{"id":669,"date":"2021-06-15T11:36:38","date_gmt":"2021-06-15T11:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/23\/?p=669"},"modified":"2026-06-19T11:53:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T11:53:27","slug":"the-fall-of-greatness-toward-an-aesthetics-of-co-reproduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/23\/the-fall-of-greatness-toward-an-aesthetics-of-co-reproduction\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fall of Greatness: Toward an Aesthetics of Co-(re)production"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Public reception of artistic inquiries into Danish colonial legacies insistently focuses on singular authorship, quality and visual representation. In public discourse, I argue, collectively uttered needs for decolonization are willfully ignored. Through an analysis of the aesthetics of reception and its entanglement in post-enlightenment onto-epistemologies of separation, I demonstrate how the \u201ccarceral frame of the art work\u201d (Moten qtd. in Harney et al.) is upheld in both art criticism and in the infrastructures of the arts. However, informed by practices of BIPoC artists\u2019 collectives, I will describe and theorize a current changing conception of production in aesthetic theory. Moving from the Kantian heritage of isolation, interiority and exclusion, I suggest instead to think with the conception of an aesthetics of co-(re)production (Kunst, \u201cNT\u201d). This shift to co-(re)production changes the conception of what an artwork is, namely not an action or an object produced through freedom by one artist, but an imprint of interdependency, a socio-aesthetic structure woven between history, infrastructures and people. Perceiving artistic production as interdependent challenges a racial grammar otherwise inherent in the tradition of Western aesthetic theory. 
Keywords<\/strong>: artists\u2019 collectives, Anonymous Visual Artists, aesthetics of production, Bojana Kunst, co-(re)production, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Marronage<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hunting Down the Author, Looking for the Object<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

On a grey November day in 2020, a plaster cast bust of the Danish king and founder of the art academy Frederik V of Denmark (1723\u201366) was removed from its pedestal rising above the heads of the students at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and thrown into the harbour. The action\u2014later framed as happening by the artists themselves\u2014was carried out by Anonymous Visual Artists, a group that made its appearance for the first time to the Danish public. The aim was\u2014in line with many effigies torn down from the public space in the context of Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests in 2020\u2014to raise awareness of the invisibilization of the Danish colonial past and its continuous consequences for BIPoCs in and outside the academy, in and outside Denmark. The happening was documented in a video by the artists, along with a written statement below the images: \u201c. . . solidarity with all the artists, students, and people all over the world who have had to live with the aftermath of Danish colonialism in the US Virgin Islands, India, Ghana, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Denmark.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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A plaster cast of a bust of King Frederik V (1723\u201366) was sunk in the harbour of Copenhagen in November 2020 by the group of Anonymous Visual Artists. The original bust was made by Jacques-Fran\u00e7ois-Joseph Saly in 1754, but the plaster copy is a more recent replica from the 1950s. Photo: Courtesy of Anonymous Visual Artists and Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, 2020<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In Denmark, the appeal to engage with Danish colonial histories has in the past years been led by BIPoC students, artists and cultural workers in collectives such as Feminist Collective with No Name (FCNN), Marronage and The Union\u2014Cultural Workers Union for BIPoCs in Denmark.[2]<\/sup><\/a> Yet, their collectively organized appeals have not reached broader media attention. It seemed now, after years of collective and very persuasive, constructive and educative attempts to raise consciousness of continuing colonial rationales in Denmark, a happening that would lead to the destruction of the colonizer\u2019s head could maybe finally raise broader public attention. But instead of generating a public debate on decolonization of artistic education and Denmark\u2019s relation to its role as colonizing nation in the U.S Virgin Islands and in Greenland (and its repercussions in Danish asylum policies), the reception in newspapers and on social media condemned the happening as both vandalization, iconoclasm in line with Daesh and the Taliban, and was judged by art critics and fellow artists as an imprecise and non-edifying work of art.[3]<\/sup><\/a> The interest in engaging with the aims of the happening was considerably small,[4]<\/sup><\/a> and calls for the police to act were quickly made by right-wing politicians as well as the social democrat Minister of Culture, Joy Mogensen (Dreyer; Henningsen).