Essay

On Liberty and Death – Brad Haylock

We meet the world not with disdain, but with indifference — and regrettably so, for disdain would at least harbour a kernel of possibility. The spectacular is no longer read as such; everything before us is apprehended as mere information, as ocular data. There is no longer any point in looking in, behind or through. In the absence of the possibility of difference, one must give oneself over, either to the seduction of differentiation or to indifference. It is the latter that prevails, and yet the distinction here is moot regardless, for the former invariably devolves into the latter. We are beyond critique because we are beyond hope. All that remains is an acerbic and ever more self-indulgent storytelling.

Comprising a body of new work in a variety of media, Liberty and Death is a rumination upon the structural homogeneity of otherwise divergent ideologies, and an expression of the circularity or impasse of politics that this is understood to engender. This body of work takes as its point of departure a flag, specifically the anarcho-capitalist flag. At first sight, this yellow and black flag represents the ultimate paradox; the conflation of ideas that it signifies strikes us as irreconcilably contradictory. Upon reflection, however, or upon a closer inspection, synergies reveal themselves. Between these habitually opposed bodies of thought, similarities abound. Both espouse freedoms of the individual. Both are evangelical in their method. Both are premised upon the possibility of utopia.

The homogeneity of these divergent canons exposes the problematic of any utopian ideal. The title of the show, however, suggests a means of resolving this paradox, a conclusion to this line of inquiry: here, death is proposed not as an alternative to freedom but as its necessary equivalent, as the definitive and singular solution to an otherwise unanswerable question. And the works here echo or advance this sentiment with respect to artistic practice — this is, in no small measure, a commentary upon the politics of political art.

If you’re not against us, you’re with us announces an essential quality of politics, namely the impossibility of apoliticism or, in other words, the complicity inherent in non-dissent. This observation, however, is non-partisan, indeed too universal to be helpful. It represents critique without end, ambiguous in respect of both object and subject. Too photogenic, too consumable, it anticipates (or perhaps revels in) the consummation of politics.

Black on black (from zero form to absolute commodity) is perversely aspirational, hyperbolic. This work proceeds from a recognition of the seductive aestheticism of Malevich’s reductivist formal language and of the historical contingency of a radicalism of form. An unlimited edition, infinitely and indeed readily reproducible, Black on black wants to be the ultimate fetish object of political art.

Daydreaming about Utopia, by contrast, is perverse in its nostalgia, but also transitional in this body of work — transitional because a self-effacing sense of humour, and therefore some semblance of meaning, can be located in its title. No such revelation is proffered, however, in the case of the untitled champagne bottle. The incomplete redaction of the bottle’s label is clearly deliberate, the resultant flag unambiguous, but the meaning, the politics, of this work is indistinct. Likewise as regards the ink and graphite works on paper. These repeat the title of the exhibition, but unnecessarily, and their titles add insult to this injury. They are derived from found images selected, admittedly, for no reason deeper than the coincidence of certain words. They are to be read as art — their hand-drawn character tells us this —and political references abound, but their meaning is slippery. The champagne bottle and these works on paper thus comprise political art only insofar as they simulate political art. These works are deliberately polysemic, expressly overdetermined. In this way, they are proposed as a critique of critique, a fatal strategy.

 

References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Baudrillard, Jean (1990) Fatal Strategies, Semiotext(e), New York

—— (1996) The System of Objects, Verso, London and New York

Drutt, Matthew (2003) Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, Guggenheim Museum, New York