Abstracts

-Below is the list of abstracts for presentations given at the 2008 Art and Power conference on 27 September at the University of Leeds-

***

Kate Antosik Parsons (University College Dublin)

Politics, Patriarchy & Power: Feminism in Contemporary Irish Art Practice

The feminist art movement of the 1970s and 1980s was predominantly visible in the United States and Britain. In Ireland, feminist art activism has had an enormous impact on the development of the art made by contemporary Irish women artists from the early 1980s through the late 1990s. During this time period, many Irish artists were politicising their work around feminist issues, subsequently, their art practices developed in tandem with the burgeoning feminist political movement. In particular, feminist networking organisations were extremely important for a number of Irish women artists. The politically-grounded practice of feminist networking inspired artists to form collectives where they found a sounding board of like-minded feminists and in turn, these collectives functioned as support systems for those involved. The practice of feminist networking opened up alternative spaces for exhibitions by women artists thus allowing them to bypass traditional gallery structures, which might seem to be male-dominated. A commitment to networking as feminists also enabled these artists to function as curators of feminist work.

This paper establishes important links between the feminist art movement and the work of contemporary Irish women artists. Specifically, this paper focuses on the Women Artists Action Group (WAAG), the largest Irish feminist collective based in the Republic of Ireland founded in 1987. This paper contextualises WAAG within the international feminist art movement and examines how WAAG engaged in a politicised struggle to undermine traditional power structures of the patriarchal art establishment.

***

Carl-Henrik Bjerstrom (University of Sussex)

Conflicted Representations: Alexander Rodchenko and the White Sea Canal issue of USSR in Construction

The editorial board of the international propaganda magazine USSR in Construction stated in its first issue that photography would be used to illustrate socialist construction because ‘the photo speaks much more convincingly in many cases than even the most brilliantly written article.’ In 1933, when the particular subject to be portrayed was the White Sea Canal, the photographic illustrations supplied by Alexander Rodchenko were consequently used as documentary evidence of the economic and humanitarian triumph described in official statements. As a result of perceived artistic compliance, most subsequent critics (e.g. Benjamin Buchloh and, more recently, Victor Margolin) have suggested Rodchenko was thus finally ready to accept Stalinist dictates, or even voluntarily prepared to glorify a brutal regime of forced labour.

However, while Rodchenko certainly appeared to exclude everything negative from his extensive coverage, a closer analysis of the magazine in which his work was published also reveals how the superficial conflictlessness often attributed to Soviet propaganda in this case only thinly veils the conflicts inherent in its making. Questions are thus posed which force us to reappraise any arguments regarding his White Sea Canal pictures as propagandistically successful, if artistically uninteresting. The methods employed emerge as particularly problematic: how did montage and retouching impact on the message conveyed; how did they fit within a category of documentary truth?

It is the aim of this paper to show that, as a consequence of a tension between socialist realist aesthetics and documentary ambitions – between official myth and dark reality – Rodchenko’s portrayal of the White Sea Canal did not simply affirm the positive narrative elaborated elsewhere by party cadres and enthusiasts. Instead, in effect, his illustrations undermined it by revealing profound representational ambiguities and disturbing details piercing the harmonious surface of official propaganda.

***

Elsa Bouet (University of Edinburgh)

The Dispossessed: The Man Lost in Ideology

In Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the reader follows the journey of a physicist, Shevek, dispossessed of home and identity. The chapters alternate between his arrival in Urras, the capitalist planet he visits, and his life on Annares, the planet home to the anarchist society, where we follow his childhood and resolution to go to Urras. He hopes to bring peace between the two planets as his discovery could ultimately change interstellar communication. The novel depicts Shevek struggling to adapt to a new world and struggling to fit his original society. Capitalism and anarchy are constantly contrasted and compared: their weaknesses and strengths are exposed. The reader and Shevek are caught up in this both utopian and dystopian ideological mesh.

This paper will examine the effects of ideology on the character and the reader. The novel has been acclaimed and studied for its depiction of the turmoil of the 1970’s: ideological conflicts of the cold war and feminism. However, the novel still reflects our own process: Shevek’s struggles with ideology are also our own. Shevek is dispossessed of identity, stripped by conflicting ideologies, dismantled by what Žižek called ideological fantasies. Žižek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, claims that individuals are aware of the reification process, that the fantasy lies in the way individuals conceive their social reality through their activity. Individuals are aware of the fact that ideology is an illusion, necessary to consolidate society, but they decide to overlook this fact, which constitutes ideological fantasy. I will explore how this constant contrast between utopia and dystopia affects Shevek, his relations to the Other and his own self, how he becomes to be the dispossessed.

