Re-imagining spaces,collectivity,and the political dimension of contemporary art

Abstract

In a neoliberal moment of cultural production marked by commodification and the dominance of economic values, it is necessary to investigate the cultural, social, and aesthetic value of art. By examining Herbert Marcuse’s aesthetic dimension, this article seeks to locate the political and pedagogic potential both in the aesthetics and in the social contextualization of art. There are several historical methods of subverting the market and of art-making that resonate politically, although a more contemporary phenomenon of forming new collective processes demarcates new spaces of resistance and alternative forms of sociality and creativity in light of neoliberal cultural forces and the pressures of individualization.

Indeed, we need to ask ourselves the fundamental political question: where are the dissenting/creative subjects of today? And how are they being produced? In both cases, I would argue, the answer must involve a serious consideration of the role of the academy, of art, and of the aesthetic dimension in general … –Simon O’Sullivan, Academy: The Production of Subjectivity.

The value of art in a contemporary, neoliberal moment must be conceptualized in a way that brings it into the discourse of agency and political possibility. The contemporary artist is, as Nikos Papastergiadis (2008) puts it, ‘now defined by the desire to be in the contemporary, rather than to produce a belated or elevated response to the everyday’ (p.363), an assertion that opens up room for a new interrogation of the relation of artists to their work and to the social context in which they produce. I examine the possibilities for art to be political and emancipatory, focusing predominantly on collective work that moves beyond the subversion of neoliberal cultural structures. Although collective, process-based work is not a new concept, there is an element of multidisciplinarity that presents a different take on previous models—a crossing point between aesthetic considerations/affect and socio-political interventions; a timely response to neoliberal cultural hegemony. The potential for art to create a rupture with the dominant social and political ideologies runs parallel to its potential to reconfigure social orderings to allow for new spaces of collective work, thought, and creative knowledge production.

The art market and cultural hegemony

Cultural hegemony under neoliberal economic and social policies affects creative processes beyond the marketization of cultural production, the positioning of the artist as celebrity, and a visual culture dominated largely by market tastes and value; cultural hegemony has come to inform, to a great degree, the manner in which representations of the self are produced and reproduced, concerned primarily with image in an individual capacity. The aggressive atomization championed by neoliberalism represses the production of a social and political subject as an agented part of a collective. The capitalist art market has long been a part of cultural hegemonic practices that extend its influence through control, facilitated by a power structure that includes corporations, critics, scholars, curators, gallerists, collectors, investors, and increasing numbers of artists.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s (1972 [1944]) theory of the culture industry illustrates the way in which the art market continues to function under the capitalist ideology of developing need and compliancy based on supply (p.121). The institutions of the art market serve as the legitimizing structures and gatekeepers of art as cultural capital, and include the responsibility of guarding the autonomy of the artist in order to assign intrinsic value to the work, then colluding with market forces to assign monetary exchange value. As auction and art fair figures indicate, the profit margins of the art market are astronomical, and ‘high art’ has evolved into a lucrative business for a small number of elite participants. Exchange value has eclipsed cultural value, and the function of art as an economic and cultural good is determined largely by market tastes and movements rather than by aesthetic or social implications. The consequences of the neoliberal art market involve conformity, submission to economic forces, and depoliticization of cultural work. There are, however, increasing amounts of political artwork, although it is unclear whether it is due to the politicization of the market or the visual marketization of politics.

Deeper implications of market-driven culture include the disjuncture between government and individual narratives on the one hand (Lowenthal, 1987: 182), and the lack of cohesion of individuals into a community on the other. Neoliberal cultural production is characterized by atomization of the individual paired with culture’s seduction of choice and the emulation of appearances. Individual freedom of expression is in the foreground, and culture becomes a dressing-up and consumption of prefabricated subjectivities; the capitalist art market and consumer culture approximates community insofar as people can share tastes or gain access to social strata through the projection of image or the consumption of particular cultural products (from music subcultures to the elite collecting artworks as capital and investment). The culture of liquid modernity as described by Zygmunt Bauman (2011) has little to do with responsibility or restructuring social boundaries:

