Creating Interstices: On Ethics, Politics, and Curatorship by Todd Kesselman

Dialogues

Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro interviews Simon Critchley

Creating Interstices: On Ethics, Politics, and Curatorship To José Luis Brea, in memoriam Throughout his work, Simon Critchley has focused on examining the relationships between philosophy and poetry, on analyzing the potential for humor and literature, and on investigating the ethical origin of that which is political in the modern world. His personal vision of philosophy does not originate from admiration of the world, but through frustration when faced with not achieving what is desired: “Philosophy begins in disappointment.” This idea is what can be found beneath the ethical program developed in books like Infinitely Demanding. Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, but it is also behind other recent interventions in the field of political studies. Faced with the loss of the meaning of the world and political disillusionment, Critchley observes two main stances: an active nihilism (violent and radical), and a passive nihilism. Infinitely Demanding reflects upon responsibility and obligation before injustice, and advocates the need for a third response: that of an ethic that represents action and commitment. Using the work of Badiou, Levinas, and Løgstrup, in addition to contributions from Freud and Lacan, Critchley constructs a complete ethical system based on the manners of articu-

lation of an inﬁnite demand. Manners of articulation are based on subjective ethical experiences, which urge us to act in accordance with something good, something that reaches beyond the empty manipulation of conventional systems (deontology, utilitarianism and the ethics of virtue). In this way, Critchley expresses the need to commit oneself to an ethical demand that is impossible to satisfy. A commitment that must drive us to action and that links ethics with politics in such a way that ethical responsibility is understood as a means of favoring a political response to injustice. Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro: I’d like to discuss with you the question of the ethics of curatorship. Before tackling the subject of curatorship, I would like to introduce the question of ethics as a problem in contemporary art. From the beginning of modern art—maybe from Courbet onwards—artists started breaking moral codes and traditions. Avant-garde art is related to the idea of rupture. In what sense can ethics be an issue for art? I mean, clearly ethics have to be different from morals. There

Dialogues

are, for instance, artists who are always working on the boundaries of ethics. Maybe Santiago Sierra is an example. His works use human beings, exploiting them in the same way a capitalist system does, in order to show that art can only reproduce the system. His works are really effective as pieces of art, but maybe there are some ethical problems around them. My question is: can art be “unethical?” Is it possible that something can be a good work of art but a bad social act? Simon Critchley: I would see that as an example of a deeply ethical aesthetic practice. And it is an ethical aesthetic practice that is working through the repetition of the system that oppresses individuals, so it is through the repetition of the very machinery that is exploiting them that in a sense something becomes different. I would see that work as critical and also as being oriented around an ethical demand. The question you raise here is: “Can art be unethical?” It is a difficult question, because we can think of those artists or writers who we would certainly consider to be immoral. So if there is a conception of morality which governs a society, bourgeois morality or whatever morality it might be, then what the artist is often doing is in conflict with a certain moral system, a certain moral code. But he is not in conflict with that system in the name of some value-free, unethical position, but in the name of some higher ethical position. And I think of that in terms of writers like Nietzsche and Bataille. I have been re-reading Bataille recently, the third volume of La Part maudite, the one on sovereignty, and it is very interesting. In Bataille, you have someone who is completely immoral on a certain level but deeply ethical. In his case, it is an ethics of sovereignty. In Bataille there is a very clear sense of an ethical demand, the ethical demand

Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro interviews Simon Critchley

is to conduct one’s life in a way that is not reducible to the principal of utility, what is refered to as “le service des biens,” in French: the service of goods. And if life is simply reduced to the principle of utility, then everything that we do is a means to an end, so to that extent someone whom we could think of as deeply immoral like Bataille is profoundly ethical. I think artists can be cynical. So you can be a cynical artist: you can believe that what you are doing has no moral value, you’re just having fun or being ironical or something, but I think that this is an unethical position which I’m personally really tired of. I think that artists can be immoral, and perhaps they should be immoral. And artists can be cynical, and that is something that I think they shouldn’t be, because if art is just about the production of a sort of knowing irony, a knowing distance whereby you rip people off by getting them to spend money on your work but you think that they are stupid, that’s terrible. But I don’t think that art can be unethical; I think that interesting art is always ethical. It is organized around ethical demand. What that ethical demand might be is up for grabs. MAHN: You have been talking about ethics and morals. Of course, these concepts are not synonymous: ethics has to do with a position, and morality is related to a sort of system or tradition. What you are saying is that art can be ethical beyond being moral. Isn’t that true? SC: Yes, exactly. MAHN: So is it possible for an artist to go beyond ethics, even when ethics is something that has to do with a subjective demand? I am thinking of some extreme examples of contemporary art, particularly of the Chinese artist Zhu Yu and his

