Dissensus and the Politics of Collaborative Practice

37

APS 1 (1) pp 37ndash53 Intellect Limited 2011

Art amp the Public SphereVolume 1 Number 1

copy 2011 Intellect Ltd Article English language doi 101386aps1137_1

KIM CHARNLEYUniversity of Essex

Dissensus and the politics of

collaborative practice

ABSTRACT

The tensions that exist in thinking around politicized collaborative art are exempli-fied by the theoretical positions taken by Claire Bishop and Grant Kester Bishop argues that the autonomy of the artist is indispensable to the critical function of collaborative art and that this is impeded by an lsquoethical turnrsquo in criticism that promotes lsquothe sacrifice of authorship in the name of a ldquotruerdquo and respectful collabo-rationrsquo (Bishop 2006a 181) By contrast Kester affirms that ethical reflection is a central feature of collaborative art where the artist must overcome their own privi-leged status in order to create an equal dialogue with participants This article is an attempt to move beyond the polarized form of debate between these two theorists It argues that collaborative art is defined by a contradiction where an apparently free aesthetic space is superimposed on the social and institutional reality of art with all of its implicit exclusions Despite appearances the positions of Kester and Bishop are complicit in their attempt to expel this contradiction This article argues that this contradiction must be regarded as the foundation of the political in collaborative art In doing so it suggests that Ranciegravere concept lsquodissensusrsquo offers scope for mapping the paradoxical complexity of the interdependence of ethical aesthetic and political issues in the liminal space between art and the social

There are clear tensions involved in current understanding of artistsrsquo attempts to engage with the social through some form of collaborative dialogic or relational practice The critical attention given to this type of work has

KEYWORDS

Ranciegravererelational aestheticsClaire BishopGrant Kestercollaborative artdissensus

APS_11_Charnley_37-54indd 37APS_11_Charnley_37-54indd 37 22111 84006 AM22111 84006 AM

Kim Charnley

38

developed in parallel to a renewed interest in the connection between aesthetics and politics but attempts to understand this connection remain fraught with difficulty Increasing numbers of commentators have drawn attention to the weakness of the political claim of Bourriaudrsquos relational aesthetics usually pointing to the fact that relational lsquomicro-utopiasrsquo depend on the art institution to guarantee their integrity and are blind to the exclusions that constitute this space To summarize Hal Fosterrsquos argument they are just one big lsquoArty Partyrsquo (Foster 2003) However attempts to put forward a more engaged account of the politics of collaborative practice have also proved divisive This article examines the problems involved in thinking the political potential of this type of artwork through two positions that are equally dissatisfied with the modest politics of relational aesthetics but nonetheless present programmes that appear polarized and mutually incompatible Claire Bishop and Grant Kester are recognized as authorities in the area of collaborative art but after the publication of Bishoprsquos lsquoThe Social Turn Collaboration and its Discontentsrsquo in February 2006 they clashed in the letters pages of Artforum Their respective arguments offer a convenient way of exploring some of the contradictions that present themselves in politicized collaborative art Here they will be used to allow an analysis of the competing claims that emerge when the political potential of the aesthetic is superimposed on the politics of the social in collaborative art This article emphasizes contradiction as the basis of the political potential of collaborative work whilst at the same time demonstrating that both Bishop and Kester try to expel this contradiction from their arguments thereby neutralizing its political potential The terms of the argument that will emerge here are drawn from the theory of Jacques Ranciegravere though they are used in a way that implies a critique of Ranciegravere thinking Ranciegravere often seems wary of work that attempts to bridge the gap between art and life insisting that this practice must end in disappointment This might be attributed to the fact that politicized collaborative art in particular confuses the distinction between his terms the lsquopolitics of aestheticsrsquo and the lsquoaesthetics of politicsrsquo Here this space is advocated as the most interesting space in the current exploration of political practice precisely because it is the most paradoxical

Claire Bishoprsquos lsquoThe Social Turn Collaboration and its Discontentsrsquo contains a forceful agenda to attack a tendency for art criticism to evalu-ate collaborative works in ethical rather than aesthetic terms judging their success solely with regards to the egalitarian form of the inter-subjective relation enacted by the work instead of evaluating it lsquoas artrsquo For Bishop this tendency reduces art to moral criteria and encourages new art to be made in the image of these criteria In this way the lsquohellip complex knot of concerns about pleasure visibility engagement and the conventions of social interac-tionrsquo that are the domain of art are subordinated to the endless reproduction of a discrete set of moral notions (Bishop 2006a 183) Kesterrsquos objection to this article and Bishoprsquos reply in the letters page of the May 2006 edition of Artforum helped to define their positions as irreconcilable poles of thinking about collaborative art Bishoprsquos article concludes with the caustic suggestion that Kesterrsquos work forms part of a trend in criticism that combines an ethic of lsquoanti-capitalism and the Christian good soulrsquo (Bishop 2006a 183) whilst Kester goes so far as to suggest that Bishop promotes lsquohellip an art practice that will continually reaffirm and flatter her self-perception as an acute critic hellip playing at hermeneutic self-discovery like Freudrsquos infant grandson in a game of ldquofortrdquo and ldquodardquorsquo (Kester 2006 22)


Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice

39

Kesterrsquos reaction was extreme because from his point of view Bishoprsquos critique represents a typical attempt to police the boundaries of art in the name of an avant-gardism that is elitist From this point of view Bishoprsquos argument is a betrayal quite simply a betrayal of the political potential of art The difference in their position derives from a fundamental disagreement about the role of ethics in collaborative practice Bishop sees collaborative art as the closest thing to a contemporary avant-garde whilst Kester avoids this term entirely associating it with an engrained refusal of art practice to engage with a lsquonon artrsquo public Bishop advocates a practice where chal-lenge and confrontation in the avant-garde tradition are key elements of the political integrity of the work This is anathema to Kester who sees dialogue between artist and lsquonon-artrsquo participants as the real political ground of collab-orative work In his view the avant-garde tradition of lsquoconfrontationrsquo acts as a smokescreen for a discourse of power that denigrates those who have not internalized artrsquos linguistic and behavioural codes For Kester it is an artistrsquos responsibility to take their privilege into account when entering into dialogue with collaborators or risk colonizing them under the aegis of the lsquoartworkrsquo This means that the lsquoaestheticrsquo in Kesterrsquos lsquodialogical aestheticsrsquo is fundamen-tally an ethical practice of engagement with the other Yet for Bishop lsquothe ethical turnrsquo is a threat to the authorial autonomy and complexity that are the sine qua non of art as aesthetic practice Both critics accuse the other of placing in jeopardy the political power of art Bishop suggests that Kesterrsquos approach results in capitulation to state agendas for exploiting art as a means of social reconciliation Kester implies that Bishop is hypocritical in her advocacy of an art that is a privileged activity where lsquopoliticsrsquo has a pleasantly radical sound Clearly this summary indicates contradictory definitions of the political but how are these to be understood And what is their relation to lsquothe ethicalrsquo and lsquothe aestheticrsquo

