metropolis m

It hardly seems a coincidence. While politicians, on the left as well as the right, seem to be increasingly conventional in the moral sense, the word ‘bourgeois’ keeps cropping up in art. The term is used to characterize art of the more respectable sort, art that does not allow too much misunderstanding about itself, art that is concrete, such as a painting or sculpture, and is more answer than question. While the galleries have been doing a brisk business for years with bourgeois landscapes, portraits and whatever else it entails, the wave of bourgeois art has meanwhile reached the Dutch museums. This spring, the tasteful storybook paintings by Uwe Henneken will be presented at De Hallen, and S.M.A.K. and De Pont are showing the literally and figuratively socially acceptable work of Anton Henning. Bourgeois is the art that sooner amuses the public than ruffles its feathers. No screaming, no yelling, no fuss – this is art that considers art itself and its history central. This is to the great satisfaction of the Western art audience, which is finally getting what it loves best: art that is about beauty and consolation. The rise of ‘arty’ art can be seen as the revenge of the middle class on the ruling art elite and their know-it-all political programme. For years, notably in the major exhibitions, art has been saddled with a political agenda with which the bourgeois art lover does not see eye to eye. Rather than becoming engaged and committing themselves to one or another politically correct profile, the bourgeoisie opt for lives and a cultural heritage of their own.But the socially critical art elite are not easily pushed aside. London’s Gasworks recently presented the Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie exhibition, in which curators Nav Haq and Tirdad Zolghadr asked artists whether they had in fact degenerated into lapdogs of the bourgeoisie. The exhibition was an attempt to investigate how social class is interwoven in art, the idea behind it all being a desire to stimulate the critical capacities of artists.Last summer, the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven presented a comparable attempt to sharpen the perspective of bourgeois art with The Subversive Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The exhibition brought together canons of good taste, such as Paulina Olowska and Marc Camille Chaimowicz, combined with several highlights from the museum’s own collection. Everything in this exhibition was tasteful and discreet. But there was a twist somewhere in the tale, whereby the work changed from coquettish to irritating. Call it subversion at a high level, in reaction to its own artistic perspective, a cunning game played with the rules of art.The critical exhibitions in London and Eindhoven demonstrate that the cultural elite do not gladly accept being labelled as Bourgeois. People prefer being associated with the ‘naughty’ anti-establishment thinking of its counterpart, the Bohemian. Today as well, while the paintings and etchings pile up by the truckload, the critical elite seek engagement with countermovements and feel the need to point out the narrow-mindedness and political foolishness of the Western art bourgeoisie. Instead of the ordered Petit Bourgeois life of welfare and tradition, they sing the song of the liberated poetic existence, free of order and authority, engaged in a continual political struggle with prevailing norms and values. The life of the Bohemian is irresponsible, unreliable and preferably also illegal. This issue zooms in on several examples of antibourgeois art that have recently surfaced. To begin, we will pause at the whirlwind of pornography that has inundated the art world in the last few months (there are exhibitions, including Das Achte Feld last autumn at the Ludwig Museum; Witte de With is preparing for Bodypoliticx- It’s Art But Is It Porn? Before it opens in September, there will be porno conferences in Berlin and soon also in Amsterdam; and an issue of Texte zur Kunst is being devoted to the subject). The art of Alexandra Bachzetsis is also antibourgeois, playing with the codes of low culture dance, mainly striptease and its contemporary derivative, the urban video clip. And we will be discussing the controversial art of Jutta Koether, recently presented in major retrospectives in Cologne and Bern. Of all the artists illuminated by this special issue, Koether is perhaps the most genuine Bohemian, because her work most poignantly represents an inversion of middle-class values.