Art as the Possibility of Politics

If the truism holds that all art is political, what might it mean to talk of the ‘increasingly political dimension of contemporary art’, as per the opening words of Anthony Downey’s 2014 book, Art and Politics Now (p. 10)? Could this dimension admit of degrees? If so, what would be the metric, and what would a minimally or maximally political art look like? Illustrating and discussing no fewer than two hundred and twenty-two artworks, Downey’s absorbing and very useful survey of the political aspects of a wide range of global contemporary art, mostly produced since the turn of the millennium, offers an excellent opportunity to size up the landscape of current politicised practice in order to consider these questions. For his part, Downey measures art’s political dimension primarily according to artists’ engagement with political themes beyond the field of art itself, indexed by the manifest political content of artworks. This, of course, is not quite the same thing as the politics of art per se. If, as Hito Steyerl has elsewhere written, art today is centrally implicated in the reproduction of global inequality as a ‘major player in unevenly advancing semiocapitalism’, then it may be more than ever incumbent upon politicised art to begin its reflections with the ‘intrinsic conditions of the art field’ and the ‘conditions of its own production and display’, in order to understand and, if possible, to subvert and resist its position within this cycle.¹

Downey’s text does, at points, broach aspects of the scenario that Steyerl describes, by considering practices that examine such pressing art-world concerns as the recuperation of critique under neoliberalism, as well as art’s absorption into globalised circuits of finance capital that funnel ever more wealth to the one percent. However, for the most part these themes play a subordinate role in the book to the many ways in which today’s artists engage the most urgent of political issues beyond the art world. The increased artistic traffic in these themes – denoted by Downey’s chapter headings as ‘globalization’, ‘labour’, ‘citizens’, ‘activism’, ‘conflict’, ‘terror’, ‘history’, ‘camps’, ‘environments’, ‘economies’, and ‘knowledge’ – is further understood to correspond to the rise and diversification of a host of new artistic ‘formal methods and techniques’ that encompass archival, research-based and documentary practices, artists’ institutional initiatives, and participatory, collaborative and community-based endeavours of all kinds (p. 10). Across the book, a politics of communicability and visibility for global social and political struggles emerges as the major stimulus for this immense expansion of the repertoire of artistic labour in recent decades. As Downey frames it, such ‘formal experimentation’ serves the principal end of ‘re-imagining the boundaries of the political sphere’, expanding ‘engagement with the political’ by giving ‘form to that which politics deems unimaginable or beyond the bounds of public discussion and debate’ (pp. 13, 21, 24, 18). In all of its diversity and powers of invention, art is able to open up challenging perspectives upon constituencies and causes that the conventionality and inertia of the mainstream media and political worlds struggles to reach.

It is in this sense, then, that for Downey, ‘contemporary art … imagines that which remains politically unimaginable’ (p. 10). And yet, to heed Steyerl’s contention that ‘the politics of art are the blind spot of much contemporary political art’, there is also the question of that which remains almost unimaginable within the bounds of Art and Politics Now, despite Downey’s alertness to this problem in his writing elsewhere: the possibility that art’s politics of visibility and representation of the disenfranchised might do just as much to shore up, as to challenge, a liberal-democratic ideological consensus that maintains our present system of the continual redistribution of material wealth and political power to the few.²

A second recent book, Anthony Gardner’s Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy, begins from the recognition that an important part of the responsibility of a politicised art must be to seek to resist or to outwit the very legitimising discourses that would submit it to this fate. Gardner’s book thus takes as its point of departure the blind spot of virtually all discussions of the politics of contemporary art, for which ‘democracy’ almost invariably figures – wittingly or not – as an ‘unimpeachable’ ideal (p. 181). Endlessly abused as ‘the master signifier of global geopolitics’, the benevolence of democracy has been under persistent strain in recent decades, its polysemy such that it may at once be claimed as the political horizon of the enforced globalisation of neoliberal social and economic policy after 1989, and as the form of the revolutionary ‘multitude’ in immanent opposition to the same (p. 5).³ With the US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, beginning in 2001 and 2003, democracy was stretched still further, emerging as the rhetorical justification for ‘regime change’ in those nations, and as the moral yardstick for the many voices of protest against the hypocrisy of the coalition’s undemocratic path to war, as well as the absurdity of its ambition to impose democracy by force on foreign polities. Pulled in all directions, democracy has achieved its ‘hollowed apotheosis’ as a circular and ‘easily cooptable logic defined through the presentation and authorisation of one’s politics as democratic’ (pp. 50, 39). And yet, far from wearing increasingly thin, the elasticity of the ‘palliative veil’ cast by democracy over the world’s injustices has instead become operative, as Gardner astutely observes, as an abiding ‘governmentality’ at the heart not only of global society at large, but also at the heart of an avowedly radical art world (pp. 11, 50). Everywhere, today, democracy regulates art’s political life by policing the limits of its discourse in the service of the neoliberal status quo.

