The Art System;
Theory as Medium and the Crisis of the Image
In an interview with Nina Powell for Frieze Magazine in October 2009, French Theorist Sylvère Lotringer diagnosed the current situation of the “Art System” as being embedded in relationships drawn between art, the market and critical thinking. Lotringer stated that academia has become a worldwide business, a money-making machine that the US have exported to the rest of the world like they have (violently or by other means) the concepts of democracy and of the free market. In his assessment regarding the link between art, the market, theory and education, he wonders cynically, “Why should not art have a go in this education market – if it is already part of a market anyways?” Lotringer’s assessment not only conveys a sound diagnosis about the current conditions of artistic production which perhaps need to be taken into account by producers of art within academia, but also, Lotringer makes us wonder: Should we be cynical with him and give up the idea of the critical potential of art and accept its subjection to the Culture Industry? And, since any critique of art’s and of artists’ complicity with institutions and the market appears to be futile, should we artists just ride the wave and make artistic work based on “applied theory”? Moreover, within academia, theory and the production of knowledge have become inextricable from artistic practice. Bearing this in mind, what are the consequences if we consider theory itself as having become the “medium” of art? Finally, what are the stakes if we oppose academic art production with recent trends prompting the collusion between contemporary art and the major industries of image-production (Hollywood, Television) –which also relies on theory to validate itself?
According to Lotringer, because there are so many things that are happening at the same time and in different places of the world, the avant-garde in art has ceased to exist. Another reason for this is because our current world is ruled by shallow individualism, cynicism and rapacity all of which are thriving in a complete vacuum that is ruled by market interests. Now when we think of the state of affairs in art, we realize that paradoxically, art has fulfilled its Dadaist avant-garde ideal insofar as it has become completely embedded into life by encompassing everything including society. In other words, art has grabbed anything it can to use it for its own purposes: from recycling garbage, to forming communities, to investigating political issues and perfumes, to playing with television, anthropology, biology and technology. This has allegedly given leeway, on the one hand, to the genre what we could call “research-art,” which along with theoretical elucidation, has become the operational basis for art education and art production within the academic domain. Moreover, the appropriation of theory by contemporary art and its having become the “medium” of the Artworld is tied for Lotringer to the market and constitutes a turning point in art production. Lotringer located this “theoretical turn in art” at the moment when a certain reception of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations by the New York Artworld made itself evident. In his introduction to Baudrillard’s polemical response to the New York Artworld’s appropriation of his theoretical work, “The Conspiracy of Art” (1995), he wrote:
The year 1987 happened to be a real turning point for the New York Artworld, throngs of young artists were flooding the art market desperately seeking Cesar, a “master thinker”, a guru, anything really to peg their career on they took Jean Baudrillard’s book, Simulations for an aesthetic statement (while it was an anthropological diagnostic) and rushed to make it a template for their art.” (“The Conspiracy of Art,” pp. 13, 14)
According to Lotringer, the power of theory lies in its potential to spare us disasters because it can give us a handle on the way in which contemporary society operates, how we occupy it, where we are going and how we can possibly affect it. Once appropriated by the Artworld, however, theory (especially post-structuralism) started to play a role in the Artworld’s need to project itself as something special separate from socio-economic relationships. 1987 is the year when the art market began to move toward becoming an industry like any other. Considering art’s subsequent dependence on Capital the question becomes: What is special about art? When this question arises, it is when art needs theory so it can claim a special privilege and to be a space for critical thinking outside of “everything else” within the Capitalist system.
On the other hand, insofar art has become an industry like any other it has been used as a platform for cross-marketing whose autonomy is precisely sustained by theory. What I have in mind here is the June 2010 event overseen by former Deitch Projects director, Jeffrey Deitch in his opening function as the new director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Deitchs’ event is reminiscent of the work of the Italian video-artist Francesco Vezzoli, whom in his work has collaborated with celebrities like Sharon Stone, Gore Vidal, Lady Gaga, etc.
The video that resulted in the collaboration with Lady Gaga was interestingly enough, filmed and launched at MoCA LA in November 2009. In it, Lady Gaga plays a Damien Hirst grand piano wearing a Prada outfit and a Frank Ghery hat, performing a real-fake spoiler of “the shortest musical you’ll ever see.” Along similar Vezzolian trans-mediatic lines, the event hosted by Deitch last June involved filming a series of scenes for the soap opera “General Hospital” at the museum. The actor James Franco had appeared in the show as the character “Franco,” a contemporary artist who has an exhibition at MoCA. Operating within a complex trans-institutional schema and for ambiguous conceptual reasons, the actor declared that his appearance in the show was a “guerrilla performance art piece” in an attempt to “smuggle conceptual art into middle-American living rooms.”
If already former gallerist Jeffrey Deitch’s appointment as the raise-founder and director of MoCA had erased the boundaries between directing museums, fund raising and selling art, Franco’s (and Vezzoli’s) cross-intervention in “General Hospital” and the Contemporary Artworld has too erased, the boundaries between the culture and entertainment industries. (The intervention is, by the way, suspected to be authored by New York based artist Kalup Linzy, who also appeared in “General Hospital” in the episode in which Franco’s character had his show at MoCA). The event at MoCA, which consisted on taping Franco’s final “General Hospital” episodes became a live meta-performance staged before an audience of invited art-world guests, the soap-opera camera crew and “General Hospital” fans. The Artforum reviewers (from their online “Scene and Heard” journal) described the massive image of Franco’s face that was projected all night in front of the museum collapsing the figure of the “actor-image” with the “contemporary artist-big brother character;” they also saw it as a Warholian encounter between pop culture and vanguard art. And we may add, all met at the mythical intersection of “celebrity” culture. New York Times’ reporter Randy Kennedy’s article on Deitch’s appointment to MoCA points at this fusion between Artworld and celebrity culture when he describes Deitch’s transfer from New York to Los Angeles:
[…] He has given up his New York apartment on the Upper East Side, a studio rental that became famous in the artworld because it was so tiny, spartan and completely devoid of art. He now lives in a rambling Spanish revival house, also rented, that once belonged to Cary Grant in the trendy Los Feliz neighborhood here, with a kidney-shaped pool. From his balcony he can see the Hollywood sign to the north and, to the south, the tennis courts of his new neighbors, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Deitch’s transition from New York to Hollywood fantasy invites us to make an interesting opposition to characterize two current operative arenas of Contemporary Art: Hollywood (and thus, the celebrity and jet-set worlds) and academia. The problem is that in both realms, the Artworld has become a black hole that sucks up theory getting clogged up by half-truths; the half-truths part is also tied to the fact that, artists and theorists have been replaced by publicists busy building the own careers within the Culture Industry all the while falling short in creating theories and practices that could help us understand the world, diagnose the future or operate in communities at the local level (in spite of Internet, which has the negative effect of ostracizing individuals creating a state of “hyper-communication”). For these reasons, in Lotringer’s view, art has become unable to digest any more data causing it to become ambivalent and indeterminate. Art’s ambivalence is due to its increased dissemination through the Internet and people’s mobility across the world. And even though Artworld figures like “independent curators” or “nomadic artists” may seem to embody or put into practice “radical” theoretical concepts (radical in the 1970s’!) such as “rhizomatic networks,” the Art System has reached a stage in which we cannot think of art as separate from the point of view of the Art System. The problem is that the Art System feeds upon itself like capitalism, absorbing critique for its own benefit and growth and so far, nothing has proven that the systemic elements of the Art System could be undermined. The consequence being: Art has metastasized in every possible direction it occupies. In this light, contemporary art for Baudrillard art is not just insignificant but null: obsolete, worthless, without merit or effect. Furthermore:
Art has confiscated banality, waste and mediocrity to turn them into values and ideologies… The New Art Order [is all about] power and glamour, which have managed to entice, subdue and integrate any potential threat. Criticizing art, in fact, has become the royal way to an art career... (“The Conspiracy of Art,” p.10)
Moreover, the ambivalence and indeterminateness of contemporary art have nothing to do with individual works of art and whether they’re good or bad, or whether they possess “singularity” in the sense Thierry de Duve defines it as art’s “trueness” which resides in aesthetic judgment. On the one hand, the indeterminateness of art is due to the change of scale in production, circulation and consumption of art at the international level. The Art System has taken monstrous proportions, having expanded exponentially since the 1980s. This situation makes us wonder as well, what does it mean for example to read Rosalind Krauss on the “post-medium condition” in Guatemala, Jacques Rancière on aesthetics and democracy in Poland, Gayatari Spivak on the subaltern in Paris or Gilles Deleuze on the time-image in Johannesburg, beyond the homogenizing trend in global cultural production? After Baudrillard, contemporary art’s ambiguous status is “half-way between a terrorist critique and de facto cultural integration.” (“The Conspiracy of Art,” p. 11) On the other hand, art’s ambivalence may be linked to the fact that today, “art is free to morph everywhere, even into politics, as the aesthetization of politics isn’t a sign of fascism anymore, nor is politization of aesthetics a sign of radicalism for that matter, they are rather means of integrating art into the economy, into the media.” (“The Conspiracy of Art,” pp. 11-12).
The ability of art to “morph everywhere” diagnosed by Baudrillard somewhat echoes Rosalind Krauss’ argument of art’s “post-medium condition.” According to her, this condition emerged from a critique of the corrupt alliance between the capitalist valorization logic and the modernist ideal of the autonomy of the artistic sphere. This critique relies therefore, on the “medium’s performativity” on which much Conceptual art is based on. This performativity is exemplified by Jeff Wall’s appropriation of the lightbox format in advertising, Dan Graham’s taking up of the genre of photo-reportage in Homes for America (1966-67) or Sophie Calle’s use of arbitrariness to trigger her projects. The “post-medium condition” refers, moreover, not only to “non-medium specificity” but to the inclusion in art-production of discourses, institutions, physical support structures and their technological implications as well as other factors that contribute to the individuation of works of art. Other examples of “post-mediatic artists” discussed as such by Krauss are: Marcel Broodthaers, Ed Ruscha, Christian Marclay, William Kentridge and James Coleman. For Krauss, artists who work on the “post-medium condition” contribute to the invention of new apparatuses or assemblages for art. We can oppose Krauss’ notion of the “postmedium” in art to Baudrillard’s negative assertion that art has “morphed everywhere.” Where can the line be drawn, however, between art’s autonomy as self-referentiality based not on the medium but on the creation of its own medium and art becoming indistinguishable from other domains, insofar as the creation of new apparatuses or discourse and image-dispositifs is not exclusive to art?
