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FOR THE DE-INCAPACITATION OF COMMUNITY ART PRACTICE We had escaped the unbearable weight of being artists, and within the specialization of art we could separate ourselves from site-specific artists, community artists, public artists, new genre artists, and the other categories with which we had little or no sympathy. In 1984 the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko wrote a broadside against the Canadian cultural state bureaucracy titled "For the De-Incapacitation of the Avant-Garde." (2) The article addressed the contradictions of incorporating "left" and "libertarian" ideas into a centralized state bureacratic system. Having come from Poland, where artists at that time feared assimilation into the technocratic rationality of the state apparatus, the "parallel" institutions supported by government grants appeared to him to pose a similar danger. In both cases, he considered the function of the state to be the appropriation of those critiques it could use to reinforce its legitimizing functions. Ostensibly, this could be achieved by financing radical-cultural magazines, film and video. The problem with avant-garde artists in the West, Wodiczko argued, was that they had begun to accept their own productions as ideology and had conflated political ideology with artistic utopia. In this context, artists who mistrusted their avant-garde forbearers were caught in an endless rehearsal of the critique of formalist modernism, forging new idioms that could ostensibly escape a linear account of art's immanent unfolding. With the advent of postmodernism, art's privileged position within the division of labor, the sign of non-alienated production became a bulwark against further radicalization of the sphere of cultural production. Rather than radicalize cultural production as a product of capitalist social relations, postmodern pluralism concluded that the avant-garde is dead and withdrew to what Hal Foster calls a relativistic "arrière-avant-gardism" that considers itself liberated from the teleological framework of History and the determinations of ideology. (3) Wodiczko also recognized that artistic and political avant-gardes did not share the same attitudes toward the degradation of art; where one called for art's destruction, the other wished to deepen art's critical autonomy. (4) In the absence of a revolutionary situation, the embattled artistic left could not know itself from the liberal state bureaucracy that supported it; it appeared serious and militant, but did not dare unmask itself. The solution to this impasse, he argued, could be found in a critical public discourse on the aims of an avant-garde programme that would lead to the de-ideologization of its processes and a confrontation with the "enemy," which included the culturally conservative political left. In this sense, the left could liberate itself from itself. It could do so if it was involved in cultural action that challenged the system of national culture as planned bureaucratic administration. (5) What might Wodiczko's ideas mean for us today in the context of the neoliberal administration of creative labor and the growth of what the radical collective BAVO refers to as "embedded" forms of cultural activism? (6) As Nina Möntmann has also argued, recent models of community-based art need to be considered against the background of the dismantling of state-organized social infrastructure in the Western world. (7) Within some circles of advanced cultural theory and practice, there is often little tolerance for the idea of an avant-garde, and cultural authority itself is mistrusted. In the context of a late capitalist post-politics, the political vanguard is often subsumed under the pluralism of liberal multiculturalism. (8) Because of this, a multitude of decentralized practices appears to be both the promise of a post-identity politics as well as the legitimizing grounds of the neoliberal state, which works to produce and manage cultural conflict. At the same time, however, the counter-globalization movement, referred to in Europe as "the movement of movements," provides a clear message that there are alternatives to capitalist hegemony. (9) What forms of socially engaged cultural practice can we envision that refuse complicity with the current ruling order?
Dictatorship of the Precariat One immediate solution to post-Fordist economic precarization has therefore been to name it. Demonstrators at the 2004 MayDay Parades in Milan and Barcelona, for instance, referred to themselves as variously, the precariously employed, precariats, cognitive workers, cognitariat, autonomous activists, affectariat, etc… They proposed “flexicurity” – rights and protections for the precariously employed. (13) As Angela Mitropoulos has remarked, the demonstrators were alert to the fact that the quality of precarity belongs to both labor and to capitalism. Whereas Fordism sought to cretinize the worker, she writes, post-Fordist decentralization and flexible accumulation harnesses the productive capacities of desire, knowledge and sociality itself. (14) In some ways the problem of the artworld precariat might be summarized with Gregory Sholette's recently proposed