Against History: Art, Culture, and Business-as-Usual under the Gazan Genocide

The Israeli mass killing in Gaza has been unrelenting. More than 70,000 tons of bombs dropped. At the time of writing, the death count is 46,584; an underestimate given that in June 2024 it was estimated that 200,000 Palestinians had been murdered since 7 October 2023. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more maimed, crushed under rubble for days, family registries decimated, suffering unthinkable illnesses and deaths in the shattered husks that serve as hospitals. A completion of the Nakba, which, as Rabeah Eghbarieh has demonstrated, is no longer an event of the past but a foundational and recurring condition of Palestine; a legal concept.

At the time of editing, Israel is incinerating housing blocks in Beirut, detonating entire villages and groves across the South and the Bekaa valley as it attempts to invade, thinking it can accumulate more land, or at best create a demilitarised zone for itself, whilst attempting to eviscerate Hezbollah’s resistance fighters, cadres and caches. The currently fascist-led Zionist entity, alongside the US, is not mowing the lawn but continuing the arc of its version of the War on Terror and a new Middle East.

As before, this unfolds with the complicity of a subdued Arab bourgeoisie and Arab States, with the support of a new Gulf petro-class, emboldened by the recent Abraham Accords. We witness the entire Western militarised, liberal order close ranks in defence of capital, allying itself to a neo-fascist Zionism. This is abetted by a White House funnelling billions to Israel, and rolling out fascist agitators and tanks on student encampments: a ‘colonialism turned inward’ as Aimé Césaire would put it. Various parties, parliaments and institutions mobilise the twisted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to pretend to endorse an older anti-antisemitism, and repress and criminalise dissent with amped policing, surveillance, court hearings. The legacy of Germany’s un-de-Nazified anti-antisemitism, relentlessly, in every military, social and cultural form, perversely supports Israel; the UK’s sham two-party system has tightened its genocidal ranks on the question of Palestine, partaking in US-Israeli militarism as it has done since the Iraq war, and revamping its counterterrorism machine, while both pummel Yemen, and threaten Iran.

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, hundreds, if not thousands, of art and cultural centres and universities have doxxed, silenced, fired, threatened, or expelled writers, students, artists, scholars and doctors. An insufferable stream of hasbara fills Western mainstream press and is reiterated in sync by politicians and university boards, in museums and art magazines. Pro-Palestine protest, including displaying the Palestine flag or keffiyeh, is banned in Germany and France; Palestine activists are interrogated, on trial, or serving jail time for direct action, or inane instagram posts. The demonstrations of a nascent antiwar movement are called ‘hate marches’ in the UK. TikTok faces hearings and an outright US ban (in part over its proliferous Palestine hashtags).

The Western cultural establishment has demonstrated a consistent complicity with a ruling order bent on the continued destruction of Palestinian life, people, and infrastructure. Art and educational institutions (especially in Germany and the US) have closed ranks in their commitment to ensuring that culture and the ruling class are in tow, propelling the punishment and revocation of hundreds of speakers, events, talks, fellowships to scholars, and going so far as to threaten deportation and travel bans for those who show alignment with Palestinian liberation. Not to mention the deafening silence of the rest. In a dangerous relativism, as we see below (albeit expectedly in a German context), art and culture spaces have even pitted other struggles such as those in Sudan, or the Congo against that of Palestine. Vaster and more pernicious than first perceived, the repression has taken its most mediatised version through the spectacle of police clampdowns on hundreds of anti-war, pro-Palestine encampments across US universities – the largest student protest encampments since the 1960s.

The social order has cracked open for many to see. The struggle against this late-stage imperial capitalism, as embodied in the Zionist state and its allies, has erupted across various social arenas (notwithstanding the resistance fronts themselves), as politics and economy can be said to enter culture as a site of contradiction and struggle. The cultural superstructure particularly writ, could once more become a site where critique as praxis can function in opposition to financial interest and total war, forging a historical movement from and within the event.

