From Viennese art magazine SPIKE, whose issue 33 just hit newsstands.

An Emotional Communist
A spectre is haunting the art biennials of Europe: the spectre of communism. But was it really the ultimate destiny of the writings of Karl Marx to add political glamour to didactic curatorial texts displayed in abandoned industrial warehouses? By Nick Currie
Picture me as a student in a grim city in the far north of Scotland. I’m wearing a thickly padded Chinese People’s Army greatcoat and working as a volunteer in a left-wing bookshop. My spartan student bedsit is decorated with posters of Chinese peasants working on collectivised farms. All the books on my shelf are by Brecht.
In the Britain of 1978, I am still able to find communistic things around me. My education is paid for by the state, as is my medical care. Many of the key sectors of the economy are still under state control. When I leave university and enter my name in the unemployment register, my rent in London is paid by the state, allowing me to start making art without any commercial considerations. My “emotional communism” is partly gratitude for this state of affairs, soon dismantled by the calamitous Mrs. Thatcher.

So where, today, after three decades of neoliberal turbo-capitalism, can I satisfy my inner emotional communist? Why, at large-scale, international art events, of course!
I don’t mean the commercial kind like Art Basel, which are no more than glitzy trade fairs. No, I mean state-subsidised events like Manifesta and Documenta: serious events isolated from the whims and fads of the art market, socially committed and didactically curated. These events are, in Nicolas Bourriaud’s phrase, “editing tables for reality”, and it goes without saying that the editing is of a committed, radical and leftist variety.
Take this year’s Manifesta, for example. It’s showing in Genk, a mining town in the north of Belgium. The venue is an abandoned coal mine called the Waterschei, and the Mexican curator Cuauhtémoc Medina has themed the exhibition around coal, labour, and something he calls “the poetics of restructuring”.

“Capitalism,” says Medina in one of the wall texts displayed in the enormous post-industrial building “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising production, and thereby all social relations. Our ways of living, as well as our sensibility and subjectivity, are to a great extent the fleeting output (and the strata of residues) of the constant restructuring of the economic system.”
I remember enough of my student Marxism to recognise this as a reformulation of Marx’s classic conception of the relationship between base and superstructure: the idea that the economic base entirely determines the cultural superstructure. This was something I resisted as a student, influenced by Barthes, post-structuralism, Situationism, and other heresies. But it’s rather refreshing to see this base-superstructure idea return in 2012.
It isn’t mere economism, either, which would be tedious and would lead straight back towards the worship of markets. For Medina talks not just about restructuring, but about a “poetics” of restructuring.

“Both empirically and enigmatically,” he argues, “artworks are witnesses to and sites of the poetic reworking of the uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, the everlasting uncertainty and the agitation characteristic of the different industrial epochs.”
This sounds like a paraphrase of one of the passages of Marx most cherished by curators, his suggestion that “all that is solid melts into air”. But, whereas for Marx this was a reason why man should “face with sober senses his real conditions of life”, for curators it’s a pretext to invoke Derridean “hauntology” (and the Waterschei is certainly a spooky space, haunted by absent miners whose jobs have flown to China) or the more poetic invocations and exorcisms the later Barthes worked into texts like Camera Lucida.
Walking around Manifesta 9, two thoughts pop into my head. One: “The sensitivity to context here is taken to almost masturbatory levels.” Two: “Jeremy Deller has won.” Most of the show is about coal. And the typical display device is the vitrine table encasing Deller-esque folksy relics: Manifesta’s drawings of a self-improving miner’s sketch club or embroidery work which shows social deprivation during a time of high unemployment resemble Deller’s informal collections of amateur art found at British funfairs, motorcycle clubs, carnivals, and pop festivals.

