What to Do
‘Today is always still.’ 1 Antonio Machado, Nuevas canciones (I9I7-I930)
‘Sit down, sit down, sit down. A path will always open up for you.’ Akira Kurosawa, To Live, 19 52
Where to start? And what to do? are the forceful questions that Lenin used as a title for an article and a political treatise he wrote in 1901 and 1902 respectively, in the context of social unrest that would lead to the Russian Revolution of October 1917- What Is To Be Done? is a programmatic work, a guide to action that signals the important role played by intellectuals as authors of theories and organisational proposals that, in the face of dispersal and hesitation, will put revolutionary actions into effect in the transformation of social structures.
Lenin, who conceived these essays during the years 1897 to 1900 when he was banished to Siberia for his activities against the tsarist regime, took the title What To Do? from a novel written in 1862 in prison by the Russian author, philosopher and revolutionary Nikolay Chernyshevsky. In 1868 Leon Tolstoy wrote What Should We Do?, a work that paraphrased the title of Cheryshevsky’s piece where he revealed his disagreement with the concept of private property, which he considered the source of inequalities. Tolstoy, who was inspired by the scientific socialism ofProudhon as much as by the poverty preached by the gospel, didn’t support violence as a method and dreamt of a pacifist revolution.
The phrase has in fact biblical echoes for it first appeared in the Gospel of Saint Luke (po-r4), where we learn that while John the Baptist announced the arrival of the Messiah and urged those listening him to ‘convert’, they replied ‘What should we do?’John’s discourse was addressed to three groups the poor, tax collectors and soldiers, and suggested specific actions be performed by each. The poor were invited to share their basic needs of food and clothing and practice ‘horizontal solidarity’, which would be complemented by the ‘vertical solidarity’ provided by the rich. Tax collectors, renown for their injustices and corruption, were exhorted to be honest and not demand higher taxes than those established. In their turn, soldiers were asked not to use their power and strength to obtain information and to make sure they didn’t seek extra benefits.
A pesar de pregonar la justicia social, tanto las religiones como las doctrinas de salvación posponen habitualmente el juicio para después de la muerte, mientras que las teorías y los movimientos de acción política priorizan la acción transformadora del presente. Sin embargo, los ideales –como la libertad, la igualdad y la fraternidad de la Revolución francesa (1789)– y los valores –como los recogidos en la Declaración de los Derechos Humanos (1948)– se siguen ignorando hoy en un contexto en el que los intereses económicos se imponen a cualquier otra consideración.
In spite of proclaiming social justice, religions and doctrines of salvation usually postpone judgement until after death, whereas political theories and movements prioritise actions that transform the present. Nevertheless, ideals (such as those of liberty, equality and fraternity declared by the French Revolution in 1879) and values (such as those announced in the Universal Declarationof Human Rights in 1948) continue to be ignored today in a context in which financial interests prevail over any other consideration. In the realm of art, the statistics drawn up by the Guerrilla Girls activist group founded in New York in 1985 are quite revealing. Their intervention at the 2005 edition of the Venice Biennale warned of the fact that the year the international art event was founded, r895, female participation was only 2% and a hundred years later, in 1995, it had only crept up to 8%. The Venice Biennale also exemplifies the unequal distribution of wealth on a global scale, as pointed out by artist Santiago Sierra in his project entitled Altavoces / Loudspeakers (2005): that year the countries that enjoyed a national pavilion of their own in the privileged space of the Giardini corresponded to 24% of the world’s population and produced 83% of the gross world product (the sum of the gross national product of all countries in the world), whereas those countries represented outside of the Giardini area corresponded to 34% of the world’s population and produced a mere 9% of the gross world product. As regards those countries not represented at the Biennial, they corresponded to 42% of the world’s population and produced 8% of the gross world product.
