metropolis m

It’s obvious that the big get bigger and stronger with every polemic, and it’s just as obvious that critics of big figures need to take this into account. A good example of such a critic is the writer and activist Dan Savage, who submitted the superbly homophobic US Senator Rick Santorum to a viral public campaign. Savage ensured that a Google search for ‘Santorum’ now brings up the definition: ‘1. The frothy mix of lube and faecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum.’ The senator recently attempted to cajole Google into rigging the situation in his favour, only to make things worse in the process. But take artist Marina Abramovi?, for example, someone who thrives on the controversy boomerang thing with aplomb. Last autumn, she whipped up a propitious fuss around her intervention at the LA MOCA gala dinner, where she put people to use as dinner decorations: lying naked on the tables or crouched underneath, their heads sticking out through gaps in the tabletops, while Tilda Swinton and other top bananas had supper and took pictures. This elicited a petition from Yvonne Rainer, who employed such stuffy language that it left Marina looking cutting-edge. Especially when the performers – largely young female artists – rallied to her defence, saying Marina was delightful, that the whole operation was a ‘gift’, and that being gawped at by collectors (‘we locked eyes for 35 minutes’) was ‘a meaningful experience’. Become a human napkin, and power will smile upon you. Dab the lobster marrow off its cheeks with you.Let’s briefly compare this to another artist intervention at a museum gala dinner, at the NY Metropolitan back in 1971. The dinner was gatecrashed by Lucy Lippard and the Art Workers’ Coalition, who unleashed a vial of cockroaches and were violently thrown out by security. As painter Kestutis Zapkus let the roaches loose, he announced this should ‘keep Harlem on our minds’, a reference to the Met’s controversial exhibition Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968 (1969). Forty years later, art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson chided Zapkus, arguing that the Harlem show had been widely attacked precisely for its ghetto stereotypes. But from the little I’ve learned myself, the uproar about the Harlem show, for the most part, was not about the representation, but about who had the right, the museal privilege, to do the representing in the first place. If you imagine Lippard and Zapkus offering Harlem poetry, or Harlem cuisine, instead of roaches, surely that would have just compounded the representational impasse. Rubbing the museum’s nose in its own phantasmagoria, and having these fantasmata come to life at a gala dinner, is a smarter move than any corrective reality check could have been. And in some ways, bathing the institution in its own fixations is what the Dan Savage approach amounts to. To come back to LA MOCA: the intervention was equally preceded by a dramatic public reaction, when dealer Jeffrey Deitch took over the museum in 2010. A move that took the blending of museum vocation and private profit to a very transparent level, and that made Marina’s gala look just as deeply appropriate as the roaches, if for different reasons. Far from a boomerang or gatecrasher, Marina merges with the context, illustrating how artists and roaches, institutions and ghettos are all rolled together in one frothy mix. At the precise time of the MOCA dinner, I myself, blessed with the mercy of insignificance, was invited to a small conference in Prague, where at one point a Belgrade-based scholar passingly referred to Marina as ‘red bourgeoisie’. It was amusing for me to consider that although her work depends greatly on tropes of wretchedness, suffering and self-exile, back in Yugoslavia the Abramovi? family is precisely equivalent to Tilda Swinton nomenclature. Remember the wallowing red regalia at the MoMA performance The Artist is Present? This is Red Bourgeoisie, my friend, and not ‘shopping mall Santa’, as Artforum unfairly suggested.To conjure a faraway bedrock of moral dignity, and some juicy class resentment, is of course immeasurably fun, which is why I’m doing it. It’s less fun to assess what ‘Marina’ more generally means, what broader professional truths the substance, the stuff, in all its glistening materiality, is representing; to consider the professional glop we wallow in with growing self-evidence, and the human napkins we routinely use to wipe the Santorum off our faces; the spineless demagogy of our Tate Moderns and New Museums, the happy zeal of our self-exploiting interns, the ruling-class servility of our schools. In such a context, and this is where I return to my moralistic Metropolis M series (of which this text is a part): institutional authority is the trickle-down faecal froth that keeps our machinery nice and greasy, and any meaningful critique needs to acknowledge this as its very own historical ground. Marina is undeniably a gift; it’s what keeps the Santorum on our minds. Tirdad Zolghadr is a writer and curator from New York. He teaches at the Center for Curatorial Studies/Bard College.