Real Dirty Ethics: An Interview With Mika Hannula

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[An edited version of this interview was first published in C Magazine #93.]




I first encountered the writings of Finish curator, teacher and art critic Mika Hannula in 2001 in a bookstore in the basement of Kulturhuset, Stockholm. The actual reason I discovered his writing was perhaps less than spectacular: the only English book in the theory section was his book Why Do I Like Rock Music? - Theoretical Discourse on Contemporary Visual Art and Culture and very simply the title caught my attention. However, right from the first page I was hooked. One passage, in a piece about Donald Kuspit, has somehow stayed with me:


It seems that the core of the contradictions, and the very core of his negativity is the notion that Kuspit […] really wants to change the world. His cynicism goes sky high as he has increasingly realized that this is not achievable through art, whether it be avant-garde or another type. Thus, art has lost its weight and meaning. But the fact that art is not capable of changing the main structures of western societies, is not, contrary to what Kuspit believes, something negative. The political system of western representative democracies is based on certain rules in which all equal citizens can participate. It is a vulgar appeal against these principles that through art, not through democratic rules, the whole system should or could be altered.


At that time Kuspit-style negativity was a position I perhaps over-related to and seeing it defeated with such a straightforward, civic-minded argument struck me as almost audacious, somehow deeply contrary to the manner politics were most frequently discussed in art and critical theory.

Since then I have devoured everything I could find by Hannula. His writings always circle around the same vivid questions - he is certainly not shy to push his central points and perspective - but nonetheless do so with an energy and lightness I would even describe as contagious. That ethics and the necessity of an open encounter with the other are central to any artistic undertaking, and that this process should be ignited from a situated position that is transparent but never rigid, is a thematic never far from the core of his writings.

The following interview took place via email some time in 2007. An abbreviated version of this interview was originally published in C Magazine.


Jacob Wren: So I thought I would begin with what is perhaps a naïve question. One of the things that interests me most about your writing is the very specific way you deal with questions of ethics. And I was wondering if you think there is any implicit connection between ethics and visual art and if so what might such a connection might be.

Mika Hannula: Yes, the reason why I deal with ethical questions is a rather simple one. It is kind of backbone to anything and everything I have been interested since, well, since being able to articulate somewhat what I want and what I feel important enough to deal and confront with. Thus, I am actually classical educated philosopher of ethics, specialized in Aristotelian ethics of virtue, or more precisely, contemporary readings of and with it.

That said, I can't say I see any specific relationship between ethics and visual arts, besides the basic fact that all ethics is about how we manage to negotiate our ways of being-in-the-world, and therefore, when meaningful, visual art is connected and situated in our daily lives.

I can turn the question around a bit, and perhaps you can even get a proper answer. I think one of the main openings with the relationship of ethical questioning in connection to visual arts is that, at least in those areas that I am active at, visual arts proves to be a field in which there is still room for activities that do not have an instant price-tag attached to them, and activities that don’t need to produce a product. In other words, the reason I am active in the field of visual art is precisely because of this: there are ways and means to shape and shake out alternative ways of thinking through who we are, where we are and how we are where we are.

JW: Your specific approach to ethics has many aspects I find counter-intuitive: focusing on how we can be open to an encounter with another person or group and how this openness is only meaningful if it is strongly situated in one’s own history and point of view. You also often focus on the need to take a stand, and the fact that taking a stand is not in contradiction with an ability to meet with the world in an open manner. This way of thinking about ethics seems quite different to me from the more traditional ethical position which concerned with ‘doing the right thing.’ Would you agree with this (obviously simplified) characterization of you work? In the end is the purpose of such openness mainly for ‘the right thing’ to emerge or would you say such situated openness is also a kind of ethical end in itself?

MH: Your short description is fine, and thanks for that, and thanks for also pointing out a clear difference between an approach within ethics of trying to figure out the "right thing" and a version of situated ethics that I, for example, try to argue for.

The difference from my, or our side, as in critical hermeneutics a la Vattimo and others, is not that there is no truth or no “right thing”. The point I try to make is that chasing this “right thing” is not helpful, and can be very dangerously counter-productive in sites and situations within which the protagonists do not share the same common ground or positions.

Or, if you allow me trace some steps sideways, instead of an illusion of an extensive common ground (or our ability to achieve it a la Habermas), this type of thinking starts from the presupposition that in any site or situation, there are always and continuously present conflictual views of the same event and reality. Thus, if and when reality is not one, and can't be forced into a box of one without harsh structural violence, we exist in sites and situations where there are competing, plural versions of realities. Versions that collide and crash, but also caress and kiss.

And yes, in this kind of a situation, who has got it right is not really helpful at all. Instead, it is about how to deal with differences, and differences that stand out and are respected and cherished, and not differences that are forced to be ironed out. It is about how to deal with uncertainties and complexities both within yourself and your surroundings. It is a never-ending process. It is, at its best, about how to move towards elaborated ways of relating to one another - and to do it so that it comes as close as possible to the idea of both a loving conflict and a reasonable disagreement.

And yes, not to forget. All this is not about a cynical or relativist position. Instead, a loving conflict and reasonable disagreement is only even potentially possible to get closer to if each participant speaks from a committed and situated point of view - that is, situated self not as a ready-made model but a commitment to a view which comes from somewhere but which is constantly re-made during the processes it goes through.

But, a question to you. Why is the idea of ethics as a process of trying to respect and cherish differences, as in the process of difference speaking to difference, counter-intuitive to you?

JW: Perhaps counter-intuitive is the wrong word. I was only thinking that in an encounter of ‘difference speaking to difference’ there is no guarantee the results will be ethical, there is always the possibility it could turn bad, that misunderstandings will outweigh communication, that potential difficulties will dominate the experience. And thinking of such a highly contingent space as the true sight for ethics is not the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word. The first thing that comes to mind, probably only a cliché, is a kind of step by step analysis of what to do in certain situations which might prove ethically difficult or are ethical conundrums.

MH: See, you need to up-date your version of ethics - but do not try to do from the internet.

Seriously speaking, the chance, or often actually the necessity, of a failure in ethical confrontation and ethics of meetings is very much the core of the point I am struggling to make. However, as always, it is not a struggle or conflict without a past, presence and a future. And it is not a site without certain clear presuppositions - and the one that must be noted is that for any kind of ethical confrontation to be meaningful, it must be so orchestrated that each participant agrees to follow and respect the rule of non-violence.

Here, again, we get to "real" dirty ethics. Because here the question is: what is violence?

Not only talking about hitting someone with a stick (remember the movie Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence with David Bowie as a British soldier?), but about other nuances of violence: structural and hidden ones.

