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The Work of Art in the State of Exile

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“The Moment of Terror is the Beginning of Life”
Front 242

“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are `status quo' is the catastrophe.”
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

Imagine you wake up one morning and your country has disappeared. Your bed and house are the same and your neighborhood is almost the same, but your neighbors seem to have changed and the city is changing even as you get out of bed. On the news a man that you do not recognize is making an inaugural presidential speech, introducing a flag and national anthem you do not recognize and he is speaking about a country, yours, that you do not know. Very soon you will begin to change as well, for with this shift everything from your religion to your education, your understanding of your family and your entire value system will be influenced and affect you in ways you could not even begin to imagine last night. In less than a decade you will notice yourself speaking in a different accent and addressing the world in a different manner than your mother taught you. Soon you will not even recognize yourself and the transformation will be complete.

This is not the scenario of a B-grade science fiction film or some bad pulp fiction novel but the reality of many countries in the world following the end of the Cold War. The citizens of countries like South Africa, East Germany, USSR, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and so forth have all experienced these extreme changes. In many instances even the borders of their countries have been redesigned.

The end of the Cold War has in the past years given rise to an entirely different global power structure where a single powerful country now asserts itself as the world's policeman with an indiscriminate right to attack any country it feels threatened by, either physically, emotionally or —in the case of Iraq—symbolically. At the same time, the military might of the United States is eclipsed in scale, power and ambition by its own global-capitalist machinery that encodes virtually every aspect of culture across the planet, from the choices we have of which clothes or shoes to wear, to what appears on our television sets and cinema screens. Even when there appears to be an alternative indigenous choice available, it is usually little more than a cheaper clone of the original, in the same style as much as in content.

The process of regime change and the construction of global consumers is related to the old colonial strategies inasmuch as they seek the same end: the capture and domination of people's minds, if not their imaginations. Controlling a person's value system and language means controlling them. Resistance thus demands the same strategy be used, and subversion is possible only from within the same structural framework.

Identity Art or Multi-Culturalism is understood today as something far more fragile and visceral than the more nationalistic or heroic conception of self two decades ago. Following the end of Apartheid and the Cold War the world seemed to suddenly discover that it was far larger than Paris, London or New York had previously wanted to imagine. All of a sudden, the art world began to court artists from South America, Africa, the Balkans, and Asia — places that hitherto had not been acknowledged on any map of the art system.

To this end Documenta 11 in 2002 was extremely important in asserting an image of the world as being round, of acknowledging that not only did artists hail from literally every corner of the globe but that it was possible to find very talented artists working in a number of different and contradictory ways in far off lands. Okwui Enwezor's Documenta was instrumental in locating art practices from the margins and fixing them within the Occidental imagination. This Documenta, more than any other exhibition ever, represented the shift into the mainstream of Identity Art and Multi-Culturalism. The exhibition redefined and enlarged the concept of a geographic margin to become a force worthy of serious consideration. Within the colonial structure, the margin was always judged according to its proximity to the center. An artist from Africa or Asia was judged according to how much their work resembled or deviated from that being shown in London or Paris. If the difference was extreme and the canons were mutually irreconcilable, as in traditional practices or folk art, then the work from the margin was regarded, if at all, within a cultural history context. However, when the work began to closely resemble the work from the center, then the art from the margin was dismissed as being derivative or even a parody of the center. It was, and perhaps still is, inconceivable that an artist from the margin could arrive at a similar conclusion, or even improve upon, the contribution of an artist from the center. Conversely, when an artist from the center, such as Picasso, was influenced by art from the margins, he was hailed as a genius for being able to integrate foreign canons into his work. Historically, in order to gain access to the world's art centers and systems, artists from the margins had to move to London or Paris or New York and establish themselves as local artists, without a history or a background outside their new city or adopted history. With Documenta 11 this physical move was no longer necessary.

As important as such a shift was, Documenta 11 short-changed artists from the margins, for their admittance into its hallowed halls, and all that they stand for, remained purely within the terms of this colonial structure. Documenta 11 stood out for its conservative and classical conception of art, and the fact that the artists from the margins were admitted only to the degree that their work lacked any sense of contamination by the realities of their points of origin. The works that did originate from the margins were presented as empty signs of internationalism, where the palatable, refined objects within the logic of High Pluralist (Post) Modernism reigned with the cold detachment of a market-driven commercial gallery system. Visitors could be forgiven for thinking that all the artists in the show, irrespective of where they were born, shared the same experiences and value system, and lived with the same privileges as artists who were born and raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

This point is only true inasmuch as “reality” or lived experience can be confused with the emptiness of television. Most of the world's inhabitants under the age of forty grew up on the same cultural diet of American television. Milica Tomi”, Anri Sala, Tania Bruguera, Surasi Kusolwong, Minerva Cuevas and others are from a generation of post-global artists born in a moment when mass media had proliferated to the point where children just about everywhere on the planet grew up watching The Smurfs, Dallas, Star Trek, The Bold and the Beautiful and, of course, MTV. When viewed outside of the USA, however, these icons of American culture no longer function in quite the same terms.

