Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1998)

Introduction: Afterimage and the Challenge of Activist Criticism

In 1969, when the universities were being assaulted by students and police, Nathan Lyons and a handful of photographers and graduate students began to transform a wood-working shop into an educational center.[1]

Alex Sweetman, "Everything overlaps: there are no edges," Afterimage, (March 1972).

Afterimage is the journal of the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW), an "artists' space" that was established by photographer, curator, and writer Nathan Lyons in Rochester, New York in the late 1960s. Lyons founded the Workshop after leaving the George Eastman House/International Museum of Photography (IMP) in Rochester, where he had been assistant director and chief curator. At the George Eastman House Lyons was the editor of an IMP journal called Image. Thus, when he decided to start a publication at the newly founded Workshop the name he chose marked both a personal and an institutional departure. What Lyons left behind was the restrictive environment of a traditional museum and archive. What he founded was an open-ended space that took a variety of forms—gallery, library/archive, educational program, media center, journal and book publishing—reflecting his varied interests, as well as those of Joan Lyons (who developed and continues to direct the book publishing and artists' books component of the Workshop) and the many talented students and artists who have moved through the space over the years.

The quote above, from an essay by Alex Sweetman in the inaugural issue of Afterimage, captures something of the spirit of the early '70s. There was at the time a desire to question existing structures of creative and intellectual practice, while trying to build new institutional models. It also suggests one of the central questions that this anthology takes up: what is the relationship between art production and more direct (or at least more conventionally recognizable) forms of political struggle and protest? In the early days of Afterimage the act of pushing against the boundaries of the image culture was seen as having at least some relationship to the broader climate of political dissent and activism. Charles Hagen begins his editorial in the first issue of Afterimage with a quote from Mao Tse-Tung ("All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience"), albeit, one suspects, with some degree of irony.[2] Issues of Afterimage from the mid 70s are filled with images of intent, long-haired (mostly) white, young men grappling with copy stands and printing presses in a fluorescent-lit industrial space that was the original home of the Workshop. Editorials and articles during this period convey an almost messianic fervor to advance a new understanding of visual meaning and visual production.

There were, generally speaking, two primary modes of resistance enunciated at the Workshop, and in the pages of Afterimage. First, there was an attempt to contest the then dominant tendency to view art photography as a form of pure expression that must remain uncontaminated by vernacular uses of the medium (e.g., in snapshots, commercial photography, travel photography, etc.). The challenge to this tendency was expressed by the incorporation of vernacular imagery in works by VSW students, as well as by the attention given to vernacular imagery by curators, historians and critics in Afterimage articles and in the exhibitions program.[3] Second, there was a desire to break down the division between the practicing artist and the historian or critic, resulting in new hybrid figures such as the "artist-curator-critic." Hollis Frampton, for example, made films and also wrote criticism. Nathan Lyons was a photographer as well as an editor, writer and curator. Both the embrace of the vernacular and the desire to challenge disciplinary specialization anticipated the more recent interest in interdisciplinarity and popular, especially visual, culture in fields such as art history, cultural studies and American studies.[4]

These modes of resistance or activism need to be understood in the context of the struggle taking place during the late '60s and early '70s to gain a greater legitimacy for photography, video and artists' books as art forms. When the Workshop was founded there were still relatively few MFA programs in photography, film, or video, and the system of photography galleries, museum departments devoted to photography and video, festivals, alternative presses and media centers was just beginning to expand. Looking back over the early issues of the publication it is clear that Afterimage, along with the Workshop, was trying to build something quite new—a space (both textual and physical) dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of visual culture in all its manifestations. There was a degree of populism involved in this endeavor as well, as artists' books, photography and video were understood as potentially more democratic media than, for example, oil painting or marble sculpture. Thus the Workshop was an early advocate of media literacy programs in Rochester's public schools and worked to widen the circulation of artists' books through the touring VSW "Book Bus".

Both of these modes of resistance, the challenge to aesthetic purity and to existing disciplinary boundaries, were constituted within certain horizons dictated by the historical moment, institutional constraints and the ideological orientation of the participants. Although there was a desire to elaborate the relationship between high art and vernacular culture the ultimate goal was not, by and large, to eliminate the social category of the art photograph itself, but rather to expand this category and make it more reflective of the broader cultural functions of photography. In the same way, the effort to break down the specialization of the "critic" and the "artist" was not undertaken in order to challenge the social authority of either figure, but, at least in part, to provide some legitimacy for what was understood as the special knowledge brought to the act of writing history or criticism by the "practitioner." Thus, Michael Lesy, in a somewhat notorious attack on On Photography, questions Susan Sontag's qualifications to discuss photography in the following manner:

This is not a book of primary research, but rather a series of inventive, witty, and perversely whimsical suppositions and intuitions, based on second-hand reports, brought by a messenger from the outside world. There is no evidence in the book that its author has ever used a still camera, engaged in research in a photographic archive, or interviewed any practitioners of the medium.[5]

This concern with practice and the figure of the practitioner (as opposed to the mere "consumer" of images), conveys a certain egalitarianism by insisting that the image-maker possesses not only a set of technical skills, but also a legitimate form of analytic knowledge about images. It also challenges the separation of theoretical and practical knowledge. The attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice created a conflict, evident in the pages of Afterimage itself, between the demand for a more systematic account of visual meaning (one that would employ "unique methods of interpretation and standards of evaluation" to cite an early essay), and the desire to preserve what was viewed as the polyvalence (and for some the utter ineffability) of the image, especially the art/photographic image.[6] Within this hermeneutic investigation the social context of both art practice and criticism, although implicit in many ways, was often bracketed. The "practitioner" was assumed to be universal in theory, even though he was, more often than not, white, male and middle-class. At the same time, activism was defined largely in terms of the struggle to establish both a new model of visual and media arts practice and the interpretive norms appropriate to this practice. There were certainly essays in Afterimage that addressed broader questions of cultural politics, such as the advocacy of visual or media literacy programs. However, this was primarily a period of consolidation in which simply supporting informed criticism of photography, independent film and video and artists' books constituted an implicit protest against their exclusion from the institutional and critical apparatus of the mainstream art world.

These two interrelated questions—the specific identity of the practitioner or the critic, and the cultural location of political struggle—would become the fulcrum points for a new definition of activist art practice elaborated in the pages of Afterimage beginning in the early 1980s, under the editorial leadership of Martha Gever, Catherine Lord and David Trend. This new activist practice was in turn informed by two historical factors: the growing cultural diversity of visual and media artists and the consolidation at approximately the same time of cultural and political conservatism. During the late '70s and early '80s the fields of photography and independent film and video underwent a considerable expansion as new journals, exhibition spaces and educational programs emerged across the country. This growth was combined with certain demographic transitions as more women, gays and lesbians, and people of color began to move through MFA programs and into positions as teachers, writers, curators and practicing artists. Although their numbers were hardly overwhelming they were sufficient to pose a challenge to nascent critical and creative methodologies in art photography and independent film and video. This shift was evident in Afterimage coverage of the activities of the "Women's Caucus" of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE). The Women's Caucus was formed in the early 1980s in an attempt to make SPE programming and policies more responsive to the organization's increasingly diverse membership. Extended battles were staged over the allocation of funds for conference programming, the editorial direction of the SPE journal exposure, and the generation of studies of hiring practices in the field, which were scrupulously reported in Afterimage's reports following the annual SPE conference. Photographic historian Bill Jay's jeremiad against the Women's Caucus (which he described as "a nasty little pimple on the face of photographic education") published in Spot in 1989 illustrates the level of rancor that these changes evoked among some members of the photographic community.[7]

Essays in Afterimage during this period focused increasingly on the artist as an individual positioned by specific differences of race, sexuality, gender and class. Editors Lord and Gever and, somewhat later, Nadine McGann, were instrumental in bringing analyses of sexual difference and queer theory to the pages of Afterimage. This transition was first evident in the work of critics and historians who sought to undermine the pantheon of heroic male artists in the history of photography and video. Thus Afterimage published Gever's critique of the "canonization" of Nam June Paik, Sally Stein's revisionist account of the documentary photography of Jacob Riis and Abigail Solomon-Godeau's investigation of the renewed interest in the work of Alfred Steiglitz during the mid-'80s.[8] Afterimage also published a number of articles that analyzed the development of an art practice informed by critiques of sexual identity. These included essays by Marita Sturken ("Feminist Video: Reiterating the Difference," April 1985), Patricia Mellencamp ("Uncanny Feminism: The Exquisite Corpses of Cecelia Condit," September 1987), Lauren Rabinovitz ("Video Cross-Dressing," March 1988), Nadine McGann, ("Consuming Passions: Feminist Video and the Home Market," Summer 1988), Chris Straayer ("Sexuality and Video Narrative," May 1989), and Liz Kotz ("Strip Tease East and West: Sexual Representation in Documentary Film," October 1989), among many others. Of particular importance for this dialogue was the "Difference: On Representation and Sexuality" exhibition held at the New Museum in 1985, which featured photo-based works and video from the U.S. and the U.K. that were informed by contemporary psychoanalytic theories of sexual identity.[9] Patricia Zimmermann's "Fetal Tissue: Reproductive Rights and Activist Video" (included here) expands the analysis of sexual representation to encompass questions raised by recent right-wing attacks on women's reproductive freedom. David Trend developed a series of influential articles on the production of community-based art projects (including "Cultural Struggle and Educational Activism," included here), and established a rapprochement between critical pedagogy and media activism in the pages of Afterimage through his own writings and through interviews with figures such as Henry Giroux.[10]

Investigations of sexual identity were also foregrounded in discussions of media and visual art works by gay and lesbian producers. In many cases this work was created in response to the growing AIDS crisis (see Alexis Danzig, "Acting Up: Independent Video and the AIDS Crisis," May 1988). Jan Zita Grover's widely re-printed essay "Visible Lesions: Images of PWA's" (Summer 1989) was one of the most influential attempts to interrogate the visual culture and representational politics of the AIDS epidemic. More recent essays, such as Ann Cvetkovich's "Video, AIDS, Activism" (included here) have focused on the reception of the by now well established genre of AIDS activist media work among various audiences. This ongoing investigation into the construction of identity was expanded to include questions of racial and ethnic difference as well. Coco Fusco's "Fantasies of Oppositionality" (included here) explores the problematic status of the racial or ethnic Other in "avant-garde" film programming. Fusco's essay, along with Lorraine O'Grady's essay on black female subjectivity (also included here), advance a critique of feminist psychoanalytic theories of identity based on their implicit privileging of a white, European subject. Recent Afterimage essays by Darrell Moore and Mable Haddock and Chiquita Mullins-Lee (also included here) have questioned the liberal openness of "multicultural" patronage and programming in the visual and media arts.

