Beyond the Disciplinary Boundaries of Art

Steven Wright

Despite all the banter about art being a discipline, the question remains whether art actually produces knowledge. With this critical reflection, Steven Wright, research fellow at the Institut Nationale de l'Art in Paris, began his March 19 talk on the shifting status of art in AUB's Architecture Lecture Hall.

In his discussion, Wright related art practices with "low coefficients of artistic visibility," thereby raising the issue of "art without art works, authorship, or spectatorship." The Kantian model of art discourse, according to him, has a paradoxical way of characterizing artistic production as a "purposeless purpose." In other words, its fundamental purpose is that it should have none. Adorno extended this contradiction by considering art "not as merely useless, but as radically useless."

Wright noted the increasing number of exhibitions that no longer showcase the iconic artworks which people are conditioned to seeing upon entering a gallery or museum. People still think art should produce aesthetic satisfaction, so when they only see the byproducts of the process, they are dissatisfied. For example, explained Wright, if someone creates a performance, those who were not there to view it can only have access to the documentation that bears witness to that performance. "In other words, the social and physical architecture that art relies on may come to be 'performed' in documentary centers and archives, characterizing an extra-disciplinary moment in art history."

Wright then transported his audience to Buenos Aires, where artists were collaborating with social movements. After Argentina's military dictatorship (1976-1983), 30,000 people "disappeared." Many considered this genocide, because the acts were not random, but a systematic liquidation of the most creative and progressive elements of society. The people involved and complicit in those violent acts included not only government officials or colonels, but also lawyers, the doctors who kept people alive so they could be further tortured, or those who delivered the babies of the incarcerated women who were raped and impregnated. As a response, the Escrachè movement wanted to draw attention to the presence of those perpetrators of violence, who continued to live with impunity. And after the dictatorship was over, the criminals were granted amnesty, in a form of tabula rasa.

Wright showed the signs that were created in black and bold yellow, explicitly referring to the "flights of death." They took the form of traffic control symbols, which outlined black jet planes and white anonymous human figures denoting the "figures of absence." Each sign was the same and reproducible. "The problem was not that 30,000 people remain missing," asserted Wright; "it is not the absence of their presence that is problematic, but the presence of their absence."