And yes, this brings up the point of the inherently powerful and potential possibility of dealing with these confrontations with the means and within the field of contemporary art. A field within which I believe we must have ability and courage to get closer and to confront views and positions that we do not agree with, and which we fail to see as interesting.

Thus, the task for contemporary visual art is to question and to eventualize. To put the finger where it hurts. Not by shouting, but by luring those who are next to each other, but currently do everything not to notice each other, to confront and discuss.

What am I talking about? I am talking about differences. Differences in political views, differences in takes on human rights, differences in taste, in quality of what we do when we do what we do, I am talking about tolerance and civil courage. I am talking about love hate fear and hope.

JW: Maybe this would be a good time to ask you about the ‘Rape Park’ project.

MH: Rape Park, yes. Obviously, the starting point is the concept of a rape park, which assumingly exists in any city of a certain size. It is a park through which the inhabitants of the city “know” that you are not supposed to go through – a park in which a lot of violence and unfortunately also rapes are concentrated.

For us, it is a project that we have now started to focus on at the Academy of

Fine Arts, Helsinki. Us as in me, a professor for Art in Public Space, and Veronica Wiman, a curator from Stockholm with a strong feminist background. The park in question is a strange one. It is in the very middle of Helsinki, just behind the main railway station. It is not a big park, and most of its corners are rather ok lit - also in the night time. However, it is the Rape Park in Helsinki, a site where disgusting crimes have happened – and their numbers are a bit increasing.

The idea is very simple. We will highlight this particular site. It is we as with a group of 10 MA level students from the Academy. We want to use the benefits that we have as people working through the arts. The kind of diplomatic status you gain to get access to information not often open for “normal” citizens, and the expectation and often a fact that we are rather harmless.

Thus, the idea is to think through what this site is. Obviously, a whole load of issues are tangled together. We will think through the role and possibility of visual arts in public space, we will address the growing feeling of fear even in Helsinki (private guards and a whole lot of surveillance cameras), and we will look into how this site has been used for demonstrations, and also how the police relate to it.

The task is, at its core, three fold. Use this opportunity to seriously question the idea of bringing any kind of art into a public space such as this park. It is to think through the whole set-up of what it means once we leave the white cube. We actually have only one pre-set limitation. There will be no exhibition at the end. There will be something at the end of next May, but what that is, is still completely open.

Secondly, it is to generate a platform for not only us, but for professionals dealing with the park (from health care to urban planners to police), to bring them together. It is not about bridging gaps, but making these different situations and the people working in them aware of the different co-existing realities and approaches in it. Thirdly, the idea is to raise the question: to whom does the city space belong? This is highly relevant in Helsinki where the city government has since 10 years followed a full-blown fascist ideology of non-tolerance to graffiti and posters. And yes, surprise surprise, it is a city that is as clean of them as it gets. But yes, at the same time commercial messages have launched their reach even further into the public sphere. The question is how to generate space in the public real that is not about profit making, but about something else.

So far, we have just started. We have invited a policeman to discuss this, a priest working at the area, a lawyer for attacked women, and a feminist activist. I believe there are a lot of possibilities in this project. The positive side is that in a social democratic Hell like Helsinki, it is possible to reach out and touch almost anybody in the society. Thus, you have a connection. The problem is how to get each person committed, and how to make this project run, not for a year, but for 5 years.

And just to add a short comment. We are by no means the pioneers of this. A lot of great work in this field has been done in Europe at the Environmental Art department at the Glasgow School of Art, an Academy that we often collaborate with.

JW: Last time we spoke in person you said something that really struck me: that what we needed was not less, but more Nation States. I wondered if you could say a bit about this idea.

MH: Yes, this is my claim. We need more of Nation State Cultural Policy. A provocative statement, which is productive because its leads to so many different paths – some of them which I want to address, and some of them not.

The paths I want to pursue with it are at least three interwoven ones. I do want to question the neo-liberal dogma that less state is always and anywhere better. I want to argue, instead of this all-encompassing ideology of privatization, that many parts of our daily lives are much too important to leave only for the market forces to decide and run. In other words, there must be spaces and time in our realities within which we can live and reflect without being forced into products with price tags and last sale dates.

The other implication is to think through the problems of state cultural policies, for example, in Finland. Needless to say, there is much to wish for in how the state conducts its policy. However, the point that it is now done rather conservatively and without enough focus on quality, just quantity, does not mean it cannot be done better. And better as in more courage for experiments and risks, for challenges and collisions of opinions, more of generating platforms for those loving and caring conflicts.

The third element is a more abstract discourse that annoys me from most of my friends and colleagues. With our age of globalized this and that, there seems to be a naive belief that nation-states have no role or no weight anymore. True and blue, its reigns have lessened, and a great deal of what matters to us (economy, for example, or ecological problems) is out of its reach as a single entity within closed borders. But then again, so many basic things in our daily lives are still controlled and constructed within a given particular place and site, a particular singularity of a situation. To put it simply: all “good” things about globalization are not bound to a fixed physical locality, whereas all “bad” things, such as unemployment, ecological catastrophe, alienation, etc are not issues that travel and cannot be moved to a better and cheaper place.

And yes, unless we - any society - is able to take a serious look at how it wants to take care of those who are less well off, and to generate potentialities of second and third chances, I think we are in the long run in deep trouble. This is not a sign of Mother Theresa symptom, just an argument based on plain self-interest and self-defense.

And yes, a counter question. Looking from your site and background, does what I just said make me sound like another bleeding liberal with no sense of reality?

JW: Something I often notice in critical theory is how much easier it is to identify and brilliantly analyze the many problems of the world than it is to propose anything resembling solutions. Analysis of problems seem accurate and convincing (and depressing) while proposed solutions often seem so weak and ineffective in comparison. I often wonder if this is a problem with the world or actually a more schematic problem that has to do with almost mythological aspects of language. How writing something negative and apocalyptic seems so much more compelling than writing something civil or, for example, about having more community meetings. Adam Phillips writes: “the sane person sees life as a novel where the bad guys get all the best lines.”

Therefore, I don’t know if it’s actually possible to wrest any given nation state away from the corporate agenda. It seems that nation states, one by one, fall prey to right wing governments that, in the end, are little more than lapdogs for the agency of global capital. What kind of activism would be required to have different governments? And then also the problem that such a project seems notably unexciting. A lot of really hard work and the results are only civic, difficult to make such endeavours seem romantic or exciting.

