Collaboration, Spacing and the Aesthetic Share Francesco Ventrella

The aesthetic goes beyond knowledge or prescription, to touch you where you live, in your body, with others.1

Conflict among different interpretations represents the material conditions of historical truth. Nevertheless, what remains in a story, is usually a record of actions that have been undertaken, the re-telling of words that have been spoken and possibly written down, but only images are received, perceived and represented. Pasolini once wrote: ‘we represent ourselves, we perform ourselves. Human reality is this double representation in which we are at once actors and spectators’.2 In a story, images are presented and represented by the same processes that previously produced them and, therefore, there can be no truth about images, there can only be a conflict of images. Images are as far as they are exchanged. Yet images, considered on a political level, do not represent the argument of this essay, but what is arguable. The disagreement between two individuals uttering the same word is primarily confronted on the level of sound. Say ‘art’. The word uttered might be the same, but it sounds different to each of them. The presence or absence of art deploys the sensible exhibition of that common good, whose commonality is defined only insofar as two or many interlocutors can show and tell – i.e. disagree – about it. As Jacques Rancière has emphasised in many of his studies, this scenario is always, already, political.3 That is why the question of collaboration in contemporary art is crucial to shed light onto the politics of aesthetics involved in the exchange of representations, by producing a critique of what is allowed or forbidden to the sight, beyond the fictional divide between public and private. Thus, the field of vision becomes the arena of political intervention, where images are signifiers conveying the exchange and conflict of worldviews, cultural perspectives and political imageries.

Every form of collaboration is a project that partakes in the exchange of images: an intervention in the aesthetic economy of visual capital. This does not mean, however, that collaboration belongs only to contemporary art practices. On the contrary, it is important to stress that collaboration mainly occurs in all fields of human experience dealing with, for example, the visual recognisability of interpersonal relations or the material conditions of collective labour. Above all, collaboration presupposes an individual’s choice as to whether or not he or she will collaborate in a collective enterprise. Perhaps what is more interesting about collaborative practices within the field of contemporary art is that they highlight the lack of ownership of those images that are produced collaboratively, thus leading to a remodulation of the aesthetic share within those fields which have been traditionally operated by managers of aesthetic

1 Brian Holmes, ‘The Oppositional Device, or Taking Matters into Whose Hands?’ in Taking the Matter into Common Hands, eds., Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson, (London: Black Dogs Publishing, 2007), p. 38. 2 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo Eretico, (Milan: Garzanti, 1972), pp. 209-210. It should be highlighted to the English reader here that Pasolini’s original phrase ‘noi ci rappresentiamo’ is supported by the fact that the verb rappresentare in Italian means both to represent and to perform, or enact. Thus representation occurs already, and always, in the political dimension, which can furthermore be emphasised if we consider the effects of the word representation in politics. In this essay Pasolini is talking about realism and politics, by thinking at the relation of image and language in cinema, and the locus in which this occurs: both in the film and before the film. 3 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

administration: art’s institutions such as art history, criticism, museums, media, project spaces, art collecting, funding boards, and so on.4

By reframing the passage from the narrow space left by the death of the author to a wider field opened by aesthetic collectivisation, the collaborative project, Showing: Expectations, contributed to the building of a critique of those institutional paradigms that define cultural management and represent the material conditions of existence for many cultural practitioners nowadays. Showing: Expectations produced a pragmatic response that took do-it-yourself practices seriously and engaged with the diffusion of images as memories of a collective experience, by stressing the questions of display, before the essence of the art object. That is why probably we should say that the final outcome of Showing: Expectations was not a group show, but a collective exhibition.5 This shift (intrinsic to the development of the project) does not only occur at an organisational level, but also in the different aesthetic premises that Leonor da Silva and Sue Wilks put at stake, which are part of a larger discussion about artists and collaboration both inside and outside of the art world and educational systems. Artists might be committed, but what does it mean to make (socially) engaged art? Shouldn’t commitment account for the ways in which different regimes of identification can produce different forms of community, rather than ending up as a political claim? ‘A “committed” work of art is always made as a kind of combination between objective politics that are inscribed in the field of possibility for writing, objective politics that are inscribed as plastic or narrative possibilities [...]. This means that there is no criterion for establishing a correspondence between aesthetic virtue and political virtue. There are only choices’.6

