Categoría: Conferencias

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AtrásPublic Art in Age of Government Austerity

 

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 18.10.11

 

 

 
Although the policy objectives of public art have been reformulated frequently over the practice’s relatively short history in the United States, the installation of public art within the urban fabric has always been—and I would argue is inherently—a political exercise. The promotion of public art, however, has a tendency to create false consensus and mask underlying political objectives by appearing to advance the seemingly neutral and uncontroversial policy of urban beautification, so it is important to subject these objectives to critical scrutiny. In my talk today, I will bring public art outside the bounds of aesthetic discourse and criticism and resituate it within urban discourse in order to understand its relationship to economic and political conditions. Today, the role of government in American society is being debated and questioned—in healthcare, in the regulation of the financial system, in cities, and, indeed, in the arts, so I wonder…in what ways does public art reflect this?

To answer this question, I will backtrack a bit in time to talk about public art during the Great Depression, an important historical precedent of “art-as-stimulus.” I will discuss the emergence of public art as a tool of economic development following New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s. And finally, I will use Olafur Eliasson’s New York City-based piece The Waterfalls as a case study to understand the impact of the current economic crisis on the practice and evaluation of public art.

The Great Depression has frequently been referenced in the popular and business media as a relevant counterpoint to the most recent recession from which the global economy is still reeling. Though the more responsible economic forecasters never predicted anything of its magnitude, casual references abound, from the “Great Recession” to the “Lesser Depression” to talk of the “worst crisis since the Great Depression.” While less has been made of the comparison of public art during the Great Depression compared to public art during the present economic crisis—perhaps because the idea of art as stimulus is a distant one—a closer examination of this era may reveal intricacies in the relationship of public art to its political and economic context that are pertinent today.

The New Deal’s socially progressive programs greatly advanced government patronage of the arts. From 1933 to 1943, artists produced more than a hundred thousand artworks with government support, administered by alphabet agencies like the PWAP, the WPA, and the TRAP, with the goal of facilitating economic recovery and job creation. For the largest program, the Works Progress (later, Works Projects) Administration’s Federal Art Project, artists were given work on the basis of financial need rather than the merit of past work or a proposal for future work.

This art established the federal government’s role as benefactor to neighborhoods and communities and symbolized it’s changed and changing relationship to the people: during the Great Depression, the federal government built housing, regulated the stock market, provided relief, and became a patron of the arts for the first time. For the first time, too, the federal government established a visual presence in remote towns and rural areas in the form of post office murals and sculpture, which reflected a shift in power away from state and local governments to the federal government, a shift that was justified by the belief that the federal government was better equipped to deal with the pervasive structural and economic problems that were plaguing the country. This shift did not occur without resistance, however, and the tension between regional and national identity played out in many commissioned pieces.

Another tension that emerged was that between the ideals of fine art and democracy, a polarity that continues to dominate the debate on public art today. Most New Deal public art employed a visual language of American art accessible to a broad public, rather than an academic or avant-garde elite. Abstract painters, for example were excluded from most commissions, which is the main reason art produced during this period and its legacy has been largely neglected by modernist-formalist art historians and critics that treat American art as beginning with Abstract Expressionism. Despite laudable democratic ambitions, commissioning agencies reserved final approval of any mural or sculpture and at times sought to influence the entire creative process. This is a big part of the New Deal era public art’s complicated legacy.

We see further complications in New York in the 1970s, when the city faced an unprecedented fiscal crisis. The city barely avoided declaring bankruptcy, which resulted in a massive paradigm shift in urban governance. During this time, economic development replaced redistributive policy and service provision as the primary function of local governments as cities sought to generate income without driving away the middle class with increased taxes. Tourism emerged as a favored development strategy because it allowed cities to import spending and export tax burden. Large public investment in cultural and entertainment facilities became commonplace, fueled by the competition between cities for tourism revenue. First, I will describe the conditions that presaged [PREH’-SIJED] the rise of economic development as a central component of urban policy and then I will talk about how public art came to be subsumed as a tool of economic development.

New York City became a major tourist destination in the late 1970s even though it was not exactly a viable place to live and work for its citizens: people continued to flee to the suburbs, crime soared, and social disorder reigned. The 1970s are widely considered to be the city’s nadir. This contradiction was overcome through an extensive image-control campaign, whereby the city co-opted the corporate strategy of branding and harnessed its position as a major media and communications center to project an image of itself to potential visitors as a safe, fun, and hospitable place. While urban boosterism is hardly a new phenomenon, starting in the 1970s, marketing professionals and economic development practitioners began operating with large budgets and had much greater influence than the amateur, de-centralized efforts of earlier eras.

In addition to comparatively inexpensive tourism marketing campaigns, political elites began partnering with their private-sector counterparts to construct “tourism infrastructure,” which serves the dual purposes of attracting tourists and providing ample opportunities for them to spend money, which is presumed to have an exponential, or multiplier, effect on the local economy. While scholars have analyzed the role of convention centers, retail malls, and major-league sports franchises as components of an urban entertainment infrastructure that serves to promote tourism, public art has not received such attention from urban political economists, even though its emerging role in urban growth politics begs explanation. Urban economic development, after all, is not just about bricks and mortar, but is realized through more intangible tactics such as city image. Furthermore, public art is not simply the object of urban development schemes; operating in an increasingly competitive environment where marketing and entrepreneurialism are the favored strategies, public art itself has been transformed.

Though they constitute an intervention into the urban built environment, temporary public art installations occupy an intermediate realm between physical tourism infrastructure and symbolic urban imagery. Due to the unpopularity of urban renewal tactics, culture war controversies on arts funding, and federal devolution in general, New York City has not built a major cultural center since the 1960s. Public art, by contrast, represents a decentralized cultural offering and a strategy of incremental change to the urban built environment. [oh-LA-fur ELLIE-a-son] Olafur Eliasson’s piece The Waterfalls, which I will discuss later on, is unique in that it is not part of a cultural center or comprehensive development project, such as New York’s Lincoln Center or Millennium Park in Chicago, and thus serves a different role. Public art lacks the immediate legibility of function that other types of urban development have—like sports stadiums, housing, and office developments—so it requires greater scrutiny.

Public art fulfills the symbolic function of bolstering confidence in urban centers once suffering from disinvestment and decline through the historical association of the arts with affluence and prestige. Public art serves as a patina of cultural sophistication in a thriving post-industrial economy by creating visible distance from the non-aestheticized spaces of the old manufacturing economy. Similar strategies have been employed more recently in an attempt to illustrate regenerative ability of cities against persistent economic downturns. [oh-LA-fur ELLIE-a-son] Olafur Eliasson’s The Waterfalls is a key example.

The Waterfalls was installed in 2008, in the middle of the recession. At a total cost of $15.5 million (which includes building materials, construction, operation, disassembly, and promotional and educational materials), The Waterfalls represents the largest public art undertaking in New York City since The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 2005. The piece consists of four- 90 to 120 foot structures located near the Brooklyn Bridge, the Brooklyn Piers, Pier 35 in Manhattan, and the north shore of Governor’s Island, which denote the widest prospect of the harbor. The Waterfalls pump water from the East River that cascades down scaffolding constructed out of simple industrial materials. The project received a $2 million grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, a joint state-city corporation that was formed in 2002 to plan the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan after the September 11 attacks. The Public Art Fund, a New York City-based non-profit, raised the remaining $13.5 million in funds from private donors. The project was justified by the fact that it was expected to generate $55 million in economic activity during its almost four month run, an estimate based on attendance at Millennium Park in Chicago in 2004, [ELLIE-a-son] Eliasson’s Weather Project at the Tate Modern in 2003, and The Gates in 2005, which are the only examples of adequate scale to justify the comparison.

While that may seem like a lot of numbers to describe this proto-Earth Art piece, a focus on quantification pervades the discussion of The Waterfalls. The height of the structures, the amount of materials used, and the rate that water was pumped from the East River are essentially product specs that serve to convince taxpayers and other project funders that they are getting a good deal for the price. It is a kind of “conspicuous consumption” on the part of a city that is not afraid to flaunt the project’s extravagant price tag despite the dismal economic climate.

In general, this kind of cost-benefit mindset pervades cash-strapped city governments, trapped in the zero-sum game of resource allocation where the burden is on them to prove that each tax dollar was spent with maximum efficiency. Thus, even before The Waterfalls was installed, the New York City Economic Development Corporation commissioned a market research consulting firm to conduct an “impact analysis” to determine the amount of tourism revenue that The Waterfalls would generate. According to their estimates, which were based on surveys and visitor counts at seven vantage points in Manhattan and Brooklyn, nearly 1.4 million people visited The Waterfalls. 79,322 of these supposedly would not have visited or would not have extended their visit to New York if not for The Waterfalls. The Economic Development Corporation reported that these visitors generated $42 million in direct spending and a total impact of $69 million, exceeding the original estimate.

As a researcher in the Program Evaluation division of a city agency that conducts plenty of “impact analyses” of subsidized housing programs in New York City, I have frequently faced the political imperative of using research to justify government policy and expenditure. During my tenure, I have worked to reframe the agency’s mindset from that of the “impact analysis,” with its attendant emphasis on generating development, cost-saving measures, and return on investments, to that of the “needs assessment.” I think this is an approach that may benefit the field of public art as well. Rather than “What kind of public art will have the greatest economic impact?” the question then becomes, “What kind of public art do communities, neighborhoods, and individuals need?” Or, “How to create work that is monumental and draws the attention of global audiences while still being responsive and accessible to New Yorkers?”

I am also troubled by this focus on quantitative data because I believe it is evidence that public art is being held responsible for the obligations of government. In general, it seems that programs that promote the arts and “creative cities” have taken precedence over and even replaced programs that are more closely tailored to address pressing social and economic problems. After all, it is probably easier to fix government investment in the arts than it is to fix the country’s macroeconomic system. I would even argue that The Waterfalls did more harm than good; through it’s spectacular elements, it may have masked underlying inequality, polarization, and conflict that is exacerbated in times of economic crisis.

As with The Waterfalls, public art is usually framed in terms of functionality and social, political, or economic instrumentality. But I think this is not conducive to a public art that reflects and comments upon the complexities of contemporary society. Function, after all, rarely enters the picture when it comes to the evaluation and criticism other types of art. If we do choose to reject the framework of functionality, what forms of evaluation are appropriate? How can we engage in an aesthetic discourse that is not depoliticizing and instead challenges the motives of urban regimes? These are the questions I would like to leave you with today. Thank you.

 

© Emily Baierl

 

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Archivomanía

44th Congreso AICA, Asunción, Paraguay, 17.10.11

 

 

 

 

Si el pasado insiste es por la ineludible exigencia vital de activar en el presente sus gérmenes de futuros enterrados. Walter Benjamin (psicografiado)[1]

 

 

 

Hay cultura, que es la regla. Y hay excepción, que es el arte… Todos dicen la regla: los cigarrillos, las computadoras, las camisetas, la televisión, el turismo, la guerra. Nadie dice la excepción. Eso no se dice. Eso se escribe… se compone… se pinta… se filma… O eso se vive. Y es entonces el arte de vivir… Es de la regla querer la muerte de la excepción. Jean-Luc Godard, Je vous salue, Sarajevo [2]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Una verdadera compulsión alrededor de archivos se ha apoderado del territorio globalizado del arte en el transcurso de las últimas décadas; compulsión que abarca desde investigaciones académicas de archivos existentes o aún por constituirse hasta exposiciones basadas parcial o íntegramente en ellos, pasando por frenéticas disputas entre coleccionistas privados y museos por la adquisición de estos nuevos objetos de deseo. Sin lugar a dudas, el fenómeno no es fruto de una pura casualidad.

En este contexto, urge preguntarse acerca de las políticas de archivo, ya que son muchos los modos de abordar las prácticas artísticas que se pretende inventariar. Dichas políticas se distinguen menos por las opciones técnicas que orientan la producción de un archivo, y más por la fuerza poética que el propio dispositivo propuesto es capaz de transmitir. Me refiero a su aptitud para hacer que las prácticas inventariadas tengan la posibilidad de activar experiencias sensibles en el presente, necesariamente distintas de las que se vivieron originalmente, pero con un mismo tenor de densidad crítico-poética. Ante esta propuesta, de entrada se impone una pregunta: ¿cómo sería un inventario portador de esta fuerza en sí mismo, es decir, la producción de un archivo “para” y no “sobre” una experiencia artística, o su mera catalogación, pretendidamente objetiva?

