| On the possibility of the avant-garde composition in contemporary art | |
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By Dmitry Vilensky and Zanny Begg |
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But to conceive of these artistic processes simply as “political” would be to seriously underestimate the situation we find ourselves in. There is evidence that what we are actually talking about the emergence of an artistic movement: its participants are concerned with developing a common terminology based on the political understanding of aesthetics; their praxis is based on confrontational approaches towards the cultural industry; it finds consistent realization in direct interaction with activists groups, progressive institutions, different publications and online resources challenging again the established order of what art is. From history we know that such traits were once one of the characteristic of the avant-garde. However, many people today see the avant-garde as something discredited by the Soviet experience where the “dictatorship of the proletariat” rapidly degenerated into a “dictatorship over the proletariat” a totalitarian situation the “one no many yeses” of the anti-capitalist movement has explicitly sought to reject. But despite the anti-vanguardist principles of the “movement of movements” - which it must be noted is as much a rebellion against the old left of Stalinism and its universal claims to truth as it is against the neo-liberal new right - we believe that some of the essential content of the avant-garde is crucial for an understanding of contemporary art. It is important to note that during moments of intensified political struggle - at the beginning of the twentieth century or in the 1960s - there has been a corresponding aesthetic turn towards minimalism and abstraction (for example, in Kazimir Malevich or Donald Judd). One might postulate that in moments of intensified political struggle artists are more receptive to radical formal breaks the possibility of which arises through the logic of revolutionary politics. Then again, in such moments, opposite tendencies also claimed their right to existence: documentary making, literature of fact, realistic painting, conceptualism and other mimetic forms of art often performed an avant-garde role of their own. In other words the avant-garde always arose as a combination (cf. Mayakovsky on LEF) of different formal devices "openly competing" to see which method would be capable of affording the most accurate representation of the revolution in art. We are proposing that we return to a discussion of the avant-garde but through a different reading of its composition: a reading which not only locates the political potential of art within the autonomy of the aesthetic experience but also within the autonomy of art as rooted within the political context. We would argue that to conceive of “the political” in art, without a corresponding commitment to the ideas of the avant-garde would diminish both concepts as would conceiving of the avant-garde as purely innovation within the “form” of art production alone. The radicality of art, therefore, cannot be reduced to its connection to social or political imperatives nor to formal stylistic innovation but must also be understood through its poietic force; its ability to question and destabilise the very notion of the political, social, cultural and artistic. The avant-garde is a coup d’etate against history and progressivism making visible new possibilities in both art and politics. John Roberts has described the promise of the avant-garde as that of the “new” which, as Adorno pointed out, did not mean a consumerist fetishising of the novel or the trendy but the “repetitive and continuous emergence from artistic tradition”. The “new” lies not in “formal, “stylistic” breakthroughs, but in the possibility of keeping alive art’s non-identity in the face of its own institutionalisation and, as such in the face of means-ends rationality of capitalist exchange value.” [1] If we create a mediated relationship between the social and autonomous role of art it is possible to see some of points of cohesion opening up between Badiou’s idea of the event and Adorno’s idea of the “new.” Adorno’s idea of the “new” which destroys the traditions which give rise to art finds some purchase with Badiou’s idea that an event is a “truth which ruptures the order which supports it”. At the current moment the components that historically belonged to the aesthetic of the avant-garde now fall into place in a new composition. Today, we could claim the following taxonomy: a) realism as an aesthetic method; b) fidelity toward the revolutionary impulse of the avant-garde; c) autonomy as political self-organization A) Realism as Method From history, we know that the avant-garde utilised a complex array of artistic strategies while claiming that the authenticity of its representation of revolutionary processes was guaranteed by the constant renewal of artistic languages and their sublation in everyday life. In the early years of the Soviet Union, the proponents of realism made a similar claim, though their method rested upon attempts at creating realistic works (in film, painting or literature) that showed the image of the revolution and the revolutionary subjectivity of the proletariat and the party. For example the Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers wrote in 1934 that the true task of realism is “the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development”. Unlike the art of socialist realism or the historical avant-garde, contemporary art necessarily has the negation of capitalism's totality as its point of departure. At the same time, it strives to connect this negativity with aesthetic