11 2006 Artistic Internationalism and Institutional Critique
Translated by Aileen Derieg Jens Kastner
I.
It was in 1970 as a group called
"Guerilla Art Collective Project" placed military uniforms filled
with meat in the main square in front of the university in San Diego, which
were labeled "ship to ...", to protest against the war in Viet Nam on
the one hand and on the other to make art (cf. Breitwieser 2003: 16). One of
the group members and initiator of the action, which was carried out on the
borderline between the installative and the sculptural as well as between art
and politics, was the Marcuse pupil Allan Sekula.
The social philosopher Herbert Marcuse
was one of the most important advocates of the sixties movements. With his
philosophical, contemporary critical work One-Dimensional
Man (1964) he influenced many students at that time in western Europe and
North America and saw in the protest movements new possibilities for the
realization of alternative, non-alienated ways of living, an approach that
later became conventional in research dealing with social movements. However,
it was not only these possibilities that united the various upheavals since the
mid-1960s and partly enabled the conjoining of very different concerns –
feminist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian,
anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic concerns. Similar in some ways to Dada
fifty years earlier, in terms of what the actors had in common, 1968 as an
international or transnational upheaval, as "a world revolution" (il
manifesto), in which widespread artistic mobilization was also involved, was
based primarily on negative internationalistic motivation: the war against Viet
Nam conducted by the USA was the outstanding negatively uniting element.
"The military intervention of the USA in the Viet Nam conflict gave the
protests of the various national student avant-garde groups an international
dimension, an idea that united them, and a common strategy"
(Gilcher-Holtey 2003: 49). Just as social criticism was linked at the political
level in the urban centers through this negative bracket with liberation
movements in developing countries, at the cultural level the agitation
endeavors of politicized students joined forces with artists expanding their
methods. Countless artistic actions took place in the most diverse countries in
the course of the protest movements, linking anti-war ideas with local social,
cultural and political concerns, and especially joined them with the actions of
the social movements. In his history of conceptual art Tony Godfrey (2005: 190)
wonders about "how little the political situation was directly addressed
by art" in light of the vehement student unrest, but he considers the
importance of the Viet Nam war in the development of art in the late 1960s and
early 1970s so great that he begins every chapter of his book by elaborating on
it.
The internationalist orientation
functions here, which is the thesis of this article, as the link between
artistic and social movements and as a possibility for overcoming the
structural obstacles between both. This conjunction is by no means to be taken
for granted, nor is it generally the case. It is blocked, according to Pierre
Bourdieu, by the complete differentness and incompatibility of the respective
fields. Although there exists a "structural affinity between literary and
political avant-garde" (Bourdieu 2001:398), the reconciliation of the two
"through a kind of social, sexual and artistic global revolution"
(Bourdieu 2001: 399) repeatedly runs into the rifts or hurdles that exist
between the two areas. It was not unusual for these hurdles to appear even in
the context of 1968. They were evident, for example, in the repeatedly occurring,
mutual vituperation between political activists and activist artists. In 1971
Henryk M. Broder, for instance, contended that the Actionist artist Otto Muehl
was "no leftist, but an anal-fascist", whereas Muehl criticized the
bourgeois mentality of all revolutionaries, who "put on their
slippers" again when they are finished revolting (quoted from Raunig 2005:
174). The controversies surrounding Muehl and the other actors from
"Viennese Actionism" were ultimately so heated because the art scene
in Austria
had a certain dominance within the situation in 1968, which was generally
marked, according to Robert Foltin (2004: 74) by "a lack of theory and by
a low degree of militancy".[i]
II.
