kester groundworks

8/7/2019 Kester Groundworks

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Lead catalog essay from the exhibition “Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration inContemporary Art,” Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University (2005)

Theories and Methods of Collaborative Art Practice

Introduction: Art, Speech & Violence

He speaks. the lake in front becomes a lawn. Woods vanish, hills subside,and valleys rise...

William Cowper, The Garden (1785)1

In Cowper’s poem The Garden he writes with ironic reverence of Lancelot Brown,

perhaps the most famous landscape designer of his day. Brown, who was nicknamed

“Capability” for his skill in identifying the potential for “improvement” in even the least

promising of properties, is associated with the natural or English school of garden

design during the Georgian era. The natural garden style was developed in opposition

to the precise, mathematical French style epitomized by Le Nôtre's work at Versailles

and was intended to evoke an uncultivated Arcadian wilderness. Of course the labor

necessary to make nature appear “natural” was herculean; Brown’s gardens involved

massive earth-moving projects, the planting and transplanting of vast numbers of trees,

and the creation of lakes and ponds. This is one of the central paradoxes of the

eighteenth-century landscape garden; in order to produce the effect of naturalness it is

necessary to engage in the most exhaustive manipulation of nature. In many cases the

desire for a wholly natural scene (one that would exclude all evidence of human culture

other than that symbolic of leisure and contemplation) required the destruction and



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relocation of entire villages and towns that had the misfortune of being in the line of

sight of a given estate.2

It is this power to literally reorder nature in conformity with human ends that led

Cowper to describe Brown as an “omnipotent magician.” Further, it suggests an

underlying continuity between the aesthetic “appropriation” of nature by the landscape

gardener, and the proprietary relationship to the land characteristic of Brown’s clients,

whose wealth was based on the hereditary control of vast agricultural estates. In her

memoirs Hannah More describes a visit to Hampton in 1782 in which she received a

"very agreeable" tour of the gardens from Brown: “He told me he compared his art to

literary composition. Now there, said he, pointing his finger, I make a comma, and there,

pointing to another spot where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another

part (where an interruption is desirable to break the view) a parenthesis, now a full stop,

and then I begin another subject.”3 More’s account reiterates this correlation between

the power of artistic expression and the physical mastery of the land. “He speaks,” as

Cowper writes, “and valleys rise”. The garden is literally a text, to be conjured forth from

the blank page of the landscape.

We often associate the figure of the artist with a heightened sensitivity to the

natural world, but intimacy does not always imply care, and the artist’s brush can as

easily resemble a dissecting scalpel as it can a lover’s caress. The act of speech, of

expression, is driven by the imperative to assert the prerogatives of self over a resistant

substance. It exists within an extractive economy which all too often views the natural

world as a resource rather than an interlocutor. I’ll return to the question of speech



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below. For now I simply want to note the not-so-secret alliance between the personality

of the artist within modernism and the mode of subjectivity that C.B. Macpherson

famously termed “possessive individualism”.4 It is a restless, conative concept of self

associated with the rise of a mercantile bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, but it’s

origins, I would argue, lie further back, in the quasi-capitalist gentry of the early modern

era for which the possession of property was a defining act, the very crucible of its

social and political identity.5 While the modern avant-garde has consistently defined

itself in opposition to the bourgeoisie culturally, the process by which it constitutes itself

ontologically, it’s proprietary relationship to the external world, presents an obvious

parallel. The relentless assertion of self, and of self-fashioning, unimpeded by conscious

or history, guilt or obligation, the transformative, “all that is solid melts into air” energies

of the rising capitalist class, are mirrored by the modern artist, eager to obliterate

existing tradition and precedent, and to bend the material of art to his own ends.

One of the central myths of this promethean subjectivity is it’s absolute autonomy

(from the limits of past art and from the demands of conventional modes of social and

political identification) coupled with an equally strenuous rejection of the pragmatic and

utilitarian. The moment that the artist begins to produce his work “for” any interest,

agenda, or cause, other than his own, singular vision, he sacrifices the purity that

sustains and defines that work as art in the first place. This detachment is necessary

because art is in constant danger of being subsumed to the condition of mass culture,

entertainment, or propaganda and can preserve it’s distance from these beguiling

cultural forms only through a principle of opposition. If mass culture is simplistic and



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superficial, the domain of Fox News and Paris Hilton, then art must be demanding and

complex. In a 1977 interview Michael Heizer chastizes environmental art in precisely

these terms: “I’m a sculptor… I’m not for hire to go patch up mining sites. The strip-mine

aspect of it is of no interest to me. I don’t support reclamation art sculptural projects.

This is strictly art… Look, I’m not out to entertain. So much damn art is about that!” 6 For

Heizer the land is a material to be used and arranged, albeit on a collossal scale. Earth

of a given color and consistency, rock of a given weight and density, are deployed in

sculptural compositions that reference history at only the most generic and quasi-

archaeological level. The actual social and economic context in which land is used, it’s

relative sickness or health, it’s relationship to human habitation here and now, are not

properly aesthetic concerns. Acknowledging these factors would only entangle Heizer in

a compromising set of obligations and constrain the free play of his creative vision.

For Heizer, as for many proponents of the avant-garde tradition, the work of art

is, and must be, the product of the artist’s unfettered, expressive self. It is this very claim

to individual autonomy that gives the work it’s ethical valence in a culture dominated by

conformist mediocrity. The unconditional autonomy of the artist’s vision is matched by

the autonomy of the art object itself. The implacable materal otherness of the object

allows it to function as a surrogate or stand-in for another human subject, creating a

necessary displacement from actual social exchange. This displacement is necessary

because “we” (viewers, if not artists) can’t be trusted to disavow our instrumentalizing

relationship to difference here and now. The interaction between viewer and work of art

thus functions as a kind of training exercise, teaching them to adopt a greater sensitivity



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towards alterity in their subsequent social interactions. It is a pharmakon, in Derrida’s

gloss on Plato, both poison and remedy; subjecting the viewer to a violent shock or

dislocation which nonetheless has the effect of chastening their predisposition towards

violence and objectification in the future.7 For Adorno the physicality of the object was

seen to embody the very separateness of the aesthetic itself, as if its autonomy could

be maintained only so long as it was safely locked within the physical container of the

art work. Already in this formulation a series of elisions have occurred. The ability of art

to transform consciousness is only catalyzed when the work of art emerges

autochthonically, from the singular personality of the artist, in the form of a physical

object created a priori and later consumed or experienced by the viewer.

The projects featured in Groundworks challenge the avant-grade tradition

sketched above on multiple levels. In place of the stringent autonomy of avant-garde

art, we find artists working in alliance with specific communities in political struggles

involving environmental policy, urban planning, and cultural perceptions of the natural

world. In place of the unyielding individualism of the conventional avant-garde, we find

these practitioners collaborating with other artists, policy-makers, researchers, activists

and community members, effectively blurring the boundaries of authorship through

participatory interaction. In several cases (Park Fiction’s work in Hamburg, for example,

or Suzanne Lacy and Susan Steinman’s Elkhorn City project) the work of art only

comes into existence through a process of consultation and reciprocal exchange (both

verbal and non-verbal) with collaborators. While the exhibition features numerous

physical objects (ranging from sand paintings to water pumps to portable oxygen bars)



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they are not intended to prepare us for some future moment of intersubjective

exchange, but rather, to catalyze social interaction here and now. The audience’s

engagement is no longer defined primarily through distanced visual contemplation,

actualized by reading or de-coding an image or object, but through haptic experience

actualized by immersion and participation in a process.