I do think in this respect Scandinavia is an interesting case. It’s one of the few places in the world that has a reputation of having governments that represent a fairly effective vision of social democracy. In Stockholm I read a t-shirt, I suspect it was an artist project, that read ‘Sweden frightens me, everything is so well organized and it actually works.’ My first thought on reading your last answer wasn’t that it was ‘bleeding liberal’ but that it was somehow particularly Scandinavian. There is a story circulating, I don’t know if it is true, that Iceland plans to have switched all cars over to hydrogen by the year 2007. This would be an example of the nation state taking positive action and I find it unimaginable that something similar might happen in Canada. Would you agree there is something inherently Scandinavian in your position. If so how would you characterize it?

MH: Yes, of course it is as Scandinavian or Nordic as possible. Quoting a classical Björk song: "Organizing freedom, how Scandinavian of me."

I come from a certain background, and speak from a certain position. However, none of these are solid as rock – they are contested and constructed. And they are demanding in all possible ways.

First of all, I am not saying that the Scandinavian model is the dream come true. I am not selling it. On the contrary, I am more interested in showing the hypocrisy behind it. As in the case of Iceland, don't know about their hydro-schemes, but I do know they just started hunting down whales, and that they have huge plans of building dams for electricity in the north – on such a scale that it would damage the whole eco-system there, and the reason is to provide dead cheap electricity to French aluminium factories.

In case of Finland, it does not look that much better. Greenpeace has been criticizing, for good reasons, Finnish companies cutting down these Ur-Wald forests in the north. And yes, in Finland, domestic violence is a huge problem. Up to every fourth woman has experienced either violence, or a threat of violence, in their relationships.

But sure, there is hope. Hope that comes out of the situation in which there is still enough of a common base (not necessary values) of being so close in terms of income and social status. In other words: it is really impossible to try to be a huge rock star in these places. Volumes just don’t match.

Where does this leave us? It is our task to stay put with the boring and tacky local problems, instead of jumping on the next helicopter. There are never any solutions, just processes of taking part in managing the mess. But I can guarantee that if you think things look bad now in Finland or in Canada, there are always ways of making it an even bigger mess.

Thus, it is about underlining the fact that not everything must be funny, sexy and sellable.

But why have you lost your hope in local activities and commitment?

JW: Well, I don’t know if I ever had any hope in local activities or commitment, but this might only be a personal shortcoming. I’ve never had an experience where people have tried to achieve something on a local level and met with any success or even felt they had any real ground beneath there feet upon which to stage a battle. I continuously have the feeling that all real decisions are actually being made elsewhere. Perhaps this has a lot to do with the fact that Canada is so close, and so economically dominated, by the United States.

I had the experience in the mid-nineties of a local right wing government in the province of Ontario led by Mike Harris sweeping in and more or less killing everything that had been happening in the early nineties. People protested like crazy and Harris said let them protest till the grass is completely worn away in front of the parliament buildings. Now the exact same thing is happening here on federal level.

And then, I travel a lot, and everywhere I go they’re now getting these local, right wing governments who are cutting everything. It feels to me like these governments aren’t springing up locally, that decisions are being made elsewhere that help these parties win. At the very least the political techniques which allow these parties to win are circulating like mad.

At the same time, I find your position convincing. And I think it’s important not to let the dominance of global capital ossify into paranoia. Global capital is not omnipotent. There are always fissures, cracks into which local initiative can break through and have an effect.

I also thought about bringing the discussion back around to art. Because practically all artists begin their formation in a local context, develop their position in and around other local artists who all influence each other and of course also compete with each other to a certain degree. When you find an artist you like it is almost certain that when they started out their were other interesting artists around who also had a lot to do with the art you are now looking at. However, when you have success as an artist today you are basically pulled out of the local context. You travel a lot. Perhaps you move to New York or Berlin. A significant portion of your contacts and your career, and therefore also your attention, lies outside of your former local context. For artists the local context might start to seem like little more than a place where it’s good to start out.

It might perhaps sound naïve, but it makes me wonder if there’s something artists can do in terms of re-thinking the relationship between the local and global.

MH: Yes, certainly. On a grand scale, but also very much based on ones experiences. I think the current situation demands that each of us speak and act from a position. But this position – or locality – is not only a physical element. The core argument in my and Tere Vaden's book Rock the Boat is the point of seeing a locality as an active participation into a discourse. Thus, it’s not only about where we wake up or all sleep, but about who we want to talk with, argue with, and share things with.

This highlights the necessity to activate and shape many, not just one context or site. This, on the other hand, does not mean that we should engage in every possible theme, but it does mean that each of us has to find the adequate focus for us – and that is personally, and thus, politically.

We all have the need to belong to something. And this belonging can be satisfied partly by taking part in discussions and activities that we burn for. There is never one collective, but many overlapping ones. The search is to find those people who you want to share your work and thoughts with – and then keep on keeping on with it.

This is a topic I have been talking a lot about with many colleagues and artist friends here and there and everywhere – artists like Roddy Buchanan in Glasgow, curators like Ina Blom in Oslo, and just to throw one more name into the soup, the curator Vasif Kortun from Istanbul.

But here is a question to you: To which discourses do you belong to? What are the themes and issues you want to participate and do participate in?

JW: I was thinking the other day about this interview and about how I have in many ways been trying to keep it focused on you. And, I suppose one of the reasons I have become so interested in your work is because so many of your concerns are similar to mine: I’m interested in ethics, in how ethics can sometimes be a positive force and sometimes serve as a kind of cover for something more sinister; I’m interested in how the left might re-invent itself, what philosophical or theoretical positions might underlie such a re-invention; I am interested in art, in what the ideal of art might still mean as it struggles to keep up with a contemporary world that will always be ridiculously ahead of it, and what it might mean to think of art in relation to politics and vice versa (I particularly like the Hannah Arendt quote: “The conflict between art and politics… cannot and must not be solved.”); I am interested in the intimacy that can be generated between a viewer and a work of art and how powerful that experience is and what that power might mean or how it might be re-thought. And, much like you, I have come to the conclusion that it is important to take a stand, while at the same time being open to the possibility that in one’s encounter with others one’s ideas can continue to grow and change.

It is true that I pursue most of these interests in relative isolation. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I approached you. I often work in theatre, but on the very edge of the theatre, where it begins to bleed into performance art or the more contemporary concerns of visual art. In many ways I try to use this marginalized theatre work (by which I mean marginalized within the art form of theatre) as a collaborative laboratory to explore many of these questions. At the same time, I don’t really know anyone working in theatre who shares my interests or concerns so I also try to search elsewhere. I often joke that the problem with my theatre work is that people who like theatre simply don’t like what I do, I suppose because they see it as a kind of anti-theatre, and the people who might really like my work believe (correctly) that they don’t like theatre and therefore will never come. This is of course a painful but also extremely interesting situation. Therefore, I am also interested in the fact that my position is not entirely consequent and trying to think about what kind of room there might be for paradoxes, and even bad faith, in art and political thinking.

