The protest targeted the awarding of the 1968 Braque Prizes by the French ambassador to Argentina. See Horacio Verbitsky, “Art and Politics,” in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, ed. Inés Katzenstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 296.
Here is Luis Camnitzer, from a conference presentation in 1969: “The second possibility is to affect cultural structures through social and political ones, applying the same creativity usually used for art. If we analyze the activities of certain guerrilla groups, especially the Tupamaros and some other urban groups, we can see that something like this is already happening. The system of reference is decidedly alien to the traditional art reference systems. However, they are functioning for expressions which, at the same time they contribute to a total structure change, also have a high density of aesthetic content. For the first time the aesthetic message is understandable, as such, without the help of the ‘art context’ given by the museum, the gallery, etc. …” Luis Camnitzer, “Contemporary Colonial Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 229–230.
This and above quotes are from Graciela Carnevale, “Project for the Experimental Art Series,” in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, 299.
Ibid., 299.
Ibid., 299.
See, for example, Dan Graham’s Time Delay Room (1974) and Michael Asher’s Untitled installation at Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles, also from 1974. Here is one contemporary critic’s response to Asher’s piece: “All that stuff on the walls is gone, along with every bit of privacy. Actually viewers don’t intend social interaction. They come to look at art. But without knowing it, they are an integral part of the work they see. How unsettling, and uncomfortable. There are no visual entertainments to cast intent gazes upon, security in the altered proportions of the room which now seems so long and narrow. Are we in the right gallery? No. Yes. Shall we walk around a little and then saunter out the door, or shall we say the hell with it and stomp on up La Cienega shaking our heads. Oh, of course, the show isn’t up yet. Oh, it is!” Kirsi Peltomäki, “Affect and Spectatorial Agency: Viewing Institutional Critique in the 1970s,” Art Journal 66 (Winter 2007): 37–38.
Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5 (June 1967): 79–83. Republished in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 12.Compare this to Thomas Hirschhorn’s similar formulation in a 2005 interview with Benjamin Buchloh:
Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, 554. Ramirez speaks of the effort to recover the “ethical dimension of artistic practice,” paraphrasing Marchán Fiz’s observation that “the distinguishing feature of the Spanish and Argentine forms of Conceptualism was extending the North American critique of the institutions and practices of art to an analysis of social and political issues.” Ibid., 557 and 551.
Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, 554. Ramirez speaks of the effort to recover the “ethical dimension of artistic practice,” paraphrasing Marchán Fiz’s observation that “the distinguishing feature of the Spanish and Argentine forms of Conceptualism was extending the North American critique of the institutions and practices of art to an analysis of social and political issues.” Ibid., 557 and 551.
Cildo Meireles, “Insertions in Ideological Circuits,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, 233. Needless to say, this formulation (aesthetics = art, culture = politics) is problematic and overlooks the necessarily “political” function of aesthetic experience, and of the very distinction between “art” and “culture.”
J. Romero Brest, “Qué es eso de la Vanguardia Artística?” (1967), cited by Jaime Vindel in “Tretyakov in Argentina: Factography and Operativity in the Artistic Avant-Garde and the Political Vanguard of the Sixties,” Transversal (August 2010), multilingual web journal of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics (EIPCP). See →.
Buck-Morss argues, “It is politically important to make this philosophical distinction in regard to avant-garde time and vanguard time, even if the avant-garde artists themselves did not.” Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 62, cited by Vindel.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 2001), 164.
This was the case during the student protests in France in May 1968, when the sons and daughters of the middle class were subjected to the kind of violence that had been visited on Algerian immigrants and the working class for many years, occasioning an outraged response. A parallel dynamic was at work in the decision to involve high school students in the marches on Selma in 1965. Images of attacks by Alabama state troopers on peaceful young marchers were widely circulated in the national media and led to widespread condemnation of Alabama’s state government, and by extension, the institutions of Jim Crow segregation. These reactions played a key role in providing broad national support for the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. See Robert Mann, The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996).
Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum (February 2006): 181. With Bishop, the avant-garde commitment to “difficult” or hermeneutically resistant art (previously articulated via a discourse of abstraction) is transformed into a commitment to work that is “difficult” by virtue of it’s exposure of the viewer’s economic or social privilege as a participant of the art world.
Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 79. It should be noted here that in this essay Bishop fails to account for the evolution of Laclau and Mouffe’s thought since the mid-80s. In particular, she ignores the key distinction Mouffe introduces between “agonism” and “antagonism” beginning in the late 1990s. As I will suggest, this distinction has significant implications for Bishop’s analysis.
Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Aduana/Customs,” in Santiago Sierra, catalog of the Spanish Pavilion, Venice Biennial 2003, curated by Rosa Martinez (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas/Turner, 2003), 233 and 17.
Benjamin Bertram notes, “For Laclau and Mouffe, the de-centering of the subject is a key moment in the great modern expansion of pluralism. The death of ‘Man’ (which accompanies the death of the centered subject), however, does not entail the end of humanist values. In fact, Laclau and Mouffe want to envision a ‘real humanism’ (i.e., a historicized humanism).” Benjamin Bertram, “New Reflections on the ‘Revolutionary’ Politics of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,” boundary 2 22 (Autumn 1995): 86.
