Critical Art: Towards a Concept of Artistic Disobedience - PDF

Okay, here is the markdown conversion of the text in the images you sent. ### Critical Art: Towards a Concept of Artistic Disobedience **Sara Alonso Gómez** From Formalism to Content: Towards a Political Art? 1 *No. I don't agree.* Bertold Brecht, Die Neinsager We are currently witnessing the...

Okay, here is the markdown conversion of the text in the images you sent. ### Critical Art: Towards a Concept of Artistic Disobedience **Sara Alonso Gómez** From Formalism to Content: Towards a Political Art? 1 *No. I don't agree.* Bertold Brecht, Die Neinsager We are currently witnessing the emergence of an unprecedented culture of protest on a global scale, with the rise of new forms of indignation and disobedience. From the Zapatista insurrection in 1994 to the G8 in Genova in 2001, and to more recent street movements such as Tahrir Square in Egypt, the 15M in Spain, Syntagma Square in Athens and *Nuit Debout* in Paris, a series of tactics directly derived from the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s are being used. Furthermore, we observe a certain re-politicization of art, which involves a critique of overly formal-ist approaches, in order to establish practices of activism, hack-tivism or hybrid forms (artivism). The increasing number of publications and academic events devoted to the relationship between art and politics confirms that the topic has become a major conceptual issue that deserves more careful attention. The relationship between art and politics has often been conflict-ridden. The famous warning coupled with a cry of hope, as Walter Benjamin put it in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," has definitively lost the affirmative power it could still have had for some people in 1936. We have learned in the meantime the nefarious use that totalitarian regimes have made of politics and aesthetics. But what the formula has lost in assertive power, it now gains in the auratic power of questioning: thanks to Benjamin, we now know that the politicization of aesthetics is as ambivalent as the aestheticization of politics.2 Throughout history, political terms have been used to describe the specific elements of transgression in the field of art-such as the artistic revolution modelled on political revolutions. From the early twentieth century onwards, art was often invoked to accompany the prospect of a radical transformation of society and the establishment of a new political order. At the time, a politicization of art unquestionably took place, often associated with an anti-formalist movement seeking to remove art from its self-referential attitude of "art for art's sake" and make it serve the betterment of society. All modern art involves this polarity between formalism and "contentism"-*contenutismo*, as Gramsci proposed to call it. While formalism defends the autonomy of the work of art and its necessary independence from the social context in which it is produced, its critics consider that art must be put at the service of political and social causes, turning art into emancipatory utopias. This tension is particularly notable in classical modernity, from Eugène Delacroix's *La Liberté guidant le peuple* to the pure sound of Stéphane Mallarmé's poetic compositions, from Francisco de Goya's *Desastres de Guerra* to the decadence of *Joris-Karl Huysmans*, from Pablo Picasso's *Guemica* to Zurich Dada's poetic tautologies. While confined to a somewhat Parnassian attitude, the former criticize the fatal depoliticization of the latter, the latter disparage an alleged naiveté consisting in submitting the work to a cause, as Arnold Schönberg denounces those who use the classification of musical Bolshevism to designate certain compositions. It should be recalled, however, that some of the supporters of the repoliticization of art have themselves defended the need for the autonomy of art. This is for example the case with André Breton and Leon Trotsky's *Manifesto for an Independent and Revolutionary Art* (1938), where the authors demand "the independence of art for the revolution; the revolution for the definitive liberation of art."3 This quarrel, which has been at the origin of many artistic movements since the nineteenth century, is intensifying today-it is even stretching beyond the artistic field into the realm of political theory-since the defenders of both formalism and contentism believe that their definition of the political power of art is correct. In this sense, the recent debate on civil disobedience shows a growing interest in practices that stem mainly from artistic strategies of the second hall of the twentieth century, including happening, performance and installation. The structure of these strategies, their communicative forms, their relationship to public space and to the sensus communis and also their ability to activate other ways of doing things, gives them a privileged place in the current discussion in political theory. The public, but above all the disruptive side of the event effectively brings together some of the classic examples Of civil disobedience of the 1960s avant-garde movement, such as Fluxus around Allan Kaprow, the Japanese art collective Gutai or the Viennese Actionism of Günter Brus or *Hermann Nitsch*. This rapprochement between artistic and political categories is often fruitful, but is also full of traps, and often generates misunderstandings. Indeed, while any disobedient