“Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.”
-Albert Camus
“In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power.”
-Cornel West
The virus that incubated in a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December in the form of a respiratory illness is not unlike pneumonia. Initially, few had any idea where the virus came from, but soon people started to realize that eating exotic live animals was the likely source. Soon after, a man in his sixties with pre-existing conditions succumbed to an untimely death, gasping for air, he was a regular at the wet market in Wuhan. People quickly started to blame bats, or rather, their consumption. A woman went viral in a YouTube video eating bat soup. The Chinese were vilified and blamed. They were brandished not as a culture that brought civilization the invention of paper and pasta, but as vile, brutal savages. Within weeks, the virus had spread along with the viral video of the woman eating bat soup. It was too late for containment. The Chinese authorities, realizing this, imposed a strict blanket of control—the battle against the virus had begun, only it was not led by a team of doctors of medicine, but by scientists and specialists in computer science and big data. The virus, having taken up residence in lungs and under fingernails, on cellphones and reusable plastic coffee cups, traveled far and wide: from South Korea to Italy, New York City and Berlin. And everywhere the virus went, so too followed new methods of totalitarian control, much of which was marketed as pandemic management.
In the wake of the coronavirus we now have the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Today, as such, it seems we have entered a post-pandemic order with revolution, not reform, at its core. With mass demonstrations now taking place all over the world, the structural inequalities of ethnicity have laid bare how COVID-19 unfairly impacted communities of color, such that what we are witnessing today is arguably a mass pushback against the repressive machinery of the state, synthesizing issues long-since related, but rarely articulated, from police brutality and White supremacy, inadequate healthcare, mass unemployment and/or underemployment, through to the suspension and violation of human rights and civil liberties, leading all the way to what appears to be the imminent wholesale collapse of American empire.
Across the world, the production of art today seems to be concerned with social responsibility, how to act and think correctly in a global environment marked by all the aforementioned insecurities and forms of civil and social unrest. The relationship between art and politics has, of course, always been extremely fraught and problematic, at times even contradictory. Today, two concepts define this appositeness: autonomous and committed art. In 1920, George Grosz, a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group, defined a similar dilemma, asking to what extent artists, curators, and critics must come to terms with autonomous and committed art. If history has taught us anything, it is that there is an ongoing battle between the oppressors and the oppressed, which may at times — during a pandemic or mass uprising for example — make art seem inadequate or even impotent. Nevertheless, indifference to art’s social coefficient negates that art can and does have a crucial responsibility; and in times of extreme uncertainty, like we are in today, it is often artists that engender expressions of solidarity across borders, cultures and ethnicities.1
Expanding on this definition, Grosz, together with Wieland Herzfelde, wrote a now infamous essay called Art Is in Danger! (1925) whereby the two sketch out a more general definition of socially engaged art:
To summarize: the meaning, essence and history of art stand in direct relationship to the meaning, essence and history of society. The prerequisite for awareness and criticism of art in our time is awareness of the realities and relationships of real life in all its upheavals and tensions. Humankind has been in control of the earth’s means of production, on a large scale, for a century now. At the same time, the struggle for possession of these means has grown ever more inclusive, drawing humankind, without exception, into its story. […] This struggle for existence, which divides humankind into exploiting and exploited halves, is called in its clearest and final form: class struggle. 2
The outcome of this formulation is that art has always had a necessary social coefficient, which is fundamental to an opposing view of history between the oppressors and the oppressed, of which art must necessarily untangle and take apart. There is no such thing as being apolitical, meaning that artists must invariably come to terms with the question: ‘what is to be done?’ Art, whether we like to admit it or not, has always been a weapon in lieu of class struggle. However, for it to be weaponized, it’s usefulness stems not from its “edginess” or “autonomous” formal qualities, but instead upon a social coefficient: to “measure the worth of [art] work in terms of its social usefulness and effectiveness–not according to some arbitrary, individualistic principle of art, nor by the work’s ‘success,’”3 hence the sensitivity artists and curators must exert during moments of catastrophe and crisis.
Building upon this formulation, it appears that might also be a slight of hand and a contradiction at play. That art, if we take social responsibility at face value, is often woefully unprepared to respond during moments of profound crisis. During socially or politically tenuous times, art can seem futile, even useless, distracting and perhaps even antagonistic to socially responsible behavior.
