woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131Sam Durant has spent his professional life making art that seeks to empathize with others. He makes art that engages the problematic narratives of American social history. Nevertheless his attempt to address \u201cthe difficult histories of the racial dimension of the criminal justice system in the United States\u201d was not successful in May 2017 when the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota attempted to install Scaffold <\/em>(2012) as part of their sculpture garden.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Sam Durant, \u201cArtist Statement Regarding Scaffold at the Walker Art Center.\u201d Artist Website, May 29, 2017, www.samdurant.com. Accessed September 26, 2018.<\/span> One of the seven historic gallows that the artist reproduced for this piece was the one built to execute thirty-eight Sioux people on December 26, 1862 in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Durant\u2019s intention to \u201ccreate a learning space for people like me, white people\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> was noble enough, but the work of art instead caused profound offence to the native Dakota people who failed to see or understand the redemptive possibilities in having the site of a traumatic cultural injustice become leisure space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bertolt Brecht deeply engaged with this dilemma as he regarded the concept of aesthetic empathy or Einf\u00fchlung with scepticism. As an eyewitness to the mass demonstrations and theatrical nationalism of Nazism, he rejected what he saw as people\u2019s over-\u00adidentification and uncritical acceptance of its visual culture. Recognizing the ability of individuals and governments to manipulate aesthetic empathy, he proposed instead a counter-theory of Verfremdung, or estrangement.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - See Juliet Koss, \u201cOn the Limits of Empathy,\u201d Art Bulletin 88:1 (March 2006): 139\u200a\u2014\u200a157.<\/span> As Brecht saw it, critical distance was necessary for the viewer to evaluate a work without bias. By no means can we rely on aesthetic empathy as a panacea for what ails human culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Albert Einstein, who witnessed the same social perversions as Brecht, claimed, \u201cAll religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man\u2019s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom\u2026 They seek to fulfill this great task by spreading moral and cultural understanding, renouncing the use of brute force.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Albert Einstein, \u201cMoral Decay\u201d (1937), Out of My Later Years (Open Road Media, 2011).<\/span> He still believed, in other words, that the pursuit of knowledge is what raises us up toward a higher state of being. Yet when the war was done and the horrors of the war became clear through photographs, such utopian aspirations for art had been incinerated.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Here I refer to Theodor Adorno\u2019s famous declaration in Prisms: \u201cTo write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.\u201d (Boston: MIT Press, 1983), 34.<\/span> Our complex emotional and individual responses to history and its images cannot always be predicted or controlled and they are not necessarily uplifting or enriching. For every Guernica that describes brute force and murder, there is a Death of Marat<\/em> (1793) that apotheosizes a mass murderer and his mission to purify society. Art is capable of moving us, but whether it does so for good or for evil is another more complicated question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Empathy is but one salient feature of a larger field of aesthetic intelligence that both shapes and is shaped by a society\u2019s moral compass.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, Barbara Kruger\u2019s assertion that \u201cempathy can change the world\u201d is no more discerning than Michael Jackson\u2019s call to \u201cheal the world.\u201d Both are admirable yet profoundly simplistic sound bites that fail to acknowledge or permit the real complexity of human experience, action, and reaction. If art still has an ennobling purpose, then it cannot fall back on trite jingles or tag lines. It must participate in the philosophical taking up of arms against the sea of capitalist marketing slogans by embracing the complexity and contradiction inherent to itself as an extension of the architecture of human beings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Empathy suggests a comforting kind of universalism that appeals to our socially democratic values, but this humanist lens can also threaten to obscure the artwork\u2019s operation within politically, economically, and technologically motivated systems of production. For example Sam Durant expected his work to inspire empathy because he assumed the politics of his viewing position were universal. Similarly the offer by Jeff Koons to donate Bouquet of Tulips (2016) to the city of Paris in commemoration of the 2015 Paris attacks has been received with scepticism by many French intellectuals who insist this is merely opportunistic self-promotion disguised as empathy. In her dystopian reading of Donald Judd\u2019s Minimalism, Anna Chave argues that its \u201cblank face\u201d\u2026 \u201cmay come into focus as the face of capital, the face of authority, the face of the father.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Anna Chave, \u201cMinimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,\u201d Arts Magazine 64 (January 1990): 110.<\/span> Money and markets make their own demands of art, in other words, demands that are often contrary to moral imperatives. With whom do we empathize, then? Even if we set aside the question of whether we can empathize with a square, a complex discussion surrounding \u201cEmpathy and Abstraction\u201d that was inaugurated by Wilhelm Worringer in his essay of 1908, it is still difficult to establish an appropriate emotional response to works of figurative art. Does empathy help us grapple with the conceptual acrobatics of Marcel Duchamp\u2019s Fountain<\/em> (1917), Piero Manzoni\u2019s Artist\u2019s Shit <\/em>(1961), or the solid gold toilet that Maurizio Cattelan installed in the Guggenheim and entitled America<\/em> (2016)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neither the ideal viewer, nor the ideal artist exists. Art does not exist in a utopian vacuum.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In the face of capitalist symbols and artist excrement, empathy may not be possible or desirable. Empathy for the victims of Guernica or for Marat, or for thirty-eight hanged Sioux, are not the same, but a viewer may not have the necessary historical context to understand this. Empathy is not always a viable means to leap the chasm that separates us in time, culture, and social conscience from the ancients who constructed the Ara Pacis Augustae in celebration of a ruthless dictator\u2019s conquests, or the nineteenth-century Americans who built monuments in honour of Andrew Jackson, the man responsible for the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Logic and the facts of history, rather than psychology or emotion, are more useful paradigms within which to discuss and accept such images as part of history.\nNot only is art a product of our social conscience, it is read and understood through the social conscience of the viewer. Neither the ideal viewer, nor the ideal artist exists. Art does not exist in a utopian vacuum. Enduring art should possess something of the philosophical, forcing us into uncomfortable, confusing, and, at times, belligerent viewing positions. Empathy is but one salient feature of a larger field of aesthetic intelligence that both shapes and is shaped by a society\u2019s moral compass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feelings are not facts. In this post-structural, post-human, and dangerously post-truth era, emotions and images are being ever more readily manipulated in the public sphere and there is a tendency to permit the governance of society on the basis of belief, feeling, or empathetic response. Intellectuals, among them the great artists of our age, have a responsibility to resist reductionism and guard against understanding images purely through emotive response by emphasizing contradiction, complexity, and, above all, context. We are not relieved of the burden of empathy: I loathe the idea that we have become a post-empathy era as well. But empathy must be carefully cultivated alongside the facts of history. What the Scaffold incident demonstrates is that feelings matter, but to cultivate empathy requires an open conversation about history and historiography, about how we determine the factual ground for our sometimes conflicting visions of the past<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n