Day, Gail & Edwards, Steve & Mabb, David Istanbul 11th Biennial Review

Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171 brill.
nl/hima
‘What Keeps Mankind Alive?’:

the Eleventh International Istanbul Biennial.
Once More on Aesthetics and Politics
Gail Daya, Steve Edwardsb, David Mabbc

a
University of Leeds
g.a.day@leeds.ac.uk
b
Open University
s.j.edwards@open.ac.uk
c
Goldsmiths University of London
d.mabb@gold.ac.uk
Abstract
Starting from the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, with its Brechtian curatorial theme, this essay
considers the Left’s varying responses to art’s so-called ‘political turn’. Discussion ranges from
the local and regional context of the Biennial’s function as part of Turkey’s bid to join the EU,
through to a longer theoretical perspective on the critical debates over ‘art and life’, artistic
autonomy and heteronomy, and the revival in avant-gardism. The authors propose that the
standard accounts of the intimate connection between the commodity and art have become
politically counterproductive. They suggest that Marxist analysis needs to develop a more
complexly-articulated philosophical reflection on the relation between economy, politics, and
art – and between political and aesthetic praxes – if it is to advance its longstanding
contributions to considerations of ‘aesthetics and politics’.
Keywords
Istanbul Biennial, aesthetics and politics, avant-garde, Brecht, contemporary art, political turn,
commodity, commodification
Biennials of contemporary art have increasingly spread across the globe,

taking place in Venice, Havana and Cape Town; in Athens, Lyon and Seville;
in Berlin, Sydney and São Paulo; in Tel Aviv and T’aipei; in Sharjah and
Shanghai; in Gyumri and Guangzhou; even Liverpool has one.1 There are also
triennials (Yokohama, Turin, London’s Tate Britain); quinennials (Documenta
1. The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to Demet Dinler for her
translations from Turkish and critical reading of this essay.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920610X550631
136 G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171
in Kassel) and decennials (the Münster Sculpture-Festival).2 Venice’s is a now

a venerable institution, dating back to 1895, and Documenta, having been
conceived as part of the postwar-reconstruction of Europe – as a means ‘to
reconcile German public life with international modernity and also confront
it with its own failed Enlightenment’3 (not to mention its rôle as a beacon of
Western values sited close to the border with East Germany) – is now over half
a century old. However, the escalating presence of these large-scale exhibitions
is a phenomenon of recent origin and a significant feature in the landscape of
late-capitalist culture, often requiring of their visitors multi-day commitments
and international travel. Big art-fests of this kind usually come with grandiose-
sounding, but generally vaporous, themes. To take just two examples from
2009: the Venice Biennale’s Making Worlds was a title so vague it could
mean everything or nothing, while Tate Triennial’s Altermodern – despite its
promise to chart a new moment beyond both modernism and postmodernism
– turned out to be a rehash of some well-worn (postmodern) values. Few
take these large curatorial claims that seriously. At these mega-shows, visitors
are typically reduced to seeking out individual works that rise above the vast
array of dark cubes filled with videos, white cubes filled with documentary-
photographs, and coloured cubes filled with every object imaginable, and are
usually forced to abandon the idea that the exhibition itself might actually add
up to something coherent. However, the Eleventh Istanbul Biennial attempted
just that: to create an exhibition that was more than the sum of its constituent
artworks.
This Biennial, which ran from 12 September to 8 November 2009, was
put together by What, How and For Whom (WHW), a curatorial group
based in Zagreb.4 WHW took as its thesis a line – ‘What Keeps Mankind
Alive?’ – from The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht (with Elisabeth
Hauptmann) and Kurt Weill:
What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions

Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive, thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed.
For once, you must try not to shirk the facts:
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.5
2. For convenience, ‘biennial’ stands as the generic term.

3. See Documenta 2007a.
4. The members of WHW are: Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović
(with designer and publicist Dejan Krišić).
5. Brecht 1979.
G. Day et al. / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171 137
The sign, ‘Brecht’, features throughout the exhibition and its spin-offs.
Quotes from Brecht are stencilled onto walls; artists make explicit reference
to his ideas in their works (one piece, by the collective Etcétera, includes his
likeness); and the work-group Chto Delat/What Is to Be Done published a
special issue of their paper devoted to Brecht’s ‘Great Method’.6 The short
exhibition-guide opens with an address to students by Brecht7 and the
parallel volume of texts is littered with his critical interventions and writing
on his work.8 Of course, one might observe, such compilations of written
material are just standard features of biennial-culture – and, anyway, who
reads the texts? However, it should be clear that something is going on in an
exhibition where Brecht is mobilised, not only as a progenitor for the critique
of representation, but as an explicit marker for left politics. Within the
biennial-scene itself, this was a significant move, pushing the theme beyond
the obligatory pitch signifying the event’s unique ‘character’ or ‘selling
point’. While maintaining the necessary commitment to openness, variety
and flexibility, WHW seemed to be seeking out a greater degree of
specification. ‘Brecht’ offers this, we might note, at the level of both form
and content: one could feel the political charge and critical pointedness; and
Brecht’s injunctions to make art politically useful were – despite the apparent
paradoxes and limits of the biennial-context – conveyed with some urgency.
The Istanbul Biennial itself has a limited budget (2,050,299 euros in
2009). A range of statistics are cited at the beginning of the Biennial-guide:
the number of male and female artists participating (30 women, 32 men);
the number of collectives (5) and collaborative projects (3); the artists’ ages
(the average age was 43); their countries and regions of origin (28 per cent
from the West and 72 per cent from the rest); and the numbers represented
by galleries. The budget is broken down, indicating how it was spent and
from where it all came. No doubt, this deliberate act of transparency – a
‘baring of the device’ – was designed as a Brechtian gesture intended to reveal
the production-apparatus of the exhibition: it was also clearly an
acknowledgment of the marxisant criticisms of the spectacular effect of such
large-scale events. However, there are some odd absences from the data
proffered by WHW. For instance, there are no percentages for the types of
6. Chto Delat 2009, with essays by Sergei Zemlyanoy, Dmitry Vilensky, Peio Aguirre, Gene
Ray, Antonio Negri, and David Riff and Dmitry Gutov. The issue also contains the screenplay
for Chto Delat’s Partisan Songspiel, which is discussed later.
7. WHW 2009c.
8. The commentaries include works by Elin Diamond, Alain Badiou, Mladen Dolar, Luis
Ignacio Garcia, Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin, Bob Dylan, Slavoj Žižek and Keti Chukhrov.
WHW 2009b.
work shown: the number of videos (quite a lot), but also the number of
works on paper (printed, water-coloured, drawn and photographed, often
pinned to the walls in grids); percentage of sculptures (very few) and
paintings (a few more, but mostly small); large photos (a few more), etc. This
point is not made out of pedantry, but to remark that it looks like the
curators were short of money for shipping and insurance. (Even the Venice
Biennale is not immune from similar material constraints, as witnessed with
the ‘Utopia Station’ in 2003.)9 Alternatively, it may be that this was just the
nature of the work selected by WHW, because their Brechtian Haltung gave
little room for more traditional art-forms. Or, perhaps, this was the result of
the political-geographical regions where most of the artists were drawn from:
the ex-‘Soviet Bloc’ (particularly its southern fringe), ex-Yugoslavia, Turkey
and down through Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Egypt. Given the lack
of a strong market for art through most of these geographical zones, it is
likely that producing saleable commodities was not the most important
motive for many of the artists involved. Whatever the reasons for the relative
absence of traditional art-media, this led to an exceptionally makeshift-
looking exhibition, with a lot of work literally lacking weight. But the
physical insubstantiality of many of the works was made up for by the
number that evidenced epic-ambitions.
Art at the Eleventh Istanbul Biennial

In this essay, we will take the Eleventh Istanbul Biennial as an occasion to
outline some recent shifts in art and the Left’s varying responses to them. We
suspect that many of the instinctive approaches to art and culture that have
become familiar among Marxists may need reconsideration. We realise that
there will be more questions raised than answers given here. This article does
not attempt to provide a comprehensive map (let alone a resolution) of the
conflicting positions that the Left in general, and Marxists in particular, have
taken towards contemporary art, but simply to give some indication of the
parameters shaping these. Perhaps the key-debate has been whether such
events are now so contaminated by corporate sponsorship that participation
is questionable: some argue for outright boycott, others for a struggle for
hegemony inside the organisations of art. Attitudes have varied substantially
towards questions such as economic or political modernisation, and how
these are to be thought in the context of an unevenly developing world. They
9. The form of chosen media in contemporary art-exhibitions are frequently a marker of such
restrictions. Biennial-venues – typically, redundant industrial public buildings – make for
difficult conditions for valuable work in terms of security, climate-control and insurance-costs.
have equally varied just as much, if not more, so when considering the ways
cultural practices have been inserted into these same historical developments,
as suggested by the famous debates on aesthetic modernity, or on formalism
and the avant-garde, from the 1920s and 30s, and from their revitalisation in
the 1960s and 70s. Some Marxists may still hold to premodernist aesthetics;
while some who accept the arguments in favour of modernism may struggle
to accommodate their views to postconceptual art. Meanwhile, opinion
continues to be divided by debates over the nature of aesthetic realism, the
relevance of beauty, or the precise means by which to articulate the ‘autonomy’
of art. None of these can be restricted to some (imagined) free-standing
aesthetic realm, but necessarily overlap with disputes in other fields
(philosophical realism, political realism, etc); at the same time, something
distinctive is brought to bear by the aesthetic context. Further, many of the
critical discussions of art, which have grown in influence, were founded on
writings that tried to read artistic form through the prism of Marx’s analysis of
the value-form; the analysis of the commodity and capitalist market have since
taken a more Bourdieu-inspired direction. Assessing the ‘political turn’ in art
(which we will return to shortly), radical critics have struggled to reach any
level of agreement. Political responses (the nature of practice, tactics or
strategy) to this turn or its manifestations have found themselves subject to
similar lack of consensus. It is not that we wish for some ready consensualism,
though the current political fragmentation certainly seems debilitating
(this itself being addressed in some of the best artworks); rather, the point, we
think, is that Marxist analysis in/of art has itself come to rely on
some standard – even standardised – responses, which have become
counterproductive. We hope that our essay may contribute towards clarifying
some of the parameters of the current debates, especially those on the relation
between ‘art and commodity’. The 2009 Istanbul Biennial dramatised the
problems. Crystallising issues – from the tensions between liberal expression
and neoliberalism, between modernisation and gentrification, between art’s
commodification and its emancipatory potential, between an individual art-
practice and the institutions of art, or between the capacity of these institutions
to ‘incorporate’ and to serve as progressive ideological platforms, through to
questions of form and content (philosophical and aesthetic), or to those of
‘art’ and ‘life’ – this Biennial brought to the fore questions concerning the very
relation of aesthetic and political praxis.
It will help to survey of some of the artworks that were on display in
Istanbul – though, given the contingent nature of the event, these are not
necessarily the most prominent of international artists present at the event
or the best examples of their work. Familiar genres were present in Istanbul:
photographs of poignant spaces, in this instance, Syrian sites used for public
executions; batches of scruffy drawings pinned to the wall (though these

