Postcard from Berlin

December in Berlin seemed to be a time when artists, institutions and magazines concentrated on self-analysis. Three events were particularly noteworthy.

On the 11th, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, Texte zur Kunst magazine organized a panel discussion entitled ‘New Spirit of criticism? The Biopolitical Turn in Perspective’ at the HAU Hebbel Theater um Ufer. Moderated by Martin Saar, the panel included Franco Berardi, Luc Boltanski, Sabeth Buchmann and André Rottmann and was part of a two-day symposium entitled as part of the two-day conference ‘Where do you stand, colleague? 
Art criticism and social critique’ (textezurkunst.de/veranstaltungen/).

Three days later, Salon Populaire hosted a discussion on Berlin’s kunsthalle-to-be entitled ‘To Have and to Need’. The moderators were Ellen Blumenstein and Florian Wüst and the guests too numerous to be mentioned here (salonpopulaire.de).


On the 15th, the Babylon Kino hosted the Berlin premiere of Liam Gillick’s and Anton Vidokle’s video A Guiding Light.

As systems of circulation and exchange of ideas, these events doubtless have the merit of being democratic in the very sense E. M. Forster intended in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951): ‘It allows criticism and permits variety. It is based on the assumption that the individual is important and that all types are needed to make a civilization. […] Those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something […] get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere. […] All these people need liberty to express themselves […] and the society that allows most liberty is a democracy.’

The expression talking shop that Forster applies positively to the idea of parliament is applicable to all areas where endeavours get widely reported. Curiously, while chatter can expose abuses in the public sphere, it generates them in creative circles. In the sphere of creative thought chatter is the same as opinion (doxa, as the Greek intended it), the nature of which is invariably fallacious and wrong most of the time. The opposite of having an opinion about something is acquiring knowledge of something.

The discussion at Salon Populaire – on the occasion of Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit’s initiative for a future Berlin Kunsthalle, combined with an open call for an ‘achievement show of young artists from Berlin’ scheduled to open in June 2011 – offered a perhaps too accurate instance in point. The kind of frenzy that permeated the atmosphere of this exchange showed that, however motley, the audience invariably resented the funding being bestowed on others or the preconceived conclusion they would probably not benefit from it. As often is the case, the point of view was one-sided personal interest. This is not the kind of abuse Forster probably had in mind when talking of ‘the private member that makes himself a nuisance and exposes abuses that would otherwise never have been mentioned’. Surely, he did not mean that an abuse is less an abuse if offender and offended exchanged roles.

Not so at Texte zur Kunst’s event. André Rottmann and Sabeth Buchmann are art historians and critics; Luc Boltanski, Franco Berardi and Martin Saar are philosophers (though very different in kind). All of them expressed their views and affably conversed on the bearing of biopolitics in the field of art criticism and in the making of art itself. They are scientists in their own right and not likely to express far-fetched opinions.

The two art historians/critics should have redirected the conversation towards contextualization within the concrete reality of art whenever it merely elided it. On the contrary, the presence of the philosophers served as an excuse for forays into critical theory. As often occurs, science turned its gaze on art, if at all, in a patronizing way – when heaven knows that art is a field that brings up enough questions specific to it before it needs to be treated in this tangential way. I wonder why we should take kindly to this kind of trespass, especially since art is rarely asked to comment on science – the various feeble attempts of art to ‘rise’ to the standards of any science and the little or no influence it derives from its attempts at doing so are proof enough.

The real problem, however, is the apologia that invariably accompanies art discussions when art is in the presence of other areas of investigation. Are we face to face with what Paul Valéry once detected? Are we frightened by the intimation of art’s humble origins? One is almost inclined to think that art is an object of some disparagement here. For example, in his book La Condition Fœtal (2004), Boltanski expresses the need to relieve the individual of the burden of being left to art or literature in order to be delivered into the safe hands of science. Of course, one would also like to find proof of the fact that art pertains simply to the individual. He states that what is general (society) and what is particular (the individual) about people are two classically distinct areas of investigation but communication between the two areas is increasingly becoming the basis of research. He draws this idea from Claude Lévi-Strauss, even if communication between the particular and the universal has been the very system of art since Greek tragedy – a system based on the balance of synthesis and analysis.

In relation to the bearing of biopolitics in the art field, there seems to be a commonplace syllogism at work: the artist (a) is a person of her time (b) who produces objects ©: a+b=c. Does art then share the same nature of real numbers or Aristotelian logic where if two terms are a given, the third automatically results? The symposium started from the assumption that biopolitics lends the means to understand what the current times are – our new favourite expression: the present crisis (b). There seems to be a common presumption of knowing what a work of art is ©. Having defined these two terms, those artists who express the contemporary world should be easy to find (a). It is only a question of finding the field in which they operate. This field, however, the panel did not locate.

The employment of the term ‘biopolitics’ is significant of the evolution of the social historiography of art – art seen in the light of neo-liberalism and governmentality. However this development of the discourse perpetuates the limitations that social history already possessed: for to see the work of art as merely the product of political and economic circumstances presents problems in relation to the artistic process. The artistic process does not just work through its influences and times by imitating them, but by forgetting and mixing them with other sources, thus precisely (at least potentially) transcending these limitations. Furthermore, this position too neatly divides form and content. Requesting that art should comment directly on politics, it endows the subject matter of the respective work of art with too much importance. The application of the theory of biopolitics in art criticism tends to turn the artist into a homo œconomicus, much as biopolitics in the political sphere turns the citizen into a suspect, a possible homo criminalis. Does the artist weigh profit and loss before he makes a work of art as the criminal does before they murder or steal?


The social aspect helps one to understand a particular age but it is never an exclusive principle. As religion helps to understand pre-illuminist societies, so the relation of man to politics helps the understanding of society from mid-18thcentury on. These parallelisms are applicable when there is a clear relation of identity and submission between the individual and the institution – medieval man and God, illuminist man and the state, for instance. But who can say that there is clear identification between man and the economic manoeuvres that rule contemporary society? Perhaps we are too much embedded in our own time to perceive what characterizes it. What remain are the problems that have never changed within artistic practice and of which Foucault gives perfect examples in The Order of Things (1966). For example: ‘the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s term: it is vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.’

In fairness, Italian philosopher Franco Berardi talked about what he knew, and when artistic making drew too near, he stopped and said that beyond that point artists were involved and he felt it was not his place to comment. Towards the end of the panel discussion Martin Saar and Luc Boltanski expressed the opinion that criticism is impossible. A person who is outside the sphere they wished to criticise has no influence. A person who is inside it would be accused of being a hypocrite if they did. It is the final blow to punk, which swung indefinitely in and out of established circles and attacked them from the outskirts.

However, above this, the problem is one of centrism. There is too much subjectivity surrounding all these talks and too little objectivity. Objectivity can only be achieved if the attention is moved away from people and restored to the objects of artistic creation that, in many different ways, everyone who works in this field is subject to. It may be argued that we are never entirely exempt from subjectivity, not even if we wished we were. Whatever we do or say is invariably about ourselves, it is the way we are made – all the more reason then to try and keep subjectivity at bay. Not even Kant so entirely denied the existence of the objects of our senses – let alone of art – or relegated them to this remote and peripheral corner of discussion. He recognized that objects lend the perceiver a sense of his own existence even if objects cannot be known in themselves. The pendulum-swing between perceiver and perceived should always be kept in mind: without the beholder there is nothing to behold; without nothing to behold the beholder has no proof of his own existence.

The crowd that attended the meeting at Salon Populaire criticized the absence of a theme on which the curators of the Berlin Kunsthalle exhibition would first organize their selection, and later the show which is meant to define what the current Berlin scene is. Instead, what was perceived as laxness could offer a great opportunity to re-establish the relation between objects and people: Logically, there is no way for the curators to know what this scene is before they have viewed the work that is being presently produced. Thus an open call is useful to gather the largest quantity of material possible and enable research. It increases the possibility of accuracy. Scrutiny of the works should be sufficient to recognize whether anything that could be called a Berlin scene actually exists, since there is also the possibility that it is a collection of extremely different experiences, the result of the heterogeneity of its inhabitants. Should it turn out that a scene exists, one could concentrate on recurrence and suspend personal inclination. Nevertheless, the central position of the art work is essential.

Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle’s video A Guiding Light confirmed these reflections. The title is taken from the longest-ever-running soap opera; the actors are really artists who engaged in a long critical discussion. A Guiding Light is admirably objective and effortlessly humorous. The contrariness of the opinions that it expresses make it impossible to pin down Gillick and Vidokle’s opinion but point out the nature of these disquisitions by cataloguing them. The work of art is evidently, purposely missing in the same way as the backdrop to the soap opera is. Thus the gulf between discourse and object is accentuated. The two-channel format stresses the mirroring effect of a work of art analyzing the conditions that regulate it. There is something fastidious about the video. I give two cheers to Gillick and Vidokle who made one think throughout the film: ‘Why doesn’t everybody just shut up about art?’ It’s an excellent piece.

Let’s end where Forster begins to enunciate the shortcomings of democracy as a system of the circulation and exchange of ideas: Plato’s Republic. Forster: ‘Democracy is not a beloved republic really and never will be – but it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government.’ Marxist and catholic readings aside, Plato’s Republic is the longest and most articulated metaphor ever written. It starts from the assumption that in order to find what justice is in relation to one man, one must look to something greater, which he identified with society. He arrives at the conclusion that justice is for every man to do what they were born to do without interfering in other people’s business.