Politics and Arts: Afterr The Fall of the Berlin Wall

Abstract

The author discusses differences between the concepts of ‘political genres in art’ and concepts of ‘political functions of art’. In other words, I will point to the problem of the politisation of art works, i.e. the interpretation of the political characters of: Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Origine du monde (XIX c.), Marcel Duchamp’s ready made Fountain (1917), and Eduardo Kac’s project Green Fluorescent Protein – GFP (2000). In order to answer the questions “are these three art works – Courbet’s pornographic painting L’Origine du monde, Duchamp’s transgressive Ready Made Fountain, and Eduardo Kac’s transgenetically modelled rabbit with fluorescent fur GFP Bunny-Alba – political art works?”, “in relation to what are these art works political?”, the author has to make a theoretical and perceptual politisation of them or at least of some of their registers or regimes of appearing in society, culture, and worlds of art. The demand of politisation becomes relevant as a demand “after the postmodern”. The crisis of postmodern plurality after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that is, after the end of the Cold War through the maintenance of ‘global politics’ provoked again the possibility of questioning ‘political’ as the relevant answer to an apparent absence of any political in the neoliberal through apparently neopolitical or outer political technological practices of organizing everyday life. This evocation of the ‘politics’ happened in many different ways with entirely different and often opposed philosophers and theoreticians (Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Giorgio Agamben, Paolo Virno, Brian Massumi, etc.). The evocation of the ‘political’, ‘the return to the political’ or ‘the politicization of non- or outer-political’ are not practices of party or state reality structuring, but theoretical constructions about the character, functions, and effects of actual performances of sociability.