Activism promotes vigorous efforts to bring about social, political, legal, economic, or environmental change. Its strategies encompass the ephemeral and the violent, as well as the efforts of an individual and those of the collective. Activist art has developed alongside these various forms of dissent, especially in the wake of the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As Andrea Giunta explains in “Activism,” a deep overview of contemporary activism, the story of activism is also the story of the relationship between art and politics. In the United States, protests against Vietnam, for civil rights, and for the rights of women provided groundwork for artists to address political issues in their art. During this time, artists in South America made work to protest oppressive military regimes, and in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries many artists employed poetic gestures to critique life under totalitarian governments. The AIDS crisis in the 1980s, especially in the United States, precipitated a range of activist work that invoked the legacy of feminism while shifting the terms from a politics of gender to one that also included sexuality.
In the wake of the culture wars at the end of the 1980s, artists engaged with what became known as identity politics in art that questioned power inequities in relation to race, class, and sexuality. These reflections on self-representation, which began as specific to an American context, became global in scope as politicized constructs of identity expanded to those related to cultures and nations. In 1989 alone, one witnessed the protests that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the uprising in Tiananmen Square. More recently wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as protests in the Middle East, have served as catalysts for activist art.
Some activist artists work in collectives and others work alone; some seek direct interaction and others representational effects; some address legislators, media outlets, or a more intimate art audience. Others focus on community—whether that sphere is something that artists might enter into or create through their own work. It is this latter model that Julia Bryan-Wilson takes on in her “Knit Dissent,” addressing the ways that some artists have used craft and the handmade to forge a kind of politics. There is also space for activism to be more abstract, philosophical meditations that, for example, ruminate on agency and its relationship to time, as with Raqs Media Collective’s eloquent “Light from a Distant Star: A Meditation on Art, Agency, and Politics.” At the core of their investigation into the conjunction of art and politics is a conception of time in which the political potential of a specific act is given the temporal space to become fully realized.
A row of tanks advances along the breadth of Cháng An Dà Jie Avenue, or “Grand Avenue of Eternal Peace,” some 200 meters from Tiananmen Square. The camera closes in on a man—on foot, with his back to the camera, in a white shirt and black pants—who confronts the row of tanks with his body, indicating, with a hand gesture, that they should leave. The first tank tries to swerve to the left; the man moves in order to block it from passing. The tank straightens its path, and so does the man. Three people on bicycles push the man and take him beyond the edge of the frame. Captured on June 5, 1989, one day after the violence committed against the civilians that occupied the Square began, knowledge of this action—widely circulated through this photo—quickly spread all over the world. (So great was its ubiquity and power that it was later understood to have anticipated the fall of the Berlin Wall.) The image represents the repression of the rebellion in Tiananmen Square and it came to be emblematic of the idea of resistance as a form of struggle. It is an arbitrary, “misleading” example of cultural activism in one sense, since this man did not conceive of his actions as artistic. To be more precise, then, it represents an individual form of civil disobedience in the iconic framing of one body against an army. Still, it capitalized upon many of cultural activism’s aspirations: to produce images and actions capable of accompanying social struggle and to intervene in forms of power in order to erode them. Perhaps this is why means are deployed to control its dissemination in China, even today.1 The citizen’s symbolic occupation of urban space, his performance of civil disobedience, and the power of contagion attributed to his image allow it to be read as a symptom of a different way of understanding and articulating cultural activism.
Cultural activism since the mid-nineteenth century has assumed two principal strategies, one being the assertion of a united front. Here, artists or representatives of the world of culture come together in order to express their opposition to a specific situation. Their works are gathered in exhibitions or in written declarations, upheld by the force of the sum of their names. Their texts are published in newspapers or circulated throughout social networks such as Facebook, as has been the case in recent years. Demonstrations in public spaces generally form a part of a strategic whole that makes visible an agenda under dispute.
A different form of activism consists in works themselves, whose meaning is interwoven with a particular political deed. Forms visually organize and fuse agendas, poetics, and urgent content. We could consider Picasso’s Guernica (1937) as an emblematic example of image activism, whereby a work that was closely tied to its immediate situation entered a repertoire of images, subsequently appropriated for other uses. This was the case, for example, in 2003, when Guernica became a rallying point for public antiwar demonstrations in protests against the bombing of Iraq.
Whether it takes the form of a cultural front or an image, cultural activism is inscribed in history. As T. J. Clark pointed out, times have existed when “art and politics could not escape one another.”3 In the realm of art during what I above referred to as the long twentieth century—a century that could be said to begin with Courbet and last until the most recent collective actions, if observed in terms of artistic activism—this relationship between art and politics registers a story related to the history of avant-garde movements, while likewise remaining at some remove from them (and modern art’s formalist narratives, sense of teleology, and assumption of progress). To be more precise, this art constitutes groups of experiences that, above all in recent years, have begun to be investigated and historicized, establishing repertoires that can then be utilized by new forms of activism.
Most crucially, artistic activism aspires to dissolve art within life. Its agendas are exact, contextual, and historical. Can we consider that activism’s forms have undergone transformation during the past twenty years? To what extent does the history of activism act as an accumulation of experiences appropriated by the present? I will cover several key moments after the 1960s when agendas and actions that function as emblematic examples germinated, and then introduce more contemporary forms of activism.
Conceptual practices allowed for the articulation of clandestine resistance based on the strength of symbolic interventions. Studies on conceptual art questioned the discourse that emanated from art centers and traced new geographies that included Eastern European, Asian, African, and Latin American countries.6 Lucy Lippard pointed out conceptualism’s two-fold inscription, as the expression of both art as idea and art as action.7 In Soviet conceptualism during the 1970s, the Collective Action Group sought alternative spaces for an alternative culture and to promote the idea that an action suffices as a creative gesture.8 In 1973–74 the Laboratoire Agit-Art was founded in Dakar, an interdisciplinary group of artists, writers, filmmakers, performance artists, and musicians who transformed the formalist concept of the art object based on the relationship between experimentation and agitation.9 Also during the 1970s, the Indonesian New Art Movement aimed to dismantle aesthetic hierarchies and questioned the aesthetic educational system.10 These are examples of premises held in common that redefined conceptualism beyond the European–North American circuit; they were forms of articulating institutional critique as a criticism of local articulations of power. Common strategies activated specific agendas. In recent years conceptual practices have been studied in particular detail, fundamentally because of their capacity to articulate institutional critique and to elaborate indirect, opaque language able to evade censorship in countries such as Chile, Brazil, Argentina, or Uruguay. During Chile’s military dictatorship, isolated events in the public sphere such as Lotty Rosenfeld’s interventions in the white lines on the pavement to convert them into crosses, or urban actions by the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (or CADA) represented forms of activism that resisted state violence.11 Among forms articulated by activism during the 1960s and 1970s, mail-art also stood out as an expression that elaborated different forms of eroding geographic distances, a desire that is fully expressed today in the development of the internet.12
During the 1970s and 1980s feminist movements wrote a significant chapter in the field of activism. Their visual and textual discourse questioned the (masculine, Western) canon and proposed new politics of the body. Their critique of the sexuality dictated by nation, class, and race created a rupture with the forms and materials of representation. Through their works and performances, artists like Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Kelly, Martha Rossler, Adrian Piper, Laurie Anderson, Lourdes Groubet, Diamela Eltit, María Evelia Marmolejo, or Monica Mayer pushed patriarchal narrative into a corner; they forged ties with political activist groups working to establish a public agenda that would transform women’s place in political and cultural spheres.
