Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
nl/hima
Abstract
Starting from the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, with its Brechtian curatorial theme, this essay
considers the Left’s varying responses to art’s so-called ‘political turn’. Discussion ranges from
the local and regional context of the Biennial’s function as part of Turkey’s bid to join the EU,
through to a longer theoretical perspective on the critical debates over ‘art and life’, artistic
autonomy and heteronomy, and the revival in avant-gardism. The authors propose that the
standard accounts of the intimate connection between the commodity and art have become
politically counterproductive. They suggest that Marxist analysis needs to develop a more
complexly-articulated philosophical reflection on the relation between economy, politics, and
art – and between political and aesthetic praxes – if it is to advance its longstanding
contributions to considerations of ‘aesthetics and politics’.
Keywords
Istanbul Biennial, aesthetics and politics, avant-garde, Brecht, contemporary art, political turn,
commodity, commodification
1. The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to Demet Dinler for her
translations from Turkish and critical reading of this essay.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920610X550631
136 G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171
The sign, ‘Brecht’, features throughout the exhibition and its spin-offs.
Quotes from Brecht are stencilled onto walls; artists make explicit reference
to his ideas in their works (one piece, by the collective Etcétera, includes his
likeness); and the work-group Chto Delat/What Is to Be Done published a
special issue of their paper devoted to Brecht’s ‘Great Method’.6 The short
exhibition-guide opens with an address to students by Brecht7 and the
parallel volume of texts is littered with his critical interventions and writing
on his work.8 Of course, one might observe, such compilations of written
material are just standard features of biennial-culture – and, anyway, who
reads the texts? However, it should be clear that something is going on in an
exhibition where Brecht is mobilised, not only as a progenitor for the critique
of representation, but as an explicit marker for left politics. Within the
biennial-scene itself, this was a significant move, pushing the theme beyond
the obligatory pitch signifying the event’s unique ‘character’ or ‘selling
point’. While maintaining the necessary commitment to openness, variety
and flexibility, WHW seemed to be seeking out a greater degree of
specification. ‘Brecht’ offers this, we might note, at the level of both form
and content: one could feel the political charge and critical pointedness; and
Brecht’s injunctions to make art politically useful were – despite the apparent
paradoxes and limits of the biennial-context – conveyed with some urgency.
The Istanbul Biennial itself has a limited budget (2,050,299 euros in
2009). A range of statistics are cited at the beginning of the Biennial-guide:
the number of male and female artists participating (30 women, 32 men);
the number of collectives (5) and collaborative projects (3); the artists’ ages
(the average age was 43); their countries and regions of origin (28 per cent
from the West and 72 per cent from the rest); and the numbers represented
by galleries. The budget is broken down, indicating how it was spent and
from where it all came. No doubt, this deliberate act of transparency – a
‘baring of the device’ – was designed as a Brechtian gesture intended to reveal
the production-apparatus of the exhibition: it was also clearly an
acknowledgment of the marxisant criticisms of the spectacular effect of such
large-scale events. However, there are some odd absences from the data
proffered by WHW. For instance, there are no percentages for the types of
6. Chto Delat 2009, with essays by Sergei Zemlyanoy, Dmitry Vilensky, Peio Aguirre, Gene
Ray, Antonio Negri, and David Riff and Dmitry Gutov. The issue also contains the screenplay
for Chto Delat’s Partisan Songspiel, which is discussed later.
7. WHW 2009c.
8. The commentaries include works by Elin Diamond, Alain Badiou, Mladen Dolar, Luis
Ignacio Garcia, Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin, Bob Dylan, Slavoj Žižek and Keti Chukhrov.
WHW 2009b.
138 G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171
work shown: the number of videos (quite a lot), but also the number of
works on paper (printed, water-coloured, drawn and photographed, often
pinned to the walls in grids); percentage of sculptures (very few) and
paintings (a few more, but mostly small); large photos (a few more), etc. This
point is not made out of pedantry, but to remark that it looks like the
curators were short of money for shipping and insurance. (Even the Venice
Biennale is not immune from similar material constraints, as witnessed with
the ‘Utopia Station’ in 2003.)9 Alternatively, it may be that this was just the
nature of the work selected by WHW, because their Brechtian Haltung gave
little room for more traditional art-forms. Or, perhaps, this was the result of
the political-geographical regions where most of the artists were drawn from:
the ex-‘Soviet Bloc’ (particularly its southern fringe), ex-Yugoslavia, Turkey
and down through Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Egypt. Given the lack
of a strong market for art through most of these geographical zones, it is
likely that producing saleable commodities was not the most important
motive for many of the artists involved. Whatever the reasons for the relative
absence of traditional art-media, this led to an exceptionally makeshift-
looking exhibition, with a lot of work literally lacking weight. But the
physical insubstantiality of many of the works was made up for by the
number that evidenced epic-ambitions.
