This is the english version of Matthew Rana's review, published in Swedish translation in Paletten #330.
The last time that I participated in a demonstration was in 2003, on the eve of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. As I recall, there wasn’t anything artful or aesthetic about it – that is, unless you consider getting gassed and beaten by riot police a kind of sublimity. Although my memories from that night are hazy, I clearly remember the feelings of guilt and despondency that followed. The only change that our protest seemed to make was that some of us were now badly injured or in jail, or both.
Such feelings are partly why I, then a BFA student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, began to turn away from more traditional forms of artistic expression towards what we might today call socially engaged art. It wasn’t necessarily the demonstration’s artistic shortcomings that I hoped to address, but rather its apparent futility. Giving political resistance an artistic form, I hoped, would be more effective – albeit on a different scale. Eventually, I formed a group with some like-minded classmates with the aim to make critical, political work in public space.
We had little in the way of art history and theory (we hadn’t yet heard of relational aesthetics, for example) or critical theory at all, for that matter. What we did have was Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1987), Situationist figurehead Guy Debord’s trenchant yet dispirited follow-up to his seminal 1967 book on “the autocratic reign of the market economy.” Writing during the early years of the Mitterand presidency, Debord here outlines his theory of what he calls “the integrated spectacle,” the total saturation of social relations by capital. Unlike the spectacle’s earlier “concentrated” and “diffuse” manifestations, which “floated above real society” and therefore offered a limited means of escape, the integrated spectacle produces a unified social reality that is both false and inescapable. If the spectacle is a social relation, we reasoned, then it is in relations themselves that we must intervene. So we gave ourselves a French-sounding name to match our reading, Guerre Atelier, and set ourselves to work.
Far from waging all-out war on capitalism, however, our agitational activities were limited to things like wheat-pasting posters around campus proclaiming “No One Is Watching” (our critique of the control society) and stamping dollar bills with the portmanteau AMIRAQA in blood-red caps; we even made a website featuring our collectively written manifestoes (there were two: one practical, one theoretical), state-of-the-art Flash animations, and free downloadable graphics. For one of our final projects, we somehow managed to procure a small grant to put up a billboard featuring a line from Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1969 poem ‘Riot!’ on a main street downtown (“the desperate die expensively today”).
Predictably, the art world, such as it existed in that mid-sized American city, started paying attention, and we began receiving invitations from local galleries to exhibit work. Whether to accept those invitations became a source of conflict within the group; accusations of ‘sell-out’ were leveled internally, and our activities dwindled as collective enthusiasm waned. We never did enter the white cube. Like many art-activist groups, ours was short-lived. Guerre Atelier officially disbanded around two years later, partly due to those aforementioned conflicts and partly because I sold out and left town to start an MFA in… Art and Social Practice. A bitter irony, for sure. But our story is not entirely ridiculous.
Looking back, it seems to me that several of the challenges that our group faced during its brief existence are symptomatic of the historical relationship between art and political activism that artist and activist Gregory Sholette charts in his new book The Activism of Art and the Art of Activism (London: Lund Humphries, 2022). Beginning with the Situationists and continuing decade by decade into the present, Sholette provides a concise and, therefore, highly selective overview of case-studies drawn from a “phantom archive” of documents and “radical tropes” produced outside the realms of official culture. By his account, around the year 1999, the activist turn in art exemplified by groups such as Art Workers Coalition (1969–71) in the United States had given way to widespread disillusionment with representative democracy and a shift away from mass politics towards a politics of the multitude – what Paolo Virno calls an ambivalentmode of being whose dark side Sholette addresses in a chapter devoted to the visuality of the alt-right. Developed in the wake of art-activist groups like Gran Fury (1988–1995) and the Guerrilla Girls (1985–present), millennial practices such as culture jamming and tactical media were thus part of a broader articulation of this political mode and its potential for anti-capitalist resistance within an increasingly spectacular and militarized global marketplace.
From this historical vantage, our group’s Situationist-inspired “return to the streets” can thus be seen as a response, typical of the period, to the emergence of a hyper-aestheticised capitalist totality more extensive than anything Debord could’ve imagined; our disillusionment with art as a distinct category of experience, an affective response to an economy extracting value from our cognitive labour and tightening controls on the processes by which we reproduce ourselves. An economy, that is, very much like our current one.
Yet what makes our present moment so different than the 2000s, Sholette stresses, is both its impenetrable unreality – what he terms the ‘unpresent’, in which historically repressed energies have returned in uncanny form – and the desire to which it gives rise: to abolish all official culture. The desire, that is, to abolish the very institution of art as such. It seems that, for Sholette, this would be no great loss. Borrowing from Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” or the political reduction of life to a mere biological fact, he refers to our current situation as one of “bare art,” in order to designate not only art’s absolute lack of freedom and autonomy, but also its present state of exposure and vulnerability. At this historical juncture, high art’s “archaic, elite, outpost,” as he puts it, can seemingly do little more than console tourists; it is too compromised, too complicit, too spectacular to offer much in the way of resistance.
