A SPECTRUM OF LEGIBILITY
When is a socially engaged work of art too obvious? And when is it too confusing?[1]
For many involved in the arts, an artwork must remain opaque enough to invite a proper amount of speculation and guesswork. Confusion is applauded over the crass simplicity of the obvious. An artwork easily open to interpretation provides a certain freedom from instrumentalization -from an agenda- and allows a viewer to experience speculation and consideration. In activism, though, clarity is celebrated, and a cogent message can reach a wide audience and can serve as a weapon. The two ends of this dynamic, which I refer to as the ambiguous and the didactic, have long proven irreconcilable. This quandary has haunted political art for a very long time. In the 1930s, the philosopher George Lukacs famously railed against the excesses of expressionism, claiming that its apolitical escapism held the nostalgic seeds of fascism. Ernst Bloch countered that expressionism was, in fact, deeply political: in it, one could find methods to escape the tyranny of Stalinism. In the history of Marxist aesthetic criticism, we find the same battles plaguing theorists torn between their desire for practical revolution and their affection for aesthetic gestures that resist their own time. Adorno opted for high modernism and praised the music of Schopenhauer—an aesthetic form that resisted the easily interpretable was the only appropriate to perpetuation of capital. And Bertolt Brecht offered a form of theater that escaped the didacticism of Lukacs’s aesthetic by attempting to produce a theater that jumped off the stage and into life itself. The subject of class oppression would touch the very heart of the audience, and in so doing, encourage a revolutionary culture. In this way, Brecht sought to net only point at the oppression of the world, but to produce in the viewer the seeds of changing that world.
Those involved in socially engaged art are certainly familiar with the divisive nature of this discussion. Work that is too deeply locked into a language of aesthetics is dismissed as too referential, too elusive, and too inaccessible to a general audience by those whose primary concerns are activism, while art that is prescriptive is too clichéd and banal for audiences whose primary concern are art. Socially engaged artists can easily feel, just like Deller in his It Is What It Is, that their combination of the didactic and poetic falls between the cracks of the aesthetic and political concerns of the activism and art communities. Not an easy knot to untangle.
The didactic is obvious, and the ambiguous is opaque; what the didactic gains in clarity, the ambiguous gains in obscurity. As with all binaries, most gestures actually fit somewhere between these two points. Most socially engaged artists deploy techniques of didacticism in order to make a work just legible enough, so that they can then engage a viewer in a level of ambiguity that will allow her to explore the work for herself, while the work under the heading of the didactic ranges from propaganda to documentary to realism to satire to the utopian, it can also be ambiguous. The didactic must be open-ended enough to encourage speculation but deploy enough legibility to impart ideas. Similarly, the ambiguous must seduce a viewer into engaging with it, and, if it relies on an aesthetic language too far removed from everyday experience, a viewer may reject its curiosity without close engagement. It’s true, of course, that discussing the uses of the didactic comes much easier than discussing the benefits of the ambiguous. Particularly because a truly open gesture is not easy to find in an era of vast commodification, making the opportunities to experience the ambiguous rare and specific. But one person’s experience of the didactic and ambiguous may not be another’s, and as with all things, one must step back and consider these concerns across the vast constellations of powers that determine them. Both the didactic and the ambiguous have something to offer under differing conditions. The battle over the didactic and the ambiguous must therefore be considered from the complex field of contexts and audiences.
THE DIDACTIC
The word “didactic” is certainly lacking friends in the arts. In the art world—a strange land that appreciates loose metaphors, elusive meanings, complexity, and conceptual ideas—the word didactic is the ultimate epithet, sending shivers down the spines of studio artists during critiques and reviews. A second cousin to “banal,” “didactic” is thrown around at all things embarrassing, naïve, and painfully obvious. This places the didactic outside the realm of art.
