Lead catalog essay from the exhibition “Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art,” Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University (2005) Theories and Methods of Collaborative Art Practice Introduction: Art, Speech & Violence He speaks. the lake in front becomes a lawn. Woods vanish, hills subside, and valleys rise... William Cowper, The Garden (1785) 1 In Cowper’s poem The Garden he writes with ironic reverence of Lancelot Brown, perhaps the most famous landscape designer of his day. Brown, who was nicknamed “Capability” for his skill in identifying the potential for “improvement” in even the least promising of properties, is associated with the natural or English school of garden design during the Georgian era. The natural garden style was developed in opposition to the precise, mathematical French style epitomized by Le Nôtre's work at Versailles and was intended to evoke an uncultivated Arcadian wilderness. Of course the labornecessary to make nature appear “natural” was herculean; Brown’s gardens involved massive earth-moving projects, the planting and transplanting of vast numbers of trees, and the creation of lakes and ponds. This is one of the central paradoxes of the eighteenth-century landscape garden; in order to produce the effect of naturalness it is necessary to engage in the most exhaustive manipulation of nature. In many cases the desire for a wholly natural scene (one that would exclude all evidence of human culture other than that symbolic of leisure and contemplation) required the destruction and
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Lead catalog essay from the exhibition “Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration inContemporary Art,” Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University (2005)
Theories and Methods of Collaborative Art Practice
Introduction: Art, Speech & Violence
He speaks. the lake in front becomes a lawn. Woods vanish, hills subside,and valleys rise...
William Cowper, The Garden (1785)1
In Cowper’s poem The Garden he writes with ironic reverence of Lancelot Brown,
perhaps the most famous landscape designer of his day. Brown, who was nicknamed
“Capability” for his skill in identifying the potential for “improvement” in even the least
promising of properties, is associated with the natural or English school of garden
design during the Georgian era. The natural garden style was developed in opposition
to the precise, mathematical French style epitomized by Le Nôtre's work at Versailles
and was intended to evoke an uncultivated Arcadian wilderness. Of course the labor
necessary to make nature appear “natural” was herculean; Brown’s gardens involved
massive earth-moving projects, the planting and transplanting of vast numbers of trees,
and the creation of lakes and ponds. This is one of the central paradoxes of the
eighteenth-century landscape garden; in order to produce the effect of naturalness it is
necessary to engage in the most exhaustive manipulation of nature. In many cases the
desire for a wholly natural scene (one that would exclude all evidence of human culture
other than that symbolic of leisure and contemplation) required the destruction and
John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding 9
Labor, in the early modern period, must be understood as a predicative term, emerging
in conjunction with its counterpart: property. It was the mobility of property, the novel
idea of possession as a right that could be earned, and lost, that set the modern period
apart. As the economic historian Robert Heilbroner famously observed:
As late as the fourteenth or fifteenth century there was no such thing as land in thesense of freely salable, rent-producing property. There were lands, of course—estates, manors, and principalities—but these were emphatically not real estate tobe bought and sold as the occasion warranted. . . A medieval nobleman in goodstanding would no more have thought of selling his land than the governor of Connecticut would think of selling a few counties to the governor of Rhode Island.10
The movement of landed property was, of course, always virtual, a transfer of rights, but
it had a profound significance. This “great transformation” was not simply economic, it
was experienced on the ontic level; literally changing the way in which political
subjecivity was constructed and legitimated in the early modern era.11 One’s social
status, for so long determined by birth and blood, could be radically transformed by the
externalization of self in the act of rendering nature productive. This new model of
identity arises in the context of a changing political scene in Europe, associated with the
emergence of a proto-capitalist class of merchants and gentry. It’s earliest
manifestations occur in England, in response to the pressure exerted by economically
powerful, but un-titled, landowners during the 1600s and early 1700s. One of the
nature” was a communal affair in which God gave all men in common the resources of
the earth. As Grotius wrote in De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres (1625):
Soon after the creation of the world, and a second time after the Flood, Godconferred upon the human race, a general right over things of a lower nature. . . Inconsequence, each man could at once take whatever he wished for his own needs,and could consume whatever was capable of being consumed.12
In this “original community of the land” (Communio Fundi Originari ) everyone is free to
take what he or she needs from the common land in order to survive. Eventually this
condition of divinely mandated communism gave way to some form of private
possession (earned by labor, not endowed by God). The transition from common
access to private property was crucial for seventeenth and eighteenth century liberal
political thought in England. This debate bore directly on contemporary arguments
about the enclosure of the commons and the relative moral and political authority of the
landowning classes. If all men are created equal then how do we account for the
systematic inequalities that exist between landowners on their vast estates, and the
rural working class? Grotius and Pfufendorf, along with Locke and Kant present differing
accounts of this transition, but all involve the emegence of some form of proto-
democratic decision-making which allowed the “commons” to be privatized, while at the
same time providing the operational foundation for modern systems of representative
government based on public consensus.
