Colloquium. Aesthetics, Politics and Violence: Reflections on Political Art

Transcription

1 Birkbeck Institute for Social Research & Department of Psychosocial Studies Colloquium Aesthetics, Politics and Violence: Reflections on Political Art SESSION 1 Friday 17 October 2014, 9.30am pm Room B04, Birkbeck Main Building (Torrington Square) Abstracts 1. Vikki Bell (Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London) Objecting (to) the Past: Wonder, Speculation, Imagination What does it mean to be 'before memory' in Derrida's sense? How is it possible to think response-ability in relation to a violent past in such a way that neither attempts to deny the lacunae nor surrender in the face of the impossibilities and accusations that follow the attempt? Reflecting on my own writing on Argentina and some further experiences of memorial museums, this intervention considers what is at stake in the encounter staged at such sites, and suggests that the creation of 'objects of wonder' at such sites can only be understood as provocations to speculation that may or may not become an ethical endeavour. Mindful of the various intersecting discussions within aesthetics and representation after atrocities, the intervention argues that objects that present or attempt to represent fail wherever they eclipse the requisite ethical space involved in the deployment of imagination.

2 SESSION 1 (continued) 2. Stewart Motha (Reader in Law, Birkbeck, University of London) Un-homely Files: Law, Violence, and Memory There has been no shortage of truth commissions and inquiries as the juridical and institutional response to mass violence, ethnic conflict, or civil war. This follows a widespread recognition of the limits of the law in contending with the enormity of social fracture or the scale of the catastrophe. But most agree that none of these institutional, bureaucratic, or quasi-juridical devices are capable of addressing the everyday experience of living through, and living with the history and memory of such violence. Monuments and memorials attempt to mark the event or keep its memory alive. All these processes reveal the fallacy or impossibility of filing it away. I want to dwell on the file, to consider the archiving of catastrophic events as a problem of home and memory. Law and quasi-judicial processes owe a great deal to the file in its many metaphorical instantiations. In the face of the limits of law and institutional processes of reconciliation, a more aesthetic form of the file is proving to be a site of memory and a memory of home. In this paper I compare the re-imagining of the file contained in the Sri Lankan artist Shanaathanan s work in The Incomplete Thombu, with Cornelia Vismann s Files: Law and Media Technology (2008). Vismann gives an account of the centrality of files for the emergence of truth, the state, and the construction of the subject. Files have been an essential part of creating a public, constituting an archive, or founding a tradition. What concerns me in this paper is what exceeds and disrupts such publics, truths, states, national boundaries, records, and legal orders. What new forms of truth, conscious and unconscious regimes of memory, structure the production of home? At stake is the possibility of recuperating loss and representing displacement. What is the relationship between the thing lost and the event of its memorialisation in art, narrative, or performance? 3. Andrew Bowie (Professor of Philosophy and German, Royal Holloway, University of London) Political Ramifications of the Marginalisation of the Aesthetic The 'philosophy of art' plays an at best subsidiary role in most Anglo-American philosophy, even though concern with art is a central issue in large parts of modern philosophy. This paper will consider how the marginal role of aesthetics in both in analytical philosophy and in some areas of European philosophy gives support to a political culture whose technocratic orientation is proving to be increasingly disastrous. The paper will look at how understanding the historical roots of aesthetics can open up new perspectives on how we negotiate the tensions between what Wilfrid Sellars termed the 'scientific' and the 'manifest' images of the world. 2

3 SESSION 2 4. Nicoline van Harskamp (Visual Artist; Board Member of Witte de With CCA, Rotterdam; Head Lecturer, Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam) Yours in Solidarity and other works In her works, Nicoline van Harskamp aim to address the function and power of the spoken word, and its ability to shape political thought and action. Using footage of public presentations and debates, records of conversational writing and other available or generated material, she writes the scripts for her video and performance pieces. For Yours in Solidarity, for example, she hand-copied excerpts from hundreds of letters from the archive of the anarchist Karl Max Kreuger; then recorded actors improvisations on the collected notes; and finally wrote the script for a fiction piece on the recent history of the anarchist movement. In the earlier Any other Business she adapted recordings from ten failed public debates into a script for a conference. A great number of actors performed their roles as speakers and audience members, mixed in with an actual live audience. In most of van Harskamp s works, actors employ a wide variation of non-native English, a language that is the topic of a new series of works. The first piece English Forecast was commissioned by Tate Modern Performance Room and can be viewed online. Nicoline van Harskamp will play excerpts of these and other works, and open up a Q&A about her work and methodology. In the context of Aesthetics and Politics particularly, she would also like to discuss the issue of artists withdrawals from large art festivals this year, notably Manifesta 10 and the Sydney Biennial. 5. Claudia Fontes (Visual Artist) The Liminal Memory In 1999, the government of Buenos Aires held an international sculpture competition to commemorate the civilians kidnapped and disappeared during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. The winning projects form part of the sculpture park at Parque de la Memoria, a memorial situated by the river in which many of the bodies tortured by the dictatorship ended their days, dumped into the water still alive from what they used to call death flights. My work Reconstruction of the portrait of Pablo Míguez sits in that context. Pablo Míguez was just one of approximately 500 children kidnapped with his/her parents during the military dictatorship. According to the perverse semantics of the Argentine dictatorship of the 70 s, the disappeared was neither alive nor dead, but his/her existence had simply ceased. Therefore, next to the kidnapping of people, the repression squads used to take with them and destroy pictures, documents, evidence of any kind that could prove the kidnapped person's existence. 3

