of the discipline of art. *Pierre Bourdieu coined the term habitus to refer to the way that class becomes naturalized to ourselves because of how we are brought up. Habitus is the deeply ingrained habits, skills and dispositions that we have as well as our tastes in clothes, food and cultural offerings. Art within neoliberalism To briefly recap arguments made in This Is Not Art about neoliberalism and the art world’s internalization of neoliberal values, artists today, having moved from the Modernist paradigm, operate without a sense of endogenous**, or discipline-specific values. The vacuum artists have created by refusing to define art or to address the question of who is an artist is filled by default. And the default in a neoliberal paradigm is that value is (and must be) established by the market. Market mechanisms ascertain the value of art in addition to any other public goods. Publicly funded organizations that provide public goods are required to justify their funding in terms of market-based econometrics where they cannot be valued in direct market terms. Prior to a generalized internalization of neoliberal values, which in the UK occurred around the turn of the millennium, the value of art was described in Romantic and avant-gardist terms of advancements in the aesthetic and the socio-political. Artists then (most often in the form of white bourgeois men) were geniuses of highly refined sensibilities moving society towards ever-greater moral and/or aesthetic heights. Anecdotes were traded within artistic 4

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

circles about bourgeois audiences and aristocratic patrons. Artists regarded themselves as leading wider society, albeit more often than not only the haut-monde, into difficult and challenging territory, into new and better worlds. We had a clear role, operating at the vanguard, both aesthetically and socially. As the archetypal Romantic genius, for example, biographers of Ludwig Beethoven describe Beethoven’s sneering tolerance of his aristocratic patrons, who were keen to be associated with the new forms of artistic language, to have proximity to genius. Today this attitude seems quaint or worse: artists of the past are accused of undemocratic attitudes, as well as of hypocrisy. **Endogenous values are values specific to a group, in this case artists. The term is used to distinguish between exogenous values established elsewhere with the type of values established within and by a group. Endogenous values include those values not consciously articulated. Endogenous is not the same as intrinsic. Intrinsic implies a continuing and inherent value. Endogenous implies more fluidity, a process with changes over time. Rather than maintaining hierarchies and exclusions, today, we don’t even attempt to define what our values are. Because we have no definition for art, and art can be done by anyone, it has become impossible to argue what actually art is, what art does in society and what artists, as artists, do or contribute to society. Yet we also maintain that art is of great value and not just to investors. The idea that anyone can be, or is, an artist has been around since Romanticism in the mid-nineteenth century. It is a generally accepted art world homily with currency in wider society. Undifferentiated inclusion is imaged to be democratic. But this idea must be contextualized. The Romantic notion of inclusivity was born of a time when the vast majority of the population had at best a basic education plus highly constrained choices, as compared with the privilege of the middle and upper classes, from whose ranks artists almost invariably came. The majority of the population had no right to vote or stand for election. The assertion 5

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

that anyone could be, and is, an artist was a challenge to class hierarchies and the inequalities of the time, part of a societal push towards a democracy of, and for, all. Today, the majority of people in the UK and other ‘economically developed’ democratic nations are middle class (however contested this category) and have access to some amount of time and resources for art, if they choose to engage with it as a practice or as a leisure pursuit. But this reality of democratic inclusivity masks its opposite. The overwhelming majority of both public and private resources for art go towards a vanishingly tiny percentage of practising artists. Moreover, it is artists with existing class, race and gender privilege who are in receipt of the most public and private resources generally, albeit there are notable and highprofile exceptions.2 My argument is that we cannot afford to hold onto the agreeable Romantic ideal of total inclusivity in the face of realities that serve an increasingly hierarchical status quo. We need to rethink a class of artist that happily upholds the values of a neoliberal status quo by imagining we operate in a meritocratic system – that we deserve our luck. The most visible art attracting the largest amount of art world discourse occurs in a system bank-rolled by transnational corporations with reputations to refresh and plutocrats trading money for cultural capital,3 legitimized through the museums and Kunsthallen of democratic nations. Spectacular contemporary art (spectacular* also in the sense critiqued by Situationist, Guy Debord) is funded through the sponsorship of corporations and super-wealthy individuals. In the past, when artists modelled ourselves on avant-gardist notions, from the mid-twentieth century until the early 1990s, we ignored Venice and the tastes of biennale funders, its audiences and curators. Instead, artists working at ‘the cutting edge’ attended open studios, artist-run spaces and artist initiatives as the sites of artistic innovation. While artist initiatives also exist today, it is to a much smaller extent and in the cities dominated by global capital such as London and New York, shoe-string budget artist-run initiatives have mostly receded into historical memory for reasons of gentrification and a lack of stable public funding (see This Is Not Art).

6

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

*Guy Debord: The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears’. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.4 Contemporary artist and theorist Gregory Sholette describes the neoliberal art world as one maintained by a ‘dark matter’ of ignored and overlooked artists, 97 per cent of all practising artists.5 In reality, it is far less than 3 per cent who are both visible and resourced. It is closer to the graph of unequal distribution of wealth in developed economies, that is, 0.001 per cent. Sholette makes an important point that most artists do not get paid or are underpaid for their ‘artistic labour’; yet, we financially maintain the corporate, wellendowed art world through paying entrance fees to galleries and museums and volunteering. However, the use of the dark matter metaphor demonstrates that even the most political, and Marxist, of artists have internalized neoliberal values. By using it, Sholette substantiates the values of the neoliberal art world. The metaphor naturalizes the idea of 3 per cent. In reality, the ‘3%’ isn’t natural. It is 0.001 per cent and it is sustained by a closed market of courtly biennials and Kunsthallen that largely reflect the specific (and often conservative and cliché) tastes of the corporate rich.6 We don’t need to legitimize the corporate art world by attending, or attending to it. We have choices. This is not to say that uninteresting, conservative, cliché, populist art occurs only in the mainstream and well-funded venues. This is simply not the case, and to portray it thus would be to resurrect a cliché from the archives of Modernism: that bourgeois taste is conservative and the true artist, namely the avant-garde artist, works outside and beyond this. Instead, the point is that interesting, compelling and important art also occurs outside the narrow circles of the corporate rich. If 99.999 per cent of artists work beyond the venues and budgets of the 0.001 per cent, we should have plenty of interesting and compelling artists to engage with. 7

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Historically, wealthy collectors working with well-networked dealers have been central to the promotion of artists, as New York Modernist art dealer Leo Castelli (1907–99) amply demonstrates. But one difference between the mid-twentieth-century art world and today is the structure of the art world itself. An argument I make in This Is Not Art is that today there is a full integration of all aspects of the art world. In the past, there were different and competing mechanisms of support for artists and for art, not only in the UK but in the United States and beyond. There were distinct private and public spheres, as well as the possibility of self-organization, before the private property boom in real estate and the marketization of intellectual property (IP) in the late 1990s. Before this, the UK boasted at least two different systems of support for contemporary art and artists which, while not mutually exclusive, were distinctive. One was the commercial gallery system and the other was publicly funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain operating at an arm’s length from UK government. Today and consequent of New Labour policies for the arts during the year 2000, which removed the arm’s length aspect of arts funding, there is a full integration of the public and the private systems of support for the arts. Added to this, a lack of affordable housing and the dismantling of squatter’s rights have led to the destruction of artistic self-organization unless artists personally have a great deal of capital behind them. And some artists do have a great deal of capital behind them. This consolidated system of support has created a certain homogenization of contemporary art practice. Art can be anything, but it isn’t. Instead (as I argue in more detail in a chapter in this book, ‘Corporate Censorship’), there is an endless variation on a few themes. This idea builds on the work of sociologist of economics, Michel Callon, and economist, Jean Gadrey, who separately detail the mechanisms of market convergence and the effect this has on innovation and diversity. In short, when markets get involved, true diversity is inexorably and inevitably driven out. This process of homogenization is true across technology, science and culture. Because capital disinvests from alternative, very different starting points, diversity is disabled. Markets will always ultimately destroy radical alternatives. This is simply what markets do in order to 8

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

create a mature market. Homogenization is the inevitable result of market maturity. It is of course simplistic and romanticizing to imagine a ‘pure’ artistic moment when artists working within the avant-garde eschewed the market and the imagined ‘corruption’ of money. After all, Picasso among others had a healthy respect for, indeed active engagement in, the art market.7 Nevertheless, numerous avantgardist movements, including Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Mail Art, Land Art, the political art movements of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, were active artistic strategies against marketization and commodification. These ‘alternatives to capitalism’ were supported in the UK through the existence of alternative mechanisms until approximately the year 2000. They were maintained by a healthy dialogue between artists about the need for endogenous artistic values (not phrased in that term).8 Endogenous artistic values were maintained explicitly against market and/or bourgeois values, as the many Marxist writers about the value of art at the time demonstrated.9 Genuinely democratic ideals such as respect for audiences as equals, as participants and as co-creators have emerged since the heady days of the cult of Romantic genius and the avant-garde. Small, select audiences are no longer a marker of success, as an indicator of an artist being ahead of his [sic] time, leading from the front. Instead, artists embrace the concept of mass audiences as a marker of value and generally no longer are patron funders considered little different from an open purse. Remarkably often, artists will alter their art to fit in with funder, patron and curatorial demands. Whether the shift to popular acclaim or to altering an artwork for ‘professional’ reasons is remarkable or worrying depends on a person’s politics, on how deeply and uncritically neoliberal values have been internalized. In addition, there is a growing common-sense professionalism around self-censorship (a topic explored further in the chapter ‘Corporate Censorship’ in this book). These shifts indicate the shift to neoliberalism from Romantic, avant-gardist attitudes of the twentieth century. Democratic ideals of equality and co-creation have become entangled with more corrosive values, mistakenly attributed to democracy but actually neoliberal in origin. 9

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

With neoliberalism a new norm has also developed in which expertise is denigrated. To be anti-expert is promoted as democratic, fair, egalitarian. Any non-monetary but high-status values are denigrated as elitist. Here I am reminded of Tocqueville’s warning of the threat of demagoguery incipient in (American) democracy.10 Within the rubric of a neoliberal conception of democracy, expertise is undemocratic. By undermining expertise, any value system operating in addition to and competing with the economic is denigrated. Other value systems, such as expertise and knowledge for its own sake, compete with the economic as values. In order to consolidate market values, competing values are corroded. The idea of artistic expertise is understood either as an elitist concept or it is laughable. After all, artists have argued for generations that art is anti-discipline, a process of unlearning, and both Picasso and Dalí are quoted on the topic.11 Of course, neither man was modest enough to imagine that their abilities were commonly held or widely distributed across the population at large. These were postures of democracy, stemming from the Romantic and not-yet-fulfilled democratic ideals of the nineteenth century. We need to recognize today that unlearning and anti-discipline are concepts that deny us value. This is described further in ‘Art and the Other’, the chapter in this book that addresses inter- and multidisciplinary collaboration. Art as knowledge Traditionally, art practice is not framed as the pursuit of knowledge, much less disciplinary knowledge. With the advent of Modernity, knowledge was understood as the province of narrowly defined scholarship within a largely positivist scientific paradigm. Seen like this, most artists would be hard pressed to describe what we do in terms of Knowledge. In This Is Not Art, I focused on the fact that artists operate very similarly, more or less akin, to scholars in other knowledge-producing spheres. But the question of the kind of knowledge that art produces was left unexplored. My argument then was not based on analysing the type of knowledge that art produces, but instead I argue that because artists and art operate just as, say, 10

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

philosophers and philosophy, anthropologists and anthropology, or scientists in any of the sciences, we can rightfully understand our practice in disciplinary terms. The observation was anthropological, extrapolating from Bruno Latour’s observations of scientists operating to create new knowledge in the science of virology.12 The fact is, similar to scientists, artists self-consciously build on the achievements of others. Not only are we schooled in appropriate techniques and skills for our discipline, but more importantly, we are taught how to think within disciplinary norms, how to ‘see with the eyes of an artist’. We are taught who are our predecessors, and what knowledge is relevant to our discipline and what is not. We share this process of ‘disciplining’ with all other disciplines. Not only is art a discipline in this sense, it is knowledge forming as well. The question of knowledge is more deeply addressed in this book in ‘Art: a Knowledge Forming Discipline’ and I turn to Wittgenstein to describe how artists do produce knowledge. My argument here is that we, artists, can and must see ourselves as producing knowledge, instead of as producing things of beauty, things that are socially ameliorative, signifiers of class distinction or commodities (etc.): some of the many uses to which artists’ work has been put by those who write about art. The personal is political I write about art, its definition and the role and value of art in society as an artist, from the inside, as an artist living and working in London. I rely on the theoretical work of philosophers and historians commonly cited within the art world and I also work with, and think through, contributions from a wider range of disciplines than is ordinarily found in art world discourse. I thread these influences together in ways that run counter to much that is accepted as true, correct, orthodox in today’s art world. I come to this conclusion, this different texture and weave, not out of perversity, in order simply to write something different from everyone else, but because in thinking about the definition, role and value of art I do so from first principles, and logic has led me elsewhere, a different synthesis has created a terra nova. 11

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Because I have spent over nine years working with social anthropologists, even contributing to knowledge in that sphere with articles and conference papers, some imagine I am writing ethnography of the London art world, as if I am an anthropologist employing participant-observation as method. But this is not true. I am not writing a theory about someone else and their practices, as an ethnographer does.13 My fellow artists are not a culture apart or a host. I am not a guest, which is the ethnographic trope. Ethnographies are written by outsiders to a given culture or group, so I am not an ethnographer. Notably, ethnographers are not flâneurs. An anthropologist participates and announces their project to their hosts. The flâneur imagines himself outside, not participating, an inert force with no impact on his surroundings. The flâneur was the archetypal Modern artist, imagining himself as outside the culture he observed. A good ethnographer reflects on both the observed culture and the culture of the observer, and a superb example of this is Katherine Dow’s Making a Good Life: An Ethnography of Nature, Ethics and Reproduction (2016). This book draws on my own experience as an artist in dialogue with a wide range of disciplines, including both analytic philosophy and anthropology, in order to consider contemporary art practice from the point of view of a contemporary artist living and working in a specific location. I am no flâneuse, although I do observe others around me, because I understand I am always already part of, constituting, my milieux. I have lived and worked from a base in London since 1991 when I moved here. I went to art college in Melbourne, Australia as soon as I left school, and graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in painting, after which I more or less immediately emigrated. A bigger world was in my sights and I felt the marginality, the parochialism, of Australia keenly at the time. I write from within the London art world, as a migrant to that megapolis of migrants. I locate myself, identifying my geographical and generational location, because I do not pretend my experience is universal or shared. I state this against the norms of art historians and most philosophers who, as part of their disciplinary mores, have a problematic tendency to remove instances of art from their context, creating an illusion

12

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

that value and interpretation are true and stable everywhere and for all time. As all experiences and therefore all knowledge are located and specific, so too value and interpretation. Locating oneself in time and space has echoes of Heidegger’s dasein and Process Philosophy; nevertheless, it is to social anthropology that I find much of my influence. Identifying location, the specificity of location in time, is paramount to their method of producing knowledge. It is of course also a feminist truism that the personal is political. Social anthropologists understand that no cultural phenomenon is universal or stable. The ethnographer is alert to difference, to alterity, so an object or exhibition may move around the world but it will be understood, it will be received, differently in different locations. An Ai Weiwei exhibition, for example, in Melbourne Australia is seen and understood differently from an Ai Weiwei exhibition in London or in Beijing. Even when the objects are the same, how they are received and understood is inflected by, read through, their different contexts. The art world, being reliant on art history and philosophy’s tendency to universalization, tends to assume there is a fixed and stable, even transcendent, significance to art and exhibitions. In art history and theory we refer to signifiers that are stable in all places and all times.14 The art world – artists, curators and theorists – continues to make this assumption despite much work done to nuance and undermine the idea of stable meaning and universality.15 What I know from being raised in Australia is that, on moving to ‘the centre’, the meaning of cultural objects changed. Meaning really is always inflected by context. Previously I had imagined that the margins have the same access to the universal as the ‘centre’, that indeed there is a centre, which, being global and not local, has a fixed, stable and universal signification. For those of us born and bred away from ‘the centre’, we learn from our geography, our class background, our socially marked status, that knowledge and differential status accrue around imagined polarities. We also learn that there is always more than one history. We know the Australian and/or Aboriginal, Maori, Welsh, Feminist, Russian, Irish, Sri Lankan, working class, queer, South African, Catalan,

13

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Muslim (etc.) story that coexists with the mainstream, globalized unmarked* norm.16 *The very act of naming or labelling a category simultaneously constructs and foregrounds that category. One is marked and the other unmarked. When something is marked, it is qualified as a specialized form that we must distinguish from its more generic form. For example, black British is marked in contrast to (white) British. We learn in at least two registers, sometimes more. There is the mainstream, the so-called universal and global, and there is the local or culturally specific. All cultures are of course culturally specific. Art historian, Svetlana Alpers, in fact employs this knowledge to inform a re-reading of the art of seventeenth-century Netherlands and its value. Her investigation into Dutch artists is in terms of Dutch-specific pressures, norms and culture. Instead of comparing Dutch artists of the time to the ‘standard’ or ideal artist, that is, comparing Dutch artists with those working in Italy within the legacy of the Renaissance and finding them wanting, which is what other art historians do, Alpers assesses Dutch artistic practice in its specific and distinct context, as located.17 Her art history of locatedness and cultural specificity remains remarkable in the field, but it demonstrates that it is possible, even within a traditional art history, to think in terms of specificity. In pressing that artists also write about art, I implore that we go beyond the usual suspects of Marxism, the Freudian and the Deleuzian. Other sources also throw useful light on our subject and successfully move us from the tropes that maintain, perhaps inadvertently, racist and sexist norms of genius and tales of progress. People who make things, including art, are found in different societies and in different times. What changes is the fact that these people, their value and the roles they perform for that society will be constructed and understood differently in those different locations and times. The concept of family, for example, may be found in any human society, but it is constructed and understood 14

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

differently in the different locations and times. Similarly, any cultural artefact, an artwork or a philosophy, is the product of a specific location and time. While some human-made things, concepts and methods travel, these are always received differently in their different contexts.18 Between Discipline and a Hard Place is an attempt at a ‘creolized’ theory in that it has emerged ‘from a productive engagement with the living dynamics of an uneven but interdependent world’.19 It is a faltering step towards the decolonization of my personal curriculum and of owning what it is to be raised in a settlercolonial country, within a minority culture, as one who passes for majority culture and/or as acceptable migrant most of the time. Reading Audre Lorde during my Masters degree brought to my attention psychoanalytic theories, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies and feminism.20 I bring these different disciplinary viewpoints to bear at different times and in different ways throughout the arguments I make here. Sometimes they’re messy. I write in such a way that self-consciously brings together non-white artists and theorists with those from the dominant perspective of the West that is most often male, white, wealthy and heterosexual. I try to cite equally women and men as fellow artists and fellow theorists. These references are consciously made against the generalized and internalized institutional sexism and racism of the art world. Being inclusive is both strategic and self-conscious on my part. It is all too easy for anyone, including those with a multi-disciplinary, feminist, postcolonial, queer and critically engaged education, to regress to the mean, and refer once again to white men as our sole reference points as fellow thinkers and fellow artists. It may be strategic to include the work of women and those from outside the successfully capitalist paradigm, but also, I believe, that in referencing the work of women and to non-white, non-Western cultures as both fellow artists and fellow theorists, I come closer to a truth about art and disciplinarity than if I reference only a small subsection of all the available thought and art. Any truth must be based on the widest range of reference points, if it is to get anywhere near to truth, however elusive that may be. In analysing the art world, and specifically the London art world, I do not wish 15

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

to imply any unitary leviathan. I do not define the edges of the art world nor its constituents. Public feedback of This Is Not Art included the assumption that in discussing the role and value of art in society, and in defining art to that end, I was referring only to those artists shown in large, institutional art venues, and that I was ignoring the contribution of the majority of practitioners. This was not the case then. Nor is it the case now. I am well aware of the coexistence of the many different types of artists working in the art world. I am aware of the coexistence of the monied mainstream, those who exhibit in Tate, Raven’s Row, Rivington Place, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, for example, and the un(der)funded ‘marginal’, marginalized, ‘invisible’ majority of artists working and exhibiting their work. I am aware of those who exhibit in the Brady Centre and Swiss Cottage Library (local authority venues) and I am aware of those artists and artist-curators who run galleries, events and exhibition opportunities themselves, eking out an existence through artist-run initiatives. I am aware of those who work with private patronage, on private incomes and also of those with public and local authority funding. I am aware of those who work with Arts Council support and those who rely on University research budgets and Research Council funding for their art and their livelihoods. I am aware of those public servants who are attempting to define their jobs as their artistic practice. I am aware of the very many artists who exhibit only from their studio, their home, online and in small self-funded events. I am aware of the artists who reach, at the fullest extent of their audiences, only friends and family, and those who reach hundreds of thousands at a time, both on a regular basis and as a one-off. I am aware of the commercial sector, ranging from those galleries showing artists found in national collections to those who sell their work through internet-based sites. There are those artists who are funded with alternative and innovative commercial models and those who sell objects that may or may not be art. I have artist friends and colleagues that fit each of these descriptions. The coexistence of all of these people and places, their networks and social relations, comprises the London art world, up to a point. This is discussed in depth here in ‘What Is Art?’ in which questions such as who is an artist, and who constitutes the art world, therefore who is it that rightly defines art and its 16

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

values, are addressed. I conclude in that chapter that the definition of art and the perimeter of the art world are created collectively, if unconsciously, as an emergent property of our artistic practice and knowledge. This is my interpretation of George Dickie’s version of the institutional definition of art and Latour’s insights into scientific knowledge production. I acknowledge it is against the grain of most philosophers of aesthetics’ understanding. Parameters, or what I’m trying to do Throughout The Discipline of Art I am critical of the Western paradigm, Western traditions of knowledge formation, and I draw on those who are similarly critical. This is not to imply that the nonWestern is inherently better, or to impose an inverted hierarchy in which the products of the European Enlightenment are all bad and that everything else is either superior or more ethical. I do not believe that the legacy of the Classical civilizations in forming ‘the West’ is uniformly shameful. However, it is problematic and I write about the West and the Enlightenment because it is the paradigm within which I work. I am critical of our assumptions because I understand them from within. I am a product of the Enlightenment and I seek truth defined in Enlightenment terms, though not limited to the rationality and positivism of the Enlightenment project. I critique the hierarchies, biases and assumptions imagined as normal and desirable within Western thought in order to work, to think, towards a more caring-careful, more plural, less exploitational, less dominating way of being/thinking/doing from within the Western paradigm, as do so many others. In addition, and similar to social anthropologists, I am acutely aware of coexistent epistemologies, perhaps ontologies, by working with people from non-Western and indigenous cultures. Encounters with completely different ways of being–seeing– doing that are also rational (as rational as we are) make it possible to understand the plasticity of culture and also, by extension, the plasticity of our selves. By acknowledging that the truths and narratives built on foundational schema can be built from a different starting point from the ones we have internalized as 17

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

normal, we become open to something else. Ordinary, normalized ways of being–seeing–doing could be different. Normal is always different in different places and in different times. Foucault demonstrated the shift in discipline from the Ancien Régime to Modernity. Radically and importantly, he also noted that we continue to reproduce the discipline of the status quo for our selves, in our selves and for other selves. None are outside the normative disciplines of Modernity. Even we, educated and radical, are most of the time maintaining a status quo of discipline, of hierarchy, dominance and exclusion because we just don’t see it’s there. We usually, most of the time, fail to see how power is operating through our very bodies and desires. This book is about art. I make no claims to understand the products, role or value of other types of practice, despite being heavily indebted to the Modernist and Postmodernist works from contiguous creative fields, including theatre, literature, music and design. I am not concerned with a wider range of ‘creative’ fields. I am not writing about design, music, poetry, craft, literature, theatre or architecture. I am not making observations about any other ‘creative practice’, practices that involve the hands and the body, in addition to the imagination and the logical and intuitive mind. Throughout this book, art refers only to the practice and discipline of art, a discipline that today has a wide variety of identifiers, including visual art, fine art, plastic arts, creative art and contemporary arts practice. Unlike This Is Not Art, in which each chapter was written as an argument towards a conclusion about the value and role of art, Between Discipline and a Hard Place is a series of interconnected essays, each one independent and with its own conclusion. Some of the arguments and references overlap across the essays and sometimes they are used from different angles to say something slightly different. This refraction, it is hoped, will produce a spectrum of ideas. Things appear different from different angles and when subjected to different tools and different lights. Unlike most art theory, this book is not written in the negative register. Generally, I will not carve out my ground by saying what I am not doing or why I am not doing it. While the negative 18

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

approach may clarify my position for some readers, it is both off putting for non-academics and not in the spirit of what I am trying to do. I also feel it is not how an artist should write about art. Those who favour the type of theory written in the negative may find this group of essays lack the trappings of rigour associated with critical writing. I realize by not conforming to these, not only will my scholarship and expertise be questioned, but I open myself up to obvious quibbles by those who wish to interpret these essays less sympathetically. It will be easy to find targets by assuming I mean one thing when I fail to mention something in particular. In writing only in the positive, I ask the reader to give me the benefit of the doubt: that thought and some scholarship lie behind these essays, and that I have probably thought of at least some of the counter-arguments and I have read at least some of the theories to the contrary, though by no means all. I have chosen to cite references, not because they are all I know, but because these are the ones that serve my argument most fully. To any analytic philosophers who may stray into my readership, I am no logician and have not read the corpus on knowledge, or liberalism. I have read beyond that which art theory tends to cite, dipping my toes into the analytic tradition, but mostly I focus on the continental philosophers because that is what my colleagues, fellows in the art world, cite. I write for artists, not philosophers. Finally, I write in the positive register because, while theorists of art may believe that the work of theory is to unravel the very ground on which we stand, I believe that the work of the artist is to create nuance and complexity that is not merely fractal but that works towards greater knowledge and understanding. Ours is a positive discipline, so positive writing is required. It is important to note that I feel no compulsion to work only with the ideas of those philosophers or historians with whom I totally agree, which is one of the norms of current art world theorizing. Those of an orthodox bent find this disturbing and suspect me of sharing all the values of those I cite. In working with the ideas of various thinkers to further my own understanding of art and ethics, I am not looking for gurus with whom to align, but interlocutors. The purpose of this book, ultimately, is to help create a climate of value and meaning for the work of artists today, 19

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Figure 1  Suzanne van Rossenberg, Diversifying Knowledge Produced by Art (2019). Digital image.

20

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

here in London, and perhaps elsewhere, if what I write resonates beyond. Meaning-making Between Discipline and a Hard Place attempts to describe the unique role that art has, as a discipline, in society and therefore the meaning, the purpose, for creating art as artists. Many contemporary artists have lost the meaning behind what we do, uniquely, as artists. This is somewhat paradoxical given that art world consensus is that anyone can be an artist and that anything could be art, which has the implicit assumption that there is a purpose behind the making of art. But meaninglessness, purposelessness, is the inevitable consequence of total inclusivity. With inclusivity comes a lack of definition, not only of art, but of the specific purpose for making art. For many artists, if art has a purpose it is as social good. Either that or that art is an innate creative instinct on which we (bravely) act. The former assumption that art does social good is investigated in more detail in ‘Art and Society’ and ‘Politics, Ethics and Art’ later in this book. The latter point about innate creative instincts demands at least a brief investigation here. There is a great deal of neoliberal attention on creativity. Making money is creative, apparently. Within the neoliberal capitalist paradigm, making money is the sole purpose of creativity and also its ultimate incarnation. Within this paradigm, making art is a form of profit hunting, which intersects with interests of the profit hunting collectors collecting art as an asset class. Each is dependent on the other for their individual, rational profit-seeking. Making art is little different from the creation of patents, IP, and akin to mining, or the refining and processing aspects of the mining industry. Within the neoliberal paradigm, artists are admired for our ability to turn the raw materials of canvas and pigment, marble and plastic, zeros and ones, into gold.

21

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

*The ancient Greek tale of King Midas in Ovid’s Metamorpheses turned everything he touched into gold. Those artists who are not making money as artists are deemed to be acting on a common and basic instinct that everyone has. In itself, this may be natural but it has little value because it is common. The market determines which artists have the Midas* touch and it is important that the Midas touch is unevenly distributed: rarity is necessary to profit-driving. The largest profits lie in the most uneven distribution (of anything). Artists without the Midas touch are the same as everyone else because all humans are creative. Artists are simply acting on innate instinct, an instinct with little difference from the libidinal. Because creativity is common to all humans, the creative human becomes an artist only once they have converted what they do into economic terms: on making money. Homo economicus, the base unit of neoliberalism, is devoid of value outside the economic. There is no place for the artist who fails to turn materials into gold. Similar to a child playing with seeds as compared with agribusiness farmer, every one may be ‘expressing themselves’ as artists, but the artist of neoliberalism is defined by successful profit-seeking. Artists might be post-Fordist precarious workers, but we embody the very ideals of neoliberalism, including a willingness to work at all hours for little or no money, selfexploiting in the belief that a meritocratic market exists and that our services are valued, or will be valued eventually. Artists understand ourselves as atomized, as unattached units. We atomize ourselves and our experience, so we fail to see the system within which we are operating, except perhaps occasionally as victims of it all. We work without reference to a greater whole, without reference to a history of practices or to a community of practitioners, and we work without reference to the types of ideals that previously motivated our practice, be it beauty, radicalism or disruption. In these circumstances, the idea of artistic autonomy takes on a quaintly nostalgic hue. Notably, a number of artists and theorists have begun to use the term favourably once again.21 For example, in

22

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

Sholette’s 2017 publication, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, he asks, ‘How can artists learn to siphon off a portion of institutional power while maintaining a safe distance and margin of autonomy from the institution.’22 In autonomy lies emancipation, apparently, as Marxist literary critic, Terry Eagleton, describes. He sums up the apparent dilemma inherent in the paradigm: there is a ‘conflict … between two opposing notions of the aesthetic, one figuring as an image of emancipation, the other ratifying domination’.23 Artists are struggling for purpose within these long-established tensions, and to make matter worse neoliberalism has re-defined creativity. As Gilles Deleuze notes: These days, information technology, communications, and advertising are taking over the words ‘concept’ and ‘creative’, and these ‘conceptualists’ constitute an arrogant breed that reveals the activity of selling to be capitalism’s supreme thought.24 Historian of creativity, Rob Pope, argues that the concept of creativity is the product of the mid-twentieth century and of the Modern West. ‘It is a specifically “modern” response to problems associated with rapid social and technological change.’25 Pope demonstrates that the concept of creativity is historically specific and tied to late capitalism. As a practice, creativity may be universal, but as a concept it is not. People throughout time and everywhere on the globe produce new ideas, new things, new forms. What happened with mid-twentiethcentury Modernity is that creativity took on the status of fetish, a new emphasis on novelty in response to specific forms of change and the fetish took on a new potency with neoliberalism. Somewhat ironically, it is artists, the paragon of creativity, who are failed by this. If everyone is creative, making money is creative, artists make money and everyone is an artist, what is the purpose of art, as art? So we have lost the reason for making art. And yet, the need for meaning is one of the few truly universal needs of human society. All human societies have narratives to create meaning for individual lives. While there are variations in social structures across human cultures, in definitions of art, in perceptions of the environment, in configurations of family, in what counts as knowledge (etc.), what is common in all human societies is the need to create meaning with our lives and in our interactions with others. 23

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Despite being so fundamental – or because it is so fundamental – we tend to take meaning for granted. Usually society, the family and cultural structures into which we are born and raised ascribe the meaning for our lives. We have meaning without thinking about the need for meaning. For centuries, Religion has done this on our behalf. More recently, it is capitalism. For homo economicus, meaning lies in profit-seeking, in attempting to own the material and immaterial, and in the status derived from achieving and amassing private wealth. For linguist, Andrew Goatly, specific metaphors are mobilized in the emergence of both capitalist economic philosophy and the Darwinism and neo-Darwinism that developed from it.26 In terms of ideology and economics, … by celebrating acquisitiveness as a sign of God’s favour, [capitalism] sets itself up against (especially medieval) Christian values of the sanctity of poverty. … For Smith’s economic model it was vital that wealth be equated with virtue rather than vice, that the quantity of one’s possessions should be an index of morality not evil. Avarice needs to be made innocuous in the eyes of society, in order for the market to operate effectively.27 By the turn of the twentieth century, according to Nietzsche, God was dead and so individuals had to create the meaning of our lives for ourselves. For the Existentialist, the task is to create for oneself, as individuals, our own morality, ethics, and also the meaning of our existence. Existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger imagined this is a relatively straightforward, albeit tremendous, undertaking. Social anthropology tells us it is even more difficult than that. Meaning-making cannot be done individually, as existential meaning is held both in the individual and in the society in which we live. It is not simply a matter of Will to Power as the Nietzschean cliché erroneously goes.28 The power of metaphor One linguistic-ideological coup of capitalism has been the use of ‘natural’ metaphors in economics, interlinking the ideas of activity, success, competition, conflict, winning, survival, fitness and the 24

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

good. Through the framing devices of both biology and economics together, the purpose of human existence is a unit of capital flow in the market economy, and a unit of evolution. Understood through the entangled metaphors of God, capitalism and Nature, humanity is the fulfilment of evolution’s destiny and capitalism the destiny of humanity. With the Nietzschean – and separately the postHolocaust – ‘Death of God’,29 the concepts of ‘nature’, ‘biology’ and ‘genes’ have replaced, and replicated, the meaning for existence achieved for millennia through the concept of God. Instead of the arguments over Free Will and Pre-Determinism taking place in the context of God, now they take place in the realm of Nature and genes. For those who emphasize our genetics, Nature is sovereign and there is little free will or agency for the organism in the face of our pre-determining, deterministic, biology. Examples of this can be seen most explicitly in arguments over gender and sex. Nature as God is understood as having primacy over ‘nurture’ or culture, so the XX and XY chromosomes of women and men determine any differentials in skeletal musculature, cognitive ability and behaviour. We are biologically determined and we therefore have little freedom, little choice in how we look, behave and think: we are what we are because of our genes. Like God, genes are omnipresent, determining everything, omnipotent. Our idea of God’s omniscience also pervades our understanding of genes. Genetic omniscience is conjured in the writing of Richard Dawkins and his field of evolutionary biology, by which genes know the future, the present and the past.30 For those who emphasize Free Will instead of PreDetermination, there is an inherent plasticity of cultures. We have individual abilities to challenge, even reverse, norms of our upbringing (nurture). For those who favour Free Will, we are free agents, free to choose how we live our lives, what we know and how we experience what we experience. The Free Will doctrine has us as atheist Existentialists reaping the consequences of our actions, as freedom or otherwise, not dissimilar from the reward and punishment of Godly religious observance. Indeed, for many, Nature is beneficent, all-powerful and all-knowing: the Christian God in all but name, including His moral-ethical demands on humanity.31 Tim O’Riordan, British Academy fellow 25

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

of Anthropology and Geography and chair of the International Advisory Board of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, wrote that ‘environmentalism is as much a state of being as a mode of conduct or a set of policies’.32 The same thing can be said of religious observance. I end Between Discipline and a Hard Place with an essay employing Nature differently. I describe how the science of ecology views life as inter-dependent, offering ecology as a less hierarchical, more inclusive, and truer model for understanding the role and value of art than the traditional models provided by art history, sociology or philosophy. Nietzsche, followed by Sartre, exhorted us to find meaning in death, in the fact of Death, instead of in religion or God, which was deemed both untrue and unnecessarily constraining on human potential. There may be no inherent reason for art in society. It may be that we must achieve that reason for ourselves. It is certainly true that this meaning, the meaning for creating art, is a social process. We must do this together. There is no teleology, no grand purpose for existence, for life and much less for art. For me, there is an argument for art similar to the reason for preserving biodiversity. While life may continue without diversity, it is a poorer and more difficult life for all individuals and every species without diversity. Once we move away from the misconceived fantasy of immortality, we can focus our attention on what we are doing right now in order to enable the diversity required to thrive in the present. Understanding more profoundly what both inter-dependence and meaninglessness mean, we can achieve meaning for our being, for our actions and for our art, beyond the economic or the God-like biological.

26

FIRST THINGS FIRST …

Figure 2 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Being an Artist #1 (2019). Digital image.

27

28

2 What is art?

Summary The question, what is art, is vexed and often asked. Philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists and the general public all have an opinion about whether a particular thing is art or not. Artists also have our own ideas. Ideas about what counts as art are varied and conflicting, changing over time and across different locations. I assert here that it is artists, and only artists, who define what is art. Others will and do argue for their own vested interests with regard to art, including as audiences. Philosopher Arthur Danto argued that it is philosophy that defines art. My argument is that, historically, it has always been artists who define art, and not philosophers. Although it is also true that art develops within a discourse, as Danto describes, artists define art through practice, historically policing the boundaries of art and moving them forward, finding a cutting edge, an avant-garde, an area that requires investigation (others might add, finding a new market niche) from within a history of local artistic practice each with its own discursive rationale. The primary discourse of artist practitioners is with other artists. Artists also define what we do and what is good by discussing these things with philosophers, theorists, critics, historians, scientists and also increasingly with audiences. In the past, the relationship was different: audiences followed the innovations of artists willingly or unwillingly, embracing changes in art practice or rejecting them in a state

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

of shock. Critics explained ‘the new’ for the uninitiated, as exemplified in 1980 by Robert Hughes and his BBC television series and publication, The Shock of the New. Since the turn of the millennium (more or less) and with the internalization of neoliberal values as our own, artists have stopped performing the vital functions of definition and quality control. Today it is rare to find an artist saying that this is art and this is not, or that this is good art and this is not. Critics, in turn, simply celebrate the choices made by international biennial curators and buyers of contemporary art. Either they celebrate the neoliberal art world or they advance theories in which the art world is an example of globalization and they denounce the art market as nothing more than an aspect of neoliberal capitalism. Instead of asserting what is art, what is good art and what is great, artists in the twenty-first century work with the idea of relevance and we attempt to secure a place for our art by reference to numbers of followers, to column inches, to clicks and likes or to price points. It is a settlement artists have made since; in the words of postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, ‘we live in a time and a place that has privatized the imagination and pitted it against the political’.1 This chapter analyses some of the various definitions of art provided by scholars in other disciplines, in history, anthropology and philosophy, and describes how these differ from the views of the general public, and from the view of artists. Here I make the case for artists, and artists alone, defining art, purporting this as good against the art world orthodoxy normalizing the abdication of all responsibility by artists for the value of art, for its boundaries and for the very definition of art.

What is art? Artists and audiences The history of art since Romanticism, including the avant-garde of the twentieth century, sets up an aesthetic arms race between what artists offer and what audiences will accept. Artists up the ante by making 30

WHAT IS ART?

something more challenging, more dissonant, more complex and audiences at first say no, this is not art, and then over time, they capitulate and even fawn over the greatness of the genius that shocked previous generations. Stravinsky’s ballet with Diaghilev’s choreography for ‘The Rite of Spring’ is one famous example of this.2 The history of Modern art is written as the shock of the new. What marks the cognoscenti from the ordinary bourgeois audience is their ability to keep up with the artists and their constant challenge to the aesthetic status quo. Robert Hughes’s BBC series, ‘The Shock of the New’, exemplifies this with his explication of the joys of shock and the inexorable march of progress.3 Since the mid-1990s, however, shock tactics have been used somewhat differently, more cynically, to sell exhibition tickets. The ‘Sensation’ exhibition in 1997 staged by advertising man, art dealer and art collector, Charles Saatchi, is an example.4 No longer relying on the type of shock that is a response to disrupting artistic categories and norms (such as the primitivism* employed by Modernists such as Stravinsky and Picasso), from the 1990s onwards, shock becomes a marketing strategy to drive up audience numbers and media attention. Since audience numbers and media attention became ways of evaluating art, markers of success in both commercial terms and for the government**, exhibitions aimed at mass audiences became the goal of art institutions.

*Primitivism is used as a term for the fascination white European artists, musicians and composers had for non– European and indigenous cultures, which they appropriate into their own artwork on the basis that non-Europeans are imagined as less civilized and therefore more free.

**In 2000 New Labour introduced the compulsion for arts organizations to seek income beyond government funding – be it sponsorship or ‘self-generated income’ i.e. shop and ticket sales – in order to receive public money. This type of funding model is known as a mixed economy model. 31

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Mass audience, popular exhibitions are marketed as ‘democratic’ and widely imagined within the art world as such. But, this is to misunderstand democracy. With neoliberalism, the terms popular, democratic and inclusive have been elided and confused. They are terms pitted against exclusivity, elitism, expertise and minority interest. The problem with this conflation is analysed at length later in this book in ‘Why Discipline?’. Here I point to the variousness of the art world, when imagined inclusively of all types of practice, and beyond the institutional and mediated. Most non-artists have access only to a much-mediated, reduced variety of all that is happening at any one time. Most artists are also only aware of the type of practices they are directly engaged with, ignoring a wider range of practice with claims to being art. There is always a greater variety of artists, art practices and places where art is happening than the media conveys, including both the traditional press and the blogosphere. The mass media pick up only a small subset covered by the specialist press, and the specialist art press focuses on only a subset of the wide variety of things that artists are doing. Not everything interesting or important is reported as such by the media, or reported at all. Even in the apparently free, and freely available, media there are biases and skew. For example, Wikipedia has a skew towards that which white American young men believe is worthy of note, historically important or zeitgesty. (Surveys done by Wikipedia indicate that approximately 85–90 per cent of the editors of the English language version are male, and there is a geographical preponderance of contributions from the United States.5) Skew may be an obvious point, but it is worth making again. There is ebb and flow to media coverage for different types of art. Some years, attention is on painting, at other times attention is afforded to participatory art. At other times again, it is public art. The constant changes in focus of media attention belie a general continuity in the range and types of art being made over the decades. Most artists may not be part of media discourse (yet), and some once were but today find their practice is no longer fashionable, funded, reviewed, discussed. Despite this, they continue to make art in their own ways according to their own values. It is incredibly difficult to say with any certainty who 32

WHAT IS ART?

is part of the art world at any one time. It may not, in fact, be possible to have an overview of all the types of art being made in any given location at any one time. On the surface, an accommodation has been reached between artists and our audiences: everything an artist produces is art. The question of quality is also settled: the role of audiences has been democratized and any judgement regarding quality is now deemed elitist. It nevertheless remains the case that artists have a different perspective on art from non-artist audiences, both the general public and the specialist. Happily, whether or not something actually is art is a debate that draws less heat in the media than previously.6 Unless large sums of public money are paid for it, audiences today seem not to mind that art is difficult to define, or that it is easily mistaken for gallery pranks or museum equipment.7 I argue here that the questions of who defines art and who should define quality in art matter. A history of definitions of art Most attempts at defining art define it universally, as if words retain their meaning in different locations and over time. Definitions are not stable. The meanings of words change over time and users of the same language in different locations may have completely different meanings for words. The fact that usage changes over time does not imply that words can mean anything, of course. It just means that we, speakers of language, collectively define words, including art, through use. And usage changes. But words also retain fragments of their history, which tend to inflect meaning. Historical but no longer current usages cling to what a word potentiates, implications of which we may be barely aware. Tracking words as they first come into print, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) provides a time line for periodizing what was thought when. Approximately a thousand years ago, the word ‘art’ emerged with the Anglo-Normans as ‘the means, method or knowledge employed to gain a certain result, a technique’.8 The Norman origins of the word are significant. The Normans, on invading England in 1066, circulated a whole series of words which, to this day, connote 33

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

class distinction.9 Odour is one example, which remains a more refined word than stench, the Old English Saxon word.10 Art shares these properties of refinement. In the thirteenth century, ‘art’ evolved to mean ‘knowledge, science, learning’, and by the early fifteenth century, art meant ‘an academic discipline’.11 From the Middle Ages, art was contrasted with Nature, as that which man makes, as distinct from God’s work, and in the fifteenth century art also meant ‘the treatise which sets out the principles of a discipline’. Apropos, Between Discipline and a Hard Place is an attempt at an art of art. It is only in the nineteenth century that art begins to mean something more fully consonant with today’s common usage. The nineteenth century saw art begin to mean that which is produced with conscious artistry, as distinct from popular or folk.12 Meanwhile, the definition of aesthetic was also being honed, first in Latinate form in the mid-eighteenth century as aesthetica by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, a contemporary of Immanuel Kant, and then used with increasing regularity throughout the nineteenth century, as Raymond Williams tracks.13 From the nineteenth century, art and aesthetics begin to have converging definitions. With its Norman roots in class distinction, the category of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was used to distinguish high-status things from other lower-status things, including craft and folk. The word was used to convey that which white, educated men produce: culture of value, high culture and high art. Those not gifted with this particular inheritance were compelled to imitate the art of educated white men. What women, the working classes and non–English people made was generally deemed imitative, second rate or not art at all, but something less. Thinking about art has also changed over time. Discourse about art practice changed radically with early Modern period and then with nineteenth-century Romanticism and again with the twentieth-century avant-garde. There has been little continuity over the millennia in thinking about art or its definition. The earliest European philosophy on ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’, written by Plato and Aristotle, is done before the word art, as we understand it, was coined. The Greek word translated as art is techne, which covers a range of crafts and skills including medicine, cooking and hunting. Although both Plato and Aristotle had much to say 34

WHAT IS ART?

about creativity in general, their contributions to an understanding of art, as we understand it, are more variable. Plato largely had literature in mind, although painting and sculpture also feature in his philosophy, and Aristotle was chiefly concerned with theatre, not the plastic arts. For the visual arts, aesthetics with all the complexity the word implies today had no equivalence in ancient Greece, only to kalon, or the beautiful, as a guiding principle. Paul Oskar Kristeller who wrote a thorough review of the history of aesthetics notes: When we consider the visual arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, it appears that their social and intellectual prestige in antiquity was much lower than one might expect from their actual achievements or from occasional enthusiastic remarks which date for the most part from the later centuries. … no ancient philosopher, as far as I know, wrote a separate systematic treatise on the visual arts or assigned to them a prominent place in his scheme of knowledge.14 Europeans may have been sculpting in marble for thousands of years, but our understanding about what artists are doing and why we are doing it has changed over time. Historian of science, G.E.R. Lloyd, compellingly argues that this type of gloss is neither unusual nor unique to art. We normalize slippages in meanings, approaches and values that emerge over time, often imagining both seamlessness and progress. The West takes ancient Greece as the site of art’s genesis, so too science, mathematics and philosophy. Western cultures like to trace knowledge back to the ancient Greeks, creating false and implied genealogies with all the heft of a ‘natural’ inheritance. Both a scholar of ancient Greece and of ancient China, and drawing comparisons across the two, Lloyd embraces the scholarship of anthropology to consider human knowledge and the question of learning and innovation crossculturally, and without the racial and hierarchical assumptions common to others who attempt this. In Disciplines in the Making (2009), Lloyd identifies a range of disciplines common to nearly every society across time, demonstrating how art, maths, science and philosophy (etc.) are very different today from the practices of the ancient Greece.15 Not only were ‘art’, ‘science’, ‘mathematics’ 35

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

and ‘philosophy’ very different in ancient Greece as compared with today, but similar types of practice existed outside Europe and in ‘simple’ societies at the same time, as well as earlier and later. Because the West defines ‘art’, ‘science’, ‘mathematics’ and ‘philosophy’ as those which occurred within the legacy of ancient Greece, any other form of ‘art’, ‘science’, ‘mathematics’ and ‘philosophy’ is dismissed simply because they originated elsewhere, beyond the reach of the legacy of ancient Greece. Lloyd’s argument is that disciplines and disciplinary knowledge exist all over the world in various societies from the ‘simple’ to the ‘complex’ and deep into the past, a point which is discussed at greater length in ‘Why Discipline?’. Suffice to say that while disciplinary knowledge exists in many forms that are each themselves also subject to disciplinary rules, the specificities of how we understand art today is a local phenomenon, local in time and place, that is, local to western European thinking since the eighteenth century. The source of the myth that art is a European phenomenon and originating in ancient Greece is, in fact, the product of nineteenthcentury art historians including Heinrich Wöfflin. Art as defined by art historians Art history, as a discipline, has its own origins in the eighteenth century. Art was defined by the first historians of art as painting and sculpture from ancient Greece and any subsequent paintings and sculpture referring back to ancient Greece and Rome, that is, the ‘Classical civilizations’ during the ‘Classical period’. Historiographer of art history, Donald Preziosi, famously challenged his fellow art historians to reconsider their disciplinary assumptions in 1998: From its beginnings, and in concert with its allied professions, art history worked to make the past synoptically visible so that it might function in and upon the present; so that the present might be seen as the demonstrable product of a particular past; and so that the past so staged might be framed as an object of historical desire: figured as that from which a modern citizen might desire descent.16 36

WHAT IS ART?

His challenge to art historians of the twentieth century, only slightly more open than their forebears, was to admit that there are places beyond Europe and the United States post-Second World War where art is made. Flicking through a tome by twentieth-century heavy weight historians, Erwin Panofsky or Ernst Gombrich on the history of art, offers us an overview of the range of inclusions and exclusions from the category of art at that time. Few, if any, women feature, and not all of Europe seems to have produced art. India, China and Japan are mentioned, tangentially, and the rest of the world is considered not to have made art or to have art so derivative and unremarkable as not to be worth mentioning. Their histories site the origins of art as extending to Palaeolithic cave drawings, petroglyphs and sculpture from 70,000 years ago. By the mid-twentieth century art historians include the art of the dark and middle ages in Europe and some forms of ‘exceptional’, representational non-European art, such as the Benin bronzes from Nigeria. This type of history of art is imagined and written as teleological, a narrative of progress, unfolding towards the point at which we are now, or less optimistically, a splendid point in the past from which art and culture have atrophied. And the tale has an enduring appeal. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries defined what is understood as art for generations. Those first art historians defined art and determined greatness in art in specifically European terms. For the general public, art is undoubtedly the kind of objects described by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art historians. Any object that looks similar to those first definitional art objects, namely, representational, perhaps stylized, images in paint, sculpture, and latterly photography is undoubtedly art. For a nonspecialist member of the public who may not visit art galleries, the definition of art is likely to include everything described by the first art historians, and things that appear similar. Art may or may not also include abstract works, even in traditional media. The further away we move from the nineteenth-century art historian’s definition of art, the more likely a ‘common-sense’ understanding of art becomes tormented, as the controversy over Tate’s purchase of Carl Andre’s bricks Equivalent VIII (1966) at the time demonstrated.17 Newspaper articles continue to be published about fakes or pranks 37

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

that pass as art for a gullible gallery-going public, including stories of paintings done by monkeys, dogs or elephants. The inclusion of everyday things and rubbish, ugly or random arrangements, and objects that seem unskilfully made is contested as art by the press, if not in the minds of the general public. For the regular attender of a gallery, the question might be settled by the very fact that if an object or event can be seen within the gallery, it is art, it is legitimated as art by the institution, as JF Lyotard puts it.18 For others, this is where art-as-elite-culture intersects with the art of Dickens’ Artful Dodger: art as con. Paintings and sculpture that look like those produced in the Classical period or during the Renaissance are easily understood as art. All other things may or may not be, depending on the tastes, class and education of the person considering the question. *Pierre Bourdieu wrote Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste based on research conducted in 1963–8 on how class categories are formed. A number of important ideas emerged from this work, including the idea of cultural capital. The aesthetic taste of a person is determined by class, which informs, but is distinct from, our cultural capital. US-based Russian émigré artist duo, Komar and Melamid, made artworks that explore this fault line. In 1994 they embarked on a project called Painting by Numbers: The Search for a People’s Art. For the artwork, they devised a poll asking members of the American public what they wanted to see in art. Based on the outcome of the poll, Komar and Melamid produced a painting. Later iterations of the project involved the populations of other countries; however, the American version of The People’s Choice depicts a rural landscape with a blue sky and fluffy white clouds, a large body of water, mountains and trees. The painting also includes a historical figure in the foreground, some deer and a group of three amiable– looking children. Komar and Melamid’s The People’s Choice project underlines the fact that the general public by and large do not share a common value system with artists. It also has the unfortunate effect of maintaining class distinction in ways familiar to Bourdieu.* 38

WHAT IS ART?

