Padiglione Veditu/ Veditu Pavilion
We waited a while to publish this article, as you will find there a virtual "pavilion" of our collective, which we had prepared in preparation for the Venice Biennale. The success of Anga's campaign about the presence of the Israeli Pavilion convinced us. We have reported only some captions, what you do not find is certainly published on this site.
So you will find a summary of the work of recent years, a not complete but extensive gallery of the work done.
Below is a text that has nothing to do with it except for the fact that it systematizes what we have written here and there on the subject of political art.
It is a bit long, so if you want to skip it go directly to the GALLERY at the end of the article,
The following text has no interest in being all-encompassing, nor will it offer more than a few ideas. There are many examples on which the underlying hypothesis with respect to political art in the time of the Marketplace rests, but each of us will have exceptions in mind. They are fine.
Throughout the text there is not a single artist mentioned. This is because, being a sort of tidy recapitulation of suggestions you find here and there on the site, we would have had to repeat ourselves. What we started from, and also the contradictions, you will find in the posts about what we saw and the interviews we did.
Ethics and morality are frequently two words used as synonyms and on the other hand, it is not strange, bearing in mind that if you open a dictionary, both are defined as 'way of acting, custom, habit, tradition, institution' or so. However, they are words with many nuances, complex, and as we continue reading the vocabulary we will try to explain where the difference that we glimpse lurks and why it interests us.
For instance, there are many instances where we could swap them: Kant's Ethics or Kant's Morals can both mean the theory of right action in Kant's philosophical system. But can the morality of the fable become the ethics of the fable? Morality can be made, but can ethics be made?
We could fill the page with many examples, from the different etymology to the many different usages, but we will spare you that because they are easily found in accessible texts anyway. What we are arguing is that the difference between the two words, what changes, is that for morality we can mean a value judgement on what is right and what is wrong (to be chic we could say axiological, but let's leave it at that), for ethics it is instead a matter of defining what is right and how to direct action towards what is right (let's throw in ontological). Clearly this is a simplification, e.g. just is the most neutral term we have come across, but you know better than we do that the aim of ethics, depending on the system of thought, could be the useful, happiness, pleasure, etc. Some authors, while distinguishing the two words, intertwine them and confuse them, but let's broadly keep it that way.
2) The end of history is one of the key concepts of political scientist Francis Fukuyama's analysis: according to this thesis, the process of mankind's social, economic and political evolution reached its apex at the end of the 20th century, an epochal juncture from which a final phase of the conclusion of history as such is opening up. Significantly published in 1989, it tells us that, revolutionary changes having failed, the dominance of the Market has become unchallenged, and it is pleasant to accept it. This is not a very innovative position, since every story has had its cantor (already in Rome, someone outlined the Empire as the best of all possible worlds).
In the 30 years since, all sorts of things have happened, large international movements moved mainly by young people with the idea that 'Another World is Possible', terrorism, defeats and victories that belied Fukuyama's prophecy. What interests us is that, at a cultural and popular level, never before has the idea of a necessary change in the Market been relegated to minority groups, while the major criticisms we see tend towards partial reforms, whether ethical or moral, of fairness, but without getting to the hard core. When an entire ruling class has to do things in secret so as not to irritate the Market, it is clear where sovereignty has gone. The absence of organised movements for change leads to the solitary parcelling out of the masses, as Giorgio Agamben said in covid times, reflecting on Elias Canetti. That is, the Market as a horizon, politics posing at best as a timid reformer, tends to break the possible critique into rivulets, which sometimes converge and sometimes do not.
Let it be clear that ours is not a nostalgic analysis of times gone by, the other twentieth-century lesson is that one does not necessarily have to reduce differences to one, it is not necessary to cage history and the world in a rigidly dialectical vision, but one can accept to reason, precisely, of multiplicity. This dislike of hierarchies is the reason why we are a collective and why we try as much as possible to look at the market and art in a discreet manner, not using absolute categories if possible (part of this attempt is to accept the contradiction): to the Other we prefer others.
3) Despite all this, the desire to propose political art is widespread. We would never say never, but if you wander around the temples of the Market, the fairs (here you can see our articles on Art Verona and Artissima 2024) you will realise how many galleries and artists claim a political position. So let's not say a few independent galleries or some form of protest to which an artist adheres, but precisely where the Market glitters most glamorously committed art takes hold.