Hundreds of thousands have demonstrated across European cities and campuses. University students across Europe and the US have studied investment portfolios and organised en-masse for divestment from arms and from Israel. New albeit small alliances commit to institutional boycott – Strike Germany, Strike Outset, and Writers Against the War in Gaza (WAWOG) – and have formed platforms for direct action as well as pushed for vast endorsement for the implementation of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Writers have publicly withdrawn from PEN America for proceeding with business-as-usual over its refusal to support Palestinian writers, while some have have declined the German DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme following the Strike Germany call and the cancellation of scholar Nancy Fraser in Cologne for her support of the Israeli boycott. Thousands of writers have signed statements committing to a boycott of Israeli publishing – similarly in academia and law. We have witnessed thousands of individual resignations and boycotts of film festivals and art exhibitions; new progressive journalism platforms; student and academic led research and reports that follow-the-money on institutional investments, such as Coalition for Palestine and Scientists Against Genocide at MIT; weapons factories organising in Britain by Workers For a Free Palestine and other groups, not to mention dockworkers from Sweden to Italy and Greece refusing to load arms shipments to Israel. The list is longer.

Palestinian liberation has once again erupted as cause and symptom in the nexus of struggles against capitalism and neo-colonialism. Lined-up against liberation are both financial capitalism and the emerging forces of late fascism who – in Europe, the US, and Hindu nationalist form – thrive inside the very economic and political structures of undecolonised ‘democracy’.

The economic tides of the last decades – financialisation, debt-austerity, poverty, stagflation – we are seeing another spectre looming; the spectre of war. A new sort of class war and antifascist war intersecting in the calls for a global intifada where Palestine becomes the universal name of emancipatory struggle, potentiating transversal alliances from Palestine resistance to land and climate struggles, from Dakota and Congo to Ecuador, from unions on Amazon’s packing floor, platform driver strikes, to Stop Cop City. Social contradictions come to the fore in a profound manner. A historical feeling, a historical consciousness – we have been here, but it’s so new – are we equipped? – has set upon us.

Tractor-like historical change, delicate, momentous. In various eruptions, political organising has returned to the streets and beyond, as ruling confluences are being pushed back against in stronger measure. Much seems to hang on it, against liberal and fascist elites, labour, housing, and new social movements; between the imperial war machine and armed resistance, grassroots anti-racist and anti-extractivist movements, to revitalised political Left forms. The legacies and the future of anticolonial, communist and communising conjunctions are at stake. Justice as struggle seems to return to a scene it left only as lull, or through revisionist coercion.

Be grateful for what we give you

Under a crisis of legitimacy for a genocidal consensus and its counter-insurrectionary injunctions, contemporary art has demonstrated some sinister instances of art’s twisted autonomy. An underhanded line splits those inclined to strike and boycott as a decisive measure of solidarity with Palestine from the others whose fears and calculations eat their dissent. e-flux Criticism – one of the streams associated with wealthy entrepreneur and filmmaker Anton Vidokle’s art advertising and publishing project, e-flux – ran an editorial in late 2024 titled ‘Biting the Hand’ (minimally crude given the current use of starvation as tool of war in Gaza), paternalistically seeking to protect from criticism those not inclined ‘to bite the hand that feeds them’: those for whom art making and exhibiting comprises their livelihood, allegedly complicating their capacity to take dissension very far.

This [support of boycott, strike, or withdrawal] is amplified by a tendency to dismiss any artist who bites the hand but accepts the food as guilty of hypocrisy. One obvious problem with this is that artists still have to eat, and the insistence that they should forego the opportunity to reach a public is another form of silencing […] this attitude seems to presume the existence of a space perfectly insulated from the structural injustices of society, within which artists might present their work with an immaculate conscience.

