Series of debates on Nets, Context, Territories

Closing debate 22-11(extract)

Speakers: Reinaldo Laddaga, Diana Aisenberg, Santiago Pagés de Artega y Rocío Pérez Armendáríz.

Claudia del Río: -I wanted to ask each of you the relationship between art and resistance.
I mean today, according to what we have been discussing, it seems to me these words are in the air.

Diana Aisenberg: -I had never thought about it in terms of resistance, but well... They descri-be public space. All this is very funny to a point - which is the space? If it is, if it is not, one never knows anything, right? And there should be some resistance, what happens is that it is a horrible word, it is really unpleasant.

Claudia del Río: -Because of how old we are, close to forty, or a little bit more, it is painful.

Sonia Abián: -Why is there a resistance to the word resistance?

Diana Aisenberg: -Because it is ugly.

Sonia Abián: -But why is it ugly?

Diana Aisenberg: -I understand that art can be read as a fight, I also understand that it can be read as a weapon for violent fighting, I understand many things that I prefer not to understand, so I find that resistance takes me into an uncomfortable place. I understand that a work may resist and I understand that it resists against, but as I think of myself as an artist, I do not like to think of myself as resisting, the artistic act transforms, then I do not read "re-sisting against", if not the action of moving so-mething, which I find happier. I do not like to remain on the other side. It is not the type of energy that I am interested in as an engine for the production of art. To resist against reminds me of one who survives. I am not saying we are not survivors and that we cannot see ourselves as surviving, but I do not like to see my-self on that side as an artist. It does nothing for myself or for whoever is looking at my work.

Santiago García Navarro: -Nevertheless, taking into account a word Reinaldo used in view of dismantling, a possibility of resistance is reparation, building as resistance, probably turning around the negative side of resistance...

Reinaldo Laddaga: -I also think there is a possibility of thinking of the term resistance not only in a strictly negative way, but resistance
as a place for the constitution of power. How power is construed is mysterious, and possibly to resist is to construe power under specific circumstances.

Marcos Hill: -I would like to ask a question to everybody at the table, taking into account
the issue of the social projection of the artist, considering this alternative dimension of pu-blic space. It seems to me that the place of the artist within this alternative dimension of public space and society is not very clear. Do you have an idea, no matter how hypothetical, of this placing of an artist's social tradition, because I think it is an important focus that often dissolves into the social issue read from sociological and political points of view, which are negative. I think that from the very mo-ment we are in a space that reasserts the po-sition of the artist, it is important to think about it as an exercise even in a hypothetical dimension.

Reinaldo Laddaga: -I think that we have to re-invent the artist. I think that a specific histo-rical constellation imagined him in a certain way, as he who provides certain material to be exposed in a certain way, or something like that. I am thinking of the writer, to move away from the question of the plastic artist. The writer, from the invention of the copyright in the 18th Century becomes a purveyor of content for certain objects, the construction and distribution of which he does not control. It is difficult to think of the author in the modern sense without a series of re-arranged institutional materials that make up the slow work of the long 18th Century. Let us take as an example the person who writes electronic texts: he has no other alternative than to see to certain questions left in the classic constellation in charge of the editor, on the one hand, of the printer, on the other, of institutional adjustments that hold this together. Therefore he who writes an electronic text cannot help ta-king part in an institutional construction pro-cess, from which the classical writer could abstain. This forces us, necessarily, to rethink the position of the artist, the author, in this case, within a specific social space. It seems to me that in relation to the instance, more and more common is the artist who is at the same time curator, who is upholding an institution, weaving nets, and all that, what takes place is a process of practical enactment of the figure of the artist and that we need to see how far he goes. I think that what this is about is that we may consider the artist as somebody particularly competent when the time comes to structure social relations. Not necessarily, but perhaps. We are in a process of redesigning the figure of the artist, and the way we think of social projection depends on this redefinition.

Santiago Pagés: -A lot was said at some point on politics, on how to operate with regards to the art media, with the work or with production, and nothing was said about culture. It seems to me that, in many cases, politics and economy themselves finally end up by emptying our culture and imposing another one. I think this is also an answer to your question.

