Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Contemporary Art,” Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University (2005)
He speaks. the lake in front becomes a lawn. Woods vanish, hills subside,
and valleys rise...
In Cowper’s poem The Garden he writes with ironic reverence of Lancelot Brown,
perhaps the most famous landscape designer of his day. Brown, who was nicknamed
“Capability” for his skill in identifying the potential for “improvement” in even the least
design during the Georgian era. The natural garden style was developed in opposition
and was intended to evoke an uncultivated Arcadian wilderness. Of course the labor
necessary to make nature appear “natural” was herculean; Brown’s gardens involved
massive earth-moving projects, the planting and transplanting of vast numbers of trees,
and the creation of lakes and ponds. This is one of the central paradoxes of the
necessary to engage in the most exhaustive manipulation of nature. In many cases the
desire for a wholly natural scene (one that would exclude all evidence of human culture
other than that symbolic of leisure and contemplation) required the destruction and
relocation of entire villages and towns that had the misfortune of being in the line of
It is this power to literally reorder nature in conformity with human ends that led
gardener, and the proprietary relationship to the land characteristic of Brown’s clients,
whose wealth was based on the hereditary control of vast agricultural estates. In her
memoirs Hannah More describes a visit to Hampton in 1782 in which she received a
"very agreeable" tour of the gardens from Brown: “He told me he compared his art to
literary composition. Now there, said he, pointing his finger, I make a comma, and there,
pointing to another spot where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another
part (where an interruption is desirable to break the view) a parenthesis, now a full stop,
and then I begin another subject.”3 More’s account reiterates this correlation between
the power of artistic expression and the physical mastery of the land. “He speaks,” as
Cowper writes, “and valleys rise”. The garden is literally a text, to be conjured forth from
We often associate the figure of the artist with a heightened sensitivity to the
natural world, but intimacy does not always imply care, and the artist’s brush can as
easily resemble a dissecting scalpel as it can a lover’s caress. The act of speech, of
expression, is driven by the imperative to assert the prerogatives of self over a resistant
substance. It exists within an extractive economy which all too often views the natural
world as a resource rather than an interlocutor. I’ll return to the question of speech
2
below. For now I simply want to note the not-so-secret alliance between the personality
of the artist within modernism and the mode of subjectivity that C.B. Macpherson
associated with the rise of a mercantile bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, but it’s
origins, I would argue, lie further back, in the quasi-capitalist gentry of the early modern
era for which the possession of property was a defining act, the very crucible of its
social and political identity.5 While the modern avant-garde has consistently defined
itself in opposition to the bourgeoisie culturally, the process by which it constitutes itself
or history, guilt or obligation, the transformative, “all that is solid melts into air” energies
of the rising capitalist class, are mirrored by the modern artist, eager to obliterate
existing tradition and precedent, and to bend the material of art to his own ends.
One of the central myths of this promethean subjectivity is it’s absolute autonomy
(from the limits of past art and from the demands of conventional modes of social and
political identification) coupled with an equally strenuous rejection of the pragmatic and
utilitarian. The moment that the artist begins to produce his work “for” any interest,
agenda, or cause, other than his own, singular vision, he sacrifices the purity that
sustains and defines that work as art in the first place. This detachment is necessary
because art is in constant danger of being subsumed to the condition of mass culture,
entertainment, or propaganda and can preserve it’s distance from these beguiling
cultural forms only through a principle of opposition. If mass culture is simplistic and
3
superficial, the domain of Fox News and Paris Hilton, then art must be demanding and
these terms: “I’m a sculptor… I’m not for hire to go patch up mining sites. The strip-mine
This is strictly art… Look, I’m not out to entertain. So much damn art is about that!” 6 For
Heizer the land is a material to be used and arranged, albeit on a collossal scale. Earth
of a given color and consistency, rock of a given weight and density, are deployed in
sculptural compositions that reference history at only the most generic and quasi-
archaeological level. The actual social and economic context in which land is used, it’s
relative sickness or health, it’s relationship to human habitation here and now, are not
properly aesthetic concerns. Acknowledging these factors would only entangle Heizer in
a compromising set of obligations and constrain the free play of his creative vision.
For Heizer, as for many proponents of the avant-garde tradition, the work of art
is, and must be, the product of the artist’s unfettered, expressive self. It is this very claim
to individual autonomy that gives the work it’s ethical valence in a culture dominated by
the autonomy of the art object itself. The implacable materal otherness of the object
because “we” (viewers, if not artists) can’t be trusted to disavow our instrumentalizing
relationship to difference here and now. The interaction between viewer and work of art
thus functions as a kind of training exercise, teaching them to adopt a greater sensitivity
4
towards alterity in their subsequent social interactions. It is a pharmakon, in Derrida’s
gloss on Plato, both poison and remedy; subjecting the viewer to a violent shock or
dislocation which nonetheless has the effect of chastening their predisposition towards
violence and objectification in the future.7 For Adorno the physicality of the object was
seen to embody the very separateness of the aesthetic itself, as if its autonomy could
be maintained only so long as it was safely locked within the physical container of the
art work. Already in this formulation a series of elisions have occurred. The ability of art
autochthonically, from the singular personality of the artist, in the form of a physical
art, we find artists working in alliance with specific communities in political struggles
involving environmental policy, urban planning, and cultural perceptions of the natural
participatory interaction. In several cases (Park Fiction’s work in Hamburg, for example,
or Suzanne Lacy and Susan Steinman’s Elkhorn City project) the work of art only
comes into existence through a process of consultation and reciprocal exchange (both
verbal and non-verbal) with collaborators. While the exhibition features numerous
physical objects (ranging from sand paintings to water pumps to portable oxygen bars)
5
they are not intended to prepare us for some future moment of intersubjective
exchange, but rather, to catalyze social interaction here and now. The audience’s
From the gardens of Georgian England to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, our
concern for nature has always depended on our ability to extract value from it, whether
this value is aesthetic, spiritual or crassly materialistic. Can art reveal to us another way
to relate to the natural world, not as a resource for self-expression or a malleable clay to
seek to answer these questions. They draw on a tradition of innovative art practice that
originated in the Conceptualist and Earth Art milieu of the 1960s and ‘70s. While some
artists of this generation simply viewed the land as a larger canvas, of interest primarily
for it’s cultural and historical associations or for the formal properties of scale and
material opened up by the natural environment, others began to approach the natural
world as a complex gestalt of biological, political, economic and cultural forces. Hans
Haacke’s Rhine Water Purification Plant of 1972 created a literal linkage between the
space of the museum and the surrounding environment, using a system of pools and
filtration units in the gallery to reveal and then cleanse the pollutants in the nearby
Rhine river. Helen and Newton Harrison’s projects during the 1970s, such as the
Survival Series and the Lagoon works, developed innovative proposals for ecosystem
6
restoration through a process of conversational exchange and mapmaking. Over the
past two decades younger practitioners, working both nationally and internationally,
have begun to build on this legacy. Collectives such as Ala Plastica, Huit Facettes,
PLATFORM, Littoral Arts, Superflex, Urban Ecology Action Group, and Park Fiction
among many others, have developed projects ranging from portable biogas generators
designed for rural African villages to proposals to uncover long-hidden rivers in the
center of London.
