129 | 2015

EMMA BALKIND

Communitas: The Commons Subject and the Subject of Community

The idea of the commons becomes both a life raft for the alienated subject and a means by which capital preconditions more of these subjects. There is a constant battle for the continuation of the commons as a form, and its attempted enclosure by capitalism. This preconditioning of the subject occurs when the idea of the commons itself is subsumed into capital through privatisation. The flexibility of terms when referring to the commons has found it being attached to ideas such as the “sharing economy” with projects which produce a form of commons that is of negative value to the individual and perpetuates inequality.
The subject of the sharing economy becomes the “meta-rentier”¹—he who not only rents his place out on Airbnb to make the rent for the month but also needs to rent somewhere else in the meantime because he has nowhere else to be. In this case the subject under capital is not only a part-of-no-part in the rental economy but must rent twice in order to participate. Esposito codifies the community as not “only to be identified with the res publica, with the common ‘thing’”, but rather as “the hole into which the common thing continually risks falling, a sort of landslide produced laterally and within”.² There is a feeling from the way he writes this that the common is incredibly precarious and something that just as easily equates with loss as it does with a form of respite. Where stabilised rents would allow the real flourishing of local communities in a physical sense, the sharing economy premises the idea of community and sharing on our most basic needs and, in making them common, puts a price on them.

¹ http://canistaywithyouwhileirentmyplaceonairbnb.com (via Joshua Simon, http://neomaterialism.tumblr.com), accessed 26 January 2015.
² Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 8.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 129/2015, pp. 13–16.

TOM HOLERT

Art Is Concrete: How Concrete. Art and Efficacy

It surely goes without question that art operates along a spectrum ranging between concrete and abstract, sharing a material (and materialist) nature, while at the same time being an immaterial activity; attaching it to one end of this spectrum or the other would thus fail to do justice to either its forms or functions. It is with heightened intensity that the fate of art is sought and negotiated today, involving extensive instrumentalisation in social struggles or coveted forms of investment for all kinds of capital (as in financial capital) or life (as in lifestyle and subjectivity). The turnover rate is high according to which new topics and concerns attach themselves to art, from economics to education, from globalisation to collectivity. This incessant, expansive interpretation brought to bear on the understanding of art is always also guided by highly concrete interests and promises that display a connection to art (though these interests and promises themselves may be very different, or even incompatible, both within the art world and in terms of global scale).
Despite all professional endeavours to moderate (curating, academicising, administrating), the diverse activations of art have tended to induce deep uncertainty. The societal and aesthetic meaning of art is just as indisputable today as it is highly dubious. No exhibition with a lecture programme in the auditorium, no conference with installative interventions in the foyer, no lecture performance event with subsequent roundtable, no weekend of documentary knowledge production featuring experts from all facets of life will ever dispute the function of art as condition of possibility and horizon of meaning, as argument for the allocation of funding and foundation for an alternative to existing conditions. And yet the assertion of art is constantly faced with the challenge that art alone does not precipitate the knowledge and change that appear necessary based on the purported and actual urgency of the political, humanitarian, or economic situation.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 129/2015, pp. 17–20.

BORIS BUDEN

Unexpected Encounters: Contemporary in the Past?

But the real reason why artists turn to the past does not lie merely in the deeds or misdeeds of political protagonists. Neither the Islamic terrorists nor the decision makers of the major Western powers are the real setters of trends for contemporary art. It is rather a very general experience being had by the democratic masses worldwide—the experience of powerlessness. Roelstraete reminds us of 15 February 2003, when between ten and thirty million people in some eight hundred cities around the globe participated in the biggest anti-war demonstrations of all time to protest against the unlawful military intervention in Iraq. In fact, the demonstration taking place that day in London was the largest in the political history of this city. Nonetheless, the mass movement failed to achieve its objective. Iraq was bombed, occupied, and torn apart. And the protesting masses were aware of their powerlessness to influence the most important political decisions in the most highly developed democratic societies of the West. What motivates so many artists today to turn away from the present and search for the meaning of their artistic work in addressing the past is therefore this inability to change the present reality, an experience that they share with the broad democratic masses. Moreover, historically and politically, it concerns quite concrete crises of real existing democracy, which seems to have exhausted its overall potential for renewal. At the same time, artists’ obsession with the past should not only be understood as one of the symptoms of this crisis. As their acting force, this obsession contributes to the deepening of the crisis itself, since it projects the critical and emancipatory potentials of art towards the wrong dimension of historical time: away from the real problems of the present and designing a better future and back to the past. This is why Roelstraete pleads for a U-turn in art. Instead of mining the past, art should again lay open the future.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 129/2015, pp. 53–55.

JALEH MANSOOR

The Militant Image: Notes on Anti-Representation, Negative Articulation, and Political Resistance

In the following, I plan to briefly explore the relationship between referential opacity and transparency in contemporary cultural practices that claim “social justice” as a political horizon for motivating and anchoring meaning. I will try to make the case, however counter-intuitive, that many attempts at explicit political messaging not only fail but frequently actively undermine the political goals of the given message. I offer the claim that the “militant image” only operates as such—that is, as an act of political agency and militancy in its own right—when it paradoxically rejects any explicit or immediate political efficacy. Part of the task, then, will be to distinguish this paradoxically mute yet efficacious “militant image” from the clichés of so-called “autonomy” as they have come to be understood over the last half century in the anglophone context. Against both the transparency of the message and the long dead horse of autonomy, inchoate strands of culture now show motivation by a stronger historical undercurrent offering another path. What follows is a brief sketch of those histories that intersect at the improbable nexus of our present, at the convergence of the disparate contexts we might associate with activism, such as feminism or ecological and indigenous rights, or with culture. I’d like to suggest the point at which those meet to articulate the political struggles of the future by turning to the past.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 129/2015, pp. 57–60.

CINENOVA FEMINIST FILM AND VIDEO DISTRIBUTOR

EMMA HEDDITCH, LOUISE SHELLEY – Cinenova: Different Hands

If you invite a group of persons to write about something, they will go forward, more or less, with their approach and understanding and experience, integrating their capacity to attend to the practice of writing, editing, and thinking. Two of us are writing on behalf of a group, and since we have chosen to work together very specifically around the urgent and critical concerns of the organisation Cinenova, we intend to explore in the following what that work is, based on what we understand it might have been, how it has been constructed as such, and some of the ways we work with it today. We will also introduce some sections from the materials we work with—folding the influence of this content into the organisation of ourselves.  “It seems incredibly important to recognise the strategies of formation, the processes in which experience and formal presentation take place. The former not distinct from the latter but as a continuous grasping on the surfaces of the other.”¹

¹ Cinenova, Mary Kelly Project (London: Cinenova, 2003), p. 11.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 129/2015, pp. 75–76.