***

Orianna Cacchione (University of California, San Diego)

and Margit Neuhold (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

The new Nomads: Politics of Aesthetics within Altermodernity

Contemporary art theory appears to be at an impasse; a place from which it is struggling to define the terms to begin to explain its manifestation in the 21^st century apart from those established for postmodernism and postcolonialism. Art theory is about to think new theoretical models to explain an intensification of movement of art works and people within the art world and the globe. Writing on these subjects has often focused on now out-dated models of multiculturalism and hybridity. We propose to present a paper, which explores the recent writing of Nicolas Bourriaud and Jacques Rancière as an attempt to produce a counter mode of investigation to approach art works.

Bourriaud recently proposed the concept of altermodern; ‘altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history.’ To expand upon Bourriaud’s observations, which underscore a need for artwork to function time-specifically as well as site-specifically, we hope to analyze Rancière’s discussions of the politics of aesthetics in order to develop different social and political narratives suggested by art practices within the altermodern framework. Rancière states, ‘Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification.

Elaborating on these concepts, we seek to present artists who politically engage issues of contemporary mobility and reformulated marginality. Conflating the European and American perspectives of the paper’s authors, we hope to contour concepts of political aesthetics within altermodernity into a critical framework for understanding these works of art.

---

***

Danielle Child (University of Leeds)

Art, Politics and Collectivity under the ‘New Spirit of Capitalism’

In 1999 Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski published Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme, a book which sought to draw attention to the emergence of a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ during the 1990s. This ‘spirit’ was found to be disseminated in management discourse; a discourse which relied heavily on the artistic model of the worker – a creative, flexible, innovative individual – which had begun to be implemented in the 1960s, but only at the level of middle management. What we witness in the artworld during the 1990s is the birth of a new business model which provides assistance solely to artists on every level – designing, producing and exhibiting a piece of artwork – which I propose this ‘new spirit’ has allowed for, alongside the booming art market. On the other hand, the art-viewing public are also made aware of practices which utilise and engage the viewer, with Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998), and also those who work under the name of a collective rather than a single author.

This paper addresses the subsequent materialisation or increased visibility of a multitude of art practices since the mid 1990s that are not concerned with having a singular author but utilise collective modes of production. These practices are predominantly political (activist; ‘hacktivist’; anti-globalisation; anti-capitalist) or even utopic in their intentions and suggest an alternative to the dominant (commodified) art object displayed in the institutionalised space. Through this paper I address Chiapello and Boltanski’s thesis; present examples of collective art practice; and argue that collective practice has come about as a direct or indirect response to the changes in business models which now utilise the (Romantic notion of the) artist as their exemplar and, therefore, in reaction to the ‘new spirit of capitalism’.

***

Simon Cooper (Newcastle University)

Strange Funeral in Braddock: Loss as commodity in the mid-1930s

This presentation focuses on the intersection of literature, music and left politics in the mid-1930s.

Throughout 1936 a new form of industrial action – the sit-down strike – swept across the United States. At the same time the formation of the breakaway Congress of Industrial Organisations led to the unionisation of millions of workers formerly excluded from craft union membership. The steel industry had traditionally maintained an anti-unionist character, and in small towns across the Pennsylvania steel belt a handful of companies maintained near-feudal domination. So the formation in June 1936 of the Steel Workers’ Organising Committee presented an unprecedented threat to conglomerate interests.

In July, Henry Cowell’s New Music Quarterly published Elie Siegmeister’s composition Strange Funeral in Braddock. This presentation investigates the broader cultural significations of the 78 recording made of the composition.

Strange Funeral in Braddock is a version of a workers’ chant written in 1924 by ‘godfather of proletarian literature’ Michael Gold. Often performed at street-corner meetings, in its written form the piece was located as part of the ‘usable past’ for revolutionary poets in the 1930s. As debates raged in radical circles over the efficacy of employing modernist techniques towards raising class-consciousness, Gold’s cautionary tale of a manual labourer encased and then buried in ‘three tons of hard steel’ must have seemed almost quaint: a reminder of a more openly didactic age of formal innocence. But Siegmeister’s dissonant setting recasts Gold’s piece into the context of American modernism.