La problematización de esta distinción depende al menos de dos bloques de preguntas. El primero se refiere a los tipos de poéticas inventariadas: ¿qué poéticas son éstas? ¿Tendrían aspectos comunes? ¿Estarían ubicadas en contextos históricos similares? ¿En qué consiste inventariar poéticas y en qué se diferenciaría esta operación de la que se ciñe a inventariar objetos y/o documentos? El segundo bloque de preguntas se refiere a la situación que engendra el frenesí con relación a los archivos: ¿cuál es la causa de la emergencia de este deseo en el contexto actual? ¿Qué políticas de deseo sirven de impulso a las diferentes iniciativas alrededor de archivos, a su surgimiento, sus modos de producción, presentación, circulación y adquisición? Pretendo aquí proponer algunas pistas para responder a estas preguntas.

Partamos de la constatación innegable de que existe en efecto un objeto privilegiado por las ansias de archivar: se trata de una amplia gama de prácticas artísticas, agrupadas bajo la denominación de “conceptualismo”, que se desarrollan en el mundo en el transcurso de los años 1960 y 1970. Dichas prácticas, así como otras, igualmente osadas para los parámetros de la época, son el resultado de un fenómeno que comienza en el pasaje del siglo XIX al XX: la acumulación de imperceptibles movimientos tectónicos en el territorio del arte que llegan a un umbral en aquellas décadas y se plasman en ciertas obras que, al tornar dichos desplazamientos sensibles, reconfiguran enteramente su paisaje. Es ése el contexto en el cual los artistas posteriormente calificados como “conceptuales” toman como objeto de la investigación el poder del “sistema del arte” en la determinación de sus creaciones. Su foco son las diversas dimensiones del referido sistema: desde los espacios destinados a las obras hasta las categorías a partir de las cuales la historia (oficial) del arte las califica, pasando por los medios, los soportes, los géneros reconocidos, etc. La explicitación y la problematización de tales limitaciones en la propia obra pasan entonces a orientar la práctica artística, en la búsqueda de líneas de fuga de sus fronteras establecidas. Esta operación constituye la médula de su poética y la condición de su potencia pensante, en la cual reside la vitalidad propiamente dicha de la obra, el virus que la misma porta.

Pero no es que la compulsión de archivar abrace cualquier práctica artística realizada en este movimiento durante las referidas décadas. Se ubican especialmente en la mira las propuestas que se produjeron fuera del eje Europa Occidental–Estados Unidos, más precisamente aquéllas creadas en Latinoamérica, en países que en ese entonces vivían bajo regímenes militares. Tales prácticas han sido incorporadas por la historia del arte producida en este eje y establecida como pensamiento hegemónico que define los contornos del territorio internacional del arte. Es desde esta perspectiva que se interpreta y se categoriza a la producción artística elaborada en otras partes del planeta, lo que tiende a causar ciertas distorsiones en la lectura de las referidas prácticas, generando efectos tóxicos en su recepción y propagación.

 

Se rompe el hechizo

Debido al avance del proceso de globalización, desde hace algunas décadas se ha venido operando una desmitificación de “esa” historia del arte. Tal fenómeno se inserta en el contexto más amplio de disolución de la actitud idealizadora ante la cultura dominante por parte de las demás culturas que hasta entonces estaban bajo su influencia. Hay una ruptura del hechizo que las mantenía cautivas y que obstruía el trabajo de elaboración de sus propias experiencias con su textura y densidad singulares y la peculiaridad de sus políticas de cognición.

Es todo un mundo instaurado por el pensamiento hegemónico el que se desestabiliza: se transmuta subterráneamente su territorio, se modifica su cartografía, se desdibujan sus límites. Se opera un proceso de reactivación de las culturas sofocadas hasta ese entonces que introduce otras sensibilidades en la construcción del presente, lo que provoca distintos tipos de reacción. Para quedarnos tan sólo en sus extremos, en la posición más reactiva se encuentran los fundamentalismos de toda índole, que crean la ficción de una identidad originaria y se fijan en ella. La versión de esta tendencia en los países dominantes es la xenofobia. En el caso específico de Europa Occidental dicha tendencia ha venido intensificándose asustadoramente en los últimos años, como un canto de cisne que se debate contra la muerte anunciada de su hegemonía. Por detrás del confinamiento en este espejismo de una esencia identitaria, existe una denegación de la experiencia de proliferación de una alteridad múltiple y variable, como así también de la flexibilidad subjetiva y cultural que la misma demanda, características propias del proceso de globalizacióni. En tanto, en el extremo de la posición más activa, se producen toda la gama de invenciones del presente, movidas en cambio por la apertura a esta pluralidad de otros culturales y a los roces y tensiones de sus efectos, en el embate con el modo en que el nuevo panorama incide en cada contexto, y en las experiencias culturales inscritas de los cuerpos que lo habitan. A medida que avanza una de estas posiciones, se intensifica su opuesto. Evidentemente, estos dos extremos no existen en estado puro: lo que existe en realidad son diferentes especies de fuerzas que se presentan en una escala variada de matices entre el polo activo y el reactivo, e interactúan en un vasto crisol de culturas. Es en esa dinámica que se delinean las formas de la sociedad transnacional.

La archivomanía aparece precisamente en este contexto signado por una guerra entre fuerzas que disputan la definición de la geopolítica del arte. Pero, ¿por qué son especialmente codiciadas por esta obsesión de investigar, producir, exponer y/o adquirir archivos ciertas prácticas artísticas llevadas a cabo en aquellas décadas en Latinoamérica? ¿Y por qué lo son preferentemente en los países del continente que en ese entonces se encontraban bajo dictaduras? En efecto, existe un aspecto común a todas esas prácticas, que no obstante adquiere matices singulares en cada una: se le agrega la dimensión política a las demás dimensiones del territorio institucional del arte, cuyo excesivo poder sobre la creación empieza a problematizarse en el período. Sucede que la política, que necesariamente permea el territorio del arte en su transversalidad, sea cual sea el contexto, se vuelve más explicita en Estados autoritarios, ya sean de derecha o de izquierda, debido a que es más violenta su incidencia en la determinación de las acciones artísticas.

No obstante, hay que distinguir entre dos modalidades de presencia de este aspecto en las prácticas artísticas latinoamericanas tomadas por la archivomanía: macro y micropolítica. Las acciones artísticas de índole macropolítica transmiten básicamente contenidos ideológicos, lo que las convierte en prácticas más cercanas a la militancia que al arte. En tanto, en el segundo tipo de acciones lo político constituye un elemento intrínseco a la investigación poética, y no algo ubicado en su exterioridad. Independientemente del valor que se les quiera adjudicar a cada una de estas modalidades, el problema es que, desafortunadamente, la vertiente macropolítica ha sido generalizada por la historia hegemónica del arte para interpretar al conjunto de las propuestas artísticas de aquellas décadas en el continente, bajo la denominación de “arte conceptual político” o “ideológico”. Esta categoría ha sido instituida por ciertos textos y exposiciones que se realizaron a partir de mediados de los años 1970 en el eje Europa Occidental–Estados Unidos, que se han vuelto paradigmáticosii. La misma implica en la denegación de la naturaleza micropolítica de las acciones artísticas en cuestión, trabando su reconocimiento y su expansión. La invención de esta categoría puede ser interpretada como un síntoma que, como tal, impone la urgencia de un trabajo de elaboración que explicite cuáles son las fuerzas reactivas que el equívoco de esa calificación revela, de modo tal de combatir más eficazmente sus efectos. A tal fin, se vuelve necesario detenerse en la diferencia existente entre ambas modalidades de presencia de lo político en las prácticas artísticas, especialmente en contextos de terrorismo de Estado.

Si bien la incidencia de los regímenes totalitarios en la cultura se manifiesta más obviamente a través de la censura, su cara macropolítica, es mucho más sutil y nefasto su efecto micropolítico imperceptible, pero no por ello menos poderoso. Este efecto consiste en la inhibición de la propia emergencia del proceso de creación, antes incluso de que su expresión haya empezado a bosquejarse. Dicha inhibición es producto del trauma inexorable de las experiencias de pavor y humillación que les son inherentes. Esas experiencias, producto de los métodos de prisión, tortura y asesinato, practicados hasta el hartazgo por los gobiernos autoritarios con cualquier persona que a ellos se oponga, impregnan la atmósfera de una sensación aterradora de peligro inminente. La situación afecta al deseo en su meollo y lo debilita, pulveriza la potencia del pensamiento que éste convoca y dispara, y así la subjetividad queda vaciada de consistencia. Al ser el terreno por excelencia en el cual se producen las excepciones a la regla de la cultura, el arte es especialmente afectado.

Experiencias de ese género se inscriben en la memoria inmaterial del cuerpo, que es la memoria física y afectiva de las sensaciones, distinta, empero indisociable de la memoria de la percepción de las formas y de los hechos, con sus respectivas representaciones y las narrativas que las enlazan (en este caso, generalmente protagonizadas por la figura de la víctima, que los interpreta apelando a un discurso puramente ideológico). El desentrañamiento del deseo para librarlo de su impotencia constituye una tarea tan sutil y compleja como el proceso que provocó su represión y la figura de la víctima que de ella resulta. Dicha elaboración puede extenderse durante treinta años o más, para plasmarse recién y efectivamente durante la segunda o la tercera generación. La especial vulnerabilidad de ciertos artistas a esta experiencia en su dimensión corporal (aquende y allende la conciencia que tengan de ella o de su interpretación ideológica) es lo que los lleva, en diferentes contextos, a afirmar en sus obras la potencia micropolítica inmanente a la práctica artística; una actitud que se distingue del uso del arte como vehículo de información macropolítica.

Cabría preguntarse entonces si a la fuerza micropolítica del arte puede convocársela y revelársela únicamente con base en experiencias de dolor, miedo y angustia, y más especialmente aún cuando éstas son movilizadas por situaciones de opresión macropolítica, ya sea en regímenes totalitarios o en las relaciones de dominación y/o explotación de clase, raza, religión, género, etc.

Sería absurdo pensar de ese modo: precisamos librarnos de las huellas de esta trampa romántica que alía la creación al dolor. Cualquier situación en la que la vida se vea constreñida por las formas de la realidad y/o el modo de describirlas produce extrañamiento. Y éste es sucedido de un malestar que moviliza la necesidad de expresar lo que no cabe en el mapa vigente, creando nuevos sentidos, la condición para que la vida vuelva a fluir. En eso consiste la experiencia estética del mundo: ésta depende de la capacidad del cuerpo de volverse vulnerable a su entorno, de dejarse tomar por la sensación de disparidad existente entre las formas de la realidad y los movimientos que se agitan bajo su supuesta estabilidad, aquello que lo pone en “estado de arte”. Una especie de experiencia del mundo que va más allá del ejercicio de su aprehensión reducida a las formas operado por la percepción y su asociación con ciertas representaciones a partir de las cuales se les adjudica sentido. La tensión de la dinámica paradójica entre estos dos modos de aprehensión del mundo vuelve intolerable la conservación del status quo; y es esto lo que nos causa extrañamiento y nos fuerza a crear. Y el cuerpo no se apacigua mientras no traigamos a la superficie de la cartografía vigente aquello que pide paso, horadando su cerco y modificando sus contornos.

Ahora bien, el malestar del extrañamiento en cuestión no necesariamente viene embebido de miedo y/o angustia; éstos son sentimientos conscientes del yo, producto de la impotencia ante circunstancias específicas, que incluyen el autoritarismo y la desigualdad social, pero no se ciñe a ellos. En situaciones extremas, tales sentimientos, como hemos visto, traen aparejado el riesgo de inhibir la potencia de creación, lo que lleva a reemplazar al pensamiento por fantasmas y proyecciones. Así es como el trauma producido en contextos dictatoriales puede provocar el reemplazo del pensamiento por la ideología. La consecuencia es la transformación del artista en activista y su obra en panfleto portador de los afectos tristes de la víctima, de su resentimiento y del deseo de venganza, afectos que se movilizan igualmente en su recepción y que tienen tan sólo dos destinos posibles: la esperanza de redención o la desesperanza movida por una alucinación de apocalipsis. Encubierta bajo el velo de proyecciones ideológicas, tejido con hilos de deseo romántico y emoción religiosa, la experiencia se nubla y sus tensiones se tornan inaccesibles. De este modo, estas últimas mantienen un poder inconsciente sobre la subjetividad, y es eso lo que la lleva a adoptar estrategias defensivas para protegerse, que al mismo tiempo la limitan. Tiende a producirse entonces un malentendido acerca de la relación entre arte y política que, debido a que tiene su origen en una operación defensiva, no es fácil deshacerlo.

