“ART IS NOT BEAUTY OR NOVELTY; ART IS EFFECTIVENESS AND DISRUPTION.” — LEÓN FERRARI
I was invited to an event called “Practices of Refusal :Art and the Obsession with Participation” so of course I went down a rabbit hole to find out what it was all about.
One of these rabbit holes led me to Documenta, a series of contemporary art exhibitions started in Germany in 1955.
It seems there is a growing number of artists who are objecting to the way these events are run (non-artists making money out of artists efforts and artists playing the game of “acceptance” while producing art that apparently challenges the status quo). The objectors are refusing to take part.
This is not new.
Jean-Paul Sartre refused to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.
Asger Jorns, a Danish artist rejected the Guggenheim International Award. He was a founder member of Situationist International.
Adrienne Rich, one of the most distinguished poets living and working in the United States, refused the 1997 National Medal for the Arts to protest the growing concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands.
At Documenta (13) in 2012 multidisciplinary artists were chosen whose messages and lines of inquiry were global, urgent and political.
Political artists are all about breaking out of this control. By definition they are anti-system, anti-method, anti-participation.
A prominent political artist in Argentina, León Ferrari, produced a series of drawings called “Letter to a General”. They were described as muffled writing — making gestures that look like letters but are really marks with no meaning. They suggested that fear muffles the voices of protestors and is the ultimate distortion.
Extract from Field: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism by anthropologist Aris Anagnostopoulos:
“In October 2016, when documenta 14 finally surfaced in public and media attention peaked, I asked a member of an occupied, self-managed theatre in Athens: “what are you going to do about documenta?” The answer was clear and assertive: “Nothing,” he said. “We are going to keep on doing what we always do, the same shows, the same parties, our normal function. Like documenta does not exist.” He then went on to explain that whatever you do “about” documenta, even if you criticize it heavily, the art behemoth will be able to assimilate it and use it to its own advantage. Even negative attention, he concluded, is positive advertising for such organizations, so a better course of action is to wait it out.”
It seems that in the attention economy the choice is not binary: to participate or protest, but to take a third option of non-participation.
And then there’s this study:
REDEFINING FAILURE
THE VALUE OF REFUSAL IN PARTICIPATORY ARTS by SARAH HARPER
“The expectation for socially engaged, participatory arts projects to effectively engage participation and contribute to evidencable social change might lead to the logical conclusion that non-participation is failure. But what does it mean when someone does not participate? Is it necessarily a failure? If so, who or what has failed? The artist, for failing to engage? The inhabitant, for lacking community spirit or artistic taste? Or is the cultural proposition meaningless or inappropriate? Is it really a failing to not want to participate or could it be seen, in certain contexts, as an affirmation of agency, a demand for something different?
Full article: https://intapi.sciendo.com/pdf/10.7146/tjcp.v7i2.119743
