Re: [-empyre-] Re: what is to be done: the public secret

[Christiane Robbins <cpr@mindspring.com>]

Warning:  The truth is not out there ….


I am finding myself in a rather remarkably tricky position here given  
my own history as an artist and cultural producer.  Perhaps that is  
best, as it allows me a measure of validity to take a rather polemic  
stance in this discussion.

It appears that we have come full circle from the questions and  
positions which I posed in my initial posting.  “It could be  
suggested that Roger Buergel's laudable utterance of “what is to be  
done?” is being imagined within a seeming consensual utopian dream  
for global salvation through the exhibition of various cultural  
practices.   My reading of the subtext of his statement is as a  
collective consciousness or understanding of art practices as  
inhabiting the realm of an almost secular spiritualism and, as such,  
a wish for artists to engage in a somewhat evangelical aesthetic  
response.

During the course of the past 15 years or so, and especially so in  
urban pockets of Northern California, I have  witnessed a regional  
cultural specificity of art practices which reflects the imperative  
and enculturation of a wider political spectrum.   It takes the form  
of revamping mid- 20thc notions of engaging with issues of  
possibility over those which now demand we engage with issues of  
necessity … those of survival, of social and cultural welfare, if you  
will.   In other words we ( at least those of us in the US and I  
suspect elsewhere as we have seen) ) no longer have the luxury of  
engaging with the “possibility “of intrinsic forms of art practice as  
we ( at least some of us ) are now necessarily preoccupied with  
"necessities" required by our own and others survival.

This engagement appears to include:

1.    an advocation - a pragmatism if you will  - that mirrors a form  
of 20th c US New Deal-style political activism.   Only this time  
around it is without the benefit of substantive governmental public  
funding and support.  It is now incumbent upon those individuals who  
can now afford to engage with cultural production to provide such  
support to those that may not be able to do that for themselves.
Where I feel discomfort is in:

a.  the unfortunate glare of neo-colonialism which now is truly  
privatized within the dynamics of class relationality and cultural  
practices;

b. The vulnerability of the sustained life of such efforts when they  
are subject to the fickleness of privatization and the marketplace.

c.  The binary opposition of the economics of the art market with  
those of the narrowcasting of 20thc notions of the social function of  
art.  By this I refer to the seeming inability to see value in art  
practices other that those of the market value or those of the use  
value associated with community art practices.  Does art practice not  
have an intrinsic cultural value in and of itself?  How does one  
negotiate and re-situate that meaning within the construct of this  
binary frame?


2.    A charge to American artist and intellectuals (often synonymous  
with the Left here in the US) to take the fight for social justice  
out of the ivory tower, out of the galleries and museums and back  
into the streets … of wherever.

3.    That art will rehabilitate an increasingly pessimistic and  
theoretical liberalism, for which hopelessness has become  
fashionable... as a viable agent for social change.   The affirmation  
that art practices can offer communities what self-respect can offer  
individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement  - in  
whatever form that may take.

4.    The implication that in order to make meaningful social  
contributions, artists need to more or less kick their conceptual  
habit.  This may harken back to Melinda’s earlier statement and  
demand more critical discussion.

Whether an artist/interventionist needs to speak the plain language  
of  Dr. Phil’s "tough love," a political /analyst, or secular  
theologian of the religion of utopian democracy.  At least some  
artists have chosen the role of active rather than that of passive  
spectator or the lap poodle with a Mohawk fashionably populating the  
marketplace.
However, this persistent identification with what is perceived by  
many to be a liberal/leftist political position ( re: G.H earlier  
response) locates artists in a seemingly moral high ground - as  
privileging a particular set of values for art practice and human  
interaction.   It defines an artist as not one who continually  
advances existing vocabularies ( dominant cultural legacies ) but one  
who is reinscribing existing social-economic imperatives and,  
subsequently, must then defend the position created by that  
reinscription.

This is tricky and becomes increasingly problematized for any attempt  
to situate an individuated cultural socio- politico- artistic  
discourse.  It is easily ( and often wrongly ) construed as a  
demonstration that one lacks the broad-based intellectualism,  
sophistication, courage, enterprise and elasticity this thought  
requires.  It calls for an artist to be pulled in all directions  
needing to be simultaneously everywhere … and nowhere.