The significant points of agreement between Bishop and Kester if anything make their dispute even more interesting It is interesting to note that the dispute between Bishop and Kester contains some areas of agree-ment In a critique of Bourriaudrsquos Relational Aesthetics published in 2004 Bishop points to a need to explore the type of relations that exist in relational works (Bishop 2004) Bishoprsquos objection is that Bourriaudrsquos rhetoric of lsquomicro-utopiarsquo conceals the social reality of art as a nexus of power and unspoken exclusivity Yet when Kester proposes an ideal type of artwork (in which the dialogue works beyond a self-selected group of art world participants) he is doing exactly what Bishop advocates thinking about the subtle relations of power that exist between artists and their non-artist collaborators However Kesterrsquos enquiry creates a problem for Bishop as reflection on art as a socio-political institution tends to raise ethico-political questions especially around access and representation Such questions are exacerbated in collaborative works where the activity of non-artist participants is understood as part of the aesthetic meaning of the work In these cases the aesthetic and socio-political reality is directly overlaid emphasizing latent contradictions The most glaring of these is that lsquothe aestheticrsquo is generally taken to mean the distinct univer-sal and free space that we access through art It has become conventional to view contemporary art as a zone of free play that is buffered from the instru-mental values of the public sphere Collaborative works that make a strong political claim run into the problem that this free space of art is constituted or at least surrounded by practices that re-inscribe social divisions To address this reality one must ask ethical questions about how art lsquoshouldrsquo operate but


Kim Charnley

40

1 Here for the sake of brevity Bishoprsquos argument is preacutecised from two different sources her 2004 article in October and the 2006 article in Artforum both of which address Battaille Monument

2 With the possible exception of Adrien Piper though Bishop is indeed somewhat ambivalent about her authoritative and confrontational stance in collaborative works

these questions come at a cost Once the artwork is assessed in ethical terms a limit is placed on the critical autonomy of the artist an autonomy that Bishop believes is vital to artrsquos political role

Bishoprsquos response is an attempt to expel ethical reflection from the aesthetic characterizing it as a type of discourse that weakens the political potential of art This point is underlined with reference to the work Battaille Monument (2002) by Thomas Hirschorn and in particular the criticism of this piece by the Swedish curator Maria Lind This work was based in Kassel during the Documenta exhibition and involved a number of features sited in an area of the city with a majority of ethnic Turkish inhabitants The work included a monument a bar and a library of Battaillersquos works Criticism of the work focused on two key points first it tended to frame the inhabitants of the district in terms of a kind of lsquosocial pornographyrsquo as a kind of exotic lsquootherrsquo to the art world visitors secondly it employed local people but did not acknowledge their contribution Against the prevalent criticism Bishop argues that this piece destabilizes the self-identification of art world visitors by pointing to the exclusions upon which the social enactment of art is based1 Drawing on the work of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau Bishop suggests that the politics of this work reside in its ability to point to the lsquoantagonismrsquo ndash or fundamental exclusions ndash that help to constitute the apparently autonomous space of art However a side effect of this argument is that questions about the morality of this work (with regards the representation of its participants) are ignored because they interrupt evaluation of its potential to articulate lsquoantagonismrsquo As a number of commentators have suggested this type of politics however much it appears to be self-reflexive is still addressed exclusively to those inside the enchanted circle of art and therefore re-enforces a structural inequality (see Kenning 2009)

Bishop is concerned that the focus on the ethical credentials of collabo-rative works leads to a positive valuation of projects where the artist(s) give up their authorial control regardless of whether this results in interesting artwork This is characterized as deriving from an ethics of lsquoauthorial renunci-ationrsquo (Bishop 2006a 180) In Bishoprsquos view socially engaged works tend not to be assessed as lsquoartrsquo but only in terms of their ethical credentials for exam-ple lsquoOda Projesirsquo the Turkish art activist group praised by Lind is implicitly criticized by Bishop for an unwillingness to engage with the aesthetic content of their work and for shying away from addressing the lsquodangerrsquo they locate in this term In the process of stating this case Bishop emphasizes that Kesterrsquos Conversation Pieces fails to convincingly argue for an aesthetics of lsquodialogicrsquo art because it stresses the importance for artists of a self-reflexive awareness of the imbalance in power in their collaborations Bishop identifies the term lsquoaestheticsrsquo with both artistic autonomy and challenge to the sensibilities of the audience neither of which are provided by the works that Kester affirms2 Indeed Kester is hostile to these traditional attributes of the avant-garde ndash viewing them as based on demeaning stereotypes of the non-art public Therefore in Bishoprsquos estimation Kesterrsquos book lsquohellip seems perfectly content to allow that a socially collaborative art project could be deemed a success if it works on the level of social intervention even though it founders on the level of artrsquo (Bishop 2006a 181)

However the weakness of Bishoprsquos analysis exists precisely in a fail-ure to explore the difficulties involved in defining the relation between the aesthetic and the political Granted a magazine article is not necessarily the context in which these issues can most easily be analysed Nonetheless



41

the definition of the aesthetic that Bishop draws from Ranciegravere is used to skirt around this difficulty

the aesthetic is according to Ranciegravere the ability to think contradic-tion the productive contradiction of artrsquos relation to social change char-acterized precisely by that tension between faith in artrsquos autonomy and belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come For Ranciegravere the aesthetic doesnrsquot need to be sacrificed at the altar of social change as it already inherently contains this ameliorative promise

(Bishop 2006a 183)

This reading of Ranciegravere whilst not necessarily inaccurate certainly empha-sizes the lsquoquietismrsquo that can be an implication of his theoretical framework (Day 2009 402) Bishop is suggesting that art is inherently political and does not need to deviate into ethical reflection in order to live up to its political promise Although this may be true of the meta-view of art advanced by Ranciegravere it is also a convenient way of suppressing the problems raised by collaborative art that engages directly with participants and builds its political claim around this relation Effectively this definition of art is used as a means of discounting enquiry into the types of social relation involved in collabora-tive works and it seems unlikely that Ranciegravere analysis is intended to end in a position of such critical immobility According to Bishop Ranciegravere challenges us to lsquothink contradictionrsquo though the immediate objection arises that her argument uses his ideas to demarcate to expel contradiction and set limits to the proper space of the aesthetic

