APS 1 (1) pp.

3753 Intellect Limited 2011

Art & the Public Sphere

Volume 1 Number 1
2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/aps.1.1.37_1

KIM CHARNLEY
University of Essex

Dissensus and the politics of

collaborative practice
ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

The tensions that exist in thinking around politicized collaborative art are exemplified by the theoretical positions taken by Claire Bishop and Grant Kester. Bishop
argues that the autonomy of the artist is indispensable to the critical function of
collaborative art, and that this is impeded by an ethical turn in criticism that
promotes the sacrifice of authorship in the name of a true and respectful collaboration (Bishop 2006a: 181). By contrast, Kester affirms that ethical reflection is a
central feature of collaborative art, where the artist must overcome their own privileged status in order to create an equal dialogue with participants. This article is an
attempt to move beyond the polarized form of debate between these two theorists.
It argues that collaborative art is defined by a contradiction where an apparently
free aesthetic space is superimposed on the social and institutional reality of art with
all of its implicit exclusions. Despite appearances, the positions of Kester and Bishop
are complicit in their attempt to expel this contradiction. This article argues that this
contradiction must be regarded as the foundation of the political in collaborative art.
In doing so it suggests that Rancire concept dissensus offers scope for mapping the
paradoxical complexity of the interdependence of ethical, aesthetic and political issues
in the liminal space between art and the social.

Rancire
relational aesthetics
Claire Bishop
Grant Kester
collaborative art
dissensus

There are clear tensions involved in current understanding of artists attempts

to engage with the social through some form of collaborative, dialogic
or relational practice. The critical attention given to this type of work has

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Kim Charnley

developed in parallel to a renewed interest in the connection between aesthetics

and politics, but attempts to understand this connection remain fraught with
difficulty. Increasing numbers of commentators have drawn attention to the
weakness of the political claim of Bourriauds relational aesthetics, usually
pointing to the fact that relational micro-utopias depend on the art institution
to guarantee their integrity, and are blind to the exclusions that constitute
this space. To summarize Hal Fosters argument, they are just one big Arty
Party (Foster 2003). However, attempts to put forward a more engaged
account of the politics of collaborative practice have also proved divisive.
This article examines the problems involved in thinking the political potential
of this type of artwork through two positions that are equally dissatisfied
with the modest politics of relational aesthetics, but nonetheless present
programmes that appear polarized and mutually incompatible. Claire Bishop
and Grant Kester are recognized as authorities in the area of collaborative art,
but after the publication of Bishops The Social Turn: Collaboration and its
Discontents in February 2006 they clashed in the letters pages of Artforum.
Their respective arguments offer a convenient way of exploring some of
the contradictions that present themselves in politicized collaborative art.
Here they will be used to allow an analysis of the competing claims that
emerge when the political potential of the aesthetic is superimposed on the
politics of the social in collaborative art. This article emphasizes contradiction
as the basis of the political potential of collaborative work, whilst at the same
time demonstrating that both Bishop and Kester try to expel this contradiction
from their arguments thereby neutralizing its political potential. The terms of
the argument that will emerge here are drawn from the theory of Jacques
Rancire, though they are used in a way that implies a critique of Rancire
thinking. Rancire often seems wary of work that attempts to bridge the gap
between art and life, insisting that this practice must end in disappointment.
This might be attributed to the fact that politicized collaborative art in particular
confuses the distinction between his terms the politics of aesthetics and the
aesthetics of politics. Here, this space is advocated as the most interesting
space in the current exploration of political practice, precisely because it is the
most paradoxical.
Claire Bishops The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents
contains a forceful agenda: to attack a tendency for art criticism to evaluate collaborative works in ethical rather than aesthetic terms, judging their
success solely with regards to the egalitarian form of the inter-subjective
relation enacted by the work, instead of evaluating it as art. For Bishop this
tendency reduces art to moral criteria, and encourages new art to be made
in the image of these criteria. In this way the complex knot of concerns
about pleasure, visibility, engagement and the conventions of social interaction that are the domain of art are subordinated to the endless reproduction
of a discrete set of moral notions (Bishop 2006a: 183). Kesters objection to
this article and Bishops reply in the letters page of the May 2006 edition of
Artforum helped to define their positions as irreconcilable poles of thinking
about collaborative art. Bishops article concludes with the caustic suggestion
that Kesters work forms part of a trend in criticism that combines an ethic
of anti-capitalism and the Christian good soul (Bishop 2006a: 183), whilst
Kester goes so far as to suggest that Bishop promotes: an art practice that
will continually reaffirm and flatter her self-perception as an acute critic
playing at hermeneutic self-discovery like Freuds infant grandson in a game
of fort and da (Kester 2006: 22).

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Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice

Kesters reaction was extreme because, from his point of view, Bishops
critique represents a typical attempt to police the boundaries of art in the
name of an avant-gardism that is elitist. From this point of view Bishops
argument is a betrayal: quite simply, a betrayal of the political potential of
art. The difference in their position derives from a fundamental disagreement
about the role of ethics in collaborative practice. Bishop sees collaborative
art as the closest thing to a contemporary avant-garde whilst Kester avoids
this term entirely, associating it with an engrained refusal of art practice
to engage with a non art public. Bishop advocates a practice where challenge and confrontation, in the avant-garde tradition, are key elements of the
political integrity of the work. This is anathema to Kester, who sees dialogue
between artist and non-art participants as the real political ground of collaborative work. In his view, the avant-garde tradition of confrontation acts as
a smokescreen for a discourse of power that denigrates those who have not
internalized arts linguistic and behavioural codes. For Kester, it is an artists
responsibility to take their privilege into account when entering into dialogue
with collaborators or risk colonizing them under the aegis of the artwork.
This means that the aesthetic in Kesters dialogical aesthetics is fundamentally an ethical practice of engagement with the other. Yet for Bishop, the
ethical turn is a threat to the authorial autonomy and complexity that are the
sine qua non of art as aesthetic practice. Both critics accuse the other of placing
in jeopardy the political power of art. Bishop suggests that Kesters approach
results in capitulation to state agendas for exploiting art as a means of social
reconciliation; Kester implies that Bishop is hypocritical in her advocacy of an
art that is a privileged activity where politics has a pleasantly radical sound.
Clearly, this summary indicates contradictory definitions of the political, but
how are these to be understood? And what is their relation to the ethical
and the aesthetic?
The significant points of agreement between Bishop and Kester, if
anything, make their dispute even more interesting. It is interesting to note
that the dispute between Bishop and Kester contains some areas of agreement. In a critique of Bourriauds Relational Aesthetics published in 2004,
Bishop points to a need to explore the type of relations that exist in relational
works (Bishop 2004). Bishops objection is that Bourriauds rhetoric of microutopia conceals the social reality of art as a nexus of power and unspoken
exclusivity. Yet, when Kester proposes an ideal type of artwork (in which the
dialogue works beyond a self-selected group of art world participants) he is
doing exactly what Bishop advocates: thinking about the subtle relations of
power that exist between artists and their non-artist collaborators. However,
Kesters enquiry creates a problem for Bishop, as reflection on art as a sociopolitical institution tends to raise ethico-political questions, especially around
access and representation. Such questions are exacerbated in collaborative
works where the activity of non-artist participants is understood as part of the
aesthetic meaning of the work. In these cases, the aesthetic and socio-political
reality is directly overlaid, emphasizing latent contradictions. The most glaring
of these is that the aesthetic is generally taken to mean the distinct, universal, and free space that we access through art. It has become conventional to
view contemporary art as a zone of free play that is buffered from the instrumental values of the public sphere. Collaborative works that make a strong
political claim run into the problem that this free space of art is constituted, or
at least surrounded, by practices that re-inscribe social divisions. To address
this reality one must ask ethical questions about how art should operate but

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1. Here, for the sake

of brevity, Bishops
argument is prcised
from two different
sources: her 2004 article
in October and the 2006
article in Artforum,
both of which address
Battaille Monument.
2. With the possible
exception of Adrien
Piper, though Bishop
is indeed somewhat
ambivalent about
her authoritative and
confrontational stance
in collaborative works.

these questions come at a cost. Once the artwork is assessed in ethical terms a
limit is placed on the critical autonomy of the artist, an autonomy that Bishop
believes is vital to arts political role.
Bishops response is an attempt to expel ethical reflection from the
aesthetic, characterizing it as a type of discourse that weakens the political
potential of art. This point is underlined with reference to the work Battaille
Monument (2002) by Thomas Hirschorn, and in particular the criticism of this
piece by the Swedish curator Maria Lind. This work was based in Kassel during
the Documenta exhibition and involved a number of features sited in an area
of the city with a majority of ethnic Turkish inhabitants. The work included
a monument, a bar, and a library of Battailles works. Criticism of the work
focused on two key points: first, it tended to frame the inhabitants of the district
in terms of a kind of social pornography, as a kind of exotic other to the art
world visitors; secondly, it employed local people but did not acknowledge
their contribution. Against the prevalent criticism Bishop argues that this
piece destabilizes the self-identification of art world visitors by pointing to the
exclusions upon which the social enactment of art is based.1 Drawing on the
work of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Bishop suggests that the politics
of this work reside in its ability to point to the antagonism or fundamental
exclusions that help to constitute the apparently autonomous space of art.
However, a side effect of this argument is that questions about the morality
of this work (with regards the representation of its participants) are ignored
because they interrupt evaluation of its potential to articulate antagonism.
As a number of commentators have suggested, this type of politics, however
much it appears to be self-reflexive, is still addressed exclusively to those inside
the enchanted circle of art and therefore re-enforces a structural inequality
(see Kenning 2009).
Bishop is concerned that the focus on the ethical credentials of collaborative works leads to a positive valuation of projects where the artist(s) give
up their authorial control, regardless of whether this results in interesting
artwork. This is characterized as deriving from an ethics of authorial renunciation (Bishop 2006a: 180). In Bishops view, socially engaged works tend not
to be assessed as art, but only in terms of their ethical credentials; for example, Oda Projesi, the Turkish art activist group praised by Lind, is implicitly
criticized by Bishop for an unwillingness to engage with the aesthetic content
of their work, and for shying away from addressing the danger they locate in
this term. In the process of stating this case, Bishop emphasizes that Kesters
Conversation Pieces fails to convincingly argue for an aesthetics of dialogic
art because it stresses the importance for artists of a self-reflexive awareness
of the imbalance in power in their collaborations. Bishop identifies the term
aesthetics with both artistic autonomy and challenge to the sensibilities of
the audience, neither of which are provided by the works that Kester affirms.2
Indeed, Kester is hostile to these traditional attributes of the avant-garde
viewing them as based on demeaning stereotypes of the non-art public.
Therefore in Bishops estimation Kesters book seems perfectly content to
allow that a socially collaborative art project could be deemed a success if it
works on the level of social intervention even though it founders on the level
of art (Bishop 2006a: 181).
However, the weakness of Bishops analysis exists precisely in a failure to explore the difficulties involved in defining the relation between the
aesthetic and the political. Granted, a magazine article is not necessarily
the context in which these issues can most easily be analysed. Nonetheless,

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Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice

the definition of the aesthetic that Bishop draws from Rancire is used to
skirt around this difficulty:
... the aesthetic is, according to Rancire, the ability to think contradiction: the productive contradiction of arts relation to social change characterized precisely by that tension between faith in arts autonomy and
belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to
come. For Rancire the aesthetic doesnt need to be sacrificed at the
altar of social change, as it already inherently contains this ameliorative
promise.
(Bishop 2006a: 183)
This reading of Rancire, whilst not necessarily inaccurate, certainly emphasizes the quietism that can be an implication of his theoretical framework
(Day 2009: 402). Bishop is suggesting that art is inherently political, and does
not need to deviate into ethical reflection in order to live up to its political
promise. Although this may be true of the meta-view of art advanced by
Rancire, it is also a convenient way of suppressing the problems raised by
collaborative art that engages directly with participants, and builds its political
claim around this relation. Effectively, this definition of art is used as a means
of discounting enquiry into the types of social relation involved in collaborative works, and it seems unlikely that Rancire analysis is intended to end in a
position of such critical immobility. According to Bishop, Rancire challenges
us to think contradiction, though the immediate objection arises that her
argument uses his ideas to demarcate, to expel contradiction, and set limits to
the proper space of the aesthetic.

