Issue #89 Art Populism and the Alter-Institutional Turn

Art Populism and the Alter-Institutional Turn

Marco Baravalle

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Installation view of the exhibition “Dark Matter Super Collider, Dark Matter Games,” S.a.L.E. Docks, 2017. Photo: Veronica Badolin.

Issue #89
March 2018










Notes
1

In 2015, to celebrate The Writer and the People’s fiftieth anniversary, the publishing house Einaudi printed a new edition of the book, which included the late unreleased essay “Scrittori e Masse” (The Writer and the Masses). I mention this for the sake of completeness, since Asor Rosa’s late writings are not of much interest for this article. In “Scrittori e Masse” he declares, perhaps too hastily, the disappearance of “the people,” instead of undertaking a cultural and political investigation into what he calls “the masses.” With this latter term he seems to indicate a growing lack of cohesion within “the people”—a crumbling of the unity that paradoxically emerged from different regionalisms and localisms.

2

Alberto Asor Rosa, The Writer and The People (Seagull Books, 2016).

3

Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (Verso, 2005).

4

Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004).

5

Marco Baravalle, “Curare e Governare. Bourriaud e Obrist, la svolta relazionale della curatela,” Opera Viva, December 19, 2016 .

6

After 1985 Chantal Mouffe specified that the core of politics has to be found in the transformation of antagonism (a clash between enemies that could resolve itself in a hopeless clash of identities) into agonism, i.e. “struggle between adversaries.” Mouffe explains that “an adversary is an enemy, but a legitimate enemy, one with whom we have some common ground because we have a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy: liberty and equality“ Chantal Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism,” Reihe Politikwissenschaft (Political Science Series), Christine Neuhold and Gertrud Hafner, eds., (Vienna: Department of Political Science, Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), 2000)

7

Laclau, On Populist Reason, 81–82.

8

Sven Lütticken, “Social Media: Practices of (In)Visibility in Contemporary Art,” Afterall 40 (Autumn–Winter 2015); Ekaterina Degot, “The Artist As Director: Artist Organisation International and its Contradictions,” ibid.

9

See “ Statement by the Artistic Director and curatorial team of documenta 14,” e-flux conversations, September 2017 .

10

Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2006).

11

Christian Marazzi, “La dislessia del manager,” in Il Comunismo del Capitale. Finanziarizzazione, biopolitiche del lavoro e crisi globale (Ombre Corte, 2010).