9. The form of chosen media in contemporary art-exhibitions are frequently a marker of such
restrictions. Biennial-venues – typically, redundant industrial public buildings – make for
difficult conditions for valuable work in terms of security, climate-control and insurance-costs.
G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171 139
have equally varied just as much, if not more, so when considering the ways
cultural practices have been inserted into these same historical developments,
as suggested by the famous debates on aesthetic modernity, or on formalism
and the avant-garde, from the 1920s and 30s, and from their revitalisation in
the 1960s and 70s. Some Marxists may still hold to premodernist aesthetics;
while some who accept the arguments in favour of modernism may struggle
to accommodate their views to postconceptual art. Meanwhile, opinion
continues to be divided by debates over the nature of aesthetic realism, the
relevance of beauty, or the precise means by which to articulate the ‘autonomy’
of art. None of these can be restricted to some (imagined) free-standing
aesthetic realm, but necessarily overlap with disputes in other fields
(philosophical realism, political realism, etc); at the same time, something
distinctive is brought to bear by the aesthetic context. Further, many of the
critical discussions of art, which have grown in influence, were founded on
writings that tried to read artistic form through the prism of Marx’s analysis of
the value-form; the analysis of the commodity and capitalist market have since
taken a more Bourdieu-inspired direction. Assessing the ‘political turn’ in art
(which we will return to shortly), radical critics have struggled to reach any
level of agreement. Political responses (the nature of practice, tactics or
strategy) to this turn or its manifestations have found themselves subject to
similar lack of consensus. It is not that we wish for some ready consensualism,
though the current political fragmentation certainly seems debilitating
(this itself being addressed in some of the best artworks); rather, the point, we
think, is that Marxist analysis in/of art has itself come to rely on
some standard – even standardised – responses, which have become
counterproductive. We hope that our essay may contribute towards clarifying
some of the parameters of the current debates, especially those on the relation
between ‘art and commodity’. The 2009 Istanbul Biennial dramatised the
problems. Crystallising issues – from the tensions between liberal expression
and neoliberalism, between modernisation and gentrification, between art’s
commodification and its emancipatory potential, between an individual art-
practice and the institutions of art, or between the capacity of these institutions
to ‘incorporate’ and to serve as progressive ideological platforms, through to
questions of form and content (philosophical and aesthetic), or to those of
‘art’ and ‘life’ – this Biennial brought to the fore questions concerning the very
relation of aesthetic and political praxis.
It will help to survey of some of the artworks that were on display in
Istanbul – though, given the contingent nature of the event, these are not
necessarily the most prominent of international artists present at the event
or the best examples of their work. Familiar genres were present in Istanbul:
photographs of poignant spaces, in this instance, Syrian sites used for public
140 G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171
Brechtian themes
Some of these works are powerful enough to remain memorable, but you
would not specifically characterise their themes and strategies as Brechtian.
As the curators acknowledge:
The works presented are not necessarily ‘Brechtian’ per se; indeed few refer
directly to Brecht’s oeuvre. They subscribe, on the one hand, to Brecht’s belief
in political engagement in art and seek to make that potential meaningful; on
the other hand, they share something of the spirit of Brecht’s song. ‘What Keeps
Mankind Alive?’ points a way forward beyond the merely existent, delineating
possible directions and new readings.10
exhibited three videos within an installation detailing the recent history and
demise of the Soviet Bloc. The first of the three videos, Chronicles of Perestroika
(made by Dmytri Vilenski), presents edited footage of demonstrations in
Leningrad from the period 1987–91. Projected in black and white with a
keyboard sound-track, it recalls silent movies from the 1920s. The footage
looks as if it was shot a lot longer than twenty years ago and, at moments, the
video is evocative of early-Soviet newsreels or Sergei Eisenstein’s October. This
footage attempts to actualise the imagery of revolution, but these are
demonstrations that would currently be difficult in the face of the Russian
Federation’s repressive state.
A chorus singing the story of ‘hopes that didn’t come true’ introduces
the second video, Perestroika-Songspiel. The story is told through ‘five heroes
of perestroika’: ‘An idealistic democrat, A noble businessman, A heroic
revolutionary, A bitter nationalist and A woman who has found her own
voice’. Interrupted by a ‘Chorus’ and a ‘Group of Wolf-Girls’, they all act out
the contested politics of the future of Russia against the coming introduction
of what became neoliberal-oligarchic capitalism. Illusion gives way before the
reality of capitalist reconstruction, and ideals become shoddy compromises.