The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 entailed, in symbolic terms, the death of the tradition of revolutionary utopias, and the decade of the nineties witnessed the triumph of global capitalism that has merely resulted in growing differences between an increasingly powerful oligarchy and a working population progressively impoverished and enslaved. The myth that one day the oppressed classes will rise up and rebel doesn’t tally with the new and sophisticated forms of control and explOitation, and the relevant question is how will the collective indignation be channelled in order to combat mechanisms of repression and rhetoric that are to an increasing extent foreign to the interests of the majority. Today, as stated by Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek, the concepts of revolution and truth are ‘zombies’-living dead. Education and critical information are key elements when it comes to confronting the reigning relativism and confusiononly through them may we be able to define the lines of action that will guide our individual and collective behaviour. This could perhaps explain why the privatisation of education is still used as a form of segregation that keeps individuals tied to the social class into which they were born.
Each individual has his or her own horizon -the line that establishes their vision of reality starting from the physical, geopolitical and cultural position of their own body. This is the personal territory in which conscious and unconscious energies, public orders and private aspirations are articulated. The personal is profoundly political, and the idea of revolution begins in oneself. Changes in subjective consciousness have a transformative power and can be determined by the awakening of critical awareness, by an existential epiphany or by the experience of an extreme situation, as narrated by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa in his film To Live, of I952, or as proven by people who have survived wars or the Holocaust, like French diplomat and writer Stephane Hessel.
Set at the time of American military custody of Japan after World War Two, Kurosawa’s film tells the story of a civil servant working at a corrupt local administration office performing the same bureaucratic tasks day in, day out. When he finds out he has cancer he undergoes a personal transformation that leads him to experiences he would not otherwise have dreamt of. A drunken Mephistophelian poet guides him as he explores the night and its pleasures, he falls in love with a woman much younger than he is, and in order to help a group of women threatened by property speculation he challenges the local mafia, that were about to take over the only square in which they could play with their children. Asked by one of the mobsters whether he is afraid of them he remains silent, although his gaze betrays the inner transformation that has led him to find new strength to resist.
Stephane Hessel, a member of the group of men who in I948 drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, revealed how after having survived confinement in Nazi concentration camps he believed in the importance ofleading committed lives. In his book Time for Outrage (20n) he appealed to the idea ‘to create is to resist, to resist is to create.’
In this sense, art as a form of knowledge, as a channel of analytic and poetic interpretation of reality can be a form of resistance against uniform, stereotyped and fetishistic thinking. While it is true that artistic creations are goods and have an exchange value, it is also true that if their use value is prioritised they can bring about transformative cognitive and emotional experiences. This has been one of the chief objectives of the series entitled What To Ihink and What To Desire, and is the leitmotif of What To Do, the show that brings the series to a close.
We know that an exhibition is a symbolic construction in a specific space, a temporal landscape in which formal and conceptual associations between different works, bound together by a revelatory syntax, suggests a discourse that articulates our sensory perception, thoughts and emotions. What To Do doesn’t formulate direct slogans or advice for action, but displays plastiC exercises and ideological explorations capable of encouraging individual and social transformation. The ‘artefacts’ made by artists -be they videos, sculptures, installations, paintings, photographs or ephemeral actions-resonate more or less, according to the vital and political objectives of each interlocutor.
The proposals in this selection reveal how certain artists reposition their body in accordance with the parameters, the forms, and the structures (physical, social, visible and invisible) that shape our environment. They offer us devices that guide us through the chaos of storms. They help us trace the family genealogies that are at once protective and stifling. They challenge the notions of mental health and madness, ask themselves where such categories come from and how the institutions that regulate them are set up. They signal how repression, censorship and the loss ofliberty of those who question prevailing order are organised, and point out how reconstruction and reconciliation should be managed so as to alleviate pain. For justice requires a critical reinterpretation, an updating of the thoughts, emotions and values that help us reformulate the questions ‘Where do we start?’ and ‘What do we do?’ As Beckett asserted, we must start at the beginning over and over: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
By assembling these works temporarily around an idea and connecting them through likenesses and contrasts, the exhibition becomes a magnetic field with zones of varying intensity that offers us a plac( in which to project our concerns and awaken our conscience. By launching convincing messages, it suggests meaningful itineraries and perspectives for the gaze and for the intellect, revealing that we all breathe a common atmosphere and stressing the fact that when we think, desire or do, we are not alone.
