S.E.A Reading Response #2

In ‘Artificial Hells’ Claire Bishop highlights how she can trace the way SEA evolved through different periods. The changes affected the relationship between art objects, the artist, and the audience. She expresses that a SEArtist is a collaborator and not an individual producer like other traditional artists. She states that the main difference between SEA and traditional art is how the audience is treated/ viewed. In SEA the audience went from being a ‘viewer’ of art to being a ‘participant’ or ‘co-producer.

SEA makes the audience go from being passive involved; seeing the art to being involved in its creation and how its distributed. We can see this in last week’s readings where the examples of SEA had direct links with the society that the artists were either involved in or wanted to elevate.

“Chocolate Sculpture, With a Bitter Taste of Colonialism” by Randy Kennedy didn’t sit right with me. The article introduces Mr. Kasiama, a palm-nut cutter turned sculptor. He creates different pieces of art through the medium of chocolate made from cocoa beans that are harvested from his country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. His sculptors focus on people in his life and his hometown. The use of chocolate, the very thing that colonizers came to the Congo for, makes his work inherently anti-colonial. My problem with this article is that it shifts its focus onto Renzo Martens, a white artist who founded the art collective that Mr. Kasiama belongs to. Mr. Martens's other work is often seen as problematic, choosing to show individuals from underprivileged backgrounds as-needed assistance to reach their potential. This assistance that he believes he can provide. In response to this criticism, Mr. Martens states, “People accuse me of being neocolonial, But the world is neocolonial, and to end it we need to come up with some kind of apparatus. I feel that there’s so much inequality in this world. I can’t just make politically critical art and show it in places of power. It’s exactly because I’m a white middle-class artist that I have to do something like this.”

Surely there must be more nuanced ways of creating political engagement and discussions on ideas of anti-colonial art. Does the work of the marginalized have to be pushed into the zeitgeist by more prominent artists and corporations? What happens to the ethics of creation when the funding of disruptive art comes from those who create hurdles against it? This article highlighted how grey the background of creation can get.