MH: See, I managed to squeeze a truly hopeful comment from you. And yes, there is a lot of stuff that I find interesting in your approach – not the least your stoic participation within a field that you don’t really feel comfortable – or in which you don't have loads of friends within. A position that most of us – me included – would find too isolated and annoying. And yes, Hannah Arendt, one of the thinkers that most commentators fail to read productively because they look for some systematic analyses of her themes, which she, obviously, does not provide. Instead, we get a fantastic case of a human being stuck by/with loads of controversies she tries to deal with – relationships to Heidegger, to Zionism, to democratic politics and so on. There is a quote from her I can’t remember fully but it goes about like this. She said it when receiving at the end of the 60's some prize, and what she said, while giving her acceptance speech, is that it is great to receive such recognition, but quite often she would rather feel, instead of being recognized, a feeling of being welcomed. A point that very well reminds me of the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, currently living in Amsterdam, who did a brilliant work at the Istanbul Biennial in 2005 – very much about her relationship to the state of Israel and its current politics.

But let me insist on your belonging to something. Ok, not many friends with similar ambitions in the field of theatre. What about this magazine you write for? Or some other critics?

JW: Yes, of course I belong to many things and many communities. I didn’t mean to suggest that I don’t. For example there are many others working in theatre who share my interest and dedication to what now sometimes seems like an almost paradoxical connection between theatre and the contemporary world. And, though often we don’t share so many thematic concerns, we all share the intense feeling of alienation that comes from working in an art form that, in some general sense, would simply prefer we disappear. It might seem that all we share is a negative condition but in fact this particular condition has many positive and fascinating aspects. And, though I am extremely critical of the art world, I share many concerns that are prevalent in contemporary art and am trying, with great difficulty, to build bridges between my practice and many of the discourses that currently surround art, yours included. And I am a great fan of music. And I firmly align myself with the left.

But all of this in fact leads me somewhere quite different. Because as an artist I somehow consider it part of my job to break away from the pack, to search for something original, for something that no one else is doing or even thinking about. Is this an old fashioned way of thinking about art? Too individualistic or avant garde? Because somewhere I suspect that all of the art works that have moved me most fiercely were made by artists or groups that broke away from those around them and in some way re-invented their form. And along with this comes a certain understandable degree of alienation. What do you think of a conception of art that accepts, for the artist, a certain degree of originality and therefore isolation?

MH: Yes, sure, there is something to it, but what?

Brings to mind two things. The old saying: Everything new comes from something old. Meaning, for me, in this context that we need to be aware where we come from, where we are and where we might want to move towards – and this in connection to whatever we do, whatever themes we address. Thus, not hunting for that authentic moment, or that original position, which I believe you did not mean anyhow, but I think it’s really important to distance ourselves from any of that essentialistic thinking or wishing and whining.

Second anecdote, which links us back to the axis of evil of foot-loose global capitalism and spineless local politicians. Just got a re-issue of the classic Curtis Mayfield vinyl, dating, I guess from 1972-73, or so. Called simply Curtis, including such heartbreakers as Miss Black America, Move on Up and others. Got it in a DJ-store in Helsinki called Lifesaver. It is a re-issue of the original. And it cost 10 euros. Do any royalties filter back to Curtis? No idea who owns the rights for Curtom records nowadays, the label where he did his best stuff. But what I do know is that if I need a helping hand in lifting the spirits, this is where I look. This is my context. This is my discourse.

And yes, of course it is a sentimental season, very much so. Opening the fold-out album cover, I find a huge picture inside of Curtis having, assumedly, his daughter, around 3 - 4 years old, sitting on his shoulders, holding her hands around his chin. And what does this make me feel? Not quite real, but it makes me feel alive. Connected, and inspired.

But back to your question. Certainly, any creative act or person taking part in the processes of production of knowledge must be partly in the opposition, and in the margins. But I will not call it isolation. Why? Well, simply because I firmly believe that for us to do what we want to do in a meaningful and enjoyable way, we need a context, we need at least a discursive community. We need people to argue with, intellectual walls to bounce against. We need someone to talk and walk with. And no, that can't be done in isolation.

Linking back to the arts, and linking to the sentimental season, when was the last time you felt “alive” at an exhibition or a theatre piece?

JW: I was really moved by the Bas Jan Ader retrospective I saw in Rotterdam. The kind of consistency of his entire project, the mix of conceptualism with so much humour and sadness felt very consequent and human to me. Another was the show by Canadian art group B.G.L. at Mercer Union two years ago, the way they completely transformed the space had such a deep and visceral effect, the experience of not knowing how to navigate through the gallery and having to figure it out little by little.

However, it’s true that my most intense experiences with culture are with music and literature. Reading and re-reading Readers Block by David Markson, Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley or The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis, these books (and many others) never fail to make me feel a little bit more alive. And with music, there’s so much that has played such an overwhelming role in my life. I’ve been listening to this song over and over again: Go To Hell, Miss Rydell by Pelle Carlberg. It’s a song about phoning up a critic whose given you a bad review, a subject I relate to for obvious reasons. It’s so simple and on point. Popular music, which is so deeply intertwined with capitalism, manages to attack the essential places with so much energy and panache. Even the way Al Green hits certain notes, the way his voice bends around them, seems so much more profound than so much of what passes for contemporary art. But I’m not sure if Adorno would agree.

I often have the experience of meeting other music fans, and we start talking about records and suddenly three or four hours have gone by and all we’ve done is name records and talk about them and what we know about them and how we feel about them. These are truly some of the most excited conversations I am capable of having. And it’s strange how so much excitement can be packed into such a simple, or even simplistic, activity.

But it’s absolutely true what you say: "we need a context, we need at least a discursive community. We need people to argue with, intellectual walls to bounce against. We need someone to talk and walk with. And no, that can't be done in isolation." However, it seems to me not so easy to find, and therefore very much an ongoing process.

MH: Yes, very true. As in any site, a context in which you are active, needs to be activated on and on and on. The moment you take it for granted, it’s gone. It is very much about becoming a place, and generating situations in which we can do what we want to do - and to do it on long-term commitment, not a 3 hour project, but looking for those next great 53 years +.

But, just to conclude, and referring back to your answer about situations when you felt “alive”, I can very easily relate to them, even if I haven't myself seen or experienced them. I was not there, but I have been very close to them, next to them. Your examples, for me, show how there are, indeed, good things happening the community – and that community being a really loose abstract frame within which acts of contemporary art and culture happen.

