Studio Will Kwan

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Roundtable: Art, Politics, and Love

Common Love: Aesthetics of Becoming in Contemporary Art. Kaira Cabañas (ed). Exhibition catalogue. New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2011, 94-101.

The following discussion took place on Friday, 12 March 2010, in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University as part of the seminar Problems in Curating taught by Kaira M. Cabañas. The conversational character of the discussion remains unchanged, although some remarks have been omitted due to space constraints. The participants were our guest Michael Hardt, Professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University, in addition to Kaira M. Cabañas, A. E. Benenson, Kristen Chappa, David Howe, Donald Johnson-Montenegro, and Tomoko Kanamitsu.

Kaira M. Cabañas:
I thought I would begin by explaining how I came to love as the curatorial idea. I was asked on 4 November 2009 to arrange a Visual Arts alumni exhibition for the Wallach Art Gallery. That was, for me, going to be impossible unless I first organized a seminar around a curatorial idea. I think that I had not yet read the excerpt from Commonwealth in Artforum, but I had recently read Serge Daney's "The Tracking Shot in Kapo." He describes a refusal to watch this tracking shot, because it was aesthetically suspect for him, the aesthetization of a moment of death.

Hardt:
"The Tracking Shot in Kapo"?

Cabañas:
Yes, a film from 1959; it's a historical drama about the Holocaust, and he takes issue with a shot where there is an inmate's hand—well, I haven't seen it, because I refused to watch it based on Daney's refusal.

[laughs]

Hardt:
In political solidarity with his refusal to watch...

[laughs]

Cabañas:
Next I went to hear Simon Critchley, Jacques Rancière, and Judith Butler on a panel [at The New School] where they were talking about the relevance of social theory to social movements. In that context, Butler was talking about various assimilation tests in The Netherlands where they s how images of gay and lesbian couples as a way of testing tolerance. Then Butler launches into a discussion about how we should not allow our own freedoms to be used against the unfreedom of someone else. So this is the second [moment]. They are quite disparate, but they led up to my sitting down and reading the October issue of Artforum, and reading about love, and then being convinced that the show needed to be about love. Not identificatory love, or love in the family, or the conventional ways we think about love, but love as a kind of doing rather than necessarily a feeling. That's the intellectual trajectory that led... from Commonwealth to Common Love.

Hardt:
Great. Let's start with the works.

PROPERTY

A. E. Benenson:
This is a work by Will Kwan [Endless Prosperity, Eternal Accumulation]. It is a collection of small envelopes, which were used as part of a symbolic ritual of gift exchange in Chinese culture—as a means of redistributing prosperity. It's this token, this idea of redistributing the wealth or good fortune that comes to one person to other people in the community on special occasions. What has happened is that these envelopes have been co-opted as a form of advertising by banks and other corporations, and now banks distribute them.... So you are actually advertising the perverse opposite: the exchange logic of commercial banking.... I want to look at a deeper reading, vis-à-vis a quote from Commonwealth [p. 240].... That suggests that how we interpret the world is predetermined by the system that we're raised in and that the way we see and understand is contingent on our historical and material circumstances. Using this model, I wonder if we can't look at these [envelopes] less as an example of how capitalism has corrupted such forms of commons exchange (or gift exchange), and more how it de-conceals [reveals] that communication, exchange, and production in the commons is always already predetermined by the subjectivities that are created in our communities. There is no naive pre-ideological subject for the commons, but a subject who has been informed or taught how to act based on hegemonic power.

Hardt:
Within capitalist society?

Benenson:
Well, not just capitalist society. This is a Chinese tradition and arguably existed before capitalism and has to do with feudalism. But simply that [subjectivity] is always going to be determined to some degree by these things, which are corruptions.

Hardt:
On the right-hand side that says Banco Ultra Marino?

Benenson:
It's also that banks in America, in New York City, are trying to do this because they realize there is a Chinese population in the neighborhood. It's also an example of how capitalism is a vehicle for a propagation of identities around the world.

Hardt:
So when you're regarding that there is no subjectivity outside, are you thinking of it as a problem or as that's-the-way-it-is?

Benenson:
It seems to be an insurmountable problem.

