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Save the Republic! Art and Politics with Hal Foster and Nato Thompson

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It is fall 2015, which means it is the dawn of election season in the United States of America and the final year of the two-term Obama administration. In other words, a tectonic change is in the offing. While obviously different in many respects, American presidential politics are not unlike political art: they don’t seem to matter until they do. Both are potently symbolic and have a profound effect on our political and aesthetic life. It is therefore a striking and notable coincidence that two leading (albeit quite different) American thinkers on contemporary art have published books on art and politics at virtually the same time. One, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (Verso, 2015) is by the art historian and critic Hal Foster; the other, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (Melville House, 2015), is by the curator and activist Nato Thompson.

 

Despite their differences, the two books share certain themes. One leitmotif found in both, and in much of the art that figures in them, is a revisiting of the social, economic, and political disaster that was the George W. Bush administration. If it sounds like I am overdetermining these texts by saying so, I would simply counter that for American authors writing on contemporary art and politics it would be odd for “W” not to figure as a relevant concern. People are still coming to grips with the vast ruin his presidency wrought. Accordingly, one term common to both texts is paranoia. Foster likens Bush’s 2004 reelection to “blackmail” in which the American electorate was held hostage by the fear-mongering rhetoric of the so-called war on terror. In his gloss of recent art, paranoia is a “practice of forced connections” that he sees in the archival proclivities of artists such as Tacita Dean, Joachim Koester, Sam Durant, and others. He suggests that paranoia is perhaps a necessary counterbalance to the utopic dimension of artists recasting archival materials, and notes that the “excavation sites” of archivally inclined artists “suggest a move away from melancholic culture”—a useful move. In this account, Foster echoes the work of the curator Dieter Roelstraete and his recent sprawling exhibition The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, which was perhaps the definitive exhibitionary articulation of this artistic mode.

 

Nato Thompson similarly claims we live in a time of “radical paranoia,” one in which truth is bent to serve market and government agendas. This environment, in which everything seems to hide a profit motive, casts a pall over any artwork whose meaning might be enigmatic. As Thompson points out, “If an image wears its heart on its sleeve, we assume that it must have a dagger behind its back.” Against this paranoid suspicion of any cultural gesture, Thompson recommends works such as Jeremy Deller’s It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq (a series of dialogues co-organized by Creative Time, Thompson’s day job, and staged at the New Museum between February 11 and March 22, 2009) and William Pope.L’s The Black Factory (an ongoing, traveling, interactive installation in a milk truck, initiated by Thompson’s 2004 exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere). Thompson suggests that these works balance a didactic message with ambiguous effect (or vice versa).

 

Both Foster and Thompson engage with the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, whose thinking rose to prominence in contemporary art during the Bush years (his participation in the 2005 Frieze Art Fair is an noted example). The authors read this notoriously difficult theorist in productive, if different, ways. Foster takes Rancière to task in a brief but convincing chapter titled “Post-Critical?” In particular, he interrogates Rancière’s scathing critique of “critical art” (this argument appears primarily in his 2009 book Aesthetics and Its Discontents). Having been drained of its potency to shock, the philosopher argues, critical art can no longer effectively challenge commodity culture and the society of spectacle; “political art” closes down the free space that art otherwise allows, entering a sort of critical cul-de-sac. Foster shows that Rancière is caught up in his own circular reasoning, and points out that he is ascribing a power to art that it does not yet possess. And he suggests that the “post-critical” art Rancière describes is no match for advertising or big data.

 

Nato Thompson, by contrast, puts to work Rancière’s conception of the “distribution of the sensible” to describe the complex infrastructure that allows art to be seen as such—which, the curator argues, frequently serves to exclude or deride the sort of art he champions, and to perpetuate and legitimate injustice. Into the art world’s exclusionary “distribution of the sensible” Thompson rounds up the usual suspects: art schools, galleries, and publications (in particular the New York Times and Artforum). It’s not clear to me that this is exactly a fair charge, given that much of the art he advocates seeks to operate outside of this constellation and its distribution of the sensible; nevertheless Thompson’s emphasis on the different stakes and frames of reference that matter to this sort of work is pointed and useful. (It is worth noting that both books praise Thomas Hirschhorn, himself something of a Rancièreian artist).

 

If for no other reason, the two books should be read for their impassioned and complementary pleas for the preservation of public cultural institutions. In Foster’s case it is a robust critical environment (consisting of artists and critics) that establishes a true and viable public sphere, one that might challenge the manipulations of the mass media and politics. He writes:

 

Why take up the bedraggled banner of critique now? The reason is simple (and it returns to the concerns with which I began): criticism is essential to the public sphere, at least as this notion was articulated by Jürgen Habermas in 1962 and developed thereafter. In some ways criticism is this sphere in operation.

 

This is Foster’s best counterargument to Rancière’s anti-critical position. Indeed, he expands “criticism” to accommodate the aesthetic (in a striking move from the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic [1981]) in an eloquent and searching passage in which he reconsiders the position that brought him to prominence in the 1980s:

 

Yet this polemic was situational, and its time has passed. Today we are more alert to the dialectical connections between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic in twentieth-century art. At the same time we are more attuned to the critical dimension in aesthetic experience and vice versa, that is, more attuned to the capacity of the aesthetic to resist ideology (e.g., of the sensuous particularity of the art work not to be utterly subsumed in the ceaseless flow of images and information) as well as to the capacity of criticism to be artful in its own ways (e.g., to be open to alternative modes of engagement that do not oppose aesthetic experience and critical reflection.)

 

The best moments in Seeing Power are drawn from Thompson’s experience of working as a curator at Creative Time and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. In a telling anecdote, he reflects on the diverse publics that regularly attend museums, which are not perpetually filled with the globetrotting elite and moneyed classes of the art world. While he was staging his political art exhibition The Interventionists, the museum also had a German painting show on view. He was surprised to learn that audiences felt, perhaps counterintuitively, that the socially engaged art was elitist, while the expensive German paintings from the Rubell Family Collection were something they could connect with. It is this type of nuanced consideration that lends this book its credibility.

 

Thompson meditates on the public sphere in a passage about reclaiming culture from what he calls the “nonprofit industrial complex” and ever more corporate museum boards:

 

Every non-profit museum’s mission statement contains bold language about serving the public good. These claims are no longer challenged, as most of the critical political art community engages in internecine battles in impoverished niche micro-communities. But they could be. As someone who worked in a museum, I know even the slightest provocation demanding accountability would send ripples across the museum boards. Power is not static and institutions—particularly those which advertise their commitment to the public good—are vulnerable to the powers of argumentation and public opinion. Artists should take advantage of this.

 

Intriguingly, both Bad New Days and Seeing Power skip, more or less, over the Obama years. Instead they point to the cautionary tale of the early 2000s, as if those years were a Joycean nightmare from which we’ve yet to wake up. As we enter the next election cycle, Foster and Thompson remind us not to cede our public sphere to the market, and to insist that art—its production and its forms of contestation—still has an important role to play in the politics that shape our world.

 

Zachary Cahill is an artist based in Chicago. He is Lecturer and Open Practice Committee Coordinator in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.


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