Keynote in 6th Elia Leadership conference 2014
published in ELIA publications, 2014
Some time ago, I was invited to a gathering by a large Finnish grant foundation. The event brought together professionals holding high positions in different fields of art and culture. I was invited to take part in a panel to discuss the topic of ‘for whom art should be made?’ The discussion centred on whether art should be made for a professional arts audience or for a wider public, and what the need was for applied arts and societal arts in today’s society in general. I remained silent for most of the discussion, as I felt I could not grasp the point of the question. The question seemed to portray art as a specific kind of a product, which was manufactured by professionals and then distributed to consumers. The structure of this art distribution was analogous to that of any product, where demand, market value and consumer expectations were driving the development of product design – in this case, the strategies of art funding.
Finally, I tried to raise my voice, and proposed to shift from the question of ‘for whom art should be made?’ (which presupposed a one-way deliverer–receiver structure) to the question of ‘who can make art in society?’ Following this, I proposed that, if we had societal funding structures such as a citizen salary, people could participate in creativity and art-making, and questions about the status of professional or amateur art or boundaries between popular culture, DIY communities and fine art would become trivial. Then, the follow-up question would be: ‘what kind of art is made and made possible by the people?’
As one might expect, my proposal was met with minimal response, as leaders of art institutions continued their debates on the distribution of governmental art funding to established institutions. The problem did not seem how to deal critically with the economic structure, which increasingly defined art and art-making, but how to get as much funding as possible from this structure. Slight panic seemed to be filling the atmosphere, as pressure from diminished state funding, on the one hand, and increased reliance on private funding, on the other, forced institutions to blindly fight for survival. For the artists, the question of DIY or amateur art posed a threat to the professional league, which also had to prove its expertise and irreplaceability in the face of the system.
For me, this was a clarifying moment. There I was, at the very core of cultural funding, amongst these high-ranking decision-makers, and not even they had any power over the rhetoric that comes, direct and unmasked, from neoliberal economic language. There seemed to be no other option than to accept what was put into action, from the top down, by the government and make the best of it. Consumer logic has rooted itself so deeply into our cultural unconscious that most of the time we do not even realise it’s there.
***
For me, the question of the role of art in society is a fundamental one. Art is at the core of all human activity, and probably a feature we share with multiple other species. Art is unexpected forms of creativity, languages that study language, communication and expression, a site for debating morals and values, a mirror and much more. Take away art, and you find just an empty shell where civilization used to be. There is no ‘good life’ where there is no art.
The role of art changes in every cultural paradigm. As Nicolas Bourriaud has noted, art was once about our relationship with natural forces, then with the divine. Now, as we seem to have lost both, art is working with social relations. These social relations are thoroughly defined by the economic structure and theories underlying them. When we look back over the past 100 years, we can see art as a series of escape attempt from the grip of capitalism. Every new art form of the last century celebrated itself as that which could not be recuperated by bourgeois society. As objects gave way to site-specificity in the name of non-commercialism, or sculpture to minimalism and installation in the name of viewers’ subjectivity, or still images to media art in the name of the flow of time, or statues to live bodies in the name of encountering the other, the ethics were always: this cannot be sold. And yet, it always has been.
This does not make art an impotent tool. Quite the contrary; art will always find ways of creating meanings where meanings are forbidden and mere reductive materialism is celebrated. As a single reason, that should be enough to encourage artistic practices outside the established arts: this is exactly where the seeds of future cultures are stored. In the discovery of new realms, a space for revolutions, becomings and unbiased research on the structures of our world always momentarily opens up. Even if this space keeps folding down, it will never close permanently, just changes place. For me, this is exactly where art happens, and this happening is not defined by art academies, art institutions or high class professionals but by expeditionaries and experimentalists who wish to turn the world upside down to see how it looks from the other side.
As art has adopted new technical innovations, it has always investigated their links to power and to the ideologies and ontologies of their time. This was the case with new cinema at the beginning of the 20th century, with media art and mass media in the ’60s and ’70s and internet art in the late ’80s and early ’90s. All of these new genres focused on the social and ontological relations created by the new media in question, as well as their application in society and wider cultural impact.
A field that is currently emergent, or perhaps just being established, is the field of art and science – an inter-disciplinary field born in the mid-’90s as artists first went into wet labs, which has now expanded into a wide range of practices that study all areas of the natural sciences. What is stunning in this field is not really what happens inside the work – as this is part of the tradition of all media art work throughout the century – but the fact that it emerged only now, given that, throughout the 20th century – when science had the most impact on human life and the human–nature relationship became so severely distorted – these themes were absent from the field of art.
