The Art of Global Power

Artwork and Popular Cultures as World-Making Practices

Emily Merson, Emily Merson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429758614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Artwork and popular cultures are crucial sites of contesting and transforming power relationships in world politics. The contributors to this edited collection draw on their experiences across arts, activist, and academic communities to analyze how the global politics of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy are expressed and may be transformed through popular cultures and artistic labour.

Through their methodological treatment of artwork and popular cultures as material sites of generating aesthetic knowledge and embodying global power, the authors foreground an analysis of global hierarchies and transformative empowerment through critically engaged political imagination and cultural projects. By centralizing an intersectional analysis of the racialized, gendered, economic dimensions of the praxis of culture, The Art of Global Power demonstrates how artwork and popular culture projects, events, and institutions are vital sites of transgressing the material conditions that produce and sustain unjust global power hierarchies.

This book intervenes in the international relations popular culture literature by problematizing the idea of a single homogenizing global popular culture and engaging with multiple popular cultures articulated from diverse global locations and worldviews. To the international relations aesthetics literature this book contributes an intersectional analysis of aesthetics as an embodied process of knowledge production and action that takes place within global conditions of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners of international relations, and gender, cultural and media studies.

Part I
Artwork un/doing disciplinary boundaries

1
The art of crossing-over

A. C. Imperial

The Crossing is also meant to evoke/invoke the crossroads, a space of convergence and endless possibility; the place where we put down and discard the unnecessary in order to pick up that which is necessary. It is that imaginary from which we dream the craft of a new compass.

– Jacqui Alexander in Pedagogies of Crossing (2 00 5, 8)

A shifting attention towards artistic methodologies and aesthetic sites has become prevalent across critical international relations (IR) theory post the ‘aesthetic turn’ in the early 2000s. This has been most prominently reflected in the current interest of reading pop culture sites through theories of world politics (Weldes 1999; Bleiker 2001; Dodds 2008; Shapiro 2008; Grayson, Davies and Philpott 200 9). What critical IR theorists in this area have done is furthered the politicization of cultural studies by linking aesthetic sites to larger networks of international relations (states, markets, global institutions, world orders, etc.) while simultaneously showing how these sites of culture (re)constitute the imaginary/discursive and material/real workings of global politics. To be sure, this move towards theorizing the relationship between aesthetic culture and world politics has important implications in the longer trajectory of the discipline. If IR’s ‘third debate’ in the late 1980s and early 1990s can be read as a confrontation between orthodox scientists and critical philosophers – or positivists and post-positivists (see Smith, Booth and Zalewski 1996) – then the current aesthetic turn potentially signals a new debate, confrontation or engagement between philosophers/theorists and artists. As such, this paper attempts to acknowledge the opening of a particular space, a ‘crossroads’ perhaps, between IR theorists and artists. As Jacqui Alexander states above, the crossroads are a ‘space of convergence and endless possibilities’ and thus, we can (and I believe, must) begin to envision future trajectories – ‘to dream the craft of a new compass’ – in this critical moment of emergence by initiating new theorizations in the relationships between critical aesthetic IR theory, artists, art-objects and artistic and academic methods/practices.

Here I find productive the work of feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz, particularly her book Chaos, Territory, Art, to begin crafting this new compass. In attending to the relationship between art and philosophy, Grosz’s framework can provide critical insights that question the limits/possibilities in the current aesthetic turn in IR. With assistance from Deleuze, Grosz explains that

[Art] produces sensations, affects, intensities as its mode of addressing problems, which sometimes align with and link to concepts, the object of philosophical production, which are how philosophy deals with or addresses problems. Thus philosophy may have a place not so much in assessing art (as aesthetics has attempted to do) but in addressing the same provocations or incitements to creation as art faces – through different means and with different effects and consequences.

(2008, 1–2)

As such, the relationship of art and philosophy is not inherently oppositional but instead potentially complimentary. As Grosz explains further, “philosophy may find itself the twin or sibling of art and its various practices… working alongside art and sharing the same enticements for the emergence of innovation and invention” (ibid., 2).

In assessing the Deleuzean relationship between the artist who produces sensations, affects and intensities and the philosopher who invents concepts, Grosz asks

Instead of supervening from above, taking art as its object, how can philosophy work with art or perhaps as and alongside art, a point of relay of connection with art?… How, in other words, do the arts and philosophy (“theory”) create? With what resources? Techniques? Counterforces? And what is it that they create when they create “works,” philosophical works and artistic works?

