Re/aktion: Circulations

text by Judith Schwarzbart

A French filmmaker once put forward the suggestion that instead of making political films one should just make films political. What’s the difference he was seeking to bring out? And does it have any implications for art and other forms of creative praxis? What is the essential difference between doing political art and making art political?

The former can be construed as what happens when art can be seen as a direct input to political debate, i.e. on the premises and in a language defined by current political discourse. By contrast, making art political has to do with a transformation of art itself that is related to society and social concerns. It involves orienting creative activity and the power of the imagination towards conceptions of what is socially possible. Such was the aim of the avant-garde – but what relevance does it have today?

In an era during which politics is gradually being replaced by a form of social administration (a post-political era) where a mono-value system leaves other value systems high and dry and ethics is reduced to the Emir’s word for what’s Good and Bad – in any such era we need to improve the infrastructure for thought and action.
Qua cultural producers we are able to fashion other economies and, with other economies, other patterns of circulation.
How might we imagine other economies informing the patterns of human transaction?
A few years ago, a series of projects was run in London which in different ways sought to organize what they called “skill exchange” – the interchange of the sort of skills which, while normally linked to ordinary everyday tasks, still pose problems if you lack the necessary know-how.

Have your bike puncture mended in return for shoulder and neck massage, learn the secret of an Indian curry as the quid pro quo for pruning a fruit tree. Although the art projects have now been wound up, a couple of projects persist in the form of expanding networks involving ever more ‘skills’.

Could art be conceived as a species of circulation, not only of aesthetic objects, not only of postures but also of an insistence on the possible, on limitless ingenuity, on the sensibilities that bind one person to another, or to several?
Couldn’t we see art as engaged in canal construction – connecting isolated points, bypassing bureaucratic illogic and letting intuition roam at will across the landscape?

It is surely no coincidence that REACTION and CREATION are made up of the same constituents!