"critical Art" a better term than activist or political art

Oppositional Art,  Critical cultural practices. That  is something that I dearly believe in.   

Was really glad I came across this  interview.

These times call for opposition. At least, that’s what political theorist Chantal Mouffe has been saying for years, and she is the living proof. While consensus politics rules, the renowned philosopher defends the importance of disagreement and explicit ideological conflict. She asserts also artists have a role to fulfil: ‘Critical art makes us realize that there are alternatives.’

Art and politics are not two separate fields’, you’ve written. How do you see this link?

‘If you accept that the reality is always discursively constructed, and that discourses are always constructed around power relations, then of course culture and the cultural field are very important elements in this construction. What Gramsci calls “the common sense”, an idea which I very much love, is something we are taught through culture: through the films and theatre we see, the novels we read… The cultural aspect is absolutely central in the way we perceive reality, construct our world and define our identities. So, that’s why I don’t think art and politics are two separate things that we need to bring together. Based on the theory of hegemony, cultural practices contribute either to the creation, reproduction or challenging of the hegemony. They have a necessary political dimension. On the other side, politics itself is – and here I use an expression of Claude Lefort – “la mise en scène, la mise en forme“ of the reality. There’s always an aesthetic dimension in politics.

“Critical art” doesn’t reproduce the common sense, but tries to undermine it

So, it doesn’t make sense to distinguish between 

'political and non-political art. What we usually consider as “political art”, should be called “critical art”. This is an art that doesn’t reproduce the common sense, but tries to undermine it. It’s an art form that challenges the existing hegemony and tries to disarticulate it. Critical art tries to create an agonistic situation, a situation in which alternatives are made possible

Art as activism - is that your conclusion?

‘Not necessarily. We need to make a distinction between art and artistic activism. ‘Artivism’ is fairly new in a sense. I’m not saying it never existed before, but we are seeing more and more of this. The most obvious difference is that artivism has an activist goal. It’s an activism that is using artistic means. In a sense it is the answer to the way in which neoliberalism is also making use of artistic means in order to trick people into buying more. So I think this artivism has definitively an important role to play in the creation of an agonistic public sphere. But of course not every form of art should be like this. Many of my friends believe artivism is the only possible form of critical art. In a way they accept the idea that there’s no space anymore for criticism. They are convinced that art practices taking place in museums are taboo: “In a museum your work is immediately recuperated. Art can only be critical if it occurs outside the institutions. Visual art and theatre should move to the public space, to the streets.” I don’t agree with that. Personally, I’m really interested in the role of the museum and how it can become an agonistic space.

‘I think of the debate in the visual arts, some years ago: “Beauty is necessarily conservative and we should now talk about the sublime.” Even today there are still many artists who seem to believe that critical art cannot be beautiful, because this category is inherently “bourgeois”. That’s absurd. Beauty can be very subversive. 




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