Critical art and social conflicts

We are living at a time when, with the justification of a supposed anti-idealism and the disappearance of the Subject, notions such as the public sphere, the critical space or class conflict are tending to disappear, or rather to be regarded as unnecessary. Today we are seeing the emergence of a host of political subjectivities (ethnic, gay, ecological, feminist, religious). However, that multiculturalism is most often more a celebration of the diversity of styles and differences which essentially sustain a subterranean One, in which productive radical and antagonistic difference is obliterated. The truth, for that host of sexes, is Unisex, the suppression of difference in favour of a whole which is the container of the multitude. That suppression is undoubtedly based on the exclusion of the public space: the common place where plural identities can come together and antagonise and which forms the basis of any democratic project.

Politically speaking, multiculturalism is one of the dominant aspects of the ideology of capital in a globalised economy, which serves to conceal rather than reveal differences. Recently, for example, we have seen a succession of art exhibitions and events presenting "new" Chinese art. Shows such as The New Chinese Art (San Francisco, MOMA, 1999) and especially the 47th Venice Biennale were highly significant. Through a massive inclusion of artists of Chinese origin in the official section, the Biennale provided a sounding board for the processes of economic, financial, commercial and technical integration and homogenisation. It is true that in exhibitions like this one, the differences between the West and China disappear or are reduced to merely formal characters. Real problems, such as the fact that in a world of transnationals China has been put in charge of replacing the Western working class, or that in the West manual work has come to be regarded as a genuine obscenity, are hidden.

As Julia Kristeva remarked some years ago, there is a good deal of talk about the return of fascism, religious fundamentalism, nationalism. But those phenomena are no more than brutal, archaic sicknesses, temporary outbreaks –let us hope– in our societies which democracy must eventually neutralise. The real danger comes from a system that tends to schematise singularity –even as perversely as certain theoretical defenders of multiculturalism maintain–, depriving individuals of their psychic specificity. In society today, whatever is exceptional about human beings runs the risk of being made banal. Today everyone seems to adjust to a standardised hierarchy of the image expected of them. At the same time, individuals are gradually ceasing to assume their own responsibilities. The aim of culture is a problem today. Culture as a critical rebellion, which emerged in Ancient Greece, culture as an element of liberation, is in danger of disappearing as it is increasingly transformed into a product ready to be consumed.

In that context –and at a time when the new entertainment society is beginning to become the natural thing– there was a reaction from groups of intellectuals and artists who, after the Second World War, thought it essential to return to a culture of rebellion that would enable us to conserve our psychic reality and cultivate memory and subjectivity. Such was particularly the case of Guy Debord and the other members of the Situationist International who, from the late fifties, drafted strategies for action in which they rethought the role of the artist, his activity and his relation to the spectator in the context of the new society. We were up against the evident logic that any act of rebellion, at least as it had been conceived by modernity, is doomed to be assimilated by the system that makes it possible. His influence on many later artists, such as Gordon Matta-Clark or even figures or groups from popular culture, such as Malcolm McLaren or the Sex Pistols, has been clear. The importance certain film practices have had for the situationists’ strategies has also been vital in understanding the works of artists today who use the cinema in a way which is incompatible with the economy of show business.

Most of the artists in the exhibition are aware of the risks of acting in culture while at the same time opposing that culture, and even culture as a whole, as an entity separated from the reality of the world. One of the aspects they try to clarify is how each individual can confront what seems to be the institutional assimilation of art by force. Following Duchamp, artists like Marcel Broodthaers in the seventies or Philippe Thomas in the eighties and nineties found the solution by transforming their exhibitions into decors, or having their works (in Thomas’s case) signed by the collectors themselves. In that way they anticipated, and to a certain extent averted, the ultimate fate of the art object when it is assimilated by the system; in other words, its conservation, literally made sacred in a container that allows journeys in time and space, the multiplicity of ownership and the attribution of meaning.

Still based on an idealistic and romantic spirit, many of the postulates of modernity structured an ideal, utopian place, as well as a supposedly natural and spontaneous language. That utopian place reaches its perfect incarnation in the museum, where an indeterminate number of artefacts are grouped according to an internal logic which tends to dispel any historical or geographical diversity. Art in the museum thus becomes an ontological category not created by men in particular historical circumstances, but by the notion of universal, ahistorical Man. As a result, there has been a tendency to regard history as something single and coherent, written with proper names, and part of a formal evolution which now seems to have been cut off by a kind of global eclecticism which, as we were saying, only replaces one idea of subject with another. It is therefore no surprise that there have still been marginal and clearly disfigured art movements and projects in our recent history. The role played in the USA by groups such as Art Workers' Coalition, Women Artists and Revolution, or events such as the Artists’ Protest Tower (1966), Angry Arts (1967), or the exhibition Information (1970), has been silenced.

Likewise, one of the most significantly mistaken perceptions in relation to the new critical attitudes in the art world of our time has been to acknowledge the importance of Minimalism only as the final chapter in the history of abstraction, the culmination of "art for art’s sake". However, as an invitation to activism and to a political and "realistic" art, the Minimalist device (especially in the world of dance and music) presupposes a break with the idealistic space of traditional sculpture by introducing into the work of art the question of the perception of the space of social reality, as well as anti-rhetorical and anti-expressive, non-hierarchical, strategies. In outline, the evolution of a certain formalism towards social activism can be clearly seen in the work of artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Hans Haacke, Carl Andre or Adrian Piper. From a certain moment, the works of those artists reformulate the traditional relation between object and spectator. The results are open and guarantee the spectator an unprecedented degree of interaction and control over the artistic experience. These are literal presences that question the capacity of objects to transcend the real world and take it to the level of art. Between the spectator and the object a "theatrical" interrelation is established, a theatre that may involve the representation of the negation of art itself, and also means a critical approach to the way things are in the previously ordered world. That experience is absolutely dependent on literal perceptions, totally incompatible with idealised and harmonic modernist painting and sculpture.

Manuel J. Borja-Villel