Documenta Fifteen: The Limits (and Possibilities) of Culture - Radical Art and Twenty-First Century Crises
It will be abundantly clear to anyone who has had even half an eye on current affairs, that we are living in a period of profound, critically intertwined crises, polycrises in fact. Global inequality is arguably more extreme today than it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution due to the domination of the system of financialised capitalism. After decades of its academic peripheralisation, issues of class struggle have returned with a vengeance. Disillusionment with neoliberal corporate ‘democracy’ has both challenged and fomented Left solidarities globally. Meanwhile, the same phenomenon has facilitated the ascendancy of increasingly violent right-wing racism and indigenous struggles against it. Meanwhile, mass protests confront mounting unignorable evidence of climate catastrophe. Many such protests have been met by governmental and police attempts to deem them illegal. All these crises intersect in real time and are fundamentally interconnected. Documenta’s last iteration Documenta Fifteen, touted as the ‘first exhibition of the twenty-first century’, touched on all the above crises. Interestingly, the exhibition excluded most big names of the Eurocentric and North American art worlds. Curated by the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa, the exhibition focused, somewhat controversially, on non-mainstream artists, artist collectives and ‘non-artists’ from the Global South.
Go on…? Speaking of Beckett
I can’t go on, I’ll go on
Beckett’s famous line from his novel The Unnamable (1958) has been reiterated innumerably, in different contexts and for different ends. Regardless, these words resonate uncannily with our era. Today, every pretense to enlightenment reveals its obverse: unerring disregard for international law; relentless degradation of human life in the basest of conflicts; retrograde imperialism; ecological collapse; allegiance to capitalist abstractions requiring ever fewer workers, let alone human beings. The impetus to give up seems entirely warranted. Conversely, the motivation to keep going arises reflexively. For most, there’s no way to give up, there’s no outside, no security, no backup, no alternative guarantee of survival. Despite this, continuity can also be resistance, wilful obstinance in the face of circumstances weighted to make us quit, to shut-up, or to simply keep consuming as the passive receptors of content monetised through our inaction.
The Artist and the Un-working of Work
Jasmine Guffond’s Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity was produced out of a collaboration with Zabriskie Bookshop in Berlin. Invited participants were asked to select a book from the Zabriskie collection to respond to. Guffond chose David Graeber’s ironically titled Debt: The First 5000 Years. During his career, sadly curtailed by his premature death in 2020, Graeber, a renowned anthropologist and outspoken anarchist strongly attached to the Occupy Wall Street movement, directed much debate to the centrality of work in capitalist societies. As he and an ever-increasing panoply of contemporary critics of neoliberalism’s mantra of endless production, endless competition, have pointed out, much of what passes for waged work these days is in fact, ‘bullshit’. Graeber’s equally ironically titled book Bullshit Jobs, deploys a wealth of research including numerous primary case studies, to illustrate his thesis that capitalism’s obsession with work is largely a ruse: many workers today are employed to do tasks they feel are meaningless and contribute nothing to society. Waged work, even highly remunerated at times, simply becomes a means of disciplining individuals, keeping them in their place day in and day out in order that they don’t find better (re: potentially subversive and/or creative) things to do.
Stupidity: A Big Picture
Art is perhaps the only occupation where behaviour that would otherwise be deemed stupid is embraced. In most other fields and in daily life, we avoid actions and statements that might make us look stupid. In art however, apparent openness to stupidity is not so much testament to the corresponding stupidity of the author (well, not always) but to the questioning of commonly held assumptions of what constitutes aptitude and mastery. Choosing to behave stupidly becomes a potential means of challenging institutions authorising intelligence. The list of art that critically engages stupidity is practically endless and well documented. As a result, this essay does not speak to individual art works or the intentions of the artists in the exhibition. Instead, it focuses on the paradoxically serious, but stupid, macro-structures that frame art today. These structures condition the knowing or unknowing stupidity of contemporary artists: the stupidity endemic to the global domination of capital, and the current accelerated stupidity and bankruptcy of Western global geopolitics. These wider interlinked lenses affect us all, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Art as Critique Under Neoliberalism: Negativity Undoing Economic Naturalism
Is contemporary art still a viable medium for socio-political critique within a cultural terrain almost wholly naturalised by neoliberalism? Historically, negativity is central to the project of critical theory. Today, art’s critical acuity is revivified by negatively divesting from art contexts saturated with neoliberal economism. Criticality is then negatively practiced as an ‘un-’ or ‘not-doing’, defining modes of exodus while crucially not abandoning art’s institutional definition altogether.
Measuring the Immeasurable: Social Media and the Dictatorship of Visibility
Institutionally today’s world is dominated by a slavish adherence to metrics. Every action and every choice is viewed as a strategic and competitive means of rising above others and ‘getting ahead’. Under neoliberalism, endless competition is purveyed not only as necessary but as ‘only natural’. This mindset is met with constant clamouring for numerical validation at every level.