The third video, Partisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story (made by Chto Delat
with Vladan Jeremić and Rena Rädle), has a related structure. Here the story
takes place in Serbia, where a group of ‘Oppressed’ archetypes – a ‘Romany
Women’, a ‘Lesbian-Activist’, a ‘Disabled Veteran’ and a ‘Worker’ – narrate
their stories, interrupting another group, the ‘Oppressors’ (a ‘Woman-
Politician’, an ‘Oligarch’, a ‘Nationalist’, and a ‘Mafioso’ – along with their
heavies – who wish to ‘clean up Serbia’). This time, the chorus dressed in
white body-suits – evoking a combination of environmental activists and
Tutti Bianchi – appears from behind the cut-out image of a stone-monument
to Yugoslav partisans, which was a montage composed from monuments
in Slovenia and Serbia. The chorus here figures as a spectral communism, a
memory of class-conscious solidarity, commenting on the divisions now so
evident today among the oppressed, and calling on the ‘comrades’ to ‘close
their ranks’. The work narrates – through speech, dance and song – political
conflicts in Serbia, but one cannot help seeing parallels with repression and
resistance elsewhere.
What is extraordinary about both Songspielen is their articulation of the
tensions created by capitalist class-restoration with a politics of form. Both
videos are, by turns, affecting and hilarious (even when the audience’s laughter
is not in time with the actors). There is nothing austere about these works:
Chto Delat is not afraid of emotion, laughter, savage irony or visual pleasure.
The two videos are very much in the tradition of Brechtian epic-theatre in
their use of music, dance, costume, and laughter; the action and views of
144 G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171
his own career, and that, as director, he holds a certain power over his subjects
and his representation of them). It is also a cipher to explore the rôle of art (its
political purposefulness; its complicity with, or the gains it makes from, such
charged material; the possibilities of, and limitations inherent to, art’s critical
capacities). In this sense, Z32 serves as a meta-work that raises questions
pertinent to the biennial-form, or, further, which focuses upon issues of
political engagements with, and of, art today.
15. The ‘documentary-turn’ has also been used. Other writers have criticised the fashion-
orientated turn to the concept of the ‘turn’.
16. Exceptionally, the Roman rather than Arabic numeral was employed in 1997.
17. David 1997.
G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171 147
when Chiapas took place, when workers and students again took to the streets
of Paris, and as the antiglobalisation-movement was cohering and developing
anticapitalist articulations; its context was framed by the new conflicts of the
world after 1989 and the expansions of the neoliberal project. Post-Seattle,
and in the years of the World Social Fora (and regional social fora), this
politicised trajectory was further developed at Documenta 11 in 2002, by
Okwui Enwezor with an increasingly global perspective. Key-sections of the
2003 Venice Biennale followed suit – Hou Hanru’s ‘Zones of Urgency’;
‘Utopia-Station’ (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Molly Nesbit, Rikrit Tiravanija); ‘The
Structure of Survival’ by Carlos Basualdo; David’s own ‘Contemporary Arab
Representations’ – as did Seville 2006 (Enwezor) and Istanbul 2007 (Hou
Hanru). Sydney 2008, directed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in association
with her ‘curatorial comrades’, was themed ‘Revolutions – Forms That Turn’,
‘a celebration of the defiant spirit’ exploring the ‘impulse to revolt’ and ‘the
agency embedded in forms that express our desire for change’.18 Even
Documenta 12 (2007, directed by Robert Buergel), which was billed as a
departure from its two politicised predecessors – ‘you don’t need a sociology
degree to understand the art’, Buergel told the International Herald Tribune –
contained significant amounts of intelligent (and sociologically demanding)
work.19 These are but a few examples among the international mega-exhibitions.
Nevertheless, practices with a strong anti-neoliberal and socialist bent, both
registering and reflecting critically on the post-89 world-order, have appeared
widely in other local, national and international exhibitions of art. At a series
of small sites along the south coast of England, for example, curator Julian
Stallabrass focused on the subject of war and photography for the 2008
Brighton Photo-Biennial.20 Of course, some of this may not be much more
than curators adapting to the fashion of the moment, but the return of such
rhetoric is symptomatic, indicating a shift away from the claims for the ‘end
of the avant-garde’ and the anomie of ‘postmodern debates’.
WHW’s deployment of ‘What Keeps Mankind Alive?’ was, in many
senses, a culmination of a longer process that turned away from the clever
21. The literature related to the neo-Brechtian practices of the 1970s is vast, and there is
nothing approaching an adequate history of this important moment in Marxist aesthetics. For
a partial view, see Rodwick 1994.
22. For a selection of exchanges, see Beech and Roberts (eds.) 2002.
G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171 149
25. There are also, to a degree, echoes of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the face of
McCarthyist hysteria, when the US intelligence-service collaborated with private cultural
institutions to promote a vision of liberal America that could not be circulated through official
state-organisations. See Guilbaut 1983; Frascina (ed.) 1985. We now know that some of these
specific claims have been over-egged, but the general point holds.
G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171 151
from the local men; at a distance, the women snigger at the exposed genitals
of the elders. The video is faux-innocent – a strategy that, even at the story’s
gravest moment, works to make it simultaneously accessible and funny.
