Third Text, Vol.

23, Issue 4, July, 2009, 421433

Aesthetics in a Time of Emergency

Malcolm Miles

A POINT OF DEPARTURE
According to a recent report in the financial pages of a national newspaper, ethical investment groups and campaigners using a stake in BP to gain a dissenting voice at its annual meeting criticised the companys exploration of oil sands in Canada and its investment in Iraq. Among the dissenters was Greg Muttitt, from the Platform human rights group.1 But Platform is an artists collective, not a campaigning group. Yet, blurring the distinction between art and campaigning, they use creative processes of democratic engagement to advance social and ecological justice.2 This goes beyond precedents such as Joseph Beuyss campaign for direct democracy, in which Beuys was careful to retain his identity as an artist to guard his autonomy. I wonder whether the distinction between art and campaigning matters, and whether anything is lost if the divide between art and politics is abandoned. There are two contexts for my speculation. The first is a shift to a politics of single-issue campaigning, as in anti-roads protest in the 1990s, when conventional politics is seen as void of real possibilities for change. Jacques Rancire describes the void as a denial of the right to expression of grievance in equality and openness, replaced today by the techniques of presentation, data and the consensus of the centre-right.3 This is the putative end of politics, enforced in the terms of consumerism. Haunting the site said to have been vacated by politics is the all too real spectre of the security state a wild zone of power. 4 This is seen by Kate Soper as a state of permanent war when she argues for a more explicit cultural representation of the non-puritanical but at the same time anti-consumerist political imaginary from which to understand what a counter- or post-consumerist order might look like. 5 The second context is cultural productions shift from bounded categories such as painting and sculpture to a liquidity in which the borders of art, architecture, fashion, design, advertising, entertainment and news are no longer policed. This offers new possibilities, but their exploitation may affirm the status quo, meshing art further into the mechanisms of
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2009) http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09528820903007701

1. Terry Macalister, Invest in Iraq and you repeat past mistakes, investors tell BP board, Guardian, 18 April 2008, p 29 2. Available online at http:// www.platformlondon.org (accessed 28 August 2008) 3. Jacques Rancire, On the Shores of Politics, Verso, London, 2007, p 98 (first published as Aux bords du politique, Paris, Editions Osiris, 1992) 4. Susan Buck-Morss, A Global Public Sphere?, Radical Philosophy, 111, January/February, 2002, p6 5. K Soper, The Awfulness of the Actual: CounterConsumerism in a New Age of War, Radical Philosophy, 135, January/ February 2006, pp 4, 7

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6. Martha Rosler, Place, Position, Power, Politics, in ed C Becker, The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility, Routledge, New York, 1994, pp 5576 7. B, Wallis, ed, If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism: A Project by Martha Rosler, Seattle, WA, Bay Press, 1995 8. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du Rel, Paris, 2002 (first published as Esthtique relationelle, Dijon, Les Presses du Rel, 1998) 9. C Bishop, ed, Participation, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006 10. Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004 11. Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, in Understanding Brecht, Verso, London, 1998 12. Jacques Rancires, The Politics of Aesthetics, Continuum, London, 2004 (first published as Le Partage du Sensible: Esthtiques et Politique, La Fabrique-Editions, Paris, 2000); Problems and Transformations in Critical Art, in Bishop, Participation, op cit, pp 8393, trans Bishop, (first published in Malaise dans lEsthtique, Editions Galile, Paris, 2004) 13. George Ydice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2003, pp 939 14. I took part in one of these walks, on 28 October 2004.

consumerism. In the 1990s, Martha Rosler wrote of arts merging into the entertainment industry when the anti-institutional revolt of the 1970s failed.6 Seeing arts role in gentrification in New Yorks SoHo, her response was to represent homelessness in a SoHo gallery.7 This still remains a representation of an issue in the genre of art, not its experience. And this is an insoluble problem, negotiated within a specific if mutable syntax and vocabulary of art. The task, for Rancire, is to examine the interactions and exchanges which occur in contemporary art. And my task here is to consider positions in the writing of Nicolas Bourriaud,8 Claire Bishop9 and Grant Kester,10 and in Rancires work. I preface this with a brief description of the work of two artists collectives, Platform in London and Ala Plstica in Argentina. Turning to Walter Benjamins The Author as Producer,11 I ask if Benjamin offers a more radical solution. I ask, too, whether there is an exit from modernisms cycles of departures from a mainstream adept at subsuming all departures from it or if the art on which Bourriaud, Kester and Bishop comment is another departure, soon to be subsumed like all the rest. I turn to Rancires relational aesthetics,12 asking if it offers an exit from the circle in a space between aesthetics and politics, or not.