public contexts, ranging from rural villages to city parks. Their gallery installations exist
rather than a simple documentary record. In addition to the video projections and
monitors included in several of the second and third floor gallery installations, the
exhibition features a specially curated media component in the first floor gallery, with
video, software and internet-based works selected by Patrick Deegan. The projects
coalitions of artists, community members, activists, policy makers, and others for
extended collaborative encounters that cross the boundary between art and activism,
aesthetics and politics, and the museum and the town hall. Groundwork’s artists are
united by the desire to maintain a productive and unresolved tension between these
discursive and institutional sites. For this reason we’ve invited a diverse mix of writers
and thinkers to contribute essays to this catalog, including philosopher Andrew Light,
7
who writes on issues of political ecology and water supply, social historian Maurine
contemporary urbanism and social change. Our intention is to situate these practices
In the following discussion I will return to the questions of agency and modernity
collaborative art practice. This endeavor poses certain challenges, as existing art theory
is oriented primarily towards the analysis of individual objects and images understood
as the product of a single creative intelligence. This approach privileges what I’ve
event produced by the artist beforehand and subsequently presented to the viewer.8 In
this paradigm the artist never relinquishes a position of semantic mastery, and the
viewer’s potential response to the work (clinical detachment, shock, awe, etc.), they can
exercise no real or substantive effect on the form and structure of the work, which
remains the singular expression of the artist’s authoring conscious. This paradigm is
entirely appropriate for most image- and object-based work, but it has little to offer in
collective interaction itself. Like most paradigms, it can be both empowering and
us from grasping what is genuinely different, and potentially productive in this work.
8
An anecdote may help to illustrate this problem. I recently had the opportunity to
Zurich pleasure boats, she argued that the presence of a dock-side audience, which
could actually witness the departing boats, would be sufficient to elevate these
performances to the status of “art”. This observation suggests the extent to which a
the only possible framework for an aesthetic encounter. For me the power of
Wochenklausur’s work clearly lay in the logic of enactment rather than representation
per se; in the complex exchanges that occurred on the boat, rather than in the image of
the boat. Yet the idea that these exchanges could be aesthetic, or bear in anyway on an
many of the Groundworks projects, which challenge (without entirely suspending) the
division between viewer, artist, and work of art. A more nuanced understanding of this
work requires a kind of Kuhn-ian “paradigm shift” in the language of art theory; a way of
literally seeing the work of art and it’s relationship to the viewer differently. As I will
9
some ways quite different from the labor demanded by the conventional work of art (that
is, the labor necessary for the viewer to come to terms with an image that resists their
initial attempt at conceptual mastery; the “semantic” labor set in motion by this
resistance and the viewer’s corresponding desire to interpret or understand the work of
art).
