Sinéad Murphy - Is art a mode of control? Does our desire to create constrain us as effectively as our desire to consume?

Sinéad Murphy, The Art Kettle, Zero Books, 2012.

„In contemporary society, art is that which appears to open up all of those possibilities that our daily lives would close down, with developments in community art, art therapy, and public art extending this seemingly liberating effect to us all. But what if art is a mode of control? What if art operates to kettle us as effectively as, if much more subtly than, recent police curtailment of protestors in public squares in London?

The Art Kettle argues that our capacities for imagination, creativity, even resistance, in being apparently fostered by art are being channelled safely and to no purpose, all the better for our continued subjection to the round of means and ends that defines our profit-driven Western democracies. Through analysis of contemporary artworks and an intriguing account of the later decades of the Victorian age, The Art Kettle would convince us to question the ways in which we currently feel ourselves to be free and to begin to practice for a better future, a future founded in our past, when fundamentalism was a kind of courage, art a kind of craft, and needlepoint a kind of revolution.“

„The theme of 'disinterest' is a dominant one in philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience, and, unlike many philosophical themes, it has had and continues to have a huge effect, on presuppositions about the nature of judgment, of feeling, of art, of resistance, of all of those experiences and activities that appear to operate at least partly outside of the given regulations of human existence. The Art Kettle has two aims: first, to show that 'modern' art - that is, art during and since the Enlightenment - is not only itself defined by 'disinterest,' by dearth of purpose, but functions as a standard for creativity, for free thinking, for choice, for indulgence, for questioning, and for protest, that suits very well the requirement, in our capitalist democracies, that differences and resistances expend themselves without effect on the combination of conservatism and consumption that supports these democracies; second, to show that the historical conflation of aesthetic experience and 'disinterest' is subject to resistance from another historical conflation: of aesthetic experience and use or purpose.“  

„An art book is a curious item. Lifting the unusually heavy cover and flapping ahead to the large colour plates, one anticipates pleasure not only in looking at the art itself without the peculiar unease of galleries – departure lounges without destination, waiting rooms without delay – and with all the attention enabled by languid time and solitude, but also reading about the art. This is where the gift may be fully unwrapped. Except one soon rediscovers that there nothing in books quite as awkward and unsatisfying as reading about art. Embarking on paragraph setting the scene of, say, an allegorical landscape, one is impatient to turn to the particular plate to see again for oneself. The same is true when the author discusses the technical properties of the work, its critical context and its family tree. In the identical original gallery movement, however, one's eyes leave the painting to seek the caption and, a moment later, the related text one had impatiently abandoned. The next impulse is to put the book away and visit the gallery again, or perhaps abandon the subject altogether. Art appreciation sometimes appears less a process of discovery and growth than an unsatisfying, moth-like fluttering between partial illuminations. Why this oscillation in the dark?

Sinéad Murphy’s dissatisfaction with art is of a different order entirely and she has no hesitation in providing an answer: by suppressing the question of what art is for, contemporary art colludes with liberal democracy in making “social, cultural and political life free of ... unpredictable, revolutionary capacities.” Moreover, this collusion is not a failure of certain contemporary artists or movements but its very mode of being:

“the manner in which art is constituted in our society – that is, what we understand art to be and to do, and the value we attribute to what art is and does – operates primarily as a mode of control.”

The Art Kettle's case is worth setting out in as much detail as a brief review allows in order to let its unusual resistance to art show through. 