Perhaps the midway point between Baudrillard’s negative take on contemporary art as “morphing everywhere” and thus as null, and Rosalind Krauss’s modernist vouching for a constant reinvention of the medium is found in Thierry de Duve’s redefinition of medium-specificity based on his reading of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. De Duve’s implies a notion of the medium that relies on the “found object” and on the indexical and thus nominalist operation of declaring: “this is art,” an address that invites the viewer to judge aesthetically with the artist whether “this is art.” De Duve however, noted in a lecture in 2007 that the situation of contemporary art has become that of a dubious “aesthetic liberalism.” By this he means, not the pejorative and clichéd “anything goes” assessment in art since Duchamp but rather, an “anything is allowed liberalism” that is tied to today’s “post-ideological” cultural battles, a new form of “respect” based on the mutual recognition of differences and identities that implies: “I shall not infringe on your private domain so don’t mess up with mine.” De Duve’s diagnosis of the problem goes well beyond the current status of medium-lessness of art and displaces the question of the medium to the level of ideology. Because of this “aesthetic liberalism,” artworks tend to exacerbate idiosyncracies promoting a kind of fake singularity that one should expect of “true works of art.” In an era in which art mirrors the liberal claims of being post-ideological and in which politics mean politically correct visibility, the task at hand being, to assert one’s or someone else’s identity, theories and critical thinking become not only the validating medium of art (within academia, the market, Hollywood) but also an alibi to art’s simulation of the political. “Simulation” according to Baudrillard characterizes our era, which is invaded not by copies of the real but by the real on its own right: the “hyperreal,” which is a world of images without referents. This takes us to the crisis of representation and of the image and art’s and artists’ inability to re-conceptualize the image in the faces of Spectacle and of the digital explosion.
For Lotringer, the avant-garde is merely a Modernist concept whose elements can still be applied, however, to creative political groups and social movements (for instance, the Italian Autonomia movement from the 1970s). For him, these movements can be potentially opposed to the Art System insofar as they are an attempt to bring out the communal part of the creative social impulse that is absent from our world today. As much as the conceptualization of social movements – and their form of visibility – are at stake here, so is an urgent reconceptualization of the image in the intersecting domains of the academic, culture and entertainment industries, well beyond applying theory to art (or using theory as a justification of art, or to sell it) and the question of art’s autonomy, medium specificity or its medium-lessness.
Eshrat Erfanian, August 2010
References and Sources:
• Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art (New York: Semiotext(e), 2009).
• Thierry de Duve, “Theory and Practice,” Frieze Art Fair, October 2007; Podcast available at: www.friezeartfair.com/podcasts/.../theory_practice_thierry_de_duve/.
• Jaltenco’s Invisible Committee Manifesto, “Fear of Animals” (February 2010) available online: http://comiteinvisiblejaltenco.blogspot.com/2010/02/fear-of-animals.html.
• Randy Kennedy, “Jeffrey Deitch and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles,” New York Times (June 29th, 2010) Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/arts/design/04deitch.html?_r=3.
• Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea« – Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1999).
• Sylvère Lotringer interviewed by Nina Power, “Intelligence Agency,” Frieze no. 125 (September 2009) Available online: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/intelligence_agency/.
• Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Jeff Hassay, “Publicity Stunt,” Artforum Online (Scene and Heard section), June 30th, 2010, available online: http://www.artforum.com/diary/id=25923.
15.7.10
EMPOBRECIMIENTO ESTÉTICO DEl ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO: SOBREPRODUCCIÓN/SOBREDESTRUCCIÓN
EL EMPOBRECIMIENTO ESTÉTICO SE DEBE A LA SOBREPRODUCCIÓN DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO
Y
LA SOBREDESTRUCCIÓN DEL TEJIDO SOCIAL SE DEBE A LAS GUERRAS EN CONTRA DEL TERRORISMO Y LOS CARTELES DE DROGA
LA SOBREPRODUCCIÓN Y LA SOBREDESTRUCCIÓN TIENEN EL PROPÓSITO DE
IMPLEMENTAR
MEDIDAS PARA ASEGURAR LA CONCENTRACIÓN DE LA RIQUEZA Y EL PODER EN LAS MANOS DE UNOS POCOS PRIVILEGIADOS
El sistema de arte contemporáneo se presenta como una herramienta neutral y positiva de integración cultural; sin embargo, al abusar de conceptos como “inclusión,” “el menor de los males,” o “libertad de expresión,” ha entrado en un viaje delirante que ha causado que se empobrezca a sí mismo.
La pobreza que destila el Artworld es intelectual y poética ya que su repertorio de variaciones formales se ha agotado. El Arte Contemporáneo, sobre todo después del Once de Septiembre, en su insaciable necesidad de racionalizar y estetizar los miedos y ansiedades colectivos azuzados por la propaganda bushista, ha llevado al arte a la bancarrota y saboteado su propio potencial crítico y visionario.
La triste historia del mundo del arte relata hoy cómo sus miembros han asumido de buena gana una actitud de auto-censura al igual que conceptualismos simplistas y formulaicos junto con un reductivismo discursivo y formal, todos ellos herramientas necesarias para poder insertarse en la red global de arte.
El arte se ha convertido en un lenguaje internacionalizado y los miembros del mundo del arte en embajadores de un sistema cultural bien intencionado que opera bajo la premisa de la inclusión y la libertad de expresión. El compromiso político y la sensibilización ética a veces se reducen a aceptar cínicamente ciertas políticas y procesos socio-económicos como “el menor de los males,” contribuyendo así a la normalización del despojo, apartheid, guerra y violencia. Esto se debe en parte al hecho de que el Artworld se encuentra subsidiado por el exceso del capital financiero invertido como herramienta de mercadeo y relaciones públicas capaz de llegarle a un público mundial: ahora los artistas entretienen a las élites corporativas eufóricas, vulgares, voraces e incultas produciendo arte que satisface sus cínicos y masoquistas gustos.
El sistema de arte contemporáneo delira ya que sus ferias y bienales continúan a prosperar sin sentido de la misma manera que el ejército de los Estados Unidos continúa su ataque y ocupación ilógicos de Irak, Afganistán, y otros lados. Mientras que el ejército de Estados Unidos sigue bombardeando gente y edificios, asesinando intelectuales y devastando culturas, las corporaciones destruyen la infraestructura de los pueblos autóctonos en nombre del “desarrollo.” Mientras tanto, el Artworld continúa a sucumbir ante la banalidad, que se ha convertido en la única manera en la que la sociedad occidental puede lidiar con esta cantidad de destrucción que no tiene precedentes. Los pensadores liberales de la cultura defienden la necesidad del arte contemporáneo ya que lo conciben como un oasis espiritual en estos tiempos violentos en los que vivimos, sin embargo, las sociedades en las que el sistema de arte contemporáneo se desarrolla pierden cuando se trata de lidiar con su pasiva participación y su silenciosa complicidad con las guerras y destrucción en curso.
La sobreproducción de arte contemporáneo superficial se ha convertido tanto en la solución como en parte del problema: el arte se usa como banda adhesiva para contener la destrucción masiva e irresponsable en otros lados, reduciéndose a actos compulsivos y convirtiéndose en vehículo de la expresión creativa del Angst occidental. ¿Cuánto tiempo seguirá operando este mecanismo de negación en nuestras sociedades?
¿Cuáles son las cuestiones políticas y morales que están en juego hoy en día en las mentes de los constituyentes del Artwold contemporáneo?
Para muchos, en una época en la que se han perdido tanto inversiones monetarias como ideológicas, cuando la fe liberal que se tiene en un sistema supuestamente encarnando valores democráticos sobre la libertad de expresión se está obviamente colapsando, hay demasiado en juego. Evidentemente, el arte contemporáneo puede abrazar una postura crítica pero solamente mientras que pase por ser el antagonismo o disidencia sanos para la democracia. De esta manera, la criticalidad se ha convertido en un mito del Artworld: al reclamar ser una plataforma de inclusión de todas las voces disidentes, el Artworld se concibe a sí mismo como portavoz de la verdadera democracia. Este mito delirante ha sido socavado, entre otros, por ejemplos recientes de la represión fascista de demostraciones pacíficas en contra de las políticas del G20 en Toronto, los ataques mortales del IDF a la Flotilla de la libertad de Gaza, el asesinato de los activistas en San Juan Copala, Oaxaca, etc.
La respuesta de los intelectuales a los recientes y alarmantes eventos mundiales ha sido de negación traducida a una masa homogénea e impenetrable de terminaciones nerviosas adormecidas inundada de sentimientos de impotencia y de la necesidad ciega de sobreproducirse a morir, como si fueran hormiguitas trabajando compulsivamente en una construcción justo antes de ser inundada por una inminente tormenta de lluvia.
De nuevo, nos topamos con un presentimiento abrumador: el Artworld es un racionalizador irracional de un sistema irracional.
En México el arte contemporáneo funciona como una cortina de humo o de vapor. No es del todo inapropiado evocar aquí una imagen de Teresa Margolles, “Vaporización” (2002), -una instalación que consiste en una habitación llena del vapor de agua previamente utilizada para lavar cuerpos asesinados en una morgue en uno de los barrios más peligrosos de la ciudad de México– como una metáfora para describir el papel compensatorio del arte contemporáneo en el México de hoy: una inundación casi corpórea y seductora de los sentidos que racionaliza y al mismo tiempo se anula al opacar las realidades de la sociedad Mexicana reforzando las sensibilidades bien intencionadas de la clase privilegiada aquí y en el extranjero.
Los principios estético-políticos del arte contemporáneo están ciegamente sincronizados con el capitalismo; este hecho se hace invisible en el arte contemporáneo en sí, ya que muchos de sus preceptos son los bastiones inamovibles e incuestionables de las sociedades modernas. La inclusión relativamente reciente del arte mexicano en el panorama global ha cumplido las ilusiones de la sociedad mexicana de ser autónoma culturalmente, más allá de ser vistos como una sensibilidad estética atrasada o meras imitaciones coloniales del arte europeo. Además, el rechazo del arte contemporáneo del contenido politizado desde el Once de Septiembre, ha encontrado tierra fértil en el México neoliberal. La trivialización de contenidos vino de la mano con la privatización de la esfera cultural mexicana. La sobreestetización preferida por la elite mexicana favorece racionalizaciones poéticas y tediosas de la violencia cotidiana en este país, socavada por la normalización inconsciente de la situación neoliberal al promover la idea que la actual crisis financiera mundial es sólo parte del ciclo de creación destructiva a través del cual el capitalismo progresa, que la destrucción creativa es el motor del crecimiento económico y que el incesante reemplazo de lo viejo por lo nuevo nos trae prosperidad.