This is no coincidence, of course. This absence was partly due to the ‘two cultures’ divide that had opened up by the early 20th century, which separated the natural sciences and humanities, taking art far from the field of exact knowledge. But, at a much deeper level, it was the result of spreading a cultural ideology which regarded nature as an endless resource for the production of goods. Justified by the dominance of reductive materialist realism in the natural sciences, the dogma of neoclassical economic theory considered the human–nature relationship as simple, technical and factual, in contrast with the ‘soft and muddy’ social issues discussed in politics. Ideology, then, was something that contrasted with this dogma (which still seems to be the case). As such, there seemed to be nothing for art to discuss in the human–nature relationship.
Throughout the 20th century, we witnessed a massive-scale abuse of species, land and natural recourses, which has resulted in climate imbalance, epidemics, erosion, the emptying of seas and uncontrolled immigration movements, to name but a few of the consequences. For decades, due to the normalisation of theories supporting the abuse of the earth in the fields of biology and economy, this devastation was considered irrelevant to mainstream politics, art and public discussion. By the end of the 20th century, it had become obvious, however, that the crisis of the natural world was rooted in thoughts and practices in the realm of the human. The cross-disciplinary, heterogeneous practices of art and science critically examine exactly this – the points of contact between ideology, knowledge production, technology and nature.
***
At the dawn of the 20th century, many of developments that are now commonplace first saw the light of day. Industrialisation and automatisation required the distribution of work, standardisation in workers’ tasks and machinery, minimisation of excess time and specialisation. As workers no longer had a full picture of the production process and production was not dependant upon the expertise of a single craftsman, power moved up to the leaders and designers of the process. Even if it is far-fetched to compare a contemporary university to a Fordist production line, a resemblance lies in the concept of specialisation. As work is fragmented into smaller and smaller tasks and scientific research areas have less and less to do with the big picture, it is increasingly easy to abuse the system in order to gain profit for the few. The 20th-century tendency towards specialisation is also visible in the development of art schools and art institutions and their distinct fields of study.
Paradoxically, one reason for these differentiated practices to come back together is forgotten nature. Just as it became evident, during the last decade or two, that our relationship with nature is severely harming our own culture, it has become necessary to revisit the ideological basis of our society and try to grasp the big picture again. There, multi- and inter-disciplinarity is a necessity. As Bruno Latour notes, phenomena like global warming are not natural, or technological, or economic, or social, but all of these at once, and much more. These phenomena have to be studied from different fields and with diverse tools. As the natural sciences began to be contaminated by the influence of the humanities, such as sociology, the empirical nature of scientific knowledge also became questionable. This prompted such reflections as: how is science actually made? Who generates new knowledge? What is the scientific method? What kind of presuppositions, about nature or life, are hidden behind this knowledge? Who ordered this knowledge? What is it used for? Is it progress?
There are few examples of areas of scientific research that are highly politicised. Stem-cell research is one of them, and climate change another. But most other fields of research are also embedded into society and cannot fully claim to fulfil the requirements of positivism. One can even argue that there is something wrong with the concept of objectivism, as it proposes a ‘view from nowhere’, as philosopher, Thomas Nagel, has put it. And, if one looks deeper into such practices, it becomes clear that the scientific method is itself contaminated with all sorts of ideas about what nature is and what humanity is and what the research and scientific subject is all about. Suddenly, scientific studies have sailed into the centre of philosophical debates and to the platforms of artistic investigations.
What art can do for science is precisely this. Art has proven to be an effective platform for discovering how things work, what their function is in society and what the ideology is that lubricates them in their movement. In our culture, our relationship with everything that was once defined as nature (body, landscape, other animals) is widely mediated by technology. Therefore, much of the work of art and science (art that is made in the realm of, or in collaboration with, the natural sciences) can be seen as continuation of the tradition of media art. But, as media art in previous decades looked into human–machine relationships and their social effects, contemporary biomedia art looks into the wet biological world and our technological relationship to it. The search travels two ways; on the other hand, art questions the straightforward link between science and so-called ‘progress’ by making the technologies and their possible applications accessible to public debate. On the other hand, science brings new, less anthropomorphic, perspectives upon reality into our human-centred mainstream culture.
