The (Un)Possessive Article.
Photo by Simon Thorogood, courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.
“One must of necessity, criticize, break-up, even destroy in order to discover.”
– Mervyn Levy. The Future of Art Schools Report, 1961.
Ownership can be defined as an act, state, condition, or case of legal possession and control over goods, chattels, deeds, property, or assets. Whilst ownership is a relatively easy thing to specify theoretically, through a dictionary definition for example, in reality it can be something much harder to discern. Can we learn, therefore, to divert from conventional concepts of possession, and to converge instead on egalitarian ideals of ‘open custodianship?’
A common agreement and understanding of ownership and acquisition can be complicated due to differing perspectives and interpretation. Depending on views held by individuals or multiple shareholders, there is much scope for both nuanced and conspicuous differences in meaning and value.
So, already we see capacity for ownership to be disrupted in the way it is presumed and distributed. Where it is possible to buy, inherit, earn, win, accrue, barter, gift, transfer, lose, steal or forcibly occupy holdings, ‘custody’ can also be traded for other forms and means of proprietorship. In this sense, ownership becomes a self-propagating entity.
Where impressions of ownership may be conveniently divvied up into concepts and categories of ‘mine,’ ‘yours,’ ‘ours,’ or ‘theirs,’ it is rarely conducted quite so neatly, or so orderly. Not least, this is because ownership can implicate physical and tangible states as well as abstract and intangible states.
Where there might be a perceived dominance of physical manifestations of ownership, conceptual presence is certainly as powerful. Abstracted or ‘absent’ notions of possession and ownership may, in fact, challenge conventional cultures of objectification and materialism, and help focus awareness on what is left behind, discarded, or ignored. Absence, therefore, becomes a highly potent force for renewal.
What we currently witness in Ukraine can certainly be determined as an experiment of acquisition. The Kremlin apparently believe Russia (a country of over 17 million square kilometres) has legitimate grounds to possess another sovereign state by force, (a country of approximately 600,000 square kilometres). Indubitably, they do not.
Strip Show.
If we step back and take a balanced view on things, prior to invasion there were grounds, perhaps, for Russia to express considerable displeasure with a perceived encroachment of the West and NATO. But, with subsequent military incursion, where soldiers have crossed borders, have encircled cities, have killed citizens, have destroyed barracks, housing, shoe factories, theatres, art schools, churches, kindergartens and hospitals, this card has been discarded for good. The aggressors cannot, surely, believe this assailment exacts ‘ownership.’
So, the initiated seizure of a nation may represent an extreme end of a continuum or scale of ownership. Indeed, the reported destruction of Ukraine’s cultural heritage may well form part of a concerted strategy by the Kremlin to strip the country of a national identity and any self-proclaimed standing as an independent sovereign state.
The Russian military have already destroyed the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre and the Ivankiv Museum, home to the national folk art archives, which houses the work of revered Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko. Unesco has reported the damage or destruction to cultural heritage of several towns and cities, including the shelling of the Assumption Cathedral in Kharkiv, and the wrecking of a 19th-century wooden church in Viazivk. Seven world heritage sites around the country are considered to be at severe risk of being targeted as the conflict intensifies.
If destruction to national heritage continues, it will become increasingly apparent that a highly cynical form of cultural warfare, conducted alongside ‘conventional’ warfare, is being waged with intent to utterly demoralise and undermine the resolve of the Ukrainian people.
The preservation and protection of cultural heritage must be considered paramount for any enlightened civilised society. Conversely, the wanton destruction and plundering of a country’s national treasure by an external power must represent the very lowest reaches of humanity.
But, there is evidently something more at play here, and a something that might never be possessed or constrained through aggression. Intent to strip away a nation’s physical presence reveals something more powerful in its place – a spirit and determination, which ‘occupies’ the hearts and minds of those who harmonise with a higher order of kinship.
This is often never quite understood by those seeking to pilfer and dominate. Instead, convenient classification is formulated and applied to fuel the demands and narratives for base acquisition.
So, the preservation of national museums, cultural assets, and places of historic significance represents a vital symbol of defiance, whilst providing a future focus for Ukraine to recover from and variously evaluate the conflict in the years to come.
Cancel Culture.
It might be argued that we all co-exist within realms of ‘occupation’ of one form or another. These domains are populated by those engaged in economies of judgment - social media influencers, vloggers, bloggers, commentators, gossip journalism, cultural reviewers, politicians or even governments, for instance. These groups, and many others, engage judgment as a tool to secure influence and authority, whether for better or worse.
The mid-20th Century artists Jasper Johns and John Baldessari both reported trauma and anxiety as a result of how their work was professionally judged and publicly perceived. They were respectively so affected by external appraisal, that at specific points in their career they both resorted to destroying their artwork, asserting that such drastic action was necessary to allow them to recover and refocus their particular motives for being an artist.