Andreas Siekmann: -If I take the projects we have been looking at out of their context, it seems
to me they take public space as a space to re-form and not as a space to resist, as this does not seem to be the consensus. This poses a question: how do you see the concept of denial, the concept of denying cultural productions.

Reinaldo Laddaga: -I will try to take up the question of denial in relation to the notion of criticism. I am under the impression that the relationship of art to politics has for some time turned around the notion of criticism. In practice, it seems to me, in what refers to critical art, art produces two things: either indignation because it exposes the violence present in a specific social system, or it projects a desired social condition. It tends to be critical or uto-pian, or an exposure of conditions that should provoke indignation. Both gestures are possible and necessary. At the same time, what I was trying to sketch in my talk is that besides this, in this that also happens in the exhibition of images or texts, I find a disquietude in the structure of effective social systems, nets, etc. that does not seem to be part of a critical di-mension or a dimension of denial in art. It ought to be an exemplary measure to participate more with utopian projects, but there is
a link of practices in the genealogy of art and in the social field that do not relate to criticism or denial, but relate to the effective construction of limited communities. It is difficult to say outright how limited.

Andreas Siekmann: -I was thinking of the book, "The return of the real".
I was amazed how the projects introduced in the book exclude the contact with current political circumstances. They do not relate to these political circumstances and, at the same time, these projects discuss a certain preoccupation over the loss, but if they do not include a concept of denial or are not in touch with what is happening in the political arena, they end up by being accomplices and end up by turning into accomplices of these affirmative structures.

Diana Aisenberg: -I think it is a political action, there is the option of not taking part or of not having the political situation as part of the projects. There is the political option of not having those mechanisms in our artistic pro-jects, as we are used in South America. It can be a very conscientious and political decision, without it being a denial.

Sonia Abián: -It could mean that Andreas' question has to do with the first question by Claudia about the subject of resistance, that relates to a political subject, and one is under the impression that there is both a resistance to discuss resistance and the political.

Diana Aisenberg: -I, personally, do not feel any psychological resistance or denial; it is simply a clear decision not to interfere in those sphe-res with certain codes. It is an artistic decision that does not relate to a personal resistance, nor to denial because I am not aware of what is going on. I do not know if I understand the questions well...

Public: -I think one can construe spaces of po-wer not only from resistance or, at least, not from a resistance so literally planned. One can create a construction that finally works out as resistance read from those terms, but that it might find its force, its origin, in a progressive idea, which builds something. Resistance implies an absolute acceptance that power is in the hands of the other one and that I have to resist somehow. I think one can build ano-ther power.

Rocío Pérez Armendáriz: -The word resistance sounds to me extremely rigid, it sounds like something that is like that and stands still resisting (gesture of hitting one fist against the other). The general idea of the projects, from my point of view, is to generate questions that allow us a certain action to adopt a form of resistance, that does not appear as resistance in terms of immobility. It seems to me that many of the projects speak politically, not of party politics or any criticism from that focus, but politics are ingrained in any of these pro-jects. In fact, I think they are politically committed without belonging to a party, and I think the majority relate to mobile resistance, generating questions that may open possibilities of thinking the same situation because, evidently, some forms of resistance are not working out or have not worked out histori-cally. One can propose to rethink situations to resist in other ways.
Some time ago I was discussing with some people the manner of organizing road blocks. They said it was no good doing one that lasted 40 hours, that it was better to organize one for half an hour, the police come, immediately another group is working somewhere else, blocking another road. This is a form or resis-tance, putting forth the same complaint but being mobile. The same ideology but different proposal. A rigid stance brings with it a type of violence that calls for a cut and non productive confrontation that fosters stiffness on both sides, while the possibility of resisting from
different places moving on are far more resistant: flexibility is more resistant.

Reinaldo Laddaga: -I was thinking about this question of denial, and I believe that the value of denial in each case relates to context. Including the context of image visibility. An urban intervention in Amsterdam happens in a different street structure than in Buenos Aires or in Rio de Janeiro. It refers to homogeneous and heterogeneous communities that have a different tradition of consensus and of dissension from that of certain American, European or Latin American cities. In the case of the Uni-ted States, for example, public work has been relatively scarce in the last few years, while in Europe the most vital recent work was done by occupying areas in the street and public spaces. This can be seen as lacking, as an Ame-rican way to conform, or as a lucid evaluation of what the conditions of urban visibility are in the US. I don't mean by this that I have arrived at a clear conclusion. But yes, in this case the decision of denial is truly linked to context.

Diana Aisenberg: -What I would like to say with regards to this, to the word resistance, not to the concept, is that it reminds me of the avant-garde, as they are both war terms directly rela-ted to war, and the time of avant-gardes are su-pposed to be over. Some like to say that they still go on, everybody discusses this, if they do or if they don't, but it is my personal wish that these words should not be used when discu-ssing art: avant-garde, rearguard, resistance, denial... they are out of the question.

Gabriela Massuh: -I think we are giving the word resistance an excessively negative value.
I think two of the projects here today are examples of resistance. The project Casas Ran-cho (Hut Houses) is an act of conservation, a cartographic design of a type of abode, structured in a certain way, that relates to this country. It is an act of recovery. Every act of recove-ry is clearly an act of resistance; faced with the destruction of cultural forms, it is an act of re-sistance. Another project that to me was clearly an act of resistance was the one of the parcel ("The perfect parcel", by Rocío Pérez Armendáriz) because it is trying to put together forms of nostalgia that one may lose when one leaves. The feeling of loss is so strong that one feels the need to trace a map of the small things one wants to keep. That keeping of small things at an individual level that one may project into a public environment is an act of resistance. Why all this fear?

Diana Aisenberg: -It is not fear, Gabriela, it is not a question of fear. I agree with what you say, and art resists per se, just by existing it resists, it resists to a lot of things, resistance is the essence of art. I am talking of the negative load that the word carries, as the word comes from a war vocabulary. That is why I prefer not to talk of resistance When talking of art, it is not because I think there is...

Gabriela Massuh: -...Listen, Christ resisted, Gandhi resisted, Mandela resisted...

Diana Aisenberg: -Yes, but they are still examples of physical suffering facing a political reality. This is what I think. I am not against those patterns of behaviour. I am discussing to what point we take on this terminology or these patterns of behaviour as art language or as art behaviour, or the place of the artist. This is what I am asking. It is a question.

Andreas Siekmann: -I am coming back on something that I brought up yesterday. There is a lecture by Foucault on Klausevitz in which he reflects on Klausevitz' phrase that war is a follow up of politics against other media, Foucault turns this around and says that po-litics is the continuation of war with other media and he develops the concept of government, trying to show that liberalism creates the fiction or the idea that the individual go-verns himself. I bring this up wondering to what point these projects of social commitment don't end up by playing up to the so-ciety to which they relate, if they do not end up by being assertive. To what point do these projects escape the idea of government? Can they be thought outside the question of go-vernment? How do they evade the idea of government?

Reinaldo Laddaga: -I can try an answer. It is a complex question and, perhaps, I ought to take up a few things that I was trying to say a while ago. In a way, the current neoliberalism in Argentina takes place under a process of organization reform, of decomposition of the state welfare structure and of the structures associated with it. Unions, public schools, and all that. It would be long to follow this up but at the end of the road we seem to find the precariousness of labour, because of the des-truction of solidarity conditions within the neighbourhood, within crafts, and all that. These are processes of hyper individualization and disaffiliation. I believe this is, at least, part of the true condition in which Argentina finds itself. What can one do about it? Of course, it is not clear. What can art do about it? It is not absolutely clear either, but I do not think it impossible that from the art field one can try exercises in organizing imagination, on the one hand, and the construction of instruments of communication, and the models of communication, on the other hand, to carry out a task of reparation (and I come back to my term) towards this condition, that can be thought from the Foucault government perspective.
A government that does not seem to be pro-perly described in disciplinarian or bio-political terms, as in the case of Foucault, and that re-lates to processes of ultra individualization that bring about the strong decomposition of a dialogue opportunity between people and of the influence of the people on power. What can art do about this? It can, no doubt, go on doing what it has been doing for a long time: explicit denunciations of specific conditions, criticism and production of images destined to mobilization. This is what it can do, and it has to do it. This dimension of the political seems necessary. I ask myself, and I do not have a ready answer, what other things can art do in other places. I find that this effort of developing organization skills is characteristic of what happens in the art field.
For a long time, and to go to another political source, Michael Mann has shown that the conditions that allow possible processes of reengineering, of social recomposition, as it is ha-ppening in Argentina relate to what I call the organizing flanks. My question is, and I feel anxious about this, if art can do something in that area. Not simply in the area of representation but in the organizing spaces. It is not clear to me what the answer is, but it seems central to the current Argentine situation because of the loss of individual power through the pro-cess of social recomposition taken over by the sphere of the powers that be.

