*

I made my decision this morning—soon after eight o’clock, as I stood by the front door, ready to drive to the office. All in all, I’m certain that I had no other choice. Yet, given that this is the most important decision of my life, it seems strange that nothing has changed. I expected the walls to tremble, at the very least a very subtle shift in the perspectives of these familiar rooms.

— J.G. Ballard, The Enormous Space, 1989

*

Oh, I’ve seen that already.

— What’s so wrong with art being familiar?

2016. I had planned a different text.  I had hoped—having woken up on the morning of June 24^th, to find that the UK had not voted to leave the EU—to have restaged familiarity as something else than the building of distinctions between the unfamiliar and unknown. As something which could be generative and abundant, rather than conservative and divisive. It had been intended to ask why artists untethered from the cannon, but nevertheless tied to an never-ending cycle of innovation could not make things that might be vaguely familiar: whether by relation to an art history that won’t go away, or out of an affinity that they draw from their peers, or, in an age of Internet communities of association and referentiality, an affinity they might want to draw.

But on the morning after the referendum, this idea seemed pretty thin. How can it be possible to argue for familiarity and recognition, when it has been so forcefully and so effectively mobilised by a campaign founded in hate and xenophobia against its political opposite, the other, the unfamiliar, the migrant? A persistent vision of the familiar that multiplied structural separations, sliced down geography and generation, and which wasn’t going to go away.

Not only has the familiar become so etymologically radicalised into an obessives version of a family footing that it only refers to an ethno-nationalism: but the fifty-fifty split between those who identify with, and those who identify against looking outwards for their sense of familiarity also defines how strictly that border between what is known or not has become. It’s a border that art, and its perpetual building of autonomous archipelagos against the familiar, mundane and everyday has long participated in.

1790. Art’s stubborn obsession since Kant’s Critique of Judgement with autonomising itself from the daily conditions and structures it nevertheless sees as its task to speak of, for, and to—places the familiar and everyday as both the most desirable setting of participation for art, and a condition of being that must be avoided at all costs.[i] This, even as the lessons of institutional critique—that art institutions and its varied histories are fully enmeshed and reproductive of the structural reality that corrals the lives of “everyday” people—take full effect on how autonomy is understood. In the innovation and individuality-obsession of the marketized art world that takes the institution’s place (still coupled with the fascinated aversion to “the real” of autonomy) now sits the worst possible, but also most likely and knowing, accusation to be levelled at an artwork:

— oh that reminds me of … yeah I’ve seen it already.

What is in that pressure to invent and re-invent? With predictable regularity, art and artists are tasked only to take the familiar into the unfamiliar—to effect on the norm an irrevocable change on what is commonly known, rendering it particular, subjective, surprising, autonomous from familiarity—to draw a line between itself and what could come to be familiar?

Of course the autonomy of the de-familiarized isn’t without a history of good intentions. Even autonomy, whose principles were laid out by Kant, Hegel, Diderot, etc., as they began the modern project, aimed to carve out a social space for art away from the utilitarian rationality of the general economy in nineteenth-century Europe in order that it could develop “audacious, scandalous, seditious works and ideas.” 1917/19. Elsewhere and later on, in his essay The Uncanny (1919), das unheimlich, Freud took this task a step further, and pointed to a simultaneous familiarity and foreignness: a jarring discomfort in the individual experiencing it that underwrote the work of artists ranging from the Surrealists to Sarah Lucas to Mike Kelly. Then in 1917, Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky coined the more collective term ostrananie. Translating as either defamiliarisation or estrangment, the term argued for art (or poetics) to revitalize that which had become clichéd or overly familiar,[ii] and giving rise to any number of truth-saying artworks.

But while this strategy of unseating the stasis of the status quo might have been at one point about drawing attention to the potentiality of artistic language as a contrast to the familiar and functional. A collapsing of the boundaries between the familiar and the unfamiliar has also been more importantly and recently deployed as a politics against cultural construction itself, (which in the art of autonomy had never strayed very far from parameters set by a modernity grounded in western liberalism). For postcolonial, feminist, posthuman and queer theory it is precisely this terrain of both the familiar (or neutral which must be challenged—a position granted to the white western male to and by itself and which others every indigenous, femme, queer, trans, black person, person of colour, plant and animal perceived to exist outside of this (and their) status—but also as Egbert Alejandro Martina[iii] writes, the assumption that it is a desirable future for the “unfamiliar” to be assimilated into what is defined “the norm,” with all of the expectation its etymological burden intact. As in decoloniality, not only does this mean repatriation of what is taken in an actual sense, but also of the right to form those definitions outside of western traditions.

Simply undermining defamiliarisation, askingwhat is wrong with something being familiar would then miss the point. The challenge to the power of the familiar as a social-structure is different to the expectation on artist to defamiliarise the “normal”—as well as artist’s increasing reaction to this, but they’re not unconnected. Instead it could be better to ask why this distinction keeps being reproduced as it does, why what is put into the realm of the unfamiliar is kept there, and what art has to do with this.

*

2016/2012/ 1978. The clash between generations and geographies in the 2016 referendum could be said to be one between the history of territory and future of circulation. As Angela Mitropoulos has argued, following Michel Foucault’s depiction in his 1978 Collège de France lectures of the shift in sovereign power lying in containing territory to policing (securitising) movement through and among that territory[iv] (derivatives vs. gold reserves, free moment of labour vs. a job-for-life and so on): far from a theoretical distinction, this policing has become a deeply and intimately political one.[v] To participate as citizens in this setting, not only must we control “good” circulation—watching our weight, as much as becoming more digital, etc.,—but we must control against contagion, or the “bad” circulation that might infect and upset the circulation of norm. Not doing so would threaten the health of the national body. As Mitropoulos points at protecting that norm at every level of intimacy is the new contract between the individual and the state.

