ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: CULTURAL INTERVENTION
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ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: CULTURAL INTERVENTION, ACTIVIST ART AND DISCOURSES OF OPPOSIONALITY IN THE US, 1980-2000 Mary Jo Aagerstoun, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Josephine Withers Department of Art History and Archaeology This dissertation examines the intersection of definitions of activist art with major discourses related to art production operational during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s in the US. The four parts of the dissertation consider how definitions of activism in art during this period shifted when considered in conjunction with notions of transgression, postmodernism, the avant-garde, and the monstrous/grotesque/abject. The emphasis in each part of the dissertation will be on the aspects of discourse that have been generated in publications of various kinds that relate to cultural production. In Part 1, key discursive elements of the 1980s treated include 1) the relationship of market forces to “successful” transgressivity as well as “successful” activism in art; 2) when certain forms of art put forward as “activist” were seen as “transgressive;” and 3) debates over controversial content related to social and political issues of the day. In Part 2, activism in US art of the eighties and nineties is considered in relation to the fortunes of the artistic category “avant-garde.” In this Part of the dissertation, the discussion tracks the development of interest in “progressive” postmodernism in contradistinction to a postmodernism of “regression;” and the generally negative valence “avant-garde” assumed in discourse over this twenty-year period. Part 3 explores the discursive relationship of activist art to the pronounced turn toward the body during the period: a particular kind of body portrayed as aggressively sexual, wounded, fragmented and imbricated with specificities of racial and gender identity. Part 4 proposes two works of art—Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party and Guillermo Gómez Peña’s Temple of Confessions—as exemplary of how the discursive element of the monstrous/grotesque/abject can assertively mobilize and foreground the eclipsed and distorted presentation of the feminine and the ”other” of color in dominant culture. The discussion seeks to demonstrate how, in two extremely complex works of art, the monstrous/abject/grotesque raises to high profile key issues of activism, postmodernism and the avant-garde. The discussion also addresses how ultimately conflicted and ambivalent it is to seek an unproblematically “progressive” outcome when attempting to mobilize monstrous/grotesque/abject thematics as apotropaic. CULTURAL INTERVENTION, ACTIVIST ART AND DISCOURSES OF OPPOSITIONALITY IN THE US, 1980-2000 by Mary Jo Aagerstoun Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2004 Advisory Committee: Dr. Josephine Withers, Chair Dr. Renée Ater Professor Stephen Mansbach Dr. Katharine King Dr. Kathy O’Dell ©Copyright by Mary Jo Aagerstoun 2004 PREFACE The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the intersection of activism in art with major discursive elements related to art production during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s in the US. The four parts of the dissertation will consider how definitions of “activism” in art during this period shifted when considered in conjunction with notions of transgression, postmodernism, the avant-garde, and the monstrous/grotesque/abject. While “discourse” includes the non-textual, non-verbal mode of cultural production usually associated with “art,” this dissertation will emphasize how particular kinds of cultural production (called “activist” art) were characterized in a variety of publications over the twenty-year period from1980 to 2000.1 The Author in Parallax I see my position, as author of this dissertation, as situated in parallax vis à vis my subject.2 Here I am referring to Hal Foster’s view of the reflexive relationship of the critic to her subject, as articulated in his 1996 book, The Return of the Real. Foster proposes that “…each epoch dreams the next…[and] revises the one before it. There is no simple now: every present is non-synchronous…each comes like sex(uality), too early or too 1 Although some few examples of discursive elements addressed here are from locations away from the East Coast, as might be expected, most are from New York. This is not so much a result of my selectivity as the fact that, though the situation has changed somewhat (some would say, considerably) New York was then, as it is now, the locus par excellence where art discourse is generated in the US. 2 Parallax is a term used primarily in astronomy to refers to a difference or change in the apparent position or direction of an object as seen from different points. When I indicate I am addressing the subject of activist art in parallax, I am referring to looking at the practice through the lens of three concepts: transgressiveness, the avant-garde and the monstrous/grotesque/abject. An overarching positionality, which is in parallax also, in my view, is that I necessarily see the discursive elements addressed here through my own set of values and political positions. It will be evident to the reader that I perceive the unstable histories here through feminist and left political prisms, though even these personal “positions”are, I hope, no more fixed than any of the moving targets I seek to examine. ii late, and our consciousness of each is premature or after the fact…”3 It is precisely because of this instability of the present in relation to the (retrospectively, equally unstable) past and (also unpredictably, equally unstable) future that Foster proposes a self-awareness on the part of the critic/historian. Foster’s notion of parallax conceives a situation in which the author consciously sees herself differentially displaced in relation to “anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts.” This is because the angles from which these futures and pasts are examined are always in the (also continuously moving) present. Foucault and Discourse Central to this dissertation’s consideration of activism in art is Michel Foucault’s concept of “discourse,” a notion that goes beyond public discussion and debate. “Discourse” here will be used, in the Foucauldian sense, as the ways in which power is generated and flows in society, and is always integrally interwoven with the production of knowledge.4 Activist art is presented in this dissertation both as power—and, as in power relationships with political and social structures of U.S. society—in the 1980s and 1990s. 3 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 207. In a review of Foster’s book, Charles Altieri points out the ambivalence inherent in Foster’s proposal of parallax as a preferred stance for a critic vis à vis her object of study. He notes: “In surveying,” parallax involves “a measurable position of the observer, linked by instruments to objective conditions and shared project.” Altieri claims that seeing parallax as a way to describe a critical stance involves “licensing the subject’s own distorting interests” especially that subject’s “distorted view of its [generation’s] historical importance.” Nonetheless, the idea resonates with how this dissertation is structured, and how I see my position as the critic/historian in relation to the processes and objects it addresses. While, as Altieri suggests, this notion of parallax may “license” my own perceptual distortions, I don’t know how that can be avoided. Perhaps it is enough to be aware that such distortions are there, though awareness does not mean omniscience regarding all distortions inherent in one’s (changing) positionalities in the present. See Charles Altieri, review of The Return of the Real, by Hal Foster, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59: 1 (Winter 2001): 205. 4 See the discussion of Foucault’s “discourse” in its relation to the subjects of this dissertation, in Part 1, Chapter 1 below. iii That defining activist art constitutes a discourse seems undeniable; and the vagaries of how this kind of cultural production has been portrayed in discourse over time resonate especially well with Michel Foucault’s theoretical constructs.5 Foucault believed the fusion of power and knowledge in discourse to be so intense that he ultimately wrote them exclusively as “power/knowledge,” phenomena both constitutive and governing in how they are (mutually) produced. 6 According to Foucault, discourses are neither uniform nor stable. They are constantly shifting kaleidoscopic representations of social and political relationships; and are distributed across discursive fields, which both consist of, and actively constitute, the relationships among language, social institutions and subjectivity. Examples of Foucauldian discursive fields would include law, family, medicine, and, of course, art. Foucault denies that there is any binarity within a discursive field between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between dominant and dominated discourse. Rather, he claims, one finds in discourses a multiplicity of discursive elements that can be 5 The discussion here springs from, but does not seek to follow closely, the perspectives of Michel Foucault on discourse. The key text consulted: Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972). Foucault elaborates his concept of discourse in his other works as well, especially in Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1980). Foucault’s is by no means the only theoretical construct that impinges on defining “activist art” by addressing the discourse about it. The concept of “hegemony” is also important. Key texts include Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence Wishart, 1971); and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s further work on the concept of hegemony in terms of the connections betweeen power and discourse in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985); as well as John B.