transpired to be illustrations to Capital ); video-essays reflecting on working
conditions or colonialism; conspiracy-maps; documentation of oil-pipelines;
‘smuggling art’ (lemons being carried through an Israeli checkpoint); archives,
here one of political posters from the civil war in Lebanon assembled by
Zeina Maasri; and fictionalised ‘documentaries’ that trade on the viewer’s
gullibility (or, satisfaction when they catch on to the trick). This last genre
is becoming tiresome, though the one shown here by Rabih Mroué – if a
little too-closely modelled on the work of Walid Ra’ad’s Atlas Group – at
least succeeded in being humorously pertinent, recasting the process of ‘truth
and reconciliation’ through his performance apologising publicly for all and
sundry. The Biennial was peppered with little-known works from the past:
Tamás St Auby’s intriguing avant-garde film Centaur from 1973–5, in which
Hungarian factory-workers break off from their labour or travel to address
Marxist dialogues on alienation and exploitation to the camera; Hamlet
Hovsepian’s Fluxus-like films documenting small actions, giving a prominent
position to an Armenian modernist; the beautifully filmed Step by Step (1977)
by Mohammed Ossama, which depicts the poverty of Syrian rural life and
the forces of Arab nationalism, and which bears the traces of his training at
VGIK, the great Moscow film-academy; the German painter K.P. Brehmer’s
marvellously subversive systems-works from the 1970s, which take as their raw
data, not the usual abstract mathematical problems, but stock-market prices
for zinc or potatoes and psychological studies of workers’ attitudes towards
their labour. None of these projects or artists were resurrected simply to flesh
out the canon and spice up the market: the exhibition may have this effect, of
course, but the works all repay extended critical engagement.
The Biennial contained works that sought to reveal the historicity of
contemporary political conjunctures or open onto questions of social
totality, and could be described as realist. In this mode, Bureau d’Etudes’
Administration of Terror (2009) plots diagrammatically connections between
secret right-wing military groups, and diplomatic, financial and intelligence-
forces – obviously topical in the light of the ‘Ergenekon’-case. Forming part
of a larger project, and produced in collaboration with local academics,
Trevor Paglan’s photographs display traces of secret satellites orbiting over
Istanbul. The images seem to invoke the sublimity that is associated with
astronomical photography, but turn this around to demonstrate the all-too-
human hidden ‘black world’ of the military-industrial complex. Marko
Peljhan’s installation – Territory 1995 – consists of maps, sound-recordings
and documents, focusing on the massacre in Srebenica, the rôle played by the
international ‘protection’-force, and the ways in which the landscape becomes
reconfigured by an explosion of tactical and strategic communications-

systems. Strictly speaking, Territory 1995 at Istanbul is less ‘installation’ than
presentation of an ongoing project, which involves collaborative work with
researchers and low-tech intercept-operators, the former contributing lectures
and the latter providing Peljhan access to their archive of data-tracking and
decoding military communications. Peljhan’s projects are envisaged, not just
as evidence of military power, but as experimentations in self-organisation.
There were a significant number of works that took as their subject the
political configurations of Israel and Palestine. Larissa Sansour’s Soup Over
Bethlehem (2006) brings together a family from the Palestinian diaspora over
the dish of mloukhieh, which provides the only splash of colour in an otherwise
black-and-white video; conversation turns to travel and being strangers in
your own land, to border-controls and passport-ruses. Sandi Hilal, Alessandro
Petti and Eyal Weizman – working as the collective decoloninizing.ps – make
proposals for refunctioning the architecture of oppression that, since the
foundation of Israel, has transformed the landscape to which displaced
Palestinians hope to return. Wafa Hourani’s Qalandia 2087 is a small-scale
model of an Israeli checkpoint and refugee-camp. This is part of a series that
considers the future of the occupation. Set in 2087, Qalandia projects forwards
to a moment of decolonisation. In another work, Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir
pick up Israeli men via an internet-site: the guys turn up expecting to be
rewarded sexually (one brings a bag of ‘tools’) only to find a video-camera and
an interview-process that turns the situation from expectations of sex to
discussions of state-military violence, mining the psychic connections and
disconnections between erotics and war. One man hopes that his vignette in
Sela and Amir’s film will lead to a lucrative future as a porn-star.
The Biennial included some pieces that directly addressed moments of
intense political confrontation. For example, Igor Grubič’s East Side Story
(2006–8) takes the form of a double-screen projection of events surrounding
the Gay-Pride demonstrations in Belgrade and Zagreb in 2001 and 2002.
On one screen, Grubič projects footage of skinhead and neo-Nazi violent
assaults on these parades; on the other, dancers re-enact incidents from the
riots. This format was a failure of nerve: all attention in Istanbul focused on
the footage of the attacks, which is so visceral as to be almost unwatchable.
Warring nationalisms are shown to rest on comparable forms of bigotry and
fear. This means no-one bothers with the adjacent screen, mounted at right-
angles, which just makes art seem ineffectual and besides the point. Artur
Żimijewski bombards viewers’ senses with his multi-screen video-work
Democracies (2009), which displays diverse demonstrations including Jörg
Haider’s funeral, anti-NATO clashes in Strasbourg, the Way of the Cross for
Working People in Poland, the Orange Order in Belfast and Palestinian

protests and Israeli counter-demonstrations. Żimijewski is an activist-
intellectual in the Polish left movement Political Critique, yet he opts to
depict these scenes of conflict with an odd neutrality and equivalence (though,
during our time in the exhibition, the monitor displaying the anti-NATO
protestors burning a petrol-station drew the most rapt viewers). Works like
these, despite Grubič’s botched aesthetic dialectic, figure the exhibition-space
with violent conflict in a way that charges the whole.
Brechtian themes
Some of these works are powerful enough to remain memorable, but you
would not specifically characterise their themes and strategies as Brechtian.
As the curators acknowledge:
The works presented are not necessarily ‘Brechtian’ per se; indeed few refer
directly to Brecht’s oeuvre. They subscribe, on the one hand, to Brecht’s belief
in political engagement in art and seek to make that potential meaningful; on
the other hand, they share something of the spirit of Brecht’s song. ‘What Keeps
Mankind Alive?’ points a way forward beyond the merely existent, delineating
possible directions and new readings.10
Nevertheless, some works in the Biennial explicitly draw, in a fashion, on

Brecht’s legacies or precursors: Mahagonny was reworked (sadly, with an
overweening portentousness, lending it the air – and historical staticity – of
classical tragedy); both Zanny Begg and Etcétera use the model of popular
entertainment to explore commodity-fetishism and its ruptures. Etcétera’s
Errorist Kabaret includes objects that talk, speaking about their place in
consumer-desire and their own sense of alienation. Begg’s Treat (or Trick)
draws spectators into a small tent (reminiscent of the attractions found on
piers or at fairgrounds) to look down on a small monitor (itself suggestive of
the way the camera obscura was used for early visual spectacle). Employing
animation and performance, and with Marx’s comments intervening, Begg
literally turns Adam Smith’s ‘invisible-hand principle’ into the sleights of a
popular illusionist – albeit one who runs out of ruses. Two explicitly Brechtian
projects require extended consideration.
Among the most impressive works in the Biennial were those by Chto
Delat/What is to Be Done. The work-group, based in Moscow and Petersburg,
10. WHW 2009b, p. 99.

exhibited three videos within an installation detailing the recent history and
demise of the Soviet Bloc. The first of the three videos, Chronicles of Perestroika
(made by Dmytri Vilenski), presents edited footage of demonstrations in
Leningrad from the period 1987–91. Projected in black and white with a
keyboard sound-track, it recalls silent movies from the 1920s. The footage
looks as if it was shot a lot longer than twenty years ago and, at moments, the
video is evocative of early-Soviet newsreels or Sergei Eisenstein’s October. This
footage attempts to actualise the imagery of revolution, but these are
demonstrations that would currently be difficult in the face of the Russian
Federation’s repressive state.
A chorus singing the story of ‘hopes that didn’t come true’ introduces
the second video, Perestroika-Songspiel. The story is told through ‘five heroes
of perestroika’: ‘An idealistic democrat, A noble businessman, A heroic
revolutionary, A bitter nationalist and A woman who has found her own
voice’. Interrupted by a ‘Chorus’ and a ‘Group of Wolf-Girls’, they all act out
the contested politics of the future of Russia against the coming introduction
of what became neoliberal-oligarchic capitalism. Illusion gives way before the
reality of capitalist reconstruction, and ideals become shoddy compromises.
The third video, Partisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story (made by Chto Delat
with Vladan Jeremić and Rena Rädle), has a related structure. Here the story
takes place in Serbia, where a group of ‘Oppressed’ archetypes – a ‘Romany
Women’, a ‘Lesbian-Activist’, a ‘Disabled Veteran’ and a ‘Worker’ – narrate
their stories, interrupting another group, the ‘Oppressors’ (a ‘Woman-
Politician’, an ‘Oligarch’, a ‘Nationalist’, and a ‘Mafioso’ – along with their
heavies – who wish to ‘clean up Serbia’). This time, the chorus dressed in
white body-suits – evoking a combination of environmental activists and
Tutti Bianchi – appears from behind the cut-out image of a stone-monument
to Yugoslav partisans, which was a montage composed from monuments
in Slovenia and Serbia. The chorus here figures as a spectral communism, a
memory of class-conscious solidarity, commenting on the divisions now so
evident today among the oppressed, and calling on the ‘comrades’ to ‘close
their ranks’. The work narrates – through speech, dance and song – political
conflicts in Serbia, but one cannot help seeing parallels with repression and
resistance elsewhere.
What is extraordinary about both Songspielen is their articulation of the
tensions created by capitalist class-restoration with a politics of form. Both
videos are, by turns, affecting and hilarious (even when the audience’s laughter
is not in time with the actors). There is nothing austere about these works:
Chto Delat is not afraid of emotion, laughter, savage irony or visual pleasure.
The two videos are very much in the tradition of Brechtian epic-theatre in
their use of music, dance, costume, and laughter; the action and views of
participants is commented on by the chorus or characters. In this dimension,