*Art historian Clement Greenberg’s famous essay ‘Art and Kitsch’ (1939) occupies a more complex position than is often assumed. Greenberg is in fact hostile to the art market for its support of kitsch, not an apologist for it: ‘Because it can be turned out mechanically, kitsch has become an integral part of our productive system in a way in which true culture could never be, except accidentally. It has been capitalized at a tremendous investment which must show commensurate returns; it is compelled to extend as well as to keep its markets.’ For Greenberg, the market is bourgeois and responsibility for support of the avant-garde is on the upper classes. There is also a difference between the general public definition and the art historian’s. A great deal of that which looks like the representational painting and sculpture praised by art historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which a general public may like and buy, is dismissed by many an art historian today, sometimes questioning whether it is art in the first place. The whole art and kitsch debate* can be inserted here to illustrate this point.19 For the art historian, the definition of art tends to emphasize the nineteenth-century variant, that is, ‘a self conscious artistry distinguished explicitly against folk and popular’, so they tend to employ a definition both broader and narrower than the general public’s definition of art. Artists and art historians may disagree with the general public about the definition of art, but they do not regard the question of art from the same vantage point. Artists know from direct experience that art historians, in line with their nineteenth-century counterparts, tend to write normatively. Historians write in order to define what is remarkable, innovative, the best, most outstanding and they do this even when they deny the role. Claiming aesthetic judgement belongs properly to the role of the critics, and that the role of the historian is a sober analysis of history; historians nevertheless maintain normative distinctions in their choices over which artists and artworks are the rightful subjects of their scholarship.20 Indeed that scholarship is used to stoke the art 39

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

market is well understood and described by Gill and Chippindale.21 The fact that art historians have a de facto relationship with the art market through their scholarship on the extraordinary, and artists ourselves are more ambivalent, is one of the many sources of tension inherent between the two disciplines. But another one, a profound one, is our right to self-definition. Ordinarily, it is adherents of a discipline who define that discipline and determine quality within. This is true according to historian of knowledge, G.E.R. Lloyd, of disciplines anywhere they are found, historically and today, and across geographies: the practitioners of a discipline define the discipline. While this is true everywhere, it seems not to be true for artists of the West. For us, for some reason, it seems acceptable that outsiders, non-artists, such as historians, anthropologists and philosophers, even the general public, define art. Without seeing the irony, Lloyd maintains that it is right that philosophers, historians etc. define who is an artist and what is quality in art practice, while also citing instances where artists do in fact define the discipline. The Abelam carvers of twentieth-century New Guinea22 and the nineteenth-century carvers of Kitawa (one of the islands of the Kula ring featured in Mauss’s The Gift) are described by Lloyd as artists who self-define and determine quality in their respective societies against the different values found in their communities.23 It seems it is artists working in the Western tradition who are the exception. It is not for us to define our practice and our values. Why we need to wrest control over this is because historians tend to cherry-pick instances of art to illustrate their agenda. Taking instances of art out of the contexts in which they were made, historians tend to create either paragons of ‘universal’ value or exemplars of socio-political trends.24 Artworks are thus instrumentalized by historians to illustrate broader points about aesthetics, politics or social conditions. Far from neutral or dispassionate observers of artistic excellence, by and large historians overlook the context in which we work, ignoring the fact that all artists have a myriad of constraints, influences, concerns and pressures that determine an individual path, even when they cite the Process Philosophers who attend to this confluence and emergence. Unfortunately, the interests and perspectives of historians tend to dominate how 40

WHAT IS ART?

we, artists, understand our own practice. And unfortunately, the discipline tends to maintain a narrative of genius and teleology, using instances of art to illustrate this problematic myth, aiding and abetting an art market operating with its own interests. The tendency is to focus on the personal aesthetic experience of the historian, and not on the artwork itself. Writing as if through their connoisseurship and the fluidity of their prose, a historian can help others to perceive paramount value and distinction, they write in order to make their subjective experience a reason for making art in the first place. Connoisseurship is another area of divergence between the practitioner and the historian. For the art historian, connoisseurship is about educating the eye to distinguish between one thing and another, between objects that might appear similar to the uneducated eye. In refining this gift, the work of the connoisseur comes to be the work of distinguishing between the marks and traces of one artist from another. The more similar the work, the greater the degree of connoisseurship required to disentangle the mark of one artist from another. Usually what is at stake is value, both monetary and status. Connoisseurship for the historian determines which artefact is crafted by ‘the master’ and which by the student, which is authentic and which is a fake. However, for an artist schooled in traditional techniques of observational drawing, it is immediately apparent that two people draw and paint differently. Connoisseurship for the artist is not acquired through a process of studied looking but from doing, and from observing the differences between what we produce and what others produce. The connoisseurship of artists is in acquiring greater acuity in what we see and greater subtlety in how our hands respond to what we see. That we each have different responses to what we see is immediately apparent when comparing our work with fellow artists. It is part of our training to discern differences in the work of others, including the art made historically, and we learn a great deal just from looking hard at an artwork, in considering how it is made, materially, conceptually and compositionally, recreating it from the inside. We try to understand both what it might be trying to say and how. As artists we know that one work in a lifetime of working as an artist is in dialogue with our own past, as well as in dialogue 41

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

with other art, both historical and contemporary. Art is made in response to discourse, fashion or anti-fashion, and the specific political, social and economic situation of a given moment in a specific location. Our art school experience of the ‘crit session’ teaches us that there is no single or correct interpretation of something we make, even amongst fellow students or tutors who are closest to us at that point in our journey. We cannot control how an audience receives a work, but we can learn from the crit to refine the range of responses, to see how similarly educated audiences receive what we have done. We also learn from crits, ideally, that it is possible to value something highly even when it finds no audience, because we know an artwork may work in terms that make sense to ourselves alone. What crits teach us is to navigate between learning from respected peers and sailing true to our own course. Most artists have the experience of valuing an example of our own work irrespective of its reception, because what we set out to achieve was achieved. We know it is possible that an audience is judging the work using ‘the wrong’ set of values – that they just don’t get it. But we also learn to listen, to pick up useful critique and drop the rest. Art historian, James Elkins, urges fellow historians and philosophers to draw in order to understand the materiality of a practice, describing the difference between phenomenology (or theories of empathy) and the materiality that artists know.25 He urges historians to experience drawing, not to learn what artists learn, but in order to add to the knowledge that an art historian should have. His desire to understand the process of drawing is to understand the greatness of those artists he already valorizes. By contrast, anthropologist, Tim Ingold, also writes about engaging with the material. Unlike Elkins, this is not to valorize one individual over another, but instead to emphasize the commonality of all human experience with our material world, the dialogue we all have as actors with material and how the material acts on us. What is notable in the two is that they both exemplify the bias and mores of their respective disciplines. Of course, it is as we would expect. Artists too have bias. We work within our own disciplinary expectations and interests.

42

WHAT IS ART?

Anthropology and art Anthropologists define art in their own way, differently from the general public, from artists, philosophers and historians. As a discipline, anthropology investigates how specific instances of human societies operate. Observations of belief systems, norms and mores, as well as taboos, are the subject of their discipline. Ethnographies are written about customs, social relations and societal structures. Some anthropologists focus on material culture, and how artefacts and tools are produced, perceived and utilized. Others focus on intangibles, such as relationships of family, cosmologies, gender, sexuality and trade. There are some anthropologists who write about contemporary artists and the art world and these ones tend to share an understanding of the definition of art with their ‘informants’, that is, with contemporary artists.26 The widest group of anthropologists, though, employ their own, highly inclusive, definition when writing about art, such as the influential Alfred Gell.27 And there are historical reasons for this attitude of inclusivity. Anthropologists of the twentieth century faced the part their discipline played at the helm of the colonial project. Today’s anthropologists therefore think hard about any assumption that bolsters the myths of European supremacy and the fantasies of racial hierarchy that were ultimately genocidal.28 While much ethnography of the nineteenth century both explicitly and implicitly maintained prevailing colonial racist ideas, the same period also saw early anthropologists such as A.C. Haddon providing evidence against the science that underpinned European white supremacist notions.29 This disciplinary ambivalence towards the ‘primitive other’ has its legacy. Today, while the use of ‘tribal’, ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ as equivalents for non-European is problematized, there remains a distinction in how the ethnographic framework views objects made by non-Europeans as compared with those made by Europeans. In general, as Laura Fischer argues regarding Australian Aboriginal art, for anthropologists, objects are authentic exemplars of a generalized community practice, which is primitive and approaching extinction, and not individual expressions of greatness or exceptionality as is definitional of the category of art as defined by historians.30 43

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

What makes something ethnological and neither art nor craft is its originating culture and the relationship between that culture and the culture of the collector. When a collector is from western Europe and the object collected is from a non-European culture, the object invariably becomes ethnology. The ethnography / ethnology category does not distinguish between art and other types of things. It includes representational figures, bowls and architecture, for example. In short, the taxonomy runs like this: pottery from ancient Greece is art, pottery from Romania is craft and pottery from Fiji is ethnography. Not only is ethnography and art separate categories, but during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnography was displayed in natural history museums alongside skeletons and taxidermy birds and mammals. It was also shown in Christian Missionary museums and later in dedicated ethnographic museums. Not until Alfred Barr shocked art audiences with the inclusion of ‘primitive art’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, did art categorized as ethnography be seen as art.31 Even then it wasn’t actually regarded as art in a similar sense to that done by Picasso and Modernists who saw the aesthetic value of the primitive. In an attempt to move beyond Eurocentric, hierarchical definitions of art and value prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, late-twentieth-century anthropologists chose instead to collapse the binary between art and ethnography.32 Most anthropologists now opt for an all-inclusive, anything-goes approach. As it happens, they share this with many contemporary artists. By trying to avoid the historical prejudices of their forebears, anthropologists today tend to put all types of material culture, except for the tools used to make things, within the category of art. For anthropologists, art is today defined akin to the Latin, ars, a category that includes anything of skill, and includes pottery, spears, body adornment, masks, cloth-making, as well as the making of representational and stylized figures. It is an all-inclusive category. While the all-inclusive approach is one answer to a history of racist and sexist exclusion, there is also ongoing debate about whether the category of art is simply inapplicable to non-Western traditions (as distinct from non-Western peoples who might, as 44

WHAT IS ART?

Figure 3  Suzanne van Rossenberg, Acknowledging Art as a Social Practice (2019). Digital image.

artists, work within Western traditions and definitions of art). In attempting a more just, fair and open engagement with other cultures, some anthropologists have opted for the idea of nontranslatability, the idea that any culture without an equivalent definition of art cannot be said to be making art. In This Is Not 45

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Art, I argue that the category of art is not applicable historically, untranslatable (if you will), to Europe prior to the eighteenth century;33 untranslatability is a concept to which I return later in this book in ‘Politics, Ethics and Art’. Against this anthropologist, Nicholas Thomas, argues that while the impetus behind untranslatability is laudable in terms of equality, it can lead to even more problematic conclusions: Ostensibly a gesture that acknowledges the profound cultural differences between Western conceptions and those of indigenous peoples, such questioning risks enshrining a gulf of mutual incomprehension, acknowledging that these great nonWestern art forms come from another world, consigning them to mystery … exoticism may also be exaggerated.34 His argument is that to redress a historical injustice by emphasizing difference instead of sameness can undermine an attempt at understanding what we also share. The very idea of untranslatability can sustain a myth that cultures are immiscible, that some societies are so different they cannot mix with other human cultures. There is a vast amount of archaeological and ethnographic evidence that demonstrates we have always mixed. Throughout history – and prehistory – and across the world, various, very different cultures have been in contact and are altered on contact, learning from the encounter. Much evidence undermines the once prevalent idea that cultures are ‘snooker balls’, colliding on contact, but remaining the same. In fact, genetic evidence demonstrates that the different human species mixed, sharing DNA with modern humans. Unlike ‘race’, which has been proven time and again to have no basis in science, species is a meaningful biological demarcation. Not only have very different cultures and ‘races’ mixed and learnt from each other, travelling vast distances, but a very long time ago when there were in fact different human species, human and non-human mixed and we were altered by our entanglements with each other. As is so often the case, whether we understand others as very different or very similar may be a matter of emphasis. Édouard Glissant, continental philosopher from Martinique, invokes the idea of translatability and advocates the right to opacity from 46

WHAT IS ART?

the perspective of ‘the subaltern’, the one without power in a relationship of power. He writes: If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that at its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgements. I have to reduce. … [Therefore] agree not merely to the right to difference, but carrying this further, agree to the right to opacity … I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him.35 In terms of art, clearly there are many great examples of ‘masterpieces’, as Nicholas Thomas might put it, made by skilful, innovative individuals from non-European cultures. Glissant might respond that these masterpieces may or may not be instances of art, but the category is yours: it is European. While the category of art may not have purchase anywhere else, that the category may or may not be applicable does not preclude admiration or appreciation. Most anthropologists investigate a specific culture, or more precisely a few aspects of that culture. Some, including Alfred Gell, who wrote an anthropological account of art, attempt to generalize from an accumulation of specificities. Gell, grounded in his observations of the Umeda people of New Guinea, saw similarities in what art does in different societies. He concluded that art is a category of things that mediate social relations.36 His argument is that not all things mediate social relations and that some things are just things. But, all the things that go beyond their thingness and mediate social relations are ‘art’. In short, art is things with agency. For example, a carving in Umeda instantiates an ancestor with potency and, similarly, a work of art in the Western tradition instantiates potency. There is a common reaction to artworks, as if they are beings acting in the world. This is art’s agency: in all cultures, ‘audiences’ enter into a personal relationship with these types of art object, triggering love, hate, desire or fear. Gell speculates that art derives its agency from technical virtuosity. For 47

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

him, agency comes from some sort of living presence response elicited by the artist from the materiality of the object. The object could be, for example, a shield made and decorated to mesmerize those who encounter it, or a medieval icon imbued with the spirit of Holiness by the artist guided by the hand of God. Evidence against Gell’s emphasis on the centrality of technical virtuosity lies the fact that many things are art which are neither virtuoso nor ‘crafted by man’ in the first place. Objets trouvé can become art, which are made from ordinary stuff indistinguishable from any other type of thing. In fact, the magic stones of Vanuatu, which to the uninitiated appear to be ordinary stones indistinguishable from any other, also have agency. These examples seem to undermine Gell’s argument about the relationship between art, agency and virtuosity. Nevertheless, the perspective he provides is useful for an artist who makes things with agency, in that it could be said that Gell describes the power of art lying not in the thing itself but in the human networks around the thing, that it is networks of people which make something art as distinct from any other thing. Since Gell’s writing about art and agency, the appeal of non-human object agency has taken off within the art world, particularly with Graham Harman’s object-orientated philosophy.37 But this takes us away from defining art and we require definition in order to establish the role and value of art in society, as distinct from any other type of practice. Art and philosophy For philosophers operating in the tradition of analytic philosophy, the question of art has culminated in the ‘institutional definition of art’. Analytic philosophy is mostly an Anglo-American branch and it is contrasted with continental philosophy. The schism in approach and canon occurs after Kant. What unites philosophers across the divide is that they write about art from the perspective of audience, and they tend to define art in terms of aesthetics, beauty or pleasure. A notable exception is Clive Cazeaux who writes about art as knowledge forming.38 In the nineteenth century, art was defined against utility and the idea of art’s uselessness as definitional came to dominate. 48

WHAT IS ART?

There are historical and geopolitical reasons for this emphasis on uselessness, including the context of the industrial revolution, a new disciplining of Modern knowledge (described by Michel Foucault, with the Modern era’s predilection for scientific taxonomies), the solidification of capitalism and the concomitant rise of critique of both capitalism and science. This was the time of Romanticism. For nineteenth-century Romantics, the uselessness of art was tied to beauty as distinct from the ugliness of industry. But a wedge between beauty and art was forced with the World Wars. In response to the devastation of the First World War, art became anti-establishment and angry: revolutionary art was made that was decidedly not-beautiful. While in the nineteenth century, some artists saw themselves as revolutionaries, for example, the Pre–Raphaelites and William Blake, who were ushering in a new and better world order than the ones that existed, this was done with an eye to the beautiful, often nostalgic either for the order of the Classical world or for a time before the decay of the present. The twentieth century was not nostalgic. The art after the First World War was angry and reflected ugliness and, increasingly after the Second World War, the toxic banality of the moment. In this context, philosophers had to consider new definitions of art. The concept of beauty was no longer sustainable as a definition. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is useful in this. For Wittgenstein, art is fundamentally one of the many types of rule-following that comprise human culture. These rules ‘may be extremely explicit and taught or not formulated at all’.39 Aesthetic decision making is done on the basis of increasingly refined judgement informed by an increasingly refined mastery of the rules in question. ‘To describe a set of aesthetic rules fully means really to describe the culture of a period.’40 If we take this approach, we can understand why the art of the final decades of the nineteenth century in Paris, for example, looks like art made in this period, irrespective of the ‘greatness’ of the artist. The rules of nineteenth-century French painting were applied differently by, for example, Georges Seurat, Mary Cassatt or Jules Bastien-Lepage, and artists from Australia who spent time in Paris, such as Tom Roberts, but there is much they share in common. In addition to the representational depiction of everyday life, they share a 49

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

similar set of ‘rules’ for painting. Each of these artists, for example, interpreted the rules of the day differently, even idiosyncratically, but the fact that we can see all their work as late nineteenth century and more or less ‘Impressionist’ demonstrates the type of rules that Wittgenstein describes. Art can be understood as a concept in juxtaposition with other words from its own cultural context and dialogically unfolding in relation to its time and place.41 But not all artists engage with the same set of rules for making art. At any given moment in history, museums and collectors collect a wide range of artistic interpretations of the various contemporary rules. There are a diversity of rules as well as a diversity of artists, which in the writing of history becomes flattened, erased, homogenized. Under special circumstances, and usually when the art embodies specific national histories, different types of artists are shown. For example, George Frankland’s Proclamation to the Aboriginal Tasmanians (1830) is an example of a nineteenthcentury painting that had no contact with Paris either directly or at a remove, utilizing instead a different set of rules for painting. So it is displayed today for its historical interest as testament to the history of violence, mistrust and miscommunication between settlers and Aboriginal Australians, and not for its qualities as art of the period. The institutional definition of art foregrounds the social, the networks, the relational that operates at the heart of the definition of art. The two main exponents of the institutional definition of art are Arthur Danto and George Dickie. For Danto it is the centrality of discourse in the very perception of art that defines what is art. His emphasis is on the role of the philosopher, or philosophy, as a condition for art making.42 George Dickie’s version of the institutional definition of art looks primarily to social processes instead of theory. He writes: ●●

●●

●●

An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art. A work of art is an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an art world public. A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object which is presented to them. 50

WHAT IS ART?

●● ●●

The art world is the totality of all art world systems. An art world system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an art world public.43

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s artwork Folk Archive (1999 ongoing) enacts the circularity inherent in Dickie’s institutional definition of art. Folk Archive is the curation and display of the kind of objects and practices that have, in the past, been excluded from the category of art. It includes traditional folk crafts and working-class art (‘kitsch’) and craft objects, as well as photographs and video footage documenting fairs, Morris dancing, political demonstrations and tattooing. Folk Archive performed an act of inclusivity into the category of art against a backdrop of historical exclusions on the lines of class, race and gender. The artwork performs the power of some artists to dub some things ‘art’ from a world of non-art things. The artefacts in Folk Archive were previously overlooked by the art world, but in the hands of artists, reframing those particular objects within the gallery setting, the totality of the objects and perhaps the objects themselves become art. Folk Archive also performs the art world’s agnosia, its inability to distinguish between art and not-art things. Deller and Kane perform what is implied by Dickie’s institutional definition of art: the act of transformation. For Jacques Rancière, this act of transformation is at the heart of Romanticism. Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (which was the inspiration for Danto rethinking the definition of art) and Folk Archive can be seen as simply the logical extension of an aesthetic philosophy, namely Romanticism, which rendered the boundary of art permeable – a discourse through which the prosaic readily became elevated to the status of art, as objects worthy of aesthetic contemplation. If that is true, as Rancière argues, we have reached the apotheosis of Romanticism and all things can be seen as art.44 This is not praise but criticism. It is Dickie, not Danto, who describes the reality of the contemporary art world because his is an explanation of how only some objects become art. A given object becomes ‘art’ through a change of category that entails a change of status. Art is not something that exists outside this process. The implication of Dickie’s theory is that art is made in a consensus of people with the 51

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

power to define what is art. He makes no judgements about this process. It is a ‘value-neutral’ theory, in that this process is not to be understood as either a good thing or a bad thing. It is precisely for this reason that Dickie’s philosophy is useful: because even in the abstract, considered divorced from any specific historical and geographical circumstances, the very definition of art must be understood as being determined by a social process. Danto argued against Dickie’s ideas, believing there is no such group of people with institutionalizing power. My riposte would be that it took the confluence of Martin Creed, The Slade School of Art and Tate Britain, as members of the ‘art world’ to dub a piece of Blu-Tack ‘art’ in Work no79. The art world Sociologist Pascal Gielen applied actor-network theory to the art world in order to describe how curators from different generations created networks, positioning themselves as legitimators of art and artists.45 Gielen’s analysis suggests power lies in the hands of a select few and that power is distributed variably across the art world. But what must also be acknowledged is that whether or not Jan Hoet and Barbara Vanderlinden (the examples Geilen cites) are accepted as interesting or relevant curator-directors is down to a broader art world consensus. Until now, I haven’t mentioned curators when I have discussed the art world. I have populated the art world with artists and those scholars from disciplines with claims to defining art and its value. I have described the differences in how art historians, philosophers, anthropologists define art and perceive its value, as compared with artists. There are artists who curate occasionally, such as Sonia Boyce, and artists who curate as their artwork, such as Group Material, but there is an important difference between artists working as curators and those curators who are not practising artists. Curator and writer Nicolas Bourriaud is an example of the latter. He has contributed to artistic thinking about art practice, coining the neologism relational aesthetics to cover a range of practices.46 Inspired by his writing, some artists have created work directly in 52

WHAT IS ART?

response to the challenges and utopias he describes. Despite this influence amongst practising artists, curators such as Bourriaud or Okwui Enwezor have more in common with art historians, as described above, than with artists because, unlike artists, they perform a normative function. They determine for a wider public what should be regarded as genius, relevant, current, new. They create opportunities for those artists they regard as such, and they write theories that validate these preferences. Curators who are not artists create opportunities within the paradigm of the curator’s established values. Artist-curators are doing something else, usually. Sometimes they attempt to create contexts for their work by creating links with fellow artists; sometimes they create juxtaposition that instantiates values from within their artistic or political concerns. Usually artists curate in more generative, less normative ways than the professional curator. There are exceptions and artist Artur Zmijewski’s curation of the 7th Berlin Biennial in 2012 is one such example. If art can only be defined in terms of the social, by definition,47 then we artists must look hard at what that means. It means that it is we who determine what is, and what is not, art. We do this collectively. No single individual defines art. All in the art world collectively define art. The problem with Dickie’s theory is his final point that the art world is constituted inclusively of specialists from parallel disciplines, such as historians, theorists, critics, philosophers, anthropologists and also the general public. But, as I have demonstrated above, artists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers and the general public have highly divergent ideas of what is art. So who should constitute the art world that Dickie describes? My argument is that it is artists, and only artists, who must maintain and police the boundaries of art. Art is what artists, collectively, across our peers, say it is. But not everything is art, not even everything any individual artist says it is. Art is an exclusive category of objects and what is included and excluded changes over time. This means that art is contested. Art is necessarily a contested category. All other knowledge-forming disciplines are similarly contested including, for example, the sciences, anthropology and archaeology. They are also similarly exclusive. Not everything is 53

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Figure 4  Suzanne van Rossenberg, Theorizing the Plurality (and Reality) of Vested Interests in Defining Art (2019). Digital image.

54

WHAT IS ART?

science and not all methods are scientific, for example. Scientists define what is a correct scientific method collectively, amongst themselves, and expose fellow scientists when they fall short of the standard while claiming to be scientists. Andrew Wakefield’s poor scientific method was exposed rapidly after his claims regarding the spurious link between the MMR vaccine and autism were published. Contestation is a hallmark of discipline. Who is an artist, who defines art and who creates its values is a question for ‘Art: A Knowledge Forming Discipline’ later in this book. The emphasis of this chapter is to problematize the idea that anyone and everyone can define art, and I argue instead that it is the job of artists to define art, in addition to making art. Artists define art through our practice and our discourse, and in self-consciously defining art we police its boundaries. The only reason why this might be a problem is because our definition is demonstrably different from the definitions employed by the general public, philosophers, historians and anthropologists. Surely this is reason enough for artists to wrest control of the definition of art from these others, who have their own disciplinary vested interests?

55

56

3 Why discipline?

Summary In this chapter I argue for disciplines in general. It is an argument that includes the discipline of art but is not specific to it. It is an argument for discipline and for expertise. This position rubs against a long history of scepticism by artists ourselves regarding any claim to expertise or specialist knowledge. A positive argument for discipline rubs particularly strongly against today’s climate of hostility towards experts in general. There is an assumption that experts are elitist. The assumption is that the existence of experts weighs against democracy. But there are others who argue strongly for the necessity of experts in a democracy, and historian of science, G.E.R. Lloyd, provides evidence that various disciplines, including art, science, history and maths are universal and present in any human society, from the hierarchical to the non-hierarchical. Disciplines are not the invention of Modernity, a conclusion often reached from reading Michel Foucault and his challenge to Modern discipline. Where Foucault and Lloyd share common ground is in their observation of the profound change that occurred in discipline and knowledge with the advent of Modernity. Discipline in the Modern era is something particular. Much of the critique of discipline is based on the understanding that discipline is a mechanism for maintaining hierarchies of privilege: Modern disciplinary knowledge is exclusive, and it maintains class, race and gender privilege. It is a mechanism by which the contributions to knowledge

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

by specific groups of people are excluded, ridiculed and marginalized. My argument for disciplinarity is made with these valid criticisms in mind, with respect to the Foucauldian, feminist and postcolonial critiques of knowledge. My argument for discipline is on the basis that disciplinarity is pervasive: all societies, including the not-Modern, actively maintain disciplinary knowledge as distinctive spheres of expertise. Furthermore, I argue that some aspects of Modern discipline are actually beneficial to democracy, on the grounds that knowledge-forming disciplines offer alternative narratives and sets of value, alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, a value system that privileges profit-seeking and hierarchy to the exclusion of all else. To distinguish between the economics and politics of liberalism and neoliberalism, politcally, liberal democracy has an emphasis on the value of diversity, on pluralism, because pluralism is fundamental to thriving democratic culture. Neoliberalism on the other hand is in conflict with pluralism. Neoliberalism is at odds with any value competing with profit and a neoliberal democratic regime will be actively hostile to values at the heart of disciplinary knowledge, such as the pursuit of truth, where this is not profitable. Indeed, neoliberal values are at odds with democratic values (namely, of equality and freedom) where these get in the way of profit. Disciplinarity may help us to navigate the specific pressures of neoliberal capitalism because with it, through it, we may embody, instantiate, other realities. My argument is that if we keep the various important and valid critiques of discipline in mind, we can build disciplines that in fact help to nurture democracy. For these reasons, if we are interested in ways of navigating the plutocratic, hierarchical and anti-democratic systems that the culture of neoliberal capitalism entrenches, we must regard disciplinary knowledge as one aspect of pluralism, one that helps articulate the value of difference, the different value systems, which any democratic culture requires in order to thrive. 58

WHY DISCIPLINE?

Why discipline? Even in democracies, culture can enable the anti-democratic. Culture can entrench values that silence the marginal, the minority, the different and difficult, fostering majorities bound together by marginalizing and denigrating minorities. What I mean by culture here is the totality of individuals and their values, actions and behaviours that together comprise or instantiate a given moment. The sum total of all our individual actions, values and behaviours comprises the culture of a specific place at a specific moment in time with its specific history(ies). Culture is emergent and imminent. Culture is what we are living; what we say, do and produce, both materially and immaterially. We are all, each of us, constitutive of culture. This is a Process Philosophy way of describing culture, in the vein of Manning or Deleuze.1 It includes overtly or self-consciously cultural acts such as the making of art and the making of knowledge, but it need not. When I refer to culture here, it is in this more amorphous, more anthropological sense of relationships to people and things, values and behaviours, in addition to the culture of high culture*, the high culture of Matthew Arnold.2 But another way would be to refer to cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, who argues that culture is not simply top-down, even when it is hegemonic.3 All cultural and knowledge production is political. Some cultural products maintain and replicate the values of the day. Other cultural products strike at orthodoxies, both political and disciplinary, challenging favoured and entrenched notions. Cultural and knowledge products can produce, embody, enact difference from the mainstream, the orthodox, the hegemonic. In turn, interpretations and engagements with culture can be radically subversive, antagonistic and perverse, as Hall describes. To some extent and within a neoliberal slipstream in which we all bathe and contribute, it remains possible to ‘imagine new schemas of politicization’, as Foucault puts it.4 *High culture is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as highly refined artistic or intellectual achievement; the manifestation of this in art, music, literature etc.; the appreciation of this, cultural sophistication.

59

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

This book is an attempt at generating another scheme of politicization. As Kevin Boileau, a scholar who unites the philosophies of Foucault and Sartre, puts it, ‘Because individuals are never exhaustively constructed from the forces of power, they have some space within which they can question and change their subjectivities.’5 A totalizing regime is one that admits no alternatives to itself. They are regimes of governance that require homogeneity, a confluence, of cultures. But, however totalizing a regime, be it Stalinism or neoliberal capitalism, power cannot – and never does – determine all choice, all the actions of an individual. As both Jean-Paul Sartre (writing about Vichy France) and Michel Foucault (writing about capitalist Modernity) note, there is always the possibility of moments of resistance, of variance, in which something different, something else, can happen. I also write to remind us that different regimes of thought, and therefore action, do exist. I write in order to encourage the ongoing existence of resistance and alternatives. Because these alternatives require ‘likely stories’,82 the argument I make here is for discipline, simply because disciplines offer a regime of thought and value divergent from neoliberal capitalism. While Foucault, Latour and many others demonstrate how discipline is a tool, a mechanism, of Modern self-governance, a regime of power that implicates us all, I want to argue that however true are these observations, like all tools, it can be used unexpectedly, perversely even. I want to use the tool of discipline not to exclude and constrain, not to subject and regulate, but to differentiate and to enable plurality. To contextualize my argument for discipline, I will create a brief periodization of regimes of thought from the nineteenth century until today, tracking changes from nineteenth-century liberalism to twenty-first-century neoliberalism. Admittedly, both liberalism and neoliberalism are glossed in order to make a larger point about an underlying change in how culture views and values culture.

60

WHY DISCIPLINE?

Figure 5 Suzanne van Rossenberg, What’s Your Strategy for Enabling Plurality in Hegemonic Culture? (2019). Digital image.

61

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Neoliberal and liberal culture In the nineteenth century, the supreme value of high culture was not contested. It was relatively straightforward to argue that, in a liberal society such as the UK, high culture must attract resources, including public expenditure from taxation, because it is ‘the best’ and a majority of people must have access to the best. Utilitarianism* applied; money was spent in affording the widest range of people access to the public good of art. The high-water mark of liberalism in the final decades of the nineteenth century was not a democratic period, given that women and working classes were excluded from voting. The liberal state existed before the democratic one. It is entirely consistent, therefore, that the politics of culture was directed towards the question of access, not pluralism or representation. For example, the 1840s saw the working classes self-organize to instigate education institutions all over Britain, creating access to that which had been solely available to the wealthy. Although the best excluded a priori working-class achievement, the assumption remained unchallenged. Throughout the twentieth century, the idea that high culture should be resourced by the state to aid access for a wider population continued to have currency, informing the formation of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946. From a liberal perspective, access to high culture is educative and socially ameliorative. It is worth funding on these grounds. And public funding for the arts remains a priority for successive UK governments into the twentyfirst century, albeit with some ebb in the flow in the amount of hard cash. The question became, not whether the arts should be funded but, how funding is obtained. Because there is always competition for finite and diminished tax resources across health, education, culture, defence, infrastructure (etc.), novel ways of increasing funding for the arts and other public goods were created beyond taxation. Conservative Prime Minister (PM) John Major initiated the National Lottery in 1994 with a view to funding charitable work generally, including for the arts and culture, partly to mitigate the shortfall in funding via direct taxation inherited from the previous Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher (1979–90). In 1997 the New Labour government under PM Tony Blair 62

WHY DISCIPLINE?

increased funding for the arts and culture, under the rubric of education, appealing to the well-established adage about access to the best. Creating the new Department of Culture Media and Sports, the New Labour government innovated public–private partnerships for museums and galleries funding, and funding for the arts was increased by two mechanisms – one public, the other public–private partnerships. By the final decades of the twentieth century the category ‘best’ had expanded to include a more extensive range of contributors than previously. Prior to this the best was largely in terms described by nineteenth-century theorist, Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy.6 Arnold’s best was decidedly Eurocentric and peppered with assumptions about class and gender. Shakespeare, classical music, and the plays, philosophy and sculpture from ancient Greece and Rome exemplify Arnold’s notion of the best. The best was the high culture of Europe, made largely by men, building on the Classical era of ancient Greece and Rome. By the end of the twentieth century, public resources were made available for a wider range of artists and artistic practices and traditions. Unfortunately, these decades of artistic pluralism were replaced with a different regime of values: the neoliberalism of the twenty-first century changed the value(s) of culture. *Utilitarianism is the principle that authorities should base their decisions on the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In Utilitarianism (1863, ii.16) J.S. Mill writes, ‘Utilitarianism  … could only attain its end by the general cultivation of nobleness of character.’ OED Neoliberal culture takes its tone from neoliberal economics. Instead of value being derived from notions of ‘the best’ as occurs in liberal culture, value is in market terms, and solely market terms. The value of any aspect of culture is economic or measured by econometric proxies**, such as numbers of audiences, media headlines, website hits or its impact on the public. Whereas the liberal culture of the nineteenth century, with all its failures, prejudices and ideals, was focused on the best, neoliberal culture 63

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

places no particular value on the ‘best’. Neoliberal culture values the popular and profitable. Built into neoliberalism is the assumption that the best is equivalent to the profitable. ‘Progress’ in terms of the market (a problematically and unexamined social Darwinian notion of progress) occurs because the best is a market leader, because the best is profitable. If something is not profitable – at least as speculative future profit – it cannot possibly be the best. Unlike in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, disciplinary values that compete with profit are insupportable. Support for a cultural practice which is neither profitable nor popular is dropped. This includes support for disciplinary knowledge. **Econometrics is the attempt to quantify using statistics and mathematical models any trends that may be happening in society and in the economy. Proxy indicators are used. For example, the value of a company may be measured by the number of users, subscribers or followers and not solely in terms of profit. Econometrics have been applied to culture, including the arts and scholarship, by which its value is determined in terms of ‘impact’, that is, followers, website hits, audience or reader numbers, as distinct from any other ‘inherent’ or endogenous qualities it may have. Since the early twentieth century, most disciplinary knowledge has been located in, and maintained by, universities. Disciplinary knowledge includes any of the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. The Modern origins of disciplines lie in the Enlightenment including both the Enlightenment definition of empirical rational truth and the anti-Enlightenment backlash for emotion, sensibility and passion. Until the turn of the millennium, UK universities were funded largely by government through taxation in line with liberal notions of access to cultural excellence as a public good. By the mid-1980s however, the once unshakeable belief in public funding for public goods had been dismantled and thus started the era of privatization of public goods such as telecoms, infrastructure, education and health provision. In 1996, an inquiry into funding higher education was commissioned by 64

WHY DISCIPLINE?

the Conservative government and, on publication of the Dearing Report in 1997, the New Labour government introduced student fees to cover (part of) the cost of a university education. With the normalization of neoliberal values since the 1980s, it was to the market that politicians of both the left and the right look in order to solve social and political objectives. New Labour applied mechanisms established in market economics for providing and improving public goods because, they rationalized, the only way to fund an expanded best for the largest percentage of people, whether it be health, education, infrastructure or culture, was to look beyond traditional state provision based on taxation and involve the market. Suddenly, and for the first time, access to the best was tied to market notions. With the introduction of student fees, there was also the ambition to increase the percentage of the population with university degrees from approximately 5 per cent to 40 per cent, to move from an elite to a mass market in higher education and access to ‘the best’. Disciplines, elites and pluralism Where once the best was defined in reference to the Classical, then the avant-garde, that is, the challenging and difficult, which required education to appreciate it, with the Postmodernism turn in the final decades of the twentieth century, the best was plural and also more uncertain. Where once the best had been made for elites by elites, and then everyone else could be educated to enjoy the fruits of these elites, now the best could include, at least in theory, cultural products from numerous, possibly infinite, starting points. The best had been pluralized, opened to a wider range of reference points and perspectives. With the revolution of inclusivity came innovation in the best, but also a crisis of authority. This is a story familiar to historian of knowledge, G.E.R. Lloyd. Lloyd concludes his study of disciplines and elites across history and across the world with the observation that there is an ‘essential tension between innovation and authority … it is scarcely possible to secure the advantages of the one without the disadvantages associated with the other’.7 Disciplines everywhere and at all times 65

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

operate exclusively, differentiating those who are not sufficiently initiated or educated from adherents of a discipline who are. With the exclusion practised by any elite comes the authority of a discipline and its values. By contrast, with inclusion authority is dissipated. Lloyds observes that ‘a discipline defines itself not just internally, where members of an elite contrast themselves with amateurs or lay practitioners, but also externally, in contrast to other fields of investigation’.8 This is as true of Modern disciplines as it is of disciplines found in ‘simple’, non-industrialized societies and in pre-Modern times. Through mechanisms of exclusion and orthodoxy, disciplines create authority for adherents and for the discipline itself. This is sometimes at the expense of innovation: there are always and necessarily ‘ongoing controversies between different experts on the demarcation of the activities and disciplines they practice’.9 In the latter decades of the twentieth century, all types of discipline (history, art, law, philosophy, science, theology) were opened to wider, more plural perspectives, inclusive of people from a far wider range of backgrounds than previously. Orthodoxies, even whole paradigms, were altered and overthrown in the name of democracy, pluralism and a more nuanced understanding of truth. This moment of inclusion, and the revolution of thought ushered in by newcomers, both revolutionized the various disciplines and it caused a crisis of authority, which on reading Lloyd was predictable. Where once disciplinary elites were the authorities, and disciplines were resourced because they pursued and maintained the best, now disciplines and their newly diverse adherents required a new basis of justification for resources. Plural and inclusive revolutions occur periodically within all disciplines at various periods throughout history and across the world. The most recent one coincided with the wider cultural change from liberalism to neoliberalism and this precipitated further changes for disciplines and their adherents with implications for the question of authority. The market has its own claims to democracy and authority, employing a different route and a different set of values. The neoliberal claim is that the market is a guarantor of democracy, and democracy is defined against the state. For neoliberal activists, the democratic state is neither truly representative nor working benignly 66

WHY DISCIPLINE?

in the interests of the majority of people. Instead, it is imagined as bureaucratic, self-interested and elitist, that is, the antithesis of democracy. The market, according to its advocates, represents the views of the majority and works benignly to provide for the needs of people through the ‘wisdom of crowds’. This is the idea that large groups of people are collectively smarter than individual experts when it comes to problem-solving, decision-making, innovating and predicting. There is a belief in the superior decision-making ability of markets via the wisdom of crowds and appeals to the popular/ populist as arbiters of value in economic and all other terms. Elites and expertise The culture wars* of the United States, the Netherlands and Australia demonstrate how much time and energy are spent by advocates of neoliberalism ridiculing anything deemed neither economically nor socially useful. Unless knowledge has a ready application in the market and for large enough groups of people, it is of dubious value. Setting out to create or investigate the obscure or the challenging, with no view to conquering new markets is perverse, and a waste of resources. Knowledge for its own sake is irrelevant, no longer understood as paving the road to Enlightenment progress, fanning away the smoke of ignorance is the dilettante proclivity of elites. *Culture wars is the term for when governments actively attack the values of cultural institutions, individual scholars and cultural producers as elitist and therefore undemocratic. On this basis they reduce spending on culture, including museums, libraries, universities and research organizations. The idea that the market is meritocratic is widely promulgated, that differentials in income and success across society reflect rightly those existing differentials in people and the real value of our skills and experience. The idea is the market will always reward the good without fail and without bias. Markets reward merit and this 67

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

neoliberal myth is the rationale for withdrawing resources from some sections of society. The meritocratic myth was foundational in previous variations of capitalism as well, and versions can be seen as early as Malthus and the social Darwinism based on his theories. What is different with neoliberalism is the idea that mass markets and popularity are paramount. For Malthus and those who followed in his wake, elites were natural, good and classbased. Today, elites are pitted against the popular or mass: elites are bad and anti-democratic and the popular is good and right. In reality, the categories of elite and popular or mass are far more complicated than the binary implies. Both are more heterogeneous than is suggested when the categories are used as a rhetorical device. The word elite comes from French meaning the choice part of something. In English, elite entails superiority of ability or superior qualities as compared with the rest of a group or society. The notion of superiority thereby forms a fulcrum around which class dynamics are played out. These can be in terms of betterment as Matthew Arnold espoused, or as counter-hegemonic, as Richard Hoggart describes in discussing the merits of popular culture.10 For Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, mass culture (as distinct from Hoggart’s popular culture) was ‘rationalized mass deception’ at the hands of hegemonic power, in order to deceive the rest of us into passivity in the face of blatant inequality and a system that perpetuates domination and exploitation. One corrective they espouse is negation, including the negation of the Modernist avantgarde.11 They championed the avant-garde for its revolutionary potential, its difficulty and challenge,12 and in a sense they come close to my argument for discipline; however, their assumptions about mass culture and the avant-garde problematically invoke the idea of progress. Michel de Certeau, once highly influential amongst artists, looks to the agency of the individual. In The Practice of Everyday Life, he writes that consumers are ‘silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality’.13 For Certeau, these fragmentary, unpredictable moments are ‘tactics’ of re-appropriation within Modernity’s overarching ‘strategies’ of power and coercion. Cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, nuances 68

WHY DISCIPLINE?

further the relationship between the individual and culture. Hall argues that cultural forms are ‘deeply contradictory’, never ‘whole and coherent’ in the ways that Arnold, Adorno, Horkheimer, Hoggart and (to some extent) Certeau imagine.14 Hall describes popular culture as a shifting terrain of containment, resistance, identification, domination and reform, fitting neither the model of passive consumers in a manipulative culture industry, nor the heroic alternative of a popular milieu entirely free from power relations. Hall’s point about the heterogeneity of the contemporary is true not only of the twentieth centuries, about which he writes, but also the Victorian era. Even then, the popular was ‘a sprawling hybrid … not coterminous with any single class … ambiguous and far from always benign, mixing the reactionary and conservative with the potentially subversive’ as historian Peter Bailey argues.15 Harnessing populism as the wisdom of the masses, neoliberal governments have attempted to undermine the value of expertise and disciplinary elites. In turn, there is an attempt to reposition expertise as a necessary part of democracy. Political theorist Alfred Moore examines the role of the expert in democracy in Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy and the Problem of Expertise (2017), citing a range of arguments (the details of which lie beyond the scope of this chapter), he writes: If science and expertise become political, then, it is not because values are embedded in or delegated to artefacts (Latour 1991), or because it involves the distribution of resources (Greenberg 2001; Kitcher 2001) or risks (Beck 1992), or simply because it shapes the material conditions of our lives (Winner 1986: 29; Sclove 1995: 17; Kitcher 2001: 199). Expertise becomes political to the extent that it is a site of conflict under the shadow of coercive decision. And by this definition we can see a pattern of politicisation of science.16 Moore cites a concept familiar to the art world for all its fraught connotations, namely autonomy, as the aspect of disciplinary expertise that benefits politics. The expert is positively required in a democracy for reasons of our autonomy from embedded and entrenched political power. The ability to ‘speak truth to power’ requires a distance from government and other hegemonic 69

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

interests. The autonomy of the expert is orientated towards seeking disciplinary truth and operating within this value system a requirement of a healthy functioning democracy. For Kant, autonomy of the will is deducible from the unconditional command of the conscience or reason.17 (Updating Kant post-Freud, we could argue as well that the unconscious has its own justifiable logic that must also be followed.) Disciplines help frame autonomy for the individual adherent, affording the individual the possibility of other values that are different from the neoliberal state. To counter both the neoliberal and the Marxist claim that expertise is elite and elitist, in non-hierarchical societies expertise is not elite in the sense of class hierarchy or superior access to power. Instead, expertise is understood horizontally, in relation to others in that society. Indeed, in the highly hierarchical societies of the Modern West, many forms of expertise are not understood as elite. Some expertise is overlooked, marginalized, ridiculed and denigrated, as Critical Race theorists protest.18 Only those types of expertise with cultural and social capital are regarded in terms of superiority. Communities and status An overview of cultures across time and in different geographical locations seems to indicate that status among peers, understood socially, as a relation of value with others, is fundamental to human well-being, even meaning-making. People will undergo great physical hardship and deprivation if it can be traded for status, making status more important than food in specific contexts. Examples of popular entertainers or religious monks fasting for weeks and months, and mountain climbers or religious penitents risking harm and death seem to prove this point. The need for meaning-making, esteem and status can be found in any society. Groups who are marginalized and maligned by mainstream society find ways of creating for themselves status and esteem in their own terms. Esteem is created via many routes, including through selfrepresentation and mirroring, and it harnesses ideas of superiority and excellence. For example, a history of writing by writers of slave descent from W.E.B. DuBois and C.L.R. James to Alice Walker and 70

WHY DISCIPLINE?

