Live, Remade and Remediated
First premise: For over two decades art criticism celebrated second degree representation as the new cool. From the ‘anything goes’ decade of the 1980s to the conceptual re-makes of the not so naughty 2000s, the incubator of the art world has remained clean, preserving the white cube of the modernist museum.
Second premise: The performative is everywhere. The subject (once the individual) performs endlessly, there is no core identity, people act themselves and change according to context. Jacques Lacan famously said that ‘I is always an Other’ as a way of emphasising that we are only ourselves in relation to an Other, or, more forcefully, we are never ourselves.1 In the endgame of postmodernism there is no truth, nothing is essential—integrity is a form of playacting. This makes way for a society of greed, celebrated in the free fall of deregulated capitalism and the collapse of the market.2
Third premise: The avant-garde is dead. Radical art which seeks to change the world is useless, it is not worth trying to produce social commentary or cultural political actions because the market is so powerful that it subsumes all resistance. Capitalism feeds off the margins of society and turns gestures of resistance into aesthetic commodities: transgression is institutionalised.3
Where does this leave live art: an art in ‘real time’? What happens to extreme art when art is complicit in a culture of spectacle? Is it possible after postmodernism to create political art?
Recently, a younger generation of artists has started to look for their experimental mentors. They are looking for those artists who have maintained a commitment to challenging society, politics, systems and institutions. After the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline