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Leonhard Emmerling
III.
If I consider the work of art as an autonomous system that follows its own rules and objectifies subjectivity through the law of form, then this art work contains, on the one hand, more than the author could have intended. On the other, she or he dissolves as a life-world subject in the art work which generates objectifying propositions. The art work is situated in a different frame of reference than any statement with non-artistic intentions, even if it is only by being positioned in the context of Art (that is, the entire institutional framework of art). [5]
Whoever positioned his or her work in the context of Art (and where else should or could it be placed?), can no longer go back. The work is out there, contextualised by exhibitions, texts, interpretations. It is now – not only as the product of objectification – an object, a fact. The author’s identity as a person – her/his individual and cultural identity – is irrelevant in the face of the work. What counts is the form into which the artistic subject has diffused.
This might sound as if the viewer and the work could enter into a relationship that is not disturbed or burdened by external (historical, political, cultural) differences and their inherent problems of understanding; as though the pure, completely transparent work existed on one side, and the completely unconditioned gaze on the other; and as if, between the work and the viewer, an all but pure, uncontaminated flow of information and perception existed, in which every contingency has been extinguished. This is, of course, not my opinion; iconography, iconology and iconics (or what is now called Bildwissenschaft – science of the image) have demonstrated to what extent it is necessary to draw on all kinds of information (biographical and artist related information included) to be able to embed the work in a horizon of understanding and thus to make it accessible. However, this is relevant particularly for the arts which have become historical and, with the passing of time, have become records of their time. In contrast, what is required from a contemporary work of art (beyond the effort of understanding it) is to critique it. The more it is simply a symptom of its time, the poorer it is. What we may ask for with good reason is, that the work of art provides us with an image of our time, or: the opportunity to think the present in the mode of the concrete (Amman 1997: 40f). This could almost be a definition of ”contemporary art“. When it comes to the determination of quality,a decisive criterion might be the degree to which this thinking of the present in the mode of the concrete succeeds, and with which degree of complexity and density. To assess this is not an authoritative act but a taken-for-granted and permanently demanded capability of orientation in the present.
To clarify: it goes without saying that works like Francisco de Goya’s ”Desastres de la Guerra“ (1810 – 1820); Théodore Géricault’s ”Raft of the Medusa“ (1819); Otto Dix’ graphic cycle ”The War“ (1924); Peter Robinson’s ”One lives“ (2006); [6] or Michael Parekowhai’s ”The Indefinite Article“ (1990) [7] (and this is a quite random collection) partially gain their strength, as well as their appellative and emotional power, from their frames of reference. But they owe this power primarily to the density by which they render formally objective the subject matter or the information contained in their frames of reference; that is, to their clarity of elaboration.
Contrast this with art to which the buzzword”relational aesthetics“ (Nicolas Bourriaud) is often applied. This art operates quite differently; it derives its legitimacy entirely from extra-aesthetic categories, such as sincere political convictions, or the indictment of economic, political, or cultural grievances. Works by the Hohenbüchlers, by Thomas Hirschhorn, [8] or by the Long March Project claim legitimacy not as autonomous works, but as ”commited art“. It is really unclear what renders them formally different from the hands-on work of a street worker, and it is hardly likely that these activities would attract much attention, were it not for the sleight of hand of locating them in the arts milieu (Auckland Art Gallery 2007: 112-23). The infamy essentially consists in making temporary interventions that poke fun at severe minority problems through, for instance, funny architecture competitions and exhibitions for the notoriously humanistic art audience – and in the end nobody stands to gain but the artist himself. He or she then moves on to the next critical engagement, a superficial globetrotter of starry-eyed idealism. Formally trivial and morally questionable, the artist uses the benefits both spheres provide – that of art and that of social and political engagement. In the sphere of art, he or she poses as a critic of the art work and as an agent of a new concept of art; in the sphere of politics, he or she purports to be an honest humanist and fighter for minority rights. I don’t know what else to add, except that both the ethics of the arts, and the ethics of a social engagement that is lastingly committed to its object are betrayed in the end.
IV.
My objection to identity art is that it all too easily plays the game of the West, and all too compliantly accepts the ‘As-If’ compensation proffered by the art business. Willingly, one plays the trump card of minority-identity (against which there is no argument to win the trick), while the migrating, globalised art business unfurls, with a sorrowful face, the post-colonial backdrop and paints it black. Discussion about an art work as an autonomous one is hardly possible since the game is, from the first, contaminated by a discourse of power.
It is not only that the post-colonialist discourse suffers (as does half the world) from the fact that colonialism survives in countless disguises (of which globalisation is surely one, but now involving new players; nations like India, China, Iran and Northern Corea are among them and form, in different ways, our perception of the world; other, older protagonists play only modest roles). Not only has colonialism dropped its poison in every zone of contact. It is also that this demon is passionately nurtured in the realm of the ‘As-If’ because nobody has to make real efforts to solve real problems. The art business is a palliative.
In his re-reading of Freud, Lacan has stringently elaborated the corrosion of substantial notions of identity initiated by structuralistic linguistics. Desire is, for Lacan, motivated by the subject’s suffering from its insufficient capability to get hold of itself completely. The rupture between je and moi suffered by the subject fuels the endless play of longing and desire. And as the desired wholeness of the subject (which could claim identity beyond discourse) is continually missed, the conversation between je and moi never stops. It is this inherent difference that tears us apart, forces us to speak, even if this speaking were only fantasizing and prattling.
However, the concept of identity deployed in the art business operates with an ideal of substantiality, not with systems of difference, no matter to which extent the post-colonialist discourse of identity insists on difference. In identity art, difference, located by Lacan within the subject, can never be found in the individual or cultural subject itself. Difference is used only as a means to constitute otherness. This otherness is always conceived as essential, block-like, monolithic, and unhistorical. Unhistorical, because identity art holds fast to the idea of a substantial identity, despite all recourse to historical developments. But substance can only be conceived as not deformable by transformations which occur due to economical, political or cultural changes.
Even if Makere Stewart-Harawira insists that her description of traditional ontologies and principles of indigenous knowledge is not intended to be essentialist (2005: 155), [9] I am at a loss what to see in it if not an essentialist generalisation of indigenous knowledge, eyeball to eyeball with its mirror image of an essentialist-generalising criticism of Western scientific principles (which certainly deserve criticism for many reasons). I see it as an indication of how close both systems of knowledge are regarding claims for universality, when I bring Stewart-Harawira’s sentence ”the important task was to find the proper pattern of interpretation” (155) in relation to René Descartes idea that the most important task is ”rightly to apply (the) vigorous mind” (1986: 3). And did Adorno and Horkheimer (1969) not show that in exactly this idea (the “right” use of the “right” principles) the possibilities for both freedom and barbarism are founded?
The substantial I (Ich) is the atrophied form of the soul in a secular world; hence the martyr’s, the prophet’s and the saviour’s gestures are deployed in the ‘As-If’ realm of art business, when the tales of the world’s problems, grievances and salvation are spun.
But if conversation, discourse, language, and speech are not only motivated by the difference between the subject and all others, but also by the difference between me and myself; between what I am and what I know about myself (and also between what I know about myself and what I long to be); between je and moi, then the assertion of a substantial I (Ich) in identity art is radically anti-communicative.
For there is a question about how communication can be conceived in this constellation. As a leaning of the viewer towards the work, to listen and learn from what it, and the subject behind it, might say? As an opening of boundaries, a transgression of limits, a change of habits of reception; that is, as scholars have defined the task of contemporary art for decades (a passepartout that sounds seditious but is really no more than a bourgeois bonmot)?
When taken by its word, identity art does not seek communication but simply posts statements. It is conservative in its continual delineation and consolidation of what has already been said, thought and asserted. It is affirmative, hermetic and (despite its pronouncement of substantiality) an art of the closed surface, not of plastic dimension.
The substance behind this surface is accessible neither to vision nor to discourse. Two surfaces clash which cannot enter into any form of communication, because they are hermetically sealed.
The subject of identity art has always taken hold of itself, even if as imperiled. It is hieratic, lonely, fragile and tragic, and demands to be taken seriously. What imperils it lies never within itself but always outside, with the Other, of which it claims to be the Other; one Other as monolithic as the other Other.
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