Toni Morrison demonstrates self-esteem through greater creativity, resilience and strength of character in both individuals and whole communities than is seen in wider, mainstream or privileged parts of society. What is remarkable about this is that they achieve this despite a wider mainstream culture of racism and denigration. Disciplines create status, by both developing and maintaining systems of value which may or may not align with wider society. There are good reasons for scepticism about the role of disciplines in any society to exclude a priori and suppress innovation, but in the face of neoliberal culture, disciplines are a strong and existing source of countervailing value, a source of ‘likely stories’. Disciplines are also a source of alternative ways of being and organizing in the world. Market logic has it that all are in competition with each other at all times and early capitalist logic was infused with Darwin’s theory evolution by natural selection. Ever since Malthus’s 1798 essay on population growth and its ‘checks’ (i.e. famine, war, poverty), the idea of a natural struggle for existence was promulgated by all sections of bourgeois society and it was further ‘naturalized’ (i.e. made to seem natural) by the economic system of the time. The idea promulgated in the nineteenth century was that humans are in rapacious competition with each other and that winners are the ‘fittest’, the strongest. And the bourgeoisie, who were politically and economically in the ascendant over this period, were evidently the fittest. Notably, Darwin also observed cooperative behaviour as endemic in many species, but this aspect of his theory was overshadowed then as now (see, for example, Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene). Unlike the model of capitalism in which all are perceived as in competition with each other, disciplines offer community but, disciplines are far from cooperative. Anyone working in academia knows this. Anthropologist Alfred Gell makes interesting – and wry – observations about the value of disciplines. He writes, ‘The notion of an academic habitus [is] founded on social exchange, “entertainment value”, and productive of bonhomie and solidarity.’19 For Gell, the point of disciplinary research is, above all, social. It gives meaning to the lives involved in it and reasons to create social bonds cemented by a common purpose through notions of excellence in disciplinary terms. Disciplines create communities in a way that is distinctly different from how corporate businesses operate. 71

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

In business the emphasis is competition. Collaboration will only take place if gains can be made by each party: the win–win scenario. In business, there is no community in any sense other than a convergence of interests. This can be seen in the example of how markets employ patents and intellectual property (IP). Patents are, and always were, a mechanism for the privatization and commercial exploitation of ideas.20 Corporate businesses buy up patents and also provide resources for the creation of new patents in order to profit from selling them directly, or to prevent other businesses from using them. Research and development in commercial terms is supported for its potential to improve on what is already profitable. Markets invest in niche innovations that produce patents to the extent that the innovation will improve what already exists, because those improvements will translate to future profit. Conversely, markets and individual corporations will disinvest from any alternative that fails to create a strong enough market, even if the alternative is better in other terms. This is well illustrated by historian of science, Ruth Cowan’s essay on ‘How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum’: The landscape of American technical history is littered with the remains of abandoned machines. These are not junked cars and used refrigerators that people leave along roadsides and in garbage dumps, but the rusting hulks of aborted ideas; patents that were never exploited; test models that could not be manufactured at affordable prices; machines that had considerable potential, but were, for one reason or another, actively suppressed by the companies that had the license to manufacture them; devices that were put on the market, but never sold well and were soon abandoned.21 Against this history, market apologists claim that the market is value-free and neutral. On this basis it is asserted that markets are the best arbiter of relevance and quality. However, as Cowan demonstrates, markets are not neutral. Corporations disable competing and unprofitable starting points and innovations. The effect of marketization itself is also rarely neutral. Richard Titmuss’s sociological study on the 72

WHY DISCIPLINE?

commodification of blood donation in the United States, comparing it to the altruistic blood donations of the UK supply over the same period, demonstrated how the quality of the blood products was degraded once altruism was replaced by economic incentives.22 The Francis Report, which was published in February 2013 was an investigation into the catastrophe at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Hospital. The non-partisan report demonstrated well how an overriding emphasis on market values imperilled other values and the investigation concluded that patient deaths were the result of market values replacing patient care.23 As philosopher and Reith lecturer, Michael Sandel states ‘markets leave their mark on social norms, driving out all other values’.24 In the logic of markets, any values other than profit are extraneous, be they the values of historical, scientific or emotional truth, ethics, or altruism. There have been valiant attempts by business academics to explain the rise in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in less calculated terms, in terms of global good corporate citizenship and the increasing role of business since the withdrawal of the state.25 However, anyone with an MBA, a masters degree in business administration, will tell you it’s all about profit. CSR exists because companies operating without it may lose, or fail to win, investors and customers. Contrasting corporate attitudes to patents and Intellectual Property (IP) with disciplinary attitudes to knowledge, copyright and IP is that the latter revolves around the acknowledgement that an individual is the author of their creative work. It is used to protect specific ideas of originality. What is protected by copyright is the form in which an idea is recorded or is manifested, and there is a notable difference of emphasis in copyright law between the European continental tradition of droit d’auteur and the AngloAmerican tradition of ownership, with the latter’s emphasis on financially rewarding intellectual endeavour.26 Copyright is a mechanism by which those who work with disciplinary values acknowledge our forebears. It is a disciplinary value not to plagiarize because this would be, to use a highly anthropological turn of phrase, to dishonour our disciplinary forebears, to arrogantly pretend that we are not ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. At their best, disciplines set out to acknowledge the 73

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

achievements of the past and the positive influence of peers. By doing so, disciplines create communities and collective enterprise. Disciplines ensure ‘the transmission of knowledge and techniques’, ‘monitor the quality of the results’ and, as Lloyd puts it, organize ‘cooperative observation and research, where the cooperation is perfectly compatible with a certain rivalry stimulating original work’.27 Disciplines define and maintain excellence, not arbitrarily, nor towards the goal of profit or other exogenous ends. This is their value in wider society. Disciplines maintain standards of excellence that are in addition to, and sometimes at odds with, the profit-motive. For example, disciplinary values endogenous within medicine and nursing should have been paramount in the treatment of patients at Mid-Staffordshire Hospital. But they weren’t. Ideally it is the discipline itself which policies the standards of excellence and adherents of the discipline expel or denounce as substandard those who fall short. Contrasting Mid-Staffs and its poor disciplinary practice with illuminating examples from the disciplines of medicine and also archaeology, we can see how disciplinary adherents usually do work towards enabling truth, as framed by the discipline. In 2005, Bosnian archaeologist Semir Osmanagić proposed that Bosnia-Herzegovina is the location of the world’s oldest pyramids, older than the Egyptian and Mesoamerican pyramids. His methods for establishing this were archaeological, but unsound. Other archaeologists tested the basis of the Osmanagić’s claims, and in attempting to replicate his results, they found that Osmanagić used poor archaeological techniques that created a false reading. Few outside archaeology would know about the Bosnian pyramid claim had Osmanagić retracted his theory. Instead, Osmanagić used the discipline’s mechanisms of legitimation in order to promulgate his spurious claims.28 A similar thing occurred with Andrew Wakefield’s poor research on the MMR vaccine.29 His methods, and therefore findings, were proven as discreditable by fellow scientists. Wakefield similarly used the mechanisms of academic validation to promulgate his spurious claims to a wider general public. Like Wakefield, Osmanagić is a heroized in some circles. Osmanagić became a national hero for putting the region on the tourist map, tapping into unfounded 74

WHY DISCIPLINE?

conspiracy theories traded globally about pyramids and aliens, creating a revenue stream for the once very poor and war-torn region. Within the discipline of archaeology, Osmanagić’s work is understood as fraudulent however much currency it has with a wider public. Both Wakefield and Osmanagić used disciplinary mechanisms to make fraudulent claims to knowledge, and both were met with the rigours of the discipline to demonstrate otherwise. Robert Eaglestone describes how the discipline of history creates knowledge and how that discipline ascertains the difference between historical truths, facts and the type of story that Holocaust deniers, for example, create. Historians and non-historians both create stories, but only some types of stories are history. However much interpretation or frames of reference are contested, history is only that which is based on evidence that can be verified. He cites Geoffrey Elton’s argument that the professional competence and integrity in the discipline of history are only guaranteed by professional training as a historian: The generic conventions that are central to history are taught implicitly through the arduous, professional training, and only once this has taken place – only once the historian knows the rules – is the history any good … rules can be followed more or less well. Following these rules does not make texts more or less objective … What it does is to make the works more or less historical, more or less of that genre of knowledge.30 Disciplines, whether found in universities of the Modern era or elsewhere, invest in the promulgation of the values of that discipline, and status, in all disciplines, comes in mastering the rules of the discipline. More variably and depending on whether a discipline is in a period of revolution and revision or orthodoxy, authoritarianism and conservatism, status may also come in challenging rules, albeit within the accepted bounds. While disciplines may create elites, status is conferred to anyone within the discipline, novitiates included, in their collective identity as individuals attempting to adhere to, refine and perfect, to work within, the endogenous rules of that discipline. A plural, diverse society allows for, and nurtures, opportunities for status across multiple sites and communities. 75

76

4 Art: A knowledge-forming discipline

Summary Art is a discipline. It is a knowledge-forming discipline, akin to any other knowledge-forming discipline. That art requires some form of training, of mentorship (including when an artist is born with ‘extraordinary talent’), that art builds on past achievements and is in dialogue with peers, are some of the ways that art operates as a discipline. Art is similar to other knowledgeforming disciplines in that art can create new knowledge, new ways of seeing and understanding, greater nuance and complexity even if it doesn’t always achieve this. An artwork can be said to be good when it has created new knowledge, given that the artwork is done at a specific moment, in a specific location, in dialogue with the specificities of time and place, and when that artwork nuances and builds complexity on what has gone before. There are many things called art that are not art. Any definition of art must be sought in what artists say it is. The definition of art cannot lie with philosophers, art historians, art critics, anthropologists or the general public, as they each have different vested interests that only sometimes intersect with the interests of artists. Just as science is defined by its practitioners, so art is defined by artists. Artists define art and assert the qualities and methods appropriate to the discipline at any given moment, and this changes over time. Art’s impact on wider society, on audiences, on institutions, on the economy, on politics, its value further afield and beyond the discipline, might be described and critiqued by

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

sociologists and historians, just as science is. However much others have their opinions, the definition of art, its methods and its achievements are a question for artists, albeit answered collectively, as an emergent property of all our practices, our values and discourse. Some of us attempt to quantify what we do, writing our own theories on art, which, in turn, may or may not be useful, resonating with our fellows in the wider context of artistic making or not. So, if art’s definition is a question for artists, we need to ask who exactly is an artist. I left that question implied earlier, keeping it open and inclusive. But, in viewing art as a knowledge-forming discipline, we must ask that question and in doing so, we must move away from the orthodoxy of the past 150 years that everyone is an artist. Everyone may be creative. Everyone may start their education with charcoal or a pencil in their hands, but not everyone is an artist. Art practice, understood here in disciplinary terms, is not synonymous with creativity. Most, if not all, people are creative in various ways. However, only a small percentage of people are artists. Only those people who make within a context of art are artists. The definition offered here refers to our training and our relationship with our history and our antecedents. This definition is inclusive of artists in many locations and histories beyond the Modern and/or Western context, but it maintains a distinction between the artist and the non-artist, the hobbyist, the child, and the untrained. I acknowledge how contested is this assertion. I use an exclusive definition that hinges on the idea of a context of understanding gained from a form of mentorship, or training, and not necessarily from a formal or university education. Here I describe the type of knowledge that art produces in both anthropological and philosophical terms – the philosophical in reference to Wittgenstein’s ‘open concept’. My argument starts with the idea that there are different forms of knowledge, beyond that which has been valorized since the Enlightenment. While operating an exclusive category of artist I nevertheless include both

78

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

mainstream and marginal artists and practices. In addition to the canonical, I understand that art happens all over the world and back in time to when art became a self-conscious category of human behaviour. Art creates knowledge through its engagement with, and production of, metaphor.

Art: A knowledge-forming discipline Despite a history of artists writing about art from an artist’s point of view, including Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneeman, Coco Fusco and Joseph Kosuth, it is a common assumption amongst historians, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists that artists ourselves should be mute. Artists produce objects which may be thoughtful and thought-provoking but artists ourselves shouldn’t comment on art as a practice, beyond furnishing biographical details that are supposed to illuminate an artwork. We are not meant to comment on the systems of resources and thought that allow our work to exist. This assumption is shared explicitly by various writers on the subject, including historian of knowledge, G.E.R. Lloyd, anthropologists Arnd Schneider and James Wright, and art historian James Elkins. It is shared implicitly by an education system that drives the inarticulate towards the art room and away from studies in science and literature. Whenever I broach the subject of artists creating knowledge, I find it is generally the art historians, theorists and critics who protest. For those scholars working in parallel disciplines, the idea that artists produce knowledge is extraordinary and provocative. Ironically, despite chafing at the idea of art as a discipline, fellow artists mostly embrace the idea that we create knowledge. Of course, we do: otherwise what are we teaching in university art departments and in the art schools? What are we bringing to inter- and multi-disciplinary collaborations, and to working with communities and the general public? We know viscerally that we produce something more than objects and events, and knowledge seems like a good word to cover our contribution.

79

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Historically, knowledge was framed in ways that precluded the type of knowledge that art creates: knowledge was understood to be based on well-defined rational methods and, until recently, it was often defined against somatic, embodied or any other form of knowledge-creation. Theorists such as John Dewey, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno put experience and education, politics and social change as the reason for (making) art. The problem with this legacy is their emphasis on experience, on education, instead of knowledge.1 The former is passive and the latter active. Art does not merely educate audiences, finding novel or effective ways with which to teach that which is already established as knowledge, nor does art merely create experiences beyond knowledge for our audiences. Instead, art creates knowledge in the first place. By referring to Wittgenstein and Gell, I am turning away from those philosophers and theorists, Dewey, Benjamin and Adorno, often cited within the art world to justify the existence of art. I am informed by their contributions, but my writing comes from a different perspective. As a practitioner, my emphasis is on knowledge, on the active part, on art’s making and its reception from the perspective of an artist. It is not the view of the audience. However, I am also mindful of the differences between when Dewey, Benjamin and Adorno wrote and today. I am writing almost a century after they did, and things have changed. The elitist culture they critique has been more or less replaced by an imagined meritocratic one promulgated within neoliberal market ideology (see ‘Why Discipline?’ in this book). The assumption that we live in a meritocracy creates a different set of barriers and exclusions. Democracy is again threatened by demagoguery, differently from the 1930s, and the specifics of the present require analysis if this is to be averted. Since the early twentieth century, the institution of art has opened out from the elitist, racist, sexist and class-based high art of Matthew Arnold’s paternalistic Victorian vision of ‘the best which has been thought and said’.2 Art now operates with a definition that is more inclusive. But this has come at a price. The emphasis on inclusion has been at the expense of authority and the expertise that underpins this authority. The new emphasis, for all its democratic appeal, has undermined what is unique in art practice, which is specific, as 80

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

distinct from creativity, which is general. The role that art uniquely plays in society, and specifically in democracy, has been lost, thereby imperilling not only art, but also democracy. Dewey and the many other theorists writing from the perspective of audience have, with their emphasis on experience, inadvertently undermined the role of disciplinary expertise and knowledge in producing art. Some have argued that the truth on which democracy stands was undermined with the advent of Postmodernism.3 I would argue that an earlier argument bubbling out of Romanticism has been used to undermine disciplinary expertise in all knowledge formation, including its orientation towards truth-seeking. The democratic shift in the distribution of knowledge across a wider sector of society has inadvertently created a relativism in which anyone is an artist and everyone is an expert. The unintended consequence of inclusion and pluralism was relativism. Under these conditions, truth and validity are determined not by experts in a discipline, perceived as elitist because they stand apart, made different through their training (not birth or genetics). Instead, truth is determined by majority consensus, ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. This neoliberal construal is at odds with not only disciplinarity but democracy itself. Truth-seeking, disciplinarity and democracy are interwoven and interconnected. Knowledge Since the Enlightenment, knowledge is categorized as a range of mutually exclusive types. The primary form of valid, valuable knowledge since the Enlightenment is empirical positivistic knowledge, the type of knowledge that science is supposed to produce, but in reality doesn’t. That empirical positivistic methods employed by scientists fall short of the Enlightenment dream for knowledge is something philosophers, historians of sciences and anthropologists have demonstrated time and again for over fifty years.4 Yet the myth persists, particularly among artists and the general public. It also persists within some parts of the science community as Jonas Salk’s response to Latour and Woolgar’s analysis of his laboratory demonstrates.5 Scientific knowledge is the type 81

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

of knowledge imagined to be found from impartially observing what is really out there, as if total impartiality, the neutrality of the observer, is possible. And this is sometimes contrasted with emotional knowledge. The binary of IQ and EQ – intelligence and emotional quotients – is imagined as mutually exclusive and indeed carry gender, class, race and cultural-inflections. Into this binary, commentators place science, philosophy and history on one side, and creative practices on the other. The contribution of art to knowledge, if it is deemed knowledge at all, lies on the emotional side. It is true that some art has an emotional pull on its audience and that it is created within the emotional register. It is equally true that some art does not. Some art is utterly cerebral, such as that by Hanne Darboven This is its appeal and also its potential contribution to the type of knowledge that art produces. That art is a discipline and a knowledge-forming discipline akin to any other knowledge-forming discipline, such as science, anthropology or history, is an assertion I make based on how artists operate with respect to each other and to our antecedents. It is also based on the fact that artists are building on precedents with understanding and awareness. This is precisely how disciplinary knowledge is formed and maintained. If we understand knowledge beyond traditional categories, we are able to see that art also creates knowledge. To describe art’s disciplinarity and how exactly art can be understood as knowledge-forming, I will describe art in ways that are more inclusive than is ordinarily understood in the discipline of art history, in which art is normatively defined in terms of the extraordinary. However art, as I define it, does not include everything that anyone makes and calls art. Just as there are boundaries to what are scientific practices, for example, or archaeological methods, there are also boundaries to what is art practice. Adisciplinarity (=without or not discipline) The question of adisciplinarity haunts the artistic imagination ever since (at least) Michel de Certeau’s writing on art and life was embraced widely by the art world.6 So I will briefly deal with this idea, before I describe the discipline of art. With the push to 82

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

democratize art and other forms of disciplinary knowledge, some theorists have settled on the idea of adisciplinarity, assuming adisciplinarity does away with the problem of disciplinary hierarchy and exclusion. Two of the many writers about art in these terms are Marxist art theorist, John Roberts, and social anthropologist, Tim Ingold. Both propose an idea that can be described as the adisciplinarity of art. Roberts argues that one of the functions of the artist is ‘to work with, reflect on, move through various non-artistic disciplines and practices without fully investing in them’ and it is for this reason that he calls art an ‘adiscipline’.7 This reflects Roberts’s own lack of familiarity with non-art disciplines and their histories, as Roberts could be describing anthropology and areas of philosophy, which similarly move through disciplines without fully investing in them. Art is far from unique in its engagement with the knowledge and practices beyond the strict limits of the discipline. But, what is notable in terms of discipline is that the artist, philosopher and anthropologist all view and employ methods and knowledge sets from other disciplines in ways defined and honed in their ‘home’ disciplines. In short, we each encounter knowledge and subjects, and we work using methods in disciplined, disciplinary-specific, ways, whether we acknowledge them to be discipline-specific or not. Unlike Roberts, Ingold is rather Romantic in his view of art process, in that he considers art as a transcendent practice in the sense that it is both pre-language and embodied. He also believes it is universal. Ingold does not differentiate between the various embodied ‘artistic’ practices, comparing the stroke of the cello bow to the act of drawing to the act of flint-knapping. He writes perspicaciously on the relationship between artist-craftsperson and material, in that it is a dialogue between, not an act of domination as many non-practitioners imagine.8 But, Ingold conflates all forms of practice, so his conclusions about art are problematically ahistorical and also idealistic. As we would expect from two writers in different fields, operating with different norms, assumptions and the different histories of their disciplines, their understanding of the ‘adisciplinarity’ of art is not the same. In this way, even the comparison between how Ingold and Roberts treat the idea of adisciplinarity illuminates the question of discipline. 83

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

I first proposed the idea of understanding art in disciplinary terms in This Is Not Art. Then it was for strategic reasons. I wanted to align art with other ‘academic’ disciplines as a way of wresting value for art from the commercial, the market and the narrowly political into which it had been squeezed. Operating under the logic of neoliberalism, all academic disciplines are compelled to find the commercial and/or narrowly defined socially beneficial aspects of their research and teaching. The days when the pursuit of truth was enough of a reason to fund research seem over, though not for the first time in history. My argument for the knowledge that the discipline of art produces here builds on an initial argument I made in This Is Not Art: In common with other disciplines, art practice has its own history of thought and historiography, a set of both established and outmoded methodologies, and a set of reference points to which practitioners orientate themselves. Each discipline has core knowledge and core practitioners to which all within that discipline must be acquainted. Each discipline has a lexicon that undergraduates or novitiates must learn in order to be taken seriously, in order to be ‘heard’ or to be understood as professional, as worth listening to. The language of a discipline also serves to exclude. The use of discipline-specific language is the same in all disciplines, including art. Each discipline is the product of its history or, more accurately, its historiography. There are also core methodologies within disciplines. For example, in medicine, it is dissection; in anthropology, field work; in archaeology, the dig. In art practice, it was life drawing whereas now it is discursive: being able to talk about one’s art practice in discipline-specific terms.9 Art Despite a long history of ‘art’ described by art historians and stretching back to the neolithic, the term and practice emerged with the Modern era, arguably in the eighteenth century which also produced the neologism ‘aesthetics’.10 Art, as a distinct category of human endeavour understood as we understand it today, 84

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

only developed recently with the hierarchy of aestheticization. The history of art, itself a recent category of distinct disciplinary knowledge, drew on the Renaissance emphasis on genius and individual creativity, as exemplified in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists written contemporaneously in 1550 as a fellow artist. For early twentieth century art historians such as Heinrich Wöfflin, Ernst Gombrich and Erwin Panofsky, genius and individuality became hallmarks of art practice, and this differentiated visual art from other forms of cultural practice, such as craft. In this way, the very definition of art became one in which only certain types of practitioners, namely European men of genius, could be truly said to be making art. With the European concept of aesthetics, the idea of what defines a great artist, and also what defines a great art collector with a receptive and refined eye for art, became gendered and culturally specific. Specific and exclusive definitions of greatness, creativity and genius were conceived in gendered and Eurocentric terms. Because of this bias, the category of art ended up implying the work of a specific gender and culture and did not refer to the practice as a whole. Assumptions about genius and creativity embedded into the discipline of art history served to exclude the art of women, including those who were similarly educated to the men of genius. Until historians and theorists such as Griselda Pollock and Germaine Greer writing in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s critiqued the various assumptions written into such histories, the histories of the visual arts maintained a Eurocentric, masculinist perspective.11 Art was defined against craft, which was made by women, the working classes and nonEuropeans. Where women artists used undeniably artistic materials such as oil paint, their work was dismissed as merely illustrative and lacking in genius. In addition to gender exclusion, art historians of the early twentieth centuries tended to assume that the visual arts were created in only Europe and its colonies by Europeans and, to some extent, in China and Japan. Philosophers, too, defined visual art by explicitly excluding the work of non-European practitioners. For example, R.G. Collingwood’s important and influential The Principles of Art (1938) described non-European, non-Western art as craft, magic or as mere illustration.12 It took anthropologists, such as Alfred Gell, to redress the Eurocentric bias of art historians and 85

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

philosophers. However, while redressing one imbalance, others were created inadvertently by male anthropologists, such as Anthony Forge and Franz Boas, focusing on men’s materials and practices and thereby reinforcing the invisibility of women’s practices.13 It seems to be difficult to have a definition of art which is inclusive of art practices irrespective of who makes the art. Arguably, this is because art has been defined by art historians and philosophers instead of artists. And art historians and philosophers refer to the extraordinary, and not to the practice as a whole. Anthropologists either refer only to one part of existing practice, or they replicate the bias of their historian and philosopher counterparts. From the nineteenth century onwards, there has been little attempt at an overview of art practice as a whole and this has skewed the very definition of art. Comparing historians of science to historians of art, we see a different approach. Historians and philosophers of art tend to exclude from consideration artwork and practices considered by them as less than extraordinary. Historically, any types of art made using techniques, materials and reference points not derived from Classical antiquity or as a response to that history were excluded ipso facto. By contrast, the history and philosophy of science consider science, and the evolution of thought and invention of tools and instruments used in science, more inclusively, across all practitioners (if not inclusive of all regions and societies). While popular understanding of science is in terms of men of genius, both historians of science and scientists themselves understand science as collaborative, as a collective enterprise, as well as a process of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. While no longer aiming at the encyclopaedic tomes of their early-twentieth-century predecessors, many art historians today nevertheless replicate their bias. Contemporary sociologists, anthropologists and art historians tend to share the assumption that the most noteworthy contemporary art is the type of art seen in art institutions and biennials, and artworks validated by the art market. They follow the money, and not the art. This focus is based either on an assumption that the contemporary art world is a meritocracy (therefore that the best art is duly rewarded), or on an assumption that it is only art at the intersection of capital which 86

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

is worthy of critical sociological, historical and anthropological attention. Occasionally, writing about art extends beyond this to encompass a wider range of practices. The contributions of Lucy Lippard, Sadie Plant and Claire Bishop are examples of this type of art history.14 Their writing attempts a fuller description of specific range of art practices at a given moment in time. Thereby their writing includes a wider range of practices than is usually compiled by art historians. By being more inclusive, none of these historians replicate the spectre of an inherently and implicitly racist and sexist idea of genius in their contributions to art history. The definition of art I employ is not predicated, even implicitly, on the concept of genius. I am defining art more inclusively and not working within the parameters set by those who focus only on the exceptional or the extraordinary. This definition keeps in mind all art worlds inhabited by contemporary artists, and not only those who are the most successful at this moment in time. I include those who made art historically, wherever they were situated in the world and whether or not their work has been subsequently bought by national collections or been written into history. Nevertheless, I do not include anything any artist has made or done. I readily maintain a distinction between art and design and I maintain a distinction between art and educational or therapeutic practices. The reason to distinguish between different forms of practice is to articulate the value of these practices in their own terms. It is not to recreate hierarchies. While I distinguish between art, education, therapy and design, I do not distinguish between art and craft. This is not because the label craft has historically been used to dismiss or undervalue things made by women and the working classes (which it has), but because craft is essential to all forms of disciplinary knowledge, not only to art. All disciplines entail both a knowledge set and an array of crafts, or embodied skills. Examples of these crafts include the craft of writing, the craft of reading data, such as looking through microscopes or at ECGs, and the craft required for the construction of a good research experiment. Practitioners of any discipline require some form of specialist craft. Craft is at the centre of disciplinary practice, but it does not comprise that discipline. Learning how to write well 87

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

and clearly is a craft at the centre of disciplines in the humanities and some social sciences, but these disciplines are distinct from each other despite sharing this common craft. What makes them distinct is the subject, the common store of knowledge, the precedents to which discipline adherents refer and the methods sanctioned as appropriate within the respective disciplines. In addition, the different disciplines may share a craft but also have a range of other crafts, such as close reading, or Logic, in order to build on disciplinary knowledge. Unlike Gregory Sholette, artist and theorist of artist-activism, who refers to the 97 per cent of artists not visible within the art world or to wider media, the so-called ‘dark matter’ of the art world,15 I do distinguish between the enthusiastic amateur attempting to master the craft of representation in charcoal, oils, collage, photography, watercolour or clay, and artists involved in the discipline of art. In Artworld Prestige: Arguing about Cultural Value, Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen provide a useful language for describing this difference. They call it the difference between professional and amateur. Personally, I would employ different descriptors for the phenomenon they describe. I would prefer to avoid reiterating the professional-amateur dichotomy. These terms have specific histories in the art world, which ascribe status paradoxically. In the art world from the 1960s until the end of the twentieth century, the idea of professional connoted an over-concern with money-making, the implication of a capitalist market-orientation, and an elitist, hierarchical and exclusive class militating against wider societal creativity. With that proviso in mind, Van Laar and Diepeveen provide a useful taxonomy for distinguishing the difference between an artist and the person who uses art materials to draw, paint, sculpt, but who is not an artist. They write: [Professionals] see their task as open-ended engagement with important issues … or as response to a problem or set of problems that demand full-time attention and rigor. … In a professionalist argument, art is something that develops, and develops with a kind of self-conscious and logical consistency … For the professional, artmaking is part of an argument about art16 88

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

This contrasts with the amateur, for whom art is not about theory, development and relevance; it is about trust, emotional expression, and sincerity … For contemporary ‘amateurs’ working from within this system of values, professional work emphasizes the wrong things (like theory), rather than sincerity of intent.17 I would add to their observations that the difference between artists in the disciplinary sense, or ‘professionals’ as described by Van Laar and Diepeveen, and non-artist others is specifically their relationship to Modernity. Ian Heywood notes that ‘an important aspect of modernity [is] the peculiar objectification of language, a self-conscious or reflective relationship of discourses with themselves – as constitutive or poetic practices.’18 Van Laar and Diepeveen note that it is the quality of self-consciousness that denotes professionalism in artistic practice,19 and Heywood reminds us that self-consciousness is the sine qua non of Modernity. For Heywood, Kant’s observation about the need for specific languages is a manifestation of the newly Modern sensibility. Modernity is a longer, broader epoch than Modernism, which is largely confined to the twentieth century. The concept of Modernity covers the paradigmatic shift in consciousness, being, knowledge and societal organization that the Enlightenment in Europe is often imagined to have precipitated or embody. Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor describe this paradigmatic shift in their different ways20 and its emergence is different in different places and also contested.21 What I am saying is that the discipline of art is akin to any other disciplinary knowledge or practice, in that it is the product of Modernity and the specific (self-)consciousness that this entails. For art historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and the general public, as well as for many artists, art is imagined as beginning deep in human history and seen widely across the globe in cultures. Against this apparently common-sense understanding, I argue that the discipline of art has only existed since Modernity, just as the discipline of science has existed since then despite having

89

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

parallels and antecedents elsewhere and earlier. In G.E.R. Lloyd’s broader definition of disciplinary practices, nearly every culture has science, art, maths, history (etc.), but he distinguishes these forms of the discipline from the more narrow forms of postEnlightenment disciplinary knowledge.22 Narrow forms of disciplinary knowledge, including art, have emerged only with the emergence of Modernity. In his thorough two-part article on the matter, Paul Kristeller writes: The fundamental importance of the eighteenth century in the history of aesthetics and of art criticism is generally recognized.  … It is known that the very term ‘Aesthetics’ was coined at that time, and, at least in the opinion of some historians, the subject matter itself, the ‘philosophy of art’, was invented in that comparatively recent period and can be applied to earlier phases of Western thought only with reservation. It is also generally agreed that such dominating concepts of modern aesthetics as taste and sentiment, genius, originality and creative imagination did not assume their definite modern meaning before the eighteenth century.23 When I include only those practitioners who self-consciously make art, as part of a history of art-making and contributing to a field of practice, I do so in the full awareness that I am excluding those who are engaged primarily in the type of craft that has been inextricably associated with art but who have no sense of the other aspects that comprise a discipline – those who are not interested in engaging with the discipline of art, but instead in perfecting a set of skills associated historically with art. A comparison might be with a person producing home remedies for ill health. The person is applying skills common to the disciplines of chemistry or pharmacology, but they are not contributing to disciplinary knowledge and may not even be aware of the existence of these fields of knowledge. Van Laar and Diepeveen’s Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value also describes some of the various normative aspects of professionalist practice that have the effect of distancing the professional from the amateur, touching on the various debates around painting, and ‘its death’. Making good general 90

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

observations, they are not practitioners themselves, so they also miss the nuances of art world mechanisms. They place painters such as the ‘Stuckists’ on the amateur side of the dichotomy, whereas Marlene Dumas is a professional despite using the most amateur of media and subject, watercolour representational portraits. I disagree. Painters such as the Stuckists are well aware of the debates within Modernism and its legacy. As contemporary artists, they are equally self-conscious and responsive to both art history and theory as artists such as Dumas. The difference is that their responses vary. Not art The discipline of art is inclusive of all contemporary practitioners who self-consciously tread paths with respect to Modernity and the contemporary moment, even when they’re wildly divergent from, or alternative to, mainstream art world consensus. What I do not include in the definition of art is the hobbyist and those with no relationship to a history of art-making. This includes young children, animals and computer algorithms not written by artists. Saying this, it is undeniable that at least some hobbyists, children, animals and computer algorithms produce aesthetically pleasing results, but aesthetic pleasure is not, in itself, definitional of art. Art historians and museum curators can include what they will in their categories of art. Indeed historically, artists such as Willem de Kooning and Pablo Picasso have provocatively and knowingly expanded the category of art by including ‘outsider art’ and non-Western art respectively in their own collections. I write about the discipline of art, and not about what is called art after the fact, ex post facto. Nor is art an interchangeable term for selfexpression. This idea is an oft-cited reduction from Romanticism. As Heywood notes, even for the Romantics art was never simply self-expression. For ‘Goethe, Wordsworth and others, expression in art was not simply a question of finding a suitable vehicle for some feeling one might happen to have, but the transformation of feelings into truths more fundamental than those of science or mere subjectivity’.24 91

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

In arguing for disciplines and the distinctiveness of them, I am making the case for understanding objects as discipline-specific. It goes without saying that, today, contributions to the discipline of art come from widely different and dispersed locations across the globe and are no longer confined to specific classes or cultures. However, when an object is abstracted from its context, made centuries or millennia ago, it is difficult to ascertain why that object was made in that form, or even why it was made at all. Objects made for medicine or science or perhaps historical narration may now be understood as art. But it is not for this reason that I distinguish between a history of objects understood as art and art itself. Instead, what I am arguing is that we must distinguish between art of the Modern period, created in relation to Modernity, and that which was made at other times and in other contexts. I am arguing that, just as Abelam carving of the early twentieth century is not art, neither is ancient Greek sculpture and pottery. I am not imposing hierarchies between these forms of material culture and our own practice of art; instead, I am addressing the specificities of art today and attempting to understand art in its uniqueness, as the product of its context. My emphasis is not to denigrate that which has been made in other locations and at other times but I am arguing that, in order to understand the discipline of art, and especially to understand the relationship between art and knowledge, we must distinguish between art practice and a history of objects now called art. Art is a knowledge-forming discipline, akin to other knowledgeforming disciplines, with its own unique focus, methods, physical and dematerialized outcomes and knowledge sets. When I use the term here, I am referring to a specific set of practices and a paradigm, or regime of thought, framing those practices. I not only define art inclusively of all practitioners of art, from those who make the extraordinary to those orientated towards the mainstream, but I also define art exclusively. This definition of art requires a specific training and knowledge, even if the training is informal.

92

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

Figure 6 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Being an Artist #2 (2019). Digital image.

93

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Academia The argument for training and knowledge is not an argument for the academicization of art, or to condone the trend of past decades that require artists to complete various higher degrees of university education before they can be considered artists. The term ‘academicization’ refers to both the proliferation of higher degrees of qualification in the field of art practice, including art as doctoral research, and the apparent necessity of at least one higher degree (though preferably two) to substantiate a person’s claim to being an artist. More recently again it seems that only a few of the many universities offering degrees in art practice confer the opportunity for an artist to be considered nationally significant. This highly problematic turn of events reinforces and amplifies existing hierarchies that occurred to a lesser extent in the past. For example, there are older artists, working as established practitioners with good reputations in the art world, who never went to university and who never undertook any form of training in visual art. However, they did not create in splendid isolation. They worked in a context in dialogue with other artists. Practice-sharing was a more informal form of training for artists, and it happened in ad hoc fashion in studios, and more formally at centres such as Black Mountain College.25 In previous decades, art could not be taken as a degree subject, much less as a graduate degree, and prior to the inclusion of art departments within universities, art schools offered diplomas. Prior to the twentieth century, training happened at the studio of a recognized master. Today, however, it is hard to imagine an emerging artist being taken seriously within the mainstream art world without a higher degree in the field, unless they came from the few allowable ‘outsider’ backgrounds, where a lack of formal training signifies the authenticity of their culture and their personal genius.26 The allowable outsider artists might be African American, Somali British or Australian Aboriginal, and the fact that it is usually a racialized category, is deeply problematic, relying on both Romantic and racist assumptions about the irrational and unconscious.27 Art requires training, however informal or formal. Specific training is a common feature of disciplines in all cultures, as G.E.R. Lloyd observes.28 94

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

Those who teach in art and design departments of universities often remark on the fact that some design students seem more interested in artistic exploration, creating interventions into their field, rather than designing things that provide solutions to life’s problems. They are designers who think and work more like artists, working to intervene into design contexts or playing with materiality as artists do. By contrast, most design students are intent on working professionally within industry. So, while I make the distinction between art and design, the distinction I make is between the different attitudes and frames of reference, not necessarily the departments in which a student studies, if they study formally at all. I am definitely not arguing that all artists must take art degrees to be artists. Extending understanding gleaned from the institutional definition of art (described in ‘What Is Art?’ here in this book) and applying it to all academic disciplines, it can be argued that all disciplines are formed by discourse and that they are socially constructed. I will argue that art practice is orientated towards truth-seeking, in addition to other values, because it is knowledgeproducing and that truth may be discursive and socially constructed, but it exists as well. Art and truth We have to keep clear that some things are true; it does not matter how rich, powerful, or insidious some force is, that force cannot make things true or not true. The most it can do is convince people to believe something is true when it is not true.  … Faith in the notion of truth is the strongest bulwark against the oppression. … You do not count as knowing something unless that thing is true. You can think you know something and to be thoroughly justified in thinking you know it, but if it is not true you only think you know it, you do not actually know it.29 This was the response of Derek Matravers, philosopher of aesthetics, on reading This Is Not Art. On reflection I agree with him. With the excesses of Postmodernist orthodoxy, truth became not only specific and plural (which it is), but non-existent or arbitrary at best. 95

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

This is the unfortunate conclusion of those not taking the trouble to understand what the deconstructionist, Postmodernist project set out to achieve when it interrogated Enlightenment knowledge for its unconsidered biases and the myth of objectivity.30 Truth is inherently problematic and difficult, perhaps too elusive ever to be categorical. Philosopher of science A.F. Chalmers demonstrates in his highly readable philosophical text ‘What is this thing called Science?’. Scientific knowledge and scientific method are completely at odds with those which are conjured by popular imagination.31 While science does create truths by drawing on certain methods, it does so in ways that are far from ‘objective’ and universal. There is no disciplinary knowledge that has attained objectivity or universality, as if these are even possible, or virtues in the first place. ‘The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules is both unrealistic and pernicious,’ Feyerabend writes.32 That this is true does not diminish the validity or importance of the findings produced through scientific method. To say that knowledge is contingent (in that it will change with contradictory experience, new insight or new knowledge), partial (in that each discipline describes and creates its own unique knowledge sets and parameters for knowledgecreation) and not universal (in that it may be true for one set of conditions, but completely untrue in another) is not to say that there are no truths. We need to contend with the wide range of perspectives that derive from the different knowledge sets found across the world and from standpoints different to our own: the awareness that each of us comes from a gendered and culturally specific point of view. For those with this emphasis, it has become difficult to sustain the primacy of a worldview derived from a singular perspective, that is, the perspective glossed since the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, as ‘the scientific method’. Philosophy has long grappled with the difference between subjective knowledge and objective knowledge; our perception and reality, phenomenology, and arguments have been made about the limits of knowledge and the persistence of phenomena in obscuring truth. In addition to these arguments, which are located at the level of the individual, there is also the fact that other, non-Western, supposedly non-scientific cultures also 96

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

have access to truth, akin to the truth derived from the scientific method. (Of course in all societies, any given individual may have a loose grasp of truth for some or all of the time.) That said, we no longer need George Orwell’s novel 1984 to remind us that despotism thrives in regimes of the arbitrary. The first quarter of the twenty-first century seems to be rife with examples from across the globe. It has become increasingly apparent that there is a fundamental relationship between knowledge, truth and democracy. The pursuit of truth requires challenge. To be truth-orientated means the ability to change one’s mind. Faith and belief, on the other hand, do not. Understanding research in this way, we may frame it as a process of adding to, or altering, existing disciplinary truths, ways of seeing, knowledge and stories. Disciplinary research is a process of moving from known stories to new stories – from cliché to nuance, and complexity. Sometimes, very occasionally, disciplinary research moves us to completely different ways of seeing and understanding, Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift.33 Knowledge Practising artists perpetually ask ourselves what (our) art does, or at least what we would like it to do. Even if we begin from an experimental, open-ended starting point, we are travelling in a direction that we have consciously chosen, at least partially. That act of consciousness, artistic self-consciousness, means we want our artwork to do something in particular, even when that something is amorphous. The fact that many artists choose to call their art their work perhaps underlines this point. We want our art to do something in the world, to or with an audience. We want it to work, on many levels. At the formative ‘crit’ (critique) sessions of the university or art college experience, artists learn about the gap between intention and an informed audience’s reading of their work. Traditionally, the student-artist sits amongst peers and mentors listening to a range of comments about their artwork, without justifying or introducing it. The artworks speak for themselves, without prologue from the 97

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

artist who made them. Artists learn through this process that our artwork may or may not do the work we intended. Sometimes we learn that the artwork did much more work, or different work, from what we set out to achieve. At other times, we discover that our artwork failed to achieve anything of value for our peers. The process of group critique teaches us, on the one hand, that an artist cannot fully determine how a work is received and, on the other, that there is invariably a range of responses, some of which align with our own intentions and some of which do not. A studentartist then learns how to navigate the various types of response, how to continue in their art practice in response to those criticisms they believe are valid, while also ignoring those that aren’t. In this way, the student-artist learns both that an artwork can work – or not – and, ideally, how to hone that work. In the end, artists learn to discern for ourselves which of our various artworks work (and discard or continue to work on those that don’t), even if we can’t ever learn why a work works. When an artwork works, we could say it is creating new knowledge, however limited, obscure or narrow that new knowledge may be, and however difficult it is to put that new knowledge into words. If, as Hans Georg Gadamer (among others) claims, art is a language, it becomes possible to argue for art as an area of knowledge production, even though it cannot be translated easily or literally into words.34 By way of analogy, mathematics is a group of languages that make sense in their own terms and produce new knowledge, some of which is untranslatable into words. The argument is not that art symbolizes things in the real world, as for example, the number three does, but perhaps that art operates analogously to algebraic number theory or descriptive set theory.35 The fact that maths uses a non-word language with its own specific and unique grammar to produce knowledge demonstrates that it is possible to convey and create new knowledge using languages that are not word-based, by following its own rules, its own grammar. M.H. Abrams, a historian and theorist of poetry, posited in 1953 four approaches to art that unfurled historically, in which each epoch and poetic rationale or sensibility was superseded by the next.36 Ian Heywood created a fifth.37 Taking what are historical analyses ahistorically and synchronously, the Abrams–Heywood 98

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

categories may be useful in thinking about the type of knowledge that art creates, practices in the visual art tradition, including live art, events, sound-based, durational, participatory or performance. The Abrams-Heywood categories are useful because the current art world has been notably plural for many decades, as Hal Foster deprecated in 1985 in ‘Against Pluralism’.38 Abrams identifies the four types of art as (1) the mimetic or representational, (2) the pragmatic or didactic, (3) the  expressive and (4) the objective or formalist. Heywood creates the transgressive. I will describe briefly a few examples of artworks and how they might fit one or more of these categories. This is merely indicative, and a full exploration of how these categories might usefully apply to various examples of contemporary and art in the Modern era lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Briefly, the mimetic or the representational category is here the drive to represent the world as it is, and also the ideal. It includes not only ‘empirical reality’, what we see when we look, but also its ideal in the sense of Plato’s forms (such as an ideal tree, flower or type). The Pre-Raphaelite emphasis on depicting the detail and thereby spiritual perfection is one example. Examples of mimesis or representation also include both Gustave Courbet’s 1854 painting, The Meeting (Bonjour Monsieur Courbet) and Tracey Emin’s 1995 artwork, Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963–1995, a store bought tent onto which the names of everyone she had ever slept with, both sexually and otherwise, had been appliqued. I know I am employing the ideas of others working in other disciplines somewhat idiosyncratically. I use the concept of mimesis here rather against Plato who argues in the Republic that mimesis cannot, by its very nature, produce new knowledge as all it does is reproduce existing appearances. Also the standard idea in philosophy and art history distinguishes between mimesis (pictorial representation) and other forms of representation, such as symbolism. Following the ‘standard’ view, Courbet would be an example of mimesis, but Emin is not because she does not pictorially represent her sexual partners.39 However, this is not the distinction I wish to make. I wish to distinguish between the attempt by artists to represent (be it by ‘copying’ or symbolizing) and the attempt to pursue the creation of new knowledge in other ways. Emin uses a different 99

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

language from that of Courbet in order to produce new knowledge, and Courbet, in turn, also produced new knowledge employing a new language with traditional media. Both artists experiment with medium, (self) representation and the representation of relationships and contemporaneity. Both of these artworks work because of the interplay between medium and the subject, the context, the knowledge that the artist had when executing the work of what went before and how these are handled, among other things. Historically, according to Abrams, the mimetic was followed by a period of art orientated towards a pragmatic or didactic end and he cites Sir Sidney Philip’s 1580 tome The Apologie for Poetry in substantiating this.40 Abrams writes that this pragmatic argument for the purpose of art was based in a classical knowledge of rhetoric, by which art is pressed into the service of a message and the effect art has on its audience becomes the mark of its quality. In terms of contemporary art practice, the category of pragmatic includes socially engaged and participatory art practices. In fact, the following sentence written by Abrams elucidating the sixteenthcentury theory could well be one inserted into a dialogue between Claire Bishop and Grant Kester:41 ‘Pragmatic theory’ looks at the work of art chiefly as a means to an end, an instrument for getting something done, and tends to judge its value according to its success in achieving that aim.42 Political philosopher of art, Jacques Rancière, argues against ‘political’ or critical art, understood here as equivalent to the rhetorical art of Abrams: Critical art is an art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation. This schema, very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes: first, the production of a sensory form of ‘strangeness’; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness.43 Rancière describes how, in eliding these three processes, ‘rhetorical’ (political critical) art is done by artists in order to motivate people to act better. But people simply do not act on the knowledge they have 100

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

of injustice and Rancière argues most rhetorical art simply restates a politics that is already well known and self-evident. In short, rhetorical art restates the status quo. For this reason, rhetorical art simply doesn’t work. I look beyond the question of efficacy, whether or not an artwork works for a given audience, and instead focus on the question of the type of knowledge being produced, nuancing or making more complex that which has gone before. The knowledge created by pragmatic, didactic or rhetorical types of artworks is not to be found in the audience and whether or not they are persuaded to do, feel or think something, but elsewhere. ‘Pragmatic’ or didactic art does not create new knowledge with its aesthetics, its exemplary use of rhetorical devices as Horace or Cicero might have it, but instead new knowledge is formed in the relationship between the work and a history of artistic making. The artwork that works builds on previous established ways of making art, taking them further, into new or more nuanced terrain. Zanele Muholi’s 2018 self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama might be considered an example of this. It reflects on, and is in dialogue with, Cindy Sherman’s bank of theatrical and selfconscious self-portraits from the 1970s, a history of portraiture of both painting and photography, using self-consciously the medium of black and white photography, and drawing out the qualities of the material. It is a powerful interrogation of black, both in its colour literal sense and its metaphorical, race-inflected sense. While its success as new knowledge-formation could be framed in terms of rhetoric, this would be to limit its achievement, not going far enough in describing what Muholi has achieved with her incredibly powerful work. Nevertheless, I cite it here as an example of what might be understood as the genuine achievements of art in the pragmatic, didactic tradition. It seems much easier to ascertain where innovation and new knowledge lie in art in the formalist tradition, the third category. Lucien Freud’s portraits build on a history of formalist representational painting and are in dialogue with the hyperempirical experiments of his younger contemporary Ewan Uglow. Orlan’s The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990 onwards) and Eduardo Kac’s Alba Rabbit (2000) also build on formalist art experimentation and creating new knowledge in the formalist 101

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

tradition, albeit interrogating the question of representation with the wholly untraditional media of plastic surgery (Orlan) and gene splicing (Kac). I use Abrams’s categories because they are a useful way of dividing the various types of contemporary art practice into potential knowledge areas. The categories are useful for framing the type of knowledge that an art practice might produce. It would be unjust and misleading to judge an artwork in formal terms, if it is a rhetorical artwork and vice versa, for example. If in attempting to ascertain whether Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 2005 installation at the Serpentine Gallery, London A New York Apartment Reconstructed did in fact contribute to the discipline of art, creating more complex and nuanced stories, narratives or knowledge than had existed previously, we might judge it employing the same criteria as that used to understand the contribution of Chris Ofili’s mixed media painting No Woman No Cry (1998). However, if we judge either by employing the wrong category, we might say one contributed nothing whereas the other produced new understanding, a more nuanced knowledge within the field. If we see No Woman No Cry in the expressive tradition, for example, and A New York Apartment Reconstructed in the rhetorical, we can see that Ofili has added something substantial to the language, grammar of art made in the expressive tradition. A New York Apartment Reconstructed doesn’t. But if we judge it in the rhetorical category, a fair comparison might be made with the Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama series. Others might instead argue that A New York Apartment Reconstructed is transgressive and builds not on the knowledge formed within the rhetorical tradition but on transgressive works such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965). These are not hard and fast categories, but potential ways of appreciating art as knowledge-forming. Just as in any other knowledge-forming discipline, there are various modes and routes to new knowledge, and a discipline requires the flexibility to include them all, while still maintaining the difference between good and bad examples, and whether practices form part of the discipline in the first place. While each of these artworks has added to knowledge, arguably, only a few have been part of paradigmatic knowledge shifts and, most often, those are shifts afforded by technological innovation. 102

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

Technological innovation similarly pushes scientific knowledge in new directions. The 1920 and 1930s saw developments in the microscope that sustained parallel pushes in both scientific and artistic knowledge.44 Paradigmatic shifts in how art itself was conceived occurred in the 1960s and 1970s when live art and participatory practices became new languages and methods to explore traditional questions of representation. In every field of knowledge-formation, a discipline is progressed towards specific notions of truth, by nuancing or making more complex what has gone before, and more rarely by initiating and participating in a paradigmatic shift. Art is no different from any other knowledgeforming discipline when understood in these terms. Like all other knowledge-forming disciplines, art follows rules or methods and builds on previous achievements. As with other disciplines, art may have pretenders that claim to follow the rules of art, but if these practitioners don’t adhere to the relationship between art methods and truth, they are not creating art, but something else. For Wittgenstein art is, and must be, untranslatable or irreducible into words. Both ethics and aesthetics are ‘transcendental’ of language, in that both may be recognized on encounter but neither can be reduced to, or encapsulated by, words. In arguing for understanding art as a knowledge-forming discipline, I do not reduce art into words. I am simply attempting to demonstrate that the discipline of art produces new, more complex, more nuanced work that builds on predecessors’ work and thereby demonstrates the hallmarks of disciplinary knowledge. Art knowledge and truth I have not yet described the type of knowledge that art produces, only how that knowledge may be understood to have been produced. Philosopher Clive Cazeaux describes the relationship in art-making between materiality, metaphor and knowledge. Writing that art is ‘always already active in the concepts that construct knowledge’,45 he is one of the few non-practitioners to consider the question of the type of knowledge that art may be said to produce. Similar to Tim Ingold, Cazeaux notes that the relationship between artist 103

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

and material is far from a simple act of domination or mastery as is sometimes imagined by non-practitioners. But Cazeaux notes that ‘the action of moving properties from one domain to another, normally attributed to metaphor, functions here as an ontological structure, as something that affects our understanding of how properties are attached to objects in the world’.46 Metaphor, he writes, is widely regarded to be a generator of knowledge. In its capacity for metaphor generation art produces knowledge. Going beyond the embodied knowledge of craft described by Ingold, Cazeaux describes how art creates new disciplinary knowledge in the world. Emphasizing the metaphoricity of material would turn material practice into what could be described as an ‘interconceptual’ epistemology: the transformation of material in the interests of revisions to concepts and their boundaries. … Artworks are all too easily reduced to objects with properties, rather than being recognized as sites of materially induced conceptual collision and demand. The shift in perception needs to be from representational to relational or ecological.47 The interconceptual potential for art as knowledge formation lies not only in its metaphoricity, but in its orientation towards truthseeking. If this weren’t the case, then art would simply work as commodities in a fully converged market, as endless variations on the same basic matrix. (See ‘Corporate Censorship’ in this book for further explication of this idea.) Art avoids its simple objectification and commodification by a pursuance of truth in the process of knowledge formation. Cazeaux cites Adorno in describing what may be meant by truth. Although artistic intention has an aim or an intention, it will be formed of ideas and manifest through media whose meaningfulness is drawn from historical and cultural contexts that can be never identical with, or entirely in the service of, that intention. In other words, any expression will include the soil and sediment that allowed it to arise in the first place. However, it is precisely because expression is constituted by sedimentary fragments with their own refractory power that art is true.48 104

ART: A KNOWLED GE FORMING DISCIPLINE

The idea of knowledge in art and art’s relationship to truth may be contested, however, criticality remains central to much art practice, and criticality requires an orientation towards some form of truth. Otherwise, criticality becomes mere nit-picking. Criticality remains an uncontested value in contemporary art practice, even when many critical artists are ambivalent about the concept of truth. Critical art practice involves reflexivity, an understanding of the self in relationship to the production of knowledge, and truthseeking within art involves critique, the ability to question the paradigm in which one is working, without this simply collapsing into relativism. This type of critical truth-seeking is shared with many of the social sciences and much of the humanities. Concluding My argument is that art can be knowledge-forming irrespective of whether it is made independently in a studio or made in the context of university research. But the type of art made in the context of university research programmes must be different from that made in the studio. The reason I argue this is in order to drive forward a distinction between the type of art produced and supported between the newly converged public–private mainstream art world and the university systems, with their own neoliberal pressures and compromises. There has been a growing convergence in the range and type of art shown in all spaces that exhibit art since the turn of the millennium both globally and in the UK. While the art world has the appearance of pluralism, the range of contemporary art practices from live art and socially engaged to photography and online to painting, sculpture and installation masks the fact that the same artists are shown all over the world, and there is in reality a narrow range of aesthetics and concerns that are privileged within the mainstream part of the globalized art world. The mainstream art world has been risk-averse since big money got involved around the turn of the millennium as Matthew Slotover, of Frieze magazine and the art fair once commented.49 Where once there was public funding for niche and specialist art spaces showing the types of 105

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

art practices that the commercially orientated part of the art world avoided, today a mostly homogeneous range of art is seen in all types of spaces everywhere, with few notable exceptions, such as 198 Gallery in Brixton, and Autograph BP in Shoreditch, London. Economist Jean Gadrey argues that plurality is guaranteed only by a plurality of systems of support, which today includes the market, the state and academia. Any monopolistic authority will succeed in reducing plurality and diversity.50 For this reason I would urge universities to foster a type of art practice in their teaching staff and researchers (not in students who require exposure to the full diversity that art can be) in order to embody, to strengthen, an other paradigm, in addition to the neoliberal norms of the art world outside the university.

