The year in art: in 2024, museums and galleries were unable to reconcile art and life, and so ended up saying nothing at all
I went to church at the beginning of the year. Not because of any moral, emotional or existential crisis. And not out of habit. I was there to hear a sermon, preached before an altar (though that bit was accidental). The preacher – Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra – was only using this pulpit because the one he’d originally intended to use, at London’s Barbican Centre, had been denied him. Mishra’s talk (part of the London Review of Books’s Winter Lecture Series) was titled ‘The Shoah After Gaza’, which seemed to form the basis for its last-minute cancellation by the Barbican’s management team. You might interpret their decision as an admission of the Barbican’s inability to deal with any discussion of complex or sensitive issues. Although, in a couple of half-hearted mea culpas after the fact, the Barbican’s management suggested that trying to deal with these issues – which it linked to a duty of care – was the reason it had been ‘forced’ to cancel the talk. It seemed like a circular type of argument: that it couldn’t deal with difficult subject matter because thinking about how to deal with difficult subject matter was too difficult. Which is, by and large, how much of the ‘debate’ in the artworld went this past year: finding more-or-less radical ways of saying nothing; all the while foregrounding the idea that it was trying to say something. Because people today do expect art to say something. And about something more than aesthetics. About issues like social or environmental justice; about how bombing people into oblivion is wrong (or even, from some perspectives, right); about the lopsided economies of visibility or attention. About inclusion, about diversity… well, I think you’re all very familiar with all that, given that you’re the ones demanding it.
At the same time, we live in an age when saying something might get a person defunded, deplatformed or, more generally, cancelled. By the time of Mishra’s lecture that had already happened to artists such as Ai Weiwei and Candice Breitz, curators such as Ranjit Hoskoté and the entire Documenta panel tasked with finding the German art jamboree’s next artistic director. After Mishra’s lecture, a number of artists (or estates of artists, or lenders) withdrew work from the Barbican’s then-ongoing group exhibition Unravel (about the ‘power’ and ‘politics’ of fibre art) in solidarity with the ‘militant’ Indian and in protest against the Barbican’s suppression of free speech. Although such solidarity didn’t seem to extend to many of them subsequently attending the lecture itself; still, you can’t be everywhere and perhaps it’s the thought that counts. Isn’t that the ‘lesson’ of conceptual art? Nevertheless, similar themes continue to resonate around the artworld today in episodes such as the very recent, very public debate between artist Nan Goldin and Neue Nationalgalerie director Klaus Biesenbach, about who has the right to say what about what (particularly when that second ‘what’ is Israel) and in what context, at the opening of her retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in November. The institution seemed to wish to distinguish between the artist (and her views on genocides in Gaza and the bombing of Lebanon) and her art; Goldin insisted they could not. Which, if you’re into such things, might suggest a more fundamental discussion about the nature of curating. But that might risk losing sight of the fact that the real issue relates to the wrongs of bombing people into dust.
Looking back over his career after picking up the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2005, the late British playwright Harold Pinter described, in his acceptance speech, the difference between being an artist (which, for him, meant being a writer) and being a citizen. It’s a distinction that could well be applied to the Goldin–Biesenbach debate. The creation of art, Pinter said, relies on the fact that something can be both true and false at the same time; but, for the citizen, it must, necessarily, be either one thing or the other. Art seeks to come to terms with the fact that truth is elusive or malleable; while to live a purposeful life you must adhere to certain absolute truths. Or, the first describes the difficult search for what the second requires. When Indian writer Arundhati Roy picked up the Pen Pinter Prize in London this October (awarded to a writer who, as Pinter put it, shows ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’), she resolved the question of any distance between art and life by asserting much the same thing as Goldin: “I am what I write”. That, in turn, was a sentiment echoed by Glasgow-based artist Jasleen Kaur when she picked up this year’s Turner Prize at Tate Britain, complaining in her acceptance speech that she wanted “the separation between the expression of politics in the gallery and the practice of politics in life to disappear.” And that she wanted “the institution to understand: if you want us inside, you need to listen to us outside”. That this was an event where the whooping and applauding seemed at times entirely orchestrated and manufactured for television audiences seemed only to enhance the point about art institutions paying lip-service to reality rather than being a part of it. Reinforcing the common-sense idea that art is mainly about appearances. And making you wonder (assuming you were at the event itself) if you were part of some terrible theatre play. Perhaps written by Pinter.
The point of all this is that most art institutions, museums and galleries turn out to be inept at dealing with complex issues. At the Barbican Centre, this concerned the use and abuse of the Holocaust as a propaganda device, which Mishra wove together with his own upbringing within the context of a family of Hindu nationalists (more specifically, he said, a grandfather who admired the lethal way in which Israel dealt with Muslims, as an example for contemporary Indian policies). It was a reference that seemed to bring things to a more personal, relatable, less abstract level (which art people see as a good thing because it signals that you have skin in the game and are not colonising someone else’s issues). While in fact, it actually expanded the argument to implicate the actions of the contemporary nationalists who are running India today and seek to make ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindu’ the same thing – in order, really, to insist that non-Hindus, particularly Muslims, are not the same thing. The lecture, then, was exemplary in its tactics. If a little long, and perhaps a little too selective in the ‘evidence’ it drew upon. But who doesn’t do that last?
By the end of the year (or October, also during Frieze Week) Mishra had gone from deplatformed to replatformed and was delivering a similar (if perhaps more nuanced) lecture to a whooping, ovating audience at London’s Southbank, under the auspices of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (which likes to bill itself as the Global South’s premiere art event and to big up its hometown as a communist heartland, which, of course, Kerala is) and the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation (which operates in solidarity the ambitions of the former and far beyond the cartographic limits of Bangladesh). And, consequently another kind of religious experience, via a background narrative of the global majority taking centre stage in the heart of the global minority’s temples of art. That narrative taking place in the background, perhaps, made the issues that led to Mishra’s earlier lecture being cancelled altogether more tolerable now.
On the subject of redemption, looking at the overlooked, giving power to the powerless, is, of course, other things that art’s supposed to be about these days. Take this year’s Venice Biennale, titled Foreigners Everywhere and curated by Adriano Pedrosa. In it, Pedrosa did his own preaching, emphasising the fact that he was picking artists who hadn’t previously been picked for the biennial as a result of (it was implied) racism, sexism, colonialism, ableism, homophobia and various other prejudices. Which felt as reductive (like a salon des refuses in which the artists are connected by their shared rejection) as it was intended to be expansive. It remained unclear what truth was being driven at here: that curating was about making choices (just as much as is censorship)? That the artworld has been and is governed by prejudice? That all expression is good expression? That art is everywhere if you can just be bothered to open your eyes and look? That one people are naturally inclined to suppress the cultures of other people? That you can’t understand or connect to everyone? It was like a practice in search of a theory. Particularly during the exhibition’s opening week, when this all-inclusive exhibition launched with a series of exclusive parties, hosted by collectors, fashion brands and Western art institutions, with free drink, free food, free concerts, free shoes (sometimes) and a general freedom from any of the ideas that the biennale purported to be championing. Business as usual, then, for the artworld. Perhaps, in the end, the whole thing was a demonstration of Friedrich Nietzsche’s rather more maudlin aesthetic theory: ‘we have art in order not to die of truth’.
So is there a message that we might take away from art in 2024? The honest answer is probably no. But for those of you who can’t live with that then perhaps it might go something like this: in today’s world we don’t need art; we need truth. And only when art drives towards truth do we need it.
