The Transversal and the Invisible by Susan Kelly
Posted on | September 18, 2006 | No Comments
The title of this paper points to some discussions that seem to have pre-occupied the beginnings at least of the republicart project – the notion of transversality and how the relationships between political and artistic activities have been re-organised in Europe over the last 5-10 years. I also invoke in the title however, Marcel Duchamp’s question, a question often repeated by Sarat Maharaj: that is: ‘how do you make a work of art, that’s not a work of art?’ In putting these issues together I am attempting to flag an anxiety that stays with me despite the work carried out not only in the context of republicart, but also several years now of very visible politically and socially engaged art practices. That is, an anxiety about how despite the purported de-territorialising actions of transversal practices, what we have ended up with, or is now ‘visible’ is more often than not, an ever-expanded category of (relational, socially engaged) art. In fact, one could say, that it has become nigh impossible to make a work of art that is not a work of art.
So the question I am trying to raise in a sense is, how does this issue of visibility relate to the production of new so-called transversal or constituent practices that cross the field and institutions of art? To what degree do regimes of legibility and the forms into which practices are constituted in order to render themselves recognisable as this or that, limit or foreclose what is possible for such new practices? And finally, what are the strategies and dynamics involved in working across situations, institutions and discourses without becoming identified with them, or subsumed to them? (And immediately here, I am generalising the term visibility to also mean recognisability and legibility.)
To continue then with a by now much quoted thesis on contemporary art by Alain Badiou: Badiou writes: ‘It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognises as existent.’[1] Here Badiou negatively connotes a condition or state of visibility, within a regime of Empire. The invention of already known or recognisable forms is deemed pointless. In the context of this paper I would like to connect this statement to Maharaj after Duchamp’s question (how do you make a work of art that’s not a work of art?) by supposing ‘the work of art’ to be the recognisable, visible form laid bare to management and containment by Empire. In other words I am suggesting that the grand inclusion or identification of all kinds of transversal practices, practices of self-organisation, practices in which it is never clear where the art ends and the politics begins, into expanded categories of art (‘relational’, socially engaged etc) needs to be met with suspicion The suggestion is therefore – that for transversal practices to retain a critical relation to ‘Empire’, it is important that they remain what Sarat Maharaj has called ‘doggedly eye-proof’.[2] I would argue that designations of certain practices as artworks, or restrictions of particular activities and forms to the ‘art field’ can limit and even foreclose their potential.
Now what are these practices and what is meant by transversality in this context? One might summarise much of what has been at work in art aswell as political practices over the last 10 years (at least) is a simultaneous questioning of the representational structures of the political party operating within the corporate ethos of the nation state, and the genres of traditional community-based and public art which correspond with these structures of political representation. This questioning of the structures underpinning the political is borne out in the significance to contemporary social movements of Zapatismo and ‘new anarchist’ experimentation with direct democracy through different forms of organisation. The often-collaborative artistic and political practices to which I refer also refuse to speak for minor constituencies, instead developing modalities that support other kinds of collective praxis. Gerald Raunig has argued that the renewed interest in public, participatory, community and interventionist art in the 1990s in Europe has taken on a newly politicised character this very connection ‘with heterogeneous activities against economic globalisation’. This work, often collaborative and concerned with issues of public and social space, the freedom of movement and of knowledge, takes on multiple forms and often works across many different sites. Common to new cultural and activist practices is a focus on experimentation rather than representation, a focus on means: on activity that brings into proximity the why and the how of coming together. Practices such as those initiated by Routes, Belfast, No One is Illegal and Florian Schneider, 16Beaver, Ultra-Red, involve producing situations, sets of tools and procedures that can be moved in and out of by various constituencies. Such practices might be said to use artistic modalities, as opposed to representations or even expressions, creatively producing new organisational forms, constellations and situations as they move through physical and social spaces.
http://www.republicart.net/disc/mundial/kelly01_en.htm
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