The Aesthetics of Social Equality: Avant-Garde, Populisms and the People
This symposium explores the social and historical interweaving of art and avant-garde aesthetics with universal demands for equality and the right of the “people”: the underclass, the underprivileged and the oppressed. Drawing on the technocratic rise of a current liberal anti-populist discourse in Europe and the USA that unilaterally discards appeals to the people as dangerous and irresponsible, whether coming from the left or from the right, this event explores the implications of artistic experiments that place discourses about emancipation, race and gender equality, the abolition of labour exploitation at center stage, while also advancing a contentious politics or dichotomous representations of social affairs. In the Western tradition of aesthetics, and especially in the writings of Clement Greenberg and Theodor Adorno, one can trace a certain disdain for artistic practices whose motives become too obvious, too moralistic or just too ‘easy’. Such practices seem to downgrade civil responsibility rather than enable it. The figure of the ‘philistine’, in Adorno’s work for instance, the uncivilized ‘other’ whose judgement relies on instinct rather than reflection, can be seen, according to this tradition, as the exact audience that populist art addresses. The current anti-populist discourse emerging in Europe and the world, which morally condemns the people as irrational and uneducated, often draws on such assumptions. Rather than seeing populism as an evil category strictly separated from its ‘other’, this event will ask under which conditions populisms, and the rhetoric of intolerance and immediacy they harbour, can be thought as egalitarian and socially transformative practices.
Program
Emilia Palonen, Lecturer in Political Science, University of Helsinki
Populism on the Loose: From Demography to Democracy
Trevor Wilson, University of Pittsburgh
Works of Wisdom: Humans after History, Art after Labor?
Kristóf Nagy, Artpool Research Center
From Artistic Radicalism to National Populism: The Trajectory of the Inconnu Group in the 1980s
Riccardo Mario Cucciolla, HSE, Moscow
The Spectacularization of Soviet justice. The Gdlyan-Ivanov affair, 1987-1991
Panos Kompatsiaris, HSE, Moscow
Contemporary Art and Left-wing Populism: Between High Aesthetics and Working Class Militancy
Yiannis Mylonas, HSE, Moscow
For a People’s Cinema in Crisis Times: The Agonistic Poetics of Pantelis Voulgaris’ “The Last Note” and Remembering the Occupation and Resistance of Greece
Michał Murawski, Queen Mary, University of London/Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism, HSE Moscow
The Path to Culture T(h)ree: From Palatial Communism to Paradisiacal Putinist Populism
Sarah Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art
± MAY '68: Street Art, Art for the People. Havana, Paris, Vietnam.
Eleonora Vratskidou, Technische Universität, Berlin
Abstracting Power Asymmetries: documenta 14’s Ideal of Lateral Solidarity based on a reading of Gustave Courbet
Angelina Lucento, National Research University-Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Painting with the People, for the People: The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) and the Birth of Radical Art Practice in the USSR
James Day, University of Copenhagen
Statues of Salt - Notes on the Dissolution of the Avant-garde into Everyday life, 1972-2018.
Maria Podzorova, Paris Diderot – Paris 7, Laboratory ICT
Mother or Sexual Object: Image of Woman of the Working Class in the Illustrations of Socially Committed Western Artists in the Interwar Period.
Polina Pugacheva, Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Nonprofessionals Guarding Local Associations: DIY Culture vs Exploitation of Amateur Labor in Theater
Alexandra Antoniadou, University of Edinburgh
Counterpublics in the Production of Contemporary Greek Art
Kaija Kaitavuori, University of Helsinki
The Aesthetics of Multitude: Ordinary People as Creators and as Material of Art
Fani Giannousi, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Greek Art and the Refugee Crisis. Genuine Art or a Fashionable One?
Sarah WIlson
Sarah Wilson is Professor in the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She was principal curator of Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968 at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2001, with an itneraional Paris-based 1968 section; the show travelled to the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Following the publication of The Visual World of French Theory 1, Figurations, by Yale University Press in 2010, Figurations ± 68 – Le monde visuel de la French Theory, Dijon, Les presses du réel Figurations 68: le monde visuelle de la théorie française is now published in Paris by Les Presses du Réel. Picasso/Marx and socialist realism in France appeared in in 2013 with Liverpool University Press. She was a curator and accademic curator of the Ist Asian Triennale /5th Guangzhou Triennale, in Guangzhou China in 2015 and received the International Association of Art Critics' award for distinguished contribution to art criticism.
Emilia Palonen
Emilia Palonen is an engaged scholar working on populism, cultural politics, and memory in Europe, particularly in Finland and Hungary. She works as Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Helsinki where she is affiliated to the Mainsteraming Populism consortium that approaches populism particularly from a comparative angle inspired by Ernesto Laclau's work. An expert on postfoundational political analysis, she has a MA and PhD degrees from the Ideology and Discourse Analysis programme at the University of Essex, and a BA honours in Contemporary East European Studies from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, University of London. She has held fellowships at IWM, Vienna and Collegium Budapest, Hungary and worked as a DAAD scholar at Humboldt Universität Berlin, Academy of Finland funded scholar at Northwestern University and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Study. She has published on politics of memory, democracy and nationalism, and co-edited a volume Populism on the Loose, where she discusses the case of Helsinki Guggenheim Museum and cultural populism (available open access: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-7401-5)