RANCIRES AESTHETIC AND POLITICS

For Rancire, the experience of the aesthetic in art is one of autonomy: an
experience of autonomy that has historically provided a motor for social
change by implicitly calling into question the social and political constraints
of the state. His historical claim is that around the eighteenth century, when
the term aesthetic first came into use, there was a transition from what
Rancire terms the mimetic to the aesthetic regime of art. The aesthetic
regime is characterized by a distinctive openness in the way that it regulates,
or fails to regulate, the link between art as a way of doing (poesis) and a
way of feeling, or experiencing (aesthesis). In the aesthetic regime there is
a gap in the place that had formerly been filled by the cluster of regulative
concepts grouped around the term human nature. This is significant
because it means that aesthetic experience was cut loose to be an experience
of freedom, rather than of particular types of artistic perfection associated
with clearly articulated social roles. This freedom implied politics it was
implicitly universal and available to all standing in contrast to the social
inequalities that characterized existing social structures. Lacking anything
to regulate this relation, art henceforth could conceive of itself as addressed
to a lost human nature or one yet to come, and in so doing become
consciously allied to a political ideal (Rancire 2009: 8). At the same time
the ground was laid for formal innovation in the name of aesthetics, so that
the entire development of nineteenth and twentieth-century modernism
can be understood in terms of this interaction between poesis and aesthesis
in the aesthetic regime.

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However, political art for Rancire must always shuttle between two poles,
which express a grounding contradiction. At one extreme, there is the type of
art that aspires to dissolve the distinction between itself and the social to
create a society in the image of art through dissolution of art as a distinct
sphere. This type of work is identified in the utopian aspirations of various avant-gardes, from William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement,
through Russian constructivism, to Joseph Beuys social sculpture. Rancire
emphasizes that the vanishing point of this avant-garde aspiration is disappointment: the aesthetic experience, as the origin of the political aspiration
of art, cannot become the social. At the other extreme, there is a politics of
art that depends on its absolute distinction from the social: offering a social
critique from the distinctive space of art. Rancire identifies this aspiration
with the various art for arts sake movements of the nineteenth century and
their descendents, as well as with the aesthetic theory of Adorno and Lyotard.
In this position there is the risk of denying the link between art and political
transformation through efforts to emphasize the otherness and inaccessible
purity of the aesthetic experience.
At first sight, Rancire emphasis on the necessarily distinct place of the
aesthetic and of art seems to support Bishops call for evaluation of collaborative work as art, rather than using ethical criteria. However, the problem is
that Bishop, in effect, advocates both of the contradictory poles of aesthetic
politics at the same time. Bishop argues for the importance of critical autonomy
in artworks that have already taken a step over the threshold between art
and the social by defining their aesthetic around some form of collaboration,
as in the works of Jeremy Deller, Thomas Hirschorn, Phil Collins and Artur
Zmijewski (alluded to in The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents).
Is it possible for art to adopt the critical position of being removed from the
social, whilst at the same time being immersed in and constituted by it? Can
this assertion of the necessary link between the aesthetic and the political be
adequate to answer the ethical questions raised by Kester and others?
It is at this point that Rancire framework for articulating the relationship
between the aesthetic and the political begins to break down, certainly in terms
of its usefulness for Bishops argument. Although Rancire does discuss relational aesthetics he remains ambivalent about the claims of socially engaged
work because it blurs the distinction between art and the social in such a way
that distinctive political formation of each field is obscured. In effect, collaborative art, of the type discussed by Kester and Bishop, falls into a lacuna in
between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics. This is because
both Kester and Bishop advocate politicized collaborative work: for Kester it
is the politics of activism, for Bishop it is the politics of provocative criticality
combined with an element of collaboration. This distinguishes them both from
Bourriauds relational aesthetics, which, as Rancire observes, tends to emphasize the modesty of its political claim (Rancire 2009). For Bourriaud, the politics of relational aesthetics diffuses into the politesse of models of sociability
where the work sidesteps the difficult narratives of transformative politics by
viewing itself as an experiment or a micro-utopia. By contrast, in very different ways Bishop and Kester see a more disruptive political potential in collaboration. However, in the liminal space between art and the social, it is impossible
for art to avoid questions that Rancire tends to confine to the field of the political: namely those of morality or the division of right (Rancire 2009).
The difficulty involved in distinguishing the aesthetic from the political and
ethical in collaborative art can be read in the arguments that Bishop advances.