There are few resources available within conventional art and aesthetic theory to
verbal and non-verbal encounters that are so central to the projects in Groundworks, not
just among the members of specific groups, but between and among these artists and
the broader network of participants catalyzed by a given project. There is, as yet, no
theoretical language to describe this intensely somatic form of knowledge: the exchange
of gesture and expression, the complex relationship to habitus and habit, and the way in
which conflict, reconciliation and solidarity are registered on the body. This “labor” is not
productive in the traditional sense associated with the emergence of private property; it
does not seek to extract value from a recalcitrant nature. Rather, its productivity lies in
the transformative effect of labor on the identity of those who share it. As I will outline
below, labor, duration and process are anathema to dominant paradigms in recent art
theory and criticism, which instead prize the instantaneous, the sublime and the “un-
worked”. Art must be precisely the inverse of labor (understood as coerced, externally-
imposed and temporally extensive) to play its assigned cultural role. I will begin, then,
with the question of labor, tracing certain problematics around labor and agency that
10
originate with the dawn of modernity, and which continue to inform, if only at the
11
1. Property and Identity
Labor, in the early modern period, must be understood as a predicative term, emerging
in conjunction with its counterpart: property. It was the mobility of property, the novel
idea of possession as a right that could be earned, and lost, that set the modern period
As late as the fourteenth or fifteenth century there was no such thing as land in the
sense of freely salable, rent-producing property. There were lands, of course—
estates, manors, and principalities—but these were emphatically not real estate to
be bought and sold as the occasion warranted. . . A medieval nobleman in good
standing would no more have thought of selling his land than the governor of
Connecticut would think of selling a few counties to the governor of Rhode Island.10
The movement of landed property was, of course, always virtual, a transfer of rights, but
it had a profound significance. This “great transformation” was not simply economic, it
was experienced on the ontic level; literally changing the way in which political
subjecivity was constructed and legitimated in the early modern era.11 One’s social
status, for so long determined by birth and blood, could be radically transformed by the
externalization of self in the act of rendering nature productive. This new model of
identity arises in the context of a changing political scene in Europe, associated with the
powerful, but un-titled, landowners during the 1600s and early 1700s. One of the
12
principle targets of this nascent class was the concept of divine right. The king must be
obeyed because, within the great chain of being, he is located in closest proximity to
God. Further, man must accept his natural subordination within the hierarchy of religious
and secular power. It was this system of aristocratic privilege that limited the political
voice of England’s propertied classes and which was used to justify monarchical fiat
We encounter the first discursive challenge to this system in the early texts of the
natural law tradition, which sought to construct new forms of political legitimation in the
face of the gradual desacralization of authority in modern Europe. What would replace
the tattered "canopies" of god and king? The answer, as I have already begun to
physical possession of property. On a more strategic level, the natural law tradition
sought to endow the contingent political claims of the nascent bourgeois with the
immemorial” on which the defense of monarchical power was based. The natural law
human society (if not in the constitution of the human personality itself), which could be
used to ground and legitimate the new political claims of the third estate. For the Dutch
jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and the theorist and professor Samuel Freiherr von
Pufendorf (1632-1694), two leading exponents of the natural law tradition, the “state of
13
nature” was a communal affair in which God gave all men in common the resources of
the earth. As Grotius wrote in De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres (1625):
Soon after the creation of the world, and a second time after the Flood, God
conferred upon the human race, a general right over things of a lower nature. . . In
consequence, each man could at once take whatever he wished for his own needs,
and could consume whatever was capable of being consumed.12
In this “original community of the land” (Communio Fundi Originari) everyone is free to
take what he or she needs from the common land in order to survive. Eventually this
possession (earned by labor, not endowed by God). The transition from common
access to private property was crucial for seventeenth and eighteenth century liberal
about the enclosure of the commons and the relative moral and political authority of the
landowning classes. If all men are created equal then how do we account for the
systematic inequalities that exist between landowners on their vast estates, and the
rural working class? Grotius and Pfufendorf, along with Locke and Kant present differing
accounts of this transition, but all involve the emegence of some form of proto-
same time providing the operational foundation for modern systems of representative
Property, and most importantly the act of possession, emerge in the philosophy
merely the possession of property, but more specifically, the faculty of possession, as it
14
is exercised or performed by the subject. This performative aspect is particularly
important. One becomes a subject through the act of possessing things as property.
This socially and historically contingent act is at the same time founded in an inherent
capacity of the human subject; it brings this subject into harmony with universal moral
laws and rights. However, the privileging of property as a precondition for public agency
introduces a central tension into liberal discourse. On the one hand the concept of the
public challenges the stasis of social roles prescribed by divine right. The public isn’t a
fixed entity, but rather, a process or mode of interaction that is available to all. But this
openness can be sustained only so long as it is never fully tested: so long as the public
sphere is limited to like-minded members of the same, property-owning class (and not
the more numerous “lower orders” clamoring for their own political recognition). The
“public” thus retains a metaphysical dimension. On the one hand it refers to a physically
proximate, empirically verifiable process of social exchange and deliberation, and on the
other it is an as-yet unrealized ideal, limited for now to a select few (propertied men).
Property introduces a second point of tension as well. The public actor enters into
represented by other actors, and with an implicit willingness to revise his or her own
beliefs in response to these others and on behalf of a collective good. But the
Within the pedagogy of capital, as outlined by thinkers such as Adam Smith, the sole
priority is to enrich and aggrandize oneself, often at the expense of others. The
boundaries between the motivations of the “private” self of the market, and the “public”
15
self of civil society are notoriously difficult to maintain.
Labor and property are linked by the power attributed to labor in transforming
both nature, and, crucially, the laboring subject. This is articulated through the natural
law concept of the extension of personality. Grotius and Pufendorf predicate their
account of property on the division between the "I," or what philosopher Karl Olivecrona
labels the "spiritual ego," and the body. The "I" is the foundational site of identity and
possession; the "I" is understood to "possess" the body, and the actions of the body.
Taken together the body and its actions constitute the individual's suum, "that which
belongs" to the individual. Thus, according to Grotius, "life, body, limbs, reputation,
honor, and our own actions (actiones propriae) belong to ourselves . . .”13 The suum is
the basis for a moral faculty (facultas moralis) that provides a kind of protection for the
possessing subject. Of particular importance is the fact that Grotius and Pufendorf
argue that the sphere of the suum can be extended to encompass things "outside" the
subject's body. This "extension of personality" is such that one can acquire a moral
warrant for these things (land, goods, and so on) and incorporate them into the suum.
Once these things are assimilated into the personality any attempt to remove or
damage them constitutes an injury that is morally commensurate to physical harm to the
body. 14
We should think of the suum not simply in terms of a spatial metaphor (the suum
as the "sphere" of the subject), but also as a faculty or power to assimilate and extend
this sphere on the basis of a moral justification. In On the Law of Nature and of Nations
(1672) Pufendorf notes that "ownership" doesn't function by "physically and intrinsically
16
affect[ing] things themselves." Rather, it produces what he describes as a "moral effect
in relation to other men. . ." 15 Locke also establishes his defense of property through
labor of the subject's body (supervised by the mind) "mixes" the subject's personality
with nature (via extraction or cultivation). Through this mixing one infuses objects with
one's personality and is thereby entitled to remove them from the commons and claim
them as one's sole property. As Locke writes, "Whatsoever then he removes out of the
state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it
something that is his own and thereby makes it his property." 16 Notably, Locke’s model
concept of “mixing,” via the cognitive labor necessary to combine simple concepts into
speculative thought.
