Art and the Politics of Withdrawal
THE RECENT CONTROVERSY surrounding founding Biennale of Sydney sponsor, Transfield’s simultaneous operation of the highly questionable Manus and Nauru Island refugee detention centres (1), ultimately raised some much broader issues. These concerned questions of contemporary global art’s intertwining with what appear to be otherwise opposed phenomena. Indeed, at first glance there could apparently be nothing more diametrically opposed than a multi-national corporation capitalising on human suffering and a cultural event, like the Biennale of Sydney (and biennales generally), implicitly believed to democratically celebrate global difference. However, the consternation voiced by local and global art communities over the revelation of Transfield’s parallel sponsorship of detention centres could be viewed as somewhat disingenuous. Certainly it is no secret that all major global arts events, of which biennales are but one, are routinely sponsored by global corporate entities. It is the only way that the resources required to produce, support and promote events of this type and scale, could be galvanized. Crucially though some much greater contemporary concerns arose out of this situation that pertain specifically to a politics of the image and its dissemination as a dissimulation serving to maintain a notion of art as inherently idealistic. Such an image is historically bound by the politics of German idealist philosophy most apparent during the late eighteenth century at the advent of Romanticism. Moreover, from a contemporary global perspective, the dissimulatory politics of images and their constant circulation, speak in the end to two conjoined images of containment, the one literal and laid bare and the other concealed behind a discourse of democratic liberalism. The latter discourse uses art imagery and cultural events like biennales to create an artificial separation between ‘real life’ political manifestations and a cultural sphere where such events might be illustrated negatively but only as a means of proving the ethical superiority of a particular image of an enlightened contemporary culture. The increasing scale and number of biennales globally further succeeds in concealing the true economic base of these events. The circulation of a surfeit of often predictably spectacularised and ‘participatory’ art diverts audience attention from thoughts of where such art comes from in the first place. And again that is true even if such art contains critical references to contemporary political realities. Fatigue and boredom also underscore the inflated expansion of biennales where there is always too much to see. Similarly, there is increasing evidence of an analogous fatigue with contemporary forms of democracy where genuine participation is barely representational. Curiously, this fatigue is conditioned by the imperative to produce more and at all times, even if today Post-Fordist work dynamics make it seem as though there were more free time and less control from external sources. Of course, given art’s idealist lineage, the seeming ‘solution’ faced with unethical activity is protest and the supposed subversion of existing frameworks by highlighting such transgressions within them. But as is well understood, this is precisely how such events function ‘democratically’ to continually absorb otherwise indigestible content. On the contrary, perhaps the answer lies in a politics of active withdrawal, not as a simple binary act of protest, but as a specific, in fact non-defeatist, attitude towards life and art.
With regards to the Biennale of Sydney 2014, the issue of withdrawal arose most literally in relation to a highly publicised open letter drafted to the Biennale Board by a working group of around 35 concerned artists. This letter expressed the artists’ misgivings about Transfield’s tainted sponsorship of the exhibition. Collectively they stated,
we will not accept the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, because it is ethically indefensible and in breach of human rights; and that, as a network of artists, arts workers and a leading cultural organisation, we do not want to be associated with these practices (2).
Despite this, while initially calling for a boycott of the exhibition, at no point in the letter itself did the artists threaten overtly to withdraw their participation from the show, understandably locating responsibility with the Biennale of Sydney as an institution and not with Juliana Engberg as the curator. A small group of around ten artists did go on to publicise their decision to withdraw including high profile Turkish practitioner Ahmet Öğüt who cited in particular,
a rather insensitive statement by the Biennale Board in response (to their letter) stating, ‘Artists must make a decision according to their own understanding and beliefs’ ... [which turned] the issue into an individual matter, and that is what is upsetting, instead of addressing a collective responsibility (3).
Events took an even more interesting turn when following on from the threat of more artist withdrawals, the Biennale of Sydney issued its own statement explaining its intention to unreservedly sever ties with Transfield thereby, according to some, endangering the Biennale’s future altogether (4). Nonetheless this decision by the Biennale of Sydney coaxed most of those artists intending to withdraw their work, back to the exhibition.