***

Terry Craven (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

Re-addressing the Political in Poetry

This paper reconsiders the long debated issue of ‘political’ verse under the hegemony of late-capitalism. Whilst recent history is littered with arguments for and against the feasibility of such a poetry, this paper argues that the two terms, ‘political’ and ‘poetry’, are more closely bound than is perhaps recognised.

Section one addresses the first term, ‘political’, to posit that despite the often revolutionary inflection, capitalism’s hegemony actually mobilises the heterogeneous elements of society for its own perpetuation. Briefly explained: resistance so often serves, as Slavoj Žižek recently wrote, only to perpetuate capitalism’s tyrannies. My paper defines the truly ‘political’ act, therefore, less as a striving for the ‘grand coup’ and more as a humbling, self-reflective act.

Section two engages with the Lacanian Symbolic order, arguing that whilst the implicit ‘trauma’ of language is inherent to all literary arts, it is perhaps poetry which engages the issue most thoroughly. In considering a range of poems, from John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ to Ted Hughes’ ‘Crow Goes Hunting’, it becomes apparent that in dealing with the Symbolic order one must exercise a constant ‘negative capability’: acknowledging the failures of language whilst continuing to strive towards linguistic exactitude. At this point, a distinct relationship emerges between the possibility for ‘political’ action per se and poetry’s very form. In both cases, progress is made through vigilantly maintaining a ‘side-long’ glance at the desired objective. This paper will investigate a poetry whose politics lies in acknowledging such a ‘negative capability’: recognising that ‘one should,’ to cite F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise’ (The Crack-Up).

***

Heather A. Crawley (University of Bristol)

Icon or Idol? Controlling Sacred Art in Late Antique Iconoclasm

What happens to art in a society where religion is politicised and aesthetics are sacralised? This paper will explore these questions in the historical context of the iconoclastic controversy in Byzantine Christianity (7th-8th centuries AD).

The sermon of the Bishop Photius celebrating the inauguration of the Madonna and child apse mosaic at Hagia Sophia, modern-day Istanbul, provides a case study of how church authorities sought to control the viewing of sacred art. It demonstrates indoctrination into a religious aesthetic and theory of sight such that Christian text controls sacred image. Contrary to reading the image through the eyes of our modern aesthetic, Byzantine viewers were instructed that such images were supra-realistic and alive with movement, and that viewing was a verbal action and a form of touch; a practice rather than the passive receipt of reflected light through the retina which is our scientific understanding of vision. Through Photius’ sermon can we see the mosaic with Byzantine eyes, and understand its political and religious power?

What did this power mean and how was it used in the political conflict of the iconoclastic controversy; did art play a significant part in founding Byzantine Christianity in the middle-ages, creating a new sense of what it meant to be a Byzantine Christian? W. J. T. Mitchell has shown that iconoclasm can be understood as the assertion of a different iconism rather than a war on images. I will show the iconoclastic controversy in a new light as an issue of competition for political power over images rather than of image use.

***

Scott Duguid (University of Edinburgh)

‘The Minority Within’: The modernism of Norman Mailer’s aesthetics of dissent

For almost sixty years, Norman Mailer embodied the dissenting artist in several of its key guises: as political conscience, as moral provocateur, as brash performing self. Emerging in the wake of the Holocaust and the political alignments of the Cold War, Mailer’s work consistently prosecutes an at first conventional, then increasingly idiosyncratic, account of totalitarianism. Central to Mailer’s work is an integral stance of non-alignment, a refusal of political constituency or identification that runs through his dissenting positions on the Cold War, Vietnam, and latterly the post-9/11 world. As early as his contribution to the 1952 Partisan Review symposium “Our Country and Our Culture”, however, it was clear that Mailer grasped this notion of dissent in explicitly modernist terms. This version of the political, then, is always for Mailer bound up with wider aesthetic questions. This paper will trace the modernist roots of this dissent, and its aesthetic implications, from his second novel Barbary Shore (1951) to the later dramatisation of non-alignment in The Armies of the Night (1968).

