In the summer of 2018, artists Sam Gould and Doug Ashford were invited to present a public program under the sails of Voile/Toile Toile/Voile (2018), a temporary installation in the Cowles Pavilion in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden by French artist Daniel Buren. Gould and Ashford were both members of artist collectives—Red76 and Group Material, respectively—that adopted activist stances towards sensitive issues and produced projects designed to engage their audiences in revolutionary thinking. Buren’s artwork canopy would serve as a prompt for each speaker’s relationship to abstraction.
Due to an unforeseen injury, the live talk could not take place, but the pair connected for a discussion to be shared here instead. Referencing Buren’s own political use of abstraction, Gould and Ashford conducted a free-wheeling phone call on precision, abstraction, and interpretation—both in art and language—as it relates to life, a binary political sphere, and idea of un-commonality.
Doug Ashford (DA)
Where do we begin? The Radical Middle?
Sam Gould (SG)
Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this phrase of Renata Alder’s, of moving “towards a radical middle.” It’s paradoxical, at least how I’m interpreting it, and it has really stuck with me. Everything has become so polemic, so didactic. I’m not interested in being wishy-washy. Finding truths, illustrating social desires and ethical imperatives is the goal, but as I see it, the desire for a radical middle suggests a need for some type of social tool for thinking through problems. And that, outside of polemical, argumentative grandstanding, has flown out the window. That critical space seems, slowly but surely, to be eroding day by day in favor of didacticism. Often, and I do understand why, it seems somehow an affront to want to sit down and consider something top to bottom. If you don’t immediately say, “Well, I’m on this side,” or, “I believe in this,” you’re somehow culpable within a system of violence. In this sense, contemplation is a privileged position. And yes, it may certainly be. But then isn’t the fight to demand more space for contemplation as opposed to limiting it?
DA
I feel like there are two issues with this idea because it’s not just Adler who’s citing this. This is a part of a general trend of much talking these days about “common ground.” After Trump’s election, I noticed a growing discussion, among the white intelligentsia in particular, about how we “didn’t pay attention to our working class brothers and sisters.” Hence, there’s an idea that somehow people are not attentive, not empathetic to the context of others, and are subsequently creating discourses or a context of political representation that are exclusive.
I agree very much with the notion that the mechanisms of power and political work do have to be tactical and considered, but I would defend strongly, for both critical and aesthetic practitioners, that we can speak in specialized, particular, or withdrawn forms of expression. As an artist, or just as a human, the different kinds of speculative terms of my self-understanding and its stylization have a right to opacity (to quote Glissant). Who I am and who I present as myself, how I dress, how I express myself publicly (or if I present myself at all) is a necessary freedom. Along with any freedom should arrive the freedom to not engage with the parameters of freedom as it is presented to me. The capacity for me to insist to not participate is important. Part of the problem of this “common ground” discussion is that we’re told that as we become more accessible, we will also become more tolerated. But for whom am I becoming transparent and why?
This seems to be a key element in the oppressive nature of our relentlessly affirmational contemporary life. “We are all in this together!” “Hold hands across America!” “Just do it!” Meanwhile, my depression, my disfunction, my boredom with the built nature of society as it has been constructed for me all put me in a place where I may not be allowed to participate. But I may only be able to be there in a state of disgust, of weakness, or of vulnerability. What am I allowed to do then?
SG
Exactly. To not be able to arrive as yourself, with all your flaws as well as your unique perspectives (or relay that you have no desire to arrive at all), limits both your own potential to transform a shared politics, as well as the transformation of others. What is it about this urgent need for precision or, as you mentioned, “common ground?” I find that really limiting, and yet the need to be precise on the political left now (not to mention the longstanding lockstep nature of the right) is seen as an urgent moral imperative. When looking at the violent obfuscation of the right (and much of the left as well), I
DA
I also agree with that, but I would give that one little and provisional caveat to your argument against precision. If we’re arguing against precision in order for there to be a context in which there are more open arenas for interpretation, then I’m for that. If we’re arguing against precision as a way to categorize certain kinds of cultural work as esoteric or intellectual or distant, I would argue against it.
With my undergraduate students at Cooper Union, but particularly my graduate students at Yale, I sometimes still have a certain problem as a teacher. When I pass out a text, students see the language and the specificity invested in the writing of authors not applying to their experience or the goals for their artmaking. On the one hand, the precision of the text means that its meanings are not universal or deep (this is a strangely bourgeois reaction); on the other, the specificity of the text makes it inaccessible and therefore elitist and against the “community.”
