Roger Cook Post Democracy and Relational Aesthetics First, I should like to thank Alex Lockett for inviting me to participate in this event. In doing so she has done a very positive thing: brought me out of the rust of retirement and set me in motion on a new line of research. It is a tribute to the seriousness of her ethical commitment to both art and philosophy that she has enlisted the services of three academics from the Reading University where she did her BA in Fine Art and Philosophy. The fact that this space is not an academic one, is, I think significant. In his introduction to the recent Spheres of Action: Art and Politics conference at the Tate last month, an event at which both Alex and I were both present, Peter Osborne suggested that the art world has become a kind of refuge outside of institutions of higher education where intellectual and political aspects of social and cultural practices could be seriously discussed and practically transformed. (1) I begin with an educational anecdote; in 2003, I wrote a letter inviting members of staff at the Department of Fine Art at Reading University, to give a series of talks on their work. (2) Under the influence of the French philosopher Alain Badiou's recently published book on ethics and his idea of ' militant commitment to the event of truth ', I suggested that maybe as a department we were too reluctant to publicly commit ourselves as individuals to the 'militancy' of our own particular [...] 'truths', and suggested that we unintentionally presented to the student body a bland and uniform picture of aesthetic consensus; that we should make more effort to critically sharpen our differences, and make them more visible publicly, so that we could present a more differentiated image of dissensus as a model of the creative sphere. In retrospect, I consider this to have been a somewhat naïve, and arrogant demand. Thankfully my colleagues quietly ignored me. In my defence, however, I do not think that the idea of "sharpening differences" and "presenting a model of dissensus" by, as I put it "putting forth a model of the art world as an agonistic field in which individuals engage adversarily for limited amounts of symbolic and economic capital" is a bad or false one. This anecdote relates to the larger political question as to the nature of democratic pluralism that has been in the air for sometime now. Indeed in my letter I mentioned an essay by the political theorist Chantal Mouffe in which she discussed the threat of the present liberal democratic idea of consensus politics to the practical pursuit of any radical realisation of the democratic ideal. In its place she makes a passionate plea, not for an antagonistic politics ("a struggle between enemies") but for an agonistic politics, a struggle between adversaries, such as might be understood by William Blake's "Do be my Enemy for Friendship Sake". (3) All this is by way of introduction to the subject of this talk, the debates initiated by Nicholas Bourriaud and Claire Bishop regarding 'relational aesthetics'. In a justly celebrated article in October magazine in 2004, Bishop discussed some limitations she saw in Bourriaud's model of 'relational aesthetics' --artistic practices of the 1990's that take as their theoretical horizon 'the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space' (as Bourriaud puts it) exemplified by artists Rikrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick. Others, too, have voiced their concerns; in a recent interview, Andrea Fraser, an artist identified with 'institutional critique' raised her doubts about this model, suggesting that its definition has been too vague, over idealised and insufficiently 'political'. Towards the end of his ICA talk in February 2005, the most recent French thinker to hit the art block, Jacques Rancière, suggested that relational art practices, may confuse art and politics, mixing them up with ethics. (4) All this bears on the wider debate as to the weakening of the democratic public sphere in neoliberal regimes, as a result of globalization and individualistic consumer culture that now pervades advanced industrial societies, a subject discussed extensively by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. These issues concerning radical democracy have a significant bearing on the nature of debate within the art world and art education. Finally, if we are inviting dissensus, what essential elements and experiences of the contemporary artistic agon would we need to construct. Here I will draw on the work of Jacques Rancière, (5) whose book The Politics of Aesthetics was published last year. At Rancière's talk at the ICA, Peter Hallward, who is one of the most reliable mediators of recent French philosophy, described Rancière's work as a " coherent project that pits a theory of disruptive equality against various kinds of orderly domination and hierarchy " . I hope to show later how, in certain cases, some contemporary artists, seek to disrupt the orderly, classificatory 'grid' of 'modernism' and 'post-modernism'- for Rancière, unhelpful terms themselves - for what he refers to as "the aesthetic revolution". In the past it has been in the nature of philosophy, art and culture to be concerned with questions of categorization; as Rancière understands it, as a result of the nineteenth century "aesthetic revolution" the frames, boundaries and borders, of art and the arts, and indeed of art and philosophy, can no longer be