From the gardens of Georgian England to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, our

concern for nature has always depended on our ability to extract value from it, whether

this value is aesthetic, spiritual or crassly materialistic. Can art reveal to us another way

to relate to the natural world, not as a resource for self-expression or a malleable clay to

be molded by the artist’s vision, but as an interlocutor? Can we conceive of a

relationship to nature that is ethical as well as aesthetic? The projects in Groundworks

seek to answer these questions. They draw on a tradition of innovative art practice that

originated in the Conceptualist and Earth Art milieu of the 1960s and ‘70s. While some

artists of this generation simply viewed the land as a larger canvas, of interest primarily

for it’s cultural and historical associations or for the formal properties of scale and

material opened up by the natural environment, others began to approach the natural

world as a complex gestalt of biological, political, economic and cultural forces. Hans

Haacke’s Rhine Water Purification Plant of 1972 created a literal linkage between the

space of the museum and the surrounding environment, using a system of pools and

filtration units in the gallery to reveal and then cleanse the pollutants in the nearby

Rhine river. Helen and Newton Harrison’s projects during the 1970s, such as the

Survival Series and the Lagoon works, developed innovative proposals for ecosystem



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restoration through a process of conversational exchange and mapmaking. Over the

past two decades younger practitioners, working both nationally and internationally,

have begun to build on this legacy. Collectives such as Ala Plastica, Huit Facettes,

PLATFORM, Littoral Arts, Superflex, Urban Ecology Action Group, and Park Fiction

among many others, have developed projects ranging from portable biogas generators

designed for rural African villages to proposals to uncover long-hidden rivers in the

center of London.

The artists and collectives featured in Groundworks are committed to working in

public contexts, ranging from rural villages to city parks. Their gallery installations exist

in a reciprocal relationship to this “other” practice, functioning as an extension of it

rather than a simple documentary record. In addition to the video projections and

monitors included in several of the second and third floor gallery installations, the

exhibition features a specially curated media component in the first floor gallery, with

video, software and internet-based works selected by Patrick Deegan. The projects

presented in Groundworks are inherently interdisciplinary, bringing together ad hoc

coalitions of artists, community members, activists, policy makers, and others for

extended collaborative encounters that cross the boundary between art and activism,

aesthetics and politics, and the museum and the town hall. Groundwork ’s artists are

united by the desire to maintain a productive and unresolved tension between these

discursive and institutional sites. For this reason we’ve invited a diverse mix of writers

and thinkers to contribute essays to this catalog, including philosopher Andrew Light,

whose research focusses on environmental ethics, Maria Kaika, an urban geographer



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who writes on issues of political ecology and water supply, social historian Maurine

Greenwald, co-editor of an invaluable anthology of essays on the Pittsburgh Survey ,

and Malcolm Miles, a UK-based cultural theorist with a particular interest in

contemporary urbanism and social change. Our intention is to situate these practices

critically and historically at the interstices of disciplinary knowledge.

In the following discussion I will return to the questions of agency and modernity

introduced above in order to outline a theoretical framework for the analysis of

collaborative art practice. This endeavor poses certain challenges, as existing art theory

is oriented primarily towards the analysis of individual objects and images understood

as the product of a single creative intelligence. This approach privileges what I’ve

described as a “textual” paradigm in which the work of art is conceived as an object or

event produced by the artist beforehand and subsequently presented to the viewer.8 In

this paradigm the artist never relinquishes a position of semantic mastery, and the

viewer’s involvement is primarily hermeneutic. While there is significant latitude in the

viewer’s potential response to the work (clinical detachment, shock, awe, etc.), they can

exercise no real or substantive effect on the form and structure of the work, which

remains the singular expression of the artist’s authoring conscious. This paradigm is

entirely appropriate for most image- and object-based work, but it has little to offer in

response to collaborative practices, which emphasize the process and experience of

collective interaction itself. Like most paradigms, it can be both empowering and

disabling. In the case of the collaborative practices exhibited in Groundworks it prevents

us from grasping what is genuinely different, and potentially productive in this work.



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An anecdote may help to illustrate this problem. I recently had the opportunity to

present a number of collaborative projects to an audience of artists and art historians.

One of the audience members, an artist as it happens, expressed uncertainty as to the

artistic legitimacy of these collaborative practices. Referring to a piece by the Austrian

group Wochenklausur, which involved a series of extended conversations on Lake

Zurich pleasure boats, she argued that the presence of a dock-side audience, which

could actually witness the departing boats, would be sufficient to elevate these

performances to the status of “art”. This observation suggests the extent to which a

conventional specular economy (which situates the viewer as the recipient of an

aesthetic/pedagogical experience programmed by the artist) has become naturalized as

the only possible framework for an aesthetic encounter. For me the power of

Wochenklausur’s work clearly lay in the logic of enactment rather than representation

per se; in the complex exchanges that occurred on the boat, rather than in the image of

the boat. Yet the idea that these exchanges could be aesthetic, or bear in anyway on an

experience relevant to art, was simply unthinkable for this artist.

This attitude stands in marked contrast to the participatory approach evident in

many of the Groundworks projects, which challenge (without entirely suspending) the

division between viewer, artist, and work of art. A more nuanced understanding of this

work requires a kind of Kuhn-ian “paradigm shift” in the language of art theory; a way of

literally seeing the work of art and it’s relationship to the viewer differently. As I will

elaborate below, I believe there is an aesthetic dimension to the process of reciprocal

exchange instantiated in these projects. It constitutes a form of creative labor that is in



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some ways quite different from the labor demanded by the conventional work of art (that

is, the labor necessary for the viewer to come to terms with an image that resists their

initial attempt at conceptual mastery; the “semantic” labor set in motion by this

resistance and the viewer’s corresponding desire to interpret or understand the work of

art).

There are few resources available within conventional art and aesthetic theory to

address the sustained experience of collective or collaborative interaction, the haptic,

verbal and non-verbal encounters that are so central to the projects in Groundworks, not

just among the members of specific groups, but between and among these artists and

the broader network of participants catalyzed by a given project. There is, as yet, no

theoretical language to describe this intensely somatic form of knowledge: the exchange

of gesture and expression, the complex relationship to habitus and habit, and the way in

which conflict, reconciliation and solidarity are registered on the body. This “labor” is not

productive in the traditional sense associated with the emergence of private property; it

does not seek to extract value from a recalcitrant nature. Rather, its productivity lies in

the transformative effect of labor on the identity of those who share it. As I will outline

below, labor, duration and process are anathema to dominant paradigms in recent art

theory and criticism, which instead prize the instantaneous, the sublime and the “un-

worked”. Art must be precisely the inverse of labor (understood as coerced, externally-

imposed and temporally extensive) to play its assigned cultural role. I will begin, then,

with the question of labor, tracing certain problematics around labor and agency that



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originate with the dawn of modernity, and which continue to inform, if only at the

subterranean level, our assumptions about the work of art.



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1. Property and Identity

Where there is no property there is no injustice.