Not wanting in any way to underestimate the seriousness and particularity of Transfield’s involvement with Australian operated detention centres, it is true that it is but one of many examples of the ways by which art is actually brought to public attention. From a historical perspective, even aspects of some of Modernism’s most revered avant-garde’s were financially buoyed by corporate funds. More generally, it took the commercialisation of art to allow it to be seen as autonomous, that is, free from explicit use to state and religious institutions. More specifically, there have been and continue to be many examples of art produced and exhibited under highly compromised circumstances. Notorious among historical precedents was the infamous financial, if not actual, support of many still-existing corporations like Kodak, Hugo Boss, Volkswagen, Bayer, Siemens, Ford, of the Nazi Party. Much more recently, protests arose over Turkey’s largest conglomerate, the Koç Group’s primary sponsorship of the 2013 Istanbul Biennale despite its activities as a producer of arms and military hardware and, as has been claimed, a corporation with many vested interests in the strategic urban and touristic transformation of the city of Istanbul (5). Contemporaneously, it has likewise come to the attention of human rights organisations, and argued by cultural theorists like British artist Guy Mannes Abbott (6), that construction works connected to the Abu Dhabi branches of the prestigious Louvre and Guggenheim museums, are being carried out by migrant construction workers who daily ‘face destitution, internment and deportation’ (7). Finally, the routine interconnection of large-scale global cultural events put forth as celebrating such things as ‘happy anarchy’ (8) and the harsh realties of their means of facilitation, point to a fundamental disjunction between the way the art world operates and how its institutions choose to represent themselves.
The origins of this disjunction stem from a basically Romantic conception of the artist as an unassailable idealist whose task is to make the world ‘better’ even if indirectly. Ironically this occurs at precisely the same time that ‘artists imitate a product particular to the post-industrial economy: the administrative, affective, and intellectual power of institutions’ (9). It is no surprise then that art institutions themselves have begun internalising this idealism habitually believed to be a defining characteristic of artists. Such idealistic self-representations are then re-voiced via institutional and corporate structures such as those underpinning global biennales. For example, an exhibition like Manifesta 5 held in San Sebastián, Spain in 2004 had the theme of ‘closing ones eyes’ and was conveniently able to implicate itself as being in league with a more general idealistic struggle against social and territorial controls. At the same time, the exhibition could effectively ignore both a self-reflexive acknowledgement of its institutionalising structure and the contested local context in which it was presented (10). In a similar vein, and before any of the controversy surrounding Transfield’s involvement was aired, the 2014 Biennale of Sydney claimed in its press release that the aim of the exhibition was to, [remind] us that powerful art is not divorced from the cultural conditions, political, social and climatic environments in which it is generated. That indeed it often exists to provide a meta-commentary on these aspects of society – and even, sometimes, act as an antidote and proposition. As a future vision (11).
Furthermore, the press release concluded saying the show,
seeks splendour and rapture in works that remain true to a greater, even sublime visuality. Today these things co-exist and overlap, and the tactics of theatricality cannot be separated from overtly social-situationist inspired works, just as they are central to works engaging with humanity at a grand scale. Extra energies are sought in works that unleash physical and psychic intensity. A happy anarchy is produced with works that activate the power of imagination through laughter and activity (12).
The hyperbolic string of artistic clichés, generalisations and extreme contradictions this statement presents is doubly revealing for its highlighting of an image of contemporary art as a powerful subjective and social force. Never mind that the alleged ‘anarchy’ it purported to embody was simultaneously the result of intense bureaucratic micro-management and immersive media promotion. And despite the use of the socio-politically loaded word ‘anarchy’, its inoffensive definition here as ‘happy’, assured audiences in advance that there was nothing to fear from the exhibition; its humanist engagement ‘at a grand-scale’ was wholly metaphoric and therefore ultimately palatable. The metaphoric and dissimulating aspect of such statements point to a particular politics of the image that is central to contemporary neoliberal forms of ‘democracy’. In the contemporary cultural sphere, biennales are perhaps the most emblematic form of a parallel democracy.
