Art after Liberalism

117 Pages·2022·30.886 MB·English

by  Gamso, Nicholas

Art after Liberalism
Art after Liberalism
Nicholas Gamso
Columbia Books on
Architecture and the City
Convergences
11
Modalities of Appearance
43
Truth, Politics, Disintegration
73
Queer Worldliness
101
The Process of Breathing
127
Beside and Between
149
Saturation Points
167
In Absentia
189
Reorienting toward Each Other
213
A Conversation with Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain
Acknowledgments
230
The essays that comprise this book address art’s role in political change.
They ask how creative practices and curatorial framings have served to
consolidate liberal spatial formations—the nation-state, the global city,
the public sphere—and to connect these formations to underlying struc-
tures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. Plotting these relation-
ships means attending not just to an artwork’s immediate spatial context,
but the whole substrate of labor, matter, capital, and affect that support
art as an object of social and economic value.
Art after Liberalism attempts to register these connections by following
itinerant artists, artworks, and art publics as they move through com-
parative political environments. Each point of convergence poses ques-
tions about the political possibilities that may appear in the wake of
liberal claims to universality and inevitability. How to wrest control
of institutions, to redistribute their resources, or to leave them behind?
How to decolonize museums, repatriating their fortunes and recovering
the land beneath them? By marshaling the transformative capacities of
art and aesthetics, by refusing neoliberal professionalization, by joining
with social movements, by creating political community—by living in
the world, in short, and not outside of it.
At work, at home, in the fields, in
the prisons, in the detention centers,
in the streets, in the shelters. Stolen
land, stolen people, stolen labor,
stolen wealth, stolen worlds, stolen
horizons . . .
International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperialist Feelings
(IIAAF), “Strike MoMA: Framework and Terms for Struggle”
8 Art after Liberalism
Convergences
On February 13, 2017, artist Manaf Halbouni
Manaf Halbouni, Monument, 2017. Installation in
installed three city buses in Dresden’s cen-
Dresden, Germany, in front of the Frauenkirche (Church
of Our Lady). Photograph by Manaf Halbouni. Courtesy of
tral square. The buses were set vertically
the artist and Zilberman, Istanbul/Berlin.
on their bumpers and lined up like dominos,
towering over pedestrians, their exposed
undercarriages—pipes, compressors, axles—
wet and rusting from winter rain. The install-
ation, which Halbouni named Monument,
mirrored three buses positioned the same
way in Aleppo, the Syrian city ravaged by
aerial bombardment between 2012 and
2016, to shield locals from sniper fire. The
corroding structure offered stark contrast to
its refined surroundings, particularly the sandstone cupola of the
Baroque Frauenkirche, the Lutheran Church of Our Lady, designed
by Dresden’s city planner George Bahr and constructed between 1726
and 1743. The Frauenkirche was destroyed by Allied bombing cam-
paigns in the last weeks of World War II and sat in ruin for decades.
Only after German unification, between 1992 and 2009, was the
church reconstructed. Today’s Frauenkirche recalls an idealized
pre-Soviet past of wealth and grandeur—a vision of Dresden, opulent
capital of nineteenth-century Saxony, awash with the fortunes of
nascent world trade. Halbouni’s buses, in contrast, disclosed a radical
understanding of transnational form, charting a shared history of war-
time decimation across disparate spaces and times. This continuity
was not just imagined, but lived. The artist’s German mother met his
Syrian father—an architecture student at Technische Universität
Dresden—in the 1970s and moved with him to Damascus, where
Halbouni was born. The artist grew up between Syria and Germany,
living a life in which the countries were one. The work captured this
connection as an object of devastation—for, as Halbouni observed,
February 13 marked the anniversary of the Allied siege. In the artist’s
words, Monument expressed “the suffering of unspeakable losses, but
also the hope of reconstruction and peace.”1
Demonstrators protesting Monument in Dresden,
Despite this elegiac framing, Halbouni’s work was more than a memo- Germany, on February 7, 2017. Photograph by Sebastian
rial. Monument was also a chance to comment upon the conflicts and Kahnert/DPA/AFP via Getty Images.
