New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

1. AESTHETIC TURNSA month before this book was developed, the Dutch Electronic Art Festival 2012exhibition The Power of Things opened its doors. The exhibition examined notions ofmateriality and beauty through a collection of eighteen works which were mostlysculptural objects. Numerous people attending the opening night and theiroverwhelmingly positive responses filled the curatorial team with a sense of pride andachievement. The next day, however, one of the curators encountered a renownedmedia art critic outside the exhibition venue and asked him if he had enjoyed theexhibition. The answer (to the curator's surprise) was a firm ‘No’. According to thecritic, this is not the time to address such tedious things as natural phenomena, letalone relate these to trivial discussions on beauty! How could one, in these dark times,ignore the threats we are facing and the slashed cultural funding to create anexhibition that does not take a critical stand against the crises at hand? Did the critichave a point? Was this exhibition an exercise in fiddling while Rome burned? The criticrefused to acknowledge that at this very moment a push for aesthetics - as a politicsof form and experience - is a potentially radical gesture.In 2006, Claire Bishop signalled that art criticism often fails to judge the artistic meritof socially engaged practice as “emphasis is shifted away from the disruptivespecificity of a given work and onto a generalized set of moral precepts” (64). Indeed,if the artistic experimentation and the reworking of forms, affects and materials isdownplayed, art becomes stagnant and only preaches to the converted. With therecent 'social turn' in contemporary art, curators and artists have quite often resortedto the discourses of political autonomy to frame the historical present. Certainly, thecurrent situation is characterised by new pressures and urgencies, requiring clarity andfirm directives. But if this results in a reduction of legitimate political positions,perspectives and stances, then the operative zone for art becomes very narrow.There is a level of accountability and risk-taking involved here. Politics cannot just becoquettishly applied to the white cube gallery space and expected to stick. This was,for example, the case at the 2012 Berlin Biennale, where the curators invited theOccupy Berlin movement into the gallery space of KW Institute for Contemporary Art,the main biennial venue. This move ignored the fact that the Occupy movement isabout public dissent in public space; it is about “the street” being heard. Locking upOccupy in the white cube is a simplistic curatorial gesture of putting “politics ondisplay.” A performative act such as this, turns artistic practices and curating intoperformances of already-activated political processes.Perhaps an exhibition like The Power of Things was difficult to read as critical,because a critical exhibition - in traditional electronic art terms - typically entails abunch of computer screens and robotic sculptures in a dark industrial space, broughttogether under a dystopian scenario serving as an exhibition theme. Such classic‘critical’ electronic art exhibitions, however, inform an antiquated interactive electronicart aesthetic - one that dictates that critically looking at technology’s impact on ourworld is best achieved by displaying hardware at work, and dispensing with frivoloustopics such as beauty. Critical art, however, is also a question of sense andperception, of transformative forms and diagrams. The approach of The Power of3