Thus, following Rancière, I would like to ask: What happens when an artist’s intention is replaced by artistic choice? Does this choice bring any awareness to the ways in which images are perceived and received insofar as they are exchanged? Answering these questions involves consideration of how looking at images, and exchanging them, is probably more integral to the politics of aesthetics, than debates about art, non-art, folk, handcrafts, and so on. It is, therefore, important to take this matter seriously, by unravelling what probably now seems to be only axiomatic: aesthetics cannot be the same after collaborative practices have started to ‘take the matter into common hands’.7 The aim of my contribution will be to emphasise how conditions for the creation of artistic forms pass through a consideration, and renegotiation of the aesthetic share, relevant to what Jacques Rancière defined as partage du sensible: ‘the implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which they are inscribed’.8 Rethinking the aesthetic relation

Em, yeah. Well this is one of our life moments in my family. We have uhm, a big old glass vase in our cupboard, an’ every time we have a celebration, (going right back from my husband an’ I graduated together), we’ve always had a bottle of champagne, and we put a cork in there, so it, but we don’t label them, so we never know which is which, but we’ve

4 Collaboration has not only entered art practices in recent years, but in this case I am considering a recent debate that is mainly concerned with collaborative practices that arose in the early 1990s. See Collective Creativity, eds., René Block and Angelica Nollert, (Kassel: Kunsthalle Fredericianum, 2005). 5 I have to thank Maria Lind for having drawn my attention to this small, but crucial language difference, which doesn’t apply to my native Italian language, for instance. See Personal Protocols and Other Preferences. A Collective Exhibition with Works by Michael Beutler, Esra Ersen, and Kristine Roepstorff, CCS Bard Galleries, June 14 - September 7, 2008. Curated by Maria Lind. 6 Jacqus Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Grabriele Rockhill, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 60. 7 Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson eds., Ibid, pp. 7-14. 8 Jacques Rancière, Ibid, p. 85.

just got this big list, big thing of corks, it’s got all sorts of memories, and we’ve got the children being born, finding out we were pregnant, gettin’ engaged, getting married… Everything that… ev, even when people die we have a celebration for their life, an’, an’ we have a cork in there for them as well, so it’s… a little moment in time.9

1. If Showing: Expectations had been one of the many Local Authority schemes for spreading cultural awareness and improving people’s everyday lives through the installation of an art exhibition in some kind of social centre, I think it would be better that I should remove my hands from the computer keyboard and use them for building something substantially more effective than a critical text. 2. If Sue Wilks and Leonor da Silva had thought that my contribution to the Showing: Expectations project would result in a text that sought to establish whether this project was art or non-art, I am sure they would not have invited me to write about the project.

Working against the grain of these two radical premises is a precondition for my showing how the institutional administration of aesthetics in socially engaged art practices has mitigated the conflict of representation(s) and thus produced, as a side effect, the very divide by means of which aesthetic conflict has been transformed into social conflict. The problem, for me, lies in the fictional divide between public and private which has been crucial to the bias of public art’s discourses and that I think is still powerful in the language of socially engaged projects.10 Therefore, the positive aspects of this conflict of representation(s) will continue to be considered a danger until we cease to overstep the divide between public and private which belongs to the critical premises of public art and that is still a powerful way of defining participatory art practices. This is important because such definitions represent the formal flow of cultural management concerned with widening participation schemes.

Showing: Expectations was an experience that by virtue exceeds the boundaries of art criticism, and perhaps also the binding of this book. Thus, my aim is not to offer a critical analysis of what happened, but rather to take some examples and to move beyond the two edges: of the artist as social worker and the critic as aesthetic administrator, because both belong to the neo-populist biases of cultural management (which is concerned with widening participation) that this text attempts to critique.11 I would like to show that there is another way in which we can talk about everyday objects that have been displayed in a project space so that they might foster participation and critical discussion, a way that does not reductively define the everyday objects on show to being folk art in an art gallery but that rather redirects attention to issues relating to display and aesthetics.12