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding 9

Labor, in the early modern period, must be understood as a predicative term, emerging

in conjunction with its counterpart: property. It was the mobility of property, the novel

idea of possession as a right that could be earned, and lost, that set the modern period

apart. As the economic historian Robert Heilbroner famously observed:

As late as the fourteenth or fifteenth century there was no such thing as land in thesense of freely salable, rent-producing property. There were lands, of course—estates, manors, and principalities—but these were emphatically not real estate tobe bought and sold as the occasion warranted. . . A medieval nobleman in goodstanding would no more have thought of selling his land than the governor of Connecticut would think of selling a few counties to the governor of Rhode Island.10

The movement of landed property was, of course, always virtual, a transfer of rights, but

it had a profound significance. This “great transformation” was not simply economic, it

was experienced on the ontic level; literally changing the way in which political

subjecivity was constructed and legitimated in the early modern era.11 One’s social

status, for so long determined by birth and blood, could be radically transformed by the

externalization of self in the act of rendering nature productive. This new model of

identity arises in the context of a changing political scene in Europe, associated with the

emergence of a proto-capitalist class of merchants and gentry. It’s earliest

manifestations occur in England, in response to the pressure exerted by economically

powerful, but un-titled, landowners during the 1600s and early 1700s. One of the



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principle targets of this nascent class was the concept of divine right. The king must be

obeyed because, within the great chain of being, he is located in closest proximity to

God. Further, man must accept his natural subordination within the hierarchy of religious

and secular power. It was this system of aristocratic privilege that limited the political

voice of England’s propertied classes and which was used to justify monarchical fiat

over their land and income.

We encounter the first discursive challenge to this system in the early texts of the

natural law tradition, which sought to construct new forms of political legitimation in the

face of the gradual desacralization of authority in modern Europe. What would replace

the tattered "canopies" of god and king? The answer, as I have already begun to

suggest, is the self-legislating subject of liberal humanism; a subject whose identity is

predicated on the possession of certain inherent powers or faculties as well as on the

physical possession of property. On a more strategic level, the natural law tradition

sought to endow the contingent political claims of the nascent bourgeois with the

inevitability of nature, in order to challenge the appeal to tradition “since time

immemorial” on which the defense of monarchical power was based. The natural law

tradition identified certain quasi-anthropological moments, rooted in the mists of early

human society (if not in the constitution of the human personality itself), which could be

used to ground and legitimate the new political claims of the third estate. For the Dutch

jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and the theorist and professor Samuel Freiherr von

Pufendorf (1632-1694), two leading exponents of the natural law tradition, the “state of



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nature” was a communal affair in which God gave all men in common the resources of

the earth. As Grotius wrote in De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres (1625):

Soon after the creation of the world, and a second time after the Flood, Godconferred upon the human race, a general right over things of a lower nature. . . Inconsequence, each man could at once take whatever he wished for his own needs,and could consume whatever was capable of being consumed.12

In this “original community of the land” (Communio Fundi Originari ) everyone is free to

take what he or she needs from the common land in order to survive. Eventually this

condition of divinely mandated communism gave way to some form of private

possession (earned by labor, not endowed by God). The transition from common

access to private property was crucial for seventeenth and eighteenth century liberal

political thought in England. This debate bore directly on contemporary arguments

about the enclosure of the commons and the relative moral and political authority of the

landowning classes. If all men are created equal then how do we account for the

systematic inequalities that exist between landowners on their vast estates, and the

rural working class? Grotius and Pfufendorf, along with Locke and Kant present differing

accounts of this transition, but all involve the emegence of some form of proto-

democratic decision-making which allowed the “commons” to be privatized, while at the

same time providing the operational foundation for modern systems of representative

government based on public consensus.

Property, and most importantly the act of possession, emerge in the philosophy

of the Enlightenment as one of the chief markers of legitimate subject status—not

merely the possession of property, but more specifically, the faculty of possession, as it



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is exercised or performed by the subject. This performative aspect is particularly

important. One becomes a subject through the act of possessing things as property.

This socially and historically contingent act is at the same time founded in an inherent

capacity of the human subject; it brings this subject into harmony with universal moral

laws and rights. However, the privileging of property as a precondition for public agency

introduces a central tension into liberal discourse. On the one hand the concept of the

public challenges the stasis of social roles prescribed by divine right. The public isn’t a

fixed entity, but rather, a process or mode of interaction that is available to all. But this

openness can be sustained only so long as it is never fully tested: so long as the public

sphere is limited to like-minded members of the same, property-owning class (and not

the more numerous “lower orders” clamoring for their own political recognition). The

“public” thus retains a metaphysical dimension. On the one hand it refers to a physically

proximate, empirically verifiable process of social exchange and deliberation, and on the

other it is an as-yet unrealized ideal, limited for now to a select few (propertied men).

Property introduces a second point of tension as well. The public actor enters into

political exchange with a commitment to acknowledge and respect the differences

represented by other actors, and with an implicit willingness to revise his or her own

beliefs in response to these others and on behalf of a collective good. But the

possession of property is premised on an unyielding self-interest and individualism.

Within the pedagogy of capital, as outlined by thinkers such as Adam Smith, the sole

priority is to enrich and aggrandize oneself, often at the expense of others. The

boundaries between the motivations of the “private” self of the market, and the “public”



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self of civil society are notoriously difficult to maintain.

Labor and property are linked by the power attributed to labor in transforming

both nature, and, crucially, the laboring subject. This is articulated through the natural

law concept of the extension of personality. Grotius and Pufendorf predicate their

account of property on the division between the "I," or what philosopher Karl Olivecrona

labels the "spiritual ego," and the body. The "I" is the foundational site of identity and

possession; the "I" is understood to "possess" the body, and the actions of the body.

Taken together the body and its actions constitute the individual's suum, "that which

belongs" to the individual. Thus, according to Grotius, "life, body, limbs, reputation,

honor, and our own actions (actiones propriae) belong to ourselves . . .”13 The suum is

the basis for a moral faculty (facultas moralis) that provides a kind of protection for the

possessing subject. Of particular importance is the fact that Grotius and Pufendorf

argue that the sphere of the suum can be extended to encompass things "outside" the

subject's body. This "extension of personality" is such that one can acquire a moral

warrant for these things (land, goods, and so on) and incorporate them into the suum.

Once these things are assimilated into the personality any attempt to remove or

damage them constitutes an injury that is morally commensurate to physical harm to the

body.14

We should think of the suum not simply in terms of a spatial metaphor (the suum

as the "sphere" of the subject), but also as a faculty or power to assimilate and extend

this sphere on the basis of a moral justification. In On the Law of Nature and of Nations

(1672) Pufendorf notes that "ownership" doesn't function by "physically and intrinsically



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affect[ing] things themselves." Rather, it produces what he describes as a "moral effect

in relation to other men. . ." 15 Locke also establishes his defense of property through

recourse to the "extension of personality" model. He describes a process by which the

labor of the subject's body (supervised by the mind) "mixes" the subject's personality

with nature (via extraction or cultivation). Through this mixing one infuses objects with

one's personality and is thereby entitled to remove them from the commons and claim

them as one's sole property. As Locke writes, "Whatsoever then he removes out of the

state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it

something that is his own and thereby makes it his property." 16 Notably, Locke’s model

of epistemology in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding employs this same

concept of “mixing,” via the cognitive labor necessary to combine simple concepts into

the more complex conceptual aggregates (“compound ideas”) characteristic of

speculative thought.