Activism is reformulated through a concept of power based on micropolitical practices, linking it with local agendas that are simultaneously inscribed in transversal and global relationships. In this context, agendas related to migratory conflicts, post-Fordist global capitalism’s functional marginalization, human rights, a contemporary reactivation of the feminist agenda, and the appearance of a new AIDS strategy in the 1980s (organized through ACT UP, articulated by politics of civil disobedience) all emerged.
With the militarization of the frontier between the United States and Mexico in the early 1980s, the art community in border cities like San Diego–Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez–El Paso developed an agenda that focused on immigration problems, border crossings, migratory violence, cultural mixes and tensions, representations of difference, beliefs, and different activations of language. The Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) has functioned since 1984 as a space for visual activism at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, San Diego, California. The group’s members have changed over time, but the purpose articulated in their actions remains the same: “We are a multi-national conduit that serves to address the issues we are confronted with while existing in a region where two countries and cultures meet.” Their actions combine video, performance, photography, and installations. They work on both sides of the border (Tijuana and San Diego) with the aim of creating a “no border” sensation, or, similarly, they carry out “border pilgrimage” practices during the Day of the Dead, when Chicano and Anglo artists gather in the cemetery of the city of Tijuana around Juan Soldado’s tomb, the patron saint of Chicanos and illegal immigrants (1987). These actions were also circulated as Forms of Resistance: Corridors of Power, a community engagement project at the Poblado Maclovio Rojas, during the late 1990s.16
Anti-globalization, contra-globalization, globalization critique, globalization from below, or the proposal for an alternative globalization all look for ways to represent groups marginalized from the global economy, groups that are functional to post-Fordist capitalism much more than merely accidental consequences of it. The protests that developed in Seattle in 1999 and at the G8 Meeting held in Genoa in 2001 lent visibility to a form of urban protest articulated in different types of resistance. Following 9/11, all forms of dissidence generated politics of denunciation and repression, articulated in the “war against terror” slogan. Different spaces and agendas that were previously separate in territorial and conceptual terms (different minorities, feminism, environmentalism) now connect in a transversal manner that leads to coordinated actions in opposition to the forces of repression. With the “no border, no nation” motto, the problematization of the border theme, including figures of exile, conflicts established by offshore prisons such as Guantanamo or in Afghanistan, and legal restrictions on residency all take the form of cultural activism in response to the neoliberal agenda that multiplies internal borders. The challenge is to change the notion of border, conceiving of it not as a limit but as a space for transgression,17 to activate the constitutive power of that which is not finalized.18 The proposal is to space out the border. On July 9, 2002, 3,000 activists met in Strasburg “for an international anti-racist border camp,” where a laboratory for creative resistance and civil disobedience was carried out over the course of ten days.19 Micropolitical actions were activated there that dealt as much with the organization of everyday life as they did with establishing formats for communicative exchange (a public internet cafe, Indymedia tent, radio, etc.), with film projections and counter-information caravans.
In contemporary activism in Latin America, the human rights agenda occupies a central role. In the resistance marches in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the Madres, and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, along with other human rights organizations and artists’ groups, have achieved a powerful and mobile level of visibility in regard to the figure of the disappeared. In 1995, the HIJOS (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio [Children for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence]) association was founded.20 One of the first commissions that they organized was dedicated to the escrache: actions that publicly evidence where those responsible for the genocide during the military dictatorship live and work—these people had been granted impunity during the 1990s by a pardon and laws citing obediencia debida (due obedience) and punto final (final point) that were then overturned in 2003, allowing new court cases for crimes against humanity to be opened.21 Escraches involve concerts, neighborhood campaigns, tours, and marking the houses of those responsible in red. The purpose is to awaken neighbors’ consciousness. The GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero) group, founded in 1997, participated in these actions. The signaling carried out by the group focused not only on the individuals responsible, but also on the repressive politics articulated in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, known as the Plan Condor. In 2000 in Rio de Janeiro, the GAC carried out an action along with students, human rights organizations, and social organizations that consisted in putting up thirty-six traffic signs on the city’s streets denunciating said plan.22
The activation of urban protest through visual actions that followed after the widespread mobilization movement that occurred in Argentina with the 2001 crisis (explosion of counter-power)—an economic crisis expressed in banks’ retention of people’s savings, a crisis in political representation manifest in the resignation of the President of the Nation, and a social crisis demonstrated in social protests and police repression—gave rise to the formation of artists’ groups associated with neighborhood assemblies and the agendas activated in response to each particular demand.23 For example, artists’ groups supported the demands of workers at Brukman, the factory recovered by women in a cooperative structure (the 18 de diciembre cooperative) when the owners had abandoned it during the crisis, leaving hundreds of workers unemployed. Resistance to this eviction, also expressed in forms of cultural activism, allowed for its recovery. The dynamics at work in the organization of these groups is centered around tasks that erase the agendas that each collective might have, establishing a time for planning and action that operates like a laboratory of images, words and organization based on impersonal, collective production and the search for symbols able to undermine expressions of power, using the logic of contagion. Normalization is an attempt to control or deactivate this viral expansion, in the face of which the Colectivo Situaciones propose to politicize sadness, by way of different dynamics that allow them to avoid being co-opted or marginalized: They look to dismantle ways of freezing events, to exercise the power of abstention, to re-conceive public spaces of intervention by attending to the specific content of each situation without a need for exceptional conditions, and to re-elaborate the notion of collectiveness as complicity in the adventure of becoming a situational interface in the world.24
In contemporary cultural activism, articulating protest on a global level is central. Mujeres creando (Women Creating)25 is an anarchist-feminist group formed in Bolivia in 1992 that publishes the Mujer Pública magazine, has a radio program and a cafe, all spaces that allow them to articulate a radical feminist agenda that is also linked to People’s Global Action, whose third meeting was held in La Paz, Bolivia (2001). This articulation seeks to activate different specific agendas in a non-exclusive manner as part of a more general one on all fronts that it seeks to maintain constantly active. Different experiences from the past in which militant cinema, activist theater, montage techniques and theory, and action art in urban spaces (murals, graffiti, intervention in urban signage, performance, theater, and street art) all gained potential from one another thanks to the possibility of acting as a network. Networked activism produces specific practices and a new vocabulary: access to programs, downloading content, distributing information (still images, moving images, and sound), opening access codes and making content available; generating participative creation online, simultaneously articulating images and sound produced in different places, capturing a chronological narrative of events; breaking up the idea of the center with those of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and simultaneousness; adding potential to the notions of liminal, frontier spaces; the ideas of contagion, virus, and infection; of nodes and nodal interconnection that provoke continual echoes and resonance; of everyday portable communications systems (like computers) that are itinerant and nomadic; the notions of node and orbit to describe mobile structures; the concept of place as site, not as a precise place but as a site of intersection, like a situation between two localities (where work comes from and to whom it pertains); the possibility and capability of being in various sites at the same time; the concept of zone as location, as an accessible space with fluid borders with no distinction between center and periphery as zones of indiscipline.26 Networks’ possibilities intersect with increased potential for collective experience, the carnivalization of protest in order to activate a global agenda that comes together in one place, based on human coexistence and interaction.27
Cultural activism today is based on interpersonal contact as much as it is on global interaction. Information and knowledge are instruments of power—as demonstrated by the relationship between hackers and activists in the case of Wikileaks—that cultural activists (actual agents) strengthen by working via the internet. However, as we can see, not everything takes place online. International meetings, periods in residency, living together, the exchange of knowledge, discussion forums that establish intervention agendas and strategies, parties and carnivalesque practices, and the dispersion of figures in terms of direction or hierarchy all bear the stamp of an interpersonal dimension that is as relevant as that which sustains online activism. Contemporary activism is based on a different concept of geography and authorship, articulated by notions that restructure the organization of knowledge and bring concepts and instruments that come from the history of more than a century of cultural activism—an activism inaugurated by Courbet—up to date.