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performance, Eating People (2000) in which he claims to eat a human fetus. SC: I think that the history of experimentalism in art in the twentieth century is a history of different sorts of ethical engagements, so I think that performance could be done cynically. It is certainly immoral, but I’d say it is the articulation of a certain ethical demand that the artist thinks should commit him to the process that his practice is part of, for example, an example I give in Infinitely Demanding when I talk about the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis de Sade was immoral but he wasn’t unethical: he thought there had to be a different ethical demand. He advocated for the right to come, or the right to have an orgasm—he called in his late works “Le droit de jouir.” He is as ethical a thinker as Kant or as any philosopher. I think that it is possible for an artist to not reflect on his practice and just do it, and there are certain examples—like young British artists from the 1990s—of a cultivation of an antiintellectual, anti-reflective attitude. It is all about making money and the links between the art world and celebrity culture and pop culture. But I think that’s stupid. The artists I know and have spoken to, or whom I admire, are all trying to do their practice in relation to something like a demand, something like a commitment, whatever that may be. So I guess art cannot be unethical. MAHN: In your work, you give a special role to “action.” For you, the only solution in this world is to do things. Sometimes art is conceived precisely as the contrary to something capable of producing “actions” or real movements. In our contemporary world, art is a sort of discourse about injustice, about the things we would like to change, but it only produces “action” a few times. Do you think art can be ethi-

cal without producing actions? Do you think action—in the sense of quick or instantaneous movement— is a feature of art? Or are there other meanings for “action” that can be present in art? SC: The political tradition that I come from, and the political views that I am trying to criticize lead me to what you were saying at the beginning. A huge early influence on me was Heidegger, and Heidegger’s late work ends up in a sort of experience of waiting and inaction. We need to cultivate a disposition of passivity and action. For example, in Badiou’s work that I very much admire, there is a sense that we have to wait for an event. An event will arise or it won’t arise, and we can’t will it into being. For someone like Žižek, the hero is Bartelby as the figure who refuses action. Now, I understand why Žižek picks Bartelby as a hero because there is a deep point to that: in Melville’s story there are certain forms of action that need to be criticized. So I agree with Žižek: there are certain forms of action that need to be criticized. We live in a world where there is a relentless imperative to act and act now. And what we need is reflection and thought, sure, but that shouldn’t lead to paralysis. There is a tendency in a lot of contemporary theory to accept a form of paralysis or inaction. I think that is there in Badiou, in Agamben and in Žižek in different ways. But the tradition that I come from is very much influenced by Gramsci. After the First World War in Italy, the revolution clearly wasn’t going to happen in the way in which Western Marxists thought. And in places like Italy, it meant that the whole question of what political action meant had to be rethought. Gramsci tried to do that with his concepts of hegemony and the rest. But what remains central to someone like Gramsci, who I follow, is that it becomes a question of how we put together a conception of action in con-

Dialogues

Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro interviews Simon Critchley

cert across a whole number of disparate interest groups. So for me, politics has always been about the expansion of our imagination when it comes to the capacity for action that we have. And to that extent I remain optimistic in a strange way: I think that human beings acting in concert, acting collectively, have an extraordinary power that they are not aware of. In the face of eventual defeat there is still this ability to cultivate action—and that’s very much what I want to do. It is not a question of action for action’s sake, so to that extent I agree with Žižek, but I don’t think that we can just sit back and do nothing.

ance and protest might mean at the present time. I think that at one level Rancière is absolutely right: there is this opposition between la police and la politique. La police is always about making invisible la politique. Politics is the emergence into visibility of that constituency which has no part. So politics is that activity of the emergence of a group into visibility. I think that’s right and that can be done through the act of naming. By nominating something, by naming something, I bring it into being. The question that’s on my mind in Infinitely Demanding is that we lack a name in politics, and what might count as a name, and if we can find a name then we can, as it were, make that name visible as a group, which means that politics is a poetic activity. Politics is an artistic activity. Politics is about the creation of a name out of nothing which names a certain group and brings them into being. The example that I give in Infinitely Demanding is the example of indigenous politics in Mexico. Politics is a struggle for visibility, so, if you like, end of story at one level. But the question that has been raised, the doubt that I have about that now, which is expressed in some recent texts is: Is visibility the only strategy of resistance, or can we think about invisibility as a strategy of resistance? And this is not just a change of position. It is a change which is taking place amongst activists, which I think is also linked to the emergence of new media—in the sense in which the anti globalization movement, particularly after Seattle, were using the technology of the Internet and all the rest incredibly powerfully. Visibility became a struggle over who controls virtual space or whatever. Now I think that those strategies of resistance have become questionable; and the limitations of them have become clear. I’m very interested in this idea that you find in the Invisible Committee, in their text, L’insurrection qui vient, and other texts of politics as a retreat

MAHN: In your work you link ethics with engagement and commitment, and you talk about the issues of resistance and visibility. Throughout Infinitely Demanding you suggest that politics is a way of “naming,” of giving a name to a particular situation and of articulating around it a position of universal hegemony. Nevertheless, in other cases—especially when you talk about radical groups—you stake for invisibility, saying that invisibility is a means of resistance in the face of politics of control, i.e. invisibility as politics versus visibility as police (using the Jacques Rancière formula). How would you articulate a political position between the necessity of being visible-enunciable (having a position/name) and the importance of not revealing everything completely, in order to preserve a kind of invisibility to make action possible? SC: It’s interesting that you put it like that, because while writing Infinitely Demanding, which was written in 20032005, I was reflecting very much on what was happening with the so called anti-globalization movement. Between that text and some other recent texts you refer to there is a change of position. There is a change in what resist-

