‘All issues are political issues’
Sarah Lowndes, All Art is Political: Writings on Performative Art
Luath Press, 160pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781910021422
reviewed by Chris Law
‘It’s been more difficult than pleasurable, actually, being so retrospective […] A complete retrospective would include everything from the beginning to the end. As I’m not dead, that can’t happen to me, and my Tate exhibition is really just a large survey of some selected works.’ Susan Hiller’s comments about her survey exhibition at Tate Britain in 2011 come at the very end of an interview conducted in the same year by Sarah Lowndes, which constitutes the fourth of five chapters collected together by Lowndes as All Art is Political: Writings on Performative Art. Hiller’s remarks conclude her response to a question about the exhibition form itself and, more particularly, the ideal of the retrospective. Lowndes’ suggestion that the ‘process of collecting, cataloguing and restaging’ works might yield productive results is one that would seem to naturally validate the work of any curator, especially given the potentially fruitful context of Hiller’s artistic concern with memory and forgetting. Yet it fills the artist with dread: ‘what I know now is that the very fact that each work had a problem was what enabled me to make the next work, so to see this now as a fixed point, that I’ve done the work and its over — that’s a terrible tendency’.
This sceptical, if not jaundiced approach to the classification and re-presentation of her own work is typical of the insights that Hiller makes throughout this short interview. I pay these remarks close attention at the outset of this review, however, mainly for their significance in the context of Lowndes’ book itself. Their importance has two valences. Theoretically, it problematises some of the art world’s more confident assertions about the meaning of curatorial work in relation to artistic labour. Referring to the surfeit of curated material accompanying contemporary exhibitions, Hiller condemns this ‘attempt to close down the gap between intention and interpretation’ as a mode of censorship whose consequence is the reduction of art’s infinite potential for communication to the discrete transmission of preconceived ideas. On another level, the denouement of this chapter on such a cautious note is testament to Lowndes’ own sustained willingness to allow the words and works of artists themselves to pose and uphold the arguments throughout her book.
This might go without saying, given that the book’s five chapters include — alongside two interviews — three pieces dedicated to individual artists, all published at the time of, or in accompaniment to, dedicated exhibitions (there is of course a certain tension between Lowndes’ work as a writer, lecturer and curator and the anti-curatorial sentiments of Hiller). It is only in Lowndes’ introduction, therefore, that she has the opportunity to plot her key arguments and to hint at how the ensuing chapters might be read, not just retrospectively as discrete texts written for particular events over the last decade (as they ostensibly are), but as a potential assemblage of connected documents of thinking relating to a discernible condition of contemporary art.
It is quite difficult to intuit exactly how, with this book, Lowndes envisages such a project, not least given its title, whose heaviness renders it almost inconspicuous. (There is a certain irony here, since Lowndes explains that she is referencing Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. ‘All issues are political issues’, wrote Orwell, hoping that a clearer use of language would allow for a more purposeful cultural landscape.) The brief history of performative art sketched by Lowndes is informative, however, and its intention is to contextualise the writings that follow rather than break new ground. Lowndes traces the rejection of Clement Greenberg’s formalism in both Minimalism and Conceptual art, recounting the ironic twist in which Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ would come to unwittingly theorise the ‘theatricality’ and site-specificity of a performative art whose essence relies on audience participation. At the same time, with the historical candor that has typified the Glasgow-based Burning Sand journal that Lowndes edits, readers are reminded of some of the earnest responses of American artists to the political exigencies facing them. Donald Judd is cited from a special edition of Artforum from 1970: ‘The citizen, the individual person has his interests and rights. He or she’s not and shouldn’t be an economic, military or institutional entity.’