prefigured; for they are in a perpetual process of re-creation. • The origins of art and culture are closely allied to religion, and, even in our secular age remain matters of belief. Gilles Deleuze with his emphatic assertions of immanence, emphasized the present day importance of the question of belief: belief in the world , contrasting philosophers with "religious personae who conceive of the institution of an always transcendent order imposed from outside". However, "Immanence is immanent only to itself and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent", as soon as immanence is immanent to something else, transcendence creeps in ( WP , p. 45). It is not only philosophers, but also artists, after the institution of the "aesthetic revolution" in the nineteenth century that institute the plane of immanence, this is also, for Rancière, the plane of radical equality that was partly ushered in by the French Revolution. However, the process of radical equality and individual subjectivation always risks falling back to subjection , a re-submission of life to the a priori hierarchies of dogmatic belief - which Rancière has called "the forlorn ceremonies of throne and religion". These are to be seen in the rising tide of fundamentalist beliefs that Chantal Mouffe sees emerging as a consequence of neoliberal "consensus at the centre". She suggests that when a society lacks genuine confrontation among a diversity of political identities, the groundwork is laid for fundamentalisms that cannot be managed by the democratic process. To counter this, it is necessary, in Deleuze's vocabulary, to produce by various means, but, especially by the plane of consistency that is art , lines of existence, consisting of intensities that are coextensive with the constructions or arrangements of desire. Now is the time, more than ever, to construct that artistic plane of immanence that is rooted in the materiality of body and world, at the simultaneous levels of thought, sensation and affect. For me, this is precisely what the most committed contemporary artists do. Some aspects of relational aesthetics would seem to reflect what Jacques Rancière has called 'post-democracy', the post-democratic condition in which antagonism has been eliminated. What underlies post-democracy is an identification of democratic form with the 'necessities' of global capital "identified with the constraints and caprices of the world market". However, as Bishop states: democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased. Without antagonism there is only the imposed consensus of authoritarian order--a total suppression of debate and discussion, which is inimical to democracy. (Bishop, 2004, p.66.) What does it mean, then, to say that the field of art and culture is an agonistic field? We need to ask ourselves what the oppositional elements are, if we are to construct a vitally agonistic, rather than antagonistic, field. In contrast to what seem like the bland assurances of Tiravanija and Gillick, Bishop puts forward Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn, two artists who exemplify agonistic artistic practice for the present time.
(6) Sierra is a Spanish artist who lives and works in Mexico City. (7) He has utilized and logically extended the 1960s minimalist 'aesthetic' by activating it politically in an extraordinarily powerful, not to say, painful, way. (7a) He takes the minimalist cube, and its corollary, the linear grid, and their relation to modernist art and architecture and the city, and connects them directly back to the currents of power that run through them; demonstrating how in specific situations they classify, contain, order and maintain the visible and invisible (economic) agencies and (labour) power that structure them. The grid and its corollary the cube in modernism and minimalism became aestheticized forms of power and manifestations of capital. (7b, 7c, 7d). Sierra shines a light on these forms of power, sometimes literally, as in an action he made in Mexico City in 2003 entitled Lighted Building : The action consisted in employing various reflectors to light up the building located in Mexico City's downtown area, which was damaged during the 1985 earthquake, and has been abandoned since. It is currently used as a warehouse by street vendors and as a shelter by indigents. Such persons as these are those who are kept in place by what Rancière describes as the policing agencies that assign that everything and everyone keeps to their rank in society, which he calls one part of la partage du sensible , the division and distribution of the sensible. He splits the current notion of the political into two concepts: police et politique , police and politics. (8) In his books The Nights of Labour: the workers dream in nineteenth century France , The Ignorant Schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectural emancipation and The Philosopher and his Poor , he describes the way thinkers from Plato to Marx and Bourdieu have unwittingly reinforced social division: by asserting that proletarian workers and artisans, like shoemakers, have no inclination, because no time or leisure to think, to paint or to write poetry. In contrast to police , politique is 'an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing': breaking with the notion that proletarians have no place in that configuration (Rancière 1999, pp. 29-30). (9) Sierra has frequently hired immigrants and itinerant workers, 'those who have no