Do We need a Turing Test for Activist Art in a Bare Art World?

Repetition and doubling—themselves an uncanny pair which double and repeat each other—seem to be at the heart of every "uncanny" phenomena.

—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (2017)¹

In its simplest form, the Turing Test involves a human evaluator physically separated by a wall or other barrier from two participants so that all communication between the three of them must take place through a keyboard device. The evaluator knows that one hidden participant is human and one is a machine, though which is which remains unknown. The evaluator is tasked with trying to identify who is the person and which is the imitation person. Simultaneously, both participants try to convince the evaluator they are human. At the moment the evaluator becomes genuinely uncertain which participant is machine and which is human, the machine has successfully passed Turing's Test.

You're in an art gallery. Toward the back of the space you spot a weird, ill-fitting emergency door. A question arises silently: is it a work of art or not? Just above your head is a rusted valve jutting out from a faded metal sign encased in white paint. Same question: Art? Not art? What about that awkwardly bent length of drainage pipe running alongside the track lights above the exhibition? Does anyone else see this? Should you refocus your attention exclusively on those objects with wall labels? Moments later, a dozen people enter the space singing, shouting, making boisterous declarations: "I Can't Breathe"; "De-Colonize this Place"; "Not My President"; "Respect Workers Rights in the UAE." Before leaving, the group hands out photocopied flyers and performs an Occupy Wall Street General Assembly in the middle of the gallery, complete with a Human Microphone.

When they do exit, the space returns to its muted, white-cube status. But you do not return to normal. Not completely. A string of questions follows: Was that a genuine, spontaneous activist intervention, or was it a carefully rehearsed performance of an activist intervention, and therefore a work of art? Then again, if something appears exactly the same as what it appears to be—if it stirs the same emotions in us and carries out the same task of raising social awareness—then does it really matter if we are uncertain about what it actually is in some fundamental, ontological way? What if this event was both at the same time: art and life, mimicry and authentic protest, fiction and fact, all doubled up and coexisting on a single continuous surface, sort of like a Möbius strip reality? Marcel Duchamp once proposed what he termed a "Reciprocal Readymade," in which a work of art is converted to an object of everyday use.² Perhaps what you just witnessed was that thought experiment put into practice?³

The questions do not leave you alone. They return, repeat, becoming obsessional, even addictive. You find yourself wondering how and when things got so disorderly—and you wonder what it might take to tidy them up again. It's not only your unease that seems at stake here. How many times have you overheard an art historian, critic, or even fellow artist demand to know "is it art or activism?"⁴ Remember how they sought some type of epistemological solace such as providing empirical evidence that demonstrates activist art's effective social outcome? Yet what that proof, should it be made, assures the mainstream art historian is that these practices subordinate aesthetics to utility, allowing for a return to business as usual. It pissed you off. But it also led you to suppress your own need for certitude with a faint-hearted swagger. And contrarily, the same questioning demand arises from community activists troubled by what they perceived to be the enfeebling effects of aestheticized politics. This is when you ask yourself only half-sardonically: does contemporary art, especially art activism, require its own version of Turing's thought experiment? Though even as you consider this, you can't help but suspect that if this test were given today, nothing would change...