Mouffe writes, “According to my conception of ‘adversary,’ and contrary to the liberal view, the presence of antagonism is not eliminated but ‘tamed.’” Chantal Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Public Sphere,” in Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 1 Platform, ed. Okwui Enwezor et al. (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002), 91. In their strenuous efforts to differentiate themselves from Habermas, Laclau and Mouffe often rely on a caricatured portrayal of an ostensibly hegemonic “consensual” model of democracy, against which their own approach can be seen as constituting a radical critique. In practice, however, the difference between “agonistic” democracy and the free exchange of contending opinions in a Habermasian public sphere is minimal. Habermas certainly never claims that the result of debate in the public sphere is a binding and universal consensus, or that political agents can’t retain a reflective understanding of the contingent basis of political identity itself. As John Brady notes, “There are, I think, very few people who would claim that contestation and agonistic political relations are not part and parcel of politics, do not belong to the very fabric of political practice. Habermas certainly has never denied this.” John S. Brady, “No Contest? Assessing the Agonistic Critiques of Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 30 (2004): 348.
Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Public Sphere,” 90.
Ibid. It’s unclear how the “common allegiance to … democratic principles” advocated by Laclau and Mouffe does not also imply some form of “consensual” agreement.
Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 2005), 19.
Slavoj Žižek, “Holding the Place,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), 321.
As noted above, the Civil Rights movement in the American South involved both “agonistic” political action as well as forms of nonviolent protest and violent confrontation (from the Selma marches and Freedom Riders to the use of 23,000 federal troops to integrate the University of Mississippi by force, leading to two deaths and hundreds of serious injuries). The forces of reaction have, historically, not been inclined to adopt a properly “ironic” and reflexive relationship to political conflict, and it seems highly unlikely that they could be brought to do so by exposure to the right kind of political philosophy.
“In fact this has always been their role and it is only the modernist illusion of the privileged position of the artist that has made us believe otherwise. Once this illusion is abandoned, jointly with the revolutionary conception of politics accompanying it, we can see that critical artistic practices represent an important dimension of democratic politics.” Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1 (Summer 2007): 5.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 4. Mouffe’s use of agonism as a model for political discourse can be read against Renato Poggioli’s thoughtful analysis of “agonistic sacrifice” (on behalf of “the people,” posterity, and so forth) as a key component of the modern artistic avant-garde. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1968), 61–77.
At the same time, Mouffe charges art with the task of “giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony.” Thus, art is simultaneously the mechanism by which the repressed will be brought to consciousness (via the disclosure of “that which has been repressed”) and the channel by which these same individuals will be “given” a voice. This confusion is symptomatic of the tensions I outlined earlier in my discussion of vanguard politics. Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” 4–5.
An instructive comparison can be made here between Occupy Wall Street (OWS), which is at this stage only very loosely organized, and the extremely disciplined command structure of the Republican Party and it’s affiliated “activists” in the United States. A typical example is the REDMAP Project (REDistricting Majority Project) of the Republican State Leadership Council, which is developing a set of coordinated strategies to exploit the re-districting process in order to ensure Republican domination even in states with Democratic majorities. The far right wing in the United States has consistently exhibited a sophisticated understanding of the interrelated mechanisms of local, regional and national governance at both the symbolic and the institutional level, extending to active involvement in school board and town council elections. This “ground up” activism, combined with a well coordinated system of message control and a centralized national leadership, has led to the creation of a formidable political machine that has been able to secure remarkably widespread support among working-class and lower middle-class voters for a pro-corporatist message in the midst of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. The pervasive success of this machine makes the ability of the OWS movement to mobilize a passionate, albeit unfocused, resistance to capitalism all the more remarkable.
Bishop disparages “the ethics of authorial renunciation,” which she associates with collaborative art practices. Bishop, “The Social Turn,” 181.
The preceding quotes are all from “The Social Turn,” 180–181. Bishop complains elsewhere of criticism in which “Authorial intentionality is privileged over a discussion of the works’ conceptual significance as a social and aesthetic form … Emphasis is shifted from the disruptive specificity of a given work and onto a generalized set of moral precepts.” Ibid., 181. Bishop appears to confuse the fact that some artists have a more reflective or critical relationship to conventions of artistic agency with an absolute abandonment of the prerogatives of authorship in toto. Most contemporary artists who work through a collaborative or collective process don’t do so because of their allegiance to an abstract moral principle, but because they find that these processes result in more interesting and challenging projects, or provide forms of insight that are different from those generated by singular forms of expression.
“Sierra’s action disrupted the art audience’s sense of identity, which is founded precisely on unspoken racial and class exclusions, as well as veiling blatant commerce.” Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 73.
Ibid., 70.
Julia Austin, “Trauma, Antagonism, and the Bodies of Others: A Dialogue on Delegated Performance,” Performance Paradigm 5 (May 2009): 4. See →.
While Bishop applauds Sierra for evoking a sense of “liberal guilt” in the viewer, she also praises artists such as Jeremy Deller, Phil Collins, and Christian Höller for not making “the ‘correct’ ethical choice … instead they act on their desire without the incapacitating restrictions of guilt.” Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” 183. The distinction here is clear. While the artist may have transcended the humanist burden of “guilt,” the viewer has not.
See Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke University Press, 2011).