Claire Bishop is one of the most prominent academics in the United States whose professional field is the study of contemporary visual art. And like many such academics, she views her professional activity as ‘theorizing’ aspects of contemporary art, with a particular focus on seemingly novel aspects of very recent art. Her new book Disordered Attention is very much of a piece with this orientation. The book consists of a lengthy introduction wherein she discusses the concept of attention and introduces her central concept of ‘hybrid attention’, then of four chapters each of which presents and ‘theorizes’ what she claims is some recently emergent genre of contemporary art. I am by no means certain that the book offers much insight into very recent visual art, but Bishop’s method, examples, and observations are at the very least symptomatic of contemporary reflective thinking on their topic, and so worth knowing by anyone who seeks orientation on and understanding of these novel kinds of art. In the following short review I’ll start with what I take to by a summary of her central arguments and analyses, and then offer some critical reflections. I note in advance that at many points in reading this short book I was unsure exactly what Bishop is arguing, as well as what the intended scope and force of her claims are; but of course I’ll try to state her points in what I take to be their maximally plausible and interesting form, though it seems to me entirely possible that I am misunderstanding her claims. I shall not resist the temptation to insert occasional marks of perplexity or exasperation in brackets.
I take her to be arguing two central claims: 1. There is an historically novel kind of attention, ‘hybrid attention’, that is the mode of viewers’ engagement solicited in some recent art (Bishop calls this “the new conditions of spectatorship” (p. 4)); and 2. There are (at least) four very recently emergent genres in contemporary visual art: (a) ‘research-based’ art presented in installations; (b) ‘performance exhibition’ wherein lengthy live performances occur in museums and galleries; (c) ‘interventions’ wherein artists attempt, both within and outside of art institutions, to capture attention with ephemeral installations or actions in order to stimulate broad discussion and debate; (d) invocations, whether in collages, paintings, photographs, installations, or performances, of modernist architecture. [One immediately notices that these four emergent ‘genres’ are quite heterogeneous, and further that prima facie (d) at least does not seem to be anything like an artistic genre, but rather more a kind of concern or topic across genres; I’ll consider this point below.] Here initially I just note that Bishop considers claims 1 and 2 to be connected in that each of the four genres demands (in very different ways) ‘hybrid attention’ from the viewer for appropriate engagement with, and understanding and appreciation of, works that are classified as instances of the genre.
I’ll now consider the claims in more detail. First, what does Bishop mean by ‘hybrid attention’? Bishop states that in this book “attention is understood not as a universal, deep-rooted faculty of the human mind, but as a capacity that is mutable—through technology, medication, and the presence of others” (p. 5). Bishop contrasts ‘hybrid attention’ with two other historically prominent kinds of attention: ‘normative attention’, which she characterizes as “an attention directed at objects (rather than subjects), that is intellectual and cognitive (rather than sensorial and affective), that is framed in terms of ownership (‘taking possession of the mind’ [here Bishop quotes from William James’s The Principles of Psychology]) and which is individual (rather than socially or collectively constituted) (p. 8)”; and the kind of absorptive attention that she thinks is characteristic of traditional approaches, both perceptual and scholarly, to visual works of art. Normative attention is, Bishop asserts, quite a nasty piece of business: it “conforms to Enlightenment conceptions of the modern subject as conscious, rational, and disciplined. This model is, of course [of course??], paradigmatically white, patriarchal, bourgeois, colonial. It is synonymous with ownership, property, and optical mastery” (p.8 [does Bishop know what the word ‘synonymous’ means?]). Further, normative attention “assumes a normative subject—privileged, white, straight, able-bodied, volitional [?]—who confers his attention onto an exteriority thereby constituted as an object.” (p. 15) The second prominent kind of attention, which I’ll call ‘absorptive attention’, is a sub-kind of normative attention that emerges prominently in the 1870s with new ways of hanging paintings in salons, newly silent and refined behavior in museums, and with Richard Wagner’s re-organization of theatrical space in the service of encouraging “optical surrender” and “ritual immersion” (p. 13) in his operas’ audiences. In the arts absorptive attention is bound to “the depth model of a fully present beholder” and “a modernist aesthetics of rapt enthrallment and plentitude” (p. 27). Earlier in the book Bishop writes that a ‘depth model of culture’ is one wherein “cherished objects (‘masterpieces’) . . . elicit inexhaustible attention”, inciting scholars to “spend long hours writing about such objects”, thereby [?] associating “meaning and profundity” (p. 5). Perhaps one might phrase Bishop’s general point by saying that absorptive attention is normative attention in modern arts. Hybrid attention contrasts with normative attention and its artistic form absorptive attention in abandoning the latters’ modes of engagement in favor of the audience relaxing, chatting, looking at their phones, taking photos and putting them on Instagram, and so forth.
