»Populism«, presented by Nifca (Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art), is a large, international exhibition project with a clear thematic focus. The catchword »populism« is used by the exhibition to name various developments: it is mainly about the hyped-up mood in the public media of the Bush era and the increasing pervasion of popular culture by reactionary ideologisms. But another theme is the way the general compulsion to be economically justifiable has increased the pressure on non-profit-oriented cultural projects. A huge display by Jens Haaning and Superflex installed at the entrance to the exhibition illustrates this, monotonously registering each visitor to the exhibition as a paying customer. In its general thrust, »Populism« is a logical follow-on from the project that preceded it: the exhibition »Fundamentalisms of the New Order«1 put on by Nifca in Copenhagen in 2001. Against the background of a shift to the right in the Danish government and the ensuing radical cuts in state cultural subsidies, this exhibition already attempted to formulate a clear, confrontative approach to the restorative tendencies at the end of the nineties. (This development was and is so painful to see in Scandinavia in particular, because in the nineties exemplary policies of cultural exchange had given the Scandinavian art scene an incomparable boost towards internationalisation.) While the focus of »Populism« can be seen as a diagnosis of the spirit of the times (zeitgeist), the main strategic aim of this choice of theme is to go on the offensive and call by its proper name the (non)-spirit against which artist practices and projects at present have to assert themselves in their efforts to gain public recognition and financial support.

While »Fundamentalisms of the New Order« presented a comparatively loose assemblage of artistic approaches, the exhibition »Populism«, curated by Cristina Ricupero, Lars Bang Larsen and Nicolaus Schafhausen, is much tighter and more precise. One reason for this is the convincing way the exhibition is supplemented by a number of publications, including an excellent theory reader with texts on the populism debate. However, the exhibition also gains its trenchancy through the fact that the concept of populism is not (like that of fundamentalism) just a phenomenon of the zeitgeist, but also defines a specific aesthetic register: the language of the popular. The engagement with this object thus takes on a particular quality within the scope of the exhibition because almost all the artists featured in it themselves speak the language of the popular that they criticise. The works shown are all visually strong and clear in their message. Although they have not all necessarily been executed at a high level of production, a familiar, street-smart treatment of the rhetoric of video clips, glossy magazines and billboards still gives most of the works a substantially popular character. Works that counter the medial flood of images with the iconoclastic anti-aesthetic of dry, text-based works are barely featured.

»Populism« takes into account a striking shift in the field of artistic practice inasmuch as it acknowledges how a growing number of internationally active artists see representation critique less (as was still the case in the mid-nineties) as an objective, categorical examination, instead conducting it as an immersive and performative practice. In the process, they become heavily involved in popular forms of production and aesthetics. Reflecting this spirit, »Populism« can be seen simultaneously in four exhibition venues in Amsterdam, Vilnius, Oslo and Frankfurt, like the start of a cinematic blockbuster. The same artists with more or less the same works are shown at all venues in different spatial configurations. The fact that the reproducibility of the works is thus inscribed in them from the beginning means that the exhibition gives the impression of an orchestrated medial action on the spot as well. This conception is especially interesting because of the way its own approach is tested by its extreme form. Accordingly, the project asks the question: How far can an artistic approach based on an immanent representation critique go? Where is its potential and where are its limits?
The theme of the exhibition is made most clearly apparent in the works that have appropriated populistic visual language to the point of total mimetic similarity. For example, there are documentations of two projects in which artists (or media activists) present campaigns of fictive, radically conservative parties. With slogans like »Save us from old Europe«, tight red-and-white uniforms and a sausage with a face as a mascot, Jakob S. Boeskov’s organisation »Danes for Bush« infiltrated Republican events in the American elections. Esto TV is a collective that at first produced social satires for Estonian television and then parodied the authoritarian politics of the Estonian right-wing government in grotesque public actions. Superflex created the wall picture »Superdanish« (2004), which shows the Danish army in heroic GI poses. It is based on an anonymous American wall painting celebrating the splendour and glory of the US troops. Mindaugas Lukosaitis also examines new forms of the militaristic national cult in »Resistance« (2004). In a series of small drawings that could easily pass for the storyboard of a Spielberg epic owing to their dramatic visual language, he shows motifs from the Lithuanian resistance against the Soviets, thus commenting in a subtly exaggerated way on the partisan cult that is at present obviously taking on a central function in the reconfiguration of the Lithuanian national consciousness. Sarah Morris then delivers total cinema with »Los Angeles« (2004). Filmed on 35mm and with a soundtrack of bass-heavy loops, the film, with its flowing montage of sequences from everyday life in Hollywood and images of L.A., creates a visual texture that, like the language of Bret Easton Ellis, takes on an absolute density in its concentrated flatness. In a perfidious way, Morris’ image of the dream industry is more Hollywood than the original.
The work by Erik van Lieshout (in the Amsterdam version of the exhibition) is the one that most strikingly conveys a feeling for the positioning of the subject of this immanent critique. In a crooked, makeshift wooden hut made of boards nailed together, with walls perforated by glory holes, van Lieshout creates a shabby lounge-room interior. »Awakening« (2005) is being shown on a television. This video shows the artist talking with a friend about his reasons for electing Pim Fortuyn, smoking pot in the evening and anal stimulation. He talks with junkies about their drugs, pesters young Moroccans with his camera and portrays an elderly woman who, in the circle of her family, first praises Adolf Hitler’s merits as a person and then launches directly into a rendition of the Internationale. Van Lieshout makes himself a multiplicator and accumulator of social contradictions and turns his own subjectivity in the heart of the chaos that he instigates into a reflection of the political situation in Holland. The overall impression that arises is one of a society in which a majority does not discriminate against a minority, but where minorities look for conflicts with other minorities for fear of being put in a precarious position.

These works generate an enormous intensity by means of their immanent criticism of populist aesthetics and ideologies. After a short time, your head starts to throb as if you have been watching television for hours. In this state of total immersion in this medial mud bath, you suddenly realise where the approach of immanent critique has its limits: precisely in the fact that limits can no longer be thought of. »Populism« shows a world without an outside. There is no room for a negative dialectic that could show alternatives to the existing situation because one’s head is full to bursting with images of reality. At this moment, Matias Faldbakken, who has projected the order found in computer menus, »Turn off», in huge letters on a wall, has the last word. The desire to turn everything off immediately becomes the last refuge in a conceptual world over-saturated by media. The video »Zilgit« by Fatma Akinci poetically echoes this concept of the last possible actions of the opposition: it shows a young woman looking down from a hill at the edge of a housing scheme at drab, modernistic concrete apartment blocks. She crouches for minutes without moving, stands up briefly to utter an unarticulated howl in a calm pose, and crouches down again. With a simple gesture, this work shows the affective limit of a society without an outside and the need to oppose something to this reality, even if only an undefined attitude of protest. The indisputable success of »Populism« thus derives from the way it presents the artistic approach based on immanent critique with all its implications and consequences and finally drives straight into a wall. In the end, it becomes clear that, with all due respect to immanence, the next step in the development of an critical art practice must be to evolve an aesthetic that somehow again makes the limits of the existing conditions visible, tangible and thinkable.

Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, 9 April to 4 June 2005, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Oslo, 16 April to 4 June 2005, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 30 April to 28 August 2005, und Frankfurter Kunstverein, 10 Mai bis 4 October 2005.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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