Seeing Differently

A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts

Amelia Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136509261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.

The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "identify" works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is, " and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way.

Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identification as a "queer feminist durational" process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "art" and "interpreter, " potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture.

1

Introduction

The Leaking Frame of the Argument on How to See Differently

This book is proposed as a history and theory of identification in the visual arts. It is a rethinking but one that acknowledges past histories of ideas about subjectivity and visuality in general and, more specifically, in relation to visual arts practices widely construed, including performance art. I insist that it is worth rethinking the question of identification through an attention to aesthetics and the visual arts. As Juliet Steyn felicitously puts it, acknowledging alterity through visual representation “prevents complete identification and totalization. That which has been traditionally thought of as aesthetics is reaffirmed as a site in which the limits of the thinkable are at work and might be rephrased and represented.”¹ In the end, to oppose the kind of totalizing “identification” Steyn notes as a danger (the kind epitomized in today’s view by the most simplistic moments of 1970s and 1980s identity politics and identity-oriented art practices), I hope to provide a provisional new model for understanding identification as a reciprocal, dynamic, and ongoing process that occurs among viewers, bodies, images, and other visual modes of the (re)presentation of subjects.

A key point, made clear by my opening anecdotes in the prologue, is that we must still account for identification (if not “identity” in the 1970s sense) in acknowledging how we interpret and give value to art or visual culture, broadly construed to include everything from painting to photography, installation, digital and film works, performance, and hybrid practices.² The interpretive model I propose, inspired by the visual arts projects I focus on as case studies and by a wide range of philosophical and theoretical texts, thus implicates a complex range of subjects who are variously identified in the ongoing production of meaning and value across the visual field. Nothing could be of more pressing political importance, in my view, in today’s world, where every day in every newspaper and on blogs, tweets, and sundry other venues issues of identification still persist in haunting our every discussion about what is going on in contemporary society.

Before proceeding to map out the chapters, a word on the paradox of defining what I hope to be putting continually in question; a word on the problem of framing. As Jacques Derrida points out in his critique of Kant’s model of the aesthetic, it presupposes the possibility of framing the work of art: of establishing once and for all what is art and what is not. Illustrating his critique, the “Parergon” in the 1978 book Truth in Painting, with elaborate etchings of Baroque frames (where the frame itself is a work of art) and with images of caryatids on buildings (where the decorative human form is a “frame” rather than the substance of the building), Derrida effectively deconstructs the fantasy that we can know what art “is”—we can never separate the “inside” (which is “art”) from the “outside” (its discursive and institutional frames). Later in the book he demonstrates as well that this impossibility infects our desire to know the subject who is the origin of the work—and thus to project meaning by imputing intentionality and will as causal forces behind the appearance of the work, by “restitution” (returning the work to its author). These insights are crucial to my arguments throughout Seeing Differently. But most importantly for my introductory arguments is Derrida’s understanding that the “frame is problematical,” in that it leaves him hanging in ambiguity: “I do not know what is essential and what is accessory in the work … Where does the frame take place,” and as a corollary, where and how does aesthetic judgment or interpretation take place?³

Ultimately, this problem cannot be solved because the framing process is both necessary and impossible. We have to define what we are doing using a common language (terms such as “Western”) even when we are seeking to interrogate or “go beyond” such terms. And the definitions, because the terms function in multiple, ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory ways, will never fully gel as would be ideal if we could return to the days of certainties and fixed “identities.”There is and always will be leakage between inside and outside of the frame or the matte (passe-partout) inside the frame, which foregrounds the work of art: “The internal edges of the passe-partout are often beveled.”⁴ For Derrida this beveling is a metaphor for the contamination of interpretation. There is a staining on the passe-partout, marking the bodily and desiring role of the interpreter in defining what a work is and what it means.⁵ As I will note at the end of this chapter, I must frame this study—and in doing so I must reiterate to some degree the binaries I seek to critique—but I will also self-consciously remark upon the shifting appearance, location, and functioning of every frame I put in place. Here, the chapters themselves can be discursively mapped, provisionally “framed,” as they will unfold.

