Marius Babias

Director, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin

The Trace of Revolt

Cleansed of politics, a new production process was discovered in the Berlin of the 1990s: one’s own subjectivity, which needs to be made use of. The »promise of Berlin,« by which so many artists, cultural producers, and other I-actors have been attracted, consists above all in providing a suitable model of reality for the co-opting of critical production models to the cultural market. The Berlin phenotype that is probably encountered most often is the self-created artist-as-subject, which provides an aesthetic fruit basket for obtaining bourgeois distinction. This development is mirrored in the huge return of painting, photography, and drawing. As a reaction to this, theory circles arose at the end of the 1990s that were loaded with dissidence, but that are overwhelmed with the development of an overarching social perspective under whose theoretical roof sub-scenes are able to position themselves.

Berlin—this is a regime for the production of the imaginary with very real resulting side effects. The identity containers of the »Berlin Republic,« »New Center,« and »Generation Berlin,« which were generated before the backdrop of German-German reunification, were filled with life first and foremost by artists and bohemian milieus. Since East Berlin was added, the lines of conflict and definition of Berlin as a whole have ceased to run along the Wall but instead proceed along concepts and symbolic battlegrounds. Whether Planwerk Innenstadt (master plan for the urban development of the center of Berlin), Stadtschloss (city palace), Holocaust memorial, or memorial center for the displaced in World War II—the socio-political damage of this debate have spawned new material and symbolic rankings of the urban with winners and losers. This new, Berlin cartography includes pledges from the German armed forces and the club and art scene in Mitte as well as the middle-class residential ghettos in Zehlendorf, the eco-bourgeois neighborhoods in Friedenau, and social impoverishment in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Berlin—this is the patchwork of majorities after reunification.

The recombining of basic social and political conditions—German-German reunification, construction boom, economic promise of the capital city Berlin—has given rise to a way of life that is borrowed from the bohemian image of artists, which substantiates just these basic conditions »artistically.« The everyday life of the »artist« has become the epitome of the Generation Berlin: young, successful, fun-loving, and money-oriented. From this profit in particular the developers, investors, and image producers, who promote art more intensively and thus help finance the »artist« way of life. The establishing of galleries, clubs, and locations by A-level graduates from West Germany in Berlin-Mitte after the fall of the Wall signalized the end of off-culture in the sense it had had up to that point, meaning that cultural activities, even if they were dilettantish, could be considered to be somehow »oppositional.« Yet the »artist« of the Berlin Republic has rejected even this minimum consensus. The »artist« orientation is toward neither art nor politics, it is instead directed toward a décollage of capitalist realism, which formed the »artist« according to its likeness: competitively viable and high-risk, narcissistic and audience-focused at once.

At the same time, a field of action for critical art practice does, nonetheless, seem to have opened up, a field of action that does not make strategic or ornamental use of the political. In the field of art and culture, as soon as it has become linked to political and social resistance and anti-globalization movements, a perspective that sees artistic activities as a chance to develop a blueprint for criticism is able to arise. The process of mixing culture and political resistance tends to generate three formats for action that permeate and reinforce each other reciprocally: 1. activism as art form; 2. cooperation between artists and activists; 3. art as an activist manifestation. Artistic practice needs to be understood as a format for social action—and not simply as a form for attaining distinction that is compatible with an antiquated bourgeois or a radical chic. Seen in this way, the artistic »work« is the starting point for a comprehensive consideration of the basis conditions for its creation as well as its power to exert an influence on the production, formulation, and reinforcing of pictures, images, attitudes, and deployments. This task is, however, barely possible with traditional media such as painting, drawing, or photography.

Art and culture as residuals of alternative drafts are in no way fields that only respond to developments in society. They rather participate actively in developing a politics of representation, in which they participate in a twofold manner—as producers and representatives at the same time.

© Marius Babias, Berlin. Die Spur der Revolte, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln 2006

Source: P/Act for Art: Berlin Biennale Zeitung