Discordia || Comments || Who is faking it: artists or activists, or both?

Information InFiltration. Art, dissent, tech culture and more - in our special dance mix.

Who is faking it: artists or activists, or both? | 11 comments

[new] a long and impassioned comment (Avg. Score: 3.00 / Raters: 1) (#6)
by BrianHolmes on Tue May 6th, 2003 at 11:09:50 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
(User Info)

Trebor my friend, from what kind of experiences did Mayakovsky's work arise? It's a real question, what I know are beautiful typographic poems inspired by the revolution... Somehow I think you're reading me defensively - what I ask in my text is not that all art should be activist, the text, just that explicitly political art should not be hypocritical. It's true that, a little like Aileen, I personally think you can find an aesthetic experience in public space - the space of contestation - that gives meaning to art, life, politics... But I don't expect or want all art to be No Border or Ne Pas Plier (by the way, I'm not part of that last group anymore - discordia, discordia)... So I'm going to respond to your response.

You ask:

"But why discount the large spectrum of political artwork that contributes to a counter memory, an alternative visual inventory?"

Indeed? The answer is: I don't discount it. If you grasp the notion of illusio proposed by Bourdieu, and then you read the closing paragraphs of the article, you'll find that I suggest two things: The first, the premise of the argument, is that the infinite struggle for defining the very basis of the artistic field - its illusio - is open again. It's at issue right now. It turns around the redefinition of art's autonomy. And the second thing, my conclusion, is that artistic practice which is really engaged in social movements - including all the examples that I give - can serve as a point of orientation, a kind of viewpoint from which to create and evaluate art.

Because the problem with art today is this: It's a counter-memory of what? What kind of alternative inventory can it offer? If art produces its autonomy as the closure of its professional field, then there is no real access to anything counter, to anything alternative. The images and signs will gain their meaning and value within the closed field of an essentially touristical art, the kind you'll find at the tendentiously "political" Venice Biennale this summer, supported and manipulated by the banks and the state administrations. To point to artists whose personal name dissolves into a social movement is to point outside the current professionalized, normalized, and fundamentally middle-class frame. Outside the magic circle where people have the leisure to contemplate artistic production. But the reason for doing this is not to discount or destroy non-activist art, no - you got me wrong, I'm no Stalinist, really! The reason for doing this is to shift the definition of art's autonomy, to shift the magnetic north of art, which is an orientation point that we must create with our own actions. At the extreme, the touchstone for art today is the paving-stone picked up by a demonstrator in the street.

Will the stone break the window of the bank? Will the protestor die - shot down by the police, shot like the protestors in Argentina or in Palestine today, who must die at gunpoint when they rise up against the limits of hunger and deprivation? Or will that stone become the first prop in an artistic theater that displays a clear consciousness of the impasse of violence, and a double refusal: the refusal to enter a deadly dance where hope can only lose, and at the same time, the refusal to go home in resignation and accept this unbearable system?

What can a juggler do in the midst of a riot? Juggle the paving-stones, of course. It matters. It's a matter of life, at those moments. Like the unutterably beautiful protest of the white-painted hands, raised up like humanity's flags over the crowd in Genoa.

What artistic practice can do, outside the museums, is give people a chance to invent and enact other values, beyond the alternative of being complicit or being crushed. This is resistance. This is the stuff of memory and dreams. This is the experience - just the beginning - of an alternative society. It's not confined to art, not at all. But today, in the forms of protest that have evolved over the past few years, artistic practice and the theatricalization of public space have been one of the ways to elude the trap of confrontation with the armed forces, which is the dead-end that imperial power has programmed. Eluding the trap, and going on ahead with the project for a better society: that's the illusio for me. Art in the streets is an alternative to the meeting of stone and lead. It's a counter-practice, a counter-power. For those of us involved with all the vast traditions of the imagination, this counter-power can help us remember the promise of art, its latent utopia. And the example of artists who have taken to the streets can help us - just us, the people directly and professionally involved in making art, or the many more people involved in making it live with their gaze. It can help us to revive the infinite struggle that will always be needed to free that promise from the empire of banks and solidiers and the state.

Only if artists respect the realities of the world today, can they retrieve and invent the utopias of yesterday and tomorrow. That's what many people, within the field of art, are now trying to do. At certain crucial points, they disappear from the museums. They have to disappear - otherwise, you're right, they become a court jester, the emperor's fool. But let's at least fill their place with something more than another luxury product for the bankers and the bureaucrats. Let's create another society - in the studios and the museums too. In the artworld and outside of the box, as you say.

all the best, Brian

Who is faking it: artists or activists, or both? | 11 comments

Sort:
Display:

[- CREATE ACCOUNT
so you can post & vote!

[- how to post and vote
[- faq (discordia q&a)
[- faq en espa�ol
[- search
[- send feedback

[- sick of english?
[- multi-lingual babelfilter

Stories, articles, images and comments are owned by the Author. The Rest � 2003 The Discordants under the Gnu Public License

submit story | create account | faq | search