Conversations

In April 2019, I screened my new film-loop project, entitled That Monster: An Allegory, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London . The event was coordinated by art historian Mignon Nixon, freelance curator and writer Kari Rittenbach, and Steven Cairn, ICA curator of film. After the screening, Mignon, Kari, and I had a discussion about the work, which was then opened up to questions from the audience.

Edwin Coomasaru, who is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art, researching the gender politics of Brexit’s visual culture, attended the event and later voiced an interest in writing about the work. I suggested that we instead have a conversation about the work and related issues. Below is that conversation, held via email between the middle of May and the middle of June, 2019.

That Monster: An Allegory is an 18-minute film loop remixed from the 1935 film Frankenstein’s Bride (1935, James Whale) with a script drawn from the movie, Mary Shelly’s novel, Frankenstein, and original writing. Music: Metamorphosis 1 and Metamorphosis 2 by Philip Glass. © 1988 Dunvagen Music Publishers Inc. Used by Permission. Pianist: Dustin O’Halloran. The film plays twice, once with music and once without.

For various reasons, I normally keep my videos on private password, showing only an excerpt of the work on my website. Following the posting of this conversation, the work will be open to viewing on vimeo without a password for two weeks. All b+w screenshots are from That Monster.

EC: At heart, That Monster: An Allegory dramatizes and destabilizes the sorting of identity into “us” and “them” – friend and foe. It stages the two positions by giving us monstrous figures that we project our imagined enemies onto, and yet the slipperiness of the “I” and “you” pronouns in the onscreen narrative text also profoundly disorients our sense of who really is the “us” and the “them”. This effect both exposes and radically undermines the whole conceptual architecture of militarism that underpins such an imaginative binary of identity. In the context of the election of President Donald Trump in the US, or Brexit in the UK, why does this matter? Why might psychoanalytic-pacifism be urgent and vital for our contemporary moment?

SK: My last three projects look at why some kinds of political violence are accepted by centrist or right-wing adherents, and other kinds of political violence are not. But my motivation in That Monster was to situate Trump as a symptom of decades of economic injustice, and look through an allegorical lens at one effect of those decades —the millions of voters who became psychically enthralled to a demagogic power that doesn’t serve their interests, at the same time as those who defy that demagogic power then turn against the supporters, without either group understanding the psychical dimensions of how they got there. Members of this latter group are likely to be some of the spectators of my project.

Let’s state from the outset that Trump is a mentally ill person, whatever pop psychology or serious psychoanalytic term one uses to explain his behavior. But that doesn’t make him a political aberration, as centrists feel more comfortable labeling him. (If he’s an aberration, then we don’t have to look at what he represents as a symptom.) The key question for me is why 30-40 million Americans (his so-called die-hard base, not the wealthy who saw an opportunity for deregulation and tax cuts) fell in thrall to such a sick person? What psychosocial dynamics arose from and sustain our current economic and political situation? I am referring to the U.S., but there are also echoes regarding Brexit in the U.K. and in other countries in crisis. In a short interview with some students in 2010 I pointed out that humans are the only species that will follow an unstable leader. They are also the only species with an unconscious. Centrists and left-liberals in the U.S. point to the chaos that Trump continuously creates, and they see it as indicative of ineffectuality. But that chaos is extremely effective at a psychical level. Trump’s followers enjoy that chaos because it channels their rage at feeling marginalized. Some of his followers understand that their marginalization has been economic and social – capitalism has for the last couple of decades decreed them expendable. But many feel an inchoate, uneducated rage that takes vicarious pleasure in identifying with Trump’s self-victimization and his lashing out against all his perceived enemies. (In the 2016 election, Trump triumphed in the 50 least-educated, and often vote-crucial, counties in the U.S.)

“…an imaginative binary of identity” points to how psychical mechanisms fuel the kinds of polarizations and disruptions (constitutional, parliamentarian, militaristic) that demagogues require in order to build control. Trump seems to be willing to exploit whatever it takes to stay in power, and that might include starting new wars or exacerbating already endless ones. By putting warmongers like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton in his cabinet, accompanied by his impulsivity, anything can happen. But most importantly, it is those in thrall to him, backed by self-serving Republican politicians and the rich, who will allow it to happen.

Tell me more about what you mean by psychoanalytic-pacifism.

EC: Militarism has a very specific set of recurring features that operate on both a societal and psychic level. At its foundations, a conceptual binary of identity is projected onto a group of people – dividing into “us” and “them” or ”friend” and “foe”. Such a binary can be restaged time and time again on different scales – from handfuls of people to groups of nations. But such imaginative frameworks work to create the impression of order in a situation that can never be completely ordered, borders and boundaries that can never fully account for the messy ways we find ourselves entangled with each other. Nevertheless, the binary puts emphasis on difference, with either side increasingly seen as opposites – and good/bad values projected onto each. “Them” is narrated as a threat—aggressive, out of control, monstrous, disease-like, bestial, and not really human. This process not only works to legitimize violence directed towards “them,” it claims such violence is merely a pre-emptive defense: “we” must kill or contain the “threat.” The trouble is – such a threat can never be eliminated in full, because the possibility of harm or vulnerability can never be banished. As much as we may desire the eradication of those we see as enemies, what makes us who we are is in part constituted by another – and when we do lash out, traumatic repercussions will come back to haunt. To wound another is to wound oneself – because the neat conceptual binary we think social groups through does not work so neatly in actuality. “Us” and “them” are actually indelibly interconnected and interdependent, because they are not neatly sealed off from each other, but cohabit a space.

For me, my thinking about psychoanalytic-pacifism came out of studying the Northern Irish peace process – the legacy of a civil war between Republican/Nationalists and Loyalist/Unionists. While I was undertaking this research, the Brexit referendum happened in the UK in 2016 – and where before there had been no binary of identity, one was brought into being, and quickly became a feedback loop: each side talking of their desire to harm or kill the other, condemning “traitors” and “betrayal.” This is not a war (not yet at any rate), but it seems to have many of the psychic and social processes of militarism at play. When I heard you speak recently at the ICA in London, I was really struck by how you described the situation in America as needing to be analyzed from the perspective of the group – but the group wasn’t just Trump supporters, but also those who also saw themselves as his opponents. For me this was really profound, because it widened the frame to think “us” and “them” in relationship to each other. Like you say: Trump is not an exception or an aberration, he is deeply implicated in an entire system – a product of the same neoliberalism that many centrists defend by trying to make Trump look like an accident or a mistake. But they are implicated, we are all implicated – it is very tempting to try and contain him under the idea he is a monster, but he is absolutely interconnected with the society that created him.

SK: Yes, maddeningly interconnected. It is more comforting to project outward when we think about who created this monster. It’s much more threatening to think that we may have been implicated in creating him, even unknowingly. Now, few culturally progressive or socially empathic people want to own that monstrosity, which is understandable. But in developing the script for That Monster I reached a point where I realized that I had to focus on using only first and second person pronouns – I and you – and I removed the voice of the scientist. I did this so as to (as Kari Rittenbach pointed out during the discussion at the ICA) implicate the spectator of the film in the instability of the pronouns used in the titles and intertitles. And while editing the film, I had followed the id space of Twitter, so I witnessed both sides – pro- and anti-Trump – caught up in a rageful dynamic that only in rare instances seemed to include a critique of an unjust economic system. But it was Mignon Nixon, the day before she participated in our discussion at the ICA screening, who articulated the reading that the film didn’t just create a spectator reacting one way or another to its rage-filled characters, but rather that the film situates us all – spectators, monsters – as part of the same group. That is a more radical notion than it might appear to be.

EC: I think you can understand for me the urgency of such an artwork as That Monster, which both exposes and works to dismantle the entire social and psychic system I outlined above. It is precisely now when it is so difficult to have this kind of conversation, that it is most needed – when people increasingly understand their political opponents through the frame of moral panic or an invasion to be crushed. That Monster stages – and reveals – the steps it takes to create a monster, in a way that does not reproduce that process but unsettles it. Remixing footage from Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s monster peers into a body of water. “Is that really me in that reflection?!” he asks. “If I am that monster, then I am filled with shame! I am a wretched outcast in the world forever!.” “All hate the wretched,” the onscreen titles declare, the musical score cut through with a deep sense of tragedy. We hear of how “you” refuses to look at the monster, or make sense of the words the monster speaks.

The intertitles express intense anger in response – “a fatal prejudice clouds your eyes. You detest and spurn me. You call me ignorant! You call me stupid! You steal my dignity. Where you ought to see a vulnerable person, you only see a burden.” The male monster topples a statue, the female monster opens her mouth in a silent, violent scream. “Shame has made me a fiend!” – the musical score picks up pace, an angry rage propelling the momentum – “I feel rage! I want revenge! I haunt you. I stalk you with bitterness and anger. You judge me and push me away. You think your contempt will control me.” The male monster wields his arms amidst a building on fire. ‘I declare war! … With pleasure I destroy you and your home. “Even if I destroy myself,” the female monster stares us in the eye. “You listen to my murderous resentments. But you hear only what you want. You want me to disappear! I want to trample you to dust!.” The male monster runs through a graveyard uprooting trees and toppling statues, before the video cuts to a monster still in bandages, immediately after creation, with the acknowledgement: “Remember – I am your creature.”

