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Seductions and Ruptures |
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Santiago Eraso
The current hegemonic cultural policies seem to be more and more fascinated and seduced by production models based specially in the spectacularization of the subjective production, the trivialization of discourse, the decontextualization of artwork and its subsequent commodification.
In this regard, the proliferation of museums, contemporary cultural centers and artistic events (biennials, fairs) is closely related, above all, with an utilitarian vision of culture, in which culture works specially as a showcase for passive consumption –or active for those with resources-, element of touristic promotion, urban reform or open political propaganda and not as a mean of authentic social construction. You don’t need to go far to find specific examples that serve as paradigm for this strategies. In Donostia/St Sebastian, there’s a photography fair in process of consolidation, which under the sponsorship of a private collector, is becoming one of the top references to provide for the future International Contemporary Cultural Center planned for construction in a former tobacco factory, located in the topographic center of the city with over thirty thousand square meters for usage. In it’s huge spaces, yet to restore and coinciding with the fair, a video show is been organized -Today revised- that reproduces to the last consequence, the most conventional clichés of artistic internationalism: the monumentalization of the aesthetic experience by the excessive usage of reproduction techniques; the construction of “fascinating” spaces that develop strategies of seduction and alienation of the spectator; the cancellation of any possibility of interaction different from mere contemplation; the neutralization of criticism and of course the hiding and denial of any kind of information and documentation that could allow a mutation in the behaviors of citizens and their relation with presented works. In these conditions, the audiences stop at a video and hardly watch it completely, and their attention is rarely intense and uninterrupted.
Just six months ago, coinciding with the last Film Festival, a “cultural event” was held in Donostia/St Sebastian –euphemism that the organizers of the festival used to name this festivity- that served as closing event for the Manifesta Biennial. It also took place at the tobacco factory.
During this party, to which hundreds of guests attended, it was presented one of the best works that could be seen at Manifesta: Route 181, a documentary film about the palestinian conflict, by Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi. The film that we presented at Arteleku during the seminar Contemporary Arab Representations, Critical Discourses and political thought, coordinated by Gema Martín Muñoz. Well, the organizars of the “cultural event” had no problems to decontextualize the projection and show it at their party, producing an effect of estrangement and aesthetization to the point that it became a mere decoration, while the guests were delighted between sophisticated and frozen “pintxos”.
In our case, we projected the documentary in the context of a seminar, that aimed to reveal the contradictions in which subjectivity is produced in the arab world and trying to connect with specific audiences. This project is iscribed in a wider collaboration network that allows a continuous and uninterrupted reflection by a participatory process in which all actors of this wide network of international collaboration are involved. Similarly, we have reached an agreement with the producer to edit the movie and attach it to the printed material containing the presentations of all participants and the intervention of seminar attendees. All this material is available in our website and was broadcasted live on Internet on that occasion.
Many cultural agents and producers -like us- have tried for years to rethink the means of production and reception of the time-image to guarantee minimum conditions of visibility for artworks. In this regard, we try to develop formulas for allowing a wider and better adaptation between the receiver and the conditions of time / space needed for the interaction to occur in the best circumstances. This work involves, of course, less mediatic effectiveness and less spectacular production processes, based mostly in achieving maximum commitment between the author, the analysis of the context in which artworks arise and the receiver, who becomes an active subject.
Catherine David, Documenta X director, said in a recent interview for the Disagreements project, that in the 90’s there’s an aggravation of a spectacular, mediatic culture, which implies the abandonment of any kind of cultural policy related to production and transmission of social complexity, and of critical consciousness of the failures and faults of this society. As a consequence a resignation to any cultural commitment is produced, a commitment that is always political. After the 90s, what is really clear is that, if there’s a whole sector of the art world aligning with the spectacular, the homogeneity and evanescence of the dominant culture, there’s another section of art practices with a future which consists of those practices that involve long lasting processes and heterogeneous spaces. In this regard, Martha Rosler, from whom I borrowed the title of this text, is redundant in that artistic work has to focus not only in production, exhibition or dissemination, but also on the social and political context that determines it.
