The One And The Many Contemporary Collaborative Art In A Global Context Grant H Kester

The One And The Many Contemporary Collaborative
Art In A Global Context Grant H Kester download
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-one-and-the-many-contemporary-
collaborative-art-in-a-global-context-grant-h-kester-51889960
Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.
The One And The Many Contemporary Collaborative Art In A Global
Context Grant H Kester
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-one-and-the-many-contemporary-
collaborative-art-in-a-global-context-grant-h-kester-5325392
The One And The Many A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics W Norris
Clarke
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-one-and-the-many-a-contemporary-
thomistic-metaphysics-w-norris-clarke-37635848
The One And The Many A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics 1st W Norris
Sj Clarke
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-one-and-the-many-a-contemporary-
thomistic-metaphysics-1st-w-norris-sj-clarke-62057564
The One And The Many A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics W Norris
Clarke
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-one-and-the-many-a-contemporary-
thomistic-metaphysics-w-norris-clarke-4631418

Politics Of The One Concepts Of The One And The Many In Contemporary
Thought Artemy Magun Editor
https://ebookbell.com/product/politics-of-the-one-concepts-of-the-one-
and-the-many-in-contemporary-thought-artemy-magun-editor-50227404
The One And The Many Relational Psychoanalysis And Group Analysis Juan
Tubertoklander
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-one-and-the-many-relational-
psychoanalysis-and-group-analysis-juan-tubertoklander-51285588
The One And The Many Englishcanadian Short Story Cycles 1st Edition
Gerald Lynch
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-one-and-the-many-englishcanadian-
short-story-cycles-1st-edition-gerald-lynch-51740730
The One And The Many The Early History Of The Quran Francois Deroche
Malcolm Debevoise
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-one-and-the-many-the-early-history-
of-the-quran-francois-deroche-malcolm-debevoise-51893484
The One And The Many The Early History Of The Quran Francois Deroche
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-one-and-the-many-the-early-history-
of-the-quran-francois-deroche-43674700

—
The One and The Many
—

Grant h. Kester
duKe universiTy Press durhaM and LOndOn 2011
—
The One and The Many
Contemporary Collaborative art in a Global Context
—

© 2011 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Warnock Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data appear on
the last printed page of this book.
Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support
provided through the Arts and Humanities Innovation
Fund and the Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities
at the University of California, San Diego, and the Creative
Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant
Program, which provided funds toward the production of
this book.

To Samira Kester, my collaborator in life

ConTenTS
ix — Acknowledgments
1
— IntroductIon
1. The Semantics of Collaboration
2. Art Practice and the Intellectual
Baroque
19 — chApter one
AuTonomy, AnTAgoniSm,
And The AeSTheTiC
1. From Text to Action
2. Park Fiction, Ala Plastica,
and Dialogue
3. Relational Antagonism
4. The Risk of Diversity
5. Programmatic Multiplicity
6. Art Theory and the
Post- structuralist Canon

67 — chApter two
The geniuS of The PlACe
1. Lessons in Futility
2. Enclosure Acts
3. The Twelfth Seat and the
Mirrored Ceiling
4. The Atelier as Workshop
5. Labor, Praxis, and Representation
6. The Divided and Incomplete
Subject of Yesterday
7. Memories of Development
8. The Limits of Ethical Capitalism
9. The Art of the Locality
155 — chApter three
eminenT domAin: ArT And urbAn SPACe
1. Blindness and Insight
2. The Invention of the Public
3. The Boulevards of the Inner City
4. Park Fiction: Desire, Resistance,
and Complicity
5. A Culture of Needles: Project Row
Houses in Houston
229 — notes
281
— references
295
— Index

ACKnowledgmenTS
It is a commonplace that any book is the product of collaboration rather
than singular authorship, but in this case it has the virtue of being true.
The One and the Many was only made possible by the generosity of a great
number of colleagues and friends. I’d like to give special thanks to Nav-
jot Altaf, Shantibai, Gessuram, and Rajkumar of Dialogue; Silvina Babich,
Alejandro Metin, and Rafael Santos of Ala Plastica (Rafael has since left
the group); Christoph Schäfer and Margit Czenki of Park Fiction; Rick
Lowe of Project Row Houses; Amadou Kane- Si and Muhsana Ali of Huit
Facettes Interaction; and Jay Koh and Chu Yuan of NICA. Thanks also to
Annie Mendoza, Navjot Altaf, and Rajkumar for help with translations in
San Diego and Bastar, and to Patrick Deegan and Noel Hefele for conduct-
ing interviews in conjunction with the Groundworks exhibition in Pitts-
burgh. The travel necessary to research this book would not have been
possible without the generous support of the Creative Capital/Warhol
Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program, one of the only programs of its
kind available to art historians and critics writing on contemporary art.
Research for this book was also supported by the Getty Research Institute
(during a 2004 fellowship), and the Division of the Arts and Humanities
and the Center for the Humanities at the University of California, San
Diego. I would also like to thank Anne Douglas and Carole Gray at Gray’s

x —— Acknowledgments
School of Art at Robert Gordon University in Scotland (who invited me to
participate in the “Working in Public” seminars in 2007), and Tim Collins
and Reiko Goto, formerly of the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie
Mellon University (who invited me to organize the Groundworks exhi-
bition in 2005). Thanks are also due to Lea and Pekka Kantonen and Jan
Kaila in Helsinki; Mick Wilson, Martin McCabe, Ed Carroll, and Ailbhe
Murphy in Dublin; Doug Ashford and Walid Raad at Cooper Union in
New York; and Raul Cárdenas Osuna of Torolab in Tijuana; along with
Nancy Adajania, Teddy Cruz, Steve Fagin, Tom Finkelpearl, Geeta Kapur,
Bill Kelley, Suzanne Lacy, Malcolm Miles, Carmen Mörsch, Per Nilsson,
Javier Rodrigo, Shubhalakshmi Shukla, and Jennifer Flores Sternad for
conversations that helped in the development of this work. Thanks also
to Ala Plastica, Chu Yuan, Dialogue, Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Lisson Gal-
lery, the Museum of the City of New York, Park Fiction, the Paul Strand
Archive at Aperture Foundation, Project Row Houses, and David Zwirner
Gallery for photos and permissions.

inTroduCTion
The SemAnTiCS of CollAborATion —— 1
if oneness in art works inevitably implies the use of force against the many—
phrases like “mastery over materials” in aesthetical criticism betray this state
of affairs—then it follows that the many must also fear oneness.
T. w. Adorno, Aesthetic theory
This book began with a question. Why have so many artists over
the past decade and a half been drawn to collaborative or collec-
tive modes of production? This is a global phenomenon, extend-
ing from the fashionable biennales of Europe to the villages of
central India, from the Hamburg waterfront to the arctic circle
of Finland, and from generously subsidized new media centers
to struggling community art programs. While each practitioner
comes to collaborative work with a unique perspective, these
individual creative choices, taken in the aggregate, reveal much
about both the current political moment and the broader his-
tory of modern art. We must begin, of course, by coming to terms
with collaboration itself. Its primary meaning is straightforward
enough: “to work together” or “in conjunction with” another, to

2 —— introduction
engage in a “united labor.” It is shadowed, however, by a second meaning:
collaboration as betrayal, to “cooperate treasonably, as with an enemy oc-
cupation force.”1 This ambivalence, the semantic slippage between posi-
tive and negative connotations, is, I think, fitting. There are other terms
that one might employ to describe this work: “cooperative,” “collective,”
and so on. Where collaboration is redolent of Vichy France, collectivity
evokes associations of forced labor camps, even as cooperation leads us
through a chain of associations to “cooperative” witnesses and a complici-
tous submission to authority.
It is telling that within the continuum of terms we use for working
together, each carries with it a counter- meaning: a warning, so to speak,
of its ethical undecidability. I’m reminded of a lecture I once gave on col-
laborative art to an audience of distinguished academics. Over the course
of an otherwise unremarkable presentation, I noticed one audience mem-
ber becoming increasingly agitated. Eventually, he could contain himself
no longer and burst out with an impassioned jeremiad about the dangers
that inevitably follow when trying to work creatively in groups. We are
well acquainted with the conformist demands that collective social forma-
tions make on individual participants, but the threat, as Adorno reminds
us, runs in both directions.2 The many have equally to fear the power of
the one, for whom the world in all its concrete particularity is a mere re-
source to be joyfully manipulated and transformed. Is the identity of the
many based on coercive consensus or radical plurality? Is the one defined
by narcissistic projection or an opening out to alterity? These are some of
the most pressing political and ethical questions of our day, and they are
also central to the collaborative art projects I’ll be exploring here.
There are, of course, no unequivocal signifiers, just as there is no art
practice that avoids all forms of co- option, compromise, or complicity.
It seems wiser to openly acknowledge this impurity than to assume that
it can somehow be defeated at the level of terminology. We can identify
many modes of collaborative practice, many ways of being together, in
contemporary art. Perhaps most visible are what we might term “artist-
to- artist” collaborations of the kind Charles Green describes in The Third
Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism. Green
discusses such collaborative “teams” as Marina and Ulay Abromovic,
Christo and Jeanne Claude, and Gilbert and George, focusing primarily
on the dynamics of collaborators who are also linked through personal re-

introduction —— 3
lationships (“publicly- bonded couples,” as Green has it).3 His key theoreti-
cal innovation, the concept of the “third artist,” marks a form of creative
praxis that emerges at the intersection of these complex, overlapping re-
lations. If art is understood as an expression of autonomy and unity (the
unity of authorial intention and of the work itself as a semantic construct),
then any concession to contingency and multiplicity will be perceived as a
transgression. At the same time, most of the examples outlined in Green’s
book simply expand a capacity for conventional artistic expression and
production to multiple participants (e.g., two “performance artists” work-
ing collaboratively rather than one in isolation). In many of the projects
I’ll be examining here, the artistic personality itself (defined by its commit-
ment to mastery and self- projection) is understood as a locus of creative
transformation. Further, they often challenge the traditional perception
of the work of art as an event or object authored beforehand and subse-
quently presented to an audience.
Modernism is identified with the emergence of the solitary genius out
of the lumpen collectivity of the medieval guild or lodge—a transition sym-
bolized by the apocryphal tale of Charles V kneeling to retrieve Titian’s
brush during a visit to the master’s studio. The modern artist would soon
make his triumphant debut on the stage of European culture, blinking in
the glare of his newfound fame like Plato’s slave freed from the dark cavern
of communal illusion. The future of (European) art from this point on was
preordained as the titanic struggle of progressive individualism against
the stultifying conformity and consensus imposed, variously, by the salon,
bourgeois consumerism, political propaganda, and, eventually, the history
of modernism itself. More recent art historical research has done much
to discredit this simplistic account (works produced in guilds and lodges
were often neither collectively authored nor anonymous).4 However, the
figure of the singular, auratic artist, reinforced by notions of artistic genius
first formalized by Kant, remains the bulwark of the long history of mod-
ernism, and the epistemological template for much contemporary criti-
cism and curatorial practice. We can also identify intellectual and creative
tendencies that challenge, or at least complicate, conventional notions of
authorship during the modern period. In fact, one of the primary trajec-
tories of modernist art involves the gradual erosion of the authoring con-
scious via techniques such as automatic drawing, frottage, montage, the
splatter and dripping of paint, and so on.

4 —— introduction
The history of modernism can be viewed from this perspective as en-
acting a relentless disavowal of agency (and the rational, calculating mind
it was seen to represent): a surrendering of authorial power to the uncon-
scious, chance, or desire. There is, as well, a more formal tradition of dis-
tributed or collective authorship that looks back, to the artisanal guilds of
an idealized Middle Ages (William Morris and the Arts and Crafts move-
ment, Jugendstil, Der Blaue Reiter), or forward, to a utopian fraternity
of artists and technicians (Constructivism, David Alfaro Siquiero’s “poly-
graphic team”). Emerging at differing historical moments and in varying
geopolitical contexts, these new collective formations also performed a
defensive function, serving as a protective enclave against an indifferent
mass culture and an openly hostile art establishment. The collaborative
and collective traditions of the interwar years (dadaism, surrealism, etc.)
were revitalized during the 1960s and ’70s by Situationist, activist, and
feminist groups, ranging from Womanhouse in the United States and
Tucuman Arde in Argentina, to Welfare State in Eng land and Hi Red Cen-
ter in Japan.5
During the 1980s and ’90s a new generation of collectives emerged
(Border Arts Workshop, Group Material, REPO History, Guerilla Girls,
Gran Fury, Platform, Wochenklausur, and Grupo Etcetera, among many
others) that experimented with multiple authorship and novel reconfigu-
rations of the artist’s relationship to audience, with a particular focus on
public space and activist intervention. Typical projects include Gran Fury’s
Silence = Death campaign in the late ’80s; Group Material’s Democracy
project at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, which featured an ex-
tended series of dialogues and exhibitions on participatory democracy;
and Platform’s Delta installation, which used a micro- hydro turbine to
mark the tidal movements of one of London’s hidden rivers. Feminist col-
laborative practices by figures such as Judy Baca, Mierle Laderman Ukeles,
Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy (whose concept of “New Genre” public art
played a key role in debates during the 1990s), and Jo Spence, Loraine Lee-
son, and the Hackney Flashers group in London, provided a particularly
important point of contact at that time between the traditions of concep-
tual art, public art, and activism.6 As curator Okwui Enwezor has argued,
those moments at which the constitution of the artistic personality is most
radically in question often coincide with periods of more general politi-
cal and social crisis. “Such crises,” Enwezor writes, “force reappraisals of

introduction —— 5
conditions of production, reevaluation of the nature of artistic work, and
reconfiguration of the position of the artist in relation to economic, so-
cial and political institutions.”7 We might consider here the link between
William Morris’s involvement in syndicalist politics in nineteenth- century
Eng land and the founding of the Arts and Crafts movement, the obvi-
ous influence of the Russian and Mexican Revolutions on early twentieth-
century avant- gardes, and the dramatic expansion of experimental ten-
dencies in the arts during the political upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s.
The current moment is defined by a complex and contradictory mixture
of cultural and geopolitical forces. The last two decades have witnessed the
rise of a powerful neoliberal economic order dedicated to eliminating all
forms of collective or public resistance (institutional, ideological, and or-
ganizational) to the primacy of capital. Within this movement, the state
and civil society have taken on a central role as zones of contestation and
targets of conquest by corporate power. Thus, during the economic crisis
that followed the demise of the subprime mortgage system in the United
States, the primary response involved a return to market- complementing
Keynesian economic policies rather than a more substantial challenge to
the imperatives of capitalism. And even these relatively modest gestures
were greeted with vehement opposition and warnings that the United
States was in danger of devolving into “socialism.” Of course, the neolib-
eral juggernaut is asynchronous. Some European countries still manage
to retain remnants of the postwar social compact, subsidizing higher edu-
cation, the arts, healthcare, and so on, while other countries (Venezuela,
e.g.) have managed to resuscitate the otherwise vilified discourse of state
socialism as a tool for the (ambivalent) promotion of economic and social
justice. But their ability to maintain the standard of living of their middle
classes is tenuous at best. Even now, the nations of the European Union
find themselves increasingly reliant on the cheap labor of foreign immi-
grants, leading to the demoralizing spectacle of anti- immigrant racism in
historically tolerant cultures like those of Holland, Denmark, and Ireland.
Predictions of a newly decentralized “Empire” notwithstanding, the
reality is that the command and control of global capital has never been
more centralized. Class divisions and the monopolization of major indus-
tries (energy, finance, pharmaceuticals, media) are reaching levels not seen
in the United States since the late nineteenth century. At the same time, we
have witnessed the recent emergence in India and China of powerful capi-

6 —— introduction
talist managerial blocs with significant nationalist ambitions of their own.
Combined with mounting U.S. dependence on China’s central banks, the
most likely future scenario is a series of low- intensity skirmishes among
competing nation- states over tariffs, energy resources, immigration, debt,
and labor markets. As the U.S. loses its economic dominance, especially in
domains where it can no longer rely on sheer military aggression to impose
its will, the risk of destabilizing nationalist conflict is likely to increase.
This hyper- rationalized economic order is accompanied, and complicated,
by the rise of right wing, theocratic fundamentalism in the United States,
the Middle East, and regions of Southeast Asia, along with the dramatic
penetration of Protestant evangelical Christianity into the faith “markets”
of South America and Asia. Thus, we have a convergence across the devel-
oped and developing world of patriarchal, absolutist, faith- based cadres,
operating in many cases at the highest level of political power, and exer-
cising considerable influence over large segments of the public.8
Despite this bleak picture, there is also a growing sense of political re-
newal around the world. From the worker- run factories of Argentina to
Tahrir Square, and from university- based protest movements in Europe
and the United States to campaigns for tribal rights in India, we encounter
new forms of social organization, resistance, and identity. This is a time of
both peril and opportunity, as the dominant political narratives used to
explain and justify social and economic inequality, the distribution of re-
sources and opportunities within society, and the relative responsibility
of the state to the public at large, are being contested and destabilized.
As these narratives lose their legitimacy, space is opened for new stories
and new visions for the future. In the past history of the United States,
to use one example, these moments of transition produced rapid trans-
formations in the political self- understanding of the country, as decades
of incremental struggle were, in a matter of a few years, realized in quite
dramatic changes. This was evident during those moments of systemic
crisis and incipient disorder (the Progressive era, the Great Depression,
the Sixties) when previously unimaginable rearticulations of the politi-
cal (the right to collective bargaining, public education, state regulation
of corporate conduct, the expansion of voting rights, etc.) were given en-
during form through legislation, legal enfranchisement, changes in public
discourse, and so on. Of course, these periods are brief, and the pressure
toward reversal and renormalization almost immediate, but they led to

introduction —— 7
substantial improvements in the quality of daily life for millions of Ameri-
cans. No doubt, similar examples could be provided for other countries
and political cultures.9
So what can we predict for the future? The continuing revival of reli-
gious theocracy marching in lockstep with corporate capital, or the tri-
umph of immaterial labor as computer programmers and artists har-
ness the “swarm intelligence” of the multitudes? Incipient fascism, as the
United States reenacts the interpenetration of state and capital of Weimar-
era Germany, or the spread of Bolivarian socialism through the southern
hemisphere? Any and all scenarios seem equally possible and equally im-
probable. It is a sign of the uncertainty of the moment—the unresolved
play of cultural, economic, and political forces currently unfolding before
us. It is this sense of possibility, and imminent threat, that animates the
remarkable profusion of contemporary art practices concerned with col-
lective action and civic engagement. The cycle of contestation and recon-
solidation in the political sphere is paralleled in the history of modernism
itself, as formerly transgressive modes of artistic practice achieve canoni-
cal status, only to be unsettled in their turn by a subsequent transgression
for which they function as the necessarily reified counterpoint. As a re-
sult, the “work” of modern art can be understood less in terms of formal
or stylistic change per se, than as an ongoing struggle to identify, and then
displace, normative conventions (whether these are discovered in the sur-
rounding sociocultural environment or within the history of art practice
itself). It is this procedure of distanciation and critique that constitutes the
essential content of the contemporary aesthetic (or at least one of its most
characteristic functions). Thus, we might view the recent proliferation of
collaborative practices as part of a cyclical paradigm shift within the field
of art, even as the nature of this shift involves an increasing permeability
between “art” and other zones of symbolic production (urbanism, envi-
ronmental activism, social work, etc.). As the history of modernism has
repeatedly demonstrated, the greatest potential for transforming and re-
energizing artistic practice is often realized precisely at those points where
its established identity is most seriously at risk.
As I will suggest subsequently, there are really two decisive shifts at
work. First, there is growing interest in collaborative or collective ap-
proaches in contemporary art. And second, as I’ve already noted, there
is a movement toward participatory, process- based experience and away