Despite the many disappointments of actually existing democracy, it obviously remains a moot point as to whether artists or anyone else ought thereby to abandon democratic ideals, and a thornier question still as to what could viably replace such a politics. The vexed question of the relationship between socialism and democracy is, needless to say, beyond the scope of Gardner’s book, and therefore the question as to whether the postsocialist suspicion of democracy necessarily entails a wholesale rejection of socialist politics here remains a little unresolved. Still, Gardner’s strongly argued text very clearly shows why more than a few artists nowadays feel democracy to be a necessary sacrifice, and Gardner himself makes a highly persuasive case for his position. Politically Unbecoming skilfully tracks democracy’s ascendance in art’s critical, curatorial and institutional discourses since the 1980s, and analyses key practices of resistance to this in the work of the five European artist, artist-group and artist-duo case studies of Ilya Kabakov, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), Thomas Hirschhorn, Christoph Buchel and Gianni Motti, and Dan and Lia Perjovschi. Gardner’s chosen practices issue from regions straddling the continent’s old Iron Curtain divide, and on more than a few occasions the argument hinges on patterns of influence across West and East with which histories of post-war and contemporary European art are only now fully beginning to reckon. Politically Unbecoming is an explicit challenge to the field on this score, and has much to offer as a model of research that recognises ‘artists’ mutual reframings of art discourse and practice across supposed borders’ (p. 9). Not least, the pan-European focus allows for a powerful demonstration that the ‘postsocialist’ condition of the book’s subtitle has a wider geographical and philosophical purchase than the merely ‘postcommunist’ purview of scholars such as Boris Groys, Piotr Piotrowski and others, as it pertains not simply to the demise of regional totalitarianisms but, more profoundly, to the apparent death of a universalist political promise, the liquidation of which has created precisely the ideological vacuum for an anointed politics of democracy swiftly to fill.⁴

Gardner demonstrates the sinuous reach of democracy most succinctly in his first substantive chapter, ‘Assumptions of Democracy and Postsocialist Critique’, which analyses a large body of European political philosophy and critical and curatorial discourse that together has given rise to the hegemony of an ‘aesthetics of democratization’ in the international art world since the fall of Soviet communism (p. 21). This is revealed to undergird the rise to prominence of installation art and its promise of spectator participation, twin modi operandi that are critically engaged in different ways by each of Gardner’s case studies. At the heart of the discussion here is an especially cogent historicisation of ‘relational aesthetics’: Nicolas Bourriaud’s influential notion is unravelled as the child of the post-war French policy of ‘Cultural Democratization’, André Malraux’s urge to engage the French public in cultural life in order to foster ‘civic well-being’ (p. 26). The enduring influence of this ethos, Gardner argues, was given new life in the 1990s via Bourriaud’s importation into the art world of the egalitarian spirit of contemporary cyber-utopianism as a response to the urgently felt need, during that decade, for a politics of art that might ‘escape the spiral of postmodern endgames’ and ‘instigate democracy’ in order to engineer social cohesion in the face of economic recession (pp. 21, 25).

While Bourriaud’s ideas offer the best-known example of an instrumentalised aesthetics of democratisation, Gardner is careful to situate relational aesthetics as one part of a complex of comparable critical positions and curatorial initiatives of the 1990s, before demonstrating their similar means of legitimation through appeal to one or another influential philosophy of democracy, ranging from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s ‘radical democracy’ and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ‘democracy without qualifiers’, to Alain Badiou’s ‘metapolitics’ and Jacques Rancière’s politics of ‘dissensus’. Each of these authors, in turn, has ‘sought self-affirmation and self-validation through the label “democracy” ’, at the fatal cost of ‘depoliticization’ and a ‘resublimation of radical politics’ (p. 39). Badiou and Rancière have even done so, Gardner argues, despite their profound misgivings as to the apparently infinite malleability and corruptibility of the term. Conversely, the achievement of Gardner’s chosen artists has been to resist the pull towards the signifier ‘democracy’ as the ‘name of the old authority and … the authority of the old name’ (p. 89). In negotiating their distinct positions, each has therefore been forced to confront the same problem of the seeming impossibility of imagining emancipatory politics outside of democracy’s discursive frame.