9 Sam O’Brien, A Life Moment, available online http://www.showingexpectations.co.uk/sam/index.shtml Accessed 4 November 2008. 10 The issue of the public/private divide has been extensively analysed in Gramsci’s Prison Notesbooks in relation to the construction of a hegemonic culture. More recently Gayatri Spivak considered how this divide forestalls the expression of the subaltern’s speech, which belongs to the critique of postcolonial reason. Louis Althusser made a comparison between the way Repressive State Apparatuses are exerting their power in the public domain, while Ideological State Apparatuses, such as churches, family, education, media, etc. can operate, or better are constituent parts of the private domain. Drawing his arguments from Gramsci he wrote, ‘[T]he distinction between the private and the public is a distinction internal to the bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its “authority”’. Louis Althusser, On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), p. 19. 11 See Brian Holmes, “‘We are the Media’: The Dream of the Transnational-Popular”, in The Populism Reader, eds., Lars Bang Larsen, Cristina Ricupero, Nicolaus Schafhausen, (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2005), pp. 19-24. 12 I am presenting this as an aesthetic issue once again, by asking what is aesthetics? On the one hand Showing: Expectations is aesthetically close to Jeremy Deller’s Folk Archive, which means that images recording the experience may seem similar. But it is precisely by acknowledging the difference between aesthetic form and aesthetic sharing that one can understand the different currency that aesthetics have for Showing: Expectations. Deller’s main aim in Folk Archive was to

The issues that I am trying to raise here are coextensive with Maria Lind’s distinction between participation, cooperation, and collaboration. Participation is usually associated with a particular context whereby participants take part in a project whose rules and patterns have been created by someone else. Therefore, individual initiative is shaped by cooperation, which (although it emphasises forms of working together that are mutually beneficial) is dependent upon and derivative of an original plan. Collaboration, instead, suggests ‘an open-ended concept, which in principle encompasses all the others. Collaboration becomes an umbrella term for the diverse working methods that require more than one participant’.13 Elsewhere Lind refers to the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom, who offers a blunter but effective definition: ‘the motivation to collaborate is that it has to result in something that would be otherwise not take place; it simply has to make possible that which is otherwise impossible’.14 But together with collaborative projects and their final forms, there are other forms of exchange and sharing taking place every time the matter of one project is passed from one hand to another. Leonor da Silva and Sue Wilks have identified that one of the problems of the widening participation scheme was the conveyance of people from the spaces of their community to spaces of knowledge.15 The spatial structure here is extremely important, because what is at stake is the reinforcement of the divide between the assumed private space of the individual and the supposedly public sphere of knowledge. Furthermore, this very divide also conveys the impossibility of imagining a collective autonomy for the construction of communities of knowledge, whereby an experimental public sphere of multiple and situated participants, as called for by Brian Holmes, ‘may be able to imagine, and ultimately even institute, alternatives to the dangerous reduction of any concern for our collective destinies in the world’.16 Sam O’Brien’s contribution to Showing: Expectations was simply a cork (Fig. 01). It was laid down on the floor and indicated by a yellow arrow drawn in chalk. Since there was this arrow pointing at the cork, any spectator familiar with the rituals of contemporary art would easily recognise a certain semiotic around the object: it is displayed in a gallery space, its presence is stressed by an icon directing the beholder’s gaze, and the staging is meant to give the pretence of nonchalance, while it is actually concealing an aesthetic concern. But whose aesthetic concern? As I have suggested already, how can collaborative practices hinge around artistic decision rather than the artist’s intent?

suggest ‘how popular art may have developed in light of recent social, technological and cultural changes’. Therefore Deller is more concerned with the way an archive records and stores some images, while da Silva and Wilks are instead concerned with understanding how an archive puts images (and imageries) in motion. Folk Archive is not about how gazes can be exchanged. It was shown at the Tate Modern, but none of the folk artists took part in the display management of the archive Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane produced and selected. Images might look the same to the assumptions of the cultivated viewer but their organic matter is constitutively different, because the way they are exchanged is radically different. See the Preface in Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Folk Archive. Contemporary Popular Art from the UK (London: Book Works, 2005), p. 1. 13 Maria Lind, ‘The Collaborative Turn’, in Taking the Matter […], op. cit., p. 17. 14 Eadem, p. 29. 15 It doesn’t matter whether these spaces of knowledge are considered the museum or educational institutions like the school or the university. Conveyance seems to be the structural movement of something that, according somebody else, should be widened. 16 See Brian Holmes, “Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society”, in Third Text, vol. 18, 6 November 2004, p. 555.

