A SPECTER is haunting
Europe—the specter of populism. In 2003, when
curators Lars Bang Larsen, Cristina Ricupero, and Nicolaus Schafhausen
were first making plans for a group of exhibitions dealing with the questions
Europe was just reeling from the rise and murder of the populist right-wing
Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. By the time their “Populism” project finally
appeared In various European venues last summer-the endeavor featured coinciding group shows in Vilnius, Oslo,
Amsterdam, and Frankfurt-populist movements In opposition to (and sometimes
within) traditional political parties had become even more prominent voices of
dissatisfaction within midstream politics. During the past fifteen years, the
technocratic projects of New Labor, Gerhard Schröder’s Neue Mitte, and the
“purple” coalitions in Holland and Belgium all sought to blend the welfare
state with neoliberalism, hoping to end class antagonism through economic
growth and social services, In an attempt to realize a kind of postpolitical
state. This dubious utopia has now been shattered by the new populists, whose
rhetoric is similar whether they are “officially” left- or right-wing: The new
German Linkspartner and the Front National in France both campaign against
Immigrants taking away Jobs from “our people’’—although It should be added that
the Left stall largely abstains from the anti-Islam agenda espoused by
right-wing politicians like Fortuyn.
Among artists and
intellectuals, reactions to this populist upsurge have often taken the form of
moralistic and snobbish condemnation. “Populism” tried to go beyond such
automatic reflexes by thinking through, and thereby beyond, contemporary
populism. An Important part of the project was The Populism Reader, a
collection of essays accompanying the show that sought to address productively
a moniker notoriously polymorphous and difficult to define. As philosopher
Dieter Lesage writes in the volume, “The usefulness of a term with different
meanings resides in the fact that it may hint at family resemblances between
different phenomena called populism.’’ This sense of underlying connections
nevertheless poses challenges to the exhibition format: There remains a need
for the analysis of the word’s various usages, their similarities and
differences; without this, an exhibition risks becoming as arbitrary as the
enumeration of animals In Jorge Luis Borges’s famed Chinese encyclopedia.
Unfortunately, the incarnation of “Populism” in the temporary quarters of
Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum (the project’s largest venue) came rather close to
this sense of disarray. While the exhibition contained convincing works, these
were rarely grouped in illuminating constellations, and more often than not
individual pieces drowned amid a sea of artistic meta- and counter-populisms.
Perhaps this was the fault of sheer ambition: Seeking to address a
sociopolitical phenomenon, “Populism” was both more and less than a good art
exhibition, seeming to demand critical responses beyond the usual art-review
format.
One of the best works in
“Populism,” Julika Rudelius’s Economisch Primaat (Economic Primacy), 2005, is a
two-channel video projection showing Dutch businessmen delivering monologues in
a generic office space. They extol free enterprise and at various mints attack
“parasites” who live off the welfare state. These are populists in suits:
elitist populists. To paraphrase Ernesto Laclau in the Reader, populism must
always construct a
not do anything about them.
That populism and elitism are not mutually exclusive was demonstrated in an
exemplary manner by Fortuyn, who was not only openly gay but also insanely
posh, a member of the privileged class. In contrast with Fortuyn’s right-wing
populism and its strong xenophobic elements, the men in Economisch Primaat more
or less limit themselves to what can be called “market populism”—another term,
borrowed from American author Thomas Frank, that regularly appears in texts by
essayists in the Reader as well as by the “Populism” curators themselves.
Market populism identifies the “free market” with what is good for “the
people”; hence, those who work with and for the market are the true
representatives of the people, defended their market from state Interference,
protectionism, and parasites.
