PLZKLME

Leonhard Emmerling

„And what I feel unites you and me is: we can locate in one another a similar yearning to be in a more just world. So I tried to evoke the idea that if we could come together in that site of desire and longing, it might be a potential place for community-building.” (hooks 1991: 83)

I.
These sentences are from an interview with bell hooks where she discusses problems of female and Afro-American identity. What I find remarkable in her statement is the implicit idea of a universal notion of justice, and of overcoming potential or actual differences (between individuals, or different genders, classes, and ethnicities) toward a (utopian) realm of yearning and desire as “a potential place for community-building“.

The realm of longing and desire for a more just world can, with some good reason, be opposed to the world as it is (and, with little nuances, probably always has been): divided by ethnic, cultural, religious, economical and political differences, which affect some simply as an accumulation of economical and thereby political power; others (since the twentieth century) also as continuing economical and cultural depravation, prolonging colonization and imperialism.

One could, of course, dismiss bell hook’s ideas as utopian in the face of an accumulation of violent conflicts, waged in the name of ’justice’ and, like the conflict in the Middle-East, cruelly ending in an almost infinite spiral of violence.

And, of course, there are valid arguments against the universalism (in the name of cultural diversity and different, culturally relative ideas of justice) implicit in hook’s text. From the perspective of liberal democracies, female genital mutilation; honour killings and forced marriage; human rights violations in China; the caste system in India; etc., do not jell with the idea of a more just world, but are often defended with reference to a particular cultural identity, or to a specific evolutionary situation. [1]

The assertion of universal human rights can also be rejected with the argument that they represent nothing else than the continuation of colonial expansion, in the pursuit of class interests, [2] in the course of the globalisation of Western Enlightenment principles, or the realisation of a global ‘internal politics’, dominated by the West. But this could only be controverted by the juridical argument that the signatory states to the Declaration of Human Rights are obligated to accept and respect it as a common law at least, and that by no means only Western delegates were involved in its drafting, but representatives of a multitude of ethnic and religious groups (see Morsink 1999); which means that the colonial argument fails. This, in turn, could be refuted by stating that Australian Aboriginals, American Hopi or New Zealand Maori (and an infinite number of other ethnic groups and indigenous nations, whose identity was, and still is, overarched by a post-colonial government) hardly had the opportunity to express their opinion of this document, let alone have it included.

Whereby the colonial argument regains its relevance. And so on. And so on.

There is no way that this text could solve what legions of lawyers, politicians and scholars could not. Therefore, I prefer to move on to my core subject and, having now sketched its approximate horizon, become more concise.

II.

What interests me is to explore how bell hooks’ statement is relevant to the field of visual arts as I am a critic of ‘identity-art’ which centres, with tiresome obstinateness, on one’s own particular cultural conditioning (or even simply one’s own biographical background). No examples necessary. At each Bienniale or Trienniale, curators compete to present new artistic examples, and to demonstrate the theme’s topicality. Globalisation, migration, identity – these are the central catchwords that many exhibition concepts hinge on in a globalised and migrating art business.

The underlying, and constantly rehashed formula can be described as follows: with ‘globalization’ as a rather diffuse but looming backdrop, an attempt is made to describe, or at least briefly illuminate and exemplify, the loss and reconfiguration of identity, and the conflict between different and specific cultural concepts of identity. The basic pattern: here we find a multi-faceted and fragmented field of different ethnicities, cultural micro systems, and individual biographies – a myriad of minorities fighting against oppression, depravation, razing and extermination; there, an aggressive, globalised, and monolithic capitalism of Western provenance, whose expansion is accompanied by endangerment, colonisation, if not effacement of non-European concepts of life, self and world.

The art business dedicates itself to this undoubtedly serious struggle in a kind of preventative and simultaneously belated admission of guilt. Thus, it repeats, knowingly or unwittingly, what the colonialist West (who first produced the art business) has already inflicted on the rest of the world: assimilation, instrumentalisation, incapacitation, and paternalism. The resulting impression of a bad conscience does not seem to be without reason. The very same imperialist and colonialist West that globally caused endless, literally murderous, and still ongoing conflicts generates a concept of art, and especially a concept of modernism, which annexes without residue what assimilates itself to it (and radically expels as local, traditional and ”anthropological“ all that is not compatible). The art system is Western, the concept of art is Western, the concept of modernism is Western, the concept of contemporary art ist Western – and the big circus of the Bienniales touring around the world disseminates these concepts, with philantropic missionary zeal and downright uncompromising, totalitarian commitment to the Good, until even the remotest archipelago has been reached.

Within the realm of art, as a realm of the ‘As-If’, the West provides platforms for the restitution and re-configuration of identity (and hardly an artist rejects the offer to present him- or herself). The West allows there – as a way to relieve its own guilt – what in reality continues to be denied: the right to be heard; the actual (that is, comprehensive, and particularly economic) rather than symbolic redress of colonial injustice; equal rights; the realisation of an undamaged life. Because charges can be laid there, no justice has to be served here.

The realm of the ‘As-If’, of autonomous art, is exclusively legitimated by, and beholden to, its own laws and independent of commissioners. In its autonomy, this art leaves the society it critisises ultimately unchallenged (Adorno 1997: 226). But exactly this is the problem of autonomous art (and also of politically/ socially committed art, which is the poorer the more it wants to be directly involved). The relationship between art and society, between art and the problems it deals with, is reciprocally analogous to a fraternity sword-fight. [3] While the latter, staged in the realm of the ‘As-If’, has consequences in reality, the former confrontation is staged because the lack of consequenses is guaranteed. Not even the little scandals about elephant’s dung on paintings of the Virgin Mary can belie this fact. [4] And that provocations are still possible does not refute the argument that art in its autonomy is only very indirectly related to the real of society.

Therefore, the game with identities in art business is precarious, and whoever has decided to play the game has decided to play the game of the West. ‘Identity’ is itself a Western idea, central to European philosophy since Aristotle, challenged for the first time by Nietzche and psychoanalysis, and subsequently shattered by deconstructivism and post-structuralism (see Hetherington 1998). According to Lacan (1977), a rift passes right through us, and nothing can heal it – just as nothing can heal us from the desire to close it. Without the notion of the self, without the notion of identity, the individual cannot exist. One can, however, differentiate between the concept of personal, individual identity (as an anthropological necessity) and the concept of cultural identity (as a system of imprints we experience more or less passively, which we affirm more or less actively, and which we question, criticise, reject or endorse).

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