Claire Bishop: A Few Notes on Accessories

Betsy Huete

As a part of the lecture series, Till Now: Contemporary Art in Context, the University of Houston’s School of Art recently hosted a lecture by contemporary art historian Claire Bishop. Entitled “Deja Vu: Contemporary Art and the Ghosts of Modernism,” she fundamentally laid out the groundwork for the symptomatic impulse of many contemporary artists to parcel out the tenets of modernism, piece-mealing seductive fragments into an hermetic, inscrutable construction in accordance to the artists’ tastes. Her delivery was smart, incisive, funny, humble, and open for discussion. This all, furthermore, comes on the heels of a biting critique of Dahn Vo’s installations at this past Venice Biennale.

Bishop started the lecture by categorizing contemporary artists’ modernist proclivities by organizing them globally: she pointed out how most of the artists today researching modernism—which by default for them, she suggests, means the clean lines of modernist architecture and not much else—are researching the modernist architects that are germane to their respective regions in the world. Since modernism essentially indicates notions of universal progress, Bishop immediately undercuts the research of most of these artists by implying that their regional myopia is, at best, provincial.


The Farnsworth House, architect Mies van der Rohe, from alexbowenblog.weebly.com

In contrast to a traditional powerpoint presentation where she presents an image and talks about it, moving on to the next one and so on, Bishop prepared a repetitious loop of images—some sharp, some blurry, some not even there—and she forewarned us that not only were some of the images not projecting correctly, but that they would also flow in and out of making sense, of being pertinent whatsoever to what she was lecturing. It came off as messy and disorganized, and instead of providing any real visual supplement, it functioned more as wallpaper. At first, it made me wonder why she prepared any images at all, that is until about ten minutes in when it became apparent that what she was doing was very much on purpose, and it was brilliant.

Instead of being the innocuous, fairly disorganized supplement as she dismissively stated, it was actually subversive and truly manipulative. The cutting lines and the similarities repeating again and again lulled us into a modernist trance, a thudding, relentlessly-paced reminder that hammered home her point, which is that so much of this work is so often the same. Her pinnacle example was the appropriation, regurgitation, and implementation of Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealized Monument to the Third International—a utopian modernist symbol that artists today, universally, can’t seem to help but come back to. She blew through a plethora of artists like Ai Weiwei, showing reified Tatlins repurposed into anything from chandeliers to coffee makers. This further drove home her point that references to Tatlin's Tower, while utilized heavily by Dan Flavin in the 1960s, disappeared almost entirely until about 1989: the so-called “end of history.”


Tatlin’s Tower, 1919, from arkinetblog.files.wordpress.com

The major gripes she has with these artists are the same gripes she has, I think, with Vo. Like Vo, Bishop declared that the research being done is less for critical, interpretive means than instead to evoke a kind of texture, perhaps a seance of a time when progress seemed real and things felt like they had a linear meaning. In her article “History Depletes Itself,” she likens Vo’s work “to diamonds on a necklace—or, better, crystals dangling from a chandelier.” By referencing jewelry and luxurious items, she effectively cuts all of this work off at the knees, relegating it all to the decorative.


Ai Weiwei, Fountain of Light, 2007 (from the Tate Museum)

But of course this is not the first time a critic has tried to deflate work by calling it decorative; it’s happened cyclically throughout the timeline of art history, particularly during the Feminist movement. Many critics (mostly male) at the time dismissed much of the work as decorative, failing to see that decoration was precisely the point, and that decoration has meaning and even political relevance. Obviously Bishop is using jewelry here as a metaphor, but she is nonetheless flinging mud in the very same way: artists like Vo are appropriating meaning to invoke a certain feeling, a kind of texture of rhetoric—therefore it is decorative, therefore it lacks any real meaning outside of itself.


Judy Chicago, Dinner Party, 1979, from cdn2.brooklynmuseum.org

In the same article she states: “So why does Vo’s success make me feel uneasy? In part, it has to do with the artist’s use of history and the way in which his poetics of the past is prone to devolving into information as ornament.” And this same frustration certainly came through in her lecture. But she was the first one to admit that she didn’t have a solution, and she even implored the audience for answers. So her bandaid solutions offered at the end of the lecture were a handful of works that seemed (I’m saying seemed because I haven’t seen them in person) like half-hearted attempts to engage contemporary art in a more overtly political manner, to somehow take the work out of the gallery and out into the world. I remember when Charles Esche lectured late last year at Glassell and he more or less said the same thing: I don’t have an actual solution, but here are a few half-hearted examples of artists making work that at least takes into account the real world outside of the institutions.

What makes me feel uneasy about this, other than laying out an argument with no real solution in mind, is the implication that the kind of political, activist, social practice art that Bishop—and even Esche—champion are somehow more political than the hermetic work she is railing against. It may be more didactic, it may implicate more activism, and it may converse with everyday people outside the gallery system—this may be true—but that does not necessarily make it more effective or poignant. It certainly doesn’t make “the real world” more receptive to or interested in contemporary art simply because contemporary art is trying to engage with it.

I think of a lot of this kind of work—although to be clear, not all—and then I think of my brother. He’s a social worker, and he helps mentally ill people get back on their feet again. He does this every day. He doesn’t do it within a gallery. He doesn’t do it for accolades. He doesn’t do it for a pat on the ass from MOMA. He just does it because it’s his job. And when I think of my brother, I can’t help but cast a skeptical eye onto activist work that needs a gallery to exist. The art world lauds contemporary art that evades the gallery system and subverts the art market, but if it relies on star curators and important critics for relevance, is it not complicit in the exact capitalist system it’s meant to counteract?

At least work like Vo’s isn’t pretending to exist somewhere it really doesn’t. The hermeticism Bishop deems inscrutable and ornamental is indeed symptomatic, as she states. I agree that it’s a form of mourning, a kind of exhumation of past ideals where there was a direction and at least a belief in answers. But that impulse to exhume today matters, and it is happening because artists are clamoring for a way to put all the pieces back together after postmodernism blew it all apart—however ill-fated that might be. This Don Quixote-esque impulse, this texturing of associations and allusions and rhetoric, is indeed a political act because it stands as a litmus test as to how, exactly, we are supposed to qualify meaning in a world where, terrifyingly, there may be none. Perhaps the work Bishop referenced was decorative in a manner that lacks substance. But with the way she’s framed her argument it begs the question: is she irked by contemporary art that examines modernist tropes, or is she just irked by poorly-researched research-based art?


Dahn Vo, Mother Tongue, 2013, from kunskritkk.no

Is it not fair to conclude that if a movement like the Feminist movement was effectually political because much of it insisted on being decorative, then so is research-based work that insists on being hermetic? It’s interesting to note that within the same issue of Artforum there is an article on the Sharjah Biennial, and its author, Yasmine El Rashidi, extols curator Eugenie Joo for organizing a show in the Middle East that was not overtly political. At the end of the article, Rashidi states: “Subtle shows walk a fine line: Some works may slip into the banal…The effect of change, so subtle you can’t quite place it, is also the knowledge and understanding that only come with time. Was it too utopian an experience? Or, against the backdrop of curating today, is that attenuated gesture art’s most political act?”

Claire Bishop lectured at Dudley Recital Hall at the University of Houston on September 16, 2015.

At the City Council Meeting

Robert Boyd

Friday night, I attended a city council meeting for the cities of Bismark, Oakland, Tempe, San Antonio, Houston, and Portland, Oregan. Except what I actually attended was a night of amateur theatricals called City Council Meeting (put on by Diverse Works) using as its scripts parts of actual city council meetings that occurred in those various cities. This was a piece of participatory art, to use the term favored by Claire Bishop in her book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. The audience were the performers to a certain extent. It was a highly formalized and controlled performance--each performer was reading from scripts. There was no improvisation. This evening's version took place at the El Dorado Ballroom over by Project Row Houses.

The audience was divided into four general roles--city councilor (including the mayor), speaker, supporter or bystander. I chose to be a bystander so I could take notes and take a few photos. That was a compromise, though, because the piece was for the participants. They stood the most to gain from participating.



The staging was minimal. The participants weren't dressed in suits and ties or otherwise made to look like a real city council. There was an elevated platform with a long table behind which the city council and the mayor say, facing out towards the bystanders and supporters. There was a small table and chair facing the city council where the various speakers would sit. Flags on either end of the long table were the only concessions to set decoration.

And sitting in the audience, I could see lots of people involved with the local art scene, lots of teenagers (and even younger kids) with their parents, and a few other people. The kids were from the Project Row Houses After School Program and from Kinkaid, an elite private school. I was told that the Kinkaid kids were promised that if they attended, they could drop their lowest test score, but I don't know if this was true. It was pretty much a full house.

The performance started out as a celebration of a retiring city councilor from Bismark, North Dakota. She had served for 20 something years, and there was a lot of jokey comaraderie as she official resigned. But curiously, she was played by a man. And the nameplates for the various city councilors and the mayor only occasionally matched in gender or ethnicity with the participant playing that role. The reason for this would become clear later. In Bismark, the retiring city councilor was replaced by a new one who we saw sworn in. She was played by one of the kids in the Project Row Houses After School Program.

At this point, we in the audience were moved to the back of the room for a few minutes, then asked to return to our seats. It wasn't at all obvious why this was happening.


Audience in the back of the room

Suddenly, all the name plates for the city councilors were changed. Now it's San Antonio and mayor Julian Castro, a rising Democratic star, is presiding. Two young people speak about their experiences with some program in San Antonio, but they both make heartfelt pleas for the government of San Antonio not to ignore East San Antonio.

Then there is a sudden change to Houston. The subject was "Renew Houston," a new flood-control infrastructure upgrade. This program was to be paid for by a new fee  and that the fee would apply to churches along with all other property owners. That was one controversial aspect. Another was that city councilor Steve Costello had, until recently, been a contractor with the city for this kind of infrastructure. Speakers addressed both these controversies, and astonishingly, Steve Costello played himself, reading his own words from that city council meeting which took place two years ago, I think.



Then it switched again, this time to the city council of Tempe, Arizona, in which the mayor gave a very strange speech. The next was an Oakland city council, which seemed tense and chaotic, with a very loud gavel being hammered every now and then. the first speaker seemed like a hippie-type, speaking about peace, love and understanding. Then a speaker came up and confessed he had just been released from jail, which got a big laugh from the audience. But that was only because the meetings were context-free. It turned out he had been an Occupy protester caught up in the big clashes between the police and the protesters in Oakland.



Hence the tense, chaotic feeling of the Oakland section. The loud gavel was to quiet the rowdy spectators, who were in this reenactment not present.

This part of the show ended with a bizarre encounter in a Portland, OR, city council meeting where a citizen speaker complained of the disgusting garbage on the street in his neighborhood, including used condoms, and proceeded to dump some of this garbage on the desk in front of him, causing the city council to declare a recess until it could be cleaned.



The idea--using a series of transcripts of city councils to illustrate a certain range of civic engagement that exists in the U.S., is good. The creators of this performance, Aaron Landsman, Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay,  realized that city council meetings were one of the few venues where civic engagement was enacted as a dialogue--in short, where the process could be easily turned into drama. And it worked--you had a range of emotions, from the fond farewell to a colleague to a charged post-riot meeting. And none of it had to be contrived by a playwright--it was, in a sense, "found" drama. Not to diminish the art of writing plays, but the fact that these bits had actually happened, that these words had actually been spoken in actual city council meetings, gave the work an incredible sense of authenticity.

Authenticity seems to be one of the frequent goals for participatory art. Hence when Jeremy Deller created The Battle of Orgreave (2001), the participants were comprised of two groups, each with their own concern for authenticity--former miners who had participated in the original clash with riot police in 1984 that the piece was recreating, and battle reenactors, who usually reenact famous battles from English history and have a fetish for authenticity.

But authenticity is curiously undermined by amateurishness. I was a "bystander," which effectively made me an audience member. And as the speakers and city councilors read their lines, I often found myself wishing they were skilled actors. Some of them embodied their roles pretty well, but many were awkward actors (just as I know I would have been if I had been in one of those roles). It was cute when the young kids of the project Row Houses After School Program were reading their parts, stumbling over hard words, but that awkwardness lessened the drama. The creators of the project have spoken of empathy, but  the amateur acting made empathy harder for me.

But perhaps not for the speakers themselves. With such a project, you have to ask who it's for. Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert chided critics in "An Open Letter to Critics Writing About Political Art" to consider who the art was for--who was the intended audience. And whether or not the art was reaching that audience effectively or at all. A good example of this is Hans Haacke. His intended audience for his most powerful pieces were the middle class liberals who went to art museums. He had researched them thoroughly through polls. And he made work that was aimed at them and which forced them to consider the complicity of their innocent art viewing with various crimes and immoral acts committed by large institutions in the world.

In this case, the art wasn't for me, a mere bystander, as much as it was for the active participants--the city councilors and the speakers. By taking on these roles, however awkwardly, they got to put themselves inside someone else's shoes--someone who was civically engaged. They got to see the love for the retiring city councilor or the tension of the post-Occupy riot meeting from the inside. How effective this was for them, I don't know. But as a viewer, I wish it had been more of a traditional theatrical performance.

The final part of the program had Steve Costello facing the project Row Houses kids. They seemed to be having a dialogue, but they were actually speaking about two different things. I found Costello's piece quite interesting. He talked about how a group of engineers with serious concerns about infrastructure in this city decided to pick their least nerdy member to run for city council so that they'd have someone on the inside to represent their interests. It was fascinating because it presented what often reads as a bad story (self-interested politicians) as a good story (a group with special knowledge because of their work picking one of their own to advocate for projects based on that special knowledge). Considering the costs to Costello (being investigated and accused in council of having a conflict of interest), the story he told was unexpectedly poignant.


Steve Costello and the kids from the Project Row Houses After School Program

How effective this was as activism is an open question, but it seems unlikely to have been more effective than "non-art" activism. For instance, activists who train folks to speak at city council meetings and round up concerned citizens to attend such as Nick Cooper with Food Not Bombs and their responses to the anti-feeding laws. This is one of Claire Bishop's complaints--that participatory art often falls pretty short as activism, but because it's art it ends up getting graded on a curve. (The opposite complaint is also true--we are often willing to give bad art a passing grade because we agree with its political stance.)  But I will take Duncombe and Lambert's instructions literally and say that as activism, City Council Meeting seemed likely to fall short, although time will tell. Will this encourage more people to be civically engaged, to go to city council meetings to talk about flooding or feeding the homeless or other issues that are important to them? I'm dubious, but who knows what those Project Row House After School Program kids will be doing in 20 years? We can't know if City Council Meeting has kickstarted the career of a future leader or activist.

"where boosterism is the only form of dialogue and lack of hype around an artist suffices for criticism"

"The force of Bishop’s language, alternating between biting critique and arching historicization, make attacks on her work unsurprising. But the agitation around Bishop can also be credited to the dullness of the contemporary art discourse, where boosterism is the only form of dialogue and lack of hype around an artist suffices for criticism. Museums, biennials, art fairs and galleries proliferate constantly and seemingly ad infinitum; the expanded field of the curator is discussed everywhere, but without an accompanying rise of the critic."

This is from a review of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship by Claire Bishop, reviewed by Ryan Wong for Hyperallergic. I just started reading this book, and this review is encouraging.