In questioning the power structures of the art world, the coronavirus has given rise to substantive conversations about change both within the rarefied art world and outside it. Truth be told, change within the art world was and is long over due, all the more so now as the world comes to terms with rebellion in the post-pandemic world.
Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that has gripped the world and now with the rise of mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, artists and curators alike have come to realize the brutal extent of their precarity as transient workers within the global capitalist system, but also the responsibility each of us have with respect to solidarity and forging communities that go beyond narcissistic addictions to ego, money, fame and spectacle. Together with thousands of museum workers that are now either furloughed or laid off, the entire art system is being forced to come to terms with an entanglement to big money and collectors, which have long since retained connections to hierarchies that promote global militarism, surveillance and control. The art world does not need a reminder that in 2019, Warren Kanders, a vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art and CEO of Safariland that manufactures the same tear gas used against protesters in the past week, was forced to step down after the activism of the collective Decolonize This Place. Or the case of Yana Peel, the former executive director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, who was also forced to resign after The Guardian revealed she had controlling interest in an Israeli company that sold a powerful spying software to countries like Saudi Arabia that it used to target individuals, hack into their phones and monitor their communications.
If one considers the art market as part of the status quo, it also means that art is trapped in somewhat of a contradiction. If art’s position within the global capitalist system is truly committed to political and critical art, the ease at which it is appropriated inevitably neutralizes its capacity to foment resistance, thereby limiting art’s affective capacity to empty gestures and/or woke grandstanding, easily co-opted by dominant power systems that create and perpetuate the social antagonisms many artists appear keen to resist.
In the midst of the coronavirus crisis, a new spectacle has emerged: the eponymous online viewing room. What may at first glance seem like an innocuous or playful distraction, not altogether different from the preexisting deluge of art on social media, the online viewing room has become the art world’s knee jerk response to mandatory “social distancing” measures.
While certainly some of these online viewing rooms may display works of high artistic merit or quality in the virtual Uffizi or the virtual Met, for example, the art presented by virtue of these platforms becomes flattened, void of in-situ experience, and ultimately part of a wider system of digital surveillance and control. This is not hyperbole. While so-called post-Internet had lives and breathes on the internet, this system enmeshes us within an Orwellian infrastructure of surveillance capitalism. What I am attempting to say is that works presented in these online viewing rooms suspend the symbolic experience of art by plunging it further into an abyss of digital alienation, which would perhaps not be so bad if there were not caveats attached to it that mimic China’s Social Credit Score pogrom – a system of total digital surveillance and control, bound to systems of identification, facial recognition and types of spying software peddled by Yana Peel, the former executive director of the Serpentine Gallery.
By focusing instead on how art is being used today to challenge pre-existing models, the SUBSTANCE 100 list celebrates art-driven initiatives that are enacting positive social, environmental and political change.
Hence, the well-oiled machine of the gallery/art fair circuit is now promoting a system that exploits art for its symbolic value, with the emergence of online viewing rooms culpable of facilitating art’s further entanglement into the machine of surveillance capitalism. The online viewing room merely mimics the exploitative choreography between technology, power and capital. Beyond the purview of online viewing rooms, even memes suffer the same impotence, exploited by centralized systems of power (Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, etc.) that neutralize even the most savage and dankest memes to realm of capital and control. Even memes that on the surface may appear edgy, transgressive or even critical, the fact is they exist within a highly controlled online ecosystem that is becoming less prone to critical voices by the day. The broader political and economic system today appears geared towards full blown pandemic induced digital alienation and increased surveillance, with artists marching in full step towards their own exploitation and alienation.
That said, there are pockets of resistance in the art world. The SUBSTANCE 100 list produced by the digital museum Collecteurs, is about highlighting art infrastructures that are boldly forging ahead with new and diverse ways of engaging in the art world and beyond. It platforms artists, activists, collectives, movements and organizations that are disrupting the dominant power mechanisms entrenched within the art world. By focusing instead on how art is being used today to challenge pre-existing models, the SUBSTANCE 100 list celebrates art-driven initiatives that are enacting positive social, environmental and political change. Some of the names and initiatives include Art Against Displacement, a coalition of artists and professionals that seek to amplify the demands of grassroots housing and community-led rezoning efforts in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Lower East Side. The Substance 100 list also includes trailblazing figures like Hannah Black, the Manchester-born art critic who draws on feminist and afro-pessimist theory to critique dominant power structures within the culture industry. The list includes other groups such as Extinction Rebellion, the decentralized climate change group who advocate environmental change policies in large urban centers often using tactics such as civil unrest and engaged theater to draw attention to their demands and Decolonize This Place, mentioned earlier, that started the actions that led to the removal of Warren Kanders from the Whitney Museum. Also on the SUBSTANCE 100 list is the ineffable art critic Boris Groys, who often examines the role of socially engaged art and the production social bodies within broader critiques of control and power writ large.
However, as we inevitably wrestle with the dilemmas of the post-pandemic world, and seek answers to the questions about what art and society might look like in the wake of the demonstrations against police brutality today, we should not shy away from the more serious questions about art and the art system, and our relationship to the social and political reality we now face in this intrepid new world.
Reflecting on the lessons history may provide for us, the late-Slovenian art critic and curator, Igor Zabel, has some insight to offer. In describing “commitment” from an essay from 2002, Zabel stresses the fact that the “idea of a consciously political or critical art practice contains contradictions that simply make it impossible for us to accept the concept of ‘committed’ art as the assumed response to questions about the relationship between art and society.” According to Zabel, “both opposing concepts — ‘political art’ and ‘autonomous art’ — negate each other in their very opposition and expose each other’s contradictions.”4 Though he was writing several years before the onset of surveillance capitalism and the types of hypolarizations and populism we are witnessing today, what Zabel was describing was the inevitable tension that exists between autonomous and committed art, a tension that I would argue is being played out before our very eyes yet again.
Zabel was also writing at a time of profound cultural, political and social upheaval, on the heels of a very brutal succession of conflicts that erupted in the 1990s across the Balkans with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Thus, while it is necessary to absorb how the paradoxes of “autonomous” art operated in a milieu of competing ethnic, political and religious tensions, the lessons Zabel may provide for us today seem potentially infinite and invaluable.
Starting in 1986, Zabel worked as a curator at the Ljubljana Museum of Modern Art, a position he maintained up until his death in 2005. During his tenure, he witnessed the dissolution and breakup of the Yugoslav state, which subsequently led to a series of brutal, albeit interrelated ethnic conflicts and wars of independence that lasted from 1991–2001. Describing his experience working as a curator at the time, Zabel spoke of his awareness at the dilemmas of art at a time when such profound political uncertainties were swirling in the air: “my colleagues and I painfully realized that the world of art was a ‘secondary matter’ in comparison with what was happening beyond the walls of studios and art museums, but we also realized that, nevertheless, we could not remain indifferent to these issues.”5 Consequently, the cultural and political milieu in which Zabel was working had considerable impact on the dilemmas confronting him, but these did not stop him from pursuing a belief that art must confront, not shy away from, the dominant political and social issues confronting him and his colleagues.
What Zabel and his colleagues came up with was a way of instrumentalizing the symbolic capital of art and dispersing to where it was needed most. In Sarajevo, the heart of the then conflict, Zabel organized an exhibition where artists were encouraged to confront the brutal realities of the war. “In our view, the symbolic value of such an act was based on the real market value of the collection. We believed that, although ‘humanitarian’ aid might save lives, it could also prolong the status quo and turn the citizens of Bosnia into passive victims; and for this reason, we also hoped that the cultural values embodied in the collection would be able to contribute a material foundation for active strategies developed by Bosnian citizens themselves.” 6
Today, as we wrestle with a different problem, the core issues remain the same. Can art have a direct impact on the world? If so, how? Thus far, the response from the contemporary art world seems to be one of silence, indifference or black-square activism. Whether due to inertia or apathy, or privilege or money, the inability of the art world to speak truth to power is part and parcel of a systemic problem within it. But questions linger, so too do solutions. After all is said and done, what will the perestroika of the post-pandemic order look like? Can art formulate surrogate systems of resistance that develop new strategies of defiance to systematic racism and police brutality, inadequate healthcare and a violation of human and civil rights? How about to the new-world order of surveillance capitalism and digital alienation?
