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ZANNY
BEGG
The Spectre of the Many: Globalisation, subjectivity and “the political”
in art
Zanny Begg [Sydney]
“The spectre of the many (and the ordinary),” Katy
Siegel wrote in the January 2005 edition of Artforum, “hovered over
blockbuster exhibitions like Documenta 11, the Venice Biennial (Dreams and
Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the viewer) The International Centre for
Photography Triennial (“Strangers”) and the 2004 Whitney Biennial.” [1]
Added to these “blockbuster” exhibitions are a series of other exhibition
projects which have sought to bring the energy and combativeness of the “crowd”
into the framework of the museum – the Ex Argentina project in Cologne,
Barcelona and Buenos Aires, the Collective Creativity exhibition in
Kassel, The Interventionists at Mass MoCA, the upcoming Zones of
Contact for the Sydney Biennial, the Disobedience exhibition at the
Ivan Dougherty Gallery Sydney and many others which have drawn inspiration from
communities in motion or conflict. In curatorial decisions and artistic production
there has been a noticeable emphasis on the nexus between social and artistic
practice registered in a return of interest in “the political” in art.
None of
this is to say that people have just starting making socially engaged art:
Gregory Sholette has made an important contribution in the most recent edition
of artwulr.org which contextualises contemporary enthusiasm for political art
through his study of a host of vibrant autonomist and political art practices
which predate any current interest in the topic. [2] In this paper I shall draw
some historical links to previous art movements which, as Constant put it as
early as 1958, have “all searched for techniques that go beyond the artwork..”
[3] But what is noticeable today is an overall trend towards the political from
broad aspects of cultural production and within this framework a trend towards
four art practices which I will explore in this paper: documentary making,
conceptual engagement, collective creativity and social intervention.
In
Seigal’s article on “Crowd scenes in Contemporary Art” she quotes the German
art historian Wolfgang Kemp who observes that “the crowd appears in art when it
erupts in political life”. [4] Although perhaps an obvious statement what is
unique about the current context is the particular way in which the crowd has
returned, the interconnection between the way the crowd appears and the
political subjectivity it possesses (and the potential it evokes). The crowd
has returned as both a subject and object of the art process – as a direct
physical presence in artworks such as Andreas Gursky’s photographs of May Day
raves or Oliver Ressler’s videos of the anti-capitalist demonstrations and as a
collective subjectivity which hovers over the creative process.
The idea
of the many, of a collective subjectivity which is constituent, hovers over
cultural production because it taps into a vein of resistance which opened up
and begun to flow again in the late ‘90s. Seattle, Chiapas, Genoa, Argentina
and other manifestations of an emerging anti-capitalist movement have helped
wash away a sense of pessimism and individualism which had been in ascendance.
What is immediately striking about a book like Empire is that it brimmed
with an unexpected optimism, a feeling which had been so absent from the darker
and more moody analysis of much of contemporary Marxism and critical theory. It
speaks of the “irrepressible joy and lightness of being a communist” a
sentiment so at odds with much of the existing nihilistic discourse surrounding
the revolutionary subject.
The “one
no many yeses” of the anti-capitalist movement has helped gather back together
the fractured strands of identity politics into a collective subject
reconfiguring an earlier debate between post-modernism and Marxism by creating
a revolutionary subject which is neither homogenised nor entirely fragmented.
Less important today are the individualistic excesses of high postmodernism
with all the associated identity based and self referential art practices but
gone too is the universal subject position of the working class. Today it seems
possible to talk of a cultural post-post-modernism where difference and
identity are assumed but the emphasis of the discussion is on collaboration,
social context, collectivity.
Significantly
for artists the anti-capitalist movement has consciously adopted some of the
techniques an earlier generation of artists used to go “beyond the artwork”.
The anti-capitalist movement with its carnivaleque aesthetic and its playful
attempts at collapsing the distinctions between art, activism and everyday life
has re-invented many of the methods of artists such as the Situationists. Some,
such as Christopher Smith in his study of the Toronto Reclaim the Streets
demonstration, have even argued that this movement, through its free floating
uses of public space, its playful recontextualising of public signs and other
such techniques is a direct continuation of the project of the Situationist
International (SI) and the ideas of social space articulated by Henri Lefebvre.