AGAINST THE GRAIN

Since the 1990s, groups such as Platform, Ala Plstica and others have worked in a space between art and processes of social determination. This runs against the grain of cultural expediency in which art addresses socioeconomic problems deriving from other areas of policy13 in retrieving arts critical function. Platform and Ala Plstica adopt different approaches: Platform retaining more of arts autonomy, as in the idea of the incidental artist (who tends to be the dclass artist), and Ala Plstica entering situations shaped as much by local publics as by themselves. There are overlaps, but the collectives seem to represent the possibilities of provocation and co-production. Platforms core members, Jane Trowell, James Marriott and Dan Gretton, decided in the 1990s to work within their home territory of London, practically and critically. In one project, they drew public attention to the neglected tributaries of the Thames and installed a turbine on the Wandle to provide electricity for the music room of a local school. More polemically, they involved design students at a south London college in the production of a solar- and pedal-powered vehicle for street video the Agitpod. And, in 1996 and 1997, Platform produced a spoof newspaper, Ignite, with news of the oil industry not published by mainstream papers, distributed at mainline stations. Trowell now takes guided walks in central London, tracing past and present stories of global trade in corporate buildings; Gretton investigates the psychology of management in a polemical comparison of the Holocaust (taken as industrialised annihilation) with the global oil industry (for both of which, in view of the remoteness of decision-making which costs lives, he uses the term desk-killing); Marriott leads narrated walks in Londons financial zone,14 inviting individuals in more or less equal numbers from art and fields such as campaigning, journalism and financial analysis, ending in group discussion. His aim is to interrogate the layered complicity of consumers

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15. D Wall, Earth First! And the Anti-Roads Movement, Routledge, London, 1999, pp 878, 1278; T Jordan, Activism! Direct Action, Hacktivism and the Future Of Society, Reaktion Books, London, 2002, pp 605, 6972 16. Annotation to draft of a section of my doctoral thesis, 1999; see also Malcolm Miles, Urban Avant-Gardes: Art, Architecture and Change, Routledge, London, 2004, pp 195203 17. Available online at http:// www.platformlondon.org (accessed 28 August 2008) 18. Informal conversation with James Marriott, Bay Horse Inn, Totnes, 9 April 2008 19. Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, The Art of Change in Docklands, in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, eds John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, G Robertson, and Lisa Tickner, Routledge, London, 1993, pp 13649 20. J F Sternad, interview transcript, available online at http:// www.latinart.com/ transcript.cfm?id=88 (accessed 19 August 2008) 21. Ibid 22. Ibid 23. P Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, trans Robert Barr, Continuum, London, 2002, p 37 24. R Keil, D V J Bell, P Penz and L Fawcett, eds, Political Ecology: Global and Local, Routledge, London, 1998 25. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds, Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, Routledge, London, 1996, p 15 26. Ibid, p 32, citing Alain Touraine, An Introduction to The Study of Social Movements, Social Research, 52:4, winter 1985, pp 74987

and de-centred global companies in oils social and ecological impacts. His findings inform the narratives of his walks, a series of web videos, and (with Muttitt) published reports. The press report cited above implies a blurring of art and campaigning which, if accurate, denotes a shift of Platforms position. In 1997 anti-roads campaign group Reclaim The Streets15 produced the spoof paper Evading Standards, using Platforms facilities, which was subsequently disowned by Platform.16 Reclaim the Streets used non-violent direct action, and perhaps Platform could not follow them there. Today, Platform fuse the transformative power of art with the tangible goals of campaigning.17 Marriott is relaxed about being called a member of a human rights group, describing himself as working in the city.18 Ala Plstica work locally, seeking to intervene when a community or ecology is threatened (often by global factors), and linking to existing networks (as The Art of Change did in Londons Docklands).19 In 1995, Ala Plstica worked with botanist Nuncia Tur to aid the restoration of a coastal area near Punta Lara on the La Plata river, using emergent plant species such as reeds (which create new terrain through sedimentation). Alejandro Meitin and Silvina Babich state:
The study of the extraordinary propagation system of the reed from its subterranean rhizomes allowed us to activate the metaphor of rhizomic expansion and of the emergence of a series of interconnected exercises bent on sustaining threatened socio-natural systems, each of them connected with the cultural and biophysical ecology of the area.20

The material imbricates the metaphorical. The spread of rhizomes is likened to that of critical attitudes in what Ala Plstica see as a slow type of activism, bearing on social, economic and environmental issues emerging from the community, as promoters of a self-organizing dynamic.21 The tools include dialogue, photography and mapping. The aim is to defy institutional authority and mobilise new forms of collective action and creativity to challenge the unidirectional mode of perceiving reality.22 This may produce a solar panel or a plant nursery, but also solidarity that is, a realisation that by acting collectively people can empower themselves. Ala Plsticas approach echoes Paulo Freires pedagogy, evolved in adult literacy education in Brazil in the 1960s. Freire writes:
Educands recognize themselves as such by cognizing subjects discovering that they are capable of knowing in which process they also become critical significators educands need to become educands by assuming themselves, taking themselves as cognizing subjects, and not as an object upon which the discourse of the educator impinges.23