By and large, this approach is continued in Lowndes’ narrative of how the material practices of Conceptual artists presaged the performative paradigm dominant since the 1990s. The book’s introduction quotes liberally from Lucy Lippard and Tom Marioni’s discussions of the ‘low commercial value’ of conceptual works, and quietly begins to trace the political and theoretical import of this transformation in artistic means. Re-voicing tensions between the material transformation of art and its immaterial concerns is a necessary function of any work of 20th-century art history but, to the extent that artworks are critically activated, the ones read by Lowndes can best be defined by what they are not. Lowndes pays no heed, at least explicitly, to works whose artistic operation relies upon their status as objects within the art market; there is little critique of value itself at work here.
All Art is Political, therefore, is its own kind of performance, self-consciously aware that its project is a utopian one. Lowndes’ previous book, Social Sculpture: The Rise of the Glasgow Art Scene, made much of the relative lack of commercial spaces in that city’s art landscape. Here, Lowndes condenses the labour of her previous book, offering a threefold formula for Glasgow’s emergence as a ‘creative city’: ‘self-sufficiency, adopting an aesthetic of necessity (work that is process-based, and often realised with an economy of means and materials) and a predilection towards social co-operation, collectivism and conviviality, that extended beyond the immediate locality and became international.’ Although Richard Wright is the only artist discussed in the book to live and work in Glasgow (he is married to Lowndes), the city has an important role, however imaginary, as the contemporary ‘local’ nexus for the kind of practices that Lowndes identifies globally. Berlin, the current home of Thea Djordjadze (the subject of Lowndes’ second chapter), is the other city to have fostered a contemporary art scene to rival that of London or New York, and Lowndes sketches some helpful economic and cultural comparisons between Glasgow and the German capital.
Just as an economy of means in artistic production is key to understanding Lowndes’ narrative at the level of works themselves, the book is largely structured around the actual lives of artists (these two strands are most clearly tied together in the book’s final essay, on Dieter Roth’s Diaries). With this in mind, the inclusion of two interviews, one with Hiller, and another with musicians Keith Rowe and Mayo Thompson, begin to make sense, introducing a temporal rupture between the (conceptual) 1960s and the (performative) present. Hiller is explicit about the paradoxes of the pre-Thatcher Britain she moved to in the late 1960s, where the creative and political urgency she found in the country’s structural class antagonisms was curbed by institutional anti-feminism within the art world. Rowe and Thomson’s reflections on the ontology of performance, moreover, are inextricable from the novelty of their music produced in the same period (Thomson has worked with Art & Language since the early 1970s). The paradigmatic performativity of music espoused in this interview finds reflection in Lowndes’ narrative of Wright’s life and almost Duchampian artistic development. Lowndes relates how Wright became disillusioned with painting at the end of the 1980s, destroying most of his work and making a living playing in ceilidh bands and working as a signwriter in Glasgow. Such details are evoked to show how anti-art tendencies have inflected Wright’s work since he began his truly site-specific painting in the 1990s, painting directly onto the wall for temporary installations that are destroyed or painted over after the exhibition’s prescribed period of time.
Whilst Wright’s signwriting experience leads him to theorise painting as ‘a word without a synonym’, Djordjadze’s work is thought in terms of translation, which permeates her own existence (working between German, English and her native Georgian) and her artistic output (a translation, according to Lowndes, of raw materials into ‘something more mysterious’). Whether the artist is presenting found and transformed objects as artworks, or whether it is the performative ‘doing’ of the artist that constitutes the work itself, Lowndes alludes to Walter Benjamin in addressing how ‘magic inheres in things done and said rather than in the things themselves’. This transformability prompts Lowndes to conclude her texts on both Wright and Djordjadze with reflections on time and a ‘Duchampian process of delay’ that introduces a temporal disjunction into both artworks themselves and their wider reception.