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Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice

Although Bishop attacks what she sees as the ethical assessment of collaborative artwork, when forced to respond to Kesters attack her position is stated
in such a way that it has the form of a profession of faith:
I believe in the continued value of disruption, with all its philosophical anti-humanism, as a form of resistance to instrumental rationality
and as a source of transformation. Without artistic gestures that shuttle
between sense and nonsense, that recalibrate our perception, that allow
multiple interpretations, that factor the problem of documentation/
presentation into each project, and that have a life beyond an immediate social goal, we are left with pleasantly innocuous art. Not non-art,
just bland art and art that easily compensates for inadequate government policies.
(Bishop 2006b: 24)
It is evident in this statement that Bishop is stating a moral position; the kind of
confrontational art that she advocates can lead to transformation and resistance to instrumental rationality in the service of a good that remains undefined, though is implicitly that of an anti-capitalist avant-garde.3 Similarly,
the term anti-humanism only ever makes sense as a re-evaluation and reinvigoration of the ethics of humanism. There is no doubt that Kester would
claim very similar goals in his formulation of a critical framework of dialogic
art. The political here is intimately connected to the ethical, if we define the
ethical as the advocacy of some action or world view that participates in a
commonly recognized good. The good that is advocated by Bishop (as well
as by Kester) is that of freedom and equality the implicit aim of transformative politics, even if this aim is never entirely realized.
Failing to recognize the ethical premises of her own argument, Bishop
uses the term ethics to invoke the image of a system of moral rules that focus
our attention on their generalized prescriptions rather than on the particular
character of a given artwork. Bishop associates this transcendent moral law
with Christianity, and with authorial renunciation, arguing in a Nietzschean
or Deleuzian vein that the artworks she advocates should be understood in
terms of heteronomy. In this way the questions raised by the social character of art are displaced into another arena, that of the supposedly repressive
character of the ethical turn that subordinates the immanence of arts heteronomy to a moralizing transcendence. This is simply a rhetorical sleight of
hand that conceals the stakes involved when art is forced to confront its social
and institutional character in the liminal space of collaborative practice.
In fact, what Rancire means by the ethical turn is entirely different from
the paradigm of moralizing repression of diversity that Bishop invokes. Rancire
work can be read as a complaint against the deterioration of thought around
the aesthetic into an advocacy of political passivity, and an analysis of the types
of thinking that perpetuate this state of affairs. It is precisely this deterioration
that Rancire means by the ethical turn and this requires him to make a very
particular definition of the term ethics. In his work the ethical turn is the
decay or elision of a relation between categories that made it possible to think
the aesthetic in its particular relation to transformative politics. This results in a
state of affairs where art becomes, despite itself, an affirmation of consensus:

3. The reference
to instrumental
rationality is
interesting as it
invokes Adorno, whose
thought is central to
any conception of
avant-garde radicalism
based around semantic
inaccessibility as
autonomy. Bishop
does not require
that the aesthetic be
inaccessible but should
shuttle between
sense and nonsense
recalling Rancire
discussion of the
critical art of Heartfield
and Dan Graham. There
is a sense in which
Bishop proposes a kind
of neutralized Adorno /
Rancire hybrid in
an ironic echo of the
way Rancire identifies
Lyotard as a kind of
ethically neutralized
Adorno in Aesthetics
and its Discontents
(2009).

... the reign of ethics is not the reign of moral judgements over the
operation of art or of political action. On the contrary, it signifies the

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Kim Charnley

constitution of an indistinct sphere in which not only is the specificity of

political and artistic practice dissolved, but so also is that which formed
the very core of old morality: the distinction between fact and law,
between what is and what ought to be.
(Rancire 2009: 109)
It is immediately apparent in this definition that morality as moral evaluation is approved by Rancire because it allows for a clear assessment of
action in relation to an agreed upon common good, which throws the injustices of an existing social system in relief. This clearly shows that Rancire
uses the term ethics entirely differently to Bishop. For Rancire, ethics is a
type of consensus world view, one of the consequences of which is to disguise
the relation between politics and aesthetics so that transformative politics
becomes more difficult to conceive:
Ethics, then, is the kind of thinking in which an identity is established
between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action.
The contemporary ethical turn is the specific conjunction of these two
phenomena. On the one hand, the instance of judgement, which evaluates and decides, finds itself humbled by the compelling power of the law,
which leaves no alternative, equates to the simple constraint of an order
of things. The growing indistinction between fact and law gives way to an
unprecedented dramaturgy of infinite evil, justice and reparation.
(Rancire 2009: 110)
Apart from the fact that Bishop herself uses forms of ethico-political argument to support her attack on ethical evaluations of collaborative practice, her
reading of Rancire is misleading on this issue. According to Rancire there
is a close relationship between morality judgements about right and wrong
action and the political. Indeed, Rancire describes the political as the dividing of right, meaning that the dissensus of politics revolves around differing interpretations of a commonly understood good like freedom or equality.
This is obvious if one reflects even for a moment on any political struggle. The
problem with Bishops argument is that its defence of disruptive, or confrontational artwork veers into a defence of the unquestionable authority of the
artist in collaborative works, which becomes effectively a defence of inequality
concealed in an apparently critical position. This is particularly evident in an
interview given by Bishop in 2006, reflecting on the dispute with Kester:
For a while I have been tempted to write an article that pushes the ethical
question a bit further, from a Lacanian angle. It would argue that the best
socially collaborative art does not derive from a super-egoic injunction
to love thy neighbour, but from the position of do not give up on your
desire. In other words, pursue your unconscious desire, as far as you can.
The former (e.g. Grace in Dogville) involves a sacrificial stance: it is the
politically correct position of doing what seems right in the eyes of others.
The logic of the latter is about taking responsibility for your own desire,
rather than acting out of guilt (for example, about being an artist).
(Bishop 2006c online)
Contained in this rhetoric of desire and guilt it is possible to read a special
pleading for the inequality of access to power and prestige that is predestined