Of course, the desire to categorically put an end to Art cuts both ways, from acts of “monumenticide” addressing the legacies of colonisation and the world-historical cataclysm of chattel slavery, to the mythico-traditionalist aesthetic of neo-fascist groups such as the Proud Boys and Revolt Through Tradition. Remarkably, for Sholette, it is precisely the total aestheticisation of the social which has today turned the distinction famously made by Walter Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility’ (1936) between fascist and communist sensibilities on its head. Whereas fascists once aestheticised politics (think Marinetti and Futurism) and communists politicised art (think Dziga Vertov, but also Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Rasheed Araeen, et al.), today’s spectacular social reality mediated by, among other things, digital platforms such as Instagram and TikTok has opened the way for a politics aestheticised in the name of progressive political change. As he puts it in the book’s final chapter, “under current circumstances, activism seems to provide the only passageway out of our conundrum.”
This elevation of activism as a privileged medium may sound somewhat counterintuitive: if everything is equally close to the centre in the capitalist totality, then wouldn’t all aesthetic gestures theoretically have resistant potential? But, according to Sholette, the exit that today’s art-activism seeks is neither the degrees of autonomy secured by self-design, nor those afforded by art or any other branch of the culture industry. Rather, the exit that today’s artist-activists – from Cuban artist Tania Bruguera to Extinction Rebellion and the German group Center for Political Beauty, a self-described “assault troop” of radical humanism – seek is one of total emancipation from capitalism.
Given these high stakes, Sholette’s inquiry into the mutually informing relationship of activism and art can feel oddly incidental at times. Especially when considering the revolutionary situation (where distinctions between art, politics, and life would no longer be meaningful) towards which today’s “abolitionist activism” strives. Indeed, the book’s fairly strict art-historical chronology, while helpfully providing context for a number of contemporary strategies and tactics, seems to limit its discussion. As though a more searching treatment of the various concepts and contradictions touched upon might risk the social and political agency of the phenomena that it seeks to describe.
Just over 150 pages, The Activism of Art condenses theses developed at greater length elsewhere in Sholette’s work. Readers already familiar with his books Dark Matter: Art in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2011) and Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (2017) may therefore feel that this is something of a coda. As he presciently wrote in the latter’s postscript, written in December 2016: “the greatest paradox activist artists must come to terms with at the theoretical, political and artistic levels [is] how to invent, or how to reinvent, a partisan art praxis now that capitalism has become a dead weight, and its social and political forms begin to implode… I suspect we already bear witness to the outlines of this process in groups and actions such as Black Lives Matter [BLM].” Continuing this thread, this new book considers the activist turn during the intervening years, offering reflections on how, in grappling with present-day urgencies, the “resistant undercommons” developed by BLM might exemplify such a praxis. Other recent developments attended to in the book, albeit briefly, include the emerging market for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), the “art world shaming” of the Sackler Trust, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sholette also devotes several pages to art-activism whose failure has led to increased oppression, citing Syria, Hong Kong, and Belarus as reminders – in what remains a more or less optimistic book – of not only the market’s autocratic reign, but also the global resurgence of totalitarianism.
Arguably, such failures are less reflective of the contradictory relationship between art and activism than they are the contradictory nature of capitalism itself. Both retrograde and revolutionary, capitalism produces new forms of fascism and new forms of ‘communism’ in which to hoard collective social wealth. In a further contradiction, it is often the latter which offers capital a reprieve, a means to not only temporarily prevent (for some) further escalation of inequality and violence, but also transgress its own internal limits, opening up new possibilities for exploitation. In this light, the art world’s often metaphorical incorporation of decolonial discourse or the inclusion of the Occupy movement in Documenta 13 and the 7th Berlin Biennale do not provide evidence of incremental structural change so much as bear out the warning issued by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in ‘Blackness and Governance’ that “the new regulation wants to give you back what you already got, publicly.”
Such impasses are perhaps why The Art of Activism comes across as strained at times, as though desperately clinging to its political vision. At least, this is how I read Sholette’s startling claim, inverting a quote by Martha Rosler, that “it is historical agency itself that now dreams of its own aesthetic incarnation.” Perhaps it is also a sign of the author’s awareness that art-activism’s latest high period may already be coming to a close. The post-Occupy agitational energies that characterised the last decade in the US and Europe seem to be showing signs of fatigue, giving way to a nihilistic ‘vibe shift’. Nevertheless, as Sholette would surely point out, we only need to look at what is currently happening in Iran for proof that the dream of emancipation remains in full force. “It is rare to read a book in which notes of hope and pessimism dovetail as tightly and as jarringly as they do here,” series editor Marcus Verhagen remarks in the book’s foreword. True enough. But I can think of at least one. It was written in 1987 by Guy Debord…