RANCIEgraveRErsquoS AESTHETIC AND POLITICS

For Ranciegravere the experience of the aesthetic in art is one of autonomy an experience of autonomy that has historically provided a motor for social change by implicitly calling into question the social and political constraints of the state His historical claim is that around the eighteenth century when the term lsquoaestheticrsquo first came into use there was a transition from what Ranciegravere terms the lsquomimeticrsquo to the lsquoaestheticrsquo regime of art The aesthetic regime is characterized by a distinctive openness in the way that it regulates or fails to regulate the link between art as a way of doing (poiumlesis) and a way of feeling or experiencing (lsquoaesthesisrsquo) In the aesthetic regime there is a gap in the place that had formerly been filled by the cluster of regulative concepts grouped around the term lsquohuman naturersquo This is significant because it means that aesthetic experience was cut loose to be an experience of freedom rather than of particular types of artistic lsquoperfectionrsquo associated with clearly articulated social roles This freedom implied politics ndash it was implicitly universal and available to all ndash standing in contrast to the social inequalities that characterized existing social structures Lacking anything to regulate this relation art henceforth could conceive of itself as addressed to a lost human nature or one yet to come and in so doing become consciously allied to a political ideal (Ranciegravere 2009 8) At the same time the ground was laid for formal innovation in the name of aesthetics so that the entire development of nineteenth and twentieth-century modernism can be understood in terms of this interaction between poiumlesis and aesthesis in the lsquoaesthetic regimersquo


Kim Charnley

42

However political art for Ranciegravere must always shuttle between two poles which express a grounding contradiction At one extreme there is the type of art that aspires to dissolve the distinction between itself and the social ndash to create a society in the image of art ndash through dissolution of art as a distinct sphere This type of work is identified in the utopian aspirations of vari-ous avant-gardes from William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement through Russian constructivism to Joseph Beuysrsquo lsquosocial sculpturersquo Ranciegravere emphasizes that the lsquovanishing pointrsquo of this avant-garde aspiration is disap-pointment the aesthetic experience as the origin of the political aspiration of art cannot become the social At the other extreme there is a politics of art that depends on its absolute distinction from the social offering a social critique from the distinctive space of art Ranciegravere identifies this aspiration with the various lsquoart for artrsquos sakersquo movements of the nineteenth century and their descendents as well as with the aesthetic theory of Adorno and Lyotard In this position there is the risk of denying the link between art and political transformation through efforts to emphasize the otherness and inaccessible purity of the aesthetic experience

At first sight Ranciegravere emphasis on the necessarily distinct place of the aesthetic and of art seems to support Bishoprsquos call for evaluation of collabora-tive work lsquoas artrsquo rather than using ethical criteria However the problem is that Bishop in effect advocates both of the contradictory poles of aesthetic politics at the same time Bishop argues for the importance of critical autonomy in artworks that have already taken a step over the threshold between art and the social by defining their aesthetic around some form of collaboration as in the works of Jeremy Deller Thomas Hirschorn Phil Collins and Artur Zmijewski (alluded to in lsquoThe Social Turn Collaboration and its Discontentsrsquo) Is it possible for art to adopt the critical position of being removed from the social whilst at the same time being immersed in and constituted by it Can this assertion of the necessary link between the aesthetic and the political be adequate to answer the ethical questions raised by Kester and others

It is at this point that Ranciegravere framework for articulating the relationship between the aesthetic and the political begins to break down certainly in terms of its usefulness for Bishoprsquos argument Although Ranciegravere does discuss lsquorela-tional aestheticsrsquo he remains ambivalent about the claims of socially engaged work because it blurs the distinction between art and the social in such a way that distinctive political formation of each field is obscured In effect collab-orative art of the type discussed by Kester and Bishop falls into a lacuna in between lsquothe politics of aestheticsrsquo and lsquothe aesthetics of politicsrsquo This is because both Kester and Bishop advocate politicized collaborative work for Kester it is the politics of activism for Bishop it is the politics of provocative criticality combined with an element of collaboration This distinguishes them both from Bourriaudrsquos lsquorelational aestheticsrsquo which as Ranciegravere observes tends to empha-size the lsquomodestyrsquo of its political claim (Ranciegravere 2009) For Bourriaud the poli-tics of relational aesthetics diffuses into the politesse of lsquomodels of sociabilityrsquo where the work sidesteps the difficult narratives of transformative politics by viewing itself as an lsquoexperimentrsquo or a lsquomicro-utopiarsquo By contrast in very differ-ent ways Bishop and Kester see a more disruptive political potential in collabo-ration However in the liminal space between art and the social it is impossible for art to avoid questions that Ranciegravere tends to confine to the field of the politi-cal namely those of morality ndash or lsquothe division of rightrsquo (Ranciegravere 2009)

The difficulty involved in distinguishing the aesthetic from the political and ethical in collaborative art can be read in the arguments that Bishop advances



43

3 The reference to lsquoinstrumental rationalityrsquo is interesting as it invokes Adorno whose thought is central to any conception of avant-garde radicalism based around semantic inaccessibility as lsquoautonomyrsquo Bishop does not require that the aesthetic be inaccessible but should lsquoshuttle between sense and nonsensersquo ndash recalling Ranciegravere discussion of the critical art of Heartfield and Dan Graham There is a sense in which Bishop proposes a kind of neutralized Adorno Ranciegravere hybrid ndash in an ironic echo of the way Ranciegravere identifies Lyotard as a kind of ethically neutralized Adorno in Aesthetics and its Discontents (2009)

Although Bishop attacks what she sees as the ethical assessment of collabora-tive artwork when forced to respond to Kesterrsquos attack her position is stated in such a way that it has the form of a profession of faith

I believe in the continued value of disruption with all its philosophi-cal anti-humanism as a form of resistance to instrumental rationality and as a source of transformation Without artistic gestures that shuttle between sense and nonsense that recalibrate our perception that allow multiple interpretations that factor the problem of documentationpresentation into each project and that have a life beyond an immedi-ate social goal we are left with pleasantly innocuous art Not non-art just bland art ndash and art that easily compensates for inadequate govern-ment policies

(Bishop 2006b 24)

It is evident in this statement that Bishop is stating a moral position the kind of confrontational art that she advocates can lead to lsquotransformationrsquo and lsquoresist-ance to instrumental rationalityrsquo in the service of a lsquogoodrsquo that remains unde-fined though is implicitly that of an anti-capitalist avant-garde3 Similarly the term lsquoanti-humanismrsquo only ever makes sense as a re-evaluation and rein-vigoration of the ethics of humanism There is no doubt that Kester would claim very similar goals in his formulation of a critical framework of dialogic art The political here is intimately connected to the ethical if we define the ethical as the advocacy of some action or world view that participates in a commonly recognized lsquogoodrsquo The lsquogoodrsquo that is advocated by Bishop (as well as by Kester) is that of freedom and equality ndash the implicit aim of transforma-tive politics even if this aim is never entirely realized