methods adequate to the study of the world in which new subjectivity arises, not only as something destructive, but as something that produces new social life. In the old argument – should artists produce for the proletariat or should the proletariat produce its own art – today’s position is best expressed through something Godard said in 1972: artists have to speak in their own name while participating in the life of political movements, or to put it another way our goal is not to make political art but to make art politically. Today realism as a method can be understood as both a continuation and a re-questioning of existing attempts at breaching the gap between the subject and the object, between an indexical relationship to everyday life and the new subjectivities produced by political events. This tension is most obviously played out through the methods of contemporary art which are closely related to documentation, photography and film/video. The ubiquitous introduction of digital technologies for capturing moments in everyday life have opened new possibilities for coming closer to representing life in the forms of life itself, but brought up the issue of media reality and its claims to truthfulness. Here, it really does make sense to return to the aesthetic discoveries of the 1930s, for example, to the strategy of estrangement introduced by Bertold Brecht. Pre-empting any possibility for empathy based on the illusion of authenticity, estrangement allows a process of defamiliarization which uncovers how social mechanisms work, demonstrating not only how and why people behave in a certain way in society, but analysing the production of social relations itself. Here, we would like to emphasize a few key methods that are central to contemporary political art. 1. Militant Research The genealogy of this tradition goes back to Fredrich Engels’ 1844 famous study The Condition of the Working Class in England. Later, this tradition was continued in research done by the operaists and activist-sociologists close to them. In the Russian context, militant research became a familiar theme through the productionist interpretation of Trotsky’s idea of the worker’s correspondent. An extremely relevant contemporary definition of militant research can be found in the work of the Argentinean group Colectivo Situaticiones: “Militant research attempts to work under alternative conditions, created by the collective itself and by the ties to counter power in which it is inscribed, pursuing its own efficacy in the production of knowledges useful to the struggles.” [2] Such life-practices present contemporary political art with an important aesthetic challenge. The representation of militant research requires a new formal language capable of providing narratives of direct participation in the transformation of the world that surrounds us, but in practice, it most frequently appears as the space of an alternative archive. Not only the quality and scale of the alternative archive’s material itself, but also the mode of interaction with it presents the opportunity of developing entirely new dimensions of protracted aesthetic (co-) experience that lie very much beyond the instantaneous reception of most contemporary art. 2. Mapping In this case, we are talking about the creation of maps that reflect the structure that arises in the interweaving of capital and power. The main aim of such maps is to suggest a clear definition of the current moment and to answer a question of crucial importance: how does contemporary society work and which factors shape its subjectivity? What are the possibilities for representing capital and the structures of its dominance? The aesthetic experience one makes while looking at such atlases is one of horror in the face of the totality and sheer force of contemporary capital. This is why such maps should always been seen in parallel to other maps, maps of resistance. In this case, the main goal is to make maps that show the interaction of various dissenting social movements. This line of mapping is not only meant to reflect the realities of protest, but the potential for a tendency of social development. It is interesting to note that the appearance of mapping as an exploration of the possibilities for visualizing sociological research also began in the “Institute of Visual Sociology” in Moscow during the early 1930s, and continued by Gerdt Arnz and Otto Neurath in their Vienna “Institute of Visual Statistics” (which have been dawn upon so effectively in the work of Andreas Siekmann). 3. Story telling If the methods of mapping are impersonal in principle and operate with numbers, quantities and symbol-pictograms, the idea of story telling is based on the old slogan of “politicizing the personal.” In this way, the main goal is to demonstrate how personal stories and fates are always produced in relation to the social and political conditions that shape and rest upon this or that form of “bare life.” First and foremost, personal story telling reveals the process of subjectivity’s formation as a product of historical conditions. In this way, they subvert the “grand narratives” and official histories of power by revealing the contradictions of capitalism operating through the smallest fragment. 