In attempting to turn this debate into one of moral relativism from which no one can emerge but the struggling artist, seemingly, those in need of protection are not those summarily dismissed and marginalised for rebelling against the genocide in Gaza, but those artists and their ilk who accede to business-as-usual to maintain the status quo. In a crude inversion, they claim that this itself – the pressure to oppose, protest, and withdraw labour in the form of strike – is a form of silencing those who prefer expedient quietism within the circuits of art and capital. They should remain ‘free to choose’ unsolidarity. Here, free choice in an economy of so-called free exchange takes over commitments to a struggle that far supersedes art. Using the tried and failed trope of ‘artists need to eat’, the editorial summarily resounds with the union-busting moral imperatives of bosses execrating those who believe in strike action, and in this case support the successful BDS movement. The anonymous editorial opines that boycotts threaten to abandon art and culture institutions to incipient fascism:

It is hard to find many shows in New York speaking on behalf of that large part of the American population that will shortly vote for an aspiring dictator, yet it is to their credit that the curators of the current Whitney Biennial have elected to foreground artists representing causes vulnerable to the dismal eventuality of his election[…] the problem is that withdrawing from the public arena cedes it to others, and that there is no guarantee of getting it back.

The pacifying piece thus asks artists and those who work in culture to ignore calls to escalate and boycott institutions complicit in genocide via their economic and political dealings, because they must first look after their own labour as an allegedly isolated, ahistorical social relation, as mere livelihood! They must confine dissent to that which does ‘not descend into disorder’ (per Biden) lest their boycott hand the space of art to fascists; and instead use art to ‘smuggle’ a narrative amenable for contemporary art to express dissent: ‘An alternative is to continue to participate in public spaces while highlighting the dissonance, using the opportunity to broadcast whatever opinions it is possible to smuggle into them’.

Artists need to eat. As does everyone else. Invoking this in the context of forced starvation in Gaza, is an insult to the art that purports to show itself in the name of avoiding starvation, and in the name of the others they claim will be under fascist tyranny in the US (how, in this climate, artists making art will prevent this is unclear). Moreover, the disdain for those who vote for the ‘dictator’ flies in the face of any class and historical analysis that seeks to understand the conditions that produced the right-leaning, reactionary moment we inhabit. Optimistically, perhaps forcing a choice between (good) genocide Democrats and (bad) fascist Republicans (as per the e-flux symptom) pursued the other way, via its own deep contradictions, could bring about the needed radical change that overruns the false choice once and for all.

As Hannah Black, Tobi Haslett and Ciaran Finlayson reminded us some years ago in their argument for the boycott of the Whitney Biennial – renamed the tear gas biennial due to the economic holdings of CEO William Kanders:

This argument (artists need to eat) flies in the face of history and turns the very notions of strike and boycott on their heads – as if they were marks of luxury, rather than acts of struggle. Although in some cases made in good faith, this view promotes the reactionary fiction that marginalised or working-class people are the passive recipients of political activity as opposed to its main driver.

Within the field of contemporary art, in conversations between artists, in op-eds, inane art reviews, art academia, including profitable platforms like e-flux, there has not been a dearth of talk that artists are living precariously. This precarity – not one analysed in terms of surplus populations, immanent characteristics of accumulation, decades of financialisation, or the ills of piece work and wage work – has positioned artists as presumed sources of critique and subversion. This anti-aesthetic trope of the bohemian artist with severed ties to patronage leads to an aversion toward structure and professionalisation as signifiers of commerce that are said to  exist within contemporary or immaterial modes of production.

Artists (but not those who work for a wage inside the art establishment?) must not be forced to engage in forms of dissent (since they are dissent?) such as strike and boycott, particularly those of boycotting art institutions and art shows where their art is made, consumed and circulated, even if (or these days, because) these are found to have donors and heads of boards fully imbricated in various forms of police repression, the prison complex, tear gas manufacturing, right-wing think tanks, even Likud affiliations and outright support for Israeli genocide. Labour is contradictorily avowed (precarious culture workers) and disavowed (no to labour strikes and boycotts). Accordingly, then, artists are never really workers, nor analysed as belonging to the working class. Simultaneously, thereby, the working class is not only not the main driver of history, but also its driver if it is alleged to vote for a Republican dictator. It is thus both scapegoated and judged in need of paternalism and protection when artists are concerned, thus repudiating entire class struggles’ historical forms of organising. Positions like e-flux’s are thus uncritically anti-historical. The fact that artists and others who work inside institutions have political alliances and class positions that set them on a path of struggle precisely because they understand who is affected by it, including those communities where art finds and shows itself – seem to run amiss.