concept of "dark matter." (15) Dark matter describes the work of autonomous and participatory cultural production by amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist and non-institutional workers. This dark matter is largely invisible to those cultural administrators – curators, directors, collectors, critics, historians and artists – who are the gatekeepers of large cultural institutions. However, the same institutional art world is dependent on this dark matter as well as the resources of its members who purchase magazines and books and who attend exhibitions and conferences. He asks, "What would become of the economic and ideological foundations of the elite art world if this mass of excluded practices was to be given equal consideration as art?" The situation we are confronted with today is one in which, as Sholette argues, dark matter is no longer invisible but is being recovered by private interests. Politicized micro-practices are given specific designations, meanings, and use-value as they are directly integrated into the globalized commercial art matrix. Sholette argues that the capitalist valorization of creative labor is as much a problem for politics as it is for culture because it "forces into view its own arbitrary value structure." (16) The affective energies of those who are excluded from the inner circles of the transnational culture industries, he concludes, need to be linked to actual resistance to capital, patriarchy and racism, and block the art world's mediocracy from appropriating their histories. This situation, as I see it, can benefit from a reconsideration of the traditions of avant-gardism that many cultural producers and theorists dismiss or distinguish sharply from activist and community-based practice. One common factor in this process of distinction is the widely held association of avant-garde with Clement Greenberg's "modernist" formulation of avant-garde as the antithesis of kitsch. While Greenberg's ideas were shaped by the Marxist critique of tendenzkunst – work that espouses the correct political position but demonstrates little artistic merit – his view that avant-garde practice could be distinguished from, and should be protected from degraded forms of production, has done a great deal to overestimate postmodernism's blurring of distinctions and misconstrue the historical avant-garde's political use of negation. Because of the resistance to avant-gardism, radical artists are treated to a number of double standards that we could define as liberal cultural blackmail. Artists are expected to provide constructive critiques of the system but not threaten public institutions, class hierarchies and other legacies of bourgeois liberalism. They are expected to intervene in culture but not appear aggressive or be seriously prepared to fight for political equality which would result in being dismissed as masculinist, intolerant of people's differences, or else submitted to ironic commentary on the inability to keep a critical stance without appearing to be something else; to understand the complex history of aesthetic and cultural radicalism and to incorporate this into intelligent forms of collaborative practice, but to stand back or compromise when the situation requires that you assume a dominant position of authorial integrity. It is not surprising that all of the withdrawals from avant-gardism and from a radical criticism of disciplinary societies are accompanied by what, on the surface of things, is their opposite: sociability, collaboration, dialogue, consultation, etc. These modalities and processes, according to Hal Foster, today "risk a weird formalism of discursivity and sociability pursued for their own sakes." (17) It does not take much either to find in them the echo of an earlier generation's obsession with systems. However, this is precisely where the radicality of formalism should be acknowledged and the identity of the opposites be considered. Why, we should ask, is socially engaged community art considered to be among the most vanguard forms of contemporary art and, if so, in what ways does it understand formalism? The blackmail situation provides two obvious solutions, either one defends the socially maligned space of autonomy, but if successful, risks having one's work recuperated as capitalist investment, or one plays the disciplinary culture industries at their own game, sublating the opposition between art and life, art and society, producing complex forms of critical autonomy. Thus if successful, risk being ignored or become invisible as an artist or an art collective. Many of the most challenging artists of the last two decades have chosen the latter. But we can see here how the path of self-precarization is not only over determined – not least by the kinds of capital that are associated with criticality – but full of contradictions. The most vanguard direction is the one that in today's late capitalist world of multiculturalism and poststructural identity politics also demands a withdrawal from avant-gardism as a done thing, passé andmodernist, masculinist, totalizing or utopian. This kind of liberal cultural blackmail, inasmuch as it comes from progressive artists, theorists and historians, is