The Islands of Evasion Notes on International Art English
Mariam Ghani and Erin Ellen Kelly, Smile, You're in Sharjah, 2009, all the same from video installation.
In April, Triple Canopy organized a forum called Critical Linguistic communication, during which a group of artists, writers, curators, arts administrators, and other cultural workers discussed the "political implications and uses" of specialized language in the art world. Nosotros used the term "International Art English language," coined past Alix Dominion and David Levine in their eponymous July 2012 Triple Canopy essay on "the rise and the space of the fine art-world press release," to stand for this specialized language and as well, to a certain extent, to stand in for a larger fence effectually "language, legibility and power in the art earth," which had been spurred by the essay. The forum itself was inspired by the specific thread of that argue tweaked past Mostafa Heddaya'due south March 2013 Hyperallergic commodity "When Artspeak Masks Oppression," which analyzed the language deployed past the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project and its representatives, and the subsequent response by Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong, also published past Hyperallergic. While preparing to participate in the forum, I wrote a serial of notes on the idea of International Art English, which represent my several perspectives on the topic. First, equally a fellow member of the GulfLabor Working Group, a coalition of artists and others working to ensure that workers' rights are respected during the construction of new cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi. 2nd, every bit an artist who has produced work in countries where state censorship is prevalent. Third, as a former arts ambassador who wrote grants and copy-edited printing releases, those much-maligned bastions of International Art English (IAE), day in and mean solar day out for several years. Fourth, as a writer and archivist with a background in linguistics who has worked with several other specialized languages and enjoys the poesy of accidental ambivalence. These notes are reproduced below more or less as I wrote them before the forum, with a few additions from notes fabricated during or after the forum itself. I've besides added notes in response to the essays published by Hito Steyerl and Martha Rosler on the same topic in
The Poor Relation
One thread that runs through many of the responses to "International Art English" is a more or less subtle insistence on the separation of printing releases from other forms of art writing. At the Triple Canopy forum, curators and critics disavowed press releases every bit distinctly dissimilar from their ain writing for magazines or catalogues. Hito Steyerl simultaneously denounces and celebrates them as "the art world's equivalent of digital spam." Martha Rosler characterizes them equally "art advertising copy" and implicitly compares art copywriting to nutrient copywriting. Logically, information technology would follow that if press releases are their own, split, "debased" grade of art writing, performed by "underpaid, unspecialized copywriters," an assay performed on printing releases cannot apply to other forms of fine art writing.
On reflection, and based on my experience as an arts ambassador, this separation seems somewhat suspect. Many small and mid-sized arts organizations in outposts both most and far have no carve up PR department, designated copywriter or copy editor, or flack-for-rent to manufacture their press releases. The person writing the copy for the press release is nearly often the person who organized the exhibition (usually a curator) or the organizer'southward assistant (unremarkably a curator in training). In many other cases, especially in places where the copywriters are underpaid, unspecialized (i.e. undereducated), and overworked, large chunks of press releases are lifted verbatim from, or découpaged like the exquisite corpses of, curatorial texts, artist statements, reviews, or fifty-fifty critical theory, if it happens to exist nearly to manus and seems apposite.
This is to say that I believe well-nigh forms of art writing are face-to-face enough to contaminate each other. If at that place is a specialized language for art, it circulates among and is refined in the exchanges between these different forms, migrating from the press release to the critical review to the theoretical or historical text to the bookish thesis to the creative person statement to the grant application to the curatorial text and back to the press release once again. The press release may be the poor relation in this family, the state cousin with the awkward haircut and clothes that don't quite fit. Simply the family resemblance cannot be denied.
Because Alix and David's essay touched a nerve, and brought back into the foreground that tricky only important conversation nearly language, legibility and power, IAE is now both a convenient proper noun for the fix of elements that make up fine art's specialized language, and an equally efficient signal that we are entering into this larger debate. I will go along to use it throughout these notes, merely I could equally well use Rosler'southward term "Roman" or Steyerl'south proposed moniker "International Disco Latin" (nigh which more subsequently) instead.
The Quagmire
Like Mostafa, I feel that the most relevant political question asked by Alix and David with respect to politics is, "Without its special language, would fine art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?"
The art world is an ethically murky place. One might even call it a quagmire. IAE—with its indeterminate spaces, its constantly unresolved processes, its simultaneously grandiose and empty assertions—helps to paper over the gaps betwixt what we might like the fine art world to be and what information technology actually is; to elide all the compromises and concessions nosotros brand in gild to get something made, shown, funded, bought, discussed, then on.
Without IAE, what would we talk nigh when we talk about art? Would we actually accept to talk about coin, labor, the means and conditions and constraints of product?
Would we actually have to acknowledge to our baser, darker, deeper (or more shallow) motives for making, selling, and buying the things we brand, sell, and purchase?
Devil'due south Advocacy
Is artspeak actually the just, or even the worst, of specialized languages infected by overcomplication and doublespeak, whose simultaneous complexity and mutability arrive "peculiarly ripe for capture by political interests"? Legal language is the start such linguistic communication that springs to listen, considering it is both more than mutable and more than contested than many retrieve. A new term like "eminent domain" or "battlefield exemption" can exist introduced into the legal field through legislation or (less commonly) Department of Justice memos, become almost immediately enforceable in fact, but then spend a decade or more than being redefined and refined in court cases unless and until the Supreme Court weighs in. Evgeny Morozov's "The Meme Hustler," in the current issue of the Baffler, traces the history of a certain strand of Silicon Valley technobabble and its creep into politics, focusing on the illustrious career and far-reaching influence of entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly. Morozov tells the story of how the concept of "open government" was rendered problematic by a decade-long fight to redefine the "open" in the open-source movement equally open to the marketplace—free as in beer, rather than gratuitous as in freedom.
Similarly, Democracy Journal recently ran an stance slice past Jack Meserve analyzing the overcomplication (or deliberate obfuscation) of national security jargon similar "disposition matrix" Meserve quotes the same Orwell essay, "Politics and the English language Language," referenced by Mostafa in his Hyperallergic commodity. (Meserve'south Orwell extract: "political spoken communication and writing are largely the defense force of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.") Meserve also discussed the misnomered "fiscal cliff," warning that "issues described incorrectly volition exist solved incorrectly" considering sometimes "the metaphor starts to trump the reality you were originally attempting to describe." Frank Luntz, the Republican operative who wrote the political transmission Words That Piece of work, lists in an appendix to his book the "twenty-one political words and phrases" that should be eliminated and replaced; he recommends that "undocumented worker" be substituted past "illegal immigrant," noting that the characterization we apply to such people "determines the attitudes [other] people have toward them." After a decades-long, concerted activist campaign confronting the use of "illegal immigrant," the AP Stylebook finally recognized that the label is not "neutral and accurate" and, in April, decided that no human being can exist chosen illegal, at least in impress. Peradventure the critical distinction between artspeak and other specialized languages lies in the intentionality with which certain players in the legal, technocratic, and political scenes work to introduce or deprecate certain terms. Do we in the art earth take an equivalent to the lawyers of the Center for Constitutional Rights, political wordsmiths like Frank Luntz, or meme producers like Tim O'Reilly?
The Isle of Happiness
In the specific case of the transformation of Saadiyat Island, or the Isle of Happiness (the literal translation of its Arabic name), into an international cultural hub, there is a widely acknowledged gap between the rhetoric of the project and its reality. It is difficult, withal, to concur the rulers of Abu Dhabi, or their proxies at the Tourism and Culture Authority, or their international partners at the Louvre, the Guggenheim, New York University, and the British Museum, to "their discussion" on labor rights or freedom of expression, when their words are largely "euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." Information technology is besides difficult to abet for people whose rights, possibilities, and freedoms accept been all been delimited from the moment they accepted their contracts and were redefined as "migrant workers" or "guest laborers." This linguistic shift, as Luntz would recognize, has real-globe consequences. And ane logical response is the activist attempt to ground the unmoored abstractions of political debates over citizenship, subcontracting, and corporate or country responsibility in the specific realities of individual lives and human costs—another shift in the terms of the contend.