While questions of identity were increasingly central to art theory and practice during the last decade and a half, the broader terrain of cultural politics began to shift decisively. The period covered by these essays begins with Ronald Reagan's victory over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Presidential election, and ends with the establishment of a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate following the 1994 Congressional elections. This has been an era of profound political realignment in the U.S., during which the liberal consensus of the Great Society was slowly but thoroughly dismantled, along with the social and cultural programs that were brought into existence by that consensus. Martha Rosler, in her "Theses on Defunding" (included here) provided one of the earliest accounts of a growing conservatism in corporate and public arts funding policy. The downward spiral that began with Reagan's first attempt to slash the National Endowment for the Art's (NEA) budget in 1981 (and the successful elimination of funding for arts criticism in 1984), is now approaching its culmination in the threatened elimination of both the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) by the Republican Congress.

Many of the essays in this anthology reflect the search among artists and critics for new strategies to challenge the now dominant conservative consensus. As conservatives have appropriated many of the tools and techniques of '50s civil rights and '60s student activism, albeit with access to a vast pool of corporate and foundation funding that was never available to either of these groups, progressive artists are faced with a number of troubling questions. How do artists position themselves within this complex and changing political climate? In particular, how do we understand art "activism" in this new context? What kinds of progressive or activist cultural practices will be most effective in challenging conservative power? What is the relationship between the form taken by an activist cultural practice and its goals? What relationship should the artist establish with her or his audience, constituency, or community? What can we learn from past examples of art and cultural activism? Finally, how does the formulation of an activist art practice relate to the questions of difference and identity politics that are at the center of contemporary media and visual arts theory? These are some of the questions that this anthology explores.

The first set of essays offer analyses of cultural patronage. More specifically, these essays examine the relationship between forms of patronage and the pedagogical work of the curator, programmer, artist, and educator. Patronage is understood here to refer not only to the question of how cultural production is funded, but also to the process by which audiences or constituencies are formed by a given work. Clearly, funding agencies and the gallery and museum system itself, whether they are explicitly acknowledged or not, constitute one of the primary "audiences" for the artists' work. As Owen Kelly has noted in regards to community art practice in the U.K.: "The communities with whom we work are not really our customers . . . they are the raw material upon which we work, on behalf of our customers, who are the agencies to whom we sell the reports and documentary evidence of our work."[11] Yet the artist can also play an active role in constructing new kinds of relationships with a range of different audiences. Further, the subject positions that the artist makes available to potential viewers can be quite varied. Audience members can be positioned in a given piece or project through sympathetic identification, shock and provocation, didactic education, active collaboration, and so on. The essays in the second section of this anthology provide analyses of activist art practice in a variety of disciplines, including film and video, photography, installation and community-based works. The areas of activism examined include struggles over AIDS, reproductive rights and racial identity, as well as both progressive and conservative forms of political organizing.

Having established this conceptual or thematic division it is at the same time necessary to challenge it. The essays on "activism" in many cases include discussions of audience and funding structures, while the essays on "patronage" also include case studies of particular activist projects and producers. What is significant here, as the reflection of a new direction in the analysis of art and culture, is the attempt to combine readings of the broader institutional and ideological structures of cultural patronage with readings of specific examples of art practice. Often these areas of research are treated independently, with discussions of art practice taking place as though the act of making a work bore little or no relationship to the structuring discourses of the institutions that contain and present it, or the funding sources that help bring it into public existence. At the same time, readings of patronage often tend to overlook the complex negotiations that take place as individual artists produce projects with and through these broader institutional networks. I do not want to suggest that what I have termed patronage (referring to both the financial/institutional basis for a work as well as the audience for that work) and practice (or the discrete set of actions engaged in by a given artist in the production of a given work) constitute a kind of langue and parole of art-making in which implacable "structures" dictated by monolithic institutions predetermine the artists' every move. These structures are not monolithic, although they do establish certain horizons for practice that often go unacknowledged. However, these horizons, once acknowledged, are themselves subject to contestation and expansion as well as contraction. In addition, in some community-based projects practice and patronage are not separate activities, but rather are integrated as part of a more dialogical form of collaboration. It is precisely the interaction between institutional structure and practice that has been neglected by most mainstream art criticism (with its focus on "text" over "context") during the last decade and a half. It is this same interaction that engaged many of Afterimage's most thoughtful contributors.

One of the virtues of the essays collected here is that they attempt to preserve the complexity of the relationship between the domain of individual decision-making and negotiation (understood as "creative," "political," etc.) and the institutional structures within which those decisions are made. This acknowledgment can produce a new set of ideas about what constitutes art as well as activism. The works under discussion here demand a new critical methodology that can replace conventional concepts such as the static and autonomous "work of art" with a more subtle and comprehensive analysis of the unfolding process of meaning production. This is a process in which the specific subject positions of both the maker and the viewer, rather than being repressed under the guise of an aesthetic transcendence, are continually re-negotiated. The essays in this anthology insist on the continuing relevance of an activist orientation to contemporary art practice and criticism. Further, they insist on the significance of an engaged art practice that is aligned with, but not identical to, social or political activism per se. All too often the unique capacities of art and of an aesthetic knowledge are elided by the demand that committed artists should simply abandon art entirely for political action. Another criticism has been voiced in the last several years by writers who argue that activist art necessarily sacrifices the unique power of the aesthetic to convey a subversive visual pleasure associated with the experience of beauty.[12] This last criticism has been based on a "return" to the aesthetic philosophy of the early modern period. Each of these views depends on the belief that there is a certain essential art function that can be discovered and conformed to: if art strays too far towards political engagement it risks surrendering its authority as a form of cultural discourse. How can we preserve the specificity of art without accepting its political immobility? As I will argue in the second half of this introduction, a return to the questions raised by the aesthetic during the modern period, far from precluding political engagement, can actually provide us with a useful framework for the criticism and analysis of activist art.