The postulates of the natural law tradition gradually coalesce into more coherent
form in early liberal political philosophy, which will contend that a social order based on
the primacy of property and individual possession (as a system for allocating wealth and
opportunity) is intrinsically egalitarian and will naturally prevent the systematic inequality
not, however, without it’s own internal contradictions. The only way you can achive
serves as the vehicle through which you actualize, experience, and express that
subjectivity. Within the larger economy (of identity-as-capital), there must always be
17
something that you own or possess—a constant supply of material to be controlled or
appropriated.17 The actual form taken by the property is less important than the kind of
relationship that it sets in place between you and the world around you. It is an active,
acquisitive, transformative relationship in which the world exists as the vehicle for your
property, in which his will is coextensive with the labor or property of his horse or
servant—all are simply vehicles for his own achievement of subject status:
Thus the Grass my horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I
have digg'd in any place where I have a right to them in common with others,
become my Property, without the assignation or consent of any body. The labor
that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed
my Property in them . . .18
The bourgeois subject is not autonomous, but intrinsically dependent (on the labor of
others and on a continuing supply of materials, frontiers, and opportunities for ontic
investment) for it’s self–constitution.19 Of particular importance here is the slippage that
is introduced among its various "possessions". Locke’s servant or his horse are merely
extensions of his will, yet in the very act of externalizing and extending that will it
becomes displaced, introducing a potential confusion between the body and objects,
and between the subject and the things that the subject can claim to possess. Further,
the relative privilege, the ontic spaciousness, of the bourgeois subject, far from being
“earned” through a fair and equal competition, the outcome of which offers a meaningful
indication of the relative fortitude of their conative drive, is, in fact, always/already
biased by pre-existing distortions in the field of social and economic opportunity (in
Locke’s time, the fact that the common land on which a subject might actualize his will,
18
and achieve political sovereignty, was being enclosed or privatized by the already
Labor is, on the one hand, proof of the superiority of the bourgeoisie to the
parasitic and effete aristocracy, and on the other, a reminder of the contingency of its
hard-won status. The myth of its absolute autonomy can only be sustained by an active
suppression or denial of this underlying dependence on the labor of the Other. In the
social sphere this suppression is produced through an ethical discourse that identifies
the non-propertied (the poor or working class) as failed subjects, whose powers of
conservative political discourse that views the poor as lazy, morally depraved, etc.). This
ethical discourse is combined with an aesthetic discourse that operates through the
strategic visual suppression of labor, and of the social costs of bourgeois privilege. In
order to observe the early articulation of these spatial and visual regimes we must
the apex of British culture and was a privileged subject of philosophical speculation.20
Pope, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and many other Enlightenment philosophers,
manufacturers. Land ownership, which had for so long been the prerogative of the
19
aristocracy, was increasingly available to the rising bourgeoisie. Thus, the English
"men of fortune" who began to acquire large country estates as the natural
accompaniment of their wealth, often through acts of enclosure.21 The natural English
style that was favored at this time was characterized by unimpeded vistas, flowing,
closely mown expanses of lawn, the "natural" placement of shrubs and groves of trees,
In addition to these visual components, one of the most essential elements of the
natural style garden was something you didn’t see: workers. In a rural economy
dependent on massive armies of seasonal laborers, the landscape garden was an oasis
elements in the landscape (for example, the farms and cottages of the rural laborer, or
cultivated fields) that offer any evidence that the land itself might be economically
productive. The boundaries between the garden and the “working farm” must be
absolute. This dynamic is apparent in the writings of Humphrey Repton, one of the
leading garden designers of the late eighteenth-century. Consider his comparison of the
"park," which is characterized by "undulating lines contrasting with each other in variety
of forms; trees so grouped as to produce light and shade to display the varied surface of
the ground; and an undivided range of pasture" with the utilitarian "farm":
The farm is forever changing the color of its surface in motley and discordant
hues; it is subdivided by straight lines of fences. The trees can only be ranged in
formal rows along the hedges; and these the farmer claims a right to cut, prune,
and disfigure. Instead of cattle enlivening the scene by their peaceful attitudes, or
sportive gambols, animals are bending beneath the yoke, or closely confined to
20
fatten within narrow enclosures, objects of profit, not of beauty. 23
Repton goes on to warn of the danger, due to the "prevailing rage for agriculture," of
trying to "blend" or "unite" the farm and the park. What disturbs Repton is not that these
two types or uses of land should co-exist, but rather that landowners should carelessly
It is the union, not the existence, of beauty and profit, of laborious exertion and
pleasurable recreation, against which I would interpose the influence of my art;
nor let the fastidious objector condemn the effort, till he can convince the
judgment that, without violation of good taste, he could introduce the dairy and
the pig-sty (those useful appendages of rural economy) into the recesses of the
drawing-room, or the area of the salon.24
The formal principles of "nature" itself (irregularity, lack of cultivation), having been
expunged from the countryside, were now internalized as aesthetic components of the
estate. One finds condensed here, in displaced form, the central tension between the
imperatives of the market, that will define the modernist tradition. The eighteenth
century landscape garden reveals the complex relationship that exists between the
determined ownership of property and the ways in which each of these is in turn related
to models of subjectivity.
