• Preface: What it is and how we did it
• Introduction
• Open Engagement: Making Things. Making Things Better. Making Things Worse.
• A Tracing, Socially
• Draft of a manifesto written in defense of a group of people that did not ask for my defense, using words they would not use and engaging people they ignore
• This is the End: Death and other Sensory Thresholds
• On the Discourse of Ethics in Socially Engaged Art Practice
• Are You Lonely? Make Art For Your Friends
• Interaction! Participation! Engagement! Production
• On Collaborating Within the M.O.S.T. (2003-2008)
• The Politics of Friendship, Or, Who Your Friends Should Be. An Interview with Matthew David Rana and Rick Butler
• On Multi-Tasking
• Making Things Better
• Me, Her and Us: Mapping Displacement with Anna Martine and Mary Anne Brooks at Open Engagement
• You Need To Have That Feeling That Anything's Possible
• Social Practice Art and Tech-Nihilism
• The Persistent Complicity of Heterogeneity
• Squirming
• Don't Just Invite Me To Dinner
• Open Engagement: A Toast to Access and Inclusion
• Thoughts On Social Practice Art
• Before, During, and After
• What is Public Art and Who is Your Public?
• From Every Angle
• What I remember about the video of John Paul II Marina Abramovic showed @ Reed in 2006
• What is there to dance about?
• Global Yawning Manifesto
• Interview: Musician, Movement Artist, Designer
• Clothing Musicians
• No Art But Class War
• Mirror Neurons to the Mona Lisa
• Fragments and Tangents
• Before
• Texts: What we are thinking about when we're thinking about Open Engagement
• After
• Contributors
• Appendix: The Back Channel
• Bibliography

On the Discourse of Ethics in Socially Engaged Art Practice

Matthew Rana

[BRIGHTLY]

Thank you etc.,

[SLOWLY]

For my talk today, I’d like to share some ideas regarding the discourse on ethics in socially engaged art. In the next few minutes, I will paraphrase and quote extensively, in an attempt to draw associations and potentially complicate an incredibly difficult discussion. With that in mind, I’d like to qualify this as a work in progress—a kind of collection of thoughts cobbled together over the last few years, rather than a concrete thesis. I hope it makes sense.

Since I take ethics, as an object of philosophical inquiry, to be primarily concerned with forms of self-relation, one that is distinct from morality as set of pre-established criteria for action or a normative way of evaluating action—I’d like to start this presentation on ethics with a statement about my self: I am an artist who writes. As such, I come to the question of ethics in socially engaged art from a dual-position, one that is particularly conflicted: on the one hand, I hold that, just as practice shapes discourse, discourse shapes practice. But I also want to acknowledge the difficulties associated with this double movement. In fact, with respect to my own work, I’ve been hard pressed to actually demonstrate how these ideas have migrated into my practice. (But I have faith that they have, and that they will). But it is with respect to these challenges that I would like to share some thoughts on what I see as the reductivism with which ethics has been discussed in socially engaged art in recent years. Namely, I’d like to talk about the binary oppositions that have been established between ethics and aesthetics and by extension, ethics and politics, in contemporary critical discourse.

I’d like to begin by focusing on two texts in particular, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” by British critic and curator Claire Bishop, first published in the February 2006 issue of Artforum magazine; and “Self Design and Aesthetic Responsibility,” by philosopher and theorist Boris Groys, which was first given as a lecture at the Frieze art fair in 2008, and was afterward published in E-Flux journal in the summer of 2009.

Bishop, on the one hand traces the “social turn” to a general malaise in left-leaning political projects, coupled with notions of authorial renunciation and self-sacrifice, while Groys on the other hand relates the proliferation of participatory art practices in contemporary art to the aestheticization of politics and practices of “self-design.”