106

5 Corporate censorship This was commissioned as a chapter in 2012 by Róisín Kennedy and Riann Coulter in response to the session they convened on censorship for the Association of Art Historians conference, hosted by the Royal College of Art, London in 2012. ‘Corporate Censorship’ was first published in Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork, editors Róisín Kennedy and Riann Coulter (I.B. Tauris, 2019). Not only is corporate censorship bad for art, but corporate censorship has a profoundly corrosive impact on wider society and democracy. This chapter describes the specific pressures that have occurred in London over the past decades, advancing a trend in censorship and self-censorship. Some may cite the wide variety of art produced and readily available, taking this as evidence of artistic freedom and therefore a lack of institutional – or pervasive – censorship; however, the seeming variety is misleading. Two events belie any grounds for complacency. The first is the London conference on censorship in the arts organized in 2013 by Index on Censorship, an international organization founded in 1972 to promote and defend the right to freedom of expression. The second is the launch of the Museums Association’s new Code of Ethics in 2015 to tackle issues of ‘undue influence’. At the launch of the new Code of Ethics, Sally Yerkovich, director of the Institute of Museum Ethics, warned delegates of the increasingly pernicious role played by private funders in guiding curatorial practice and even exhibition content. This chapter also describes what is not censorship. There are a few aspects of the art world sometimes mistaken for

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

censorship but which strictly aren’t, for example, the ordinary operations of the art world to police its boundaries – creating orthodoxies, centres, margins and exclusions. This is not censorship but how any discipline operates. Another form of exclusion that is not true censorship, even though it has been described as such in the Index on Censorship Report, can be more accurately described as institutional bias, the prejudices that create exclusion on the grounds of sexism, racism and class (etc.). When these biases become systemic in institutions, exclusions that are over and above the strictly disciplinary also emerge. However, these are not instances of censorship either. A final area of confusion is the operation of the art market – any market – with its inherent tendency towards convergence, homogenization and the elimination of competition. Markets disinvest from competing starting points in order to consolidate gains and subsequently destroy radical alternatives. This too is sometimes described as censorship, but it isn’t. However, incidents of actual censorship are increasing, and especially self-censorship, with the internalization of neoliberal values by artists and others in the art world. It is important to understand what is censorship because censorship has a profoundly corrosive impact on wider society and democracy. Corporate censorship Not only is corporate censorship bad for art, but it has a profoundly corrosive impact on wider society and democracy.1 All the acts of censorship and self-censorship I will describe here relate to the London contemporary art world. I have avoided cherry-picking examples from across the globe because, while both neoliberalism and censorship are global phenomena, they occur differently in different places and it would be inaccurate to imply global homogeneity. This chapter is about the specific pressures that have occurred in London over the past decades, advancing a trend in censorship and self-censorship. In order to 108

C ORPOR ATE CENSORSHIP

provide insight for the London context, I cite an ethnography of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. By its inclusion, I do not wish to convey a sense that the contexts of the United States and UK are the same, only that the insights of its author are relevant more broadly. Those who are fond of the London contemporary art world may argue against the idea of a growing culture of censorship. They may argue there has never been so wide a variety of art produced and readily available, taking this as evidence of artistic freedom and therefore a lack of institutional or pervasive censorship. Belying any grounds for complacency are two recent events. The first is the London conference on censorship in the arts organized in 2013 by Index on Censorship, an international organization founded in 1972 to promote and defend the right to freedom of expression.2 The second is the launch of the Museums Association’s new Code of Ethics in 2015 to tackle issues of ‘undue influence’.3 At the launch of the new Code of Ethics, Sally Yerkovich, director of the Institute of Museum Ethics, warned delegates of the increasingly pernicious role played by private funders in guiding curatorial practice and even exhibition content.4 Corporate censorship, and the self-censorship some forms of corporate sponsorship engenders, is a growing problem. Yet, aside from these two examples, it remains little discussed within the art or museum worlds, with one notable exception: there has been heightened visibility around the role of oil companies in sponsoring arts and cultural institutions since the sustained actions of the Art Not Oil coalition (see below).5 Generally, though, silence about the pervasiveness of self-censorship in the London art world remains the key note while, paradoxically, we also champion freedom of expression, as the press coverage around Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei amply demonstrates.6 Perhaps illustrating the pervasiveness of self-censorship in the London art world is the fact that very few of the 300 colleagues I contacted to obtain examples from personal experience of censorship and self-censorship responded.7 While there may be numerous reasons why a person doesn’t respond to a question sent by a colleague and friend, included in my email list were those I knew to have been subject to censorship, who have since gone on 109

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

to elevated positions in the art world and who had discussed this openly and with anger at the time. Institutional self-censorship may be inescapable in our current neoliberal climate, as ethnographer Matti Bunzl concludes: The task of the curator continues to evolve. No longer centered on the quest for the new, challenging, and difficult, it has become a position of managerial mediation. Success, in this context, comes from the ability to domesticate contemporary art in ways that make it amenable to maximum audience engagement and donor involvement. The curator of the moment, in other words, is someone who can readily execute populist shows without losing conceptual credibility, reconcile institution and market without seeming a sell-out, and build exhibitions around patron’s collections without being too obvious about it.8 Not censorship but something else: The art world Before I describe corporate censorship, I will first describe what is not censorship but something else instead. The ordinary operations of the art world to police its boundaries – creating orthodoxies, centres, margins and exclusions – may be felt as censorship, but it is not. These ordinary normative art world practices have been described by philosophers since the 1960s as the ‘institutional definition of art’.9 While Arthur Danto is the more famous proponent of the institutional definition of art, it is George Dickie who takes his ideas further and, I believe, onto more accurate ground. I describe this more fully elsewhere,10 but in short George Dickie argues that a thing becomes art because the art world deems one thing to be art and another not art.11 This process happens in a largely unconscious way and it happens collectively. No one individual determines whether a thing is art and another is not art, though some individuals are better placed than others within existing art world structures to exert this power of inclusion and exclusion. Building on Dickie’s understanding, I argue that the work artists do in defining art is comparable to the work that scientists do to define science. This is an important point in terms of censorship. 110

C ORPOR ATE CENSORSHIP

By comparison, scientists not only do science but they define what is science and scientific method through that process. What they include as science (both scientific fact and appropriate methods for creating scientific fact) determines what is science for wider society. That there are social processes at work in the formation of knowledge in the laboratory was demonstrated in the ethnography of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar,12 and it is comparable to the social process in defining art described by Dickie. Art, like science, proceeds via social processes. This is an idea of disciplinarity supported by historian of science, G.E.R. Lloyd.13 Because all forms of knowledge are ultimately created through social processes, all disciplines have processes subject to the vagaries of fashion and exclusion, he argues, and all disciplines are subject to orthodoxies and to periodic revolution. This includes both science and art. If some things are art, other things are not art. This is true whether or not artists acknowledge their participation in the process of exclusion. In addition to exclusions produced as a consequence of the ordinary operation of the art world, there is another form of exclusion that is not true censorship, even though it has been described as such in the Index on Censorship 2013 report. This type of exclusion can be described as institutional bias. Prejudice or biases that create exclusions include sexism, racism and class exclusion, to name a few. When these biases emerge as systemic in institutions, exclusions that are over and above the strictly disciplinary also emerge. The Index on Censorship conference provides a few examples of this form of bias exclusion. Kenan Malik, for example, observes an art world tendency to homogenize minority communities, thereby creating significant obstacles for artists coming from ethnic minorities who may not conform to the idea of what is acceptable or expected by the mainstream. Jeanette Bain-Burnett, artistic director of the Association for Dance of the African Diaspora, describes a deepseated prejudice in the UK that limits the range of work that minority ethnic artists are able to produce, based on specific yet unspoken expectations – that ‘artists critiquing their own minority communities were more likely to get their work produced than artists critiquing the mainstream [or] challenging misconceptions’.14 111

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

While the Index on Censorship reports these forms of bias as censorship, it is important to make a distinction between true censorship and the type of exclusion that occurs based on prejudice. The exclusions Bain-Burnett and Malik describe are not exclusions made on the basis of art values. They are instances of institutional racism and the (largely unconscious) perpetuation of the dominance of white, often male, voices at the expense of others. It goes without saying that institutional racism and other institutional bias inherently impoverish art. That institutional bias denies access to, and representation of, some types of art and artist also undermines art its potential as a democratic form. Not censorship but something else: The market In addition to the operation of the art world to define art, and the operation of the art world to exclude by dint of ethnicity or gender prejudice, the market also creates its own exclusions. These too are not censorship, despite arguments to the contrary. Current prevailing ideology assumes that markets are the best, most efficient and most appropriate means of providing for everything in society, including what used to be called public goods (those goods and services that provide for public welfare, such as sanitation, electricity, health, education). This ideology is called neoliberalism and it is an extreme variant of capitalism.15 It is a tenet of neoliberalism that markets are the only way to arbitrate correctly as to the value of a thing. Good or useful things do well in a market. Conversely, it is believed that only if something is bad or useless, it will fail in a market system. Within neoliberal capitalism, the state should never prop up any form of production that has no market. Arguing against this assumption but from a pro-market perspective is Jean Gadrey, a French economist, who states: Markets [have an] inability to create, on a commercial basis, all the intellectual, cultural and social conditions for economic and social development of sufficient quality and variety to be sustainable. Markets are powerful and flexible and can offer 112

C ORPOR ATE CENSORSHIP

freedom in the short term, however, they are reductive, since they need to stabilise the identity of their objects, of their agents and of the framework within which their reckonings take place.16 In other words, markets have their own inherent processes of exclusion. They characteristically kill off competition so that only limited, constrained options are left, on which a rational competitive market can be based. A process of ‘rationalization’ occurs in markets when valuing commodities, including art. Markets disable other options or wider diversity by dis-investing from other starting points and subsequently destroy radical alternatives.17 Reduction in diversity is the product of how markets operate. It is not censorship. A single corporation or business may dis-invest and a market’s support for a narrow range of all the available options may create a distortion. Those who support ‘midlist’ authors against Amazon’s ‘censorship’ alert us to the distortions of the market, but they are wrong to name it censorship.18 It is not censorship. It is what markets do. Because any monopolistic authority will reduce diversity, including markets, Gadrey argues for a balance and variety of systems to ensure a diversity of innovation. He argues that the market, the state or academia will all succeed equally in reducing plurality and diversity, the bedrock of innovation, if allowed to become monopolistic authorities. For diversity to thrive, Gadrey’s argument is that we need a diversity of systems. At one time, the London art world could boast such a diversity of systems. Prior to the New Labour government (1997–2010) which introduced the ‘mixed economy’ or public–private partnerships, governments of all hues maintained an ‘arm’s length’ policy towards arts funding and a wide range of art and artists were supported.19 Indeed, publicly funded art tended to be different from that which was championed by the market. By the late 1980s and early 1990s different artists from a wider variety of backgrounds were shown in publicly funded galleries than were shown in commercial galleries. The public and the private were two distinct models of support for art, and different opportunities were afforded through the different systems. In general, the commercial system fostered the talents of white men, usually of a similar class background to the patrons, 113

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

and public funding directly to artists, artist-led organizations and to ‘alternative’ galleries supported both white men and everyone else as well, including those doing the most challenging of art practices, and those who took a counter-cultural and dissident view of art and society.20 Once it became a requirement for museums and galleries to develop relationships with corporate sponsors and individual patrons, and to achieve ‘self-generated income’, in order to receive state funding, homogenization of the London art world became the, perhaps unintended, consequence of policies for the arts and culture in the new millennium. This policy-led convergence in models of support was further exacerbated by the increasing dominance of one patron during the 1990s, namely Charles Saatchi, and adding to the drift towards homogeneity, the new millennium saw a dramatic increase in property prices. Subsequent development closed down the informal structures that support artists, including the end of London studios, artist-led spaces and workshops. As we might expect from a fully converged market, with the new millennium there is little or no difference in the range of artists seen in publicly funded spaces as compared with commercial spaces. Jack Vettriano’s highly commercial paintings were appreciated at Kelvingrove Museum, a publicly funded national museum in Glasgow in 2013. By contrast, the commercial gallery Hauser and Wirth hosted Christoph Büchel’s powerful political interventioninstallation in 2007, Simply Botiful: a squalid factory and impoverished apartment staged on Cheshire Street, East London. Again, this may appear as diversity to some. As the commercial sector supports the type of work previously only seen in noncommercial, publicly funded art venues, publicly funded spaces host the highly commercial. But a wide diversity of voices, positions and subtleties are sidelined in the homogeneously mixed economy model, including the widest range of those from non-white, nondominant cultures and many types of women’s voice.21 It was this level of diversity that had been supported in previous times through the distinct, and also sometimes overlapping, models of support that existed in London during the latter half of the twentieth century. Both the operation of a discipline to include and exclude and the operation of a market to narrow and limit genuine diversity are 114

C ORPOR ATE CENSORSHIP

fundamentally different from censorship. The London art world may be institutionally biased, as described above, notwithstanding leagues of liberals attesting the opposite, but to understand censorship we need to disentangle confounders like racism and sexism from the operation of censorship and self-censorship. The operation of a market to limit and withdraw support has also been mistakenly called censorship. Indeed, markets can and do limit and withdraw support on the grounds of racist and sexist assumptions as well as the ‘purely economic’. Again, this is not censorship and, while contemptible, mistaking these exclusions for censorship do not add to our understanding. (Corporate) censorship Corporate censorship exists in at least three forms. The first, and most rare, is when a corporation acts in a way reminiscent of egregious state censorship and the censorship exercised by private patrons.22 It is when an artwork or exhibition is altered, dismantled, covered, cancelled or destroyed as a result of direct interference by a corporation. The second form is when an art institution anticipates a negative reaction from a corporate sponsor and so, assuming this will be the case, self-censors. The third is when an art organization or individual artist, in protecting an image or brand, self-censors. There are a number of examples over the last twenty years of direct corporate censorship, that is, when an artwork or exhibition is directly altered or threatened with alteration, dismantled or deleted because of corporate intervention. These acts of censorship range from the modest to the flagrant, although modest acts of censorship are far more common. One modest attempt at censorship occurred when the global luxury fashion company, Louis Vuitton (LVMH), aligned their brand with the London art college, Central St Martins, over ten years ago. Louis Vuitton had sponsored various events at the art school and lent their name to the students’ lecture hall (now called the LVMH lecture room).23 Despite choosing to ally themselves with the creativity and freedom associated with art students, they requested that a section of online content be deleted from 115

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

the Central St Martins website in 2012. It featured a project that included a general discussion about the role of corporate sponsorship at Central St Martins.24 Their request was refused. Unlike the response to Louis Vuitton, elsewhere small-scale corporate interventions have been met with little or no resistance. When BP demanded that the youth programme of Tate Britain’s education department be renamed to one more in-keeping with their brand image, Tate Britain capitulated. Instead of using the name the young people themselves had chosen, the programme was renamed, ‘Loud’. Apparently, the word was more innocuous and family-friendly than the choice the young people had made.25 My informant understood the decision as a clear case of corporate censorship. Discussing the incident with someone else who had been the head of education at the time revealed another reaction altogether. For the head of education the decision seemed uncomplicated and ‘business-as-usual’.26 This echoes Bunzl’s observations about operations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in which curators and educators alter, however slightly, their programme of work in order to accommodate the real or imaginary whims of corporate donors. A similar process of institutional corporate censorship also appears to have occurred when Peter Kennard exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 1997. He was dissuaded from pursuing a commission to make work for the deck chairs around the gallery on the grounds that it might be censored. Having been invited to apply to produce artwork for the gallery, Kennard received a letter with the following: I fear that this project may not be the best place for an overtly political artist. The indication was that ‘controversial’ work may be at risk of censorship and I feel it would be unfair to ask you to invest in the project when this is a possible outcome.27 Kennard, whose artwork is found in national collections including Tate, has seen a number of instances of direct corporate censorship at its most flagrant. These include the occasion on 15 July 1985, when one image in the exhibition, Peter Kennard: Images against War 1965–1985, at Barbican Arts Centre, was censored by the gallery director, Henry Wrong, because, according to Kennard, the Chilean finance minister at the time was coming 116

C ORPOR ATE CENSORSHIP

to talk to British bankers at the venue and might happen upon his work.28 More recently, in November 2003 his Peace on Earth image, which was to be projected on Trinity House in the City of London at Christmas time, was censored by Orange (now EE) and never shown.29 Institutional self-censorship is far more common than direct intervention and occurs in anticipation of censure, opprobrium or difficulty with the corporate sponsor. I was subject to this form of corporate self-censorship working for Tate Modern in the Interpretation and Education department. Writing the ‘Teacher’s Kit’ for the exhibition ‘Century City’ (1 February–29 April 2001), sponsored by CGNU plc, I contextualized the experimental largescale temporary exhibition within a background of debate on the impact of globalization. My tone was ambivalent, including both positive and negative impacts. On publication ambivalence was altered to an unequivocally positive account of the impact of globalization. I received no forewarning of the change; yet, my name remained as sole author of the publication. Shortly after the exhibition, CGNU carried out a successful merger to become the transnational global corporation Aviva. More flagrantly, in 2005, South Bank Centre (SBC) cancelled a programme of events commissioned by the Hayward Gallery’s education department which sought to critique the role of corporate sponsorship in the arts. The reason given for the cancellation of a programme of live events and the new Pankof Bank commission was fear of alienating its corporate partners and particularly Starbucks, who held a franchise at the time. The Pankof Bank commission, ‘Another Waste of Space’, was to be a temporary structure occupying part of the car park and connected by a lift from Starbucks café and the Dan Graham ‘Interaction Space’ above it. A series of events on the work of Georges Bataille was programmed for the temporary structure and the space was to boast a traditional ‘greasy spoon’ cafe run by restauranteurs recently evicted as part of Southwark’s regeneration project. ‘Another Waste of Space’ is an example of institutional critique, which, even within the walls of the establishment art world, has a history reaching back to the 1960s.30 While censorship has periodically dogged the heels of artists who work in this vein – 117

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

and Hans Haacke is the most famous example of this – it is also worth noting that the approach is much vaunted. A number of high-profile artists working today, including for example Andrea Fraser, have a body of work that operates within that history. After all, institutional critique demonstrates the art world’s commitment to freedom of expression. Nevertheless, this freedom does not apply to all artists equally. On three different occasions in 2007, 2008 and 2011, SBC censored Platform, an art-activist organization devoted to campaigning on the social, economic and environmental impacts of the global oil industry.31 Shell oil is a large corporate sponsor of SBC then and now. A comparable act of corporate (self)-censorship occurred in 2009 when John Jordan was invited to lead a workshop about art and activism at the request of the education department of Tate Modern. Attempts were made subsequently to censor the content of the workshop in order to protect oil company BP. An email was sent to him, saying: Ultimately, it is also important to be aware that we cannot host any activism directed against Tate and its sponsors, however we very much welcome and encourage a debate and reflection on the relationship between art and activism.32 In agreement with Amber Hickey, who offered the invitation on Tate’s behalf in the first place,33 instead of proceeding with a general workshop on art and activism, Jordan chose to read the email to the workshop participants and let them decide on a course of action. According to him, the group had been mixed in their politics and variously positioned regarding questions of art and activism, but it was decided unanimously to act against the blatant attempt at censoring the artist and the subject of the workshop.34 Liberate Tate was formed as a consequence with the aim of ‘freeing art from oil’.35 They had an initial and primary focus on Tate ending its sponsorship deal with BP and, in the end, Liberate Tate succeeded in this aim. In March 2016, BP announced the end of its sponsorship of Tate from 2017, although equivocations are given as to the reasons behind this decision.36 Liberate Tate is one of the organizations that forms the Art Not Oil coalition, whose ambitions extend to all other arts recipients of 118

C ORPOR ATE CENSORSHIP

oil sponsorship. The work of Art Not Oil brings to light the various impacts and compromises surrounding oil sponsorship and proves that creative action can effect change. Not only have BP pulled out of sponsoring Tate, but their ‘undue influence’ was investigated by the Museums Association.37 According to The Guardian newspaper, in addition, there is evidence that BP put pressure on the institutions to investigate employees for specific Trade Union membership with regard to their political and ecological views. (It is illegal to interfere with a worker’s right to membership of a Trade Union or to interfere with a worker’s right to affiliate with any particular politics.38) In 2002, Chin Tao Wu provided the art world with a rigorous and detailed analysis of the impact of a wider range of corporations on the arts since the 1980s.39 Unfortunately, the impact of her work and those academics following her has been confined to the ivory tower. Consequent of BP’s exposure to media and public scrutiny by the work of the artist-activists, corporate sponsorship in general began to attract media scrutiny, although it remains to be seen whether there is any lasting impact.40 Direct censorship continues at Tate. Tate continues to refuse to answer a FoI request enquiring about the level of sponsorship by BP since 2006, despite losing their first battle in the courts and being required to disclose the sponsorship arrangements with Tate until 2006. After protracted recalcitrance on the part of Tate to comply with the rules of FoI, they were taken to court and lost. At the close of 2014, Tate begrudgingly disclosed the moderate amount donated by BP in return for high visibility branding.41 While refusing to answer a FoI request can be seen as a form of censorship, Tate’s response to later actions by Liberate Tate was not, however much they are felt to be censorship by Liberate Tate. Unsanctioned art interventions happen periodically at Tate by various artists, and, as with any unsanctioned art in the gallery, attempts are made to erase, transfer or distract audience attention away from it. This is as true of Liberate Tate as it is of any other artist or group. From their earliest performance interventions, for example, Licence to Spill (2010) until the final ones including Birthmark (2015) and Time Piece (2015), Tate’s strategy was to limit audience exposure to the work, not to stop or prevent the art-action.42 They are not instances of censorship. 119

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Figure 7  Suzanne van Rossenberg, Distinguishing between Art and Art Censorship (2019). Digital image.

The self-censoring artist What is new in the context of neoliberalism is the type of selfcensorship that artists, ourselves, are choosing to enact. Our avantgarde predecessors, fuelled by Romantic notions of genius and supported in their endeavours by various models of support and self-support, seem to have been cowed only by the most totalitarian of regimes.43 By contrast, in the UK in the first decades of the 120

C ORPOR ATE CENSORSHIP

twenty-first century there is accumulating evidence that artists prioritize exogenous pressures like markets, audiences and ‘careers’ over endogenous art values.44 This trade-off may be reasonable for the art institution. As Bunzl concludes, censorship and selfcensorship may be understood as ‘a set of strategies devised to persist during a particular economic and cultural moment’,45 but it is highly corrosive of both art itself and democratic values when individual artists choose to self-censor. I will argue that, as distinct from the action of the institution, the fact that artists self-censor, bowing under the pressures of a neoliberal market, is not only largely unobserved and normalized, but dangerous both for wider society and for art. Artist Sophie Hope’s doctoral research, Participating in the Wrong Way? Practice Based Research into Cultural Democracy and the Commissioning of Art to Effect Social Change (2006–2010), tracked instances of selfcensorship in the UK art world. Her work makes it evident that selfcensorship has become part of the working practice of UK artists, including, and perhaps especially, those with radically progressive political agendas.46 Self-censorship is understood here as the choice to alter an artwork fundamentally from its original conception to one that is more palatable to institutions or funders. With the internalization of neoliberal values, UK artists find it acceptable, or part of the professionalization of their practice, to self-censor in these terms, altering artworks in order to make them more palatable to commissioners, exhibitions and funders. This marks a distinct change from past artistic norms, values and practices. In a similar process, artists conspicuously ‘hone their brand’, expelling extraneous concerns, ethics or aesthetic elaboration in order to create a brand more readily consumed within the market. Hope’s interviews were presented anonymously. The interviews themselves were performed with animal masks worn by informants. Most of the interviewees requested anonymity before they would speak, hence the use of masks. According to Hope, only one person was happy to be named and understood that it was important to stand by their remarks. The overwhelming choice was to participate in the research project anonymously, demonstrating a tendency to avoid thinking through ideas of representation and politics, despite an avowed progressive or radical agenda and a passing 121

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

acquaintance with the ideas of Mouffe and Arendt.47 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe more fully the problematics of anonymity in the constitution of the social realm. Suffice to say, the argument here is that anonymity fundamentally undermines the condition for plurality. The actor becomes potent, according to Arendt, only when ‘he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do’.48 When I was asked to write a piece critiquing the London art world of 2013 anonymously for Artquest’s series of pamphlets, I accepted on the proviso that my work would be published under my own name and not anonymously. This was refused; I assume because it would have thrown into relief the anonymity of other contributors. I then suggested that I contribute a piece about anonymity in the art world and, for reasons of irony, contribute that anonymously. This offer was also rejected and, as we had reached an impasse, the offer to publish any criticism of the London art world was withdrawn.49 While this may be an example of poor curating, considering the esteemed history of institutional critique, it is not an example of censorship. However, as with Sophie Hope’s informants, the Artquest Pamphlets demonstrate a growing complacency, even normativity, around anonymity. Self-censorship undermines art’s vital role within a democracy; so too trends, established in the wider world, to accept unthinkingly norms for cultural participation, such as anonymity and measuring achievement in terms of website hits and sales figures. Internalizing neoliberal norms, including the desirability for smoothing a career trajectory by self-censoring, impoverishes art and the definition of art. It severs the potential for art as truth. I have argued above briefly and elsewhere in more depth50 that artists not only make art but also define what is art, collectively and often unconsciously, just as scientists both do science and define what are science and its methods. So the rules by which we, artists, make art are of fundamental importance. It is fundamentally important not simply because what we do is the act of an individual but because we, collectively, define art, setting the parameters for art and, ultimately, defining what is art for society as a whole. If artists working within the discipline of art self-censor, the methods of 122

C ORPOR ATE CENSORSHIP

self-censorship become the methods of art, unless or until the community of artists, the art world, denounce the practice. This is comparable to when a scientist falsifies results or dilutes scientific method in order to achieve a desirable outcome. In that case, the scientist is deemed to be acting non-scientifically and expelled from the scientific community, or if the science community fails in their role of policing appropriate methods, science itself is altered fundamentally to incorporate such methods.51 Self-censorship also undermines art’s vital role in society. I have argued elsewhere at length that the role and value of art in society are to create the public realm or to create ‘dissensus’ as Jacques Rancière expresses it.52 The public realm is the space for the establishment of our public identities, for the recognition of a common reality and for the assessment of the actions of others. It is in the public realm that democracy is instantiated and reiterated. Democracy is made possible, or otherwise, by action in public as Arendt argues.53 Because art enacts plurality, diversity, the alterity that baffles simple categorization and hierarchies (Rancière’s ‘dissensus’), art is constitutive of democracy. The vital social role of art in society is to instantiate freedom and plurality within the public realm. When we censor ourselves we undermine this social role. We undermine the enactment and the possibility of plurality: ‘This plurality [which] is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life.’54 When we self-censor, we fail to instantiate the plurality that is the very condition of democracy. As artists, we collectively define art. Those who self-censor are defining art within neoliberal values and reneging on our preexisting commitment to drive art towards understanding and truth (however contested), towards instantiating plurality and freedom, in other words, democracy. On the one hand, it is democratic values that are at stake and, on the other, it is the value of truth. Artists both make art and define what is art. We define art in what we do and in what we accept are the rules for making art. Every artist who self-censors for the sake of their brand image or for their career defines art in those terms. There is much at stake when we fail to recognize or normalize corporate censorship.

123

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Figure 8 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Being an Artist #3 (2019). Digital image.

124

6 Art in society

Summary For Heidegger truth is aletheia, an uncovering, and art is ‘an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual’.1 The relationship between art and wider society was also theorized by the Frankfurt School and the writing of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno has been influential amongst artists, theorists and curators for generations. I am coming from a perspective closer to Heidegger’s, and for me, art’s role in society is something more than either to reproduce the capitalist status quo, or simply to provide a challenge to it. Because of the relationship of art to truth, I argue that art is constitutive of democracy and also essential to it. Democracy is a society built on, and enabling, the freedom and equality of all, regardless of birth or belief. Democracy is therefore predicated on plurality, on the various differences between people, alterity, being acknowledged and accommodated. Alterity must be enacted, visible in public, for democracy to thrive. This was Hannah Arendt’s point. I build on her position and argue that when art is orientated towards truth-seeking, however difficult and contested any form of truth may be, art enables and instantiates democracy. Despite much scepticism amongst artists about truth, there is, and always has been, an orientation in art towards truth. These forms of truth are explored in further detail – so too another problematic concept, aesthetics. In developing the relationship between form and content, within a history of such engagements, artists have developed the notion of the aesthetic and thereby move the discipline into new territory.

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Art is the attempt to move aesthetics somewhere else, not randomly or simply as a demonstration of prowess, intellectual or otherwise, but in a critical, reflexive response to the past in the present moment, and towards truth. For truth to be maintained as a value, truth-seekers must expose ourselves to the possibility that even our most cherished beliefs, understood mistakenly as knowledge, may be wrong. This reflexivity is essential also for democracy. Considering each as emergent of Modernity, we can see there is a profound relationship between art, truth, freedom and also democracy. Reflexivity and openness to difference in others and reflexivity in being wrong, openness to failure, enable both democracy and truth. Democracy requires openness and flexibility of mind in order to engage with otherness, with difference. It requires also an orientation towards truth while acknowledging a reality that changes. At our best, artists have the flexibility to be wrong and to fail, to engage with others in their profound alterity and to instantiate difference in public, thereby guaranteeing democracy.

Art in Society The concept of society used here in ‘Art in Society’ is Modern,2 democratic and liberal: liberal in the specific sense that each person is considered equal to every other and that each is free, however contested the balance and however fraught it can be to determine exactly what we mean by equal and free. Democracy is not only a system of voting, as is often understood, but it entails all the legal and political mechanisms that underwrite freedom and equality of all. Because we inherited the word from non-democratic and nearly democratic societies, famously from ancient Athens in which only some citizens were free and equal, this requires spelling out. The word liberal specifies the type of democracy I describe here, as one in which all are free and equal, irrespective of birth or belief. It is not the so-called democracy of Britain and elsewhere before the twentieth century, which afforded rights only (or predominately) to 126

ART IN SO CIET Y

property-owning white men. Here society is the liberal democracy imagined since the eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment values of a shared and common humanity that projects equality across genders, classes, races, religions and creeds. This type of democracy is a Modern one. Contemporary political philosopher Will Kymlicka writes that liberal democracy is an emergent property of Modernity. Unlike in former times, today and with Modernity, ‘we lead our life from the inside, in accordance with our beliefs about what gives value to life; that we be free to question those beliefs, to examine them in the light of whatever information and examples and arguments our culture can provide.’3 Modern democracy and art, in the Modern sense of the concept, share this in common. Just as democracy, in which all are equal regardless of birth or belief, is a concept and a practice born of the Modern era, so too art. The words, democracy and art, may have been applied to other things in other times, but with Modernity, democracy becomes specific and so too art. However, in the past decade, both terms have become baggy, meaning almost anything depending on who is using them, so I define my usage here and I explain why I employ that usage. I defined art earlier in this book in ‘What Is Art?’. Here I will say briefly that art is not synonymous with creativity, a term with which it is so often conflated.4 Art is also not craft, not education and not design. Art is also not science. This assertion, that art is not science, is unlikely to be challenged; yet, I do not want to reinforce the dualism that C.P. Snow describes.5 Art is not science; however, it is not the opposite of science. Just as science requires training in both skills and thinking, so too art. Art is one of many knowledgeforming disciplines that contribute to a world of knowledge and ways of seeing. While I acknowledge that art has a different culture from science, I would also say that every knowledge-forming discipline has a distinct culture, derived in part from the norms and values of that discipline. When non-artists come to my home and see the kind of artwork I have around me, they sometimes comment on the ideas. ‘That’s a good idea’, they say, when seeing a work they like. Sometimes they share an idea for an artwork they themselves would like to do at some point in the future. I explain that art does not lie in the idea. 127

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Art lies in the relationship between the idea and its realization. One of the many things that art college teaches the student-artist is that a single idea can spawn a great variety of artworks, some of which are interesting, some of which work and others that don’t. One idea can be extrapolated, extruded, examined, explored, instantiated, in a seemingly infinite varieties of ways. Art is not about having a ‘great idea’, although a good or interesting idea may be a start. Art lies in the execution of an idea, however novel or banal the originating idea. An artwork works in the realization of the concept, in the successful interplay between form (how it’s made) and content (what it’s about), even when its realization is process and not product. The artwork is the total accumulation of decisions and action: few or many, small and large, becoming: the manifestation of an idea, a line of inquiry. This relationship between form and content has been described by Peter Lamarque, an analytic philosopher.6 And Lamarque and Clive Cazeaux’s philosophical analyses of art, and the relationship of art to material, are useful here. Others have also written on this but I find theirs very illuminating from the perspective of a practising artist, in addition to aspects of Tim Ingold’s writing on craft and materiality, and Erin Manning’s use of Whiteread’s Process Philosophy. Understanding the relationship between form and content is a very useful, possibly the most generative, way for artists to understand the type of knowledge that art produces. Aesthetics Aesthetics is most often used as synonymous with beauty. The line taken since Kant is that aesthetic is the equivalent of extraordinary beauty, including in both art and nature. As a term, it was invented in the eighteenth century by a contemporary of Kant, Baumgarten. It was Baumgarten who altered the term aesthetics from something akin to ‘perception’ to mean something related to beauty. The relationship between art and aesthetics is not that both terms pertain to beauty, but instead that both terms emerged as the concepts we understand today at a similar point in time (with art first). Paul Oscar Kristeller, historian of aesthetics, 128

ART IN SO CIET Y

demonstrates that the concept of art emerged as we use it today a little before Baumgarten’s coinage and ‘[not] before the second half of the eighteenth century’.7 Despite being located at a specific historical moment, aesthetics is posited as universal, not in the sense that all cultures have an aesthetic sense, but in the sense that there is one universal aesthetic. The visual arts have a particular and special relationship with aesthetics so defined. This imagined universal aesthetic is Platonist in that symmetry, balance, proportion and harmony are posited as universally beautiful qualities. A Platonist view of aesthetics also has it that beauty and morality, ‘the good’, are inherently connected. To kalon, the Greek equivalent of beauty, means both outer aesthetic beauty and inner moral beauty and it is the qualities of proportionality, harmony and balance that connect the inner with the outer senses of to kalon. Based on this idea, experiences with the beautiful in art and nature are imagined to be morally beneficial; that art betters us. Some have even imagined that immoral people can’t make beautiful art. In this paradigm it becomes paradoxical that the Nazis can make, or enjoy, the aesthetic. But the equation of beauty with morality is a nineteenth-century Romantic spin on Plato, albeit with resonance today.8 Even philosophers of aesthetics, including Peter Lamarque, conflate aesthetics and beauty, as his concluding remarks about Conceptual Art being ‘deliberately unaesthetic’ demonstrate.9 In common with both Marxist and Postmodern deconstructionist colleagues, I have railed against the concept of aesthetics previously, and specifically against the centrality of aesthetics in defining art and its role and value in society.10 Yet, on reflection, and in considering art as a knowledge-forming discipline, I find myself compelled to see that there is indeed an integral relationship between art and aesthetics. But the aesthetics I propose is not synonymous with beauty. Nor is it the aesthetics of Romanticism or the nineteenth-century version of Plato. I define aesthetics instead as the relationship between form and content, and the aesthetic is the point at which an artwork works. So, aesthetics becomes what artists over the decades have been building on, in our attempt at discovering the point at which the artwork works, produced in a context, in relation to specific locations and histories. In art, there 129

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

is always a relationship between form and content, including in dematerialized art.11 Lamarque writes to assert this and he asserts it against one of the assumptions prevalent within the discourse of the Conceptual Art movement. Mel Bochner, one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, emphatically denied the role of materiality in conceptual art. Bochner declared: A doctrinaire Conceptualist viewpoint would say that the two relevant features of the ‘ideal Conceptual work’ would be that it have an exact linguistic correlative, that is, it could be described and experienced in its description, and that it be infinitely repeatable. It must have absolutely no ‘aura’, no uniqueness to it whatsoever.12 A work by Sol LeWitt, for example, Wall Drawing #1136 (2004), executed by technicians ad infinitum theoretically, and not by the artist himself, provides an example of this, despite being framed outside the anti-capitalist politics of the Conceptual Art movement.13 In the second half of the twentieth century, the definition, role and value of Conceptual Art were distinguished from materialist ‘capitalist’ art under the rubric of ‘dematerialization’.14 Its value was asserted specifically against painting and sculpture, which had seen increasing commodification. Addressing, not the social-political context of conceptual art, but its aesthetic claims, Lamarque argues that despite the emphasis on non-materiality: there is an inescapable visual dimension, a physical medium which acts as a vehicle for the transmission of ideas. There is even an aesthetic dimension if we allow the consonance of means to ends under this heading. … Like so many works of conceptual art there is salience in the vehicle – the sandwich board, the typeface – and perceiving the ensemble.15 As with any artwork, the materiality of the vehicle by which an artwork is conveyed is central to the question of whether or not it works as an artwork. The artwork works in the case of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1136 because of the materiality of the instructions, written and signed, and also because these instructions are 130

ART IN SO CIET Y

occasionally executed in such a way that audiences can see the product of those instructions, or algorithms if you will. It works as instructions and it works in its execution of the instructions as an artwork, if and only if its process, its art context are also known. Otherwise, the colourful lines are decoration, perhaps education or design, all of which have their uses and pleasures, but are not art. What is established in one generation is reflected on, critiqued and challenged by later generations. What was established in the 1960s and 1970s within the Conceptual Art movement is taken up later in, for example, the wall work of Kara Walker, Banksy and Mark Titchner, each in their different forms with their different emphases taken from that legacy. This is how new knowledge, greater complexity and nuance are created. In some, nuance on past knowledge is created. In others, an artwork becomes an example of how clichés are distributed, in repeating the aesthetics achieved by previous generations (that is, the point at which form and content together work). Peter Osborne, Marxist philosopher and historian of the Conceptual Art movement, has described the current ‘postconceptual’ art moment, building on Rosalind Krauss’s idea of the ‘post-medium condition’.16 Osborne’s observation is that, unlike previous art which has been understood and appreciated as exemplars of a type, contemporary art today is always specific, and it needs to be appreciated as such.17 For Osborne, art today is ‘constituted by concepts, their relations and their instantiations in practices of discrimination’.18 This is a useful and accurate description of how art works, and I would argue that it has always been thus, even when art was medium-specific. The knowledge that art produces lies in the interplay of form, content and context. With Modernity came a self-consciousness, an artistic self-consciousness including around context, medium and materiality. How this interplay becomes, or contributes to, knowledge is described by Cazeaux: The most basic decisions made by the artist will have epistemological significance because, on the epistemology of interconceptuality … all elements exist as concepts with the potential for novel expansion, including those from surrounding environmental factors to which one would not normally ascribe 131

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

agency. This applies at the start of a project, when the artist considers the territory – the ideas, the concerns, the participants or audience members, the technologies – in which they want to work, and at the end, when the work is given public form.19 Art and truth There is a truth, an honesty, in the relationship of an artist to their artwork, to the processes, materials and context that comprise that artwork, even when an artist rejects the very notion of truth. The relationship of artists towards the notion of truth has changed over time and remains fraught since Postmodern, poststructuralist thought became a touchstone. For the Romantics, art instantiated a type of truth asserted against the hyper-rationalist of the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment. Later, for the avant-garde, art contained the truth of individual experience, standpoints, within and against totalitarian and/or dehumanizing regimes of war, Nazism, Stalinism, capitalism. Since the death of the avantgarde, with memes drawn from the post-structuralist playbook, truth is relativized so totally that claims to truth are received with scepticism. However, there is an inherent relationship of art to truth. One is the idea of ‘truth to material’. It was described by Henry Moore in the early twentieth century, and ‘truth to material’ remains a guiding value in art: Each material has its own individual qualities … Stone, for example, is hard and concentrated and should not be falsified to look like soft flesh … It should keep its hard tense stoniness.20 This form of a truth to material has changed over time. It has become more nuanced and flexible; however, artists continue to consider the integrity of materials and only ‘fake it’, use artifice, if artifice is integral to the artwork. Jeff Koons provides examples of the centrality of this idea to art-making. The work Balloon Dogs (1994–2000) can be said to work because it hinges on the fact that the balloon dogs are made of aluminium instead of latex balloons, as we would expect of these types of forms, familiar from clowns and children’s parties. By contrast, Three Ball Total Equilibrium 132

ART IN SO CIET Y

Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-Off) (1985) requires another relationship with materiality for it to work as an artwork. The floating but submerged basketballs are read through the actual objects that comprise it. The artwork requires a truth to materials to read it as art. All objets trouvées from Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades onwards employ a similar dependency on truth to materials. Artists will use a urinal for its mass-manufactured porcelain materiality, or terracotta clay for its clay-ness and perhaps colour, for example, and do not substitute for fibreglass or aluminium unless the pretence, the fake, is part of the intention, to be read in the artwork. The question of truth to material is one of the fault-lines between art and the type of anthropology that employs art in its process to create anthropological truths. The value and understanding of ‘truth to material’ is foundational in art-making and it is absent in anthropology. This is noted by Jen Clarke, who straddles art practice and social anthropology, and she writes about the differences, and rifts between the two, in knowledge-creation and disciplinarity.21 Artists engage with materiality knowingly and self-consciously employing material, using the metaphors implicit in material in order to take metaphor in other directions. This, as Cazeaux describes, is how art creates knowledge. New knowledge is created in art’s play with materiality to produce metaphors. Cazeaux tracks the relationship of art to material to metaphor to knowledge in Art, Research, Philosophy. He writes that art produces: ‘a poetics of knowledge’ … where ‘poetics’ denotes the leaps between concepts that are encouraged once the material, embodied properties of an artwork are placed alongside the terms of a research question in a share network of concepts.22 Truth is essential to art in other senses as well. Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 provides an example of another form of truth. Haacke’s work only makes sense, and works as an artwork, if we believe that what the artwork states about the real-estate holdings of Shapolsky is true. Our appreciation and reading of 133

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

the artwork entirely depend on our understanding that this truth exists. The same can be said of many other types of art practice that rely on a shared understanding that such truths exist and can be excavated intact, for example, the truth that interesting women artists existed in previous generations (Judy Chicago), or that the British colonial project occurred in specific ways, in specific locations, at specific moments, in time with specific consequences (Lisa Reihana). There is another level of truth implicit in many types of practice that depend on the notion that photography is a reliable witness, an accurate form of documentation. The truth value implicit in photography is required in various artistic approaches for them to work as art. For example, the photographic documentation of Adrian Piper’s 1970s Catalysis performances is read as fair representation of performances, live art, done in 1970, or Sophie Calle’s 1980s documents of hotel life require us to understand that the representation of objects in these photographs staged by the artist is fair representation of that specific location at that specific moment in time. They are read and understood as true representation, not faked. These works work because there is a relationship with reality, the truth of that reality. And there are other types of truth that art explores, such as emotional or expressive truth, examples of which include artworks by, for example, Louis Bourgeois, Stanley Spencer and Francesca Woodman. Either psychological or spiritual, they each also work with emotional truths. However true are artworks such as 10am Is When You Come to Me (Bourgeois 2006), Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife (Spencer 1937) and Untitled, from Polka Dot Series, Providence, Rhode Island (Woodman 1976), this does not imply they are immune to reproducing clichés. An artwork can be true while also reproducing a cliché. For me – and many of my students will argue to the contrary– Woodman reproduces clichés about women’s self-portraiture, femininity and madness. The cliché is not in the subject (which cannot be clichéd because any idea is an appropriate starting point for art), but the cliché lies in the form, in how the subject is expressed and explored – the aesthetic point at which the artwork works. Clichés might 134

ART IN SO CIET Y

be emotional or they might be political, such as the vast majority of the artwork by Banksy (again I imagine furore from his many fans), with the exception of The Walled Off Hotel (2017–ongoing). The cliché might be popular and the artwork successful in terms of its market value. But, if an artwork reproduces cliché, it cannot be said to be knowledge-producing. There is no intrinsic relationship between truth and knowledge in this sense. Complexity, nuance and truth Truth functions variously across types of art practice, and it is integral to the discipline of art. Far from an inherently problematic relic of a Modernist or naïve past, many artists would argue that criticality has been fundamental to art practice since Modernity, and there is a fundamental relationship between criticality and truth. To produce knowledge, disciplines move from the known and the cliché, towards the more nuanced, the more subtle and more complex. The movement towards nuanced, more complex knowledge is, ideally, also towards truth. Distinguishing between the type of complexity produced in knowledge-producing disciplines and the type of complexity treasured by capitalism, capitalism produces endless variations on a single basic matrix23 (a point described here in ‘Corporate Censorship’, and more fully in This Is Not Art). Examples of capitalist profit-orientated complexity include the endless and slight variations of toothpaste available on the supermarket shelf and the various financial instruments based on complex mathematics that enable market expansion. Complexity for its own sake also occurs in puzzles and games. In these examples, it is a superficial complexity with no truth-value. Neither capitalist complexity nor puzzles has a relationship to truth-seeking. This contrasts with disciplinary knowledge in which variations and complexity are oriented towards truth and truth-seeking. Even those disciplines across the arts, humanities and social sciences, where the notion of truth is contested and problematized, these too are similarly truth-seeking. Postmodernism did not banish the concept of truth, although many undergraduates of the 1990s and 2000s, steeped in Postmodern orthodoxy, banished it from our 135

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

vocabularies. And we continue to shy away from the idea when teaching millennials and younger generations. Theories that became orthodoxy problematized only a specific type of truth, namely a universal, unassailable, positivist, objective truth – a specific legacy of the Enlightenment, the type of truth that underpins an objective, out-there, uncontestable form of reality. This is the type of truth that Foucault, Derrida, Haraway and Deleuze, for example, challenged for its unacknowledged capitalist, gendered, racist, Eurocentric, homophobic, class-based (etc.) bias. Their and others’ work made more complex and nuanced the way we understand socialization, language, politics and knowledge. This complexity furthered our understanding of the underpinnings of power, moving us closer to a truth about the function of knowledge, language and systems of (self-) governance. The conclusion of much-late-twentiethand twenty-first-century philosophy in both the analytic and the continental traditions, as well as physics, psychology and many other truth-seeking disciplines is that truth is not universal, objective, invariable nor immutable. We know from disciplines dealing directly with perception that perception and reality are a complicated admixture: so much so that the old-fashioned binary of objective (or empirical) and subjective is discredited in most scholarship across the board. But this does not mean that truth does not exist, that reality is merely a subjective phenomenon experienced and interpreted individually or that all statements uttered by individuals are of equal truth-value. After all, some people lie. Others state beliefs as if they are true because they believe them to be true, when they are not in fact true. Unlike faith or belief, our understanding of truth is mutable because what we understand as true may change when new, credible data, phenomena, understanding and arguments emerge. The mutability of truth is not the ‘alternative facts’ of marketing and political obfuscation, nor the type of oppression conjured by George Orwell in his novel, 1984.24 The mutability of truth is not that 2 + 2 can equal 5 instead of 4, but that we can have new views on fourness and on multiplication, gained from another non-Western culture’s mathematical systems of thought, for example.25 Complexity is what happens as a consequence of examining knowledge in the light of new data, new phenomena, 136

ART IN SO CIET Y

further examples and deeper arguments. Moreover, it is through changes in knowledge over time that we can see how knowledge is open to questioning. Totalizing regimes resist challenges to orthodoxy, suppressing and dismissing new knowledge and often withdrawing support for knowledge-production. That knowledge and truth adapt on exposure to better models, more precise data and new experience is a sign of the adaptability, flexibility and openness required for truth to emerge. There are two distinct types of truth. One has temporal longevity, meaning that there is evidence it is true in the present, and we have evidence that it was true in the past. We therefore assume it will be also true in the future. So, for example, the laws of physics have temporal longevity, in that they are true now, and deep into the past, and presumably deep into the future. Nevertheless, their truth value is also temporally constrained, in that conditions prior to the Big Bang were different, and fundamentally so, in ways we have not yet imagined. The laws of physics that governed the universe then were not the same as now. The other type of truth is much more temporally brief than the laws of physics. It is a fluid, fluctuating, context-specific truth. Research, or knowledge-seeking, predicated on the first notion of truth may seek nuances or complexities that have been overlooked or obscured until new technology emerges, truths that have not been part of knowledge until innovations occurred, such as, knowledge of the existence of atoms, microbiota, exoplanets. There is also the integration of overlooked and marginalized but notable contributions to knowledge, such as recent archaeological investigation into the invention and role of string as pivotal in human technological history, which had been overlooked by the focus on weapons and the Soviet work on phages in infectious disease control. The other type of truth-seeking focuses on noting, observing and theorizing changing conditions in the present: an ongoing process that is dynamic and continuously going on and coming about, because context and reality itself change.26 Reality is different today from what it was a hundred years ago. We currently live in a world with higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any other time since humans evolved, and our environment has 137

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

higher levels of both background and localized radioactivity.27 Not only is reality in flux, so too our perception of reality. Whether we are at war or at peace alters our perception of reality; so too our temporal proximity to any catastrophe, that is, whether it is ourselves or our grandparents who are witness to catastrophe. Technology alters reality, not only perceptions of reality. New devices exist that previously hadn’t, and these new devices inform how we use our bodies and create knowledge, which itself may create new realities. This is as true of early humans inventing new, useful shapes by flint knapping, as it is of more recent innovations such as AI and XR (extended reality). Each has wrought changes in reality, in perception of reality and in knowledge. Innovation in discursive technologies including, for example, the languages of mathematics, art and philosophy, also alters knowledge, perception and reality itself. For example, democracy has changed from what it meant in ancient Greece, Victorian Britain and for those eighteenthcentury philosophers of liberal democracy now that the value of equality and freedom is extended to a much wider section of society than was previously. In saying this I am not invoking a notion of progress, but simply stating that change happens, not only for its own sake, as occurs in evolution, because children are genetically and environmentally different from their parents, but because reality itself is fluid and not a static condition. Reality changes. Therefore, knowledge, in order to be knowledge, also changes and needs to change. Over time what may have been true in the past, even in an immediate and proximate past, may no longer be true in the present. It is not that the past truth was wrong necessarily, or that we held a mistaken belief about reality, just that truth is contingent in this sense. The conclusion of quantum physics (that there is no observer-independent existence), cognitive science (that objective empirical observation is an illusion) and anthropology’s settlement on the irreducibility of the ontology of the host culture with that of the anthropologist – as well as phenomenology’s observations about data – all conclude similarly, and counter-intuitively: a positivist, self-evident, out-there, real objective reality does not exist. We cannot now state with certainty where, in reality, reality lies. It exists. But it is elusive and unavailable even to those who 138

ART IN SO CIET Y

seek it. This doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t get closer to the truth, to reality, as we can possibly know it. Truth may be context–specific; however, context itself is not a transparent or simple term. As a discipline, anthropologists consider the question of context: theirs is a discipline of reflexivity around knowledge, the context by which that knowledge is obtained. Their reflexivity lies in considering both the culture of the observer and the observed. ‘When faced with ideas and concepts from a culture conceived as other, the anthropologist is faced with the task of rendering them within a conceptual universe that has space for them, and thus of creating that universe,’ as eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern explains.28 Because of being aware of the difficulties in describing whole frameworks of thought not found within the anthropologists’ own culture, and then teasing apart concepts and knowledge within that cultural framework in order to perceive them in the first place, anthropologists since the late twentieth century have considered the question of both context and knowledge as part of their daily work. I would argue that art operates similarly. As with anthropology’s awareness of both creating contexts and intervening deliberately into these contexts, art similarly defies a simple division between context and action. Artists who are creating new, more nuanced knowledge both create the world as it exists, describing it for themselves and for others, and attempt to create something new within that world that they describe. These artworks are then tested for their (truth) value by exposing them to fellow artists and to those from ‘other cultures’, by which I mean, non-artists. Falsifiability, truth and democracy Those interested in truth must always be open both to failure in that pursuit and to the idea that cherished beliefs may be untrue. I derive a term that encompasses this openness from Karl Popper,29 namely falsifiability, although I am aware that I use the term well beyond Popper’s own usage. I decontextualize his concept of falsifiability, wrenching it from any necessity to predict, as Popper requires, and instead I focus on a relationship between falsifiability and truth. Popper’s idea of falsifiability was meant to help distinguish between 139

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

the type of knowledge that science produces and non-science. Interestingly, it is scientists themselves who baulk at this theory. They did so at that time and also today.30 Scientists argue that, for example, in synthesizing a new polymer or attempting to find a cure for cancer, working chemists are not attempting to falsify anything, but instead they are finding a solution to a problem. This is true, most working scientists are not trying to advance knowledge in the abstract, nor are they working within the realm of the theoretical, but instead they are attempting to create new substances and processes in response to specific, defined problems. Nevertheless, they would be bad scientists indeed if they produced something new that inadvertently falsified established scientific thinking, and then overlooked or denied this new knowledge. If chemists understand their work within very small parameters, then falsifiability plays no role in their work. On the other hand, if they understand that anything they create may also create new knowledge, or it may nuance and make more complex the field in which they work, then we can see that any and all scientific work forms part of a falsifiability regime. Falsifiability plays a fundamental role in knowledge formation and when it doesn’t, the intrinsic role and value of scientific knowledge are undermined. Ultimately, scientists discredit science and undermine the value of truth-seeking more generally, when they fail to publish or to offer their results to the test of falsifiability. Experts can be wrong, believe or know things that aren’t true because of the paucity of disciplinary models, because of insufficient, partial or anomalous data, and also because it can be very difficult to surrender cherished axioms in the light of different and unexpected challenges to that knowledge. These are versions of humans failing to maintain the structures and strictures of disciplinary knowledge formation. The hope is that, despite individual failings, which are inevitable, the discipline ultimately moves collectively towards greater truth and insight into reality. Examples cited in ‘Why Discipline?’ earlier in this book demonstrate how disciplinarity maintains truth, against popular opinion and individual human failure. Here it is also worth noting what is imperilled by a system that privileges commercial values over truth. That is, the problem with industry pharmacologists not publishing their complete results due 140

ART IN SO CIET Y

to the constraints of ‘commercial sensitivity’,31 or the suppression of climate science data by Exxon scientists,32 demonstrates the way that commercial values are in tension with truth as a value. This tension between truth and the commercial also has implications for democracy because there is a fundamental relationship between truth(-seeking) and democracy. In common with other knowledge-forming disciplines, art plays a specific role in a democracy because of its relationship to truth. If truth is predicated on the idea of falsifiability, so the question is, what type of knowledge does art produce that can be falsified?