Failing to recognize the ethical premises of her own argument Bishop uses the term ethics to invoke the image of a system of moral rules that focus our attention on their generalized prescriptions rather than on the lsquoparticularrsquo character of a given artwork Bishop associates this transcendent moral law with Christianity and with lsquoauthorial renunciationrsquo arguing in a Nietzschean or Deleuzian vein that the artworks she advocates should be understood in terms of lsquoheteronomyrsquo In this way the questions raised by the social charac-ter of art are displaced into another arena that of the supposedly repressive character of the lsquoethical turnrsquo that subordinates the immanence of artrsquos heter-onomy to a moralizing transcendence This is simply a rhetorical sleight of hand that conceals the stakes involved when art is forced to confront its social and institutional character in the liminal space of collaborative practice

In fact what Ranciegravere means by the lsquoethical turnrsquo is entirely different from the paradigm of moralizing repression of diversity that Bishop invokes Ranciegravere work can be read as a complaint against the deterioration of thought around the aesthetic into an advocacy of political passivity and an analysis of the types of thinking that perpetuate this state of affairs It is precisely this deterioration that Ranciegravere means by lsquothe ethical turnrsquo and this requires him to make a very particular definition of the term lsquoethicsrsquo In his work the lsquoethical turnrsquo is the decay or elision of a relation between categories that made it possible to think the aesthetic in its particular relation to transformative politics This results in a state of affairs where art becomes despite itself an affirmation of consensus

the reign of ethics is not the reign of moral judgements over the operation of art or of political action On the contrary it signifies the

APS_11_Charnley_37-54indd 43APS_11_Charnley_37-54indd 43 3311 13739 PM3311 13739 PM

Kim Charnley

44

constitution of an indistinct sphere in which not only is the specificity of political and artistic practice dissolved but so also is that which formed the very core of lsquoold moralityrsquo the distinction between fact and law between what is and what ought to be

(Ranciegravere 2009 109)

It is immediately apparent in this definition that morality ndash as moral evalu-ation ndash is approved by Ranciegravere because it allows for a clear assessment of action in relation to an agreed upon common good which throws the injus-tices of an existing social system in relief This clearly shows that Ranciegravere uses the term ethics entirely differently to Bishop For Ranciegravere ethics is a type of consensus world view one of the consequences of which is to disguise the relation between politics and aesthetics so that transformative politics becomes more difficult to conceive

Ethics then is the kind of thinking in which an identity is established between an environment a way of being and a principle of action The contemporary ethical turn is the specific conjunction of these two phenomena On the one hand the instance of judgement which evalu-ates and decides finds itself humbled by the compelling power of the law which leaves no alternative equates to the simple constraint of an order of things The growing indistinction between fact and law gives way to an unprecedented dramaturgy of infinite evil justice and reparation


Apart from the fact that Bishop herself uses forms of ethico-political argu-ment to support her attack on ethical evaluations of collaborative practice her reading of Ranciegravere is misleading on this issue According to Ranciegravere there is a close relationship between morality ndash judgements about right and wrong action ndash and the political Indeed Ranciegravere describes the political as the divid-ing of lsquorightrsquo meaning that the dissensus of politics revolves around differ-ing interpretations of a commonly understood lsquogoodrsquo like freedom or equality This is obvious if one reflects even for a moment on any political struggle The problem with Bishoprsquos argument is that its defence of disruptive or confron-tational artwork veers into a defence of the unquestionable authority of the artist in collaborative works which becomes effectively a defence of inequality concealed in an apparently critical position This is particularly evident in an interview given by Bishop in 2006 reflecting on the dispute with Kester

For a while I have been tempted to write an article that pushes the ethical question a bit further from a Lacanian angle It would argue that the best socially collaborative art does not derive from a super-egoic injunction to lsquolove thy neighbourrsquo but from the position of lsquodo not give up on your desirersquo In other words pursue your unconscious desire as far as you can The former (eg Grace in Dogville) involves a sacrificial stance it is the politically correct position of doing what seems right in the eyes of others The logic of the latter is about taking responsibility for your own desire rather than acting out of guilt (for example about being an artist)

(Bishop 2006c online)

Contained in this rhetoric of desire and guilt it is possible to read a special pleading for the inequality of access to power and prestige that is predestined



45

between artist and their non-art-world collaborators If an artist considers social inequality a problem does this necessarily involve lsquoa sacrificial stancersquo In that case can we also say that none of us should consider social inequality a problem because this is merely a hypocritical expression of guilt Clearly this is a complacent chain of reasoning that mirrors the advocacy of unlim-ited desire that is one of the favourite themes of advertising This argument indexes social inequality to a discourse of desire and repression implicitly suggesting that those who achieve power have somehow achieved a supe-rior level of self-realization which they may deign to communicate to others through collaborative art a classic example of snake-oil logic naturalizing social inequality

Bishop whilst attempting to use the term ethics to disconnect art from questions about its socio-political reality grounds her position an ethico-political argument In this way her position is closer to Kesterrsquos advo-cacy of ethics than she realizes The question becomes can the ethical be isolated from political art or should it be Or even more simply what do we mean by lsquoethicalrsquo There is an important tradition in critical philosophy that views morality as an insidious form of subordination to rationality The origin is of course Nietzsche and a similar understanding can be traced through Bataille Deleuze and Foucault amongst many others Undoubtedly morality can take this form though it is open to question whether it often does in our cynically deregulated age where repressive de-sublimation ndash the requirement to transgress ndash is the vanguard of the commodity form In any case Bishoprsquos argument fails to engage properly with the question of an ethical thinking that is appropriate to a collaborative aesthetic of challenge confrontation and lsquorecalibration of the sensesrsquo

No doubt this proposition is a complex and difficult one though a start-ing point might be Simon Critchleyrsquos understanding of ethics as constituted by an lsquoimpossible demandrsquo For Critchley we are always faced with an lsquoethi-cal political and hellip socio-cultural manifoldrsquo which militates against any simple distinction between the apparently separate discourses of ethics and politics In this situation lsquoethics without politics is emptyrsquo and lsquopolitics without ethics is blindrsquo as lsquohellip the world that we have in sight overwhelms us with the diffi-cult plurality of its demandsrsquo (Critchley 2007 120) However this affirmation of the central importance of ethics cannot be reduced to some kind of inflex-ible regime of self-negation as Bishop implies Rather the ethical emerges as a dis-sensual contradictory force involving the subjective approval of a subjec-tive demand ndash a commitment in other words ndash as well as the conscience as a lsquosplitting at the heart of selfrsquo around the unfulfillable nature of this demand Although this may appear at first reading a tortured schema it leads for Critchley to the risus purus the pure laugh of the self recognizing the absurd-ity of its limitation In political terms this suggests the ethical as what Critchley terms lsquoan anarchic meta-politicsrsquo one that always opposes a resolved consti-tution of the political undermining it through humour and antagonism in order to point to the more fundamental ethical flux and mutual subjective undoing of social existence