The alleged neutrality of art and culture in regard to the political and the socialization of public space can lead, deliberately or unconsciously to a shameful bias that covers strategies of privatization of all kinds of experience. In our time, the unavoidable link of art and culture to social commitment, is currently obstructed by the objective conditions of specific dominant policies and the consequent hegemony of certain artistic and cultural practices, engaged in legitimating certain complacent attitudes and a system that inhibits the visibility of other emerging forms of cultural production. And as Marius Babias said, in his text Subject production and political art practice, published in Zehar nº 55, in perpetuating a system that strengthens the role of art and culture as an integration social-political mechanism instead of, as the avant-garde anticipated, as a mean for unlocking the potential for emancipation.
It deals with asking ourselves how and how far is possible to think and act in a different way. It seems that, in the exercise of certain cultural practices, a sacrificial character is imposed and, in some cases an agonic one, in open antagonism to the consensus of public opinion and dominant political discourse. Undoubtedly, the limit can be trespassed but it is immediately recomposed. It’s in the continuous displacement where we can open spaces to rethink the relations between subject, words and things, to create new ways of being, other ways of thinking. In this antagonism between absorption and resistance, it also deals with thinking of structures of social and collective production that emphasize the political perspectives of cultural practice. In this context, where public space acquires its greatest significance, it deals with alerting about cultural strategies for settlement that keep us from developing and maintaining spaces for experimentation and for innovation projects. Despite certain political strategies that promote its increasing marginalization, there’s a surviving and continuously evolving form of artistic practice that aims to new possibilities of cultural resistance and to the construction of critical networks in which “specific intellectuals”, in the Foucauldian sense, unite to form a true collective intellectual, that can lead its thoughts, actions and ruptures independently.
In this regard, Tester is a project that has tried to be consequent with these political resolutions, by contrasting the construction of organizational models and renewed production systems to hegemonic cultural practices and, in the same way, to the rhetoric of a critical judgment, motivated in many cases by mere destructiveness.
Our commitment is focused in that direction. It’s not about denying the existing of different ways of understanding cultural action, but of enabling the emergence of new ways and preventing the disappearance of others, so diversity and heterogeneity can remain at the complex cultural map where Arteleku is inscribed and to maintain the added value that through this years it has incorporated to social fabric.
Translated by David Ayala Alfonso
Santiago Eraso is a cultural manager based in Tolosa, Gipuzkoa. He has directed the contemporary art and cultural Arteleku for eighteen years, in San Sebastián, The Basque Country, Spain.
Notes:
1.- Contemporary arab representations is a project directed by Catherine David and organized by Witte de With, Rotterdam and Fundació Antoni Tápies from Barcelona, in collaboration with the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (UNIA arteypensamiento) and Arteleku (Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa).
2.- Disagreements. Regarding arts, politics and public sphere in Spain is a project co-produced by Arteleku-Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona-MACBA and Universidad Internacional de Andalucia-UNIA arteypensamiento. www.desacuerdos.org
3.- Tester is a project coordinated by the Rodriguez Foundation. It focus on production and dissemination of contemporary art practices. Specially those related to the new technological possibilities. It uses technology as tool for production, as means of communication between participants and as a vehicle for dissemination of the project. TESTER wants to pay attention to local areas (international) of creation, that have no presense or visibility in international circuits or that are not known through the hegemonic panorama of visual arts. It’s a system of detection for creative activity, Es un sistema de detección de actividad creativa, raised as work-in-progress, as network and production structure.
It involves different nodes of production :Marina Grzinic –Eslovenia -, Oliver Ressler –Viena -, Marcus Neustetter – Johannesburg -, José Carlos Mariategui- Lima- y los artistas Tanja Ostojic, Masaki Hirano, Ralo Mayer, Philipp Haupt, Sejla Kameric, David Throrne, Usha Seejarim, Robin Rode, Kathryn Smith, Stephen Hobbs, Diego Lama, Gabriela Golder, Iván Lozano, Lucas Bambozzi, Yael Katz, Kirmen Uribe, Ibon Saenz de Olazagoitia, Hacklab Leioa, Zoran Pantelic, Kristian Lukic, Trinity Session, Iñaki Arzoz, Andoi Alonso, Kien Nghi Ha, Shulin Zhao, Jorge La Ferla.