Frameworks—Activism and the Aesthetic

Take away from a painting all representation, all signification, any theme and any text-as-meaning, removing from it also all the material . . . efface any design oriented by a determinable end, subtract the wall-background, its social, historical, economic, political supports, etc.; what is left? The frame.[13]

—Jacques Derrida, from The Truth in Painting (1978)

. . . the sense of inappropriateness that was felt from the start toward Haacke's "social system" exhibit was due to an aesthetic weakness which interacted with a forcing of art boundaries.[14]

—Thomas Messer, director of the Guggenheim Museum, on the cancellation of Hans Haacke's exhibition "Shapolsky, et. al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971."

Art is about framing and re-framing things, and [David Avalos, Louis Hock and I] think that the way that this issue [undocumented immigrant workers in Southern California] has been framed is a problem.[15]

—Elizabeth Sisco discussing the Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso project (1995).

To the extent that this anthology is devoted to the criticism and analysis of activist art it must at the same time concern itself with the theoretical system within which activist art might be evaluated. As I've indicated above, we can locate one possible model for activist art criticism within the tradition of modernist aesthetics. There are two aspects of aesthetic discourse that are of particular importance in this inquiry. First is the capacity of aesthetic knowledge to overcome the particularity of existing systems of representation and to comprehend a larger totality defined by otherwise suppressed interrelationships. Second is the utopian drive of the aesthetic to imagine a more ideal form of social life beyond the brute facticity of what is. These aspects combine to provide the aesthetic with a unique ability to identify and describe the operations of political, social, cultural, and economic power, while at the same time thinking beyond the horizons established by these forms of power. However, the transgressive and critical power of the aesthetic has been linked in the modern era with a very specific set of restrictions. The tradition of aesthetic liberalism, stretching from Friedrich Schiller to Clement Greenberg and beyond, is postulated on the belief that art can retain its authenticity only by remaining within the charmed circle of social disengagement.[16] Once art steps beyond this circle, and moves from a sublime self-reflexivity to direct involvement with the social or the political, its moral authority vanishes and it becomes instead a mundane extension of everyday culture. It is interesting to note the similarities between this view of the aesthetic and Victorian models of femininity that argued that women possessed an inherent moral superiority that could be exercised only so long as they withdrew from the public world of work and politics and remained within the home. From this sanctuary they could maintain the uncontaminated purity of their moral power, and thereby provide their husbands with the armor necessary to survive the temptations and challenges of the dirty and dangerous world beyond. Women gained their moral transcendence over men and the "real" world of work precisely through their detachment from it.[17] In the same way the aesthetic retains its moral transcendence by steadfastly refusing any direct engagement with the social world beyond the "domestic" enclave of the gallery and the museum.

We find echoes of this outlook in the work of more contemporary critics such as Michael Fried who, in his influential essay "Art and Objecthood" (1967), rejected the insolent "theatricality" of art works that impetuously solicit the viewer in favor of a chaste and demure "presentness." Fried differentiates "literalist" art, in which the viewer is implicated, from an art work that presents itself as timeless and indifferent to anything but itself, existing thereby in a state of "grace" (the inevitable moral dimension of the aesthetic, which Fried allows only in the closing line of his essay).[18] T.W. Adorno insists that art can survive reification only by withdrawing entirely from the field of hermeneutics into an implacable isolation.[19] For Greenberg the production of "avant-garde" art requires that the artist "retire . . . from the public altogether."[20] Within this disabling domesticity an exaggerated and compensatory rhetoric of virility and heroism is attached to the most mundane symbolic actions (Pollock's dribbles, de Kooning's slashes, Yves Klein's leap, Schnabel's broken plates, etc.). This gesture of withdrawal has been one of the most common methods by which modern art has registered its protest against any number of cultural and political conditions (kitsch, fascism, or a generalized sense of anomie, malaise, and fragmentation associated with modernity), and expressed its longing for some organic and integrated expression of human creativity.

Artists during the post-W.W.II era have displayed remarkable ingenuity in embodying their ambivalence and/or anger about modern culture and politics through the production of discrete objects. However, this vast ingenuity finds itself suddenly arrested when it comes to thinking creatively about how these objects might produce meaning and interact with viewers beyond the precincts of the gallery, the museum, the art school or the pages of art magazines. Thus, the moral dimension of the aesthetic, its drive to envision a more just and equitable society, has too often been devoted to the manufacture of a highly coded commentary (in turns wry and ironic, serious and austere, elegiac, cynical, impassioned, or euphoric) on the demise of various humanist values and virtues (the integrity of the well-crafted object, creative labor, spirituality, community, beauty, etc.). At the same time the ability of aesthetic knowledge to grasp the complex totality of a given system of meaning, has within this tradition often been confined to the exploration of the formal and technical conditions of the art-making process itself, whether in terms of the formal elements of shape, line, color and mark, or the abstracted conceptual categories of object, process and transformation. This didacticism of materials, the call for a "return" to the object and somatic forms of knowledge, has become especially pronounced in recent years, as part of a more general art world backlash against the twin specters of "multiculturalism" and "theory."

