Art as Capital by Polona Tratnik

Author:Polona Tratnik
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538154236
Publisher: Polona Tratnik

Figure 6.4 Eva & Franco Mattes, press clippings on Darko Maver, 1998–2000. Courtesy of the artists. Darko Maver was an art project about a nonexisting “war” artist that was arrested for his brutal art interventions and then found dead in his prison cell in Priština on April 30, 1999. Free Art Campaign sent a press release to the national press agency ANSA claiming the death was suspicious. In the world of art, protesting response to the maltreating of the artist was huge.

Figure 6.5 Eva & Franco Mattes, Darko Maver(Deposition), 1999. Found photograph, frames, caption. 73.5 × 94.5 × 4.5 cm. Courtesy of the artists. The artists used found photographs and disseminated the news that those were images of the leftovers of artistic interventions by the artist Darko Maver, which took place in abandoned places and hotels with life-sized dummies from wax.

In its essay “Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance,” the art collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) explains how structured, present, and centralized power began to dissolve into its absent, invisible, and decentralized form of today: what once was resistance is now domination, and vice versa. CAE also speaks about vectors of world power that has now extended into virtuality. For CAE, however, keeping afloat does not necessarily mean agreeing and cooperating. Although in an awkward position, political and cultural activists can still produce disturbances (CAE n.d., 12). Even CAE finds the former strategies of subversion or concealed attack questionable, for knowing what to subvert presupposes that forces of oppression are unchangeable and can be defined and eliminated (Ibid.). Today, the modes of subversive strategies depend on the power. In the 1980s, Fredric Jameson observed that “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover” (Jameson 1992, 4). But CAE believes that credit should be given to those who resist and that a subversive act or product is not as quickly made over as the bourgeois aesthetic of efficiency dictates (CAE n.d., 12). The group observes that contemporary society is peculiar in terms of its nomadic power. The power field is diffused, without a location or a solid, fixed point, and presents itself as a spectacle. We may notice a shift from archaic space to an electronic network. Although technology connects the diffused power field and the sight machine, which both make up the global Empire, the power field is now typically nomadic—in such a panoptic spatial lock-down (to reference Michel Foucault), the site of resistance needs not necessarily be defined, for the power of the nomads is the greatest when they are not forced to take a defensive position (Ibid., 15‒16).

CAE wonders how it is possible to critically assess a subject that cannot be located, studied, or even seen. Appeals to revolution (on the part of the Situationists, for example) are a dead strategy for they require impractical unity and historical attempts of taking possession through occupation have led to poor results.

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