Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art (2005)

Lead catalog essay from the exhibition “Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art,” Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University (2005) Theories and Methods of Collaborative Art Practice Introduction: Art, Speech & Violence He speaks. the lake in front becomes a lawn. Woods vanish, hills subside, and valleys rise... William Cowper, The Garden (1785)1 In Cowper’s poem The Garden he writes with ironic reverence of Lancelot Brown, perhaps the most famous landscape designer of his day. Brown, who was nicknamed “Capability” for his skill in identifying the potential for “improvement” in even the least promising of properties, is associated with the natural or English school of garden design during the Georgian era. The natural garden style was developed in opposition to the precise, mathematical French style epitomized by Le Nôtre's work at Versailles and was intended to evoke an uncultivated Arcadian wilderness. Of course the labor necessary to make nature appear “natural” was herculean; Brown’s gardens involved massive earth-moving projects, the planting and transplanting of vast numbers of trees, and the creation of lakes and ponds. This is one of the central paradoxes of the eighteenth-century landscape garden; in order to produce the effect of naturalness it is necessary to engage in the most exhaustive manipulation of nature. In many cases the desire for a wholly natural scene (one that would exclude all evidence of human culture other than that symbolic of leisure and contemplation) required the destruction and relocation of entire villages and towns that had the misfortune of being in the line of sight of a given estate.2 It is this power to literally reorder nature in conformity with human ends that led Cowper to describe Brown as an “omnipotent magician.” Further, it suggests an underlying continuity between the aesthetic “appropriation” of nature by the landscape gardener, and the proprietary relationship to the land characteristic of Brown’s clients, whose wealth was based on the hereditary control of vast agricultural estates. In her memoirs Hannah More describes a visit to Hampton in 1782 in which she received a "very agreeable" tour of the gardens from Brown: “He told me he compared his art to literary composition. Now there, said he, pointing his finger, I make a comma, and there, pointing to another spot where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part (where an interruption is desirable to break the view) a parenthesis, now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.”3 More’s account reiterates this correlation between the power of artistic expression and the physical mastery of the land. “He speaks,” as Cowper writes, “and valleys rise”. The garden is literally a text, to be conjured forth from the blank page of the landscape. We often associate the figure of the artist with a heightened sensitivity to the natural world, but intimacy does not always imply care, and the artist’s brush can as easily resemble a dissecting scalpel as it can a lover’s caress. The act of speech, of expression, is driven by the imperative to assert the prerogatives of self over a resistant substance. It exists within an extractive economy which all too often views the natural world as a resource rather than an interlocutor. I’ll return to the question of speech 2 below. For now I simply want to note the not-so-secret alliance between the personality of the artist within modernism and the mode of subjectivity that C.B. Macpherson famously termed “possessive individualism”.4 It is a restless, conative concept of self associated with the rise of a mercantile bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, but it’s origins, I would argue, lie further back, in the quasi-capitalist gentry of the early modern era for which the possession of property was a defining act, the very crucible of its social and political identity.5 While the modern avant-garde has consistently defined itself in opposition to the bourgeoisie culturally, the process by which it constitutes itself ontologically, it’s proprietary relationship to the external world, presents an obvious parallel. The relentless assertion of self, and of self-fashioning, unimpeded by conscious or history, guilt or obligation, the transformative, “all that is solid melts into air” energies of the rising capitalist class, are mirrored by the modern artist, eager to obliterate existing tradition and precedent, and to bend the material of art to his own ends. One of the central myths of this promethean subjectivity is it’s absolute autonomy (from the limits of past art and from the demands of conventional modes of social and political identification) coupled with an equally strenuous rejection of the pragmatic and utilitarian. The moment that the artist begins to produce his work “for” any interest, agenda, or cause, other than his own, singular vision, he sacrifices the purity that sustains and defines that work as art in the first place. This detachment is necessary because art is in constant danger of being subsumed to the condition of mass culture, entertainment, or propaganda and can preserve it’s distance from these beguiling cultural forms only through a principle of opposition. If mass culture is simplistic and 3 superficial, the domain of Fox News and Paris Hilton, then art must be demanding and complex. In a 1977 interview Michael Heizer chastizes environmental art in precisely these terms: “I’m a sculptor… I’m not for hire to go patch up mining sites. The strip-mine aspect of it is of no interest to me. I don’t support reclamation art sculptural projects. This is strictly art… Look, I’m not out to entertain. So much damn art is about that!” 6 For Heizer the land is a material to be used and arranged, albeit on a collossal scale. Earth of a given color and consistency, rock of a given weight and density, are deployed in sculptural compositions that reference history at only the most generic and quasiarchaeological level. The actual social and economic context in which land is used, it’s relative sickness or health, it’s relationship to human habitation here and now, are not properly aesthetic concerns. Acknowledging these factors would only entangle Heizer in a compromising set of obligations and constrain the free play of his creative vision. For Heizer, as for many proponents of the avant-garde tradition, the work of art is, and must be, the product of the artist’s unfettered, expressive self. It is this very claim to individual autonomy that gives the work it’s ethical valence in a culture dominated by conformist mediocrity. The unconditional autonomy of the artist’s vision is matched by the autonomy of the art object itself. The implacable materal otherness of the object allows it to function as a surrogate or stand-in for another human subject, creating a necessary displacement from actual social exchange. This displacement is necessary because “we” (viewers, if not artists) can’t be trusted to disavow our instrumentalizing relationship to difference here and now. The interaction between viewer and work of art thus functions as a kind of training exercise, teaching them to adopt a greater sensitivity 4 towards alterity in their subsequent social interactions. It is a pharmakon, in Derrida’s gloss on Plato, both poison and remedy; subjecting the viewer to a violent shock or dislocation which nonetheless has the effect of chastening their predisposition towards violence and objectification in the future.7 For Adorno the physicality of the object was seen to embody the very separateness of the aesthetic itself, as if its autonomy could be maintained only so long as it was safely locked within the physical container of the art work. Already in this formulation a series of elisions have occurred. The ability of art to transform consciousness is only catalyzed when the work of art emerges autochthonically, from the singular personality of the artist, in the form of a physical object created a priori and later consumed or experienced by the viewer. The projects featured in Groundworks challenge the avant-grade tradition sketched above on multiple levels. In place of the stringent autonomy of avant-garde art, we find artists working in alliance with specific communities in political struggles involving environmental policy, urban planning, and cultural perceptions of the natural world. In place of the unyielding individualism of the conventional avant-garde, we find these practitioners collaborating with other artists, policy-makers, researchers, activists and community members, effectively blurring the boundaries of authorship through participatory interaction. In several cases (Park Fiction’s work in Hamburg, for example, or Suzanne Lacy and Susan Steinman’s Elkhorn City project) the work of art only comes into existence through a process of consultation and reciprocal exchange (both verbal and non-verbal) with collaborators. While the exhibition features numerous physical objects (ranging from sand paintings to water pumps to portable oxygen bars) 5 they are not intended to prepare us for some future moment of intersubjective exchange, but rather, to catalyze social interaction here and now. The audience’s engagement is no longer defined primarily through distanced visual contemplation, actualized by reading or de-coding an image or object, but through haptic experience actualized by immersion and