Figure 9  Suzanne van Rossenberg, Falsifying this Cartoon’s Knowledge Production (2019). Digital image. 141

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Earlier in this book, in ‘Art: A Knowledge Forming Discipline’, I describe the type of knowledge that art can be said to produce, offering Zanele Muholi’s self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama (2014–ongoing) as one example. Somnyama Ngonyama creates knowledge by reflecting on a history of self-portraiture including Cindy Sherman’s bank of theatrical and self-conscious selfportraits from the 1970s. Somnyama Ngonyama is in dialogue also with a longer history of portraiture in both paint and photography and the medium of black and white photography. In this respect it is knowledge-producing, because it produces more complex and nuanced versions of what has been made before, and it does so knowingly. The knowledge produced by art cannot falsify the knowledge produced in the past, in the way that Einstein can falsify, or nuance, Newton. However, seen from another angle, an argument can be made for Somnyama Ngonyama falsifying previous aesthetic knowledge and art historical assumptions. On the one hand, as a black woman, Muholi, falsifies stereotypes of creativity and genius, historically imagined as the province of white men educated in the specific tradition of Classicism. That is an art historical point. On the other hand, viewed within the types of questions that art itself explores, Somnyama Ngonyama falsifies previous norms and orthodoxies established as the point at which artworks work, through its aesthetics, by drawing out and drawing on the qualities of photography’s materiality. The artist is photographed dressed in various costumes, both everyday and theatrical, and also transgressive in binary gender terms. The photographs are larger than life with deeper blacks than can be obtained through ordinary and familiar printing processes. Somnyama Ngonyama is experienced as a series of beautifully, deeply black photographs, that seem to have found a new form of chiaroscuro, that are portraits, no, they are self-portraits. By discovering a new aesthetic point, a new relationship between form and content, Somnyama Ngonyama falsifies the previously established limits of aesthetics. And the artwork falsifies the previously established semiotics of black, using the language of black and white photography and pushing blackness to new, more nuanced meaning, depth and understanding. Muholi builds on the language of past art and does something else: she pushes the 142

ART IN SO CIET Y

metaphor of black and white with the materiality of the medium through the subject of the series. More than simply the instantiation of individual psyches or impressions, or the aesthetic innovations in the relationship between form, content and context, art’s role and value in society lie in its relationship to truth, when something in addition (more nuanced, more complex, perhaps even new) has been added to the prevailing store of clichés circulating as truth. The potential of art, realized in Somnyama Ngonyama in its aesthetics of form, content and context, is to create, instantiate and embody radically complex and nuanced ways of seeing and being. For some this is outrageously jesuitical: I am using sophistry to justify how art can be seen to be falsifiable just as science is. However, perhaps the idea of falsifiability can be seen from another direction. Perhaps falsifiability is an attitude of openness, to being wrong, to being surprised, to encounters with the new in others as well as oneself, to learning. For Heidegger truth is aletheia, an uncovering, and art is ‘an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual’.33 Because of this relationship between art and aletheia, I will argue that art is constitutive of democracy and also essential to it. However difficult it is to know what is true, the orientation towards truth, and therefore also the capacity to shed knowledge that is no longer understood to be true, is fundamental to democracy. What guarantees the openness and flexibility required for democracy is encounters with difference, with others, as equals, as beings free as ourselves. Democracies require open, ethical engagements with the new and the unexpected. This is a big claim for art, but one that I make with the conclusions of philosopher Charles Taylor in mind, and his exhaustive tracing of the developments in thought since Modernity.34 In Sources of the Self, Taylor demonstrates the various strands and tensions that comprise the formation of the Modern Self. The Modern Self (or self-conscious individual), he argues, has a fundamental and foundational relationship to the value of freedom, the precise and nuanced meaning of which changes over time, in different societies and for different individuals. (Heidegger is, of course, a case in point.) What holds true despite these shifts is that freedom, however defined, is a paramount value for Modern 143

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

being. In valuing freedom for oneself, by implication we value it for others (sometimes all others), and in this sense, freedom, equality and democracy are linked through their common genesis in the Modern and self-conscious self. Art is similarly an emergent property of Modernity and is interlinked inherently with these other Modern values, as the endogenous values constant within art throughout Modernity, namely agency, autonomy, freedom and plurality, demonstrate. These values are political. The Modern era, defined by the centrality of freedom in a process of meaning-making for individuals and society as a whole, is also demarcated by shifts in power militating against that freedom. I argued in This Is Not Art that the role and value of art lie in its specific political, or socio-political, potential, and I referred to Hannah Arendt to substantiate this claim. She writes, ‘We are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live’35 and as such, human plurality has the twofold character of ‘equality and distinction’.36 Arguably therefore any action by any individual instantiating their equality and distinction guarantees democracy. The ‘fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him’,37 and further, to act and to be free are the same, because action is ‘not forced upon us by necessity, like labor … [or] prompted by utility, like work’.38 This relationship, between action and freedom, is at the basis of art’s value in society. The point I make here builds on Arendt, in that it is not simply individual action in public, but an orientation towards truth-seeking that creates, embodies, instantiates and guarantees democracy. When art embodies new, more complex and nuanced ways of seeing in the world, art constitutes a society which is (becoming) democratic. In instantiating the complex and nuanced, art – in its entirety and located across all its practitioners en masse (without coordination, as an emergent property) – embodies plurality and diversity. But it also requires truth-seeking, an orientation towards truth. As much as reality changes, and even in those areas where truth is being pursued by those interested in truth, truth-seekers can and do get it wrong. So truth is a difficult pursuit, even for those who are interested. 144

ART IN SO CIET Y

Indeed, it is a minority pursuit given that much of what passes for truth, in most of our lives, most of the time, is unexamined and therefore at best vestigial, no longer useful, perhaps even harmful. But truth is vital to democracy, and the democratic potential for art lies in its instantiation of this type of truth as ‘something else’. Art provides something else, in addition to the options readily available in society, namely, the cliché, vestigial knowledge and the well-worn options for dissent. It is in art’s orientation towards truth, building nuance and complexity, and the reflexivity that requires an openness to difference, to change, to being wrong and to failing, that art embodies democratic engagement and the values of freedom and equality.

145

146

7 Politics, ethics and art

Summary In some parts of the art world, there is a normative pressure to make the world a better place in specific ways, to make arte util, ‘useful art’, as artist Tania Bruguera coined it. These types of practice are valorized in terms of their ‘social good’ and ‘radicalism’ by various artists, art historians and art theorists, including, for example, Grant Kester, Gregory Sholette and Anthony Downey. It is against this backdrop that I argue that most forms of art activism are not radical, but are instead facets of the status quo. Institutional support for art-activism demonstrates the commitment of the mainstream art world to liberal axioms of freedom and equality, without actually troubling the deep structural inequality and exploitation. The orthodox, reductive Marxist interpretation of power imagines the state as the instrument of oppression, a ruling class, and the body politic is a set of coercive superstructures. This model focuses on types, classes of people, in conflict or in consensus. Art that claims a politics while ignoring ethics is not political in the sense of radically democratic, nor does it enable democratic engagements with others in their alterity. I argue that we need a deeper understanding of the ethics that underwrites politics, and the relationship between art and ethics. The question of politics and the question of ethics demand different calls on our attention. This is true of us as artists, and also true of us as human beings. Politics lies in the imminent, in the coming into being, because everything is now – right now – and our relationship to

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

the whole in the present. In short, the different temporality of the two forms of politics, the shift in focus from the future (the avant-garde, both artistic and military) to the present, changes the nature of politics, the conflict, from the abstract to the relational. Levinas, Glissant and Ingold each call on us, albeit differently, for ethical engagements with an emphasis on relationality. They each critique the type of abstraction that besets Western philosophy, Western thought, in determining what is knowledge and therefore how we act in the world. Politics grounded in Western norms of abstraction is different from a politics that starts from ethics and relationality. The former is not, and cannot, be ethical because of its starting point. Politics, ethics and art Here I argue that we need a deeper understanding of the ethics that underwrites politics, and the relationship between art and ethics. The question of politics and the question of ethics demand different calls on our attention. This is true of us as artists, and also true of us as human beings. Observing the differences between the notion of politics and the notion of ethics reinstates a binary, a categorical partition. I do this, not for the sake of pedantry, but because categories can aid understanding. Of course, these divisions may be contrived, false or only temporarily true. Nevertheless, categories can be generative and interesting: tools that divide up things and ideas can create new knowledge, new perspectives. It is also true in the obverse. Disintegrating the categories that currently exist, categories that have become normalized, and seeing what happens, what emerges from dismantling existing categories is also highly generative of new knowledge. The latter is the deconstruction project of Jacques Derrida. The former is often considered suspect in the wake of the deconstructionist imperative to collapse the binary, but this is to misunderstand the potential of the deconstructionism. Derrida never meant to replace one set of orthodoxies with another. 148

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

The reason to collapse binaries, as all who have written on this since Hegel have demonstrated, is because any dichotomy has an inherent imbalance: one side is implicitly ‘good’ or desirable and the other ‘bad’, undesirable. Hegel’s observation about one of the dichotomies, ‘self ’ and ‘Other’, was usefully fleshed out by Simone de Beauvoir: ‘no group sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other* over against itself ’.1 *The gendered Other and the postcolonial Other employ a capital O to distinguish from the ordinary sense of other, as in, any other or additional person, culture, thing (etc.). Capitalizing Other denotes a social construct where one is defined against an other as two aspects of a binary. One dichotomy with currency in the art world is the binary of ethics and aesthetics. Since Romanticism and growing in political urgency during the twentieth century, art was divided into two groups – the ethical and the aesthetic. One was considered right and proper, a ‘good thing’ for art to be, and the other was a failing in art. If we avoid ascribing to one a particular set of qualities and the other its opposite, we can see that the split between aesthetics and ethics has served as a useful straw man in that it demonstrates an attempt to describe what is desirable in art and culture. The dichotomy, a tussle for the true value of art, is articulated in the written discussion between Claire Bishop and Grant Kester in 2006 on socially engaged art practice; their respective positions are summarized in the three ArtForum articles.2 The heat that seems still to surround the aesthetics–ethics debate demonstrates that it has continuing resonance into the present, however threadbare the argument and despite the efforts of some more recently to disentangle from myth both Kant and Adorno, and nuance both of their contributions.3 The imagined opposition between ethics and aesthetics is borne of the Marxist imaginary, an example of which is John Roberts, who normalizes the ‘Kantian dichotomy’ by reference to Adorno.4 Another view, has it that the ‘Kantian dichotomy’ is the product of art historians Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg reducing Kant’s 149

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

aesthetic theory to a kind of formalism. This, according to Rose, became entrenched with Hal Foster’s highly influential, The AntiAesthetic (1983).5 The point I am making is whatever its origins, it is a false dichotomy and one to be dispensed with if we are to investigate afresh the role of ethics in politics and art. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)6 Some have taken seriously this statement, attempting to understand exactly how aesthetics and ethics are one and the same. This may be a fruitful exploration, but it is not my project. Given that the statement comes from Wittgenstein’s earlier work, we can assume that he meant that both aesthetics and ethics must be embodied or experienced, because neither can be adequately put into words that capture what the words mean, are, or do. In itself, this is interesting in terms of the knowability of both ethics and aesthetics and the problem of reducing concepts into words. Art theorist Ian Heywood argues that ‘if art is a language it must, in order to be itself, resist the rule of the word, or rather, the drive of reflective prose to dominate and prescribe criteria of success and failure to all other forms of expression’.7 When I argue that art is a knowledge-forming discipline, it is not an argument about its reducibility to words. Knowledge exists beyond words, in addition to being mediated through them: a Wittgensteinian point.

*Aesthetic here is used in the traditional sense in which aesthetics is synonymous with beauty. I employ the traditional usage of aesthetics here because it has been used in binary form against the concept of ethics throughout the twentieth century and, for many, the term continues to be used in this way. This is to be distinguished against the sense of aesthetics I describe in ‘Art: a Knowledge Forming Discipline’ and ‘Art in Society’ in which aesthetics is the point at which an artwork works, in the resolution of form, content and context. This updated understanding of aesthetics has little to do with beauty. 150

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

Both ethics and aesthetics* are qualities that art may possess. However, it is also true that art can be unethical or anti-ethical as well as non-aesthetic* and anti-aesthetic* and still be art. Ethics and aesthetics are qualities that art may have but neither term is definitional. Neither term defines what art is. (See ‘What is Art?’ in this book.) It is also true that neither value is invariably political nor otherwise, despite claims to the contrary. The twentieth century saw an orthodoxy emerge on the basis of Romantic foundations, in which ethics and aesthetics are imagined to be on some kind of continuum. One end is imagined as inherently political (i.e. politically progressive) and the other is apolitical or politically retrogressive. Critics of Bishop claim that her call for aesthetic criteria in evaluating socially engaged practices is necessarily politically retrogressive, a harking back to Greenbergian** elitism and apolitical notions of art.8 She stands accused of espousing a problematically apolitical approach to art, perhaps even a right-wing one, by calling for a role for aesthetics (as beauty) in participatory art. However, I would argue, it is more helpful to describe the two values as axial, with points of overlap and divergence, rather than imagining aesthetics and ethics as existing as mutually exclusive values on the poles of a spectrum. ** This is itself a caricature of Greenberg’s position. The art world response to ‘Art and Kitsch’ (1939) in the mid-twentieth century is typified by artist John Latham’s. In 1967 Latham held a party at which people were invited to chew up a library copy of Greenberg’s Art and Culture, returning it, masticated, in phials to the art-college library as an artwork titled Art and Culture. The artwork is now part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Yet I have great sympathy for artists working in this paradigm. A lot of our art education led us to work within a dichotomy where either we are political and make art as social good by employing approved methods, including ‘dematerialized’ art practices, to use Lucy Lippard’s word, ‘participatory’ in Bishop’s and ‘relational’ in Bourriaud’s.9 Or we engage in aesthetics and make things for rich 151

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

people to consume and help to prop up capitalism. This dichotomy, presented to us as art students as inviolably true, becomes internalized. We understand our art and the art of others in these terms: on the one hand, we can sell objets to rich collectors, branding ourselves as corporations do and finding our unique selling point on the art market, or we must try to earn our money doing what is stipulated as socially useful: good things that help either directly or indirectly through education. This good/bad, complicit/purist divide has led many an artist astray, which is why I am trying to steer artists away from this type of Marxist orthodoxy, despite being heavily indebted to it. I am not arguing for accepting the futility of acting differently from market norms, as others such as Drucker have done.10 Instead, my argument is that the imagined dichotomy is anti-creative. It weighs against pluralism, undermining the very idea of art as a discipline in its own right and, in containing the role for art, it undermines art’s role in democracy (described here in ‘Art in Society’). Politically, the importance of art lies, not in occupying positions along a fixed political spectrum, but in instantiating or embodying plurality, difference, the complex and nuanced, the difficult. The political or socio-political role of art is neither to act as under-paid social workers, nor to tell people how to think correctly, (re)education albeit with a light touch. Instead, our role is to seek out and be, to instantiate, nuanced, more complex ways of being, doing, thinking, acting than are currently normalized as correct, as we orientate towards truth (again see ‘Art in Society’ in this book). As Foucault pointed out, capitalism produces a grid of normative behaviours, a predefined set of knowledge and desires which we each of us follow and maintain. Art is enacted in public, so it is thoroughly implicated in, and constitutive of the public realm. Capitalism, and its neoliberal most recent variant, reproduces a totalizing discourse that maps and distributes both private knowledge and public utterance, to employ a Foucauldian turn of phrase. Our role as artists is to work within that grid differently, to consider the grid and what it offers and to work on the something else, when and if we can. Other chapters here, and also in the final chapter of This Is Not Art, explore what I mean by doing something else but suffice to say I don’t mean endlessly replicating the same basic matrix already 152

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

established within capitalist and art world modes, like endless varieties of hair shampoo, pop art or sandwiches. What I mean by something else is having a different starting point altogether, working with different assumptions from those that are readily available, and perpetuated across all of the political hues and in institutions most of the time (see ‘Corporate Censorship’ in this book). The specific conflation between ethics and politics in the realm of art in the UK has seen the two concepts used almost interchangeably since the turn of the millennium.11 The reason for the conflation is historical, at least in part, which I recount briefly here: the mainstream art world of the 1980s and early 1990s saw a range of left-wing political art practices exhibited in important public exhibitions, including those by AIDS activists, feminists and the Black Arts Movement. This was followed by a period associated with the ‘yBas’ (young British artists) where the mainstream was apolitical and, if not avowedly right-wing, happily marketorientated and consumerist.12 At the height of the yBa domination of the mainstream art world during the 1990s and 2000s, there was a generalized hostility towards the type practices that had been de rigueur only a decade earlier. Artist Liz Ellis provides indirect evidence of the normative pressures at the time. Frustration is palpable in her 1997 article for feminist art journal n.paradoxa, ‘Do You Want to Be in My Gang: An Account of Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Practice’.13 At that time, art displaying an overtly left-wing politics was perceived as passé. This was a time well before Banksy. Class-based critique was seen as redundant and gender politics resolved. Even globalization at the turn of the millennium was largely understood with the positive gloss of the ‘global village’, as an answer to the problems of postcolonialism.14 The only unapologetically political artist given the opportunity to voice his left wing politics to a UK mainstream art world at the time was Peter Kennard. He wrote critically in 2000 on the art of the Millennium Dome, noting that Art Monthly had been complicit in maintaining the irrelevance of a social or political engagement by framing all art discourse in market terms.15 The article is particularly useful in demonstrating the ambivalence of the London art world at the time towards left-wing political engagement. His criticism was published, but only his. There were many other silenced or 153

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

marginalized critics at the time. The majority of critics, curators and artists instead chose to avoid the ‘old’ language of politics, and invoked ‘ethics’ and ‘social(ly-engaged)’ to replace a now stigmatized ‘politics’. What was once strategic stuck. Politics as democracy Politics includes party politics and the politics of the art world and the university, the politics of Machiavelli, but the politics I am interested in – and the politics I am discussing here - is the politics of democracy. By this I do not mean the mechanism of votes, nor the legal procedures that ensure that all are equal under the law. These mechanisms and procedures enable the philosophical foundations of democracy to happen in actuality, but they do not equate to democracy. They are part of a structure. The notion of politics I use here is the action that instantiates, embodies and guarantees democracy where democracy is understood as freedom and equality regardless of birth and belief, and this understanding comes from Hannah Arendt (see ‘Art in Society’). Greek lends us the word, but in reality democracy in this sense began long after the decline and fall of the Athens. In ancient Athens, only men who were citizens could vote and, more importantly, no thought was given to the equality or even human-ness of others, including women and ‘barbarians’. The term barbarian or barbaros meant literally someone who doesn’t speak Greek. Then as now, the word implied a lack of civilization, a primitive backwardness, a lack of human-ness. Barbarians and women were imagined as deformed, maimed or unfinished versions of ancient Greek man, as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas points out.16 For Hannah Arendt, writing after the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust, it is pluralism or a diversity of actors, people acting – that is, speaking, being, doing in the public realm – that guarantees democracy, or politics, as she called it. Totalitarianism replaced democracy in Germany as the diversity of people and politics disappeared off the streets and out of the political realm. Difference was no longer encountered, and subsequently difference was expelled and exterminated. Notably, the pluralism of Arendt’s 154

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

politics is not the same as that which liberalism describes. Arendt’s emphasis is on the human condition, as distinct from an unchanging ‘human nature’, the concept at the basis of much liberal philosophy.17 Jean-François Lyotard, among many other Postmodern poststructuralist political philosophers who have influenced my thinking, also critiques the liberal idea of Human Rights as just one more hegemonic language game with no particular hold on justice, because ‘we judge without criteria’.18 So it is with caution that I proceed. I must emphasize that I am not advocating art’s role in liberalism or in maintaining human rights. I am writing against the idea of art as a political act so conceived. Instead, I advocate ethics. Because of this I need also to distance myself from the type of traditional and Marxist conception of politics that continues to hold captive the imaginations and language of many in grassroots politics, and many an artist. As with Arendt and many of the post-structuralists, I find problematic the orthodox, reductive Marxist interpretation of power in which the state is the instrument of oppression, a ruling class and the body politic is a set of coercive superstructures. This model focuses on types, classes of people, in conflict or in consensus. My focus is the individual, our individual engagement and action in the public realm. Even Chantal Mouffe, a post-Marxist theorist, who actively nuances the caricatured idea of class oppression with anti-racist, feminist and ecological critical frameworks, nevertheless remains problematic for me, because she has remained faithful to a model which, at bottom, is based on a binary good/ bad, responsible/irresponsible. Mouffe argues against Arendt, who wrote more than a generation earlier and in response to her experience of Nazi totalitarianism, that non-violent action fails to address issues of inequality and exclusion.19 Arendt’s foregrounding difference enacted in public as a guarantee and instantiation of democracy is perceived by post-Marxists such as Mouffe as not politically effective. Many operating within this model of politics will find me similarly ineffective, perhaps even apolitical. Pluralism, including the pluralism that art enacts, is nevertheless the foundation of my argument about the role and value of art in society. Regimes support the art that exemplifies them. Much of the art history written about Soviet Social Realism, 155

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

the Blood and Soil art of the Nazi regime, Abstract Expressionism of Cold War USA, the ‘High Art Lite’20 (as Stallabrass coined it) of neoliberalism, as well as the historical art made under the auspices of the aristocratic and papal hierarchies, demonstrates the role that art plays in these regimes. What is different about democracies is that the art that guarantees democracy must also embody and describe values at odds with those of the ruling class, and against the majority consensus, at least some of the time. A liberal democracy endangers its own democratic underpinnings if it suppresses the unpopular and marginal as well as the non-liberal/ illiberal/not-liberal, on any grounds. A democracy endangers its own democratic underpinnings if conflict is avoided instead of celebrated as imminent to alterity (difference). On this, Arendt, Lyotard and Mouffe agree. Following Arendt, I argue that because art is public action in the public realm, art in particular enables and instantiates democracy. This is not an argument for using art or, in other words, selfinstrumentalizing our practice as artists for specific ends, including the party political, environmental or socially ameliorative. For me, and also for Jacques Rancière, this is neither politics nor is it the potential for art. Strategies of self-instrumentalization are not ‘disruptive of the sensible’ as Jacques Rancière would put it, nor do they embody pluralism, where pluralism is a plurality of ideas and ways of being and acting in the world. Art’s political potential lies in the embodiment of nuance and complexity, in being action in public with an orientation towards truth. This has already been covered in this book. Here the emphasis is on the question of alterity, or difference, which is at the basis of ethics, and perhaps the ethical basis of politics. A relationship between politics and ethics has been espoused by both Rancière and Derrida, in which politics is imagined either as individuals in relation to one another and all else, or as individual action in public with the embodied ethics of current and imminent relations. This ethical politics can be distinguished from the traditional binary form of politics: us-vsthem that replicates the good/bad of self/Other dichotomies. In its binary form, politics becomes a system of abstract typologies, seen from a distance. The mentality where ‘the end justifies 156

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

the means’ is the product of this form of distancing. While all politics may require an ability to perceive systems and their effects on individuals, politics does not necessarily take the form of typology, that is, the privileging of type over individual and specific relations. So that I am not writing only in the abstract and possibly losing my readers in the abstraction, I will give a concrete example of what I mean by the difference between ethics and politics, and the problem of typology, privileging type over individual  and specific relations. I was at a book launch for a politically and socially engaged artist. One of the invited speakers was renowned for her creative political engagements and political pedagogy. The speaker has spent a lifetime in direct action and campaigning and also in pedagogy. Over the past decade, she has also become aware of the question of white privilege and unconscious bias. Despite this history and her personal sensibilities and sensitivities, she chose the public moment of the book launch to point out the under-representation of black people in the room during her address. The only black person in the room, a man, shifted awkwardly in his seat as the sea of white faces turned to him. For me, this stands out as an example of what happens when a distancing typology is used for political ends, replacing the ethical requirements that surface when we are primarily concerned with people as individuals, and not types that serve political ends. With one stroke, one particular man became ‘a black man’, no longer an individual member of the audience but a type, and a type in relation to everyone else in the room who were also a type, unified as an undifferentiated ‘we’. However politically good or politically educational the intentions of the speaker, it was a moment when the humanity of the individual was stripped because he was used in the abstract; his personhood was instrumentalized for political ends. Ethics, and a politics based on ethics, is always relational, never abstracted or distanced/distancing. An engagement with ethics is to understand our own relationships within these systems and wider networks or ecologies. It is a relationship between self and Other.

157

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Figure 10 Suzanne van Rossenberg, Searching for the Right Balance between Art, Ethics and Politics (2019). Digital image.

158

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

Ethics For ethics I turn to Emmanuel Levinas. As with so many thinkers in the generation who lived through the Second World War, attention was on the question, how could the most civilized nation on earth commit the unprecedented atrocity of industrial scale genocide, complete with an efficient bureaucracy to make it happen? How could people who loved art, literature and music be so inhumane? The popular idea that the Nazis were mad or evil, that it was something in the DNA of Germans and specific to them, not us, prevails. This is not the answer Levinas came to. For him, the answer lay in the very foundations of knowledge (philosophy) in Western civilization. To summarize, Levinas observes that Western philosophy has been based on an assumption and a paradox. On the one hand, within the Western paradigm we believe that knowledge, if it is true, it must be universally true, whereas knowledge actually stems from, and is confined to (necessarily), the particularity of perspective and tradition. In the West this particularity is GrecoEuropean. In making assumptions about universality, the West creates theories and practices of totality that obliterate difference. Levinas’s philosophy is an attempt to move beyond the ontological question of what is, which is the starting point of ancient Greek philosophy, to the ethical question of whether my relation to others is justified. Levinas argues that what should come first is not the question of being, but questions about relations with others.21 Whereas ontology is about unity, interiority and being, ethics is about plurality, exteriority and alterity. As Lisbeth Lipari puts it, ‘The self is called to responsibility for the other before it is free, and the face is the manifestation of the ethical exigency that is woven into the very structure of human being.’22 Levinas writes that any other is Other to ourselves but we fail to understand this when blinded by ontologies based on philia or sameness. Because I am blinded by ideas of sameness, I imagine you are like me, and I imagine I understand you, as if you were me. This is false knowledge. Furthermore, knowledge based on philia, this system of likeness, on the exchange of the same with the same, is a system of knowledge, of thought, of culture that has an inherent horror of the Other. 159

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

The ‘Other is not allowed to be other; it must be an extension of the self or the same’, as Levinas scholar Simon Critchley puts it.23 Western thought is thereby beset by a violent duality of self (good) and Other (bad) in which the horror of the other is minimized only once the Other is assimilated as part of the self. The focus of Levinas’s philosophy is on an Other, any other person, not a whole group, gender, ethnicity or culture, but any other face. Levinas does not refer to terms such as misogyny or racism: his emphasis is on individual relations. Nevertheless, for me, misogyny, racism, Orientalism, primitivism and, in the case of animals, anthropomorphism* can be understood as cultural manifestations of the extension of the (Western) self onto others. The psychoanalytic way of understanding this is that we, as the inherently ‘good’ self, imagine that we (and others like us) are good, and only good; any value or quality we consider bad (for instance weakness, anger, or simplicity) is imagined as existing only or predominately in someone who is Other. I knowingly take the contribution Levinas beyond his own parameters by virtue of this psychoanalytic understanding. *misogyny, hatred of women, is the negative projection by men onto women; racism, hatred of groups of people in terms of ‘race’ as an aspect of white supremacism, is the projection by ‘white’ people of negative qualities onto those who are ‘not-white’; Orientalism marks as profoundly different, perhaps exotic but also inferior, those cultures east of the West (including the Near, the Middle and the Far East); primitivism marks as profoundly different, perhaps exotic but also inferior, those cultures that are not ‘Oriental’ but which are also not ‘European’ used as synonymous with ‘white’; anthropomorphism is the quality of imagining human emotions, perceptions and thoughts in non-human species, both good and bad, in which animals are perceived as the opposite of ‘human’.

160

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

For Levinas, to act ethically, we must act always in engagements with the other, any other, knowing they are unknowably Other. Knowledge (philosophy) must start from the unknowable-ness of the other as Other, and also that I am unknowable to the other. We must avoid mistaking the other as the self; you are always Other and unknowable. Following Levinas, knowledge must be relational and predicated on not knowing. Philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant writes also of not knowing. His philosophy is positioned in the overtly political context of the postcolonial Caribbean: If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that at its basis is this requirement for transparency. … Agree not merely to a right to difference but, carrying this further, agree to the right to opacity, that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. … I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my own opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him.24 For Glissant, the way to counter the kind of thinking that underwrites human oppression is to bring to consciousness multicultural complexity and intercultural crossings that render it impossible to label any one, any Self, in relation to a single culture, language, ‘race’, nation, place of ‘origin’. For Levinas, by contrast, our potential for a knowledge, indeed a politics based on ethics, lies in understanding every face as stripped of all reference to any system of difference. Both Glissant and Levinas locate ‘ethics in the defeat or transcendence of identitarian reflexes or regimes of human classification’ as Mary Gallagher puts it.25 For both, a politics underwritten by ethics requires the primacy of a relation to difference, to the other as unknowably Other, the unknowable otherness of any other as Other. I must always act and think with respect to unknowableness and it is only when I act accordingly that ethical engagements emerge. For Derrida, Glissant and Levinas, the Other is the individual other as distinct from the self. This is different from the Other of the postcolonialist theories of Edward Said and Gayatri 161

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Chakravorty Spivak, for example.26 For Said and Spivak, self-Other is a Hegelian dichotomy, where the self is Western male culture understood as normative, natural, given, superior. Western culture is the universal Self and non-Western cultures are all Other. In these frameworks, the Other is understood as a class, a subaltern class and not an individual. So Spivak questions the value of a Levinasian ethics. ‘Is Levinas use-less?’,27 she asks, within a political imperative to redress structural inequalities. Her question demonstrates a similar tension to that observed between Arendt and Mouffe (above). Because of Levinas’s emphasis on the individual, Spivak deems his philosophical proposal apolitical. For theorists such as Spivak and Mouffe, politics requires a ‘we’. For Levinas, ‘we’ does violence inherently. The collective pronoun ‘we’ erases alterity, difference, subsuming the Other within. With this understanding of ‘we’, Levinas is suspicious of collectivity and its attendant assumptions of sameness, communities of ‘like’. His suspicion also extends to the notion of empathy. Empathy, for him, suggests an imaginative leap that reduces the Other to the self. In contrast to liberalism predicated on empathy with those who are ‘not like us’, Levinas draws attention to the fact that empathy necessitates the projection of the self onto the other, and so the Other is reduced to the same.28 For liberals and progressives, the value of empathy is a given. It is necessarily virtuous. In liberal political and philosophical traditions, ethics is based on empathy. For Levinas empathy is unethical. Because it reduces the other to the same. Because of the legacy of ancient thinking, empathy and ethics have been confused in the West, leading to problematic conclusions about the role of empathy in human relations with others. Anthropologists Nils Bubandt and Rane Willerslev have observed in at least two different cultures how empathy is far from the benign complex of emotions that psychologists trained in the Western tradition imagine. They argue that the ability of humans to empathize must not be confused with our ability to have ethical engagements. Empathy, they observe, can be used as a tool of deceit. As ‘a vicarious insight into the other that insists on one’s own identity, [it is a] stepping into and a stepping back from the perspective of the other, at once an identification with an other and a determined insistence on 162

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

the other’s alterity’.29 Bubandt and Willerslev demonstrate how in various societies, empathy is used as a tool of deception and violence: Quite frequently, empathic identifications with others do not have as their goal mutual understanding, altruism, consolation, intersubjective compassion, care or social cohesion – goals conventionally regarded as the sine qua non of empathy. … Our focus [is] on these instances where empathy and deception are linked with aggressive intent … we are interested in those instances when the empathetic incorporation of an alien perspective contains, and in fact is motivated by, seduction, deception, manipulation and violent intent.30 The ethics-politics that Levinas demands frustrates, not only a traditional liberalism founded on unethical notions of empathy, but a post-Marxist postcolonial politics of ‘we’. He has this in common with Édouard Glissant once Glissant turned from postMarxism to a ‘Tout-monde’ philosophy. There is often a dismissive response to any reframing of politics away from the Hegelian binary towards the ecological, so to speak, or Tout-monde, to use Glissant’s phrase. Whenever the locus of politics is shifted towards a more complex, relational, emergent, immanent model, those who understand politics within the distanced typological trope despair. The tout-monde or ecological entails a change from the politics of usefulness, in which the ‘means justifies the end’ and a world divided into types (us–them, good–bad), to one that is predicated on the ethical engagement with the other as Other, and the complex interweaving of relations. The question of ecological worldviews is discussed in this book in ‘Ecology’. Here I will briefly describe the hostility an individual faces when turning away from the binary or typological towards the relational and ecological. Ethics and politics The frustrated dismissal of the relational (ethical) by the staunchly political is exemplified by Hallward and Bongie’s responses to 163

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Édouard Glissant. They each valorize Glissant’s earlier work on decolonization, valuing the binary, antagonistic politics familiar from Marxist theory, and pour scorn on the later Tout-monde, relational work, which is premised on a different set of doxa (to use Arendt’s term). In Friends and Enemies, Chris Bongie accuses Glissant of ‘an increasing skepticism, indeed cynicism … when it comes to “substantive politics”’, of moving from ‘the political’ to ‘the aesthetic’.31 This is an interesting slur. For me it demonstrates exactly the point I am trying to make here: that politics and ethics have different calls on our being. Politics and ethics are not the same, and indeed the politics of Bongie, Spivak and Mouffe is unethical in a Levinasian sense because it is predicated on types, classes, a notional ‘we’. However, politics and ethics are the same in an Arendtian sense (as well as in Lyotard’s, Deleuze’s, Derrida’s etc.); and art has a relationship with ethics when its aesthetic in the sense described earlier (i.e. not as beauty), in being the point at which an artwork works in the relationship between form, content and context, in its production of new, nuanced knowledge, a greater complexity orientated towards truth. In this sense is it indeed high praise to note that Glissant moved from the political to the aesthetic. Glissant’s later work emphasizes open-endedness: he uses terms such as Tout-monde, Relation, totalité-monde and chaosmonde. But to understand this as an act of depoliticization is to misunderstand the political within the ethics of Glissant. His later work argues that crossing borders entails conflict: the basis for Relation is a violent crossing, forced encounters, and unpredictable outcomes. Glissant’s open-endedness does not imply consensus or easy, but the difficult, confrontational, and fraught. It is the agonism that Mouffe describes, but it is neither optimistic nor pessimistic.32 It is a politics that knows that the ends never justify the means, because the ends are always now. We are always in process. Politics is how we are in the world and also how we make sense of that world. Politics lies in the imminent, in the coming into being, because everything is now – right now – and our relationship to the whole in the present. In short, the different temporality of the two forms of politics, the shift in focus

164

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

from the future (the avant-garde, both artistic and military) to the present, changes the nature of politics, the conflict, not from pessimism to optimism, as Mouffe might argue,33 but from the abstracted to the relational. Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s contribution to ethics starts from a different basis to that of Levinas or Glissant. Nevertheless, his conclusion is an inescapable ethics with others. Ingold’s is an ‘ethics of dwelling’ and is grounded in a commitment at the heart of an ecological self, which is a self not predicated on anthropocentric (or human-centred) ontologies. Like Levinas and Glissant, Ingold identifies the problem as stemming from the heart of Western thought and science, that is, the ‘commitment to the ascendancy of abstract or universal reason’.34 I would add the observation that the commitment to the ascendancy of abstract is a definition of politics in its traditional Marxist, liberal and indeed fascist variants. Ingold argues it is wrong and unhelpful to imagine Western thought as transcendent, floating above other non-Western understandings of the world. Instead, we need to view cosmologies, and their corresponding ontological frameworks, as plural. Western thought is one among many cosmologies including its attendant ontological framework. He describes how in Western thought, we divide nature from culture, and therefore inevitably, human–environment relations are understood as instrumental and biological, or else, merely metaphorical. Because Ingold starts from the premise that how we relate to the world is inseparable from how we value things and how we act, his argument is that an ontological framework of dualism and disengagement inevitably supports an ethics that is vastly different from one of engagement with and through a relational self. Ingold’s challenge is to create for ourselves (we who perceive, think and dwell within the Western paradigm) a relational self. We see a common language of relationality emerge between these disparate philosophies, emanating from different starting points: two philosophers, one also a poet, and one social anthropologist and cellist who has worked with people from non-Western cultures in his fieldwork.

165

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

For Ingold, the relational self is sensitive to the intimate bonds that we already have with human and non-human others. ‘The effect of taking the agent-in-the-environment rather than the isolated, self-contained individual as our point of departure is to collapse  … the venerable Durkheimian distinction between the individual and society.’35 Ingold argues that a world understood through the relational self produces, instead of domination, a profound ethics of dwelling. With relationality, we can model for ourselves a way of engaging others as Other, including the postcolonial Other, and a way of understanding ethically our engagements with non-human others. Reflexive engagements with both human and non-human others, whom we understand also to have agency, form ourselves as a relational self in relationships of trust: ‘It is precisely in relations of trust that autonomy is retained despite dependency. But trust … inevitably entails risk and this is as much the case in hunters’ relations with animals as it is within the human community.’36 Levinas, Glissant and Ingold each call on us, albeit differently, to ethical engagements with an emphasis on relationality. They each critique the type of abstraction that besets Western philosophy and Western thought, in determining what is knowledge and therefore how we act in the world. Politics grounded in Western norms of abstraction is different from a politics that starts from ethics and relationality. The former is not, and cannot be, ethical because of its starting point. Briefly, I will note here that the relationality that Levinas, Glissant and Ingold invoke is not the same at the relation of Marx and Hegel. Marx perceived capital as a relation and for Hegel relationality lies in the progress of the dialectical relationship between classes.37 Alex Callinicos explains Marxist methods of analysis: The whole of Capital is … proof of the labour theory of value. Marx considered the correct scientific method to be that of ‘rising from the abstract to the concrete’. He starts off by setting out the labour theory of value in the very abstract form … But this is only the starting point of his analysis. He then proceeds, step by step, to show how the complex, and

166

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

often chaotic behaviour of the capitalist economy can be understood on the basis of the labour theory of value, and only on that basis.38 There is a foundational relationship between selves and others in the abstract, which ultimately opens the door to the possibility of domination in the name of political action. While I share the goals of Marxists in analysing systems of inequality, and in examining the role that capitalism plays in perpetuating inequality and a lack of freedom, that is, the role that capitalism plays in undermining the democratic ideals of freedom and quality, the difference between my politics and those of Marxists (and others operating within Western mores of abstraction) is the relationship to Ingoldian dwelling, Glissantian Relation and Levinasian ethics. Derrida was similarly aware of the inherent tension in politics and ethics and proposed to found a law and a politics on the basis of Levinas.39 Simone Drichel explores this and describes how a Levinasian ethics can be understood as a necessary corollary to politics. She cites Bernasconi on how ethics and politics can serve as effective correctives for each other ‘if they are held in vigilant tension’: In this vision of a permanent oscillation between singular and collective identity, the other is perceived in both his or her singularity and his or her ethnicity: from within a politically enabling structure that is continuously interrupted and called into question, but - crucially - not disabled by the demands of the singular other.40 Working within the traditional Hegelian paradigm of Western scientific thought, this may seem an answer to the question of the relationship between ethics and politics, but ethics remains merely a corrective. It is not the paradigm shift that Levinas demands. The ethics that must come before knowledge, and action as one of active not-knowing, instead of empathy. The ethics of Ingold, Glissant and Levinas require a different starting point.

167

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Figure 11  Suzanne van Rossenberg, Being an Artist #4 (2019). Digital image.

168

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

It’s ethics and not morality For Jacques Rancière: ethics is … a fashionable word. But it is often taken as a simple, more euphonious translation of the old word ‘morals’ … [Indeed] it is the morality of consensus in which the voice of each is represented as a ‘community of one single people’ that fundamentally undermines both aesthetics and politics.41 This is a point also made by Chantal Mouffe, including in her earlier work with Ernesto Laclau, with regard the centrality of a ‘pluralist agonism’.42 Rancière continues: The reign of ethics is not the reign of moral judgements over the operations of art or of political action. On the contrary, it signifies the constitution of an indistinct sphere where not only is the specificity of political and artistic practices dissolved, but also what was actually the core of the old term morals: the distinction between fact and law, what is and what ought to be.43 Anthropologist Didier Fassin makes the point that a large chunk of the recent ‘ethical turn’ in his field has blurred the distinction between the morals and ethics, noting that the two concepts are understood as either radically different or interchangeable.44 The same observation could be made of the art world’s ethical or socially engaged turn. However, ethics and morals are different, or at least it is worth conceptualizing them as different in order to describe the value of ethics. Just as the difference between politics and ethics lies in abstraction, so too morality and ethics. Morality is an abstraction; it is formed of abstract notions, be they derived from God and religious decree, or the legacy of those same religious ideas in secular societies: ideas of good and evil or, in secular language, wrongdoing. Unlike ethics, morality is an orientation towards abstract ideals and it is normative. Morality includes normative statements around sex, sexuality, gender, various types of taboo, and acts of consumption including of drugs, drink, food and goods. Politics takes a view in many of these categories, proscribing some forms of consumption and encouraging others, for example. There may be, 169

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

in fact, a fundamental relationship between politics and morality. Be it a libertarian, or a censorious, abstemious one, every political party seems to employ these types of normative values. One-party political stance may be inclusive with regard to gender and sexuality but censorious with regard to the consumption of goods. Another politics may demonstrate a permissiveness regarding consumption of goods and sex, but censoriousness regarding gender norms and what counts as natural. Whereas morality revolves around rules for self that are also applied to others, ethics pertains specifically to how one engages with the other. Ethics also pertain to how humans engage with non-human others.45 The relationship between politics, morality and ethics is different in different conceptions of pluralism. For example, Mouffe has a moral, not an ethical, dimension, whereas Arendt is ethical not moral. Mouffe builds on Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political as the ‘friend/enemy’ distinction in that ‘every religious, moral, economic, ethical or other antithesis transforms itself into a political one, if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy’.46 In stating that, ‘by the political I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies’, Mouffe demonstrates her debt to Schmitt.47 And she shares this definition with a majority of political theorists, except for those working within an Arendtian democratic tradition in which politics is the action of, with, and against, infinite and exquisite difference. While Mouffe describes how we should behave in a political movement, Arendt’s politics is immanent to difference enacted, embodied in public. It is worth noting that Mouffe’s pluralist agonism, however moral as distinct from ethical, is far more ethical than most forms of socially engaged art that homogenize differences between individuals in gestures of community. Jacques Rancière also makes this point, citing Chris Burden’s Other Memorial and Christian Boltanski’s Les Abonnés du Téléphone (People in the Phonebook) in his critique.48 Many additional examples of unethical artistic practice claiming to be ethical can be found in Claire Bishop’s account of, for example, Smith and Aupetitallot, Clegg and Guttman, and curator, Eric Troncy, although they are not critiqued by Bishop in these terms.49 Not only are Mouffe and many other political theorists who 170

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

guide artistic socially engaged practice not ethical in the sense described above (as relational), but many artists claiming a politics and an ethics are engaged in the violence that Levinas describes: the violence of ‘we’, not to mention the violence of ‘representation’. Examples below. Art, representation and ethics Here I consider the ethics and politics of representation. Luke Fowler’s 25 min video Depositions (2014) demonstrates a lack of criticality and clarity around the once-central concept of representation within art practice. I do not single out Depositions because it’s particularly egregious, but conversely because it’s seemingly benign, political and inclusive. For Depositions, Fowler inserts recent footage into archived material from 1970s and 1980s BBC documentaries about the traveller communities of the Scottish highlands and footage from the School of Scottish Studios. His intentions are both ethical and political. Fowler wants to ‘restore dignity to images of the travelling communities’ according to the exhibition catalogue for ‘The Inoperative Community’, curated by Dan Kidner for Raven Row 2015–16. The intention is to humanize the travellers against a backdrop of the historical derision by authorities, here embodied by the BBC. What Fowler does is evoke derision for the BBC so that derision now (rightfully) belongs to the authorities and not to the travellers. However, simply inverting sympathy does nothing to alter the politics involved. The juxtaposition created reiterates an established dichotomy between powerful and powerless where the BBC, as an aspect of dominant hegemonic discourse, is juxtaposed with the marginalized traveller community. The epistemic paradigm where one type of voice is derided and the other valorized is maintained in simply inverting it. Re-contextualizing the other (in this case producers and presenters from the BBC from over a generation ago) as ‘representative’ of dominant culture is not ethical, and for this reason the politics are also dubious. There may have been sympathy for the travellers behind the decision of the artist, even some awareness of the politics and ethics of representation, 171

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

but the ends do not justify the means. Ever. Including in art practice. Blithely re-contextualizing an other, however powerful we imagine that other to be, is ethically dubious, even when wellintentioned. Much political art is predicated on the expedient of representation, based on a paradigm of the distanced, isolated, self-contained individual, which as Ingold critiques is inherently exploitational and dominating. The question of representation in an artistic sense and also in politics was directly critiqued by Gayatri Spivak, and, although well cited, its implications remain unheeded. Her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ thinks through the question of representation. It challenges the politics of ‘we’, while also employing the ‘we’ of a post-Marxist politics. Spivak’s argument is that every act of representation necessarily represents in two ways: politically and epistemologically. Representations of both the colonized and the colonizer stand in for, represent and create knowledge for the colonized.50 Spivak starts her essay with an observation also made by Edward Said in Orientalism. The art that represents colonized peoples and cultures represents, not the truth of those cultures, but imaginary versions of those cultures. Art and culture of the colonizer represent a view of the colonized that the dominant wish to perpetuate, both consciously and otherwise.51 Spivak argues that Western culture imagines the Other in terms of the self, as if it is the same but a more colourful, better version of itself or a more primitive, worse one. Representations of the other as either better or worse than the Western self happen regularly by the most wellmeaning and avowedly political artists. Political artists ‘represent’ the perspective of a subaltern (be it the dispossessed, endangered species, working classes etc.) identifying with the subaltern in question, and, as well-meaning outsiders, believe they can offer something, an aesthetic or a voice, that others can’t. Runa Islam’s art film First Day of Spring (2005) exemplifies this. The film claims to be a cinematic group portrait of rickshaw drivers in Dhaka. The eight male drivers remain motionless throughout the seven minutes of beautifully filmed urban twilight, and the viewer is offered the opportunity to make and break assumptions about the men, based on their rickshaws, slight movements, postures, clothes and appearance. Islam claims to want to ‘reclaim the idea of 172

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

alienation’ with this artwork (presumably she is referring to Marxist alienated labour).52 Whether or not Islam identifies as Bangladeshi (she was born there but was raised in London), First Day of Spring is not a self-portrait, a representation of self, but a portrait of the subaltern and, like Luke Fowler’s, it exemplifies the problematics of representation. Each man is an object for the colonial (Western) gaze, a mechanism well rehearsed within the Western tradition of art and available for any to exploit, even those born in Bangladesh who are women. Spivak describes a double-bind beyond this. She notes that the colonized ‘subaltern’ actually perpetuates the violence of colonialism when representing themselves, by fixing and essentializing the ‘truth’ of the Other. As Simone Drichel puts it, ‘A certain “portrait” is painted which then acts as a fixed - essentialised - proxy for the represented. As a result, even self-authored images of the other remain inherently violent.’53 In other words, had Runa Islam actually made a video portrait of herself, instead of the rickshaw drivers, she would nevertheless be implicated in the double-bind of essentialism. Viewers would be invited to see a self-portrait as representing some kind of essentially Bangladeshi, or British Bangladeshi, experience, and neither the individuality of Islam as one type of person on earth nor the heterogeneity of Bangladeshis. Spivak’s position is particularly challenging to artists occupying subaltern positions when we claim to represent a whole political group, a whole community, a whole nation. If the subaltern takes authorship of the narrative, creating self-portraits, we are perceived not as an individual, but instead as representing our whole community. When an indigenous artist, for example, is asked to represent the postcolonial nation on an international stage (finally, because it has always been white people from settler communities who represent the nation), her work tends to be valued beyond its contribution as a singular artist with a unique practice. It becomes representative of a whole culture, the nation’s indigenous populations. The invitation to exhibit demonstrates the postcolonial nation-state’s commitment to indigenous rights and equality. The projection of the Western self onto the colonized other may appear flattering, for example when an artist’s work is nationally 173

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

and internationally celebrated: they are colourful, they are creative, they are also capable of creative genius, it seems to say. Celebration is certainly better than derision, but neither the positive nor the negative variants of othering is actually true or ethical. All types of othering, including the positive, are projections of the Western self onto the other. Both reiterate the fantasy that it is the other who has peculiar and unshifting markers of difference. Another way of stating this is the problematics of ‘we’; that through the colonial, Orientalist gaze, the subaltern ‘I’ becomes a representative ‘we’/‘they’. Many curators, historians and journalists operate within this paradigm, erasing alterity of the Other. Drichel observes that this ‘raises the difficult question of how the other can be represented at all without the further perpetuation of such epistemic violence’.54 For those of us who make art, this is a centrally important point. Whenever an artist represents, we must bear in mind Spivak’s criticism of representation. Despite the many decades since Spivak’s important and well-cited essay, the idea that representation of others is benign, fair, even good, continues to be presumed, especially by artists. Gayatri Spivak’s critique of the power of representation takes on heightened importance in a time when re-contextualization via the gifts of digital technology, the internet and social media is done by both artists and nonartists alike. While some political and socially engaged artists do claim (problematically) to represent others, many others do not, even when the media and other interpreters of their work, praise or critique in these terms. Mona Hatoum is a good example of this tension. Some interpreters of her work – lecturers, curators, historians and critics – reduce her art to mere representation of a Palestinian or diasporic viewpoint. When Hatoum becomes representative of all other diasporic or Palestinian voices, there is no room for any other voices or nuance and subtlety, so difference within the subaltern, the marginalized, the other, is erased and homogenized, so complexity and heterogeneity are reinforced as the sole province of the self, the white, Western, male. To this conundrum of the subaltern, Édouard Glissant provides a foil:

174

POLITICS, ETHICS AND ART

The poetics of relation presupposes that each one is confronted by the density (the opacity) of the other. The more the other resists in his thickness or his mobility (without being limited in this way), the more expressive reality becomes, the more fruitful the relation.55 In short, unless a politics is based on ethics, it has none of the radicalism or democratic potential the artist desires or claims. Artists must avoid representation in the sense described by Spivak if we are to be ethical, and if we are subaltern, we must occupy the space of opacity when called upon to illustrate and represent. This is the only basis for the politics of democracy: to foreground and embody the ethics of relation.