Fig. 01 Cork, contributed by Sam O’Brien and curated by Linda

I am discussing Sam O’Brien’s cork because I find that it stresses a peculiar aspect, which has been at stake throughout the entire process of organising Showing: Expectations. That is, the idea of curation as care. In fact, the arrow, as a dispositif for the display of the cork was not Sam’s decision, but was the outcome of a bilateral choice made together with Linda, another participant in the project. This was the only rule that Leonor da Silva and Sue Wilks inscribed into the fabric of Showing: Expectations… that participants should curate each others contributions, but not their own. All other aspects of the project were generated in an environment of ongoing conflict and negotiation, sometimes empowered and at other times limited by the very architectural space that was situating the event.17 In this specific case, it became clear that while Sam was still the formal owner of the cork, its aesthetic relation to the other participants’ and/as the audience, together with the story attached to it, found its raison d’être only when it was shared with other people. Whether this can be taken as a critique of the art object as commodity fetishism is not as important as reflecting on the display in which this act of giving was framed. The art’s space (whatever gallery, museum, project space or creative platform it is) enhances the echoing (probably like a megaphone, or the internet for the indymedia community) of a story that is never concluded, because it exists only in the telling and retelling of the storytellers. But is there anything else beyond the staging of the exchange that took place in a particular artistic environment? Sunday painters and the artistic mob Among other images from the collective exhibition, I took the cork as an example because (together with the arrow) it performs the act of pointing as the basic grammar of aesthetic curiosity. John Baldessari’s The Commissioned Paintings (1969-70) was a series of paintings documenting some objects that the artist and a friend photographed during a walk through town in Los Angeles. Baldessari asked his companion to point at an object while Baldessari took a Polaroid picture of the performative act. Afterwards, he asked some Sunday painters with whom he randomly got in touch by visiting flea markets or handicraft exhibitions, to reproduce the photographs through painting. Each artist was asked to apply their own particular technique using acrylics or oil paints. The handcrafted artworks bore the name of each painter on the white banner at the bottom

17 Carol Duncan has wittingly argued about the function of museums in Western culture that a row of columns, a porch and a staircase are not the indexical features of its institution, which should rather been recognised in the frame of a discursively constructed function of spectatorship. See Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. Inside Public Art Museum, (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

of the Polaroid framing: ‘A painting by Dante Guido’, ‘A painting by Patrick X. Nidorf O.S.A.’, ‘A painting by Nancy Conger’, and so on.

To what extent the participation of Sunday painters were involved with the realisation of Baldessari’s work can perhaps be discussed in terms of collective autonomy. Baldessari presented this conceptual operation as a critique of Greenberg’s statement that ‘all conceptual art is just pointing at things’. Yet, like a choreographer, the artist leads the action of the performer/painter, without letting his hand leave any mark on the surface.18 But despite the death of the author, the ownership of the work remains attributed to the artist alone (Baldessari’s dead hand?) that is still at work in the memory of art history. As a collaborative work, it represents the autonomy of the artist alone and does not collectivise the intellectual labour invested in the production of the work.19 Baldessari is using the Sunday painters to negotiate his own autonomy within the art institution, but he is not organic to the Sunday painters, to recall a Gramscian idea about the intellectual. Therefore, Baldessari’s The Commissioned Paintings ended up by representing the Sunday painters as an artistic mob opposed to the cultivated art community and this domination is made visible inside, due to the showing of the works in an art gallery.20