Not only does That Monster tell a story of how militarism works at the level of the psyche, it also destabilizes it by putting pressure on the fantasies at its foundations. “Us” and “them” – despite the aggression, the unwillingness to apprehend each other as a life – are indelibly tied to each other, haunted by each other. It is impossible to eliminate the “enemy” completely, it is impossible to restore a feeling of total control over those seen as threatening. And yet, what is also profound about That Monster, is the slipperiness of “you” and “I” – the monsters and their creator. Whoever watches the work may have their own monster in mind – Trump, I’m sure for many, and Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” also comes to mind, yet the video sets up such neat categorization as deeply unstable. Because of the way it articulates the creation of a “monster,” it is hard not to be left wondering whether you could be someone else’s. As I watched the film, I imagined many kinds of monsters: Leavers and Remainers in the UK (Frankenstein images are a staple of current newspaper cartoons), Trump supporters and opponents in the US, etc.

The anger behind the Brexit and Trump votes may or may not have been in part a result of the 2007-08 financial crisis, an economic order in the midst of collapse, even while inequality spirals and the wealth of the top 1% intensifies, and an electorate caught in the contradictions of a system they thought would pay out for them, and the bitter abandonment many now feel. Obviously, the electorates who voted for Trump and Brexit are complex – they include a coalition of voters, some are from that 1% – many working class, hoping their 2016 vote would fund the welfare state in the UK or traditional industries in the US. Yet we are also living through a moment with a lot of socialist activism in the UK and US – Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party promising to transform society (although the “us/them” of Brexit is a major problem for thinking collectively outside of Leave or Remain). How does That Monster register and work through some of the tensions in this historical moment? Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) has been called a “gothic novel” – what might Frankenstein’s monster tell us about the current crisis of neoliberalism?

SK: It’s clear to anyone not looking through rose-colored glasses of psychical resistance that decades of radical income mal-distribution (i.e. the obscenely uneven effects of globalized neoliberalism) have helped produce mass precarity in a context of mediatized wealth and consumption. Also, a prime component of neo-liberalism has been psychosocial—to blame and to shame the victim; the poor and precarious don’t deserve attention or mediation, are not entitled to the basic necessities of daily life. The naturalization of that component, as much as wealth mal-distribution and greed at the top, is responsible for the perfect storm that gathered after the 2008 crash in the U.S.- with virtually all factions in the U.S. government looking the other way.

Different parts of the population deal with precarity differently at the electoral level. For obvious reasons, a little more than half the voting public– largely from the two coasts -did not fall for Trump. The U.S. has been divided down the middle during every presidential election of the past few decades. Politicians and the public both tacitly accepted that as long as you had 1% or 2% of the votes to pull you over the finishing line, you won fair and square. In fact, that was an ominous symptom of a democracy in deep dysfunction.

A major focus of mine as I developed That Monster was the psychoanalytic dimension of shame. There’s been a lot of talk lately about how Trump’s being a ridiculously bad businessman (recently revealed documents show that over a ten-year period he lost a trillion dollars) would allow his base to see the light and reject him because he actually isn’t the business mastermind who promised to enrich them (i.e. the neoliberal phantasm). But this is a form of thinking that denies the logic of unconscious identification. One thing that makes Trump so resilient is that there is so much for his base to identify with. He’s a shamefully bad businessman? Well, he’s one of us. He traffics in conspiracy theories? Well, there’s something out there that’s rendering me unstable, even if I can’t pinpoint it.

It is certainly encouraging that there is a surge of socialist and democratic-socialist sentiment and activism in the U.S. For the first time in my lifetime, the word socialism is publicly utterable (even if both centrist Democrats and Republicans routinely smear those who align themselves with this surge). But even groups of the left are clueless or resistant when it comes to the role that the psyche plays in mass politics or the ways in which the electorate can engage in psychical delusions that are not dispelled through truths and facts.

EC: I couldn’t agree more – to think politics without psychoanalysis (or vice versa) simply fails to account for the drives, desire, contradictions, and complications that mark a fundamentally unstable subject – us. Even just on the level of political rhetoric – it is psychoanalysis that can allow us to excavate the messy terrain between what is said at face value and what is meant: the projections, anxieties, and defenses that structure political discourse (Leavers and Remainers, for example, practice a profound amount of magical thinking – declaring the world as they wish it to be). Earlier you spoke about Twitter’s “id” – I’d love to hear more about your research online in preparation for That Monster.

I am also interested in the relationships among psychoanalysis, sexuality, and technology – and their bearings on the work. The gothic emerges in literature from 1764; during this time many new communication technologies are invented (photography, telegrams, telephones) – as part of huge societal changes during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914), a period also marked by considerable working-class and feminist activism.

That Monster obviously traces together the historical and conceptual connections between psychoanalysis and the gothic – but I want to ask about the role of technology. Perhaps not unlike the earlier historical period I mentioned, we are experiencing a moment of rapid technological change (especially communication technologies). These technologies, and the surveillance capitalism that underpins them, have profound implications for our future. Technology has also become the site of a moral panic as well, in ways that perhaps also draw historical parallels (in the1860-80s, people thought the invention of trains would cause mass madness). I have lost count of the number of newspaper articles declaring social media and smart phones as the prime cause of mental illness, narcissism, anxiety – with a particular concern about children and the stakes of heterosexual reproduction (long the focal point of any moral panic). Which is not to say social media doesn’t manipulate its users, but that “addiction” and “ill health” are also the very metaphors invoked during every moral panic (homophobia has long cast same-sex desire as a contagion that will harm or destroy the possibility of children, for example). Mental health certainly has become a real concern at the moment, and it is connected to rapid technological change – but to treat it as the prime cause is often done by media organizations unwilling to see the aftermath of the Financial Crisis as having a huge effect on society.

Technological anxieties are really important for That Monster: from the film scenes depicting the electric machines that create the monster, to the very medium of the artwork itself which remixes film from the 1930s and introduces glitches and loops that resonate with internet aesthetics. The monster is also a subject brought into being outside of heterosexual procreation, and the original Bride of Frankenstein film also performs his own failure to find a bride in that she rejects him. Queerness disrupts linear ideas of time based on procreation; trauma also disrupts linear ideas of time, as it repeats and reoccurs. How does the work reference and recycle past technological cultures in order to make sense of our present? And to what extent could we consider your monster a “queer” figure?

SK: I strongly believe that all of the issues you interconnect, and more, cannot be thought separately. Technological consequences, homophobia, queerness, neoliberalism, surveillance, xenophobia, moral panic, militarism, racism, misogyny, the mal-distribution of wealth, psychical enthrallment to autocratic phantasms – to which we can add the direness of the climate crisis. Have we ever lived through a moment where holistic thinking was more necessary, and less common? There’s no question that surveillance capitalism has profound implications. I never see an instance in which the algorithm doesn’t cut in at least two opposing– and lopsided-ways. And we have to consider that the advent of the algorithm is actually radically different from the advent of other technologies in the past. I have been feeling for at least a decade that the simple combination of capitalism, the algorithm, and the psyche results in a ridiculously ominous brew. Take the example of platforms of media distribution that allow one to “curate” the consumption of journalism, documentary, commentary, and even raw political output (for example, excerpts of a press conference on-demand). Although I vehemently disagree with the common liberal sentiment here that it was better when we had only about four TV stations as purveyors of news that the whole country could use as a reference point — those news programs were neoliberal trash — a swing toward customized news has been deadly if you take the example of Fox News in a country in which only about 30% of the population is able to afford an undergraduate degree that might inculcate critical thinking. The submerged question of where knowledge resides is one that is rife with transferential implications that are rarely discussed on the left, although the right instinctively manipulates them with glee.

Twitter as a site for research—I think it’s important for artists to be aware of popular sites of distribution, exchange, and technological representation. I used GIF movements in the film as markers of the algorithmic present, while remixing an anachronistic silent film genre to allow the silence and titles to create a transferential space for the spectator. It’s clear that Twitter is a site where many allow themselves to attack and vent. It’s not just the right; the spleen vented by liberals can take the breath away. Spend a day following a Trump twitter response thread if you want to see a space that is completely devoid of politics, but filled with displaced rage. Interestingly, the far left on Twitter is more reasonable. There was a survey in the U.S. recently that claimed that only radical political extremes inhabit Twitter – i.e. Bernie Sanders supporters and Trump supporters. Firstly, it’s diabolical to equate the left and right in this way, and awfully convenient for those who jumped on it as an explanation of why right-of-center Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden is trolled and dismissed by the left on Twitter. Secondly, Twitter is most definitely awash in centrist liberals. There are 69 million Twitter users in the U.S. (13 million in the U.K.) and something like 138 million Americans voted in the 2016 election. Not all 69 million Twitter users are engaging in political exchanges or comments, but these are not numbers that can be ignored, especially with the phenomenon of charismatic media stars who can generate a lot of focus on a political topic with one tweet.

