Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

How Do You Pronounce the Politics of Aesthetics?

Like Gregory Sholette, I was interested in the statement by Stéphanie Benzaquen in seminar 9. This last seminar was about addressing any lack or exclusion of subjects that the participants noticed. She claimed that the group had “not touched on the social and economic conditions of theories of art.” Instead, she says, “We have been living in the abstract.” She references Edward Said’s text in The Anti-Aesthetic1 because he explicitly talks about the patterns of exclusion that exist within both writing and its interpretation. In his essay, Said talks about the divisions that exist between academic fields of inquiry and likens them to the Cold War binaries in which he was writing.2 Said invokes Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge3 and employs its methodology to look at the structures of knowledge production that he has participated in. For instance, Said notes the partisan politics that exists within the humanities and the actual and social capital at stake in the academic publishing industry. He concludes this analysis with a pronouncement: “we need to think about breaking out of the disciplinary ghettos in which as intellectuals we have been confined, to reopen the blocked social processes ceding objective representation (hence power) of the world to a small coterie of experts and their clients.”4 James Elkins says that this seminar was consciously organized to include participants from a wide range of fields and geographic centers to avoid the problems that Said raised. But, for the most part, there weren’t many actual examples brought up in discussion of patterns or trends in institutional structures or artistic practice that actually compare the ways that art production, dissemination, and interpretation might work differently in places like Beirut or Ramallah as compared to Chicago or New York. Does the matter at hand, the anti-aesthetic, function differently for different communities? Elkins also notes that he thought that this issue was covered in a previous seminar on art and globalization. But again, following Said and bucking the desire to delimit categories, how can we think of one topic informing the other? Why, for instance, have so many artists from the Middle East who address its politics used conceptualist methodologies? Artists like Walid Raad, Emily Jacir, Akhram Zattari, and Khaled Hourani deal explicitly with very volatile how do you pronounce the politics of aesthetics? noah simblist 1. Edward Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community,” in The AntiAesthetic : Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 2nd ed. (New York: New Press, 1998), 155–83. 2. In a lecture at the Frieze Art Fair in 2011 entitled “The Luxury of Incommensurability,” Katy Siegel also noted the links between this binary and the Cold War and suggested the famous duck/rabbit diagram as a way out of it by imagining seeing two things at once. 3. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). 4. Said, “Opponents, Audiences,” 182. Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 172 politics connected to the Lebanon Civil War, the Israeli occupation of Palestine , and other topics. These topics, as Said himself noted in Covering Islam,5 are frequently and problematically represented in mainstream media. But the strategies that the mainstream media often use focus on the bodies of the dead or wounded, burning tires, military strikes, and screaming funeral marches. These artists turn away from the aesthetics of hyperbolic violence and instead choose a tactic of remove. The question, then, is if these conceptualist methodologies are anti-aesthetic or if they simply employ an aesthetic characteristic of a certain brand of conceptualism—what Benjamin Buchloh referred to as the “aesthetics of administration .”6 It is clear that they are not engaging in the kind of aesthetic questions that Clement Greenberg had when he referred to aesthetics—something that existed for him within the realm of painting and sometimes sculpture. They favor text and photographic images instead of the materiality of objects, and they use these media in a way that Fredric Jameson would call “pastiche.”7 Walid Raad certainly cares for and employs aesthetics. In his video I Only Wish I Could Weep (2002), done under the auspices of the Atlas Group, an intelligence agent chooses to focus his surveillance on a sunset instead of the target that his supervisors chose for him. This move by Raad explores the aesthetics of politics by showing an instance where an individual within a saturated political environment seeks out an aesthetic rupture. But as...