Proceeding: Chapter Summaries

I want to make several key points to establish my framework here—points I will be elaborating throughout the book. In order to address the false consciousness behind post-identity rhetoric, I want to sketch several overlapping histories while at the same time theorizing how art is always already about identity or, as I will call it, identification in the first place. The first history I trace to set the stage for my critique, which I elaborate at length in Chapter 2, “Art as a binary proposition; identity as a binary proposition,” is that of the development of beliefs about art that define it as the expression of an individual, and thus ascribe its meaning and value in relation to how we identify that individual (via ideas about his or her “identity” that themselves, paradoxically, are partly or entirely determined through interpretations of the works of art). The second history, also addressed in Chapter 2, is the development of binary models for understanding identity in Euro-American culture, deriving from Enlightenment ideas about the self or the subject and in particular Hegel’s oppositional model of the master/slave dialectic. These are models for what came to be called “identity politics” in the 1960s and the following decades, which developed largely out of binary structures of belief about the self and the other coming out of European colonizing and industrializing processes.⁶

Acknowledging and tracing these histories of movements, theories and ideas, beliefs and critical models of analysis is a crucial goal of this book—for, as I have noted, it is the erasure of the complexity of these histories, or of the histories in toto, that allows the fatuous and politically empty rhetoric of post-identity to take hold and flourish in the face of all evidence to the contrary. While the scope and ambition of this book might appear to be vast (one would certainly urge a student strongly away from such a conceit: a book exploring both the history and theories of identity in contemporary art, with reference to the beginning of the notion of art in Europe in the early modern period!), I hope it is clear already just how focused it is. In no way do I actually presume to trace a comprehensive intellectual history of the role of identity or debates about identity in aesthetics, nor to add to the wealth of aesthetic philosophy that has developed in art history and philosophy departments; nor do I pretend to deal at all comprehensively with the rise of identity politics and its relationship to developments in Western contemporary art. To the contrary, as the following more extended chapter summation will clarify, I have a very specific and pointed set of examinations in mind to achieve the goals noted above.

In Chapter 2 I thus explore the ways in which structures of belief attach artworks to individuals while, at the same time, modern Euro-American concepts of identity, as noted, stage the self in opposition to an other (the “master” in opposition to the “slave”). The work of art is central to the Euro-American construction of the modern subject. The legacy of Renaissance to modern, nineteenth- and twentieth-century, European aesthetics was to elaborate a way of understanding a particular kind of individual expression as a “work of art,” thereby reciprocally defining both the origin of the work (as “author”/artist) and the work itself (as the authentic expression of the artist). As has been pointed out, this discourse conflates artwork with a set of identities circulating around the artist or “author-function,” Michel Foucault’s term for identifying the way in which in European thought we reciprocally determine the identity of the author and the work—we read the latter to discern the former’s supposed intention, which we then cast back on the work to confirm our interpretation.⁷ As I explore in this chapter through the work of Donald Preziosi and others, the visual arts have a particularly over-determined relationship to this circular system of attribution given the attachment of art to a global art market, thereby exacerbating what Derrida terms the “divine teleology [that] secures the political economy of the fine arts,” intensifying the importance of assigning works to an originating “genius,” thereby reciprocally valuing the work, the artist, and the art critic or art historian.⁸

I link this conceptual belief system to the development of a European perspective, and structures of subjectification linked to this mode of understanding the world as rooted in the originating creative subject.⁹ Here I will note as well the interrelation between perspectival models of seeing and making with early modern philosophies of the subject, from Descartes to Kant and Hegel, the latter of whose theory of subjectivity in the model of the master/slave dialectic was developed in twentieth-century neo-Hegelian theory to crystallize the binary at the base of modern European thought. In this way, I stress the profound influence of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic on twentieth-century models of subjectivity and identity, as reinterpreted in the crucially influential lectures of Alexandre Kojève in Paris in the 1930s (attended by some of the key figures responsible for the early development of what would come to be called poststructuralist theories of meaning and subjectivity, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty). I also trace the political codification of the master/slave model of subjectification of the 1940s and 1950s in the identity theory of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, both working in close proximity with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

