Contemporary Art

Agency is the capacity of an individual (or group understood singularly) to operate, make decisions, and effect choices. It is not necessarily the same thing as subjectivity, although at times the terms are synonymous, describing a state in which artists, viewers, or both have the ability to construct and present identity and intention in the world. Agency is at issue for artist, audience, and content alike. At what point are artists just another cog in an economic machine that has little space for the role of culture, dissent, and intellectual inquiry? In what way can artists achieve a sense of agency? How might this relate to questions of aesthetics, of judgment, of the kinds of art presented to the world?

Contemporary artists and writers have used the concept of agency in diverse, complex, and ambitious ways. Agency is a condition, as Juliane Rebentisch argues in “Participation in Art: 10 Theses,” that contemporary art should strive to attain, especially as a kind of quasi-subjective dignity that has the ability to avoid being fixed or constrained to a deterministic model. And it is the goal of Tirdad Zolghadr to reveal in his essay “Fusions of Powers: Four Models of Agency in the Field of Contemporary Art, Ranked Unapologetically in Order of Preference” the various social conditions that make such a concept as agency possible. Having gained currency in the face of increasingly repressive politics in the last decade, agency has come to refer to abstract goals that have leftist, political implications.

Additionally, states of agency are posed as resistant to economic and cultural forces that attempt to instrumentalize artists, works of art, as well as the populace. T. J. Demos, for example, looks at the art of Yto Barrada, Emily Jacir, and Steve McQueen in his “Life Full of Holes: Contemporary Art and Bare Life” in order to see how it is possible to represent those with no political agency—those, to borrow from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who experience the condition of “bare life.” As Demos’s text suggests, the ramifications of the current economic and political landscape on the production and reception of contemporary art has become a source of fraught debate.

Participation in Art: 10 Theses

1 Within the framework of a very influential strand of modern aesthetics ranging from Theodor W. Adorno to Michael Fried,¹ participating in art means transcending one’s subjectivity and partaking in something that possesses universal validity. Universality is a core element of the respective notion of autonomy, which seeks to set art apart from the world of consumable things as well as from its reduction to the expression of empirical subjectivity. The notion of autonomy of art thus possesses an ethical dimension; in said modernist tradition autonomy is conceived as art’s emancipation from the ascendancy of the subject. By transcending individual expression and eluding consumption, the autonomous work demands that the subject adopt an attitude other than that of willful disposal vis-à-vis the work, namely an attitude of recognition. This constitutes the quasi-subjective dignity of the autonomous work. To the extent that the work can attain the quality of a subject in its own right, this quality must not be reducible to the empirical subjectivity of the artist or recipient.
Consequently Adorno believed—and Alain Badiou, whose work updates central motifs of aesthetic modernism, now believes—that the ideal artist is one who brings out an aspect within the work that both frees it from the artist’s individuality (its expression) and defies the logic of subjective command over the material. By committing herself to the project of releasing art into its autonomy (freeing it from all concrete subjectivity, including her own), the “artist” is to become the “representative of the total social subject.”² According to Adorno the subjectivity that manifests itself in the “work-subject”³ must therefore be free of all the limitations incumbent upon empirical forms of life and—hence—truly universal. “It is a We,” Adorno writes in his Aesthetic Theory, that speaks from art, “and not an I—indeed all the more so the less the artwork adapts externally to a We and its idiom.”⁴ For the side of aesthetic experience, this idea implies that participation in art must be conceptualized as partaking in this universality: The beholder, listener, spectator, or reader, by relating to the work, likewise is to overcome her own empirical situatedness. In Adorno’s ideal aesthetic experience, the work of art is not assimilated to the experiencing subject; rather, the latter assimilates itself to the work.⁵ What Adorno, adopting a Hegelian term, sometimes calls Dabeisein—“engagement” or, more literally, “being present to it”—“puts the recipient qua empirical psychological person out of action, which benefits his relation to the work.”⁶ Under these conditions, a tinge of utopia accrues to aesthetic experience: for to have an aesthetic experience then means to partake in the adumbration of reconciliation.
Contemporary art, by contrast, quite explicitly opposes the modernist overburdening of art with the utopian project of anticipating the nonexistent subject of a nonexistent total society. This project strikes many of today’s artists as corrupted: Modernist universalism has turned out, in too many respects, to be a particularism.

2 If this crisis of the utopian determination of art is indeed constitutive for many developments in art after 1960 that today fall under the rubric of “contemporary art,” what are the consequences to be drawn? The theory of “relational aesthetics” for example concludes from this crisis that the very idea of aesthetic autonomy must be regarded as irrelevant both for the theory and the practice of contemporary art. Instead of isolating art from life—and utopia from politics—in a modernist fashion, the advocates of relational aesthetics argue that both need to be transposed into a communicative practice that by virtue of being immediately inter-subjective counteracts social isolation and the capitalist corruption of structures of communication.⁷ In other words, instead of asserting art’s autonomy in order to represent a utopia unattainable to any concrete politics, art is to become an instrument of the practical-political realization of what is micro-topically possible: assisting in the creation of communicative social integration that enables social participation. In effect, however, this theoretical shift merely implements a paradoxical sublation of art into life that once again cements the difference between the ideal practice of art and a less-than-ideal reality. However, this difference is now a social difference: A communicative practice celebrates itself in the sheltered space of the art institution, relating to its other—a reality in which disintegration is otherwise prevalent—only from the distance of privilege.

3 Reducing art to a practical-political instrument of social integration moreover means eschewing any attempt to elaborate a concept of critical art that would enable us to think the fact that today’s art largely rejects the pathos of utopia along with the aesthetic quality of said art. By the same token, this reduction also blocks access to an alternative conception of what it means to participate in art, a different understanding of aesthetic participation. To approach this conceptual task, however, we must first seek to form a more accurate picture of the artistic opposition to modernism. The modernist-utopian definition of art is tied to the presumption that the work possesses a “second reality” divorced from all other reality.⁸ Contemporary art undermines this presumption. If the highly variegated developments of “contemporary art” can be reduced to a common denominator at all, it is that they radically call the system of the arts and the self-containment of the work into question. In most instances we are confronted with decidedly open works that destabilize the boundary separating the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic. Yet such destabilization, far from obviating the question regarding the specificity of the aesthetic, raises it anew.

4 Philosophical aesthetics responded to this challenge as early as the 1970s by turning to the category of aesthetic experience. Unlike modernist aesthetics, the theories of aesthetic experience that subsequently emerged no longer afford the work’s methodological primacy over aesthetic experience but, on the contrary, now give the aesthetic experience primacy over the work. The conflict between the modernist aesthetics of the work and contemporary theories of aesthetic experience turns on how exactly we are to conceive the interrelation of artwork and experience (as opposed to whether aesthetic experience is an important category as such). Modernist aesthetics begins with the assumption that the work is an objective given, understanding aesthetic experience to be the subsequent reconstructive apperception of the work’s structure. Theories of aesthetic experience conversely define the work as a product emerging from the process of aesthetic experience.
Art, in other words, is not an objective given but comes into existence in and by virtue of the experiences it releases—which also means that the difference between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic is no longer conceived as that between a self-contained work and what is external to it. According to this view, the aesthetic does not constitute a special domain separate from the non-aesthetic at all. The aesthetic exists instead in the process of becoming aesthetic. The aesthetic and the non-aesthetic do not relate to each other as mutually external; instead, the aesthetic consists in a specific transformation of the non-aesthetic. This also allows us to envision the aesthetic point of open work-forms. For the many fragments of ordinary life that can be found in today’s art do not simply dissolve that art into life. To the contrary, the pieces of reality incorporated into art become dissimilar to themselves in their becoming something other than what they were. They are neither simply reality,⁹ nor unambiguous signs for (another) reality. Precisely this ambivalence releases their representational potential: How and as what they appear to us is then inseparably tied up with us and the imagination’s share in our experience. This is dramatically emphasized by works that decidedly leave unanswered the question as to which elements should be regarded as elements of the work and which ones should not.