I found my way to the Frankenstein story at the start of the project through researching narcissism –because of the mass identification with Trump’s narcissism. I wanted to understand that, because if there’s anything that post-structuralism has taught us, it’s that belief is not rigid or inherent. A chance web search led me to literary analyses of narcissism in the Frankenstein story. I was then drawn to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, because of its prescience. It is the prescient figure who intrigues me, because prescience indicates an uncannily clear vision when others need more temporal distance for clarity. And the expression of prescience is always accompanied by a social courage that pulls the veil off the normative. In the 1818 novel, Shelly refers to a “spark” that brings the monster to life; in the 1935 movie, it is lightning that appears to be harnessed through some electrical-looking equipment. Apparently Shelley was advanced in engaging what a recent book on the topic, Frankenstein Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of all Kinds, refers to as a relatively new idea at the time – the use of electrical current to activate muscles. This book also points out that she anticipated by two centuries the ethical questions that robotics would raise. Interestingly, one annotator connects these ethical questions – i.e. should the scientist be considered a murderer if he destroys his own robotic creation? – to a topic that arose during periods of slavery. That is, could a slave owner be prosecuted for killing a slave, since that slave was considered their property; yet if it were considered legal for the slave owner to be prosecuted, then the whole premise of slavery, and its reduction of humans to property, would be called into question. I didn’t read this book until after I made the film, but for me the Frankenstein story held remarkable potential for an allegorical extrapolation.

While we’ve been having this exchange, the political situation here has worsened dramatically. An abortion ban was passed in Alabama that was even more radical than those recently passed in six other states. And in regards to your comment about the monster being “a subject brought into being outside of heterosexual procreation,” a 1952 US citizenship restriction not actively pursued previously has now been latched onto by the Trump administration. It challenges the citizenship of a child of same-sex parents if the body that gave birth to the child did not have US citizenship at the time; i.e. due to non-citizen surrogacy in the case of one challenged male gay couple, and due to the fact that one birth mother in a lesbian marriage was not American when the child was born, while the other was. It’s an obvious attempt on the part of this rabidly xenophobic and homophobic administration to harass select groups (although Trump recently claimed he’s all for gay marriage). This is an instance in which children born outside of heterosexual procreation are cast as monstrous, as unnatural. At the moment, our court system seems to be resisting this move, but liberals in the US have for years mistakenly relied on the judicial system to save them from the collapse of democracy.

Do you think the monster in my film is a “queer” figure?

EC: I think That Monster draws attention to the ways in which hetero-normativity and militarism are closely interrelated (as with patriarchy too); there are direct parallels between the way homophobia and a pro-war mentality work to create enemies by casting others as aggressive, monstrous threats supposedly in need of containment. The slipperiness of the monster in That Monster is profoundly generative: throwing up all sorts of potential associations, even associations in conflict and tension with each other – a testament to how complex it is as an artwork. The female monster also asks important questions about gender; the gothic seems to have long been a particularly powerful site for feminist thinking – from Shelley’s novel, to Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic text Powers of Horror (1980), and many contemporary art practices. How does That Monster think through femininity and ideas of the monstrous?

I am particularly interested in the stakes of Trump’s masculinity in the context of the film: centrist journalists have spent a lot of time claiming “excessive” masculinity is the prime reason he is a bad president. This analysis rests on very conservative gender norms: the idea that masculinity is a spectrum – you can have too much (thuggish) or too little (effeminate) – but the figure in the middle, military masculinity, is the only subject able to exert “self-control;” and therefore has a natural right to exert that control and “order” over all those who supposedly cannot (women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, nonhumans). In criticizing Trump on the basis of being “excessively” masculine and therefore a bad custodian, such attacks perpetuate the idea that a “real man” is needed to exert discipline.

If That Monster picks up some of these undercurrents (intentionally or otherwise), it is also destabilizing of the assumptions that underpin them, in the way it exposes and undermines group fantasies about “leadership.” You also see some of these patterns of identification and anxiety when it comes to climate change – the desire and demand that a “savior” will fix the problem without changing the structural system (capitalism) that has brought it about. Obviously, there are very long historical relationships between masculinity and custodianship of the land – ideas of ecological control often drawn on and profoundly subverted by the gothic.

Could all of these threads connect somehow: from the cultures of managerialism in neoliberal governance, the demand that “shepherds” subject nature to order and fruitfulness, the appeal for a Christ-like savior at moments of crisis, or even the fantasy of military masculinity exerting custodianship over women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people? At the base of all these things is the concept of control: a “natural” figure in charge, keeping the imaginative “monsters” at bay. But maybe That Monster puts pressure on that very desire, precisely by insisting on the constructed and slippery nature of monstrosity itself? Rather than presenting an image of a stable world or social order, the film is adamant that wherever there is power there will be resistance – and that regimes of power can never be total or absolute.

SK: The other day I came across some notes I made a few years ago on Mark Cousin’s 1994 text “The Ugly.” Cousins defines the ugly as that which is there and should not be there, or that which is not there and should be. The ugly frustrates desire, and in that sense, it haunts. It is not a negligible task for art to set for itself – to haunt the spectator with the unsettling of the easy categorizations of the other, which you pointed to at the beginning of our discussion. It is those easy categorizations that have made possible the intensification of a defensive split in the U.S., and I suspect in the UK as well. This is what neoliberalism exploits. As for how That Monster thinks through femininity and ideas of the monstrous, again, it may have to do with something being in the wrong place. The bride is barely a character in the novel or Hollywood film, but in That Monster—thanks to filmic editing— she gets equal billing. She too has the capacity to be monstrous – ugly– to haunt, to represent psychical resistance. Cousins talks about beauty as a defense against human precarity – “beauty and symmetry induce the illusion of coherence and ideality into a subject who is in fact always close to the edge.” Let’s see if curators are willing to bring these monsters to spectators …

It’s infuriating to have witnessed the dramatic growth of presidential power (and personality) in the U.S. over the past few decades. Cheney masterminded this for George W. Bush; Obama contributed through his kill lists, his dramatic increase of executive orders, and his unilateral militarism; Trump has his radical enabler in his personal Attorney General William Barr. But none of this could have been accomplished without mass compliance. That compliance is connected to the desire for a savior from the chaos and confusion that neoliberalism has created for the many. One hears repeatedly how his base likes the fact that Trump is a “fighter.” And now we have millions falling for Biden as savior. Yet he is almost as megalomaniacal and domineering as Trump. Aside from his retrograde politics, Biden’s m.o. is that of the bully.

But I think that the characteristics of a savior today are complex because of the role played by mass projected rage. Trump-the-symptom lauds the reactionary tenets of masculinity – men should be very tall, have big hands that allude to a big penis, be generals (he likes them tall, in uniform, and not bald), be dominant and not listen to the opinions of others (including generals), ignore women when not insulting them (particularly women of color). But at the same time, he betrays enormous anxiety about his masculinity and behaves in ways that aren’t conventionally masculine. He’s not exactly the strong, silent type. He publicly exaggerates his sexual prowess, belittles the masculinity of men he can’t control, pretends he has a full head of hair, hesitates to engage in military aggression, etc. He performs anxiety. Centrists and those who have economic plenitude accompanied by other privileges have comforted themselves for a few years by holding onto the useless idea of “the grownup in the room” as savior, who more often than not is either a military man or a corporate man.

Recently I’ve had the sense that Trump is losing some support. The many who granted him a winning margin because he was the new “change you [could] believe in” are looking for their next change, something to stop the pain of an unidentified neoliberalism. The tragedy is that if some of his voters turn against him, it won’t be because they understand what drew them to him or what kind of change would actually alleviate that pain. Into that American vacuum are stepping a few truly progressive politicians who try to clarify the raw deal experienced by the 95%, but at the level of mass psychology, art remains one of the few potential players.

EC: Yes – culture and the humanities are as important as ever in making sense of the violent divisions, upheavals, and social struggles around us. That Monster not only does vital and urgent work in unpicking, unraveling and making sense of our current psychic-political landscape, it also leaves us with a powerful and profound message: no one can exert absolute control over themselves or others.

[To view That Monster, click here.]

What’s art got to do with it? – A conversation about art and rape with Emily Apter, Emily Liebert, and Siona Wilson

October 22, 2015

Conversations

7 Comments

Event detail of 12 Weeks in May, 1977, by Suzanne Lacy.

A few weeks ago I invited Emily Apter, Emily Liebert, and Siona Wilson to discuss some recent and historical art projects that address the issue of rape. [Participant bios can be found at the foot of this transcript.]

