So at one level I reject the idea of a critical art – an art that stands outside life, engaging in interference, subversion, etc. Yet, at the same time, I also reject the idea of an art that blurs the boundaries between art and life – that negates their schism. So I argue that art can neither stand outside life nor be neatly positioned within it. How can I make sense of this contradiction?
My suspicion of critical art hinges less on the issue of its alienated position per se than upon the various assumptions of critical purity and clarity that are associated with this position. Alienation need not grant a lofty perspective or a privileged insight into the nature of the world. Alienation need not even demand the thought of an integrally exterior being. Alongside separation. alienation can also entail dimensions of common identity and complicity. Indeed it describes much more accurately a troubled state – a mingled sense of implication and withdrawal – than an absolutely configured exclusion. In this sense art can retain a sense of alienation without imagining any categorically grounded capacity for critique.
On the other hand, the suggestion that art can intervene directly in life – and become co-extensive with life – ignores two things: firstly, that the notion of intervention itself assumes separation precisely as it struggles to overcome it; and secondly, most importantly, that art draws its energy from its troubled, uncertain, intimately distanced relation to the real.
There is a need, somehow, to conceive of an art that is both inside and outside and that is neither purely inside nor purely outside.