Afterimage. #NotSurprised

A few weeks ago, Knight Landesman, co-publisher of the New York-based art magazine Artforum , was accused of sexual harassment by several women, and one of his former employees even filed a lawsuit against him. While it’s the season of lists, allegations, refutations and confessions, some in the art world responded to the news with a truism: “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.”

A truism is a self-evident truth — so obvious that it is not worth a mention. The one quoted above belongs to the neo-conceptual American artist Jenny Holzer and was most famously exhibited as a Spectacolor animation in Times Square, New York City, in 1982.

As reports of Landesman’s misconduct were made public, a group of women and transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people working in the art world wrote an open letter titled ‘We are not surprised’ that garnered 9,500-plus signatures within two days. The group calls itself WANS (We Are Not Surprised) and has provided a definition of sexual harassment that relates it to power: “Sexual harassment is rarely purely related to sexual desire. It is often a misuse and abuse of power and position, whose perpetrators use sexual behaviour as a tool or weapon. It is predatory and manipulative, often used to assert the superiority or dominance of one person over another person.”

WANS, on its website, promises to come up with helpful ways to deal with abusers. But irrespective of the efficacy of the steps/rules/methods that the group comes up with to tackle harassment at the workplace, it has taken a giant leap with the use of the refrain “not surprised”.

One of the main hurdles that victims of sexual abuse face is the disbelief with which their testimonies are met. Even the mundane details of their accounts are put within quotation marks, as if “Monday” and “office party” are unstable notions that need to be confirmed after further scrutiny. Most people strongly believe that women (and children) accuse someone of sexual abuse to malign their reputation. This despite the fact that it is generally after years of engaging in predatory behaviour that anyone gets called out. It is an attitude that primarily stems from the fact that we are shocked that an influential man — RK Pachauri, Tarun Tejpal, Louis CK — could have engaged in sexual misconduct. That is, the abuse of power and abuse by powerful men surprises us.

Being shocked by something is often an indication of being in denial. For instance, discovering that your teenager watches pornography on the Internet would be shocking only because it is comforting and comfortable to believe otherwise. Being shocked also paralyses us, makes us unable to respond to the situation adequately and appropriately.

The claim “we are not surprised” levels the field. It reinforces the statistically commonplace nature of sexual abuse and strips it of its garb of being a scandal. The focus is taken away from the moral character of the accused and the accuser. It nudges us to not weigh in on whether the accused is a good parent or a creative genius but to look at sexual misconduct as a routinely committed transgression that should be meted with punishment.

For instance, nothing about Louis CK’s personality is an indicator that he is more or less likely to sexually harass someone — not his intelligence, sense of humour or creativity. Not even his offensive jokes. Responding to his behaviour as “not surprised” gets us closer to understanding why he made female comedians watch or listen to him masturbate: because he could and because he felt he could get away with it.

Turning back to Holzer, whose truism inspired the phrase, helps us better understand the motivation behind “not surprised”. Holzer, who is one of the signees of the open letter, began her career with ‘Truisms’ (1977-79), her own one-liners that she cheaply printed on paper and pasted on the walls of buildings in Manhattan. In the 1990s she started using texts by poets and littérateurs, and her more recent works involve redacted US government documents, especially those related to human rights violations in Abu Ghraib prison. The works take different forms — carvings on granite benches, paintings, LED signs, projections on to the façades of monumental buildings — but their aim remains the same: to stop a bystander and give her a catchphrase for an oppressive experience she has had but may not have yet articulated.

“Not surprised”, unlike most catchphrases, is not a statement (#YesAllWomen), a refutation (#NotAllMen), or a demand for acceptance (Black Lives Matter). Notwithstanding the possibility that someone will come up with a whataboutery rebuttal, it still remains a response that first and foremost expresses solidarity with a victim.

Blessy Augustine is an art critic based in New Delhi; @blessyaugust

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