Common People

‘Currently, one way to give in to populism’s anti-intellectual speech regime would be to think that what we need most in a debate […] is a clear-cut definition of populism. A project on populism, therefore, should claim as a basic right the right to use the term in different ways […] it should enact difference. It should differ from itself. It should reflect its own presuppositions.’1

Curated by Lars Bang Larsen, Cristina Ricupero and Nicolaus Schafhausen, the sprawling group show ‘Populism’ lived up to its name at the Stedelijk’s temporary home in a large 1960s’ office block. Contributions by some 40 artists brought to mind a bewilderingly heterogeneous trade fair, or else a convention of unhinged political lobbyists, an impression reinforced by the somewhat provisional setting. Art works clamoured for attention, some taking the form of slogans: ‘Terror’ spelt out on balloons and streamers (The Party is Over, 2005, Marc Bijl), ‘Hang the DJ’ in English and Spanish (The World Won’t Listen, 2005, Phil Collins); Jens Haaning’s ‘Nederland’ (2005) in giant letters across a wall. Marc Bijl’s CND symbol, (again, 2004), made from a two-metre diameter gas burner, burnt a shadow of itself into the white emulsion on which it was installed. The show was packed with populist heroes and villains: politicians, celebrities, the police, suspected criminals, activists and revellers. Conflicting brands and icons were much in evidence – a newly launched soft drink, a trolley load of supermarket products, the Statue of Liberty, and pieces of Tatlin’s Tower. When conflicting voices weren’t hustling you, product displays were trying to seduce you.

Around the size of a medium-scale biennial (the show’s title could be read as a commentary on the populist characteristics of this new exhibition genre), ‘Populism’ was a self-reflexive blockbuster touring show, produced by The Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art (NIFCA) in Helsinki, which occurred simultaneously in four venues in four European countries: the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Most of the artists featured in at least three of the four showings, which suggests a preponderance of video and other editioned work, but which also meant that many artists produced different work for different cities. The simultaneity of the exhibition emphasized the temporality of the exhibition as medium, highlighting the idea of the exhibition as multiple, which implied a further critique of autonomous and auratic understandings of the medium. At the same time four additional cities hosted panel discussions (Berlin, Copenhagen, Malmö and Reykjavik), evoking the way that information and images of an important event supplied by a multinational news agency such as Reuters are translated, manipulated and disseminated by multiple national media outlets.

The political philosopher Ernesto Laclau characterizes populism as a style rather than an ideology, one that offers quick and simple solutions to difficult problems. It appeals to the emotions rather than the intellect, stimulating false hopes and exploiting fears and insecurities. It is opposed to the slow and complex mechanisms of mature liberal democracies, with their systems of accountability and legality and their emphasis on ‘mediation and temporalization – debate and deliberation’.2 Populism claims to speak on behalf of ‘the people’ but doesn’t bother defining who or what ‘the people’ might be, and, paradoxically, often tends towards demagogy and personality cults.3

Populism’s enemies are what it regards as the political élite and, for the right, those it regards as outsiders: immigrants, ethnic minorities, neighbouring states etc. However, Dieter Lesage argues that populism’s ‘primordial “other” isn’t “the alien” or “the immigrant”, no matter how much both have obviously been a target […] but “the intellectual”’, since its project is ‘the grand restoration of all binary oppositions and dichotomies’ that have otherwise been deconstructed.4

So this ambitious exhibition and publishing project represents a timely cultural intervention in an urgent political debate. Populism in the political realm has been on the rise over the last two decades, spurred on by the collapse of the Soviet empire, the subsequent expansion of the European Union, rampant globalization of markets and labour and, more recently, recession and unemployment in much of Europe, terrorist outrages and Bush’s outrageous ‘War on Terror’. Right-wing populist parties of various stripes have taken shape in just about every European state since the 1980s: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France, Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria and Umberto Bossi’s Northern League in Italy. Now Switzerland has Christoph Blocher’s Union of the Centre (whose position in the government coalition led Thomas Hirschhorn to declare he wouldn’t be exhibiting again in his native country), Denmark and Norway their Parties of Progress and Portugal the Popular Party; in Holland the leader of the party Livable Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn, was recently assassinated. Nationalist parties have had at least as much impact in Eastern Europe. In Britain one of the leading lights of the UK Independence Party in the last European parliamentary election was Robert Kilroy-Silk, a former chat show host and sometime Labour MP, sacked by the BBC for (allegedly) anti-Arab remarks in a British tabloid. In Prime Minister and media monopolist Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has the most successful populist politician of them all.

