We have been mulling over the following sentence from the call for papers of the “Democratising Classics” panel:
Who was and is tasked with the translation of ancient works, with teaching others about classical antiquity, and with shaping the future of the subject?
While there is a great deal to unpack here, today we want to spend some time considering the first few words (“who was and is tasked”) as part of a somewhat simplistic issue at the heart of our project for the panel called “Our Ancient Group Material”. The joining of past (“was”) and present (“is”) in the question about who gets to translate (and here the organizers are thinking beyond linguistic translation, but also more general interpretive and cultural translation), teach and determined the future shape of the subject (“Classics”) implies that we can compare and contrast historical and contemporary approaches to a shared issue.
For us, we are interested in understanding the efficacy of transposing a collective art project from 1988-1989 (Group Material’s Democracy) onto a panel discussion of Classicists in 2018 (“Democratising Classics”) with their shared issue of democracy at the center.
Of course we could stick to the past by scouring through lists of Classics conferences from the late-eighties looking for some reflection of the field that could chime with the same debates swirling around democratic education, politics, cultural participation and the AIDS crisis. However, another approach could be to see how the debates at the heart of Group Material’s investigation into the topic of democracy are still very much alive today and, by extension, are part of any attempt to understand or enact a democratisation of the discipline of Classics.
While we will be addressing such long-standing debates directly in future posts, today we want to look to how the work of another artist, both in her work in the 1980s and today, engages with a continuous attention to the limits of democratic ideals, specifically within a US context, but also expanding to a global stage given the far-reaching impact of neoliberalism instituted by Reagan and Thatcher.
Immediately following Group Material’s Democracy project at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, Martha Rosler developed If You Lived Here a project following the same format of exhibitions and town hall meetings about homelessness and the failure of the Reagan administration to support low-income housing. (Both projects have been recently the focus of Adair Rounthwaite’s 2017 book Asking the Audience).
In her preface to both books from the 1988-1989 season of exhibitions at Dia, Yvonne Rainer reacts to a comment about ideas of value in art with the phrase “The cream always rises to the top” (sound familiar, classicists?) Rainer notes how:
The Group Material and Rosler projects are a vivid demonstration of how art exhibition can constitute a radically different approach, one that can offer not only a diversity of objects but can contextualize a social field in and from which the objects are produced and derive their meaning. In other words, art exhibition does not have to separate, or isolate, its objects from the conditions in and under which those objects have been produced. Most art exhibition obscures these conditions under the smoke screen of “quality,” or the implicitly superior taste involved with selection.
This attention to how certain methods of art exhibition relies on a consensus of “quality”, in contrast to uncovering this ideological framework by Group Material and Rosler, is a process already at work in one of Rosler’s earlier performance pieces called Watchwords of the Eighties, presented at Documenta 7, in Kassel, Germany in 1982, and in various venues in the United States and Canada. Here is a brief description of the project:
A silhouetted figure of ambiguous identity, in street gear and carrying a huge ghetto blaster, scrawls messages of resistance on a wall with projected slides of Reagan and on a map of Latin America. Press cuttings, budget graphics and articles on the horrors perpetrated in Central America are intervened by the artist, while she raps to music commenting on these subjects.
Rosler produced a statement about this performance (which you can read in full below), in which we were struck by how her lists of social gains that the Right was sweeping away and the place of a critical art in addressing them, were still in play to this day. The statement ends with a direct address to the audience of her work as ‘white-collar’ professionals, asking if they are happy with the watchwords of the eighties (QUALITY and ELEGANCE) over more humane values? While we may reject “Elegance” as a helpful category for describing the field of classics in contemporary culture (although the art world has its clear alignments with ostentatious displays of wealth and such displays often have a classical sculpture or two lurking around), this notion of “Quality” still holds sway, and it is an idea that underpins the questions of the “Democratising Classics” project. To return to the sentence from the call for papers, when asking:
Who was and is tasked with the translation of ancient works, with teaching others about classical antiquity, and with shaping the future of the subject?
There looms the issue of quality – who is responsible for translating ancient texts, teaching them and forging the future of the discipline, but classicists themselves, as guarantors of quality? Are classicists really willing to let their belief in the ‘cream’ of their discipline be questioned by ceding responsibility of its transmission to others (e.g. writers, artists etc), possibly those who are not themselves trained classicists and who don’t know Greek and Latin? What is to gain for classicists in adopting a model of display (of exhibition) that aligns more with Group Material and Rosler’s work than that of the academic panel?
Our response lies in how the model of exhibition that brings both the objects of creation and study and their conditions for production together, is also the model that can bridge the historical and contemporary moments. Martha Rosler is an artist who is incredibly sensitive to the shifts in the political and cultural landscape that allow her work from the past to align with present debates. For example, the original 1982 performance was part of the Agit Prop Performance Art Series at Mercier Union in Toronto (for info, go here). At the same time, Rosler took part in the 2015-16 exhibition Agitprop! at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Closer to home, Rosler reinstalled and expanded If You Lived Here at the New York gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nashe in the summer of 2016 under the title If you can’t afford to live here, mo-o-ve!!”. Amid the closing stages of the US election, Rosler included a painting of Donald Trump by Andrew Castrucci painted in 1986, when he was just a reckless developer buying up large areas of New York real estate.
We can compare this historical portrait with Rosler’s own montage of Trump (for Artforum) following his election called POINT & SHOOT, a mourning thought (though I am more enraged than in mourning):
So, for participants in the panel “Democratising Classics”, where do you place your own contemporary work as classicists (and any claims to the democratization of your discipline) in relation to Rosler’s ongoing projects? (You can start by reading her statement for Watchwords of the Eighties below and thinking about your own current work). At the same time, to Martha Rosler, we ask how would she update or change the statement to reflect the present conditions under Trump?
This is a work of the present: about the Right’s taking power in the United States, marking a change in the world order having enormous though varying effects on people’s lives virtually everywhere. The weight of shored-up privilege of an ever-smaller U.S. elite will fall most heavily on the “Third World” and on the poorest at home — but we all will feel it.
It seems particularly important now for a critical art to take shape, now that irrationalism is being deployed to regain control over national life and class divisions are being accentuated. New regimes promise to make everything right by sweeping away what came before, and the Rightist regime that swept in on a minority of possible votes is attempting to sweep away the social gains of the sixties, fought for and won inch by inch:
- of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, native Americans and other national minorities
- of women of gays and lesbians
- of working people
- of students and young people
- of the poor, the elderly, the socially and physically handicapped, including veterans
- of left intellectuals and professionals
- of community activists of antiwar, antimilitarist, and anti nuclear activists
- of artists and others doing cultural work
- for citizenship rights and personal rights, for self-control and privacy
- for reasonable pay, job security, and occupational health and safety
- for corporate accountability and the valuing of people over profits
- for good and secure housing and enough food to eat for freedom of expression and
- for good and humane education for ecologically sound and humanly safe practices
- for buyers’ protections
- for a movement away from war and away from support for repressive governments
In the mid-70’s Cold War academician Samual P. Huntington announced that the United States was suffering from TOO MUCH DEMOCRACY. On the cusp of the 80’s people are giving up their democratic rights under pressure of economic warfare. You white collar, professional, and business people constituting most of our audience, reconsider your allegiances! Are you satisfied to accept the new watchwords
QUALITY (= elite, expensive, conservative cultural products) and
ELEGANCE (= unblushing ostentation for the limousine class)
over your own more humane values, such as tolerance and compassion, or a just and dignified life? On the cusp of the 80’s, the Cold War dark ages will not be reimposed without enormous cost.
For the full text, go here.