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Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice

between artist and their non-art-world collaborators. If an artist considers

social inequality a problem does this necessarily involve a sacrificial stance?
In that case, can we also say that none of us should consider social inequality
a problem, because this is merely a hypocritical expression of guilt? Clearly
this is a complacent chain of reasoning that mirrors the advocacy of unlimited desire that is one of the favourite themes of advertising. This argument
indexes social inequality to a discourse of desire and repression, implicitly
suggesting that those who achieve power have somehow achieved a superior level of self-realization, which they may deign to communicate to others
through collaborative art: a classic example of snake-oil logic naturalizing
social inequality.
Bishop, whilst attempting to use the term ethics to disconnect art
from questions about its socio-political reality, grounds her position an
ethico-political argument. In this way, her position is closer to Kesters advocacy of ethics than she realizes. The question becomes: can the ethical be
isolated from political art, or should it be? Or even more simply: what do we
mean by ethical? There is an important tradition in critical philosophy that
views morality as an insidious form of subordination to rationality. The origin
is of course Nietzsche, and a similar understanding can be traced through
Bataille, Deleuze and Foucault amongst many others. Undoubtedly morality
can take this form, though it is open to question whether it often does in our
cynically deregulated age, where repressive de-sublimation the requirement
to transgress is the vanguard of the commodity form. In any case, Bishops
argument fails to engage properly with the question of an ethical thinking
that is appropriate to a collaborative aesthetic of challenge, confrontation and
recalibration of the senses.
No doubt, this proposition is a complex and difficult one, though a starting point might be Simon Critchleys understanding of ethics as constituted
by an impossible demand. For Critchley, we are always faced with an ethical, political and socio-cultural manifold which militates against any simple
distinction between the apparently separate discourses of ethics and politics.
In this situation ethics without politics is empty and politics without ethics
is blind as . the world that we have in sight overwhelms us with the difficult plurality of its demands (Critchley 2007: 120). However, this affirmation
of the central importance of ethics cannot be reduced to some kind of inflexible regime of self-negation as Bishop implies. Rather the ethical emerges as a
dis-sensual, contradictory force, involving the subjective approval of a subjective demand a commitment in other words as well as the conscience as a
splitting at the heart of self around the unfulfillable nature of this demand.
Although this may appear, at first reading, a tortured schema, it leads, for
Critchley, to the risus purus, the pure laugh of the self, recognizing the absurdity of its limitation. In political terms this suggests the ethical as what Critchley
terms an anarchic meta-politics, one that always opposes a resolved constitution of the political, undermining it through humour and antagonism, in
order to point to the more fundamental ethical flux and mutual subjective
undoing of social existence.
It is not possible to fully unravel the suggestive possibilities for Critchleys
thought in relation to aesthetics in the space allowed here. What is important
is that these ideas indicate a way of conceiving of ethics that moves outside of
the narrow interpretation presented by Bishop. Critchley presents the ethical
as a destabilizing, rather than a regulative, power, and this surely is the way
that it must operate in collaborative artwork. As has already been observed,

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4. This suggestive phrase

is quoted by Bishop
from Saltzs A Short
History of Rikrit
Tirivanija. Saltz muses
upon this invisible
enzyme without
recognizing what it
clearly represents a
system of exclusion
that is enacted in
complex initiatory
knowledge, social cues,
aesthetic conventions
etc. thus underlining
the blinkered
perspective of some
art world insiders in
Bishops Antagonism
and Relational
Aesthetics, October,
110, p. 68.

politicized collaborative work falls into a space between the aesthetic and
the social where the fierce contradictions between these domains are aggravated. This makes it one of the most exciting spaces to occupy from the point
of view of political art. As Gail Day has recently observed, despite its widespread influence even Rancires theory ultimately fails to account for the
institutional reality of art as flipside of the implicit freedom of the aesthetic
experience. Collaborative artwork eludes Rancire to a great extent, and
presents an opportunity amongst all of its contradictions: that of interrogating and challenging the social constitution of art whilst demonstrating a
willingness to wager on the social excess of the heteronomous embrace
(Day 2009: 406).

THE ROLE OF DIALOGUE IN DIALOGIC ART

Bishop fails to make an argument to exclude reflection on the equality of
the relation between artist and participants in politicized collaborative works.
This is partly because these works fall into an aporetic space in Rancire
theoretical framework. In other words, they inhabit both contradictory poles
of arts political aspiration at the same time: to cross the boundary into the
social and to stand apart from it as a distinct critical space. Making this observation, does not, of course, invalidate these types of works, though it does
call into question whether they can ever be accounted for with a consistent
argument, when they are in a sense defined by the paradoxical form of their
political aspiration. However, it is not enough simply to critique Bishops
formulation of the collaborative art if we are to gain an understanding of the
paradoxical nature of the problem. Although Bishops reading of the ethical
is simplistic, this does not mean her critique of Kesters theoretical position
is inaccurate. It is still necessary to ask whether Kesters dialogic aesthetics
avoids advocating, as Bishop puts it, bland art. If the contradictions inherent in collaborative art are to open a space, then it is important to challenge
the reduction of this space to any simplistic principle. As has been demonstrated, it is impossible in practice to entirely separate the political and the
ethical. Nonetheless, it is important to ask whether Kesters understanding
of the ethical responsibility of the artist constrains or opens thinking about
collaborative art.
Grant Kesters Conversation Pieces (2004) is a distinctive account of
collaborative art because it addresses work that is more closely tied to grassroots community politics than, for example, Nicholas Bourriauds Relational
Aesthetics (2002). Bourriaud suggests that Relational Aesthetics (RA) is political,
but redefines politics around an exploration of models of sociability and
micro-utopia, within the experimental space that is implicitly provided by
the art institution. As Bishop indicates, for RA there can be no consideration
of the invisible enzyme4 that repels the non-art public (Bishop 2004: 68).
Conversation Pieces, by contrast, attempts to legitimize and explore work that
engages with the outside of art in an intelligible way. As part of this enquiry
Kester considers a range of different types of collaborative work, including the
new-genre public art projects of Suzanne Lacy, the social interventions of
the Austrian collective WochenKlausur, and Littoral art in the UK. Although
the works produced by these groups vary greatly, they have in common an
attempt to use conversation to imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities,
official discourse, and the perceived inevitability of partisan political conflict
(Kester 2004: 8). This use of conversation presumes equality of access for those

