Resistance as form.

FORMS OF RESISTANCE: ARTISTS AND THE DESIRE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE FROM 1871 TO THE PRESENT

VANABBE MUSEUM

EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS

SEPTEMBER 22, 2007-JANUARY 6, 2008

The past few years have seen a renewed interest in aesthetics as a universal language (for example, the exhibition "documenta 12" in Kassel, Germany in 2007) and as immediately politically relevant (the popularity of Jacques Ranciere's 2004 book The Politics of Aesthetics). "Aesthetics" is often interpreted as the unmediated encounter with the art object, with the implication that we can avoid the uncomfortable questions provoked by the recent expansion of the art market and the instrumentalization of cultural policy. The recent exhibition "Forms of Resistance: Artists and the Desire for Social Change from 1871 to the Present," curated by Will Bradley, Charles Esche, and Phillip van den Bossche, could be seen as an intervention into the discussion on aesthetics, connecting the history of the avant-garde with radical politics. If the turn to aesthetics could signal Adornian withdrawal, then the exhibition frames aesthetics in terms of how artists relate to social movements. There is a strong pedagogical dimension to both the exhibition and the accompanying text, Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader. Bradley's introduction reminds us that "the conscious politicization of art comes about in response to the realisation that art is, in some sense, already politicized." (1)

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The exhibition is loosely structured around well-known historical moments: the 1871 Paris Commune, the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Prague Spring of '68, and the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It is heterogeneous, combining exhibition posters, flyers, small press publications, and newspaper clippings, so that the viewer reads the works in terms of both aesthetics and as communication, and also as historical documents. "Forms of Resistance" is a reconsideration of the canon, unearthing forgotten or suppressed political activities by canonical artists and movements (such as anti-Franco political cartoons by Picasso). In the preface to the reader, Esche argues, "Our purpose is to sketch a parallel history which, while closely linked to accepted narratives of the history of modern art, is also defined against them." (2)

The Paris Commune is represented through paintings, sketches, prints, political cartoons, and posters advertising public lectures about the Commune in Italy and the UK (indicating the international impact). The exhibition includes paintings and illustrations by Gustave Courbet (a Communard), Edouard Manet, and others--some which depict the Commune and others that do not. The question of how much one directly represents politics through one's work also plays through the Bauhaus room, which juxtaposes formalist craft and design works (ceramics, textiles, rugs, and wallpaper) with newspaper clippings about a protest by Bauhaus students.

The presentation of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is equally varied, including a mural by the Chilean collective Brigadas Ramona Parra, a welcome surprise in an exhibition largely dominated by the Europcan and American avant-garde. A room entitled "Leaving the Art World" includes documentation of Bonnie Sherk's 1974-80 Crossroads Community project, a farm under a San Francisco freeway, as well as political street theatre from the Danish collective Solvognen. Another room, mainly dedicated to institutional critique, the influence of new social movements, and international solidarity campaigns, includes Hans Haackc's 1978 work But I think You Question My Motives, which links the Philips Corporation to South African apartheid. This is provocative as the Philips headquarters are in Eindhoven. The post-1989 section presents the "Disobedience Archive," curated by Marco Scotini, which documents activist art from 1977 to the present through videos by well-known figures of political art (such as Chto Delat, Marcelo Exposito, Park Fiction, and Oliver Ressler), and activist projects such as the CHAos campaign against the Chicago Housing Authority Other rooms involve reconstructions, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko's "Workers' Club" (1925), which was intended as a space for workers to keep up on the latest news (it was not a library). "Forms of Resistance" takes some liberties by awkwardly setting this Constructivist work within a relational aesthetics environment.

The exhibition structure bears a close resemblance to Gerald Raunig's Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, which concentrated on both similar moments (such as the Paris Commune and May 68) and similar artists (such as Courbet and the Situationists). In a review, Sven Lutticken has argued that Raunig's text served as inspiration. (3) This emphasis on key moments raises the question of what defines a revolutionary moment and who constitutes a revolutionary While an exhibition on this scale cannot include everything on this topic, some of the choices seem arbitrary and idiosyncratic. For example, why highlight Constructivism but give so little space to Productivism? The light cynicism of Superflex's "Free Beer" also seems misplaced in an exhibition about political commitment. Another issue is the concentration primarily on European and the American political movements. More attention could also have been paid to feminism. Is the challenge to patriarchy, both in the art world and society in general, "not radical enough"? Focusing on "key moments" also risks slipping into the logic of "event culture" as well as the romance and heroism of "history in the making." This critique is now being made within the anti-globalization movement: how can summit protests or the World Social Forum inspire ongoing activism? One exception to this logic is Peter Kennard's anti-nuclear photomontages, produced as part of a campaign rather than an identifiable "revolutionary moment" and powerful in their urgency and specificity.

While "Forms of Resistance" is important in representing what is in many cases a forgotten history, there is also the sense of reaching the limits of representing social movements through conventional museology. Many of the works took place outside the white cube, and in some cases, the art context. By representing them through posters and historical documents, the exhibition avoids the problems of spectacularization but sometimes risks subsuming the content of these activities into an "archival aesthetic." This leads to questions such as, What are other possibilities for enacting politics or considering the past in relation to the present, and how ultimately useful are museum structures and conventions in achieving these purposes?

KIRSTEN FORKERT is an artist, writer, organizer, and PhD student in media and communications at Goldsmiths College in London.

NOTES 1. Will Bradley and Charles Esche, eds., Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader (London: Tate/Afterall, 2007). 2. Ibid. 3. Sven Lutticken, "Event Horizon" Artforum (September 2007), 83-87.