175

176

8 Art and the other

Summary There is a late-twentieth-century aphorism: the role of the artist is as joker, catalyst or shaman; that what artists bring to the world is a not-knowing and anti-discipline. I argue strongly against this way of framing of what we do. Art has its own set of expertise, including both skills and knowledge sets, and I believe artists ourselves need to recognize our expertise. This is particularly important when working in non-art contexts. Otherwise, our contribution is threatened with becoming undervalued or instrumentalized by those with a clear agenda for our work. The idea of disciplinary knowledge is not based on the fact that student-artists are currently located in universities instead of Art Schools, but because art, in common with all other disciplines, requires a framework of knowledge that acknowledges past contributions to the field, and an understanding of the field itself. Artists share a common set of methods, a common set of reference points, a sense of the history of the discipline and a common language. These we share, more or less, with practitioners all over the world. We have this disciplinary perspective in common, tempered by our specific cultural and personal perspectives. The commonality of disciplinary knowledge and values despite other types of differences is something artists share with practitioners in other fields. ‘Politics, Ethics, Art’ in this book dealt with the ethics within an art practice and the difference between ethics and politics. Here I am concerned with the ethics between. This chapter

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

investigates what it means to have ethical engagements with others who are not-artists understood from the perspective of the discipline of art. This includes engagements with students yet to become artists, and also working with nonartists in a community context, and collaborating with scholars in other disciplines. In each instance, the question of ethics emerges although this is rarely acknowledged. Especially rarely is the ethics of teaching acknowledged, what happens when apprehending and appreciating the student-artist as Other, not merely an extension of the self, in the attempt both to assess and to nurture their talent even when it is at odds with our own parameters for making art, our values or indeed ethics. An ethical art practice (and an ethical art-pedagogy) engages with the other as Other, where Other is unknowably other, and situated, entangled in a web of pre-existing relations. Otherness here is a reflexive awareness around the question of difference, that other people, an other person, is profoundly different in ways that I cannot begin to guess (building on arguments made previously in ‘Politics, Ethics, Art’). Knowing that the Other shares a common humanity with me, and demanding respect and acknowledgement of our common humanity, lies at the basis of any ethical relationship. Each Other is profoundly different from me and ethics begins from this understanding.

Art and the Other Throughout the history of teaching art, from the time of the master’s [sic] studio then the Art School to contemporary university art departments, an assumption prevails that the ideal student is the cut from the same cloth as the teacher; the student works within the concerns, aesthetics and ethics of the master. It is assumed that the work of the outstanding student reflects that of the teacher, and the main area for a student to assert their 178

ART AND THE OTHER

difference lies in their use of new techniques or artistic languages. Only then may the student be different from, perhaps even surpass, the master. In this pedagogical model, difference is minimized and suppressed. It is certainly not celebrated and rarely is it of value at all. Art schools and, later, art departments in universities fail students who occupy the space of the Other because, too often, there is little awareness of the value of difference, when it exists outside known parameters. The fact there is a continuing and marked ‘attainment gap’ in BAME (Black and Asian Minority Ethnic, a UK government category) students compared with white students, irrespective of educational background, seems to demonstrate this point.1 I will describe Levinasian ethics and the extension of the self onto the Other further below, but in short, there is a tendency in tutors either to reward students who make art in the vein of that tutor, those who share similar concerns, ethics and aesthetics, or to reward a student for their difference, when it is deemed sufficiently different in known and seemingly well-understood ways. I hear of numerous contemporary examples of a white tutor encouraging, say, a black British student to make artwork that explores ‘their’ identity and heritage, and discouraging them from making work about non-identity subjects, such as landscape or time. Women students tend to be encouraged to make artwork about the body, her body, maintaining a long tradition of limited expectations for women and girls. (Young) women artists and young black men are bodies, not minds and are encouraged to reflect that fact. Art students in universities across the world tell me that this once prevalent style of teaching (the type of teaching I myself encountered at art school) continues into the present, despite decades of pedagogical and critical awareness about sexist and racist bias. There is today a whole area of pedagogic specialism, called Critical Race Theory, that addresses this, and there is obligatory ‘equalities’ training available to those who work in Higher Education. Nevertheless, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more it changes, the more it stays the same).

179

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Figure 12  Suzanne van Rossenberg, Oops (2019). Digital image.

180

ART AND THE OTHER

Ethics, the other and universities Failure to recognize difference is unethical in specifically Levinasian terms (see ‘Ethics, Politics, Art’ in this book). A lack of awareness of the other as Other not only diminishes the individual student’s experience of art education, but more importantly impoverishes the potential for art and its role as democratic act. As I have argued, the potential for art in disciplinary terms and in its role and value in society lies in art’s pluralism, its instantiation of alterity (see ‘Art in Society’). For universities to create a positive ‘virtuous circle’ within democracies, they must nurture the diversity, the alterity of pluralism. What makes universities today potentially better able to serve art and its democratic potential than the studio system of bygone days is the existence of mechanisms that are meant to enable parity of achievement and esteem. Universities have mechanisms that can help to underwrite the ethical engagements between artist and student-artist as Other. The Guilds and studio systems, by contrast, were not set up with this in mind. Instead, they were set up to continue the craft, the art of the master, the mastery of the artist. Students were encouraged as acolytes, improving upon perhaps, but not radically different, from the master and the Guild. A university can and should do something different. I realize I am being idealistic when I talk about the potential of universities to enable alterity. I regularly sport the metaphorical bruises of encounters with those who prefer to game a system than address where it fails, even though it fails in its own stated aims. Admittedly, those aims are not democratic per se but orientated towards league table positions and financial sustainability with a few non-discrimination goals added, such as addressing the attainment and gender pay gaps. League table and financial stability are the concerns of senior management who then use instruments of measurement, as neoliberal proxies of performance, to pressure colleagues to achieve the goal of financial sustainability. Much has been written on the internalization of neoliberal values within the university sector with its attendant pressures on lecturers and researchers. I don’t need add to it. My emphasis is, as always, on addressing the individual operating within and between a system that maintains hierarchy and exploitation. This includes universities today. My emphasis is on individual action, which can and does instantiate democratic values of freedom and equality, or otherwise. 181

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Potential exists for a university system to nurture new knowledge and pluralism, but this potential is only sometimes met. I remain hopeful that once artists working as tutors and professors in universities understand their practice as a discipline, and also how university mechanisms can support and nurture disciplinary knowledge, we will find better, more supportive teaching methods and mechanisms for assessment for those who are different from ourselves. My hope is that we will bolster the disciplinary strengths of pluralism and reflexivity inherent in art by discarding the muchloved narrative that art is anti-discipline or not a discipline. I want to focus on what universities could do for art as a knowledgeforming discipline that previous methods for teaching art couldn’t: how a university education could be more ethical than previous models, fostering art as instantiation of democratic values. At undergraduate level, a university education familiarizes students with the norms and structures of the professional field. Its purpose is to acculturate incomers, a process of naturalization, to the norms and language of the discipline. Students are taught skills to some extent, but more importantly students learn how to think and talk like professionals. In short, students learn habitus*. The lessons learnt in a person’s first degree therefore tend to be formative of their worldview, particularly when the student is in their 20s. The effect of a first degree is marked in disciplining the student’s mind to ‘see and think like an artist’. Many art students find the process challenging, even destructive. Learning how to be an artist entails much that cannot be transformed easily into words, and much of the transformation lies beyond the acquisition of traditional and technological skills. *Habitus is a word coined by Pierre Bourdieu, meaning the deeply ingrained habits, skills and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences. Bourdieu often used sports metaphors to explicate habitus, referring to it as a ‘feel for the game’. Whereas habitus generally refers to class, I use it here to include what is learnt specifically during Higher Education, which itself has class implications.

182

ART AND THE OTHER

Postgraduate studies offer a different engagement. At postgraduate level, students attempt to refine the rules of their own individual engagement within the established field, and one with which they already have familiarity. Since the recent expansion in higher education provision, it is at postgraduate level that students usually decide which route their career will take: whether they will pursue further the academic route, the commercial system, commissions or publicly funded opportunities (not that these are mutually exclusive). The decision can be taken at an earlier point in their career, but often isn’t. Master’s degrees tend to help artists (re-)focus their careers. It goes without say that the financial rewards of a Master’s degree are less guaranteed for the individual artist than, for example, the scientist. Whereas graduates with science degrees will often succeed in obtaining good jobs after graduation, graduates with art degrees will only rarely earn a living directly from their practice. And there is evidence that our earning prospects are actually worse than those without university educations. In Ireland, where the research has been done into artists’ incomes, it appears that most artists earn less than £5,000 per annum directly from their art.2 This will be a familiar story to artists living in the UK. A very small minority of artists live solely on the proceeds of their art, and the vast majority of artists tend to earn the bulk of our income beyond our art practice. Many artists pursue opportunities to make and exhibit our work despite the fact that these opportunities offer only small fees, certainly not enough to live on, and no stability or prospect of ongoing employment. Why we make art therefore does not fit a simple economist’s model. It seems irrational from that perspective. Seen from the perspective of social anthropology though, being an artist despite the attendant financial hardships is rational because, in common with other knowledge-forming disciplines, art-making is meaning-making for its practitioners. (See Alfred Gell3 on this and ‘Why Discipline’ in this book.) In making art, and performing our part in a discipline, contributing to it and engaging others with similar training and therefore values, we create meaning for our lives, and also status for ourselves, in disciplinary terms, in terms other than those offered elsewhere in society. These are good personal reasons for being an artist and contributing to the field. There are good 183

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

political reasons for orientating an art practice towards greater nuance and complexity, towards truth and in that sense towards originality, ideas which were explored more fully in ‘Art in Society’ and ‘Corporate Censorship’. Here I will note that since the critique of the 1980s and 1990s, the question of originality in art is fraught. There is a lingering suspicion over originality as a value. Originality had been central to the avant-garde, but this value became suspect with the critique of Enlightenment assumptions and Eurocentric masculinist ideas of genius and originality in Modernism and the avant-garde. Rosalind Krauss’s 1985 The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths is often cited in this debate.4 Drawing on post-structuralism in order to understand the new forms of art proliferating around her, Krauss’s emphasis is on how meaning is achieved, not what a thing means. Art, her argument goes, in common with any ‘sign’, is not an object with a priori meanings and values that can be discerned by the critic. Nor is art part of a teleological project, a project of progress towards an end, as Modernist critics and historians had imagined. Rather, art’s meaning is generated through a system of substitutions, the terms of which are irreducible to any single referent. Understood in these terms, originality simply isn’t a value. Instead, according to Krauss, we must understand that the fetish of originality is the product of Modernist historiography. With this in mind, the original contribution of art is not the type of originality valorized previously by historians of Modernism. Originality is not to be imagined as somehow absolute, conclusive and progressive. Instead, the originality of new knowledge can be understood as something relative and rhizomatic (to use the Deleuzean cliché), generative of nuance and complexity, not progressive in a teleological sense. It seems that artists ourselves were articulating the value of this type of originality well before the critique of Modernism by Krauss. In 1964, artist David Hare spoke on ‘The Myth of Originality in Contemporary Art’.5 A vaunted American Modernist sculptor, Hare made an argument that somewhat anticipates the arguments I make (caveat: his text is redolent of many antiquated views, mostly glaringly in terms of gender). While Hare does not use the term discipline or disciplinarity, what the text makes apparent is 184

ART AND THE OTHER

that artists have a history of thinking carefully and articulating the foundations of what we do and why we do it, while also navigating the values that others (art historians, critics, the general public, politicians etc.) thrust on us. Hare writes: To my mind, Gorky became at the end of his life, far more original than most of the Abstract-Expressionists who followed him. The more he copies Cézanne and Picasso and Mirò … the less his work resembled Cézanne and Picasso and Mirò. The resemblance in his last works to these heroes is in the organization, not the work itself. Gorky’s was not as original as the work of Pollock, but much more interestingly so, since Gorky became original in the face of art history, which he loved. Pollock became so at a time when he spit in the face of art history. Pollock’s was an easier originality since it attempted to surpass the hero through negation, while Gorky’s attempted to surpass it through understanding, a more difficult task.6 Hare articulates some of the different ways that ‘originality’ may be produced within art. He notes that artists, such as Gorky, create new knowledge by building on, adding complexity and nuance, to the field, whereas others, such as Pollock, create a new paradigm through negation (a term with provenance in Hegelian–Marxism that was once well understood). As such, Hare describes how disciplinary knowledge is formed. Importantly, he perceives differences in types of originality, in the different contributions of artists to the discipline and he articulates how we might use different understanding of achievement for artistic projects. The potential benefit of learning the discipline of art within a university, as distinct from when art was learnt in the studio of a master, is the university’s unique potential to enable artists to articulate the type of knowledge we produce. Also, the framework of the university offers the potential for ethical encounters with the student, their learning and potential, since student-centred pedagogies became best-practice. Unfortunately, though, because of a lack of consideration given to the role that ethics plays in the teaching of art, specifically the ethics that Levinas, Glissant and Ingold describe (see ‘Politics, Ethics, Art’ in this book), there is all too often little to distinguish between the contemporary university department 185

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

and the older studio system. A student-centred approach requires a tutor recognizes the otherness of the student-artist before them. Instead, too often students are required to replicate the aesthetics, politics and concerns of the master in order to get good degrees. Individual psychological development plays its part in the misperception that others are like ourselves, and, if they’re not, that they should be. From the time we are infants we must learn that our perception of the world is not the only one in existence. Our subjectivity is not the whole truth and we learn we must negotiate a path between our subjectivity and that which has been termed ‘objective reality’, in addition to navigating the subjectivities of others. This is a developmental process and a difficult one. Not all adults make the developmental journey away from the infant’s perception that the world revolves, and should revolve, around them. Narcissism is one term for a failure to perceive the other as Other, the idea that the other should be like oneself because I am normal and somehow the best, fittest or most able. Contrary to our self-mythology of openness and vangardism, art has a history of repressing Otherness. We even occasionally valorize our nascent narcissism. While we pay lip service to pluralism and diversity, the art of white men from dominant culture (heterosexual, middle-class, Christian-atheist, western European and north American) still dominates our museums, galleries, publications and education syllabus. The same minority also tends to dominate senior management and senior research and teaching roles in universities. In our more enlightened moments we include others, but often only for their markers of difference from this norm: the black artist creating ‘black art’. The assimilation of anything assimilable and total rejection, or total invisibility, of anything that is not, is iterated throughout the ‘cultural sector’, through museums, galleries and in education at all the various levels. Levinas might say that unless we get a grip on the Classical paradox, get some theoretical, philosophical perspective on our singularity, and therefore the bias in our knowledge, it can’t be otherwise. Since Postmodernism we have rightly problematized the notion of objective standards but, instead of liberating art from normative and exclusive ideas of genius and originality that privilege cultures of the self, we have created a relativist sludge. The 186

ART AND THE OTHER

various arguments for parallel value, such as those offered by Luce Irigaray or Homi Bhabha,7 were eroded once pluralism became confused with relativism. In imagining that any one is an artist and that anything goes, anything is art and everyone is an artist, it becomes arbitrary and random which of the artistic practices are resourced and enabled. The argument that Irigaray makes in terms of valuing the particularity and Otherness of women/the feminine, and the arguments Bhabha makes in terms of hybridity become undermined once everything is relative instead of specific. The regime of relativism, in which anything goes, where there is no value inherent in any particular version of anything, where judgements regarding quality are considered suspiciously elitist, within that regime, those with the greatest resources are (once again) privileged. The rejoinder is the specificity that comprises pluralism. If we are to avoid confusing pluralism with relativism, we need also to promote the fully variety of artistic starting points while understanding that, as a knowledge-forming discipline, art is truth-orientated. This process of inclusion and pluralism must begin with art education. While any academic working in any field may fail to recognize the other as Other and thereby recreate a culture of the Same, I would argue the question of appreciating and assessing ‘good’ or ‘great’ in art can only be judged once an ethical engagement with the Other is established. Because, as artists, we have imagined our job is to extend our Self and impose it onto wider culture, we tend to imagine that this is an appropriate way to engage with student-others. So there continues to be gendered responses to students from tutors and assessors of all genders. Women tend to be expected to be good, very good, in their engagements with the field, but not too challengingly, and within specific parameters. A Levinasian ethics reminds us, not that we are wrong to assert our art practice as valuable, and our knowledge and expertise as important, but that we must also regard the other as unknown and as valuable. Encountering students with the ethics of Levinas and Glissant has the potential to alter radically traditional hierarchical engagements with our students and differently from the radical pedagogy of Jacques Rancière and Paolo Freire, whose ideas are oft repeated in art departments and by socially engaged artists. 187

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Rancière and Freire are invoked to signify that the artist-tutor is politically on the left with a progressivist concern for ‘community’ and the social realm, that the tutor is a ‘good’ person. Their names are brandished not for the sake of the student but for the tutor. Rarely does radical pedagogy actually inform the process of engagement in the inherently unequal arrangement of teacher and student. This is why I offer Levinas.8 Indeed, if we understand art as a knowledge-forming discipline, building nuance and complexity in an orientation towards truth, then Freire’s is not a model for student– teacher relations in the context of disciplinary knowledge. Freire’s is a model for liberation – learning as self-determination. Disciplines are inherently and inescapably hierarchical in the student’s initial encounters with that discipline. In the context of teaching art in Higher Education, imagining that everyone is the same, and failing to recognize the difference in knowledge and experience between the artist-tutor and the artist-student is unethical. It becomes disingenuous if the engagement pretends equality when there isn’t equality. Neither does the pretence to equality foster pluralism. My argument is that it is only through ethical engagements with the other as Other that the potential for art as a knowledge-forming discipline can most fully be met, with all its implications for deepening and ensuring art as instantiation of democracy. Non-artist others: Sci–art and community art Art historian and Marxist theorist, John Roberts, defines the specific role of art in science–art collaborations, sci–art, hoping to guide artists away from the perils of merely illustrating science. He writes: It is not the job of art to defend or extend the truth claims of a particular discipline, but to reflect on the discipline’s epistemological claims and symbolic status with the totality of non-art/art disciplines and their social relations. When art draws, for example, from a particular scientific discipline such as physics, this is not in order to defend the truths of a particular branch of physics, but rather, to use such truths as a reflection 188

ART AND THE OTHER

on physics as such, or as means to reflect on the truth claims of other disciplines and practices.9 I share with Roberts a concern that much sci–art merely illustrates scientific knowledge and, as much as I am concerned with environmental degradation and climate change myself, I agree that most art that explores these areas demonstrates the problematic tendency to illustrate established truths. But the quote also exemplifies his tendency to view art as educative, in terms of art’s utility, its usefulness and supposed efficacy. For all art’s value in the eyes of Roberts, art is not understood in its own right, as a discipline that might be knowledge-forming. For Roberts, the role of art is rather traditional. Firstly, art serves as counterpart, a corollary, to Scientific Rationalism. The job of art, for him, is to reflect critically on the claims of science. Therefore, by implication, art carries a higher order of truth than science, a proposition familiar from Goethe, Wordsworth and other nineteenth-century Romantics. Secondly, art is understood explicitly as educative, in that art teaches us about the status, cultural capital and class aspects implicit in the production of science as disciplinary knowledge. Art is pressed into the service of this specific, preformulated approach: the artist must take science to task for its own ‘epistemological claims’ and ‘symbolic status’, as Roberts puts it (just as presumably art has done for itself), educating others about class critique, and delivering a reflexivity, a scepticism, framed as anti-discipline. Those who need educating in this way usually include both the non-artist collaborators and the audience. While there may be potentially interesting and important areas for an artist to pursue in working with the questions Roberts prescribes, reducing the entire role and value of sci–art to this is reductive, clearly. An answer to moving away from a merely illustrative approach to one that is knowledge-forming in its own right, I would argue, lies not in imposing Marxist or Romantic dictums as Roberts encourages (though I suspect he would strongly deny the taint of Romanticism). Nor does it lie in other reductive simplifications sometimes demanded by commentators and commissioners of art, including cliché ideas about aesthetics as beauty. 189

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Artists ourselves often make claims to an exquisite aesthetic awareness as well as the tools of visualization to deliver on those exquisite sensibilities, in order to obtain the funds and opportunities to make art. It is this special sensitivity that marks the artist from the non-artist, apparently, so give us the money. Art historians Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle exemplify this assumption in their description of the achievements of eco-artists, The Harrison Studio. According to Douglas and Fremantle, the achievement of The Harrison Studio lies in presenting ‘information purposefully but sparingly’, as ‘poetics’.10 Michel de Certeau who also writes about the Harrisons states, ‘Simply paying attention guarantees the transformation from a nature supposedly asleep to the work that displays nature’s strange vitality. Art is what attention makes with nature.’11 For Certeau, Douglas and Freemantle, the artistic achievement lies in specific artists’ special access to aesthetics, their ability to aestheticize nature and knowledge. Michel de Certeau was once a renowned amongst artists for espousing the radical potential of practising the art of everyday life.12 But this remarkably Romantic evocation betrays a politically orthodox position on multiple levels, including the traditional idea that artists are at a vanguard of society leading from the front. As always with this political-educative model, not only is it assumed to work, to be efficacious in ways that Rancière has critiqued, but it assumes that others need this form of education. I summarize Rancière’s point in This Is Not Art: As early as 1760 Jean Jacques Rousseau had already described problems with the pedagogical model of art. He understood that art can never be politically or pedagogically efficacious because representation entails a separation between seeing and doing. Jacques Rancière described this in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. ‘Critical art is an art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation. This schema, very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes: first, the production of a sensory form of “strangeness”; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness.’ He goes 190

ART AND THE OTHER

on to discuss that, in eliding these three processes, the notion that awareness of an injustice or a problem will necessarily motivate people to act is fostered. Awareness of environmental damage is a case in point: of those who are recently convinced of anthropogenic climate change some appear disabled by this new understanding, acting exactly as they have always done despite understanding the human impact on global climate.13 Indeed this model assumes that others lack the aesthetic sensibility in the first place, which is where it is unethical. When working collaboratively with non-artists, artists tend to claim two things: firstly, that artists have a particularly exquisite sensitivity to aesthetics as beauty, a claim with direct lineage to Romanticism, and secondly that artists are best placed for translating knowledge (assumed to be either invisible or irretrievable for a nonspecialist public) into an easily absorbed aesthetics as lingua franca. Aesthetics does play a pivotal role in the formation of knowledge, but this, as I described in ‘Art: A Knowledge-forming Discipline’ in this book, is specifically in terms of the accommodation found between form and content. In sci–art, by contrast, the claim to aesthetics is in its stereotypical sense – in the sense of beauty – and through this device, scientists themselves occasionally claim to be artists invoking beauty as their justification. There are scientists, such as physicist Stephen W. Morris, who exhibit highly aesthetic (i.e. beautiful) photographs of scientific phenomena as art in art galleries. These are embraced as art because artists and curators seem to forget that equating art with beauty has been problematic for over 100 years, since twentiethcentury Modernism sucessfully questioned that equation. Aesthetics as beauty is today considered simplistic and it is also reductive of the potential of art and it is problematic in terms of ethics. The idea that types of people are superior and somehow magically different from others in their access to the beautiful has been peddled since Social Darwinism was used to justify white supremacism. The implicit racism and sexism of this claim is discussed at length in ‘What Is Art?’ in this book. Here I will furnish an example from the journal of Baron Anatole von Hügel, a late-nineteenth-century traveller to Fiji and Cambridge-based proto-anthropologist who stated his surprise that Fijians have 191

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

aesthetic responses.14 When these types of judgements are cast back into colonial history, it becomes evident how offensively untrue they are. Aesthetic responses are not the province of one special group of people. Von Hügel was in fact renowned for his sympathy for Fijians and his humanity. He was not of the Francis Galton ilk, setting out to prove European racial superiority. Nevertheless, his writing betrays that despite his sympathy and knowledge about Fijian culture and people, the idea that aesthetic sensibility is exclusive to those of his own class remained. The argument here is that artists ourselves value our input simply in terms of aesthetics when we collaborate with non-artists because we fail to own the full extent of our expertise, skills and knowledge as artists. We fail to understand the disciplinarity of art and that disciplines are learnt, not the product of a unique sensibility. Aesthetics as beauty is often invoked as the reason to commission artists to work with scientists. However, in much sci–art, the job of communicating scientific ideas is a design one. In fact, more often than is generally acknowledged within the art world, commissions to engage publics with difficult scientific ideas go to designers and architects, not to artists.15 Arguably communicating the ideas of others is precisely the job of graphic designers, illustrators and others working in visual fields distinct from the discipline of art. The commissioning trend may, in fact, be tacit acknowledgement that artists working from within the discipline of art bring to scientific collaboration something in addition to aesthetics. And this something is difficult and beyond beauty. In turn, artists ourselves most often claim that our work is to produce questions, not answers, as if no other discipline is capable of questioning, and no other discipline is reflexive. The artist tends to claim a unique ability to ask questions and to ‘disrupt’. We like to imagine ourselves in the role of shaman or jester: the legacy of Joseph Beuys is to claim adisciplinarity or anti-discipline. Unfortunately, this claim obscures and overshadows our very great artistic competence and understanding, eclipsing it under a pretence of guileless naivety. Sci–art and ‘community’ or socially engaged art have more in common than is often recognized. They are both forms of collaboration with non-artists in non-art contexts. For the socially 192

ART AND THE OTHER

engaged, the legacy of Joseph Beuys is not shamanic intervention but ‘social sculpture’. Many socially engaged artists imagine ourselves as having unique tools of visualization, just as artists working in sci– art collaboration do, but there is an additional emphasis on having the skills and experience to make things happen, in short, in having production skills. What unites sci–art with socially engaged practice is that the artist often claims a particular sensibility regarding aesthetics. Grant Kester’s formulation of an ‘openness and quality of listening and the dynamic set up between artist, collaborator and viewer’ reasserts the centrality of aesthetics in art. This time without the historical baggage of beauty, he nevertheless asserts the idea that artists have a peculiar sensitivity, which others lack. Again, this is an unethical starting point. At least some of our non-artist collaborators will share aesthetic sensitivity. What they don’t have is our knowledge set, training, methods and values. As artists, we must claim disciplinary expertise, not only because it is true, but because it is only on this basis that ethical engagements with the other as Other will be established. The idea that artists have a unique aesthetic sensibility that eludes the less fortunate is both untrue and unethical. As Roberts says, sci–art often serves to illustrate an established knowledge set or viewpoint, rather than proceeding on the type of open-ended investigation required for new, nuanced and more complex thinking and making, sharing this tendency with much socially engaged art. In some socially engaged art practice, the artist starts from the premise that there is an established truth about this group or that situation, which remains unknown to others and that it is the job of the artist to enlighten audiences about the situation. In these projects, art is imagined as a type of lingua franca that all understand sufficiently well to serve as a bridge between scientific or political knowledge and the general public. The following is typical of evaluative reports about the successes of sci–art projects and it well illustrates the point: The Arts Programme … provided opportunities for creativity to be integrated into wider education, interpretation, conservation and awareness programmes to increase participation, engage different audiences and set a precedent for cross sectoral work especially given our OUV [Outstanding Universal Value], between the arts and earth sciences. 193

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

‘There are some parts of Management, particularly education and communicating the OUV, where taking an artistic approach has enabled us to tell completely new audiences about World Heritage, in very engaging and inspiring ways.’ (Sam Rose, Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site Manager)16 Hugh Petrie writes about inter- and multi-disciplinary research in the natural sciences, observing that ‘all too frequently, people look upon interdisciplinary projects as a dumping ground for the less than disciplinarily competent’.17 This is a familiar refrain from mainstream critics of both sci–art and socially engaged or community art. Petrie also adds, ‘justifiably so’.18 He goes onto write that: different disciplines … have different cognitive maps and … these maps may well get in the way of successful interdisciplinary inquiry. By cognitive map here I mean the whole cognitive and perceptual apparatus utilized by any given discipline. This includes but it is not limited to, basic concepts, modes of inquiry, what counts as a problem, observational categories, representation techniques, standards of proof, types of explanation, and general ideals of what constitutes the discipline. Perhaps the most striking of these, and also the least noted, is the extent to which disciplinary categories of observation are theory and discipline relative. Quite literally, two opposing disciplinarians can look at the same thing and not see the same thing. … a failure to [learn at least part of the other disciplinary maps] helps explain the relatively naive character of so much interdisciplinary work. Failing to realize the significant differences in cognitive maps and yet faced with the necessity for communicating with each other on some level or other, the participants retreat to the level of common sense which is shared by all. But ipso facto, such a level cannot make use of the more powerful insights of these disciplines.19 Notwithstanding a few spectacular multidisciplinary scientific successes such as the double helix model of DNA by Watson and Crick using Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray photographs, Petrie’s 1976 critique of interdisciplinary work in the natural sciences holds true 194

ART AND THE OTHER

of any inter-disciplinary work. It is similarly true for sci–art and for artist’s collaborations with communities. Petrie’s critique is from the field of education but can be restated in terms of Levinasian ethics. Ethical engagements with the other as Other are predicated on not knowing, on an openness to the other as unknowably Other and in proceeding from this starting point. Ethical engagements require the artist to assume the other is competent, with skills, and neither representative of a homogeneous group nor known in any respect. What is required in collaborative engagement with non-artists is a way of bridging the unknowableness of the other and Petrie offers mapping as a method. Artists working with non-artists in non-art contexts must be aware of both our own personal mental map and always and importantly our disciplinary maps. As Munira Mirza acerbically described in Culture Vultures (2006), vacuous and unsubstantiated claims are frequently made about the good that art brings to sites and communities.20 Unlike Mirza, I do believe that art can and does have an important role to play, and Idle Women and Numbi both provide superb examples,21 but I also know that the supposed impact of art is over-stated and misrepresented because of the econometrics into which art is forced by dint of pleasing the UK government Treasury department and a macro-economist’s worldview. If art has enabled the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site managers to ‘tell completely new audiences about World Heritage in very engaging and inspiring ways’, it was not art that was commissioned and encountered, but something else, something akin to design or education. Or else, it was indeed art and the experience of it has been distorted to please the audiences of the report. Art is not a lingua franca. The fact that every sizeable art institution in the UK has an education department with professional energies directed at educating a general public and specific targeted communities, in addition to young people, in the understanding Modern and contemporary art belies this myth. Tate Modern called it ‘visual literacy’ when it first opened in 2000 and offered workshops in understanding how to read a work of art, as well as teaching others how to teach ‘visual literacy’. Art, even historical art, is not a language immediately understood by 195

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

anyone who strays into its vicinity. Education and interpretation programmes exist not only at Tate Modern, but also at the National Gallery with its collection of paintings from the thirteenth to early twentieth centuries. The volume of audio guides sold to explain what a person is looking at amply demonstrates the fact that art is not in itself readily and easily understood by all, and that this is true whether it’s historical or contemporary art, from the West or from elsewhere. The proliferation of opportunities to make both sci–art and community socially engaged or public art that meet the specific agenda of a funder or commissioner has been problematic. In order to get the funding to do what we believe will be interesting and important work, artists will exaggerate the educative and ameliorative aims of the work. The funding tail wags the art dog, and some would argue it has always been thus when justifying the status quo. But Romanticism also saw the rise of the genius artist who condescended to patrons as anecdotes about Beethoven illustrate. I am not advocating a return to ideas of Romantic genius as the final chapter of the book, ‘Ecology’ will elaborate, but I am underlining the fact that, while it is true that artists have to eat and pay rent, there are choices to be made in how we navigate our need for funding. Emulating our Romantic predecessors, we could assert the role of the artist differently. We have an important and distinctive role. We could argue that the role of the artist lies in art’s contribution to nuanced and more complex understanding. This requires disciplinary skills and expertise and, when negotiating with non-artists in non-art contexts and with funders, artists ourselves need to have an appreciation and awareness of the skills that our specific discipline brings. When artists write as artists Artists ourselves increasingly describe what an artist does and what we bring to these types of collaborations and I applaud this trend. I believe it is important that artists write about art, describing the discipline from within, as Collins and Goto do for eco-art and Loraine Leeson does for ‘socially situated’ practice. Whether or not Collins 196

ART AND THE OTHER

and Goto make art that contributes to disciplinary knowledge, an art that instantiates the freedom and equality that guarantees democracy or, instead, as Jen Clarke argues, simply adds to prevailing discourse with their ‘apocalyptic art’ is not under consideration here.22 What I am concerned with is how artists describe and understand our expertise, our discipline, especially when working with non-artist collaborators and in non-artistic contexts. When we fail to consider what is our expertise, and what we bring to collaborations with nonartists in community contexts and in inter- and multidisciplinary contexts, we fail to realize the potential for art, the potential for knowledge and arts role in democracy. Without questioning what it is that we actually do and what we value in art practice, we tend to fall into describing our work and the achievements of our discipline in terms that are both historical and exogenous, using terms relevant to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and defined from the outside. This is not to deny that thought, ways of seeing and understanding, is built on previous ideas and a wide range of thought, as Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self amply demonstrates.23 But as artists we tend to remain in theoretical eddies because we think uncritically about our well-established tropes. We work within favoured homilies, within parameters set by art historians, philosophers and critics, and blindly accept normative ideas established within Postmodern, Marxist and Romantic thought. Because we fail to perceive art as discipline, let alone a knowledge-forming discipline, we fail to think critically about how we think, about the role and value of art, or even its definition. We even forget there is an expansive library of artists writing about art. Compelling contributions exist from across the spectrum of art-making, including by David Hare, Joseph Kosuth, Coco Fusco, Marcel Duchamp and Suzanne Lacey. Instead of largely building on this tradition, we look to philosophers, art historians and critics to legitimize our work, standing mute as makers before the professional thinkers. Because we adopt this position, what we actually do remains under-theorized from within. Surely one of the great benefits of doctoral research in art practice is that we now have the skills to contextualize our practice within its history and ideas relevant to practice, writing about it sufficiently well. Nevertheless, to date it appears that most artists who do write about 197

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

art and their practice within a specific history and context maintain paradigms and values set outside the discipline of art. One exception is the writing of Loraine Leeson who, while she describes an artistic method largely derived from Paolo Freire and skills of mediation, she nevertheless contextualizes her practice in reference to other artists and their writing, directly contributing to the debate about aesthetics and ethics. Leeson, whose oeuvre is firmly within the socially engaged, takes the imagined ethics–aesthetics dichotomy to task, writing: The relevance of visual quality to socially based work was first recognised by Peter and myself during the making of the Emergency [1977] video for the campaign to save Bethnal Green hospital, when we encountered the value of bringing our visual and imaginative skills as artists to bear on collaboration with activists. In order to be effective in this work it was clear that the impact of creative outputs was of central importance.24 For the project, she cites artists John Heartfield (1891–1968) and the Russian Constructivists, particularly Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956) and El Lissitsky (1890–1941), as reference points for the artwork. What distinguishes her artwork from that of activism, even the creative activism of Platform, is that Leeson knows exactly which artists her practice builds on. In addition to building on past artistic achievements, Leeson describes how, as an artist, she is in dialogue with contemporaries such as Conrad Atkinson and Stephen Willats, and critical of the work of APG (Artists Placement Group), among others. Another of the remarkable artists who write is Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll. In Art in the Time of Colony she instantiates an art-centred, practice-based interrogation of the blanks in the historical record produced by the silencing of the indigenous voice throughout the process of Australian colonialism.25 The product of doctoral research in art history and therefore written, to some extent, to conform to those particular disciplinary norms and mores, Art in the Time of Colony is nevertheless a radical departure in knowledge formation. She ‘creolizes’ knowledge through art practice, inhabiting epistemes of the Other, without falling prey to hegemonic lure of either cultural appropriation or pastiche.

198

ART AND THE OTHER

With these two exemplars I want to demonstrate that my argument is not to seal off art from other disciplines, to act as if they don’t exist or as if the insights of contiguous disciplines are nominal. As must be evident from this publication, I refer often to the work of thinkers outside the discipline of art and, having read in the fields of both philosophy and social/cultural anthropology, I know that other scholars in other disciplines do likewise. Foucault and Deleuze have influenced social anthropology; meanwhile, psychology has influenced Analytic philosophy. I am not advocating silos of thought. They don’t exist anyway. There are a number of thinkers we share in common across disciplines and many more that we don’t, which is one of the hallmarks of any discipline. I am advocating disciplinarity premised on an awareness of how disciplinary knowledge is produced, while also being mindful of Simon Schaffer’s observation that disciplinary histories ‘make disciplines look like well-institutionalised homogeneous systems of formal behaviour’.26 Nevertheless, my argument is that if we are concerned with the type of ethics described above, there are good reasons for artists ourselves to embrace discipline. I will briefly reiterate what I mean by disciplinarity in art before describing ethical encounters with other disciplines. I have argued that art is a knowledge-forming discipline and that the knowledge created evades the confines of language. I follow Wittgenstein on the untranslatability or irreducibility of art into words. For Wittgenstein, both ethics and aesthetics are ‘transcendental’ of language, meaning that both may be recognized on encounter but neither can be reduced to, or encapsulated by, words. In arguing for artists writing about art, and for understanding art as a knowledge-forming discipline, I do not wish to reduce art to words. Ian Heywood puts it well (if normatively) in Social Theories of Art: A Critique. He writes: If art is a language it must, in order to be itself, resist the rule of the word, or rather, the drive of reflective prose to dominate and prescribe criteria of success and failure to all other forms of expression. … Art’s task is to find ways in which to achieve particularities that matter; the scope of the particular, for visual art, goes all the way from its materials and processes … and specifically to everyday life.27 199

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Philosopher Clive Cazeaux homes in on materiality as a source of disciplinary knowledge formation specific to art practice: Materials, technologies, found objects and situations have properties of their own, and a significant part of the pleasure in making is exploring what these properties can do, where they can lead, what they can open on to, what they can evoke and what they make possible … the action of moving properties from one domain to another, normally attributed to metaphor, functions here as an ontological structure.28 Art starts with material. Because of the self-conscious, recursive and meta-relationship of the artist to the constituent parts (including relations, actors and more traditional materials, such as paint and marble), the specific knowledge produced by art lies in the experience of material. This experience may be translated into words or into other media, such as documentary photography, seen on websites and in print, but the knowledge exists in the instance of art’s specific and considered material (even dematerialized) form. The knowledge that art produces is produced physically, materially, embodied. Explicating this, Cazeaux quotes Adorno: ‘Artworks are enigmatic in terms … of their truth content.’ This is not truth as correspondence, the artwork corresponding to a state of affairs, but truth as ‘constellation’, the concept introduced by Adorno in Negative Dialectics … ‘Constellation’ (Konstellation) is the gathering of concepts around an object in a fashion that shows that the object cannot be reduced to or known completely by any one concept. There is always more to an object than what can be perceived or conceptualized, what Adorno calls the ‘preponderance’ of the object. … The most basic decisions made by the artist will have epistemological significance because, on the epistemology of interconceptuality  … all elements exist as concepts with the potential for novel expansion, including those from surrounding environmental factors to which one would not normally ascribe agency. This applies at the start of a project, when the artist considers the territory – the ideas, the concerns, the participants or audience members, the technologies – in which they want to work, and at the end, 200

ART AND THE OTHER

when the work is given public form. Whatever creative work is undertaken, it has to take a form.29 Added to the materiality of art practice there is the question of metaphor and, in combination, we can start to elucidate the type of knowledge that art uniquely produces. Hugh Petrie’s text on disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity in the natural sciences, namely in biology, chemistry, physics, geology (etc.), describes the centrality of the role that metaphor plays in knowledge production in science. This is also true of the knowledge produced by art practice: Metaphors traditionally have enabled us to gain an insight into a new area by juxtaposing language and concepts familiar in one area with a new area. One begins to see the similarities and differences between the literal uses of the metaphor and the new area to which we have been invited to apply the ‘lens’ or ‘cognitive map’ supplied by the metaphor.30 Artists have a specific understanding of the concepts integral to our discipline and we must not assume a shared vocabulary, or indeed that we are looking at the same thing, situation or ‘problem’ in the first place. This is why ethics matters. Understanding and owning our disciplinary knowledge not only guarantees ethical engagements with others, but it is the basis for excellence in art, in taking art from the clichéd to nuance and complexity, towards truth.

201

202

9 Ecology

Summary There are a range of interlinked ideas that together help maintain the primacy of the idea of genius, even though the concept has been discredited by feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial analysis of the sexist and white supremacist underpinnings of the idea, not to mention the hundred-year-long-sustained reappraisal of Romanticism, the fount of the cult of genius.* The idea of the white, male and normal artist (normal in all current senses) leading culture from the front is actively derided throughout the contemporary art world; yet, fragments of the old stereotype continue to thrive and inform art world gatekeepers, not to mention artists ourselves. The old ideas of genius maintain disproportionate market prices for the white men, disproportionate biennial and gallery exhibition opportunities for men and the sexism that #MeToo and #NotSurprised describe.1 What is needed is not reform nor addenda to an art historical narrative that was, since the origins of the discipline, focused on the achievement of European men working within a Classical tradition. Instead, we need a completely different way of understanding what is art and how art making is related to everything else. The avant-garde paradigm requires a hierarchy of achievement; the exceptional is sought and genius is perpetuated. We need to move from this progressivist, because it is skewed

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

and therefore untrue and potentiates further skews, militating against democratic pluralism. The progressivist, avant-gardist model fails to conceptualize the fact of interrelationality, that any achievement is the product of contexts, of specific conditions. I argue here that we need to inhabit a different paradigm based on an ecological understanding. The science of ecology helps us to visualize the differences between traditional views of art and art history and the one I want to describe here. Much traditional art history focuses on the individual, a singular organism understood as either exemplar or extraordinary. Occasionally, art historians also describe a population, lots of individuals within one ‘species’ living in a given location. Only rarely do historians describe a ‘community’ in the ecological sense, which includes those things that sustain or deplete the population. Changes in art happen over time and evolution (so to speak) occurs because artist populations collectively behave in one way, and institutions and funding respond. Institutions behave and make choices to support or deny. Discourse also changes to which both artists and institutions respond. Different possibilities emerge so that artists and sometimes institutions behave in other, additional, new ways. In an ecological view, what happens is the emergent property of all these factors. None is deterministic. There is interrelationality. Because it is understood that diversity is the consequence of stability and also change over time, the drivers of evolution are both change and stability. Without diversity, ecosystems become unbalanced and only very few individuals and populations survive, so less and less diversity is the consequence. As the pre-eminent value of ecology is diversity, and the pre-eminent guarantee of democracy is pluralism, there is a good fit between an ecological view of art and culture and democracy. We must move away from models of genius to understand the value of complexity and diversity in its own terms, and because these are the enactment and guarantee of democracy.

204

EC OLO GY

Not genius, ecology Genius*2 *While the cult of genius has its genesis in the Renaissance, the full blown fantasy of genius was formed later. R.A. Sydie argues that aristocratic women of Renaissance Italy held positions of aesthetic and political power. As society changed and became bourgeois and capitalist, the concept of genius changed to exclude women.2

Because artists remain in thrall to the idea of genius I take artists ourselves to task about our contribution to the perpetuation of white male privilege. There are a number of often unacknowledged reasons why we continue to buy into the myth. Firstly, the concept of genius explains the success of one and the omission and absence of others. Where the myth doesn’t serve us personally, we find ourselves hoping there exists a critic, a dealer, a gallerist, a curator who will indeed spot our unique genius, as the myth of meritocracy promises. With feminism and critiques of class and race bias, we like to imagine exclusions from genius based on gender, class and race are a thing of the past,3 that the art world today is indeed a meritocracy. For this reason, we do little to problematize the myth of genius. We are invested in it. For those who work in the realm of socially engaged art, a different type of genius myth prevails, this time across the collective which imagines that groups of likeminded and appropriately skilled people will lead society from the front, for the good of everyone else, in the name of progress, thereby implicitly buying into the avant-gardist idea of artistic genius. I have argued against a politics and art practice predicated on the idea that we, artists, are the good guys with knowledge of the solutions to the world’s problems, and that we know exactly who are the bad guys and the evil consequences of what they’re doing. I argue against this type of old-fashioned us-and-them politics and

205

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

the implicit sense of genius that drives the avant-gardist approach in both art and politics, not simply because it is old-fashioned, but because this paradigm actually serves the status quo and also more extreme versions of the status quo, such as plutocracy and oligarchy (some would argue these are descriptions of the regimes we are currently living within). More importantly, the progressivist avant-garde genius model of art fails to serve art’s potential as instantiation of democracy. The progressivist drive behind the story of Modern art is familiar, almost a cliché, since Alfred Barr’s tenure as director of the then newly inaugurated Museum of Modern Art. Aligning his approach with what was de rigueur in the 1930s, his was genealogical: one genius begets another who begets another, and so Modern art progresses. Barr’s understanding of avant-garde art was informed the ‘Armory Show’ of 1913, staged while Barr was still a student at university. And the Armory Show was itself created to respond to an imagined race with Europe which the United States was losing. The raison d’etre is given in the catalogue: The American artists responsible for bringing the works of foreigners to this country consider the exhibition as of equal importance for themselves as for the lay public. The less they find their work showing signs of the developments indicated in the Europeans, the more reason they will have to consider whether or not painters or sculptors here have fallen behind through escaping the incidence through distance and for other reasons of the forces that have manifested themselves on the other side of the Atlantic.4 In turn, Clement Greenberg, art critic par excellence and whole-hearted supporter of the myths of Modernism, took the progressivist paradigm that Barr made famous and provided evidence for it by supporting those American men of genius he deemed as rightly following in the footsteps of Picasso and other Modernists championed by Barr. Under Greenberg’s careful positioning, Jackson Pollock* became the paragon of Modern genius: rightful heir to the European men of genius. ‘Greenberg was always careful to state that there were precedents for individual aspects of Pollock’s achievement. 206

EC OLO GY

Tobey being one example of an acknowledged forebear, [with] Krasner and Sobel.’5 In fact, Greenberg and Pollock would go together to see Janet Sobel’s drip paintings in 1946. With the myth of genius comes the erasure and marginalization of those who don’t fit. Through this narrative of an imagined competition, the endgame of the Modernist project, as described by Greenberg, Michael Fried and Clive Bell, became abstraction and flatness. The American painters thereby become winners in this tale of progress. With the end of the Second World War, the competition between the United States and Europe had been decided and Jackson Pollock became poster boy for the American avant-garde.

*A bit of history: With the demonization and subsequent expulsion of Jewish avant-gardist artists by the Nazis, the Modernist avantgarde project became associated with freedom. This idea of freedom, as pre-eminent value of the West and of the avantgarde, was capitalized upon during the Cold War (c.1945– c.1990), pitching American capitalist freedom typified by Jackson Pollock against Soviet communist and Soviet Socialist Realism. By the mid-twentieth century, the story was established that the centre of avant-garde excellence had moved from Europe, and specifically from France and Germany, to the United States.

The novel The Fountainhead (1943) by Ayn Rand could be read as a blueprint for right-wing proto-neoliberal American success: a Modernist story of just rewards for genius, building on Nietzsche’s will to power. (It is worth noting that Silicon Valley’s contemporary tech entrepreneurs are Rand devotees.6) There is a competition to be won and lost and for there to be a group of winners and losers, the terms of the competition must be widely accepted. There is no point in being winners of a competition that no one else recognizes. 207

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Power is achieved through its recognition, to gloss a point made by Jurgen Habermas. All of us choose what we recognize as true, as valid, as part of our personal curriculum, who are our reference points and who aren’t. By the latter quarter of the twentieth century, the traditional white men version of history was augmented with evidence that women too ran the art race and perhaps won, in their own way. In addition, the European Modernist tale began to include not only the French and Germans, but (white) Europeans from elsewhere. In the revised tale of progressivist Modern art, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) becomes the (obscure) originator of Modernist abstraction. Meanwhile the similarly obscure and similarly female Janet Sobel becomes the progenitor for Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. The idea of genius that lies at the foundation of progressivist versions of culture and politics imagines a special few leading a bovine or recalcitrant mass towards Enlightenment, defined in terms laid down by the few and for the supposed good of everyone, or at least for the good of the majority. We are so wed to this type of historical narrative that when looking for agents beyond the most visible, beyond the aristocratic and bourgeois white men of genius, we add the names of a few women and others with less historically privileged backgrounds and confer on them a status as a variation on the genius theme. The progressivist paradigm not only selects one minority for visibility and resources but it simultaneously renders whole other groups of people as mere muses or sources of inspiration. While Barr celebrated through MoMA’s exhibitions the genius of Picasso and how his art draws on the material culture of Africa, he also firmly established the role of ‘the primitive’ vis à vis Modernity as mere inspiration for great art as translated by white men of genius. Examples of this can be seen in many of the works included in the 2018 ‘Oceania’ exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, such as one from the early nineteenth century by a now anonymous artist from the tiny Nukuoro Atoll in the Caroline Islands (Micronesia), which is so reminiscent of the sculpture of Brancusi that it seems like Brancusi was simply a plagiarist, not the genius the Armory Show portrays him. The role of ‘primitive’ art, imagined as untaught, pure creativity and expression emanating from the Pacific and Africa was to 208

EC OLO GY

reinvigorate art in the European tradition. In the primitivist binary, Oceania and Africa are savage, excitingly so, but dangerous, unconscious, untrained, free and unconstrained by convention. Africa and Oceania are Freud’s id to Europe’s repressive superego. At the time, this view was considered liberal and progressive, a foil to bourgeois norms, by inverting through the creative arts the assumption that Europe alone is capable of civilization and creating things of beauty. At the time, embracing the primitive was imagined as daring. Its potential for shocking and discomforting the bourgeoisie was exploited by many beyond the visual arts, including by Modernist composer Igor Stravinsky and AfricanAmerican, French-based, popular singer Josephine Baker. The legacy of Barr’s paradigm in the United States for AfricanAmerican artists working 100 years later is that artists of colour are today encouraged to downplay any art expertise and training they have. Instead, they inhabit the role of ingénue and primitivist, occupying the marked role of outsider or folk artist. There are many great exceptions to this, such as Theaster Gates; however, in general, African-American artists working in the United States today are not artists on par with white artists but instead they occupy only a specific and constrained niche of artistic achievement. They are required to perform the role that those anonymous/anonymized makers of West Africa and Oceania did for European Modernism, as primitives with direct access to unconscious free expression imagined as untrammelled by education and training.7 And JeanMichel Basquiat tops the auction tables proving the appetite for such work. Black British artists are constrained by other stereotypes. They are not required to pretend they are untrained. Instead, as Jeanette Bain-Burnett, artistic director of the Association for Dance of the African Diaspora, describes there is a deep-seated prejudice in the UK that limits the range of work that minority ethnic artists are able to produce based on specific yet unspoken expectations – that ‘artists critiquing their own minority communities were more likely to get their work produced than artists critiquing the mainstream [or] challenging misconceptions’.8 Comparing the enduring appeal of genius with the enduring appeal of ‘race’ theory, we can see how tenacious are these 209

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

discourses, despite being thoroughly discredited and undermined as empirically untrue. Race theory and genius are interlinked, ideas underpinning a particular notion of history and politics, which serves to undermine democracy and art’s role in democracy. Even at the very inception of race theory, the science of ‘race’ was disproved; yet, its journey to popular and mainstream acceptance remained unabated. The nineteenth century saw the invention of the paradigm of biological race and the scientific methods to measure it. Taking these theories and measurements at face value, Cambridge University anthropologist, Alfred Cort Haddon, set out in 1898 to measure scientifically the population of the Torres Strait Islanders, a group of small islands to the north of Australia and compare them to the Fens population of Norfolk, England. Instead of proving the existence and validity of racial difference, Haddon demonstrated that there is as much difference and variation amongst the Torres Strait islanders, as there is between the English.9 This is the first in a long list of studies, including the human genome project, that undermine race theory with evidence of human diversity and pluralism, proving there is greater diversity amongst a population than there is between them. Nevertheless, race seems to have perennial appeal for both science and the general public. As Foster and Sharp argue: Although simplistic biological interpretations of race and ethnicity have been discredited for decades, studies in clinical and population genetics continue to associate biological findings with the social identities of research participants. … the simplistic biological understanding of race and ethnicity associated with the eugenics movement may be dead, the far more subtle presumption that racial and ethnic distinctions nonetheless capture ‘some’ meaningful biological differences is alive and flourishing.10 The concept of genius shares an overlapping tenacity. As a theory, the concept of genius too has been thoroughly critiqued and undermined. It has been exposed for the assumptions and biases behind it. There is scholarship into the systemic social exclusion and networks that privilege one while ignoring the achievements and potential of another. Systemic and systematic ways of excluding 210

EC OLO GY

some categories of artist from institutional support, definition, resources and consideration have been thoroughly investigated. Nevertheless, while the simplistic Romantic understanding of genius associated with the traditional canon of art may be dead, the seductive ‘man of genius’ trope continues to be used to entice audiences and buyers, stoking the idea that the concept has substance. I am not making the argument that none of the art collected by museums and plutocrats is unworthy of public attention and acclaim, just that other artists also achieve works of note and that the art which attracts high market value is variable and sometimes quite ordinary. The market is inherently conservative and reduces plurality, as demonstrated by Michel Callon and Jean Gadrey and described in ‘Corporate Censorship’ in this book. Artists, for reasons of needing to pay the rent and perhaps unaware of the role and potential for art as both knowledge and instantiation of democracy, conform to the ‘niches’ the market affords, inhabiting the available stereotypes. Collectors and curators fuel our conformity. Artists maintain structures that do not serve us, as artists, and that do not serve art as a knowledge-forming discipline, or art’s role in democracy. The democratic, meritocratic imperative of the late twentieth century and beyond requires us to open our histories to other exceptional actors, beyond the white bourgeois men of genius, but not to change the paradigm. But it is the paradigm that needs changing. While I do not deny the achievements of most of the artists associated with the story of progress, I am also mindful of Audre Lorde’s observation that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’.11 Art ecologically understood Much intellectual energy has already been invested in undermining the assumptions that maintain the paradigm of progress. It has been under attack since the mid-twentieth century with the likes of Foucault, Deleuze, Haraway and Latour. Each is cited, if not read, by artists. In the art world, citations sometimes signify a politics, an identity, not necessarily a familiarity with an author’s work. 211

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Foucault, until recently, was perversely invoked in the name of binary, progressivist and Marxist politics, whereas now it is more often Deleuze who is pressed into serving class war. On the one hand, this doesn’t matter. Misquoting and misunderstanding, combining afresh new clichés and old, is all part of sociality and normative discourse. It serves as social glue. Not everyone is truth-seeking and none of us is truth-seeking all of the time. But we are all social beings. On the other hand, misrepresenting Deleuzian rhizome or Foucauldian biopower matters a great deal because the frequency of misconstrual demonstrates just how firmly entrenched are the hierarchies they attempt to describe. Here I propose an ecological approach to understanding art practice. It builds on, or rewords, Deleuze, Foucault, Haraway, Latour, Barad and many others. Their work informs my use of the scientific understanding of ecology as a central metaphor. Given that each knowledge-forming discipline not only defines what is knowledge for that discipline but also sets the parameters for the types of questions considered apposite, it is worth noting the differences in those parameters between ecology and the disciplines of art history and philosophy. As I have noted, for art historians and philosophers of art, the tendency is to frame knowledge about art around the extraordinary. The questions art historians and philosophers ask about art, the knowledge they pursue, are about exceptional individuals understood in isolation. There is often a disregard of any larger view of the intellectual, physical, technological, geographical milieu of an individual, to name some of the many wider factors that enable or disable art. Using the ecology metaphor, art historians and philosophers tend to investigate individuals within a species, the organism in isolation, not as part of a community or population of other artists. There are two different tendencies that occur when looking at the individual in isolation. On the one hand, the scholar views the individual as typical of its kind, and therefore makes generalizations about a whole species based on the study of a few individuals. Psychology and biology are exemplars of this type of knowledge formation. Both tend to take a few specimens as typical and create rules from this perspective that are meant to apply across the entire species 212

EC OLO GY

(a species such as all humans) or order (such as all primates). In biology, for example, there is a known problem with drug trials based on young, usually white, men that are assumed to have results applicable across the entirety of humanity. A similar bias happens in psychological trials, in which the set of data tends to be even more narrow, capturing mostly American middle-class norms, and assuming these are true of all humans everywhere at all times. In art, this happens with ‘art as ethnography’, where objects are collected for their markers of that society, valued in terms of their authenticity.12 The other temptation when investigating the individual in isolation is to choose the individual for their exceptionality, and to produce a body of knowledge from this selection and the perspective selection affords. While the former produces and reproduces the skew of ‘normal’ and, thereby, has a tendency to promulgate normative rules, downplaying existing natural variation, the latter’s emphasis on the exceptional must, by definition, have little to offer in terms of insight into the rest of the population. The exceptional is, by definition, an outlier, at the extreme end of a bell curve. Art historians and most philosophers are generally unconcerned with the broadest array of art, namely the dome of the bell curve or its extent (the width of the bell curve from the exceptionally poor to the ordinary to exceptionally interesting). They assume the exceptional is self-evident, both the exceptionally poor and the exceptionally interesting, and few art historians even attempt a survey of the totality of art practices in a given location at a given time. Theirs is a cherry-picking discipline so that even historians attempting a survey, such as Claire Bishop’s writing on participatory practice, is highly selected and partial. In general, instead of investigating the art of a particular time and locality, most art historians cherrypick from around the globe when they survey a genre of art. Armin Medosch’s New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–78) is one notable exception, and there are others.13 When scholarly focus is on the exceptional alone, the tendency is to state that the exceptional exists then panegyrics to the exceptional are written, reiterating exceptionality. Because of this emphasis, art historians and philosophers offer few insights into art more broadly, except when creating hierarchies of achievement 213

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

that substantiate favoured notions of what is excellent, or indeed what is art in the first place. Ecologists, by contrast, investigate the interrelationships between species in a given location, including relationships with non-living matter. Their field of study is the relationships within a community, an ecosystem or a biome. One version of an ecological understanding of art history might be created by describing the relationships between art practice, the development of technology, changes in discourse about art, and changes in the provision of funding and space that have occurred over a period of time. A number of years ago I gave an unpublished talk about understanding what artists do in just these terms, addressing that set of relations, from the late nineteenth century until the present. As these relationships are one way of describing art practice ecologically, I will revisit those ideas here. There are also other ways of describing art ecologically; this is just one. I will begin with the metaphors that ecology affords. Figure 13 by Suzanne van Rossenberg is based on a teaching aide used for undergraduate ecology courses. Much traditional art history focuses on the individual, a singular organism understood as either exemplar or extraordinary (in this case, the frog). Occasionally, art historians also describe a population, lots of individuals of the same species living in a given location (the group of frogs), or a community as pictured in the illustration which includes those things that sustain or deplete the individual frog or population of frogs. In a sense, sociologists investigate art at the community level, and sociology’s contribution to understanding what sustains current art world structures has been invaluable. But sociologists tend to work within the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu and see art primarily as a mechanism for social distinction, a way of maintaining bourgeois class privilege. Some types of art do this, of course, and the critique and insights offered by Bourdieu and the numerous sociologists working within his legacy, such as Pascal Geilen, are important. But I didn’t become an artist for reasons of social distinction, and my own art practice defies, or at least attempts to challenge, regimes of privilege and exclusion. Many other artists work similarly. Anthropologists such as Matti Bunzl also research ‘community’ and perhaps hint at the ecosystem view.14 I find the 214

EC OLO GY

Figure 13  Suzanne van Rossenberg, Ecology Terms – Population, Community, Ecosystem, Biosphere (2019). Digital image.

215

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

anthropological approach potentially very useful, a true analysis of art and the art world for artists.15 But it is not an analytic tool we can use for ourselves. Ethnography is predicated on an outsider view of a community, the perspective of participant-observer and the struggle from this outside perspective to understand a community as the community understand themselves, including their taboos and their myths. Types of art history: Population view Sometimes, in a traditional art history, the focus will expand beyond the single extraordinary organism to those that surround that individual, namely the ‘population’. This happens, for example, when the art historian foregrounds the idea of movements instead of the individuals within the movement. An instance of the population view of art history can be seen in most writing about Mail Art of the 1960s and 1970s. This was global and networked art historical ‘movement’ and it is most often studied and described in these terms, not through the biographies of individual artists, although this also happens. The Wikipedia entry of 2019, somewhat predictably being mostly written by American white men, cites a white US man as the originator of Mail Art and this emphasis on the individual, the originating genius, misses completely the reality of the emergent, global and networked properties of Mail Art at the time, or how Mail Art had been viewed in the decades since its emergence. The population view also comes into play when describing the ‘yBAs’, the young British artists of the 1990s and 2000s. Although most art histories of the yBa movement emphasize individual ‘organisms’, when described as ‘the yBas’, these individual artists are regarded as a cohort or population interacting with one another in a specific location, London. Types of art history: Community view The ecological study of community has two different emphases. On the one hand, it is a way of comparing species living in 216

EC OLO GY

different geographical areas, and on the other, it is a view of a population that also includes predators and prey, that which sustains and depletes populations. One example of the community view, in which comparisons are made across populations living in different locations, would be the many books and articles written about the globalization of contemporary art and the various biennials across the globe and comparing them, describing the conditions that ensure their proliferation.16 The other type of community view can be seen in Svetlana Alpers’s art historical reinvestigation of the art of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. She takes the population of artists with Dutch locationspecific pressures and norms, and compares them to the ‘standard species’ of artists working in Italy at the same time within the legacy of the Renaissance.17 Alpers’s disquisition on the specific values, knowledge and ways of seeing embodied in Dutch seventeenth-century painting argues that these works have been misunderstood and their value overlooked by art historians who use the Italian Renaissance, and specifically Alberti, as a lens by which to judge all contemporary painting. At the time, she argues, Dutch empiricism, Dutch Enlightenment knowledge-production, believed that painting is, actuates, a form of knowledge. Simultaneously, painting in Italy had a fundamentally different relationship to knowledge. Whereas Italian painting, in general, narrates, Dutch painting describes. In making this argument, she throws light on the assumptions made by art historians that have obscured and underestimated the role and value of Dutch seventeenth-century painting and the types of contribution art makes to knowledge. Hers is a radical art history because it treats the population of Dutch artists, not as deviant or inferior versions of art in the tradition of the Renaissance, but as a population equivalent to other populations and operating with different influences, pressures, societal and religious norms. The other version of community that ecologists study are those factors that sustain or predate on an individual organism or population. An account of the dealers, collectors, gallerists, state support (etc.) that surround and support an artist or a population of artists would be an example of this type of ecological view of ‘community’. For example, a history of the yBas might include an 217

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

account of Charles Saatchi, as primary collector, Sarah Kent as primary critic writing for the then influential and widely read Time Out magazine, and Goldsmiths College as primary art school in the development of the yBa population, as well as the ambition and contacts of artist and lecturer, Michael Craig Martin. Perhaps a community understanding of the yBas would include also the infrastructure and prevailing discourse in London during the late 1980s and 1990s, including the fact that London then boasted large unused and undeveloped industrial spaces in the East end which many artists used and squatted, or that the decade saw the possibility of social class mobility of various types of artists and cultural producers. This type of holistic view replaces individual genius with an understanding of the art in a specific period and place as an emergent property of particular conditions. In Britain, opportunities wax and wane for the working classes (and also for people of colour whatever their class) depending on the decade. Usually, including as I write this, most opportunities are structurally and ideologically available only to (upper) middle-class people, sometimes augmented by those working-class people who act in ways that conform to dominant class norms. Occasionally, working-class culture prevails, is offered resources and visibility within dominant culture, and at those moments, working-class people are offered resources to see their potential realized without having to conform to the standards and norms of the dominant class. This was true of the 1990s and it is no coincidence that some of the yBas were working class, although many were not. Considering artists in terms of community, habitat, ecosystems, is an understanding of art in larger, more holistic terms and it is something artists know implicitly, as embodied knowledge. Because we live in communities, we are conscious of ecosystems that maintain us or impoverish. With an emphasis on community, the story of art moves away from the idea of genius and progress. Instead of imagining one individual as superlative or type, individuals are seen as always already part of a set of structures and relationships. By looking at relationships between ‘species’, ‘communities’ and ‘habitat’, an ecological view sees a relationship between all of these factors, privileging none and instead attempts to track the interrelationships between habitats and communities. 218

EC OLO GY

Types of art history: Examples of ecological narrations of art history Every aspect of art has expanded since the nineteenth century. The variety of backgrounds of those who make art have expanded (and then contracted with the steep rise in university fees). The materials in which art is made have expanded, the places where art can be encountered have expanded and the funding structures that support the making of art expanded, then contracted. These factors effect the type of art that is made and that can be made. Each factor is beyond the influence of an individual artist or even a population of artists, but they determine the possibility and limits within which any individual and population works. To describe these changes in more detail, I will address first the expansion of places in which art is encountered, and then describe other changes to art’s ecology. The context is London, and the spaces in which art is encountered have expanded markedly since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The nineteenth century was the high watermark in the history of museums and galleries, with various collections offered to the public in the service of our betterment, as public goods. These were housed in publicly funded new buildings. Collections were made and gifted that included archaeological artefacts, some of which were classed as art, particularly if they came from ancient Greek, Roman or Egyptian culture, and also non-art objects that were aesthetically and scientifically appreciated, including ethnography and natural world specimens. Hans Sloane gifted his collection, which became the foundation of the British Museum in 1753 by an Act of Parliament, with the building opening to the public in 1757. In 1760, at the provocation of a group of artists surrounding William Hogarth, the Royal Academy was inaugurated and Somerset House was theirs by 1775. Fifty years later, the National Gallery began with donations of paintings from John Julius Angerstein and George Beaumont in the 1820s and in 1831 Parliament decided to pay for a new building for the collection, which was completed in 1838. John Soane left his collection of art and archaeology for the nation on his death in 1837 by Private Act of Parliament and one part of his house plus the collection became a museum. These 219

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

collections built on and gave a scientific gloss to the seventeenthcentury wunderkammers, cabinets of curiosity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, collections were eclectic, mixing up the categories that later became normalized. In slow process of swapping and reaccessioning, collections became fixed in their contemporary categories: zoology, anthropology, archaeology, geology and Art. Despite all the early slippage between categories, the one category that has been fixed from the start, since the earliest days of public museums, was Art which was always and only by European men using oil paint, marble and bronze. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, art was encountered in private homes and in public institutions. It was also experienced in urban public places in the form of statues of great men immortalized in bronze. From the eighteenth century onwards, art was experienced in public purpose-built buildings and in the urban environment as public statues, in addition to the collections in aristocratic homes where art had always been collected. The materials from which art was made determined where it could be seen. Painting had been confined to small wooden supports or site-specific frescos until the Venetians innovated the use of canvas. Being too damp for fresco, Venice needed to solve the specific problem of this location and ultimately heralded the boom in oil painting on canvas. Canvas was useful in other respects too. As a support for oil painting, canvas radiated well beyond the confines of damp Venice, eventually almost completely replacing any other type. Not only were beautiful and arresting artworks done on canvas, but as canvas offered artists and their patrons greater scope for the large and portable, the support was used across all of Europe. By the nineteenth century, painting was often monumental in size, and the inherent portability of oil on canvas meant the rise in opportunities for exhibition. Largely replacing site-specific fresco painting, the transportability of oil on canvas meant that large numbers of different paintings by different artists could be shown together in buildings dedicated to the medium, and portability had another benefit as well. Unlike largely immovable frescos, oil on canvas with its portability meant that painting could become an asset to be bought and sold. As a medium it fitted well with the Modern capitalist economy, much more readily than 220

EC OLO GY

site-specific fresco or the size-constrained, payment-by-the-metreand-material of painting in the aristocratic medieval tradition. At that time, the European ideal for art was timeless, atrophydefying and monumental, and these ideals informed the choice of materials in sculpture in addition to painting. In painting, oil was a primary choice, which is relatively long lasting despite the many experiments in colour technology that have ultimately failed the test of time. For sculpture away from the vagaries of weather and bird guano, marble had over 3,000 years of use attesting to its own permanence as well as inferring its Classical pedigree. In the outdoor urban context, longevity usually meant the use of bronze. With this we can see the relationship between materials, prevailing attitudes to art, and the places where art could be seen. In the present, there continues to be a relationship between materials and the places where art can be seen and, at least in part, because of changes in the range and cost of durable materials, art can be seen absolutely anywhere, including on vessels bound for space, in the oceans, in remote rural locations, on walls in urban environments and on the internet, to name a few in an almost inexhaustible list. What has changed since the nineteenth century is prevailing attitudes to art. Where once it was assumed that art is rightly aristocratic, and public access to art was on the basis that exposure to Great Art or High Art is for the good of the nation, today art is made for and by a wider range of people, espousing not elitist but democratic ideals of inclusivity. This may contribute to its ubiquity, the fact that art can be experienced almost anywhere and at any time. In the nineteenth century, art was made for two different, oppositional exhibition opportunities, namely the Academy and the anti-Academy. The anti-Academy was where art refused from the better-attended and more prestigious venues went on display. Anti-Academies or Salons de Refusés were initially held in small private galleries and were organized by artists. Later, famously in 1863, the Salon de Refusés was shown in rooms next door to the Paris Salon but remained only modestly attended. Grosvenor Gallery in London, founded in 1877, was the anti-Academy of London. Unlike its French counterpart however, it was well attended, with enough interest in new and bourgeoning avant221

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

garde to allow for the founding of a further anti-Academy gallery, the New Gallery, in 1888. In the nineteenth century, both types of exhibition, the Academy and the anti-Academy, showed art that was meant to be timeless, permanent and preferably appealing, drawing on what we now call traditional skills and materials. By the early twentieth century however, this changed and the anti-Academy showed not only oil painting, but objets trouvé, in the form of Marcel Duchamp’s 1913 Bicycle Wheel and 1917 Fountain (signed urinal) as well as Elsa Hildegard von Freytag-Loringhoven’s 1915 God (cast iron plumbing). Suddenly a much wider array of material could be used for art than previously. What became established with the early-twentieth-century avant-garde and its relationship to the mainstream is that traditional art materials such as oil paint on canvas, marble and bronze were associated with the mainstream, popular, accessible, bourgeois, acceptable and commercial. By contrast, other materials, sometimes used in conjunction with the more traditional ones, were associated with the challenging, anti-establishment and avant-garde. So art of the anti-Academy, that is, art of the avant-garde, is made with shit, fur, everyday detritus, household paint, bones, soil and mass manufactured products of industry and commerce, in addition to the more traditional oil paint, marble and bronze. The Modernist and avant-gardist artists, such as those associated with Dada and Fluxus, used materials that are perishable, making art for their own time and location. The implication of materials, how they are read as traditional or radically disruptive, can be seen as much in Meret Oppenhiem in the 1930s as Chris Ofili in the 1990s, and the history of ready materials continues to share a similar radically disruptive resonance into the twenty-first century. What changed over this period is not the expanded use of materials in itself, but the attitude of artists with regard the desire for bourgeois (mainstream) approval. I described this earlier as the internalization of neoliberal values. By the second half of the twentieth century, with ever new materials and technologies being created, art is made with computers and coding (ICA 1968 exhibition, ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’), on the internet using internet-specific media, methods and subjects (e.g. Paolo Cirio) and using virtual reality (e.g. Rebecca Allen). 222

EC OLO GY

Art is made with genetic experimentation (e.g. by Eduardo Kac) and surgical portraiture (e.g. by Orlan). Meanwhile the market in contemporary art values the more traditional or durable range of materials: durable subjects in durable materials. This may imply that the connotation of materiality set in train in previous centuries continue to have currency. Or it may imply that investors have conservative tastes. Art is today readily encountered outside the white cube and other spaces dedicated to art, as distinct from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course, some of the large interventions that exist in the UK pre-date the twentieth century (such as Westbury White Horse, Wiltshire mid-1700s), and monumental carving into the landscape, on rocks, trees and caves has been associated with human prehistory and some contemporary indigenous cultures. But in general, as an approach, using the landscape itself as a material for art was an innovation of the twentieth century and specifically the 1960s and 1970s, both for reasons of anti-commercialization and in response to the impact of a ‘return to nature’ zeitgeist (to use an outdated and problematic term). Graffiti, fly-posters and billboards became modes of art-making and exhibition in the decades after the Second World War, with prevalence for the use of one material instead of another waxing and waning over the decades. Interventionist practices into museums, landscapes, industrial spaces, shops and streets also came to the fore in different ways from the 1960s onwards. By later in the twentieth century, interventionist practices moved into the countryside. In some cases, artists were invited into the new locations, in other cases they were not, and artists chose to invade, taking over the new environment. By the end of the twentieth century, artists were invited into museums to ‘disrupt’ and challenge. Artists were also invited to disrupt traditional urban spaces for art, for example, by using the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Where once challenge and disruption were found only in ‘alternative spaces’, on the streets, in shops and in other places where art was never previously found, by the end of the twentieth century, not only was art found anywhere, put there at the instigation of artists, but all sorts of non-art environments, such as department stores and non-art museums, started to invite artists for the frisson of excitement that art seems to create. 223

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Other types of change In addition to changes in the materials and sites for art, there have also been marked changes to economics and funding. Changes have occurred in economics and also in funding for the arts from the eighteenth century until today. While this is self-evident, the impact of these changes on the way that artists make art and also on how we think about our practice is often overlooked, except in terms defined through Marxist class analysis such as that provided by Alfonso Sánchez Vázquez on the question of capitalist alienation and artistic authenticity.18 The eighteenth century in London retained systems of aristocratic patronage reminiscent of previous centuries but, by the nineteenth century, London also saw the hard-headed capitalism that Marx, Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell describe. Under capitalism, in addition to commissions from patrons, art is commodified for a market in art. Christie’s art auctioneers began during the eighteenth century and, while both Bonham’s and Sotherby’s auction houses also began around the same time, books and antique prints were their original metier. It was not until the twentieth century that Bonham’s and Sotherby’s sold contemporary art. These changes demonstrate that, with capitalism, art was bought and sold for the first time as investments or commodities, and collections of objects including art became the hallmark of a gentlemanly pursuit open now to nineteenth- and twentieth-century bourgeois collectors, and twenty-first-century plutocratic ones. In the nineteenth century, art was funded by the upper middle classes as luxury objects to collect and art was also funded through the older forms of aristocratic commission. In addition, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contemporary art was paid for by public subscription as public monuments, and also contemporary paintings and sculpture were seen in ticketed events paid for by the middle class. Free access for the general public to the national collections housed in buildings paid for by taxation was made possible once the idea of art as public good had become established. This mix of funding arrangements for contemporary art continued more or less unchanged until the Welfare State, established in Britain after the Second World War, when public funding through taxation was made available directly to contemporary artists in order to enable the creation of art. This was the innovation of the 224

EC OLO GY

Figure 14  Suzanne van Rossenberg, Finding Modern Art in the History of Life (2019). Digital image.

225

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

Arts Council of Great Britain in 1948, and artists could receive funding from the State for their practice because art is a public good. With dedicated Arts Council funding, there also emerged publicly funded galleries, which were distinct from commercial galleries and auction houses, and which showed different types of art. Only with the late 1990s did the two distinct funding practices that enabled different types of institution merge, so that today there is the single model of funding. These are variations on public– private partnership arrangements between corporations, the state, the commercial sector and extremely wealthy individuals. In an ecological view, none of these factors are more fundamental than the other, but instead it is the range of factors that together conspire to create a habitat in which a community, a population, thrives or otherwise. While individuals comprise those populations and communities, the ecological view focuses on interrelations. It is understood that each factor has a bearing on the whole. Changes in art happen over time and evolution (so to speak) occurs because artist populations collectively behave in one way, and institutions and funding respond (and vice versa). Institutions behave and make choices to support or deny support, and also discourse changes to which both artists and institutions contribute and respond. Different possibilities emerge so that artists and sometimes institutions behave in other, additional ways. In an ecological view what happens is the emergent property of all these factors. None is deterministic. The preeminent value of ecology is diversity. It is understood that diversity is the consequence of stability over time and also some moments of change, which act as the drivers of evolution. Without diversity, ecosystems become unbalanced and few individuals and populations thrive or even survive, so less and less diversity is the consequence. Eventually the possibility for life is restricted, both in terms of the individual and whole species. Not a teleology The metaphors bound up in the term ecology and evolution are variously understood within the different disciplines. I want to 226

EC OLO GY

be generous and say these are all equally valid interpretations, perhaps compatible, but really I believe that some disciplines have it completely distorted, wrong. In particular, evolutionary psychology has a distorted and distorting view of evolution because there is a tendency to read backwards, to impose what’s normal or desirable for us (us meaning heterosexual, Western and bourgeois) and narrate evolution as the inexorable journey towards this ideal in our own image; to imagine that the ‘fittest’, as in ‘survival of the fittest’, is a feature of an individual, not a population, that ‘fittest’ equates to ‘best’ in some kind of aristocratic or hierarchical sense. Even though evolution is inherently an ecological process, in that numerous extra-biological, non-biological, environmental and inter/intra-species biological factors drive it, disciplines without an understanding of ecological interdependence seem to end up with a teleological notion of evolution that reads similarly to the traditional Biblical narrative common to the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam being the major, but not the only, Abrahamic religions). Teleology is the explanation of phenomena in terms of a goal, or its endpoint. The discipline of history when it’s done badly (see R.G Collingwood on this19) tends to narrate teleologically, as if it is the goal of the past to become the present. The concept of teleology is a religious term: it was the purpose of the creation of light and dark, earth and sky, animals and plants and the Garden of Eden to service man, Adam (and of course servicing man is also the reason for the creation of woman, Eve). Similarly, in scientific evolutionary teleology, it is the purpose of past versions of animals to become humans and all aspects of humanity can be explained functionally in teleological terms. A familiar trope from evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology is to describe absolutely everything about an individual in terms of that individual’s survival and its reproduction. Anything that doesn’t fit this narrative is regarded as vestigial, literally superfluous to need. Examples of this can be seen both in Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion20 and Ronald Giphart and Mark van Vugt’s recent pop science explanation of, and response to, Dawkins (to name but one of many).21 For Dawkins, religion is necessarily about God, and notably Dawkins understands religion solely through the lens of 227

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

the Abrahamic religious norms. Religion, according to Dawkins, is a harmful vestigial artefact of human evolution. For the Giphart and van Vugt, religion is similarly defined through the lens of the Abrahamic norms (universalizing what is normal for Europe onto the rest of the world, again), but for Giphart and van Vugt, religion serves an ongoing human need, imagined as universal with regard to survival and/or reproduction, understood in evolutionary terms. Whenever God and religion get in the way of either an individual’s survival or reproduction, their beliefs and behaviours are understood by Giphart and van Vugt as counter-evolutionary. The authors perceive evolution as a type of higher purpose, and they describe each individual mechanistically, as simply serving this purpose. Giphart and van Vugt even maintain a moral overlay of Protestant Christianity in that, as individuals, we each must survive and reproduce, and thereby participate in the Great Project of evolution. Otherwise we are not doing our job, serving our purpose.22 Dawkins, Giphart and van Vugt are some of the many examples I could have chosen to illustrate how Christian, Western and universalist are the assumptions behind evolutionary theory. A less teleological understanding of evolution is an inclusive ‘history’ of life in the round. Evolution, understood ecologically, is a way of understanding both deep time and changes over time. There is no assumption that what we see about us now is best, or the end product of progress. It just is, and it’s here now because of a whole range of factors that have occurred over time. We know there will be changes in the future and things will be different from what is normal now, because no matter how long a species has existed in the past, things have always changed, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly over periods unimaginable to the human mind, seemingly unchanging from the vantage point of any individual or species. The things that lived in the very ancient period called the Ediacara many millions of years before the dinosaurs, and even many millions of years before the eye evolved in any animal anywhere on earth, held the same configuration of life for at least 100 million years. By way of comparison, modern humans have only been around for one-third of a million years, and any type of human-like creature (hominid) for between 4 and 2.5 million years, depending on where you mark the split as the 228

EC OLO GY

origin of human – Hominini or Homo. Change continues because changes happen in habitat and populations, communities and ecosystems, and not for any other reason. The idea of fittest is not best, but simply the emergence of creatures at a particular time and place due to innumerable factors, including both biological and non-biological. The reason why Darwin suppressed publishing his theory of evolution until he could see Alfred Wallace closing in on him with his own version (with its own slightly different emphasis from Darwin’s) was because he knew that in this understanding, there is no room for God and Divine teleology. Darwin loved his God-fearing wife and didn’t want to publish something so offensive to her deeply held beliefs. In the story of ecological evolution, life is without purpose or meaning. It just is the consequence of various factors. It is an emergent property. Because this is so alarming to our psyche, or at least it is alarming to cultures formed through both the Aristotelian legacy and Abrahamic religions (namely the West), many branches of evolutionary science have reapplied the teleological and the purpose of life is described in those terms. They imagine the purpose of life for everything living is survival and reproduction. But it isn’t. We are here now by happenstance as the product of complex systems into which we also play our part. As both sentient and self-conscious creatures, we can consider this and surmise that perhaps we have some volition, agency, in our relationships with everything else, including both human and non-human species. To me, Western culture has a tendency both to overestimate and to underestimate our agency. The narratives that give our lives meaning tend to emphasize individuals over relationality and interrelatedness. The historian and philosopher’s view of the history of art provides an example of this tendency. It imagines individual men of great volition and agency, creativity and genius beyond the norm, and by this mechanism, genius stands out against a backdrop of humdrum humanity and unchanging culture. The ecological model goes beyond any version of an amended hierarchical, racist and sexist model of human achievement. It is more than the addition of a few examples of women, people of colour and working-class geniuses. If we are interested in democracy, the value of equality and freedom of all, we must alter how we know what we 229

BET WEEN DISCIPLINE AND A HARD PL ACE

know and who we include in the process of knowledge formation, without also losing the expertise and special role of disciplinary knowledge. The ecological model is not predicated on sameness, on monoculture, but on diversity. Ecology has in common with democracy the value of diversity which, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt says, is both embodied and guaranteed by pluralism enacted in public.23 Democracy needs its experts and specialists, including artists, because disciplinary expertise and rigour contain the drive towards truth. Truth is a necessary value for democracy to work, even though truth changes over time and is inflected by its author’s standpoint. It is this standpoint and the openness of truth-seekers to failure, to being wrong, that guarantees pluralism and the relationship between truth and democracy. Art enacts plurality, diversity the alterity that baffles simple categorization and hierarchies. By doing so in public, art is constitutive of the social realm. At times, art embodies the radically Other, disrupting the order of things through these encounters with Otherness and thereby undermines totalizing discourse. However, most of the time it does not, and instead art maintains a status quo predicated on exclusion and hierarchy. At its best and also, separately, when art is indeed an instantiation of democracy, it is profoundly revolutionary in its evocation and enactment of something else.

230

EC OLO GY

Figure 15  Suzanne van Rossenberg, The End (2019). Digital image.

231

Notes

Chapter 1 For example, Working Papers on University Reform, 2012, Series Editor Susan Wright, Aarhus University. 2. For example, Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (New York and London: Pluto Press, 2011). 3. Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London and New York: Verso, 2002). 4. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, trans. into English 1970, Red and Black. 5. Sholette, Dark Matter. 6. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/oct/28/art-criticdave-hickey-quits-art-world. William Powhida’s artwork, ‘How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality’ (2009) including the words – OF COURSE THEY ♥ RICH PEOPLE. 7. The idea that the avant-garde was uniformly hostile to the market is solidly, if ideologically, undermined in Michael C. FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentiethcentury Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 8. Adolfo Sánchez, Vázquez, Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics, trans. Mario Riofrancos (1965) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973). 9. For example, John Berger, Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969); Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and György Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007); Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avantgarde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, c.1996). 10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, Democracy in America (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago, 2002). 1.

NOTES

 ‘A government retains its sway over a great number of citizens, far less by the voluntary and rational consent of the multitude, than by that instinctive, and to a certain extent involuntary agreement, which results from similarity of feelings and resemblances of opinion. … Society can only exist when a great number of men consider a great number of things in the same point of view; when they hold the same opinions upon many subjects, and when the same occurrences suggest the same thoughts and impressions to their minds.’ Chapter XVIII: Future Condition Of Three Races – Part VII Tocqueville, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, Democracy in America (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago 2002). 11. Salvador Dalì, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, ed. and trans. Haim Findelstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Picasso’s quote ‘It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.’ Quoted in Peter Erskine and Rick Mattingly, Drum Perspective: Writings, Wisdom and Musings on the Art of Making ([Place of publication not identified]: Hal Leonard Corp., 1998), 73. Available online: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/ Pablo_Picasso (accessed 13 December 2019). 12. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London: Sage, 1979). 13. Examples can be seen in the anthropologies and ethnographic writing of Arnd Schneider, Roger Sansi, Kiven Strohm, most successfully, Jen Clarke. 14. For example, Jonathan Harris, ed., Globalization and Contemporary Art (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Grace McQuilten, Art in Consumer Culture: Mis-Design (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); and various entries on multiple topics in Routledge’s 2018 edition of Goldblatt, Brown and Patridge (eds), Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts (London: Routledge, 2018). 15. For example, Stuart Hall (1973) ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Selected Working Papers, Vol. 2, ed. Ann Gray et al. (London: Routledge, 2007), 386–398. 16. Wayne Brekhus, ‘A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus’, Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (March 1998): 34–51. 17. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London: John Murray, 1983). 18. This process is described historically by anthropologist Nicholas Thomas in his analysis of British colonial encounters with the

233

NOTES

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

many and various cultures of the Pacific region in Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991). Shi Lionnet, Françoise Lionne and Shumei Shi, The Creolization of Theory (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 2. Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, ed. Audre Lorde and Cheryl Clarke (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110–114. There are numerous examples including 2018 Suzanne Von Falkenhausen, ‘Are Today’s Art Biennials Facing an Impasse?’ Frieze. Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 38. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 411. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, [1991] 1995), 136. Rob Pope, Creativity: History Theory Practice (London: Routledge, 2005), 19. Andrew Goatly, Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology (Amsterdam, PA: John Benjamins Publishing, 2007). Andrew Goatly, ‘Ideology and Metaphor’. English Today 22, no. 3 (July 2006): 25–39, 38. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. M. Clark and B. Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 116. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Walter Kaufmann, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York: Vintage, 1974 (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), 1882 Section 125. The ontological argument goes back to St Anselm (1033/34–1109). Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (London: Paladin, [1976] 1978). Katherine Dow, Making a Good Life: An Ethnography of Nature, Ethics, and Reproduction (Princeton, NJ; Oxford, England: Princeton University Press, 2016). Kay Milton, Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology cited in Dow, Making A Good Life, 44.

Chapter 2 1.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2003), 37. 234

NOTES

2.

Ivan Hewett, ‘The Riot at the Rite: The Premiere of the Rite of Spring’. British Library Articles, 25 May 2016. Available online: https:// www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/the-riot-at-the-rite-thepremiere-of-the-rite-of-spring (accessed 16 December 2019). 3. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980). 4. ‘Sensation’ was shown at Royal Academy of the Arts, London, then Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof Museum 1998–99; Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2000. It included Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Ron Mueck, Glenn Brown, Gavin Turk, Martin Maloney, Marcus Harvey, Chris Ofili, Mark Wallinger and Gary Hume. 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia (accessed 16 December 2019). For geographical and other bias, see work the Oxford Internet Institute based at the University of Oxford. https:// geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed 16 December 2019). 6. Unlike the furore around Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (bricks) in the 1970s (see https://theartsdesk.com/tv/bricks-bbc-four (accessed 10 April 2019)) and Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ in the1999 (see https:// www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/23/fiachragibbons1 (accessed 10 April 2019)). 7. Elle Hunt, ‘Pair of Glasses Left on US Gallery Floor Mistaken for Art’, The Guardian, 27 May 2016. Roisin O’Connor, ‘Students Left a Pineapple in the Middle of an Exhibition and People Mistook It for Art’, The Independent, 8 May 2017. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/27/pair-of-glasses-left-onus-gallery-floor-mistaken-for-art (accessed 10 April 2019). https:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/pineappleart-exhibition-scotland-robert-gordon-university-ruairi-gray-lloydjack-a7723516.html (accessed 10 April 2019). 8. Oxford English Dictionary. Full Entry Etymology. Available online: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/11125?result=1&rskey=pcFjSI (accessed 17 December 2019). 9. Gregory Clark, 2011, ‘Ruling Classes and under Classes: 1,000 Years of Social Mobility’. Available online: http://economics.yale.edu/sites/ default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Economic-History/clark111024b.pdf (accessed 20 July 2016). 10. Oxford English Dictionary. Full Entry Etymology. Available online: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/189769?rskey=SY8a1B&result=1# eid (accessed 17 December 2019).

235

NOTES

11. Oxford English Dictionary. Full Entry Etymology. Available online: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/11125?result=1&rskey=pcFjSI (accessed 17 December 2019). 12. Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’. Part 1, Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (October 1951): 496–527. Part II, Journal of the History of Ideas 13, no. 1 (January 1952): 17–46, University of Pennsylvania Press. 13. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1983 [1976]), 31–33, 40–43. 14. Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, Part 1, 496–527, 502–503. 15. G.E.R. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning, and Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 16. Preziosi, ‘Art History: Making the Visible Legible’, in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11. 17. For an overview from the perspective of 40 years later see Marina Vaizey, ‘Bricks!, BBC Four – Forty Years on: The Accidental Furore Around Carl Andre’s Work Remembered, Adam Boult’, Bricks! BBC4, The Arts Desk. 21 September 2016. Available online: https:// theartsdesk.com/tv/bricks-bbc-four (accessed 18 May 2018). 18. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). 19. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Paperbacks, [1961] 1984). 20. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, ‘The Traffic in Art and Culture: An Introduction’, in The Traffic in Art and Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1995), 1–35. 21. David Gill and Chris Chippindale, ‘Material and Intellectual Consequences of Esteem for Cycladic Figures’. American Journal of Archaeology 97, no. 4 (1993): 601. C. Chippindale and D. Gill, ‘Material Consequences of Contemporary Classical Collecting’. American Journal of Archaeology 104, no. 3 (2000): 463–511. 22. Anthony Forge, ‘The Abelam Artist’, in Social Organization Essays Presented to Raymond Firth, ed. Maurice Freedman (London: Cass, 1967), 65–84. 23. Giancarlo Scoditti, Kitawa: A Linguistic and Aesthetic Analysis of Visual Art in Melanesia (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990); Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 1925, trans. French Jane Guyer (Chicago: HAU books, 2015).

236

NOTES

24. For example, Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2014) or T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). 25. James Elkins, ‘Why Art Historians Should Learn to Paint: The Case for Studio Experience’. Available online: http://www.jameselkins. com/images/stories/jamese/pdfs/A-h-should-draw.pdf (accessed 14 July 2016). 26. Kiven Strohm, ‘When Anthropology Meets Contemporary Art: Notes for a Politics of Collaboration’, Collaborative Anthropologies 5 (2012): 98–124. Roger Sansi, Art, Anthropology and the Gift (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Schneider and Wright, eds, Contemporary Art and Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2006). 27. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 28. For example, A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Children in Australian History (New York: Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004). 29. Alfred Cort Haddon ends his report from his 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait (Australia) with the following: ‘It is at least suggestive that what little evidence we have tends to show that the more excitable Italian and Papuan react less rapidly than the more phlegmatic Teuton and Malay. If, however, we bear in mind how wide are the elementary psychical differences, which in all likelihood underlie seemingly similar temperaments, the unwisdom of venturing on such a general statement is at once obvious.’ Torres Straits Vol II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901 [2010]), 223. 30. Laura Fischer, ‘The Art/Ethnography Binary: Post-Colonial Tensions within the Field of Australian Aboriginal Art’. Cultural Sociology 6, no. 2 (2012): 251–271, 255. 31. Nana Leigh, ‘Creating Ancestors and Affinities: A Rhetorical Analysis of African Art in the Story of Modern Art’. Stedelijk Studies Journal 1 (Fall 2014). Available online: https://www.stedelijkstudies. com/journal/creating-ancestors-affinities-rhetorical-analysisafrican-art-story-modern-art/ (accessed 17 July 2018). 32. Henrika Kuklick makes the distinction that it was not in the nineteenth century but later in the third decade of the twentieth century that social Darwinism took hold of anthropology. Henrika

237

NOTES

Kuklick, ‘Islands in the Pacific: Darwinian Biogeography and British Anthropology’. American Ethnologist 23, no. 3 (1996): 611–638, 614. 33. Alana Jelinek, This Is Not Art: Activism and Other Not Art (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 132–135. 34. Nicholas Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Art in Oceania: A New History, ed. Peter Brunt et al. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 12. 35. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]), 189–193. 36. Gell, Art and Agency. 37. Graham Harman, Object-oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018). 38. Clive Cazeaux Art, Research, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2017). 39. 1966, 8 n3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). 40. Ibid. 41. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. and ed. G.E.M. Anscombe, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), Part I, sections 65–75. Wittgenstein wrote little directly about art or aesthetics, instead interweaving aesthetics within all of his work as a ‘very big’ subject. Garry Hagberg, ‘Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2014/entries/wittgenstein-aesthetics/ (accessed 4 August 2016). 42. Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’. Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (15 October 1964): 571–584. 43. George Dickie, Art Circle: A Theory of Art (Chicago: Spectrum Press, 1997), 80–82. 44. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010). 45. Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2009), 17–68, 18–45, 30. 46. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les presses du réel, [1998] 2002). 47. Robert Yanal, ‘The Institutional Theory of Art’, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, Vol. 2, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 510, 508–512.

238

NOTES

Chapter 3 Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy/Erin Manning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [c2009] 2012). François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event: Together with, The Vocabulary of Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 2. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, 1906). 3. Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Hutchinson in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1980), 117–127. 4. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 777–795 cited in Kevin Craig Boileau, Genuine Reciprocity and Group Authenticity: Foucault’s Developments on Sartre’s Social Ontology (Lanham; Oxford: University of America, 2000), 216 and Foucault and Robert Hurley, History of Sexuality: The History of Sexuality. [Vol. 1], An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 190; ‘The Subject and Power Foucault’, in Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd ed.), ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 5. Boileau, Genuine Reciprocity and Group Authenticity, 131. 6. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith Elder, 1869). 7. GER Lloyd, Disciplines in the Marking: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning and Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 182. 8. Ibid., 178. 9. Ibid., 176. 10. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959). 11. Theodor W. Adorno [with the assistance of G. Simpson], ‘On Popular Music’, in Essays on Music, ed. R. Leppert (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 437–469 and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 12. Ibid., xviii. John Abromeit, ‘Genealogy and Critical Historicism: Two Models of Enlightenment in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Writings’. Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 283–308. 1.

239

NOTES

13. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), xviii. 14. Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular”’, in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. R. Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981), 277–239, 233. 15. Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10–11. 16. Alfred Moore, Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy and the Problem of Expertise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 36, citing U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); D. Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); P. Kitcher, Science, Truth and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); B. Latour, ‘The Impact of Science Studies on Political Philosophy’. Science, Technology & Human Values 16, no. 1 (1991): 3–19; R.E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1995); L. Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 17. Immanuel Kant, ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4, 435, 37–108. 18. N. Rollock and D. Gillborn (2011), Critical Race Theory (CRT), British Educational Research Association online resource. Available online: https://www.bera.ac.uk/researchers-resources/publications/ critical-race-theory-crt (accessed 7 May 2019). 19. Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Athlone Press, 1999), 7. 20. Specific forms of knowledge have been an economic product since 1986 through ‘TRIPS’, International Trade in Intellectual Property, becoming vitally important to the GDP of the West since 1997 according to The Corner House, Briefing Paper 32: Political Organising behind TRIPS (Sturminster Newton, Dorset: September 2004). 21. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, ‘How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum’, in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1999), 202–218, 202. 22. R.M. Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, ed. A. Oakley and J. Ashton (London: London School of Economics, 1997 [1971]). 23. Robert Francis QC, Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry (London: Stationery Office, 2013). Available

240

NOTES

online: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/279124/0947.pdf (accessed 21 December 2019). 24. Michael Sandel, ‘Reith Lecture: A Price for Everything but at What Cost?’ BBC Radio 4. Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b00kt7sh (accessed 21 December 2019). 25. For example, Dennis A. Rondinelli, ‘Transnational Corporations: International Citizens or New Sovereigns?’ Business and Society Review Blackwell 107, no. 4 (2002): 391–413. 26. David Bainbridge, Software Copyright Law, 4th edn (London: Butterworths, 1999). 27. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Marking, 177. 28. T.C. Pruitt (2011), ‘Authority and the Production of Knowledge in Archaeology’ (Doctoral thesis). https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.15966. 29. BMJ 2011;342:c7452. 30. Robert Eaglestone, Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001), 41, 49–50.

Chapter 4 M. Ueno, Democratic Education and the Public Sphere: Towards John Dewey’s Theory of Aesthetic Experience (London: Routledge, 2015). 2. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. 3. Eaglestone, Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial. 4. A.F. Chalmers, What Is This Thing Called Science?: An Assessment of the Nature and Status of Science and Its Methods (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland, 1978); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago; London: University of Chicago, 1968 [1962]). 5. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life. 6. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 7. John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2016), 112. 8. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and skill (London: Routledge, 2000). 9. Jelinek, This Is Not Art, 136. 10. Sansi, Art, Anthropology and the Gift, 69. 11. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Pandora, [1980] 1995); Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (London: Pan, 1981). 1.

241

NOTES

12. R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (London: Oxford University Press, [1938] 1958). 13. Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover, 1955); Anthony Forge, Style and Meaning: Essays on the Anthropology of Art, ed. Alison Clarke and Nicholas Thomas (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2017). The gender bias is being addressed in the more recent scholarship of Anna-Karina Hermkens and Wonu Veys, among others. Fanny Wonu Veys, Unwrapping Tongan Barkcloth: Encounters, Creativity and Female Agency (London; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2017); Anna-Karina Hermkens, Engendering Objects. Dynamics of Barkcloth and Gender among the Maisin in Papua New Guinea (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2013). 14. Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 2006); Lucy R. Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012); Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (London; Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery; MIT, 2006). 15. Sholette, Dark Matter. 16. Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen, Artworld Prestige: Arguing about Cultural Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 44. 17. Ibid., 50. 18. Ian Heywood, Social Theories of Art: A Critique (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 74. 19. Van Laar and Diepeveen, Artworld Prestige, 51, 163. 20. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 21. In Britain, the Elizabethan period (1558–1603) is understood as Early Modern, whereas for Foucault and his observations about France, it is the French Revolution in 1789 that begins modernity. 22. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making. 23. Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, Part 1, 496–527, 496–497. 24. Heywood, Social Theories of Art, 42. 25. Annette Jael Lehmann, ed., Black Mountain Research (Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2016). Available online: https://black-mountain-research. com/documents/ (accessed 21 December 2019). 26. This aspect of the myth of primitivism was raised by the collector of African American art, financial entrepreneur and BBC radio 4 presenter, Alvin Hall, in ‘American Art: From the Outside In’, broadcast, 3 May 2018. Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b0b0x2kk (accessed 27 December 2019).

242

NOTES

27. Susan Hiller, ed., The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (London: Routledge, 1991); Joshua I. Cohen, ‘Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern “Primitivist” Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905–8’. The Art Bulletin 99, no. 2 (2017): 136–165. DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2017.1252241; Fred Myers, ‘“Primitivism,” Anthropology and the Category of “Primitive Art”’, in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 267–284. 28. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making; G.E.R. Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007). 29. Derek Matravers, ‘Art, Knowledge and Virtue: Comments on Alana Jelinek’s This Is Not Art’. Journal of Visual Art Practice 13, no. 3 (November 2014): 169–177, 173. 30. On the credulity of metanarratives, see Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition; and for the establishment of reality after objectivity, JeanFrancois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 31. A.F. Chalmers, What Is This Thing Called Science? (St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, [1982] 1976). 32. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: New Left Books, 1975). 33. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 34. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum Books, [1975] 2004). 35. In 1940, G.H. Hardy made the reverse argument, that pure maths is like art (painting and poetry) in that it creates patterns and is, it must be, beautiful. As with any disciplinarian, Hardy also argues for the supremacy of his own. G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 13–14. 36. M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). 37. Heywood, Social Theories of Art, 107. 38. Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1985), 13–32. 39. With thanks to Derek Matravers and his bringing to my attention Republic X, 596c. 40. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 14. 41. Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’. Artforum 44, no. 6 (February 2006): 178–183; Grant H. Kester, ‘Another Turn’. Artforum 44, no. 9 (May 2006): 22; Claire Bishop, ‘Responds’. Art Forum 44, no. 9 (May 2006): 24.

243

NOTES

42. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 15. 43. Rancière, Dissensus, 142. 44. For example, Henry Moore. Edward Juler, ‘Life Forms: Henry Moore, Morphology and Biologism in the Interwar Years’, Tate Papers. Available online: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/researchpublications/henry-moore/edward-juler-life-forms-henry-mooremorphology-and-biologism-in-the-interwar-years-r1151314 (accessed 28 December 2019). 45. Clive Cazeaux, Art, Research, Philosophy, 124. 46. Ibid., 94. 47. Ibid., 107. 48. Ibid., 120. 49. I cite Matthew Slotover in This Is Not Art, 32; see also Wu, Privatising Culture. 50. Jean Gadrey, New Economy New Myth (New York; London: Routledge, 2001).

Chapter 5 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

As Tocqueville observed, democracy is not merely the organization of voting rights or government. It is a set of values and cultural assumptions with the then new and specific emphasis on equality. For a discussion of this see James T. Schleifer, The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). Index on Censorship conference held at South Bank Centre, London, in January 2013, Julia Farrington, Conference Report May 2013. Available online: http://www.indexoncensorship.org/ takingtheoffensive (accessed 28 December 2019). Museums Association Code of Ethics 2015 1.2 ‘Ensure Editorial Integrity in Programming and Interpretation. Resist Attempts to Influence Interpretation or Content by Particular Interest Groups, Including Lenders, Donors and Funders.’ Available online: https:// www.museumsassociation.org/ethics/code-of-ethics (accessed 28 December 2019). Sally Yerkovich’s talk is available on the Museum Association website at http://www.museumsassociation.org/video/17112015sally-yerkovich-conference (accessed 28 December 2019). Since the publication of this chapter in Censoring Art, attention has been paid to other types of sponsorship of the arts and most notably, 244

NOTES

the case of the £1M gift from the Sackler fund to the National Portrait Gallery being refused. The high-profile invited artist Nan Goldin ran an effective campaign about the role of the pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, in creating a mass addiction problem in the United States to their product Oxycontin and threatened to withdraw from the upcoming exhibition of her artwork at the gallery. Joanna Walters and Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Nan Goldin Threatens London Gallery Boycott over £1m Gift from Sackler Fund’, The Guardian, 17 February 2019. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/ feb/16/nan-goldin-sackler-gift-oxycontin-national-portrait-gallery (accessed 28 December 2019). 6. For example, http://creativetimereports.org/2013/04/15/chinaevery-day-we-put-the-state-on-trial/, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2014/06/19/ai-weiwei-self-censorship-ullens_n_5509225. html and, in the United States, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ ist/?next=/arts-culture/is-ai-weiwei-chinas-most-dangerousman-17989316/. 7. Snowball sampling, which is the name for this method of finding data, is a valid social science qualitative method of data collection, although it is also acknowledged to be a biased network-based method. Participants were offered anonymity which could be waived. I decided to present most of my informants’ material anonymously in order to protect those who chose this option. 8. Matti Bunzl, In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde: An Anthropologist Investigates the Contemporary Art Museum (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 91. 9. Danto, ‘The Artworld’, 571–584. 10. Jelinek, This Is Not Art, 47–58. 11. Dickie, Art Circle. 12. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life. 13. The point here is not whether a discipline creates facts that are also empirically true but that disciplines create orthodoxies and innovation within what is ‘true’ in its broader disciplinary sense.Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making; Lloyd, Cognitive Variations; G.E.R. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making Cross-cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning, and Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); G.E.R. Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, c2007). 14. Julia Farrington, ‘Taking the Offensive: Defending Artistic Freedom of Expression in the UK’, Index on Censorship Conference Report (May 2013), 11.

