One of the ways in which a word is identifiable as a keyword is in its simultaneous ‘obviousness’ – it seems to naturally present itself when we undertake to understand certain social phenomena – and difficulty of definition. We all reach for ‘culture’ at certain moments of interpretation, but what does ‘culture’ actually mean? Can one extrapolate from the, presumably basic, meaning implicit in ‘bacterial culture’, to a highly complex affair like ‘modern culture’ (there are people who would say ‘yes’)? Why is it that when some people say ‘culture’ they automatically think of something which focuses on eating and listening to music, while others think of museums and canonical books? Others again will naturally incline to concepts of national or ethnic difference – food again, but also language, dress, ‘folkishness’. Listening to the word it becomes clear that there is a struggle for definition going on inside, a debate that is a continuation of debates and conversations that have sometimes been active for two and a half millennia, but may have taken radical turns at different points in history, often in response to whole new social experiences.

 
Williams found himself out of step with the cultural mainstream – that is, on the other side of a threshold of social experience – not once, but twice in his early adult life. He entered the university system between the World Wars from a workingclass, provincial background: his father was a railway worker from Abergavenny. His academic career was interrupted by World War II, in which he fought, and when he returned he found himself again somehow on the other side of a cultural shift, that marking the emergence of the post-war generation, one radical enough to change the very ‘language’ spoken among the new students. This made him particularly sensitive to interpretative language’s continual selftransformation, and not merely as a matter of technical advance, but as something socially responsive and active. Through these words the structures of society were being reproduced and transformed; often the same word was being brandished by mutually antagonistic cultural forces, so that quite different meanings resonated in the same word when examined. Which is not to say that words are merely ideological, the tools of political movements and parties – Williams mentions at one point how a particular word use has collapsed from its operation as a keyword into being ‘mere rhetoric’ – an ideological label to be slapped onto an opponent with little or no effort of understanding (‘populist’, for instance, is such a usage since at least the mid-2000s). Rather, there is a continuity with that Marxist analysis of inherent social ‘contradictions’, working themselves out and initiating crises, though in Williams the contradictions are not just functions of the productive base of capitalism, but are pressure points within the legislative, political and interpretative sphere responding to, maintaining, and sometimes reacting against that transforming material base and the relations it produces. And pace Williams’ ‘mere rhetoric’, I think there is also an element of rhetoric, that is, the study of public, persuasive language, in Keywords: the book is certainly no manual for speech-makers, but the way in which keywords work places them, I think, in that dynamic territory between theoretical discourse and political action tout court. Historicised, non-instrumental rhetoric, perhaps – what you cannot avoid if you are to take a position within society’s formations and transformations – a rhetoric you believe in (and even among the most cynical of politicians, masters of ‘mere rhetoric’, those keywords can be found which reflect their underlying understanding of the public world).

 
One of Williams’ keywords dominated the framing texts produced by the curators of the 57th Venice Biennale, and was felt throughout the giant concatenation of exhibitions: ‘human’. As one would expect from Williams, the keyword was surrounded, like satellites, by cognates and synonyms, some given the status of slogans, some unvoiced but operative all the same: ‘humanism’, ‘mankind’, ‘inhuman’, ‘anthropos’. Rhetorically, one might reduce the curatorial thinking behind the Biennale to a dynamic constellation of three keywords – crisis, humanism, artist – given succinct expression in the first sentence of curator Christine Macel’s ‘Introduction’:

Today, in a world of conflicts and shocks, art bears witness to the most precious part of what makes us human.

We are immediately in the territory of the simultaneously obvious – our being human, the value of our humanity, the most precious part of that value – and of difficulty of definition – ‘being human’, what does that actually mean? What is it that gives it value (while the images and headlines shouting from the media repeatedly suggest that it is everywhere devalued)? What is the essence of that thing, referred to in terms of intimacy or sacredness: the most precious part? President of the Board of the Biennale, Paolo Baratta, developed Macel’s opening:

. . . this humanism, through art, celebrates man’s ability to avoid being dominated by the powers governing world affairs.

 
‘The powers governing world affairs’ not being the directors, curators and corporate and governmental sponsors of the Venice Biennale, presumably: Japan International Tobacco, Illy, real estate investment company COIMA, the state foundations behind the various national pavilions, ex-mayor of New York Mike Bloomberg’s philanthropic foundation, Russian gas billionaire Leonid Michelson’s V-A-C art foundation, etc. Not to mention the financial power represented by the super-yachts moored before the entrance to the Giardini for the festival’s duration.

 
The sense of crisis, and its relation to world political power, was impossible to ignore in the period when the 57th Biennale was being organised. What happened in world politics in late 2016 hardly needs to be repeated here, but what was equally momentous in that period was the extreme reaction of what might be described as the progressive establishment: that of utter disbelief, as if not only a political status quo, but a basic understanding of how the world worked, had collapsed. The reaction of the Biennale’s executive seems to have been very similar – a shocked distancing from something inescapable. The blatancy of austerity politics, the world’s increasing economic inequality and its open enforcement by national and international governance, still allowed space for a response in the spirit of left-wing idealism by Enwezor Okwui’s invocation of Marx in the Biennale of 2015 (even under pressure from the obvious dependence of the exhibition on the same reservoirs of wealth). But how to come to terms with the sudden running backwards of historical progress itself, the victory in world politics of rhetoric devoid of any notion of social enlightenment? The light of good intentions that had accompanied Western power and capital had been abruptly switched off. One option would have been to embrace a spirit of doom apparent in much international art, but this was hardly a formula for La Biennale. Venice’s answer bore all the hallmarks of a sense of trauma: the bad stuff, for the time being, was to be ‘avoided’, to use Baratta’s word – this was to be a Biennale where one did not speak of ‘politics’, and one could take a break from constant awareness of the dark, regressive side of human nature. Ironically, it was the artwork that most unashamedly took on the themes of dark humanity and darker politics, Anne Imhof’s Faust in the German Pavilion, that was to prove the Biennale’s greatest success. I will return to this piece later.

 
So what is one left with, that all art-lovers visiting dream-like, crumbling Venice with its jeweled interiors can agree upon, if not the value of ‘art’ itself? ‘Viva Arte!’, as the not-altogether convincing typography announced: in these dark times let us celebrate something that brightens all our lives (why else would we be here in Venice?). The selfexplanatory formula – ‘let’s have an art exhibition celebrating art’ – encountered difficulties, however, in trying to maintain its distance from the ongoing source of trauma, and the pressures involved resulted in a subtle shift from ‘art’ to ‘the artist’, and a reaching about for a positive value upon which the shows in the Central Pavilion and Arsenale might be built (‘humanism’).

 
In the first place, self-consciously modern art, from its beginnings in the illusionless gaze of Manet and Baudelaire, has often been anything but ‘ celebratory’ – a cold, destructive strain has been synonymous with much of modernism in art. The figure of the modern artist, on the other hand, is something that may more easily be identified with the good life, with freedom of expression, distance from the stresses and emptiness of modern work, and a creativity that includes slow time and idleness. This ‘otium’ (leisure or idle time) was celebrated in the ‘Pavilion of Artists and Books’, by, among others, Kazakh artists Yelena Vorobyeva and Victor Vorobyev’s recreation of their 1996 installation, The Artist is Asleep. With its dull wall-hanging of a generic landscape, and comfortless iron bed and thin blanket, this piece introduced an interesting note of local and temporal specificity, expanded extravagantly in the Georgian Pavilion with the folk-gothic poetry of Vajiko Chachkhiani’s A Living Dog Among Dead Lions (it would take some time to describe this piece – a Georgian rural hut reconstructed in the Arsenale with all its furniture, and with a constant interior downpour of ‘rain’).

 
‘The artist’ appeared in the most stunningly literal form in the inclusion of an actual working artist, New York-based performance and installation artist Dawn Kasper, in a recreation of her studio in the Central Pavilion’s Belle Époque octagonal hall (incidentally, the Belle Époque was a classic period of monetary inequality and art for art’s sake). About this figure were a number of rooms dedicated to ‘the book’, a timely subject that promised much. Unfortunately, as the odd linkage of ‘artists’ and ‘books’ suggested (both involved in ‘slow time’? both precious affairs in danger of being declared obsolescent?), it was hard to ascertain what had occurred in the way of serious thought. The equation ‘books + art’ boiled down to a library of books chosen by the Biennale’s artists (touchstones for the artist’s inner life, perhaps?), and some rooms of art made from books. Despite some powerful work being included in the latter, it was hard to sense any thread of curatorial inquiry to the placement together, for instance, of John Latham’s violent wall-hung assemblages, and crude, Sputniklike hanging Dark Stars, from the early sixties and nineties respectively, and the delicately dyed pages of Geng Jianyi’s The Reason Why Classic Is, from around 2001. It was a pleasure in particular to see all those Lathams together, to sense the strain between the rigorous formalism of the sculptural composition and the aggressiveness of the treatment of the material, but the two senses of ‘book’ represented in the room were incapable of entering into any dialogue.

 
Macel’s ‘humanism’, the value intended to bind the figure of the artist to the spirit of celebration, and to stand somehow in resistance to the values of those in power, manifested itself, more often than not, as a kind of sixties revival. Was there an element of nostalgia here for the atmosphere in which the baby boomer generation – the world’s custodians since at least the nineties, and now on the edge of retirement – had grown up, the time of their youth and uncompromised ideals? Much of the Arsenale felt like the giant expansion of the interior of a hippierun community centre (or an extension of Biennale artist Nancy Shaver’s New York curio shop), the visitor constantly having to negotiate small jungles of hanging fabrics, textiles and recycled knick knacks, while being presented with images of communal ‘healing’ ceremonies. It came as a relief when things took a less reassuring, Wicker Man turn, as did the video of Antoni Miralda, Joan Rabascall, Dorothée Selz and Jaume Xifra’s 1972 Ritual in Four Colours.

 
After the ‘Pavilion of the Common’ came the ‘Pavilion of the Earth’ where, in keeping with the general hippie-inflected feel, a concern for nature was in evidence, followed by Pavilions dedicated to ‘traditions’ (art inspired by folk-craft), ‘shamans’ and even Jim Morrison’s favourite deity, Dionysus. The lofty tunnel of the ancient naval complex’s rope factory ended in an admittedly spectacular reiteration of the woolly, non-specific positivity of what had gone before: Sheila Hicks’ towering, chromatically resonating wall of bales of fibre (in the ‘Pavilion of Colors’). Repeatedly we were introduced to artists who worked communally, healed, offered therapy, or simply wished the world well. When, in the midst of the earnestness of it all, the deadpan over-logic of Shimabuku’s interventions in the natural and technological environment appeared (‘a Macbook is the modern equivalent of Stone Age tools – what if I were to use it as an axe?’) it prompted, in me at least, what may have been excessive hilarity.

 
What ‘humanism’ amounted to, then, was a warm fellow-feeling, for man and nature; the kind of small-scale lifestyle and gentle habits that might go with such a feeling; and a wish for better things in the world that might take on a quasi-spiritual power to realise itself, á la the magical rites of pre-modern or ‘non-civilized’ peoples. This is a version of ‘human’ that Williams associates with the older meanings of the word ‘humane’, before the idea of ‘humane killing’ added a particularly modern inflection. To act ‘humanely’ meant to withhold from acts and behaviour that might be classed as ‘animalistic’, ‘bestial’, ‘machine-like’, ‘demonic’ – in short, harder, colder, more savage classes of conscious being. It is a return to limits, or a refusal to exceed them – a detachment from those areas of modern life that implicitly lead to the inhuman. All well and good, but what the legacy of the baby boomers made clear was the compatibility of such well-wishing and therapeutic spaces with power, often violent power, at a distance – perhaps that generation’s most important legacy – and the unconscious reproduction of privilege. This is the generation that invented ‘ humanitarian intervention’, a phrase typical in its abstract wellwishing and ‘avoidance’ of acknowledgement of brutal, local consequences.