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Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice

participants who do not have the initiatory knowledge usually required to be

an art insider, and Kesters book is in a sense defined by its attempt to speak
within the discourse of art and point to its shortcomings at the same time.
On one level the book lays out a field of study, documenting a range of
artists who inherited the post-Greenbergian diaspora of practices and turned
the focus of these forms outwards: away from a critique of art towards an
engagement with communities and political activism. Equally, it involves a
rereading of theory associated with the avant-garde tradition, including the
work of Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried and Francois
Lyotard. Here Kester addresses what he sees as an art-world disdain for activist works, proposing that a prejudice against straightforward communication
is deeply ingrained in art criticism. Kester identifies in all of these theorists
a tendency to privilege what he calls semantic inaccessibility, based on
the assumption that conventional discursive communication is marked by a
fundamental deficit: by its complicity in power, the degeneration of meaning, or some similar formula. Kester suggests that this inheritance from the
avant-garde, whilst it has generated important works, has tended to slide into
elitist assumptions about the audience of art. Thus the avant-garde shock
to the sensibilities has become a means of holding at bay the political and
social world rather than an attempt to engage with it. This case is made with
particular reference to the discourse around Rachel Whitereads House (1993).
Kester draws attention to the framing of this work as a classic avant-garde
attempt to expose the limits of language, which nonetheless involved a good
deal of casual denigration of those not equipped with the language to understand it. With reference to the catalogue that accompanied the work, Kester
points to the easy way in which objections to this work were portrayed as a
philistine reaction (Kester 2004: 10).
There are some problems with this type of staging of a contrast between
inside and outside of art, as the art critic Miwon Kwon has effectively
demonstrated in relation to the furious public debate surrounding Richard
Serras Tilted Arc in New York in the 1980s (Kwon 2002). Kwon makes the
point that both right-wing reactionaries and activist art groups tended to
make a claim in the name of the people a mythologized authentic subject
in such a way that they ended up being strange bedfellows in their opposition
to Serras work. Kesters analysis of House works in a similar way, making
an objection to art discourse in the name of the victimized other: who are,
of course, excluded by this discourse. As Kwon concedes, it is certainly the
case that much public art has been developed without any kind of public
consultation (and the question of what counts as consultation continues to
be a compelling problem). However, Kester tends to drift from a valid point
about a tendency for art to define itself around tired avant-garde doxa, to
a crude association of avant-garde politics with elitist subjugation of the
public. Kester is not wrong when he emphasizes that the role of the artist in
socially engaged work is fraught with the risk of calling for democracy from
a structure of social relations that enacts inequality. It is important to make
the point that collaborative art projects can be: centred on an exchange
between an artist (who is viewed as creatively, intellectually, financially,
and institutionally empowered) and a given subject who is defined a priori
as in need of empowerment or access to creative / expressive skills (Kester
2004: 137). However, this pitfall cannot be generalized as a sign of arts basic
injustice as this ethical formulation of the problem inhibits enquiry into the
enigmatic quality of arts opposition to and complicity with power.

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The strength of Kesters work is to identify, in the supposedly radical challenge of the avant-garde, a potential prejudice against those who have not
assimilated its distinctive language: a language that falls into self-parody when
it claims to question the value of intelligibility whilst mocking those who find
this claim, itself, unintelligible. Attempts to resuscitate the discourse of avantgarde practice must remain watchful against this sleepwalking academicized
radicalism. In this sense, Kesters ethical challenge is destabilizing as it forces
a revaluation of the tenets of critical art. This challenge can be summarized in
a call for an art that substitutes listening for an addiction to statement. This
idea is highly suggestive, and potentially enriching to the range of practice
that now attempts to break the aporetic condition that has created the sense
that an avant-garde challenge is no longer tenable. As Gail Day observes, it is
notable that current politicized practices such as discussions in Chto Delat
by Dmitry Vilensky and Zanny Begg tend to focus on a challenge to the
institution of art in the name of a politics of the multitude, seeking a reconciliation of art with movements for social change (Day 2009: 403).
Unfortunately, Kesters argument does tend to drift into an equation
of challenging art with inward-looking elitist attempts to maintain cultural
authority. This is partly because Kester seeks to ally aesthetics to an idea of
dialogue that draws heavily on Habermass advocacy of discursive communication. Habermass attempt at conserving the enlightenment project depends
on the notion of a space where discursive communication can be employed:
where material and social differentials (of power, resources and authority) are
bracketed and speakers rely solely on the compelling force of superior argument (Kester 2004: 109). Kester attempts to argue that dialogic aesthetics
enact this type of space, and at this point stumbles into a glaring contradiction, for he has already acknowledged the sociological / institutional critique
of art that identifies it as a locus of privilege and authority. How then is it to
become simultaneously a space of dialogue where material and social differentials have no bearing?
The answer proposed by Kester is that the artist must effectively be on
guard against their own privilege in order to achieve the egalitarian relation appropriate to dialogical aesthetics. Implicitly, Kester constructs a type
of cautionary ethics whose role is to act as a check to the power of the artist.
Kester sees the social power commanded by the artist as a kind of original
sin, which dialogic art must guard against, embedded in the very language
and practice that the artist engages in. Effectively, the artist is required to
absolve this authority through a commitment to open dialogue. However, for
Kester, this means that the open-ness of dialogue is not open in as much as
it already plays an over-determined role in his argument: one of overcoming the imbalance of power between artist and collaborators. This means that
his depiction of dialogue always tends to emphasize understanding without
addressing a preceding conflict of perspectives especially those between the
artist and the participants in a given work. Any conflict in perspectives tends
to be subsumed in the question of inequalities of power and representation,
and therefore becomes implicitly a danger to be avoided. Or, conflict is represented as an agonistic stand-off where delegates and representatives [are]
charged with defending a priori positions (Kester 2004: 111). There seems to
be no space here to view conflict, as dissensus, as a necessary condition of
the political. Yet, as a number of theorists including Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto
Laclau and Jacques Rancire have indicated, antagonism or dissensus is the
very essence of the political, and of democracy.