Curated From Within: the Artist as Curator
Artists invented what we now understand as modern curating. The various avant-gardes established types of display that fundamentally changed what was possible in an exhibition context. Their efforts were later echoed by other practices of independent artist-run spaces, also known as “artist-run initiatives,” that drew curating close to interventionist and activist intentions.
Say it Again, KNULP at New Joerg, Vienna
Habitually we assume that what we read and say neatly corresponds with what we see and experience. Language and speech however rarely fully align with what we attempt to express or describe.
In Brief: The Future of Art Schools etc.
There are two principal challenges facing art schools today. Both pertain to the decades-long impact of neoliberalism.
Another Place After Another
The exhibition ‘Transplant’ was conceived as a collaboration between the independent artist space KNULP in Sydney and Sydney College of the Arts gallery at the University of Sydney. Part of the underlying though not explicit mandate of the exhibition, was to highlight the seminal role independent art spaces play in the creation and critique of contemporary culture locally and around the world.
From Pillar to Post
This exhibition addressed the unique physical peculiarities of the ageing colonial-era architecture in which it occurred. Its title, ‘Pillar to Post’ suggested the degree to which contemporary life is evermore at the whim of external forces that propel us from one space to another. We move more frequently than ever from one place to another, from one situation to another, willingly or not.
Work and the Immaterial Labour of Music, Marx 200, KARL records, Berlin
Karl Marx critiqued the domination of life by capitalist labour. Increasingly labour has been dematerialised. Music is inherently immaterial: it escapes true physical capture as much as it is increasingly accessible digitally. Music is temporal and from one perspective, un-ownable: we own the music in a subjective sense. We incorporate its rhythms, textures, harmonies and patterns into the organic circumstances of our own lives. We live the music.
Here and Nowhere: Artistic Identity on Social Media
Social media is a dominant force in contemporary art and culture. Social media attempts to incorporate everything into it. Its underlying consensus is of sharing all with all at all times. The unprecedented popularity of social media among artists suggests they have finally escaped their traditional identity as alienated individuals. Or have they?
Barbarians at the Gates: Corporate Art Institutions Against the ‘People’
The world of global art institutions is based, at least in theory, on the capacity to adequately represent liberal ‘free-spirited’ contemporary artists. Yet what does it mean when apparently progressive art is exhibited in the same high-profile international museums that largely relegate women and artists of non-Western heritages to silence and invisibility?
Art and Celebrity: the Quest for Ultravisibilty
Controversy surrounding Björk’s recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art raises a number of questions about the role of major art institutions in the 21st Century. These questions go far beyond fusty reactions over a pop star exhibiting in the hallowed halls of a high-end museum. Instead they indicate a broader crisis of identity for public art institutions beset by neoliberalism’s privatising demands for ever-greater profits.
Art and the Politics of Withdrawal
The controversy surrounding founding Biennale of Sydney corporate sponsor Transfield, and its simultaneous operation of refugee detention centres, raises much broader issues. At first glance, could there be anything more diametrically opposed than a multi-national corporation capitalising on human suffering and a mass cultural event implicitly believed to democratically celebrate global difference?
Someone Looks at Something/ with One Eye Close To... Shane Haseman at AFAAAR
References to four key figures of the historical avant-garde - Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp and Samuel Beckett - appear in Shane Haseman’s latest work ‘High Street’, at NEAR gallery in Sydney. A series of site-specific intellectual gags suggest alternative understandings of their historical legacies.
History is a Dying Star, Jelena Telecki, NEW14, ACCA, Melbourne
Jelena Telecki’s paintings prove that the representation of subjective truth need not automatically result in simple illustrative narratives. In the artist’s recent body of work, references to the overreaching ‘utopian’ ambitions of states and their leaders, are unhinged from easy readings of historical causality.
Something in the Air: Internet Art as Archive and Strategy Beyond the Gates of the Museum
Internet art’s seeming peripherality to the greater art world is uncanny when the internet has so radically altered the ways in which anyone with access to such technology, views both art and the world generally. Meanwhile, the virtualisation of Capital, labour, art and culture, is far more pervasive, far less obvious and far more insidious than simple ‘VR’ technology would suggest.
Sweeping Art Under the Market
Critical art writing bemoaning a fundamental ‘crisis’ in contemporary art is by no means new. In fact, since the 1980s such writing has become commonplace. A recent article by Camille Paglia extrapolating such a crisis called ‘How Capitalism Can Save Art’ appeared, fittingly enough, in the Wall Street Journal. How exactly capitalism can save art however is by no means convincingly argued.
To produce value under Capital is a misfortune because it means producing value for somebody else.