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public debate focused on the view that artists had been destroying cultural heritage and vandalizing another (dead) artist\u2019s artwork\u2014a cast from around 1950 made in plaster worth around \u20ac5.000, it turned out, and of which there were more copies in the archives and so it could easily be reproduced. This heated discussion involved an accusation by journalist Poul Pilgaard from the newspaper Weekendavisen <\/em>that the academy was the victim of harsh and damaging identity politics.He decided to publicly name four BIPoC art students who\u2014according to the journalist\u2014could possibly be involved in the happening. As a reaction to this hunting down of BIPoC students, the teacher, artist and postdoc researcher Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld from the academy publicly took full responsibility for the group action, possibly in order to protect students from further accusations. She was instantly expelled from her position at the art academy where the rector Kirsten Langkilde stated that \u201c[t]he Art Academy can accommodate all opinions\u2014but not all actions\u201d (Langkilde). When expelled from the position in the academy, Dirckinck-Holmfeld also lost her grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation for her research on the legacies of Danish colonial archives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The urge for public interest to identify the persons behind Anonymous Visual Artists, and not accepting a collective and de-personified authorship behind the action, was striking. As Dirckinck-Holmfeld took the responsibility for the happening and was held accountable for vandalism by the police, the desire for solidarity beyond the kingdom of Denmark was \u201cdrowned.\u201d Instead, the reception of the acclaimed authorship was met by colleagues with infantilizing, personifying mockery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artists in the Danish theatre scene\u2014until then quiet\u2014found now a possibility to attack the confirmed and assumed artist personae behind the happening. Dirckinck-Holmfeld\u2019s presentation of the happening\u2019s decolonializing invitation, explained, in rather academic vocabulary, on public television, was imitated sarcastically by Danish playwright Line Knutzon and the actress Paprika Steen on an Instagram<\/em> video series with more than 15.000 views.[5]<\/sup><\/a> A satirical trio of actors, Platt-form, made a music video performing young, hip (and racialized white) fine arts students posing in a shabby basement and throwing small puppet statues in a bowl of water while identifying with both the Taliban and Mao Zedong and shrilly claiming to be \u201cthe radical left wing.\u201d[6]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The debate has given rise to threatening rhetorical ammunition imported from the right wing[7]<\/sup><\/a>: scapegoating and hunting down personified \u201cperpetrators\u201d and insistently avoiding the questioning of colonial repercussions by linking the attention to the Americanized and all-too-sensitive \u201cidentity politics.\u201d What is missing in the public debate is a greater discussion of what it would actually mean to decolonize the academy. A crucial question is whether artistic practices can change the foundational rationales of the art institution, when they materialize in the classical category of the artwork, building on a hermeneutic understanding of soloist authorship and the artwork as expressing the artist\u2019s interiority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe need new institutions, not new art,\u201d  performance artist Coco Fusco recently stated (2020), pointing towards the overproduction of artworks in unfortunate and precarious infrastructures. If performance art has always been concerned with the embodied implications of the political\u2014personal questions of the gendered, racialized, classist subject at the centre for structural analysis\u2014then a shift can be observed moving from working on and pointing towards the personal as political to operating on an infrastructural level. How can (not subjectivities but) structurally formed collective identities be performed and renegotiated through new ways of organizing? And will decolonizing suggestions formulated collectively be perceivable in a wider public in Denmark?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to understand the attempts to change institutions collectively and from the bottom up, I suggest moving the scholarly focus from an aesthetics of reception to an aesthetics of production. The cultural analysis thereby shifts focus from concrete artworks to infrastructural performance <\/em>in itselflooking at the (re)organization of production within the arts as an artistic practice in itself, and thereby provincializing the analytical interest in artistic content, themes and expression.[8]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recognition of the contributions made by the collective organization of BIPoCs in the Danish art scene, and situated as a racialized white scholar in Cultural Studies and Performance Studies in Denmark, I will analyse how the aesthetics of production is profoundly interdependent and engaged with necessary affective labour and care work. Informed by practices of BIPoC artists\u2019 collectives, I describe and theorize a current changing conception of production<\/em> in aesthetic theory, moving from the Kantian heritage of isolation, exclusion, distinction and abstraction as rationales in aesthetics of production, towards an aesthetics of co-(re)production <\/em>(Kunst, Artist at Work<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This shift from an aesthetics of reception to an aesthetics of