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Art is a ProblemBy Joshua Decter
December 16, 2013
Joshua Decter grapples with arts inherent contradictions; the
Los Angeles race riots; and a
contemporary artists social allegories in response to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Art is a Problem.
Yael Bartana, Kings of the Hill, 2005. MoMA PS1
Art may have become a problem only because it is no longer
really problematic. Arthowever we may
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choose to define, de-define, re-define, or un-define itis on the
verge of becoming so thoroughlyassimilated into, or integrated
within, global social, economic, ideological, and institutional
networksthat it may no longer be able to pose any problems to those
systems. As a result, art seemsincreasingly insulated from deeply
critical questions that would seriously compromise its validity
orvalue. It is also tenable to suggest that this has been arts odd
predicament for quite some time. Amore difficult question to
consider is whether art ever did pose any problemsand what criteria
ormetric would we use to measure this?
Some would argue that arts assimilationits distribution into
broader networksallows it to act, soto speak, upon the imaginations
of more publics and in increasingly complex, subtle ways than at
anyother time in recent history. To others, arts ubiquity merely
tranquilizes its transformative potential.Sectors of the global
contemporary art market may have become economic drivers of
employment andwealth, but this does not mitigate the anxiety that
comes with acknowledging arts discomfitingparadoxes: it is a
creative practice that still can generate meaning beyond itself; a
robustly investableclass of commodity that reinvents the terms of
its own language; and a specialized cultural productthat aspires to
critical, yet demotic, social and political germaneness. Yes, there
are circumstances inwhich art has surfaced as a vehicle of dissent,
resistance, protest, oppositionseeking to questionpower and
authority, intolerance and repression, and economic and social
injustice. The variouslytermed political, social, critical,
interventionist, public, participatory, and other turns are
testimony toongoing efforts at cultivating a verifiable agency
and/or utility for art and artist. Yet, paradoxically, themore
tolerant or liberal a society becomes, the more art becomes a
naturalized, normative elementwithin an environment of unfettered
(and perhaps increasingly undifferentiated) creative production.At
the same time, we might say that art embodies these self-same
contradictions. Art is an aporia. Toexpress it differently: art can
only allegorize its indeterminate relationship to itself, and to
everythingelse. Critical writing may have the capacity to cut
through the fog of arts ambiguities and shed lighton its
contradictory place in the world, but such discourse can do nothing
to vitiate thesecontradictions. To some, this is inspiring; for me,
it is occasionally exasperating.
In order to be critical, we must convince ourselves that
our sovereignty as critical thinkers is meaningful and
tangible, even while acknowledging that this very
sovereignty is the result of precariously occupying a
mental space that is at once inside and outside power.
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Engaging in critical processesi.e., questioning, pressuring, and
troubling things as they appear to be
may temporarily reduce the psychic pain unleashed by the
contradictions of art and its global
systems, even though it is in no way ameliorative of these
conditions. (For better results, take
Ibuprofen.) In order to be critical, we must convince ourselves
that our sovereignty as critical thinkers
is meaningful and tangible, even while acknowledging that this
very sovereignty is the result of
precariously occupying a mental space that is at once inside and
outside power. We find creative,
even pleasurable, ways to maintain the self-delusiona suspension
of disbeliefthat our sovereignty
as critical beings is beyond contradiction. It would be
hypocrisy not to admit that my criticality is
located both outside of and within these contradictions. If
anything, this book reflects an ongoing
struggle to reconcile the limits of criticality (and criticism)
with a continuing desire to imagine that
the questioning of things might have some relevance beyond a
relatively closed discursive spice or
community (that is itself constituted both inside and outside
power). It is emblematic of the endless
circularity of reconciling ones doubt and skepticism with a
sense of commitment to art and artists.