The link between knowledge and power neither of which is donated can be understood today, within Freires post-colonial framework, in fields such as radical development work and political ecology.24 In the field of liberation ecology, for example, Richard Peet and Michael Watts ask if discourse theory can recover the voices of colonized peoples.25 They cite Alain Touraine to the effect that society is a field of action in which the passage between formations allows the entry of social movements with transformative capabilities.26 Similarly, as Arturo Escobar writes:

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we need new narratives of life and culture. These narratives will likely be hybrids of sorts; they will arise from the mediations that local cultures are able to effect on the discourses and practices of nature, capital, and modernity. This is a collective task that perhaps only social movements are in a position to advance. The task entails the construction of collective identities, as well as struggles over the redefinition of the boundaries between nature and culture.27

Superficially, such arguments suggest an art of empowerment. But Escobar means by culture not art, but the articulation of shared values in everyday lives. To conflate the two senses of the term as often happens in culturally led urban redevelopment28 is likely to mean that, if art adopts everyday cultures, they bear an alterity as foil for arts privileged status. That status is affirmed when art by non-artists, in community arts in the 1970s or participatory art now, is criticised as lacking aesthetic quality. This relies on a definition of aesthetic quality. Usually this is stated in universal terms such as innovation and excellence, reflecting a consensus parallel to the political consensus perceived by Rancire of dealers, curators, critics and artists successful in its terms as to what constitutes contemporary art. The consensus (and the art market it informs) can incorporate almost any departure or rejection, including anti-art and graffiti, as in Tate Moderns 2008 summer show, Street Art, in which the museums exterior walls carry graffiti in different styles.29

OVER THERE
27. A Escobar, Constructing Nature: Elements for a poststructural political ecology, in Peet and Watts, Liberation Ecologies, op cit, p 65 28. See M Miles, Interruptions: Testing the Rhetoric of Culturally Led Urban Development, Urban Studies, 42:5/6, May 2005, pp 889911 29. Available online at http:// www.tate.org.uk/modern/ exhibitions/streetart (accessed 19 August 2008); see also T Cresswell, In Place Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, pp 31 61 on graffiti and the New York artworld in the 1970s 30. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, op cit, p 13 31. Bishop, Participation, op cit, p 10 32. Kester, Conversation Pieces, op cit, p 2 33. Ibid, p 3

I move to a comparison of the critical tactics adopted by Kester in Conversation Pieces, Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics, and Bishop in Participation. Kester and Bourriaud introduce art in gallery and nongallery sites. Kester cites WochenKlausur, a Vienna-based collective working in non-gallery spaces; and Adrian Pipers use of artworld settings. Bourriaud focuses on installation art, situating it in an avantgarde trajectory beginning with Dada, in a caf in Zrich. Bishop includes texts by artists ranging from Allan Kaprow to Joseph Beuys, Jeremy Deller and Rirkrit Tiravanija, aiming for a balanced selection, again spread from the gallery to the street. If the site is unimportant, however, the trajectories cited differ. For Bourriaud, contemporary art extends modernism: It is not modernity that is dead, but its idealistic and teleological version.30 Bishop establishes participatory art as following from Paris Dada: a series of manifestations that sought to involve the citys public31 and seeks a critical revision of modernism, not its abandonment on the shores of activism. For Kester, the criterion for dialogic art is the engagement of publics who co-define its agenda. But dialogic art is art not activism, using arts liminality to suspend routine. Hence, WochenKlausurs Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women (19941995) brought together sex-workers, journalists, activists and local politicians in dialogues on boats on Lake Zurich. It led to provision of a hostel for sex-workers32 but, for Kester, the legacy is insight into how aesthetic experience challenges systems of knowledge.33 This can happen in an artworld setting too, when Adrian Piper, an artist of light colour often seen as white, hands out a card saying, I am black. I am

