The politics of aesthetics
Considered the highest honour an artist can achieve within the British art world and one of the best-known prizes for the visual arts in the world, the Turner Prize is awarded annually to an artist born or based in the UK in recognition for an outstanding exhibition in the past twelve months. Established in 1984, it aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. A five-person jury, including the director of Tate Britain as chair of the jury, determines the short list of four artists as well as the final winner. Despite its long and sometimes controversial history, no year can equal last year’s surprising turn of events. On a late winter evening in December 2019, it was unexpectedly announced that not one, but all four nominated artists – Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani – all of who have very different artistic practices and the works for which they have been nominated vary greatly in subject matter and artistic medium – had been awarded the prize. Even if collectively received, the artists in question are not a collective – in fact they have never met each other prior to their nomination – instead, they collectively requested in a letter that the jury considered them as such. In their joint statement to the jury, the artists expressed as follows:
“At this time of political crisis in Britain and much of the world, when there is already so much that divides and isolates people and communities, we feel strongly motivated to use the occasion of the Prize to make a collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity – in art as in society. … The politics we deal with differ greatly, and for us it would feel problematic if they were pitted against each other.” [press statement]
The jury, rather than dismissing their request, praised the artists’ act of solidarity. During the ceremony the jury announced as follows:
“At our meeting today, we were presented with the letter from the artists and unanimously took the decision to agree to their request. We are honoured to be supporting this bold statement of solidarity and collaboration in these divided times. Their symbolic act reflects the political and social poetics that we admire and value in their work.” [press statement]
In spite of this controversial act, it might be uncontroversial to claim that last year’s Turner Prize has been the most explicitly political in its 35-year history because the artists asked of the jury to not pit their subject matters against one another, thereby implying that this would result in one artist’s work, not aesthetically, but politically, to be considered of greater importance than that of the other artists. In fact, Abu Hamdan pointed out that all four artists where on a similar political track, stating that:
“This time it seemed to be that there was cohesion around a political approach more than an aesthetic practice. The other reason is that we genuinely didn’t feel like in the nature of the works we make the competition format worked because it would pit prescience over the contribution we make as artists.” [press statement]
What Abu Hamdan’s statement exposes is two ways of thinking about art: 1. The political aspect of an artwork should be considered over and above its aesthetic quality; and 2. That the effects and/or consequences of an artwork should also be considered over and above the aesthetic dimension thereof.
It is no stretch to argue that the aesthetic and the political appear inseparable in all four artists’ work. Yet the question this throws up is what this relationship consists of. In fact, numerous ways of understanding the relationship between art and politics exist, though it is interesting to note that the artists did not consider this relationship in a more traditional manner, namely that political art is art as representation of the political, and in particular political injustice, but rather conceptualize art in the stronger sense, namely art as a catalyst towards political alternatives in the future. Needless to say, there are other ways in which the relationship between art and politics can be and has been theorized, as well as practised[1]. However, for the current purpose, I am focusing on the notion of 1. Politics prior to aesthetics and 2. The effect of art over the impression thereof. The rest of this short paper will elaborate on these two notions in relation to Abu Hamdan’s Turner Prize winning work Walled Unwalled , which I will read through the prism of French philosopher Jacques Rancière. Therefore, I shall at first introduce a rough sketch of Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible , in order to subsequently apply it to Abu Hamdan’s work in relation to the notion of speaking on behalf of someone. I intend to test in this paper whether the concept of ‘giving voice to’ is sufficient as a criterion according to which art can be evaluated and its relationship to the political established.
PART I: JACQUES RANCIÈRE
For Rancière, aesthetics is neither a theory nor a framework that assigns art to its effects on sensibility. Instead it refers to a specific regime for reflecting on the arts as a means that enables an articulation between ways of producing art, its forms of visibility, and the relationship between the two. Therefore, the aesthetic regime of art provokes a new possibility and transformation of the distribution of the sensible, the seen and the heard.
For Rancière, the distribution of the sensible is defined by what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetic-political regime. In Rancière’s conceptual framework, what establishes this regime is the police – police in this instance is defined as an organizational system that coordinates the sensible, the seen and the heard by means of diving a community into sub-stratum: from groups and positions, to functions. This law of separation is defined by a division between inclusion and exclusion, participation and non-participation, which pre-supposes a prior aesthetic division between the visible and invisible, the audible and inaudible, the sayable and unsayable. For Rancière, the essential function of politics lies in interrupting the distribution of the sensible by means of giving people who are excluded from the perceptual coordinates of the community a space of visibility. This in turn changes the very aesthetic-political playing field as it introduces invisible, inaudible and unsayable elements into the current distribution of the sensible and thereby changes its very possibility in the future. Therefore, the political, according to Rancière, is always relational in nature, as it signifies an intervention of politics in the police order. Therefore, the political does not designate a relationship to an establishment of a particular political regime. The persistent tension between politics and the police arises from a wrong that the law is unable to resolve.