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from visibility, and the cultivation of an invisibility, opacity, and also politics as a succession from this realm. Now I don’t agree with that. As I said, I’m a Gramscian at some level, which means that politics has to be about the building up of a front, of a hegemonic force, but at this point in history there might be a need for secession and withdrawal. Visibility has become completely “operationalized” or commercialized it seems to me. Everything is visible. One thing that really interests me as an aesthetic and political practice, are those groups or people that refuse to engage with the Internet. There are a number of groups I’m aware of that are circulating texts that are often typewritten texts or even handwritten texts, which are photocopied and then transferred from one hand to another. And then, after a week or two weeks, thirty people have read that. In a sense, we’ve been seduced by the question of number. But you can put something on the Internet and everybody can read it and it means nothing, right? So the question is how does something mean something? How do we form chains of resistance? It might be by going back to other forms of media. These questions for me are questions, which are coming out. Something has changed in the tactics of resistance from ten years ago. I’m trying to think about that and just what concepts might be best used to think that through. MAHN: I completely agree with this “in-between” position. Maybe this is more difﬁcult for art, since it is situated in the realm of the visible. How can art resist in those terms (and be ethical) if it is essentially visible? SC: I think that is a difﬁcult question. I think one example of invisibility in art would be to look at what someone like Tino Sehgal has done. He has rigorously refused the exhibition in the exhibition, which is sort of fascinating. Nothing about the work is visible. The

problem with that is that he seems to accept completely the imperatives of the institution. He accepts entirely the institutional framework of the Guggenheim or whatever, or even the opening hours of the gallery and just does his work within that context and then it circulates. That is one strategy. I think there are possibly better strategies. For me the great thing about the art world is the nakedness of its mediation by capital. In a sense it’s obvious what this is about. This is about selling work and making money and the artist has become the exemplary worker in conditions of late capitalism. The artist has become the exemplary worker and the worker is meant to be an artist, so to be a worker it’s not enough to just turn up at work and do your job: you have to be creative, you have to be innovative, you have to be ﬂexible, you have to be constantly available. So, if you like, the new model of the worker is a model drawn from the artist, and that means that you can turn up at work wearing your Ramones t-shirt or listening to Radiohead on your iPod and you don’t have to shave or anything and you can be completely bohemian and say that you hate capitalism or whatever, but you’re still a good worker, and in fact you’re the best worker. There’s a sense in which the artist has become the paradigm for work and I want to think about that a little bit to try and recover some discourses around work. There’s a rich history of discourse around work, which we need to go back to. Now, so the question is, if you go back to the example of Tino Sehgal, here is someone who is cultivating invisibility. What I don’t see in his work is criticality. So can there be an artwork or an art practice that accepts the necessity of the mediation of art by capital and yet still is able to maintain a certain critical stance? I think that’s the question, and the closest I’ve got to that is a concept that Liam Gillick has of semiautonomy. So if the old idea of critical-

Dialogues

Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro interviews Simon Critchley

ity in, say, modernism, was the criticality of the autonomous art work we had that model: the artwork is critical because it has no relationship to capitalism. The other model would be the complicity of art with capital, which is maybe where we got to with art in the 1990s and its consequences. Another model I was thinking about is a model of semi-autonomy, where art is both completely conscious of its complicity with capital and yet tries to subvert it at the same time.

piece of art then it will simply be reincorporated within the system. The situationists realized this nearly fifty years ago. At this moment in many ways the recession has been a good thing in the sense that the financial crisis has been a good thing: the people in the economy in social life, and in the art world in particular, were living a sort of dream, were living a sort of fantasy of accumulation and all the rest. I think in many ways that the crisis has sort of forced people to reflect on questions of ethics and ethical responsibility at the basis of their practice.

MAHN: To some extent this is the idea you defend at the end of Inﬁnitely Demanding, especially when you observe the potential of working with the interstices. It seems as if working with distances or interstices is the only way of producing resistance for you. There is no outside. We are inside the governments, inside capitalism, inside the systems. Maybe contemporary art is a good example of this way of working between interstices, creating sites for action, just in places where the institution is dominating. Do you think these “little resistances” that art produces can be understood as effective actions? SC: As someone who read Derrida for many, many years I have to say that there is no outside, there is no pure outside. There is also no pure inside. The distinction between outside and inside is always unstable. The institutions are fragile and are totally perforated by an outside they cannot control. To go back to Bataille, he is interested in moments of sovereignty that can be articulated artistically and which are ways in which an outside can punctuate, can puncture an inside that is determined by utility and money and the circulation of capital. But that is only going to happen for a transitory moment. This is where the paradox of visibility is. Once something works as a subversive

