Striking Normativity: The Art of Being Surprised
by Diana Al-Halabi ︎︎︎31 Jan 2022
“I started out like all of us start out, a coward, afraid. It is not to say I am not afraid now, it is to say that whether I am afraid or not, I count less, I value myself more than I value my terrors. It does not mean I don’t have them, once I take that position I can look at them and see what it is they teach me”
Audre Lorde.
An artist who once fought the institution for Palestine, once fought for her right to education, for her right to visas and freedom of movement and – with all due humbleness – was told “you are courageous, you lead by example”, has recently gone through a breakup. And the voice she is fighting in her head, is that which keeps telling her: “How will you make it alone? You are just a woman”. Yes, as non-normative as an artist such as myself could seem to her family members, her peers, and herself, the internalized voice of patriarchal construct – if paid attention to– could be the battlefield of daily life, and not many would dare to declare that the war is happening, and that the war is televised in disguise.
Why disguise? I came to art and writing refusing to compromise, refusing anything that is less than the “truth”, as well as refusing pretentious art. And when I was told by a writer I admire, “all art is pretentious”, I kept fighting this notion, saying mine is not. Up until I was invited to write this essay on normativity. I realized that I have lost a good portion of pretentiousness with my breakup, the dose that makes you think highly, assertively and confidently enough of yourself to write. It was in a moment of sterile confrontation with my screen that I recalled how my whole graduation project was a feminist one that spoke of how I was deceived by the patriarchal gaze to think I am smaller than the world.
We often confuse pretentiousness with inauthenticity, but I came to forget that as a woman – which I discovered, sociopolitically, that I am one back in 2017– I had to wear a good chunk of pretentiousness on top of my vulnerability to outlive the craziness of everything that I was told to be “normal”. Normal, if I come to define it, is that which contributes to normativity by making girls wish to be boys instead of wishing to abolish patriarchy, just as I did when I was a child. This is the definition of norma/l/tivity.
I pretend to be strong, I pretend that I can, I pretend to admit confidently that I don’t know. And even in this essay I will pretend that my voice will be heard, I will pretend that I have something you must read, I will pretend that I can reference as if I have read the whole book, but believe me, I didn’t, and I won’t. Because as Nina Wakeford (my former MFA tutor) once told me in a studio visit, this is how artists read, they will get what stimulates them out of a book and go to their own creative work. Therefore, I will write like an artist, and everything I cite in this essay, is the only thing I know, and I know nothing beyond it. That is the pretentious truth I insist to tell you here.
Now
let’s talk about normativity.
In David lynch’s film Inlands Empire, a woman narrates the tale of a little boy who “opened the door, and saw the world, […]”. A sentence that stopped me and made me think, where does the world start? Does the world exist in our houses? When we open the door? Or is it everything we see as we leave the walls of our houses? Do we see the world every time we go to the supermarket? Or does it start as we land in another country? And if it starts as we land in that other country, does it mean that the world we see there goes unnoticed by the people already living in it?
The incomprehensible difference in the perception of the world inside a hospital for instance and a world outside of it, whether you are a visitor, a patient, or a doctor, is one example of thinking of worlds that coexist simultaneously in space and time. A world on a cancer patients floor is utterly different from that of a birth giving floor. And while we navigate through those worlds, as truth seekers, we are left with a multiplicity of lenses to look at the “worlds” which contain us and the “other” by and large.
But the worlds we are trying to address here aren’t as simple as the example that I just laid out, a world of many worlds, meaning a world ruled by differences, which in a great number of times are detested , fought, or simply pushed down and silenced by whoever got power, and succeeds to misuse it.
The major (meaning those who are ruling, marginalizing, and oppressing) and the minor (meaning those who are ruled, marginalized, and oppressed) play an important role in this dance of differences which is ultimately a vertical one. While democracy intends to play the role of opening the space for each voice to rise, whether it is right or wrong, it ought to keep one condition intact for it to serve its value: the acknowledging and agreeing that differences exist, which would become the only common point of departure for a discussion to arise.
Nonetheless, institutions – and here allow me to speak of some of the art institutions specifically from my personal experience – tend to claim the democratic right to freedom of speech, a decolonial curriculum and a critique on normativity, while they instrumentalize those claims in order to be accepted under the new normative standards of the art world, which is supposedly to serve justice.
But what the art world’s institutions often miss about normativity and its critique, is that by being the container and the contained at once, art can’t function by itself without it being the vessel that upholds and seeks truth and justice in all worlds in- and outside of itself.
Therefore, the mission of art is perhaps to keep self-critiquing to the extent of deconstruction, in order not to give birth to double-faced norms as a result of a lack of integrity and a lack of surprise. Once an intellectual named Adel Nassar, told me: the time we stop being surprised at injustice would be the time that injustice wins.
In Revisiting normativity with Deleuze, Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pesters encapsulate Deleuze’s monistic ontology with the following: “This could also be described as a metamethodological shift or an ongoing experiment with evaluative judgements that cultivate affirmative and creative modes of becoming.” It is modes of becoming that art institutions should seek in order not only to be ahead of the so-called normative that we know, but also the normative that is becoming.