Los gestos poéticos y cínicos de los artistas se han convertido en parte del problema, ya que el Artworld se ha aclimatizado a la violencia produciendo objetos que precisamente fetichizan la violencia. Para muchos, estas expresiones son denunciaciones o hasta críticas de la brutalidad reinante, sin embargo, no son más que racionalizaciones de ciertos fenómenos promovidas por las voces que detentan el poder cultural detrás del escenario. Tal vez las abrumantes realidades socio-económicas del mundo no pueden ser comprendidas o digeridas por el Artworld en este preciso momento.
Como lo afirmó Ben Davis, el arte contemporáneo tiende a ser elitista a propósito, a jugar juegos intelectuales opacos y a poner en escena acciones políticas o espectáculos populistas que reflejan las contradicciones de la realidad económica pero a través del filtro de la posición clasemediera del mundo del arte dentro de dicha realidad, necesariamente insensible a los antagonismos sociales reales. Así, la actitud liberal clasemediera del Artworld mexicano contemporáneo encaja perfectamente con la agenda cultural de las elites financieras que manejan al mundo.
La máquina de guerra y la máquina del arte han estado trabajando a todo lo que dan durante muchos años, destruyendo y sobreproduciendo sin parar, cómplices con la tarea capitalista de homogeneizar las necesidades de los consumidores al igual que las sensibilidades estéticas a escala global. ¿Porqué no declarar una moratoria de producción de arte durante un rato? Los artistas deberían de dejar de mostrar su trabajo, ralentizar y reflexionar sobre lo que está sucediendo a su alrededor; galerías y museos deberían de cerrar y las fundaciones de arte junto con los bien intencionados mecenas de arte parar todas las actividades culturales hasta que la sociedad pueda renovar la cultura por sí misma, en vez de que la cultura se les de en cuchara de plata. La elite cultural no puede seguir escondiéndose detrás de las instituciones comerciales y culturales de prestigio durante mucho tiempo. Por eso, MUACC-NILC hace un llamado a toda la producción cultural hasta el momento en el que la cultura pueda redefinirse por sí misma dentro del contexto de los cambios históricos que ha habido en nuestra sociedad, fruto de la guerra civil, de la violencia sin precedentes y del despojo masivo financiero y de recursos. Los ricos viven en México como Arundathi Roy ha descrito cómo viven en la India: Como animales encarcelados por su propia riqueza, encerrados y aislados en sus jaulas doradas, protegiéndose de la amenaza de las multitudes vulgares y desordenadas a quienes han desposeído sistemáticamente durante siglos. Esta es la causa de nuestra actual guerra civil, no las amenazas de un puñado de narcobandidos de tomar el poder en el país, sino el evidente resultado de décadas de injusticia social y ceguera manipuladora de la parte de las elites mexicanas de las cuales los artistas son ahora cómplices.
Y
LA SOBREDESTRUCCIÓN DEL TEJIDO SOCIAL SE DEBE A LAS GUERRAS EN CONTRA DEL TERRORISMO Y LOS CARTELES DE DROGA
LA SOBREPRODUCCIÓN Y LA SOBREDESTRUCCIÓN TIENEN EL PROPÓSITO DE
IMPLEMENTAR
MEDIDAS PARA ASEGURAR LA CONCENTRACIÓN DE LA RIQUEZA Y EL PODER EN LAS MANOS DE UNOS POCOS PRIVILEGIADOS
El sistema de arte contemporáneo se presenta como una herramienta neutral y positiva de integración cultural; sin embargo, al abusar de conceptos como “inclusión,” “el menor de los males,” o “libertad de expresión,” ha entrado en un viaje delirante que ha causado que se empobrezca a sí mismo.
La pobreza que destila el Artworld es intelectual y poética ya que su repertorio de variaciones formales se ha agotado. El Arte Contemporáneo, sobre todo después del Once de Septiembre, en su insaciable necesidad de racionalizar y estetizar los miedos y ansiedades colectivos azuzados por la propaganda bushista, ha llevado al arte a la bancarrota y saboteado su propio potencial crítico y visionario.
La triste historia del mundo del arte relata hoy cómo sus miembros han asumido de buena gana una actitud de auto-censura al igual que conceptualismos simplistas y formulaicos junto con un reductivismo discursivo y formal, todos ellos herramientas necesarias para poder insertarse en la red global de arte.
El arte se ha convertido en un lenguaje internacionalizado y los miembros del mundo del arte en embajadores de un sistema cultural bien intencionado que opera bajo la premisa de la inclusión y la libertad de expresión. El compromiso político y la sensibilización ética a veces se reducen a aceptar cínicamente ciertas políticas y procesos socio-económicos como “el menor de los males,” contribuyendo así a la normalización del despojo, apartheid, guerra y violencia. Esto se debe en parte al hecho de que el Artworld se encuentra subsidiado por el exceso del capital financiero invertido como herramienta de mercadeo y relaciones públicas capaz de llegarle a un público mundial: ahora los artistas entretienen a las élites corporativas eufóricas, vulgares, voraces e incultas produciendo arte que satisface sus cínicos y masoquistas gustos.
El sistema de arte contemporáneo delira ya que sus ferias y bienales continúan a prosperar sin sentido de la misma manera que el ejército de los Estados Unidos continúa su ataque y ocupación ilógicos de Irak, Afganistán, y otros lados. Mientras que el ejército de Estados Unidos sigue bombardeando gente y edificios, asesinando intelectuales y devastando culturas, las corporaciones destruyen la infraestructura de los pueblos autóctonos en nombre del “desarrollo.” Mientras tanto, el Artworld continúa a sucumbir ante la banalidad, que se ha convertido en la única manera en la que la sociedad occidental puede lidiar con esta cantidad de destrucción que no tiene precedentes. Los pensadores liberales de la cultura defienden la necesidad del arte contemporáneo ya que lo conciben como un oasis espiritual en estos tiempos violentos en los que vivimos, sin embargo, las sociedades en las que el sistema de arte contemporáneo se desarrolla pierden cuando se trata de lidiar con su pasiva participación y su silenciosa complicidad con las guerras y destrucción en curso.
La sobreproducción de arte contemporáneo superficial se ha convertido tanto en la solución como en parte del problema: el arte se usa como banda adhesiva para contener la destrucción masiva e irresponsable en otros lados, reduciéndose a actos compulsivos y convirtiéndose en vehículo de la expresión creativa del Angst occidental. ¿Cuánto tiempo seguirá operando este mecanismo de negación en nuestras sociedades?
¿Cuáles son las cuestiones políticas y morales que están en juego hoy en día en las mentes de los constituyentes del Artwold contemporáneo?
Para muchos, en una época en la que se han perdido tanto inversiones monetarias como ideológicas, cuando la fe liberal que se tiene en un sistema supuestamente encarnando valores democráticos sobre la libertad de expresión se está obviamente colapsando, hay demasiado en juego. Evidentemente, el arte contemporáneo puede abrazar una postura crítica pero solamente mientras que pase por ser el antagonismo o disidencia sanos para la democracia. De esta manera, la criticalidad se ha convertido en un mito del Artworld: al reclamar ser una plataforma de inclusión de todas las voces disidentes, el Artworld se concibe a sí mismo como portavoz de la verdadera democracia. Este mito delirante ha sido socavado, entre otros, por ejemplos recientes de la represión fascista de demostraciones pacíficas en contra de las políticas del G20 en Toronto, los ataques mortales del IDF a la Flotilla de la libertad de Gaza, el asesinato de los activistas en San Juan Copala, Oaxaca, etc.
La respuesta de los intelectuales a los recientes y alarmantes eventos mundiales ha sido de negación traducida a una masa homogénea e impenetrable de terminaciones nerviosas adormecidas inundada de sentimientos de impotencia y de la necesidad ciega de sobreproducirse a morir, como si fueran hormiguitas trabajando compulsivamente en una construcción justo antes de ser inundada por una inminente tormenta de lluvia.
De nuevo, nos topamos con un presentimiento abrumador: el Artworld es un racionalizador irracional de un sistema irracional.
En México el arte contemporáneo funciona como una cortina de humo o de vapor. No es del todo inapropiado evocar aquí una imagen de Teresa Margolles, “Vaporización” (2002), -una instalación que consiste en una habitación llena del vapor de agua previamente utilizada para lavar cuerpos asesinados en una morgue en uno de los barrios más peligrosos de la ciudad de México– como una metáfora para describir el papel compensatorio del arte contemporáneo en el México de hoy: una inundación casi corpórea y seductora de los sentidos que racionaliza y al mismo tiempo se anula al opacar las realidades de la sociedad Mexicana reforzando las sensibilidades bien intencionadas de la clase privilegiada aquí y en el extranjero.
Los principios estético-políticos del arte contemporáneo están ciegamente sincronizados con el capitalismo; este hecho se hace invisible en el arte contemporáneo en sí, ya que muchos de sus preceptos son los bastiones inamovibles e incuestionables de las sociedades modernas. La inclusión relativamente reciente del arte mexicano en el panorama global ha cumplido las ilusiones de la sociedad mexicana de ser autónoma culturalmente, más allá de ser vistos como una sensibilidad estética atrasada o meras imitaciones coloniales del arte europeo. Además, el rechazo del arte contemporáneo del contenido politizado desde el Once de Septiembre, ha encontrado tierra fértil en el México neoliberal. La trivialización de contenidos vino de la mano con la privatización de la esfera cultural mexicana. La sobreestetización preferida por la elite mexicana favorece racionalizaciones poéticas y tediosas de la violencia cotidiana en este país, socavada por la normalización inconsciente de la situación neoliberal al promover la idea que la actual crisis financiera mundial es sólo parte del ciclo de creación destructiva a través del cual el capitalismo progresa, que la destrucción creativa es el motor del crecimiento económico y que el incesante reemplazo de lo viejo por lo nuevo nos trae prosperidad.
Los gestos poéticos y cínicos de los artistas se han convertido en parte del problema, ya que el Artworld se ha aclimatizado a la violencia produciendo objetos que precisamente fetichizan la violencia. Para muchos, estas expresiones son denunciaciones o hasta críticas de la brutalidad reinante, sin embargo, no son más que racionalizaciones de ciertos fenómenos promovidas por las voces que detentan el poder cultural detrás del escenario. Tal vez las abrumantes realidades socio-económicas del mundo no pueden ser comprendidas o digeridas por el Artworld en este preciso momento.
Como lo afirmó Ben Davis, el arte contemporáneo tiende a ser elitista a propósito, a jugar juegos intelectuales opacos y a poner en escena acciones políticas o espectáculos populistas que reflejan las contradicciones de la realidad económica pero a través del filtro de la posición clasemediera del mundo del arte dentro de dicha realidad, necesariamente insensible a los antagonismos sociales reales. Así, la actitud liberal clasemediera del Artworld mexicano contemporáneo encaja perfectamente con la agenda cultural de las elites financieras que manejan al mundo.