8 —— introduction
from a “textual” mode of production in which the artist fashions an ob-
ject or event that is subsequently presented to the viewer. This shift is evi-
dent across a wide range of practices, from neoconceptual, biennial- based
works by figures like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Thomas Hirschhorn, to more
recognizably activist projects by groups like Park Fiction and Ala Plastica.
The breadth of this shift is somewhat unusual. During the 1980s, the last
time that collaborative work was on the radar screen of the mainstream
art world, there were obvious methodological differences between the
projects of groups like ACT UP, Colab, the Social and Public Art Resources
Center, and Group Material, and the recognized avant- garde represented
by Neo- Expressionist painting and postmodern appropriation, which both
remained mono- authorial and fairly traditional in terms of media. Today
the boundaries between socially engaged art practice and the avant- garde
are harder to determine, with mainstream artists like Hirschhorn, Francis
Alÿs, and Liam Gillick working in public space, engaging social networks,
and so on. The interrelationship among and between these various modes
of collaborative practice will be an important subtheme of this book.
2 —— ArT PrACTiCe And The inTelleCTuAl bAroque
The One and the Many builds on research that I began in Conversation
Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004). Where
that book concentrated on what I described as “dialogical” art practices
(projects organized around conversational exchange and interaction), The
One and the Many casts a wider net, examining the broader methodologi-
cal field constituted by recent collaborative and participatory art. I will,
however, continue to elaborate on the concept of dialogical production
in the current study, especially as it relates to questions of creative labor.
Since the publication of Conversation Pieces, interest in “relational” aes-
thetics and art practices concerned with social networks has increased
dramatically within the art world. This is due in part to the growing im-
portance of biennial exhibitions as both gatekeepers and commissioning
agents for contemporary art projects that must, by their nature, be ephem-
eral or temporary. This institutional framework is paralleled by the emer-
gence of entrepreneurial curators, like Nicholas Bourriaud, Catherine
David, Okwui Enwezor, Uta Meta Bauer, and Hans- Ulbrich Obrist, who

introduction —— 9
have done much to encourage art world interest in such work. Further, the
range of collaborative art has continued to expand over the past decade,
extending into work in new media (online collectives, concepts of distrib-
uted creativity, etc.) and protest- based practices catalyzed by the anti- war
and anti- globalization movements in the United States and Europe, as well
as an active tradition of demonstration- based collective work in South
America (Grupo Etcetera and Taller Popular Serigrafia in Argentina, e.g.).
There is, in addition, a long history of collaborative work in activist theater
(much of it inspired by the writings of Augusto Boal) and community-
based art.10
A substantive account of this entire field would require several volumes.
It has been my preference to provide a more sustained analysis of a smaller
number of projects rather than a synoptic overview. As noted above, I’ll
focus here on site- specific collaborative projects that unfold through ex-
tended interaction and shared labor, and in which the process of participa-
tory interaction itself is treated as a form of creative praxis. In many cases
these projects have been developed outside of traditional art venues such
as biennials, galleries, and museums, and were produced instead in con-
junction with local communities, neighborhoods, or sites of political re-
sistance (Park Fiction’s work challenging gentrification in Hamburg, e.g.,
or Dialogue’s creation of water pump enclosures in central India). At the
same time, as I’ve already noted, collaborative work has gained increas-
ing legitimacy in the mainstream art world, as evidenced by the visibility
of figures such as Alÿs, Gillick, Hirschhorn, and Tiravanija, who employ
methodologies (video collectives, workshops, public meetings, etc.) that
would have been identified, and possibly dismissed, as “community art”
only a generation ago.11 I’m interested in the differential articulation of
participation and collaboration across a range of practices and sites, and
what it can reveal about the more general condition of contemporary art.
Thus, this book will also feature extended readings of projects by more
recognized figures and groups (Alÿs, Superflex, and Santiago Sierra in par-
ticular).12
The proliferation of collaborative and participatory work suggests cer-
tain transformations in the nature of contemporary art practice that have
broader implications for art historiography and theory. There are three
areas in which these transformations have been particularly significant.
First, contemporary collaborative art practices complicate conventional

10 —— introduction
notions of aesthetic autonomy. These practices mark a (cyclical) renego-
tiation of aesthetic autonomy via the permeability that exists between art
production and other, adjacent, forms of cultural production and activism.
This raises an important set of ontological questions. What constitutes
“art” at this historical moment, and what are its constituent or defining
conditions? A second set of questions concern the epistemological status
of this work. What forms of knowledge do collaborative, participatory, and
socially engaged practices generate? These questions have come to the fore
in recent debates over the differentiation of “aesthetic” and “ethical” crite-
ria in the evaluation of artistic production. The issue of evaluative criteria
is further complicated by the contrasting modes of transgression at work
in the aesthetic and political fields, which I outlined above. How do we de-
termine which transgressions matter in the arts? In the political sphere the
act of transgression is typically framed through an appeal to some ethical
criteria (respect for difference, the cultivation of the full range of human
capacities, equal opportunity for participation in decision making, etc.).
There is some reluctance, however, to explicitly acknowledge the kinds of
ethical claims that art practices advance. Instead, the procedures of distan-
ciation and destabilization are presented in much current criticism as in-
trinsically valuable. Finally, collaborative practices have important herme-
neutic implications. While many projects that I examine include a physical
component, the artists involved also identify various dialogical processes as
integral to the content of the work. This suggests a model of reception, and
a set of research methodologies, that are potentially quite different from
those employed to analyze object- based art practices. The extemporane-
ous and participatory nature of these projects requires the historian or
critic to employ techniques (field research, participant- observation, inter-
views, etc.) more typically associated with the social sciences.13
Taken in the aggregate, collaborative practices suggest a paradigm shift
in contemporary art production. As I’ve already suggested, they deviate in
certain key ways from textual forms of production in which the work of
art is presented to an audience or viewer fully- formed. In using this des-
ignation I’m not suggesting that collaborative or participatory practices
are somehow more rooted in the political or social “real.” The concept of
textual production refers here to the status of authorship and reception
in the work, rather than proximity to conventional notions of the politi-
cal. Moreover, as I’ll outline in subsequent case studies, these are not hard

introduction —— 11
and fast distinctions. Rather, “collaborative” and “textual” approaches can
more accurately be described as predispositions within contemporary art
practice that vary from artist to artist and project to project, depending on
the artist’s relationship to the materiality of a given work and to the viewer.
Thus, collaborative practices don’t supersede this textual approach. They
simply offer a different articulation of a capacity that I take to be central
to the constitution of modern art more generally: the ability of aesthetic
experience to transform our perceptions of difference and to open space
for forms of knowledge that challenge cognitive, social, or political con-
ventions. This is, of course, a fairly vague definition, but I hope to make
its meaning clearer through the case studies and project descriptions that
follow.
An analysis of this paradigm shift requires, in turn, a reevaluation of
existing art theory and the ways in which art theory and criticism are used
to legitimate specific forms of art production. Therefore, my investiga-
tion of collaborative practice will also entail an extended engagement with
the normative conventions of art theory itself. I’ll be using the concept
of an avant- garde “discourse,” or “tradition” to describe a set of features
common to a range of otherwise diverse contemporary practices. While
the notion of an avant- garde tradition may seem oxymoronic, it is my
contention that certain historically specific modes of artistic production
have achieved a canonical status in contemporary theory and criticism.
The constituent elements of this avant- garde tradition include a particular
model of reception (based on shock or disruption), the a priori assump-
tion of the viewer’s perceptual or cognitive naïveté, and a belief in the in-
trinsically transgressive or liberatory power of desire or a- rational somatic
experience. This mode of production remains quite vital and pervasive in
contemporary art. My description of it as a “tradition” is not meant as a
judgment of its efficacy or value, but is simply intended to denaturalize it
as a particular system of art production rather than the necessary condi-
tion of all advanced art.
This model of artistic production emerged in conjunction with the as-
similation of Continental (and primarily French) philosophy in the United
States and European art worlds during the 1990s. Of course, various forms
of theory began to play an increasingly central role in artistic production
and criticism during the 1970s and early ’80s. One could produce a reveal-
ing portrait of the art world based solely on changing intellectual fashions

12 —— introduction
over the past four decades—from Zen in the Art of Archery to The Poetics
of Space; from von Bertalanffy and systems theory to Wittgenstein and the
Tractatus; from Lacan and psychoanalytic theory to Saussure and semi-
otics; from the cultural studies of Raymond Williams to the cultural an-
thropology of Clifford Geertz; from the feminism of Screen to the queer
theory of GLQ ; and from the Western Marxism of Gramsci, Le febvre, and
Benjamin to postcolonial theory via Fanon, Bhabha, and Spivak. By the
early 1990s, this relatively inchoate mélange had been gradually winnowed
down to the familiar patrimony of Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault, and
more recently, the quartet of Agamben, Badiou, Nancy, and Rancière.14
While other sources and theoretical paradigms continued to be refer-
enced, the poststructuralist tradition gained a quasi- hegemonic promi-
nence in art critical discourse and was widely reproduced through the
expansion and professionalization of graduate education in art history,
studio art, and curatorial practice. The academic regularization of “theory”
inevitably led to pressures to produce a uniform and consistent narrative
based around a relatively limited number of canonical authors. As a re-
sult, theoretical paradigms that emerged out of the distinctive political
conditions of Fifth Republic France were, in many cases, unproblemati-
cally imported into dramatically different contexts and settings. The re-
sult has been a complex and often contradictory dialogue between the art
world and the academy. François Cusset describes this exchange in French
Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Company Transformed the
Intellectual Life of the United States:
When revolution is reinterpreted as stylized rebellion, when social
forces are turned into identity politics, when writing is replaced by
reading, when texts published by Gallimard or Éditions de Minuit wind
up translated by specialized university presses, when mottos coined
during Left Bank marches are being re- used in New York art galleries,
then indeed one can speak of a “structural misunderstanding,” not in
the sense of a misreading, an error, a betrayal of some original, but in
the sense of a highly productive transfer of words and concepts from
one specific market of symbolic goods to another.15
While Cusset is concerned to deny any connotation of “betrayal” in the
broader assimilation of French theory, the transition he describes (from
revolution to “stylized” rebellion, from Gallimard to “specialized univer-

introduction —— 13
sity presses,” from Left Bank marches to “New York art galleries”) inevi-
tably implies a process of deracination or compromise; a movement from
populist political engagement to more marginal forms of cultural produc-
tion. I will return to this contrast in greater detail subsequently. For now,
I simply want to note the growing interdependence between art practice
and the academy, and the institutionalization of “theory” itself. Within
this system the artist or the intellectual is simultaneously dependent on
the dominant social order (through its subsidy of academic or cultural
production) and external to it (through his or her capacity to achieve a
critical distance from normative conventions), both alibi and critic. This
development was anticipated almost twenty years ago by Pierre Bourdieu,
who writes of the “reproduction of the corps” necessary to sustain institu-
tional power in the academic system (an analysis that could be applied, in
modified form, to the art world itself) and of the central role played by the
“consecrated heretic” and “ritual sacrilege” within this system.16
Of course many of the insights on which this study depends (intersub-
jective models of identity, the aesthetics of collective or collaborative pro-
duction, the micro- politics of various cultural practices) are themselves
informed by the traditions of post- structuralism. It is, nonetheless, neces-
sary to subject these same theoretical models to critical scrutiny, precisely
because they have increasingly taken on the form of received wisdom
within the art world. There are also certain assumptions about the nature
of political resistance and cultural production specific to critical theory
produced in the wake of May 1968 that require reconsideration. While
this tradition is hardly monolithic, it nonetheless exhibits certain generic
characteristics, especially around the question of the individual’s relation-
ship to the collective and the relative efficacy of organized forms of politi-
cal action. As I will discuss in chapter 1, the concept of a textual politics
(centered on a process of critical reading, or decoding) is symptomatic of
an underlying tension within post- structuralist thought in which the act of
critique must be insulated from the exigencies of practice or direct action.
We find a telling example of this tension in an incident recounted by the
philosopher Alain Renaut in François Dosse’s History of Structuralism :
I remember [Jacques] Derrida, at the ENS [Ecole Normale Supérieure]
on the rue d’Ulm, after having been stopped in Czechoslovakia. Dur-
ing his seminar, he said that he had been quite distressed because after

14 —— introduction
having spent his life as a philosopher deconstructing humanism and
saying that the idea of the author and of responsibility did not exist, he
had one day been stripped naked in Czechoslovakia at a police station.
He had to admit that this was a serious infringement of human rights.
On that day, Derrida demonstrated his great lucidity by saying that he
was in a very bizarre intellectual situation. So he proposed a category of
the intellectual baroque, because, according to him, the two levels did
not intersect. But we cannot remain eternally in the baroque.17
We might view the intellectual baroque as an essentially aesthetic cate-
gory in which a given critical or creative protocol takes on a life of its own,
operating independently of the mechanisms of social and political change
necessary to realize the ideals on which it is founded. The artists discussed
in this book have each, in their own way, struggled with the dilemma of
Derrida’s “bizarre” situation. How does one reconcile the utopian or trans-
formative insight disclosed by creative practice with the actuality of lived
experience? Is it possible for these two levels to “intersect”? The nature of
this intersection, between theory and practice, withdrawal and engage-
ment, text and materiality, will be a central theme in the following study.
The book is divided into three chapters. The first, “Autonomy, Antago-
nism, and the Aesthetic,” will include summary descriptions of three col-
laborative projects that will be examined more fully in subsequent sec-
tions (Park Fiction in Germany, Ala Plastica in Argentina, and Dialogue in
India). The chapter’s main focus involves an extended meditation on the
significance of autonomy in the development of modern art and art theory.
As I’ve suggested, one of the most decisive features of recent collaborative
art practice is a rearticulation of aesthetic autonomy as art practices par-
allel, overlap with, and challenge the organizational and ideological proto-
cols of urban planning, political activism, and other fields of cultural pro-
duction. It is necessary then to determine more precisely how the concept
of autonomy originated, what function it has played through the evolution
of modern art, and what is at stake in its maintenance or transformation
today. This investigation will begin with an analysis of aesthetic autonomy
as it emerged during the early modern period in reaction to growing anxi-
eties about the vulgar taste of an incipient middle class. I’ll relate this de-
fensive notion of autonomy to recent discussions of relational aesthetics
by the curator Nicholas Bourriaud and the critic Claire Bishop, one of his

introduction —— 15
primary interlocutors. These writers can help us more clearly identify an
underlying set of assumptions regarding the autonomy of the work of art
and the sovereignty of the artistic personality, which have exerted a strong
normative influence on contemporary art production and criticism, with
particular implications for the analysis of collaborative art. Finally, I will
trace the rapprochement that occurs between this discourse and the tra-
ditions of post- structuralist theory during the 1980s and ’90s, focusing in
particular on the impact of the events of May ’68.
The second chapter, “The Genius of the Place,” builds on the theoretical
framework established in chapter 1, providing a more detailed analysis of
the specific material conditions and epistemological effects of collabora-
tive experience. What forms of knowledge are catalyzed in collaborative
interaction? How do they differ from the insights generated through the
specular experience provided by object- based practices? The chapter be-
gins with an extended reading of Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Moun-
tains (2002), a large- scale performance staged near a shantytown outside
Lima, Peru. Alÿs’s work allows for a discussion of the status of labor in con-
temporary art. I identify a series of elisions in recent critical theory that
led to a privileging of the un- worked and simultaneous over the labored
and durational, and which have blocked a more substantive engagement
with collaborative experience and interaction. I outline a new framework
for the analysis of collaborative art practice, rooted in a reinterpretation of
labor. It’s first necessary to free the concept of labor from the productivist
paradigm that has governed both historical and contemporary accounts.
This analysis opens out into a broader examination of the history of artis-
tic identity, pointing to certain fault lines in the constitution of modern
subjectivity around notions of property and possessive individualism.
The chapter then turns to an investigation of the rhetoric of “develop-
ment” in contemporary social policy and political theory. The relationship
between developed and developing nations is paralleled at the regional
level by a discourse that constructs the “rural” as the degraded antipode
of the “urban.” In each case, we encounter a set of oppositions that define
the rural, or developing, culture as the parochial counterpart of an im-
plicitly superior metropolitan culture. Insight and emulation can flow in
only one direction: from the enlightened core to the blighted periphery.
I’ll investigate a series of projects that challenge or destabilize the rural/
urban dichotomy, and which produce strategic inversions in the field of