participation in a process. From the gardens of Georgian England to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, our concern for nature has always depended on our ability to extract value from it, whether this value is aesthetic, spiritual or crassly materialistic. Can art reveal to us another way to relate to the natural world, not as a resource for self-expression or a malleable clay to be molded by the artist’s vision, but as an interlocutor? Can we conceive of a relationship to nature that is ethical as well as aesthetic? The projects in Groundworks seek to answer these questions. They draw on a tradition of innovative art practice that originated in the Conceptualist and Earth Art milieu of the 1960s and ‘70s. While some artists of this generation simply viewed the land as a larger canvas, of interest primarily for it’s cultural and historical associations or for the formal properties of scale and material opened up by the natural environment, others began to approach the natural world as a complex gestalt of biological, political, economic and cultural forces. Hans Haacke’s Rhine Water Purification Plant of 1972 created a literal linkage between the space of the museum and the surrounding environment, using a system of pools and filtration units in the gallery to reveal and then cleanse the pollutants in the nearby Rhine river. Helen and Newton Harrison’s projects during the 1970s, such as the Survival Series and the Lagoon works, developed innovative proposals for ecosystem 6 restoration through a process of conversational exchange and mapmaking. Over the past two decades younger practitioners, working both nationally and internationally, have begun to build on this legacy. Collectives such as Ala Plastica, Huit Facettes, PLATFORM, Littoral Arts, Superflex, Urban Ecology Action Group, and Park Fiction among many others, have developed projects ranging from portable biogas generators designed for rural African villages to proposals to uncover long-hidden rivers in the center of London. The artists and collectives featured in Groundworks are committed to working in public contexts, ranging from rural villages to city parks. Their gallery installations exist in a reciprocal relationship to this “other” practice, functioning as an extension of it rather than a simple documentary record. In addition to the video projections and monitors included in several of the second and third floor gallery installations, the exhibition features a specially curated media component in the first floor gallery, with video, software and internet-based works selected by Patrick Deegan. The projects presented in Groundworks are inherently interdisciplinary, bringing together ad hoc coalitions of artists, community members, activists, policy makers, and others for extended collaborative encounters that cross the boundary between art and activism, aesthetics and politics, and the museum and the town hall. Groundwork’s artists are united by the desire to maintain a productive and unresolved tension between these discursive and institutional sites. For this reason we’ve invited a diverse mix of writers and thinkers to contribute essays to this catalog, including philosopher Andrew Light, whose research focusses on environmental ethics, Maria Kaika, an urban geographer 7 who writes on issues of political ecology and water supply, social historian Maurine Greenwald, co-editor of an invaluable anthology of essays on the Pittsburgh Survey, and Malcolm Miles, a UK-based cultural theorist with a particular interest in contemporary urbanism and social change. Our intention is to situate these practices critically and historically at the interstices of disciplinary knowledge. In the following discussion I will return to the questions of agency and modernity introduced above in order to outline a theoretical framework for the analysis of collaborative art practice. This endeavor poses certain challenges, as existing art theory is oriented primarily towards the analysis of individual objects and images understood as the product of a single creative intelligence. This approach privileges what I’ve described as a “textual” paradigm in which the work of art is conceived as an object or event produced by the artist beforehand and subsequently presented to the viewer.8 In this paradigm the artist never relinquishes a position of semantic mastery, and the viewer’s involvement is primarily hermeneutic. While there is significant latitude in the viewer’s potential response to the work (clinical detachment, shock, awe, etc.), they can exercise no real or substantive effect on the form and structure of the work, which remains the singular expression of the artist’s authoring conscious. This paradigm is entirely appropriate for most image- and object-based work, but it has little to offer in response to collaborative practices, which emphasize the process and experience of collective interaction itself. Like most paradigms, it can be both empowering and disabling. In the case of the collaborative practices exhibited in Groundworks it prevents us from grasping what is genuinely different, and potentially productive in this work. 8 An anecdote may help to illustrate this problem. I recently had the opportunity to present a number of collaborative projects to an audience of artists and art historians. One of the audience members, an artist as it happens, expressed uncertainty as to the artistic legitimacy of these collaborative practices. Referring to a piece by the Austrian group Wochenklausur, which involved a series of extended conversations on Lake Zurich pleasure boats, she argued that the presence of a dock-side audience, which could actually witness the departing boats, would be sufficient to elevate these performances to the status of “art”. This observation suggests the extent to which a conventional specular economy (which situates the viewer as the recipient of an aesthetic/pedagogical experience programmed by the artist) has become naturalized as the only possible framework for an aesthetic encounter. For me the power of Wochenklausur’s work clearly lay in the logic of enactment rather than representation per se; in the complex exchanges that occurred on the boat, rather than in the image of the boat. Yet the idea that these exchanges could be aesthetic, or bear in anyway on an experience relevant to art, was simply unthinkable for this artist. This attitude stands in marked contrast to the participatory approach evident in many of the Groundworks projects, which challenge (without entirely suspending) the division between viewer, artist, and work of art. A more nuanced understanding of this work requires a kind of Kuhn-ian “paradigm shift” in the language of art theory; a way of literally seeing the work of art and it’s relationship to the viewer differently. As I will elaborate below, I believe there is an aesthetic dimension to the process of reciprocal exchange instantiated in these projects. It constitutes a form of creative labor that is in 9 some ways quite different from the labor demanded by the conventional work of art (that is, the labor necessary for the viewer to come to terms with an image that resists their initial attempt at conceptual mastery; the “semantic” labor set in motion by this resistance and the viewer’s corresponding desire to interpret or understand the work of art). There are few resources available within conventional art and aesthetic theory to address the sustained experience of collective or collaborative interaction, the haptic, verbal and non-verbal encounters that are so central to the projects in Groundworks, not just among the members of specific groups, but between and among these artists and the broader network of participants catalyzed by a given project. There is, as yet, no theoretical language to describe this intensely somatic form of knowledge: the exchange of gesture and expression, the complex relationship to habitus and habit, and the way in which conflict, reconciliation and solidarity are registered on the body. This “labor” is not productive in the traditional sense associated with the emergence of private property; it does not seek to extract value from a recalcitrant nature. Rather, its productivity lies in the transformative effect of labor on the identity of those who share it. As I will outline below, labor, duration and process are anathema to dominant paradigms in recent art theory and criticism, which instead prize the instantaneous, the sublime and the “unworked”. Art must be precisely the inverse of labor (understood as coerced, externallyimposed and temporally extensive) to play its assigned cultural role. I will begin, then, with the question of labor, tracing certain problematics around labor and agency that 10 originate with the dawn of modernity, and which continue to inform, if only at the subterranean level, our assumptions about the work of art. 11 1. Property and Identity Where there is no property there is no injustice. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding9 Labor, in the early modern period, must be understood as a predicative term, emerging in conjunction with its counterpart: property. It was the mobility of property, the novel idea of possession as a right that could be earned, and lost, that set the modern period apart. As the economic historian Robert Heilbroner famously observed: As late as the fourteenth or fifteenth century there was no such thing as land in the sense of freely salable, rent-producing property. There were lands, of course— estates, manors, and principalities—but these were emphatically not real estate to be bought and sold as the occasion warranted. . . A medieval nobleman in good standing would no more have thought of selling his land than the governor of Connecticut would think of selling a few counties to the governor of Rhode Island.10 The movement of landed property was, of course, always virtual, a transfer of rights, but it had a profound significance. This “great transformation” was not simply economic, it was experienced on the ontic level; literally changing the way in which political subjecivity was constructed and legitimated in the early modern era.11 One’s social status, for so long determined by birth and blood, could be radically transformed by the externalization of self in the act of rendering nature productive. This new model of identity arises in the context of a changing political scene in Europe, associated with the emergence of a proto-capitalist class of merchants and gentry. It’s earliest manifestations occur in England, in response to the pressure exerted by economically powerful, but un-titled, landowners during the 1600s and early 1700s. One of the 12 principle targets of this nascent class was the concept of divine right. The king must be obeyed because, within the great chain of being, he is located in closest proximity to God. Further, man must accept his natural subordination within the hierarchy of religious and secular power. It was this system of aristocratic privilege that limited the political voice of England’s propertied classes and which was used to justify monarchical fiat over their land and income. We encounter the first discursive challenge to this system in the early texts of the natural law tradition, which sought to construct new forms of political legitimation in the face of the gradual desacralization of authority in modern Europe. What would replace the tattered "canopies" of god and king? The answer, as I have already begun to suggest, is the self-legislating subject of liberal humanism; a subject whose identity is predicated on the possession of certain inherent powers or faculties as well as on the physical possession of property. On a more strategic level, the natural law tradition sought to endow the contingent political claims of the nascent bourgeois with the inevitability of nature, in order to challenge the appeal to tradition “since time immemorial” on which the defense of monarchical power was based. The natural law tradition identified certain quasi-anthropological moments, rooted in the mists of early human society (if not in the constitution of the human personality itself), which could be used to ground and legitimate the new political claims of the third estate. For the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and the theorist and professor Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf (1632-1694), two leading exponents of the natural law tradition, the “state of 13 nature” was a communal affair in which God gave all men in common the resources of the earth. As Grotius wrote in De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres (1625): Soon after the creation of the world, and a second time after the Flood, God conferred upon the human race, a general right over things of a lower nature. . . In consequence, each man could at once take whatever he wished for his own needs, and could consume whatever was capable of being consumed.12 In this “original community of the land” (Communio Fundi Originari) everyone is free to take what he or she needs from the common land in order to survive. Eventually this condition of divinely mandated communism gave way to some form of private possession (earned by labor, not endowed by God). The transition from common access to private property was crucial for seventeenth and eighteenth century liberal political thought in England. This debate bore directly on contemporary arguments about the enclosure of the commons and the relative moral and political authority of the landowning classes. If all men are created equal then how do we account for the systematic inequalities that exist between landowners on their vast estates, and the rural working class? Grotius and Pfufendorf, along with Locke and Kant present differing accounts of this transition, but all involve the emegence of some form of protodemocratic decision-making which allowed the “commons” to be privatized, while at the same time providing the operational foundation for modern systems of representative government based on public consensus. Property, and most importantly the act of possession, emerge in the philosophy of the Enlightenment as one of the chief markers of legitimate subject status—not merely the possession of property, but more specifically, the faculty of possession, as it 14 is exercised or performed by the subject. This performative aspect is particularly important. One becomes a subject through the act of possessing things as property. This socially and historically contingent act is at the same time founded in an inherent capacity of the human subject; it brings this subject into harmony with universal moral laws and rights. However, the privileging of property as a precondition for public agency introduces a central tension into liberal discourse. On the one hand the concept of the public challenges the stasis of social roles prescribed by divine right. The public isn’t a fixed entity, but rather, a process or mode of interaction that is available to all. But this openness can be sustained only so long as it is never fully tested: so long as the public sphere is limited to like-minded members of the same, property-owning class (and not the more numerous “lower orders” clamoring for their own political recognition). The “public” thus retains a metaphysical dimension. On the one hand it refers to a physically proximate, empirically verifiable process of social exchange and deliberation, and on the other it is an as-yet unrealized ideal, limited for now to a select few (propertied men). Property introduces a second point of tension as well. The public actor enters into political exchange with a commitment to acknowledge and respect the differences represented by other actors, and with an implicit willingness to revise his or her own beliefs in response to these others and on behalf of a collective good. But the possession of property is premised on an unyielding self-interest and individualism. Within the pedagogy of capital, as outlined by thinkers such as Adam Smith, the sole priority is to enrich and aggrandize oneself, often at the expense of others. The boundaries between the motivations of the “private” self of the market, and the “public” 15 self of civil society are notoriously difficult to maintain. Labor and property are linked by the power attributed to labor in transforming both nature, and, crucially, the laboring subject. This is articulated through the natural law concept of the extension of personality. Grotius and Pufendorf predicate their account of property on the division between the "I," or what philosopher Karl Olivecrona labels the "spiritual ego," and the body. The "I" is the foundational site of identity and possession; the "I" is understood to "possess" the body, and the actions of the body. Taken together the body and its actions constitute the individual's suum, "that which belongs" to the individual. Thus, according to Grotius, "life, body, limbs, reputation, honor, and our own actions (actiones propriae) belong to ourselves . . .”13 The suum is the basis for a moral faculty (facultas moralis) that provides a kind of protection for the possessing subject. Of particular importance is the fact that Grotius and Pufendorf argue that the sphere of the suum can be extended to encompass things "outside" the subject's body. This "extension of personality" is such that one can acquire a moral warrant for these things (land, goods, and so on) and incorporate them into the suum. Once these things are assimilated into the personality any attempt to remove or damage them constitutes an injury that is morally commensurate to physical harm to the body. 14 We should think of the suum not simply in terms of a spatial metaphor (the suum as the "sphere" of the subject), but also as a faculty or power to assimilate and extend this sphere on the basis of a moral justification. In On the Law of Nature and of Nations (1672) Pufendorf notes that "ownership" doesn't function by "physically and intrinsically 16 affect[ing] things themselves." Rather, it produces what he describes as a "moral effect in relation to other men. . ." 15 Locke also establishes his defense of property through recourse to the "extension of personality" model. He describes a process by which the labor of the subject's body (supervised by the mind) "mixes" the subject's personality with nature (via extraction or cultivation). Through this mixing one infuses objects with one's personality and is thereby entitled to remove them from the commons and claim them as one's sole property. As Locke writes, "Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own and thereby makes it his property." 