Yet, this shorthand—for both what constitutes the realm of art as well as what remains outside of its purview- policies a dubious border. The contradictions that surround the question of what actually constitutes a work of art have persisted throughout the history of art. And an inherent lack of clarity-mixed with a community whose members feel that they understand the definition of art quite intuitively- continues to impede engaged artists who want to use the tools of art for social change. The arts community is a tough audience to appease. The relationship between the didactic and the arts has suffered immensely, and the gulf continues to grow: the socially engaged artist that wades into the waters of the didactic faces the wrath of an arts community that privileges rigidified codes of ambiguous aesthetics above all else.
Didactic, by definition, means the desire to teach and moralize. This is often reduced to the notion that a work can be understood, that the production of an image and the reaction it seeks in the viewer are not hard to read. When a poster says “Stop the War,” we read it as didactic because its desire to encourage the viewer to also be against the war is obvious. But the ability to read intentionality and the ability to teach are not exactly the same. One could almost go so far as to say that in everyday speech, the word refers to a form of teaching where the lesson is already known. That is to say, teaching and moralizing imply a form of communication that is repetitive and unrevealing. For the purposes of argument, we must, to some degree, accept this small discrepancy between common usage and its definition.
The didactic can mean many things, and the legibility of a didactic artist’s intentions is unstable—different people read images from different perspectives. What might be obvious to one viewer may not be obvious to another, and the attempt to gauge what will make sense to a viewer—what will inspire her—amounts to a kind of enlightened guesswork. But there are real implications to this guesswork. How does one actually reach people? And what do images, speech, and actions do? After decades of increased visual production, culture as a whole has evolved in its capacity to interpret codes. Increasing visual literacy provides an acute sense of intentionality.
Consider the paradox of Abstract Expressionism, which is certainly not the first genre that comes to mind when discussing the didactic. The abstract expressionists’ abstract paintings were produced out of a desire to become more real. Defended by the New York theorist Clement Greenberg, the abstract expressionists rejected representation altogether: they argued that representational painting was illusionist–that was no more real or obvious than a magic show. What Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman saw in their work was a rejection of the aesthetic values of the bourgeoisie in favor of an entirely new nonrepresentational aesthetic that painted things as they are. This rejection of the bourgeois aesthetic in favor of one’s own, is of course, the very point of the avant-garde tradition: twenty years later, the Minimalism of Richard Serra, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin would function in much the same way. Minimalism, too, cashed in on their aesthetic rejection of bourgeois aesthetics.
Strangely enough, the contemporary criticism of abstract expressionism labeled the work extremely didactic. It was obvious, and what you saw was what you got. A red painting with a yellow stripe was a red painting with a yellow stripe, and nothing more. Yet even if, in art historical terms, abstract expressionism didn’t mark a break with bourgeois art, in the American psyche, the movement embodied a new state of affairs: if what you saw was what you got, then what many people saw were rich people pretending sophistication in front of something a child might be able to paint.
Which is to say that one person’s idea of the didactic is another person’s state of confusion. When I worked at MASS MoCA, we asked a Harvard class to study audience reception of an exhibition I organized called Becoming Animal, which explored the porous space between humans and animals. To put their conclusion in simple terms, they found that the more the audience knew about art, the fewer interpretative connections they made with the work. While people who knew about art focused on minute aesthetic maneuvers, those that did not made giant leaps in regard to what the work could possibly mean, drawing upon a vast range of personal references. One could argue that the lesson of their study is that the more one knows about art the less one gets out of it, but this would be overstating the matter considerably. The more important lesson is simply that the more one knows about art, the more radically different one’s approach is to art, compared with that of the general viewer. This lesson becomes all the more important, as artists interested in reaching popular audiences must account for the gap between their (and their community of art-makers and critics’) understanding of the artistic gesture and the understanding of a general audience.
But let us not completely dilute the experience of the didactic, which can, at times, be as straightforward as the didactic message itself. In a recent visit to an anarchist bookstore, I went by the art section to find what one might expect. Books on graffiti, Adbusters, billboard manipulation, Emory Douglas posters for the Black Panthers, and antiwar poster campaigns were the range of purchasable options. Adorning the book-store walls were the wonderful “Celebrate People’s History” poster series emphasizing the work of lost radical leaders like Fred Hampton, Emma Goldman, Little Bighorn, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, and numerous people and points of history generally unknown. While all this work remains important, I couldn’t help but feel that there wasn’t any room in the store for more non-didactic art. No books on contemporary art could be found, and every aesthetic project had to have a cause. Every visual signifier either had to be from the street or from a movement. The ambiguous, the poetic, the absurd—any gesture that didn’t directly correlate to activism—simply was not invited.