Devil'due south Advancement, Part Ii
Alix and David'southward essay ends with what some have read every bit a joke: a press release "reformatted as meter" and a suggestion that we read IAE texts not for their content, but for their lyricism. (This, in some ways, is like what Chitra Ganesh and I practice with Index of the Disappeared, a projection partly defended to finding moments of adventitious verse in declassified official documents—though we are looking to the accidents every bit moments of human error within inhuman and inhumane systems.) William Empson argues in Vii Types of Ambiguity (1930) for the importance within poetry of ambiguous language: "verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for culling reactions to the same slice of language." The seven types of ambiguity identified past Empson include "multiplication," where individual details could apply in several different ways (literally and metaphorically) to the context in which they are used; "complication," where those alternative and often interrelated meanings are used to bespeak the author's complicated position or state; "fortunate confusion," where the idea behind a phrase is withal being discovered in the deed of writing; and "full contradiction," which reflects a sectionalisation in the author's ain heed, either an ability to hold 2 seemingly opposed ideas at once or an inability to decide betwixt them. IAE as before long written and read appears full of complexity, contradiction, and confusion, fortunate or not, all stemming—if we accept Alix and David's analysis—from multiplication, an overflow of ambiguous and apparently extraneous language. Is that ambiguity in fact at the heart of IAE's utility, non only for use past "interns in the Chinese Ministry of Culture," advocates for art in Abu Dhabi, and others invested in seemingly contradictory ideas, only also for artists? Afterward all, what would critics do if in that location were no ambiguities for them to decipher and interpret?
Equally an artist myself, I can say that sometimes the use of IAE in an artist argument, interview or other text wherein an artist describes her ain piece of work—especially that bulletproof brand of IAE where a number of words add upward to very little—signals that the artist is trying, consciously or not, to escape from the demand to explain her work. She is wriggling away, discussion past ambiguous word, from the frame she is meant to be holding up around herself. As Alix and David betoken out, the creative person is presenting a "practice" that is e'er unfinished, not a production, and refusing a fixed position. Fittingly, this refusal both distances her from specific politics and is a politicized act in itself. Refusing your designated position or label, or opting to shuffle through labels and positions as you like, is also to some extent a refusal of the rules of the art market place.
Which Brings Us to: Kabul in Kassel, Kassel in Kabul
Anyone present in Kassel during the press preview of Documenta 13 in June 2012, when the Documenta Kabul-Bamiyan seminars had their first airing exterior of Afghanistan, was treated to a tiny masterpiece of IAE. In this case, IAE was used for its ability to simultaneously display and muffle, to quickly create and but as speedily circumscribe a specific discursive space. It was non used because the Documenta seminars in Kabul and Bamiyan had actually been particularly colonialist or exploitative or even unsuccessful, merely considering the organizers anticipated that those criticisms would be made and preferred to forestall any substantive discussion of the project (even amongst those participants in the seminars who were invited to join the organizers on stage) rather than admit the possibility of the colonialist critique inbound into this high-visibility event. This strategy led, predictably enough, to a rather ugly finish; simply the preceding hr and a one-half had been so boring that near all the printing had already left the room by the fourth dimension the explosion occurred, so you could be forgiven for thinking that the strategy really worked.