16 —— introduction
developmental rhetoric sketched above, focusing in particular on the
work of Dialogue, an art collective working in central India. I also address
the complex and often contradictory interrelationship between collabo-
rative art practices in the developing world and the operations of non-
governmental organizations, using the work of the Danish group Superflex
as an example. The chapter concludes with a discussion of two extended
collaborative projects, in Argentina’s Rio de la Plata basin and in Myanmar.
If “development” provides a primary frame of reference for the projects
discussed in chapter 2, “regeneration” is a central theme in chapter 3
(“Eminent Domain”), which examines collaborative groups working in
urban settings. The discourse of development implies a primal, or pastoral,
culture awaiting the civilizing effects of modernization. Regeneration, on
the other hand, suggests a formerly healthy or advanced organism that has
undergone a process of atavistic decline. In the history of the modern city
this decline has often expressed a moral dimension: not simply the dete-
rioration of a city’s physical infrastructure, but the demoralization or spiri-
tual degeneration of its (typically working- class) inhabitants. The signs of
this demoralization include labor unrest, rising crime rates, the growth of
poverty, the spread of disease, and so on. From Manchester in the 1860s
to Detroit in the 1960s to modern- day Bangalore, the image of the city as
a “natural” organism entails a strategic disavowal of its function as a sys-
tem for the efficient spatial organization of industrial (or post- industrial)
production. The pathological city, diseased and chaotic, effectively recodes
the systemic effects of the capitalist economy (brought about by the divi-
sion of labor, downward pressure on wages, cyclical crises of overproduc-
tion, and corporate disregard for public welfare) as the consequence of the
moral depravity of the urban poor and working classes. As a result, con-
temporary urban regeneration schemes remain a site of significant politi-
cal conflict.
In chapter 3, I’ll discuss a range of projects that employ modes of col-
laborative and collective interaction to address the regeneration process
and the imaginary construction of urban space. These projects explore the
ways in which the image of the city is deployed to justify the authority
of dominant economic and political interests, as well as struggles over
the narratives used to advance or challenge specific public policies and
projects. I begin chapter 3 with an extended analysis of work produced by
Santiago Sierra in conjunction with beggars and the homeless. I discuss

introduction —— 17
Sierra’s attempt to mobilize images of urban poverty in relationship to the
visual culture of urban reform in the late nineteenth century (specifically,
the work of the Danish- American journalist Jacob Riis), examining the
ways in which both Riis and Sierra deploy images of the suffering body.
Following this analysis I survey the cultural history of urban renewal (or
urban regeneration as it is often known in Europe), focusing primarily on
the relationship between urban renewal, public art, and gentrification in
the United States during the 1960s and ’70s, but with some reference to
debates over regeneration in London during the 1980s as well. The second
half of the chapter will concentrate on collaborative projects that involve
the reclamation of urban space against the grain of gentrification and dis-
placement, or that seek to activate urban space as a site of public, political
discourse. The projects include Park Fiction’s work in Hamburg’s Hafen-
straße neighborhood and Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses in Houston,
Texas. Each of these projects asserts a claim of spatial sovereignty, while
at the same time seeking to preserve a reflective relationship to the modes
of collective solidarity necessary to sustain this claim, returning us to the
questions of agency, identity, and labor introduced in chapter 2.

1
AuTonomy, AnTAgoniSm, And The AeSTheTiC
from TexT To ACTion —— 1
Augustine writes in the Confessions, “What is time? If no one
asks me, I know what it is: if someone asks me, I no longer
know.”1 Here Augustine suggests that the moment that passes be-
tween posing a question and receiving a reply is marked by both
risk and possibility: the risk of doubt and uncertainty, and the
possibility of an opening out to the other. Paul Ricoeur, in From
Text to Action, uses Augustine’s quote to illustrate a familiar post-
structuralist parable, as our “confused, formless . . . [and] mute
temporal experience” inevitably succumbs to the instrumental-
izing grasp of narrative discourse.2 However, this passage carries
another, equally subversive, message. Knowledge is reliable, safe,
and certain as long as it is held in mono- logical isolation and syn-
chronic arrest. As soon as it becomes mobilized and communi-
cable, this certainty slips away and truth is negotiated in the gap
between self and other, through an unfolding, dialogical exchange.
The Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky reiterated Augustine’s
famous query in the early twentieth century: “When someone
would ask me what ‘Art’ is, then in that moment I do not know

20 —— Chapter one
what it is. But when I’m not being asked, then I know what it is.”3 Lis-
sitzky’s paraphrase neatly conflates two of the central tenets of the modern
avant- garde. First, avant- garde art constitutes a form of critical insight;
its task is to transgress existing categories of thought, action, and cre-
ativity (beginning with the definition of art itself), to constantly challenge
fixed boundaries and identities. And second, the formation of an artis-
tic subjectivity capable of such insight requires a process of withdrawal
and defensive interiorization. The uncertainty that the artist experiences
in responding to an interlocutor is presented as a barrier and a constraint,
while the certitude of his own, internal, definition of art is a necessary pre-
condition for creative practice. It is precisely in not attempting to define or
fix the meaning of art for the Other that the artist is freed to act with the
greatest creativity, even as his own self- understanding provides an infal-
lible compass. It’s symptomatic that even in the midst of a Constructivist
movement notoriously hostile to traditional notions of self- expression,
we encounter this conflation of the task of modern art (the generation of
counter- normative insight) and the experience of subjective individuation
(the isolation of the artistic personality in a sequestered zone of autono-
mous self- reflection). For Lissitzky, the artist requires mono- logical clarity,
needs to “know” what art is, precisely because he is challenging bourgeois
tradition, popular opinion, or other forms of collective or cumulative
knowledge, which are understood as intrinsically compromised. Armed
with this wisdom, incubated within the far recesses of the self, the artist
creates physical manifestations, works of art, designed to variously pro-
voke, reveal, expose, and transgress.4
At the same moment, Lissitzky was acutely conscious of the new de-
mands placed on artistic subjectivity by the Constructivist movement and
the necessary contradiction between the imperative to subvert conven-
tional knowledge, on the one hand, and the use of conventional forms of
authorship to produce this subversion, on the other. “What is needed is a
cooperative,” he wrote in a letter to Jan Tschichold in 1925. “But there is
still too much subjectivist leaven in us, since every attempt fails.” Writing
seven years later, Lissitzky reflected on the impact of the avant- garde as-
sault on conventional artistic production: “We fought against ‘art,’ we spat
on its ‘altar’—and we got what we wanted. Now, of course, we need no
new art monasteries and sacred groves, but, even flying through a storm
as we are, we would like to be able to achieve a little more concentration

Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic —— 21
and to carry our offspring to term.”5 This ambivalent relationship between
individual and collectivity identity, between the work of art as experiential
process and final product, is symptomatic. It isn’t a question of privileging
one term over the other, the collective over authorial sovereignty, or self-
expression over the constraints of popular culture, but rather of recogniz-
ing the interplay of these ostensibly divided terms as a key nexus of cre-
ative action.
The tension between artistic and normative models of subjectivity was
central to the development of modernist art over the past century, and
continues to inform contemporary art practice and criticism.6 The persis-
tence of this dynamic is understandable. It was set in place initially by the
overt hostility that greeted modernism’s earliest outriders (the Roman-
tic painters, the Realists, the Barbizon school, Der Blaüe Reiter, etc.) as
they did battle with the still resonant forces of the salon and the academy.
Withdrawal into the fortified enclave of the group or movement, and
doughty faith in the integrity of one’s personal vision against the grain of
an art establishment mired in neoclassical repetition, were necessary for
survival. The risk of significant ostracism and hostility has long ago sub-
sided, but the Weltbild remains, a residue of modernism’s initial struggle
for legitimacy, internalized now by young artists at the earliest stages of
their careers.
There is, of course, much at stake in the effort to preserve a cultural
space that allows for critical reflection. Despite its many positive contri-
butions, the impact of modernity on human subjectivity has also been pro-
foundly damaging: the violence of industrial production, the brutal means/
end rationality of the market, divisive class structures, the displacement
or outright destruction of indigenous cultures, and oppressive forms of
political totalitarianism have all diminished our understanding of what
it is to be human. The history of modern art can be viewed, in large mea-
sure, as an ongoing struggle to develop a compensatory cultural response
to the destructive and dehumanizing effects of modernity, whether this
is done through the agency of a well- crafted object, paintings of bucolic
Polynesians, or the therapeutic disruption of the viewer’s perception. The
artistic personality itself is perhaps the most symptomatic expression of
this struggle. It exists as an explicit rebuke to the complacency, compart-
mentalization, and depersonalization imposed by the contemporary social
order. Modern art has come to function as a privileged site of reflection

22 —— Chapter one
on the forces of modernism—a quasi- autonomous space of commentary
and engagement, whose critical optic has been made possible precisely by
art’s gradual displacement from its previously integral cultural role within
premodern society. Now occupying the margins of society (in terms of
broader cultural relevance if not its status as a signifier of class hierarchy),
it exists at a critical remove, allowing the artist the distance necessary to
recognize the flaws and limitations of modern life and consciousness, and
to reveal those constraints to the viewer.
The modern artist’s attack on society and societal norms has most often
been mobilized through a critique of representation (or, more recently,
“signification”). It was the way in which society chose to image itself, the
fawning idealization of wealth in Baroque painting, the sentimentaliza-
tion of bourgeois privilege in the nineteenth- century salon, and later an
entire mass cultural apparatus predicated on illusion and manipulation,
that provided the axis of attack for the modern avant- garde. In response,
artists deployed a range of counter- representational strategies (the dis-
ruption of academic conventions governing the use of color, facture, and
composition; the turn toward abstraction; and eventually a full- scale at-
tack on the very principle of mimesis in visual art), calling attention to the
mythifying powers of the conventional image and holding open space for
a more complex aesthetic experience, capable of catalyzing self- reflection
rather than Pavlovian consumption. The result was a modernist discourse
centered on the theatrical struggle between good and evil images, and de-
fined by heroic acts of exposure and revelation against the nefarious forces
of duplicity and reification. Artists would wage war on the instrumental-
izing powers of representation on behalf of the chaotic integrity of lived
experience. This remained, of course, a deeply and self- consciously ethical
tendency: a battle for the heart and mind of the modern subject. It sought
to produce viewers more sensitive to the singularity and difference of the
world around them, and less reliant on simplistic or reductive systems of
meaning in trying to comprehend that world.
These two characteristics—the inviolable autonomy of the individual
practitioner and a mode of ethico- representational engagement—remain
an article of faith in even the most ostensibly participatory or interactive
works of contemporary art. Consider curator Lars Bang Larsen’s account
of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s Cruising Pavilion (1998), a cube-

Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic —— 23
shaped space designed to facilitate public sex in Denmark’s Marselisborg
Forest:
In a way, queer space is being queered; the codes and routines that hold
it together as a cultural arrangement are worn thin. This is in keeping
with a process that implicitly questions what can be particularly “gay”
about any representation, when gay culture has gained relative access
to the mainstream. . . . To find yourself in Elmgreen and Dragset’s dis-
placed ambiences is to feel the pull of your identity, whether you are
straight or gay. . . . Space is fucked up because function is fucked up.
“What are you about?” the work seems to ask. “What does your desire
hang on to?” On the one hand, there is the suggestion of a fading “we”
that refers to the loneliness of violently separate identities: on the other
hand, the sense of a failure to condense things into a representational
logic that can speak for the coherence and relevance of group identity.7
Larsen’s talk of “codes” and “representational logic” is symptomatic. Con-
fronted with a site whose inhabitants are already engaged in the creative
deconstruction of conventional systems of meaning (subverting the public
park into a space for proscribed forms of “private” sexual interaction), the
artist’s only conceivable option is to engage in a further act of deconstruc-
tion such that (ostensibly “mainstream”) queer desire itself is problema-
tized, interrogated, and challenged. Visitors to Elmgreen and Dragset’s
“fucked up” space are in familiar avant- garde territory. Larsen’s descrip-
tion echoes Ad Reinhardt’s famous cartoon of the philistine viewer chid-
ing the abstract painting (“What does this represent?”) only to have the
painting spring to life, jab its anthropomorphic finger in the viewer’s face,
and demand in turn: “What do you represent?” The artist is responsible
for arranging and administering an experience of therapeutic dislocation
directed specifically at the representational matrix of identity, but it’s a
dislocation that remains strangely abstract. It’s unclear whether gay (or
straight) Danes need lessons in queer representation or identity politics
or help in finding spots for public sexual encounters, but this question is
really beside the point. The function of this project, in Larsen’s view, is less
to engage the actual inhabitants of Marselisborg Forest than to constitute
an ideal formal manifestation within which engagement could, hypotheti-
cally, take place. It is an architectural symbol of this dislocation, a con-

24 —— Chapter one
ceptual provocation that gains its aesthetic resonance from the juxtaposi-
tion of sterile minimalist form and the physical actuality of queer sex (the
structure is replete with glory holes) (see Plate 1).
The works that I’ll be discussing here challenge this paradigm in a num-
ber of ways. Most importantly, the various social interactions that unfold
around a given project, rather than being ancillary to, or collapsed into,
the a priori formal structure or design of a physical object (Elmgreen and
Dragset’s Pavilion, for example), are openly and often independently the-
matized as a locus for aesthetic practice. I’ll be tracing a shift from an aes-
thetic discourse centered primarily on questions of visual signification to
one concerned with the generative experience of collective interaction.
2 —— PArK fiCTion, AlA PlASTiCA, And diAlogue
we believe that the interesting and relevant art projects at the moment are developing
new ways of cooperation and always build platforms of communication and exchange
with others as well. we would go so far as to say, that this is a change of paradigm and
that these collaborative qualities signify a new kind of avant- garde.
ChriSToPh SChäfer, PArK fiCTion
This experimental engagement with new forms of collectivity and agency
is evident in Park Fiction’s work in Hamburg, Germany, where they re-
invented the process of participatory urban planning as an imaginative
game.8 The speculative quality of this work is literally embodied in their
name (the “fiction” of a park), and in the audacity necessary to imagine a
public park in place of the high- rise apartment and office buildings that
were being proposed by the city’s development community. Rather than
simply protest and critique the process of gentrification that was begin-
ning to unfold around Hamburg’s waterfront (an area with a diverse,
working- class population), Park Fiction organized a “parallel planning
process” that began with the creation of alternative platforms for exchange
among the area’s existing residents (“musicians, priests, a headmistress, a
cook, café- owners, bar- men, a psychologist, squatters, artists and inter-
ventionist residents”9). The element of fantasy is apparent in the propos-
als already completed for the park, including the Teagarden Island, which
features artificial palm trees and is surrounded by an elegant forty- meter-
long bench from Barcelona, an Open Air Solarium, and a Flying Carpet

Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic —— 25
(a wave- shaped lawn area surrounded by a mosaic inspired by the Alham-
bra). Park Fiction combines this whimsical spirit with a well- developed
tactical sensibility and a sophisticated grasp of the realpolitik involved
in challenging powerful economic interests. They were able to build on a
tradition of organized political resistance in the area around Hamburg’s
harbor that extends back to the occupation of the Hafenstraße (Harbor
Street) neighborhood during the 1980s, when local residents took control
of several city blocks and effectively halted the city’s efforts at eviction. The
residents of the Hafenstraße employed street theater, pirate radio, mural
painting, and other cultural practices during the occupation to chal-
lenge the police, gain media attention, and encourage a sense of solidarity
and cohesion within the embattled neighborhood. Park Fiction member
Christoph Schäfer describes the leverage this history provided in the pro-
cess of bringing the park into existence:
The location for the park is directly at the river. It’s a very expensive,
highly symbolic place, where power likes to represent itself. . . . To claim
this space as a public park designed by the residents really meant to
challenge power—it’s not an alternative corner or a social sandbox the
parents can afford to give away. The resistance could only be overcome
by a very broad and clever network in the community, by a new set of
tactics, trickery, seduction and stubbornness and an unspoken threat
lingering in the background of all this: that a militant situation might
again develop that would be costly, and bad for the city’s image, and
deter investment in the whole neighborhood.10
It was necessary for Park Fiction to develop a close rapport with activist
groups and organizations in the neighborhood. As Schäfer describes it,
they only collaborated with institutions that had local “credibility.” These
included a community center, which was known for providing free and
anonymous legal services, as well as a school that had supported the Ha-
fenstraße squatters during the 1980s.
While operating in a very different cultural context, the work of the
Argentinian collective Ala Plastica parallels that of Park Fiction in many
ways. Their AA Project, located in the Rio de la Plata basin near Buenos
Aires, mobilized new modes of collective action and creativity in order to
challenge the political and economic interests behind large- scale devel-
opment in the region. The construction of a massive transportation sys-