4 I will revisit the journey I took at attempting the reconstruction of one of the multiple possible images of Pablo Míguez, an ongoing exercise in collective memory building. Pablo's relatives, friends, scientists and 13 year old children assisted with the physical process of reconstruction. However the piece is far from finished: every time a viewer confronts the artwork, he/she reenacts the reconstruction process by evoking his/her own 'desaparecidos', while Pablo's face remains physically inaccessible, his back turned to the spectator afar on the Río de la Plata's waters. SESSION 3 6. Elena Loizidou (Senior Lecturer in Law, Birkbeck, University of London) Was My Life Worth Living? Or Anarchism As an Art of Life Upon the invitation of the US Harper s Monthly magazine, in December 1934, the anarchist Emma Goldman addresses the very difficult question of Was my Life Worth Living? In reading the essay we note that Goldman does not address the worthiness of her political actions and contributions, nor does she paint anarchism as a merely political project, instead she provides us with a composition that enables us to understand that anarchism, her anarchism at least, is an anarchist art of life, and as an art of life, it is expressed through a subject with certain political, ethical and aesthetic sensibilities; childlike (political), relating to others at the limits of what me know (ethical), act and live freely outside routinization (aesthetics). We can therefore view Goldman s essay, as a memo to future generations, that brings to our attention that the relation between art and politics, or politics and aesthetics may require a thinking of the our relation to politics, ethics and aesthetics, a relation that as I will show through her writings and records of her words, is always in process and never complete. If violence emanates from the absorption of bodies to the time, space and command of capital, law, production, then the anarchism as lived by Goldman enables us to sense a sense of freedom as that which remains open and in relation to the political, ethical and aesthetic forms of life. In making these connections, I will be drawing upon the thinking of Frederick Nietzsche (who has greatly influenced her), Judith Butler and Michel Foucault (who as we know both have strong Nietzschean influences). 4

5 SESSION 3 (continued) 7. Nicholas Smith (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Södertörn University, Stockholm) The Politics of Perception in Art Even art that is not explicitly political" or immediately socially engaged" can still be highly relevant in a political sense, in that such art - if relevant at all - will alter our vision of things. Something happens to our perception when we encounter works that qualify as art". The malleability of perception which allows us to see some things while disregarding others, is, as Walter Benjamin knew well, often triggered by art. Perception is never a direct sensorial replica of a "world" given as such, instead, as Butler, Foucault and others have shown, it is a repeated practice, something that we must learn over and over, and as such it always varies with history and culture. Here contemporary art and strands of political philosophy such as de-/postcolonial thinking, critical race theory etc. share similar concerns. This becomes clear once we connect art with this type of political philosophy which has shown how the dominant, Eurocentric, 'white' culture has come to see social reality in a distorted way over the past centuries. Such a claim does not lead to a belief in the possibility of a direct, undistorted vision of reality "as it is", unaffected by the bias of cultures, traditions, languages that always informs perception. What contemporary art does is to remind us that we never see what we think we see, that there is always a moment of non-understanding at play in perception, which we automatically cover up by means of fantasy, prejudice, tradition and habits of seeing. Perception, then, always interacts with language, with prejudice and with the habits of a given tradition, thus shaping what we perceive before we know it, and this is where (what I call) destabilizing perception through art kicks in. In this sense, art is inflammably political. 8. Jiří Přibáň (Professor in Law, Cardiff University) Art as Political Anaesthetics: The Courage and Art of Jiří David Art is infused with something that is originally the opposite politics and its rigid iconography. It can freeze the manipulative effects of political iconography in today s media consumer society: the aesthetic code works as political anaesthetics. We live in a time when there is no point in constantly debating whether this era is kitschy and therefore morally defective. If everything can be art, then everything can, naturally, be kitsch. The only way to resist such a world is to continuously nurture doubt about what appears to look like the solid and unquestionable foundation of our world. And we can only doubt if we think about the apparent confines of the world. Descartes was well aware of this, but now the burden of philosophers must also be borne by artists. 5

6 SESSION 4 9. Martín Plot (Professor in Aesthetics and Politics, CalArts, Los Angeles) Towards an Aesthetic Understanding of Political Regimes Inspired in an interrogation on the aesthetic character of politics, in this paper I will put forward a critically expanded reading of French philosopher Claude Lefort s typology of theologico-political, modern-democratic, and totalitarian forms of society. Following his notion of political regimes, I will propose to see them as constellations of practices and institutions, social positions and interpretative horizons, successively inaugurated and made available, instituted, and sedimented. This is, of course, close to Lefort s view. In emphasizing the way in which they are capable of remaining in competing coexistence, however, I will try to render his typology more critically relevant for our times. In the framework of this aesthetic understanding of political regimes, I will then engage the question of political violence, tracing back the way in which Lefort s teacher and friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty first understood the theologico-political consequences of a Marxism that contingency forced to abandon its epistemological claims and thus shifted its focus to the will to make real its "philosophical truth. Under these conditions, he said, the assurance of being the carrier of truth is vertiginous. [...] Such are the poisoned fruits of willed truth: it authorizes one to go ahead against all appearances; in itself it is madness. And willed truth is either suicidal or murderous, both literally and metaphorically: in the literal form of political violence or in the metaphorical form of political actors that, by engaging in voluntaristic action, generate the conditions for their own demise and/or seek too proactively that of their adversaries. This presentation will mark the release of my most recent book, The Aesthetico-Political: 6