MAHN: We are now speaking about interstices; I think the task of the curator is precisely working with these “in-between” spaces. The curator can be seen as someone who articulates different ethical demands: the artist’s demands, the institution’s demands, and the public’s demands. And in some way his own ethical demand (the one that is the result of putting together the different positions and interests in a sort of an ethical assemblage). How is it possible to have an ethic for curatorship in this battlefield of demands? SC: My first experience of curating was this summer. I did a show at Apexart in New York. It was called Men with Balls: The Art of the 2010 World Cup. I was asked by the gallery to do something, and I said I just wanted to create some place where we can watch football together, and then we began to put this whole show together. I experienced directly the conflict between those three levels: between the institutional demands, the demands of the artist and the demands of the public—and so I guess curatorship is taking care as a sort of compromise structure. I found it demanding as an experience being a curator, which is interesting. But in many ways what I was trying to do was to bring about some sort of

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experience of sociality. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to create a group of people within a city full of strangers who would watch games together and we would then maybe think about the meaning of this: what is football, what is this activity that we’re engaged in? What was interesting is that so much of my thinking had to become spatial. I had to think in terms of the organization of space, and the management of space, which is not something that I normally do. On the other hand, those demands I guess are just irreconcilable: institutional demands, artistic demands and the public demands are things which can be momentarily assembled into a show and then that’s as close as one can get. MAHN: So you find a sort of infinite conflict or disagreement that has to be articulated. What is the place of—and I put it to you again—interstices in this conflict? SC: People often get this wrong in relation to Infinitely Demanding and the argument I’m making. My claim is that there are no interstices, that it’s the societies that we live in, more or less globally, that are increasingly defined by an apparatus of security. That apparatus of security is the control of visibility, which is based in the United States on the fear of terrorist attacks and all the rest. Far from the state being a less important actor politically, it seems that the state is an apparatus, which is there to control security at all costs. Within the state there are no interstices, there can be no interstices. And if there are interstices, they have to be controlled, they have to be policed. That’s why in the major cities of Europe, we have to know where the immigrants are, the police have to be put there, and there cannot be interstices. The interstices of those things which have to be created through an articulation. So, this is something that people often get wrong.

And it’s not that we can retreat to the interstices, because there are no interstices. The activity, action is what creates a momentary interstice, that’s what creates a momentary gap. To that extent a show could do that. An instance of curating could create such an interstice, such a gap. MAHN: You mean a sort of event? SC: Yes, the ethics of curating would be the ethics of the event, to bring about such interstices within the structure, given the conflicting ethical demands that one is under. MAHN: But here we have the risk of creating fixed interstices capable of founding “traditions.” And when an interstice becomes something fixed, its critical and political potentiality starts to disappear. In your book you do not look for founding ways of resistance (and responsibility), you do not focus on generating new fixed structures. You advocate for eventual and performative acts in order to generate dynamics and not staticism. Art is always in danger of canonization. How can art be an absolute contingent? How can the habitus be avoided (in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense as structuring structure)? SC: There is no answer for that. The risk always exists. We have to be alert in every case. Maybe we have to remember now Jean Francois Lyotard. As you know, he curated a very influential show in 1985 called Les Immateriaux. There was a plan for a second show at the Centre Pompidou, which was never realized because he died, and it was going to be called Resistance. I think in many ways the perpetual ethical demand is the creation of Lyotard’s posthumous show, to create this show from the death.

Discourse

Miguel Ángel Hernández-Navarro

NOTES

The Curator’s Demands: Towards an Ethics of Commitment

1—Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London and New York: Verso, 2001) 2—Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2006); Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 3—See Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 4—Simon Critchley, Inﬁnitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London and New York: Verso, 2007).

1. BETWEEN DUTY AND RESPONSIBILITY: ETHICS AS A KEY QUESTION The question around ethics has recently become among the most urgent in the contemporary Western world. We have of late seen ourselves full of deontological codes and ethics manuals applied to professions, but we have also seen treatises on ethics and the recuperation of ethical politics. Alan Badiou’s work, to mention a relevant example, calls for a return to ethics as a primary philosophy from which to think of the world and, particularly, from which to build communities of meaning.1 Questions such as dignity, justice, or compassion, which are usually studied in ethics, nowadays become central questions of contemporary thought as they appear in the work of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, or Giorgio Agamben.2 We also ﬁnd a resurgence and a new importance given to a think-

er such as Emmanuel Lévinas, whose conception of subjectivity based on the ethical relationship with the other is taking a central role in ways of thinking about a contemporary world whose problem and essential centre of tension is the encounter with the other.3 In such a state of affairs, we shouldn’t be surprised by contributions such as those of Simon Critchley’s, who attempts to direct all reﬂections on ethics towards a politics of action.4 As we shall see in detail later on, the impossibility of fulﬁlling ethical demands—a key point for Critchley—is central to the production of an ethics of action that doesn’t limit itself to mere discourse. This central position that ethics occupies in contemporary thought, which also coincides with a public preoccupation over ethical matters, takes place, paradoxically, at a time when morality (as a system of ethical traditions) has