 … [culture] is fashioned to fit individual freedom of choice and individual responsibility for that choice; and that its function is to ensure that the choice should be and will always remain a necessity and unavoidable duty of life, while the responsibility for the choice and its consequences remains where it has been placed by the liquid modern human condition—on the shoulders of the individual. (p.12)

This liquid culture crafted by the mechanization of neoliberal economics is one of rapid turnover, in which products and tastes are designed to expire, to be rendered disposable; their obsolescence already present in their preconception. This is the design that drives ‘freedom’ of cultural choice—the freedom to replace one representation of self with the next, the ability to define oneself through projection, image, and consumption. Commodified art becomes part of the ameliorative tonic provided to the disenfranchised, depoliticized individual; one of the few active options provided in the neoliberal framework is one of constructing individual identity, and the most efficient means to do so is to assert taste through market choices.

Pierre Bourdieu (1993) suggests that art and cultural production is the marriage of structural (socially contextual) and agented (or phenomenological) forces—resisting both the Marxist aesthetic concept of contingencies as well as the elevation of art above life (p.65). Neoliberal cultural structures move beyond commodification and into the ideological governing of art as a social institution. This particular brand of culture is divorced from politics in a public, collective sense; art can become artifice.

It must be a collective effort to re-envision and redefine the socio-cultural landscape, and a certain political power exists in art’s potential to produce new subjectivities, not just institutional or ideological critique (O’Sullivan, 2006: 1). Critical art as cultural work is a means to politicize cultural conversations. The challenge is to understand the evolving relationship between art, market, and viewer and to critically animate work to demand and facilitate a culture of questioning. This is not a conversation that can be reduced to a simple critique of markets or institutions; rather, it is an examination of the social ideologies and discourses that dominate orderings of seeing, interpretation, and utilization. The ‘common sense’ modes of how we engage with the world dictate how we value cultural work. Taking into account the pedagogical potential of cultural work, ‘such modes of production and regimes of representation are problematic, to say the least, particularly as they help maintain unjust inequalities and are implicated in the daily symbolic and physical violence which diminishes the possibility of human dignity’ (Giroux, 1994: 94). Furthermore, it is important to understand the neoliberal conditions under which work of dissent and radical imagination exist, and the way that these spaces of dissent develop out of necessity and as a consequence of their social and economic context.

Donald Kuspit (2010) suggests that, paradoxically, the capitalist art market spectacle contains within it the means to its own transcendence:

Spectacularization by way of reproduction and commodification also do the work of art unexpected good— more unexpected yet consistent good than they do the spectator. For only by becoming a spectacular commodity is the work of art likely to—in fact will—survive in capitalist society, and with that into posterity, for the capitalists who own, sponsor and celebrate it as a spectacular achievement—who are the powerful elite in the society of the capitalist spectacle—have the power to give it a post-commodity future. The only way for art to become unconditionally elite—immortal—is to become a spectacular commodity and thus appeal to the spectacular capitalist elite. (par. 24)

This transcendence, however, does not allow art to exist without the structures of the capitalist market, remaining still well within its demarcated borders. The quest for emancipation from market forces is not a new phenomenon, and historically there have been two strategies in particular that artists have used to subvert or transcend these limits.

Politics of art

The first, not unlike what Kuspit describes, functions within the market-regulated cultural structures, offering an institutional critique from within, recognizing the frames that limit perception and possibility, and expressing them through the language of the market. Work such as Yves Klein’s 1958 opening ‘The Void’—wherein no material work was exhibited and the public was the work, implicit in the spectacle of the gallery sphere—calls attention to the relationship between the consumer and ‘high art’. Although this category includes work that may be critical and even subversive, it functions within the structures of the art market: ‘visual representations of social struggles or even conceptual and discursive indictments of established power can be brought into galleries and exhibition spaces without questioning the autonomy those spaces institute’ (Ray, 2006: 4).

The second method is the active creation of an alternative and oppositional space outside of the market—popularized in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of countercultural spaces marked by critique of institutions and rejections of consumerism and the valuing of ‘expression over communication,’ although there were problems regarding legitimacy and access, which ultimately rendered many of these movements unsuccessful (Rosler, 1994: 57). This work is produced and disseminated independently of the institutional structures of the capitalist art system and its hierarchy. Most notably championed through the work of the Situationist International and Guy Debord, contemporary work such as street art and the early work of the Bruce High Quality Foundation fall under this category. Graffiti artist Banksy is also a necessary mention here, although he functions in a liminal space both inside and outside the market—his critique and subversive commentary on the market (selling his work for US$60 at a booth in Central Park during his month long NYC ‘residency’ [BBC News, 2013]) is coupled with his anonymous celebrity status.