26 —— Chapter one
tem (the Zárate- Brazo Largo rail complex) over the last two decades has
exacerbated flooding and damaged the fishing and tourist economies in
the delta, leading to high levels of unemployment and deteriorating social
services. Ala Plastica initiated the AA Project with a process of spatial and
cognitive mapping, developed in collaboration with the area’s residents,
along with a bioregional study of the Rio de la Plata and Parana delta. This
mapping procedure was combined with various exercises designed to re-
cover and collect local knowledge about the region. Ala Plastica sought
to actualize the insights of the area’s residents into the social and envi-
ronmental costs of the rail complex and the proposed Punta Lara Colo-
nia bridge. In order to challenge the institutional authority and “techno-
political” mindset of the corporate and governmental agencies responsible
for these projects, Ala Plastica worked with the area’s residents to articu-
late their own visions for the region through the creation of communica-
tions platforms and networks for mutual cooperation. They helped design
emergency housing modules for use during periods of flooding and pro-
vided communications training and infrastructure, with a particular focus
on women. Building on a tradition of willow cultivation that dates back
to the mid- nineteenth century, the AA Project identified new uses for wil-
lows and encouraged the emergence of local economies based on willow
production. Throughout the AA Project, Ala Plastica worked closely with
local activist groups and NGOs, including the Producers Cooperative of
the Coast of Berisso and the Health and Plants Network of Argentina.
The AA Project was inspired by an earlier work, Emergent Species (1995),
which involved research into the capacity of reeds and other aquatic plants
to absorb pollution. In the process, Ala Plastica’s members came to iden-
tify a significant correspondence between the structure of reed- bed propa-
gation and a creative practice that links diverse particularities via a non-
hierarchical network:
We planned a project represented by the metaphor of rhizomatic ex-
pansion and emergence, alluding to the behavior of these plants and to
the emergent character of ideas and creative practices. The connection
of remnants within one another generated a practically indescribable
warp of intercommunication deriving into innumerable actions that
developed and increased through reciprocity: dealing with social and
environmental problems; exploring both non- institutional and inter-

Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic —— 27
cultural models while working with the community and on the social
sphere; interacting, exchanging experiences and knowledge with pro-
ducers of culture and crops, of art and craftwork, of ideas and objects.11
We find a similar commitment to collaborative modes of creativity in
the hand pump sites and children’s temples produced by the Dialogue
collective in conjunction with Adivasi tribal and peasant communities in
central India over the past eight years (the Adivasi are India’s indigenous
population and have long suffered from economic and social discrimi-
nation). Access to clean water is a complex, and politically contentious,
issue in rural India. As corporations penetrate farther into the country-
side in pursuit of cheap labor, they put increasing pressure on natural re-
sources to support their production facilities: in many cases either con-
taminating or privatizing local water supplies.12 As a result, the Adivasi
communities in the Bastar region where Dialogue has been working are
engaged in struggles over land and water access, while also grappling with
the impact of economic and cultural modernization. As Dialogue member
Navjot Altaf writes, “What interested me most was the hybridism of the
cultures [in Bastar]; contradictions and identity crises which are multiple
and interrelated.”13 This macropolitical dimension is paralleled by a set of
cultural traditions around water collection that place the greatest burden
on young women and girls. Altaf and Dialogue began working in the vil-
lages around Kondagaon in Bastar with the simple goal of creating more
efficient pump sites, using ergonomic designs that would ease the physi-
cal burden of collecting and transporting water. They developed the sites
through a series of collaborative workshops that brought together Adivasi
craftspeople, village residents, teachers, college students, hawkers, and
other volunteers in the creation of quasi- sculptural constructions that sur-
round the pumps. The constructions are practical (they include niches that
allow water carriers to rest their vessels as they lift them to their shoul-
ders), while also incorporating symbols and forms associated with local
cultural and spiritual traditions. In the process of developing the pump
sites, Dialogue’s members came to realize their importance as gathering
points for women and children—one of the few spaces in which they could
meet and interact socially. This led in turn to the development of Chil-
dren’s Temples (Pilla Gudi) that could function as centers for activity and
exchange among young people in the village.

28 —— Chapter one
Altaf views the collaborative interactions among artists and village resi-
dents, and between Adivasi and non- Adivasi, that occur in these projects
as decisive. As she writes, “For us, organizing the workshops required to
design and construct the pumps and Pilla Gudi is as important as cre-
ating the sites themselves. It encourages a communication network among
artists from different cultures and disciplines, both within the area and
outside, and with and among the young.” These cross- cultural exchanges,
Altaf notes, “lead the young to think about different ways of knowing and
modes of working, enabling them to draw nourishment and sustenance
from difference and similarities.” The process of designing and construct-
ing the pump sites and temples, the interactions of artisans, young people,
and visitors, has encouraged a critical renegotiation of Adivasi identity.
This renegotiation is particularly crucial in contemporary India, due to the
rise of a right- wing fundamentalist movement over the past decade that
has actively repressed non- Hindu cultures (like that of the Adivasi). At the
same time, the mainstream educational system in India attempts to “neu-
tralize” cultural difference, according to Altaf, through a policy of “Unity
in Diversity” that minimizes the specific histories of the Adivasi and the
Dalit (or “untouchables”).14
I’ll examine the projects of Park Fiction, Ala Plastica, Dialogue, and
other groups more closely in the following two chapters of this book. In
each case, the artists take on a strategic relationship to political collec-
tivities currently in formation. Their projects begin with an opening out
to their collaborators, which I have written about elsewhere in terms of a
dialogical aesthetic.15 The effect of collaborative art practice is to frame
this exchange (spatially, institutionally, procedurally), setting it sufficiently
apart from quotidian social interaction to encourage a degree of self-
reflection, and calling attention to the exchange itself as creative praxis.
A particular experience of openness is encouraged as participants are im-
plicated in an exchange that is not wholly subsumable to conventional,
pragmatic demands, but is consciously marked as a form of artistic prac-
tice. In fact, it is in part the lack of categorical fixity around art that makes
this openness possible. The distancing from the protocols and assump-
tions of normative social exchange created by aesthetic framing reduces
our dependence on default behaviors, expectations, and modes of being,
encouraging a more performative and experimental attitude toward the
work of identity. Despite their differences the projects of Park Fiction, Ala

Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic —— 29
Plastica, and Dialogue reflect a calling out to these experiences: a desire to
work through them in a tentative, experimental, but nonetheless rigorous,
manner.
relATionAl AnTAgoniSm —— 3
The artwork is . . . no longer presented to be consumed within a “monumental” time
frame and open for a universal public; rather it elapses within a factual time, for an
audience summoned by the artist.
niCholAS bourriAud, relAtionAl Aesthetics
How do we account for the recent proliferation of art practices concerned
with the creation or facilitation of new social networks and new modali-
ties of social interaction? Nicholas Bourriaud, co- director of the Palais de
Tokyo in Paris, has argued that we are witnessing the transition to a “rela-
tional” aesthetic in contemporary art, defined by “meetings, encounters,
events [and] various types of collaboration between people.” And critic
Claire Bishop, writing in Artforum, goes so far as to claim that “politically-
engaged” collaborative art practice constitutes today’s “avant- garde.”16
Bourriaud’s analysis, or at least his nomenclature, has gained the most
traction in the art world. By now the general contours of his argument
(first floated in his eponymous 1998 book) are well established. We live in
a “society of the spectacle,” in which even social relations are reified (“The
social bond has turned into a standardized artifact”).17 In response, a cadre
of artists, beginning in the 1990s, developed a new approach to art in-
volving the staging of “micro utopias,” or “micro communities” of human
interaction. These “convivial, user- friendly artistic projects,” including
“meetings, encounters, events, [and] various types of collaboration be-
tween people,” provided a “rich loam for social interaction.”18 The “tan-
gible models of sociability” enacted in these relational projects promise to
overcome the reification of social relationships. In the process, these art-
ists also sought to reorient artistic practice away from technical expertise
or object- production and toward processes of intersubjective exchange.
On the one hand, Bourriaud offers a fairly straightforward rearticu-
lation of conventional avant- garde discourse, in which the instrumen-
talizing attitude formerly understood as a potential result of exposure to
mass culture has now colonized the most intimate modes and pathways

30 —— Chapter one
of human interaction. No longer able to destabilize these effects through a
kind of formal/representational “reverse engineering” (i.e., by creating ob-
jects and images that challenge, deform, or complicate the reductive visual
codes of mass culture), artists must now engage them on the terrain of so-
cial interaction itself. It is not entirely clear why the “social bond” should
be any more reified now than it was twenty, fifty, or even a hundred years
ago. Rather, this claim seems to reproduce the epochal consciousness that
is typical of the modernist project, in which art’s ameliorative function is
in some way demanded or called into existence by the exigencies of a sin-
gular historical moment defined by an experience of loss or lack. Thus,
images used to be less manipulative or superficial, social interactions used
to be more holistic, or society as a whole used to be less driven by greed
and self- interest, and it is the artist’s job to evoke or reclaim this lost, uto-
pic experience. Bourriaud also describes relational practice as an epiphe-
nomenal expression of the shift from industrial forms of labor to a service
economy. If the artist under industrial production had the “job” of creating
complex or well- crafted objects as an antidote to mass- produced dreck,
then the “postindustrial” artist must now create alternative models of soci-
ality to challenge the instrumentalizing of human social interaction char-
acteristic of a postindustrial economic system. Although this explanation
possesses a certain symmetrical elegance, it seems problematic to trans-
pose economic transformations (which have, after all, been developing
for fifty years or more) so neatly onto shifts in contemporary art practice.
Further, this postulate relies on the highly questionable assertion (much
beloved by advocates of the “immaterial labor” thesis) that the most symp-
tomatic transformations in the contemporary economy are all centered in
the realm of service- based labor or intellectual production.19 While Bour-
riaud’s writing is compelling, it is also highly schematic. Further, he pro-
vides few substantive readings of specific projects. As a result, it is difficult
to determine what, precisely, constitutes the aesthetic content of a given
relational work. At the same time, he has captured something that is un-
deniably central to a recent generation of artists: a concern with social and
collective interaction. As he writes, “Today, after two centuries of struggle
for singularity and against group impulses . . . we must [reintroduce] the
idea of plurality [and invent] new ways of being together, forms of inter-
action that go beyond the inevitability of the families, ghettos of techno-
logical user- friendliness, and collective institutions.”20

Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic —— 31
Drawing on the work of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Bourriaud
contends that relational art practices challenge the “territorialization” of
conventional identity with a “plural, polyphonic” understanding of the
subject. “Subjectivity can only be defined,” Bourriaud writes, “by the pres-
ence of a second subjectivity. It does not form a ‘territory’ except on the
basis of the other territories it comes across; . . . it is modeled . . . on
the principle of otherness.”21 This profession of faith in the verities of the
“plural” and decentered subject is by now routine, if not de rigueur, in
art criticism. It exists in some tension, however, with Bourriaud’s rather
strenuous efforts to establish clear boundaries between the “new ways of
being together” that he has privileged in his own curatorial work (by art-
ists such as Pierre Huyghe, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Christine
Hill) and an abject Other, embodied in traditions of performance art and
socially engaged collaborative practice that extend back to the 1960s. From
the work of Conrad Atkinson, Grupo de Artistas Argentinos de Vanguar-
dia, David Harding, and Helen and Newton Harrison, through Suzanne
Lacy, Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge,
Group Material, and Welfare State, and up to groups such as Ala Plastica,
Huit Facettes Interaction, Grupo Etcetera, Platform, Littoral, Park Fiction,
Ultra Red, and many others, we find a diverse range of artists and col-
lectives working in collaboration with environmentalists, AIDs activists,
trade unions, anti- globalization protestors, and many others. This tradi-
tion is not only absent from Bourriaud’s account, it is openly disparaged as
naive and even reactionary. “Any stance that is ‘directly’ critical of society,”
as Bourriaud writes, “is futile.” Bourriaud offers an ominous description
of socially engaged art practice marching in lock- step conformity with
a vaguely Stalinist political program (“It is clear that the age of the New
Man, future- oriented manifestos, and calls for a better world all ready to
be walked into and lived in is well and truly over”).22
Bourriaud’s caricature, which collapses all activist art into the condi-
tion of 1930s socialist realism, fails to convey the complexity and diver-
sity of socially engaged art practice over the last several decades. Even
Bourriaud’s critics share this almost visceral distaste for socially engaged
art. Writing in Artforum, Bishop imposes a similarly rigid boundary be-
tween “aesthetic” projects (“provocative,” “uncomfortable,” and “multilay-
ered”) and activist works (“predictable,” “benevolent,” and “ineffectual”).
In a critique of Bourriaud published in October, Bishop feels compelled

32 —— Chapter one
to reassure her readers: “I’m not suggesting that relational art works need
to develop a greater social conscious—by making pin- board works about
international terrorism, for example, or giving free curries to refugees.”23
For Bishop, art can become legitimately “political” only indirectly, by ex-
posing the limits and contradictions of political discourse itself (the ex-
clusions implicit in democratic consensus, e.g.) from the quasi- detached
perspective of the artist. This is also the basis for Thomas Hirschhorn’s
anxious assertion that he is not a “political artist,” but rather an artist who
“makes art politically.”24 In this view, artists who choose to work in alliance
with specific collectives, social movements, or political struggles, will, in-
evitably, be consigned to decorating floats for the annual May Day parade.
Without the detachment and autonomy of conventional art to insulate
them, they are doomed to “represent,” in the most naive and facile manner
possible, a given political issue or constituency.
This detachment is necessary because art is constantly in danger of
being subsumed to the condition of consumer culture, propaganda, or
“entertainment” (cultural forms predicated on immersion rather than a
recondite critical distance). Instead of seducing the viewer, the artist’s task
is to hold him at arm’s length, inculcating a skeptical distance (defined in
terms of opacity, estrangement, confusion, or ironic distanciation) that
parallels the insight provided by critical theory into the contingency of
social and political meaning. The maintenance of this distance (literally
embodied in projects such as Santiago Sierra’s Wall Enclosing a Space, for
the Spanish Pavilion of the 2003 Venice Biennale, in which only those
carrying Spanish passports were allowed to enter the gallery) requires that
the artist retain complete control over the form and structure of the work.
Relational practice is thus characterized by a tension between two move-
ments. One runs along a continuum from the specular to the haptic (the
desire to literalize social interaction in nonvirtual space), and the other
runs along a continuum from the work as a preconceived entity to the
work as improvisational and situationally responsive. In order to preserve
the legitimacy of relational practice as a hereditary expression of avant-
garde art, it is necessary for critics like Bourriaud and Bishop to privilege
the first movement over the second. It is for this reason, I would suggest,
that a number of Bourriaud’s relational projects retain an essentially tex-
tual status, in which social exchange is choreographed as an a priori event
for the consumption of an audience “summoned” by the artist.25 In addi-

Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic —— 33
tion to naturalizing deconstructive interpretation as the only appropriate
metric for aesthetic experience, this approach places the artist in a posi-
tion of adjudicatory oversight, unveiling or revealing the contingency of
systems of meaning that the viewer would otherwise submit to without
thinking. The viewer, in short, can’t be trusted.26 Hence the deep suspicion
which both Bourriaud and Bishop hold for art practices which surrender
some autonomy to collaborators and which involve the artist directly in
the (implicitly compromised) machinations of political resistance.
On one level, this persistent discomfort with activist art is typical of
post–Cold War intellectuals embarrassed by work that evokes leftist
ideals. Precisely what makes relational artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija,
Thomas Hirschhorn, Pierre Huyghe, and Jens Hanning “new,” in this view,
is their attempt to redefine collectivity and intersubjective exchange out-
side of existing, and implicitly retrograde, political referents (the extent
to which their projects actually accomplish a significant remodeling of
collectivity is open to question). The modest gestures employed by Bour-
riaud’s artists (offering to do someone’s washing up, paying a fortune teller,
hiring models, etc.) run no risk of being appropriated to dangerous grand
recits that will, inevitably, be revealed as reactionary and compromised.27
It would seem to be relatively uncontroversial to locate the relational
projects embraced by Bourriaud (or Bishop) on a continuum with socially
engaged projects that employ processes of collaborative interaction. How-
ever, for both of these writers activist work triggers a kind of sacrificial
response—as if to even acknowledge this work as “art” somehow threat-
ens the legitimacy of the practices that they do support.28 In her Artforum
essay Bishop dismisses activist art en masse as “politically correct,” “Pla-
tonic,” and even “Christian.” A reductive version of engaged or activist art
(“free curries for refugees”) thus functions as a necessary foil, represent-
ing the abject, unsophisticated Other to the complex “aesthetic” works of
which she approves.29
We can gain a more balanced perspective on recent collaborative art
practices (and their critical interlocutors) if we locate them in a broader
historical context relative to the traditions of the modern avant- garde. As I
suggested above, the core function of art changes dramatically in the mod-
ern period. By the early nineteenth century art began to abandon its tra-
ditional function of transmitting and idealizing dominant forms of social
or political power (as in medieval concepts of theophany, sacral or courtly

34 —— Chapter one
art, or the flattering depictions of aristocratic leisure in the canvases of
Boucher or Watteau), and instead took on the role of disrupting or desta-
bilizing them. We can already detect this shift in Goya’s famous portrait
of Charles IV with his Family (1798) (“the corner baker and his wife after
they have won the lottery,” as Theophile Gautier described it). This thinly
veiled criticism of monarchical power would have been almost unimagin-
able a generation before. It tells us much about the very different nature of
bourgeois power, which was, at its earliest stage, defined by a capacity for
self- reflection, often displaced into the institution of art. During the nine-
teenth century, provocation and critique would rapidly move from being
an occasional or incidental aspect of art to its primary orientation, with the
emergence of a series of avant- garde movements that sought, each in its
own way, to challenge or destabilize normative bourgeois values. It is im-
portant to recall the remarkable consistency of avant- garde rhetoric across
a broad range of otherwise disparate movements and tendencies. Of par-
ticular importance here was the notion of the artist as a provocateur, chal-
lenging modernity from a position of cultural exteriority that was typically
leveraged via identification with an “other” identified either spatially (via a
geographic displacement, to rural France, North Africa, the Middle East,
Japan, etc.) or temporally (through the evocation of a past moment of cul-
tural harmony or authenticity, as in the preRaphaelite’s fetishization of the
Italian primitives).
This agonistic posture changes art’s self- understanding, its ontology,
if you will, as well as the kinds of knowledge that it produces. First, mod-
ern art begins to define itself in opposition to, or as the negation of, cer-
tain characteristics identified with the dominant culture. Initially, genu-
ine or authentic art was defined as the antithesis of the academic painting
of the salon (which embodied dominant values through its allegiance to
fixed representational protocols derived from classical models). Where
academic art was labored and formulaic, authentic art would be sponta-
neous and improvisational. The decline of the academy and the growing
influence of consumer culture during the early- to mid- twentieth century
opened up a new axis of differentiation, as avant- garde art was defined
against the grain of a rising wave of mass culture and propaganda that
threatened to overwhelm it. By the post–Second World War period con-
temporary art was sufficiently institutionalized and capitalized that its
survival was no longer at stake. The previously externalized threat repre-

Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic —— 35
sented by kitsch was internalized in anxieties about the proliferation of
rogue tendencies within contemporary art itself.30 In this process, particu-
lar modes of art practice (installation, performance, activist work) which
failed to foreground their own media specificity with sufficient rigor be-
came supplemental replacements for the faded mass cultural Other. The
result is an aesthetic discourse based on notions of purity and contamina-
tion in which it is necessary to maintain a rigid segregation between cor-
rupt and authentic practices. This approach lends itself to a hygienic atti-
tude on the part of the critic, who must defend art from contamination:
a fear that art will lose its specific identity if it becomes too permeable to
other, impure, areas of culture.
As I’ve described it, modern art’s self- definition unfolds via a modu-
lating series of foils. The specific identity of the individual terms is less im-
portant than the kind of attitude art takes up relative to them as a whole.
In each case there is an instrumentalizing relationship to the material,
against which art is defined. This material, be it salon painting, kitsch,
propaganda, or performance art, is reduced to a (reified) vehicle for the
achievement of authentic art’s own self- reflection (all mass culture is vul-
gar kitsch; all political discourse is propaganda; all performance art is
merely theatrical). “Progress” in art is defined by this ongoing movement,
as art’s meaning becomes fixed, then finds itself called into question, only
to eventually reassert its identity as art. As I’ve already suggested, the very
capacity of art to attend reflexively to its own enabling conditions becomes
its content, and it can only exercise this capacity by periodically identify-
ing, and purging itself of, the “non- art” material it has accumulated in the
process of reenergizing itself through contact with other cultural forms.
The second feature of this agonistic model involves the way in which
the work of art produces meaning for an audience. Here, negation is pro-
duced in the artwork’s relationship to the viewer via what I’ve described as
an “orthopedic” aesthetic (in which the viewer’s implicitly flawed modes of
cognition or perception will be adjusted or improved via exposure to the
work of art). The appropriate response to the work of art is no longer ven-
eration or obeisance, but discomfort, rupture, or an uncanny derangement
of the senses. These provocations can also perform an affirmative func-
tion, reinforcing a particular sense of identity among art world viewers
(as liberal- minded risktakers). Or they are consumed rhetorically, as the
viewer identifies, in a self- congratulatory manner, with the subject posi-

36 —— Chapter one
tion of the artist rather than the hapless implied viewer. In fact, one comes
to the space of art prepared for precisely this sort of provocation; disrup-
tion is, in a way, expected and even savored. This coincides with a textual
model of art production, based in part on the rapprochement between
neoconceptual art strategies and post- structuralist theory in the 1990s.
Here the work of art functions as a hermeneutic device intended to desta-
bilize fixed oppositions via some form of embodied conceptual provoca-
tion. Importantly, the work, whether it’s a painting, installation, or event,
is conceived by the artist beforehand and subsequently set in place before
the viewer.
This approach is based on a principle of repetition; the work of art
essentially replicates a vision or an idea generated by the artist and then
presented to the viewer. While there is certainly an interactive dimension
to even the most opaque or static art work, the “interaction” involved in
textual production is understood primarily in terms of either contempla-
tive decoding or somatic disruption. Artistic production in this mode is
both teleological (resolved in the creation of a final, formally- delimited
object, text, or event) and mimetic (the work of art functions as the physi-
cal manifestation of an idea first developed in the artist’s imagination). The
textual paradigm is defined by a spatial concept of agency, in which com-
positional and receptive roles are fixed. It thus forecloses the possibility
that creative insight might be generated through less proprietary forms of
compositional agency. That is, rather than viewing agency as the unique
property of specific individuals, seeing it instead as fluid and transposi-
tional over the course of a given creative action.
4 —— The riSK of diverSiTy
nature in her physical creation points the way we have to take in the moral. not until
the strife of elemental forces in the lower organisms has been assuaged does she turn to
the nobler creation of physical man. in the same way, the strife of elements in moral man,
the conflict of blind impulses, has first to be appeased, and crude antagonisms first
have ceased within him, before we can take the risk of promoting diversity.
friedriCh SChiller, on the Aesthetic educAtion of MAn
We are witnessing today a certain disenchantment with the existing
parameters of avant- garde art and an attempt to rearticulate the speci-

Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic —— 37
ficity of the aesthetic in relationship to both the viewer and to other cul-
tural and political practices. Collectives such as Dialogue, Park Fiction,
Ala Plastica, Huit Facettes Interaction in Senegal, and NICA (Networking
and Initiatives for Culture and the Arts) in Myanmar, among many others,
are engaged in a more or less conscious effort to renegotiate the condi-
tion of art’s autonomy, and to shape a new paradigm. In place of an either/
or mentality, which defines art through antithetical negation (art is not-
activism, not- ethnography, not- popular culture), we encounter a relation
of reciprocal elucidation relative to other fields of political and cultural
action. And in place of a textual paradigm we discover practices centered
on immersive interaction and a referential orientation to specific sites of
social production. I would argue that some of the most challenging new
collaborative art projects are located on a continuum with forms of cul-
tural activism, rather than being defined in hard- and- fast opposition to
them. Far from viewing this sort of categorical slippage as something to
be feared, I believe it is both productive and inevitable given the period of
transition through which we are living. It is, in fact, a persistent character-
istic of modern art created during moments of historical crisis and change
(Dadaism and Constructivism in the wake of the First World War and the
Russian Revolution, the profusion of new movements and practices that
emerged out of the political turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s, etc.). Is Tatlin’s
Monument to the Third International an example of architecture, sculp-
ture, or public art avant la lettre? What about John Heartfield’s montages
for AIZ? Are they art, graphic design, or experimental photojournalism?
The principle of aesthetic autonomy constitutes a central point of ten-
sion in this work. Within the modern tradition, it has, of course, never
been a question of an absolute distance or separation “between” the aes-
thetic and the social or political. The political always operates through
an aesthetic modality, and even the most strident claim of art pour la art
poetic freedom is political at its core. Rather, it is the tension between
these sites, their points of overlap, corroboration, and resistance, which
have been most productive. Art may perceive itself as existing at some re-
move or distance from the social, but it also, always, imagines that it re-
tains a causal or reflective relationship with the social world (whether as
a reservoir for forms of affect and identity that are under assault in the
modern life- world, as a therapeutic reprieve, or a symbolic embodiment
of what- could- be). What remains of art, in the wake of a century and a half

38 —— Chapter one
of avant- garde experimentation, if not the very concept of an autonomy
or distance that enables a (critical) perspective on, and relation to, the
existing social order? But for this distance, this autonomy, to retain its
value, it must be recalibrated, it must respond to a specific social context
and the particular ways in which art is mobilized during a given historical
moment. Fluctuations within the field of aesthetic legitimacy are a neces-
sary part of this process. The elasticity of the category “art” in response to
changing historical conditions, the opening out and the closing down, the
varying centripetal and centrifugal movements as art periodically encom-
passes and then expels other political and cultural modes is part of its very
function within modernity.
On the one hand this autonomy is necessary in order to achieve an
adjudicatory distance from dominant cultural, social, and political values
(already here we are collapsing any distinction between “dominant” values
that are imposed on a given social system and those values that evolve
consensually). At the same time, autonomy implies a relationship of seg-
regation or exclusion. It is this second connotation that fuels hygienic
criticism: the defensive fear of affiliations or interconnections with con-
taminated or impure realms (and the corollary assumption that all forms
of cultural production within modernity, aside from the arts, are complicit
with, or symptomatic of, a repressive social order). The persistence of this
fear among critics, curators, and artists is understandable. An antagonistic
relationship to the viewer and a defensive relationship to other domains of
cultural practice are written into the very DNA of modernist art.
We can gain a deeper understanding of the complex function of aes-
thetic autonomy in contemporary art if we examine its initial historical
articulation. As Martha Woodmansee suggests in her revealing study of
German aesthetic philosophy, the development of a concept of aesthetic
autonomy is closely identified with the emergence of the modern literary
market. Woodmansee analyzes the impact of rising literacy rates in Ger-
many during the mid- 1700s. The new “reading craze” (Lesewut ) that swept
Germany at that time led to a dramatic increase in the number of authors,
publishers, bookstores, and libraries. As a result the comfortable intimacy
that the first generation of Aufklärer writers enjoyed with their aristocratic
patrons was rudely disturbed. Rather than flocking to the edifying works
of Lessing, Hölderlin, and von Kleist, the new reading public displayed a
seemingly inexhaustible appetite for ghost stories and romances. Friedrich

Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic —— 39
Schiller lamented the flood of “mindless, tasteless, and pernicious novels,
dramatized stories, so- called journals for the ladies and the like” that were
destroying the taste of the German reading public.31 As a result of the frag-
menting impact of modernity, the public is now bifurcated between those
few who possess sufficient humanity to comprehend and take pleasure in
complex art, and the untutored masses, which remain insensitive to it.32
Further, any attempt to reach these mass readers in a familiar or colloquial
language is doomed to failure, as their own perceptions, their own cultural
responses to modernity, can only ever be failed and compromised.33
Confronted with a new mode of literary production devoted to enter-
tainment rather than improvement, and alarmed by the declining prestige
of serious literature, authors such as Schiller and Karl Philipp Moritz pro-
mulgated a radical new definition of art; a “remapping” as Woodmansee
describes it, in which art, unique among all forms of human culture, is
understood to have a wholly immanent value.34 “The first, essential condi-
tion for the perfection of a poem,” Schiller observes, “is that it possess an
absolute intrinsic value that is entirely independent of the powers of com-
prehension of its readers.”35 If their poems, plays, and novels failed to cap-
ture the interest of newly literate Germans, then the problem rested with
the readers themselves, who were too dependent on the simple pleasures
of sensation and spectacle to meet the challenge posed by advanced lit-
erature. “The rabble seek only diversion,” Moritz complains, and beautiful
works of art are “passed by with indifference.”36 In fact, the public’s lack of
interest in, or outright resistance to, one’s work became a badge of honor,
a guarantee of its aesthetic integrity (“War,” as Schiller claims, “is the only
possible relationship to the public”).37
But revulsion at the cultural enfranchisement brought about by literacy
and the literary market is only one of the forces driving the initial articu-
lation of an autonomous aesthetic. Woodmansee reveals a surprising, and
heretofore unrecognized, affiliation with the discourse of German Piet-
ism. The connection is explicit in the writing of Moritz, whose 1785 essay,
“An Attempt to Unite All the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept
of That Which is Complete in Itself,” published five years before Kant’s
third Critique, describes the ideal work of art as a “self- sufficient totality”
produced for its own sake.38 Moreover, for the work to remain pure and
authentic, it must be produced from an entirely disinterested perspective;
the artist must disavow any benefit or fame that might accrue as a result

40 —— Chapter one
of its creation. As Moritz writes, “If the thought of approval is your main
consideration, and if your work is of value to you only insofar as it brings
you fame, then you are working in a self- interested manner: the focal point
of the work will fall outside the work: you are not creating it for its own
sake. . . . You are only seeking to ‘dazzle the rabble.’”39
As Woodmansee notes, this insistence on art’s necessary detachment
from the praxis of life departs dramatically from the long history of West-
ern aesthetics, in which art was understood to have a functional role
within society (to educate, or indoctrinate, the viewer, to reproduce or dis-
close the natural world, and so on). While there is no significant precedent
for this view in the European philosophical tradition, it replicates almost
exactly the discourse of German Pietist theology, which exerted a powerful
influence on Moritz’s generation. As Moritz himself described it, Pietist
doctrine “posited . . . absolute self- sufficiency, or freedom from depen-
dence upon anything external to [god] Himself, as a necessary condition
of the pure perfection of the Deity.” Pietist teachings, according to Moritz,
demanded “total abandonment of the self and entry upon a blissful state of
nothingness, with that complete extermination of all so- called self- ness or
self- love, and a totally disinterested love of God, in which not the merest
spark of self- love may mingle, if it is to be pure.” We are, in short, “enjoined
to love God disinterestedly,” not as a “source of private gain.”40 This same
attitude is “transported, almost verbatim,” according to Woodmansee,
into Moritz’s concept of art. The “aesthetic attitude” provides a “pleasant
forgetfulness of ourselves. . . . We seem to lose ourselves in the beautiful
object, and precisely this loss, this forgetfulness of ourselves, is the highest
degree of pure and disinterested pleasure which beauty grants us.”41
The discourse of aesthetic autonomy operates through a form of “dis-
placed theology,” preserving a residual metaphysical element in the fantasy
of an entirely pure self- transcendence and the work of art as a substitute
for god’s absolute self- sufficiency and freedom from external determina-
tion. It’s not simply the theological principle of disinterest that is retained,
but also a set of assumptions about the viewer or reader. Woodmansee’s
research helps us recognize the essentially religious character of the divi-
sion between the artist and the “vulgar masses” evident in early aesthetic
philosophy (as well as the subsequent evolution of modernist art theory).
In the writings of Schiller, Moritz, and others, we encounter an adjudica-

Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:

libremente a la libertad de la Naturaleza, esto es, al azar? Y no nos
perdamos en un cotejo entre el trabajo y el deporte.
Y el sentimiento de hacernos insustituíbles, de no merecer la
muerte, de hacer que nuestra aniquilación, si es que nos está
reservada, sea una injusticia, no sólo debe llevarnos a cumplir
religiosamente, por amor a Dios y a nuestra eternidad y
eternización, nuestro propio oficio, sino a cumplirlo
apasionadamente, trágicamente si se quiere. Debe llevarnos a
esforzarnos por sellar a los demás con nuestro sello, por
perpetuarnos en ellos y en sus hijos, dominándolos, por dejar en
todo imperecedera nuestra cifra. La más fecunda moral es la moral
de la imposición mutua.
Ante todo, cambiar en positivos los mandamientos que en forma
negativa nos legó la Ley Antigua. Y así donde se nos dijo: ¡no
mentirás!, entender que nos dice: ¡dirás siempre la verdad, oportuna
o inoportunamente! aunque sea cada uno de nosotros, y no los
demás, quien juzgue en cada caso de esa oportunidad. Y donde se
nos dijo: ¡no matarás!, entender: ¡darás vida y la acrecentarás! Y
donde: ¡no hurtarás!, que dice: ¡acrecentarás la riqueza pública! Y
donde: ¡no cometerás adulterio!, esto: ¡darás a tu tierra y al cielo
hijos sanos, fuertes y buenos! Y así todo lo demás.
El que no pierda su vida, no la logrará. Entrégate, pues, a los
demás, pero para entregarte a ellos domínalos primero. Pues no
cabe dominar sin ser dominado. Cada uno se alimenta de la carne
de aquel a quien devora. Para dominar al prójimo, hay que conocerlo
y quererlo. Tratando de imponerle mis ideas, es como recibo las
suyas. Amar al prójimo, es querer que sea como yo, que sea otro yo,
es decir, es querer yo ser él; es querer borrar la divisoria entre él y

yo, suprimir el mal. Mi esfuerzo por imponerme a otro, por ser y vivir
yo en él y de él, por hacerle mío —que es lo mismo que hacerme
suyo—, es lo que da sentido religioso a la colectividad, a la
solidaridad humana.
El sentimiento de solidaridad parte de mí mismo; como soy
sociedad, necesito adueñarme de la sociedad humana; como soy un
producto social, tengo que socializarme y de mí voy a Dios —que soy
yo proyectado al Todo— y de Dios a cada uno de mis prójimos.
De primera intención protesto contra el inquisidor y a él prefiero
el comerciante que viene a colocarme sus mercancías; pero si
recogido en mí mismo lo pienso mejor, veré que aquél, el inquisidor,
cuando es de buena intención, me trata como a un hombre, como a
un fin en sí, pues si me molesta es por el caritativo deseo de salvar
mi alma, mientras que el otro no me considera sino como a un
cliente, como a un medio, y su indulgencia y tolerancia no es en el
fondo sino la más absoluta indiferencia respecto a mi destino. Hay
mucha más humanidad en el inquisidor.
Como suele haber mucha más humanidad en la guerra que no en
la paz. La no resistencia al mal implica resistencia al bien, y aun
fuera de la defensiva, la ofensiva misma es lo más divino acaso de lo
humano. La guerra es escuela de fraternidad y lazo de amor; es la
guerra la que, por el choque y la agresión mutua, ha puesto en
contacto a los pueblos, y les ha hecho conocerse y quererse. El más
puro y más fecundo abrazo de amor que se den entre sí los
hombres, es el que sobre el campo de batalla se dan el vencedor y
el vencido. Y aun el odio depurado que surge de la guerra es
fecundo. La guerra es, en su más estricto sentido, la santificación del
homicidio; Caín se redime como general de ejércitos. Y si Caín no