It is not possible to fully unravel the suggestive possibilities for Critchleyrsquos thought in relation to aesthetics in the space allowed here What is important is that these ideas indicate a way of conceiving of ethics that moves outside of the narrow interpretation presented by Bishop Critchley presents the ethical as a destabilizing rather than a regulative power and this surely is the way that it must operate in collaborative artwork As has already been observed


Kim Charnley

46

4 This suggestive phrase is quoted by Bishop from Saltzrsquos lsquoA Short History of Rikrit Tirivanijarsquo Saltz muses upon this lsquoinvisible enzymersquo without recognizing what it clearly represents ndash a system of exclusion that is enacted in complex initiatory knowledge social cues aesthetic conventions etc ndash thus underlining the lsquoblinkeredrsquo perspective of some art world lsquoinsidersrsquo in Bishoprsquos lsquoAntagonism and Relational Aestheticsrsquo October 110 p 68

politicized collaborative work falls into a space between the aesthetic and the social where the fierce contradictions between these domains are aggra-vated This makes it one of the most exciting spaces to occupy from the point of view of political art As Gail Day has recently observed despite its wide-spread influence even Ranciegraverersquos theory ultimately fails to account for the institutional reality of art as flipside of the implicit freedom of the aesthetic experience Collaborative artwork eludes Ranciegravere to a great extent and presents an opportunity amongst all of its contradictions that of interro-gating and challenging the social constitution of art whilst demonstrating a willingness lsquohellip to wager on the social excess of the heteronomous embracersquo (Day 2009 406)

THE ROLE OF DIALOGUE IN lsquoDIALOGIC ARTrsquo

Bishop fails to make an argument to exclude reflection on the equality of the relation between artist and participants in politicized collaborative works This is partly because these works fall into an aporetic space in Ranciegravere theoretical framework In other words they inhabit both contradictory poles of artrsquos political aspiration at the same time to cross the boundary into the social and to stand apart from it as a distinct critical space Making this obser-vation does not of course invalidate these types of works though it does call into question whether they can ever be accounted for with a consistent argument when they are in a sense defined by the paradoxical form of their political aspiration However it is not enough simply to critique Bishoprsquos formulation of the collaborative art if we are to gain an understanding of the paradoxical nature of the problem Although Bishoprsquos reading of the ethical is simplistic this does not mean her critique of Kesterrsquos theoretical position is inaccurate It is still necessary to ask whether Kesterrsquos dialogic aesthetics avoids advocating as Bishop puts it lsquobland artrsquo If the contradictions inher-ent in collaborative art are to open a space then it is important to challenge the reduction of this space to any simplistic principle As has been demon-strated it is impossible in practice to entirely separate the political and the ethical Nonetheless it is important to ask whether Kesterrsquos understanding of the ethical responsibility of the artist constrains or opens thinking about collaborative art

Grant Kesterrsquos Conversation Pieces (2004) is a distinctive account of collaborative art because it addresses work that is more closely tied to lsquograss-rootsrsquo community politics than for example Nicholas Bourriaudrsquos Relational Aesthetics (2002) Bourriaud suggests that Relational Aesthetics (RA) is political but redefines politics around an exploration of lsquomodels of sociabilityrsquo and lsquomicro-utopiarsquo within the experimental space that is implicitly provided by the art institution As Bishop indicates for RA there can be no consideration of the lsquoinvisible enzymersquo4 that repels the lsquonon-artrsquo public (Bishop 2004 68) Conversation Pieces by contrast attempts to legitimize and explore work that engages with the lsquooutsidersquo of art in an intelligible way As part of this enquiry Kester considers a range of different types of collaborative work including the lsquonew-genrersquo public art projects of Suzanne Lacy the social interventions of the Austrian collective WochenKlausur and Littoral art in the UK Although the works produced by these groups vary greatly they have in common an attempt to use conversation to lsquoimagine beyond the limits of fixed identities official discourse and the perceived inevitability of partisan political conflictrsquo (Kester 2004 8) This use of conversation presumes equality of access for those



47

participants who do not have the initiatory knowledge usually required to be an art lsquoinsiderrsquo and Kesterrsquos book is in a sense defined by its attempt to speak within the discourse of art and point to its shortcomings at the same time

On one level the book lays out a field of study documenting a range of artists who inherited the post-Greenbergian lsquodiasporarsquo of practices and turned the focus of these forms outwards away from a critique of art towards an engagement with communities and political activism Equally it involves a rereading of theory associated with the avant-garde tradition including the work of Clive Bell Roger Fry Clement Greenberg Michael Fried and Francois Lyotard Here Kester addresses what he sees as an art-world disdain for activ-ist works proposing that a prejudice against straightforward communication is deeply ingrained in art criticism Kester identifies in all of these theorists a tendency to privilege what he calls lsquosemantic inaccessibilityrsquo based on the assumption that conventional discursive communication is marked by a fundamental deficit by its complicity in power the degeneration of mean-ing or some similar formula Kester suggests that this inheritance from the avant-garde whilst it has generated important works has tended to slide into elitist assumptions about the audience of art Thus the avant-garde lsquoshockrsquo to the sensibilities has become a means of holding at bay the political and social world rather than an attempt to engage with it This case is made with particular reference to the discourse around Rachel Whitereadrsquos House (1993) Kester draws attention to the framing of this work as a classic avant-garde attempt to expose the limits of language which nonetheless involved a good deal of casual denigration of those not equipped with the language to under-stand it With reference to the catalogue that accompanied the work Kester points to the easy way in which objections to this work were portrayed as a lsquophilistine reactionrsquo (Kester 2004 10)

There are some problems with this type of staging of a contrast between inside and outside of art as the art critic Miwon Kwon has effectively demonstrated in relation to the furious public debate surrounding Richard Serrarsquos Tilted Arc in New York in the 1980s (Kwon 2002) Kwon makes the point that both right-wing reactionaries and activist art groups tended to make a claim in the name of the lsquopeoplersquo ndash a mythologized authentic subject ndash in such a way that they ended up being strange bedfellows in their opposition to Serrarsquos work Kesterrsquos analysis of House works in a similar way making an objection to art discourse in the name of the victimized lsquootherrsquo who are of course excluded by this discourse As Kwon concedes it is certainly the case that much public art has been developed without any kind of public consultation (and the question of what counts as consultation continues to be a compelling problem) However Kester tends to drift from a valid point about a tendency for art to define itself around tired avant-garde doxa to a crude association of avant-garde politics with elitist subjugation of lsquothe publicrsquo Kester is not wrong when he emphasizes that the role of the artist in socially engaged work is fraught with the risk of calling for democracy from a structure of social relations that enacts inequality It is important to make the point that collaborative art projects can be lsquohellip centred on an exchange between an artist (who is viewed as creatively intellectually financially and institutionally empowered) and a given subject who is defined a priori as in need of empowerment or access to creative expressive skillsrsquo (Kester 2004 137) However this pitfall cannot be generalized as a sign of artrsquos basic injustice as this ethical formulation of the problem inhibits enquiry into the enigmatic quality of artrsquos opposition to and complicity with power