16 Notably, Locke’s model of epistemology in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding employs this same concept of “mixing,” via the cognitive labor necessary to combine simple concepts into the more complex conceptual aggregates (“compound ideas”) characteristic of speculative thought. The postulates of the natural law tradition gradually coalesce into more coherent form in early liberal political philosophy, which will contend that a social order based on the primacy of property and individual possession (as a system for allocating wealth and opportunity) is intrinsically egalitarian and will naturally prevent the systematic inequality and arbitrary abuses of power characteristic of absolutist government. This system is not, however, without it’s own internal contradictions. The only way you can achive subjectivity, and experience freedom, is at the expense of an "other" person/thing which serves as the vehicle through which you actualize, experience, and express that subjectivity. Within the larger economy (of identity-as-capital), there must always be 17 something that you own or possess—a constant supply of material to be controlled or appropriated.17 The actual form taken by the property is less important than the kind of relationship that it sets in place between you and the world around you. It is an active, acquisitive, transformative relationship in which the world exists as the vehicle for your own redemption and fulfillment as a subject. This is clear in Locke's discussion of property, in which his will is coextensive with the labor or property of his horse or servant—all are simply vehicles for his own achievement of subject status: Thus the Grass my horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digg'd in any place where I have a right to them in common with others, become my Property, without the assignation or consent of any body. The labor that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my Property in them . . .18 The bourgeois subject is not autonomous, but intrinsically dependent (on the labor of others and on a continuing supply of materials, frontiers, and opportunities for ontic investment) for it’s self–constitution.19 Of particular importance here is the slippage that is introduced among its various "possessions". Locke’s servant or his horse are merely extensions of his will, yet in the very act of externalizing and extending that will it becomes displaced, introducing a potential confusion between the body and objects, and between the subject and the things that the subject can claim to possess. Further, the relative privilege, the ontic spaciousness, of the bourgeois subject, far from being “earned” through a fair and equal competition, the outcome of which offers a meaningful indication of the relative fortitude of their conative drive, is, in fact, always/already biased by pre-existing distortions in the field of social and economic opportunity (in Locke’s time, the fact that the common land on which a subject might actualize his will, 18 and achieve political sovereignty, was being enclosed or privatized by the already wealthy landowners who controlled parliament). Labor is, on the one hand, proof of the superiority of the bourgeoisie to the parasitic and effete aristocracy, and on the other, a reminder of the contingency of its hard-won status. The myth of its absolute autonomy can only be sustained by an active suppression or denial of this underlying dependence on the labor of the Other. In the social sphere this suppression is produced through an ethical discourse that identifies the non-propertied (the poor or working class) as failed subjects, whose powers of appropriation are insufficiently developed (from this flows a long tradition of conservative political discourse that views the poor as lazy, morally depraved, etc.). This ethical discourse is combined with an aesthetic discourse that operates through the strategic visual suppression of labor, and of the social costs of bourgeois privilege. In order to observe the early articulation of these spatial and visual regimes we must return to Capability Brown and the English-style landscape garden. During the eighteenth century landscape gardening was widely considered to be ! the apex of British culture and was a privileged subject of philosophical speculation.20 Discussions of landscape gardening figure prominently in the writings of Alexander Pope, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and many other Enlightenment philosophers, including Kant. During the mid-eighteenth century England’s emerging industrial economy, as well as expanding colonial investments, were contributing to the development of a wealthy middle class of factory owners, bankers, brokers, and manufacturers. Land ownership, which had for so long been the prerogative of the 19 aristocracy, was increasingly available to the rising bourgeoisie. Thus, the English landscape garden is closely linked to the emergence of a class of powerful, land-owning "men of fortune" who began to acquire large country estates as the natural accompaniment of their wealth, often through acts of enclosure.21 The natural English style that was favored at this time was characterized by unimpeded vistas, flowing, closely mown expanses of lawn, the "natural" placement of shrubs and groves of trees, and serpentine footpaths.22 In addition to these visual components, one of the most essential elements of the natural style garden was something you didn’t see: workers. In a rural economy dependent on massive armies of seasonal laborers, the landscape garden was an oasis of solitude. The aesthetic of the garden hinges on the suppression of particular elements in the landscape (for example, the farms and cottages of the rural laborer, or cultivated fields) that offer any evidence that the land itself might be economically productive. The boundaries between the garden and the “working farm” must be absolute. This dynamic is apparent in the writings of Humphrey Repton, one of the leading garden designers of the late eighteenth-century. Consider his comparison of the "park," which is characterized by "undulating lines contrasting with each other in variety of forms; trees so grouped as to produce light and shade to display the varied surface of the ground; and an undivided range of pasture" with the utilitarian "farm": The farm is forever changing the color of its surface in motley and discordant hues; it is subdivided by straight lines of fences. The trees can only be ranged in formal rows along the hedges; and these the farmer claims a right to cut, prune, and disfigure. Instead of cattle enlivening the scene by their peaceful attitudes, or sportive gambols, animals are bending beneath the yoke, or closely confined to 20 fatten within narrow enclosures, objects of profit, not of beauty. 23 Repton goes on to warn of the danger, due to the "prevailing rage for agriculture," of trying to "blend" or "unite" the farm and the park. What disturbs Repton is not that these two types or uses of land should co-exist, but rather that landowners should carelessly allow them to mingle together in close proximity: It is the union, not the existence, of beauty and profit, of laborious exertion and pleasurable recreation, against which I would interpose the influence of my art; nor let the fastidious objector condemn the effort, till he can convince the judgment that, without violation of good taste, he could introduce the dairy and the pig-sty (those useful appendages of rural economy) into the recesses of the drawing-room, or the area of the salon.24 The formal principles of "nature" itself (irregularity, lack of cultivation), having been expunged from the countryside, were now internalized as aesthetic components of the estate. One finds condensed here, in displaced form, the central tension between the aesthetic, as a domain of free pleasure and Spieltrieb, and the instrumentalizing imperatives of the market, that will define the modernist tradition. The eighteenth century landscape garden reveals the complex relationship that exists between the (ostensibly) socially transcendent act of aesthetic contemplation and the socially determined ownership of property and the ways in which each of these is in turn related to models of subjectivity. The aesthetic principles that are elaborated in the landscape garden can also be viewed in relationship to the suum and the extension of personality in natural law. They provide a set of tools for regulating the landowner's experience of property, and of themselves as possessive subjects. The garden performs the complex task of insulating 21 the bourgeois subject from the "actual" rural environment (i.e., the sight of cultivated fields, laborers, etc.), while at the same time producing a mythologized recreation of that environment. Here we have two key episodes in the construction of a bourgeois social epistemology: first, the process of masking or suppressing the "difference" of the rural economy, and second, the process of transforming the surrounding environment into a kind of reflective scrim that mirrors back to the bourgeois subject its own idealized selfimage. The identity of the bourgeois subject is produced, or performed, through the act of possession. This performance requires the agency of some as yet un-possessed thing which must provide sufficient resistance to man's will to mark the boundaries of his identity, while at the same time not offering so much resistance that this identity is threatened. The freedom of his view expresses the extent of his domain and of his status as a subject. Paradigmatically "nature" is the name assigned to that category of objects that resist man's will. The landscape garden provides the spectacle of a naturelike land, un-marked