Erkan Özgen, from the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, showed
Robben, a triptych of scenes where actions are performed at the prison known
for holding political prisoners after the 1980 coup (it should be remarked
that, although association of prisons with the author of Discipline and Punish
is evident, we still do not fully understand why, in one video, we see a child
lobbing stones at large picture of Foucault stuck to the building’s exterior-
wall). In his video Origin, Özgen has a group of young men from Africa
march around a park chanting a line from the national oath – ‘How fortunate
is the one who says I am Turkish’ – which, turned into a repetitive mantra
accompanying the steady rhythm of stomping feet, impinged itself upon the
exhibition-space. By including works such as these, the Biennial allows an
argument to be made for Turkey’s modernity and tolerance for critical and
unorthodox views.
Even the international curators appointed figures within this project of
open inclusion. It is one thing to take on Hou Hanru, the director of the
2007 Biennial, a curator famed for layering his selections into ‘urban’
cacophonies, taking Simmel’s account of ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ to
new extremes.26 Even if it risks some complaints of headaches, frayed nerves
and demands to know why there is no space to meditate on beautifully-
crafted pictures, the acoustic-visual assault of hypermodernity in all its
excitement/horror appears safe enough – even, it could be argued, desirable
for the state’s larger project of ideological modernisation. (The reality in
Istanbul 2007 was significantly less frenetic than might have been expected.)
However, it is difficult to opt for a curatorial collective like WHW – whose
first exhibition, in 2000, celebrated 150 years of the Communist Manifesto –
without knowing what you will get: even one of the smaller venues they
secured – the abandoned Greek school in Feriköy – made the point.
Despite the odd hitch, the exhibition is part of a wider political strategy
aimed at Turkey’s inclusion in an expanded ‘open’ Europe. Gökçe Dervişoğlu
draws the lesson: the shift from the European Community to the European
Union involved a policy of ‘creating a “European Culture” via cultural
integration’.27 Dervişoğlu, however, appears to be advocating a replay of this
older European strategy in order to meet Turkey’s current aspirations. The
privatisation of culture in Turkey can be traced to the 1960s with the
We have to stop pretending that the popularity of politically engaged art within
the museums, magazines and markets over the last few years has anything to do
with really changing the world. We have to stop pretending that taking risks in
the space of art, pushing boundaries of form, and disobeying the conventions of
culture, making art about politics makes any difference. We have to stop
pretending that art is a free space, autonomous from webs of capital and power.
It’s time for the artist to become invisible. To dissolve back into life.31
Literally, this statement is not really true, since ‘pushing boundaries of form,
and disobeying the conventions of culture’ do change art and culture, but the
frustrations and ambitions contained in this statement are intriguing,
condensing several key-debates from the critical traditions of cultural analysis
(to which we will return shortly). The open letter acknowledges that the
members of WHW quoted Brecht and foregrounded the issue of
neoliberalism, but continues:
we recognize that art should have never existed as a separate category from life.
Therefore we are writing you to stop collaborating with arms dealers such as the
Koç Holding which white wash themselves in warm waters of the global art
scene and invite you to the life, the life of resistance.
In fact, the correlation of Brecht with the corporate sponsors seems to have
especially upset the critics. (Why was Brecht acceptable back then, but not
now? Were the theatres in Weimar untainted?) In contrast to the ‘corporate
spaces reserved for tolerated institutional critique so as to help them clear
their conscience’, the letter’s authors invite involvement in the ‘resistance
carnival’ organised to welcome the IMF and World Bank to Istanbul in
October 2009:
Let’s prepare works and visuals (poster, sticker, stencil etc.) for the streets of the
resistance days. Let’s produce together, not within the white cube, but in the
streets and squares during the resistance week! Creativity belongs to each and
every of us and can’t be sponsored.32
These are now familiar criticisms of the institutions of art from direct-action
and anarchist groups. We are all for stickers, posters and warm welcomes for
the IMF, but starkly contrasting activism to ‘autonomous art’ does not seem
good enough, even when it is draped in the fashionable rhetoric of the
Situationist International. The splitting of consensus performed in the space
such as the cartoon by Zampa di Leone, ‘What Keeps Bazaar Alive’ (di Leone 2004); see also the
exchange between Resistanbul and Brian Holmes in Holmes 2009.
32. DIRDCF 2009. The same issues of corporate sponsorship were also raised with the
curators in an interview published online. Asked to comment on the selection of a collective
(who had previously organised an exhibition on the Communist Manifesto) by a foundation
governed by Eczacibasi and with Koç Holdings as the main sponsor, the curators responded:
‘What does the source of money impose on our independence. . . . Can we say what we want to
say? We feel that in this biennale we feel that we can tell our concerns, what we want to discuss. . . .
We want to open and use all possible channels.’ The questioner was unconvinced, and suggested
that the joining of Koç and Brecht was an abuse that closed channels rather than opened them.
