Art of Indebtedness
Since the financial and debt crisis pushed the global economic system to the verge of destruction, heightened levels of alarmism have also become noticeable in the culture business. Over the last few years, a growing number of symptoms suggest that radical economic uncertainty is also increasingly impacting on the production, distribution and reception of art. Ongoing developments are noted and responded to with varying degrees of unease, although one can quite legitimately ask what has actually changed since the start of the crisis in 2008. Trading continues on the stock exchanges just as it did before; the principal beneficiaries of the system have on the whole grown richer over the last five years and the quest to identify those responsible seems to have become bogged down, with a tendency to blame national scapegoats rather than conduct a more in-depth examination of the underlying economic order. How does contemporary art respond to all of this? Is it merely an interested observer in the midst of this confusion? Is it a form of seismograph, its needle oscillating particularly wildly when the fundaments of its own existence are called into question? Or can it offer a response, or even a rebuttal, to developments that have long escaped the grasp of any nation-state regime (let alone of any regime based on individual power)? It is however clear in this context that any such response can only take the form of ideations or aesthetic positions, either by identifying possible alternative scenarios or as a cry of alarm, indicating that something simply has to change.
A number of contributions in this edition circle around precisely this question, namely how art that views itself as critical can be situated or indeed adopt its own position in this context. Pascal Jurt and Beat Weber draw up a brief inventory of the way in which approaches that have resolutely tackled economic matters over the last five years have responded to the crisis. Whilst this type of work is certainly no longer in short supply – indeed, there have been entire thematic exhibitions addressing the topic – the extent to which these works also reflect upon their own involvement in this system teetering on the verge of the abyss remains questionable. The blind spot for economy-critical art still seems to lie in the fact that its own conditions of existence are at stake too, and indeed the substantive and formal thrust of this art is often also rooted in a principle of indebtness. That principle is expressed conceptually in borrowings and transfers, whilst art of this kind does indeed benefit from this sort of “debt structure” in economic terms. How can contemporary art derive something positive from this virtually irreparable, comprehensive shortcoming or even present an alternative to it?
Daphne Dragona attempts to put a positive spin on the “making of indebted man“ (Maurizio Lazzarato) and to identify in it one of the principal sites in which something akin to commons is created. Dragona clearly is not referring to the hypercapitalised art market, but instead to the niches and byways that have begun to take shape around biennials, alternative summits and other forums for discourse. The question of whether contemporary art can ever be redirected or channelled into the creation of a commons on a broader basis constitutes the provocative vanishing point of this line of thought.
David Graeber, the second major point of reference in the artistic economy debate, alongside Maurizio Lazzarato, is also repeatedly referenced in this edition. Graeber’s book Debt. The First 5000 Years, which has made its way onto the bestseller lists in critical discourse circles, is also subjected to an argumentative interrogation here (Felix Klopotek). It has to be said though that Graeber’s anti-capitalist and anarchic impetus continues to shine out, irrespective of all critique, however justified.
Alongside the theoreticians of indebtedness, it is however primarily artists who make their voices heard in this edition. Mathias Poledna, for example, explains the background and subtexts of his film Imitation of Life, which picks up on historical genres that first blossomed during the economic crisis in the 1930s (animation and musicals). Melanie Gilligan, who has engaged with the visual and performative sympomatics of the finance disaster ever since it broke upon us, contributes an episode from the work she is currently producing The Common Sense. The central motif is the utopian consideration of what would happen if people were in direct mental contact with the wishes and needs of everyone else, and were connected via an all-encompassing “common sense”.
Ali Akay recapitulates one recent revolt of this “commons”, namely the insurgency of Turkish civil society in protest at state and business authoritarianism. Many motifs from other essays in this edition recur in Akay’s comments on the “horizontal struggle” that is conducted here. It is not just the conditions of our survival that are at stake; general thematic, substantive and formal orientations, building nolens volens on the principle of indebtedness, are also being called into question. Thinking along the same lines as Akay, and moving beyond his position, the following question arises: how is it possible to “intervene” in the current situation when politicians and the world of business have long had to concede that they are powerless to act? How can “indebted subjects” be liberated from this non-self-imposed immaturity? Questions such as these will continue to resonate well beyond the end of the crisis, if indeed this crisis does indeed ever draw to a close.