I turn now to the four emergent genres of contemporary visual art. Bishop is not wholly consistent in her use of terminology. At one point she says that only the first three kinds of art considered solicit hybrid attention (pp. 27-8), and that the fourth kind is not a genre but a ‘citational practice’ (p. 30). However, in a schematic table (p. 32) she classifies all four as ‘genres of practice’ that solicit different ‘modes of attention’ that are manifestly hybrid in her sense, so for consistency with her most formal statement I’ll consider them all as genres involving hybrid attention. In a number of places Bishop states that she is ‘theorizing’ the different genres. What does this mean? Bishop gives some indications of her understanding of ‘theorization’, and her practice is reasonably consistent. A genre is ‘theorized’ when (a) a short characterization is given of its central features; (b) an intra-artistic pre-history and history of its central works are sketched; (c) central works are picked out and described; (d) something of the broader institutional, social, political, and/or economic background or context of the relevant works is indicated; and (e) the central works and the genre as a whole are assessed in light of the roles they play in sustaining, fostering, or hindering an array of broader concerns, especially those relating to the destructive effects of capitalism and presumptive social progress in ethics, social mores, and rights. On what I take to be a fairly standard understanding, inquiry consisting of (a)-(c) is the normal practice of art history, (a)-(d) is the social history of art, and the full ‘theorizing’ of (a)-(e) is a complacent, academic version of critical theory, unreflective in its failure to probe, historicize, or problematize the standards and criteria invoked in (e).
Bishop’s remarks can readily be organized under the (a)-(e) schema, as follows:
--Research-based art is a kind of visual art that spatially exhibits a great deal of textual material, along with in many cases photographs, videos, and/or films, all of which are manifestly the product of the artist’s research into a particular self-chosen topic. In many cases the materials shown are so numerous and lengthy that no viewer/reader could reasonably be expected to look at and/or read all of it. No narrative is presented, and no conclusion is insinuated. The genre emerges as the confluence of three earlier though historically quite recent artforms: photodocumentary, the film essay, and Conceptual art (p. 41). There are as of now three phases of such art: an initial phase exemplified by Renée Green’s [profoundly dreary] Import/Export Funk Office of 1992, a mixed-media exhibition including books, magazines, newspapers, videos, cassettes, and various pedestrian wooden structures; a second phase that partially overlaps the first phase and is distinguished by its deployment of seemingly outmoded technologies such as slideshows and embrace of narrative, as exemplified by the work of Mario García Torres including A Film Treatment (Share-e-Nau Wanderings) (2006), which uses faxes, slides, and audio recording to present Torres’s attempts to locate a certain hotel in Afghanistan; and a third phase which largely restricts itself to internet research, and presents its materials as an aggregation of data that the viewer is expected to sift through, though to no particular end, and as exemplified by Wolfgang Tillmans’s ‘Truth Study Center’ of many iterations starting in 2005.