However, there is a radical difference that stands out in contemporary artistic activism, especially in relation to that which burst forth in the 1960s and 1970s. While activism in these decades proposed the complete transformation of society by way of revolution (with art being a major part of this colossal enterprise), today the task may seem less radical, although no less relevant. On the contrary, contemporary artists no longer await the perfect historical scenario in order to activate their practices jointly with a revolutionary movement. Nor do they aspire to operate as the detonators of a revolution in the making.
Activism has diversified its fronts and articulates them on an international scale. The internet allows for a degree of simultaneousness that the technology extant during the 1960s did not permit. Reactions against current wars or the global market can be organized and articulated simultaneously in various cities around the world. At the same time, in everyday practice, the most elemental mechanisms of subsistence in terms of reconstructing social networks are situated locally. For contemporary activism, not only is it important to transform the world, but also to do so through actions on a micro scale. Transformation does not lie in substituting one model with another, since contemporary activism distrusts all models. It instead aspires to mobility and adapting agendas that allow new forms of power to be detected and deactivated. Wherever the power of the dominant system shifts and reorganizes itself to maximize its resources, activism diversifies its strategies in order to intervene and activate newly adapted forms of resistance. More than a radical transformation of the entire world, what artistic activism seeks is to continually renovate the formats that permit different types of power to be debated, along with strategies for a counter-power.
We could sustain that critical contemporary art is not willing to restrict its actions to the institutional critique to which existing power has assigned it. Biennials and exhibitions serve as the scenario for an institutional critique that is agreed upon with curators and commissioners. It is a soft institutional critique that in spite of everything, can detonate controversies and make the sensitive social areas activated by the work more visible, generating acts of censorship that range from removing works to cutting budgets. Above and beyond this artistic activism that situates itself in friction with the art field, however, a different aspect is the power that different art groups manipulate when they situate their images together with social organizations who move against the effects of globalization or that are organized around different agendas (strikes, claims for housing and land, racial or sexual rights, or aligned with humans rights organizations).
In these cases, actions develop outside of art institutions (more cultural activism than artistic activism), diversifying its spaces and alliances, looking for those places from which they can articulate effective actions in dialogue with political agendas thought of in terms of poetic interventions. Here, images distance themselves from art institutions to occupy all the spaces in which actions can be put into motion that will put power in check right where it is reorganizing itself. Its interventions are not settled in a single confrontation. The spaces and strategies it utilizes multiply and diversify to convert counter-power tactics into a state of continual cultural organization.
Notes
1 http://en.kioskea.net/news/14619-tiananmen-tank-man-photo-available-on-google-china.
2 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 129.
3 T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 9.
4 Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, and Raúl Escari, “An Art of Communication Media (manifesto),” [1966] in Inés Katzenstein, ed., Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art on the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), pp. 223–225.
5 María Teresa Gramuglio and Nicolás Rosa, “Tucuman Is Burning,” [1968], in Katzenstein, op. cit., pp. 319–326.
6 Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999).
7 Lucy Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973).
8 Margarita Tupitsyn, “About Early Soviet Conceptualism,” in Camnitzer, Farver and Weiss, op. cit., pp. 99–107.
9 Okwui Enwezor, “Where, What, Who, When: A Few Notes on “African” Conceptualism,” in Camnitzer, Farver and Weiss, op. cit., pp. 108–117.
10 Apinan Poshyananda, “‘Con Art’ Seen from the Edge: The Meaning of Conceptual Art in South and Southeast Asia,” in Camnitzer, Farver and Weiss, op. cit., pp. 143–148.
11 Nelly Richard, “Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973.” Art & Text (Melbourne), no. 21 (May–July 1986).
12 Anmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark, At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
13 Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 41.
14 John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London: Pluto Press, 2005), p. 6.
15 EZLN, “Primera declaración de la realidad,” in La Jornada (January 30, 1996); also in Holloway, op. cit., p. 20.
16 http://www.borderartworkshop.com/BAWHistory/BAWhistory.html.
17 Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1977), pp. 29–52.
18 Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999).
19 Raunig, op. cit., pp. 255–256.
21 www.hijos-capital.org.ar/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=7&id=31&Itemid=47; www.hijosmexico.org/index-escraches.
22 http://grupodeartecallejero.blogspot.com.
23 Andrea Giunta, “Post-Crisis: Scenes of Cultural Change in Buenos Aires,” in Jonathan Harris, ed., Globalization and Contemporary Art (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 105–122.
24 Colectivo Situaciones, “Politicising Sadness,” in Will Bradley and Charles Esche, eds., Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader (London: Tate-Afterall, 2007), pp. 313–318.
26 Raqs Media Collective, “A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons,” [2003] in Bradley and Esche, op. cit., pp. 340–334.
27 Brian Holmes, “The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges, Networked Resistance,” [2004] in Bradley and Esche, op. cit., pp. 350–368; Lecture delivered at the symposium of the exhibition “Geography and the Politics of Mobility,” Generali Foundation, Vienna, January 18, 2003 and published in Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2004), pp. 350–368.
Crocheted military helmet liners and sewn gas masks: Increasingly, these handworked objects embody many aspects of social art practice today. Though the return to textiles has been duly noted in contemporary criticism as stretching the bounds of what the “proper” objects of art might be, the current popularity of knit, crocheted, or woven materials is also often derided as yet another market trend. Skepticism runs rampant: What is this return to craft, really? A true grassroots campaign? Or just another hipster hobby? This uncertainty speaks to the fundamental ambivalence of claims about political art—if we agree that form and materials matter, and matter politically, then we must also interrogate how these processes are recruited across a spectrum of ideologies.
