This is for an event in NYC, but I thought the questions are interesting and also the links are helpful...
(also, this Adorno article on Commitment is on reserve for this class. If you have not yet read it (and I know some people did last semester), I highly recommend it. Not sure I agree with it but there is a lot to think about.
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Monday Night -- 11.15.04 -- Art After Abu Ghraib? -- with Yates McKee--"Four More Years" Series
Contents:
1. About this Monday Night
2. About Presentation
3. About Yates McKee
4. Useful Links
5. Arthur Danto Text from Artforum
6. Michael Kimmelman Text from NYTimes
7. About "Four More Years" Series
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday
___________________________________________________
1. About this Monday Night
What: Presentation / Discussion
When: 7:00pm, Monday November 15th, 2004
Where: 16 Beaver St. NY, NY 4th Floor
Who: Open to all (As Always)
For our very first event at 16Beaver since the 2004 elections, we are pleased to invite you to a presentation entitled "Art After Abu Ghraib?"by Yates McKee (see details below). The talk will of course be followed by an open discussion. Although this presentation has been in the works
for a few months, it is also an apt follow-up to last week's Cooper Union field trip.
This event will also be the first installment of a series we will for the interim name "Four More Years" (See #4)
___________________________________________________
2. About Presentation
This Monday, Yates Mckee will give a presentation entitled Art After Abu Ghraib? that takes as its point of departure Shame, a kinetic artwork produced by Marc Robinson in 2003.
Informed by Adorno's remark in "Commitment" that "by turning suffering into images" artists "wound our shame before the victims," the presentation poses the following question: at a moment when it seems imperative for artists to effectively intervene in the global battlefield of images, what do we make of an imageless artwork that apparently withdraws from political instrumentality and even history itself? What presuppositions about "critical art practice" might this throw into relief, especially in the ongoing aftermath of the global events marked by the singular place-name "Abu Ghraib"?
Robinson's work will be read as a challenge to the reabsorption of the Abu Ghraib images into a narcissistic circuit of American "self-examination," implied by Arthur Danto's recent remark in Artforum that "Hideous as the conduct they depict is, the photographs are powerful examples of how
images can change what we are, and from that perspective must from now on act as standards against which we can judge the political efficacy of art."
In the process, the presentation will consider "the mobilization of shame" as a strategy that presumes the power of images in the service of human rights, as well as the "weaponization of shame" in the "anthropological laboratory" of Abu Ghraib. How can we identify in legal and ethical terms the "culturally" specific design of the torture, without affirming the Orientalist hypothesis that Muslim men are indeed exemplars of "shame society" as opposed to the "guilt society" of the West? What would it mean to identify the "other-directedness" often associated with shame not as a collective psycho-pathology but as a constituent feature of humanity itself, a feature that divides the human from within and defines it as infinite ethical responsibility? In a Levinasian vein, Robinson's work demands that we attend to this possibility.
The title of this presentation is meant to be speculative question, an invitation to debate about the uncertain relationship of aesthetics and politics at the current global conjuncture. Needless to say, such a debate now takes place during a period of mourning for the American Left, including those in the cultural and artistic sector whose activities were said to have finally "made a difference," as Alisa Solomon put it. What becomes of the monstrous images from Abu Ghraib now that the primary task
assigned to them by the Left-exposing and defeating the Bush administration in the 2004 election-has been lost? How will we account for-and critically participate in-the post-election afterlives of these
images? Their uncertain survival is a problem necessarily at work in the exhibition Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib, which will show at the International Center for Photography until November 28th. Attendees to Monday's discussion are highly encouraged to see the show, which would be a good point of common reference.
This will enable us to address issues such as: does the exhibition of the photographs in a museum context necessarily "aestheticize" them and strip them of their proper status as documents of suffering? Can an image have a "proper" status? Is "aestheticization" inherently a bad thing? Is it something that would be desireable or even possible to evade, especially since the images are structured from within as aesthetic artefacts? How, where, and to whom, if at all, should they be shown (recognizing that they will continue to appear in an inifnity of contexts, whether we like it or not). How might the images complicate the mnemonic, archival, preservational function of the museum, without simply disqualifying it as a simply an agent of entombment and homogenization?
Our discussion will also be shadowed by the appointment of Alberto Gonzalez to the position of U.S. Attorney General. As counsel to the President, he was the one who in a memo referred to the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" relics of the pre-9/11 era.
___________________________________________________
3. About Yates McKee
Yates Mckee is a writer in New York City. He co-curated the exhibiton "Empire/State" at the Whitney ISP and coordinated the recent 16Beaver event "8 short talks on bio-art, bio-tech, bio-politics" at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He has also written texts engaged with works by Alia Hasan-Khan, Allora & Calzadilla, and Thorne & Ressler.