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34. A Piper, My Calling (Card) #1, 1986, illustrated in Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, op cit, fig 13, p 72 35. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p 17 36. Ibid, p 61 37. Alan Kaprow, Notes on the Elimination of the Audience, in Bishop, Participation, op cit, p 103 (first published in A Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, Abrams, New York, 1966), pp 1878, 1958 38. Ibid 39. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p 13 40. Ibid, p 43 41. Ibid, citing Bourriaud, Esthetique relationelle, p 37 42. Rancire, Problems and transformations in Critical Art, op cit, p 90 43. Kester, Conversation Pieces, op cit, p 105

sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark.34 This draws attention to the issue of voluntarism: WochenKlausur invite the voluntary input of co-producers, and Piper responds to those who volunteer racist attitudes. I read both as reliant on the status of art. For Bourriaud, the status of the artist enables provocation in installation art, or in works which begin in sites of public access but are documented for subsequent exhibition. To give two cases: Gabriel Orozco slung a hammock in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1993); and Jens Haaning read jokes in Turkish through a loudspeaker in a Copenhagen square (1994). In the latter, Bourriaud sees a microcommunity of exiles united by collective laughter.35 He argues that audiences are drawn into such ludic work like participants in festivities so that, the aura of art no longer lies in the hinter-world represented by the work so much as in, the temporary collective form that it produces by being put on show.36 This at first resembles a position advanced by Kaprow in 1966, that the audience of passive artworld spectators should be removed from happenings and participants be drawn to events as meaningful activity (to which non-artists bring freedom from the habitual responses of a professional training, like non-professional actors on stage).37 But while Kaprow leaves art and its aura behind, Bourriaud retains the concept of aura. Arts community effect occurs in art space, but not in corporate phenomena which too often act as a disguise for die-hard forms of conservatism.38 Oddly, he ignores the anti-consumerist aspect in non-gallery art deriving from conceptual arts refusal of the object in the 1960s and since. Even more oddly because it conflates conceptual frameworks with campaigns he includes feminism, antiracism and environmentalism in his denigration of what he calls lobby groups. The avant-garde project of changing the world, admittedly a failure, is thus discarded for the modest intention of inhabiting the world (as it is) in a better way.39 This may be sensible, but perhaps for other pragmatic reasons. The art cited by Bourriaud is contained in the sphere of inter-human relations.40 This is not interaction between a spectator and an artwork but between viewers, as may occur in installations like Tiravanijas One Revolution Per Minute (1996), where spectators were invited to read or eat together. Rancire cites Bourriaud, that by offering small services, the artist repairs the weaknesses in the social bond41 and perceives here a slippage between arts polemical role and its communitarian vocation: the artist-collector institutes a space of reception to engage the passer-by in an unexpected relationship.42 This is not an invitation to festivity but a visualised critique of a society in which excess of things is the sign for a lack of connections between people. Kesters interest is in intersections of, rather than slippages between, art and non-art, following the efforts of artists such as Kaprow to merge art into everyday life. Kester mentions the work of Jay Koh as creating a discursive exchange as an antidote to the violence of economic exchange in ET-Exchanging Thought, in Chiang Mai, Thailand (1995 1996).43 Objects were contributed by artists from the affluent and majority worlds, exchanged with objects brought by local people. Kester refuses to align this work with Tiravanijas installations. To be dialogic, the latter would have involved taking the time to learn what was happening in the neighbourhood around the gallery in which his work

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44. Ibid, p 1107 45. Ibid, p 149 46. Ibid, citing A Wolper, Making Art, Reclaiming Lives: The Artist and Homeless Collaborative, in N Felshin, But Is It Art?, Bay Press, Seattle, 1995, p 259 47. Bishop, Participation, op cit, p 10 48. Bishop states 8000, Participation, op cit, p 10, citing F Deak, Russian Mass Spectacles, Drama Review, 19:2, June 1975, pp 722 49. Interview with N N Yevreinov, Zhizn iskustria (Life of Art), pp 5967, pp 301, September 1920, in Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebrations in Russia, 191833, eds Vladimir Tolstoy, Irina Bibikova and Cathereine Cooke, Thames & Hudson, London, 1990, pp 13940 50. C Cooke, The Artists are Mobilized, in Street Art of the Russian Revolution, op cit, p 35 51. Bishop, Participation, op cit, p 11 52. J Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, in Bishop, Participation, op cit, pp 1467 (from James Lingwood and Michael Morris, Off Limits: 40 Artangel Projects, Merrell, London, 2002, pp 905) 53. Bishop, Participation, op cit, p 12