Neutrality
as a norm
Art institutions that consider themselves to be apolitical follow a method of “neither one nor the other”, a use of negation that renders the neutral to be innocent. However, they perpetually fail this innocence, as they distance themselves from the fact that censorship is the dominant virtue they abide by. Censorship in so called ‘neutral institutions’ or ‘apolitical ones’ becomes the paradoxical act of taking a position to decide who is “the one” and who is “the other”, instead of being under the so-called “neutral” frame of “neither the one nor the other”. In other words neutrality never existed and would never exist without it being tied to censorship, which becomes the “either, or” rather than the “neither, nor”. Therefore, I can confidently state here, that in such institutions there was never neutrality in the first place.
It is fundamental to take into account the process that has been done in the last decades in art institutions, which shaped them to represent inclusivity, less male dominance and racial division. But this process is not an accomplished task that took place in the past so to speak, it is and it must be an ongoing process. In other words, to acknowledge the change and the efforts done in the past – predominantly by non-white cultural practitioners– is not to accept that tokenizing and instrumentalizing inclusivity – predominantly done by white opportunists in position of power– of the present should go unnoticed. The mission of acting upon a virtue of integrity and justice wouldn’t be a given norm as long as institutions are still afraid to speak about Palestine and present colonial powers for the sake of their own funding.
Cornel West in a talk titled What It Means to Be Human? stated that “The education at its highest level is about fusing the formation of our critical thinking that’s linked to the maturation of compassionate and courageous people, now we raise a question: is courage a dominant virtue in our universities? Hell no! It is about smartness, it’s about status, and too often arrogance and condescension. Courage is tied to fortitude, and fortitude is tied to certain humility […]”
In the light of the virtue of courage in Universities, in May 2021, students of the Dutch art academy Piet Zwart Institute (myself among them) hung a banner in solidarity with Palestinian people, against the catastrophic atrocities they face under the Israeli settler-colonial state for 7 decades. The Hogeschool Rotterdam removed their banner under the claim that “no political speech is allowed on the campus building”. When students refused such an approach, they stated that a decolonial curriculum in theory must be a decolonial one in practice.
It is needless to state how crucial it is for professors, managers, and deans of art universities, to educate themselves beyond surface levels when it comes to anticolonial matters.
When he ordered the banner to be taken down, the dean of WDKA and PZI, Mr. Jeroen Chabot stated that his preference of showing solidarity with Palestine manifests in rather subtle ways than hanging a banner or issuing a statement (in other words: freedom of speech). And that was by sending students on excursions to Ramallah. A statement that defines being at the surface beyond comprehension. And I wonder if I should explain here in this essay the definition of an Apartheid, as I had to explain to him in that meeting. It was enough to state that I am a Lebanese student in his university to prove that his method of solidarity is a false equation by default. The white innocent way of solidarity failed to acknowledge that, as a Lebanese student, I won’t be able to make it to Ramallah through Tel Aviv.
In 1971 Nikki Giovanni in conversation with James Baldwin, asks “why should a writer be free to write what they want to write, while say a teacher isn’t free to teach what they want to teach?” Baldwin answers “a teacher who isn’t free to teach what they want is not a teacher […] and to teach – in the conditions which black people of America find themselves– is a revolutionary act”.
With this spirit, tutors of diverse backgrounds and precarious contracts in WDKA came forward together with some students from PZI to put an Alternative Working Assembly. As a response to the closed meetings the dean had suggested to solve the banner issue, the AWA took an alternative road into this discussion, in which meetings around anticolonial matters and institutional demands were addressed in a public assembly.
Through this Alternative Working Assembly (AWA) we have been working against bureaucracy, against its vertical architecture, and against time slaughter. The corridors of bureaucracy are by design a massive labyrinth for demands to get lost, normative bureaucracy becomes the dominant architecture that pushes down any intention of change. In the building of bureaucracy (the institution by default), we all live in the aisles of nonplace, where demands are buried under the guise of time, transmission, and process.
To think of normativity, one must first stop, and then, think. I solely believe that normativity is everything that happens outside of the act of “stopping and thinking”. In an interview of Hannah Arendt in 1964 with Joachim Fest, she states that to carry on without “stopping and thinking”, is to be restless under this bureaucratic Machina which cancels the person and causes the sense of responsibility to evaporate.
Contrary to how that bureaucratic Machina operates, demands that collectively were set in the AWA are to be publicly announced around February 2022 in another public assembly.
The unpaid labor that tutors and students put into this assembly goes beyond the institution and its crooked bureaucratic vertical system. A grassroots model of resistance was born in May 2021, and as it works itself into demands against the institution, it is as well a model to be directed towards all systems of power.
In the pursuit of a collective sense of responsibility and ongoing transformation of the normative, the question remains, how do we draw an enabling potential for change from that which constrains us? What questions must you ask yourself, if you are a student or an employee in a museum, or a cultural practitioner in order to revolt? And what questions must you ask yourself as a professor, a dean, a museum director, in order to reform?