‘The word “aesthetics” is reinvented by decolonial movements as a critique of the repressive mechanisms of colonial “beauty” associated with this term. It is a concept worth reforming, as it also points to the emancipation of experience, the body, and the senses …’ (Pedro Lasch)
Almost 30 years ago, in 1992, Fred Wilson’s art installation Mining the Museum was inaugurated in Baltimore’s Maryland Historical Society. This installation consisted of several pieces in which Wilson juxtaposed different objects that formed part of the museum’s collection. In the welcome lobby, Wilson exhibited six pedestals. The three on the right carried the busts of Henry Clay, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Andrew Jackson; the three on the left were empty but for labels with the names “Benjamin Banneker,” “Harriet Tubman,” and “Frederick Douglass.” In the center stood the ‘Truth trophy,’ an award given to the Society for truth in advertising, emblazoned by the word ‘TRUTH.’ The rest of the installation followed the same tonic. In another room, for example, the portrait of Henry Darnall III—a Maryland planter—was shown. Wilson installed a spotlight that illuminated an enslaved child depicted in the background, and an audio recording in in which the voice of a child asked in a loop: “Am I your brother? Am I your friend? Am I your pet?” In another room, Wilson placed a Ku Klux Klan robe—supposedly donated anonymously to the Society—carefully folded in a baby stroller. In one of the most shocking exhibits, Wilson placed a showcase titled Metalwork 1793-1880, where the audience could see a collection of silverware alongside metal slave shackles that were also part of the museum’s collection but that had remained hidden in the storage room until then.
Wilson’s work is clearly a criticism of racism in America. But besides the obvious, what else is there to say about it? How can we evaluate Wilson’s installation from an aesthetic perspective? Or is it the case that it should rather be viewed from a political or ethical lens?
As an intermedial installation that shuns modernist conventions—such as medium specificity, the priority of the visual, or aesthetic autonomy—Wilson’s work checks the necessary boxes for being considered a wholly contemporary work. Given its challenge to the meta-narratives of modernity, it has also been interpreted as a postmodern piece of art that ‘rains on the parade’ of “mostly white, mostly male …Western art,” as a reviewer of a retrospective exhibit wrote. And yet, while these interpretations apprehend some important aspects of the installation, it seems to me that they miss its ethical and political implications. But these implications only become apparent when we shift the focus away from the purely aesthetic aspect of the work and ask the crucial question of its motivation, its why. Why does Wilson decide to ‘mine’ the museum and expose its hidden archive? Why does he criticize the paradigms and conventions of modernist art? Is it merely to explore the limits between art and non-art? Is it to show the relativity of truth? As I want to show, Wilson’s work, rather, should be interpreted as an intervention into the history and legacy of slavery and colonialism. This interpretation becomes possible when we adopt the standpoint of decolonial theory.
The main thesis of decolonial theory is that ‘modernity,’ a narrative of progress and triumph that originated in Europe around the 15th and 16th centuries, has a hidden—and constitutive—face: colonialism. Decoloniality, as a counter-discourse to modernity, emerges in the attempt to expose this often occluded link as well as its continuing implications for the 21st century. While colonialism might have ended with the wars of independence of the 19th and 20th centuries, decolonial theory aims to show that its effects are still felt today—in the form of racial, ethnic, or national discrimination and subjection. These hierarchies, established during colonialism, were embedded as social facts, as ‘natural’ phenomena that acquired a scientific, moral, epistemic, and political objectivity that still weighs on the shoulders of the oppressed. It is these effects that decolonial theorists call ‘coloniality,’ which Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez define as “the continuing hidden process of expropriation, exploitation, pollution, and corruption that underlies the narrative of modernity.”
Art and aesthetic discourses would seem to be immune to this critique. What could be more innocent than a painting of a pair of shoes hanging on a white wall or a sculpture depicting a Greek goddess? Of course, art galleries and museums have problematic aspects, but isn’t it too much to say that these further coloniality? And what about those works—Picasso’s Guernica, for example—that are critical of modernity? Yet decolonial thought has begun to inquire into art’s and aesthetics’ entwinement with coloniality, arguing that the modern aesthetic discourse—born with the works of Alexander Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant—along with its institutions, are not as innocent as they seem. Indeed, the argument is that modern aesthetics lies within what Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano calls the ‘colonial matrix of power,’ the structure of control that subjects and molds everything from politics to culture. This matrix, because it partakes in the control of our senses and sensibility, defines which experiences and which forms of perception are valid in the public sphere, and it legitimizes certain works as ‘art’ while confining others to ethnographic museums or, at best, to museums of ‘folk’ or ‘popular’ art. According to decolonial aesthesis, this has taken place through the regulation of taste and the imposition of particular standards of beauty, something that has sidelined other, non-Western sensibilities and creative and expressive practices. Think, for example, how the ideas of the ‘grotesque’ or the concept of ‘kitsch’ were used to devalue everything that did not follow European standards of beauty, or about how sight is prioritized over taste or smell in the ‘fine’ arts. The modern aesthetic discourse, that is, has constructed and limited our structures of feeling and our sensibility.
