Contemporary Art, Photography, and the Politics of Citizenship

Vered Maimon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000096767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia della fotografia

This book analyzes recent artistic and activist projects in order to conceptualize the new roles and goals of a critical theory and practice of art and photography. Vered Maimon argues that current artistic and activist practices are no longer concerned with the "politics of representation" and the critique of the spectacle, but with a "politics of rights" and the performative formation of shared yet highly contested public domains.

The book thus offers a critical framework in which to rethink the artistic, the activist, and the political under globalization. The primary focus is on the ways contemporary artists and activists examine political citizenship as a paradox where subjects are struggling to acquire rights whose formulation rests on attributes they allegedly don't have; while the universal political validity of these rights presupposes precisely the abstraction of every form of difference, rights for all.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, photography theory, visual culture, cultural studies, critical theory, political theory, human rights, and activism.

1 The Third Citizen

Critique, Belief, and the Problem of Appearance

The regime of the all-visible, of the endless presentation to each and every one of us of a real indissociable from its image, is not the liberation of appearance. It is, on the contrary, its loss. The world of total visibility carves out a real where appearance has no place to occur or to produce its divisive, fragmenting effects. Appearance, particularly political appearance, does not conceal reality but in fact splinters it, introduces contentious objects into it, objects whose mode of presentation is not homogeneous with the ordinary mode of existence of the objects thereby identified.

Jacques Rancière, Disagreement ¹

What would it mean to come to terms with the fact there are things which happen in front of cameras that are not simply true or false, not simply representations and references, but rather opportunities, events, performances, things that are done and done for the camera, which come into being in a space beyond truth and falsity that is created in view of mediation and transmission?

Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame”²

Politics as a sphere of action and speech demands a public space of appearance. This was argued, well before Rancière, by Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition (1958). For Arendt, the space of appearance is not any specific physical space, the city or the polis, or a formal constitutional governmental form, but a specific organization of people acting and speaking together out of which the political realm can emerge; it therefore lies between people living together: “It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.”³ For Arendt, to be deprived of appearance is to be deprived of reality because “To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all.”⁴ Appearance secures reality because “everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity.”⁵ This means that only what is seen by others, rather than just the individual, can be considered “real”; “public” thus means a certain mode of epistemological authentication or affirmation.

For Arendt, “public” also means “common” rather than privately owned: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common.”⁶ This notion of “in-between” is meant to suggest a relation of both separation and sharing – that is, the “simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives” – because, although the common world is a common meeting ground for all, each individual occupies a different position within it. The meaning of public life for Arendt is that everyone sees and hears from a different position. This again becomes necessary for the epistemological “grounding” of the world:

Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the ‘common nature’ of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object.⁷

Yet, for Arendt, appearance assumes a certain power and freedom in which individuals can control and determinate how they appear. This ignores the fact that appearance is not an equally distributed resource. As Judith Butler argues in her criticism of Arendt’s notion of appearance, we appear and “are made available, bodily, for another whose perspective we can neither fully anticipate nor control. In this way, I am, as a body, … constituted and dispossessed by the perspectives of others.”⁸ That is, the fact that political action takes place between bodies marks not simply mutual recognition among equals as in the Greek polis – the primary model for Arendt’s formulation of the public realm – but also a perceptual, social, and material constraint (or inequality), because one’s body is established by perspectives it cannot inhabit but that inhabit it.⁹ This suggests that the space of appearance is not simply the space of freedom, but also of regulation and power. Such is the case, firstly, because not everybody is included in this space of plurality (in the Greek polis, for example, most of its members, such as slaves and women, were excluded from the political realm) and plurality can mask antagonism and exclusion; and secondly because in political acts, Butler and Rancière argue, the very act of appearing is meant to challenge a specific regime of appearance, a specific “partition of the sensible,” thus the space of appearance is both mobilized and disabled.¹⁰ When bodies gather in public they do so in order to contest: What is a public? Who are the people? Who is included in the community of knowledge? Who is the subject of rights?¹¹ To appear thus means not only to be seen by everyone, but to be recognized as a political subject, a member of a particular community, entitled to certain rights and protections as well as vulnerable to certain prohibitions and restrictions.