 The title makes the explicit connection between the art world and the Metropolitan Police’s new tactic of containing political protests: a uniformed cordon blocks citizens into a corner and, on pain of truncheon and arrest, refuses to let them proceed until they are exhausted and the protest tranquilised. Art’s collusion is exemplified by the book’s premier example: Brian Haw's permanent protest in Parliament Square against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, made up of placards, photographs and paintings, that was then recreated in Tate Modern by the artist Mark Wallinger. In 2005 the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act came into force outlawing unauthorised protests within a kilometre of the square and Haw’s protest was almost entirely dismantled. Yet Wallinger’s creation, also within the kilometre exclusion zone, remained untouched: “Haw’s protest, become art,” Murphy observes, “had ceased to make itself heard”. The removal of one installation thereby “makes explicit the subtle dismantling of possibilities for protest by a government bent on protecting the ‘freedom’ of its citizens”, reducing political action “to mere performance of action, to remake it ... with merely aesthetic import”. Protest in liberal democracy is then possible only in terms that disqualifies its need to exist.
The direct connection with art in Murphy's account seems, on first impression, wilful and excessive. Art must have great power to prove so weak. So how did it reach this place in society and what is the alternative? For The Art Kettle, the reason is the art world’s “obviation of the question What is it for?” through disinterested appreciation of exhibitions rather than active engagement, and the proper alternative is not a “political art” at all but craft: “that thinking and feeling mode of living for which use and beauty are warp and woof”. To get to this point the book tells several stories that follow the movement from natural human creativity to disinterested art.
The first movement began in 1878 when John Ruskin accused James Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” by exhibiting Nocturne in Black and Gold. Whistler sued and the debate about whether the painting was genuinely art took place in a court of law. While Ruskin’s lawyer saw no beauty in the painting and could not therefore regard it as art, Whistler contended that any “artist of culture” would see that it is and would. For Whistler then, art was for only the cultured few, while Ruskin believed it should be “devotional handmaids of right and of good”. Murphy summarises this as the first and permanent division of art’s possibilities “between an exercise in the elevation of the masses and an experiment in the artistic interests of the few”. This is a familiar charge of course, particularly in the literary and musical spheres, but The Art Kettle makes explicit how false this opposition is: both in fact serve the cause of Kantian disinterest in the work. After Whistler vs. Ruskin, art’s possibilities have existed in an “It’s not art/It is art” loop which continues today in the Stuckists’ protests against the Turner Prize. The former bemoans the latter rewarding the disappearance of art into life while the movement, Murphy argues, is quite clearly life disappearing into art. Both serve the same tranquilising goal. The Art Kettle presents disinterest as an ideology of art appreciation imposed by a navel-gazing elite; an ideology that “pursues” both permanence (timelessness) and evanescence (irrelevance to the social moment) and is thereby “the enemy of human existence twice over”. Yet her examples suggest there is something less intentional at work.
William Morris saw that the industrial revolution eventually removed working people from their ability to “think, create and invent” and though they might live in comfort with beautiful furniture and appliances, it is a comfort detached from its foundation: “all of those things that we now regard work as 'freeing us up' to do: read, paint, shop, travel, think – is also alienated, from the educative, the enlightening, incubation that is craft.” One only has to recognise how demeaning the word “hobby” has become to appreciate the anxiety generated in a deracinated population. But Morris’ own design work has itself been assimilated into the same consumer culture and his aim “to conflate the faculties of thought and feeling” neutralised; it has become another hobby-like lifestyle choice as much as minimalist kitchens and properties with “character”. Worse, in the 2009 Turner Prize was won by a maker of wallpaper, a decorative object become chin-stroking aid. This is certainly life disappearing into art, placing taste in the hands of a disinterested few. But isn't something stranger taking its course?

 Édouard Manet’s paintings portrayed people dressed in the fashion of the time in otherwise classical works as a means of depicting the present day, to make ordinary life the subject of art by confronting the viewer with images of himself and not, as had been the case for centuries, the divine. Murphy says the man in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is meant to be you, not anyone but precisely you. The same goes for the viewer of Olympia. Manet spent his career trying to address “people who would not listen, who would not look”, partly perhaps because the fashions change so quickly the man reflected in the mirror the Folies-Bergère was soon as out-of-date as a Roman in a toga. The viewer saw only another great work of art. In a key pointer Murphy says the human subjects in Mante's paintings “went very quickly the way of their gods”. The democratic art he and others sought all went this way, much like the French Revolution was the first of many to go the way of the terror. We’re told the newest design for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square is called Power Structures, Fig. 101, a title presented as revelatory: “artworks as power structures; art as the guillotine of the modern age”. Art as the Calvary Cross of the modern age would perhaps be more appropriate; a revolutionary saviour ritually executed by an occupying force.

