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Powerful
Art and
Power
Essays by
Jessica Stockholder
Ann Lauterbach
Rochelle Feinstein
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Jessica Stockholder
Powerful Art and Power
1 June 2006
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In my own work I provide circumstances for powerful private expe-
rience and for spectacle. I am obsessed with how the self alone, and
the self understood as part of a group bump up against each other; and
how both experiences of self can be empowering. At different
moments my work can impress one with the power of the maker, the
power of the institution exhibiting the work, or the power of the collec-
tive of viewers that contribute meaning to the event of exhibition.
That visual art often engenders pleasure is significant. I am sure
that understanding the sources of, and reasons for pleasure are linked
to power, and I am happy to revel in exploring how this might be so. I
have found Dave Hicky and Carol Gilligan very useful as points of refer-
ence here.
I work with many students who as a result of their wish to be criti-
cal of, or unaligned with, the various power structures that support the
art world make work that is itself without visual, formal or affective
power. This seems a little painful to me though I can empathize. And I
watch others who having discovered buttons for creating spectacle
make work that is lapped up so quickly by the powers that grease the
machine that they seem to be swept off their feet. The present inten-
sity of focus on graduate student work can make it challenging to hold
onto rich and varied expressions of value and power.
Power, itself neither good nor bad, can be used to various ends. It is
not necessarily distributed fairly and it is not always earned. Perhaps
given our democratic ideals and mythology it is difficult for us to toler-
ate the inequities inherent in the distribution of power, and it is conse-
quently taboo to meander through the thicket of desire meeting power.
Nevertheless, that art objects can engender deep experience and
affect, and are perhaps even effective in the world must have some-
thing to do with how they tap into the complexity of power relations of
all sorts.
That we like artworks to have power over us and that it feels good to
be overcome might be related to religious experience or to twelve step
programs that urge us to accept and take comfort in our relative pow-
erlessness. Some art insists that there is a greater power. And some
insists that we have power over our circumstances.
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The question of gender relations is laced with questions of power. It
is relatively uncomplicated to assert that men and women make art;
and many of us can agree that there are power inequities between
men and women. The relative difference in the success of men and
women in the art world is both an unfortunate fact and the subject of
much art. It is more complicated to try and understand any single indi-
viduals relationship to these facts, and how we are all party to this
power inequity. It is also important to say that there are, and have
been, many powerful women, and that there are many women who
make great and powerful art.
I would like to put my foot in it and explore this question a little in
terms of form — I pose two sets of formal qualities:
The first: stiff, upright, hard, industrial, geometric and big.
The second: soft, round, flexible, organic, earth bound, and small.
It is easy to tie the first set of qualities to men and the second to
women. That said, it is patently absurd to fix the meaning of any form
to either gender. Efforts in this direction quickly disintegrate. There
are, however, undeniable strands of meaning that weave through
these facts of our experience. Our shared forms of communication,
physical, visual, and verbal, use metaphor and grow from the facts of
our bodies. How these forms are assigned status and power socially,
economically, and politically is something that is constantly reinvented
alongside life’s givens. Art and design are party to this invention.
And there is the fact of war during which physical power is asserted
over others and power is attained through force and subjugation. And
economic power is achieved through increased means. Social power is
informed by these physical realities but also by style, attitude, psycho-
logical maneuvering, knowledge, wisdom, and perhaps enlighten-
ment. Art objects are situated within a power structure informed by all
of this.
And power can arise from passivity (Ghandi) and the exposure of
vulnerability. I’m thinking of Vito Acconci’s work where he is both vul-
nerable and aggressive, waving a stick at his audience blindfolded.
Masturbating under a floor, exposing his desire and his shame. And
Lynda Benglis’s work exposing its weakness in the face of gravity. And
perhaps the work of Mary Heillman whose geometry has “expression”
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and “character “ having given up some of its hardness. And Hannah
Wilkie, who presents her personal and mortal vulnerability up for our
consideration.
Success accrues power to the successful. Most of us want our work
and our persons to be successful. Money is power and most of us want
and need money. How artworks are understood within the money
economy intersects all these questions of power and presents an
opportunity. As artists selling our works to people or institutions with
money, we are at their service. We are in some respects in their power.
On the other hand, we invent and decide what it is that we want to make
and present the world with objects , ideas, and perhaps ideals to desire.
Information is power. How stories are told, how the facts of the
world are represented with images support and help to uphold power
structures. Map-making and history are often discussed from this
point of view. Wallid Raad stirs this particular pot.