Is it possible to think the aesthetic differently? Is there another way in which the systematic orientation, self-reflexivity, and moral vision of the aesthetic might be figured or re-claimed? Hans Haacke's work, and in particular the shift that took place in his practice during the early '70s, provides a valuable set of coordinates for an activist aesthetic philosophy. Moreover, it can shed some light on the questions of art and political engagement that would subsequently emerge in the pages of Afterimage. Haacke's early works, such as Condensation Cube (1963/65), Live Airborne System (1965/68), Grass Grows (1967/69), and Circulation (1969) combined his interest in systems theory with a conceptual art focus on "process" to examine ecological or environmental "systems" (the climate of the gallery, the growth of grass on a mound of dirt, etc.). These works can be viewed as part of the general interest at that time among artists such as Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Helen and Newton Harrison, and others, in "nature" as a site at which to deploy various conceptual art strategies, and as a way to escape the perceived limitations of the conventional "white cube" of the gallery.[21] Here, the transgressive power of the aesthetic is expressed in the desire for a more comprehensive way to frame and analyze a particular location (the desert, the eco-system, etc.). Further, the interest in "site specific" projects functioned to challenge the immanence of the modernist art object. Robert Irwin's light "sculptures", for example, raised the question of how the specific location of a work, or the viewer's orientation towards it, changed the work's perceptual "meaning". This concern is made even more explicit in Adrian Piper's works during the early '70s, such as the "Catalysis" series of site-specific performances (see her interview here). As Piper wrote at the time, "I've been doing pieces the significance and experience of which is defined as completely as possible by the viewer's reaction and interpretation. Ideally the work has no meaning or independent existence outside of its function as a medium of change; it exists only as a catalytic agent between myself and the viewer."[22] Dan Graham's video, installation, and performance works during this period provide another example of the interest in what might be termed the spatial politics of the spectator or viewer.[23]

In these works aesthetic knowledge transgresses existing boundaries and categories (the verities of traditional aesthetic epistemology that posits the art object as the repository of an immanent and non-contingent meaning). However, if one is willing to question the way in which the physical environment, location, or orientation of the viewer changes the meaning of a piece, why not expand that inquiry to include the way in which the viewer's social "location" changes that meaning as well? This is the decisive step that Haacke took with his Gallery-Goers Birthplace and Residence Profile at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969. Here Haacke collected information from viewers (who identified their homes by placing pins of a map of New York), demonstrating just how "closely confined" the "art world" is.[24] This marks a decisive shift in Haacke's art to works that openly acknowledge the presence of the viewer, not as an anonymously transcendent subject, but as the product of particular social, economic, and geographic conditions. Further, it suggests that these conditions act as mediating factors in the work's production of meaning. Piper's Mythic Being series (1973-1975) and later works provide an equally important manifestation of this shift.[25]

In Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971) and Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971) Haacke's concept of the "system" of art meaning expanded to include the financial interests that supported and in some cases controlled museums themselves. It was this work, scheduled to be shown at the Guggenheim museum on April 30th of 1971 and canceled on April 1st, that elicited Thomas Messer's comment above. For Messer Haacke had taken the transgressive power of the aesthetic a bit too far. His work had violated the implicit contract of social disengagement required by the tradition of aesthetic liberalism, and could no longer be accorded the moral protection of the museum. His work had become, in Messer's words, "an alien substance [in] the art museum organism . . ."[26] While Haacke has, of course, gone on to produce a large body of work, I am focusing on this moment in particular because it shows in the clearest way how the orientation of a transgressive aesthetic knowledge was defined and subsequently redefined to account for the social basis of aesthetic experience. Instead of Fried's mute "presence" (or even Robert Irwin's transcendental phenomenology) we have works that openly engage the audience in an interactive manner. Rather than presenting the viewer with a pre-determined and immanent meaning, these projects, as Piper writes, only produce their meaning in a dialogical encounter between the viewer (understood as a socially specific subject) and the "work."

In the preceding discussion I identified two key moments within the tradition of the modernist aesthetic. First is the transgressive force of aesthetic knowledge. As in Kant's third Critique the aesthetic is that mode of knowledge that can overcome the boundaries of conventional thought (the opposition between reason and sense, or between subjective and objective judgment, for example). The aesthetic, as Derrida writes of the Kantian sublime, is the surplus that always threatens to exceed the frame of reason (even as it depends on the frame for its very existence).[27] Second is the moral/teleological dimension of aesthetic knowledge, which allows it to envision a more just and humane form of human society (even if it can only be evoked in the discrete encounter between the viewer and the work of art). These two dynamics combine to provide the aesthetic with the power to grasp the totality of social relations in a more systematic or comprehensive manner. It is this power that Haacke, Piper, and other artists claimed in their works during the early 1970s. These artists offered a radically new way in which to think of the transgressive function of the aesthetic.

This model was taken up by other artists and groups working throughout the '70s, '80s, and into the '90s, including Judy Baca, The Guerrilla Art Action Group, Suzanne Lacy, Fred Lonidier, Martha Rosler, Alan Sekula, and Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PADD), among many others, and more recently by artists and collectives such as Group Material, Repo History, and the collaborative projects of David Avalos, Louis Hock and Elizabeth Sisco. Here an activist practice informed by conceptual art intersects with the public and community based projects covered by Afterimage over the last fifteen years. For these artists the transgressive power of aesthetic knowledge is important precisely because it can be used to investigate the boundaries that are drawn between political and aesthetic experience, and political and cultural action. As Sisco noted, her collaborators bring an aesthetic awareness of the function of "framing" (in which what is excluded is as important as what is included) to their examination of the ways in which the mass media and politicians in Southern California have worked to construct a particular image of undocumented immigrant workers.[28] One of the chief strategies the conservative movement has used to weld together an electoral consensus has been the creation of powerful images of pathologized Others (migrant workers, mothers on welfare, young black "criminals," etc.). Artists are skilled in the modulation of symbolic meaning. In this respect, they are ideally suited to engage, and subvert, the image politics of the conservative consensus. The projects of Avalos, Hock and Sisco, which I will discuss in more detail below, show just how essential a representational politics is to the cultural work of the conservative consensus, and just how effective artists can be in challenging it.

One of the most promising directions for activist cultural practice today is suggested by a recent essay on movement politics by Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. Piven and Cloward, who have been influential as analysts of, and participants in, progressive political movements for the past three decades, argue that movements emerge when the configuration of party-based political power no longer responds to the demands of existing constituencies and communities.[29] This is of course what happened during the late '60s and early '70s when the Democratic party was forced to respond in some measure to movement-based demands by women and people of color for greater political power. Piven and Cloward offer a useful diagnosis of the rise of the conservative movement and its ability to weaken the Democratic party's electoral base through an appeal to gender and race-based conflicts within the American public. While party politicians work to achieve consensus and to smother differences and conflicts, movements work to exacerbate those conflicts and provide a language that will bring them to the surface of existing political debate. Thus, conservatives were able to offer formerly Democratic Southern voters who were experiencing a real decline in their standard of living an explanatory narrative and a vivid set of images that would turn them against feminist and African American demands for greater equality and opportunity. As Piven and Cloward write:

The inflammatory rhetoric and dramatic representations of collective indignation associated with these tactics project new definitions of social reality, or definitions of the social reality of new groups, into public discourse. They change understandings not only of what is real but of what is possible and of what is just. As a result, grievances that are otherwise naturalized or submerged become political issues.[30]

This is precisely what conservatives have done so effectively within the Republican party by articulating (and amplifying) the political and cultural desires (and fears) of religious conservatives and a small but electorally crucial segment of "middle America." In the process they have fundamentally altered political debate on welfare policy, racial inequality, poverty, and the role of the state. It is this lesson (which conservatives took from progressive political activists and civil rights leaders of the '50s and '60s) that contemporary activists must learn again.

The conservative "revolution" has been premised on an uneasy alliance between fiscal, free-market conservatives and cultural conservatives, especially fundamentalist Christians. There are certainly schisms between these two groups. On the one hand, the market system so beloved by neo-conservatives from Milton Friedman to Phil Gramm tends to produce a consumerist culture that Christians find morally reprehensible. At the same time, conservatives believe in reducing, if not eliminating altogether the government's role in the "private" sector (with the exception of subsidies provided to the corporate sector, of course), while fundamentalist Christians believe in expanding the government's power, under their supervision, to police the behavior of individual citizens. Despite these differences the broader strategies of the conservative alliance have thus far been remarkably consistent. In large measure this is because they have identified the same enemy, in the form of a mythic "liberalism" that can be blamed for any number of social and cultural and economic ills.

It is here that the legacy of anti-communism plays a role. For over four decades anti-communism functioned as the central structuring fantasy of American conservatism. The demise of the Soviet Union created an ideological vacuum within conservative ideology that has been filled with the specter of a dangerous moral decay in American culture itself, brought about by the liberal culture and by liberal social and economic policies. One reason for the rapid rise to power of religious conservatives is that they are able to offer a particularly evocative account of this threat. Liberalism is a composite of conservative fears and fantasies, both moral and economic. On the governmental level it is identified with the "giveaway" of hard-earned tax dollars to shiftless welfare cheats who would rather not work. On the cultural level it is identified with "secular humanism" and with a morally depraved media and cultural elite out of touch with the needs and opinions of everyday, God-fearing Americans. Conservatives have been able to provide working-class and lower-middle-class white voters with a convincing narrative that explains their declining standard of living not as a product of corporate decision making or global investment policies, but as the direct result of the parasitic moral depravity of young mothers on welfare, gay and lesbian artists, poor people of color, immigrant workers and abortion doctors, overseen by a cabalistic liberal elite. Ioannis Mookas traces this process in his analysis of "Gay Rights Special Rights," included here. By emphasizing the idea of a moral and cultural decay, and linking it with what Barbara Ehrenreich has called the "fear of falling," conservatives have been able to portray themselves as populists for perhaps the first time in the post-W.W.II era. This represents a singular ideological achievement, as the Republican party has traditionally suffered among working-class and lower-middle class voters due to its pro-corporate image. This shift has been brought about in large measure by the rapprochement between old-line fiscal conservatives and religious conservatives, who have been able to overcome the traditional resistance among Southern voters, especially working-class and lower-middle-class voters, to the party of Lincoln.

How long can this strategy work? Clearly the "outsider" stance so favored by conservatives has already begun to lose its credibility. Along with their wholesale elimination of what remained of liberal social and cultural programs this presents them with a dilemma that is at the heart of conservatism: how to build and sustain a political community without an enemy. Without liberalism to blame any more, the conservative-fundamentalist coalition will be placed under increasing pressure to account for the persistence of those conditions it has so relentlessly associated with liberalism's pernicious influence (e.g. crime, poverty, declining American productivity, etc.). The shibboleth of cultural immorality will only function for so long before people begin to ask questions, as they already have, about the morality of conservative economic policies that favor the rich and powerful and punish the poor and working class, and fundamentalist religious leaders who encourage hatred, and even violence, against non-believers. There is a growing discontent among those people and those communities that are treated by the conservative coalition merely as signifiers of difference and moral depravity, and that have been excluded from current political debate precisely because of the effectiveness of the political-cultural narratives and images promulgated by conservatives.

How can activist artists work with and through these communities? This is one of the most important questions facing critics, advocates, and practitioners of a politically engaged art practice today. I would argue that the current political moment demands an activist aesthetic based on performativity and localism, rather than the immanence and universality that are the hallmarks of traditional aesthetics. Performativity is a concept that has emerged in a number of areas in recent cultural criticism to describe a practice that is adaptive and improvisational, rather than originary and fixed.[31] Within this outlook the work of art is less a discrete object than it is a process of dialogue, exchange, and even collaboration that responds to the changing conditions and needs of both viewer and maker. Linked with performativity is the importance of localism. Artists recognize that the process of shared dialogue can proceed most effectively if they function not as privileged outsiders, but as co-participants who are intimately involved in the concerns of the community or constituency with which they work. This "community" may be defined by geographic location, commitment to a specific political issue or movement, identity based on race, gender, sexuality or class, etc. In some of the most effective activist projects the tactical nuances allowed by performativity and localism are combined with the systematic comprehension and moral vision described above as part of a re-figured aesthetic discourse.

The projects of Avalos, Hock and Sisco offer a useful example of how an activist aesthetic based on localism and performativity can play a direct role in "project[ing] new definitions of social reality" and new understandings of "what is possible . . . and just." All three have lived in San Diego for many years, and as a result have developed a deep understanding of the complex interrelationships of economic and political power, and race, class, and gender based violence and discrimination in the city. Their long commitment to the area has also allowed them to develop their own "community," consisting of other artists, political activists, neighbors, neighborhood organizers, and sociologists and other academics concerned with the region. They are able to turn to this network for support, collaborative assistance, political and cultural information, and as a bridge to new communities. In the "Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate" project (1993) they distributed signed 10 dollar bills to undocumented workers as a symbolic recognition of their contribution to the Southern California economy. The work was developed to directly challenge conservative arguments that migrant workers constitute a negative drain on the state's resources. As Avalos, Hock and Sisco discovered, undocumented workers make a substantial contribution to the economy, not merely through the profits they provide for their employers, but also through the expenditures they make in the U.S. and the taxes that are deducted from their pay.

The symbolic gesture of the 10 dollar "rebate" had a much more effective resonance due to the creative control that Avalos, Hock and Sisco exercised over news coverage. Their handling of the individual performances was modulated in response to the kind of media attention that the project received. Upon discovering that U.S. news crews in particular were fixing on the image of the undocumented worker receiving money (which could be used to reinforce the very perception that they wished to contest), rather than on the contribution that the workers make to the U.S. economy, they prevented them from taping this part of the performance. Thus, the "meaning" of the piece was not merely the signed bills, nor the act of distributing them, but also the subsequent coverage of the event by the media. Further, they collaborated with researchers, social service providers and advocates for immigrants rights in developing the project, and involved them in the process of explaining the "performance" to each of the workers who received a 10 dollar bill. Their goal in the project was, as Sisco has noted, to "redefine community to include those who have been left out."[32]

This work is exemplary of a re-invented aesthetic that takes the tools of conventional aesthetic knowledge and transforms them. It is based on the utopian ability to imagine a better world, as well as the power to critically comprehend a broader social, cultural, and economic "ecology." Within this process the artist, as well as the critic, must both look inwards, to interrogate the internal conditions of their practice and their own role within that practice, and outwards, to examine the systematic structures that influence the way in which their practice is actualized in the world. These two movements are represented in this anthology by the parallel concerns with patronage and funding, and with the pragmatics of an activist cultural practice.

Artists today are operating in an environment in which the formerly expansive umbrella of support for the arts is rapidly closing. The liberal consensus that had partially sheltered the NEA through so many controversies during the past decade and a half (the belief that art represents a socially and culturally valuable practice in and of itself, and that the state has a legitimate role in supporting its production), is finally exhausted. The assumption that the public necessarily values art-making and the artist can no longer be sustained. As we move towards a society in which the buffering institutions of the liberal state gradually disappear artists will be confronted with the difficult choice between quietism and withdrawal or renewed engagement. It is necessary, perhaps now more than ever, to think critically but constructively about what constitutes an activist art practice. The essays in this anthology offer one set of guideposts for this inquiry. We hope that it can act as both a record of this inquiry as it unfolded in the pages of Afterimage, and as an incitement to carry it on into the future.

Grant Kester, University of California, San Diego

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[1]Alex Sweetman, "Everything overlaps: there are no edges," Afterimage, vol.1, no.1, (March 1972), pp.2-3.

[2]"As Mao said in 1937, 'All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.' Why not join us?" Charles M. Hagen, "Editorial: A Position of Service," Afterimage, vol.1, no.1, (March 1972), p.4.

[3]This is a tendency at the Workshop that continues to the current day. See From the Backdrop to the Foreground: Photographic Backdrops, exhibition organized by James Wyman, with a catalog in the XX issue of Afterimage. [cite]

[4]See Scott Heller, "Visual Images Replace Text as Focal Point for Many Scholars" The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 19, 1996), p.A-15. See also "Questionnaire on Visual Culture," October 77 (Summer 1996), pp.25-70.

[5]Michael Lesy, "Review of Susan Sontag's On Photography," Afterimage, vol.5, no.7, (January 1978), p.5.

[6] "Is there anything peculiarly 'photographic' about photography—something which sets it apart from all other ways of making pictures? If there is, how important is it to our understanding of photos? Are photographs so unlike other sorts of pictures as to require unique methods of interpretation and standards of evaluation?" Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen, "Photography, Vision, and Representation," Afterimage, vol.3, no.7, (January 1976), pp.8.

[7]As Jay writes "The issue is this: a minority group of radical feminists/pseudo-Marxists has, though a process of intimidation, gained a position of power in the medium which has distorted and subverted topics of critical and historical importance in the medium." Bill Jay, "Fascism of the Left," Shots #13 (January/February 1989), p.22. See Catherine Lord's response: "Herstory, Their Story, and (Male) Hysteria," in Afterimage, vol.18, no.1, (Summer 1990), pp.9-10. An Afterimage reader's survey, conducted in 1992, suggests the extent to which the "field" of the media and visual arts remains divided by deep cultural and political differences. Although the majority of respondents applauded coverage of film and video by women, gays, and people of color, a significant number also articulated a strong resentment of this work ("Enough already with the third world video; you've seen one, you've seen them all. More first person responses and reflections of artists and photographers."). The art world is clearly not immune to the same kinds of race and gender-based antagonisms that have provided a foundation for the current anti-affirmative action backlash among conservative voters. [cite]

[8] Martha Gever, "The Canonization of Nam June Paik," (October 1982), Sally Stein, "Making Connections with the Camera: Photography and Social Mobility in the Career of Jacob Riis," (May 1983), and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Back to Basics: The Return of Steiglitz," (Summer 1984).

[9] Difference: On Representation and Sexuality (Kate Linker, curator, Jane Weinstock, film and video curator), (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). See Joanna Issak, "Woman: The Ruin of Representation," (April 1985) and Maureen Turim, "What is Sexual Difference?," (April 1985). The connection of Afterimage to art and cultural theory from Great Britain was also evident in the influence of art historians such as John Tagg, Griselda Pollock, and Victor Burgin (all of whom were interviewed in Afterimage), the British journal Ten.8, and the Photography/Politics: One and Two anthologies (London: Photography Workshop, 1979, 1986), as well as the writings and art works of Jo Spence, among others. Another important British influence was the media work produced in the community-based "Workshop" movement. See: Coco Fusco, "Black Filmmaking in Britain's Workshop Sector," (15:7, January 1988). [cite interviews with John Akomfrah and Issac Julien]

[10]Citation for David Trend's book

[11]Owen Kelly, Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels, (London: Comedia Publishing Group, 1984), pp.106-107.

[12] See Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993).

[13] Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.98.

[14]The full quote from Messer reads: "To the degree to which an artist deliberately pursues aims that lie beyond art, his very concentration upon ulterior ends stands in conflict with the intrinsic nature of the work as an end in itself. The conclusion is that the sense of inappropriateness that was felt from the start toward Haacke's 'social system' exhibit was due to an aesthetic weakness which interacted with a forcing of art boundaries. The tensions within this contradiction in the work itself transferred itself from it onto the museum environment and beyond it into society at large. Eventually, the choice was between the acceptance of or rejection of an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism. " Hans Haacke, Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-1975 (The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design: Halifax, 1975), p.138.

[15]Elizabeth Sisco during the panel discussion "Production and Representation in Contemporary Art" at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (November 11th., 1995).

[16]I have taken this term from Anthony Cascardi, who defines aesthetic liberalism in the following way: ". . . the aesthetic moment in Kant replicates rather than resolves the tensions between the individual and the community that Kant elsewhere formulates as central to the position of the subject in the modern world. Whereas the Enlightenment reading of Kant [exemplified by Habermas] sees the third Critique as reflecting a development of the 'inner logic' of a self-contained aesthetic sphere, and tends to privilege the public discourse of taste over the experience of art itself, and whereas the Romantic response to Kant tends to see the Critique of Judgment as a reintegrative and redemptive attempt to restore unity through the formation of what Schiller called an 'aesthetic state,' to a social totality that had been shattered by the disintegrative forces of capital, I would suggest that . . . Kant leads us to conclude that the foundations of the liberal ethic reside not in the cognitive powers of reason or understanding, but in the (transcendental) imagination which regrounds the liberal state as the unity of wills under the concept of an end which has subjective claim to universality." Anthony J. Cascardi, "Aesthetic Liberalism: Kant and the Ethics of Modernity," Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol.45/no.176 (1/1991), p.12-13.

[17]See Carol Christ, "Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House," in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, Martha Vicinus, ed., (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1977), pp.146-162.

[18]Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood" in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), pp. 822-834. This essay originally appeared in Artforum (Summer 1967).

[19]See T.W. Adorno, "Black as an Ideal" in Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, (London: Routledge, 1984), pp.58-59.

[20]Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, p.531.

[21]See Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966-1972, (London: Studio Vista, 1973).

[22]From Adrian Piper's essay in the catalog for "26 Contemporary Women Artists" at the Aldrich Museum in April, 1971 cited in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, p.235.

[23] See Dan Graham, Rock my Religion: Writings and Art Projects 1965-1990, Brian Wallis, editor, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

[24]Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-1975, p.135.

[25]See Maurice Berger's interview with Adrian Piper in this anthology.

[26]Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-1975, p.138. Also see Lucy Lippard's documentation of this event in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966-1972, pp.122, 227, and 229.

[27]See "The Colossal" in The Truth in Painting, pp.119-147.

[28]From the symposium "Production and Representation in Contemporary Art". For more information on Avalos, Hock and Sisco's projects see Cylena Simonds, "Public Audit: An Interview with Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos," Afterimage 22:1 (Summer 1994), pp.8-11. On the Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate project see John C. Welchman, "Bait or Tackle? An Assisted Commentary on Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso," Art and Text 48 (1994), pp.31-33, 86-87.

[29]Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, "Movements and Dissensus Politics" in Cultural Politics and Social Movements, edited by Marcy Darnovsky, Barbara Epstein, and Richard Flacks, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), pp.235-250.

[30]Ibid, p.239.

[31]See Manthia Diawara, "Black Studies, Cultural Studies: Performative Acts," Afterimage 20:3 (October 1992), pp.6-7. Also see Let's Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance, edited by Catherine Ugwu, (Seattle: Bay Press/London: ICA, 1995).

[32]Elizabeth Sisco from the symposium "Production and Representation in Contemporary Art".