Discourse

Miguel Ángel Hernández-Navarro

5—Gilles Lipovetsky, Le crépuscule du devoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

lost its structure and has been reduced to radical individualism. We are witnessing what Lipovetsky described as “the dusk of duty,” the suspension of responsibility, and the commitment to an ethos that is increasingly subject to the satisfaction of desire.5 As Slavoj Žižek observed, the ethics of the contemporary subject is governed by the imperative of pleasure.6 “Enjoy!” is the order of an ethics within which the individual’s only preoccupation is the satisfaction of his own desires. This satisfaction of desire, as Zygmunt Bauman suggested, takes the form of an ethics of consumption, and is only possible by suspending our responsibility towards others.7

almost like mere abstractions. This is one of the essential preoccupations of contemporary reflection on ethics: the disappearance of responsibility— diluted within a system of consumption—and the imposition of an “artificial” responsibility that appears in the shape of both political correctness’ false conscience, and of moral norms transformed into a deontological code. The contemporary subject thus finds himself torn between the internalized mandate of pleasure and the artificial and public mandate of responsibility.

6—See for instance Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute. Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London and New York: Verso, 2001). 7—Zygmunt Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

The progressive “deresponsibilization” of the world that is taking place in the private sphere thus renders necessary the appearance of ethical codes, and of a deontology that can regulate a subject who has already lost his sense of commitment and responsibility before the world. These are ethical codes that, in a way, work almost like laws: citizens’ “moral duties” that are no longer a reflection of subjectivity and internal experience, but a pseudo-legal imposition from the pure exterior. The result of this is that today, instead of finding ourselves before an “ethical subject,” we stand before a “subjection to ethics.” That is to say, an ethics of responsibility—which should operate within the private sphere, and which is a basic condition of the civilized human condition—has been progressively replaced by an ethics of consumption and of fulfillment of pleasure. Paradoxically, in order for this unlimited fulfillment not to destroy the system’s cohesion, moral codes are promulgated from the public sphere: guidelines and rules that are now completely artificial in that they have to be obeyed not as moral imperatives that are linked to experience, but as legal imperatives deprived of any contact with subjective reality,

It is this state of affairs—which has been presented here in a rather cartoon-like manner—that must lead us to a reflection on an ethics of curating, a reflection that also presents itself as an urgent and necessary one. So far, there is no deontological code for curators. The closest we have come to is the International Council of Museum’s ethical code, which sets out a series of principles for museum curators, some of which could be “applied” to independent curators, and set the foundations for an ethics applied to this “profession” that ultimately fails to professionalize. Working towards a “universalizable” and common deontology is, without a doubt, a pending matter, as is the goal of achieving a collaborative form of action agreed by consensus. Said deontology would nevertheless have no value if it didn’t come directly from individual ethical experiences. And in the case of curating, this experience has a number of peculiarities that make it difficult to universalize—that is to say, that make it common and agreed upon by consensus. In essence, this peculiarity has something to do with questions of responsibility and ethical negotiation. In an era of the dusk of duty and of deontology’s hypertrophy, a curator is a subject who questions the universalizability of ethics because his job, as I will

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argue here, is essentially ethical, linked to responsibility and commitment. Curatorial deontology would therefore be traversed by ethical demands and wouldn’t be able to detach itself from experience. My point is that ethics is a fundamental part of curating. Furthermore, the figure of the curator may be understood as the ethical subject par excellence, at least if by ethics we understand the constant questioning and reconsideration of duty, commitment and responsibility. As Joan-Carles Mèlich suggested recently, ethics doesn’t fix duty; it constantly questions what is to be done: “ethics has nothing to do with a deontological code, with normative frameworks, with political precepts, or with absolute values, because ethics is not morality. Instead, it questions morality. Ethics emerges on the limits of morality, in its dark crevices.”8 If ethics is understood in this way, in terms of the profession of the curator, it may be said that a curator’s task is without a doubt that of constantly making decisions, articulating a series of ethical demands from the other. A curator is someone who maintains a commitment with the other, which can only be fulfilled if he manages to balance other demands. A curator’s job is the infinite articulation of the demands of the other, but without erasing his own. And it is difficult to promulgate an ethical or deontological code whilst doing this. There are no rules or principles in this profession that can be made universal, because every rule may be questioned within a given context. The ethos of the curator is precisely that of constantly questioning the norm. If there are no rules, then do we advocate anarchy? No, or only partly so, because this anarchy—an absence of rules and principles—could be constructive if it were to adjust itself to the

ethical principle of responsibility. The task of the curator is ethical if it is in compliance with its ethical task, which is that of responsibility and commitment towards the other. A deontology is only an empty law that must be questioned at all times. The only mandate or principle the curator has, which he shouldn’t betray, is that of fidelity and respect towards the other. Curatorial ethics therefore comes from an ethical experience of the subject, which is that of responsibility. In a world where responsibility is questioned and has disappeared from the individual sphere, curators have the single duty of being responsible individuals. That is why curating is an ethical profession, because, from the very etymology of the term, its task is to take care and be in charge of things, “to be responsible for” things. 2. THE TRIPLE DEMAND The curator’s job is an ethical one from the start. It is a work of commitment. The problem presented here is that his commitment is always a multiple one. He must fulfill the demands of institutions, artworks, and the public. The curator’s job thus implies a triple ethical demand, which he must articulate and assemble in the best possible way. Being a curator involves shaping this demand, which, as we shall see, is in itself contradictory and impossible to carry out.9 2.1. THE INSTITUTION’S DEMAND The first condition of the demands on a curator is his commitment to the institution. Whether we are dealing with an independent curator or an associate one, the moment he puts on an exhibition, he is temporarily “in charge” of a (real or symbolic) space. He is “in charge” of the institution, whichever one it may be. In every exhibition there is always a “motto” of the institution. Every institution speaks and shows it-