4. Montage 5. Subversive Affirmation 6. Carnivalesque 7. Re-enactment and fiction The formation of a new subjectivity is not only shaped in relation to the current political situation – it also finds its shape in relations to the past. That's why many art works are semi-retroactive - not only challenging the present but also how we understand the past which is full with unrealized potential. Why go backwards? The only point in revisiting the past is its inter-relation with the future. As Hito Steyerl commented in a recent article "...the only possible critical documentary today is the presentation of an affective and political constellation which does not even exist, and which is yet to come". The possibility of this "becoming" is located not only in the possibilities of the future but is also rooted in the actualisation of all lost chances. Many recent art works have thus used tactics, reminiscent of Brecht learning plays, such as re-enactments and fictions where the actors and audience must try and distinguish political from apolitical behavior by imitating ways of behaving, thinking, talking, and relating. The fiction allow us to draw closer the moment in which the actualized elements of the past interweave with what is taking place in the presence of the now (Jetztzeit), leading to the potential composition of a new Event. Here it is important to consider fidelity as it has been posed by Badiou, that is not as an artistic fidelity to the goals and aims of the anti-capitalist movement per se a position which would be reminiscent of the modus operandi of socialist realism and would reduce contemporary art production to the propagandistic position of cheer-leader or advocate for this movement, but a fidelity to the subjective space from which the movement sprang. From this position the new avant-garde does not conform to the already-mythical subject of revolutionary social change, but seeks out and forms this subject through its own experiments and processes of engagement and new artistic discoveries. Esther Lesslie provides a vivid description of this role of the avant--garde within this framework: “Engels likened capitalist society to a train which is accelerating towards a broken bridge: socialism means subjecting the anarchy of capitalism to human direction, a hand on the brake. The avant-garde shows you that hand is yours”. [3] C) Autonomy as a Principle of Self-Organisation Both in the Soviet Union and in capitalist society, the defeat of the avant-garde was a result of the attempt to sublate art into life. This attempt was then instrumentalized by the party or the culture industry. The experience of this defeat underwent exhaustive analysis in discussions initiated by Adorno and lasting to the present day. The conclusion drawn from these debates makes it necessary for contemporary political art to rethink its conception of autonomy. But this new project of autonomy has more to do with the experience of political practices of worker’s autonomy and council communism than with the modernist project of defending the autonomy of the aesthetic experience. A more contemporary understanding of autonomy is as a confrontational practice in relation to the dominant forces of cultural production; comparable to the act of “exodus from the factory,” and the attempt to create a decentralized network of self-organizing collectives. This understanding of autonomy moves beyond the classic conception of “self-law” and articulates a position of independence and opposition to social relations which threatens to destroy these relations as they are; as Sylvere Lortinger and Christian Marazzi argue autonomy is “not only a political project, it is a project for existence.” [3] This collectivist, confrontational, politicised notion of autonomy which exerts such influence in the anti-capitalist movement today presents an alternative interpretation to the individualist and classical one within existing art discourses. Here, the point is not art’s dissolution into life, but its crystallization in life as a constant re-discovery, beyond our reactionary times, of the possibilities of new forms of life (yet) to come. Conclusion It is with a certain sense of historical irony, therefore, that we would like to end this article with a quote from Leon Trotsky : A reactionary epoch not only decomposes and weakens the working class, isolating its avant-garde, but also reduces the general ideological level of the movement, projecting political ideas back to previous historical epochs. The task of the avant-garde in these conditions consists, first of all, in not being carried away by this stream, but of necessarily going against this stream.
Published in Chto Delat? (www.chtodelat.org) as part of the Documenta 12 Magazine Program. 1. see. John Roberts “Avant-gardes After Avant-Gardism” 2. Colectivo Situaciones, On the Research Militant. In: Transversal (web-journal). http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en 3. A Statement of Militant Esthetix, A Talk given at The Aquarium Gallery, 29 August 2003 by Ben Watson/Esther Leslie 4. Lotringer, Sylvere and Marazzi, Christian “The Return of the Political” trans. Peter Caravetta and John Johnson, “Autonomia Post Political Politics”, semiotext(e), Vol. 3, No. 3, 1980, p8 |
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Over the last few years, a number of artists have succeeded in both realizing and finding the theoretical grounding for a variety of works which allows us to speak of a new situation in art. These projects have found points of connection between art, new technologies, and the global movement against neo-liberal capitalism. The lineages of this interest in political art can be traced back to Documenta 10 (1997) and coincides with the emergence of the “movement of movements” which erupted onto the political horizon in Seattle in 1999 – an event which, it can be argued, has crystallised a new political subject (named the Multitude by Hardt and Negri’s Empire published in 2000). This situation has subsequently been manifested through a variety of cultural projects whose critical stance towards the process of capitalist globalisation and emphasis on the principles of self-organisation, self-publishing and collectivity has evoked the idea of a return to “the political” in art.
