Adel Abdessemed: Situation And Practice

Abdel has constructed antibiotics to treat the violent tendencies of humanity. He thinks that he can save the world with his art (according to his opening lecture). The idea is to feed us little bits of violence and then we will not need to create it anymore. His show at the MIT List Gallery explores both pointless violence and violence with a purpose. He looks at necessary victimization – putting one’s self into another’s power in order to survive. These themes are explored through short looped videos projected onto all the walls of the gallery as well as shown on small television sets set around the floor interspersed with sculptures.
Born in war-recovering Algeria, Abdel is familiar with violence. He is careful to point out, however, that he is not a postcolonial artist. He is not taking a stance on international affairs and he is also not stuck in the national finger pointing game. During his lecture he said “Western guilt and culpability do not interest me”. He is simply showing us the basic, borderless human tendencies towards sadism and the reality of some violence being necessary. He is exploring the relationship between humans and aggression – along with the different forms that it takes.
To begin with, the pieces exploring necessary violence use animals as examples of necessary brutality. Birth of Love 2006 is a wall-sized projection of a feral cat graphically devouring a mouse. Muscles and ligaments slide around its lips and hang from its chomping jaws. There are several ideas at play here. One of them being violence for sustenance – in this case, violence towards the mouse. The violence for sustenance is then turned around when a series of feral cats put themselves in harm’s way in order to drink the milk being offered to them by Abdel in Self-sufficient sustenance through violence. Abdel calls this violence because the cats are subservient and “dependence on the kindness of others” for their food. It is strange that he picked cats drinking milk to prove this point. Prostitution gone wrong, or something where actual violence instead of the threat (a weak threat at that) of violence in order to obtain sustenance. Rape for food versus possibly being swatted by a human hand would be more appropriate – but I suppose it is aesthetically most fluid to keep it within the cat arena.
Unnecessary violence is his most interesting topic. Appropriately, he uses humans as the instigators for these acts. The comparison of animals committing violence versus humans committing violence is important in Abdel’s work. The conscious being (i.e. human) is capable of choosing not to commit violence and to find an alternative way to go about something. Also, we are the most diversely hedonists species. We do things left and right for our own pleasure. Humans do not prioritize necessity over pleasure. We can even go against functionality – like in the case of unnecessary violence. He makes this point with his installation piece, which consists of a series of human feet stomping on things that hurt them – for no apparent reason. One is a soda can. This is a pointless violent act, which will damage the foot and will therefore make it unable to walk for a while. He therefore, for the sake of pleasure (being art and social criticism in this case), depleted functionality. That is essentially human. Animals do not break their own feet. Animals are all superego. So, the conscious being is capable of performing unnecessary and unconstructive violent acts whereas animals cause harm out of necessity. The pointless harm of the other was shown through a piece where Abdel paid a black man to get milk continually and almost violently poured on him for a long time, so that he is gasping for breath and suffering quite immensely, stifled by the white liquid. It is very difficult to watch, particularly when acknowledging the unavoidable racial issues and the relationship to our recent history of slavery. This was a terrible thing to do to someone and there is motivation but pleasure through artistic engagement to do it
These pieces also raise the question about how different necessary violence and unnecessary violence for pleasure is. He did something wrong as an art piece to examine the foundation of ethics. These pieces suggest that ethical violations are as natural to humans as eating mice is to cats.
MIT List Visual Arts Center October 11th - January 4th.