Para captar dicha operación más precisamente, vale la pena recordar que la sensación opera en el plano corporal inconsciente, mientras que el sentimiento o la emoción operan en el plano psicológico. El objeto de la sensación es el proceso que deshace mundos y engendra otros, lo cual ocurre, tal como hemos visto, en cualquier contexto en que la vida se encuentre disminuida en su potencia. Es ese proceso el que mueve a la creación artística. La sensación es por lo tanto portavoz de la fuerza de creación y diferenciación que define a la vida en su esencia, constituyéndose así en una especie de «emoción vital», lo que la distingue de los sentimientos y emociones psicológicas, voceros del yo y de su conciencia. Sin embargo, los contextos que movilizan sentimientos exacerbados de angustia pueden impregnar a punto tal las sensaciones del proceso en curso que se tiende mezclarlos, como si fuesen lo mismo. Pero no debemos confundirlos: aunque el malestar de la sensación de la disparidad existente entre las formas de la realidad y las fuerzas que causan su desguace esté también signado por turbulencias difíciles de sostener mientras aquello que presiona no se resuelve en obra, este estado produce al mismo tiempo una extraña alegría. Sucede que la creación abre canales para la afirmación de la vida y alimenta la confianza de que logra imponerse incluso en situaciones límite, aun en contextos de opresión macropolítica, tal como es el caso de las prácticas artísticas que aquí se enfocan. Por eso, aunque lo que convoca a la acción artística en los regímenes dictatoriales en curso sea precisamente la presencia brutal de la macropolítica en la creación, la naturaleza de su potencia sigue siendo micropolítica. Lo que orienta al artista acá es su escucha de la realidad intensiva que presiona, y ésta solamente logra perforar la barrera y hacerse presente si se concreta en las entrañas de su poética. Esa capacidad hace del arte un poderoso reactivo químico que, al propagarse por contagio, puede interferir en la composición molecular de los medios en que se inserta, disolviendo sus elementos tóxicos.

Es precisamente ésta la dimensión política del arte que caracteriza a las propuestas artísticas más contundentes elaboradas en América Latina durante las dictaduras de las décadas de 1960 y 1970. Encarnada en la obra, la insistencia de la fuerza de invención ante la experiencia omnipresente y difusa de su opresión se volvía sensible, en un medio en el cual la brutalidad del terrorismo de Estado tendía a provocar una reacción defensiva de ceguera y de sordera voluntarias, por una cuestión de supervivencia. Por ende, tales acciones artísticas son de una índole totalmente distinta de aquélla que rige en el plano en que operan las que se acercan a las acciones pedagógicas o doctrinarias de concientización y transmisión de contenidos ideológicos, aun a las acciones socioeducativas de “inclusión”. Debido a que no inciden en el plano de la experiencia estética, estas últimas no tienen el mismo poder sobre el debilitamiento del deseo y de la subjetividad en su capacidad pensante.

Otro malentendido tiende a generarse en este mismo tipo de situación consiste en suponer que en las prácticas artísticas en las cuales se afirma su poder político, la forma sería irrelevante. Una cosa no se contrapone a la otra, al contrario: en dichas prácticas, el rigor formal de la obra ­–ya sea ésta pintura, escultura, intervención urbana, instalación, performance, etc.­– es más esencial y sutil que nunca. Con todo, en este caso, no son sus formas per se, separadas del proceso que les da origen, lo que las hace poderosas y las vuelve seductoras; la forma aquí es indisociable de su rigor como actualización de las sensaciones que tensan y obligan a pensar-crear. Un tipo de rigor que es estético, pero es también e indisociablemente ético: estético, porque vuelve sensible a aquello que los afectos del mundo en el cuerpo anuncian; ético, porque implica hacerse cargo de las exigencias de la vida para mantenerse en proceso. En ese sentido, cuanto más preciso y sintónico es su lenguaje, más vigorosa es su cualidad intensiva y mayor su poder de seducción, y es eso lo que le otorga una energía de influencia efectiva en los ambientes por los cuales circula. Al alcanzar este grado de rigor, el arte se convierte en una especie de medicina: la experiencia que promueve es capaz de intervenir en el proceso de subjetivación de aquéllos que se acercan a él, precisamente en el punto en el que el deseo tiende a volverse cautivo y a despotencializarse. Cuando esto sucede, se reanima el ejercicio del pensamiento y se activan otras formas de percepción, pero también y por sobre todo, de invención y de expresión. Se delinean nuevas políticas del deseo y de su relación con el mundo, es decir, nuevos diagramas del inconsciente en el campo social que se actualizan en reconfiguraciones de la cartografía vigente. En definitiva, se trata de un rigor vital que se mueve a contracorriente de las fuerzas que dibujan mapas cuya tendencia es mutilar la vida en su propio meollo, y que consiste, como hemos visto, en su insistencia en reciclarse en la creación permanente del mundo.

Por ende, el carácter político específico de las prácticas artísticas a las cuales nos abocamos aquí reside en aquello que pueden suscitar en los medios que son afectados por ellas. Y no se trata en este caso tan sólo de la conciencia de las tensiones (su cara extensiva, representacional, macropolítica), sino fundamentalmente de la experiencia de este estado de cosas en el propio cuerpo y de los afectos movilizados por las fuerzas que lo componen (su cara intensiva, inconsciente, micropolítica).

Se gana así en precisión de foco, el cual en cambio se enturbia cuando todo lo relativo a la vida social en el arte se vuelve a reducir exclusivamente a un abordaje macropolítico, el cual, como hemos visto, tiene a estimularse en situaciones signadas por la opresión por parte del Estado y/o por la vigencia de una exacerbada desigualdad social. Tal fue el caso de ciertas prácticas artísticas durante las mismas décadas de 1960 y 1970 en Sudamérica, como así también de ciertas prácticas contemporáneas, principalmente a partir de los años 1990 (y no sólo en este continente). A estas prácticas artísticas, y solamente a éstas, podría efectivamente calificárselas como “políticas” o “ideológicas”.

Es en este punto que se sitúa el desafortunado equívoco cometido por la historia (oficial) del arte, cuya narrativa pasó de largo de la esencia de las acciones aquí privilegiadas: al incidir potencialmente sobre la naturaleza afectivo-vibrátil de la subjetividad y no solamente sobre su conciencia, dichas acciones bosquejaron la superación de la escisión entre lo poético y lo político. Una escisión que se actualiza en el conflicto entre la figura clásica del artista, destituido de la dimensión micropolítica propia de su práctica y la del militante, destituido de la dimensión estética de su subjetividad y disociado del cuerpo como brújula vital en su interpretación del mundo y en las acciones que de ello resultan. Este conflicto extirpa del arte la energía micropolítica que le es inmanente y crea la figura del artista militante, cuyas acciones operan en el plano macropolítico, desde donde se rotula como formalistas a las acciones artísticas que no abordan directa y literalmente ese plano. Si bien es cierto que ese bosquejo de superación ya estaba presente en las vanguardias artísticas de comienzos del siglo XX, y que el mismo avanza y se disemina a lo largo de la primera mitad del siglo, y más intensamente en la posguerra, durante las décadas del 1960 y 1970 la activación de la micropolítica hace eclosión como un vasto movimiento en el arte, el cual incide en la cultura en el sentido amplio del término que se extiende a los modos de existencia. Éstos se transmutan irreversiblemente durante dicho período, cuando la excepción del arte se mostró más fuerte que las reglas de la cultura. De allí que se le haya dado el nombre de “contracultura”iii a este movimiento. Es ésta la reactivación que, al sufrir el golpe micropolítico de las dictaduras, tendió a retraerse nuevamente en el silencio de su represión.

 

La represión colonial

Para que esta radiografía se vuelva más precisa, resulta indispensable recordar que la articulación entre lo poético y lo político tampoco tiene su inicio con las vanguardias históricas; la misma proviene a decir verdad de mucho más lejos en el tiempo. Podríamos incluso afirmar que dicha articulación constituye uno de los aspectos fundamentales de la política de cognición que, de diferentes modos, caracterizaba a buena parte de las culturas dominadas por la modernidad fundada por Europa Occidental. Un régimen cultural que, tal como sabemos, es inseparable de sus corolarios en el campo de la economía (el régimen capitalista) y también en el campo del deseo (el régimen del individuo moderno, origen de la subjetividad burguesa, cuya estructura psíquica Freud circunscribió bajo la denominación de “neurosis”). Recordemos también que esta modalidad cultural se le impuso al mundo como paradigma universal por medio de la colonización, cuyo blanco no fueron solamente los otros tres continentes (América, África y Asia), sino también las diferentes culturas sofocadas en el interior del propio continente europeo.

Entre estas últimas, hagamos hincapié en las culturas mediterráneas, que nos atañen más directamente, en especial, la cultura árabe-judía, que predominaba en la Península Ibérica antes de las navegaciones intercontinentales que resultaron en la colonización. Como es sabido, a partir de ese período, los practicantes de esa cultura sufrieron la violencia de la Inquisición, lo que llevo muchos de ellos a refugiarse en el Nuevo Mundo que, en ese entonces, se empezaba a construir en la América Ibéricaiv. Ahora bien, dicha violencia se perpetró en el transcurso de los mismos tres siglos que África sufrió la violencia de la esclavitud, y las culturas indígenas americanas la violencia de su cuasi extinción. Un triple trauma fundacional de algunos países latinoamericanos, entre los cuales se ubica Brasil. Pero la cosa no se detiene por ahí: las formas de violencia que caracterizaron a la  época colonial dejaron marcas activas en la memoria de los cuerpos de las sociedades americanas post Independencia, empezando por los arraigados prejuicios de clase y de raza. Remanentes de la política de deseo colonial-esclavista, dichos prejuicios generaron y siguen generando la peor de las humillaciones y constituyen probablemente uno de los traumas más graves y difíciles de superar, debido a la permanencia del estigma y su incesante reiteración en la vida social. Reforzando y prolongando este proceso, otros males en el plano macropolítico, tales como la miseria, la exclusión social, el dominio externo y los regímenes autoritarios, se fueron mezclando con los anteriores, lo que en el plano micropolítico ha agravado los traumas preexistentes y ha creado nuevos en el transcurso de la historia y aún hoy en día. Podemos entonces suponer que la represión de la articulación inmanente entre lo poético y lo político tiene su inicio con la propia instalación de la modernidad occidental, y culmina en los días actuales con la política de cognición del capitalismo financiero transnacional, habiendo pasado por las dictaduras en el caso del Cono Sur. Me arriesgo a decir que, desde el punto de vista micropolítico, esta operación desempeña un rol central en la fundación de esta cultura y en su imposición al mundo, a punto tal que propongo denominarla “represión colonial”. Si leemos la colonización desde esta perspectiva, constatamos que quizás éste haya sido su dispositivo más eficazv.

Vale la pena retomar la descripción de la política de cognición que la represión colonial tiene como objeto, ahora ubicado en el marco del horizonte histórico. Tres aspectos la caracterizan: el vigor de la vibratibilidad del cuerpo ante las fuerzas que se agitan en el plano intensivo (la experiencia estética del mundo); la sensación movilizada por la tensión de la dinámica paradójica entre esta experiencia y la de la percepción, y la potencia del pensamiento-creación que se activa cuando dicha tensión alcanza un cierto umbral. El objeto de la represión es precisamente esa fuerza de la imaginación creadora y su capacidad de resistencia al deseo de conservación de las formas de vivir conocidas, deseo signado por una política que consiste en adoptar el ejercicio de la percepción como la vía exclusiva de conocimiento del mundo. La operación de represión hace que la subjetividad ya no logre sostenerse en la referida tensión, el motor de la máquina del pensamiento que produce las acciones en las cuales la realidad se reinventa. En definitiva, el objeto de esta represión es el propio cuerpo y la posibilidad de encarnarlo, de lo que depende su poder de escucha del diagrama de fuerzas del presente, como principal brújula para el ejercicio de la producción cognitiva y su interferencia en el mundo: una brújula cuya función no consiste en ubicarnos en el espacio visible, sino en lo invisible de los estados de pulsación vital. La activación de esta aptitud del cuerpo que fue reprimida por la modernidad instaurada por Europa Occidental constituye una dimensión esencial de cualquier acción poético-política. Sin ello, no se hacen sino variaciones alrededor de los modos de producción de subjetividad y de cognición que nos fundan como colonias de Europa Occidental, condición de la cual precisamente pretendemos apartarnos.