By self-declaration, because the form expressing politicalness, in the author's intentions, is often so laboriously anchored to the subject it deals with that it is difficult to grasp it. Many question how contemporary art, where political, can be interpreted precisely because the theoretical assumption is, quoting ArtTribune (Spaces of Appearance. A work of art can be political even if it does not seem to be, 29 March 2024): 'In general, indeed, we can say that today the more political a work seems, the less political it is. So it is the context that must make this clear: the accompanying text, the space, the title of the individual work or of the exhibition as a whole (for example, Judith Butler at Palazzo Grassi spoke of a space of appearance, quoting Hanna Harendt, as a place dedicated to a collective experience).
The prevailing themes of this commitment are certainly environmental issues, people's rights, a critique of the commodification of life. As a testament to what we have written above, if one takes notice, the issue of labour and exploitation has disappeared, creating these amusing short circuits where the catalogue of a fair can begin by condemning the commodification of art.
4) In his Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Wittgenstein boldly states (without arguing further or at least clarifying) that 'Ethics and aesthetics are one'. And he is not the only one to think so. Tendentially, since we have occasionally dealt with the East, in Confucianism ethics and aesthetics are also extremely linked. For example in the Dialogues, Confucius insists on the ethical importance of the 'attainment of harmony' and the fact that, good or bad, a good person also promotes beauty.
And indeed, in the absence of politics aiming at change, at a different world, the politicalness of a substantial part of what we see clings to what is most innate, thus resulting from some choice or ethical tension. But if in an ideal system political action is closely connected to ethics, the latter, Norberto Bobbio argued, is a part of it, if only because a political choice must pass through a sharing of many, while an ethical choice can also be individual. And it is good that this is so, because an ethical state, understood, quoting Hegel, as 'self-conscious ethical substance', makes politics the sole and indisputable source of right, and when something like this has appeared, it has always looked very much like a dictatorship. The distinction between ethics and politics that we have outlined in the wake of Bobbio becomes evident and declared at every lecture, post, statement in which it is argued (and this is done obsessively), that in order to 'change the world one must first change oneself'.
a) It is certainly a good thing that, despite the Market's self-praising monologue, art feels that all is not well and signals it, in whatever form or context this is expressed. However, as is often emphasised on this site, we do not start from a territory of freedom, but from a conditioning of the historical society in which we find ourselves living, in our case by the Market, of the appetites that move our actions and the anthropological judgements that derive from those appetites. And it is an intimate conditioning, through the installation in us of the institutions that society (the Market) provides us with for the satisfaction of the instinctive tendencies of individual bodies. In this sense, a purely ethical vision cannot but be profoundly influenced by the world in which we are living, in our opinion, even more so than a political perspective. And this is why, although it is a strong position insofar as ethics is not called into question, we are not here in the realm of philosophical reasoning in which we discuss what we mean by ethics, it runs the risk of becoming sectorialised, of insisting on a single specification while ignoring what goes on around it. However, it is also true that, as we saw in the first paragraph, this kind of approach that makes a value judgement on what is right or wrong is called morality. In fact, the impression we get is that just being fashionable makes one prefer the word ethics to moral, since there is really nothing wrong with the latter and indeed it would be more appropriate. But a moral art, like any other human activity so definable, by giving patents of goodness and immorality will tend to speak above all to the good, to the like-minded who share the author's judgement. Let's say we were not interested in climate change, how would we be received at an exhibition of artists committed to the environment? On the other hand, it would be impossible to establish what is moral without feeling right, better than those who make a different choice. In fact, and this goes along with point 3), we can certainly say that, compared to more traditional forms, contemporary art lacks the vocation for proselytism. The fact that, apart from the major events, many contemporary art exhibitions do not shine in terms of participation is not only due to factors inherent to the audience, to the difficulty, for a thousand reasons, of relating to current art forms, but also to the contradiction between the pleasure of being part of an exhibition with many visitors and the lack of interest in having people who are not morally/ethically already aligned. The work is not the thing that supports a political cause, but the terminal of a path of conviction that sees, in participating in an exhibition, the testimony of a decision already made. On the other hand, when one speaks of morality, there is the risk that, without wanting to and even starting from absolutely liberal and modern positions, one could fall into moralism, which would explain the impression of sadness conveyed by some works (and the parties that accompany some openings).
b)Judith Butler says in another text (The Alliance of Bodies): "No body singularly establishes the space of appearance, because this action, this performative exercise, only happens "between" bodies, in a space that constitutes the void between my body and that of the other. Consequently, my body never acts alone when it acts politically." Translated then into the necessity of a well-defined public space, called the space of appearance, in which only the artistic experience can exist, which, in spite of all the conceptual art we want, passes through the involvement of the body. The work of art, in order to have its political significance, must therefore have a specific context, with its own rules, or non-rules. In this perspective, however, we return to the contradictory difficulty of participation, because the public sphere is not created from the free, equal and reciprocal action of a plurality, but rather, at a more original level, from its very borders: without an outside, formed by those who lack the possibility of appearing, one could not in fact identify an inside. The inclusive effort, which such a situation requires, to make the borders permeable to the possibility of participation, is, as is evident from what has been said so far, particularly complicated in an ethical option of the political message. In the recent past, a whole model of thought, alternative to that of the great systems of art, has attempted to construct experiences, if not the same, driven by ideas that suggest the space imagined by Butler.