8—Joan-Carles Mèlich, Ética de la compassion (Barcelona: Herder Editorial, 2010), 35. 9— I am following here, as many will have noticed, the position developed by Simon Critchley, in his book Inﬁnitely Demanding, on the subject of ethics. His arguments, which will progressively appear in this text, form the basis of my thinking on the ethics of curating.

Discourse

Miguel Ángel Hernández-Navarro

10—See Alain Badiou, Being and Event (New York: Continuum, 2006).

self through its exhibitions—although its speech might also be of a critical nature. Every curatorial job is a phrase of the institution. The institution— everything it represents—speaks itself; it shows or even questions itself in every exhibition. The curator makes the institution speak, and, at the same time, speaks for it. The curator is in charge of the institution’s “speech”; is responsible for its speaking. He has to level the institution’s demand for infinite affirmation, as the latter would like to speak itself through every artwork. The curator cannot get rid of the institution altogether. He must balance its speech. If he eliminates it, he creates a false feeling of absolute transparency; if he makes it too evident, he distorts the artwork’s meaning. But in some cases it may be necessary to erase and get rid of it, whilst in others, it might be necessary for it to be present, as a stain. So, the curator thus runs into our initial question: how can the institution’s desires be fulfilled while also respecting the desires of the other (the artwork, the public, and the curator himself)?

in a very broad sense, as in “what is shown.” Originally, this was the curator’s main duty: to take care of the work, being responsible for it before the public and before the institution. A curator must guarantee that the work— the artist and his discourse—ﬁnds its best, optimum way of speaking. A curator must guarantee that the artwork will unfold its full potential.

11—Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), and The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

The problem the curator faces is that he is a part of the institution, even if only momentarily. This is one of the questions we normally ask ourselves: whose side are we on? Generally speaking, we place ourselves on the artist’s or the public’s side, but we must not forget that the curator is representing the institution. He works for them, however uncomfortable that temporary function may be. And it is precisely this discomfort, this clash, which guarantees an ethical negotiation between curator and institution, as it in itself questions the curator’s own legitimacy and identity within the triad of demands. 2.2. THE ARTWORK’S DEMANDS Together with the institution’s demands, the curator has to articulate and give shape to the artwork’s demands—understanding “the artwork”

In this sense, two demands collide here: that of the artist and that of the curator. The danger of “ventriloquism,” of making the work say what it doesn’t want to say, is clear. That would mean betraying the work. The curator as an ethical subject, according to the diagram designed by Badiou, holds a responsibility towards the work, a commitment towards fidelity.10 And that fidelity does not mean, as one might think, that the curator must literally place the work and its speech within the discursive space. That would be impossible, even if he were set out to do so—there is no ideal space, just like there is no ideal reader, and each exhibition distorts its origin. A curator cannot be the translator of the work and of the artists’ original intentions into space. We got over the fallacy of intentionality some time ago. And, of course, an artwork says much more than it is aware of. But it is also true that there are some things that the work cannot say, there are limits and over-interpretations, even what Umberto Eco called “aberrant decoding,” which must be taken into account in a world that plays at the multiplicity of interpretation.11 There are multiple, almost infinite readings, but there are some limits. Being faithful to the work involves maintaining its field of possibilities—of conscious possibilities, what the artist wants to say; but also of unconscious possibilities, latent ones: the artwork’s potential. To articulate the work’s ethical demands would guarantee the

Manifesta Journal 12 — 2010/2011

work’s speech and its relationship with other speeches, being faithful to a universe of possibilities. We would otherwise run into the danger of the curatorartist who distorts the artworks and the artists in order to create his own discourse by emptying out and “using” the works for his own purposes. This is manipulation. And it doesn’t matter whether it is with people or with artworks, it implies forcing someone (or something) to say something he (or it) doesn’t want to say. We would then be entering a different discussion altogether: that of the curator as artist. This implies crossing the borders of responsibility and fidelity to the work, in order to enter a different territory. And yet, this ethical negotiation is sometimes necessary: when the discourse needs to be made evident; when we have to make the works speak, intensifying their voice. For the matter at hand, articulating the artwork’s ethical demands implies remaining faithful to it, to a multiplicity of meanings, to addressing its loaded meaning, and not emptying it and using it as if it were an empty signifier. At that moment, we would be crossing the line, and would cease to “take care” of the work in order to take care of ourselves. The articulation of the work’s ethical demands thus maintains a dialogue and a push and pull with the curator’s own demands. When this balance falls on one side and there is no subjectivity whatsoever, the curator merely becomes someone in charge of installing work or hanging paintings; when the balance is tipped in favor of the curator, he turns into an artist. The curator’s job here is to maintain a balance. And once again, that balance is impossible to reach, as we are dealing with two demands that are impossible to fulfill because they cancel each other out. Once again, we come across the experience of negotiation. A negotiation that