 
I’m raising the matter of the ethics of the boomer generation in power because of a repeated, truly jarring phenomenon in the Biennale’s non-national exhibitions, also bound up with, as far as I can see, the aporias resulting from the engagement of a decontextualised, well-wishing self with the greater sphere of structural, cross-cultural and institutional human relations. The effect in the Biennale was ‘ anthropological’, to introduce the Greek synonym for the keyword ‘human’ – it involved a gaze, like that of the anthropologist, that objectified its human focus, despite the fact that the gazer, obviously, was also human. I’ve already mentioned the strange ‘exhibition’ of a, presumably, representative artist (Dawn Kasper) in the Central Pavilion – this was not performance, nor was it a function of a relational aesthetic of some kind, it was simply a matter of an artist, and perhaps more importantly her lifestyle, being on display as part of an exhibition dedicated to ‘the artist’. Spoken of simply as a ‘residency’, the context of gallery space and viewing public shifted the private and inter-personal into the public and made every one of the artist’s movements a kind of counter-performance, attempting to fend off the logical conversion of a sizeable chunk of her life into a kind of displayed object.

 
Even more bizarre were Olafur Eliasson’s space – a workshop and exhibition area for his Green Light project – and Ernesto Neto’s Um Sagrado Lugar (A Sacred Space), in association with the Brazilian Huni Kuin people. Both had humanitarian intentions, both had anthropological effects. The former revolved around a commodity for sale – a variety of geometrically severe green lamps – the proceeds going to two ‘NGOs that work with refugees’. And here were ‘the refugees’, taking a break or crafting a lamp. Again a tension was evident – as their objectification as ‘ refugees’ (and why else were they here? and it was unavoidably ‘they’) was felt by the visitor within the invitation to gaze offered by the environment. Neto’s caul-like crocheted wigwam was a focal point for the more magical aspirations of the exhibition: a recreation of a core social and religious space of an indigenous people, it seemed to radiate all the deep, life-sustaining values still adhered to by humans close to nature. And there in the middle of it were, yes, humans close to nature, two Huni Kuin Indians, representative ‘indigenous people’, in short. Seeing them waiting there came as a shock: how did they understand their involvement among the complex of discourses and motifs that make up contemporary art? If Neto had been there to mediate with the viewer (now more cultural tourist than humanitarian donor) the jarring objectification of the transplanted Huni Kuin might have been circumvented somehow. But as it was, the dark memory of the ‘ethnological exposition’, the ‘human zoo’ of the high imperialist period, kept rising despite all the good intentions.

 
Which brings us to the German Pavilion. Anne Imhof’s was an advanced piece of work, worthy of the attention it received – the ‘constructed situations’ of Tino Sehgal and occupation of space explored by contemporary dance were combined with architectural modification to produce something quite new and complete. After its intensity and coherence most of the other national pavilions felt scrappy, unfocused and derivitive. It was not without flaws – Benjamin Buchloh has written (in Artforum) a scathing review of the corporate fascist aesthetics of Imhof’s ‘panzerglas’ interiors. Buchloh has a nose for art that draws on the allure of totalitarian relics, having grown up in Germany in the age of Beuys and Kiefer, and, yes, there were times when Faust positively bellowed ‘Feel My Totalitarianism!’ to a soundtrack by Rammstein. But there were also ways in which the use of a new idiom to forge the same linkage between the events of the thirties and forties and a contemporary urban experience allowed something about our current situation to come through, something that issued from a level deeper than that set out by the Biennale’s curatorial agenda.

 
Faust essentially involved the ‘activation’ of the German Pavilion. A small, severe neoclassical building, the pavilion was built in 1938 in a style approved by the Nazi regime of the time, as a text distributed at Faust reminded the visitor. The building’s origins have long haunted the Biennale, and in 1993 Hans Haacke (sharing the building with Nam June Paik) smashed up the floor, leaving the viewer with its fragmented remains under the word ‘Germania’, spelled out in imposing letters on the central space’s wall. If Haacke’s intervention was like an explosive release of tension, making no attempt to side-step the building’s connotations, Imhof’s modifications and occupations (by collaborating performance artists) increases the same historical tension, make it palpable until it obtrudes into the present and finds an echo. The visiting crowds (and it was crowds, willing to queue for over an hour beyond the show’s official starting time in stifling heat – a certain ‘art reverence’ clung to the whole affair) found themselves in a doubled space – by the use of reinforced glass walls and floors Imhof’s performers could move through different spaces and levels, inside and out, inaccessible to the viewer. They also moved among the observing crowd, or perched above as well as below them in slowly changing poses, making no sign of acknowledgement of the viewer, with a dual-dimensional effect. Both groups of people were in the same building simultaneously, but not in the same space, and sometimes not in the same temporal flow – an idea that has its forerunners in the image of unseen angels moving among the readers in a Berlin library in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire or, more traditionally, and with endless re-echoes in popular culture, from My Little Pony to Star Trek, Dickens’ Ghosts of Christmas leading Scrooge through scenes from different temporalities, unobservable by the inhabitants. The latter brings in the theme of haunting again.

 
The ‘second dimension’ was very much in the tradition of Beuys and Kiefer – industrial equipment, rooms with hoses, what looked like lecterns, and what might have been mortuary slabs – but without the consolation of Imhof’s predecessors’ ‘impoverished’ materials – the lead, straw, felt, etc. Everything, as Buchloh noted, was stripped to a harsh, steely minimum. Along with these suggestive industrial fragments were electronic accessories – a player with headphones, a guitar and amp. What the viewer was left with was a sense of a living space, but one with some kind of cruel, institutional physical regime in place. The age, dress and movement of the performers – young but severe, in down-at-heel casual sportswear, making gestures or interacting in ways that suggested physical discomfort, pain and aggression – brought together the imagery of inner city subculture (that portrayed in Uli Edel’s 1971 Christiane F., perhaps) and some kind of fascist experiment (with echoes of Pasolini’s Salo [1975]). This was a human zoo pure and simple, but one in which the spaces of observed and observer had somehow been juxtaposed. What was disturbing was how the concept managed to attach itself to figures representing young urban adults, and rippled out to both the surrounding exhibitions’ unreflective presentation of fellow humans as objects of observation (‘persons’, clearly, but depersonalised by the context – ‘humans’ among ‘persons’?) and more widely to the violent economic ‘experiments’ visited on various countries since 1989: Russia’s ‘shock therapy’; the post-industrialisation of the West; austerity; the ‘water-boarding’ of Greece; the laissez-faire response to record homelessness in Ireland.

 
Faust wasn’t perfect, and in a certain drawing on forms and attitudes from the world of modeling (most obvious in the ‘detached’ movement through the crowd by the athletically built performers – might there be a ‘totalitarian chic’ in the offing?) it colluded with, rather than reflected on dominant social structures. But some kind of structural exposition at least was achieved, in stark contrast to the policy of political ‘looking away’, from oneself as well as the ‘bad stuff going on’, evident in the Arsenale and Central Pavilion.

 

NOTES
1. Geng Jianyi, a pioneer of Chinese art from the eighties onwards, died this December at the age of 55.

28 Janvier 1924
28 Janvier 1976.

 
But even that isn’t certain – it seems too neat, too scripted, that he should have died on his birthday. The matter of the ‘scriptible’ extends too to the object itself, the gravestone. It is inscribed on both sides, making for a ‘double-grave’ and a memorial with a recto and verso, like a page. The catch-phrase ‘il n’y a pas de hors–texte’ would be on the tip of the tongue, were it not for the fact that Broodthaers has already anticipated it, pre-empting any final word at the ceremony, even that uttered by his semblable, the expert reader:

there is no proof that the real simpleton isn’t the author himself, who thought he was a linguist able to leap over the bar in the signifier/signified formula, but who might in fact have been merely playing the professor.

 
So what is inscribed there, in the afterlife? The joking continues (it is protracted, off-beat ‘joking’ rather than a series of discrete ‘jokes’ – walking around the retrospective at MoMA you find yourself repeatedly chuckling at the jibes and manoeuvres, but there is rarely any sense of a ‘pay-off’); there are the same deskilled images and ‘handwritten’ words and phrases, reminiscent of children’s primers; the tradition of modern poetry and the world of then-contemporary art (Nouveau Realisme, Pop, Fluxus, Minimalism, Conceptualism) are not far away; marketing, mass consumption and industry, ever-present in the preposthumous work, are at a remove, but what they consigned to the past – imperial emblems, dusty and ornate museums, ‘high art’ (particularly painting), former colonies, the certitudes of the man in the bowler hat – are still there; and Broodthaer’s own art is referenced. The aesthetic is modest and largely unengaging, an antidote to the appropriation of loud mass imagery by Pop, or the claims to bureaucratic neutrality of Conceptual Art. And there’s Minimalism, on the side of the stone without his name and dates, in the middle of a rather haphazard arrangement of what look like simple book illustrations and subtitles to illustrations, above the parrot (or eagle?) and below (Magritte’s?) pipe, next to the palm tree, not far from the words ‘museum’, ‘fig. 0’, ‘allegro’: four solids of spectral appearance – a cube, a pyramid, what is probably a sphere, and a cylinder. ‘There are no primary structures / there are no “primary structures”’, Broodthaers had (doubly) pronounced in 1968, two years after the seminal ‘Primary Structures’ exhibition in New York. But the (not really there) solids also suggested a much older iconic moment in art history: Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514). There are the solids again, a sphere and a rhombohedron to the left of the Saturnine angel, this time looking all too material – what should have been the ideal, geometric building blocks of art and existence, looking like the parts of a game that has gone stale. And sure enough, on the gravestone’s verso (or is it recto?) – the more ‘poetic’ side, in any case – more composed, and with the name and fateful dates – the word appears – ‘Melancolie’. In fact it is invoked, as part of a line from one of Broodthaers’ poems, composed before he made the ‘insincere’ gesture of encasing his final poetry collection Pense- Bête (1964) in plaster, and found an audience:

Ô Mélancolie aigre château des aigles

(O Melancholy sour castle of eagles).

 
A retrospective, like that at MoMA, is also a gravestone of sorts, and is concerned with an artist’s afterlife. In some respects this was Broodthaers’ canonisation, a rich, considered and detailed exhibition of his work in what is arguably the ‘museum of modern art’. There had been US exhibitions in 1989, but as Broodthaers’ widow, Maria Gilissen, mentions in the exhibition catalog, these ‘occurred perhaps a little early with respect to the sensibilities of the wider public’. Broodthaers himself, a scrutiniser of museums and their role in the public authorisation of artworks, would have recognised the difference. Despite the historic occasion, however, what struck me most, passing through the various areas arranged more or less chronologically, was the air of melancholy hanging over the spaces – of elements being arranged and rearranged which could never catch fire, too much dust having collected in their awkward joints and crevices, lacking the smooth surfaces of a confident modernity. It should not have been the case: I visited on a Friday evening, when the museum opens late and there is free entry. Consequently the place was jammed, particularly with groups of students, a constant flow through the exhibition’s circuit like the crowd around the Kaaba. It wasn’t exactly a situation conducive to experiencing feelings of solitude, repetitiveness and ultimate, worldly emptiness. But despite the kids relaxing in the Winter Garden (1974), checking their smart phones or idly chatting among the potted palms, the sparse installation with its plants and 19th century illustrations of peacocks, elephants and camels still felt like the gesture of a shopkeeper towards a store emptied by bad conditions. And would you have it full again? The charming exoticism, after all, relied on the same empire that gave birth to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). And we were in the financial heart of an America that was again to be ‘great’, that would again grasp its eagles and lion heads, and, yes, its shiny, world-beating international art and new museums, successfully lifted above the rubble of the old bourgeois West, the world of Broodthaers’ childhood. His allegiances leap back and forth over a dividing bar, to adapt his own literary figure.

 
In Grove Art Online’s entry on Broodthaers Michael Compton makes the extraordinary statement that the artist ‘regarded his art as a defence of European high cultural traditions in the face of barbarian threats and especially of western commercialism’. Which ‘high culture’, we might well ask? That of the Mallarmé, whose spatial quality Broodthaers forefronted by replacing the lines of poetry with thick, black bars (Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé [1969])? That of Ingres, whose paintings appear in the form of postcard reproductions next to empty crates stenciled ‘PICTURE’ ‘WITH CARE’ ‘KEEP DRY’ (Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles: Section XIXe Siècle [1969]). Those objects sacralised in a 19th Century Musée des Beaux Arts with its plush, mummified interiors (L’Angelus de Daumier: Sale rose [1975])? This is taking Broodthaers at face-value, a move as walleyed as those made by his American contemporaries (‘commercialist’ or ‘barbaric’), to Broodthaers’ mind (though he could be ‘touched and amused’ by them as well, as his widow says he was by Warhol), and to which he offered the rejoinder of the carefully ordered residues of ‘high culture’ – the museum as institution, the ‘history of Ingres’, the emblematic eagles, the dreams of internationality, his own locality, Belgium, mussels and frites, bourgeois mentalities. More deeply, the inescapable subtitle that goes with the image – be it only ‘fig. 0’. And under this again, the egg of Broodthaers’ art, that has been cracked to form the plaster base of Pense-Bête — poetry.