Black, Haslett and Finlayson reminded us in 2018 that tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders sat on the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art, making ample donations to a biennial concerned with disenfranchised communities, while also sitting at the head of Safariland – which, while producing tear gas, also ‘does a brisk trade supplying batons, handcuffs, holsters, and body armor to police and security forces including the IDF and the NYPD’ to police the neighbourhoods where said art is displayed and consumed. A contradiction that could not but come to a crisis point.

The sorts of positions like those in e-flux’s editorial, with a stretch, recall the reactionary tendency to mis-assign the cause of systemic distress caused by economic and social policy over decades – the crisis of neoliberalism reaped in the present – to outsiders, migrants, refugees, or to the Left rather than to the beneficiaries of this systemic disaster. Against history, it presumes that the solution lies with the individual and the individuated, or within the narratives conjured by the artist. How can this not remind us of the Benjaminian critique that communism politicises art, in contradistinction to the aestheticisation of politics?

It is worth recapitulating it: Benjamin warned that fascism reorganises the now proletarianised masses, explicitly giving them the right to express themselves while preserving property relations of domination, which those same masses sought to abolish:

The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

In other words, even as liberalism holds that expression is better than no so-called freedom of expression (they have not understood the fascist inversion of their own dictum because they are not dialecticians), we must still contend with the form of that expression and its political valences. Efforts to render politics aesthetic, or, aestheticising politics, culminates in war, or, at best, fascist agitation. Benjamin’s formula for the fascist aesthetic was: ‘war and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system’.

Quoting F T Marinetti’s 1920’s futurist manifesto, he reminds us:

War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture.

More on point for our present, Marinetti rallies for a new aesthetic order wherein politics lies at the service of aesthetics:

Poets and artists of Futurism! … remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art … may be illumined by them!

Art for its sake becomes, for Benjamin, the culmination and consummation of man for himself, satiated by the artistic scene of a war, where self-alienation had ‘reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics, in which Fascism is rendered aesthetic. Communism responds by politicising art’.

Art Value Infrastructure

We know from Marxist cultural analyses if not baseline historical materialism, as well as from some meticulous readers of the edifices of capitalist totality, that social structure and the superstructure that composes, say, culture, art, education, law, is in dialectical – and sometimes contradictory – relation with the historical and particular moment of production it finds itself in. For vast social and political transformation, these have to be taken into account in the totality of relations under capitalism. If this superstructure, as it were, both serves and reproduces the ruling class order in various ways, it is as much a practical location for contradiction and antagonism that help overturn that order.

Terry Eagleton obliquely claims that

since the material production that gives birth to culture is racked by conflict, bits of this culture tend to be used from time to time to legitimate the social order that strives to contain or resolve the conflict, and this is known as ideology

– an allusion to the dialectics of base and superstructure. At certain historical junctures when certain contradictory economic conditions and revolutionary forces come to a head, creating contingency in what had been seen as deterministic history, the site of culture appears as one of the grounds for political and economic critique, if not outright struggle.

The story of art’s autonomy, originally grounded in the unique conditions of the late eighteenth century, coincides, in some accounts, with the dependence of modern culture on the surplus generated by labour for capital. As art assimilated under capitalism, it led to conditions in which art’s contradictory dependence and independence was the basis for the critique of and struggle against capitalist commodification: caught between autonomy and social forces (or heteronomy), it became a source of both capital valorisation and negative critique.

