What We Do Is Secret Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy

On the aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy.

Written in the wake of the far-right populist turn in Europe, the US, and beyond, What We Do Is Secret addresses aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy, proposing a theory of conspiracy that is not primarily concerned with conspiracy theory. This inquiry takes shape across chapters on the politics of post-internet art aesthetics; the sublime and possessive individualism in recent “critical” art; Cady Noland’s security fences, and silkscreens of the Symbionese Liberation Army; and mutuality, secrecy, and improvisation in the work of Ima-Abasi Okon. Larne Abse Gogarty discusses the relationship between culture and contemporary politics, following on from David Lloyd’s proposition that through its compensatory qualities, the aesthetic sphere naturalizes forms of life lived under the rule of property. What kind of art can work against this? Can art exist as a conspiracy capable of corroding that rule?

Larne Abse Gogarty is the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Humboldt University. Larne has previously held positions at University College London, and has taught at Goldsmiths College and Chelsea College of Art. She is a member of the editorial collective Cesura//Acceso, a journal for music, politics, and poetics. Larne frequently writes criticism for Art Monthly and elsewhere.