9.5 Theses on Art and Class. Ben Davis

a kind of public backlash. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl coined the term “festivalism” to describe the kind of facile, posturing radical art made for international art biennials and museum shows—academically infused conceptual or environmental works of great liberal pathos and self-righteousness directed toward an uncertain audience (as Schjeldahl defined his term: “Installation art . . . used to nurture a quasi-political hostility to ‘commodity capitalism’”).8 More recently, such attitudinizing has become less fashionable as “festivalism” has become displaced by the “conceptual bling” favored by the ascendant culture of art fairs, where edgy baubles reign—but for those enmeshed in the debate about art, it remains important as the symbolic other pole to market-based aesthetics, soaking up a great deal of the energy of politically curious artists.

      For me, one of the clearer examples of the paradoxes of this type of political art came in 2006, when the Danish art troupe Wooloo Productions staged a project called AsylumNYC at the generally progressive White Box space in New York City. The piece was meant to draw attention to the plight of immigrants and the cruelties of US immigration policy through a faux reality competition in which Wooloo invited a group of foreign-born artists to live in the gallery, while attempting to construct art installations using only materials they could convince visitors to bring to them. The “winner” would get a rarely granted O-1 visa granting them “creative asylum.”

      The sensationalism and mock cruelty of this weeklong stunt (“It’s sort of a gladiators’ arena in a sophisticated setting,” one of the contestants told the New York Times9) was justified by the need to generate a media spectacle that would call attention to the issue of immigration—a justification that was considerably undercut in that the show happened to coincide with the massive May Day marches of 2006 in the United States, in which literally millions of undocumented workers flooded the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City in a stand against the shameful Sensenbrenner Bill, which would have criminalized the undocumented to an unprecedented degree. Set against the historic May Day supermarches, this art project looked completely gratuitous or even distracting because of its deliberately provocative moral ambiguity.10

      A much more prominent example might be the work of Swiss installation artist Thomas Hirshhorn, who has staged numerous projects that purport to be some kind of righteous experiment in artistic consciousness-raising. In 2006, at the Gladstone Gallery in New York, he created a bracing installation featuring fashion mannequins riddled with nails, festooned with gory, graphic images of casualties from the war in Iraq. The title of this spectacle, Superficial Engagement, was connected to a rather messianic theory about how Hirshhorn’s art praxis represents a needed model of intervention. As the press release explained it:

      The events of the world, both the violence and glamour, cannot be cast aside; the imagery that stares back from the news reflects and creates the collective view of the world. This form of “superficial engagement,” as the artist dubs it, keeps the argument on the surface, not giving room to pundits or politicians to equivocate. As he puts it in his own formulation of the show, “To go deeply into something, I first must begin with the surface. The truth of things, its own logic, is reflected on the surface.” The current climate of constant war and oppression worldwide particularly provokes Hirschhorn’s critical inquiry, as he considers his art and his political activism to be inseparable.11

      Superficial Engagement was particularly illuminating because its motivating theory pushed the contradictions of festivalism to its limits. It confronted the viewer with brutal images of the ongoing war in a visceral way to force a reaction, and thereby seemed to acknowledge the problem posed by the lack of clear positions and general esoteric character of most political art, which allows critics to praise it as radical without taking any real position of practical consequence. But of course the idea that forcing viewers to confront the facts of brutality somehow prevents pundits and politicians from equivocating was (and is) simply wrong. As Susan Sontag put it: “In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people’s pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.”12

      In fact, Hirshhorn’s own take on the vital questions then being debated about the war (should the United States withdraw from Iraq?) was not at all clear from Superficial Engagement—despite how the theory of “superficial engagement” itself seemed to be an elaborate way of saying that Hirshhorn felt that he, as an artist with political convictions, should make work that approached the condition of propaganda. In the end, it was as if he was more comfortable in creating a theory about what he should do than doing it.

      Maybe this type of tortured attempt to occupy some ideal political-aesthetic space has merit in a period where there are few political movements in evidence; the intellectual hothouse of art is a place where radical ideas can be kept alive in some kind of coded form (although in 2006 there was, in fact, an antiwar movement, just as there was an immigrant rights movement). But the truth may as well be admitted outright: there is no elegant fit between art and politics, no ideal meld of the two. What is needed for effective political activism relates to the demands of a living political movement, which may or may not call for something that is particularly aesthetically refined, just as what “works” best aesthetically in the context of a gallery or museum is not usually a slogan or a placard. This lack of fit is an ugly condition for professional artists—but it will remain with us as long as we live in a world that is as ugly as this one.

      “The work of ‘political artists’ usually harms no one, and I would defend their right to make it; what I cannot support is their self-serving assumption that it ‘somehow’ has a political effect in the real world,” the artist Victor Burgin said in a 2007 interview. “In a university art department, I would prefer as my colleague the artist who makes watercolours of sunsets but stands up to the administration to the colleague who makes radical political noises in the gallery but colludes in imposing educationally disastrous government policies on the department.”13 Expanding things beyond the university milieu, I think this is a fine way to frame the question of art and politics today.

      What do these reflections mean, practically? They definitely do not mean “Don’t make political art.” I hope that we will have much more politically inspired art—and inspired political art—in the near future. What they do mean, though, is that with new and important struggles all around, we should once and for all ditch the bad art-theory habit of looking for a “political aesthetic,” of judging an artwork’s righteousness in philosophical or formal terms, divorced from its significance to what is happening in the world. Not even the most committed art practice can, on its own, be a substitute for the simple act of being politically involved as an organizer and activist. Perhaps in this context one’s talents as an artist might find a place, or perhaps an experience of this kind of activity might be processed, later, into something of enduring creative significance—but the need to engage comes first. This is a lesson I take from the Egyptian artists and their struggle.

      In a 2008 contribution to the journal October’s issue on artistic responses to the war in Iraq, Martha Rosler—who has made her share of “political art” and is probably considered an exemplary “political artist”—addressed the question of what artists could and should do. Her final word: “organize, organize, organize.”14 This was the correct starting point then and it is definitely the correct starting point now.