hito steyerl_politics of art

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Hito Steyerl

Politics of Art:Contemporary

Art and theTransition toPost-Democracy

A standard way of relating politics to artassumes that art represents political issues inone way or another. But there is a much moreinteresting perspective: the politics of the fieldof art as a place of work.1 Simply look at what itdoes Ð not what it shows.

Amongst all other forms of art, fine art hasbeen most closely linked to post-Fordistspeculation, with bling, boom, and bust.

Contemporary art is no unworldly disciplinenestled away in some remote ivory tower. On thecontrary, it is squarely placed in the neoliberalthick of things. We cannot dissociate the hypearound contemporary art from the shock policiesused to defibrillate slowing economies. Suchhype embodies the affective dimension of globaleconomies tied to ponzi schemes, creditaddiction, and bygone bull markets.Contemporary art is a brand name without abrand, ready to be slapped onto almost anything,a quick face-lift touting the new creative

imperative for places in need of an extrememakeover, the suspense of gambling combinedwith the stern pleasures of upper-class boardingschool education, a licensed playground for aworld confused and collapsed by dizzyingderegulation. If contemporary art is the answer,the question is: How can capitalism be mademore beautiful? But contemporary art is not only aboutbeauty. It is also about function. What is thefunction of art within disaster capitalism?Contemporary art feeds on the crumbs of amassive and widespread redistribution of wealthfrom the poor to the rich, conducted by means ofan ongoing class struggle from above.2 It lendsprimordial accumulation a whiff ofpostconceptual razzmatazz. Additionally, itsreach has grown much more decentralized Ðimportant hubs of art are no longer only locatedin the Western metropolis. Today,deconstructivist contemporary art museums popup in any self-respecting autocracy. A countrywith human rights violations? Bring on the Gehrygallery!

The Global Guggenheim is a cultural refinery

for a set of post-democratic oligarchies, as arethe countless international biennials tasked withupgrading and reeducating the surpluspopulation.3 Art thus facilitates the developmentof a new multipolar distribution of geopoliticalpower whose predatory economies are oftenfueled by internal oppression, class war fromabove, and radical shock and awe policies.

Contemporary art thus not only reflects, butactively intervenes in the transition towards anew post-Cold War world order. It is a majorplayer in unevenly advancing semiocapitalism

wherever T-Mobile plants its flag. It is involved inmining for raw materials for dual-core

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P o l i t i c s o f A r t : C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t a n d t h e T r a n s i t i o n t o P o s

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Frank Gehry wedding ring.

processors. It pollutes, gentrifies, and ravishes.It seduces and consumes, then suddenly walksoff, breaking your heart. From the deserts ofMongolia to the high plains of Peru,contemporary art is everywhere. And when it isfinally dragged into Gagosian dripping from headto toe with blood and dirt, it triggers off roundsand rounds of rapturous applause.

Why and for whom is contemporary art so

attractive? One guess: the production of artpresents a mirror image of post-democraticforms of hypercapitalism that look set to becomethe dominant political post-Cold War paradigm.It seems unpredictable, unaccountable, brilliant,mercurial, moody, guided by inspiration andgenius. Just as any oligarch aspiring todictatorship might want to see himself. Thetraditional conception of the artistÕs rolecorresponds all too well with the self-image ofwannabe autocrats, who see governmentpotentially Ð and dangerously Ð as an art form.

Post-democratic government is very muchrelated to this erratic type of male-genius-artistbehavior. It is opaque, corrupt, and completelyunaccountable. Both models operate within malebonding structures that are as democratic asyour local mafia chapter. Rule of law? Why donÕtwe just leave it to taste? Checks and balances?

