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A Case for Art As a Socially Engaged, Politicising Force, Utilising the Work of Alfredo Jaar

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A Case for Art As a Socially Engaged, Politicising Force, Utilising the Work of Alfredo Jaar A Case for Art as a Socially Engaged, Politicising Force, Utilising the Work of Alfredo Jaar A thesis submitted to the Royal College of Art for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of the Arts and Humanities Submitted 2nd October 2017 By Janet Kilcoyne (JK) 2 Copyright statement This text represents the submission for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Royal College of Art. This copy has been supplied for the purpose of research for private study, on the understanding that it is copyright material, and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. 3 Abstract My original contribution to knowledge is a framework constructed via the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin for understanding what distinguishes art as a political object from art as a socially engaged, politicising force. The dominant understanding of art’s reformative social agency raises two ethical problems that the thesis addresses. The first involves the artist’s right to assume the authority to represent people and social conditions. The second involves an ethical aesthetic of tastefulness that engages with viewing as opposed to action. The framework I develop argues that art’s functionalisms, for good or for ill, do not work with categories of art but are embedded in the politics of all cultural production. By disentangling art from the elitist paradigms enmeshed in concepts of artistic skill and art’s own internal history of development, the thesis clarifies what separates art as political object from art as a socially engaged, politicising force. In the thesis, I argue for the advantages of the framework I develop via critical engagements with influential approaches such as those advocated by Clement Greenberg and Roland Barthes, artworks such as those produced by Judy Chicago and Art & Language, and theorists of art’s social and political role such as those offered by Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière. A key point made across the thesis is that political art is not necessarily politicising art, with the former being more interested in modifying the forms taken by art – what art is – and the latter asking how art can contribute to social and political change – what art does. Subsequently, the thesis outlines in detail the aforementioned framework inspired by Gramsci and Benjamin. This sets the scene for the second half of the thesis, which discusses the installations and interventions of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, whose practices are an exemplary case for illustrating the potential of the framework outlined above. As a self-professed Gramscian, Jaar works to actively participate in practical life as a constructor, organiser and ‘permanent persuader’ (Gramsci, 1971, p.10), through creating models for ‘learning to think, for solving a problem’ (Jaar, 2006, p.76). Moreover, as someone who is explicitly political in his practices, and who has been lauded worldwide for his works since the late 1970s, Jaar is a highly appropriate artist through which to highlight the challenges inherent to attempts to make the most of art’s social and political potential. The chapters on Jaar consider, in turn, his Chilean works in the late 1970s and early 1980s, his photographic installations, and his explicitly political interventions. I argue that, while at times the work has 4 embodied a politicising dynamic, more often than not the work has remained political and thus within more traditional understandings of art and of the artist. As such, the thesis offers a richer, more holistic approach to theorising art and discussing artistic practices compared to existing scholarship and criticism, and it also enables us to develop more nuanced analyses of artworks which are presented as political and potentially transformative than has hitherto been the case. 5 Table of contents List of figures 8 Acknowledgements 10 Author’s declaration 11 Chapter 1 12 Approaches to Societal Reform 1.1. Introduction 12 1.2. Key critical approaches to art’s politicising function: Chantal Mouffe and 15 Jacques Rancière 1.2.1. Mouffe and the formation of subjectivities 16 1.2.2. Representing subjectivity through art 17 1.2.3. Approaches to hegemony 19 1.2.4. Alfredo Jaar: the artist as organic intellectual 21 1.2.5. Jacques Rancière’s perspective on emancipating the spectator 24 1.2.6. The problem of art as dissensus 25 1.2.7. The problems of addressing the unfreedoms of viewing 27 1.2.8. Rancière on Jaar’s theatre of images 29 1.2.9. Conclusion 33 1.3. The Gramscian/Benjaminite approach 34 1.3.1. The Gramscian view of culture 35 1.3.2. Benjamin and the politics of representation 35 1.4. Thesis structure 36 Chapter 2 40 Greenbergian Values of Formalism 2.1. Introduction 40 2.2. Greenberg’s influence on 20th century art criticism 42 2.3. New art/history? 