Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

248 Okwui Enwezor
recent debates around the ethics of cloning), law (capital punishment), or
human rights (child labor, slavery, racism), have engaged further explorations
of the ethical as that which sutures certain complex conducts in the
political, scientiWc, and cultural sphere. And here artists have been at the
forefront of an interdisciplinary response to the debates that have grown out
of them. However, the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic, the
aesthetic and the political, the poetic and the social has increasingly brought
the philosophical value of ethics before us in an unresolved form. This is
where I believe that the discourse of authenticity as the force that gives positive
content to the work of the African artist is not only misguided, but
deeply problematic. Therefore, to understand that which animates the worldview
of the African artist, we must do well to invent a new politics of the
subject.
NOTES
1. In a famous statement Joseph Beuys provocatively proclaimed the point of view
that everyone is an artist and therefore we are all artists. Such judgment no doubt
can equally be conceived as part of the hubristic simpliWcation with which some
critics often associate Beuys.
2. With regard to the question “what is an author?” Jean-Paul Sartre, in a series
of essays written after the Second World War, asked a similar question. What is Literature
and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
3. In an interview in The Guardian of October 31, 2002, Mr. Howells described
the work of the artists thus: “If this is the best British artists can produce then British
art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit.” The artist Martin Creed,
who presented an installation of lights going on and off in one of the galleries of
Tate Modern, London, as part of his presentation for the Turner Prize, was especially
marked out for excoriation. SufWce it to say that the minister’s reaction was
not about the work as much as it was about a prestigious award being conferred on
something that displays a minimum of artistic originality or labor.
4. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avantgarde and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; 1985).
5. Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production,”
in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin Essays and ReXections, ed. Hannah Arendt
(New York: Schocken Books, 1969), has remained a classic and the most penetrating
analysis of the contingency of the nature of aura as what determines the uniqueness
in the work of art. The transfer from uniqueness to reproduction inherently
marks the end of the idea of aura insofar as the question of the nature of art was
concerned.
6. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
7. See Joseph Kosuth, Art after Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990,
ed. Gabriele Guercio (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).
8. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in ReXections: Essays, Aphorism,
Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:
Schocken, 1989), 229.