especially harmful given the economic pressures that come from cultural institutions. According to Andrea Fraser, current trends within the culture industries have contributed to a wholesale devaluation of avant-garde aesthetic’s(?) autonomy. She writes: We're in the midst of the total corporatization and marketization of the artistic field and the historic loss of autonomy won through more than a century of struggle. The field of art and now only nominally public and non-profit institutions has been transformed into a highly competitive global market. The specifically artistic values and criteria that marked the relative autonomy of the artistic field have been overtaken by quantitative criteria in museums, galleries and art discourse, where programmes are increasingly determined by sales – of art, at the box office and of advertising – and where a popular and rich artist is almost invariably considered a good artist, and vice versa. Art works are increasingly reduced to pure instruments of financial investment, as art-focused hedge funds sell shares of single paintings. The threat of instrumentalization by corporate interests has been met in the art world by a wholesale internalization of corporate values, methods and models, which can be seen everywhere from art schools to museums and galleries to the studios of artists who rely on big-money backers for large-scale – and often out-sourced – production. We are living through a historical tragedy: the extinguishing of the field of art as a site of resistance to the logic, values and power of the market. (18) The market indicators that drive so much cultural production today would merely be supplemental if artists and critics themselves had not conceded so much cultural and intellectual ground to the logic of the end of history. In the following I take this manifestation of the prohibition against avant-gardism as symptomatic of contemporary cultural theory and practice, and further, as a probable explanation for the growing salience of the discourse on precarity.
The Elephant in the Room Contemporary art resorts to milder versions of this story, working with concepts of collaboration or complicity as alternatives to the stormy weather called forth by the concepts of alienation and repression. The sociological determinants of cultural appreciation and the distribution of cultural wealth however are misconstrued when contemporary socially engaged community artists presume to perform benevolent acts. (21) Art can neither escape its conditions of determination, nor can it be reduced by them. Beholden to a liberal model of the needy public or a multicultural model of diversity, much contemporary art refuses to challenge audiences in ways that are associated with avant-garde resistance. In two of its most recent manifestations, Nicolas Bourriaud's "relational aesthetics" and Grant Kester's "dialogical aesthetics," political claims and social protest are to be renounced in favour of dialogical interaction (a word entirely denuded of its basis in the class analysis of the Russian formalists) where the artist is expected to renounce all claims to authority and authorship. (22) These critics not only seek to transform the way that artists interact with audiences, but decry the sort of activism that takes the form of militant struggle, whether in the form of agitational work or utopian projection. The following considers the symptomatic nature of the prohibition against avant-gardism and even the prohibition of the prohibition itself as a serious topic of discussion. The example I wish to give is Komar & Melamid's Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project (1995-2000), which I take to be a serious satire of contemporary community art. The type of community art I have in mind is best represented by Mary Jane Jacob's well-known curatorial venture Culture in Action, the 1993 instalment of the annual Sculpture Chicago summer festival. (23) Culture in Action was dedicated almost entirely to community-based projects, for which the artists worked with communities and created pieces that emphasized dialogue, participation and interaction. Notwithstanding the merit of many of the individual projects, what concerns me here is the manner in which the curatorial framing was decidedly anti-avant-garde. The rhetoric of Culture in Action was that art provides a redemptive, therapeutic healing of social divisions. In contrast, what Komar & Melamid are interested in is precisely the problem of the integration of living labor within a global capitalist mode of flexible accumulation. Briefly stated, Komar & Melamid's Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project (1995-2000) is a complex work that enlists the participation of Thai elephants and their trainers (mahouts). (24) After the ban on rainforest timber in 1989, the elephants and the timber workers became unemployed, forced to engage in tricks for tourists, panhandling, and illegal work. Malnourishment led to the decimation of the mostly domesticated elephant population. By training some elephants to paint "abstract expressionist" canvases and then by selling their paintings, Komar & Melamid raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for their care