La máquina de guerra y la máquina del arte han estado trabajando a todo lo que dan durante muchos años, destruyendo y sobreproduciendo sin parar, cómplices con la tarea capitalista de homogeneizar las necesidades de los consumidores al igual que las sensibilidades estéticas a escala global. ¿Porqué no declarar una moratoria de producción de arte durante un rato? Los artistas deberían de dejar de mostrar su trabajo, ralentizar y reflexionar sobre lo que está sucediendo a su alrededor; galerías y museos deberían de cerrar y las fundaciones de arte junto con los bien intencionados mecenas de arte parar todas las actividades culturales hasta que la sociedad pueda renovar la cultura por sí misma, en vez de que la cultura se les de en cuchara de plata. La elite cultural no puede seguir escondiéndose detrás de las instituciones comerciales y culturales de prestigio durante mucho tiempo. Por eso, MUACC-NILC hace un llamado a toda la producción cultural hasta el momento en el que la cultura pueda redefinirse por sí misma dentro del contexto de los cambios históricos que ha habido en nuestra sociedad, fruto de la guerra civil, de la violencia sin precedentes y del despojo masivo financiero y de recursos. Los ricos viven en México como Arundathi Roy ha descrito cómo viven en la India: Como animales encarcelados por su propia riqueza, encerrados y aislados en sus jaulas doradas, protegiéndose de la amenaza de las multitudes vulgares y desordenadas a quienes han desposeído sistemáticamente durante siglos. Esta es la causa de nuestra actual guerra civil, no las amenazas de un puñado de narcobandidos de tomar el poder en el país, sino el evidente resultado de décadas de injusticia social y ceguera manipuladora de la parte de las elites mexicanas de las cuales los artistas son ahora cómplices.
8.7.10
Contemporary Art Impoverishment: Overproduction/Overdestruction
AESTHETIC IMPOVERISHMENT IS DUE TO OVERPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY ART
AND
OVERDESTRUCTION OF THE SOCIAL TISSUE IS DUE TO THE WARS ON TERRORISM AND DRUG CARTELS
OVERPRODUCTION AND OVERDESTRUCTION HAVE THE PURPOSE OF IMPLEMENTING
MORE MEASURES TO ASSURE THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH AND POWER IN THE HANDS OF THE PRIVILEGED FEW
The contemporary art system plays itself up as a neutral and positive cultural integration tool, however, by abusing concepts like “inclusion,” “the lesser of evils” or “freedom of expression” it has become delirious and has impoverished itself.
The contemporary Artworld reeks of intellectual and poetic poverty as its repertoire of formal variations is exhausted. Contemporary Art has bankrupted “art” in its never ending need, especially since 9/11, to rationalize and aestheticize the fears and anxieties fueled by Bushist propaganda and in the process, sabotaging its own critical and visionary potential.
The sad story about the world of contemporary art today is how its members have willingly assumed an attitude of self-censorship as well as simplistic and formulaic formal conceptualisms and reductiveness as necessary tools in order to insert themselves in the global art network.
Art has become an internationalized language and Art World members ambassadors of a well intentioned cultural system premised on inclusion and freedom of speech. Political engagement or ethical sensibilization is at times reduced to accepting cynically certain policies and socio-economic processes as “the lesser of evils,” contributing to the normalization of dispossession, apartheid, war and violence. This is partly due to the fact that the Artworld is subsidized by the excess produced by financial capital invested as a marketing and public relations tool that is capable of reaching out to a worldwide public: Artists now entertain the euphoric, voracious, vulgar and illiterate corporate elites producing art that caters to their masochistic and cynical tastes.
The contemporary art system is delusional insofar as its fairs and biennials continue thriving in the same purposeless way that the United States forces continue its illogical attacks and occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
As the US army keeps on blowing up people and buildings, to massacre intellectuals and to devastate culture, corporations destroy native infrastructure in the name of ‘development.’ In the meantime, the Artworld continues to subside into banality; which happens to be Western society’s only way of being able to deal with such unprecedented massive destruction. Liberal cultural thinkers defend the need for contemporary art as a spiritual oasis in these violent times we live in, but the societies where the contemporary art system thrives are at a loss when it comes to coping with their passive participation and thus, silent complicity in the ongoing wars and destruction.
Overproduction of banal contemporary art has become the solution as well as part of the problem: Art is the band-aid for reckless and massive destruction elsewhere, a compulsive activity and the vehicle of creative expression of Western angst. How long will this denial mechanism keep on thriving in our societies?
What political and moral questions are in play now in the minds of contemporary Artworld constituents?
A lot might be at stake for many, at a time of the loss of their monetary and ideological investments, when their whole-hearted liberal faith in a system supposedly incarnating democratic values about the freedom of expression is obviously collapsing. Evidently, a critical stand can be embraced by contemporary art, but only insofar as it passes as the antagonism that is inherent to a healthy democracy. This is how criticality has become an Artworld myth: in its claim to be a platform for the inclusion of all dissident voices, the Artworld conceives itself as the spokesperson of true democracy. This delirious myth is undermined by recent examples of the fascistic repression of pacific demonstrators against the policies of the G20 in Toronto, the IDF mortal attacks on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the murder of activists in San Juan Copala, Oaxaca, etc.
The intellectuals’ response to recent alarming facts and events in the world has been denial translated into one homogenous impenetrable mass of numbed nerve endings all feeling the same impotence and blind need to overproduce themselves to death like busy little ants working compulsively at an interminable construction site just before it is about to be inundated by an impending rain storm.
Again, we are faced with the overwhelming sensation that the Artworld is an irrational rationalizer of an irrational system.
In Mexico contemporary art functions as a smoke shield or a steam shield. It is not inappropriate to evoke an image by Teresa Margolles, Vaporización (2002), – an installation that consists of a room full of steaming water that had been previously used to wash the bodies of murdered people at a morgue in one of Mexico City’s most dangerous neighborhoods – as metaphor to describe the compensatory role of contemporary art in Mexico today: A seductive quasi corporeal inundation of the senses which rationalizes and at the same time nullifies itself by clouding the realities of Mexican society reinforcing the well intentioned liberal sensibilities of the privileged class here and abroad.
The aesthetico-political principles of contemporary art are blindly in sync with capitalism; this fact is rendered invisible by contemporary art itself because many of its precepts are the immovable and unquestionable bastions of modern societies. The fairly recent inclusion of contemporary Mexican art in the global panorama has fulfilled liberal Mexican society’s expectations of cultural autonomy beyond being seen as backward or a mere colonial imitation of European art. Moreover, contemporary art’s disavowal of politicized content since 9/11, has found fecund ground in neo-liberal Mexico. The trivialization of content came hand in hand with the privatization of the Mexican cultural sphere. The over-aesthetization preferred by the Mexican elite favors tedious poetic rationalizations of the daily violence lived daily in this country, underscored by the unconscious normalization of the Neoliberal situation by promoting the idea that the current worldwide financial crisis is just part of the normal cycle of creative destruction through which capitalism progresses, that creative destruction is the engine of economic growth, and that the ceaseless replacement of the old with the new brings prosperity.
Artists’ poetic and cynical gestures have become part of the problem, as the Artworld has acclimatized itself to the present climate of violence by producing objects that precisely fetishize violence. Many understand these works as denunciations or even as critiques of the reigning brutality, however, they are convenient rationalizations of phenomena promoted by the voices holding the cultural power behind the scenes. Perhaps the overwhelming socio-economic realities of the world cannot be apprehended or digested by the Artworld at this precise moment.
As Ben Davis pointed out, contemporary art tends to be purposefully elitist, to play opaque intellectual games, and to stage political action or populist spectacles that reflect the contradictions of economic reality but through the filter of the Artworld’s middle class position within such reality, necessarily oblivious to real social antagonisms. This is how the liberal, middle class attitude of the contemporary Mexican Artworld fits in perfectly with the cultural agenda of the corporate and financial ruling elites worldwide.
The war machinery and the art machinery have been working full blast for many years now, unrelentless in their overproductive destruction insofar as they are complicit with capitalism’s task of homogenizing consumer needs and aesthetic sensibilities at the global scale. Why not an art production moratorium for a while? Artists should stop showing their work, slow down and reflect upon what is happening around them; galleries and museums must close down, and art foundations and well intentioned art patrons should bring all cultural activities to a halt, until society is able to renew culture by itself, as opposed to being fed culture. The cultural elite cannot continue hiding behind institutional, commercial and cultural venues of pseudo prestige for much longer. MUACC-NILC calls for a stop to all cultural production until culture can again redefine itself within the context of the historical changes brought to our society by the current civil war, unprecedented violence and massive financial and resource dispossession. The rich live in Mexico like Arundathi Roy describes how they live in India: Like animals incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over centuries. This is the cause of the current civil war, not the few narco bandits threatening to take over the country, the evident result of decades of social injustice and manipulative blindness on the part of the Mexican elites to which artists are now complicit.
AND
OVERDESTRUCTION OF THE SOCIAL TISSUE IS DUE TO THE WARS ON TERRORISM AND DRUG CARTELS
OVERPRODUCTION AND OVERDESTRUCTION HAVE THE PURPOSE OF IMPLEMENTING
MORE MEASURES TO ASSURE THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH AND POWER IN THE HANDS OF THE PRIVILEGED FEW
The contemporary art system plays itself up as a neutral and positive cultural integration tool, however, by abusing concepts like “inclusion,” “the lesser of evils” or “freedom of expression” it has become delirious and has impoverished itself.
The contemporary Artworld reeks of intellectual and poetic poverty as its repertoire of formal variations is exhausted. Contemporary Art has bankrupted “art” in its never ending need, especially since 9/11, to rationalize and aestheticize the fears and anxieties fueled by Bushist propaganda and in the process, sabotaging its own critical and visionary potential.
The sad story about the world of contemporary art today is how its members have willingly assumed an attitude of self-censorship as well as simplistic and formulaic formal conceptualisms and reductiveness as necessary tools in order to insert themselves in the global art network.
Art has become an internationalized language and Art World members ambassadors of a well intentioned cultural system premised on inclusion and freedom of speech. Political engagement or ethical sensibilization is at times reduced to accepting cynically certain policies and socio-economic processes as “the lesser of evils,” contributing to the normalization of dispossession, apartheid, war and violence. This is partly due to the fact that the Artworld is subsidized by the excess produced by financial capital invested as a marketing and public relations tool that is capable of reaching out to a worldwide public: Artists now entertain the euphoric, voracious, vulgar and illiterate corporate elites producing art that caters to their masochistic and cynical tastes.
