One of the reasons

There were many reasons why leaving became inevitable, with family foremost among them. Yet family and love alone do not fully explain the decision. Those considerations might have led to a different arrangement, without requiring me to leave a place I had called home for fourteen years. The cultural environment that was supposed to nourish creative work had become increasingly unwilling to examine its own assumptions.

One day in 2019, on the ITP board, the discussion regarding the protests was overwhelmingly lopsided, reflecting the typical liberal position. By that point, I was already weary of the moral certainty of that milieu—the familiar vocabulary of correctness that recurred in proposals and statements. And those texts rarely asked after the grounds from which they derived their legitimacy. What troubled me was how readily this framing became the settled interpretation, with little room to examine its assumptions or consider what it left out.

Seeing how one-sided the discussion was, I tried to introduce some nuances. “Should we talk about this? The case is complicated, and I want to open a space for nuances.” The response was quick and dismissive. The reply was simply—almost verbatim—“What is there to discuss? What is there to talk about?” My attempts to complicate the discussion were received as moves toward defending authoritarianism. “Authoritarianism” functioned as a moral verdict that could end the exchange: once a position was associated with authoritarianism, examining that position risked becoming evidence of sympathy for authoritarianism itself. This was a form of premature interpretive closure, reinforced by suspicion toward those who tried to reopen the discussion.

A related rigidity, of course, formed in the community’s expectations of art.

Media art works through acts of mediation: selecting, arranging, processing, and structuring the conditions under which something can appear or be experienced. To work with media is already to intervene. Within this milieu, that intervention was expected to make itself legible through an established political vocabulary. Political assumptions thereby became aesthetic criteria, shaping expectations about what art should be, what it should do, and which questions it could legitimately ask.

An institutionally favored political framework quickly took shape and proved remarkably resilient. This framework drew on familiar liberal commitments: individual liberty; rights-based claims organized around privacy and freedom of speech; and political participation articulated through voting, representation, and democracy. These commitments supplied recognizable themes for artistic work, along with a ready account of why that work mattered. An artwork could establish its critical credentials by identifying a violation, making an excluded voice audible, or exposing a restriction on individual agency. The problem, the injured political subject, and the direction of emancipation were already intelligible within the same framework.

This framework also carried ontological commitments: assumptions about what kinds of beings exist, how they are differentiated, and which differences matter. The individual appeared as the primary bearer of rights and agency. Social difference became legible through familiar categories of identity—for instance, skin color. When these categories served as the starting point for interpretation, the histories and processes through which they were constituted receded from view. Art was largely invited to address the distribution of visibility, recognition, and power among already identifiable subjects. Questions about how those subjects and their distinctions came into being became hard to pose as questions at all.

Individual rights and liberty should of course be protected; that is not in dispute. The real question is whether the supposedly clear and free subject is itself unstable—and, in some circumstances, a myth from the start. If so, much of the moral and ethical system grounded in that conception of the subject must be recognized as a set of temporary, relative truths that can be reoriented when circumstances change.

Consciously or unconsciously, those seeking or conferring institutional recognition found it difficult not to participate in this political framework. Some artists and cultural workers considered their position too weak to diverge; others saw no reason not to do the “good and correct thing.” Curators, funders, and artists could recognize the stakes of work articulated within the framework and anticipate how that work would be publicly justified. Repetition made the framework’s vocabulary increasingly authoritative: it supplied both the questions worth asking and the language through which their importance could be established.

Approaches to making and interpreting art that departed from this political framework encountered two related forms of exclusion. Some were actively discredited, their departure read as political indifference or suspect allegiance. Others remained illegible (“chicks speak to ducks”): the questions raised by such approaches failed to register as problems in the first place, leaving no acknowledged stake around which discussion could form. This latter exclusion was harder to contest because it could occur before any explicit disagreement. The field’s political assumptions had already shaped what participants were capable of noticing.

Of course, I feel the need to stress that I am by no means saying that places outside New York and the States have a higher reflexivity about their position and the ground on which that position becomes intelligible. Whether there is an external sphere open to a different ground plan—one that could grow something other than the dominant strain—remains to be found out.

Ideology carries implicit aesthetic expectations. Art practices formed within this political framework tend to reproduce the framework’s rigidity, including a low tolerance for disagreement. Here, the community’s professed openness to difference encountered a limit: disagreement over the framework itself became grounds for suspicion and exclusion. This exposed a contradiction within the community’s multicultural utopian vision, as the acceptance of difference became conditional on political agreement.