 The Art Kettle concentrates on visual artists but a chapter is devoted to the dressmaker Charles Frederick Worth whose story takes the reverse direction of Manet’s. He went from selling clothes that suited the needs of women of the day to cultivating a permanence in what is, by definition, ephemeral – that is, by being purposely retro like Teddy Boys or Mods – and so diminishing craft and taste to adorn himself with timeless art. Murphy compares this with modern day fashion houses and is  characteristically sharp about the pretension of parading clothes never to worn by anyone other than by tall, ultra-slim models. Yet while this certainly removes the craft of dress sense that Murphy values, it is perhaps also obscurely aspirational to a customer, much like a peacock’s tail is to a peahen, an otherwise useless item used to gain a mate or, in our case, a customer: a surplus of strength used solely to display useless beauty. What then is motivating this Siren-like movement from utility to art?

 We may recognise an answer by going back to the “It’s not art/It is art” loop. One figure who brought it to prominence is undoubtedly Marcel Duchamp. Murphy aligns his readymades with Manet’s paintings in which the bare canvas could be seen beneath the oils. But Duchamp’s Fountain was his direct challenge to art as art.

“Making something is choosing a tube of blue, a tube of red, putting some of it on the palette, and always choosing the quality of the blue, the quality of the red, and always choosing the place to put it on the canvas, it’s always choosing.” 

If art involves such limitless choices, then it is essentially arbitrary, and so a crafted item such as a urinal may as well effuse the supposed glory of art as anything else. A banal point nowadays and repeated as often as the gesture itself, but it helps to brighten the space between art as a craft and art as an abiding veneration of something, if no longer divinity. The assumption of intentionality as central in the process of art cannot be maintained when the tradition and purpose of worship has gone, when the work of art has become like our world, irredeemably secular and disenchanted. Duchamp's Fountain more or less discharges intention at its very apex, thus perhaps demanding the re-evaluation of the meaning of art. What fascinated Duchamp was the introduction chance into the made work, what Francis Bacon called “the non-rationality of a mark”. Of course his elaborately perplexing installations, such as The Large Glass with its unintentional rainbow shatterings, have gone the way of the gods too. 

What suggests itself then is precisely what Sinéad Murphy desires: a naive, anachronistic and exclusive reconstitution of craft: “a kind of fundamentalism that identifies ends that are worth pursuing and commits itself to their realization". This is not a utopian demand, if not its opposite. It is instead open resistance to the utopian whiteout of the gallery space that has extended its bland, neutralising presence into the everyday world. With craft replacing consumption as a universal practice, we may then begin to witness the disappearance of art, and how art might thereby transfigure our relation to the world, not merely remove us from it. It has happened before.
In the caves of southern France tens of thousands of years ago, humans lit fires and painted animals on the walls. For what reason, we can only speculate, but there must have been a reason; most likely, we suppose, a shamanic ceremony. What ever the reason, here is art before art, apparently useless and manifestly overwhelming. For us there is nowhere to go but back into the light of day struck by the power of painted things and wondering, again, what to make of this experience of partial illumination. Could it be that the irrationality of these excessive acts in the dark, now protected from human contact (the contrast with art galleries is pertinent), is necessary for a revelation/revolution? Art may be the inevitable remainder of craft, the epiphenomenon of human creativity, and all that we call art since Lascaux has sought in vain its unintentional alchemy. This would mean the craft of rational argument, on display throughout The Art Kettle in as much quantity as bitter passion, may be seen to be part of that vain search, as is each art book, and this review too. Perhaps the best response would be to learn how to build a fire in a cave.“ – Stephen Mitchelmore


