K&K - Kultur og Klasse

Protestens billeder

Mikkel Bolt — 2023-05-02

Teorihistorisk skitsering af den nye protestcyklus

Mikkel Bolt — 2023-05-02

The article proposes a reading of the new cycle of protests that erupted in 2011 with the so-called Arab Spring and the square occupation movements in Souther Europe before moving on to the US with the Occupy movement. The years since 2011 have been marked by a significant rise in the numer of protests, riots and revolts across the world with the years 2011, 2014 and 2019 as preliminary high points. The pandemic and the repressive anti-rebellion measures put in place during the pandemic does not seem to have stopped protests from continuing to take place. The article challenges readings of the contemporary protests that fault them for being desperate, defensive and unpolitical proposing a reading using the notion of refusal put forth by Maurice Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo in 1958 as a prims for understanding the emergence of a new anti-political protest culture.

Protest, subjekt og udsagn i to nutidige egyptiske eksperimentalfilm

Maj Ørskov — 2023-05-02

The films The Square (2013) by Jehane Noujaim and In the Last Days of the City (2016) by Tamer El Said both relate to the 2011 uprising in Cairo and its aftermath, albeit in very different ways. The article analyses how the films in each their way mobilise and articulate – rather than represent – political protest and a subject of this protest. The analysis is guided by the hypothesis that parts of critical Egyptian contemporary art, experimental film in particular, have increasingly moved away from the immediate endeavours of the uprising to establish a collective subject and toward a reparation of more unstable, politically seeking subjectivities with a view to destabilise the current authoritarian regime in Egypt. With reference to the political changes in Egypt in the period from 2011 to 2016 the article explores the enunciational conditions for protest in the span between a collectively manifest subject and fragmented, searching subjectivities. In dialog with Elizabeth Kassab’s notion of political humanism, Jacques Rancière’s understanding of political subjectivity, and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of destitution the authors analyse the visual articulation of protest – also where it is not readable as statement and iconography but, on the contrary, precisely insisting in its absence – and try to connect these analyses to reflections on the changing temporality and spatiality of uprising.

En voldtægtsmand på din vej

Alexander Ulrich Thygesen — 2023-05-02

This article studies how the Chilean street performance Un violador en tu camino reorganized what Jacques Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible and simultaneously facilitated the emergence of new collective subjects. Theoretically anchored in Ann Rigney’s memory-activism nexus, it explores the performance’s role as part of an inherited Chilean protest repertoire, while arguing that the performance’s redistribution of the sensible and inherent collectivization of experiences did not only affect contemporary conditions, but also the remembrance of the past. The article demonstrates that Un violador en tu camino is an integrated part of a decades-long tradition of performative activist interventions in the public space in Chile and therefore serves as an example of how activists learn from earlier social movements and repurpose their practices in new contexts of contention. Furthermore, through the analysis of the performance’s lyrics, choreography, visual expression, and placement in the public space, the article concludes that the performance made visible the continuity of state perpetrated sexual violence in Chile: from the military dictatorship to the estallido social protest wave in 2019-2020 that together with the coherent emergence of new collective subjects, united activists from different generations in a multitemporal denouncement of the patriarchy’s abuse.

”Memes uden mål”

Dominique Routhier — 2023-05-02

Beginning from a major retrospective exhibition at the prestigious Centre Pompidou in Paris in the summer of 2021, this article discusses the German artist-theorist Hito Steyerl’s political aesthetics and, more specifically, the idea of the art strike as a strategy of resistance. Through a historically contextualizing analysis of two key artworks, Strike I (2010) and Strike II (2012), the article argues that the proper theoretical framework for understanding Steyerl’s work is not post-Occupy “strike art” but rather the cultural logic of the “era of riots.” Thus, the article claims that Steyerl’s art strike resonates in form and content with extra-institutional and “memetic” forms of contemporary protest culture.

