ABSTRACT
Failure is personal and political, local, global, present, past and future. All individuals and systems know failure better than they might care to admit — failed romance, failed careers, failed politics, failed society, failed targets, failed humanity, failed failures. Failure is too often tied to its twin of achievement. A more accurate pairing might be utopias, an abused and misused term, certainly in the realm of art. Josiah McElheny is an example of an artist who usefully turns to utopic thinking. In the realm of art failure has currency and potential for criticality that embraces possibility. Art-making can be characterised as an activity where doubt lies in wait at every turn and where failure is not always unacceptable conduct. Emphatically stating that failure is the inevitable outcome of artistic behaviour, Samuel Beckett argues that engaging withfailure offers a possibility for art to refuse expression: a quality he proposes is a misperception at the core of reception of artwork.