Dicha represión se opera mediante complejos procedimientos que se diferencian en el transcurso de la historia. Quedémonos tan sólo en las experiencias más recientes, aquéllas que estamos examinando aquí. En los regímenes totalitarios, como hemos visto, el ejercicio del pensamiento se ve concretamente impedido y termina por inhibirse, bajo los efectos del miedo y de la humillación. En cambio, en el capitalismo financiero, la operación de represión es mucho más refinada: no se trata ya de impedir este ejercicio, ni tampoco de anhelar su parcial o total inhibición. Al contrario: se trata de incitarlo e incluso de festejarlo, pero para ponerlo al servicio de los intereses puramente económicos del régimen, destituyéndolo así de la fuerza disruptiva inmanente a su poética. Es por eso que muchos pensadores contemporáneos consideran que es de la fuerza de trabajo del pensamiento-creación que el capitalismo contemporáneo extrae su principal fuente de energía; de allí que lo hayan calificado como “capitalismo cultural”, “cognitivo” o “informacional”, una idea que se ha vuelto moneda corriente.

Este régimen moviliza la fragilidad que provoca la tensión entre los dos vectores de la experiencia del mundo, y en ella se inscribe, mediante la promesa de un apaciguamiento instantáneo. El deseo de enfrentar esta presión y la energía de creación que la misma moviliza tienden a ser canalizados exclusivamente hacia el mercado. Esto se opera por diversos medios, entre los cuales el más obvio es la incitación de la subjetividad a una caza de imágenes de formas de vivir prêt-à-porter que pueblan la cultura de masas y la publicidad, incansablemente difundidas por los medios de comunicación, que ofertan una variadísima gama de posibilidades para identificarse. En ella se incluyen ofertas específicas de cultura de lujo igualmente homogeneizadas. En esta categoría ocupan una posición privilegiada ciertos Museos de Arte Contemporáneo y sus ostentosas arquitecturas, así como también la proliferación de bienales por todas partes, un fenómeno al cual el pensamiento crítico le ha dado el nombre de  «bienalización» del planeta. Ambos funcionan actualmente como dispositivos de turismo cultural de las clases medias altas y las elites, en las cuales se forja una lengua internacional común clasificada como “alta cultura”, compuesta por algunas palabras y floreos de la retórica del momento, algunos nombres de artistas y curadores meteóricamente celebrados por los medios de comunicación y un cierto “estilo” de comportamiento que comprende griffes de moda, diseño, gastronomía, etc. El deseo es capturado por algunas de esas imágenes que selecciona y, mediante un proceso de identificación simbiótica con las mismas, se desencadena una compulsión de consumo de los productos asociados a éstas, con el objetivo de realizar el mundo que proponen en nuestras existencias, ilusionados por la promesa de admisión en una especie de paraíso terrenal. Lo que atrae el deseo y hace que éste se deje capturar por esa dinámica es el espejismo de ser reconocidos y reconocernos en alguna de las mise en scènes que ofrece el menú del día. El objetivo es librarnos de la angustiante sensación de vaciamiento de uno mismo y recuperar nuestro valor social supuestamente perdido, como por arte de magia. Sin embargo, el mantenimiento de esta ilusión tiene su precio: con la instrumentalización del deseo, se pierde el olfato para husmear la pulsación vital y sus trabas, y nuestra capacidad de invención se desvía de su foco primordial, que consiste en abrir nuevos caminos para que la vida vuelva a fluir cuando esto se hace necesario.

 

El retorno de lo reprimido y la archivomanía

Con todo, existe una contrapartida: no es solamente el trauma de la articulación entre lo poético y lo político causante de su represión lo que se encuentra inscrito en la memoria de los cuerpos que habitan las regiones bajo dominio de la cultura dominante, sino también la memoria de la vivencia de la referida articulación, que queda a la espera de hallar las condiciones como para reactivarse y escapar de su confinamiento. Éstas se presentan en ciertos tipos de situaciones sociales que favorecen la neutralización de los efectos patológicos de su trauma en la conducción de la existencia y de sus destinos.

Pues bien, una situación de este tipo se plantea en la propia vivencia del estado de cosas en la actualidad. El destino de la proliferación de imágenes-mundos que aparecen y desaparecen sin cesar a una velocidad vertiginosa, promovida por el desarrollo de las tecnologías de la comunicación, no es únicamente la instrumentalización de nuestras fuerzas subjetivas por parte del mercado. Si le añadimos a ello la polifonía de culturas que puede oírse y vivenciarse a toda hora y en cualquier punto del planeta, veremos que su efecto es también el de hacer imposible que un repertorio, sea cual sea, mantenga un poder estable, ni mucho menos absoluto. Esta imposibilidad es una de las causas de la ruptura de la fascinación y la seducción ejercidas por la modernidad europea y norteamericana, ahora en su versión neoliberal, que viene sucediendo en las últimas décadas, tal como se evocó al comienzo de este texto. No estamos más en un momento de oposición y resentimiento, ni de su contracara: la identificación y el pedido de reconocimiento, es decir, la demanda de amor, que en este caso es el síntoma de una subjetividad humillada que idealiza al opresor y depende de su deseo perverso. El movimiento actual consiste precisamente en los mayores o menores desplazamientos del lugar de humillación y de la consiguiente sumisión al opresor, en busca de activar lo que fue reprimido en nuestros cuerpos.

Sería estúpido pensar que el objetivo de esta vuelta al pasado es “rescatar” una supuesta esencia perdida que se encontraría en las formas de existencia africanas, indígenas o mediterráneas anteriores al siglo XV, o en la inflexión contracultural de los años 1960-1970. Dicho movimiento se caracterizó precisamente por esta tendencia a idealizar un supuesto origen perdido, lo que llevó a parte de la generación que lo creó a una especie de caza del tesoro en esas regiones, como si su pasado estuviese allí resguardado en “estado puro” y pudiese ser “revelado”. En lugar de ello, el objeto de la reconexión con ese pasado es ahora el ejercicio de la ética del deseo y del conocimiento que regía en aquellas culturas y en sus actualizaciones: velar por la preservación de la vida, que depende de la factibilidad de la experiencia estética, para escuchar sus movimientos y adoptarlos como balizas en la orientación de la existencia; una ética que, dicho sea de paso, se encuentra hoy igualmente reprimida en aquellas regiones. Ahora bien, la reconexión con este ejercicio no pasa por la reproducción de las formas que esta ética habría engendrado en el pasado, sino por la activación, en el actual contexto, de la propia ética en cuestión para reorientar las reinvenciones de la cartografía del presente, a contramano de las operaciones que reiteran su represión.

Es precisamente en este contexto que irrumpe una voluntad ineludible de revolver los archivos existentes o de constituir nuevos a partir de los rastros de las prácticas artísticas realizadas en América del Sur en los años 1960-1970, una voluntad que se disemina como una verdadera epidemia. Sucede que, con las dictaduras, la experiencia de la fusión de la fuerza poética y la fuerza política vivenciada en estas prácticas había quedado encapsulada en la memoria de nuestros cuerpos bajo un manto de olvido; solamente lográbamos llegar a ella en la exterioridad de las formas en que se plasmaba, y aun así, fragmentariamente. Su potencia disruptiva –y lo que ésta desató y podría seguir desatando en su entorno–, como hemos visto, quedó enterrada bajo el efecto del trauma que le causaron los gobiernos militares, a lo que le siguió su reanimación perversa por parte del capitalismo cognitivo que los sucedió.

 

El equívoco tóxico de la historia (oficial) del arte

Pues bien, éste es el aspecto crucial de la producción artística de los años 1960-1970 en el continente que parece habérsele escapado a la historia del arte. Aunque mantengamos esa producción bajo el paraguas del “conceptualismo“, es inaceptable rotularlo a éste como “ideológico” o “político” para caracterizar a la peculiaridad que la misma habría introducido en esta categoría, peculiaridad que en la práctica ha ampliado sus límites y transformado potencialmente sus contornos. Sucede que, si bien encontramos efectivamente en estas propuestas un germen de integración entre lo político y lo poético, vivenciado y actualizado en acciones artísticas, como así también en los modos de existencia que se crearon durante el mismo período, dicho germen era empero aún frágil e innombrable en ese entonces. Ahora bien, el tacharlo de “ideológico” o “político” es un síntoma de la denegación de la excepción que esta experiencia artística radicalmente nueva introdujo en la cultura y el estado de extrañamiento que esto produjo en las subjetividades. La estrategia defensiva es sencilla: si lo que allí experimentamos no es reconocible en el dominio del arte, entonces, para protegernos de ese ruido molesto, lo encasillamos en el dominio de la macropolítica y todo vuelve a su lugar. Se deniega la dimensión micropolítica inmanente al arte, se aborta el germen de su activación, y junto con él, también aquello que está por venir, que en el mejor de los casos queda incubado.

La gravedad de esta operación es innegable si recordamos que el estado de extrañamiento que la excepción del arte instaura constituye una experiencia crucial, ya que resulta de la reverberación de la multiplicidad plástica de fuerzas del mundo en nuestros cuerpos, captadas por su capacidad vibrátil. Un espacio de alteridad que se instala en la subjetividad, la desestabiliza, la inquieta y le exige un trabajo de recreación de sus contornos y del mapa de sus conexiones como condición para alcanzar un nuevo equilibrio. El hecho de soslayarlo implica el bloqueo de la vida pensante que da impulso a las acciones artísticas y de la cual depende su influencia potencial en las formas del presente. Es precisamente dicha denegación el elemento tóxico contenido en las tristes categorías establecidas por la historia del arte para interpretar las propuestas artísticas en cuestión; ésta es la fuerza reactiva que el síntoma de su equívoco revela, al tiempo que nos suministra la pista del objeto al que apunta.

En este estado de cosas, urge activar la articulación intrínseca entre lo poético y lo político y la fuerza de afirmación de la vida que depende de ella. Ésta es la condición para que el deseo se libre de su debilitamiento defensivo, de manera tal de hacer factible la expansión vital en función de la experiencia vivida por el cuerpo vibrátil en el tiempo presente. He allí el contexto que, de diferentes maneras, desencadena una serie de iniciativas generadas por el fervor de investigar, crear, exponer y/o poseer archivos que ha tomado el territorio del arte.

Sin embargo, esta misma situación moviliza igualmente una política del deseo diametralmente opuesta: en el preciso momento en que dichas iniciativas reaparecen, y antes de que hayan vuelto a respirar los gérmenes de futuro que traían incubados, el sistema global del arte las incorpora, para transformarlas en fetichizados expolios de una guerra cognitiva disputados por los grandes museos y coleccionistas de Europa Occidental y Estados Unidos. Dicha operación tiene el poder de devolver a esos gérmenes a la penumbra del olvido; y esto hace de ella un eficiente dispositivo del capitalismo cognitivo. Como sugiere Godard, «es de la regla querer la muerte de la excepción». Si el movimiento de pensamiento crítico que se dio intensamente en los años 1960-1970 en América Latina fue brutalmente interrumpido por los gobiernos militares, en el preciso momento en que su memoria empieza a reactivarse, este proceso se ve nuevamente interrumpido, y ahora con el refinamiento glamouroso y seductor del mercado del arte, cuando sus intereses cobran demasiado poder sobre la creación artística y tienden a ignorar sus poéticas pensantes. Una operación muy distinta de los groseros y atroces procedimientos ejercidos contra la producción artística por los gobiernos dictatoriales. Un nuevo capítulo de la historia, mucho menos poscolonial de lo que nos gustaría…

He aquí que la política de producción de archivos y la necesidad de distinguir sus múltiples modalidades cobran relevancia. El desafío de las iniciativas que pretenden desobstruir el acceso indispensable a los gérmenes de futuros, soterrados en las poéticas que toman como objeto, consiste en activar su contundencia crítica, para crear así las condiciones de una experiencia de igual calibre en el enfrentamiento de las cuestiones que se plantean en la contemporaneidad. Es así como la fuerza crítico-poética de dichos archivos puede sumarse a las fuerzas de creación que aparecen en nuestra actualidad, ampliando su poder en el combate contra los efectos de la vacuna toxica del capitalismo cultural que neutraliza al virus del arte, lo que contribuye a que la misma tienda a funcionar únicamente a favor de sus designios. Una operación que no incide únicamente en el ámbito del arte, pero que en este campo específico se da a través del mercado y, tal como se evocó anteriormente, incluye entre sus principales dispositivos a muchos museos de arte contemporáneo y a la proliferación de bienales y ferias de arte.vi

Resulta obvio que no se trata de demonizar al mercado, ni al coleccionismo ni a las galerías que le son inherentes, pues los artistas deben tener una remuneración por sus trabajos, y los coleccionadores no tienen por qué privarse del deseo de convivir con obras de arte; ni mucho menos se trata de demonizar a los museos en sus importantes funciones de constituir archivos de las producciones artísticas, velar por su preservación y ponerlas a disposición del público. El mercado y los museos no constituyen una extraterritorialidad del arte, sino que son parte integrante de su dinámica. La vida no puede regirse por una moral maniqueísta que divide a las actividades humanas en buenas y malas; lo que cuenta es el combate entre fuerzas activas y reactivas en cada campo de actividad, en los diferentes tiempos y contextos que lo atraviesan. Así también es en el territorio del arte: es en las fuerzas que lo rigen en cada momento, en toda su compleja transversalidad, y no en un supuesto territorio imaginario idealizado, donde deben pensarse las producciones artísticas, críticas, curatoriales, museológicas y archivistas, cuando son instigadas por el deseo de inscribir la excepción del arte en la cultura globalizada, contribuyendo así a preservar el ejercicio del “arte de vivir” en su trazado polifónico.

