[Reader-list] David Garcia: Claire Bishop’s Game: Subversive Compliance

Tue Jun 23 00:49:28 CDT 2015

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Subject: <nettime> Claire Bishop’s Game: Subversive Compliance
From:    "David Garcia" <d.garcia at new-tactical-research.co.uk>
Date:    Mon, June 22, 2015 17:24
To:      nettime-l at mx.kein.org
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Claire Bishop’s Game: Subversive Compliance through Strategic Exclusion.

As that most straightforward of publishing platforms, the mailing list,
also turns out to be one of the most resilient of the collaborative media
forms to have emerged from the internet revolution, it makes sense for
nettimers to get acquainted with the writings of the critic Claire Bishop,
particularly those of us interested in the fate of the arts in the age of
networks.

For anyone who has missed out on Bishop’s writings, she has in recent
years, established a reputation as one of the most influential advocates
of what has been called –the social turn in art- a movement that began in
the 1990s that effectively shifted art’s centre of gravity towards the
social and the political. Taking these practices from the margins of what
used to be called -community arts- to become a prominent genre of the
international mainstream.

For Bishop it is above all the participatory aesthetic (and the
accompanying issues around politics of spectatorship) that represent the
key dynamic (and problematic) of the “social turn” in art. The revival
(for that’s what it is) of a participatory emphasis in art, emerged, in a
dialectical relationship, to the mass popularisation of the internet in
the 1990s.

Given this historical proximity it is quite strange that Bishop has
managed to write her entire magnum opus, Artificial Hells, without once
mentioning the internet. This is a significant though dubious achievement
and exploring this fact may take us a little closer to understanding the
failure of the mainsteam art world to come to terms with the post war
cybernetic paradigm and why the media arts have been unable to become more
of a force to be reckoned with in this territory.

I want to argue that a certain historical amnesia has contributed to
Bishop’s professional success. She has ability to combine both highly
evolved scholarship and insight with moments of strategic omission and
that enable her to appear radical without ever fundamentally challenging
the art world’s status quo. She is as interesting for what she leaves out
as what she includes.

The Plus Side

Despite my strong reservations about some aspects of Bishop’s work, it is
important to begin by acknowledging her considerable achievements.
Bishop’s critical reflections over a number of years culminated in 2012
with her major work, “Artificial Hells”, the title is taken from -Breton’s
post mortum of the DaDa Spring in which he argues for the exquisite
potential of social disruption in the public sphere.

The book is laid out as a set of interconnected explorations of key
historical threads and moments that led to the re-emergence of the
participatory turn in art. Her breadth of scholarship reveal this impulse
to be a recurring strand of the 20th century utopian avant garde.
Importantly her work is enlivened by an intellectual confidence enabling
her to make bold assertions based on substantive arguments that go beyond
the descriptive. In otherwords there is plenty to agree or disagee with.
In art criticism that is a rare and valuable attribute.

One of her most important contributions has been to foreground the theater
as a principal historical progenitor of the participatory aesthetic. This
is important as most of the available histories of this kind of work have
over emphasized the visual arts at theaters expense; even when discussing
the performative.

But her most urgent polemical mission has been to mount a stiff defense of
the aesthetic and the role of the spectator. Bishop throws down the
gauntlet to those who argue that the aesthetic judgement (and by inference
the function of the critic) are an irrelevance to work which seeks to
dispense with the role of spectator.

The defense is necessitated by the widely held assumption that, in this
field,  aesthetic judgments are by definition reactionary, and, that it is
only possible to judge this kind of work from the standpoint of the active
participant. In this context aesthetic judgments are seen as outmoded
forms of connoisseurship or put more simply; elitist .  The principal
weapon in Bishop’s armory in attacking this position is of course
Rancière. Particularly his alternative to the work of art as autonomous.
Instead emphasizing our (the spectator’s) autonomy. The autonomy which we
as spectators experience in relation to art. Thus at a stroke he
undermines the simplistic dichotomy of passive spectator vs active
participant. For Ranciere the key lies in the undecidability of the
aesthetic experience which -implies a questioning of how the world is
organised, and therefore the possibility of changing or redistributing
that same world-.

