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.
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.
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.