Kim Charnley

48

The strength of Kesterrsquos work is to identify in the supposedly radical chal-lenge of the avant-garde a potential prejudice against those who have not assimilated its distinctive language a language that falls into self-parody when it claims to question the value of intelligibility whilst mocking those who find this claim itself unintelligible Attempts to resuscitate the discourse of avant-garde practice must remain watchful against this sleepwalking academicized radicalism In this sense Kesterrsquos ethical challenge is destabilizing as it forces a revaluation of the tenets of critical art This challenge can be summarized in a call for an art that substitutes lsquolisteningrsquo for an addiction to statement This idea is highly suggestive and potentially enriching to the range of practice that now attempts to break the lsquoaporetic conditionrsquo that has created the sense that an avant-garde challenge is no longer tenable As Gail Day observes it is notable that current politicized practices ndash such as discussions in Chto Delat by Dmitry Vilensky and Zanny Begg ndash tend to focus on a challenge to the institution of art in the name of a politics of lsquothe multitudersquo seeking a recon-ciliation of art with movements for social change (Day 2009 403)

Unfortunately Kesterrsquos argument does tend to drift into an equation of challenging art with inward-looking elitist attempts to maintain cultural authority This is partly because Kester seeks to ally aesthetics to an idea of dialogue that draws heavily on Habermasrsquos advocacy of lsquodiscursive communi-cationrsquo Habermasrsquos attempt at conserving the enlightenment project depends on the notion of a space where lsquodiscursive communicationrsquo can be employed lsquowhere material and social differentials (of power resources and authority) are bracketed and speakers rely solely on the compelling force of superior argu-mentrsquo (Kester 2004 109) Kester attempts to argue that dialogic aesthetics enact this type of space and at this point stumbles into a glaring contradic-tion for he has already acknowledged the sociological institutional critique of art that identifies it as a locus of privilege and authority How then is it to become simultaneously a space of dialogue where lsquomaterial and social differ-entialsrsquo have no bearing

The answer proposed by Kester is that the artist must effectively be on guard against their own privilege in order to achieve the egalitarian rela-tion appropriate to dialogical aesthetics Implicitly Kester constructs a type of cautionary ethics whose role is to act as a check to the power of the artist Kester sees the social power commanded by the artist as a kind of original sin which dialogic art must guard against embedded in the very language and practice that the artist engages in Effectively the artist is required to absolve this authority through a commitment to open dialogue However for Kester this means that the open-ness of dialogue is not open in as much as it already plays an over-determined role in his argument one of overcom-ing the imbalance of power between artist and collaborators This means that his depiction of dialogue always tends to emphasize understanding without addressing a preceding conflict of perspectives ndash especially those between the artist and the participants in a given work Any conflict in perspectives tends to be subsumed in the question of inequalities of power and representation and therefore becomes implicitly a danger to be avoided Or conflict is repre-sented as an agonistic stand-off where lsquodelegates and representatives [are] charged with defending a priori positionsrsquo (Kester 2004 111) There seems to be no space here to view conflict as lsquodissensusrsquo as a necessary condition of the political Yet as a number of theorists including Chantal Mouffe Ernesto Laclau and Jacques Ranciegravere have indicated lsquoantagonismrsquo or lsquodissensusrsquo is the very essence of the political and of democracy



49

This suggests a strange sort of symmetry in the apparently opposed theo-retical perspectives of Bishop and Kester Bishop attempts to deny the claims of ethics and in so doing slides into an unsavoury argument that natural-izes the economic power and social prestige associated with the arts Kester associates the autonomy of the artist with inequality and seeks to charge the artist with absolving it by ethical reflection and consensual dialogue Both arguments are struggling with the contradiction that is created when artrsquos autonomous criticality is superimposed onto art as a socio-economic nexus of power The problem is that each of these positions results in a neutraliza-tion of the political despite the intentions of the authors Bishoprsquos because she suggests that critical collaborative art must be blind to the social relations that constitute it and Kesterrsquos because it becomes a generalized ethical claim on behalf of the lsquootherrsquo that art excludes Each of these theoristsrsquo attempts to erase contradiction in order to maintain a consistent account of the political ndash and it is in the attempt to be consistent that the political is erased In collabo-rative work the political presents itself as a savage and irresolvable dialectical opposition

This complicity between the positions presented by Bishop and Kester can also be formulated in terms that focus on the socio-political reality of art The point to emphasize about Kesterrsquos attempt to make an ethically consistent activist art is that art activism must always allow for the tactical employment of the category lsquoartrsquo in order to achieve politico-aesthetic aims or to make a disruptive politico-aesthetic statement ndash therefore activist art can never be entirely ethically consistent in as much as it must play a lsquodouble gamersquo by its very nature This is hardly a revelation it is a self-evident condition of politically engaged practice that is understood by all artists working in this area For example an earlier inflection of this same problem can be seen in a statement from Group Material made in a panel discussion at the lsquoAnti-Baudrillardrsquo show at White Columns Gallery in 1987

By showing certain levels of cultural production in a gallery you legit-imize the sources of those productions If you show images from SWAPO you legitimize them as icons People see the sources of those things as valuable and they try to figure out why they are valuable Rich and powerful people who go to art shows are exposed to different ideas then support concrete political struggles lsquoArtistrsquos Call against US Intervention In Central Americarsquo was basically a liberal project hellip but raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to be sent to Central America to be used in less liberal ways

(Group Material 1987)

Activist art if it is to remain close to its political aims requires at the very least a double address on the one hand there is the attempt to work towards an egalitarian form of social relation on the other the basic exclusivity of the term lsquoartrsquo when viewed in sociological terms This exclusivity to put it crudely attracts money and prestige attracts participants and requires a particular type of language One might borrow a term from Bourdieu and suggest that art is subject to a logic of lsquodistinctionrsquo Kester recognizes this ndash he quotes from Bourdieu in his book ndash but transposes this structural reality of art into the ethi-cal domain in order to expel it This logic is inescapable in collaborative activist art because it is integral to the role of the artist himherself as one set apart from the nexus of social roles and practices with which he or she engages as


