Interventions and provocations introduction (1998)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 9 September 2011
This text was previously published as an introduction in the book Interventions and Provocations: Conversations on Art, Culture, and Resistance published by the State University of New York Press, May 1998.
Introduction
Although the discourse on contemporary art has been dominated in the 1980s and ’90s by Postmodern pastiche and a sometimes facile critique of consumerism, throughout the past two decades there have been a number of artists who have been engaged in creating a form of art that exhibits a Postmodern skepticism about transcendence but nevertheless seeks to engage critically and creatively with society and history. These artists have sought to forge new relations among art, everyday life, and the public sphere. Their work is not related in terms of style, gallery affiliations, regional groupings, or promotional groupings created by the art press. They are instead related to one another by the critical approach they take toward social norms, and by their resistance to centralized cultural hegemony. This alternative to the art market and to the culture of passive consumption is characterized by the artists’ interventions in and challenges to everyday social reality
The interventionist and provocationist artists participate in a new invigoration of public space and civic discourse (sometimes with results far beyond the usually narrow borders of the art world, such as in the public debates over the works of Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, and Tim Miller, all of whose voices can be heard in the conversations collected in this volume). Whether these artists’ site of engagement is the gallery or the street, they participate in the creation of a new form of art that is conceptual rather than object-oriented; unlike classic conceptual art, however their work attempts to influence a public beyond the galleries and art magazines— but at the same time, unlike overtly political art, their work avoids both ideology and any belief in utopian, transcendental goals. Whether their work is performance, installation, text, painting, sculpture, film, or the kind of public collaboration that Arlene Raven has called "art in the public interest", these artists are involved in the creation of a new form of art that is both public and skeptical.
That is to say, the political interventions and social provocations exemplified by the artists in this collection demonstrate an attitude toward art and form that can be characterized as "tactical", adopting a term used by Michel de Certeau, or "postutopian", a term used by Boris Groys to describe the unofficial art of the late Soviet Union. These artists have lost the early twentieth century’s faith in radical transformations and transcendental ideals. They have not abandoned the ambition of twentieth-century artists to engage with the social realm, but they are much more likely to see the social impact of their work as an intervention into the network of normal social relations or a provocation to normative social values.
The relation to daily life staked out by these artists owes a great deal to Bertolt Brecht and Viktor Shklovsky for the idea that art produces an alienation or estrangement that interrupts the flow of normal, normative, socialized experience. But it is perhaps not coincidental that these artists began to appear during a revival of interest in Mikhail Bakhtin, the Soviet critic whose notions of answerability, dialogism, and the carnivalesque suggest that art must be engaged with daily life, but also that art’s transfiguration of an audience’s experience will be a momentary, liminal experience rather than a revolutionary transformation.
The practice of tactical artists can be categorized as feminist, political, performative, or even "puerile", to borrow a term from Peter Schjeldahl’s Village Voice columns. But unlike artists intent on realizing an essential feminine, a political truth, or a return of the repressed desires of childhood, postutopian artists use tactics like provocation in the service of critical interventions in social discourse. For example, Nayland Blake’s soft sculpture installations engage in a breadth of dialogue with daily life that is beyond Mike Kelley’s intentions in the stuffed animal installations and other "puerile" works for which the latter artist is famous. Blake brings both his own life and his political engagement into his work in ways that Kelley does not, in spite of the power of Kelley’s aesthetic explorations of repression, representation, and the art world itself. Blake’s work derives its power from the autobiographical exploration, political commitment, and depth of both vision and humor that the artist exhibits throughout all phases of his work.
Interventions and provocations - introduction: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
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