hal foster - precarious

7/29/2019 Hal Foster - Precarious

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DECEMBER 2009

Jon Kessler, The Palace at 4 AM, 2005, mixed media. Installation view, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, NewYork. Photo: Rick Haylor.

NO CONCEPT COMPREHENDS THE ART OF THE PASTDECADE, but there is a condition that this art has shared, and it isa precarious one. Almost any litany of the machinations of the lastten years will evoke this state of uncertainty: a stolen presidentialelection; the attacks of 9/11 and the war on terror; the deception ofthe Iraq war and the debacle of the occupation; Abu Ghraib,
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Guantnamo Bay, and rendition to torture camps; anotherproblematic presidential election; Katrina; the scapegoating ofimmigrants; the health-care crisis; the ecological disaster; thefinancial house of cards . . . For all the discussion of failed states

elsewhere, our own government came to operate, routinely anddestructively, out of bounds. It is little wonder that the concept of thestate of exception (developed by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt) wasrevived, that this state once again appeared to be (as WalterBenjamin wrote in 1940) not the exception but the rule, and that,as a consequence, the camp seems to have become (as GiorgioAgamben asserted in 1994) the new biopolitical nomos [principle]of the planet.

Perhaps our political bondwhether we call it the social contract orthe symbolic orderis always more tenuous than we think;certainly it was precarious long before 2000. Prior to Bush andBlair, Reagan and Thatcher led the charge of neoliberalism with thebattle cry There is no such thing as society, targeting the mostvulnerable (the underclass, gays and lesbians, immigrants) in waysthat made their lives even more precarious. Over the past decade,this condition became all but pervasive, and it is this heightenedinsecurity that much art has attempted to manifest, even toexacerbate. This social instability is redoubled by an artisticinstability, as the work at issue here foregrounds its own schismaticcondition, its own lack of shared meanings, methods, ormotivations. Paradoxically, then, precariousness seems almostconstitutive of much art, yet sometimes in a manner that transformsthis debilitating affliction into a compelling appeal.

Again, this situation is not entirely new. The true and mostimportant function of the avant-garde, Clement Greenberg wrote

seventy years ago in Avant-Garde and Kitsch, was to find a pathalong which it would be possible to keep culture movingin themidst of ideological confusion and violence. In his view, the properpath was to push the media of art to the expression of an absolutein which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolvedor beside the point, a project now long since abandoned.


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However, in a revision of Greenberg nearly thirty years ago, T. J.Clark argued that such self-definition was in fact inseparable frompractices of negation produced precisely out of relativities andcontradictions, with negation understood here as an attempt to

capture the lack of consistent and repeatable meanings in thecultureto capture the lack and make it over into form. In the art Ihave in mind, negation is still wrested from relativities andcontradictions, but not as a making over of formlessness into form.On the contrary, it is concerned with letting this formlessness be, asit were, so that it might evoke, as directly as possible, both theconfusion of ruling elites and the violence of global capital. Asmight be expected, this mimesis of the precarious is often staged inperformative installations, and among recent projects the followinghave remained most vivid for me.

In early 2005, Robert Gober presented an untitled installation at theMatthew Marks Gallery in New York in which we were ushered intothe aftermath of 9/11 as though into a dream made up equally offorlorn objects of everyday life and nasty bits of American kitsch.The orderly presentation of handmade readymades hereapriestly frock neatly folded on a bare plywood board, pristine piecesof beeswax fruit in a crystal bowl, faux-petrified planks of woodproduced in bronze, beeswax body parts perversely conjoined, andso onwas at once forensic, like so much evidence laid out in apolice warehousecum-morgue, and ritualistic, for the rows of thesesea-changed tokens also evoked the aisles of a church. And, infact, on a far wall hung a headless Christ on the cross (made ofcement and bronze), an acephalic apparition that condensed thebeheaded hostages in Iraq of the time with the figure of America asJesus the sacrificial victim turned righteous aggressor, the one who

kills in order to redeem.Late that same year, at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in NewYork, Jon Kessler staged The Palace at 4 AM, a babel of RubeGoldberg gadgets, screens, cables, and wires that was engineeredto evoke, all at once, a convulsive White House, the trashed palaceof Saddam Hussein, and our own harried minds wired wide open to


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the obscenity of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. With smallsurveillance cameras relaying the bizarre actions of little makeshiftautomatons on nearby monitors, Kessler responded, directly andindirectly, to the chaotic image-world of the Bush era, reworking TV

bulletins, military reports, touristic postcards, seductive ads, andfranchised toys into delirious dramas that played on the deadlyobsessions of the period.