 
The retrospective at MoMA made two very important advances on any exhibition of the Belgian’s work that I had seen to date. First, it didn’t show the pieces in isolation, as discrete artworks – it tried to recreate the sense of their immersion in carefully orchestrated occasions (‘environments’, perhaps, but with a surrounding of announcements and informal performance). What had always seemed missing to me when encountering a ‘Broodthaers’ at an exhibition was immediately restored – a kind of discursive and aesthetic milieu in which the separate moments were expected to appear and which they punctuated and prolonged. Second, the poetry. It is invariably referred to, if only to introduce the grand gesture of Pense-Bête, but we are rarely presented with the actual poems, which are sly, lyrical and inventive, in a post-surrealist way, and well worth reading. It is also, as this exhibition makes clear, there at the heart of all the subsequent visual art. He may have effaced himself as a poet in order to become an artist, but that effacement became the most significant of those residues with which he confronted the successful art of the world in which he found himself, a trader from a largely insignificant, former colonial empire with a shop of remainders. A substantial collection of the poetry books were on show at MoMA, with many individual poems there to be read, and fragments of these poems could be found throughout the subsequent artwork, right up to that moment when it appears also on the gravestone. We’ll take the lesson to heart, and give the poem from which the line comes (from the collection Mon livre d’ogre [1957]), along with a rough translation:

ÔTristesse envol de canards sauvages
Viol d’oiseaux au grenier des forêts
Ô Melancolie aigre château des aigles.

 
(Oh Sadness, taking-off of wild ducks / Violation of
birds in the woods’ loft / Oh Melancholy, sour castle
of eagles)

Birnbaum’s argument turned on a clearly defined sense of the biennial as more than a mere cyclical art exhibition, and this definition came across in his comparison of the condition of the biennial to that of a literary form, the novel. In other words, the biennial was also a kind of cultural ‘form’, comprising various genres perhaps: it was practiced in a self-conscious way; it had a history; it developed over time; it had certain essential characteristics. So what is a biennial in these terms? We can safely say that it has a prehistory leading back to Venice’s grand old mother of biennials, which prehistory is inflected by enterprises from the Cold War years like Documenta and the Bienal de São Paulo, but that it really got underway in the nineties, with flagship events like Manifesta and the Berlin Biennial (both associated with the aforementioned Swiss-born curator Obrist, who left his finger-prints all over the period) sparking off an astonishing spread of biennials across the planet: over a hundred and fifty if one goes by the list offered by the Biennial Foundation (see biennialfoundation. org), although a third of these probably do not conform to the ‘biennial form’ as we are describing it. Very roughly, the essential characteristics of this form as it developed were: it was of-the-moment – there was a sense of the unprecedented about the show; it was city-based, and in some way drew attention to the city; it was large-scale, and often utilised industrial-scale exhibition spaces; it generated the two Ds, discourse and discussion – for every biennial there were innumerable photographs or video clips of artists, curators and theorists sitting behind a microphone- and water-bottle-topped table – and from every biennial a stream of texts flowed, to be collected in a catalogue of some kind. Finally, it was committed to social ‘transformation’, and it was from the interaction of this last element with the others that the vitality and problematic nature of the biennial issued.

The historic moment of the ‘biennial boom’ was also that of post-Berlin Wall Europe: in other words, after the collapse of the model of existent European socialism. The biennial, in some respects, was instituted on this no man’s land of left-wing political thought, an occasion for new models and manifestations of the counter-capitalist tradition. The artistic neo-avant-garde seemed to provide an environment for such a ‘reimagination’. Early on (2001’s Berlin Biennial, for example, curated by Saskia Bos, who incidentally acted as outside curator for Eva in 1990) the idea of ‘sociable’ or ‘relational’ art, independent of production (Rikrit Tiravanija’s ‘meals’ were highly influential in this regard), seemed to suggest the way forward; by the 2000s the biennials hosted the meeting of art and politics in terms of ‘utopianism’ (e.g. Obrist, Birnbaum and Molly Nesbit’s Utopia Stations at Venice in 2003). These curatorial themes (and criteria for the promotion of particular artists, artistic tendencies and analogous theoretical discourse), however, though the most articulate and explicit dimension of the biennial, remained only part of a greater set of cultural operations. The biennial was to interact with the city – and it was from the city that most of the considerable funding came – in such a way as to make that city internationally apparent: as someplace on the map, ‘the map’ now being increasingly global and polycentric. In a simple way the biennial as spectacle (historians often point out the continuity between the biennial and the old ‘world’s fair’) achieved this aim: the city looked different while a biennial was in town, and the crowds of visitors, media coverage and giant, startling public sculptures (Luc Deleu’s Construction X, originally hosted by Eva in 1994 and reconstructed in the first Eva international in 2012, is typical) offered a temporary vision of the city transformed, if not politically, at least economically – the terms in which such events are pitched to prospective municipal funders.

That a city should see itself in need of transformation connects to that question of ‘scale’, and to the use of industrial-sized exhibition spaces. Biennials generally occur where there is an industrial deficit of some kind, linked to a city’s status as part of a major, international economic network. Venice provides the model: the Arsenale has been described (by Lewis Mumford in The City in History [1961]) as the first modern factory site – its giant, assembly line-like shipbuilding facility was certainly the centre for European trade with the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia for centuries. The temptation here is to talk in terms of ‘post-industrialism’, but the fact is that venues like Guangzhou are, if anything, ‘protoindustrial’, fast-growing centres of mammoth new economic networks whose biennial announces their expanded mercantile and industrial ambitions and global arrival. The left-wing conceptualities of the biennial sit even less easily in such contexts, but for a while at least it seemed that the wave of globalisation, and the consequent bringing together of cosmopolitan creative professionals from different social systems, retained a certain promise of transformative enclaves scattered across the increasingly urban world.

In 2012 Limerick’s 35-year-old exhibition joined this world of the international biennial, and now proclaims its status as ‘Ireland’s biennial’ (a title that hints at the perceived failure of 2011’s Dublin Contemporary, and suggests that Ireland can be treated as a single city-state, perhaps as it operated economically in the boom period, a Singapore or Hong Kong off the west of Europe). This year, with the Egyptian curator Bassam El Baroni at the helm, that sense of approximation to the transportable international model felt particularly strong. Much of the reason for this was the inclusion of a new exhibition site: the former Golden Vale Milk Plant across the Shannon from the town centre. An abandoned industrial zone, with buildings going back to the 19th century, it allowed for the presentation of large-scale works in even larger-scale, raw spaces that is a trademark of the contemporary cyclical exhibition (Eva’s director, Woodrow Kernohan, even referred in the press to the Arsenale, along with Tate’s Turbine Hall). The works presented there, and at Limerick’s City Gallery (and to a lesser extent at three other sites), were emphatically ‘international’: in line with the tendency since 2000 to present the contemporary art world as one no longer centred in the old ‘First World’, there were representatives of contemporary artistic cultures from across the globe (with the exception of East Asia and Oceania), with as many artists associated with the Eastern Mediterranean as with Ireland. The old biennial core, the European cities associated with the first ‘curators’ in the modern sense, nevertheless furnished about half the participants. The reduced proportion of Irish artists was a sharp break with Eva tradition, but like the first biennial edition, and in line with the tendency of Eva’s tradition of ‘colloquies’, the two Ds were well represented, with texts being issued to tease out the concept of ‘agitationism’ and major seminars under the banner of ‘Artistic Justice’ being held in Limerick, Dublin and Marrakech respectively. Eva formally aimed at being a model biennial and, in so far as this was the purpose of the show, Eva 2014 was a success.

Problems arose, however, with the actual effect of that formal success, that is, in coming to terms with the experience of viewing the assembled artworks. The late Patrick Jolley’s This Monkey (2009), a large digital video projection shown to great effect in a concrete industrial space in the Golden Vale complex, encapsulated a pervasive spirit. Shot on 16mm film in New Delhi the seven-minute piece followed a rhesus monkey from a sandy wasteland into empty, claustrophobic backstreets and even more claustrophobic interiors. All the time the sense of the animal’s close relation to us humans grew – the interior shots suggested psychological states, in which human fabrications placed alien restrictions on a natural, sympathetic subject. This growing identification led to the piece’s final shock: returning to the wasteland, the focus of the piece is joined by other monkeys to feast on what turns out to be human carcasses. This economic, grim metaphor for human entrapment moved through sequences that echoed wildlife documentaries, indie music videos, especially from the eighties, and eventually the opening sequence of Kubrick’s 2001, but without the sci-fi film’s transcendental dimension; in other words, it aggressively combined isolated subjectivity with matters of identity at the level of the species. It was hard not to feel that an historic sense of disillusionment had been focused, through a neo-Darwinian lens, into a statement of existential pessimism. Which is to say, in the context of the model of the biennial, it presented a vision of human affairs beyond hope of real transformation by human actors.

El Baroni’s introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue presented his curatorial thinking in terms of a resistance to the temptation, in the face of a constant ‘flow of agitations’ – social and political upheavals, for instance – to give in to ‘romanticisms, utopias, ideologies and nostalgias’ – social emotions and conceptualities, in other words, that remove our sense of agitation by subsuming it within a complete and satisfying scheme, or by escaping from the present and its demands on us. But the etymological root of the word ‘agitation’, shared by the word ‘action’, points to a sense of disappointment and loss behind this conceptual positioning. Political upheavals would not be mere agitations if they brought about the political transformation for which they had ‘agitated’. This understandable gloom, generated by recent revolutionary failures, like that of El Baroni’s own Egypt – now back under an authoritarian government, one possibly worse than that of Mubarak against which the Tahrir Square occupiers had demonstrated – seems to underlie the sense of upheaval and change as agitation, and pervades the exhibition. The pessimistic fatalism of Jolley’s This Monkey was echoed in Doa Aly’s disturbing H.C.F. (2014), which turned the fearful, pro-authoritarian crowd that gathered at Tahrir Square to celebrate the third anniversary of the original uprising, into a choir of young women calmly chanting a murderous excerpt from De Sade. This making explicit of the spirit of the occasion may have been intended as a bringing of the ‘Hysterical Choir of the Frightened’ in some way to account, but the actual experience was one of disillusioned youth (women specifically) demonically relinquishing moral responsibility, and somehow becoming empowered in the process – a truly dark image. Amanda Beech’s almost psychedelic video installation Final Machine (2013) inter-cut 1960s Marxist political theory with the discourse of espionage and counter-espionage, images of the desert and violent sonic interruptions, to generate a sense of paranoid, impossible quest for political resolution in conditions where reality is patently unreal. Michael Patterson-Carver’s disarmingly simple and direct depictions of political dissent in the US promised to slice through the involuted and highly reflexive working of art like Beech’s, to a plain account of direct action, but his naive and obsessive drawings had an automatic distancing effect (which I assumed was not intentional – this work had a certain ‘found art’ quality), placing the political action depicted within a psychological and behaviouristic frame. Where political ideals did appear they were often in the form of archives and memorials – Nicoline Van Harskamp’s archive of the Dutch anarchist Karl Max Kreuger; Per-Oskar Leu’s riffing on Bertolt Brecht’s testimony before the Un- American Activities Committee in 1947 – or strangely echoed the aesthetics and accessories of jihadist terrorism (Metahaven’s Black Transparency).