The aesthetic principles that are elaborated in the landscape garden can also be
viewed in relationship to the suum and the extension of personality in natural law. They
provide a set of tools for regulating the landowner's experience of property, and of
themselves as possessive subjects. The garden performs the complex task of insulating
21
the bourgeois subject from the "actual" rural environment (i.e., the sight of cultivated
fields, laborers, etc.), while at the same time producing a mythologized recreation of that
environment. Here we have two key episodes in the construction of a bourgeois social
epistemology: first, the process of masking or suppressing the "difference" of the rural
economy, and second, the process of transforming the surrounding environment into a
kind of reflective scrim that mirrors back to the bourgeois subject its own idealized self-
image.
The identity of the bourgeois subject is produced, or performed, through the act
thing which must provide sufficient resistance to man's will to mark the boundaries of his
identity, while at the same time not offering so much resistance that this identity is
threatened. The freedom of his view expresses the extent of his domain and of his
objects that resist man's will. The landscape garden provides the spectacle of a nature-
like land, un-marked by the signs of possession. A kind of capitalist primal scene, it
promises both the plenitude and the universality of the original common land, open and
available and not yet subject to the regime of cultivation. It is land that is suspended
between nature and culture, awaiting only the transformative ritual of ownership. The
The natural garden aesthetic provided a screen memory against the actual
violence of enclosure and coerced human labor on which landed wealth depended,
22
evoking instead a halcyon illusion of bourgeois power arising organically and
autonomously from the surrounding countryside. The spatial tactics of the landscape
devoted to regulating visual evidence of the poverty, inequality and human sufferring
precipitated by the rise of industrial capitalism. They are most evident in systems of
. . . the finest part of this arrangement [the spatial organization of housing and
businesses in the city] is this, that the members of the money aristocracy can take the
shortest road through the middle of all the laboring districts to their places of business,
without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right
and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of
the city are lined. . . with an almost unbroken series of shops. . . [that] suffice to
conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak
nerves the misery and grime that form the complement of their wealth.25
In her essay for this catalog Maria Kaika describes the logic of this visual suppression
through the imperative to expel a “bad” nature from the nineteenth-century industrial
metropolis through modern sewer systems and the paving over of urban rivers.
and dissimulation, constitute a central motif in modern art and art theory, which will be
defined in large measure by it’s ongoing fear of the seductive, manipulative powers of
kitsch and mass culture and the cooptive abilities of the bourgeoisie. It is symptomatic,
then, that a characteristic response of the early avant-garde to this cooptive threat was
to confront bourgeois viewers with evidence of the human labor and misery that
23
Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, the Barbizon school, etc.). This underlying
suspicion of the aesthetic continues to the present day, in fretful speculations over the
dangerous ability of visual and somatic experience to trivialize or suppress the actuality
of violence. Martin Jay reiterates this position in his essay “Drifting into Dangerous
“human suffering will become an occasion for aesthetic delectation.” Although the
causal link is not entirely clear, Jay appears to blame modern art for this dire situation
due to it’s “indiscriminate leveling of the distinction between artwork and lifeworld
through the projection of the qualities of the former onto the latter”. “When the frame is
reality becomes fair game for aestheticization.”26 The “frame,” the clear division between
art and daily life, should be rigorously policed. For Jay, the risk of “pig styes in the
drawing room,” to use Repton’s evocative phrase, is simply too great. Far from
challenging the separation between art and quotidian social structures artists must
maintain it, addressing themselves to the viewer only obliquely, through the surrogate of
the artwork safely confined within the sanctuary of the museum or the gallery.
24
2. Aesthetics, Labor and Collectivity
To deconstruct, certainly, but that already represents a luxury for whoever has not
built a world.
Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community (1999)27
As Jay’s commentary suggests, art strikes a Faustian bargain with the forces of
the catalyst for a new function: embodying a distanced, critical perspective on normative
social and cultural values (typically, through reflection on representational norms). The
work of art in the avant-garde tradition will shock the viewer out of their mythic self-
enclosure, forcing them to acknowledge the social costs of their own privilege and to
the introduction, the relationship of the artist to the viewer implied by this tradition is
contemporary art, and has become so routinized, that it’s hard to imagine an alternative.
remediation and correction by the work of art (in this, the avant-garde tradition owes
more to the traditions of Christianity, and concepts of repentence and original sin, than
one might expect). This skepticism also links the modern avant-garde to the proponents
of natural law, and the broader philosophical history of liberalism, for which self-interest
25
is the founding condition of human subjectivity. For Grotius there is no inherent human
only forced upon us by the finitude of natural resources (or, for Hobbes, by the
division. Hume will subsequently argue that self-interested desire is the primary
mechanism of human conduct, laying the groundwork for the ontological paradigm that
For both avant-garde discourse and bourgeois liberalism the conative drive is
force. From Pere Ubu to Karen Finley the avant-garde has often defined itself in
caricature that embodies all the most reviled characteristics of the boorish middle class:
it’s heedless narcissicism, it’s reactionary fear of difference, and its destructive
compulsion to extract profit from even the most anodyne of sites. By the 1980s, under
the influence of continental philosophy and it’s critique of the Enlightenment, this figure
gained a new theoretical pedigree and was re-born as the “Cartesian” subject. A more
Cartesian subject was seen to reside not simply in it’s class origins, but in it’s very ontic
condition: centered, autonomous and self-identical. The necessary antidote to this mode
of subjectivity was a shattering “ontological dislocation” (cf., Lyotard); exposing the false
26
cherished self-hood is actually relational, decentered and contingent. Eve Kosofsky
analysis of the “paranoid consensus” that has come to dominate contemporary critical
historical identification of critical theory with the act of revealing the (structural)
determinants that pattern our perception of reality, the paranoid approach obsessively
view, attributes an almost mystical agency to the act of revelation in and of itself. As she
writes:
secret, awaiting only the epistemological dynamite of the avant-garde artist or critical
theorist to break it free and catalyze a new era of peace and harmony. In fact,
already relational, contextual, and performative. The decisive shift within modernity is
produced or invented through labor. Thus, the arid procedural mechanisms of natural
27
law carry a radical implication. Bourgeois identity is marked by a colonizing expansion
of self, yes, but also an opening out of self to otherness. Identity is mutable in this
formulation, not fixed or given. It has no intrinsic substance, only a potential or capacity,
waiting to be actualized by the subject through their interaction with the material and
social world. While bourgeois ideology attempts to cover over this contingency, to “re-
transcendentalize” it via the ethical and aesthetic procedures I’ve described, it remains
central to the history of liberal thought. In fact, the very deliberateness of these
strategies, their visibility as “strategies” in the first place, suggests the operation of a
kind of “cynical reason” in which the bourgeois viewer, while conscious of this
aesthetic experience and new frameworks for thinking identity through the thickly
textured haptic and verbal exchanges that occur in the process of collaborative
interaction. They call upon us, in turn, to reconsider the formation of modern subjectivity.