The kind of thinking that privileges doubt may dwell in a
precarious state in relation to various
audiences and receptions (academic, non-academic, or other), yet
we also understand that skepticism
can be fodder for the radical chic mill. Doubt and skepticism
are infinitely marketable. Its a truism
that criticality and/or criticism is perpetually in crisis, and
that dissent can be recuperated for other
applications; e.g., dissent as an iPhone app. Yet one may also
conceive of doubt as the prerequisite to
a commitment to art, artists, and people. Once we work our way
through doubt, or at least assuage
our skepticism, commitment and engagement may ensue. And so we
might consider doubt not as
anathema to commitment, but rather as the necessary prerequisite
for it.
* * *
The Fractious Hybrid State (Of Things)
I am in the process of completing an essay on the contradictions
of the notion of multiculturalism as
it pertains to the domain of contemporary art and visual culture
vis--vis this countrys rather
unstable socioeconomic fabric, when it is brought to my
attention that civil violence has erupted into
the streets of the South Central Los Angeles community as a
direct response to the not guilty verdict
reached in the trial of four white L.A. police officers accused
of using excessive force in the
apprehension and arrest of black motorist Rodney King. I turn on
the television, and a mlange of
images transmitted live via satellite flood into my domicile.
The events unfold, the news coverage is
disorganized and reactive: a helicopter hovers above the streets
of South Central, sending pictures of
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an urban topography steadily descending into social unrest and
violence. It is immediately clear whatis happening: the
predominantly black residents of that community have begun to
register a generalprotest against an acquittal which seems to
re-confirm their worst fears that the countrys judicialsystem is
inherently unjust to African Americans, that it systematically
favors whites. I am angered bya verdict delivered by a mostly white
jury in a police brutality trial held in Simi Valleya Los
Angelessuburb with a mere 2 percent black population. It is clear
that the judicial system failed in thisinstance.
The class and race conflicts which always seem to
simmer beneath the surface of this society reached a
boiling point.
The sense of social, economic, cultural, and political
disenfranchisement that must be felt by blackcitizens within a
community racked by gang warfare, ubiquitous drug traffic, and
black-on-blackcrime, is difficult to imagine. Following the verdict
in the Rodney King trial, that community let loosefrom years of
pent-up frustration regarding the cycle of economic and social
decay, disempowerment,and social marginalization. The class and
race conflicts which always seem to simmer beneath thesurface of
this society reached a boiling point; for some, the rage was
unmanageable, leading to amicro-civil war: angry black youth
beating white motorists who had strayed into South Central,
angryKorean businessmen organized into a paramilitary organization,
firing at looters in defense of theirproperties. Clearly, the
beatings, arson, and lootings were perpetrated by a relatively
small contingentof irresponsible, desperate, or criminal elements;
ironically, it is reported that the looters comprised amultiracial
coalition (predominantly black, but also Latino and Anglo).
But we are all implicated, regardless of our race, cultural
identity, economic status, or social class; it isa question of how
we position ourselves in relation to the complexities and
contradictions. Perhaps Ihave fallen victim to the media spectacle
of the situation; maybe Im caught up in a mass culturallogic that
transforms real social upheaval into a theatrical proliferation of
televisual abstraction. Maybemy white, liberal identityitself a
hybrid site of ideological, emotional contestationhas been
coaxedtowards an enhanced self-criticality. Cornel Wests 1990
essay, The New Cultural Politics ofDifference, has been useful:
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In the recent past, the dominant cultural identities have been
circumscribed by immoral patriarchal,
imperial, jingoistic, and xenophobic constraints. The political
consequences have been principally a
public sphere regulated by and for well-to-do White males in the
name of freedom and democracy.
The new cultural criticism exposes and explodes the exclusions,
blindness, and silence of this past,
calling from it radical libertarians and democratic projects
that will create a better present and future.