Si hubo un logro micropolítico significativo luego de los movimientos de los años 1960-1970 que nos aparta de aquel período, éste reside precisamente en la posibilidad de abandonar los antiguos sueños románticos de “soluciones finales”, ya sean utópicas o distópicas, que siempre han desembocado en regímenes totalitarios. Ahora bien, el proceso de reactivación de la potencia vibrátil de nuestro cuerpo actualmente en curso, pese a estar aún en sus albores, nos permite entrever que no existe otro mundo sino éste, y que es desde dentro de sus impasses que otros mundos pueden estar inventándose en cada momento de la experiencia humana. Éste es el esfuerzo del trabajo del pensamiento: ya sea que se plantee en el arte o en otros lenguajes, su tarea es la composición de cartografías, que se dibujan al mismo tiempo que cobran cuerpo nuevos territorios existenciales, mientras otros se deshacen.

Pero no seamos ingenuos: nada asegura que el virus crítico-poético que los mencionados gérmenes portan se propague efectivamente como una epidemia planetaria; ni siquiera el virus transmisible que porta cualquier obra de nuestro tiempo, por más poderosa que sea. Siempre existirá la cultura que es la regla y el arte que es la excepción. Lo que “puede” el arte es arrojar el virus de lo poético en el aire. Y eso no es poco en el embate entre distintos tipos de fuerzas, cuyo resultado son las formas siempre provisorias de la realidad, en su interminable construcción.

 

© Suely Rolnik

 

AtrásArchive Mania

 

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 18.10.11

 

 

 

If the past insists, it is because of life’s unavoidable demand to activate in the present the seeds of its buried futures. Walter Benjamin, Psychography [1]

 

 

 

There is culture, and that is the rule. There is exception, and that is art. Everything tells the rule: cigarettes, computers, T-shirts, television, tourism, war. Nothing says the exception. That is not said. It is written, composed, painted, filmed. Or it is lived. And it is then the art of living. It is of the nature of the rule to desire the death of exception. Jean-Luc Godard, Je vous salue, Sarajevo [2]

 

 

 

 

 

The globalized art world has been overtaken in recent decades by a true compulsion to archive—a compulsion that includes anything from academic research into preexisting archives or those still to be constructed, through exhibitions fully or in part based on them, to frantic competition among private collectors and museums in the acquisition of these new objects of desire. Without a doubt, this phenomenon is not the result of chance.

In view of this, it is urgent that we problematize the politics of archiving, since there are many different ways of approaching those artistic practices that are being archived. Such politics should be distinguished on the basis of the poetic force that an archiving device can transmit rather than on that of its technical or methodological choices. I am referring here to their ability to enable the archived practices to activate sensible experiences in the present, necessarily different from those that were originally lived, but with an equivalent critical-poetic density. Facing this issue, a question immediately emerges: How can we conceive of an inventory that is able to carry this potential in itself—that is, an archive “for” and not “about” artistic experience or its mere cataloguing in an allegedly objective manner?

This distinction can be explored according to at least two sets of questions. The first refers to the kind of poetics that are being catalogued: Which poetics are these exactly? Do they share common traits? Do they originate from similar historical contexts? What does it mean to catalogue poetics, and how is this operation different from the cataloguing of objects or documents? The second set of questions refers to the situation that has given rise to the current archive fever: What is the cause of the emergence of such desire today? What different politics of desire has given impulse to the many initiatives focused on archives, their emergence and means of production, presentation, circulation, and acquisition? In what follows, I aim to propose some clues to answering these questions.

Let us begin with the undeniable fact that there exists a privileged object of this yearning for the archive: the broad spectrum of artistic practices framed by the label “Conceptualism,” which were developed throughout the world during the 1960s and 1970s. Such practices, as well as others that shared a similar daring attitude in relation to the standards of their time, are the result of a phenomenon that starts at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth: an accumulation of imperceptible tectonic movements within the art world that reached a threshold during those years and resulted in works that, by making such movements sensible, completely reconfigured the artistic landscape. This is the context in which the artists subsequently referred to as “Conceptual” emerge, adopting as the subject of their research the way in which the “art system” determines their creations. Their focus is on the diverse levels of such a system: from the spaces where the works are exhibited, to the categories and genres that the (official) history of art uses to qualify them, and to their media, supports, etc. The making critically explicit of such limitations within the artworks themselves provided at that moment in history a key orientation to artistic practice in search of lines of flight from such established boundaries. This operation provides the core to the poetics of those artistic proposals, and the conditions for the potency of their thinking—here resides the vitality of those artworks and the virus that they carry.

But the compulsion to archive hasn’t extended to every Conceptual artistic practice that emerged during those decades. The compulsion’s main focus is artistic proposals made outside the axis formed by Western Europe and the US—especially proposals originating in Latin America, in countries then under military rule. Such practices have been incorporated into the art history that has been written from within the Western Europe–US axis—an art history that has become the hegemonic discourse and defines the boundaries of the international art context. This is the perspective from which artistic production made elsewhere is interpreted and categorized today, which tends to distort the reading of such practices and generate toxic effects in their reception and dissemination.

 

The Spell Is Broken

For the past few decades, due to the advance of globalization, a demystification of that art history has been taking place. Such a phenomenon is part of a broader one, a process by which the previously idealizing view of the dominant culture that was held by other cultures—cultures that were until then under its influence—progressively fades. The spell that kept them captive has been broken, and with it the impediments it set to the possibility of elaborating their own experiences, with their own texture and density, and with the peculiarity of their own politics of production of knowledge.

A whole world, instituted by that hegemonic thought, is being destabilized. Its territory is being transformed from underground, its cartography modified, its limits redrawn. A process is beginning in which the cultures that until then had been suffocated are being reactivated, and new sensibilities introduced in the construction of the present, giving a cue to different modes of response. If we consider exclusively the two extreme positions, at the most reactive pole we find all kinds of fundamentalisms—movements that create the fiction of an originary identity that is lived as truth and that shapes subjectivity. In the hegemonic countries, this movement manifests itself in the form of xenophobia. In the specific case of Western Europe, the tendency has intensified in recent years to a dangerous degree, like a swan song responding to the announced death of such hegemony. Behind this mirage of an identitarian essence there is a denial of the experience of a multiple and variable alterity, and of the subjective and cultural flexibility that such alterity demands—phenomena that are the result of globalization. Simultaneously, at the most active pole, a whole range of inventions of the present are being produced. They are motivated, in contrast, by an opening up to the plurality of cultural others, and to the brushes and tensions that result from the collision with the new panorama in each particular context, chiefly with the cultural experiences inscribed in the bodies that inhabit it. As either one of these two positions advances, its opposite gains in intensity. Evidently, these two extremes do not exist in a pure state—what actually exists are different types of forces that manifest themselves in a range of different shades between the active and reactive poles, interacting in a vast cultural melting pot. Through this dynamic, the forms of transnational society are shaped.

Archive mania appears within a context shaken up by these contending forces regarding the definition of the geopolitics of art. But why were certain artistic practices that took place in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s especially embraced by this obsession with investigating, producing, exhibiting, and acquiring archives? And why especially those that took place in the Latin American countries that were under dictatorial regimes? There is, in fact, a shared element to all these practices, which nevertheless adopts distinct forms in each case: the problematization of the political dimension of the institutional territory of art was added to its other dimensions whose excessive influence on artistic creation was criticized during those years. Politics, which permeates art in its transversality, regardless of the context, becomes more explicit in authoritarian states—both Left and Right—because its effect on artistic actions is more violent.

However, it is necessary to differentiate between two modes of politics present in the Latin American artistic practices that are the object of this archive mania: macro- and micro-politics. Artistic actions of a macro-political nature basically transmit ideological content, and this brings them closer to activism than to art. In contrast, in the second type of actions the political constitutes an element that is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, to poetic investigation. Independent of the value that might be assigned to each of these types, unfortunately, the macro-political tendency has been taken by hegemonic art history as a general interpretive tool for all Latin American artistic practices from those decades, through the label of “political” or “ideological” Conceptual art. This category was established by certain texts and exhibitions in the mid-1970s within the Western Europe–US axis—texts and exhibitions that have since become canonical.1 It contributes to the denial of the micro-political artistic actions, hindering both their recognition and their expansion. The invention of this mistaken category can be interpreted as a symptom of reactive forces, and it demands urgent redress in order to counter its effects. With that in sight, it is necessary to focus on the difference between the two modes in which politics is present in artistic practices, especially in contexts affected by state terrorism.

While the effect of totalitarian regimes on culture manifests itself most clearly through censorship—its macro-political face—its micro-political, imperceptible effect is much more subtle, but no less nefarious. It consists in the inhibition of the emergence of the creative process, even before artistic expression begins to take shape. Such inhibition is the result of an inexorable trauma caused by the experiences of fear and humiliation inherent to dictatorial regimes. Those experiences, which are the product of the tactics of imprisoning, torturing, and killing applied by authoritarian governments to those who oppose them, impregnate the atmosphere with a terrifying sensation of imminent danger. The situation affects desire at its core and weakens it, shattering the potency of thinking that desire summons and releases, and emptying subjectivity of its consistency. Since art is the privileged territory for exceptions within the rule of culture, it is especially affected.

Experiences of this kind are inscribed in the immaterial memory of the body, the physical and affective memory of sensations, different but inseparable from the memory of the perception of forms and facts, with their respective representations and their connective narratives—in this case, conventionally led by the figure of the victim, who interprets them by appealing to a purely ideological discourse. The unraveling of desire, the attempt to free it from its impotence, constitutes a task as subtle and complex as the process that caused both its unconscious repression2 and the figure of the victim that results from it. Such a task can endure for thirty years or longer, and may take shape with the second or third generation. The special vulnerability of some artists to this experience in its bodily dimension (regardless of whether or not they are aware of it or of its ideological interpretation) is what drives them to seek the micro-political potency that is immanent to artistic practice—an attitude that is very different from the use of art as a vehicle for macro-political information.

But it would be absurd to think that the micro-political power of art can be summoned and revealed exclusively on the basis of experiences of pain, fear, and anguish—especially when these are prompted by situations of macro-political oppression, whether in totalitarian regimes or in relationships of domination and exploitation through class, race, religion, gender, etc. We must free ourselves from the romantic trap that binds creation to pain. Any situation in which life is constrained by forms of reality and their description creates estrangement. And this estrangement is followed by a malaise that creates the need to express what does not fit into the current map, creating new meanings that are the condition for life to flow again. That is precisely what the aesthetic experience of the world is about. This experience depends on the ability of the body to become vulnerable to what surrounds it, to let itself be taken over by the sensation of disparity between the forms of reality and the movements that fluctuate underneath its apparent stability, which set it in a “state of art.” Such experience of the world goes beyond the apprehension of mere forms, as practiced by the perception associated with representations through which they are assigned meaning. The tension created by the paradoxical dynamic between these two modes of apprehension of the world makes maintaining the status quo intolerable—this causes estrangement and is what drives us to create. The body is not appeased until what is demanding to come into existence is brought to the surface of the current cartography, piercing what encloses it and changing its contours.

The malaise caused by such estrangement is not necessarily generated by fear or anguish. These are ego-conscious feelings, the product of impotence in the face of specific circumstances, including but not restricted to authoritarianism and social inequality. In extreme situations, feelings like these, as we have seen, bring with them the risk of inhibiting the power to create, and with it the replacement of thought by phantasms and projections. This is the way in which the trauma that results from dictatorial contexts can cause the substitution of ideology for thought. As a consequence of this, the artist becomes an activist, and his or her work a pamphlet expressing the sad affect of the victim, or his or her resentment and desire for vengeance—affects that are also mobilized in the artwork’s reception, with only two possible outcomes: the hope of redemption or the hopelessness fueled by the hallucination of an apocalypse. Covered by the screen of ideological projections, woven with the threads of romantic desire and religious emotion, experience is clouded and its tensions become inaccessible. Such tensions retain an unconscious power over subjectivity, which is led to adopt defensive strategies aimed to protect it but that at the same time limit it. At this juncture, a misunderstanding about the relationship between art and politics tends to emerge—a misunderstanding that, because it has its origin in this unconscious defensive operation, is not easy to undo.

