The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts

Gregory Blair, Noa Bronstein, Gregory Blair, Noa Bronstein

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030553890
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is an anthology of the varied strategies of spatial transgressions and how they have been implemented through the arts as a means to resist, rejuvenate, reclaim, critique or cohabitate. The book is divided into two sections – Displacements and Disruptions. The first section discusses the ramifications of the spatial displacements of bodies, organizations, groups of people and ethnicities, and explores how artists, theorists and arts organizations have an attentive history of revealing and reacting to the displacement of peoples and how their presence or absence radically reconfigures the value, identity, and uses of place. In the second section, each author considers how aesthetic strategies have been utilized to disrupt expected spatial experiences and logic. Many of these strategies form radical alternative methodologies that include transgressions, geographies of resistance, and psychogeographies. These spatial performances of disruption set into motion a critical exchange between the subject, space and materiality, in which ideology and experience are both produced/spatialized and deconstructed/destabilized.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

G. Blair, N. Bronstein (eds.)The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Artshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55389-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts

Gregory Blair¹

(1)

Evansville, IN, USA

Gregory Blair

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

The word “transgression” is rich and robust with a multitude of meanings. It can suggest an action that is a violation or something that contradicts a code or law. There is also an inherent spatial quality built into its Latin etymology that intimates a “going beyond.” As a metaphor, transgression evokes imagery of “stepping over”—the movement in space past a defined boundary or limit. Historically, there have been numerous theoretical conceptualizations and descriptive methodologies that incorporate transgression—many of which are echoed throughout this anthology. For example, the philosopher Michel Foucault consistently wrote about, and made use of, transgression. For Foucault, transgression represented, “the still silent and groping apparition of a form of thought in which the interrogation of the limit replaces the search for totality and the act of transgression replaces the movement of contradictions.”¹ In terms of this anthology, Foucault’s conception is helpful and productive because he (re)frames transgression as a search, as an adaptable and constructive method of seeking new knowledge. The interminable presence of transgression in Foucault’s own thought and oeuvre is given a detailed exposition by Charles C. Lemert and Garth Gillan in their text: Michel Foucault: Social Theory and Transgression.

Another philosopher, bell hooks, has also written about how she has latched onto transgression as a cornerstone of her methodology. For hooks, transgression is wonderfully productive, because as she states, “I cross boundaries to take another look, to contest, to interrogate, and in some cases to recover and redeem.”² The human geographer Tim Cresswell has also completed extensive research on transgression including the publication of such texts as: Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects and In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. What interests Cresswell so much about transgression is how physically crossing a boundary holds the potential for a rupture in the normative social order. “The geographical ordering of society” writes Cresswell, “is founded on a multitude of boundary making—of territorialization—whose ambiguity is to simultaneously open up the possibilities for transgression.”³

The cultural theorist, Gloria Anzaldúa was also drawn to the possibilities of transgression throughout her lifetime. In her formative text, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she writes, “I am a border woman.”⁴ A little further on in her writing she explains how she has adopted transgression as a mode of existence—a way of being the new mestiza. A mestiza or mestizo is a word traditionally used in Spain and Latin America to indicate to someone of shared Indigenous American and European descent. For Anzaldúa, being a mestiza meant that “Perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off all together as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react. These numerous possibilities leave la mestiza floundering in uncharted seas. In perceiving conflicting information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death.”⁵ For Anzaldúa, transgression became essential as the only way to survive.

The writer Malcolm Gladwell has also alluded to the practice of transgression in a recent interview in which he discussed cultural subversion. His portrayal of subversion and how one might practice it, is included here to additionally widen our notion of what transgression can be, and also to emphasize the eclectic range of cultural figures that have practiced and played with transgression—from artists and philosophers to writers and geographers. As you read the following quotation from the interview, imagine Gladwell saying “transgression” when he says “subversion:” “You do rebellion in the beginning, but rebellion is often kind of mindless. You do subversion when you understand your culture enough to figure out how to properly critique it—when you take a little needle, and you insert it exactly in the right place, and you make the status quo squirm.”⁶ Gladwell provides such an ardent and poetic portrayal of the power of subversion/transgression, and I think he would be sufficiently comfortable with the shift in utterance that I have suggested. Transgression is often related to subversion—swapping one for the other is sometimes not really much of a stretch.

Another recent discourse on transgression that has a kinship with Gladwell’s comments was contemplated in an issue of the radical revolutionary socialist journal, Red Wedge. In late 2018, an entire issue was dedicated to the “defense of transgression.” In their editorial for the issue, Alexander Billet and Adam Turl put forth their notion of transgression as a fundamental building block for human beings because it is the “starting point for human self-discovery, of which art is a key and unavoidable part.”⁷ By touching upon these manifold and disparate variations of transgression, I have intended to demonstrate and embrace the ambiguity of transgression. This text purposefully embraces a vague and open-ended notion of transgression, which David Sibley adroitly describes as: “Crossing boundaries, from a familiar space to an alien one which is under the control of somebody else, can provide anxious moments; in some circumstances it could be fatal, or might be an exhilarating experience—the thrill of transgression.”⁸

Sibley reminds us that transgression is not always appreciated and for some, may even end up being devastating or debilitating. Similarly, Shannon Bell writes that, “in many acts of transgression the intent is not resistance.”⁹ In Chapter 2, Noa Bronstein examines an instance in which there is a possibility of forced displacement and unwelcomed transgression. Bronstein highlights the bellicose spirit of those potentially being displaced as she posits possible answers to some of the questions Foucault asked in his ruminations on transgression in A Preface to Transgression. Originally written for a 1963 issue of Critique which was dedicated to its founder, George Bataille, after his recent passing, in A Preface to Transgression, Foucault wonders about the limit (what we might call the context, site, or place) and if it can “have a life of its own outside of the act that gloriously passes through it and negates it? What becomes of it after this act and what might it have been before?”¹⁰ Several chapters in this anthology analyze the adverse effects of transgression as their writers wonder about the future of the places and people that are transgressed against. For example, in Chapter 4, Noni Brynjolson explores the practices of the artist/activist collective Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and how they fight for the rights, lives, and place-based histories of those displaced by a process of urban gentrification in the Bay area of California.

Transgression, in all of its nuanced and subtly manifested forms, comprises the overarching focus of critique for this text. This project is an anthology that aims to explore and elucidate the various political repercussions of spatial transgressions (either through the displacement of bodies and other entities or the disruption of how we experience space) in the art world. It is distinctive because it explores two of the main variants of spatial transgression—displacements and disruptions—in a fresh and unique manner that reveals both the constructive and deconstructive nature of displacements and disruptions. These two variants have also been used to develop an organization and structure for the text. We have decided to categorize and conceptualize transgression using these two modes, in order to delineate Parts I and II of this book. This categorization has been created in a way that has been purposely left nebulous enough to encompass the divergent manifestations of transgression presented in each chapter.

Part I: Displacements examines the physical and symbolic movement or reorientation of bodies, artifacts, objects, and organizations from the places that they are expected to occupy. The rippling effects of these displacements are considered for both the displaced and the spaces left behind. Some of the chapters reveal how people are often coerced into places they don’t want to be, or as in some cases, places they are unwelcome as persona non grata. The delineation of space is built upon exclusion and each of the chapters in Part I considers the tangled web of conditions and consequences that those exclusions manifest. Often these geographies of exclusion become so naturalized and normalized that they can disappear from our consciousness—which is exactly what the Situationists feared was happening in the Parisian urban sprawl of the mid twentieth century. This trepidation urged them to find a “new city throu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts
• Part I. Displacements
• Part II. Disruptions
• Back Matter