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Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice

This suggests a strange sort of symmetry in the apparently opposed theoretical perspectives of Bishop and Kester. Bishop attempts to deny the claims
of ethics and in so doing slides into an unsavoury argument that naturalizes the economic power and social prestige associated with the arts. Kester
associates the autonomy of the artist with inequality and seeks to charge the
artist with absolving it by ethical reflection and consensual dialogue. Both
arguments are struggling with the contradiction that is created when arts
autonomous criticality is superimposed onto art as a socio-economic nexus
of power. The problem is that each of these positions results in a neutralization of the political, despite the intentions of the authors: Bishops because
she suggests that critical collaborative art must be blind to the social relations
that constitute it; and Kesters because it becomes a generalized ethical claim
on behalf of the other that art excludes. Each of these theorists attempts to
erase contradiction in order to maintain a consistent account of the political
and it is in the attempt to be consistent that the political is erased. In collaborative work the political presents itself as a savage and irresolvable dialectical
opposition.
This complicity between the positions presented by Bishop and Kester can
also be formulated in terms that focus on the socio-political reality of art. The
point to emphasize about Kesters attempt to make an ethically consistent
activist art is that art activism must always allow for the tactical employment
of the category art in order to achieve politico-aesthetic aims, or to make a
disruptive politico-aesthetic statement therefore activist art can never be entirely
ethically consistent in as much as it must play a double game by its very nature.
This is hardly a revelation; it is a self-evident condition of politically engaged
practice that is understood by all artists working in this area. For example, an
earlier inflection of this same problem can be seen in a statement from Group
Material made in a panel discussion at the Anti-Baudrillard show at White
Columns Gallery in 1987:
By showing certain levels of cultural production in a gallery you legitimize the sources of those productions. If you show images from
SWAPO you legitimize them as icons. People see the sources of those
things as valuable and they try to figure out why they are valuable.
Rich and powerful people who go to art shows are exposed to different
ideas, then support concrete political struggles. Artists Call against US
Intervention In Central America was basically a liberal project but
raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to be sent to Central America to
be used in less liberal ways.
(Group Material 1987)
Activist art, if it is to remain close to its political aims, requires at the very
least a double address: on the one hand there is the attempt to work towards
an egalitarian form of social relation, on the other the basic exclusivity of the
term art, when viewed in sociological terms. This exclusivity, to put it crudely,
attracts money and prestige, attracts participants and requires a particular type
of language. One might borrow a term from Bourdieu and suggest that art
is subject to a logic of distinction. Kester recognizes this he quotes from
Bourdieu in his book but transposes this structural reality of art into the ethical domain in order to expel it. This logic is inescapable in collaborative activist
art because it is integral to the role of the artist him/herself, as one set apart
from the nexus of social roles and practices with which he or she engages as

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Kim Charnley

an artist. There would be no activist art without the prestige that accrues to
art as an activity set aside from the mainstream of social existence an activity
that is not quite an accessible common ground, but requires various forms of
initiatory knowledge. To put it simply, activist art would not be able to open
a political space if it did not deploy itself as a sign of distinction. This must be
acknowledged as integral to the form of this practice, especially if engaged art
aspires to work with this contradiction to create a form that does not reproduce
inequality. It does not negate the political claim of art, but reveals its contradictory character. Successful engaged art works with this contradiction to achieve
a successful outcome: and many of the artworks addressed in Conversation
Pieces fall into this category. The problem comes with Kesters attempt to distil
from them a generalized ethical framework for dialogic practice.

DISSENSUS AND COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE

There is, as has been shown, a fundamental contradiction that exists in politicized collaborative art, where aesthetic autonomy and socio-political claims
are superimposed. The question remains how this contradiction can be understood as the starting point for the politics of these works, rather than as some
kind of negation of it. By attempting to expel this contradiction the work of
Bishop and Kester casts it as a closure, and ironically this closure determines
their theoretical position. Nonetheless, contradiction does have the potential
to act as the ground of experimentation and disciplinary openness. A thorough investigation of the implications of such a proposition would take more
space than remains here; however, a few thoughts can be outlined in relation
to the concept dissensus, which is again drawn from Rancire.
Dissensus plays so many different roles in Rancire account of the relation
between aesthetics and politics that it is not really possible to summarize the
scope of the concept briefly. In his writings on politics, dissensus is important
as the moment where consensus is challenged in order to dispute the inscription of several peoples in one in the aesthetic, legal and constitutional forms
of the state. For Rancire the political is the claim made by a group that is not
yet inscribed in this order to have itself recognized in the name of a right
that is yet to be inscribed in facts (Rancire 2009: 115). The dissensus exists
in the challenge to the closure of meanings associated with the forms of the
state, where an excluded group demands a re-distribution of the sensible
from which they have implicity been excluded. Dissensus is also the point of
contact between art and the political because both deal, on a fundamental
level, with the reordering of the distribution of the sensible: ... the rupture of
a certain agreement between thought and the sensible, already lies at the core
of aesthetic agreement and repose (Rancire 2009: 98). For Simon Critchley
dissensus also links politics to the ethical through action that opposes the false
clarity and simplicity of political discourse to the conflictual inter-subjective
space of ethical experience. Here, I am suggesting that dissensus is part of the
social reality of collaborative art. Where dissensus is not viewed as the vital
element of socially engaged art then even the most rigorous ethics or carefully
guarded autonomy becomes an extension of consensus. In the same way, any
attempt to create an argument that overcomes the grounding contradictions
of this area helps to polarize and neutralize the field. This is the case for both
Bishop and Kester: Bishop attempts to expel the ethical from consideration
of the aesthetic in works where any politics is intimately tied to questions
of morality; Kester tries to use ethical reflection and consensual dialogue to