Beyond the apparent indexical comparison, the cork raises those critical issues that Baldessari failed to address and which, once again, might tell us more about the fact that images are, insofar as they are exchanged. Baldessari’s use of the Sunday painters seems to re-present the idea that the cultural cohesion of a minority group is actually secured to the hegemony of a dominant class. Baldessari made the work by fostering the participation of other people in a project whose rules were defined by him. But the problem was not (only) that the agency of his name, as the choreographer of the entire performance, was dominant compared to the other names stencilled on each painting, but, more interestingly for my purposes, is consideration of how the show in the art gallery exhausted the aesthetic exchange by producing the signification of the work inside the very same place in which it was distributed. I want to consider this aesthetic captivity as an outcome of the fictional private/public divide of public art. If this did not happen in the case of Sam’s cork, it was because the terms of collaboration were experienced otherwise. Artistic authorship was replaced by artistic decision, whereas the place of community and the space of knowledge met within the framework of the personal as political. The participants in Showing: Expectations were not visiting East Street Art’s Project Space as a temple of knowledge, because first of all there would be no knowledge on show if they did not first put it on display. Moreover, though it might sound obvious, vital to the structure of the project, was the participants’ voluntary commitment to go and hear the stories that Leonor da Silva and Sue Wilks wanted to tell them (which thus occurred on the side of their expectations). Therefore, what I found most compelling is that a project space was not used to give artistic resonance to common objects that would not otherwise have any value other than the

18 Although not concerned with the work of John Baldessari, Charles Green’s study on collaboration and conceptual art gives account to the way collaboration represented the privileged method for conceptual art to overcome both the question of authorship, and originality of the artwork within the 60s debate about the status of art. Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 19 In this sense, if we want to refer again to Maria Lind’s distinction, it would be more precise to talk about participation and cooperation, rather than collaborative practice. 20 The Commissioned Paintings were exhibited for the first time at Eugenia Butler’s gallery in Los Angeles and then at Richard Feigen in New York. Emphasising the need to show the paintings only as a series, Baldessari said that his main intention was to let ‘the spectator practice connoisseurship, for example comparing how the extended forefinger in each was painted. In all the point was to organise these artists in a different context and provide them with an unhackneyed subject that would attract the attention of the viewer interested in modern art’. Quoted in Coosje van Bruggen, John Baldessari, (New York: Rizzoli International, 1990), p. 47.

affective one, but rather to stage collective forms of spectatorship.21 Yet collaboration was taking place thanks to the sharing of those conflicts that were created by the challenges presented in the very management of a space whose rules seem as absent as the transparent cleanness of its walls, but that are actually constantly projecting encoding messages: any project space is loaded with its own expectations.22 On the other hand, people’s expectations are shown only insofar as they conflict with the attempts of any actual space to channel them. But this is also true the other way around. The artist and educator Tim Brennan, has written extensively about the concept of Nu-Curationism, and on the role of ‘Nu-Curators’ as agents who are actively engaged in the construction of ‘spatial debates which lay bare the conditions of possibility for future human agency. […] This construction is one in which everyone is considered experientially well versed, regardless of age, background or culture, (“everyone” is not “an artist” but everyone does have experience)’.23 Working with these ideas, the matter that Wilks and da Silva took into common hands moulded a provisional but effective experiment in collective autonomy, to remodulate and remodel the framework of all those institutions seemingly owned by nobody. What is at stake here is not the value of art and who is allowed to handle it. ‘Art’ is the same word both to both the people at St Anne’s Resource Centre & Open Learning and to the artworld in general. But is it the same experience? By showing expectations, (deliberately not in italics here!), stress placed on the social fabric of words such as art, project space and curation which are the same, and yet sound different. One can show a cork in a museum as art and still leave unquestioned the set of expectations around the object by abdicating to the aesthetic administration of the space that is hosting it. The fact that Baldessari also set participation on display in his project makes clear how his claim that ‘everybody is an artist’ or ‘any painting is art’ actually fails to understand the play of expectations. The result was that the artist unwittingly reproduced and subjected participants to existing means of cultural subordination by reinforcing the perception of the Sunday painter as part of an artistic mob. This is a major critique that has, for instance, been addressed in collaborative projects by artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn or Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose respective projects, contrary to Baldessari’s, mark the passage from a goods to a service-based economy.24 What is the arena where the play of expectations can be made visible? Postmodern claims that art practices become socially engaged by choosing the social fabric of the multitude as a field for intervention and which theorise possibilities for non-privatised forms of art do not recognise that these theoretical paradigms are oblivious to the fact that art has always been a public enterprise in the history of art, until a certain point.25 When Nicolas Bourriaud argued that relational aesthetics dealt with ‘the realm of human interactions and its social context’ as opposed to ‘an independent private and symbolic space’,26 he was not only forgetting that Renaissance patronage, for instance, was a public enterprise (obviously within the framework of the prince’s domination), but was also dangerously reinforcing the very opposition between private and public produced by

