55 Decoys and disruptions

Increasingly, today’s hegemonic cultural policies are becoming fascinated with and seduced by production models that are based largely on the spectacularisation of subjective production; on the trivialisation and subsequent mercantilisation of the discourses.

In this sense, the proliferation of museums, centres of contemporary culture and artistic events, forms part of a utilitarian vision of culture, where culture primarily operates as a feature for tourist promotion, urban reform or political propaganda, rather than a tool of social construction. As Catherine David says, the almost dominant consolidation of spectacle culture in the 1990s led to the abandonment of a cultural policy related to the production and transmission of social complexity, and with the critical building of an awareness of the faults and shortfalls in this society. The result was that cultural commitment —and the construction of citizenship— resigned en masse.

At a time when some artistic and cultural practices insist on legitimising conventional systems of representation, obstructing the visibility of other emerging forms, we wonder how and to what extent it is possible to think and act otherwise. A decidedly sacrificial — even agonic— character appears to be being imposed on certain cultural practices. But it is in this antagonism with the consensus of the prevailing political discourse that we can open up spaces for rethinking the subject relations, creating new forms and ways of essence and state. It is in this conflict between assimilation and resistance that we try to devise structures of social and collective production that accentuate the political perspectives of cultural practice. As Marius Babias says in his text, “despite a growing marginalisation, a form of artistic practice survives and continues to evolve which points to new possibilities of cultural resistance and the construction of critical networks in which ‘specific intellectuals’, in the Foucaultian sense, come together to form a genuine intellectual group which can direct its thoughts, actions and breaks independently”. Martha Rosler, from whom we have borrowed the title of this edition, also reveals her interest not only in the production, exhibition and dissemination of art work, but also in the social and political context that determines it.