Response to Claire Bishop (before reading Kestler)
This is my own response to Claire Bishop’s article The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents, in Artforum, 2006, p179-185.
See her original article and Kestler's response here:
http://onedaysculpture.org.nz/assets/images/reading/Bishop%20_%20Kester.pdf
http://danm.ucsc.edu/~lkelley/wiki_docs/bishop.pdf
http://www.artforum.com/html/issues/200602/new
I wrote it immediately after a long a slow read and although wish to start by qualifying it by recognising my own degree of naïveté in the field of research, I am struck with how much more intimately I understand what it is to practice in these ways than she, even though I have only been doing it for a few years. Her article has interesting questions to pose to open up theoretical debate, but has almost nothing to say relevant to the practicing itself and her statements about its constitution as a discipline are misleading, if not directly in contrast to the majority of various substantive conceptions of the truth held by the participants in the various projects I have been a part of, including myself.
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My initial take on this is relatively clear. Although it is academically unacceptable, I would start by stating that Bishop is an enemy of the practice I am investigating. She is not an enemy because she invites more critique, but an enemy because she in a hegemonic fashion introduces a must definition to the judgement of works, and reinstates the importance of judgement.
It is my understanding that the question of judgement of worth / value is in itself different to that of critique, and this difficult distinction is in many ways the fundamental question of these practices. These practices, instead of carrying preconceived definitions of judgement and value build foundation in the projects and as such the projects have their own autonomy. This is an autonomy not from the world, but from a privileged and impassionate eye of the disconnected critic, or a lineage of projects in a broad field that would dictate methods more appropriate to the field than the project itself. Indeed, finding the values inherent in a project are often the key aims of these collaborative projects, not in a consensual (also consenting) fashion but in sense of a materialisation, as a performing or practicing of those values through discourse. The values are diversified, expressed and made specific to that place and each person in conversation. A critical reflection of the project does not discuss the smartness of the project to communicate and consider these values for a general audience, but describes the how the project specifically interacted with the material of the site – place in an artful / architectural fashion. This of course invites a ambiguous relationship, as artful / architectural is not a neutral definition in itself, however it is this definition that links the project to the general audience, not the value of the project. Judgement thus needs to set up its own criteria embedded in the project, and be beholden to that alone. This autonomy becomes the value of the work generally.
My second issue with the article is the assertive placement of analysis and examples. Bishop almost relegates the reader to an uncritical position that is at the whim of the author’s internal judgements. This is yet another reflection of the previous point. Bishop in her very manipulative assertions does exactly what she critiques uncritical artists from doing: hiding the judgements and values and assuming common understanding and politic of the reader. Bishop’s analysis seems to be going to a predetermined place, which is especially evident in her comments about the role of the work in this realm being necessarily about ‘self-sacrifice’, having an ethics of ‘authorial renunciation’ or minimalisation of them, necessarily ‘anticapitalist’ in tendency, or ‘less nuanced’. These are examples of her summation of the projects in an assertive manner rather than taking on particularities of the projects themselves. Her summation is purposeful rather than critically analytical. Although this may be only one way of approaching a critique of work, she neither lays out this methodology, justifies it (ie in search of or for a reason?) nor tempers it with a more complex understanding (‘nuanced’?) that might identify certain aspects as fitting her analysis and others unfitting. Her judgement is assertively complete is this way, from the outset, and therefore a fundamental contradiction occurs in which she devalues the art of the artists in question in favour of her own de-authoring. These projects, at least the ones I have been involved in, are fundamentally authored, and usually in multiple ways that respond to, support and contradict her assertions. Deller’s work is an example of this, I would read through the lines that the ‘point’ of the work was indeed this uncomfortable play of contradictions that could only be at best experienced, rather than resolved. To use her own words against her: “Untangling this knot – or ignoring it by seeking more concrete ends for art – is slightly to miss the point, since the aesthetic is, according to Rancière, the ability to think contradiction: the productive contradiction of art’s relationship to social change, characterized precisely by that tension between faith in art’s autonomy and belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come.” p183
It seems to me that Bishop is exceedingly uncomfortable with what she actually espouses as she throughout hides the values of her arguments, and fails to use the same judgments in any deep way on the projects she espouses.
My third issue with this article is her messy use of ‘ethics’ and morals. Ethics is very difficult and has an involved discourse which I would not even fain to be an expert in. I do however know of a very vigorous debate that puts these terms in an interesting field discourse that is extremely productive (and destructive) – Nietzsche – Genealogy of Morals? Habermas / Rawls? Of these participatory / social art projects this complex question of what is moral-ethical is often openly part of the production of the project and thus, would (if she had have read the construction of value rhetoric in an analysis I am suggesting) in fact add to her argument that these projects are valuable by their ethical-moral dimension. Here I am saying the question of what is moral and what is ethical is included in many participatory projects and often the conversation of what as a substantive context for the project must be first conceived before the work can be judged or indeed understood. Yes; these projects are valuable because they see themselves as ethical-moral in constitution, but now let us, as Bishop suggests look critique them, to remove their ethical-moral discourse is to remove them from their ‘life’ dimension, that she also proposes is so important. (Is this a more appropriate way towards a discourse on aesthetics? Not subsumed by an ethic-moral but considering of it?) Indeed antinomy is an aim, but then a concerted effort to understand and substantially engage with the projects should be the first part of any critique of them as practices that constitute a discipline.