Political-Aesthetics and Contemporary Artists: Introduction

As introduction to the four essays on contemporary practice, this chapter opens with some examples of political despondency at the turn of the century. Two films from the 1960s, Soy Cuba and Winter Soldier, are closely examined as a way to understand the hopefulness for a renewed future that must have inspired their making. From a contemporary perspective, hope has faded with the unfolding of history and the intensification of class inequality. While this seems to support an ‘end of history’ thesis, it is the point where Andrew Benjamin’s structuring of hope in the present becomes a potent retort. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how political-aesthetics is informed this century by a renewed interest in materials and their effects, while also considering the materialist approaches of Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Elizabeth Grosz. A materialist approach means that focus on the sensate realm determines that a portion of any interpretation of artwork will include a subjective dimension. [154]

Alex Monteith – Na Trioblóidí and Decolonising Tactics

Alex Monteith’s practice falls somewhere in the interconnecting threads of performance, situation and place, and often involves working with different kinds of communities. As a woman born in Northern Ireland and then as an immigrant to NZ Aotearoa, she offers an interesting perspective on colonialist subjectivity and its ongoing effects. Covered are her Irish works, Chapter and Verse (2005) and Shadow V (2017), both dealing with The Troubles, and her ongoing project Murihiku Coastal Incursions (2014–) that explores questionable archaeological practices in 1970s’ Aotearoa. Each artwork offers a different set of problems about how to present an ethically positioned political-aesthetics that deeply considers the rights of the people with whom she engages. Teased out are the implications of the British Navy’s Pacific explorations in the 18th century that preceded the displacement of first peoples in Aotearoa and Australia by waves of settlers. Other artworks included in this chapter are Sarah Munro’s series, Trade Item (2018), which are reworkings of Tupaia’s, Māori Bartering a Crayfish (1768), William Hodges, Cascade Cove: Dusky Bay (1775) and John Glover’s, The River Nile, Van Diemen’s Land from Mr Glover’s Farm (1837). [187]

Claire Denis – The Intruder

An extended essay on Claire Denis’ L’Intrus acts as a companion piece to the chapter on Frances Barrett. Dealing with similar themes of care, hospitality, and feminism, it expands on an aspect that sat at the edges of Curator, the questioning of received ontological boundaries or defining categories. Denis covers both formerly and conceptually a taxonomy of borders, which are both physical and psychological. Her source material, Jean Luc Nancy’s essay about his heart transplant, is considered in relation to the way Denis produces a moving image work from a philosophical text, with particular concern for her treatment of narrative to produce bodily sensation. The ‘Other’ or figure of the stranger is pitted against the disintegrating power of patriarchy referenced in Denis’ casting of the actor, Michel Subor, who appears in L’Intrus and Beau Travail (1999) as well as Jean Luc Godard’s Petite Soldat (1955). [145]

Encounter Three: Art and the Socialist State

This chapter traces the tactics used by the art Slovenian collective, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), specifically the art section, Irwin and the music group, Laibach, to criticise the socialist state of Yugoslavia. The chapter offers a brief overview of the political climate at the time leading up to and during the Yugoslavian wars (1980s and ‘90s). Closely analysed is NSK’s use of ambiguity and parody to hold a mirror up to authoritarianism and Irwin’s appropriation of early Russian avant-garde motifs to criticise socialist-realism and the State’s ‘misuse’ of art. As protection against retaliation by the state, NSK never prescribed their intentions, so audiences and viewers needed to bring their own context and perspective to events. Once Slovenia left the Yugoslavian Federation to enter into free-market capitalism, NSKs tactics seemed far less potent, flowing neatly into a 1980s western art context (a moment in history) that embraced ambivalence and indeterminacy. As an approach that hides a work’s political intent, allowing its viewers to have their own political views affirmed, it is argued that such a tactic fails to shake the political aesthetic. [181]

Still Deep in the Bones of the Bourgeoisie: Introduction

The ‘gift of being disgusted’ is a challenge first raised by Walter Benjamin in the 1920s, insisting that each era has a responsibility to critically contest the inequalities of its time. This chapter looks at two 21st century art events, the 56th La Biennale di Venezia (2015), which had global politics as its core theme, and the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) that attracted artist boycotts as protest to successive Australian Governments’ treatment of asylum seekers. Venice and Sydney are examples of large publicly-funded art events that instrumentalise politics as spectacle. However, the experience of Sydney also revealed the chasm that often exists between a patron class and artists working on the ground. [113]