by the signs of possession. A kind of capitalist primal scene, it promises both the plenitude and the universality of the original common land, open and available and not yet subject to the regime of cultivation. It is land that is suspended between nature and culture, awaiting only the transformative ritual of ownership. The redemptive experience of property-taking is performed over and over again in the unimpeded vistas offered by the natural-style landscape garden. The natural garden aesthetic provided a screen memory against the actual violence of enclosure and coerced human labor on which landed wealth depended, 22 evoking instead a halcyon illusion of bourgeois power arising organically and autonomously from the surrounding countryside. The spatial tactics of the landscape garden expand, in due course, to encompass a whole range of cultural practices devoted to regulating visual evidence of the poverty, inequality and human sufferring precipitated by the rise of industrial capitalism. They are most evident in systems of urban planning and suburban development, as described by Frederich Engel’s in his famous account of Manchester in the 1850s: . . . the finest part of this arrangement [the spatial organization of housing and businesses in the city] is this, that the members of the money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the laboring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined. . . with an almost unbroken series of shops. . . [that] suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime that form the complement of their wealth.25 In her essay for this catalog Maria Kaika describes the logic of this visual suppression through the imperative to expel a “bad” nature from the nineteenth-century industrial metropolis through modern sewer systems and the paving over of urban rivers. The ideological function of the aesthetic, it’s participation in a process of masking and dissimulation, constitute a central motif in modern art and art theory, which will be defined in large measure by it’s ongoing fear of the seductive, manipulative powers of kitsch and mass culture and the cooptive abilities of the bourgeoisie. It is symptomatic, then, that a characteristic response of the early avant-garde to this cooptive threat was to confront bourgeois viewers with evidence of the human labor and misery that constituted the repressed Other to their own privilege (Courbet’s Stonebreakers, 23 Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, the Barbizon school, etc.). This underlying suspicion of the aesthetic continues to the present day, in fretful speculations over the dangerous ability of visual and somatic experience to trivialize or suppress the actuality of violence. Martin Jay reiterates this position in his essay “Drifting into Dangerous Waters,” warning of a “promiscuous aestheticization of the entire world” in which “human suffering will become an occasion for aesthetic delectation.” Although the causal link is not entirely clear, Jay appears to blame modern art for this dire situation due to it’s “indiscriminate leveling of the distinction between artwork and lifeworld through the projection of the qualities of the former onto the latter”. “When the frame is broken,” as Jay writes, “representation is confused with reference and unmediated reality becomes fair game for aestheticization.”26 The “frame,” the clear division between art and daily life, should be rigorously policed. For Jay, the risk of “pig styes in the drawing room,” to use Repton’s evocative phrase, is simply too great. Far from challenging the separation between art and quotidian social structures artists must maintain it, addressing themselves to the viewer only obliquely, through the surrogate of the artwork safely confined within the sanctuary of the museum or the gallery. 24 2. Aesthetics, Labor and Collectivity To deconstruct, certainly, but that already represents a luxury for whoever has not built a world. Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community (1999)27 As Jay’s commentary suggests, art strikes a Faustian bargain with the forces of modernity. It makes a virtue of a necessity (detachment from life praxis), by using it as the catalyst for a new function: embodying a distanced, critical perspective on normative social and cultural values (typically, through reflection on representational norms). The work of art in the avant-garde tradition will shock the viewer out of their mythic selfenclosure, forcing them to acknowledge the social costs of their own privilege and to abandon their reliance on reductive and objectifying modes of perception. As I noted in the introduction, the relationship of the artist to the viewer implied by this tradition is essentially adjudicatory and conspiratorial. The artist is the inveterate provocateur, tirelessly deconstructing, subverting, and destablizing fixed meanings and identities in the name of an inchoate aesthetic libertarianism. This attitude is so pervasive in contemporary art, and has become so routinized, that it’s hard to imagine an alternative. It is premised on a deep skepticism about the viewer, who is assumed to possess a “natural” inclination towards reductive or instrumentalizing behavior that requires remediation and correction by the work of art (in this, the avant-garde tradition owes more to the traditions of Christianity, and concepts of repentence and original sin, than one might expect). This skepticism also links the modern avant-garde to the proponents of natural law, and the broader philosophical history of liberalism, for which self-interest 25 is the founding condition of human subjectivity. For Grotius there is no inherent human disposition towards convivialty. Rather, community and the sacrifice of self-interest is only forced upon us by the finitude of natural resources (or, for Hobbes, by the unbearable violence of man’s war-like nature). In the absence of these external compulsions humanity’s inherent tendency would be towards dispersal, singularity and division. Hume will subsequently argue that self-interested desire is the primary mechanism of human conduct, laying the groundwork for the ontological paradigm that continues to dominate analytic philosophy to the present day. For both avant-garde discourse and bourgeois liberalism the conative drive is understood as a quasi-anthropological feature of human subjectivity; it’s primary motive force. From Pere Ubu to Karen Finley the avant-garde has often defined itself in opposition to what it perceives as a paradigmatic “bourgeois” identity: a Piñata-like caricature that embodies all the most reviled characteristics of the boorish middle class: it’s heedless narcissicism, it’s reactionary fear of difference, and its destructive compulsion to extract profit from even the most anodyne of sites. By the 1980s, under the influence of continental philosophy and it’s critique of the Enlightenment, this figure gained a new theoretical pedigree and was re-born as the “Cartesian” subject. A more sophisticated incarnation of the bourgeois subject, the soul-destroying power of the Cartesian subject was seen to reside not simply in it’s class origins, but in it’s very ontic condition: centered, autonomous and self-identical. The necessary antidote to this mode of subjectivity was a shattering “ontological dislocation” (cf., Lyotard); exposing the false consciousness of bourgeois subjectivity via the quasi-religious “revelation” that its 26 cherished self-hood is actually relational, decentered and contingent. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a useful interpretation of the avant-garde rhetoric of revelation in her analysis of the “paranoid consensus” that has come to dominate contemporary critical theory informed by structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism. Based in part on the historical identification of critical theory with the act of revealing the (structural) determinants that pattern our perception of reality, the paranoid approach obsessively repeats the gesture of “unveiling hidden violence” to a benumbed or disbelieving world.28 As enabling and necessary as it is to probe beneath the surface of appearance and to identify unacknowledged forms of power, the paranoid approach, in Sedgwick’s view, attributes an almost mystical agency to the act of revelation in and of itself. As she writes: The paranoid trust in exposure seemingly depends . . . on an infinite reservoir of naiveté in those who make up the audience for these unveilings. What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate, anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic or even violent?29 As I’ve suggested above, the contingency of bourgeois subjectivity is hardly a repressed secret, awaiting only the epistemological dynamite of the avant-garde artist or critical theorist to break it free and catalyze a new era of peace and harmony. In fact, contingency and dependency are openly acknowledged as central features of modern subjectivity. As the natural law tradition demonstrates, bourgeois identity is always already relational, contextual, and performative. The decisive shift within modernity is from a static identity (dependent on fixed proximity to God) to an identity that is produced or invented through labor. Thus, the arid procedural mechanisms of natural 27 law carry a radical implication. Bourgeois identity is marked by a colonizing expansion of self, yes, but also an opening out of self to otherness. Identity