always depends on context, but which must always be governed by the principle of fidelity. What fidelity is, and how it can be shaped, is something that may only be determined through localized experiences. 2.3. THE PUBLIC’S DEMANDS Finally, together with the demands of the institution and of the artwork, the curator, of course, maintains a commitment towards the public—once again, understanding “the public” in a broad sense, as an undefined community of receivers who have “access” to the work. Being a curator involves promoting the works’ or the discourse’s visibility, to make them seen—although this might sometimes be understood in a metaphorical sense, as it also involves making them heard, read, felt—to have them reach an audience: a receiver or a community of receivers. It doesn’t matter what means are employed to obtain this, the curator should always guarantee the best conditions of accessibility for the work. He is, in this sense, someone who arranges the visible. And to “arrange” is not only to situate or locate, but to emphasize a sense of the distribution of the visible that falls back on a sense of access, of making, a putting-together that guarantees reception. Of course, this field of commitment to the public momentarily situates the curator in the field of mediation. But he is never really a mediator, but rather a guarantor of mediation, someone who makes mediation possible, and who contributes to making this relationship exist so that contact between the work and the receiver may come about. The curator, in this sense, guarantees the area of contact, which is not always an area of agreement and understanding, but which is instead generally an area of conflict. In fact, the curator’s duty is that of watching over that area of contact.

Discourse

Miguel Ángel Hernández-Navarro

12—Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

We come across the curator’s ethical demands once again. A curator is not a mediator or a translator. He must be faithful to the work’s and the public’s demands, but he cannot be transparent. An exhibition is an act of transmission. It is the curator’s job to create a space where this transmission may take place. To guarantee the cleanliness of the channel of emission, or to emphasize the noise when he deems it necessary, is an ethical task where, once again, a negotiation is present. To get rid of noise is to establish the most appropriate channels for reception, those that are required by the work or by the discourse. These are channels that will occasionally need to be noisy. Sometimes, the work will require the viewer’s gaze to be altered, contemplation to be distorted, and traditional ways of seeing to be frustrated. The curator will be in charge of balancing that demand for disruption with the public’s demand for intelligibility and the satisfaction of the scopic drive.

another, demands that would cancel each other out. The curator is therefore in charge of balancing and articulating this conﬂict. His job is to be committed to each and every one of these demands, and to himself. His ethos is that of constant negotiation. A negotiation that is only possible through an internalized responsibility. The curator is only capable of feeling the commitment if he internalizes these ethical demands, if he becomes another.

13—Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 32-95. 14—Weber, Vocation Lectures, 77.

In short, what the curator does is to find a space for the assembly of different ethical demands. Different demands that are also different social levels, so that this assembly is also an assembly of the social in the sense that Bruno Latour sees it.12 An exhibition will thus be understood as a meeting place, an area of contact between different ethical demands. 3. INFINITE NEGOTIATION The curator will thus be responsible for several ethical demands. Each one of them is an infinite demand that cannot be completely fulfilled. The curator is in charge of giving shape to that impossibility. The institution possesses the infinite demand for affirmation; the work, the demand for authenticity and originality; and the audience, for translation and satisfaction. The curator therefore finds himself at the crossroads of demands that are incompatible with one

In the end, we would encounter a similar problem to the one Max Weber posed in 1918, when he made an analysis of the labor of politics through the tension between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conviction.13 In his famous essay “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber distinguished between responsibility as a rational duty (which is related to Kant’s categorical imperative) and conviction, in the sense of a subjective and intuitive internalization, that is to say, a positioning that goes beyond reason, and which is based on experience and passion: For the problem is simply how can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul? Politics is made with the head, not with other parts of the body or soul. And yet devotion to politics, if it is not to be frivolous intellectual game but rather genuinely human conduct, can be born and nourished from passion alone. However, that ﬁrm taming of the soul, which distinguishes the passionate politician and differentiates him from the “sterilely excited” and mere political dilettante, is possible only through habituation to detachment in every sense of the word. The “strength” of a political “personality” means, in the ﬁrst place, the possession of these qualities of passion, responsibility, and proportion. 14