The most significant conceptual shift brought about by the natural sciences, scientific studies and posthumanist theories relates to the place of humans in the world. In the realm of theory, the anthropocene era – the era in which humans are the most defining geological force of the planet – is, paradoxically, defined by the movement of the human figure from the centre of the world into the margins. Theories such as psychoanalysis, feminism, post-colonial studies and queer theory had already removed the rational, white male human from the pedestal on which the Enlightenment had placed him. Animal studies and posthumanism are just the latest waves in this process. Thus, the key figure of the neoliberal system – the individual – turns out to be a an illusion. Instead, the human subject seems to be a bodily being, constructed by language, culture and the relationships with other species. In itself, it is an ecosystem that consists of billions of species. Homo sapiens, the rational human, has proven to be an invention of its time.
***
Prior to modernity, there was hardly a more studied theme in the history of art than that of ‘representation of nature’. For centuries, visual art was about representing what was not there, thus portraying how we see and understand nature. The epistemological concept of representationalism – the idea that we can only access the outside world though mental or physical representations of it – has been at the core of the Western culture, shared by art and science since the early ages of the renaissance. Representationalism peaked in postmodern theory and its view of language as all-compassing. It is no wonder, then, that looking critically at the representations our cultures produce has been the focus of contemporary art for the past two or three decades, just as models of scientific representation have been in the focus of science studies. This is the level at which most of the art concerning human–nature relations has been situated: the level of cultural representations of nature and animals, and the ways in which it affects our relationships with them.
However, there is another aspect built into the idea of representation, which is to speak for another. This aspect connects humans with nature, not as an epistemological crossing but in a political power structure. Representation, in this sense of the word, points to the question of how nature is represented in the languages of law- and decision-making in society.
The concept of democracy is defined by ideals of equality and fair representation of all. But this democracy is only accessible to a small minority of those present. Not only animals and other species but also groups of humans live in society without access to the decision-making process and without recognition of their legal rights. A structure of exclusion is built into the system of a nation state and of a reichstadt – the sovereign state, consisting of its sovereign people, who gain their position as subjects and members of the state exactly by differentiating themselves from ‘the earthlings’. Exclusion, of course, traditionally functions as a way of using the excluded as a resource for the benefit of those inside the system. All struggles for emancipation have been confronted with rage and ridicule; claiming rights and autonomy for the excluded is a threat to the establishment. We know this from the battles of slaves, women, ethnic or sexual minorities and many other groups fighting for autonomy, freedom and equal rights. These battles have been fought on two fronts; the oppressed have had to stand up and speak for themselves, but, even more importantly, there have been people inside the system who talk on behalf of those who are excluded. Beyond the politics of interest groups, there has always been a tradition of political altruism – politics that tries to speak on behalf of she who cannot speak for herself.
The most common method of exclusion is dehumanising. The word ‘animal’ can be seen as a theoretical tool for denying the basic rights of a group and excluding from society those who are de facto already present. The word ‘animal’ stands for a metaphysical order which places a division between us and them at the centre of the world, an order, which enables a politics based on essentialism, instead of relations, politics that normalise means of exclusion instead of acknowledgement and discussion of existing power relations.
When we talk about society, we usually refer to the structure made by and for humans. Other species are strangers in this community; they are present, but not members. They are just ‘animals’. Hundreds of millions of individuals in industrial food production or in the wilderness take care of the processes fundamental to our society, such as circulation of carbon, oxygen or water, decomposition or the production of raw materials for industry. These agents do not have any legal position; instead, their legal position is generally defined by their use value in relation to other humans. This divide is not a natural one; like all divides, it is cultural and supported by the interests of those who benefit from it.
We have arrived at a situation in which the concept of universal equality between all humans is widely accepted though not widely respected. We are facing a time in which we have to ?finally bring up the question of ‘the animal’ in all of its radicality. For as long as we have this barrier, it is possible to push anyone outside society and ‘treat him like an animal’.
The Party of Others, an artistic political intervention I initiated in 2011, was established in order to try and approach this question. The first version of this project is based on interviews with 12 Finnish individuals from the fields of animal rights, environmental politics, law theory, art and politics. They were asked: what would society be like if the excluded – whether human or non-human – were acknowledged as members? What would the political structure of that society be like? How would it be possible to speak for those who do not have a voice, a vote? Based on these interviews, an agenda for a real political party was written. This agenda tries to formulate the radical, utopian ideas of a truly open society, which would not be based on exclusion, into the form of a traditional political party strategy.