and that of their trainers. Paintings were auctioned off at Christie's and bulk sales were organized with hotel chains, thus raising awareness of the elephants' circumstances. Elephant Project provides a clear indication of what Slavoj Žižek has explained as the truth of community; the fact that the deepest identification that holds a community together is not an identification with the written laws that regulate normal everyday routine, but an identification with the transgression or suspension of the law. It is an identification with an obscene secret code. (25) For our purposes, we could say that the deepest identification that structures the field of contemporary art production is not the particularistic political transgression of the new art of community, relationality and dialogue, the official art of our times, but an identification with the prohibition of avant-garde radicality. Komar & Melamid's elephant project is an avant-garde work – not because it defies or parodies the politically immaterial mandates of relational aesthetics and the new community art, but because it exposes the obscene underside of so-called dialogical collaboration. How so? Like the post-Fordist precariat, the elephants/artists are out of work. And what is the secret code, the unwritten law that gives artistic transgression its specific form if not the momentary political suspension of art for the sake of art's renewal? Is this renewal not also the admission of the pure symbolic meaninglessness of the aesthetic as a measure of human value; in particular in the face of abjection, poverty and unemployment? This same fact is what constitutes the truly obscene side of this unwritten law; obscene because ever since Kant necessity has been ruled out as a hindrance to aesthetic judgement. And ever since Marx, enjoyment itself was transmuted into necessity. This is why in contemporary liberal multiculturalist discourse the term avant-garde remains unspoken – not because its logic has been exhausted, but because avant-gardism continues to structure modes of enjoyment. And why not understand this in its full Lacanian sense as surplus enjoyment, the plus de jour that signals the moment of flight from the analyst's couch? What Elephant Project showcases is a realist art that is fully reflective of and integrated with the ideological apparatus of community art as the official art of neoliberal capitalism, where political rule is not exercised directly through police control but through the manipulation of popular opinion – represented here by paintings tailored to accommodate the taste for the generation of reality. Elephant Project unashamedly reveals how its very modes of procedure are drawn from the kinds of pre-existing practices that are commercially successful, in this case from the success of "Ruby," the painting elephant of the Phoenix Zoo. For art-world audiences however, the key referent is not elephant paintings but community art. On a basic level, and in an avant-garde sense, the artists attempt to make the”form” (the conceptual contours of the work) the specific characteristic of the work within the more general and overarching category of “content” (the organization of means of subsistence for unemployed elephants in the context of both ecologically sensitive de-industrialization and the permutations of contemporary art within the culture industries). This critical use of realism allows the obscene prohibition against avant-gardism to come to our consideration. It does so by associating relationality, dialogue and collaboration with relations of class power. This point is brought home by the way that Elephant Project involves not only the representation of disenfranchised communities, not only the avid participation of art-world insiders, but also the determining power of collectors, including Thai royalty. As with their previous poll-based projects, Komar & Melamid manipulate the range of responses that one can anticipate in reaction to the work. These sociologically 'typical' responses are treated like readymade components of the work, engineered in advance as means to engage viewers in an extended reflection. The photograph of the two artists teaching a baby elephant and its trainer about the work of Marcel Duchamp provides a glimpse of this intentional authorial approach. The elephants are not so much producing abstract expressionist canvases but are part of an extended materialist strategy to re-conceptualize community art. The ideational and psychological aspect is crucial here. Among the readymade structures of feeling that Komar & Melamid activate are the responses that viewers may have about the project: "Do Komar & Melamid think that people will actually be moved by the paintings or the project as a whole?"; "Does the public appreciate all of the ironic references to Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, etc.?"; "Aren't they merely creating another investment opportunity for the art market?"; "Aren't they merely reproducing the structures of neocolonialism?" What happens then when people take their antics seriously? The critical aspect of this project is that Komar & Melamid not only take their work seriously as community public art, they simultaneously engage