these works are much closer to Brecht than the neo-Brechtian works of the
1970s, which were, for the most part, humourless. They walk the line between
typification and caricature – the problem of how to have one individual
represent or stand for a social group and how particular representations are
used to achieve this. Such characters sometimes run the risk of degenerating
into stereotypes, particularly in the case of gender and sexuality; Chto Delat
is aware of the problem, and in Partisan Songspiel worked with a prominent
lesbian-activist.11 Never for a moment can the viewer believe that the story is
anything but a theatrical construction: there are no ‘hypnotic tensions’.12 The
Songspielen are a new departure for Chto Delat. The group has primarily made
filmic records of actions, but this current direction is especially suggestive. The
three videos work together to function as a moving lament for the possibilities
offered by the overthrow of Eastern-European bureaucratic state-capitalism
that ended in betrayal and lost opportunities.13 The epic historical sweep
animated the Biennial’s premise of rereading Marx through Brecht. But to
see these works as no more than a ‘lament’ and concern with the erasure of
historical memory – a prominent and widespread mood within recent art – is
to recognise but one aspect, and to strip the project of its vital counterpart;
the mood is less defensive, less pessimistic, less nostalgic, and less melancholic
than most other works that have been mining this vein of historical memory.
Even Benjamin’s dialectical images, which aimed to let the past rip into now-
time – a claim he made on behalf of the historical-materialist project – seems
not quite to grasp it adequately.14 To the fore are themes of collective action,
solidarity, agency – conveyed, not just as ‘reminders’ of ‘lost’ terms, but
more as the need to register anger and to mobilise here, now. These works
are among the most significant cultural products of our time for Marxists
to reflect upon, not least for considering the gap between the social desires
and aesthetic mood being expressed in art, on the one hand, and, on the
other, the state of our current political reality and the fragile self-confidence
of emancipatory projects.
Another work in the tradition of epic-theatre is the film Z32 by Avi
Mograbi. It also deploys the structure of the narrative punctuated with
the intervention of a chorus, but, this time, Mograbi himself sings a
11. How this image travels is another matter.

12. Brecht 1978, p. 136.
13. We note that one author of this essay disagrees with this characterisation of the ex-Soviet
state, but the likelihood of three Marxists agreeing on this subject is obviously still remote.
14. Benjamin 2003.
commentary from his living room, progressively joined and accompanied by

a small-but-growing orchestra. The storyline is formed by a digitally-disguised
former Israeli soldier describing to his girlfriend (who is similarly masked) his
rôle in the murder of two Palestinian police-officers in a revenge-attack. He
asks her for forgiveness, but, at the same time, shows little remorse or
understanding of the significance of his actions; indeed, he still seems to take
some pleasure and excitement from the episode. A third strand of the
film – the only one to break the claustrophobic confines of interior-domestic
space – has Mograbi drive the soldier through the district to provoke his
memories and to identify the spot where the killings took place. The video
covers similar ground to the film Waltz with Bashir in that it grapples with the
way Israeli society is itself collectively damaged by this violence (a theme also
present in Amir and Sela’s work), but Mograbi utilises the ex-soldier’s inability
to sympathise with the Palestinians he murdered to distance the viewer
critically from the central character. The work is structured through both
repetition and development. Sitting on a bed or divan, the young man and
woman go through their discussion, as if working through a process of therapy,
or as though rehearsing their rôles for a performance and attempting to get
into character. The digital masks gradually drop away – as if ‘de-pixelating’ –
but, most significantly, the woman, who starts out unable, and unwilling, to
understand her lover’s past-actions, begins to identify with him. Asked
(initially, pressured and cajoled) to speak back to him his experiences, her
halting and reluctant account passes over, not just into a seamlessly smooth
relating of his perspective, but also into a new grammatical voice; now telling
his story in first-person narrative, she effectively takes on his point of view.
This alone offers a powerful consideration of the forces of ideology, the
pressures to conform socially, or to submit in the face of love – all played out
with reference to a specific geopolitical context and as an interpretation of
that situation’s social mechanisms. But, taken in isolation, this narrative-
strand runs the risk of fatalism. As with Chto Delat, Mograbi’s work has an
internal resistance to the tendency, common in recent art, towards ‘left
melancholy’. In addition to serving its function as punctuation, the chorus is
also the counterpoint to this part of the narrative. It grows in size, sonic
clamour, musical complexity and sense of social integration; its growing ‘one-
ness’ made of many – a move away from the solitary voice of Mograbi – is of
a different nature to the emerging ‘one-ness’ of the two individuals; here,
solidarity displaces conformity. The chorus provides its expected meta-
commentary on the ex-soldier’s narrative, but it also comments on the rôle of
the filmmaker. The latter is a means to consider Mograbi’s own ethics (he
reports his wife’s criticism that his artistic project risks being in the service of
his own career, and that, as director, he holds a certain power over his subjects
and his representation of them). It is also a cipher to explore the rôle of art (its
political purposefulness; its complicity with, or the gains it makes from, such
charged material; the possibilities of, and limitations inherent to, art’s critical
capacities). In this sense, Z32 serves as a meta-work that raises questions
pertinent to the biennial-form, or, further, which focuses upon issues of
political engagements with, and of, art today.
Biennials and the ‘political turn’

As these works indicate, there has been a marked politicisation of artistic
activity. Art-critics have dubbed this mood the ‘political turn’ or the ‘social
turn’.15 This reconfiguration of art beyond the postmodern consensus began
in the mid 1990s and coalesced symbolically with Seattle in 1999. Much of
this art is characterised by attempts to find new ways to represent capitalism
and war; others are turning to direct intervention (a mix of agitprop and
counter-spectacle); and there is a marked rise in collectives and group-
projects. As each year passes, the mood seems increasingly emboldened.
Biennials have played a part in this phenomenon, bringing artists together
and crystallising a structure of feeling. A significant moment of the
reorientation was provided in 1997 by Catherine David’s curatorial
directorship of the tenth Documenta – known as Document X.16 This event
was orchestrated around the conjuncture ‘Politics/Poetics’ and, at the time,
was widely dismissed by critical cognoscenti as a retrograde leftism, nostalgic
for an earlier time and unable to face up to the ‘end of history’. However,
David’s mobilisation of the spirits of Pasolini, Fassbinder, Rossellini, Godard,
etc – in conjunction with interventions, such as, David Harvey’s ‘militant
particularity’, Masao Miyoshi on ‘A Borderless World?’, Etienne Balibar,
Jacques Rancière, Edouard Glissant, Dominique Lecourt, Alain Lipietz, and
many others – now appears, not as backward-looking, but as a perspicacious
point-of-departure for the next decade or so, as though she and her team had
detected early signs of a shifting cultural mood and a need to recover (and not
just for the purposes of historical curiosity) a range of abandoned radical and
socially-focused aesthetic traditions.17 Documenta X was in development
15. The ‘documentary-turn’ has also been used. Other writers have criticised the fashion-
orientated turn to the concept of the ‘turn’.
16. Exceptionally, the Roman rather than Arabic numeral was employed in 1997.
17. David 1997.
when Chiapas took place, when workers and students again took to the streets
of Paris, and as the antiglobalisation-movement was cohering and developing
anticapitalist articulations; its context was framed by the new conflicts of the
world after 1989 and the expansions of the neoliberal project. Post-Seattle,
and in the years of the World Social Fora (and regional social fora), this
politicised trajectory was further developed at Documenta 11 in 2002, by
Okwui Enwezor with an increasingly global perspective. Key-sections of the
2003 Venice Biennale followed suit – Hou Hanru’s ‘Zones of Urgency’;
‘Utopia-Station’ (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Molly Nesbit, Rikrit Tiravanija); ‘The
Structure of Survival’ by Carlos Basualdo; David’s own ‘Contemporary Arab
Representations’ – as did Seville 2006 (Enwezor) and Istanbul 2007 (Hou
Hanru). Sydney 2008, directed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in association
with her ‘curatorial comrades’, was themed ‘Revolutions – Forms That Turn’,
‘a celebration of the defiant spirit’ exploring the ‘impulse to revolt’ and ‘the
agency embedded in forms that express our desire for change’.18 Even
Documenta 12 (2007, directed by Robert Buergel), which was billed as a
departure from its two politicised predecessors – ‘you don’t need a sociology
degree to understand the art’, Buergel told the International Herald Tribune –
contained significant amounts of intelligent (and sociologically demanding)
work.19 These are but a few examples among the international mega-exhibitions.
Nevertheless, practices with a strong anti-neoliberal and socialist bent, both
registering and reflecting critically on the post-89 world-order, have appeared
widely in other local, national and international exhibitions of art. At a series
of small sites along the south coast of England, for example, curator Julian
Stallabrass focused on the subject of war and photography for the 2008
Brighton Photo-Biennial.20 Of course, some of this may not be much more
than curators adapting to the fashion of the moment, but the return of such
rhetoric is symptomatic, indicating a shift away from the claims for the ‘end
of the avant-garde’ and the anomie of ‘postmodern debates’.
WHW’s deployment of ‘What Keeps Mankind Alive?’ was, in many
senses, a culmination of a longer process that turned away from the clever
18. See Biennale of Sydney 2008a and 2008b.

