Session Notes
November 16, 2013 · Tate Modern, London
Speakers: Chantal Mouffe, Gregory Sholette, Andrea Fraser
In November 2013, Tate Modern convened a day-long symposium on art’s relationship to political activism during a period of severe economic austerity across Europe. The event brought together three thinkers whose work had, in different ways, interrogated the structural conditions under which art is produced, circulated, and instrumentalized.
Chantal Mouffe opened with a lecture drawing on her theory of agonistic pluralism, arguing that the proper role of art in democratic politics is not to build consensus but to make visible the conflicts that consensus politics suppresses. For Mouffe, the austerity regime represented precisely the kind of post-political order she had long criticized — one in which genuine political alternatives are foreclosed by the claim that “there is no alternative.” Art, she argued, has the capacity to re-open the space of the political by staging dissensus in affective, embodied forms that purely discursive critique cannot achieve.
Gregory Sholette followed with a presentation rooted in his research on “dark matter” — the vast mass of artistic production that exists outside the visibility of the art market and institutional frameworks. During austerity, Sholette observed, this dark matter becomes more visible and more politically charged: artist-run spaces, informal collectives, and precarious cultural workers who had always existed at the margins now became the norm rather than the exception. He called for a political economy of art that takes this invisible majority seriously.
Andrea Fraser’s contribution was characteristically self-reflexive. She examined the complicity of major art institutions — Tate included — in the very economic structures that produce austerity, pointing to corporate sponsorship, trustee wealth derived from finance capital, and the use of cultural institutions as instruments of urban gentrification. Fraser did not exempt herself from this critique, noting that her own career had been sustained by the institutional apparatus she was analyzing.
The symposium remains a crucial document of a moment when the relationship between art institutions and economic power was being contested with unusual directness — inside the institution itself.
