As always, it couldn’t have been more pleasant, even luxurious, to stroll down Auguststrasse, past the cafés and galleries, then into the sunlit courtyard of KW, with its own café scene for artgoers, here for the seventh edition of the Berlin Biennale, where the Polish artist and curator Artur Zmijewski undertook to stamp his feet in this gilded cage. “Forget Fear,” co-curated with Joanna Warsza and the Russian art-activist group Voina, is his mammoth, laudably intentioned, almost heroic demonstration of collective resistance to the forces of global political hegemony and capitalism’s lubricating power to reduce art to frictionless pleasure. More than 90 participants in six venues were armed for a battle meant to stand against the old-school “magic” of art objects, as Zmijewski called it, and the toxic fetish of capital’s fairy dust. In his words, their biennial presents “art that actually works, makes its mark on reality, and opens a space where politics can be performed.” So much is revealed in that last word: The performance of politics is a telling indication of what “actually works” might really mean.
A spectacular confusion about artistic and political efficacy, even a kind of sleight of hand, troubles this biennial, spilling a cornucopia of unexamined and contradictory ideas and actions. The first and most obvious of these, of course, is that Zmijewski uses his position of power while claiming to hold the hierarchical power intrinsic to institutions in contempt. His demands for political and material equality are voiced within the confines of an art palace whose audience is hardly a cross-section of exploited classes. (Other venues around town simply bring the same audience from one station of this political Via Dolorosa to the next.) Further, more than 2.5 million euros of funding provided by the government and corporate sponsors underwrites his complaints against capitalism’s vitiating force. If these ironies are intended, they do absolutely nothing to advance Zmijewski’s cause.
At the start of “Forget Fear,” the viewer enters through a long corridor with the welcoming word “Revolution!” scrawled in orange letters overhead and quotes like “To create is to resist” on the walls. At the end of the hall is the downstairs gallery where a sign announces, “This Is Not Our Museum. This Is Our Action Space.” The space is given over to stands for various political and Occupy movements, relegating the distinction of political organizations and artistic practice to an enthusiastic blur. The Occupy movements’ power and proven social effectiveness is what Zmijewski wants for art. But his co-optation of them directly contradicts their protest against the established capitalist order that the art gallery and its regime of representation exemplify. He has done nothing more than deploy this regime of representation to “perform” the political, transforming the actualization of politics embodied by the real actors of the Occupy movements into playacting, into—in the well-worn phrase—the aestheticization of politics.
Zmijewski flatly denies this in the biennial’s catalogue, writing: “Art needs to be reinvented, but not as some crafty option to aestheticize human problems in a novel way by turning them into a formal spectacle. What we need is more an art that offers its tools, time, and resources to solve the economic problems of the impoverished majority.” But this last demand for art can lay no actual claim of evidence in the real world, while what precedes it is undermined by the same standard regime of representation everywhere present in the biennial he has curated, with its performances, conventional sculptures, dark rooms of videos, and vitrines of objects—all the trappings of the un-reinvented art world and its glittering things.
At least in the downstairs gallery the encounter with political activists is an engagement, a two-way exchange. Upstairs, in a large, darkened space devoted to documentary videos of political oppression and various Occupy movements, collectively titled “Breaking the News,” there is no news in terms of this biennial’s overarching goal: Nothing is reinvented for us as political workers (or mere consumers) to do, just sit in the dark, mute, and watch. Yet he claims that to merely bare witness is insufficient. Meanwhile, this art that “actually works” as a new form of social expression to change governments and institutions is nowhere to be seen. Take the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar’s wonderful project for the biennial in which he fabricated a national Palestinian stamp and managed to slip it into the postal system through mailings. It is not political reality reordered but an act within a symbolic order, a trickster’s bending of reality without fundamentally breaking it. It is a cool piece of subversion, subtly disruptive, yet it hardly fulfills the mandate of a reckoning with transformative structural change. Nor does Łukasz Surowiec’s Berlin-Birkenau project, for which the artist brought 320 birch saplings from the area surrounding the Auschwitz death camp and planted them across Berlin as a “living archive.” Here, too, the poetic gesture is barely visible; in terms of the realpolitik demanded, the work leaves only a fine sense of despair floating in the air. Nor does the biennial’s re-enactment of the Battle of Berlin offer anything more, finally, than underscore its rendering of history as theater. This is not revolution. Considering the voluminous social discourse that has fueled vast numbers of works populating art spaces over the last decade, what Zmijewski serves us is the opposite of radical provocation. It is entirely in step with radical chic, its popularity among curators (whom he also derides as tools of the market) giving it the prestige of the institutional art world to which he claims superiority while strutting its stage, since the world of social institutions, actual political workers, governments, NGOs, and even the incursive movements of Occupy and terrorist organizations have little real use for art and artists.
