Aesthetic Responsibility

A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczkoon the Transformative Avant-Garde

Marc James Leger

In spring 2013 Krzysztof Wodiczko and Greg Sholette contributed aninterview essay to my curated book project The Idea of the AvantGarde – And What It Means Today, which brings together fifty artistsand intellectuals to discuss the contemporary significance of the avant-garde and the possibility of contemporary avant-garde compositions.1

Wodiczko subsequently wrote ‘The Transformative Avant-Garde: AManifest of the Present’ in the summer of 2013. I met with him todiscuss his thoughts on the ‘transformative avant-garde’ as a kind ofupdate to his 1987 essay ‘Strategies of Public Address: Which Media,Which Publics?’.2 The following is the transcription of our subsequentSkype conversation on 8 September 2013.

Marc James Leger In his Theory of the Avant-Garde of 1962, RenatoPoggioli defined the avant-garde as an ‘anti-tradition tradition’.3 Itseems here that he opted for one side of the possible equation, missingthe chance to define it in Hegelian terms as an anti-anti-tradition, bothanti-traditional – the way the Situationists defined themselves againstthe exhausted strategies of Surrealism – and anti-anti-traditional, defin-ing themselves as not the enemies of Surrealism, but as the enemies ofthe division of labour – in other words, as a new instance of avant-garde cultural expression. From this point of view, your idea that we,the generation of the seventies onward, liberated ourselves from theavant-gardes may have less to do with artistic avant-gardes than withthe association of avant-garde movements with revolutionary politics.

Is it not the leftist Marxist tool kit – teleology, totality, dialecticalovercoming, alienation, political vanguard, etc – that postmodernistswanted to get away from – and maybe also some feminist and postcolo-nial idea of patrilineal succession or Eurocentric modernism? I would saythen that the resurgence of leftist macro-political theorizing, the current

Third Text, 2014

Vol. 28, No. 2, 123–136, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2014.885628

# 2014 Third Text

1. Gregory Sholette andKrzysztof Wodiczko,‘Liberate the Avant Garde?’,in Marc James Leger, ed,The Idea of the AvantGarde – And What ItMeans Today, forthcoming.Thanks to Gregory Sholettefor his participation in TheIdea of the Avant Garde.

2. Krzysztof Wodiczko,‘Strategies of PublicAddress: Which Media,Which Publics?’, in HalFoster, ed, Discussions inContemporary Culture,New Press, New York,1987, pp 41–45

3. See Renato Poggioli, TheTheory of the Avant-Garde(1962), Gerald Fitzgerald,trans, Harvard UniversityPress, Cambridge,Massachusetts, 1968.

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interest in workerism, anarchism, alter-global anti-capitalism andMarxist political economy is one way that today’s interest in the avant-garde can make sense to us. I would even oppose this to a specificallyart-historical recuperation, as noticed in the development of new researchnetworks on the avant-garde, which sometimes seem more intent onsquaring avant-garde genealogies with post-structural academe and crea-tive industries than with cultural contestation. Seeing this resurgence interms of the links between leftist political articulation and cultural articu-lation – the politicization of culture – allows us to say, as you put it, ‘longlive the avant-garde’, as against those who, according to John Roberts, seethe avant-garde as a superseded historical category – those who representa neo-modernist and romantic fatalism or a neo-postmodern culturalnihilism.4 Was it not too easy a way out, as you put it, because itassumed that leftist articulation was superseded by the anti-foundationalpostmodern ‘no man’s land’ beyond left and right?

Krzysztof Wodiczko I agree with you, but that’s how it looks from outside,when you are looking down from a helicopter! I think that there is a possi-bility that something else happened – that an intellectual avant-garde . . .and I use this term when I’m thinking about people like Gilles Deleuzeand Felix Guattari, when they wrote Capitalism and Schizophrenia, orpeople like Donna Haraway, with her ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, from a fem-inist-socialist-technological perspective. In terms of generations, LucienKroll was working at the same time as Deleuze – in the same area,

Lucien Kroll, La Meme, Medical Faculties at l’Universite Catholique de Louvain, Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, Brussels, Belgium,1970, photo # Audrey-UCL

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4. John Roberts,‘Revolutionary Pathos,Negation, and theSuspensive Avant-Garde’,New Literary History, vol41, no 4, Autumn 2010, pp717–730

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country and maybe even city – and was creating a new kind of architec-ture. He wrote a book called The Architecture of Complexity, a kind ofmanifesto.5 I think that between Kroll and Deleuze the concepts of‘rhizome’ and ‘nomadology’ have a direct connection, but Kroll workeddirectly with people. It was an actual, practical and artistic answer to theavant-garde, not a philosophical answer, yet, without being conscious ofit he was doing Deleuze. He was the first to use computers to work withfuture users and inhabitants of his building projects, and he modelledinteriors according to the discussions that he was having with them. Itwas the very first time that architecture and buildings were designedwith the use of modern technology and with people. They were designedby these people. So we’re talking about creating a non-striated space tocreate conditions for people to act as if it was smooth space.