For instance, let us talk about performance studies, and to make it easy, let us not enter into the debate between them, but take the theories of Richard Shechner (1980s/90s), one of the founders, if only because he believes that there exists, in performance and ritual play, a set of rules intended to determine another time, another space and another end, such as to make the distinction between these practices and so-called 'real life' inescapable. In particular, here too there must be a formal structure, with a beginning, an unfolding and an end; gestures 'recovered' from routines, habits, cultural elements consolidated by the participating community are used, even in the most experimental performances and in the oldest rituals; space, in rituals as in performances, besides being different, can become separate.
Second and last example (sparing you happenings and Temporarily Liberated Zones) is the Situationist drift (1960s), i.e. a technique of exploration that consists of moving through urban environments without a predefined direction, allowing the landscape and situations encountered to guide the experience. It too has its own rules, as otherwise one loses the purpose, which is to escape from the spectacular mediation of the marketplace and experience things directly with one's own body and perceptions. The creation of temporary spaces and fleeting experiences, which exist only for the duration of the exploration, involves their separateness from everyday life, and in this case it is necessary for a small group of people to drift along for a limited period of time.
These three cases, from different times and with different basic thoughts, albeit in a simplified reading in which we do not highlight the differences, represent decentralised modes of political criticism with respect to the more institutional forms, but certainly in the involvement of the body and the recovery of community forms that allow artistic action through a system of rules, as in ritual, from Debord to Butler, a possibility of political action is outlined that is perhaps interesting for contemporary times. After all, for Shechner, performances were essentially models of utopian societies.
c)When it comes to a political claim, however, there is a paradigm shift and exceptions to everything argued in (a) are created. For example, the case of ANGA, Art Not Genocide Alliance. The issue is well known and it is a manifestation of artists* who demanded the exclusion of the Israeli pavilion from the Venice Biennale, condemning the genocide that state is committing against the Palestinians. Starting from the consideration that 'Art does not exist in a vacuum (certainly not in a "bubble") and cannot transcend reality', their manifesto describes what is happening in Palestine and calls for the exclusion of the Pavilion through a true political analysis, in which not once does the word "ethics" appear. Thousands of artists* responded to the call and the Biennale was forced to respond to their objections, thus taking the movement as a credible interlocutor. What does ANGA do? It organises a fundraiser to finance the continuation of the campaign, thus leaving the network and entering reality, it opens a Palestinian pavilion, it organises a widespread exhibition, it communicates by means of posters, flyers, materials often self-produced by adherents. It even organises events for the closure of the pavilion, and as many events have been held in various parts of the world independently. There are two things in particular that struck us: first, the map of complicity, that is, of states that are complicit in promoting and supporting Israeli aggression. This is an accurate representation of a political assessment shared in discussions, both online and in presence, and which precisely analyses the network of support and motivations that drive some states to support Israel, understanding the relative importance and fragility of nation states in the Marketplace. The other theme is the form that joining the campaign takes, i.e. the works inspired by it that have been 'donated' to support it. Many of them you can find on their Instagram page and they certainly contradict the theory of political art that it does not have to look like it to be effective. All the works are extremely explicit about the message they want to spread, beyond even the usual artistic practice of the individual artist. The ArTribune crowd would say that they resemble tazebaus, but it is clear that, in certain circumstances, there is a need to move away from the forms suggested by the art system hinged on the Market, so much so that its established language and forms are questioned. Now, it is not that we all want to say do this and we are fine. But the idea of being able to discuss, if we want to deterritorialise, the language codified by the Market, through the mediation of curators and galleries that rightly think about that, even at the cost of being criticised by the sector magazines, is in our opinion fundamental in the attempt to create new concepts.
Also because language in the Market tends, for many reasons, to simplify. If we think of speech, for example, although an adult person has an active vocabulary of 10,000/15,000 words in everyday life, he uses 800/1000. In art, it is no different and, if we remain within the framework of the established language, our critical capacity also loses complexity and potential. To renounce an escape, however thought out or attempted, even temporarily, from the language of the market, with all the risk that this entails, is to remain, perhaps critically, in the happy territories described 30 years ago by Fukuyama.