The Moment of Violence
by
Chon A. Noriega
The state's most important institution is that of the
means of violence and coercion.
John A. Hall and John G. Ikenberry, The State
The moment of violence is the moment when the
coloniser becomes aware of the existence of the
colonised.
Glauber Rocha, "The Aesthetics of Hunger"
If we look in any dictionary, violence is defined as an
aberration of law, ethics, and civilized behavior. It is an
"unjust exercise of power," or "physical force exerted for the
purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing." Clearly, such
things are not to be done, for they violate our social contract.
This perspective on violence is a liberal humanist one in which
moral discourses are focused on the individual. And it is the
mainstay of our media and entertainment culture, which reduces
the messiness of the social world to the black-and-white moral
universe of melodrama.
But if we look to political theory, there is a countervailing
commonsense: violence is the primary "institution" by which the
state defines its territorial boundaries and maintains its
authority. The state both exerts and regulates violence; and,
as a consequence, violence becomes the necessary starting point
for any significant challenge to the state, its structure of
rule, and the social order. This perspective is concerned with
the state, the nation, and social movements. Here violence is
less a moral conundrum than the basis for and means of social
organization. Thus, the moment of violence is intimately tied
to forms of belonging, from citizenship to being jumped into a
gang. That is so because violence also defines what is outside
belonging through the act of being "disappeared," deported,
interned, imprisoned, enslaved, but also through being denied
education, social services, or the right to vote. As René
Girard states in Violence and the Sacred, "all man's religious,
familial, economic, and social institutions grew out of the body
of an original victim" (306). To speak of violence, then, is
not to call attention to an aberration, but to place one's body
in direct relationship to the origin of things -- it is, for
better or worse, the moment of one's recognition as a political
being.
The aesthetic would seem to be far removed from the moment of
violence. After all, pace Kant, aesthetics deals with the
beauty of things separate from their instrumental relationship
to the world. It is the law of perception. Violence, on the
other hand, organizes human relations, creates a political
culture, and structures our identities. It is power become law.
If art is sacred, then violence is profane. So for art to
engage violence is at once a form of violence against art and
the most profound expression of the political. That is, in
violating the boundaries between the aesthetic and violence-cumsocial institution, such art goes beyond the mere topical and
imbricates perception with power.
While this move within art can be traced to many moments, a
particularly useful one can be found in the decade after World
War II. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Destructivism, a
now-forgotten international art movement, criticized the postwar
avant-garde for its failure to engage the unprecedented violence
and destruction of the 20th century. Rafael Montañez Ortiz -- a
Puerto Rican artist who would become one of the first to produce
art on the Holocaust -- gave theoretical coherence to this
movement, shifting the domain of destruction from society to
art. There destruction would become symbolic rather than real.
In this view, art would constitute an autonomous sphere that
could displace the threat of nuclear war or racial violence
through symbolic destruction that transformed the object, the
artist, and society. For Ortiz, destruction did not become art;
rather art constituted an arena within which destruction was
itself transformed. In destroying pianos, sofas, chairs,
mattresses, shoes, and even films, Ortiz turned destruction into
a sacrificial process that released the man-made object from the
violence within Western culture. In the process, the destroyed
objects also became art.
By the end of the 1960s, Ortiz would be erased from the history
of art, falling into the widening gap between an avant-garde
refigured as postmodernist (and nonethnic) and an ethnic art
defined in terms of cultural nationalism (and modernist
aesthetics). If both sides started from different premises of
the relationship between signifier and signified, both spoke
about their work in political terms. For his part, Ortiz
refused to conflate politics and art; for him, politics meant
putting your body, and not art, on the front lines. And he did.
In the early 1970s, for example, Ortiz was an active member of
the Artist Worker's Coalition, taking part in street protests
against the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Ortiz also
founded El Museo del Barrio, the first Latino art museum in the
United States, in 1969. Today he works on the digital
deconstruction of Hollywood (Noriega 1995). Ortiz's refusal to
conflate politics and art is calculated insofar as he wants to
maintain aesthetics as a separate category, while still seeking
those spaces where violence imbricate art and politics,
perception and power.
There is another dimension to consider: the family. If our
media and entertainment culture reduces the question of violence
to melodrama, it is able to do so because the family provides
the narrative context for the individual's travails, thereby
mystifying the role of the state. But here it is crucial to
remember that the family is itself an institution closely
aligned with the state, and, in fact, is second in importance
only to the means of violence. The feminist insight that "the
personal is political" captures this sense that the personal,
private, and familial are not separate spheres, but rather
constitutive of our political and societal reality. Therefore,
by way of an ending, consider the following passage from Harry
Gamboa's short story, "The Chosen Fugue":
Rowena St. @ Hyperion Ave.: The woman was walking
slowly as she carried her infant daughter in her arms.
A transient who had been trailing them since they had
walked out of the grocery store picked up a brick and
threw it with great strength. Fortunately, the baby
took evasive action and the brick barely missed the
woman's head. They managed to get home safely. Her
husband became alarmed when he heard of the attempted
assault and grabbed the largest kitchen knife and a
formidable claw hammer. He was gone for less than
thirty minutes. He returned with a plain brown paper
bag that contained an infected tongue, two dirty
hands, one filthy foot, a ravaged ear, five square
inches of scalp, and a set of tenderized genitals.
The family was united and would never be defeated.
(498)
Gamboa, like Ortiz, is an artist whose engagement with violence
challenged prevailing avant-garde practices, largely by emerging
and being articulated outside the art world. Starting in the
early 1970s, he developed conceptual and performance-based works
that intervened within police riots, state and federal
surveillance, and distorted media and press coverage. What one
notices most about Gamboa's body of work is the unrelenting
expression of violence outside melodramatic and moral discourses
-- as a cultural logic, an administrative tactic, a familial
ritual, and a fact of everyday life. The moment of violence
signals our belonging in the world.
#
About the Author:
Chon A. Noriega is Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research
Center and Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media. He
is the author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the
Rise of Chicano Cinema and editor of nine books dealing with
Latino media, performance and visual art. He has curated
numerous exhibitions, including "Just Another Poster: Chicano
Graphic Arts in California," which will travel to five venues
nationwide through 2003.
Works Cited
Gamboa Jr., Harry. 1998. Urban Exile: Collected Writings of
Harry Gamboa Jr. Ed. Chon A. Noriega. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick
Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hall, John A., and G. John Ikenberry. 1989. The State.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Noriega, Chon A. 1995. "Sacred Contingencies: The Digital
Deconstructions of Rafael Montañez Ortiz," Art Journal (Winter):
36-40.
Rocha, Glauber. 1983. "The Aesthetics of Hunger." In Twenty-Five
Years of the New Latin American Cinema. Ed. Michael Chanan.
London: British Film Institute and Channel Four Television. 1314.