Practices of Negation of secondary

lsBN 978-0-262-53432-1

, llllUJ!ilUUun|til

lttfliitlftrtt

I Zl17 LLfiil

Fcundation & The Center

for Curatorial

Studies,

Bard Coilege

A1i r!.g-fts reserwed. lio part of this book may be reproduced in any form
by any elec+rcric or rechanical means [including photocopying, recording,
or ir:fosraticn storage and retrievall without permission in writing

fro.

t}re pubLisher.

This bcok ras set in Circular and Septima, and

Librar! of

Congress Cataloging - i

n-

Publ

l{ares: 0'llei.ll., Pau1, 1973- editor.

editor.

Titl.e:

ti@r

discoucse

irstitr.rtions think :

/

edj.ted by PauI

i

ication

r'vas

printtsd and bound

in lta1y.

Data

Steeds, Lucy,

editor. I Wilson, Mick,

art and curatorial
Lucy Steeds, and Mick Wilson.

between contemporary

0'Neill,

: The HIT Press, 2017. I Includes bibliographical
referenees.
Identifiefs: 't-ffi* 2a17a27r?9 I ISBN 9780262534321 [pbk. : a]k. paper]
Subjects: LCSi.: Art ruseums--Curatorship. | 0rganizational behavior, I Art,
llode.n--z1st centlry. I Art and society.

Descrigtlcn: Sartridge, HA

Classifieat!.or: !3C i4!8 .HBg 2017

https

:

//icc-. i..=, ?ca / 23i7a27729

|

nDC 708--dc23 LC xecord

available at

2+2

CONTR]BUTORS' BIOGRAPH]ES

O PaulO'Neill
Paul O'Neill is a curator, artist, writer, and

educator based in New York and Helsinki. He was
the Director of the Graduate Program at the Center
for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, between 2013
and 2017. Paul has co-curated close to 6O exhibition
projects across the world and his writing has been
published in many books, catalogues, journals, and

magazines, and he is a regular contributor to Art
Monthly. He is reviews editor for Art ond the Public
Sphere Journol, and an editor of Afterall's Exhibition
Histories series, while he is on the editorial board of
FIELD and The Journol of Curotoriol Studies. He was

co-editor of The Curatoriol Conundrum: Whot to
Study? Whot to Reseorch? Whot to Proctice?, with
Lucy Steeds and Mick Wilson (The MIT Press, 2016);
co-editor of Curoting Reseorch (de Appel and Open
Editions, 2015) with Mick Wilson; editor of the
curatorial anthology Curating Subiects (ZOOZ) and
co-editor of Curoting ond the EducotionolTurn

with Mick Wilson (ZO1O), both published by de
Appel and Open Editions; and author of Locoting the
Producers: Durationol Approoches to Public Art
(Valiz,2O11), edited with Claire Doherty. He is author
of the critically acclaimed book lhe Culture of
Curoting ond the Curoting of Culture(s) (The MIT
Press, 2012).

O Emily Pethick
Emily Pethick has been the Director of The
Showroom, London, since 2OO8. She is currently
also working as part of a curatorial team researching
plans for a new institution in Amsterdam led by
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Ammodo, while
also teaching the Curating Positions programme at
the Dutch Art lnstitute. From 2OO5 to 20O8 she was
the Director of Casco, Office for Art, Design and
Theory, in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and in 20052OO4 she was curator at Cubitt, London. Her writing
has been included in numerous catalogs, including
essays on Stephen Willats and Dave Hullfish Bailey,

and in magazines such as Artforum, Afteroll and
frieze. She has also edited books, including Circulor
Focts (Sternberg, 2011) with Binna Choi and Mai
AbuElDahab; Hidden Curriculum (Epidose, 2008) by
Annette Krauss; Cosco /ssues Xl: An Ambiguous
Cose (ZOOS) with Marina Vishmidt and Tanja
Widmann, and Cosco /ssues X: The Greot Method
(ZOOT) with Peio Aguirre; and monographs on
Annette Krauss, The Otolith Group, Wendelien van
Oldenborgh, and Ricardo Basbaum. Emily Pethick is
a jury member for the 2O17 Turner Prize.

