“While all thought [is] subject to nature, nature [is] not subject
to our systems”
Robert Smithson
Leaving aside for the moment, the kind of entropic bind that came along with the artist’s comment above, he was on firm enough ground in saying that our institutional systems in being constituted with games of representation have a profound disjuncture with the earth processes. Take a certain rectangular shape of paper. It can function as a cultural arbitrator in economic exchanges, but not because of its paperness (it can burn because of its paperness). It can function as money because of its institutional granted abilities to represent such an exchange. And we all assume it has that kind of institutional status. Nonetheless, this very real disjuncture between phenomenal facts and institutional facts has its pitfalls. For example, it has allowed many to believe that culture is not part of nature—a sense of nature as that which is untouched by man. Or there is the belief that fine art objects are separate from artifacts—as if esthetics is not a cultural feel.
For the last two centuries this later fine art habit has seen the art object,
and its frameworks (the art historian, the art museum and the studio) dispatched
to various autonomous spheres, replete with para-religious rituals and values.
And on up to the present, there has been an enormous strain in western art
talk about visual art in non-social, implicitly metaphysical terms. Yet having
said this, in being an institutional fact itself, esthetics (or acts of artistic
representation) shouldn’t require an autonomous thrill of recognition
just because the fine art idea says so. And, in fact, there has been an ongoing
challenge to the fine art status. There has been a shift (if you will allow
me) from making a kind of art object that anticipates the art museum space
and the protocols of the fine art idea, to a cultural activity no longer
participating in such a blinkered sense of any relationship—let alone
art.
Beholding art objects continue to call forth or interpellate viewers as if
being held by the tides and flows of a particular life made objective—that
is, made into objects. Yet in concert with this, current practice includes
cultural activity that regards all visual art as a human, institutionally
grounded, socially driven construct. More and more, artists have been developing
a personal feel for esthetics in social terms, an art engaged to the social
process. Refusing the a-esthetic versions of the fine art idea, many artists
are now pursuing esthetics within the logic of a social enactment. What this
kind of practice has changed more than anything else is a sense of what makes
any artwork work is somehow already about what makes the social work. Which
in turn, continues to implicate the art that still wants the fine art idea
deciding the institutional facts of esthetics.
This has led many to revisit an important question: How does the social even
work? But to avoid the every present epistemological status of social thought,
it should be stated before attempting the deed that there is no way one can
keep separate the urge to understand how society works from the desire to
direct its evolutionary movement. Yet for that very same reason, this can
enable the creation of esthetic projects that bring a democracy in line with
social advance. And have others inspired by these projects. The ethical charge
is to keep open the right to debate politically ambivalent issues, and still
be part of what are genuinely joyous yet difficult cultural matters.
No doubt, to understand how the social works an accurate assessment of economic
conditions and relations of production must be accounted for and as human
inventions intent on sustaining the social process. In other words, what
almost every kid on the playground knows is this; any mode of production
must have an ability to reproduce itself hard wired into its mode of production—that
is if the kid’s version of play wants to be doing it tomorrow. Our
capitalist version of economic production is no exception. In its capitalist
form, any irreducible sense of how it works must not only include its conditions
and relations of production, but that must already means an ability to reproduce
itself and in a double sense. That is, a private enterprise’s own internal
conditions and relations matter, but what about the many social conditions
and relations that exist external to any enterprise? Without this later component
as a support mechanism, any economic process doesn’t make a lot of
social sense.
What has changed though, is that our capitalist’s ability to reproduce
itself now includes what still feels like an addendum: unless our social modes
of production out-strip the earth’s ability to reproduce itself in ways
that can sustain our capitalist ways. This later ecological discourse surfaced
when the internal logic of modern capital began running into nature’s
trump cards. Capital has had a perennial conflict with labor relations too,
and labor’s voice has had a positive impact. But that voice always seemed
to be lacking any trump cards. The various public discourses on sustainable
life, or sustainable development, or sustainable profit are the cultural indicators
that the long-standing institutional logic of Capital is being forced to take
off its blinders. The same goes for esthetic experience. Slowly (and I mean
slowly) this ecological discourse has been pushing capitalist economics into
a kind of ecolomic hybrid. Maybe I should add something about labor’s
current role in all this too—something like, with the environmental justice
movement beginning to absorb the ecology movement, labor seems to have found
a powerful partner. But since institutional protocols ground any representational
act, the crucial issue is going to be how we, through our cultural relations,
enact a different sense of how “nature [is] not subject to our systems.” And
of course, this no longer means anything remotely suggesting that nature cannot
be (in any profound way) affected by our political economy.