Kim Charnley

50

an artist There would be no lsquoactivist artrsquo without the prestige that accrues to art as an activity set aside from the mainstream of social existence ndash an activity that is not quite an accessible common ground but requires various forms of initiatory knowledge To put it simply activist art would not be able to open a political space if it did not deploy itself as a sign of distinction This must be acknowledged as integral to the form of this practice especially if engaged art aspires to work with this contradiction to create a form that does not reproduce inequality It does not negate the political claim of art but reveals its contradic-tory character Successful lsquoengagedrsquo art works with this contradiction to achieve a successful outcome and many of the artworks addressed in Conversation Pieces fall into this category The problem comes with Kesterrsquos attempt to distil from them a generalized ethical framework for dialogic practice

DISSENSUS AND COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE

There is as has been shown a fundamental contradiction that exists in politi-cized collaborative art where aesthetic autonomy and socio-political claims are superimposed The question remains how this contradiction can be under-stood as the starting point for the politics of these works rather than as some kind of negation of it By attempting to expel this contradiction the work of Bishop and Kester casts it as a closure and ironically this closure determines their theoretical position Nonetheless contradiction does have the potential to act as the ground of experimentation and disciplinary openness A thor-ough investigation of the implications of such a proposition would take more space than remains here however a few thoughts can be outlined in relation to the concept lsquodissensusrsquo which is again drawn from Ranciegravere

Dissensus plays so many different roles in Ranciegravere account of the relation between aesthetics and politics that it is not really possible to summarize the scope of the concept briefly In his writings on politics dissensus is important as the moment where consensus is challenged in order to dispute the inscrip-tion of lsquoseveral peoples in onersquo in the aesthetic legal and constitutional forms of the state For Ranciegravere the political is the claim made by a group that is not yet inscribed in this order to have itself recognized in the name of lsquo hellip a right that is yet to be inscribed in factsrsquo (Ranciegravere 2009 115) The dissensus exists in the challenge to the closure of meanings associated with the forms of the state where an excluded group demands a re-distribution of lsquothe sensiblersquo from which they have implicity been excluded Dissensus is also the point of contact between art and the political because both deal on a fundamental level with the reordering of the lsquodistribution of the sensiblersquo lsquo the rupture of a certain agreement between thought and the sensible already lies at the core of aesthetic agreement and reposersquo (Ranciegravere 2009 98) For Simon Critchley dissensus also links politics to the ethical through action that opposes the false clarity and simplicity of political discourse to the conflictual inter-subjective space of ethical experience Here I am suggesting that dissensus is part of the social reality of collaborative art Where dissensus is not viewed as the vital element of socially engaged art then even the most rigorous ethics or carefully guarded autonomy becomes an extension of consensus In the same way any attempt to create an argument that overcomes the grounding contradictions of this area helps to polarize and neutralize the field This is the case for both Bishop and Kester Bishop attempts to expel the ethical from consideration of the aesthetic in works where any politics is intimately tied to questions of morality Kester tries to use ethical reflection and consensual dialogue to



51

erase the disjuncture between the autonomous aesthetic field and the social Collaborative artwork is fascinating because it is a nexus of contradictory claims where the political potential of art directly confronts its institutional character Work that explores and thrives on this dissensus neither needs to abandon ethics nor should it relinquish the tradition of avant-garde confron-tation A lsquorecalibration of the sensesrsquo is impossible in an ethically neutral space just as dialogue is weak if it avoids conflict

Ranciegravere is wary of politicized collaborative art because it confuses the boundary between art and the social As he puts it lsquohellip the more [art] goes out into the streets and professes to be engaging in a form of social interven-tion the more it anticipates and mimics its own effects Art thus risks becom-ing a parody of its alleged efficacyrsquo (Ranciegravere 2010 148) There is something disappointing about this avoidance of questions that are raised when art is confronted by a limit in the moment of attempting to transgress it At this moment the dissensus is a radical one in as much as it is a disjuncture between artrsquos self-understanding and its social reality It is interesting to relate it to the strongest point of Kesterrsquos analysis which is the observation that much chal-lenging work is lsquoaddictedrsquo to making statements rather than attempting to lsquolistenrsquo Kester tends to take this notion of listening in the direction of consen-sual reparative dialogue however it is perhaps useful to ask what this might mean to a practice that views dissensus as central to its project

A key tension in collaborative work exists between those who are inside and outside of art discourse in many respects it is the language of art and its distinctive theoretical and historical resources that work to legitimize innova-tive practice and mark out those who are inside artrsquos enchanted circle from those who are outside of it For it is apparent that any non-traditional art form justifies its significance with reference to a welter of initiatory knowledge an expanse of text and an archive of historical precedent On a basic level it is this information that distinguishes the art insider from the lsquonon-artrsquo public acting as cultural capital at the same time as it has the potential to open up different ways of thinking It is only natural that art insiders prefer to dwell on the latter of these two characteristics but this tendency betrays the key politi-cal weakness of art and theory in political terms It tends to congeal into an inward-looking consensus whilst at the same time claiming to represent the vanguard coordinates of political experience

There is always a temptation to extend this consensus to educate partici-pants in collaborative art to accept its fundamental claims This is a necessary part of collaborative practice but it can easily override the critical perspec-tive that is the greatest asset of the uninitiated To listen then is to find a way outside of this consensus and to carry a suspicion and discontent within it One of the clearest articulations of this idea comes from Dave Beech and John Robertrsquos development of the concept lsquothe philistinersquo Although this idea produced a good deal of controversy when it emerged in the 1990s it is worth revisiting here because of its attempt at a reflexive critique of the claims of artrsquos theoretical discourse As Kester observes there is a tendency in art discourse to brand all objections to its practice as philistinism Yet for Beech and Roberts the philistine betrays the limit and the weak point of the hegemony of art and theory It is a concept that is constructed by its historical moment where

hellip the perverse the lsquoprimitiversquo the unschooled the lsquodumbed downrsquo and so forth are not themselves philistine rather they appear to


Kim Charnley

52

be philistine ndash or related to philistinism ndash only when they come into contact with the issues of cultural division which confer on the term its controversy

(Beech and Roberts 2002 273)

A collaborative art of dissensus requires that art is willing to use an engage-ment with its lsquooutsidersquo to challenge itself rather than to reproduce the hege-monic terms of its lsquofailed totalityrsquo A text piece by the art collective Freee part of the exhibition lsquoHow to Make a Differencersquo aptly summarizes this need for collaborative art to explore its own negation in order to seek a dissensual poli-tics lsquoThe function of public art for the gallery is to preserve the distinction between art and the rest of culture by establishing a legitimate form of excep-tion on artrsquos own termsrsquo (Freee Vinyl text 6m times 3m 2007)

This is the flaw that all politicized collaborative art carries within it It is one that cannot be expelled although it does force us as practitioners to subject our claims to scrutiny And although it seems contradictory it may be that dissensus is best served by listening as long as listening does not always mean agreement It is also the type of contradiction that inspires laughter ndash Critchleyrsquos risus purus or even something a little less Latinized ndash as a necessary part of its politics

