In this essay, we analyze an ongoing droitisation of contemporary art with a central focus on how far-right curators are striving to produce a counter-narrative of the ‹political artist›. Our case is the double-exhibition Political Art in Læsø Kunsthal (Denmark) and Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art (Poland) that was arranged through an anti-censorship art network – Passion for Freedom. Our unravelment of Political Art entails a certain acknowledgement of the art world’s own white noise, as the strategies of this exhibition for promoting far-right agendas consist of synthesizing global struggles of censorship, dissidence, and human rights along with the ‹institutional critique› originally developed by progressive artists and theorists. We further theorise how Political Art produces a universal aesthetic subject of ‹avant-garde outcasts› by manipulating the prevailing systems of distribution, interpretation, and marketing to produce symbolic violence. Recalling Walter Benjamin’s call to render «art theory useless for the purposes of fascism», our ambition is to neutralize or override this aesthetic subject – a neo-Nashist artist, as we will come to call it.^[1]

Our analysis takes shape as a hypothetical dialogue between a Generic Star Curator (GSC) and an extradisciplinary collective – the Organ of the Autonomous Sciences (OAS). The dialogue’s function is to confront the projections of academic-cultural discomfort when challenging the blind spots of the progressive art institutions. It is thus concerned with the inadequacy of contemporary art theory for identifying and disarming the new institutional critique of far-right artists, and how to specify these artists’ adherence to a peculiar «racial regime of aesthetics».^[2]

 

The Cases of Fascistoid Freedom-Mongering from 1962–2023 in Scandinavia and abroad 

Requiem

In our ongoing extradisciplinary research project on spectacular fascism within Scandinavia, we – the Organ of Autonomous Sciences – sometimes imagine a dialogue with a certain Idealtypus of the contemporary art world: the ‹Generic Star Curator› that is a mirror of our intellectual malaise.^[3] This GSC arises through a hypothetical conversation, or rather a series of allegations, posed by a cool, self-critical, educated, interesting, progressive and ‹woke› person, who can only address us with an eerily frozen set of gestures. Within our scenographic ruminations, we envision that this conversation could take place at a vernissage that we were accidentally invited to. After a drink, or five, and some chit-chat, the conversation takes a right-wing turn, so to say …

GSC: Why do you cater to a need for identifying a typology of a contemporary far-right artist? As you surely know, since the postwar years, art has been conceived as a crucial bulwark against the resurgence of authoritarianism. On this terrain, a fascist artist – even more a curator – remains a contradictio in adjecto. I’m going out on a limb here, but can you please explain what you mean when labelling something far-right or reactionary art?

OAS: We are not yet able to obtain proof of a genuinely fascist takeover of the art world. So how do we imagine – let alone fight against – the appearance of an international network of far-right artists with the power to access contemporary art spaces and influence popular opinion? How can we be more sensitive to the continuum between ‹ironic› flirtations with the alt-right and debates concerning artistic freedom of expression, as manifested in the controversies surrounding Dana Schutz’s Open Casket at the 2017 Whitney Biennial or the affirmation of the former theory-fiction-icon-turned-eugenicist, Nick Land, in certain environments, and the much broader illiberal and reactionary tendencies in our era of too-late capitalism? Drawing on the important attempts to answer this question, we are beginning to speculate whether – to phrase it a bit dramatically – we might be witnessing a certain ‹tipping point›.^[4] We see signals in the exhibition Political Art that was first displayed in 2019 at the iconic artist island in Læsø Kunsthal, and for the second time in 2021–2022 at a much larger scale, in Warszawa’s glorious Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art (fig. 1). Both exhibitions attracted wide audiences, public outrage, demonstrations, and security forces.

fig 1. Exhibition view from one of the rooms of “Political Art”, Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warszawa 2021, Courtesy Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Daniel Czarnocki.

 

Whereas we in our former research had targeted certain far-right practices that, indepted to the Scandinavian Situationist from the 1960s and 1970s, have employed an ensemble of aesthetic practices beyond the art institution, we now wish to confront the antipode to such demonolatry in how the acute societal fetishization concerning the autonomy of art has become an essential function for sanctioning and legitimizing far-right ‹provocations› in a format and extent hardly seen before. The cases of Læsø Kunsthal and Ujazdowski differ significantly from the familiar spectacles noted above, even from the more familiar and resembling case of the London gallery LD50, inasmuch as they outline a more programmatic – though still highly contradictory – agenda that through its conspiratorial critique of the elusive planetary conglomerate called ‹contemporary art› comes to delineate the emergence of a far-right artist - the neo-Nashist, as we have come to call it.^[5] Whereas even bourgeois journalists now discuss the cultural and superstructural significance and even style of the alt- and far-right, we think it is time to speak of the peculiar aesthetic subject underpinning this ‹program without a program›.

 

The Far-Right Institutional Critique

GSC: Cute and collected. But how do you define and qualify an exhibition as ‹far-right›, ‹fascist› or ‹reactionary›? And please don’t mention this ‹Rasmus Paludan› guy again; let’s admit, he’s not really an artist, even less a ‹contemporary› one, and should be ignored. Besides, aren’t you also conspiring, using the very methods of the far-right in a vague attempt to counter them? On what grounds do you fire these conceptual assaults? Are you looking at the artworks, their financial funding, explicit political orientations, or just some enigmatic and coincidental Freudian slip that you randomly read on Substack? You might successfully identify a few racist mockeries, but are you sure you’re not overstating the case entirely and thus contributing to the perverse sensationalism so beloved by the culture warriors?

OAS: The droitisation of contemporary art is today only in its becoming, and this necessitates that we are capable of oscillating between selecting empirical material and theorizing its conditions of possibility. By droitisation – or right-wing turn – we identify an ongoing ideological shift that structures the well-known reactionary strands of funding and economic power that underpins contemporary art. To be frank it surprises us you will not acknowledge the obvious fait sociaux, since your own advocacy group UKK (Danish Organization for Artists, Curators, and Art Mediators) publicly denounced the exhibitions due to its legitimization of the Law and Justice-party, and multiple of your artist friends already saw it necessary to boycott Læsø Kunsthal before the opening exhibition.^[6]

In 2019, Political Art opened its doors at the art gallery Læsø Kunsthal (fig. 2) on the disparate island Læsø, famous for its manufacturing of luxury salt for psoriasis patients, and for having served as an artistic shelter for the famous Danish artists Asger Jorn and Per Kirkeby. The exhibition attracted wide attention in Denmark with the announcement promising works of world-famous figures such as Ai Weiwei and Banksy (the former withdrew his work right before the opening) along with the street artist and Holocaust denier Dan Park, the so-called ‹penis artist› and candidate of the far-right party Hard Line Uwe Max Jensen, the Swedish artist and art critic Lars Vilks who were infamous for his cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, and more commercially successful figures in the Danish cultural field, the ‹provo artist› Kristian von Hornsleth, and the publicly respected author and performance artist Madame Nielsen. However, less attention was drawn to the foundational circumstance that the exhibition was arranged in collaboration with the network Passion for Freedom, which is a charity organization and active fighter against «religious terrorism» and various forms of censorship, a self-proclaimed «tight-knit sisterhood dedicated to their shared values of free expression, and the power of art to inspire, awaken and shake the world».^[7] The passionate agenda of this network evokes how the life of liberty remains the privilege of the modern idiot - that is, the Tocquevillain freemen, which Hannah Arendt has aptly demonstrated.^[8] Yeehaw!

fig 2. Exhibition view from Den Politiske Kunst, Læsø Kunsthal, 2019. Courtesy Læsø Kunsthal.
Photo by Jon-Eirik Lundberg

 

The distinctive curatorial feature of both Political Art exhibitions was to delineate a heroic image of the free-spirited ‹political artist›, an individualistic notion of political art. This is the artist whose creation resists cultural opinion, an agent who ventures to politics through a confrontation with systems of repression and silencing of higher powers. While contemporary art is «politically conditioned» and thus «involved in political art […]», the curator for the following Polish exhibition, Piotr Bernatowicz, argues, «nobody admits it», as they merely comply with dominant wokeism.^[9] Following that approach, both exhibitions very clearly identified the ‹politics› of Political Art beyond the representative content or formal experiments, even beyond any clearly demarcated ideological motivation. All references to political regimes served only as a formal abstraction. This peculiar formalism is what allows Lundberg and later Bernatowicz to assemble ‹dissident› artists from North Korea and Sweden, China and Denmark, Iran and England. Whether the coercive powers are the theocracy of Iran or the Western ‹cultural elite› amounts to nihil: it is a display of a tragic conflict surrounding these individuals’s passion for creative freedom that through a curatorial frame is cast as metaphysically threatened by some higher form of power.

