Unrest of Form
It seemed for a time as if new, unrelated forms of protest were perpetually springing into being in a simply inexhaustible series, dispersed all over the world. However, more recently it has looked as if the “old system” - or an equally authoritarian order now taking shape in this debate on more equitable living conditions - would ultimately continue to hold sway. This poses a series of highly charged new questions for people in the world of the arts and culture who are keen to express solidarity with this kind of protest movement. How can the art of today foster resistance against economic structures in which it participates itself nolens volens? Hasn’t all the potential of everything “difficult” and non-conformist long been annihilated behind the facades of spaces conceived as areas of freedom? Isn’t the project of a political aesthetic that extends beyond the type of activism guzzled up by the media something we must now view as being truncated and sidelined? And finally, can this “historical aporia” (as it might justifiably be designated) be heightened to such an extent that the artistic imagination of political subjectivity can unfold anew in response?
Questions such as these form the point of departure for the project Unruhe der Form/Unrest of Form, organised by Wiener Festwochen in various locations across Vienna in spring 2013. The Secession building and exhibition spaces at the nearby Akademie der bildende Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) and the MuseumsQuartier are integrated into this cross-genre project. Artistic contributions, lectures, concerts and performances add vitality to the pathway traced out by these exhibition spaces and – oscillating between the fine and performing arts – delineate the shape that might be assumed by an agora of the future. In addition, a series of authors are giving speeches engaging with blind spots in the contemporary political scenario, seeking to address aspects that are missing from public discourse or are simply viewed as disruptive.
All of this spans a five-week time frame and to a large extent involves time-dependent formats. This edition, produced in cooperation with the Festwochen project, is intended as a reader accompanying the programme and aims to turn the spotlight on some of the problematic issues addressed by the project. This includes the complex web of interactions between the fine arts, performance and theatre, explored in a roundtable with participants from the Unrest of Form project. Rather than presenting a unanimous affirmation of the joys of crossover practice, it is precisely the differences between the genres involved in such undertakings that emerge in the roundtable discussion – for example, the self-referential frame that contemporary art cannot really escape; the process of creating something “out of nothing” that has long been a hallmark of performance art; and the community-generating dimension of theatre. The wide-ranging discussions did not try to play down all these elements that continue to separate the disciplines but instead to render them productive for the shared project frame, which brings together disparate, heterogeneous components.
Keti Chukhrov, one of the participants in the debate and in the project, has engaged in depth with the epistemological foundations of performance and theatre, and elaborates further on distinctions between them in her essay. Chukhrov’s nuanced theoretical examination of the multiple meanings of the term “perform” in terms of philosophical parameters inter alia makes clear how difficult it is to fit performative formats into contemporary art discourse. The essays by Catherine Malabou and Brian Massumi in this edition underscore the entirely different dimensions involved in representational forms – aspects such as adaptability, plasticity and malleability. Picking up on ideas propounded by Derrida and Lévinas, Malabou explores the role that malleability plays in connection with key political topics of our era, namely hospitability and welcoming the “Other” or “Others”. In her appraisal and in the approach she advocates, Malabou tends to recognise a plastic kind of hospitality, systematically distinguishing between this and the neo-economic bugbear of flexibility. Brian Massumi, long one of the top experts and exegetes of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, picks up on their persistent scepticism about any form of ideology. His detailed depiction concentrates on the level of the most elementary affect-based encounters i.e. the question of how the social realm structures itself from scratch without any kind of conceptual superstructure being involved. This has far-reaching consequences, not only for contemporary techniques of government and domination but also in respect of the way in which the resistance inherent to current forms of protest is constituted.
Süreyyya Evren and Nicolas Siepen look at how this kind of understanding of form through the prism of “unrest” is transposed back into contemporary art and how it is related to concerns addressed by protest and resistance. In their essays both authors, arguing along somewhat different lines, assert that making determinedly political art always also implies finding an appropriate, previously non-existent form – and indeed underscore that one of the most quintessential features of such political art is this process of searching, which is never definitively concluded but is always engaged in deciphering the issues anew.
Last but not least, the thematic section includes one of the literary speeches in which Unrest of Form participants – in this case Judith Nika Pfeifer – address the blind spots in real existing politics. As in the other essays, the focus here is on timely contemporary forms – in a sense, safety valves that suggest exit routes to escape the currently predominant political subjectivization - escape routes that do not fit neatly into any prescribed format and that at the same time also herald a honing of the artistic imagination.