O Nata5a Petre5in-Bachelez
NataSa Petreiin-Bachelez is an independent
curator and writer. She curated projects and
exhibitions at the Moderna galerija/Museum of
Contemporary Art (Lju bljana), transmediale a nd
HKW (Berlin), Living Art Museum (Reykjavik),
Sursock Museum (Beirut), the Centre Pompidou and
Jeu de Paume (Paris), and Le Plateau/FRAC lle-deFrance. Between 2O10 and 2012, she was co-Director

of Les Laboratoires dAubervilliers, and co-founder
of the network of art institutions Cluster. She is a
co-organizer of the seminar "Something you should
know" at EHESS, Paris, and a member of the
research group Travelling F6ministe, at Centre
audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir. She is the editor of
the online platform L'lnternationole Online of the
museums confederation L'lnternationale, and was
the chief editor of the Monifesto Journol between
2012 and 2014.

O Andrea Phillips
Andrea Phillips is PARSE Professor of Art and
Head of Research at the Valand Academy of Arts,
University of Gothenburg. Phillips lectures and
writes about the economic and social construction

of publics within contemporary art, the
manipulation of forms of participation, and the
potential of forms of political, architectural, and

social reorganization within artistic and curatorial
culture. Recent publications include "ln Service: art,
value, merit and the making of publics," in Public
Servonts (The MIT Press/New Museum, 2O15);
"Making the Public," in When Site Lost the Plot
(Urbanomic, 2015); "Contemporary Art and
Transactional Behaviour," inThe New Economy of
Art (DACS, 2O1tr); "Remaking the Arts Centre," in
Cluster: Other Culturol Offers (Casco, 2OA); and 'Art
as Property," in Economy: Art ond the Subject ofter
Postmodermsm (Liverpool University Press, 2O15).

O Sarah Pierce
Sarah Pierce is an artist who lives in Dublin. She
holds a PhD in Curatorial Knowledge from Goldsmiths,
and an MFA from Cornell University. Since 2003,
Pierce has used the title The Metropoliton Complex

to describe her project. Despite its institutional
resonance, this phrase does not signify an organization.

Instead, it shows a broad understanding of cultural
work, articulated through methods that highlight
a continual renegotiation of the terms for making
art: the potential for dissent and self-determination,

?43

CONTR]BUTORS' B]OGRAPH]ES

and the slippages between individual work and
institution. Her work is deeply invested in uses
of the canon and collections, and the potential for
these to open up to experimentation and selfdetermination. ln 2015 Pierce mounted major
exhibitions at the lrish Museum of Modern Art
and the National Gallery of lreland in Dublin, and
the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.

O Moses Serubiri
Moses Serubiri is an independent art writer and
curator based in Kampala, Uganda. His essays have

been published in Chimurengo (South Africa),
Ku I t u ro u stousch (Germa ny), a nd C&
Co nte m po ro ry
And (Germany). His research and curatorial projects
include "Life mu City" (2014), on urban language
held at the Goethe Zentrum Kampala, and the
biennial contemporary art festival, KLA ARTUNMAPPED (ZOt+), on urban mapping and social
classification in Uganda. As research intern for

C&-Contemporory And, he wrote short essays on
African cultural producers on the international art
scene. Serubiri is currently on the curatorial team
for the 10th Berlin Biennale, curated by Gabi
Ngcobo. He is an alumnus of the Asiko lnternational
Art School, and was awarded the 2015 Stadtschreiber
residency at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced

African Studies.

O Simon Sheikh
Simon Sheikh is a curator and theorist. He is
Reader in Art and Programme Director of the MFA
Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is
a correspondent for Springerin, Vienna, and a
columnist for e-flux Journol, New York. He has been
a researcher for the ongoing Former West project,
initiated by BAK in Utrecht, and was co-editor
of Former West. Art ond the Contemporory ofter
1989 (BAK/The MIT Press, 2O17).

O Lucy Steeds
Lucy Steeds is Reader in Art Theory and
Exhibition Histories at Central Saint Martins (CSM),
University of the Arts London. She is Senior
Research Fellow for Afterall at CSM-leading on
the Exhibition Histories strand-and she teaches on
the MRes Art: Exhibition Studies course. Her recent
books include The Curotoriol Conundrum: Whot to
Study? Whot to Reseorch? Whot to Proctice?,
co-edited with Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson (The

MIT Press, 2016),and the anthology Exhibition
(Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2014). Her recent
essays include contributions to Ihe Artist os Curotor
(Mousse Publishing, 2016); Towords the Light,
Exhi biti ng Conte m poro ry Drawi ng, 1964-1980
(Roven 6ditions and Mus6e Jenisch, 2O15); Moking
Bienniols in Contemporory Times (The Biennial
Foundation, FundagSo Bienal de S5o Paulo and
lCCo, 2O15); and Art Critique Taiwon, special issue
on Curatorship (Tainan National University of the
Arts, 2O15). She has a doctorate in Cultural History
from Goldsmiths, University of London.

