Andrea Bowers / Daniel Joseph Martinez
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EvEry thing is Pol itical andrea Bowers / Daniel Joseph Martinez FOCA 2 everything is political BEtween a rock anD a harD PlacE: FroM raDical art to raDical OptiMisM lucía sanromán 4 everything is political if a rock is thrown into a pond and no one observes its shockwaves, does it still make an impact? This play on the Platonic metaphor comes to mind when considering Andrea Bowers and Daniel Joseph Martinez’s exhibition for the Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Martinez has used a similar image to describe the conceptual underpinnings of their shared exhibition: His sculpture of a taxidermied hare, eviscerated and stuffed with dynamite sticks, hangs from the ceiling of the Fellows’ Chinatown gallery like a thrown rock caught suspended in mid-air in the moment just before it hits its target. Encircling the corpse is a grouping of 8 plastic tables lined with 15 metal chairs—this is the furniture that typically populates the space, which also functions as the office for the 6 everything is political organization and frequently hosts board meetings, juries, and panels. Andrea Bowers, whose laborious, handcrafted work often appropriates domestic or functional objects, has applied the name of a late contemporary artist to the back of each folding chair; under each seat she has pasted the artist’s obituary—an honor …art objects roll that lists a crucial group of activist artists who have influenced her practice. Interlaced with the space’s utilitarian furnishings, the intervention created by these works discloses the function of the room and stages a generative opposition not just to the space, but between the works themselves: Martinez’ dead hare is a can be thE bomb, a projectile, an incendiary device meant to provoke a chain reaction that begins at the heart of the gallery/board room. Bowers’ textual piece does not contain the force of an explosion but instead expands and tempers its ripple effect with the intimate mindfulness of her memorial. vEssEls anD The contrasting artworks, dense with odd associations and meanings, intensify the viewer’s awareness of the institutional framework within which this exhibition takes place: each of the artists is a recipient of a 2010 FOCAFellowship, which includes a grant, the exhibition, and this catalog. Paradoxically, the end result is less an institutional critique—of the part played by a non-profit such as FOCA signiFiErs when it comes to modes of exhibition, support, and patronage in contemporary art—and more a calling into question of the possibility for contemporary art practice to effect change while remaining embedded, above all else, in a widespread system of production and distribution committed to commodity culture and the oF valuation and consumption of art objects. Andrea Bowers and Daniel Joseph Martinez are political artists. Their practices are fundamentally different, yet they share an insistent belief in art as a detonator of various forms of agency, social engagement, and political action. Although their awarEnEss, related artworks for this exhibition allude to the historical avant-garde and its pedagogical transmission, as well as to the generative and destructive capacities inherent in making, these works also ask vital new questions: Is it still possible to speak of radical art practice today? Does the figure of the political artist continue to have relevance after an era in which many of the doomsday scenarios described ideas, anD by postmodernism have not only come about, but even worse, superseded the diagnosis? What is art good for, anyway, if it does not engender change? The word “radical” derives from the notion of a root or origin; the term “radical practice” is closely associated with Herbert Marcuse’s writings on Marxist EvEn lovE. 8 everything is political revolutionary politics, ethics, and art. Marcuse’s work analyzes art in the context of the forces of domination and resistance that governed late industrial society. Under his formulation, art generates the possibility of liberation and the what is art transformation of a new subjectivity, disenfranchised from alienation and repression, through play, the eroticized self, and aesthetics. In his last major work, the aesthetic Dimension: toward a critique of Marxist aesthetics, Marcuse goes one step further, positing art—whether object-based or ephemeral—as independent gooD For, from social reality, affording art a privileged position in the structuring of a transcendent utopian order. Today, “radical art practice” continues to connote resistance to commodification and often explicitly sets conceptual or time-based performance and dialogical art forms in direct opposition to those founded on the aesthetics of the object. This Manichean formulation of action and discourse versus anyway, art object is a response to the seemingly untroubled manner in which physical objects are absorbed into the art market. Yet late capitalism co-opts not only that which it can consume: As