In terms of medium there was a predominance of video-work, which set the artistic subject-matter and pervasive mood in a particular frame. Even with non-screen based works – e.g. with Sophie Loscher’s Waiting in the Wings (2013), Pauline M’Barek’s Showcase (2012) and Trophy Stands (2011), and Raqs Media Collective with Iswanto Hartono’s 5 Principle No-s, For a New Pancasila (2012-2013) – what might be termed a ‘screen aesthetics’ operated. All involved light and mirror effects, dependent upon the viewer’s position and playing with the limits of ocular perception, the very bases of our capacity to read and view into the two dimensional electronic or coloured light-reflecting screen of the digital world. The result was that the exhibition environment seemed to mimic that most obvious change in our social environment of the last decade: the growing ubiquity of screens – handheld, domestic, commercial and public. Just as the experience of an average day may be factually described in terms of a navigation through and between digital screens, so too our experience of the biennial was a matter of screen-defined perception.

This merging of the physical environment with that of electronic communications, reproduced by the exhibition’s dominant media, resonated with Zacahary Formwalt’s video installation based around images of a soon-to-be-activated stock exchange in Shenzen, China. In Light of the Arc (2013) engaged with a central technological mediation of reality – the screen of a stock exchange, manipulating the processes of economically bound life through its flickering matrix of abstract valuations. Formwalt’s installation pinned the image to a real, material basis – the construction, materials, engineering, machinery and unfinished interiors of the located, physical exchange-building – in a gesture that recalled old Marxist ideas of the ‘material base’ beneath the cultural ‘superstructure’. But the gesture simultaneously conveyed the sense that the same site threatened, once the switches were thrown, to withdraw from physical terms into a purely symbolic realm, its communications with us mediated by algorithms and abstract economic terms. This treatment of the most essential of electronic screens pointed to the Janus character of the display screen in general – including that carrying Formwalt’s images – as a material site of ‘pinning’, a final tension between a non-human symbolic and the most basic human environment – positioned, physical occupancy of space – a ‘skin of light’, as it were, between the symbolic and the material. The screen is both the last hold of the ancien régime of materiality, to which we are physically bound, and the site and emblem of the apparent withdrawal of the technologically determined motors of control from our grasp.

This is a far cry from the rhetoric of technology, of social technology in particular, propagated during the optimistic days of the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring. Then, new digital communications and networking were a means to empowerment the disempowered: technological advance seemed almost capable, by and in itself, of bringing about democratic social transformation. But already there was a sense in which digital technology’s simple instrumentality was exceeded: it was a driver of a social ‘evolution’ – the invention of the instrument and its enabling apps preceded, indeed determined, the emergence of the revolutionary actions. All that was needed for the change from optimism to fatalism was the failure of this secondary social behaviour. The consequent supplement to the fatalistic mood of Agitationism provided by the hegemony of the screen was a sense of the evacuation of time, as a dimension responsive to human action – its reduction to a technological change as inscrutable as the raw nature to which Jolley’s monkey returns. Transformation and revolution give way to evolution and adaptation to an endlessly agitating environment.

There is a disturbing passivity about all of this, which makes it very hard to judge Agitationism a success, despite the ticking of all the biennial boxes. El Baroni, or the artworks selected, however, should not be singled out in this regard: Rem Koolhaas’ current Venice Architectural Biennale, for instance, is premised on the similarly pessimistic grounds of the impotence of the architect. It is a perfectly understandable attitude that seems to be seeping into much of the socially engaged artworld. (My own first experience of this new attitude came at Terminal Convention in Cork in 2011, when curator and museum director Charles Esche proclaimed the end of the avant-garde: advanced capitalism was simply way ahead of art when it came to innovation and radical change.) And it is possible that I am dwelling too exclusively on one, albeit highly significant, aspect of Eva 2014. I have had little to say about the semiotic sophistication of much of the work (but then, a certain kind of semiotic sophistication seems to be inextricably linked with the withdrawal or deferral of the possibility of action); or, for that matter, the amped-up, return-to-punk and DIY feel of the graphic work, like Garret Phelan’s, that sought to celebrate an ‘agitated’ life. But the question remains: what is the point of a biennial model without any commitment to transformation? If we ignore, for the moment, ‘boosts for the economy’, ‘urban branding’ and the like, we have to agree with Birnbaum that the biennial is showing distinct signs of (dispirited) fatigue – that too much has happened since the nineties for the format to absorb and incorporate successfully. But what of Birnbaum’s conclusion, that the format may yet be re-forged, away from the old centres; perhaps even in an uneasy city on the west coast of Ireland?

The new exhibition site, the Golden Vale Milk Plant, is hardly a place conducive to feelings of hope and new beginnings. The absence of industry and employment is palpable – it felt like the machinery had been removed and the workers had departed only days before the exhibition had been installed (Golden Vale’s new owners, the multinational Kerry Group, had sold on the milk supply rights, but not the buildings, to another multinational of Irish origin, Glanbia, in 2011). A little investigation paints an even bleaker picture: around 1900 there were close to 2000 locals employed here (the headquarters of the Condensed Milk Company of Ireland Ltd.) by the Canadian Cleeve family, of toffee fame. If the closure of this original giant dairy processing plant can be excused on the grounds of early twentieth century historical upheaval, the loss of hundreds of jobs (documented in the proceedings of the dismal 1970s Dáil debates over the privatisation of the semi-state Dairy Disposal Company, that had employed over 500 workers at the site) was inexcusable, its mechanics depressing. But at least we are in the realm of politics and human decisions, and not some impassive, technologically driven ‘evolution’. Much of what happened to what was originally known as the Landsdowne site was a matter of over-exposure to international economic scale, showing little consideration for the local or regional conditions. The kind of economics, driven more by expansion through acquisitions than any ‘organic growth’, as it is termed, that devastated Landsdowne (and a large part of Limerick’s workforce), made the Kerry Group, a former dairy co-operative, into a global player in the food industry, with offices in forty-three countries and manufacturing facilities in twenty-three. Here is the very site where the conflicts of such economic policy were played out, and corporate empires were maintained. There is much for an art of social transformation, and resistance for that matter, to get its teeth into. And if one wants an image of possibility associated with the same site, one already involved in public display, why not resurrect the banner placed over a Cleeve-owned rural dairy during the short-lived Limerick soviet: ‘We Make Butter Not Profits’?

The word ‘dystopia’ has its origins in Ireland, coined in the British parliament by statesman and philosopher John Stuart Mill to describe the policies of colonial landlords in post-Famine Ireland (he contrasted their activities with the supposed ‘utopianism’ of the policies of his faction, which included granting reclaimed lands to peasant proprietors). Ireland might be the right place for breaking out of the dystopianism cultivated by the current biennial model, and for the renewal of the transformative (if not necessarily utopian) thinking of the biennials of twenty years ago. To achieve that, a way of simultaneously being ‘eva international’ and ‘Ireland’s biennial’ would have to be found.

Around the turn of the decade Cotter’s work seemed to be progressing along two separate lines. On the one hand, in pieces like Garden (2010, at the Dept. of Defence in Newbridge) asymmetrical, spreading lattices made up of small flat units, usually white – not unlike parts of a child’s construction set – were attached to interior architectural spaces, giving a sense of vegetative growth generated somehow out of the building. I wasn’t convinced by these: they seemed to fall between the two stools of being a spatio-material concept, applicable to any interior, and being an intervention in a particular architectural space, without either the concept or the installation quite holding its own. On the other hand there were almost surrealist pieces using ornate domestic items and pieces of furniture, like the overturned tower of china tea cups, held in place by stalactites of plaster, of Waiting for the Future (2007), or the undulating tables, with their elongated, unmatched and extravagantly turned legs, of More Than One Way Out (2009). What was peculiar about these latter pieces was the fact that, despite their use of recognisable objects, it was their formal and material effects that held attention. The marvellous sense of wateriness in More Than One Way Out, for instance – dripping, beading, lapping and pooling, without any recourse to clichés of melting – seemed to call for a further transmutation into a more purely formal object.

With a solution is in the room these two lines seem to have converged, and the results are consummate. What strikes the viewer is the tact, light economy and sensitivity to material of these pieces, as well as their capacity to suggest effects in the real world without abandoning their artificial terms. There was nothing demonstrative in Just Now to suggest an apple-tree trunk with blossom unfurling from its top, but the association remained, despite the piece consisting purely of a perpendicular, thin steel frame supporting a stream of holed, interslotted wooden discs, off-white with hints of rose. The same frame supported some found objects – a plastic cup and plastic shade or dish cover, both in delicate artificial colours, and a globe made of corrugated cardboard. The whole airy assemblage bafflingly, precariously cohered, a refashioning of that fundamental modernist trope – a formal extensive structure triggering informal, irreducible particles – in terms of the contingent, intimate world of a modern kitchen or garden. In sieve the ‘formal structure’ clearly referred to a kitchen implement: a comically giant sieve that also brought 1960s’ images of space stations to mind. Around its edge the disc-units clustered, both reminiscent of a twining vine with autumn leaves, and of some shaken foodstuff clinging to its mothery distributor. Abstraction unable to shake off naturalistic reference, recognisable referents unable to keep a grip on an autonomous object, and all done without strain, and with the minimum of means. I was reminded a few times, despite the airiness of Cotter’s pieces, of the space of Analytical Cubism – a space that integrated geometry, sensitive localised treatment of colour, and quotidian reference – before encountering the brown, cardboard fetish of settlement (2013). The shelly light strength of PVA-coated corrugated board, a cousin of basketry, had dictated this piece’s more tightly packed form, which included a bowl, tea-tray and clothes brush made of a lacquer-like bakelite. Perched on its unlikely base of wire frame, lopsided aeroboard hemisphere and compensatory white aeroboard wedge, the composite form with its circular ‘head’ had something primitivist about it: an irreverent revival of Cubist assemblage meeting African idol.

All in all, a coup for the Wandesford: possibly its best exhibition to date.

something nonsensical about it, like dreams in which, having experienced the end of the world, one afterwards crawls from a basement.
(Minima Moralia, 1951)

Funny how, once awareness of the possibility of nuclear war seeped through to popular consciousness, the philosopher’s absurdist image became stock-in-trade for the film industry, as though we were all, since the 1940s, in the business of ‘surviving’.

Wols died shortly after making Blue Phantom, at the age of 38, and his status (buoyed, perhaps, by the myth of the doomed artist that grew up around him, a myth cultivated to some extent by Jean-Paul Sartre) was made clear by inclusion in the first and second Documentas and the 1958 Venice Biennale. Unfortunately, in the sixties, the market became flooded with forgeries, and galleries backed away, with the result that he was largely overlooked until 1989 and 1990, with exhibitions in Zurich and Düsseldorf respectively. Neverthless, this sober, modest, but wholly sufficient retrospective in Bremen constitutes a major opportunity to reappraise Wols’ achievement, as it includes not only work from various museums and private collections in Germany, France and the US, but has been able to draw on the comprehensive Menil Collection in Houston.

That such a reappraisal is necessary was made clear when in 1996 the important Formless exhibition, curated by Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, included only Wols’ photography, on the grounds that his painting was ‘tachiste’ (i.e. part of the gestural, self-projecting French school of painting inspired to a degree by Wols, and associated with Georges Mathieu, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Soulages and others). In the ensuing publication (Zone Books, 1997) Bois further discriminated between the informe (or the ‘formless’, a category coined by Georges Bataille) and art informel, and included Wols, along with Fautrier and Dubuffet, in the latter, a category capable of overlapping slightly with the former (in the case of Wols’ photography for instance), but in general too concerned with the ‘depicted object’, differentiation (rather than entropic collapse back into materiality) and the ‘“authenticity” of the personal touch’ (Formless 140-143).

The problem with all this is that it treats Wols’ paintings as a single object, something that the Bremen retrospective strongly demonstrates not to be the case. Yes, some of the oil paintings seem to anticipate tachisme, or at least to border on its concern with personal marking, but it is not a sizeable part: the tachiste painters who claimed Wols as a predecessor seem to have seized rather opportunistically on a single, not always convincing, aspect of his work. And most of Wols’ paintings do not, admittedly, fit Bois’ and Krauss’ agenda of ‘formlessness’ – but some do (Composition IV [1946], I would suggest), and it would have been strange if the same sensibility that dwelt photographically on a disturbing, dismembered fleshiness of small objects, should not have been in the least transferred into the later painting practice. More importantly, perhaps, Wols’ painting places pressure on the border between the anti-formal, disintegrative movement towards material displayed for its own sake, and that appearance of the ‘unreal’ object that concerned Sartre in his writings on art informel. What is at issue, I suspect, is that question of the ‘figurative’, beyond abstraction or realism, that engagement, even if as a resistance or a wholesale antagonism, with the viewer’s anticipations of a represented ‘reality’.