The social precondition of such [disheartening and excruciatingly boring] art is the rise of doctoral programs for artists (p. 38). Bishop for the most part evaluates this genre with two criteria: Does it or does it not undermine the presumptive authority of the artist and so ‘decenter the subject’? And is it worthwhile for a viewer to engage with it? The first and third phases do such undermining, the second doesn’t, but all of this is trumped by the fact that the work is so diffuse. Against these dispiriting works, Bishop counterposes the work of Walid Raad and Anna Boghiguian which involves some research, but which synthesizes the research with a personal narrative and presents the synthesis in such a manner that a viewer is allowed “a lived, sensuous encounter that has been digested” (p. 72). Good on Raad and Boghiguian, the reader sighs; but how do these works fit into Bishop’s three phases? And if they don’t fit, does that mean that they aren’t actually part of the genre? Or alternatively, does it mean that Bishop’s description is incomplete, and indeed omits what should be the central instances of the genre, that is, those that succeed artistically?
In order not to overly try the reader’s patience, I’ll describe the quite similar accounts of the remaining three genres more briefly. Performance exhibitions emerge from the precedent of Merce Cunningham’s events, which were multi-media presentations of his choreographed dances off-stage in museums and other public spaces. An exemplary work is Maria Hassabi’s PLASTIC of 2015, consisting of lengthy performances of very slow dances of crawling the floors and inching down stairs. Hybrid attention is particularly evident with viewers taking photos [and fleeing the museum?]. Bishop rather likes this, as the viewer is uncertain how to act (p. 109), and the whole thing is quite sociable with all the resultant photos and chatter online. Interventions are “self-initiated actions that address the polis through the use of public space, employing an everyday visual language, and harnessing the media to force an issue into public consciousness and spark debate” (p. 115) [In what sense is this an artistic genre? And what does Bishop intend in using the Greek term polis instead of, say, ‘city’ or ‘urban environment’?]
A recent and well-known such intervention was Pussy Riot’s Mother of God, Drive Putin Away in a cathedral in Moscow in 2012. Bishop seems to approve of many interventions because effective in their provocations, but is seemingly troubled by the fact that on her own account the storming of the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 might plausibly count as an intervention.
The final genre [or is it strategy?] involves contemporary artists’ invoking modernist architecture, such as in Kcho’s To the Eyes of History (1992-95) and Ai Weiwei’s Fountain of Light (2007), a genre-or-strategy that Bishop finds typically and lamentably nostalgic. Positive counter-instances are provided by the widely known ‘monuments’ of Thomas Hirschhorn, which provide a “collision of demographics and activities” that create “a social montage “ that is disjunctive and beautiful (p. 192).
Having already signaled my dismay about a number of Bishop’s formulations—her unexamined and complacent use of fashionable clichés; her sloppiness in formulations; inconsistencies resulting from the failure to think through her basic points and concepts-- by way of criticism I’ll restrict myself to what I take to be a central conceptual problem with the book, namely her presentation and understanding of the concept of attention. She cites James’s formulation of attention as an aspect of human psychology that involves selection, focalization, and sustained awareness as somehow a distinctive mark of all the socially despised types of liberal academics—the white, the privileged, the bourgeois, the colonialist. But surely attention is an aspect of human psychology; and if James’s formulation is irredeemably tainted ideological, then how ought one formulate what attention is? I can see nothing problematic with James’s formulation as an initial orientation to the topic, and Bishop provides no reason, evidence, or argumentation to suggest otherwise, other than the bare assertion that it is of course white, bourgeois, etc. One might with equal justification retort that Bishop’s assertion is of course rubbish. Further, one might think that her inability to formulate the conception of hybrid attention as something other than looking at something + looking at one’s phone is evidence of her lack of an intellectually plausible conception of attention per se. And finally, on her own account successful works in her chosen genres, such as those of Walid Raad, do rely for their artistic effectiveness on synthesis of heterogeneous materials and perceptually graspable presentations. This suggests that hybrid attention is at most an aspect of contemporary sensibilities that may—or may not—be incorporated into and function as an aspect of a successful work of contemporary art, rather than hybrid attention being somehow the core manner of encounter with (some) works of contemporary art. Bishop needs to go back to the drawing board (or whatever its digital equivalent is), read the basic literature on attention and on aesthetic response, and re-think her points accordingly.
References:
Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (2024)
William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)