metropolis m

Oppressive norms

What is it that some of us are struggling with right now in our unlearning, or addressing oppressive internalised norms?

If we’re moving at the speed of the slowest person, someone who is habituated to the extent that they are as-yet ignorant to the seeing a possibility other than for art to promise itself as a mechanism of freedom, then we should that there. That’s why it seems fitting to let this text resonate with Krauss’s thoughts on unlearning habits. It starts with questioning our own engagement: You reading an art magazine and me writing an essay to be published in one and read by you.

Unlearning is the size of a workbook, without any direct invitation to write in it, but with an implicit requirement to work through it, not just read it. In fact I can’t imagine why someone would read this book alone, as I have just done, having, let’s say, taken up the habitual role of the solitary thinker that is the art critic. Oops.

Unlearning, which was built through collective endeavours, begs to be read and debated as such. When I ask myself now why I’m reading it as a solitary actor, I think also of a context, a privilege, that is especially troublesome for the committed asthete, which is of being paid to write critique, and the fact of compulsory participation in the labour market. This compulsion is the glue that holds together the racist heteropatriarchy and our respective roles within it. 

I think of Krauss’ co-conspirator and friend, late feminist philosopher Marina Vishmidt who taught me that while art (and I consider writing my art) by habit, is considered separate from labour but it is not, although it is distinct from ‘normal’ labour, is also co-constituitive of labour while it is also constituted by the detritus of labour, which is value, and also creates value that can be used to buy more labour. Ironic now that I’m doing my art, writing, being paid to critique a book about what it might look like to unlearn all of the things that colonial capital holds together, which would certainly include the economy of art criticism, where taste and judgement live comfortably. 

What I could surmise, to unlearn my role in this ecosystem, is to insist on reading the book as a group, but I didn’t think of that until I had already started writing my response. I also could refuse to read the book in the dynamic of paid labour, but I think that feels a bit like a reaction that Krauss, via Gayatri Spivak, warns against: when you realise your own privileges, ‘it is not enough to recognise one’s privilege and to resign from one’s authoritative position by being silent. Rather it is necessary to actively work through one’s own privileged position that will finally influence … how one engages in social change’.[1] To this end, I also think that paying your co-conspirators/ comrades/ friends should be, even if it is perverse, considered an effective form of solidarity in our neoliberal financialised present. I’ve written elsewhere about this tension field in relation to nepotism.[2]

I could try a spate of unlearning the review form and its aesthetics? And try to respond while I am embedded already in the ecosystem of art critique. Perhaps this is what Krauss via Spivak speaks to: how we learn to play the double bind. Of particular interest to me, as a writer who reviews while also being a hater of taste and meritocracy, was Krauss’ essay “Instead of Solving Paradoxes and Contradictions”. I see my participation in the framework of art in a western context, while I also host a spirit that desires something completely otherwise to its logics as a contradiction. My choice to participate and furthermore install this work as my primary mode of my compulsory trade of my body’s labour for capital,  all the while harbouring in the same body deep desire for this industry to fall into extinction, as irreconcilble demands.

Taught Instincts

The book unpacks what it means to Krauss to unlearn, which seems from the aforementioned essay, is built from the artists deep study of Spivak’s theorisations on privilege and on the irreconcilable demands that a privileged person faces if they choose to become aware, rather, to let go of their blissful ignorance, of what their privilege makes impossible for them to see and feel. This creates an ironic ignorance, especially for those with formal education in aesthetic traditions, because a main characteristic of that training is to hone one’s ability to sense and respond.

Regarding unlearning privilege, Krauss questions one’s ostensibly instinctual responses and attraction as learned and not an a priori characteristic of the thing being judged. This is of incredible important in an ecosystem which thrives and trades on attraction and response. We are still living in the remnants of Kantian and Schillerian ideologies that purport art and beauty as a mechanism for attaining freedom.