The new cultural politics of difference is neither an
ahistorical Jacobin program that discards tradition
and ushers in new self-righteous authoritarianism nor a
guilt-ridden leveling anti-imperialist liberalism
that celebrates token pluralism from smooth inclusion. Rather,
it acknowledges the uphill struggle of
fundamentally transforming highly objectified, rationalized, and
commodified societies and cultures in
the name of individuality and democracy. This means locating the
structural causes of unnecessary
forms of social misery (without reducing all such human
suffering to historical causes), depicting the
plight and predicaments of demoralized and depoliticized
citizens caught in market-driven cycles of
therapeutic releasedrugs, alcoholism, consumerismand projecting
alternative visions analysis and
actions that proceed from particularities and arrive at moral
and political connectedness. This
connectedness does not signify a homogenous unity or monolithic
totality but rather a contingent,
fragile coalition-building in an effort to pursue common radical
libertarian and democratic goals that
overlap.
My desire is to reach out beyond the rhetorical enclave of
academic discourse, and the institutional and social
limitations attached to that language.
As an art critic operating within the territory of a privileged
contemporary art culture, how can I hope
to articulate a meaningful and persuasive account of the
contradictory nature of our hybrid culture?
Who constitutes the audience for this text? What are the
conditions of its receptions? What type(s) of
communications does it establish within, and beyond, the
parameters of the art world? How do we
identify those parameters? When I extract a quote from an
African American cultural critic,
incorporating it within my discourse, what, if any, are the
sociopolitical implications of this act? In the
spirit of cultural, racial, ideological, political, and
intellectual coalition-building, I may be weaving an
elaborate intertextuality, but my desire is to reach out beyond
the rhetorical enclave of academic
discourse, and the institutional and social limitations attached
to that language. But reach out to
where, and to whom? The streets of South Central L.A., or New
Yorks Harlem community? New lines
1
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of verbal and visual communication have to be opened through
intercultural, interracial, inter-ideological, inter-political and
inter-economic coalitions and dialogue.
In his essay Secular Criticism, the Palestinian American
literary and cultural critic Edward Saidcalled for the critic to
overcome the pernicious specialization of the insular academic
realm (as aliteral institutional space, as well as a codified
system of theoretical language-formations), and work torecognize
the humanistic obligations of the intellectual to operate, in that
potential space insidecivil society, acting on behalf of those
alternative acts and alternative intentions whose advancement isa
fundamental human obligation. Following Said, I would like to
suggest a transformation of theEnlightenment model re-inscribed in
his text (e.g., acting on behalf) into a differently
articulatedconception, so that the so-called alternative can
manufacture the self-empowerment to act on mybehalf, reversing
Saids potentially problematic hierarchy of authority. Yet today,
the penal system inthis country has become the school for a
disproportionate percentage of young black men; the failureof the
public educational system for the so-called inner city, low-income
youth of this country ispandemic, and is connected to other
systematic problems within this nations institutional, social,
andeconomic infrastructure. The fiction of equal opportunity is
made graphically evident at the flashpoint of reactive urban
violence.
Take a good look at todays America: the contradictions and
complexities of racial segregation persist,and have become even
more firmly entrenched within a seemingly vicious cycle of
economic,ideological, educational, and political relations which
produce wide gulfs between culturalempowerment and disempowerment,
representation, and non-representation. A recent studypublished in
the New York Times once again indicates the almost absurd disparity
of economic powerbetween the relatively small percentage of wealthy
Americans (who continue to control,proportionally, the majority of
capital), and the low-income populations (whose opportunity
toimprove their economic condition has begun to deteriorate); this
is a disparity made even moreglaring as fortunes and opportunities
also decline for the middle class.
It is abundantly clear that cultural capital remains in thehands
of a select, primarily white, network of experts,specialists,
connoisseur, galleries, curators, collectors,
artists, writers.