resentments that have come to define Dresden’s three decades of
post-unification liberal development. Although the city’s economy has
improved since 1992, it suffered widespread losses during the 2010
Eurozone crisis and never fully recovered. Deindustrialized eastern
Germany exhibits what economists call “regressive modernization,”
in which “employment rates have increased but wages and working
conditions have deteriorated.”2 Over the last decade, many of the
region’s economic “losers” have made common cause with right-wing
parties like Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Patriotic Europeans
Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA), which holds weekly
“Monday marches” in Dresden. Both groups have been increasingly
visible since 2015, when German president Angela Merkel granted
amnesty to more than one million asylum seekers. In February 2016,
arsonists set fire to a hotel in the nearby town of Bautzen, which had
been turned into temporary housing for migrants.3 The very same week,
a bus bringing migrants into the region was blocked by protesters who
shouted “Go Home” and “We Are the People.”4 In the 2019 elections,
the AfD claimed a record 25 percent of the votes in Saxony. Dresden’s
city council—nursing its bid to become the European Union’s 2025
“Capital of Culture”— responded by passing a resolution declaring
“Nazinostand”: a Nazi Emergency.5
12 Art after Liberalism
Over the two months that Monument was displayed in Dresden, the
structure came to illustrate the most alarming features of contemporary
liberal crisis—mass displacement and ascendant right-wing nativism.
By occupying a space that had, most recently, been used to host recur-
ring Islamophobic rallies, the work made both a symbolic and a strategic
intervention. Like Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981–1989), Monument
reoriented the spatial dynamics of the city in an immediate and at times
hostile way. Serra’s work obstructed the path of government workers
moving between buildings in Lower Manhattan—a gesture that was
viewed as an unwelcome but clever usurpation of a pedestrian artery.6
Halbouni also rerouted urban perambulations, but he did so in the clas-
sical site of political action: a public square storied with history and clut-
tered by countervailing interests. As an expression of what Christine
Hentschel calls “affective verticality,” Monument summoned the pop-
ular sentiments of its immediate environment as well as the digital net-
works it traversed as it became a viral social media topic: “All utterances
and movement in its vicinity are expressed in relation to it,” in Hentschel’s
words, “gravitating to it even as they transport repulsive emotions such
as dismay, outrage, or disgust.”7 While the installation was authored by
Halbouni, its meanings were collectively written and rewritten by the
multiple publics that converged on the site. Political imaginaries arose
A makeshift barricade of overturned buses in Aleppo,
in relation to the statue’s transformation of the city center. Even the
Syria, on March 14, 2015. Photograph by Karam
structure’s opening ceremony was marked by protests, counterprotests,
Al-Masri/AFP via Getty Images.
and remonstrations of the unruly crowd by local politicians and civic fig-
ures, including the rector of the Frauenkirche, who dedicated the work.
Halbouni’s Monument put into focus not just political positions, but
a set of shifting territorial relationships. The structure utilized its own
eroding materiality (an AfD statement called it “scrap metal”) to reani-
mate a relation between political life and its material bearings. In doing
so, it reordered space at multiple scales, drawing equivalences, per-
forming substitutions, and revealing that the logics of free mobility have
never really been free but determined by colonial legacies. The ruined
bodies of the buses allegorized stalled progress and disintegrating social
worlds. They seemed in this way to transpose the modern Arab expres-
sion “standing before the ruins” (wuquf ‘ala al-atlal) into a twenty-
first-century idiom characterized by iterative loss, popular diasporic
expression, and worsening global emergency.8 To speak of a political
ontology, the work shows, is not only to discuss the infrastructures that
connect and support public life, but to register sedimentary processes—
slow, steady attritions of environmental trauma, polarized growth and
deterioration, corroding institutional power, and depleting resource
reserves.9 The ruin provides strange recollections of a time and place.
But it also discloses underlying instabilities.
14 Art after Liberalism
Picking Up the Power
Halbouni’s Monument appeared a key conjuncture. Over the last decade,
a series of global financial calamities, out-of-control wars and civil
conflicts, fascist movements, and apocalyptic climate disasters have led
nations to close their national borders and deny individuals within
and beyond those borders basic rights and protections. Together, these
events have precipitated a crisis of legitimacy for liberalism’s claims to
freedom, progress, and universal inclusion. The West’s putative bestowal
of democracy and free trade as the “blessing of liberty” (as George W.
Bush said of the US invasion of Iraq) is now regarded as recklessly
deceitful.10 Paltry state responses to the 2008 financial crash and the
2020 devastation brought about by COVID-19 have worsened debt, job-
lessness, and wealth concentration, disproving narratives of endless
economic prosperity. This point was not lost on liberal political parties.
In 2008, before decamping to become a J.P. Morgan executive, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair opined that “the biggest danger was a view
that people would want the state to come back into fashion.”11 The cul-
tural politics of liberalism—characterized by multiculturalism, institu-
Decolonize This Place protest during the exhibition Andy
tional diversity, and reformist approaches to social change—are also in
Warhol: From A to B and Back Again at the Whitney
crisis, regarded as a smoke screen for structural race and class relations.12
Museum of American Art, New York, as part of “9 Weeks
The broad-based political movements that have emerged all over the of Art and Action” launched March 22, 2019. Courtesy of
world in reaction to such crises are noteworthy not merely for popular- Hakim Bishara for Hyperallergic.
izing critiques of financialization but also for engaging a field of material
politics. Protesters have exploited key vulnerabilities in built environ-
ments, media systems, and emplaced social relationships, implying, as
Judith Butler has put it, that “the ‘life’ one has to lead is always a social
life,” situated within “a larger social, economic, infrastructural world.”13
The Movement of the Squares, which encompassed Occupy Wall Street,
the Indignados in southern Europe, and popular uprisings throughout
North Africa and the Middle East, employed obstructionist tactics in
public space—occupying plazas, roundabouts, parliamentary structures,
and art museums—in order to stage popular democratic decision-
making.14 These mass public assemblies created new spaces, in Butler’s
words, for “nascent and provisional forms of popular sovereignty,”
offering “indispensable reminders of how legitimation functions in
democratic theory and practice.”15 In certain instances, the politics
began with a fundamental assertion of value and social agency. The
Movement for Black Lives, which has grown widely in visibility since
2014, has shut down ports, toppled monuments, and closed bridges and
highways, obstructing the workings of racial capitalism by expressing
collective power.16 Other movements have focused attention on oil pipe-
lines, border fences, extraction zones, and detention centers, as well as
sites of social reproduction like schools, hospitals, and indeed the home,
16 Art after Liberalism
turning the artifacts of liberal political economy into the grounds
for direct action. What the protestors demand is a share of the world’s
wealth and an equal stake in its future.17
Such actions, as Hannah Arendt has remarked in her philosophical writ-
ings, do not “seize power,” but “pick it up where it lies in the streets.”18
Power is an expression of collective action; it is located in shared spaces
of everyday life. It has become increasingly available for appropriation
as institutions and governments relinquish their claims to popular legiti-
macy. Such a crisis of institutional power results from “disintegrative
processes [that] have been allowed to develop unchecked, usually over a
prolonged period of time,” often as a result of stagnant and, in the con-
text of neoliberal governance, irreparably compromised bureaucracy.
The disintegration that results from such inaction is by no means meta-
phorical.19 As Wendy Brown has argued, the decline of the nation-state
has already created opportunities for extra-state actors. It materializes
in space and time as power breaking apart from its state apparatus and
scattering across lawless border territories and financial networks.20 In
Decolonize This Place covering the Theodore Roosevelt
the context of a fragmented global system, it is these clandestine inter-
statue at the American Museum of Natural History,
zones that become grounds for political action as well as conflict. The
in New York, as part of “9 Weeks of Art and Action”
specter of migrants from Calais pushing through the Channel Tunnel en
launched March 22, 2019. Courtesy of MTL Collective.
masse, clogging an arterial network of global trade and goading the
British media into nonstop coverage, offers a dramatic example of these
tactics applied in the heat of the moment, collectively and in opposition
to a sovereign border regime.21 Digital security breaches by anonymous
hackers, sometimes without clear cause or ideology, offer another.22
Art after Liberalism engages these tactics at a moment when the
conceit of the enterprising individual in pursuit of freedom appears as
an inadequate salve for escalating social and environmental emergen-
cies. The essays assembled in this book therefore engage artworks and
art practices that deindividualize creative expression through novel
combinations of space, matter, bodies, and environment, generating
shared worlds of mutual appearance and interdependence. The argu-
ments follow a recognition, in Butler’s words, that “everyone is depen-
dent on social relations and enduring infrastructures in order to main-
tain a livable life,” while acknowledging the fact that “dependency,
though not the same as a condition of subjugation, can easily become
one.” As Butler’s cautious remark implies, phenomena like infrastruc-
ture rot, climate breakdown, and fallout from runaway automation can
immobilize the kinds of large-scale political activities that rely upon
existing systems.23 Our sense of paralysis in the face of rapid change
closely follows the paradox that consumed Arendt in the twentieth
century as the radical possibilities of an uprooted world were fed into
the bureaucratic machinery of mid-century industrial capitalism. As
18 Art after Liberalism