THE AMBIGUOUS
An artist’s longing for ambiguity is understandable. The right not to be clear offers a tremendous kind of freedom: in a world that always wants something from us, isn’t it appealing to make something that makes sense to no one? Isn’t the pursuit of the ambiguous, in essence, the pursuit of individual freedom? Any discussion of political or socially engaged art must begin with an acknowledgment of this basic instinct, which resides in the hearts of many artists and must be respected. The dream of not being utilitarian is a courageous and exciting ambition that should not be squashed.
That said, the tensions between the didactic and the ambiguous need to be approached with sensitivity and an awareness of each approach’s values, for the ambiguous is a confusing dream that lives in all of us.
The arts often provide a safe haven for projects that escape basic notions of common sense—that are, by design, irrational, confusing, opaque, non-literal, open-ended, poetic, and ab-surd. This embrace of the obscure is often liberating for artists themselves, but for many viewers focused on political change, these absurd antics can resemble a room full of jesters juggling before a king—the weirdness easily dismissed as entertainment for a bored ruling class. This reactive and suspicious tendency has left the absurdist edge of contemporary art outside the analytic lens of many political activists. Nonetheless, this work often has much to offer.
Consider international Airport Montello (2006), in which a collective called eteam organized a small community in Montello, Nevada to arrange a layover by a plane at an abandoned local airport. The tiny town’s economy was in collapse, like that of many of the small towns that litter the southwest—it was a ghost town waiting to happen. An abandoned airport remained one of the few elements of Montello’s infrastructure, and it was literally gathering tumbleweeds, along with the occasional windblown plastic bag. The eteam, a collective of two people, traveled to the town in an effort to rally the community around an absurd cause: the brief opening of the airport for one plane.
The airport project came on the heels of other strange endeavors the eteam had enacted in Montello. After interviewing numerous residents about what made they found that one of the town’s great assets was that it had never experienced a traffic jam, so in an effort to upset the natural order, the eteam rallied Montellans to get in their cars, drive toward a central intersection, and, for maybe the first time in the town’s history, enjoy the peculiar pleasure of a traffic jam. This strange action endeared the eteam to some people in the area and made them all the more annoying to others. After their experiment with small-town traffic, they asked the locals they had worked with to hatch a more ambitious plot. With the assistance of the New York arts organization Art in General, the eteam received a grant to fly a plane to Montello and, for a half a day, enjoy the fruits of another pleasure long unknown to Montello and its residents: the plane layover (and a working airport). Some residents took on a job as luggage handlers, while others took on the air traffic tower, while others still worked local security or hosted the bar. All in all, International Airport Montello emerged as a performative production that was a cross between Airplane! and Waiting for Guffinan.
What exactly were the political results of this project? It had captured the imagination of the town, and the eteam had emboldened the community to take on a form of absurdist social action. The use of the absurd had worked as a catalyst for a local experiment that would most certainly fall outside the range of the didactic. Where does this kind of work fall in the realm of socially engaged art? The social significance of work like this is often dismissed, yet it deserves consideration not because it is interesting, but because, at times, it can be effective in capturing the imagination.
Activists often use the phrase “be the change you wish t to see in the world” and some art certainly produce exactly this kind of effort – albeit not necessarily in the way activists intend this phrase to be used. The eteams’s venture into the desert produced a dream enacted by multiple people; a play that was life at the edge of the horizon. The effect on and activation of the imagination were powerful because the work opened up a sense of freedom not just in the future, but in the very present of the now.