O Mick Wilson
Mick Wilson is an artist, educator, and researcher
based in Sweden and lreland. He is currently the
first Head of the Valand Academy of Art, University
of Gothenburg. Edited volumes include lhe
Curatorial Conundrum: Whot to Study? Whot to
Research? Whot to Proctice? (The MIT Press, 2O16)

co-edited with Paul O'Neill and Lucy Steeds;
Curoting Reseorch (Open Editions /de Appel, 2014),
and Curoting ond the Educotionol Turn (Open
Editions /de Appel, 2O10) both co-edited with Paul
O'Neill; and SHARE Hondbook for Artistic Reseorch
Educotion (ELlA, 2013) co-edited with Schelte van
Ruiten. Projects and exhibitions include Aesthetrcs
Jom, Tai pei Bien n ia I (zOA); J oyf u I Wi sd o m, Reza n
Has Museum, lstanbul (zOtS); The Judgement is
the Mirror, Living Art Museum, Reykjavik (2013);
Sorne songs ore sung slower, The Lab, Dublin (zots);
and Of the solt bitter sweet seo.'A public bonquet,
Dublin (2012). Recent publications include: "Opening
to a Discussion on Judgement," PARSE journal # 1,
(zots);"Dead Public: An unfinished enquiry," in
Vector: Artistic research in context (ZOfl);
'Anachronistic Aesthesis," in Experi mental
Aesthetics (ZOU); "Between Apparatus and Ethos:
On Building a Research Pedagogy in the Arts," in
Artrsts with PhDs: On the New Doctorol Degree in
Studio Art (zOl+); "We are the Board, but what is an
Assemblage?," in Art os o Thinking Process (ZOts);
"Come Promises From Teachers," in Offside Effect:
Popers from the lst Tbilisi Trienniol(ZOtS); and
"Blame it on Bologn a," in MetropolisM (2013).

246

ACKNOWLEIGI4ENTS

&

CRE!]TS

HOW INSTITUTIONS THINK
ln February 2O16, the symposium How lnstitutions
Think took place at LUMA Arles / Parc des Ateliers,
Arles, France. The symposium was organized by
LUMA Foundation with Paul O'Neill and Tom Eccles
(CCS Bard), in partnership with Mick Wilson (Valand
Academy of Arts, University of Gothenburg);
Charles Esche, Alison Green, Lucy Steeds (Central
Saint Martins, University of the Arts London); Simon
Sheikh (Department of Art, Gotdsmiths, University
of London); Maria Mkrtycheva (the V-A-C
Foundation, Moscow); and Guus van Engelshoven
(de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam).
The symposium included contributions by
Dave Beech, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre,
M6lanie Bouteloup, Jason E. Bowman, Binna Choi
and Annette Krauss, C6line Condorelli, Pip Day,
Cl6mentine Deliss, Keller Easterling, Tom Eccles,
Bassam El Baroni, Charles Esche, Patricia Falguidres,
Patrick D. Flores, Alison Green, Marina GrZinii,
Alhena Katsof, Maria Mkrtycheva, Richard Noble,
Paul O'Nelll, Nata5a PetreSin-Bachelez, Andrea
Phillips, Sarah Pierce,Zahia Rahmani, Helena
Reckitt, Simon Sheikh, Lucy Steeds, Jeanine Tang,
Guus van Engelshoven, and Mick Wilson.
The symposium was part of an ongoing
collaboration between CCS Bard and the LUMA
Foundation, which hosted previous symposia
organized by the two institutions. The symposium
The Future Curotoriol Whot Not ond Study What?
Conundrum (2014) focused on key concerns in
contemporary curating in terms of what to study,
what to research and what to practice, and took
place at the Hessel Museum, Bard College. Both Ihe
Humon Snopshot (ZOtt), and Ihe Flood

of

Rights

organized collaboratively with Bard College's
Human Rights Project, were held in Arles, and
addressed the photographic image and human rights.
Following the symposium How lnstitutions Think,
the participants were invited to expand on their
presentations and submit new texts, while some
additional authors were also invited to contribute,
which has resulted in this book.
(ZO1S),