5 Because semblance cannot be cleaved from the aesthetic object, any meaning the work may acquire for us must always also withdraw back into the material from which it had emerged. This allows the materiality of the work to come to the fore. Aesthetic materiality is an effect of its tense relation to meaning and not its obtuse opposite, mere matter. This state of affairs is illustrated particularly well by pieces of reality isolated from their pragmatic functions and transposed into art. When Heimo Zobernig for example exhibits golden chairs, he primarily relieves them of any defined semantic charge. Yet the chairs are not simply left standing in their thingness, their facticity. The relationship between these chairs and meaning is rather indicated by the English preposition “without”; it is a paradoxical relationship, one with(out) the other. The reference to meaning, to something they potentially represent, remains essential to these chairs on exhibition even if this meaning can no longer be fixed unambiguously. They seem to be now the leftover props of a contemporary theater production; now the actors themselves, communicating with perfect eloquence with one another; now they form up into a golden pun on that modernist fetish, the Arne Jacobsen chair, which each one of them quotes; now they are uncannily disfigured, a legion of doppelgangers who eye each other with hostility; now they read as institutional critique, an exaggerated comment on the scarcity of seating in exhibition spaces; and so on.¹⁰ They develop a certain “spectrality,” as Jacques Derrida puts it;¹¹ they are always more, and something other, than what they are. The same holds true for the performing body no longer subjected to the task of representing a role. A performer like Xavier Le Roy can appear as an insect, a tender blossom, a mesmerizing diva—his body swollen with meaning. Yet, both examples show that aesthetic spectralization is not dematerialization, not spiritualization, to the contrary such spectralization is internally linked to a heightened awareness of the materiality of the exhibited things, or the physis of the performing body.

6 Seen in this perspective, participation or partaking in art means acting out tensions—the tension between materiality and meaning, but also between two incompatible attitudes that, taken as extremes, both designate exits from aesthetic experience: a “contentist” attitude on the one hand, and a “formalist” one on the other. That the tension between these two possible attitudes remains present within contemporary art is particularly evident in performance situations that know neither the distinction between stage and audience, nor a clear ontological separation between the real and fictional world. For such situations will not only render the physical presence of the actors more intensely: the intensity will, in a reflective movement, extend to the spectator. The latter is then no longer a consumer hiding in the dark, but rather an individual whose presence—and that includes his physical presence—influences the performance by virtue of his position in the room. A possible disruption of the event marks the remote horizon of the responsibility for the situation imposed upon the spectator, whether he is willing to accept it or not.¹² The reader need only think of the performances of Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, Santiago Sierra, or Christoph Schlingensief for vivid illustrations of the viability of this option. Yet any disruption of the performance, however moral its motives may be, inevitably cancels the aspect of theatrical production, negating the performance.
On the other hand, it is just as unhelpful to suggest, regarding performances that play with their own boundaries, that they are merely art and should thus be considered in purely formal terms. Something else is truly at issue: the creation of a tension between two attitudes that will inevitably disintegrate the unquestioned safety of the spectator’s position, and will do so to the degree that the boundary between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, between art and non-art, between reality and fiction, becomes the focus of aesthetic play. Yet such forms of contemporary performance art only dramatize a paradox that, as Alexander García Düttmann emphasizes, permeates the contemplation of all, at least all non-formalist, art: that it demands both an element of immediate belief in the world it opens up and an attention to its being art, its being mediated, which fractures that belief.¹³ Art then takes place to the extent that the paradoxical union of immediate belief in the world disclosed by the work on the one hand and advertence for the mediated character of the artwork on the other is acknowledged, and carried out.

7 This double nature of participation in art becomes acutely important regarding the emotional—or, affective, a term often misleadingly used as though it were synonymous—dimension of aesthetic experience. Unlike instincts and reflexes, emotions are not part of a stratum located, as it were, beneath the plane of meaning. Rather, emotions are themselves meaningful. They are interwoven in a great variety of ways with our assumptions about the world, informed by a normative praxis that is always linguistically mediated. We have learned to be ashamed, to feel revulsion; and we have learned to do so in relation to specific situations or objects. Emotions, that is to say, are not independent of the situations or objects that trigger them—or of our assumptions about them. To the contrary, interpretations of situations and objects usually first confer the contours of significance on our emotional agitations. Without knowing what someone’s emotions are about, or rather, without knowing her interpretation of what they are about, we will hardly be able to determine her emotional state.¹⁴
Now aesthetic experience will by necessity subject the connection between emotions and our normative orientations to a distancing re-presentation. It will do so, first, because the attention art demands to its mediated-ness conflicts with the immediacy of the emotional response it nonetheless provokes; and second, because the semantic openness of the work of art bends any interpretation, however immediate and even obtrusive it may seem to the recipient, back toward itself and the indeterminate materiality of the work. In a certain way, the emotions corresponding to her interpretations must then indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “become zero,”¹⁵ making the energies of affective agitation available for other semantic modulations, which is to say: for a different emotional meaning.

8 Conceived along these lines the artwork can never achieve the objective impartiality the modernist aesthetics of the work ascribed to it because it becomes a work only in and by virtue of the energeia of aesthetic experience. But because of the reflectivity of aesthetic experience, this does not imply that the work is powerless before the ascendancy of the recipient. “Aesthetic experience” must not be misunderstood as something the subject could, in an instrumental fashion make or, in a consumerist fashion, have. Rather, aesthetic experience designates a process that comprises subject and object alike and leaves neither unchanged. By implication the subject, too, undergoes transformation in its relation to the object, becoming an aesthetic subject. If the work is engendered as work only in and by virtue of the chains of associations it may call up in its beholders that means conversely that all meanings the same subjects may perceive in the work always also elude them; no such meaning can be conclusively and objectively bonded to the work. If the work is thus given to us forever only in the intangible and hence distanced mode of its appearance, we are always also referred back to ourselves and the social influences that have informed the ways we understand.
The subject of such experience is no longer the subject of modernism, transcending its particular situation by participating in art. Conceived instead as decidedly concrete and situated, this subject does not transcend her own empirical conditions but rather reflects on them in a specific fashion. If contemporary art, by opening up toward concrete social contexts, always also addresses the heterogeneous social composition of its audience, that does not entail, pace Alain Badiou’s apprehensions,¹⁶ an affirmation of the given—as though such art merely confirmed the differences society has determined. The experience of such works opens the subjects to themselves by virtue of a figure of reflective self-estrangement. The subjects of this experience are referred back to themselves precisely to the degree to which they cannot simply situate themselves vis-à-vis the objects in an identificatory fashion—the degree to which their own conditioning confronts them as alien in the mode of aesthetic semblance. If art can indeed effect a change in consciousness that may spill over into political attitudes, it does so, in the perspective of more recent aesthetics—that is to say, the aesthetics of experience—not because it breaks with our finite worlds from the supercilious position of an “elevated […] star” (Badiou¹⁷), but because in the semblance of art we encounter these same worlds in a different way.
Incidentally, the ethical-political potential of such experience is demonstrable not least in works that are generally considered to be representative of “relational aesthetics.” Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work Lover Boys (1991), for instance, a heaped-up pile of sweets, harbors potential not by virtue of the mere fact that the beholder can take some candy—that would be neither aesthetically nor politically significant. Rather, the work achieves expressive force only as we reflect on the discomfortingly unfathomable question of how taking a candy relates, or would relate, to the information that the weight of the pile is equal to that of the body of the artist himself, who died of AIDS in 1996, plus that of his lover, who also died of AIDS in the early 1990s.¹⁸ With regard to the suggested invitation to participate, every beholder is quite alone before this work. The inter-subjectivity such works broach does not consist in the concrete audience that happens to meet before a work at any given time. What becomes thematic in every individual beholder’s own reflection, rather, is the inter-subjectivity of our cultural and social praxis, which always already informs our experiences. A work of this sort, that is to say, develops ethical-political potential not by forming random groups, but by provoking reflective attention to those inter-subjectively formed convictions that—in individually specific ways—constitute us as historically and socially situated subjects.