___________________________________________________
4. Useful Links
Theodor Adorno, "Commitment," where he reiterates the paradoxical survival of art "after Auschwitz"
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/001103.php
Arthur Danto, "Art and Politics in American Self-Consciousness" (see below)
http://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=200407
Iraqi Artists Depict Anger Over Abu Ghraib:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0615/p07s01-woiq.html
Abu Gulag Freedom Park, Baghdad
http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/96250/index.php
Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others"
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html?ex=1100408400&en=b89d89aed36a36d3&ei=5070
Mark Danner, author of the new book Truth and Torture, "The Logic of Torture"
http://www.markdanner.com/nyreview/062404_Road_to_Torture.htm
Gregory Starrett, "Culture Never Dies: Anthropology at Abu Ghraib" A useful discussion of R. Patai's canonical "The Arab Mind" (1972), which continues to inform the "cultural training" given to U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/0406if-comm1.htm
Thomas Keenan: "Mobilizing Shame"
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/toc/saq103.2.html
A continually updated archive of articles on Abu Ghraib, including recent material on the appointment of Alberto Gonzalez:
http://www.ccmep.org/2004_articles/abu_ghraib.htm
Maureen Dowd, "Alberto Gonzalez, The Torture Guy":
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1111-27.htm
Slavoj Zizek "Between Two Deaths: The Culture of Torture"
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001084.php
Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Torture Photographs from Abu Ghraib exhibition statement by Brian Wallis:
http://www.icp.org/exhibitions/abu_ghraib/introduction.html
Alisa Solomon's pre-election article "Art Makes a Difference"
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041108&s=solomon
___________________________________________________
5. Arthur Danto Text from Artforum
"Art and Politics in American Self-Consciousness"
WITH THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE ART world, national differences among artists have grown increasingly marginal. There is little to distinguish American art from the rest in the growing list of intercontinental art fairs and biennials. At the same time, "American art," however defined, is widely assumed to reveal something of the inner life of America as it changes over time. So there is a value in an exhibition such as the Whitney Biennial, which is largely restricted to American artists, since it may, at two-year intervals, tell us something worth knowing about where we are as a culture. During just the past decade, the Biennial's curators appear to have tried meeting this challenge by organizing shows that do not merely present American art but imply something about the objective spirit of the country through art. And viewers, whether American or not, have responded to what these shows seem to tell them about America. The 1993 Biennial was vehemently political, and even though the show was widely reviled, viewers were forced to measure the art against what they believed they knew about American realities.
The Biennial's implicit invitation for audiences to measure the art against the culture makes all the more interesting the assertion by the curators of the 2004 installment that one defining attitude of younger artists in the show was a nostalgia for a certain activism that had vanished from the scene. It seemed strange to me, given the political reality of the Bush years, that young artists could do no better than envy artists of the '60s for the forthrightness of their protests. And it was stranger still that they expressed their own immediate political concerns obliquely, even while the curators suggested that in terms of involvement with current issues, the show was really as political as that of 1993. It would today be unrealistic for young people to try to be '68ers, whatever the content of current political nostalgia may be, since no one seriously interested in politics would wish the context of '68
world reality to be reconstituted. How could one wish that and at the same time want to protest it all over again? If consciousness is like a stream, as William James believed, we really cannot step in it at the same place twice. Further, why would anyone, least of all an artist genuinely concerned with the issues of the war in Iraq or inequalities at home-or the conservatism of the religious Right-have recourse to Aesopian strategies, as if a Polish dissident in the cold-war era?
Cover of Artforum, May 1993. Pictured: Daniel J. Martinez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque-Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993.
But even if there was not this encrypted criticism, it was impossible merely to think about the art as art, and not about what it told us about the political moment in America. In some way, art is always political, and American art is always somehow informative of American political reality. When I think back to the Whitney surveys of the 1950s, it seems to me that one could feel the moral pulse of America in the landscapes and still lifes, which they comprised. In his monograph on Milton Avery, Robert Hobbs writes that Avery's political activism in the 1930s is important to his art, for "it indicates that his simple themes-his emphasis on family, his at times blank masks, his combinations of peoples of different races sitting contentedly on beaches-stem from his deep concern with social issues and his desire for a better, more harmonious life where humor, charm, intimacy, and human dignity all assume their rightful places." If Avery's ingratiating beach scenes had a political implication, it merely
requires an exercise of hermeneutical will to identify the political subtext of work that had seemed to have different agendas. So it is difficult to resist reflecting on the self-consciousness of the American
artist as an "American artist" today, given the current political landscape. What did this Biennial seem to tell us, perhaps in spite of itself?
Last year, I participated in a symposium at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the organizers framed our topic as follows: "What precisely is the relation between the fiction that nationality is a trait and the assorted uses to which it is nevertheless put in both practical and interpretive discourses of art?" Immediately after this, they asked how we are to come to terms with the political power of nationality as an idea "in the light of its philosophical poverty." To think of nationality as a fiction is, I think, evidence of having taken postmodern theory much too literally. I regard nationality neither as a fictional construct nor as a philosophically impoverished one but, to the contrary, as a palpable reality in people's lives, whatever its bearing on the practice of art. Nations have much the same structure that we do as conscious beings, according to the deep analysis of consciousness that we owe to Jean-Paul Sartre. Like individuals, nations have a being-for-others (pour autrui) and for themselves (pour soi), and the great political tensions often arise from the failure of congruence between them. Given American power, how other nations perceive us-how we are defined from without-for better or worse defines the political reality for everyone today. It is impossible, seeing America from within, to appreciate how we can be hated as much as we obviously
are. If only "They" could see us as we see ourselves, from within! "They" would modulate their resentments and their anger. But given how little power we have to see "Them" as "They" see themselves, there is scant reason to suppose that "They" can do better with "Us."
There is a distinction between being in the world as an American and being an American citizen. One can renounce the latter, but renouncing the former is impossible, like renouncing one's language. Yet they are not entirely external to one another, inasmuch as the consciousness of being American includes in some degree an awareness of what it means politically to be American. This is especially the case with being an American artist in America, whether one is a citizen or not. So one wants to ask in what way American political institutions penetrate the consciousness of being an American artist. Everyone must acknowledge that the American government has never had much interest in the arts-has never felt, for example, that America's standing in the world has much, if any, connection with what American artists have done. Indeed, the practice of art in America has taken place in an atmosphere of near-total governmental indifference, except insofar as it falls under constitutional protections governing freedom of expression. The CIA's covert involvement with the dissemination of Abstract Expressionism internationally after World War II was opportunistic but in any case had nothing to do with what made that art possible in the first place. In general, I think, the making of art has been considered in terms of the pursuit of happiness, as specified in the Declaration of Independence, and hence the exercise of a right, with no effort on the government's part to say how it should be done.