Kroll was therefore making a nomadic, or nomadological work. Otherarchitects, who were reading Jacques Derrida or Deleuze, started to makebuildings that looked like they were moving, like sculptures that weresymbolically articulating the ideas of Deleuze, but they were notnomadic. But Lucien Kroll was actually part of that avant-garde, andso what I’m saying is that things were happening with some artists andarchitects who were not just reading theory. People like Kroll weredoing a kind of deconstruction as construction, as proactive work withother people.

That tradition of Lucien Kroll can be linked to something contempor-ary like the work of Atelier Van Lieshout, who, in 2001, built FreestateAVL-Ville, an alternative city in Rotterdam.6 Under the rubric of arteverything is possible, and so Van Lieshout went back to a kind ofclassic avant-garde, using artistic autonomy, to take advantage of thisautonomy and disappear into life. We could also talk about projectsmade with immigrants – as in the work of Tania Bruguera – that are con-nected with some concepts and ideas of the philosophical avant-garde ofthe 1970s.7 This you could connect to some of Julia Kristeva’s ideas, forinstance, in Strangers to Ourselves.8

So what happened between then and today? Maybe what happened isthat some artists forgot that they are artists. They were reading decon-struction, but they became artists who translate ideas into forms ratherthan being artists who joined their philosophical colleagues by makingpractical, transformative work. There has always been an analytical, criti-cal approach that is parallel to a practical and proactive, transformativeapproach, which is the tradition we have from the history of the avant-gardes. Maybe artists were not conscious of this approach during thetime of the ‘critique of representation’. But during that time there wasalso the Guerrilla Girls – there were groups who were very active. Forexample, Las Agencias, or The Agencies, which took place in thespring and early summer of 2001, was a very important project. I waspart of it with my workshop in conjunction with the Pret a revolterproject on fashion for safety and visibility during anti-globalization dem-onstrations. The core of Pret a revolter was a team of designers who wereclosely connected to social movements, who armed themselves symboli-cally and also physically against police attacks, and also against mediamisrepresentation. They created a counter-representation, combinedwith action and design. This is what I remember from the early counter-points to globalism that were advanced by artists and social movements. I

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5. Lucien Kroll, TheArchitecture of Complexity,Peter Blundell Jones, trans,BT Batsford, London, 1986.See also the Kroll website:http://homeusers.brutele.be/kroll/, accessed 15September 2013.

6. See http://www.ateliervanlieshout.com,accessed 15 September2013.

7. See http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms,accessed 15 September2013.

8. Julia Kristeva, Strangers toOurselves (1988), Leon SRoudiez, trans, ColumbiaUniversity Press, New York,1991

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think they were very much affected by the writings of people like JacquesRanciere, but also by Italian Marxism, which was very influential at thattime.

MJL I would say, though, that some things have changed along with therise of the anti-globalization movement. Before this there was not only aprohibition on the avant-garde – viewed by postmodernists as part of themeta-narrative of class struggle and by post-structuralists as a masculin-ism – there was a prohibition on the prohibition itself; it went withoutsaying that this topic was proscribed. Now, with the resurgence ofleftist theorizing, including Italian Marxism, I think that the subject ofavant-gardism returns, even if only as something that people want to dis-tinguish themselves from. There is often among activist artists the viewthat there can no longer be an avant-garde, that we’re post-Marxist,post-political, and that we can no longer think of aesthetics in terms ofsuperstructural effectivity, but that the superstructure is now foldedinto the social relations and modes of post-industrial production, accord-ing to new media and new methods of communication – the new aspectsof flexibilized labour, risk society, and so on. These are the smooth formswe are expected to work in, for which ‘there is no outside’. I prefer to saythat there is no outside to contradiction.

KW In the context of Las Agencias, the MACBA Museum in Barcelonastaged a series of lectures, and one of the projects they were going for

Atelier Van Lieshout, AVL-Ville, 2001, photo and copyright: Atelier Van Lieshout

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was a New Productivism!9 So they called for a New Productivism, butthey didn’t call for a new avant-garde. Maybe in a very traditionalistMarxist way, they were hoping to aid and inspire the real avant-gardeto move on – the ‘chosen’ class in charge of the future!