2
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And so what do people mean when they use words such as
multiculturalism or cultural difference
in todays art world? It is abundantly clear that cultural
capital remains in the hands of a select,
primarily white, network of experts, specialists, connoisseur,
galleries, curators, collectors, artists,
writers, etc. The rise of the alternative space in the early
1970s attested to dissatisfactions with the
consolidation of the so-called mainstream venues for specific
types of practices, and the development
and emergence of localized, community-based art centers within
the city similarly demonstrated a
desire for new frameworks of self-representation and
self-presentation. Yet such developments have
produced a rather paradoxical situation: the virtual segregation
of practices by artists of color (where
African American, Asian American, Latino, etc. who live and work
in different urban contexts or
communities other than those officially sanctioned by the
legislators of the supposed mainstream)
from other cultural venues that might offer them a greater stake
in the art marketplace. The whole
rather dead-end issue of mainstream versus alternative, center
versus periphery, in terms of
contemporary visual arts culture suggests a logic of inclusion
and exclusion that must be overcome on
conceptual and institutional levels, for it is clear that
artists within certain ethnic communities beyond
the domain of SoHo would like to establish enhanced degrees of
cultural-economic autonomy and
control that suggest a productive interface (in)between distinct
urban sites of artistic production.
Yet, I am also somewhat uncomfortable with my own motivations as
a white art critic attempting to
discuss issues of race relations, class, and cultural identity
in relation to the contemporary art world,
particularly as I have sought to bring into this discussion the
recent events in South Central L.A. as
they indicate the contradictory status of the notion of
multiculturalism. My discomfort arises from an
understanding, however incomplete, of the contradictory and
complex nature of my so-called white
identity, and the degree to which this hybrid, unstable identity
itself evidences an ambivalent
relationship to constructing a discourse on other cultural,
racial, and ethnic identities.
The dream: to develop a more authentic understanding of cultural
identity as a means (to paraphrase
Cornell West) of establishing or locating affiliations between
distinct conditions of race and gender.
Wests call for coalition-building in order to identify
overlapping libertarian and democratic agendas
for whites, blacks, and others, as well as his demand that the
new cultural critics explore different
territories and avoid disciplinary and institutional closure or
insularity, seem to be essential
prerequisites for the struggle to resolve the glaring
contradictions and enormous systemic problems
facing our hybrid, yet fractious society.
Notes:
1. Cornel West, The New Cultural Politics of Difference, in Out
There: Marginalization and
Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et. al. (Cambridge:
The MIT Press and New York: The
New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990). p. 35.
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2. Edward Said, Secular Criticism, in The World, the Text and
the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983). p. 30.
Revised version of essay originally published in catalog for The
Hybrid State exhibition, Exit Art, New
York, November 2, 1991 through January 25, 1992.
* * *
Yael Bartana: an aesthetics of restorative justice deployed into
the space of quotidian
injustice.
Disputatious claims of belonging and emplacement; boundaries and
flows; communication and
misunderstanding; historical narratives in contradiction: These
are the preoccupations of Yael
Bartanas post-documentary, allegorical practice. Born in Israel
in 1970, Bartana makes work that
delivers resonant poetic-political reflections on the cultural,
political, geographic, psychological, and
religious irreconcilabilities of the Israeli and Palestinian
peoples. Indeed, both seem incapable, in their
mutually reinforcing fears and misunderstandings and their
reciprocalindeed, at this point,
ritualisticgestures of discipline and punishment, of forging a
workable two-state solution. Yet
Bartanas work cannot be considered activist in any normative
sense. It is best understood within a
broader context of artists (e.g., Emily Jacir, the Atlas Group
with Walid Raad) who hybridize
conceptual structures, documentary codes, and
post-representational strategies, deconstructing
assumptions of truth and stable ideological systems while
remaining within the proximity of
realpolitik. Artists such as Bartana, Jacir, and Raad inhabit
post-colonial, post-diasporic transnational
identities and interstitial real and imaginary geographic
spaces. Their practices reactivate the viewers
relation tonot complicity withthe entanglements of these
conflicted worlds and illuminate the
interdependencies of artistic and political labor for viewer and
producer alike.