The lack of real reflection on the Documenta-in-Kabul project in Kassel was unfortunate, because the projection in itself, while flawed, points to some of the means in which the opacity and ambiguities of IAE (and the ambiguity employed in certain fine art practices) can exist used to circumvent both explicit and implicit restrictions on freedom of expression in places like Afghanistan. For example: if William Kentridge'due south Shadow Procession were described to the Afghan Ministry of Culture as a political artwork about South African history with a clear counterpart in the Afghan civil war, would the Ministry building have permitted it to exist shown in a park where 27,000 people could run across it? No. Only described as information technology was in the wall text and catalogue of the Kabul exhibition, as "a dreamlike procession of black puppets, made from cardboard paper cutouts, slowly mak[ing] a commonage exodus, a ghostly reminder of the violence of a land plagued by oppositions but exorcized by a need for reconciliation and change"? Sure, why not? Nonetheless, the parallel to the grim processions of refugees fleeing Kabul between 1993 and 1996 was clear to everyone who saw the work in the Bagh-e-Babur pavilion.
Some of the art history seminars may take themselves been tripped up past the teachers' over-reliance on Western art-theory jargon. (I was not in that location; I am going past the accounts of some of the Afghan students, who described some seminars as "by and large irrelevant," and "halfghan" observers, who by and large expressed admiration for the stamina and invention of the translators.) Some of the seminars took translation, omission, and censorship as their subjects. Students in Ashkan Sepahvand and Natascha Sadr Haghighian'south Seeing Studies workshop used paintings that had been removed from the National Gallery for a range of reasons, including shifts in censorship laws, as the starting point for new works—two of which were confiscated by the Ministry of Civilisation before the last exhibition, but ultimately returned. They discussed translations of Walter Benjamin into Western farsi, and the ways in which terms acquire new meanings and ideas new currency through translation and recontextualization.
One of the explicit rules of fine art censorship in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan since 2001 is that no scenes of war may be depicted. The discussion "depicted" is important hither, because it is the foundation of an argument that picture, video, sound, and performance—ephemeral, unfixed media—are non field of study to this constabulary. And so far that argument has proved successful. And so one may watch a pic about the civil war, but not look at a painting of the nineteenth-century boxing of Maiwand, around which so many Afghan legends have been spun. And an artist like myself may get away with any number of things—like talking about people, events, and periods of Afghan history that ordinarily become unremembered—if I describe my piece of work equally a "speculative" history that mixes fact and fiction, and use the tone of a dark fairy tale to talk virtually past horrors. So some value is added in the Afghan context past IAE's capacity for evasive maneuvering. Just would I want to use the same tactics in a place where defying censorship doesn't deport with information technology the threat of prison time? Then once more, while fine art is not habitually censored in the West, other kinds of censorship are increasingly prevalent fifty-fifty here.
Co-ordinate to Jacques Rancière, politics perceives art every bit powerless, which is why art has the liberty to practise politics. This principle does not hold true in places like Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, where art is actually perceived as dangerous, and therefore has very lilliputian liberty to practise politics. It is possible that the infinite for politics inside fine art in Afghanistan may only exist carved out, in this earliest stage of the recovery of the country'southward destroyed creative traditions, through the evasions and opacities of IAE or something like information technology.
The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, has embarked on a program of deliberate acceleration of its art scene, leap-frogging accepted stages of evolution with the reckless abandon of the truly rich. It has arrived at a dissimilar moment in its negotiation of the human relationship between the state and the art earth, a moment when direct confrontation becomes advisable. The situation in Saadiyat is especially ripe because Abu Dhabi, the richest of the Emirates, is infusing so much of every kind of capital into the project, and yet refuses to ensure basic standards of human rights for the workers constructing this fever-dream in the desert, for fear of setting a precedent.
Conclusions, or Questions
I keep circling dorsum to labels, without necessarily meaning to. Perhaps there is a third indicate of origin for IAE, somewhere between the emergence of identity-based fine art in the 1980s and the culture of "political correctness" adult in the 1990s? Mayhap IAE developed, in function, equally a circumlocution of the troubling terms that surfaced through the works of Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, Jimmie Durham, Coco Fusco, Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, David Wojnarowicz, et al? Not a whitewashing per se, simply a way to cloak the confrontation of these works in a more polite, less direct form of accost.