21 In this sense, Showing: Expectations is different from other forms of art practices that are mainly concerned with Institutional Critique and even collaborative projects that are mainly questioning the statute of the art object, rather than the politics of aesthetics. 22 This condition, of course, does not apply to East Street Art’s Project Space in particular, but to any project space, gallery, art venue, museum in general. In this sense, a charitable organisation or an exhibition space in a social centre would have deployed different expectations, which were not productive to the artists’ field of research and intervention in this project. 23 Tim Brennan discusses the role of the Nu-Curator on his website, available online <http://curationism.mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/> Accessed 22 November 2008. 24 Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, in October 110, Fall 2004, p. 54. 25 Flaminia Gennari Santori, “Formes de mécénat à la renaissance: Suggestions pour la pratique actuelle”, in Xavier Douroux (ed.), Questions de mediateurs. Premiere séminaire de Nouveaux Commanditaires (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), p. 11. 26 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), p. 14.

the exhibitionary complex occurring after the French Revolution and which was, therefore, an absolute bourgeois phenomenon, turning an artistic public enterprise into a private initiative.27 Bourriaud seems to translate into a critical argument that which Richard Serra had realised in sculpture. While Serra was trying to ‘dislocate or alter the decorative function’ of the Federal Building Plaza, and ‘bring the viewer into the sculpture’, his grand sculptural gestures instead blocked the views across the plaza. Tilted Arc replaced the patterns of people’s movements designed by an urban planner with a screen that blocked the vista, even at eye-level. Passers-by were conveyed like marbles from one track to another.28 And so, Nicolas Bourriaud made a plea for artworks produced in an autonomous context to be replaced by a relational art that is environmentally responsive, while forgetting that aesthetic relations are not only conveyed by processes of production, but mostly by divisions of aesthetic labour, in the aesthetic share. Differently from Bourriaud’s stable of artists, Serra has not been interested in opening his practice to collaboration with communities (although he may have needed the help of steel workers to handle his massive sculptures!) Similarly to Serra, Bourriaud’s criticism has had no impact on the institutionalised hierarchies of value within the art market. To quote from Miwon Kwon about Serra’s heavy metal public art, ‘In this way, a peculiar alignment developed between the “authoritarian populism” of the right and the community advocacy of the new genre public art type on the left. Both rejected a certain kind of critical art in the name of “the people”’.29 My point is that a collaborative project can eschew the ‘violence of public art’30 only to the extent that it succeeds in remodulating the expectations that art institutions are conveying by the channelling represented in the very divide between public and private. It does not matter whether institutions are manifested as a part of a project or not, because the real conflict always occurs in the expanded field of the aesthetic exchange and not in the enclosed spaces of aesthetic administration. Disagreed spaces: between the square and the art gallery In one of the last scenes of La Haine (1995) by Mathieu Kassovitz, the three main characters (Hubert, Vinz and Saïd) are walking in the main square of Muguet, an estate 30 kilometres away from the centre of Paris in the banlieue of Chanteloup-les-Vignes. The camera focuses on two black-and-white murals of monumental dimensions representing Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. They are constructed of large mosaic tiles cast along the full side façade of each building. Actually, they are part of a larger public art project composed of four other murals representing Hugo, Mallarmé, Nerval and Valery (Fig. 02).31 All the representatives of the great tradition of French