Take the following example: In 2002, British artist Freddie Robins knitted a gray yarn life-size figure that is pierced, Saint-Sebastian style, by numerous knitting needles that also scatter in a ring on the floor at its feet. Stitched onto the narrow chest of this strange bodily surrogate, which hovers just slightly in the air, are the words CRAFT KILLS. What does it mean to utilize a knitting needle as a dangerous tool, and to envision craft as a process that might harm, injure, or wound? Or does it point out, ironically, the seeming opposite—that is, the absolute harmlessness of craft? The phrase works on both fronts; made in response to a very specific historical moment (the escalation of fear after the events of September 11, 2001), it captures a certain mordant humor. Robins’ piece comments on the fact that, due to heightened anxieties about national safety in the months after 9/11, knitting and crochet needles were banned on airplanes because of their potential to be utilized as weapons. This outright prohibition has since been lifted, but the U.S. Transportation and Security Administration still recommends that travelers do not bring long metal needles in carry-on luggage.
The threat that craft might actually kill, however, is far from the historical understanding of textile techniques such as sewing, knitting, or crocheting, which are often trivialized and denigrated. Think of the ubiquitous hobby macramé home projects from the 1970s that in the popular imagination are loosely associated with an embarrassing mainstreaming of hippie culture, divorced from the sometimes radical environmentalism that was intrinsic to handmade, countercultural lifestyles. In fact, such “hobbyist” methods of crafting have long been castigated as domestic, quiescent, conservative, and trivial, particularly because they have traditionally been gendered female. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949, “with the needle or the crochet hook, woman sadly weaves the very nothingness of her days.”1 By contrast, Robins’ work reflects a competing, contemporary trend that understands craft as an ideological weapon bestowed with fresh urgency and relevance. Craft has played a significant role in the formation of national identities, especially in times of political turmoil or war, as well as in resistant actions and protest cultures. This article examines how these links are made explicit in much contemporary craft-based art, in particular by feminist artists working at the intersection of art, antiwar activism, and craft.
Craft is often defined as that which is utilitarian, that has a specific function or use value—this distinction, arguably, separates it from art. But within craft theory and contemporary art, the art versus craft divide is slowly eroding, even as there persist classed distinctions between “high craft” meant for institutional display (Rosemarie Trockel or Louise Bourgeois, for instance) and “low craft.” Recent important books by Glenn Adamson and Elissa Auther address the studio craft versus art divide, as well as the false binary between highly trained skilled professional craft workers and amateur efforts.2 But if the realm of amateur craft sometimes falls outside the scope of discussions on contemporary art, art history is a vital place to theorize the current rhetoric that links handmaking and activism or to understand craft as a form of politics. Indeed, looking to this longer history of protest craft art shows that Robins was not the first feminist artist to connect craft to threat, and to do so with a sly sense of humor. In the mid-1970s, the Oregon Women’s Political Caucus invented a mock organization, a “Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society,” and turned it into a well-known feminist logo, emblazoned with a deceptively innocent flower motif and a crypto-Celtic-meets-art nouveau font. For about a decade, one could send away to Springfield, Oregon for T-shirts and mugs with this design, sold through small print classified ads in the back of Ms. magazine and Mother Jones. The joke here stems from the presumed absurdity that a sewing circle might be fostering collective domestic unrest in the time of the Vietnam War.3 Both Robins’ high craft object and the popular T-shirt allude to female handmaking as a form of dissent in a time of global conflict.
The connection between craft and war is rooted deep within US culture—and knitting in particular has been a patriotic rallying point from the revolutionary war on. Women were exhorted to knit to support military efforts as soldiers sent letters complaining of frozen toes and asking their wives to send socks and mittens.4 During the Civil War, the image of women diligently knitting for soldiers on the front lines folded into a larger campaign of working to unite for the war effort in both the North and the South. The idea that knitting is a way for women to occupy their time and sublimate their feelings of loss or trauma, as well as a useful activity that directly supports the war cause, has recurred in every US wartime. In the First World War, the Red Cross distributed over a million pamphlets and held instructional sessions throughout the country to teach young girls to knit. Yarn companies unsurprisingly embraced the declared “national knitting phenomenon” as a way to sell more of their product, advertising their goods with slogans like “Uncle Sam wants you to knit.”
The Second World War witnessed a similar knitting frenzy as women organized to knit military supplies. However, as historian Anne Macdonald recounts, in a time of widespread industrial production and availability, there was far less need for homemade objects, and “many women knit because women had always knit in wartime.”5 In other words, it had become more a symbolic, nostalgic custom and ritual than an actual material necessity. Knitting was taken up again in the late 1960s, again to symbolically if not literally support the troops, and celebrated as a way for women to “do their part.” But during the Vietnam War, crafting was also an indelible part of a growing environmental movement that fed other alternative cultures and oppositional politics. Thus handmaking was increasingly recruited for antiwar causes, such as Bread and Puppet’s street demonstrations, which centered on handmade tapestries, large-scale crafted cloth and wood puppets, and protestors in handsewn costumes. Bread and Puppet, which was founded by Peter Schumann in 1963, was a fixture in peace marches at the Pentagon and other places, and crafting what they termed “cheap art” was a vital part of their practice.6 And in the 1980s, when Reagan and Thatcher were stoking Cold War fears, British women protestors for nuclear disarmament formed the Greenham Common Peace Camp and occupied land adjacent to a US airbase. With their homemade textiles, banners, and hand-knit improvised shelters, the Greenham Common women “literally wove themselves into the site of their protest.”7
Many contemporary artists are using craft to comment on the current wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan; these include works like Los Angeles artist Lisa Anne Auerbach’s hand-knit Body Count Mittens. This series, begun in 2005, uses the act of knitting as a way to mark time, as well as a method of visibly registering the growing number of US casualties in the war in Iraq. As she begins each mitten, she inscribes it with the official body count on that day. During the time it takes her to finish one hand, the number of dead inevitably increases, so she notes the new body count as she moves on to the other hand. Auerbach has posted the pattern for the gloves on her website, and she encourages knitters to make them in public, while waiting for the bus, or at a restaurant, hoping to spawn conversations and debate about these grim (and not widely publicized) statistics. Auerbach’s work reaches out to the online community of hobby crafters as she encourages them to think about the legacies of women knitting during war.
In Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Wartime Knitting Circle, an interactive installation at the Museum of Arts and Design’s exhibition Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting (2007), the artist set up round tables and provided yarn, knitting needles, and instructions for various projects (including Auerbach’s body count mittens). She invited members of the public to come in and knit with her while talking about the war. The space was demarcated by large knit banners—“photo blankets”—featuring images of previous wartime knitting activities, and she has movingly described how a museum worker (the traveling exhibitions coordinator) who had a relative deployed in Iraq learned to knit during the course of the show.
Another artist exploring the history of craft and war is Allison Smith, whose 2010 series Needle Work was based on her extensive research regarding European and American cloth gas masks used in the First World War to guard against chemical warfare; she photographed these masks and remakes them by hand. First seeing an early mask from 1918, Smith writes, “I was struck by the recurring thought—someone made this—and I tried to imagine what that would be like. I began to think of these fabric masks as evidence of an as yet unwritten history of needlework.”8 Rather than protective, these gas masks seems fragile and insufficient, and Smith’s haunting project points to the ways in which bodies and textiles are sewn together in symbiotic relationship that relates to protection as well as to masquerade.