The agenda of the Party of Others includes detailed notions of community, law, language, imagination, education, representational structures and altruism. It is radical, in the sense that it calls for a fundamental change in society at all levels, from culture to power structures. But the agenda is also realistic, as there are many proposals for improving the status of the excluded that could already be realised within the existing political structure. During the launch of the project, a campaign for registering the party into the official party register was started. In Finland, there are only 17 official parties, and 5,000 support cards from voters are needed for registration. The Party of Others project received a great amount of interest and a lot of media coverage. The project is continuing to be a platform upon which ideas around nature and legislation in different cultures can be developed. The aim is to use the Party of Others as a Trojan horse which challenges and provokes the existing political structure from the inside.
Despite the interest the project has received, not much of it considered the initiative to have anything to do with the real political institutions. In the past few years, however, voices speaking for the rights of nature have been starting to come together. Fields of law theory – called wild laws or earth jurisprudence – study the possibilities for natural entities or individuals from other species having representatives. Even if we do not have any realistic discussion of the representation of non-humans in the mainstream western parliamentary system, in more and more societies the idea of establishing positions for nature representatives, who would have to be heard in cases concerning possible harm to a site or a species, is considered less and less ridiculous. These steps gradually make it possible to discuss the legal situation and status of non-humans in the world.
Rhetorics matter. Our language defines what can be talked about and how. Conventional language is transparent, giving us only that which is said, not the medium of language itself. Art and poetry are places where language can be brought into play and where the way it structures our thinking can be made visible. When it comes to talking on behalf of the other, language matters even more. Because we cannot have direct access to the others’ languages, we must be even more careful about how we reflect the medium we use. This is why the Party of Others project also investigates how language perpetuates structures of exclusion. As key concepts of law are thoroughly anthropomorphic, the discussion of the role of non-humans in society stops too easily at the threshold of the parliament. We do not have words with which to address non-human subjectivities or their silent utterances. Language itself becomes a form of discrimination, as only those with access to it have a vote. New interpretations of our relationships with body and matter in philosophy and poetry help us develop a thinking that can see and categorise the world differently, giving us tools with which to make politics when the time comes.
A sister project, The History of Others, focuses on rewriting history from the perspective of other species. The starting point is a simple, though not widely recognised, fact: that history has always been written from the perspective of only one species, though there have been millions of others in the making of it. This silenced history – the way other species understand our common reality – is the narrative left untold in museums celebrating human progress and development. Aiming at working on one or two species a year, I, together with my working partner, author and playwright Laura Gustafsson, decided to start by writing about the everyday speciesism we encounter. Absurd and often insane revelations of our culture become visible when looking at the telos of human common sense, which is to say nothing of techno-scientific ‘rationality’ from the point of view of other species.
The first exhibition of the project, The Museum of the History of Cattle, opened in November 2013 in Helsinki, and it is by now the world’s first ethnographic museum that exhibits a non-human account of history. Taking a bovine perspective, the museum looks at the ways in which central developments in the human–cattle relationship has affected cattle culture, and how different technologies, sciences and ideologies form a network that neither humans nor cattle can escape. It becomes clear how economic theories and industrial inventions have created a culture in which both human and animal bodies are subjected to biopolitics, biotechnologies and control in order to reduce the cost of unperfect bodies to society. It also becomes clear how concepts such as slavery, animal, control or normalisation have not disappeared but have only changed places and hidden themselves in different forms in ever more effective ways. The standardisation of bodies and work, automatisation and measurability at the basis of every lifeform in the name of efficiency are the reality of cattle and human populations all over the western world.
In the upcoming second part, The Museum of the History of Parasites (2014-2015), we will create a narrative of world history from the microbiological point of view. Drawing on recent discoveries from human microbiome and the resulting concept of the human body as an ecosystem, we will look at how the history we consider to be ‘ours’ could actually be seen as the conquest of multiple other species which use our bodies as host organisms. In the exhibition, the viewer’s body becomes the ‘museum’ and the narrative draws a parallel with the relationship between human culture and the earth.
Both the Party of Others and The History of Others investigate the structures of exclusion and the ‘animal’ (the conceptual differentiation of humans from ‘the other’ and the ‘animal’ – qualities typically connected to this otherness, such as incapacity to express oneself with language) as something that is foundational to these structures. By appropriating existing institutional forms, like the political party or museum, they make visible the anthropomorphism built into these societal traditions. As they propose to deliver a non-anthropocentric view – an impossibility to start with, as the project is made by and for humans – they frame a space in our society which the animal other cannot occupy, because this space is formed on the basis of the human figure. Still, the approach of these projects is productive rather than cynical; by trying to do and think that which is impossible in the existing paradigm, I believe it is possible to make cracks in which the seeds of a new paradigm can take root.
