Detail; Critique of the Relations Between Art + Politics (2010), GCGCA(i)

Critique of the Relation Between Art and Politics

The Center for Contemporary Political Art, Washington

21 Jun - 22 Sep 2010

For all its by now rather familiar intellectual foibles, the art world currently remains the main site (outside of institutions of higher education) where intellectual and political aspects of social and cultural practises can be seriously discussed, and where these debates are often transformed.

The art world has increasingly become a kind of refuge for intellectuals, who are still interested in trying to engage ideas in public spaces. In this respect, one aspect of this displacement has been some kind of displacement of political discussions into art political discussions. Or at least, it's not really a displacement of politics into art; it's more of a cultural displacement of the ‘idea’ of politics - or particularly, the ‘desire’ for politics - into art.

We find this displaced desire for politics manifesting itself a lot in, not just art practise (less in art practise), but in the critical debates around it institutionally. This displacement of politics into art has been theorised - and indeed has been theoretically legitimated, albeit on the basis of its merely cognitive negation of actuality, in the work of most notably someone like Theodore Adorno.

There is a connection between art as a cultural form - as part of historical culture - and historical temporalizations of the present. A politics of time is one that is conscious of the temporalization of history by cultural form, and takes the temporal structure of social practises as the specific objects of its transformative intent.

The idea of a politics of time appropriates the phenomenological dimension of Levinas's exposition of infinity as desire in order to make sense of the idea of the historization of temporality by the anticipation of a timeless end.

Critique of the Relations Between Art + Politics (2010), GCGCA(i)