27 There is a another question assumed in this argument, which is asking whether the project of art history itself would crumble as soon as we dispensed with these two oppositional categories produced by the dominant culture (the meaning of private and public in the framework of capitalist modes of production), or would they rather be renegotiated by new hegemonic formations. See Tony Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’ in New Formations, n. 4 Spring 1988. 28 See Sherrill Jordan (ed.), Public Art, Public Controversy: The “Tilted Arc” on Trial, (New York: 1987). 29 Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another. Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 83. 30 W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘The Violence of Public Art: Do The Right Thing”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 16, n. 4 (Summer, 1990), especially pp. 881-887. 31 Ginette Vincendeau, La Haine (London: I.B. Tauruis, 2005), pp. 109-113. Vincendau’s visit to the places of La Haine is more than an enquiry on the setting of the film few years later. Her personal travel diary in the estate actually makes clear the relations and implications between images and ideology in the movie [see pp. 67-72]. In her account of the trip to Chanteloup-les-Vignes Vincendau recalls that she felt like the television reporter in the movie, who was attacked by Hubert shouting that his cité was not the zoo of Thoiry. When Vincendeau writes: ‘We had come to observe them and their habitat with our distant, learned and privileged gaze, our gesture

literature are depicted on the buildings, which are arranged to form a radial framing of the square. While Hubert, having heard the sound of a police car, is walking back toward Vinz and Saïd, the camera shoots his trajectory from behind, framing Baudelaire in the background, as if the poet is witnessing a last murderous scene (with his customary grumpy expression). Taking a step outside of the fiction of the film, I wonder why those white men of letters are there, looking at people living in a derelict banlieue characterised by the presence of pied noir, Beur, Portuguese and Eastern Europeans. I understand that the fiction of the film can only give a partial answer – an answer dealing with the conflict of images, whereby cinema des not produce images by mirroring the way we consume them. Saïd is a Muslim Beur, meaning a second-generation French person of North-African origins. Hubert is a black African, and Vinz is Jewish. In a previous scene the trio have gatecrashed the opening party of an art gallery in the centre of Paris. One would have been happy for them to have had a different, or a wider participation in the art space, but it is evident that there is no space there for them. When Hubert makes an opening gambit by introducing himself and Saïd to two girls, Vinz is leaning against a wall, which he doesn’t realise is actually an artwork, ‘You are hiding an artwork’ says the gallerist to Vinz. ‘You are the artwork!’ the latter ironically replies. The girls are not really interested in them and so they begin to act like kids and turn aggressive. They would prefer to destroy everything rather than be framed as banlieusards by the art’s public. It is suddenly clear how the gallery space is fostering a conflict of representations, where who is looking at whom is as important as who is looking at what. Thus, the conflict of identities and identifications becomes irreducible, insofar as the three young men appear to be responsible for their own exclusion. Conflict has been embodied in the social space, whereas cinema represents the division of space as a subtext of the filmic track.

Fig. 02 Nerval, Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Valery on the walls of Chanteloup-les-Vignes (photo courtesy of Ginette Vincendeau)

Taking these two scenes together, we have a clear depiction of the embedding of anger. Institutions are promoting only one idea of culture in Kassovitz’s film, which has nonetheless been articulated in two different spaces. The culture of the French authors that they have been given to cultivate their estate speak a language that is not theirs, given the fact that verlan is notoriously the most spoken language by young people of the

reinforcing their deprivation’, I think she precisely discloses how the distribution of images (our gesture) can reproduce certain social conditions (their deprivation).

