Community for a Week

Abstract

is Concrete: A 24/7 Marathon Camp Graz, Austria September 21-28, 2012 looks like a concentration camp, quipped one of the guests as he pointed to the makeshift toilet cubicles separated by plastic curtains. trenchant remark did not leave as much consternation as it otherwise would; the mood was jovial and nothing was to be taken too seriously. dormitories were housed in an old city council building. Wooden slats rested on empty plastic crates of Gosser beer and made for beds. steps of the makeshift metal-railed stairs wobbled underneath our feet. event was, after all, officially entitled a camp. Invited by the curators of streirischer herbst, three hundred activists, artists, curators, and theorists gathered in Graz, Austria, to partake in a weeklong marathon of presentations, talks, and debates around the current historical conjuncture of art and politics. idea was to turn the city's annual performance festival into a platform on political strategies in art (and artistic strategies in politics) under the title Truth Is Concrete. title came from words written on Bertolt Brecht's wall during his exile in Denmark. Something of that statement left its imprint on the course of the event; one could see it on the placards peppering the camp's walls along with other less renowned statements, from Bring down patriarchy now! to Shut up white boy! There is a kernel of solidity to the statement, in its rejection of ambiguity and skepticism and its commitment to the obviousness of things, which is indeed characteristic of the current moment. This was not the first event to profess distaste toward artistic self-absorption and intellectualism while veering toward a form of art that works beyond art. We saw this most recently in the 7th Berlin Biennale (and is a curious similarity between the curatorial statements of the two events). There were other postmodern times when ambiguity was cherished and relativism was the preferred path. Positionalities preceded statements like imperious disclaimers. was always relative, suspiciously heeded as a calling card that rectified power relations, and was never to be used in conjunction with the concrete. But all of that belonged to times prior to the protest events of 2011 and the political turn that followed. Now truth, qua political truth, is something to be exhumed from the state of homeopathic dilution (to quote the marathon's curator, Florian Malzacher) imposed on it by layers of cognitive capitalism. It is a time for concrete positions and actions. This was not the same as discussing the parameters of artistic production, as art did not seem to be the main course on the agenda; there is some really bad art here, acknowledged Malzacher, who was not the least discomfited by the fact. It was not even a matter of political art--there was little talk of that either. What transpired over the course of the event was the agreement to think of art and politics not as two domains, or ontologies, understood according to two distinct parameters to be bridged, hut as actions and positions that are intrinsically political and transformative. question of ontology was most salient in the panel The Politics of Artistic Practice. Moderator Chantal Mouffe had mustered a formidable platoon of theory heavyweights with an agonistic edge. Gerald Raunig presented a fascinating, albeit at times monolithic, taxonomy of seven machinic concatenations of art and politics, and asked whether we are witnessing a new abstract machine currently coming into formation. Stefan Hertmans brought the question of artistic autonomy back into the fray, a notion that did not sit easily with the rest of the debate about art's commitment to political change. Artistic autonomy, Hertmans argued, could be seen as means of resistance to cognitive capitalism by counterpoising strategies of naming and classification, and on a larger score, the specters of functionalism that lingered unspoken during the course of the marathon. …