Chinese version (translated by LLM)

离开之所以变得不可避免，有很多原因，家庭是其中最重要的一个。但家庭与爱，并不足以完整解释这个决定。如果仅仅出于这些考虑，我或许会选择另一种生活安排，未必需要离开这个十四年来一直被我视为家的地方。那个本应滋养创作的文化环境，对自身的预设越来越不愿反思。

2019年的一天，ITP讨论板上关于抗议活动的讨论几乎一边倒，体现出典型的自由主义（liberalism）立场。那时，我已经有些疲于这个圈子里的道德确信（moral certainty）——在各种提案和声明中，反复出现的总是那套熟悉的正确话语。而这些文字很少追问：它们究竟凭借什么获得正当性？令我困扰的是，这种理解方式如此轻易地成了定论，几乎没有留下空间，让人审视其中的预设，或思考它遗漏了什么。

看到讨论如此一边倒，我试着引入一些更细致的考量。“我们能不能讨论一下？事情很复杂，我想留一点空间，把问题谈得更细一些。“回应来得很快，也相当不客气。对方的回复很简单，原话几乎就是：“有什么好讨论的？有什么好谈的？“我试图把问题的复杂性带入讨论，却被视为在替威权主义（authoritarianism）辩护。“威权主义"在这里成了一种足以终止对话的道德判决：一旦某个立场被贴上这个标签，继续探究这一立场，就可能被当作同情威权主义的证据。这是一种过早的诠释封闭（interpretive closure）；而对那些试图重启讨论的人所抱持的怀疑，又进一步巩固了这种封闭。

类似的僵化，当然也出现在这个社群对艺术的期待之中。

媒体艺术通过各种中介活动（mediation）展开：选择、编排、处理，以及组织事物得以呈现或被感知的条件。从事媒体艺术，本身就已经是一种介入。在这个圈子里，这种介入必须通过一套既定的政治话语来表达，才能获得理解。政治预设由此成了审美标准（aesthetic criteria），规定着人们对艺术的期待：艺术应当是什么，应当做什么，以及哪些问题才有资格被提出。

一套受到机构青睐的政治框架很快成形，而且异常稳固。这个框架建立在一些熟悉的自由主义理念之上：个人自由；围绕隐私和言论自由展开的权利诉求；以及通过投票、代议制和民主来表达的政治参与。这些理念为艺术创作提供了一批容易被理解和认可的主题，也提供了现成的理由，说明作品为什么重要。一件作品只要指出某种侵害，让被排除的声音得到听见，或揭示个人能动性（agency）受到的限制，就能确立自身的批判性。问题是什么，受伤害的政治主体（political subject）是谁，解放应当朝哪个方向展开——这些都已在同一框架内有了明确的位置。

这个框架也包含一些本体论承诺（ontological commitments）：它预设了哪些存在者存在，如何区分它们，以及哪些差异具有意义。个人被视为权利与能动性的首要承载者。社会差异则通过一些熟悉的身份类别得到辨认，比如肤色。当这些类别成为理解问题的起点，塑造这些类别的历史与过程便逐渐淡出了视野。艺术更多被引向那些身份已经明确的主体之间，可见性、承认与权力如何分配的问题。至于这些主体及其相互区别究竟如何形成，追问这些反而很难被当作有意义的问题。

个人权利与自由当然应当受到保护，这一点没有争议。问题在于：那个被认为界限清晰、拥有自由的主体，本身是否就不稳定——甚至在某些情况下，从一开始就是一个神话？如果是这样，那么，建立在这一主体观之上的道德与伦理体系，很大一部分就需要被看作一组暂时的、相对的真理，并且可以随着情境的变化而重新调整。

无论是否自觉，寻求机构认可的人，以及有权给予这种认可的人，都很难不参与这套政治框架的运作。一些艺术家和文化工作者觉得自身地位太弱，无力偏离；另一些则觉得，做"善良而正确的事"并没有什么不好。对于在这个框架内展开的作品，策展人、资助者和艺术家都能理解其中关切的问题，也能预先知道该如何向公众解释作品的意义。不断重复使这套框架的话语越来越具有权威：它既决定了哪些问题值得提出，也提供了说明这些问题为何重要的语言。

偏离这套政治框架的艺术创作与阐释方式，会遭遇两种相互关联的排斥。有些遭到直接贬斥，偏离框架本身就被解读为政治冷漠，或被怀疑在支持某种不可接受的政治立场。另一些则根本无法被理解，仿佛"鸡同鸭讲”：这些创作与阐释方式提出的疑问，甚至不被视为问题，也就无法形成一个得到承认、可供讨论的共同关切。后一种排斥更难反驳，因为它可能在任何明确的分歧出现之前，就已经发生了。这个领域的政治预设，早已塑造了身处其中的人能够注意到什么。

当然，我仍觉得有必要强调：我绝不是说，纽约和美国以外的地方，就更善于反思自身立场，以及使这些立场得以被理解的基础。是否存在这样一个外部空间，能够容纳另一套基本构想，让主流之外的东西生长出来，仍有待探寻。

意识形态（ideology）隐含着对艺术的审美期待。在这套政治框架内形成的艺术实践，往往也会再生产框架本身的僵化，包括对异议缺乏耐心。在这里，社群宣称的对差异的开放显露出了边界：一旦有人对这套框架本身提出异议，就会成为被怀疑和排斥的对象。这暴露了社群所憧憬的多元文化乌托邦（multicultural utopia）内部的矛盾：对差异的接纳，以政治上的认同为条件。