[6]
Groups
such as the Tute Bianche, Disobbedienti, San Precario, yomango, Reclaim the
Streets and others have created direct cultural experiences for people entirely
independent of any gallery context. The movement has created its own media
centres, video works, stencils, posters, street performances, “happenings” or
“situations.” John Jordon argues that protests such as these have succeeded
where art movements like dada and the SI failed because in their DIY nature
they have lost the need to cling to the “question of art”. [7]
The DIY
aspect of the anti-capitalist movement has fused together several cultural
lineages: earlier art movements such as the Situationists and aspects of
conceptual art, ‘60s counter culture, traditions of temporary autonomist zones
and the squatting and social centre movements - enacting both an
aestheticisation of the social and a socialisation of the aesthetic. Artists
interested in a contemporary and critically engaged practice work in a climate
where the movement sees itself as a cultural producer and where
creativity has been socially located in the potencia of the multitude.
It is no wonder then that the “question of art” is currently posed through a
blurry overlap between activism, social context and art.
Perhaps a
good place to start in this discussion is an excerpt from a video work by
Oliver Ressler in collaboration with Dario Azellini which comes form a longer
54 minute documentary called Disobbedienti (2002). As the title suggests
the work is an account of the “movement of movements” as it unfolded before and
after the anti-G8 demonstrations in Genoa.
In Ressler and Azzellini’s film the
movement plays the staring role with the creative designs and intentions
of the artists’ minimisalised to a simple documentary style. As Ressler
explains he “largely dispense[s] with off-camera
commentaries, which evaluate and create distance in many documentaries as
transitions, comparisons and questions, or which, in the case of a militant
group, express separation from the actions”. [8] This work easily and
deliberately blends with much of the cultural production of the movement
itself, looking like a documentary we may see at an activist centre as much as
a work of art we might expect to see in a gallery.
Of course the documentary is not wedded
particularly to notions of “truth”. While Ressler and Azzellini’s documentary
is a self avowedly partisan account of the movement other artists such as the
Bernadetta Corporation, who have also made a documentary on the anti-G8 demonstrations
in Genoa, have used documentary making in a much more fictitious and lateral
way. But the documentary form has emerged as a key device for artists who wish
to communicate complex political and social content and has been one strategy
utilised by socially engaged artists.
In Disobbeddienti
we see an interview with an activist who summarises arguments crucial to our
discussion here: the current use of the term multitude is premised on a series
of changes which have destabilised a traditional understanding of class;
encapsulated in the term post-Fordism, and situated within the framework of
globalisation, these changes revolve around the hegemonic position of
immaterial labour; the subsumption of society under capital and the penetration
of capital into the production and reproduction of life (biopolitics).
I have
touched already on some European traditions of art – I want to look now at a
discussion which is located more within American art traditions. In 1968 Lucy
Lippard and John Chandler wrote an influential, although highly disputed, essay
called “The Dematerialization of Art.” In this they argued that artists grouped
together under the label “conceptual art” were pursuing a range of strategies
to avoid the production of art as object: “the shift in emphasis from art as
product to art as idea has freed artists from present limitations – both
economic and technical.” The result of this, according to Lippard and Chandler
was that conceptual artists were making work which the art dealer would not be
able to sell thus denying “economic materialism along with physical
materialism.” [9] They constructed a long list of art practices which fit
within these parameters including artists working with ephemeral materials,
performance based works, text based works and works which facilitated
experiences.
The
“dematerialisation of art” thesis has been disputed for a variety of reasons.
Most didactically because of the persisting materiality (in some form) of art
production: the Art and Language artists who tried to make a piece of air into
an artwork still encountered the materiality of the piece of paper the
experiment was written down on. More broadly conceptual artists have been
criticised for their reabsorption into the very market they tried to elude.
According to Michael Corris today it is commonplace to cite Lippard and
Chandler’s argument as proof of the profound political “naiveté” which infected
the discourse surrounding conceptual art in the mid 1960s. [10]
But
perhaps within the current context, we can look back differently on the
discussion. Rather than naïve maybe this discussion was instead anticipatory of
broader changes which were taking place within capitalist development post
1968. The attempt to create non-commercialised, non-alienated, non-commodity
orientated works was at one with the attempts by the working class more broadly
to escape the drudgery and pressure of work. This “flight from labour” defined
a generation’s incursions against the power of capital in our lives.
The
networked, information and communicational Empire we see today is the product
of all of these attempts at escaping from the tyranny of things. Rather than
viewing the construction of Empire as “their work” we can see it as “ours” –
our desire for less alienated work and less work per se has driven the constant
evolution of technology and society towards networks, communication,
information and affect. Whilst “our” work is not done, as capitalism remains in
ascendance, and for the vast majority of people in a rather material and
alienated way, we should also not underestimate our power, or potencia,
to continue to generate culture and society.
This
perspective is informed by what has been described as the “Copernican
revolution” autonomist Marxists carried out within the Marxist cannon more
broadly – transforming the prism of our analysis from the framework of
capitalist domination towards working class potencia. Whilst this
analysis is not exactly new - dating back to early discussions within the
autonomist Marxist current [11] – we feel the “Italian effect” more strongly
today because of the way in which their starting point – the working class
rather than capital - has blended into an analysis of the agent of
revolutionary subjectivity – the multitude.