In each of its parts, and as a whole, however, the book is missing an invocation of the relation between artworks (the ones it interrogates, in particular) and that most ‘mysterious’ of mysteries in modernity: the commodity. Calling upon Benjamin’s essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ without assessing the modern transformation of this faculty (as Benjamin himself did in his unsurpassed reading of Surrealism) means that Lowndes’ project — at least initially, like the cities that produced these works — eludes the gaze of the art marketplace. It finds a corner in the space of the phenomenological encounter with art itself where Lowndes, particularly when her voice is weaved with Wright’s, offers lucid readings of Robert Smithson’s seminal writings. Smithson’s fragmentary legacy has lent itself to any number of uses, from the most formalist of art theories to philosophical accounts of contemporary art that suggest the social reality of works can only be considered through their evaluation on a global market. In Lowndes’ own future writing, and in the scholarship that this book will no doubt inspire, I hope that the space dug out in All Art is Political might be expanded through discussions with other theoretical texts, as well as through continuous close readings of works themselves.
This sceptical, if not jaundiced approach to the classification and re-presentation of her own work is typical of the insights that Hiller makes throughout this short interview. I pay these remarks close attention at the outset of this review, however, mainly for their significance in the context of Lowndes’ book itself. Their importance has two valences. Theoretically, it problematises some of the art world’s more confident assertions about the meaning of curatorial work in relation to artistic labour. Referring to the surfeit of curated material accompanying contemporary exhibitions, Hiller condemns this ‘attempt to close down the gap between intention and interpretation’ as a mode of censorship whose consequence is the reduction of art’s infinite potential for communication to the discrete transmission of preconceived ideas. On another level, the denouement of this chapter on such a cautious note is testament to Lowndes’ own sustained willingness to allow the words and works of artists themselves to pose and uphold the arguments throughout her book.
This might go without saying, given that the book’s five chapters include — alongside two interviews — three pieces dedicated to individual artists, all published at the time of, or in accompaniment to, dedicated exhibitions (there is of course a certain tension between Lowndes’ work as a writer, lecturer and curator and the anti-curatorial sentiments of Hiller). It is only in Lowndes’ introduction, therefore, that she has the opportunity to plot her key arguments and to hint at how the ensuing chapters might be read, not just retrospectively as discrete texts written for particular events over the last decade (as they ostensibly are), but as a potential assemblage of connected documents of thinking relating to a discernible condition of contemporary art.
It is quite difficult to intuit exactly how, with this book, Lowndes envisages such a project, not least given its title, whose heaviness renders it almost inconspicuous. (There is a certain irony here, since Lowndes explains that she is referencing Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. ‘All issues are political issues’, wrote Orwell, hoping that a clearer use of language would allow for a more purposeful cultural landscape.) The brief history of performative art sketched by Lowndes is informative, however, and its intention is to contextualise the writings that follow rather than break new ground. Lowndes traces the rejection of Clement Greenberg’s formalism in both Minimalism and Conceptual art, recounting the ironic twist in which Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ would come to unwittingly theorise the ‘theatricality’ and site-specificity of a performative art whose essence relies on audience participation. At the same time, with the historical candor that has typified the Glasgow-based Burning Sand journal that Lowndes edits, readers are reminded of some of the earnest responses of American artists to the political exigencies facing them. Donald Judd is cited from a special edition of Artforum from 1970: ‘The citizen, the individual person has his interests and rights. He or she’s not and shouldn’t be an economic, military or institutional entity.’
By and large, this approach is continued in Lowndes’ narrative of how the material practices of Conceptual artists presaged the performative paradigm dominant since the 1990s. The book’s introduction quotes liberally from Lucy Lippard and Tom Marioni’s discussions of the ‘low commercial value’ of conceptual works, and quietly begins to trace the political and theoretical import of this transformation in artistic means. Re-voicing tensions between the material transformation of art and its immaterial concerns is a necessary function of any work of 20th-century art history but, to the extent that artworks are critically activated, the ones read by Lowndes can best be defined by what they are not. Lowndes pays no heed, at least explicitly, to works whose artistic operation relies upon their status as objects within the art market; there is little critique of value itself at work here.