was installed.44 Kester admits the communitys voice is not always heard but argues that a moment of transference can occur, creating a moral equivalence between the artist and community members.45 This assumes a great deal, and, for me, Kester stretches the credibility of his case when he extends the definition of a moral equivalence beyond experiences such as migration to include disconnected life events. For instance, he cites an account of a project with homeless women in which artist Hope Sandrows moment of transference is said to have occurred when two years work was destroyed in an accident, curtailing her career.46 This is a world away from Freires idea that people are empowered by finding content in their own experiences. More to the point here might be an instance rejected by Bishop as a propagandistic display of collective life in service of a regime sublating individualism: the re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd (1920).47 Many spectators may have been in the streets during the original storming in 1917. The re-enactment may have involved 10,000 actors from the Red Army and Navy,48 directed by N N Yevreinov, working with ten theatre directors, using three stages, a connecting bridge to street level, and cinematic projection onto windows above.49 For Catherine Cooke, participation in street performances was habitual, in the everyday life of a Russian, rooted in traditions of religious dramatisation, processing of icons and the re-staging of state events such as coronations in provincial sites.50 Agitprop is an extension of this genre for a radically different content. The spectators are not the co-producers of the re-enactment, yet their engagement may have resembled that of people who abuse public monuments when a regime falls. Such acts are symbolic re-enactments of the shift of power which enables them to take place: cultural production between politics, art and everyday life. Re-enactments enable a collective celebration of a shared historically redefining narrative, according to a well-known script either staged or spontaneous. They are not categorised as art, and may be closer to carnival which turns the world upside down in the liminal space of a day. Bishop mentions Brechts songs as disrupting the narrative plot and Antonin Artauds Theatre of Cruelty linking avant-garde art and theatre: In this framework, physical involvement is considered an essential precursor to social change.51 She anthologises Jeremy Dellers description of his filmed re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave (2002),52 but in the face of reality televisions engagement of a mass audience, she asserts that As an artistic medium participation is arguably no more intrinsically political than any other.53 Perhaps she could equally say (but does not) that the artists privileged status offers no guarantee of criticality. The question is to what extent art enables a sense of agency, and by implication whether the divide between artist and public equates to the relations of social production and economic exchange. Can these too be imagined in new ways? If this is utopian, an anticipatory glimpse of such a leap may be viable.

ART AND EMERGENCY

In Paris on 27 April 1934, Benjamin addressed a meeting of writers organised by the Communist Party, two months after Fascists staged

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54. Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, Pluto Press, London, 2002, p 123 55. Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, in Understanding Brecht, Verso, London, 2003, p 87 (first published as Versuche ber Brecht, Frankfurt-amMain, Suhrkamp, 1966) 56. Benjamin, The Author as Producer, op cit, p 90 57. Ibid, p 90 ; Schreibender (one who writes), Beschreibender (who describes), Vorschreibender (who prescribes) translators note, p 90 58. Benjamin The Author as Producer, op cit, p 88 59. Leslie, Walter Benjamin, op cit, pp 923 60. Ibid, p 94 61. Ibid, p 96 62. H Marcuse, Liberation from the Affluent Society, in The Dialectics of Liberation, ed D Cooper, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, pp 17592 63. C Bodenmann-Ritter, Every Man An Artist: Talks at Documenta V by Joseph Beuys, in Joseph Beuys: The reader, eds Claudia Mesch and Viola Michely, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2007, pp 18997; see also C Mesch, Institutionalizing Social Sculpture: Beuys, in Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum, Installation (1972), in the same volume, pp 198217

attacks in which more than a thousand people were injured and fifteen were killed.54 In this time of emergency, the issue of commitment was foremost. Benjamin argues, the dialectical treatment of this problem requires that literature must be inserted into the context of living social relations.55 To write about politics is inadequate; writers must now insert themselves within its means of production. This is, I think, equivalent to workers taking over the means of industrial production (as in Russia in 1917). The divide between production and reception is collapsed, so that readers become writers and, Authority to write is no longer founded in a specialist training but in a polytechnical one so becomes common property.56 This is the technique, in a more loaded sense than the word has in English, of the Soviet press of the 1930s in which readers letters had a prominent place. Benjamin plays on words: The reader is always prepared to become a writer who describes or prescribes,57 and cites Soviet writer Sergey Tretyakovs work in collective agriculture at the Communist Lighthouse Commune in 1928, taking part in everyday actions such as calling mass meetings, collecting for down-payments on tractors, and introducing radio and travelling film shows.58 In the second part of his paper Benjamin examines Brechts work, but the co-production techniques of the Soviet press remain a model for the production relations of writing. To me, they are as relevant for relational art, illuminating Beuyss idea that everyone has the capacity to use a creative imagination socially. Esther Leslie summarises that for Benjamin, Art can be prefigurative of social and technical relations and that if an author uses art as a realm for templates of new patterns of technical arrangements the author becomes a producer.59 This could almost describe the work of WochenKlausur and questions the avant-garde retention of an authorial voice, and Bourriauds retention of arts aura. Benjamin was a practical producer, giving radio talks and organising writers workshops.60 As Leslie writes, For Benjamin, properly political art is concerned with reception effects, generated by modes of production that provide conditions for consumers to become producers.61 The intervention here is in the conditions so that if art does not change the world it still inflects or makes visible in certain ways by which people are conditioned, in terms of dialectical materialism and in which they can intervene. An implication, from Herbert Marcuses idea of society as a work of art,62 is that in the better world produced incrementally through such inflections, art is no longer a specialism and becomes the creativity of everyday lives. Beuyss idea of a society in which everyone is an artist in which people creatively imagine new social as well as aesthetic forms proposed in his Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum at Documenta V (1972) is an invitation to create such an inflection. Beuys saw ways to direct democracy in referenda, constitutional change and free education at all levels.63 In a tripartite model of autonomous art, democratic law and a move to an economy of need rather than accumulation, Beuys relied on modern arts claim to autonomy while subverting it in the open studio. This may be a paradox, or what Rancire reads as arts inability to function in the terms of its own logic. Art withdraws from control by the established social order but its intervention is coded, in the case of Documenta, in the terms of an international art show.