These diverse practices attest to the potency and resonance of crafting during wartime for current feminist artists, but, sometimes, such work becomes predictable. For instance, both US-based Shirley Klinghoffer and Danish artist Marianne Joergensen have conceived of large-scale knit military “cozies”—Klinghoffer’s Love Armor Project (2008) covered a Humvee on loan from the New Mexico National Guard with a cloth made by over seventy volunteers during a series of “love ins.” Similarly, Joergensen swaddled a tank with a knit and crocheted pink patchwork “tank blanket.” These two closely related projects, which are formally and conceptually very similar—though the artists were unaware of each others’ work—veer into the territory of the precious or naive, as they express a wish that the knitted garment covering a tank renders it useless or smothers its deadly potential. It is thus an ongoing problematic within the realm of contemporary craft to think through how divergent practices utilize handmaking differently rather than to elide their distinctions. For there are actions and objects, like Smith’s, that rewrite the whole history of handmaking in relation to gender and war, and then there are others, like Klinghoffer and Joergensen, that fall into clichéd versions of pacifying female domestic work.
Indeed, some of the most potent craft critiques are coming not from US or European artists, but from Middle Eastern women who use handmaking methods to question stereotypes and the language of terror, such as Lebanese-born, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, who has woven a scarf out of human hair—Keffieh (1993–9)—in order to upend assumptions about Islamic codes of decorum and female visibility. In her 2005 installation The Reign of Terror, Egyptian Ghada Amer, who makes extensive use of embroidery in many of her projects, comments on the fact that while the words peace and safety exist in Arabic, the term “terror” is not indexed in Arabic dictionaries.
Just as in the historical context, though, crafting in the framework of recent wars appears at both the “high” and “low” ends of the spectrum, from more fine-arts oriented work like Hatoum and Amer’s, to amateur hobbyist; likewise it also spans a political spread, from avowedly leftist to something ideologically more ambiguous. For instance, the anonymous Afghan war rugs that have proliferated since the 1979 Soviet invasion have become a controversial embodiment of the politics of craft.9 In these rugs, textile makers refer to war in various ways, from incorporating simplified tanks, guns, and planes into almost abstract patterns, to creating elaborate, realistic depictions of the attacks on the World Trade Center. It is not always clear who makes these rugs, and for what purpose—an exhibition at the Textile Museum of Canada in 2008–9 focused more on questions of dating and genre than intention.10 Interestingly, such rugs have found a niche for online customers around the world, not least the United States, which leads to speculation that some of them are being produced strategically and self-consciously for the US market.
The Afghan war rugs open onto many questions, including the commodification of dissent, the ever-increasing traffic in mementoes of disaster, the tangibility of memorialization, and the relation between textile design, tradition, religious ritual, and global catastrophe. They also emphasize why so much political craft is textiles-based. For while other kinds of handmaking methods (such as pottery or glassblowing) can have political registers, the bulk of war-themed craft focuses on fabric. In part, this is because sewing, quilting, weaving, and knitting are specialized forms of making and communicating. As the editors of the anthology The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production write: “The physical and intimate qualities of fabric allow it to embody memory and sensation and become a quintessential metaphor for the human condition.”11
Beyond the fact that we constantly use cloth, textile making is also distinct from mediums such as metalsmithing in that it is portable—what has been called lapwork—and can be made in a range of fluid circumstances. Much of this work is small-scale and requires no extensive equipment (unlike a pottery wheel); hence it is often performed in public to create new forms of social space, from early feminist quilting bees to contemporary activist groups like the British knitting club Cast-Off, which has held major “knitting for peace” events in the London Underground. Knitting’s flexible transportability has allowed it to be pressed into service in the New York activist group Granny Peace Brigade, who take their needles to the streets with signs around their necks declaring, “I am knitting stump socks for amputees.” Conjuring the whole history of female wartime knitting, these women publicly knit garments for injured Iraq war veterans, using handicraft to express political anger as well as to transform that anger into useful objects.
Beyond art-historical investigations about handmaking and war, the groundswell of craft in the past decade has been accompanied by strident political claims as websites, blogs, and conferences extol the “radical” and “revolutionary” potential of handmaking—to name just two examples, a 2006 conference at the Pasadena Art Center was entitled “Radical Craft;” and a 2008 symposium at the Melbourne Craft Centre proclaimed “The Revolution is Handmade.” Trade books with titles like Subversive Cross Stitch and Subversive Seamster proliferate.12 These books could be echoing the influential feminist literature about the gendered hierarchy in the crafts, namely Rozsika Parker’s 1984 The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. Parker’s gender- and class-based analysis, together with a deep history of embroidery technique and the labor formations it engendered, provide a model for thinking through how craft methods have been deployed, re-appropriated, and politicized over time.13 But Parker’s precedent goes unacknowledged within these books, which are more hipster how-to guides complete with irreverent patterns and practical tips for sewing your own gauchos.
Other texts from the past few years, such as Betsy Christiansen’s Knitting for Peace: Making the World a Better Place One Stitch at a Time, are eager to extend the positive feminist legacy of handiwork, and assert that knitting might in itself be method of direct protest.14 In 2004, Betsy Greer coined the term “craftivism,” joining craft and activism to suggest that handmaking (especially the domestic “female” crafts) have become—or are even implicitly—a form of resistance in an era of global mass production.15
Here one convention has easily been replaced by another—if craft was formerly the territory of kitsch, the low, the regressive, and the decorative, it has recently has become an easy, all-too-uncontested shorthand for alternative politics. Some of this rhetoric ties into a longstanding desire to link craft to left politics (i.e. constructivist textiles in post-revolutionary Russia, William Morris’s socialist workshop where textile design was at the core of his utopian theories of work, or John Ruskin’s writings on the nobility of the hand). But today’s understanding of the do-it-yourself imperative is evermore fueled by the dominance of machine-made factory work within the transnational sweatshop era. Craft has been aligned with an anti-consumerist ethos, as in the online campaign buyhandmade.org that asked participants to commit to not buying at big-box or chain stores. Launched for the holiday season in 2007, it was signed by over 50,000 people; however, note that the slogan urges you to buy handmade gifts, not to make them yourself.
