At present, it is not possible to generalize about whether there has really been a radical change in the relationship between art and politics in Austria over the past two years under the right-wing coalition government. What is certain, however, is that the government - as a real enemy - has caused a large number of politically very heterogeneous groups to join together and take action.

The exhibition »Die Gewalt ist der Rand aller Dinge. Subjektverhältnisse, politische Militanz und künstlerische Vorgehensweisen« (»Violence is at the Margin of All Things. Subject Relations, Political Militancy and Artistic Procedures« in the Vienna Generali Foundation, curated by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, also focuses on a basically very similar, »real-political« activation. With historical and contemporary photographs, (sound) installations, videos and drawings, sculptures and paintings, Creischer and Siekmann create cross-connections, full of ingenious strategic ideas, between aesthetic and political practice.

With the exhibition’s focus on »militancy,« the wide-ranging thematic area is condensed in a way that not only invites attacks from hostile political camps, but also provoked some skepticism in the ranks of those supportive of its ideals. For this reason, several safeguards had to be built in, as visitors to the exhibition find out: they move along a very »safe« circuit. For one thing, it is »safe« simply because »we are in a salon« (Andreas Siekmann). The interior has been divided up into a »backstage« and »stage« by the Berlin architecture collective Freies Fach, in order to accentuate the »unreality« of the project. SITEX - a steel construction developed to protect vacant buildings - is now, in the Generali Foundation’s exhibition room, used as a »defense« against conservatives who could claim that the show represents a call for violent action, but it at the same time restricts their own scope of action towards the inside.

The fact that usual defense reactions were already accorded a high status in the conception of the exhibition is probably also the reason why historical examples of esthetic practice have been included. For, being politically less explosive, these works - as is shown, for instance, by the statistics and picture-stories of the graphic artist Gerd Arntz from the interwar period - do not so much initiate an internal »change of perspective« as make available a seemingly ideology-free space in which aesthetic qualities can come to the fore in a quasi neutral manner.

The concept of the exhibition is also safeguarded in an academic regard. The two curators name the traps this project has to deal with, which, according to them, include an »unconsidered transfer of political authenticity into an exhibition space« and the »affirmation of a machismo of action«. The central problem is rather the problem of representation, which is already connected in the subtitle with the political ability to act (subject relations). Here, Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann fall back on the term »sovereignty«, resignifying it inasmuch as they see it as an often necessary claim made with an awareness of its temporary, constructed nature as well as »its conditional performability«. They go further with their strategic ideas and this political artifice, presenting a selection of their long-standing artistic and political connections that shows how a »sovereignly« appropriated concept of resistance can be used in the politico-symbolic conflict.

The French Revolution makes its presence very much felt in the exhibition as an event that went towards bringing about a radical reassessment of violent subversion as a way of changing the world. If one follows the circuit laid down by the curators - made visible by numbers and lines on the ground - which takes visitors back and forth across the room several times, a very specific reading of the individual presentations is suggested. The project, arranged at first chronologically, begins with photographs of the Paris Commune, which arose in 1871 against the background of an extremely heterogeneous Left. The exhibition not only introduces the famous triad »liberté, égalité, fraternité«, but at the same time takes it ad absurdum. For the Commune’s »Manifesto of the Enraged« was directed at the continuity of bourgeois values that replaced »fraternité« with »property and security«, a continuity that was very quickly restored.

In the accompanying booklet, the photographs recording the street fighting of the Paris Commune are shown next to a pamphlet by Baudelaire that hits out at the contemporary understanding of art, which was still deeply bourgeois: it elevated the »exact reproduction of nature«, and thus - as Baudelaire cynically writes - photography, to the highest form of art. A similar criticism of this kind of concept of realism is also to be found elsewhere in the exhibition in a picture-story by Gerd Arntz with the title »Bürgerkrieg« (Civil War) (1928). Outside, a street fight is raging that has already claimed some victims; inside, in the drawing room, the bourgeoisie drinks its cocktails - including an artist who is putting onto canvas a realistic still life consisting of a plant with a small occasional table.