ocrold L{eres

uolle60N

+o

socl}cerd

zfr4

SARAH PIERCE

I
My education-s/osh-initiation into being an artist
coincided with the arrival of my politics. I still have
the secondhand cop14 of Francis Frascina's Pollock
and After: The Criticol Debate, purchased from
a college bookshop in 1989 for a course on
contemporary art. The debate begins one-sidedly
with American critic Clement Greenberg's defense
of Abstract Art, painting in particular. For Greenberg,
the artist's commitment to medium places the
'values of art' above aJl other concerns, thereby
delivering modernism's foremost promise: to
continually renew itself. trl ln Greenberg's view, this
is the only promise that matters, and abstraction,
above all other forms, delivers it beautifully by
protecting the art object from everything outside
itself. Art 'plagued' by subject matter is to be
avoided at all costs, for the good of painting, for
the good of art, indeed, for the good of everyone,
since art's vulnerability to populism on the one
hand, and propaganda on the other puts all of
society at risk.rz: Aesthetic judgment, medium
purity, and new formalisms were all a critic need
look for in a work of art. "CutI when your evaluation
goes beyond the aesthetic," was Greenberg's
advice to young critics. tst
When the Portrson Review published Greenberg's
'Avant-garde and Kitsch" in 1939, it became the
dominant story of art, to be told and re-told in
museums and art schools across the United States
and Europe. ln the face of its exploitation by the
Nazis, and postwar revelations the CIA had promoted
abstract art as a weapon of the Cold War, and
despite the challenges and reprisals that grew into a
subsequent generation's political movement, the
power of a paradigm to reproduce its own ideology
prevailed. Greenberg's cautionary prose is exactly
the language politicians used to thwart a so-called
left-turn among artists and intellectuals, while a
complicit art establishment more often than not sided
against artworks that went beyond the aesthetic.
In 1982, British art historian T.J. Clark addressed
Greenberg's theory of art in a pivotal text that
named those proctrces of negotion, that obscure their
own history through moral claims of neutrality. t+l
For Clark there were no inherent values in art, only
ideological divisions, including the avant-garde's
historical awareness that sought to break down

[1]

Clemen+-

Greenberg, "Towards a

Newel

in Pollock and After: The
Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frasclna
ILondon: Routledge, 2000] p. 6a.
[2] Clement Greenberg, "Avant garde
and Kitsch," in Frascina, Pollock and
lfter, p. 50.
1,. Lr-p,s- 9 o o'.d b, tr" -ra I'
Laocoon,"

received traditions through the emergence of
competing practices. Clark wrote, "On the other
side of negation is always emptiness: that is a
message which modernism never tires of repeating
and a territory into which it regularly strays. We
have an art in which ambiguity becomes infinite,
which is on the verge of proposing-and does
propose-an Other which is comfortably ineffable,
a vacuity, a vagueness, a mere mysticism of
sight."tst The politics of representation forced the
hand of Greenberg's adage, ort-for-ort's'soke, which
anchored his theory of art. For Clark, the formalisms
that breached the symbolic and isolated art f rom its
social histories betrayed more than class allegiance.
They negated real conflicts. Within the limits of
practice, the autonomy of art was most at stake.
Then, less so now, the poles of Greenberg and
Clark's positions seemed clear and far apart. As a
student, I distinctly recall feeling that Clark was
right. Far from arising autonomously and escaping
politics, art was waged between systems of power
and the struggles of life. This translated into a
politics that I identified with as a young artist, if only
because I could see the negations Clark pointed to
in the world around me. By 1989, the anti-Russia
rhetoric I grew up with was spinning into a maniacal
victory for the West, marred by oppressive regimes
of trickle-down economics, the chaotic onset of
AIDS and a fallacious war on drugs. The full
callousness of a government unwilling to address,
let alone channel funding, to fix a major health crisis
was simultaneously wreaking havoc on families
whose children were now criminalized, dragged
under by the political undertow.
ln 1988, George H.W. Bush was elected president,
rounding eight years of unprecedented spending
with four years of drastic cuts to domestic
programs, and a foreign policy that claimed a new
world order. ln a matter of months, boys I went to
high school with who had joined the army to pay
for college were shipped off to the Gulf War. By
1989, Jesse Helms, a Republican senator from North
Carolina, had effectively shut down the National
Endowment for the Arts, halting all government
funding to individual artists by pitting defense
spending against monies spent on art. The folloWing
year, a beloved family friend who was my First
Grade teacher, died of AIDS in his apartment,
exhausted, emaciated, and far too young.