Cheques and balances! Good governance? Badcurating! You see why the contemporary oligarchloves contemporary art: itÕs just what works forhim. Thus, traditional art production may be arole model for the nouveaux riches created byprivatization, expropriation, and speculation. Butthe actual production of art is simultaneously aworkshop for many of the nouveaux poor, trying

their luck as jpeg virtuosos and conceptualimpostors, as gallerinas and overdrive contentproviders. Because art also means work, moreprecisely strike work.4 It is produced asspectacle, on post-Fordist all-you-can-workconveyor belts. Strike or shock work is affectivelabor at insane speeds, enthusiastic,hyperactive, and deeply compromised.

Originally, strike workers were excesslaborers in the early Soviet Union. The term isderived from the expression Òudarny trudÓ forÒsuperproductive, enthusiastic laborÓ (udar for

Òshock, strike, blowÓ). Now, transferred topresent-day cultural factories, strike workrelates to the sensual dimension of shock.Rather than painting, welding, and molding,artistic strike work consists of ripping, chatting,and posing. This accelerated form of artisticproduction creates punch and glitz, sensation

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Image found in a technologynews website accompanying the

following opening sentence "Themultinational Joint PhotographicExperts Group, responsible forthe JPEG standard (...) hasannounced the next iteration ofits format will be based on theformat Microsoft HD Photo." seehttp://noticiastech.com/wordpress/?p=9919.

and impact. Its historical origin as format forStalinist model brigades brings an additionaledge to the paradigm of hyperproductivity. Strikeworkers churn out feelings, perception, anddistinction in all possible sizes and variations.Intensity or evacuation, sublime or crap,readymade or readymade reality Ð strike worksupplies consumers with all they never knewthey wanted.

Strike work feeds on exhaustion and tempo,on deadlines and curatorial bullshit, on smalltalk and fine print. It also thrives on acceleratedexploitation. IÕd guess that Ð apart from domesticand care work Ð art is the industry with the mostunpaid labor around. It sustains itself on thetime and energy of unpaid interns and self-exploiting actors on pretty much every level andin almost every function. Free labor and rampantexploitation are the invisible dark matter thatkeeps the cultural sector going.

Free-floating strike workers plus new (and

old) elites and oligarchies equal the frameworkof the contemporary politics of art. While thelatter manage the transition to post-democracy,the former image it. But what does this situationactually indicate? Nothing but the ways in whichcontemporary art is implicated in transformingglobal power patterns.

Contemporary artÕs workforce consistslargely of people who, despite workingconstantly, do not correspond to any traditionalimage of labor. They stubbornly resist settlinginto any entity recognizable enough to beidentified as a class. While the easy way outwould be to classify this constituency asmultitude or crowd, it might be less romantic toask whether they are not global

lumpenfreelancers, deterritorialized andideologically free-floating: a reserve army ofimagination communicating via Google Translate. Instead of shaping up as a new class, thisfragile constituency may well consist Ð asHannah Arendt once spitefully formulated Ð ofthe Òrefuse of all classes.Ó These dispossessedadventurers described by Arendt, the urbanpimps and hoodlums ready to be hired ascolonial mercenaries and exploiters, are faintly(and quite distortedly) mirrored in the brigades ofcreative strike workers propelled into the global

sphere of circulation known today as the artworld.5 If we acknowledge that current strikeworkers might inhabit similarly shifting groundsÐ the opaque disaster zones of shock capitalismÐ a decidedly un-heroic, conflicted, andambivalent picture of artistic labor emerges.

We have to face up to the fact that there is

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no automatically available road to resistance andorganization for artistic labor. That opportunismand competition are not a deviation of this formof labor but its inherent structure. That thisworkforce is not ever going to march in unison,except perhaps while dancing to a viral LadyGaga imitation video. The international is over.Now letÕs get on with the global.