The paths to resistance are often furtive and elusive, and Gardner marshals a rich, if sometimes bewildering, vocabulary of both his own and the artists’ ‘idiosyncratic signifiers’ to particularise each practice (292). Thus the Perjovschis enact a ‘dizzydent dynamo-tactics’ in the management of the Center for Art Analysis from their Bucharest studio, while Buchel and Motti develop a collaborative ‘aesthetic of infection and withdrawal’ in their site-specific skewering of the Romanian government’s harnessing of culture in the service of its democratic ambitions in 2004, ahead of both an imminent presidential election and the longer-term horizon of the country’s EU accession (pp. 284, 231).

Stealthiest of all, perhaps, is the calculatedly fugitive focus of Gardner’s third chapter, ‘Altered States and Retro Politics’. The subject here is the extended quasi-institutional project State in Time, or Država v Času, conceived by the Ljubljana-based collective NSK in 1991 as the refigured identity of the group following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. During the 1990s, the NSK State appeared sporadically as different intimations of a ‘pseudo-nation-state’, opening transient ‘embassies’ in various European cities and establishing a passport office for three days in Amsterdam in 1993 (p. 12). Gardner demonstrates the ‘fragility’ and ‘absurdity’ of the NSK State’s spectral existence – in time rather than across territory – as a state ‘too mobile and destabilising to ever actually exist’ (pp. 130, 144). In implicit contrast to the abstract anti-corporatism of any number of other contemporary ‘mockstitutions’, Gardner argues for the NSK State’s (non-) existence in pointedly dialectical relation to a nexus of political developments to emerge in the name of democratisation during the period of decommunisation in the early-mid 1990s. These include the resurgence of various nationalisms amid the formation of new nation states in Central and Eastern Europe, and the mirroring of the fledgling European superstate by the roving European biennial Manifesta, conceived in 1991 and first mounted in Rotterdam in 1996.⁵

NSK’s erstwhile critique of the Yugoslav state during the 1980s had taken the form of a ‘retro politics’ that reanimated the aesthetics of fascism and socialist realism from earlier in the twentieth century, developing a nonconformist practice whose satirical impulse was largely invisible within – excluded from – the purview of late communist culture. With the subsequent amnesia of postcommunist Europe’s cultural tabula rasa in the 1990s erasing the history of nonconformist art along with the memory of communism itself, nonconformist practices such as NSK were left in the puzzling position of being ‘ “excluded from the excluded” ’, as NSK member Borut Vogelnik described the group’s predicament in 2000 (p. 134). NSK’s response was to develop what Gardner calls a ‘retro politics of retro politics’, a recursive strategy that mined the history and aesthetics of the group’s own practice along with its past and present objects of critique, chiefly the Yugoslav state of the 1980s and the brave new nineties world of global liberal democracy (p. 133). Signal projects from this phase of NSK’s activities, such as Transnacionala (1996), for which the group travelled around the US in two campervans to engage local audiences in cultural debate with the aim to ‘unwork’ preconceptions of both US and postcommunist European artistic practices, are read by Gardner as having capitalised on the deconstructive potential of the group’s own ‘double displacement’, after 1991, from any readily intelligible political context, and thus more emphatically than before ‘from any existing political significations’ (pp. 134, 124).

Gardner thus understands NSK’s reinvention as the Država v Času as a redoubling of the group’s nonconformity and critical autonomy, a position from which NSK could re-emerge as a ‘self-determined’ entity in fuller control of its reception and more sensitive than ever to its own ‘parameters of interpretation and recognition’ (p. 143). Artistic autonomy as a defiant assertion of authorial control over the possibilities of interpretation is, in turn, deciphered as a key aspect of the ‘continuum’ that Gardner identifies in his fourth chapter between the practices of Kabakov, NSK and Hirschhorn, whose own ‘retro politics’ is revealed to draw on both practices (p. 179). This, indeed, is one of Kabakov’s major lessons for Hirschhorn, as well as for Buchel and Motti, who each cite Kabakov as a formative influence on account of his delicate yet rigorous evasion of all ‘preconceptions’ regarding his practice, his rejection of all ‘predetermined discursive frames’ and, ultimately, his identity as a ‘conceptually … self-determined’ artist (pp. 178, 180). In this and other ways, it is the heroic figure of Kabakov who clearly emerges as the book’s anchor, since it is by working through the complex implications of his practice that his artistic heirs are able not only to puncture the politics and rhetoric of contemporary democracy, but also to work to sustain the radical political openness of the postsocialist condition itself.

