[spectre] Fwd: Ekaterina Degot on Manifesta 10, and art, and Russia in 2014

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Betreff: 	A Text That Should Never Have Been Written?
Datum: 	Thu, 26 Jun 2014 19:00:07 -0400
Von: 	e-flux <info at mailer.e-flux.com>
	
	
June 26, 2014 e-flux journal

http://www.e-flux.com/journals/


*Ekaterina Degot*
*/A Text That Should Never Have Been Written?/*

/Timing is everything./

/When I was commissioned to contribute to the Manifesta 10 exhibition
catalogue(1) with a text on the political meaning of Russian art,
Russian lawmakers had already passed legislation against "homosexual
propaganda," but Crimea had not yet been annexed./

/Once the annexation became fact, it was finally clear that it would be
impossible to write such a text, as if the Manifesta in Petersburg were
just an ordinary exhibition in yet another ordinary country (albeit one
with shortcomings). I decided to distance myself from the project/.

/When Manifesta's curator Kasper König answered public demands to
boycott this year's festival by saying he would be upset if Manifesta
was "misused by political actors as a platform for their own
self-righteous representation," it became clear to me that precisely
what I had to do was "misuse" this platform/—/though not to address the
political significance of Russian art, but to rather address the
political significance of Manifesta 10, scheduled to open in Saint
Petersburg on June 27./

/It is still unclear whether it was the right decision to write this
text in the moment it was written. Subversive positions are fragile and
context-dependent. They are always at risk of turning into
legitimations. If and when this text appears in print, the situation may
well have changed. Timing is everything./

—Ekaterina Degot


As I write these lines, parts of Eastern Ukraine seem to be following
the Crimean scenario of "annexation on demand of the local population,"
but World War Three has not yet started. Russian officials deploy
notions like "foreign agents," "fifth column," and "national traitor,"
but these figures haven't yet entered the criminal code. None of my
close friends have been arrested, at least not yet. A purely Russian
equivalent of Wikipedia or an alternative payment system to Visa and
Mastercard have not been set up. The Ministry of Culture of the Russian
Federation has suggested only to support those phenomena in contemporary 
art that cater to the government's call for patriotism and non-European 
distinctiveness, but Manifesta's funding has not yet been cut. Manifesta 
will take place, but it is as of yet unclear whether it will be subject 
to censorship or self-censorship.

With every passing second, the situation slips further into the abyss
and the future becomes ever more uncertain. Only one point is clear:
things are very bad indeed.

Are things so bad that Manifesta 10 might be considered a positive,
"civilizational" event no matter what its content, by sheer dint of
taking place in a country plummeting into the abyss of militarist
aggression, obscurantism, and proto-fascist nationalism? Could it be
that the fast-paced conservative revolution in Russia will save not just
the reputation but also the very identity of contemporary art? Or is
this simply untrue? Representations of contemporary art in authoritarian
contexts have become more and more frequent since the 2000s. Perhaps
they rather call into question the very foundations of the discipline at
large. Slavoj Žižek has said again and again that the eternal marriage
between capitalism and democracy has ended, but perhaps we must say the
same of the supposedly eternal marriage between contemporary art and
progressive thinking?

The liaison of critical theory and visual art dates back to the 1990s,
and is not without its material motivations, not least through the sheer
amount of money circulating in the latter sphere. Art understands itself
as an exclusive zone of oppositional thinking, which, after 1989, became
a refuge for the idea of communism (an idea that simultaneously lost its
contours in reality). Here, every artwork benefits from a "presumption
of criticality," and what's more, a criticality from the left. This
presumption extends from artworks to institutions, the more contemporary
of which were shaped in the 1990s through a system of big international
exhibitions usually funded from municipal budgets. Manifesta is a
perfect example. The main know-how developed in such exhibitions, one
might say, is a certain "opportunism" of critical agency (to speak with
Paolo Virno). Critiques are not only tolerated but encouraged and funded
by the very entities under criticism.