To which WHW replied: ‘What you say evokes this feeling: “Brecht is ours, we want to protect
Brecht from Koç”.’ (WHW 2009a.)
154 G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171
through the landscape. And, while the theme of global war was not as
prominent as it was in the 2006 Seville Biennial or at Brighton in 2008, it was
present enough to have been a focus for political discussion. These criticisms
may say as much about the nationalism of sections of the Left as about the
exhibitions in question; they also suggest a backward-looking antipathy
towards contemporary art.
However, Evren himself mobilises the critics’ hostility to art to champion
the ‘libertarian Left’ against those ‘traditionalists’ of the Left who insist on
reckoning with the state and imperialism. As with some of the other writers
on contemporary art in Turkey, he seems to feel that economic liberalisation
will generate a space beyond the state, and provide a dynamic force against
the dead-weight of cultural conservatism. (If these critics are intent on
supping with the Devil, they may be advised to obtain the proverbial long
spoons.) Marxist anti-intellectualism is undoubtedly frustrating; but, while
contemporary art may provide an energetic force against conservative
traditions, critics should not underestimate how art can also be, and regularly
is, mobilised as a driver for neoliberal modernisation, financial speculation
and gentrification.38 Whatever their limitations, ‘old-school Marxist’
arguments cannot simply be set aside.
38. Deutsche and Gendel Ryan 1984; Deutsche 1996; Cameron and Coaffee 2005;
Mathews 2010.
156 G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171
sponsorship does not leave art untainted, but this now familiar argument is
becoming stultifyingly one-dimensional. At its worst, it dissolves into crass
economism. One risk with this attitude is that it allows old prejudices to
bubble up: contemporary art – like modern art before it – is portrayed as
distracting, élitist, unrealistic and inherently compromised. As an argument,
the proposals of the letter are in equal measure populist, conservative and
ultraleftist. The traditional Stalinist-populist version of this claim has entailed
a weird aesthetic which hovers in some indeterminate space between, on the
one hand, viewing art as decorative surface-effect and, on the other, a cosmic
vision that believed art could mould the ‘new man’.39 Neither version offers a
productive engagement with, let alone critique of, modern art: the Stalinist
version locked the Left into association with an aesthetic past and failed to
register the critical resources contained in modern art.40 In the name of
confronting the immanent crisis, the call to activist-immediacy equally
circumvents or defers the difficult work of analysis and representation that
makes politics possible. The modernised version – with its claim to join with
life through stickers and street-protests – seems to us no more compelling: just
what is, and where are we to find, this ‘life’? In the realm of ephemeral counter-
spectacles? We can appreciate the sentiment and also the strategic use of such
actions, but part of the answer to these questions, it seems, is that ‘life’ is not
sitting around ready-made, waiting to be ‘found’; ‘we’ need to make it possible,
and to elide this project surely goes way beyond making demands on Biennial-
participants to join a carnival. Even if conceived as a tactic for mobilising and
building a movement, the demands seem misjudged: they set up a false
dichotomy and an unnecessary division between artists and festival. Considered
more theoretically, their categories can be seen as too overwrought with a
critical-theoretical language – and, as a corollary – with the difficult and
multifaceted legacy of those emancipatory debates on art/life, autonomy/
heteronomy, aesthetics/politics, and so forth (none of which lend themselves
to such straightforward solutions).
Just how helpful or progressive is it, today, to call for the (self-)abolition
of art and artists? (Indeed, some might sniff out deeply regressive – even
reactionary – consequences from this argument.) The sublation once dreamed
of – whatever the faults and limits of its dreams – had the ambition to
transform ‘life’ fundamentally; it was not imagined to take place on the terms
39. The latter perspective was shared by many in the avant-garde. We find much to disagree
with in Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism, but he does capture something of this strange
cultural alliance between activist anti-art and Stalinist wish-fulfilment. See Groys 1992.
40. Which is not to say there is nothing to be found of critical interest – historical, aesthetic
or cognitive – in socialist realism, or that it was monolithic and unchanging.
G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171 157
41. Bürger 1984. He further noted that the sublation of art and life was indeed made, but
in the postwar-situation and as the ‘false sublation’ of neo-avantgarde art with the commodity.
For arguments over the historical avant-garde’s ‘false negations’ of the division of art and life,
see Habermas 1981 and Bürger 1981. Bürger’s original account of the neo-avantgarde false
sublation proved contentious. See Buchloh 1984; Foster 1996; Buchloh 2000. Buchloh’s social
pessimism has grown; see Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh 2004.
42. Modernism was, by many accounts, a rather more complex phenomenon.
43. Adorno 1997; Bürger 1984; Rancière 2004; Rancière 2009a; Day 2009. It is noticeable
that there has been a further shift among curators and critics to reassert art’s autonomy (from
politics) while trying simultaneously to retain the charge that politics has provided over the past
couple of decades. See, for example, the public statements issued on the websites of the 2010
Sydney Biennial and the 2010 Bienal de São Paulo.