Another example of such work was created by the Viennese collective Gelatin. In their provocatively titled project Dig Cunt (2007), Gelatin simply dug a hole in the sand on the beach in Coney Island and filled it up every day for the course of a week. This was a truly Sisyphean adventure: four scantily clad Austrians smoking cigarettes in the sand, laughing, and spending their days doing something and then undoing it. It was, in other words, a project without sense. And yet, over the course of the event, people would approach the Gelatin team and ask about what they were doing. When the answer was “digging a hole and then filling it back up,” the insanity of such a gesture often piqued the interest of those around them. What was the point?
Both of these absurd, Dada-inspired projects—International Airport Montello and Dig Cunt—do not discuss politics too overtly (though the use of the word “cunt” by four queer Austrian boys could be a kind of political provocation). Nor do they attempt to rectify a social ill. But while their nonpolitical position places them outside the dialogue of political art, their use of ambiguity in public space has political implications.
What are the political uses of the absurd, the corrosive, the curious, the silly, the insane, and the melancholic? What are the political uses of Bruce Nauman’s performance, Bouncing in the Corner No. 1 (1968), where the artist simply bounces his body over and over again against a wall? What are the political consequences of Spencer Finch’s series of pink paintings, Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy’s Pillbox Hat (in 10 parts) (1993), in which the artist tries to recreate the exact color of Jacqueline Onassis’s pink pillbox hat from memory? What is to be gained by Guy Ben-Ner directing a family soap opera in IKEA showrooms in Stealing Beauty (2007)? All of these projects offer thoughtful explorations of the world around us, yet they continue to be excluded from the rubric of the Political. Even if one takes for granted the claim that all art is political, the typical response to this kind of absurd work is that it is comfortably status quo. The illegibility of ambiguous cultural phenomena presents a great conundrum for a community dedicated to clarity, efficiency, and utility. (On the other hand, just as often, we find professional art critics praising this kind of work as the highest form of politics, thus leaving more utilitarian work—such as a protest poster, or art aimed at helping the homeless—safely outside their purview.)
By definition, ambiguous gestures resist singular interpretations. They possess multiple implications deployed at once, and the dissonance between them produces a complicated web of interpretability. Poetry gains momentum not from the clarity of its meaning, but from the range of possible meanings that generate more robust, and, at times, conflicted interpretations of what it is. A close—but, to some degree, very different—definition of ambiguity is the quality of being inexplicable. Rather than offer numerous explanations, this form of ambiguity offers none at all. I suspect that, of the two, the one that provokes the highest degree of contestation is the gesture that cannot be explained. This gesture, this interpretive black hole, mutely sucks political acrimony down into its aggressive un-apologetic maw.
So what do we do with projects that are entirely ambiguous, which lack any connection to a topical political issue, and which may, in fact, even stand against any sense of ethical prescription?
Take, for example, the magazine cabinet, whose name is derived from the Cabinet of Curiosities. Each of the magazine’s issues explores a simple theme—bones, fire, childhood, doubles, shadows, fruits, fictional states, and so on. And inside each interesting and eloquent writers tackle some obscure dement of the chosen topic, such as a study of the fictional state of Atlantium, or how houseflies see the world in a kaleidoscope, or the disappearance of coral reefs, or the history of the placebo. There is a love of history in the pages of Cabinet —history that’s unabashedly unfiltered, obscure, and apparently meaningless. The articles are comfortably aloof, and the magazine does not provoke or produce any sense of urgency. It is strangely comfortable with thinking for the sake of thinking about quirky de-tails of daily life.
There are numerous incredible experiments in the arts that resist easy definition. In the pursuit of expressive forms outside of a direct language, many artists find themselves engaging in forms of work that elude prescription. Think about the Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, who, in the 196os produced bizarre, socially engaged rituals with thread, shapes, and bodies. While grounded in psychoanalysis and deliberately produced in reaction to the Brazilian government of the time, Clark and Oiticica’s performances included everything from pulling thread from one’s mouth onto the prostrate body of a participant below to paintings worn while dancing to Samba. Think about Cabaret Voltaire, in Weimar Germany, whose in-sane cabaret shows fused sound poetry with absurdist performance. Think of the Japanese post-World War II movement Gutai, which made objects by bashing their bodies against, on, and through them. These early and mid-twentieth-century explorations were radical breaks with sensibility and found in the language of formal rejection an extremely political tool.