9 Participation in art thus acquires a specifically aesthetic meaning. Its specific reflectivity distinguishes it from understanding as much as from acting (therein lies the distinction, the difference or autonomy of the aesthetic vis-à-vis theory as well as practice). Accordingly, interpretations fall short that misread the fact that open works sometimes challenge their recipients to participate in their production as the expression of a practical “democratization” of the production of art. As Umberto Eco has insistently pointed out, the open form does not abolish the asymmetry between the artist and her audience.¹⁹ Instead, the audience’s interventions into the work are part of the artistic calculation; they take place within a horizon delineated by the artist even when the very frame separating art from non-art becomes the object of engagement.
What is at stake here is best illustrated by the significance of open works in the allographic arts, where such work-forms radically expand the zones of indeterminacy that have always existed between the work as (prescriptive) script (notation, choreography) and its interpretation in the performance, expanding them to the point where the script can no longer accomplish what Nelson Goodman has argued is the script’s primary function: to keep a work identifiable from performance to performance, from interpretation to interpretation.²⁰ Yet such ways of calling the identity of the work in question in the register of the (open) work reflect a fundamental insight into the constitutive function of processes of interpretation for the autonomous life of the work of art itself. Any work of art, Eco writes, is constitutively open “to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings.”²¹ But as open works illustrate with particular vividness, this does not imply that the individual interpretation is doomed to arbitrariness. Any execution and performance of a graphical notation, for instance, lays complete and even absolute claim to fidelity to the work, while also retaining awareness of the fact that it is one among infinitely many possible interpretations. But the tension between the aspiration to fidelity and the awareness of contingence that accompanies any attempt to live up to that aspiration is a specific feature of the engagement with art in general.
Participation in art, then, implies more than the literal-practical fabrication of one of its manifestations or the establishment of a meaning. Participating in art always also means partaking in the potentiality—or spectrality—of the work. It means experiencing its infinity.

10 The idea of a quasi-subjective dignity of the work of art that constitutes the ethical core of the modernist notion of autonomy returns transformed. Whereas the modernist aesthetics of the work recognized the autonomous dignity of the work in its self-sufficient closure, theories of aesthetic experience stress its potentiality. The work accordingly attains a quasi-subjective character not by possessing this or that determinate quality, but on the contrary by forever exceeding the determinations it may take on in relation to any beholder, listener, spectator, or reader. The ethical idea of a quasi-subjectivity of the work of art then corresponds to a theory of the subject that emphasizes that the subject is always being and becoming at once. We in fact often feel a strange sting when someone we do not know very well says something perfectly true about us: you are x. We then hasten to demonstrate that that is not everything we are, that we are also y and z and an infinite number of other things. Much though we yearn to be recognized for “who we really are,” we also suffer when, as Helmuth Plessner puts it, the judgment of others determines and “finitizes” us.²² It is not by accident that the spheres of love and friendship are where the individual receives the most comprehensive form of recognition. For unlike in the sphere of social appreciation, where we are recognized for the way we perform our various social roles, the recognition we experience in love and friendship also addresses our potential in excess of all social roles. We are fond of the friend or beloved not merely on the basis of his or her actual being this or that at any given time. Friendship and love, especially in their erotic dimensions, always also aim at the potentiality of the other. Friendship and love, then, exist essentially in and as the play of revelation and withdrawal, of actuality and potentiality whose dynamism keeps us in a lively relation to the other, rendering our recognition a constant challenge. To the extent that the work of art, conceived along the lines of a theory of experience, can likewise never be conclusively known but always only recognized, its quasi-subjective dignity consists precisely in its eluding any objectifying determination. That is why we sometimes return to works of art as though to good friends—why they mean more to us than mere objects, and why we can in their presence be more, as well as something other, than subjects who dispose of objects.

1 For a detailed analysis of this line of ethical-aesthetic thinking in modernism cf. Juliane Rebentisch, Ästhetik der Installation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).

2 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Artist as Deputy,” in Notes to Literature, vol. I, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 98–108, here p. 107.

3 Alain Badiou, “Manifesto of Affirmationism,” trans. Barbara P. Fulks, lacanian ink 24 (Winter 2005), www.lacan.com/frameXXIV5.htm (accessed March 6, 2011).

4 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 220.

7 Cf. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2002), especially pp. 8–10.

8 Rüdiger Bubner, “Über einige Bedingungen gegenwärtiger Ästhetik,” in Ästhetische Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 33.

9 That was Peter Bürger’s claim in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 78.

10 Cf. Juliane Rebentisch, “Parva Theatralia,” in Heimo Zobernig and the Tate Collection, exh. cat. (St Ives: Tate, 2009), pp. 68–71, here p. 69.

11 “A masterpiece always moves, by definition, in the manner of a ghost.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 18.

12 On the concept of the situation, see also Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 122–125.

13 On this point cf. Alexander García Düttmann, “QUASI. Antonioni und die Teilhabe an der Kunst,” Neue Rundschau 4 (2009), pp. 151–165.

14 For a more detailed discussion, see Christiane Voss, Narrative Emotionen: Eine Untersuchung über Möglichkeiten und Grenzen philosophischer Emotionstheorien (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004).

15 Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Percept, Affect, and Concept,” in What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 163–199, here p. 169.

16 Cf. Alain Badiou’s polemic against the “abolition of the universal” in favor of a “total exposition of particularisms” in his “Manifesto of Affirmationism.”

18 Nicolas Bourriaud did not fail to notice such dimensions in the work of Gonzalez-Torres, which he in fact described in detail. Yet these descriptions are always at odds with other passages in which he attempts to construe the public of a work of this sort as a community, however limited in time and intrinsically fragile it may be. Cf. Nicolas Bourriaud, “Joint Presence and Availability: The Theoretical Legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” in Relational Aesthetics, pp. 49–64, here especially p. 55.

19 Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1–23.

20 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), pp. 179–192, especially pp. 187–192.

22 Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft: Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), p. 64; translated as The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism, trans. Andrew Wallace (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), p. 100.

Fusions of Powers: Four Models of Agency in the Field of Contemporary Art, Ranked Unapologetically in Order of Preference

Drawing on personal experience as a writer and curator, I’ll circumscribe four distinct approaches to the notion of agency in an order that reflects my personal sympathies. Stringent definitions of “agency” are less pressing, I find, than understanding the atmospheres the term creates: agencies of agency, if you will. Among the different tenors I will discuss, a first de-emphasizes agency by defining the art as a strictly inconsequential affair; a second, not necessarily an antithesis of the former, believes agency to be both related and possible qua art. A third model sees agency as inconsequential and as a kind of withdrawal from engagement, while the last model treats agency as a given, emphasizing the inevitable consequences of the arts. This last example rallies not for a fusion of powers but for the spirit of checks and balances. In politics proper, the former system advocates unfettered efficiency, while the latter suggests a multiplicity of actors who willingly get in each other’s way, thereby tempering the damage a government is wont to wreak upon its surroundings. Agency here becomes a cause for damage control, not a best-case scenario, an ambrosial political resource to be rescued from the bowels of the art-world apparatus.

By and large, the predominant self-image of the arts is that of a harmless adolescent, full of dreams and ideals—but dwarfed by a gargantuan entertainment industry. I’d like to suggest a less cherubim insignia: A kid clumsily toying with a handgun, behind the wheel of a moving car with the headlights off. If we took this very book as an example, and compared it to, say, Tony Blair’s memoirs, the scope is seemingly negligible. But time and again, we’ve seen similarly innocuous publications trickle down through generations of students and authors. Chances are that everything from the conditions it offers its writers to the way it circulates as a textbook commodity advocating a sweeping meta-narrative of art (which in turn facilitates its circulation as a commodity) will leave unmistakable traces. This is where the potential for agency is quite impressive.