The
emergence of conceptual art in the late ’60s coincided with the transitional
period from Fordist to post-Fordist production methods as artists anticipated
the shift from the circulation and production of things to the circulation and
production of ideas. Maurizio Lazzarato describes this process as a tendency
towards “mass intellectuality” which has increasingly required the input of
subjectivity in all forms of labour, breaking down boundaries of manual and
intellectual work. [12] Contemporary artists since the ’60s have placed a
stronger emphasis on “intellectuality” within their work and have increasingly
demanded greater levels of engagement and understanding from their audiences.
A work
which is pertinent for our discussion at this point is one by Russian artist
Dmitry Vilensky The Negation of the Negation which was exhibited at an
exhibition that I co-curated with David McNeil Disobedience at the Ivan
Dougherty Gallery in Sydney 2005. This work engages directly with the
discussion over the significance of immaterial labour by containing video
footage of a debate between the Toni Negri and Alex Callinicos at the European
Social Forum over “multitude or class”. Vilensky shows three video works
assembled as an installation around a wall which is constructed in
collaboration with a stencil or graffiti artist: in one video protesters chant
and scream into a megaphone (an indicator of the climate of militancy in which
this discussion takes place), in one we hear Negri’s side of the debate (with
Callinicos as unseen challenger) and then projected on the back of the wall we
see a video of workers sweating it out in the very material environment of a
car factory.
This work
presents us with a complex path into this discussion. In the debate the camera
focuses on the faces of the crowd as they listen and, as one would expect of a
multitude, they do not receive the talk passively but interject and dispute the
translation provided for Negri’s speech eventually replacing one translator
with another. Negri’s argument rings strongly: yet the work eludes any easy
complete acceptance of his argument by reminding us through the third video
projection of the material labourers who still work in less economically
developed places like Russia (Callinicos remains present).
I think
this work provides an insightful exploration of the trends towards immaterial
labour but also the spectral nature of class which haunts any discussion of
this topic. It reminds us that what we talk about in any of these discussions
are trends towards or away from various social categories which remain
incomplete, partial, disputable, particularly in more marginal economies
outside the main flow of capital. It is worth remembering that the shift
towards immaterial labour in developed economies is often accompanied by a
displacement of Fordist production lines, and even pre-Fordist sweatshops in
less developed ones.
Vilensky’s
work also provides an interesting marker of a shift for artists working along
conceptual, post-conceptual or neo-conceptual lines from the earlier generation
outlined by Lippard. While the artists she drew attention to sought to elude
capitalism through the form of their work the content of it was often
self-referential, socially neutral, private or quite playful. Today there is
much more of a shift towards engagement with social issues and practices by
artists who seek to avoid the commodification of the art-market through the
form of their work. There are a range of artists working today, such as
Vilensky and Ressler, who place themselves deliberately within the
anti-capitalist movement (as broadly defined).
Another
trend within socially engaged art is the emphasis on collectivity. In May last year a
major exhibition was held at Kassel Fridericianum called Collective
Creativity. The exhibition catalogue noted that “over the past 15 years
artists have become increasingly interested in collective work” [13] and
profiled the work of a plethora of art collective working at the moment: What
is to be Done?, Grupo Etcetera, Contra Filé, The Revolution Will not be Televised
and many more. Echoing the
previous discussion on the move from “art as object to art as idea” we can see
how the emphasis within art production on collectives and collaboration is a
tussle between our desire for greater social connection and meaning and moves
within capitalist production towards exploitation of communication and
cooperation: as Toni Negri has pointed out “if we pose the multitude as a class
concept, the notion of exploitation will be defined as exploitation of
cooperation”. [14] The art collective can be like the rock band a marketing
tool which fetishes a group of insiders whose social bonds and cohesion remain
exclusionary for those on the outside.
But more interestingly are art collectives, such as Contra
Filé (Brazil), who use the collective nature of their collectivity to open up
social issues and invite responses and interaction which go beyond the limits
of their own work. One example of this is their work The Program for the
De-turnstilisation of Life Itself. The turnstile is a persitant feature of
life in Brazil regulating acces to educational institutions, transport and
public utilities. Young people who do not have enough money to pay for public
transport are called “ghost riders” when they slip under the turnstiles and ride
to school for free.