For those excluded from the distribution of the sensible, those without name who remain invisible and unheard, are only able to access and subvert the established police order through a mode of subjectivization which enables them to transform the aesthetic coordinates of a community by insisting to implement politics’ universal presupposition of our equality. According to Rancière and in his own words, “A ‘common’ world is never simply an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the sedimentation of a certain number of intertwined acts. It is always a polemical distribution of modes of being and ‘occupations’ in a space of possibilities.”(The Politics of Aesthetics 42)
THE AESTHETIC VIS A VIS THE POLITICAL
For Rancière, a parallel between art and politics exists in at least two ways, while he nonetheless insists that an exact criterion for correlation cannot be established. One way of thinking the parallel between art and politics comes by means of comparing both to forms of knowledge. Art and politics, for him, both construct fictions in as much that both rearrange signs and words, or what is seen and what is said, as well as their relationship. Another way of thinking the parallel between art and politics stems from their ability to produce effects within reality. They not only define modes of visibility and speech but produce actions in the world. These actions can take on various forms, from defining acceptable variations of perceptions and abilities of bodies; take groups of people, redefine their constituents, force them further apart from one another, or draw them closer together according to new definitions and perceptions, modify their conditions of existence, their reaction to each other, or their relation to themselves. Both art and politics reconfigure the distribution of the sensible through interference in definition, relations and functionality of a group’s natural cycle of production, reproduction and submission by changing the maps of visibility. As Rancière points out: “Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his ‘natural’ purpose by the power of words.” (The Politics of Aesthetics 39)
However, for Rancière, no criterion for appropriately evaluating the correlation between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics exist. As we have seen, Rancière defines the aesthetic dimension of politics in terms of the distribution of the sensible. However, when it comes to the evaluation of the political dimension of art, Rancière urges us to avoid the question, as he believes that the politics of art are somewhat more complicated in nature, due to a larger global context against which art has to reconfigure experiences and perceptions of police consensus and political dissensus. Hence, a redistribution of the sensible might be more diffuse due to the global context of art as artistic forms of visibility enter into, or are subsumed, into politics’ aesthetic possibilities. What Rancière would have us believe is that politics can, or even should, appropriate aesthetic approaches and modes of presentation whereas artistic practices should shy away from appropriating politics. On this reading, it might be arguable that the problem of the correlation between art and politics does not lie in an absent criterion but rather a problem of Rancière’s notion of the politics of art, as well as the political dimension of art. To negate an answer due to the question’s complexity is not an argument that should be easily granted. In the context of this paper, it won’t be possible to sketch an attempt of defining the precise nature of the politics of art, as well as an attempt to make an ethical argument in favour of introducing possible criteria for formulating an appropriate correction – something I am currently working on for a longer paper – instead I shall now be turning to thinking Rancière alongside Abu Hamdan’s work.
PART II: LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN
Artist, audio investigator, self-titled ‘private ear’ Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work explores the complex connections between sound, listening, language, politics and the production of truth. His body of work overall, and in particular his audio-visual installation Walled Unwalled (2019)[2], one of the four winners of last year’s Turner Prize, is situated within the liminal space between human rights law and art. His research-driven artistic practice is deeply engaging, resonating and resounding across the aesthetic-political spectrum.
As part of Forensic Architecture[3] and Amnesty International’s investigation[4] into the Syrian Regime prison Saydnaya, Abu Hamdan interviewed and collected acoustic and aural testimonies of six prison survivors, bearing witness to the human rights violations that took place there. Saydnaya is located just north of Damascus and is now known to have operated as a torture and execution camp, where, since 2011, some 13,000 people have been killed. Prisoners learn upon being brought to Saydnaya that speaking is punishable by death. In addition, prisoners are blindfolded when they enter and exit the prison and remain foremost within a single cell during their duration of detention. Hence, they see little to nothing, whereby the acoustics of the building, reverberating nothing more than the guards’ footsteps and the detainee’s scream-less beatings, become the primary source of perception for the detainees. The experience of survivors is marked by sensory deprivation as a brutally enforced silence echoes through Saydnaya.
For the Turner Prize 2019, Abu Hamdan presented a trio of works that draws on his research with Forensic Architecture and for Amnesty International. For Walled Unwalled, Abu Hamdan weaves together sonic testimonies from Saydnaya with other legal cases and popular culture in one of the two videos[5]. For the second audio-visual installation he draws on his previous installation Earwitness Inventory, which consists of 95 custom-designed and sourced objects, all derived from legal cases, in which sonic evidence is contested, and presented in between the cracks of testimonies. In contrast, the final work displays neither movement nor sound. Saydnaya (the missing 19db) illustrates the transformation of Saydnaya from prison to death camp through a visualisation of sound, as the prisoners’ disappearing voices are a consequence of the increase of violence since the Syrian revolution in 2011, at which point speaking became punishable by death in Saydnaya.
