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Six months ago I participated in an unusual event organised by Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolghadr for an art fair, the ARCO 07 in Madrid. Their original idea, elaborating upon Anton Vidokle’s unitednationsplaza in Berlin – a project that takes the ‘exhibition-as-school’ as its departure point – was to organise a series of workshops.[1] These were to be presented in the stead of the usual panel discussions that accompany art fairs nowadays, seeing as such discussions normally are not much more than symbolic presentations of intellectual capital and mostly lack any characteristics of a real debate. As preparations got underway, however, Vidokle and Zolghadr decided that to merely replace panel discussions with workshops was not enough. There was still the problem of the context in which the workshops were to occur. For isn’t the so-called critical agenda directed against the prevailing tendency to reduce contemporary art to a commercial spectacle, of which the art fair has become the symbol? In the end they decided to turn the event into a mock trial. Such trials have a tradition in art – to which there was an obvious referral here – the most famous examples being the mock trials of the Surrealists or the Situationists, which were primarily used to get rid of those perceived as being a threat to the integrity of the movement. In the age of ‘isms’, a mock trial seemed the appropriate tool for clarifying ideological standpoints, a sort of formalisation of debate in cases of emergency.On the face of it, nothing of comparable urgency was at stake in the mock trial organised by Vidokle and Zolghadr, however. The invited participants (almost all of whom were directors or representatives of international art institutes) were accordingly requested to not act in their own interests, but to assume certain roles: that of prosecutor, defendant, witness, judge and so on. The accused parties were Vidokle and Zolghadr, who as organisers of the event had turned themselves in because of their very willingness to accept the art fair’s invitation in the first place, a charge that was then more generally formulated as ‘co-optation with the (new) bourgeoisie’. The trial lasted for more than six hours in a separate space in the fair building, during which the participants remained pretty much on their own. From a historical perspective, it should be noted that the set-up of this event mirrored the current situation in which the artist as a protagonist has been replaced by the art world agent. A film was made of the event, a document that first of all shows the extent to which a simple formalisation of speech can influence social exchange (the language of a trial compared to that of a panel discussion). The film also confirms the dilemmas that came up during the trial. The first issue, determining the ‘nature of the crime’ (as expressed by the judge, Jan Verwoert), was never resolved. What’s more, partly due to the experimental novelty of the speech format (at least for those enacting it), the general arguments remained rather vague. The new bourgeoisie, accused of having taken art ‘hostage’, were identified as ‘the people buying Peter Doig paintings for more than 4 million’, in other words, those who have reduced art to a luxury fetish. Nor was the other side of the matter left unmentioned, the fact that the bourgeoisie arises from a politics of secularisation and due to the free flow of capital is potentially universal. Furthermore, all participants in the mock trial were identified (perhaps a bit too hastily) as belonging to the bourgeoisie or new bourgeoisie themselves, without further elucidation. Although it was several times stated that since 1989 we have lived in a situation in which there is no longer any escaping the ideological rule of neoliberal capitalism, the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie found no particular place in the debate. That hegemony was even contradicted – by the very presence of the participants in the trial itself. This is the second dilemma that remained unresolved: whether or not a reality exists ‘outside’ neoliberal capitalism, which seems an important prerequisite for each individual’s decision about where to draw the line between principles and ‘playing along with the game’.

History of the Imagination

Yet the main problem uncovered by the mock trial is the fact that it is difficult to describe where the crux of the problem lies. In her role as expert in the trial, Maria Lind [director of IASPIS, Stockholm, ed.] tried to fall back on ‘hard facts’. Summarizing her ‘Report on European Cultural Policies 2015’, she related how she and a number of writers had responded to an invitation to participate with the Swedish government organisation IASPIS in a project financed by the EU as part of the curatorial side-programme of the Frieze Art Fair in London. report shows how much the lines are really blurring, not merely on an individual level, but especially between cultural and economical policies on a large scale, between private interests and the public sphere (the European government supporting an art fair which commissions a national government organization to conduct an investigation into European support of cultural programmes, including the art fair itself). Although I am fully aware of the political necessity of works such as the IASPIS report, this kind of evidence is not what I have in mind when trying to describe ‘what’s really going on’. I will try to lay out some ideas here on the relationship between the market and so-called political art. Also I would like to shed some light on the second stage of the trial in Madrid, which revolved around the ‘possibility of art’. What is ‘really going on’ is that the framework of the political imagination of the individual is changing. This makes it increasingly difficult to address the power relations at play, and I suspect that the current success of the market and the commercialisation of all aspects of life are mainly due to this fact – one that is difficult to address in the first place. The most powerful effect of this changing framework is that contradistinctions and the individual’s resistance are being neutralised and that the related desires are being ‘redirected’ to the market. My proposition is that this has led to a situation in which life itself, or more precisely, images of life and, more importantly, life energy, turns into a commodity. At the mock trial in Madrid, once the class discussion was abandoned without too much antagonism, the debate turned to the question of what institutional practice allows the ‘possibility of art’. Charles Esche, performing brilliantly in the role of the defendant, stated that the most important task of an institute is to offer art the possibility to ‘imagine things otherwise’. Yet this minimal description leaves out the modern fate of the utopian imagination – that is, the history of spectral disappointments casting their shadow on our ability to imagine anything otherwise.If art is connected to the imagination in that manner as a faculty, we have to link the history of modern and contemporary art to the history of the imagination as a faculty, which also makes us keenly aware of art’s troubled relation to everything that is not art, its relation to politics and life, and to the problem of its institutional framing.