The contemporary art system is delusional insofar as its fairs and biennials continue thriving in the same purposeless way that the United States forces continue its illogical attacks and occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
As the US army keeps on blowing up people and buildings, to massacre intellectuals and to devastate culture, corporations destroy native infrastructure in the name of ‘development.’ In the meantime, the Artworld continues to subside into banality; which happens to be Western society’s only way of being able to deal with such unprecedented massive destruction. Liberal cultural thinkers defend the need for contemporary art as a spiritual oasis in these violent times we live in, but the societies where the contemporary art system thrives are at a loss when it comes to coping with their passive participation and thus, silent complicity in the ongoing wars and destruction.
Overproduction of banal contemporary art has become the solution as well as part of the problem: Art is the band-aid for reckless and massive destruction elsewhere, a compulsive activity and the vehicle of creative expression of Western angst. How long will this denial mechanism keep on thriving in our societies?
What political and moral questions are in play now in the minds of contemporary Artworld constituents?
A lot might be at stake for many, at a time of the loss of their monetary and ideological investments, when their whole-hearted liberal faith in a system supposedly incarnating democratic values about the freedom of expression is obviously collapsing. Evidently, a critical stand can be embraced by contemporary art, but only insofar as it passes as the antagonism that is inherent to a healthy democracy. This is how criticality has become an Artworld myth: in its claim to be a platform for the inclusion of all dissident voices, the Artworld conceives itself as the spokesperson of true democracy. This delirious myth is undermined by recent examples of the fascistic repression of pacific demonstrators against the policies of the G20 in Toronto, the IDF mortal attacks on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the murder of activists in San Juan Copala, Oaxaca, etc.
The intellectuals’ response to recent alarming facts and events in the world has been denial translated into one homogenous impenetrable mass of numbed nerve endings all feeling the same impotence and blind need to overproduce themselves to death like busy little ants working compulsively at an interminable construction site just before it is about to be inundated by an impending rain storm.
Again, we are faced with the overwhelming sensation that the Artworld is an irrational rationalizer of an irrational system.
In Mexico contemporary art functions as a smoke shield or a steam shield. It is not inappropriate to evoke an image by Teresa Margolles, Vaporización (2002), – an installation that consists of a room full of steaming water that had been previously used to wash the bodies of murdered people at a morgue in one of Mexico City’s most dangerous neighborhoods – as metaphor to describe the compensatory role of contemporary art in Mexico today: A seductive quasi corporeal inundation of the senses which rationalizes and at the same time nullifies itself by clouding the realities of Mexican society reinforcing the well intentioned liberal sensibilities of the privileged class here and abroad.
The aesthetico-political principles of contemporary art are blindly in sync with capitalism; this fact is rendered invisible by contemporary art itself because many of its precepts are the immovable and unquestionable bastions of modern societies. The fairly recent inclusion of contemporary Mexican art in the global panorama has fulfilled liberal Mexican society’s expectations of cultural autonomy beyond being seen as backward or a mere colonial imitation of European art. Moreover, contemporary art’s disavowal of politicized content since 9/11, has found fecund ground in neo-liberal Mexico. The trivialization of content came hand in hand with the privatization of the Mexican cultural sphere. The over-aesthetization preferred by the Mexican elite favors tedious poetic rationalizations of the daily violence lived daily in this country, underscored by the unconscious normalization of the Neoliberal situation by promoting the idea that the current worldwide financial crisis is just part of the normal cycle of creative destruction through which capitalism progresses, that creative destruction is the engine of economic growth, and that the ceaseless replacement of the old with the new brings prosperity.
Artists’ poetic and cynical gestures have become part of the problem, as the Artworld has acclimatized itself to the present climate of violence by producing objects that precisely fetishize violence. Many understand these works as denunciations or even as critiques of the reigning brutality, however, they are convenient rationalizations of phenomena promoted by the voices holding the cultural power behind the scenes. Perhaps the overwhelming socio-economic realities of the world cannot be apprehended or digested by the Artworld at this precise moment.
As Ben Davis pointed out, contemporary art tends to be purposefully elitist, to play opaque intellectual games, and to stage political action or populist spectacles that reflect the contradictions of economic reality but through the filter of the Artworld’s middle class position within such reality, necessarily oblivious to real social antagonisms. This is how the liberal, middle class attitude of the contemporary Mexican Artworld fits in perfectly with the cultural agenda of the corporate and financial ruling elites worldwide.
The war machinery and the art machinery have been working full blast for many years now, unrelentless in their overproductive destruction insofar as they are complicit with capitalism’s task of homogenizing consumer needs and aesthetic sensibilities at the global scale. Why not an art production moratorium for a while? Artists should stop showing their work, slow down and reflect upon what is happening around them; galleries and museums must close down, and art foundations and well intentioned art patrons should bring all cultural activities to a halt, until society is able to renew culture by itself, as opposed to being fed culture. The cultural elite cannot continue hiding behind institutional, commercial and cultural venues of pseudo prestige for much longer. MUACC-NILC calls for a stop to all cultural production until culture can again redefine itself within the context of the historical changes brought to our society by the current civil war, unprecedented violence and massive financial and resource dispossession. The rich live in Mexico like Arundathi Roy describes how they live in India: Like animals incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over centuries. This is the cause of the current civil war, not the few narco bandits threatening to take over the country, the evident result of decades of social injustice and manipulative blindness on the part of the Mexican elites to which artists are now complicit.
7.7.10
30.6.10
THE CONTEMPORARY ART SYSTEM IS AN IRRATIONAL RATIONALIZER OF AN IRRATIONAL SYSTEM AND THE SURPLUS SUPPLEMENT OF FINANCIAL CAPITALISM
Minimalist art is a given and an inevitable stage in the Darwinist evolution of contemporary art: what you see is what you see
Contemporary art is usually thought of as an empty signifier or vessel that can be filled with any content whatever
The content of contemporary art is determined by the market and by middle class liberal aesthetico-political ideology
The contemporary art system is an irrational rationalizer of an irrational system and the surplus supplement of financial capitalism
El arte minimalista es un dado y una etapa inevitable en la evolución darwinista del arte contemporáneo: lo que ves es lo que ves
Usualmente se considera al arte contemporáneo como un significante o contenedor vacío que puede llenarse con cualquier contenido
El contenido del arte contemporáneo es determinado por el mercado y por la ideología estético-política liberal de la clase media
El sistema del arte contemporáneo es un racionalizador irracional de un sistema irracional y el suplemento en plusvalía del capitalismo financiero
agrande la imagen/click on image to enlarge
Contemporary art is usually thought of as an empty signifier or vessel that can be filled with any content whatever
The content of contemporary art is determined by the market and by middle class liberal aesthetico-political ideology
The contemporary art system is an irrational rationalizer of an irrational system and the surplus supplement of financial capitalism
El arte minimalista es un dado y una etapa inevitable en la evolución darwinista del arte contemporáneo: lo que ves es lo que ves
Usualmente se considera al arte contemporáneo como un significante o contenedor vacío que puede llenarse con cualquier contenido
El contenido del arte contemporáneo es determinado por el mercado y por la ideología estético-política liberal de la clase media
El sistema del arte contemporáneo es un racionalizador irracional de un sistema irracional y el suplemento en plusvalía del capitalismo financiero
agrande la imagen/click on image to enlarge
28.6.10
THE OBSESSION WITH IDENTITY FASCISM/FRANCO BERARDI
The obsession with identity fascism
Franco Berardi
Potere Operaio presented itself explicitly, even provocatively, as a movement that had severed all links with the history of realised socialism. Just as decisively, it refused to identify with the tradition of anti-fascism. We have seen in the group’s political history, after the 1970 Florence Congress and the Leninist turn, the reinvigoration of the languages and methodologies of the Third International tradition, to the point that these suffocated the group’s originality. But it remains true nonetheless that the peculiar conception of the relation between working class autonomy, power and development elaborated by Potere Operaio in the first phase of its history was able to escape the historicist model of the realisation of socialism. Nor was its judgement on the socialist mode of production compatible with the Marxist-Leninist tradition. With Lenin’s affirmation in the NEP period that socialism equalled ‘soviets plus electricity’, and his embrace of the taylorist model, socialism could not but become (and here the Mensheviks were right) bureaucratic capitalism. Potere Operaio did not develop a more profound reflection on the Soviet model, on its feudal- bureaucratic character, on the military apparatus as the cement of the social structure, and thus its imperialist vocation. Then again, no-one else in Italy took this up either.
Studies such as that of Castoriadis — whose Devant la guerre (Paris, Seuil, 1981) analysed the stratocratic character of the USSR and its intrinsic rigidity — or that of Isabelle D’Encausse — whose L’empire en miettes (Paris, Fayard, 1981) anticipated the Empire’s collapse from a range of pressures (of identity, and of centrifuge) — have never found the audience they deserved in Italy. The analysis of realised socialism and its crisis has largely been institutional, focused on the formal political sphere (politicista). The PCI’s hypocrisy on this point was the worst obstacle to a critical understanding. The PCI spent decades repeating formulas about the Soviet regime’s ‘backwardness, errors, deviations’, systematically refusing to address the organically criminal character of that regime. But this is understandable, given that the PCI was born out of the same matrix, and had functioned as an organic part of the international system of authoritarianism. The collapse of the socialist regimes was inscribed in the horizon of possibilities foreseen by Potere Operaio’s analysis. What instead was certainly alien to its predictions was the close connection between the collapse of the Soviet empire and the crisis of every internationalist perspective, and so the outbreak on a planetary scale of a civil war over the question of identity.
This is the prospect that has unfolded over the course of the nineties. It is on the basis of the crisis of internationalism that the obsession with identity has taken the initiative, darkening the planetary horizon. Metropolitan cosmopolitanism remains limited to the virtual class, to the globalised stratum of the planetary network. The great majority of humanity remains excluded from the cabled circuit of hyper-modern cosmopolitanism, and is gripped by its obsessions with identity. Residual localisms acquire a desperate energy. But this signals the beginning of the crisis of modern universalism. What does universalism mean? We can talk of universalism when confronted with a perspective of ethical, political and existential value that possesses a universal normative force beyond (a prescindere) cultural differences. Materialist dialectics opposed bourgeois universalism with proletarian particularism, the negative force of a partisan interest that contained within itself the nucleus of a higher, more fully human form of social relation. But this particularism still possessed (dialectically) a universalist horizon. Affirming with sectarianism working class particularity meant, in the dialectical vision, posing the conditions for a higher universality. This ideological schema is clearly of Hegelian, historicist derivation. But this does not take away the fact that internationalism was something more concrete than a moral proposition.