Populist politicians who succeed are charismatic. They understand how to exploit the communicative power of the media. Contemporary populism represents the convergence of politics and the media, while its techniques and aesthetics are familiar from marketing and entertainment. Populism, more generally, pervades all mainstream politics in the West – as personified by the spin doctor. However, although it is usually associated with the right, populism, Laclau asserts, is ‘compatible in principle with all the great political ideologies (liberalism, nationalism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, etc.)’.5 Many strands of the anti-globalization, anti-capitalist and ecology movements are populist, with their emphasis on direct action, their opposition to authority and élites, and their focus on mobilization at a grassroots level. It shouldn’t be automatically assumed, then, that the motivations of populists are malignant.

In ‘Populism’ the revolution was (unsurprisingly) televised and the media ever present, in the form of A-list movie stars in Sarah Morris’ film Los Angeles (2004) and the Danes for Bush (2004) campaign (Jakob S. Boeskov), documentation of the G8 riots in Genoa (Get Rid of Yourself, 2002, Bernadette Corporation) and coverage of the recent Hirschhorn show at the Swiss Centre in Paris, which resulted in the Swiss government slashing a million francs from Pro Helvetica’s budget (Swiss Swiss Democracy Experience, 2004, a documentary by Nicholas Trembley).

The Populism Reader, a 200-page anthology of 20 essays, accompanies the exhibition and features contributions by philosophers, political scientists, historians, art historians, activists and cultural commentators. Some begin their thesis warning of the elusiveness of the term ‘populism’, pointing out that it can be applied to many different phenomena, that it has no fixed ideological position and that it evades conventional political analysis. Some works in ‘Populism’ are themselves populist in a radically progressive sense, advocating a cause in a manner that is barely distinguishable from the more sophisticated forms of ‘expressive activism’ associated with a long line of radical direct action groups – the Situationists, say, or the Yippies in the late 1960s. Minerva Cuevas’ various projects are examples of this, as are Nomea and Gediminas Urbonas’ reclamation of public space in their Cinema Lietuva action in Lithuania (2005) and Superflex’s development of Guarana Power (2003), a soft drink made from the eponymous, supposedly medicinal berry, with a farmers’ co-operative in the Brazilian Amazon to combat giant brands who have driven the produce’s price down 80 per cent.

At the same time neo-activist work of this kind can be seen as a second wave of what Nicolas Bourriaud has termed ‘relational aesthetics’. These artists have abandoned the reflexivity of their immediate predecessors, and with it their Duchampian reliance on the semiotics of the gallery or museum as art’s unique framing system. Neo-activist work, socially interventionist practices or post-‘relational aesthetics’ sidestep the art institution altogether or simply use it as part of the continuum of public spaces, albeit one increasingly penetrated by the logic of capital, as exposed by Jens Haaning and Superflex’s Number of Visitors (2005), which took the form of four large digital counters installed on the façades of each of the show’s venues. Given its scale, ‘Populism’ represents a curatorial apotheosis of these prevalent international tendencies.

In general, the works in ‘Populism’ took on the style and format of their object of their criticism, with parody much in evidence: for example, Esto TV and Boeskov’s mock campaigns on behalf of right-wing causes (Res Publica, the ruling party in Estonia, and the fictitious ‘Danes for Bush’ movement, respectively), which they exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or Martin Le Chevallier’s Game Boy-style animation Safe Society (2003), ‘an ironic trailer for a future world where all society’s ailments are overcome’.6

Many works embraced the hyperbolic aesthetics of spectacle, if only to turn the values it purveys on their head: Henrik Plenge Jakobsen’s delirious Circus Pentium (2005), for example, or Superflex’s Superdanish (2005), an over-triumphant mural commemorating Denmark’s role in the ‘liberation’ of Baghdad. Given its emphasis on content-driven work that employs the emotive language of the mass media, ‘Populism’ is at odds with the heritage of much political art of the avant-garde era, particularly strategies related to Theodor Adorno’s theory of autonomy and negation. The curators suggest as much in their introductory essay: ‘The project’s point of departure is the idea that the affects and desires that characterize populist politics are not necessarily separate from the ones that find expression in the sphere of art […] The populist premise shared by all artists in “Populism” is an unwillingness to accept the old opposition between mass and élite culture.’7

Besides The Populism Reader and the catalogue, which features short stories by Matias Faldbakken and Liam Gillick, ‘Populism’ was interpreted by a tabloid newspaper, The Populist, which acted as the exhibition guide, with ‘stories’ on the work of each participating artist.8 The format underscored the exhibition’s position on contemporary political art practices: that works of art should utilize the same languages, audiences, time and space frames as the phenomena they seek to criticize, change and dismantle, rather than seeking a Utopian location somewhere on the outside that ultimately simply leads back to the confines of the art institution.