Genuine participation, as Ranciere declared in the Uses of Democracy,
requires the invention of the unpredictable subject who momentarily
occupies the street, the factory, the museum, rather than fixed space of
allocated participation
This approach depends on accommodating the role of
the spectator and rejecting the notion that, by definition, spectators
lack agency. They have interpretive agency and that matters. - Nettimers
take note: I lurk therefore I am – lurkers of the world unite.

 So what’s the Problem.

For all its value Bishop’s work is too often tempted by the sin of
-subversive compliance- meaning the kind of political art (and criticism)
that capitalises on looking edgy by continually threatening to -bite the
hand that feeds it – but without ever actually intending to draw-blood.
And Bishop’s preferred method for enacting subversive compliance is the
strategic exclusion.

About a year after the publication of Artificial Hells 2013 she wrote a
widely circulated essay in Art Forum in which she develops her proposition
- (Quote) that the content of contemporary art has been curiously
unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by
the digital revolution”. Bishop proceeds to note - that there is, of
course, an entire sphere of “new media” art, but this is a specialized
field of its own: It rarely overlaps with the mainstream art world
(commercial galleries, the Turner Prize, national pavilions at Venice).
While this split is itself undoubtedly symptomatic, the main- stream art
world and its response to the digital are the focus of this essay. – End
of Quote Art Forum

So because it doesn’t sit in the -Oh so important mainstream art world-
she will not be considering it beyond noting that it exists. Thus she
identifies a key problem, then identifies those artists and events where
the problem is being addressed but then declares she will ignore them
because what is happening in the mainstream art world is of course far
more important. (Strategic Exclusion) Sadly this approach implicates
Bishop as part of, the problem she is describing. To paraphrase Walter
Benjamin -we should not look beyond the critic’s declared sympathies, but
at the position that the work occupies in the production relations of its
time.-

Returning to the more important case of Artificial Hells, too often
Bishop’s defense of the aesthetic is elided with a defense of the art
world as the primary territory where the aesthetic is happens (through
being endorced or legitimised). At one point Bishop asserts (Qute) that
-it is crucial to discuss, analyse and compare this work critically as
art, (for emphasis she puts -as art- in italics) -since –she asserts- this
is the institutional field in which it is endorsed and disseminated-(end
quote)

I would argue that the most inventive of contemporary artist/activists
(perhaps beginning with the AIDS activists of ACTUP) utilise contemporary
art’s language of tactical undecidability to be both a trigger and an
invitation to discourse whilst dispensing with the legitimizing
paraphernalia of the mainstream art world with its hierarchical
equivalents of Popes, cardinals, saints and sinners. Contemporary
mediatised activist/art at its best does not tell us what to think, in the
manner of traditional propaganda: instead it is an invitation to
discourse. It does not require, (in Bishop’s words) the institutional
field as a means of endorsement and dissemination.

Perhaps this is why early in the introduction of Artificial Hells, Bishop
cleverly put in place a framework of strategic exclusion that distorts the
radical potentiality of the –social turn- Her momentous feat of omitting
the internet from the book, does not appear ridiculous because from the
outset , she declares that she will not be addressing; “transdisciplinary,
research-based, activist or interventionist art”. Why on earth Not?!
Because according to Bishop “these projects do not primarily involve
people as the medium or material of the work”. She goes on to claim that
they are also excluded “because they have their own set of discursive
problems that I would like to address in the future”. Four years after the
book’s publication and I am still waiting for her to identify and address
these “discursive problems”.

I would argue that it is precisely the areas she has excluded the
-transdisciplinary, research-based, activist or interventionist art-
 that
offer the most radical and far reaching contribution to the social turn in
culture. Indeed it is precisely this constellation that suggest a partial
definition of tactical media, and as a whole the saga suggests why a new
term was required that retained an aesthetic dimension whilst dispensing
with much of the onerous historical baggage.

-----------------------------------------------

d a v i d  g a r c i a
Prof. Digital Arts & Media Activism
Bournemouth University
d.garcia at new-tactical-research.co.uk
http://new-tactical-research.co.uk

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