All Art is Political, therefore, is its own kind of performance, self-consciously aware that its project is a utopian one. Lowndes’ previous book, Social Sculpture: The Rise of the Glasgow Art Scene, made much of the relative lack of commercial spaces in that city’s art landscape. Here, Lowndes condenses the labour of her previous book, offering a threefold formula for Glasgow’s emergence as a ‘creative city’: ‘self-sufficiency, adopting an aesthetic of necessity (work that is process-based, and often realised with an economy of means and materials) and a predilection towards social co-operation, collectivism and conviviality, that extended beyond the immediate locality and became international.’ Although Richard Wright is the only artist discussed in the book to live and work in Glasgow (he is married to Lowndes), the city has an important role, however imaginary, as the contemporary ‘local’ nexus for the kind of practices that Lowndes identifies globally. Berlin, the current home of Thea Djordjadze (the subject of Lowndes’ second chapter), is the other city to have fostered a contemporary art scene to rival that of London or New York, and Lowndes sketches some helpful economic and cultural comparisons between Glasgow and the German capital.
Just as an economy of means in artistic production is key to understanding Lowndes’ narrative at the level of works themselves, the book is largely structured around the actual lives of artists (these two strands are most clearly tied together in the book’s final essay, on Dieter Roth’s Diaries). With this in mind, the inclusion of two interviews, one with Hiller, and another with musicians Keith Rowe and Mayo Thompson, begin to make sense, introducing a temporal rupture between the (conceptual) 1960s and the (performative) present. Hiller is explicit about the paradoxes of the pre-Thatcher Britain she moved to in the late 1960s, where the creative and political urgency she found in the country’s structural class antagonisms was curbed by institutional anti-feminism within the art world. Rowe and Thomson’s reflections on the ontology of performance, moreover, are inextricable from the novelty of their music produced in the same period (Thomson has worked with Art & Language since the early 1970s). The paradigmatic performativity of music espoused in this interview finds reflection in Lowndes’ narrative of Wright’s life and almost Duchampian artistic development. Lowndes relates how Wright became disillusioned with painting at the end of the 1980s, destroying most of his work and making a living playing in ceilidh bands and working as a signwriter in Glasgow. Such details are evoked to show how anti-art tendencies have inflected Wright’s work since he began his truly site-specific painting in the 1990s, painting directly onto the wall for temporary installations that are destroyed or painted over after the exhibition’s prescribed period of time.
Whilst Wright’s signwriting experience leads him to theorise painting as ‘a word without a synonym’, Djordjadze’s work is thought in terms of translation, which permeates her own existence (working between German, English and her native Georgian) and her artistic output (a translation, according to Lowndes, of raw materials into ‘something more mysterious’). Whether the artist is presenting found and transformed objects as artworks, or whether it is the performative ‘doing’ of the artist that constitutes the work itself, Lowndes alludes to Walter Benjamin in addressing how ‘magic inheres in things done and said rather than in the things themselves’. This transformability prompts Lowndes to conclude her texts on both Wright and Djordjadze with reflections on time and a ‘Duchampian process of delay’ that introduces a temporal disjunction into both artworks themselves and their wider reception.
In each of its parts, and as a whole, however, the book is missing an invocation of the relation between artworks (the ones it interrogates, in particular) and that most ‘mysterious’ of mysteries in modernity: the commodity. Calling upon Benjamin’s essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ without assessing the modern transformation of this faculty (as Benjamin himself did in his unsurpassed reading of Surrealism) means that Lowndes’ project — at least initially, like the cities that produced these works — eludes the gaze of the art marketplace. It finds a corner in the space of the phenomenological encounter with art itself where Lowndes, particularly when her voice is weaved with Wright’s, offers lucid readings of Robert Smithson’s seminal writings. Smithson’s fragmentary legacy has lent itself to any number of uses, from the most formalist of art theories to philosophical accounts of contemporary art that suggest the social reality of works can only be considered through their evaluation on a global market. In Lowndes’ own future writing, and in the scholarship that this book will no doubt inspire, I hope that the space dug out in All Art is Political might be expanded through discussions with other theoretical texts, as well as through continuous close readings of works themselves.