A further aim, however, is to reframe Mailer within wider debates about the ideology of the aesthetic within modernism, and also a later postmodernism. Mailer’s post-9/11 description of the Twin Towers as an “architectural monstrosity” will be measured against his modernist account of the “aesthetics of bombing”. Taking his queue from the question of fascist aesthetics, Mailer addresses the implications for the liberal subject of what he calls “the minority within”. This account of the political subject, closely identifiable with what art history has called the traumatic subject, underwrites Mailer’s stances of refusal and performance.

***

James Hudson (University of Leeds)

From Bread and Circuses to the Rational Theatre: Desublimating Repressive Desublimation

Around the same time that Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘end of ideology’, calling to an end the 200- year continuum of left and right, progress and reform, esteemed theatrical critic Michael Billington pronounced political theatre a ‘dead duck.’ Yet in a post-modern paradigm that takes ‘all theatre is political’ as axiomatic, art has lost its claim to universal significance and stands instead inside the ideological, always already prefabricated by and imbricated in the social.

This paper looks at socialist theatre through the paradoxical prism of the end of ideology/ubiquity of ideology contradiction, and asks whether the position of a socialist dramatist as a determinate subjective substrate from which the revolution emanates is still within the co-ordinates of the possible within the present ideological constellation. Further, in extrapolating Juvenal’s ‘Bread and Circuses’ remark to Marcuse’s concept of ‘Repressive Desublimation’ the paper seeks to examine the possibility of a revolutionary horizon in a Western world where liberal democracy is the de facto situation.

***

Yvonne Kyriakides (University of Oxford)

The politicization of silence in post WWII art production

The visual representation of genocide is a deeply contested and politicised area. The Assyrian wall reliefs, housed in the British Museum, figuratively depict the genocidal conquest perpetrated by Ashburnipal in 660-650BC. However, engagement with artworks made in response to more recent genocides is challenged through theoretical discourses concerned with art’s representation of genocide and have, since WWII, predominantly been concerned with theses of silence, or perhaps a silencing, a muting or the mediation of the artistic impulse. In the decades following Picasso’s Guernica, a representational critique of mass civilian bombing, it was as though the image became suspect, itself culpable. Within the theoretical framework of genocide analysis there exists the perception of defining categories (ethnicity) as a political resource, that lends itself to all kinds of political manipulation (on all sides). A silencing might locate the image in an equally undesirable space, a mystification. Following the interrogation of silence‚ as an ideology through Adorno, and the location of such silence‚ within competing discourses such as Arendt and Foucault, my paper will address the politicisation of silence through competing discourses of genocide representation in post World War II art production.

***

Cara Levey (University of Leeds)

‘Memory is the weapon’
Art and Resistance in contemporary Buenos Aire

Argentina, March, 24th 1976: a coup d’état marks the beginning of the darkest period of Argentina’s turbulent history. The onset of military rule precipitated an internal Dirty War against all political and social opposition, led by the state. Those deemed subversive were incarcerated, tortured or killed, and thousands disappeared. The fact that the majority of these 20,000-30,000 desaparecidos remains unaccounted for has been an enduring legacy of dictatorial rule. This is compounded by a notable lack of justice, particularly in the form of trials. Perpetrators of human rights violations have benefited from impunity laws and presidential pardons since the end of the dictatorship in 1983. In spite of recent openings in the judicial sphere and increased commitment from federal and local actors to address previous violations, the demands for truth, memory and justice remain potent even 25 years after the return to democratic rule.

The struggles to have these demands realised have taken various forms including marches, exhibitions and memorials. It is in this context that the Grupo Arte Callejero (Street Art Group) was formed in the late 1990s by a collective of Argentine artists. The group create visual aids and posters, placing them strategically throughout Buenos Aires in order to ensure citizens do not forget their painful past. A map identifying the locations of former clandestine detention centres is one such example of their work. Indeed, the group describe their street art as creating a space in which the ‘artistic’ and the ‘political’ are part of the same mechanism of production. Taking their statement as a departure point, this particular aesthetic form of memory will be discussed in relation to its potential to challenge the cultural and judicial impunity characteristic of the Argentine post-dictatorship period. The focus will be the specificity of Buenos Aires’ streets vis-à-vis past human rights violations and impunity, the productions themselves, and their propensity for engagement with the political and judicial spheres. Finally, I will address the wider implications for contemporary Argentine society, particularly in defying the social and economic inequalities that persist as a result of the neoliberal policies pursued during the military dictatorship.