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This limited freedom of arts potential, stated by Marcuse in The Aesthetic Dimension, is justified by the absence of conditions for real political change. Asking how art conveys alterity, Marcuse argues that it is not a matter of style, of finding a previously unoccupied terrain or arbitrary novelty, but of a transmission of cultural material in a shared vocabulary:
And no matter how much art overturns the ordinary meanings of words and images, the transfiguration is still that of a given material. This is the case even when the words are broken This limitation of aesthetic autonomy is the condition under which art can become a social factor.64

64. Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, Beacon Press, Bosto, MA, 1978, pp 401 65. Ibid, p 45 66. Marcuse, Liberation from the Affluent Society, op cit, p 185 67. Henri Lefebvre, Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre, Messidor, Paris, 1991, p 70, cited in Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, London, 2006, pp 256 68. C Greenberg, AvantGarde and Kitsch, in Perceptions and Judgments, 19391944: Collected Essays and Criticism, vol 1, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988, pp 522 69. Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, op cit, p 11

Art is inevitably complicit, even when it is engaged. But the familiar is estranged, and aesthetic transformation becomes indictment,65 a means to glimpse liberation. In the heady atmosphere of 1967, Marcuse proposed a society as a work of art, as the most Utopian, the most radical possibility of liberation today.66 Henri Lefebvre found him too dependent on aesthetics, in the midst of a general strike of ten million workers in Paris in May 1968.67 For Lefebvre, the activities of the Situationists demonstrated arts tendency to marginalisation, as if occupying a position outside the political, even though the tactics used were politicised. But Lefebvres relations with the Situationists had become strained by 1968 (as theirs with him), while a more formative influence may have been his early study of Dada. But then perhaps contemporary art creates as rarefied a terrain as, say, Symbolism in the 1890s, from which ordinary life is elsewhere (or faraway, in the exotic and utopian). Faced with the putative end of politics, however, a claim to non-complicity might most effectively be made via arts autonomy, even in some circumstances its marginality in relation to dominant structures (including arts institutions). That autonomy, though, is constructed in a cycle of arts permanent renewal, as each movement succeeds the last and is in turn absorbed into the relentless mainstream.

DEPARTURES AND RETURNS

Arts special status, its validity as art, which means its validation by arts formal and informal institutions, underpins the modernist trajectory of successive departure and reintegration since the Secessions of the 1890s. This trajectory was re-formulated as a reductionist art history, culminating in 1960s formalism, by Clement Greenberg. In his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939),68 Greenberg erroneously takes a work by Russian nineteenth-century artist Ilya Repin as a case of Socialist Realism to equate the passive reception he supposes for Repins work with that of a Western mass public looking at mass kitsch culture. The avant-garde must keep art moving as the only defence against kitsch, in a permanent emergence of the new. The difficulty, Greenberg observes, is that the avant-garde is in thrall to elites, while its outputs are meaningless to a mass public nurtured on kitsch, yet the elite also disowns the avant-garde: Since the avant-garde forms the only living culture we now have, the survival in the near future of culture is thus threatened.69 Ultimately, Greenberg expresses the hope that, Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable

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70. Ibid, p 22 71. T W Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Athlone, London, 1997 (first published as Aesthetische Theorie, Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp, 1970) 72. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, op cit, p 17 73. Ibid, p 112 74. Ibid, p 110; Bourriaud has in mind Althussers late work see p 18 and quotes Althusser to the effect that the city is now a state of encounter imposed on people L Althusser, Ecrits philosophiques et politiques, Editions StockIMEC, Paris, 1995, p 557, in Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, op cit, p 15