Elsewhere, but not Outside

The history of the imagination, if it can at all be summarized in such a way, is one of a dialectics of mobilisation and neutralisation. Mobilisation, because in modern times imagination is being unleashed. We have only to think of the debates on whether girls should be allowed to read novels in the 19th century, for example, or of the effects which globalisation and migration have had on the imagination from colonial times to this very day.[2]The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claims that one of modernity’s central features is the unleashing of the imagination for ordinary people in ordinary life, the most basic condition in today’s networked media society being that ‘de-territorialised viewers’ meet images in flux.[3]This history of the mobilisation of the imagination, which coincides with ‘modernity’, would also allow us to link the imagination in new ways to the history of utopia, and consequently to the history of desires. We could link this ‘mental’ history with the concrete history of territorial movements, with the frontier [the urge to go the West, the longing for innovation, ed.], five centuries of European expansion, and with migration in general, all of which are based on imagining an ‘otherwise’, imagining and moving towards an ‘elsewhere’, previously thought of as an ‘outside’. Today this reads differently: ‘We have to know where we live in order to be able to imagine living elsewhere. We have to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there,’ writes the sociologist Avery Gordon.[4] The paradoxical condition of the imagination today is that, although mobilised, it has been deprived of this knowledge, of the possibility of imagining an ‘elsewhere’, an ‘outside’. Utopian imagination has become clinical, merely a ‘pathology’: we can imagine everything (just think of how the terms ‘imagine’ and ‘possibility’ are being used in advertising as keywords to the desire for mobility, mental mobility), and yet it doesn’t matter. We can imagine ‘otherwise’, but without the consequences of change. In his famous novel White Noise, the American author Don DeLillo, as the narrator, comments repeatedly on his own characters: ‘In the end, it doesn’t matter what they see or say.’ Whatever they could possibly say doesn’t matter because the framework has already neutralised. This is the condition of depression, the condition in which nothing is possible any longer, and it is precisely this impossibility for which no language exists. And is this not precisely the situation in which we find ourselves so often? Situations suggesting ‘possibility’ in which nothing is in fact possible at all, and yet this impossibility cannot be addressed? Imagination becomes pathological precisely when it is disconnected from the reality principle of transformation and change. This loss of the imagination’s access to producing antagonism to that which simply is marks its special status in a world ‘without alternatives’ and ‘without an outside’: here imagination merely advertises itself, remaining nothing but a promise, the fetish of the possibility of life. In this situation we are left with nothing but the animistic forces of the market, the power of the market to produce the ‘genuinely real’, that is, to regard the capitalist valuation as the ultimate source of the real. The market at least ‘moves’, and we have to enter the market with our entire subjectivity if we still have hopes of moving and being moved.

The Outside Internalized

In a world that no longer recognizes an outside, the avantgarde frontier has become internalized. The market has gained a special social status in this economy, also called the ‘experience economy’ or ‘transformation economy’. Products are classified by their emotional content: How much can a product move us, to what extent can it create subjectivity, along with a sense of mobility? The art market, because of its detachment from any utilitarian value, has in fact become something like the narcissistic reflection of the market’s expansion into the sphere of life. In other words, the loss of reality is compensated by the reality of capitalism’s ‘phantom objectivity’ (George Lukasz): commodities concealing the fact that they stand for social relationships as ‘natural’ facts. A market-driven policy such as we have today is one that has already accepted the notion of ‘it doesn’t matter what they see or think’, and that, at best, looks if there are still possibilities of doing something, if immanent critique is still possible. But if this concerns the role and fate of the imagination, what is its relation to art? I believe that artistic practice today is, or should be, aware of the fact that it no longer has any monopoly on setting the imagination free. The ‘possibility of art’ is not merely to imagine things differently anymore, but to look at the conditions of difference as such. If power now operates at the level of the ‘interior’ of a subject, the possibility of art must lie in collectivising that which has been privatised, to exteriorise that which has become the unspeakable condition of the subject. The problem with the market – however animistic and even self-reflective its processes of valuation may be – is that it makes us further dependent on ‘phantom objectivity’, that is, conditions that cannot be negotiated, a framework that is already set, and thus negates the core of the emancipative project of modernity – autonomy. The politics of art is not to address or picture anything ‘political’, but to make the political act thinkable. And the political act consists of making the ‘nonnegotiable’ negotiable once again. The film A Crime Against Art (2007) was distributed by bdv. Director: Hila Peleg. Produced by unitednationplazastudio.Performers: Jan Verwoert as judge, Anton Vidokle & Tirdad Zolghadr as the accused, Chus Martinez & Vasíf Kortun as public prosecutors, Charles Esche as counsel for the defence, Maria Lind as expert, Setareh Shahbazi as artist, Anselm Franke as witness, Keti Chukhrov as member of the public.[1] See www.unitednationsplaza.org [2] see, in German, the excellent description of the role the emerging American novel had on the social imaginary: Winfried Fluck, Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900, Suhrkamp 2002.[3] Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large – Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1996.[4] Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters – Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1996.