Splinters from Art, Politics and Theory

November applied as an intellectual concept refers back to October and its aesthetic political connotations. I first encountered this theoretical framework in a study by English art critic T.J. Demos, who in The Migrant Image gives an in-depth analysis of Hito Steyerl’s filmic work and November in particular. November, one of Steyerls early video essays, contains itself a short excerpt from Sergej Eisensteins October. Reflecting on her close friendship with a young German woman who later turned into a revolutionary fighter for the Kurdish PKK and finally was shot, the film deals with one of the fundamental issues of our time: as the classic concepts of revolution dating back to the 20th century are no more of any use, whether the marxist dogma or any other left-wing ideology, the global community, and with it the concept of solidarity, are in desperate need of forms for a new and reinvented imaginary. Not least since 20th century socialism, like any totalitarianism, showed a deadly unwillingness to deal with any existing difference or opposition.

At the same time as a number of more recent events – the finanical crisis, the uprisings in the Arab world, movements like Occupy, at Gezi or Black Lives Matter – prove to be of fundamental impact on our contemporary world, the question of social justice and particaption is at stake again and by no means less urgent than it was before the neoliberal project displayed its devastating effects in full. But even if one agrees that the state the of the world is in deep crisis and no sustainable future is at hand the way we live, it is still open to discussion and a matter of dissent what that ‘other world’ needed to be like, plus, what forms might represent it best as the ‘good alternative’ to the capitalist system in power. This dilemma can be complained about or, as in the case of some artists that are featured on this blog, you take on this uncertainty and make it productive, creating and releasing potentialities of a kind of new experience that thrives on its ambiguity.

Against this background of our time and its manifestations of a post-revolutionary state as well as of new forms of ideological fanatism and racism, the question of how art, how any aesthetic experience can take on political or social meaning, is once more pressing, at least if art is not to be fully identified with activism and hence shall not be limited to directly representing political messages.

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Christian

Base: Berlin