Katherine Behar and Emmy Mikelson
Whether anxious and lonely or brave and hubristic, humans have staked out for themselves a privileged position, alone, at the center of everything. Anthropocentrism is the name for this ontological lynchpin that binds together centuries of art, philosophy, social theory, and scientific inquiry. The current exhibition, And Another Thing, is part of an alternate movement toward non-anthropocentrism, an effort to dislodge the human from the center of discussion, to enrich the concept of being, and to open the very world itself to all things that comprise it. The world is brimming with things, and seen from a non-anthropocentric vantage, all things are equal, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. Non-anthropocentrism repositions humans as just “another thing,” no more precious or central than any other.
The works in this exhibition approach non-anthropocentrism variously. Yet each is remarkable for denying the human subject’s centrality, or for questioning how certain things come to attain subject status. In this, they break with longstanding conventions in art, according to which human subjects have held a central place by both figuring in art and producing it. However, the works in And Another Thing go beyond reassessing the human subject; they reject the subject/object paradigm entirely. In place of this paradigm—one based on difference—they operate on aninterchangeable mereology of humans and things. The artworks on view do not treat humans as subjects, nor even as objects, but simply as things, like everything else.
And Another Thing is timely now in part because of recent interest in these ideas in fields outside of art, most notably in philosophy. In 2007, the first meeting of a new movement in philosophy called speculative realism was held in London at Goldsmiths College. Since that time the movement has swelled through publications, symposia, and intensive discourse in the blogosphere.[1] Both speculative realism and its offshoot, object-oriented ontology, hold non-anthropocentrism as a central tenet. Their articulation of a world composed of a nonhierarchical collection of objects inspired this exhibition. According to this philosophy, objects are specific, self-contained and non-reducible, and human subjects are objects, no more or less important than any other. From a curatorial perspective, these concepts are compelling because they echo the ethos of Minimalism and feminist body art, along with the contemporary art that draws on the legacy of these movements.
Minimalism speaks to these ideas in three ways: by engaging the specificity of materials, by removing the authorial hand, and by opening up negative space around objects to include the human viewer and the sculptural object as equal occupant bodies. For example, in his canonical 1965 essay, “Specific Objects,” Minimalist artist Donald Judd wrote, “There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material.”[2] We can read this statement today as indicating an emergent “object-oriented” perspective in avant-garde art.
Meanwhile, body artists turned this detached appropriation of material back onto themselves, by exploiting their own bodies as obdurate art materials. Feminist body artists confounded categories by occupying a dual role as author and artwork, subject and object, human and thing. Writing at the forefront of feminist performance art and body art in 1963, Carolee Schneeman stated, “I establish my body as a visual territory […and] explore the image values of flesh as material I choose to work with.”[3] Stressing their own commodification as art objects and consumption as objects of the gaze, feminist body artists interrogated the subject/object relationship and the hierarchies entailed.
Thanks to this history (not to mention the broad and powerful social conditions of materialism writ large) we are already primed to think of objects as subjects, to identify ourselves as “another thing,” and to use thingness to eschew human privilege. To achieve this, some works in And Another Thing destabilize the human subject by dismembering it and creating a distributed subject; some render the human as a thing amongst things; and some explore relationships between things, cutting humans out of the loop. Finally, framed most broadly, the exhibition and related programs also seek to demonstrate how, in this interdisciplinary moment, each field—art, philosophy, neuroscience, physics, ecology, architecture, political science, etc.—is itself another thing, contending with thingness, just like each artwork in the exhibition.
[1] Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman offer an account of speculative realism’s origins in “Toward a Speculative Philosophy,” the introduction to their edited volume, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds. (Melbourne: re.press, 2011).
[2] Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965).
[3] Carolee Schneeman, “Eye Body,” More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce McPherson (New Paltz, New York: Documentext, 1979) 52.