In this respect, perhaps, it could be useful to return to Theodor Adorno’s essay Commitment, wherein he unpacks the mutual complacency of committed versus autonomous art, revealing, as it were, the inherent tensions that inevitably exist between committed and autonomous art along a kind of continuum.7 Adorno approaches autonomous and committed art not as a dialectic with a view of synthesizing the two, but rather as two antagonistic strategies that, in the end, cancel each other out. Adorno takes stock of autonomous art — the idea that art exists in a vacuum as a self-referential discipline void of other social or political matters — suggesting that art is independent from life and defines itself solely on account of historical dialogue with itself. Though in Adorno’s view art history is defined as linear, part of the Enlightenment idea of progress, there is also the idea that art history is a nonlinear process of multiracial and multi-canonical attempts to chin up to culture and history. And it is here that a history of critical or political art (which is based on a keen understanding of the social reality and social responsibility of art in lieu of the oppressor and oppressed, class struggle, racial and gender based forms of discrimination) also contains a paradox: that it cannot avoid being co-opted by the very system which it critiques. This led Adorno to an impasse, noting that if committed art can be appropriated by the very powers it attempts to critique, that it cannot escape being exploited by the global capitalist system writ large. This tension also led Adorno to suggest that perhaps there exists a catch-22, a negation of the idea that art can be neither completely absorbed by ideology nor to the marketplace, with the conclusion being that art can continue to serve as a focal point for resistance, albeit in a kind of calcified way. Adorno ultimately concluded that the relationship between committed and autonomous art is not fixed, that it is permanently in flux, constantly changing and responsive to the winds of social and political circumstances. The crucial take away from Adorno is thus that autonomous art can evolve beyond self-referentiality in order to come to terms with evolving sociopolitical concerns:
The emphasis on the autonomous work, however, is itself sociopolitical in nature. […] At present everything cultural, even autonomous works, which are in danger of suffocating in cultural twaddle; at the same time the work of art is changed with wordlessly maintaining what politics has no access to. […] This is not the time for political works of art; rather, politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art, and it has penetrated most deeply into works that present themselves as politically dead.8
It goes without saying that while Adorno’s formulation refers to his particular historical epoch, that we can also take his ideas further afield and use them to formulate new tools and languages of resistance today. Thus, while it appears that today the demand for deterritorializing the autonomous quality of art towards social and political responsibility is now, perhaps more than ever, required. Accordingly, the discontinuous space between autonomous and committed art requires a keen sensitivity towards our unique social and political context, but also the ability to see past disciplinary distinctions between fields such as art and activism, technology and politics, poetry and science, and so on. By reformulating the notion that autonomous art can, and perhaps should, contribute to a new general intellect of multiracial and multi-canonical cultures, perhaps then we can begin to ascertain strategies that question art’s near indissoluble relationship to power and capital.
The herculean task that now lies before us in lieu of the coronavirus pandemic and the massive uprising against racial inequality that came after, is now at a crucial precipice. While many are quick to cite the dystopian adjacent policies of shock doctrine that often follow moments of crisis in the neoliberal world order, this formulation offers little by way of hope or opportunity. It is crucial today, I believe, to keep in mind not only the work of Adorno, Zabel and Grosz; but also, critically, the cultural zeitgeist that emerged in lieu of black liberation struggles and writings of profoundly important thinkers like Angela Davis, Cornel West and Hannah Black.
As we continue to face the four catastrophes that Martin Luther King Jr warned us about years ago—militarism (in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc.), poverty (at record levels in the ‘West’), materialism (narcissistic egos in art and music, celebrity culture, fame, fashion and trends), racism (against black and indigenous peoples, Asians, Jews and Muslims); we must continue to remind ourselves that a nonviolent revolutionary project of democratic sharing and redistribution of power is possible, even necessary, and that art has a crucial role to play in achieving and advancing it.
Dorian Batycka
Rijeka, Croatia
April 8, 2020
End.
2 George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde, “Art Is in Danger!” [Die Kunst ist in Gefahr, 1925], George Grosz, John Heartfeld and Wieland Herzfelde, Art Is in Danger!, trans. By Paul Gorrell, Curbstone Press, Willimantic, Conn., 1987, p. 59.
3 Ibid., p. 58-59.
4 Igor Zabel, “Commitment” [Angazma, 2002], Igor Zabel, Contemporary Art and Theory trans. Rawley Grau, JRP|Ringier Publications, Berlin, Germany, 2012, p. 71.
5 Ibid., p. 73.
6 Ibid., p. 74.
7 Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. By Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Columbia University Press, 1992.
8 Ibid., p. 93-94.