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The Politics of Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Politics in Barcelona Roger Sansi Universitat de Barcelona/ Goldsmiths University of London.

1. The Paint Attack.

The 6th of October 2006, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), in Spain, suffered the “fury of a group of people out of control” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMSYzVL8ZeM), who threw missiles of paint to the façade of the museum. The missiles didn’t break any window, and nobody even tried to break-in the museum. Still, the visual impact of the colour paint on the glass and white surface of the museum was quite clear. The MACBA is a pristine, spotless modernist building, its cleanliness is almost uncanny: in more than a decade, I have never seen it tagged, in spite of being surrounded by old dark buildings covered in graffiti. I often wondered if the museum has a special brigade of cleaners working really early in the morning to erase any stain that may sully it’s shining walls. But that evening, the pure white cube was under attack. The reporter actually says, “ it seems that the main problem is the painting”. Seeing the museum splattered in colour was a shock. Who were these “people out of control”? According to the

police, they were “Okupas”, squatters, splitting away from a spontaneous demonstration that had taken place earlier in the evening. The demonstration started about half a mile away from MACBA, in another section of the Old Town of Barcelona, as a reaction to the police occupation of a plot of land. This plot of land, popularly called “El forat de la vergonya”, the Hole of Shame, was the last empty plot left in the Old Town. The plot had been used as a small garden and a playground by the neighbours. The morning of the 6th of October of 2006, without previous consultation, the city council started to “urbanise” the plot under massive police protection. This resulted in the outrage of the neighbours that used the plot, and a demonstration that walked down from the plot to the city centre, and from there, to MACBA. The attack to MACBA resulted in the detention of two people, accused of public disorder, damage to public property and aggression to public authority. But they were quickly absolved, since the police had no proof of their participation in the event. In fact the very identification of the authors of the “missiles” with squatters was never proved. To this day the authors of the paint attack to MACBA remain anonymous. In any case, the media explicitly made the connection between the demonstration and the paint attack to MACBA; and as a result a local protest that wouldn’t have had much coverage ended up having a wide public repercussion. Furthermore, the European summit on housing that had to be celebrated in Barcelona some weeks later, was cancelled because of fears of public

disorder. Why would a local neighbourhood demonstration end up throwing paint at MACBA? According to the anthropologist Manuel Delgado, MACBA is not just a contemporary art museum, but a symbol of the process of gentrification and “Artistification” of the city (Delgado 2008). MACBA is the White Elephant, o perhaps the Troy Horse, which started the process of urban transformation of the Old Town of Barcelona in the nineties into a “radical chic”, bohemian, artistic heaven. According to Delgado, this process has been essentially directed from the top down, without direct consultation to the neighbours. The “Hole of Shame” was the last bit of the city that escaped from Artistification; according to him, the demonstrators spontaneously linked alpha and omega, beginning and end of the process, and some ended their demonstration throwing paint at MACBA.

2. The Agencies.

Paradoxically, and perhaps interestingly, the museum’s self-image is the radical opposite. Since the turn of the century, the MACBA defined itself as a centre of political activism opposed to “capitalism”, “globalisation” and “gentrification”, a focus of counterculture that promoted practices of direct action very similar to those that were directed against the very museum that evening in 2006. The MACBA opened in 1995 in the Raval, back then a poor,

dilapidated neighbourhood in the Old Town of Barcelona. The building was commissioned to the American architect, Richard Meyer, who claimed to have designed a building in response to its historical environment, but in fact produced an international modernist white cube structure, in brutal contrast to the dark and old nineteenth century tenements of the area. In front of the Museum a big, empty square was unfolded to “lighten up” or “sponge” the densely populated neighbourhood. The MACBA was clearly following the model of the Pompidou in Paris, as a “catalyst for the regeneration” of the neighbourhood. The “container” of the museum was defined very clearly since its origin, but the content, not so much. When Manuel Borja Villel became the director of the museum in 1998, he had the clear idea that the museum had to engage with radical politics. But at the beginning, what this engagement would entail was not totally clear. On the one hand, Borja (as I will call him from now on) organised exhibitions of 1970ies political art. Together with these exhibits, Borja and his team also proposed projects that would “rearticulate the relation between the museum and the city” (Ribalta 2010: 225). The first project was the workshop “Direct action as one of the Fine Arts”. This workshop was explicitly organised in response to the events of Seattle in 1999 and the public emergence of the anti-globalisation movement. The objective of the workshop was to create a platform of coordination of the movement in Barcelona. Its immediate result was a project called “Las Agencias”, the Agencies, in 2001. The Agencies