Silvia Kolbowski I’ll start with the brief text I sent to all of you in advance of our in-person conversation. In the last few years there has been substantial reporting on the lack of responsiveness- on the part of American universities, police departments, and prosecutors – to the epidemic of rapes, both on university campuses and off. The 2015 film The Hunting Ground documents this criminal negligence as it takes place in universities. The film delves into some reasons for this behavior, including the willingness of universities to ignore allegations in order to maintain the positive branding (and therefore competitiveness) of tuition-hungry institutions in the U.S. education marketplace, and their reluctance to risk alienating, by holding them accountable, the fraternities and sports players that are the strongest generators of alumni donations. In addition, a recent report revealed that even repeat rapists are often not pursued by police departments and prosecutors because rape cases pose difficult challenges to both, and career-promoting successes in rape cases can be elusive. The fact that police departments are reluctant to engage in connecting database information across the country, which would greatly contribute to capturing and successfully prosecuting repeat rapists, indicates that there’s something in excess of careerist pragmatism at play in ignoring reported rape crimes.

The reporting and documentation of the rape crisis has been direct and thorough, backed up by compelling, not to say devastating studies and statistics, although of course the issue deserves even greater distribution. But such facts do not always convince when a culture doesn’t value women’s sovereignty. This is where non-legal and non-documentary representation comes in, raising the question of what art can contribute to intervening in a problem that is never disconnected from other aspects of cultural misogyny.

To that end, we’ll look at a number of art projects of the last few decades that deal with rape. I’ll start with two general questions – What are the particular ways in which art can intervene in the rape crisis? Which projects come to mind in this regard?

Siona Wilson Thinking about the range of different artistic projects that address the question of rape, from the late 1960s through the last few years, they seem to occupy the position of activism, assuming the voice of the artist as an activist voice. It’s striking that even the film The Hunting Ground, represents a range of artistic projects. There’s the photographic art project through which one of the central protagonists, from UNC Chapel Hill, came out to the campus community about her rape. And of course there’s the central example of Emma Sulkowicz at Columbia University, with her Carry the Weight mattress art project, in which she uses a performance project as a way of putting pressure on the University to act on her accusation of rape by another student on campus.

Kolbowski Siona, are you defining an art project as activist if it has a direct goal, if it addresses the institution directly with a demand? Is that what defines the work as activist for you?

Wilson In this case, I think so. It’s the act of taking on the role of advocacy, with a speech address directed to the institution. And I think there’s another level in which we can see, if we go back and look at some of the historical examples, such as the Ana Mendieta work from 1973 – Untitled (Rape scene) – that the activist dimension of such a work was tied into a feminist politics of consciousness-raising, of discussions. It may not have been what she intended, but that was what arose from the work.

Kolbowski I would say, based on what you’re describing, that the Suzanne Lacy works on rape – the 1977 “Three Weeks in May” and its 2012 recreation, fit into your description. But I wouldn’t say that the Mendieta project did.

Event detail of 12 Weeks in May, 1977, by Suzanne Lacy.

Wilson I think it does in the sense that it’s a live work. The audience is invited into her apartment, where they witness her with blood on her body, a re-enactment of a rape/murder case that was recent in her college community, and the audience response is to stage a discussion about what happened. So that became part of the work, with a response that was actually the development of a discourse around the issue of rape. Even if Mendieta hadn’t intended it, it took on the role of advocacy.

Kolbowski I thought the point of the Mendieta project was to position the spectator as a voyeur through their witnessing a tableau in a personal setting. There’s an echo of the Mendieta piece in the Sulkowicz web video piece – Ceci n’est pas un viol. By virtue of using a surveillance camera format with a split screen to show sex enacted by herself and an anonymous male, Sulkowicz positions spectators as voyeurs.

Documentation of Untitled (Rape scene), 1973, by Ana Mendieta.

Liebert I think a crucial difference between those two pieces is that Mendieta is showing us a kind of after-image, so the spectator by necessity has to project what has preceded the tableau. But in Ceci n’est pas un viol, we’re actually watching the act start to finish.

Wilson But Ceci n’est pas un viol also provides an after-image, because it’s not the actual act.

Apter Ceci n’est pas un viol raises the question of address, of how you come to the work. Are you supposed to have the foreknowledge of Carry That Weight, and of the media spectacle around Sulkowicz’s rape accusation on campus and the fallout from all of that? There are several levels of reference involved.

Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, video, 2015, Emma Sulkowicz.

Kolbowski In that regard, what is different now – which didn’t exist at the time of the Mendieta piece, or with the first Lacy rape project– is the search algorithm. With somebody like Sulkowicz, everything gets attached to everything else, which is the nature of the algorithm. So you would have to assume that anyone looking at Ceci n’est pas un viol would be aware of her earlier accusation and of Carry That Weight.

Apter The Mendieta and the Lacy pieces, as you mentioned, Siona, were made in reference to actual rapes that had occurred to others. But the difference with Ceci n’est pas un viol is that this supposedly happened to Sulkowicz. So it’s not the re-presenting the rapes of even anonymous others, based on information that could have been taken from police files or blotters, but instead a level of self-situating that is very different from the other works. That’s a huge difference. The fact that with post-millenials it’s all about “me.”

Siona When I first watched Ceci n’est pas un viol, I was struck by that shift from a collective connection or advocacy to an individual perspective. But it’s really important to see this as a web project and this connects back to Silvia’s point about the connectivity of the internet. You immediately wiki Sulkowicz and find information. And that’s how she staged this work. I also think that the text that she put as a preface to the video on the project webpage, which raises a trigger warning, evokes a collective viewing response. And I thought the comments were crucial to the work.

Kolbowski Ceci n’est pas un viol is an enactment at a personal level, as you’ve pointed out, Emily. But of course the artist means to be representative; her claim on the project website is that she’s setting out to change the world. But to some degree that video as an artwork has a tendency to simplify and to reduce what rape culture is in general. There’s a lot of complexity around the role that rape plays in contemporary culture – whether it’s an aspect of a military war or something that takes place on a university campus, or if it is carried out in an urban context that delimits which areas women can traverse alone and which they can’t.

Apter And sex trafficking…

Kolbowski Exactly. So although I think that one of the main things that Ceci n’est pas un viol does well is allude to the way that rape is sexualized, when in fact rape has little to do with sex, I also think that the project does not bring to light the complexity of rape in our culture. What do you think?

Apter Yes and no. When I watched the video for the first time, it felt very staged and almost like watching something on a stage; a mock enactment. She doesn’t want to use the word “re-enactment”-

Wilson – a demonstration.

Apter But it’s very unconvincing as sex.

Wilson Absolutely.

Apter So the fact that some of the comments left on the site refer to what takes place in the video as porn –in order to undermine her project, or to hurt her – maybe some porn has the same effect, but it really wasn’t very good as porn. It wasn’t convincing to me in that regard. But when I watched it the second time, I did think that it actually problematized the question of consent. And this gets into something that is maybe not critically profound, but I think that there’s a general misunderstanding about sex. People can enter into having sex, and it can be very pleasurable at one moment, and“consensual,” and then suddenly it’s not. Sex is risky in that way. And the question raised for me in this regard is, where is this pointing? Is Sulkowicz saying that sex should not be risky? That sex should always, in a sense, have an institutional eye looking out for you? Or the old cliché of the contract, where you’re signing onto this and this, and having everything spelled out? You don’t have to be a libertarian feminist to say, no way, I do not want that; I do not want the state intruding into my body, just as I wouldn’t want the state telling me whether I could have an abortion or not. So these are the kinds of contadictions that were raised for me on second viewing, where I felt that it did capture that menacing moment when she – maybe because the slap was louder the second time I heard it, and the “ow,” and I looked more closely at the moment where violence and risk come together, and not so much the sex itself, which I took out of the picture. So the question of consent and the question of a feminist position about risk within sexuality – that was what was raised for me the second time I viewed the video, linked to some kind of performative dimension. I would say that the work problematizes that issue for me.

Kolbowski I thought it was interesting that the sound of the slaps seems to be imposed in post-production. I’m almost positive that he’s not generating that degree of sound during the course of videotaping, because it has a different quality than the rest of the sound in the video.

Wilson Really?!

Apter That actually changes what I’ve just said…

Kolbowski It seemed to me that the sound of the slaps was heightened in post-production. In regards to what you said, Emily A., I wanted to raise the article recommended to us by Emily L., written by Carrie Lambert-Beatty, in part on the 2008 senior project by the then Yale undergraduate art student Aliza Shvartz. The project was described in a Yale newspaper as “…a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.” One of the things that struck me in Carrie’s text – although obviously the piece by Shvartz is about abortion and not about rape – in terms of how an artwork can intervene, is Carrie’s point that Shvartz’s piece was intended to and did engage institutional mechanisms -the institutional frameworks of law, public discourse, popular definitions of morality, the media’s role in defining an act, the university’s enactment of what it perceived to be its legal privileges, the revealing alignment of pro- and anti-abortion public discourses, etc. And by virtue of smoking out these institutional elements, as Carrie points out, the work highlights the different definitions that could be accorded to the act in different frameworks. In one institutional context, the artist is thought to have performed self-abortions; in another context the event is considered a menstrual period; in another it’s a performance. Reading about the Shvartz piece made me question whether Ceci n’est pas un viol frames the existing levels of complexity in rape culture. That’s not to say that rape isn’t simply rape. In other words, where consent doesn’t exist, it’s rape.