Here is the bad news: political art routinely

shies away from discussing all these matters.6

Addressing the intrinsic conditions of the artfield, as well as the blatant corruption within it Ðthink of bribes to get this or that large-scalebiennial into one peripheral region or another Ð isa taboo even on the agenda of most artists whoconsider themselves political. Even thoughpolitical art manages to represent so-called localsituations from all over the globe, and routinelypackages injustice and destitution, theconditions of its own production and displayremain pretty much unexplored. One could even

say that the politics of art are the blind spot ofmuch contemporary political art. Of course, institutional critique hastraditionally been interested in similar issues.But today we need a quite extensive expansion ofit.7 Because in contrast to the age of aninstitutional criticism, which focused on artinstitutions, or even the sphere of representationat large, art production (consumption,distribution, marketing, etc.) takes on a differentand extended role within post-democraticglobalization. One example, which is a quiteabsurd but also common phenomenon, is thatradical art is nowadays very often sponsored bythe most predatory banks or arms traders andcompletely embedded in rhetorics of citymarketing, branding, and social engineering.8 Forvery obvious reasons, this condition is rarelyexplored within political art, which is in manycases content to offer exotic self-ethnicization,pithy gestures, and militant nostalgia.

I am certainly not arguing for a position ofinnocence.9 It is at best illusory, at worst justanother selling point. Most of all it is very boring.But I do think that political artists could become

more relevant if they were to confront theseissues instead of safely parade as Stalinistrealists, CNN situationists, or Jamie-Oliver-meets-probation-officer social engineers. ItÕstime to kick the hammer-and-sickle souvenir artinto the dustbin. If politics is thought of as theOther, happening somewhere else, alwaysbelonging to disenfranchised communities inwhose name no one can speak, we end upmissing what makes art intrinsically politicalnowadays: its function as a place for labor,conflict, andÉfun Ð a site of condensation of the

contradictions of capital and of extremelyentertaining and sometimes devastating

misunderstandings between the global and thelocal.

Fashion production for Harper's Bazar, September 2009, titled Peggy Guggenheim's Venice.

The art field is a space of wild contradictionand phenomenal exploitation. It is a place ofpower mongering, speculation, financialengineering, and massive and crookedmanipulation. But it is also a site of commonality,movement, energy, and desire. In its bestiterations it is a terrific cosmopolitan arenapopulated by mobile shock workers, itinerant

salesmen of self, tech whiz kids, budgettricksters, supersonic translators, PhD interns,and other digital vagrants and day laborers. ItÕshard-wired, thin-skinned, plastic-fantastic. Apotential commonplace where competition isruthless and solidarity remains the only foreignexpression. Peopled with charming scumbags,bully-kings, almost-beauty-queens. ItÕs HDMI,CMYK, LGBT. Pretentious, flirtatious,mesmerizing.

This mess is kept afloat by the sheerdynamism of loads and loads of hardworking

women. A hive of affective labor under closescrutiny and controlled by capital, woven tightly

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into its multiple contradictions. All of this makesit relevant to contemporary reality. Art affectsthis reality precisely because it is entangled intoall of its aspects. ItÕs messy, embedded,troubled, irresistible. We could try to understandits space as a political one instead of trying torepresent a politics that is always happeningelsewhere. Art is not outside politics, but politicsresides within its production, its distribution,

and its reception. If we take this on, we mightsurpass the plane of a politics of representationand embark on a politics that is there, in front ofour eyes, ready to embrace.

!

This text is dedicated to the people who bear with me throughdigital hysteria, frequent flyer syndrome, and installationdisasters. Thanks especially to Tirdad, Christoph, David, andFreya. Also Brian for the edit, as always.

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer.She teaches New Media Art at University of Arts Berlinand has recentlyparticipated in Documenta 12, Shanghai Biennial, andRotterdam Film Festival.

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1I am expanding on a notiondeveloped by Hongjohn Lin in hiscuratorial statement for theTaipei Biennial 2010. HongjohnLin, ÒCuratorial Statement,Ó in10TB Taipei Biennial Guidebook(Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum,2010), 10Ð11.

2This has been described as aglobal and ongoing process ofexpropriation since the 1970s.