Parisian banlieues.32 However, was the culture that they encountered in the art gallery in Paris still not speaking the language of the fathers of French modern literature that are taunting the square back on their estate? Both the mosaics of the public artworks commissioned by state philanthropy and the artworks in the private art gallery which were to be purchased by some private collector are the product of the same culture that excludes Hubert, Saïd and Vinz, despite the aesthetic exchange that the easy access to the gallery pretends to foster. This movie is crucial to issues of cultural integration in post-Mitterand France. In fact, Kassovitz has also been accused of inciting the banlieusards to start their urban guerrilla activities, which have not yet ceased. But this film created an imaginative space to represent the conflict internalised in the social order, and reiterated the conveyance of people from the peripheries to the centre (which is not always a topographical issue, as Kassovitz succeeds in showing). It is thus a conflict built upon the paradoxical coextension of public and private interests in terms of cultural distribution. Therefore, La Haine probably produces a cinematic locale that uncovers the private interests behind the cultural construction of public space. The violence used by Hubert, Saïd and Vinz in the art gallery does not belong to the idea of conflict that was postulated at the beginning of this essay. Nevertheless, anger and rage can definitely be considered as feelings or affects that move people toward an aesthetic exchange, and possibly become one condition for the artistic creation.33 What ultimately La Haine and Showing: Expectations seem to have in common is this working out of a symptom of radical disagreement that needs to be expressed, which involves seizing the institutions of art and using them to change what you don’t like in society. Besides, isn’t that what art institutions are made for?34 Rancière posits the disagreement neither as a form of misunderstanding nor as a general lack of comprehension. ‘It is a conflict over what is meant by “to speak” and over the very distribution of the sensible that delimits the horizons of the sayable and determines the relationship between seeing, hearing, doing, making and thinking’. Disagreement is less

32 In French language verlan is the inversion of syllables that is typical of slang in young language. The name verlan itself is an example: ver-lan = l’en-vers (meaning the inverse). As there are as many verlans as young communities, it can be said that verlan circumscribes both a generational and geographical group. 33 I have to thank Louise Garrett for having pushed me to consider anger as a possible motor for the artistic production. This point might be even become more proper as we take into account the production of (critical) art in non-democratic regimes. One of the major characteristics that Eastern European artists have emphasised of their practices before 1989 was indeed the need to express their anger against the regime in public spaces, those institutional spaces where they could receive collective visibility, while remain anonymous. Among many others, I would like to mention the work of Mladen Stilinović as part of the Groupa Sestorice Auotora (Group of Six Artists). Between 1975-79 Stilinović undertook a series of public performances in the streets of several Yugoslavian cities, analysing and critiquing the rituals of the everyday (socialist) life. See Mladen Stilinović: 1973–1983, Artist at work, catalogue ed. by Alenka Gregorič and Branka Stipančić, (Ljubljana: Škuc Gallery, 2005). The expression of anger in the public domain can also be compared in Latin-American conceptual art, as it has been documented by Alexander Alberro’s research on the topic. See A. Alberro, ‘A Media Art: Conceptualism in Latin America in the 1960s’, in Michael Newman and Jon Bird eds., Rewriting Conceptual Art, (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 140-151. Similarly, Western subcultures seem to have represented an answer to the breakdown of the consensus after WWII. Punk subculture, for instance, can be argued to have expressed its anger and disappointment towards the dominant order, by manufacturing a DIY ‘revolting style’ which involved fashion, music, graffiti, film. See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the meaning of style, (London: Methuen, 1979). For a general requisition on the relation between art practices and the expression of social disagreement see Charles Esche and Will Bradley eds., Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, (London: Tate Publishing and Afterall, 2007). 34 I am paraphrasing this question from Brian Holmes institutional critique that the control, in hyper-individualist societies, is a function of the way our attention is modulated by the content you freely select. See Brian Holmes, “The Oppositional Device, or Taking Matters into Whose Hands?” in Taking the Matter […], pp. 35-41.

a clash between heterogeneous spaces than a conflict between ‘a given distribution of the sensible and what remains outside it’.35 Collaborative art practices should be considered for their actual capability of contesting social space management.Rather than working for a demagogic politics of inclusion, collaboration in art becomes the terrain for starting a strategy of spacing the territory in which institutions keep on staging the fantasy of a disembodied spectatorship. Collaboration in politics is about the collectivisation of aesthetics and vice versa.

35 Quoted from the introduction to Jacques Rancière, The Politics […], p. 4. * In this essay I have not aimed to present an objective judgement, but on the contrary I hope to have succeeded in opening, by stressing many points of partial criticism, a space of disagreement within the very telling of the story of Showing: Expectations, (which I did not personally experience, but only heard and viewed as an ‘external spectator’). By positioning myself as a part of this untruthful story, might the reader’s disagreement now create a further space for collective autonomy? In my defence, I can only say that one always exaggerates the stories which one has been told by somebody else, possibly in order to allow, by stretching the narrative extension of the fiction, a space for his/her own stories not to be forgotten.