***

Pei-chen Liao (National Taiwan University)

The Uncanny Violence of the Strangers to Ourselves: Post-9/11 Terror in Shalimar the Clown

In Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie, writing from the edge as a black British diaspora, contextualizes multiple forms of violence in the First and the Third World. As a hybrid testimonial novel, Shalimar the Clown rhetorically bears witness to the Holocaust in Europe during WWII, ethnic cleansing in Kashmir since the 1960s, and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.

This paper argues that Rushdie, while not speaking directly of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and America’s subsequent war on terrorism, subtly provides a transcultural response to and reflection on the current “war” on/and “terrorism.” As far as international wars are concerned, foreign opponents are easily targeted as enemies to any nation state. Nevertheless, in Shalimar the Clown, a microcosmic story about a Kashmiri paradise lost in the contemporary global village and a Muslim terrorist born out of a failed love and personal revenge, Rushdie demonstrates that definitions, forms, and effects of wars and terrorism are not purely concerned with religion, race, ethnicity, or nation state, but rather depend on contexts. That is, terrorist movements, as Rushdie says in an interview with Steve Inskeep, are not just an ideological issue but a human one which may involve trivial reasons. Moreover, as the novel deconstructs the naming politics of terrorism and enemies, it shows that in the post-9/11 and the contemporary globalization era, the real object of terror and violence may not be the exclusive others, but the others of and within the selves, who ironically bring self-destructive tragedies onto the constructive selves fearful of uncertainty, deviation, and inadequacy.

***

Carmen Otilia Teodorescu (University of Constance, Germany)

Poetry as Politics and Love as Resistance: Dionne Brand’s Love Poetry

Canadian writer Dionne Brand argues that her poetry is no different from her politics, and that writing can be one of the most efficient means to challenge the social and political status quo. For her, love becomes a political issue in a postmodern and “post”-colonial world that is still tolerant of sexist, racist, or essentialist taxonomies and practices. In her poetry, which combines wit, irony, and humor with political commentary and an implicit urge for social action, Brand therefore tackles the distorted myths and utopian promises inherent in the traditional discourse of love, and renegotiates their present-day validity from the point of view of a woman / lesbian / of color / Caribbean / immigrant writer. Poetry can indeed be “a social corrective” or “politically effective” when it identifies the pitfalls of hegemonic discourses and articulates alternative views of change.

Brand’s poetry revises the concept of love in connection with notions of gender, identity, ethnicity, or sexuality in postmodern society. It also addresses the commodification of romance in the capitalist system, or the corruptive influence of capitalist politics of exchange upon human relations. For Brand, hetero- or homosexual love is doomed when slanted ideologies that equate race with “stories about cannibalism” or ignore revolutionary figures such as “Martin, Malcolm, or Garvey, or Dubois, or Angela” interfere with intimacy. In writing about the “guerrilla”-like experience of lesbian lovers within the “compulsory heterosexuality” of tradition, Brand defines love as resistance against a background of exclusion, violence, and displacement. Her goal is to make “reality claims” about love in a contemporary social and political context, because, despite the risks of disillusion, “to be awake is more lovely than dreams.” Like Marlene Nourbese Philip, Brand “tries her tongue” at “softly breaking the silence” on behalf of the marginalized, and like Margaret Atwood she believes that “a word after a word / after a word is power.”

***

Natalie Pollard (University of York)

Violence and Poetry: Geoffrey Hill’s Civil Power

This paper will raise a series of questions involving the nature and function of violence in twentieth-century poetry. It will draw primarily on the late poems of the contemporary English poet, Geoffrey Hill. Hill’s work has often reassessed violent episodes in British history. His texts scrutinise the language in which these accounts are made, as if suspicious of the power that artistic and historical language wields. For Hill, the poem is not a neutral realm set apart from political and physical powers but a space where these are staged, tested, and often violently fought over. In conceiving of an appropriate style in which to consider art’s power, Hill also exemplifies the dissonance at play in his own aesthetic examinations. Not only has his work rudely rebuffed and berated an audience of critics, editors, readers, public institutions, it engages in violent redresses of them, of their roles as powers actively influencing the work under construction. Hill’s work suggests that verbal representations of conflict are not themselves unconflicted. But rather than attempting to resolve the violence of word, Hill’s poetics invites it, as if provocation and dissent might animate thought, in a way that cannot be broached by assent or harmony.

Drawing upon twentieth-century linguistic philosophies and traditional close reading techniques, I will explore the ways in which Hill continually leads us back to language’s fraught power as historical exposition, change and construction.

***

Edward Quipp (University of Edinburgh)

Singular Difficulty – Lyric Openings in the Public Realm

This paper begins with the premise that in twentieth century modernity the lyric form – according to the conceptual tensions uncovered by Heidegger and Adorno – came to occupy a uniquely privileged position as a clarifier of the relationship between art and power. In the work of poets as different as Auden and Celan, respective lyric strategies contributed to the awareness that the public realm was assailable owing to its linguistic operations, and that poetry could thus act as a bulwark against the abuse of public language, however detached from the sphere of direct action it may have been. These circumstances have persisted and evolved into the twenty-first century, as reflected in the work of poets such as Geoffrey Hill, August Kleinzahler and J. H. Prynne. Contributors to this lineage are commonly regarded as difficult. But what is the political resonance of difficulty, and to what extent are the “singular” insights afforded by the aesthetic experience dependent on difficulty? Can the singularity of lyric be free of political construal, or is the singular emphasis rather the latest incarnation of ideology critique? If contemporary poets have taken on board Auden’s (frequently misrepresented) dictum, “Poetry makes nothing happen”, what alternatives of poetic affect have they generated in its place, as lyrists?

My position traces a binding principle of difficulty that the colloquy of lyric – that is, the unfolding, provisional moment of interaction between reader and page – encourages. Drawing on the work of Derek Attridge, Peter De Bolla and Peter McDonald among others, and developing a subtle presentation of the dimensions of the contemporary genre of lyric, I will refer to a number of poets and argue that the form retains its potential to clarify how the experience of art seeds political critique.

***

Noa Roei (University of Amsterdam)

Mobilizing political ineffectiveness in contemporary Israeli art

The political has always been an integral part of Israeli art, to such an extreme that, in Israel today, challenging governmental policies through art might be considered a fashionable, profitable business. This, however, should not lead to the conclusion that Israeli art has a strong effect on Israeli politics. As a few art critics have already argued, there seems to exist a disavowed alliance between the ostensibly conflicting artistic and political institutions in Israel, where the excessive criticism voiced by political art ends up serving the nation as its conscientious, but politically powerless, constituent. This paper will juxtapose two Israeli exhibitions from 2004 that attempted to overcome this predicament by playing with the apparent political ineffectiveness of contemporary Israeli art. “Breaking the Silence” was a small exhibition that featured photographs and videos of soldiers that testified to the abuse of human rights during their military service in the Palestinian occupied territories. “One Pink Rose” was a large scale exhibition that was never displayed to the public, but smuggled instead into the cells of two conscientious refusers in a military prison. Both exhibitions made selective use of the conventions of an art exhibition display, and exploited the general understanding of art as something that is external to politics and to the law, in order to widen the boundaries of contemporary political debates.

In my presentation I will focus on the curatorial strategies that allowed both “One Pink Rose” and “Breaking the Silence” to bypass legal and discursive boundaries in order to critique the unquestioned revered place of the soldier in Israeli society on the one hand, and the taken for granted political ineffectiveness of art on the other.

***

Kim Sasser (University of Edinburgh)

The Jaguar Smile: Cosmopolitan Solidarity or Appropriation?

The murals painted during Nicaragua’s revolutionary years (1979-1989) depicted the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional’s (FSLN) vision of past and future. David Kunzle expounds on their cultural and political significance calling them “the blackboards of the people,” as they instructed a highly illiterate populace. The murals are significant from another perspective, too, functioning as a point of transnational convergence between Nicaraguans and non-Nicaraguans. Kunzle records that over half the murals painted during this time were a collaboration between “internationalists” and national artists. One of the most popular images painted depicted martyr Sandino, a potent symbol Salman Rushdie ponders in The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987).

Paralleling the transnational significance of the murals, Rushdie’s narrative also serves as a point from which to analyze cosmopolitan solidarity, as the text documents the development of his solidarity with Nicaragua and, like the murals, leaves a physical record of his support. Yet, to analyze Rushdie’s Nicaraguan solidarity is to understand its complexity, for Rushdie’s fraternity is janus-faced. At some points, it is morally grounded and praiseworthy. He supports Nicaragua out of a conviction that the US’s (bloody) interference is unjust. At other points, the bases for Rushdie’s alliance show themselves faulty. For example, Rushdie draws parallels between himself and certain campesinos based on their shared encounters with homelessness, though his experience has been primarily conceptual while theirs material.

