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<\/strong>White Paper: The Land<\/em>, installation views, Casco Art Institute, Utrecht, 2015.
Photos : Niels Moolenaar, courtesy of the artist & Laveronica arte contemporanea, Modica<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The twentieth-century avant-garde prompted critical questionings of art and the artist\u2019s position in society by attempting to erase the boundary between art and life. To abolish art as a subsection of society meant that artists held, to varying degrees, not only the radical positions of destroying museums and rejecting the artwork as such (positions about art in general), but also diverse stances on the conditions that gave rise to cultural hierarchies and common understandings about the social role of art (positions about society at large). Walter Benjamin\u2019s conception of the \u201cauthor as producer\u201d and his further enthusiasm for the anti-fascist, democratic potential of mechanical reproduction summarizes well the philosophical mission that many an avant-gardist had: to re-functionalize, per his reference to Bertolt Brecht\u2019s attempt to give new meaning to theatre itself,4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Functional transformation\u201d in the English translation. Walter Benjamin, \u201cThe Author as Producer,\u201d in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931\u20131934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).<\/span> the field of art entirely. Benjamin\u2019s term serves well to delineate the basic relationship between the aesthetic and the political articulated by acts of appropriation, in the sense that any appropriation reorganizes meanings and exerts pressure upon the context in which it is made, beginning with that of art itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The vanguardist drive to shift the purpose of art was perhaps best theorized by the SI, which developed and utilized the technique of d\u00e9tournement for the purpose of extracting the ideological import of objects in capitalism in order to use the object (ideological form) against the logic that produced it. According to the SI, capitalism constantly appropriated the new in favour of the old, and so the most effective way to fight against it was to mobilize its own images\u200a\u2014\u200ato appropriate the old in favour of the (truly) new. As a form of appropriation, d\u00e9tournement turns the image into a site of social struggle; in other words, it reveals that the core problem of appropriation is not authorship or art practices, but social relationships. One of the most important social relationships is property, the significance of which is thus modified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is fruitful to distinguish between appropriation and expropriation as art practices because the question of property is one of the primary elements of the relationship between aesthetics and politics that each practice configures.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n This significance of property has varied across modernity, from the Lockean distinction implied in Husni-Bey\u2019s White Paper series, to the ways in which nineteenth-century socialist and anarchist thinkers defined appropriation and expropriation. Whereas in current, legal terms, expropriation means the privation of a property in exchange for a compensation, for Karl Marx (explicitly) and Peter Kropotkin (implicitly), to give just two examples, it is \u201cappropriation minus the equality in all actual exchange relationships. Expropriation thus meant theft of the title to property.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, \u201cThe Expropriation of Nature,\u201d Monthly Review, vol. 69, no. 10 (March 2018): https:\/\/monthlyreview.org\/2018\/03\/01\/the-expropriation-of-nature\/.<\/span> In Marx\u2019s view, expropriation was key to understanding primary accumulation, and it represented the foundation of the alienation of workers from the land as well as the lack of reciprocity with which capitalism exploited nature. Property, here, is neither a virtuous supersession of the natural state (Locke) nor a vicious regression from it (Jean-Jacques Rousseau): it is a neutral social relationship that can be codified and employed for purposes of oppression or liberation. Capitalism\u2019s mode of appropriating nature produces capitalist private property, but it is in its negation through socialist appropriation that a new, socialized property is born, inverting the relationship so that if we once \u201chad the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers\u2026 we [now] have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1867-c1\/ch32.htm.<\/span> This reversal, deep at the heart of d\u00e9tournement, is also the way in which Kropotkin conceives of anarchist expropriation, put simply, as the way to take back the product of anyone\u2019s work that has been appropriated by someone else.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47. D\u00e9tournement is not only a reversal, in the sense that it treats the private property of a spectacular image as something to be both socialized (anyone can do it, and given the erasure of traditional authorship, it is, in the end, anonymized and collective) and abolished (everyone, without distinction, has a right to the image, without needing that right to be protected by the collective or the state). It is meant to take and give something perverted in return, inasmuch as it would be uncannily recognizable to the logic that produced what has been taken.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Following this line of thought, appropriation, in contrast, does give something back. The basic rearrangement of meanings that it produces already sets any property up for further reconfiguration and reabsorption into the context of origin. This is the case of what certain art historians have reductively framed as \u201cappropriation art,\u201d and it is what Kenneth Goldsmith intended when, from a literary perspective, he promoted appropriation as a path to further dissolving authorship and surrealistically modifying contexts by introducing new and fragmented associations of objects and texts. Appropriation as a straightforward practice does not treat property differently in any significant way, and it thus retains the ambivalence with which the nineteenth-century thinkers characterized it. That does not imply, however, that it doesn\u2019t configure a relationship between aesthetics and politics; rather, its articulation serves different purposes. Still, it is significant that the effects of appropriation as conducted by contemporary artists have for the most part been absorbed (perhaps reappropriated) by the art world. The projects that veer closer to expropriation, like White Paper, which attempts to enable the reconfiguration of the social contract, do not solely reintroduce objects or cultural elements into a context in order to send a wave of fragmented meanings that can be contained by art\u2019s institutional framework. They provoke an antagonism between the spectator and something else; in the case of Husni-Bey, property is subjected to a process in which the spectator or reader re-evaluates the role of the state in protecting and promoting the needs of humans. In Husni-Bey\u2019s The Land (the first work in the White Paper series) informal settlements in Cairo are threatened by privately funded urban development enterprises, showcasing the basis of a problem that in The Law (the second work in the series) is intervened in by means of collective political discussion. The resulting object, a legal document titled \u201cConvention on the Use of Space,\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - See the \u201cConvention on the Use of Space\u201d website: www.useofspaceconvention.org\/.<\/span> isn\u2019t meant to be housed in an art institution but to be used by communities to redefine property use and the various forms of occupation that have arisen from essential breaches in social contracts (thus arguing that their illegality is only a function of the law\u2019s wrongful protection of exchange-value over use-value). The limits between state and private property are put to the test by referring to \u201cspace\u201d and thus criticizing the reductive approach that signifies property solely as real estate. It is a discussion that potentially reaches the (Enlightenment, contractual) foundations of society itself, organized by people whose relationship with property will tend towards taking it back from those who own it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is fruitful to distinguish between appropriation and expropriation as art practices because the question of property is one of the primary elements of the relationship between aesthetics and politics that each practice configures. In all instances a property is violated, but its repurposing springs from implicit, and sometimes explicit, views about what property is for and what kinds of property there should be. Cases such as Husni-Bey\u2019s White Paper series are useful when talking about \u201cexpropriation art,\u201d in the sense that questions of property are as relevant as, or even more important than, traditional questions concerning authorship and the institutional framework of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Traduit de l\u2019anglais par Sophie Chisogne<\/p>\n\n\n