There was not a national museum of art in America until the 1930s, and even then it was not a museum of American art-though the idea of a national museum of art had been intimately associated with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Consider the Louvre, for example, which organized its collections into schools: the Italian, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the French-the latter to make plain to French men and women, to whom as citizens the museum belonged after the Revolution, that there was such a thing as a national school and that France could hold its head high among the nations because of Poussin, Claude, Clouet, Vouet, and others. The Louvre was far less a sanctuary for aesthetic contemplation and scholarly investigation than an instrument for forming a national consciousness. It was also a component of that consciousness, in that the art from the other schools had been expropriated by the French military. (Stealing the enemy's treasure as trophies, like stealing its women, is immemorially the victor's prerogative.) By contrast, our National Gallery of Art could not be a temple to the American spirit through American art, since the prevailing idea in 1937 (when it was founded) was that real art was something that happened somewhere else-a view American artists at the time shared. Duchamp addressed this point in an interview when he arrived
in America in 1915, two years after the Armory show, and tried in effect to say that Americans should have no reason to feel inferior:
Renée Cox, Yo Mama's Last Supper (detail), 1996, color photograph, 30" x
12' 5".
The capitals of the Old World have labored for hundreds of years to find that which constitutes good taste and one may say that they have found the zenith thereof. But why do people not understand what a bore this is? . . . If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished-dead-and that America is the country of the art of the future. . . . Look at the skyscrapers! Has Europe anything to show more beautiful than these? New York itself is a work of art, a complete work of art. . .
.
American artists today need no longer acquiesce in such compensatory consolations, for just the reason that American art is part of an international art scene, in which it is no longer expected that art should display the attributes of a national identity. I am not even sure that the consciousness of being an American artist is at all part of the consciousness of artists in America today. It hardly seems relevant, and I think this is reflected in the framing questions of the symposium I cited above: Being American seems to have so little to do with the "practical and interpretive discourses of art" that many individuals have made the inference that nationality itself is a fiction. I don't think, as I have been saying, that it is. But it may well be true that by the time American art began to be taken seriously-after World War II, in the '50s and '60s especially-the idea of a national spirit being expressed through art had definitively lost its appeal, largely, I think, because the idea of a
national spirit was perceived as a form of political pathology. The great political movements of the century constituted themselves as dictatorships of artistic rectitude, as we all know. Moscow and Berlin, Rome and Beijing made painting outside prescribed formats too dangerous to practice unless
one were exceedingly courageous and prepared for an underground existence. While there were pressures on painters in America-Arshile Gorky, for example, felt pressures as an abstractionist, from the American regionalists on the one side and from socialist realists on the other-a
true nationalistic coercion did not quite happen here. Gorky was never in political danger, not even when he worked for the WPA, which supported his murals for Newark Airport though they were entirely modernist.
What was remarkable about the WPA was that it was supported by the government at all, since the question in the United States had always been-and remains-whether the taxpayer's dollar should be spent on art. Otherwise the government took scant interest in what artists did or did not do. As recently as the Giuliani administration, with its perhaps cynical obsession with decency, it remained acceptable for people in the private sector to look at photographs like Yo Mama's Last Supper, 1996, by
Renée Cox, or at paintings of the Holy Virgin at which some artist (Chris Ofili) had "flung dung"-the mayor's language-since that was protected by the First Amendment. "Decent" people might care to picket and protest, but as long as tax moneys were not called on to support it, the art world was ideally a scene of freedom. In America, the separation of art and the state is almost as strong as that of church and state. I think this is an unqualified blessing, but I won't try to argue that here.
The issue of taxes is whether the people's money should be used to support art that conflicts with their moral values, and that, of course, is a political matter, since the argument can be made that people of
differing values have a right to live by them so long as they do not break the law, and we all have an obligation to support the free interchange of ideas. That, however coarsely stated, is the purview of
the First Amendment. We all pay taxes to support the exercise of free expression, and pay taxes, moreover, so that the government enforces that right and remains indifferent to the content of conflicting expressions. Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibition "The Perfect Moment" (1988-90) was
funded by the NEA, which he felt entirely appropriate, since the art was too difficult in subject matter and treatment to expect commercial support. The question was whether the art had "redeeming social value," though the mere fact that it conveyed certain views of sexual conduct through images should have been social value enough, given the grounds of the First Amendment. Artists dealing with pornography can always say that they, too, are mainly interested in promoting discussion. This is more or less conceded by the government, in that efforts to legislate the monitoring of pornographic images on the Internet have consistently been voted down on First Amendment grounds.
American soldiers posing with naked and hooded Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, ca. 2003-2004. First published in the New Yorker, May 10, 2004.
There is, however, another dimension to pornography, which the recent Abu Ghraib photographs make salient to our discussion. I have not seen it mentioned that many of them could as easily have appeared on pornographic websites as with the news headlines on our browsers. I have little doubt that dominatrices will sooner or later adopt the standard camouflage fatigues issued by the army, and this returns me to the structure of consciousness with which I began, between what we are for ourselves and what we are for others. The reflex of the Bush administration has been to disclaim these images as not really Us-to maintain that torture and humiliation of this sort are not in the American grain, when everyone who sees the photographs knows that they are. The images show the degree to which American consciousness has been penetrated by the imagery of pornography. But so has world consciousness, given the ubiquity of videotapes that deal with images of sexual bondage and humiliation. Whether these images existed as fantasies before they were put on tape-or online-is difficult to say, but the archives of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Representation at the University of Indiana have photographs that show males in a posture of humiliation before women. And I have seen Renaissance engravings that deal with such subjects, which suggests that these thoughts have been part of the sexual imagination for a very long time. Plato once described the despot as performing the actions that the rest of us merely dream of, and what the Abu Ghraib images testify to is the democratization of despotic fantasy. For the time being, however, the behavior depicted has entered world consciousness as integral to the pour autrui of America. There is little doubt that America is going to have to take measures to ensure that the impulse to submit its captives to sexual torture remains unenacted and confined within the
boundaries of fantasy. And that will certainly be at least a step in the direction of changing our image in the world's conception of what we are, though such images are fairly indelible.