Frontløberne som motiv

Mai Corlin Frederiksen — 2023-05-02

The 2019 protests in Hong Kong unfolded with a visual forcefulness that shaped a movement that was at once popular and radical, peaceful and belligerent, orderly and sabotaging. One of the movement’s central instruments was to occupy the territory of Hong Kong with visual protest material. Protest walls spread with lightning speed from early July and from August and September, the contents of the city’s protest walls were updated every single day by independent, self-organized groupings and individuals. As long as the walls were updated with the latest information, the protest movement could prove that it was still ready for battle and that the Hong Kong they were all fighting for was right there on the wall in front of them.

The image of the frontliners as the ones leading the fight against the police came to play a central role in the formation of a political identity for the protest movement. As the protest movement developed and the violent clashes with the police intensified, the images of the frontliners, dressed in black, wearing gas masks and safety goggles and with flag in their hands, emerged as the image of the protest movement.

In this article, I follow the evolution of the image of the frontliners and the attempt to create a visual language that shapes this specific movement. I follow the development of the frontliners as parts of a history of protest and as parts of an ensemble of protest figures and protest-specific events. I explore what the frontliners and their images do as they unfold in the dynamic between the resistance the movement provides and the oppression they encounter.

”Hope Dies – Action Begins”

Leif Dahlberg — 2023-05-02

The article explores the use of civil disobedience and non-violent direct action (NVDA) as a strategy and method in climate activism in Sweden, with a particular focus on the group Extinction Rebellion (XR). The article describes and analyzes a number of XR actions carried out in 2019-2022, with a focus on meaning-making practices. The uses of civil disobedience and NVDA are presented within a historical, cultural and social context; the question of the role and legitimacy of civil disobedience in democratic societies is discussed.

XR has civil disobedience and NVDA as central strategy and in this way the group has put these protest methods in focus, and after each major action there is a need to both explain and justify their use. This is more noticeable in a Swedish cultural context that is characterized by consensus and a stigmatization of disobedience. This relationship in turn affects the planning and execution of disobedient and disruptive protest actions in Sweden. The article explores how activists in XR Sweden relate to this specific cultural context and how they try to influence it; hence XR Sweden works not only to influence those in power and public opinion regarding the climate crisis, but also on the possibilities and forms of civil political protests.

The article is based on participant observation. These began in the spring of 2019 and are still ongoing. The study has an anthropological perspective, with an emphasis on semiotics and hermeneutics.

Helbredelsen

Marie Finsten Jensen — 2023-05-02

On November 29, 2020, 500 inhabitants gathered in a parade around the public housing neighborhood AKB Lundtoftegade in Copenhagen. Uniting spiritual, aesthetic, and political forms and under the name The Healing, the inhabitants fought against the Danish government’s so-called ”Ghetto Law” – a set of comprehensive laws and policies targeting low-income, largely minority public housing neighborhoods.

The present paper examines The Healing using Judith Butler’s elucidation of transient, public assembly and precarity – in this case, the ”Ghetto Law’s” destruction of the conditions of livability – in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015).

While The Healing as a public assembly exemplifies the critical potential of a transient, unexpected political and aesthetic assembly, the paper emphasizes how the aesthetic and spiritual elements help to ensure that The Healing can be repeated – that the fight against the ”Ghetto Law” can be recurring, caring, and healing.

The Healing, I argue, is thus both a transient prefiguration, and a proof of AKB Lundtoftegade’s historical democratic, vivid, and caring way of organizing that is made invisible by the current discourse surrounding the ”Ghetto Law” describing social housing as AKB Lundtoftegade as ”ghettoes”, ”holes in the map of Denmark”, and ”stone deserts”.

Säga nej

Ulf Olsson — 2023-05-02

In 2011, during the occupation of Zucotti Park in New York, Occupy Wall Street arranged a public reading of Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby, 1853. The widely discussed choice of this story points to OWS’s own politics: the movement said ”no”, but without forming any more specific demands for reform. This article, taking its theoretical lead from Judith Butler, Marcello Tarì and Michel Foucault, discusses if the self can be re-modelled. Bartleby and his refusal – “I would prefer not to” – is related to one other prominent no-sayer in literature: Stiller. Refusal is also the theme of Max Frisch’s novel Stiller, 1954, in which the protagonist simply refuses to acknowledge the identity that everyone, authorities as well as his wife, forces upon him. That way, he also refuses the society in which he lives, and its political subject in the form of the citizen. Stiller thereby illustrates Foucault’s theses that we must refuse who we are. Bartleby and Stiller can both be understood as examples of the obstinacy that Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt have emphasized as the basic form of resistance.

