The topic, descriptively condensed in this too long of a title, was the theme of one of the chapters of the documentary exhibition SKC in ŠKUC that I wrote about in my previous post. I'm presenting here some of our basic questions and observations.
How to theorize political practices in art? How to bridge the gap between art or political theory and the ongoing art and activist practices? These questions stem from the confrontation of the theoretical abstractions, explaining the relation of art and politics, which are usually completely detached from the actual practices and insufficiently elaborated concepts produced in the terrain of the very practice [of art, curating, art criticism etc.]. This confrontation is either leading towards the disciplinary enclosure in the language and related epistemology [of both the theory and artistic practice] or to the reduction and utilization of the efficiency of art in political theory and philosophy [i.e. Ranciere, Badiou…]. The answer, then, must be found in the mutual and active testing of concepts and contexts of theoretical and art production in order to find the common language for the actual discussion of politics of art.
The generic term 'critical art' is often used nowadays in order to define a certain kind of cultural production. What does it really mean? By using the language of contemporary art criticism, one is tempted to claim both that every art is critical, and every art is political; but, the basic questions still remains open: what kind of critique and what kind of politics? Therefore, the real problem is about how to (re-)define the art of critique, and how to make it effective today.
Contemporary cultural production embraces critique as the vaunted value of contemporary art, and this new tendency emerges in parallel with the changes of the institutional field in contemporary post-welfare state capitalism. Neo-liberal institution of culture advocates the policy of transformation from the inside [of the society, cultural, alternative or state institutions, etc.], which relies upon on the inclusion of the critique from the very beginning [and, consequently, its appropriation]. Such dynamic constellation produces the so-called 'institutionalization of critique' - the topic that has been re-discussed in the past few years on various 'institutional' and ‘independent/self-organized’ levels. This new institutionalization is followed by the processes of 'culturalization' (of political relations), that is, the strategy of outsourcing political issues to the field of culture, the process especially visible on the European margins, in so-called transitional societies. The requests for 'critical intellectual production' and 'social engagement of art' are already inscribed in the guidelines of the leading European art foundations.
The 'New artistic practices' of the 1960s and 1970s, being at stake here, were, generally speaking, developed through the critique of conformism, art market, welfare-state institutions, institutional bureaucracy and hierarchy. At the same time, they are directed against bourgeois values of art in the sense of 'beautiful image in the rich interior', but are also, in the sense of modernist formalism, self-contemplation and concept of autonomy of art, conceived through self-sufficiency, disciplinary enclosure, professional division of labor, etc. Those practices were consequently challenging not only the status of art object [its material form, commodity status and forms of distribution], but also the [art] institutions themselves, together with their ideological-representative social function. As Benjamin Buchloh noticed, conceptual art has introduced a “new legalistic language and administrative style of material presentation” as a contrast to the traditional forms of appearance and [social] function of art.
The project of Conceptual art on the wider level has been formulated as a tactical replacement of marketable art product by critical art attitude. This replacement of the “object” by the “idea” is sometimes openly [and naively] perceived as the tactical operation, which confronts and even overcomes the logic of the market economy in art. Observed from the contemporary cultural and economical perspective, this emancipatory attempt contributed to the formal radicalization of art rather than to the real change of its social function. It resulted in practicing the “methods” of self-reflexivity and self-referentiality within the enclosed disciplinary field of art. In other words, the replacement of the “object” by the “idea” at the same time remained internal to the discourse of the “institution of art” and created a well situated self-position in the logic of the post-Fordist (re) production and what is referred to as a “cognitive capitalism”.
The cultural climate around the network of Students' Cultural Centers established all over Yugoslavia [as the consequence of the protests of '68] could be described as the left critique of the official culture of the Yugoslav Socialist state. The official cultural policy-making was following the idea of self-management as the unique principle of Yugoslav socialism, resulting with the concept of 'relative autonomy of the culture' and, in general, modernist-progressivist tendency, often discussed under the term of 'socialist modernism'. While 1970s in Yugoslavia are characterized by the sweeping changes in the direction of liberalization of the society, the 'New artistic practices' developed around new liberal institutions of Students Centers were influenced by the Western, neo-Marxist, post '68 political criticism. Their critique was mostly directed towards politically passivized bureaucracy of the Yugoslav State and the emergence of the new class of 'red bourgeoisie'.
The selection of the artifacts and documents presented at the exhibition SKC in ŠKUC points to the ideological trajectory and political positioning of 'New artistic practices' in the former Yugoslavia from their original context until the present day, when they are generously marketed in the Western art institutions as the artifacts of 'aestheticised politics' of post-communism. Within the prevailing post-Socialist condition, the critique can be only dissidentry, and, consequently, 'critical art' created inside the Socialist state can only be the representation of an individual rebel in totalitarian society [stereotypically represented through the skinny body of the performer in the gloomy alternative (art) space]. The ideological re-framing of the critique of the post '68 generation of artists from former Yugoslavia develops in parallel with the paradigm of “Eastern European” art. That paradigm, meticulously built through the cultural politics of SCCA network during the 90s via blockbuster exhibitions of EE art at the beginning of XXI century [such are Body and East, After the Wall, Aspects/Positions, etc] and leading all the way to the formation of the examples like the Erste Bank collection, points to the ultimate victory of the postmodernist-cultural studies approach in the interpretation of politics of art, sovereignly replacing the political position of art with cultural identity of the artist.
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1968 in yugoslavia, conceptual art, post-communism, ppyuart, prelom
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