More-than-social art
In the publication, Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (Oxford: 2016), the editors argue for greater appreciation of art as a form of social and civic engagement. This includes a consideration of the rights and responsibilities of artists and their practices, accenting how art or “artistry” contributes to human flourishing – how artistry lends to the articulation and manifestation of a more egalitarian world. In making such arguments, the editors also recognize how notions of rights and responsibilities may rub against traditional understandings of the artist as an autonomous figure, and art making as something that should not be anchored to forms of moral reasoning or social instrumentalization. What happens to the artist by being positioned within a framework of citizenship? The editors propose that such a move helps in capturing the ways in which artists are always working within specific communities, even a community of fellow artists, and in this sense, as an artist one operates through societal structures; the artwork or artistic gesture as well is positioned as a public act or object, situated within a communal framework deriving much of its power through its circulation as a social good. That is to say, artists are enabled through the rights of free expression, and through a range of communal and institutional structures, and therefore have a responsibility to those communities and institutions. In this regard, artistic citizenship is already at play, and as such, requires greater discursive and critical questioning.
I’m curious about these arguments, and am intrigued by the claims of the rights and responsibilities inherent to artistic practices. It does much to help in capturing art as an essential social and cultural good, in so far as creativity and the affirming actions of free expression punctuate social life, nourishing and supporting the imaginative force underpinning how we live and celebrate together, how we honor and remember our histories and ancestors, and how we envision a world to come. In raising the question of responsibility, artists can be reminded of their particular place within communities, and can be encouraged to more overtly direct their practices toward public issues, or to understand already existing social practices and engagements as expressions of rights and duties. At the same time, I’m curious what may go missing when entering into artistic citizenship: in accepting these as guiding terms for how we come to practice as artists, what do we lose? In a recent conversation with a friend, we found ourselves celebrating the rather “unreasonableness” of artistic action, which brings us back to the importance of the irresponsibility of the artist: if we accept this view or narrative, irresponsibility in fact becomes a responsibility, a way of enacting the very creative force of an artistic position or sensibility. While we may strive for social engagement, or a position of human flourishing, we must do so by hanging onto the rather anti-social or disobedient nature of artistic actions – that is, to hang onto the strange articulations, unwieldy meanings, and obsessive antics art is prominently delivering.
In their arguments, the editors of Artistic Citizenship often accentuate the ways in which art supports and affirms human sociality, nourishing the creative vitality of togetherness. Yet, such affirmation is often only ever impactful by upsetting the languages, genealogies, orientations and behaviors of the social – art nourishes by challenging, refiguring and diffracting what constitutes the social. This may also include fundamental gestures of withdrawal, escape and alienation, or radical solidarity – especially as a way to reach beyond institutionalized normativity. What then becomes of our notion of artistic citizenship? As an artist, my greatest responsibility may be to challenge or refuse to accept the order of citizenry altogether.
In thinking through these different questions and views, I’m led to think less about reinforcing practices of socially engaged art, and rather, to consider a more-than-social approach and practice. More-than-social art may help capture the sense in which artistic actions attend to public issues, social worlds, and human challenges, while staying close to their fundamental irresponsibility and anti-social features, their excessive, wild and uncanny drives. To recognize how my artistic citizenship is also grounded in acts of disobedience and objection, withdrawal and escape, poetic rupture and nonsensical fantasy – that is, the imagination of a non- or extra-citizen, or rather, a more-than-social subject.
As Giorgio Agamben reminds in his work on forms-of-life, conceptualizations of what counts as “community” often fail to recognize how being-in-common is founded on a profound unrecognizability (the limits of language): that if we are to approach community as the creative undertaking that it is, we must stay close to the fundamental inertia of the common as what exceeds identity. In this way, a “true community” is that which never names itself as such. (Potentialities, 47)
Aganben’s arguments provide useful input into reflecting upon artistic citizenship, if not citizenship in general. As the editors of the publication argue, to be a citizen is to act as a political subject within a specific community; it is to be a figure of the city, a participant within a given polity and set of discourses – and importantly, it is to be a legal subject. Yet, from an artistic perspective, community and citizenship also often find their expression through aesthetic, material and affective experience, as processes of encounter. The editors suggest as much by underscoring artistry as an “ethical praxis” and how artists bring forward a profound sensitivity and engagement with the situatedness of people and places. Such ethical praxis could be said to require an ongoing invention of approaches that also lend to the worlding of other ontologies, other knowledges, other relationalities. The artist as a figure, and artistic actions in general, may work through political subjectivity by showing the limits of the political, captured not only by participating in an informed public sphere, but rather, by way of a range of gestures, including: the experimental reworking of states of matter and affective relationalities, the expression of diverse forms of embodiment and enactment, the construction and deconstruction of institutional discourses, the erotic engendering of collective practices, from kinetic theater to playful pedagogies. These forms of expression or action may echo Agamben’s description of “the swindler”, as that figure who not so much breaks the rules, but “pretends to keep playing when in reality he has already left the game.” (The Use of Bodies, 242) This description of swindling is suggestive for appreciating the ways in which art not only civically and socially engages, but does so by often worlding another game altogether, another communal scene and therefore, another polity – as my friend mused, not so much to “redistribute the sensible” but to create a different sensible altogether. If so, how is it possible to hang onto my citizenship when encountering the profoundly differentiating acts of artistic expression? Can I even recognize what citizenship is when confronting the meat joys of Carolee Schneemann, the trans-species life-forms of Špela Petric, the wandering lines and dream acts of Francis Alÿs, or the cloudy theoretical drawings of Luis Guerra?
From ethical praxis to swindling trickster, from conscientious aesthetics to rituals of escape, a more-than-social art is posed then as what not only relates us to the social or civic sphere (as an identifiable scene) but additionally to the currents of life always underpinning and exceeding the social in general.