Ødelæggelsens billeder

Terne Thorsen — 2023-05-02

During the past years statues and monuments that were previously invisible, have now become impossible to overlook. The contestation of monuments commemorating questionable aspects of European and American history culminated in 2020 with the unauthorized removal of several statues. While iconoclasm has always been a part of protests, the paradox of iconoclasm today is that it is both perceived as vandalism (deemed not compatible with democracy) and as an important tool for democratization.

With this paradox as a starting point, this paper questions the perception of iconoclasm as a solely destructive act, by examining it as an image-creating protest language. Through an analysis of three examples of contemporary events, the article argues that these events are producing images as much as they are destroying them. The images created at these events are an important part of the protests that provided these images – both in the articulation and communication of the protest and in the visualization of what is being protested.

The article suggests that this kind of image-creating iconoclasm works as a transformative image analysis that analyzes images (like statues and monuments) through a physical and/or symbolic intervention. This way, the analysis transforms the image into a tool for resistance: A monument once celebrating an oppressor, now broken and covered in graffiti, is transformed into an object for those who it oppressed and those who resisted.

Aktiv modstand

Laura Katrine Skinnebach — 2023-05-02

In this article, we examine the notion of ‘active resistance’ as a distinct activist and artistic practice. With the so-called Banana Collective, an art collective comprised of a wide variety of people, as our point of departure we investigate a new mode of political art in which critical, caring, loud-mouthed, uncompromising and loving resistance toward a violent political system are practised simultaneously. This resistance takes place at the edges of democracy, it concerns people our society has displaced at these edges (e.g., refugees and immigrants), but the resistance also finds its way to museums and concert halls: venues where more advantaged eyes are looking. The article discusses whether functioning in this spectrum is what makes The Banana Collective’s work stand out within an increasingly conscious and political art scene. It investigates the collective’s specific take on socially engaged art and points to its potential for influencing current neoliberal and anti-immigrant politics. The article aims to shed light on the specific type of avant-gardism practiced by the group: an avant-gardism that seeks a more radical amalgamation of life and art by building new spaces of appearance and a new language of resistance. And it attempts to answer if this type of direct avant-gardism has the potency of political or/and social change.

Upploppet som det absoluta konstverket

Johannes Björk — 2023-05-02

In this article, we suggest that the notion of “aesthetic cultures of protest” can be understood as designating two broad tendencies in the contemporary field of art and politics: on the one hand, the incorporation of the protest by the art world and, on the other hand, the appropriation of aesthetic traits by social protests. To counteract the ethical immediacy of both, we turn to Theodor W. Adorno’s more dialectical understanding of the relationship between protests and the aesthetic. After being marshalled against art’s internalisation of protest, and the protests’ appropriation of the aesthetic, we assess Adorno’s notion of form and autonomy through an immanent critique that is both conceptual and historical. We argue that Adorno’s aesthetics lacks an understanding of social labour, to which it itself ascribes great conceptual significance, and that recent changes in the global composition of capital and labour has affected the role of social labour in such a way that Adorno’s tendency to identify art’s autonomy with its negativity can no longer be upheld. Finally, we argue that the characteristics, which Adorno ascribes to the work of art has migrated to, and been realised by, a form of protest which reemerged simultaneously with the death of Adorno, namely the riot.