This is one of the most conflicting aspects of “craftivism,” which is that so much of the purported handmade revolution is really about shopping. For some, setting up booths at fairs or selling their work on the craft commerce website Etsy has become the way to pay rent, and it is increasingly hard to reconcile the tension between what could be a grassroots, micro-economy of local production with the aggressive neoliberal entrepreneurialism advocated by books like Craft, Inc. or The Handmade Marketplace, which outline strategies of self-marketing and self-promotion.16 Yet an article in 2009 outlined how difficult it is to make a decent living wage selling work on Etsy, given the effort, time, and materials these crafts demand.17
In addition, the “buy handmade” pledge overlooks one significant paradox: ostensibly machine-made consumer goods are also in large part made by hand. London journalist Eric Clark’s book The Real Toy Story, which reveals unjust labor conditions in the toy industry, illustrates how much significant bodily work and handiwork go into factory production in China, cranking out objects for overseas markets.18 In the over 8,000 factories in the Pearl River Delta region of China, where eighty percent of the toys bought in the United States are made, women work sixteen-hour days under toxic conditions for about ten cents an hour. Thousands of women workers in bright pink coats sew pants legs onto action figures: This is the reality of contemporary craft as it is persistently feminized and undervalued.19
The knitting needles that half-jokingly stab Robins’ torso indicate a fundamental ambivalence about just what the political value of craft today might be. Craft is itself neither inherently conservative nor progressive—along with the contemporary “revolutionary” knitting circles, there are also right-wing knitted “yellow ribbon” drives that extend the nationalism of early knitting-during-wartime campaigns. Yet perhaps craft matters in part because it gives us purchase on a pointed, potentially messy, necessarily intricate and in-process activism, as it leaves room for the dropped stitch, the slight irregularity, the imperfection that reveals the personal investment and care in making. In other words, craft may not kill, but it is not dead, either.
Notes
1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex [1949], trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevailler (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2010), p. 634.
2 Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (London: Berg, 2007); Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
3 Karen Beckman has discussed the ongoing elision between feminism and terrorism; “Terrorism, Feminism, Sisters, and Twins Building Relations in the Wake of the World Trade Center Attacks,” Grey Room 7 (Spring 2002), pp. 24–39.
4 Anne Macdonald, No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting (Boston: Ballantine Books, 1988).
5 Ibid., p. 295.
6 See George Dennison and Peter Schumann, An Existing Better World: Notes on the Bread and Puppet Theater (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2000).
7 Victoria Mitchell, ed., Selvedges: Janis Jefferies, Writings and Artworks since 1980 (Norwich: Norwich Gallery, 2000), p. 39.
8 Allison Smith, Needle Work (St. Louis: Kemper Museum of Art, 2010), p. 39.
9 For one polemical look at Afghan war rugs, see Enrico Mascelloni, War Rugs: The Nightmare of Modernism (Milan: Skira, 2009).
10 Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan, curated by Max Allen, Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto, April 2008–January 2009.
11 Joan Livingston and John Ploof, eds., The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. vii.
12 Julie Jackson, Subversive Cross Stitch (New York: Chronicle Books, 2006); Melissa Alvarado et al., Subversive Seamster (New York: Taunton Press, 2007).
13 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984).
14 Betsy Christiansen, Knitting for Peace: Making the World a Better Place One Stitch at a Time (New York: STC Craft, 2006).
15 Betsy Greer, Knitting for Good: A Guide to Creating Personal, Social, and Political Change, Stitch by Stitch (Boston: Trumpeter Press, 2008). See also Greer, “Craftivist History,” in Maria Elena Buszek, ed. Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
16 Meg Mateo Ilasco, Craft, Inc.: Turn Your Creative Hobby into a Business (New York: Chronicle Books, 2007); Kari Chapin, The Handmade Marketplace: How to Sell your Crafts Locally, Globally, and Online (New York: Storey Publishing, 2010).
17 Alex Williams, “That Hobby Looks Like A Lot of Work,” New York Times (December 17, 2009), E1.
18 Eric Clarke, The Real Toy Story (New York: Free Press, 2007); see also Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (New York: Speigel and Grau, 2008).
19 Jane Lou Collins, Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.)
An artistic action is a class of action that is expressive of a will. It contains something more than just will in its unfolding. The will of each human being indicates a response to the specific conditions of that person’s existence. While that remains a constituent of every artistic action, the artistic action is supplemented by something that is more than what can be explained away by the necessities and circumstances of a single life in historic time.
Human existence presupposes points of contact between the individual human being and humanity, as well as between what it means to be human and the situation that human beings come into. We call these surroundings the world, the present, time, reality. At an ontological level, this envelope seems possessed of infinity. We appear to ourselves as relative, contingent, and fleeting in the presence of this infinity. It is in this sense that Kazuo Okakuro, the nineteenth-century curator, theorist, and interpreter of Japanese culture spoke of art and the aesthetic gesture in The Book of Tea: “The present is the moving infinity, the legitimate sphere of the relative. Relativity seeks Adjustment; Adjustment is Art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.”1
An artistic action is the means by which humanity adjusts the infinity of being to itself. It necessitates the calling forth of that within human beings that can participate in breaking the bonds of finitude, and act reciprocally to the plenitude of infinity. Rabindranath Tagore, in The Religion of Man, personifies this invocation as the “the angel of surplus” within human beings, “a surplus far in excess of the biological animal in Man, an overflowing influence that leads us over the strict boundaries of living, offering us an open space where Man’s thoughts and dreams could have their own holidays.”2
Although Tagore’s “angel of surplus” sings out to humanity to “rejoice,” in reality, the process of adjustment to infinity may be painful, pleasurable, abrasive, delightful, enervating, or stimulating. Howsoever its immediate experience may be colored, there can be no denying the fact that it transforms us from being “creatures” into becoming “creators” of the world. It enables us to make infinity speak through the language of contingency. Seen this way, an artist is the person who does not merely receive the world through her senses, but equally, the one who gives something back.
And yet, there is another sense in which the world comes to us as the network of constraints and possibilities constituted by the circumstances of the millions of lives around us, in historic time. Here the world is not a figure of ontology, but of history. Frequently, these circumstances, which we may also call society and politics, are marked by injustice and suffering. They propel us into rage and/or despair. They turn us into partisans and warriors. On the days when history and politics overshadow the ontological significance of the present, the world does not seem possessed of infinity as much as it does of constraints.
The action which we call artistic then has to deal with the fact that it exists in the interstices between senses of the self’s relation to the world: one possessed of infinity and plenitude and another constructed in response to constraints and limits. The politically committed are drawn to art because it offers them a mode of imagining realities other than the ones that constrain their being in the world, and artists are drawn to the arena of political action because their cultivation of a sensibility founded on plenitude is a resource that actually can have radical currency in an arena accustomed to the burden of constraints: the traffic between art and activism.
The significance of the artistic act lies in the disturbance of balance sheets, of taxes, of wages, and of war by a sense of immeasurable immensity, plenitude, and infinity. The altitude at which the comedian Harold Lloyd hangs on to a clock’s hands, suspended over Manhattan while maintaining a poker face in the silent film Safety Last (1920), renders the framework of this clock-time measurability momentarily inoperable through a gesture that is both supremely comic and absurdly beautiful.
The value of a work of art consists of its ability to arrest, even if temporarily, the stream of purposive acts and routine dispositions. It affords us a moment’s respite from the strain of maintaining a purely functional, quantifiable profile within the boundaries of a conflicted and abrasive situation. This is not a dismissal of the mundane, but an attempt to seek substance and plenitude in quotidian things, gestures, acts as one sees with them, and through them, with a kind of “second sight” into a zone that is not predetermined in terms of meaning by the way the world is administered and governed.