In Bishop’s essay, she discusses what she perceives to be the inadequacies of an ethical turn in art criticism whereby socially engaged works are no longer judged by their aesthetic quality, but rather according to their social value as models for collaboration. She writes quote, the discursive criteria of socially engaged art are, at present, drawn from a tacit analogy between anti-capitalism and the Christian ‘good soul.’ In this schema, self-sacrifice is triumphant: the artist should renounce authorial presence in favor of allowing participants to speak through him or her. This self-sacrifice is accomplished by the idea that art should extract itself from the ‘useless’ domain of the aesthetic and be fused with social praxis. [ENDQUOTE]

Throughout her essay, the author rightly bristles at the instrumentalization of artistic practice by neo-liberal agendas in the form of ostensibly ameliorative cultural projects sponsored by the State. She also rightly criticizes a normalizing capitalist ethos that treats individuals as a means to an economic end. But in her valorization of projects that are “ethically bad,” but “aesthetically good,” she makes a reductive move, as though these assessments can be fully separated. Writing that artists such as Santiago Sierra and Phil Collins “do not make the ‘correct’ ethical choice ... they act on their desire without the incapacitating restrictions of guilt,” the author conflates ethics with a normative morality. In making the measurement of desire a benchmark for aesthetic quality, Bishop is over reliant on a romanticized ideal of the artist as more authentic, more in tune with a freely flowing desire that is both immanent and resistant to the functional logic of capitalism. By mystifying her criteria in such a manner, the author not only confirms the systems of valuation that operate within a commercial art market, but she ignores desire itself as a highly mediated category that is both socially and historically produced.

For his part, Groys pays closer attention to the constructed nature of desire and indeed, aligns the “social turn” with practices of self-design. [SLOWLY] Linking these practices to an avant-garde ideology of “zero design” in which the aestheticized surface of appearances—which we are to understand as a by product of the aestheticization of politics through spectacular representations—is countered by instances of honesty, morality and truth. Within the history of modernity, he argues, the artist has come to be associated with the only honest person in a sea of corruption and lies. Groys outlines two categories of self-design, the first of which is that of “the artist as ethically bad.” Groys writes that today, “the romantic image [of the artist as a walking catastrophe] is substituted by that of the artist being explicitly cynical, greedy, manipulative, business-oriented, seeking only material profit and implementing art as a machine for deceiving the audience.” [ENDQUOTE] Jeff Koons and Damian Hirst are cited as prototypical examples of this “ethically bad,” figure that performs a kind of self-denunciation, while confirming the system of symbolic exchange in which, for example, politicians are made trustworthy by way of calculated disclosures that confirm popular conspiracy theories. The work, in this instance, can only be evaluated according to its price, its exchange value increasing in direct proportion to how “bad” the artist is. Although this “ethically bad” artist shares some characteristics with Bishop’s desiring artist of near-mythical authenticity, Groys somewhat paradoxically reorients this figure a manipulator, thereby repositioning the supposedly immanent moment of self-relation to its function within an increasingly sophisticated apparatus of spectacular power.

The second category of self-design that Groys outlines is that of the “self-suicide.” As in Bishop, the artist’s renunciation of authorial privilege is suspect, and is related to the secularization of art and its social function within the symbolic economy of spiritual practice. However for Groys, collaborative, participatory practices are ethically suspect not because the artist gains recognition at the expense of an exploited audience of nameless and instrumentalized collaborators, but because it ultimately immunizes artists from shared/public judgments of quality. According to Groys, any negative judgment by participants directly translates into a form of self-critique, thereby mimicking aspects of religious community while weakening the public’s capacity to respond critically to the work.

The two essays by Groys and Bishop share an overriding concern with the self—in how the authorship of a given work is positioned, portrayed or sacrificed within a given representational economy. Yet, ultimately they skirt the question of ethics as a form of self relation, and fall back in to questions of ethos and morality. This appears to be in service of a shared interest in the fundamental incompatibility of ethical and aesthetic concerns. According to these two texts, it would seem that there is no way to determine the quality of a work, whether this assessment is based in aesthetic or political criteria, if it is infected by notions of ethics. In fact, these authors posit that aesthetics are negated by ethics. It paradoxically becomes more “ethical” for the ethical question in criticism, to become subsumed by aesthetic judgments and their political potential.

