Uncommitted Crimes: The Defiance of the Artistic Imagination by Tara Atluri (review)

Borrowing her title from Theodor Adorno, who once stated that "every work of art is an uncommitted crime," Tara Atluri offers this metaphorical scaffolding to examine a series of artistic practices that confront and defy the oppressive structures of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism amid the backdrop of Turtle Island/white settler Canada. Positioned in the dominant cultural imaginary as, what Gayatri Spivak has termed, "native informants," racialized Others, Atluri argues, are called on to support the perpetuation of a national narrative built on the exoticization of the Other, a narrative that is also, paradoxically, dependent on the Other in constructing narratives of freedom. The artist, Atluri argues, is akin to a philosopher, who makes no claim to providing answers but, instead, to posing new questions: "If the figure of the artist is often deviant within a global capitalist context that produces banal conformities and fearful apolitical publics, then these artists are guilty of being truly criminal in their sublime creativity."

Defiance, in Atluri's book, refers to artists who confront notions of universal morality, associated, in Canada, with white Christian values; conversely, identity politics, she cautions, risk reinscribing the pursuit of inclusion contingent on the upholding of dominant values. The artistic strategies employed by the artists in Atluri's study, who "both politicize aesthetics and aestheticize politics beyond protest banners emblazoned with red and black fists," suggests a similarly complex relationship between these artists and the nation-state. Atluri calls on queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz's conception of "disidentification," which provides a powerful articulation of artists who simultaneously work through and against majoritarian culture, neither wholly conforming to, nor resisting, this culture, yet cognizant of its contribution to marginalization. Coupled with Rosi Braidotti's notion of the nomadic, Atluri argues that each of the artists included are in one way or another nomadic subjects, either in their crossing of borders or through their traversing of temporal and geographic bounds via art.

Each chapter centres on an artist or group of artists, through which Atluri picks up on shared strategies, such as affect (Andil Gosine, Syrus Marcus Ware, Elisha Lim), filmic techniques for conveying personal narrative (Amita Zamaan and Helen Lee), interventions in canonical art historical and religious narratives through a retreading of the medium (Shirin Fathi, Kara Springer, and Rajni Perera), spectatorial engagement and challenges (Joshua Vettivelu and Brendan Fernandes), and a foregrounding of Indigenous urgencies on the backdrop of stolen land (Kerry Potts and Rebecca Belmore). The native informant is repositioned so as not to be in service to dominant culture but, rather, to reveal the "anxieties, desires, and aggressions that haunt white settler colonies and transnational viewing publics."

Present-day attempts to retread and rearticulate the art historical canon in the classroom hit up against a lack of sourcebooks with which to adequately launch this project. This, in and of itself, supports a view to the systemic and sustained oppression to which the artists in Uncommitted Crimes attend; as Atluri states, "[i]n exile and liberation, their art terrorizes the banal indifference to violence that structures and sustains systemic oppression." Atluri positions the book as a tribute to the artists whose work she examines – important, in that the book interrupts the cycle of subjugation, offering an art history not of instrumentalization, but of emancipation and intervening in the perpetuation of nationalist art historical narratives.