MJL Yes, the class that dissolves class society.

KW Right, but I don’t think they would immediately use the word avant-garde, in general, but maybe they would discuss it. Avant-garde was notmentioned, but in fact, they wanted to go back to Productivism and notConstructivism; they wanted to embrace the real force behind change,like ‘illegal’ immigrants from Africa, by supporting and protecting theirlandings on the beaches in Spain. They were talking about Productivismon the one hand, and on the other about the G8 and globalization. It wasan interesting moment, as if the avant-garde was brought back, withoutshame. So what you are saying is that there is something else going on,maybe, psychoanalytically speaking, a kind of fear of an artistic avant-garde, and so of aesthetic responsibility.

Yesterday I spoke with Thomas Hirschhorn, at his GramsciMonument in the Bronx, and it became very clear to me that he is present-ing himself as an artist, without any doubt – and this is my interpret-ation – but it looks like this kind of self-conscious self-presentation asan artist actually helped him to gain the confidence of the people whobrought life to his project, because they trust an artist more than anactivist.10 With an activist they would probably be nervous about somekind of manipulation. So in fact aesthetics can help in these kinds ofsituations. Through the function of autonomy, to come to Peter Burger,he manages to have a complete engagement, and it allows other peopleto take over and inhabit his autonomy.11

Now the residents of Forest Houses in the Bronx are dismantling theMonument and I suppose they are very conscious that it became, really,their project – one hundred per cent their own project. It’s his projectand their project, and so it’s a kind of transitional object – to speaklike Donald Winnicott, the English psychoanalyst. And so the questionof whether the Monument was created by Hirschhorn and given to theBronx residents, or whether it was created by them, should not even beformulated. So the aesthetic aspect, as with Atelier Van Lieshout, isabout building things, and making things, about discussing things,about finding forms for things, and he, Hirschhorn, took responsibilityfor those aspects, and so maybe the whole ‘art’ business is too difficultto embrace or acknowledge, I’m not sure. The historical avant-gardewas definitely taking responsibility for its art, but they did so as if itwas non-art, art as non-art, transformed into life. They would take fullresponsibility – they knew who they were, in order to disappear intolife. They first understood their special abilities, special tradition,history, knowhow, and they were offering this, in their own way, andso this is the act of actually immersing yourself in life. And then ofcourse there were also the so-called fiascos.

The Atelier Van Lieshout project in Rotterdam lasted only one year Ithink, maybe less than one year. And Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monumentlasted only six months. Perhaps such projects bring up this fear of artamong many people who are engaged in art activism and social projects.

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9. The seminar on The NewProductivisms wasorganized by Jorge Ribaltaand took place at theMuseu d’ArtContemporani deBarcelona (MACBA) on27 and 29 March 2009.See Jorge Ribalta,‘Mediation andConstruction of Publics:The MACBA Experience’,Republicart, April 2004,available at http://republicart.net/disc/institution/ribalta01_en.htm. See also MarceloExposito, ‘The NewProductivisms’,Transversal, September2010, available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0910/exposito/en,accessed 15 September2013.

10. See the GramsciMonument website: http://gramsci-monument.com,accessed 15 September2013.

11. Peter Burger, Theory of theAvant-Garde (1974),Michael Shaw, trans,University of MinnesotaPress, Minneapolis,Minnesota, 1984

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Maybe they are not so sure about themselves as artists, and maybe they donot want to call themselves artists, and so it’s bad for them to go intoavant-garde territory. Maybe Claire Bishop is somehow on the righttrack in tracing this kind of ambivalence towards art and the lack offull commitment to aesthetic practice.12 Maybe she understands thatthere is something there, even if I don’t agree with the general tone ofher concern for the deficit of evaluative aesthetic criteria. But there is agood reason for seeking such criteria and to not use only ethical and pol-itical ones. In my 1984 article on the ‘De-Incapacitation of the Avant-Garde’, I called for critical re-actualization of the art of the artisticavant-garde and not only of its ethics and politics of social engagement.13

MJL It seems that because social practice, or socially engaged art, ismoving away from museum practices, and therefore moving away fromobjects towards processes, making post-studio kinds of work – in thesense that it was moving more in the direction of community art and prac-tices that resemble social and political work – there’s a worry that artinstitutions and critics do not recognize these as legitimate art practices,and so there’s a concern that art criticism needs to develop method-ologies, as you mention, that are able to account for the new practices.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Gramsci Monument, 2013, school supplies distribution by Forest Resident Association, Forest Houses,Bronx, New York, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, photo: Romain Lopez

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12. See Claire Bishop,‘Antagonism andRelational Aesthetics’,October 110, fall 2004, pp51–79; Bishop, ed,Participation,Whitechapel, London;MIT Press, Cambridge,Massachusetts, 2006;Bishop, Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and thePolitics of Spectatorship,Verso, London, 2012.

