Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Work
I began work on [one] of my projects here yesterday. Many thanks to Niels, the first volunteer.
Like allot of the things that I do, and, I guess, allot of the things that every artist does, it isn't always apparent to me why I am doing what I'm doing. The thing that I like about his project is that making the work is a process of finding out what the work is. It generates more questions every time.
The project has a fairly simple basis. I ask people to make a drawing with me of how they think government works. I provide the paper and the other materials. We sit on either of the long sides of the paper. We start with a conversation about how they think government works. The drawing is a representation of that conversation, with both of us making contributions to the drawing.
The result is a representation of subjective knowledge, but also a representation of the conversation, and representation of the communication that occurs between myself and the other artist. So in a sense it is "about" government, and in another sense it’s not about government at all.
this is a familiar image of debate between our Prime Minister (seated, on the left hand side) and our Opposition Leader (standing, on the right) in the Australian parliament
The first unanswered question is whether I want to challenge this idea, or entrench the idea further.
The second question comes from some of the people I have approached to be part of the project - am I a political artist? No, and um ... yes. In a sense (he says in an enthusiastic rush, wildly making connections between thoughts that no-one else can follow) every artist is political and every artwork is political. It's always been a feeling that I've had, that if we participate in something (like the art world, or capitalism, or the tax system) we implicitly give our consent to the way that something is organised, we agree with it in a sense. Chantal Mouffe puts it quite succinctly in an interview about the connections between art and politics ... she says
... One cannot make a distinction between political art and non-political art because every form of artistic practice either contributes to the reproduction of the given common sense —and in that sense is political— or contributes to the deconstruction or critique of it. Every form of art has a political dimension.
... but I guess that I'm getting ahead of myself here. Because the interview begins with Mouffe making a distinction between 'politics' and 'the political' —
What I call "the political" is the dimension of antagonism—the friend/enemy distinction. And [...] this can emerge out of any kind of relation. It's not something that can be localised precisely; it's an ever-present possibility. What I call "politics", on the other hand, is the ensemble of discourses and practices, institutional or even artistic practices, that contribute to and reproduce a certain order. These are always in conditions that are potentially conflictual because they are informed by, or traversed by, the dimension of "the political." [ ...]
I want to continue and say how I think that this relates to the drawing project, but I have also just realised that the "we" that I keep talking about and the audience that the interview assumes are people that have a choice whether to be part of a country, a system of government, or a way of life. Maybe I'll just leave that hanging there, as a problem that is internal to this project, and by implication the discourse that the project is part of.
I was going to say that the drawing project is an attempt to make material some of the ideas that jumped out at me when I read this interview the first few times, i.e.: the distinction between "politics" and "the political", the dimension of antagonism that is present in every relation, and that artistic practices contribute to and reproduce a certain order.
Anyway the Chantal Mouffe interview is available in a journal called "Grey Room", It's called Every form of Art has a Political Dimension and it is in Issue 02, Winter 2001 - it's available on-line, but you have to subscribe, which is why I haven't linked to it.
The third question that remains unanswered is -why am I only asking artists to participate? There are many long conversations to be had about this. (One involves the issue of involving (non-art) people in artistic practice, and a kind of discussion about something that I want to call ethics but probably has another name - and deserves to be pursued at length, perhaps as a topic for a MA research project, so if I ever do a Masters ...)
I know for sure that while I am continually drawn to work with other people, I also find it really difficult to get to know people - artists are the easiest people for me to work with because we at least have something to start the conversation. The other answer is that the project is in response to the current interest in the (one of many) art world(s) in political practice - I was interested in how much artists actually knew about the system that they were commenting on ... that, making a comment on "politics" or "the political" seemed to me to assume a position of being already outside the system, and, like many of contemporary art's excursions (into "the everyday" for example), the political was treated as someplace else. It assumes that artists or institutions have a position outside the political, when really our world, the art world, is a microcosm or intensification of the politics that exist out there. It is also inextricably linked to the world of politics through the provision of government funding, the stucture of institutions, and our education system - however, sometimes artists dealing with the political can be kind of like civilising missionaries or anthropologists.
So another signpost, here, from an interview with Lucy Suchman - an anthropologist who I first heard interviewed on the radio about her work studying the behaviour of people interacting with office machines (photocopiers, faxes, printers). Such a topic piqued my interest - and I looked her up. I have held onto this interview because it points to some of the ways that I feel about making work with other artists and about the art world. The full transcript I have, more than ever, a sense of the immovability of these institutions is at http://www.dialogonleadership.org/interviewSuchman.html
Lucy Suchman: (…) I was also very much interested in Native Americans, as many students of anthropology are. I was just overwhelmed by the sense of their wonderful ways of organizing and relating to the world. But it was a very terrible history, and I started to feel that the last thing that Native Americans needed was another anthropologist studying them. I thought instead I should study the institutions that were closer to my own position in life and that had tremendous consequences for Native Americans, for example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This was also at the time when the idea of studying up, as it was called in anthropology, was developing at Berkeley.
Interviewer: “Studying up” means?
Lucy Suchman: Anthropology had traditionally been concerned with non-industrial cultures, or those that major Western societies were interested in administering and dominating, and that’s carried over into the field. Even within American anthropology, the focus has always been on Native Americans, and then more recently on various minority groups within the United States, rather than on mainstream, middle-class Americans, on elite institutions, powerful organizations. In the 70s there was an initiative within anthropology that said: We have as much culture here as anywhere else. In fact, we have a responsibility to turn the anthropological gaze back on ourselves, and really understand ourselves as participants and co-creators of the world, rather than just as observers.
Like allot of the things that I do, and, I guess, allot of the things that every artist does, it isn't always apparent to me why I am doing what I'm doing. The thing that I like about his project is that making the work is a process of finding out what the work is. It generates more questions every time.