REFERENCES

Beech D and Roberts J (2002) The Philistine Controversy London and New York Verso

Bishop C (2004) lsquoAntagonism and Relational Aestheticsrsquo October 110 Fall httproundtablekeinorgfilesroundtableclaire20bishop-antagonismamprelational20aestheticspdf Accessed December 2009

Bishop C (2006a) lsquoThe Social Turn Collaboration and its Discontentsrsquo Artforum February

Bishop C (2006b) lsquoClaire Bishop Respondsrsquo Artforum MayBishop C (2006c) lsquoSocially Engaged art Critics and its Discontentsrsquo

Interview with Jennifer Roche httpwwwcommunityartsnetreadin-groomarchivefiles200607socially_engagephp (accessed 100610)

Bourriaud N (2002) Relational Aesthetics Paris Les presses du ReelCritchley S (2007) Infinitely Demanding Ethics of Commitment Politics of

Resistance London and New York VersoDay G (2009) lsquoThe Fear of Heteronomyrsquo Third Text 23 4 pp 393ndash406Foster H (2003) lsquoArty Partyrsquo London Review of Books 25 23 pp 21ndash22 Group Material (1987) Panel discussion transcript lsquoAnti-Baudrillard Showrsquo

White Columns New York copy in possession of the author ndash available on request

Kenning D (2009) lsquoArt Relations and the Presence of Absencersquo Third Text 23 4 pp 435ndash446

Kester G (2004) Conversation Pieces Community and Communication in Modern Art Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press

Kester G (2006) lsquoAnother Turnrsquo Artforum MayKwon M (2002) One Place After Another Site Specific Art and Locational

Identity Cambridge Massachusetts and London MIT PressRanciegravere J (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents Cambridge Polity Ranciegravere J (2010) Dissensus On Politics and Aesthetics London and New

York Continuum



53

SUGGESTED CITATION

Charnley K (2011) lsquoDissensus and the politics of collaborative practicersquo Art amp the Public Sphere 1 1 pp 37ndash53 doi 101386aps1137_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Kim Charnley is a PhD researcher studying the role of theory in politi-cized art practice After graduating in fine art he worked for eight years in an art education project based in Portland Square Bristol He now teaches at Plymouth College of Art Contact 76 Frogmore Avenue Plymouth PL6 5RTE-mail k_charnleyhotmailcom


issue 43 bull fallwinter 2010

Antony GormleyKate Gilmore

William CochranRoman Signer

Reshada CrouseMarlene Dumas

William KentridgeJudith Shea

Patricia CroninWilliam PopeL

Mark Tribe

ampRealismRepresentation

Published since 1989 by Forecast Public Art


Kim Charnley

38

developed in parallel to a renewed interest in the connection between aesthetics and politics but attempts to understand this connection remain fraught with difficulty Increasing numbers of commentators have drawn attention to the weakness of the political claim of Bourriaudrsquos relational aesthetics usually pointing to the fact that relational lsquomicro-utopiasrsquo depend on the art institution to guarantee their integrity and are blind to the exclusions that constitute this space To summarize Hal Fosterrsquos argument they are just one big lsquoArty Partyrsquo (Foster 2003) However attempts to put forward a more engaged account of the politics of collaborative practice have also proved divisive This article examines the problems involved in thinking the political potential of this type of artwork through two positions that are equally dissatisfied with the modest politics of relational aesthetics but nonetheless present programmes that appear polarized and mutually incompatible Claire Bishop and Grant Kester are recognized as authorities in the area of collaborative art but after the publication of Bishoprsquos lsquoThe Social Turn Collaboration and its Discontentsrsquo in February 2006 they clashed in the letters pages of Artforum Their respective arguments offer a convenient way of exploring some of the contradictions that present themselves in politicized collaborative art Here they will be used to allow an analysis of the competing claims that emerge when the political potential of the aesthetic is superimposed on the politics of the social in collaborative art This article emphasizes contradiction as the basis of the political potential of collaborative work whilst at the same time demonstrating that both Bishop and Kester try to expel this contradiction from their arguments thereby neutralizing its political potential The terms of the argument that will emerge here are drawn from the theory of Jacques Ranciegravere though they are used in a way that implies a critique of Ranciegravere thinking Ranciegravere often seems wary of work that attempts to bridge the gap between art and life insisting that this practice must end in disappointment This might be attributed to the fact that politicized collaborative art in particular confuses the distinction between his terms the lsquopolitics of aestheticsrsquo and the lsquoaesthetics of politicsrsquo Here this space is advocated as the most interesting space in the current exploration of political practice precisely because it is the most paradoxical

Claire Bishoprsquos lsquoThe Social Turn Collaboration and its Discontentsrsquo contains a forceful agenda to attack a tendency for art criticism to evalu-ate collaborative works in ethical rather than aesthetic terms judging their success solely with regards to the egalitarian form of the inter-subjective relation enacted by the work instead of evaluating it lsquoas artrsquo For Bishop this tendency reduces art to moral criteria and encourages new art to be made in the image of these criteria In this way the lsquohellip complex knot of concerns about pleasure visibility engagement and the conventions of social interac-tionrsquo that are the domain of art are subordinated to the endless reproduction of a discrete set of moral notions (Bishop 2006a 183) Kesterrsquos objection to this article and Bishoprsquos reply in the letters page of the May 2006 edition of Artforum helped to define their positions as irreconcilable poles of thinking about collaborative art Bishoprsquos article concludes with the caustic suggestion that Kesterrsquos work forms part of a trend in criticism that combines an ethic of lsquoanti-capitalism and the Christian good soulrsquo (Bishop 2006a 183) whilst Kester goes so far as to suggest that Bishop promotes lsquohellip an art practice that will continually reaffirm and flatter her self-perception as an acute critic hellip playing at hermeneutic self-discovery like Freudrsquos infant grandson in a game of ldquofortrdquo and ldquodardquorsquo (Kester 2006 22)



39




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(Bishop 2006a 183)





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(Bishop 2006b 24)






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(Bishop 2006b 24)






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(Bishop 2006b 24)






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(Bishop 2006b 24)






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Mark Tribe




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(Bishop 2006b 24)






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(Bishop 2006b 24)






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Kim Charnley

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York Continuum



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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS









Mark Tribe




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47





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48






49







Kim Charnley

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Kim Charnley

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REFERENCES













York Continuum



53

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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS









Mark Tribe





47





Kim Charnley

48






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Kim Charnley

50







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Kim Charnley

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REFERENCES













York Continuum



53

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York Continuum



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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS









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REFERENCES













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SUGGESTED CITATION


CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS









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Dissensus and the Politics of Collaborative Practice

Documents

Transcript of Dissensus and the Politics of Collaborative Practice