The 1993 Whitney Biennial showed the Rodney King tape, the appropriateness of which was contested on the grounds that it was not art, even though it was widely felt that the footage had already become
part of American self-consciousness. And if one of the aims of the exhibition was to make this self-consciousness accessible, what image could do it better? I wonder whether the same is not true for the Abu Ghraib photographs, which might well be among the exhibits of the 2006 Biennial. My sense is that, hideous as the conduct they depict is, the Abu Ghraib photographs are powerful examples of how images can change what we are, and from that perspective they must from now on act as standards against which we can judge the political efficacy of art. That measure, when applied to American art today, seems to me to imply that American artists are on balance satisfied with the existing political structure. There was nothing in the 2004 Biennial that, were we to see it from the outside, would cause us to want to change the way we are for others. That may finally be the way that, for better or worse, the art in it was political.
Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University.
___________________________________________________
6. Michael Kimmelman Text from NYTimes
Abu Ghraib returns - as art?
Michael Kimmelman NYT
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
NEW YORK Five months after they made their first shocking appearance, the Abu Ghraib photographs have become a museum exhibition. Once ubiquitous on television and in newspapers, they now qualify as quasi-aesthetic artifacts, pictures you may choose to seek out - for edification, as a
distraction, even.
.
Presented jointly at the International Center of Photography in New York and the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, "Inconvenient Evidence" includes 17 of the published pictures from the notorious prison in Iraq, reminding us of the deep and symbiotic relationship between photographs and the conduct of modern war. They also demonstrate how quickly the life cycle of an image spins these days.
.
In New York, where the photographs have been printed straight off the Web and tacked to the walls, there is a more conventional show of famous shots from Life magazine just a few steps away. The comparison is useful: The visual equivalent of cellphone chatter has achieved the power to shape public opinion that Larry Burrows's classic Vietnam pictures, which Life published, had a generation ago. Now war's participants snap the images themselves.
.
Both shows are on view at the center through Nov. 28. After that, they'll be taken down and replaced by others: The Abu Ghraib photographs have joined the vast, passing pageant of American cultural experience.
.
Placing these atrocious pictures in a sleek white room and inviting us to cogitate on their visual properties raises some interesting ethical questions. Why Abu Ghraib but not images of beheadings, which are also on the Web, floating in the digital ether, fragments from the same new photographic universe? Would it be considered an invasion of the dead's privacy? Too disgusting? Politically incorrect?
.
There is a dead prisoner on view. As for surviving detainees, how might they feel about being exhibited like this? Elsewhere, their images have become tools of political resistance, but here the detainees are in a sense twice violated, first as objects of the photographers' derision, then as objects of the audience's detached contemplation.
.
Meanwhile, other images from the war remain conspicuously invisible. Photographers still cannot take pictures of the returning coffins of American soldiers; the most gruesome battle injuries still don't make it into the day's news; supposedly even more shocking images from Abu Ghraib are still under wraps somewhere.
.
An obvious danger of showing the available Abu Ghraib pictures like this is that the setting might somehow defuse the content, turning the images into just one more artful provocation. Surprisingly, the show has the opposite effect: The coolly cerebral space reinforces the distinction between the usual contrived "shock" art and these genuinely shocking amateur snapshots.
.
The art critic John Berger once drew a distinction between public and private photographs. Public photographs are comprehensible to strangers and predicated on the viewers' sympathy. Charles Moore's famous shots of police dogs lunging at civil rights marchers - one of them is among the pictures in the Life show - elicit sympathy for the subjects. Like all public photographs of suffering, it is taken as if in our name, and shocks us into a condition of moral alarm. The photographer's virtue is implicit.
.
But private pictures, never meant to be seen beyond a certain circle of friends, occupy a morally ambiguous state. The photos of Abu Ghraib detainees menaced by guard dogs, unconsciously echoing Moore's image, imply no outrage about what's happening. In fact, the intent of the pictures is precisely to compound the humiliation.
.
The moral quagmire brings to mind recently published photographs from German archives showing Nazis as war victims. Or the photographs from Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge death camp, which the Museum of Modern Art exhibited some years ago. Shot, like the Nazi photos, for the purpose of record-keeping, they show a mother cradling a baby; two men, blindfolded and shackled, holding hands; a boy, quietly standing, with his prison number safety-pinned into his bare chest, like a modern St. Sebastian. All of them about to die. All these photographs raise the same disturbing questions about the motives of the photographers. What did they presume about the people looking at their pictures?
.
That said, even the most repulsive photographs bear witness. They are evidence. And therefore a kind of gift to memory. We live in an amnesiac society. The Abu Ghraib photographs have passed from the headlines to the art pages in half a year. One can only imagine how much further they may retreat in six more months.
___________________________________________________
7. About "Four More Years" Series
What is meant by the injunction, "Four More Years"? 4 more years of what? 4 years for whom? Why not 10 or 16 more years? And what of the 4 or 12 years which just passed? The series will address what we or our invited guests deem to be critical questions confronting cultural activists today. What if anything can be learned from the past 4 years? If we assumed that behind the "Defeat Bush" agenda rested a tremendous potential for socio-political transformation, what can be made of this potential post "victory," today? Thus, the series will with modest steps examine the future of activism, media criticism, and critical cultural practice especially at a moment when "culture" is being explicitly recognized by the right and the left as the key terrain in the struggle for hegemony. It will consider plans and proposals as well as analyses of past interventions (including of course all of the sweat and ink spilled over the past 4 years about art and defeating bush). It will also traverse philosophical questions pertaining to mourning, resistance (again), revolution (?), and the status of the image and representation in this war without end, in our current, open-ended, state of exception.