In this endeavor it’s necessary to uncouple the process by which identity is constituted
28
essentialism. Thus, Nancy’s “inoperative” community is a “workless and inoperative
“Community is given to us—or we are given and abandoned to the community; a gift to
exchange, Nancy reduces all human labor (“work,” “making,” “production,”) to a simple
shock or disruption, etc.), and a failure to conceive of the knowledge produced through
politically abject. For Nancy, like Repton, there can be no evidence of labor in the
experience that offers a therapeutic antidote to the instrumentality of work. Repton and
Nancy (or the traditions they represent) are linked by this key elision; labor can only
diachronic processes of human speech (he famously considered speech acts or parole
an unsuitable object of “scientific” inquiry). Derrida extends this schism in his Manichean
opposition between the “phonocentrism” of speech (the realm of authorial presence and
Platonic truth) and the ludic domain of ecriture. Only the written text is open to the
29
liberatory play of meaning, while speaking and listening, and by implication, the haptic
texture of human social exchange, is consigned to the realm of logocentric fixity. As this
the US academy and art world, it has tended to block a deeper engagement with the
I would suggest that the challenge posed by modern identity lies not with our
illusory independence per se, but with our relationship to our own intrinsically dependent
nature. The decisive point is not to simply acknowledge the “truth” of our de-centered
selves in some single, epiphanic moment engineered by the artist, but rather, to develop
the skills necessary to mitigate violence and objectification in our ongoing encounters
with difference. This form of ethical and aesthetic insight can’t be generated through the
surrogate of an art object or through an ontological dislocation that simply reflects the
durationally extended process of exchange on both the discursive and the haptic level
(literally, a “co-labor”). The effect of collaborative art practice is to frame this exchange
pragmatic contexts, but is ceremonially marked off as “art”. In fact, it is precisely the lack
of categorical fixity around art that makes this open-ness possible. This approach
30
consultative planning project in Styria is presented in Groundworks. For Wochenklausur,
the distancing from the protocols and assumptions of normative social exchange (the
classroom, the town council, the boardroom, the church, etc.) created by aesthetic
framing reduces our dependence on the default behaviors, expectations and modes of
address that are typically triggered by these sites, encouraging a more performative and
experimental attitude towards the work of identity. Despite their differences the projects
segregation. It is not the defensive “autonomy” of conventional modernist art, but rather,
aesthetic. The projects on display are neither fully “art” nor fully “activist” in orientation
and derive much of their force from this tension. They are sufficiently separate from
existing networks of social power to allow for the unfolding of new insights, but at the
same time, sufficiently integrated with these networks to allow for their pragmatic
translation. They float between the real and the virtual, the applied and the symbolic,
art, a sense of “standing back while being immersed”. In his essay for this catalog Miles
Geoffrey Galt Harpham. “The Kantian faculties,” Harpham writes, “invariably disappoint
aestheticians seeking art as such . . .”32 When Park Fiction re-invents the process of
31
participatory planning as a game of desire and imagination they exploit this
undecideability. It is literally embodied in their name (the “fiction” of a park), and in the
audacity to imagine a public park in place of expensive, high rise apartment buildings.
Rather than simply protest the process of gentrification in Hamburg, Park Fiction
organized a “parallel planning process” that began with the creation of alternative
“platforms” for exchange among the area’s existing residents (“musicians, priests, a
developed for the park, including the Teagarden Island, which features artificial palm
trees and is surrounded by an elegant 40 meter long bench from Barcelona, an Open
Air Solarium and a Flying Carpet (a wave-shaped lawn area surrounded by a mosaic
preoccupied previous generations of artists have given way to engagement with modes
of social exchange, collective action and what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “the sphere of
previous issues (in fact, most of the artists and groups in Groundworks clearly view the
representation) than of widening the field of artistic practice beyond the textual
paradigm (the artist making an object or image for the viewer’s consumption). Thus,
Navjot Atlaf’s background as a sculptor and installation artist is evident in the hand
32
pump sites she produces in collaboration with Adivasi communities in Bastar
Chattisgarh in central India (the Adivasi are India’s indigenous or native population, and
have, along with the Dalit or “untouchables,” long suffered from economic and social
discrimination). At the same time, she views the collaborative interactions among artists
and village residents, and between Adivasi and non-Adivasi, that occur in these projects
as decisive. As she writes, “For us, organizing the workshops required to design and
network between artists from different cultures and disciplines from within Bastar and
outside, and with and between the young.” These cross-cultural exchanges, which Altaf
also organizes around the collaborative production of children’s temples (Pilla Gudis),
“encourage the young to think about different ways of knowing and modes of working,
enabling them to draw nourishment and sustenance from difference and similarities.”