Poilock and After p. ir. The first

eoi 'o-, rrl ) T Poo o. o ,ss' ', Lo.
a different introduction to the second
edition published by Routledge.
[4] f.i. Clark, "Cfemeni- 0reenberg's
Theory cf Art," in Frascina, Pollock
and After, p. 84.
l5) Ibid. , p. lsa.

[6]

PegSy

Phefan, "Serrano,

the NEA, and You: '[4oney
Ta1ks,"' The Drana Fevier, 0ctober 1989,
Vol. 34, No. 1, p. 13.
17) Ibid., p. 10.
l8) rbid.
ls) Ibid., p. L2.
Mapplethorpe,

PRACTTCES OF NEGATION

was primed to occupy a political position
against all of it, as Lou Reed wrote, not just some of
it, and this included Clement Greenberg's theory of
art, and old patriarchies that traded in real power.
These were moral battles. The United States were
embroiled in what eventually came to be known as
the culture wars, and the art I identified with
involved a sense of justice. Sides were drawn.
Politics launched its attack on culture, and a socalled moral majority succeeded in shutting down
exhibitions supported by the NEA. Censorship
became a real concern for any artist in receipt of
government f unding. This aspect of the debate was
the most outwardly divisive, with performance
artists bearing the brunt of partisan politicking
around decency issues. Underlining the Christian
Right's moral outrage was a belief among
conservatives that the government should not fund
art-any art-regardless of the message. ln
November 1989, Artists Space planned to open
Witnesses.' Agoinst Our Vanishing, curated by Nan
Goldin. Anticipating an attack by Helms and his
supporters, then director of Artists Space Susan
Wyatt alerted John Frohnmayer, the Bush-appointed
new director of the NEA, about the show's content.
Frohnmayer responded by requesting the return of
$10,000 in NEA funding, and the removal of the
NEAs name as a supporter of the exhibition. After
several days of back-and-forth faxes, board
meetings, and consultations with the Justice
Department, Frohnmayer changed his mind. Artists
Space opened the show and included the
correspondence in the exhibition. tet
With acute insight into what was at stake in a
controversy still unfolding, theorist Peggy Phelan
wrote an article in lhe Dromo Review, suggesting
that the zeal of conservative arguments against the
image signaled that the New Right understood
something crucial about art that those on the side of
art had lost sight of-which is that art really does
matter. Amid the scandal, censorship, and moral
outrage were raw, beautiful, startling images. As the
art world prepared well-crafted arguments that cast
Helms and his fellow Republicans as luddites, few of
art's defenders found words to represent the
.artworks in question as powerfully as those who
opposed them. tzt Phelan pointed out a defense that
reverted to a protective socio/ autonomy by claiming
that intensely charged images were purely
conceptual visions. Caught in the wake of the right's
vitriol, we lost track of our own unapologetic and
irrational desire for art. This is what Phelan means
when she wrote, 'Art really does expand the
imagination and release new forms of the possible.
We must stop finding this truth embarrassing,
retrograde, nostalgic. Sure, it sounds corny-but so
I

205

does'l love you'and I wouldn't want to eliminate
that from my imagination either."tel Besides, to
disparage some images cannot, by any logic, mean
disparaging o// images. As Phelan put it, where
Helms and others attacked art, they ought to o/so
defend it: "lf Helms can denounce'offensive'art and
call Serrano 'a jerk' on the floor of the Senate, he
must also be able to define what'good'art is. I for
one would love to hear Helms tell the nation why
Michelangelo's David is magnificent, or why Manet's
Olympio is glorious." tsl
One of my jobs after college was as the
exhibitions assistant at LACE, a nonprofit venue
located in the Cotton Exchange in downtown Los
Angeles (which, speaking of negations, is now the
site of the looming Ronald Reagan State Building).
The shows at LACE existed in another world, then
described as outside the marketplace, outside
traditional institutions; but in hindsight they went
inside, deep, deep inside the pain inflicted by a
hypocritical and perverted system run by men in
suits and black robes. This art dug in with pushy,
crowded, shrill, queer, messy, mystical works that
went way beyond the aesthetic. Against the chaos
of Bush's presidency, I knew nothing but I held my
heroes close. Eleanor Antin, Karen Finlay, Jenny
Holzer, PattiSmith, Mike Kelley, Coco Fusco, Group
Material, and many others.
While working at LACE, I remember a long week
of loading slide carousels with hundreds of
applications for that year's NEA grants. These
awards were given annually to local artists through
panels set up across the county, and administered
by places like LACE. We did not know it then, but it
was the last year the grants would be awarded.
There are no longer direct discretionary funds
allocated to American artists by the US government.
On the final day of the panel, the session ended
early. The Rodney King verdict was going to be
announced later that day, and no one wanted to be
driving around downtown when things kicked offand they did. That evening Fox News reported the
LA Riots with a narrative of people looting; the
evening news was lit with images of broken store
fronts in working-class black and Latino
neighborhoods. ln white neighborhoods, the looting
had been going on for years, with less spectacle and
billions more dollars in damage done by bankers and
executives (including Neil Bush, the president's son),
who robbed the country's Savings and Loans
institutions to line their own pockets.
Negations. The abstract paintings that
Greenberg heralded for their neutrality and purity
hung in every corporate lobby on Wall Street.
Downtown art scenes were dying, but the art
market of the 1980s was booming. Artists like Jeff