co-(re)production fundamentally changes the conception of what an artwork is and challenges lines of demarcation inherent in the tradition of Western aesthetic theory. Instead of giving attention to the artistic object and its origin in the artist\u2019s genius, so distinguished from others, the relations and dependencies of the artwork become central to the very understanding of art. In an aesthetics of co-(re)production, art is seen as a social structure woven by history, institutions and people. My argument here is influenced by Black feminist theory, as I interrogate the iteration and privilege of interiority<\/em> (da Silva, Toward<\/em>; \u201cMaterial Aesthetics\u201d) as racializing implication in the conception of the artwork itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the Work Done<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

It is no wonder if artists, academics and activists concerned with Danish colonialism, Denmark\u2019s participation in transatlantic enslavement and the racializing repercussions today, are suffering from a certain fatigueand articulation of afro-pessimism.[9]<\/sup><\/a> The three Caribbean islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John were Danish colonies for over 250 years and Denmark was\u2013with engagements in the transatlantic enslavement triangle\u2014the seventh largest slave-trading nation worldwide. In 2017, the centenary of the sale of the Danish West Indies was marked with several exhibitions, performances, publications and conferences. The many \u201cedifying\u201d artworks from 2017\u2014this is a term the critics would later call for as the bust was sunk into the harbour, meaning works that are constructive and inviting for further conversation\u2014have not led to any radical change in Danish public identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The major narrative is still that Denmark is part of a \u201cNordic exceptionalism,\u201d meaning that Denmark, before others, set the enslaved free and is still, although it is costly, benevolently helping Greenland\u2019s small nation to survive through some semi-colonial ties.[10]<\/sup><\/a> Despite the brutal history of the Danish slave trade from 1673\u20131863, and despite the recent documentation of the forced adoption of Greenlandic children in the twentieth century, there have been no official apologies nor paid reparations from Danish governments. The centre-liberal government in 2017 chose not<\/em> to financially support any memorials in the centenary year of the sale of the Danish West Indies. Ironically, two sculptures have been donated from the U.S Virgin Island to<\/em> Denmark as gifts in order to remind the public that \u201cwe are here because you were there.\u201d[11]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many artists are continuously contributing to the decolonizing attempts in the Danish art scene from positions across genres: both regarding the colonies in Greenland and the former Danish West Indies, but also through critiques of transatlantic adoption and the everyday racialization of descendants of immigrants. Some examples include visual artists Jeanette Ehlers, La Vaughn Belle, Emil Elg, Jane Jin Kaisen, Pia Arke and Jessie Kliemann, and authors Yahya Hassan, Maja Lee Langvad and Niviaq Korneliussen.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cWe are here because you were there\u201d Stuart Hall famously stated in a BBC documentary in 1978. The quote is repeatedly cited by a group of racialized Black performers on stage, facing the tribune with the audience in a small theatre, F\u00e5r302, in Copenhagen. The scene is part of the performance Into the dark<\/em>, directed by visual artist Jeanette Ehlers in 2017. Photo: S\u00f8ren Meisner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Most significantly, a large number of BIPoCs have organized in collectives across media, activism and art: UFOlab, Marronage, Feminist Collective With No Name (FCNN), (Un)told Pages, A Seat at the Table, Andromeda and The Union\u2014Cultural Workers Union for People of Colour. These collectives have\u2014through performances, readings, zines, self-made media platforms, artist-driven spaces, book stores, festivals or artists\u2019 organizations\u2014acted as rewriters, confronters, archivists, caretakers and healers of Danish cultural memory. These works can, each in their own right, be seen as \u201cedifying\u201d as opposed to destructive, as was the critique of the \u201cbust happening\u201d in the sense that they are suggestive and constructive. Why have all the \u201cedifying\u201d practices of the collectives not reached wider media attention? Does the Danish media public need the signature and personae of the single artist in order to have a scapegoat, so that a discussion on the artist personae can overshadow public unwillingness to deal with colonial amnesia?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a conversation on collective organization and strategic separatism in BIPoC artists\u2019 collectives, FCNN member Dina El Kaisy Friemuth explains why appearing only as a group is a way of protecting themselves after exiting \u201cthe white castle,\u201d as she names the art academy in Copenhagen: \u201cI needed to organize. I needed to get some people with me, because it\u2019s really tough to do political work, and when you do it alone it really like [sic] crushes you.