Although only one of Manifesta's earlier editions took place in a former
communist country, it is very much the product of 1989, when there was a
simultaneous discovery of new markets and new resources of all
varieties, including those of the human and the cultural kind. Manifesta
usually works with "developing" artists from "developing regions" (such
as Eastern Europe, as well as political problem zones or economically
depressed regions of the deindustrialized "old" Europe). Both are
developing in the direction of the global market and post-industrial
capitalism, if at all. This much is clear for countries, but
"development" in this sense also concerns artists. For many, critical,
post-objective, "biennial art"—be it "ephemeral" or activist in
questioning art's autonomy—is little more than an extended stage for
transitioning to the private market of galleries by the age of sixty at
the very latest. Critical art corresponds to a "career phase" in the
artist's biography and in art at large—the phase that today draws the
most media attention. It is followed by a "phase of capitalization,"
when biennials won't be interested in you anymore (unless you are very
old, forgotten, and worthy of being rediscovered) but during which
you'll have a relatively comfortable life in galleries and at art
fairs—impregnable to curators and critics.

In recent years, Manifesta has become one of the main stops in the
"career phase" for artists and curators—a showcase for a new,
defetishized art market whose clients are no longer private collectors,
but rather a non-buying public. The money is almost never only private
but also federal, municipal, or corporate, and works are no longer sold
as unique objects but are more often than not made on commission and as
a part of a series or edition. Self-referentiality is displaced by a
thematic and didactic principle, upholding the image of art as something
socially necessary (at the very least for getting municipal funding, one
might add). This is also a zone where the autonomy of art has been, if
not overcome, then at least given a new critical meaning, since the
majority of biennials are based on some form of site-specificity. It is
a strange market whose own ideology and practices have incorporated the
critique of art's autonomy and even the critique of the market as such,
working under the oblique influence of Soviet experiments from the
1920s, albeit seen through the European and American neo-avant-gardes
after 1968.

However, it is precisely the market and its ideology that stands at the
center of the biennial system, notwithstanding its non-commercial status.

The object of fetishization is no longer the commodity, but one of the
market's most central self-proclaimed features, namely freedom,
understood primarily as the freedom of choice from a plethora of offers
and options. This is precisely why all biennials always present a
diversity of something (diverse media, diverse artists, diverse
countries and continents, and never a monographic exhibition, for
example), relegating the idea of "multiculturalism" to a market ideology
of culinary choice. Just as biennials fetishize consumer choice, they
also enshrine a form of entrepreneurial freedom on the part of the
producer. Big exhibitions create executive jobs for independent (free)
curators, who are free to choose venues, titles, and a team of
collaborators. In other institutions, all of these elements are usually
stable and given in advance, but in biennials, they belong to the zone
of curatorial authorship. Free curators personify the holy cow of free
choice, and it is a principle they follow as the highest ethic of their
profession.

The dominance of the ideology and rhetoric of freedom in Manifesta and
analogous biennials raises the question of how such freedom manifests
itself in un-free or insufficiently free contexts. When bureaucrats
prevent curators from deciding upon creative questions themselves, they
inevitably fail to understand the rules of contemporary art and fall
prey to ridicule; even during the earliest stages of preparations for
Manifesta, the foundation made a point of releasing a special statement
assuring that the Hermitage "understands" the idea of a curator's
creative freedom. But the fetishization of free choice also fetishizes
the process far more than its result; if the curator made an original
choice but then was prevented from presenting that choice through an act
of censorship, the choice itself (which can always be announced in the
press) becomes all the more significant. This whole system of mutually
beneficial relations between several social and political groups is
based on a mutual understanding shared by all sides involved of the
rules of the game.

Initially, the assumption could have been that this machine of harmless,
opportunistic subversion would work in Petersburg just like anywhere
else. Indeed, that would have been the case, had the Russian state
agreed to tolerate harmless criticism in return for economic benefit. In
many senses, that is how things were until very recently, and Russia
seemed to be one of the many possible territories of contemporary art.
In fact, as it turns out, the country's inclusion was very fragile and
hardly existed at all. The aforementioned "career globalism," as
typified by Manifesta, has included Russia even less than the
international market. Until recently, Art Basel included one Russian
gallery and a smattering of Russian artists here or there. But
institutional curatorial careers in Russia have never been and are still
rarely recognized abroad, even with a drop of several rungs in the
career ladder.

In post-Soviet Russia, contemporary art has been legitimized differently
than elsewhere—not through its critical function or its social rhetoric,
but in a more traditional way, as an exclusive commodity—strengthening
the logic of inequality constituent of this country. Its most naive
version is literally an expensive commodity for rich collectors. Its
more sophisticated variant is exclusive knowledge for an intellectual
elite: to appreciate a socially oriented work of contemporary art, you
have to belong to a sophisticated international community.