(also, this Adorno article on Commitment is on reserve for this class. If you have not yet read it (and I know some people did last semester), I highly recommend it. Not sure I agree with it but there is a lot to think about.
From: "Sixteen Beaver"
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Monday Night -- 11.15.04 -- Art After Abu Ghraib? -- with Yates McKee--"Four More Years" Series
Contents:
1. About this Monday Night
2. About Presentation
3. About Yates McKee
4. Useful Links
5. Arthur Danto Text from Artforum
6. Michael Kimmelman Text from NYTimes
7. About "Four More Years" Series
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday
___________________________________________________
1. About this Monday Night
What: Presentation / Discussion
When: 7:00pm, Monday November 15th, 2004
Where: 16 Beaver St. NY, NY 4th Floor
Who: Open to all (As Always)
For our very first event at 16Beaver since the 2004 elections, we are pleased to invite you to a presentation entitled "Art After Abu Ghraib?"by Yates McKee (see details below). The talk will of course be followed by an open discussion. Although this presentation has been in the works
for a few months, it is also an apt follow-up to last week's Cooper Union field trip.
This event will also be the first installment of a series we will for the interim name "Four More Years" (See #4)
___________________________________________________
2. About Presentation
This Monday, Yates Mckee will give a presentation entitled Art After Abu Ghraib? that takes as its point of departure Shame, a kinetic artwork produced by Marc Robinson in 2003.
Informed by Adorno's remark in "Commitment" that "by turning suffering into images" artists "wound our shame before the victims," the presentation poses the following question: at a moment when it seems imperative for artists to effectively intervene in the global battlefield of images, what do we make of an imageless artwork that apparently withdraws from political instrumentality and even history itself? What presuppositions about "critical art practice" might this throw into relief, especially in the ongoing aftermath of the global events marked by the singular place-name "Abu Ghraib"?
Robinson's work will be read as a challenge to the reabsorption of the Abu Ghraib images into a narcissistic circuit of American "self-examination," implied by Arthur Danto's recent remark in Artforum that "Hideous as the conduct they depict is, the photographs are powerful examples of how
images can change what we are, and from that perspective must from now on act as standards against which we can judge the political efficacy of art."
In the process, the presentation will consider "the mobilization of shame" as a strategy that presumes the power of images in the service of human rights, as well as the "weaponization of shame" in the "anthropological laboratory" of Abu Ghraib. How can we identify in legal and ethical terms the "culturally" specific design of the torture, without affirming the Orientalist hypothesis that Muslim men are indeed exemplars of "shame society" as opposed to the "guilt society" of the West? What would it mean to identify the "other-directedness" often associated with shame not as a collective psycho-pathology but as a constituent feature of humanity itself, a feature that divides the human from within and defines it as infinite ethical responsibility? In a Levinasian vein, Robinson's work demands that we attend to this possibility.
The title of this presentation is meant to be speculative question, an invitation to debate about the uncertain relationship of aesthetics and politics at the current global conjuncture. Needless to say, such a debate now takes place during a period of mourning for the American Left, including those in the cultural and artistic sector whose activities were said to have finally "made a difference," as Alisa Solomon put it. What becomes of the monstrous images from Abu Ghraib now that the primary task
assigned to them by the Left-exposing and defeating the Bush administration in the 2004 election-has been lost? How will we account for-and critically participate in-the post-election afterlives of these
images? Their uncertain survival is a problem necessarily at work in the exhibition Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib, which will show at the International Center for Photography until November 28th. Attendees to Monday's discussion are highly encouraged to see the show, which would be a good point of common reference.
This will enable us to address issues such as: does the exhibition of the photographs in a museum context necessarily "aestheticize" them and strip them of their proper status as documents of suffering? Can an image have a "proper" status? Is "aestheticization" inherently a bad thing? Is it something that would be desireable or even possible to evade, especially since the images are structured from within as aesthetic artefacts? How, where, and to whom, if at all, should they be shown (recognizing that they will continue to appear in an inifnity of contexts, whether we like it or not). How might the images complicate the mnemonic, archival, preservational function of the museum, without simply disqualifying it as a simply an agent of entombment and homogenization?
Our discussion will also be shadowed by the appointment of Alberto Gonzalez to the position of U.S. Attorney General. As counsel to the President, he was the one who in a memo referred to the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" relics of the pre-9/11 era.
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3. About Yates McKee
Yates Mckee is a writer in New York City. He co-curated the exhibiton "Empire/State" at the Whitney ISP and coordinated the recent 16Beaver event "8 short talks on bio-art, bio-tech, bio-politics" at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He has also written texts engaged with works by Alia Hasan-Khan, Allora & Calzadilla, and Thorne & Ressler.