The thesis that social and artistic
movements come together and/or mutually permeate one another in artistic
internationalism also contradicts two narrow readings of Bourdieu, which have been
formulated in discussions about institutional critique. Andrea Fraser's reading
(2005), for example, which picks up from Bourdieu, regards the art field as
being so closed that everything done outside it can have no effects at all
towards the inside – and vice versa. Gerald Raunig (2006) rightly criticizes
positions like Fraser's as "closure phantasms". Stefan Nowotny (2006)
criticizes a similar position on the part of Isabelle Graw (2005). Nowotny
maintains that in her essay "Beyond Institutional Critique", there is
a "flagrant example of fixing institutional critique art practices to
art". However, Graw's position also stands for a second curtailment of
Bourdieu's art field theory. In light of the sales-oriented clientele of a New
Yorker art fair, completely uninterested in content, she wrote in a taz article in 2004 that "under
these circumstances ... the notion of art as an autonomous special sphere ...
can no longer be maintained." However, since the autonomization of the art
field, the economy of symbolic goods, which Bourdieu speaks of, does not take
place between the poles of total commercialization and "pure
production".[ii] Hence the existence and
expansion of influential art fairs does not at all contradict the autonomy of
the field.[iii]
Objections must therefore be raised against both of these constrictions:
talking about the autonomy of the art field means neither asserting a social
area incapable of achieving effects towards the outside, nor that a terrain exists
here, which is untouched by economic, social and other influences. Instead, it
is a matter of pointing out specific functionalities that differ from those in
other social fields.[iv]
The artist, photographer and art
theoretician Allan Sekula also formulated the protest against the Viet Nam war in
another action, which was photographically documented as well. In this six-part
photo series an activist, barefooted and equipped with a Vietnamese peasant's
straw hat and plastic machine gun, crawls through the wealthy suburbs of a
large US American city. The title of the 1972 action, "Two, three, many
... (terrorism)", directly refers to Ernesto Che Guevara's
anti-imperialist focus theory. In this context Guevara called for the creation
of "two, three, many" Viet
Nams to thus expand the so-called people's
war against imperialism by creating multiple revolutionary hot spots. Sekula
thus puts Che Guevara's internationalist appeal into an artistic form,
indicating the justification for the appeal on the one hand, but on the other
also representing a symbolic alternative to the non-artistic implementation of
guerilla concepts in the major urban centers. The focus theory was not only one
of the foundations for the development of the "urban guerilla
concept" by the Red Army Fraction (RAF) in 1971. Following a first wave of
guerilla foundations limited to Latin America, a "second wave" (cf.
Kaller-Dietrich/Mayer, undated) arose in western cities based on the practices
of the Tuparmaros, the leftist urban guerillas in Uruguay. The Weather Underground in
the USA
and other radical leftist groups in various western countries also referred
directly or indirectly to this dictum from Che Guevara as they went
underground.[v]
The collage series "Bringing the
War Home" (1967 – 1972) by the US American artist and art theoretician
Martha Rosler[vi]
is also to be seen in the context of focus theory. The collages show various
motifs from the Viet Nam
war mounted in pictures from contemporary US American brochures for
furnishings. By calling everyday furnishings into question as the furnishings
of everyday life, Rosler builds here on an effect similar to that of the
Berliner Commune 1 with their flyer about a fire in a Brussels department store in 1967. In this
flyer the Commune 1 satirically called the fire an advertising gag for the USA, invoking the "crackling Viet Nam
feeling (of being there and burning too)", that everyone should be able to
share (cf. Enzensberger 2004). This satire strategy also serves the idea of
making injustice in developing countries directly comprehensible to people in
major cities, making it palpable, in fact "bringing the war home".
III.
If institutional critique is taken not
merely as a label for works by the four or five protagonists that are always
named (Asher, Broodthaers, Buren,
Haacke, Knight), but rather, as Hito Steyerl (2006) sees it, as "a new
social movement within the art field", then this would certainly include
Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula. Questioning one's own role within the art
system, linking this with concrete socio-political themes such as the criticism
of US foreign policy and the criticism of the ideology of the idyllic private
sphere of the family, indicates a version of institutional critique at the same
time, which not only goes beyond the limitation to art institutions like galleries
and museums. It also covers more than Isabelle Graw (2005: 50) includes with
the differentiated, expanded concept of institution, of corporate culture and
celebrity culture. It is more to be understood as a criticism of the
institutions of capitalist society altogether, in the sense of Herbert
Marcuse's utopian idea that the aim is to work towards a society, in which
people are no longer enslaved by institutions. To this extent, Steyerl's
analysis also needs to be expanded: institutional critique should not only be
understood as a movement within the art field, but also as one that would
hardly be imaginable without the social movements outside the art field.
