Nelson - The art of cruelty: a reckoning

ALSO BY M AGGIE N ELSON

Bluets

Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions

The Red Parts: A Memoir

Jane: A Murder

Something Bright, Then Holes

The Latest Winter

Shiner

The Art
of Cruelty

A R ECKONING

Maggie Nelson

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright 2011 by Maggie Nelson

All rights reserved

First printed as a Norton paperback 2012

Lustmord by Jenny Holzer. Copyright 2010 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected
Poems: Volume II, 19391962 . Copyright 1944 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. The Ivy Crown by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 19391962 . Copyright 1953 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Her Beckett from Decreation by Anne Carson. Copyright 2005 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Brief excerpts from various Sylvia Plath poems from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes. Copyright 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial material copyright 1981 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers (from Getting There, Fever 103, Elm, Tulips, The Surgeon at 2 a.m., Lesbos, Three Women, Little Fugue, The Detective, Lady Lazarus, Daddy, The Rabbit Catcher, The Jailer, Event, Poem for a Birthday, The Moon and the Yew Tree). Brief excerpts from Ariel and Years from Ariel: Poems by Sylvia Plath . Copyright 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966 by Ted Hughes. Foreword by Robert Lowell. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Faber and Faber, Ltd.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nelson, Maggie, 1973

The art of cruelty : a reckoning / Maggie Nelson. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-393-07215-0 (hardcover)

1. Cruelty in art. 2. ArtMoral and ethical aspects. I. Title. II. Title: Reckoning.

N8217.C792N45 2011

700'.453dc22

2011001828

ISBN 978-0-393-34314-4 pbk.

eISBN 978-0-393-08223-4

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

For Annie Dillard, who advises otherwise.

Contents

STYLES OF IMPRISONMENT

O NE SHOULD open ones eyes and take a new look at cruelty, Friedrich Nietzsche exhorted in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), in which Nietzsche famously attempts to lay waste to traditional notions of morality, especially those associated with Christianity. Nietzsche hoped that, in catapulting beyond the poles of good and evil, kindness and cruelty, the true energy and strength of mankind would be liberated: in art as in life, this energywhich Nietzsche termed our will to powerwould pour forth; it would dance; it would shine.

The next centurywith its unthinkable wars, premeditated and spontaneous genocides, rapacious exploitation of resources, environmental catastrophes, and systemic injustices of all kindsprovided ample opportunity to take this new look. Many of the centurys art movements (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Viennese Actionism, the Black Arts Movement, and so on) made complicated contributions to this conversation, in that many artists associated with them hoped to mount a forceful protest against such cruelties, while they also derived much of their inspiration, rhetoric, and strategy from a bellicose avant-garde tradition with thinkers such as Nietzsche at its root. To complicate matters further, the twentieth century brought an explosion in the human capacity to create and circulate images, via technological inventions such as film, television, Internet, digital photography, and countless other means. Given brutalitys particularly fraught relationship with representation, twentieth-century art that concerned itself with its depiction or activation often found itself in turbulent ethical and aesthetic waters.

By now, it is something of a commonplace to say that twentieth- century art movements were veritably obsessed with diagnosing injustice and alienation, and prescribing various shock and awe treatments to cure us of thema method Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke usefully, if revoltingly, described in a 2007 interview as raping the viewer into independence. (Art critic Grant Kester has described this approach more gently, calling it the orthopedic aesthetic.) In short, the idea is that theres something wrong with us, from the get-gobe it the mark of original sin (or, conversely, as Nietzsche would have it, adherence to the slave morality of Christianity), alienation from our labor, a fatal rift with Nature, being lost in a forest of simulations, being deformed by systems such as capitalism and patriarchy, Westernization, not enough Westernization, or simply an epistemological lack, as Kester has put itthat requires forceful (i.e., orthopedic) intervention to correct.

This premise is so ubiquitous that it allows phony wagers such as Hanekes to go largely unchallenged, in both artistic and political arenas. It isnt that many serious thinkers loudly profess to believe in them anymore, but rather that the habits of thought which have accrued around them remain largely intact, even when their core has been roundly disavowed. As anarchist anthropologist David Graeber puts it in an excellent short essay, The Twilight of Vanguardism, Revolutionary thinkers have been declaring the age of vanguardism over for most of a century now. Outside a handful of tiny sectarian groups, its almost impossible to find radical intellectuals who seriously believe that their role should be to determine the correct historical analysis of the world situation, so as to lead the masses along in the one true revolutionary direction. But (rather like the idea of progress, to which its obviously connected), it seems much easier to renounce the principle than to shake the accompanying habits of thought. This book attempts such a shaking.

There are, of course, major trends in contemporary art that have set themselves explicitly apart from the vanguardist, shock-and-awe strategies just described. Indeed, while writing, I have been often haunted by the fact that much, if not most of the art surrounding me at present follows a different trajectory altogetherone that goes by the name of relational aesthetics (or conversational art, or social practice, or community-based art, or littoral art, or as Kesterone of this works most articulate championsprefers, dialogical art). For Kester and others, these out-of-the-gallery projects, typically based on community engagement and interactive dialogue, offer the freshest, most viable response to what Kester calls the most pressing questions facing us in the twentieth century: How do we reduce the violence and hatred that have so often marked human social interactions? How do we, in short, lead a non-fascist life? There is much to admire here, as well as much to question. But in the end, such projects remain outside this books purview, if only for the simple reason that they are most always predicated on the desire to lessen the amount of cruelty and miscommunication in the world, rather than to explore or express it.