Almost of my work as an arts administrator was performed for the alternative infinite Exit Art, recently disbanded later on the death of cofounder Jeanette Ingberman. Almost all the artists I mentioned above showed at Get out in the 1980s or early 1990s, and I start came to know their work through Exit'southward athenaeum, which preserved everything from early drafts of wall and catalogue text to correspondence with exhibiting artists to receipts for screws to install their piece of work. I can attest that in those early years, when Jeanette and cofounder Papo Colo wrote all the press releases themselves, they were always idiosyncratic, sometimes poetic, often bizarre, simply rarely possessing those traits identified by Alix and David as the marks of International Art English. At the fourth dimension, Exit Art was however located in SoHo and known as Exit Art/The First World, and its posters played with notions of center and periphery, running slogans like "the within is the outside" around their margins or borders. With mischief in their eyes, Jeanette and Colo were staking out a peripheral position, even while occupying the very center of the art world.
We return, and then, to that larger debate about "language, legibility, and power" that troubles the original conception of IAE. If someone is unable or unwilling to explain an artwork in IAE, does that make the work illegible to the ability structures of the art world (by which I hateful, primarily, those people with the power to put an artwork into apportionment), and therefore render information technology invisible to greater or lesser degree? Does the aforementioned condition apply if the artwork tin can be explained through the specialized vocabulary of art in the artist'due south native natural language, and and so translated? Or is the existent condition of legibility that the artwork must be explained in English, no thing what kind of English it is?
If fluency in IAE for native English language speakers, or in English language for non-native speakers, facilitates entry into the flows of people, data and capital that constitute the fine art world, does a lack of fluency prevent an artist from existence alloyed into the eye? Is the bulwark to entry still college if an artist is physically located in the "periphery" rather than the "middle," or does physical location now matter but inasmuch as it determines access to infrastructure (education, engineering, financial support)? I suspect that location matters less these days than the ability to admission, understand and manipulate those flows of people, information, and uppercase. But then again, depending on your physical location, your data-gathering and exchange may exist field of study to surveillance, censorship, and sudden suspensions.
I love Steyerl's call for a joyously deviant, queered "International Disco Latin," a "digital lingua franca" that revels in and remakes itself from its glitches and hitches, its glissandos and excesses, its "digital dispersion, its composition and artifice." Merely it is withal incommunicable for images, texts, videos and other files to travel and be traded every bit promiscuously through all the ramifications of online networks. File-sharing sites, YouTube, and other key nodes of exchange are all blocked in a whole slew of countries where artspeak is used both to mask and elude oppression, including Afghanistan and the UAE. If International Disco Latin is premised on digital dispersion, is indeed formed from the glitch aesthetics and gleeful brew-ups of "accelerated data sets" crashing into "fantastic apportionment orbits," it would inevitably be formed elsewhere, in the more networked earth, and trickle into those other spheres the aforementioned fashion IAE did – through the migratory patterns of privileged diasporas, those perpetual vectors of infection. (I say this with total consciousness that I migrate with intent every other month.)
In Cathay, one of the means that Internet users talk about politics without being censored is by exploiting linguistic loopholes: ambiguities in ideograms or pronunciation that permit innocuous terms to stand up in for destructive ones, separated by simply a hair's breadth of emphasis. These slippages take their own loopy poetics, producing odd artifacts like that new blithe hero, the grass-mud horse. Like the Chinese activists and their coded language, the more deliberate users of IAE may, in fact, be exploiting its ambiguities to conceal something, or to conceal some lack, for good reasons or bad. Or they may just exist flashing their credentials: I know the passwords, I speak your language, now will yous please open the door?
Source: https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/the-islands-of-evasion-notes-on-international-art-english
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