My current computer desktop picture shows a piece of plyboard with the words “REVOLUTIONARY LIFE” elegantly hand-drawn on it, along with several imaginary book covers. It’s Argentinian artist Magdalena Jitrik’s contribution to Manifesta, described in the catalogue as “an overview in drawing form of the critical exchanges between Belgian writer and activist Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky on the fate of working class dissent in the Soviet Union”.
When I research this correspondence, it’s a rather sad affair. Which factions in the Spanish Civil War should be supported? Which comrades are bourgeois backsliders? Have popular uprisings in the Soviet Union been crushed mercilessly and then covered up? What schisms are afoot in the party? Has Serge betrayed Trotsky and become his enemy?
Jitrik herself shifts the focus from political bickering and wonders instead whether “art as a system of thought might not be able to replace political economy, such that the object of every organisation of society would be the enjoyment of free time”. The exact opposite of the Medina party line that base must determine superstructure! But easily reconciled if we say that Medina is talking about what is, and Jitrik about what might be. Aren’t these, in fact, the complementary jobs of critic and artist?
After seeing this show about Genk’s departed proletariat, I encounter the town’s current underclass in the form of old Turkish men frying meat on the street across the road and young Turkish teenagers riding off-road motorbikes, playing loud music, and flirting in the nature park beyond the abandoned mine head.
These immigrants are very different from the British coal miners I’ve been watching swinging picks in time to a Benjamin Britten score in Manifesta’s screening of Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1935 film Coal Face, an instance of what curator Medina calls “docu-Modernism” – a collision between avant-garde music, statistics, history, Modernism, Marxism and poetry. For a start, both Cavalcanti and Britten were gay, and these Turkish kids seem thoroughly hetero.

The contrast reminds me of why I describe myself only as an “emotional” communist and not a fully committed, pragmatic one. There’s an abiding mismatch between what leftist intellectuals think is good for the masses and what the masses think is good for themselves.
Marx called this the proletariat’s “false consciousness” and spoke of the day when a class-in-itself would become a class-for-itself. And, in that sense, we could call Marx an artist too: a man focused on what might be rather than what is.
Nick Currie is a writer and musician based in Osaka.

An Emotional Communist
A spectre is haunting the art biennials of Europe: the spectre of communism. But was it really the ultimate destiny of the writings of Karl Marx to add political glamour to didactic curatorial texts displayed in abandoned industrial warehouses? By Nick Currie
Picture me as a student in a grim city in the far north of Scotland. I’m wearing a thickly padded Chinese People’s Army greatcoat and working as a volunteer in a left-wing bookshop. My spartan student bedsit is decorated with posters of Chinese peasants working on collectivised farms. All the books on my shelf are by Brecht.
In the Britain of 1978, I am still able to find communistic things around me. My education is paid for by the state, as is my medical care. Many of the key sectors of the economy are still under state control. When I leave university and enter my name in the unemployment register, my rent in London is paid by the state, allowing me to start making art without any commercial considerations. My “emotional communism” is partly gratitude for this state of affairs, soon dismantled by the calamitous Mrs. Thatcher.

So where, today, after three decades of neoliberal turbo-capitalism, can I satisfy my inner emotional communist? Why, at large-scale, international art events, of course!
I don’t mean the commercial kind like Art Basel, which are no more than glitzy trade fairs. No, I mean state-subsidised events like Manifesta and Documenta: serious events isolated from the whims and fads of the art market, socially committed and didactically curated. These events are, in Nicolas Bourriaud’s phrase, “editing tables for reality”, and it goes without saying that the editing is of a committed, radical and leftist variety.
Take this year’s Manifesta, for example. It’s showing in Genk, a mining town in the north of Belgium. The venue is an abandoned coal mine called the Waterschei, and the Mexican curator Cuauhtémoc Medina has themed the exhibition around coal, labour, and something he calls “the poetics of restructuring”.