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4. Useful Links
Theodor Adorno, "Commitment," where he reiterates the paradoxical survival of art "after Auschwitz"
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/001103.php
Arthur Danto, "Art and Politics in American Self-Consciousness" (see below)
http://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=200407
Iraqi Artists Depict Anger Over Abu Ghraib:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0615/p07s01-woiq.html
Abu Gulag Freedom Park, Baghdad
http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/96250/index.php
Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others"
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html?ex=1100408400&en=b89d89aed36a36d3&ei=5070
Mark Danner, author of the new book Truth and Torture, "The Logic of Torture"
http://www.markdanner.com/nyreview/062404_Road_to_Torture.htm
Gregory Starrett, "Culture Never Dies: Anthropology at Abu Ghraib" A useful discussion of R. Patai's canonical "The Arab Mind" (1972), which continues to inform the "cultural training" given to U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/0406if-comm1.htm
Thomas Keenan: "Mobilizing Shame"
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/toc/saq103.2.html
A continually updated archive of articles on Abu Ghraib, including recent material on the appointment of Alberto Gonzalez:
http://www.ccmep.org/2004_articles/abu_ghraib.htm
Maureen Dowd, "Alberto Gonzalez, The Torture Guy":
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1111-27.htm
Slavoj Zizek "Between Two Deaths: The Culture of Torture"
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001084.php
Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Torture Photographs from Abu Ghraib exhibition statement by Brian Wallis:
http://www.icp.org/exhibitions/abu_ghraib/introduction.html
Alisa Solomon's pre-election article "Art Makes a Difference"
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041108&s=solomon
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5. Arthur Danto Text from Artforum
"Art and Politics in American Self-Consciousness"
From Artforum
WITH THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE ART world, national differences among artists have grown increasingly marginal. There is little to distinguish American art from the rest in the growing list of intercontinental art fairs and biennials. At the same time, "American art," however defined, is widely assumed to reveal something of the inner life of America as it changes over time. So there is a value in an exhibition such as the Whitney Biennial, which is largely restricted to American artists, since it may, at two-year intervals, tell us something worth knowing about where we are as a culture. During just the past decade, the Biennial's curators appear to have tried meeting this challenge by organizing shows that do not merely present American art but imply something about the objective spirit of the country through art. And viewers, whether American or not, have responded to what these shows seem to tell them about America. The 1993 Biennial was vehemently political, and even though the show was widely reviled, viewers were forced to measure the art against what they believed they knew about American realities.
The Biennial's implicit invitation for audiences to measure the art against the culture makes all the more interesting the assertion by the curators of the 2004 installment that one defining attitude of younger artists in the show was a nostalgia for a certain activism that had vanished from the scene. It seemed strange to me, given the political reality of the Bush years, that young artists could do no better than envy artists of the '60s for the forthrightness of their protests. And it was stranger still that they expressed their own immediate political concerns obliquely, even while the curators suggested that in terms of involvement with current issues, the show was really as political as that of 1993. It would today be unrealistic for young people to try to be '68ers, whatever the content of current political nostalgia may be, since no one seriously interested in politics would wish the context of '68
world reality to be reconstituted. How could one wish that and at the same time want to protest it all over again? If consciousness is like a stream, as William James believed, we really cannot step in it at the same place twice. Further, why would anyone, least of all an artist genuinely concerned with the issues of the war in Iraq or inequalities at home-or the conservatism of the religious Right-have recourse to Aesopian strategies, as if a Polish dissident in the cold-war era?
Cover of Artforum, May 1993. Pictured: Daniel J. Martinez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque-Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993.
But even if there was not this encrypted criticism, it was impossible merely to think about the art as art, and not about what it told us about the political moment in America. In some way, art is always political, and American art is always somehow informative of American political reality. When I think back to the Whitney surveys of the 1950s, it seems to me that one could feel the moral pulse of America in the landscapes and still lifes, which they comprised. In his monograph on Milton Avery, Robert Hobbs writes that Avery's political activism in the 1930s is important to his art, for "it indicates that his simple themes-his emphasis on family, his at times blank masks, his combinations of peoples of different races sitting contentedly on beaches-stem from his deep concern with social issues and his desire for a better, more harmonious life where humor, charm, intimacy, and human dignity all assume their rightful places." If Avery's ingratiating beach scenes had a political implication, it merely
requires an exercise of hermeneutical will to identify the political subtext of work that had seemed to have different agendas. So it is difficult to resist reflecting on the self-consciousness of the American
artist as an "American artist" today, given the current political landscape. What did this Biennial seem to tell us, perhaps in spite of itself?
Last year, I participated in a symposium at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the organizers framed our topic as follows: "What precisely is the relation between the fiction that nationality is a trait and the assorted uses to which it is nevertheless put in both practical and interpretive discourses of art?" Immediately after this, they asked how we are to come to terms with the political power of nationality as an idea "in the light of its philosophical poverty." To think of nationality as a fiction is, I think, evidence of having taken postmodern theory much too literally. I regard nationality neither as a fictional construct nor as a philosophically impoverished one but, to the contrary, as a palpable reality in people's lives, whatever its bearing on the practice of art. Nations have much the same structure that we do as conscious beings, according to the deep analysis of consciousness that we owe to Jean-Paul Sartre. Like individuals, nations have a being-for-others (pour autrui) and for themselves (pour soi), and the great political tensions often arise from the failure of congruence between them. Given American power, how other nations perceive us-how we are defined from without-for better or worse defines the political reality for everyone today. It is impossible, seeing America from within, to appreciate how we can be hated as much as we obviously
are. If only "They" could see us as we see ourselves, from within! "They" would modulate their resentments and their anger. But given how little power we have to see "Them" as "They" see themselves, there is scant reason to suppose that "They" can do better with "Us."
There is a distinction between being in the world as an American and being an American citizen. One can renounce the latter, but renouncing the former is impossible, like renouncing one's language. Yet they are not entirely external to one another, inasmuch as the consciousness of being American includes in some degree an awareness of what it means politically to be American. This is especially the case with being an American artist in America, whether one is a citizen or not. So one wants to ask in what way American political institutions penetrate the consciousness of being an American artist. Everyone must acknowledge that the American government has never had much interest in the arts-has never felt, for example, that America's standing in the world has much, if any, connection with what American artists have done. Indeed, the practice of art in America has taken place in an atmosphere of near-total governmental indifference, except insofar as it falls under constitutional protections governing freedom of expression. The CIA's covert involvement with the dissemination of Abstract Expressionism internationally after World War II was opportunistic but in any case had nothing to do with what made that art possible in the first place. In general, I think, the making of art has been considered in terms of the pursuit of happiness, as specified in the Declaration of Independence, and hence the exercise of a right, with no effort on the government's part to say how it should be done.
