The Brooklyn Rail

Harboring, radically

Reading through recent discursive takes on radicality in the arts while preparing to write this piece I spent quite a bit of time with MIT’s ArtMargins dossier “What is Radical?”

Its early post-pandemic-times takes on the subject combined fears of increased institutional and third-party plaformization in the arts and in academia with barely repressed angst about a fascist surge that then just seemed on holding mode rather than truly tamed.

Five years or so on, needless to say things are looking bleaker than they did then. The genocidal elephant in the room has crystallized what was then still dismissed as “underlying tensions”: the long, hard and concerted turn to the right; the blanket silencing and straight-out repression; the remarkable ineffectuality of the institutional art world at even simply suggesting models of collective resistance.

Recent flashpoints have also shined a hard light on how easily an increasingly ineffective and increasingly exploitative art world continues to use platform economy models to showcase and ultimately tame even the personalities, works, and themes with the most potential for radicality.

How many new biennials have (re-)emerged post-pandemic and reached their second or nth edition crowing about how they had doubled their duration or the number of artists they featured, while keeping their budgets on a tight leash?

In a time that requires constant presence, availability, and accessibility, how often has long-term collaboration between artists, curators, and institutions been replaced by pressure-packed, three-day-long, pre-opening production sprints where the goal is to reproduce a successful piece and bank on its previous successes?

The platforms just want to play the hits: that’s the surest way they will accrue both clout and income, leaving just crumbs to artists that increasingly become simple strategic and communicational pawns.

When repetition and (re)productive pressure leave artists isolated, without peers to “echo with,” the chance for continuity, for collective memory, for solidarity, and ultimately for resistance, dwindles.

As poet and musician Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, put it to me in a summer 2024 conversation (that I quote approximately), “this world, as it is, is just not made for us to spend time with the people we should be spending time with.”

This (here) being Europe, militarization of budgets notwithstanding, you’d expect public powers and public funding for culture to step in and course-correct. I doubt they really do.

What you get is project-bound management pressure and data collection, driven by public policy managers who have long developed their own tortured forms of private management emulation.

What you get is “equal treatment for all” translated into “everyone will get everything (that national art prize, that prized residency) once, but just once.” Meaning equality (Gleichheit) mutates into indifference (Gleichgültigkeit), and continuous collective solidarity is once again trumped by itemization and isolation.

Also: why would public funding for the arts always have to translate into forms of public emergence? All-public all the time means density and complexity are simplified to be mediated—and what dictates mediation is generally some relatively polite form of aggressive normality that brings us back into Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s “enclosure” and into the framing politics of public discourse. If we want a strong and resilient culture, maybe support should also go to non-public, elusive forms of art and of exchange.

What radical action am I to take, then, as I seem to be uncontestably, but hopefully not hopelessly, representing an institution, one that hosts?

I may pick radical themes that radically resonate with radical intersectional depth. It won’t matter, though, if these are just presented as options on the fancy lunch platter of “diversity.” As T. J. Demos put it, “we can no longer afford to operate merely as radical content providers.”

What I can work on, though, with colleagues and hosted accomplices, is the radical application of a form of common sense that consists in asking tough questions to how we harbor, host, and accompany artists. To systematically ask whether we are working in favor of those we welcome rather than in favor of the institution.

And if we’re falling back into exploitative forms of hosting and of platforming, then we must radically ask why the hell this should be the only way to possibly do that job we are doing. Because it simply isn’t—and this today needs to be more frequently and more radically stated.

To work on forms of relative opacity that allow for the flourishing of undocumented, unregimented knowledge. No dumbing down and no recording. Just direct conversations among people with an urgency to ask each other urgent questions and with a drive to hold on to each other through these questions.

To work on reestablishing another form of time in which one is allowed to return. Where one can share a place imbued with multiple temporalities with others. Where the work we do together is not limited to an x-month project cycle and to the finalized—finished—cultural product(s) it has generated, but in a true sense of wanting the work and trust to go on, for the “study” to be practiced together in its untamed forms.

It’s really not that radically complicated.