Hardt:
It's interesting how the commodity and commodification already seem like an obstacle. It might be that, in fact, artistic practices are so well placed to confront and critique commodification because of the constant threat of commodification of the artistic product itself. I had been thinking about how property—I'm not sure this a big difference—how property is an obstacle to love, and I sometimes mean that in a very simple sense. There's someone you probably haven't read named Alexandra Kollontai, an early Soviet minister. She was the only woman who was a member of the council of the Soviets. She wrote about love as the antithesis of property. What she was mostly upset about was the way marriage and family were constructed through property relationships: "Woman as property." And the family itself was only a property relationship. Lenin wanted to put in the constitution the abolition of the state, and she wanted to add the abolition of the family, because of its being founded on property relations—the idea that our intimacy or the continuity of our intimacy can only be guaranteed through our property. That's actually a pretty common way of thinking about it. Like if we didn't treat each other like we were each other's property, then there wouldn't be a lasting tie. So she's arguing against this notion. [She's] saying that love is the antithesis of property, that such property relations can't be part of love.

GENERATIONS

Hardt:
I'm curious about how this notion of love, or even thinking about love in these ways... how you first reacted. I'm sort of assuming—we were talking about this earlier—there is some sort of generational difference. People of your parents' generation might view talking about love in a political context or even in a social context as something that sounded not so much sentimental but hippylike and not so serious. Did it immediately strike you as something that seemed worthy of serious thought, or did it seem like something that was foreign to you? Or maybe I can even preface it differently. I often find myself very reluctant in the university context to talk about love, but among artists it's different. In general, in the university context, raising questions about love runs the risk of sentimentality and, therefore , not sounding intellectually serious or politically serious. I guess I'm asking you to reflect on it generationally, but also disciplinary-wise, or even just your first person experience. You could say, "at first it seemed really weird to me but then as we talked about it, it made more sense," or...

[silence]

Cabañas: Like, "when Kaira said she wanted to do a show on love..."

[laughter]

Hardt:
There is, I can imagine, a reticence too... I'm not even sure what the disqualification should be.

David Howe:
Love is littered with these tropes, and in the first class we went through certain tropes of love.

Cabañas:
In fact, we've said that love should be nowhere present in the exhibition, as in a work's title or image.

Hardt:
Right, you wouldn't want some Klimt kiss or anything like that.

Cabañas:
I had an argument with a colleague in Barcelona actually. I told him that we were going to do a show on love, and, in this very orthodox Marxist way, he said, "oh, that is the weakest part of their [Hardt's and Negri's] thinking!"

[laughter]

I just looked at him... He very much shut down any conversation around it. It was not to be discussed—that was the end of the conversation. I made a joke about it later, but that was it.

[laughter]

Hardt:
Do you think it's a lack of seriousness? What is "the weak part"? I can imagine all kinds of weaknesses for other things, but why specifically, I wonder, would that strike someone as weak?

Benenson:
Part of it might be—and this might be a generational thing, or a personal thing—that the word "love" has been co-opted and re-used and fashioned into a cliché so often in pop culture and in a certain type of art production that people hear a totally emptied—out shell of a buzzword.

Tomoko Kanamitsu:
My first reaction was to be excited to work on something about love, because it seemed separate from the usual discourse that we were having.... The reading list that Kaira put together... began with Commonwealth, then we read some chapters from Leo Bersani's Intimacies and The Politics of Friendship by Derrida. I felt we were really building up our thinking more and more upon these ideas of love that were different from the love that Alex is talking about. I thought that was very interesting and refreshing.

Hardt:
So, it takes some intellectual work to recuperate or to open up the term.

All:
Yes.

Hardt:
That seems like a big challenge for a show, because people will obviously come with...

Howe:
... preconceived notions.

Hardt:
I'm glad you guys are doing it. I don't know how to do such things, but I guess that banning all of the readymade stereotypes is a first step.

Donald Johnson-Montenegro:
It came from something we read, "In the poem about love, you don't write the word love."... That speaks to why we were so interested in the term... doing archaeological work to bring up the true potential of the concept is what's interesting to us.

Hardt:
It's great. Also, I was excited and intrigued when you mentioned this project, because I'm thinking that coming at it from a different perspective the way you all are might also help advance it. For me, it's an excellent opportunity to try to think differently about it. It's something I've been working on for a long time, but I don't succeed very well at communicating to people about it. I feel like I know what I'm talking about.

[laughter]

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

Howe:

This is Gabriel Martinez's Cracks in the pavement are watered with Miracle-Gro (Rose Park). It's an ongoing project where he waters grass in the pavement.

Hardt:
And photographs it?

Howe:
All of his work only exists through [photographic] documentation of it, typically.

Hardt:
Interesting. So is that watering can incredibly small?

[laughter]

Howe:
I think it's Photoshopped.... In a way, he's effecting a literal transgression of park infrastructure as it reifies the commons. Martinez's is a natural intervention. With Miracle-Gro, it complicates this critical gesture.... It's the idea of public and private space that's really interesting.