What are the repercussions of the current loss of appearance as a space for political contestation for artistic and activist practices? This chapter points to the way contemporary practices splinter certain forms of identification and consensual framings of the “real.” While postmodern and neo-avant-garde models of criticality were concerned with what Jean Baudrillard termed the “loss of the real,” and therefore devised ways to bring “back the real” by insisting on (textual and photographic) referentiality and communicative rationality, current practices mobilize the performative, fictional, and imaginary as strategies of repetition, reinscription, and retransmission.¹² This, I argue, comes as a response to the fact that under globalization, politics, as Étienne Balibar points out, is no longer an emancipatory project – the “Other” of violence – because violence became unavoidable. He argues that while Marx urged rational subjects to turn away from the “apparent scene” of politics that is structured by “ideas” and unveil the “real scene” of economic processes and class struggle, in the current political conditions, “‘material’ processes are themselves (over- and under-) determined by the process of the imaginary, which have their own very effective materiality.”¹³ This suggests that “all forces which interact in the economico-political are also collective groupings, and consequently possess an (ambivalent) imaginary identity.”¹⁴

By analyzing works by Hans Haacke, I identify the historical and epistemological limits of postwar artistic forms of critique, namely Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique, that focused on, among other things, the concept of the spectacle as indicative of the impossibility of community under the conditions of late capitalism. I then note the ways in which contemporary artistic projects by Walid Raad and Pierre Huyghe, while informed by conceptual and institutional artistic models of criticality, also move beyond them by focusing on what was excluded from them: bodily experience, destabilizing desire, mnemonic incoherency, and affective attachments. In different ways, their projects recognize the (im)possibility of conceiving of community as a highly contested form of belonging and sharing beyond the realm of the imaginary, the spectral, and the spectacular itself.

These projects often remobilize photographic and filmic readymade documents in a way that problematizes their evidentiary status and brings to the fore the problem of belief. They also point to a major shift in the political and critical viability of photography within global visual culture. With the economic and institutional collapse of photojournalism and the emergence of citizen journalism and visual activism, photography has acquired a prominent role not due to its status as an “irrefutable” form of evidence, but because of its communicative capacity to relay and mediate political and ethical affects that are inseparably sensorial, perceptual, and material. Roger Hallas has described it as the shift from the documentation of victimhood and destitution to the visualization of the social relationships and networks that underlie the activities of struggling and protesting communities.¹⁵

I end this chapter with an analysis of the work of the photography collective Activestills. The significance of the collective’s photographs lies not simply in their “documentary” or indexical status but in the opening of a space that questions political, social, and perceptual partitions as these manifest themselves in normative frames of violence. Their work suggests that understanding the current role and status of the photographic and filmic document within both contemporary art and activism necessitates a shift in the frame and ends of analysis within the theory and history of art and photography: from problems of reference to those of circulation and transmission; from notions of irrefutable (indexical) authentication to ones of belief and accumulative affects; and finally, from the focus on images and their institutional and spectacular modes of representation to an analysis of their performative modes of enunciation and repetition, through which political forms of agency are simultaneously contested and enabled.

Mimicking Democracy: Hans Haacke’s Institutional Critique

In his historical reconsideration of Institutional Critique, Alexander Alberro argues that, on the one hand, it exposed the compromised nature of art institutions “where political, economic, and ideological interests directly intervened and interfered in the production of public culture”; yet on the other hand, its practitioners “ultimately championed and advocated for the institution: the critiques culminated in a demand to straighten up the operation of this central site of the public sphere and to realign its actual function with what it is in theory.”¹⁶ Andrea Fraser also recently argued that Institutional Critique developed not as a further attack on art’s autonomy, but rather as a defense of art (and art institutions) against economic exploitation.¹⁷ She singles out Hans Haacke as “a heroic challenger, fearlessly speaking truth to power …. [However] far from trying to break down the museum, Haacke’s project has been an attempt to defend the institution of art from instrumentalization by political and economic interests.”¹⁸ This suggests, as Blake Stimson argues, that Institutional Critique was not fully responsive or embedded in the anti-authoritarian and anti-institutional position that emerged after 1968 within the New Left politics and the theoretical thinking of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Instead it endorsed a “modernist” critical gesture of negation because “against many of the postmodernisms that would emerge subsequently, institutional critique retained its commitment to the old promise of insitutionality.”¹⁹

This complex relation to art institutions manifests itself most clearly in Haacke’s 1970s visitors’ polls. These projects also exemplify the shift in conceptual practices from what Benjamin Buchloh defined as the shift from an “aesthetic of administration” to the “critique of institutions”: the moment when the “violence” of the “mimetic relation” between instrumental rationality and artistic practices was turned back onto “the ideological apparatus itself, using it to analyze and expose the social institutions from which the laws of positivist instrumentality and the logic of administration emanate in the first place.”²⁰ In Haacke’s first poll, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile (Howard Wise Gallery, 1969), visitors were asked to mark their ...