argument is often related to minority artists. These were artists who were rejected from the Salon, they were kept outside the museum, and then all of a sudden the art market discovers them, and they become as consumerable as anything else. I think it is a bit naïve to say simply that this is a takeover. The more important and challenging thing to do is to argue for different types of institutionalization. That is when you have First Nations art of this transformative, hybridizing quality, that touches and transforms so many other kinds of art practices and raises so many other questions about consumerability, canonicity, and so on. Maybe the time has come not to locate this work within the general history of modernism or postmodernism, but to start from the very specific symbolic and semiotic structure of this work and allow works from minority artists to shape the larger institutions and the discourses. Not to fit them in, but for them to re-translate the traditions followed by larger institutions, older cultures, more traditional forms of knowledge.
SdB: In her essay On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag saw a weakness in the medium of photography in the way that it allowed space for speculation. She suggested, “Only that which narrates can make us understand.” You have explored the notion of textual ambivalence and the “slip of the tongue,” which can enable us to understand the hidden narratives within larger, official narratives, thus allowing us to see history in its full complexity. Whilst you write mainly about literature, you have often referred to other forms of creativity, such as dance, poetry and visual art. These media create narrative in very different ways. For example, one could argue that there is no “slip of the tongue” in visual art, yet the knowing, conscious use of ambivalence is widespread. For you, do these different forms of creativity enable us to “understand” in the same way?
HB: I think I take a different line here. We could have a long discussion about what is narrative, but I think it is very difficult to think of any art form as not being engaged in a narrative practice. Now, there are certain art forms – say, historical painting in the nineteenth century – where you can actually see the narrative, just like in the novel, as a form. Narrative is the medium. All the time and trouble is taken by the person to produce a narrative. If you see some Surrealist works, then there isn’t the same attention to a narrative internally in the work, or if you read a lyric poem, or a sonnet or a haiku, there isn’t the same investment of narrative. But narrativity cannot be left out of the process of engagement with a work.
Having said that, I want to make a distinction between a proper use of narrative and a weak use of narrative. The weak or sentimental use of narrative would be to somehow take a work that internally resists the narrative impulse and to create a story out of it, to facilitate the exchange between the viewer and the work, or between the work and the world, not acknowledging its resistance to telling a story in a particular kind of way. The strong use of narrative neither imputes to nor imports into the work a kind of narrative that resists its obscurity or its difficulty. It tries to extract or engage with the work to find its own transformative process and structure. It allows the work itself to make problematic our normal or normalizing ways of viewing or producing meaning. So a good form of narrativity is a relationship of productive tension and conflict with the work. A bad form of narrativity always tries to reframe the work in order to find a consensus.
ZG: We were interested in the way you see reading, not as a passive but as an active and productive process. Today, so much emphasis in cultural policy (and thus public funding) is placed upon participation. Whilst the impetus behind this new focus is admirable, few politicians seem to have really questioned what kind of participation they are seeking, instead limiting their concerns to “bums on seats” statistics, or the number of new visitors that pass through the doors of a cultural institution. Few people seem to be asking how audiences participate, how they might benefit from such participation in culture, and how culture might be altered or improved in return.
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