Hardt:
The park is interesting. So, the park is public space in a sense. Already with "public," we're constantly running into these terminological problems where often when people say the word "public" they mean something like what Toni and I mean by "common"—like "make your ideas public" or something like that. But what we mean by public or public space is control or regulation by the city, or government more generally. The park is an excellent example because the park is public space in that sense. It's open, but open under the constraints of the state's regulation, which is not [in fact, open]. I don't mean that as necessarily nefarious. But the way you started presenting this seems that a first reading could be that these cracks in the pavement and the grass growing in them are an irrepressible emergence of the common in public space. It's complicated by this Miracle-Gro... Because you might think in an old-fashioned romantic way that nature is springing forth and claiming back the world from the pavement. But it's not nature; it's Miracle-Gro , which is one of t he most heavily marketed and branded fertilizers. So what do you do? Is [Martinez] just undermining that romantic nature reading? Why does he insist that he's using MiracleGro, or use Miracle-Gro?

Benenson:
It's a form of resistance, developed from the very tools of capital or the market, right?

Hardt:
Oh. So, if he had the cracks in the pavement watered by this super-organic fertilizer taken from birds in Peru...

[laughter]

Hardt:
Here it's tools within... I like that. I do have a certain revulsion for the romantic naturalist imagination of the outside. To come back to when Alex was talking commodification [in relation to Will Kwan's work]: when you were saying there's no subject—you didn't quite say it this way—but I wrote down "no subject outside of capital."... In some ways, the Miracle-Gro as the means of resistance is the nonfatalistic version of "there is no outside."

Benenson:
Or it's a solution, an internal solution.

Hardt:
Well, there are some modes of resistance, at least, that one can find within.

IMMANENCE

Cabañas:
You were talking about this blockage or perhaps difficulty in relation to speaking about love. I was wondering if part of the conceptual difficulty is perhaps that one is not to think of love as something you can say or something you can conceptualize, but rather as something you do. There's this underlying pragmatism in Commonwealth that I find quite interesting, whether it's participation as pedagogy, [etc.].... So if love is something you do and not necessarily what you feel in a reified way—if it's something you do as an act of generosity perverted in various ways in terms of commodified culture or the family—then it's something that exceeds conceptual language. To talk about it is already to take it out of the field of immanence where love is to actually operate.

Hardt:
That makes a lot of sense. Another problem I have with the love stuff is that I feel the need to constantly [think about it] on at least two levels: it has to make sense to me on the level of intimacy and also on a socialpolitical level. Of course, it's true, or often true, in relationships that constantly talking about love can really be annoying. Do you know what I mean?

[laughter]

And that actually doing it, actually loving is much more important. OK. I am trying to understand what you were saying in those terms, which makes a lot of sense. Then, I agree up to a point. [pause] I still feel the need to find a way to talk about it, because I'm convinced of its political importance. [pause] But maybe you're saying one could find a way to talk about it in such a way that emphasizes it as a practice and not as much as a discourse. That's interesting too.

FRIENDSHIP

Kristen Chappa:
One of the questions that came up is, why didn't you mobilize friendship as a term?

Hardt:
Was that after you read the Derrida?

Chappa:
We were discussing the transformative possibility of friendship. So I was wondering, why love and not friendship?

Cabañas:
They saw your YouTube appearance where you say that friendship is...

Hardt:
... is not transformative.

[laughter]

Hardt:
Yeah. [pause] Do you think I'm wrong about that? Might be.... Sometimes it could be that we are talking about the same thing, and one of us is saying "love" and the other is saying "friendship.".... I'm talking about our common use of the terms—that I lose myself in love and I don't lose myself in friendship. That's what I meant by the transformative thing, that I become something different in love. That's horrifying in some ways. In friendship—but maybe I'm short-shrifting, maybe I'm giving too little esteem, too little consideration to friendship's powers—I think of friendship as the possibility of our cooperation, interaction, but you and I stay the same in our friendship. [pause] Is that wrong?

Cabañas:
Yes, I actually think it's wrong.

Hardt:
Because in friendship

Cabañas:
In my experience of friendship... not to...

Hardt:
Well, but no, that's part of the difficulty of these discussions, they do have to make sense simultaneously on several levels.

Benenson:
Maybe if you start earlier you can find the difference. It's not so much what happens during it but the rationale for starting each action. The rationale when starting friendship is we see that we have things in common, we see that we have things that we can exchange with each other, have mutual benefits, and help each other out [as in] a typical exchange. Where love is an opening yourself up to an unknown experience, where it's a perhaps, as Derrida says, as opposed to an "I know."