In order to perceive that operation in more detail, it is worth remembering that sensation operates in the unconscious, corporeal realm, while feeling or emotion operates in the psychological realm. The object of sensation is the process that unmakes worlds and generates others, which happens, as we have seen, in any context in which life’s power is diminished. This is the process that moves us to artistic creation. Sensation therefore voices the power of creation and differentiation that defines the essence of life, a type of “vital emotion” distinguished from feelings and psychological emotions that merely voice the I and its consciousness. However, contexts that mobilize exacerbated feelings of anguish can impregnate those sensations to such an extent that they tend to become confused with one another. This confusion must be overcome: even though there is in fact a malaise caused by the disparity between the current forms of reality and the forces that aim to destroy them in order to create something new, and this malaise is difficult to sustain when what pushes through is not yet actualized in a new form of living or in an artwork, this state also results in a strange joy, because life is germinating. Artistic creation opens life-affirming channels and promotes a confidence in its ability to triumph even in extreme situations such as contexts of macro-political oppression, as was the case with the artistic practices under discussion here. Because of that, despite the fact that what spurs artistic action in dictatorial regimes is precisely the brutal presence of macro-politics in the process of creation, the nature of its strength is still micro-political. What guides artists is listening to the intensive reality that spurs them, and this reality can only puncture its boundaries if it is made concrete within the artist’s poetics. This ability makes art a powerful chemical reactive that, propagating through contagion, can interfere in the molecular composition of the environments it enters, dissolving its toxic elements.

This specific political dimension characterizes the sharpest artistic practices developed in Latin America during the dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. In the face of the omnipresent, diffuse experience of oppression, the activation of the power of invention embodied in those works points out that it is possible to maintain the exercise of thinking even in this kind of situation, which can have effects against the tendency to defensive reactions of voluntary blindness and deafness as a matter of survival. Because of this, such artistic actions are of a completely different kind from the pedagogical or doctrinaire sort of action that aimed to increase awareness and communicate an ideological content, as well as the social and educational actions of “inclusion.” Because they do not take place within the realm of aesthetic experience, the latter lack the power over the weakening of desire and subjectivity.

Another misunderstanding that tends to emerge in this situation is the assumption that within the artistic practice in which political potential is affirmed, form is irrelevant. The political and form are not opposed; on the contrary, in such practices, the formal rigor of the work—whether painting, sculpture, urban intervention, installation, or performance—is more important and often more subtle than ever. In this case, forms are not powerful and seductive in their own right, or autonomous from the process that gives birth to them; form here is inseparable from its role as an actualization of the sensations and tensions that force the artist to think-create. This is an aesthetic rigor, but it is also and inseparably an ethical one—aesthetic, because it renders sensible what is announced by the affects of the world within the body; ethical, because it implies taking charge of the demands of life to remain in process. In this sense, the more precise and in tune the artistic language, the more vigorous its intensive quality and the stronger its seductive power—this is what provides it with the energy that enables it effectively to influence the contexts through which it circulates. When it reaches this degree of rigor, art becomes a sort of medicine: the experience it promotes might intervene in the subjectivity of those who come close to it, precisely at the point when desire tends to become trapped and to lose power. When this happens, the exercise of thought is reanimated, as well as other types of perception—but also, and above all, of invention and expression. A new politics of desire and its relationship to the world is then drawn—new diagrams of the unconscious in the social field, actualized through reconfigurations of the current cartography. In conclusion, it is a vital rigor that opposes those forces that draw maps in order to cripple life at its core, and that consists, as we have seen, in a persistent renewing of itself in the permanent creation of the world.

The specific political character of the artistic practices that we are considering here lies, therefore, in what they can give occasion to in the environments that are affected by them. The issue is to be aware not of the tensions (their extensive, representational, macro-political face), but of the experience of this state of things within the body itself, and of the effects mobilized by the forces that make them up (their intensive, unconscious, micro-political face). In this manner, focus is increased—the same focus that is lost when what is related to the social life of art is exclusively reduced to a macro-political approach, which, as we have seen, tends to be fostered by situations of state oppression or extreme social inequality. Such was the case with certain artistic practices during the 1960s and 1970s in South America, as well as with certain contemporary practices, mainly since the 1990s (and not only on that subcontinent). These artistic practices, and only these, can truly be called “political” or “ideological.”

Here resides the unfortunate misunderstanding promoted by (official) art history, which ignored the essence of the actions on which we are focusing here. By acting on the affective-resonating nature of subjectivity, and not only on consciousness, such actions began to overcome the split between the poetic and the political. This split used to be actualized in the classic figures of the artist and the activist: the first dispossessed of the micro-political dimension of his practice, and the second dispossessed of the ethical dimension of his subjectivity and dissociated from the body as a vital compass in the interpretation of the world and the actions that result from it. This conflict extricates from art the micro-political energy that is immanent to it, and in that case when politics is introduced within artistic practices it is reduced to the macro dimension and gives rise to the a third figure: the militant artist. From this figure’s perspective, artistic practices that do not directly and literally tackle the macro-political dimension are dismissed as formalist. While it is true that the overcoming of this split between the poetic and the political was already in process within the artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, and that it was developed and disseminated during the first half of that century—and more intensively in the postwar period—it was during the 1960s and 1970s that this connection acquired the consistency of a vast movement in art, influencing culture in a broader sense, which includes modes of existence. These changed irreversibly during that period, when the exception of art proved to be stronger than the rules of culture—hence the name it has been given: “counterculture.”3 Such reactivation, when it suffered a military coup, tended to retract back to the silence of unconscious repression.

 

Colonial Unconscious Repression

For this picture to gain precision it is necessary to point out that the joint articulation of the poetic and the political does not start with the historical avant-gardes; it actually starts much earlier. We could go as far as to say that such articulation is one of the fundamental aspects of the politics of cognition that, in different ways, characterized a great part of the cultures dominated by Western European modernity. This cultural regime is inseparable from its counterparts in the field of economy (the capitalist system) and in the field of desire (the modern individual, source of bourgeois subjectivity, and whose psychic structure Freud framed under the concept of “neurosis”). Let us not forget that this cultural mode was forced on the world at large as a universal paradigm through colonization, targeting not only other continents (America, Africa, and Asia) but also the different cultures that were smothered within the European continent.

Among these are the Mediterranean cultures, especially the Arab-Jewish culture that was dominant on the Iberian Peninsula prior to the intercontinental travels that launched colonization in the late fifteenth century. As is well known, from then on those practicing this culture suffered the violence of the Inquisition, and many of them took refuge in the “New World” that was being built in America.4 Such violence was perpetrated throughout the same three centuries when Africa suffered the assault of slavery, and when indigenous American cultures suffered the assault of near extinction—a triple foundational trauma in some Latin American countries, among them Brazil. But there is more: the forms of violence that characterized the colonial period left active scars on the collective body’s memory of American societies after they had secured their independence, starting with deep-rooted class and racial prejudices. Remnants of a politics of colonial, slavery-inflicted desire, such prejudices generated, and still generate, the worst kind of humiliation and probably the most serious traumas, hard to overcome due to the persistence of the stigma and its recurrence in social life. Reinforcing and prolonging this process, other evils in the macro-political context—such as poverty, social exclusion, external domination, and authoritarian regimes—started to mix with the above, and this, in the micro-political dimension, has worsened the preexisting traumas and created new ones, in the past and still today. We can assume, therefore, that the unconscious repression of the immanent articulation of the poetic with the political has its origins in Western modernity, and culminates today with the cognition politics of transnational financial capital. We could even risk stating that, from a micro-political perspective, such an operation had a central role in the foundation of Western culture and its imposition on the rest of the world, and because of this I will refer to it as “colonial unconscious repression.” If we consider colonization from this perspective, we might conclude that this has perhaps been its most effective device.5

It is worth returning to the description of the politics of cognition, which is the object of colonial unconscious repression, in the framework of our historical horizon. It is characterized by three aspects: the vigor of the body’s capacity to resonate in the face of the forces that agitate in the intensive plane (the aesthetic experience of the world), the sensation mobilized by the tension of the paradoxical dynamics of this experience and that of perception, and the power of the thought-creation that is activated when such tension reaches a certain threshold. The object of this kind of repression is precisely this strength of inventive imagination and its capacity to resist the desire to maintain the familiar forms of life—a desire that is characterized by a politics that adopts perception as the exclusive means of knowing the world. Unconscious repression makes subjectivity unable to support itself on such tension, the engine of the thought machine that produces the actions in which reality is reinvented. In conclusion, the object of this type of repression is the body itself, and the possibility of inhabiting it. In this operation what is repressed is its ability to listen to the diagram of forces of the present, as the key compass for the exercise of the cognitive production and its interference in the world—a compass that is meant to guide us not in the visible space, but in the invisible states of life-pulse. The activation of the bodily ability that was repressed by modernity constitutes an essential dimension for any poetic-political action. Without such activation, the only possibility is to produce variations around the modes of production of subjectivity and of cognition that found us as colonies of Western Europe—precisely the condition from which we want to escape.

Unconscious repression functions through complex procedures that have been transformed throughout history. Here, we are examining only the most recent experiences. In totalitarian regimes, as we have seen, the exercise of thought is concretely hindered, and this ultimately leads to its inhibition, threatened by fear and humiliation. In contrast, in the context of financial capitalism, the unconscious repression operation is much more refined. The goal is not to prevent such exercise, or to aim at its partial or full inhibition, but to foster it, even to celebrate it, in order to place it at the service of the purely economic interests of the regime, voiding it of the immanent disruptive force of its poetics. This is what drives many thinkers to conclude that contemporary capitalism finds its main energy source in the power of thought-creation, and has led them to call it “cultural,” “cognitive,” or “informational” capitalism—an idea that is common currency today.

This regime takes advantage of the fragility caused by the tension between the two vectors of experience of the world, through the promise of an instant appeasement. The desire to confront this pressure and the energy of creation that it mobilizes tend to be channeled exclusively to the market. This takes place in several modes, among which perhaps the most obvious is the move to push subjectivity toward images of ready-made forms of life, such as the ones that populate mass culture and publicity, tirelessly spread by the mass media and offering a diverse range of possibilities of identification. These ready-made forms of life also include luxury cultural offers that are equally homogenized. In this area, some museums of contemporary art, with their ostentatious architecture, fulfill a privileged role, as does the proliferation of biennials—a phenomenon that has been critically referred to as the “biennialization” of the planet. Both currently work as facilitators of cultural tourism for the middle and upper classes and shape a shared international language that is considered “high culture,” made up of a few words and ornaments taken from the dominant rhetoric—the names of artists and curators fleetingly celebrated by the media—and a certain “style” of behavior that includes elements of fashion, design, gastronomy, etc. Desire is trapped by some of the images it selects through a process of symbiotic identification, triggering a compulsion to consume the products associated with them, with the goal of reproducing the world that they propose in everyday life, deceived by the promise of admission to a paradise on earth. What attracts desire and traps it within this dynamic is the mirage of being recognized and recognizing ourselves in one of the mise-en-scènes that this operation offers. The intention is to free ourselves from the distressing sensation of one’s emptiness, and to recuperate, as if by magic, a social value that seems to have been lost. However, in order to maintain this illusion, a price must be paid: with the instrumentalization of desire, the flair to track the vital pulse and its obstacles is lost; our capacity for invention is diverted from its primordial focus, which consists of opening up new roads for life to flow.

 

The Return of the Repressed

However, there is a reverse side to this dynamic: the memory of the bodies that inhabit the regions controlled by the dominant culture is not only inscribed with the trauma of the articulation of the poetic and the political that causes its unconscious repression. It is also inscribed with the experience of that articulation, which waits for the right conditions to reactivate itself and escape from its confinement. These conditions are caused by social situations that favor the neutralization of the pathological effects of the trauma, in the way it shapes existence and its destinies.

A situation of this kind can be found in the experience of the state of things today. The proliferation of world-images that incessantly appear and disappear at a blinding speed, promoted by the development of communication technologies, will not just result in the instrumentalization of our subjective forces by the market. If we add to this situation the polyphony of cultures that can be heard and experienced at any time and in any place, we can see that their effect is also to make it impossible for any repertoire to have a stable or absolute power. This impossibility is one of the reasons for the decline during recent decades of the fascination and seduction of European and North American modernity, now in its neoliberal version. Today is no longer a time of opposition and resentment, or of its flip side—the identification and demand for recognition, which means the demand for love that is in this case the symptom of a humiliated subjectivity that idealizes the oppressor and depends on his perverse desire. The current movement consists precisely in major or minor displacements out of humiliation, and the subsequent submission to the oppressor, with the goal to reactivate what has been repressed in our bodies.