Apter The question is, what is the act? Is the accent here on the consent or is it on something called genital penetration? I think you can be raped in different ways. It can shade into something metaphorical, a form of psychic violence that is absolutely devastating and leads to trauma, but doesn’t involve physical penetration or a form of violence with an object on your body…

Kolbowski Did you notice that in The Hunting Ground they refer to anything that is not penetration by a penis as sexual assault? And rape is the word that they reserve for the penetration of an orifice by a penis.

Wilson I wonder if they were using a legal definition?

Kolbowski But even if it were a legal definition, it’s still interesting that they chose that demarcation for the documentary –

Apter – even if it were legal, it doesn’t mean it’s true. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a blur line between assault and penetration.

Kolbowski Right.

Liebert The questions that you’re bringing up about consent and risk, which are maybe the complexities raised by Ceci n’est pas un viol, did they map onto issues of spectatorship for you or did they seem like they were located exclusively in the sphere of rape?

Apter Siona brought up the question of address. The question of spectatorship or auditory reception is important because there’s an active way of looking at the video, and then there’s the address of the instructions, the proviso or warning text on the Ceci n’est pas un viol website page. Sulkowicz writes “Do not watch this video if your motives would upset me, my desires are unclear to you, or my nuances are indecipherable…Please don’t participate in my rape. Watch kindly.” Many of us would find that manipulative. And that’s what a lot of the comments on the blog are reacting against – “Oh, well, I guess I just raped Emma Sulkowicz.” But the text presents a taunt – please, please don’t participate in my rape. Ceci n’est pas un viol – for me it’s spells “don’t do it, but do it.” It’s one of these double negative affirmatives. It’s Octave Mannoni’s “Je sais bien, mais quand même..” I know, but still.

Kolbowski But doesn’t that echo a large aspect of rape culture — the masculinist assumption that when women say no, they really mean yes?

Apter That was the most shocking thing in The Hunting Ground, the sign at a Skull and Bones fraternity that had on it “No means yes; yes means anal.”

Kolbowski Then how do you interpret the written preface to Ceci n’est pas un viol ?

Wilson I found it annoying when I first read the webpage preface, but only in so far as it seemed naïve. But that’s the nature of a student art project. She’s no longer a student with this work, but still it had that I-want-to-save-the-world naivete to it. But I also found the preface interesting, because it stages the very problem that the video itself seems to be presenting. And here I want to go back to the point that you made, Emily A., which is that Ceci n’est pas un viol raises some very difficult questions that The Hunting Ground as a documentary cannot raise; for example, the question of sexual practice in a more general sense, when it really isn’t clear whether consent is being given. Consent doesn’t cover the whole issue. I thought, how could anybody watch her video if you followed Sulkowicz’s directions, because how can we really know what she feels? It poses an impossibility.

Apter It leaves you with the possibility that if consent is ultimately unknowable, then what are you saying to the university, to the institution?

Wilson Exactly, this opens up a whole other issue.

Kolbowski But then isn’t there an element of so-called acting out in that preface?

Wilson That’s another form of juvenilia.

Kolbowski But what she’s setting up in the webpage preface is the very complexity that she’s denying in both her public accusations and in the video. I’m not, let me be clear, suggesting that she didn’t get raped. She may have been. But I prefer to treat this artwork as an artwork.

Detail of Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol website page, inverted.

Apter But is this a site-specific work, in the sense that it has to refer to knowledge about her case in order to make sense?

Kolbowski The preface implies that she would say no.

Liebert I agree that there’s a promise in the title and in the textual framework that the piece is about the impossibility of proof or of naming rape, and that in the space of that ambiguity is where the spectator would project. In the title and the framework there’s a promise that the piece will turn back to the spectator, and then to me that space is collapsed in the visual material, or reduced.

Kolbowski In that regard I would return to the Mendieta piece. Mendieta sets up only one condition for viewing – that of voyeurship. She sets up a peephole, in effect. She doesn’t prescribe viewer reactions and outcomes. It’s interesting that although the Mendieta work is owned by the Tate, they describe the work on their website, but there is a blank where the image would be, and yet the image is searchable. That raises the general question of what gets shown and what doesn’t get shown. In other words, in the legal courtroom the word and forensic evidence should suffice. The least likely thing is that there would be a visual representation of a rape. At the very best you’d have corroborating evidence, as in one of the cases presented in The Hunting Ground, where the rapist’s schoolmates witnessed parts of the assault, although it didn’t seem to help the case.

But in an artwork that addresses rape, if it isn’t a work that depends solely on data, the tendency is to visualize.

Apter And that ties into the Black Lives Matter movement, and whether seeing the footage is changing the nature of the trials or the possibility of a grand jury indictment. What seems to be so shocking is that you can come up with forensic evidence and even have footage and it’s still not making a difference in terms of how the law is responding.

Liebert I think this also goes back to Silvia’s framing. You asked what art can offer in situations where facts don’t convince. Black Lives Matter arose when proof was ineffective. In the incidences of rape – when facts don’t convince, what can come in? In important ways, the Sulkowicz mattress piece had real impact in terms of catalyzing a very broad activist effort, and there she used a symbolic object and her body’s relationship to that object to disrupt the routines on [at?]the site of an institution.

Wilson She used that project to connect it to the institution, and also to complicate the situation.

Kolbowski The mattress piece used a metonymic strategy and also the engagement of identification in a collective sense–

Wilson –because of those who helped carry the mattress, and offered support.

Kolbowski And maybe not only offered support, but also engaged in an experiential identification.

Wilson With regard to the question of the visual, the Eric Garner case on Staten Island made it very clear –since the whole assault was recorded on video, which did not aid in indicting the officer–that it’s always discourse that frames the veracity of the visual. I think it’s Ariella Azulay who has written that it’s impossible to photograph rape. The question of rape does not reside in the visual. It has to reside in a discursive framing of the visual. So even if you have a kind of reenactment of a rape event, the reenactment is doing other things than providing veracity and proof. Maybe it would be interesting to think about what kind of work the visual is engaged in.

Apter Just as a footnote, I can’t help pointing out that the subtitle of the Magritte piece, Ceci n’est pas une pipe is La Trahison des images. The Treachery of Images. It seems to me you could also apply that subtitle to Ceci n’est pas un viol.

Wilson, Liebert Right.

KolbowskI But the fact remains that the artist chose to–

Wilson–to represent.

Kolbowski Images, whether they be videos or photographic images, often serve to reinforce the prejudice of the viewer. Because that is an aspect of viewing. A comparable example that I’ve used in teaching is Slavoj Zizek’s point about the Austrian election in which Kurt Waldheim ran for president. The Socialist party that ran against him exposed as the major part of their campaign the facts of Waldheim’s Nazi role. And Waldheim won! So, as Zizek points out, by telling the truth, by exposing something that Waldheim himself could not have exposed but something with which voters identified or at least condoned, the opposing party was doing the work of electing Waldheim. That’s where the limitations of the image come into play. It’s like saying, I use this video to prove that something that is considered consensual is actually part of rape culture, part of a rape. But then you read the 4600 comments on the website, and you have your proof that people will distort by projecting themselves onto the image. The image confirms what they want confirmed. And that to me points to what you quoted, Siona, that…

Wilson …that discourse determines the image. It shapes the meaning of the image. Azoulay’s point that rape cannot be a visual thing.

Kolbowski Well, it is for both the perpetrator and the victim, but…

Apter And let it not be forgotten that in the culture we’re in, very often it is precisely for viewing that many women in these initiation rights of fraternities are gang-raped, and it’s filmed and sometimes distributed. So it’s not just that they are violated in terms of a legal notion of consent but that any sense of their privacy is violently attacked. And the loss of privacy doesn’t fall under sexual assault. But it does become rape by spectatorship.

Liebert In The Hunting Ground they discuss one fraternity that has a “conquest wall” of photographs.

Apter So even though a “post-feminist” generation describes itself as empowered, as sex-positive, as initiators as much as they’re being hit on, there is nonetheless – though perhaps it’s linked to backlash –also this idea of the woman-hunt. Silvia, you mentioned rape in war situations, but it’s also a form of sport that gets incorporated into hazings. One of the things that’s so troubling is that rape is ignored and blatantly condoned, especially when it’s to do with sports heroes on campus. Universities and police departments won’t go there; there’s too much money at stake, there’s too much male heroism at stake. So that old idea of the woman-hunt is strangely reinforced in such settings, and especially with the spectatorial aggression that’s attached to it.

Liebert And it’s interesting that there’s a sort of dualism, or an unfortunate contradiction here. On the one hand we’re talking about an extreme visiblity that you’re rightly saying is part of the rape, and on the other hand an invisibility that perpetuates rape culture. It’s exposure in the wrong places.