J-Montenegro:
Maybe when friendship is transformative—because I don't think it can always be transformative—then what is operating within that friendship is love.

Hardt:
That's when it becomes a terminological thing.

J-Montenegro:
Right.

Hardt:
The definition you [Benenson] just gave, one thing that attracted me to it conceptually was it sounds like friendship in some way is based on a notion of exchange. Because that goes along with my attempt at saying that the subjects involved are stable, and hence the practices of friendship are about the exchanges between these people. What would one have to say about love if one were to say that in some ways it's not about exchange? It's about... transformation. Let me come back to your [Cabañas's] immediate personal reaction, which I recognize, too. I could easily see where friendships have changed me. All of my friendships have, of course, changed me in some way... What I imagine love to be is not an evolution of that person I was, but a kind of losing of the person I was. Anyway, like you said—you were the one that said that, Donald—that at the moment at which a friendship, or acts of friendship, or practices of friendship, become something else, they [love and friendship] don't have to be exclusive of one another. I guess that's the way out. [long pause] I'm trying to think what's to be gained by the difference. [pause] I don't know. I also think love is really dangerous—I mean that in a good way—whereas "friendship" doesn't seem that dangerous to me. But, I suppose [that if] my parents thought I was going out with the wrong crowd or something—that's dangerous.

[laughter]

Cabañas:
There are so many different models of friendship. What Alex was invoking was an Aristotelian model of friendship. This is not necessarily t he model of friendship we read in Derrida, which is more about the "love of the farthest" and not about love of the similar.

Hardt:
And not about exchange.

Cabañas:
And not about exchange

Benenson:
That's a terminology thing.

Cabañas: But I do like Donald's intervention about how maybe when friendships are transformative then what's operating in them is love.

SHARING AND THE COMMONS

Chappa:
Do you have thoughts on how exhibitions, such as the one we're attempting to conceptualize, might adopt structures that enact a democratic sharing of the commons?... We're grappling with these issues of how the structure of our exhibition, how the structure itself could mirror some of these concepts.

Hardt:
What do you think about how it, an exhibit, can open itself up? You guys know more about the history of artistic practices and struggling with these questions than I do. What do you all think?

Chappa:
There's a general move from displaying material objects to the exhibition as something that is more transitory, or more open, or a meeting ground for discussion and research.

Hardt:
So it would be an occasion for encounter not only among the participants but also the public.... There is some relationship, I guess, between the ephemeral nature of it and the possibilities for encounter. I think of performance in general, too, as breaking with the museum tradition. It's also about that ephemeral character.

Benenson:
It's like artists who are not presenting art; they're presenting their research and their ideas... It's an interesting investigation into how artists treat their intellectual properties like commodities and private property, right? So much about the art world is about keeping one's ideas, having control not only over one's physical art objects but over the propagation of one's ideas about art.

Hardt:
Say a little bit more. It's clear to me the part about the commodification of the artwork, of the piece, and the art market, things like that. It makes sense to me, but I hadn't thought as much about maintaining a certain currency in ideas in the art world.

Benenson:
People get cagey about paper topics or terms that they think they've invented [laughter], or whatever.... [There] is no longer such a concern for artists making art objects. And, if you do an art object, you can take a photo of it and it costs nothing to anyone to distribute that photo over the Internet.... That's a question not of the commodity art object in a traditional sense but of the intellectual property, over the licensing, or the right to use.

Hardt:
Of the image?

Benenson:
Or the idea, even, right?

Chappa:
It's because of intellectual property laws around art and graphics. It's difficult to prove that someone has stolen your idea. And a lot of artists don't feel that they have the resources to fight back or hire an attorney when they're in that situation.

Benenson:
Absolutely.

Chappa:
I've known artists who have shared ideas among friends and then another artist will do a project that really resembles theirs....

Hardt:
They feel cheated by it.

Chappa:
There's an interesting tension between sharing in the commons, wanting to participate in that, but also wanting to protect one's own ideas and work.

Hardt:
There wouldn't be artistic production, almost, if there weren't that exchange. And yet at the same time there's the need for...

Benenson:
There's this obsession... the modernist myth of originality.

POOR

J-Montenegro:
Gedi Sibony creates these subtle sculptures from discarded construction materials. His work seems to function on the concept of almost, "almost disappearing," "almost stable," "almost blank."

Hardt:
Is that your idea or his? I like that.