of producing becomes a threat to its own existence.70 New cultural forms corrode the society under whose auspices they are produced an inversion of the idea that the art market corrodes all refusals of its terms. Greenbergs essay, setting aside the comments on Repin, revolves around the model of a trajectory and the claim that arts vitality is its departure from the mainstream. The function of Greenbergs art criticism in the 1960s was to validate such departures as new art, the most recent phase of the mainstream. It is hard to see how Bourriauds critical project is other than similarly prescriptive, proposing installation art as the new engagement, the new emergent form, unless that kind of art subverts the cycle of permanent departure by making a leap to a new function for art denied by his retention of arts aura and, potentially, abolition of the category art. Yet Kesters attempt to construct a new critical terrain for an art of co-production, of transference as he puts it, could be read either as this termination of arts specialism, or as a case for another departure which he sees as not returning to the mainstream. Is this viable? Is Kester claiming the status of a historian describing this fracture, or that of a critic advocating it? These are rhetorical questions and could be applied to my own writing here. But what emerges from them is a realisation that contemporary arts claimed transitional zone between art and politics is a form of the aporia previously articulated by Marcuse and by T W Adorno in Aesthetic Theory71 that arts social and aesthetic dimensions are mutually disabling. Or, to state this another way, the two dimensions are polarities of an axis of creative discourse, not an oppositional duality. If then, to apply this, the exit from the circle of arts departures is in a mass creativity, when the use of the creative imagination permeates everyday life, the category of art ceases to be useful. The leap breaks the circle by discarding the terms in which the circle exists. But the leap is never made. The permanence of departures prevails even for radical alternatives to the dominant structure. The location of relational aesthetics as a new critical term appears then to be in a zone between viability and non-viability, between engagement and the disengagement, by which it is both enabled and limited.

RELATIONAL AESTHETICS
For Bourriaud, Contemporary art is definitely developing a political project when it endeavours to move into the relational realm.72 He defines relational aesthetics as Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt73 and calls on the authority of Marx and Althusser to say the world consists of random encounters echoed in arts chance meetings of signs and forms.74 For Bourriaud, in his own account, installation art in particular produces a new sense of connectivity, not between the spectator and the work as in a conventional model of reception, but between observers themselves although encounters of each other there may be random. If, then, a difficulty in Kesters position is that art addresses the needs of citizens in an art which might be taken as a substitute for the provisions of a welfare state, substituting therapy for autonomy, the difficulty in Bourriauds position is that access to the

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encounters he envisages is likely to be restricted to the existing publics for contemporary art. For some members of this set of publics, the experience of art may be predictable, located in the contemporary equivalent of modernisms value-free space as constituted by the sites in which such art was and is shown. If, as Bourriaud seems to claim, art differs from the ever-present noise of mass media, and has a ludic aspect, it achieves this by its separation from the wider world. But could the ludic not be present there as well? Kester draws the term dialogical art from Mikhail Bakhtin for whom literature offers dialogic encounters producing new insights: ideas emerge between speakers and not in the utterances of individuals. This depends on an equality of voices which Rancire sees erased in contemporary politics and I think implies a suspension of the artists claim to special insight, or an orchestration of the work reliant on it. Kester complains that such practices are criticized for being unaesthetic for needlessly suppressing visual gratification.75 But this seems to say merely that such work is not reintegrated into the trajectory of modern art, the terms of which are aesthetic. Kester claims the status of art for this work, all his examples presented not as social or political activism but as works of art,76 but simultaneously rejects the terms on which art is validated. To me, as an academic working only in theory, the question as to whether an intervention is art is not interesting. I am drawn more to Marriotts ease when Platform is called a human rights group (above). It seems more interesting to observe, as Rancire advises, what an intervention does, how it is received by the publics it creates, and to what if any extent it states or tacitly implies a political position or programme. Is co-produced art, for example, an enactment of direct democracy? Rancire outlines three cultural forms at the end of politics: art which is not art but historical documentation; art which asserts a presence as refusal of the ubiquitous devaluation of imagery in mass media; and art which trades on metaphor, playing on ambiguity and ambivalence (to which I would add irony). These are ways of coupling and uncoupling the power of showing and the power of signifying ,77 yet none can function, Rancire says, in the terms of its own logic. Presence becomes presentation, and ambivalence which plays with consumerism tends to a release from seriousness when, Rancire remarks:
75. Kester, Conversation Pieces, op cit, p 10 76. Ibid, p 11 77. Jacques Rancire, The Future of the Image, Verso, London, 2007, p 26 (first published as Le Dessin des Images, Paris, Editions La Fabrique, 2003) 78. Rancire, The Future of the Image, op cit, p 28 79. Rancire, Problems and Transformations in Critical Art, op cit, p 83 80. Ibid

The procedures of cutting and humour [from cinema] have themselves become the stock-in-trade of advertising, the means by which it generates both adoration of its icons and the positive attitude towards them created by the very possibility of ironizing it.78

Perhaps Rancires concept of critical art is purposively embedded in this intractable difficulty (or axis of creative discourse): critical art intends to raise consciousness of the mechanisms of domination in order to turn the spectator into a conscious agent in the transformation of the world.79 That consciousness alone is not enough, however: exploited people have rarely had the need to have the laws of exploitation explained to them.80 Rancire states the problem as follows:
In this vicious circle of critical art we generally see proof that aesthetics and politics cant go together. It would be more fair, however, to recognize

