Performing Politics - Posing the question

 

What can we mean nowadays, be it in theatre, in performance or fine art, when we talk about making art politically? Throughout the last decade a range of explorations within the arts on the fringes of large institutions attest to a renewed interest in the questions that have survived the 20th century and its catastrophes, posing questions pertaining to ‘the political’ as well as to politics and political intervention. On the whole these works of art are characterized by notions such as ‘back to reality’, or the contention of an ‘antipode to power’ or a renewed examination of the guiding principles of revolutionary movements’ of the past.

And if, following the return of ‘the political moment’ into the arts, a radical uncertainty can be observed within all these experimentations as to what might - considering our experience of the 20th century - be a pertinent form to describe the liaison between art and politics then this is matched in notable cases by the conclusion that the price we pay for a seamless continuance of those forms of political art derived from the 20th century is the epigone.

Investigating ways - in line with Godard’s proposal - of making art politically instead of making political art can be seen as the (smallest) common denominator of the ideas and the work that the Hamburg International Festival has since it was re-established has offered up for discussion.

It is as a place for comprehensive encounter with work of this kind that the festival has over the past years established itself and now the Hamburg International Summer Academy is launching an attempt to make discursive what has already manifested itself in the ideas as well as the work of invited artists - endeavouring at the same time to form a connection between this inherent theory and the accepted wisdom of other theories that attempt in similar ways the critical dialogue with present day social reality.