19. A number of radical journals were meant to come together to discuss the urgency of
reconstituting a public sphere through the leitmotifs ‘Is Modernity Our Antiquity?’, ‘What Is
Bare Life?’ and ‘What Is to Be Done?’, the last of which identified education as ‘one viable
alternative to the devil (didacticism, academia) and the deep blue sea (commodity fetishism)’.
See Documenta 2007b. On the ensuing debacle, prompted by the reduction of the magazines
to a low-key, disorganised, critical window-dressing, see Radical Philosophy 2007.
20. The 2008 Brighton Photo-Biennial was entitled Memory of Fire: The War of Images and
Images of War. For an assessment, see Edwards 2009.
complacencies and political cynicism/defeatism (with all the knowing irony-

for-no-particular-sake) that dominated discussions of art during the 1980s
and early 1990s. But Istanbul 2009 did not simply lie at the end of an artistic
and curatorial lineage; it pushed further. The anti-neoliberal structure of
feeling that has dominated the so-called political turn acquired a redder
colouration. The effort seemed to exceed the more usual left-liberal appeals –
such as those made to, say, Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’, or the figure of the
‘nomad’ – as diagnoses of contemporary modernity. What seemed striking
about the event was its depth and energy, its forward-looking and agitated
mood. The line taken from Brecht demanded – and demands – more than
the interpretation and representation of capitalism’s features. It would be
perfectly possible, of course, to evacuate Brecht’s work of any political
meaning – it has been done often enough and the sign, ‘Brecht’, does not
carry radical values out of necessity – but it is to the credit of WHW that the
Eleventh Istanbul Biennial centred Brecht for his political values and
suggested something more precise about the rôle(s) of aesthetic-political
praxis. Brecht’s star tends to rise at those times when possibilities for activism
and cultural intervention open up; his militant class-politics and aesthetic
strategies for ideological dislocation are, to take one of his favourite ideas,
‘useful’ at moments like this.21 In Godard and Gorin’s Vent d’est (1969), the
final name erased from the list of those to be reckoned with was ‘Brecht’.
(Concomitantly, the prestige of Theodor Adorno – predicated on his defence
of art’s autonomy as a placeholder for critical values in dark times – declines
under such circumstances; and, until fairly recently, it was Adorno whose
work set the main terms for debate.22 For reasons that should be obvious,
Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’ also took a back-seat through this
period.) If art can be understood as, among other things, symptomatic of
social currents, the theme of the 2009 Istanbul Biennial might be one more
indication on the ideological barometer that we are seeing a resurgence of
socially radical aspirations; or, at least, that we may be witnessing a significant
puncturing to capital’s hegemony of ideas within significant sections of the
growing creative and cultural workforce.
21. The literature related to the neo-Brechtian practices of the 1970s is vast, and there is
nothing approaching an adequate history of this important moment in Marxist aesthetics. For
a partial view, see Rodwick 1994.
22. For a selection of exchanges, see Beech and Roberts (eds.) 2002.
Neoliberalism and art in Istanbul

It is one of the features of the Istanbul Biennial that its geopolitical position
makes it one of the most interesting of such events. We mean by this, not
some cliché about the ‘meeting of East and West’, though the curators went
out of their way to draw artists from geographical areas that might resonate
in Istanbul. (It is not often that one can see such a strong representation of
artists from the Kyrgyz Republic.) Rather, the biennials in Istanbul are
animated by the internal struggles between secular/religious/progressive/
conservative forces in Turkish society. These were condensed in 2007 by the
assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. In such contexts,
artworks can become highly charged. In the Ninth Biennial in 2005, Burak
Delier’s photograph Guard was censored; for reproducing it in the catalogue,
the publisher Halil Altindere stood trial under article 301 of the penal code.23
In the same event, the Istanbul/New York-based collective Xurban was refused
permission to take photographs for a project on the cheek-by-jowl proximity
of prostitution, chandelier-production and ritual-ablution in the Karaköy-
area of the city. The collective’s proposal to ship to Istanbul refuse from
Northern-European brothels employing Turkish sex-workers was also blocked.
(In the end, a fold-out work inside the cover of the catalogue was included.)24
Perhaps the traces of this censorship can be found in the 2009 catalogue.
Brecht famously claimed that things could be said in Austria which were not
utterable in Nazi Germany, and maybe the catalogue employs a similar
throwing of the voice: Morad Farhadpour’s account of ‘Secularism and Politics
in Iran’ can be read with a neighbouring land in mind; another account of the
‘great transformation’ might substitute for that adopted from Karl Polanyi in
the essay by Ayşe Buğra as well as that by Brian Holmes and Claire Pentecost;
class-formation in China, probed by Minqi Li, might be considered closer
to home.
The framing situation for the Istanbul Biennial is undoubtedly the politics
of Turkey’s pitch to join the European Union. Tourism is a necessary part of
this project, drawing the liberal middle class from the Euro-zone and beyond.
Euros are already exchanged for cultural wares, as well as in hotels and
restaurants; but it is widely recognised that the real deal revolves around the
consumption of the idea of cultural openness and democratic diversity in a
bid to ‘win hearts and minds’ and to ‘make friends and influence people’ in
the EU. The contradiction here is that to play this biennial-game successfully
23. Evren 2008b, p. 42.

24. Mörtenbeck and Mooshammer 2008, pp. 59–60.
entails drawing to Istanbul critical artists who can be relied on to challenge

received wisdoms and culturally-accepted values.25 The situation may be
fragile and uneven, but it seems that more is being tolerated. In the 2007
exhibition, Kutluğ Ataman and Atom Egoyan showed the videos Testimony
and Auroras as a collaborative project addressing the Armenian genocide. The
situation where they could speak of this history stood in contrast to public
trials taking place of intellectuals. A critic might – with some reason – point
to the narrow audience of the Biennial, or to the relative obliqueness of
videos by Ataman and Egoyan, but this explanation seems too straightforward
and does not chime with the facts: the Istanbul Biennial is not only geared at
impressing European politicians and art-critics; it also draws very large local
audiences (the central venue being especially packed during weekends and
Eid). And, while Ataman and Egoyan, rather than writing explicit treatises on
the genocide, deploy suggestion through the index of lens-based testimony
and the charged metonyms of place, it is hardly a major challenge to
recognise the links being made (arguably, the ‘haunting’ quality of these
banal scenes – a familiar enough tactic in contemporary art’s fascination with
politically-poignant spaces – has equal, if not greater, affectivity).
The animation Exemplary, by Canan Şenol, was one of the obvious
successes of the eleventh Biennial. Outside the projection-room, a notice
announced that this work might be disturbing for minors and, sure enough,
the room was permanently overflowing with attentive and appreciative
viewers. Exemplary was one of the few works – surprisingly, perhaps, in such
a politically motivated and reflective exhibition – which centrally addressed
the politics of the personal, making public issues usually kept private or
repressed. Using a narrative reminiscent of a folk-tale and an animation-style
based on Ottoman miniatures, Exemplary took the life of one extraordinarily
beautiful woman as a parable of the period from Atatürk’s passive revolution
through to the postwar-world of consumerism. Spoken as a ‘women’s tale’,
with the mother’s constant warnings to beware of falling for male predators,
it touched on a number of themes: forced westernisation; the passage from
the rural to urban world; sexual desire among young girls and female-
heterosexual promiscuity; incest in the family; and the morality behind the
institution of marriage. In one incident, in an attempt to enforce the ban on
traditional dress, soldiers are depicted entering a village and tearing clothes
25. There are also, to a degree, echoes of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the face of
McCarthyist hysteria, when the US intelligence-service collaborated with private cultural
institutions to promote a vision of liberal America that could not be circulated through official
state-organisations. See Guilbaut 1983; Frascina (ed.) 1985. We now know that some of these
specific claims have been over-egged, but the general point holds.
from the local men; at a distance, the women snigger at the exposed genitals
of the elders. The video is faux-innocent – a strategy that, even at the story’s
gravest moment, works to make it simultaneously accessible and funny.
Erkan Özgen, from the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, showed
Robben, a triptych of scenes where actions are performed at the prison known
for holding political prisoners after the 1980 coup (it should be remarked
that, although association of prisons with the author of Discipline and Punish
is evident, we still do not fully understand why, in one video, we see a child
lobbing stones at large picture of Foucault stuck to the building’s exterior-
wall). In his video Origin, Özgen has a group of young men from Africa
march around a park chanting a line from the national oath – ‘How fortunate
is the one who says I am Turkish’ – which, turned into a repetitive mantra
accompanying the steady rhythm of stomping feet, impinged itself upon the
exhibition-space. By including works such as these, the Biennial allows an
argument to be made for Turkey’s modernity and tolerance for critical and
unorthodox views.
Even the international curators appointed figures within this project of
open inclusion. It is one thing to take on Hou Hanru, the director of the
2007 Biennial, a curator famed for layering his selections into ‘urban’
cacophonies, taking Simmel’s account of ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ to
new extremes.26 Even if it risks some complaints of headaches, frayed nerves
and demands to know why there is no space to meditate on beautifully-
crafted pictures, the acoustic-visual assault of hypermodernity in all its
excitement/horror appears safe enough – even, it could be argued, desirable
for the state’s larger project of ideological modernisation. (The reality in
Istanbul 2007 was significantly less frenetic than might have been expected.)
However, it is difficult to opt for a curatorial collective like WHW – whose
first exhibition, in 2000, celebrated 150 years of the Communist Manifesto –
without knowing what you will get: even one of the smaller venues they
secured – the abandoned Greek school in Feriköy – made the point.
Despite the odd hitch, the exhibition is part of a wider political strategy
aimed at Turkey’s inclusion in an expanded ‘open’ Europe. Gökçe Dervişoğlu
draws the lesson: the shift from the European Community to the European
Union involved a policy of ‘creating a “European Culture” via cultural
integration’.27 Dervişoğlu, however, appears to be advocating a replay of this
older European strategy in order to meet Turkey’s current aspirations. The
privatisation of culture in Turkey can be traced to the 1960s with the
26. Simmel 1997.