\u201dShe further explains the experience of racial violence and what it means to be \u201ccrushed\u201d publicly by exemplifying it with the sudden death of the Palestinian-Danish author Yahya Hassan (1995\u20132020), who had been subjected to massive media attention and embroiled in a scandal for his critique of both Danish structural racism and domestic and psychic violence in immigrant families:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We just saw that you had a really big loss in Denmark, a person who has been crushed . . . you get so much shit when you talk about these things and you need to have a community around you, . . . a safe environment and somebody who has your bag. (El Kaisy Friemuth)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What El Kaisy Friemuth argues here is that the public Danish discourse can be intimidating for BIPoCs to engage in, and even deadly, when individual artists become scapegoats for racist defence of the realm. We can see her argument as a specific need amongst BIPoCs to be organized and represented in groups in order to be less vulnerable and structurally isolated as minoritized and racialized non-white individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A recurring motif in Black aesthetics is how to work against structural loneliness (Rankine, Don\u2019t Let Me Be Lonely<\/em>; Just Us<\/em>) and organize as many\u2014in plural<\/em> (da Silva, \u201cHacking\u201d)\u2014or as assembly <\/em>(Harney et al.). <\/em>The organization of bodies in artists\u2019 collectives, counteracting the individuation of the artist and (national) lines of demarcation within the infrastructures of the art world, can be seen as a strategy in order to escape what Fred Moten has also termed \u201cthe carceral frame of the art work\u201d (Harney et al.).<\/p>\n\n\n

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FCNN News is a media platform by Feminist Collective with No Name (FCNN). Photo: Maja Theodoraki<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

To be organized as many, particularly as BIPoCs, has turned out to be crucial in Denmark: by being in plural it becomes obvious that the single BIPoC artist is not \u201ctoo sensitive,\u201d  having an individual problem, but that the experiences of racism in Denmark are structural and the ignorance towards colonial repercussion seems willful. Claims of structural racism and colonial amnesia in the Danish public are often met with the accusation of \u201cpolicing\u201d with the agenda of identity politics,[12]<\/sup><\/a> and the demands for anti-racist work and decolonizing actions are neglected. The Danes are, according to scholars in Nordic colonialism, holding on to the so-called \u201chygge-racism\u201d[13]<\/sup><\/a>: a defence of normative \u201ccolour blindness\u201d and the ways in which Danish racist heritage is preserved as only cosy, retro-cultural reminiscences of times where people were less conscious of their vocabulary and artifacts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be critical towards \u201chygge-racism\u201d is often perceived as an attack on free speech. Similarly, when discomfort is uttered by academics, criticizing the use of colonial vocabulary such as the n-word or the e-word[14]<\/sup><\/a> in children\u2019s books, the media in Denmark presents it as \u201ccensorship.\u201d Unlike other former colonizing nations, Denmark has not reflected publicly on its continuation of \u201cwhite innocence\u201d (Wekker). Rather, Denmark has defended its right to be ignorant by continuously drawing borders and identifying who really belongs to the \u201cgood\u201d old nation state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artistic Authorship Draws Borders<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, we have seen rich examples across fine arts and performance art of what has been named instituent practices (Raunig) or extra-institutional alliances (Rogoff). The terms cover artist-run institutions which offer an alternative institution to political institutions. They are NGO-like, however located within the arts, and try to criticize governmental policies\u2013often on immigration and asylum\u2013by founding new institutions and taking direct action. They suggest supplementary or restorative politics by supporting conditions for refugees, changing education or making alternative parliaments. They can be seen as institutional critiques of subjection and governance in governmental institutions, but also as artistic answers to ignorant continuations of colonizing patterns and responses to austerity policies within the arts. These non-governmental, artistic practices are mostly durational and unfold in close exchange with social movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent article, art theorist Ver\u00f3nica Tello suggested revising the relations in the production of these institutions. Tello\u2019s examples are The New World Summit <\/em>(Jonas Staal), Institute for Human Activities <\/em>(Renzo Martens), Immigration Movement International <\/em>(Tania Bruguera), The Silent University<\/em> (Ahmet \u00d6gut). In a Danish context a comparable institution would be Trampoline House <\/em>(Morten Goll and Tone Olaf Nielsen, 2009\u201320), which was an artist-run community centre for refugees and asylum seekers in Copenhagen. However, despite commoning, democratizing and collectivizing aspirations\u2014and also being perceived as such\u2014not all artists initiating refugee-integrating art spaces, decolonizing summits and temporal institutes of anti-racist justice have distanced themselves from the idea of artistic authorship and ownership. As Tello has argued, there is an asymmetric division of