Lets try that again. With culture the material manifestation of the social,
a good case has been made that in discursive fact, the place to look for
how society reproduces itself is not in terms of its myriad representational
acts but in terms of their cultural status. Let me restate this; status (how
cultural representations are stage-crafted) is the crucial element in a 2
component adhesive cultural act. In other words, the conflation of institutional
acts of representation and the status accorded them (or what the social theorist
Bourdieu would have called fields of capital) is the catalytic glue to the
specifics of any social sustainability. More to this essay’s point,
Bourdieu’s categorical designations— symbolic capital, cultural
capital, political capital, or economic capital—have productively lead
many into the characteristics of this glue. His further categorizations into
subfields—for example, cultural capital includes objectified forms,
embodied forms, or institutionalized forms—only enhanced this ability.
In short, the objects of representation we make in reckoning with the world
matter in matters-of-production. But it is the various kinds of capital status
that the social process is enlivened with that also matter in matters-of-reproducibility.
Well as long as one doesn’t forget to include Foucault’s sense
of discourse as the rules that permit, that order, that even allow status
to occur. While things will get complicated, this seems a good enough place
to start understanding how the social works.
All this also seems an appropriate place for art historical inquiry, for visual
culture is still a place for a variety of onsite inspection of this kind.
But in methodological terms, the question becomes. How does one assess the
art that has a direct relationship with the social? And the follow up question
being, are the current conceptual tools of art history up to the analytical
task? I think they can be and have been. It requires a move away from the
fine art conceptual tools of the art historian. And replaced with socio-historical
methods able to articulate the shift in art that has been going on for some
time now. What would hopefully result are art historical narratives capable
of assessing the connection between certain contemporary art and their relation
with a variety of institutional acts currently re-presenting or standing
in for Capital. And this wouldn’t require any draconian implosion of
art history. For if status is the glue to the social process and for that
reason a crucial focus in current esthetic analysis. Let’s face it;
the fine art idea is all status. And in terms of its effectiveness, one can
only admire the firm adhesive quality of its ideological framework. Nonetheless,
it will mean art historians can no longer stop short of the social, let alone
start short of the social.
Stylistic production or analysis would, in turn, simply be a different beast.
Instead of the internal logic of the color and design protocols of fine art
(and as if color & design for color & design sake) artists are concerned
with handling the complex logic of the social in esthetic terms. And stylistic
analysis would mean an art historical narrative that included an assessment
of art in relation to the logic and style of the civic the art has internalized.
This also should include how the social logic has been impacted. What would
be called for are different methodological tools, still attuned to ‘representational’ issues,
but now also in tune with how an art adapts to a social structure. It would
also mean methods that are based on a theory of hierarchical social fields
or social interactions. An intuitive grasp of these fields has already become
part of the articulturalists’ stylistic toolbox. But it would also
enable art historians to categorize and recognize these kinds of distinctions
in art—and in order to admire or challenge the art’s compositional
choices and inflections in socially grounded ways. Whether it is the art
that is responsibly partnering up with the shift to sustainability, or re-enactments
of the status quo in denial, or somewhere in between. This can be what is
recognized as the very heart of an esthetic experience. But hearts being
what they are, if we as participants feel we are the problem we are trying
to work through, or to the contrary, desire to preserve certain values. Then
one’s ability to appreciate how an art object reproduces social relations
or changes them will matter in those terms. Here is another way to say the
same thing. It is an institutional fact that the fine art status is an ideological
act; that there has been another incompatible esthetic framework developing
for the last half century; that the primary cultural site of that contestation
has been the institutional logic (and politics) of representation itself.
And things have been changing.