The postulates of the natural law tradition gradually coalesce into more coherent

form in early liberal political philosophy, which will contend that a social order based on

the primacy of property and individual possession (as a system for allocating wealth and

opportunity) is intrinsically egalitarian and will naturally prevent the systematic inequality

and arbitrary abuses of power characteristic of absolutist government. This system is

not, however, without it’s own internal contradictions. The only way you can achive

subjectivity, and experience freedom, is at the expense of an "other" person/thing which

serves as the vehicle through which you actualize, experience, and express that

subjectivity. Within the larger economy (of identity-as-capital), there must always be



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something that you own or possess—a constant supply of material to be controlled or

appropriated.17 The actual form taken by the property is less important than the kind of

relationship that it sets in place between you and the world around you. It is an active,

acquisitive, transformative relationship in which the world exists as the vehicle for your

own redemption and fulfillment as a subject. This is clear in Locke's discussion of

property, in which his will is coextensive with the labor or property of his horse or

servant—all are simply vehicles for his own achievement of subject status:

Thus the Grass my horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore Ihave digg'd in any place where I have a right to them in common with others,become my Property , without the assignation or consent of any body. The labor that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my Property in them . . .18

The bourgeois subject is not autonomous, but intrinsically dependent (on the labor of

others and on a continuing supply of materials, frontiers, and opportunities for ontic

investment) for it’s self–constitution.19 Of particular importance here is the slippage that

is introduced among its various "possessions". Locke’s servant or his horse are merely

extensions of his will, yet in the very act of externalizing and extending that will it

becomes displaced, introducing a potential confusion between the body and objects,

and between the subject and the things that the subject can claim to possess. Further,

the relative privilege, the ontic spaciousness, of the bourgeois subject, far from being

“earned” through a fair and equal competition, the outcome of which offers a meaningful

indication of the relative fortitude of their conative drive, is, in fact, always/already

biased by pre-existing distortions in the field of social and economic opportunity (in

Locke’s time, the fact that the common land on which a subject might actualize his will,



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and achieve political sovereignty, was being enclosed or privatized by the already

wealthy landowners who controlled parliament).

Labor is, on the one hand, proof of the superiority of the bourgeoisie to the

parasitic and effete aristocracy, and on the other, a reminder of the contingency of its

hard-won status. The myth of its absolute autonomy can only be sustained by an active

suppression or denial of this underlying dependence on the labor of the Other. In the

social sphere this suppression is produced through an ethical discourse that identifies

the non-propertied (the poor or working class) as failed subjects, whose powers of

appropriation are insufficiently developed (from this flows a long tradition of

conservative political discourse that views the poor as lazy, morally depraved, etc.). This

ethical discourse is combined with an aesthetic discourse that operates through the

strategic visual suppression of labor, and of the social costs of bourgeois privilege. In

order to observe the early articulation of these spatial and visual regimes we must

return to Capability Brown and the English-style landscape garden.

During the eighteenth century landscape gardening was widely considered to be

the apex of British culture and was a privileged subject of philosophical speculation.20

Discussions of landscape gardening figure prominently in the writings of Alexander

Pope, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and many other Enlightenment philosophers,

including Kant. During the mid-eighteenth century England’s emerging industrial

economy, as well as expanding colonial investments, were contributing to the

development of a wealthy middle class of factory owners, bankers, brokers, and

manufacturers. Land ownership, which had for so long been the prerogative of the



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aristocracy, was increasingly available to the rising bourgeoisie. Thus, the English

landscape garden is closely linked to the emergence of a class of powerful, land-owning

"men of fortune" who began to acquire large country estates as the natural

accompaniment of their wealth, often through acts of enclosure.21 The natural English

style that was favored at this time was characterized by unimpeded vistas, flowing,

closely mown expanses of lawn, the "natural" placement of shrubs and groves of trees,

and serpentine footpaths.22

In addition to these visual components, one of the most essential elements of the

natural style garden was something you didn’t see: workers. In a rural economy

dependent on massive armies of seasonal laborers, the landscape garden was an oasis

of solitude. The aesthetic of the garden hinges on the suppression of particular

elements in the landscape (for example, the farms and cottages of the rural laborer, or

cultivated fields) that offer any evidence that the land itself might be economically

productive. The boundaries between the garden and the “working farm” must be

absolute. This dynamic is apparent in the writings of Humphrey Repton, one of the

leading garden designers of the late eighteenth-century. Consider his comparison of the

"park," which is characterized by "undulating lines contrasting with each other in variety

of forms; trees so grouped as to produce light and shade to display the varied surface of

the ground; and an undivided range of pasture" with the utilitarian "farm":

The farm is forever changing the color of its surface in motley and discordanthues; it is subdivided by straight lines of fences. The trees can only be ranged informal rows along the hedges; and these the farmer claims a right to cut, prune,and disfigure. Instead of cattle enlivening the scene by their peaceful attitudes, or sportive gambols, animals are bending beneath the yoke, or closely confined to



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fatten within narrow enclosures, objects of profit, not of beauty. 23

Repton goes on to warn of the danger, due to the "prevailing rage for agriculture," of

trying to "blend" or "unite" the farm and the park. What disturbs Repton is not that these

two types or uses of land should co-exist, but rather that landowners should carelessly

allow them to mingle together in close proximity:

It is the union, not the existence, of beauty and profit, of laborious exertion andpleasurable recreation, against which I would interpose the influence of my art;nor let the fastidious objector condemn the effort, till he can convince thejudgment that, without violation of good taste, he could introduce the dairy and

the pig-sty (those useful appendages of rural economy) into the recesses of thedrawing-room, or the area of the salon.24

The formal principles of "nature" itself (irregularity, lack of cultivation), having been

expunged from the countryside, were now internalized as aesthetic components of the

estate. One finds condensed here, in displaced form, the central tension between the

aesthetic, as a domain of free pleasure and Spieltrieb, and the instrumentalizing

imperatives of the market, that will define the modernist tradition. The eighteenth

century landscape garden reveals the complex relationship that exists between the

(ostensibly) socially transcendent act of aesthetic contemplation and the socially

determined ownership of property and the ways in which each of these is in turn related

to models of subjectivity.

The aesthetic principles that are elaborated in the landscape garden can also be

viewed in relationship to the suum and the extension of personality in natural law. They

provide a set of tools for regulating the landowner's experience of property, and of

themselves as possessive subjects. The garden performs the complex task of insulating



22

the bourgeois subject from the "actual" rural environment (i.e., the sight of cultivated

fields, laborers, etc.), while at the same time producing a mythologized recreation of that

environment. Here we have two key episodes in the construction of a bourgeois social

epistemology: first, the process of masking or suppressing the "difference" of the rural

economy, and second, the process of transforming the surrounding environment into a

kind of reflective scrim that mirrors back to the bourgeois subject its own idealized self-

image.

The identity of the bourgeois subject is produced, or performed, through the act

of possession. This performance requires the agency of some as yet un-possessed

thing which must provide sufficient resistance to man's will to mark the boundaries of his

identity, while at the same time not offering so much resistance that this identity is

threatened. The freedom of his view expresses the extent of his domain and of his

status as a subject. Paradigmatically "nature" is the name assigned to that category of

objects that resist man's will. The landscape garden provides the spectacle of a nature-

like land, un-marked by the signs of possession. A kind of capitalist primal scene, it

promises both the plenitude and the universality of the original common land, open and

available and not yet subject to the regime of cultivation. It is land that is suspended

between nature and culture, awaiting only the transformative ritual of ownership. The

redemptive experience of property-taking is performed over and over again in the

unimpeded vistas offered by the natural-style landscape garden.

The natural garden aesthetic provided a screen memory against the actual

violence of enclosure and coerced human labor on which landed wealth depended,



23

evoking instead a halcyon illusion of bourgeois power arising organically and

autonomously from the surrounding countryside. The spatial tactics of the landscape

garden expand, in due course, to encompass a whole range of cultural practices

devoted to regulating visual evidence of the poverty, inequality and human sufferring

precipitated by the rise of industrial capitalism. They are most evident in systems of

urban planning and suburban development, as described by Frederich Engel’s in his

famous account of Manchester in the 1850s:

. . . the finest part of this arrangement [the spatial organization of housing andbusinesses in the city] is this, that the members of the money aristocracy can take theshortest road through the middle of all the laboring districts to their places of business,without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the rightand the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined. . . with an almost unbroken series of shops. . . [that] suffice toconceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weaknerves the misery and grime that form the complement of their wealth.25

In her essay for this catalog Maria Kaika describes the logic of this visual suppression

through the imperative to expel a “bad” nature from the nineteenth-century industrial

metropolis through modern sewer systems and the paving over of urban rivers.