In the context of European
policymaking, neoliberal market populism has been used to extol the virtues of
private initiative In culture and, more specifically, to propose the “real”
culture Industry as a model for its high-art cousin, which has largely been
dependent on state sponsorship. In the 1990s, the pressure to meet targets,
expand audiences, and attract alternative funding screamed steadily, the logic
being that art must be legitimized by popular demand, by the market. Pop
culture, meaning Industrial mass culture, is presented as the norm. And
deviations from this norm—difficult, critical, “unpopular” cultural
practices—are considered evil. However, the claim that pop culture is truly
democratic and popular is open to debate, since It is after all created by an
elite of specialists. In this respect, Phil Collins’s hilarious video of
Bogotá-based fans of the Smiths doing karaoke versions of songs from the band’s
1989 album The World Won’t Listen is highly interesting: The Smiths have always
attracted fans who were disillusioned with mainstream pop culture, and by the
look of it, these Latin-American youths-who perform in front of an
Incongruously sunny photograph of what seems to be a tropical beach resort-are
no exception. One of the posters used to advertise the Smiths karaoke event
(the video comprises recorders of individuals who responded to the artist’s
open call in Bogotá) reads, “Hang the DJ” a phrase from the song “Panic,” in
which a DJ’s music is attacked for saying “nothing to me about my life,” In
some ways, the Smiths and their original following constitute a depoliticized,
poppy version of the late 1950s and early ’60s folk revival, which denounced
commercial pop culture as being precisely antipopular, imposed on the
people-the folk-by the specialists of spectacle. Of course, the Smiths were
themselves a British pop phenomenon; they were an “alternative” product on the
attitude market of youth culture. Yet within pop culture, they urged their
teenage weltschmerz constituency to regard pop as an enemy, “popularity” being
nothing but a drab, imposed conformity. That the allegedly popular may in fact
be a product imposed on consumers by ruthless, ever-subtler marketing
strategies is a lesson worth recalling—both for cultural producers and fine
artists alike—amid today’s populisms.
The curators have explained
that their project sprang from concerns about contemporary European populism’s
“oversimplified responses to complex situations,” its unfounded nostalgia for a
more orderly past, its refusal to redistribute wealth, its racist and anti-
intellectual rhetoric, and its willingness to sacrifice the European Union—the
main political project of postwar Europe, now seen by many as the ultimate
postpolitical, bureaucratic-technocratic monstrosity—to sensationalist
sentiments. Populism, then, is considered the enemy here; even when it is not
racist, it is usually protectionist and backward-looking. But what if, as
Laclau argues, politics without populism is unthinkable? If he is correct in
his assessment that “no political movement will be entirely exempt from populism,
because none will fail to interpellate to some extent “the people” against an
enemy, through the construction of a social frontier,” then the failure of the
postpolitical utopia means that populism is here to stay. It may seem a glum
prospect: Is the political scene in Europe to be a perpetual stalemate between
various populisms, some of which use Islamic fundamentalism to create fear
among their followers, whale Islamists themselves engage In a related game by
interpellating not “the people” but “true believers” against the decadent Western enemy? Is Europe to
become dominated by the likes of Theo van Gogh—the Fortuyn friendly filmmaker
and columnist who used to rail against Jews before he discovered a more fashionable
enemy in Muslim “goat-fuckers”—and his Islamist murderer, who frenetically
stabbed van Gogh to death In broad daylight?
On the other hand, if the
current populist tendencies can be seen as attempts to repoliticize European
politics, perhaps the question should then be whether another form of
repoliticization is possible. To this end the concept of “the people” needs to
be redeemed. Against the populism of exclusion, an inclusive populism should be
defended, a populism identifying the people as those excluded from “the people”
as defined by the dominant populism—a montage—people full of internal and
external contradictions, rather than a phantasmatic seamless whole. Such a
populism would go beyond the nation-state fetishized by today’s populists. The
Populism Reader is one attempt at developing such a populist and political
alternative—the “transnational” multitude—populism espoused by Brian Holmes
(although this form of populism, while not elitist, will no doubt have a hard
time becoming popular). And in the exhibition “Populism,” there was another
glimpse of such a possible populism offered to the relatively homogenous
audience of contemporary art, in the form of the shabby shack housing Erik van
Lieshout’s video Awakening, 2005, a hallucinatory odyssey through Rotterdam’s
overlapped right-wing, gay, Immigrant, and drug scenes. Here was the main
strength of Larsen, Ricupero, and Schafhausen’s project, and something of its
legacy when It comes to considering art’s relationship to contemporary culture
and politics: “Populism” could easily have turned into another exercise in
elitist populism, positing an enlightened, cultured, and tolerant “us”—the art
world-as the true representative of the people against the rabble outside.
Thanks to a few decisive artistic and theoretical contributions, “Populism”
became sometime much more productive.
SVEN LUITTICKEN IS AN ART HISTORIAN AND CRITIC BASED IN AMSTERDAM