Kolbowski I wonder if it wouldn’t be more important for art to pursue the rape issue obliquely. Because one of the things that’s clear in reportage about rape, and documented in The Hunting Ground, is how the shame that rape victims experience often shapes their hesitation to report the crime. Even today, shame is often the reason why they don’t tell family or friends, let alone the police. And yet it’s telling that the women who are expressing shame in the film are the same ones whose rapes involved no nuances of consent at all. Female shame is a part of rape culture. By addressing the question of shame that women feel when they’re violated by rape or sexual assault, you’re not necessarily going to change the ways universities or cops react to accusations, but you would start to chip away at a huge part of why we’re not making any headway against the statistic of a rape every six minutes in the U.S.

Apter I just went to see a very interesting film by Sylvie and Florence Tissot about the French feminist Christine Delphy, which was, interestingly, titled Je ne suis pas féministe, mais…. A title in the line of those denials that affirm. There was a discussion afterwards with a group of feminists. I think it was Sarah Shulman who said in the discussion that there was no feminism anymore. And I objected by pointing out that there are many discussions of rape. Her point was that there was no real feminist engagement at the moment because there’s no anger, because there are no issues that women are angry about.

Kolbowski Wow.

Apter I didn’t buy that. But it relates a little to what you’re saying, Silvia, in that we could ask if rape is a galvanizing issue. The focus on rape often refers to privileged women on campuses, but not always, or to date rape, and that kind of focus often get media attention. But is the focus on rape gaining traction as a rejuvenation of feminism at this particular moment? Is it one of those issues that crosses generational, class, race, and professional lines?

Kolbowski It should. Think about, for example, the link I sent to the performative piece by the art collective Blank Noise that was done in India, which has the third highest rape statistic in the world.

Activists converse with strangers on a road near Bangalore, India, as part of the public art project, Talk To Me, by Blank Noise art collective, begun in 2012.

Wilson I think that’s a great point, Emily A., and I do think that it’s a class-defined issue. For example, at the public college where I teach, we’ve only had student dorms for a couple of years. So students are not living on campus. If there isn’t a social life around the campus, if students work at night, if they don’t have social events–

Liebert –if they’re not drinking together.

Wilson They’re not drinking together.

Kolbowski But the one-rape-every-six-minutes in the U.S. is happening to women whether they’re on campus or not.

Apter But when the rape occurs on campus, the media is giving it another level of attention.

Kolbowski True. To bring the topic back around to art, I would reiterate my initial question. There’s obviously a necessity for data, for legal activism, for demands placed on institutions, and also to rewrite the discourse of women’s sovereignty, let’s say, but what do we see–

Apter – a necessity for sexual citizenship!

Liebert, Kolbowski, Wilson Sexual citizenship!

Apter But that’s for another discussion, since we should bring the discussion back to art.

Kolbowski Well, we’ve talked about visualization and non-visualization, and we shouldn’t exclude the auditory in discussing art about rape. Because there is an auditory dimension to rape, even though typically no soundtrack to rape travels beyond the perpetrator and victim. These are the things that art excels at – it excels at the visual, it excels at the auditory, and even at the discursive and the affective. So is there something that art can contribute to this ongoing crisis that it’s particularly well-poised to do?

Apter This isn’t a direct answer to your question, but it is something that comes back to the formal construction of Ceci n’est pas un viol. We haven’t discussed its four frames and what the different camera angles do or don’t do to the viewing of the act. The project overtly refuses the term reenactment, but it quotes surveillance footage, the way the surveillance camera is used when you’re reviewing a crime scene. The different angles – they’re probably false angles into a truth, but to address your question directly, there is still in art some claim to authenticity, some claim to truth – even if it is refuted or denied. In art there’s some claim to a higher angle of vision or a multiplicity of angles of vision, that may bring you to the aporia, to the unknowable, but they may also bring you to critical parameters. So the question is whether the technique that Sulkowicz used, of the four frames and the different angles is intrinsically important to how we approach Ceci n’est pas un viol? Does it actually go somewhere in answering the questions you raised about the topic?

Kolbowski It’s interesting that a lot of the comments on the Ceci n’est pas un viol website have to do with the surveillance aspect of the work. I read one comment that shocked me. The writer pointed out that the window in the room is not covered. The commenter then reasons that because of the exposed window, the impression that the man would have gotten in going into the room is that the woman was into voyeuristic sex and therefore the man would have gotten mixed messages about what sort of sex she wanted to engage in. I didn’t even notice that window when I watched the video a couple of times, and in fact there’s no way of telling from the window in the four frames whether anyone could actually look into the room. So for that reason among others, the comment is exposed as pure projection. In some ways, the most reprehensible and stupid comments on the site are the work of the piece. And that’s where I think art has the potential to intervene– at the level of the psychical. To understand that it isn’t just about proving a violation to a spectator, but rather to show how the spectator frames that violation.

Wilson And frames it through their own experience, through their own investment in their own sexuality, their own…sexual citizenship!!

Liebert Related to your comments on the piece itself, and to your question, Silvia, I think that art informed by feminism, specifically, can intervene in the rape crisis. The most successful elements of Ceci n’est pas un viol and Carry That Weight are in the ways they turn back toward the spectator, and that is one of the legacies of art informed by feminism that Sulkowicz is carrying forward.

Kolbowski Would you say that it’s art informed by feminism and psychoanalysis? Do you think that there’s an awareness in the work of the psychical dimension of spectatorship?

Liebert Yes, the work engages questions of desire—conscious and unconscious—in spectatorship.

Kolbowski Shall we end on that note?

Apter Sure, except there’s one last thing I’d like to bring up. You’ve said, Silvia, that there are several ways in which you find Ceci n’est pas un viol to be problematic. Can you pin that down for us? What was most problematic for you about the piece?

Kolbowski It has to do with what I pointed out earlier in comparing Ceci n’est pas un viol to the Shvartz piece. For me, Ceci n’est pas un viol doesn’t expose the institutional/discursive framework of how people are positioned in rape culture. There’s too much investment in Ceci n’est pas un viol in proving a smaller point – no less traumatic, but smaller. Sometimes a smaller focus can stand in for the larger, but for me in that work it doesn’t. Maybe it does for others. For me, the Shvartz piece continued to resonate after I read about it because of the way that it exposes framework and because of the nuanced ways that work displays how women are contained through naming. Because ultimately, while rape is a physical violation, so much of the violence of rape concerns language…in its aftermath, and in the continuation of that culture.

BIOS

Emily Apter is Professor of French and Comparative Literature, and Chair of Comparative Literature at New York University. Recent books include Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability (2013) and Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014). Recent articles include “Occupy Derivatives!” in October, “Planetary Dysphoria” in Third Text, and “Women’s Time (Again)” in differences. In 2012 she was appointed Remarque-Ecole Normale Supérieure Visiting Professor in Paris. Together with Bruno Bosteels she co-edited Alain Badiou’s The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Poetry and Prose (Verso 2014).

Emily Liebert is a Curatorial Assistant at The Museum of Modern Art in the Department of Painting and Sculpture since 2013. Prior to her current position she curated the exhibition Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin’s “Selves” (2013-2014) at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery and ICA/Boston, which was a finalist for an AICA “Best Exhibition” award. From 2008-2011 Liebert was a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program (2009-2010). Liebert holds a B.A from Yale (1997) and a Ph.D. from Columbia (2013).

Siona Wilson is author of Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minnesota, 2015). She is Associate professor of art history at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests are grounded in issues of sexual difference, sexuality and the intersection of art and politics in post-war and contemporary art in relation to experiment film, video, photography, performance and sound/music. Recent publications include an essay on Yvonne Rainer’s Film About a Woman Who… (October) and a reflection on digital media and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (Brooklyn Rail).

Not for circulation? A conversation with Rachel Haidu

April 21, 2014

Conversations

Curating Without Evangelism: A Conversation with Sébastien Pluot

September 15, 2013

Conversations

Leave a comment

Sébastien Pluot is a Paris-based art historian, curator, and a professor at the École supérieure des beaux-arts Tours Angers Le Mans. He has developed a unique and subtle way of interweaving pedagogy, curatorial practices, and art historical and theoretical research.

I met Sébastien in 2009 when I was invited to participate in an exhibition he co-curated with Dean Inkster on the subject of art and translation (“Double Bind: Stop Trying to Understand Me!” Villa Arson, Nice). I was asked to contribute an existing work, an inadequate history of conceptual art, so the work traveled to Nice, but I didn’t, meaning I didn’t have much of a chance to get to know Sébastien then. When I was invited to give a talk at the San Francisco Art Institute later that year, I was surprised to encounter Sébastien there, teaching for a semester and working with students on an exhibition entitled “Living Archives” (under the umbrella of Renée Green’s program Spheres of Interest). I have to confess that I didn’t fully grasp at that time exactly how Sébastien works because his process is so unusual. In 2011, I saw his exhibition Anarchism without Adjectives, On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo, (1975-1979), co-curated with Dean Inkster, and I started to get a sense of his atypical curatorial approach. That exhibition addresses the 1970s work of an artist without exhibiting any extant work or documents per se. (Anarchism without Adjectives is currently at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University, Montreal.)