The type of democracy thus evidenced is one in which annunciation is everything, to speak is to present an image of conviction and/or belief (13). The managerial aspects of this type of democracy are highly dependent on self-presentation where the self is also increasingly conceived as a kind of image to be traded, whether by artists, celebrities or politicians. And this situation occurs in a supposedly borderless and deregulated world where, superficially at least, all images are equal. It is a radically aestheticised form of democracy where values are leveled at the level of the image and where democratic ‘choice’ merely represents reproduction of the same. Unsurprisingly, such a vision of democracy is accompanied by the leveling of value under a globalised regime of Capital that all contemporary phenomena must defer to. The repetitiveness of this mechanism of constant deferral to the assumed necessity for ‘concrete’ measurable values means that in a global art context, images must speak at all times, they must ‘mean’ something, their social and material value must be made readable and available. Beyond semiotics, the question of meaning in the terrain of the rootless digital imagery that surrounds us, coagulates as a condition where in practice, as presaged by Walter Benjamin, the ‘image is dialectics at a standstill’ because ‘…The image that is read … [is] the image in the now of its recognisability’ (14). Therefore, as far as democracy in both its political and cultural manifestations is concerned, recognisability as repetition and reiteration is paramount. The cyclical aspects of such a model means that, as with the globalised economy and transnational artistic manifestations like biennales that are increasingly a by-product of it, circulation circulates itself. The meanings expected to be encountered within a biennale, that might even speak of such things as internment or othering, are themselves part of a system of othering and containment. The stasis of the image as the most insistent and inescapable cultural currency of our global-contemporary age – and while imagery circulates ad-infinitum as at no other moment in history – testifies in fact to a freedom conditioned by the most stringent and covert controls. Recognisability, facilitates an essentially informational understanding of content (15).
Of course, global cultural events like biennales continuously emphasise the role of art as fundamentally communicative. This would explain as well, why the primacy of the biennale as a Western construct, regardless of where it is situated, begins to function around the world according to a fundamental logic of visuality reminiscent of that developed by the Medieval Christian church (16). Despite the fact that visitors to biennales are undoubtedly more literate than their medieval antecedents, the truth remains that both the early Christian church and the diverse displays assembled by biennales, rely heavily on the presentation of readable narratives presented in spectacularised visual forms (17). That is not to say that biennales simply enact a crude revivified form of Western colonialism either (although they do that too) but that the global neoliberalism on which they depend (18) needs to be able to communicate endlessly in as many diverse contexts as possible, thus the centrality of the images produced by them (19). Biennales need to create an informational environment requiring that viewers submit to learning from them. They inculcate a belief in their educational necessity as a wholly contemporary form of understanding the world visually. In doing so, they preempt a parallel sense of the necessity for their continuity. This assumed need for the continuity of such large-scale transnational cultural expressions, reiterates the repetitive circulatory channels of the contemporary global economy.
As a result, the possibility of offering alternatives that refuse to defer to the production of yet more images is frequently forestalled. This situation is attested today by the fact that there would appear to be almost no other way to imagine a world not wholly enclosed by exchangeable imagery, especially when the images so readily accessible are often undeniably compelling in themselves. This question of the image is not simply literal either: the extreme burgeoning of performative and ‘relational’ practices common to contemporary biennales, in no way escape the prevailing regime of the image; their instant consumption as art already creates an image of them. From this point of view, the reduction of human life to bare life (20), as is most blatantly evidenced by the sorts of conditions experienced by those like the asylum seekers detained at Manus and Nauru islands, is but the literalisation of a global democratic system that disguises control in the image of fluidity, diversity and free choice.