Charles Esche: -It's an interesting question, on which I would like to talk a little bit tomorrow but I think it does relate to what you pointed out in relation to our getting together. There's a great quote by an important American artist, very important to me, Vito Aconcci, where he said a gallery could be the place where a co-mmunity is called to order. He said that in 1980, so it's a long time ago, but it still seems very relevant now. I didn't want to talk about that, but I think that it is in part a possible way towards an answer. But the question I wanted to bring up, which is picking up what Andreas said, is this issue of resistance. It seems to me that we have to define what we are resisting, and this is the great trick of neoliberalism, be-cause actually in the end individual resistance in neoliberalism turns into a resistance against yourself. It turns into a resistance against a certain level of desire that neoliberalism and capitalism create in us. So when we talk about Gandhi or we talk about the South African si-tuation, you are talking about a very clear sense of opposition: opposition to apartheid, opposition to imperialism.
Now what we have within global capitalism is a very ill-defined sense of what that is. It seems to me that if art, along with other means can attempt some kind of definition, and maybe that definition, when we are thinking about global relations, has to do with a kind of neo-colonialism, which in its economic phase might be a far more helpful term than globalisation. And, of course, there's a cultural globalisation we are witnessing now, which is different. This is being far too long-winded, sorry.
What I mean to say is, how can we, or what in the Argentine situation, would you define as re-sistance? Because if it is resistance to an Argen-tine government, it seems to me it is to be re-sistant to what in English you call a paper tiger.
In other words resistance to something which itself has no real effective power to change the situation anyway. And we see that perhaps with Venezuela at the moment. The situation there, where there is an attempt to develop another model, is proving extremely difficult.

Andreas Siekmann: -An answer. I think that the autonomous worker-manager, which is what we have become, is in a permanent competition situation, not only against ourselves but also against the whole context. We are in a sort of auto regression because we compete against ourselves.

Reinaldo Laddaga: -Can I add something to this question? I think there is an interesting point in what Charles is mentioning, particularly within the Argentine context and in relation to criticism and to denial, that in my case is only an impression, but it is, nevertheless, a strong and persistent impression that there is a determined change in the ideological function of the Argentine State. Even the dictatorship, which was extremely violent, felt it had to represent some sort of figure of what is national, a project for the country, what we would be against them, while what is characteristic between the people and the government in Argentina (today) is a type of information that relates to the following: the usual answer of the power that be is: "This is so", not: "This is who we are". There is a change, I am not saying there is a disappearance, but a change, in the function of the management of the population ideology that seems to place all art made in the tradition of ideological criticism in a complex and difficult situation. I was thinking, for example, in the "Grupo de Arte Callejero" (Street Art Group), the "Liquidación- FMI" (Sale- IMF) flag. The function there is to name the other one, strictly the enemy, which is strategically useful, no doubt, in a certain way, but it is equivocal as well in another sense, and also, it would seem to fall off the type of the power economy that the Argentine State would appear to propose. It would take too long to discuss this, but this question seems to be particularly central since we are talking about art, and since the canon social critique in the art context has been the ideological critique. I am under the impression that this ideology we are concerned with does not hold the same place it used to, at least in Argentina and in the US.

Public: -I would like to know if you could talk of peripheral action. I believe you used a word in English: "reengineering". The concept seemed interesting, like another vision from which we may rethink art or act in some way, without art being necessarily denunciation or going against. One wonders against what, if there is no against what, against is against oneself.

Reinaldo Laddaga: -That is just the point Charles has made with regards to the fact that the cha-llenge of the current government regime is their effort to withdraw as a source of power and the fact that power aspires to become unidentifiable. This is characteristic, not only of the national state in a place like Argentina, also of the power in the factories, managing power, and all that. There is a different economy of the face of power and, therefore, of the ideology that brought the changes about. Reengineering is an organizing recomposition. This is what I meant, a concrete reorganizing recomposition when one accepts the end of full employment, high levels of unemployment, the dismantling of the possibility of union power.

Sonia Abián: -I would like to add something to what was said. There was talk of an act of recovery as an act of resistance. In the current context of our country simply doing something is already an act of resistance, and as such, assertive.

Charles Esche: -Can I just ask what are you resisting?

Sonia Abián: -The pressure is not to do, everything pulls you down, it is in that sense that I place the word resistance, resistance to the ten-dency of inertia, immobility, detention, to death.

Charles Esche: -In a situation of high capitalism in which the only model is actually more, and more, and more. More consumption, this exists everywhere, even in the situation of decline, the paradigm is more consumption, more success, more beauty, whatever. Actually inertia, boredom, refusal to do things, could actually be its own form of resistance. It seems to me that the object of resistance needs to be carefully defined and I can't define it, this is the problem. I think that in the end it becomes a resistance to your own set of desires, which are developed by capitalism. This is the catch, this is the Moebius strip that we're caught in, I think we started on one side of the object we are looking at, we have followed it around and we end by finding that it is actually flat, if you know what a Moebius strip is. It is a three di-mension object that's actually only in two di-mensions. (If you don't know what a Moebius strip is that's not a good analogy, sorry.)

Public: -It seems to me that capitalism in Ar-gentina does not answer exactly to the descrip-tion of capitalism in the US.
I sincerely adhere to those postures and I know lots of people who work in that sense: the day of not consuming, not watching tele-vision, etc, etc. But here reality is really very different. We are infected with this message but we cannot even execute it, so things are
a little more complex.

Charles Esche: -There's no possibility of complaints, there's only the creation of desire, because to actually fulfil the desires created by capitalism would mean the end of capitalism, which is an impossible position for capitalism to be in.

Reinaldo Laddaga: -I do not believe that capitalism really works towards generating desires which are impossible to satisfy or something like that -unless you think of the present case with 20 % unemployment plus another 20 % of concealed unemployment- it works fundamentally through the lure of security, of insecurity with regards to which is one's own position in the structure. That is the different ideological position, because in the model you are posing, ideology has a central function: to ge-nerate desires, to generate a specific type of desire and a specific subjective structure. The place of ideology in Argentina is different as it is about the confrontation of the population with a high level of insecurity. That is why I believe that the creation of new public spaces that allow for the conquest of power positions, even if it is only the power to speak, has a definite function in Argentina.

Public: -Carrying on with what you say, I be-lieve that Trama is resistance, in the sense that it draws attention to what is said and encou-rages a desire to comprehend and to achieve understanding, not only among ourselves abut also outside. It seems to me that the same is happening with the rest of society, this "it does not matter because it does not happen to me" does not work any more, and there is the need to listen that calls for these public spaces to be able to understand each other.

Eduardo Molinari: -I think that Santiago said something important that has to do with high capitalism, that is not only an economic imposition but also a cultural imposition. So, if we speak of resistance, we are discussing the re-sistance to impositions of definite cultural vi-sions. I also think that the ability to create historical symbols in the last decades, at least, be-cause of those systems that have been totally emptied of meaning or right out degenerate. There is a certain challenge; at least I feel there is, for us artists to generate new stimulating symbols that raise new hopes.