"In the beginning:
The starting point is a George Eliot quote from Middlemarch, a sentiment is expressed of a jadedness with art that lies outside life and doesn't improve the world and favouring instead a view in which everyone's life should be made beautiful. This directly relates to the question what art is for. It reminds us not to obviate the question of what art is for. And what is art for? This is answered by Murphy: To keep us all in good order. p4 How is this to be understood? Murphy describes an instance of protest, by Brian Haw, in 2001, against the war in Iraq. This protest was dismantled later. by the police. An artist called Wallinger reconstructed this protest which was then not dismantled by the police.
Once this initial protest had become art, it was only art and not visible anymore as a form of protest.
Interlude: The guillotine.
What is the diagnosis: It is one of guillotines: artworks as power structures; art as the guillotine of the modern age. p49, one of loss:
How much now lost is evident all around us: in the large, cool, white, and mostly empty spaces in which what we call art is now displayed; in the very limited demographic ever likely to enter such spaces; in the almost total identification of art with the artworld and corresponding to almost total loss of art from any other world: the world of home, the world of work, the world of play, the world of life. p46
I want to approach Murphy's book with a concept of vertigo originating out of Lucile's last lines. Büchner's play Danton's Death ends with the lines: Es lebe der König!, [Long live the King!] famously interpreted by Celan in his meridian speech as a revolutionary counterword. Long live the King, this being said during the French Revolution is bound to lead to Lucile's death. How to understand this sentence as revolutionary? The statement, what is being said is something that wants back the old order, that is the content, it is so far from revolutionary as one can imagine. So how can this be interpreted as revolutionary act?
This is a situation of reversal. Of a counterword. Words don't mean anymore what they used to mean. Even back then. Words mean two things: that what they actually mean and their opposite. Direct communication is - or has become impossible.
You can't say anymore what you wanted to say, because you don't want the King to live. But you can't say what you actually wanted to say, because all these words are already assimilated and not available anymore to you so that you can express your innermost truth. Only to hail towards the opposite of what you want you can express your resistance and freedom. Why is it freedom when you have to say the opposite of what you want to say in order to be free? Of what nature is this freedom? A freedom of the second degree, an indirect freedom not necessarily leaving any traction in your life. Because yon know this is not what you want, you only cannot say it. But you still have this knowledge which can only find its way out as its opposition, with serious consequences for the individual and understanding.
Art today.
Murphy describes a reversal of the Lucile situation. Art today, or some of it, if it is meant to be critical, express resistance, it is assimilated into the status quo. The powers of assimilation of capitalism, the art functionaries and so on. The usual suspects. Instead of Long live the King, it rather ought to say Long live Capitalism in the same manner Lucile expressed her last words. The reversal does not take place today. Authentically being critical of anything is rather seen as a sign of health: When the children are dirty, they are healthy. When they children demonstrate, when they create their disinterested, sterile art, they are healthy. When the children display an interest in integrity....
They are being assimilated like the borg into the natural order of things. Such Art has no traction, no meaning in every day life, all radicality is lost and it is as neutral as it is meaningless.
This guarantees for a situation of vertigo as perceptions and words are contorted. It is possible to interpret Lucile's statement or contemporary art in two opposite ways. Once in a way as giving up and resignation and on the other hand as a way of a person at the fullest height of consciousness knowing very well what she is doing and putting all her strength into these very last words and them becoming an act of utmost freedom and resistance. The problem is that it is not easy to discern form the outside what actually is being meant. Because, what you end up with is a silence.
The silence is characterised by it being impossible to use the own words. So one is only heard by proxy of the words that mean the opposite of what one actually wanted to say, at the price of the loss of oneself while still holding on to one's inner truth. One could say: An inhuman statement saving humanity [cf.71]. And further, art lost the ability to speak, directly. This ambiguity is the very thing leading to a sort of vertigo. Directness is lost. The self is - in the last instance - not sure of reality and art anymore.
And therein lies the kernel of the kettle that is art in our times, for its defining move is to make the medium into the message and, thereby, to silence the message. If one would, as Manet thought he might, touch one's audience, you can be sure that art, in moving quickly to honour touch itself will disarm any such possibility; it would, as Manet thought he might, encourage one's view to think of themselves as involved in one's paintings, as at stake in them, you can be sure that art, in moving quickly to honour involvement itself, will annihilate any such possibility. 48f
The vertigo situation is excellently described by Murphy like this: When Susan Philipsz confessed to having experienced the sound of chants of protest at government cuts as if they were in a dream, she could not have summarised more accurately the extent to which, in its simultaneous monopolising of the creative impulse and designation of that impulse as necessarily extricated from any purpose, as for nothing, what we call “art” has rendered un-real the possibilities for “free-thinking” and for resistance. p5