See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005). As forthe resulting distribution ofwealth, a study by the Helsinki-based World Institute forDevelopment EconomicsResearch of the United NationsUniversity (UNU-WIDER) foundthat in the year 2000, the richest1 percent of adults alone owned40 percent of global assets. Thebottom half of the world's adultpopulation owned 1 percent ofglobal wealth. Seehttp://www.wider.unu.edu/events/past-events/2006-events/en_GB/05-12-2006/.

3For just one example of oligarchinvolvement, seehttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/nyregion/28trustee.htm l.While such biennials span fromMoscow to Dubai to Shanghaiand many of the so-calledtransitional countries, weshouldnÕt consider post-democracy to be a non-Westernphenomenon. The Schengenarea is a brilliant example ofpost-democratic rule, with awhole host of politicalinstitutions not legitimized bypopular vote and a substantialsection of the populationexcluded from citizenship (not to

mention the Old WorldÕs growingfondness for democratically-elected fascists). The currentexhibition ÒThe Potos’-Principle,Ó organized by AliceCreischer, Andreas Siekmann,and Max Jorge Hinderer,highlights the connectionbetween oligarchy and imageproduction from anotherhistorically relevant perspective.

4I am drawing on a field ofmeaning developed by EkaterinaDegot, Cosmin Costinas, andDavid Riff for their 1st UralIndustrial Biennial, 2010.

5Arendt may have been wrong onthe matter of taste. Taste is notnecessarily a matter of thecommon, as she argued,following Kant. In this context, itis a matter of manufacturingconsensus, engineeringreputation, and other delicatemachinations, which Ð whoops Ðmetamorphose into art-historical bibliographies. LetÕsface it: the politics of taste arenot about the collective, butabout the collector. Not aboutthe common but about thepatron. Not about sharing butabout sponsoring.

6

There are of course manylaudable and great exceptions,and I admit that I myself maybow my head in shame, too.

7As is also argued in the readerInstitutional Critique, eds. AlexAlberro and Blake Stimson(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,2009). See also the collectedissues of the online journaltransform:http://transform.eipcp.net/t

ransversal/0106.

8Recently on show at HenieOnstad Kunstsenter in Oslo wasÒGuggenheim Visibility StudyGroup,Ó a very interesting projectby Nomeda and GediminasUrbonas that unpacked thetensions between local (andpartly indigenist) art scenes andthe Guggenheim franchisesystem, with the Guggenheimeffect analyzed in detail in acase study. Seehttp://www.vilma.cc/2G/. Alsosee Joseba Zulaika, GuggenheimBilbao Museoa: Museums,

Architecture, and City Renewal

(Reno: Center for BasqueStudies, University of Nevada,2003). Another case study: BeatWeber, Therese Kaufmann, ÒTheFoundation, the State Secretaryand the Bank Ð A Journey intothe Cultural Policy of a PrivateInstitution,Óhttp://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1145970626. Seealso Martha Rosler, ÒTake theMoney and Run? Can Politicaland Socio-critical Art ÔSurviveÕ?Óe-flux journal, issue 12,http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/107, and Tirdad Zolghadr,Ò11th Istanbul Biennial,Óhttp://www.frieze.com/issue/review/11th_istanbul_biennia l/.

9This is evident from this text'splacement on e-flux as anadvertisement supplement. Thesituation is furthermorecomplicated by the fact thatthese ads may well flaunt myown shows. At the risk ofrepeating myself, I would like toemphasize that I do not considerinnocence a political position,but a moral one, and thuspolitically irrelevant. Aninteresting comment on thissituation can be found in LuisCamnitzer, ÒThe Corruption inthe Arts / the Art of Corruption,Ó

published in the context of TheMarco Polo Syndrome, asymposium at the House ofWorld Cultures in April, 1995.See http://www.universes-in-univ erse.de/magazin/marco-polo/s -camnitzer.htm.

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