There was not a national museum of art in America until the 1930s, and even then it was not a museum of American art-though the idea of a national museum of art had been intimately associated with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Consider the Louvre, for example, which organized its collections into schools: the Italian, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the French-the latter to make plain to French men and women, to whom as citizens the museum belonged after the Revolution, that there was such a thing as a national school and that France could hold its head high among the nations because of Poussin, Claude, Clouet, Vouet, and others. The Louvre was far less a sanctuary for aesthetic contemplation and scholarly investigation than an instrument for forming a national consciousness. It was also a component of that consciousness, in that the art from the other schools had been expropriated by the French military. (Stealing the enemy's treasure as trophies, like stealing its women, is immemorially the victor's prerogative.) By contrast, our National Gallery of Art could not be a temple to the American spirit through American art, since the prevailing idea in 1937 (when it was founded) was that real art was something that happened somewhere else-a view American artists at the time shared. Duchamp addressed this point in an interview when he arrived
in America in 1915, two years after the Armory show, and tried in effect to say that Americans should have no reason to feel inferior:
Renée Cox, Yo Mama's Last Supper (detail), 1996, color photograph, 30" x
12' 5".
The capitals of the Old World have labored for hundreds of years to find that which constitutes good taste and one may say that they have found the zenith thereof. But why do people not understand what a bore this is? . . . If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished-dead-and that America is the country of the art of the future. . . . Look at the skyscrapers! Has Europe anything to show more beautiful than these? New York itself is a work of art, a complete work of art. . .
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American artists today need no longer acquiesce in such compensatory consolations, for just the reason that American art is part of an international art scene, in which it is no longer expected that art should display the attributes of a national identity. I am not even sure that the consciousness of being an American artist is at all part of the consciousness of artists in America today. It hardly seems relevant, and I think this is reflected in the framing questions of the symposium I cited above: Being American seems to have so little to do with the "practical and interpretive discourses of art" that many individuals have made the inference that nationality itself is a fiction. I don't think, as I have been saying, that it is. But it may well be true that by the time American art began to be taken seriously-after World War II, in the '50s and '60s especially-the idea of a national spirit being expressed through art had definitively lost its appeal, largely, I think, because the idea of a
national spirit was perceived as a form of political pathology. The great political movements of the century constituted themselves as dictatorships of artistic rectitude, as we all know. Moscow and Berlin, Rome and Beijing made painting outside prescribed formats too dangerous to practice unless
one were exceedingly courageous and prepared for an underground existence. While there were pressures on painters in America-Arshile Gorky, for example, felt pressures as an abstractionist, from the American regionalists on the one side and from socialist realists on the other-a
true nationalistic coercion did not quite happen here. Gorky was never in political danger, not even when he worked for the WPA, which supported his murals for Newark Airport though they were entirely modernist.
What was remarkable about the WPA was that it was supported by the government at all, since the question in the United States had always been-and remains-whether the taxpayer's dollar should be spent on art. Otherwise the government took scant interest in what artists did or did not do. As recently as the Giuliani administration, with its perhaps cynical obsession with decency, it remained acceptable for people in the private sector to look at photographs like Yo Mama's Last Supper, 1996, by
Renée Cox, or at paintings of the Holy Virgin at which some artist (Chris Ofili) had "flung dung"-the mayor's language-since that was protected by the First Amendment. "Decent" people might care to picket and protest, but as long as tax moneys were not called on to support it, the art world was ideally a scene of freedom. In America, the separation of art and the state is almost as strong as that of church and state. I think this is an unqualified blessing, but I won't try to argue that here.
The issue of taxes is whether the people's money should be used to support art that conflicts with their moral values, and that, of course, is a political matter, since the argument can be made that people of
differing values have a right to live by them so long as they do not break the law, and we all have an obligation to support the free interchange of ideas. That, however coarsely stated, is the purview of
the First Amendment. We all pay taxes to support the exercise of free expression, and pay taxes, moreover, so that the government enforces that right and remains indifferent to the content of conflicting expressions. Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibition "The Perfect Moment" (1988-90) was
funded by the NEA, which he felt entirely appropriate, since the art was too difficult in subject matter and treatment to expect commercial support. The question was whether the art had "redeeming social value," though the mere fact that it conveyed certain views of sexual conduct through images should have been social value enough, given the grounds of the First Amendment. Artists dealing with pornography can always say that they, too, are mainly interested in promoting discussion. This is more or less conceded by the government, in that efforts to legislate the monitoring of pornographic images on the Internet have consistently been voted down on First Amendment grounds.
American soldiers posing with naked and hooded Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, ca. 2003-2004. First published in the New Yorker, May 10, 2004.
There is, however, another dimension to pornography, which the recent Abu Ghraib photographs make salient to our discussion. I have not seen it mentioned that many of them could as easily have appeared on pornographic websites as with the news headlines on our browsers. I have little doubt that dominatrices will sooner or later adopt the standard camouflage fatigues issued by the army, and this returns me to the structure of consciousness with which I began, between what we are for ourselves and what we are for others. The reflex of the Bush administration has been to disclaim these images as not really Us-to maintain that torture and humiliation of this sort are not in the American grain, when everyone who sees the photographs knows that they are. The images show the degree to which American consciousness has been penetrated by the imagery of pornography. But so has world consciousness, given the ubiquity of videotapes that deal with images of sexual bondage and humiliation. Whether these images existed as fantasies before they were put on tape-or online-is difficult to say, but the archives of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Representation at the University of Indiana have photographs that show males in a posture of humiliation before women. And I have seen Renaissance engravings that deal with such subjects, which suggests that these thoughts have been part of the sexual imagination for a very long time. Plato once described the despot as performing the actions that the rest of us merely dream of, and what the Abu Ghraib images testify to is the democratization of despotic fantasy. For the time being, however, the behavior depicted has entered world consciousness as integral to the pour autrui of America. There is little doubt that America is going to have to take measures to ensure that the impulse to submit its captives to sexual torture remains unenacted and confined within the
boundaries of fantasy. And that will certainly be at least a step in the direction of changing our image in the world's conception of what we are, though such images are fairly indelible.