The process of designing and constructing the pump sites and temples, the interactions
of artisans, children, and visitors, are at the same moment designed to encourage a
due to the rise of right wing fundamentalism over the past decade, which has actively
repressed non-Hindu cultures (like that of the Adivasi). At the same time the mainstream
through a policy of “Unity in Diversity” that minimizes the specific histories of the Adivasi
well in the work of the Senegalese group Huit Facettes-Interaction. In an interview with
33
Groundworks media curator Patrick Deegan, Huit Facettes coordinator Amadou Kane
Sy speaks of the essential “proximity between artistic expression and the social field” in
their collaborative projects in the village of Hamdallaye Samba Mbaye. Huit Facettes
has established a permanent arts workshop in the village in order to catalyze a series of
exchanges that privilege the “individual temporalities” of the local culture against the
conventional oppositions that are typically used to situate African art (art vs. crafts,
“Third” vs. “First” world, etc.) within the ethnocentric discourse of the west.35 In place of
within Africa (what Kane Sy calls “south-south” exchanges). The projects of Huit
Facettes and Altaf return us to the question of speech with which this essay began, but
in a new register. They enact a mode of expression that no longer privileges the
analysis of the events of May ’68, “Insofar as people wish to run the risk of existing—
insofar as they notice that in order to have speech its power must be assured—they will
give to their identity the historical figure of a new cultural and political unity.”36 Is it
possible that the propensity for community is not simply a concession to an inherent
identities, and new forms of collective unity, without the cohesive threat provided by a
beings? And can art help to elaborate, distill, or catalyze this inclination?
34
The artists of Groundworks don’t begin with the assumption that the viewer,
they possess a privileged insight into the operations of social power, unavailable to
others. They begin, instead, with an opening out to their collaborators: a recognition of
them as complex and fully human, which I have written about elsewhere in terms of a
witness to their existence as a human being in the truest sense of the word. The one
who ‘feels’ that you exist (by respecting you) legitimates to some extent your humanity.
This is a fundamental value in the part of the world where we live."38 Altaf reiterates this
the group we feel that we are conscious about the right to speak, how to speak together,
or to speak with or alongside others, in the sense of forming alliances. All this could be
impossible, but we believe that those who are interested in restructuring power in more
egalitarian ways, must consciously work towards these values.”39 This process of
speech entails respect for the interlocutor and for the process of communication itself,
as subtle, shifting and temporally extensive. Suzanne Lacy, Susan Steinman and
Yutaka Kobayashi have been working in collaboration with residents of Elkhorn City,
Kentucky for six years, gradually building the trust and rapport necessary to catalyze the
The exchanges initiated in the workshops of Navjot Altaf, Huit Facettes, and
35
Lacy, Steinman and Kobayashi constitute a form of labor that is distinct from the “work”
of possessive individualism. Their goal is not the violent extraction of value or the
cultural traditions, political forces, and individual subjectivities. Nor is this labor
models.40 Antagonism is only possible among those who hold fixed positions and are
defined in turn by a subjectivity that must be defended from cooptation. This model fails
to acknowledge the possibility that the process of intersubjective exchange itself, rather
another set of possibilities, to enact change and not simply represent a priori positions.
Groundworks is paralleled by an opening out to the natural world. This approach is not,
instead a consistent acknowledgement that nature is, for better and for worse, always
defined in relation to human use and habitation. This connection is explicit in Ala
Plastica’s Emergent Species project in 1995, which involved research into the capacity
of reeds and other aquatic plants to absorb pollution. In the process, Ala Plastica’s
bed propagation and a creative practice that links diverse particularities via a non-
36
hierarchical network:
This approach echoes Andrew Light’s discussion of “place” and the dialectical
relationship between narrative and identity formed through lived interaction with
particular eco-systems. Ala Plastica began their AA Project in the Rio del Plata basin
with a process of “local knowledge recovery” in order to actualize the insights of the
area’s residents into the social and environmental costs of destructive “mega-
railroad and highway line) and the Punta Lara Colonia bridge, which have damaged
eco-systems in the region (through flooding and erosion) as well the social fabric of
local communities. In order to challenge the institutional authority of the corporate and
governmental interests responsible for these projects, Ala Plastica worked with the
area’s residents to articulate their own visions for the region through the creation of
now, we also encounter in this exhibition a sense of collectivity that transcends spatial
to water access as a “fundamental human right”. Noting the vast disparities in water
37
usage (the average Kenyan survives on five liters of water per-day while some
responsibility for water resources that extends regionally and even globally. His 80,000
Liter Water Box project (2003) involves the creation of large water storage units in sites
around the world as a way to call attention to these disparities and their potential impact
on future generations. He describes the water boxes “as a starting point for forwarding
water for 1000 people to the next generation living on the earth”. In his Water Ekiden-
Manosegawa River Art Project (1999-) Ikeda used a series of meetings, performances
four communities on the polluted Manosegawa River, leading to the creation of four
“water stations” for the storage and transfer of water. This ability to imagine, and to
literally feel, our connectedness to others, extends into the past and future in Platform’s
Delta project, which evokes the lost riparian communities of London, and Brookner,
glimpse of a revitalized McKeesport, circa 2020. It brings us, finally, to the faculty of
aesthetic imagination and the essential human capacity to envision alternative forms of
sociality, and a future for the planet that transcends the brutish values of economic
status of a religion in the American polity, and in which trust, and the willingness to risk
Groundworks remind us of art’s ability to evoke a society based on hope rather than
fear, and on care for others rather than the violent assertion of self.