The alternative ‘outside’ space, often referred to as the avant-garde (literally ‘advance guard’ or ‘vanguard’, which suggests being ahead of something and indicates a one-directional, linear movement), defines itself precisely by the thing it is rallying against. Historically, there has been a cyclical motion between the mainstream and the outside—the avant-garde’s rupture with the academy, provoking a shift in perspectives and visual language and, slowly, the major expanded to envelope what once was the minor. ¹ This mode of expansion might explain the induction of Fluxus, Dada, performance, and other movements into the art history canon, although they developed in moments of critique and signified a break from the dominant apparatuses of visual culture. Contemporarily, much of the liminal space between the major and minor is occupied by political work—work with a political content or institutional critique, yet produced or presented in a form that emulates the dominant structures, something Jacques Rancière (2007) warns against: ‘If there is a circulation that should be stopped at this point, it’s this circulation of stereotypes that critique stereotypes, giant stuffed animals that denounce our infantilization, media images that denounce the media, spectacular installations that denounce the spectacle, etc…’ (p.6). The shortcoming of such work is its failure to suggest or provoke a movement beyond—although it has importantly critiqued conditions and even raised questions, it has neither imagined nor offered an alternative.

It is important to note that not all worthwhile art is explicitly political; however, it tells us something about the human experience, whether that be a social, political, or purely aesthetic experience—it tells us that there is something more. This idea is reminiscent of Mary Warnock’s (1976) discussion of the imagination and its pedagogical importance: ‘It is the main purpose of education to give people the opportunity of never being … bored; of not ever succumbing to a feeling of futility, or to the belief that they have come to an end of what is worth having’ (p.203). This sentiment incites the radical imagination, opening possibilities for new perspectives— ultimately a harbinger of hope and a language of the future. Implicit in conceptualizing the future is a sense of investment that deals with an idea of the common good and of justice.

Herbert Marcuse (1978 [1977]) suggested that the political power of art came from its aesthetic dimension, and that overt political content was too literal an intervention: ‘The more immediately political the work of art, the more it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical, transcendent goals of change’ (pp.xii–xiii). Aesthetics cannot be completely divorced from lived contexts, and critical art can work in both of these spheres simultaneously. However, devoid of aesthetic consideration or form, art devolves into visual activism, its overt politics often undermining the reception, or underestimating the intellect and sensibilities of its audience.

I assert that the goal for oppositional visual art in light of neoliberal market forces is to harness a utopian discourse that stems from the engagement and stimulation of the social imagination. This type of imagination is often missing from the discourse on visual art, and the work itself is often lacking in a discursive power to offer questions and insights regarding literacy, production, representation, and interpretation. A confrontation of dominant modes of value assessment, dissemination, seeing, and thinking about visual cultural work gives the public the impetus to engage in a critical dialogue, raising questions and refining private and public concerns into an oppositional format. This opposition allows for the possibility of a visual pedagogy to be applied toward an emancipatory civic practice. This goal is partial, however, because although there is a crucial link between a critical visual practice and civic engagement, it follows the model of artist and viewer as two sides of a binary, missing what Rancière discusses as the re-examination of boundaries in art discourse and that the question of value or power is not one of content or form, but rather, one of process: ‘An art is emancipated and emancipating when it renounces the authority of the imposed message, the target audience, and the univocal mode of explicating the world, when, in other words, it stops wanting to emancipate us’ (p.2). There is a call for a participatory public pedagogy in art production, in which what was the audience is now shaping the conditions of production and engagement—what Raymond Williams (1989) refers to as the importance of the student being able to define the questions being asked (p.156). This process gives weight to the lived experience and to cultural work that is necessarily critically reflexive; a process in which the artistic and intellectual pursuits are not separated from one another or from society, but both socially rooted and crucial to it.

