Last year I wrote about a ‘multiplexed’ notion of art, arguing that instead of dissolving the boundaries between art and everyday life, significant forms of contemporary practice run as currents through all manner of other, extra-artistic activities. I suggested that it is always possible to isolate the art signal, however closely it becomes bound up with other strands of practice.
The question then arises, what is it that distinctively characterises art practice, enabling it to become neatly recoverable?
At one level art clearly has a distinct social and discursive identity – there are relevant traditions that lend any specific ‘art action’ coherent artistic status. This relates less to the material qualities of the work or its mode of choreographic articulation than its position within an ongoing conversation about the nature and possibilities of art. And this conversation is actually multiple conversations, none of which are hermetically sealed. The limits and boundaries of the plural ‘art conversation’ are constantly subject to renegotiation. So it becomes circular and unhelpful to say that art is simply whatever happens within the purview of art. Something more is needed – not an essentialist definition, but some means of identifying key features, topoi and attractors within this awkwardly determined and constantly evolving space.
Very briefly then, I wonder whether some meta-level understanding is possible?
Could we recognise now, for instance, a shift away from the modern (Kantian) aesthetic paradigm of autonomy, disinterestedness, non-instrumentality and formal identity towards something that appears roughly opposite – enmeshed, engaged, useful, formally elusive and profoundly ethically characterised?
Within the context of 20th century modernism, Adorno famously leaves the Kantian values in place precisely in order to describe a critical role for art. He argues that art, in its alienation from the practical world and the world of instrumental scientific rationality, represents a space of contradiction, and a space in which contradictions can be expressed. It indicates (contrary to Kant) the impossibility of reconciliation, and yet maintains also, in its pained distance from the world, some forlorn hope for genuine social transformation.
Contemporary art is less content with this sense of exclusion – whether regarded as an avenue of freedom or as a sign of alienation. Socially engaged practice, for instance, is social not just in being participatory, not just in involving interaction with and between people, but in terms of opening up a relation to other, extra-artistic forms of practice – social work, ethnography, teaching, etc. It is social then also in looking beyond art per se, in resisting any sense of modernist aesthetic autonomy.
Much more explanation needed here, but these are just notes.
Returning to the notion of multiplexing then, it occurs to me now that the recoverable aesthetic character of any specific action remains an awkward problem. At one level I am tempted to say that contemporary art resists all neatly delineated efforts of recovery, yet art also needs to guard against assuming some universal discursive validity. The latter would tend to raise old issues of colonisation; a lack of respect for other means of engaging with the world that are not specifically aesthetically constituted. So, for instance, the activity of walking can be articulated in artistic terms, but this need not imply that walking is inevitably and exclusively artistically inflected. It was in the interests of respecting other dimensions of action than I conceived the notion of multiplexing. It enabled any particular action to be conceived in terms of a multiplicity of interests, rather than being reducible to a singular orientation.