Following the tragic events of 11 September 2001, the USA began to understand for the first time what for the rest of the world, especially the Third World, is everyday knowledge. Beyond the images of the television screen lies another reality —a world of change, chaos, revolution, dissent, AIDS, jihads, ethnic cleansing, civil war and culture clashes. The reality of television is its imperviousness to class differences, social injustices or the sweat shops that grease the global capitalist system so that the USA can continue to “Just Do It.” For the majority of the planet, the events of 11 September made little difference, for we had grown up in the presence of so-called terrorist attacks by, among others, Baader Meinhoff, Carlos the Jackal, ETA, the IRA, the ANC, and the PLO, as well as drug wars in Colombia, and civil wars in Nicaragua, Angola, Rwanda, Palestine, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Eritrea, Zimbabwe and so forth. For most of the world, basic human rights such as healthcare, housing or education cannot be taken for granted and millions are denied access to self-representation or the right to even live in their own country. For the majority of the planet, the world is a complex space of contested histories and painful memories.

For Franz Fanon, the `Third World' was one that existed between the `First World' of Capitalism and the `Second World' of Communism, without choosing either side. While this Cold War binary system of opposites has ceased to exist, Fanon's notion of a non-aligned Third World, that takes the best from both, has not been so quickly abandoned. For the world's developing countries, ravaged by war, poverty, drought, famine and AIDS, the pipe dreams of televised reality are often the only escape, one where American soap operas at least reveal another world where dreams could come true.

In 1928, the Brazilian Oswalde de Andrade wrote his famous Manifeste Anthropophage, in which he declared:

“The quotidian love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into totem... What happens is not a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is the thermometric scale of the anthropophagic instinct. From carnal, it becomes elective and creates friendship. Affectionate, love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers itself. We reach vilification. Low anthropophagy agglomerated in the sins of catechism — envy, usury, calumny, assassination. Plague of the so-called cultured and christianized peoples, it is against it that we are acting.”

For Andrade, the only intelligent option available to the world's colonized people was the ancient practice of cannibalism, whereby the best parts of the colonizer's body and culture are devoured, digested and assimilated. Naturally, of course, a great deal is also defecated in the process, from which further infections of culture may grow.

This manner of inverting that which oppresses the self can be applied to today's colonizing global culture industry, perhaps even more aptly and with greater precision than it was in 1928. The processing of the garbage and cultural effluence of the culture industry is the modus operandi of the DJ and hacker, in which the mainstream is devoured, recycled and infected with the virus of everyday life. In stark contrast with the First World glut of mass media and the international culture industry stands the Third World reality of lived experience. They are two parallel worlds that are, for the most part, mutually irreconcilable. Both realities exist simultaneously: as the USA was bombing Belgrade in 1999, the children of that city continued watching Disney on television.

Today's generation of artists who grew up in the margins and ghettos have learnt their lessons from the Freedom Fighters of the past decades, from the guerilla soldiers that brought them freedom at any cost. The difference between a “Freedom Fighter” and “Terrorist” is defined simply by whose side you are on, and whether you have the ability to speak for yourself or not. A terrorist can only exist when the individual is denied access to a voice, to self-representation, to an equal and consequential seat at the United Nations, to freedom. Once denied, the only option available is to resort to subversive means and guerilla tactics. Disenfranchised and denied any other voice, the terrorist's actions argue that the most effective method for effecting change is through violence, implicit or explicit. Nelson Mandela and Ghandi won the wars against their oppressors, and thus they are no longer considered terrorists but liberators.

