Carey Young at the Urban Field Speakers Series

Her more recent projects, including an ongoing series where Young uses legal language and stipulations to drastically reframe the gallery space, or the recent series of photos that restage famous pioneer performance and video works in settings in Dubai, have taken a more serious and sometimes, as Reckitt and others noted, violent turn. Young cited an interest in complicity in corporate agendas and the branding of public space as the impetus for many of these projects, as well as a recent interest in Gilles Deleuze’s theories on “Humour, Irony and the Law” where he argues that one of the only ways to subvert arbitrary and absurd legal systems is to become a masochist: to adhere to the law so strictly and exaggerate its system to the point that one enjoys the pain associated with punishment, thereby perverting the intended result of that punishment (to prevent future infringements) by taking pleasure in it.

Young mentioned that her seeming ambivalence in the works that aim to critique corporate culture, or a perceived lack of radicalism on her part, has often made viewers, particularly in the UK, upset with her for not being harder on corporate culture or more staunch in her critique. While the question period at Prefix was rather subdued, the same undercurrent of questioning the success or effect of her critique appeared in many of the questions she was asked about her working methods and her reflections on the result of her projects.

While I can definitely sympathize with wanting to see performance art, especially by younger women artists that deals with corporate and commercial culture, be polemical in the face of global capitalism, I couldn’t help but think that some of these questions were not starting from the same premise as Young’s own projects. For me, just because Young doesn’t use her female, business/upper-middle-class bedecked body as a dialogic site of meaning-making and doesn’t make explicit or obvious the violence inherent in these international movements doesn’t necessarily negate the critical potency of her work. Instead, I appreciate that her projects begin from a place of acceptance that the avant-garde ideal of finding a space outside of the systems of commercialization and institutionalization to critique these same systems might not be possible. That, from their outset, Young’s performances and interventions accept that everyone – artists included (or maybe especially) – are often complicit in the processes that they also wish to critique. In many of her videos and text works, especially, there seems to be a moment of self-deprecating humour and self-reflexivity where Young (or her persona) implicitly addresses the audience, saying “yes, we all know that when we closely examine this rhetoric of creativity and commercial success that it is ridiculous, but yet it still works. It still has a hold on us and is something we want to be a part of, even as we subvert it.”

While this acceptance of messy complicity might not offer the radicalism we’ve come to expect from contemporary artists, and might be uncomfortable in the ways it reminds us of our own daily complicity, it felt refreshing to see work that was so pragmatic and, in many ways, practical in its approach to these peculiar social conditions.