Now to clarify my position: If I can only rarely sympathize with the first two ideal types, I often find myself championing the third, and generally describe myself as a fairly typical specimen of the fourth. To state the obvious, the moods I describe tend to blend, overlap, morph, and transfigure. They’re atmospheres, not baseball teams. This is less about pinpointing individuals and the teams they root for, than about a mood that is set in a room when one discourse rather than another is resorted to. So if I have my preferences, I’ve nevertheless been guilty of subscribing to all variations at some point or other.

Indefinite Postponements

The notion of art being as inconsequential as actors screaming fire in a Broadway theater is sometimes a melancholic outlook. Art ideally should, but realistically cannot, harbor agency beyond the representational. The best art can do is acknowledge its chains and shackles to the circumstances designed by the powers that be. This position need not be melancholic necessarily, but can also be mediated by a rather chipper sense of faith in the unmeasurable, unthinkable, undefinable. Kant of the Third Critique is quoted; the political grist of Martha Rosler is regretted; and art’s status beyond any measure of functionality becomes a badge of pride.

What is striking here is the common ground as regarding art’s place in the world, whether the tone is melancholic or chipper. Both positions regard the notion of art’s agency as sheer superstition and prosopopeia: as pixie dust, curatorial snake oil, or an example of what Deleuze and Guattari have termed “fabriquer un bon Dieu pour les mouvements géologiques” (declaring what are inevitable tectonic movements to be proof of someone’s sovereign actions). By and large, this model is the most soothing of all temperaments regarding agency in the arts, for it’s the one that is least wracked with paradoxical imperatives exhorting one to action.

Both the chipper exclamations—art as the untouchable “over yonder”—and the melancholic pleas—art as agent, handmaiden, pawn, decorator, steward, geisha, lapdog, or court jester of “the bourgeoisie”—are rarely marked with unadulterated discomfort. To be sure, one of the most graceful ways to engage in conversation at an opening is to regretfully assert one’s relationship to something termed the bourgeoisie, to be an example of repressive tolerance, excessive tolerance, or repression tout court, and yet to insist the relationship is a mysteriously productive one, indeed melancholically so. Art’s co-optation by the bourgeoisie is inevitable, one can sadly burble, since there’s nothing more bourgeois than being critical of the bourgeoisie.

The tacit assumption here is that the artistic and the bourgeois have become one and the same thing. The irony being that in order to more precisely understand and describe who has really profited from art’s relationship to the bourgeoisie one must successfully define the latter as something other than art itself. It is also necessary to then devise adequate abstract models with which one could embark on a long-term tracking of the behaviors of all decisive actors in this very relationship. Despite the occasional journalist tracing price data in auction house inventories, no such thing has been devised for the arts. And until this is done, the show must go on, at least until further notice of a better idea than the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

Underlying the appetite for indefinite postponement is not only the sweetness of hazy suspension, but also the promise of ultimate redemption from the current state of innocuous limbo. This is a pattern that is patently visible in many different places, from particular, stringent strands of academic Marxism (Terry Eagleton, for example) to those who partake in the field with staggering success, albeit with that apologetic air of being knowingly shackled to the bourgeoisie. Art harbors within it a hint of meaning that will become apparent on judgment day, but for now, art, according to this model of indefinite postponement, it cannot conjure a counter-public sphere into existence. It cannot even fully exist until such a sphere has come into existence first.

Catholics

The following conception of agency is one that staunchly believes in a potential for positive transformations both beyond art and qua art. Even when this version of agency comes to hands-on interventions in the social realm, what is usually seen as the strongest part of the contribution is not the actual activism itself, but the representation thereof—the possibility to put things on the map. In this instance, the rationale of the respective art projects is not fundamentally different from that of photojournalistic and humanitarian endeavors. Even Doctors Without Borders see their agency—at least partly—in drawing attention to crisis zones in a manner that disregards boundaries between institutions, disciplines, nation-states, and ideologies.

Among the many means or media deemed adequate for good causes, shaming is a popular choice: shaming not only the bourgeoisie in all its contemporary iterations, but also shaming peers and colleagues who do not adhere to one’s political ethos. Shame is a primordial force that links knowledge to action not by physical contact but by consciousness alone, making it an attractive mode of agency to photojournalists and artists alike.¹ Karl Marx once famously said to Arnold Ruge that shame can be a revolutionary sentiment, “a kind of anger turned inward.” It is potentially like “a lion, crouching ready to spring.”² The dialectical pendant to shame is probably pride, akin to Martin Luther’s “Hier steh ich und kann nichts anders.” Here I stand and cannot do otherwise. The trouble with this prototype, still widely taught as a glittering jewel of political principle, as critic Mark Cousins once remarked, is that it obfuscates what exactly is being “done” by virtue of insisting so doggedly on what is being “stood” for. In other words, what is represented takes precedent over what is actually being enacted.

Art is undoubtedly transformative, but it’s always fascinating when people assume it transforms things for the better, along an authored axis comparable to a grassroots petition or a soup kitchen. I’m not objecting to the idea of an industry as hierarchical, exploitative, compromised, and ideologically contradictory, as the arts being a self-evident agent for change we can believe in. I’m happy to go with exceptions to the above modus operandi, be they few and far between. But I also believe a sober assessment of art’s empirical track record be can be tremendously helpful in any effort to understand how art always already is an arena of political agency, usually for the worse, if not necessarily so. Whether you’re publishing a book, curating a biennial, or teaching a class, you are always already forming such an arena with your students, artists, writers, or administrators. Unfortunately, our focus seems forever to remain on the arena beyond the classroom or commissioning process. What will the students do once they enter “The Real World”? How many readers will the book reach? What results when the character, quality, and political spirit of the book, the classroom, or the biennial are primarily marked by what happens during the commissioning process, the teaching method, or the conditions of production behind the scenes?

Allow me to share an anecdote recounted to me by artist and curator Hongjohn Lin. During the Taipei Biennial 2008, a violent demonstration against a visiting Chinese official unfolded near the museum, which left the artists, largely of activist disposition, depressed and frustrated. How impotent the video installations look when compared to the grand roar of the streets! To state the obvious, whenever art is compared to tear gas and burning cop cars, it will look pretty frivolous, which in turn leads to the predictable aforementioned economy of shame and shaming, and to the sinking feeling that the symbolic, aesthetic, and representational are not enough. It bears mentioning that there are few things more symbolic, aesthetic, and representational than a burning cop car. This is not to say that the symbolic, the aesthetic, and the representational are inconsequential. The contrary is precisely my point.

Conspirateurs Professionnels

Thirdly, we have the gentle rebels: The multitudes of flâneurs and other fine souls united by a notion of the arts being some kind of accidental, open-ended conspiracy. The key idea here is that it is best to forget the shame of inefficacy and embrace it instead. Perform marginality, espouse latency, celebrate those pockets of semi-failure and hyper-ambiguity as a way of braving the predominant culture of high performance in a context of rampant post-Fordism. A man with a mandate, these “multidudes” will tell you (artist Dirk Herzog), is never free, for he has to act. The highest form of power, by contrast, is the privilege not to act.

Often, this distinctively Bartleby-inflected mindset is defined by a soft spot for the obtuse, the incommensurable, the unnamable, the Third Meaning. This is equally important to my first iteration of agency, indefinite postponement, but gentle rebels regard the ethics of open-endedness not with melancholia or cynicism, but will elevate it to the purest form of agency art can possibly offer.

Often the mindset is equally informed by a certain number of Italian theorists, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Giorgio Agamben etc., who are not homogeneous in disposition. Much like the impossible unity of French poststructuralist theory, the Italian corpus suggests a shared history, an “instinctive understanding of the strength in numbers that comes from a national cultural identity.”³ This, in actuality, is an apt description of how commodification and agency can successfully and productively go hand in hand, especially when—to varying degrees—the national-intellectual corpus in question grapples with comparable shades of biopolitical exodus. How to use powers vested in your creativity, your mobility, your emotional intelligence, even your pleasures, against a system that demands them?

