In dialogue with current and former fellows, as well as guest authors, Plural is evolving into a site for the emergence of textual forms that engage with, reflect on, and practice artistic research. These essays and conversations discuss theories, accompany research projects and examine frameworks of knowledge production. 

The first contribution, Research Towards Rupture by Season Butler (fellow 2022/23), is an essay that explores the tension between artistic research, aesthetic language, and actual social transformation:

Research Towards Rupture
– Season Butler –

To educate man [sic] to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act. (1)

– Frantz Fanon

***

Years ago, I taught a module called The Cultural Politics of Performance. In a conversation with my group of very astute, talented third-year undergraduates, we found ourselves discussing film, music and race. In the previous year, the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri made international headlines and, by then, the Black Lives Matter movement was a household name and familiar to everyone in the room. 

At one point in our conversation, a particularly bright student mentioned the recently released film Straight Outta Compton, a biopic of the ground-breaking hip-hop group NWA. The film charts the group’s rise to commercial success and cultural prominence within the context of (among other social ills) the vicious state violence to which the group’s members (as young Black men) were constantly subject to through the Los Angeles police and which their artwork challenged in distinctly confrontational terms. 

The student mentioned the film and then immediately said something to the effect of, “…and since it came out, relations between police and the Black community have improved tremendously.” 

I knew this wasn’t right, but I was immediately curious as to why that statement sounded so true. What’s the entirely non-stupid instinct at work here that makes this predicate so attractive that we, often, don’t even seek verification?

Of course, this story itself is a single anecdote and, therefore, is neither evidence of anything, nor part of any research process. But I think it sheds some light on what many of us hope will come from artwork with an awareness-raising agenda and how those hopes become assumptions which might actually constitute an impediment to real change. If the work appears to have been done because the aesthetic product is successful (on whatever terms we might apply)—that it moves us, is well-received, sustains its maker(s) materially etc.), how easy is it to forget (and neglect) the less-aesthetic processes that bring about social change?

NWA, Straight Outta Compton, album cover, 1988

NWA’s landmark anthem “Fuck Tha Police” is a gold record, honoured as one of Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 greatest songs of all time. Meanwhile, the eponymous “police”, the LAPD, has bloated monstrously from astronomical state investment and massive militarisation, both of which have seen significant increases since the song’s release in 1988. 

The artwork and its opponent have gone from strength to strength. Arms manufacturers and industry executives are wealthier than ever. Black men are still murdered while their murderers enjoy paid vacations. “Fuck Tha Police” makes me feel powerful when I listen to it. All of this is true.

***

When works of art are produced using (qualitative and/or quantitative) data which support the truth claims they contain and are presented in engaging, aesthetically accomplished ways, achieve popular circulation or critical recognition, or any combination of these factors, it is tempting to presume a pro-social impact on those who engage with the work. Even if it does positively affect popular behaviour among those who encounter it, does social transformation follow per se? And how useful is the attempt to look to a single work of art or artistic practice or movement as a direct cause of change, when history shows us that large-scale social change takes place in an amalgamation of conditions, of which any single artwork could ever only be a part. 

This line of thinking was triggered most recently when I was invited to address a group of practice-based PhD students at a training day on the topic of “Research-based Practice and Social Transformation”. The title of the event provided three elements to inform my exploration: research, art/aesthetic or creative practice and an emancipatory or revolutionary intention (as distinct from a reformist or an amelioratory one).

If I intend to start as an arts practitioner whose work is informed by research and who wants very much to see society transformed (and who would like to contribute to that transformation), whilst also harbouring very real doubts whether research or art can bear the weight of that proposition, what resources can I use as a practitioner? What can I salvage from what my doubt savages?

I want to note quickly that I know this is not new. In fact, it is (to me) frustratingly old. This revenant imperative to consider what art has the power to do in society, which returns as a perennial, amnesiac tick is itself, I think, worth considering. I’ve decided many times that, for me, art does not do what I sometimes wish it might. Nor do facts. Maybe compelling facts aesthetically presented? Alas. Yet my own fantasies of art, politics and progress return resilient to the challenges I subject them to out of a sense of political and academic rigour, so maybe they’re productive fantasies rather than humiliating ones?

***

W.E.B. Du Bois is widely considered one of the founding parents of modern sociology, receiving his doctorate in sociology from Harvard University in 1895 (he was indeed the first Black person to do so).

Du Bois was born in 1868 (three years after the official abolition of slavery in the US) and died in 1963, and so was a true child of the Reconstruction—the period following legal, largely plantation-based slavery, in which the Black population was faced with the challenges of integrating, with little to no organised government support, into a civil society built on their exclusion and dehumanization. It is in this context that Du Bois and his collaborators created The Exhibit of American Negroes to appear in the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. One of the most powerful elements is also some of the most obscure work in Du Bois’s oeuvre, namely the sixty handmade modernist infographics, data visualisations of the African-American condition in the wake of 400 years of chattel slavery.

W.E.B. Du Bois, Data visualisations for the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, Ink and watercolour, 710 × 560 mm, Library of Congress, 1900

🔗 W.E.B Du Bois‘ visionary infographics on Drawing Matter
🔗 W.E.B. Du Bois’s Modernist Data Visualizations of Black Life on HYPERALLERGIC

Alexandra Bell is a contemporary interdisciplinary artist with a background in journalism. Bell’s series Counternarratives provides a powerful and lucid critique of the mainstream liberal media and the ways in which, often under the guise of neutrality or even a commitment to civil rights, these media outlets advance reactionary agendas.