Kabakov himself is argued to have done so through the development of a singularly supple philosophy and aesthetics of ‘emptiness’, whose key anti-statement is the artist’s 1981 essay, ‘On Emptiness’, revised in English in 1990. Developing clues from this text, Gardner cautiously approaches Kabakovian emptiness as a ‘virtual realm of state ideology’, and initially reads the essay as an excursus on the ubiquitous immanence of power akin to Gilles Deleuze’s influential 1990 essay, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (p. 66).⁶ Ultimately, however, Gardner finds that Kabakov’s non-concept evades all definition, and he even points in this light towards the inadequacy of its translation as ‘emptiness’ from the Cyrillic signifier of the original Russian text. Emptiness cannot be equated with mere nothingness, Gardner writes; rather, ‘lack of clarity and certainty in either the ontology or definition of emptiness is precisely Kabakov’s main point’ (p. 68). While emptiness would therefore appear to be a thoroughly deconstructive notion, Gardner further argues that, in its ‘strategic withdrawal from the geopoliticised harness of representation’, indeed from any clear signification at all, emptiness ‘maintains [a] … criticality’ that even Jacques Derrida’s practice of deconstruction finally sacrifices at the altar of an ‘undeconstructible’ politics of democracy, even if only that of the ‘unfulfillable’ vanishing point of a ‘democracy-to-come’ (pp. 91, 90).

From here, Kabakov’s installations of the 1980s and 1990s are revealed to function both as enactments and analogues of this aporia at the heart of the artist’s thinking. A central aspect of the installation Before Supper, exhibited at Opernhaus Graz in 1988, provides a concise illustration of his antinomic strategy in practice. Here, a mise-en-abyme is formed by the display of a rectangular, white enamel monochrome painting that is bordered on all sides by small drawings of similar borders around miniature rectangular monochromes. The repetition of the large central monochrome within and as its own frame renders its status undecidable as either empty or full, absence or presence: appearing as a spatial void, it is also legible as a magnified image of the surrounding drawings. In the impurity of this ambiguity, the ‘active emptiness’ of Kabakov’s void/image suggests a cryptic critique of the ‘uncritical utopianism’ and latent totalitarian purism of the monochrome as trope of modernist art history, with Kabakov’s sights trained squarely on Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White from 1918 (p. 74).

Before Supper was one of the first of Kabakov’s installations to be realised outside the Soviet Union, and Gardner’s argument emphasises the significance of Kabakov’s insistence that all of these works are intelligible only within the context of the Western art world that received them. To substantiate the importance of this point, Gardner turns to Kabakov’s pivotal Ten Characters exhibition at New York’s Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in April 1988, the artist’s transformation of a SoHo commercial gallery into a fictionalised Soviet communal apartment of ten single-occupant rooms, each belonging to a recently departed inhabitant whose enigmatic monikers – such as The Man Who Flew into His Picture, The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, and, most famously, The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment – function to narrativise each space in turn. At every step, as Gardner demonstrates in detail, Ten Characters sought to foster the viewer’s alienation from the installation, disrupting its own legibility and, especially, working to distance its English-speaking audience from clearly engaging with the Soviet subject matter by repeatedly setting translated texts at a distance from the corresponding vignette, enacting a deferral between experience and interpretation, ‘the self and the Soviet’ (p. 81).⁷ As such, the work consistently wrong-foots au courant expectations of the democratic nature of participatory installation, then taking shape within the emergent climate of ‘New York social aesthetics’ (p. 83).

