Rebellion without a goal: on the work of Sharon Hayes

Doug Ashford
In a culture of increasingly managed expression it is up
to artists to point out what it means to speak publicly.
—Sharon Hayes1
Looking again at the work of Sharon Hayes I find myself able
to overcome a not uncommon paralysis amongst the creative
class: the hesitancy to discuss directly what it means for
us to have a public voice. By “public voice” I mean an urgent
utterance in front of others that describes what it means
to be artist in a time that has either distorted or eliminated
the social agency of a large part of population of the earth.
I have argued for some time now that the embodiment
of agency is a form of aesthetics—something that art does
and has always done. In other words, questioning power is
beautiful, and in such questioning is a “making visible” of things
not seen before. By making things visible artists are therefore
engineers of the right to visibility, the right to be seen and
heard—a right that is increasingly in danger for all groups in
repressive economies and times of war. Sharon Hayes, in her
work “After Before”, has made something that encourages
me to try to find the re-birth of public practices in aesthetic
moments of participatory questioning.
One of the greatest questioners of participation that
I know is Jimmie Durham. He once wrote about how proud he
was of the mammals—how varied and adaptive we have
become in relation to other types of creatures.2 This is to say
that humans, as members of the group “mammals,” have sisters
and brothers with bodies that can fly as bats, dig tunnels as
moles, swim like otters or climb like monkeys. I am encouraged
by his remark because I see the imagined bodies of animals art production so dominated by the conditions of war economy.
Not to be species arrogant—but if artists are mammals they are
working in an entrepreneurial world run by reptiles. If things get
worse mammals might get even better: then in this world artists
might get even better. These imagined bodies cause possibilities
for re-thinking social systems, for changing political will—
for becoming artistically enlarged.
In her video installation After Before, Hayes represents
political will through the multi-channel video representations
of interviews and interviewing, a will that in the reptilian
media is represented in the most reductive fashion, as
a “yes/no” poll or simple pie chart. In After Before, social
will becomes a series of overlapping quotations, something
invented. Through the duration of the work and by moving
through the exhibition room, the viewer finds definitions of
audience and speaker complicated and transformed in their
representation. The perceived conditions for public speech
become part of the architectural spaces and institutional
orders we accept from an existing social hierarchy. In a way
then all the terms of democratic investment that I may
have—audiences, publics, citizenry—are strangely shifted
out of the field of video document (what I see and hear)
and into a receptive part of an interpretation chain of events.
What they say is part of me as a viewer—what I see is part
of them as speakers. In this way, groups of people and
their opinions have become more than the subject of the
artwork: they are the medium of the work. So the goal
of rebellion is no longer a subject of the work—it is ignorable
for a moment so the viewer can register other questions
about public address.
The institutional management of expression (more
insidious than outright censorship, more directed than taste
culture) is an imaginary space of repression. After Before
shows the passage of time through a representation of time’s
recording, otherwise known as history. Modern history we can
see as a product of the struggle for political representation of direct address. I have a book of these addresses—
of speeches, manifestos and petitions here in my hand—
and they move me still, whether known and heard often as
in “I have a dream…” to unknown as in “Most of us grew
up thinking that the US was a strong and humble nation…”3
But Hayes’s work makes me wonder to a certain extent
if such address, as an effect, might not just be a kind of
ongoing fantasy. This critical wonder seems key to reinventing
participatory events. After Before allows an audience to stand
just to the side of the political position of address: to see
it askew. And as many of us know who have been at the side
of others—here one can see the profile of the language
of participation itself.
Once imaginary bodies have rewritten the language
of participation, artists like Hayes can take it a step further:
recasting the actual physical sites of rebellion into unoccupied
places. We know from mass protests the way language fails us
in public! We chant “the people united will never be defeated,”
repeated over and over again, knowing all the time that the
people on aspects of our is enfranchisement have always been
united, and that the people, in the majority at least, have always
been defeated.
To me, the question has been: could a rebellion without
a goal (aesthetics) change the terms of our involvement in
the world (politics)? Gurus of the “experience economy,” for
who places are products that can be expended after branding,
have re-defined the spectacle of social flexibility, cultural
difference and outlaw personae. Starbucks is now presented
to us as a countercultural laboratory, and artists are listed
as resources of urban renewal. These days our public utterances,
our address to others as members of a group—
artists, humans, and mammals, whatever—are often used
to adjust character of an increasingly managed subjection.
If the symbolic and performative function of art works help
create such conditions than they also can lead to their undoing.
Like marchers chanting in the street we already know
the failures we describe. It has been there in public art in the way in which official agencies can never really make anything
truly festive, in community organizing not being able to show
anything truly inclusive. Then there is the way we pretend
that these moments of collectivity and agency do work in order
to feel that there is some way to participate. This pretension
is a beautiful thing. It is a kind of performance that suspends
the status quo. It is both intimate and spectacular and creates
affinity where it has not before. Rebellion without a goal is
an artwork; rebellion without a goal shows that all art is public.

1. Sharon Hayes, interview with the author,
November 12, 2005, as part of the Performa
Interviews: Art Radio, www.wps1.org
2. Durham, Jimmie, Between the Furniture
and the Building (Between a Rock and
a Hard Place), Verlag Der Buchhandlung
Walther König, Köln and Kunstverein
München, 1998.)
3. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Speeches
in Washington, DC in 1964 and 1965,
published in Potter, Paul, The Sixties
Papers, Praeger, 1984, pp. 218–26.

From Sharon Hayes: After Before – in the near future