To Be Political It Doesn’t Have to Be Stereotypical
Ra�l Zamudio
Adorno once wrote that the effect of capitalism’s conversion of art into an
industry was the museum’s transformation into a mausoleum; that museums
consequently became the sepulchers of art. However, Adorno’s observation of
capitalism’s power should not have only been targeted at the Right. For some
artists on the Left who are so eager to be political unwittingly end up
appearing like ideologues when they transgress ethics in their practice.
Consequently, they are subsumed by what they are contesting and their politics
end up working against them (remember Hannah Wilke’s 1974-77 piece that
responded to conservative feminism with the text, “Beware of Fascist
Feminism”?). It’s not that artists
should cease making political art or that politics and art shouldn’t mix,
because they always do, whether through the front door or the backdoor. But
when political art announces itself as such, how far is it from didacticism and
soap-boxing when subtlety is completely discarded? The best political art
blindsides one with its politics and does not jettison aesthetics or poetics
for content, and in fact may ostensibly be devoid of political themes
altogether. On the other hand, when art veers into pure propaganda, an
interesting thing occurs: art is exposed as ideologically inflected. Walter
Benjamin succinctly alluded to this at the end of his famous “Mechanical
Reproduction” essay. Apropos Adorno’s statement about capitalism and the
culture industry, Benjamin noted that one of the strategies of the modernist
nation state was to infuse the aesthetic into politics, thus making ideology
palatable; and Benjamin’s response to this is that one should do the inverse
and politicize art. The most astute art with a political edge, however, is the
kind that gets under one’s skin and festers in one’s unconscious until it
attains a certain critical valence. Unfortunately, the recent Apex Art
exhibition, To Be Political It Has To Look Nice,
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> lacked the critical savvy to
achieve this; and this may have been because of its curatorial opacity.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">
The
curatorial framework ofTo Be Political It Has To Look Nice
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>intended “an
investigation of the projects and a presentation of cultural articulations of
the aesthetical, the political, the social and the everydayness
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> taking place in, or manifesting
its origins from the American sub-continent.” This opaque and broad parameter was countered with a caveat
that the show did not claim to be a survey, though the above statement sure
made it sound like one. And while
the curatorial subtext said a lot about placing one’s cards on the table, To
Be Political It Has To Look Nice was neither like the Whitney’s American Effect
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> nor was it tightly framed like Unpacking
Europe. And the
only reason why I am stating these comparisons is because the curatorial
directive went on with digressions about identity, stereotypes and problematic
constructs about the ideologically charged nomenclature surrounding the
geo-cultural region known as Latin America. In one sense, then, the Apex show
focused on what constitutes this rubric, though it could have been more
self-reflexive when it interrogated notions from the inside about this
homogeneous and monolithic continental descriptive. For the construction of subjectivity, identity and
nationalism is not unilateral, but is constituted from dialogical interactions
between the inside and the outside. To be sure, there were references in the
curatorial statement to outdated perceptions from within Latin America itself,
specifically Jos� Vasconcelos’ concept of “The Cosmic Race.”
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> This term, however, was specific to
Mexico at a particular historical moment, and Vasconcelos was responding to and
was a product of certain Mexican social and political contexts.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> By not stating this, one was left to
wonder if the curator was parodying or just generalizing by grafting this
native Mexican concept onto identity politics outside of it. And consequently
by using this term from the last millennium as a foil to address contemporary
social and political phenomena across the South American board, so to speak, it
evinced a lack of specificity and historicity. This inconsistency was also
evident in the works chosen, and it wasn’t that the works lacked merit.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Some of the works and events that
coincided with the show were inserted at the last minute, giving the exhibition
an air of serendipity and of an anything-goes mentality.
Yet even
the works that had political edge were blunt on further inspection or seemed to
have nothing to do with the exhibition whatsoever. Carolina Caycedo’s piece
titled How to Get a British Passport was an interesting proposal, and her piece would have
been more interesting still if she had been from a country that had a
historically colonial relationship with England. Here is a person who was born
in England —granted that the artist’s parents are Columbian and she lived in
Bogota for some time— making a piece on how to obtain a British passport did
not quite have the potential that it could if she was an artist from India, for
instance. One work that
didn’t seem to fit in the curatorial “framework” at all was from Javier T�llez.
His contribution, titled Socle du Monde, was a sculpture that formally converged Andy
Warhol’s Silver Clouds and the famous Manzoni piece from which T�llez’ work is titled.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> The poetic gesture of the work’s upside
down placement was not bereft of unintended irony, however: for now the work
literally and metaphorically hovered beyond the reach of the exhibition. It was
a guessing game as to whether this piece was “political” or if it was chosen
for some other obscure reason.
One artist
who was literally “in sync” with the show was Stefan Br�ggeman, and probably
because his piece was also the title of the exhibition. To Be Political It
Has To Look Nice
consisted of text stating the title that was made into a neon sculpture, and
its ostensible hermetic quality figuratively reminded me of one of Br�ggeman’s
other works: Looks Conceptual. There were
numerous works that were engaging, including pieces from El Vicio, Ediciones El
Chino and Galleria Chilena. What
it really came down to was that these overall interesting artists were at the
mercy of the show’s overly porous framework; for, by including such disparate
works that were not linked in some thematic way, it seemed that anything could
have been exhibited as long as it “looked political,” which in the case of the
exhibition was purely subjective.
There were
some interesting observations in the brochure, which was ingeniously formatted
to appear as manifesto or broadside.
Especially poignant in the “manifesto” was the discussion of the “New
Exoticism.” This portion of the brochure essay took to task curators who have
turned Mexico City into a fetish by highlighting its violence, crime and so
forth. However, this same section
had such exhortations as “Es el Che the Answer to Latin America?”, “Es el
Chavez the Answer to Latin America?” and “Es el Chavo the Answer to Latin
America?” These proclamations
foregrounded how native icons can produce unintended cultural generalizations
outside of Latin America, yet exhibitions such as this that attempt to combat
stereotypes with stereotypes have the propensity to reiterate them from within
as well. While 1980s identity
politics and “stereotypes” as a thematic have generally gone the route of more
intellectually denser discourses around post-identity frameworks, exhibitions
such as To Be Political It Has To Look Nice
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> need more rigorous contexts,
otherwise they feel doctrinaire, and to do so is to reiterate a stereotype
about political shows in general and in this particular exhibition, about South
American artists. This reminds me
of an anecdote about the Latin American Artists of the Twentieth-Century
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> show that was at the Museum of
Modern Art in the 1990s. A friend
who worked in the events department told me they were in a cultural conundrum
as to what to serve its guests as the opening date approached.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> MOMA came to the conclusion that Latin
Americans prefer things as tamales, beans, “taquitos,” tortilla chips, and
guacamole and like to drink rum mixed with Goya fruit juice.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> There is nothing innately wrong with
any of these foods, nor with working with stereotypes.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> But it is a little heavy-handed to
thematically serve a stereotype to sophisticated art audiences these days; if
one does, it had better be as formally and conceptually complex as Kara Walker,
if not, then there is a risk of turning into a stereotype oneself.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">
In the
same way that Adorno pointed out capitalism’s conversion of the museum into
mausoleum, of the neutralization of art by way of the culture industry, To
Be Political It Has to Look Nice probably complements whatever it is politically
targeting. Through its unintended self-parody and occasional side-show antics,
its criticality fell short and the only thing one could say about it was that
it attempted to look political rather than being political.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> On the other hand, the show did look
nice.