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the plurality of ways in which they are linked. On the one hand, politics is not a simple sphere of action that comes after the aesthetic revelation of the state of things. It has its own aesthetic: its ways of dissensually inventing scenes and characters, of manifestations and statements different from the inventions of art and sometimes even opposed to them. On the other hand, aesthetics has its own politics, or rather its own tension between two opposed politics: between the logic of art that becomes life at the price of abolishing itself as art; and the logic of art that does politics on the explicit condition of not doing it at all.81

Critical art negotiates the tensions. Brecht, for example, produces double meaning in ordinary things cauliflowers in Arturo Ui to draw out contradictions in capitalism. The radical strangeness of the aesthetic object is vital to a micro-politics of art.82 This takes the form of shock tactics in Andy Warhols soup cans, or Hans Haackes labels announcing the investment status of exhibits in the art museum, and Krzysztof Wodiczkos projections of homeless figures onto public monuments. Or shock is a displacing humour, taking art from critique to play, merging art in consumer-culture while retaining art-status in defence against exactly this absorption. Another mode is the artists inventory or assemblage of everyday or incidental things. Rancire writes:
In this logic, the artist is at once an archivist of collective life and the collector, witness to a shared ability. Because the inventory, which evidences the potential of objects and images collective history, by bringing closer the art of the sculptor and that of the rag-and-bone man, shows in this way the relationship between the inventive gesture of art and the multiplicity of inventions of the arts of doing and arts of living83

A third mode is the art-encounter, as in Tiravanijas work in which Haaning is also mentioned. Here, art goes beyond conceptualist rejection of the object (inevitably a commodity) to a void in social relations (the non-connectivity to which Bourriaud refers). Yet if art can spark recognition of a lack of connection, it equally states awareness that art cannot fill the gap. So, critical art:
must borrow the connections that provoke political intelligibility from the blurry zone between art and other spheres. And it must borrow the sense of sensible heterogeneity that feeds the political energies of refusal from isolation of the work of art. Its this negotiation that permits the formation of combinations of elements capable of speaking twice: from their readability and from their unreadability.84

81. Ibid 82. Rancire, Problems and Transformations in Critical Art, op cit, p 86 83. Ibid, p 89 84. Ibid, p 84 85. Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, op cit, p 61 86. Ibid

The double-take is characteristic of Rancires writing. He argues that a committed artist may choose a fragmented language to denote the worlds disorder, or, citing Otto Dix and George Grosz, play on modes of dehumanisation a universe where human beings drift between marionettes, masks, and skeletons.85 But to juxtapose the masks with the system reproducing their inhumanity can be called reactionary nihilism.86 He concludes that political art negotiates a duality of a shock to the system and a sense of the uncanny. Art intervenes between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all

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Terrorist: get him!, poster, Lisbon, 2003, photo: Malcolm Miles

political meaning.87 This is postmodern disillusion, the wit and irony which invite the spectator into the contradictions of capitalism. But it remains art, not politics. If art has a political function if this is an appropriate question it is in its contradistinction from the closures of political life.

CODA
In Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Benjamin writes, the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.88 The writers task is to create a real state of emergency demonstrating realitys irrationality. I am not sure if this can appropriately be applied to installation art or relational aesthetics, or if the irony attendant on most cases of critical art is overpowering. The emergency is of a different kind now than in Benjamins time, anyway. I venture no conclusion but end as

87. Ibid, p 63 88. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations, Fontana, London, p 259

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I began with a newspaper report, on Guggenheims theanyspacewhatever show:

Thanks to the artist Carsten Hller, you can get your own hotel room for two at the Guggenheim Hllers work is fully equipped for overnight guests, who will have full access to the exhibition at night but be on full view to the public during the day. Guests will also have to pay For the shows curator the work is a great example of how Carsten is interested in engaging the viewer in the very realization of [the] artwork.89

89. A Room for Two at the Guggenheim, Guardian, 27 August 2008, G2, p 29 90. Rancire, The Future of the Image, op cit, p 28

Rancire writes that spectators may need to be told that, in the space they are about to enter, they will learn anew how to see and to put the flood of media messages that usually captivates them at a distance.90 The flow of media images outside the gallery, meanwhile, is continuously interrupted, re-contextualised and evacuated of meaning. As evidence of a more real state of emergency, in Benjamins terms, I cite a poster which appeared briefly in Lisbon in 2003 depicting George W Bush under the text I translate loosely from Portuguese: Terrorist: get him. The urgency of its message appears incompatible with the diversionary tactic of Hllers adventure in art as the ultimate-ironic lifestyleconsumerism (or perhaps I take both too literally).
1 Terrorist: get him!, poster, Lisbon, 2003, photo: Malcolm Miles