Internationalism was not an abstract value to pursue, but a fact of collective experience that lived in the struggle of workers against capitalism, and in the unity of proletarian interests that knew no borders. Workers have the same interests in every place across the globe: to appropriate growing quotients of the wealth that they themselves have produced, and to reduce the time of their dependence upon wage labour. The stronger workers are in one point of the cycle, the stronger workers are in all other points of the cycle. This elementary truth did not allow us to foresee the profound cultural change which followed the capitalist attack of the eighties. In order to defeat working class autonomy, to drive back the libertarian and anti-productivist wave of the movements, capital created the conditions for the diffusion of a widespread aggressiveness in the form of the re-emergence of ‘the people’. The re-emergence on the world scene of ‘peoples’ is the sign of working class defeat: peoples are the particularity that cannot be rendered dialectical, the particularity without a universal project, the idiot particularity.
***
In the years when the movements were at their height, fascism, in all its forms, appeared to us as an epoch that was dead and gone forever; or, at most, as a brutal instrument of repression. We thought a new type of totalitarianism was possible, but under the banners of social democracy, of a concentrated and technological hyper-development. Only social democracy, it seemed to us, was capable of dividing the movement of workers and subordinating it to reformism and statism. We thought that the fascists and various other criminals would only reappear on the scene thanks to the initiative and goodness of the reformist state. The scenario of the nineties is completely different. It is no longer true that the decisive forces are capital and the working class. As in a game of mirrors, the context has been fragmented, multiplied, overturned. Capital and working class continue to confront each other, but in a manner that overturns their relation in the sixties: the initiative (which then belonged to the workers) has today decisively shifted to international finance capital. At the same time two other figures have appeared: the virtual class, that is the cycle of globalised mental labour; and the residual class, the shapeless mass of populations excluded from (or never part of) the production cycle, which press aggressively to conquer a space of survival and recognition in the planetary spectacle.The word ‘revolution’ no longer means anything within this new configuration—but then neither does the phrase ‘political democracy’. An ethical, immaginary, projectual level common to the figures of globalised fragmentary labour no longer exists, because they lack a shared social foundation. While capital courses through them all, because it continues to be the agent of generalised codification, the figures of mental labour are simultaneously fragmentary in their inmost (intima) constitution, and global in their extrinsic relation, mediated by technology.
***
A very tight dialectic between capitalist progress and working class revolution was the horizon of Potere Operaio’s thought. Communism was simply a weapon of this struggle: ‘communism is the real movement that abolishes the present state of things’. That dialectic bore its own fruit: the development of labour’s autonomy from the factory, intellectualisation, enormous productive potentiality, the reduction of the labour necessary for global reproduction. But at this point the world presents itself in another light. No longer the light of a dialectic in which particular subjectivities produce a universal perspective, but the disquieting light of devolution, of a regression that society inflicts upon itself in order to withstand capital’s mutagenic impact upon its anthropological and psychochemical composition. One recognisable form of devolution is fascism. Fascism, that strange word, that shapeless word. For a long time I strove to find a concept able to define the different (and contradictory) forms of authoritarianism, of nationalistic or ethnic aggression and so on, but without success. In his article ‘Il fascismo eterno’, Umberto Eco recognises that ‘the characteristics cannot be marshalled into a system, many are mutually contradictory and are typical of other forms of despotism and fanaticism. But it is sufficient for one to be present for a fascist nebula to coagulate’.
There follows a list of Ur-fascism’s characteristics: the cult of tradition, the refusal of modernism, action for action’s sake, the fear of difference, and so on. But, as interesting and pertinent as these characteristics are, Eco himself recognises that the effort of definition seems ultimately to end in frustration because the object continues to get away. For example, after having said that fascism is contrary to modernism, it must be recognised that historic fascism played a role in the modernisation of society in both Italy and Germany. In the absence, then, of a satisfactory and comprehensive definition, we run the risk of defining fascism as everything that disgusts us, and of identifying fascism, simply, as the party of imbecility and violence: as the party of evil. And this, naturally, doesn’t work, it doesn’t define anything. The problem is that that to which we are referring, using this word—fascism—which is imprecise and historically far too dated, is an extremely vast field of forms of life, behaviours, ideologies, prejudices that have, in the last analysis, a single element in common: the obsession with definition. The obsession to define is, in the last analysis, the characteristic common to the field of phenomena that we define as ‘fascism’; it is simultaneously comprehensible and difficult to define.
‘Fascism’, in its maximum conceptual extension (encompassing nationalism and religious fundamentalism, political authoritarianism, sexual aggression and so on . . .) can be brought back to a fundamental obsession: the obsession with identity, the obsession with belonging, with origin, with recognisability. This obsession has grown, extended itself, exploded over the course of our century, precisely because our century is a century of deterritorialisation, of cultural contamination and de-identification. The pressure (pulsione) that seems to guide fundamentally those behaviours which fall within the ambit of ‘fascism’ is the pressure to recognise ourselves as identical, identifiable, and therefore belonging to a community (of language, faith, race . . .). based upon origin. Only origin bears witness to belonging, and as we know, origin is an illusion, a legend, an attribute that is more or less shared, but unfounded. Ethnic identity does not exist, any more than linguistic identity. While each of us comes from a history of crossbreedings and contaminations that can neither be attested nor authenticated, there are illusions of ethnic belonging; while each of us speaks our own dialect that can never be fundamentally translatable by another speaker, there are illusions of linguistic comprehension. Living together is premised on these. The more the field of ethnic identifiability, of comprehensibility, of origin are perturbed, the more acute becomes the need to identify, to the point of obsession.
***
In the end, the inhuman appears as the dominant form of human relations: reaction devolved to a development of capital that, even as it proceeds triumphantly, excludes and crystallises growing sections of the planetary nervous system, and secretes inhumanity. After having subordinated the working class variable, capital readies itself for its new, titanic enterprise: subordinating the entire cycle of human cognitive activity into an automated system that is cabled on a number of levels: the economic, technological, psychochemical—and perhaps in the future, also the biogenetic. But the residues that this enterprise leaves along its course are immense, corresponding to the majority of the human population.
After having incorporated working class autonomy in technique, and after having eliminated every alternative perspective, capital imposes itself as the accumulation of automatic processes that are no more governable nor opposable. Techno-social interfaces progressively connect towards the transformation of the global economy into a hive mind that functions according to prescribed goals and cabled in the techno-linguistic garb of its human terminals. At this point, the bio-computer super-organism reads the human and discards it as noise.
This process goes towards the creation of a super-identity completely indifferent to identities of origin (of sex, race, faith, nationality). But in the process of this super-identity’s formation, an enormous quantity of human material is discarded: the majority of humanity, which remains outside the cabled circuit of the globalised techno-economy. This material residue identifies itself through aggressive cults, founded on the illusion of an originary authenticity in need of restoration. Only the affirmation of an identity makes survival possible in a world increasingly dense with conflicting territorial projects, in a world dominated by the paradox of growing wealth that produces an expanding misery.
In the horizon of evolution, the problem of collective happiness and liberation comes to be posed in terms that are completely asymmetrical to those we have known in the past. How will the human singularity reproduce itself in the sphere of the posthuman? Harmony, happiness, awareness: how can these be singularised in the sphere of the cabled global mind? The universality to which dialectical thought aspired was the result of the very process of the particularities’ capacity to constitute themselves as a conscious subject, and therefore to surpass the particular. The abolition of wage labour by the class of wage labour ably represented this process of inverting the whole starting from the negative affirmation of the parts. What is instead determinate is another type of universality: the abstract universality of code that semiotises every fragment of the existing without respecting any pulsation of living human particularity.
The century is ending under the sign of an inhuman universality, the universality of Code, of abstraction that manifests in money, in the circulation of information and finances. Therefore an abstract and disincarnated totalitarianism takes the place of the machine of universal semioticisation. Facing it, the massive return of the residual human, of the body, of blood and soil, of tradition and identity: the rancorous and aggressive reaffirmation of particularity against every other particularity in the name of no universality.
Translated by Steve Wright
Franco Berardi
Potere Operaio presented itself explicitly, even provocatively, as a movement that had severed all links with the history of realised socialism. Just as decisively, it refused to identify with the tradition of anti-fascism. We have seen in the group’s political history, after the 1970 Florence Congress and the Leninist turn, the reinvigoration of the languages and methodologies of the Third International tradition, to the point that these suffocated the group’s originality. But it remains true nonetheless that the peculiar conception of the relation between working class autonomy, power and development elaborated by Potere Operaio in the first phase of its history was able to escape the historicist model of the realisation of socialism. Nor was its judgement on the socialist mode of production compatible with the Marxist-Leninist tradition. With Lenin’s affirmation in the NEP period that socialism equalled ‘soviets plus electricity’, and his embrace of the taylorist model, socialism could not but become (and here the Mensheviks were right) bureaucratic capitalism. Potere Operaio did not develop a more profound reflection on the Soviet model, on its feudal- bureaucratic character, on the military apparatus as the cement of the social structure, and thus its imperialist vocation. Then again, no-one else in Italy took this up either.
Studies such as that of Castoriadis — whose Devant la guerre (Paris, Seuil, 1981) analysed the stratocratic character of the USSR and its intrinsic rigidity — or that of Isabelle D’Encausse — whose L’empire en miettes (Paris, Fayard, 1981) anticipated the Empire’s collapse from a range of pressures (of identity, and of centrifuge) — have never found the audience they deserved in Italy. The analysis of realised socialism and its crisis has largely been institutional, focused on the formal political sphere (politicista). The PCI’s hypocrisy on this point was the worst obstacle to a critical understanding. The PCI spent decades repeating formulas about the Soviet regime’s ‘backwardness, errors, deviations’, systematically refusing to address the organically criminal character of that regime. But this is understandable, given that the PCI was born out of the same matrix, and had functioned as an organic part of the international system of authoritarianism. The collapse of the socialist regimes was inscribed in the horizon of possibilities foreseen by Potere Operaio’s analysis. What instead was certainly alien to its predictions was the close connection between the collapse of the Soviet empire and the crisis of every internationalist perspective, and so the outbreak on a planetary scale of a civil war over the question of identity.
This is the prospect that has unfolded over the course of the nineties. It is on the basis of the crisis of internationalism that the obsession with identity has taken the initiative, darkening the planetary horizon. Metropolitan cosmopolitanism remains limited to the virtual class, to the globalised stratum of the planetary network. The great majority of humanity remains excluded from the cabled circuit of hyper-modern cosmopolitanism, and is gripped by its obsessions with identity. Residual localisms acquire a desperate energy. But this signals the beginning of the crisis of modern universalism. What does universalism mean? We can talk of universalism when confronted with a perspective of ethical, political and existential value that possesses a universal normative force beyond (a prescindere) cultural differences. Materialist dialectics opposed bourgeois universalism with proletarian particularism, the negative force of a partisan interest that contained within itself the nucleus of a higher, more fully human form of social relation. But this particularism still possessed (dialectically) a universalist horizon. Affirming with sectarianism working class particularity meant, in the dialectical vision, posing the conditions for a higher universality. This ideological schema is clearly of Hegelian, historicist derivation. But this does not take away the fact that internationalism was something more concrete than a moral proposition.
