Política da arte: pistas para um debate a haver

Inaesthetik é uma publicação anual bilingue (em alemão e inglês). Ao nº 0, “Theses on Contemporary Art”, seguiu-se, em 2009, o nº 1 sobre “política da arte”.
O facto de a revista ter por título o conceito de “inestética” (proposto por Alain Badiou), não traduzindo necessariamente a inscrição do seus contributos – de resto, bastante heterogéneos – no pensamento deste filósofo, realça sobretudo a afinidade entre o(s) pensamento(s) da arte e da filosofia e os seus modos de aflorar a verdade – uma afinidade para que aponta o conceito de “inestética” e que norteia os muito variados textos da publicação.

Não estando ainda on-line, deixo alguns excertos do editorial deste nº 1, por Tobias Huber e Marcus Steinweg onde se perfilam questões, impasses, pistas para/de um debate a haver:

«The latest edition of INAESTHETIK is all about the politics of art. Do works of art have a political mandate? How does a work of art place itself in the social domain? How do art production, art criticism, art theory and philosophy interact? Does art have to be critical – critical of institutions, the market, and ideologies? Or does the work of art set limits to criticism and the good conscience of critics, who turn art into a practice that is risky and perhaps necessarily affirmative? Is the whole point of resistance and subversion, categories constantly being linked to works of art, not a kind of tranquilizer, allowing artists to take part in the political game without a real commitment to it, making political conscience a form of unacknowledged depoliticization? How affirmative does a work of art have to be in order to be subversive or political?

Any convincing work of art must possess a critical force that reflects the conditions under which it was made. At the same time it cannot be limited to reflexive intelligence, because – like every postulation, assertion of form, and decision – it also contains a moment of proflexive blindness in which it escapes its own identity and sense of self-assurance. (...) Of course, art has little to do with mistrust, culpability, and the zealous practice of policing. Its critical force always contains a certain degree of affirmation, comparable to a kind of ontological acquiescence. (...)

The political in art lies in addressing both moments equally: refusing, on the one hand, to let its critical force be neutralized in blind affirmation while remaining certain, on the other hand, that there is no art which can or, indeed, should renounce its blindness, because it is blindness that opens a work of art to the new and unknown. (...)

The vigilance and concern of art – its own unique politicality – becomes visible in its affirmative resistance to the temptation of self-journalization, in its resistance to the power of facts, on the one hand, and to its aesthetic and always idealistic inadequacy in the phantasm of pure art, on the other. Art can only be found in the sphere of economic, cultural, social and political overdeterminacy. This is where it must articulate its distance from everything that limits its claim to autonomy.»