Encounter Two: Lefebvre and Blanchot

Henri Lefebvre spent many decades developing a theory of the everyday as a locus of revolutionary potential. Maurice Blanchot takes a sideways route from praising to pulling down Lefebvre’s ‘everyday’, arguing that revolutionary desire cannot dwell in this enigmatic sphere. Rather, the everyday is the unthought, private, absorbing, and self-contained. The failure of Lefebvre to move from abstraction to action, from metaphysics to an effective Marxist critical theory is revealed at a crucial moment in history, as the Left is appearing to fracture in response to the disappointments of 1968. The chapter includes a close analysis of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) in relation to the everyday and tedium. [110]

A Community of Sense

The chapter opens with a distinction between political activism and artmaking by suggesting that activism tends to push the political as subject matter, while art has moved away this century from representing ‘the political’, returning to a concern for materials and their affects. However, such a crude distinction fails to account for nuances within practices, and thus the example of the Cuban artist, Tania Brugera, who uses political tools as material for her work, complicates the claim. Is it possible to define something as nebulous as an art community today? As with the contested space of aesthetics, Rancière argues that communities offer similar breaches that open and close, in this case between identities. There will be agreement in certain places and times on what constitutes an art community, but this is contingent upon an ongoing process of dissensus and transformation, subjectivation and disidentification. The chapter closes with an introduction to what became a global economic imperative from the 1970s, neo-liberalism, and it suggests that what is at stake for artists is a battle to define one’s practice against the contemporary figure of a complicit artist-entrepreneur. [185]

Encounters from the Twentieth Century: Introduction

The disappointments that flowed from the squashing of the student uprisings in 1968 is discussed as a way to underline a rupture in progressive thinking in the latter years of last century. Of particular concern for Marxists was a loss of faith in the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. It introduces three case studies that form the content of the next chapters, each revealing intellectual differences which became apparent the post 1968 era: (1) Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino; (2) Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot; and (3) the political aesthetic of Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). The aim is to offer detailed encounters between left thinkers, not only to reveal a clash of approaches to resisting forms of power, but to offer an alternative for understanding how recent intellectual history has informed contemporary political aesthetics. It is also a way to avoid restaging another history of art, or received canon, to offer instead a non-totalising picture of history. [157]

Benjamin’s Challenge for the Twenty-first Century

The 19th Biennale of Sydney, discussed in the last chapter, is a case study that reveals the way contemporary western governments are increasingly closing down public criticism. The tendency is to raise opaque screens over controversial actions, and to use financial retaliation as a method for keeping artists’ protests inside exhibiting contexts. This chapter looks at political theorists who write about the re-emergence of forms of authoritarianism, beginning with Nicos Poulantzas who argued as early as 1970 that a new form of fascism was materialising, and Michel Foucault’s warning that we each need to check our own fascist tendencies, no matter how private or small the context. More recent comments by Judith Butler and Madeline Albright insist on the danger of this burgeoning trend and the urgent need to fight it. Through the writings of Ronald F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris, this chapter also describes right populism as a prominent feature of western democracies, and the way concerns from climate change to human rights divide today along ideological, partisan lines. [170]

Introduction: The Gift of Being Disgusted

This introductory chapter outlines the book’s theoretical concerns: how the political is thought as a distinction between politics (le politique) and the political (la politique); the need to argue for hope as a possibility of the present, disentangled from teleological or theological forms, framed by Andrew Benjamin; and, the indivisibility of politics and aesthetics (the political aesthetic) conceptualised by Rancière. It covers the crucial difference between Schmitt’s ‘enemy/friend conflict’ and ‘dissensus’, which Rancière poses as a struggle for emancipation played out on the aesthetic plane. An important thrust of the book is to see artists’ relationships to others as a quality and methodology that inheres in the practice itself. This is a demand for an ethics of practice (Simon Critchley) that disavows the autonomy of art as an act or an object separated from its making or worldly context. [139]