In a somewhat different register, but perhaps the most broadly influential work regarding the “ethical turn,” is French philosopher Jacques Ranciere’s distinction between of the ethical and the aesthetic, regimes of art. In art’s “ethical regime,” he argues that representational systems distribute distinct functions and roles to individuals in relation to the dominant ethos of the community in which they live. In contrast, “the aesthetic regime of art” is one in which these ways of being are contested through dismantling hierarchies of subject matter, representational appropriateness and art’s social function. For Ranciere, these regimes are not necessarily situated within a historical progression, as in modernism and post-modernism, one marking a break with the other. Indeed, the ethical and the aesthetic regimes overlap, and are both operative within the field of what can be called contemporary art. While Ranciere is often invoked (as he is by Bishop) to separate the questions of the ethical and the aesthetic, his work actually suggests that ethics and aesthetics can be productively [WITH EMPHASIS] thought together, rather than in opposition.

In fact, his emphasis on subjects in constant negotiation with received modes of visibility recalls a Foucauldian concept of ethics as [WITH EMPHASIS] an aesthetic practice. For Foucault, ethics is the forms and practices of self-relation with respect to an ethos—otherwise understood as the discourses and “truth games” the subject inhabits in relation to the community in which they live. The ethical subject thus can be thought to exist in a state of 'permanent provocation' between one's freedoms and one's role within the communities they inhabit. Indeed, Foucault locates this notion of ethics as self care within ancient Greek practices of what Groys might have called self-design: the specific form that the subject takes, or put another way, how one speaks, eats, dresses, walks, etc. The ethics of the care of the self can be considered as the art of living, the development of a singular set of criteria for how one lives. It is also a form of caring for others in that it begs the question: what form do I give to my freedoms, what ethos to embody?

Despite the fact that a regime of self-care has historically remained a privileged one, even Groys argues that practices of the self have been radically expanded in a contemporary environment characterized by excessive mediation and design. Yet, rather than a form of self-denunciation, self-care did not involve the concealment of truths through a carefully designed persona, or being “ethically bad.” Rather, it was conceived as the practice of establishing a relationship to truth. The truth, in this instance is not a universal, nor is it the reality underlying false appearances. Rather, here the truth is contingent and highly unstable, historically and socially constructed, rooted in various discourses, forms of visibility and claims to knowledge.

Thus considered, ethics becomes both a negative and a projective enterprise; it becomes performative, as both a means of inscribing oneself within a social system and as a negotiation with the received modes of visibility the system posits. The failure to perform, or the failure to fully conform to a normative (or radical) ideal thus opens productive gaps—through the process of marking and unmarking, identifying and disidentifying—in that it posits a tension between forms of visibility, while simultaneously resisting total absorption by them. At once negative and positive, a performative ethics complicates and holds ethical questions in tension, alternatively confirming and denying the histories and narratives with which they are imbricated.

[PAUSE, SLOWLY]

If nothing else, this way of thinking through ethics recommends a certain level of reflexivity. For artists in particular, this can be articulated not only in terms of self-presentation but also in terms of formal and methodological strategies. But this reflexivity makes contradictory demands: ethics has an aesthetic and aesthetics can have an ethics. And in terms of making things better or making things worse, what’s better and what’s worse is often unclear. And this fact alone suggests that we ought not try to artificially resolve these contradictions, or moments of uncertainty (ethically, unethically, aesthetically or inaesthetically) but rather, we would do well to interrogate and perform them—to attend to the narratives and forms of visibility that are produced and reproduced in our work, both as a way of caring for ourselves, and for those with whom we work. Thank you.

This paper was delivered at the Open Engagement conference in Portland, Oregon. 2010.