This state of affairs is also exemplified by the presently frequently discussed move within current democracies, from industrial to Post-Fordist models of labour. In the latter, the figure of the artist is paradigmatic as artists have long-been expected to be flexible, hardworking, quasi-itinerant, resourceful and willing to produce at short notice for comparatively little economic reward (21). Furthermore, because the artist is in a sense always at work it means that, unlike the fixed labour time workers spend in offices or factories, the artist’s labour is perpetually productive (22). In principle, this makes the resultant production of ideas constantly available to deregulated markets where they can be repeatedly capitalised on. This is particularly the case in a so-called ‘knowledge economy’ like ours linked to a global system of dematerialsed commerce that is based on the ceaseless trading of immaterial concepts that can be variously put to work in a diversity of contexts. Once more, the paradoxical aspect of the contemporary artist’s reinvigorated idealism comes to the fore at exactly the moment when the work practices he or she believes to be an alternative to consumerist norms, are in fact central to them: the closer the contemporary artist’s work seems to approach ‘real life’ the closer it is to the existing networks of the global economy (23).This would explain why ‘artists who make lifelike (24) art are more inclined to obfuscate their relationship to commerce as biennale artists tend to do’ (25). As for biennales as organisations, their parallel championing of contemporary enlightenment rhetoric is equally paradoxical given that they frequently ape a global schema whose negative effects they profess to criticise. Recognition of this state of affairs would have undeniably rendered Transfield’s relationship to the Biennale of Sydney natural rather than compromised (26).
Of course, there is a significant dimension of exhaustion and fatigue engendered by this scenario: artists are expected to produce more and more while biennales are expected to grow ever larger presenting evermore ‘ambitious’, that is to say spectacular, art works. The sheer inflation of biennales on every level, even though it means from one point of view there is potentially more ‘good’ work to see within them, becomes exhausting in a normative setting where more is never enough. Meanwhile, artists who recognise their basically inescapable complicity with the cultural and economic systems they seek to critique are frustrated once they realise that criticism and dissent have become staple spectacles of the institutionalisation of a global contemporary culture that a priori speaks for ‘others’. At the same time, the artist as public citizen is often disillusioned with an image of contemporary democracy that similarly speaks representationally for them while wholly disregarding their actual values and desires. Considering these basically dystopian circumstances, what is an artist, let alone anyone else, to do? If an artist cannot effectively use predominant structures to criticise them from within because the results will always be representationally reframed from outside, what, beyond indiscriminately seeking solace in cynicism, should they do? How should they work? In the end, the potential answer demands a much broader speculation on a politics of active withdrawal that refuses to submit to the demands of a global system of insatiable consumptive appetites.
In the most literal sense, and returning to the controversy surrounding Transfield’s dual sponsorship of the Biennale of Sydney and detention centres, surely the singularly most forceful protest in such a situation would have been the immediate refusal to participate. It is hard not imagine – and some of the Biennale’s artists obviously did imagine – just how disruptive to an exhibition as visible as the Biennale of Sydney, the sudden appearance within it of empty galleries as zones of nothingness, would have been. Yet, this question of the nothingness that is left in such a scenario is not simply one relating to stubborn obstinacy. Neither is it a call for an impotent retreat into base indolence. Ultimately it is a philosophical question addressing the demands and expectations of a democracy that fails us. Recently, Slavoj Žižek has written at length about the resistant dimension of a self-aware negativity that refuses to act productively. With this in mind, he proposed the catch cry ‘Don’t Act. Just Think’ in what could also be interpreted as a wittily oblique rejoinder to the Nike corporation’s ubiquitous ‘Just Do It!’. Overall, Žižek’s theory, is precisely about nothing. But of course, this is a dialectical nothing. A negativity that is full of significance in an all-encompassing post-historical ideology where every ‘something’ is able to appear on account of being palatable to consumer/neoliberal (communicative) capitalism [yet] it is an active nothing, a nothing that is full of consequence and potential, that we must perform (i.e. not simply inactivity) (27).
Withdrawal then need not be a giving up. This is because it also indicates a very particular recognition of the elusiveness and flexibility of the artist’s choices. Beyond a wholly professionalised vision of contemporary creative activity (of the sort promoted by prevailing econometric discourse) the very ambiguity of what artists do remains. So too does the potential difficulty in ‘reading’ what artists produce. Jacques Rancière echoes this understanding,
The carpenter, baker, shoemaker, blacksmith, all must remain tied to their stations in life. The ‘office’ of the artist, however, is ambiguous. It is like a phantom profession, one that permits the artist to simultaneously work and not work, to have ‘real’ job, and a fictional job. And nothing is more subversive than showing other workers the pleasure of not engaging in productive labour (28).
