Table Of ContentNot- Forgetting
Not- Forgetting
Contemporary Art and the
Interrogation of Mastery
rosalyn deutsche
The University of Chicago Press ChiCago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2022 by The University of Chicago
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the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2022
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 81960- 0 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 81959- 4 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 81961- 7 (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago /9780226819617 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Deutsche, Rosalyn, author.
Title: Not-forgetting : contemporary art and the interrogation of mastery /
Rosalyn Deutsche.
Other titles: Contemporary art and the interrogation of mastery
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022022550 | ISBN 9780226819600 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780226819594 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226819617 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern—20th century. | Art, Modern—21st century. |
Feminism and art. | Psychoanalysis and art. | Art and war. | BISAC: ART /
Criticism & Theory | ART / History / General | LCGFT: Essays.
Classification: LCC N7445.2 .D48 2022 | DDC 709.04—dc23/eng/20220714
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022550
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
to the memory of my dear friend
douglas crimp (1944– 2019)
Contents
Introduction 1
Part One: Psychoanalytic Feminism
1 Not- Forgetting: Mary Kelly’s Love Songs (2006) 13
2 Inadequacy: Silvia Kolbowski’s History of Conceptual Art (2004) 24
3 Darkness: The Emergence of James Welling (2002) 39
4 Breaking Ground: Barbara Kruger’s Spatial Practice (1999) 56
5 Louise Lawler’s Rude Museum (2006) 69
Part Two: Radical Democracy
6 Christopher D’Arcangelo’s Elliptical Interruptions (2020) 89
7 The Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much:
Hans Haacke’s Polls (2007) 108
8 Art from Guantánamo Bay (2020) 123
9 Reasonable Urbanism (1999) 131
Part Three: War Resistance
10 Un- War: An Aesthetic Sketch (2014) 161
11 Museum of Innocence (2014) 177
12 “We don’t need another hero”: War and Public Memory (2017) 184
13 Louise Lawler’s Play Technique (2017) 203
14 Mary Kelly’s Attunement (2017/2020) 218
15 Martha Rosler’s Unrest (2018) 232
Acknowledgments 239 Notes 243 Index 283
Introduction
We live in a time of emboldened cruelty and perpetual war. The essays col-
lected here explore the intersection of contemporary art with three prac-
tices that counter the prevailing destructiveness: psychoanalytic feminism,
radical democracy, and war resistance. Although Not- Forgetting is divided
into thematic parts, it advances a single project. For the counter-p ractices
it engages with— and the artworks it discusses— are linked as critiques of
the human subject’s quest to master the world.1
While I was preparing this volume for publication, having already cho-
sen its title, I came across the term “not-f orgetting” used to describe the
mission of the Hague Tribunal, the court established by the United Nations
to prosecute atrocities, including mass rape, committed during the Yugo-
slav Wars of 1991 to 2001.2 My book’s title, then, can serve as a synonym for
bearing witness and for exercising critical memory, which I advocate in sev-
eral of these essays. Critical memory, or what the French philosopher Paul
Ricoeur calls “the duty of memory,”3 is the ethical antidote to the repressive,
narcissistic, and instrumental memory embodied in official monuments,
such as the war memorials I discuss in “We don’t need another hero” and
“Un- War: An Aesthetic Sketch,” and in institutions like the National Sep-
tember 11 Memorial Museum in Lower Manhattan, the topic of “Museum
of Innocence.” In this last essay, I adopt Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the
pathogenic effects of repression in individuals as a model for the dangers
of collective repression, which, like that of individuals, modifies reality,
alienating the collective— say, a nation— from truth and from the outside
world.4 Seeking to ward off danger, such repression is itself dangerous, not
only to the group that employs it but to those the group turns away from.
Viewed as an analogue for the act of critical remembrance, not-f orgetting is
2 introduCtion
newly relevant in the current moment, when, as I write, White supremacists
in the United States and elsewhere defend racist and colonialist statues and
seek to censor knowledge of slavery and its legacy.
Originally, however, when I conceived of Not- Forgetting, its title had a dif-
ferent source, the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of “the event.”
As I explain in greater detail in the opening essay, “Not- Forgetting: Mary
Kelly’s Love Songs,” Badiou defines an event as something— a happening—
that interrupts existing conditions, calling into question the political,
personal, or artistic system within which it takes place. Examples are the
French Revolution, an amorous passion, and Schoenberg’s invention of
the twelve- tone scale.5 The event vanishes, but it initiates a “truth- process”
in which hitherto unknown possibilities appear, opposing consensus and
dominant opinion. The event also produces a subject that, caught up in the
event’s alterity and unpredictable course, is compelled to “decide a new way
of being.” That subject does not return to continuity but perseveres in the
interruption, always approaching present circumstances from the perspec-
tive of the event.6 Badiou uses the term not-f orgetting to name such faith-
fulness to the event, a fidelity that for him is the foundation of an ethico-
politics of refusing conservatism.
Feminism was my event (although Badiou does not seem to consider it
one), and the origin of this book.7 It seized me around 1970, when I was help-
ing to organize protests against the American War in Vietnam. Like others
in the women’s liberation movement, I campaigned for reproductive rights
and against legally mandated gender inequalities as well as those that are
common practice but unofficial, embedded, for example, in marriage and
childcare arrangements. Galvanized by the slogan “the personal is politi-
cal” and profoundly influenced by the writings of Simone de Beauvoir— The
Second Sex, of course, but particularly her multivolume autobiography—
I questioned the kinship relations prescribed by bourgeois and patriarchal
society, trying to free myself from what Beauvoir calls the hierarchy of “the
well- regulated human heart,” in which friends occupy a level below that of
biological family and husbands.8 Needless to say, my goal was not to achieve
equality in the existing social world but, rather, to make a better, less vio-
lent world, to enter the public realm otherwise, as Virginia Woolf thought
women must do if they want to prevent war, an argument I apply to art prac-
tice in “Louise Lawler’s Rude Museum.”9
Later in the 1970s and early 1980s, something different made an ap-
pearance among feminists: critiques of patriarchy encountered emerging
postmodern critiques of the way power and violence are exerted not just
legally or forcefully but in the act of representing and, in so doing, produc-
