In times of
expansive global capitalism, corporatization of culture,
the demolition of the welfare state and the
marginalization of the critical left, it is crucial to
discuss and assess modes of critique, participation and
resistance in the crossing fields of culture and
politics – specifically, the intersection of political
representation and the politics of representation, of
presentation and participation. What is, for instance,
the relationship between artistic practice and political
representation? Or, put in another way, the difference
between representing something and representing someone?
What is the relationship between the claimed autonomy of
the artwork, and claims for political autonomy? If art,
be it the single work or the whole institution, can be
conceived as a meeting place, how can we mediate between
representation and participation? And, finally, what are
the similarities and differences between representation
and power?
Such questions are
crucial to contemporary art institutions, be they 'progressive'
or 'regressive' in their self understanding and in the
view of others (both inside and outside the artworld),
since art institutions are indeed the in-between, the
mediator, interlocutor, translator and meeting place
between art production and the conception of its 'public.'
I here deliberately use the term 'public' without qualifying
(or quantifying) it, since it is exactly the definition
and constitution of this 'public' as audience, community,
constituency or potentiality that should be the task
of the so-called 'progressive' institution: a place
that is always becoming a place, a public sphere. Historically,
the art institution, or museum, was the bourgeois public
sphere per excellance, a place for rational-critical
thought and (self)representation of the bourgeois class
and its values. As aptly described by Frazer Ward,
The museum contributed
to the self-representation of and self-authorization
of the new bourgeois subject of reason. More accurately,
this subject, this "fictitious identity" of
property owner and human being pure and simple, was
itself an interlinked process of self-representation
and self-authorization. That is, it was intimately bound
to its cultural self-representation as a public.
The abstract and
ideal projection of how a public sphere formulates itself
and its subjects across social differences, despite
the obvious contingency of this subject (as classed
and gendered, to start with), has of course become somewhat
normative, as theorized by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere. A model that has
since been heavily criticized, mainly through the efforts
of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. In their book, tellingly
entitled Public Sphere and Experience, they describe
the bourgeois public sphere as a receding horizon, and
an ideal that does not correspond to our everyday interactions
with, and access to public spheres – in plural rather
than singular. Rather, they claim, our lives and sense
of publicness, individuality and community is heavily
compartmentalized and fragmented into multiple (public)
spheres or spaces that are dependent on different experiences,
mainly in an antagonism between bourgeois ideals and
proletarian realities. We no longer conceive of the
public sphere as an entity, as one location and/or formation
as suggested by Habermas. Instead, we have to think
of the public sphere as fragmented, as consisting of
a number of spaces and/or formations that sometimes
connect, sometimes close off, and that are in conflictual
and contradictory relations to each other. There not
only exist public spheres (and ideals here-of), but
also counter-publics. If we can, then, only talk about
the public sphere in plural, and in terms of relationality
and negation, it becomes crucial to understand, situate
and reconfigure art's spaces – institutions – as 'public
spheres'.
When establishing
the artworld as a particular public sphere, we must
explore this notion along two lines; firstly as a sphere
that is not unitary, but rather conflictual and a platform
for different and opposionary subjectivities, politics
and economies: a 'battleground' as defined by Pierre
Bourdieu and Hans Haacke. A battleground where different
ideological positions strive for power and sovereignty.
And, secondly, the artworld is not an autonomous system,
even though it sometimes strives and/or pretends to
be, but regulated by economies and policies, and constantly
in connection with other fields or spheres, which has
not least been evident in critical theory and critical,
contextual art practices. In contemporary art practices
we can see a certain 'permissiveness', an interdisciplinary
approach where almost anything can be considered an
art object in the appropriate context, and where more
than ever before work with an expanded praxis, intervening
in several fields other than the traditional art sphere,
and as such touching upon such areas as architecture
and design, but also philosophy, sociology, politics,
biology, science and so on. The field of art has become
a field of possibilities, of exchange and comparative
analysis. It has become a field for thinking, alternativity,
and can, crucially, act as a cross field, an intermediary
between different fields, modes of perception and thinking,
as well as between very different positions and subjectivities.
It thus has a very privileged, if tenable and slippery,
and crucial position and potential in contemporary society.
It is, then, perhaps
not surprising that such art institutions are under
constant scrutiny from funding and ruling bodies, be
they state controlled or private. What are, after all,
their goals? Do they compromise a critical and oppositional
space, or are they merely on the vanguard of new modes
of working and thinking, and there for the taking for
corporate models of production and capitalization? As
I mentioned in the beginning, we are witnessing a closing
of potential critical spaces, or at least a regulation
of them in terms of law if perceived as outside governmental
control, and a limitation of funds and/or imposition
of a managerial model taken from the corporate world,
in the case of government run institutions. Institutions
seem caught between a rock and a hard place, as it were,
and here I have not even mentioned the pressures internal
to the artworld. Ironically, financial cutbacks from
governmental bodies are usually done in the name of
the public: the public sphere is narrowed in the name
of the public – public here meaning people, and people
meaning taxpayers. The people, it is said, are not generally
interested in something as particular as art, unless
this art can seen as part of the culture, or more accurately,
entertainment industry. The public sphere is here conceived
of in terms of populism: Give the people want they want,
which is always already bread and circus.
We see, then, a double
movement diminishing the so-called autonomy of art and
the artworld: one the one hand, its own particularism,
or historical strive for autonomy, from being an arm's
length away from the political sphere has indeed removed
it from the trust and goodwill of political funding
bodies. On the other hand we see that the dissolvement
of the bourgeois public sphere has resulted in a decrease
of interest from politicians for an upkeep of the bourgeois
public sphere per excellance, the art institution. With
political populism on the rise, especially, the traditional
space for critical-rational thinking is becoming more
and more unwanted. But also within the welfare model
are we witnessing new contingencies and limitations,
mainly a surge towards merging culture with capital.
Obviously, we do not want to maintain, claim or return
to the bourgeois category of the art space and subjectivity,
nor to the classical avant garde notions of resistance,
which is why we need not only new skills and tools,
but also new conceptions of 'the institution'. I would
suggest that we take our point of departure in precisely
the unhinging of stable categories and subject positions,
in the interdisciplinary and intermediary, in the conflictual
and dividing, in the fragmented and permissive – in
different spaces of experience, as it were. We should
begin to think of this contradictory and non-unitary
notion of a public sphere, and of the art institution
as the embodiment of this sphere. We can, perhaps, think
of it as the spatial formation of, or platform for what
Chantal Mouffe has an agonistic public sphere:
According to such
a view, the aim of democratic institutions is not to
establish a rational consensus in the public sphere
but to defuse the potential of hostility that exists
in human societies by providing the possibility for
antagonism to be transformed into "agonism".
If we want to address
the problems the art institution is facing without reverting
to a historical and unusable model and rhetoric, I think
that an emphasis on the democratic potentials of the
art space is paramount. Democracy is, arguably, the
uniting, empty signifier of our times, and as such something
insurmountable and impossible to deny or defy openly.
In the public language game, no one can argue against
democracy within democracy, and by insisting on the
art institution as the place for democracy and, indeed,
its everlasting agonism, I believe one can counter both
populism and managerialism. This emphasis indicates
how our notions of audience, the dialogical, various
modes of address and conception(s) of the public sphere(s)
has become the all important points for our institutional
constitution, and how this entails both the ethical
and the political: Art that is not just concerned with
the artworld, but with the world.
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