practice undeniably possesses a certain sensitive and aesthetic quality, not all disobedient practices can be qualified as artistic. This rapprochement has often been purported by some of the actors in the field themselves. One of the masterminds of the Russian collective Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, does not hesitate to say that the feminist movement practices oppositional art and that its political action takes Forms invented by artists.4 Does this mean that such political performances are works of art? For sure, the dividing line Seems thinner than ever, given the numerous cases of political action that take the form of an artistic happening, or occur in places reserved for art. Thus, in 2010, the Liberate Tate movement consisted in dumping oil in the Tate Modern to protest against the funding of the London art institution by the oil giant BP, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon ecological disaster. But what does it mean to talk about "disobedience as performance"? Can a work of art be considered an act of civil disobedience? These questions deserve further reflection, beginning with the deconstruction of the disobedient act. Disobeying: The Power of Negation Generally speaking, contesting something is tantamount to disagreeing: it means saying no to an order, or refusing a state of affairs. In terms of psychogenesis, this power of negation manifests itself very early in the development of the human subject and is a crucial step in the formation of personality. When children say "no," they discover a new ability to confront grown-ups and mark a differential gap. At first, this gap is rarely ever justified by the child; the negative force they discover precedes by tar the learning of discursive forms of argumentation. Rather, it corresponds to a spontaneous disobedience towards external requirements, but without being able to give reasons for it yet. In his book *Non! De l'esprit de révolte*, French philosopher Vincent Delecroix expresses his amazement at his three-year-old daughter whose persistent "no," he says, expresses the beginning of life or her very vitality. Contesting is synonymous with the development of an individual and free personality, capable of reflection; in the words of the philosopher Alain: "To think is to say no."7 A "no" more generally expresses insubordination. Take, for example, the servant Leporello in Mozart's Don Giovanni, who, in the opening aria, sings "No no no no no no no no no, non voglio più servir," thus signifying that he refuses to bow to his master's wishes. Here, a gradual refinement of the forms of "no" can be testified, moving from the child's "no, no and no!" to a more subtle relationship of refusal that is no less corrosive, and Vincent Delecroix does not hesitate to say that there is a "change of no." After all, Leporello doesn't just say no. Through his act, he questions a certain power relationship, a dialectic of master and slave. Potentially, his act of refusal is not limited to his individual case, but can serve as an example to others, whom he will inspire. If a certain dominant order will try to make "no" look childish, it is precisely because the "no" is profoundly seditious, and that it has a subversive force for the entire social order. Moreover, in some circumstances, it is in the name of the defense of society that the need for disobedience is openly advocated. The right to resistance (or even the duty of resistance) to the tyrant, for example, is at the heart of European legal thinking. Its motives date back a long time: it is Socrates who refuses comply with the orders of the government of the Thirty Tyrants; it is Saint Peter, who, in the "Acts of the Apostles," maintains: "It is necessary to obey God rather than men."8 Thomas Aquinas in turn refers to this to justify a real right of resistance, which made its entry not only into canon law, but also into European civil law. In the face of injustice, citizens not only have the right but even the duty to revolt. The idea came fully into force during the Reformation (with Luther and Calvin) and there is an abundant literature to justify tyrannicide, from Rousseau to Abraham Lincoln.10 There is a truly modern motive pervading these examples-that of a resistance the right to which is not transhistorical and universal (as in Aquinas for example), and does not proceed from a personal whim. In this case, disobedience is legitimated through a call to civility. In legal matters, it is the notion of civil disobedience, generally attributed to the American writer Henry David Thoreau, that crystallized these issues. In July 1846, Thoreau was imprisoned for refusing to pay six years' arrears to the tax authorities because he did not want to pay a cent to a State that permitted slavery and was waging war in Mexico. Two years later, he gave a series of lectures at the Massachusetts Concord Lyceum entitled The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Govern-ment, whose ideas formed the basis of his subsequent famous essay. Ultimately published in 1849 under the title "Resistance to Civil Government," the author's choice of the term resistance enables him to distinguish himself from the anarcho-pacifists also called non-resistant: by using the metaphor of government as a machine, he considers that the citizen's duty is to produce a "counter friction," i.e., resistance in the physical sense of the term, in order to "stop the machine."11 Since Thoreau, the notion of civil