But I’m going too far: Formless was exhibition as thesis, intended to throw other histories of modern art into relief, and as such was presented in bold, unambiguous outlines. It remains, however, that the dismissal of Wols as a tachiste painter is highly reductive.

In one thing Krauss and Bois were certainly correct: the photographs are well worth recovering. Taken in 1930s Paris when Wols was in his twenties and associating with the surrealists, they are highly sophisticated. From the clever applications of Cubist space in Untitled (Paris) (at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles), to the already apparent fascination with decay and degradation (an Untitled that features the word ‘Canaille’ [‘scum’] at the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in Stuttgart , and the fetishisation of dismembered, biomorphic details (pastries? cannolis perhaps? resembling fat fingers, in a photograph at the Kunsthaus Zurich), they reveal a precocious, idiosyncratic talent. The war, however, put a stop to his photographic career, and in his drawings he seems to have to begin again from almost nothing.

These relatively small (generally less than A3) ink and watercolour pieces begin to appear about 1937 and are initially little better than imaginative doodles – surreal landscapes in which he tries out devices borrowed from Tanguy, Miró and Ernst. The serious work begins about 1942/1943, by which time Wols was living in extreme penury with his wife Gréty in the south of France, after years spent in internment camps. This means that, the photography aside, Wols’ mature artistic career occurs across a period of only nine years, with only six of these dedicated to both drawing and painting in oils. It might seem surprising, then, that I insist on the diversity of his work, but what the Bremen exhibition makes clear is that there were multiple strains, motifs, lines of thought pursued during this short but highly productive time.

As regards the ink-and-watercolours, despite Ewald Rathke’s assertion to the contrary in the exhibition’s catalogue, it is impossible not to see the influence of Klee operating, at least along one line of the work.

This line, culminating in a series of images of towns and villages (Ville Chaude of 1943/44, for instance), shows Wols more or less content to be Klee’s disciple, albeit a nervy, obsessive one, with a touch of Masson pulling at the little formations. But his most characteristic pieces – they mark the arrival of his post-photographic maturity – are quite unique: biomorphic figures, positioned centrally, within an aura that conveys a sense of ‘apparition’. These tinted drawings are vividly coloured and obsessively detailed, the details often bringing to mind miniscule or microscopic features: cilia, pubic hair, formations of living tissue, polyps, tiny primitive limbs. They bring with them a sense of closeness and magnification, like a rockpool viewed by a child; of the alien; and of something that spasms, blushes, transforms abruptly, perhaps even transmits, but, being in a different element, is incapable of acting in our world, though visible here – a mere register of affect. The ‘closeness’ is related to the innate intimacy of the medium: the relation of the sheet of paper to the artist bending over with pens or small brushes was exaggerated by Wols’ practice, who often painted in bed, his bottle and food nearby, his dog at his feet. Some of this intimacy is carried into the public space of the gallery: it is difficult for a watercolour to be properly viewed by more than one member of the public at a time. This relation bypasses something that Wols must have sensed strongly, as it is dramatised by an early series of images with the title Circus Wols (from 1940): the presence of the spectator, especially of spectators in the plural. In these quirky fantasies the insectoid, surreal creatures of Wols’ early drawings are surrounded by caricatures of an audience. Between the two appears an apparatus with a system of lenses of some kind, and marked ‘polyscope’ in one of the drawings: the suggestion is of a tiny world being brought to perform before an anonymous, but pressing, self-assertive crowd. There is an inherent sense of something small and private being artificially made apparent in a not altogether hospitable public space.

So, what happens, as happened to Wols in 1946 when a gallerist gave him the materials for oil painting, if the minituarist is suddenly released into the open, half-body-with-arms-outstretched-sized space of the easel painting, capable of being viewed by six or seven people at a time (if not more, if the crowds in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre are anything to go by)? Agoraphobia, to some extent. Many of the canvases (which are far from universally successful) show evidence of a crisis – how to fill that exposed, more public space, and still maintain some kind of control? One solution, which seems to me close in spirit to the category of ‘formlessness’, was to seemingly scrape at the white ground, to achieve an all-over abstraction that resembles a floor scored by what it has supported, and dyed by innumerable washings of what looks like wastewater. Along another line (the styles are not wholly separate, there are various crossovers), certainly more tachiste, there are attacks, markings, assertions of the artist’s physical presence against the empty space, often resulting in what looks like a structure, and often quasi-representationalist (like the Bateau Ivre of 1951). There is a sense of flailing intoxication about some of these, and a looseness after the intense detailing of the drawings, despite the artificial means of the prominent ‘structure’. These same ink and watercolour pieces take on new chromatic power in the same period, becoming less governed by their drawn dimension, doubtless under the influence of the oil painting. Meanwhile Wols was also producing exquisite black-and-white book illustrations, those for a collection of Kafka stories called L’Invité des morts being particularly fine.

And then there are oil paintings like the Veil of Veronica (1946/47), Blue Grenade (1948/49) and the Blue Phantom (it should be noted that most of these titles were not given by Wols himself). Here the old centrally placed, figurative motif manages to hold its own in the expanded space of the canvas, but the results are more than merely expanded versions of the ink and watercolour pieces. Something happens because of the oil paintings’ particular scale, something to do both with how we tend to ‘read’ the figures before us on the canvas, and the kind of relational space surrounding the work. Facing Blue Phantom we find ourselves thinking less along the lines of microscopic organisms (despite the continued use of biological details) and more of something human-sized, something capable of confronting us rather than something we observe, separate and whole in its elementally different milieu. Certain more representationalist drawings come to mind – Woman with Nails (1944), Fool with Flowing Hair (1942/43) – as well as images by Ernst, Miró and, especially, Picasso, where a disc on a stem, with flowing lines that stand for hair, serve as a shorthand for a woman’s neck and head. The Blue Phantom, in short, is a woman’s head, or rather, it looms before us in the place of a woman’s head. This is where the second effect of the new scale comes into play: moving straight from an ink and watercolour piece to an oil painting one has a sense of sudden expansion and openness, like the experience of looking up from a small, very near object, like a book being read, or an insect examined, to focus immediately on figures in the space ahead of you. Whence the whole jolting, unnerving quality of Blue Phantom: occupying that space, the one where ordinarily human figures interact, or address the viewer, is an image as alien as the apparitions in the world beneath human scale, but somehow now in place in the human dimension, surrounded by its own, toxic to us, element. This uncanny but beautiful painting gathers to itself a host of experiences, concerning the war and its aftermath, the relation of private to the exposed and public, of self to the alien, the emergence of the ‘inhuman’, etc. etc. It is clearly the work of a master of twentieth century painting.

But what of art? Shortly before this interview was conducted Day had organised a seminar in Amsterdam, issuing from a series of reading-groups there and in Berlin, to ‘take a good look at [Arendt’s] 1961 text ‘The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance’.9 The hope was that a connection between artistic practice and Arendtian politics might be found there; after all, ‘if this person’s work was so important to [Day], and [he] was mostly busy with art’, it made sense to ‘figure out exactly what her take was.’ It was not a straightforward affair – one of the principle moves in Arendt’s political thinking is her establishment of separate, fundamental domains of human experience, all of which come into play in human existence, but which individually tend to predominate in particular cases. The Human Condition (1958) divides its sections between three of them: labour (according to whose values man is an animal laborans, part of ‘the metabolism of man and nature’); active life (which depends upon the existence of a public realm); and work, the realm of homo faber, the man who makes things.10 (The fourth, philosophy and ‘the life of the mind’, was the subject of her last major work.) Art, Arendt obstinately insists, belongs to the realm of making: the artist makes beautiful objects and their thinking is that of a fabricator, submitting material to an idea so that an object may be made – the means-end conceptuality that in modern governance precedes the full dissolution of ‘effectiveness’ into the ‘efficiency’ and logical consistency of quasi-natural processes (administration). This proved to be a constant stumbling-block in Amsterdam, a kind of scandal continually half-acknowledged as the text was read and discussed. How, in a post-conceptual art environment, could art be limited to its concern with objects? Or how could art that thought of itself in terms of political intervention, like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-1979), be understood primarily as fabrication? What did this offer the artist with political instincts? When it came to art was the artist simply to return to their studio and concentrate on the work? Whatever avenues were opened by Arendtian political thinking abruptly ended, for the artists gathered, at a barrier marking the border with art practice. Would it not be more sensible to dissolve such borders, to regard Arendt’s experience of art as anachronistic? Transdisciplinary theories were on the tips of the attending artists’ tongues. And yet, the tension introduced by the discrete Arendtian domains somehow sharpened the problems, and maintained a conceptual space for active politics that otherwise shrank and disappeared. And the urgent need for active politics was palpable in Amsterdam in 2012, the movement of Dutch governance to the populist right, with concomitant attacks on the autonomy of artistic institutions and the conditions of artistic livelihood, coinciding with the crisis in the EU. On what was such active politics to be based? And again: what was its relation to art?

 
The suggestions in Arendt were hard-won and cryptic, undeveloped. Culture, at least, artistic reception and education, had some kind of relationship to real political life. Drawing on Pericles’ ‘Funeral Oration’ on the occasion of the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, Arendt suggests that certain forms of culture maintain a readiness for political action, work in a kind of vitalising tension with politics, whereas others, perfectly fine in artistic terms, undermined that readiness, dissipated the instincts involved in real politics. ‘We love beauty within the limits of political judgement,’ said Pericles.11 Culture, in these terms, seemed almost like an activity itself. Second, the figure of the artist seemed to be a last repository of individual freedom in twentieth century society. This was initially unhelpful: it seemed to return us to a naive popular image of the artist, to Kirk Douglas’ Van Gogh, or to the Late Romantic figure that attached itself to the ‘heroes’ of American Abstract Expressionism or the lyrical ‘bards’ of the sixties, a figure that Minimalism and the rediscovery of Duchamp, non-authorial art and the artist as game-player, had overcome.
 

But it did possibly point to a source of the connection between the artist and the survival of political instincts, that in the artist’s education at least, perhaps especially in their unofficial and pre-institutional education, the promise of art had been bound up with a promise of active freedom. And, finally, there was the matter of judgement.

 
It was the question of judgement that led me into reading Arendt. My being asked with Dobz O’Brien in 2004 to be involved in the curation of the aforementioned Cork Caucus, sparked off a process of thought. It was an event premised (by Charles Esche, primarily) on the joint between art and politics, a connection that was again au courant after about twenty years in the margins. There had been a lot of internationally recognised political art since the late nineties, much of it issuing from the practice of ‘institutional critique’, more of it attaching itself to Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ – the Documentas of 1997 and 2002 had set their imprimatur on the scene. And this had seemed to revitalise interest in the avant-garde artistic tradition and its relationship with political revolutionary activity. But could we assume, I asked myself, that the political current within the avant- garde still fed into contemporary art, especially after the events of 1989? If more than a mere passing trend was involved – and the artworld has a voracious appetite for passing trends, enshrining them as historical just as it looks elsewhere for its next source of ‘importance’ – there must be some lasting connection between art and politics that warranted their continued association in a time of the Revolutio Abscondita. The concept of judgement provided just such a durable hinge. As Arendt frequently remarks, judgement is the political faculty par excellence – in active human affairs (i.e. affairs not part of a mechanistic system, managed according to behavioural laws or subjugated to industrial processes) it is impossible to calculate outcomes – the improbable is continually occurring. Judgement, and the kind of knowledge associated with it (called phronesis by the Greeks, the word ‘prudence’ as used in the 18th century still captured some of its meaning) is the responsible thinking and understanding towards decision in the face of this half-unknown and incalculable reality. There are two kinds of judgement, as Kant had analysed the concept, writing, as Arendt noted, in the French Revolutionary period: determinative and reflective. Determinative judgement subsumed the individual case under the universal and understood it, fully, in those more general terms. Reflective judgement moved from the individual to a new or changed universal, even leaving an insoluble residue of the individual behind, and it was to this latter category of judgement that both political and aesthetic judgement belonged. In Kant, in fact, aesthetic judgement was the exemplary form of this faculty that governed truly political activity.
 
