https://harpers.org/archive/2024/12/the-painted-protest-dean-kissick-contemporary-art/
"
This year’s Biennale, called Foreigners Everywhere, took four
identities as its subjects—the queer artist; the outsider artist; the
folk artist; the indigenous artist—and suggested that they were all
foreigners because they were marginalized. It was a show of painted,
handsewn, sculpted, photographed, and filmed portraits of such figures;
naïve scenes of everyday life across the Global South, from Aboriginal
Australia to the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon; and traditional
pottery, wood carving, metal sculpture, and dyed fabric. There was a
massive mural by a women’s collective from Bangalore; a contemporary
dance interpretation of violence committed against Chinese migrants and
queer people in the West by a millennial choreographer from Hong Kong; a
text painting that read anonymous homosexual; and, on an outdoor patio, a bronze nude self-portrait of a transgender artist on a plinth that said, simply, woman.
In fact, every major biennial I have visited over the past eight
years—from Germany to Greece, Italy to the United States, Brazil to the
United Arab Emirates—has taken as its themes the deep richness of
identity and the rejection of the West.
(...)
One might reasonably identify a return to tradition, a longing for the
past, with the forces of political reaction. But if conservatives
generally have little interest in novelty, neither does anyone else
today. Everyone in the world of contemporary art wants to revive a
tradition, however recent: Hellenistic Greek sculpture, the Roman cult
of Adonis, ancient Nubian wedding ceremonies, Ancestral Pueblo pottery
culture, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican song, Mapuche cosmology, Maya
Tz’utujil weaving, Incan mythology, African mask-making and the early
Cubist painting it inspired, Fifties Americana, the Sixties New Sacred
Art Movement of the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, Eighties Beijing
migrant-worker cruising culture, late-Aughts contemporary art, etc.
Everyone, it seems, wants to escape the present. We just long for
different pasts."
(...)
One particularly popular genre consists of artists filming themselves
wandering the rainforest or reenacting old rituals, making videos that
exist somewhere between ethnographic documentary and TikTok dance.
(...)
Celebrations of identity made in such deeply traditional styles are progressive in content but conservative in form. They offer a détournement of cultural appropriation by trying to atone for the sins and omissions of the past with a series of art-historical pastiches: canonical art remade by artists with minority identities
(...)
Once, we had painters of modern life; now we have painters of
contemporary identities. And it is the fact of those identities—not the
way they are expressed—that is understood to give value to our art.
(...)
When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated
to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized?
They speak for the cultural mainstream, backed by institutional
authority. The project of centering the previously excluded has been
completed; it no longer needs to be museums’ main priority and has by
now been hollowed out into a trope. These voices have lost their own
unique qualities. In a world with Foreigners Everywhere, differences
have flattened and all forms of oppression have blended into one
universal grief. We are bombarded with identities until they become
meaningless. When everyone’s tossed together into the big salad of
marginalization, otherness is made banal and abstract.
(...)
If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography
rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant; when the self
is more important than the expression, true culture becomes impossible.
(...)
Critical claims have ceased to be about the art itself—as they were in
Wolfe’s day—and now concern art’s capacity to drive political change.
Not only has the art world embraced the magical spiritualities of the
elders, but it has also returned to an old view that artworks can
possess a mysterious, world-changing power; according to the texts
issued by art institutions around the world, society’s ills might be
healed through inclusivity, symbolic representations, and arcane, coded
gestures. Reparations can be paid in images, guilt sloughed away with
incomprehensible signifiers of accountability.
(...)
We lie to one another and to ourselves that all this humdrum work is
inspiring, that it has an influence on how opinions are formed and
hearts are won, but, of course, it doesn’t. Nobody cares, which is
partly why the exhibitions feel so lifeless.
(...)
Curators keep fighting a culture war that has already ended in the world outside.
(...)
When I worked for Obrist, he held a twenty-four-hour marathon lecture
series in which philosophers, industrial designers, historians,
ecologists, novelists, landscape architects, and filmmakers would come
and speak for fifteen minutes each. Back then, there was someone turning
up at highbrow art events across London and throwing his shit at
important people. It was my job at the lecture series to make sure
Obrist remained excrement-free. Today, it’s impossible to imagine anyone
wanting to do such a thing to a curator, to imagine anyone caring
enough or even knowing whom to aim for.
(...)
They create strange, dark
fantasy scenes of violence, terror, lust, and perversity—the kinds of
repressed and unspoken human desires that have appeared in art for
thousands of years, but which are, for the most part, no longer welcome
in the galleries. You can tell by looking at their works that they are
searching for the something else.
(...)
in the Nineties, when I was a student at a Christian boys’ school in
Oxford, the art teacher showed us a video of a Viennese Actionist
performance by Hermann Nitsch’s Das Orgien Mysterien Theater (“Theater
of Orgies and Mystery”). As I remember it, the participants were naked,
wrapped in white sheets, soaked in the blood of cows they had
sacrificed, performing rituals in their commune in the Austrian
countryside, accompanied by music, singing, dancing, and feasting.
That’s how I came to understand the idea of modern art as transgressive.
(...)
Artists have gone from trying to destroy reality, as in the days of the
Dadaists, to attempting to reassert it and restore order today. But it
is far too late. Consensus reality is gone. We are blessed to live now,
in the West, in a strange world without common sense. As fact grows
stranger than fiction, we should embrace the surreal and try harder to
imagine more outlandish fictions. We might begin by accepting that we
are being lied to all the time, that most of what we hear and see is an
illusion, misrepresentation, or performance—and that’s fine. Life has in
many ways become a fiction, reality is vanishing under its own
representations, we are suffering from collective delusions, we are
teetering on the precipice of the real, with a multiverse of fantasies
spinning out beneath us—and that’s okay, that’s fine. Reality is gone,
and the art crowd keeps trying to recover it, keeps claiming, “Oh, we
can find it again, we can hold on to it, if we just keep exhibiting
ceramics, if we just keep making paintings”—but we cannot
