When did art become “inappropriate”?
Unlike corporations trying to maintain their impeccable brands of sensitivity demanded by shareholders and consumers alike, artists, through their use of the inappropriate, serve a vital function. The inappropriate is a tool that expands and tests the boundaries of culture and, perhaps more importantly, disturbs our facile acceptance of social norms, niceties, codes, laws and regulations.
So why the abhorrence of the inappropriate? Perhaps the answer to what I deem so perplexing is quite simple: art—or more accurately, an artist’s practice—has become structurally identical to corporate practice: a space preoccupied with marketing, sales, product, modes of production, expansion, and public appeasement, i.e., the artist’s main preoccupation is the artist’s brand. Why would an artist, curator, art critic or art historian dare risk their brand on a single painting, sculpture, essay or idea when the halls of academia and malls of commerce beckon?
Of course, this is not to say that artists, curators, and writers can’t be critical of curatorial projects, art criticism, art history and artworks. In fact, there is a dire need for the return of acidic and acrimonious criticism. One could say that the draconian responses to the examples I listed above are types of “inappropriate” contestation that I champion. But the problem is that to the extent these demands for the censoring, withdrawal, and destruction of artworks are forms of criticism, they are simultaneously oppressive strategies focused solely on silencing artistic speech, i.e.- killing freedom of expression. These are criticisms aimed at the destruction rather than the production of content, knowledge and debate, as disturbing and uncomfortable as they may be.
Let’s take Sam Durant’s Walker sculpture as an example. Durant was trained at CalArts and is currently an instructor there—the same institution that pretty much invented criticality in artistic production. Durant must know that context and intent play a major role—if not the sole role—in determining an object’s meaning. Certainly CalArts’s loss of Michael Asher and Allan Sekula cannot mean that Durant jettisoned history, context, intent, and discourses regarding institutions and the public from the making and reception of an artwork. Had Durant and Walker Art Center curator, Olga Viso, considered context and intent, that alone would have sufficed as a defense to Durant’s alleged insensitivity and naiveté. By willfully ignoring the fact that Durant’s sculpture would not read the same in Europe as it would in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Viso and Durant perpetuate the modernist myth of the autonomous art object. Had the question of context and intent been addressed during curatorial planning, the Walker and Durant would have evaded self-censorship and the hot trend called, corporate social responsibility.
Yet the “inappropriate” should not be left solely to artistic production. Those who teach art and its disciplines, e.g.- curating, should also challenge and encourage their students to engage every written and visual work with rigorous criticism focused on presenting alternatives to and weaknesses in the object of criticism, not to level ad hominen attacks at other artists or demand an artwork’s withdrawal or destruction. Art schools and art departments should place more focus on establishing spaces where questions can be raised rather than suppressed. Spaces where students can think of culture outside of residencies, art fairs and institutional frameworks. An environment that nurtures a Socratic method of analysis, not a space that indoctrinates with the latest politically fashionable dogma.
We must remember that the present has precedent. The establishment of “propriety” in art can, and will, help so-called “conservative communities” establish censorship and destruction as a paradigm in artistic production and culture. If certain liberal sectors are offended by paintings, sculptures, syllabi, questions and comments, why should the Catholic church not have a right to demand the removal or destruction of an artwork or entire exhibition when offended by the next Piss Christ?
– Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento
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