hubiese matado a su hermano Abel, habría acaso muerto a manos
de éste. Dios se reveló sobre todo en la guerra; empezó siendo el
Dios de los ejércitos, y uno de los mayores servicios de la cruz es el
de defender en la espada la mano que esgrime ésta.
Fué Caín el fratricida, el fundador del Estado, dicen los enemigos
de éste. Y hay que aceptarlo y volverlo en gloria del Estado, hijo de
la guerra. La civilización empezó el día en que un hombre, sujetando
a otro y obligándole a trabajar para los dos, pudo vagar a la
contemplación del mundo y obligar a su sometido a trabajos de lujo.
Fué la esclavitud lo que permitió a Platón especular sobre la
república ideal, y fué la guerra la que trajo la esclavitud. No en vano
es Atena la diosa de la guerra y de la ciencia. Pero, ¿será menester
repetir una vez más estas verdades tan obvias, mil veces
desatendidas y que otras mil vuelven a renacer?
El precepto supremo que surge del amor a Dios y la base de toda
moral es éste: entrégate por entero: da tu espíritu para salvarlo,
para eternizarlo. Tal es el sacrificio de vida.
Y el entregarse supone, lo he de repetir, imponerse. La verdadera
moral religiosa es en el fondo agresiva, invasora.
El individuo en cuanto individuo, el miserable individuo que vive
preso del instinto de conservación y de los sentidos, no quiere sino
conservarse, y todo su hipo es que no penetren los demás en su
esfera, que no le inquieten, que no le rompan la pereza, a cambio de
lo cual, o para dar ejemplo y norma, renuncia a penetrar él en los
otros, a romperles la pereza, a inquietarles, a apoderarse de ellos. El
«no hagas a otro lo que para ti no quieras», lo traduce él así: yo no
me meto con los demás; que no se metan los demás conmigo. Y se
achica y se engurruña y perece en esta avaricia espiritual y en esta

moral repulsiva del individualismo anárquico: cada uno para sí. Y
como cada uno no es él mismo, mal puede ser para sí.
Mas así que el individuo se siente en la sociedad, se siente en
Dios, y el instinto de perpetuación le enciende en amor a Dios y en
caridad dominadora, busca perpetuarse en los demás, perennizar su
espíritu, eternizarlo, desclavar a Dios, y sólo anhela sellar su espíritu
en los demás espíritus y recibir el sello de éstos. Es que se sacudió
de la pereza y de la avaricia espirituales.
La pereza, se dice, es la madre de todos los vicios, y la pereza, en
efecto, engendra los dos vicios, la avaricia y la envidia, que son a su
vez fuente de todos los demás. La pereza es el peso de la materia,
de suyo inerte, en nosotros, y esa pereza, mientras nos dice que
trata de conservarnos por el ahorro, en realidad no trata sino de
amenguarnos, de anonadarnos.
Al hombre o le sobra materia o le sobra espíritu, o mejor dicho, o
siente hambre de espíritu, esto es, de eternidad, o hambre de
materia, resignación a anonadarse. Cuando le sobra espíritu y siente
hambre de más de él, lo vierte y derrama fuera, y al derramarlo, se
le acrecienta con lo de los demás; y, por el contrario, cuando, avaro
de sí mismo, se recoge en sí pensando mejor conservarse, acaba por
perderlo todo, y le ocurre lo que al que recibió un solo talento: lo
enterró para no perderlo, y se quedó sin él. Porque al que tiene, se
le dará; pero al que no tiene sino poco, hasta eso poco le será
quitado.
Sed perfectos como vuestro Padre celestial lo es, se nos dijo, y
este terrible precepto —terrible porque la perfección infinita del
Padre nos es inasequible— debe ser nuestra suprema norma de
conducta. El que no aspire a lo imposible, apenas hará nada

hacedero que valga la pena. Debemos aspirar a lo imposible, a la
perfección absoluta e infinita, y decir al Padre: ¡Padre, no puedo:
ayuda a mi impotencia! Y él lo hará en nosotros.
Y ser perfecto es serlo todo, es ser yo y ser todos los demás, es
ser humanidad, es ser universo. Y no hay otro camino para ser todo
lo demás sino darse a todo, y cuando todo sea en todo, todo será en
cada uno de nosotros. La apocatástasis es más que un ensueño
místico, es una norma de acción, es un faro de altas hazañas.
De donde la moral invasora, dominadora, agresiva, inquisidora, si
queréis. Porque la caridad verdadera es invasora, y consiste en
meter mi espíritu en los demás espíritus, en darles mi dolor como
pábulo y consuelo a sus dolores, en despertar con mi inquietud sus
inquietudes, en aguzar su hambre de Dios con mi hambre de Él. La
caridad no es brezar y adormecer a nuestros hermanos en la inercia
y modorra de la materia, sino despertarles en la zozobra y el
tormento del espíritu.
A las catorce obras de misericordia que se nos enseñó en el
Catecismo de la doctrina cristiana, habría que añadir a las veces una
más, y es la de despertar al dormido. A las veces por lo menos, y
desde luego cuando el dormido duerme al borde de una sima, el
despertarle es mucho más misericordioso que enterrarle después de
muerto, pues dejemos que los muertos entierren a sus muertos.
Bien se dijo aquello de «quien bien te quiera, te hará llorar», y la
caridad suele hacer llorar. «El amor que no mortifica, no merece tan
divino nombre», decía el encendido apóstol portugués Fr. Thomé de
Jesus (Trabalhos de Jesus, parte primera); el de esta jaculatoria:
«¡Oh fuego infinito, oh amor eterno, que si no tienes donde abraces
y te alargues y muchos corazones a que quemes lloras!» El que ama

al prójimo, le quema el corazón, y el corazón, como la leña fresca,
cuando se quema, gime y destila lágrimas.
Y el hacer eso es generosidad, una de las dos virtudes madres
que surgen cuando se vence a la inercia, a la pereza. Las más de
nuestras miserias vienen de avaricia espiritual.
El remedio al dolor, que es, dijimos, el choque de la conciencia en
la inconsciencia no es hundirse en ésta, sino elevarse a aquélla y
sufrir más. Lo malo del dolor se cura con más dolor, con más alto
dolor. No hay que darse opio, sino poner vinagre y sal en la herida
del alma, porque cuando te duermas y no sientas ya el dolor, es que
no eres. Y hay que ser. No cerréis, pues, los ojos a la Esfinge
acongojadora, sino miradla cara a cara, y dejad que os coja y os
masque en su boca de cien mil dientes venenosos y os trague.
Veréis qué dulzura cuando os haya tragado, qué dolor más sabroso.
Y a esto se va prácticamente por la moral de la imposición mutua.
Los hombres deben tratar de imponerse los unos a los otros, de
darse mutuamente sus espíritus, de sellarse mutuamente las almas.
Es cosa que da en qué pensar eso de que hayan llamado a la
moral cristiana moral de esclavos, ¿quiénes? ¡Los anarquistas! El
anarquismo sí que es moral de esclavos, pues sólo el esclavo canta a
la libertad anárquica. ¡Anarquismo, no!, sino panarquismo; no
aquello de ni Dios ni amo, sino todos dioses y amos todos, todos
esforzándose por divinizarse, por inmortalizarse. Y para ello
dominando a los demás.
¡Y hay tantos modos de dominar! A las veces, hasta pasivamente,
al parecer al menos, se cumple con esta ley de vida. El acomodarse
al ámbito, el imitar, el ponerse uno en lugar de otro, la simpatía, en
fin, además de ser una manifestación de la unidad de la especie, es

un modo de expansionarse, de ser otro. Ser vencido, o por lo menos
aparecer vencido, es muchas veces vencer; tomar lo de otro, es un
modo de vivir en él.
Y es que al decir dominar, no quiero decir como el tigre. También
domina el zorro por la astucia, y la liebre huyendo, y la víbora por su
veneno, y el mosquito por su pequeñez, y el calamar por su tinta
con que oscurece el ámbito y huye. Y nadie se escandalice de esto,
pues el mismo Padre de todos, que dió fiereza, garras y fauces al
tigre, dió astucia al zorro, patas veloces a la liebre, veneno a la
víbora, pequeñez al mosquito y tinta al calamar. Y no consiste la
nobleza o innobleza en las armas de que se use, pues cada especie,
y hasta cada individuo, tiene las suyas, sino en cómo se las use, y,
sobre todo, en el fin para que uno las esgrima.
Y entre las armas de vencer hay también la de la paciencia y la
resignación apasionadas, llenas de actividad y de anhelos anteriores.
Recordad aquel estupendo soneto del gran luchador, del gran
inquietador puritano Juan Milton, el secuaz de Cromwell y cantor de
Satanás, el que al verse ciego y considerar su luz apagada e inútil en
él aquel talento cuya ocultación es muerte, oye que la Paciencia le
dice: «Dios no necesita ni de obra de hombre ni de sus dones;
quienes mejor llevan su blando yugo, le sirven mejor; su estado es
regio; miles hay que se lanzan a su señal y corren sin descanso
tierras y mares, pero también le sirven los que no hacen sino estarse
y aguardar».
They also serve who only stand and wait. Sí, también le sirven los
que sólo se están aguardándole, pero es cuando le aguardan
apasionadamente, hambrientamente, llenos de anhelo de
inmortalidad en Él.

Y hay que imponerse, aunque sólo sea por la paciencia. «Mi vaso
es pequeño, pero bebo en mi vaso» —decía un poeta egoísta y de
un pueblo de avaros—. No, en mi vaso beben todos, quiero que
todos beban de él; se lo doy, y mi vaso crece, según el número de
los que en él beben, y todos, al poner en él sus labios, dejan allí algo
de su espíritu. Y bebo también de los vasos de los demás, mientras
ellos beben del mío. Porque cuanto más soy de mí mismo, y cuanto
soy más yo mismo, más soy de los demás; de la plenitud de mí
mismo me vierto a mis hermanos, y al verterme a ellos, ellos entran
en mí.
«Sed perfectos como vuestro Padre», se nos dijo, y nuestro Padre
es perfecto porque es Él, y es cada uno de sus hijos que en él viven,
son y se mueven. Y el fin de la perfección, es que seamos todos una
sola cosa (Juan, XVII, 21), todos un cuerpo en Cristo (Rom., XII, 5),
y que, al cabo, sujetas todas las cosas al Hijo, el Hijo mismo se
sujete a su vez a quien le sujetó todo para que Dios sea todo en
todos. Y esto es hacer que el Universo sea conciencia; hacer de la
Naturaleza sociedad, y sociedad humana. Y entonces se le podrá a
Dios llamar Padre a boca llena.
Ya sé que los que dicen que la ética es ciencia, dirán que todo
esto que vengo exponiendo no es más que retórica; pero cada cual
tiene su lenguaje y su pasión. Es decir, el que la tiene, y el que no
tiene pasión, de nada le sirve tener ciencia.
Y a la pasión que se expresa por esta retórica, le llaman egotismo
los de la ciencia ética, y el tal egotismo es el único verdadero
remedio del egoísmo, de la avaricia espiritual, del vicio de
conservarse y ahorrarse, y no de tratar de perennizarse dándose.

«No seas, y podrás más que todo lo que es», decía nuestro Fr.
Juan de los Ángeles en uno de sus Diálogos de la conquista del reino
de Dios (Dial., III, 8); pero ¿qué quiere decir eso de no seas? ¿No
querrá acaso decir paradójicamente, como a menudo en los místicos
sucede, lo contrario de lo que tomado a la letra y a primera lección
dice? ¿No es una inmensa paradoja, un gran contrasentido trágico,
más bien, la moral toda de la sumisión y del quietismo? La moral
monástica, la puramente monástica, ¿no es un absurdo? Y llamo
aquí moral monástica a la del cartujo solitario, a la del eremita, que
huye del mundo —llevándolo acaso consigo— para vivir sólo y a
solas con un Dios sólo también y solitario; no a la del dominico
inquisidor, que recorre la Provenza a quemar corazones de
albigenses.
«¡Que lo haga todo Dios!» —dirá alguien—; pero es que si el
hombre se cruza de brazos, Dios se echa a dormir.
Esa moral cartujana y la otra moral científica, la que sacan de la
ciencia ética —¡oh, la ética como ciencia! ¡la ética racional y
racionalista! ¡pedantería de pedanterías y todo pedantería!—, eso sí
que puede ser egoísmo y frialdad de corazón.
Hay quien dice aislarse con Dios para mejor salvarse, para mejor
redimirse; pero es que la redención tiene que ser colectiva, pues que
la culpa lo es. «Lo religioso es la determinación de totalidad, y todo
lo que está fuera de esto es engaño de los sentidos, por lo cual el
mayor criminal es, en el fondo, inocente y un hombre bondadoso, un
santo.» Así Kierkegaard (Afsluttende, etc., II, II, cap IV, sect. II, A.)
¿Y se comprende, por otra parte, que se quiera ganar la otra vida,
la eterna, renunciando a ésta, a la temporal? Si algo es la otra vida,
ha de ser continuación de ésta, y sólo como continuación, más o

menos depurada, de ella la imagina nuestro anhelo, y si así es, cual
sea esta vida del tiempo será la de la eternidad.
«Este mundo y el otro son como dos mujeres de un solo marido,
que si agradas a la una, mueves a la otra a envidia» —dice un
pensador árabe; citado por Windelband (Das Heilige, en el vol. II de
Präludien)—; mas tal pensamiento no ha podido brotar sino de quien
no ha sabido resolver en una lucha fecunda, en una contradicción
práctica, el conflicto trágico entre su espíritu y el mundo. «Venga a
nos el tu reino», nos enseñó el Cristo a pedir a su Padre, y no
«vayamos al tu reino», y según las primitivas creencias cristianas, la
vida eterna había de cumplirse sobre esta misma tierra, y como
continuación de la de ella. Hombres y no ángeles se nos hizo, para
que buscásemos nuestra dicha a través de la vida, y el Cristo de la
fe cristiana no se angelizó, sino que se humanó, tomando cuerpo
real y efectivo, y no apariencia de él para redimirnos. Y según esa
misma fe, los ángeles, hasta los más encumbrados, adoran a la
Virgen, símbolo supremo de la Humanidad terrena. No es, pues, el
ideal angélico un ideal cristiano, y desde luego no lo es humano, ni
puede serlo. Es, además, un ángel algo neutro, sin sexo y sin patria.
No nos cabe sentir la otra vida, la vida eterna, lo he repetido ya
varias veces, como una vida de contemplación angélica; ha de ser
vida de acción. Decía Goethe que «el hombre debe creer en la
inmortalidad; tiene para ello un derecho conforme a su naturaleza».
Y añadía así: «La convicción de nuestra perduración me brota del
concepto de la actividad. Si obro sin tregua hasta mi fin, la
Naturaleza está obligada —so ist die Natur verpflichtet— a
proporcionarme otra forma de existencia, ya que mi actual espíritu
no puede soportar más». Cambiad lo de Naturaleza por Dios, y

tendréis un pensamiento que no deja de ser cristiano, pues los
primeros padres de la Iglesia no creyeron que la inmortalidad del
alma fuera un don natural —es decir, algo racional—, sino un don
divino de gracia. Y lo que es de gracia suele ser, en el fondo, de
justicia, ya que la justicia es divina y gratuita, no natural. Y agregaba
Goethe: «No sabría empezar nada con una felicidad eterna; si no me
ofreciera nuevas tareas y nuevas dificultades a que vencer». Y así
es, la ociosidad contemplativa no es dicha.
Mas, ¿no tendrá alguna justificación la moral eremítica, cartujana,
la de la Tebaida? ¿No se podrá, acaso, decir que es menester se
conserven esos tipos de excepción para que sirvan de eterno modelo
a los otros? ¿No crían los hombres caballos de carrera, inútiles para
todo otro menester utilitario, pero que mantienen la pureza de la
sangre y son padres de excelentes caballos de tiro y de silla? ¿No
hay, acaso, un lujo ético, no menos justificable que el otro? Pero, por
otra parte, ¿no es esto, en el fondo, estética y no moral, y mucho
menos religión? ¿No es que será estético y no religioso, ni siquiera
ético, el ideal monástico contemplativo medieval? Y al fin los de
entre aquellos solitarios que nos han contado sus coloquios a solas
con Dios, han hecho una obra eternizadora, se han metido en las
almas de los demás. Y ya sólo con eso, con que el claustro haya
podido darnos un Eckart, un Suso, un Taulero, un Ruisbroquio, un
Juan de la Cruz, una Catalina de Siena, una Ángela de Foligno, una
Teresa de Jesús, está justificado el claustro.
Pero nuestras Órdenes españolas son, sobre todo, la de
Predicadores, que Domingo de Guzmán instituyó para la obra
agresiva de estirpar la herejía, la Compañía de Jesús, una milicia en
medio del mundo, y con ello está dicho todo, la de las Escuelas Pías,

para la obra también invasora de la enseñanza... Cierto es que se
me dirá que también la reforma del Carmelo, Orden contemplativa
que emprendió Teresa de Jesús, fué obra española. Sí, española fué,
y en ella se buscaba libertad.
Era el ansia de libertad, de libertad interior, en efecto, lo que en
aquellos revueltos tiempos de Inquisición llevaba a las almas
escogidas al claustro. Encarcelábanse para ser mejor libres. «¿No es
linda cosa que una pobre monja de San José pueda llegar a
enseñorear toda la tierra y elementos?» decía en su Vida Santa
Teresa. Era el ansia pauliniana de libertad, de sacudirse de la ley
externa, que era bien dura, y, como decía el Maestro Fray Luis de
León, bien cabezuda entonces.
¿Pero lograron libertad así? Es muy dudoso que la lograran, y hoy
imposible. Porque la verdadera libertad no es esa de sacudirse de la
ley externa; la libertad es la conciencia de la ley. Es libre no el que
se sacude de la ley, sino el que se adueña de ella. La libertad hay
que buscarla en medio del mundo que es donde vive la ley, y con la
ley la culpa, su hija. De lo que hay que libertarse es de la culpa, que
es colectiva.
En vez de renunciar al mundo para dominarlo —¿quién no conoce
el instinto colectivo de dominación de las órdenes religiosas cuyos
individuos renuncian al mundo?— lo que habría que hacer es
dominar al mundo para poder renunciar a él. No buscar la pobreza y
la sumisión, sino buscar la riqueza para emplearla en acrecentar la
conciencia humana, y buscar el poder para servirse de él con el
mismo fin.
Es cosa curiosa que frailes y anarquistas se combatan entre sí,
cuando en el fondo profesan la misma moral y tienen un tan íntimo