place' for standard wages to perform in his works, for example: L aborers who cannot be payed, remunerated to remain in the interior of carton boxes 2000: This work is an adaptation of the ones executed in Guatemala and New York, where laborers were introduced into carton boxes under different circumstances. In this case, six workers remained four hours daily for six weeks inside the boxes, having to collect their salaries in secret because of their condition as political exiles. German legislation gives an exiled person 80 marcs, about 40 USD. a month, and prohibits that he or she work under the threat of returning them to their country of origin. Therefore, the details of this piece could not be made public at the time. The refugees came from Chechenia. • Thomas Hirschhorn, the second artist who exemplifies agonistic artistic practice for the present time, is known for his assertion that he does not make political art, but that he makes art politically . This does not however, as Bishop points out, mean that he makes work that is "interactive" or is "open-ended". She quotes Hirschhorn directly: (10) I do not want to invite or oblige viewers to become interactive with what I do; I do not want to activate the public. I want to give of myself, to engage myself to such a degree that viewers confronted with the work can take part and become involved, but not as actors. (10a) To make art politically means to choose materials that do not intimidate, a format that doesn't dominate, a device that does not seduce. To make art politically is not to submit to an ideology or to denounce the system, in opposition to so-called "political art." It is to work with the fullest energy against the principle of "quality." (Here we might note that notions of 'quality' are part of the policing system of culture, and that Hirschhorn's affirmation of 'energy' is a political resistance to that.) All this is typified by (11) Hirschhorn's Bataille Monument which was made for the 2002 Documenta in Kassel. This was an homage to the French writer George Bataille consisting of a series of five interconnected structures, built and maintained by the artist with the assistance and support of the local residents, that occupied the public spaces between extant residential buildings on a working class housing estate. (11a) Here is a sound clip of Hirschhorn discussing this project, from a talk that he gave at Tate Modern which can be found online in the Tate Modern archive. Deleuze and Guattari have asserted that works of art must attain consistency in order to attain effectivity on the plane of immanence. This consistency is not homogeneity, but as Brian Massumi asserts "a [heterogeneous] holding together of disparate elements" which might be said to constitute the singularity and historicity of 'style' adequate to a specific geopolitical time and place and cultural moment. In Ranciere's terms, " Works of art are now defined as such, by belonging to a specific sensorium that stands out as an exception from the normal regime of the sensible, which presents us with an immediate adequation of thought and sensible materiality" (AR:135). (12) With the help of his thinking on aesthetics and politics of I think we might be able to plot one fundamental agon of what he calls the 'aesthetic revolution' of modern and contemporary art: the agonistic relation between art and non-art, or art and life, an agonistic relation that he sees as going back to (12a) Schiller's contention in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man that 'Man is only completely human when he plays' and that the 'play drive'- Spieltrieb -will completely reconstruct both the edifice of art and the edifice of life. Rancière goes on to say that: Understanding the 'politics' proper to the aesthetic regime of art means understanding the way autonomy and heteronomy are originally linked in Schiller's formula. (13) Furthermore, he distinguishes three 'regimes of art': the ethical, the representational, and the aesthetic. In the ethical, works of art have no autonomy. "They are viewed as images to be questioned for their truth and for their effect on the ethos of individuals and the community". As we indicated at the beginning it would seem that Bourriaud's notion of relational aesthetics is in danger of collapsing art back into the ethical regime. "In the representational regime, works of art belong to the sphere of imitation. [...] They are not so much copies of reality as ways of imposing form on matter. As such they are subject to a set of intrinsic norms: a hierarchy of genres, adequation of expression to subject matter, correspondence between the arts etc." The final regime, the aesthetic regime of art "overthrows this normativity and the relationship between form and matter, on which it is based. Works of art are now defined as such, by belonging to a specific sensorium that stands out as an exception from the normal regime of the sensible, which presents us with an immediate adequation of thought and sensible materiality". If I have understood Rancière correctly, then he is saying that in the aesthetic regime of art, the agon between art and life is held in tense equilibrium. He sums up this position with three points, that, I have to say, I am not sure I entirely understand: (14) Firstly, the autonomy staged by the aesthetic regime of art is not that of the work of art, but of a mode of experience. Secondly, the 'aesthetic experience' is one of heterogeneity, such that