I go on to briefly explore the extension of Beauvoir’s and Fanon’s oppositional models of identity formation (Beauvoir of course stressing gender and sexuality, but mentioning class and race; Fanon explicitly foregrounding race and nationality, and implicitly addressing gender, sexuality, and class) into post-1960 models of coalitional identity politics. The extent to which these latter models are informed by the Hegelian binary structuring of Beauvoir’s and Fanon’s model cannot be overestimated, nor can the impact of this binary model on Freudian psychoanalysis, which largely determined structures of critical analysis in art criticism, art history, and film theory, particularly of the feminist variety, from the early 1970s into the 1980s. Chapter 2 thus provides a particular and necessarily schematic history of the impact of identity theory and identity politics on art discourse and art making from the 1960s onward.

Core beliefs about identity condition our every encounter with works of art. Debates about identity have had a profound impact on the visual arts broadly construed, and, tied to binary structures of subjectivity in general, continue to inform the way we view and discuss visual culture. To this end, Chapters 3 through 5 trace histories and theories of ideas about identity and art through the 1970s and 1980s (Chapter 3) and then through the 1990s (Chapter 4) and 2000s (Chapter 5). As Chapter 3, “Fetishizing the gaze and the anamorphic perversion: ‘the other is you’,” explores, using numerous art practices as case studies, the binary model of self and other that became reified to some degree through psychoanalytic visual theory by the 1970s and 1980s—a particularly strong movement within feminist art and film theory as practiced in the UK and US. This is a key moment of the infiltration of identity politics into the Western art world.

Beginning with a series of extended examples of how artists since 1960 have explored fetishism, and ultimately rejected its binaries, I address the uses of fetishism in explorations of sexual and racial difference with the rise of identity politics, and particularly in feminist theory, with its emphasis on “sexual difference” and foregrounding of psychoanalytical models of subject formation. In order to challenge the tendency to focus singularly on “gender” as a separable category, and one defined in binary terms through Freud’s model of fetishism, I examine the historical and theoretical relationship among Freudian, Marxian, ethnographic, and imagistic fetishisms, as these are activated in modern Western visual imagery. Fetishism, I argue, parallels the general knowledge system of Western modernity, where a subject can potentially (in theory if not in practice) attain a position of complete mastery in relation to the “world picture” (in the words of Martin Heidegger), one coincident with the authorial position of a perspectivally rendered work of art and with what feminist visual theorists in the 1970s and 1980s termed the “male gaze.”¹⁰

Ultimately, to rethink this deadlock, I look towards the notion of anamorphosis, the rendering of an image on a two-dimensional plane that defeats this illusion of perspectival knowing, to challenge the focus on fetishism as a singular model through which to understand visual identification. Through its distortion, anamorphosis willfully ruins the logic of the world picture and of models of normative subjectivity identified by feminists, anti-racists, and queer theorists as subtending Western culture in the modern period.

Chapter 4, “Multiculturalism, intersectionality, and ‘post-identity’,” explores current debates about multiculturalism in Europe and North America as an access point to address its rise and fall within the US art world, particularly in its main commercial center of New York. Linked to this extended examination of debates about multiculturalism (a code word for racial and ethnic difference and often, on the larger international stage, for issues of immigration) is an attention to the development of terms such as post-feminism and post-black in curating and art criticism in the 1990s, terms themselves linked to the idea of political correctness and post-identity in US culture as a whole. Discussing these debates in the art world is a way of highlighting what is at stake in the continued retrenchment and refusal explicitly to address political aspects of how art comes to mean and have value. As well, I strategically link these debates to larger global discussions since the attacks on the US World Trade Center and...