The notion of art’s disinterestedness – which today may paradoxically appear as renditions of contemporary art as critical virtue because it understands itself as market and institution-opposed – has its roots in a Kantian aesthetics that divorced art from labour, or production. Not dismissing it entirely, the prescient and inimitable late Marxist theorist Marina Vishmidt clarifies, ‘modernist aesthetics generates notions of the freedom of subjectivity. This is a subjectivity rooted in the unconditioned or ‘disinterested’ nature of aesthetic experience and not in labour or production.’

Vishmidt has reminded us how early Italian feminist theorists of social reproduction, amongst others, enabled us to extend the view that any arena of life is both a site of capital valorisation and simultaneous struggle (say, for wages), coinciding with the adequate critique of conditions of production and reproduction. Eventually, in modern art uselessness and usefulness too came to function, not always symmetrically, in line with use and exchange, creating and succumbing to abstractions that have real consequences. This uselessness – this alleged standing outside – can, but not in an overdetermined way, forget that it is underpinned by violent infrastructures, or, invertedly, mistake itself for being critically useful (against history) because it forgets that it is otherwise bound by history.

It has been the object of much speculation whether the art existing as part of contemporary art (artworks, institutions, discourse, transnational commodity flows, etc.), and where the latter sits within the cultural field, could produce any critique at all, much less one beyond the legacy of art as institutional critique, and moreover, if it could deploy its infrastructural imbrications within the political-economic and social order.

There may not be shortage of cynicism among those who work in the art establishment still attached to what became the institution of institutional critique, as Andrea Fraser might put it, towards (although not directed at) what Vishmidt has theorised, but did not have time to fully develop, as infrastructural critique: practices and artistic engagements that consider infrastructure, the determined capital flows, costs, and value that it generates, and speculatively, artist risks and wagers. Those that run counter to the defunct and now stylised negations of traditional institutional critique, stipulate either that art cannot really exist outside the institution, is the institution, or that the institution is bad and that artists need to be freed from it. The unheeding of mainstream contemporary art in looking at infrastructure tout court – of art and of capital – belies an obfuscated class struggle and prefers to maintain itself on the basis of an attitudinal ‘we are not surprised’. Its timbre being that radical institutional considerations are naïve and counterproductive; reform institutions by making more art, more content, more affirmative representation inside them. Moreover, it cynically misreads the call to boycott (with its historical heritage of the strike), claiming (per e-flux) that it is in effect the precise opposite of what it is: a retreat from the world! ‘It is not only misguided, but counterproductive: to insist that art retreat entirely from the complexities and contradictions of the world would seem to condemn it to irrelevance.’ This should be inverted to say that it is indeed irrelevance that looms large, if not already actualised, if (contemporary) art does not study, foreground, speculate, and even leverage its aesthetic and non-artistic valorisation mechanisms.

As Vishmidt has reminded us, the more art has become an asset class and a ‘laundromat for hegemonic values’ the more it shrinks art’s contradiction between its self-reference and the horizon of emancipated social relations – its negative critique. Key for the idea of infrastructure in art is not content but as Vishmidt says: ‘how the art is inscribed into circuits of valoration’, even if not necessarily value producing in itself (like other forms of labour), and thus is not about finding the ‘value behind a certain form of art but to ask instead why is it now that in our society value (also) takes the form of art.’

Art does not stand outside the mode of production that is capitalism. And if, in the broader anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle, a version of contemporary art is chiselled away, this will be part of the tectonic shifts that will shatter its postmodern particularisms, historicism, institutional ‘criticality’, and its style of styles that it prides itself on presenting as universal, against the pale of history.

If that version of art is to be abolished (by being made irrelevant, discredited, or dismantled) under social revolution, it is because, like other social divisions in the capitalist totality, it has served to reproduce that denial of totality, of history, of labour, of ‘multiple determinations’ in one manner through its own disavowals. Or, as Trotsky reminded us (contra Marx) in 1938:

Art can neither escape the crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itself. It will rot away inevitably – as Grecian art rotted beneath the ruins of a culture founded on slavery – unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character.

