Antagonisms. Case studies

Antagonisms is a research project which examines some political and activist aspects of artistic practices since the sixties. The exhibition presents "case studies" or specific projects in which the aesthetic object is used as a tool for social observation and critical practice and which explicitly manifest artistic attitudes of cultural resistance. Here works central to an understanding of the personal careers of certain authors are combined with occasional contributions from other artists which, while not necessarily being one of the cores of their discourse, clearly represented a stance taken at the time towards particular social conflicts. So, for example Marcel Broodthaers’ La Salle Blanche (1975) and Alighiero & Boetti’s 12 forme del giugno (1967) share the same space. Boetti reacts "artistically" to the armed conflicts that were taking place in different parts of the world at the time, drawing a cartography of condemnation. With one of his fundamental works, like most of the participants in Antagonisms, Broodthaers shows that he is aware of the risks of acting in a culture while simultaneously opposing it, or even understanding it as an entity apart. How to deal with the almost forced institutional assimilation of art? In the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, he offers a possible solution by transforming his exhibitions into décors, or multiplying the social function of the figure of the artist.

The chronological beginning of the exhibition coincides with the development of the new entertainment society, after the definitive end of the post-war period. The general ethical stance of the show is inspired by historical documents which are important for placing the issues tackled in it, such as the collection of journals of the Situationist International, published in Paris from 1958. Also in the way in which, in those days, there were reactions from groups of intellectuals and artists who considered it essential to intensify a culture of rebellion. Thus Guy Debord’s revolutionary cultural proclamation: "First we think the world needs changing. We want the change which will be the most liberating for the society and the life where we are imprisoned. We know that change is possible through appropriate actions." It was then, in a number of cities on two continents, that strategies were put forward to redefine the role of the artist, his activity and his relation with the spectator and the context where the cultural transaction takes place. The exhibition covers a period which began then and is still continuing, including works specially produced for it such as Pedro G. Romero’s FX. Sobre el fin del arte, which deals with idolatry and iconoclasm.

Antagonisms is not structured as the results of a supposed encyclopaedic search, but as an explanatory essay focusing on the study and testing of the current political effectiveness of certain data –works and documents– which help to clarify an understanding of the historical period analysed in the conceptual key proposed. To do so, the example of the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie is included, using an alternative form of exhibition which combines two rhetorics of presentation, that of art objects and that of documentary information, in order to give an account of what happened in the intense period between 1965 and 1975 in that local-international environment. It shows how the university, as a place for the management of knowledge, has the capacity to operate as an engine of collective resistance and social experiment. "Services", a collective project organised by Andrea Fraser and Helmut Draxler for the University of Lüneburg (Germany), provides an alternative contemporary art exhibition model, in which information, documents, association, process, distribution and politics are structured as a means of collective critical action and multiple authority, which proposes a fruitful relation between art and cultural studies for the nineties. Therefore, the specific condition of what is selected and its great relevance to a moment which was a landmark in time mark the way of selecting the works and documents.

This show is based on an exploration through essays in recent files and the current state of artistic thought in the West, and on the way some of its most sophisticated visual expressions on the political are fixed in exhibitions. As a result, we believe it is possible for the cases studied in Antagonisms to establish certain correspondences –not necessarily cause and effect– with conflictive social events based on complex models of artistic action and reaction, such as May 68 in Europe, the escalation of the Vietnam War in the United States and the repression of the military dictatorships in the seventies in Latin America. All three of them events which marked a generation of intellectuals formed after the end of the postwar period; historical events that still have a certain referential influence on current artistic behaviours which we are interested in here, after the fall of the Berlin Wall or the gradual establishment of a global model for the world economy.

The project accepts the essential difference Chantal Mouffe rightly emphasises between two terms which are close, but still allude to practices which do not overlap. What she calls politics is the set of institutional, or even artistic, discourses and practices that help to affirm and reproduce a certain kind of order. On the other hand, there is the idea of "the political", which corresponds to the dimension of antagonism; the distinction between friend and enemy. According to Schmitt, that difference may crop up in any kind of relation; it is not a matter of something that can be precisely located. On the contrary, it is a constant present possibility (ever-present). So, because it is always present, the dimension of "the political" never allows the complete, absolute, inclusive hegemony involved in political practice, concerned by its very nature with the system, the reproduction or deconstruction of hegemony.

In this context, Mouffe shows that cultural and artistic practices can play a central role as one of the levels on which identifications and forms of identity are constituted: "One cannot make a distinction between political art and non-political art, because every form of artistic practice either contributes to the reproduction of the given common sense –and in that sense is political– or contributes to the deconstruction or critique of it."

There are well over fifty artists taking part in Antagonisms, individually or collectively. However, we consider that the most important part of this exhibition is not the artists’ names. The main thing are the specific works and documents which have been selected; the places and moments they recall, the actions or reactions those individuals or collectives produce in cities in Europe, the United States and Latin America in the face of events with a high social impact, such as the ones mentioned earlier, or the effect of the end of the Cold War on affluent societies, or the conversion of cities into objects to be consumed by tourists. What seems to unite most of the artists taking part is a shared awareness of collective presence at a prolonged global crisis of representation, which is revealed in the aesthetic and the political, in the psychological and the economic. Hence, as Douglas Crimp says in relation to the AIDS crisis, the need for cultural activism as an added value to political activism. An activism understood as the task of collecting and distributing information first of all, but also bearing in mind that in certain circumstances culture can and must play a strong part in political activism, and unequivocally express its potential resistance value. Antagonisms provides a summary of the chronicle of forty years of interaction between the two. In that relation there have been moments of high dialectical tension which, as Timothy Clark shows, have forced a renegotiation of the two categories –art and politics–, as happened, for example, in the early seventies with the fruitful artistic reaction to the world of television and its power to disseminate individuality in an endless jungle of reproductions.

And so what in the crucible of politics is a public demonstration leads to the direct action in Paris of the Situationist International or, a quarter of a century later, in the theatrical performance and feminist militancy of Guerrilla Girls, who published posters and T-shirts with anti-misogynist slogans in New York; Muntadas turns the mass media into an alternative medium for social communication on the first local television channel in Spain in 1974; for Valcárcel Medina, the celebration of institutionalised culture with the opening of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid a year later is a valuable opportunity to infiltrate and reveal the workings of the mechanism of limitation imposed by the very apparatus of official culture.

Antagonisms is being shown at a time when the museum has lost a good deal of the critical credibility that it had been attributed socially as a gathering place and legitimising guarantor of art’s potential for transformation. Many of the postulates of modernity still tried to imagine the structuring of a utopia and an innovatory language which would supposedly be natural and spontaneous. The museum is the perfect incarnation of that desire: an indeterminate number of artefacts are grouped according to an internal logic which tends to dispel any historical or geographical diversity. Through that process, the work of art becomes an ontological category which does not seem to be the result of human work done in particular historical circumstances, but the result of an act performed by a universal, ahistorical being.

José Lebrero Stals