Alfonso Cuarón’s brilliant film Children of Men presents another way that art institutions might respond to planetary civil war.7 It depicts a bleak near-future where humanity has become sterile. A planetary civil war has engulfed Britain, dividing the island into segregated zones, one for refugees and undocumented persons—a total dystopia—and another for citizens. Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern has become the home of the Ministry of the Arts; here, precious artworks are given a safe haven: an Ark of the Arts. In one scene set in Turbine Hall, Michelangelo’s David is shown with a broken leg, perhaps damaged during the conflict.
The destruction of antiquities by Daesh (also known as ISIS or Islamic State), which was preceded by major destruction and the looting of cultural objects during the US invasion in Iraq, raises the question: Wouldn’t it be great to have an Ark of the Arts that could rescue the antiquities of Palmyra or Nineveh and safeguard cultural treasures from violence?
However, the Ark of the Arts is a quite ambivalent institution. One is never quite sure what its function really is. In another scene, Picasso’s Guernica is used as a decoration for a private dinner.8 The Ark of the Arts might be an institution that has become so secure that the only people permitted to see the artworks are the Ark’s directors, their children, and their servants. But it could also be an evolution of international freeport art storage, where artworks disappear into the invisibility of tax-free storage cubes.9
Besides the international biennial, duty free art storage is probably the most important contemporary active form for art. It’s like the dystopian backside of the biennial, at a time when liberal dreams of globalization and cosmopolitanism have been realized as a multipolar mess peopled with oligarchs, warlords, too-big-to-fail corporations, dictators, and lots of newly stateless people.10
In the late twentieth century, globalization was described as a formula: the value of civil society multiplied by the internet divided by migration, metropolitan urbanism, the power of NGOs, and other forms of transnational political organization.11 Saskia Sassen characterized those activities as “citizen practices that go beyond the nation.”12 The internet was still full of hope and people believed in it. This was long ago.
The organizational forms pioneered by human rights NGOs and liberal women’s rights campaigns are now deployed by oligarch-funded fascist battalions, GoPro jihadi units, displaced dudes playing Forex exchanges, and internet trolls posing as feng shui Eurasians.13 In their wake, para-statelets and anti-“terrorist” operation zones emerge alongside duty free zones, offshore entities, and corporate proxy concessions.14 At the same time, horizontal networks are turned into global fiber-optic surveillance: the planetary civil war is fought by engaging with the logistic disruptions of planetary computerization. Contemporary cosmopolitans do not fail to promptly engage in civil warfare whenever the chance presents itself. Every digital tool imaginable is put to work: bot armies, Western Union, Telegram,15 PowerPoint presentations, jihadi forum gamification16—whatever works. Stasis acts as a mechanism that converts the “cosmo” of “cosmopolitan” into “corporate” and the polis into property.
The corresponding institutional model for art is freeport art storage, built on tax-exempt status and tactical extraterritoriality. Children of Men shows how this model could become a template for public institutions amid the effects of planetary civil war, securing artworks to the point of withdrawal. While the international biennial was the active form of art for late twentieth-century ideas of globalization, duty free art storage and the terror-proof hypersecure bunker are its equivalent in the age of globalizing stasis and pop-up NATO fence borders. But this is not a necessary or inevitable outcome.
Consider how Guernica was hung during a previous global civil war.
Guernica was made for the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the 1937 World Expo in Paris, to show the results of airstrikes on civilian populations. In terms of conservation, this was a lousy decision indeed. The painting was hung more or less outdoors for quite some time.
In the future projected by Children of Men, Picasso’s painting finds shelter from the mayhem of war in a private dining room. The painting might be “safe,” and it certainly enjoys a climate-controlled atmosphere, but very few people will see it. In the historical civil war, however, a completely opposite decision was made: to expose the painting, to literally put it out there. After all, in French and other Latin languages, a show is called an “exposition.” Not an imposition.17
In terms of conservation, the scenario in Children of Men is contradictory, because the first thing that has to be conserved or even created is a situation where art can be seen and accessed. Why is this so? Because art is not art if it cannot be seen. And if it is not art, there is no point in conserving it. More than the artworks themselves, the thing that’s threatened by the institutional response to civil war—be it privatization or overprotection—is public access. But it is public access, to a certain degree, that makes art what it is in the first place, thus necessitating its conservation. Hence the contradiction: art requires visibility to be what it is, and yet this visibility is precisely what is threatened by efforts to preserve or privatize it.
But there is something wrong here. The Spanish Republic’s pavilion is, after all, an example from 1937. Am I not lapsing into bad old nostalgic Zombie Marxism here? Isn’t this repetition as farce?
The answer is no. Let’s come back to Edge of Tomorrow to see how it solves the problem of the loop. It offers an unexpected solution to the problem of stasis, to escaping from history-as-repetition. The movie is based on the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, which built a narrative out of the experience of hitting the reset button on a video-game console. So it is no coincidence that the movie narrates the impasse of a gamer being stuck, unable to complete a given level. But gamers are used to this: it is their mission to get to the next level. A gamer is not a reenactor. She doesn’t derive pleasure from having to play the same level over and over again or endlessly reenacting historical models. She will go online and look up a forum to figure out how to beat the level and move on. In gaming (most games at least) there is an exit for each level, each repeated sequence, each loop. Most likely there is a weapon or a tool hidden in some cupboard, and this can be used to vanquish whatever enemy and complete the level. Edge of Tomorrow not only maintains that there is a tomorrow, but that we are positioned at its edge, that it is possible to complete the level and to break free from the loop. Gaming can evolve into playing. And here, the ambiguity of “play” is helpful. On the one hand, play is about rules, which must be mastered if one is to proceed. On the other, play is also about the improvised creation of new, common rules. So reenactment is scrapped in favor of gaming moving towards play, which may or may not be another form of acting.
What does all this mean for the museum? First of all, one could say that history only exists if there is a tomorrow—if tanks remain locked up within historical collections and time moves on. The future only happens if history doesn’t occupy and invade the present. The museum must render the tank useless upon entry, the way old cannons are filled with cement before being displayed in parks. Otherwise, the museum becomes an instrument for prolonging stasis by preserving the tyranny of a partial, partisan history, which also turns out to be a great business opportunity.
But what does this have to do with the Spanish pavilion? It’s very simple. There was one detail I didn’t mention but which is very obvious if you think about it. In 1937,