If we examine contemporary art and its socio-cultural roles critically, we must focus our examination on its potential not only to respond to social conditions but also to affect social change. We must examine the ways in which art can provoke questioning and what Maxine Greene calls ‘wide-awakeness’ (1977: 121); by activating the social and radical imagination, we re-engage with the future. Here, I will examine the way in which collaborative structures of art production, by widening the space in which they exist, can challenge the established norms and ‘common sense’ of neoliberal cultural structures.

Collaborative structures: ‘There are always several spaces in a space, several ways of occupying it’. ( Rancière, 2007 : 4)

Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1991) suggests that a critical practice must be rooted in an oppositional sphere, be collaborative, and that the work must have the ability to critique and question the dominant social assumptions, all the while addressing forces of economic, cultural, and social repression that bear upon these practices (p.134). She goes on to suggest that collaborative practice is rare, yet in the 20 years since her writing, the possibility for collaboration has transformed and grown to become an area ripe with opportunity for both a culture of questioning as well as the creation of oppositional space. The process, by virtue of its collaborative potential, can contain the other factors of resistance outlined by Solomon-Godeau—space and rupture. By understanding the collaborative space as a political one, ² we are able to reformulate the boundaries between spaces, the creation of subjectivities, resistance, and the aesthetic dimension. These factors, while still relevant in and of themselves, can be rearranged in the collaborative space to work in new ways with one another. Aesthetics and form can be re-imagined as performative, realized through collaborative organization, and contingent on the social dimensions of process.

Although Marcuse argued that art must be necessarily apart from life, so that it can create a rupture with the reality principle, this suggests that it must not mimic life, and so an embedded practice still maintains the potential of rupture. The multidisciplinary work I wish to discuss here is characterized by the blurring of the boundaries between art and life, as well as between culture and politics. This work reclaims creativity and imagination for their discursive and emancipatory potential through the lived experience, not in reaction to it, tying the political dimension of interdisciplinary collaboration to the process rather than to the product. Yet art is not void of aesthetics, nor of the suggestions of form or beauty. Art does not need to be overtly didactic and practical as a thing—its pedagogical promise comes from the process and the experience of it. The question is, what happens if you remove the product and make the lived experience tantamount to the aesthetic experience? Can the experience be changed or shared if it is constructed collectively?

Through collective, participatory, and multidisciplinary work, art refuses the distinction of autonomy in which it is separated from life, and rather ascribes to the astructural model in which art is embedded. Work here often transcends ‘high art’ and exists in a space that the traditional art market cannot—perhaps yet—quite grasp. Art as process becomes a way of life and its multidisciplinary and utilitarian functions work both to invoke the social imagination and also to provide spaces for communal exploration and interrogation. Particularly relevant is the work of Caroline Woolard, who has engaged with concerns about assignation of value and founded a school run on barter; and N55, a Danish collective that creates open source available work and operates on the understanding that art is inextricable from people, politics, and social engagement. Beyond the theoretical ways in which these reconfigurations of critical cultural practice can become emancipatory, these collaborative works function in very real and physical ways to resist the neoliberal individualization and the marketization of culture.

Caroline Woolard predominately works in collaboration with others to create forums of exchange and planning. She has cofounded several organizations that promote collaborative cultural production, and values the creation of sustainable infrastructure as essential to the work. She organized a barter network (ourgoods.com) and co-founded Trade School (n.d.; tradeschool.coop), a self-organized, internationally expanding network that champions the sociality of exchange and knowledge production. Woolard says of her involvement with Trade School:

I am involved because I want to encourage cooperation and discussion about value … Trade School is a small part of the solidarity economy—economic practices that reinforce values of mutualism, cooperation, social justice, democracy, and ecological sustainability. I hope Trade School allows mutual respect to emerge between people. (About)

These practices challenge the hierarchical and individualizing structures in cultural production. Woolard’s upcoming projects include the establishment of a community land trust in NYC, in collaboration with community organizers, hackers, and other artists, a project dedicated to common spaces and what Woolard refers to as

Solidarity Art Worlds [that] emerge as we share authority and sense our collective power … linking common struggles so that the next generations can work towards a world without structural violence, without worrying that solidarity, cooperation, redistribution, or guaranteed housing, universal health care, and education are alternative. (Woolard, 2013, emphasis in the original)