disobedience has become widely accepted in theoretical thinking. In the second half of the twentieth century, several authors tried to systematize it and identify its main characteristics. Some expressed doubts about the very applicability of the concept of civil disobedience to Thoreau's own case. John Rawls, for example, considered that Thoreau's refusal to pay tax should rather be defined as a refusal for reasons of conscientious objection than as an act of civil disobedience *stricto sensu*. What is missing from Thoreau's refusal in July 1846 is the public expression of this act for which the individual is ready to take responsibility: it was only afterwards that Thoreau expressed himself publicly about his act, in particular by providing the reasons underlying it. Although conscientious objection and civil disobedience both take place in the public space, they differ in nature. Moreover, their relationship to the law is fundamentally different, since civil disobedience recognizes the legitimacy of general law. Openly expressed, the refusal concerns everyone, not just the power in place or those over whom this power is exercised: it is therefore an act that has a general goal. The public nature this disobedience, as Rawls points out, has immediate implications for the issue of violence. If civil disobedience claims to be non-violent, it is because it acknowledges the law and its functioning. It expresses "disobedience to law within the limits of fidelity to law, although it is at the outer edge thereof. The law is broken, but fidelity to law is expressed by the public and non-violent nature of the act, by the willingness to accept the legal consequences of one's conduct."13 While not taking exactly the same political stance, Jürgen Habermas has taken up many elements of Rawls' definition, some of which he develops in more detail. Habermas insists in particular on the communicative and symbolic nature of civil disobedience: while accepting the judicial framework and legal consequences of non-compliance with the law, disobedience brings to light the functioning of the law, and the refusal to comply therefore takes on an exemplary value, that can hope to serve as a model for other similar behaviours. The act must be communicated to everyone, it is intended to be visible and intelligible to society as a whole, but it also has a symbolic function and serves as an example, since it aims to encourage other individuals to show the same attitude. 14 Rawls' and Habermas' conception of public includes prior notification to the authorities of the disobedient action, as well as acceptance of punishment for violating the law. However, Robin Celikates emphasizes that "the exercise of many well-established forms of civil disobedience-think of blocking a busy intersection, occupying a port or obstructing the deportation of so-called illegal immigrants, to give just a few examples-depends on not giving the authorities fair notice in advance" and the police are therefore not in a position to predict the course of these actions. Moreover, while most emblematic cases of civil disobedience are linked to the readiness of the people involved to pay the price, and more specifically, a legal price, such as going to jail if needed, it is difficult to make it an absolute criterion, given the sheer variety of forms of protest today, particularly among net-activists and cyber-dissidents, who deliberately cloak their identities in order to evade state power. Although whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden, Julien Assange or Chelsea Elizabeth (born Bradley Edward) Manning are now publicly acknowledged to have borne the personal consequences of their actions, the majority of protesters in the digital world-Anonymous, for example, and other hacktivists-rely on obfuscation and anonymity.16 Paradoxically, these "invisible" people have been inventing their own aesthetics: the play of masks and hoods generates new visual codes, which are indefinitely taken up and readjusted. Militant anonymity creates its own language and new iconologies, an "aesthetic of the black block" for example.17 This aesthetic of politics is in line, as was said earlier, with the increasingly frequent use of strategies stemming from the field of art, such as happenings or performances. The Occupy Wall Street movement did not hesitate to create an Occupy Museum. It remains to be clarified, however, what happens when categories borrowed from art are used to describe the nature of political actions. Is it simply a progressive "aesthetization" of civil disobedience, or is civil disobedience really changing in nature, to become something else? In short, should we broaden the notion of civil disobedience, or, on the contrary, should we circumscribe it, to pave the way for other practices for which a name still has to be invented? #### Is There Such a Thing as an Aesthetics of Disobedience? As illustrated, the new forms of revolt and cultures of protest are inseparable from a new aesthetics. No doubt the new precarious and anti-hierarchical assemblies, without any pre-established order, owe much to the pioneering work provided by performance art: the emphasis on the bodily dimension, on improvisation and on the effect of interruption, but also on the public and spectator dimension, is not incidental. There is essentially nothing to be said against those happenings, which consist in drawing up the catalogue of these new sensitive forms of revolt, these aesthetics of resistance. And indeed, political activism leads to prolific ingenuity in design, as shown in the exhibition *Disobedient Objects* held in London (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2014). The culture of protest has undeniably generated visual and plastic creations whose inventiveness and beauty can be admired, a bit in the same way as Peter Weiss spoke, in his monumental Aesthetics of Resistance, of the beauty of the insurrectional gesture. 