38
1From “The Task” in The Poetical Works of William Cowper, with Memoirs and Notes
(Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1920), p.326.
The village street became a path in the park for viewing the valley below. The
church was turned into a classical temple and the congregation still responsible
for its upkeep, now had to walk a mile and a half to worship. Cows were provided
with a special underground passage so they could pass from field to field without
spoiling the view. One old woman, the shepherdess Babs Wyatt, was allowed to
stay in her cottage in the middle of the new landscape garden. Martin Hoyles,
The Story of Gardening (London: Journeyman Press, 1991), p.36.
3William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, vol. 1
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), p.155.
5See Grant Kester, The Faculty of Possession: Property and the Aesthetic in English
Culture 1730-1850 (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, 1996).
6Erika Lee Doss, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in
American Communities (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), p.124.
Original source: John Gruen, “Michael Heizer: ‘You Might Say I’m in the Construction
Business,’” ARTnews 76 (December 1977), p.99.
8See my essay “Aesthetic Enactment: Loraine Leeson’s Reparative Practice,” Art for
Change: Loraine Leeson, 1975-2005 (Berlin: Neueun Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst,
2005).
9John Locke, The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, volume one, edited with
an introduction by John W. Yolton, (London: J.M. Dent, 1961), p.155., (Book 4, chapter
3).
10Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers; The Lives, Times and Ideas of the
Great Economic Thinkers, 6th. edition (New York: Touchstone, 1999), p.28.
12Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres, vol.2, book 1, translated by Francis W.
Kelsey, with Arthur E.R. Boak, Henry A. Sanders, Jesses S. Reeves, and Herbert W.
Wright, introduction by James Brown Scott, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p.186.
15The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf, Craig L. Carr, editor, Michale J. Seidler,
translator, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.175.
16John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (and Robert Filmer's Patriarcha), edited,
with an introduction by Thomas I. Cook, (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1969), p.134.
18 John Locke, "Of Property," in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, p.18.
19 While Locke is a staunch advocate of the idea that "every man has a property in his
own person," this principle comes into conflict with the "extension of personality" I've
already outlined, which allows one person to possess the labor of another as his or her
property. In a society in which the bulk of the common land has already been
engrossed, one segment of the population will, inevitably, be forced to sell their labor to
the other. Thus, the juridically free worker is granted property-right in his own labor in a
situation in which his only possible option is to then surrender that "property" in
exchange for wages. That is, the act of granting the worker property in his own labor is
only allowed in order for it to then be made available to others.
20In his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) Sir William Chambers argued for the
universality of the garden as an art form: "The production of other arts have their
separate classes of admirers . . . But Gardening is of a different nature: its dominion is
general; its effects upon the human mind certain and invariable; without any previous
information, without being taught, all men are delighted with the gay luxuriant scenery of
summer, and depressed at the dismal aspect of autumnal prospects; the charms of
cultivation are equally sensible to the learned and the ignorant. . . " The Eighteenth
Century: Art, design and society, 1689-1789, edited by Bernard Denvir, (London:
Longman, 1983), p.244.
21 As Miles Hadfield notes, "The rising class of industrialists, merchants, and new rich
from India and North America sought political power, pleasure, and gentility through the
building or acquiring of country houses. Soon, in spite of the vulgar taint of trade, they
were in a position equal to—and often financially sounder to—the inheritors of the old
parks and country seats. The machinery for obtaining their lands was of course, often
the use of the Enclosure Acts." Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1985), pp.197-198.
22The centrality of the landscape garden in English culture at the time is derived in part
from it’s explicit political symbolism. If the geometric French garden, with its rows of
regimented parterres stretching to the horizon, was seen by many as symbolic of the
inflexibility of the French monarchy, imposing its a priori rules on the populace
regardless of their wishes, then the more accommodating "natural" landscape garden
was symptomatic of the political character of a country that was democratically open
and based on the natural harmony of human interests. What made the “natural” style
English landscape garden unique at the time was precisely its informality, its openness,
and its liberal refusal to dictate a single point of view or to be circumscribed by imposed
hierarchies. Here was a form of power that didn't have to rely on the sheer force of an
externally-imposed royal will to command and regulate the surrounding environment,
and its political subjects. In A History of British Gardening Miles Hadfield describes the
"new fashion" of the natural landscape garden as "essentially Whig" (p.180).
23The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphrey Repton,
Esq., with an introduction, analysis, biography, notes, and index by J.C. Loudon, F.L.S.,
(London: Longman and Company, 1840), p.208.
24Ibid.
26 Martin Jay, “Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience
from the Work of Art,” Aesthetic Subjects, edited by Pamela R. Matthews and David
McWhirter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p.18-19. The tension
between the desire to transgress discursive and disciplinary boundaries, on the one
hand, and to protect the “autonomy” of the aesthetic, on the other, is a central issue in
contemporary art theory. Jay’s tendency to define the erosion of aesthetic autonomy
through a sexualized rhetoric (he warns of the “promiscuous re-enchantment of the
entire world” and the “promiscuous aestheticization of the entire world”) reiterates the
conventional avant-garde opposition between art (which is resistant, austere and
demanding) and popular and consumer culture (which surrender themselves to the
viewer to easily).
27Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, translated by
Stephen Pluhacek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p.4.
29 Ibid., p.141.
35Artist Jay Koh has explored similar issues in relationship to art practice in southeast
Asia. See my essay “The Art of Listening (and of Being Heard): Jay Koh’s Discursive
Networks,” Third Text 47 (Summer, 1999), pp.19-26.
36Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, introduction
by Luce Giard, translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997), p.32.
38 Patrick Deegan, unpublished interview with Amadou Kane Sy, (spring 2005).
40See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).