The Jaguar Smile occasions needed investigation into cosmopolitan solidarity. Particularly because of the hopes theorists such as Martha Nussbaum have vested in solidarity, its role needs to be interrogated by questions that explore its reasonable development, appropriate function, and possible outcomes. As contemporary events make manifest, human solidarity is desperately needed now as ever, yet Rushdie’s novel reminds that in aiming for this ideal caution is also required.

***

Gwendolyn Starks (University of St. Andrews)

“All the World’s a Stage”: Augusto Boal’s World Stage Ideology

For centuries public spectacles have been used as a means to voice opinion, educate or indicate opposition. Theatre, in particular, has been used to comment on or cope with socio-political situations as is evident in early Greek comedy, Elizabethan drama and twentieth-century ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’. This conference’s desire “to establish a dialogue that takes up the various intersections between art and power” is met in Theatre’s desire to wrestle with the human story through the combined use of physical action and spoken word.

This paper will centre upon the work of renowned Theatre Artist Augusto Boal and his use of theatre as a means to dissolve borders and barriers that block communication. In his writings on the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ and his acting exercises we see the curtain between actor and spectator lift and, rather than revealing a fourth wall, Boal has merged audience and actor into one ‘Spect-Actor.’ Boal not only collapses barriers but brings an awareness of new walls to be created such as those against racism and sexism – a form of oppression that does not see the other as a person, a fellow human. His work empowers the participant with the ability to view themselves not as a globalized people group but as Actors on a World Stage.

***

Lena Wånggren (University of Edinburgh)

Making a Spectacle out of Oneself: Burlesque Performance as Parody and Politics

Burlesque can be said to mean many things – always focusing on parody and the social critique inherent in the form. I will study theatrical burlesque, burlesque as performance. Performance art covers a wide set of different practices, and is therefore difficult to define. It signifies a form of live performances, ranging from improvised events to acts that have been practiced and prepared for months. Many women and feminist artists have used the directness of performance art to question notions of gender, desire and identity, and to criticise social structures.

Performance art and burlesque performance in their directness of form blur the borders between what reality, fiction, and performativity are. Burlesque performance gives an opportunity for play and direct change, contact with the audience. I will study particular contemporary burlesque performance artists, and also the deployment of burlesque in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), in the light of postmodernist, feminist, and performativity theories. Luce Irigaray’s ideas on mimicry, and performativity theory as recently developed by Judith Butler, will provide the basis.

Mary Russo in The Female Grotesque asks: ‘In what sense can women really produce or make spectacles of themselves?’ As I will see, this making spectacle of oneself through burlesque performance can be an important political tool. I will see how burlesque performances, by the use of parody, can destabilise norms of gender and the idea of a ‘natural’ gender.

***

Helen Wright (Loughborough University)

Power in Conflict: Instrumentalism vs. Ethics

My paper will address the inherent dangers of any instrumentalist appropriation of literary art for the purposes of socio-political reform. From a phenomenological perspective, I will argue that all instrumentalist readings of literary texts rely upon producing ‘closed’ readings from a predetermined critical or political standpoint; and that they do so strategically, in order to provide solid and defensible grounds for the desired social or political change. From this, I will then move on to suggest that, although such readings certainly enable literary art to be appropriated for specific ideological purposes, they simultaneously expose an underlying conflict between two different forms of power associated with literature and literary readings. Whilst the predetermined, closed readings of instrumentalism seek to appropriate literature under the banner of socio-political power, these readings inevitably fail to do justice to the power that literature has in and of itself to resist any such appropriation. Using the concepts of ethics, singularity, otherness, and alterity, I will argue that instrumentalism is an inherently dangerous process, as the power it forces literature to serve is – in itself – vulnerable, never being complete or absolute. Drawing upon the work of J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge, I will illustrate that this vulnerability is derived from the fact that any instrumentalist reading always contains within it the seed of its own de(con)struction. As a result of this, without the definitive ground required for driving responsible and enduring socio-political change, the issue thus becomes not whether instrumentalism is effective in establishing change, but, rather, is it safe in doing so?