Den liberala demokratins konstkritiska protest

Fredrik Svensk — 2023-05-02

Claims that liberal democracy is in crisis need to reckon with the fact that it is a social system historically premised on crisis and criticality. Protest and protesting can, from this standpoint, be viewed as constitutive boundary phenomena of liberal democracy. By considering liberal democracy as a critical life form from a biopolitical perspective, the aim of the article is to suggest how liberal democracy itself can protest art-critically and that this indicates a crisis of its critical life form that is rarely acknowledged. The article argues that the crisis of liberal democracy in Sweden is made visible in the racial aspects of art-critical protests. The claim is also that these art-critical protests, in their turn, must be understood through an analysis of the relationship between, on the one hand, art criticism and citizenship and, on the other, the class relation and capital accumulation. In the article, this is demonstrated through an account of the biopolitical function of the aesthetic culture of the critical tradition, followed by two recent examples of the art-critical protest of liberal democracy. Whereas one of these examples represents a liberal critique of identity politics in art, the other demonstrates a transgression of the liberal principle of arm’s length distance in culture policy. The article concludes that the aesthetic culture of the critical tradition, strategically taken over by the Social Democrats at the dawn of liberal democracy, enabled a continuous reformation of how politics in liberal democracy is organically developed, and that the art-critical protest of liberal democracy today challenges this critical life form.

Bag masken atter en maske

Kasper Opstrup — 2023-05-02

This article investigates concatenations of art, activism and occultism in contemporary art and politics while it, simultaneously, develops a notion of the ‘political weird’. Beginning with the Gruppo di Nun’s manifesto for a revolutionary demonology, the article traces the interconnectedness between art, politics, and the occult in a historical perspective, using the tactical media scenes from the 90s, with a particular focus on the Luther Blissett project, as a primary point of comparison to the Nun group.

This leads to a reflection on the use of myth functions and hyperstitions as ways of destabilizing truth to make art happen and move it from the fictional to the factual, as well as to a discussion of what happens when political terms are being swapped with occult terms as an act of activism. The article argues that this can be seen as attempts on world building that challenge consensual reality in order to construct new commons, new subjectivities, and new outsides.

The political weird insists that there is an outside and appears when this outside breaks into the present order. It is constituted by irruptions of the irrational and a presence of something that does not belong. Speculating about this outside as a place where barbarians roam, the article, in a final analysis, looks at the intellectual barbarianism of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a youth movement possessed by more than a touch of surrealism which grew out of the British woodcraft movement in the 1920s.

The Kift wanted to invoke another future populated by new barbarians through the realization of art and fictional ideas from not only Rosicrucianism but also authors like James Fenimore Cooper and H. G. Wells. This, they hoped, would bring about a new era of world peace and universal brotherhood.

Som en skapelseakt

Stefan Jonsson — 2023-05-02

This essay analyzes how artworks express the Ukrainian revolution 2013–2014 as an experience of democracy. Three questions are foregrounded. How do aesthetic expressions capture and accumulate social energy? How do they help convert such energy into political action? How do they preserve it, for future use? These questions concern the ways in which aesthetic works express what I call political emergence: people who have no say in political institutions come together as a collective that changes the political order. Analyzing selected examples from the Maidan uprising, the essay demonstrates a contradiction between how democratic protests generate aesthetic forms with a strong universal and utopian thrust and how these democratic utopias are subsequently contained by cultural representations and political traditions, in Ukraine’s case a particular form of militant and self-sacrificing nationalism, which, however, cannot do without projections of utopian solidarity.

Enquete: På genbesøg hos Georg Brandes

William Banks — 2023-05-02

Inden for bare et par år er der udkommet adskillige bøger af eller om Georg Brandes på andre sprog end dansk: William Banks’ Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples: Collected Essays and Speeches (2020), Søren Blak Hjortshøjs Son of Spinoza: Georg Brandes and Modern Jewish Cosmopolitanism (2021) og Per Dahl & Gert Posselts Vorlesungen über Friedrich Nietzsche (1888) und Aristokratischer Radicalismus (1889/1890) (2021). Hertil kommer den flersproglige online-udgave af Hovedstrømninger (2019) redigeret under ansvar af Lasse Horne Kjældgaard og Jens Bjerring-Hansen. Rækken af udgivelser synes at fortsætte i 2022-23 med flere engelsksprogede antologier på vej.

Documenta 15 inviteret ind i ruangrupas globalæstetiske beredskab

Carsten Juhl — 2023-05-02

Anmeldelse af Documenta 15