“If you are an artist in Brazil, you know of at least one friend who is being tortured; if you are one in Argentina, you probably have had a neighbor who has been in jail for having long hair, or for not being ‘dressed’ properly; and if you are living in the United States, you may fear that you will be shot at, either in the universities, in your bed, or more formally in Indochina. It may seem too inappropriate, if not absurd, to get up in the morning, walk into a room, and apply dabs of paint from a little tube to a square of canvas. What can you as a young artist do that seems relevant and meaningful?”[^1]
There is a question that has become almost impossible to avoid in contemporary art practice. How does one keep producing while the world is in this state, or more fundamentally, why produce at all, especially given the progressivist connotations of the word “production.” This question, which emerges organically from an unbroken sequence of crises and presents itself as healthy criticism, in fact assumes that the artist must justify their production through some achievement. It assumes that production must be vindicated by a purpose, by an effect commensurate with the scale of the crisis, by a meaningful political contribution. Once this assumption is accepted, every artistic practice inevitably falls short, because it is assigned a task that its own structure does not permit.
One thing that makes this issue so difficult for an artist is that it is felt as several pressures at once. First, there is a social pressure that comes from the codes of the art world. Contemporary art organizes itself around particular kinds of discourse, and your relation to those discourses determines whether you are taken to be a “serious” artist and even shapes your entire “career.” Second, there is a more personal and perhaps more sincere discomfort. The sense that the art being made is “insufficient” relative to what current conditions demand often blocks free production or pushes it to attach itself to forced narratives. Thinking that continuing to work while collapse, violence and fragmentation play out in the background is a kind of complicity, being unable to handle that belief, unable to face it, and even when one faces it, being unable to produce a satisfying response, and even when one produces it, finding the response impossible to apply. And then there is a formal unease. This comes from questioning whether one’s work is genuinely in contact with the conditions of the present. Are the works operating at a remove from their conditions of production? Are they continuing through inherited forms that belong to an earlier period?
An Economy of Good Intentions
“Furthermore, as some artists have noticed, community-based art can function as a kind of ‘soft’ social engineering to defuse, rather than address, community tensions and to divert, rather than attend to, the legitimate dissatisfaction that many community groups feel in regard to the uneven distribution of existing cultural and economic resources. Additionally, according to artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, there ‘is a growing and disturbing similarity between initiatives such as community policing and [community-based] cultural programs,’ both motivated at times by a paranoiac fear of social upheaval. Which is to say, community-based art ‘on the streets,’ despite the ‘real-life’ siting, serves a disciplinary purpose just as do art museums.”[^2]
Whether in the so-called social responsibility projects of institutions sponsoring art, or in the criteria of residencies, competitions and academies that demand socially or environmentally sensitive proposals from applicants, there are now uniform frameworks that position certain “topics” as current and others as reactionary. There are also more “serious” forms of social responsibility, like biennials or contemporary art academies, and what these expect from art generally resembles a creative social-sciences practice. These institutional spaces reward “intent” and “the right signals” rather than genuine political engagement or change. The result is an economy of good intentions and representational discourse that does nothing for current crises. And those receiving these signals come from the same world.
The problem here is not that emphasis is being placed on these issues, that they are being made visible, that they are being kept on the agenda. The problem is that work organized around social legibility, while trying to confirm art as a politically serious field, does very little of what the political situation actually demands. Because such works focus on urgent and responsible subjects, criticizing them is also very difficult, since anything you say can instantly turn you into someone insensitive to the world or a reactionary aesthetic formalist.
Insufficiency
There is a belief that art is insufficient in the face of crises. This belief stems from the kind of pretending described above. But beneath this sense of insufficiency lies another, more troubled idea. For some reason, artistic practice is expected to be proportionate to the scale of the crisis. We tend to believe, that is, that a work can be “appropriate or inappropriate to the situation” the way a political action might be. Problems appear when we expect from art what we expect from politics. A political response to the climate crisis, for instance, actually operates at the scale of the problem. Our expectations might include intervention in the systems causing ecological collapse, regulation of industrial infrastructure, legislation on incentives in energy economies, and so on. At least in principle, political practice and discourse can be measured and judged against the scale of the problem they try to address. Art operates through entirely different structures. Art and politics are not rival disciplines in the same domain, with one more ambitious or more effective than the other. Measuring one by the standards appropriate to the other creates a serious confusion. Once “appropriateness” is accepted as a political criterion, art is naturally faced with an impossible task. And the effort to carry out this task naturally ends in a feeling of insufficiency or insincerity.
Formal Unease
Formal unease, on the other hand, probably touches a more productive place among these anxieties. This unease is the feeling that one’s practice does not think along with the conditions it inhabits, that it is not shaped by those conditions, a kind of anxiety about “failing to be contemporary enough.” I am not talking here about political content or about being visibly concerned with crises. What I mean is more an anxiety about searching for a practice that genuinely emerges from the conditions of today and belongs to today. I think this is a real problem, one that any art capable of being worked on should primarily concern itself with, problematic in the positive sense.