20 A red cloth, the arm of a statue, a trade union speech, a raised list-these are all details that Weiss describes over thousands of pages and that form an admirable fresco of all these minor gestures that made up the history of the twentieth century. But Peter Weiss would probably not have allowed himself say that these political acts constitute art, despite their aesthetic quality. And indeed, what exactly is gained by describing political acts as art? And conversely, is it enough to affirm that every work of art is automatically political? In an article on the aesthetics of civil disobedience, Tom Grimwood and Martin Lang reflected upon these paradoxes.21 Certainly, many activists like to redeploy the joyfully subversive energies of art by blurring the boundaries between art and politics. Yet from the point of view of art, such forced activation might quickly turn into its opposite, inducing a critical deactivation of sorts. Two artworks might illustrate this tension: *The Militant Training Camp* (2012) on display in the London Arcadia Missa Gallery, whose aim was to prepare for acts of civil disobedience; and "The Pixelated Revolution" (2012), in which Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué explains how to make truly revolutionary art, according to the codes imposed by the *Dogma 95 manifesto*. As Herbert already said: "art cannot represent the revolution, it can only invoke it in another medium."22 Yet this refiguring of political acts often verges on ridicule, and oscillates between empty mimicry and critical deactivation, which ultimately amounts to the work's depoliticization. In a word, there is no shortage of arguments for resisting the temptation to reduce political protest to artistic protest and vice versa without forsaking what is to be gained by comparing their respective logics. Instead of trying to reduce one to the other, should not we explore the way in which they are intertwined, as well as the gap between them? Before answering this question, we shall focus on the notion of aesthetic disobedience, while explaining its limitations for understanding political agency through the work of art. In order to consider the transgression of art in terms of political categories, Christine Abbt and Jonathan Neufeld proposed to introduce the notion of aesthetic disobedience with respect to civil disobedience. Tested during a symposium held in 2012 at the International Forschungszentrum Kulturwissen-schaften (IFK) in Vienna, the aim was to develop a new conceptual tool to describe the interference between art and politics. Just as civil disobedience requires boldness, when it asserts, against all odds, a principle of legitimacy that the law does not recognize, art is only effective when it ceases to be pleasant, and thus to conform to the expectations and codes of a certain era. A "pleasant" art is not art, as Christine Abbt points out in an interview about the event, but conversely, a bold art accepts, like the act of civil disobedience, to be sanctioned, except that the sanctions in art are not the same: the "punishment" in art is not condemnation by law (which generally works in its favor, in the long term because most prohibited works have experienced a revival of interest), but rather being ignored and falling into oblivion: "Ignoring a work of art is a form of judgement(....) Since modern times, art has been constantly on the edge: It must have the courage not to please, but on the other hand, it must be able to generate attention." This necessary attention, even if only virtual or future, returns art to its public condition, which is also that of civil disobedience. As it has been said: unlike the conscientiousobjector, who is only responsible to themselves and for themselves, civil disobedience always has a public dimension; it is addressed to society as a whole. In a subsequent article, Jonathan Neufeld proposes a systematization of the notion of aesthetic disobedience in relation to civil disobedience.24 He points out that aesthetic disobedience is not limited to artists, but can also come from the public, which can collectively choose whether or not to see or partake in certain shows. Thus, every citizen of the art world, Neufeld argues, participates in certain shared convictions and norms that they will defend whenever they are violated, for example in the event of authoritarian or consumerist excesses. Neufeld even argues that by virtue of the aesthetic judgement it implies, any experience of art is equivalent to a deliberate act. While Neufeld's proposal serves as a pioneer in this field and allows us to determine other avenues to be explored with respect to the relationship between art and politics and, more precisely, between aesthetics and civil disobedience, it is nevertheless necessary to critically approach his theory. To say that the artistic experience is approximate is one thing, to say that it is deliberative is another. By affirming that all art is deliberative, he applies a political logic on works