13. Krzysztof Wodiczko, ‘Forthe De-Incapacitation ofthe Avant-Garde’,Parallelogramme, vol 9, no4, 1984, pp 22–25;Krzysztof Wodiczko andKarl Beveridge, ‘West/East: The Depoliticizationof Art’, FUSE, March1980, pp 140–143. Seealso Marc James Leger,‘For the De-Incapacitationof Community Art

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However, in some cases, the ways to keep art in the picture are a bit ata-vistic, and so rather than drawing on the theoretical sophistication thatwas enabled by avant-garde predecessors, one turns to Kantian autonomyas a default, or to Friedrich Schiller, which are both of course very formaland non-materialist approaches to artistic production. It seems to methat, with respect to the limitations of aesthetic idealism, the historicalavant-gardes had already developed a sophistication that is in factinscribed into new practices, which Bishop has at least attempted toshow. Yet for artists themselves there is some kind of defensivenessabout the politics of these avant-garde legacies, perhaps due to the needto be recognized as adequately contemporary and so to be supportedby conservative institutions.

KW Yes, because there has been a sense of feeling rejected or misunder-stood by art institutions and so artists reject those institutions, togetherwith the idea of art or the word art and the avant-garde. So it’s like:‘You don’t want us, we don’t want you! We didn’t want you anyway,from the beginning!’ There is this kind of psychological projection. Soit’s true that only now art institutions are kind of waking up and tryingto re-appropriate what they call social practice art, which has becomefashionable. Research has in fact proved that there was this schismwhere the dirty word ‘art’ was associated with art institutions andmuseums and there has been criticism of the ways that social practicewas excluded for a long time, being treated as not artistic enough, ornot worth putting into textbooks. Now, suddenly, it’s all there in ahuge book by Claire Bishop! But it kind of came back, maybe withsome pollution; it’s coming back from the same art world.

MJL Yes, and there is also the Creative Time Summit and Nato Thomp-son’s book Living as Form.14 Perhaps I could ask you at this point to say afew things about your Arc de Triomphe World Institute for the Abolitionof War. In your conclusion to your Manifest on the TransformativeAvant-Garde you say that you worry that you may not be avant-gardeenough. If I may say so, you have been one of our most challengingand consistently fearless artists. Especially recently, you have challengedall of us with your World Institute, a work that is exceptionally visionaryin its ambition, in part because it is a project that is possible to realize butthat at that the same time is immense in its scale and scope. I would like tohelp you realize this Institute by suggesting, as you say in your essay, thatthe world is too complicated to work alone. In your 2007 ‘Response tothe October questionnaire’, you mention artists who focus on themethods of war against war, and an important aspect of this task is tobreak the ‘cultural economy of silence’ around war as perhaps one ofthe more ideological aspects of the secondary traumas transmitted bywar.15 In this sense, all of us who have not gone to war are neverthelesswar veterans since we all have to live with the guilt and the consequencesof war.

I know that you’ve presented this proposal on a number of occasionsand you’ve published a book on it.16 Could you say a few things, not somuch about the project itself in terms of its description, but about theproject in terms of what has happened since you first proposed it –how it’s been received, what you think could be done in order to

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Practice’, Journal ofAesthetics and Protest 6,2008, pp 286–299.

14. Nato Thomspson, ed,Living as Form: SociallyEngaged Art From 1991–2011, Creative Time,New York; MIT Press,Cambridge,Massachusetts, 2012

15. Krzysztof Wodiczko,‘Response to the OctoberQuestionnaire: ‘In whatways have artists,academics and culturalinstitutions responded tothe US-led invasions andoccupations of Iraq?’,October 123, winter 2008,pp 172–179

16. Krzysztof Wodiczko, TheAbolition of War, BlackDog, London, 2012

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realize the project, what has transpired so far, what more you could hopeto do, and also, what you think of the idea that this project could use thecollaboration of the art world as a whole, which is capable of comingtogether, as we’ve seen with the reactions to government attacks on thework of Robert Mapplethorpe and Steve Kurtz. Since the so-called ‘waron terror’ began in 2001 and 2003, and even going back to the 1980swith Bush Sr, we have been in a falsely created constant state of emer-gency, and of course now we’re facing a situation in Syria that the USwould like to spread to Iran, the rest of the Middle East, to possiblyRussia, and China, with its co-called ‘Pivot to Asia’, etc.