We all need to acknowledge the problematic position that we have  
created in our attempts to bridge the gap between the conventions of  
the market place of art practice, social theorizing and political  
activism.  In doing so, this concession is just as much an invitation  
to enter this labyrinth of the intricately wrought contestations of  
the art world, as it is an admission of possible conceptual  
inadequacy driven by the exigencies of social necessity.  Certainly,  
we can justify the compromises of any of these modes of cultural  
engagement as problematic precisely because they constitute an  
inscription of a new mode  - one that is impossible to validate in  
the present as  “a new vocabulary ... which will have its utility  
explained only retrospectively".  We will only be able to look back  
from the ever-receding future.

As critic Sande Cohen states in Academia and the Luster of Capital   
"'Historical thought,'" writes Cohen, "is a way of establishing the  
power of what is believed to be irreducibly social.... We have to say  
that past 'victims' nonetheless 'resisted'; we have to say that a  
better future is possible; we have to say that we are not socially  
extraneous, but necessary agents of larger processes."



All best,

Chris






On Jan 25, 2007, at 10:53 AM, Sharon Daniel wrote:

> I just want to say to Henry that I agree - the phenomena that he  
> lists certainly fit the definition of the public secret,  
> particularly because of their apparent intractability. It is  
> difficult to know what is to be done in the face of such  
> overwhelming problems. It is much easier to slip into collective  
> denial. How do we force ourselves to face our own self- 
> annihilation? and at the scale of the problems Henry addressed?   
> The list he posted - his focus on overpopulation and depleted  
> resources - made me think of an interestingly controversial  
> project  "A-Portable", a refurbished shipping container that  
> functioned as a mobile gynecological clinic designed by Atelier Van  
> Leishout in collaboration with Dr. Rebecca Gompers, founder of  
> "Women on Waves" in Amsterdam. "A-Portable" was designed to allow  
> Dr. Gomperts to make first trimester abortions available where the  
> procedure is illegal by performing them in international waters -  
> 19km from shore just outside national jurisdiction - free of  
> charge. "A-Portable" was exhibited as a work of art in the Venice  
> Biennale and the subsequent media attention was intended to provoke  
> activism that would lead to legislative change. There were many  
> questions around the actual use of "A-Portable" after the  
> exhibition and initial launch. I admit have not followed the  
> history of the project and I don't mean to suggest that it was a  
> successful intervention but I bring it up merely as an example of a  
> pragmatic strategic approach to both education (direct education in  
> the clinic setting and political education through the media) and  
> activism that operated, in part, in the realm of art practice and  
> exhibition. It also provided a catalyst for legal activism. I was  
> very taken with a quote from the text, which accompanied the  
> exhibition at the Venice Biennale,
>
> "To understand the work one must move from ontology, (what is art?)  
> to pragmatism (what can art do?). Herein lies a possible revival of  
> avant-garde politics - no longer historically "ahead", nor  
> operating through shock and estrangement, but rather producing  
> works that make things possible right now..."
>
> I think that A-portable actually did operate through shock and  
> estrangement and, I think that is why it succeeded in getting the  
> attention that it did - - if it was ever really operative it could  
> also have changed the realities of the individuals and communities  
> it engaged. While I tend to see the latter as much more important  
> there is the problem of scale that Henry's post makes clear.
>
> There are many answers to the question "what can art do?" in  
> productive and practical resistance to the public secret at varying  
> levels of scale - Ricardo's post provides a number of really  
> productive answers in the realm of grass-roots activism and  
> critical pedagogy which do not rely on  shock estrangement and do  
> not always get the attention of the art world or media that is  
> necessary to facilitate social change.
>
> best,
> Sharon
>
>
> Sharon wrote:
>
> There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are  
> "public secrets" - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe  
> from itself, like the troubling  "don't ask, don't tell." The trick  
> to the public secret is in knowing what not to know. This is the  
> most powerful form of social knowledge. Such shared secrets sustain  
> social and political institutions. The injustices of the war on  
> drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial  
> Complex are "public secrets."
> ==========================================================
>
>
> OK - here's a few public secrets:
>
> 1. There are too many people.
> 2. We are way into overshoot and unless massive sacrifices are made  
> immediately
> in terms of economic and material wealth that is re-directed into  
> mitigation
> efforts, the planet will experience a massive die off in the 21st  
> century.
> 3. Government exists to protect and project the interests of the  
> ruling class.
> 4. We Are Atlantis.
>
> HW
> SF
> CA
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Christiane Robbins

J e t z t z e i t
Los Angeles  l  San Francisco
CA  l USA

... the space between zero and one ...
Walter Benjamin





The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to  
the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence for in  
these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804-1872,
German Philosopher