From White Cube to Black Block

In the Western world, post-1945 and contrary to the political appropriation of the topic during the Third Reich and in the Eastern Bloc countries, the consensus was that Modern art was abstract art. To exaggerate the case polemically: it was limited to spreading color on canvases and to the formal design of objects that stood only for themselves and were presented in a neutral gallery space – the White Cube. This unilateral thrust was the product, or so it later emerged, not only of committed efforts by Modern artists such as Willi Baumeister, who defended Modernism, for example, against cultural historian Hans Sedlmayr and artist Karl Hofer, but also of organizations such as the Congress of Cultural Freedom, financed and directed by the CIA. The fact that modern art was considered progressive also had to do with the fierce opposition put up by conservative circles.The same pieces that once kindled utopian expectations are now to be found as precious objects decorating the walls of bank offices and private residences. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the counter-model disappeared – the model from which Western art had sought to set itself off. Artists from other parts of the world demanded entry to an art system whose preconditions they did not always share. The purported end of history also created a political vacuum. In a media world dominated by particularist interests there is no appropriate representation of key problematic issues. In the functional systems of politics, business, science, and law, which according to Niklas Luhmann obey distinct intrinsic logics of their own, over-arching issues do not get considered.These disastrous trends can only be countered in two areas: in civil society and in art – or at least insofar as the latter has exited the White Cube and intervenes in social processes. In this case, art and activism blend seamlessly. Art is intended to render things visible, to question existing visual worlds and create new ones. Artistic activities can support citizens’ initiatives and NGOs or function independently: with performances in public spaces or employing a variety of media such as video, photography, comics, blogs, or Street art. Images from other regions of the world round out a person’s local experiences, for which there is no substitute as a reality check. During the protest movement against the railway and urban development project centering on the restructuring of Stuttgart’s main railway station (“Stuttgart 21”), the art group SOUP (Stuttgarter Observatorium urbaner Phänomene [Stuttgart’s observatory of urban phenomena]) set up a container in the Mittlerer Schlossgarten park, in close proximity to the station. Attached to an older artwork, Thomas Lenk’s Stuttgarter Tor [Stuttgart’s Gate], it initially functioned as a camera obscura, which – once the eyes had spent about 20 minutes adjusting to the darkness – revealed the station tower standing upside down. Yet over and above its metaphorical implications, before long the container was called Unser Pavillon [Our Pavilion] and functioned as the hub of the civil protest movement. A key factor in this was the darkness of the Black Box, that quality of not-yet-knowing how things will pan out. Independently of this, the artist duo Bankleer also focused on this process in one of their pieces. Referring to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, several actors concealed inside a cube made of black fabric took part in a demonstration in Aarhus on 1 May 2008. From inside the cube came the sounds of choirs and horns, although no players were visible. The “Black Block” toyed with the threatening dimension that uncontrollable protests possess for those in power: an image of the intrinsic momentum of civil movements that are open-ended.