KW I agree, maybe there could be some sort of coalition between artistsand political activists, and maybe some members of social movementsthat are against war or for the abolition of war. Right now I don’t thinkI’ve achieved much – almost nothing. Yes, there is an interest amongsome people from the art world, and some politicians and cultural officials,but when the project was proposed to be shown in the Palais de Tokyo itwas rejected for various reasons. So it was only shown once with a modestpresentation in a small gallery in Paris – the Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, asignificant but small gallery. Many people came to the opening, certainly,but time is moving on and there is not much happening. There is a plan tocreate some kind of foundation or association in support of it, so somenames of people who may support this have been collected, but so far ithasn’t happened. But what you are saying is true – it should be happening,it must be done but I still don’t know how to do it. Maybe there is a need tocreate a better promotion and distribution of my recently published bookThe Abolition of War, which proposes, elaborates and argues for theproject, because, so far, despite some coverage in art magazines, there isno strong interest and response to it.

In terms of the abolition of anything, like the abolition of slavery forexample, the groups that were fighting for abolition were very small. Ifyou look back historically, it took a very long time – about 300 years– before slavery was abolished, starting with Quakers, actually, here inthe American colonies. We’re talking about something more difficultthan the legal abolition of war, which already exists in the various char-ters of the United Nations, and also in the Rome Statute and its review inKampala – a more recent reinforcement of that Statute against the crimeof wars of aggression. So we are legally getting close to it, but in terms ofthe culture of war we are very far from connecting with the new inter-national rules. In that sense artists have a very difficult task here – to chal-lenge French culture, the culture of nationalism in Europe, in the UnitedStates, and everywhere. So there would have to be some movementagainst the culture of war, and this project should perhaps be one ofthe elements of the ‘equipment’, in the struggle to dismantle the cultureof war, to create new institutions, and new structures, to move towardsa new culture of what I call un-war.

But the project itself, when it is presented, doesn’t seem to be veryeffective. And so the Arc de Triomphe World Institute for the Abolitionof War has to become one of many projects that could be developed –on a pedagogical level, in textbooks, but also in terms of war memorialsthat are operating in our culture – in the direction of physical, literary andphilosophical transformation.

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MJL One of the few artworks that I’ve seen in the last little while, not onlyhere in Montreal but anywhere else, in terms of art concerned about warwas the exhibition last summer by the artist David Tomas called ‘LiveRightly, Die, Die . . . ’, a phrase taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness, which is concerned with the figure of Kurtz, who, in thenovel, is a figure of despotism who is at the same time a creation of allof Europe, the unconscious of Western culture expressed somewhereelse, in an African colony.17 The exhibition uses e-flux announcementsas a way to revisit Tony Bennett’s idea of the ‘exhibitionary complex’,where you have a Victorian culture of exhibitions, leisure and spectacle,combined with the reality of a counter-space of state and police regu-lation, which implies that if you don’t participate in the world ofleisure, if you reject the world of spectacle, or if you don’t share thesame class privilege, you are or become potentially dangerous and there-fore subject to disciplinary measures.18 Today we would complicate thatby saying that we live in a society of control, where the oppositionbetween these two spaces – the exhibitionary and the carceral – ismore fluid, so that even if we’re thinking in terms of rhizomatic struc-tures, we’re still producing biopolitical control, which makes gettingbeyond the culture of war a bit more complicated in the sense that

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Arc de Triomphe World Institute for the Abolition of War, daytime street view, 2012, photo courtesythe artist and Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris

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17. David Tomas, ed, LiveRightly, Die, Die . . . ,exhibition catalogue,Dazibao, Montreal, 2012.See also Marc Leger’sdocumentation of theexhibition and interviewwith Tomas at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYAcJJVeTvA,accessed 15 September2013.

18. Tony Bennett, ‘TheExhibitionary Complex’,New Formations 4, spring1988, pp 73–102,available online at http://www.londonconsortium.com/uploads/The%20Exhibitionary%20Complex.pdf, accessed15 September 2013.

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there is a compulsion for people to look for ways to escape theinstitutional routes and to self-institute, to opt for autonomous grassrootsspaces, against and outside established or constituted forms of power. Allof this could make the Institute for the Abolition of War a somewhatmore difficult project to realize, since some of the people who are actuallycapable of legitimizing such a project are institutionalized players.

