Art and Negativity: Questioning the Critical Potential of Activist Performance Art through an Adornian Critique of the Transborder Immigrant Tool

Abstract

What is the critical potential of art? It is argued that socially-engaged, activist art is unable to critique society because of its positive, communicative intentions. Instead, the author suggests that art’s critical capacities arrive negatively, turning away from society so as to think freely. Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics is made central to the project of making room for more questions at a time when socially-engaged art is a product of neoliberal administration. It follows Adorno’s assertion that art is implicitly critical to society, and explores this idea more fully. Performance art is taken as the objective starting point, wherein comparisons are drawn between the radical commitment of performance and the immediacy of activism. It is supposed that the convergence of performance art and activism amount to positive ameliorative gestures, meaning that critique is unable to be found within their aesthetic constitution. The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) is used as an exemplary case-study that complicates the issue of performance art dissolving into the object, but retreats back into a crisis of itself due to its social engagement. As such, it is argued that negative aesthetic distance is necessary for art to exert a critical force upon society.