Dismantling the Master's Art

Joanne Klein

Underwire: Annual Journal of Women Studies

Spring 2000

The Maintenance Art Project, which was undertaken by students in fall semester's Geographies of Performance (THEA 450) class, featured in The Point News, and exhibited in Montgomery Hall Upper Commons, continues to spark productive inquiry whenever it comes up for discussion. Most recently, students in Introduction to Women Studies (WMST 200) scrutinized the project and plummeted headlong into an instructive quest for definitions of art and work. I would like to supply that quest with more dimensions from my (over-privileged) perspective as a feminist performance scholar/artist.

Responses to the project have been mostly enthusiastic, but those students who have confronted it with skepticism have shown a healthy and incisive suspicion of the colonialist ethos in their critiques. For them, the project smacks of arrogance according to their reading of it as an attempt to palliate alienated labor by reinscribing it as Art. (These students send spangles of joy through me.) Seen from that perspective, the project would be deleterious. As one campus maintenance worker observed, the cleaning of a shitty toilet bowl is not redeemed by calling it Art. This thinking--however compelling--nonetheless leaves the received (political) construction of Art untroubled.

If we glance for a moment at the Arts in Eurocentric cultures, we might notice they are marked by a shared preciosity. The production and reception of "legitimate" painting, sculpture, music, dance, and theatre are limited to a privileged few. Art is something that happens exquisitely and remotely in the galleries, concert halls, and theatres of authenticating cultural centers. Anything tainted by "popular" culture, indecorousness, or practical application is excluded from these arenas, except, of course, as a colonizing gesture of appropriation. Counter-culture work (errrr, art) is often neutralized by exhibition in this manner.

Let's interrogate this curious valorization of "art for art's sake." Where does it come from? Did it just evolve "naturally" or erupt from Zeus's thigh? Who and what does it privilege? Are there other models for designating art? What ideology secures the place of Marcel Duchamp's urinal in a museum of Art and obfuscates the work of the College's housekeeping staff?

All of the arts originated as instrumentalities: cave paintings of speared animals, for example, were directed toward putting meat on the table. Notions of product perfectability for its own sake--the lifting of Art from the mess of life--occurred later in the history of Eurocentric cultures. Referring to the age of the ancient Greek Tyrants at the end of the seventh century BCE, Arnold Hauser writes in his multi-volume study, The Social History of Art:

We meet here a completely new conception of art, it is no longer a means toward an end, but an end in itself. . . . And thus art, originally a mere handmaid of magic and ritual, an instrument of propaganda and panegyric, a means to influence gods, spirits, and men, becomes a pure, autonomous, "disinterested" activity to some extent, practised for its own sake and for the beauty it reveals. . . . This abandonment of the old view that art is valuable and intelligible only as a weapon in the struggle for life, in favour of a new attitude which treats it as mere play of line and colour, mere rhythm and harmony, mere imitation or interpretation of reality--this is the most tremendous change that has ever occurred in the whole history of art.

If we appropriately qualify Hauser's (sixty year-old) statement as an insight into the historical development of privileged European Arts, it describes a compelling and problematic quality: an exclusivity and preciosity that are more troubling today than a cause for celebration. The Eurocentric valorization of what Hauser subsequently refers to as "inner perfection" has produced an increasing estrangement of its arts, which are now widely viewed (according to college curricula, government funding, audience figures, popular opinion, and so on) as dispensable.

Feminist scholars have noted that this plucking of Art from the mire of everyday struggle corresponded with the domestic sequestration of women in classical Greece--a policy intended to ensure patrilineal transmission of private property by guaranteeing paternity. With women now excluded from citizenship and the public arena, their work (art?) became hidden, and men set about the task of rarefying criteria for Art. The resulting codes of decorum prized the arena of public life, causing women and their interests to become even less visible, although Aristotle singles them out in his Poetics as objects of scorn. Furthermore, classical Greece (along with some Asian cultures) substituted a wholly male-produced idea of Woman, which was also performed and codified almost exclusively by men for approximately 2000 years. Slaves were similarly otherized and re-invented.

I digress some and abbreviate much, but my point is that this classical construction of Art, which we inherit, was a political project that privileged the free male citizens of Greece and their gender-linked preferences for purity and distance. Their definitions of Art consolidated and preserved their power by denying access to Others. We continue to promote and reward this tradition that assigns special status to "aesthetic" objects and experience, defined to exclude the work/art/artwork generally performed by menials and women.

The queerness (archaic usage) of our cultural devaluation of art?/work that is contaminated by instrumentality or "imperfection" becomes conspicuous when we consider the art of otherized cultures. If Eurocentric arts find their highest achievement in airtight perfection, the arts of otherized traditions sometimes promote intentional imperfection as a medium of instrumentality. Certain African and Native American cultures, for example, deliberately insinuate flaws in textile or weaving patterns in order to promote entry of the divine into the art. Likewise, in their performance traditions, the borders created by apparatuses of "perfection"--those practices that isolate art from here and now--are absent. Permeability and immediacy are regarded as sources of reciprocal empowerment and as vital components of artistry.

I think that the Maintenance Art Project, rather than re-enacting colonialism, challenges our notion of Art. It asks all of us to interrogate the presumptions that divide Art from specific kinds of toil and effects. My title refers to Audre Lorde's famous essay, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," which appears in her book, Sister Outsider, and is one of the most widely cited quotes in feminist movements. If we fail to question Art--to query the constructedness of our ideas--then we are borrowing the master's toolbox and restoring the master's house.

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