Let's do politics, (1)
by Reconstruction Community
(Contribution of the Reconstruction Community to the workshop organized by the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly on Saturday, 10 January 2009 at the Benaki Museum on: Extimacies: Art, politics and society at times of crisis”)We will attempt, at first, to reverse the order of the elements given by the workshop's title - “art, politics and society at times of crisis” - which sums up the question that has been frequently emerging lately: In what way/ways does art manage, recapitulate, or/and redeem political demands for society, public space and public sphere in general? Or, as more imperatively put in a recent public discussion, (2)“ how is it possible to be making art in the middle of a shit storm?”
We will also attempt to bypass questions, which naturally pose an issue regarding the possibility of contemporary art to assume the social projects of its times, such as “can contemporary art be considered as a kind of politics and social action, and under what conditions?”, given that art is still placed in an autonomous field, beyond social reality, or in a field that preserves some kind of connection, yet rather singular (3) and basically distant from the present political and social context. We bypass them because we believe that such questions, deriving from external art, that is, art acting “from outside” upon society, actually exonerate art from the accusations of both integrating into the market society and turning into a carrier of discourse and an advocate of a specious bourgeois democracy, which “has nothing whatsoever to do with genuine democracy -i.e. the direct exercise of all kinds of power by the people themselves and not by the political elites of professional politicians, or by the economic elites which control the internationalized capitalist market economy”, as Takis Fotopoulos mentions in a recent article published in the newspaper Eleftherotypia(4).
Therefore, when contemporary art or contemporary art theory uses terms of contemporary liberal democracy, a meaningless democracy given that the only right surviving today in fact is the right to dominance (I have the right to assert dominance, power), then, in reality, (art) does nothing but preserving the same system that creates it, doubting only on-demand. Such a characteristic example is the recent exhibition organized by the Ministry of the Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works, “Art and Nature” by which it actually legalizes – through a much-promoted event with the participation of many artists – the adoption of the General Framework for Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development, a text that flagrantly sacrifices natural environment on the altar of capitalist profiteering.(5)
We are not therefore interested in contesting the conditions under which contemporary art approaches the social field. And this is for we believe that art is clearly a part of society (the artist is primarily a social subject); art is based within the body of society, regardless how deeply rooted it is in social reality in any respective historical circumstance, or how much autonomous it becomes as an ideological construct of the bourgeois society. Art echoes society.
We believe that it is perhaps more important to re-state the initial question by keeping similar terms: How can a society in crisis – economic, social, political, value crisis – and turmoil hear the voice of an art, which is usually whispering behind the thick and high walls of the mainly institutionalized spaces (museums, institutes, galleries), inside hallways of television studios or newspapers, or in exhibition spaces where art events are organized with excessive government or private sector sponsorships?
The question is rather rhetorical since its phrasing embraces the answer identifying contemporary art practice (namely, the way art functions within the contemporary society, the institutions surrounding it, the system it is feeding on) with the conservatisation entailed by the practice of the dominant economic and political system (capitalism, neoliberalism) and definitely not with radical social and political demands. Contemporary art practice, many times even from the artist's workshop to the large domestic and international art events, meets market mentality, and likewise the artistic work meets the value mentality (or surplus value / symbolic value) of the merchandise. Therefore, it meets the same mentality that imposes raw violence (upon the worker, the citizen, the citizen of an opponent state), the same mentality that imposes the relations of subordination, the exploitation and the individualization of our needs to such an extent that they are turned into infinite indifference towards the consciousness of our sociability and the collective demands and common claims.
Thus, society finds it hard to listen carefully to art as a part of a radical social process nowadays. The consecutive questions in writings during the December events were characteristic: “where are the artists?”, “what are the artists doing?”, “why do the artists not speak?”