Internationalism was not an abstract value to pursue, but a fact of collective experience that lived in the struggle of workers against capitalism, and in the unity of proletarian interests that knew no borders. Workers have the same interests in every place across the globe: to appropriate growing quotients of the wealth that they themselves have produced, and to reduce the time of their dependence upon wage labour. The stronger workers are in one point of the cycle, the stronger workers are in all other points of the cycle. This elementary truth did not allow us to foresee the profound cultural change which followed the capitalist attack of the eighties. In order to defeat working class autonomy, to drive back the libertarian and anti-productivist wave of the movements, capital created the conditions for the diffusion of a widespread aggressiveness in the form of the re-emergence of ‘the people’. The re-emergence on the world scene of ‘peoples’ is the sign of working class defeat: peoples are the particularity that cannot be rendered dialectical, the particularity without a universal project, the idiot particularity.
***
In the years when the movements were at their height, fascism, in all its forms, appeared to us as an epoch that was dead and gone forever; or, at most, as a brutal instrument of repression. We thought a new type of totalitarianism was possible, but under the banners of social democracy, of a concentrated and technological hyper-development. Only social democracy, it seemed to us, was capable of dividing the movement of workers and subordinating it to reformism and statism. We thought that the fascists and various other criminals would only reappear on the scene thanks to the initiative and goodness of the reformist state. The scenario of the nineties is completely different. It is no longer true that the decisive forces are capital and the working class. As in a game of mirrors, the context has been fragmented, multiplied, overturned. Capital and working class continue to confront each other, but in a manner that overturns their relation in the sixties: the initiative (which then belonged to the workers) has today decisively shifted to international finance capital. At the same time two other figures have appeared: the virtual class, that is the cycle of globalised mental labour; and the residual class, the shapeless mass of populations excluded from (or never part of) the production cycle, which press aggressively to conquer a space of survival and recognition in the planetary spectacle.The word ‘revolution’ no longer means anything within this new configuration—but then neither does the phrase ‘political democracy’. An ethical, immaginary, projectual level common to the figures of globalised fragmentary labour no longer exists, because they lack a shared social foundation. While capital courses through them all, because it continues to be the agent of generalised codification, the figures of mental labour are simultaneously fragmentary in their inmost (intima) constitution, and global in their extrinsic relation, mediated by technology.
***
A very tight dialectic between capitalist progress and working class revolution was the horizon of Potere Operaio’s thought. Communism was simply a weapon of this struggle: ‘communism is the real movement that abolishes the present state of things’. That dialectic bore its own fruit: the development of labour’s autonomy from the factory, intellectualisation, enormous productive potentiality, the reduction of the labour necessary for global reproduction. But at this point the world presents itself in another light. No longer the light of a dialectic in which particular subjectivities produce a universal perspective, but the disquieting light of devolution, of a regression that society inflicts upon itself in order to withstand capital’s mutagenic impact upon its anthropological and psychochemical composition. One recognisable form of devolution is fascism. Fascism, that strange word, that shapeless word. For a long time I strove to find a concept able to define the different (and contradictory) forms of authoritarianism, of nationalistic or ethnic aggression and so on, but without success. In his article ‘Il fascismo eterno’, Umberto Eco recognises that ‘the characteristics cannot be marshalled into a system, many are mutually contradictory and are typical of other forms of despotism and fanaticism. But it is sufficient for one to be present for a fascist nebula to coagulate’.
There follows a list of Ur-fascism’s characteristics: the cult of tradition, the refusal of modernism, action for action’s sake, the fear of difference, and so on. But, as interesting and pertinent as these characteristics are, Eco himself recognises that the effort of definition seems ultimately to end in frustration because the object continues to get away. For example, after having said that fascism is contrary to modernism, it must be recognised that historic fascism played a role in the modernisation of society in both Italy and Germany. In the absence, then, of a satisfactory and comprehensive definition, we run the risk of defining fascism as everything that disgusts us, and of identifying fascism, simply, as the party of imbecility and violence: as the party of evil. And this, naturally, doesn’t work, it doesn’t define anything. The problem is that that to which we are referring, using this word—fascism—which is imprecise and historically far too dated, is an extremely vast field of forms of life, behaviours, ideologies, prejudices that have, in the last analysis, a single element in common: the obsession with definition. The obsession to define is, in the last analysis, the characteristic common to the field of phenomena that we define as ‘fascism’; it is simultaneously comprehensible and difficult to define.
‘Fascism’, in its maximum conceptual extension (encompassing nationalism and religious fundamentalism, political authoritarianism, sexual aggression and so on . . .) can be brought back to a fundamental obsession: the obsession with identity, the obsession with belonging, with origin, with recognisability. This obsession has grown, extended itself, exploded over the course of our century, precisely because our century is a century of deterritorialisation, of cultural contamination and de-identification. The pressure (pulsione) that seems to guide fundamentally those behaviours which fall within the ambit of ‘fascism’ is the pressure to recognise ourselves as identical, identifiable, and therefore belonging to a community (of language, faith, race . . .). based upon origin. Only origin bears witness to belonging, and as we know, origin is an illusion, a legend, an attribute that is more or less shared, but unfounded. Ethnic identity does not exist, any more than linguistic identity. While each of us comes from a history of crossbreedings and contaminations that can neither be attested nor authenticated, there are illusions of ethnic belonging; while each of us speaks our own dialect that can never be fundamentally translatable by another speaker, there are illusions of linguistic comprehension. Living together is premised on these. The more the field of ethnic identifiability, of comprehensibility, of origin are perturbed, the more acute becomes the need to identify, to the point of obsession.
***
In the end, the inhuman appears as the dominant form of human relations: reaction devolved to a development of capital that, even as it proceeds triumphantly, excludes and crystallises growing sections of the planetary nervous system, and secretes inhumanity. After having subordinated the working class variable, capital readies itself for its new, titanic enterprise: subordinating the entire cycle of human cognitive activity into an automated system that is cabled on a number of levels: the economic, technological, psychochemical—and perhaps in the future, also the biogenetic. But the residues that this enterprise leaves along its course are immense, corresponding to the majority of the human population.
After having incorporated working class autonomy in technique, and after having eliminated every alternative perspective, capital imposes itself as the accumulation of automatic processes that are no more governable nor opposable. Techno-social interfaces progressively connect towards the transformation of the global economy into a hive mind that functions according to prescribed goals and cabled in the techno-linguistic garb of its human terminals. At this point, the bio-computer super-organism reads the human and discards it as noise.
This process goes towards the creation of a super-identity completely indifferent to identities of origin (of sex, race, faith, nationality). But in the process of this super-identity’s formation, an enormous quantity of human material is discarded: the majority of humanity, which remains outside the cabled circuit of the globalised techno-economy. This material residue identifies itself through aggressive cults, founded on the illusion of an originary authenticity in need of restoration. Only the affirmation of an identity makes survival possible in a world increasingly dense with conflicting territorial projects, in a world dominated by the paradox of growing wealth that produces an expanding misery.
In the horizon of evolution, the problem of collective happiness and liberation comes to be posed in terms that are completely asymmetrical to those we have known in the past. How will the human singularity reproduce itself in the sphere of the posthuman? Harmony, happiness, awareness: how can these be singularised in the sphere of the cabled global mind? The universality to which dialectical thought aspired was the result of the very process of the particularities’ capacity to constitute themselves as a conscious subject, and therefore to surpass the particular. The abolition of wage labour by the class of wage labour ably represented this process of inverting the whole starting from the negative affirmation of the parts. What is instead determinate is another type of universality: the abstract universality of code that semiotises every fragment of the existing without respecting any pulsation of living human particularity.
The century is ending under the sign of an inhuman universality, the universality of Code, of abstraction that manifests in money, in the circulation of information and finances. Therefore an abstract and disincarnated totalitarianism takes the place of the machine of universal semioticisation. Facing it, the massive return of the residual human, of the body, of blood and soil, of tradition and identity: the rancorous and aggressive reaffirmation of particularity against every other particularity in the name of no universality.
Translated by Steve Wright
21.6.10
EL ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO O FORMA PARTE DEL PROBLEMA O PARTE DE LA SOLUCIÓN
agrande la imagen/click on image to enlarge
20.6.10
¡BLANCO SOMOS Y BLANCO SEREMOS: ROBERT RYMAN Y LOS CRIOLLOS! UNA EXPOSICIÓN CURADA POR VICTOR ZAMUDIO TAYLOR Y ENRIQUE KRAUZE
agrande la imagen/click on image to enlarge
I
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO NO SON UN ERROR.
ES LA TRISTE EVIDENCIA DE QUE, COMO SOCIEDAD, NOS
HEMOS CONVERTIDO EN EL BLANCO DE LA INSEGURIDAD
Y EL TERROR; SECUESTROS, VIOLENCIA, CRIMEN ORGANIZADO,
IMPUNIDAD.
ESTAS PÁGINAS BLANCAS COMO LOS CUADROS BLANCOS DE ROBERT RYMAN, REFLEJAN UNA VEZ MAS, NUESTRA CEGUERA Y ESTUPIDEZ. SON LA TRISTE EVIDENCIA DE QUE, JUNTO CON NUESTRO ESTATUS DE CÚSPIDE DE LA PIRÁMIDE SOCIAL VIENE EL MIEDO A SER EL BLANCO DE NUESTRA PROPIA REALIDAD SOCIAL, MISMA QUE INGNORAMOS: EL MANTENER NUESTRA HEGEMONÍA DE SIGLOS NOS HA GANADO INEVITABLEMENTE EL ODIO DE LA MANO DE OBRA Y CAMPESINADO INVISIBLES Y POR ESO SOMOS VÍCTIMAS DE NUESTRA PROPIA IMPUNIDAD Y PREPOTENCIA, Y NOS MERECEMOS SER BLANCO DE SECUESTROS, VIOLENCIA Y CRIMEN ORGANIZADO.
2
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO SON GRITOS DE MIEDO.
GRITOS AL VACÍO QUE LAS VICTIMAS DE LA INSEGURIDAD
Y LA VIOLENCIA ELEVAN. GRITOS QUE LA SOCIEDAD ESCUCHA CON HORROR.
GRITOS QUE LAS AUTORIDADES NO OYEN, NO ATIENDEN, DEJAN EN BLANCO.