PART III: RANCIERE AND ABU HAMDAN
THE ARTIST AS SPEAKING IN THE NAME OF X
Without a doubt, Abu Hamdan displays a desire to communicate on behalf of the detainees he interviews, thereby acting as mediator between the detainees and the audience. In Walled Unwalled, Abu Handan’s voice and presence is clear and concise, oscillating between producing clarity and removing ambiguity. Yet he refrains from telling the audience what to think and how to think about it, avoiding judgement in favour of presenting connections previously unthought. The audience learns from Walled Unwalled not only about the conditions of a particular prison in Syria but more fundamental notions on testimony, incarceration and violence. Above this, what Abu Hamdan is attempting, is to go beyond the visual and the sound by not only speaking on behalf of the detainees but to make their own voice heard. This act of ‘giving voice to’ is a deeply political act that is intertwined with Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible.
To quote Rancière: “A speaking being, according to Aristotle, is a political being. If a slave understands the language of its rulers, however, he does not ‘possess’ it.” (The Politics of Aesthetics 12) Following this line, Abu Hamdan not only gives voice to the detainees but turns them from silent victims who do not ‘possess’ the regime’s language into speaking survivors who become political beings by creating a new language themselves, a language now others can refer to and share more widely. Following Rancière, politics can be defined as revolving around what is visible and what is said about that which is visible, revolving around who has the ability to see and make seen, the ability to speak and to be spoken about. Rancière is precisely concerned with the often violent moments of political subjectivization, moments when the unseen make a claim to speak of and for themselves, thereby changing previous perceptions and spaces, so as to be included as a legitimate actor, no longer a hidden slave to unthinkable violence on a seemingly inescapable journey towards silence or death. Hence, the voice is a political instrument and in Abu Hamdan’s work closely related to the auditory perceptions of hearing, speaking and listening, which enable the artist to investigate a punishing political and humanitarian crisis previously unseen and unheard.
If the essence of politics is to change the perceptual coordinates of a community or group of people in favour of those who have been left behind, left out or never known of to begin with, then Abu Hamdan’s work appears to succeed in its drive towards a political approach over an aesthetic practice. If he has enabled those who previously had no name to penetrate with the help of the artist what Rancière defines as the police order, then Abu Hamndan’s work has achieved more than many artists before him can claim to have achieved. But what would it mean for him or his artwork to have modify the aesthetic-political field of possibility, the step beyond making the invisible merely visible? What are the qualifying criteria according to which we can establish the effects and not only the perceptions of an artwork? Is a step ever so slightly enough or how small is big enough to make a change in the world? Is me now knowing of Saydnaya, of telling you who also have not known about it previously, sufficient to designate this artwork as a catalyst for change? Or would it be necessary for the prison to be abolished, the regime brought to its knees, the perpetrators of this horrific crime against humanity be charged and prosecuted, in order for this artwork to classify as a catalyst for change? Can art only ever change knowledge, create fictions but never change reality? Is it this that Rancière didn’t dare to say when he spoke of the politics of art as too complex in context and therefore escaping definition? How far can we go in our demand on art before art becomes politics and ceases to be art?
CONCLUSION
It can be said that Abu Hamdan’s work is in line with Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible, in as much as his work can be understood as re-configuration and re-presentation of experience that creates a new mode of perception from which a new form of political subjectivity may arise, as it makes visible the previously invisible, heard the previously unheard, expanding an audience’s awareness, becoming witness to a shared aesthetic-political, if global, world as no longer acceptable, a shock that raptures our collective conscience.
It should not be surprising that the political dimension of Walled Unwalled is over and above its artistic qualities, but whether it will have an effect over and above its aesthetic qualities only time will be able to tell. The future in which we shall look back on this artwork, thinking through the consequences it posed on us and onto a British and global community of art lovers will be a different future to the one we still imagined in 2019. If taken seriously, it isn’t simply the Turner Prize’s most political year to date but it marks a shift in our conception of art – if the prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art, then the debate is no longer about artistic practices but one about whether art as art, not only British art, has come to an end and been replaced by art as politics.
[1] Art can, on the one hand, be also understood as being complicit with political oppression, injustices and othering, while, on the other hand, art can also be seen as an escape from politics. A third way of seeing the relationship between art and politics can be understood in terms of art’s capacity (theoretically speaking) to establish political community. However, none of these notions are pertinent to my analysis of Abu Hamdan’s work.
[2] Walled Unwalled is a reproduction of After SFX, which was originally a performance at Tate Modern, London.
[3] Forensic Architecture is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University College London, under the director Eyal Weizman. They investigate state and corporate violence and human rights violations worldwide through artistic, journalistic, scientific and legal means.
[4] Link to the report online
[5] Abu Hamdan used sound effect from the BBC and Warner Bros archives to help retrieve the prisoners’ experience and create a language for the unspeakable, as well as serving as a tool to activate memory and solicit testimony. However, this aspect of the work will not be discussed in this version of the paper.