The ideological function of the aesthetic, it’s participation in a process of masking

and dissimulation, constitute a central motif in modern art and art theory, which will be

defined in large measure by it’s ongoing fear of the seductive, manipulative powers of

kitsch and mass culture and the cooptive abilities of the bourgeoisie. It is symptomatic,

then, that a characteristic response of the early avant-garde to this cooptive threat was

to confront bourgeois viewers with evidence of the human labor and misery that

constituted the repressed Other to their own privilege (Courbet’s Stonebreakers,



24

Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, the Barbizon school, etc.). This underlying

suspicion of the aesthetic continues to the present day, in fretful speculations over the

dangerous ability of visual and somatic experience to trivialize or suppress the actuality

of violence. Martin Jay reiterates this position in his essay “Drifting into Dangerous

Waters,” warning of a “promiscuous aestheticization of the entire world” in which

“human suffering will become an occasion for aesthetic delectation.” Although the

causal link is not entirely clear, Jay appears to blame modern art for this dire situation

due to it’s “indiscriminate leveling of the distinction between artwork and lifeworld

through the projection of the qualities of the former onto the latter”. “When the frame is

broken,” as Jay writes, “representation is confused with reference and unmediated

reality becomes fair game for aestheticization.”26 The “frame,” the clear division between

art and daily life, should be rigorously policed. For Jay, the risk of “pig styes in the

drawing room,” to use Repton’s evocative phrase, is simply too great. Far from

challenging the separation between art and quotidian social structures artists must

maintain it, addressing themselves to the viewer only obliquely, through the surrogate of

the artwork safely confined within the sanctuary of the museum or the gallery.



25

2. Aesthetics, Labor and Collectivity

To deconstruct, certainly, but that already represents a luxury for whoever has notbuilt a world.

Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community (1999)27

As Jay’s commentary suggests, art strikes a Faustian bargain with the forces of

modernity. It makes a virtue of a necessity (detachment from life praxis), by using it as

the catalyst for a new function: embodying a distanced, critical perspective on normative

social and cultural values (typically, through reflection on representational norms). The

work of art in the avant-garde tradition will shock the viewer out of their mythic self-

enclosure, forcing them to acknowledge the social costs of their own privilege and to

abandon their reliance on reductive and objectifying modes of perception. As I noted in

the introduction, the relationship of the artist to the viewer implied by this tradition is

essentially adjudicatory and conspiratorial. The artist is the inveterate provocateur,

tirelessly deconstructing, subverting, and destablizing fixed meanings and identities in

the name of an inchoate aesthetic libertarianism. This attitude is so pervasive in

contemporary art, and has become so routinized, that it’s hard to imagine an alternative.

It is premised on a deep skepticism about the viewer, who is assumed to possess a

“natural” inclination towards reductive or instrumentalizing behavior that requires

remediation and correction by the work of art (in this, the avant-garde tradition owes

more to the traditions of Christianity, and concepts of repentence and original sin, than

one might expect). This skepticism also links the modern avant-garde to the proponents

of natural law, and the broader philosophical history of liberalism, for which self-interest



26

is the founding condition of human subjectivity. For Grotius there is no inherent human

disposition towards convivialty. Rather, community and the sacrifice of self-interest is

only forced upon us by the finitude of natural resources (or, for Hobbes, by the

unbearable violence of man’s war-like nature). In the absence of these external

compulsions humanity’s inherent tendency would be towards dispersal, singularity and

division. Hume will subsequently argue that self-interested desire is the primary

mechanism of human conduct, laying the groundwork for the ontological paradigm that

continues to dominate analytic philosophy to the present day.

For both avant-garde discourse and bourgeois liberalism the conative drive is

understood as a quasi-anthropological feature of human subjectivity; it’s primary motive

force. From Pere Ubu to Karen Finley the avant-garde has often defined itself in

opposition to what it perceives as a paradigmatic “bourgeois” identity: a Piñata-like

caricature that embodies all the most reviled characteristics of the boorish middle class:

it’s heedless narcissicism, it’s reactionary fear of difference, and its destructive

compulsion to extract profit from even the most anodyne of sites. By the 1980s, under

the influence of continental philosophy and it’s critique of the Enlightenment, this figure

gained a new theoretical pedigree and was re-born as the “Cartesian” subject. A more

sophisticated incarnation of the bourgeois subject, the soul-destroying power of the

Cartesian subject was seen to reside not simply in it’s class origins, but in it’s very ontic

condition: centered, autonomous and self-identical. The necessary antidote to this mode

of subjectivity was a shattering “ontological dislocation” (cf., Lyotard); exposing the false

consciousness of bourgeois subjectivity via the quasi-religious “revelation” that its



27

cherished self-hood is actually relational, decentered and contingent. Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick offers a useful interpretation of the avant-garde rhetoric of revelation in her

analysis of the “paranoid consensus” that has come to dominate contemporary critical

theory informed by structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism. Based in part on the

historical identification of critical theory with the act of revealing the (structural)

determinants that pattern our perception of reality, the paranoid approach obsessively

repeats the gesture of “unveiling hidden violence” to a benumbed or disbelieving

world.28 As enabling and necessary as it is to probe beneath the surface of appearance

and to identify unacknowledged forms of power, the paranoid approach, in Sedgwick’s

view, attributes an almost mystical agency to the act of revelation in and of itself. As she

writes:

The paranoid trust in exposure seemingly depends . . . on an infinite reservoir of naiveté in those who make up the audience for these unveilings. What is the basisfor assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate, anyone to learn that

a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic or even violent?29

As I’ve suggested above, the contingency of bourgeois subjectivity is hardly a repressed

secret, awaiting only the epistemological dynamite of the avant-garde artist or critical

theorist to break it free and catalyze a new era of peace and harmony. In fact,

contingency and dependency are openly acknowledged as central features of modern

subjectivity. As the natural law tradition demonstrates, bourgeois identity is always

already relational, contextual, and performative. The decisive shift within modernity is

from a static identity (dependent on fixed proximity to God) to an identity that is

produced or invented through labor. Thus, the arid procedural mechanisms of natural



28

law carry a radical implication. Bourgeois identity is marked by a colonizing expansion

of self, yes, but also an opening out of self to otherness. Identity is mutable in this

formulation, not fixed or given. It has no intrinsic substance, only a potential or capacity,

waiting to be actualized by the subject through their interaction with the material and

social world. While bourgeois ideology attempts to cover over this contingency, to “re-

transcendentalize” it via the ethical and aesthetic procedures I’ve described, it remains

central to the history of liberal thought. In fact, the very deliberateness of these

strategies, their visibility as “strategies” in the first place, suggests the operation of a

kind of “cynical reason” in which the bourgeois viewer, while conscious of this

dependency, simply chooses to ignore it.30

The projects on display in Groundworks challenge us to recognize new modes of

aesthetic experience and new frameworks for thinking identity through the thickly

textured haptic and verbal exchanges that occur in the process of collaborative

interaction. They call upon us, in turn, to reconsider the formation of modern subjectivity.