Thereby, as an example of doing while not doing, of refusing to be wholly answerable to the demand for constant production, the artist may deliberately deploy techniques of opacity to deny the easy narrative readability so often expected of contemporary artists’ works (29). This refusal of making sense of images, of disallowing them from reiterating the rhetoric of a liberal democracy where narrative dissent is expected, is also tantamount to producing nothing, at least nothing of clear value. The question of withdrawal also suggests a somewhat Situationist celebration of the right to choose not to do certain things and to reconfigure artistic practice as separate from, albeit linked to, a practice of life. And this is definitely not to espouse a romantically bohemian conception of the artist either, as this image has already returned to the global art scene with a vengeance (30). Except now the image of the bohemian has been comprehensively professionalised and bears with it stock-in-trade discourses about a return to ‘beauty’ and a fixation with ‘aesthetics’. Likewise, the recognition of the practice of art as partaking of a broader attitude to a life that refuses or at least seriously complicates, its marketable parcellisation, cannot be answered by the production of ‘relational art’ which in any case is by now so generic as to represent the status-quo. Relational art only succeeds in formalising aspects of life while refusing in its habitual good naturedness, to acknowledge that ‘power is relational’ (31). Much relational art favoured by biennales, avoids questions of power altogether by embracing the type of communicative and socially interactive processes central to the ‘casually’ networked systems of power by which neoliberalism operates. And from a different perspective, cultures of militant protest could also been seen as contributing to the structures they despise because aren’t ‘the forms of agency that we commonly associate with resistance not modes of high performance themselves?’ don’t they ‘actually exemplify the core momentum of high performance… : they make something happen and deliver an event’ (32). Delivering an event is grist to the mill of neoliberal culture, the more to see the better, the more emotive or dramatic that event, the better. The contemporary democratic spectacle of which biennales for better or worse, are increasingly a key part, demand participation and dynamism, they demand constant interaction, communication and discourse regardless of whether or not artists or individuals are genuinely, or even want to be, engaged. Things may change yet though if we start to think about withdrawal as an active refusal to contribute to the endlessly cyclical production of the language and imagery of freedom as containment for ‘reflexive withdrawal… does not entail a retreat into inactivity, but the opening up of a space for radical change’ (33). The refusal to appear, or to reappear where least expected, or to disengage in our search for creative ‘forms of non-alignment, non-compliance, non-compliance, uncooperativeness’ (34) is an active search for genuine disruption, of a way of living practice contrary to the stasis of its myopic characterisation as nothing but a series of representative professional ‘outcomes’.
Alex Gawronski
Originally published in Broadsheet vol. 43 no. 2, Jun, Jul, Aug 2014, CACSA, Adelaide, Australia.
1. It should be noted that Transfield and the Biennale of Sydney have both released statements with reference to the complexities of Transfield’s sponsorship: http://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/blog/2014/03/03/related-links-biennale-boycott/ [accessed 26 August 2014]. Further discussions surrounding the 19th Biennale of Sydney controversy and Transfield’s involvement, both directly and indirectly can be found in Broadsheet vol. 43 no. 2, Jun, Jul, Aug 2014: http://issuu.com/cacsabroadsheet/docs/cvacb_v43_iss2 [accessed 26 August 2014]
2. ‘Open Letter to the Board of the Biennale by Participants of the 19th Biennale of Sydney’ at http://xborderoperationalmatters.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/letter-biennale-artists/ (amended 20 February 2014 to include additional signatories) [accessed 26 August 2014]
3. Ahmet Öğüt quoted in ‘Five artists have withdrawn from the Sydney Biennale,’ ArtsHub, 26 February 2014: http://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/news/grants-and-funding/five-artists-have-withdrawn-from-the-sydney-biennale-198258 [accessed 26 August 2014]
4. Andrew Taylor, ‘Biennale of Sydney facing uncertain future after severing ties with Transfield’, Sydney Morning Herald, 07 March 2014
5. Ozge Yilmaz, ‘Protests at Istanbul Biennale,’ The New Contemporary at http://thenewcontemporary.com/2013/06/06/turkish-protests-reach-art-scene/, 06 June 2013
6. See also, Guy Mannes-Abbott and Samar Martha, In Ramallah, Running, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2012
7. David Batty, ‘Conditions for Abu Dhabi's migrant workers 'shame the west',’ The Guardian, Sunday 22 December 2013
8. 19th Biennale of Sydney Press Release, 13 March 2014: https://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/19bos/exhibition/exhibition-overview/BoS [accessed 26 August 2014]
9. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, Pluto Press, London, 2011, p. 152
10. San Sebastián, is located in the Basque Autonomous Community and therefore within a region of continuous politico-cultural contestation.
