Not- 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 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5 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-