In order for our work to be part of the larger culture, for it to have an
audience, it has to be inserted into existing power structures one way
or another. The infrastructure of galleries, museums, and patrons, are
powerful as is the work that we make.
I would like to end by asking: How do you understand and value
power in art? What do you want from your work in terms of power?
And, how do you negotiate the insertion of your work into existing
structures of power?
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Ann Lauterbach
Powerful Art and Power
11 Septmber 2006
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on the floor and covered my head; within moments, there was a sound
for which I have not found the words, since it was simultaneously
enormous and muted; I had no references, no likenesses with which to
compare it. A great swallowing, perhaps. It was the announcement of
Power at its most primal, erupting from exactly the pre-linguistic
ground of our most profound imaginings. Within minutes, it was clear
that an event was underway that would occupy the world stage for
years to come, shifting the ground of history and of our, America’s,
place in it. But one could not have anticipated the degree to which it
would also elicit years of destructive abuses: of language, of persons,
places, things, and that these abuses would place cultures, our own
and others, at risk.
They would, in turn, put immense pressure on artists to find ways to
be in conversation with this risk.
For some weeks, I have been rereading certain passages from some of
my favorite thinkers, writers who have, however obliquely, addressed
the issue or theme of power: Michel Foulcault, Gilles Deleuze, Edward
Said, Giorgio Agamben, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hannah Arendt, Judith
Butler. I read the Fragments of Heraclitus, the novel Plowing the Dark
by Richard Powers, and an unpublished talk by my friend the poet
Michael Palmer called “On the Sustaining of Culture in Dark Times.”
Palmer calls this time, our moment, “fraught and contentious and
corrupted.’
None of these thinkers focuses on art, although each writes in such
a way that an artist might feel, one way or another, implicated.
I think I want to believe that powerful art is a critique of power.
From Said, I have the idea of the amateur, and of the necessity to
find reconciliation between intractable opposition.
From Agamben, the notion of the gesture, that ideas and objects
find meaning through mobile constellations that rupture boundaries.
From Emerson, the idea of the present as the practice of active
thought.
From Heraclitus, the idea of mindfulness within change.
From Butler, the idea of precariousness in relation to violence and
mourning.
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From Foulcault, the denial of universality and the consciousness of
structures.
From Arendt, the scruple of fearless skepticism.
From Deleuze: oppostion to vertical hierarchies.
Heraclitus Fragment 91
Since mindfulness, of all things,
Is the ground of being,
To speak one’s true mind,
And to keep things known
In common, serves all being,
Just as laws made clear
Uphold the city,
Yet with greater strength.
Of all pronouncements of the law
The one source is the Word
Whereby we choose what helps
True mindfulness prevail.
I spent some time this June in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Like all great
cities, Saint Petersburg has many disparate layers; unlike most cities I
have been in, these layers seem to be rubbing against each other,
causing an almost palpable friction. Nothing seems to be quite in align-
ment with the present, which courses through the streets like a reck-
less toxic current. In any case, I visited the Hermitage, the vast pale
green museum that was once an Imperial Palace. It would take days,
maybe weeks, to even begin to know what is there, in the immense
rooms and corridors with their gilt trim and poor lighting. I knew that
some of my favorite Matisse paintings were there, including The
Conversation, and Music, and The Dance. I did not, however, know that
there were several Rembrandts. Rembrandt has never particularly
captured my attention. But I was, that day, arrested by his painting of
the Deposition, of Jesus being lifted down from the Cross. It was poorly
lit, and needs cleaning. The figure of Jesus is deeply, impossibly human;
it has weight, dead weight; you can see the arms of those who are lift-
ing the body down strain; you feel the lifeless burden. There are fleshy
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folds around the figure’s mid-section. I do not recall if there is blood, or
any signs of the stigmata. But the painting registered inside me, and I
have tried to think about its power. I am not a religious person. Was it
powerful for me that day because I was in the difficult flux of a difficult
city, whose complex relation to faith was everywhere apparent? Was it
because there are so many images of the newly dead in my mind these
days, and somehow this portrayal spoke from a space of such pro-
found humanity that it seemed to redeem or remind me of the parts of
Western culture that seem all but erased in our excruciating exercise of
raw power. If I visited the painting again, would it again elicit such a
strong response?
