Contemporary Art and Nomadic Subjectivities: Rethinking the Subject in an Interrelational Context

This essay interrogates the notion of subjectivity and poses the following questions: How does one become a subject? What positions constitute his/her subjectivity? How are these positions interpreted by others? How can we envision an ethics that doesn't take the unitary subject or universal moral norms as its foundation? To this end, I trace poststructuralist discourses around identity and sexuality, and investigate the subject both as shaped by the self and called into being by an Other. The proposition presented as a result of this discussion is to think of the contemporary subject as a nomadic one, and to seek an ethics that can accompany this understanding. Interpellation and power relations in Althusser and Foucault, resistance to power in Butler and Žižek, and nomadic subjectivity and ethics in Deleuze and Guattari and Braidotti form the core of this paper's theoretical explorations. These notions provide a framework within which my three studio projects Indefinitions, Card No. IV and Dear, can be thought. These projects investigate gay subjectivity, psychology as ideological power, and emotional vulnerability; respectively. Interspersed within the essay are further links drawn to some of the ways in which subjectivity is negotiated in contemporary art, with reference to specific artworks by artists Elmgreen & Dragset, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Sophie Calle.