These are some of the concerns at the crux of what might be called the biopolitical turn. Can your reproductive organs, your refusals, your bare life (to borrow Agamben’s term) be used as a weapon? This line of thought is at its most productive when coupled with an uncompromising departure from forms of teleologies or eschatologies, in favor of an investment in, and conceptualization of, the agency of pleasure in the here and now. If the means and the process are just as significant as proscenium and outcome, then a form of enjoyment that rigorously uncouples itself from any form of biopolitical instrumentalization is key. Agency thereby amounts to what is enacted, not what is resisted.

In 2008, the last Italian communist was voted out of parliament, and with his departure a complex of cultural phenomenon including the feste dell’unita, the tradition of operas and lectures held for workers in factory halls, met its end. What, then, can operaismo—the term that most generally forms the common ground between the above gentlemen to whom this model is indebted to—mean today, in a context where another kind of “factory hall” still host lectures, the Kunsthalle, which remind us not of Gramsci but of lofts we cannot afford? Withdrawal is a questionable strategy, especially when it becomes a substitute for structure, given that globalization as we currently know it has become so formidably successful at making capital mobile while domesticating everything else. This is why it seems that the idea of momentary tactics, employed project-by-project, position-by-position, only seem to confirm that if a position is defined by its opponents it lacks its own agenda. You can stylize withdrawal into a unique selling point of the arts, and maintain that art must exist beyond market demand, redefining its mandate again and again. But eventually, you will need to account for the fact that the selling point of art is not as unique as it sounds, for even capitalism itself is well beyond catering to demands. It actively defines them.

Atheist Choir Boys

Inefficacy is not an option if you consider that, through long-term, circuitous routes of mainstream fashion, advertising, politics, and pedagogy, the arts have monumentally effected society at large. From the 1960s conceptualists to the Young British Artists of the 1990s, artists can look back on a proud tradition of not just decorating or chaperoning but updating and refining the spirit of capitalism at large.⁴ Again, the challenge for any theory bereft of a social movement is that of the wider hegemonic context becoming decisive. If you’re unfortunate enough to cling to the possibility of social movements informing your political theories, you must first, in my opinion, proceed to patiently interpret the prerequisites of conditions for such movements to emerge.

To return to French critical theory, poststructuralist philosophers prominently refused to see their contributions as discursive toolboxes for the movements unfolding around them in Paris and beyond, espousing instead a mentality of avowed restraint that embraced the institution as an arena for critique and reflexivity. Poststructuralists were operating in a comparatively vibrant context, and were widely accused of being lame ducks. Today, the art world underestimates these texts once again, using them as critical karaoke because there’s so very little we can otherwise share across space and time, project-by-project, position-by-position. Great theorists offer the warm comfort of family anecdotes recounted over Skype, frequently that evergreen of agency folklore: making-the-reader-a-writer. Sometimes we add that we need to abandon the position “next” to the proletariat. This is all good and true, but it lacks the reflexive rigor of the maîtres themselves. Publishers, curators, and lecturers roll out rigorous theorizations of political positioning to highlight good intentions or to define the idea of agency. Once again, I’d venture that, more often than not, the application of these theories to what happens within the actual editorial, curatorial, or pedagogical process would unearth a number of weird and wonderful contradictions.

As a fairly stereotypical writer/curator in many respects, I’m never really sure which type of knowledge it is I am pursuing, let alone the operations through which it’s being put into practice. I’d be the first to defend the Narrenfreiheit (unbridled freedom) of the arts, seeing its trans-professional porosity as one of the few perks it has to offer. The assumption, however, that curatorial concepts and artist projects constitute a benevolent cottage industry of criticality never accounts for the fact that compared to other cultural activities, contemporary art is a formidable example of self-exploitation, post-Fordist propaganda, semi-academic posture, and professional blackmail. Audiences, students, interns, political minorities, pop cultures, and painful local histories are being cuteified, tokenized, plagiarized, instrumentalized and condescended to, one venue after another.

Let’s take one of the more hands-on activist protagonists of the poststructuralist pantheon: Michel Foucault’s “Society Must Be Defended.”⁵ Even Foucault would typically introduce rigorous measures of self-reflexivity on four to five different levels in any given lecture. In “Society Must Be Defended,” he contextualizes his work in terms of traditional academia (the “great and tender freemasonry of useless erudition”) and of a new intellectual movement unfolding around him (a “contemporary efficacy of discontinuous narratives”), before introducing his own agenda (the return of subjugated knowledges and “noncentralized theoretical production”). But he also mocks his own lecture notes as props for public performance, only then to define a thème du jour, that of “power as war by other means” (which in itself would be relevant here incidentally). With its barrage of self-positioning, a text of the kind imposes a punishingly reflexive disposition, one that achieved an unprecedented politicization of knowledge across the universities internationally.

Strategic Essentialism

One Agency. One Community. […] We hold ourselves—and each other—to the highest standards. We embrace personal accountability. We reflect on our performance and learn from that reflection (CIA mission statement).

Lest I be accused of being a hyena and a curmudgeon once again (“Tirdad hates art”) allow me to sincerely concede that art can be undeniably empowering, even magically so. But what I’m arguing is nothing more odious than the fact that agency should also be traced within the field itself, not in faraway lands. The dynamics unfolding daily in your gallery, your classroom, even your inbox, are not comparable to those in a sweatshop, but are both more challenging to articulate, and have far more impact on the work you’re actually producing. Incidentally, the faraway lands beyond the Euro-American metropolis are where the brash calls for outright agency become downright hazardous, as I try to argue below. This is where the traumatic referent is irresistibly fresh and gleaming, this is where the art is to document, reflect, address the context around it, and thereby offer a veneer of the agency we in the Euro-American exhibition machine supposedly lack. Just as long as the work offers formal chestnuts, suggesting it “complicates-our-relationship-to-reality,” boundaries can be successfully blurred between basic political intelligence and airline bonus miles.

It’s an interesting case of the aforementioned rift between theory and context. Seeing as there’s a chronic lack of art infrastructure in places such as Tehran, Nicosia, and Murcia, international art-world attention can be useful provided local actors can fine-tune the disproportionate weight of faraway support systems. Transnational funders, critics, and curators must always pay attention to developments in government relations and curatorial trends, and are liable to change priorities at a moment’s notice.⁶ Moreover, transnational incentives in the form of curatorial attention, critical fascination or hard cash can spark longstanding, toxic antagonisms between those who are deemed worthy and those who are not. This introduces a new perspective among the more worthy practitioners, who are no longer answerable to the very city context that lent them all the mana to begin with.

To some extent, this is inevitable. To think that art can be globalized without a moderate degree of epistemic violence is idiotic. However, this does not absolve the globalizers from an attentiveness to the act of “reining in.” As opposed to a dogged belief in agency through innocently “reaching out.”⁷ Art-world practitioners are usually well aware of the interests underpinning the expansion of contemporary art, and the fact that few things are as potent as women’s rights, fiscal restraint, and conceptual art to reassure foreign visitors. Admittedly, it’s hard to reflect these things in your own practice, but surely, at the very least, one can refrain from cutesy tropes of international exchange. To be sure, this is not about the nobility of depth. On the contrary, the idea that local context needs to be dug up and carefully accounted for, like Ginseng shoots or childhood traumata, is possibly the most destructive of all. Instead, and I’m aware this will sound as wistful as a UNICEF Christmas calendar, what’s implied here is a methodology based on an ethics of prolonged listening, which implies in turn that there should be an awareness of limits and limitations, checks and balances—an acceptance to keep one’s site-specific opinions to oneself every once in a while, which, no doubt, is a highly distressing exercise for your average arts professional.