post-structuralism has theorized, capitalism does not stop at the physical world, but colonizes all aspects of the self—our bodies, our iF it desires, and our imaginations—demarcating as surely as a barrier the limits of autonomy. The prim separation between matter and ideas that lies at the heart of the object versus action argument, although appropriate given the overriding influence of the art market, does not by itself ensure that the deleterious effects of a stultifying society will be contained. As we all know, anything can be traded— DoEs particularly time, which is the foundation of the labor economy. Marcuse’s concept leaves itself open to argument. Art theorists who privilege social exchange and dialogue over the primacy of the formal aesthetic experience see Marcuse’s late theories as a recasting of Platonic ideas. Yet a return to the not origins of the idea of a radical practice provides useful guideposts with which to understand Bowers and Martinez’s intervention into FOCA’s space and their commitment to multi-layered art practices that critique, reclaim, and reformulate the current prevalent discourse. EngEnDEr Caught between a rock and a hard place, contemporary art criticism has essentialized the critique of the object into dualistic polemical categories: formalist practice on one end of the spectrum, and socially engaged public practice on the other. Political art may address a multiplicity of formal and aesthetic approaches ranging between changE? these poles, yet it continues to be haunted by the representational styles and 10 everything is political political agendas of fascism. Often easily dismissed as pamphleteering and poet Hakim Bey as “poetic terrorism,” a term that the artist borrows to describe subordinated to ideology—not seen as properly effective as art because of its his own practice. For Bey, liberation and transcendence are also the point: “Art ties to social agendas—political art is, on the other hand, frequently viewed as can have the power of a terrorist act, its magical potency—but toward life instead ineffective and capricious—too caught up in the symbolic realm to cause real of death. I mean that a really effective poiesis should act powerfully on emotion social change in the world. These, by now, old arguments, which came of age in and perception, causing an aesthetic shock as powerful as terror but aimed at the 1980s and 1990s, nevertheless still permeate the discussion structuring an catharsis or even satori, the aha! moment, the breakthrough into transcendence. essentially tautological line of reasoning that, under the guise of art theory and Liberation from the image proceeds through the image.”2 criticism, seems to leave no escape other than a fatalistic acceptance of the status In redemption of the Flesh: it’s just a little headache, it’s just a little bruise; the quo. The Marcusean definition of radical practice, however, allows us to move politics of the future as urgent as the blue sky (2008), a sculptural work that is beyond these arguments; artists engaging in “radical practice” ought to be prepared related to the FOCA piece, a taxidermied hare is grafted with an animatronics to question the very parameters of the term. reproduction of the artist’s own arm onto an automatic painting machine. The Martinez declined to engage in an email conversation with other prominent artists cyborgean creature shoots fake blood onto a white gallery wall like a relentless, on the subject of political art, organized by art in america in 2008. Instead, he mechanized Pollock for the new millennium. The reading of the sculpture, however, contributed a statement that denied the validity of the binary terms used to cannot be linear: it is about Abex aesthetics and the mechanized self; it is about categorize political art practice—profit versus non-profit, object versus non-object. the fear of the sublime and the beauty of deterministic logic; it is about shock and These exist, he wrote, “in a state of permanent ambiguity that reflects a condition despair; it is about war and sacrifice; it is also about anger. redemption of the Flesh of the culture’s inability to render a purpose beyond the accumulation of wealth does not presuppose a difference between that which is political (that which and fame, and the complete instrumentalization of art and artists.”1 Martinez’s belongs to the realm of society and its collective structuring of community) and critique, directed at artists first, and collectors and art institutions next, goes a that which is aesthetic (the body of accepted knowledge that defines and describes step further to reject a progressive, ameliorative, and ultimately utilitarian analysis what comes before the senses). The work seeks to intervene into the political of the purpose of art in society. He argues in favor of the repositioning of art as a structure of the commons in the same manner that it enters into a conversation field of knowledge and experience that is charged with the possibility of generating with art and its history, both recent and distant.