In this endeavor it’s necessary to uncouple the process by which identity is constituted

within modernity from the conative drive of possessive individualism. Unfortunately,

currently dominant theoretical paradigms, especially those informed by the

poststructuralist tradition, harbor a deep suspicion of labor and durational experience.

Jean Luc-Nancy’s writing on community is emblematic in this regard. Community, for

Nancy, can only be ethically constituted if it arises in an instant, in a moment of

“unworked” epiphany. As soon as the experience of community involves a durationally

extended process of social and discursive exchange it descends into mythic



29

essentialism. Thus, Nancy’s “inoperative” community is a “workless and inoperative

activity. It is not a matter of making, producing or instituting a community.” and

“Community is given to us—or we are given and abandoned to the community; a gift to

be renewed and communicated, it is not a work to be done or produced.” 31 In his

understandable desire to foreclose the potential violence of direct, inter-subjective

exchange, Nancy reduces all human labor (“work,” “making,” “production,”) to a simple

expression of conative aggression, functioning only to master and negate difference.

The result is a fetishization of simultaneity in aesthetic experience (cf., the sublime,

shock or disruption, etc.), and a failure to conceive of the knowledge produced through

durational, collective interaction as anything other than compromised, totalizing, and

politically abject. For Nancy, like Repton, there can be no evidence of labor in the

“garden” of an aesthetic community because the aesthetic is precisely that mode of

experience that offers a therapeutic antidote to the instrumentality of work. Repton and

Nancy (or the traditions they represent) are linked by this key elision; labor can only

ever be the domain of coercion and exploitation.

We encounter a parallel aporia around verbal and haptic exchange in the

poststructuralist tradition, beginning with Sausurre’s decision to concentrate exclusively

on language (as a synchronic totality) at the expense of an investigation of the

diachronic processes of human speech (he famously considered speech acts or parole

an unsuitable object of “scientific” inquiry). Derrida extends this schism in his Manichean

opposition between the “phonocentrism” of speech (the realm of authorial presence and

Platonic truth) and the ludic domain of ecriture. Only the written text is open to the



30

liberatory play of meaning, while speaking and listening, and by implication, the haptic

texture of human social exchange, is consigned to the realm of logocentric fixity. As this

theoretical tradition has acquired an increasingly canonical, and unquestioned, status in

the US academy and art world, it has tended to block a deeper engagement with the

mechanics of collective action and transformation.

I would suggest that the challenge posed by modern identity lies not with our

illusory independence per se, but with our relationship to our own intrinsically dependent

nature. The decisive point is not to simply acknowledge the “truth” of our de-centered

selves in some single, epiphanic moment engineered by the artist, but rather, to develop

the skills necessary to mitigate violence and objectification in our ongoing encounters

with difference. This form of ethical and aesthetic insight can’t be generated through the

surrogate of an art object or through an ontological dislocation that simply reflects the

experience of instrumentalization back onto the viewer. It requires, instead, a reciprocal,

durationally extended process of exchange on both the discursive and the haptic level

(literally, a “co-labor”). The effect of collaborative art practice is to frame this exchange

(spatially, institutionally, procedurally), setting it sufficiently apart from quotidian social

interaction to encourage a degree of self-reflection; calling attention to the exchange

itself as creative praxis. There is a kind of open-ness that is encouraged as participants

are implicated in an exchange that is not immediately subsumable to conventional,

pragmatic contexts, but is ceremonially marked off as “art”. In fact, it is precisely the lack

of categorical fixity around art that makes this open-ness possible. This approach

figures prominently in the work of the Austrian group Wochenklausur, whose



31

consultative planning project in Styria is presented in Groundworks. For Wochenklausur,

the distancing from the protocols and assumptions of normative social exchange (the

classroom, the town council, the boardroom, the church, etc.) created by aesthetic

framing reduces our dependence on the default behaviors, expectations and modes of

address that are typically triggered by these sites, encouraging a more performative and

experimental attitude towards the work of identity. Despite their differences the projects

on display in Groundworks reflect a calling out to these experiences: a desire to work

through them in a tentative, experimental, but nonetheless systematic, manner.

This distance from the quotidian is not, however, based on an absolute

segregation. It is not the defensive “autonomy” of conventional modernist art, but rather,

a relationship in which the quotidian is held in an unresolved suspension with the

aesthetic. The projects on display are neither fully “art” nor fully “activist” in orientation

and derive much of their force from this tension. They are sufficiently separate from

existing networks of social power to allow for the unfolding of new insights, but at the

same time, sufficiently integrated with these networks to allow for their pragmatic

translation. They float between the real and the virtual, the applied and the symbolic,

echoing Malcolm Mile’s observation on the necessary “ambivalence” of contemporary

art, a sense of “standing back while being immersed”. In his essay for this catalog Miles

identifies this ambivalence with Kant, a position that is reiterated by critic/theorist

Geoffrey Galt Harpham. “The Kantian faculties,” Harpham writes, “invariably disappoint

philosophers seeking rigorous distinctions, moralists seeking clean resistances, and

aestheticians seeking art as such . . .”32 When Park Fiction re-invents the process of



32

participatory planning as a game of desire and imagination they exploit this

undecideability. It is literally embodied in their name (the “fiction” of a park), and in the

audacity to imagine a public park in place of expensive, high rise apartment buildings.

Rather than simply protest the process of gentrification in Hamburg, Park Fiction

organized a “parallel planning process” that began with the creation of alternative

“platforms” for exchange among the area’s existing residents (“musicians, priests, a

headmistress, a cook, café-owners, bar-men, a psychologist, squatters, artists and

interventionist residents”). The element of fantasy is apparent in the plans already

developed for the park, including the Teagarden Island, which features artificial palm

trees and is surrounded by an elegant 40 meter long bench from Barcelona, an Open

Air Solarium and a Flying Carpet (a wave-shaped lawn area surrounded by a mosaic

inspired by the Alhambra).

A set of latent methodological concerns run through these projects, an

understanding that the issues of representation and material production that so

preoccupied previous generations of artists have given way to engagement with modes

of social exchange, collective action and what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “the sphere of

interhuman relations”.33 It is not so much a question of having “transcended” these

previous issues (in fact, most of the artists and groups in Groundworks clearly view the

social networks within which they operate as already implicated in a politics of

representation) than of widening the field of artistic practice beyond the textual

paradigm (the artist making an object or image for the viewer’s consumption). Thus,

Navjot Atlaf’s background as a sculptor and installation artist is evident in the hand



33

pump sites she produces in collaboration with Adivasi communities in Bastar

Chattisgarh in central India (the Adivasi are India’s indigenous or native population, and

have, along with the Dalit or “untouchables,” long suffered from economic and social

discrimination). At the same time, she views the collaborative interactions among artists

and village residents, and between Adivasi and non-Adivasi, that occur in these projects

as decisive. As she writes, “For us, organizing the workshops required to design and

construct the pump is as important as creating the sites; it encourages a communication

network between artists from different cultures and disciplines from within Bastar and

outside, and with and between the young.” These cross-cultural exchanges, which Altaf

also organizes around the collaborative production of children’s temples (Pilla Gudis),

“encourage the young to think about different ways of knowing and modes of working,

enabling them to draw nourishment and sustenance from difference and similarities.”

