Postpolitikak

“Proceed”, said the newly elected president of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner. It was the 24th of March 2004, and an audience of ministers, high-ranking military officers and journalists watched a man in uniform step forward onto a small ladder, propped against the wall of the gallery in the Military Academy. Cameras flashed, as he took down the stately portraits of General Videla and General Bignone, almost 20 years after the fall of their violent regime.

There is something treacherously seductive in the shadow play about the artist and the city, that is performed by certain discourses on gentrification and the creative class. Feeding off old-fashioned notions of the avant-garde, it stages the artist as an instrument of change, a positive influence, one whose mere presence is a symptom of a declining neighbourhood's recovery.

What is the role of art in moments of social transformation? A look at the models followed by the Free State of AVL-Ville and Slave City of Atelier van Lieshout, and The Best Party, an Icelandic political party founded by a group of artists, musicians and other cultural agents. Recent events regarding the protests against cultural policies in The Netherlands have imbued this article with a new kind of relevance. The call for resistance against the government's fateful neoliberal grasp on society is growing stronger. For art to play a pivotal role in this, it could take some cues from the examples presented in this article: Time to leave self-effacing moderateness behind, stop being reasonable, and demand the impossible!

In the Netherlands, cultural workers are on the streets, protesting against the pending cuts on government funding for art and culture. In the newspapers, meanwhile, their opponents have put the question of whether art is elitist back on the agenda again. Time for a little introspection.