Politics as a sphere of action and speech demands a public space of appearance. This was argued, well before RanciĂšre, 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: âIt 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.â3 For Arendt, to be deprived of appearance is to be deprived of reality because âTo men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all.â4 Appearance secures reality because âeverything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity.â5 This means that only what is seen by others, rather than just the individual, can be considered ârealâ; âpublicâ thus means a certain mode of epistemological authentication or affirmation.
For Arendt, âpublicâ also means âcommonâ rather than privately owned: âTo live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common.â6 This notion of âin-betweenâ is meant to suggest a relation of both separation and sharing â that is, the âsimultaneous presence of innumerable perspectivesâ â 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 âgroundingâ of the world:
Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the âcommon natureâ 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 Arendtâs notion of appearance, we appear and âare 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.â8 That is, the fact that political action takes place between bodies marks not simply mutual recognition among equals as in the Greek polis â the primary model for Arendtâs formulation of the public realm â but also a perceptual, social, and material constraint (or inequality), because oneâs 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 RanciĂšre argue, the very act of appearing is meant to challenge a specific regime of appearance, a specific âpartition of the sensible,â 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 âreal.â While postmodern and neo-avant-garde models of criticality were concerned with what Jean Baudrillard termed the âloss of the real,â and therefore devised ways to bring âback the realâ 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 Ătienne Balibar points out, is no longer an emancipatory project â the âOtherâ of violence â because violence became unavoidable. He argues that while Marx urged rational subjects to turn away from the âapparent sceneâ of politics that is structured by âideasâ and unveil the âreal sceneâ of economic processes and class struggle, in the current political conditions, ââmaterialâ processes are themselves (over- and under-) determined by the process of the imaginary, which have their own very effective materiality.â13 This suggests that âall forces which interact in the economico-political are also collective groupings, and consequently possess an (ambivalent) imaginary identity.â14
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 âirrefutableâ 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 collectiveâs photographs lies not simply in their âdocumentaryâ 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 Haackeâs 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 âwhere political, economic, and ideological interests directly intervened and interfered in the production of public cultureâ; yet on the other hand, its practitioners âultimately 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.â16 Andrea Fraser also recently argued that Institutional Critique developed not as a further attack on artâs autonomy, but rather as a defense of art (and art institutions) against economic exploitation.17 She singles out Hans Haacke as âa heroic challenger, fearlessly speaking truth to power âŠ. [However] far from trying to break down the museum, Haackeâs project has been an attempt to defend the institution of art from instrumentalization by political and economic interests.â18 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 âmodernistâ critical gesture of negation because âagainst many of the postmodernisms that would emerge subsequently, institutional critique retained its commitment to the old promise of insitutionality.â19
This complex relation to art institutions manifests itself most clearly in Haackeâs 1970s visitorsâ polls. These projects also exemplify the shift in conceptual practices from what Benjamin Buchloh defined as the shift from an âaesthetic of administrationâ to the âcritique of institutionsâ: the moment when the âviolenceâ of the âmimetic relationâ between instrumental rationality and artistic practices was turned back onto âthe 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.â20 In Haackeâs first poll, Gallery-Goersâ Birthplace and Residence Profile (Howard Wise Gallery, 1969), visitors were asked to mark their ...