This respite is not like repose or slumber or rest or leisure or sleep. They all have been reduced to the function of replenishing the energies we have exhausted through labor, and are opportunities for the existing order to reproduce itself. This respite, on the other hand, works more like “time-out” in a game with only too well-established conventions. Sometimes, the contours of a new game can be discovered when the rules are in suspension—neither conformed to, nor yet concretely reinvented. It causes and inhabits an ontological rupture—time-out—a strike at time, at space and at being. Like the “time-out” when the game itself is changed and challenged, art offers an opportunity to glimpse the contours of the world, and ourselves, at a different state of play.
A work of art does not have to conform to, nor confirm, the established order of the world. Were a work to be constrained thus, it would have to fit into an extant necessity in the existing arrangement of the world, much like a plug would fit a socket. When worn, it would have to be replaced—so long as the need for its presence existed—by an item identical to itself. Things of beauty, things that amuse and entertain or inform, may fulfill such requirements.
Each move in art has the liberty to be, at least to some extent, unprecedented. That is why we sometimes feel that a work of art, like a sudden and beautiful turn in a football game, or a moment with a lover, has set us free. The rapture and exhilaration of such moments may be few, but as Nietzsche says in The Gay Science, without them, “life would be utterly unbearable, honesty would invariably lead to nausea and suicide.”3
A move made in a chess game played to pass the time in prison between inmates may be identical in appearance to a move played in a tournament between champions, and yet, nothing about what the move does to the players, and to time, is identical. Any move in art, like any ludic, playful gesture, has the same jewel-like ontological uniqueness both for the maker and for the beholder. This gesture strikes a chord, reminding the beholder that he, too, contains within himself something that is not reducible to the banal necessities of the circumstances of his life. The artistic gesture breaches the limits of personal finitude, even if inarticulately, to act in the world.
The early medieval aesthetician Bharata’s treatise on performance, Rasa Sutra, and the medieval Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta’s commentary on Bharata’s text, Abhinava Bharati, produce a seemingly unending taxonomy of affective states and correspondences across stances, somatic transformations, and emotional nuances that explodes any ordinary sense and understanding of how we come to think of a body inhabiting a structure of feeling in the terms of finitude.4
Here, emotions such as desire, love, fear, anger, joy, or sadness are refracted through a multitude of transient affect–enactment–recognition configurations into ever-expanding constellations of what it means to become human through the representation of different experiences and situations. Thus, a performer can be required to induce between self and beholder the aesthetic equivalent (the rasa, or distillation) of a neural dance between the hair-raising experience of anxiety to the goose-pimpled-tingling of anticipated erotic excitement with a detour into the storm of arousal. This plenitude of affect is a serious interruption in the cut and dried models of selfhood and interaction between self and other demanded of us by our time.
To accommodate this transition, the viewer will have to acknowledge that she is more than the person who eats and shits, who gets up to work and returns fatigued, who pays taxes, makes contributions to the gross domestic product, obeys traffic rules, reads the newspaper and redeems debts, who allows herself to be governed by saying “yes” and “no” in response to questions that cannot be answered with yes and no.
Art, like play, like the erotic, is nothing if it does not express our humanity. And our humanity is as generously capable of expansion as the bellows of a well-tuned accordion. What makes us human is the ability to persistently ask what makes us human and the corresponding unfathomable facility to create new conditions for being human. It is the capacity to discover things within us that were facilitated by our willingness to undertake the artistic act, to do the work that the work of art requires us to do.
This, more than anything else, defines our role as protagonists on the world stage. Here, the protagonist is the one who sets things into motion by witnessing what occurs when she asks the questions that reveal her own humanity to herself and the world, even and especially when this task is not without its attendant risks. What makes her a protagonist is the fact that she is not rendered immobile by her questions and the way she faces the world. This is an important difference from the stance of a critic, who, without a conception of creators, becomes overwhelmed by the way in which he constructs his criticism. In the first instance, the protagonist transforms her questions into the means by which she moves between being and becoming. In the second instance, the critic and the target of his criticism get locked in a death embrace.
Ultimately, art, play, and philosophy can ask that question, create those conditions, walk that path between being and becoming that cuts through the ties that entangle the critic. This can be done playfully, lightly, even whimsically. That is why play is sometimes called re-creation (in that the world, and we, are “re-created” through play). That is why art, at its best, is playful and philosophical at the same time. In other words, art may not be a means to ensure survival, but it certainly can be a reason for living.
Art can invoke in us the desire to do what it means for us to be beyond our obligations and necessities in historic time. It can awaken in us our sense of our ontological obligations to ourselves. If asked why we live, rather than how we live, we would have to answer in terms borrowed from the languages of play, dream, and art. None of this is useful in concrete or pragmatic terms, but it does not make it any less essential. The dying man confronting sublime music or remembering a striking image may desire it because it might seem to him to be essential to ensuring that the last moments of his life and his passage into death have a certain grace. This grace may be of no utility to anyone, but no one can deny its cardinal place in the map of human existence.
In the final analysis, as Nietszche says in The Birth of Tragedy, “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”5 If this is indeed the case, then the question at hand is not about what art needs to do in order to earn its rightful place in the world. Rather, it is a question of what kind of world we need to fashion in order for it to be able to answer and withstand the queries put to it by art. These queries are the way in which art acts on the world, and in the world. Art is action, in the sense that Hannah Arendt talks of action in The Human Condition: as insertions of human presence and beginnings into the world. As she says: “This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labour and not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born, and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative. To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin, to set something in motion.”6
Because human beings act, they make themselves unique through their actions in the world. This is what makes each human life as valuable as another (because each and all are unique in equal but not identical ways) and at the same time, this is what ensures that we cannot justify trading one human being for another. Human beings are not fungible entities because each person is new, and is renewed by his actions. The newness in them prevents the emergence of a common denominator that can act as an abstract unit of exchange mediating between them.
However, the assumed fungibility of human beings, of human actions, is a prerequisite of the way in which economy, society, and the state are organized. The congealment of human plenitude into the molds of citizen and alien, worker and unwaged, consumer and spectators, are the consequences of this reordering of the human condition to retrofit the necessities of the rule of capital. Actions give way to labor, to work, which enables the emergence of an arbitrary analytical category of the general equivalence of laboring in the world. The plugs we become to fit the sockets of this world require us to be bereft of significant portions of our humanity, especially of our actions. This is why the abstraction of wage labor, which slyly inserts fungibility into human affairs and relationships by creating an illusion of a transactable standard of a means to measure humans against the axes of production and time, violates the plenitude of every human individual. The aesthetic, because of its insistence on the incommensurability of an act against any grid that seeks to equate one act with another through an abstraction welded out of the measure of time and effort, is in perpetual insubordination to the rule of wage labor.
We do not say that a newborn child “replaces” an aged grandparent, merely because the productive years of the newborn are ahead of him, and those of the grandparent behind him. Similarly, unlike goods in general, no work of art can actually exchange for another, because, despite the market in art, there cannot be a functional equivalence between any two artistic expressions. One artwork cannot be made to do the “work” of another, nor does it make sense for us to say that it involves the same amount of “labor” as another artwork. Art, despite the hyperactivity of the art market, is nonfungible, because of its specific ontological status as an index of what it means to be human.