The Hermitage plays a special role in all of this with its orientation
toward "high art" and its collection of treasures. The museum's identity
was always based on gold, be it that of the Scyths or of the tsars, and
in that it was special. In terms of class, it stood in opposition to the
typical Soviet museum with its documents and its ideological pictures, a
space both didactic and anti-fetishistic by nature. In Soviet culture,
the Hermitage and other palaces in Petersburg were rare zones for "the
rhetoric of wealth," which the conservative logic of public opinion
conflated with the zone of "high art." As a "museum of wealth," the
Hermitage could and still can afford to look down upon the uneducated,
including uneducated politicians.

The initial assumption was that the Manifesta in Petersburg would take
place in such an enclave of autonomy founded on real and symbolic
wealth, and all political calculations were made accordingly. The
Hermitage's authority would serve to shield attacks on contemporary art,
whose source was not yet the state, but last year largely originated
from Russian Orthodox fanatics and Cossack activists. This calculation
differs at the root from all previous editions of Manifesta, which
usually preferred to work with "interesting poverty" rather than
"interesting affluence" (when actually there is enough poverty in Russia
and Petersburg to go around).

Actually, it may well be that the choice of the Hermitage, with its
legendary wealth, as the location for the tenth anniversary edition of
Manifesta seemed like an even more interesting challenge than Manifesta
9's former industrial hangar in Genk. This is a bit like the question
radical leftwing Soviet artists and theorists posed themselves in the
1930s when they felt that their paradigm of militancy had exhausted
itself. As they formulated it, what was at stake was the search for the
humanistic basis of the classics of art, and their search for
universality and truth as opposed to tendentious political tasks. One
might imagine a similarly risky conservative turn with a goal of
unearthing the true roots of contemporary art before and beyond its
instrumentalization through creative capitalism in the context of
Manifesta 10. Its curator Kasper König's creative biography makes him an
important figure of contemporary art "before Manifesta," a protagonist
of the heroic "Western" autonomy of art from the epoch of the Cold War.

Such a reading of the conservative "Old Masters" through the
conservatism of modernist practices of artistic autonomy might have
given weight to a productive self-criticism of Manifesta and its
routinized "progressivism." However, unfortunately for all involved, the
Russian state has undertaken its own ultra-militant conservative turn in
both domestic and foreign policy, and they have discredited or at least
problematized the artistic dimension of transgression in that direction,
running the danger of instrumentalization from the Right. To explore the
underestimated emancipatory and humanist potential of classical museum
heritage might be a bold gesture in a context where a certain type of
black-and-white and conceptual documenta-art is considered mainstream,
but it takes much greater boldness and political /doigté /in a country
where the heavy authority of classical painting is invoked as an
argument and a weapon against everything contemporary, even against the
once contemporary and political meaning of those very same paintings.

Admittedly, Manifesta has always been part of neoliberal urban
transformations with the silent consent of all parties involved, and its
curators are usually very good at maneuvering and defending their
interests and those of the participating artists. But is Manifesta ready
to mirror that situation when an experimental "conservative" exhibition
suddenly begins to resonate all too harmonically with ultraright-wing
cultural policies initiated by the state? Is there something available
to describe this, like the language invented by non-conformist artists
of the Soviet Seventies, indicated by the untranslatable term
/nevlipaniya/, which roughly means "how not to put your foot in it"?
Over the last years, Putin's Russia has unexpectedly turned to realizing
a project of perverse decolonization and liberation from Western
influences, including that of modern art and even more post-modernism
(with the latter term constantly used as an accusation by the
authorities). In official documents from the Ministry of Culture, full
of sympathetic quotes from Max Nordau, the author of the term
"degenerate art," such work is now presented as a mix of "black humor,
cursing, porn, and mediocre shamanism under the slogan of innovation."

While earlier editions of Manifesta often declared their social
engagement, they were rarely able to engage a local public in the
broadest sense, imagining that critical art would find its audience in
the new precariat of a post-industrial age. In reality, the "career" art
of Manifesta addresses the instances of that career; it caters to
curators and institutions. The Hermitage edition of Manifesta is a clear
departure from this model, but the audience it addresses—tourists from
the Russian provinces and foreign passengers from Baltic cruises who
usually visit the Hermitage—will be hard to mobilize for critical
thinking, let alone resistance. Such an audience is far too deeply stuck
in the register of enlightened nationalism and the admiration of wealth
that the Hermitage evinces. In the new political configuration, a turn
toward this audience does not come dangerously close to the populist
context, but rather threatens to "put its foot into" the triumphalist
aesthetics of the opening ceremony at Sochi. The tenth-anniversary
Manifesta, planned as a transgressive aesthetic gesture, may well prove
full of such political pitfalls.