Or, at the very least, ‘art must make its own way by its own means.’ The bourgeois structure of feeling exemplified in editorials such as the ones by e-flux but also across art in the latest round of business-as-usual under genocide, have already countlessly been demolished, including in the tear gas biennial critique cited above. And yet they return. They seem more and more intent to have you keep your head down and work to make a living in an unlivable economy, while your dissent and critique are registered on the level of your (tepidly political) artistic content, or historically remote modernisms, because we may well now finally be in the true absence of the referent qua postmodernity, as Suhail Malik has remarked. And because they think that infrastructure analyses of and as art – with serious formal implications – within the broader economy is an old problem; that post-history has no resolution except, tautologically, using art to make art about the world modelled after its own image. Otherwise, you are told, you threaten with obsolescence the value of art as an alleged platform of social engagement, as though art itself as mediation, was not full of contradictions to be enunciated and confronted. Or, as Anna Kornbluh argues in her critique of immediacy as the style of too late capitalism: it is as though art was not in fact already mediated and mediation, rather, used here as a conduit to engage in some sort of immediate (or ideologically transparent) aesthetics and politics. In other words, once again: use that public space afforded you to communicate your grievances (as if mediation was translucent) within the confines of the styles afforded you by a history not yours that you nonetheless repeat. This is what Adorno and Horkeimer call a ‘system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain “unity of style” if it really made any sense to speak of stylised barbarity.’ Symbolisms, reruns, identities, all manner of stories will be allowed within the so-called safe space of free speech, as well as the enjoyment of the political subject matter of destitution that you may, or may not, manage to bring into the space of art (depending more recently on how pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide you are), which is nonetheless the same site from which you garner value for being virtuous and for being critical. And yet, we remind them, even their good social engagement qua art – the commodification process of observing art as social practice – can also become a derivative device in the form of the Social Impact Bond. Adorno and Horkheimer remark, in The Culture Industry:

A style might be called artificial which is imposed from without on the refractory impulses of a form. But in the culture industry every element of the subject matter has its origin in the same apparatus as that jargon whose stamp it bears.

Subject matter garners exchange value. Museums, galleries and art institutes, publicly funded or not, are happy to debate anything in indeterminate ways (except Palestine liberation, for now) from climate catastrophe to mid-century anti-colonial movements, so long as, for the most part, the confines of the product don’t spill into the infrastructure that makes it possible, creates value, or speculates on art’s capacity for negative critique. The fantasy being that this kind of art in itself (and not for itself?) is a form of immediacy (immediate experience regardless of the types of contemporary art, which trumps the mediation of the money / exchange / commodity form). Or, a kind of disavowed mediation; it already holds the outside in it, is its own mediation. While it is a mediation for, by and as capital.

The artistic and non-artistic are dialectically entwined (akin to the very historiography of art’s autonomy and heteronomy). Their separation now under the guise of the opposite – make socially-engaged art about whatever you want within the art establishment, publishing houses or production houses, on decolonisation, world-making, nationalism, archaeology, oil extraction, but don’t boycott, or bring attention to labour, or financial investments for those same reasons – would render art as it emerges today, irrelevant. Not the inverse.

If art as it stands – here mostly so-called contemporary art as a vast arena of the culture establishment – is already irrelevant (as a barometer of social transformation, say), Suhail Malik’s position in these older debates has been that art needs to exit contemporary art, in its valorising, critical virtue. So that contemporary art holds traction (for Tirdad Zolghadr) as it only symbolically claims to do, it must leverage its knots, bolts, and labour to do so, where curation and art could become both work and organising, as they remake art in ways that mediate the very alienation the former begs to transform, or at least to mediate. In the many contestations of institutional critique, it was said to have turned its own conceptual critique of the scaffolding of art into a thing repeated enough to congeal into a reified style, removed from the scene of its birth, and the conditions of its making. An important contestation by Malik claims that saying ‘no’ inside art institutions is an affirmation of contemporary art’s critical virtue and the fiction of the artist’s total freedom (as an absolute right), where ‘the critical virtue of contemporary art manifests the affirmative negation of institutionalisation required by the civic virtue of rights’ (think of the radical ‘rights’ being evoked as the new right-wing Republicans eviscerate institutions). These affirmative negations should turn into a loud, vociferous ‘no’, like that of the institutionalised ape who had gained language in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, one that in fact affirms through negation the institutions that one wants to see come into existence, to build, to destroy, from which the determinacy of critique and praxis can emerge, and whose function is not solely to self-valorise value. Wedded to this point comes serious reflection around the ways art and society, the artistic and the non-artistic actually mesh; how to work in coincidence with, or through the destruction of,  institutions for a wider struggle. Avoiding words like ‘smuggling’, and not even beginning to refer to tokenising diversity and equality, these invitations focus more on how to force what exists to bring about what does not yet exist, and to formalise this in practice internal to the places of work, relations, art forms, contracts, and so on.

Solidarity

Between 2017 and 2020, there was a wave of Black Lives Matter acknowledgements on art institution websites and #MeToo ricochets in the form of signposting campaigns such as the open letter: ‘We are not surprised.’ Given the complicit silence over the genocide in Palestine, let’s face it, the former’s ultimate horizons were vague gesturing, some more quotas, and looking politically good. When the struggle became concrete on the streets, as we witnessed in the 2020 riots, the ruling classes in the US, the liberal base and establishment, went on to nearly claim that no riots had taken place across the cities where intense protests had occurred, weaponising what suited them from that insurrectionary moment. It seemed that many years later those same organisations and individuals were not surprised enough that Israel and its US-Euro allies were committing mass death, ethnic cleansing and starvation, to proclaim their solidarity, because this time they understood that proclaiming was taking historical action their property relations could not afford, gaining traction in a time where statements of allegiance became speech acts of commitment. The silence was deafening and humorous. Solidarity appeared conveniently as dinner table sympathy because no identification with shared struggle seemed possible without concrete risk.

I’ve inquired elsewhere about the way class composition presents itself in contemporary art, the ways ‘cultural workers’ claiming they are workers sits repellently with those who see that curators, dealers, heads of museums, and artists who lubricate the global flows of capital can hardly nudge themselves into this made up strata (although they can certainly leverage their positions), and that the question of labour in art, and its status as a (non) commodity, is still unresolved. Today, perhaps since masks have fallen off, solidarity indeed has come to mean praxis. The desired replacement by immaterial and mental labour does not resolve, or dissolve, the problem of the violence of abstraction (real abstraction). Rather, the crisis of labour and wage, life and exchange, under late capitalism is still very much at stake.

Where do we place the cultural establishment’s tendency to incriminate boycott, strike, and maintain business-as-usual not only under genocide made possible by their patrons in Europe and the United States, but also in relation to the latest waves of labour organising across the world since 2019? Over the last few years and into the Covid-19 pandemic, after the drawn-out aftermath of financial collapse, the bailout of banks, the crises of production/debt, the further intensification of austerity and rise of right-wing populism, strikes, riots, social movements, as well as labour organising, have been on the rise – the inheritors of the coming of age of the Occupy movements and the redrawing of communisation lines among Leftist activist and theory circles. An uncanny grammar. These new waves across the global north for one, from nurses, doctors, university unions, and gilets jaunes, to Amazon, Google and platform delivery workers (today the Palestine movement trying to engage directly with arms factory workers), had some effect in the art field. Art handlers and museum workers organised to form unions in various US cities; interns circulated spreadsheets detailing their working hours and major discrepancies in pay; various US and UK museum workers and artists banded to end museum investment in fossil fuel, the prison complex, tear gas, dire labour practices, and beyond (e.g. Liberate Tate, Gas Art, Strike MoMA, preceded by Gulf Labour Artist Coalition and G.U.L.F); artists and researchers followed-the-money on museum board members evidently finding imbrications in all manner of ruling elite filth, such as the spyware Pegasus owned by then Serpentine CEO Yana Peel’s husband, and links to the Netenyahus and the Israeli Occupation Forces by the likes of the Gertlers and their funding patronage outfit, Outset – to name but two.