Similarly, N55’s work is rooted in open sourcing—in which sustainable living apparatuses and designs are shared— underscored by their politics of the creative commons and common rights to knowledge and living space. They conceptualize art as necessarily bound up with the quality of being social and, as such, inextricable from questions of rights and political struggle:

That also artists must first and foremost be concerned with creating consciousness about [rights and the influence of concentrations of power] … In this way we have a case where the fundamental ethical norm, and thus ethics, become decisive for aesthetics and politics become decisive to the performance of art. (N55, n.d.: Art)

N55 publishes its ‘manuals’—discussions, interviews, images, and instructions for various discourses and projects (including fabrication of sustainable movement or housing projects)—as a cornerstone of their dedication to exchange and collaboration in cultural production.

It makes sense for art, especially publically conscious work, to occupy a space that contains in its constitution the ability to restructure social collaboration. The collectivity privileges the discursive and pedagogic power of art to re-imagine rather than just represent its condition. The decentered, horizontal structure of a process-based collective practice champions the same of need social movements to deconstruct hierarchical and hegemonic structures. The revolutionary power in such practices stems from integration of domains, that when held to be discrete, often become ossified:

 … we will need to design cultural spaces unfettered by the debilitating separation of theory from practice, the distance between academics and “the people.” Both inside and outside the university boundaries have been drawn and antagonisms entrenched between those who analyze and those who make films, novels, or paintings. It is time to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of theory and the theoretical character of aesthetic production. (Trend, 1992: 107)

It is not simply a question of being inside or outside the dominant structures, but rather a necessary investigation of what sorts of discourses are being perpetuated or challenged.

The embedded restructuring inherent in such work is important in its resistance of neoliberal social mechanisms of atomization—reclaiming the creative forces that engender space for collective deliberation and critique, the assembly of ideas and individuals creates a carefully orchestrated body—a place for collective aesthetic experience. This experience is a way to ‘link art to practices that are transgressive and oppositional, but also to make visible a wider project of connecting forms of cultural production to the creation of multiple critical spheres’ (Giroux, 1995: 5). A commitment to visual literacy and a collective engagement in creating a discursive and generative form of visual culture positions art as inextricable from the issues of public critical pedagogy. This is not to say that art has to be didactic in a literal sense, but rather that learning and transformation are crucially linked. Artists in this sense must be understood as public figures, social agents, and cultural intellectuals—provoking the social imagination through aesthetic work and through a reorganization of the social structure within which art is produced. The reintegration of community into a social and cultural discourse is precisely what is threatened by neoliberal cultural hegemonic practice: ‘Pedagogical relationships exist wherever knowledge is produced, highlighting how conflicts over meaning, language, and representation become symptomatic of a larger struggle over cultural authority, the role of intellectuals and artists, and the meaning of democratic public life’ (Giroux, 1995: 8). The potential of this work is to re-imagine the power structures that have dominated not only the economic sphere of art production, but also the forces by which cultural production has been evacuated from its pedagogic and political potential. Cultural production as a communal activity does not mean ‘everyone is an artist,’ but rather that active participation in culture is a common duty, a resistance to the culture industry, and a mode of critical questioning that introduces a language of possibility. The construction of political subjectivities through a social practice in the arts becomes a perpetual project when it is understood as a process. If the work is to present contemporary issues, it must do so ‘in a form that embodies their ability to transform themselves—revealing their contradictions and their emotional, political resonance’ (Becker, 1994: 122). This potential is the power of art, which has long been viewed as dangerous and has prompted repeated attempts throughout both history and contemporary society to ban, censor, and destroy art and those who make it.

This collective work is both structuralist in its responsiveness to cultural codes, affected by context, perspectives and conditions, yet simultaneously it offers a potential to liberate itself from them. The aesthetic dimension can be experienced, even understood outside of its socio-historical context, signifying that there is value outside of contingency. I would suggest that the process is an extension of that value, informed by the context but not beholden to it. Expanding the idea of social process outward from a mere notion of accidental circumstance and chance confluence of situational factors, the crucial intervention is the widening of the process-space in a theoretically rigorous manner to root the aesthetics in a public space that contains—in its social interconnectivity—its political potential. This rooting opens the possibility for arts, artists, and process to be cultural agents—simultaneously affected and affecters.

