Political Aesthetics: A New Beginning – YEAR 2| RAYVENN SHALEIGHA D'CLARK| THEORETICAL

The aestheticization of politics was an idea first coined by Walter Benjamin as being a key ingredient to Fascist regimes.

In this theory, life and the affairs of living are conceived of as innately artistic, and related to as such politically. Politics are in turn viewed as artistic, and structured like an art form which reciprocates the artistic conception of life being seen as art.

This has also been noted as being connected to the Italian Futurist movement and postulated as its main motivation for getting involved in the Fascist regime of Italy.

Alternately, the term “the politicization of aesthetics” has been used as a term for an ideologically opposing synthesis, sometimes associated with the Soviet Union, wherein art is ultimately subordinate to political life and thus a result of it, separate from it, but which is attempted to be incorporated for political use as theory relating to the consequential political nature of art. The author Emilio Gentile has stressed that these two ideas are not mutually exclusive, and both regimes had a large degree of the other. Alexander Gray is a modern advocate of this theory and has two publications on it. In Benjamin’s original formulation, however, the politicization of aesthetics was treated conceptually as the polar opposite of the aestheticization of politics, the former treated as a kind of revolutionary praxis, redeeming force, or ‘antidote’ to the corrupting fascistic influence of the latter.

Hans Haacke

Condensation Cube,

begun 1965, completed 2008; Plexiglas and water;

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

During his formative years in Germany, he was a member of Zero (an international group of artist, active ca. 1957-1966). This group was held together with common motivations: the longing to re-harmonize man and nature and to restore art’s metaphysical dimension. They sought to organize the pictorial surface without using traditional devices.

Although their methods differed greatly, most of the work was monochromatic, geometric, kinetic, and gestural.

But most of all they used nontraditional materials such as industrial materials, fire and water, light, and kinetic effects. The influence of the Zero group and the materials they used is clear in Haacke’s early work from his paintings that allude to movement and expression to his early installations that are formally minimal and use earthly elements as materials.

These early installations focused on systems and processes. Condensation Cube (1963–65) embodies a physical occurrence, of the condensation cycle, in real time. Some of the themes in these works from the 1960s include the interactions of physical and biological systems, living animals, plants, and the states of water and the wind. He also made forays into land art, but by the end of the 1960s his art had found a more specific focus.

90’s: Appropriation and Copyright

Haacke’s controversial 1990 painting Cowboy with Cigarette turned Picasso’s Man with a Hat (1912–13) into a cigarette advertisement.

The work was a reaction to the Phillip Morris company’s sponsorship of a 1989–90 exhibition about Cubism at the Museum of Modern Art.

Political Commentary:

Hans Haacke, Sanitation, Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York (2000)

At the 2000 Whitney Biennial, at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York, Haacke presented a piece that is a direct reaction to art censorship. The piece called Sanitation featured six anti-art quotes from US political figures on each side of mounted American flags.

The quotes were in a Gothic style script typeface once favored by Hitler’s Third Reich. On the floor was an excerpt of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech and expression. Lined up against the wall were a dozen garbage cans with speakers emitting military marching sounds.

Haacke notes that “freedom of expression is the focus of the work”.

Writings and Publications:

On being considered a political artist Haacke says:

“it is uncomfortable for me to be a politicized artist…. the work of an artist with such a label is in danger of being understood one dimensionally without exception…. all artwork have a political component whether its intended or not”.

Jack Burnham comments on Haacke’s political growth and links its roots to exposure to a time of political unrest in the US surrounding the Vietnam War. Burnham also points to Haacke’s joining the Arts Workers Coalition and the boycott of the São Paulo Bienal in Brazil in 1969 as catalyst for the artist’s work to take a political direction.

Hans Haacke, Blue Sail, 1964-1965

The Whitechapel Series – ‘The Everyday’

Chelsea College of Arts [709.04 EVE]

http://shop.whitechapelgallery.org/products/the-everyday

Artists surveyed include Chantal Akerman, Francis Alÿs, Vladimir Arkhipov, Ian Breakwell, Stanley Brouwn, Sophie Calle, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli & Weiss, Nan Goldin, Dan Graham, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Mary Kelly, Lettrist International, Jonas Mekas, Annette Messager, Aleksandra Mir, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Daniel Spoerri, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol, Richard Wentworth and Stephen Willats.

Part of the acclaimed series of anthologies which document major themes and ideas in contemporary art.

Numerous international exhibitions and biennales have born witness to the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday and its antecedents in Dada and Surrealism, Pop, Situationism and Fluxus.

Art’s turn to the ordinary is symptomatic of a desire to address things in the world, rather than the history and institutions of art. It shows a recognition of ordinary dignity or the accidentally miraculous; an engagement with a new kind of anthropology; an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture; or a meditation on what happens, when nothing happens.

The celebration of the everyday has oppositional and dissident overtones, offering a voice to the silenced and proposing possibilities for change. This collection of writings by artists, theorists and critics assembles for the first time a comprehensive anthology on the everyday in the world of contemporary art.

Hollybush Gardens – Falke Pisano

http://hollybushgardens.co.uk