Identity Art Is Bad
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Wendy Brown in States of Power defines "wounded attachment" as a fixation on the past; in the context of politics, when identity is defined by past suffering, the political focus shifts to gaining recognition and legal protection for that wound, rather than developing a vision for a radically different future. The political subject who feels such a way desires to stay in their subordinated position because they there find a cause to the powerlessness they experience which can be blamed for the suffering and the vulnerability that they have felt. Such a rhetoric of self wallowing is an ultimate expression of destructive behavior, since those who stick to an identity created by injury, thus lock oneself to the structure that has created these injuries, which inevitably reproduces the violently self-destructive cycle. A central merit of this is its tendency towards hostility and bitterness, a self-righteous, moralizing and blaming tone, and the preoccupation with dividing the world into a crude binary of good and bad, stemming from a deep difficulty to find constructive ways of formulating ones own political projects, despite longing for deep change.
I am not curbing myself to flagrantize that identity art and activism art is void of substance, but somehow, the Internet's panopticory illusion appears to define "significance" in art and poetry to a reduced ego identity and social crisis, reduced ego markers of the time it existed in. There is a pattern that all art must be a statement, a violent accusatory predicament of where the artist is from, what the artist has suffered, so that we can understand the detail of their trauma. The amount of times that I have conversed with an artist whose practice is "rooted in their cultural heritage", and flinched at their pointed syntax of "ME", of "MY CULTURE", "MY SUFFERING", "MY TRAUMA", "MY WOUNDS" – how does one respond to this? The polite thing, or rather, the only thing you really can do, is merely nod and absorb this unasked-for, accusatory flagrance that has been flecked onto your skin with the rhetoric of inflicted guilt. "You should fucking feel bad for me/relate to me and that's what makes my art important." How art might convey such details, its textures, tones and medium, is now largely irrelevant. Identity becomes a property to be defended, legitimizing its owners to strike and to silence any trespassers. Affect in this setting becomes the watchdog – not only sounding the alarm but attacking everyone who allegedly climbs over the fence of these sacred grounds of identity. Identity politics as a strategy for emancipatory self-empowerment is flawed from the beginning because identity is an exclusionary concept.
In modern art, artistic aestheticization means the defunctionalization of the tool, the violent annulment of practical applicability and efficiency. There is a fallacy of seeing artists of the avant-garde as heralds in the vanguard of technological progress, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Their urgency to aestheticize technologically driven modernity is not a glorification of it, but rather, an attempt to make catastrophize since art accepts reality as the status quo. However, art also sees the status quo as something dysfunctionally already-failed because it does not believe in the stability of our present conditions of existence, to such a degree that it does not even try to improve these conditions.
Art activism cannot escape a much more radical revolutionary tradition of the aestheticization of politics: the acceptance of one's own failure, understood as a prefiguration of coming failure of the status quo in its totality that can leave no room for improvement or correction. There is a tendency to think that inequality can be corrected by upward mobility, in the form of letting people realize their talents, their gifts, to be ready to protest against inequality dictated by the existing system of power. But how can you fight this when you install the label of "creative", of "artist" upon yourself and accept the social Darwinistic neoliberal gospel of the inevitable unequal distribution of natural gifts?
However, I do think art can represent a radical politicality without the implication of selfhood. Many are unsuspecting of Malevich's infamous Black Square to be related to any political or social revolution, that it is merely an artistic gesture that holds relevance only inside the artistic space. It was not an "active" revolutionary gesture in the sense that explicitly criticized the status quo or advertised the coming of the 1917 October Revolution, which are the characteristics we tend to look for today when we think of "critically, engaged art".
Rather, the blackness, devoidness of the piece does not depict process of the postrevolutionary period's duties of building a new society, but rather, a radical destruction of the current. It announces the absolute, total destruction of all Russian culture, of all social classes, when confronted by the October Revolution and signifies a radical gesture of such acceptance. It announces the death of any form of cultural nostalgia, it is a window for revolutionaries to be able to enter the space of culture and reduce it to ashes. He notes that, "Life knows what it is doing, and if it is striving to destroy, one must not interfere, since by hindering we are blocking the path to a new conception of life that is born within us. In burning the corpse we obtain one gram of powder: accordingly thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on a single chemist's shelf." The image that survives the work of destruction is the image of destruction, this act of destruction of art in the past, present, or future, necessarily produces an image of its own destruction. This image is anti-messianic because it demonstrates that the end of time will never come, that material forces can never be stopped by the divine, or any form of transcendental power, but it also means that no image can ever truly be destroyed.
The role of the artist is different from that of the doctor or technician, trained to remove deficiencies or malfunctions, to restore the integrity of a failing body or failing machine. Rather, artists and the teaching of art must modify the immune system of their practice in order to incorporate a new aesthetic bacilli to survive them and seek a new inner balance, a new definition of health. Ignorance of the self is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, an ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric”. Silencing one's implication is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture; with silence, the artist frees oneself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter, or distorter of their work. Only dull, powerless artists defend their art by reference to sincerity because to be sincere means precisely to remain repetitive, caged, and reproduce one's own already existing taste, to deal with one's already existing identity. Radicality means to infect yourself with exteriority, to become sick with the contagions of the outside world, to extend beyond your selfhood, and the conventions of what is your precipice. As Boris Groys says, "The artist accepts this infinite violence of the material flow and appropriates it, lets himself be infected by it.”
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