Cultural pedagogy and new sociality

A feature of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) conception of the major and the minor is its collectivity:

 … what each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren’t in agreement… But above all else, because collective or national consciousness is ‘often inactive in external life and always in the process of break-down,’ literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of the collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation. (p.17)

This particular potential of literature is present in visual art as well, in these efforts that transform individual practices into collective, necessarily political, spaces. I believe that this integrative, political effort in visual art is in part an attempt to reclaim creativity as a part of life and more importantly, as an essential part of the community. Arts, in a rupture from reality via aesthetics, and through the integration with the lived experience via social embeddedness, can in themselves be a mode of thinking, a new language to articulate what can or what needs to be. Art allows a recognition of what is good about humanity, what it is capable of, while simultaneously upsetting things we thought we understood; ‘[art] is a reminder of what a truly integrated experience of oneself in society might be, a remembrance of gratification, a sense of purpose beyond alienation’ (Becker, 1994: 117).

These cultural interventions and reorganizations are not simply a question of collecting ‘against’ the system, as opposition is not the primary object, but rather it is a process of creating and becoming a new system in which the pedagogic properties of visual work are inherently part of a larger conversation about public issues, social orderings, exclusion, inequality, and democratic potential. The shared public site of cultural work allows politics that exist in the ‘world of discourse’ to be integrated into the ‘rest of life’ (Couldry, 2004: 10). Art is instrumental in translating the private domain into the public sphere—connecting issues held to be individual problems to greater social concerns. Collective contemporary art makes the process itself a public, participatory one, in essence laying a claim to the commons. Art in this sense is a means of connection in a space that makes possible a practice of public politics. Such cultural work can be viewed as a form of public pedagogy whose role, Nick Couldry (2004) asserts, is ‘sustaining practices of public connection: practices through which people’s fragmented, uncertain, incomplete narratives of agency … are valued, preserved, and made available for exchange, which being related, analytically, to wider contexts of power’ (p.12). This practice of connection is a vital source of creating a new sociality that can expand beyond the prescriptive neoliberal social order, crucial for the creation of political agency. Social movements attest to the fact that individual efforts are important, yet transformation happens collectively, and this is true for the efficacy of cultural processes as well. Not only is this a crucial form of resistance in an environment that is typically hostile (in policy) toward collective radical work in arts and culture, but it also creates a type of generative momentum that fosters cultural work as a germ of change and possibility.

In an insistently individualistic and market-driven order, in which value is quantifiable, it is necessary to construct social mechanisms that protect and encourage creative cultural work, as the health of a society depends on it. A further implication of this investigation is the need for state-sponsored support of critical cultural work, in which wealth and value cannot be reduced to monetary measures. Argentina’s recent adoption of a writers’ pension program is an effort to expand social welfare programs by supporting work often considered to be marginal in states that champion austerity measures. The writers’ pension is a system for acknowledging the role that artists as intellectuals have in shaping a society and forming its culture; a way to recognize the contribution this cultural work has made. Says poet Graciela Aráoz: ‘In the end, this is about fortifying the pleasurable act of reading, which prevents us from turning into the equivalent of zombies’ (Romero, 2012: 2).

The imagination is the integral part of cultivating and sustaining the possibility of a liberationist cultural practice—‘its regenerative abilities to remain uncolonized by the prevailing ideology, continue to generate new ideas, and reconfigure the familiar’ (Becker, 1994: 114). Intellectual health and cultural production are closely linked in that the social work of the intellectual must take into account where her ideas are taken up and how. Marcuse’s two conditions for art are that the artist’s responsibility is to help society confront and struggle with its issues, and that the work must embody hope (pp.52,57–58). The transcendence of the reality principle and these two conditions are not unique to artists alone—this is the domain of all public intellectuals and, as such, Marcuse’s analysis suggests that artists, of the sort whose work matters deeply, are necessarily public intellectuals. Instead of positioning the intellectual outside of the public, commenting on the human condition, the public intellectual’s job is to function within the social realm, aware of the social structure and simultaneously creating new cultural knowledge. The limit of art’s potential in a social context is not determined solely by visual literacy—the challenge presented to us through new configurations of collective practice and social engagement is developing a language of interdisciplinary cultural work.