Andreas Broeckmann (Germany)
Culture and artistic practice are feeble weapons in the struggle for global
justice. The economic and political forces that largely determine short-term as
well as long-term historical processes hold a material power which by far
surpasses the symbolic force that art and culture can unfold. This does not mean
that art and culture
are futile, but people working in this field should, I believe,be humble about
what can and what cannot be achieved here.
The myth of globalisation is a beast that cannot easily be beaten at present. Too many decisions are being taken in the non-located world of the global city. The notion of globalisation is the rhetorical weapon of those who seek to take the edge off forms of local or translocal agency that would counter the homogeneity and blandness of global culture.
Digital technologies are instruments used to convey the messages of
globalisation, yet in as much as resistance to
Empire will only succeed when it becomes global, such an effective resistance
will of course make intelligent and comprehensive use of all means
available,including digital and analogue media and production tools. Art does
not have to be openly political in order to unfold its efficacy.
Both the strength and the weakness of art and culture is that they are playing in the field of the symbolic, of communication and representation.While a dominant strand of modernism has resulted in the speculative essence of art itself becoming the main object of artistic practice, there is also a tradition of representational, performative and conceptual art practices which have continued to engage with the world. Their symbolical needles, pins and daggers, such as irony, jokes, sublime beauty or revulsion, have afforded an aesthetically informed, reflexive attitude beyond dialectical analyses.
Some of the strategies that can be referenced in this context are:the path of
becoming the media (as in Marko Peljhan 's research and infrastructure
projects);the path of translocal wandering and story-telling (as in Heidrun
Holzfeind 's or Coco Fusco 's video and performance work);the path of
techno-cultural interference (as in the engineering of software tools by
Beatrice Gibson, Adrian Ward and Graham Harwood); or the path of carnivalesque
performance (described by Brian Holmes as strategies of surprise and the
aesthetics of collective public action).