GSC: Okay, so this is the curatorial scenery that largely belongs to both Læsø Kunsthal and Ujazdowski. But are you actually content to characterize this scenery as ‹far-right› already before the Polish exhibition whose mixture of cultural politics did the job for you, so to speak? While it would definitely be perverse to overlook the influence of explicit far-right artists such as Park and Jensen in the material planning of the exhibition at Læsø, do you really believe that the red thread of this exhibition – criticism of Islam – necessarily imposes a fascistoid or far-right element across all the singular works of Agnieszka Kolek, Banksy, Erik K. Christensen, Firozeeh Bazrafkan, Gongsam Kim, Kristian von Hornsleth, Lars Vilks, Lina Hashim, Mimsy, and even Madame Nielsen?

OAS: What interests us in the first place is: What kinds of ideological consequences and subjectivities can certain events produce? To ask this question requires a partial suspension of chronological order.

To stay with your pettiness, we would argue that to identify Political Art as far-right, we do not need to delve into the common threads and differences between, say, Mimsy’s photographs of Sylvanian toys being threatened by ISIS or photographs of dead martyrs dipped in blood, as in Lina Hashim’s Suicide Bombers. It is sufficient to look at the curatorial frame. In fact, Jon Eirik Lundberg responded to the allegations of facilitating a far-right agenda of islamophobic and even nazi artists with a very telling ‹solution›. As the election in Denmark was in full swing by 2019, Lundberg thought he could repel these allegations by asking the artists if they would take a so-called «candidate test».^[10] This revealed that the majority would vote for centrist politicians. Here, we must not only remember the continuum between neoliberal politics and authoritarianism, if not outright fascism, but also underline the irony of how the measure for discussing ‹political art› was reduced to an idiotic questionnaire devoid of ideological conflicts that was détourned from the cultural environment of a depoliticizing electoral campaign that viewed the so-called ‹democratic ritual› as a TV Quiz. Of course, we cannot dispute that particular artists have aligned with particular ideologies. But Lundberg’s individualizing, static, intention-based, and fundamentally asocial conceptual gestures led us to identify that the political or ideological convictions of certain artists are employed within the exhibition apparatus to crystallize a particular form of aesthetic subject – a neo-Nashist artist – who takes part in a planetary social, economic and political environment of rightwing show-off.

 

The Institutionalisation of a Nashist Aesthetics

GSC: I thought that your concept of neo-Nashism – that essentially relates the Situationist artist Jørgen Nash to the far-right politician Rasmus Paludan – was supposed to define extra-institutional practices. Are you not lazy to reuse it within the context of contemporary art?

OAS: The concept of Nashism was first conceived by Guy Debord to ‹callout› a sort of ‹reactionary› avant-garde that attempts to catch up with public appreciation and an authoritarian state apparatus. The dictum underlying this practical logic was that ‹provo art› could be seen as a form of practice that rather than critiquing the state and the society of the spectacle came to nurture it. This carries all sorts of implications for the historical transformation and recuperation of «institutional critique» and what has recently been called «infrastructural critique» or «infrastructural activism», but truth be told:^[11] we do not have a clue whether these far-right artists are really working for or against the institution. They are all mere sycophants who know by heart that complicity offers the ideal route to acknowledgement.

To review how a neo-Nashist artist manifests within the institutions of contemporary art, we ought not least to contest the conceptual alignment between freedom, transgression, and taboos.^[12] The taboo transgressed in the form of the Læsø exhibition is the taboo of ‹contemporary art›, of the alleged ‹cultural elite› from which the curator and some of the artists feel excluded. Thereupon the curator makes an exhibition of dissident ‹political artists› that transgressed the taboos of the ‹politically correct› contemporary art institutions that to a large extent were already transgressed – ceaselessly – by journalists, politicians, and the Danish state apparatus itself.^[13] Quite a thing, right? Bataille was right: the taboo and its transgression are fully interdependent. Now, the neo-Nashist artist performs an aesthetic transgression sanctioned from within its culture through a sense of autonomy that is only the Whitest variant of the existing «racial regime of aesthetics», to echo David Lloyd.^[14] This means that the neo-Nashists’ public ‹provocations› – a notion that now just serves as an aesthetic euphemism for racist or misogynic behaviour – always takes place through the discrimination and exclusion of ‹the Other› (Muslims, Black people, LGBT+, people with disability, women et cetera) by virtue of the sanctioning by some external authority such as curators, journalists, politicians or police officers.

The precondition for becoming a free aesthetic subject that elevates from contradiction and exploitation is merely the instantiation of symbolic or material violence.^[15] Here, any liberal counter-argument which insists that an entrance to the public sphere and the possibility of transforming oneself into an aesthetic subject is formally equal, will only amplify the violence of such «formal abstractions» and the aesthetic athletics of autonomy.^[16]

On this point, our aim is not to undermine the possibility of an artistic response to the brutality of terrorist groups like ISIS or Iranian theocracy. We merely problematize whether an exhibition including anti-Islamic artworks has transgressed any taboo in a country where – as a survey showed – around a quarter of the population thinks Muslims should be expelled.^[17] Going beyond the narrow confines of contemporary art, it is clear that the islamophobic nature of Danish culture and its state policies renders the status of the taboo inoperable, and thus undermines the story of these heroic artists’ (self-serving) passion for freedom.

 

The Inadequacy of Dialogism

GSC: I must admit that while you were speaking, something curious about the exhibition at Ujazdowski came to my mind. They used a work by this guy who some years ago made headlines through a neo-colonial Uganda art project, Kristian von Hornsleth, to advertise the event, right? A rather monstrous bust, as I remember, that seems to reference Caravaggio’s painting Medusa (fig. 3) of which two versions exist from 1596 and 1597 at The Uffizi. As Caravaggio replaced Medusa’s face with his own, thus foregrounding his artistic immunity to the gaze of the gorgon, Hornsleth uses his own head to stage himself as a kind of gorgon of contemporary art, or the protector of anything that is grim and dreadful.

fig 3. Exhibition poster for Political Art, Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warszawa 2021, facing Kristian van Hornsleth’s sculpture Head (2019). Courtesy Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Daniel Czarnocki.

 

OAS: We have come to think that the curatorial team chose Hornsleth’s work due to an intuitive assessment – a curatorial team which, besides Lundberg prominently consisted of the hyper-reactionary artistic director of Ujazdowski, Piotr Bernatowicz, who was elected by the Polish Ministry of Culture without competition for a seven-year period, in the latest example of the Law and Justice-party’s attempt to impose their neo-conservative agenda in the cultural field.^[18] The reference to Medusa was in this way prosaic: here the audience was confronted with a White, male, ‹politically incorrect› artist whose head was chopped off by the «cultural Marxists like us».^[19] Hornsleth’s visage is at once terror-inducing and a frozen physiognomy of someone who a few seconds before decapitation is confronted with his worst nightmare. As Hornsleth himself described it, the bust was to be seen as «a kind reminder of what happens to you when you get caught in a system you don’t like, so never abide to any kind of thought control, don’t let the fascist come to you, fight for whatever you want, and stay with it.»^[20] Following Freud who argued that the terror of Medusa is a terror of castration, the self-interpretation of and by Hornsleth rather introduces an afterimage of the act of castration. Here, however, Hornsleths head is devoid of the mitigating effect that, as Freud proclaimed, comes from recognizing that the (male) gaze is still in a possession of a penis. Confronting Hornsleths bust , the (male) gaze is instead invited to fight against the fact that it has lost its penis, that is, its world. Understood as a threat, a “kind reminder”, it is easy to detect in Hornsleths bust-with its unconscious appropriation of an of feminist rage and unrepresentability-an awakened desire for revenge.This post-phallic execution is directed towards an art world whose ideology, as Bernatowicz has described it, «goes hand in hand with the regime of Alexander Lukashenko».^[21]

GSC: In these changing contexts, it’s quite interesting to reflect upon how much has happened since Hornsleth’s Uganda Village Project in 2006, which they redisplayed at both Political Art exhibitions. The subtitle was: we want to help you but we want to own you. His work consists of a hundred photographs of villagers from Buteyongera who all show an ID card that proves that they legally have changed their last name to ‹Hornsleth› (fig. 4). Within this scheme, Hornsleth had traded each villager with domestic stock animals such as goats and pigs. I have just read his biography, and here he in fact reveals that the idea for the work was conceived by the business magnate Lars Seier Christensen (the brother to Peter Seier who founded the far-right political party Nye Borgerlige) at an intimate dinner party. Hornsleth was seeking suggestions for how he could «make an artwork of a human being» to which Seier proposed that he could get someone to change his name into ‹Hornsleth›. «People will do anything if they are poor. Why don’t you try with some Africans?» this tycoon allegedly added.^[22]

fig 4. Kristian von Hornsleth, Hornsleth Village Project Uganda, 2006, 110 C-type prints, installation view in Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warszawa 2021. Courtesy Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo by Daniel Czarnocki.

 

I remember that even the great Boris Groys lauded the work as a postmodernist play on identity in the age of indifferent welfare politics well beyond the end of history.^[23] Reviewing Hornsleth’s work within the context of these two exhibitions reveals such Hegelian recognition as wildly insensitive. Contemporary with Groys, the art historians Mathias Danbolt and Tobias Raun also pointed to how Hornsleth was rather performing a neo-colonial «aesthetic evangelism» (a notion originally coined by Grant Kester) as masked by the icon of an ‹avant-garde badass› – a performative play that came to function as a kind of trap for this type of art criticism whose aesthetic concept displayed the sermonic inclinations of academia.^[24] I think this trap is also why Hornsleth attracts you, right? But surely everything has changed? So, as we are reaching my time limit for this conversation, can you just shortly theorize Hornsleth’s ideological moodiness from his yuppie youth over futile plays on postmodernism to a viscous reactionary environment? Does it tell us something about what you so pompously dubbed the droitisation of contemporary art?

OAS: Falling into your trap, we have deemed that Hornsleth finally is caught by his own. Our intuition that Hornsleth incarnates all the banalities of evil was only bolstered by his participation in the opening performance at Ujazdowski where he body-painted Uwe Max Jensen as a ‹black man› after which Jensen slithered on the floor shouting «I can’t breathe».^[25] The problem now is not just a suppression of the ethical, and probably it never was. The problem is a Master-Subject peculiarly dressed as an autogenetic, sovereign and micro-fascist failed artist.^[26]

To remain with Hornsleth’s artistic immunity, and recalling Donatella Di Cesare’s thesis of «immunodemocracy», we posit that Political Art and its neo-Nashist artists suffer from what could be described as an immunological drift:^[27] their relentless passion for self-preservation empowers them to reproduce as Artist-Subjects that vigilantly expel, harass and subsume their subjugated subjects. The neo-Nashist artist is the illiberal, ‹avant-garde outcast› of the crisis in the so-called liberal western democracies; the formalist reflection of an Artist-Subject without qualities. In order to avoid castration and maintain the organic cohesion of their scrotums – that is, the ‹form› of the neo-Nashist ‹aesthetic subject› – the «aesthetic division of the human» between the sovereign modern subjects and their racialized and gendered subordinates is kept under close guard.^[28] The immunological, ‹formalist› drift endlessly fosters strategies, provocations, and artworks that reproduce the kakistocracy. If necessary, sovereign artists must simply become their subordinates in order to survive, even performing the castration itself. As such, Hornsleth incarnates the local village of Buteyongera as a pataverse mirror of Mark Zuckerberg’s global social network. This micro-fascist athletics treats everything and everyone as «formally identical».^[29]And as time flies, no one will notice anymore.

GSC: I must admit that I remain somehow unconcerned, and a bit puzzled about which words to use. But I can identify two options for your future work: either you become the custodians of these ‹avant-garde outcasts›, or you convince me to host a shooting tent like the Situationists in 1963 at Galerie Exi, Odense, where I allow you to massacre neo-Nashists as cardboard figures? So will you turn shit into gold, or fight fire with fire?

OAS: Those tasks are yours now. We will desert to the empyrean constitution of a Far Far Away.