were set up some months before the World Bank meeting programmed for June 2001 in Barcelona. According to Jorge Ribalta, Head of Public Programs of MACBA, Las Agencias had a central role in the organisation of the counter-summit, in particular “designing communication strategies and public visibility that transformed the methods of the anti-capitalist movements in the city” (2010:235). These strategies of public visibility were developed on various fronts: a media agency that constituted the base of the local Barcelona Indymedia website; a bar in the ground level of the museum, that was used as a “relational space” by different political collectives to organise actions; and in particular, a workshop that developed a line of “fashion” to be used in demonstrations ( Prêt a Revolter) and “photographic shields” to be used in demonstrations, “Art Mani” ( playing with the words “art: and “demonstration”, “manifestacion” or “mani” in Spanish). Las Agencias were formed by various activist collectives like La Fiambrera Obrera (http://www.sindominio.net/fiambrera/) from Madrid, who took charge of the bar, and Ne Pas Plier (http://www.nepasplier.fr/) from France, who was a source of inspiration for the demonstration artwork. Another source of inspiration were the Italian group Tute Bianche, white overalls. Both Ne Pas Plier and Tute Bianche were born in the nineties proposing alternative forms of organising political demonstrations. Highly inspired by art practices, their objective was to rely on visual shock rather than actual physical confrontation. Tute Bianche, white

overcoats, presented themselves as a “block” wearing white, in a sign of peace and non-violence, but at the same time they could be seen as a threat because of their organised uniformity. Las Agencias were building on these ideas; Pret a revolter proposed to dress up in very colourful, carnivalesque clothes designed for direct actionpaddled to offer protection from physical attack. The objective, in their own terms, was to provide clothes for direct action but also for direct representation (http://leodecerca.net/proyectos/pret-arevolter/). Art Mani had a very similar objective: the posters displayed high quality, big sized images of children and Zapatistas without any written slogans, looking more “art” than demonstration posters. Both Art Mani and Pret a revolter had two objectives: one, confusing the police with a non-aggressive, Carnivalesque, arty appearance, and two, creating a good, positive image of the movement for the general public. Because of the massive mobilisations that had been foreseen, the Word Bank summit in June 2001 was finally cancelled. But the anti-summit demonstration wasn’t cancelled. There the Tute Bianche group used the Art Mani posters. The demo of June 24th 2001 ended up with the police chasing back some demonstrators to the MACBA, and the MACBA Bar/ Activist centre was smashed to pieces. As a result, the director of the museum, under direct pressure of the local authorities, had to cancel the project. Still, Las Agencias participated actively in the demonstrations against the G8 summit of July that same year in Genoa. But Genoa was also a moment of crisis. The

extremely violent police repression of the demonstrations in Genoa, where one young man was killed and many injured, questioned the effectiveness of “arty” approaches. The dominant images of Genoa were violent police and “ Black Blocs”. The Tute Bianche and people like Las Agencias were almost ignored by the media. After Genoa, the Tute Bianche group went into crisis, and disintegrated. Las Agencias, without an institutional base at MACBA, were also disbanded.

3. Dissent.

After this abrupt ending, MACBA entered in a phase of in-depth discussion on what it meant exactly to work on the “edge” of art and politics. The work of Jacques Rancière, could perhaps provide some answers. In May 2002 , Rancière was invited to give a series of talks at MACBA : “ Aesthetics and Politics, a bond to be reconsidered”1. Rancière discussed amongst other things, the relation between art spaces and their context- Art “inside” and “outside” the Museum. Rancière questioned this very topography that separates the “inside” from the “outside” of the museum, and the assumption that this separation is a problem to solve- the museum has to “reach out” of the museum. This “reaching out” is a result the notion that the museum as a public institution has to create “consensus”. There, Rancière radically disagrees: for him the political function of the art 1

Published as Sobre Politicas Esteticas (2005)

space is to “discover new forms of dissent, ways of fighting against the consensual distribution of authorities, spaces and functions” (Rancière 2005: 76). The art space has to create dissent, as opposed to consensus, which produces a clear separation of responsabilities and authorities. The art space has to question these separations. This notion of dissent, or disagreement, became the title of MACBA’s next big exhibit, Desacuerdos, Disagreements. But disagreements on what grounds? Desacuerdos proposed to challenge the historiography of contemporary Spanish art, aspiring to propose a “countermodel”. Together with the exhibit, it involved a massive “research” project, conferences and texts (The catalogue is a four volume publication, and it doesn’t have many pictures). And yet, it very clearly restricted itself to a “disagreement” within the art world and its particular narratives. In this sense, the MACBA had clearly retreated from the “Outside”- even if for Ranciere, it doesn’t really make sense to make these distinctions. By 2006, the director of the Museum, Borja Villel, could explicitly say that the Museum had moved on from its “activist” past. “ We are not withdrawing from the political dimension of artistic practice, but we are emphasising more knowledge and poetics (…) This doesn’t imply (…) a renounce to politics (…) but to rethink the politics from the poetics” ( A-Desk). In another interview, to justify this connection of poetics and politics, Borja makes reference to Rancière - who said that human beings are political animals because they are literary animals (ARTELEKU, 2003:46).