parentesco unos con otros. Como que el anarquismo viene a ser una
especie de monacato ateo, y más una doctrina religiosa que ética o
económico social. Los unos parten de que el hombre nace malo, en
pecado original, y la gracia le hace luego bueno, si es que le hace
tal, y los otros de que nace bueno y la sociedad le pervierte luego. Y
en resolución, lo mismo da una cosa que otra, pues en ambas se
opone el individuo a la sociedad, y como si precediera, y, por lo
tanto, hubiese de sobrevivir, a ella. Y las dos morales son morales de
claustro.
Y el que la culpa es colectiva no ha de servir para sacudirme de
ella sobre los demás, sino para cargar sobre mí las culpas de los
otros, las de todos; no para difundir mi culpa y anegarla en la culpa
total, sino para hacer la culpa total mía; no para enajenar mi culpa,
sino para ensimismarme y apropiarme, adentrándomela, la de todos.
Y cada uno debe contribuir a curarla, por lo que otros no hacen. El
que la sociedad sea culpable, agrava la culpa de cada uno. «Alguien
tiene que hacerlo, ¿pero por qué he de ser yo?; es la frase que
repiten los débiles bien intencionados. Alguien tiene que hacerlo,
¿por qué no yo?, es el grito de un serio servidor del hombre que
afronta cara a cara un serio peligro. Entre estas dos sentencias
median siglos enteros de evolución moral.» Así dijo Mrs. Annie
Besant, en su autobiografía. Así dijo la teósofa.
El que la sociedad sea culpable agrava la culpa de cada uno, y es
más culpable el que más siente la culpa. Cristo, el inocente, como
conocía mejor que nadie la intensidad de la culpa, era en un cierto
sentido el más culpable. En él llegó a conciencia la divinidad de la
humanidad y con ella su culpabilidad. Suele dar que reir a no pocos
el leer de grandísimos santos que por pequeñísimas faltas, por faltas

que hacen sonreirse a un hombre de mundo, se tuvieron por los más
grandes pecadores. Pero la intensidad de la culpa no se mide por el
acto externo, sino por la conciencia de ella, y a uno le causa
agudísimo dolor lo que a otro apenas si un ligero cosquilleo. Y en un
santo puede llegar la conciencia moral a tal plenitud y agudeza, que
el más leve pecado le remuerda más que al mayor criminal su
crimen. Y la culpa estriba en tener conciencia de ella, está en el que
juzga y en cuanto juzga. Cuando uno comete un acto pernicioso
creyendo de buena fe hacer una acción virtuosa, no podemos
tenerle por moralmente culpable, y cuando otro cree que es mala
una acción indiferente o acaso beneficiosa, y la lleva a cabo, es
culpable. El acto pasa, la intención queda, y lo malo del mal acto es
que malea la intención, que haciendo mal a sabiendas se predispone
uno a seguir haciéndolo, se oscurece la conciencia. Y no es lo mismo
hacer el mal que ser malo. El mal oscurece la conciencia, y no sólo la
conciencia moral, sino la conciencia general, la psíquica. Y es que es
bueno cuanto exalta y ensancha la conciencia, y malo lo que la
deprime y amengua.
Y aquí acaso cabría aquello que ya Sócrates, según Platón, se
proponía, y es si la virtud es ciencia. Lo que equivale a decir si la
virtud es racional.
Los eticistas, los de que la moral es ciencia, los que al leer todas
estas divagaciones dirán: ¡retórica, retórica, retórica!, creerán, me
parece, que la virtud se adquiere por ciencia, por estudio racional, y
hasta que las matemáticas nos ayudan a ser mejores. No lo sé, pero
yo siento que la virtud, como la religiosidad, como el anhelo de no
morirse nunca —y todo ello es la misma cosa en el fondo—, se
adquiere más bien por pasión.

Pero y la pasión ¿qué es? se me dirá. No lo sé; o, mejor dicho, lo
sé muy bien, porque la siento, y, sintiéndola no necesito definírmela.
Es más aún: temo que si llego a definirla, dejaré de sentirla y de
tenerla. La pasión es como el dolor, y como el dolor, crea su objeto.
Es más fácil al fuego hallar combustible que al combustible fuego.
Vaciedad y sofistería habrá de parecer esto, bien lo sé. Y se me
dirá también que hay la ciencia de la pasión, y que hay la pasión de
la ciencia, y que es en la esfera moral donde la razón y la vida se
aunan.
No lo sé, no lo sé, no lo sé... Y acaso esté yo diciendo en el
fondo, aunque más turbiamente lo mismo que esos, los adversarios
que me finjo para tener a quien combatir, dicen, sólo que más claro,
más definida y más racionalmente. No lo sé, no lo sé... Pero sus
cosas me hielan y me suenan a vaciedad afectiva.
Y volviendo a lo mismo, ¿es la virtud ciencia? ¿Es la ciencia
virtud? Porque son dos cosas distintas. Puede ser ciencia la virtud,
ciencia de saber conducirse bien, sin que por eso toda otra ciencia
sea virtud. Ciencia es la de Maquiavelo; y no puede decirse que su
virtú sea virtud moral siempre. Sabido es, además, que no son
mejores ni los más inteligentes, ni los más instruidos.
No, no, no; ni la fisiología enseña a digerir, ni la lógica a discurrir,
ni la estética a sentir la belleza o a expresarla, ni la ética a ser
bueno. Y menos mal si no enseña a ser hipócrita; porque la
pedantería, sea de lógica, sea de estética, sea de ética, no es en el
fondo sino hipocresía.
Acaso la razón enseña ciertas virtudes burguesas, pero no hace ni
héroes ni santos. Porque santo es el que hace el bien no por el bien
mismo, sino por Dios, por la eternización.

Acaso, por otra parte, la cultura, es decir, la Cultura —¡oh, la
cultura!—, obra sobre todo de filósofos y de hombres de ciencia, no
la han hecho ni los héroes ni los santos. Porque los santos se han
cuidado muy poco del progreso de la cultura humana; se cuidaron
más bien de la salvación de las almas individuales de aquellos con
quienes convivían. ¿Qué significa, por ejemplo, en la historia de la
cultura humana nuestro San Juan de la Cruz, aquel frailecito
incandescente, como se le ha llamado culturalmente —y no sé si
cultamente—, junto a Descartes?
Todos esos santos, encendidos de religiosa caridad hacia sus
prójimos, hambrientos de eternización propia y ajena, que iban a
quemar corazones ajenos, inquisidores acaso, todos esos santos,
¿qué han hecho por el progreso de la ciencia de la ética? ¿Inventó
acaso alguno de ellos el imperativo categórico, como lo inventó el
solterón de Koenigsberg, que si no fué santo mereció serlo?
Quejábaseme un día el hijo de un gran profesor de ética, de uno
a quien apenas si se le caía de la boca el imperativo ese, que vivía
en una desoladora sequedad de espíritu, en un vacío interior. Y hube
de decirle: —Es que su padre de usted, amigo mío, tenía un río
soterraño en el espíritu, una fresca corriente de antiguas creencias
infantiles, de esperanzas de ultratumba; y cuando creía alimentar su
alma con el imperativo ese o con algo parecido, lo estaba en
realidad alimentando con aquellas aguas de la niñez. Y a usted le ha
dado la flor acaso de su espíritu, sus doctrinas racionales de moral,
pero no la raíz, no lo soterraño, no lo irracional.
¿Por qué prendió aquí, en España, el krausismo y no el
hegelianismo o el kantismo, siendo estos sistemas mucho más
profundos, racional y filosóficamente, que aquél? Porque el uno nos

le trajeron con raíces. El pensamiento filosófico de un pueblo o de
una época es como su flor, es aquello que está fuera y está encima;
pero esa flor, o si se quiere fruto, toma sus jugos de las raíces de la
planta, y las raíces, que están dentro y están debajo de tierra, son el
sentimiento religioso. El pensamiento filosófico de Kant, suprema flor
de la evolución mental del pueblo germánico, tiene sus raíces en el
sentimiento religioso de Lutero, y no es posible que el kantismo,
sobre todo en su parte práctica, prendiese y diese flores y frutos en
pueblos que ni habían pasado por la Reforma ni acaso podían pasar
por ella. El kantismo es protestante, y nosotros, los españoles,
somos fundamentalmente católicos. Y si Krause echó aquí algunas
raíces —más que se cree, y no tan pasajeras como se supone—, es
porque Krause tenía raíces pietistas, y el pietismo, como lo demostró
Ritschl en la historia de él (Geschichte der Pietismus), tiene raíces
específicamente católicas, y significa en gran parte la invasión, o
más bien la persistencia del misticismo católico en el seno del
racionalismo protestante. Y así se explica que se krausizaran aquí
hasta no pocos pensadores católicos.
Y puesto que los españoles somos católicos, sepámoslo o no lo
sepamos, queriéndolo o sin quererlo, y aunque alguno de nosotros
presuma de racionalista o de ateo, acaso nuestra más honda labor
de cultura y lo que vale más que de cultura, de religiosidad —si es
que no son lo mismo—, es tratar de darnos clara cuenta de ese
nuestro catolicismo subconsciente, social o popular. Y esto es lo que
he tratado de hacer en esta obra.
Lo que llamo el sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y
en los pueblos es por lo menos nuestro sentimiento trágico de la
vida, el de los españoles y el pueblo español, tal y como se refleja

en mi conciencia, que es una conciencia española, hecha en España.
Y este sentimiento trágico de la vida es el sentimiento mismo
católico de ella, pues el catolicismo y mucho más el popular, es
trágico. El pueblo aborrece la comedia. El pueblo, cuando Pilato, el
señorito, el distinguido, el esteta, racionalista si queréis, quiere darle
comedia y le presenta al Cristo en irrisión diciéndole: ¡He aquí el
hombre!, se amotina y grita: ¡crucifícale! ¡crucifícale! No quiere
comedia, sino tragedia. Y lo que el Dante, el gran católico, llamó
comedia divina, es la más trágica tragedia que se haya escrito.
Y como he querido en estos ensayos mostrar el alma de un
español y en ella el alma española, he escatimado las citas de
escritores españoles prodigando, acaso en exceso, las de los de
otros países. Y es que todas las almas humanas son hermanas.
Y hay una figura, una figura cómicamente trágica, una figura en
que se ve todo lo profundamente trágico de la comedia humana, la
figura de Nuestro Señor Don Quijote, el Cristo español, en que se
cifra y encierra el alma inmortal de este mi pueblo. Acaso la pasión y
muerte del Caballero de la Triste Figura es la pasión y muerte del
pueblo español. Su muerte y su resurrección. Y hay una filosofía, y
hasta una metafísica quijotesca, y una lógica y una ética quijotescas
también, y una religiosidad —religiosidad católica española—
quijotesca. Es la filosofía, es la lógica, es la ética, es la religiosidad
que he tratado de esbozar y más de sugerir que de desarrollar en
esta obra. Desarrollarlas racionalmente no; la locura quijotesca no
consiente la lógica científica.
Y ahora, antes de concluir, y despedirme de mis lectores,
quédame hablar del papel que le está reservado a Don Quijote en la
tragi-comedia europea moderna.

Vamos a verlo en un último ensayo de éstos.

CONCLUSIÓN
DON QUIJOTE EN LA TRAGI-COMEDIA EUROPEA CONTEMPORÁNEA
¡Voz que clama en el desierto!
Isaías, XL. 3.
Fuerza me es ya concluir, por ahora al menos, estos ensayos que
amenazan convertírseme en el cuento de nunca acabar. Han ido
saliendo de mis manos a la imprenta en una casi improvisación
sobre notas recogidas durante años, sin haber tenido presentes al
escribir cada ensayo los que le precedieron. Y así irán llenos de
contradicciones íntimas —al menos aparentes— como la vida y como
yo mismo.
Mi pecado ha sido, si alguno, el haberlos exornado en exceso con
citas ajenas, muchas de las cuales parecerán traídas con cierta
violencia. Mas ya lo explicaré otra vez.
Muy pocos años después de haber andado Nuestro Señor Don
Quijote por España, decíanos Jacobo Boehme (Aurora, capítulo XI,
§ 75), que no escribía una historia que le hubiesen contado otros,
sino que tenía que estar él mismo en la batalla, y en ella en gran
pelea, donde a menudo tenía que ser vencido como todos los
hombres, y más adelante (§ 83) añade que aunque tenga que
hacerse espectáculo del mundo y del demonio, le queda la
esperanza en Dios sobre la vida futura, en quien quiere arriesgarla y

no resistir al Espíritu. Amén. Y tampoco yo, como este Quijote del
pensamiento alemán, quiero resistir al Espíritu.
Y por esto lanzo mi voz que clamará en el desierto, y la lanzo
desde esta Universidad de Salamanca, que se llamó a sí misma
arrogantemente omnium scientiarum princeps, y a la que Carlyle
llamó fortaleza de la ignorancia, y un literato francés, hace poco,
Universidad fantasma; desde esta España, «tierra de los ensueños
que se hacen realidades, defensora de Europa, hogar del ideal
caballeresco», así me decía en carta no ha mucho Mr. Archer M.
Huntington, poeta; desde esta España, cabeza de la Contra-Reforma
en el siglo XVI. ¡Y bien se lo guardan!
En el cuarto de estos ensayos os hablé de la esencia del
catolicismo. Y a desesenciarlo, esto es, a descatolizar a Europa, han
contribuído el Renacimiento, la Reforma y la Revolución,
sustituyendo aquel ideal de una vida eterna ultraterrena por el ideal
del progreso, de la razón, de la ciencia. O mejor de la Ciencia, con
letra mayúscula. Y lo último, lo que hoy más se lleva, es la Cultura.
Y en la segunda mitad del pasado siglo XIX, época infilosófica y
tecnicista, dominada por especialismo miope y por el materialismo
histórico, ese ideal se tradujo en una obra no ya de vulgarización,
sino de avulgaramiento científico —o más bien pseudocientífico—
que se desahogaba en democráticas bibliotecas baratas y sectarias.
Quería así popularizarse la ciencia como si hubiere de ser ésta la que
haya de bajar al pueblo y servir sus pasiones, y no el pueblo el que
debe subir a ella y por ella más arriba aún, a nuevos y más
profundos anhelos.
Todo esto llevó a Brunetière a proclamar la bancarrota de la
ciencia, y esa ciencia o lo que fuere, bancarroteó en efecto. Y como

ella no satisfacía, no dejaba de buscarse la felicidad; sin encontrarla
ni en la riqueza, ni en el saber, ni en el poderío, ni en el goce, ni en
la resignación, ni en la buena conciencia moral, ni en la cultura. Y
vino el pesimismo.
El progresismo no satisfacía tampoco. Progresar, ¿para qué? El
hombre no se conformaba con lo racional, el Kulturkampf no le
bastaba; quería dar finalidad final a la vida, que esta que llamo la
finalidad final es el verdadero ὄντως ὄν. Y la famosa maladie du
siècle, que se anuncia en Rousseau y acusa más claramente que
nadie el Obermann de Sénancour, no era ni es otra cosa que la
pérdida de la fe en la inmortalidad del alma, en la finalidad humana
del Universo.
Su símbolo, su verdadero símbolo es un ente de ficción, el Dr.
Fausto.
Este inmortal Dr. Fausto que se nos aparece ya a principios del
siglo XVII, en 1604, por obra del Renacimiento y de la Reforma y por
ministerio de Cristóbal Marlowe, es ya el mismo que volverá a
descubrir Goethe, aunque en ciertos respectos más espontáneo y
más fresco. Y junto a él aparece Mefistófeles, a quien pregunta
Fausto aquello de «¿qué bien hará mi alma a tu señor»? Y le
contesta: «Ensanchar su reino.» «¿Y es esa la razón por la que nos
tienta así?» vuelve a preguntar el Doctor, y el espíritu maligno
responde: «solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris», que es lo que
mal traducido en romance, decimos: mal de muchos, consuelo de
tontos. «Donde estamos, allí está el infierno, y donde está el
infierno, allí tenemos que estar siempre» —añade Mefistófeles— a lo
que Fausto agrega que cree ser una fábula tal infierno, y le pregunta
quién hizo el mundo. Y este trágico Doctor, torturado por nuestra

tortura, acaba encontrando a Helena, que no es otra, aunque
Marlowe acaso no lo sospechase, que la Cultura renaciente. Y hay
aquí en este Faust de Marlowe una escena que vale por toda la
segunda parte del Faust de Goethe. Le dice a Helena Fausto: «Dulce
Helena, hazme inmortal con un beso —y le besa—. Sus labios me
chupan el alma; ¡mira cómo huye! ¡Ven, Helena, ven; devuélveme el
alma! Aquí quiero quedarme, porque el cielo está en estos labios, y
todo lo que no es Helena, escoria es.»
¡Devuélveme el alma! He aquí el grito de Fausto, el Doctor,
cuando después de haber besado a Helena va a perderse para
siempre. Porque al Fausto primitivo no hay ingenua Margarita alguna
que le salve. Esto de la salvación fué invención de Goethe. ¿Y quién
no conoce a su Fausto, nuestro Fausto, que estudió Filosofía,
Jurisprudencia, Medicina, hasta Teología, y sólo vió que no podemos
saber nada, y quiso huir al campo libre —hinaus ins weite Land!— y
topó con Mefistófeles, parte de aquella fuerza que siempre quiere el
mal haciendo siempre el bien, y éste le llevó a los brazos de
Margarita, del pueblo sencillo, a la que aquél, el sabio perdió; pero
merced a la cual, que por él se entregó, se salva, redimido por el
pueblo creyente con fe sencilla? Pero tuvo esa segunda parte,
porque aquel otro Fausto era el Fausto anecdótico y no el categórico
de Goethe, y volvió a entregarse a la Cultura, a Helena, y a
engendrar en ella a Euforión, acabando todo con aquello del eterno
femenino entre coros místicos. ¡Pobre Euforión!
Y esta Helena, ¿es la esposa del rubio Menelao, la que robó Paris
y causó la guerra de Troya, y de quien los ancianos troyanos decían
que no debía indignar el que se pelease por mujer que por su rostro
se parecía tan terriblemente a las diosas inmortales? Creo más bien

que esa Helena de Fausto era otra, la que acompañaba a Simón
Mago, y que éste decía ser la inteligencia divina. Y Fausto puede
decirle: ¡devuélveme el alma!
Porque Helena con sus besos nos saca el alma. Y lo que
queremos y necesitamos es alma, y alma de bulto y de sustancia.
Pero vinieron el Renacimiento, la Reforma y la Revolución,
trayéndonos a Helena, o más bien empujados por ella, y ahora nos
hablan de Cultura y de Europa.
¡Europa! Esta noción primitiva e inmediatamente geográfica nos
la han convertido por arte mágica en una categoría casi metafísica.
¿Quién sabe hoy ya, en España por lo menos, lo que es Europa? Yo
sólo sé que es un chibolete (v. mis Tres Ensayos). Y cuando me
pongo a escudriñar lo que llaman Europa nuestros europeizantes,
paréceme a las veces que queda fuera de ella mucho de lo periférico
—España desde luego, Inglaterra, Italia, Escandinavia, Rusia...— y
que se reduce a lo central, a Franco-Alemania, con sus anejos y
dependencias.
Todo esto nos lo han traído, digo, el Renacimiento y la Reforma,
hermanos mellizos que vivieron en aparente guerra intestina. Los
renacientes italianos, socinianos todos ellos; los humanistas, con
Erasmo a la cabeza, tuvieron por un bárbaro a aquel fraile Lutero,
que del claustro sacó su ímpetu, como de él lo sacaron Bruno y
Campanella. Pero aquel bárbaro era su hermano mellizo;
combatiéndolos, combatía a su lado contra el enemigo común. Todo
eso nos han traído el Renacimiento y la Reforma, y luego la
Revolución, su hija, y nos han traído también una nueva Inquisición:
la de la ciencia o la cultura, que usa por armas el ridículo y el
desprecio para los que no se rinden a su ortodoxia.

