See spread
published in: Art on Paper, New York, January 2007

Wrong question!

Why this question now? Activism vs. Actionism, or Poster Art turned into Posture Art, the Participant body expressively pronounced. From Fashion to Fascism, recycled and returned as Philantropism.

As if the idea of Activist Art could be anything but this perpetually recurring sign for loss, where art, as usual, acts as a veil in front of the mourning process using nostalgia to save us from reality. This is the dysfunctional, comforting character that Art for centuries has played so well.

In a vain attempt to unveil the notion of 'activism' as present in art, I cocked up four models, in many ways arbitrary, focusing on the variations in the location of the content, the placement of which determines the viability of the strategy. A most conventional location could be using a display of facts, another the use of style or action as the main ingredient. Some displace it further away into larger structures of semantic or social systems.

6 ... for sex, seduction, and 60s. Works that imitate a historical mode using dated (60s or 70s) appearances, commonly involving work on paper in the form of posters, leaflets, and flyers containing propaganda-like slogans printed with known iconography such as a fist, a peace sign or specific ethnic or gender visuals. This nostalgic re-iteration, communally laments a felt disappearance of active political communities, while focusing on looks as its primary content. A style-based approach; activism the "ism" might better be left to the fashion visionary or the marketing strategist.

REP ... for representative, party politics, and repair philosophy. Art which, includes specific socio-political content from various geographical locations of conflict or current social debates. Looking to fix, while forgetting that artists cannot be ambivalent or ambiguous activists they simply are not activists. Here the fact-based topic becomes the content, which seems better left for the professional politician or the social worker.

*(&^ ... for non-sensical jibberish. Personal, intimate works that through their unproductiveness and non-goal orientation refuse to partake in societal economies. Attempts to locate the practice outside of shared language, by looking for bare forms, in the form of scribbles or ritualistic repetition without any content. Here, the shared escapist belief in one s own expression and private language gets forefronted as the content, rejecting communication as pollution.

$ ... for money, market, and much more. Operative works of art and inserted proposals that penetrate the art system in covert, disruptive, and un-prescribed ways on a structural level. By necessity, this can best be done with commercially successful works, which through access in the system, have the capacity to shift the expected locus of content around. Where one expects to find the content of this work, there might only be empty containers, signifying nothing.

Focusing on the way the work 'works' — how the choice of address assigns content — the inverted mechanics of 6 and REP each uphold a distinction and a hierarchy between form and content: what one does with form the other does with content. For *(&^, escapism might be a viable political alternative, if it can remain solipsistic. The operative artwork of $ is the only one which might make 'damage' (if that's what we want) through being 'it', the real thing, leaving an idea of content contained behind, combining symbolic mimicry and blatant stage behavior, distribution and format shifting, looking at methods for structural reshuffle.

It's doubtful whether moments in history can be less or more political. Rather what is needed is a more sophisticated understanding of what the political can be. Every generation must enact its own viable procedure for the political, the more operational the version, the harder it is to perceive. Models 6, REP and *(&^ all share an overt tactic, already played out by earlier works. Naturally, Bin Laden did not post the 9/11 itinerary in the media prior to the attacks! Why go explicit, unless it is pornographic?

The general problem is the moralistic polarization between activism/engagement and the art market, which as a result posits the existence of an outside from where a notion of criticality supposedly could be exerted. All models but $ are built on this structure. This emancipated position of no-access is pathetically debilitating and prohibits possibilities for maneuvering the current situation. Rather than role-playing accepted forms of what is already labeled or understood as political, $ enters this digital-image era full-fledged on, 'doing' the system, with all its implications, to play with the available parameters.

Though reluctant to pollute my pure categories with reality, I will put the work of Roe Ethridge and Kelley Walker to the service of $, the structurally operative work; both engage in the question of the location of content, shuffling the functionality of the image by pulling in the reception, the venues, and the market in different ways. Ethridge's content hovers outside of the frame, forced beyond the evasive bond set up between his images to the very way images operate at large in contemporary culture: think key words, stock images, and googling for fruit. His hodgepodge of images counterproductively toys with the terms of style and theme, which are used to define the commercial viability of an artist's oeuvre. This kind of resistance can only be upheld by allowing for reckless trafficking of images focusing on their surfaces. Walker uses well-known political imagery—such as '60s era, race riot imagery (think Warhol)—on top of which he silk-screens deKooning-esque strokes in chocolate. The photographic 'documentary', as sign for other and political awarenes, is collapsed with other signs for self-expressiveness, but is about neither. The locations for form and content swing ambiguously, which corrupt an easy use of perceived political 'content'.

As opposed to yet another attempt at socio-economic reality-driven topics, or identity politics tied in with the politics of representation in the predictable visual draping, here language is without a posited 'outside' of sliding symbols and slippery sites of signification. 6 and REP instantly turn into dead-end propositions, while *(&^ is undermined by the thoroughly coded fooling around which $ puts into play. Streams of significations are ruptured, recycling our thoroughly excavated consumer minds, mixing up the tropes, while not making sense in that easygoing metaphorical way—doing what it is, rather than looking like what it wants to mean. Where the blue signs for blues carry a promise of biorhythmic chemistry to fix, emotion turned into commotion, and authenticity a commodity of melted messy chocolate, dark, milk or white, for like-ness literate sugar-saturated consumer, who gets the signs for when to buy or turn things around.

To the core of it all: Does art make sense and how? So comrade, step out of your private sense making and nostalgic longings if you can, and remember, if you know what IT is, what IT means, instantly rendered impotent—IT can no longer serve as that.