Contra Filé made a simple artwork where they placed a
turnstile on a plinth in a public park. But this simple gesture was such a
powerful metaphor as it drew into an already existing critique of turnstiles in
daily life and touched off a national debate about the role of the turnstile –
even creating a new word to explain this phenomenon: “turnstilism”. The
Program for the De-turnstilisation of Life Itself sparked off a storm of
protests culiminating, true to its name, in students setting fire to turnstiles
outside their universities. Contra Filé then incorporated the public responses
to their work into the re-exhibition of this work for the La Normalidad
exhibition in Argentina. This is one example of works being produced by art collectives
which “go beyond the artwork.”
The anti-capitalist movement, with its emphasis on
self-awareness, social connections and anti-consumerism has been enormously
influencial on contemporary art practices. Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term “relational
aesthetics” to talk about a trend he identified in artworks in the 90s which
aimed to facilitate moments of conviviality and sociability. Claire Bishop, in
her cogent critique of Bourriaud’s argument, explained that what remains
unquestioned in many of these interactions was the broader social consequences
of this conviviality: as she asks of Rirkrit Tiravanija’work: who gets fed?
Why? And how? [16]
More
recently there has been a trend towards art projects which don’t merely aim to
facilitate a sense of conviviality but to “intervene” in social situations to
reveal some of the power dynamics or interactions involved. One example of this
type of practice which I want to show you is the Redfern/Waterloo Tour of
Beauty by Squatspace (Australia). This artwork was part of the Disobedience
exhibition in Sydney and has been shown again several times. Through this
project Squatspace created an intentional overlap between the activities of
campaigners who have been fighting proposals to gentrify the region and their
artwork.
The tour took people through the contested regions of the
area: the school which was closed down, the site where an Aboriginal boy was
killed by police, the Aboriginal settlement, the housing projects, the local
gym, empty buildings. But rather than providing the commentary themselves they
invited locals to come out and talk to the tour at various points.
One of the
aims of this project was to create a sustainable model of art activism which
created ongoing and effective relationships between those in struggle and those
in solidarity. The tour has been enormously popular both with the participants
and with the local activists who have enjoyed the greater levels of community
interest and support the project has generated. It was initiated with funding
through a museum, the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, but its low cost DIY nature has
meant that it has been able to continue easily without funding and independent
of the museum context.
Hopefully
through these examples I have provided some substance to the claim that “the
many” have returned as a focus within contemporary art practice. Although
partial my taxonomy of approaches to political art illustrates some of the ways
artists have responded this challenge through documentary, conceptual
engagement, collective creativity and social intervention. Karl Marx reminds us
in Grundrisse that production not only creates “an object for the
subject, but also a subject for the object.” [17] The changes in production I
have alluded to in this paper have changed artists relationship to the art
object and allowed us to re-imagine a collective subject a process which has
opened spaces for a new interest in the political in art.
1. Siegel, K, “All
together now: Crowd Scenes in contemporary art” Artforum, January 2005,
p. 167.
2. Sholette, G, “Snip, Snip… Bang, Bang:
Political Art Reloaded” artwurl.org, internet 13/03/06 http://artwurl.org/interviews/INT052.html
3. Constant, Situationist
International Vol 2, 1958
4. op cit
Seigel p. 167
5. Jameson, F., Cultural
Turn, Verso, London: 1998 p. 50.
6. Smith, C, “Whose Streets?
Notes on Urban Social Movements and the Politi-cization of Urban (Public?)
Space”
7. Jordan, J., “The
Art of necessity: the subversive imagination of anti-road protests and reclaim
the streets”, Culture Resistance Reader, ed. Stephen Duncombe, Verso,
Lodon: 2002, p. 348.
8. Oliver Ressler
interview on www.resler.com
9. Lippard, L. and
J. Chandler, “The Dematerialisation of Art” Art International XII no. 2
(February 1968) p. 34.
10. Corris, M., Conceptual
Art, theory, myth and practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge:
2004, p. 21.
11. In 1964 Mario Tronti
published an essay as an editorial in Classe Operaia’s first
edition which argued that Marxism needed to be “turned on its head”. He
explained “We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development
first, and worker’s second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the
problem on its head… and start from the beginning: and the beginning is the
class struggle of the working class.” Tronti, M. in Storming Heaven,
Wright, S, Pluto Press, London: 2002, p. 64.
12. Lazzarato, M., General
Intellect: Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labour” trans. Ed Emery.
13. Catalogue essay
by What, How & for Whom, Collective Creativity catalogue, Kunsthalle
Fridericianum Kassel, 2005 p. 8.
14. Negri, T, “Towards an
ontological definition of multitude”, Internet, 1/11/03, <http://www.generation-online.org/t/approximations.htm>
15. Kunst, B., “The
Collaboration and Space”,
16. Bishop, C.,
“Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, October 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51-79.
17. Marx, K, Grundrisse,
Penguin Classics, London: reprinted 1993.