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO REFLEJAN LA SIMPLICIDAD POÉTICA MODERNISTA Y SE JACTAN DE NUESTRA PERTENENCIA Y SINTONÍA CON EL MUNDO GLOBAL DE LA REDUCCIÓN DECORATIVA.
NOS IDENTIFICAMOS CON LOS CUADROS BLANCOS DE ROBERT RYMAN POR VARIAS RAZONES:
SU IMPENETRABILIDAD MATERIAL E IDEOLÓGICA, QUE REPRESENTAN UN GIRO EN LA PRODUCCIÓN
PLÁSTICA EN ESTADOS UNIDOS EN UN MOMENTO DE GRAN VIOLENCIA INTERNA Y EXTERNA.
ESTAS PAGINAS EN BLANCO SON GRITOS ILUSOS AL VACÍO ELEVADOS POR FALSAS VÍCTIMAS
AMENAZADAS DENTRO DE CASAS-BÚNKER EN CONJUNTOS HABITACIONALES AISLADOS Y VIGILADOS DEL PELIGRO FICTICIO
QUE REPRESENTAN LAS HUESTES MORENAS QUE SUPUESTAMENTE AMENAZAN
NUESTRO BIENESTAR Y NUESTRO DERECHO A LA IMPUNIDAD.
LAS AUTORIDADES NO OYEN, NO ATIENDEN, DEJAN EN BLANCO NUESTROS GRITOS DENUNCIANDO LA VIOLENCIA DE LA QUE SON RESPONSABLES. Y SIN EMBARGO, LAS AUTORIDADES ESTÁN CEGADAS COMO NOSOTROS A LA VERDADERA RAZÓN DE TANTA VIOLENCIA: LA DESIGUALDAD SOCIAL, EL RACISMO Y EL AFERRAMIENTO A
UN MODELO SOCIAL QUE IMPLICA LA DOMESTICACIÓN Y EXPLOTACIÓN DE LOS DESPOSEÍDOS DE ESTE PAÍS.
3
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO SON EL HUECO DE ACCIÓN DE LAS AUTORIDADES. SIN IMPORTAR EL CLAMOR DE PROTECCIÓN CIUDADANA, HAN DEJADO EN BLANCO SUS PROMESAS DE COMBATIR EL CRIMEN, DE REFORMAR EL OBSOLETO SISTEMA JUDICIAL. DE GARANTIZARNOS TRANQUILIDAD.
LAS PINTURAS BLANCAS DE ROBERT RYMAN COINCIDEN CON NUESTRA NECESIDAD CULTURAL DE APOYAR UN ARTE DESPOLITIZADO Y TOTALMENTE DESVINCULADO DE LA REALIDAD SOCIAL DEL PAÍS. LAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO SIMBOLIZAN NUESTRA EXIGENCIA DE QUE COMO CIUDADANOS BLANCOS, SEAMOS LOS ÚNICOS DIGNOS DE SER PROTEGIDOS POR LAS AUTORIDADES. ¿QUE HARÍAMOS LOS BLANCOS SIN NUESTRAS CRIADAS, NANAS, CHOFERES Y JARDINEROS MORENITOS?
4
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO SON LA NUEVA BANDERA DE LA SOCIEDAD. UNA BANDERA DE PAZ Y DE EXIGENCIA QUE TODO MÉXICO ONDEA FRENTE A LAS AUTORIDADES. DEMANDAMOS QUE HAGAN A UN LADO SUS DIFERENCIAS POLÍTICAS Y CUMPLAN CON SU OBLIGACIÓN MAS ELEMENTAL: NUESTRA SEGURIDAD.
AHORA SI, ¡YA BASTA!
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO RESUMEN EL MOMENTO HISTÓRICO QUE VIVIMOS:
NAVEGAMOS CON BANDERA DE PAZ PERO MAS BIEN NOS COBIJAMOS
DE BLANCO PARA NEGAR NUESTRA PARTICIPACIÓN ACTIVA Y COMPLICIDAD CON
EL ACTUAL CLIMA DE VIOLENCIA Y DE INSEGURIDAD. LA OBLIGACIÓN PRINCIPAL DE UN GOBIERNO DEMOCRÁTICO NO ES LA “SEGURIDAD” DE LA ÉLITE Y DE LA CLASE MEDIA, SINO DE ASEGURARSE QUE TODOS LOS CIUDADANOS CUMPLAN CON EL CONTRATO SOCIAL, AUN INEXISTENTE EN ESTE PAÍS.
I
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO NO SON UN ERROR.
ES LA TRISTE EVIDENCIA DE QUE, COMO SOCIEDAD, NOS
HEMOS CONVERTIDO EN EL BLANCO DE LA INSEGURIDAD
Y EL TERROR; SECUESTROS, VIOLENCIA, CRIMEN ORGANIZADO,
IMPUNIDAD.
ESTAS PÁGINAS BLANCAS COMO LOS CUADROS BLANCOS DE ROBERT RYMAN, REFLEJAN UNA VEZ MAS, NUESTRA CEGUERA Y ESTUPIDEZ. SON LA TRISTE EVIDENCIA DE QUE, JUNTO CON NUESTRO ESTATUS DE CÚSPIDE DE LA PIRÁMIDE SOCIAL VIENE EL MIEDO A SER EL BLANCO DE NUESTRA PROPIA REALIDAD SOCIAL, MISMA QUE INGNORAMOS: EL MANTENER NUESTRA HEGEMONÍA DE SIGLOS NOS HA GANADO INEVITABLEMENTE EL ODIO DE LA MANO DE OBRA Y CAMPESINADO INVISIBLES Y POR ESO SOMOS VÍCTIMAS DE NUESTRA PROPIA IMPUNIDAD Y PREPOTENCIA, Y NOS MERECEMOS SER BLANCO DE SECUESTROS, VIOLENCIA Y CRIMEN ORGANIZADO.
2
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO SON GRITOS DE MIEDO.
GRITOS AL VACÍO QUE LAS VICTIMAS DE LA INSEGURIDAD
Y LA VIOLENCIA ELEVAN. GRITOS QUE LA SOCIEDAD ESCUCHA CON HORROR.
GRITOS QUE LAS AUTORIDADES NO OYEN, NO ATIENDEN, DEJAN EN BLANCO.
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO REFLEJAN LA SIMPLICIDAD POÉTICA MODERNISTA Y SE JACTAN DE NUESTRA PERTENENCIA Y SINTONÍA CON EL MUNDO GLOBAL DE LA REDUCCIÓN DECORATIVA.
NOS IDENTIFICAMOS CON LOS CUADROS BLANCOS DE ROBERT RYMAN POR VARIAS RAZONES:
SU IMPENETRABILIDAD MATERIAL E IDEOLÓGICA, QUE REPRESENTAN UN GIRO EN LA PRODUCCIÓN
PLÁSTICA EN ESTADOS UNIDOS EN UN MOMENTO DE GRAN VIOLENCIA INTERNA Y EXTERNA.
ESTAS PAGINAS EN BLANCO SON GRITOS ILUSOS AL VACÍO ELEVADOS POR FALSAS VÍCTIMAS
AMENAZADAS DENTRO DE CASAS-BÚNKER EN CONJUNTOS HABITACIONALES AISLADOS Y VIGILADOS DEL PELIGRO FICTICIO
QUE REPRESENTAN LAS HUESTES MORENAS QUE SUPUESTAMENTE AMENAZAN
NUESTRO BIENESTAR Y NUESTRO DERECHO A LA IMPUNIDAD.
LAS AUTORIDADES NO OYEN, NO ATIENDEN, DEJAN EN BLANCO NUESTROS GRITOS DENUNCIANDO LA VIOLENCIA DE LA QUE SON RESPONSABLES. Y SIN EMBARGO, LAS AUTORIDADES ESTÁN CEGADAS COMO NOSOTROS A LA VERDADERA RAZÓN DE TANTA VIOLENCIA: LA DESIGUALDAD SOCIAL, EL RACISMO Y EL AFERRAMIENTO A
UN MODELO SOCIAL QUE IMPLICA LA DOMESTICACIÓN Y EXPLOTACIÓN DE LOS DESPOSEÍDOS DE ESTE PAÍS.
3
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO SON EL HUECO DE ACCIÓN DE LAS AUTORIDADES. SIN IMPORTAR EL CLAMOR DE PROTECCIÓN CIUDADANA, HAN DEJADO EN BLANCO SUS PROMESAS DE COMBATIR EL CRIMEN, DE REFORMAR EL OBSOLETO SISTEMA JUDICIAL. DE GARANTIZARNOS TRANQUILIDAD.
LAS PINTURAS BLANCAS DE ROBERT RYMAN COINCIDEN CON NUESTRA NECESIDAD CULTURAL DE APOYAR UN ARTE DESPOLITIZADO Y TOTALMENTE DESVINCULADO DE LA REALIDAD SOCIAL DEL PAÍS. LAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO SIMBOLIZAN NUESTRA EXIGENCIA DE QUE COMO CIUDADANOS BLANCOS, SEAMOS LOS ÚNICOS DIGNOS DE SER PROTEGIDOS POR LAS AUTORIDADES. ¿QUE HARÍAMOS LOS BLANCOS SIN NUESTRAS CRIADAS, NANAS, CHOFERES Y JARDINEROS MORENITOS?
4
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO SON LA NUEVA BANDERA DE LA SOCIEDAD. UNA BANDERA DE PAZ Y DE EXIGENCIA QUE TODO MÉXICO ONDEA FRENTE A LAS AUTORIDADES. DEMANDAMOS QUE HAGAN A UN LADO SUS DIFERENCIAS POLÍTICAS Y CUMPLAN CON SU OBLIGACIÓN MAS ELEMENTAL: NUESTRA SEGURIDAD.
AHORA SI, ¡YA BASTA!
ESTAS PÁGINAS EN BLANCO RESUMEN EL MOMENTO HISTÓRICO QUE VIVIMOS:
NAVEGAMOS CON BANDERA DE PAZ PERO MAS BIEN NOS COBIJAMOS
DE BLANCO PARA NEGAR NUESTRA PARTICIPACIÓN ACTIVA Y COMPLICIDAD CON
EL ACTUAL CLIMA DE VIOLENCIA Y DE INSEGURIDAD. LA OBLIGACIÓN PRINCIPAL DE UN GOBIERNO DEMOCRÁTICO NO ES LA “SEGURIDAD” DE LA ÉLITE Y DE LA CLASE MEDIA, SINO DE ASEGURARSE QUE TODOS LOS CIUDADANOS CUMPLAN CON EL CONTRATO SOCIAL, AUN INEXISTENTE EN ESTE PAÍS.
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