Brad Buckley

[ SUB ROSA ] .…and so I hasten to turn aside from this extraordinary heat
2001
Contemporary Art Services Tasmania, Australia
Paint, neon, vinyl text, dimensions variable

Biography of Nikos Papastergiadis
Author of The Politics of Art

Nikos Papastergiadis is a Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is a cultural theorist who has worked on migration and contemporary visual practice. He has worked extensively with artists in Europe and Australia. Educated at Melbourne and Cambridge Universities and between 1992-1998 he lectured at Manchester University and Glasgow School of Art. In 2005 he was the Willy Brandt Guest Professor at Malmo University and among his most recent publications are The Turbulence of Migration (2000) and Spatial Aesthetics (2006).

The Politics of Art
2005
Nikos Papastergiadis

The place of art in everyday surroundings and the use of everyday materials in art has created the need for new critical tools to determine its aesthetic value and social meaning. The traditional methods for determining the relevance of place and the materiality of art have been pushed to new limits. Art history, especially in relation to painting, has often examined the context of production and analysed the representation of place. Establishing the connection between the background of an image or the origins of the artist and the subsequent meanings of the artwork, are not always sufficient. The realm of biographical influence not only require more sophisticated techniques of mapping psycho-social connections, but also the symbolic framing of place which has been radically altered by new geo-political and technological forces require new paradigms. The cultural field of globalization can no longer be mapped by the binary categories. For instance, the status of contemporary artists cannot be differentiated according to the racist and metropolitan a priori categories that structured modernism.

The debates on the ideology of art which previously discussed the context of art were also bound by limited causal models. Sociological forces where eventually recognized as being significant, but mostly only in terms of their influence on the production of art. The relationship between contemporary art, place and the everyday goes beyond the realm of influence. Place and the everyday are constitutive in the production of contemporary art. The place in which contemporary art is displayed, the material from which it is produced are both intertwined with the process of its production and reception. We need to develop new models for discussing art which is made from the materials that are available in the place of its encounter. These artworks which are in the narrow sense often categorized as ‘interventions’ also raise complex questions about the role of locality and the artist’s attachment to a place. These questions are especially poignant when the artists does not belong to the specific place, or employs objects from different places.

In more recent debates, art historians have borrowed models from post structuralist theories in order to address the constitutive role of discursive practices. These theories have tended to confine the role of discourse in terms of language and overlooked the spatial dynamics of contemporary art. Introducing the concept of the everyday into the discourse of art was belated in relation to the longstanding practice of artistic experimentation with the everyday. It was however timely in relation to the theoretical impasse on the relationship between art and politics. The theories of art, which were dominant in the 1980s and which stressed the constitutive role in the articulation of a transformative cultural politics, had nevertheless failed to address the materiality of art. The representation of ideological differences, which polarized the debates in the 1970s, were supplemented by more complex perspectives such as, the feminist and postcolonial concerns with the politics of exclusion and the consitutive role of the Other. Throughout this period, many artists were developing techniques for the direct engagement between political actions and philosophical ideas in the context of everyday life. However, by the 1990s the role of theory gained an ambivalent status in the debates on contemporary art. On the one hand, many of the theoretical concepts of the earlier debates were actively internalized within art practice, and on the other, they were vehemently disavowed.

During the early 1990s, the disavowal of the role of theory in art produced some notable defensive reactions. Just as a number of concepts were being given explanatory power for decoding the context of cultural practice, a group of artists demanded that critics avoid loading any theoretical baggage onto the meaning of their work. In the face of growing attention to the social and cultural forces that were highlighted by feminism, postcolonialism and postmodernism, and consequently, a discourse that stressed the complicity or responsibility of the artist, in, or against, the oppressive structures of the dominant culture, an almost deliberate apolitical and anti-intellectual stance gained ascendancy. No sooner had the artworld entered a number of sociological or political concepts into their glossary, then there was another brash, aggressive, narcissistic counter-tendency which explicitly renounced the need for either theoretical sophistication, or political gesturing. This disavowal was timed with the successive demise of socialist regimes in the Eastern Bloc and the collapse of traditional working class structures that accompanied the process of deindustrialization in the west. The combined effect of these radical geo-political shifts was a broadening of the effect that Jean-Francois Lyotard had earlier described as the ‘loss of faith’ in the grand narratives of modernity. The revolutionary calls to struggle that were so resonant in the late 1960s began to sound hollow, tired and pointless. For this generation of artists a direct response to popular culture seemed more authentic and appealing than a theoretical analysis of the ‘class struggle’. We had entered a phase in which the artwork sought to aspire to a condition that the very articulate and sensitive critic, Andrew Renton, described as, “dumb muteness”. It was no longer fashionable for artists to validate their work by quoting Jacques Lacan or Michel Foucault. Theory was increasingly seen as another oppressive shackle that the creative artist was expected to break.