Now lets jump-start the essay and with agriart the topic. What seems to characterize all the show’s projects is the ability to imagine the significance of artistic creation and/or esthetic pleasure as an activity in exchange with other types of embodied political ecolomies. They all work directly through pre-existing organizations, and in terms of valuing their chosen institutional mode(s) as enabling the human condition. This in turn can lead to a preliminary yet useful question like: How does the esthetic field operate in supporting existing social relations or (at times) act as an agent of change in social relations? Add a sense of all art as necessarily part of a complex global ecosystem, and the institutional (f)act of esthetic representation takes on a different and more relational sense of social responsibility. Stylistic analysis could then glissade across this theoretical rupture to include the likes of symbolic and or cultural capital. And here again Smithson will be paraphrased if only to insist on the fact that with the earth’s limited resources and our ever-increasing depletion of it on a global level, it is unfortunately the case that more and more artists are necessarily by default working on entropic sites—and off of Smithson’s entropic visions. As Smithson only said in part, without a sense of ‘art’s relationship with land, labor, and class’ esthetics become ‘metaphyisical.’ To say this differently, with institutional facts understood as culture in the service of the social, any representational relationship with a metaphysical is on ideological grounds.
In conjunction with this, and for several decades now, the challenge has also
seen the discourse shift from reactionary visions (i.e. deconstructing the
political economy in the fine art idea) to more proactive ways of artworks
enacting an actual relationship with the logic of the social. Early on, many
of these esthetic moves were like passes thrown without knowing the pattern
the receiver was running. And even though one can win with only a ground
game, the more one knows about the social patterns of the likes of economic
or wage capital, the more one could appreciate what esthetics can mean in
this kind of engagement. And it seems worth restating this: this now includes
even the art that wants the fine art idea deciding the institutional facts
of esthetics. And when it comes to one’s encounter with the kind of
art that produces socially grounded meaning rather than deflating art with
autonomous notions it still seems worth mentioning this too. Those who seek
art as a refuge from the civic dance can be quite indignant toward that other
kind of participant who believes the esthetic faultlines that structure any
artistic difference need to be socially grounded for its impact to be felt.
But even if status is the active adhesive agent in the social process, what
would be the point of having a way of life, if the institutional framework
for enabling that way of life also included ways that works against the earth’s
ability to sustain that way of life. I am tempted to ask and in a rather
self-righteous way; how would that even work? But way too many of us have
been acting for a long time as if that kind of blinkered version was convincing.
What now seems to be a growing critical attitude is for our economic modes
of production to begin to account for the earth’s natural processes.
But for this change to have lasting power what will be needed are appropriate
institutional forms of stagecraft convincing enough to interpellate the relational
approach as an ethical ontology. This will require a change in both the representational
and status catalysts and as discursive partners aimed at a truly sustainable
(s)way of life. And in ways that accommodate other sustainable life styles.
The same could be said for a sustainable esthetics.
That too sounds reasonable enough. But as this complex web of social, political
and environmental interconnectedness has been taking place on the world stage,
the ongoing global political economy of nomadic capitalism has been developing.
And with the nation-state no longer able to be the political framework for
global capitalism, the market is constantly attempting to take the place
of the state as the arbitrator of social processes. In response, there has
been a vast number of NGOs that have filled the lacuna, taking upon themselves
the role of maintaining some sort of social equity among the protagonists.
But this is only a stopgap. Fortunately—and by this I don’t mean
for those who have been on the wrong end of the current free market meltdown—it
seems a lot more people understand now, to their credit, that there can be
no solution without government. Some of these proposals have, in turn, asked
for a re-call of Capital’s mystical faith in the invisible hand of
the market (which has had way to many fingers in the earthen jar.) Perhaps
what is now needed is for the nation-state itself to become mobile—to
become portable (for example, as a political shareholder in global economic
pursuits.) On the home front, many of the ongoing campaigns for a National
Sustainability Strategy do claim that to steer the right course we need sustainability
as our compass and a strategy to get us where we want to go. But to use different
agents for change requires inventing them—and one needs an inventory
to invent with. And the logic of our social inventory has lots of problems.
So where does one turn?
There are many kinds of practices that one can draw from. For example, in contrast
to Plato's trust in the philosopher king (and his inventory), the current
President has expressed a belief that the collaborative steering of the ships
of state is not only the responsibilities of presidents and politicians,
and businesses but of concerned and informed citizens. Decisions no longer
dominated by powerful corporate lobbyists but guided by a framework balancing
social, economic and environmental priorities and engaging those affected
by these decisions, not simply those profiting most from them. Something
more equitable, democratic and sustainable—in other words an ecological
justice. Well this kind of collaborative vision has surfaced in the past.