Since the Gazan genocide began, a recent activist call was Strike Outset (the art fund, Outset is run by the Gertlers who are close with the Netanyahus, and are apparently implicated in right wing think-tanks in the apartheid state of Israel), coming at the heels of Strike Germany launched by writers and artists asking to unequivocally boycott German cultural and academic institutions for their now farcical, perverted and total support of Israel against the Palestinians. Strike Germany also came with a clear set of demands against the IHRA definition of antisemitism (and the anti-BDS motions both voted on in the Bundestag) asking scholars, writers and artists to decline all invitations and withdraw their labour from German institutions.

The BDS movement and PACBI were conceived prior to the second intifada and have now returned with force, as the powers against them work across parliaments to pass outlaw motions. The attempts at banning and shaming, if not criminalising the premise of boycott, including in the fields of art and education (now we see more clearly the extent of universities’ military research and support of genocide in Israel and the US), had been pre-emptive before October 7, aimed at undermining the movement’s concrete effects against Zionist profit and reputation. Today, this contributes to the fat financing poured into doxxing students at Harvard, and the aggressive clampdowns on hundreds of university encampments across Europe, the UK and the US, as the correlation between state, police, million-dollar educational endowments and billionaire boards is all too evident. Organising to divest from weapons and block arms shipments to Israel (including by dock and factory workers) can become successful politically and also exposes the logistical nature of capital as targetable because indeed (also) premised on what Charmaine Chua would call circulation as a mode of production. Boycott and divestment are chokepoints. Blockades and boycotts are effective. As they are also contained inside the so-called field of culture.

The dominant stance across contemporary and culture art (as we witness through editorials, vast silences, firings, censoring and lately the pitting of African and Afro-Deutsche causes against those of Palestine, as happened at a decolonial Berlin event at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)) has conveniently perceived the strike and boycott as in themselves another form of repression. As Ciaran Finlayson reminds us, if we forget art’s dialectical autonomy, its uselessness and its being subtended by an infrastructure that is itself subtended by the violence of both wage and slave labour, then we are doing bad politics and bad art. This liberal establishment politics indicates the drive to un-read the gravity of this historical moment as an intensification of past-present economic conditions, and a propitious one for movements, labour organising, and a communist politics bent on changing those conditions. And that bad politics and art, broadly writ, which mistakes art’s dialectical condition, propagates a self-image as non-contradictory and critical only on the scale of its discourse – an irony in today’s neo-McCarthyist era. Together these two bad sides progress to remake the very status quo of art that, at best, valorises the value of either socially good art, or only indeterminate poetics ungrounded from histories of form, and plays a key role in intensifying the conditions where art value is the site of inscription in networks of value production for capital by and large.

Art, like other sites of circulation, consumption, and reproduction, could be a site of struggle and a site where the liberal political consensus can recompose itself. As such, asking the question what is to be done? through, as we understand it, an infrastructural critique in art that can find form to speculation/speculating on inherent contradictions, as we understand Vishmidt to have meant, and through organising (boycotts, strikes, divestments, plans for new formations, methods to abolish), is a concrete social question. Because then we also speculate on art and the institution as imbricated in broader struggles and movements against the violent manifestation and abstraction of infrastructure (per Vishmidt). The clash between a self-perception of art as social engagement cum critical poetics, and the obfuscated struggle with capital infrastructure and logistics is clear to see. Anyone who cuts off that confrontation serves the liberal ruling consensus, and is politically naive and cynical. In the end, all this but affirms that this conjuncture must end; ‘the necessary prerequisite to the creation of a new world and a new life’.

Ghalya Saadawi teaches critical theory and art theory at Goldsmiths University and the Dutch Art Institute. Her first book Between October and November is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions.