Martens vs. KIRAC: Do Extremes Meet?
Thijs Lijster
University of Groningen
t.e.lijster@rug.nl
Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 115.4 (2023), 362–376. https://doi.org/10.5117/ANTW2023.4.002.LIJS
© Thijs Lijster
Abstract
Martens vs. KIRAC: les extrêmes se touchent?
This paper discusses the relationship between art and politics by taking Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation on the ‘politicization of art’ and the ‘aestheticization of politics’ as a starting point. The work of Dutch artist Renzo Martens and the work of art collective KIRAC are considered to be exemplifying the two sides of Benjamin’s formulation, and at the same time as representative of wider tendencies of the contemporary art world. I argue that, in their extreme and contradictory positions, these sides also share a common, art-hostile moment, one that I counter with a conception of art as ‘acting as if’ (doen alsof) – with the dual dimension of acting (a form of praxis or performance) and ‘as if’ (imagined). Based on this idea of ‘acting as if’ I argue that art’s relationship to politics is one of productive contradiction.
Keywords: art and politics, aestheticization of politics, politicization of art, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Rancière
‘The dialectic of modern art consists to a considerable extent in its wish to shed its character as semblance, as animals shed the antlers they have grown.’ — Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie
Prologue: art and politics, once again
The question of the relationship between art and politics is an age-old one in philosophical aesthetics. Ever since Kant defined aesthetic judgment as ‘disinterested’, and Schiller characterized art itself as useless in a positive sense, the two spheres have been something like opposites that attract one another and dance around each other. Sometimes one turns its back on the other, as in the nineteenth-century l’art pour l’art movement and decadentism; sometimes they temporarily move in tandem and extend one another, as in surrealism or situationism; and sometimes one is entirely subordinated to the other, as in socialist realism (Raunig 2007).
Today there are at least two reasons, one artistic and one philosophical, to reconsider the relationship between art and politics. The artistic reason is that this relationship has once again become a fraught issue in the art world over the past few years. We could see this, for example, in Sara Vos’s documentary White Balls on Walls (Engel and Vos 2022), which follows the director and staff of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum as they work to implement diversity and inclusion policies, urged on by the alderman for culture. Both the staff and the artists exhibited are predominantly white, Western and male, raising questions about the museum’s representative function and how criteria of quality are established. Although few dispute the need for an inclusive museum, there is considerable debate about precisely what this means. Concerns are expressed both by artists of colour, who rightly resist being invited as tokens rather than on their artistic merits, and by those who argue that ‘politically correct’ considerations are taking precedence over aesthetic ones. The museum as a ‘reflection of society’ thus seems to be in tension with the museum as a place where the viewer’s worldview is challenged and questioned.
The philosophical reason lies in the considerable influence of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière on contemporary thinking about art and politics. Rancière has stressed that asking about the relationship between art and politics is actually asking the wrong question, since it already presupposes that we are dealing with two separate domains. Against this, Rancière emphasizes that politics has an aesthetic dimension and, conversely, aesthetics a political one. Both art and politics are ways of organizing and distributing the sensible (partage du sensible), so the question is not whether but how they are connected. The idea of art’s ‘autonomy’, which emerges from the eighteenth century onwards in what Rancière calls the ‘aesthetic regime’, therefore does not mean that art becomes an apolitical domain. Rather, it organizes the ‘sensorily perceptible’ in a way that differs from the existing political order: against the prevailing consensus, art is a form of dissensus. This is also where its political power resides, although we cannot say in advance that it will have an actual political effect. As Rancière puts it in his essay ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’:
The effect of a museum, a book or a theatre depends first on the presentation they bring about, and only then on the content of a work of art. But this effect defines neither a political strategy of art as such nor a calculable contribution by art to political action. (Rancière 2015: 67)
In both cases, in Rancière as in the so-called ‘inclusivity debate’, art is regarded as fundamentally political, regardless of whether we are dealing with explicitly ‘engaged’ art or with art supposed to convey a clear political message. Art is always already political, to use Derrida’s favourite interjection (toujours déjà). But this also threatens to make art’s political character a truism or a tautology: if art is always already political, what are we actually saying? Moreover, can we still say anything about the kind of politics art conveys, or about how particular forms of political organization relate to artistic forms?