Paul Chan, The 5th Light, 2007, digital video projection, 14 minutes. Installation view, New Museum, NewYork, 2008. From the series The 7 Lights, 20052007. Photo: Jean Vong.

For the first eight months of 2007, Mark Wallinger presented StateBritain in the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain, where, instead of theusual sculpture, there appeared a reconstruction of the six-hundred-plus weathered photographs, placards, banners, flags,and well-wisher notes that a British subject named Brian Haw hadassembled, since June 2001, opposite the Palace of Westminster ina lived protest against Anglo-American aggressions in Iraq. Onlydays before this one-man retort was removed by police, on May 23,2006 (on the remit of a new law, prompted by this display,forbidding such demonstrations within a one-kilometer radius ofParliament Square), Wallinger photographed its manifold piecesand on that basis produced his painstaking replica. (The gallerieshappen to be one kilometer from the square, so he also inscribed a


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section of this perimeter on the floor.) According to the artist, theextreme verisimilitude of the reconstruction was necessary both tounderscore the authenticity of the original and to insist on its value,but it also confronted viewers with documents of violence (including

images of Iraqi children maimed by American bombs) that theofficial media had suppressed, and suggested that, at least in thisinstance, the museum had provided a last resort for oppositionalspeech.

That same summer, for Skulptur Projekte Mnster, Isa Genzkenscattered, on the square beside the Catholic berwasserkirche(also known as Liebfrauen-berwasser, or Our Lady Above theWaters), twelve casual assemblages made up of cheap dolls and

toys, little chairs and tricycles, plastic flowers and umbrellas.Quickly blown apart, the tacky umbrellas signaled the opposite ofshelter, and everything else also appeared utterly abandoned. (Inthis case, Our Lady offered no sanctuary, turning her grim Gothicback on these miserable leavings.) In fact, with some of the dollparts painted silver or otherwise molested, the entire piece seemed,like State Britain, a staging of the Massacre of the Innocents andthus an indirect rebuke to the church (one of the oldest in Mnster),to the city, and to the nation at large.

Finally, in several venues in 2007 and 2008, including theSerpentine Gallery in London and the New Museum in New York,Paul Chan presented the series The 7 Lights, 20052007,consisting primarily of six digital animations projected on floor andwall. Evoking the passing of a single day, each projection beginsbenignly enough, with telephone cables bending along the sky, say,or sunlight filtering through a canopy of leaves. But the moodquickly darkens as silhouetted images begin to pass byobjectsthat range from the mundane (e.g., cell phones) to the portentous(e.g., a flock of birds). Human figures also float past, and thememory of victims plummeting from the World Trade Center towersis difficult to suppress. Sometimes these images seem to descend,as if to a private hell, and sometimes to ascend, as if in a collectiverapture. The 7 Lights thus suggests an apocalypse that is equally


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catastrophic and beatific; at the same time, it evokes our everydayworld as a precarious Platos Cave of flitting shadows withoutenlightenment.

I came to the termprecarious via Thomas Hirschhorn, and many ofhis projects, such as Muse Prcaire Albinet, staged in theAubervilliers banlieue of Paris in 2004, are very much to the pointhere; his sometime collaborator the French poet Manuel Josephhas also used the term, in a short text on la prcarit as a politicaland aesthetic apparatus. Yet what I want to underscore in theword is already present in the OED: Precarious: from the Latinprecarius, obtained by entreaty, depending on the favor of another,hence uncertain, precarious, fromprecem, prayer. This implies that

this state of insecurity is not natural but constructeda politicalcondition produced by a power on whose favor we depend andwhich we can only petition. To act out the precarious, then, is notonly to evoke its perilous and privative effects but also to intimatehow and why they are producedand thus to implicate theauthority that imposes this antisocial contract of revocabletolerance (as Joseph puts it). The note of entreaty is largely lost inthe English word, yet it is strong in the installations I mentionedabove. Sometimes it is mournful (as in Gober and Chan),sometimes desperate (as in Kessler, Wallinger, and Genzken), butin all instances this importunate quality implies that the entreatycarries the force of accusation as wellan attesting to the violencedone to basic principles of human responsibility.