To me it is not that the Arts (as an economy that derives value from the exchange of aesthetic beliefs) are any more or less insidious than another ecosystem that is build within our racist heteropatriarchal capitalist Western modernity, but that the Arts have a particular insidiousness. While being one of many systems of oppression, the aesthetic disciplines’ primary self-descriptions are one that purports to do the exact opposite – to facilitate freedom and transcendence through education. To understand this, it has been helpful to me to recall Georgetown law professor K-Sue Park’s theory of predatory inclusion, wherein they demonstrate that institutional initiatives to include ‘the other’ , whether that be racialised peoples or, women, or gender non conforming people, into their programmes, is not progress but predatory because that inclusion further inscribes the so-called excluded other into a violent and dysfunctional system.

It is because of perspectives like Park’s that I am no longer excited when a young black woman artist tells me that she wants to ‘get into’ the artworld. Save yourself ! I cry from deep inside my chest, but previously my thinking mind has assuaged myself knowing that this logic operates in any industry. I’m not sure (yet) if there is a reason to discourage people from offering themselves up as prey to this aesthetic beast. But maybe, there is something particular here to pay attention to, in what Krauss also has been investigating and dismantling, which is the ingrained assumption that to be educated in art, beauty and aesthetics provides a route to freedom, to possibility.

Speaking of the body, I agree with Krauss who by using Gramsci shows that participation in the arts is a pyscho physical habit. It is important to acknowledge the bodily dimension because another aspect of our art ecosystem is still founded in the ingrained belief or the impulse to keep including or incorporating new people into this world through art education. Supposedly ‘freeing’ their minds because aesthetics, in European modernity, is associated as civilisation and freedom. But this is not often spoken about as indoctrination of our bodies as well.

Cognitive labour is nothing more than a psycho-physical habit of pretending that the mind is superior to the flesh. This habit has to be trained, but this training should not be considered an elevation. I’m very interested in the physicality of aethetic education and unlearning as bodies. Krauss even interrogates the act of scholarly reading as a bodily exercise. Cognitive labour has a physicality, and we as an ecosystem of writers and curators, especially at an institutional level, through an optimism about what institutions can do, risk displaying a habit of ignoring the bodily aspect of what we do with our cognitive faculties.

With patience and generosity, Krauss proposes some tools for the slowest person in all of us. The book uses four modes of writing: reprinted conversations, citations, new essays and something that Krauss adeptly calls ‘scenes’—text records of embodied practice. All of this is backdropped by Krauss’s own rigorous interrogation of her own social position as a white woman born raised and working as an artist in Western Europe. I would image that Krauss is also thinking here about the default infrastructure of being seen as an individual artists, or an intellectual authority on the ideas she wishes to share, all the while living the contradiction that, well, her name (as well as others) is still on the cover of the book as its primary contributor. In this sense, in addition to being one of the books authors, positioning herself as editor (with Janine Armin), might serve to soften the solitary authorship that is associated with artistic merit (a habit of the production, but also the consumption of artworks) and maybe positions her as a gatherer of ideas rather than an progenitor of them.

Krauss seems to situtate herself as ‘building on’ insights, rather than being insightful. I think this is a very subtle but foundation dishabituation that deserves some attention in an art education context. It reflects her investment in alternative education and feminist anticolonial strategies counter to the academizing institutionalism, the latter being a primary safe space for white innonence, white ignorance formed through unexamined adherence to habit. Still we have to acknowledge that the institution has often been our norm, our habit, even when we are black women working within them. Perhaps, included via predation and serving as (not only, but always also) a representational signal to that institution’s goodness or forward thinking.

Looking at what we have inherited from aesthetic education, like Kant and Schiller, Krauss proposes that we break away from position aesthetics as considered developmental to one that considers aesthetics as material. For which there is no quick fix, and the work will be slow. But it’s essential that we, you reading an art magazine, me writing for one, critically consider with some depth how institutional habits, especially those of goodwill, inculcate the oppressive cultures that have built what we consider normal.