of art, and therefore he fails to engage with what is specific to art. In general, Neufeld tends to subordinate the art world to the functioning of politics, which, far from conferring on it its critical load, ends up removing it. To say that civil dosedience motivates artistic transgression and gives it sense is to subscribe to a strongly reductive reading of art. Finally, this conception of aesthetic disobedience still concedes too much to a certain subjectivism, which places the entire weight of the transgression either on the intention of the artists or on the spectator, instead of giving importance to the work of art itself. No matter how important *aisthésis*, sensitive experience and aesthetic judgement are, disobedience must be redefined on the basis of the work of art and not the intention preceding it or the subjective reception of it. #### Artistic Disobedience The phenomenon of the "repoliticization of art," which I mentioned at the beginning of this article, has taken the most diverse forms and has been described using a wide variety of terms: from a social turn of art (Claire Bishop), to the advent of a relational art (Nicolas Bourriaud); as a collaborative art (Grant H. Kester); as a contextual art (Paul Ardenne) or quite simply as the retum of committed art. This desire to anchor art in the heart of the city, and to give it a political significance that modern art had often deliberately refused, in its heroic quest for autonomy from the social sphere, is part of a vast movement of disempowerment, already initiated since the 1960s. The German painter Jörg Immendorf captured the spirit of an era in his 1973 painting *Wo stehst Du mit deiner Kunst, Kollege?* *Where are you at with your art, colleague?)* which shows a self-portrait of the painter in his studio, facing the easel, while the revolution is raging outside. The desire for an art that would have a direct hold on society or that would enlist in the service of the revolution dates back a long time, but is not without danger, as Walter Benjamin's warning against the "politicization of aesthetics," which is only the counterpart of an aestheticization of politics, clearly shows. But isn't the resistance capacity of art precisely of a different type than political resistance! Significantly, when, during the Dresden uprising, Bakunin suggested installing the most beautiful paintings from the city museum on the barricades, it was hardly for illustrative purposes, but precisely to force the interruption of enemy fire, as if there were a universal recognition of the autonomy of works of art. It is impossible to know whether Bakunin would have been proved right, because the Dresden insurgents did not follow his suggestion. But the fact remains that the question of the autonomy of art contin-ues to arise, even now. In a sense, one could even state that it is becoming increasingly difficult for an artwork to unleash its subversive power, as subversion has become expected. As Rainer Rochlitz noted in his time, in Subversion and Subsidy: Unlike pre-modern times, which subjected the artist to censorship by their patrons, and also unlike the modern era, which made the emancipated and subversive artist the victim of a largely obtuse society, the contempory era attempts to institutionalize revolt and to enforce the coexistence of subversion and allowances Indeed, institutions themselves are fond of works that are hostile to them or even insult them; a good example here is the exhibiting in the Vatican museums of an anti-papist painting by Francis Bacon. This new Society which claims to pacity social conflicts, also claims to accept the systematic non-conformism of emancipated arts must then prove that it has not opened its temples to an insubordinate art for the sole purose of neutralizing explosive forces. In other words, if the notion of artistic disobedience is destined to have the slightest heuristic value, it is still necessary to establish under what conditions art can continue to be disobedient. Marcel Duchamp had already highlighted this problem. While recommending using a Rembrandt painting as an ironing board, he noted in 1961 how difficult it was for art to push the limits further, when it was itself assimilated to the great commercialization movement: "Art", he said, "Is a product like beans. We buy art like we buy spaghetti. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons, and by no means the least significant one, for this re-politicization of art: when the work of art has become an investment factor among others, and is no longer distinguished by its form from other consumer objects, a discourse around art remerges. Art is declared, and it is inscribed in a desire, a willingness to say that is supposed to restore its critical load. Juliane Rebentisch has clearly idenified these paradoxes, which she interprets as great return of content contentism as evoked at the beginning vis-à-vis the formalism of modem art: When art. in the name of direct political statements, attempts to reap, as it were. a moral revard for neglecting its formal side of course, I do not mean simply the Inotivetad neglect of merely beautiful or tech- nially bborious design). it not only revioduces-for the umpteenth time in history-the tad allernative between frumalisin and con tntim" Rather by altempting is enort is own importince by force of is contents, risis lalling hon of ilie concept ar Mureve, in mosi cases. 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