When contemporary Russia's president rejects "Western values," many in
the West misread this as a radical critique of capitalism and reacted
with professions of sympathy. However, the point is that the negation of
West in this case also negates the inner critique of the West. That is,
both critical thinking and post-classical art find themselves beyond the
law. If we are dealing with a fundamentalist cultural revolution, isn't
the reference to the Old Masters and the classical museum context a
"step toward" the Russian state, as it demands that artists comply to
standards and taboos of "high art" as opposed to contemporary culture?
  From the perversely poignant perspective of this new Russian
ultraright-wing conservativism, the critical character of contemporary
art's gestures embodies the "propaganda" (of homosexuality, the Western
way of life, tolerance, and multiculturalism), while classical art
embodies their aestheticization. In general, the state has no problem
with the "aestheticization" of LGBT clichés (for example, in pop music)
or of "Westernness" in design or architecture, and the Russian
avant-garde was also successfully domesticated (and instrumentalized as
a symbol of Russia's eternal glory) in the opening ceremony of the Sochi
Olympics. On the other hand, isn't today's allegedly "progressive" art
producing too formalist a language (even if it is a critical language
with a left-wing vocabulary) to be immune to instrumentalization?
Today's soft dictators wear Armani suits, watch American sitcoms,
tolerate some nice contemporary art, and even, why not, read and
assimilate Slavoj Žižek's critiques (or at least their adherents do).

In a way, the Russian cultural authorities who suddenly became
archaically and ridiculously anti-modernist and made Manifesta, no
matter how it would appear, into a heroic deed, made things look simpler
than they currently are. Since Vladimir Putin goes so far as forbidding
state employees to ride foreign cars and to take their holidays abroad,
why not just ban any foreign art outright? Under aesthetic censorship
(that agrees to make some exceptions for "export" situations),
international contemporary art is a protest act by definition. But in a
broader context it is not, and has not been for decades. The world we
live in is more complex than that. There is no guarantee of emancipatory
potential in contemporary art, and neither are there specific forms that
would assure us of the correct political behavior of their creators, let
alone their owners. Increasingly, we hear of such a thing as a left-wing
rhetoric (and maybe not even just a rhetoric) of the right wing, and we
see contemporary-looking (and maybe even contemporary-thinking) art that
embraces nationalism and dictatorship. There will be such examples—from
the Russian context—at Manifesta, although it seems through an oversight
rather than programmatically. There are no rules anymore, and each case
has to be taken separately; the relatively safe common ground of
contemporary art is shifting. And this incredible complexity is the only 
hope left.


Translated by David Riff

(1) Deliberately or unconsciously, the text was never delivered on time.


This text is part of the current summer issue of /e-flux journal/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18118&F=H>:
"The End of the End of History.”

Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
/Editorial—“The End of the End of History?”/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18115&F=H>

James T. Hong
/The Nationalist Thing Which Thinks: Notes on a Genealogy of
Ultranationalism/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18105&F=H>

Nina Power
/Rainy Fascism Island/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18108&F=H>

LaborinArt
/Running Along the Disaster: A Conversation with Franco “Bifo” Berardi/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18107&F=H>

Sabu Kohso
/Mutation of the Triad: Totalitarianism, Fascism, and Nationalism in
Japan/ <http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18111&F=H>

Oleksiy Radynski
/Maidan and Beyond, Part II: The Cacophony of Donbas/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18112&F=H>

Oxana Timofeeva
/The End of the World: From Apocalypse to the End of History and Back/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18106&F=H>

Walid Raad
/Appendix XVIII: Plates 22-257/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18116&F=H>

Boris Groys
/On Art Activism/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18109&F=H>

Lawrence Liang
/Ultranationalism: A Proposal for a Quiet Withdrawal/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18103&F=H>

Raqs Media Collective
/Is the World Sleeping, Sleepless, or Awake or Dreaming?/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18113&F=H>

Szabolcs KissPál
/The Rise of a Fallen Feather: The Symbolism of the Turul Bird in
Contemporary Hungary/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18104&F=H>

Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu
/From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: The Echoes of Socialist
Realism, Part II/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18114&F=H>

Daniel Birnbaum
/Obituary for Sturtevant/
<http://interspire.e-flux.com/link.php?M=133213&N=9312&L=18110&F=H>