Al enviar Galileo al Gran Duque de Toscana su escrito sobre la
movilidad de la Tierra, le decía que conviene obedecer y creer a las
determinaciones de los superiores, y que reputaba aquel escrito
«como una poesía o bien un ensueño, y por tal recíbalo Vuestra
Alteza». Y otras veces le llama «quimera» y «capricho matemático».
Y así yo en estos ensayos, por temor también —¿por qué no
confesarlo?— a la Inquisición, pero a la de hoy, a la científica,
presento como poesía, ensueño, quimera o capricho místico lo que
más de dentro me brota. Y digo con Galileo: Eppur si muove! Mas
¿es sólo por ese temor? ¡Ah, no! que hay otra más trágica
Inquisición, y es la que un hombre moderno, culto, europeo —como
lo soy yo, quiéralo o no—, lleva dentro de sí. Hay un más terrible
ridículo, y es el ridículo de uno ante sí mismo y para consigo. Es mi
razón que se burla de mi fe y la desprecia.
Y aquí es donde tengo que acogerme a mi Señor Don Quijote
para aprender a afrontar el ridículo y vencerlo, y un ridículo que
acaso —¿quién sabe?— él no conoció.
Sí, sí, ¿cómo no ha de sonreir mi razón de estas construcciones
pseudo-filosóficas, pretendidas místicas, diletantescas, en que hay
de todo menos paciente estudio, objetividad y método... científicos?
¡Y, sin embargo... Eppur si muove!
Eppur si muove, sí! Y me acojo al diletantismo, a lo que un
pedante llamaría filosofía demi-mondaine, contra la pedantería
especialista, contra la filosofía de los filósofos profesionales. Y quién
sabe... Los progresos suelen venir del bárbaro, y nada más
estancado que la filosofía de los filósofos y la teología de los
teólogos.

¡Y que nos hablen de Europa! La civilización del Tibet es paralela
a la nuestra, y ha hecho y hace vivir a hombres que desaparecen
como nosotros. Y queda flotando sobre las civilizaciones todas el
Eclesiastés, y aquello de «así muere el sabio como el necio» (II, 3).
Corre entre las gentes de nuestro pueblo una respuesta admirable
a la ordinaria pregunta de «¿qué tal?» o «¿cómo va?», y es aquella
que responde: «¡se vive!...» Y de hecho es así; se vive, vivimos
tanto como los demás. ¿Y qué más puede pedirse? ¿Y quién no
recuerda lo de la copla? «Cada vez que considero — que me tengo
de morir, — tiendo la capa en el suelo — y no me harto de dormir.»
Pero no dormir, no, sino soñar; soñar la vida, ya que la vida es
sueño.
Proverbial se ha hecho también en muy poco tiempo entre
nosotros, los españoles, la frase de que la cuestión es pasar el rato,
o sea matar el tiempo. Y de hecho hacemos tiempo para matarlo.
Pero hay algo que nos ha preocupado siempre tanto o más que
pasar el rato —fórmula que marca una posición estética— y es ganar
la eternidad; fórmula de la posición religiosa. Y es que saltamos de
lo estético y lo económico a lo religioso, por encima de lo lógico y lo
ético; del arte a la religión.
Un joven novelista nuestro, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, en su reciente
novela La pata de la raposa, nos dice que la idea de la muerte es el
cepo; el espíritu, la raposa, o sea virtud astuta con que burlar las
celadas de la fatalidad, y añade: «Cogidos en el cepo, hombres
débiles y pueblos débiles yacen por tierra...; los espíritus recios y los
pueblos fuertes reciben en el peligro clarividente estupor,
desentrañan de pronto la desmesurada belleza de la vida y,
renunciando para siempre a la agilidad y locura primeras, salen del

cepo con los músculos tensos para la acción y con las fuerzas del
alma centuplicadas en ímpetu, potencia y eficacia.» Pero veamos;
hombres débiles..., pueblos débiles..., espíritus recios..., pueblos
fuertes..., ¿qué es eso? Yo no lo sé. Lo que creo saber es que unos
individuos y pueblos no han pensado aún de veras en la muerte y la
inmortalidad; no las han sentido, y otros han dejado de pensar en
ellas, o más bien han dejado de sentirlas. Y no es, creo, cosa de que
se engrían los hombres y los pueblos que no han pasado por la edad
religiosa.
Lo de la desmesurada belleza de la vida está bien para escrito, y
hay, en efecto, quienes se resignan y la aceptan tal cual es, y hasta
quienes nos quieren persuadir que el del cepo no es problema. Pero
ya dijo Calderón (Gustos y disgustos no son más que imaginación,
act. I, esc. 4.ª) que «No es consuelo de desdichas, — es otra
desdicha aparte, — querer a quien las padece — persuadir que no
son tales.» Y además, «a un corazón no habla sino otro corazón»,
según fray Diego de Estella (Vanidad del mundo, cap. XXI).
No ha mucho hubo quien hizo como que se escandalizaba de que,
respondiendo yo a los que nos reprochaban a los españoles nuestra
incapacidad científica, dijese, después de hacer observar que la luz
eléctrica luce aquí, y corre aquí la locomotora tan bien como donde
se inventaron, y nos servimos de los logaritmos como en el país
donde fueron ideados, aquello de: «¡que inventen ellos!» Expresión
paradójica a que no renuncio. Los españoles deberíamos apropiarnos
no poco de aquellos sabios consejos que a los rusos, nuestros
semejantes, dirigía el conde José de Maistre en aquellas sus
admirables cartas al conde Rasoumowski, sobre la educación pública
en Rusia, cuando le decía que no por no estar hecha para la ciencia

debe una nación estimarse menos; que los romanos no entendieron
de artes ni tuvieron un matemático, lo que no les impidió hacer su
papel, y todo lo que añadía sobre esa muchedumbre de semisabios
falsos y orgullosos, idólatras de los gustos, las modas y las lenguas
extranjeras, y siempre prontos a derribar cuanto desprecian, que es
todo.
¿Que no tenemos espíritu científico? ¿Y qué, si tenemos algún
espíritu? ¿Y se sabe si el que tenemos es o no compatible con ese
otro?
Mas al decir ¡que inventen ellos!, no quise decir que hayamos de
contentarnos con un papel pasivo, no. Ellos a la ciencia de que nos
aprovecharemos; nosotros, a lo nuestro. No basta defenderse, hay
que atacar.
Pero atacar con tino y cautela. La razón ha de ser nuestra arma.
Lo es hasta del loco. Nuestro loco sublime, nuestro modelo, Don
Quijote, después que destrozó de dos cuchilladas aquella a modo de
media celada que encajó con el morrión, «la tornó a hacer de nuevo,
poniéndole unas barras de hierro por de dentro, de tal manera que
él quedó satisfecho de su fortaleza, y sin querer hacer nueva
experiencia della la diputó y tuvo por celada finísima de encaje». Y
con ella en la cabeza se inmortalizó. Es decir, se puso en ridículo.
Pues fué poniéndose en ridículo como alcanzó su inmortalidad Don
Quijote.
¡Y hay tantos modos de ponerse en ridículo...! Cournot (Traité de
l’enchaînement des idées fondamentales, etc., § 510) dijo: «No hay
que hablar ni a los príncipes ni a los pueblos de sus probabilidades
de muerte: los príncipes castigan esta temeridad con la desgracia; el
público se venga de ella por el ridículo». Así es, y por eso dicen que

hay que vivir con el siglo. Corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur
(Tácito, Germania, 19).
Hay que saber ponerse en ridículo, y no sólo ante los demás, sino
ante nosotros mismos. Y más ahora, en que tanto se charla de la
conciencia de nuestro atraso respecto a los demás pueblos cultos;
ahora, en que unos cuantos atolondrados que no conocen nuestra
propia historia —que está por hacer, deshaciendo antes lo que la
calumnia protestante ha tejido en torno de ella— dicen que no
hemos tenido ni ciencia, ni arte, ni filosofía, ni Renacimiento (éste
acaso nos sobraba), ni nada.
Carducci, el que habló de los contorcimenti dell’ affannosa
grandiosità spagnola, dejó escrito (en Mosche cocchiere) que «hasta
España que jamás tuvo hegemonía de pensamiento, tuvo su
Cervantes». ¿Pero es que Cervantes se dió aquí solo, aislado, sin
raíces, sin tronco, sin apoyo? Mas se comprende que diga que
España non ebbe egemonia mai di pensiero un racionalista italiano
que recuerda que fué España la que reaccionó contra el
Renacimiento en su patria. Y qué ¿acaso no fué algo, y algo
hegemónico en el orden cultural, la Contra-Reforma, que acaudilló
España y que empezó de hecho con el saco de Roma, providencial
castigo contra la ciudad de los paganos Papas del Renacimiento
pagano? Dejemos ahora si fué mala o buena la Contra-Reforma,
pero ¿es que no fueron algo hegemónico Loyola y el Concilio de
Trento? Antes de éste dábanse en Italia cristianismo y paganismo, o
mejor, inmortalismo y mortalismo en nefando abrazo y contubernio,
hasta en las almas de algunos Papas, y era verdad en filosofía lo que
en teología no lo era, y todo se arreglaba con la fórmula de salva la
fe. Después ya no, después vino la lucha franca y abierta entre la

razón y la fe, la ciencia y la religión. Y el haber traído esto, gracias
sobre todo a la testarudez española, ¿no fué hegemónico?
Sin la Contra-Reforma, no habría la Reforma seguido el curso que
siguió; sin aquélla, acaso ésta, falta del sostén del pietismo, habría
perecido en la ramplona racionalidad de la Aufklärung, de la
ilustración. Sin Carlos I, sin Felipe II, nuestro gran Felipe, ¿habría
sido todo igual?
Labor negativa, dirá alguien. ¿Qué es eso? ¿Qué es lo negativo?
¿qué lo positivo? ¿En el tiempo, línea que va siempre en la misma
dirección, del pasado al porvenir, dónde está el cero que marca el
límite entre lo positivo y lo negativo? España, esta tierra que dicen
de caballeros y pícaros —y todos pícaros—, ha sido la gran
calumniada de la Historia precisamente por haber acaudillado la
Contra-Reforma. Y porque su arrogancia le ha impedido salir a la
plaza pública, a la feria de las vanidades, a justificarse.
Dejemos su lucha de ocho siglos con la morisma, defendiendo a
Europa del mahometismo, su labor de unificación interna, su
descubrimiento de América y las Indias —que lo hicieron España y
Portugal, y no Colón y Gama—; dejemos eso y más, y no es dejar
poco. ¿No es nada cultural crear veinte naciones sin reservarse nada
y engendrar, como engendró el conquistador, en pobres indias
siervas hombres libres? Fuera de esto, en el orden del pensamiento,
¿no es nada nuestra mística? Acaso un día tengan que volver a ella,
a buscar su alma, los pueblos a quienes Helena se la arrebatara con
sus besos.
Pero ya se sabe, la Cultura se compone de ideas y sólo de ideas y
el hombre no es sino un instrumento de ella. El hombre para la idea,
y no la idea para el hombre; el cuerpo para la sombra. El fin del

hombre es hacer ciencia, catalogar el Universo para devolvérselo a
Dios en orden, como escribí hace unos años en mi novela Amor y
Pedagogía. El hombre no es, al parecer, ni siquiera una idea. Y al
cabo el género humano sucumbirá al pie de las bibliotecas —talados
bosques enteros para hacer el papel que en ellas se almacena—,
museos, máquinas, fábricas, laboratorios... para legarlos... ¿a quién?
Porque Dios no los recibirá.
Aquella hórrida literatura regeneracionista, casi toda ella embuste,
que provocó la pérdida de nuestras últimas colonias americanas,
trajo la pedantería de hablar del trabajo perseverante y callado —
eso sí, voceándolo mucho, voceando el silencio—, de la prudencia, la
exactitud, la moderación, la fortaleza espiritual, la sindéresis, la
ecuanimidad, las virtudes sociales, sobre todo los que más
carecemos de ellas. En esa ridícula literatura caímos casi todos los
españoles, unos más y otros menos, y se dió el caso de aquel archi-
español Joaquín Costa, uno de los espíritus menos europeos que
hemos tenido, sacando lo de europeizarnos y poniéndose a cidear
mientras proclamaba que había que cerrar con siete llaves el
sepulcro del Cid y... conquistar África. Y yo di un ¡muera Don
Quijote!, y de esta blasfemia, que quería decir todo lo contrario que
decía —así estábamos entonces—, brotó mi Vida de Don Quijote y
Sancho y mi culto al quijotismo como religión nacional.
Escribí aquel libro para repensar el Quijote contra cervantistas y
eruditos, para hacer obra de vida de lo que era y sigue siendo para
los más letra muerta. ¿Que me importa lo que Cervantes quiso o no
quiso poner allí y lo que realmente puso? Lo vivo es lo que yo allí
descubro, pusiéralo o no Cervantes, lo que yo allí pongo y

sobrepongo y sotopongo, y lo que ponemos allí todos. Quise allí
rastrear nuestra filosofía.
Pues abrigo cada vez más la convicción de que nuestra filosofía,
la filosofía española, está líquida y difusa en nuestra literatura, en
nuestra vida, en nuestra acción, en nuestra mística, sobre todo, y no
en sistemas filosóficos. Es concreta. ¿Y es que acaso no hay en
Goethe, v. gr., tanta o más filosofía que en Hegel? Las coplas de
Jorge Manrique, el Romancero, el Quijote, La vida es sueño, la
Subida al Monte Carmelo, implican una intuición del mundo y un
concepto de la vida, Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht. Filosofía
esta nuestra que era difícil se formulase en esa segunda mitad del
siglo XIX, época afilosófica, positivista, tecnicista, de pura historia y
de ciencias naturales, época en el fondo materialista y pesimista.
Nuestra lengua misma, como toda lengua culta, lleva implícita
una filosofía.
Una lengua, en efecto, es una filosofía potencial. El platonismo es
la lengua griega que discurre en Platón, desarrollando sus metáforas
seculares: la escolástica es la filosofía del latín muerto de la Edad
Media en lucha con las lenguas vulgares; en Descartes discurre la
lengua francesa, la alemana en Kant y en Hegel y el inglés en Hume
y en Stuart Mill. Y es que el punto de partida lógico de toda
especulación filosófica no es el yo, ni es la representación —
Vorstellung— o el mundo tal como se nos presenta inmediatamente
a los sentidos, sino que es la representación mediata o histórica,
humanamente elaborada y tal como se nos da principalmente en el
lenguaje por medio del cual conocemos el mundo; no es la
representación psíquica sino la pneumática. Cada uno de nosotros
parte para pensar, sabiéndolo o no y quiéralo o no lo quiera, de lo

Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.
More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge
connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.
Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and
personal growth every day!
ebookbell.com

The One And The Many Contemporary Collaborative Art In A Global Context Grant H Kester

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Tags

Categories

Download

Quick Actions

Statistics

Related Slideshows

The One And The Many Contemporary Collaborative Art In A Global Context Grant H Kester

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Slide 1

Slide 2

Slide 3

Slide 5

Slide 7

Slide 8

Slide 9

Slide 10

Slide 11

Slide 13

Slide 14

Slide 15

Slide 16

Slide 17

Slide 18

Slide 19

Slide 20

Slide 21

Slide 22

Slide 23

Slide 24

Slide 25

Slide 26

Slide 27

Slide 28

Slide 29

Slide 30

Slide 31

Slide 33

Slide 34

Slide 35

Slide 36

Slide 37

Slide 38

Slide 39

Slide 40

Slide 41

Slide 42

Slide 43

Slide 44

Slide 45

Slide 46

Slide 47

Slide 48

Slide 49

Slide 50

Slide 51

Slide 52

Slide 53

Slide 54

Slide 55

Slide 56

Slide 57

Slide 58

Slide 59

Slide 60

Slide 61

Slide 62

Slide 63

Slide 64

Slide 65

Slide 66

Slide 67

Slide 68

Slide 69

Slide 70

Slide 71

Slide 72

Slide 73

Slide 74

Slide 75

Slide 76

Slide 77

Slide 78

Slide 79

Slide 80

Slide 81