Fundaçao Serralves in Porto is opening this weekend an exhibition
entitled To the Arts,
Citizens!
Their press realease states that: To the Arts,
Citizens!’ focuses on some of the intersections between art and
politics as manifested in our time by looking into issues such as activism,
citizenship, memory, immigration, ideology, revolution, utopia, iconoclasm,
democracy, catastrophe, crisis, sexuality, environment and globalization, among
others.The exhibition brings together works produced by artists born after
1961, the year of the construction of the Berlin Wall, an object that
materializes an ideological divide which marked the twentieth century, and
whose shadow still impinges upon political and cultural thought at the
beginning of the twenty-first century.
Some of the artists in this show are CHTO DELAT?, ANDREA GEYER,
SHILPA GUPTA, SHARON HAYES, ASIER MENDIZABAL, AHMET ÖGÜT, NICOLINE VAN
HARSKAMP, VANGELIS VLAHOS, DANH Vo and SIMON WACHSMUTH until a long list of
both Portuguese and international artists.
There will be a reader they are publishing as a parallel feature
to the show with Sven Lütticken, Federico Ferrari, Brian Holmes, Roberto
Merrill, Hito Steyerl and myself focusing in some the subjects which are
relevant.
I have written an essay entitled “Form, meaning and reality”,
which is a contribution that somehow can be seen as a manifesto of my own
thoughts about a subject such ticklish as the mentioned one: Art and politics.
Since I’m not a good Jacques Ranciere reader, I came
back to my own assertions about the rol of art and aesthetics play in
society. Historically here, one of the main references belongs to the called
“Brecht-Lukács debate”, one of the hot polemics during the central period
of the Western Marxism. Modernism versus realism.
So in my essay I go back to that debate, replacing the word
“modernism” by that one of “form”.
Then, the essay is divided in three parts: Part one is an account
of this debate, considering both Brecht and Lukács’ positions and
extending from this analyse a further examination of what the word “realism” and
“realist” entails in our days. So the first part becomes a meta-commentary
about the many realisms that arise today, or better to say, is an
account of why Realism is under a re-birth (more than an aesthetic fashion is
becoming a discursive weapon).
Part two is entitled “Questions of genre or ‘exhausted realism’”
where I account about the inaccuracy of still considering the faithful
traditional aesthetics of realism as appropriate to our present condition. In
a lukácsian movement I argue about the replacement of The Historical
Novel towards historical equivalents, commenting both Fredric Jameson and Carl
Freedman to see science fiction as a genre that inherits a quality of
description that prior was to be found in the historical novel itself.
In part three “Art as a form of reality” I go to Marcuse’s key
text “The Aesthetic Dimension” in itself a critique of the Marxist orthodox and
a critique of realism as the dominant and form for a Marxist aesthetics. Then I
analyse Marcuse’s concept of the “aesthetic form”, which he kindly says is
influenced by Adorno’s ideas of the autonomy of art and so on.
Part four is an attempt to gather all this previous stuff and try
to go for a syntheses. Entitled “Historicity of form” this part is a
dialectical movement of considering Realism (with R o r) not opposed to form or
to the Marcusean “aesthetic form” but rather as a form in itself,
which is part of modernism as such. Here I historize the concept of
FORM both in Lukács and Jameson, where I recall
his groundbreaking book “Marxism and Form”.
Entradas