What makes it so unsettling is both the tenacious sense of entitlement to an opinion always and everywhere, and the even more tenacious division of labor between the material and the narrative overlay, the work and the discourse, the mediated and the mediation. What to do with, say, a potential locus of agency that is mediated in a nonverbal, contingent, fleeting manner, and is easily eclipsed due to issues of language skills, pure and simple, or due to the text/image duality which implies the former is to the latter as speech is to action, or thought is to bodies, and which structures the field’s most central modi operandi? The frame of this essay will hardly allow for my own flimsy, tenuous answers to this question. Suffice to say that if editors, curators, and lecturers used half as much verbosity to address their own work, as opposed to covering the objects of their attention in narrative bombast … well that wouldn’t be so bad.

The reason it’s pertinent to drag in such a devastatingly enormous topic, so late in the essay, is because it pertains to the way agency-as-action and agency-as-body are routinely merged into one. Through a blinding gesture of mutual reinforcements, the doing and the doer both become visible in one fell swoop. Prompting magically adequate expressions with miraculating potential, allowing one to speak through a socius, as an agent thereof. It’s what many call “essentialism,” which is basically a question of form over context. The postcolonial school likes to uphold essentialisms that are strategic and well chosen, of which I believe “Euro-American art world” is an example. Much as “art world” subdivides the Catholics or the Conspirateurs, or the Atheist Choir Boys, the “strategic” element in the strategically essentialist equation, in the best of cases, amounts to persistent deconstructive critique of the theoretical and discursive overlay, with “persistent” in turn meaning a critique that unfolds also—but not exclusively–at the moment of triumph. Here’s the challenge: To critique persistently whether you’re addressing someone who is lying face down in the gutter, hungover, heartbroken and bankrupt, having just witnessed a biennial and all of its glittering agency, or whether you’re addressing the biennial itself.

1 Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2004), p. 103.

3 Timothy Brennan, “The Italian Ideology,” in Debating Empire (London: Verso, 2003), p. 100.

4 As by now very famously explained in Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski’s New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007).

5 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended“: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (London: Picador, 2003).

6 cf. Noushin Ahmadi, “Paved with Good Intentions: Political Opposition and the Pitfalls of International Support,” Bidoun 5 (Fall 2005).

7 Eloquently described in the opening chapters of Timothy Brennan’s At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Life Full of Holes: Contemporary Art and Bare Life¹

In her recent series of photographs, Yto Barrada glimpses at life slipping away from law. A street in Tangier appears in one image from a bird’s-eye view, an angle that centers sight on the ground, crops out the urban surrounds, and renders the space depicted nondescript but consequently generates a richness of metaphorical play: While the pavement seems to melt into a sea across which an old schooner sails, the street’s horizontal expanse alternately transforms into a vertical wall that bars visual passage as if to block escape. The image visualizes a geopolitical conflict that is ironic. Whereas such colonial vessels once transported the glory of European civilization to darkest Africa, their current-day avatars suggest only an imaginary return voyage that occurs in reality against enormous odds. The ship, actually an intricate model named “Le Détroit”—also French for “The Strait”—is carried across Tangier’s Avenue d’Espagne by a young man peripherally located in the corner of the image. He holds the vessel at shoulder level, which obscures his face, removing his visage from the camera’s visual access. This representational dislocation, the blurring of human being and boat that distances a man from his community, is the visual effect of a figure becoming the vanishing point of citizenship.

Barrada, a Moroccan artist based in Tangier, has for several years concerned herself with the Strait of Gibraltar, that contentious divide between Africa and Europe where two continents nearly touch but mobility is strictly regulated.² A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1998–2004), represents this area less as vivid geography than as zone of desire, one split between the would-be émigré’s longing for escape and the expatriate’s homesickness. In the image of the street in Tangier the turbulence between these two positions seems to lift our vantage point to a disembodied height, the uncertainty of which indicates the ungrounding of any single interpretation. Pledged to a certain ambiguity, the scene depicts not only a drama of displacement but also the experiential conditions of the refugee that have already seeped into everyday life.

I begin with this provocative photograph because it both inspires and provides one answer to a question I am left with after considering Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” meaning, here, life stripped of political identity—as in the case of the refugee—and reduced to mere biological existence:³ How can one represent artistically a life severed from representation politically, and what are the implications regarding agency of such an artistic representation?

In his essay “Beyond Human Rights,” Agamben makes a startling declaration: “Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinity of state-nation-territory, it deserves instead to be regarded as the central figure of our political history.”⁴ If so, then our understanding of subjectivity must surely change, and with it the philosophical basis of human rights. Because the refugee—a figure Agamben comes to generalize radically, referring to voluntary expats, destitute asylum-seekers, and economic migrants—presents the very instantiation of bare life, insofar as the refugee exists outside of the nation-state, it exposes the “originary fiction” of national sovereignty. “Rights, in other words, are attributed to the human being,” Agamben notes, “only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately vanishing presupposition (and, in fact, the presupposition that must never come to light as such) of the citizen.”⁵ For if this realization—that human beings have no inalienable rights—ever did come to light, as it does precisely in the case of the refugee, so would the realization that rights are assigned arbitrarily, and thus unjustly, by virtue of one’s nationality.

For me, these theoretical questions are not marginal to contemporary artistic practice; indeed they go right to its heart, as they endow art with urgency in this time of crisis in relation to political being. And they constitute the central issues that are systematically explored by those artists whose work is currently among the most compelling in the contemporary field. I will consider here examples from only three—Steve McQueen, Emily Jacir, and Yto Barrada—but certainly my list is incomplete. The representing of bare life, of course, is not my concern alone. Not only did the intersection between art and bare life form, most notably, a significant thematic component of Documenta 11 (2002), organized by Okwui Enwezor, it was also enlisted in the conceptualization of Documenta 12 (2007), directed by Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack, and included as a central concern of its international magazine project. In addition, the topic of art’s relation to bare life has been taken up in numerous critical studies and has informed several art exhibitions ever since.⁶

How can one document bare life? The two terms might appear homologous: Just as bare life is life severed from political identity, so, too, documentary representation is representation reduced to its essence, shed of aestheticization.⁷ According to Enwezor’s formulation, “The meaning of the term ‘documentary’ that was of philosophical interest to our main purpose in Documenta 11 … refers to Giorgio Agamben’s idea of bare life or naked life.”⁸ There seems to be a necessary link between the two, so that the existence of bare life, as an essential form of life, is somehow its own documentary realization. Enwezor complicates this equation by hybridizing “the documentary mode” (defined as “a purposive forensic inclination concerned essentially with the recording of dry facts”) by joining it to “the idea of vérité” (“a process of unraveling, exploring, questioning, probing, analyzing, and diagnosing a search for truth”).⁹ Still, one might question the basis of this homology altogether, arguing conversely that the negativity of bare life, of life as absence within the political field, can simply not be consonant with the positivity of visual representation.

But what if to represent is to make absent? And what if the documentary mode is always a form of representation, always a construction requiring the process of interpretation, its meaning never univocal or unambiguous? This is an old realization for sure, but one that writers on documentary practice don’t always critically put to task. In the “life full of holes” that Yto Barrada depicts, the rupture from political status brings about a troubling of representation, seen in the fragmentations, elisions, and visual blockages that characterize her photographs. “It’s their political disenfranchisement that’s expressed in these characters trapped in a state of absence,” Barrada echoes.¹⁰ Bare life is not at all, it turns out, a natural condition of documentary practice.