Artistic internationalism, in other
words a certain orientation of the subject matter of artistic work, which
nevertheless first develops in the confrontation with the viewers, proves to be
the link between the art movement and the social movement. In this function as
a link, works like those described above are to be defended against both their
proponents and their opponents.
One of these opponents, for example, is
Jacques Rancière (2006), who lists Rosler's aforementioned work as an example
of art that too strongly disambiguates the relation between illusion and
reality. In works like "Bringing the War Home", according to
Rancière, "the sense of fiction is lost" (Rancière 2006: 91), which
should, however, be central to the real politics of art. Rancière (2006: 87)
argues for a "politics of art that is proper to the aesthetic regime of
art" and which precedes the political action of the artist.[vii]
He maintains that the confrontation between two heterogeneous elements, as
demonstrated in Rosler's collages, is characteristic of critical art. However,
it tends to turn itself into a mere inventory of things. In turn, this taking
inventory leads to the exact opposite of what was intended: the politics of art
is reduced to "welfare and ethical imprecision" (Rancière 2006: 96),
or it dissolves into "the indeterminacy [...] that is called ethics
today" (Rancière 2006: 99). According to Rancière, art is political
neither because of its message nor in the way that it represents social
structures, ethnic and sexual identity or political struggles. "Art is
primarily political in creating a space-time sensorium, in certain modes of
being together or apart, of defining being inside or outside, opposite to or in
the middle of" (Rancière 2006: 77).
Yet Rosler and Sekula's works are by no
means situated exclusively in the tradition of explicitly political agitation
art like that of John Heartfield or Diego Rivera. However, even their works
denigrated by Rancière as "directly" political art could prove to be
suitable for creating a sensorium, if, for example, the indeterminate
specification of being together and apart, etc. is interpreted as a
relationship, as it exists and is thematized in the relationship between work
and viewer. For only very few "political" works are limited solely to
conveying messages and representing social/political conflicts. Michelangelo
Pistoletto, for instance, in his mirror painting ("Vietnam",
1962/1965) linked the art historical issue of the work-viewer relationship with
political explicitness. Two persons, painted on tissue paper and cut out along
their contours, are glued to a reflecting metal panel, a woman in a red trench
coat and a man in a black suit with a tie, each of them holding a stick with a
demo banner attached to the upper ends, on which the letters "...NAM"
can be read. Looking at this life-sized picture, viewers are immediately drawn
into the depiction of the scene, obviously an anti-Viet Nam
demonstration. Here Pistoletto positions the viewers both opposite the picture
as such and also in front of a political statement, directly involving them in
both. According to Tony Godfrey (2005: 114), this artistic stance, which places
the viewer in a direct relationship to the image, is "a crucial
characteristic of Conceptual Art."
In the case of Sekula's "Two,
three, many ... (terrorism)" and Rosler's "Bringing the War
Home", this kind of context is established through the internationalism of
1968. This internationalism involves more of a political stance than a (for
example, Trotskyist) program, an awareness of the mutual conditionedness of
social battles in different regions of the world. Due not least of all to the
anti-colonial liberation movements, with the student movements of the 1960s an
anti-authoritarian internationalism – in contrast to the proletarian
internationalism of the early 20th century – gained "more significance theoretically
as well [...] In fact, this was one of its central components. Internationalism
and '68' formed a unit and must therefore also be treated as such"
(Hierlmeier 2002: 23). This internationalist perspective was realized in the
social movements in this way perhaps even more than in the art field, within
which it was criticized as obscuring western hegemony.[viii]
The artistic internationalism is all
the more to be emphasized also in response to proponents of Rosler's
"Bringing the War Home", such as Beatrice von Bismarck (2006). Martha
Rosler continued her series in 2004 under the same title, but instead of motifs
from the Viet Nam war she
used motifs from the US
invasion of Iraq.