208

SARAH P]ERCE

Koons, Eric Fischl, and David Salle were selling work
at prices never before seen by living artists. Huge
payoffs and blockbuster shows left those in favor
of curbing public money to the arts with a menacing
proposition-let the market decide. Capitalism,
pure and simple, was the answer to art's money
problems. The unbridled glee of moneyed investors
getting rich off art reflected the true brutality of
power. I remember feeling the art world had two
distinct sides: David and Goliath. Good and Evil.
Koons's tycoon-persona struck a stark contrast to
the places I loved, and the artists I wanted to be,
and these divides, real and symbolic, trickled down
into decisions I made as a young artist.
Arguments made long ago across various
ideological planes became my arguments.
Somewhere in the context of these early encounters,
my work became this work. Mary Douglas refers
to the feelings of solidarity and sacrifice that arise
through the hidden codes of institutions, where
institutions allow us to think certain ways and act
certain acts.trol This conversation about art and
politics, tired and worn with so many roundabouts
and returns delivered me to where I am in the
present-if only, as Svetlana Boym suggests, by way
of a "reflective nostalgia that lingers on ruins."1rr1
lf nostalgia is a betrayal of the present, it also
betrays a linear passage of time, or a progressive
time that builds and moves forward, because
nostalgia's return unlocks time, passing into the
folds of a perpetually incomplete present, never
fully restored, never with the wholeness of a
completed past.
The legislation introduced by Senator Helms was
eventually defeated, at a compromise that revealed
the paranoia that surrounded codifying decency in
art. As written, the Act prohibits endowment funds
to, "promote, disseminate or produce, materials
considered obscene, including sadomasochism,
homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children,
or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when
taken as a whole, do not have serious literary,
artistic, political, or scientific value."1rz1 ln the mess
of legislation, the nudes and exposed pubises,
unsheathed groins and gleaming torsos became

[10] [4ary nouglas begins her inquiry
statlng: "To write about cooperation and
solidarity means writing at the same
tlme about rejectlon and mistrust," thus
offering inslght into the ways
institutions translate identity into
loyalty. See l\1ary Douglas, Hor
Institutions Ihink ISyracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 19861 p. 1.
[11] Svetlana Boym, Ihe Future of
Nostalgia

INew

York, l']Y: Basi.c,

20011

p. 41.
[12] Quoted by Peggy Phelan, "Serrano,
[4applethorpe, the NEA...," p. 12.

[13]

Greenberg

an issue, and given that serious value is a criterion
for funding, it would appear that in the end art did
not decide what is good and what is bad for art.trsl
To exit a paradigm takes almost super-human
strength. To galvanize against two hundred years of
art history, and the stranglehold that runs through
the very institutionality of art, requires more than
political will. lt is not a rational moment. lt is not
simply an argument made, a problematic entered
into, a reorganized project, a theoretical
restructuring, or even an ideological battle. As a
student of art in the late 1980s, I inherited a
discussion that was well underway. A set orthodoxy
of prescribed knowledges, judgments, and
absolutes on one side, and, on the other, a truth
about what it is to make art.

tr
On the morning of November 9,2016,1 drove my
seven-year-old son along a country road to school.
He kept asking and wanting to know if the people
who voted for Trump are bad people. I shared the
question. Are they? The Day After (as I call it now
for the end-of-the-world dread it carried) was filled
with questions. Houz did this hoppen? How were we
so wrong? lt was hard to say his name, let alone
believe this was the next president. We had been
living in upstate New York for two months while
taught at Bard College. lt was a fleeting return to
the US, planned partly to show my lrish son what
life is like in America. The sore spot was that our
semester away coincided with the US presidential
election. The evening we arrived, as we entered
Red Hook in early September, I saw the first of
many Trump for President signs we would
encounter during our stay. lt was instantly clear
that the consensus we streamed via NPR into our
Dublin home had a whole other angle, but less clear
then was the scale of that side's bigotry. Trump
placards were to be expected; the Confederate
flags were a surprise.
As I walked from the parking lot along the wide
path leading to the entrance of the Hessel Museum,
I

writes of the avant,

garde: "It is interested in, and feels
responsible to, only the values of art;
and given society as it 1s, has an
organic sense of whet is good and what
is bad for art..." 0reenberg, "Towards a
Newer Laocodn,"

p.

64.

[14] Llnda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been
No Oreat Women Ari-ists?," in Wonen, Art,
and Power: And Other Essays INew York,
NY: Harper & Row, 19BBl p. 88.
[15] lbid. Nochlin includes class in
these circumstances as well, which
extends to race, since for her class is

Toro .o.ia- than e onoml
[16] Hannah Arendt, fhe Pronjse of

Politjcs, ed. ierome Kohn INew York, NY:
Schocken, 20051 p. 95.
[17] Hannah Arerdt, Ihe Hurtan Condition,
ed. llargaret Canovan IChicago, 1L:
lJniversity of Chicago, 19981 p. 198.

PRACT]CES OF NEGAT]ON

through the post-apocalyptic haze that hung over
the campus, I pondered whether my students would
show up. The seminar I was teaching involved a
small group of graduate students at the Center for
Curatorial Studies. I wanted to make a class that
would take up the structural challenges of feminism,
built on a thesis set out in 1971by Linda Nochlin in
her essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?" Nochlin cautioned her reader not to take
the bait. That is, "to dig up examples of worthy or
insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout
history; to rehabilitate rather modest, if interesting
and productive careers; to'rediscover' forgotten
flower painters or David followers and make out a
case for them; to demonstrate that Berthe Morisot
was really less dependent upon Manet than one had
been led to think."tr+l lnstead, Nochlin suggested a
radical, far more ambitious undertaking: to change
educational institutions so that anyone courageous
enough to take the risk can prepare, study,
experiment, and ultimately achieve greatness. This
is not a recalibration of institutional standards or
a leveling of the playing field; it involves a profound
commitment to change. Men-and women-rely
on, reproduce, and benefit from institutional
arrangements where a large portion of great and
not-so-great art results from a circumstance of
gender.trst Greatness as a mark of liberation
requires a complete reworking of organizational
circumstances: an institutional turn away from the
cult of the artist, and an educational turn toward
signs and symbols within a total system of art making.
Through our weekly provocations we asked what
it would mean to predicate a feminist project on
greotness-not as a demand or desire to be named,
recognized, valued, or seen, but instead as a
condition to be claimed and produced. This
structural shift asks questions at the level of
institution. What does it mean to be here, in this
privilege, and who is here with us? The meaning of
razifh extends beyond physical presence. lt extends
across times. Hannah Arendt wrote about politics as
what "arises between men."[rs] We are never alone
in politics, which is why my politics are never mine
only. This plurality is crucial to those "spaces of
appearance" that Arendt described "where I appear
to others as other appear to me." 1ro1 ln many ways,
teaching epitomizes the very stakes of what we
mean by plurality-of what it means to situate one's
activity through an ongoing inhabitation rather than
through quantifiable work,/works. To think through
teaching is to connect the outward manifestations
of practice to a political mode of being in the world.
An idea that politics are handed from one
generation to the next does not sufficiently account
for making new beginnings within the conditions of

207

politics. The political binds us to territories (both
real and imaginary) that are difficult to escape;
difficult, but not impossible, and this is the promise
of politics evoked by Hannah Arendt.lrzl A promise
that is not predicated on mastering the political, or
gaining experience in politics, is not limited to
speculative thought, but is itself an embodied
reality.
As an artist who teaches, I often wonder how
to deliver Arendt's promise to students. To promise
the world can change, changes the conditions of
politics-it changes things. Teaching holds this

promise-not holds as in potential, but rather

as in

sustorns. Teaching holds this promise, and this both
risks and affirms what passes between generations
as a need to think, judge, and make the conditions
of politics qnew.l wonder if it is possible to teach in
ways that open the political to new thoughts and
new acts-l do not mean as a result of teaching, but
as a way of risking what it means to feoch. The
plurality of politics arises out of a thinking and doing
together that involves the past as much as the
future-but never securely or completely. At its
most basic level, teaching is an address. lt requires
one to address the other through modes that
formalize what is said. Conversations that take place
through teaching behave like a monologue, spoken
by one person and addressed to other people, such
that in the structure of teaching, no matter how
informal the tone, there is an authority instilled
by the one who speaks. Anyone who teaches knows
this, or should know this (which is not to say that
privileging the teacher's voice is warranted or
preferable.) The teacher who makes efforts to
counterbalance this authority also knows that the
student speaks as a student. I prepare by placing the
chairs in circle, or reminding students to address
each other, or introducing other voices, but it is me
who authorizes these realignments.
As a teacher I am responsible for an address,
which is to say I am also responsible for the
practices of negation that obscure this authority.
This introduces an ethical dimension to the activity
of teaching that is further complicated by a paradox
that goes to the core of what it means to speok
in situations that are personal and contingent,
immediate and to a degree public. lt helps here to
think of teaching less as a transfer or transmission
and more as a setting down. To set down is also
to let go, and by letting go I allow others to take up
what has been said. Arendt wrote eloquently about
such moments. ln her concept of action, we venture
to put our words in the world, and by doing so she
emphasized a necessary unpredictability that
accompanies action, because it is impossible to
predict or determine how what is said will be used,

SARAH P]ERCE

misused, understood, or repeated.tral Action moves
what I have said, and produces something more, and
this reproducibility of action is also its community.
I arrive and my students are waiting. I feel the
weight and limit of my role. What to say? What to
say, let alone teach in this moment? I have nothing.
Hillary Clinton's concession speech is scheduled
to come on at some stage during our session, and
scrolling news headlines along open monitors
distract us from a conversation yet to take place.
To kill time, I suggest we walk across the hall to the
museum. But no one wants to be in there. We return
after a few minutes, too discomposed to be in an
exhibition. We need to move through this without
explanations or citations-without art. There is
nothing to elaborate and nothing to enact. As we
stand by in an atmosphere of imminent delays and
arrivals, ltry reading to the group. lt is a lost act.
We do nothing.
It occurs to me now, what I could not put into
words then. This nothing was our agency as much as
it was our situation. Pure and absolute. A power
yielded in anticipation of those of us who were
there, gathered in institution, as well as those who
had not yet appeared.
ln a long passage in Ihe Unovowoble Community,
Maurice Blanchot identifies a way of being-intogetherness not marked as presence, but that
instead hands us over to "time as a dispenser."[rg]
This function of time operates as a community, but
a negative community marked by absence. A
community without the event, without a determination
to remain, not measured by duration, but more truly
by its power to endure. A community that disregards
its own imperatives; formidable in its refusalto
react. Blanchot writes, "Presence of the 'people' in
their limitless power which, in order not to limit
itself, accepts doing nothing... A power supreme,
because it included, without feeling diminished,
its virtual and absolute powerlessness, symbolized
accurately by the fact that it was there as an
extension of those who could no longer be there...
Presence and absence... in a sovereignty the law
cannot circumscribe."Izo] As we navigate gatherings
that involve people and institutions, questions
resurface about how community returns, not
through the presence of a project, but through
a negation that cannot speak. ln absence we return
to a community that holds over distances and times,
through variable failures and impossibilities. ln the

[18] Arendt, The Pronise of
Politjcs, pp.191-197.

the

[1S] Arendt, The Hunan Condition,
pp. 175-246.
[20] l.laurice Blanchot, fhe Unavawable
Connunity IBarrytown, NY: Station Hi11,

middle of our inheritances, while believing in them,
we confront their incongruities-not as lost illusions
but as lived conditions.
This is one way to think about that day last
November. We held through slippages and murky
waters. A discussion underway transformed into
practice. Greatness coalesced across different
planes, exposed and transferable in the structural
arrangements of a pedagogy stripped bare.

ISBBl p. 47. Blanchot and Arendt have
connections to Bard through their

p. 32. The e1llpsed text
spontaneous march during

intention is to cite them
ctte a conrnunity of readers
that runs through thls tert.
[21] Blanchot, The Urtavowabfe Connunity,

l.1ay

writings;

my

and thereby

details a
the events

68 in Paris for the victims of

Charonne.