That said, documentary representation today often serves the interests of the state—to identify, to recognize, to know, to control—according to which photography and video, positioned within ever new and expanding surveillance systems, operate as judicial and forensic evidence, and “truth” and “objectivity” live on through their continued institutional and legal validation. Indeed the documentation of bare life appears closely aligned to the exercise of state power. As an application of force against the body of those denied political rights, this function was revealed in the shocking images American military personnel took of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, where photography itself was enlisted as an instrument of torture, where the exposure of bare life was simultaneously its constitution. Of course the wider implication of the “War on Terror” is that as technologies of reproduction become increasingly available, and as protections for civil liberties and privacy are gradually eroded, we—whether undocumented workers, terrorists, or law-abiding citizens—are all placed in the position of being perpetually surveilled, and consequently stripped of our political rights against the encroachments of governmental power. Conversely in Barrada’s work, photography does not operate as a technique of identification; rather it enacts a visual subtraction of figures that is multivalent, both melancholy in the way it allegorizes the social devastation to Moroccan culture and promising in its liberation of life, where identification, for better or worse, is freed from representation, and where representation acknowledges its absences. The documentation of bare life, in other words, only takes place negatively, that is, indicated through the lacuna, blurs, and blind spots that mar the image, which opens up possibility for subjective invention within it, contesting the representational victimization of the subject stripped bare of political representation.

A further reason why the refugee deserves to be elevated to the position of the “central figure of our political history,” according to Agamben, is because it proposes the elemental unit of a postnational social formation. In this regard, it is telling that Agamben wrote his essay in 1993 during the jubilant years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the hopes of a new Europe liberated from national borders and promising creative possibilities for re-imagining identity beyond the nation-state. Just as Hannah Arendt in 1943—startlingly—thought that “Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples,” insofar as “history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of Gentiles,”¹¹ so for Agamben “the condition of the countryless refugee” today represents “the paradigm of a new historical consciousness.”¹² The situation of Israel becomes a case in point for Agamben to draw out the potentiality of his theoretical repositioning of the refugee in terms of a radically new conception of community:

Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, it might be possible to imagine two political communities insisting on the same region and in a condition of exodus from each other—communities that would articulate each other via a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius (right) of the citizen but rather the refugium (refuge) of the singular.¹³

This eminently democratic proposal—made before the start of the second intifada but equally compelling today—is extended in turn to the imagined reinvention of Europe not as a unity of nations (the European Union) but as an “aterritoriality or extraterritorial space” in which all inhabitants would exist “in a position of exodus”; “the status of European would then mean the being-in-exodus of the citizen.”¹⁴ This call for the transvaluation of aterritoriality into a positive status, however, is extremely complicated. It is especially so when extended to geopolitical contexts where neocolonial occupation drives an emancipatory movement defined not by the embrace of aterritoriality but rather by the struggle for national independence, which is posed as the only viable solution for a stateless people. Emily Jacir’s project Where We Come From (2001–3) opens up this complexity in relation to Palestinians and movingly gestures toward a related resolution.

“If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” With this question, Jacir solicited requests from Palestinians living within or outside Israel and the Occupied Territories who face severe Israeli travel restrictions that prohibit movement within the country. Jacir, Palestinian but holding an American passport, could travel and fulfill these requests—to visit someone’s mother in Gaza, to walk the streets of Nazareth, to photograph another’s family in Lahia, to light a commemorative candle in Haifa, and so on.¹⁵ A series of photographs document her performances, each of which is paired next to a text panel in Arabic and English that records the original pleas and offers explanation of each participant’s political circumstances that has rendered their mobility impossible. Rather than show the Palestinians who made the requests, which would have risked grounding them in their subjection through the very documentary process, Jacir allegorizes their deprived political status through their visual absence, fragmenting identity and thereby revealing documentation, as a form of representation, to be only a partial recognition of personhood. The piece, then, dramatizes the parallel between political illegibility and representational erasure, where the existence of the exiled subject is conveyed only through a skeletal descriptive language reminiscent of a depersonalized bureaucratic discourse.

One might view Where We Come From as exemplifying the privation of human rights—such as the freedom of movement, personal independence, equality, protection from discrimination and degrading treatment, and the right to nationality¹⁶—in order to encourage their extension to all Palestinians. The apparent solution, which this interpretation supports, would ostensibly be Palestinian nationalization, which would guarantee basic political protections, putting right the wrongs suffered by those under occupation. This struggle identifies what is at stake for those commentators who privilege the Palestinian-ness of Jacir’s work over and above its relation to exile, diaspora, and mobility—terms of occasionally uncritical celebration within recent art-critical discourse—and seek to return Jacir’s piece to its origins in “the localized context of Palestinian artistic expression and practice,” as critic Rasha Salti puts it.¹⁷

To dislocate Jacir’s work from its geopolitical field by ascribing it to a fashionable category of contemporary art is tantamount to eviscerating and depoliticizing her practice. But to argue conversely that “Emily Jacir stands first and foremost as a Palestinian artist” raises its own specters, the most obvious being the resurrection of a nationalist framework to determine the meaning and significance of her art as well as its political agenda. The belief that national sovereignty will restore human rights, however, is questionable—in fact, the opposite appears to be more likely. The nation-state is the very power uniquely authorized to suspend law when it sees fit, creating a state of emergency—that zone of indeterminacy between law and non-law that opens a space for extrajudicial brutality (e.g., torture and executions) that is sometimes the fate of bare life—which is now threatening to become the rule.¹⁸ In reality Palestinians already exist in the shadow of the nation-state, precariously inhabiting Israel’s seemingly permanent state of exception.¹⁹ While Jacir’s work certainly does bear an inextricable relation to Palestinian identity, this framework cannot, in my view, delegitimize the recognition that her artwork holds within itself the potential to inhabit ever new contexts of reception. It thereby transforms exile into a corrosive force against the determination of nationality, and does so on the international stage where the artist chooses to exhibit.

Jacir’s art is profoundly moving for its ability to cut through the polarized oppositions that deadlock political dialogue and perpetuate the conflict in order to engender a humane compassion between people. In Where We Come From, this relation is activated by the artist inhabiting the virtual position of another who is the subject of privation—the one who cannot go on a date in East Jerusalem, who cannot walk in Nazareth, and so on—but it is soon extended to the audience. When the viewer looks at the photographs, it becomes clear that he or she is inserted into them in the first person, as if that were my shadow floating across the grave or me who is on a date with this young woman whose quizzical gaze meets my own. This perceptual structure approximates the “reciprocal extraterritoriality” described by Agamben. The challenge of this work, then, is located not so much in thinking about how human rights might be extended to the refugee status of Palestinian identity within the conceptual boundaries of the nation (though this is also a possibility) but rather in considering that figure as a “limit concept” that requires the creation of altogether new categories.²⁰ Jacir’s project demands a renegotiation of one’s relationship to the Middle East conflict by engendering new virtual sites of identification beyond those determined by opposed national communities, however modest its immediate effects. Its promise is to imagine the possibilities of relating to exile by exiling oneself, which is the perceptual experience of Jacir’s art, and then to suggest a possible social formation, system of rights, and collective relation to territory, that is both constitutive of Palestinian identity and beyond the exclusionary logic of nationalism.²¹

This is no mere aestheticization of politics, where art gives expression to freedom in lieu of its realization in reality; indeed to reveal new sources of possibility and restore hope for a future different from today’s course is the very ethico-political force of this art. Here the future is no longer a closed book, and politics is no longer the privilege of the dominant order—an achievement, also, of Steve McQueen’s.

In a recent show in Paris, McQueen presented two works that, between them, explore the rush of possibility that accompanies the release from subjection. Portrait as an Escapologist (2006), a series of photographic images depicting the artist with hands and feet bound by metal shackles, greeted visitors as soon as they entered the Marian Goodman Gallery. Appearing one after the next in grid formation like the repetition of proliferating posters or a patterned expanse of wallpaper, the images invoke a long history of artistic projects that have made plays on photography put to task by law to capture life, from Duchamp’s Wanted: $2000 Reward (1923) to Warhol’s Most Wanted (1964). Those precedents parodied official representations of the subject, flaunting its transgression of law to spite the documentary return to order. In McQueen’s piece the subject appears apprehended, bound physically as much as caught photographically. Yet the obviously posed figure of the artist, shot against a nondescript background and appearing smartly dressed in a neatly pressed white shirt, dark trousers, and polished black shoes, speaks with tongue in cheek, implying that this man will not stay trapped for long, for McQueen’s second piece brings about a release of the self from the grips of identity.