KW Well, in fact, without the signature of the French Prime Minister itwill not work. So I will have to be much more clever. In fact, becausethe Ministry of Culture is so powerful, anything that is happening withthat Ministry is radical in so far as it could cause Parliamentary debate.Cultural issues can become a matter of political injunction, disruptingthe procedures of the Parliament by focusing on something urgent, forexample, in relation to major memorials. So I think that in this case weneed a kind of mixture of forces from both the top and the grassrootsand the middle, as was the case with the abolition of slavery. After all,it was a revolutionary government [in France], in 1848, a short-lived gov-ernment, that actually abolished slavery. Nobody else supported it. It wasVictor Schœlcher, the Minister of Colonies, who did this. But it needed tobe pushed to higher levels, through a long process, until finally there wasthe right government to actually do it, and afterwards it was very difficultto reverse. Of course there were attempts to reverse it. In fact the FrenchRevolution abolished slavery but that was reversed by Napoleon. So thereis always a danger that major acts can be reversed. That kind of processwill never end but we need those acts – not only for the legal abolition ofwar, but for the legal abolition of the dissemination, propagation and per-petuation of beliefs and concepts and ideas that are linked to war. I thinkartists definitely could create a global coalition and push the EuropeanParliament to do something about it, and then that, maybe, would inturn put pressure on national governments in Europe.

MJL In terms of democratic politics and debate, you refer in your Mani-fest to Chantal Mouffe’s idea of agonism in the public sphere and the ideathat democracy needs to be able to sustain disagreement – hegemonicarticulations that do not seek to occupy the ‘empty space of power’.How would you argue this point in relation to the current resurgenceof communist theorizing in the last decade or so, which of course is pre-mised on a critique of state socialism? For thinkers like Slavoj Zizek andAlain Badiou we’re now in a new phase of the communist hypothesis thatgoes beyond the post-May 1968 generation of thinkers like Michel Fou-cault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari.19

Zizek argues that we need to preserve the idea of communism, because,among other things, the idea of democracy is easily recuperated by theright and because, he argues, we’re approaching dangerous times whenwe may have to do things on a massive scale.20 Of course the wareconomy is one of these major social-structural forces that we must con-front, because the war economy, the imperialist-capitalist framework, asRosa Luxemburg explained a long time ago, is one of the ways that capit-alism overcomes its crises of accumulation, by forcing open new markets.Since at least World War II, the war economy has become a way tosustain economic growth, and, of course, this growth today is directlyconnected to the environmental crisis. So I would emphasize how in the

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19. Alain Badiou, TheCommunist Hypothesis,David Macey and SteveCorcoran, trans, Verso,London, 2010; SlavojZizek, ‘The CommunistHypothesis’, in First asTragedy, Then as Farce,Verso, London, 2009, pp86–157

20. Slavoj Zizek, ‘Less ThanNothing: Slavoj Zizek inConversation withJonathan Derbyshire’,lecture presented atCentral Saint Martin’s,London, 12 June 2012,available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvWkWYHmMxg,accessed 15 September2013

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last decade or so there has been a resurgence of specifically leftist formu-lations of society and politics, and that these tendencies have a bearing onaesthetic articulation.

KW Well, I still don’t understand what kind of communism is beingemployed or suggested, directly or indirectly – a new type of commun-ism, which is maybe what someone like Henri Lefebvre had in mind.

MJL Yes, absolutely, Lefebvre’s idea of the ‘right to the city’ is an impor-tant reference point for someone like David Harvey, who in his recentbook Rebel Cities describes the demand by the new urban classes forlife to be less alienated, less an empty signifier for reckless speculationand capitalist development, less an informal space of precariousworking conditions, less a screen for programmed leisure and spectacle,and more a living process in which revolutionary impulses are animatedby visions of a better life.21 Think of the ‘movements of the squares’ thatwe’ve seen everywhere since 2011.

KW But as defined by Lefebvre, these are very discursive forms in whichagonism plays an important role. So the communism that is here pro-posed has to be one that would be going even further than Lefebvre’sconcept of socialism, or at least not backwards, so in that way maybeeven Parliament needs this kind of discursive democratic project, evenif great global things are to be done. But of course I’m nervous aboutthose kinds of total projects that are somehow attached to the need fora new communism, because it will bring back the fear of totalitarianism– an invention of Benito Mussolini. I don’t know if this is really a project,because the communism that was presented by Karl Marx and FriedrichEngels was not yet practically clear. The Communist Manifesto intelli-gently tried to dispel the fears that were related to communism, andespecially the idea of the abolition of private property, but the projectwas at that time only very general.