These examples are certainly some of the more renowned artistic endeavors of the avant-garde. They were successful not only because they were ambiguous, but because they also created spaces to appreciate the open-ended nature of their ventures. That is to say, these acts often took place outside the realm of direct capitalist exploitation. They were hybrid cultural forms, which emerged out of a collective desire to make something new, and from a deeply ambiguous space. Not only did these performances and events allow each member to produce new cultural forms—they also allowed them to participate in the production of themselves. Of course, these moments do not occur in galleries or museums—nor do they occur on television or popular radio. They are enacted outside of a logic of obvious coercion and capital.
THE AMBIGUOUS IN AN UNAMBIGUOUS WORLD
Over the last sixty years of spectacle, forms of meaning have been churned out and consumed at a frenetic pace. The consequence is a complicated, anxious relationship with the question of what constitutes an image—and what its intentions might be. Advertising hasn’t simply sold us products—it has shaped our expectations of how meaning should be produced. With billions of dollars spent on coercive visual strategies, capitalist cultural production has given rise to a population in the throes of deep-seated visual paranoia. As the average person in the United States today sees nearly 5,000 advertisements in a day (compared to around 500 in the 1970s), one cannot help but sympathize with this paranoia: the world scares us because it wants something—and wants it relentlessly. The documentary image or explicit text must thus account for the current atmosphere of visual suspicion. While we do not trust the didactic, we also do not trust the ambiguous, because as a culture we do not trust anything. The only truth is a unified suspicion of truth.
As a result, the ambiguous gesture has gained Political portent through its very lack of clear intentions. All direct meaning has, to some degree, found itself tainted by a dominant means-ends capitalist visual culture. Every speech act—be it about Miller Lite or the Baptist church or police brutality concludes with a desire for someone to do something—a call to action. This is what is called the production of affect, and the vast deployment of affect has made us suspicious of all gestures. Indeed, the intentions of all communication have be-come increasingly interchangeable and hard to distinguish from one another. The ambiguous gesture can act, in many cases, as a place of individual self-production, and as a way to escape the escalating war of coercive visual material. The desire for real open-ended meaning—and everything vulnerable and embarrassing that comes with it—can thus be read as a reaction to a visually and socially manipulative environment.
THE AMBIGUOUS IN AN AMBIGUOUS WORLD
Over the last sixty years of spectacle, forms of meaning have been churned out and consumed at a frenetic pace. The consequence is a complicated, anxious relationship with the question of what constitutes an image—and what its intentions might be. Advertising hasn’t simply sold us products—it has shaped our expectations of how meaning should be produced. With billions of dollars spent on coercive visual strategies, capitalist cultural production has given rise to a population in the throes of deep-seated visual paranoia. As the average person in the United States today sees nearly 5,000 advertisements in a day (compared to around 500 in the 1970s), one cannot help but sympathize with this paranoia: the world scares us because it wants something—and wants it relentlessly. The documentary image or explicit text must thus account for the current atmosphere of visual suspicion. While we do not trust the didactic, we also do not trust the ambiguous, because as a culture we do not trust anything. The only truth is a unified suspicion of truth.
As a result, the ambiguous gesture has gained Political portent through its very lack of clear intentions. All direct meaning has, to some degree, found itself tainted by a dominant means-ends capitalist visual culture. Every speech act—be it about Miller Lite or the Baptist church or police brutality concludes with a desire for someone to do something—a call to action. This is what is called the production of affect, and the vast deployment of affect has made us suspicious of all gestures. Indeed, the intentions of all communication have be-come increasingly interchangeable and hard to distinguish from one another.
The ambiguous gesture can act, in many cases, as a place of individual self-production, and as a way to escape the escalating war of coercive visual material. The desire for real open-ended meaning—and everything vulnerable and embarrassing that comes with it—can thus be read as a reaction to a visually and socially manipulative environment.
[1] The following text is taken from Nato Thompson’s book, Seeing power. Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century.
