Chantal Mouffe
The politics of artistic practices

How do different theories envisage the relation between art and politics and the possibility for artistic practices to play a critical role in society? Several divergences currently exist among artistic and cultural workers who are interested in making a political intervention. It is important to bring them to the fore. To clarify what is at stake in those disagreements, the symposium will scrutinise the different interpretations of the evolution of the work process brought about by the Post-fordist stage of capitalism and its consequences for visualising aesthetic modes of resistance. What form could those resistances take and where should they take place? Is an effective critique still possible inside the art world or are all critical interventions in that field bound to be neutralised and recuperated?

Pressures towards pure entertainment exerted by corporations’ drive for profit are difficult to resist. With cuts in public subsidies for the arts, the situation in several European countries looks really bleak. One argument is that the loss of public support offers the opportunity to break away from the institutions. To be sure the proliferation of various modalities of artistic activism testifies to the possibility of different ways of exercising creativity. But, while acknowledging the significance of those new ways of using artistic means to make political interventions, one might also be reluctant to follow those who claim that “artivism” is the only manner for artists to intervene politically.

The session is interrupted by a lecture performance by common spring collective, revisiting Walter Benjamin’s dialectical approach on the aestheticisation of politics and the politicisation of aesthetics.

Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Chantal Mouffe
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Anette Baldauf
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Zdenka Badovinac
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: common spring collective
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Stefan Hertmans
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Oliver Marchart
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Giulia Palladini
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Gerald Raunig
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Bert Theis
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Stephen Wright
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Stephen Zepke