So here was a direct theoretical connection between art and the political, and in my own pursuit of an understanding of the topic I was soon led to the strand within Arendt’s work concerned with judgement that eventually issued in her final work – those lectures in which she attempted to derive a political philosophy from Kant, from the Critique of Judgement in particular.12 But in Arendt there also ran alongside these comments on the role and nature of judgement a less theoretical account of the conditions and environment needed for the life of political activity, one still under the sway of reflective judgement and thus saturated with aesthetic and artistic qualities. Action and speech – political activity in particular – were concerned with the making apparent of the individual among others, and for this to occur in any enduring or reliable way a space of public display was required, often referred to by Arendt as ‘the world’ (in contrast to the unworldliness advocated by the Christian tradition, in the Middle Ages at least), but in a more concrete way in terms of the Greek polis. This was a physical, legal and customary social establishment, a particular form of city-state intended as a kind of ‘theatre where freedom could appear’, freedom and human agency being bound together.13 At the heart of the polis, metaphorically and actually, was the agora, an open public area (shared, incidentally, with a market) in which citizens gathered daily. The physical shape of the agora, the architecture and statuary associated with it, the traditions, law, history and literature of the polis – all these things guaranteed a political life, which happened continually and spontaneously as a free overflowing of the existence of the citizenry (apart from their private, physiological and fabricatory lives). The chief source for Arendt in this regard is what she refers to as the experience of the ancient Greeks, as apart from the experience of Greek philosophy – in which concept can be seen the influence of Nietzsche and her early mentor Heidegger, as well as post-Husserlian thinking on the ‘phenomenon’ (literally, ‘that which appears’). And the values associated with the world and politics, in Arendt’s account, bear their marks, and also the marks of a thinking according to the terms of reflective judgement: deeds and speech ‘shine’, are ‘glorious’, ‘great’, ‘immortal’, ‘beautiful’, ‘splendid’.14 The terms are aesthetic, but without the self-referentiality of an aesthetics seeking to detach itself from all other experience. Neither, however, do they serve any end outside of themselves – there is a delicate balancing act here between a seduction into self-enclosed formalism, and a collapse back into given content.
 
Does this bring us to a contemporary sense of what real politics and the public realm are? Yes, to a degree – but it is surprising what happens if we apply these terms directly to the present world. The association of politics with ‘appearance’ rapidly loses its Hellenic meaning of a clear, transparent, exterior existence, of citizens living and dying by what they say and do in public, and takes on a post-Machiavellian tone: ‘appearances’ as semblances, occlusion of real motives becoming essential to political conduct, power being established and maintained through secrecy and the manipulation of public perception, the stage of freedom becoming the ‘theatre’ of the media. As Richard Sennett’s extraction of a performative ethic from Arendt in The Fall of Public Man (1976), and the twin meanings of words like ‘appearance’, ‘stage’, ‘drama’ and ‘gesture’ show, the two forms of ‘acting’ are very closely related – in post-monarchical government at least since the strange confusion of revolution and theatricality in 1848, when revolutionaries invaded parliament dressed as popular stage characters.15 The quasi-aesthetic values of the life of action, on the other hand, call to mind, if anything, the world of sport, of international football in particular. What state, unless ruled by a tyrant or drawing upon the jingoism of the national imperialist period, would refer to itself in terms of ‘glory’? Yet ‘glory, glory Man Utd.’ is sung by thousands. What piece of improvisation in parliament would attract the epithet ‘immortal’? Yet an overhead kick by a football player at a crucial point in a major match will be talked of in such terms. Again, there is a close relation between the two: Arendt’s Kant lectures, after all, take as one of their central topoi the description, attributed to Pythagoras, of life as a festival, that is, as an occasion for competitions.16 Associations, organised protests, criticism, judgement – all gather around football teams. Seen from this perspective sport is the most effective mode of containment of political spirit that there is. Dialectically, that is, in an inverted form, it might also be seen to maintain one of the last images of true political life.
 
It is not easy to find continuities between Arendt’s concepts of true political existence and the present situation. There are examples from the past – the Greeks, of course, to a lesser extent the Romans, the late medieval and renaissance Italian republics, the 18th century American townhall movements … As modernity advances, to a greater and greater extent the examples are furnished by revolutionary activity or the experience of resistance fighters (apart from the interesting case of the historical self-organisation of scientists and the foundation of the Royal Society).17 Concrete, modern examples of the opposite of political existence, however, of subsistence in a state of ‘worldlessness’, are provided by many twentieth century societies, and form the heart of Arendt’s extensive treatment of life under totalitarianism. Arendt mentions that Kant disagreed passionately with the belief that, no matter how the state restricted public exchange of ideas and opinions, one was always free to think. Publication was a basic right and the removal of publication grounds for rebellion.18 The loss of public space, the modern confinement in private spaces of personal taste and importance, so that the individual cannot appear in any objective sense to others, is, for Arendt, the root of the phenomenon of ‘mass loneliness’, which was to form the basis – along with the concept of the ‘movement’ and the vulnerable position of the stateless ‘human’ – of the states established by Hitler and Stalin. Without the great richness of private life, and relative absence of material pressure, of a period like the Belle Époque, or the consolation of a flourishing religious ‘worldlessness’ like that of Christianity, the privated person becomes prey to ‘social epidemics’ – xenophobia, unfocused rage, belief in global conspiracies, unreal, hyperlogical private philosophies – which are grasped as the elements of a new social order by particular revolutionary movements. To a certain extent Arendt would argue that this should not matter to artists, who work in isolation, their eye upon the eidos, the inner shape according to which their work is fabricated. This clearly corresponds to what we would call the ‘studio artist’, a lifestyle which often seems enviably pure – an art practice undertaken away from collaborations, form-filling and negotiations, a simple, concentrated making in a dedicated environment as only the research scientist seems able to achieve in recent years. But even in the Arendtian conception of the artist the question of worldlessness, the lack of a shared, open space of display maintained between individuals, arises. Where does one bring the work when it is finished? How can it be shown so that others will, not only see it, but engage with it? Where is that place of display where appearance matters? A social realist painting produced in a worldless state, according to party diktats, in many respects needs no such display: if it has already put in place the requirements for a work of art as specified by the relevant office of the state, it is beyond judgement, it has fulfilled its function in the overall process of the moving social organism. It is consciously meaningless. The same danger arises with a heavily administrated national artistic culture: to get funding certain forms must be filled out, the fulfillment of certain criteria must be promised. To get continued funding the finished works must be seen to correspond to that promise: noone need judge along the way (certainly it would not make sense to put arts administrators in the position of judges). Truly successful works in this vein hardly need to be displayed – unless displayed as consumer goods are displayed, in a market; or for the artist’s vanity; or because, as is usually the case, ‘display’ is an administrative criterion; or in the hope that the artist might achieve some level of celebrity that places them above the administrative apparatus. But for the tradition of art part of the artwork’s working is cut off, amputated, if it cannot extend into a space where, through the judgement of others, it may come into full appearance.
 

In my experience the absence of this space has been generally accepted and internalised by art students. I had the good fortune to be part of a project based around this predicament of the artist, the graduating artist in particular, by the Liverpool art-group Static. The Exit Review I was involved in in 2005 staged a confrontation between students who had just produced their graduate show (at Cork’s Crawford College), that is, at the threshold of post-College life, and the custodians of the institutions their fledgling career would depend on: gallerists, curators, critics, administrators. Each of the latter had to review randomly picked samples of the graduate show in a very small textual space. A group meeting between the reviewers and reviewees was then arranged at which, once the initial, understandable nervousness of the students was overcome, negative reviews led to confrontations. These took on interesting shapes: a particularly outraged student questioned the very right of any individual to set themselves up in authority by judging. This struck most of the other students as naive: of course, once the work goes into the outside world, it will be judged. But what interested me about their understanding of this process was that they considered this judgement to be inconsequential as far as the artwork was concerned – this outside judgement was a matter of private meaning, and it was the artist’s private assessment that truly mattered, although, of course, if the outside assessor happened to be someone with clout in the artworld, their public assessment could have important consequences for the artist’s career. Publicity, display and criticism were hard facts of life of an artist’s existence, but they were separate from what actually mattered.

 
This struck me as being a defensive position, adopted in the face of what was felt to be a hostile environment. Wholly understandable: the chances in Ireland of having the general public notice an artist’s work, to the point where they might establish a livelihood from their practice, are quite slim. And as far as a successful career is concerned a ‘troika’ of factors faces the young artist: the market, the scene and administrated funding. This troika, in fact, is what occupies the ‘space of display’ towards which the artist’s work is aimed, and it ensures that the public outlet of the artwork is anything but a free space – it must, in fact, appear to the uninitiated as a wholly determined and determining arena. Either your work must be eminently sellable; or you must get to know the right people and learn how to speak their language and promote yourself; or you must become an expert at filling out forms and producing the kind of work that conforms to the criteria of accountabability anticipated by those forms.19 Yet what simultaneously came home to me was the falseness of the notion that artistic meaning was essentially private – not only was it bound up with public appearance, but that this public character was part of the work itself – the public dimension of the artwork. Furthermore, the graduate artists knew it: while they told themselves and others that everything other than the work’s private meaning was a matter of indifference, they were busy with intervening in that public dimension: organising DIY gallery-spaces, reading groups, collaborative projects, alternative funding methods, critical projects. All art is public, was the maxim I came away with – the problem was how to achieve a properly public space for this dimension of the artwork to be liberated. Looking at the outcomes of the public spatial projects undertaken by young artists it was clear that mere placement in what went by the name of public spaces was not enough – the openness of the public realm, as Arendt attested, was something achieved and maintained, it was made open by a constant practice of judgement. Projection onto the biggest billboard in the centre of the biggest city meant nothing if not within a culture of judgement, which would lead to the work, if it was judged to be worthy of it, being remembered, discussed and preserved. If by sheer force of spectacle such a work did enter art history, as anything other than an indictment of the times, then a fundamental loss of judgement, and the closure of art history would be in play.
 
This was a lynch-pin holding contemporary art and politics together: how to reoccupy that space of appearance currently occupied by the ‘troika’. Meanwhile this concern with making apparent, and the occupation of designated public spaces, suddenly became physical reality on a grand scale in the wake of the collapse of the credit-fuelled finance system in 2008, which pitched the old capitalist West into severe recession and occasioned the representation on the streets of the ‘99%’, the envoicing and making visible – that is, making politically apparent – of the financially disempowered that was the Occupy movement. However, what actually became apparent with these revolts against what was, even after efforts at reform, the same establishment that had brought about the economic collapse, was not the ‘people power’ or the ‘alternative social organisation’ hoped for by the protesters, but the bizarre absence of the basic conditions for their activity: public space, open space in which they might gather and make apparent what they represented. In New York the ‘public park’ chosen for the occupation, Zucotti Park, turned out legally to be a strange chimera, a ‘privately owned public space’, part of a deal made by the city (ironically, in 1968) with developers in return for permission to build the neighbouring U.S. Steel building over the legal height. Private property concerns, such as matters of health and safety, could be used to legalise the eviction of the protesters. In London the protesters found themselves, under duress from the police, having to fall back anachronistically on the role and customs of the medieval Church: a truly free space, one on which one could gather publically, could be found only on the grounds of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The relatively recent (since the late nineties?) police technique of ‘kettling’, used again in the control of student protests in 2010, ensured that even when large crowds attempted to lay claim to the streets, the participants were shut off from ordinary civil society, in terms of visibility and rights to ordinary self-maintenance, until such time as they lost their status as protesters. Meanwhile, popular revolution in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, seemed to constitute an unadulterated model of political action. Presenting themselves, at the risk of extreme violence, in Tahrir Square, a sufficiently large open area at the centre of Cairo, a cross-section of the citizenry had (successfully) made their demand for the end of tyrannical government. Yet the reception by the West’s media managed to depoliticise this most simply political of actions. According to the majority of reports and editorials, the revolution had not occurred on Tahrir Square, but on Facebook, the social media website. It had not been ‘the people’ who had revolted, but the new young, technologically savvy professionals that had made the cultural leap to online interaction. Ignoring the fact that only 20 of the 300,000 or so protesters operated the relevant Facebook page, mainly as a means of counteracting distorted accounts emanating from the official media organs, and that the square’s occupants had been drawn from a great variety of social backgrounds, and that the numbers gathering had actually increased during the blackout of social media, it remains that a tool for organisation and publicity (as such little different to the network of men on bicycles, railway workers and representatives in the US used by Irish insurrectionaries in the revolutionary years) was replacing human action in official Western accounts.20 The subtext was clear: the revolution had actually been brought about by techno-economic development, the appearance of individuals in public was no more than a symptom of such ‘real’ unapparent processes, leading inexorably towards liberal capitalist ‘democracies’. If these political agents were of any interest, in fact, it was as a new market for the goods supporting western lifestyles: they were a category of marketing, a demographic profile. The Arendtian resonances are obvious.21
 
If contemporary politics and contemporary art, then, are both concerned with appearance of this kind (or rather with non-appearance) – politics with the appearance to each other through speech and deed of individuals and groups, which appearance requires an open space constituted by constant acts of judgement (and preserved and dissolved by interactions of law, governance, tradition and cultural works) – art with the dimension of appearance intrinsic to the artwork itself, its need for a space of display made meaningful, again, by a culture of judgement – and if we call this space, after Arendt, the public realm, then it is clear that among the web of connections between the artist and political activity there is one lasting strand. Both are fundamentally concerned with the public realm and with its survival or reestablisment. And though it is imperative, as Arendt states, that the ‘conflict’ between the artist, as homo faber, and homo politicus, not be solved, that one figure not be collapsed into the other, the two are nevertheless allied when it comes to the question of the continuing existence of the public realm: artists (and, by the same logic, the politically inclined) naturally find themselves playing dual roles.23
 
If we wish to get a palpable sense of what the public realm is, therefore, if we wish to experience it in its own appearance, we could do worse than to go to those places where artists have reached the stage of successfully organising themselves and public spaces for artistic ends. If the individuals drawn to these spaces show a desire to teach, exhibit, perform, discuss, publish – that is, reach gatherings of attentive, judging others – then chances are something truly public is under way. The likelihood is considerably higher if there is a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs among the individuals concerned, that is, if they are not all the same sort, or necessarily agree with one another. This is not easy to achieve, though it may be easy enough to produce something that passes, is adequate to the notion of public space, something whose real concern is with instincts and interests that have greater currency. Real public spaces have nothing to do with personal expression, for instance, despite the centrality of individuals reaching others. Nor can they be organised as temporary affairs – they are not festivals, events or ‘biennials’ – at best conceived in such a way as to be repeated. As Arendt constantly asserts, public spaces are implicitly concerned with endurance – if they can be made to last, they will be made to last, despite the dangers of institutionalisation. Permanence may be all but impossible in prevailing conditions, but it remains imperative that the possibility of endurance not be discounted in advance. Finally, there is that rock upon which innumerable revolutions, that is, real appearances of the public, have foundered: property. Though unavoidable – so that its dissolution into various socialist or communist abstractions simply engrains and intensifies the matter in actuality – the question of ownership, nevertheless, has nothing to do with public space. Stewardship, yes, and it may be that a single individual, undemocratically, might perform this role, but the space must remain in no way the property of the steward or stewards. And with the manifold forms of appropriation today in existence this necessity becomes near impossible to achieve: it cannot be ‘the people’s’ or common property; it cannot be an intellectual property, boosting the investment folio that is a CV (not even if it boost the CVs of all of the participants); it cannot be the means to office of its founders and participants; its activities cannot be included in the returns of any associated artistic institution or funding body; it cannot be the generator of coolness or authenticity for a social scene; it cannot exist for the sake of the social legitimation of a private patron; it cannot be there to make money – it will, of course, need to be financed, but this must be conducted in such a way as not to impinge upon the space itself; it cannot be there to eventually serve other interests – economic regeneration, for instance. It is not that public space is noone’s property, nor even that it is anyone’s property, rather it has, remarkably, nothing to do with property at all. If there is any question of ownership involved it occurs in an inverted form: the actors in the space somehow belong to that which grants them their appearance and its endurance. Public space opens in such a way as to make its own anyone who can appear there.
 
 
 
NOTES
 
1. In the UK, for instance, under The Public Order Act (1994, amended 1996), police may refer to violent precedents when dealing with non-violent protests, and legitimately use cordoning tactics (‘kettling’) to effectively remove the possibility of publically visible protest, depriving the protesters of their liberty in the process. Essentially ‘kettling’ is undertaken as a preemptive measure for the protection of property (public and private) and maintenance of public peace. In practice, therefore, a gathering of non-violent protesters and a crowd of looters are no different in the eyes of the law. See the UK Government’s (successful) defence in Austin and Others v. The United Kingdom at the European Court of Human Rights (15 March 2012).
2. See, for instance, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958) pp.38-49 and On Revolution (Viking, 1963) pp.59-114. Arendt uses the word ‘society’ in three quite different ways: neutrally, according to common usage, to designate the general organised collection of people; but also to refer to a fully administrated modern form of society – the subject of ‘sociology’ and the behavioural sciences – a technically manageable system of human life processes; and lastly, interchangeably with ‘good society’, a cultural elite that absorbs political action, refocussing it on a self-regarding theatrical round of salons and intrigues, which sets the tone, as it were, for greater ‘society’. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (Abacus, 1994) p.269.
3. The word ‘economics’ is derived from the Greek for ‘household’, oikos, and nomos, i.e. ‘law’ or ‘custom’.
4. The Human Condition p.59, n. 54.
5. The full text is available at http://www.merrionstreet.ie/index.php/2012/08/speech-by-an-taoiseach-to-commemorate-the-90th-anniversary-of-the-death-of-michael-collins-at-beal-na-mblath/ [accessed Nov. 3rd 2012].
6. Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957-2012 ran at the Hayward from 12 June – 5 August 2102; Voids: a Retrospective at the Pompidou Centre from 25 February – 23 March 2009; A Brief History of Invisible Art at the Carl Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art 30 November 2005 – 21 February 2006.
7. More Silent than Ever involves the placement of a small text on the wall of an empty room ‘informing’ the viewer that an eavesdropping device has been planted nearby.
8. Email of 24.06.2012.
9. ‘Hannah Arendt’s Crisis in Culture 50th Anniversary: Reflections, Implications, Speculations.’ Presented by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and co-hosted by Goleb, 16th-19th May 2012.
10. ‘Metabolism of man and nature’: a Marxian phrase often quoted by Arendt, denoting human productivity as a physiological process, albeit one capable, unlike related bestial processes, of producing a surplus. See The Human Condition pp. 98-99, referring to Capital.
11. The ‘Funeral Oration’ is reported by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. See ‘The Crisis in Culture’ (In Between Past and Future [Viking, 1961]), pp. 213-217.
12. The lectures were given at the New School for Social Research in the Fall semester of 1970. The texts are collected, along with other material relating to Arendt’s thought on judgement, in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1992), which includes a fulsome interpretative essay by Ronald Beiner.
13. Arendt, ‘What is Freedom’, Between Past and Future p. 154.
14. For instance:
Unlike human behavior … action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.
(The Human Condition 205, emphasis mine)
15. See Philip Mansell, Paris between Empires: 1814 – 1852 (Phoenix, 2001). De Tocqueville noted that:
The men of the first Revolution were living in all minds, their acts and words were present to all memories. All that I saw on that day bore the visible imprint of those souvenirs; it always seemed to me that they were imitating the French Revolution rather than continuing it.
(quoted in De Sant Amand, The Revolution of 1848 [Hutchinson, 1895]. p. 243)
16. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy p.55. Even Heidegger was not immune to the power of football, talking about an international match he had just watched at a meeting with the director of the Freiburg Theatre when the latter would have preferred to discuss literature and the stage, and enthusing about Franz Beckenbauer the ‘invulnerable’ (Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil [Harvard UP, 1998]).
17. See The Human Condition pp. 271, 324.
18. ‘… we may safely state that the external power which deprives man of the freedom to communicate his thoughts publicly also takes away his freedom to think.’ (‘Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientieren?’, quoted in Arendt, Lectures 41)
19. I am equating the ‘art social scene’, with its openings, parties, patrons, celebrities, gossip and self-promoters, in terms of Arendt’s understanding of the 19th salon and ‘society’:
Good society, as we know it from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, probably had its origin in the European courts of the age of absolutism, especially the court society of Louis XIV, who knew so well how to reduce French nobility to political insignificance by the simple means of gathering them at Versailles, transforming them into courtiers, and making them entertain one another through the intrigues, cabals, and endless gossip which this perpetual party inevitably engendered.
My own suspicion is that Louis XIV’s strategems were a continuation of Catherine De Medici’s attempts at defusing the conflicts between French Protestant and Catholic nobles that accompanied the reigns of her children in the latter half of the sixteenth century.
20. See, for instance, the report of visiting design doctoral student Mohamed Elshahed: http://places.designobserver.com/feature/tahrir-square-social-media-public-space/25108/ (accessed 30.11.12), and Miriyam Aouragh & Anne Alexander, ‘The Egyptian Experience: Sense and Nonsense of the Internet Revolution’. University of Cambridge International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), pp.1344-1358.
22. Though it could be argued that Arendt’s critique of Marx, in terms of the victory of the animal laborans, underestimates the power and influence of the market. On the other hand, the destructive power of capital is more than clear enough in her account of imperialism in Origins of Totalitarianism.
23. ‘The Crisis in Culture’, p. 218.

These fragments punctuate a selection of work from a number of Crawford lecturers and tutors. As the overriding impression is one of modesty (apart from a few pieces, such as Pádraigh Trehy’s short film dramatising the psychological relationship of James Joyce to John McCormack in terms of the Shem and Shaun characters of Finnegans Wake, a sense of strong art-practical ambition is lacking) the viewer’s thoughts naturally wander to the question of the relation of art teaching to art practice. On the basis of one or two artworks and a list of names, of course, this is never likely to amount to anything more than idle speculation, but it’s tempting to see in the solid technical accomplishment of Colin Crotty’s or Eileen Healy’s paintings suitable models for a teaching practice.

 
The works were generally well-displayed, and I was particularly happy to have the opportunity to view Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s collaged digital video Emigrant III (2010), in ample space in one of the gallery’s two arched cellars. This is the third time I’ve encountered her work, the first being at the Darkness Visible show in Galway in 2008. The second, at this year’s eva, was sufficiently recent for it to be still active in my thinking. It’s intriguing stuff, one of the best engagements with the possibilities of digital video I’ve come across. The capacity for image manipulation and collage runs the risk of producing a new literalness – fantastic or hallucinatory scenes that merely reinforce ingrained, prosaic understanding by extending it out to unencountered experiences. This is the weakness of much of Dali’s painting (when it isn’t being out and out kitsch) – a floppy watch or melting body keeps the naturalistically represented watch or recognisable body firmly in place, it simply adds the diversion of the distorting mirror to its perception and raises the result to the status of the truly reimagined. Ní Bhriain’s work has more in common with pre-war De Chirico (via the closing sequence of Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, perhaps), those paintings which justify the epithet ‘metaphysical’, and cast the viewer back on a consideration of temporality and spatiality.
 
As in De Chirico different experiences of space are combined in the same image, with each being given discrete zones (bordered by a curtain, screen, corner or horizon – this is clearer in eva’s Great Good Places), sometimes gently transgressed (e.g. water laps from behind a screen through which the open sea can be discerned). The addition of motion to Ní Bhriain’s images brings in another kind of zoning – layering. Drifting minutiae on the image’s surface, for instance, give the impression of underwater currents, though the objects behind belong to an indoors scene and may be disturbed from time to time by what appears to be a breeze. The juxtaposition of different spatial experiences places emphasis on the images’ temporality – a slow duration that includes motion, but not change, a kind of extended pause between acts (Virginia Woolf’s intermediating section in To the Lighthouse comes to mind). In contrast to post-Newtonian concepts, time is understood by Aristotle to be a function of the innate changeability of the various beings. Such a way of thinking raises the question whether without change there could be any time. In Ní Bhriain’s digital videos such an impossible, ‘timeless’ universe is made apparent.
 
 
Crawford 100 was on view 24 May – 23 June 2012.

There was no doubting the role of a certain kind of politics in the collection and presentation of the artworks. A list of some of the artists’ places of origin gives some sense of the affiliations – Sarajevo, Kfar Yehezkel in Israel, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Marrakech, Belgrade, Sofia, Istanbul – the majority were from international crisis points, the margins of Europe or the former Eastern Bloc. On this evidence if the Vanabbemuseum is ‘a neighbourhood’, as the exhibition’s title prompts, then it is a neighbourhood for which the figure of the refugee, sometimes as dissident but most often as testifier, is central. With each new work a further narrative of overlooked or tolerated oppression unfolded: Harun Farocki on the Jews at the Dutch camp of Westerbork in 1944; Danica Dakic on the House for the Protection of Childhood and Youth near Sarajevo; Akram Zaatari on Lebanese political prisoners; etc. Added to this were reformulations of contemporary art from its margins: Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin immersed us in popular cultural imagery from the Eastern Mediterranean, almost daring the viewer to treat it in terms of the exotic, though it represented the real minutiae of historical existence; Ivan Boccara carefully presented scenes from Morrocan Berber life picked from the Bordeaux archives, drawing out the materiality and atmosphere of the images and texts; etc. All directed towards a new political imagination, or at least, the effort towards the generation of a political discussion that might house such an imagination, the ‘What is to be done’ of the Project speech. (This also happened to be the name of a Russian art-group [Chto Delat?] who, on a large screen at one end of the hall, enacted the progress of post-Soviet Russia in terms of simple stylised characters representing different political positions, a DIY Threepenny Opera for the age of gallery-based digital screenings.)

 
Strange and Close was not entirely about politics, but even the less overtly political work tended to be concerned with matters of social relations (Andrea Zittel), communication (Joseph Grigely) or power relations (Artur Żmijewski and the witty Nedko Solakov), which clearly took part in a wider metapolitical mesh. With this relentless political or metapolitical agenda the lack of strong aesthetic operation was often sorely missed, if only to provide breathing space in what sometimes felt like indifference to all but the topic and narrative being transmitted. That said, a subtle work by Yael Bartana, Summer Camp (2007), which played two films simultaneously, back to back on a single screen, provided a pointed reflection on this question of aesthetics and their role. On one side appeared Herman Lerski’s 1935 Avoda, a piece of propaganda about Zionist pioneers building on the West Bank, but a masterpiece of cinematic oratory all the same, with often stunning aesthetic power. On the other side Avoda was shadowed using footage of members of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions rebuilding Palestinian houses in the same territory. Here the aesthetic strength of the original had been curbed and muted, the twenty-first century supplement providing a quiet rejoinder to the confident power of the original. But of course the aesthetic working of Bartana’s piece didn’t simply reside in the modest refilming, it comprised the ‘double film’, as it were, and the thin screen of interpretation between primary and secondary. One could refer to this aware, critiquing adaptation of the idioms of modern art and media as a kind of ‘refugee form’, in keeping with the general orientation of the exhibition. As the refugee inhabits the state as outsider, and confronts the ‘insider’ as a fact of the limitation of that state, making exposed the state’s character as a system of legitimacies and power relations, so the ‘refugee form’ works by the addition of an outsider supplement to an established artistic or significatory idiom. In Strange and Close’s best works such a form was evident, and a precise balance was achieved between narrative content and the presented work. Not everything was up to this standard.
 
Ordinarily with an Esche-curated show much of this pressure towards a balanced, finished product would be eased by the conversation-centred events surrounding the exhibition: the works appearing as markers of an ongoing discursive process, the presence at the venue of artists and artists’ groups reducing the distance between viewer and artwork. Here, with the emphasis on pieces from a collection, a different aspect of Esche’s curatorial practice came to the fore. The recording of Homi Bhabha at the exhibition’s centre, presenting his concept of the neighbour in places of mixed ethnicity as ‘strange and close’, and the extensive notes accompanying the works, both on the walls and in the ‘map’ of the show given to each visitor on admission, gave a distinct educational colour to the show. This is worth noting: the reconstruction of the modern / contemporary art museum as an educational institution (there’s a very interesting precedent in the Barnes Collection in Pennsylvania, itself a centre of controversy) could be a way of sidestepping expectations of spectacle and crowded, media-friendly shows, while playing a strong democratic (as opposed to populist) role in its locality. There is always the danger (as there was in early Soviet Russia, to return to Lissitzky) that education might degenerate into indoctrination, but Strange and Close’s theoretical identification with the ‘refugee’ would appear to preclude this possibility, as well as grant a certain purchase on a deep layer of Europe’s political condition, while aligning itself with a subtle, unshowy aesthetic.
 
 
Strange and Close was on view at CAPC Bordeaux 6 October 2011 – 12 February 2012.

On the basis of this line-up it must be admitted that Terminal Convention will indeed be a, if not the major art event this year in Cork, at least. The premise, that a biennale-like event can be staged in an environment that, in theory, mirrors its activities, by means of commercial supports that operate in plain view of the event’s participants (that are, indeed, integrated into the event’s working), seems no less practical and inspiring for its opportunism. The event will be blind to many aspects of the building’s individual character and its relation to its locale, but then again, the old Cork Airport terminal, despite its parochialness and the bizarre sample of a gas fireplace that used to greet passengers in the baggage retrieval area, remained that exemplary social space, the international airport.

 
How exemplary was made clear to me as I sat in the waiting area of Heathrow’s Terminal 3, one afternoon in the busy Christmas period. The place was crowded, and in constant motion: a complex of commercial, biological and practical flows. In short, it was a largescale, enclosed organisation of people, a working, upto-the-minute social model. Its troubling aspects were easily discerned: the serviced democracy within was rigidly exclusive, citizenship here was offered only after intense security screening and credit approval – we were those who had submitted to examination of our identity and possessed, at least temporarily, a certain level of affluence. This ‘affluent’ status was reflected everywhere by the outlets for global brands, especially those dealing in luxury items. On the other hand it was hard not to perceive a utopian dimension to the same space: all the races and nations of the earth appeared to be represented, co-existing peacefully. More than that, a disproportionate number of the travelling families seemed to be of mixed-race: outside the Slavic-serviced Italian café my own Fenno-Hibernian trio was trumped by a South American-English quartet at the next table, and across the way a white North American with a partner from India tried to entertain two American-accented children. In this enclave of internationalism old identities seemed to be in flux, unforming and reforming. It occurred to me that my surroundings amounted to the imaginary of the nomadic contemporary artist, those who follow the credit-flows to their biennial poolings, maintaining studios in Jakarta and Berlin.
 
It was a space with a starkly functional, ahistorical shell, brought to social life by ubiquitous instructions and directions, post-literary symbols and slogans and the punctuation of identity by advertisement images: a supremely visual zone, in which the slippery, critical nomadic artist would have all the expertise of the ‘native tracker’.
 
Is this a ‘coming community’, to borrow Agamben’s phrase? Of course between the police-governed perimeter and the utopian congregation was all the banality of airport culture, the twin of biennale art in Byrne’s account. But I cannot imagine that such speculative thoughts will not also arise among the visitors to Terminal Convention – about a future that has been in operation in the present since at least the post-war construction of Idlewild. And what about the present possibility of the ruin of that futurity? What makes Terminal Convention possible, after all, is the redundancy of a building that, despite its parochialness, was once ahead of the contemporary.
 
 
Terminal Convention ran from March 17th – 27th 2011.

In terms of form, Beuys is clearly uninterested in the Platonic or technicist aesthetic possibilities of formalism. This, of course, is a trait held in common with many wartime and post-war artists –hence the elaboration of Georges Bataille’s concept of the Informe by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. Beuys, however, is not an artist of the ‘formless’: what appears in his work is a combination of the half-formed and the post-formed, of objects, often made of clay, still bearing the artist’s hand-print, and seemingly on their way to some more distinctive shape, but caught at a moment of their development; and of objects that, by extreme usage or immersion in a space of violent conditions (a furnace perhaps), have lost their sense of final shape and readiness for use. In terms of materials, Beuys’ sculptural works can be divided roughly into two modes: the ‘grey-brown’ and the ‘black’. The former is the most familiar; I registered the existence of the latter for the first time at this exhibition – the shining black of bakelite and ebony giving an odd sense of ‘industrial luxury’, perhaps, in the surrounding pauperdom. My first thought was to the parallel with Arte Povera, and with a Jannis Kounellis piece I had seen at a Tate retrospective some years ago – to my mind a resistance to the commodification of the artwork by the presentation of basic materials of commodity culture – iron ore, coke, etc. – so fundamental to industry as to provide a limit point to its commodificatory action. Then it occurred to me that the materials and, indeed, class of industry evoked, were curiously anachronistic for an artist working in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Beuys was not only putting on show the bare rudiments of an industrial culture, but those of a particular industrial culture, that of the thirties and forties. In the context of the work of a German artist it was very hard not to sense that here was an art concentratedly working through the detritus of the war and the Nazi era.

 
I don’t think that this would have occurred to me had the retrospective been filled out by references to the non-material work: in restricting themselves to the ‘serious’ museum pieces the curators had amplified what the critic Gene Ray has referred to as ‘the work of mourning’.¹ I had a niggling misgiving about this recognition and especially its calling to mind of Ray’s account: was what affected me among these objects an ‘Auschwitz aesthetic’?Did I automatically sense a solemnity to the work because of an innate resemblance to the images I’d absorbed of the remains of the extermination camps? Ray is clear on this point: there was never any suggestion of Beuys’ exploitation of these images, he was at pains to keep mention of the camps at a distance in his scattershot of public pronouncements, only letting his awareness of a deep concern for that era slip out once or twice in his career. Beuys had no qualms about exploiting other affairs – the media-friendly character of his appearance, for instance – if it promoted the work; but when a number of others had set up their stall as ‘Auschwitz artists’ he remained rigorously silent on the subject.
 
But in bringing this essential ‘mourning’ dimension to our attention Ray is remiss in terms of what Beuys did articulate: in short, what has often been seen as his ‘clownish’ side, his relentlessly positive Steiner-influenced politico-artistic agitation. If the unvoiced ‘work of mourning’ has its formal equivalent in the ‘post-formed’ objects – bearing the blows and scorching of the preceding violence, then the ‘half-formed’ links to the constant, garrulous propulsion of the same rudimentary materials towards a future. Beuys, in short, is a Janus-faced artist, at once a late-modernist elegist and a post-modern impresario, the same ‘post-modernism’ revealing itself here as a relentlessly positive openness to whatever new social forms or opportunities appeared in the post-war course of north-western history. I don’t think the two sides can finally be separated, and in a work like Lightning with Stag in its Glare a sense of their conjunction, albeit with the stress on the side of retrospection because of its materiality, can be felt.
 
For some reason the piece didn’t come off for me in its position in Parallel Processes, but I’ve felt the energy and registered the inherent artist’s trace when viewing it elsewhere (originally at Frankfurt’s Kunstverein). It is, as his Belgian contemporary Marcel Broodthaers intimated, when he slyly identified Beuys with Wagner in a famous open letter published in the ‘Dusseldorfer Feuilleton’, a Gesamtkunstwerk, an all-embracing maximal artistic effort suggesting the artist’s status as quasi-spiritual genius, but, significantly, it fails as such. The narratives, symbolism and theatrical action having withered away we are left with the remains: an ‘unformed’ artwork, or rather, an energy-bound configuration of the half-formed and post-formed. With boundless optimism, using the most rudimentary, and grave, materials, the ‘genius’ has made a huge attempt to bring a work of regeneration into being, and has been forced to abandon the effort in a state of incompletion, casting doubt on the genius’ status, or the possibility of renewal, but not on the artist’s positivity, or the gravity of his subject. Without the former (the spirit that announced that ‘democracy is fun’) the latter would not be articulated; and without the latter (the silent absorption in the legacy of wartime Germany) the former would have evaporated off as another haze of half-focused utopianism, typical of its heyday in the sixties.
 
1 ‘Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime’ (Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, 2001).
 
 
Parallel Processes ran from September 11th 2010 –January 16th 2011.