The process of designing and constructing the pump sites and temples, the interactions

of artisans, children, and visitors, are at the same moment designed to encourage a

critical re-negotiation of Adivasi identity. This re-negotiation is particularly crucial in India

due to the rise of right wing fundamentalism over the past decade, which has actively

repressed non-Hindu cultures (like that of the Adivasi). At the same time the mainstream

educational system in India attempts to “neutralize” cultural difference, according to Altaf

through a policy of “Unity in Diversity” that minimizes the specific histories of the Adivasi

and the Dalit.34

This concern with the complex micro-politics of collective identity is evident as

well in the work of the Senegalese group Huit Facettes-Interaction. In an interview with



34

Groundworks media curator Patrick Deegan, Huit Facettes coordinator Amadou Kane

Sy speaks of the essential “proximity between artistic expression and the social field” in

their collaborative projects in the village of Hamdallaye Samba Mbaye. Huit Facettes

has established a permanent arts workshop in the village in order to catalyze a series of

exchanges that privilege the “individual temporalities” of the local culture against the

conventional oppositions that are typically used to situate African art (art vs. crafts,

“Third” vs. “First” world, etc.) within the ethnocentric discourse of the west.35 In place of

a simple opposition between centered and de-centered, essentializing and inchoate

subjectivities, we encounter a strategic reconfiguration of cultural identity across and

within Africa (what Kane Sy calls “south-south” exchanges). The projects of Huit

Facettes and Altaf return us to the question of speech with which this essay began, but

in a new register. They enact a mode of expression that no longer privileges the

individual artist as exemplary speaker but rather, takes on a strategic relationship to

political collectivities currently in formation. As Michel de Certeau observed in his

analysis of the events of May ’68, “Insofar as people wish to run the risk of existing—

insofar as they notice that in order to have speech its power must be assured—they will

give to their identity the historical figure of a new cultural and political unity .”36 Is it

possible that the propensity for community is not simply a concession to an inherent

individualism, extracted from us by necessity or force? Is it possible to forge new

identities, and new forms of collective unity, without the cohesive threat provided by a

common enemy? Do we possess a deeper, ameliorative inclination towards our fellow

beings? And can art help to elaborate, distill, or catalyze this inclination?



35

The artists of Groundworks don’t begin with the assumption that the viewer,

participant or collaborator is always, already a naïve accomplice to oppression, or that

they possess a privileged insight into the operations of social power, unavailable to

others. They begin, instead, with an opening out to their collaborators: a recognition of

them as complex and fully human, which I have written about elsewhere in terms of a

dialogical aesthetic.37 As Kane Sy writes: "In Senegal, as elsewhere in Africa, greeting

someone, being conscious of the presence of the other, as interlocutor, is to bear

witness to their existence as a human being in the truest sense of the word. The one

who ‘feels’ that you exist (by respecting you) legitimates to some extent your humanity.

This is a fundamental value in the part of the world where we live." 38 Altaf reiterates this

sentiment, “Beginning to listen is the beginning of the process of communication. Within

the group we feel that we are conscious about the right to speak, how to speak together,

or to speak with or alongside others, in the sense of forming alliances. All this could be

impossible, but we believe that those who are interested in restructuring power in more

egalitarian ways, must consciously work towards these values.”39 This process of

speech entails respect for the interlocutor and for the process of communication itself,

as subtle, shifting and temporally extensive. Suzanne Lacy, Susan Steinman and

Yutaka Kobayashi have been working in collaboration with residents of Elkhorn City,

Kentucky for six years, gradually building the trust and rapport necessary to catalyze the

process of re-envisioning their ecologically devastated community. This kind of labor is

invisible to conventional art discourse, but clearly essential to these practitioners.

The exchanges initiated in the workshops of Navjot Altaf, Huit Facettes, and



36

Lacy, Steinman and Kobayashi constitute a form of labor that is distinct from the “work”

of possessive individualism. Their goal is not the violent extraction of value or the

suppression of difference, but a co-production of identity at the interstices of existing

cultural traditions, political forces, and individual subjectivities. Nor is this labor

subsumable to the tradition of “antagonistic” democracy favored by Ernesto Laclau and

Chantal Mouffe, which seeks to preserve a symbolic kernel of un-assimilable resistance

as a necessary corrective to the conformist pressure exerted by consensual political

models.40 Antagonism is only possible among those who hold fixed positions and are

defined in turn by a subjectivity that must be defended from cooptation. This model fails

to acknowledge the possibility that the process of intersubjective exchange itself, rather

than merely transmitting existing knowledge, could be generative and ontologically

transformative. It is the promise of collaborative aesthetic experience to prefigure

another set of possibilities, to enact change and not simply represent a priori positions.

The opening out to alterity and the collaborative interlocutor evident in

Groundworks is paralleled by an opening out to the natural world. This approach is not,

however, concerned with nature as a pristine and romanticized ideal. We encounter

instead a consistent acknowledgement that nature is, for better and for worse, always

defined in relation to human use and habitation. This connection is explicit in Ala

Plastica’s Emergent Species project in 1995, which involved research into the capacity

of reeds and other aquatic plants to absorb pollution. In the process, Ala Plastica’s

members came to identify a significant correspondence between the structure of reed-

bed propagation and a creative practice that links diverse particularities via a non-



37

hierarchical network:

We planned a project represented by the metaphor of rhizomatic expansion andemergence, alluding to the behavior of these plants and to the emergentcharacter of ideas and creative practices. The connection of remnants within oneanother generated a practically indescribable warp of intercommunicationderiving into innumerable actions that developed and increased throughreciprocity : dealing with social and environmental problems; exploring both non-institutional and intercultural models while working with the community and onthe social sphere; interacting, exchanging experiences and knowledge withproducers of culture and crops, of art and craftwork, of ideas and objects.

This approach echoes Andrew Light’s discussion of “place” and the dialectical

relationship between narrative and identity formed through lived interaction with

particular eco-systems. Ala Plastica began their AA Project in the Rio del Plata basin

with a process of “local knowledge recovery” in order to actualize the insights of the

area’s residents into the social and environmental costs of destructive “mega-

engineering” projects. These include the Zárate-Brazo Largo complex (a massive

railroad and highway line) and the Punta Lara Colonia bridge, which have damaged

eco-systems in the region (through flooding and erosion) as well the social fabric of

local communities. In order to challenge the institutional authority of the corporate and

governmental interests responsible for these projects, Ala Plastica worked with the

area’s residents to articulate their own visions for the region through the creation of

communications platforms and networks for mutual cooperation.

If Ala Plastica’s work is predicated on the enhancement of solidarity here and

now, we also encounter in this exhibition a sense of collectivity that transcends spatial

or temporal proximity. This “anamnetic” solidarity is apparent in Ichi Ikeda’s commitment

to water access as a “fundamental human right”. Noting the vast disparities in water



38

usage (the average Kenyan survives on five liters of water per-day while some

Americans consume as much as a thousand), Ikeda seeks to elicit a shared

responsibility for water resources that extends regionally and even globally. His 80,000

Liter Water Box project (2003) involves the creation of large water storage units in sites

around the world as a way to call attention to these disparities and their potential impact

on future generations. He describes the water boxes “as a starting point for forwarding

water for 1000 people to the next generation living on the earth”. In his Water Ekiden-

Manosegawa River Art Project (1999-) Ikeda used a series of meetings, performances

and workshops to catalyze a sense of collective responsibility among the residents of

four communities on the polluted Manosegawa River, leading to the creation of four

“water stations” for the storage and transfer of water. This ability to imagine, and to

literally feel, our connectedness to others, extends into the past and future in Platform’s

Delta project, which evokes the lost riparian communities of London, and Brookner,

Flom and Rosenthal’s Discover McKeesport project, which offers an anticipatory

glimpse of a revitalized McKeesport, circa 2020. It brings us, finally, to the faculty of

aesthetic imagination and the essential human capacity to envision alternative forms of

sociality, and a future for the planet that transcends the brutish values of economic

“necessity”. At a historical moment in which possessive individualism has risen to the

status of a religion in the American polity, and in which trust, and the willingness to risk

communication across boundaries of difference, are so imperiled, the projects in

Groundworks remind us of art’s ability to evoke a society based on hope rather than

fear, and on care for others rather than the violent assertion of self.