labour between the ones owning symbolic capital (the artists) and the ones accumulating it (the rest). In other words, the iterations of authorship produce symbolic capital and draw invisible borders even within anti-authoritarian art institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Distinct from the above-mentioned instituent practices founding alternative institutions in order to supplement politics, other artists\u2019 groups are more explicitly identifying as collectives and working explicitly with an erasure of the artistic signature. A canonical example is Guerilla Girls who work under anonymous identity since 1985 by wearing identical gorilla masks in order to draw attention to structural invisibilization of women artists. Amongst the Danish BIPoC collectives I mentioned in the introduction, Marronage operates without a credit list and The Union\u2014imitating the form of a union\u2014has members<\/em>, but no authors, directors or initiating artists. It has, however, been an ongoing struggle for collectives in the areas of fine arts, publishing and performing arts to resist infrastructural requests for both hierarchies and solo authorships (Matzke; Schmidt, Everybody Counts<\/em>). The economy and fetishization of single authorship haunting even collectivizing attempts is embedded in post-enlightenment thought and, as I will show, is part of a border-drawing onto-epistemology that is foundational in modern racial grammar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing a border between \u201cthe artist and the rest\u201d by identifying the artist by their exceptional abilities is a founding rationale in aesthetic theory on artistic production. In his Critique<\/em> of Judgement<\/em>, Immanuel Kant concentrates mainly on aesthetic judgement which means he develops primarily a concept on the reception of the artwork. Yet, as he needs to differentiate artworks from other objects, he develops a short theory on the production of the artwork: that production is only a concern when it comes to distinguish art from other things. It is the production carried out by the artist that makes art exclusive, something other than nature, science and crafts. Kant\u2019s definition of the artist as a genius is clear and concise. In four paragraphs, from par. 46 to par. 50 in Critique<\/em> of Judgement<\/em>, he promotes the genius as a natural talent producing original artworks. The most central premise for an aesthetics of production according to Kant is that before art comes the genius:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Genius <\/em>is the talent (or natural gift) which gives the rule to Art. Since talent, as the innate productive faculty of the artist, belongs itself to Nature, we may express the matter thus: Genius <\/em>is the innate mental disposition (ingenium<\/em>) through which <\/em>Nature gives the rule. (Kant par. 46)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The crucial circumstance, or condition, for art is the genius. Not money, not time, not social relations or institutions, but natural talent precedes the possibility of art. It is an idealist, not a material condition. It is a conceptualizing capacity, not a conditioned privilege. The Kantian promise of talent is transcendental, ahistorical and knows no political context. It is enhancing genius as an expression of interiority<\/em>, something that is produced by a spirit independent from material, historical and worldly support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The motif of the spirit is central to the concept of the artist as a genius. The spirit animates the soul to create (Kant par. 49). The spirit allows the artist to have intuition, or aesthetic ideas, representations made up by the imagination (Einbildungskraft <\/em>in German). The artist is able to imagine aesthetic ideas and then pass them on as representations which \u201cgo beyond the limits of experience\u201d (Kant par. 49). Beyond reason, the imagination of the artist genius creates representations that communicate more than words can express. Therefore, the work of the artist genius is exemplary and does not spring from imitation (Kant par. 46).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exclusivity of the artist is the base for an individualized and bourgeois artist subject: without class and gender, \u201cbeyond\u201d power relations, colonial hierarchies and exploitation. The history of aesthetic theory keeps repeating how the artist needs to be isolated\u2014whether in nature, or in their studio\u2013from the disturbing reality as if dependency only corrupts the otherwise \u201cpure\u201d channelling of truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Methodologically, Kant defines artistic production from what it is not, through the technique of exclusion. By that, he draws a formalist line of demarcation between what Black feminist Denise Ferreira da Silva has termed interiority <\/em>and exteriority. <\/em>Da Silva finds this distinction between the inner and the outer, the interiority and the exteriority, a central distinction in the ontological construction of universal man, a decisive division in what could be described as the racial grammar <\/em>of post-enlightenment thought. Interiority is an ontological descriptor of \u201cmodern man,\u201d preceding any materiality or context (Toward<\/em> 25).