Property, and most importantly the act of possession, emerge in the philosophy
of the Enlightenment as one of the chief markers of legitimate subject status—not
merely the possession of property, but more specifically, the faculty of possession, as it
something that you own or possess—a constant supply of material to be controlled or
appropriated.17 The actual form taken by the property is less important than the kind of
relationship that it sets in place between you and the world around you. It is an active,
acquisitive, transformative relationship in which the world exists as the vehicle for your
own redemption and fulfillment as a subject. This is clear in Locke's discussion of
property, in which his will is coextensive with the labor or property of his horse or
servant—all are simply vehicles for his own achievement of subject status:
Thus the Grass my horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore Ihave digg'd in any place where I have a right to them in common with others,become my Property , without the assignation or consent of any body. The labor that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my Property in them . . .18
The bourgeois subject is not autonomous, but intrinsically dependent (on the labor of
others and on a continuing supply of materials, frontiers, and opportunities for ontic
investment) for it’s self–constitution.19 Of particular importance here is the slippage that
is introduced among its various "possessions". Locke’s servant or his horse are merely
extensions of his will, yet in the very act of externalizing and extending that will it
becomes displaced, introducing a potential confusion between the body and objects,
and between the subject and the things that the subject can claim to possess. Further,
the relative privilege, the ontic spaciousness, of the bourgeois subject, far from being
“earned” through a fair and equal competition, the outcome of which offers a meaningful
indication of the relative fortitude of their conative drive, is, in fact, always/already
biased by pre-existing distortions in the field of social and economic opportunity (in
Locke’s time, the fact that the common land on which a subject might actualize his will,
aristocracy, was increasingly available to the rising bourgeoisie. Thus, the English
landscape garden is closely linked to the emergence of a class of powerful, land-owning
"men of fortune" who began to acquire large country estates as the natural
accompaniment of their wealth, often through acts of enclosure.21 The natural English
style that was favored at this time was characterized by unimpeded vistas, flowing,
closely mown expanses of lawn, the "natural" placement of shrubs and groves of trees,
and serpentine footpaths.22
In addition to these visual components, one of the most essential elements of the
natural style garden was something you didn’t see: workers. In a rural economy
dependent on massive armies of seasonal laborers, the landscape garden was an oasis
of solitude. The aesthetic of the garden hinges on the suppression of particular
elements in the landscape (for example, the farms and cottages of the rural laborer, or
cultivated fields) that offer any evidence that the land itself might be economically
productive. The boundaries between the garden and the “working farm” must be
absolute. This dynamic is apparent in the writings of Humphrey Repton, one of the
leading garden designers of the late eighteenth-century. Consider his comparison of the
"park," which is characterized by "undulating lines contrasting with each other in variety
of forms; trees so grouped as to produce light and shade to display the varied surface of
the ground; and an undivided range of pasture" with the utilitarian "farm":
The farm is forever changing the color of its surface in motley and discordanthues; it is subdivided by straight lines of fences. The trees can only be ranged informal rows along the hedges; and these the farmer claims a right to cut, prune,and disfigure. Instead of cattle enlivening the scene by their peaceful attitudes, or sportive gambols, animals are bending beneath the yoke, or closely confined to
fatten within narrow enclosures, objects of profit, not of beauty. 23
Repton goes on to warn of the danger, due to the "prevailing rage for agriculture," of
trying to "blend" or "unite" the farm and the park. What disturbs Repton is not that these
two types or uses of land should co-exist, but rather that landowners should carelessly
allow them to mingle together in close proximity:
It is the union, not the existence, of beauty and profit, of laborious exertion andpleasurable recreation, against which I would interpose the influence of my art;nor let the fastidious objector condemn the effort, till he can convince thejudgment that, without violation of good taste, he could introduce the dairy and
the pig-sty (those useful appendages of rural economy) into the recesses of thedrawing-room, or the area of the salon.24
The formal principles of "nature" itself (irregularity, lack of cultivation), having been
expunged from the countryside, were now internalized as aesthetic components of the
estate. One finds condensed here, in displaced form, the central tension between the
aesthetic, as a domain of free pleasure and Spieltrieb, and the instrumentalizing
imperatives of the market, that will define the modernist tradition. The eighteenth
century landscape garden reveals the complex relationship that exists between the
(ostensibly) socially transcendent act of aesthetic contemplation and the socially
determined ownership of property and the ways in which each of these is in turn related
to models of subjectivity.
