How do we include critical distance in our practices?
The critical distance of the misanthropic socialite
Joshua Decter, ©2014
As a misanthropic socialite, my first reaction to the question, “How do we include critical distance in our practices?”: endeavor to gain as much critical distance from this question as possible. Take a long vacation from it. After establishing the requisite critical distance (or, critical distraction), it dawned on me that my nearly thirty years as a writer, curator, art historian and educator has been devoted to maintaining various critical distances, potentially leading to critical distance exhaustion. It’s really difficult to establish critical distance from critical distance.
Historically and etymologically, precursors to critical distance might include Charles Baudelaire’s invocation of the flâneur in the 19th Century, as well as Walter Benjamin’s subsequent rethinking of the flâneur as a figure at once immersed in and removed from the phantasmagoria of commodity culture (and the crowd). George Simmel alludes to distance in “The Sociological Significance of the ‘Stranger’,” from his 1908 book, Soziologie, proposing that the stranger exists in relation to others, yet is also distanced from others. Critical distance is related to Viktor Shklovsky’s 1917 notion of defamiliarization, and Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 alienation effect. Somewhat later, in the field of hermeneutics, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that outsideness is a precondition of the reader’s textual understanding. And Paul Ricoeur claims that the reader’s distanciation (a form of alienation) is already a condition of the text: distance enables interpretation.
In Julia Kristeva’s 1991 book, Strangers to Ourselves, she analyzes alterity and political difference in relation to exclusion as a precondition of the subject’s identity––the stranger inhabits us, and to understand the other in social relations, we must also understand the other within us. It’s tenable to suggest that we use critical distance to establish difference from others even as we recognize otherness within ourselves. Perhaps, the various modes of artmaking that constitute social practice ask us to distantiate ourselves from critical distance in order to engage with the otherness of strangers. Yet if we do share our alterity with others, maybe there is no alterity? Could this be one of the goals of social practice: not the elimination of difference, per se, but rather an exchange of social otherness? The question is whether such exchanges occur on an equal footing between social practice artists and others; or, if these exchanges inadvertently reproduce normative disparities in power. For the empowering of strangers is also an instrumentalizing of others (and ourselves).
In Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle, we encounter the notion that geographic distance has been displaced and reproduced as an internalized distance: a spectacular separation. Such a notion anticipates our era of massively scaled up social media, with its conflations of distance and closeness. In 2000, British sociologist Anthony Giddins proposed a time-space distantiation to characterize the shift from face-to-face to increasingly remote social interactions that produces an interconnectivity of previously disconnected social systems––and dislocations of space from place.
So what about critical distance in relation to the social practice genre of art? Rather than critical distance, let’s apply critically intimate pressures upon how we constitute our power, autonomy, and sovereignty as cultural producers, and remain alert to the contradictions and paradoxes that emerge around social and participatory practices vis-à-vis institutional constructions of authorship and authority. We can respectfully question the assumptions and claims occasionally made by social practice artists and gatekeepers regarding effectiveness. Finally, as Groucho Marx once avowed: “I don’t want to belong to any social practice club that will accept me as a member.”
About the contributor: Joshua Decter is a New York-based writer, curator, and art historian who has contributed to Artforum, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, The Exhibitionist, Mousse, and other periodicals. Decter’s new book, Art is a Problem: Selected Criticism, Essays, Interviews and Curatorial Projects (1986-2012), published by JRP|Ringier, encompasses seven chapters: Institutional Critique® and its Discontents; Aporia (art as politics, the politics of art); Everything is Social; Convoluted Cities; The (Un)De-definition of Art; What Do We Want from Exhibitions?; On the Curatorial Road.
Decter is co-author of the forthcoming book, Exhibition as Social Intervention: ‘Culture in Action’ 1993, volume 5 of Afterall Books Exhibition Histories series. He has curated exhibitions such as a/drift at The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Transmute at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Tele[visions] at The Kunsthalle Vienna, Dark Places at The Santa Monica Museum of Art, and was a curatorial interlocutor for inSite_05, Interventions (Tijuana/San Diego). Decter has taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, The School of Visual Arts in New York, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, UCLA, and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Decter was Director of the Master of Public Art Studies Program at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles, where he founded the new graduate program, M.A. Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere. He has organized symposia such as: The Architecture of Display: New Approaches to Exhibition Design at the Santa Monica Museum of Art; The Situational Drive: Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement, co-sponsored by inSite, Creative Time, and The Cooper Union, New York; Participation and Friction: Rethinking Art and Architecture as Public Culture (Architecture, Design Art: Strategies for Survival & Art and Architecture in the Public Sphere of Cities) at USC in Los Angeles. He was a participant in Creative Time’s 2013 Summit: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City.