158 G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171
Another way of putting this is to say that it is an approach suited to the liberal
academy, whose tendency is to spot the spectacular-commodity working its
tricks, while rendering any opposition – political as well as aesthetic – already
neutralised. The result, for Rancière, is a ‘left-wing irony or melancholy’ in
which any gesture of opposition is seen as ‘a game available on the global
market’.45 The argument is especially suited to sustaining the radical reputation
of the critic in conjuncture with an aloof resignation. Rancière’s own aesthetic
thought – developed out of his leave-taking from Marxism – remains to be
reckoned with, but, in this instance, he exposes an apparently radical criticism
for the conformism it has increasingly become. Many of those who see
themselves as resisting political neutralisation draw on the founding ideas of
critical theory, but Rancière underestimates the range of political practices
produced in response to this model in recent times, which can span from
voluntarism and direct action to near-total inertia.
Brecht had no doubt that artworks were commodities:
Only those who blind themselves to the enormous power of the revolutionary
process that drags everything in this world into the circuit of commodities,
without exception and without delay, can assume that works of art in any genre
could be excluded . . .46
This realisation did not stop him writing poems and plays, or novels and
film-scripts; nor did he conclude that the institutions of art should be
boycotted, but rather, that they should be changed through intervention
and ideological ‘re-functioning [Umfunktionierung]’. Unfortunately, discussion
of art’s position within capitalism – and specifically its relation to the
commodity – increasingly tends to be reduced to some well-worn gambits:
the popular fascination and disgust, and whole British media-obsession, with,
for instance, the Saatchi-Hirst-yBa nexus; the attention given to the way
museums try to capitalise on their collections by raising money from pathetic
spin-off trinkets, or on their premises by renting them out for company-
receptions; the focus on the expanding proportion of floor-space devoted to
retail and catering and the corporate sponsorship of exhibitions; the rise of
‘biennial-culture’ and the sense that all art is becoming equivalent in a global
homogenisation-process that erases local character, promotes tourism and
increases the ‘carbon-footprint’. This is all undoubtedly true, and reveals
aspects of capitalism’s stultifying banality, but these things are easy targets if
there is no attempt at a larger critique; they too-easily slip into a reactionary
sentimentality for the good old days promoted by critics such as Dave
Hickey.47
There have, in recent years, been some significant studies of specific
developments of cultural neoliberalisation;48 some thinkers have tried to
explore art’s relation to the commodity at a more abstract critical-theoretical
level, or have sought to pursue cultural analysis by finding structural
homologies with the value-form.49 There are a host of criticisms that see in
art-developments that are isomorphic with the changing skill-demands of the
workplace.50 Yet other approaches focus on art’s connection to affective
models of labour.51 Yet, it is not at all clear what it means to characterise the
artwork as a commodity. The commodification-debate lacks real specificity.
On the one hand, there are detailed sociological studies of markets and
institutions that remain largely under-theorised; on the other, theoretical
reflections with remarkably little empirical content. The field of debate, if that
is what it is, for the commodification-thesis has been produced out of a weird
amalgam of themes from Bourdieu, Debord, Adorno and Horkheimer. These
are odd bedfellows to say the least, and it is not surprising that there is a lack
of mediation, but the key-point is akin to one Terry Eagleton once made
about postmodernism: the problems reside, less with the ideas of these thinkers
(though, there are those too), than with ‘the culture, milieu or even sensibility’
as a whole.52
It is certainly the case that artworks have been issued in print-runs, editions
and multiples; and artworks have increasingly come to resemble filmic work
(in part because art-spaces have come to welcome time- and lens-based media
as the distribution-networks for radical film or indeed journalism have
diminished). It is true that art has become tied to branding and celebrity, to
gentrification and to tourism, and that art can also be used as stock on which
to gamble. Writing in the early 1970s, Ernest Mandel described how –
alongside building sites, gold, precious metals, antiques, and stamps – art
served as a ‘“mobilization” of material values’ in response to the devaluation
of paper-money.53 With the drying-up of credit in the recent crisis, the big
auction-houses turned into blue-chip pawn-shops where valuable artworks
provided collateral on which to raise finance.54 Recognising the part played
by factors such as these, however, still does not seem to get us close to
understanding art.
Critical theory is likely to remain an important resource for Marxist work
on aesthetics, art and ideology, but it is time serious critical questions about
the commodification-of-art thesis were posed. Even at its best, the work of the
Frankfurt-school, and those influenced by it, often proceeds by homology –
or, perhaps, by a model-analogy that only claims deeper structural connections
between cultural and commodity-forms.55 The universalisation of market-
relations transformed art as it did other aspects of social life. But it did so in
some peculiar ways, which has meant that art’s status as commodity has never
been worked through in the ways seen with other human products. Art has
long been mobilised by those in social power, and, historically, this relationship
has generally been fairly direct and explicit, registered through the patronage
and glorification of monarchs, aristocrats and religious orders. Capitalism
made the connection between art and economic control more circuitous and
ambivalent. The rise of the public museum mediates market-mechanisms.