It was only when he asked me to contribute to a 2012 exhibition entitled “Art by Telephone…Recalled”, co-curated with Fabien Vallos, and involving art and art history students from Barnard College, the Barnard Department of Comparative Literature, and students from four other schools, that I began to understand something about his unique curatorial methodology. Currently Sébastien is curating two exhibitions, entitled “A Letter Always Reaches its Destination” and “Breaking News From the Ether,” at the Centre de Culture Contemporaine-Montpellier, to which he has also asked me to contribute. And that’s another unusual thing about Sébastien – his fidelity to the artists whose work he values. There are other curators out there who practice such fidelity, but in my experience they are few and far between, those curators who consistently follow an artist’s work and include them in multiple projects. His is not a “discard after using” approach. The following conversation took place a couple of weeks ago.

Silvia: I want to start our conversation with something that may seem tangential, but that I will tie back to some questions later. I recently re-read Pierre Cabanne’s book-length interview with Marcel Duchamp of 1966 (Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp), and one paragraph in it struck me differently than it had before. I also read the newly published Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews, Calvin Tompkins’s interviews with him of 1964 and I’d like to ask you about one exchange in it.

This is the paragraph from the Cabanne interview:

Cabanne: Where does your antiretinal attitude come from?

Duchamp: From too great an importance given to the retinal. Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions; it could be religious, philosophical, moral. If I had the chance to take an antiretinal attitude, it unfortunately hasn’t changed much; our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat. And still, they didn’t go so far! In spite of the fact that Breton says he believes in judging from a Surrealist point of view, down deep he’s still really interested in painting in the retinal sense. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It has to change; it hasn’t always been like this.

Silvia: I’m intrigued by Duchamp’s vigorous reference to painting having had other “functions” in the past. And when he calls for change, he seems to refer to some kind of continuity with art that existed before the retinal became its defining characteristic. Now, I’m certain that he would not have been calling for a return to the religious, because he was explicitly anti-religious. But it made me wonder what forms the philosophical and moral “functions” of art of the past would take today.

Sébastien: I don’t think that’s what he meant. He was referring to a period in which art was not organized around the pleasure of the retinal, and since it was organized around something else previously , it could be organized again in another way.

Silvia: That is in a sense what I’m trying to point out. I know that most people see Duchamp’s life-long argument against the retinal in art as leading directly to the conceptual. He himself uses the word in the Cabanne interview. But do you not think he indicates some need to consider the pre-retinal as well as the post-retinal?

Sébastien: He’s saying that retinal satisfaction is not an ontological condition of art. But that doesn’t mean he was calling for a return to the state of art previous to the emphasis on the retinal. It’s a call to go beyond modernity’s concern with visuality and conventional notions of beauty, or with good and bad taste. He’s interested in going beyond good and bad taste to the indifferent.

Silvia: Yes, he later ridicules the “tasty artist.” But while he condemns the religious in other comments, he doesn’t condemn the other roles that art once played – the philosophical and the moral. He often argued for art-as-nothing, so that’s why his comment intrigued me. By analogy, what could the art of the preretinal be today? In his moment and ours?

Let’s bring in the Tompkins/Duchamp exchange now:

Tompkins: And yet in spite of all the commercialism and the rat race it’s still a fact that there’s such a great deal going on among younger artists now. There’s so much more inventiveness and excitement…

Duchamp: Yes, there was less activity then than now. There were not as many artists as today. The profession of being an artist, of becoming an artist, was only left to a few, compared to what it is today, when a young man not having special aptitude for anything will say, “Well, I’ll try art.” In my day, young people who didn’t know what to do tried medicine or studied to become a lawyer. It was the thing to do. It was rather simple, and the examinations were not as long as they are today. You could become a doctor in four years, in France at least.

Tompkins: Do you think the idea has spread that art is easy?

Duchamp: It’s not that it’s done more easily. But there is more of an outlet for it. Exchanging art for dollars did not exist then except for a few artists of that time. The life of an artist in 1915 was non-existent as a money-making proposition – far from it. Many more people are miserable today because they try to make a living from painting and can’t. There is so much competition.

Tompkins: But isn’t all the new art activity in one sense a healthy sign?

Duchamp: In a way, if you consider it from the social angle. But from the aesthetic angle I think it’s very detrimental. In my opinion, such an abundant production can only result in mediocrity. There is no time to make very fine work. The pace of production is such that it becomes another kind of race, not rat, but I don’t know what.

Tompkins: Doesn’t this also reflect a change in the concept of what art is – a loss of faith in the creation of masterpieces, and an attempt to make art a part of daily life?

Duchamp: Exactly, it’s what I call the integration of the artist into society, which means he’s on a par with the lawyer, with the doctor. Fifty years ago we were pariahs – a young girl’s parents would never let her marry an artist.

Tompkins: But you’ve said you liked being a pariah.

Duchamp: Oh, yes, of course, it may not be very comfortable but at least you have a feeling that you may be accomplishing something different from the usual, and maybe something that will last for centuries after you die. It’s very pleasant in a way, because there is the possibility to make a living. But that state is very detrimental to the quality of the work done. I feel that things of great importance have to be slowly produced. I don’t believe in speed in artistic production, and that goes with integration…

Silvia: Tompkins is the classic liberal capitalist of the period. The more the merrier when it comes to art. The quantitative is king – the more inventiveness and excitement the better. Art can be anything and anybody can be an artist is what Tompkins conveys in the interview. Duchamp is not impressed, to say the least.

For me, the two excerpts I chose dovetail because Duchamp seems to uncharacteristically be calling for a more weighty position for art. Duchamp is seen as the artist who unleashed de-skilling and an unbounded inclusiveness in art through the readymade, and he agrees that he was responsible for unleashing this, but he’s not entirely comfortable with the effects. For example, he calls for slow production and he’s at pains later in the Cabanne interview to explain how he controlled the dispersal of the readymades, how he didn’t market or sell them (at least this is his account).

Sébastien: What is fascinating is how Duchamp redefines his positions at different moments. He begins with a readymade that is a selected object, then he assembles objects as readymades, then he selects them through random processes, later he limits the readymades, and subsequently duplicates them himself or lets others do so. With each of these acts he integrates a different historical moment, a different consequence of his act, and the context in which it’s done. At the moment at which Nude Descending A Staircase is rejected from inclusion in the Cubist Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1912, he stops painting. But when the painting is a successful scandal in New York in 1913, sold along with several of his other paintings, instead of responding to Picabia’s request that he send to New York more paintings to sell, in 1913 he takes a job at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, and begins to work on The Large Glass.

Silvia: I think your point about his integrating different consequences and contexts at different times is very interesting, and seems to connect to what I was trying to say about the paragraph from the Cabanne interview. These adjustments which you point out that Duchamp makes could be seen as an analogical method of addressing, in a post-retinal moment, the moral and philosophical “functions” of art of the preretinal period. The decades spent producing the Étant donnés in secret are another such adjustment.

I think it’s very interesting that the artist who pushed us towards an “anything goes” culture of art is clearly skeptical if not contemptuous of such a culture. These adjustments are subtle and seem to be carefully thought through in terms of the social status of art at a given moment.

Sébastien: The nominalist interpretation of the readymade [i.e. this is a work of art because I call it art] is based on a complete misunderstanding of Duchamp’s position on the retinal paradigm. There is a related debate that took place between art historian Benjamin Buchloh and Daniel Buren, when they taught at the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris, which concerned the importance of visuality in the work of Duchamp. Buren argued that even if Duchamp was intent on countering visuality, the visuality of his work could not be erased. Buchloh opposed this, pointing out that the urinal, for example, doesn’t have to be seen in order to be acknowledged as a work. The fact is that the work existed without having been shown. It was dependent on language. Many of the ready-mades were not shown or were not identified as readymades.

Silvia: But that would bring us closer to the point that Tompkins makes, without using the term, that Duchamp helped create a condition of nominalism, since a work so dependent on language and not exhibited could include almost anything.

Sébastien: I would not say that the readymade could be anything. I would say that the readymade has to be considered in its evolution and in how it exists in specific contexts. At a given point it could be anything, but anything as specifically found through a random process. The work of art therefore is not the aesthetic dimensions of the object, but the condition of its being in a particular location and context. It also has to do with canceling the object’s use and exchange values — the bicycle wheel and the stool are two frustrated functional objects.

Silvia: But then of course the readymades acquire different kinds of exchange value in the short or long run. In your teaching, and often in your curatorial work, which sometimes involves archival research with students, my sense is that you erase the boundaries of the aesthetic. Would you agree with that?