In light of that last question, I want to juxtapose two artists in this article—or, more precisely, an artist and a collective: Renzo Martens and KIRAC, short for Keeping It Real Art Critics. As I will argue, each exemplifies an opposing tendency in contemporary art, which, following Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation, I characterize respectively as the ‘politicization of art’ and the ‘aestheticization of politics’ (Benjamin 2008: 43). Although Benjamin used these formulations in his famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1936) to characterize communism and fascism respectively, I do not want to assign either of these artists to a particular political camp in advance. My concern is with how art and politics intermingle in their work. I therefore see their work not merely as examples or case studies, but as contributions in their own right to a philosophical conversation about art and politics—a conversation I want to reconstruct and make explicit in what follows.[1]
I will first discuss Martens’s work in light of Benjamin’s ‘politicization of art’, and KIRAC in light of the ‘aestheticization of politics’. I will then argue that, precisely in their opposing positions, they also share something: a certain hostility to art. By thinking this through, I ultimately want to arrive at a positive point of contact between them, one that can also connect art and politics.
Finally, a remark about the selection of these artists. Beyond a personal fascination, the choice was prompted by the wide attention their work has attracted in recent years, including outside the art world, making it part of public debates about the relationship between art and politics. In light of the debates about inclusivity and diversity already mentioned, the choice of predominantly white, Western, male artists yet again may seem remarkable or even misplaced. I nevertheless think it can be justified precisely because these works explicitly reflect on the meaning of that position, which is also my own. This provides an opportunity to challenge the dominance of whiteness, masculinity and the Western gaze in thinking about art.
The politicization of art: Renzo Martens
Benjamin’s formulation is often misunderstood. By the ‘politicization of art’, he had in mind not so much politically engaged art as a redistribution of the ‘means of production’ within the domain of art. As is well known, his artwork essay concerned the way media such as photography and film undermined the work of art’s ‘aura’: its authenticity and its significance within tradition. Technological reproducibility not only makes art itself more everyday, since it is potentially ubiquitous; it also places the ability to create images in the hands of the masses, where previously it was reserved for an elite. For Benjamin, politically revolutionary art is not so much art that addresses political themes as art that itself attempts to revolutionize the relations of production. As he puts it in his lecture Der Autor als Produzent (1934): ‘Rather than asking, then, what attitude a work takes towards the relations of production of its time, I would like to ask: what is its position within the relations of production?’ (Benjamin 1977: 686)
This last question also seems to be what is at stake in Renzo Martens’s work. Martens is a Dutch artist whose work consists of documentary films in which he himself plays a leading role and which report on projects, mainly in conflict zones. His international breakthrough came with Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), which follows Martens on his travels through Congo as he spreads the message that poverty is in fact the country’s most important export product. His aim is to make the local population aware of this so that they themselves can reap the ‘fruits’ of their poverty, instead of the international press agencies and NGOs that currently earn most of the money from it. He shows Congolese photographers, for instance, how they can make more money photographing starving children and war victims than weddings and parties. Yet when they approach an international press agency with their new photographs, accompanied by Martens, they are turned away. In the film’s final scenes, we see Martens travelling through the jungle on a raft bearing the message ‘Please enjoy poverty’ in neon letters.
