Art of Angry
Anger, discontent and rage as the driving forces for artistic production? That was pretty much taken for granted in the days when the prime focus was on deploying radical gestures to set oneself apart from all that had gone before. There were generally plenty of emotive declarations of this sort, directed first and foremost »against« something, at least in the rhetorical statements of rebellious movements that aimed to stake out their position as being clearly distinct from all around. However, now that the age of immeasurable indifference and neutralising co-existence has dawned, complete with a plethora of very different and in some cases incompatible styles wherever you look, this affect-based impetus has assumed a much more modest function. At most, giving artistic expression to anger about an issue heightens a work’s entertainment value within the art market industry. However, artistic revolution comprising a genuinely insurgent dimension, of the type inherent in furious recent – or indeed older – art, expressed as a formal caesura rather than merely as a declaration pertaining to the content, seems to have vanished into thin air and is unlikely to re-appear in the foreseeable future.
It seems that all these statements are up for re-discussion in the wake of the emergence in 2011 of various occupations of public space and other Occupy activities. As more and more new, often unexpected, protest movements with really inexhaustible energy have begun to shoot up all over the world, without any kind of direction from any kind of centre, a series of burning questions has also emerged in the artistic-cultural field: how can the art of today, which sees itself as part of these movements, whilst resisting instrumentalisation by them, foster resistance to economic structures that have gone into a tailspin? It should be noted here that art has long been a participant in these structures – as is widely acknowledged –and has also derived considerable profit from them. Is there a kind of social substrate for all these many uprisings, which are often sparked by local issues or in marginal contexts, and which theory and art perhaps tend to register with somewhat greater acuity than other milieus? Is it possible to construct a more resilient movement on the basis of outrage and dissensus, a movement that could do more than just act in an ad hoc or ephemeral modus? And finally: what conceivable forms and formats exist for protest and rebellion beyond the genre of short-lived forms of artistic agitation and agitprop?
The »Art of Angry« edition addresses such questions and focuses on how the affect of rebellion, which cannot readily be boiled down to any common denominator, runs through a whole host of artistic disciplines and practices today. It examines how this affect, however non-identical and »at odds« it may be, continues to be the source and goal of heterogeneous articulations of desire. In his essay Brian Holmes considers the basic preconditions required for the emergence of social movements. In the process he also explores the role of outrage and fury within activist approaches as he runs through the history of successful artistic and social articulation. In Holmes’ view these emotions can only trigger a genuinely »social dimension« in combination with other factors, such as appropriate forms of network formation, participation and self-organisation. Political scientist Jodi Dean, who has been observing the Occupy movement up close for some time, also advocates a certain degree of organisation and discipline. Dean has repeatedly wondered whether it suffices to articulate discontent and dissent without formulating any kind of demands cast in positive terms – whilst being well aware that networking and participation now number among the most basic tenets of »communicative capitalism«. However, a political project – one that is more than simply an expression of outrage – can only come into being when a realm structured horizontally and functioning in a diffuse or distributed fashion begins to establish productive links between objectives and agendas.
Artists Marina Naprushkina and Oliver Ressler, who seek to probe anger about current political circumstances using visual means, offer some illustrations of these issues. Ressler engages with the occupations of public squares in Athens or Madrid, observing closely and focusing heightened attention on the details addressed in these contexts, whilst Naprushkina responds by presenting an excerpt from the newspaper she co-founded, »Self#Governing« The political cartoon, which inter alia reveals the economic underpinning of the thoroughly undemocratic situation in Belarus, forms part of an initiative supported by the organisation Nash dom (Our House). It vigorously opposes the appalling realities it identifies, and serves as a »grassroots« instrument for self-empowerment.
The growing wave of censorship and criminal prosecution of artistic activities lies at the heart of Herwig G. Höller’s on-the-spot snapshot of the current situation in Russia and Ukraine. Whilst revealing that signs of totalitarian repression, which previously had long vanished from sight, are now re-emerging, at the same time this analysis also offers grounds for hope, as politically engaged art is currently being accorded greater importance than ever before. Much the same could be said of Thomas Edlinger’s overview of the contemporary Israeli art scene. In addition to an upsurge of protest and discontent directed towards a political reality that seems increasingly unconscionable, Edlinger identifies growing critique of an arts policy that seeks primarily to pacify.
Short case studies in »Art of Angry« examine the activist video scene in Syria, the increasingly beleaguered Roma culture in Hungary and queer-feminist art practices in Poland. Years ago »Revolt!« may well have been the unifying battle-cry of all these heterogeneous scenes. Now – as most of the contributions to this edition seek to underline – the real issue is how to create a sustainable longer-term basis for this outrage.