27. Dervişoğlu 2009, p. 39.
development of art-collections and galleries by private banks, but the turn

from Kemalist cultural statism to private or corporate initiatives really
gathered pace after the military coup in 1980 – in line with international
neoliberal developments.28 The art-museum Istanbul Modern (İKSV),
founded by the Eczacibaşi business-empire as a non-state enterprise, is
regularly presented as the face of modern Turkey. Recently, the Suna and
Inan Kiriç Foundation put aside US$500 million for art and culture,
including a new cultural complex to be built by high-end architect Frank
Gehry for US$160 million.29 There are plans afoot for loan-deals with Tate
Modern and the Louvre (the latter – and it is not alone – is developing
similar links in the Gulf-states). The Istanbul Biennial is heavily funded by
Koç and a host of other private and corporate sponsors. The point is, as
Mahmut Mutman observes, that the EU-process ‘of globalisation, the model
of the multicultural, liberal, rule-of-law state cannot be artificially separated
from the process of IMF-imposed policies of economic liberalisation’.30 This
holds just as much for neoliberalism in the field of art. The Biennial sits
alongside the rise of commercial TV aimed at the middle class, the
construction of giant shopping malls, hosting the Champions-League Final,
and the city’s status as European Capital of Culture for 2010. It will, though,
take a lot of art-exhibitions to gentrify Istanbul beyond its obvious property
hot-spots.
If the strategy of the Istanbul Biennial involves bringing in critical curators
and artists then the question remains, have they been bought off? As far as
outsiders can tell, the answer of the Turkish Left has been ‘yes’. Some of
these criticisms have been conservative from private dealers, those who feel
painting is under-represented among the new media, and some who argue
that too few Turkish artists are included. Here, we will look at two responses
to the Biennial, but we do so only insofar as they are characteristic of wider
trends in left thinking. In an open letter to the curators, the Direnal-İstanbul
Resistance Days Conceptual Framework began by citing John Jordan:
We have to stop pretending that the popularity of politically engaged art within
the museums, magazines and markets over the last few years has anything to do
with really changing the world. We have to stop pretending that taking risks in
the space of art, pushing boundaries of form, and disobeying the conventions of
culture, making art about politics makes any difference. We have to stop
pretending that art is a free space, autonomous from webs of capital and power.
It’s time for the artist to become invisible. To dissolve back into life.31
28. On urbanism and development in Istanbul, see Tuğal 2008.

29. Aksoy 2008, p. 77.
30. Mutman 2008, p. 19.
31. Jordan n.d.; see other critiques from more-or-less the same direct-action perspective,
Literally, this statement is not really true, since ‘pushing boundaries of form,
and disobeying the conventions of culture’ do change art and culture, but the
frustrations and ambitions contained in this statement are intriguing,
condensing several key-debates from the critical traditions of cultural analysis
(to which we will return shortly). The open letter acknowledges that the
members of WHW quoted Brecht and foregrounded the issue of
neoliberalism, but continues:
we recognize that art should have never existed as a separate category from life.
Therefore we are writing you to stop collaborating with arms dealers such as the
Koç Holding which white wash themselves in warm waters of the global art
scene and invite you to the life, the life of resistance.
In fact, the correlation of Brecht with the corporate sponsors seems to have
especially upset the critics. (Why was Brecht acceptable back then, but not
now? Were the theatres in Weimar untainted?) In contrast to the ‘corporate
spaces reserved for tolerated institutional critique so as to help them clear
their conscience’, the letter’s authors invite involvement in the ‘resistance
carnival’ organised to welcome the IMF and World Bank to Istanbul in
October 2009:
Let’s prepare works and visuals (poster, sticker, stencil etc.) for the streets of the
resistance days. Let’s produce together, not within the white cube, but in the
streets and squares during the resistance week! Creativity belongs to each and
every of us and can’t be sponsored.32
These are now familiar criticisms of the institutions of art from direct-action
and anarchist groups. We are all for stickers, posters and warm welcomes for
the IMF, but starkly contrasting activism to ‘autonomous art’ does not seem
good enough, even when it is draped in the fashionable rhetoric of the
Situationist International. The splitting of consensus performed in the space
such as the cartoon by Zampa di Leone, ‘What Keeps Bazaar Alive’ (di Leone 2004); see also the
exchange between Resistanbul and Brian Holmes in Holmes 2009.
32. DIRDCF 2009. The same issues of corporate sponsorship were also raised with the
curators in an interview published online. Asked to comment on the selection of a collective
(who had previously organised an exhibition on the Communist Manifesto) by a foundation
governed by Eczacibasi and with Koç Holdings as the main sponsor, the curators responded:
‘What does the source of money impose on our independence. . . . Can we say what we want to
say? We feel that in this biennale we feel that we can tell our concerns, what we want to discuss. . . .
We want to open and use all possible channels.’ The questioner was unconvinced, and suggested
that the joining of Koç and Brecht was an abuse that closed channels rather than opened them.
To which WHW replied: ‘What you say evokes this feeling: “Brecht is ours, we want to protect
Brecht from Koç”.’ (WHW 2009a.)
of the Biennial – and its bringing into vision conditions occluded by an

increasingly conformist mass-media – is a political task of some significance.
Moreover, a great deal of what now goes on in resistance-festivals is modelled
on the activities of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, itself once
frequently dismissed on much the same grounds; they may now be famed for
their projects intended to transform ‘art into life’, but the historical avant-
gardes – or, for that matter, the SI – were not, on the whole, well received in
their own time by Marxists. (Some would even argue that the growing
interest in avant-gardist rhetoric – whether by curators, artists or political
activists – in the later-twentieth century is itself, in part, a reflex of
revolutionary defeat: a type of compensation.)
Sürreyyya Evren, an advocate of the postmodern Left,33 offers a different
perspective on the Biennial. According to him, there has been a clash between
orthodox Marxism and contemporary art in Istanbul for quite a while. The
Biennial, Evren suggests, has always drawn sharpest criticism from the Left,
with the sponsorship of Koç as its pretext.34 He criticises a ‘Marxist cultural
magazine’ for constructing a holistic demonology made out of ‘neo-
liberalism, globalism, imperialism, contemporary art and curators’.35 Some of
these things certainly need to be resisted, of course, but the Left’s bundling of
these phenomena smells of a stale anti-intellectualism. Evren can only explain
this difference in terms of a contrast between libertarianism and the
nationalism (or statism) of ‘old-school Marxist motivations’.36 He does tell us
that the traditional Left felt that Hou Hanru committed two key-errors in
the tenth Biennial: he made judgements about Turkish politics from the
outside, and his theme, ‘Not only Possible, But Necessary: Art in the Age of
Global War’, was seen as insufficiently critical of the system’s destructiveness.37
It is now a familiar criticism that international curators regularly lay down the
law before their feet have touched the ground, but Hou Hanru at least brought
with him plenty of art with which Marxists ought to have been able to engage.
A section of the exhibition, entitled ‘World-Factory’, explored working
conditions from China to Mexico, including: Black Sea Files, by Ursula
Biemann, on the flow of oil and people associated with the pipeline; Chen
Chieh-Jen’s haunting meditations on making community in desolate
factories; Allan Sekula’s A Short Film for Laos; Multiplicity’s recording and
mapping of differential constraints on Israelis and Palestinians as they pass
33. Evren 2008a.

34. Evren 2009, pp. 376–7.
35. Evren 2009, p. 374.
36. He gives no source, but the journal in question seems to be Mesele.
37. Evren 2009, p. 370.
through the landscape. And, while the theme of global war was not as
prominent as it was in the 2006 Seville Biennial or at Brighton in 2008, it was
present enough to have been a focus for political discussion. These criticisms
may say as much about the nationalism of sections of the Left as about the
exhibitions in question; they also suggest a backward-looking antipathy
towards contemporary art.
However, Evren himself mobilises the critics’ hostility to art to champion
the ‘libertarian Left’ against those ‘traditionalists’ of the Left who insist on
reckoning with the state and imperialism. As with some of the other writers
on contemporary art in Turkey, he seems to feel that economic liberalisation
will generate a space beyond the state, and provide a dynamic force against
the dead-weight of cultural conservatism. (If these critics are intent on
supping with the Devil, they may be advised to obtain the proverbial long
spoons.) Marxist anti-intellectualism is undoubtedly frustrating; but, while
contemporary art may provide an energetic force against conservative
traditions, critics should not underestimate how art can also be, and regularly
is, mobilised as a driver for neoliberal modernisation, financial speculation
and gentrification.38 Whatever their limitations, ‘old-school Marxist’
arguments cannot simply be set aside.
Commodity-critique, or aesthetics and politics

Taken together, the debates provoked by the Biennial can be seen as
registering some parameters with respect to the way in which the relation
between art and politics is often framed today. Between the positions
presented by the authors of the open letter, the defenders of modernisation/
‘Europeanisation’, Evren’s ‘old-school Marxists’, the curators – not to
mention the various stances suggested by the artists – we are returned to the
heart of the debate on ‘aesthetics and politics’, which has been a vital, and
much contested, part of the Marxist-intellectual inheritance. The discussion
is overlaid with the spectre of commodification and its potentiation in the
late-twentieth century.
Serious thinking on these matters must hold together intransigent
anticapitalism and the space of experimentation and aesthetic recomposition.
The hostility to art’s proximity to private institutions and corporate money is
registered in the open letter to the curators, along with its appeal for activism
on the streets rather than messing about with ‘autonomous’ art. Corporate
38. Deutsche and Gendel Ryan 1984; Deutsche 1996; Cameron and Coaffee 2005;
Mathews 2010.
sponsorship does not leave art untainted, but this now familiar argument is
becoming stultifyingly one-dimensional. At its worst, it dissolves into crass
economism. One risk with this attitude is that it allows old prejudices to
bubble up: contemporary art – like modern art before it – is portrayed as
distracting, élitist, unrealistic and inherently compromised. As an argument,
the proposals of the letter are in equal measure populist, conservative and
ultraleftist. The traditional Stalinist-populist version of this claim has entailed
a weird aesthetic which hovers in some indeterminate space between, on the
one hand, viewing art as decorative surface-effect and, on the other, a cosmic
vision that believed art could mould the ‘new man’.39 Neither version offers a
productive engagement with, let alone critique of, modern art: the Stalinist
version locked the Left into association with an aesthetic past and failed to
register the critical resources contained in modern art.40 In the name of
confronting the immanent crisis, the call to activist-immediacy equally
circumvents or defers the difficult work of analysis and representation that
makes politics possible. The modernised version – with its claim to join with
life through stickers and street-protests – seems to us no more compelling: just
what is, and where are we to find, this ‘life’? In the realm of ephemeral counter-
spectacles? We can appreciate the sentiment and also the strategic use of such
actions, but part of the answer to these questions, it seems, is that ‘life’ is not
sitting around ready-made, waiting to be ‘found’; ‘we’ need to make it possible,
and to elide this project surely goes way beyond making demands on Biennial-
participants to join a carnival. Even if conceived as a tactic for mobilising and
building a movement, the demands seem misjudged: they set up a false
dichotomy and an unnecessary division between artists and festival. Considered
more theoretically, their categories can be seen as too overwrought with a
critical-theoretical language – and, as a corollary – with the difficult and
multifaceted legacy of those emancipatory debates on art/life, autonomy/
heteronomy, aesthetics/politics, and so forth (none of which lend themselves
to such straightforward solutions).
Just how helpful or progressive is it, today, to call for the (self-)abolition
of art and artists? (Indeed, some might sniff out deeply regressive – even
reactionary – consequences from this argument.) The sublation once dreamed
of – whatever the faults and limits of its dreams – had the ambition to
transform ‘life’ fundamentally; it was not imagined to take place on the terms
39. The latter perspective was shared by many in the avant-garde. We find much to disagree
with in Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism, but he does capture something of this strange
cultural alliance between activist anti-art and Stalinist wish-fulfilment. See Groys 1992.
40. Which is not to say there is nothing to be found of critical interest – historical, aesthetic
or cognitive – in socialist realism, or that it was monolithic and unchanging.
of life as it stands, even if that is the life of anticapitalist actions. Here, we

have the paradox of avant-garde rhetoric (of merging with life) mobilised
against no-less avant-garde inspired art. Peter Bürger once suggested that the
avant-garde’s appeal to merge art with life-praxis was made, not on the grounds
of ‘life’, but on those of ‘art’; the ambition of the historical avant-gardes –
essentially a romantic aspiration – was to draw on the powers of poiesis
to transform the everyday.41 The letter’s authors invoke a more limited
interpretation, where, for example, ‘autonomy’ means simply the old modernist
call of ‘freedom’ or even ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ usually associated with modernism.42
Where is Adorno, at this moment, or Bürger, or Rancière, for whom – albeit
in distinct ways – autonomy has to be grasped more dialectically in terms of
its relation to heteronomy, and not as some ideological or ethical preference
identified by artists, but, rather, as a condition of art under capitalism (one
that impinges even on artists who want to evade ‘autonomous art’ and take to
the streets)?43
It has become an increasingly common gambit for critics to dismiss the
new forms of critical art as commodified gestures that offer the bourgeoisie
the edgy allure of aesthetic opposition, while fuelling the spectacular machine.
The open letter offers an activist-spin on themes drawn from the Frankfurt-
school, whose ideas now seem to underpin a number of conflicting assessments.
Similarly, the current fascinations with the SI can run in different directions,
sometimes allowing devotees to conjoin deep-seated political pessimism
with anti-theoretical activism, sometimes pre-empting any kind of critique
by viewing everything as already incorporated into the commodity-nexus.
Jacques Rancière has recently characterised the commodification-thesis (from
his own post-Marxist perspective) as a ‘post-Marxist and post-Situationist
wisdom’ that:
41. Bürger 1984. He further noted that the sublation of art and life was indeed made, but
in the postwar-situation and as the ‘false sublation’ of neo-avantgarde art with the commodity.
For arguments over the historical avant-garde’s ‘false negations’ of the division of art and life,
see Habermas 1981 and Bürger 1981. Bürger’s original account of the neo-avantgarde false
sublation proved contentious. See Buchloh 1984; Foster 1996; Buchloh 2000. Buchloh’s social
pessimism has grown; see Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh 2004.
42. Modernism was, by many accounts, a rather more complex phenomenon.
43. Adorno 1997; Bürger 1984; Rancière 2004; Rancière 2009a; Day 2009. It is noticeable
that there has been a further shift among curators and critics to reassert art’s autonomy (from
politics) while trying simultaneously to retain the charge that politics has provided over the past
couple of decades. See, for example, the public statements issued on the websites of the 2010
Sydney Biennial and the 2010 Bienal de São Paulo.
is not content to furnish a phantasmagorical depiction of humanity completely

buried beneath the rubbish of frenzied consumption. It also depicts the law of
domination as a force seizing on anything that claims to challenge it. It makes
any protest a spectacle and any spectacle a commodity.44
Another way of putting this is to say that it is an approach suited to the liberal
academy, whose tendency is to spot the spectacular-commodity working its
tricks, while rendering any opposition – political as well as aesthetic – already
neutralised. The result, for Rancière, is a ‘left-wing irony or melancholy’ in
which any gesture of opposition is seen as ‘a game available on the global
market’.45 The argument is especially suited to sustaining the radical reputation
of the critic in conjuncture with an aloof resignation. Rancière’s own aesthetic
thought – developed out of his leave-taking from Marxism – remains to be
reckoned with, but, in this instance, he exposes an apparently radical criticism
for the conformism it has increasingly become. Many of those who see
themselves as resisting political neutralisation draw on the founding ideas of
critical theory, but Rancière underestimates the range of political practices
produced in response to this model in recent times, which can span from
voluntarism and direct action to near-total inertia.
Brecht had no doubt that artworks were commodities:
Only those who blind themselves to the enormous power of the revolutionary
process that drags everything in this world into the circuit of commodities,
without exception and without delay, can assume that works of art in any genre
could be excluded . . .46
This realisation did not stop him writing poems and plays, or novels and
film-scripts; nor did he conclude that the institutions of art should be
boycotted, but rather, that they should be changed through intervention
and ideological ‘re-functioning [Umfunktionierung]’. Unfortunately, discussion
of art’s position within capitalism – and specifically its relation to the
commodity – increasingly tends to be reduced to some well-worn gambits:
the popular fascination and disgust, and whole British media-obsession, with,
for instance, the Saatchi-Hirst-yBa nexus; the attention given to the way
museums try to capitalise on their collections by raising money from pathetic
spin-off trinkets, or on their premises by renting them out for company-
receptions; the focus on the expanding proportion of floor-space devoted to
44. Rancière 2009b, pp. 32–3.

45. Rancière 2009b, p. 33; see also Walter Benjamin’s earlier criticism of a related
formation: Benjamin 1999.
46. Brecht 2000, p. 169.
retail and catering and the corporate sponsorship of exhibitions; the rise of
‘biennial-culture’ and the sense that all art is becoming equivalent in a global
homogenisation-process that erases local character, promotes tourism and
increases the ‘carbon-footprint’. This is all undoubtedly true, and reveals
aspects of capitalism’s stultifying banality, but these things are easy targets if
there is no attempt at a larger critique; they too-easily slip into a reactionary
sentimentality for the good old days promoted by critics such as Dave
Hickey.47
There have, in recent years, been some significant studies of specific
developments of cultural neoliberalisation;48 some thinkers have tried to
explore art’s relation to the commodity at a more abstract critical-theoretical
level, or have sought to pursue cultural analysis by finding structural
homologies with the value-form.49 There are a host of criticisms that see in
art-developments that are isomorphic with the changing skill-demands of the
workplace.50 Yet other approaches focus on art’s connection to affective
models of labour.51 Yet, it is not at all clear what it means to characterise the
artwork as a commodity. The commodification-debate lacks real specificity.
On the one hand, there are detailed sociological studies of markets and
institutions that remain largely under-theorised; on the other, theoretical
reflections with remarkably little empirical content. The field of debate, if that
is what it is, for the commodification-thesis has been produced out of a weird
amalgam of themes from Bourdieu, Debord, Adorno and Horkheimer. These
are odd bedfellows to say the least, and it is not surprising that there is a lack
of mediation, but the key-point is akin to one Terry Eagleton once made
about postmodernism: the problems reside, less with the ideas of these thinkers
(though, there are those too), than with ‘the culture, milieu or even sensibility’
as a whole.52
47. Hickey 2009.

48. For example, Wu 2003 and 2009.
49. See, for example: Jameson 1991; Jameson 1998a; Buchloh 2000, Roberts 2000, Martin
2007; Martin 2009.
50. Influential here has been Boltanski and Chiapello, who have written on the way late
twentieth-century management-discourse adopted the model of ‘artistic critique’ (Boltanski
and Chiapello 2005; Holmes 2006). Other examples include: Buchloh on conceptual art as an
‘aesthetics of administration’; Miwon Kwon on artists bringing managerial functions into the
heart of their practice; Buchloh 1991, Kwon 1997; or the many critics correlating relational
aesthetics to either the neoliberal emphasis on networking or as subordinated to the needs of
state-cultural policy.
51. A theme prominent among postworkerist writers: Hardt and Negri 2000; Lazzarato
1996: Lazzarato 2008; Negri 2008.
52. Eagleton 1996, p. viii.
It is certainly the case that artworks have been issued in print-runs, editions
and multiples; and artworks have increasingly come to resemble filmic work
(in part because art-spaces have come to welcome time- and lens-based media
as the distribution-networks for radical film or indeed journalism have
diminished). It is true that art has become tied to branding and celebrity, to
gentrification and to tourism, and that art can also be used as stock on which
to gamble. Writing in the early 1970s, Ernest Mandel described how –
alongside building sites, gold, precious metals, antiques, and stamps – art
served as a ‘“mobilization” of material values’ in response to the devaluation
of paper-money.53 With the drying-up of credit in the recent crisis, the big
auction-houses turned into blue-chip pawn-shops where valuable artworks
provided collateral on which to raise finance.54 Recognising the part played
by factors such as these, however, still does not seem to get us close to
understanding art.
Critical theory is likely to remain an important resource for Marxist work
on aesthetics, art and ideology, but it is time serious critical questions about
the commodification-of-art thesis were posed. Even at its best, the work of the
Frankfurt-school, and those influenced by it, often proceeds by homology –
or, perhaps, by a model-analogy that only claims deeper structural connections
between cultural and commodity-forms.55 The universalisation of market-
relations transformed art as it did other aspects of social life. But it did so in
some peculiar ways, which has meant that art’s status as commodity has never
been worked through in the ways seen with other human products. Art has
long been mobilised by those in social power, and, historically, this relationship
has generally been fairly direct and explicit, registered through the patronage
and glorification of monarchs, aristocrats and religious orders. Capitalism
made the connection between art and economic control more circuitous and
ambivalent. The rise of the public museum mediates market-mechanisms.
Nearly all works in art-museums are purchased from a small group of galleries,
or donated by collectors who have, in turn, bought from these same galleries.
These transactions are obscured, and the most confidential information of all
is how much – or little – an institution has paid for an artwork.56
53. Mandel 1978, pp. 450–1.

54. Salkin 2009. This is not a new activity as such, but its prominence has, according to
reports, escalated.
55. Adorno made this criticism of Benjamin’s Paris-studies, though he was hardly innocent
on this score himself. See Adorno 2007; the classic statement is probably Kracauer on the Tiller
Girls dance-troupe and the Fordist production-line: Kracauer 1995.
56. As an institution on the European model, the public museum also raises further
interesting questions about the rôle of the state, its relative autonomy (or otherwise) from
Nevertheless, both the film-industry and literature have been subject to

much deeper commodity-penetration; they are fields where, in comparison to
the visual arts, the deployment of substantially higher capital-values can be
found. Interestingly, despite this, discussions of literature rarely adopt the
same tenor as those to be found in assessments of art: commodification seems
not to be the primary concern when considering, say, the works of Stieg
Larsson or a TV series, such as The Wire. On the whole, other questions are
asked, and criticisms made, of these works; their cognitive status is treated as
uppermost. Discussions of film seem to proceed without getting fixated on the
sponsorship of film-festivals, or on the quantity of money and celebrities
circulating at Cannes. When addressing these fields, Marxist critics seem
better able to draw distinctions between the institutional contexts and the
specific practices delivered through them. We are not arguing that these factors
should be treated as separate; we need an account able to address both realms
– and their mediated relations – without collapsing them into some direct
identity. The reasons for the differential types of critical discourse across these
cultural fields are probably complex, but we suspect the historical élite-
associations of the visual arts may impinge. Art generally lacks the commodity-
penetration that is taken to ‘democratise’ the availability of a product.
Moreover, the near-singularity of the artwork tends to connect to its form in
a different spatiotemporal way to film, literature or to music.57 It should not
be forgotten that the model of ‘bourgeois art’ (an early stage in art’s
commodification) has been precisely the target of radical art-practices for over
a century.58
The story of ‘the rule of equivalence’ has become a marxisant commonplace,
and is often an unwritten assumption underpinning other more-or-less
adequate accounts of social developments.59 The observation that subjection
to the value-form has extended and deepened historically is now often
translated into the false statement that, in the contexts of monopoly- and late
capital-processes, and its association with cultural-ideological agendas. Conflicting tendencies

operate at all levels.
57. Benjamin 2002.
58. Other important factors would have to feature, which are themselves no less
contradictory, from the rise of the public museum to its intersections (direct or indirect) with
the state; from the ‘civilising’ ideology of culture to the making-accessible of ‘high’-cultural
forms. The historical rôle of criticism and the development of critical values are also vital to
understand.
59. Buchloh 2000; Buchloh in Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh 2004; Stallabrass 2004.
Interestingly, this account generally leaves the speaker – the critical theorist or philosopher –
oddly untainted by the same process in a sort of performative contradiction; the book, the
journal and the lecture-circuit – the writer’s institutional base in a university – somehow seem
to escape the commodity-nexus she describes.
capitalism, use-value has disappeared.60 This argument has little to do with

Marx or Marxism (although it is often understood to be the specifically
Marxist contribution to cultural theory). Ernest Mandel was already on to
this problem in the early 1970s when he challenged those who ‘make a great
stir out of the fact that capital succeeds in converting “everything” into a
commodity’.61 His example was revolutionary-Marxist literature. No doubt,
he argued, publishers saw the chance of making a profit out the rising interest
in Marxism, but their ‘insensitivity’ to the use-value of such works did not
amount to ‘an “integration” of Marxism into the world of commodities’;
these writings still had a specific use-value at the point of consumption: the
capacity to heighten readers’ anticapitalist understanding. Mandel’s primary
target was the prevailing ideology of ‘technical rationality’ (and, in this
particular instance, some comments from Adorno), but he was picking up on
an outlook whose delineations can still be found in the theoretical accounts
of art and culture. As he pointed out, the argument which says that
‘everything’ is exchange-value not only overlooks use; it also erases social
contradiction, nurturing political fatalism, addressing analysis solely from the
perspective of capital. At best, the critics address the formal and not real
subsumption of art under capital; arguably, art cannot be fully subsumed and
remain art.
There remains something quite distinctive about the nature of art’s
insertion into the economic circuits of capital, which is yet to be understood
comprehensively and theoretically. Part of the trouble is that it is undoubtedly
difficult to pin down the nature of this most peculiar commodity. ‘For
instance’, Marx wrote:
Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. On the other
hand, a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is a
productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as
the activation of his own nature.62
The silk-worm analogy, unfortunately, reduces art to nature, but Marx’s

distinction between productive and unproductive labour registers the problem.
In this important passage, he continues to distinguish between forms of
60. Sources for this can be found in Adorno; Debord and a host of later thinkers. Day 2010
offers an account of the way historical and logical tendencies have been rendered as a concrete
condition; relational categories absolutised; the opening chapter of Capital read as a literal and
direct account of the phenomenal world of capitalism and a dialectical analysis of the
commodity-form and its two-fold nature turned into a one-dimensional historical narrative.
61. Mandel 1978, p. 507.
62. Marx 1976, p. 1044.
cultural labour (his examples are a literary proletarian, a singer and a school-
teacher) that are unproductive and those that produce ‘capital directly’. He
concludes by suggesting that, on the whole, this is ‘wage labour that is not at
the same time productive labour’.63 Shifting the ground of the argument to
immaterial or affective labour without sorting out the initial problem of art-
as-commodity will not help.
Comparing art to luxury-commodities – a pair of hand-made shoes or a
piece of individually-crafted jewellery, whose value is related to total social
production – only goes so far towards art’s status as a commodity. David
Harvey gives perhaps the most sophisticated version of the insertion of art into
the circuits of capital by comparing artworks to viticulture. ‘That culture has
become a commodity of some sort is undeniable’, he announces at the start of
his essay ‘The Art of Rent’.64 However, his question becomes ‘of what sort?’,
because, as he maintains, cultural artefacts and practices are distinct from
ordinary commodities. This is an important recognition, and art-theorists
would be advised to note the point. Harvey’s argument turns on the rôle art
and wine play in the formation of ‘monopoly-rent’ and competition (an
account which draws also on Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of cultural
‘distinction’ and ‘symbolic capital’).65 Harvey writes:
All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of
the globe. Monopoly rent arises because social actors can realize an enhanced
income-stream over an extended time by virtue of their exclusive control over
some directly or indirectly tradable item which is in some respects unique and
non-replicable.66
There are two kinds of monopoly-rent for Harvey: the first entails the control
of some ‘quality resource, commodity or location’ that enable the extraction
of monopoly-rent – here, the example is a vineyard; the second form involves
the scarcity of a site or commodity – the example being a painting by Picasso.
Harvey’s argument may shed light on the mechanisms of gentrification and
raising property-values around museums (Bilbao’s Guggenheim, Tate
Liverpool, Tate Modern). But we should note that, in such cases, the
monopoly-rent does not accrue primarily to the museums, but to the
developers operating in the immediate vicinity; in some cases, it is state-
collections (national, regional, federal, or municipal) that are being used to
redevelop blighted areas, amounting to a form of state-subvention to private
63. Marx 1976, p. 1045.

64. Harvey 2001.
65. Bourdieu 1985.
66. Harvey 2001, p. 395.
capital. By analogy, the biennial-artist’s economic rôle may be tied less to the
art-market than to the business of hotels, airlines and restaurants. This is one
reason that they are increasingly located outside of capital-cities and combine
public and private finance with the aim of regeneration. Of course, the
condition is that there has to be something worth seeing.
More significantly, the comparison with ‘special’ goods has real limitations:
Harvey recognises contradictions in this account – which would only be
exacerbated if he shifted from a blue-chip artist to a young video-maker or
art-activist – but his analogy with the wine-trade serves a significant rhetorical
rôle in the argument. Comments on appellation contrôlée, terroir and the
language of wine-connoisseurs (‘flavour of peach and plum, with a hint of
thyme and gooseberry’) shift onto ideas of ‘distinction’ and ‘cultural capital’.67
Knowingly or not, this stacking of metaphor – and appeal to Bourdieu –
allows Harvey to relegate the critical or cognitive claims of art to Pseuds’
Corner. The problem is that no-one even tries to speak of the truth-content
of a necklace or pair of brogues, nor – despite its associated discourse of
taste – do they attempt to do so when discussing Champagne, Burgundy,
Chablis or Sauternes. Even with wine, this underplays important questions
relating to the education of the senses, but Harvey dismisses the larger
problems being suggested as no more than the ‘residues of wishful thinking
(often backed by powerful ideologies)’ which want to see art as existing on a
‘higher plane of human creativity’.68 This (anti-romantic) statement is, in
part, a ruse to prepare the ground for his own, more ‘technical and arid’
economic analysis (he was clearly being mischievous, the original audience
for his argument being seated in the auditorium of Tate Modern).69
Nevertheless, it means he evades important dimensions pertaining to the
consideration of art – its aesthetic-cognitive status – that cannot be so readily
dismissed with allusions to privilege or ‘distinction’, or, by extension, to
‘aesthetic ideology’, or to the legacies of German-idealist philosophy.70 Visual
67. Harvey 2001, pp. 400–1.

