Laboratory for an uncertain future
A letter from Hou Hanru to Hans Ulrich Obrist
Dear HUO,
I was very impressed by your text on Paul Chan. Certainly the question of political engagement in contemporary art activity has become more crucial and urgent than ever, particularly in the USA, where Neo-Imperialism is advancing hand-in-hand with global capitalist power to dominate the world. Contemporary art, like almost every social activity, is being rapidly drawn into that spiral. There has never been more money and space for contemporary art products, and yet, ironically, overwhelming censorship, often in the form of market consensus, prevails. Engaging artists like Paul Chan are becoming increasingly rare, and voices of independence and resistance are being silenced all around the world, in the shadow of splendid edifices for the arts.
To deconstruct the Empire
A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from Chris Gilbert, Matrix curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, announcing his resignation due to the censoring of his project Now-Time, Venezuela, Part 1 with a video installation by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler. He makes it clear that critical cultural and artistic activities are now being systematically censored by the US government and the ‘American bourgeoisie’. He concludes (and I believe Paul Chan and we would agree):
“We live in the midst of a fascist imperialism – there is no other way to describe the system that the US has created and that exercises such control through terror over populations both inside and outside. History has shown that to make ‘deals’ or ‘compromises’ with fascism avails nothing. Instead a radical and daily intransigence is required. Fascism operates to destroy life. It installs and operates on the logic of the camp on all levels, including culture. In the face of that logic, which holds life as nothing, compromises and deals at best buy time for the aggressor and symbolic capital for the aggressor. One should have no illusions: until capitalism and imperialism are brought down, cultural institutions will go on being, in their primary role, lapdogs of a system that spreads misery and death to people everywhere on the planet. The fight to abolish that system completely and build one based on socialism must remain our exclusive and constant focus.” (ref.http://www.ressler.at/content/view/97/lang,en_GB, http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/nowtime/index.html)
Yes, the contemporary art world, after a decade of euphoric self-celebration prompted by the global expansion and prevalence of what we call ‘contemporary art’ incarnated by the creation of numerous biennials, triennials, museums, galleries, specialized and general media for the arts, and the economic success of art fairs, etc., is now somehow awakened by social crisis. We are not only concerned with and reacting to the general geopolitical struggle from Iraq to Palestine, from Sudan to Chechnya [by the way, the Emergency Biennale for Chechnya curated by Evelyne Jouanno (www.emergency-biennale.org) is an absolutely indispensable example]: what is even more serious is the fact that we, and our freedom of expression, are now intimately compromised by all kinds of political, economic, ideological and social powers that form our bio-political environments. Under the pretext of “the war against terror”, a real social and political terror is now being imposed everywhere. Resistance and critiques of such aggressive oppression hence become an urgent challenge, even for the most “independent” and “distant” artist. Recently, in my visits to both the Berlin Biennial and the Whitney Biennial, I was deeply moved by the obvious reappearance of such social-political consciousness, contributing to reconstruct a certain utopian space beyond the grasp of the market and official institutional ideology, in spite of their inevitable negotiations with their established positions in the art system. As Toni Negri and Michael Hardt have pointed out: there is no longer the outside, but a need to mobilize the multitude to deconstruct the Empire from within (ref. Negri and Hardt’s books Empire and Multitude, etc.).
Creating space for political and social engagement
It is in this context that I’d like to send you a translation of the text for the exhibition Laboratoire pour un avenir incertain, which I am curating for the larger exhibition Force de l’Art organized by the French Cultural Ministry at the newly reopened Grand Palais in Paris. In spite of the ‘official’ appearance of the exhibition (in fact, it was initiated by the French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin), it is still possible and necessary to use this opportunity to deconstruct officialdom and open up space for political and social engagement in art, so needed in the current French and international art worlds. I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to see the show, and would like to hear your critical reaction to it. Meanwhile, let me share part of the project text:
‘Laboratory for an uncertain future’
We are living in an uncertain time, especially in France today. Our society, despite progress realized in different fields, is still going through a kind of ambient pessimism. Recent events prove this. The social situation is becoming quasi-explosive, with the French rejection of the European constitution in the referendum, debates on the history of colonization, turmoil in the suburbs, and fear of globalization and transformation of the economic structure, not forgetting the questions of unemployment and everyday violence. As the philosopher Marcel Gauchet remarks: “We can say that in France there is a kind of collective desperation.” (Liberation, 25 Feb 2006)… and the future seems even more uncertain.
What is tricky is that confronted with such an uncertain reality, different social actors start to mobilize themselves, especially via the media, and enter into contradictory but passionate debates, sometimes virulent, in order to devise some kind of recipe for a miracle, while a kind of ideology of total security is winning over public opinion and collective action. Reinforcement of social control and liberalization of the market work perfectly together.
In the meantime, social and cultural conflicts as well as social segregations push us into an arena of incessant struggle, a permanent global war, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt wrote in Empire and Multitude.
In this context, the established power is feeling threatened. It seeks to make its future more certain by any means, including via ‘cultural’ and ‘artistic’ actions.
Like every time of uncertainty, this is also an opportunity to open new spaces for critical voices, without excluding the production of innovative and efficient experiments and solutions. This opportunity is no doubt a challenge for everyone, a veritable artistic, intellectual and social challenge.
By nature, art, and overall, contemporary art, signifies engagement within reality through original languages and images, guiding us towards an imaginary, utopian world, in other words, an unknown and uncertain world.
This also necessarily means that real creative dynamics are possible and unprecedentedly significant. Involvement with the battle of defending and promoting a new alliance between art and reality, between creation and social mutation, is the primary vocation of art. Contemporary art should reinvent itself in order to reclaim its role and its freedom. This is realized through exploring the domain of social critique, memory of history, and the reevaluation of new modes of production and restructuring of society in favour of multiculturalism, the positions of women, of ‘minorities’, of the multitude of forces resisting the dominant powers, and, always, from the perspective of a globalized world. However, this is certainly an uncertain task…
Of course, artistic action is first and foremost an action of experiment, tactics, linked to infinite evolution and changes. The playground of art is an immense laboratory of ideas, critiques, proposals, inventions, permanent redefinitions through collaboration and convergence with other fields and disciplines, from literature, music, architecture, theatre, etc. to social and economic actions. This laboratory is a field of negotiations between utopia, distopia and heterotopia… A new world is thus being continuously imagined, conceived, generated, tested and questioned. In art, we can, and we should, fantasize and produce the future, even if the result can be nothing but an uncertain future!
In closing, dear HUO, I’d like to dedicate this text to our dear friend Liang Juhui, a remarkably original artist and generous comrade in Guangzhou, China, and member of the famous Big Tail Elephant Group (with Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong and Xu Tan). Liang Juhui unfortunately passed away due to a medical accident on 22 May 2006. But he will remain alive forever in our hearts. His work, especially pieces like the performance One Hour Game realized in a Guangzhou construction site in 1996, is among the strongest examples of social engagement in contemporary Chinese and global art. I’d like to share this memory with you, and all those who commit themselves to the struggle for freedom via artistic and cultural actions.
Yours Hanru
Paris, 31 May 2006
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Originally printed in ART iT No.12 Summer/Fall 2006