Out of Beirut, Wonderful Beirut: only three days after the exhibition “Out of Beirut”, organised at Modern Art Oxford and meant to highlight the great revival of Beirut as the “Ibiza of the Middle East” (or, as intellectuals would prefer to call it, the “Paris of the Middle East”) closed down, hostilities broke out between Hezbollah and Israel, putting an abrupt halt to – and effectively reversing – the fifteen years of steady rebuilding that had gone on in the city since the civil war ended in 1990. On that same fateful day, July 19, an E-flux announcement made its way through the art community with a message from Ashkal Alwan, a centre for contemporary art in Beirut, calling for donations and urging us to help civilians living in Lebanon. So there it was – “bare life”, one of the buzzwords on the contemporary philosophical scene and already announced a key concept of the upcoming Documenta 12, coming to life (no irony intended) as a brutal fact of quotidian political reality, simultaneously reminding the art world of its enviable luxuries, its powerlessness, and the inevitable confusions that its responsibilities necessarily entail.
Responsibility is key here; if anything, the Ashkal Alwan case calls for responses that are both truthful and meaningful with regards to the “medium” we are engaged in and the art world we choose to operate in and work from. Art is serious; it partakes and posits itself within the world, and as such obliges us to think through, reflect upon and react upon the brute facts of this world.
In her lecture at the Academy: Learning from Art symposium held at MuHKA, the museum of contemporary art in Antwerp in September, London-based visual cultures theorist Irit Rogoff expanded upon the difference between critique and criticality. Whereas she identifies “critique” as a position one may take when one stands outside of a set of problems, she pleads for “criticality” instead – as a way to inhabit a given set of problems rather then to analyse it from said outside position of transcendental sovereignty, thus avoiding the antiquated heroism of Judgement. “Being in the middle of things” – inhabiting the world – as an ethical imperative seems to be particularly current in many contemporary art practices, as well as in related educational contexts. Could it then also operate as a model for the museum and other institutions?
No more than a few days later, Hito Steyerl, a filmmaker and video artist who also teaches at Goldsmiths College in London, defended another, similar-sounding position (summarily called the “uncertainty principle”) at a symposium at Iaspis called “Slowly Learning to Survive the Desire to Simplify”; taking her cue from Heisenberg’s famed tenet of quantum physics, Steyerl stated that “the closer we come, the less we see”. In the epistemes of power – systems of knowledge production that are primarily concerned with domination – there is no such thing as an “outside position”, which means there are no critical positions left either. Exactly here, according to Steyerl, lies the space for art, and for its ability to be more effective then ever before, especially seeing as we now can no longer trust the media anymore, and simultaneously feel forced to relate to them more and more each day because what is discussed in and by them affects our everyday life more than ever before. Documentary forms in particular – that is, Steyerl’s own practice of choice – offer ways of deploying this sense of criticality to more meaningful ends.
In this issue of A Prior Magazine devoted to the work of Joe Scanlan, there is ample room to examine and explore the wide variety of relationships between art and its various institutions, and between art and the marketplace in particular. Phillip Van den Bossche, Dieter Roelstraete and Raimundas Malasauskas variously analyse Scanlan’s interest in the political and economical aspects of the arts and the art business. At the same time, however, his work also reflects upon the status and position of the artist within this context of political economy. The concept of authorship (authority as ownership) and the questions of identity and identification they trigger are directly enlightened in the collective practices of artists working together with other artists, as is shown in the network of collaborations between Joe Scanlan and Donelle Woolford, Lucy McKenzie, Paulina Olowska, and Koenraad Dedobbeleer. [Incidentally, the strong attachment that each of these artists feel to the all-too-hastily dispatched legacies of the modernist paradigm – the collaborative practice of the “artist collective” being one of its governing principles – has helped pave the way for A Prior Magazine’s response to the Documenta 12 magazine project, in which APM has been invited to participate: another of Documenta 12’s central tenets or conceptual concerns, along with the aforementioned notion of “bare life”, holds that “modernity is our antiquity.”]
In A Prior Magazine #12, Annie Fletcher wondered whether the work of art could really “fill the gap” between critical theory and the outside world. “Being in the middle” of the artworks, proposals and practices assembled in our current issue, trying to inhabit them even, one can only conclude (thankfully) that, yes, it is possible – there are valuable positions at stake: it is a position that, by way of its embedment in the world, fills this exact gap, and in so doing relates us back – in ways that are more total than anything we might have hoped for – to the outside World.