Put another way, the tyranny of theory has finally been overthrown. It is my view that this disavowal of the idea of theory and politics from the context of art, is not only linked to the commercial success but also lead to a deepening of vapid and superficial practice. By contrast, the British critic ,John Roberts, has argued that the ‘invasion’ of French theory has both undermined the credibility and diverted the creative attention of contemporary artists. Arguing against the grain of postmodernism, which he has interpreted as the dominant theoretical force in art discourse, Roberts developed a counter critical position of ‘philistinism’.

From this perspective, the decisive change brought about by this work is a loss of guilt in front of popular culture. In this, the conceptual categories and strategies of critical postmodernism (the spectacle, simulation, and the deconstruction of representation and identity) are perceived to have distanced artists from the pleasures and contradictions of the everyday. If all visual experience is subject to the law of ‘reification’ and all representation is suspect, the representation of the everyday is always being judged as a problem and in need of critique, rather than a site where ideology and resistance are lived out in all their messy contingency. The critical act of deconstruction makes it difficult for artists to take the truth of their own experience seriously, for it always appears to be invented somewhere else.1

Roberts’s anxiety over the disabling influence of theory partially reflects the gap between academic discourse that was emerging and the appeal of populist culture to another generation of artists. While there was an increasingly sophisticated use of structuralist and semiotic theory by both the producers and the critics of popular critic2 , Roberts insists that artists should distance themselves from theoretical engagements. There is no doubt that there are times when the dialogue between art, politics and theory becomes counter-productive or obsolete. The artist may temporarily withdraw from theoretical investigations and institutional politics, but where to go, there is no exit from the social field. These debates on the boundaries between art, politics and theory, in an all too easy manoeuvre, were swept into either the ‘too hard basket’, or dumped into the historical dustbin of irrelevance.

However, it cannot be overlooked that the backlash against ‘theory envy’ in the institutional domain coincided with the steady withdrawal of interest in cultural identities which were previously excluded from or positioned at the margins of the mainstream artworld. As the cultural critic, Kobena Mercer argued, the ‘other’ was made more visible at a time when the negotiation for the conditions of visibility were being withdrawn3  Attention turned to art which was more celebratory of its location in the world, and less critical of the social context. It was assumed that the role of the artist had previously not only become overburdened by theoretical abstractions and social obligations, but that the art had been reduced to an obscure footnoting process, and that the message, when visible, had become unbearably pious. The debate with philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics was not seen as producing a more profound, dynamic and interactive art practice, but one which overdetermined the very possibility of creativity. To renew the creative drive in art, the artist was expected to drop their bookish concerns with the text, and bring art into direct contact with life.

Bringing art and everyday life together could be a healthy antidote against the academicist tendencies to reduce all forms of critical practice to language games. However, it could also lead to reproducing the idiocies and banalities of life under the name of art. The relationship between art and life is never a straightforward or transparent one. What cannot be denied, is the need for the artist to start from the materiality of both their art practice and their experience. However, this appreciation of the materiality of art and life does not preclude language, nor does it imply that the limitations of our specific starting points, by their mere display, should be elevated to marvellous achievements.

One could cite a number of artists, in several different countries, on the international stage, as precursors of this tendency, who have turned away from theory, exploreing with greater self confidence the boundaries of their own identity, sexuality and culture, we then could ask, where did this license to play with the self come from? Could it have been possible to embrace the pleasures of being a postfeminist, without the prior struggles of feminism? Would popular culture be part of the materiality of art, if there had not already been two decades of critical theory which had already validated it as a site of historical and theoretical significance? Is the current fascination of the relationship between the self and others, not linked to way in which artists, who were previously excluded from the boundaries of modernism, explored their own hybrid subjectivities?

This is not to say that there is always a debt which must be paid, a tax which must attributed by each generation to their antecedents, but it is necessary to caution against the celebrations of this ‘raw’ energy and exuberance which took the form of naive readings of Oedipal rebellions. What happens when there is not even the memory of other struggles? Neither the pleasures nor the vices that are expressive of this voluptuous self presence are embedded within a social history of political solidarity or aesthetic investigation. This practice of acknowledgment is disavowed as being part of the boring politics of correctness. Yet paradoxically, in the assertion of the newness of this art, there is both a rejection of lineage and the claim of assimilation.

Assuming that certain forms of art will have already embraced the kernel of the old without hanging on to the academicist crust of history. This dynamic of internalization is supposedly already there in the pulse of popular culture. Can we assume that the history of resistance is already incorporated in popular consciousness, and that the production of art, by virtue of its own sensual and material practice, traces the contours of this silent knowledge and bear witness to all that is knowable and real? To attempt to forget the past is to be condemned to repeat it by other means.

Art can never be a prisoner of politics and theory. It is too elusive, mercurial and elaborate to be caught within the confines of another discourse. Art cannot be simply reduced to an example of, either a predefined political practice, or a prior theoretical abstraction. It has to be measured by its own terms. The material presence of the artwork itself is where its own constellation of meanings reside. These meanings resound within a broader social context but the manner in which they ‘speak’ is never direct or transparent. In the past, among certain schools of art theory, there was a tendency to collapse the dialogue between the aesthetic and the social within simplistic schemas. However, the problem is that art does not furnish us with a language of measurement other than its own material presence, which of course, is separate to the language of representation in which critical discourse operates.

When the production and interpretation of art are always situated within a social history, the broader meaning of art lies in the conjunction of perception, in all its bodily perceptions and the languages of art historical discourse. The totality of art’s meaning is never confined to either symptom or consequence of other discourses. Its specificity is located within a social context, but the available concepts of the social are not always adequate for communicating the fullness of its meaning. Thus the mode of exchange between art, politics and theory is not like antagonists trapped in a militaristic game of surrender and defeat, or where the truth of one position can only be grasped by gaining distance from all the configurations that are implicated within it. Rather, the relationship, between art, politics and theory, resembles a rhetorical game between agonists, who are in dialogue with each other, who measure each other’s truth claims by gaining some critical intimacy with their respective worldviews, and who are bound to respect the integrity of their mutual differences. The meaning of art does not come just from within, it also comes from without, from the parallel, or even contrapuntal, efforts to investigate meaning in the realms of action and reflection.

Much of the current confusion over the political meaning of art is related to the ambiguous social position that is claimed for or by the artists. The value of art is often driven by myths about the origins and experiences of the artist. To overcome this conflation between the transcendence of the artwork and the artist’s social position, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School attempted to measure the impact of the avant – garde on contemporary culture in terms of its oppositionality to the dominant culture, and defined the social position of the artist in dualistic terms – both at the centre and along the margins. While some of the most influential members of the Frankfurt School like Walter Benjamin evoked the mysterious ways in which artists could imaginatively recreate the past to critique the present with a lightness of touch, and Teodor Adorno’s sense of the aesthetic was resolutely policed by a patrician austerity against the vulgarizing forces of the commercial world, they nevertheless developed a dialectical understanding of the transformative and redemptive role of art in everyday life. The representation of art and politics in contemporary art history has not always maintained such rigorous and poetic standards. The dialectical relationship between art and politics that was defined by the Frankfurt School was often succeeded by historians and critics who over-emphasized the moral role of art or the inherently superior vision of the artist.

Some of the most influential social positions that have been attributed to artists include the role of outrider4 , witness to the forgotten or buried history of the everyday5 , and moral guide in a restless and fragmented world.6 As modern art was distinguished from the decorative crafts and the position of the artists was elevated to a modern version of the prophet, the function of art was also granted salvific qualities. Art was seen as being capable of reminding us of the gaps between the promise of progress and the dystopic realities in modernity; exposing the alienating effects of technological changes; challenging the barriers which were imposed to separate social classes and segregate the private from the public; expressing inner states that lacked representation in everyday language; creating ‘happenings’ in which we could experience feelings and relationships that had been excluded from ‘normal’ encounters.

The conceptual framework for representing the context of art does require a radical overhaul It is important to stress that the artistic strategies for developing interventions into the perception and construction of the social order were formed in conjunction with other political movements. The conjunctural role of this relationship between art and politics was often overlooked in mainstream art historical discourse. This obscured the crucial process of reciprocity, and exaggerated either the autonomy of art or its dependence on politics. The relationship of art to the political is not confined to fixed polarities but formed in the dynamics of relational processes. A method of understanding art which stresses both the constitutive role in the formations of modernity, and its conjunctural relationships to the political could offer a step out of the rigid polarities which dominated earlier debates. Art does participate in the political by testing the boundaries of representation. As the language of politics is forever in a state of transformation, so to are the boundaries of the significance of art. To fully appreciate the relationship between art and politics in the contemporary setting, requires a parallel re-thinking of the inter-connection between the aesthetic and the critical. These two headings, which are conventionally kept apart, are more potent when grasped in terms of their imbrication. It is worth considering the ways in which the perception of the aesthetic and the critical is experienced simultaneously. For the discourse of art to go beyond the determination of its political message, or the proclamation of its inherent autonomy, it is necessary as I have argued to examine the place of art in the everyday.

 

1. John Roberts, “Mad For It!: Philistinism, the Everyday and the New British Art”, Third Text, Summer, 1996, p 30. [↩]
2. One need only recall the debt to Guy Debord expressed in the obituary writtenby the leader of Benneton’s advertising campaign. Or the ambivalent relationship between Saatchi as a patron of young British artists and his advertising company appropriating the ideas of these artists in their advertising campaigns. See Rita Hatton & John Walker, Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi, Ellipsis, London, 2000 and Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, Verso, London, 1999. [↩]
3. Kobena Mercer, ‘Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diaspora Based Blackness’,Third Text, No 49, Winter 1999-2000. [↩]
4. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, Verso, London, 1989. [↩]
5. John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, Writers and Readers, London, 1984. [↩]
6. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity, Cambridge, 2000. [↩]