Some thoughts on the 'puzzles' and texts sent round?
Darian Leader
Reading through the brief section on ‘Art, Identities, Censorship’, in conjunction with the extract from Henrietta Moore’s essay ‘The Failure of Pluralism?’ raises a number of questions about community, culture and the concept of dialogue. It is often observed how communities can be spoken rather than speaking: we continually read about what the Muslim, Sikh or Jewish community thinks, without any real reason to assume any homogeneity of that community. It is easier, in general, to assume that it is one community that is at stake, a single uniform body that can be identified with a single and uniform position. This means that complex and heterogeneous groupings are given one voice rather than several. Groupings thus become ‘spoken’ as communities.
However well-intentioned such ascriptions may at times be, they form part of a logic that is as troubling as it is helpful to power structures. Furthermore, they may generate what have been called ‘looping effects’. A single voice is ascribed to a community, rather than to disparate groupings, and in this very process differences may be polarised into new configurations. People may identify with a position which they feel is being ascribed to them, generating local effects of uniformity where previously these may have been far from evident. In a general sense, it could be argued that this is an effect of representations themselves. Representations mould ‘communities’ rather than being the elective attributes of ‘communities’.
And this brings us to the very significant question of the place of artistic practice. One could see the place that different cultural groupings attribute to works of art as, in the terms of old-fashioned communications theory, messages about the code. Art functions as a particular space in which the grouping which sustains it can articulate something about itself, not simply in the sense of social or historical commentary, but in terms of the broader question of how representations operate, how value systems operate and so on. But also artistic practice is crucial in a slightly different sense, and this introduces a certain idea of dialogue.
When commentators try to explain the appeal of art forms, they frequently invoke the notion of identification: we identify with the protagonist in a novel or film, or with the perspective or impression involved in a painting. Without elaborating any further on this simple paradigm, it is clear that it misses a second one: the role of identification not with a protagonist as such but with the very process of making. The art work, after all, has been made by someone, and this identificatory link with creating could be seen as a key variable in the dialogue which we call culture. Why? Since perhaps one of its effects is to spark creative processes in others.
If it is true that human groups always involve a tension between a set of imperatives and the possibilities of carrying them out, pain and disappointment are a given. If the products of creative processes tend to come out of the experience of pain, which is a common ground to any culture, what can be identified with is not a single, uniform product, but rather the action of making something out of the experience of pain. Doesn’t this open up a number of possibilities of dialogue, not based on uniformity or agreement, or even on propositional content (‘this is what we/they believe’), but on practices of making?
Dr. Darian Leader, June 7 2005