However, how does art itself(6) perceives itself in such conditions of crisis? The issue is not for art to become a vehicle of changes on its own, but to create fields of debate, like other social spaces, in order to produce a political result, namely social awakening and alertness. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino says: “Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space”.(7)
This is what art can do. What is the reason that art is not in a position to do it? Why does art remain troubled today, unwieldy before the crisis and the social uprising that we have recently experienced?(8)
We believe that this happens because art runs short within its self-reference. The dominant art movement is governed by the concern before the risk of losing its identity as art and the concern to determine itself strictly as artistic work or action. An urgent need to preserve over and beyond everything the identity of the artist and the artistic work is therefore expressed as an attempt to rescue and establish art itself, since in a competitive fragmented world, identity, as Holloway mentions “is a seeming paradise of certainty” or because, as he also says, “identity takes away the pain”.(9)
In a socio-political project it is important that there are different starting points, many different routes. Thus, while art is or may constitute one of these starting points, it does not proceed today to a transformation of the outcome of its action into a political act or, better phrased, contemporary art does not allow to the product it produces to be assimilated by the social process and transformed into political consciousness. On the contrary, it produces and circulates its products under terms. That is to say only with the label “artistic product”(10). In reality, however, it annuls this way its political character and any attempted negotiation with social and political extensions on a demand ends up, most times, in the mere aesthetization of politics. (The uprising is brought out as the absolute spectacle).
If, for example, a public discussion organized by artists aiming to raise issues on intense and very rapidly developing social processes, instead of remaining an open and dynamic process on development, it is finally documented by the artists themselves, promoted and circulated by them as art (in books, catalogues, publications) or exhibited as an artistic product (in exhibitions, museums); then naturally neither the artist becomes able to emerge as a political subject, nor the action itself can become broader, that is, politically extended. On the contrary, this is a process of recycling, identification and essentially necrophilia because it devitalizes the flow of the act and is easily absorbed by a fragmented world of many different identities that cannot form a union. The artist is only an artist and he/she is alone. The emphasis on the creation of the identity of the artist and the artistic work ceases to involve a process on development. It turns into “being”; a consummated substance and therefore dead, it becomes fetishised. Artistic product fetishism is a process equivalent to merchandise fetishism, and the recording, the reproduction, and the accumulation of artistic occurrence is also equivalent to the capital accumulation rationale.
Let's give a reverse example now; the hanging of a banner from Acropolis a few days ago. The banner had a totally political message: “Resistance”. Let's assume that this action was organized by a group of artists. It clearly is a political action, precisely because in the end it was not recorded as an artistic action, that is to say, it did not receive the art “label”. If, on the contrary, they were intending to hang the banner and at the same time record the action aiming to exhibit it, then the outcome would be totally different. It could not have been a political action, yet it would have ended up becoming its representation.(11) In this particular occasion, however, the self-reference of art cracks. Its significance does not lie in the fact that it is art, but art and more than art. The artist is not only an artist, but an artist and more than an artist.(12) This act could possibly have art as a starting point, but it remains an open process, a stake, a demand that can be adopted by anyone who wishes to make it his/her own demand. To be precise, the return of the motion to its starting point is not put as an end in itself; it does not claim an identity of origin. And this is why it is perhaps mostly an artistic action rather than any other type of action, in contrast with a performance attempted by dancers outside the building of the Police Directorate General of Athens at Alexandras Street, which was later presented by one of them on television, while introducing himself as well.(13) A political act was also the one organized by artists (directors, actors, visual artists) in the National Theatre. And this is because it interrupted the artistic art and specifically it interrupted the representation of reality (being a process of disassociation from reality) and associated it with what was happening outside, with reality itself. It was a political act also because it produced action, given that many of the spectators left the theatre in order to take part in the protest rally.
Art is part of the social chain and as such it can cause chain reactions, given that all social contradictions are concentrated within it. Yet, for art to criticize society, it must firstly criticize itself, that is, to negate itself as an effective system of today.(14) If art in older historical circumstances were able to doubt the institutions by criticizing from within, now this model has worked out all its possibilities. The integration and the reproduction of the system seem to be the prevailing perception now.
Obviously, the public space is an essential political space of action also for art, as a space of politics and political expression, a space for bringing out social contradictions and stakes, and also a space where these latter coexist. The public space is the real space. It belongs neither in the sphere of ideas nor in the sphere of political theory. It is the space of physical communication, gathering, cohabitation and conflict. It is our vital space for which we are obliged and called to struggle every day. The importance of public space is of course essential in a dialectical relationship with the public sphere. We believe in the priority of public space because we believe that it is more radical today, given that everything is being reduced to a clear relativism, to learn to organize macro politics from within this struggle, in the level of tangible everyday life. We deem politics as the identification of theory and practice and any political act is considered as such precisely because it involves a risk for the acting subject. There will be nothing left if we push off this struggling potential as well at the level of deliberation and representation, namely if we confer it to others or to opposing procedures.