Nearly all works in art-museums are purchased from a small group of galleries,
or donated by collectors who have, in turn, bought from these same galleries.
These transactions are obscured, and the most confidential information of all
is how much – or little – an institution has paid for an artwork.56
Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. On the other
hand, a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is a
productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as
the activation of his own nature.62
60. Sources for this can be found in Adorno; Debord and a host of later thinkers. Day 2010
offers an account of the way historical and logical tendencies have been rendered as a concrete
condition; relational categories absolutised; the opening chapter of Capital read as a literal and
direct account of the phenomenal world of capitalism and a dialectical analysis of the
commodity-form and its two-fold nature turned into a one-dimensional historical narrative.
61. Mandel 1978, p. 507.
62. Marx 1976, p. 1044.
G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171 163
cultural labour (his examples are a literary proletarian, a singer and a school-
teacher) that are unproductive and those that produce ‘capital directly’. He
concludes by suggesting that, on the whole, this is ‘wage labour that is not at
the same time productive labour’.63 Shifting the ground of the argument to
immaterial or affective labour without sorting out the initial problem of art-
as-commodity will not help.
Comparing art to luxury-commodities – a pair of hand-made shoes or a
piece of individually-crafted jewellery, whose value is related to total social
production – only goes so far towards art’s status as a commodity. David
Harvey gives perhaps the most sophisticated version of the insertion of art into
the circuits of capital by comparing artworks to viticulture. ‘That culture has
become a commodity of some sort is undeniable’, he announces at the start of
his essay ‘The Art of Rent’.64 However, his question becomes ‘of what sort?’,
because, as he maintains, cultural artefacts and practices are distinct from
ordinary commodities. This is an important recognition, and art-theorists
would be advised to note the point. Harvey’s argument turns on the rôle art
and wine play in the formation of ‘monopoly-rent’ and competition (an
account which draws also on Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of cultural
‘distinction’ and ‘symbolic capital’).65 Harvey writes:
All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of
the globe. Monopoly rent arises because social actors can realize an enhanced
income-stream over an extended time by virtue of their exclusive control over
some directly or indirectly tradable item which is in some respects unique and
non-replicable.66
There are two kinds of monopoly-rent for Harvey: the first entails the control
of some ‘quality resource, commodity or location’ that enable the extraction
of monopoly-rent – here, the example is a vineyard; the second form involves
the scarcity of a site or commodity – the example being a painting by Picasso.
Harvey’s argument may shed light on the mechanisms of gentrification and
raising property-values around museums (Bilbao’s Guggenheim, Tate
Liverpool, Tate Modern). But we should note that, in such cases, the
monopoly-rent does not accrue primarily to the museums, but to the
developers operating in the immediate vicinity; in some cases, it is state-
collections (national, regional, federal, or municipal) that are being used to
redevelop blighted areas, amounting to a form of state-subvention to private
capital. By analogy, the biennial-artist’s economic rôle may be tied less to the
art-market than to the business of hotels, airlines and restaurants. This is one
reason that they are increasingly located outside of capital-cities and combine
public and private finance with the aim of regeneration. Of course, the
condition is that there has to be something worth seeing.
More significantly, the comparison with ‘special’ goods has real limitations:
Harvey recognises contradictions in this account – which would only be
exacerbated if he shifted from a blue-chip artist to a young video-maker or
art-activist – but his analogy with the wine-trade serves a significant rhetorical
rôle in the argument. Comments on appellation contrôlée, terroir and the
language of wine-connoisseurs (‘flavour of peach and plum, with a hint of
thyme and gooseberry’) shift onto ideas of ‘distinction’ and ‘cultural capital’.67
Knowingly or not, this stacking of metaphor – and appeal to Bourdieu –
allows Harvey to relegate the critical or cognitive claims of art to Pseuds’
Corner. The problem is that no-one even tries to speak of the truth-content
of a necklace or pair of brogues, nor – despite its associated discourse of
taste – do they attempt to do so when discussing Champagne, Burgundy,
Chablis or Sauternes. Even with wine, this underplays important questions
relating to the education of the senses, but Harvey dismisses the larger
problems being suggested as no more than the ‘residues of wishful thinking
(often backed by powerful ideologies)’ which want to see art as existing on a
‘higher plane of human creativity’.68 This (anti-romantic) statement is, in
part, a ruse to prepare the ground for his own, more ‘technical and arid’
economic analysis (he was clearly being mischievous, the original audience
for his argument being seated in the auditorium of Tate Modern).69
Nevertheless, it means he evades important dimensions pertaining to the
consideration of art – its aesthetic-cognitive status – that cannot be so readily
dismissed with allusions to privilege or ‘distinction’, or, by extension, to
‘aesthetic ideology’, or to the legacies of German-idealist philosophy.70 Visual
art, like literature and film, can be (although none necessarily are) engaged at a
number of levels: ideological, symbolic, communicative, aesthetic, affective,
cognitive, and critical. Marxism ought – among so many bodies of thought –
to be supremely positioned to think through the social relations of art, ranging
from the commodity-form to the aesthetic and cognitive dimensions. No
other intellectual tradition has the conceptual riches necessary to make the
mediations. But, to do this, Marxists will need to advance beyond the current
level of discussion-at-large and begin to think about the problems again, to
think them more dialectically. Social science and its cognates can, arguably,
do without aesthetic thought, but it is doubtful if Marxism can jettison this
legacy of German idealism without doing serious self-harm. Art was once
understood to have a triple function: ‘to teach, to move, to delight’, although,
as Jameson reminded us, there has been a tendency to marginalise the first of
these functions.71 Although it is unhelpful to make a fetish or orthodoxy of
Brechtian models, it is worth taking seriously the claim of the Istanbul
Biennial to engage with learning.