Some months after this interview, MACBA was attacked by that group of people “Out of control”. a “prank”, a “joke”. And as I mentioned, the official reaction was not of bemusement: the suspension of an European summit on housing and real state that had to take place in Barcelona a month latter. For the second time in a few years, the MACBA was at the origin of the suspension of a major “power” event in the city, even if this time, involuntarily. Not only the MACBA had changed from 2001 to 2006. The city had changed. The Irak war and the terrorist attacks to Madrid had produced massive mobilisations in 2002 and 2003. One still could say, by then, that these mobilisations were directed to an external enemy: globalisation, American imperialism, etc. Barcelona could still present itself as a “radical chic” city, with art museums that hosted anti-globalisation activists. But by 2006 the enemy became much more explicitly internal. The transformation of Barcelona into a tourist destination with very expensive real state was starting to affect the everyday life of its citizens directly, who started to be unable to pay their mortgages and rents. The Barcelona model of which many felt proud in the early nineties became the enemy. The consensus started to crack down. The attack to MACBA in 2006 was nothing but another example of the growing distance between political activism and the institutions that once claimed not just to support it, but to promote it.

4. Concluding. On Political subjects and Aesthetics.

I know this is a recurrent cliché, but as Marx said, history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. This means that history never actually repeats itself, but when an event seems to repeat a previous one, we have to think about their differences. Two major international political summits were cancelled in Barcelona in 5 years. Both cancellations had to do, somewhat, with events of “public disorder” around the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona. The first time the public disorder was a direct result of “ The Agencies” of the museum. The second time around the museum seems to be not so much the agent but the victim of the attack. And yet, some argued, ultimately this attack was motivated by the museum itself, and what it stood for: “Artistification”. The second time MACBA was the object of playful attack of a group of people that performed very similar actions to the “direct representation” that the Agencies had proposed some years before, but there wasn’t any pretense of making “Art”. The event was improvised, it wasn’t the result of a carefully planned artistic project, and the “authors”, the “people out of control”, could not be identified. What would Rancière say of the attack to MACBA? I doubt he would disapprove; like other people in the art world, he would appreciate the iconoclastic “prank”. Perhaps he would appreciate its aesthetic dimension: its intention was not just to attack the museum but to create an image, the image of the pure white museum splattered in colour. Both events could be described as having an

effect: the cancelation of two European summits nonetheless! And yet to reduce these events to its supposed political effects wouldn’t be enough .From Rancière’s perspective, more than the particular political effects of aesthetics, what is important is the emergence of political agents through aesthetics (Rancière 2008). I agree with Rancière’s questioning of the reduction of aesthetic events to their effects, but perhaps for a different reason. Rancière holds that an aesthetic event is important because a political subject emerges out of it. I am not so sure this is always the case. Rancière describes political subjectivation, I quote, as “ the process through which those who don’t have a name, attribute themselves a collective name, which they use to re-name and re-qualify a given situation” (…)“a collective of enunciation”( Rancière 2005: 83). In my understanding, this may work for the first “Art” events – in which collectives like Tute Bianche (re)present themselves clearly as political subjects. But not so clearly in the second event, which was much more murky and ambiguous: its authors reject any explicit identification, any affirmative “aesthetics”. Still, this rejection of “the aesthetic” can be seen as an aesthetic, a device that produces images, but perhaps images closer to the black bloc than to the Tute Bianche. And as my colleage David Graeber said recently, the black bloc is not a collective, but a tactic, a tactic of anonymity. This is a political subject that resists being identified, recognised, represented. The attack to MACBA didn’t have an author, it couldn’t be identified with any particular collective. The basis of its “affective” (not just

“effective”) power is being unidentifiable, unrecognisable, “out of control”. The power of an amorphous “mob” that emerges out of nowhere in a glimpse, as it were, incorporating the “mood” of the city speaking to itself- as an affect, an internal convulsion. Can we explain this affect in Rancière’s terms? I am not so sure.

Bibilography. A-Desk, “ Entrevista a Manuel Borja-Villel, director del MACBA”, No7, 04-09-20006 A-desk.org Arteleku 2003 ”Entrevista a Manuel Borja director del MACBA, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona” Zehar Nº51, p.46 Delgado, Manuel 2008 “ La Artistización de las Políticas urbanas” X Coloquio Internacional de Geocrítica Rancière, Jacques, 2005 Sobre Políticas Estéticas. MACBA, Barcelona --2008, Le Spectateur Émancipé. La Fabrique editions, Paris. Ribalta, Jorge 2010 “Experimentos para una nueva institucionalidad” Objetos Relacionales, MACBA, Barcelona.