2016. But whether its debt, health-choices, or free movement, we’re not exactly all in this together. To control that movement we need borders and definitions. Deviations from the perceived norm, from that border of the nationally-familiar (raced, of sexuality or gender, political, or ideological, etc.,), become a threat against the familiarity of the nation that must not pass. And if, as Frances Stonor Saunders writes in the London Review of Books “cognitive mapping is the way we mobilise a definition of who we are, and borders are the way we protect this definition,”[vi] then a hold on the autonomy of mapping, on the privilege of being separate from the flow, and participating in the mapping and delineation of good/bad circulation can, simply put, only ever continue to multiply these borders[vii] rather than do away with them altogether.

*

1989. In an act of self-aggrandizing little-islander separatism, the main character In J.G. Ballard’s The Enormous Space decides without much forethought to shut the front door on the excessive banality of the world out there. He leaves behind work and ended relationships, and buries himself into the controlled familiarity of his suburban Croydon home. Shutting out the familiarity of his past life with the ultra-familiar closed box. Privatising it. He becomes smaller and smaller as the inside of the house engulfs him:

“No longer dependent on myself. . . . I am free to think only of the essential elements of existence—the visual continuum around me, and the play of air and light. . . The house relaxes its protective hold on me . . . A curious discovery—the rooms are larger. . . . My eyes now see everything as it is, uncluttered by the paraphernalia of conventional life. . . . The true dimensions of this house may be exhilarating to perceive, but from now on I will sleep downstairs. Time and space are not necessarily on my side.

He spends longer and longer in the seclusion of the rich, deep interiority of the house that has driven him to both madness and morbidity. “Three months—. . . The house enlarges itself around me . . . The walls of this once tiny space constitute a universe of their own . . . So much space has receded from me that I must be close to the irreducible core.” He lies next to his dead secretary in the freezer, “the perspective lines flow from me, enlarging the interior of the compartment. Soon I will lie beside her, in a palace of ice that will crystallise around us finding at last the still centre of the world which came to claim me.” The further he withdraws the clearer the paradox, everything that encases him expands and grows more voluminous the more he becomes familiar with it. It is only the ensuing madness of starvation and solitude that can keep him separated from this familiarity which comes to claim him.

*

2013. Writing on the emerging political subjectivity of usership that he argues has come with the rise of user generated content, web 2.0 culture, and widely available political and economic instruments, writer Stephen Wright describes how the user exerts their agency “paradoxically, exactly where it is expected.” They do this against the “conceptual institutions” of “spectatorship, expert culture, and ownership,”[viii] that make up a contemporary culture still based on the idea that art can and should be separated from its use. Wright pitches usership as something operative in the hear-and-now rather than as something waiting for a revolutionary moment to transcend it. Usership is “all about repurposing available ways and means without seeking to possess them,”[ix] For the expert use is always mis-use. But at the same time usership is never ownership. Like this, usership is unlike participation, which plays by the rules, but instead like a sort of self-regulating, hands-on, thing. Its terms are made in the agreement, and in proximity.

Though he had a figure, its sphere of engagement remained illusive. And even though Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau had persuasively analysed “the goings-on, inventiveness and usership of what has come to be called ‘the everyday’,”[x] this “wasn’t quite right.” Perhaps it was too universal for what he hand in mind. In any case it came, overheard in a bar one day. “A regular stepped up to the bar, exchanged a quick glance with the barman who asked, invitingly, as if confident in what he already knew, ‘the usual”?”[xi] It was not was expected, but what had come to be agreed through use. The usual is not easily familiar, but particular and subject to change. “Operative only in the here and now.”[xii] It is in this sense that Wright can claim that if art can be used rather than the subject of expertise, then its sphere of engagement will support equally particular and changeable Artworlds or “art-sustaining environments.” Artworlds whose use make the one-world of Art’s autonomy drastically unstable.

*

2016. The usual comes through the shared use of the usual and not through its inheritance. The autonomy of art has done a lot to create one, single, art world with itself as the norm. A norm that only wants the new and the familiarity of the unexpected. Using art, on the other hand it is said creates many art-sustaining worlds, many worlds that support much more than just art. I write this because the artists here share, if not something in common, an affinity, something familiar between each of their works. They want it. Let’s be clear, familiarity is used as a tool to boil political identification down to the lowliest common denominator, the body as a border to be protected or prosecuted against. But if a search for affinity and reference recognizes the radical abundance of becoming familiar—rather than policing the norm by controlling the opposite—then perhaps we could say, artists using familiarity, pluralizing and agreeing on it, joining what they are making with the world they are in, undo some of the borders produced by obsession of art to be autonomous and apart.

Refugees are welcome here, as are migrants, as are those already here, as are all those disaffected by the structural inequality of a country for the few: not because they threaten the familiar, but because they expand it. Because they un-police its borders. “We construct borders, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are,” but “we cross them in search of who we might become.”[xiii] Being able to say this looks like something that might become familiar is one way to begin that crossing.

— That looks like …

— The usual?

— Sure.

 

 

x

TC

2016

This text was written on the occasion of the exhibition "Modest villa immense Versailles," Kinman Gallery, July 2016. Featuring Rebecca Ackroyd, Laura Bygrave, Maria De Lima, Sebastian Jefford, Athena Papadopoulos, Sam Windett, & Joel Wyllie.