Art & the Public Sphere - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014

In the art institutional landscape, a blurring of boundaries between the state and the market is effectively transforming public art institutions into semi-private ones. In response to these developments, a New Wave of critical institutionalism has recently emerged with the goal of contesting the neo-liberalization of the public art institution. Existing literature in this field reduces the strategies these critical institutions employ to a dichotomy between attempting to reform public art institutions from within, or abandoning them completely in order to set up alternatives that exist outside the state system and its market logic. The former thinking follows a strategy of ‘engagement-with’ as theorized by Chantal Mouffe, while the latter adheres to the post-Operaist strategy of ‘exodus’. Within the field of left-wing political philosophy these strategies have been challenged by a third position put forward by Simon Critchley, which proposes that radical politics should take place at an ‘interstitial distance’ from state institutions, a strategy that involves opening spaces of opposition against the state from within state territory. Although Critchley does not apply this thinking to the field of art, it is my contention that his strategy of interstitial distance offers a third path for the critical institution, one which, I argue, is exemplified in the practices of the UK-based art collectives: Freee and Liberate Tate.

The documentary is often perceived as an officiated item, a ‘public’ record of sorts. The essay is seen as a personal and introspective device. This article will argue that certain artistic practices that work within an expanded and historicised sense of the documentary – specifically, the genre of the ‘video essay’ – provide new vicissitudes through which to examine the heteronymous character of the aesthetic mode as it has developed in political art praxis of the last fifteen to twenty years. More broadly, this article will examine how works such as these re-engage with the politics of representation debates of the 1920s/1930s and 1970s, despite the tendency for the rejection of ‘representation’ in relational or, indeed, post-relational art practices of recent years.

Having regard to two video works produced by Ursula Biemann, Remote Sensing (2001) and The Black Sea Files (2005), this article examines the portrayal of female displacement and migration in the context of Miranda Fricker’s recent discussion of ‘epistemic injustice’. Focusing on ways in which the videos demonstrate instances of testimonial injustice, it is argued that Biemann’s work requires audiences to broaden their conception of the circumstances in which such injustice might arise. The discussion shows that Remote Sensing and The Black Sea Files do not just illuminate the distinctive harm of testimonial injustice, but also deepen current debates in analytical philosophy about the ways in which social pressures, customs, and power structures impact on the provision and receipt of testimony. Instead of viewing the exercise of prejudice as the trigger for testimonial injustice, Biemann’s works show that such injustice can arise when listeners fail to have regard to the background socio-economic conditions that shape the context in which testimony is given and received. By self-consciously locating her works in a network of image circulation, Biemann also raises questions about the reliability of moving images that seek to illuminate testimonial injustice at the intersection of art and documentary.

‘Hlysnan: The Notion and Politics of Listening’, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 17 May–7 September 2014

Direct Urbanism, Transparadiso: Barbara Holub and Paul Rajakovics, Jane Rendell, Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (2013) Nurnberg: Verlag fur Moderne Kunst, 216 pp., colour illustrations, ISBN-10: 3869844086 (Language: English, German), p/bk, £25

‘Announcer’, Focal Point Gallery, Southend, United Kingdom, 14 April–12 July 2014

Owning the Immaterial: Art, Technology and Culture Symposium, Firstsite, Colchester, FRIDAY 30 May 2014