In other words, these are the moments that we have, and they are the only ones. Because when in doubt, always reserve enough energy and time and go back to the basics, go back to the substance, back to the individual works of art and yes, talk with them, be with them, stay with them and take always something with you just in order to be able to give it away again and again.



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Glad The CIA Is Immoral

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[This text was originally published in C Magazine #99.]



Lene Berg’s artist book arrives in the mail in a zip lock bag. On the front of the bag is a large green sticker with a text in white letters. The heading reads INSTRUCTION MANUAL and it begins as follows:

Gentlemen & Arseholes consists of the first issue of the cultural journal Encounter from 1953, along with a series of supplementary materials that are inserted between the original pages. The inserts were collected over a long period, from books, newspapers, private albums, conversations, and so on, and thus vary in their character and form. What they all have in common is that they describe aspects of that which, for various reasons, was never mentioned in Encounter, nor in connection with any of the other undertakings of the sponsor and publisher, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950-1967).

The ‘aspects’ in question, which were never mentioned in any issue of Encounter but are documented extensively in it’s re-printing as Gentlemen & Arseholes (2006), concern the fact that the Congress for Cultural Freedom – which also organized international conferences, artist residencies and publications in other languages – was secretly funded by the CIA with the objective of turning the European intelligentsia away from Communism and Socialism and of ameliorating the image of the United States. For a long time these aspects have no longer been secret, and in fact now anyone can read about them on the CIA website.

The re-printed first issue of Encounter features beautiful literary texts and essays from Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Christopher Isherwood, the Japanese writer Dazai Osama and many others, all of whom apparently knew nothing about the CIA agenda of the publication (though as the years rolled on there would certainly be rumors.) Neither did editors such as Stephen Spender or ‘Honorary Chairmen’ such as Karl Jaspers and Bertrand Russell.

But one man definitely did know. In a sense Gentlemen & Arseholes is the story of Michael Josselson, founder and head of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Many of the inserts in Gentlemen & Arseholes tell the story of Josselson and the charm and persuasiveness with which he led his double life as both the head of a prestigious cultural foundation and a CIA agent. In Lene Berg’s accompanying video The Man In The Background (2006) his widow Diana Josselson is interviewed at length about their life together:

It was life pervasive. […] You couldn’t talk freely to anybody that was not a co-CIA person. And as I said: it comes at every turn. This was easy, because Michael was a charmer and he did it naturally. I followed as well as I could.

Later she goes on to defend him quite bluntly (and yet I also found this moment strangely touching):

It wasn’t a question of what these people in the books say, that he was a stooger for the CIA. He was an independent thinker and actor, and part of his problem was to keep the boss happy, and mostly he did that.

Berg focuses on Michael Josselson not only because he was in charge but also, more importantly, because when in May 1967 Thomas W. Braden (in fact one of the very bosses mentioned above) published the article I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral’ in The Saturday Evening Post, an article which confirmed the link between the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Josselson almost exclusively took the fall. All of the other writers and thinkers associated with Encounter emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed, claiming they didn’t know a thing, continuing their prestigious careers in the arts and academy. But Josselson’s life was completely ruined. Braden’s article was apparently the CIA’s way to get rid of an organization that had become a burden. By 1967 speculations about the CIA link had grown pervasive, focusing on the fact that there had been no mention of Vietnam in any issue of Encounter. (What better way to ‘ameliorate the image of the United States’ than to act as if the Vietnam war simply didn’t exist.)

Thomas W. Braden – who was head of CIA’s international Organizations Division (IOD) from 1950-1954 – makes other appearances in the inserts of Gentlemen & Arseholes, including this quote from the Granada television program World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (1975):

It [CIA] never had to account for the money it spent except to the President… the funds were not only unaccountable, they were unvouchered, so there was really no means of checking them – ‘unvouchered funds’ meaning expenditures that don’t have to be accounted for… […] Since it was unaccountable, it could hire as many people as it wanted. It never had to say to any committee – no committee said to it – ‘You can only have so many men.’ It could do exactly as it pleased. It made preparations therefore for every contingency. It could hire armies; it could buy banks. There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war – the secret war… It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first.

This notion of the CIA as the first multinational strikes me as extremely resonant. For many years now I have often found myself thinking that the world we live in is so utterly influenced by CIA thinking, strategies and money. The more I learn about the extent of CIA activities since the end of World War Two the more I feel that other, more subtle, explanations for our current predicament – the startling rise of the right and concurrent decline of the left, the war on terrorism, the unfettered expansion of capital, etc. – are relatively unnecessary. The CIA of course cannot be held responsible for all of the world’s ills, but they worked really hard and did a lot. Definitely more than most people realize. And yet at the same time I am extremely careful who I say such things around. To be branded a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is a further marginalization I don’t exactly feel like I need in my already marginalized cultural existence. (Ironically, who else but the CIA could dream up a strategy as simple and effective as branding someone a conspiracy theorist.) So it is likely that before I had even opened the zip lock bag, Lene Berg had already found a true fan. But this work then went on to earn my love, speaking to my interests with an eloquence, perceptiveness and conceptual rigor that for me are the very essence of art.

There is no evidence that the CIA ever censored Encounter, or in any way told the editors or writers what they should write, think, or say. Judging by all available facts, the whole thing was based on a tacit agreement between what the people associated with Encounter wanted to do, and what the CIA wanted to fund.

Because Gentlemen & Arseholes is not only about the possibly CIA-influenced world in which we currently live. It is also, like all of Lene Berg’s work, about a more basic relationship between art and politics. The secret nature of the CIA funding makes it a particularly insidious example, but we can certainly find parallels for this ambiguous dynamic in all historical periods in which artists have received support, whether it be from the church, the king, the bourgeoisie, the state or the market. Artists always need money and, fiercely dedicated to artistic concerns, it might even seem natural not to question too much where the money comes from or why. Why not simply be grateful that it is possible to continue producing artistic works in (what are always for artists) difficult times?

It seems clear to me that Josselson believed he was doing the right thing and genuinely believed that he was taking government money and putting it towards a good cause. Of course he also believed in the fight against communism. Much like the fight against terrorism today, such battles are an excellent pretext for the re-distribution of priorities and the re-distribution of wealth. Give the money to artists and writers who are not communist, raise their profiles, build their careers and reputations. The writers and artists who are communist will take the hit indirectly, falling ever so slightly behind, with only unfounded suspicions as to the real reasons why. In The Man in the Background Berg questions the long-term effects of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, wondering if perhaps it is one of the reasons that today 90% of all cultural products in Europe are produced in America. Of course there is no way we can find out what the world would be like if Michael Josselson and the Congress for Cultural Freedom had never existed. But there is plenty of room to speculate.