(ibid., 4)

These, I believe, are crucial questions for guiding the current trajectory of critical aesthetic IR theory which risks ‘supervening from above’ by appropriating sites of the aesthetic in order to pursue the philosophical function of inventing concepts for the sole task of professionalizing our work. This pursuit results in the reification or rigidification of the Deleuzean dichotomy, maintaining an oppositional demarcation of these two figures as separately functioning entities, rendering them oppositional, disrupting the possibility of finding and sharing strategies of innovation and invention. Grosz’s question of how philosophy can work with and/or alongside the arts is salient in order to resist these unnecessary boundary creations between artist and theorist ontologies and to potentiate transdisciplinary and transnational solidarities with other critical agents of rupture and global transformation.

As such, I forward that the possibility of resisting a ‘supervening from above’ can be done by an act of crossing-over. Specifically, a crossing-over of the threshold of philosopher/artist through pedagogical processes of learning about art through artistic methods, creative processes, intentions, assumptions, visions, etc. from the artists themselves. Our current fascination with art objects in IR must be re-oriented towards an interest in the methodologies and production of sensations or affects rather than the creation of ‘supervening’ discourses to interpret and ‘capture’ the aesthetic for our own professional purposes. Only then, I believe, can we fully benefit from turning our attention towards aesthetics: when our understandings of the sensorial relations of the aesthetic inevitably ‘feed-back’ into the invention of concepts in our own work. Critical aesthetic IR theory in my view has concerned itself more with how we consume (that is, how we read and analyze art objects) and less how the art object is produced (that is, the critical energies that go into the creation of art and the concomitant techniques or methodologies involved). Thus, to thoroughly take up Grosz’s question of ‘how do we, as both theorists and artists, create “works”?’ we must gain greater sensitivity to artistic techniques of producing sensations – or what can be called methodologies of affect – and in doing so create productive pedagogical conversations to work with or alongside artists and their art towards larger critical and transformative projects against hegemonic structures of power.¹

By remaining at the conceptual level of the aesthetic, critical IR theorists have ostensibly rendered invisible the corporeal agency in the affective processes of emotional labour that constitute the actual creation of art. As critical IR theorists fascinated with art objects, we need to think about an artist’s ‘work of art’ in terms of the actual work that the artist engages in. That is, the approaches, practices and/or methods they employ in relation to their particular politicized subject positions and historical/geographic localities. Put simply, we must begin acknowledging the lives of artists themselves in relation to the art objects produced.

Conversations of crossing

On November 5, 2010, I was privileged to chair an experimental panel entitled “Pop Culture, Art and World Politics” which was part of the YCISS (York Centre for International Security Studies) sponsored Pop Culture and World Politics III conference. Held at A Space Gallery in Toronto, Canada, this panel included the likes of artist/activists/academics John Greyson, Andil Gosine, Rachel Gorman, Gein Wong and Richard Fung. Before the plenary began, the gallery space was abuzz emanating a carnivalesque quality of play and celebration. This feeling resonantly carried over as each panellist took their seat at the front of an asymmetrically aligned room and began their presentations. Not only was there an array of analysis on art and artists – a practice familiar enough to the theorist – there were also panellists who presented solely on their artwork, allowing their images and video clips to speak for themselves without the need to re-narrate their art into a discourse of critical politics, as the art was already speaking politics affectively through a circulation of auditory and visual sensations felt by the audience’s bodies. Throughout the talks, I slowly became struck by how the gallery space – a space primarily dedicated to the act of memorialization and viewing – was effectively transformed: a space of aesthetic interplay with political conversation/contestation, bridging and potentially fusing the academic and artist in a wonderful spectacle of analysis and exhibition. This transformation of space stirred in me the images and feelings of a longer history of protests (both read about and experienced), where activists, artists and academics would occupy a public or private space, infusing it with their critical passions, celebrating their marginalized belonging, uniting across disparate boundaries of identity in order to redirect those chaotic energies towards a common goal of political recognition and social transformation. Truly inspired by the end of the presentations, I opened the floor for discussion where I expected, after such a provocative panel, a fireworks display of inquiring hands to go off. There was instead a deafening silence that resonated intensely throughout the room…

There were no words. Instead what lingered was an unnameable sensation that flooded the space. In that moment, the ‘A’ in A Space stood for ‘affectivity’ where, as Chair, whose function it is to be the conduit of conversation, the effective link between the academic audience and the panel of artists, I anxiously gazed out into the sea of highly ingenious people that seemed at a loss for words, unable to reconfigure the varying sensations produced by the artists and their art into an intelligible question to initiate a needed conversation. I had felt this moment before, in numerous classrooms where interested undergraduates had not developed the ability to engage with the required literature with great depth and needed some form of provocation to question further. I feared the worst but like any patient teacher, I provoked with more silence, waiting for the ebb of silent thinking to break and the flow of inquiring words to take charge. I could see the gears turning behind the eyes of the crowd and finally, after a moment that seemingly stretched for an eternity, a hand shot up and the questions began rolling in like a strong wave.