As modernity began to investigate itself, other species vanished from view. As art lost sight of nature, it also lost the animal; if art was to discuss only itself and the languages it used, there was no space to bring in anyone else. Representations and images were considered to belong only to the human sphere. During one hundred years of industrial development, the animal was reduced, on the one hand, to a symbol of itself – mere representations to be consumed as fabrics, figures and icons by consumer society. On the other hand, the fleshy, bodily existence of the animal was reduced to mere matter and churned into never-ending billions of pounds of nuggets, milk or leather products. This way, the animal could be consumed ‘body and soul’ without ever really being encountered.
The question of the animal has come to light only in the past few years, as the figure of the independent, rational human individual – the ‘Enlightenment man’ – has lost its magic. Suddenly, non-humans are everywhere. They have surrounded our conferences, our literature, our exhibitions. They do not yet have access, but we can feel their presence, and we know we cannot hold the barriers much longer. They sniff and see and talk in many foreign voices, and, even if we cannot understand them, we can at least hear them talking. Now what do we do with them?
***
There has hardly ever been a greater void between the reality of theory and the reality of praxis than at the beginning of the 21st century. Despite the one hundred year quest in the realm of theory to dismantle the Enlightenment figure, we see no end to the individualist, rationalist, profit-seeking man in the practical reality of our lives. He – because, despite actual gender, this is a male construction – is up and running and very much at the centre of the world.
But the void between theory and praxis is, in fact, a void between theories – a void between theories in humanities and theories in economics. While humanist theories (the broad tree of thought from philosophy to science studies to social studies) increasingly propose an image of the human as a companion species, a hybrid, an ecosystem or a production of its culture – in short, something far from the autonomous, rational and unique individual – neoclassical economic theory still relies on the Newtonian worldview and the rationality celebrated by Enlightenment theories. Despite all this inter-disciplinarity, we have not overcome the two cultures divide, and we will only do so if we realise that the economic conditions which govern our lives are not laws of nature but based on worldviews, theories and ideologies. We cannot simply reject ‘economic talk’ as something threatening, or superimpose it onto our non-anthopomorphic artistic or research practices. We only overcome this divide if we challenge neoclassical economic theory from the very root, and start to look for theories of economy that could address the displaced, non-centred mode of humanity. The current economic crisis has proven that neoclassical theory brings poverty to the majority and benefit only to a minority of a minority. Behind a normalised vocabulary lie concepts of human nature and societal behaviour, of what utility is and how to measure it, of what oikos, household, is and who is counted as part of it.
There is a great tendency to go along with justifying art on the basis of economic profit. The pressure to adopt this vocabulary is heavy, and it is already being implemented in most of the university- and art-funding discourses. What adopting this language means is that we continue to live in a schizophrenic state in which the practice and theory we apply do not meet in any morally consistent way. But in doing this we also lose the tools and modes of thinking about value in any terms other than economic ones. We must resist this tendency with every means possible.
Rhetorics matter.
As the art world is increasingly consumed by market ideology and the ‘success’ of art is equated with the amounts of money exchanged, we define the value of art only in economic terms. This has already started to distort the general audience’s opinion of what art is, and what its role is in society – as if art that does not sell is not art at all. It is necessary to investigate, and make explicit, how mainstream economic theory works its way into the art market, and to make visible both reality and its alternatives. What is in play is not (just) the erosion of values but also real, live, human and animal bodies.
As politics flee from politics and parliamentary decision-making becomes mere distribution of state funds, it is increasingly important to secure art as a site for discussion on ethics and on good life. Non-productivity, non-individualism and not meeting consumer needs must be taken seriously; when art becomes a production process, its appreciators paying customers and its makers entrepreneurs, we lose a place from which to critically investigate society and keep a door open to alternatives. This is not a formal question but an acute, ethical one. Art is a site of play, just as children play without a pre-set concept of how things should be. This is where radicality (in the true sense of the word) can emerge.
References
Alexander, Denis R., and Numbers, Ronald L, (ed’s) Biology and Ideology From descartes to Dawkins. University of Chicago Press 2010
Baker, Steve: The Postmodern Animal. Reaktion books, 2000
Latour, Bruno: Emme ole koskaan olleet moderneja. Gummerus, 2006.
Wolfe, Cary: What is Posthumanism. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Weil, Kari: Why Animal Studies Now?