is mutable in this formulation, not fixed or given. It has no intrinsic substance, only a potential or capacity, waiting to be actualized by the subject through their interaction with the material and social world. While bourgeois ideology attempts to cover over this contingency, to “retranscendentalize” it via the ethical and aesthetic procedures I’ve described, it remains central to the history of liberal thought. In fact, the very deliberateness of these strategies, their visibility as “strategies” in the first place, suggests the operation of a kind of “cynical reason” in which the bourgeois viewer, while conscious of this dependency, simply chooses to ignore it.30 The projects on display in Groundworks challenge us to recognize new modes of aesthetic experience and new frameworks for thinking identity through the thickly textured haptic and verbal exchanges that occur in the process of collaborative interaction. They call upon us, in turn, to reconsider the formation of modern subjectivity. In this endeavor it’s necessary to uncouple the process by which identity is constituted within modernity from the conative drive of possessive individualism. Unfortunately, currently dominant theoretical paradigms, especially those informed by the poststructuralist tradition, harbor a deep suspicion of labor and durational experience. Jean Luc-Nancy’s writing on community is emblematic in this regard. Community, for Nancy, can only be ethically constituted if it arises in an instant, in a moment of “unworked” epiphany. As soon as the experience of community involves a durationally extended process of social and discursive exchange it descends into mythic 28 essentialism. Thus, Nancy’s “inoperative” community is a “workless and inoperative activity. It is not a matter of making, producing or instituting a community.” and “Community is given to us—or we are given and abandoned to the community; a gift to be renewed and communicated, it is not a work to be done or produced.” 31 In his understandable desire to foreclose the potential violence of direct, inter-subjective exchange, Nancy reduces all human labor (“work,” “making,” “production,”) to a simple expression of conative aggression, functioning only to master and negate difference. The result is a fetishization of simultaneity in aesthetic experience (cf., the sublime, shock or disruption, etc.), and a failure to conceive of the knowledge produced through durational, collective interaction as anything other than compromised, totalizing, and politically abject. For Nancy, like Repton, there can be no evidence of labor in the “garden” of an aesthetic community because the aesthetic is precisely that mode of experience that offers a therapeutic antidote to the instrumentality of work. Repton and Nancy (or the traditions they represent) are linked by this key elision; labor can only ever be the domain of coercion and exploitation. We encounter a parallel aporia around verbal and haptic exchange in the poststructuralist tradition, beginning with Sausurre’s decision to concentrate exclusively on language (as a synchronic totality) at the expense of an investigation of the diachronic processes of human speech (he famously considered speech acts or parole an unsuitable object of “scientific” inquiry). Derrida extends this schism in his Manichean opposition between the “phonocentrism” of speech (the realm of authorial presence and Platonic truth) and the ludic domain of ecriture. Only the written text is open to the 29 liberatory play of meaning, while speaking and listening, and by implication, the haptic texture of human social exchange, is consigned to the realm of logocentric fixity. As this theoretical tradition has acquired an increasingly canonical, and unquestioned, status in the US academy and art world, it has tended to block a deeper engagement with the mechanics of collective action and transformation. I would suggest that the challenge posed by modern identity lies not with our illusory independence per se, but with our relationship to our own intrinsically dependent nature. The decisive point is not to simply acknowledge the “truth” of our de-centered selves in some single, epiphanic moment engineered by the artist, but rather, to develop the skills necessary to mitigate violence and objectification in our ongoing encounters with difference. This form of ethical and aesthetic insight can’t be generated through the surrogate of an art object or through an ontological dislocation that simply reflects the experience of instrumentalization back onto the viewer. It requires, instead, a reciprocal, durationally extended process of exchange on both the discursive and the haptic level (literally, a “co-labor”). 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; calling attention to the exchange itself as creative praxis. There is a kind of open-ness that is encouraged as participants are implicated in an exchange that is not immediately subsumable to conventional, pragmatic contexts, but is ceremonially marked off as “art”. In fact, it is precisely the lack of categorical fixity around art that makes this open-ness possible. This approach figures prominently in the work of the Austrian group Wochenklausur, whose 30 consultative planning project in Styria is presented in Groundworks. For Wochenklausur, the distancing from the protocols and assumptions of normative social exchange (the classroom, the town council, the boardroom, the church, etc.) created by aesthetic framing reduces our dependence on the default behaviors, expectations and modes of address that are typically triggered by these sites, encouraging a more performative and experimental attitude towards the work of identity. Despite their differences the projects on display in Groundworks reflect a calling out to these experiences: a desire to work through them in a tentative, experimental, but nonetheless systematic, manner. This distance from the quotidian is not, however, based on an absolute segregation. It is not the defensive “autonomy” of conventional modernist art, but rather, a relationship in which the quotidian is held in an unresolved suspension with the aesthetic. The projects on display are neither fully “art” nor fully “activist” in orientation and derive much of their force from this tension. They are sufficiently separate from existing networks of social power to allow for the unfolding of new insights, but at the same time, sufficiently integrated with these networks to allow for their pragmatic translation. They float between the real and the virtual, the applied and the symbolic, echoing Malcolm Mile’s observation on the necessary “ambivalence” of contemporary art, a sense of “standing back while being immersed”. In his essay for this catalog Miles identifies this ambivalence with Kant, a position that is reiterated by critic/theorist Geoffrey Galt Harpham. “The Kantian faculties,” Harpham writes, “invariably disappoint philosophers seeking rigorous distinctions, moralists seeking clean resistances, and aestheticians seeking art as such . . .”32 When Park Fiction re-invents the process of 31 participatory planning as a game of desire and imagination they exploit this undecideability. It is literally embodied in their name (the “fiction” of a park), and in the audacity to imagine a public park in place of expensive, high rise apartment buildings. Rather than simply protest the process of gentrification in Hamburg, 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 interventionist residents”). The element of fantasy is apparent in the plans already developed for the park, including the Teagarden Island, which features artificial palm trees and is surrounded by an elegant 40 meter long bench from Barcelona, an Open Air Solarium and a Flying Carpet (a wave-shaped lawn area surrounded by a mosaic inspired by the Alhambra). A set of latent methodological concerns run through these projects, an understanding that the issues of representation and material production that so preoccupied previous generations of artists have given way to engagement with modes of social exchange, collective action and what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “the sphere of interhuman relations”.33 It is not so much a question of having “transcended” these previous issues (in fact, most of the artists and groups in Groundworks clearly view the social networks within which they operate as already implicated in a politics of representation) than of widening the field of artistic practice beyond the textual paradigm (the artist making an object or image for the viewer’s consumption). Thus, Navjot Atlaf’s background as a sculptor and installation artist is evident in the hand 32 pump sites she produces in collaboration with Adivasi communities in Bastar Chattisgarh in central India (the Adivasi are India’s indigenous or native population, and have, along with the Dalit or “untouchables,” long suffered from economic and social discrimination). At the same time, she views the collaborative interactions among artists and village residents, 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 pump is as important as creating the sites; it encourages a communication network between artists from different cultures and disciplines from within Bastar and outside, and with and between the young.” These cross-cultural exchanges, which Altaf also organizes around the collaborative production of children’s temples (Pilla Gudis), “encourage 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 