War, History, and the Legacy of Allegorical Production: Silvia Kolbowski's Art after September 11, 2001

In: https://digitalcollections.saic.edu/islandora/object/islandora%3A103336

Abstract

When, in the wake of September 11, 2001, a new military imperialism took hold in the U. S. the New York-based American artist Silvia Kolbowski reflected on the limits and possibilities of a counterpublic sphere, and asked how an artist might respond. What form should a work of art take when, despite the proliferation of WMD and neoliberalism's monstrous dominance, citizens continue to move in passive compliance with the whims of an authoritarian state? In contrast to progressives whom the artist has observed so often dismiss the psychical dimensions of state violence, Kolbowski in 2003 decided to confront the aggression that seized the American public in the aftermath of national trauma. Her response, an installation titled Proximity to Power: American Style (2003–04), which is the subject of this thesis, would take shape in the months following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, to be exhibited for the first time between September 17th and November 11th, 2004, at Secession, Vienna. Belonging to a group of recent production that included her celebrated an inadequate history of conceptual art (1998–99), Kolbowski's installation assumed the task of examining this war, and specifically as a pathology of masculine power. With a methodology informed by an artistic inheritance aligned with the leftist politics of May 1968, the artist, this study argues, interrogated the subject formed in a moment that witnessed an intense identification with a wounded empire, one reiterating the traumatic heritage of permanent war. Over the years, Kolbowski's interlocutors have accounted for her recourse to psychoanalytic feminism since its emergence three decades earlier within postmodernism and poststructuralism, linking her ethnographic art to Mary Kelly as her most important peer and predecessor. If this moment witnessed the restoration of the war subject to a position of heroic mastery, Proximity to Power then repudiated that hegemonic militant discourse, drawing from the critical projects of earlier moments that sought to decenter the Cartesian subject. By doing so, the artist gave focus to what was one of the most striking features of the Iraq War, this, its Oedipal logic, and further, by harnessing the noninstrumentalizing ambitions of montage, she did so allegorically, and in multiple ways. Among them Kolbowski staged images and sounds derived from interviews conducted with the primary source material for the project, in this case, a group of boys and men, whom she questioned about the nature of masculine power. And as the world ignited in collective protest against empire's latest claims for territorial expansion, she also reminded visitors that the Iraq War is inextricably, but also conditionally tied to wars past.