Benefit of the doubt

Visiting a display of archival material related to Senga Nengudi this week, I came across a letter by Lorraine O’Grady recommending the artist’s work for a commission. Nengudi, she wrote, “can fit into a suitcase an installation more important than others can erect with earth-moving equipment.” It offered a timely—and enjoyably biting—reminder that the significance of a work has very little to do with the scale at which it is realized, the spectacle of its appearance, its material cost to the world, or the explicitly stated ambitions of the artist.1

That there is no correlation between the size of the statement and its meaning is something worth clinging onto right now. As is the sense, affirmed by this modest presentation of an artist who has always resisted the straightforward interpretation of her work as advancing a determinate cause, that we should be wary of anyone who claims for their work of art an incontestable meaning.

If anything unites the totalitarianisms now metastasizing around the world, it is their absolute certainty and the expression of that certainty at scale. Whether it stems from egotism, ignorance, racism, fear, misogyny, insecurity, sheer stupidity, or all of the above, these regimes are characterized by an unshakable (or at least deeply defensive) belief in the truth of their own perspectives on the world. The antidote to which, though it can feel weak, is doubt. Questioning what one sees, what one is told, one’s own unacknowledged prejudices.

If the social expression of doubt is constitutional or representative democracy, which acknowledges that no one—not even artists or editors—can know what is right in every circumstance, but which holds out faith in the basic humanity of informed people and seeks out common ground, then its intellectual expressions are philosophy and art.

The combination of doubt with fundamental structural principles, or the trying out of the latter against the former, is the basis of both. That everything might be made subject to inquiry does not mean nothing can survive, but rather that what survives is stronger for having been tested. Works of art can force us to reappraise that which we think we know, to see from perspectives other than our own, to expand our set of references and affinities beyond the preservation of our own security. This is what I think O’Grady means by “important.”

It can be reassuring, in certain circumstances, to hear artists, writers, curators, and writers doubt the value of their work in this historical moment. As long as it doesn’t slip into the indulgences of navel-gazing or the masochism of self-flagellation, this is how one knows they are possessed of the social conscience and self-awareness so lacking in our “world leaders.” And this form of scepticism, in its positive sense of an ability to recognize the limits of one’s own knowledge, a reluctance to accept the received narratives, and a willingness to act on what is discovered through the process, carries through this month’s program.

It’s there in the tentative hope and restless experimentalism of Alexis Akrithakis’s protests against the Greek junta and other repressive regimes. It’s there in Pablo Delano’s excavation of the buried histories of Spanish and US oppression of minority communities in Puerto Rico, in the conviction of Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk that violence begets violence unless its effects are reflected upon, and in the promise (at least) of the survey exhibition “Greater New York” to examine “strategies of resistance” to what is being normalized in the United States. It’s there in the lyrical abstractions of Tacita Dean, with their incorporation of chance and unpredictable circumstances, and it’s there in the call for protests at the forthcoming Venice Biennale. Because this kind of doubt, which is also called critical thinking, brings clarity.