On the contrary, through the practical application of self-organization and participatory techniques (collectives, residents' committees, assemblies, occupations etc), solidarity spirit and collective thinking and direct action (participation in protest rallies, creation of counter-information centres, etc), through the enhancement of our resistance before the fear of repression and disruption of our normality, first of all, the consciousness that we can subvert this situation on our own is fostered. Through such processes and agitations which endure, alternative forms, competitive to the dominant ones, are built and take away the monopoly of their dominance.(15) And wherever these forms occur, they can become examples of a subversive process for the radicalization and liberation of our lives and the grains of something new about to be born. It is exactly what we hear and what we call out these days in the streets of Athens: “Consciousness is born in the streets”.
Athens, 5 January 2009
Reconstruction Community
(*The participants in the discussion for the composition of the text were Dimitris Halatsis, Elena Akyla, Harris Kondosphyris, Katerina Nasioka, Nikos Kazeros)
Footnotes
(1) The coma is deliberately put at the end of the title. It leaves the sentence unfinished and in a way it means that let's do politics and more than politics (an identity analysis borrowed by Holloway and placed in this particular discussion about art, as analyzed hereupon).
(2) The discussion was organized in an apartment at Satovriandou Street on 14-12-2008 from the group Under Construction. For further information you may visit the site:
http://our-living-room.blogspot.com
(3) See other historical circumstances at: Daskalothanasis, Nikos, The artist as a historical subject from the 19th to the 21st century, Athens: Agra Publications, 2004, p.104.
(4) Fotopoulos, Takis, “The Crime of the Zionists and the Transnational Elite and the Stand of the Left” (summarized article published in the Greek newspaper Eleftherotypia on 3-1-2009, p8). The English and full version of the text can be found in the International Journal of Inclusive Democracy Vol. 5, No. 2 (Spring 2009)
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol5/vol5_no2_takis_crime_of_zionsts.htm
(5) See the text of the Reconstruction Community titled:“Can someone transcend alienation using the codes of alienation itself?", December 2008 [not yet translated in English]. See also the counter-action that took place inside the exhibition by the Localathens: http://localathens.blogspot.com/.
(6) Throughout the whole text we are not referring to art ontologically. We are referring to the social subjects and the existent social relations of contemporary artistic production as a whole (artists, theorists, critics, institutions, promoters).
(7) We have borrowed this phrase from the introduction citation in the Greek translation of J.F. Richard Day's Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, London: Pluto Press, 2005, translated by Panayiotis Kalamaras (Athens: Eleftheriaki Kultura, 2008) p.9.
(8) Similar to the above questions seem to be arising also from the perspective of the artistic subject: “what am I doing being an artist?”, “why can't I talk about the events?”, “do I want to? Am I able to?”, “why do I have to talk as an artist? Do I have to?”
(9) Holloway, John, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, London: Pluto Press, 2002 (Greek translation, Athens: Savvalas, 2006, pp.203, 211 – see his excellent analysis on identification and fetishisation pp.166-214).
(10) Respectively, the relation of art to other subject fields is an open process in appearance, given that even when it incorporates their elements it keeps a hegemonic role. It therefore proceeds to an artificial osmosis in order to preserve its primacy.
(11) As concerns views on the representation of the action, see Daskalothanasis, Nikos op.cit., p.169.
(12) What is important is what transcends the identity of the artist. See Holloway, John, op. cit., p.210, where he says: “There is a vast difference between a struggle concerning merely the identity (“we are Black”, “we are Irish”, “we are Basque”) and a struggle concerning the identity and, along with identification, denies identification: “we are indigenous but we are more than indigenous”, “we are women but we are not only women”. While the second form of struggle opposes identification during identification's validation process itself, the first one is easily absorbed by a fragmented world of identities”.
(13) “EREVNA” television program by Pavlos Tsimas on 16-12-2008.
(14) On the contrary, art perceives itself as elite and connives with other ruling elite to establish the existent situation, using bureaucratic control mechanisms to survive as part of the market system.
(15) As concerns the direct action currents in contemporary radical activism, see Day, J.F. Richard, op.cit., pp.31-65.
Photographs: Nikos Kazeros/ Monastiraki Square, Christmas Party by the What Street Party.