MJL Yes, both utopian and critical of utopianism.

KW Yes, but of course Lenin tried to make it practical, practically-dialec-tically moving forward, not for better but for worse, as we know now. SoI don’t know what Badiou is proposing. Do you know?

MJL Well, he’s proposing a certain philosophical model of subjectivity,on the one hand, an ontology that is influenced by Lacanian psychoana-lysis as well as set theory, and that is linked, in topological terms, to whathe refers to as different truth procedures, which are developed in terms ofhis understanding of what an ‘event’ is – communism being an eventwithin the category of a political truth procedure, and so not all politicalmovements, for example identity politics – which is proposed byMouffe’s radical democracy – not all of these qualify as political truthprocedures, in part because they are not generic and do not affect every-one universally.22 The new communism, whatever it is to become, wouldnot, as you say, move backwards, but it would also not dissolve every-thing that was achieved by the left. Badiou has been exceptional in thisregard in advancing a radical leftist theory that is critical of democratic

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21. David Harvey, RebelCities: From the Right tothe City to the UrbanRevolution, Verso,London, 2012

22. See Bruno Bosteels, Badiouand Politics, DukeUniversity Press, Durham,North Carolina, 2011.

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discourse and its world of free markets, which is not a space of ‘lived-through experience’, as you mention in relation to Peter Burger. Andthrough l’Organisation politique Badiou did a great deal to advance therights of immigrants and sans papiers, which was a way for him to main-tain the Maoist emphasis on the need for organization and, through mili-tant research, to identify concrete solutions to social problems – and so toorganize around problems as a way to be effective, but in forms that arenot premised on state power.

Of course Badiou has also discussed art in terms of truth procedureand in terms of what kinds of activism are possible today.23 Some ofwhat he says, which resonates with what we have discussed so far, ishis assertion that activist art is an art that is oriented towards a ‘presen-tation’ and not ‘the representative glorification of the results’, because, ashe says, ‘there are no results at the moment’.24 An art of presentation is akind of action art or socially engaged art which is about doing somethingto bring about social change, as opposed to an art of representation, oreven a cultural politics of representation, which assumes that what weare working for is already there, say, in terms of identities or vested inter-ests – bodies and languages.

KW This is what Atelier Van Lieshout would call ‘solvism’ – presen-tation, rather than representation – autonomy related to solving thingsand moving ahead. There is an aesthetics in that, of course, a design aes-thetic. And this is not on a political party level; it’s on a social movementlevel, perhaps even micro-level of social movements, or temporary socialmovements. This is very much what interests me, but when we move intomajor cultural projects like the abolition of war, then I don’t know howthose methodologies can be effective on a larger scale. Will it happenautomatically or is it protest that will overdetermine and shift things sud-denly? How is it going to happen? With Mouffe it’s not through consen-sus or liberal agreement, or compromise; it has to be a shift of paradigm.So we have to change the conditions that produce unhappiness, but wehave to be careful with this new communism so that it doesn’t becomeonce again a new religion.

MJL Perhaps one of the most serious challenges to the concept of agonismhas been Slavoj Zizek’s argument that Laclau and Mouffe leave the spaceof the universal empty because they have as yet failed to renounce liberaldemocratic capitalism as the only viable political order.25 Zizek’s Revo-lution at the Gates would remind us that Lenin’s act was not performedin an empty space.26 I tend to refer to today’s left as a ‘post-traumaticleft’, exhausted by its experience in the twentieth century. Unfortunately,much of what is valuable gets systematically left out.

KW One way to live through trauma is to go through the work of memoryand ‘work through’ the ills, the wounds and the damage that was done bythose who acted in the name of communism. So, yes, it’s important tobring it back as well, and quickly, so that it’s clear that those who aretalking about communism are in fact healing themselves from all of thetrauma that is attached to this word – spelling it out by saying it publicly,and finding an emotional form for it. So I would like to hear this morefrom people like Zizek as well.

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23. Alain Badiou, Handbookof Inaesthetics, AlbertoToscano, trans, StanfordUniversity Press, Stanford,California, 2005

24. Alain Badiou, ‘Does theNotion of Activist Art StillHave Meaning?’, lecturepresented at the MiguelAbreu Gallery, New YorkCity, 13 October 2010, incollaboration withLacanian Ink

25. See in particular SlavojZizek, The TicklishSubject: The AbsentCentre of PoliticalOntology, Verso, London,1999; Zizek, ‘ClassStruggle orPostmodernism? Yes,Please!’, in Judith Butler,Ernesto Laclau and SlavojZizek, Contingency,Hegemony, Universality:Contemporary Dialogueson the Left, Verso,London, 2000, pp 90–135.

