Political art has received a bashing of late. Explicit forms of critique have been scarcely present in recent exhibitions; the Whitney Biennial of 1993 may have been the last major show in this country of demonstrably political art. Its do-gooder tone and simple conception of identity politics aside, the “multicultural” Biennial was far more memorable than the revanchist surveys that followed in its wake. Yet the charges of “political correctness” hurled at that show by critics of right-wing affiliation or archaic sensibility ultimately had an effect; so too did a certain boredom with critical thinking, an exhaustion with always being asked to read and think and question the status quo. Factor in a marketplace tired of critique and a loss of engaged criticism, and you have the widespread misconception of political art as a “style” whose time has come and gone. Indeed, it would seem that the very notion of the political in art is in crisis. It is unclear how such an art would be defined, what its current techniques are, and how it could reassert its relevance in a context that professes indifference to critique itself.
What are the forms of political art at present? Is criticality still viable in an art world inured to critique? These are some of the questions raised by “Antagonisms.” They are good questions, and one can only applaud the efforts of curators Jose Lebrero Stals and Manuel Borja-Villel for having raised them. The show, an ambitious survey spanning the ’60s to the present, was structured as a sequence of “case studies” in loose chronological order, each represented by a single work, or in some cases several works, exhibited in a single gallery. Some of the “cases” were categories of style (“Minimalism” and “Arte Povera” are the inventions of art critics) while others (Situationism, the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie) defined a specific geographical-historical context. Other galleries were devoted to a particular technique used over several decades, sometimes in quite different locales (“Information”; “Service”). In short, the exhibition showed quite convincingly that the integration of politics and art necessarily varies in form as it responds to context and audience. Not all “political” art (however this category is defined) looks the same. On the contrary, in order to convey its message it must be infinitely adaptable.
Inevitably, some “cases” were more convincing than others. Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time System, 1971 (“Information”), a rigorous documentation of a Lower East Side and Harlem real estate monopoly, comprising photographs, maps, and a bewildering array of financial detail, remains, thirty years later, the outstanding exemplar of art as a mode of research and documentation. The gallery devoted to activist art included generous displays of posters by ACT UP, the Guerilla Girls. Think Again and the German graphic artist Klaus Staeck, whose work addresses such issues as nuclear energy and global warming through competing graphic means. In an adjacent room, the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie of the ’60s and ’70s was amply documented with photographs of student actions, including works by a youthful Jörg Immendorff, the best of which, Stop Painting, 1966, was betrayed by the artist’s subsequent embrace of a banal neo-expressionism. The category “Service” was represented by Andrea Fraser and Helmut Draxler’s Service, 1994, which traced artists’ efforts since the ’60s to devise a “project”-rather than “product”-oriented art. Its documentation of Mel Bochner’s groundbreaking “Working Drawings,” Sol LeWitt’s early statements on Conceptual art, the meetings of the Art Workers Coalition, the activities of Womanhouse, and more recent attempts to reconceive artistic work by such artists as Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, and Renee Green—all this made for a fascinating presentation. Among recent works, other memorable contributions included Harun Farocki’s installation recording the inhumane treatment of convicts in a California prison (Ich glaube, Gefangene zu sehen, 2000) and Ursula Biemann’s video on women laborers in the maquiladoras of northern Mexico (Performing the Border, 1999).
As is often the case in large shows, one questioned the relevance of certain works. The political claims of Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Painting, 1978, Jeff Wall’s photographs, and a Vito Acconci video of the artist terrorizing his cat were hard to discern. Marcel Broodthaers’s La Salle blanche, 1975, was a decent example of the category “Decor,” but the urgency of this notion amid so much didactic or explicitly cultural work was not entirely apparent. Carl Andre’s Sand-Lime Instar, 1995, a reconstitution of his brick installation Equivalents I-VIII,1966, looked stunning on MACBA’s gray stone floor. Yet the curators’ claim that Minimalism’s activation of the beholder fosters a politically radicalized subject is an old argument indeed, and perhaps no longer so convincing as it initially seemed. Alexander Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices (1995), a documentary of Russian soldiers surviving on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border, was an antiwar plea in the tradition of Crane and Remarque. Yet—maybe because I could feel myself literally growing old during the six-hour screening—I bristled at its pretentious appropriation of Mozart’s music and short, tragic life (recounted by a teary narrator) as an allegory of human suffering, and its grandiose Dostoevskian declamations. As for the exhibition itself, my only complaint was the lack of a catalogue; apparently there was no funding. Many shows don’t warrant textual support; “Antagonisms” did. A handout with blurbs on the case studies, a few curatorial statements, and an essay by Chantal Mouffe on the politics of “democratic identity,” which bore an opaque relation to the art, was a beginning, but it did not all add up to a rigorous presentation. Still, “Antagonisms” was admirable. One can only hope that future exhibitions will take up where it left off.
James Meyer is assistant professor of art history at Emory University.