245

NOTES

15. It is worth noting, if only in footnote, that neoliberalism is sonamed for it being a re-visitation of the conditions of economic liberalism that prevailed in the late nineteenth century, as critiqued by Marx and Engels. This is an observation of Foucault’s. Yet, neither Foucault nor I would, on the other hand, wish to overstate the similarities between then and now. My own emphasis in the analysis of the micro-physics of power is attention given to the particularities of conditions at a specific time and location. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart, Gen. eds. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana; trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 16. Jean Gadrey, New Economy, New Myth (London: Routledge, 2001), 82. 17. Michel Callon, ed., ‘Introduction’, in The Laws of the Markets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 18. An instance of perceived, but not actual, corporate censorship following the ordinary operations of a corporation and the market can be seen in the report by David Streitfeld, ‘Literary Lions Unite in Protest Over Amazon’s E-book Tactics’, The New York Times (29 September 2014). 19. New Labour was building on Conservative policies for privatization in general, not just for the arts. It was assumed by Tony Blair that what mattered was the provision of public services, not how they were paid for. This was understood as The Third Way. Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). 20. I am not overly nostalgic about the previous model of arts funding as it had its problems, namely it was biased generally towards the art of already-privileged white men. Nevertheless, the various ‘firsts’ for Black Arts Movement, live art and feminist art practices occurred within the walls of the publicly funded ICA and a few other publicly funded and self-funded venues. 21. Jennifer Thatcher, ‘Women Are Still Woefully Under-represented in the Art World’. Art Monthly 367 (June 2013). Wu, Privatising Culture, 258–270. 22. See, for example, Rockefeller’s censorship of Diego Rivera in Sharon Ann Musher, Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). 23. Available online: www.arts.ac.uk/csm/business-and-innovation/ working-with-our-students/sponsorship/lvmh/. 24. Available online: www.recreativeuk.com/resource/value-art-school. 25. Tate Press Release, BP Saturdays: Loud Tate (6 August 2010). Available online: www.tate.org.uk/about/press-office/press-releases/ bp-saturdays-loud-tate. 246

NOTES

26. My informant(s) were not the previous head of that programme and I discussed the incident with at least two people who were in the meeting(s) at the time the decision was made. 27. Extract from letter to Peter Kennard from Serpentine Gallery employee, personal communication. 28. Personal communication. 29. Personal communication. 30. Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’, Art Forum XLIV, no. 1 (September 2005): 278–283. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds, Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, c2009). 31. Jane Trowell, ‘Shell Sponsorship and Censorship at Southbank Centre?’ Platform London Blog, 14 July 2011. Available online: https://platformlondon.org/2011/07/14/shell-sponsorship-andcensorship-at-southbank-centre/ (accessed 7 January 2020). 32. Extract from email to John Jordan from Tate Modern (5 February 2009), personal communication. 33. Available online: http://www.on-curating.org/index.php/issue20-reader/to-bp-or-not-to-bp-art-activism-and-the-future-ofinstitutional-sponsorship.html. 34. Various articles stand as testament to the outrage caused by the attempt at corporate self-censorship beginning with John Jordan’s, ‘On Refusing to Pretend to Do Politics in a Museum’, Art Monthly (334, March 2010). 35. Available online: https://liberatetate.wordpress.com/ (accessed 7 January 2020). 36. Despite disavowing any connection between the actions of Liberate Tate and the withdrawal of sponsorship from Tate, citing instead ‘a challenging business environment’ (The Independent, 11 March 2016), there is a broad acceptance of the direct causal relationship. This was openly discussed at the annual conference of the Museums Association 2015. 37. Terry Macalister, ‘Museums Face Ethics Investigation over Influence of Sponsor BP’, The Guardian, 29 April 2016. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/29/museums-ethicsinvestigation-influence-sponsor-bp-british-museum (accessed 7 January 2020). 38. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/join-trade-union/trade-unionmembership-your-employment-rights. Available online: https:// www.harpermacleod.co.uk/hm-insights/2014/january/politicalbeliefs-and-the-equality-act-2010/. 247

NOTES

39. Chin-Tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London: Verso, 2003). 40. Susana Rustin and George Arnett, ‘Corporate Sponsorship’, The Guardian, 2 March 2015. Available online: http://www.theguardian. com/culture/2015/mar/02/arts-corporate-sponsorship-tate-britishmuseum. (accessed 7 January 2020). 41. Mark Brown, ‘Tate Ordered to Reveal BP Sponsorship Details in Case by Environment Activists’, The Guardian (23 December 2014). 42. Personal communication. 43. Even under the Nazi regime, there is dispute about the full extent of artistic capitulation and complicity; see Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, c1996). 44. One example is the doctoral research of Sophie Hope in Logbook 3 Performative Interviews (London: Cultural Democracy Editions, 2010). Available online: https://sophiehope.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/Logbook_03_Performative_Interviews.pdf. Mirza’s critique of the ill-effects of measurement on the visual arts can be read as further evidence: Munira Mirza et al., Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? (London: Policy Exchange, 2006). 45. Bunzl, In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde, 7. 46. Sophie Hope, Logbook 3 Performative Interviews, Available online: http://sophiehope.org.uk/research/. 47. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000). Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). 48. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Charles R. Walgreen Foundation. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press 1965 [1958]), 179. 49. Pamphlets: A Collection of Essays in Which Artists Express Their Views on the Art World with Complete Freedom, Artquest 2014. Available online: http://www.artquest.org.uk/project/pamphlets/ (accessed 7 January 2020). 50. Alana Jelinek, ‘Introduction and Response’, Journal of Visual Art Practice XIII, no. 3 (November 2014). 51. Scientific controversy regulates science as a discipline. For example, the science community’s reaction to Andrew Wakefield’s findings about the MMR vaccine was both to expel him from the community (he was struck off from the UK Medical Register) and to denounce his method, stating that his sample was too small to prove anything conclusive, and also that there were flaws in how he collected his data. For non-scientists, Wakefield’s scientific conclusion was undermined by ‘conflict of interest’. This point is less salient when understanding the case through the lens 248

NOTES

of disciplinarity. Understood through discipline, what matters is both the conduct of the individual and the conduct of the community reacting to an individual when they act to undermine the integrity of the discipline. 52. Rancière, Dissensus. Jelinek, This Is Not Art. 53. Arendt, The Human Condition. 54. Ibid., 7.

Chapter 6 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (London: Harper and Row, 1971), 72. 2. Despite Latour’s proposition that we have never been modern. Latour and Porter, We Have Never Been Modern (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). 3. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991); Mark Redhead, Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity (Lanham, MD; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 120. Please note, by no means do I uphold the liberal ideas of universal human rights. My thinking is too influenced by anthropologists such as Philippe Descola and his critics such as Amiria Salmond, as well as Donna Haraway to countenance this. Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013); Amiria J. M. Salmond ‘Transforming Translations (part 2): Addressing Ontological Alterity’, Hau 4, no. 1 (2014); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Verso, 1992). 4. Pope, Creativity, 19. 5. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures, Introduction by Stefan Collini (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 6. Peter Lamarque, ‘On Perceiving Conceptual Art’, in Philosophy and Conceptual Art, ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 7. Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics Part I’. Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (October 1951): 496–527, 521. 8. F.C. White, ‘Love and Beauty in Plato’s Symposium’. The Journal of Hellenic Studies 109 (1989): 149–157 cited in Pappas, Nickolas, ‘Plato’s Aesthetics’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), . 1.

249

NOTES

9. Lamarque, ‘On Perceiving Conceptual Art’, 16. 10. For example, New Aestheticism and its discontents including Dave Beech and John Roberts, ‘spectres of the aesthetic’ 1996 New Left Review I/218, July–August. 11. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: A Cross-reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries (London: Studio Vista, 1973).The dematerialization of art, as Lucy Lippard famously coined it, was an urgent political move in the 1970s. We could see conceptual art, historically, as a way of returning art to the distinct rigour and passion, the radical urgency of the avant-garde. As is so often the case with politics, the case for the politics and potential of dematerialization may have been over-stated. See also Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 [1974]). 12. Mel Bochner, ‘Mel Bochner on Malevich: An Interview’ (with John Coplans), Artforum 12/10 (June 1974) 62 Quoted in Roberta Smith, ‘Conceptual Art’, in Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 259. 13. A letter of instruction, an installation diagram and a certificate pertaining to Wall Drawing #1136 can be found in Tate Gallery Records (PC10.1 LeWitt, Sol). Available online: https://www.tate. org.uk/art/artworks/lewitt-wall-drawing-1136-ar00165 (accessed 2 January 2020). 14. Lippard, Six Years. 15. Peter Lamarque in On Perceiving Conceptual Art Philosophy and Conceptual Art, ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens 2007, p. 15. 16. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Art in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (1979): 30–44; Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000). 17. John Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 6–7. 18. Ibid., 48. 19. Clive Cazeax, Art Research Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2017), 164. 20. Henry Moore, ‘Statement for Unit One’, in Unit I. The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture. [The Opinions on Art of the Various Members of Unit I], ed. Herbert Read (London, 1934), 29. 21. Jennifer Clarke, ‘From of, to With, to and? Curation and Collaboration in Inter-disciplinary Exhibition Making’, in The Anthropologist as Curator, ed. Roger Sansi (London: Bloomsbury 2019), 133–146.

250

NOTES

22. Cazeaux, Art Research Philosophy, 74. 23. Gadrey, New Economy New Myth, 84. 24. A point made by Derek Matravers in response to the This Is Not Art in Matravers ‘Art, Knowledge and Virtue’, 169–177. 25. Helaine Selin. Mathematics across Cultures: The History of NonWestern Mathematics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000). 26. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 27. Scott, Salter and Halverson, ‘Transport and Deposition of Plutonium in the Ocean: Evidence from Gulf of Mexico Sediments’, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 63, no. 2 (May 1983): 202–222; Paulo Alves de Lima Ferreira et al., ‘Using a Cesium-137 Sedimentary Fallout Record in the South Atlantic Ocean as a Supporting Tool for Defining the Anthropocene’, Anthropocene 14 (June 2016): 34–45. 28. Marilyn Strathern, ‘Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 28 (1987), 251–281, 256, in Jeanette Edwards, ‘Tugging on a Thread (of thought): A Comment on Marilyn Strathern’s “Anthropological reasoning”’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 3: 39–44. 29. Chalmers, What Is This Thing Called Science? 30. Ashutosh Jogalekar, ‘Falsification and Its Discontents’, Scientific American, 24 (January 2014); Thornton, Stephen, ‘Karl Popper’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2017/entries/popper/ (accessed 2 January 2020). 31. Ben Goldacre, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010). 32. Shannon Hall, ‘Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago’. Scientific American, October 2015. Available online: https:// www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climatechange-almost-40-years-ago/ (accessed 2 January 2020). 33. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 72. 34. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 35. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1958] 1998), 8. 36. Ibid., 175. 37. Ibid., 178. 38. Ibid., 177.

251

NOTES

Chapter 7 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex 1976 (1953), trans. and ed. H.M.  Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 17. 2. Bishop, ‘The Social Turn’, 178–183; Kester, ‘Another Turn’, 22 and Bishop, ‘Responds’, 24. 3. Cazeaux, Art, Research, Philosophy. 4. John Roberts, ‘Art and Its Negations’. Third Text 24, no. 3 (2010): 289–303. 5. Sam Rose, ‘The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory’. New Literary History 48, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 223–244. Hal Foster, The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, [1983] 1998). 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.421 in Wittgenstein, Pears, McGuinness, Pears, David Francis, and McGuinness, Brian (eds), Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (London: Routledge, [1973] 2002). 7. Ian Heywood, Social Theories of Art: A Critique (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 186. 8. Clement Greenberg, ‘Art and Kitsch’ (1939), in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965 [1961]). 9. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972: A Cross-reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries: Consisting of a Bibliography into Which Are Inserted a Fragmented Text, Art Works, Documents, Interviews, and Symposia, Arranged Chronologically and Focused on So-called Conceptual or Information or Idea Art with Mentions of Such Vaguely Designated Areas as Minimal, Anti-form, Systems, Earth, of Process Art, Occurring Now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with Occasional Political Overtones). Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relationnelle ([Dijon]: Presses du réel, c.2001). 10. Johanna Drucker’s Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity is one such example (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 11. One example can be seen in the practice and rhetoric of activist artist Ellie Harrison and the ‘Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund’ launch at Glasgow’s ‘The Only Way is Ethics’ festival 2016. 12. Sarah Kent, Shark-Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s (London: Zwemmer, 1994). 1.

252

NOTES

13. Liz Ellis, ‘Do You Want to Be in My Gang: An Account of Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Practice’, in n.paradoxa (London: KT Press, 2, 1997) 6–14. 14. Issue 13 of engage (Summer 2003) is one example of this assumption. Further analysis of perceptions of globalization at the time can be seen in David Slater, ‘Post-colonial Questions for Global Times’. Review of International Political Economy 5, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 647–678. 15. Peter Kennard, ‘Blair’s Art’, Art Monthly, no. 235 (April 2000): 45. 16. Emmanuel Levinas was a philosopher, not a Classical historian. As such he did not pursue the origins of the Greek-Other dichotomy and took it as read, creating his philosophical proposition on this basis. It is argued by historians Julia Smith, David Cannadine, Edith Hall among others that the Classical dichotomy of civilizationbarbarian is actually the product of Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbons’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire’ 1776–1789 and the mercantile imperial mindset of modernity. 17. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9–11. 18. Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, c.1985), 14. 19. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 107. 20. Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s. (London: Verso, 1999). 21. Emmanuel Levinas and Alphonso Lingis, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998 [1969]), 201. 22. Lisbeth Lipari, ‘Rhetoric’s Other: Levinas, Listening, and the Ethical Response’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 45, no. 3 (2012): 227–245, 229. 23. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1992), 31. 24. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing 1990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) 189–193. 25. Mary Gallagher ‘Ethics in the Absence of Reference: Levinas and the (Aesthetic) Value of Diversity’. Levinas Studies, 7 (2015): 95–125, 96. 26. Edward W Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1991); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Rosalind C. Morris (Ed) Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2010). 21–29. 27. Simone Drichel, ‘Face to Face with the Other Other: Levinas versus the Postcolonial’. Levinas Studies 7 (2006): 21–42, 22. 28. B.C. Hutchens, Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2004).

253

NOTES

29. Nils Bubandt and Rane Willerslev, ‘The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 1 (2015): 5–34, 7. 30. Ibid., 6. 31. Chris Bongie, Friends and Enemies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 328 cited in Michael J. Dash, ‘Location Matters: Grounding the Global in Glissant’, in Regionality/Mondiality: Perspective on Art, Aesthetics and Globalisation (Södertörn: Södertörn University Press, 2014), 25–39. 32. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox. 33. Colin Hay, Why We Hate Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). 34. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 15. 35. Ibid., 171. 36. Ibid., 72. 37. Callinicos, Against the Third Way. 38. Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx Bookmarks 1983 (2004), 111 quoting Marx Grundrisse (Harmondsworth, 1973), 101. 39. Jacques Derrida, 1999 Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas cited in Drichel, Face to Face with the Other Other. 40. Drichel, ‘Face to Face with the Other Other’, 21–42, 38–39. 41. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, Critical Horizons 7, no. 1 (2006): 1–20. 42. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013); Mouffe and Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. 43. Rancière, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, 1–2. 44. Didier Fassin, ‘The Ethical Turn in Anthropology: Promises and Uncertainties’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1 (2014): 429–435. 45. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment; Tim Ingold, The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). 46. Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, [1932] 1976), 37. 47. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 9. 48. Rancière, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’. 49. Bishop, Artificial Hells. 50. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993), 70–75. 51. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Penguin, 1979), 12.

254

NOTES

52. 16 January 2006. Runa Islam Review by Belinda Bowring Frieze. 53. Drichel, Face to Face with the Other Other, 21–42, 26. 54. Ibid. 55. Édouard Glissant, L’intention poétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) 24. Édouard Glissant, Anne Malena, and Nathanaël, Poetic Intention. (Callicoon, NY; Lebanon, NH: Nightboat; Distributed by University Press of New England, 2010).

Chapter 8 Stijn Broecke and Tom Nicholls, Ethnicity and Degree Attainment, Research Report RW92 (Department for Education and Skills, 2007). Available online: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/6846/1/RW92.pdf (accessed 5 January 2020). 2. The Living and Working Conditions of Artists in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, 2010. Available online: http://www. artscouncil.ie/uploadedFiles/LWCA_Study_-_Final_2010.pdf (accessed 5 January 2020). 3. Gell, The Art of Anthropology. 4. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, c.1985). 5. David Hare, ‘The Myth of Originality in Contemporary Art’. Art Journal 24, no. 2 (Winter 1964–65): 139–142. 6. Ibid., 140. 7. Luce Irigaray, Je, tu, nous: Pour une culture de la différence (Paris: B. Grasset 1990); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2004). 8. I do not agree with much of Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, despite it being purportedly true as evidenced by Sugata Mitra and his now famous experiments in computer literacy and selfdirected learning in Indian slums. Peter Wilby, ‘Sugata Mitra – The Professor with His Head in the Cloud’. The Guardian, 7 June 2016. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/ jun/07/sugata-mitra-professor-school-in-cloud (accessed 5 January 2020). 9. Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, 114. 10. Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, ‘What Poetry Does Best: The Harrisons’ Poetics of Being and Acting in the World’, in The Time of the Force Majeur: After 45 Years Counterforce Is on the Horizon, ed. M.H. Harrison and N. Harrison (Grantham: Presetel, 2016). Available online: 1.

255

NOTES

https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/246537/what-poetrydoes-best-the-harrisons-poetics-of-being-and-acting-in-the-world 11. Michel De Certeau, ‘Pay Attention: To Make Art’, in Lagoon Cycle, ed. M.H. Harrison and N. Harrison (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 17. Cited in Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, ‘What Poetry Does Best: The Harrisons’ Poetics of Being and Acting in the World’. 12. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 13. This Is Not Art, 75. 14. Anatole von Hügel, The Fiji Journals of Baron Anatole von Hügel, 1875–1877, ed. Jane Roth and Steven Hooper (Suva: Fiji Museum in Association with Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1990). 15. See, for example, the range of contributors to the annual RIXC Art Science Festival and conference in Riga, Latvia. Available online: http://rixc.org/en/festival/. 16. Daisy Sutcliffe, Creative Coast: A Case Study in How the Arts Can Support Management of a Natural World Heritage Site (Jurassic Coast Partnership, April 2013), 6. Available online: https:// jurassiccoast.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Creative-Coast-ACase-Study.pdf (accessed 6 January 2020). 17. Hugh G Petrie, ‘Do You See What I See? The Epistemology of Interdisciplinary Inquiry’. Journal of Aesthetic Education 10, no. 1 (1976): 29–43, 30. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 35–36. 20. Munira Mirza, ‘Introduction’, in Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? ed. Munira Mirza et al. (London: Policy Exchange, 2006), 13–19. 21. Alana Jelinek, ‘Feminist Artivisms: Examples of an Art History’, in Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms, ed. Katy Deepwell (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020), 214–225. 22. Jennifer Clarke, ‘Working between Art and Forestry: Towards an Ecology of Practice’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Aberdeen 2013. 23. Taylor, Sources of the Self. 24. L. Leeson, Art: Process: Change – Inside a Socially Engaged Practice (London: Routledge, 2017), 134. 25. K. Von Zinnenburg Carroll, Art in the Time of Colony (Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–2000) (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2014).

256

NOTES

26. Simon Schaffer, ‘How Disciplines Look’, in Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences, ed. Andrew Barry and Georgina Born (London: Routledge, 2013), 57–81, 58. 27. Heywood Social theories of Art, 186. 28. Cazeaux, Art, Research, Philosophy, 94. 29. Ibid., 183–194, quoting Theodore Adorno Aesthetic Theory (1970) and Negative Dialectics, trans E.B. Ashton (1973). 30. Petrie, ‘Do You See What I See? The Epistemology of Interdisciplinary Inquiry’, 41.

Chapter 9 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Nadja Sayej, ‘See Change: The battle against sexual harassment in the art world’. The Guardian, 20 February 2018; Arina Aristarkhova, ‘MeToo in the Art World: Genius should not excuse sexual harassment’. Salon, 7 May 2018; Matthew Blackman, ‘Zipped mouths over alleged “racial slurs and sexual innuendo” at Zeitz MOCAA’ news24, 10 June 2018. RA Sydie, ‘Humanism, Patronage and the Question of Women’s Artistic Genius in the Italian Renaissance’, Journal of Historical Sociology 2, no. 3 (September 1989): 175–205. L. Nochlin ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ 1971, in Women, Art, and Power: And Other Essays (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989); Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker (eds), Art and Sexual Politics: Women’s Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History (New York: Macmillan, 1973). James Hodkinson, ‘Genius beyond Gender: Novalis, Women and the Art of Shapeshifting’, The Modern Language Review 96, no. 1 (January 2001): 103–105. Frederick James Gregg Preface, Catalogue International Exhibition of Modern Art, Association of American Painters and Sculptors, Inc. Vreeland Advertising Press, New York, 1913. Caroline A Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 220–222. Nick Bilton ‘Silicon Valley’s Most Disturbing Obsession’. Vanity Fair 5 (October 2016). Available online: https://www.vanityfair.com/ news/2016/10/silicon-valley-ayn-rand-obsession Alvin Hall (Broadcaster) ‘American Art from the Outside In’, BBC Radio 4 (3 May 2018). Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b0b0x2kk (accessed 7 January 2020). 257

NOTES

8. 9.

Farrington, ‘Taking the Offensive’, 11. Anita Herle, Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 10. Morris W. foster and Richard R. Sharp, ‘Race, Ethnicity and Genomics: Social Classification as Proxies of Biological Heterogeneity’, Genome Research 12 (2002): 844–850. 11. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Foreword Cheryl Clarke. (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 2007). 12. Kuklick, ‘Islands in the Pacific’, 611–638, 614; Fischer, ‘The Art/ Ethnography Binary’, 251–271. 13. Armin Medosch, New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 14. Bunzl, In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde. 15. Unfortunately, though, much of what has been written by anthropologists of art strays far from this type of situated ethnographic practice and instead simply replicates the norms that art historians established, and either focus on the rarefied or confuse creativity with art. Alana Jelinek, ‘Gender and the Visual Arts’, in International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 12 Volume Set, ed. Hilary Callan (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). 16. One example is Anthony Gardner, Biennials Triennials and Documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 17. Alpers, The Art of Describing. 18. Sánchez Vázquez, Art and Society. 19. R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of History: And Other Writings in Philosophy of History Introduction by William H. Dray and W.J. van der Dussen (eds) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1999] 2001). 20. R. Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Black Swan, 2007). 21. R. Giphart and Mark van Vugt, Mismatch: How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day and What We Can Do about It, trans. Suzanne Heukensfeldt Jansen (London: Robinson, 2018). 22. Ibid. 23. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7.

258

Bibliography

MH Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). John Abromeit, ‘Genealogy and Critical Historicism: Two Models of Enlightenment in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Writings’. Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 283–308. Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and György Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007). Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2009). Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London: John Murray, 1983). Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Charles R. Walgreen Foundation. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1965 [1958]). Arina Aristarkhova, ‘MeToo in the Art World: Genius Should Not Excuse Sexual Harassment’. Salon, 7 May 2018. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, 1906). Matthew Arnold, Arts Council Ireland, The Living and Working Conditions of Artists in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland 2010 Available online: http://www.artscouncil.ie/uploadedFiles/ LWCA_Study_-_Final_2010.pdf Association of American Painters and Sculptors, Catalogue International Exhibition of Modern Art (New York: The Association, 1913). Association of American Painters and Sculptors, ‘Wakefield’s Article Linking MMR Vaccine and Autism Was Fraudulent’ BMJ342

BIBLIO GR APHY

(15 March 2011): d1678. doi: 10.1136/bmj.d1678. Available online: https://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d1678 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). David Bainbridge, Software Copyright Law, 4th edn (London: Butterworths, 1999). Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Andrew Barry and Georgina Born (eds), Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences (London: Routledge, 2013). Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex 1976 (1953), trans & ed. H.M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Dave Beech and John Roberts, ‘Spectres of the Aesthetic’. New Left Review (I/218 July–August, 1996). John Berger, Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2004). Nick Bilton, ‘Silicon Valley’s Most Disturbing Obsession’. Vanity Fair, 5 October 2016. Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’. Artforum 44, no. 6 (February 2006): 178–183. Claire Bishop, ‘Responds’. Artforum 44, no. 9 (May 2006): 22. Claire Bishop (ed.), Participation (London; Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery; MIT, 2006). Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012). Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover, 1955). Matthew Blackman, ‘Zipped Mouths over Alleged “Racial Slurs and Sexual Innuendo” at Zeitz Mocaa’. news24, 10 June 2018. Kevin Craig Boileau, Genuine Reciprocity and Group Authenticity: Foucault’s Developments on Sartre’s Social Ontology (Lanham; Oxford: University of America, 2000). Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les presses du réel, [1998] 2002). Wayne Brekhus, ‘A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus’. Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (March 1998): 34–51.

260

BIBLIO GR APHY

Stijn Broecke and Tom Nicholls, Ethnicity and Degree Attainment, Research Report RW92 (Department for Education and Skills 2007) Available online: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/6846/1/RW92.pdf Mark Brown, ‘Tate Ordered to Reveal BP Sponsorship Details in Case by Environment Activists’. The Guardian (23 December 2014). Peter Brunt and Nicholas Thomas (eds), Art in Oceania: A New History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012). Nils Bubandt and Rane Willerslev, ‘The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 1 (2015): 5–34. Matti Bunzl, In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde: An Anthropologist Investigates the Contemporary Art Museum (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 [1974]). Hilary Callan (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 12 Volume Set (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (London and Sydney: Bookmarks, [1983] 2004). Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). Michel Callon (ed.), The Laws of the Markets (Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review, 1998). Clive Cazeaux, Art, Research, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2017). Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). A.F. Chalmers, What Is This Thing Called Science?: An Assessment of the Nature and Status of Science and Its Methods (St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland, 1978). Christopher Chippindale and David Gill, ‘Material Consequences of Contemporary Classical Collecting’. American Journal of Archaeology 104, no. 3 (2000): 463–511. Gregory Clark, ‘Ruling Classes and under Classes: 1,000 Years of Social Mobility’ (2011). Available online: http://economics.yale.edu/sites/ default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Economic-History/clark111024b.pdf (accessed 20 July 2016). T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2014).

261

BIBLIO GR APHY

Alison Clarke, Nicholas Thomas (eds), Style and Meaning: Essays on the Anthropology of Art (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2017). Jennifer Clarke, ‘Working between Art and Forestry: Towards an Ecology of Practice’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2013. Jennifer Clarke, ‘From of, to with, to and? Curation and Collaboration in Inter-disciplinary Exhibition Making’, in The Anthropologist as Curator. Roger Sansi, ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 133–146. Joshua I. Cohen, ‘Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern “Primitivist” Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905–8’. The Art Bulletin 99, no. 2 (2017): 136–165, doi: 10.1080/00043079.2017.1252241 R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (London: Oxford University Press, [1938] 1958). R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of History: And Other Writings in Philosophy of History. Introduction by William H. Dray; W. J. van der Dussen (eds) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1999] 2001). (The) Corner House, Briefing Paper 32: Political Organising behind TRIPS (Sturminster Newton, Dorset: September 2004). Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). Salvador Dalì, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, ed. & trans. Haim Findelstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’. Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 571–584. Michael J. Dash, ‘Location Matters: Grounding the Global in Glissant’, in Regionality / Mondiality: Perspectives on Art, Aesthetics and Globalisation: an Anthology, Charlotte Bydler and Cecilia Sjöholm, ed. (Södertörn: Södertörn University Press, 2014), 23–40. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (London: Paladin, [1976] 1978). Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Black Swan, 2007). Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, trans into English 1970, Red and Black. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, [1991] 1995). Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013). George Dickie, Art Circle: A Theory of Art (Chicago: Spectrum Press, 1997). Dreyfus, Rabinow, Foucault (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Simone Drichel, ‘Face to Face with the Other Other: Levinas versus the Postcolonial’. Levinas Studies 7 (2006): 21–42.

262

BIBLIO GR APHY

Katherine Dow, Making a Good Life: An Ethnography of Nature, Ethics, and Reproduction (Princeton, NJ; Oxford, England: Princeton University Press, 2016). Johanna Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2005). Robert Eaglestone, Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (Cambridge: Icon books, 2001). Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Jeanette Edwards, ‘Tugging on a Thread (of thought): A Comment on Marilyn Strathern’s “Anthropological Reasoning”’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 3: 39–44. James Elkins, ‘Why Art Historians Should Learn to Paint: The Case for Studio Experience’ Available online: http://www.jameselkins. com/images/stories/jamese/pdfs/A-h-should-draw.pdf (accessed 14 July 2016). Liz Ellis, ‘Do You Want to Be in My Gang: An Account of Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Practice’. n.paradoxa (London: KT Press, Vol. 2, February 1997), 4–19. Available online: https://www. ktpress.co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue2_Liz-Ellis_4-19.pdf? Julia Farrington, Index on Censorship Taking the Offensive Conference Report May 2013. Available online: http://www.indexoncensorship. org/takingtheoffensive Didier Fassin, ‘The Ethical Turn in Anthropology: Promises and Uncertainties’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1 (2014): 429–435. Paulo Alves de Lima Ferreira et al., ‘Using a Cesium-137 Sedimentary Fallout Record in the South Atlantic Ocean as a Supporting Tool for Defining the Anthropocene’. Anthropocene 14 (June 2016): 34–45. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: New Left Books, 1975). Laura Fischer, ‘The Art/Ethnography Binary: Post-Colonial Tensions within the Field of Australian Aboriginal Art’. Cultural Sociology 6, no. 2 (2012): 251–271. Michael C. FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: New Press, [1983] 1998). Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1985).

263

BIBLIO GR APHY

Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, c1996). Morris W. Foster and Richard R. Sharp, ‘Race, Ethnicity and Genomics: Social Classification as Proxies of Biological Heterogeneity’. Genome Research, 12 (2002): 844–850. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’. Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 777–795. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, Gen. eds. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana; trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, 2010). Michel Foucault and Robert Hurley, History of Sexuality. [Vol. 1], An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). Robert Francis Q.C., Report of the Mid Stafforshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry (London: Stationery Office, 2013) Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/279124/0947.pdf Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’. Art Forum, XLIV, no. 1 (September 2005): 278–283. Maurice Freedman (ed.), Social Organization Essays Presented to Raymond Firth (London: Cass, 1967). Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum Books, [1975] 2004). Mary Gallagher, ‘Ethics in the Absence of Reference: Levinas and the (Aesthetic) Value of Diversity’. Levinas Studies 7 (2015): 95–125. Anthony Gardner, Biennials Triennials and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (London: Athlone Press, 1999). Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2009). David Gill and Chris Chippindale, ‘Material and Intellectual Consequences of Esteem for Cycladic Figures’. American Journal of Archaeology 97, no. 4 (1993): 601–659. R. Giphart and Mark van Vugt, Mismatch: How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day and What We Can Do about It, trans. Suzanne Heukensfeldt Jansen (London: Robinson, 2018). Édouard Glissant, L’intention poétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]).

264

BIBLIO GR APHY

Édouard Glissant, Anne Malena, and Nathanaël, Poetic Intention (Callicoon, NY: Lebanon, NH: Nightboat; Distributed by University Press of New England, 2010). Andrew Goatly, Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology (Amsterdam; Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing, 2007). Andrew Goatly, ‘Ideology and Metaphor’. English Today 22, no. 3 (July 2006): 25–39. Clement Greenberg, ‘Art and Culture: Critical Essays’ (Boston: Beacon Paperbacks, [1961] 1984). Ben Goldacre, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010). Goldblatt, Brown and Patridge (eds), Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts (London: Routledge, 2018). D. Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (London: Pan, 1981). Alfred Cort Haddon, Torres Straits Vol II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1904] 2010). Garry Hagberg, ‘Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/ wittgenstein-aesthetics/ Alvin Hall, ‘American Art: From the Outside In’ broadcast 3 May 2018 Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b0x2kk Shannon Hall, ‘Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 Years Ago’. Scientific American, October 2015 Available online: https:// www. scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climatechangealmost- 40-years-ago/ Stuart Hall (1973), ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Selected Working Papers. Vol. 2, ed. Ann Gray et al. (London: Hutchinson in Association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1980), 117–127 (Also published in CCCS Selected Working Papers: Vol. 2 (London: Routledge 2007)). Hall, Hobson, Lowe and Wilson (eds), Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1981). Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Verso, 1992). G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

265

BIBLIO GR APHY

David Hare, ‘The Myth of Originality in Contemporary Art’. Art Journal 24, no. 2 (Winter 1964–65): 139–142. Graham Harman, Object-oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2017). Jonathan Harris (ed.), Globalization and Contemporary Art (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). M.H. Harrison and N. Harrison (eds), The Time of the Force Majeur: After 45 Years Counterforce Is on the Horizon (Grantham: Presetel, 2016). Colin Hay, Why We Hate Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (London: Harper and Row, 1971). Anita Herle, Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Anna-Karina Hermkens, Engendering Objects. Dynamics of Barkcloth and Gender among the Maisin in Papua New Guinea (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2013). Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker (eds), Art and Sexual Politics: Women’s Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History (New York: Macmillan, 1973). Ivan Hewett, ‘The Riot at the Rite: The Premiere of the Rite of Spring’. British Library articles, 25 May 2016, https://www.bl.uk/20thcenturyliterature/ articles/the-riot-at-the-rite-the-premiere-of-therite-ofspring (accessed 16 December 2019). Ian Heywood, Social Theories of Art: A Critique (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). Susan Hiller (ed.), The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (London: Routledge, 1991). James Hodkinson, ‘Genius beyond Gender: Novalis, Women and the Art of Shapeshifting’. The Modern Language Review 96, no. 1 (January 2001): 103–115. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959). Sophie Hope in Logbook 3 Performative Interviews (London, 2010) Available online: http://sophiehope.org.uk/research/ Anatole von Hügel, The Fiji Journals of Baron Anatole von Hügel, 1875–1877, Jane Roth and Steven Hooper (eds) (Fiji Museum, Suva in association with Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1990). Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980).

266

BIBLIO GR APHY

B. C. Hutchens, Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2004). Tim Ingold, The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000). Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013). Luce Irigaray, Je, tu, nous: Pour une culture de la différence (Paris: B. Grasset, 1990). Alana Jelinek, This Is Not Art: Activism and Other Not Art (London I.B. Tauris, 2013). Alana Jelinek, ‘Introduction and Response’. Journal of Visual Art Practice XIII, no. 3 (November 2014): 159–168. Alana Jelinek, ‘Feminist Artivisms: Examples of an Art History’, in Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms, Katy Deepwell, ed. (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020), 214–225. Ashutosh Jogalekar, ‘Falsification and Its Discontents’. Scientific American, 24 January 2014. Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). John Jordan, ‘On Refusing to Pretend to Do Politics in a Museum’. Art Monthly (334, March 2010). Edward Juler, ‘Life Forms: Henry Moore, Morphology and Biologism in the Interwar Years’. Tate Papers Available online: https://www.tate. org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moore/edward-juler-lifeforms-henry-moore-morphology-and-biologism-in-the-interwaryears-r1151314 Immanuel Kant, ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’. Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Peter Kennard, ‘Blair’s Art’. Art Monthly (April 2000, No. 235). Sarah Kent, Shark-Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s (London: Zwemmer, 1994). Grant H. Kester, ‘Another Turn’. Artforum 44, no. 9 (May 2006): 22. Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1991] 2001). Rosalind Krauss, ‘Art in the Expanded Field’. October 8 (1979): 30–44. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, c1985).

267

BIBLIO GR APHY

Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the PostMedium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000). Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, Part 1’. Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (October 1951): 496–527. Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, Part II’. Journal of the History of Ideas 13, no. 1 (January 1952): 17–46, University of Pennsylvania Press. Thomas Kuhn, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (Chicago; London: University of Chicago, 1968). Henrika Kuklick, ‘Islands in the Pacific: Darwinian Biogeography and British Anthropology’. American Ethnologist 23, no. 3 (1996): 611–638. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). Bruno Latour, ‘The Impact of Science Studies on Political Philosophy’. Science, Technology & Human Values 16, no. 1 (Winter, 1991): 3–19. Bruno Latour and Catherine Porter, We Have Never Been Modern (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London: Sage, 1979). Loraine Leeson, Art: Process: Change– Inside a Socially Engaged Practice (London Routledge, 2017). Nana Leigh, ‘Creating Ancestors and Affinities: A Rhetorical Analysis of African Art in the Story of Modern Art’. Stedelijk Studies Journal 1 (Fall 2014). Available online: https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/ creating-ancestors-affinities-rhetorical-analysis-african-art-storymodern-art/ Annette Jael Lehmann (ed.), Black Mountain Research (Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2016) Available online: https://black-mountain-research.com/ documents/ R. Leppert (ed.), Essays on Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002). Emmanuel Levinas and Alphonso Lingis, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998 [1969]). Shi Lionnet, Françoise Lionne, and Shumei Shi, The Creolization of Theory (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2011). Lisbeth Lipari, ‘Rhetoric’s Other: Levinas, Listening, and the Ethical Response’. Philosophy and Rhetoric 45, no. 3 (2012): 227–245. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: A Cross-reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic

268

BIBLIO GR APHY

Boundaries: Consisting of a Bibliography into Which Are Inserted a Fragmented Text, Art Works, Documents, Interviews, and Symposia, Arranged Chronologically and Focused on So-called Conceptual or Information or Idea Art with Mentions of Such Vaguely Designated Areas as Minimal, Anti-form, Systems, Earth, of Process Art, Occurring Now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with Occasional Political Overtones) (London: Studio Vista, 1973). Lucy R. Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976). G.E.R. Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007). G.E.R. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning, and Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, [1984] 2007). Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). ———. Museums Association Code of Ethics, 2015. Available online: https://www.museumsassociation.org/ethics/code-of-ethics; https:// www.museumsassociation.org/download?id=1155827 Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, c1985). Terry Macalister, ‘Museums Face Ethics Investigation over Influence of Sponsor BP’. The Guardian, 29 April 2016. Available online: http:// www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/29/museums-ethicsinvestigation-influence-sponsor-bp-british-museum Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (eds), The Social Shaping of Technology (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1999). Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy/Erin Manning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [c2009] 2012). George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (eds), The Traffic in Art and Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (London: University of California Press, 1995). Derek Matravers, ‘Art, Knowledge and Virtue: Comments on Alana Jelinek’s This Is Not Art’. Journal Of Visual Art Practice 13, no. 3 (November 2014): 169–177.

269

BIBLIO GR APHY

Marcel Mauss, ‘The Gift’, 1925, trans. French Jane Guyer (Chicago HAU books, 2015). Grace McQuilten, Art in Consumer Culture: Mis-Design (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Armin Medosch, New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). Munira Mirza (ed.), Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? (London: Policy Exchange, 2006). Alfred Moore, Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy and the Problem of Expertise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Rosalind C. Morri and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2010). Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Children in Australian History (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004). Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000). Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005). Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013). Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985). Sharon Ann Musher, Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, c1988). Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. M. Clark & B. Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Walter Kaufmann, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (New York: Vintage, 1974). Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power: And Other Essays (Routledge, 2018) (London : Thames and Hudson, 1989 [1994 printing]). Ann Oakley and J. Ashton (eds), The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (London: London School of Economics, 1997 [1971]). John Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013). Nickolas Pappas, ‘Plato’s Aesthetics’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/plato-aesthetics/

270

BIBLIO GR APHY

Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Pandora, [1980] 1995). Hugh G. Petrie, ‘Do You See What I See? The Epistemology of Interdisciplinary Inquiry’. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 10, no. 1 (1976): 29–43. Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 2006). Rob Pope, Creativity: History Theory Practice (London: Routledge, 2005). Donald Preziosi, ‘Art History: Making the Visible Legible’, in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). T.C. Pruitt (2011), ‘Authority and the Production of Knowledge in Archaeology’ (Doctoral thesis). doi: 10.17863/CAM.15966 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. with an Introduction by Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Jacques Rancière, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’. Critical Horizons 7, no. 1 (2006): 1–20 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Steven Corcoran, ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2010). Herbert Read (ed.), Unit I. The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture. [The Opinions on Art of the Various Members of Unit I] (London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1934). Mark Redhead, Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity (Lanham, MD; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). John Roberts, ‘Art and Its Negations’. Third Text 24, no. 3 (2010): 289–303. John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2016). N. Rollock and D. Gillborn (2011), Critical Race Theory (CRT), British Educational Research Association online resource. Available online: https://www.bera.ac.uk/researchers-resources/publications/criticalrace-theory-crt Dennis A. Rondinelli, ‘Transnational Corporations: International Citizens or New Sovereigns?’ Business and Society Review 107, no. 4 (2002): 391–413. Sam Rose, ‘The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory’. New Literary History 48, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 223–244. Susana Rustin and George Arnett, ‘Corporate Sponsorship’. The Guardian, 2 March 2015. Available online http://www.theguardian. com/culture/2015/mar/02/arts-corporate-sponsorship-tate-britishmuseum 271

BIBLIO GR APHY

Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, [1979] 1991). Amiria J. M. Salmond, ‘Transforming Translations (Part 2): Addressing Ontological Alterity’. Hau 4, no. 1 (2014): 155–187. Scott, Salter and Halverson, ‘Transport and Deposition of Plutonium in the Ocean: Evidence from Gulf of Mexico Sediments’. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 63, no. 2 (May 1983): 202–222. Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics, trans. Mario Riofrancos (1965) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973). Michael Sandel, ‘Reith Lecture: A Price for Everything but at What Cost?’ BBC Radio 4. Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b00kt7s Roger Sansi, Art, Anthropology and the Gift (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Roger Sansi (ed.), The Anthropologist as Curator (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). Nadja Sayej, ‘See Change: The Battle against Sexual Harassment in the Art World’. The Guardian, 20 February 2018. James T. Schleifer, The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, [1932] 1976). Arnd Schneider and C. Wright (eds), Contemporary Art and Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2006). Arnd Schneider and C. Wright (eds), ‘Between Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic Practice’ (Oxford: Berg, 2010). Richard E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology (New York; London: Guilford Press, 1995). Giancarlo Scoditti, Kitawa: A Linguistic and Aesthetic Analysis of Visual Art in Melanesia (Berlin: de Gruyter 1990). Helaine Selin, Mathematics across Cultures: The History of Non-western Mathematics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000). Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (New York and London: Pluto Press, 2011). Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press 2017). David Slater, ‘Post-colonial Questions for Global Times’. Review of International Political Economy 5, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 647–678. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures, Introduction by Stefan Collini (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

272

BIBLIO GR APHY

Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Nikos Stangos (ed.), Concepts of Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994). David Streitfeld, ‘Literary Lions Unite in Protest over Amazon’s E-book Tactics’. The New York Times (29 September 2014). Kiven Strohm, ‘When Anthropology Meets Contemporary Art: Notes for a Politics of Collaboration’. Collaborative Anthropologies 5 (2012): 98–124. Daisy Sutcliffe, Creative Coast: A Case Study in How the Arts Can Support Management of a Natural World Heritage Site (Jurassic Coast Partnership, April 2013) Available online: https://jurassiccoast.org/ wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Creative-Coast-A-Case-Study.pdf R.A. Sydie, ‘Humanism, Patronage and the Question of Women’s Artistic Genius in the Italian Renaissance’. Journal of Historical Sociology 2, no.  3 (September 1989): 175–205. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Jennifer Thatcher, ‘Women Are Still Woefully Under-represented in the Art World’. Art Monthly, no. 367 (June 2013). Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Harvard University Press, 1991). Stephen Thornton, ‘Karl Popper’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Available online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/popper/ Christopher Tilley et al. (eds), Handbook of Material Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006). Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 1831; Tocqueville, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, Democracy in America (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago, 2002). Jane Trowell, ‘Shell Sponsorship and Censorship at Southbank Centre?’ Platform London Blog, 14 July 2011. Available online: https:// platformlondon.org/2011/07/14/shell-sponsorship-and-censorshipat-southbank-centre/ Masamichi Ueno, Democratic Education and the Public Sphere: Towards John Dewey’s Theory of Aesthetic Experience (London: Routledge, 2015). Fanny Wonu Veys, Unwrapping Tongan Barkcloth: Encounters, Creativity and Female Agency (London; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2017). Peter Wilby, ‘Sugata Mitra – The Professor with His Head in the Cloud’. The Guardian, 7 June 2016. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/education/2016/jun/07/sugata-mitra-professorschool-in-cloud 273

BIBLIO GR APHY

Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1983 [1976]). Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.421. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, ed., 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966). ———. Working Papers on University Reform, Series Editor Susan Wright, Aarhus University, 2012. Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London and New York: Verso, 2002). Robert Yanal, ‘The Institutional Theory of Art’, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, Vol. 2, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 508–512. François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event: Together with, The Vocabulary of Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

274

Index

anthropology 12–13, 43–8, 79, 85–6, 109–10, 116, 138–9, 214–15 anti-discipline 3, 10, 192 Arendt, Hannah 58, 122–5, 144, 154–6, 162, 170, 230 art 127–8, 211–25 definition of 18, 33–5, 37–40, 48–55, 85–7, 91–2, 110, 123, 125, 127–31 history of 36–7, 84–6, 89 as knowledge 48, 98–102, 128, 131, 150, 184–6, 217 as knowledge forming discipline 10–11, 92 market 8–9, 22, 39, 40–1, 86, 108, 152–3, 211, 223–4 museums 6–7, 33, 44, 50, 63, 67, 109, 114, 186, 211, 219–20, 223 under neoliberalism 4–10, 80, 110, 114, 120–3 role of 21, 112, 122–7, 141, 143–5, 149–52, 181–2, 197, 201, 206, 211, 229–30 artist who is an 15–17, 32–3, 40, 78, 84–8, 90–91 training 41–2, 94–5, 178–9, 182–3, 187 Artists (named) af Klint, Hilma 208 Allen, Rebecca 222 Banksy 131, 135, 153

Basquiat, Jean-Michel 209 Black Arts Movement, The 153 Bourgeois, Louise 134 Boyce, Sonia 52 Bruguera, Tania 147 Büchel, Christoph 114 Calle, Sophie 134 Chicago, Judy 134 Cirio, Paolo 222 Courbet, Gustave 99–100 Darboven, Hanne 82 Deller, Jeremy with Alan Kane 51 Duchamp, Marcel 79, 133, 197, 222 Dumas, Marlene 91 Emin, Tracey 99 Fowler, Luke 171, 173 Fraser, Andrea 118 Fusco, Coco 79, 197 Gates, Theaster 209 Haacke, Hans 118, 133–4 Hare, David 184, 197 Harrison Studio, The 190 Hatoum, Mona 174 Hope, Sophie 121–2 Islam, Runa 172–3 Jordan, John 118 Kac, Eduardo 101–2, 223 Kennard, Peter 116–7, 153 Kooning, Willem de 91 Koons, Jeff 132–3 Kosuth, Joseph 79 Lacey, Suzanne 197

INDEX

Leeson, Loraine 196, 198 LeWitt, Sol 130 Moore, Henry 132 Muholi, Zanele 101–2, 142–3 Ofili, Chris 102, 222 Ono, Yoko 102 Oppenheim, Meret 222 Orlan 101–2, 223 Picasso, Pablo 9–10, 31, 44, 91, 206, 208 Piper, Adrian 134 Pollock, Jackson 206–8 Reihana, Lisa 134 Schneeman, Carolee 79 Sherman, Cindy 101, 142 Sobel, Janet 207–8 Spencer, Stanley 134 Stuckists, The 91 Tiravanija, Rirkrit 102 von Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa Hildegard 222 von Zinnenburg Carroll, Khadija 198 Walker, Kara 131 Weiwei, Ai 13, 109 Woodman, Francesca 134 yBAs 153, 216–18 Arts Council 8, 62–3, 217, 224–6 avant-garde 4–9, 29–34, 65, 68, 120, 148, 165, 184, 186, 203–7, 221–2

127, 128, 181 creativity 18, 21–3, 35, 70, 78, 80–2, 85, 88, 90, 115, 127, 142, 193, 208–9, 229 culture 59 high 59, 62, 63, 221 war 67 demagoguery 10, 80 democracy 5–6, 9–10, 32, 57–60, 62, 66–70, 73, 80–1, 97, 107–8, 122, 125–7, 138–9, 144–5, 154–6, 167, 170, 175, 203–4, 221, 229–30 (Also, democratic) democratic engagements 147–8 democratize 33, 83 discipline 60–1, 65–8, 83–4, 90 (See also, art as a knowledge forming discipline) disciplinarity 15, 73–5, 110, 199 anti-discipline 82–3, 189 ecology 26, 104, 119, 157, 163, 165, 203–4, 212–18, 219, 225–30 Tout-monde 163–4 endogenous values 4–5, 8–9, 64, 75, 121, 144 ethics 19, 24, 73, 103, 121, 159–63, 165–70 and empathy 162–3 Museum Code of 107–9 and politics 163–4 of representation 171–5 expertise 3, 10, 32, 57–8, 67–70, 73–5, 80–1, 140, 177, 192–3, 196–7, 209

Cazeaux, Clive 48, 103–4, 128, 131–3, 200–1 censorship 108–10, 115–20 colonial 43, 134, 173–4, 192, 198 postcolonial 15, 58, 149, 153, 163, 166 (Also postcolonialism) connoisseurship 41 copyright 73 craft 18, 34, 44, 51, 85, 87–8, 90, 104,

falsifiability 139–140 Foucault, Michel 2, 18, 49, 57–61, 89, 152, 199, 211–12 276

INDEX

genius 4–5, 9, 14, 31, 41, 53, 85–7, 90, 94, 120, 142, 174, 184–7, 196, 203–11, 216, 218, 229 Glissant, Édouard 46–7, 148, 161–7, 174–5, 185–7 Greenberg, Clement 39, 149, 151, 206–7 group ‘crits’ 42, 97–8 (See also, artist training)

34, 36, 49, 60, 64–6, 84, 99, 143–4, 220 Modernist 4, 7–8, 18, 31, 68, 91, 135, 184, 191, 195, 206–9, 222 Postmodern 2, 18, 65, 81, 95–6, 129, 135–6, 155, 186, 197 Mouffe, Chantal 122, 155–6, 162–5, 169–70

habitus 4, 71, 182 Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 38, 182, 214 Hall, Stuart 59, 68–9

neoliberalism and art 4, 22, 32, 105–6, 195 and creativity 21, 207–8 and culture 60, 63–5, 67–70 definition of 3 and meritocracy 67–8 as totalizing regime 61, 152–3

Ingold, Tim 4, 42, 83, 103–4, 165–7, 172 knowledge 10, 35, 49, 67, 81–2, 96, 98, 103–5, 131–2, 135, 140, 186 (See, art as a knowledge forming discipline)

Primitivism 31, 160, 208–9 primitive 43–4, 154, 172 racism 14–15, 43–4, 71, 80, 87, 94, 108, 111–12, 115, 136, 157, 160, 179, 191–2, 209–10, 218 Rancière, Jacques 51, 100–1, 123, 156, 169–70, 187–8, 190 Romanticism 4–6, 30, 34, 49, 51, 83, 91, 94, 132, 189–91, 197

Levinas, Emmanuel 148, 154, 159–171, 179, 181, 185–8, 195 Lloyd, G.E.R. 35–6, 40, 65–6, 74, 79, 90, 94, 111 market capitalism operation of 4, 7–10, 22–24, 25, 63–73, 64, 88, 104, 106, 112–15, 121, 135–136 meaning meaning-making (existentialist) 21–6, 70–1, 183, 229 semiotic 184 metaphor 7, 101–4, 133, 143, 165, 201 ecological 212–20, 227–30 uses of 24–5 Modernity 10, 18, 57–8, 70, 75, 78, 89–92, 126–7, 131, 143 Modern, Modern era 12, 17–18,

Sartre, Jean Paul 24, 60 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 30, 162, 164, 172–5 truth 66, 81, 95–7, 125–6, 132–45, 152, 156, 164, 172–3, 184, 186–9, 193, 200–1, 230 untranslatability 46, 199 opacity 46–7, 161, 175 Wittgenstein 49–50, 78, 103, 150, 199

277

278

279

280

281

282

283

284