Manifesta Journal 12 — 2010/2011

The curator’s task therefore lies between responsibility and conviction, within that space of constant negotiation that, if we follow Mèlich’s aforementioned idea, would be the ethical space par excellence, as it is a place where duty, as an imposition, fades. In any case, it would perhaps be more productive to advocate for a responsibility of conviction, thinking through both concepts within a single impulse. That is what Simon Critchley has done, using the idea of commitment, and above all, the idea of ethical experience. Instead of committing to an emptiness of self-imposed deontological codes, Critchley advocates for an ethics that emerges through the interaction with the other, through ethical experience. For Critchley, ethics is not possible without the notion of an ethical subject and an ethical experience that invades subjectivity: “[A]ll questions of normative justification, whether with reference to theories of justice, rights, duties, obligations or whatever, should be referred to what I call ‘ethical experience’. . . . Without a conception of the ethical subject, moral reflection is reduced to the empty manipulation of the standard justificatory frameworks: deontology, utilitarism and virtue ethics.”15 My position coincides with Critchley’s completely. An ethics of curating, imposed by a deontological code, is not possible. Responsibility and commitment, which are at the foundations of curatorial practice, can only be exercised as such through an ethical subject, a subject who feels—and I stress the term “feel”—the demands of the other, and his own commitment towards himself. The ethics of the curator cannot therefore be anything but an ethical experience, a positioning based on the negotiation with infinite demands that are impossible to fulfill completely. What is fundamental about all this, that the figure of the curator almost serves

as a paradigm for the ethical subject. Within him, applied ethics (deontology) and ethical experience come together. The two come into play through commitment. A commitment that—taking up Weber’s formula again—is the balance between responsibility and conviction; a balance that, according to Critchley’s argument, would always be an impossible one to attain. Critchley brings into play Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s ethics to argue that ethical demands are always impossible to fulfill, and Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics to observe that an impossible ethical demand is what lies at the bottom of subjectivity. In Lévinas’s model, the subject is precisely constituted before the other, before an otherness that demands from him a responsibility that he cannot fulfill. In this way, the ethical subject that Critchley reflects upon is a subject who is split between himself and the other, burdened by demands that he cannot fulfill completely, that are beyond him, and that he cannot manage to formalize because, like Lacanian pleasure, they always slip between his fingers. In a way, the curator’s task brings into play the same separation from subjectivity, but complicates it further, because here the other is a multiple, resulting in the demands being infinite and contradictory at the same time. In Infinitely Demanding, Critchley argues that sublimation could be a way of taking distance from those impossible demands in order to do something with them. But he doesn’t advocate tragic sublimation, instead he advocates a practice of “minimalist sublimation,” which is that of humor: a sublimation that maintains the subject’s division whilst attenuating it, thus making action possible. For Critchley, humor carries out the function of showing the impossibility of fulfilling demands, and of pointing towards ways to gain

15—Critchley, Inﬁnitely Demanding, 9.

STATEMENTS

One of the most signiﬁcant aspects of curatorial work in relation to ethics is the adjective “temporary” that comes to be associated with exhibitions as opposed to “permanent collections.” Shows never stay, art survives them. I always bear this in mind in order to remind myself that art should always be the center of the project, never the frame.—Francesco Manacorda

16—See Rancière, Disagreement.

satisfaction. Through irony and humorous explosion, the subject is aware of the discomfort caused by asymmetry and the impossibility of fulfilling demands, but this discomfort doesn’t disable or destroy him. It is a form of active protection. In a way, an exhibition set up by a curator could be understood in this way, as a compromise to escape from impossible demands. Humor shows that we cannot change the whole world, but that this will not destroy us, that we can keep going forward despite it. An exhibition finally does the same: it is a minimalist sublimation of an excess of demands. The key to Critchley’s thought is that the distance taken from the impossibility of fulfilling demands is important because it doesn’t invalidate us; it allows us to continue acting. In fact, those unfulfilled demands—which are what ultimately lie at the bottom of conscience, a term that is loaded with prejudices but that Critchley hopes to retrieve—are what make action possible. Because for Critchley, the origin of politics ultimately lies in ethics, taken as a responsibility and commitment with the other that is impossible to fulfill. The ethical subject’s experience is at the base of all politics. A politics that, to use Rancière’s argument, certainly cannot be taken as something that pacifies and controls opposites, la police, but rather as a manifestation of dissent, la politique.16

Miguel Ángel Hernández-Navarro

Every exhibition is therefore an ethical device that brings into play infinite demands that are impossible to fulfill completely. A curator is always a frustrated subject, for his ethical experience is that of a perpetual imbalance of demands. An imbalance that is only resolved as an event through an exhibition. The exhibition is, in this way, the formalization of this ethical conflict. As I have suggested, the impossibility of fulfilling ethical demands is what produces a sort of “conscience,” an ethics of discomfort that is the internalization of the fact that demands are impossible to fulfill, the internalization of an imbalance. I would like to propose that this ethics of discomfort that characterizes the true ethical subject, is, deep down, also the ethics of the curator. It is precisely this discomfort, this imbalance, which paves the way towards taking action. In this way, a curator represents rather well the ethical task of constantly negotiating duty and responsibility, and the awareness that said negotiation is never satisfactory. An exhibition should then be a device for showing the impossibility of grouping and conciliating demands, a critical and mobile device that should always be in the form of an event, and never canonical; an interstitial, unrepeatable event. Because all exhibitions articulate and give shape to demands that are always defined by context and impossible to universalize, negotiation always takes place on site; it is always generated within the field of experience. Ethical experience is the political experience of dissent. And there can be no law to regulate it. For that reason, said ethics, which is capable of promoting action, is finally an anarchist ethics based on commitment to justice and infinite responsibility.