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erase the disjuncture between the autonomous aesthetic field and the social.
Collaborative artwork is fascinating because it is a nexus of contradictory
claims where the political potential of art directly confronts its institutional
character. Work that explores and thrives on this dissensus neither needs to
abandon ethics, nor should it relinquish the tradition of avant-garde confrontation. A recalibration of the senses is impossible in an ethically neutral
space, just as dialogue is weak if it avoids conflict.
Rancire is wary of politicized collaborative art because it confuses the
boundary between art and the social. As he puts it: the more [art] goes
out into the streets and professes to be engaging in a form of social intervention, the more it anticipates and mimics its own effects. Art thus risks becoming a parody of its alleged efficacy (Rancire 2010: 148). There is something
disappointing about this avoidance of questions that are raised when art is
confronted by a limit, in the moment of attempting to transgress it. At this
moment the dissensus is a radical one, in as much as it is a disjuncture between
arts self-understanding and its social reality. It is interesting to relate it to the
strongest point of Kesters analysis, which is the observation that much challenging work is addicted to making statements, rather than attempting to
listen. Kester tends to take this notion of listening in the direction of consensual, reparative dialogue; however, it is perhaps useful to ask what this might
mean to a practice that views dissensus as central to its project.
A key tension in collaborative work exists between those who are inside
and outside of art discourse: in many respects it is the language of art and its
distinctive theoretical and historical resources that work to legitimize innovative practice and mark out those who are inside arts enchanted circle from
those who are outside of it. For it is apparent that any non-traditional art form
justifies its significance with reference to a welter of initiatory knowledge, an
expanse of text and an archive of historical precedent. On a basic level it is
this information that distinguishes the art insider from the non-art public,
acting as cultural capital at the same time as it has the potential to open up
different ways of thinking. It is only natural that art insiders prefer to dwell on
the latter of these two characteristics, but this tendency betrays the key political weakness of art and theory in political terms. It tends to congeal into an
inward-looking consensus, whilst at the same time claiming to represent the
vanguard coordinates of political experience.
There is always a temptation to extend this consensus: to educate participants in collaborative art to accept its fundamental claims. This is a necessary
part of collaborative practice, but it can easily override the critical perspective that is the greatest asset of the uninitiated. To listen then is to find a
way outside of this consensus, and to carry a suspicion and discontent within
it. One of the clearest articulations of this idea comes from Dave Beech and
John Roberts development of the concept the philistine. Although this
idea produced a good deal of controversy when it emerged in the 1990s, it
is worth revisiting here because of its attempt at a reflexive critique of the
claims of arts theoretical discourse. As Kester observes, there is a tendency
in art discourse to brand all objections to its practice as philistinism. Yet for
Beech and Roberts the philistine betrays the limit, and the weak point, of the
hegemony of art and theory. It is a concept that is constructed by its historical
moment, where:
the perverse, the primitive, the unschooled, the dumbed down
and so forth, are not themselves philistine; rather, they appear to

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Kim Charnley

be philistine or related to philistinism only when they come into

contact with the issues of cultural division which confer on the term its
controversy.
(Beech and Roberts 2002: 273)
A collaborative art of dissensus requires that art is willing to use an engagement with its outside to challenge itself, rather than to reproduce the hegemonic terms of its failed totality. A text piece by the art collective Freee, part
of the exhibition How to Make a Difference, aptly summarizes this need for
collaborative art to explore its own negation in order to seek a dissensual politics: The function of public art for the gallery is to preserve the distinction
between art and the rest of culture by establishing a legitimate form of exception on arts own terms (Freee, Vinyl text, 6m 3m, 2007).
This is the flaw that all politicized collaborative art carries within it. It
is one that cannot be expelled, although it does force us as practitioners to
subject our claims to scrutiny. And although it seems contradictory it may be
that dissensus is best served by listening, as long as listening does not always
mean agreement. It is also the type of contradiction that inspires laughter
Critchleys risus purus or even something a little less Latinized as a necessary
part of its politics.

REFERENCES
Beech, D. and Roberts, J. (2002), The Philistine Controversy, London and New
York: Verso.
Bishop, C. (2004), Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, October,
110: Fall, http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/claire%20bishopantagonism&relational%20aesthetics.pdf. Accessed December 2009.
Bishop, C. (2006a), The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,
Artforum, February.
Bishop, C. (2006b), Claire Bishop Responds, Artforum, May.
Bishop, C. (2006c), Socially Engaged art, Critics and its Discontents,
Interview with Jennifer Roche, http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage.php. (accessed 10.06.10).
Bourriaud, N. (2002), Relational Aesthetics, Paris: Les presses du Reel.
Critchley, S. (2007), Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of
Resistance, London and New York: Verso.
Day, G. (2009), The Fear of Heteronomy, Third Text, 23: 4, pp. 393406.
Foster, H. (2003), Arty Party, London Review of Books, 25: 23, pp. 2122.
Group Material (1987), Panel discussion transcript Anti-Baudrillard Show,
White Columns, New York: copy in possession of the author available
on request.
Kenning, D. (2009), Art Relations and the Presence of Absence, Third Text,
23: 4, pp. 435446.
Kester, G. (2004), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern
Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Kester, G. (2006), Another Turn, Artforum, May.
Kwon, M. (2002), One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational
Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press.
Rancire, J. (2009), Aesthetics and its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity.
Rancire, J. (2010), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, London and New
York: Continuum.

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Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice

SUGGESTED CITATION
Charnley, K. (2011), Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice, Art
& the Public Sphere 1: 1, pp. 3753, doi: 10.1386/aps.1.1.37_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Kim Charnley is a Ph.D. researcher studying the role of theory in politicized art practice. After graduating in fine art he worked for eight years in
an art education project based in Portland Square, Bristol. He now teaches at
Plymouth College of Art.
Contact: 76, Frogmore Avenue Plymouth PL6 5RT.
E-mail: k_charnley@hotmail.com

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