47 2.4. Conclusion 54 Chapter 3 56 The Death of the Author and the Barthesian Inheritance 3.1. Introduction 56 3.2. Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ 57 3.3. Art & Language: returning an essayistic competency to art 60 3.3.1. The strategy of indexing 63 3.3.2. Enabling a wider constituency of viewers 67 3.3.3. The resilience of the allegory of the artist’s studio 69 3.4. Conclusion 72 Chapter 4 74 Enrichment through a Gramscian/Benjaminite Framework 4.1. Introduction 74 4.2. Marxist interventions in art history and theory 75 6 4.3. Why Gramsci? 84 4.3.1. Hegemony: consent and coercion 85 4.3.2. Hegemony and common sense 87 4.3.3. Good sense and the organic intellectual 88 4.3.4. Making an inventory as the starting point of reform 92 4.3.5. The war of position against taste 94 4.4. Why Benjamin? 95 4.4.1 Imaging as a political tool 97 4.4.2. Fracturing the class divisions in art 101 4.5. Conclusion 104 Chapter 5 107 Alfredo Jaar’s Chilean Work 5.1. Introduction 107 5.2. The background of American colonisation of democratic processes in Chile 108 to the early work of Alfredo Jaar 5.2.1. Years of covert American operations in Chile 109 5.2.2. Cultural colonisation: Donald Duck’s Chilean station mission 114 5.3. Evaluating Jaar’s early cultural practices 118 5.3.1. Jaar’s Chilean work, 1979-81 119 5.3.2. ‘Studies on Happiness’ 121 5.3.3. ‘Telecomunicación’ (1981), ‘Opus 1981 Andante Desesperato’ (1981), 126 ‘Antes de Partir’ (1981) 5.4. Conclusion 130 Chapter 6 132 Alfredo Jaar’s Photographic Installations 6.1. Introduction 132 6.2. Photojournalist images of suffering as documentation or distraction 133 6.2.1. Re-framing the image 141 6.2.2. ‘The Sound of Silence’ 144 6.2.3. Narrowing the frame to broaden the field 149 6.2.4. Returning the gaze 152 6.3. Conclusion 156 Chapter 7 159 Alfredo Jaar’s Public Interventions 7.1. Introduction 159 7.2. ‘The Gramsci Trilogy’ 160 7.3. ‘The Marx Lounge’ 166 7.4. An impossible place for artist and viewer 168 7.5. The level of action in social intervention 172 7.6. Education versus inclusion 179 7.7. Conclusion 185 7 Chapter 8 187 Conclusion 8.1. Summary of key arguments 187 8.2. Art’s political, rather than politicising, function 188 8.2.1. Mouffe and Rancière on art and politics 189 8.2.2. Problems concerning formalism 189 8.2.3. The potentials and limitations of the Barthesian inheritance 191 8.3. Gramsci’s and Benjamin’s contributions 191 8.4. Jaar’s political and politicising art 195 8.5. Directions for future research 197 8.6. Conclusion 199 Bibliography 200 8 List of figures Fig. 1: Sophie Ristelhueber: Israeli blockades on Palestinian road (1991) 27 Fig. 2: Alfredo Jaar: Real Pictures (1995) 30 Fig. 3: Alfredo Jaar: The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996) 31 Fig. 4: Judy Chicago: The Dinner Party (1979) 49 Fig. 5: Art & Language (Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden): Index 01, 1972 65 Fig. 6: Art & Language (Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden): 71 Index 1981 – 1982: The Studio at 3 Wesley Place Fig. 7: Dorfman & Mattelart: How To Read Donald Duck (259x179 mm, 115 72 pages of text) Fig. 8: Alfredo Jaar 1980: Happiness Survey 121 Fig. 9: Alfredo Jaar: Studies on Happiness, September 1980: Portraits of 122 happy and unhappy people Fig. 10: Alfredo Jaar: Studies on Happiness 1981 Billboard Intervention 123 Fig. 11: Belfast Women Protesting: Press cutting collection of artist (1981) 127 Fig. 12: Alfredo Jaar: Telecomunicación (1981) 127 Fig. 13: Sandanista Playing Clarinet to Fellow Fighters: Susan Meiselas (1978) 128 Fig. 14: Stills from Opus 1981 Andante Desesperato: Alfredo Jaar (1981) 128 Fig. 15: Alfredo Jaar: Antes De Partir (1981) 130 Fig. 16: Hocine (1977): The Madonna from Bentalha 136 Fig. 17: Dayanita Singh (early 1990s): Marie Twelve Years Old 136 Fig. 18: Grünewald: Isenheim Altarpiece 137 Fig. 19: Alexander Gardner (1865): Portrait of Lewis Payne 140 Fig. 20: Jaar (1994) (Untitled) Newsweek 142 Fig. 21: Jaar (1994) (Untitled) Newsweek 143 Fig. 22: Kevin Carter’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning photograph 145 Fig. 23: Jaar (1995) Real Pictures 150 9 Fig. 24: Jaar (1996) The Eyes of Gutete Emerita 153 Fig. 25: Jaar (1996) The Eyes of Gutete Emerita 153 Fig. 26: Alfredo Jaar (2004) Infinite Cell 163 Fig. 27: Alfredo Jaar (2004) Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom 164 Fig. 28: Alfredo Jaar (2005) The Ashes of Gramsci 164 Fig. 29: Alfredo Jaar (2005) The Aesthetics of Resistance 165 Fig. 30: Alfredo Jaar (2010), The Marx Lounge, Liverpool Bienniale 166 Fig. 31: Alfredo Jaar, Professor David Harvey and WHW, 12/11/2010 168 Fig.
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