The condition of slavery strikes us as inhuman precisely because it presupposes the fungibility of human beings, and disregards what may be unique, untransactable, and impossible to replace in any human being who happens to be a slave. A world without art can only be possible in a world where every man believes himself to be enslaved, and where every slave believes in the eternity and infinity of his slavery. Conversely, a state where human beings cease to be fungible objects in any way for the purposes of political economy is only possible through the multiplication of acts that insist on the unique agency of every human being. It may well be that such a state may never be attained in its entirety, but the insertion of each new work of art into the world may takes us closer in the direction of its realization. The generalization of artistic agency may even lead to the disappearance of the figure of the artist, but that will be a minor price to pay for an infinitely richer, stranger and more joyous world, where all our senses (both the outer senses of hearing, touch and taste, but also the inner senses of balance, empathy, attraction and understanding) will be greatly amplified. It is in this sense that we can agree to Jacques Rancière’s insistence on the distribution of the sensible as a key to an understanding of why aesthetics, even while going beyond politics, is inherently political.7 The practice of art requires and demands that the distribution of the sensible be an open question. That the way we inhabit time, space, speech, belonging, be malleable to the ever-new possibilities opened out by artistic action.
Asking questions about how best we could spend time, about the quality of our experience of time, about what can be visible in the spaces common to us, what can be spoken and who can do the speaking: these are the things that art does when it acts in the world. And that is why, to act artistically is to constantly challenge the realm of constituted politics, in the name of all the things that can and cannot be named.
A dysfunctional world becomes obsessed with utility. Intriguingly, utility itself may be rendered dysfunctional because of the commonplace prospect of having to make utilitarian choices between a plethora of the identically useful, as in a store aisle where we confront a hundred different shapes of the same mineral water. Similarly, a political language premised on the alienation of subjects from sovereignty overcompensates for its obvious disenfranchisement by its insistence on the primacy of representation. The combustive upsurge of insurgent crowds and masses are quickly, and urgently, sublimated by means of identity and unity: The enabling trick of representative politics trades the ambitions of leaders against the aspirations and practices for possible new configurations of collective life. The post-upsurge-state’s violence towards strikers, critics, and dissidents bears out this fact time and again. In such circumstances, the freedom to be elusive and non-representable is sometimes the most alarming thing for regimes in order to maintain the circus of their rule.
Walter Benjamin says in his remarkable meditation on the storyteller, “The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.”8
The righteous man encounters his righteousness, his rights, because the story that he tells about himself inserts the novelty of his being into the world as a subject who acts, dreams, desires, thinks. We remember why Plato banished storytellers from his republic. Perhaps because he was worried that the slaves would recognize themselves in the yarns peddled by storytellers, and in doing so, begin imagining what it would be for them to act through their drives, capacities, motives, desires, opinions, thoughts, and with confidence. The republic would have to change. But for this to occur, many unspeakable things will need to be heard.
In a world where the humanity of a slave or any unrecognized being is not borne by any word, it will first have to make itself heard in silence, as an absence in an image.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence says, “what if language expresses as much by what is between words as by the words themselves. By that which it does not ‘say’ as by what it ‘says’. And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a language raised to a second power in which signs once again lead the vague life of colours, and in which meanings never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?”9 He goes on to make the remarkable claim that “Political thought itself is of this order” because our “theses” at any given time can only be “schematic formulations” that cannot accommodate within them “the excess of what we live over what has already been said.”10 And continues, “we must consider speech before it is pronounced, the background of silence which does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing. Or, to put the matter another way, we must uncover the threads of silence with which speech is mixed.”11
The political significance of art (a matter greater than mere politics as we know it) lies in the fact that each artwork comes laden with its own invocations pointing towards a range of possible dispositions because it proposes something specific and unique with reference to being itself. Such an action takes us beyond the horizon of the political into questions of ontology, and paradoxically, that is why it is so urgently political. The most political thing in the world is that which shows the limits of politics. It is at this limit that being seeks to assert in a manner that cannot be contained within the language of arrangements and rearrangements of power, within the vocabulary of rights and duties.
Just as being with a person compels us to consider the quality of time that we spend with them, and to gauge what it will mean to spend time without them.
Just as being with a person forces us to think of what it means to be intimate and to be apart, close enough to touch something or far enough to think of horizons or produce eddies within us.
Just as being with a person provokes us to think about the way power, attraction, respect, desire and a host of other attributes of relationality flow between us, let us float or confine us in knots.
Just as being with a person makes us think of how we see him, how we hear her, how we touch him, how her weight feels when we hold her, so too, a work of art makes us consider our senses, together or apart. It makes things sharp and keen or blunt or soft. It makes us think about the intensity of yellow, the feeling of a minor chord, the heft of justice, the balance of forces, the friction of contrarian desires, the collisions of truths and the aftertaste of a lie.
Much of life we pass through zones marked by the sign of the unknown. We do not know where we stand, we are uncertain of our destination, even whether or not we will arrive. Sometimes, the information we receive is of use; often it only bewilders us.
Perhaps, in undertaking such a journey, we would be wise to say, each time, with Nietzsche, “My time is not yet, the tremendous event is still on its way, it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time. The light of the stars requires time, deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant star – and yet they have done it themselves.”12
Like a deed done by the light of the most distant star, political action, illuminated by the imaginative amplitude produced by the work of imagination, requires time and even silence to unfold. Occasionally, art, like a telescope, can be a means by which it becomes possible for us to apprehend something that the “naked eye” of ordinary cognition would keep apart from us at the distance of a few light years. In such instances, the artistic act is the lens that transforms the optics of a situation, advancing a desire, telescoping what might take epochs into the intensity of a single moment of awareness and epiphany.
It requires the time to pass from one person to another and then to the multitude, and then back to the life of every individual. Art can foreshorten this time, but it cannot do away with it. It requires time, imagination and artfulness to pass, in each instance, from the sensed, the felt, the thought, the unsaid, to the said, the questioned, the answered, the decided and then to the done. Art is the playground where the desire for becoming more human than the world can account for at present continues to be tried on for size. In that playground, by the light of distant stars, we may recognize the artist as the angel of surplus at play.
Notes
1 Kazuo Okakuro, The Book of Tea (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2005), p. 58.
2 Rabindranath Tagore, “The Religion of Man,” in Sisir Kumar Das, ed., (A Miscellany) of The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume III (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008), p. 99.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Our Ultimate Gratitude to Art,” in The Gay Science (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 163.
4 Manjul Gupta, “Rasa,” in A Study of Abhinavabharati on Bharata’s Natyasastra and Avaloka on Dhananjaya’s Dasarupaka (Dramaturgical Principles) (New Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1987), pp. 215–243.
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” in The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 52.
6 Hannah Arendt, “Action,” in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) p. 177.
7 Jacques Rancière, “The Distribution of the Sensible,” in The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum Books, 2004), p. 12.
8 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Howard Eiland and Micahel W. Jennings, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–38 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 162.
9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, eds., The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 246, 248, 282.
10 Ibid., p. 248.
11 Ibid., p. 282.
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Parable of the Madman,” op. cit., p. 182.