It would be mistaken to think that the objective of this return to the past is to “rescue” a supposed lost essence from African, indigenous, or Mediterranean forms of existence that were in place before the fifteenth century, or in the countercultural shift of the 1960s and 1970s. This movement was characterized by a tendency to idealize an alleged lost origin, and this led part of the generation that created it on a treasure hunt in those regions, as if their past remained there in its “pure state” and could be “revealed.” Instead, the object of reconnecting with that past is to engage in the ethics of desire and of knowledge that was practiced in those cultures and in their actualizations—their effort to ensure the preservation of life, which depends on the fact of the aesthetic experience, in order to listen to life movements and adopt them as orientation points for existence. (This ethics, it must be said, is also repressed today in those regions.) Getting back in touch with this exercise does not demand the reproduction of the forms that such ethics generated in the past; it demands the activation, in today’s context, of this ethics as a way in which to reorient the new inventions of the cartography of the present, against the operations that aim to secure their unconscious repression.

In this context, the will to return to existing archives emerges, as does the will to create new ones from the traces of the artistic practices produced in South America in the 1960s and 1970s—a will that is today almost epidemic. With the dictatorships, the experience of the fusion of poetic and political forces put forward by such practices remains veiled in the memory of our bodies. We could only access it through the exteriority of the forms in which it was manifested, and always in fragmentary form. As we have seen, its disruptive power—and what this power triggered and could continue to trigger—was buried by the effect of the trauma that the military governments caused, and this was followed by their perverse reanimation by the cognitive capitalism that followed it.

 

The Toxic Misunderstanding of the (Official) History of Art

This major aspect of South America’s artistic production in the 1960s and 1970s seems to have escaped art history. Even if this production could perhaps be labeled with the umbrella term “Conceptualism,” it is unacceptable to call it “ideological” or “political” in order to characterize a peculiarity that in practice has widened its limits and potentially transformed its surroundings. While it is true that we find in these proposals a seed of the integration of the political and the poetic, as experienced and actualized in artistic practices and in the modes of existence that emerged at that time, such a seed was fragile and unsayable. To call it “ideological” or “political” is a symptom of the denial of the exception that this radically new artistic experience introduced into culture and the state of estrangement this caused in the subjectivities. The defensive strategy is simple: if what we experience there is not recognizable within the realm of art, in order to protect ourselves from the bothersome noise we place it within the category of macro-politics, and everything is then in place. The micro-political dimension that is immanent to art is therefore denied, its process of germination is interrupted, and what is to come remains incubated at best.

The seriousness of this operation is undeniable, especially if we remind ourselves that the state of estrangement to which the exception of art gives rise is a crucial experience—one that results from the reverberation of the plastic multiplicity of the forces of the world on our bodies, picked up by its resonating capacities. This is a space of alterity that opens up within subjectivity, destabilizes it, disturbs it, and demands a reworking of its boundaries and the map of its connections in order to achieve a new equilibrium. Ignoring it demands blocking the thinking life that gives an impulse to artistic actions, and that allows it to have a potential influence on the forms of the present. Such denial is the toxic element contained in the sad categories mobilized by art history to interpret the artistic practices under discussion here; such is the reactive force that its misunderstanding reveals and that at the same time hints at its goal.

In this state of things, it becomes urgent to activate the intrinsic articulation between the poetic and the political, and the life-affirming force that depends on it. This is the condition for desire to free itself from its defensive weakening, in order to allow for a vital expansion on the basis of the experience lived by the resonating body in the present. Here is the context that, in different ways, has triggered a series of initiatives generated by the fever to investigate, create, exhibit, and own archives that has taken over the domain of art.

However, this situation also mobilizes a politics of desire that is diametrically opposed to the above: at the exact moment in which those initiatives appear, and before the seeds of the future that they brought with them emerge, the global art system incorporates them in order to transform them into fetishized objects, plundered in a cognitive war among the major museums and collectors of Western Europe and the U.S. Such operation risks sending back those seeds to oblivion and makes it an efficient device of cognitive capitalism. As Jean-Luc Godard suggests, “It is of the nature of the rule to desire the death of exception.” While the movement of critical thought that took place in such an intense manner in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America was brutally interrupted by the military governments, at the exact moment its memory begins to be reactivated this process is again interrupted, now with the glamorous refinement and seduction of the art market—a market with interests that have too much power over artistic creation and tend to ignore its thinking poetics. This operation is very different from the atrocious actions exerted against artistic production by dictatorial regimes: it is a new chapter in history, yet much less postcolonial than we would wish.

The politics of the production of archives and the need to distinguish its multiple modalities become relevant here. The challenge of the initiatives that aim to unblock the necessary access to the seeds of the future, hidden in the poetics that they address, is to activate their critical acuteness in order to guarantee the conditions of an experience of the same caliber when facing the questions that are posed today. The critical-poetic force of these archives can in this manner come together with the forces of creation active today, adding to their power in the fight against the effects of the toxic vaccination of cultural capitalism, which neutralizes art’s virus and makes it work only for its own purposes. This operation is not only taking place in the context of art-making; it happens through the market and, as discussed earlier, includes, among its key instruments, many museums of contemporary art and the proliferation of biennials and art fairs.6

The point is not to demonize the art market, collecting, or commercial galleries, since artists must make a living from their work, and collectors should not repress their desire to live with artworks and enjoy them. Nor is it to demonize museums, which play an important role in the building of archives of artistic production, preserving them and making them available to the public. The market and the museums are not external to art, but an integral part of its dynamic. Life cannot be ruled by Manichaean morals that distinguish between good and bad human activities; what counts is the struggle between active and reactive forces in each field of activity, at different times and in different contexts. This is also the case in the domain of art: artistic, critical, curatorial, museological, and archiving activities must be thought through the forces that determine them at each moment, in their complex transversality and not as if in an idealized, imaginary territory. From an ethical perspective, what matters is if they are driven by the desire to inscribe the exception of art in a globalized culture, contributing to preserving the polyphonic exercise of the “art of living.”

If there is a micro-political achievement after the 1960s and 1970s that differentiates that time from ours, it is the possibility of abandoning the old romantic dreams of “final solutions”—be they utopian or dystopian—that have always resulted in totalitarian regimes. The process of reactivation of the resonating capacity of our body that is currently taking place, even if it is only just beginning, allows us to glimpse the fact that there is no other world but the one in which we live, and that only within its dead ends can other worlds be invented at each moment of human experience. This is the work of thought, in art or in other languages: to draft cartographies while new existential territories are taking shape and others are vanishing.

But let us not be naive: nothing guarantees that the critical-poetic virus carried by the seeds we have discussed will effectively spread as a world epidemic, not even the virus carried by work from our own time, no matter how powerful it might be. There will always be culture as rule and art as exception. What art can do is release the poetic virus out into the open air. And that is at least something, in the midst of the struggle between the different forces that shape the provisional forms of reality in their never-ending process of construction.

 

© Suely Rolnik

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AtrásI Am for the Equality of Intelligence
Notes on Some Positive Effects of Times of Crisis on Art Criticism

 

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 7.10.11

 

 

 

 
“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river”—wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Antonio Gramsci famously stated: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Gramsci also argued that although economic crises may not lead to historic transformations of society, which may or may not be constructive, they create a favorable climate for “the dissemination of certain modes of thought,” which nowadays we may call paradigms, épistemes, or simply inquires. With this in mind, today’s “crisis” might be best defined here as a slow and open-ended “testing time,” rather than, for example, a fast and conclusive “emergency event.”

In my presentation I will argue that “times of crisis” can impact art critics positively, for such times demand radical reevaluation and reshaping of the existing methodologies to synchronize them with the current praxis. I will quote numerous art critics to place my arguments in the context of a longer conversation and stress that we art critics form a community. It is, in fact, a conversational character of art criticism that interests me greatly.

Discussions of crisis in relation to modern criticism have had a long history, reaching back to Winckelmann, Goethe, Baudelaire, and Malarmé. I will return here to a more recent example, which as “random” as it is, I my opinion, still serves well to shed light on what we critics are confronted with, which is not a new phenomenon. In “The Crisis of Contemporary Criticism,” an essay written in 1966 for a conference at the University of Texas, the Belgian-born deconstructionist critic and theorist Paul de Man commented on the state of literary criticism:

Congress after congress devoted to the problem of criticism has taken place in France and elsewhere, and they have, in general, been as acrimonious as they are confused. One is tempted to speak of recent developments in Continental criticism in terms of crisis. To confine oneself for the moment to purely outward symptoms, the crisis-aspect of the situation is apparent, for instance, in the incredible swiftness with which often conflicting tendencies succeed each other, condemning the immediate obsolescence what night have appeared as the extreme point of avant-gardism briefly before. Rarely has the dangerous word “new” been used so frequently.

Following other thinkers, such as Friederich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger (to name just three important thinkers), De Man cautioned against the use of the category “new,” seeing it as the result of a predilection for intellectual fashion among critics, rather than as their rigorous reflection on history. After providing a brief overview of the trends in blurring the boundaries between academic disciplines fashionable at that time—including the connection of criticism to the social sciences and linguistics, and to latest interests in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan—de Man suggested that the symptoms of the then current crisis-like situation had arisen from the fact that theory is often shaped in reaction to “actual institutional and economic interests,” rather than in reaction to the interests of the individual. Examining Western society in the 1960s, he noted the growing presence of the new masses demanding spectacle—a phenomenon that a year later Guy Debord would analyze in his book The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle)—a spectacle, which serves the interests of the consciousness-shaping industry. Nowadays, these ideas seem to be quite obvious. “But”—let’s remind ourselves, de Man continued on a positive note—“this does not mean that the moment of crisis itself, doomed as it may be, cannot be intensely interesting.”

Treating literary criticism as another form of writing, and therefore questioning its uniqueness, de Man considered criticality as a necessity to self-reflection, which is characteristic of all writings. Hence, “[t]o speak of a crisis of criticism is then,” he argued, “to some degree, redundant,” because such a “crisis” is embedded in the very notion of modern language. In other words, writing demands critical approach to its structure and its intent, regardless of the political or economic circumstances. He stressed, therefore, that the responsibility to remain self-critical lies on individuals, who must avoid being “blind to what takes place within themselves.” I will return to this idea later.

 

The old is dying and the new cannot be born.

The Italian writer and Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote these words in prison in 1930. Perceiving cultural hegemony as a tool for maintaining political power, he questioned the relevance of the traditional intelligentsia (which usually avoids direct interaction with society at large and tend to focus on lofty ideas), and suggested that its place should be taken by an intelligentsia that emerges organically from within the society, a product of the modern and undiscriminating system of education and of dynamic and emphatic discourses related to the real conditions of life. Such a shift should be mentioned here not to suggest the abolition of any ancien régime, but rather to provoke us to rethink our role as critics in the context of the globalization of culture and the arts, which, to a large degree, diluted professionalism in art criticism (anybody can claim to be an art critic). Yet, we can still make difference; in fact, the more critics the better—as long as we keep questioning ourselves.

What kind of social consciousness should contemporary criticism reflect while facing not only global growth, but also widespread instability? How should we evaluate the impact of current developments in technology and science on art? What kind of art reflects the best actual culture and social reality? Which channels of communication do we need to privilege to make our voices heard? Here, we shall also ask ourselves: “What is AICA’s role in redefining art criticism for us all?

What is really dying?—probably nothing important. It is easy to link the ongoing changes in the role of art criticism to technological transformations and economic factors and their impact on how we practice our profession. The proliferation of online publications has created a virtual database that is highly useful, but also both extremely vast and largely inaccurate, because anyone can publish on the Internet—with the visibility of those postings directly linked to the financial resources of the institution or person who posts them. As one of my Facebook friends wrote to me recently: “There is a jungle out there, with millions of speedy bloggers eager to share their instant thoughts with anyone who is willing to go to their sites.” Millions of speedy bloggers is not necessary bad.

No doubt the rapid growth in digital technologies and science in recent years has produced faster channels of communication than have ever existed before. As a result of these, the printing press is in decline—not only because it can hardly sustain the fast-growing challenge from online publications, but in large part because of the miscalculations of publishers, who have often chosen to compete with the online publications by shortening the length of articles, and by making them more information-oriented, less analytical and, often, less intellectually rigorous. Similarly, publishing houses around the world have responded to the “crisis” by demanding that the authors make their books “more accessible” and shorter, offering, instead, coffee-table design, which clearly cannot supplement the lack of serious content. Responding to the “crisis,” (or shall we call it “disorientation”?) newspapers and art magazines now skillfully blend articles with advertisements—to satisfy their advertisers, who are fewer but wealthier. Dying therefore are, above all, old methods of reacting to the “crisis” by implementing various short cuts in production, which result in a weakening of the intellectual quality of writings—hence the loss of the readership.

