Bishop is an excellent diagnostician. Her descriptions of problems with much of the current “social” art are tremendously useful, accurate, and astute. But negativity is not enough. To suggest a rejection of ethics in favor of a return to aesthetics (as she does in The Social Turn) is self-defeating. First, because the positive rejection of ethics (or any specific ethic) is itself an ethical position—this is what Bishop seems to want to do, especially by advocating “relational antagonism”. Second, because a simple negative rejection of ethics raises the question of why any given aesthetic criterion should be favored over others—”because I like it” is not sufficient.

Sensing this problem, Bishop openly worried about describing and evaluating artworks she enjoyed, for fear of “killing” the work with language. (In Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics she offers lengthy descriptions of works by Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra, but refuses to explain how to evaluate them in aesthetic, i.e. non-ethical, terms: “This is not an issue that can be adequately dealt with here.”) She expressed dismay about being required to think and write with an artificially limited critical vocabulary which she understood as given, deeply rooted within the mechanics of the academy, arts journals, and conferences, and suggested the use of more poetic modes of writing to avoid pinning down artworks in a way which would damage them. Such alternate modes of writing would be welcome, but I don’t think they would solve any of Bishop’s problems. Rather, I think the (threatened) turn away from critical language is an attempt to dodge the gaping void left by her rejection of ethics as a basis for the evaluation of art. It is not that the given mode of critical writing (if there is such a thing with the force she describes) is too blunt an instrument to capture a work without doing it harm, but that the descriptive terms which she chooses to bring to the table are rigid and suffocating. In particular, she treats “ethics” and “aesthetics” as clearly delineated spaces with firm borders. In fact, the active renegotiation of these spaces is ideally one of the primary effects of “social” art (or social “art”). If Bishop treats those spaces as always already fixed and frozen, it’s no wonder she can’t provide a positive approach to evaluating works which engage in deforming them.

Moving away from readymade ethics and toward ethics as an open question suggests a positive approach for evaluating social art in ethical terms. Rather than focusing on those ethics represented by or enacted within the “frame” of a given social artwork, we can look at how the art reshapes the space of the ethical regardless of its “frame”. From this perspective, the works (and critics) Bishop criticizes in The Social Turn for being too uncritically Christian are not bad simply because they are Christian, but because they treat Christian ethics as an end, and are simply satisfied with art which brings this end about. Instead, we would want art which implicates participants in a reevaluation of their ethical givens (some subset of their “unknown knowns”, to borrow from Žižek), art which takes a constitutive role in the formation of the ethical. From this perspective, and despite Bishop’s protestations to the contrary (in Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics she advocates considering works either “aesthetically” or “politically”), relational antagonism ends up looking like a deeply ethical enterprise. Indeed, it seems to bear a remarkable similarity to Marxist revealing of ideology or false consciousness, a mode of art-making and analysis that Bishop explicitly condemned at the beginning of her talk. I can only assume that the grounds for such condemnation are not themselves ethical, but “aesthetic”; i.e. not based on an engagement with Marxism’s critical or ethical strengths and weaknesses. If, as Bishop also asserted, we should think in terms of an “expanded field” of social aesthetics, then an expanded field of social ethics should be possible too. Within such a field, Marxism and Bishop’s relational antagonism might be good neighbors.

Coda:

In Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics Bishop offers a thorough account of the failures of various works of relational art, especially works by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick. She contrasts these failures with the successes of works by Sierra and Hirschhorn, and suggests at several points that these successes can be explained by the choice to reject certain types of inclusiveness and interactivity in favor of antagonistic social scenarios. This is, at least partially, a formal explanation, but in conversation with Griffin, Bishop seemed to reject formalism, or at least rejected the notion of analyzing art in terms of its “effects”. (Note: I could have misunderstood; this part of the conversation was pretty abstract and my memory of it is hazy.) Not being at all scared of formalism, and seeing how it could offer Bishop an “out” here, I wonder what exactly she finds objectionable. For my own part, I’d very much like to see a catalog or taxonomy of techniques and their effects in “social” “art”; something like A Social Art Pattern Language.

The works themselves are fighting for the taxonomical priority of their own generative impulses. Sure, they’re all about “location”, but first they are all about the approach of the artist, to location or anything else. For the works to be meaningful—to make a case for the political, the local, the sublime, or whatever—they have to fight against the exhibition’s prioritization of the putatively common feature of location-awareness.

What makes this kind of “topical” exhibition possible? How can we read Carl Andre’s poetry as inhabiting the same universe as Francis Alÿs’s oil paintings of Jerusalem? In order to be perceived as parts of a cohesive whole, the works have to lose their battle against the exhibition and submit to being read and understood as fundamentally similar.

Like my earlier post about various “distancing” strategies used in music by e.g. Ligeti and in visual art by e.g. the artists of PaintFX, I don’t want to take the step of condemning this kind of taxonomical inversion as a necessarily corrupt strategy. If, in losing the battle against the organizational impulse of an exhibition, the art itself is made to expand its scope, and to expand our vision, then we the viewers win. (I really liked Vision is elastic. Thought is elastic., an exhibition at Murray Guy curated by Moyra Davey and Zoe Leonard.) Though the topical curatorial approach is always in conflict with the art, it can still be put to work.

But Locations doesn’t work like this. Here’s the trap: “location” does not it itself suggest any evaluative framework. That a work is about location does not in itself justify its inclusion in the show; some higher-order evaluation needs to take place. What is being evaluated? Mostly obvious things, I think: the relationships of the artists with the Paula Cooper Gallery, the market value of the included works, their political orientation, and how they fit into a certain post-conceptual art-community tradition of visual tastefulness. Basically, the show is about Paula Cooper Gallery. And mostly the market wins.

The clearest way to signal a relationship to historical precedent is the appropriation of materials and techniques. Simple appropriation, though, opens one to accusations of unoriginality or vulgar nostalgia. It is not enough to simply be aligned with the past; the past must also be distanced.

There are at least two common tactics for achieving this distance. The first is to break the appropriated element, rendering it non-functional. That is, recognizability is retained, but perceptual and cognitive effects are interfered with. The second is to dislocate the element, removing it from its cultural context and placing it within a network of symbols foreign to its originary time and place.

Rhetorically, these tactics often effect foreclosure on the historical trajectory of the appropriated element. The obverse of the progressiveness of the new is the naivete of the old.

Dislocation is on evidence in Ligeti’s appropriation of African rhythmic devices in his piano concerto, and both dislocation and breakage are key to the “blurring” of romantic flourishes into indistinct gestural clouds in his second string quartet. Outside of music, Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real describes a paradigmatic case of strategic and tactical distancing in his account of “simulationist” appropriation of abstract impressionist techniques. This particular game of historical oneupmanship continues to this day, as discussed in Tom Moody’s critique of digital abstract painting.

The audience is led to regard mechanical movement (or a facsimile thereof) as an aesthetic object. In so doing we become observers, affirming our separateness from the movement itself and confirming our essential humanity. This works whether or not one deems the movement “beautiful”—everybody gets to feel good, so long as there is a judgement.