Although it cannot to be dismissed that the Iraq
series is a "self-quotation", as Beatrice von Bismarck (2006: 239)
states, a comparable point of reference in terms of subject matter is certainly
the rhetoric of freedom used by the US government both then and now.
Nor is the observation false that the more garish choice of colors in
comparison with the original series enhances the impression of uncanniness,
understood in Freud's sense as a return of the repressed. "Especially in
Rosler's photographic collages, in which the images of war break into the
familiar homeyness, the home sweet home, as what is only seemingly alien, this
return of the repressed finds a striking visual form" (Bismarck 2006:
240).
Yet one crucial criterion still remains
unmentioned in this view, specifically the integration of artistic work in the
strategies and practices of the social movements. Although the US invasion of Iraq was accompanied by worldwide
protests, in its majority this movement has long since ceased to operate in the
context of a Guevara-like anti-imperialism. The tactic of "bringing the
war home" in any way was completely omitted. And there is a reason for
this: filling this slogan with emancipatory significance seems to be entirely
unthinkable at least for the social movements at a time when Islamic terror
like that of Al Qaida has multiply affected western capitals on the one hand
and on the other is installed as a scenario of general threat. The war, or a
war, has long since "come home", has arrived in the western urban
centers, into which it first had to be brought in the 1960s and 1970s, although
its effects are not those intended by the actors of the sixties movements. On
the contrary, instead of enlightenment, awareness, empathy, emancipatory
radicalization, an institutional and psychological insulation is taking place.
The boom in security technologies and policies had already signaled the end of
the urban guerillas in the 1970s. Not reflecting on this end and seamlessly
picking up from where it stopped thirty years earlier must give rise to
perplexity with an artist like Rosler. For she herself had emphasized how
relatively "the measures of aesthetic coherence are applied to
photographic practice" (Rosler 1999: 122), and lamented a contemporary
tendency to detach art works from their context. Although a link is made in the
continuation of the series to an ethical issue, and the standpoint of the
viewer to and in the depicted situation is questioned, the political context of
the emancipatory social movement and its strategies remains omitted – both in
the work and in the criticism formulated by von Bismarck.
IV.
With respect to the first phase of
institutional critique, Sabeth Buchmann (2006) states that in terms of the call
for cultural and social relevance she differs from the historical avant-garde
in that a different way of dealing with these issues has been cultivated: the
"radius of action was and is no longer society," according to
Buchmann (2006: 22), "but rather specific public, institutional and/or
media fields."
Neither the depreciation of the
aesthetic value of artistic works like "Two, three, many ...
(terrorism)" or "Bringing Home the War" nor their
decontextualization in a political respect does justice to their specific
criticism. The works discussed here do indeed thematize central issues that are
immanent to the art field, which are linked to the questions and concerns of
social movements – with the normative turn, so to speak, of being embroiled in
the production of the social world: if I am part of the historical process,
then – according to one of the central ideas of focus theory, which has been
criticized as being voluntaristic – it ultimately only depends on my
determination (and that of a few others) to reverse the conditions. Both
Rancière and von Bismarck are building on a false focus: Rancière with his criticism
of the unambiguousness that he claims exists in the confrontation with social
conditions and destroys or does not enable the alleged "politics of
aesthetics"; and von Bismarck (and even Rosler herself with her
continuation) by overlooking this tie with the social context. It would be
better to build instead on the hinge function between artistic issues and
political forms of social movements. Tying into the art historical question of
the relationship between artist, work and viewer would make it possible to draw
from what Bourdieu called the "space of possibilities", which
"defines and delimits the universe of both what is thinkable and what is
unthinkable" (Bourdieu 2001: 373). In this sense, the development of
artistic internationalism that is based on and rooted in the battles of the
social movements and their practices of solidarity represents a potential
expansion of this space.
Literature:
Araeen, Rasheed 1997: „Westliche Kunst
kontra Dritte Welt“, in: Weibel, Peter (Hg.): Inklusion : Exklusion. Versuch einer Kartografie der Kunst im Zeitalter
von Postkolonialismus und globaler Migration, Köln (DuMont Verlag), S.