The aesthetic principles that are elaborated in the landscape garden can also be
viewed in relationship to the suum and the extension of personality in natural law. They
provide a set of tools for regulating the landowner's experience of property, and of
themselves as possessive subjects. The garden performs the complex task of insulating
evoking instead a halcyon illusion of bourgeois power arising organically and
autonomously from the surrounding countryside. The spatial tactics of the landscape
garden expand, in due course, to encompass a whole range of cultural practices
devoted to regulating visual evidence of the poverty, inequality and human sufferring
precipitated by the rise of industrial capitalism. They are most evident in systems of
urban planning and suburban development, as described by Frederich Engel’s in his
famous account of Manchester in the 1850s:
. . . the finest part of this arrangement [the spatial organization of housing andbusinesses in the city] is this, that the members of the money aristocracy can take theshortest road through the middle of all the laboring districts to their places of business,without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the rightand the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined. . . with an almost unbroken series of shops. . . [that] suffice toconceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weaknerves the misery and grime that form the complement of their wealth.25
In her essay for this catalog Maria Kaika describes the logic of this visual suppression
through the imperative to expel a “bad” nature from the nineteenth-century industrial
metropolis through modern sewer systems and the paving over of urban rivers.
The ideological function of the aesthetic, it’s participation in a process of masking
and dissimulation, constitute a central motif in modern art and art theory, which will be
defined in large measure by it’s ongoing fear of the seductive, manipulative powers of
kitsch and mass culture and the cooptive abilities of the bourgeoisie. It is symptomatic,
then, that a characteristic response of the early avant-garde to this cooptive threat was
to confront bourgeois viewers with evidence of the human labor and misery that
constituted the repressed Other to their own privilege (Courbet’s Stonebreakers,
cherished self-hood is actually relational, decentered and contingent. Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick offers a useful interpretation of the avant-garde rhetoric of revelation in her
analysis of the “paranoid consensus” that has come to dominate contemporary critical
theory informed by structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism. Based in part on the
historical identification of critical theory with the act of revealing the (structural)
determinants that pattern our perception of reality, the paranoid approach obsessively
repeats the gesture of “unveiling hidden violence” to a benumbed or disbelieving
world.28 As enabling and necessary as it is to probe beneath the surface of appearance
and to identify unacknowledged forms of power, the paranoid approach, in Sedgwick’s
view, attributes an almost mystical agency to the act of revelation in and of itself. As she
writes:
The paranoid trust in exposure seemingly depends . . . on an infinite reservoir of naiveté in those who make up the audience for these unveilings. What is the basisfor assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate, anyone to learn that
a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic or even violent?29
As I’ve suggested above, the contingency of bourgeois subjectivity is hardly a repressed
secret, awaiting only the epistemological dynamite of the avant-garde artist or critical
theorist to break it free and catalyze a new era of peace and harmony. In fact,
contingency and dependency are openly acknowledged as central features of modern
subjectivity. As the natural law tradition demonstrates, bourgeois identity is always
already relational, contextual, and performative. The decisive shift within modernity is
from a static identity (dependent on fixed proximity to God) to an identity that is
produced or invented through labor. Thus, the arid procedural mechanisms of natural
We planned a project represented by the metaphor of rhizomatic expansion andemergence, alluding to the behavior of these plants and to the emergentcharacter of ideas and creative practices. The connection of remnants within oneanother generated a practically indescribable warp of intercommunicationderiving into innumerable actions that developed and increased throughreciprocity : dealing with social and environmental problems; exploring both non-institutional and intercultural models while working with the community and onthe social sphere; interacting, exchanging experiences and knowledge withproducers of culture and crops, of art and craftwork, of ideas and objects.
