Aesthetics and Politics After the Avant-Garde

One of the defining features of art during the period of modernity—the period, that is, when the concept of "art" with which we largely continue to operate came into focus—is its immediate relationship to the political. This relationship is twofold. The autonomy granted to the aesthetic in philosophical texts and social practices alike transformed art into a space of unique critical reflection not only on the traumas of modern social and political life but also on its own problems and incapacities. However, this power came with a built-in limit. Even while consecrated as the deepest expression of the human, the practice of art was defined through its very autonomy as having little real bearing on the direction of social life. This first, limited politics generated what has since come to be the clearest expression of art's relationship to politics: the desire of successive avant-gardes to undo art's autonomy by transforming life into art and art into life—a form of political and social revolution by means other than barricades and palace putsches. The melancholic reflections of the late Frankfurt School, the laments of Guy Debord against the society of the spectacle, and current anxieties about the unapologetic transformation of art and culture into new economic forces (whether explained through theories of creativity or exemplified by the weedlike growth of contemporary art museums worldwide), all share a single conclusion: if revolution ever was possible through the transformative powers of art, that moment is now over once and for all. What remains of art and politics seems to be on the order of the meek interventions of Nicholas Bourriaud's "relational aesthetics," in which avant-gardist desires give way to the creation of "social interstices" or "constructed situations" whose aim is to enable individuals to think about new kinds of social exchange in a self-developmental fashion. A visit to the gallery becomes a trip to the candy store or the lunch counter: stuff your pockets full of candies courtesy of Félix Gonzalez-Torres or get a meal cooked by Rirkrit Tiravanija, and you'll be all the better for it.

Viennese art theorist Gerald Raunig's fascinating Art and Revolution proposes a different way of thinking about the relationship between art and politics than suggested by this now familiar history of avant-garde exhaustion. His interest is not in probing (either theoretically or historically) the vicissitudes of the folding of life into art or vice versa, but in exploring practices and moments "in which transitions, overlaps and concatenations of art and revolution become possible for a limited time, but without synthesis and identification" (17–18). "Concatenation" is a key term in Raunig's genealogy of art and revolution over the long twentieth century, which stretches from the Paris Commune to the protests against the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001. The "and" linking art and revolution points to their ongoing connection in a historical series or chain of events—repeated encounters, each time on different terms and on a unique terrain. It is in this sense that art and revolution are concatenated: inter-connected and interdependent, yet finally not reducible to each other in the social field they occupy or the specific force they exert. It might seem as if revolution would of necessity form the dominant pole in this relation of distinct modes of transversal activism. For Raunig, however, contemporary forms of activism make clear what has been true all along: "it is not only activist art that docks into a political movement, but political activism also increasingly makes use of specific methods, skills and techniques that have been conceived and tested in art production and media work" (263). Art and Revolution offers an account of the brief history of this complex relationship in order to give substance to the politics of forms of art activism that have been too quickly dismissed for being either too artistic or not revolutionary enough in their aims...