i Ethics of Contemporary Art This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 ii ii This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 iii Ethics of Contemporary Art In the Shadow of Transgression Theo Reeves-Evison This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 iv BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Theo Reeves-Evison, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Damián Ortega, Borromeo’s Knots 4, 2011, Cast concrete, 23 5/8 x 29 1/2 x 39 3/8 in. (60 x 75 x 100 cm) © Damián Ortega. Photo © Stephen White, Courtesy White Cube. 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Identifiers: LCCN 2020035674 (print) | LCCN 2020035675 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501339905 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501339912 (epub) | ISBN 9781501339936 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Art and morals. | Art–Moral and ethical aspects. | Art and society–History–20th century. | Art and society–History–21st century. Classification: LCC N72.E8 R44 2020 (print) | LCC N72.E8 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035674 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035675 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3990-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3993-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-3991-2 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 v For Ada This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 vi vi This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 vii Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 Empty ethics, resurgent morality 3 Lacan and Guattari: Diagnosis and production 5 Critical cultures of transgression 9 Integrating transgression 12 27 1 Four snapshots of transgression Snapshot 1: The dialectics of descent 27 Snapshot 2: The politics of ecstasy 32 Snapshot 3: The inversion of values 38 Snapshot 4: The disorientation of morality 45 A postface to transgression 49 Princely pursuits 50 Just say yes 54 As if on wheels 55 69 2 Magic models The puppet master 74 Breaks and continuities 77 Intergenerational games 85 Fragments of reality 91 105 3 Knots and partial enunciators Psychosis in a swarm 107 Borromean Joyce 111 A Guattarian graft 119 ‘Language leaks all over the place’ 120 Existential pragmatics and the production of subjectivity 128 Aesthetics everywhere 133 This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 viii viii Contents 145 4 Repair Defining repair 149 Space-time polyphony 151 Sinthomatic repairs 156 Between change and continuity 159 Holding things together 161 167 5 Experiments with truth From intention to effect 168 Lying to liars 171 Intimate percussion 175 Talking back 179 Knot not true 181 Conclusion 191 Bibliography 197 Index 213 This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 ix Figures 1.1 Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl and Adolf Frohner, Die Blutorgel/The Blood Organ (1962) 28 34 1.2 Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy (1964) 39 1.3 Thrust in Me (1985), dir. by Richard Kern and Nick Zedd 39 1.4 Thrust in Me (1985), dir. by Richard Kern and Nick Zedd 70 2.1 Artur Żmijewski, Repetition (2005) 72 2.2 Artur Żmijewski, Them (2007) 112 3.1 Three-Ring Borromean Chain 114 3.2 Unlinked Three-Ring Chain 117 3.3 Unlinked Three-Ring Chain with Repair 123 3.4 The Role of the Signifier in the Institution 126 3.5 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Conflicted Phonemes (2013) 4.1 Paul Landowski, Monument to the Dead of Algiers, or ‘Le Pavois’ (1928) 146 147 4.2 M’hamed Issiakhem, Monument to the Martyrs (1962) 4.3 Kader Attia, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (2012) 151 152 4.4 Kader Attia, Open Your Eyes (2010) 172 5.1 Pilvi Takala, The Trainee (2008) 5.2 Dora Garcia, Heartbeaters (2005) 179 This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 x Acknowledgements Books come to be finished for a variety of reasons. Sometimes a train of thought reaches a natural stopping point, sometimes a new project beckons and some- times contractual obligations force the author’s hand. The first iteration of this book was finished in the run-up to my daughter’s birth, and for this gentle imperative I thank her. Much of the research for Ethics of Contemporary Art was conducted at Goldsmiths College under the supervision of Matthew Fuller and Simon O’ Sullivan, who provided advice with patience and generosity. Conversations with various people I met and spoke with at Goldsmiths, as well as numerous conferences, reading groups and seminars, reminded me that research is always to some extent a collaborative enterprise. Institutional and professional support has been gratefully received from Birmingham City University, who eased my teaching load towards the end of the project. My colleagues within the School of Art, in particular John Wigley, Jenny Wright, Lisa Metherell and Anthony Downey, have offered invaluable support in the early stages of my academic career, and collaborative work with Jon K. Shaw greatly sharpened my thoughts about fiction. Many of the chapters of this book have been considerably enriched by conversations with artists, especially Dora García, Kader Attia and Pilvi Takala, who each contributed invaluable clarifications to my writing about their work. I’m grateful to Margaret Michniewicz at Bloomsbury Academic for her initial enthusiasm for the book, to April Peake and Barbara Cohen Bastos for helping bring the project to completion, and to Ilavarasi Selvaraj for her work on copy-editing. Finally, I express my gratitude to Maggie Reeves and Barrie Evison for support that began when this book was little more than a loose set of intuitions and continued well after these thoughts found their way onto the page. The first few paragraphs of Chapter 4 appear in the introduction of a special issue of the journal Third Text that I co-edited with Mark Rainey in 2018. I am grateful to Mark and Taylor & Francis for their permission to reprint this material. This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 xi Acknowledgements xi Chapter 5 is a reworked version of an article I published in 2015 under the title ‘Rogues, Rumours and Giants: Some Examples of Deception and Fabulation in Contemporary Art’ in the journal Parallax. Taylor & Francis deserve another mention here, as does Agnieszka Jasnowska for her editorial input. This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 xii xii This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 1 Introduction Scatological shock-merchants, irresponsible social workers, conflict-zone tourists: discussions of the ethics of contemporary art often gravitate towards actions that would otherwise be frowned upon in any other field of activity. At their centre stands the figure of the artist, whose personality and intentions often serve as an ethical measure of the work. This book operates on the basis of a different premise: that the artwork itself has an ethical content, and looking at this content more closely can tell us about how we are constituted as ethical subjects. More than simply condensations of an artist’s own moral or ethical disposition, artworks fun- damentally channel, express and help shape the attitudes at play in the social field. And these attitudes, in turn, shape us. Shifting the emphasis away from an artist’s intentions and onto the ethical force their work contains is merely the first step on the path towards a larger shift in how the ethics of contemporary art can be thought differently. This second shift is announced in the subtitle of this book: In the Shadow of Transgression. It is now over thirty years since Hal Foster called time on transgressive strat- egies in visual art,1 and yet conversations on the subject remain caught in the wake of this influential critical concept. While the word ‘transgression’ itself may have receded into the background in more recent years, survey books on contemporary art and ethics nevertheless remain preoccupied with artworks that court controversy, rather than ameliorate social problems or promote new values.2 One of the key arguments of this book is that ethics can be more than a warning light that periodically flickers on when an artwork crosses a moral boundary, visible or otherwise.