Velocities mutate and a subtle time lapse of sensuous
dissolves and fades makes it appear that the vehicles are
moving through one another, creating ghostly
afterimages and displacing real-time modalities.
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Bartanas P.S. 1 showher first institutional exhibition in the
U.S.features several works produced
over the past eight years. The earliest is Trembling Time, 2001,
a deceptively simple video that
embodies the contradictions of a society tangled up in
secularity and urbanity on the one hand and
religiosity and a deep commitment to historical commemoration on
the other. From atop the
Hashalom Bridge in Tel Aviv, Bartana shot that citys main
highway during the event marking the
start of Israels Remembrance Day, which honors fallen soldiers:
sirens wail across the country,
broadcast on all media outlets; a minute of silence is observed;
and the nation briefly grinds to a halt.
Initially, it is a rather mundane scene. Cars and trucks pass
below at normal speed, but then velocities
mutate and a subtle time lapse of sensuous dissolves and fades
makes it appear that the vehicles are
moving through one another, creating ghostly afterimages and
displacing real-time modalities. A siren
is heard; cars gradually come to a stop; the passengers step
onto the asphalt, stand in the middle of
the highway, and then return to their vehicles. We are witness
to a historically transcendent
memorialization that is at once tangible and phantasmica
momentary break with a normative order
of things that has, itself, become normalized. Significantly,
Bartanas simultaneously narrative and
non-narrative depiction of the episode is looped, alluding to
the tautology that is intrinsic to all
rituals, including rituals of non-reconciliation. The work is
testimony and counter-testimony, at once
documentation and a displacement or de-realization of the event
into other (i.e., aesthetic) terms
what might be described as a process of social abstraction.
Questions of responsibility and territory or place come to the
surface in Wild Seeds, 2005, a two-
screen installation that presents images of a cluster of Israeli
teenagers playing a game devised by
Bartana that reenacts the struggle by Israeli police to evict
settlers from illegal outposts. The young
actors take on the requisite roles: those playing the settlers
seek to establish themselves as an
interlocked, horizontally positioned unit of resistance on the
ground; those playing the police attempt
to pull them apart and eject them from their entrenched
positions. Yelling and screaming ensue. On
the second screen, perpendicular to the first, the rhetorical
battle is translated from Hebrew into
English: A Jew does not deport another Jew; Where is your
conscience?; Motherfuckers, etc.
Smiles suggest it is all in good fun, yet there are also moments
of uncomfortable laughter and
tension, as well as real physical struggle, mirroring the larger
existential struggle. We understand that
Bartana has enacted a social-symbolic episode that allegorizes
the extent to which Israeli society has
been torn apart by territorial claims, with the state becoming
the hegemonic other, the institutional
bad cop, in the eyes of some extremist settlers. Its a powerful
indictment of the schizophrenia of a
society that may or may not be able to heal its largely
self-inflicted wounds.
Bartanas practice gains force by functioning as a response to
localized realities while at the same time
generating social imaginaries that productively dislocate us
into regions of broader political allegory.
Potentially, this allegory operates on transnational terms and,
possibly, as a means of allowing us to
project ourselves to territory beyond normative media
representations. In Summer Camp, 2007, we
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discover black-and-white images of people of apparently European
descent riding camels through an
idyllic desert landscape, cacti and palm trees blowing in the
wind. A phrase appears: To the pioneers
in Palestine. It turns out that were looking at a print of the
1935 Zionist film Awodah, directed by
Helmar Lerski, which, according to curator Sergio Edelsztein,
was commissioned to promote the
immigration of European Jews to pre-state Israel, hailing
agricultural development as a collectivizing
epic. Bartana recorded footage of the reconstruction of a house
in the Palestinian village of Anata,
near Jerusalem, that had been demolished by the Israeli Army.