1 From “The Task” in The Poetical Works of William Cowper, with Memoirs and Notes

(Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1920), p.326.

2 Historian Martin Hoyles describes the transformation made by Lord Harcourt atNuneham Courtenay near Oxford in 1761:

The village street became a path in the park for viewing the valley below. Thechurch was turned into a classical temple and the congregation still responsiblefor its upkeep, now had to walk a mile and a half to worship. Cows were providedwith a special underground passage so they could pass from field to field withoutspoiling the view. One old woman, the shepherdess Babs Wyatt, was allowed tostay in her cottage in the middle of the new landscape garden. Martin Hoyles,The Story of Gardening (London: Journeyman Press, 1991), p.36.

3 William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More , vol. 1(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), p.155.

4 C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke,(Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1962).

5 See Grant Kester, The Faculty of Possession: Property and the Aesthetic in EnglishCulture 1730-1850 (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, 1996).

6 Erika Lee Doss, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy inAmerican Communities (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), p.124.Original source: John Gruen, “Michael Heizer: ‘You Might Say I’m in the ConstructionBusiness,’” ARTnews 76 (December 1977), p.99.

7 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp.61-84.

8

See my essay “Aesthetic Enactment: Loraine Leeson’s Reparative Practice,” Art for Change: Loraine Leeson, 1975-2005 (Berlin: Neueun Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst,2005).



9 John Locke, The Essay Concerning Human Understanding , volume one, edited withan introduction by John W. Yolton, (London: J.M. Dent, 1961), p.155., (Book 4, chapter 3).

10 Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers; The Lives, Times and Ideas of theGreat Economic Thinkers, 6th. edition (New York: Touchstone, 1999), p.28.

11 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944).

12Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres, vol.2, book 1, translated by Francis W.Kelsey, with Arthur E.R. Boak, Henry A. Sanders, Jesses S. Reeves, and Herbert W.Wright, introduction by James Brown Scott, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p.186.

13Grotius cited in Karl Olivecrona, "Locke's Theory of Appropriation," John Locke:Critical Assessments, Richard Ashcraft, editor, (London: Routledge, 1991), p.330.

14Olivecrona, "Locke's Theory of Appropriation," pp.330-331.

15The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf , Craig L. Carr, editor, Michale J. Seidler,translator, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.175.

16

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (and Robert Filmer's Patriarcha), edited,with an introduction by Thomas I. Cook, (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1969), p.134.

17 As C.B. Macpherson notes, property should be understood not as a "thing" to bepossessed, but as a "right" to be exercised or performed. C.B. MacPherson, "TheMeaning of Property," Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, (Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 1978), p.3.

18 John Locke, "Of Property," in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, p.18.



19 While Locke is a staunch advocate of the idea that "every man has a property in hisown person," this principle comes into conflict with the "extension of personality" I'vealready outlined, which allows one person to possess the labor of another as his or her property. In a society in which the bulk of the common land has already beenengrossed, one segment of the population will, inevitably, be forced to sell their labor tothe other. Thus, the juridically free worker is granted property-right in his own labor in asituation in which his only possible option is to then surrender that "property" inexchange for wages. That is, the act of granting the worker property in his own labor isonly allowed in order for it to then be made available to others.

20In his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) Sir William Chambers argued for theuniversality of the garden as an art form: "The production of other arts have their separate classes of admirers . . . But Gardening is of a different nature: its dominion isgeneral; its effects upon the human mind certain and invariable; without any previousinformation, without being taught, all men are delighted with the gay luxuriant scenery of

summer, and depressed at the dismal aspect of autumnal prospects; the charms of cultivation are equally sensible to the learned and the ignorant. . . " The EighteenthCentury: Art, design and society, 1689-1789, edited by Bernard Denvir, (London:Longman, 1983), p.244.

21 As Miles Hadfield notes, "The rising class of industrialists, merchants, and new richfrom India and North America sought political power, pleasure, and gentility through thebuilding or acquiring of country houses. Soon, in spite of the vulgar taint of trade, theywere in a position equal to—and often financially sounder to—the inheritors of the oldparks and country seats. The machinery for obtaining their lands was of course, often

the use of the Enclosure Acts." Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1985), pp.197-198.

22The centrality of the landscape garden in English culture at the time is derived in partfrom it’s explicit political symbolism. If the geometric French garden, with its rows of regimented parterres stretching to the horizon, was seen by many as symbolic of theinflexibility of the French monarchy, imposing its a priori rules on the populaceregardless of their wishes, then the more accommodating "natural" landscape gardenwas symptomatic of the political character of a country that was democratically openand based on the natural harmony of human interests. What made the “natural” style

English landscape garden unique at the time was precisely its informality, its openness,and its liberal refusal to dictate a single point of view or to be circumscribed by imposedhierarchies. Here was a form of power that didn't have to rely on the sheer force of anexternally-imposed royal will to command and regulate the surrounding environment,and its political subjects. In A History of British Gardening Miles Hadfield describes the"new fashion" of the natural landscape garden as "essentially Whig" (p.180).



23The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphrey Repton,Esq., with an introduction, analysis, biography, notes, and index by J.C. Loudon, F.L.S.,(London: Longman and Company, 1840), p.208.

24Ibid.

25 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England , (Moscow: ProgressPublishers, 1980), p.78.

26 Martin Jay, “Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experiencefrom the Work of Art,” Aesthetic Subjects, edited by Pamela R. Matthews and DavidMcWhirter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p.18-19. The tensionbetween the desire to transgress discursive and disciplinary boundaries, on the one

hand, and to protect the “autonomy” of the aesthetic, on the other, is a central issue incontemporary art theory. Jay’s tendency to define the erosion of aesthetic autonomythrough a sexualized rhetoric (he warns of the “promiscuous re-enchantment of theentire world” and the “promiscuous aestheticization of the entire world”) reiterates theconventional avant-garde opposition between art (which is resistant, austere anddemanding) and popular and consumer culture (which surrender themselves to theviewer to easily).

27 Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community , translated byStephen Pluhacek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p.4.

28 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2003), p.140. I’d like to thank Carol McDowelland Legier Biederman at UCLA for bringing this reference to my attention.

29 Ibid., p.141.

30 See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

31 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community , edited by Peter Connor, translated byPeter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p.35.



32 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Aesthetics and Modernity” in Aesthetics and Ideology ,George Levine, editor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p.134.

33 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza

Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002),p.28.

34 Navjot Altaf, “Contemporary Art, Issues of Praxis, and Art-Collaboration: My Bastar Interventions and Interrogations” (unpublished essay, 2004).

35 Artist Jay Koh has explored similar issues in relationship to art practice in southeastAsia. See my essay “The Art of Listening (and of Being Heard): Jay Koh’s DiscursiveNetworks,” Third Text 47 (Summer, 1999), pp.19-26.

36 Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, introductionby Luce Giard, translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1997), p.32.

37 See Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2004).

38 Patrick Deegan, unpublished interview with Amadou Kane Sy, (spring 2005).

39 Navjot Altaf, “Contemporary Art, Issues of Praxis, and Art-Collaboration: My Bastar Interventions and Interrogations”.

40 See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

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