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But under which circumstances does the artist emerge as a genius? Kant is not much concerned with the context, the relations or the infrastructures of the artwork. Besides the explicit disturbances such as the need for money and mechanical reproduction, both circumstances hindering \u201cfreedom,\u201d a lot of other conditions within the production of art are not mentioned. According to Kant, art is\u2014unlike the works of scientists or craftsmen\u2014\u201cproduction through freedom\u201d (par. 43). In Kantian aesthetics free production is the act of imagination. When creating from interiority <\/em>and out of pure imagination, the artist becomes ontologically detached and isolated from material surroundings, historical context and local sociality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back on the border-drawing rationales through the lens of Black feminist theory, we can align Kantian idealist aesthetics of production with what da Silva has called interiorized poesis<\/em>: a productive force that comes from the rational mind. In her book Toward a Global Idea of Race<\/em>, she unfolds how, in canonical post-enlightenment philosophy, \u201cuniversal reason produces human difference\u201d (4). The production of the transparent spirit, the interiority without historicity, is found in the writings of Kant and Hegel. For da Silva, the production and stressing of interiority\u2014the self-actualizing Spirit\u2014of the subject is central in post-enlightenment onto-epistemology as \u201cthe portal to self-determination\u201d of the modern, Western subject (25). The praise of interiority is dependent, epistemologically, of an other<\/em>, the exteriority<\/em> of global thought, which da Silva detects as the racial. The transparent \u201cglobal\u201d and very racialized white subject was and is thus still, following da Silva, constructed on a logic of exclusion. And as long as the logic of exclusion continues, racialization and border-drawing reside in modern grammar.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Returning to the instituent practices of artists, there is a discrepancy between the intention (and reception) of commonality and community across refugees and other citizens, and then a border-drawing and exclusionist grammar residing in the credits. How can such political artistic practices attacking the European border regime uphold a grammar of exclusion?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 My suggestion is that when an artistic work requires more than a single (spontaneous) action, it is dependent on infrastructures of artistic production. The infrastructures of artistic production require and uphold the soloist signature as well as further border-drawing rationales: when funding is applied for, an authorship must be recognizable; the habit of art institutions is to present solo exhibitions of individual artists; next to the artist\u2019s name in the exhibition a code of their country is put; the national cultural policies support to the nation state\u2019s own citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through da Silva\u2019s analysis of raciality in modern grammar we can say that the infrastructures of artistic production uphold and require the interiorized poesis. In other words, lines of demarcation are foundational in the infrastructures of production. But also, the habits of reception of an artwork are longing for the individual to reincarnate and perform the idealist artist\u2019s spirit. Art reception\u2014whether in the appreciation of the beholder at the museum, written by newspaper critics, academics or in public debates\u2014is often identifying individuals to \u201cblame,\u201d honour or \u201cunderstand\u201d; an aggressive example of how insistently the public media hunt down the artist is made evident by the journalist Pilgaard investigating who the artists behind the bust happening might have been, guessing their identity to be BIPoC students. Hence, infrastructures across artistic production and reception, actors in cultural policy, circulation and critique, defend both onto-epistemological and national borders; they perform a politics of accusation when they require the continuation of authorship, even when artists suggest interdependent and solidary ways of organizing anonymously and beyond interiorization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An Artwork Requires a Judgement<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Anonymous Visual Artists have defined the dismantling of the bust as a happening and thus inscribe it into the context of political and publicly scandalous happenings in modern art history (Stockmann; Deadline<\/em>). Past examples of such happenings are Danish artists Lene Adler Petersen and Bj\u00f8rn N\u00f8rgaard\u2019s ritual sacrificing of a horse in order to raise attention to the victims of the Vietnam War (Copenhagen, 1970), or performance artist Ulay\u2019s stealing of Hitler\u2019s favorite painting and the rehanging of it in the living room of a Turkish immigrant family (Berlin, 1976), or\u2014recently in Offenbach, autumn 2020\u2014the trio Frankfurter Hauptschule\u2019s stealing of the sculpture Capri Battery<\/em> by Joseph Beuys and bringing it to the ethnographical museum Iringa Boma in the former German colony of Tanzania as a symbolic act of restitution. Thus, Anonymous Visual Artists have claimed kinship with other political happenings in art history rather than in the obvious relation of the BLM demonstrations and its activist overthrowing of statues of colonial and imperial history in the spring and summer of 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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