“Capitalism,” says Medina in one of the wall texts displayed in the enormous post-industrial building “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising production, and thereby all social relations. Our ways of living, as well as our sensibility and subjectivity, are to a great extent the fleeting output (and the strata of residues) of the constant restructuring of the economic system.”
I remember enough of my student Marxism to recognise this as a reformulation of Marx’s classic conception of the relationship between base and superstructure: the idea that the economic base entirely determines the cultural superstructure. This was something I resisted as a student, influenced by Barthes, post-structuralism, Situationism, and other heresies. But it’s rather refreshing to see this base-superstructure idea return in 2012.
It isn’t mere economism, either, which would be tedious and would lead straight back towards the worship of markets. For Medina talks not just about restructuring, but about a “poetics” of restructuring.

“Both empirically and enigmatically,” he argues, “artworks are witnesses to and sites of the poetic reworking of the uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, the everlasting uncertainty and the agitation characteristic of the different industrial epochs.”
This sounds like a paraphrase of one of the passages of Marx most cherished by curators, his suggestion that “all that is solid melts into air”. But, whereas for Marx this was a reason why man should “face with sober senses his real conditions of life”, for curators it’s a pretext to invoke Derridean “hauntology” (and the Waterschei is certainly a spooky space, haunted by absent miners whose jobs have flown to China) or the more poetic invocations and exorcisms the later Barthes worked into texts like Camera Lucida.
Walking around Manifesta 9, two thoughts pop into my head. One: “The sensitivity to context here is taken to almost masturbatory levels.” Two: “Jeremy Deller has won.” Most of the show is about coal. And the typical display device is the vitrine table encasing Deller-esque folksy relics: Manifesta’s drawings of a self-improving miner’s sketch club or embroidery work which shows social deprivation during a time of high unemployment resemble Deller’s informal collections of amateur art found at British funfairs, motorcycle clubs, carnivals, and pop festivals.

My current computer desktop picture shows a piece of plyboard with the words “REVOLUTIONARY LIFE” elegantly hand-drawn on it, along with several imaginary book covers. It’s Argentinian artist Magdalena Jitrik’s contribution to Manifesta, described in the catalogue as “an overview in drawing form of the critical exchanges between Belgian writer and activist Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky on the fate of working class dissent in the Soviet Union”.
When I research this correspondence, it’s a rather sad affair. Which factions in the Spanish Civil War should be supported? Which comrades are bourgeois backsliders? Have popular uprisings in the Soviet Union been crushed mercilessly and then covered up? What schisms are afoot in the party? Has Serge betrayed Trotsky and become his enemy?
Jitrik herself shifts the focus from political bickering and wonders instead whether “art as a system of thought might not be able to replace political economy, such that the object of every organisation of society would be the enjoyment of free time”. The exact opposite of the Medina party line that base must determine superstructure! But easily reconciled if we say that Medina is talking about what is, and Jitrik about what might be. Aren’t these, in fact, the complementary jobs of critic and artist?
After seeing this show about Genk’s departed proletariat, I encounter the town’s current underclass in the form of old Turkish men frying meat on the street across the road and young Turkish teenagers riding off-road motorbikes, playing loud music, and flirting in the nature park beyond the abandoned mine head.
These immigrants are very different from the British coal miners I’ve been watching swinging picks in time to a Benjamin Britten score in Manifesta’s screening of Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1935 film Coal Face, an instance of what curator Medina calls “docu-Modernism” – a collision between avant-garde music, statistics, history, Modernism, Marxism and poetry. For a start, both Cavalcanti and Britten were gay, and these Turkish kids seem thoroughly hetero.

The contrast reminds me of why I describe myself only as an “emotional” communist and not a fully committed, pragmatic one. There’s an abiding mismatch between what leftist intellectuals think is good for the masses and what the masses think is good for themselves.
Marx called this the proletariat’s “false consciousness” and spoke of the day when a class-in-itself would become a class-for-itself. And, in that sense, we could call Marx an artist too: a man focused on what might be rather than what is.
Nick Currie is a writer and musician based in Osaka.