68. Harvey 2001, p. 394; the education of the senses is Marx’s reworking of Schiller via
Feuerbach: Marx 1975.
69. Harvey has recently reaffirmed German-idealist philosophy as one of the three
components of Marxist method, but he seems to see this solely in terms of the process and
movement of categories, and passes over the aesthetic dimension to Marx’s thought. See Harvey
2010.
70. In their distinct ways, both Althusserianism and analytical Marxism would like to ditch
the romantic dimension of Marx’s work. The enormous cost of this is to sever Marxism from
aesthetic and affective thought. Marx was a profoundly aesthetic thinker who drew much more
than a model of dialectic from the tradition of German philosophy: terms like ‘sensuous’ and
‘sensible’ play an important rôle throughout his work, while his mature economic and historical
art, like literature and film, can be (although none necessarily are) engaged at a
number of levels: ideological, symbolic, communicative, aesthetic, affective,
cognitive, and critical. Marxism ought – among so many bodies of thought –
to be supremely positioned to think through the social relations of art, ranging
from the commodity-form to the aesthetic and cognitive dimensions. No
other intellectual tradition has the conceptual riches necessary to make the
mediations. But, to do this, Marxists will need to advance beyond the current
level of discussion-at-large and begin to think about the problems again, to
think them more dialectically. Social science and its cognates can, arguably,
do without aesthetic thought, but it is doubtful if Marxism can jettison this
legacy of German idealism without doing serious self-harm. Art was once
understood to have a triple function: ‘to teach, to move, to delight’, although,
as Jameson reminded us, there has been a tendency to marginalise the first of
these functions.71 Although it is unhelpful to make a fetish or orthodoxy of
Brechtian models, it is worth taking seriously the claim of the Istanbul
Biennial to engage with learning.
WHW acknowledges that biennials largely function as ‘high-end branding
tools for promoting cultural tourism in metropolitan cities, market-driven
“events” designed to ensure a more seamless integration of art and capital’.72
Faced with the invitation to oversee the 2009 Biennial, WHW elected to take
up the ‘opportunity for a big career move and decided to put together a
biennial informed by a fully-fledged political program’ that would also be
‘completely aesthetic’.73 The double-bluff in this passage is palpable, both
registering the problem of working in the institutions of art and insisting on
the radical potential of art. Brecht, then, was being invoked in yet another
sense: WHW sets out to subject the very institution of an art-biennial to a
‘refunctioning’. The aspiration was ‘to rethink the Biennial as a meta-device
with the potential to facilitate the renewal of critical thinking by extracting
thought from the immediate artistic and political context where it takes
place’,74 and ‘to give the public some form of “agency,” making choices that
would boost their capacity for action’. The collective continues:
studies are inconceivable without the form/content distinction. The same might be said about
totality and a host of other key-concepts.
71. For Jameson, its resurrection accompanied the call for an aesthetics of ‘cognitive
mapping’. Arguably, the situation has changed since he wrote this in the early 1980s, with
many bewailing the loss of the latter two functions in the wake of postconceptual practice. See
Jameson 1988.
72. WHW 2009b, p. 95.
73. Ibid.
74. WHW 2009b, p. 96.
Is it not possible, today, to think of art the way Brecht understood theatre – that
is, as a mode of ‘collective historical education’, an apparatus for constructing
truth rather than what amounts to a viewing fest for the bourgeoisie?75
To this end, the curators gathered together openly political artworks. ‘In
times like these, like ours, art can – and should – involve itself as one of the
few places where unfettered analysis and the eclosion of new concepts, where
criticism, education, and even agitation, are possible’. The emphasis here is
on art’s rôle within cultural ideology; not just as a vehicle for dominant
values, but its part in internal contestations and struggles. Creative-
intellectual work also provides an important facet to the history of human
expression and the self-understanding of society; these complexities can be
seen as ‘useful’, not only for general expansion of intellectual and aesthetic
capabilities, but also – and we mean ‘also’, not ‘instead’ – as counter-
ideological or as challenges to cultural or political hegemony. From the
ideological perspective, biennials comprise, not just the exhibitions of art, but
all the platforms and openings they provide for generating debate. Indeed,
the very status of the ‘political turn’ becomes part of the dispute. If some see
in art’s politicisation a hypostatised response to a wider political sclerosis (a
marker of the political defeats of the twentieth century), there are those who
argue to the contrary that the politicisation of discussion in art signifies the
emergence of an alternative public sphere in reaction to the increasingly supine
and banal news-media.76 At times, however, the political claims tip into
overstatement, as when WHW states: ‘Art is arguably not the best place to
plan, for instance, the future of Palestine. But it may well be the only one’.77
This version of art-as-enclave does not stand up: nevertheless, it perhaps
points, symptomatically, to the ambitions and political limitations of such
aesthetic endeavours. These ambitions may not ultimately counter or displace
the biennial’s rôle in capital-(re)generation – how could they, outside of the
context of a sustained and broad-based social resistance? – but it would be too
easy to allow ourselves to rest on the cynical conclusion.78
The works in Istanbul – and we have mentioned only a small number – split
consensus, bringing the overlooked into sight or the unsaid into hearing;
they gesture to militant collectives that have yet to emerge: most of all, they
offer reconfigurations of experience through a meeting of politics and strategies
for formal recomposition. This swing to the left has taken multiple forms
75. WHW 2009b, p. 98.

76. See, for examples on each side: Charlesworth 2002; Jonsson 2009.
77. WHW 2009b, p. 97.
78. WHW 2009b, p. 95.
(Marxism surely has precedents enough for a range of aesthetic-cognitive

responses and assessments – and often, conflicting ones). Probably for
the first time since the ‘Tucamán Burns’ manifesto, the implosion of the
Situationist International, the demise of The Fox and the break-up of the
Godard-Gorin double act, there is something approaching an authentic
anticapitalist avant-garde at work. Arguably, nothing has been seen on this
scale since the end of the 1960s, and, this time around, its scope is much more
international. There are, of course, limits to the ‘political turn’ – sometimes
for utterly banal reasons; sometimes because not all the artists live up to the
over-stated claims; sometimes because they are opportunistically hitching a
ride on a bandwagon; sometimes because the enthusiasts for ‘political art’ have
negligible interest in politics, let alone questions of praxis. But, there is plenty
of work that is serious and committed; some that has come through activism
or has activist-dimensions; some that is the result of a lifetime of endeavour,
or which sees the aesthetic-political conjuncture as a serious project. Anarcho-
communism is the most characteristic politics associated with this trend.
However, this has been redirected under the impact of, first, autonomism
(influenced, of course, by the writings of Hardt, Negri and Virno) and, more
recently, by a resurgent interest in the histories of, and ideas associated with,
council-communism and building socialism from below. Depending on
outlook, some readers may remain unimpressed by this shift, but it is surely
important to take note when artistic discussions not only begin from the
rejection of the givens of capitalist life, but increasingly feature Marx or Rosa
Luxemburg; and when some artists even thematise questions of political
organisation within their work.
The critics of contemporary art see certain dimensions of its institution,
but they miss – or downplay – the intensity of the shift to the left among a
significant sphere of art, ranging across the renewed critical interest in
realism, ‘cognitive mapping’ (Jameson), historical analysis, and various levels
of ‘intervention’ or ‘relational’ engagement. Marxist aesthetics must be
prepared to grapple with such artistic ambitions, and the issues raised by
them, not least art’s position of both being and not being ‘incorporated’.
There is something here of what Jameson has called art’s ‘fundamental
ambivalence’.79 The test is to avoid the trap of taking that ambivalence to be
no more than liberal ambiguity (with all its political evasiveness and reducing
of viewers to undecidability-spotters); instead, ambivalence needs to be
understood through the prism of social contradictions. This would involve
drawing on some of Marx’s most distinctive contributions: to be able to
79. Jameson 1998b, p. 149.

think historically and philosophically, socially and aesthetically – a task made

all the more complex by the institutional histories and reification of the
disciplines now inhabited. These questions often impinge on art-debates
in terms of tensions between more sociologically-inclined and more
philosophical-aesthetic models of interpretation. With its Brechtian drive, the
2009 Istanbul Biennial might be seen as an opportunity which, by bringing
the problems to the fore – and by crystallising the contradictions – helps
develop our reflections on the aesthetic-political questions before us. Of
course, in and of itself, this radicalisation of contemporary art may yet
evaporate without trace; conceived as a fashionable ‘turn’, it may inevitably
follow the way of the New. But it might prove an indicative weathervane for
coming storms, or contribute to the actualisation of counter-hegemony, to
making visible social division and to the ‘eclosion of new concepts’. WHW
have certainly grabbed this mood. For the first time in an age, there is the real
possibility to revivify critical culture through a meeting between Marxism and
the artistic avant-garde.
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Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 135–171 brill.

‘What Keeps Mankind Alive?’:

Gail Daya, Steve Edwardsb, David Mabbc

Biennials of contemporary art have increasingly spread across the globe,

in Kassel) and decennials (the Münster Sculpture-Festival).2 Venice’s is a now

What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions

2. For convenience, ‘biennial’ stands as the generic term.

Art at the Eleventh Istanbul Biennial

executions; batches of scruﬀy drawings pinned to the wall (though these

reconﬁgured by an explosion of tactical and strategic communications-

Working People in Poland, the Orange Order in Belfast and Palestinian

Nevertheless, some works in the Biennial explicitly draw, in a fashion, on

10. WHW 2009b, p. 99.

participants is commented on by the chorus or characters. In this dimension,

11. How this image travels is another matter.

commentary from his living room, progressively joined and accompanied by

Biennials and the ‘political turn’

18. See Biennale of Sydney 2008a and 2008b.

complacencies and political cynicism/defeatism (with all the knowing irony-

Neoliberalism and art in Istanbul

23. Evren 2008b, p. 42.

entails drawing to Istanbul critical artists who can be relied on to challenge

26. Simmel 1997.

development of art-collections and galleries by private banks, but the turn

28. On urbanism and development in Istanbul, see Tuğal 2008.

of the Biennial – and its bringing into vision conditions occluded by an

33. Evren 2008a.

Commodity-critique, or aesthetics and politics

of life as it stands, even if that is the life of anticapitalist actions. Here, we

is not content to furnish a phantasmagorical depiction of humanity completely

44. Rancière 2009b, pp. 32–3.

47. Hickey 2009.

53. Mandel 1978, pp. 450–1.

Nevertheless, both the ﬁlm-industry and literature have been subject to

capital-processes, and its association with cultural-ideological agendas. Conﬂicting tendencies

capitalism, use-value has disappeared.60 This argument has little to do with

The silk-worm analogy, unfortunately, reduces art to nature, but Marx’s

63. Marx 1976, p. 1045.

67. Harvey 2001, pp. 400–1.

75. WHW 2009b, p. 98.

(Marxism surely has precedents enough for a range of aesthetic-cognitive

79. Jameson 1998b, p. 149.

think historically and philosophically, socially and aesthetically – a task made

—— 2009a [2004], Aesthetics and its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity.

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