There is much art today that gives lip service to being ‘political’ but it is rare for an artwork to ask difficult, compelling, real-world political questions in a manner that at the same time resonates so effortlessly with the dilemmas of artistic praxis. Such battles are political but they are also, on so many levels, deeply romantic: concerning the real questions of what we believe in, how much we believe in it, and whether or not we are willing to fight. It is rare I get to write about art that makes me think and feel as much as the work of Lene Berg. And therefore I would like to end with something that, like all romantic battles, goes a bit too far: far enough to take on the violence of the very rigged historical battle between the CIA and the left, to match Michael Josselson’s perhaps inevitable, yet somehow still tragic, fall from grace. But all I have come up with is this (and I write it here because it is true): Lene Berg is the artist I have been waiting for all of my life.



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The Romantic and the Entrepreneur

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[This text was originally published in C Magazine #92.]




In David Markson’s 1996 experimental novel Reader’s Block, sparse, isolated sentences about a protagonist referred to only as ‘Reader’ are interspersed among a much larger number of equally sparse, isolated biographical fragments from the lives of well-known painters, writers, philosophers, composers, etc. These fragments are rarely flattering. For example:

Emily Dickinson became so extravagantly reclusive in the second half of her life that for the last ten years she did not once leave her house.

Or:

When Rembrandt’s possessions were sold at bankruptcy in 1656, they included paintings by Raphael, Giorgione, and van Eyck. And seventy-five Rembrants.

And did not bring in enough to discharge the bankruptcy.

Or:

Fighting with his wife, drunk, Paul Verlaine once threw their three-month-old son against a wall.

In the universe of Reader’s Block, so many artists were anti-semites, so many more suicides. Their struggles with poverty and isolation, and in fact with life itself, more often than not got the better of them.

This vision of the artist as someone destroyed by his or her vocation seems somehow outdated, a relic from the past. Certainly enough contemporary artists are poor and/or drunk. But I suspect a more entrepreneurial model now holds sway over our idea of what an artist might represent in the world. No longer encapsulated by an individual’s solitary engagement with his or her own genius, a more social and relational set of images now comes to mind when we think of artists today.

This change, perhaps a demotion within the realm of symbolic value, is part and parcel of an art context where anything can be art, a context in which, as the critic Sven Lütticken writes “the objects nowadays exhibited as art no longer derive their legitimacy from a tradition or an artistic medium, but from the fact that their artistic status is initially dubious”, a context in which it is often remarkably unclear just exactly what ‘special quality’ the artist actually brings to the work.

However, it is important to remember that this situation is only made possible because the contemporary work of art is in fact set in stark relief against an art-historical backdrop. An empty cardboard box sitting in the middle of a room in a museum would simply not mean anything to us if museums weren’t also places where paintings by Rembrandt once hung (and of course still do.) The radical break obtains meaning and resonance only in relation to a history from which one wishes to escape.

This might seem like an obvious enough point and of course many contemporary works of art are based explicitly on art historical precedents while many catalog essays work overtime to contextualize contemporary work within a historical framework. Nonetheless, the paradoxical complexity of the dynamic between contemporary art and art history is difficult to overstate. While the original movements of the avant-garde derived their power and energy from the incredible strength of will it took to break with the hegemony of convention and tradition, in the contemporary world tradition no longer rules society to anywhere near the degree it once did and to break away from such a weak master is not an especially impressive feat.

I certainly have no desire to argue for a return to tradition. I simply believe further consideration can be given to the degree to which any seemingly radical gesture (most of which we no longer find especially radical) would not be possible without a series of conventions for it to be radical in relation to. While the previous, more romantic, conception of the artist hinged on the artist’s will to push forward and break with tradition; the current more entrepreneurial conception of the artist hinges on our understanding that these traditions have now been demolished and therefore the artist is free to run wild amongst the wreckage: for profit, pleasure or in the name of some multi-faceted ideal that, for lack of a better term, we continue to refer to using the word ‘art.’ While, for the historical romantic artist, a forced break with tradition had the potential to be a brave and meaningful action – or at the very least had the potential to be a metaphor for a brave and meaningful action – for the contemporary artist, continuing to run wild long after all traditional boundaries have disappeared, it is more likely to seem a bit aimless, perhaps even becoming a metaphor for how aimless and powerless we often feel living in the contemporary world.

In a sense, one of the things that is so remarkable about the contemporary artistic project is how often this potential aimlessness continues to accrue meaning in relation to the entire history of art and how often this essential relationship, without which so many contemporary artistic gestures might seem only aimless, is taken for granted. The fact that it is taken for granted, pushed into the background (where it must remain silent in order not to draw undue attention towards itself) in part serves to mask the essential weakness of the dynamic between contemporary practice and art history, serves to create a certain aura of mystery around some of the most basic reasons why contemporary art still continues to be thought of as ‘art’. But it is also possible that many artists working today simply aren’t aware of the degree to which the core values of their practice are derived from a) how fully the romantic ideal of art and of the artist continues to hold sway over our imagination and b) how powerful the modernist ideal of a break with tradition continues to be.

At any rate, to whatever degree any artist may or may not be aware of this reality, there is no question that in certain fundamental ways our current, more entrepreneurial, cliché of the role a contemporary artist fulfils is (perhaps unconsciously) built upon the historical foundation of an older, more romantic, position and would not be possible without the aura of this previous conception. And for artists who are insightfully aware of this slightly paradoxical situation – that for their work to be effectively contemporary it must continuously break with an art-historical tradition that at the same time it’s very status as a work of art also depends upon – one of the more positive side effects is that it allows them an enormous degree of play, both with their own individual persona as an artist and with the seemingly old-fashioned romantic idea of being an artist in the first place. There are far too many examples of this type of playfulness to mention here but as a particularly complex and reified example I will focus on the 1991 work Heavy Burschi (Heavy Guy) by Martin Kippenberger.

As an artist, Kippenberger was particularly aware of his public persona, always perversely engaged in an almost confrontational process of negotiation between the creation of his own persona and the creation of his art. For Heavy Burschi, Kippenberger asked his assistant to make a series of paintings based on images from the entirety of Kippenberger’s previous work. However, upon seeing the finished paintings he was extremely unsatisfied with them. He ordered all fifty-one paintings to be destroyed, but first had each one photographed, reprinted to its original size, and framed, exhibiting the reproductions in a single installation along with the remnants of the original paintings which he now placed in a giant dumpster in the middle of the gallery.