[laughter]

J-Montenegro:

It was in some of the writing about his work... So this is a tendency, which recalls the concept of perhaps on which friendship and love hinge for Derrida. I'm going to read a short quote from the catalogue for his first museum solo show: "Sibony's sculptures achieve a nonchalant awkwardness, a proud nudity, an overall plausibility that bring together space, weight, and the materiality that seem happily accidental. In the context of the near collapse of our contemporary socio-political reality, these works quietly promote an economy of means, reuse, transparency, and the power and beauty of bare essentials." A work like Except for the Guards is a simple gesture [that] subtly changes the quality of the light inside of the room; his work points out for the viewer elements of the architecture and environment that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Hardt:
I see.

J-Montenegro:
It also makes evident the apparent potential of what we discard; the political potency of love lies in its transformational nature. Through love we become other than what we are. In Sibony's work, refuse becomes sculpture. His castaway materials can be likened to the marginal, neglected members of our society, and the way they are underappreciated and often ignored. Sibony infuses love into the otherwise disregarded and creates beautiful, engaging works. They suggest the potential strength of the marginalized and how that strength might be harnessed and propelled by love. His project thus serves as a metaphor for a larger socio-political issue. What is suggested is an empowering of the marginal.... We've been speaking about Derrida and this concept of "love of the farthest." [Sibony's] choice of material not used in traditional art making parallels that concept of the "love of the farthest."

Hardt:
Or poverty was what I was thinking.

J-Montenegro:
Yes, there are probably relations to Arte Povera.

Hardt:
That's interesting, I hadn't thought of that. You think that using found materials [is] in a way [using] materials of the poor. [pause] It's so interesting how, with so many of the things that you've come up with, the ephemeral nature of them and the transient nature is really key.

J-Montenegro:
There's something honest about that in terms of the artists seeing the place of art within the larger context... Understanding that through a work of art, you're not really going out there, and you're not organizing political rallies or something like that, but in this very small way you're creating a metaphor for the way that can operate—which is political. Alex had mentioned this before, about being able to leverage what you have and knowing how to best...

Benenson:
It raises the question that this kind of art is only possible when excess is available, trash is capitalist excess...To what degree does it rely on the creation of excess to exist?

Hardt:
Right. I'm not sure; maybe I'm translating too much, though. If it were the case that we could only love, or love only when we had the luxury or the free time to do it, then it would be only rich people who love. Whereas, at least, the kind of love that I'm talking about is intimately related with the survival skills of living. Do you know what I mean?

J-Montenegro:
This is an excellent point about only being able to produce such work when there is such a thing as excess. But to me it was [about] being able to create, no matter what your situation is.... If we could really create a society based on these ideas of the common, then what we have to leverage becomes monumental and really powerful. If natural resources become common property, we have that much more to work with.

Cabañas:
We have five more minutes.

Hardt:
It always goes quickly.

[laughter]

J-Montenegro:
I'm really interested in the lecture you gave at the European Graduate School. You mentioned five positive characteristics of love. One of them was specifically the primacy of love, the poor, and the poor as a subject of love. I was wondering if you could speak very briefly to what it is you see in the poor that is so central to your conception of love.

Hardt:
That does sort of relate to what I was thinking... It's hard to know how much one has to back up to start the arguments. I have to start from an inversion, which maybe would seem obvious and not necessary: thinking of the poor and even a state of poverty, not in terms of what is lacking... recognizing the poor—it's also a sociological point—not as victims but as wealthy and powerful. Not always wealthy and powerful in the same ways... [but] focusing on the abilities of making do with what one has.... There is a passage in Marx that Toni, my coauthor, and I talked [about] a lot, where Marx refers to the worker as a figure of absolute poverty. He's stripped of wealth and stripped of all things. Yet, also, maybe even because of this absolute poverty, the worker is also a figure of absolute possibility. Marx's inversion was around that coincidence between absolute poverty and absolute possibility.... So then, I was thinking that it would be a similar approach to love, that love is not only a constructive force—absolute possibility—but it also has an inverse relation to property. Or rather that property—this is where I was going with it—is an obstacle to love. Sometimes property functions as a stand-in for love that acts as an obstacle to love. In another text of Marx, his Manuscripts of 1844, his often very romantic notebooks, he focuses on the way that property is meant to substitute for human capacities. For example, "I don't have to be beautiful, I can pay to be beautiful"; "I don't have to have friends, I can pay for friendship"; "I don't have to be lovable, I can pay to be loved." And he concludes, of course, that property cannot really substitute for beauty, friendship, and love, but instead makes them impossible... I don't want to say the poor are really privileged. Like, "Oh, isn't it great, I wanna be like those people that are homeless." No. But there is a way in which property functions as an obstacle, which reveals how poverty is linked to possibility, how poverty is the condition of love.