The conversation continued steadily yet I could not shake the feeling that we (the audience) were for the most part still performing tropes of ‘the academic’; where the artwork presented was still being engaged with on the terms of academic discourse and theoretical analytics. From the outset, the boundary that lay between artist and theorist haunted the engagement, but to be generous, this was to be expected from a primarily academic audience at an ‘academic’ conference and one could not complain too much since there was at least a conversation occurring. Still, I could not help theorize the encounter, concluding that this undercur-rent of awkwardness, amplified by the initial silence of the audience, spoke more loudly to the lack of training in artistic discourses to deal with art-objects as well as the relative disjuncture in social relations academics have with not only artists but to the larger world. While the pop cultural stereotype of the ivory tower dwelling scholar reeks of cliché, I am certain that most academics themselves could not deny how institutionally incestuous they are, tending to only converse within highly exclusive, technically like-minded circles. Where our primary activity of reading and writing is for the most part done in much solitude, academics are placed into a slight ontological crisis when confronting an ‘other’ such as that of the artist. A conversation with such a friendly stranger entails a bit of strategic manoeuvring – skilful negotiations of identity/difference – in order to overcome the initial awkwardness and anxiety. Yet I believe these awkward, anxious moments are incredibly necessary in a politics of transdisciplinary/transnational social relations and an inevitable step in the direction of establishing relationships of solidarity that potentially become quite productive.²

Personally, there was a significant apex in the conversation during the decrescendo of discussion where I conceded my position as chair to ask a question of the panellists myself. In acknowledging the academic orientation of the audience I asked how their presentations would change if they were speaking to a different type of audience such as other artists, activists or the general public. It was Richard Fung who picked up my question but in answering, gave it a unique spin which challenged my understanding of who exactly is an ‘academic’ and who exactly is an ‘artist’. He spoke of two institutional spaces he had inhabited during his career that could be respectively categorized as being an academic space and an artistic space. While working at OISE (Ontario Institute for Social Education) Richard explained that the academics he worked with were readily attempting to incorporate aesthetic sites into their analysis, appending art discourses into their own academic work to generate more innovative and radical political projects. But more specifically, this was done to advance and ‘professionalize’ their academic work. When he joined the faculty at OCAD (Ontario College of Arts and Design), Richard found the complete inverse of the situation: artists were appropriating academic discourses in order to legitimize their artwork for the sole purpose of garnering the lifeblood of artistic survival: grant approvals. That is, in both professions there was a marked dependency on the ‘others’’ knowledge in order to secure institutional advancement (or economic survival) which is shaped by structural, economic pressures to professionalize, commercialize and commodify their work.

Richard Fung’s insight led me to begin thinking about not only how the Deleuzean dichotomy of artist and philosopher is necessarily being blurred in the face of corporate neoliberalization of both the academic and art worlds but also how the panellists themselves are fundamentally imbricated in these structural relations, negotiating these two terrains as being both artists and academics. Here I was forced to reassess the spatial relations I had determined previous to the discussion. The conversation was not a hard separation between artists and academics as I initially thought; it was instead increasingly complex: a conversation between artist-as-academics and academics-as-artists. Put differently, the popularly perceived ontologies of artists and academics are being radically transformed by the shifts in neoliberal restructurings of the academe and the arts, where subjects effected by these hegemonic structures of power must begin reconstructing themselves into new, oftentimes complicit, oftentimes resistant political subjectivities. In either case, both academics and artists are finding themselves relegated to the margins by the increasing pressures of neoliberal forces. Yet, as bell hooks (1 98 9, 209) proclaims, while becoming marginalized might denote at once an oppressive force creating a crisis for traditional subjectivities, it simultaneously engenders the possibility of positional realignment and a reclaiming of marginality as a critical space of social and ontological transformation:

I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor foreword
• Introduction: artwork and popular cultures as world-making practices
• PART I Artwork un/doing disciplinary boundaries
• PART II The colonial self/other and decolonial popular cultures
• PART III Creative methods as world politics
• Index