This multilayered, hyper-ironic approach to a certain kind of power dynamic implicit within the romantic idea of the ‘great artist’ is of course, on one level, an extremely cynical ploy, embodying the very abuses of power that it also serves to draw attention to. Thematically, it is also rich and complex. Among many other possible readings, this gesture of destroying fifty-one paintings, paintings filled with motifs from his entire oeuvre, and then displaying the destroyed remnants along with reproductions of the originals, originals that were in fact somehow copies of his own work to begin with, evokes a relationship between Kippenberger’s very entrepreneurial and contemporary artistic persona and a more romantic idea of artistic integrity that we associate with the past.

Great artists of the past, depending on the period we are referring to, often had assistants as well. The names of their assistants have generally disappeared into the ether of history while the names of the artists are continually being renewed and further established. To be a bit pithy about it, history is written by the victors. Kippenberger makes this relationship explicit within his work, at the same time toying with his own persona as a cynical artist, as someone who doesn’t actually have to make the work himself, doesn’t have to suffer in his pursuit of it, and yet in some ironic sense ‘suffers’ anyway when he finds himself unhappy with the results of the work he has commissioned from his assistant. Heavy Burschi is a work by an artist who clearly isn’t trying to make you think he’s a nice guy. To the contrary, it openly explores the out-dated notion of the artist as someone who can get away with behavior that would, in other circumstances, be unacceptable, get away with such behavior in the name of the higher calling of art. Kippenberger updates this notion and brings it into the self-referential present, at the same time undermining the romantic idealism previously associated with it. The ethically problematic behavior at Heavy Burschi’s core resonates with a history of artist biographies that are equally problematic. It also gives one a feeling that Kippenberger is almost the last of a dying breed, that artist’s are no longer really like that, that we now like to believe that things have changed.

Of course, Heavy Burschi was made at the beginning of the nineties when such an emphasis on irony most likely seemed more fresh and relevant. But the manner in which Kippenberger thematizes his role as a contemporary artist, in dialog with a romantic ideal that is both past and yet remains deeply instilled within us, continues to feel consequent. Kippenberger is simultaneously an old fashioned romantic artist and a contemporary parody of that role and in embodying this double condition he tells us quite a lot about what it’s like to be an artist today.

The old fashioned romantic model (which evokes obsession and suffering) may very well contrast with the more contemporary entrepreneurial model (which involves travel and networking) in many ways, but there is never any question that the relationship between them is essentially a symbiotic one. The present needs the past as a tradition that covertly continues to validate its status as actual art. And the past needs the present in order to maintain it’s vaulted position as historically sanctioned great art. While much contemporary art downplays this ever-present dynamic, in doing so it creates a potential misunderstanding about what we are actually looking at when we look at contemporary art.



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No Truth Without A Fight

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[This text was originally published in C Magazine #86 in 2005.]

This question of the existence of truths (that “there be” truths) points to a co-responsibility of art, which produces truths, and philosophy, which, under the condition that there are truths, is duty-bound to make them manifest (a very difficult task indeed). Basically, to make truths manifest means the following: to distinguish truths from opinion. So that the question today is this and no other: Is there something besides opinion? In other words (one will, or will not, forgive the provocation), is there something besides our “democracies”?
– Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics

The writings of French philosopher Alain Badiou carve out their own distinct path in almost militant opposition to what he sees as philosophies’ current failure to renew itself or provide effective opposition to the ‘repulsive mixture of power and opinion’ that typifies capitalism’s vision of democracy. His works implore us to ‘keep going’, keep pushing against the mere sophistry of an academic overemphasis on the limits of language (he cites Plato: “We philosophers do not take as our point of departure words, but things.”) and towards a manner of thinking that would allow philosophy to regain its primary historical function as a search for ‘truth’. This conviction – that concepts such as truth are essential if we are to continue to effectively think about, and act upon, the world in which we live – is clearly of great relevance to any assessment of contemporary aesthetics.

Concepts such as “truth” might well sound a bit awkward (perhaps even ridiculous) to our post- post modern ears and are certainly a hard-sell when confronted with the widespread certainty that pluralism and tolerance are the most appropriate responses to the complexities of the world in which we live. But if pluralism is no longer doing the trick, if you’re looking for something a little bit more uncompromising, Badiou’s doing what he can to provide it in a manner worthy of the name philosophy, the four dimensions of which he defines as ‘revolt, logic, universality and risk.’

Badiou approaches truth from a provocative and unexpected angle. According to his central work L’Etre et l’Evénement, the only way to become a subject is by encountering an event and then persisting in your fidelity to the truth of that event. At first glance this might seem a bit harsh: if you have never experienced an event (of which there are only four kinds: artistic invention, emancipatory politics, scientific re-foundation and love) and then stood firm in your loyalty to its truth, you simply don’t qualify as a subject. However, no one said truth was going to be easy.

For example, if you were a scientist in the twenties and thirties it would be impossible to practice science in the same way after having experienced the event of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as you did previous to it. The theory of relativity creates a truth that changes the way you think about and practice physics. It is your fidelity to this truth that defines you as a scientist and it is now possible that the rest of your life might be spent teasing out the many complications and consequences of your encounter.

Badiou goes on to define and re-define his central terms in great detail, a few of which I will attempt to summarize as follows:

Situation
A situation is simply the way things are in any given field of experience. It is the status quo, the unquestioned set of assumptions that make up our knowledge of life and thought. If nothing happens the situation remains the same, it can only be changed by an event.

Event
An event is always ‘unpredictable and incalculable’, never something that you can plan, always something that unexpectedly happens and you simply have to deal with. What differentiates an event from other significant occurrences is that the truth it generates cannot be assessed using current criteria. To decide whether or not a given event is significant, whether or not it has generated a ‘truth’, one is forced to change the way one thinks. An event creates something new, something that has the potential to alter the situation once and for all. In doing so, it also reveals the void of the situation, showing that the situation previous to the event was devoid of truth.

Truth
Stemming from the rupture of an event, truth forms ‘a hole in knowledge’, breaking open the situation, pushing at the limits of what potentially can be said. In this it contains a paradox since it is both ‘something new and exceptional’ while at the same time encompassing ‘the most stable, the closest, ontologically speaking, to the initial state of things.’ Badiou never sees truth as an unchanging verity. To the contrary, he always views it as an ‘infinite multiplicity.’ Any given truth is not the only one, contains infinite aspects, and therefore should never be rigid. If it goes too far or becomes totalizing, it betrays itself, opening the way to terror and disaster. Significantly, philosophy is not a ‘truth procedure’ and therefore can never create truths. Rather, philosophy’s role is to identify truths that have already been brought into being by one of it’s four conditions – Art, Politics, Science and Love – and to seize them, both in the sense of giving them a name and in the sense of being seized by them, of being astonished.