Imagine artists who have been influenced by the strategies of the freedom fighter, the passion of the terrorist, the Realism of lived experience, the perversity and free expression of Surrealism, the politics of the Realists, the eye for detail of the Hyper-Realists, the experience of the ghetto, the pain of disenfranchisement—TerroRealism is born. These artists are united only inasmuch as they share a common disillusionment with the promise of the grand narratives of Democracy, Nation, Equality, God, Truth, Art, Justice and even History. More often than not, with some exceptions, these artists were either born into or currently live in a Third World context, where access to the control centers of power is severely limited. Their work reveals an intrinsic mistrust of power, whether covertly or more overtly. Their violence can be understood in terms of Fanon or Malcolm X's belief that violence is the only way to challenge power and enforce change, but I would also argue that it functions in a far more spiritual sense —as a purifying force or energy, for beneath the violence there persists a deep sense of hope and the dream of a better world for all. Following Plato's conception of the artist, the TerroRealist is dangerous to society and lives in a state of exile, alongside thieves, immigrants, refugees, and outcasts.

TerroRealism is not an intellectual position, but a lived experience through which reality and real life infects the image, anthropophagically contaminating culture. The artist's knowledge and experience of reality is dragged into the context of art, where neither the viewer nor the work is neutral or innocent, where the luxury of the white cube is built upon sweatshops and oil wars. The voice of dissent cannot be silenced or assimilated as fashion, for the dirt and noise of this contamination is not the cold intellectualism of the Third World imprisoned in Documenta 11 but a visceral, fluid, chaotic, dangerous world of raw experience.

The strategies used in this inversion of power are gleaned from streets, bars, riots, toilets, brothels, prison cells and gambling halls. The argot of the street, the stench of sweaty bodies, jokes scribbled on the backs of toilets doors, pornography, the howl of two men in a bar on a Friday night —all provide clues to understanding the human being.

For the TerroRealist the work of art is as physical and consequential as the human body and equally fragile and vulnerable. This is not the heroic body that survives its ordeal, but the fragile bodies of Santiago Siera's indigents, who will bear the scarring of tattoos from his exhibition until they die, or the bloody wounds of Milica Tomi” who is lashed in anger every time she asserts herself to be “Milica Tomi”.” The right to simply state your name, to exist in the world as a human being, the right to a sense of self, is born in pain and blood, with wounds and scars that are both physical and emotional.

The artists whose work can be understood within such a framework share a common sense of a loss of faith in the notion of a national identity, for all live in countries that no longer exist (Yugoslavia, USSR, East Germany) or else in a state of exile in Third World countries (Mexico or Senegal), or are disenfranchised within their own country of birth (Northern Ireland or Palestine). The concept of exile is implicit in the TerroRealist work of art, for the institution of Art could be considered the exile of Reality. Art's displacement of lived experience and its purging of consequences makes it fertile ground for attack and hijacking. The work of art is always understood to be political and every object, image and color is coded both culturally and in terms of class and race. Discomfort is a strategy that demands of, or incites within the viewer, the need to assume a position in relation to the work of art. The position demanded is not that of post-Cold War rhetoric or grand propagandistic statements, but an intimate understanding of the daily politics of being alive. The work of art thus functions in terms of a Relational Ethics, whereby neither the viewer nor the object is being judged, but the situation requires an acknowledgement of the complexity of the context. The work functions best when viewers must determine for themselves a moral and aesthetic position. It is understood that the artist is as culpable as the viewer, but their guilt need not be the same, since they may not share the same background, race or culture.

The TerroRealist artwork exists within the space of moral ambiguity that simultaneously defines the identity and the world of the producer. This moral ambiguity is a weapon against easy assimilation. Since the value systems of the ghetto and the white cube are mutually irreconcilable, what would be the consequences of conflating the two into a single action or object? The moral distance between the two is transformed into a working space where the artist functions as a interlocutor or trickster, being a simultaneous presence in both, living within the border logic of order and chaos.

While over the past decade the art system has actively sought out artists from the margins, few critics or curators seem able to acknowledge or understand that extreme differences in experience of everyday reality throughout the world would inevitably affect the way art is understood and produced. The rise of the TerroRealist phenomenon is as much connected to the nature of global politics and its imbalances of power and wealth as it is an art historical, highly coded precise response to the stalemate of Multi-Cultural Pluralist (Post) Modernism.

The movement into the mainstream of the TerroRealist may be considered by many of its detractors as a selling out or compromise. Yes, the TerroRealist work of art finds its way into the art museums and art galleries and biennials today through the same logic as hip-hop artists, DJs or even Walter van Beirendonck's “Aestheticterrorists” fashion label. There is a natural affinity between the punk underground of music and fashion and the disenfranchised of the Third World. The TerroRealist work of art is a historical phenomenon that cannot be denied, as artists from the margins begin to assert themselves on a global level. In fact, I am certain that most of the artists whom I consider to be TerroRealists would reject this attempt at creating a logic of their production, for resistance to assimilation and to any nationalism of any sort is the source of their strength.