Generation in Negation

Refusal seems to fit into a liminal space in terms of its role in art. For example, if a collective refuses to participate in Manifesta because the host country’s government has taken actions the collective disagrees with, is that decision part of an artistic practice, or is it motivated by personal reasons within the members of the group? Are those two things separate, or must they inevitably form part of the same impulse?

The readings focused primarily on examples of artists refusing to participate in shows and biennials, often due to politically motivated reasons that tie into the cohesion of collective practice. Withdrawal from a biennial such as the Whitney Biennial works within the context of an institution not just by refusing to participate, but by even refusing to acknowledge the power-structure and expected social-structure paradigms within the context of the institution. Refusal is like the Whitney saying, you can’t withdraw, but the artist saying there’s no such thing as can’t because she rejects those power dynamics and social schema.

How does that refusal work outside of the context of the institution, and within the context of critique or the art historical canon? For example: refusal to acknowledge the “obsolescence” of a medium; refusal to participate in a popular practice or dialogue; refusal to accept the validity of certain approaches (such as when Isabelle Graw “vehemently [rejects] the claims that mark making by itself harbors any potential” during a 2010 conversation with Achim Hochdörfer). In these examples, refusal does not just include refusing to participate within a discrete context of social-power-structures, but refusal to participate within a much larger ongoing discussion—refusal even to participate in critical narrative.

At what point, then, is the negation of refusal generative? The Dadaists refused to go to war when many of them dodged the World War I draft or deserted; they rejected painting and other art forms traditionally associated with nationalistic propaganda; they even refused to follow reason in their work. These refusals generated art through the resulting chaos, through the new means they needed to find to make work.  Similarly, female painters such as Elizabeth Murray heard 1970s New York critics say that painting was dead; Murray’s reaction was to refuse this analysis and to paint anyway. In both of these cases, refusal of critical or material narrative combines with political and artistic refusal to form something generative.

Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919, collage, image courtesy of Wikipedia

Elizabeth Murray, Children Meeting, 1978, oil on canvas, image courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art