in an over-identification with the ideological structure of community art that is capable of exposing the links between cultural activism and the class function of cultural production within the new neoliberal "creative" economy. The project does so in part because it makes use of the lessons about ideology developed by the two artists in response to Socialist Realism. The name I give this kind of practice, following Žižek interpretation of Lacan, is a sinthomeopathic practice in which subjects hold on to their deepest libidinal attachments. By both learning from the public what it wants, and making this the subject of the work (the symptomatic aspect of public opinion), Elephant Project reveals the meta-rules of community art as part of the creative industries. This aspect of over-identification is what Žižek refers to as the "manipulation of transference," a situation that begins with the "subject supposed to know." The artists put in place the function of "the subject supposed to know" through a strategy of interpassivity; by listening to what the public wants they are relieved of the superego injunction to be amused by the spectacle of elephants painting. Their role resembles what television provides in the form of canned laughter. However, in this case, the canned laughter is foregrounded in order to provide a Brechtian defamiliarization. This allows for a shift from belief to knowledge. For Lacan, the function of the symbolic order, an impersonal set of social regulations, refers to belief rather than knowledge. The asymmetry between the subject supposed to know and the subject supposed to believe reveals the reliance of belief on a big Other (a sort of impersonal superego) that relieves us of responsibility for what we desire. In terms of psychoanalytic transference, the unconscious desire of the patient can be viewed inasmuch as the analyst is considered the subject supposed to know (to know the unconscious desire of the patient). As viewers of the work, then, we are caught in a transferential confusion of belief and knowledge. With whom are we expected to identify: with the members of the public who are confounded by the full panoply of Komar & Melamid's avant-garde exposé, or with those of us whose libidinal investments are most fully constituted by fantasmatic identification with contemporary art? With what are we expected to identify: with art's exceptional power to transcend and heal social divisions within actually existing global capitalism, or with the utopian possibility of a critical autonomy that can reconstruct and alter the field of cultural production? Before we seek answers to these questions however, psychoanalytic ethics require that we attend to the transferential reversal that defines the psychoanalytic cure. Because the function of the subject supposed to know is here occupied by elephants and not "kids on the street," it is easier for us to see how our ideological obsession with the desire of the Other locates the truth in something or someone that exists as such and that is to be brought into political representation by the poetic subtleties of the public artist, or the not so subtle philanthropy of state and corporate granting agencies and a few collectors. If what takes place at the end of psychoanalytic transference is the shift from desire to drive, then what an effective para-public art practice like Komar & Melamid's can do is shift the coordinates of both art producers and the public towards the understanding that desire (defined by Lacan as the unconscious rules that regulate social interaction) has no support in the symbolic law that separates art from politics, pleasure from necessity. In other words, psychoanalytic ethics require that we subjectivize the field of social relations, that we think for ourselves rather than follow the dictates of the obscene unwritten law. This law, as I have argued, is the injunction against avant-gardism that informs the current manifestations of much socially engaged community art. The injunction itself, as a symptom of our cultural condition needs to be brought into relation with the official art of our times. Elephant Project does this by identifying with community art as one of the most advanced forms of cultural and biopolitical production within neoliberal societies. Komar & Melamid's strategy of learning from what the people want should inform and not hamstring our relation to a critical community art. It underscores the role of collaboration as a symptom of ideological and psychological relations. The problem for the avant-garde, of public art in the age of neoliberal globalization then, is not that of collaboration versus antagonism, of contingency versus universality, but the enabling of a radical subjectivization of politics. The incorporation of various community contexts into the frame of art, and thus within the flexible production strategies of the creative industries, is not strictly speakinga form of mass deception, but also a self-deception. We are and we are not that community. I would like to thank Rosika Desnoyers, Rosemary Heather, Vitaly Komar, and Lucia Summer and Marc Herbst for their helpful comments on this paper.
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