Who are you artists

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// On art and philosophy: a transcribed excerpt of an on-going conversation between an artist and a philosopher

(Originally composed for the Exhibition “Who are you artists?”)

...But, art is nothing other than philosophy! That is, it has been freed, as Danto pointed out, from its self-defining prerogative, its modernist agenda, to be more than it was. And artists are free to engage with a world-building project that is concerned with more than the definition of art as such, or the limitations of the epistemological question of what is art. Art is no longer restricted to the question of art and has, as Danto argues, become philosophy itself.

Art and philosophy have necessarily different horizons. Sure, you have artists who engage with pseudo-philosophical inquires, or speak “philosophically” through their work, but these are always tired illustrations of what has been displayed in philosophy before-hand, they are not philosophizing in any sense. Because they are not capable of doing so. The work of philosophy is necessarily tied to the freedom project of rationalism and is bound by and through language and reason. Art’s project is different.

So, are you saying that the difference between art and philosophy is that art is not subject to reason? But, wouldn’t that be focusing, in an uninteresting way, on the methodological difference between art and philosophy? And even if art may not be bound by reason, those who engage with art are, and the dialectics of that engagement are certainly, like philosophy, aimed at delimiting the horizons of what we know.

First of all, methodology is not an arbitrary question, and second, the project of philosophy is distinctly aligned with the project of reason such that...

Yes, but for example, last week we spoke about nihilism, and the need to push through nihilism—to come out the other side without falling into complete relativism, solipsism, etc.. Isn’t that the task of philosophy? Of world-building? And doesn’t art do this as well? As Bourriaud said in his panel talk last week: “art ruptures, it punctures knowledge.” And anyway, it seems quite clear, that art shares the belief, found everywhere today, of the human as a constructible hypothesis.

The task of Inhumanism, which we spoke of last week and which I assume you are referring to, is one of revision. It is easiest to understand it metaphorically:

Humanity is constantly drawing a portrait in the sand. A self-portrait. A portrait of humanity itself. It is the Sisyphean work of the Inhumanist—the philosopher—to, like a wave, wash that image away, so that a new one can be drawn once again.

As a vector of revision, Inhumanism relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposed evident characteristics and preserving certain invariances (thus it is a universalist project). In this erasure, Inhumanism is itself a demand for construction.

And isn’t this the task of art? At least, any good art? A project of erasure: to disrupt what we think we know? Then, to return to the problem of methodology, it seems that the difference between art and philosophy is rather how they propose this erasure: philosophers propose to analyze the portrait of humanity themselves, while the artists’ sole aim is to get us to do the analyzing ourselves.

But, is it a project of erasure, behind all the rhetoric? Or is it a project of self-representation? Is art the activity of removing those self-evident characteristics—of erasing the self-portrait—or is it, as is commonly cited as a defense for arts in cultural programs across the world, a representation of society to itself—the technology by which humanity draws its portrait? We can take for example a social practice artist like Jeremy Deller: through re-enactments, parades, processions, and interviews, he participates in the cultivation of oral histories which celebrate the world as it is. As Rancière reminds us: Plato long ago concluded that the spectacle is the self-division of the subject caused by a lack of knowledge and the transmission of ignorance. It is easy to see how Deller’s Procession might be cast in these terms, insofar as it’s historical and contemporary form encourages and operates through spectatorship. His work relies on, and exalts, the living memories of its collaborators, conditioning the population through the re-presentation of public culture. He is even unconsciously responsible for the co-opting of existing pockets of counter-culture through his use of the parade—a historic means of conditioning a population—by enlisting exactly those people who identify themselves as castoffs from traditional social norms, such as the Goths and Emos, in the celebration of a city which has ostracized them.

Well, sticking to Rancière: if the “distribution of the sensible,” as he calls it, is the self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it, then art, insofar as it is involved in making visible what in that distribution is invisible, or sayable what was unsayable—that is in the political project of “re-distributing the sensible”—is indeed a technology, but one of revision. Even in its roots as Poïesis, art is an action that transforms and continues the world. Deller would not be my first choice of examples—though I think his use of re-enactment’s works upon precisely that self-portrait we are speaking of—but even his Procession can be used to explicate this making visible the invisible. True, Deller himself claims that the work is an “attempt to show the public to itself,” but which public is that? It is the part of Manchester that is not only underrepresented or unacknowledged, or even persecuted, but even silent and voiceless.

While I think that it is arguable whether or not Deller’s portrait of Manchester gives voice to the voiceless we can still make use of Rancière for one minute longer: we can see that art’s project is the redrawing of the self-portrait of man, of restructuring the world and reorganizing the political horizons (skipping for now the potential triviality of Rancière’s politics). But, we must return to our original question, which was whether art and philosophy undertake the same project, and, after that, whether art participates in the inhumanist project of erasure. You will recall that my primary claim was that the difference between art and philosophy lay in access to the discursive space of language: these discursive practices constitute the giving and asking for reasons and outlining the space of reason as a landscape of navigation, marking the constructible character of human. But in our discussion thus far we have been confusing two registers which must be disentangled: Discourse about art and art per se.

An ontological question or an epistemological one? Wouldn’t such a division between art discourse and art per se be trivial? Not only that it would be operating on an outdated model of art or ignoring contemporary art practice.

I understand your concern, and indeed we’re not interested in that old modernist modality—any categorical definition would run us in circles. And even from the very outset, though we started with a distinction between art and philosophy, what we are really interested in is operations. Thus, we must return to the question of the rational project....