Who are the new masses interested in art and art criticism? While the proliferation of biennial exhibitions and art fairs has caused the so-called art world to expand, it has also resulted in a loss of local specificity of art in different regions. Art promoted by those spectacular art events looks homogenous, whereas art produced locally, with no international stamp of approval keeps being marginalized. The Russian artist Ilya Kabakov compared the art world to a peculiar family: “The family moves just like flies. Completely free, flying through the air, organizing its exhibitions no matter where. In South Africa, or in South America, or in Norway, or in Iceland.” His “family” recalls in fact, Plato’s community constantly moving in unison (as opposed to the “poetic” and democratic society. In such a fast moving global art world, we witness growing bureaucratization and commercialization of art production and dissemination, which has resulted in a transfer of power from artists and critics to gallerists and curators, and it is the latter who determine what the “new” in art stands for nowadays and present it to the new “masses” in motion. But, are they really new masses, or perhaps it is just a larger group of followers that have little to do with an average viewer?

The art critic is yet again forced to reexamine his or her role vis-à-vis his or her audience, or he or she will be further marginalized. For a long time, art criticism was perceived as a form of “privileged consciousness,” an insight into the art, which required special skills and, hopefully, an artistic sensibility. The old art critic, whether he or she was a professional or a dilettante, once performed a regulatory, introspective and proscriptive function for the circulation and reception of art. That erudite has already been largely replaced by a fast moving, semi-professional critic-curator-art agent, who pursues a career that might or might not last longer than few years, depending on the rapidity of the success of his/her program. Art criticism practiced by those individuals wearing multiple hats, according to the American critic and artist Peter Plagens, has become “a subdivision of the entertainment industry.”

It is easy to be pessimistic, or skeptical. Assessing the current state of art criticism, James Elkins lamented its decline in What Happened to Art Criticism? in these words: “In worldwide crisis … dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural crisis… [art criticism is] dying… massively produced, and massively ignored.” His apocalyptic voice has joined the voices of others, who have already proclaimed an end to art and an end to history. But art and art critic are not dead, not yet.

Art criticism faces the challenge from new forms of communication, but to simply condemn modern technology as destructive to critical thinking is itself to exercise a sort of intellectual laziness. After all, as de Man argued: “unmediated expression is a philosophical impossibility.” As recent events in different parts of the world, such as the “Arab Spring” and the “occupation” of Wall Street by young demonstrators outraged by the greed of the bankers, have demonstrated, newly developed social media can provide effective means for public mobilization against the domination of prevailing systems of power, including that of the so-called “culture industry,” which is increasingly in the hands of large corporations and governments. With the growing political, economic and military instability of the current world, technology, when used in a conscious fashion, can become a powerful tool for dissemination of ideas and provide a new platform to activism; it is easily available to both artists and art critics.

The highly unstable political and economic situation in the world has already stimulated heated debates on its future direction for the world. “Communism: A New Beginning?” was the provocative title of a symposium co-organized by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek that recently took place at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Lately, Badiou has been proposing the “communist hypothesis” as a response to having our lives taken over by the “primary fear” (instead of the more self-reflective “fear of the fear”) that governs nowadays. Obviously, he does not propose a return to Soviet-style Communism, or to any specific type of old-style Marxism, but rather that we embrace the old ideology of collective action on its most fundamental level—to respect the rights of the individual. Žižek has predicted that, “The long night of the left is coming to a close,” after several decades of being silenced by various right-wing demagogues. Let’s hope so. Unfortunately, the hermetic, highly specific language uses by the participants in the conference did not help to make the experience “communal.”

The voices of the left include those of other scholars and critics, who are deeply dissatisfied with the current state of affairs in the world, its intellectual climate included, but who do not simply proclaim the end of the old in its totality. Still, the number of those vocal scholars and critics appears to shrink, while the new ones are slow to emerge. The Japanese philosopher Takeshi Umehara perceptively linked those transformations with the intellectual wellbeing of global society when he wrote in the 1990s that the “complete failure of Marxism and the spectacular disintegration of the Soviet Union are only the predecessors of the collapse of Western liberalism, the main current of modernity. Far from being an alternative to Marxism and the dominant ideology at the end of history, liberalism will be the next domino to fall.” Badiou was more specific when he argued that the democratization of the world that came after the fall of the Berlin Wall, instead of bringing more freedom has resulted in the further economic and political polarization of West from East, and North from South. Thus, to remain optimistic, we should consider our new role to be that of preventing “old” liberalism from dying, instead of worrying that “the debate about the ‘crisis in criticism’” might turn into “a proxy for a real political debate” or become purely philosophical.

 

Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river

These words appear in Borges’s “New Refutation of Time” (“Nueva refutacion del tiempo”) included in Other Inquisitions (Otras inquisiciones) published in 1952. The sentence belongs to a longer thought, which I will quote entirely to preserve the beauty of the Argentinean writer’s prose, because such a beauty of writing is often absent in art criticism (As art criticism becomes more and more “mechanical,” I want to stress our responsibility to the language itself as an important component of our profession. As Oscar Wilde famously argued, the critic must be an artist to be a good critic): “Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.” Is it really “unfortunate” that Borges was only Borges? Obviously, it isn’t and that is not how his words should be read. In the sentences I just quoted, the writer simply places a self-reflective mirror in front of himself (“fear of the fear), in order to avoid being blind to what takes place within him, and to be suspicious of his own authority and realistic about his ignorance.

Following de Man’s “deconstructive” approach to the then current interests among critics, we might argue that subsequent academic fashions keep expanding our horizons, yet they leave us partially dissatisfied, not because they are false or incomplete, not even because they often sound like the “old” rewritten in another scholarly jargon, but rather because they might blind to what takes place within ourselves. While examining the “theoretical production” (Hal Foster’s expression), we should remain cautious with dividing critics from scholars, practitioners from theoreticians. As the American critic Ben Davis observes “the debate about the ‘crisis in criticism’ seems a proxy for a real political debate: popular types defend some kind of humanist vision of the individual imagination against the art-theory bureaucrats; theory-heads clamor for art that has a didactic value, that doesn’t capitulate to popular wisdom, that takes a stand. This, it should be noted, is one of the all-time classic false oppositions.” This type of a common sense, pragmatic arguing is necessary for keeping us focus on real issues, but surprisingly it is “locked” in its exclusive focus on the local situation and local critics in the United States, while poking en passant at various French thinkers, from Michel Foucault to Jacques Rancière.

Let’s recall just a few of recent academic fashions here, to remind ourselves that they are not novel, but belong to a long tradition of universal critical thinking that attempts to anchor art in the present day, and as such might be viewed as a latest examples of collective dramaturgy of translations about the externality (rather than internality) of our experience. In fact, one might argue the successive fashions, often hermetic and “unreadable,” have proven de Man to be right in his assessment of the impact of academic discourse on our modes of thinking, which lately—in times of crisis—have been perceptively scrutinized and reevaluated.

For instance, let’s take Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics” of the late 1990s, a point of view that considers artistic activities to be a game, assigns an active role to the viewer and suggests the conversational aspects of art, while reducing the presence of the work itself to something of a “pretext” or a prop. By questioning newness as a valid criterion for art, Bourriaud followed in the footsteps of such writers as Guy Debord (“the spectacle”) and Jean Baudrillard, whose concept of “hyperreality” relies on a premise that modern man can no longer tell what reality is because he has become lost in a world of “simulacra,” images and signs created and presented as “real” by the mass media.

Going further back in time, some have argued that “hyperreality” is also nothing new; for instance, in the 18th century Bishop Berkeley had theorized that everything that individuals know about objects or events is their perception of it, a perception placed in their minds by God. Thus, Baudrillard simply replaced God with the mass media. One could also extend such a reading of reality to the non-religious Platonic notion of the cave. Confronted with the limitations of such a view of reality, even Baudrillard became skeptical of his own vision of it, when he asked: “What are you doing after the orgy?,” suggesting to move on.

In the United States, linking art to lofty theory still might be associated with formalism, with Rosalind Krauss remaining one of its most vocal proponents. One might view her so-called “method” as sort of a doctrine of aesthetic privilege—which in fact is an offspring of Greenbergian doctrine of purity of the artistic medium itself and echoes Kantianism. As one young American critic observed, in her methodology Krauss pushed the responsibility for artistic meaning toward the written, at the expense of the conditions in which the written is written. Her totalizing “method” has been, in fact, a favorite subject of criticism for postmodern critics, such as Nicholas Mirzoeff, whose concept of “Visual Culture” has already produced an intellectual dizziness in the United States and elsewhere.

“Visual culture”—Mirzoeff writes—“is concerned with visual events in which information, it means our pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology.” He argues that “observing” is not “understanding.” Observing belongs to culture (or rather leisure), understanding to history. Needless to say, this believe in a kind of contemporary flâneurie puts too much emphasis on the unavoidability of the impact of technology, making the viewer a largely passive recipient of its stimuli, pleasure (perhaps in a Kantian sense) being the principal one. Yet, in principle Mirzoeff denies the aesthetic condition to be sensory. What Mirzoeff “dematerializes” the most successfully is the presence of a neutral, homogenous identity, replacing it with a plethora of smaller ones—these once thought of as aspects of “the Other”—in a postmodernist manner.

Fortunately, views of historical passivity of the viewer have already been successfully challenged by writers such as Rancière, whose concept of the “emancipated spectator” questions the idea that looking and knowing are two different things. Let’s recall what the French philosopher argued for in his 2004 lecture, a few years ago extended into a book. “The master [let’s replaced “master” with “critic” here] cannot ignore”—writes Rancière —“that the so-called ‘ignorant’ who is in front of him knows in fact a lot of things, that he has learnt on its own, by looking and listening around him, by figuring out the meaning of what he has seen and heard, repeating what he has heard and known by chance, comparing what he discovers with what he already knew and so on.” If he or she wants to become a member of the emancipated community—he or she needs to become a “storyteller” or a “translator,” or both as I am attempting to do here.

Needless to say, in the consumer-driven society we live in academic discourse keep evolving quickly, one exclusive theory being replaced by another, making time feel like a river passing by. But how much those theories change our fundamental understanding of our role as art critics—and our understanding of art—how much they pass through us, remains an open question. How much do those theories demand from us to reexamine what takes place within ourselves? It demands a “reappropriation of Time.”

If I had to name one thing that I believe we must not allow to die, I would say it is personal responsibility vis-à-vis ourselves, individuals as part of a living collective and of history. To reexamine the meaning of such a personal responsibility and mutual recognition, we might need to return to a passionate, even opinionated, and informed approach to writing about art. As Elkins suggested, by doing so we might be able to reinstate “criticism important enough to count as history, and vice versa.” History might be defined here as a conscious inquiry (or ἱστορία in Greek, “inaccurately” told by Herodotus, which passed into Latin to become “history”) that allows one see himself or herself in the context of a longer view of the transformations of society and the critical reflections they generate. History can be (hi)story.

Without producing another totalizing approach to art criticism in such a short presentation, I would like to suggest a model that might be worth considering: this would be one that stresses the unity of art and life, rather than art as a reflection of an impotent relationship with mass culture that relies on technology, read economy. In this model, art would represent an active engagement with society perceived as a thoughtful collective organism, which acknowledges the value of “the equality of intelligence.” It is phenomenon, related to the knowable world of the senses—rather than noumenon, related to the unknowable world of ideas—that fosters the commonality of our experience and by doing so, also allows the art critic communicate with the existing audience in a active fashion, and hopefully gain a new public.

Such a “popular” (as opposed to “bureaucratic”) and sensory (for the use of multiple senses is what we seem to be loosing in the electronic age) approach to writing criticism—as partial and fragile as it might be—can make art critics’ words matter again, rather than ceding control over their meaning to others, be they art magazines, museums, galleries, or advertisers. As a result as such a resistance, “[t]he political consequences of the axiom, ‘there is only one world’,”—we shall repeat after Badiou—“will work to consolidate what is universal in identities,” which constitutes true globalism.

Perhaps the most appropriate way to finish this presentation is to return to the inconclusive words from Paul de Man’s essay, which I reference in this presentation: “This is not the endpoint, the telos [“purpose” or “goal”] but the starting point, the arché [“origin,” “first cause,” “power” and “sovereignty”] of literature” … art criticism included. To put it simply, we art critics still have job to be done.

 

© Marek Bartelik. New York, October 2011

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