11. 19th Biennale of Sydney Press Release, op. cit.
12. ibid.
13. ‘Advertising, politics, and the media speak a self-declared language. Nobody believes in the truth of public statements. The value of the commodity is established on the basis of a simulation in a relation that no longer follows any rules’. Franco Berardi, After the Future, eds Gary Genosko & Nicholas Thorburn eds., AK Press, Oakland and Edinburgh, 2011, p 116
14. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (N3 1.), Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 463
15. ‘The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time’. Walter Benjamin quoted in Peter Osborne, Anywhere if not at All, Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London, New York, 2013, p. 62
16. And before that, although to a lesser visual extent, the Romans.
17. Most obviously in Christian Churches in the guise of polychromatic stained glass windows.
18. ‘… art biennales demonstrate effectively that a country aims to function within the rules of neoliberalism: liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation.’ Alana Jelinek, This is not Art, I.B. Tauris, London, New York, p. 37
19. ‘If you want to make yourself known everywhere and establish dominion over the world, manufacture images instead of writing books … This is the moral of the story which all empires have known, from the Byzantine to the American.’ Regis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, Verso, London, New York, 1996, p. 155
20. Giorgio Agamben’s theory of ‘bare life’ relates to a conception of life as a condition of meager survival where all sense of aspiration and futurity has been halted. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics), Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995
21. ‘Artists, with their idealism, flexibility and enthusiasm to work even under precarious circumstances, became the role model for a new concept of capitalism’. See Anthony Davies, Stephen Dillemuth & Jakob Jakobsen, ‘There is No Alternative: THE FUTURE IS (SELF-) ORGANISED PART 2 in Stine Herbert & Anne Szefer Karlsen (eds.) Self-Organised, Open Editions/Hordarland Art Centre, London, 2013, p. 30
22. In theory that is, not withstanding that most contemporary artists often work other, usually multiple, jobs in order to produce work in the first place.
23. Thus ‘Only a radically failed society could give birth to fantasies of triumphant communality such as relational aesthetics’. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, Pluto Press, London, 2011, p.154
24. Theorist Alana Jelinek conceives ‘lifelike’ art as representing those practices within art aimed at drawing issues of art and daily life closer together. She contrasts this to ‘artlike’ art that is primarily concerned with discourses around art. See Jelinek, op. cit., p. 102
25. ibid.
26. Particularly seeing as even ‘… though few in the artworld even use the term neoliberalism to describe the set of values, many happily champion those values, assuming them to be common-sense, normal, even modern and of-the-moment’. Ibid, p. 89.
27. Zizek, A lot of Fuss about Nothing,’ EsJayBe, 22 July 2013: http://esjaybe.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/zizek-alot-of-fuss-about-nothing-2/ [accessed 26 August 2014]
28. Jacques Rancière quoted in Sholette, op. cit., p. 152
29. Despite the fact that ‘… neoliberalism has rendered the idea of difficulty elitist’. Alana Jelinek, op. cit., p.108
30. Such an attitude is clearly evidenced by the language used in the 19th Biennale of Sydney press release.
31. Alana Jelinek quoting Michel Foucault in Jelinek, op. cit., p. 81
32. Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform’, from a pamphlet edited by Stuart Bailey on the occasion of Art Sheffield 2008, p. 92.
33. Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Verso, London, New York, 2012, p. 110
34. Verwoert, op. cit., p. 92