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The Production of Social Space as Artwork 247
FIGURE 8.8. Group Material, Democracy, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1990.
formations; that is, all activities, events, and practices of art are determined
by a history and the structure of the formation of that history. It is also
important not to analyze the complex manifestation of this practice from the
perspective of an aesthetics of political action that today is not only problematic,
but has increased the dialectical tension between notions of ethics
and aesthetics. Whether it is possible to address ethical questions through
the vehicle of aesthetics seems, for now, not only overdetermined but also
subject to deep ideological appropriation by both liberal and conservative
forces. In fact, the combination of the political and the poetic, the aesthetic
and the ethical has often led to an unhappy conXation of power and morality.
Consequently, the conjunction of ethics and aesthetics in certain
forms of institutional critique have tended to view artistic practice through
the lens of a simplistic analysis of the politics (between good and bad,
proper and improper, virtuous and cynical) rather than the more critical
notion of the political, which to my mind grounds all relations of power and
discourses between artists, activists, and institutions. Ethics today have a
high currency in the Weld of contemporary art, all the more so because of
the kinds of surprising prohibition placed on the political in relation to art. 43
Contemporary discourses in many areas, be it in the conduct of war, medicine
(euthanasia and abortion being two examples), biotechnology (the