constructing the pump sites and temples, the interactions of artisans, children, and visitors, are at the same moment designed to encourage a critical re-negotiation of Adivasi identity. This re-negotiation is particularly crucial in India due to the rise of right wing fundamentalism over the past decade, which has actively repressed non-Hindu cultures (like that of the Adivasi). At the same time the mainstream educational system in India attempts to “neutralize” cultural difference, according to Altaf through a policy of “Unity in Diversity” that minimizes the specific histories of the Adivasi and the Dalit.34 This concern with the complex micro-politics of collective identity is evident as well in the work of the Senegalese group Huit Facettes-Interaction. In an interview with 33 Groundworks media curator Patrick Deegan, Huit Facettes coordinator Amadou Kane Sy speaks of the essential “proximity between artistic expression and the social field” in their collaborative projects in the village of Hamdallaye Samba Mbaye. Huit Facettes has established a permanent arts workshop in the village in order to catalyze a series of exchanges that privilege the “individual temporalities” of the local culture against the conventional oppositions that are typically used to situate African art (art vs. crafts, “Third” vs. “First” world, etc.) within the ethnocentric discourse of the west.35 In place of a simple opposition between centered and de-centered, essentializing and inchoate subjectivities, we encounter a strategic reconfiguration of cultural identity across and within Africa (what Kane Sy calls “south-south” exchanges). The projects of Huit Facettes and Altaf return us to the question of speech with which this essay began, but in a new register. They enact a mode of expression that no longer privileges the individual artist as exemplary speaker but rather, takes on a strategic relationship to political collectivities currently in formation. As Michel de Certeau observed in his analysis of the events of May ’68, “Insofar as people wish to run the risk of existing— insofar as they notice that in order to have speech its power must be assured—they will give to their identity the historical figure of a new cultural and political unity.”36 Is it possible that the propensity for community is not simply a concession to an inherent individualism, extracted from us by necessity or force? Is it possible to forge new identities, and new forms of collective unity, without the cohesive threat provided by a common enemy? Do we possess a deeper, ameliorative inclination towards our fellow beings? And can art help to elaborate, distill, or catalyze this inclination? 34 The artists of Groundworks don’t begin with the assumption that the viewer, participant or collaborator is always, already a naïve accomplice to oppression, or that they possess a privileged insight into the operations of social power, unavailable to others. They begin, instead, with an opening out to their collaborators: a recognition of them as complex and fully human, which I have written about elsewhere in terms of a dialogical aesthetic.37 As Kane Sy writes: "In Senegal, as elsewhere in Africa, greeting someone, being conscious of the presence of the other, as interlocutor, is to bear witness to their existence as a human being in the truest sense of the word. The one who ‘feels’ that you exist (by respecting you) legitimates to some extent your humanity. This is a fundamental value in the part of the world where we live."38 Altaf reiterates this sentiment, “Beginning to listen is the beginning of the process of communication. Within the group we feel that we are conscious about the right to speak, how to speak together, or to speak with or alongside others, in the sense of forming alliances. All this could be impossible, but we believe that those who are interested in restructuring power in more egalitarian ways, must consciously work towards these values.”39 This process of speech entails respect for the interlocutor and for the process of communication itself, as subtle, shifting and temporally extensive. Suzanne Lacy, Susan Steinman and Yutaka Kobayashi have been working in collaboration with residents of Elkhorn City, Kentucky for six years, gradually building the trust and rapport necessary to catalyze the process of re-envisioning their ecologically devastated community. This kind of labor is invisible to conventional art discourse, but clearly essential to these practitioners. The exchanges initiated in the workshops of Navjot Altaf, Huit Facettes, and 35 Lacy, Steinman and Kobayashi constitute a form of labor that is distinct from the “work” of possessive individualism. Their goal is not the violent extraction of value or the suppression of difference, but a co-production of identity at the interstices of existing cultural traditions, political forces, and individual subjectivities. Nor is this labor subsumable to the tradition of “antagonistic” democracy favored by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which seeks to preserve a symbolic kernel of un-assimilable resistance as a necessary corrective to the conformist pressure exerted by consensual political models.40 Antagonism is only possible among those who hold fixed positions and are defined in turn by a subjectivity that must be defended from cooptation. This model fails to acknowledge the possibility that the process of intersubjective exchange itself, rather than merely transmitting existing knowledge, could be generative and ontologically transformative. It is the promise of collaborative aesthetic experience to prefigure another set of possibilities, to enact change and not simply represent a priori positions. The opening out to alterity and the collaborative interlocutor evident in Groundworks is paralleled by an opening out to the natural world. This approach is not, however, concerned with nature as a pristine and romanticized ideal. We encounter instead a consistent acknowledgement that nature is, for better and for worse, always defined in relation to human use and habitation. This connection is explicit in Ala Plastica’s Emergent Species project in 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 identify a significant correspondence between the structure of reedbed propagation and a creative practice that links diverse particularities via a non36 hierarchical network: We planned a project represented by the metaphor of rhizomatic expansion 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 noninstitutional and intercultural models while working with the community and on the social sphere; interacting, exchanging experiences and knowledge with producers of culture and crops, of art and craftwork, of ideas and objects. This approach echoes Andrew Light’s discussion of “place” and the dialectical relationship between narrative and identity formed through lived interaction with particular eco-systems. Ala Plastica began their AA Project in the Rio del Plata basin with a process of “local knowledge recovery” in order to actualize the insights of the area’s residents into the social and environmental costs of destructive “megaengineering” projects. These include the Zárate-Brazo Largo complex (a massive railroad and highway line) and the Punta Lara Colonia bridge, which have damaged eco-systems in the region (through flooding and erosion) as well the social fabric of local communities. In order to challenge the institutional authority of the corporate and governmental interests responsible for these projects, Ala Plastica worked with the area’s residents to articulate their own visions for the region through the creation of communications platforms and networks for mutual cooperation. If Ala Plastica’s work is predicated on the enhancement of solidarity here and now, we also encounter in this exhibition a sense of collectivity that transcends spatial or temporal proximity. This “anamnetic” solidarity is apparent in Ichi Ikeda’s commitment to water access as a “fundamental human right”. Noting the vast disparities in water 37 usage (the average Kenyan survives on five liters of water per-day while some Americans consume as much as a thousand), Ikeda seeks to elicit a shared responsibility for water resources that extends regionally and even globally. His 80,000 Liter Water Box project (2003) involves the creation of large water storage units in sites around the world as a way to call attention to these disparities and their potential impact on future generations. He describes the water boxes “as a starting point for forwarding water for 1000 people to the next generation living on the earth”. In his Water EkidenManosegawa River Art Project (1999-) Ikeda used a series of meetings, performances and workshops to catalyze a sense of collective responsibility among the residents of four communities on the polluted Manosegawa River, leading to the creation of four “water stations” for the storage and transfer of water. This ability to imagine, and to literally feel, our connectedness to others, extends into the past and future in Platform’s Delta project, which evokes the lost riparian communities of London, and Brookner, Flom and Rosenthal’s Discover McKeesport project, which offers an anticipatory glimpse of a revitalized McKeesport, circa 2020. It brings us, finally, to the faculty of aesthetic imagination and the essential human capacity to envision alternative forms of sociality, and a future for the planet that transcends the brutish values of economic “necessity”. At a historical moment in which possessive individualism has risen to the status of a religion in the American polity, and in which trust, and the willingness to risk communication across boundaries of difference, are so imperiled, the projects in Groundworks remind us of art’s ability to evoke a society based on hope rather than fear, and on care for others rather than the violent assertion of self. 38 From “The Task” in The Poetical Works of William Cowper, with Memoirs and Notes (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1920), p.326. 