Things become un-real. Christina von Braun suggests in her book Über den Schwindel (about vertigo) that the vertigo is like a house that is being erected by these mechanisms, always anew erected simultaneously in order to house people but it is a house without a floor. Further, vertigo is also always related to the simulation of new spaces or, new realities, such as the re-evaluation of - or better downgrading of protest into art and the downgrading of art into nothingness and the downgrading of art into a form of control. Vertigo shows the frailty of the self, the loss of the senses and in turn can become a movement that embraces vertigo in the end (like the counterword of Lucile, embracing the opposite of what you want to say).
Another vertigo-causing double movement is described again slightly turned here in the way how disinterest defines contemporary art:
The value of disinterest, now definitive of art, is a double edged sword, it would seem: taking from creativity the craft that would make it wearable, that would make it useful; and exposing those who wear, who use, who go about the business of living, to all the obsolescences and renewals unleashed by the wane of judgement, of taste. Disinterest, then, pursues both permanence (it has no investment in time and place) and an almost total evanescence (it has no connection with time and place); it is, in this sense, the enemy of human existence twice over, first because the human changes and then because the human does not change quickly or continuously enough. p55f
How do the mechanisms of control work? This is explained with Foucault's notion of discipline, control is self internalised, the individual in last instance monitors itself. It echoes here Christina von Braun who states that an acceptance of collective norms is demanded from the individual, and demands the subjection under these norms as a conscious free decision. Selfinternalization and assimilation are completed. Yet then again: ethical behaviour means that on the one hand the very acceptance of those collective norms while on the other hand the capacity not to be determined totally by these norms, by being able to separate oneself from the collective, as well the possibility for individuality.
Are people stupid?
Despite the beginning where the promising beautification of life was to be extended to everyone I had occasionally feelings of unease when I read formulations like anaesthetised spectatorship p75 and people being unable to exercise their judgements anymore p5f and a very docile population, obediently lined up p57 and such like. They still might use their judgement, as skillful as ever, only is it directed rather to chose the best insurance instead of creative purposes. But maybe, they are creative after all it only find not an expression in ways in which it is publicly perceiveable.
So, are people stupid?
It is the same with the Lucile situation. They may full well be aware of that the deal is rotten. But how do they express it. What possibilities are left for addressing this? They may very well have left only analogue responses to Long live the King. Long live capitalism, they might say. Except they might not mean it. What do we know. The only way to express their resistance is the very medium that cuts off their resistance. And the vertigo continues.
Christa Wolf in her last book Stadt der Engel wrote that when a society forces people in this sort of impasse, society is very sick.
Is art really the culprit.
I am not sure about this. Is it not rather about how it is being used? and assimilated? Is not art actually Lucile? That has become mute? Isn't art just as messed up as we are? Or just not? I am tempted to think that art is rather like Lucile and subjected to these same vertigomechanisms.
It is, after all the question of - reality or what Christina von Braun calls Wirklichkeitsmacht = The power to reality. The way it escapes us in the vertigo and the way we can ascertain an own power to reality as well. To establish our reality, mirrored by art, and a protection against the vertigo. And if we want to: To make words count again, and art as well.
What is suggested, how to get art back into life, to give it traction, to enable it to leave traces in our reality:
To overcome this art-vertigo-impasse with craftsmanship in the Morris sense, where craftsmanship is regarded as fully human existence. That suggests a creativity that needs exercise and extends itself to all areas of life, an art, that is useful in life, that is not disinterested, that can be touched and is not inhuman. This reminds of Edward Reed, The Necessity of Experience that writes against the loss of first-hand experience and the dangers of vertigo-situations due to second-hand experiences a loss of our self knowledge, in last instance a loss our knowledge of the world, and reality while this is all being replaced with simulations of second- or third-hand reality.
What is art really for? Finally, to become a fundamentalist believer in yesterday's good taste, a fundamental change in our ways we relate to art:
Fundamentalism is a much tainted word in the West at present, and difficult to pick up and brush off. But it is a kind of fundamentalism that is required to loosen the hold of this awful reasonableness that makes us dull even when we are being creative, and obedient even when we are resistant; a kind of fundamentalism that identifies ends that are worth pursuing and commits itself to their realization, and that practices means that are both purposeful and pleasurable, both useful and enriching; a kind of fundamentalism that, as Bourriaud describes it, is very like that outdated thing we call good taste. And, if this sounds naive, anachronistic, and exclusive, then so it should sound naive to a world now so sophisticated that nothing arouses its interest, and anachronistic to a world now gone over a century from a time when the judgement of taste might have won the day, and exclusive to a world bent on being so inclusive that nothing is allowed to be worth anything but what someone else will pay for it. p75f  [all emphases murphy]" - Flowerville

 

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