‘Aesthesis’—which originally referred to the sensory experience of perception achieved through taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell—was therefore regulated by ‘aesthetics,’ a philosophical discourse that focuses on what Susan Buck-Morss called the “philosophical trinity of Art, Beauty, and Truth.” This transformation amounted to the ‘colonization’ of aesthesis by aesthetics, which established the standards of what counts as good taste, and projected them to the entire globe. As Walter Mignolo has argued, “If aesthesis is a phenomenon common to all living organisms with a sensory system, aesthetics is a particular theory of how certain sensations relate to beauty. That is to say that there is no universal law that states the necessary relation between aesthesis [as sense perception] and beauty.”
Decolonial aesthesis recovers the original meaning of the word ‘aesthesis’ as sense perception with the aim of exposing the false universality of modern aesthetics and the role it has played in repressing ‘other’ forms of knowledge, ‘other’ worldviews, and ‘other’ systems of image and symbol production. But this recovery also has a productive aspect: to empower and make visible practices, subjectivities, and modes of being that have been eclipsed by the discourse of modernity but that persist, obstinately, at its margins and blind spots. This recovery is, therefore, not primarily concerned with the artistic contribution of the decolonial perspective—something that would remain within the confines of ‘aesthetics.’ Rather, it is concerned with how art and its institutions can be mobilized to instantiate a critique of Western modernity and its colonial specter. Its goal is not (merely or primarily) aesthetic, but rather concerns aesthesis: the transformation of our sensibility and structures of feeling.
So let me return to Wilson’s work. If we take a step away from its purely aesthetic aspects, we realize that Wilson’s work is performing a criticism that fits seamlessly into the decolonial critique. In bringing to light the underside of the museum’s collection, he invites the audience to dwell on its preconceptions regarding art, aesthetics, and cultural institutions, pointing to their often unacknowledged complicity with the persistence of oppression. The museum and the art institutions, Wilson’s work shows, are not passive bystanders but actively shape the ways we think about history, culture, and race. Crucially, and in contrast to the works of figures like Daniel Buren, this is not an internal critique of the art institution, but is supposed to trigger a revision of the spectator’s own preconceptions and complicity with racism.
Wilson’s project shuns the discourse of aesthetic autonomy and brings to the fore an ethical and political subject. He therefore explicitly disobeys the artistic and aesthetic standards—but not with purely artistic or aesthetic goals. His goal is to liberate a racialized experience from the shackles of the aesthetic discourse of modernity, so as to undo its negation and its confinement to the underground of the museum. In so doing, it also contributes to the visibilization of sensibilities and subjectivities hidden by the claims of modern aesthetics. The task for decolonial aesthesis, as Mignolo and Vazquez write, is to produce works that “[make] visible decolonial subjectivities,” and that “[re-valuate] what has been made invisible or devalued by the modern-colonial order.” In this sense, Wilson’s work is wholly decolonial.
Many years before Wilson’s work, and many years before the language of ‘decolonial aesthesis’ even existed, the Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles modified Coca-Cola bottles by inscribing in them messages such as ‘Yankees Go Home!’ or the instructions for making a Molotov cocktail. Meireles did not exhibit these bottles in a gallery or museum but returned them back to the circuit of distribution and consumption. The work was titled Inserções em circuitos ideológicos (Insertions into Ideological Circuits) and was part of a larger artistic movement that emerged in Latin America. Filmmaker ‘Pino’ Solanas, the Argentinian collective Tucuman Arde, and the Brazilian artists Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, among others, were all reacting to the military dictatorships, sponsored by the USA, that permeated South America in the 70’s, as well as to the failed process of modernization. These artists believed that art had a role to play in the struggle against oppression and the echoes of colonization. But if the struggle was to succeed, it required what Juan Pablo Renzi—a member of Tucuman Arde—called “a conscious incorporation of political action into artistic practice.”
Fifty years later, decolonial aesthesis is echoing this call. In so doing, it has brought new life to the old question regarding art’s relation to ethics and politics, that is, the question of aesthetic autonomy. The lesson of decolonial aesthesis is that, today, art cannot afford to ignore the continued impact that consumerism, neoliberalism, globalization, and colonially have on society and on its own production. Only an art that takes this seriously can tap into the potential to liberate the senses and experiences that have been occluded by the discourses of modernity and coloniality. To liberate aesthesis, that is, we need to decolonize aesthetics.
Ricardo Samaniego de la Fuente
Ricardo Samaniego de la Fuente holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Essex. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Aesthetics (Faculty of Arts, Universidad de la República, Uruguay), and is currently working on a postdoctoral project on popular culture and the public sphere in Latin America, sponsored by the Agencia Nacional de Investigacion e Innovacion (ANII). He has published articles on Adorno, Habermas, and Kluge in journals such as New German Critique, Artefilosofia, and Kriterion, and is interested in the work of the Frankfurt School and on the intersection between aesthetics and politics.
