metropolis m

Twenty-three years ago, in the now distant 1994, my mother made a wager and relocated us to Greece in an attempt to claim Greek citizenship, to seek developmental opportunities that then came with increased mobility ‘in the West’. The decision was risky, but felt intuitively in line with the direction that the world was moving into. The early nineties were some of the messiest, bloodiest and, for some, euphoric years of the post-Soviet transition, felt particularly intensely in industrial heartlands of the former empire; areas rich in exploitable natural resources. Those were strategically important in redrawing and stabilizing the contours of the newly emerging geopolitical map. Donetsk, a major industrial city on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, ticked all of these boxes. From the vantage point of 1994, the future of the city and the region felt as murky, constricted and potentially lethal as its metallurgically polluted air, so it was hardly surprising that the newly palpable proximity to the seemingly clear skies of the Western world prompted a trend of emigration to liberal democratic states with generous repatriation laws (like Greece) and special arrangements for certain groups (for example Russian Jews in Germany).

The last decade of the twentieth century was a charmed time for the liberal cosmopolitan project as it entered the self-branded ‘end of history’ phase following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Propelled by the twin energies of economic and cultural globalization (think World Bank Development programs and the proliferation of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation offices across the globe), liberal cosmopolitanism monopolized the ideological horizon of the transnational realm, making itself synonymous with emancipation and progress. Fast-forward twenty-three years and that horizon appears to be at the brink of bankruptcy. Demystified and attacked from all possible flanks, left, right, centre, inside, outside, the very model of liberal democracy seems to be living on borrowed time. What is striking is that the outing of liberal values as the no longer so invisible cloaks of financial and political power mongering comes at a moment where the ambition of traditionally non-liberal actors to reorganize geopolitical hierarchies and institute value creation chains outside the sphere of Euro-American influence  is matched by the very real need to surpass the limitations of the liberal framework for mediating such structural changes as automation of finance and labour, and the wide-reaching effects of looming environmental shifts. While we are clearly witnessing an emptying out of a unified globalism guided by the liberal cosmopolitan imaginary, some with more anxiety and dread than others, it is not yet clear what kind of globalisms will come at its stead and whether art has any role to play in this transition. I would argue that the latter question requires the development of pragmatist approaches and strategies that have generally been alien to the logics of contemporary art.

It now seems widely acknowledged — thanks to the work of such authors as Suhail Malik, Peter Osborne and Terry Smith amongst others — that the consolidation of contemporary art as the hegemonic model of art with a claim to universality came with the global expansion of its socio-institutional and market complex in the nineties, in which the emergence of transnationally oriented private wealth played a significant role. I have argued elsewhere that in many ways contemporary art also came to replace the top-down, restrictive and clearly ‘Western’ conceptions of liberal freedom as envisioned by human rights, with a vision of transnational cosmopolitanism constituted through difference and constantly evolving capacity to self-determine subjecthood and meaning, which coalesced far better with the libertarian ethos of neoliberalism than the regulatory approach of human rights. However, if the horizon of a unified cosmopolitanism is now fracturing, the question arises if contemporary art can be anything beyond a bubble that just caters to its own class. Some would argue that is exactly what contemporary art has been since its inception; an elite social, financial and (sometimes) intellectual formation that despite its appeals to the general public and (for the most part) interest in societal processes is predicated on the generation, circulation and distribution of value for its direct participants. Nowhere is this as palpably evident as during the professional and VIP previews of biennials and art fairs.

Recently, I was invited in various capacities to take part in Future Climates, an ongoing project led by Antonia Alampi and iLiana Fokianaki that seeks to influence the future possibilities of small to mid-sized independent art institutions. They held a symposium on the topic of infrastructures in Athens just a day before documenta 14 opened its doors to professionals and VIPs. The range of contributions was in some ways predictable (as was the fact that most listeners had just arrived in town for documenta), but it provided a rather accurate overview of what is at stake: from the (self)critical and damning characterization of contemporary art as a sphere that needs to deal with the dubious ethics of its infrastructures and systems, to reification of art and art experience as sites of redemption, to my own slightly more marginal position that we should treat the infrastructural as part and parcel of art rather than continuing to draw a distinction and a hierarchy between them, looking for methods that operate at the level of that entanglement, if systemic shifts is what we are after. The next day, along with all the confused documenta crowds, I visited some of the venues of documenta. Apart from the missing artists list and the marble stones solution to captions that were the talk of the town, what struck me about Learning from Athens was the conspicuous absence of any indication that infrastructural and systemic conditions at play were engaged with beyond an implicit tongue-in-cheek commentary. All that I could gather was that I was being asked to get lost in the lack of meaning and (un-)learn from it.

When I ask my mother what she has learned from the lack of meaning that had made her take the decision to gamble in the nineties, she tells me that it was not a question of lessons: it seemed only logical to seek an alternative path where confidence and meaning could be regained, even if it meant that an entirely novel coordinate system had to be adopted. I would argue that a similar attitude needs to emerge as the cracks within contemporary art and its host system become too deep to maintain a sense of unity. What follows next is to be constructed but perhaps leaving behind the mutually reinforcing approaches of self-flagellation and escapism that have been the emblems of the liberal cosmopolitan ethos in art could be a good start.