for the subject of that experience it is also the dismissal of a certain autonomy. Thirdly, the object of that experience is 'aesthetic', in so far as it is not-or at least not only- art. (O the joys of philosophical rumination, if only I could say they were truly mine!) What then, are the consequences of all this for the agonistic relation between art and life in and for contemporary art? It would seem that the two stand in vital relation: everyday experience being the life-blood of art, and art being the life-blood of the aesthetic component of experience, the two in tense productive dis/equilibrium, are played out in what Rancière calls "three major scenarios": 1. Art can become life. 2. Life can become art. 3. Art and life can exchange properties (without merging). (14a) [...] the aesthetic formula ties art to non-art from the start, it sets up that life between two vanishing points: art becoming mere life or art becoming mere art. (14b) [...] art in the aesthetic regime consists [...] of a shuttling between these scenarios, playing an autonomy against a heteronomy and a heteronomy against an autonomy, playing one linkage between art and non-art against another such linkage. No discussion of aesthetic revolution and the politics of aesthetics in relation to contemporary art by me, would be complete without mention of Paul McCarthy. (15) 'Art thinks': the French art historian Hubert Damisch believed, and in its historical specificity engenders general, transhistorical and philosophical questions. It engenders those questions, as Deleuze says, through the agency of affects and percepts, which through their direct impact on and through our senses (our bodies) have enormous powers of persuasion: the ability to change perception. These percepts and affects can have both positive and negative, productive and destructive, political agency, an agency that works through the biopower of unconscious drives, effecting deep mechanisms of our embodied being. No contemporary artist gives better understanding of this than McCarthy. (16) For nearly forty years he has now revealed the violence that lies beneath the surface of competitive capitalist consumer society -- "prized from the tabloid unconscious of global capitalism" -- as Robert Storr accurately puts it. Growing up in the American badlands, in Mormon Salt Lake City, Utah and living and working later in LA, he has experienced and expressed social violence in visceral ways that simultaneously disgust, amuse, amaze and appall with their inordinate animalistic excess, referencing the basic violence (17) of the anal and oral drives in ways that simultaneously entertain and terrify us. As Storr points out, "Eating" [and I am sure he would agree: excreting ] "rituals and food", [ add 'waste' "products] [...] have been a staple of McCarthy's work since the mid-1970s." (18) In early performances that allegorized social conditioning and sexual oppression, he stuffed raw meat and cold cream into his mouth; filled his pants with tuna fish, butter, and ketchup; and dressed as a housewife and scrubbed the floor with milk. He has maintained his working relationship with savory sauces and family foods over the years, typically using ketchup, HP Sauce, mayonnaise, and chocolate syrup in actions that conflate consumption and trauma, ingestion and wounding. I want to immediately follow this quotation from Robert Storr with a typically difficult, though absolutely key one, from Rancière: (19) Politics is aesthetic in that it makes visible what had been excluded from a perceptual field and in that it makes audible what used to be inaudible. It inscribes one perceptual world within another--for example, the world in which proletarians or women may participate in a community within another in which they both are "visibly" domestic beings outside the life of the community; the world in which they both can speak within another in which they both "evidently" were capable only of moans of pain, cries of hysteria, or groans of fury. Politics is completely an affair of the antagonistic subjectivation of the division of the sensible. (20) It is important to remember the importance of 'venting' in the art of McCarthy. (21) However, in his work, the 'moans of pain, cries of hysteria and groans of fury' though they reference the real, they are not real 'moans of pain, cries of hysteria and groans of fury'; they are 'the moans of pain, cries of hysteria and groans of fury' of theatricality and artifice ; as Storr suggests, this is why McCarthy's work is never actually obscene: Rather than the expression of the artist's insatiable id, they confront us with a particular cliché of obscenity - a nightmare of polymorphous sexuality and physical decay that could only be the bad dream of a consumer culture as spectral and disembodied as our own. (22) There is only one artist I love more than Paul McCarthy, and that is Andy Warhol. The other night this postcard suddenly appeared from nowhere. It is my favourite photograph of Andy - a rather obscure one taken by a relatively unknown Scandinavian photographer, that was given away free in a bar in Soho. It perfectly captures 'Abino Andy': Andy from the wrong side of the tracks; and this is what the biographical facts reveal, for as an adolescent Andy was a total loser, no-hoper and mummy's boy, who probably masturbated too much, and had serious skin problems. Yet the story of how Albino Andy the Artisan rose through the ranks to become the most important, and by that I mean, socially significant artist of the late twentieth-century, is a true miracle. Few think of Andy Warhol as a 'political' artist, yet that is what he was, in Ranciére's sense, of 'making visible what has been excluded from a perceptual field', especially the patronisingly myopic field of Greenbergian modernism. Hal Foster has suggested that Warhol evoked what the political theorist Claude Lefort termed "the mass subject" in both its absence and anonymity. At a fairly early moment in spectacle culture, he intuited that the mass subject is often apparent only as an effect of mass media, of mass technology, and especially so of a catastrophic failure of these things. Think of the Disaster series or 129 Die in Jet, which deals with the representation of a plane crash on the front page of the New York Mirror in 1962. Warhol identified with mass man, and though he could hardly bear being touched, "relational aesthetics" were pretty important to him. He succeeded in creating a relational aesthetic circle at the Factory, that in 1966, when I visited it, was, infinitely more remarkable than I, a green young 'mod', though not entirely consciously 'modernist' painter of 26, realized. This is why it thrilled me when I first read Thomas Hirschhorn's simple eulogy, published in Artforum in 2004: I LOVE ANDY WARHOL, AND I LOVE ANDY WARHOL'S WORK. I love Andy Warhol with a love that is exclusionist and egoistic. It is not respect or admiration that I have for Warhol and his work, it is love. [...] Andy Warhol dared to say yes. I first saw a Warhol in 1978 [...]. It was the painting 129 Die in Jet, from 1962. I immediately felt included: included in the artist's work; included in art. It was the first time in my life that art had an impact on me, the first time I was directly in dialogue with it. 129 Die in Jet changed my life. [...] In saying yes, Andy Warhol agreed with social and economic reality. Warhol is the artist of agreement. To agree in this sense, though, is to confront oneself with reality as it is. To agree is the precondition for either accepting or refusing something; only by agreeing can one change it. Andy Warhol was courageous. He cooperated with reality in order to change it. He showed me that reality cannot be changed unless you agree with it Andy Warhol never deviated from his initial trajectory. [...] his art from beginning to end was grounded in being faithful to himself. He developed what he had been at the start, he repeated it, he industrialized it, he exaggerated it, but he remained true to it. It was in doing these things that his work reached its full formal strength and political dimension. Through his work, constantly and powerfully, Andy Warhol defended the autonomy of art. I always recall something I think he once said: "Don't cry--work!" Warhol, McCarthy, Sierra and Hirschhorn show us that we should have the courage to speak directly, of the things we care about: Bugger 'democracy' 'politics' and 'relational aesthetics'. Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics , Presses du Reél, 2002, p.14. Claire Bishop , "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics" October , Volume 110, Number 1, MIT Press, 2004 , pp. 51-80(30) has asked: "If relational art produces human relations then the next logical question is to ask what types of relations are being produced, for whom and why?" For the distinction between adversaries and enemies, see Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox , London:Verso, 2000, p.102 ff. Stuart Comer, "Art Must Hang: An Interview with Andrea Fraser about the Whitney Independent Study Program", ed,, Mike Sperlinger, Afterthought: new writing on conceptual art , London 2005, pp.38-41. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics , London: Verso, 1985, Chantal Mouffe, "For an Agonistic Public Sphere", in Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11_Platform 1 , Hatje Cantz, 2002. Much of her argument is based on her The Democratic Paradox , London:Verso, 2000 . Jean Khalfa, "An Impersonal Consciousness" An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze , London and New York, 2003, p.66, Jacques Rancière, "The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes" p.140. Mouffe, "For an Agonistic Public Sphere", Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11_Platform 1, 2002 , Osfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp.87-88. Jacques Rancière, Dis-Agreement , Minnesota University Press, 1998. Santiago Sierra: 300 Tons and Previous Works , pp.64-65 The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself...The artist creates blocks of percepts and affects, but the only law of creation is that the compound must stand up on its own. What is Philosophy? P. 164. Brian Massumi, A user's guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: deviations from Deleuze and Guattari , Cambridge Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1992, p.7. Jacques Rancière, "On the Aesthetic Revolution" New Left Review , 14, Mar/Apr 2002, p.133. Jacques Rancière, "The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes", New Left Review 14 March 2002, p.150 Ernest van Alphen, Journal of Visual culture , Volume 4, Number 3, August 2005, p.192. Robert Storr, Picadilly Circus , p. 168. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor , p.226. www.echonyc.com/~trans/Telesymposia3/Foster/Telesymposia3HalFosterQ1.html |
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