While the revolutionary message of this work seems to have lost a lot of its power in view of the present sociopolitical environment, a progressive and aesthetic approach like that found in the works of the Grupo de Arte Callejero is surprisingly relevant. Since February 1998, this group of Argentinean artists has been putting up signs around Buenos Aires to commemorate the victims of state terrorism, and - additionally - to publicly criticize the present disastrous political situation.

The social commitment of Gerd Arntz, who was active in the labor movement in the 20s, and the Grupo de Arte Callejero is no exception in this exhibition. On the contrary: this aspect of the biography of every artist is significant for the whole exhibition, because it can also make the borderline visible that has to be drawn for the medium of political art with regard to the question - tiresome, but constantly posed - of its effectiveness. For this much is certain: one single art work is not suddenly going to change the laws on asylum.

But the recognition of this fact results in very different individual decisions, which, when all the positions are considered, are put in a strangely unequal light through the minimalist Charlotte Posenenske. One gains the impression that this German artist, who turned her back on art in 1968 because »it cannot help solve urgent social problems«, was the most consistent. Although she only represents one point of view among the many that are possible - the American artist Yvonne Rainer, for instance, changed medium for the same reasons; the French painter Gérard Fromanger was a member of the »Groupe d’information sur les prisons«; there are gaps in the artistic career of Seth Tobocmann because he was arrested several times on grounds of his political involvement - Posenenske’s inclusion in the exhibition raises the question of whether this position is simply a product of the idiotic complacency with which social work is persistently suggested to politically involved artists as a solution.

Here, the exhibition’s conception obviously again serves one side, while maintaining a radical standpoint on the other side: some contemporary works exploring the post-fascist Bundesrepublik Deutschland draw a very clear picture of the enemy. The works of Imma Harms and Thomas Klipper tell of the brutality of German federal forces of law and order, the omnipresent confrontation with National Socialist ideas, and a seething powerlessness that turned into an active use of violence. The video work of the group P.S.P.I. documents an action that targeted a fascist war memorial, which still defaces a Hamburg park, using Jackson Pollock’s painting techniques; the German artist Klaus Weber also refers to these conflicts by showing in his video work »Demo Inverse« that there now seems to be one police transport vehicle for each German car.

The ministry of the interior itself, which passes ever tighter asylum laws, is, for the painter Dierk Schmidt, a possible place for intervention. With his - in the narrower sense - aesthetic operations, he raises the question of whether a painting of an overloaded refugee ship hung in the drawing rooms of the ministry could help the gentlemen there come up with some brighter ideas.

The exhibition contains many examples of analytic, deconstructive artistic methods, which feminists have explored very thoroughly. If visitors leave the suggested path, a photograph of the Paris Commune can be seen in cross-reference to the work by the group J.U.P., which, with its feminist agenda, could not formulate any common political goals with the women of the S.I.. It shows the female members who were interned in the Chantiers prison, and its caption prominently mentions the French woman revolutionary Louise Michel. The fact that the struggle of the women was mainly motivated by economic factors, and that the gender-specific balance of power was naturally left untouched, is one familiar to feminist historiography. This is also a consideration in the case of the Plexiglas sculpture by Linda Bilda, as it is open to doubt whether the Maid of Orleans, as a symbol for - not necessarily non-violent - political struggle, also represents concrete feminist concerns.

Four presentations ending the round tour work using subversive, pop-culture methods: while the street will continue to be a crucial element in the actionist sound works of the group »Ultra-red«, the drawings by Christoph Schäfer, the new arrangement of Woody Guthrie’s music from »Global Dustbowl Ballads« or the adaptation of a Melville story by the group »Theoretisches Fernsehen« are very much at home in a exhibition room. There, the film »Bartleby« shows how deeply the capitalistic logic of efficiency has already permeated society, but argues that even a single individual with a »I prefer not« - motivated perhaps by sheer phlegm - can bring a functioning post-Fordian system to a standstill.

These different steps towards destruction (Alice Creischer) - whether directed against totalitarian social systems, the policies of the WTO or violence in their own surroundings - formed the main point of departure for this project. If, in the exhibition’s reception, the question of the legitimacy of these activist steps is suddenly posed, this would seem to be the price for the fact that the exhibition - when provided with many safeguards - itself functions smoothly in a system based on the rule of law.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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