In the documentary’s follow-up, White Cube (2020), Martens has an art centre and museum built on a former plantation in Lusanga, Congo, in order, as he puts it, to gentrify the jungle. According to the popular urban geographer Richard Florida, art and the creative industries lead to economic prosperity and rising property prices, which is precisely what Martens wants to achieve in Congo. A by-product of this latest project was the establishment of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), a group of plantation workers and artists whose sculptures are scanned in Congo, 3D-printed in chocolate and sold in Western museums. Martens and CATPC were recently invited to represent the Netherlands at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Martens’s projects seem like provocations or tasteless jokes: ‘It sounds like a sick joke’, as The Guardian wrote of the White Cube project (Jeffries 2014). Enjoy Poverty in particular contains an element of what Slavoj Žižek, in his interpretation of the Slovenian band Laibach, calls the strategy of ‘over-identification’: carrying a system or ideology through, in thought and practice, so consistently that its absurdity and perversity become unmistakably apparent (Žižek 2006). In his films Martens often appears in a suit and a starched white shirt, deliberately playing the role of the neocolonial missionary or teacher who comes to explain to the local population how to escape poverty, as in Enjoy Poverty, or that of the property entrepreneur or developer who has to evict people from their homes—naturally to his great regret and for their own good—to realize his creative quarter. The association with Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, who wanted to build an opera house in Peru, is also obvious.
Insofar as his works are jokes, they have a serious purpose. They direct attention to the economic basis of the contemporary art world and expose its perversely unequal relations of production. In Enjoy Poverty, Martens explains to the Congolese that he cannot do anything for them because he is making a work of art for ‘the people back home’. This makes the viewer complicit in what they see and reveals who is actually ‘enjoying’ the poverty. According to Martens, the inspiration for his White Cube came when, having become famous, he was invited to exhibit in the Turbine Hall, where works by Ai Weiwei and Tino Seghal were shown in the prestigious Unilever Series. For Martens, there was a bitter irony in the fact that all this deeply socially engaged art was financed by the heirs of William Lever, who had accumulated his capital in Congo by exploiting and dispossessing plantation workers. The White Cube is not only a kind of re-enactment of that violence but also an attempt to let some of the capital flow back to the plantation workers through art.
In Der Autor als Produzent, Walter Benjamin sharply criticized tendentious art and the neue Sachlichkeit, which in his view sought to make even poverty a source of aesthetic pleasure. An echo of that criticism can be found in Martens: it is not enough to make poverty, war or inequality the subject of art without also thinking about the material and economic conditions and circumstances in which such ‘critical’ art is produced.
His work thus intervenes in a debate in philosophical aesthetics familiar from, among others, Theodor W. Adorno, Susan Sontag and Rancière, concerning how injustice and human suffering can be addressed and represented responsibly and with integrity. In doing so, he is acutely aware of his own position as a Western, white, male artist and the privileges it entails. Yet it is precisely from that position that he can also map and redirect the art world’s flows of money and power.
The aestheticization of politics: KIRAC
What Benjamin means by an ‘aestheticization of politics’ is not self-evident either. He was thinking primarily of the way fascism approaches politics as an aesthetic spectacle: no longer as a struggle over economic power, or even ideas, but as a ‘cult’ centred on the people and the leader.[2] The artwork’s enchanting ‘aura’, which technological reproducibility had been destroying, is transferred to politics, as it were. As an example, Benjamin quotes the futurist Marinetti: ‘War is beautiful because it enriches a meadow in bloom with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it unites gunfire, cannonades, the pauses between shots, the smells and the stench of decay into a symphony.’ (Benjamin 2008: 42)
Without wishing to place them in a particular political or ideological camp, we can nevertheless say that KIRAC exhibits the same radically aesthetic and aestheticizing attitude towards the world as Marinetti. KIRAC’s Stefan Ruitenbeek put it as follows in an interview: ‘Just as the Impressionists began painting syphilis and whores in the bar instead of the mythological creatures that were popular at the time, we too want to portray present-day reality in our films. That includes that crazy trench-warfare situation, that polarization you see on Twitter. […] I want to make beauty out of that misery.’ (De Nieuwe Wereld 2022)
KIRAC is the name under which Ruitenbeek and his wife Kate Sinha operate. Like Martens, they themselves are the protagonists of their films. Their friend, the painter Tarik Sadouma, also appears frequently, along with recurring figures such as the patron Philip van den Hurk and porn actress Jini Jane, although it remains unclear exactly who belongs to ‘team KIRAC’, and to what extent it really is a ‘collective’. KIRAC makes documentary-like films that take aim at the art-world establishment. In their view, it revolves mainly around good intentions, money and self-congratulation. They had already built a certain reputation within the Dutch art world with their first film in 2016, ‘Indignation in De Appel’, which puts an exhibition at the Amsterdam arts centre through the wringer. Their subsequent films, ranging from ten minutes to an hour and a half, include critical discussions of the #MeToo movement and documenta 14, which they call a ‘propaganda machine’. Their other ‘victims’ include major art-world names such as Charles Esche, Rem Koolhaas, Beatrix Ruf and Renzo Martens himself.
