Remapping Critique
Critical perspectives are generally characterised by a peculiar tension. Socially, aesthetically and in terms of discourse, numerous fractures exist in the relationship between critical positions and the objects they target. However, this tension affects not only the objects that an advanced cultural critique addresses, but as associated phenomena also the kind of advocacy and the self-defined niche adopted. Often enough the standpoint and the context from which a critical position is propagated are blocked out with a generous sweep of the hand or not even taken into consideration.
»Remapping Critique« poses questions pertaining to the specific divisions that emerge between criticism, the subject-matter critiqued and the (positive) counter-images often promised in the process. Without wishing to sink into infinite relativisations or trying to drum up premature reconciliations with words, this edition’s contributors explore highly specific dimensions of tension currently emerging in many arenas of »critical culture«. We find Bojana Pejic’s reading of the recently revived interest in feminist art and theory with an eye to its blind spots and genealogies, which are often cast into oblivion in the course of this resurgence. It is not just that in this context a historical shift occurs from confrontational to rather auto-technological approaches, indeed with lifestyle-focused dimensions coming into play, but also the way in which the formerly rather critical impulse falls prey to a strange self-forgetfulness in the process. Helmut Draxler investigates a not dissimilar set of symptoms by means of broader complexes of issues – be this with reference to the danger he identifies of a »substantialisation« of critical practice or in his hindsight assessment of a show he curated on questions of authorship and the practices deployed in exhibitions.
The way in which social relations, or rather the history of the »discovery of poverty«, have entered into the current business of exhibitions is explored by Jochen Becker, who sheds light on this by referring back to modernism conceived as having a social policy slant, rather than purely in terms of formal aesthetic considerations. Finally, Hu Fang takes a closer look at the connection between social conditions and the options available to critical art from the other side of the equation: in his considerations, the issue in the foreground is not what it means to produce artistic representations of the situation in contemporary China, but rather the question of the intellectual groundwork needed and the work required on the history of ideas if one wishes to move closer to this kind of process of depiction and reflection at all.
These texts, along with many other articles in this edition, assume the difficult task of taking a new look at critical approaches to topics and agendas in contemporary art, indeed finding one’s own criteria and starting-points to give greater acuity to critical perspectives. An implicit leitmotif, which will continue to have an impact beyond this edition, could be summarised as follows: how would a cultural critique need to look if it were not – bending right down or gazing from quite other spheres – to look down on the subject matter it examines, which is supposedly in need of improvement, but were instead to engage with its topics on an equal footing?