98–103.
Bismarck,
Beatrice von 2006: "Freedom I have none. Martha Rosler in der Galerie Christian Nagel", Berlin, in: Texte zur Kunst, Berlin, No. 62, June
2006, vol. 16, p. 239–241.
Bourdieu, Pierre
2001: Die Regeln der Kunst. Genese und
Struktur des literarischen Feldes, Frankfurt am Main (Suhrkamp Verlag).
Bourdieu, Pierre 2003: "Einführung
in die Soziologie des Kunstwerks", in: Jurt, Joseph (Ed.): Pierre Bourdieu, Freiburg (orange
press), p. 130–146.
Breitwieser,
Sabine 2003: "Fotografie zwischen Dokumentation und Theatralität: In,
entlang von und durch Fotografien sprechen", in: ibid. (Ed.): Allan Sekula. Performance under Working
Conditions, Vienna (Generali Foundation) and Cologne (Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther König), p. 14–19.
Buchmann, Sabeth
2006: "Kritik der Institution und/oder Institutionskritik? (Neu-)Betrachtung
eines historischen Dilemmas", in: Bildpunkt.
Zeitschrift der IG Bildende Kunst, Vienna, Autumn 2006, p. 22–23.
Enzensberger,
Ulrich 2004: "Warum brennst du, Konsument?", in: die tageszeitung, Berlin, 29.04.2004,
http://www.taz.de/pt/2004/09/25/a0315.1/text (21.07.2006).
Foltin, Robert
2004: Und wir bewegen uns doch. Soziale
Bewegungen in Österreich, Vienna (edition grundrisse).
Foucault, Michel
1997: Die Ordnung der Dinge. Eine
Archäologie der Humanwissenschaften, Frankfurt a. M. (Suhrkamp Verlag),
14th edition.
Fraser, Andrea 2005: "From the
Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique", in: Artforum, September 2005, p. 278–283.
Gilcher-Holtey,
Ingrid 2003: Die 68er Bewegung. Deutschland
– Westeuropa – USA, Munich (Verlag C. H. Beck), 2nd edition.
Godfrey, Tony
2005: Konzeptuelle Kunst, Berlin
(Phaidon Verlag).
Graw, Isabelle
2004: "Im Griff des Kunstmarkts. Von Künstlern und Intellektuellen möchte
der heutige Sammler und Trustee nicht mehr behelligt werden. Der Kunstmarkt hat
sich von seiner Produktionssphäre abgespalten, wie man etwa auf der New Yorker
Armory Show beobachten konnte", in: die
tageszeitung, 14. 04. 2004, p. 15.
Graw, Isabelle 2005: "Jenseits der
Institutionskritik. Ein Vortrag im Los Angeles County Museum of Art", in: Texte zur Kunst, Berlin, No. 59,
September 2005, Vol. 15, p. 40–53.
Hierlmeier, Josef
Moe 2002: Internationalismus. Eine
Einführung in die Ideengeschichte des Internationalismus von Vietnam bis Genua,
Stuttgart (Schmetterling Verlag).
Höller, Christian
2006: "Tun, Sein, Sehen, Sagen. Über drei Neuerscheinungen von Jacques
Rancière", in: Texte zur Kunst,
Berlin, No. 63, September 2006, Vol. 16, p. 180–183.
Jacobs, Ron 1997: Woher der Wind weht. Eine Geschichte des
Weather Underground, Berlin (ID Verlag).
Kaller-Dietrich,
Martina and David Mayer, undated: Geschichte
Lateinamerikas im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Ein historischer Überblick, http://www.lateinamerika-studien.at/content/geschichtepolitik/geschichte/geschichte-titel.html
(28.08.2006).
Nowotny, Stefan:
"Anti-Canonization. The Differential Knowledge of Institutional
Critique", in: Transversal
multilingual webjournal: do you
remember institutional critique?, 1/2006,
http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/nowotny/en (05.01.2007).