WHW acknowledges that biennials largely function as ‘high-end branding
tools for promoting cultural tourism in metropolitan cities, market-driven
“events” designed to ensure a more seamless integration of art and capital’.72
Faced with the invitation to oversee the 2009 Biennial, WHW elected to take
up the ‘opportunity for a big career move and decided to put together a
biennial informed by a fully-fledged political program’ that would also be
‘completely aesthetic’.73 The double-bluff in this passage is palpable, both
registering the problem of working in the institutions of art and insisting on
the radical potential of art. Brecht, then, was being invoked in yet another
sense: WHW sets out to subject the very institution of an art-biennial to a
‘refunctioning’. The aspiration was ‘to rethink the Biennial as a meta-device
with the potential to facilitate the renewal of critical thinking by extracting
thought from the immediate artistic and political context where it takes
place’,74 and ‘to give the public some form of “agency,” making choices that
would boost their capacity for action’. The collective continues:
studies are inconceivable without the form/content distinction. The same might be said about
totality and a host of other key-concepts.
71. For Jameson, its resurrection accompanied the call for an aesthetics of ‘cognitive
mapping’. Arguably, the situation has changed since he wrote this in the early 1980s, with
many bewailing the loss of the latter two functions in the wake of postconceptual practice. See
Jameson 1988.
72. WHW 2009b, p. 95.
73. Ibid.
74. WHW 2009b, p. 96.
166 G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171
Is it not possible, today, to think of art the way Brecht understood theatre – that
is, as a mode of ‘collective historical education’, an apparatus for constructing
truth rather than what amounts to a viewing fest for the bourgeoisie?75
To this end, the curators gathered together openly political artworks. ‘In
times like these, like ours, art can – and should – involve itself as one of the
few places where unfettered analysis and the eclosion of new concepts, where
criticism, education, and even agitation, are possible’. The emphasis here is
on art’s rôle within cultural ideology; not just as a vehicle for dominant
values, but its part in internal contestations and struggles. Creative-
intellectual work also provides an important facet to the history of human
expression and the self-understanding of society; these complexities can be
seen as ‘useful’, not only for general expansion of intellectual and aesthetic
capabilities, but also – and we mean ‘also’, not ‘instead’ – as counter-
ideological or as challenges to cultural or political hegemony. From the
ideological perspective, biennials comprise, not just the exhibitions of art, but
all the platforms and openings they provide for generating debate. Indeed,
the very status of the ‘political turn’ becomes part of the dispute. If some see
in art’s politicisation a hypostatised response to a wider political sclerosis (a
marker of the political defeats of the twentieth century), there are those who
argue to the contrary that the politicisation of discussion in art signifies the
emergence of an alternative public sphere in reaction to the increasingly supine
and banal news-media.76 At times, however, the political claims tip into
overstatement, as when WHW states: ‘Art is arguably not the best place to
plan, for instance, the future of Palestine. But it may well be the only one’.77
This version of art-as-enclave does not stand up: nevertheless, it perhaps
points, symptomatically, to the ambitions and political limitations of such
aesthetic endeavours. These ambitions may not ultimately counter or displace
the biennial’s rôle in capital-(re)generation – how could they, outside of the
context of a sustained and broad-based social resistance? – but it would be too
easy to allow ourselves to rest on the cynical conclusion.78
The works in Istanbul – and we have mentioned only a small number – split
consensus, bringing the overlooked into sight or the unsaid into hearing;
they gesture to militant collectives that have yet to emerge: most of all, they
offer reconfigurations of experience through a meeting of politics and strategies
for formal recomposition. This swing to the left has taken multiple forms
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