|
Article Excerpt
The following is an expanded version of a conversation that took place between Mick Wilson and Grant Kester at the Dublin City Council Pearse Street Library on June 9, 2006. Kester was invited to Dublin by CityArts as part of its ongoing In Conversation series (www.cityarts.ie/home.asp).
Mick Wilson: In the early 1990s, when the essays "Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public" and "Aesthetic Evangelists: The Rhetoric of Empowerment and Conversion in Contemporary Community Art" appeared, they presented profound questions to the domain of socially engaged, community-oriented, or transformative practices in a way that was sustained, systematic, and sympathetic. This was a major challenge. In your more recent book, Conversation Pieces, there's a line that says: "After developing my critique of community-based practice I was confronted by the contradiction between the unrelenting purism that drives a certain kind of theoretical reflection and the pragmatic demands of artists working in social movements here and now." (1) Has there been a shift between those earlier essays and Conversation Pieces?
Grant Kester: The "Aesthetic Evangelists" essay was written in 1994, so there's inevitably some evolution in one's views. (2) I don't feel like I've forsaken criticality in writing about activist projects, but I have become increasingly frustrated by seeing the "political" criticism of this work used as such a blunt instrument by subsequent critics. My intention in "Aesthetic Evangelists" wasn't to say, "This is 'bad' art because it dares to engage issues of race or poverty outside conventional art-world spaces." Rather, it was to argue that if one chooses to work in this manner it's necessary to develop a more complex understanding of the specific terrain (the politics of incarceration, for example), rather than blundering along with little more than good intentions and inadvertently reinforcing what I felt were damaging ideas about criminality associated with the rise of neoconservatism in America. The key, for me, was to join the interpretation of a given work with a close contextual analysis, in this case focused on the relationship between contemporary art practice on the one hand and the history of urban reform and evangelical Christianity on the other. It was never a question of simply mapping one discursive system onto the other in a syllogistic manner, but of trying to decipher the points of resistance and correspondence between the two.
Unfortunately, some of the more recent criticisms of activist art resort to an intellectual shorthand and simply assume a priori that any project funded or supported by a non-arts organization, whether it's a community group, a development agency, or an NGO, is necessarily subject to compromise and co-optation by the specific agenda of the sponsoring bureaucracy. Thus, its failure, both aesthetically and politically, is read off its institutional framing, with little or no attention given to its specific operation and effects. It is obviously true that some projects produced in conjunction with development agencies or community groups are manipulated to other ends, but one could easily make the same argument about various forms of art-specific funding. I suppose I'm impatient with the reductive nature of this critique because it often seems to imply that the private art market is necessarily more liberal and accommodating, unburdened by the compromises and conflicts entailed by public support. And this, in turn, lines up with a more general attack on public institutions of all kinds on behalf of an ethical normalization of the market--which I associate with the growing hegemony of neoliberalism.
The question of "unrelenting purism" is also interesting to me. I came to realize that the theoretical paradigm driving much recent art theory carries with it certain liabilities in the ways in which it models the intelligence of the critic. Paradoxically, the art-world assimilation of poststructuralism for the past decade or so has encouraged a remarkably programmatic approach to criticism. The critic functions as a kind of policeman of becoming, seeking out and exposing moments of stasis, fixity, or coherence in any given project or work (or reflexively lauding instances of ambiguity or dislocation). Activist or engaged art can never be anything but didactic, reductive, and simplistic in this account, and "authentic" art is always complex, contradictory, and challenging. Any effort to identify or work within an existing social collectivity is suspect, and any suspension or critique of such identity is assumed a priori to be both ethically and aesthetically superior. The more interesting question--whether there might be moments in artistic practice during which coherence is productive and dislocation or ambiguity become formulaic or banal--never gets asked. Instead we see the same metric applied over and over, authorized by appeals to the same theorists: Derrida, Deleuze, Ranciere, Nancy, and so on. These writers do provide some useful tools, but their very authority makes it difficult to recognize those elements in a given practice that might have something new to teach us, that might even challenge theoretical doxa. And the relative lack of philosophical training or background among artists and critics insures that the theoretical claims of a given thinker are seldom seriously tested. Instead we tend to take their work on faith; the theorist functions as the custodian of an intellectual tradition that is less engaged with than subscribed to. As a result,...
|