The rebuilding project was organized
by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) in
opposition to the Israel Defense
Forces tactic of razing homes suspected of housing militants or
their families. Bartana skillfully edited
her ICAHD documentation so as to echo the
Zionist-socialist-realist style of the utopian narrative of
the historical film. With composer Guy Harries, she created a
new score based on her previously
reedited version of Paul Dessaus original heroic-modernist music
for Awodah, now incorporating
traditional Arab music to suggest the inevitability of
cross-cultural hybridization between Israel and
Palestinean ironic consequence of their entwined fates. We
cannot help experiencing or reading one
film (and one history) through the filter of the other.
One recognizes a wry reminder of just how selective a
nations memory can be, and how we forget that our
collective destiny is predicated on the fate of others.
We are, in other words, invited by Bartana to reflect on the
profound contradictions of Israels
settlement policies in the occupied territories in relation to
its own history. If the Jewish people
cannot be separated from the land of their biblical heritage,
why should there be a different standard
for Palestinians, who make their own legitimate claim? This
transgenerational dispute is now
ultimately a question of equal rights under the law, at least
within the current terms of occupation. In
its Tel Aviv incarnation, Bartanas show, untitled at P.S. 1, was
called Short Memory. One recognizes
a wry reminder of just how selective a nations memory can be,
and how we forget that our collective
destiny is predicated on the fate of others. Bartanas work
eloquently reminds us of the disturbing
psychosocial media feedback loop of tit-for-tat violencethe
trauma of conflict endlessly reanimated
that taints Israelis and Palestinians alike. By extension, she
implicates all viewers, us, within a
seemingly hopeless complexity that is calling out for
imaginative actsdare we say cultural and
artistic operationsof global responsibility and engagement.
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Bartana may not be claiming that art can ameliorate calamity,
but she does appear to have just
enough faith in the emancipatory potential of allegories of
social justice, even as her work functions
as an allegorical rendering of social injustice. As an artist,
she can only hope to reengineer these
social, political, cultural, and religious entanglements into
another kind of representation, a conflictual
zone of deferred imaginary reconciliations. Within her
cartography of trauma, the land is not
transfigured into an essentialized condition, but rather is
conceived as a post-territorial space that
simultaneously precedes and exceeds, includes and excludes,
religion, culture, politics, ideology, and
perhaps even representation itself. In other words, the land is
a space of possibility wherein social
imaginaries may cross-pollinate with realpolitik. Might her
practice be understood as an aesthetics of
restorative justice deployed into the space of quotidian
injustice?
Revised version of text on Yael Bartanas survey show at MoMA
PS1, New York, October 19, 2008
through May 4, 2009. Originally published in Artforum
International, April 2009.
Find Guernicas interview with Joshua Decter here
(http://www.guernicamag.com/art/more-problems/) .
Joshua Decter is a New York-based writer, curator, art
historian, and theorist. In addition to Art is a
Problem, Decter is co-author of a forthcoming book in Afteralls
Exhibition Histories series on the
1993 exhibition, Culture in Action. He has curated exhibitions
at PS1, the Center for Curatorial
Studies at Bard College, Apex Art, the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago, the Kunsthalle
Vienna, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and was a curatorial
interlocutor for inSite_05. Decter
founded the MA Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere
program at the University of
Southern California, and has taught at Bard Colleges Center for
Curatorial Studies, the School of
Visual Arts, NYU, and other institutions.
All texts excerpted from Art is a Problem
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3037641959/ref=as_li_tf_tl?
ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=3037641959&linkCode=as2&tag=gueamagofarta-20)
by
Joshua Decter. Preface: 2013 Joshua Decter and JRP|Ringier
Kunstverlag AG. The Fractious Hybrid
State (Of Things): 1992 Joshua Decter, Exit Art, and JRP|Ringier
Kunstverlag AG. Yael Bartana: an
aesthetics of restorative justice deployed into the space of
quotidian injustice: 2009 Joshua Decter,
Artforum International, and JRP|Ringier Kunstverlag AG.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
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