They became known to a wider public when the Rietveld Academy cancelled a screening of one of their films in 2018 following complaints from students. The source of offence was an article by Sinha about the Stedelijk Museum’s ‘left-wing engaged indifference’, and more specifically the Zanele Muholi exhibition, ‘where the visitor was expected to take an interest in the lazy concoctions of a spoiled slut simply because she is from South Africa, lesbian and black’ (Sinha 2017). For KIRAC, the cancellation prompted a tirade about cancel culture and safe spaces at art academies, winning them an appreciative audience at GeenStijl, The Post Online and other New Right outlets.
Yet they are not so easily placed on the political spectrum. Hardly had they been embraced by the populist right when they produced a film about Sid Lukkassen, an ultraconservative writer associated with Forum for Democracy who, in books such as Avondland en identiteit, complains about ‘female sexual selection power’, advocates a right-wing social pillar and openly fantasizes about armed struggle against the left-wing intelligentsia. For the film Honey Pot (Studio KIRAC and Ruitenbeek 2021), KIRAC persuaded Lukkassen to be filmed on a date with the ‘left-wing girl’ Jini, who had previously announced in an online appeal that she wanted to have sex with a ‘right-wing’ person to combat political polarization. In the film, however, Jini backs out just before the act, unhappy with the cheap chocolates the intellectual has brought. Despite Lukkassen’s subsequent pleas not to use the footage for fear of damage to his reputation—also captured on camera—the film was screened, including at the debate centre De Balie. It brought KIRAC criticism from across the political spectrum: from the right, which now apparently felt that there were limits to freedom of expression after all, to the left, which dismissed the film as a form of revenge porn. Moreover, at a screening in KIRAC’s so-called ‘Unsafe House’, Julian Andeweg makes an appearance. An artist then suspected of sexually abusing several women, and since convicted of assault and rape, he was nevertheless literally put on a horse by KIRAC and declared ‘uncancelled’. Internationally, KIRAC caused a stir through a collaboration with the French writer Michel Houellebecq, who was to appear in a pornographic film. After the film’s trailer was released, Houellebecq wanted to withdraw his participation and prohibit KIRAC from using the footage. Several court cases followed.
As noted, KIRAC began as a critique of the art business and the art world. The interplay of political forces, the money and prestige, the intellectual phrases and well-intentioned left-wing engagement within it are approached first and foremost as aesthetic forms, which they adopt the role of art critics to dissect. Once they themselves began to take part in media controversies, those controversies—between woke lefties and right-wing incels—became part of the aesthetic spectacle in turn. In Ruitenbeek’s words, they want to make beauty out of all this ‘misery’.
But this also means that they are radically amoral. They have no qualms about insulting people on camera, ridiculing them or reducing them to tears, recording and broadcasting telephone conversations without permission, or provoking arguments and confrontations that are then furnished with ironic voice-over commentary or subjected to Sinha’s psychological and philosophical analysis. ‘Fiat ars – pereat mundus’: let art be created even if the world perishes, is how Benjamin sums up this attitude. This is what I mean by KIRAC’s ‘aestheticization of politics’: a nihilistic and carnivalesque approach to politics and culture, which increasingly raises the question of what values they themselves stand for.
Extremes
In many respects, Martens and KIRAC could hardly seem further apart in their working methods, attitudes and political orientations. In this, they also exemplify two broader tendencies in the relationship between art and politics. On the one hand, art—in the form of institutional, feminist and decolonial critique, ‘artivism’, community art and participatory art—has become increasingly intertwined with, or even entirely absorbed into, activism and social work (see, among others, Bishop 2012). Consider, for example, the recent documenta 15 of 2023, under the artistic direction of the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa. Its motto was ‘Make friends, not art’, and there was a great deal of cooking, skateboarding and karaoke singing, but much less art exhibited in the traditional sense.
On the other hand, there is a movement that, by way of Dada, South Park and Milo Yiannopoulos, culminates in an attitude that makes irony, black humour and transgression the highest values. As noted, KIRAC certainly cannot be directly identified with the alt-right. What it does share with the alt-right, however, is the Nietzschean notion that genuine counterculture today must first and foremost attack the left’s political correctness and slave morality, as well as an aesthetic attitude inspired by Sade and Bataille in which transgression is regarded as the highest good (Nagle 2017).
Despite this opposition, I want to argue that these movements meet precisely in their extreme and exemplary forms, insofar as both sides display a certain contempt for art. Both the politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics ultimately make art their victim. In KIRAC’s case, the hostility to art seems clearest, at least at first sight. Their films appeal to an audience that already had little time for contemporary art, because they confirm the suspicion that the entire art world consists of nothing but opportunists, emperors without clothes who guzzle white wine and subsidies and, on top of that, display a kind of totalitarian intolerance towards dissenting voices. It remains unclear whether any art actually meets with their approval—when Ruitenbeek is asked, he generally refers to his own films—or whether the beauty KIRAC is seeking can still be found within the domain of the arts at all. Martens, too, often displays a disdain for art in interviews, albeit half-ironic and half-sincere. Of his ‘creative incubator’ in Lusanga, for example, he remarks: ‘If the Stedelijk buys a single drawing by a Congolese worker, that already amounts to several years’ wages. Every person is creative; art isn’t that difficult’ (Boogaard 2012). And in a short documentary about his work in the Hollandse Meesters series (Interakt and Gerrets n.d.), he says: ‘Just making nice art—that’s not for me.’ Of the members of CATPC: ‘Of course, no one here is officially an artist; they were simply plantation workers. But after a while, well, none of it is that difficult, of course, they just started making drawings and sculpture.’ As noted, it is unclear how seriously we should take such statements, because Martens often remains in his role as a colonial schoolmaster in public appearances and on camera. It is clear, however, that the actual sculptures and/or drawings are not what Martens is concerned with. His work is immaterial, or institutional, centred on the so-called Institute for Human Activities, which exposes the economic flows within the international art world. The question, however, is whether this does an injustice not only to the images he himself creates and their power, but also to the work of Congolese artists such as Mathieu Kasiama, who make the sculptures printed in chocolate.
Such rhetoric hostile to art is, of course, nothing new within art itself. The Futurists already called for museums to be blown up, Duchamp drew a little moustache on the Mona Lisa, the feminist artists’ collective Guerrilla Girls complained of ‘White balls on walls’, from which Sara Vos’s documentary takes its title, and Banksy put a freshly auctioned work through a paper shredder—after which, incidentally, it only increased in value. And indeed, in Benjamin’s words, there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism (Benjamin 1996: 146). Yet what comes under pressure when we write off art because of its share in barbarism, or conversely elevate barbarism into art, is precisely the domain from which we can reflect on barbarism.
Taking the dialectic further
In a notorious, because highly critical, response to Benjamin’s artwork essay, Theodor W. Adorno argued that Benjamin needed to take the oppositions he posited ‘further dialectically’ (Adorno and Benjamin 1994: 173). I want to attempt the same in what follows, not so much by seeking a golden mean between these two tendencies as by examining how and where the extremes of Martens and KIRAC can also meet in a positive sense: where, despite themselves, they demarcate and defend a domain for art.
Adorno harboured no more illusions about culture than Benjamin. In Negative Dialectics (1966), referring to Bertolt Brecht, he writes that its palace is built out of dog shit. But, he continues, while anyone who argues for the preservation of culture is an accomplice, anyone who simply writes it off, from an ideal of purity or a wish to make a clean sweep, directly promotes barbarism (Adorno 2014: 415–416). This is precisely what one might call the ‘antinomy of autonomy’ of contemporary art in Adorno: a contradiction whereby art must neither stubbornly cling to its autonomy, because of the material conditions underlying it—the ‘dog shit’ out of which the palace of culture is built—nor simply reject that autonomy, because of the continuing possibility of reflecting on those material conditions in a way that other institutional domains cannot. Autonomy is then understood not only, or not so much, in institutional or economic terms, but above all in ontological terms. In other words, art is a domain that, as semblance and by virtue of its ‘imaginary’ character, transcends reality: a domain of ‘acting as if’ that is precisely thereby able to take a critical stance towards the social totality. After all, from within and through this imagination, we are also able in a sense to step ‘outside’ the world and imagine things differently from how they actually are. In Ästhetische Theorie, Adorno therefore speaks of an ‘Errettung des Scheins’, a formulation that simultaneously identifies aesthetic semblance as what must be saved and attributes to it the power to save (Adorno 1970: 163–167).
This is ultimately also where KIRAC and Martens meet, this time in a positive sense. Elsewhere, I have ‘defended KIRAC against their admirers’, because at their best they engage in a kind of ‘critique of institutional critique’ (Lijster 2019b). They then seem to want to protect art against the purely moral and moralizing gaze, and therefore also against those who reduce art wholesale to machinations, money, power and corruption. ‘Where does this distrust of art come from?’ Kate Sinha wonders in one of their films (KIRAC 2019). Is it still possible to talk about art and enjoy it without asking whether the work subscribes to the right moral values or political outlook, and without paying attention to the number of ‘boxes’ the artist ticks?
Martens does admittedly practise this kind of institutional critique. In the short documentary quoted earlier, for instance, he says: ‘Art almost never has positive consequences for poor people’, effectively answering Sinha’s question. Yet he, too, does not want to abolish art: ultimately, his concern is to ‘save’ it. He once said in an interview: ‘A work of art has to be a reflection on what it itself is. So if you exhibit fantastic artworks by the greatest artists, and those works have no awareness that they are paid for by underpaid labour and sponsored by abject poverty, then they are simply bad artworks’ (Interakt and Gerrets n.d.). What is interesting about this quotation is that he condemns the works not only, or not so much, politically, but specifically as artworks. Here again there is an echo of Adorno, who wrote in Ästhetische Theorie: ‘If it [art, TL] is perceived in strictly aesthetic terms, it is not properly perceived aesthetically’ (Adorno 1970: 17). The second part of this quotation is crucial. Adorno is saying that when we consider the artwork in isolation, ‘strictly aesthetically’, we not only have a blind spot for social reality, but also do an injustice to the artwork itself and to aesthetics as such.
Art as the domain of the ‘as if’, the als ob that Kant already wrote about in his Critique of Judgment, is precisely what makes cultural and social criticism possible.[3] But art is not merely the as if; it is acting as if. If there is something for which we can reproach Adorno, it is that he placed too little emphasis precisely on that acting, on art’s praxis or performativity. Art not only represents something or makes it present; it is also part of a praxis and, as such, brings something about. By this I do not mean that only explicitly socially critical art is valuable. Rather, the reverse: valuable art in fact always already entails a form of criticism, insofar as it critically reflects on its own status as ‘acting as if’.
It is in this interplay of ‘acting’ and ‘as if’ that both the strength and the pitfall of Martens and KIRAC become apparent. KIRAC began as criticism of and within the art world, particularly of the predictable political ideals art presumed to espouse. As their gaze widened to encompass the political game outside the art world, the domain of the ‘as if’ also expanded, as it were entropically, until absolutely everything became part of their spectacle. The gaze of the art critic, which is explicitly made a theme—and in a certain sense parodied—in relation to an exhibition at De Appel, is applied as a matter of course in later films to political, cultural and social controversies. Even the ‘fascist’ Lukkassen, as Ruitenbeek calls him, must be made into art, into beauty. But the question is whether such an amoral, aestheticizing gaze is always legitimate outside art. That question is not asked, and the conditions that make such a gaze possible are not examined either. Although they themselves increasingly become part of the conflicts they portray, culminating in Houellebecq’s lawsuit against them, which Ruitenbeek says will become part of the film, they paradoxically disappear from view. Moreover, it makes KIRAC impervious to any form of criticism, since they always operate within art’s safe harbour.
Whereas in KIRAC art entropically swallows up society, Martens faces the threat of an implosion. His pitfall is that he, and art along with him, disappears into the ‘good works’ he brings about in Lusanga. His recent work lacks the cutting irony of Enjoy Poverty, which is perhaps understandable given how difficult a position it is to sustain. But he also struggles with his own ‘platform’ as an artist, as well as the platforms his international fame enables him to offer other, Congolese artists. Martens also seems increasingly uninterested in institutional critique and his own position within it. As a result, however, his work increasingly becomes precisely what he initially criticized: humanitarian work. He, too, gradually disappears from view, admittedly with the noble aim of ‘passing the microphone’ and ceasing to treat the representation of inequality as a privilege of white people, but at the expense of his art’s self-aware, reflective character.
The position of art in modernity, as both Adorno and Benjamin teach us, is full of contradictions. It navigates back and forth between the wish to make itself superfluous, to merge into life and praxis, and the need to carve out a domain for itself from which to voice radical criticism. That contradiction cannot be resolved. What matters is to persist within it, express it and explicitly make it a theme. Art must be defended not despite barbarism, despite the dog shit, but because of it.
Notes
[1] This is in keeping with the understanding of the artwork as a thing-that-thinks, which I previously set out in my book Kijken, proeven, denken (Lijster 2019a).
[2] Thus he writes that fascism ‘attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without altering property relations’. It does this by ‘giving these masses a chance to express themselves, instead of allowing them to obtain their rights’ (Benjamin 2008: 41).
[3] I refer to the famous section 40 of the Critique of Judgment, where Kant discusses the sensus communis. Kant emphasizes that we weigh our aesthetic judgment of taste ‘as it were’ (als ob) against that of the whole of humanity, or, as he continues, that ‘we weigh our judgment not so much against the actual as against the merely possible judgments of others, and put ourselves in the position of everyone else, solely by abstracting from the limitations that happen to be connected with our own judgment’ (Kant 2009: 188–189). In other words, according to Kant, the ‘community’ to which we relate in making judgments takes the form of an as if. This means that by appealing to the sensus communis, or ‘common sense’, we anticipate a community that does not actually exist yet. Not because it is merely fictional, but because it depends on the power of the imagination. Or, as Arendt writes in her lectures on Kant: ‘[T]hanks to the power of the imagination, others are made present: critical thinking moves into a potentially public space that is open on all sides’ (Arendt 2016: 184).
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About the author
Thijs Lijster is an assistant professor of philosophy of art and culture at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. His research lies at the intersection of critical social theory and philosophical aesthetics. His books include De grote vlucht inwaarts (2016), Kijken, proeven, denken (2019) and Wat we gemeen hebben (2022).