Descending to the basement level of the gallery, one entered a cavernous space that was completely dark, which was the context for McQueen’s second piece, Pursuit (2006). Punctuated only by flickering lights appearing like uneven raindrops in all directions, the gallery was filled with ambiguous sounds of rumbling and dragging heard from somewhere overhead, as if someone was trying to free himself from containment in the space above. In the few intense minutes before one’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, the void completely defamiliarized perceptual relations by removing all visual markers of spatial orientation. The installation effectively created a zone of indeterminacy in which the visitor could only navigate tentatively, recalling David Hammons’s installation Concerto in Black and Blue (2003), in which the immense space of Ace Gallery in New York was thrown into a blackout and visitors, provided with miniature pressure-activated LED lights, were invited to explore the empty galleries, filling them with a pulsating web of blue luminosity.

Because the reflective environment of Pursuit produced the illusion of an abstract play of lights dissociated from material support and extended to infinity by luminous reverberations, it created a disruption of the normal relation between tactility and opticality. In this immersive space of precarious mobility and bodily uncertainty, where walking into walls, columns, and other bodies became a probability, one was forced to navigate the room more by touch than vision. Moreover, light itself became the sign for material presence and was physicalized against a black void, even while the sense of touch became a substitute for the visual scanning of space. What the installation achieved was the disorganization of sensation, disrupting the body’s habitual relation to the world and others within it. This meant dissolving the space of individual self-possession, upsetting the sanctity of its proprietary territory, as one’s personal location was surrendered to indeterminacy. With the withdrawal of visual perception from even the body’s area of physical being came the blurring of the normally clear distinctions between self and other, as well as inside and outside. Consequently, at least for a brief period of time when defamiliarization was at its height, one experienced precisely the aterritoriality Agamben mentions, “where exterior and interior indetermine each other.”²² Faced with this deforming situation, Pursuit compelled visitors to recreate anew perceptual and physical relations to others, as the specific qualities that normally construct identity—fashion, bodily appearance, markers of class, race, gender—were stripped from the self by the darkness. While McQueen’s work wasn’t framed by an explicit thematics of denationalization, it nonetheless opened a line of flight from determination that eluded political inscription.

Stepping back, it becomes clear that these two projects were thoughtfully interconnected: Whereas The Escapologist indicts documentary photography as performing the regimentation of the subject akin to a form of imprisonment, enmeshing it within its matrix of repetition and visibility, and making of it a challenge to his talents of flight, Pursuit catalyzes the diffusion of being into a phenomenological experience of becoming.²³ It would be a mistake, however, to read McQueen’s work as advancing the viewer’s virtualization and mystification within the framework of a thoroughly institutionalized space (the commercial art gallery), thus confusing escapology with escapism; for his pieces revealed this arena to be conflicted between the forces of capture and release. McQueen’s work acknowledged and evaded this jail of institutionalization (of identity, of containment, of categorization) through multiple means, including a strategic employment of technology whereby video is directed against its own capacity to mesmerize and pacify its viewer; the transgression of cinematic conventions, creating an open plan without structured seating for optimized disorientation; and the exposure and subversion of documentary photography’s reifying functions.

By achieving this escape from the grips of representation, Pursuit engenders an extreme form of being-in-exodus that proposes an experimental social arena different from the other examples considered here. The installation distinguishes itself from Barrada’s melancholy gaze at the erosion of Moroccan identity in the face of expatriation, which in mourning its loss potentially energizes its reconstruction, and equally differs from Jacir’s attempts to build a political community around a sharing of the experience of exile that is distinctly Palestinian yet beyond nation-state identity. But like the projects of these other artists, Pursuit creates its own state of exception, which demands a creative redefinition of one’s relation to the self and to others, figuring as a phenomenological precursor to the political negotiation of social relations. As in the work of Barrada and Jacir, bare life does not designate merely the literal condition of being a refugee, with all it implies of existential distress and inhumane mistreatment; rather with McQueen’s work it opens an area of indeterminacy between law and life encouraging the experimental re-creation of being in the world—prompting the construction of agency beyond human rights. Upon the erosion of constituted forms of regulation, life is invited to negotiate its own identity and relationships to others anew. What if more came to accept this invitation? Only in such a world where “the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or she is,” Agamben writes, “is the political survival of humankind today thinkable.”²⁴ With these artworks, this recognition has now begun.

1 This text represents a condensed reworking of ideas first given form in “Life Full of Holes,” Grey Room, no. 24 (Fall 2006), pp. 72–88.

2 In a text that accompanies her recent series of photographs, Barrada writes, “Before 1991 any Moroccan with a passport could travel freely to Europe. But since the European Union’s (EU) Schengen Agreement, visiting rights have become unilateral across what is now legally a one-way strait.” Yto Barrada, A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (London: Autograph ABP, 2005), p. 57.

3 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

4 Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” [1993] in Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 22.

6 See, for instance, Eva Geulen, “Bare Life,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 66 (June 2007), pp. 102–107; and Anthony Downey, “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s Bare Life and the Ethics of Aesthetics,” Third Text 23: 2 (2009), pp. 109–125. The topic of bare life informed “Zones of Conflict,” the exhibition I curated at Pratt Manhattan Gallery in 2008–9. See T. J. Demos, “Image Wars,” Zones of Conflict (New York: Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 2008), pp. 3–11.

7 For instance, Grant Kester once wrote: “If social documentary can be recuperated as a new documentary, it is precisely because it was never entirely aestheticized in the first place.” See “Toward a New Social Documentary,” Afterimage 14: 8 (March 1987), p. 14.

8 Okwui Enwezor, “Documentary/Verité: The Figure of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art,” in Mark Nash, ed., Experiments with Truth (Philadelphia, PA: The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2005), p. 101.

9 Ibid., p. 101. He continues, “The hinge for the examination of naked or bare life is the vérité/documentary space.”

10 “Barrada in Conversation with Nadia Tazi,” in Barrada, op. cit., p. 60.

11 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” op. cit., p. 15. Arendt’s words were originally published in the essay “We Refugees” (1943), in Mark M. Anderson, ed., Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America (New York: The New Press, 1998).

15 However, given the current conflict this mobility would no longer be possible for her.

16 See for instance the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the General Assembly of the United Nations, adopted December 10, 1948, which includes these rights.

17 See Rasha Salti, “Emily Jacir: She Lends Her Body to Others to Resurrect an Absent Reality,” Zawaya (Beirut), no. 13 (Fall 2004–Winter 2005): n.p.; and T. J. Demos, “Desire in Diaspora: Emily Jacir,” Art Journal 63: 3 (Winter 2004), pp. 68–78.

18 See Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. K. Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

19 For a critical consideration of Israel’s relation to the “state of exception,” see Ronit Lentin, ed., Thinking Palestine (London: Zed, 2008).

20 We must abandon “the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.” Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” op. cit. p. 16.

21 For a broader consideration of contemporary art and exile, see T. J. Demos, “The Ends of Exile: Toward a Coming Universality,”in Nicolas Bourriaud, ed., Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009 (London: Tate Britain, 2009), pp. 74–89.

23 For me this figures as a further instance of the escape from regimentation that McQueen performs in Western Deep, where he develops the critique and reinvention of documentary representation in the course of exploring the brutal labor conditions of migrant workers within a gold mine in South Africa. I explore this work at length in “The Art of Darkness: On the Work of Steve McQueen,” October 114 (Fall 2005), pp. 61–89.

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AGENCY

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Fusions of Powers: Four Models of Agency in the Field of Contemporary Art, Ranked Unapologetically in Order of Preference

Indefinite Postponements

Catholics

Conspirateurs Professionnels

Atheist Choir Boys

Strategic Essentialism

Life Full of Holes: Contemporary Art and Bare Life1

Life Full of Holes: Contemporary Art and Bare Life¹