Fidelity
There is no truth without choice. If in your lifetime you happen to encounter an event, you must choose whether or not what you have experienced is significant enough to have generated a new truth and if so whether this truth should be brought into the fold of your situation (therefore changing everything). If so, this truth will demand of you a fidelity that then leads to an ongoing (possibly lifelong) investigation into its complications and consequences. There is nothing easy about such fidelity, you might change your mind, be killed in the struggle to establish the truth you have encountered, be ostracized from your community, etc. But something new has arisen: precarious, fragile, unable to fend for itself against the tides of convention, corruption, your own exhaustion and the inertia of prevailing wisdom. Without your fidelity to it, the truth you have encountered is unlikely to prevail.

Badiou claims that contemporary philosophy is a kind of ‘generalized, potent sophistry’; the foundational principle of all sophistry, both ancient and modern, being that there is no truth, only social convention, argument, desire, self interest, opinion, etc. It is telling that his response to this situation is not to try and ‘do away’ with the sophists but rather to enter into an ongoing dialogue with them, accepting them as philosophy’s necessary ‘enemy-brother’.

In visual art today we can also recognize something analogous to sophistry: a conception of art that – in its skilful, eccentric rejection of truth – undeniably forfeits certain possibilities for clarity and direction. This loss can then be reintegrated back into the work in the form of institutional or social critique. An institutional critique that unintentionally doubles as an acceptance of art’s socially marginal status by turning in on itself, by attacking the very institutions which, for better or worse, have been set up for art’s benefit and protection. Or a social critique that does in fact acknowledge the role of art within a larger set of social relations but does so under the cloak of a ‘defence mechanism’ irony that is really just the other face of an inability to meaningfully alter our surroundings. Such a strategies are certainly a reflection of the world in which we live, of capitalism’s ability to absorb absolutely anything, and gains further resonance by skirting the thin line between being a reflection of the problematic nature of the world and the spectator’s implicit acceptance of these same problems. However, without principles, without some consideration of questions pertaining to truth as a foundation on which to build, such strategies spin endlessly in circles.

I suppose the main thing I’m arguing for here is that we consider what contemporary art might look like if, much like David Hickey brought ‘beauty’ back into the art discourse of the mid-nineties, Alain Badiou managed to do the same for ‘truth.’ If art today often seems like a series of ‘opinions’, what might an art look like that moves past opinion and tries to encompass truth in Badiou’s sense of the term? At first glance this might appear an unlikely scenario, but fifteen years ago it certainly didn’t seem likely that beauty would become the buzzword of the mid-nineties. And much like beauty, if only as a provocation to current art world thinking, I suspect ‘truth’ has a great deal to offer.

Artists today very much need something like this. Perhaps not precisely what Badiou explores, but definitely something along these lines. For example, what would it mean to see ‘Duchamp’ as a central event (in Badiou’s sense of the term) in the formation of contemporary art? Of course, a great deal of work has been done along these lines already, but for the most part such work has been done while studiously avoiding (or rejecting) words such as ‘truth’. To see Duchamp as an event certainly doesn’t mean that Marcel Duchamp, as an individual artist, should be further lionized. Rather, we would have to search for the truth of what Duchamp and his legacy brought into the situation of art and what it might mean to continue to work in fidelity to this truth. Not just to continue working conceptually because it remains, in one way or another, the dominant paradigm. But rather to intensify one’s relationship with what is essential within the foundation of this paradigm. Of course, it is equally possible that we might realize that the event we are referring to here as ‘Duchamp’ is devoid of truth and therefore the contemporary art situation must simply change.

More to the point, I suspect an engagement with truth (or something like it) is essentially what most artists do anyway, almost as a dirty little secret or unspoken impulse. They feel that within their work there is something true and they bear this truth, remaining loyal to early breakthroughs and realizations, continually teasing out the many complications and consequences of their ongoing endeavour. Dealing with the language of ‘truth-procedures’ more directly has the potential to challenge the unspoken nature of this struggle, asking us to think about what art means on a more fundamental level, intensifying our engagement with our fundamental artistic concerns, allowing the multiplicity of our practice to swarm around a central point, giving us back a clear, yet still hazardous, sense of direction.

In what could also serve as a critique of contemporary art, Badiou condemns the framework of current philosophy as being ‘too strongly committed to the polyvalence of meaning and the plurality of languages’. He feels there is something in it that goes ‘too far in reflecting the physiognomy of the world itself’, that it is ‘too compatible with the status quo to be able to sustain the rupture or distance that philosophy requires.’ In many ways philosophy’s unacknowledged compliance with the status quo is what lies behind Badiou’s preoccupation with truth. If philosophy does not have the tools to sustain ‘revolt, logic, universality and risk’, there is probably something lacking. An ‘end of philosophy’ thinking now dominates which leads towards an unbreakable sense of paralysis.

This sense of cultural paralysis is certainly not an unusual modern sensation. What is unusual, and reveals Badiou’s activist roots, is his ongoing attempt to break it. He characterizes this attempted break as a kind of gamble, a roll of the dice. Perhaps it will succeed, perhaps not. When one is seized by a truth it is imperative to try, to roll the dice, see what might be possible if one chooses not to accept the current situation and instead work towards something that, while seemingly impossible under the current conditions, might suddenly become possible if things were to change.

In the end what Badiou tells us is that there is no truth without a fight, that to be a subject requires a certain degree of militancy (he quotes Mallarmé in saying that we must become ‘militants of restraint’), that ‘respect for the Other’ means nothing without some deeper conception of truth to guide one’s thoughts and actions.

It is only by declaring that we want what conservatism decrees to be impossible, and by affirming truths against the desire for nothingness, that we tear ourselves away from nihilism. The possibility of the impossible, which is exposed by every loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation, every artistic invention and every sequence of emancipatory politics, is the sole principle – against the ethics of living well whose real content is the deciding of death – of an ethic of truths.
– Alain Badiou, Ethics

As artists today, what events can we call upon and generate to destabilize the current situation, to undo unexamined certainties and replace them with something more flexible, more useful, more courageous? Are we willing to leave behind the stifling comfort of relativity in order to once again start thinking about truth? It’s certainly unlikely, but hopefully intriguing to consider. If, without for a moment loosing sight of moderation and critical distance, we allow ourselves to believe that artistic invention has the potential to generate truths – with all the complexity, rigour and multiplicity such a word implies – what might this change? Would anyone care to find out?



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