The project has a fairly simple basis. I ask people to make a drawing with me of how they think government works. I provide the paper and the other materials. We sit on either of the long sides of the paper. We start with a conversation about how they think government works. The drawing is a representation of that conversation, with both of us making contributions to the drawing.
The result is a representation of subjective knowledge, but also a representation of the conversation, and representation of the communication that occurs between myself and the other artist. So in a sense it is "about" government, and in another sense it’s not about government at all.
To start with, I think that I am already creating a representation of an aspect of government by having the other artist sit across the table from me, and then creating something through what is [more or less, depending on the person] a process of consensus. This is an idealised and simplified representation of consensus decision-making and of the process of government.
this is a familiar image of debate between our Prime Minister (seated, on the left hand side) and our Opposition Leader (standing, on the right) in the Australian parliament
The first unanswered question is whether I want to challenge this idea, or entrench the idea further.
The second question comes from some of the people I have approached to be part of the project - am I a political artist? No, and um ... yes. In a sense (he says in an enthusiastic rush, wildly making connections between thoughts that no-one else can follow) every artist is political and every artwork is political. It's always been a feeling that I've had, that if we participate in something (like the art world, or capitalism, or the tax system) we implicitly give our consent to the way that something is organised, we agree with it in a sense. Chantal Mouffe puts it quite succinctly in an interview about the connections between art and politics ... she says
... One cannot make a distinction between political art and non-political art because every form of artistic practice either contributes to the reproduction of the given common sense —and in that sense is political— or contributes to the deconstruction or critique of it. Every form of art has a political dimension.
... but I guess that I'm getting ahead of myself here. Because the interview begins with Mouffe making a distinction between 'politics' and 'the political' —
What I call "the political" is the dimension of antagonism—the friend/enemy distinction. And [...] this can emerge out of any kind of relation. It's not something that can be localised precisely; it's an ever-present possibility. What I call "politics", on the other hand, is the ensemble of discourses and practices, institutional or even artistic practices, that contribute to and reproduce a certain order. These are always in conditions that are potentially conflictual because they are informed by, or traversed by, the dimension of "the political." [ ...]
I want to continue and say how I think that this relates to the drawing project, but I have also just realised that the "we" that I keep talking about and the audience that the interview assumes are people that have a choice whether to be part of a country, a system of government, or a way of life. Maybe I'll just leave that hanging there, as a problem that is internal to this project, and by implication the discourse that the project is part of.
I was going to say that the drawing project is an attempt to make material some of the ideas that jumped out at me when I read this interview the first few times, i.e.: the distinction between "politics" and "the political", the dimension of antagonism that is present in every relation, and that artistic practices contribute to and reproduce a certain order.
Anyway the Chantal Mouffe interview is available in a journal called "Grey Room", It's called Every form of Art has a Political Dimension and it is in Issue 02, Winter 2001 - it's available on-line, but you have to subscribe, which is why I haven't linked to it.
The third question that remains unanswered is -why am I only asking artists to participate? There are many long conversations to be had about this. (One involves the issue of involving (non-art) people in artistic practice, and a kind of discussion about something that I want to call ethics but probably has another name - and deserves to be pursued at length, perhaps as a topic for a MA research project, so if I ever do a Masters ...)
I know for sure that while I am continually drawn to work with other people, I also find it really difficult to get to know people - artists are the easiest people for me to work with because we at least have something to start the conversation. The other answer is that the project is in response to the current interest in the (one of many) art world(s) in political practice - I was interested in how much artists actually knew about the system that they were commenting on ... that, making a comment on "politics" or "the political" seemed to me to assume a position of being already outside the system, and, like many of contemporary art's excursions (into "the everyday" for example), the political was treated as someplace else. It assumes that artists or institutions have a position outside the political, when really our world, the art world, is a microcosm or intensification of the politics that exist out there. It is also inextricably linked to the world of politics through the provision of government funding, the stucture of institutions, and our education system - however, sometimes artists dealing with the political can be kind of like civilising missionaries or anthropologists.
So another signpost, here, from an interview with Lucy Suchman - an anthropologist who I first heard interviewed on the radio about her work studying the behaviour of people interacting with office machines (photocopiers, faxes, printers). Such a topic piqued my interest - and I looked her up. I have held onto this interview because it points to some of the ways that I feel about making work with other artists and about the art world. The full transcript I have, more than ever, a sense of the immovability of these institutions is at http://www.dialogonleadership.org/interviewSuchman.html
Lucy Suchman: (…) I was also very much interested in Native Americans, as many students of anthropology are. I was just overwhelmed by the sense of their wonderful ways of organizing and relating to the world. But it was a very terrible history, and I started to feel that the last thing that Native Americans needed was another anthropologist studying them. I thought instead I should study the institutions that were closer to my own position in life and that had tremendous consequences for Native Americans, for example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This was also at the time when the idea of studying up, as it was called in anthropology, was developing at Berkeley.
Interviewer: “Studying up” means?
Lucy Suchman: Anthropology had traditionally been concerned with non-industrial cultures, or those that major Western societies were interested in administering and dominating, and that’s carried over into the field. Even within American anthropology, the focus has always been on Native Americans, and then more recently on various minority groups within the United States, rather than on mainstream, middle-class Americans, on elite institutions, powerful organizations. In the 70s there was an initiative within anthropology that said: We have as much culture here as anywhere else. In fact, we have a responsibility to turn the anthropological gaze back on ourselves, and really understand ourselves as participants and co-creators of the world, rather than just as observers.
Labels: studies for the shape of government, the netherlands
# posted by amcqu : 7:30 pm