I have been trying to think of what to say without stating the obvious
while wondering what the obvious might be; I have been wondering if
the obvious is what needs in fact to be stated. I have been thinking for
a while about the difference between knowledge in relation to power
and knowledge in relation to art. I have been wondering about the
necessary forms of knowing.
This wondering has taken the form of some questions:
Are knowledge and power inevitably reciprocal?
What kinds of knowledge do artists need, and is it more important
to think of how we know than what we know? The American philoso-
pher Alfred North Whitehead comments that, “in the real world, it is
more important for a thing to be interesting than for it be true.”
Duchamp is said to have commented that he never did anything unless
it amused him.
Is art, to invoke Wittgenstein’s great phrase, a form of life? If it is,
what does this imply about the form of an artist’s life?
Is there still any meaning to be found in the etymological connec-
tion between experience and experiment?
Is powerful art necessarily art that embraces technology?
The word “power” comes from the Latin potere: to be able. What
abilities does an artist need to make powerful art?
Is powerful art art that shifts our perceptions of reality or art that
confirms them; art that causes consternation or consolation? Are
these exclusive registers?
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Here is Richard Powers writing about his heroine Adie’s response to
being inside the machinery that will make a totally virtual world, which
she has been hired to help realize through her capacity to make per-
fectly mimetic drawings:
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Heracitus Fragment 101
What use are these people’s wits,
Who let themselves be led
By speechmakers, in crowds,
Without considering
How many fools and thieves
They are among, and how few
Choose the good?
The best choose progress
Toward one thing, a name
Forever honored by the gods,
While others eat their way
Toward sleep like nameless oxen.
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Rochelle Feinstein
Powerful Art and Power
11 Septmber 2006
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composites. Alterations were made to this history, in other words, to
make better entertainment. To improve its form. It was unsettling
because, throughout the afternoon, helicopters were suspended over
my head as they observed Pres. Bush solemnizing @ Ground Zero, and
this morning, Air Force jets buzzed overhead since 7 am.
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Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Art Can Have Power
11 Septmber 2006
The essential notion I have about power and its relationship to art and
artist is that there is no separation; power is an integral part of the
maker and the forms made. Integrally constructed in much the same
way Nick Rock’s poster for this panel embeds the declarative in the
interrogative and how Pedro Almodovar constructs Agrado in his film,
Todo Sobre mi Mama, not incidentally dedicated to all women and all
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those who want to be women. I simply will not accept or be undone by
the traditional abusive power and gender games and delight in
Amodovar’s power lighting up the screen. Superseding the ongoing
inequality and abuse in conventional gender stereotypes and power
relations, Almodovar displays an apparent ease and acceptance of a
much wider variety and combination of gendered relationships and
bodies in blazing color and pattern — and laughter.
Laughter occurs every time Agrado appears on the screen. The
audience laughs as she explains that she is called agreeable because
she tries to make everyone’s life more pleasant. Agrado’s responsive
and generous qualities are evident as she happily accepts the difficult
job of telling the audience that the show is cancelled, and asks those
who are interested to stay to hear her life story but if they want to
leave that too is fine with her. She proceeds to describe her surgeries,
how much each part of her body cost as she made female physical
attributes an integral part of her body.
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ers that replaced the tenements, the greatest neighborhood this side
of heaven.
The handrails carry 16 more quotes from former West End residents
their lifestyle and enjoyment of what they had in these buildings dis-
missed and destroyed, The privileged greed is represented by dollar
sign scrolls integrated into the new light fixtures, the “takings” clause
of the US constitution at the top of the missile barrier into which
the handrails embedded carrying with Camilla Kaputchnik’s quote
about the smells of cooking. The new Big Dig highway crashes through
the tenements ghosted into the abutments and the smell is now that
of automobile fumes. Occasionally pedestrians will come across tan
ineffable name. These are the places where the city grid would have
crossed the current curving sidewalks.
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janitor at the Gas Company, who accrued the power through respect
by his community and his ability to get the attention of the head of the
company not to shut off the gas but to help people learn how to pay off
the bill.
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the exit/entrances and on the walls the ellipse makes a place for the
viewers interiority to take over. At the start… and At long last… invites
the pedestrian viewer to complete the phrase in whatever way or not
at all. The ellipse is powerful because it provides a concrete location for
lost meanings and lapsed connections … makes lack tangible without
falsifying it, makes a place for absence.
Thank you for listening . I am as eager to hear from you in the audience
as I am the other speakers.
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