I find this disabling because, again, one could try to organize their thinking mindful of opacity’s value. That is, by resisting or refusing the concepts of affirmation or appropriation into the larger context of cultural discourse, they might be able to say something about the constraints that public life now produces. In other, perhaps religious, words, they would resist sacrament.
SG
I like this idea of “resisting sacrament.” I’m far from religious, but it reminds me of another idea that contains a lot of meaning for me, where Donna Haraway, at the beginning of The Cyborg Manifesto talks about the necessity of the heretic within a community, the person who speaks out of turn, who complicates how things are understood or how they flow. She writes that the heretic is a vital component for a society, and maybe in our case here, a demos, to function.
DA
Yes, this person would disavow or at least try to pervert their relationship to the larger conversions that happen as through the media’s dissemination of art that works in accordance with the motives and means of capitalism.
Of course, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to say that therefore they would be more or less artistically or even politically successful. A good example is the electoral system, which as we experience it today is completely a disaster. I can try to pretend to function as a citizen within the context of electoral politics (and I do: I vote and write checks) as if I believe in the democratic context of representation, but it is always aspirationally abstract.
Believing in something and acting in a state of care and responsibility, that’s an abstraction that has consequences in the real. Although inherent in the set of ideas that are deeply imbedded in radical democracy, they often actually seem quite privileged and sequestered from the way that institutions actually function. But here we are: the function of electoral democracy is not functioning. It is neither caring or responsible. But if I withdraw from the demands of political participation, I would be named by those “common grounders” as impractical.
But I have siblings and many others I love who are deeply involved in progressive political institutions: people in NGOs, the State Department, community activism. They’re very interested in having and reinventing functional civic systems that work to actually help people. And they actually do make things happen. In each and every case, if I actually examine what they’re involved in, I can see that it is only through that work that the slow arc of social justice continues. And I know doing this work is very difficult.
SG
Yes, it’s just feels like work that’s plugging the dam before it bursts.
DA
Or it’s maintaining an already existing disaster.
SG
Exactly.
DA
It’s—what’s the analogy?—“decorating the burning house.”
SG
If I can’t be impractical, specifically in encountering something that I find to be extremely necessary and complex, I don’t think I’m going to get out of this alive. I say this as an artist, but also as a citizen, a neighbor. Impracticality, believing in something that is, on the face of it, contradictory to what’s in front of you, keeps the spirit and apparatus of democracy in play. And not democracy in the American sense, but the Greek notion of a space of individuals developing power in proximity. But arguing for that is not arguing for it in totality. It’s, again, a social tool—one way to engage the complexities of living together. There are other people engaged in practical, cause-and-effect politics, and they are needed, too. This notion that there’s one or the other that works is ridiculous. We need the people who can go and work on the inside and try to make something ethical out of it, because, obviously, these institutions are people too, and there are times where they are more human, and there are times that they’re more vulgar and destructive. From the outside —which is a misnomer, of course, because there is no outside, actually just one giant ecosystem—there needs to be the space to consider those institutions, how they affect our lives, and how we, as groups of individuals, can transform them through shared attitudes. If we don’t have that, it calcifies.
DA
Perhaps you and I have had this discussion before! Particularly, when we remember how we all allowed “social practice” to enter the field of art in such a limited way. That has matured, at least in my lifetime. In the early ’90s, Julie Ault, Thomas Eggerer, Jochen Klein, and I [as Group Material] were invited to do public art projects for “community-based” art institutions in cities across the country. The unseen method embedded in the idea of the public artist was that they must be “inclusive and discursive.” Of course, a progressive discourse often ends up being anything but progressive, when its shackled to the festivalization of cities, as they are, or funded to give a “placeness” to cities already prescribed with social and economic inequity.
SG
Pablo Helguera was in town the other night, and we were on a panel together. The audience was asking us questions along these lines—considering this work in an affirmational, cause-and-effect manner, suggesting its need for “an ethics.” I started saying, “Well, I think so-called ‘social practice’ has the ability to do things that are effective that can go and change the world.” Really, I do think this work can change society! But… it doesn’t change society in the way that so many people think, and therefore they become disappointed and disillusioned—this idea that you do this project, and all of a sudden this thing is solved. The work, in concert and accumulation with others, changes society in the same way, and should be considered in the same way, as a painter paints a still life. There’s a bowl of fruit on the table. You don’t go and critique the painter and say, “I can’t eat the fruit. What the fuck? You’re a failure as a painter!” The point is that you, as the painter, as the artist, are asking the viewer to participate in a process of considering the idea of the fruit. What it means to you in context and in the abstract. And in that sense, it has a real use-value attached to it. That still life allows us, especially in concert with all the other paintings of bowls of fruit, to consider not just the real fruit in front of us, but the table, the chairs, the room, the light, the people eating or not allowed to be eating, the fruit in the bowl. Social practice, as it were, does the same thing. It’s not there to rebuild the building—or society, for that matter. It’s there for us to ask whether we ever needed the building at all, or if society is working for us in the way we imagine it should or could. Like all art, it’s a space for questioning, not solving problems.
DA
That possibility for irrational social modeling, that was what Red76, and other projects that you’ve been involved in, were after. Where the work is involving audiences into a field of possibilities. Sure, there’s an event, there’s as a meal, there’s a temporary radio station: something is produced, but what I’m looking at is actually an abstract model of something else. It’s an inferential gesture. It produces the thing and something else, but not a picture of the thing.
SG
Not a picture of the thing at all. It’s the possibility of moving in any number of directions. An invitation into being. So in that sense, it’s a social tool to understand where we reside rather than trying to tell someone, “We’re here right now and only here” This is what I got from you, from Group Material.
DA
Maybe we’re Cubists. We make pictures of what we see and what we know in the same object or what we think we know and not necessarily what we see. Cézanne’s painting is not an apple.
SG
What’s that?
DA
You show something as an apple. But obviously it has none of the qualities of an apple. It’s an apple? Our senses say it might be. That is an example from art I make often in school to help me clue into trying to think of how an artistic invention is something that produces politics. The deliberation of shared values goes back to interpretation. There are so many apples! Why is the only one important to me the one in my mouth? The interpretation of all apples meaning “apple” would mandate transforming society, a transformation in naming and understanding that is also transforming our subjectivity.
SG
Exactly.
DA
When I am in a situation in which I’m aesthetically moved, beyond my traditional expectations, I become unhinged from what I thought I was. That state of psychological, or maybe even that ontological, state when my being gets interrupted allows me to relate to other objects out of any coherent opposition to them…. including other people!
Surely, there are things under the rubric of social practice that are profoundly interruptive, like walking into a gallery and finding some guy in the middle of the room saying, “Hey, do you want to make a book?” (That would be you, Sam.) That shift in the context of perspective and expectations, seems to be something that is, yes, presenting a profound readjustment of what I, as a viewer or subject of the work, was taught to inhabit before I walked into that experience.
It also seems to me that it could be potentially understood as a basis to a very much withdrawn activity that preserves the opacity of all involved. For sure it’s social, but as an artwork it may present me to myself in a way that is not ideologically clear. It then would be difficult to base its value on virtually any kind of notion of ethical production. Or it could be based in ethics but it would only work if it is actually challenging the normative conditions of empathy: “You are just like me!”
To go back to your original comment, it’s my sense that this idea of looking for common ground is overly affirmational and therefore so leveling in its insistence on sameness as a politics, as a way of being seen and heard.
SG
Yes. Absolutely.
DA
We are all supposed to work together somehow. It’s the same nonsense that colleagues of mine where I teach would address students from different backgrounds and say, “Tell us about yourself,” as some kind of liberal inclusiveness. “Tell us about your difference. Tell us about where you came from.” Not considering for a minute that this supposed opening of the gates of interpretation is defining themselves as the gatekeepers of the context in which self-expression gets to happen! This doesn’t happen as much anymore, thankfully. My students today are like, “If you don’t know anything about the ‘us’ you propose to make me from, it’s your problem. I refuse to be the anthropological docent to your discourse, so supposedly humanitarian. I will not perform and work to include you in what you have already defined as this great melting pot of ideas and desires.” Non-recognition is privilege. I’m talking about me as a white man, enjoying a life that is part and parcel of the context of those differentiations and the violence that produced them. For me to sit at any table and say, “Look, we’re all in this together, let’s figure it out,” is a lie. We’re not.
SG
This idea of “we’re all in this together,” there’s a part of me that adheres to that, honestly. But the together as I see it is that we are surrounded by a certain meaninglessness and that’s the together in question. It’s a positive emptiness. A generative one at that. Like you, I can’t get around this notion of, “Oh, we share a common bond,” or, “We share common concerns.” I don’t need that. I just need for people to agree that this is a pretty confusing thing, this thing we call living, and not to force the notion that “truth” and “ethics” are mutually inclusive of one another or shared amongst us. Whatever we can do to make it easier for people to be themselves, in all their messiness, whatever it means to be one’s self without infringing on the continued liberation of one’s self, that’s where I want to go towards.
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