The 1993 Whitney Biennial showed the Rodney King tape, the appropriateness of which was contested on the grounds that it was not art, even though it was widely felt that the footage had already become
part of American self-consciousness. And if one of the aims of the exhibition was to make this self-consciousness accessible, what image could do it better? I wonder whether the same is not true for the Abu Ghraib photographs, which might well be among the exhibits of the 2006 Biennial. My sense is that, hideous as the conduct they depict is, the Abu Ghraib photographs are powerful examples of how images can change what we are, and from that perspective they must from now on act as standards against which we can judge the political efficacy of art. That measure, when applied to American art today, seems to me to imply that American artists are on balance satisfied with the existing political structure. There was nothing in the 2004 Biennial that, were we to see it from the outside, would cause us to want to change the way we are for others. That may finally be the way that, for better or worse, the art in it was political.
Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University.
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6. Michael Kimmelman Text from NYTimes
Abu Ghraib returns - as art?
Michael Kimmelman NYT
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
NEW YORK Five months after they made their first shocking appearance, the Abu Ghraib photographs have become a museum exhibition. Once ubiquitous on television and in newspapers, they now qualify as quasi-aesthetic artifacts, pictures you may choose to seek out - for edification, as a
distraction, even.
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Presented jointly at the International Center of Photography in New York and the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, "Inconvenient Evidence" includes 17 of the published pictures from the notorious prison in Iraq, reminding us of the deep and symbiotic relationship between photographs and the conduct of modern war. They also demonstrate how quickly the life cycle of an image spins these days.
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In New York, where the photographs have been printed straight off the Web and tacked to the walls, there is a more conventional show of famous shots from Life magazine just a few steps away. The comparison is useful: The visual equivalent of cellphone chatter has achieved the power to shape public opinion that Larry Burrows's classic Vietnam pictures, which Life published, had a generation ago. Now war's participants snap the images themselves.
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Both shows are on view at the center through Nov. 28. After that, they'll be taken down and replaced by others: The Abu Ghraib photographs have joined the vast, passing pageant of American cultural experience.
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Placing these atrocious pictures in a sleek white room and inviting us to cogitate on their visual properties raises some interesting ethical questions. Why Abu Ghraib but not images of beheadings, which are also on the Web, floating in the digital ether, fragments from the same new photographic universe? Would it be considered an invasion of the dead's privacy? Too disgusting? Politically incorrect?
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There is a dead prisoner on view. As for surviving detainees, how might they feel about being exhibited like this? Elsewhere, their images have become tools of political resistance, but here the detainees are in a sense twice violated, first as objects of the photographers' derision, then as objects of the audience's detached contemplation.
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Meanwhile, other images from the war remain conspicuously invisible. Photographers still cannot take pictures of the returning coffins of American soldiers; the most gruesome battle injuries still don't make it into the day's news; supposedly even more shocking images from Abu Ghraib are still under wraps somewhere.
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An obvious danger of showing the available Abu Ghraib pictures like this is that the setting might somehow defuse the content, turning the images into just one more artful provocation. Surprisingly, the show has the opposite effect: The coolly cerebral space reinforces the distinction between the usual contrived "shock" art and these genuinely shocking amateur snapshots.
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The art critic John Berger once drew a distinction between public and private photographs. Public photographs are comprehensible to strangers and predicated on the viewers' sympathy. Charles Moore's famous shots of police dogs lunging at civil rights marchers - one of them is among the pictures in the Life show - elicit sympathy for the subjects. Like all public photographs of suffering, it is taken as if in our name, and shocks us into a condition of moral alarm. The photographer's virtue is implicit.
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But private pictures, never meant to be seen beyond a certain circle of friends, occupy a morally ambiguous state. The photos of Abu Ghraib detainees menaced by guard dogs, unconsciously echoing Moore's image, imply no outrage about what's happening. In fact, the intent of the pictures is precisely to compound the humiliation.
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The moral quagmire brings to mind recently published photographs from German archives showing Nazis as war victims. Or the photographs from Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge death camp, which the Museum of Modern Art exhibited some years ago. Shot, like the Nazi photos, for the purpose of record-keeping, they show a mother cradling a baby; two men, blindfolded and shackled, holding hands; a boy, quietly standing, with his prison number safety-pinned into his bare chest, like a modern St. Sebastian. All of them about to die. All these photographs raise the same disturbing questions about the motives of the photographers. What did they presume about the people looking at their pictures?
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That said, even the most repulsive photographs bear witness. They are evidence. And therefore a kind of gift to memory. We live in an amnesiac society. The Abu Ghraib photographs have passed from the headlines to the art pages in half a year. One can only imagine how much further they may retreat in six more months.
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7. About "Four More Years" Series
What is meant by the injunction, "Four More Years"? 4 more years of what? 4 years for whom? Why not 10 or 16 more years? And what of the 4 or 12 years which just passed? The series will address what we or our invited guests deem to be critical questions confronting cultural activists today. What if anything can be learned from the past 4 years? If we assumed that behind the "Defeat Bush" agenda rested a tremendous potential for socio-political transformation, what can be made of this potential post "victory," today? Thus, the series will with modest steps examine the future of activism, media criticism, and critical cultural practice especially at a moment when "culture" is being explicitly recognized by the right and the left as the key terrain in the struggle for hegemony. It will consider plans and proposals as well as analyses of past interventions (including of course all of the sweat and ink spilled over the past 4 years about art and defeating bush). It will also traverse philosophical questions pertaining to mourning, resistance (again), revolution (?), and the status of the image and representation in this war without end, in our current, open-ended, state of exception.
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