1 2 Historian Martin Hoyles describes the transformation made by Lord Harcourt at Nuneham Courtenay near Oxford in 1761: The village street became a path in the park for viewing the valley below. The church was turned into a classical temple and the congregation still responsible for its upkeep, now had to walk a mile and a half to worship. Cows were provided with a special underground passage so they could pass from field to field without spoiling the view. One old woman, the shepherdess Babs Wyatt, was allowed to stay in her cottage in the middle of the new landscape garden. Martin Hoyles, The Story of Gardening (London: Journeyman Press, 1991), p.36. 3 William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), p.155. 4 C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1962). 5 See Grant Kester, The Faculty of Possession: Property and the Aesthetic in English Culture 1730-1850 (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, 1996). 6 Erika Lee Doss, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), p.124. Original source: John Gruen, “Michael Heizer: ‘You Might Say I’m in the Construction Business,’” ARTnews 76 (December 1977), p.99. 7 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp.61-84. 8 See my essay “Aesthetic Enactment: Loraine Leeson’s Reparative Practice,” Art for Change: Loraine Leeson, 1975-2005 (Berlin: Neueun Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 2005). 9 John Locke, The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, volume one, edited with an introduction by John W. Yolton, (London: J.M. Dent, 1961), p.155., (Book 4, chapter 3). 10 Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers; The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 6th. edition (New York: Touchstone, 1999), p.28. 11 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). 12Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres, vol.2, book 1, translated by Francis W. Kelsey, with Arthur E.R. Boak, Henry A. Sanders, Jesses S. Reeves, and Herbert W. Wright, introduction by James Brown Scott, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p.186. 13Grotius cited in Karl Olivecrona, "Locke's Theory of Appropriation," John Locke: Critical Assessments, Richard Ashcraft, editor, (London: Routledge, 1991), p.330. 14Olivecrona, "Locke's Theory of Appropriation," pp.330-331. 15The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf, Craig L. Carr, editor, Michale J. Seidler, translator, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.175. 16John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (and Robert Filmer's Patriarcha), edited, with an introduction by Thomas I. Cook, (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1969), p.134. 17 As C.B. Macpherson notes, property should be understood not as a "thing" to be possessed, but as a "right" to be exercised or performed. C.B. MacPherson, "The Meaning of Property," Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p.3. 18 John Locke, "Of Property," in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, p.18. 19 While Locke is a staunch advocate of the idea that "every man has a property in his own person," this principle comes into conflict with the "extension of personality" I've already outlined, which allows one person to possess the labor of another as his or her property. In a society in which the bulk of the common land has already been engrossed, one segment of the population will, inevitably, be forced to sell their labor to the other. Thus, the juridically free worker is granted property-right in his own labor in a situation in which his only possible option is to then surrender that "property" in exchange for wages. That is, the act of granting the worker property in his own labor is only allowed in order for it to then be made available to others. 20In his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) Sir William Chambers argued for the universality of the garden as an art form: "The production of other arts have their separate classes of admirers . . . But Gardening is of a different nature: its dominion is general; its effects upon the human mind certain and invariable; without any previous information, without being taught, all men are delighted with the gay luxuriant scenery of summer, and depressed at the dismal aspect of autumnal prospects; the charms of cultivation are equally sensible to the learned and the ignorant. . . " The Eighteenth Century: Art, design and society, 1689-1789, edited by Bernard Denvir, (London: Longman, 1983), p.244. 21 As Miles Hadfield notes, "The rising class of industrialists, merchants, and new rich from India and North America sought political power, pleasure, and gentility through the building or acquiring of country houses. Soon, in spite of the vulgar taint of trade, they were in a position equal to—and often financially sounder to—the inheritors of the old parks and country seats. The machinery for obtaining their lands was of course, often the use of the Enclosure Acts." Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1985), pp.197-198. 22The centrality of the landscape garden in English culture at the time is derived in part from it’s explicit political symbolism. If the geometric French garden, with its rows of regimented parterres stretching to the horizon, was seen by many as symbolic of the inflexibility of the French monarchy, imposing its a priori rules on the populace regardless of their wishes, then the more accommodating "natural" landscape garden was symptomatic of the political character of a country that was democratically open and based on the natural harmony of human interests. What made the “natural” style English landscape garden unique at the time was precisely its informality, its openness, and its liberal refusal to dictate a single point of view or to be circumscribed by imposed hierarchies. Here was a form of power that didn't have to rely on the sheer force of an externally-imposed royal will to command and regulate the surrounding environment, and its political subjects. In A History of British Gardening Miles Hadfield describes the "new fashion" of the natural landscape garden as "essentially Whig" (p.180). 23The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphrey Repton, Esq., with an introduction, analysis, biography, notes, and index by J.C. Loudon, F.L.S., (London: Longman and Company, 1840), p.208. 24Ibid. 25 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), p.78. 26 Martin Jay, “Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from the Work of Art,” Aesthetic Subjects, edited by Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p.18-19. The tension between the desire to transgress discursive and disciplinary boundaries, on the one hand, and to protect the “autonomy” of the aesthetic, on the other, is a central issue in contemporary art theory. Jay’s tendency to define the erosion of aesthetic autonomy through a sexualized rhetoric (he warns of the “promiscuous re-enchantment of the entire world” and the “promiscuous aestheticization of the entire world”) reiterates the conventional avant-garde opposition between art (which is resistant, austere and demanding) and popular and consumer culture (which surrender themselves to the viewer to easily). 27 Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, translated by Stephen Pluhacek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p.4. 28 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2003), p.140. I’d like to thank Carol McDowell and Legier Biederman at UCLA for bringing this reference to my attention. 29 Ibid., p.141. 30 See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 31 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, edited by Peter Connor, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p.35. 32 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Aesthetics and Modernity” in Aesthetics and Ideology, George Levine, editor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p.134. 33 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), p.28. 34 Navjot Altaf, “Contemporary Art, Issues of Praxis, and Art-Collaboration: My Bastar Interventions and Interrogations” (unpublished essay, 2004). 35 Artist Jay Koh has explored similar issues in relationship to art practice in southeast Asia. See my essay “The Art of Listening (and of Being Heard): Jay Koh’s Discursive Networks,” Third Text 47 (Summer, 1999), pp.19-26. 36 Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, introduction by Luce Giard, translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.32. 37 See Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 38 Patrick Deegan, unpublished interview with Amadou Kane Sy, (spring 2005). 39 Navjot Altaf, “Contemporary Art, Issues of Praxis, and Art-Collaboration: My Bastar Interventions and Interrogations”. 40 See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).