How Much Politics? Engaged Art in Reactionary Times
Vesna Vuković [BLOK, Zagreb]
How Much Politics? Engaged Art in Reactionary Times
Lecturer: Vesna Vuković (BLOK, Zagreb)
December 2, 2014
“After the boom experienced by so-called political art since the 1990s, we now increasingly witness both softer and harsher attacks on engaged artistic practices. These criticisms typically start from the claim that such art is insufficiently artistic—that is, too tainted by day-to-day politics and ‘cheap’ activism. Supported by the academization of artistic discourse and art education, and accompanied by the loud insistence of experts who demand that art be free of ideology and politics—it is symptomatic that conservative and liberal discourses on art converge at precisely this point—such arguments occupy an increasingly large space in public debate. One can conclude that an ideological struggle is unfolding in the field of art, coinciding with a moment of institutional—and, of course, social—reorganization and the decline of the social function of art institutions.
The aim of the lecture is to shift political art away from the usual art-historical interpretations that either reduce it to institutional critique or, conversely, glorify non-institutional artistic practices. It also seeks to avoid theories that celebrate the supposed inherent politicality of art. Through a brief historical overview, the lecture will instead attempt to open up the question of the place of art in today’s social constellation—both in terms of production relations and their ideological reproduction. I will pay particular attention to the relationship between art and political movements: to how, in moments of the left’s weakening or its fragmentation into a series of micropolitical formations, art increasingly takes on the political agenda, and how activist practices, in turn, adopt artistic formats.”
(Vesna Vuković)
The lecture was organized as part of the public program of the seminar “Critique of the Narrative of the Dominant Ideology: Media Reproduction of Ideology,” realized within the project “Critical Machine”.
Vesna Vuković is a member of the curatorial collective [BLOK], a translator, and the author of the radio program “Stvarnost prostora” on the Third Program of Croatian Radio.
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The Critical Machine project is carried out through a series of seminars aimed at creating the conditions for the continuous reproduction and dissemination of a new language of critique—one capable of analyzing social phenomena in a way that is publicly accessible, analytically grounded, research-based, and marked by critical sharpness. The need for new analyses that consistently challenge the logic of common sense and societal consensus appears to be essential.