 |
| Dr. Mohamed Abdel-Aziz, Bauhaus Weimar Summer Program, Cultural Landscapes and Urban Resilience, lead by Philippe Schmidt. 2014. |
Aesthetics of Collective
Action
07.09.2014
One of the most
important concepts coming from the Crozier and Friedberg publication, Actors
and Systems: The Politics of Collective Action, is the demonstration of
power as relational. And thus to speak of social organization as the
construction of discrete negotiations, we see the emergence of power as
fundamentally between two parties. This reading makes necessary an
understanding of power’s reciprocal albeit imbalanced structure.
It’s a highly phenomenological reading, but gives an important correction to the static understanding of power as objective. For the artist endeavoring to work within social aesthetics this correction is paramount, especially as we see the artist invested in multiple relationships, and by this I mean diverse constructions of power within varying groups. Here we see a sort of golden triangle afforded the social artist: his or her ability to move between distinctions of economy and pedagogy, audience and institution. It’s important to stress that beyond those categorical shifts exists more concretely a diverse portfolio which allocates them a maximum mobility within a structured social field. This is a power over zones of uncertainty, which Crozier and Friedberg establish as one of the fundamental constructive apparatuses behind power and its relations. Introduced more critically in differing waves of Feminist production, we would have to talk very different about this anti-epistemology, and particularly the time factor in relations of power. The creation of alternative time structures should not be immediately read as a social practice, and must be understood within discourses of dominance. The social mobility of the artist is a differing concern, primarily, because of the very potential risk to see the artist as outside of the social construction of power they seek to intervene within; this risk ultimately makes them key arbiters within the structural implementation of power.
It’s a highly phenomenological reading, but gives an important correction to the static understanding of power as objective. For the artist endeavoring to work within social aesthetics this correction is paramount, especially as we see the artist invested in multiple relationships, and by this I mean diverse constructions of power within varying groups. Here we see a sort of golden triangle afforded the social artist: his or her ability to move between distinctions of economy and pedagogy, audience and institution. It’s important to stress that beyond those categorical shifts exists more concretely a diverse portfolio which allocates them a maximum mobility within a structured social field. This is a power over zones of uncertainty, which Crozier and Friedberg establish as one of the fundamental constructive apparatuses behind power and its relations. Introduced more critically in differing waves of Feminist production, we would have to talk very different about this anti-epistemology, and particularly the time factor in relations of power. The creation of alternative time structures should not be immediately read as a social practice, and must be understood within discourses of dominance. The social mobility of the artist is a differing concern, primarily, because of the very potential risk to see the artist as outside of the social construction of power they seek to intervene within; this risk ultimately makes them key arbiters within the structural implementation of power.
This may seem self-evident
if we look backwards to the history of the collection, both as public or
private for there is no inherent bias, nor distinction, as an objectification
of class. Surely we can imagine relational aesthetics’ nascent program, however,
to counteract the collection, and more rhetorically the commodification of art.
This is the real danger behind relational aesthetics, for in order to produce a
horizontal frame for its production to set up within, it must forgo the rationality
of the individual. In attempting to dissolve class verticality, it may only
resist that formation through erasure. It becomes much like a scientific
discipline with its own objective system, a lens on the social organism en
masse. The artist and audience disappear into the public sphere, the
collection becomes the public itself, and power is rendered invisible.
French sociologists were
highly critical in this sense of the American schools, as post-structuralism
found its development in the eighties. It’s odd to consider then that Nicolas
Bourriaud would not capture this transition, and later, Bishop would revert it
back to a sort of Modernist program of formal autonomy despite its basis in
antagonism. The failure to understand power as the means by which both social
organizations and individuals operate risks a diversion into their endless
particularities without the requisite rational framework behind individuality.
Contrary to conventional social aesthetics, to read from the basis of the
individual actor towards a constructed exteriority prevents imbuing the artist
with an almost neo-religious order in society, behind which the only God is
capital. This underscores the extreme difficulty of exposing capital as both
the material work done by social organizations, and meanwhile, resisting a
commodification of the social apparatus. Ultimately, it’s much easier to
replicate the social structure through a machinic assembly, as with the case of
early cybernetics, but also with the important projects of Teresa Margolles and
Santiago Sierra. Despite these efforts towards antagonism we are not able to
move past a transcendent tautological modelling of society reinscribed by the
reversal. The outcome is reversed in its order, but remains the same. If the
artist is to invest themselves publicly the formal outcome must inscribe a
tension between mediation and negotiation as constructions of power, not as a
counteraction to privatization. Better to construct the private within the
public, not as means of autonomy, but for its necessary acknowledgement of the
production of power. If the formal outcome can maintain this legibility we may
begin to access the process of collectivized action so often reputed within
social aesthetics.
--
Written after the
workshop “Cultural Landscapes and Urban Resilience” organized by Dr. Philippe
Schmidt at Bauhaus-Weimar Universitat. Additional acknowledgements are given to
Dr. Hassan El-Moehli and Dr. Mohamed Abdel-Aziz for their contributions on
urban sociology and participatory development in Cairo; Melinda Guillen for her
writings on administration and temporal dissonance in Feminist artistic
production; and theorist, Mariana Botey, for her continued examination of
Marxist sociology and aesthetic production. Special thanks is also given to the
COMEXUS Foundation Garcia-Robles Fulbright Grant which supports my research
period and the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego.