Alexandra Bell, A Teenager With Promise (Annotated), screenprint and archival pigment print on paper 45 x 35″ each; 45 x 105″ combined, 2019

🔗 Art That Forms New Narratives by Alexandra Bell on YouTube
🔗 Alexandra Bell’s Website

Turner Prize nominated collective Forensic Architecture employs “cutting-edge techniques in spatial and architectural analysis, open source investigation, digital modelling and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research, situated interviews and academic collaboration” (2) to create visual, graphic and textual representations of state and corporate violence globally. Founded by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman and working with a distinctly activist agenda, their work has been presented in fine art settings along with its deployment in official inquiries, courts and tribunals. 

Forensic Architecture, Houses Occupied by Settlers in Sheikh Jarrah: Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem, 2021

🔗 Forensic Architecture, Sheikh Jarrah: Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem

In the face of the clarity, beauty, transparency and veracity contained in these practices, all of this work points to the misguided fantasy harboured in the recurring question about what research-based practice can do and its potential impact in the world. Therefore, to me, the terms must be misguided. After all, if Du Bois’s modernist work had been “successful” in these terms, Bell’s exposé of the New York Times would not have been necessary and my cousins in Palestine, the Mediterranean, Namibia, the list goes frighteningly on, would not continue to be subject to the decades of human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, ecocide and state violence evinced by Forensic Architecture.

***

Perhaps aesthetic work doesn’t have to matter beyond the experience of appreciation, satisfaction or individual politicization. But somehow we return to the question of whether it does matter historically and on the scale of social transformation or the (possibly useful, possibly unsound) fantasy whether it could. 

One of the central sources I’m drawing from in the research for my second novel is Lauren Berlant’s 2011 treatise Cruel Optimism. As Berlant explains, “[a] relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Throughout the text, Berlant explores the ways in which people under neoliberalism have remained attached to fantasies of “the good life”—with its promises of “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality and durable intimacy”—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide any of this.

[T]he very pleasure of being inside a relation [has] become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.(3)

– Lauran Berlant

Les Films du Fleuve and Diaphana Distribution, Rosetta, film poster, 1999.

Among other sources, Berlant analyses the 1999 film Rosetta by directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes to illustrate their exposition of the eponymous doomed mode of attachment. With Rosetta, I had finally discovered a work of art that uses research to great artistic effect and which led directly to a policy change that put actual food in real people’s mouths. An aesthetic work based in qualitative and quantitative data, released to critical acclaim, contained artistic content so moving (see, in particular, the title character’s heartbreaking monologue where she hopes aloud that she will not crumble under the burden of her poverty) that the powers-that-be were provoked to change policy:

When some Belgians saw Rosetta they understood this scene to exemplify a national crisis, and the government promptly sponsored and passed a law called the “Rosetta Plan” that forced businesses to hire the young Belgians who, like Rosetta, were desperately struggling to gain a foothold of any sort in the increasingly global economy. Much contemporary theory defines citizenship as an amalgam of the legal and commercial activity of states and business and individual acts of participation and consumption, but Rosetta’s speech about falling through the cracks and the effects of the cinematic event remind that citizenship, in its formal and informal senses of social belonging, is also an affective state where attachments that matter take shape.

Except that it didn’t. Jean-Pierre Dardennes corrected this common misconception in a 2006 interview in the Guardian: „No, that law already existed, it just hadn’t been voted through yet. The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.” (Guardian 2006)

***

Making his case for political humility in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto (2022), China Miéville highlights the necessary “puncturing of any sense of a clear-eyed Elect teaching the masses. […] If the wager is correct that a party’s analysis is persuasive to people, this certainly isn’t because its intellectuals and activists are innately smarter. We all come to ideas for countless complex reasons.” As researchers and art-makers, rejecting a sense of exceptionalism that can easily tip into superiority is imperative if our work, in the studio or on the streets, is to play a part in a broader project of social transformation.

Social transformation does happen and reactionary and revolutionary movements alike deploy both the arts and research as a part of their political projects. While Trump and his ilk have provided us with  a fantastic figure for mockery, we should not imagine that good taste, care for the environment, a willingness to learn from history and a season ticket to our local underground performance space aren’t also in the possession of our political enemies. As Brecht put it in 1949, “We know that the barbarians have their art. Let us create another.”

***

Art workers know intimately (and usually appreciate immensely) the often unseen elements indispensable to their work: the copy editor whose name appears nowhere on the book she rendered readable; the mentors who steer gently and roughly; the grips and assistants, interns, caterers; the installers and technicians; the physiotherapists—the list goes on. And this work, imbued as it may be with the revolutionary intentions of its author, can only be part of the larger labor of rupture and world-making.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56) was catalysed by a legendary performance—Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat—and is considered a foundational moment in the wider movement to end racial segregation in the United States. But it was not the performance, the event, the spectacle that caused the change. The bus company could not survive the financial stress of the boycott, which lasted 381 days before the performance’s demand was met. Parks is the one we remember, but let’s think also of the hundreds of volunteers who organised the carpools, without which the boycott could never have been maintained. Let’s remember that other work needs doing, too. Organising is always the un-glamorous binding agent of the radical rupture. 

***

Like it or not, we are paradigms of our own values, advertisements of our own ethics […] What are we personally willing to sacrifice, give up for the ‘public good’? What gestures of reparation are we personally willing to make? What risky, unfashionable research are we willing to undertake? (4)

– Toni Morrison 

As Referenced

(1) Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967)
(2) Forensic Architecture. “Agency.” Forensic Architecture. Accessed November 20, 2023.
(3) Lauran Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011
(4) Toni Morrison, „How can values be taught in the University?”, in: Michigan Quarterly Review, 40, Nr. 2 (Spring 2001), S.273-278. (2002)