The Dialogics of Contemporary Art: Painting Politics

Abstract

Introduction

"Within the arena of almost every utterance, an intense interaction and struggle between one’s own and another’s word is being waged, a process in which they oppose or dialogically interanimate each other" —Bakhtin 1984, 354

It is through Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘interanimating dialogics,’ the affective and agonistic play at work in speaking and listening, in reading and writing, that this book about painting can be best understood. The dialogic process is not restricted to utterance and word, here, readers will also find interanimation in and between painting practices. For Bakhtin, individuals, when in dialogue, “participate with their eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit” and with their bodies and deeds. The entire self is invested in discourse, “and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium” (293).

Bahktin’s notion of the dialogical in language coheres with the significance of pluralism in action found in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958). Pluralism, central to Arendt’s theory, encapsulates the idea that everyone is different and unique and that differences ought to be shared, embraced, and celebrated. The plurality displayed in human political action arises from the fact that “nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (1958, 8). From identification of the significance of difference, Arendt develops a political theory of action where people engage in active citizenship to create and recreate new institutions for democratic participation. Arendtian political action begins with the (creative) moment where people step forward and show themselves in public as they share ideas in dialogue with other people. This moment enacts a person’s ‘political coming into being’ and answers the question: “Who are you?” (178). It is through action in words and deeds that “[people] show who they are, reveal actively their unique…identities” (179). This is particularly important for artists and authors in this volume, many of whom connect with identities that range from hard-edged to fluid, situated to nomadic, clearly delineated to blurred. This diversity is important because the book does not propose a topdown, univocal argument but instead reflects, and is open to, a plurality of voices and perspectives. If painting is often generalised as a domain of inwardness and subjectivity, politics is often reduced to an operation of structures ‘out there’ in the public world. This book examines what happens when ‘inwardness’ and ‘outwardness’ become continuous.

There are also other generalisations about painting: that it is only about formal concerns and technique, or aesthetics and emotional expression, something to be protected from the cut and thrust of politics. Yet artists have always ‘abstracted from’ or distilled aspects of their social and political milieu. Most of the artists in this volume do this in different ways, using various forms of abstraction, figuration, phenomenology, and affect. Artists logically and non-logically, with imagination and material exploration, expand, critique, and even reject what is meant by the political. This book suggests that the very relationship between art and politics must be thought of anew through the interanimation of dialogical exchanges.