So today, where we unite behind a comprehensive and collective rejection of aggressive action and misapplied conviction exercised by a rogue state, we might concurrently be brought to a place where we confront and challenge the basis of conspicuous and excessive ownership elsewhere. We might choose to move away from perceptible measures of ‘control’ evident in our world towards more connected and concentrated ideologies, which we can further describe as idea-assets, idea-existences, or idea-nations.
Like literary fiction, we may be reminded that ownership, and it’s representation, does not convey absolutes of reality, truth, or authority, but where it has greater capacity as agency. Accordingly, tenets of ownership may be entirely re-configured as services or mediums of distributed ‘conceptual consummates,’ reflecting a broader spectrum of emancipated criteria, ideas, agendas, approaches and people.
What the crisis in Ukraine is also advising, is that it is increasingly harder for us to adopt positions of indifference or lassitude in our everyday ‘world-building.’ We may have arrived at a point, once again, where it is no longer okay to be just ‘living’ through something, but where we need to be ‘changing’ through something.
As we witness a savage invasion unfold ‘there,’ we might be reminded how very privileged we are to employ art and culture as weapon and apparatus to disrupt perceptions of dominance ‘here.’ As a mechanism to challenge, subvert, and redefine, art also has a mission to nourish, liberate and propagate ideas for the benefit of all.
Culture and creativity, as a reflection of the world, can also be a distinctively messy or disorderly business. This mess refers not only to the use of materials employed to make things, but in the way that new ideas are intellectually conceived and the way that old ideas are actively eradicated.
Art has notably undergone profound aesthetic and philosophical evolution through periods of rejection and elimination. Much celebrated artwork of the 20th Century, for example, can be characterised as mirroring geo-political unrest and turmoil, in turn spawning some of the most dynamic examples of modern art - consider Picasso’s Guernica, for example. And when viewing such notable artworks of a time, we can often ask of them, “what is missing here?”
Certainly, if we scrutinise an evolution of artistic movements, practices and philosophies throughout a history of art, we might observe a progressive degree of disappearance and removal from displayed artworks. Perhaps, the first conspicuous aspect to be visually expunged by artists was realism. This was perhaps followed by representational objects, framed and hung compositions, brushwork and paint, the two-dimensional plane, three-dimensional forms, the gallery wall, the museum, and perhaps space itself.
This ongoing process of reduction provided the logical framework for the idealistic Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Here, there was emphasis on saying more with less, and a dialogue in which artists sought to eliminate representation of the outside world from a tradition of flat surface or plastic form, and instead situate a work directly in the mind.
Relinquishment, as the arts continue to show, can be as advantageous to reasoning and culture as any progressive augmentation of material objects, entities, tools, or spaces. It can also be a useful way of displacing oneself in the world.
Where we recognise conventional or endorsed operational frameworks of a particular discipline, so in turn we can begin to understand what exactly of this framework we may wish to dismantle, and why. Thus, the importance of a process of elimination in the formulation of new creative languages and mediums becomes stronger.
Learning how to subvert, how to abandon, and how to eradicate is something that more radically inclined art schools and colleges have traditionally provided for society, as uncommon places that positively capture and harness ‘disturbance.’
Removal Services.
“Tenets of ownership may be entirely re-configured as services or mediums of distributed ‘conceptual consummates,’ reflecting a broader spectrum of emancipated criteria, ideas, agendas, approaches and people.”
If we recognise the value of such social laboratories, and what they do when supported and staffed well, then other non-creative institutions may consider how they analogously function. Where relevant, how might they learn to operate as ‘agencies of disappearance,’ where they too may become positively empowered through strategic ‘amnestic practice?’
Might this permit them and their audiences a particular autonomy and dexterity to find futures differently? Again, as the arts show, where something is surrendered, healthy conditions of unfamiliarity can arise and new discoveries are made in the space where the something once was. We can also learn differently about what it means to be human.
As a largely conceptual initiative, such reasoning may help nourish shifts away from perpetual engagements with physical production and ownership of stuff and stimulate awakenings to a distributed idea of belonging.
So, where the formation of culture corresponds with episodes of turmoil or destruction, what new manifestations of instructive culture might we experience now? What kinds of cultural reaction will there be to the Covid-19 pandemic, or the invasion of Ukraine when they are absent, have faded, or no longer current?
Most certainly, this period will be extensively audited and hypothesised in pending annals of history, but the arts and culture should also provide a cogent lens for an extensive process of review, entirely necessary for history to continue to ‘occupy’ our present and everyday consciousness.
Leave Of Absence.
Idealism, then, has clear legitimacy and capability to change a world, and provides a clear licence for us to leave out what need not be there anymore.
Where the arts have provided a rich catalogue of leaving out something that no-one else had previously thought of leaving out before, similarly how might the world learn to leave out things that it thought it could not?
Whilst admittedly a simplistic retort, leaving out things such as gratuitous material acquisition, commercial holding monopolies, property development consortiums, tech conglomerates, immense military arsenals, or conceits of global expansionism, to name just a few things, seems a really good place to start.