Designing for the Viewer
“The work of art… in seemingly by-passing all difficulties, attains full freedom, thus in fact nourishing the prevailing ideology. It functions as a security valve for the system, an image of freedom in the midst of general alienation and finally as a bourgeois concept supposedly beyond all criticism, natural, above and beyond all ideology.”[^3]
There is a shared pattern in how artists respond to the conditions we live in. It can be seen in activist work as much as in work that supposedly keeps itself entirely apart from political demands. This common pattern can be summarized as follows. The work’s task is to establish a proper relation between the viewer and a predetermined outcome. The outcomes vary across different kinds of art, but the expectations are very similar. In this model the work is reduced to an instrument, and its meaning is designed around an imagined moment of encounter with the viewer. Its scale, its material, its context, its formal decisions are all oriented toward this goal. This is also one of the things that makes a work didactic. Didacticism, then, should be understood as a structural property rather than a stylistic one. It is usually associated with overtly political or educational work, with protest banners, agitation, and art carrying legible messages. But fundamentally it is a property not of content or style, but of the relation between the work and its predetermined outcome. A large-scale photograph of a coral reef, taken by a photographer who has spent years at sea, processed with great craft and exhibited in a serious institutional context, can be completely didactic in structural terms even though it carries no overt message and contains no political demand. The image has been arranged to elicit the right melancholy in the viewer, to produce the emotional response appropriate to ecological loss. That response has been desired and designed. The viewer is being directed toward a destination the work selected before they arrived. Whether the means are aesthetically subtle or crude, whether the predetermined outcome is political, emotional or purely sensorial, the structure is the same.
This same structure appears even in art that keeps itself away from current political demands, that engages with abstract visual forms, that foregrounds an experience of immersion or aesthetic contemplation. The artist has decided in advance that what the viewer needs is relief, or aesthetic feelings that evoke the sublime, and has organized the materials to deliver that relief efficiently.
This is why topics like “the artist’s aim” and “the artist’s intention” never go out of fashion in exhibition talks. What did the artist intend, and how successful were they? How well do their discourse and their actions align? With what skill have they used materials to produce those effects and meanings?
Gesturing, Not Stating
One popular method for escaping the didactic and the pressure of external expectations is to emphasize the slipperiness of meaning. “Good art” is ambiguous, open-ended, resistant to conclusion, inviting the viewer to produce meaning rather than receive it. Art is sometimes described as having a unique capacity, beyond other forms, to produce unresolved meanings and to leave questions genuinely open. It is even said that one of the most important features distinguishing art from other fields is this capacity for plural meaning. First of all, this is an exaggerated claim. An everyday conversation can also refuse to reach a conclusion, resist interpretation, leave something genuinely undecided. The capacity for unresolvedness is not specific to art.
What is specific to art, or more precisely to the institutional and social space art occupies, is that ambiguity or non-resolution registers as a deliberate act rather than a failure. When a documentary in the traditional sense refuses to reach a conclusion, it is generally read as an unfinished, failed work. When a contemporary artwork refuses to reach a conclusion, that refusal is read as doing something, as the artist taking up a position. The work is therefore far more instrumental than it appears.
Today ambiguity also produces a kind of autonomy that consistently functions to absolve works from accountability to anything outside themselves, and in that sense it looks positive. If meaning is genuinely multiple and unresolved, if the work’s value lies in its resistance to conclusion, then there is no external standard against which the work could fail. The plurality of meaning looks like intellectual maturity, like the responsible acceptance of complexity, but it also insulates the practice from any genuine external demand.
This may be one of the sources of formal unease. A practice that feels unable to make real contact with today’s conditions may feel that way precisely because of this ambiguity. A zone of indeterminacy tested by nothing certainly opens up potential spaces for creativity, but it is worth asking whether something this formulaic and this tactical actually produces indeterminacy in any real sense.
The Outside
A practice organized around any predetermined outcome, including deliberate ambiguity, has already decided in advance what the work will produce. In this kind of planned targeting, the outside cannot permeate the inside. Constraints that strain the frame of the practice are few, and the work neither produces outcomes the artist did not foresee nor raises demands that would require earlier outcomes to change. However much labor it has cost and however serious it looks, the practice keeps confirming what it already knew.
What matters is whether there is a real outside within the practice, whether something that cannot be reduced to the artist’s categories, that is not obliged to fit their frame, that operates by its own logic, actually transforms the practice. This outside need not be thought of as a place, a war zone, say, in the way that war photography imagines it. It can also be a process or context in which the work is made and operates. It can be a real moment of encounter with another actor, an unpredictable flow of data within an apparently closed system, a leak, a crack, a collapse, or the practice confronting its own history. What matters is the capacity of the uncalculated to permeate the practice, to change it, to refute the artist’s previous decisions.
This contact requires forces that operate independently and follow their own logic, and the practice must be open to that independence, not so closed that it can no longer fail on its own terms. It must be able to show that what was assumed in advance is wrong, to expose the places where the artist’s frame falls short, and instead of merely processing what it encounters, to genuinely change the practice.
This openness is not a psychological quality. It comes from the structure of the relation the practice is in, not from the person. It has nothing to do with how honest, how humble, or how skeptical the artist is. It has to do with the real independence of what the practice is in contact with.
This should also not be confused with leaving meaning open because that is a decision by the artist, and therefore something that remains under the artist’s control. What is described here is the intervention of conditions, which operates independently of whether the artist wants it or not. It is also not trial and error where the target is fixed, only the method changes. Here the targets themselves can change, and are forced to change.
Contact of this kind promises nothing about what the work will do in the world. A practice in real contact with the outside can still produce weak, ineffective works that reach no one. It may not enter art history, since its target is not the legitimacy criteria of the art world. It does not have the insulation provided by the alibi of ambiguity, because it has a mechanism by which it can be tested against specific conditions that have their own logic, their own timing, and that can produce outcomes the artist did not foresee. For this reason, a practice in contact with the outside does not answer the question of how to make art in today’s world, and cannot answer it.