The Double Nature of Contemporary Art

Let us, if only for a brief moment — even though it may be cracking nuts with sledgehammers or just far, far too late — look at contemporary art in the light of the Western Marxist idea of art as an instrument of resistance, what Herbert Marcuse called "the great refusal" and Debord named "the art of change". What do we see? On the face of it, it doesn't look particularly good. The traditional forms of intellectual and aesthetic opposition no longer to seem to be available. Visual images, as well as words and music, appear to lack their former alienating effect and are rarely antagonistic towards the prevailing order. Wherever we direct our gaze, it is mostly the complicity of the art institution with established power that is conspicuous.

The speculation economy of neo-liberal capitalism pumped huge sums of money into the art market after 1989, with the result that art today is closely tied to the transnational circulation of capital. At the same time, national governments, provinces and cities use art as a marketing instrument in the febrile competition for investments and tourists. These developments towards an ever-closer link between art and capital, and between art and the ruling order, are undoubtedly the predominant tendency when it comes to contemporary art.

But at the same time, it is important to point out that the space of art is still characterized by the presence of various representations of the political and attempts to use the field of art as a starting point for the visualization of conflicts that have been marginalized in the broader public sphere. For example, "political" exhibitions are held regularly, and even large institutions here and there have facilitated "political" exhibitions, and presented (artistic representations of) "art-external" themes.

In a quickly compiled list of just some of the important ones from the last 10 to 15 years, the following comes to mind: "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa" at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich and PS1 in New York; "The Interventionists" at MASS MoCA; "Communism" at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin; "Populism" at the Museum for Contemporary art in Oslo and Frankfurter Kunstverein, among other venues; "Revolution is not a Garden Party" at the Trafó Gallery in Budapest and Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic in Zagreb, among other venues; "Signs of Change" at Exit Art in New York; "Asking We Walk: Voices of Resistance" at Den Frie Udstilling in Copenhagen; Creative Time's "Living as Form" in New York; the 7th Berlin Biennial "Forget Fear" and "Soulèvement" at Jeu de Paume in Paris. The list is long. Since the end of the 1990s, there has been a greater interest in collective and antagonistic art, and art activism projects, which have been invited into art institutions and have been made the object of major exhibitions.

If we take the big biennials and Documenta as signposts, in the period after 1989 we can observe a movement from the highly traditional exhibitions of the early 1990s — with a preponderance of paintings by middle-aged white men, Jan Hoet's Documenta IX in 1992, for example — to the globalization-critical and postcolonial exhibitions of the late 1990s and 2000s. This occurred at Okwui Enwezor et al.'s Documenta 11 in 2002, where an attempt was made to start an explicit shift away from the prevailing colonial art-historical and political hierarchy. It is also where contemporary art, in an interaction with critical philosophy, urbanism and economics, mapped out the challenges and possibilities of the postcolonial era.

Of course, many of the exhibitions that have been described as "political" have been so only in a very limited way. Often, the reference to the "political" and the inclusion of activist projects has most of all been a sales gimmick. An attempt to "comply with the wishes of the museums, the periodicals and the market for a visual representation of the political" or, quite simply, a move to disable any potentially radical gesture. Nevertheless, there have been attempts to draw attention to pressing political issues and even to contribute to ongoing political struggles or to challenge the way we think about them.

However, such exhibitions have been confronted with the problem that they take place in the absence of a political context in which the projects could potentially have a meaning beyond the enclave of the art institution. Paradoxically, it looks as if parts of the art institution are full of representations of political conflicts and struggles because, by and large, they do not appear anywhere else. There is no global progressive political public sphere for new thinking to articulate modes of resistance and discuss effective strategies for curbing the implementation of the new anti-dissent regime that is developing across the world, from Copenhagen through Athens to Gaza. This is meant to ensure that the well-heeled survive the crises and catastrophes ahead, whether they take the form of terror attacks, immigration or climate disaster. In the absence of viable radical political projects, it seems to be at the margins of the art institution that counter-paradigms and political alternatives are being kept alive, if in no other way than as images of conflict.

Contradictions

What this all means is that we are dealing with a situation full of contradictions; and, of course, that was part of what Benjamin, Marcuse, Lefebvre and the others registered in their critical analyses of avant-garde art, and its ambivalent problematizing of the autonomy of art in the first half of the 20th century. They were all so keenly aware that modern art involved a promesse de bonheur, pointing beyond established bourgeois capitalist society, while at the same time confirming it.

This was what Marcuse crystallized in his formulation about the affirmative character of art. On the one hand, the autonomy of art equips artists with a freedom that is both a proclamation of a free praxis in a free society and a critique of the existing unfree society. On the other hand, modern art always legitimizes the society in which it exists. As Marcuse writes, the independent sphere of art is affirmative, since it is "compatible with the bad present".

This dialectical duality was the platform for the attack launched by the historical avant-gardes on the art institution, and their paradoxical attempts to overcome artistic autonomy and realize the freedom of art outside its institutional base as an element in the radical transformation of human life. The anarchistic imagination that had hibernated in art, but disappeared in the rest of human life because of modern life's rationalization, was to be unleashed and made available to all. But, as we now know all too well, the ambitious project of the avant-garde did not succeed. As with the...