In no way, then, can Kabakov’s installations be understood as the simple importation into the West of a ‘dissident’ Soviet artistic practice, already fully formed; there is no question but that that practice is profoundly transformed in this shift of context. Gardner refers, in this light, to the widespread ‘ethnographic’ misreading of Kabakov’s installations as providing ‘indexical traces of Soviet disintegration’ as fetishes for the Western market (p. 61). He shows, instead, that works such as Ten Characters trouble both Western expectations of Eastern European art and life under totalitarian rule, at the same time as they confront the Western art world – and by extension, the hubris of Western liberal-democratic triumphalism in general – with the arrogance of its self-image.

While Kabakov’s practice provides a further key to Gardner’s book in performing the same resistance to the ‘treatment of art … on the level of ethnography’ to which Politically Unbecoming as a whole aspires, Gardner eventually locates Kabakov’s own shortcoming in his failure fully to deconstruct a ‘monolithic identification of the West’ (pp. 9, 97). If this might appear to jeopardise the artist’s otherwise exacting deconstruction of an essential ‘East’ – if, that is, to leave intact one half of a binary opposition is necessarily to resurrect the other – then the very subtlety and inscrutability of Kabakov’s ‘aesthetic of withdrawal’ suggests another difficulty for his practice (p. 85). For it is undeniable that the obscurity and significance of its central philosophy of ‘emptiness’ is such to have long escaped the understanding not only of Kabakov’s most attentive Western critics but also certain of his longest-standing Russian comrades. Gardner cites a 2003 article in which artist Anatoly Osmolovsky denigrates Kabakov’s ‘typical variety of imperialist art which subordinates consciousness … [to] the chain of visual narratives imposed by the artist’, a charge of authoritarianism (one that, Gardner later affirms, may also be levelled at Hirschhorn) that would seem to lie in opposition to Soviet émigré and early Kabakov champion Margarita Tupitsyn’s misplaced enthusiasm for the ‘democratic … form’ of the ‘total installation’ that comprised Ten Characters in 1988 (p. 57).⁸ Both critics’ assessments turn, if not quite on the presumption of a democratic will on the artist’s part, then on a shared assumption of democratic form and politics as an appropriate metric for the work’s appraisal. If they are both mistaken in this approach, then the fact that so many of Kabakov’s critics have fallen so wide of the mark would at the very least appear to place a question mark over Gardner’s suggestion that Kabakov’s practice, and by extension those of his heirs, is in any clear sense able to emerge unscathed from the manifold mediations of the art system in order to ‘ensure’ that its ‘theorization … cannot be harnessed and legitimized by hegemonic ideologies’ of democracy (p. 52). If not for the audience at large, and not even for the work’s keenest observers, for what constituency is it able to do so? Each of Gardner’s artists is sceptical ‘toward art’s appeals to democracy and the exclusions conducted in the name of democratization’, but it seems likely that other equally profound exclusions might at times be enacted in their strategies of aesthetic ‘withdrawal’, and thus at the heart of their attempts ‘to resist art’s disciplining by other fields of discourse’ (pp. 13, 292).

If Kabakov’s slipperiness does, at times, seem solipsistic, then the boldly public address of artists such as Hirschhorn and the Perjovschis would appear, at least, to evade this shortcoming. Yet the share of these artists, too, in a Kabakovian belief in artistic autonomy as the possibility of interpretative dominion and a ‘capacity for self-determined art making’ presents a different, though related, problem for Gardner’s broader argument (p. 182). It is at this point that each artist’s diligent resistance to the mediation of their practice as democratic seems to be in tension with a somewhat naive confidence in their own powers of ‘self-authorization’ (p. 188). The hegemonic discourses of the art world appear here to be at once so powerful as to demand all the energies of resistance as can be mustered, and yet at the same time oddly powerless for the determination of the practices’ ‘aesthetic politics’ (p. 144). Discussing Hirschhorn, Gardner does concede the reality of the regular ‘folding [of] his practice into discourses of democracy’ – at the time of writing, Hirschhorn is paired with Spanish artist Santiago Sierra in an exhibition at Tokyo’s ASAKUSA gallery, entitled ‘Radical Democracy’ – but the story of Politically Unbecoming may nevertheless be rather more a tale of art’s failure in this respect than the narrative is quite ready to admit (p. 190). All the same, at least on the terms of the artists’ own steadfast insistence on the death of democracy, their failure remains noble, as does Gardner’s assiduous commitment to peeling away the many layers of misconception that obfuscate the politics of postsocialist artistic practice, in hope of the possibility that art might make politics possible again.