On the one hand, Zmijewski and his co-curators are agitating to reconvene art within the space of political action, but what they actually give us is the political represented and bracketed by artistic gesture. They limit the political just as they limit the play and multiplicity of art. They say the artist must give answers, while the most provocative conjugations of art are the interrogatory and the conditional. Use and efficacy are at the base of their argument, yet they never account for the productive labor of the magical function of art—they simply dismiss it. The essentially dystopian vision of the artist whose emergent self-realization must assume the shape of a single form of agent provocateur as political worker represents a giving up, a threadbare faithlessness in the richness of the imagination, and only the most depleted interpretation of Beuys’s social sculpture. They reject all other forms of art as weak and bourgeois, while they never escape the terms of the bourgeois. They never offer a fundamental alternative or even a rethinking of the political.
Far more interesting than Zmijewski’s injunction that the artist awake and rise on the barricades is the ongoing rehabilitation of the Nazi political thinker par excellence, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s coldly rationalized justifications of the Reich’s actions are captured in a passage that Zmijewski might well want to consider in his call for the univocal politicization of artists. In his masterwork, "The Concept of the Political," Schmitt proposes: “Let us now make thoroughly clear what the affirmation of the political in disregard of the moral, the primacy of the political over the moral, would signify. Being political means being oriented to the ‘dire emergency.’ Therefore the affirmation of the political as such is the affirmation of fighting as such, wholly irrespective of what is being fought for.” Schmitt claimed Hitler’s murder of his political opponents was “the highest form of administrative justice.”
Despite his legions of detractors based on his irrepressible zeal for dictatorship, book burnings, and murder, it is the reason of Schmitt’s insight into the weaknesses of liberal individualism that remains fascinating. His offering of brutality as the true form of agency of the political worker has a shattering clarity, however despicable, while Zmijewski’s call for the political retooling of art and artist never presents a deep examination of his most crucial term or, in fact, any originality. It is not that a countervailing political thinking hasn’t been profoundly conceived elsewhere. It is the final lack of any radical rethinking of the political on Zmijewski’s part that leaves his demands vague and irretrievable. More than a hundred years ago, William Morris reimagined a world in which, as he wrote in "News from Nowhere," his novel about a socialist future, “many of the things which used to be produced—slave-wares for the poor and mere wealth-wasting wares for the rich—ceased to be made. That remedy was, in short, the production of what used to be called art, but which has no name amongst us now, because it has become a necessary part of the labor of every man who produces.” Where is Zmijewski’s true rethinking of the world that legitimates his rhetoric?
I am writing this during a stay in Tel Aviv, where I sat the other day with Yael Bartana, one of the artists participating in the Berlin Biennale. She said to me that any art made in Israel is, by the nature of reality here, political. Every work is freighted with the burden of the mentality of lockdown, of repression in all forms of social and legal existence. The reading of every work as a commentary on occupation, in which the exceptionalism of the artist as a seer outside the status quo is pitted against the exceptionalism of the government that declares itself unaccountable to international law, offers an immensely more nuanced version of the artist as political agent without demanding Zmijewski’s tyranny of a single role and efficacy for art. In the catalogue, Voina writes: “Armed with a weapon. That is real art.” I’m waiting to see one contemporary artist or group of artists whose work can be rigorously defined as art and whose societal impact is equal to the Occupy movements or the revolutions of the Arab Spring. For all his claims and work, Zmijewski does nothing in Berlin but shoot blanks.
To see works from the Berlin Biennale's "Forget Fear" exhibition, click the slide show.
This article appears in the July issue of Modern Painters magazine.