In some way we come to exist in the moment of being addressed,Judith Butler writes, and something about our existence provesprecarious when that address fails. In Precarious Life (2004), herbrief essay on Emmanuel Levinas, Butler explores the notion ofthe face, which the French philosopher poses as the very imageof the extreme precariousness of the other. To respond to theface, to understand its meaning, Butler argues, means to beawake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, theprecariousness of life itself. This is the face put forward by the art


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of the past decade that has most affected me.

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin 17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.

NOTES1. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, trans. HarryZohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257; Giorgio Agamben, What Is a Camp?, inMeans Without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2000), 45.

2. In response to a questionnaire on this condition, the curator Kelly Baum writes: What ifarts heterogeneity signals possibility instead of dysfunction? What if heterogeneity is artspursuit instead of its affliction? What if, in its very heterogeneity, art were to productivelyengage current socio-political conditions. . . . I think what we are seeing today is art mimingits context. I think we are witnessing art performing agonism, disaggregation, andparticularization. Heterogeneity isnt just contemporary arts condition, in other words; it isits subject as well (October130 [Fall 2009]: 9196; 91, 93).

3. Clement Greenberg,Avant-Garde and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 5.

4. T. J. Clark, Clement Greenbergs Theory of Art, Critical Inquiry9, no. 1 (September1982): 13956; 153, 154.

5. My sampling is arbitrary, based on semiaccidental encounters, and I can only point to theworks here, but they are well documented elsewhere. The precarious has many otherregisters than the ones noted, ranging from the outlandish (e.g., Mike Kelley) to the poetic(e.g., Gabriel Orozco).

6. See Yve-Alain Bois et al., An Interview with Mark Wallinger, October123 (Winter 2008):185204; 188.

7. Elsewhere I have written about this strategy of mimetic exacerbation in relation to Dada.What we call Dada is a farce of nothingness in which all higher questions are involved,Hugo Ball writes on June 12, 1916, in his great diary of Zurich Dada, Flight out of Time; it isa gladiators gesture, a play with shabby leftovers. However, for all that the world of Dada isa chaos of fragments, Ball suggests, the Dadaist does not give up on totality; on thecontrary, he is still so convinced of the unity of all beings, of the totality of all things, that hesuffers from the dissonances to the point of self-disintegration (Flight out of Time, trans.

Ann Raimes [New York: Viking, 1974], 6566). This is a crucial dialectic, and it is active inmuch of the art discussed here, but amid the dissonances it is very difficult to maintain. Forexample, at times in her work Genzken appears perilously close to the point of self-disintegration. See my Dada Mime, October105 (Summer 2003): 16676.

8. See Thomas Hirschhorn, Muse Prcaire Albinet(Aubervilliers: ditions Xavier Barral,2005). In Linfme et la Tolrance rvocable: La prcarit comme dispositif politique etesthtique, Joseph writes: Precariousness, by right, is put into practice by means of aprovisional authorization, that is, by a revocable tolerance accorded by the Letter of the Lawlaw as conceived, invented, written by man. It concerns a condition whose duration is notguaranteed, except for the men who have drawn up, decreed, and imposed this contract.Thanks to Hirschhorn for sharing this unpublished text with me.

9. The wordprcaire, the late-eighteenth-century French satirist Antoine de Rivarol wrote


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(as if in anticipation of Kafka), proves how little we obtain from prayer, seeing that this wordderives from it (as quoted by Joseph).

10. Judith Butler, Precarious Life, in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence(London: Verso, 2004), 12851; 130, 134.

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