26. Slavoj Zizek, ed,Revolution at the Gates:Zizek on Lenin, The 1917Writings, Verso, London,2002

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MJL Well, you know, Zizek says this too, that Marxists have to be moreknowledgeable about Stalinism than anyone else, so that we can under-stand that experience, and he has written about Stalinism in manyplaces, including, for instance, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?27

KW One thing to bring back, which is a certain aspect of the avant-garde –the one that I like – is a sense of humour. When you look at Bertolt Brecht,for instance – and maybe some of Zizek’s writings, or Marx’s, for thatmatter – there is a sense of humour there that is very important becauseit brings a form for contradictions. Laughter, Walter Benjamin has said,going back to Denis Diderot, is a condition for thinking. Laughter surfaceswhat we embody through our upbringing and culture – the systems ofbelief that are circulating in us come out with laughter and help us see our-selves. I think humour is one of the avant-garde techniques that is worthpreserving. There is artistry to this kind of humour – allegorical, explosivehumour like that of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin – that one finds inthe historical avant-gardes, as, for instance, when Duchamp and otherartists, during World War I, took over this little Arc de Triomphe inWashington Square Park, to form an Independent Republic. That was anavant-garde act that was both brave and humorous. Or when AtelierVan Lieshout does this with their independent republic in Rotterdam –it’s not only what is being said but it’s something that we can enjoy,through a mockery of the world around us, as a counterpoint to the so-called well-organized society around it. So this artistic responsibilitycarried the capacity to find a form that could help us to recognize contra-dictions and transmit them, to make people laugh.

Or, for instance, in the Hirschhorn project, the residents of the ForestHousing Project are philosophers and they learned a lot in six months andlearned to see themselves from a different perspective. But there is also asense of humour in this, in the reversal of roles, or in the playing of roles,showing that they are in fact roles. They are giving us lectures and we’resitting there, intellectuals from Manhattan and my students from Harvard,learning from them. When the roles are changed we see the older rolesmore clearly. The division of labour was overturned to the point of absurd-ity, so that was a moment to laugh rather than telling so-called fundamentaltruths. So there was displacement there, not only placement – there waspresentation and also there was deconstruction and destruction going on.

Projects like this create conditions for people to become artists, andfor a moment take some chunks of the symbolic environment and displacethe fixed meanings that are attached to it. So the issue is how to do it indevelopmental ways, with projects that help people to become artists intheir own right. This is not to take for granted what those peoplealready do but to create a new opportunity for people to advance interms of their aesthetics, or in terms of the complexity of what theywant to transmit and how they want to transmit it. The issue is how todo it long enough so that things that are difficult can be articulated, sothat the issues that are unexpected or unsolicited, the experiences thatare not acknowledged can bring forward critical meaning. This meanscombining entertainment with instruction. Here I’m on the side ofBrecht and his notion of a ‘Theatre for Pleasure, and Theatre for Instruc-tion’, which I could see happening at Hirschhorn’s Monument, whetherthat was intended or not.28

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27. Slavoj Zizek, DidSomebody SayTotalitarianism? FiveInterventions in the(Mis)Use of a Notion,Verso, London, 2002

28. Bertolt Brecht, ‘Theatre forPleasure or Theatre forInstruction’, in Brecht onTheatre, John Willett,trans, Methuen, London,1964, pp 71–72

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Krzysztof Wodiczko is Professor of Art, Design and the Public Domain atthe Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments.He has realized more than eighty such public projections internationallyand has also designed nomadic instruments and vehicles with homeless,immigrant and veteran operators. He has had many retrospectives andhas exhibited at Documenta and the Paris, Sydney, Lyon, Venice,Whitney, and Kyoto Biennales. His work has been the subject of numer-ous publications, including Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Inter-views (1999), Krzysztof Wodiczko: Guests (2009) and City of Refuge:A 9/11 Memorial (2010), Krzysztof Wodiczko (2011) and Abolition ofWar (2011).

Marc James Leger is an artist and writer living in Montreal. He has pub-lished numerous essays, including pieces in Afterimage, Art Journal, CMagazine, Etc, FUSE, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Left Curve,Parachute, RACAR and Third Text. He is author of Brave New AvantGarde (2012) and The Neoliberal Undead (2013), both published byZero Books, and is editor of Culture and Contestation in the NewCentury (2011) as well as the forthcoming The Idea of the AvantGarde – And What It Means Today.

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