Raunig, Gerald
2005: Kunst und Revolution. Künstlerischer
Aktivismus im langen 20. Jahrhundert, Vienna (Verlag Turia + Kant).
Raunig,
Gerald 2006: "Instituent Practices. Fleeing, Instituting,
Transforming" in: Transversal
multilingual webjournal: do you
remember institutional critique?, 1/2006, http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/raunig/en
(05.01.2007).
Rancière, Jacques
2006: "Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien", in: ibid.: Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen. Die Politik
der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien, edited by Maria Muhle, Berlin
(b_books/Polypen), p. 75–100.
Rosler, Martha
1999: "Drinnen, Drumherum und nachträgliche Gedanken (zur
Dokumentarfotografie)", in: Breitwieser, Sabine (Ed.): Martha Rosler. Positionen in der Lebenswelt,
catalogue for the exhibition, 12 May to 08 August 1999, Vienna (Generali Foundation), p. 105–148.
Steyerl, Hito 2006: "The
Institution of Critique", in: Transversal
multilingual webjournal: do you
remember institutional critique?, 1/2006,
http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/steyerl/en (05.01.2007).
Zahner, Nina Tessa
2006: Die neuen Regeln der Kunst. Andy
Warhol und der Umbau des Kunstbetriebs im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt a.
M./New York (Campus Verlag).
[i]On
the connection between "Viennese Actionism" and the student movement,
cf. especially Foltin 2004: 58 ff. and Raunig 2005: 169ff.
[ii]Nina
Tessa Zahner (2005) has analyzed the emergence of a third field, a
"sub-field of expanded production" in the context of the Pop Art of
the 1960s. This conjoins elements from both poles in the figure of the artist
as entrepreneur. The lasting transformations of the field that go back to these
developments would have to be discussed separately.
[iii]The
"autonomy of the art field" that Bourdieu speaks of is thus not to be
confused with the "autonomy of the art work" that is asserted by
modernist art theory. Bourdieu's whole theory ultimately aims to unmask the
"autonomy of the art work" as an ideology. Both Graw's slightly
disgusted statement about the dominance of money on the one hand and Zahner's
(2005: 290) recognition of Pop Art on the other, which credits Warhol for,
among other things, "having pointed out the ideological content of the art
that claims to be autonomous", are based on this misunderstanding.
[iv]Bourdieu
(2003: 141) speaks of a "space with two dimensions and two forms of
struggle and history": between the "pure" and the
"commercial" pole there is the question of the legitimacy and the
status of art; at another level the recognition of the works and the conflicts
between young/new and old/established artists is at stake.
[v]On
the history of the Weather Underground, cf. Jacobs 1997.
[vi]The
first pictures of the series were published about 1970 as contributions to a
magazine called "Goodbuy to all that" (No. 10), placed next to an
article by the "Angela Davis committee in Defense of Women
Prisoners".
[vii]Rancière also decisively rejects the social conditions of
judgments of taste and their integration in the symbolic struggles of a society
that Bourdieu developed in Distinction
(1982). He describes Bourdieu's demystification of the pure aesthetic gaze as a
"cheap alliance between scientific and political progressive
thinking" (Rancière 2006: 79), yet he has nothing to counter this with but
the assertion of a singular "form of freedom and indifference [...], which
joined aesthetics with the identification of what art is at all" (ibid.).
It would be interesting to discuss whether that is the reason why Rancière, as
Christian Höller (2006: 180) stresses, is to be regarded "currently in the
context of left-wing cultural circles as 'most wanted'".
[viii]For
example, Rasheed Araeen's (1997: 100) criticism in 1978: "The myth of the
internationalism of western art must be destroyed now. [...] Western art
expresses exclusively the characteristics of the west [...]. Western art is not
international. It is only a transatlantic art. It only reflects the culture of
Europe and North America. The current
'internationalism' of western art is no more than a function of the political
and economic power of the west, which imposes its values on other people. In an
international context it would therefore be more appropriate to speak of an
imperialistic art."
|
Jens Kastner
biography
Aileen Derieg (translation)
biography
languages
Deutsch
English
Español
transversal
do you remember institutional critique?
|