Sébastien: It has more to do with the question of hierarchy. I think when we work with people – students, young artists – who cannot be expected to have an elaborate knowledge of art and art practices, you can work with them in a way that doesn’t acknowledge hierarchy. I don’t think you need to bring in the subject of hierarchy in order to create a situation in which they develop knowledge. Put another way, I try in the teaching and/or collective curatorial situation not to make hierarchy and differentiation the premises for the construction of knowledge.

Silvia: It’s interesting that your method is to not even articulate the subjects of hierarchy and differentiation when you’re working with students on a collaborative project. And by differentiation, I mean both in the sense of who does what and of what defines art. I think that approach is very interesting at this historical moment – not articulating it even though one knows it exists as a problematic. And I’ve actually seen how you do that, but I would also question your statement somewhat because I’ve seen you directing the development of such projects, by default almost.

Sébastien: In the exhibition “Art by Telephone…Recalled, ” curated by myself and Fabien Vallos and involving students from five institutions, we re-presented an exhibition that took place in 1969 (Art by Telephone), which itself refers back to Moholy-Nagy and Duchamp, and we generated projects in the present using the premise of that historical exhibition. How we dealt with re-presenting the historical show, and reinterpreting it in the present with students has something to do with what Duchamp clearly stated in his text “The Creative Act” (1957) – the spectator contributes to making the art.

The original Art by Telephone exhibition went further and radicalized the notion of the non-autonomy of the artist and the artwork in the sense that the interpretations of the language speech proposals made by the artists over the telephone could lead to other sounds or to the re-organization of the language content, or to an object or an event or anything relevant to the artist’s proposal.

Silvia: Well, let’s take Art by Telephone…Recalled as an example. After you received the spoken directions that I contributed to the exhibition, you said to me, “I think I know just the right student to interpret these instructions.” And I didn’t know what you meant by that until I met the student who enacted my instructions brilliantly, Zoë Harris, and realized that she had focused on audio work in her undergraduate art history degree at Barnard. And my instructions required that whoever enacted the work would have to hold a conversation with, in a sense, an audio function – I specified asking the Siri function of an iphone a particular question. Most artists in the first, and even in the second show, gave instructions using the telephone as an instrument of conveyance, but in my work I had a self-referential strategy that I suppose led you to think that she would be a good person to enact my instructions because her focus had been on audio.

Sebastien: I had no idea that her focus had been on audio.

Silvia: Really?! So why did you choose her?

Sébastien: When we played the contemporary recordings for the students to hear and proposed to them that they interpret the spoken words of the artists in the exhibition, they needed to learn about the practices of the artists involved. We showed them documents about the other work of the artists in the show who recorded the verbal instructions, and discussed those works, and the students learned a lot about the artists. We organized workshops – theoretical and historical – where they started to learn about concepts of translation, the historical avant-garde, and the art of the 60s and 70s.

Silvia: So did you choose her because you felt she would have an affinity for my work?

Sébastien: I knew that she would have an affinity because we’d had conversations with her. And I knew that she would be able to react to your proposal, which implied the delegation of a delegation. I knew she would be able to take that into account.

Silvia: So in a way you’re proving my point. That is your directorial move. And there’s an implicit hierarchy in that directorial move. You make a decision as a curator that shapes the outcome. Right? I’m not against that –

Sébastien: But I don’t understand that as a hierarchical stance. It always develops through conversations. And it always involves negotiation. Of course when you put yourself in the position of being responsible – ethically – for the work of the other and for the framework inside of which a work would be delegated, of course you allow yourself an authority. But authority does not automatically imply a hierarchical position, but a permanent questioning of an ethical task. In a way, Fabien and I are extremely arrogant in confronting the huge historical precedent of the 1969 show “Art by Telephone.” But at the same time I would say that we assume generative positions, because we didn’t want to engage in a two-person research into “Art by Telephone.” We thought that it was important to involve other art historians and philosophers and artists to historicize “Art by Telephone” through a new exhibition that would also include contemporary work. So this responsibility and this task and this ethical position we shared with others.

For example, in this summer’s Prada remake of “When Attitude Becomes Form” (1969) in Venice the three people involved (Germano Celant, Rem Koolhaas, Thomas Demand) produced a battle of the egos, and questions of the ethics of translation from history, and of interpretation in the present are non-existent.

Silvia: That’s beautifully put: an authority that does not imply a hierarchical position, but a permanent questioning of an ethical task. I think an ethics of authority is always important, but it’s particularly relevant today, when people are trying to move away from definitions, whether it be distinct definitions of artist, curator, or even historian in some academic contexts, and yet hierarchies are maintained. But what does an ethics of authority really mean? You defined it as involving a state of constant questioning—

Sébastien:— and dialogue.

Silvia: Constant questioning, dialogue, and negotiation. But even in the midst of that there are decisions made and limits set. There is a huge difference between what Celant, Demand, and Koolhaas do – their non-ethics of authority in relation to history and the spectator, so to speak – and what you and your colleagues do in your curatorial and pedagogical work, without having to relegate an ethics of authority to a realm of extreme suspension in which there is no decision-maker, or there’s no individual who sets limits, who to some extent has ultimate authority. Right? Because you’re also taking responsibility for the material that gets exhibited. Your way of working is to some extent related to the breakdown of definitions that we talked about earlier, but you are trying to develop a different way of dealing with that erosion of categories. Ha! “breakdown,” “erosion” — I keep using very negative words, because I guess I’m still skeptical about the erasure of definitions. I have enormous respect for the way you work, Sébastien, because I’ve seen it in action, but at the same time I’m not sure you’ve given me a convincing definition of the ethics of authority.

Sébastien: The ethics of the translator implies at one and the same time fidelity to and an acknowledgement of the fact that you cannot be fully faithful to the so-called original. Derrida called that a “double-bind” between the necessity and the impossibility of translating. It has to do with the German term Aufgabe used by Walter Benjamin in his text “The Task of The Translator” [“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”]. It means at the same time “task” and “renouncement”.

Silvia: I think the notion of the curator as a translator is crucial in not, as I’ve heard you say, reducing curatorial work to evangelizing. And I see the ethical component of that. However, you raised the issue of ethics and authority when I questioned how you chose Zoe to realize my verbal directions in “Art by Telephone: Recalled.” You connected it to an idea of responsibility.

Sébastien: There were actually three people who tried to enact the work.

Silvia: I didn’t know that.

Sébastien: Yes, and I knew that there was one who I thought would do it very well. In the end we chose the result that we considered to be the most interesting. There were six or seven people around the table, considering your project, talking about the work and how it would be realized – would it have only audio, or also include an image, video or film? We even considered having a digital voice talking to another digital voice. We discussed various possibilities.

Silvia: Guidance still involves authority of some kind.

Sébastien: But a project like this one is based on the premise that one of its central aspects is the questioning or deconstruction of authority, it’s already contaminated by that from the beginning.

Silvia: So let’s say in this instance you chose the result, in collaboration with the group, that you felt best suited the instructions. But let’s say the group decided to choose the project that you felt worst suited the instructions. Would you have gone ahead with that worst project?

Sébastien: No.

Silvia: Why?

Sébastien: For example, something happened while re-enacting the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing #26 voice instructions from the original 1969 exhibition. I knew a student who I thought would be extremely precise and meticulous, could use a pencil methodically, and I thought he would know how to interpret conceptually and graphically the intentions of the artist. But I didn’t measure the dimensions of the ego, and he did what Sol LeWitt alluded to very early in his text “How to Make Wall Drawings,” [Art Now : New York, vol 3, n°2, June 1971] in which he wrote that if the craftsman carrying out his instructions did not follow the rules, then the resulting work became the work of the craftsman and no longer a work by Sol LeWitt. And that is what happened with this student. The resulting work no longer had any relation to LeWitt. And this resulted in a very long conversation. In the end, I told him that if we wanted to be faithful to LeWitt’s idea we had to erase the student’s work and start again.

Silvia: So when we talk about an ethics of authority and you say it always has to do with negotiation and dialogue, that’s like saying that your way of working is not to impose something but to bring the students around to what you think would be the best result. But is that really so different than working with a hierarchical structure where the curator ultimately makes a decision and takes responsibility and assumes authority. Is that really so different?

Sébastien: I try to avoid thinking that I know what is the best result. If I am interested in these issues it’s because I am interested in uncertainty and unpredictable events. I think there is a huge difference from a political perspective. And I think it involves not considering the approach as a single truth and evangelizing it. It’s about putting forward the questions and the debates as something that we as curators or educators work on together with other people.

Silvia: So the ethics of authority is process?

Sébastien: It’s process, doubt, and sometimes withdrawal.

—silviakolbowskiblog

writings on art, culture, politics

Archive

Conversations

That Monster: A Conversation About Politics and the Psyche

What’s art got to do with it? – A conversation about art and rape with Emily Apter, Emily Liebert, and Siona Wilson

Not for circulation? A conversation with Rachel Haidu

Curating Without Evangelism: A Conversation with Sébastien Pluot

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: