metropolis m

Imagine a high-end supermarket: the lights are emitting a neon hue (bright but not sterile), Muzak resonates softly in the aisles, the products lay shining, fresh and welcoming on the shelves. You stroll by with your trolley whilst enjoying a cup of fair trade espresso, examining the goods, checking expiry dates, ingredient composition and place of origin and production.As a critical consumer, you feel empowered that your purchase has been made upon a well-informed decision. Your enjoyment of your shopping experience is partly derived from ‘being on the right end of things’, a moral sense of wellbeing which ends up flavouring your dinner dish, and makes it taste so much better. It heightens your sensibility of being a conscientious and engaged subject: it provides you – or so you believe – with a sense of agency. However, have you in effect really seen and savoured the produce for what it is: taste, smell, freshness, colour? Or have you only valued the latter for what it is supposed to represent: an ethical, healthy and informed choice? It might seem a politically incorrect proposition for quotidian grocery shopping, since eventually our choices do matter. I support fair trade and organic farming to the fullest. Nevertheless, this is a useful imaginary exercise and the analogy with the art world (or art market) is not entirely far-fetched. The first question to pose would be whether we should be so overtly concerned with the politically correct in the realm of art in the first place. In 2006, Claire Bishop signalled that art criticism often fails to judge the artistic merit of socially engaged practice as ‘[e]mphasis is shifted away from the disruptive specificity of a given work and onto a generalized set of moral precepts.’1 Perhaps the above scenario can serve as an invitation to rethink the exegetic – if not at times didactic – discourse invested in much of ‘engaged’ and ‘documentarist’ art, on the level of production as well as on the level of reception. In some cases, the weight of socio-political narratives overshadows other properties of art-making such as aesthetics and form, or makes them secondary, if not unimportant. This is clearly a loss, for it markedly shrinks the multiple registers on which art operates. One might argue that circumstances and urgencies call for clarity and firm directives, but if this effectuates a reduction of meaning, then the leeway for art becomes very narrow. This is not a plea against practice which invests itself in political and social issues; on the contrary, it is an attempt to allow affect (back again) as a possible critical site and departure point for curatorial and artistic production. Affect is understood by theorists such as Brian Massumi and Judith Butler as a primary, embodied response that comes before consciousness and cannot fully be inscribed in language.2 Affect differs from feelings and emotions, in the sense that the former are personal and the latter are events of social display.3 Responses of affect – even though unconscious – take place within a social and perceptual framework. If you will, it is the raw gut reaction which occurs before a process of cognitive rationalisation or conscious social checks and balances takes place. In that respect, affect can be read as an alternative way of acquiring and demonstrating knowledge: one that transcends a pre-ordained ethical conditioning and pushes us to cross boundaries and produce and perceive differently. I would welcome a knocking on – if not the kicking in – of closed doors again, rather then repeating the move with the already open ones.An aesthetics of affect would presuppose a proximity to the subject matter, and thus argue against the idea of safe distance; against the measured over-contextualised tip-toeing around issues. It would call for an immersed and embodied approach as a basis for different modalities of representation and interpretation. The bodily sensorial, because always specific, cancels out the general, and requires full presence and complete engagement. In that sense, it might do away with carefully scripted objectivity, and open up the scope for that which is normatively not always accepted. An embodied presence would in its term necessitate a re-evaluation of form(at) and medium: if art inhabits a plane wherein complex and contradictory meanings can co-exist, this will have to be ramified in its execution. The regime of the mono-dimensional message and its ‘breaking news’ value or bitesize info blips – often communicated through a screen – permeate our work spaces, living rooms, and public spaces: they should not always dominate our art spaces.Utopian perhaps, but wouldn’t it be nice to imagine the end of consensus politics in art and beyond? Affect could provide a subjective base for liaisoning a strong political position with an artistic one, and offer a counter to the increasing instrumentalisation (read functionality) of art, as defined by the agendas of third parties (funding bodies, governments, artist-in-residency programs, etc) wherein the artist takes on the role of social worker, conflict mediator, anthropologist, journalist or diplomat. For what is the subjectivity and position of the artist if s/he is primarily concerned with recording, registering, documenting and hence producing the subjectivity of others? Where does the artist fit in this equation, and where does the audience?If anything, affect accommodates an exit strategy when the premises of the supermarket become too confining, and when – over-saturated with conscientious consumption – we find nothing we would like to take home. For both shopping trip and art experience, refusal or deviation should always be an option.Nat Muller is an independant curator and critic based on between Rotterdam and the Middle East. 1. Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontent’, in Artforum www.artforum.com/inprint/id=10274 (last accessed on 28 September 2009) 2. Judith Butler, ‘Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect’ in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009, pp. 33-62. Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’ in Cultural Critique, 31 (1995) 2, pp. 83-109. 3. See for a clear description: Eric Shouse, ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’ in M/C Journal Vol.6, No.8, December 2005. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php (last accessed 28 September 2009).