In the 1960s, with the polity of capital in a crisis of de-termination, ideological
practices ruptured across a variety of civic dimensions including an ecological
one. What made the internal logic of the 1964 Wilderness Act different is
in how its passage included providing for direct citizen involvement in the
formulation of proposals for defining wilderness designation and how to manage
what that would mean. One can also go further into our past for an economic
standard worth turning to. In the 1930s, with the economics of capital in
a crisis of de-termination, ideological practices also ruptured across a
variety of civic dimensions—it was called the New Deal. What would
a current policy be like that revisited both the economic spirit of a new
deal combined with a legislative spirit of collaborating with citizen initiatives
or NGOs? What would art be like in these terms?
Now for some preliminary notes on the show—
The challenge is still how to navigate a social life style permeated by economic,
political, cultural fields of unsustainability that continue to influence the
opinions formed by art makers and viewers. What has been called site-specific,
context driven, (new public genre, relational esthetics, dialogical esthetics,
etc) has been dancing around (and within) these fields for some time now—and
this show is a good indication of some of the directions it has taken. In reenacting
a social process, many of the projects become role models, and in ways that
allow for a public to formulate a performative feel which could in turn, re-shape
other social encounters.
For their part in the agriart show, the Beehive Design Collective has brought
together the status of two advocates of development—free trade. But
what does that mean when the manipulative use of other people or raw resources
defines the very status of ownership and trade. In the political economy
of Capital, acquiring profit, or property, or self (for example, the esthetics
of finding one’s own voice) is at odds with the lack of freedom that
will necessarily mean for many. So with trade buttressed with an ability
to possess, how does freedom make any ethical sense except in autonomous,
or ideological terms? The stylistic feel of the Beehive’s Biojustice
has something to offer here.
On the other hand, in the Edible Estates project, the status of private property
and artistic merit are juxtaposed. As stated above, a sense of ownership
defines our sense of self. And private property is not only based on a resolute
individualism or self interest, its moral fiber is biblical in that God gave
humans dominium over the land. Like wise, the fine art status of artistic
merit enables the manipulation of material to become the vehicle of the artist’s
own identity or subjectivity. The question might be, what is being sustained
in this project?
Or for example, the agri-practices of Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell have
focused around the status allotted various offshoots of preservationism (and
taste). In an earlier project, Sonoma County Preserve, a farmer’s market
enactment of preserves as a life force was enacted in an art museum. And remarkably,
by simply grafting their version of preservationism (and taste) with the museums
version, the status of how esthetic taste is preserved in art museums took
on the look of a fetish. Whether that was felt by any of the participants is
another matter. Or for the current show, Ted Purves & Susanne Cockrell’s
Temescal Amity Works: Big Backyard internalized a much more unpredictable sense
of public involvement and their willingness to reactivate forgotten regional
lifestyles—a kind of depreservationist lifestyle.
Similar formal elements of social status are incorporated in Amy Franceschini’s
Shepherding Sovereignty as well as Critical Art Ensemble’s (CAE) Molecular
Invasion. While both address the cultural capital of science (and CAE stylistic
moves are certainly more involved with these indicators) how both understand
the public as a mode of interaction are quite different. With the logic of
the public structured with an aspect of compromise, its status stands in harsh
contrast to its capital counterpart of possessive individualism. And for that
reason its status (as a form of cultural capital) is often suspected. Both
groups challenge the notion that the free/market always works in the public
interest. But CAE’s stylistic sense of their public has a more suspicious
feel than does Shepherding Sovereignty. To say all this in sustainable terms,
CAE’s suspect of scientific property rights might have helped Edible
Estates’ projects. Or a sense of how the public is structured into Shepherding
Sovereignty might have given Molecular Invasion something more productive to
work with. But then, how each project has internalized an ability to reproduce
itself already decides a lot. Now to abruptly conclude; the hope is from this
end that these agriart projects will play a role in informing future initiatives.
This text was produced in conjunction with AgriArt: Companion Planting for Social and Biological Systems, an exhibition curated by Mark Cooley and Ryan Griffis at George Mason University, April 21 - May 15, 2009.