This approach echoes Andrew Light’s discussion of “place” and the dialectical
relationship between narrative and identity formed through lived interaction with
particular eco-systems. Ala Plastica began their AA Project in the Rio del Plata basin
with a process of “local knowledge recovery” in order to actualize the insights of the
area’s residents into the social and environmental costs of destructive “mega-
engineering” projects. These include the Zárate-Brazo Largo complex (a massive
railroad and highway line) and the Punta Lara Colonia bridge, which have damaged
eco-systems in the region (through flooding and erosion) as well the social fabric of
local communities. In order to challenge the institutional authority of the corporate and
governmental interests responsible for these projects, Ala Plastica worked with the
area’s residents to articulate their own visions for the region through the creation of
communications platforms and networks for mutual cooperation.
If Ala Plastica’s work is predicated on the enhancement of solidarity here and
now, we also encounter in this exhibition a sense of collectivity that transcends spatial
or temporal proximity. This “anamnetic” solidarity is apparent in Ichi Ikeda’s commitment
to water access as a “fundamental human right”. Noting the vast disparities in water
1 From “The Task” in The Poetical Works of William Cowper, with Memoirs and Notes
(Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1920), p.326.
2 Historian Martin Hoyles describes the transformation made by Lord Harcourt atNuneham Courtenay near Oxford in 1761:
The village street became a path in the park for viewing the valley below. Thechurch was turned into a classical temple and the congregation still responsiblefor its upkeep, now had to walk a mile and a half to worship. Cows were providedwith a special underground passage so they could pass from field to field withoutspoiling the view. One old woman, the shepherdess Babs Wyatt, was allowed tostay in her cottage in the middle of the new landscape garden. Martin Hoyles,The Story of Gardening (London: Journeyman Press, 1991), p.36.
3 William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More , vol. 1(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), p.155.
4 C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke,(Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1962).
5 See Grant Kester, The Faculty of Possession: Property and the Aesthetic in EnglishCulture 1730-1850 (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, 1996).
6 Erika Lee Doss, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy inAmerican Communities (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), p.124.Original source: John Gruen, “Michael Heizer: ‘You Might Say I’m in the ConstructionBusiness,’” ARTnews 76 (December 1977), p.99.
7 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp.61-84.
8
See my essay “Aesthetic Enactment: Loraine Leeson’s Reparative Practice,” Art for Change: Loraine Leeson, 1975-2005 (Berlin: Neueun Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst,2005).
9 John Locke, The Essay Concerning Human Understanding , volume one, edited withan introduction by John W. Yolton, (London: J.M. Dent, 1961), p.155., (Book 4, chapter 3).
10 Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers; The Lives, Times and Ideas of theGreat Economic Thinkers, 6th. edition (New York: Touchstone, 1999), p.28.
11 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944).
12Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres, vol.2, book 1, translated by Francis W.Kelsey, with Arthur E.R. Boak, Henry A. Sanders, Jesses S. Reeves, and Herbert W.Wright, introduction by James Brown Scott, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p.186.
13Grotius cited in Karl Olivecrona, "Locke's Theory of Appropriation," John Locke:Critical Assessments, Richard Ashcraft, editor, (London: Routledge, 1991), p.330.
14Olivecrona, "Locke's Theory of Appropriation," pp.330-331.
15The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf , Craig L. Carr, editor, Michale J. Seidler,translator, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.175.
16
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (and Robert Filmer's Patriarcha), edited,with an introduction by Thomas I. Cook, (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1969), p.134.
17 As C.B. Macpherson notes, property should be understood not as a "thing" to bepossessed, but as a "right" to be exercised or performed. C.B. MacPherson, "TheMeaning of Property," Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, (Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 1978), p.3.
18 John Locke, "Of Property," in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, p.18.
19 While Locke is a staunch advocate of the idea that "every man has a property in hisown person," this principle comes into conflict with the "extension of personality" I'vealready outlined, which allows one person to possess the labor of another as his or her property. In a society in which the bulk of the common land has already beenengrossed, one segment of the population will, inevitably, be forced to sell their labor tothe other. Thus, the juridically free worker is granted property-right in his own labor in asituation in which his only possible option is to then surrender that "property" inexchange for wages. That is, the act of granting the worker property in his own labor isonly allowed in order for it to then be made available to others.
20In his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) Sir William Chambers argued for theuniversality of the garden as an art form: "The production of other arts have their separate classes of admirers . . . But Gardening is of a different nature: its dominion isgeneral; its effects upon the human mind certain and invariable; without any previousinformation, without being taught, all men are delighted with the gay luxuriant scenery of
summer, and depressed at the dismal aspect of autumnal prospects; the charms of cultivation are equally sensible to the learned and the ignorant. . . " The EighteenthCentury: Art, design and society, 1689-1789, edited by Bernard Denvir, (London:Longman, 1983), p.244.
21 As Miles Hadfield notes, "The rising class of industrialists, merchants, and new richfrom India and North America sought political power, pleasure, and gentility through thebuilding or acquiring of country houses. Soon, in spite of the vulgar taint of trade, theywere in a position equal to—and often financially sounder to—the inheritors of the oldparks and country seats. The machinery for obtaining their lands was of course, often
the use of the Enclosure Acts." Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1985), pp.197-198.
22The centrality of the landscape garden in English culture at the time is derived in partfrom it’s explicit political symbolism. If the geometric French garden, with its rows of regimented parterres stretching to the horizon, was seen by many as symbolic of theinflexibility of the French monarchy, imposing its a priori rules on the populaceregardless of their wishes, then the more accommodating "natural" landscape gardenwas symptomatic of the political character of a country that was democratically openand based on the natural harmony of human interests. What made the “natural” style
English landscape garden unique at the time was precisely its informality, its openness,and its liberal refusal to dictate a single point of view or to be circumscribed by imposedhierarchies. Here was a form of power that didn't have to rely on the sheer force of anexternally-imposed royal will to command and regulate the surrounding environment,and its political subjects. In A History of British Gardening Miles Hadfield describes the"new fashion" of the natural landscape garden as "essentially Whig" (p.180).
23The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphrey Repton,Esq., with an introduction, analysis, biography, notes, and index by J.C. Loudon, F.L.S.,(London: Longman and Company, 1840), p.208.
24Ibid.
25 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England , (Moscow: ProgressPublishers, 1980), p.78.
26 Martin Jay, “Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experiencefrom the Work of Art,” Aesthetic Subjects, edited by Pamela R. Matthews and DavidMcWhirter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p.18-19. The tensionbetween the desire to transgress discursive and disciplinary boundaries, on the one
hand, and to protect the “autonomy” of the aesthetic, on the other, is a central issue incontemporary art theory. Jay’s tendency to define the erosion of aesthetic autonomythrough a sexualized rhetoric (he warns of the “promiscuous re-enchantment of theentire world” and the “promiscuous aestheticization of the entire world”) reiterates theconventional avant-garde opposition between art (which is resistant, austere anddemanding) and popular and consumer culture (which surrender themselves to theviewer to easily).
27 Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community , translated byStephen Pluhacek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p.4.
28 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2003), p.140. I’d like to thank Carol McDowelland Legier Biederman at UCLA for bringing this reference to my attention.
29 Ibid., p.141.
30 See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
31 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community , edited by Peter Connor, translated byPeter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p.35.
32 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Aesthetics and Modernity” in Aesthetics and Ideology ,George Levine, editor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p.134.
33 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza
Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002),p.28.
34 Navjot Altaf, “Contemporary Art, Issues of Praxis, and Art-Collaboration: My Bastar Interventions and Interrogations” (unpublished essay, 2004).
35 Artist Jay Koh has explored similar issues in relationship to art practice in southeastAsia. See my essay “The Art of Listening (and of Being Heard): Jay Koh’s DiscursiveNetworks,” Third Text 47 (Summer, 1999), pp.19-26.
36 Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, introductionby Luce Giard, translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1997), p.32.
37 See Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2004).
38 Patrick Deegan, unpublished interview with Amadou Kane Sy, (spring 2005).
39 Navjot Altaf, “Contemporary Art, Issues of Praxis, and Art-Collaboration: My Bastar Interventions and Interrogations”.
40 See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).