25th Anniversary Reflections: From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: A Look Back at Marina Gržinić’s Interview with Maja and Reuben Fowkes, 2012
ARTMargins Online is celebrating 25 years! To mark the occasion, the editors invited past ARTMargins Online authors and other writers from the region to select one article from AMO’s online archive of more than 1000 texts, providing a brief introduction that highlights the chosen item’s continued relevance. ARTMargins Online published its first article on January 15, 1999. Today, the publication is one of the largest online archival resources for contemporary art from East-Central Europe and beyond. Our reflection project celebrates AMO’s 25 years, but it also aims to highlight our unwavering commitment to promoting research, criticism, and artistic projects that advance our understanding of contemporary art from the region in a critical global perspective.
I was first introduced to the influential concept and theory of necropolitics while attending the “Writing in the Humanities after the Fall of Communism” summer school at the Central European University more than a decade ago. As a young student trained in more conservative art historical approaches and discourses, Achille Mbembe’s groundbreaking theoretical manoeuvre seemed both foreign (for art historical considerations, at least) and yet uncannily familiar.
The bodily, lived experience of those of us coming from the former Yugoslav region resonated with some of the ideas Mbembe bravely put forward. The “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” appeared as familiar structures that ordered our life for quite some time. Introduced by philosopher, artist, and theorist Marina Gržinić, one of the school’s lecturers, this theory seemed a convincing tool to think about our post-socialist condition amidst the neo-colonial expansion strategies of the EU.
Here, I return to Gržinić and the interview she gave to art historians Maja and Reuben Fowkes, in order to highlight some key points that continue to provide an important framework for considering the global art market, the (East?) European position within it, contemporary art discourses, and, increasingly, the functioning of the globalized world and culture as such.
In the interview—structured over a few questions—Gržinić discussed various topics, including the margins, Europe, West/East divisions, and East European conceptual art. Towards the end, the focus shifted to the Slovenian IRWIN group, a part of Neue Slovenische Kunst (NSK) that became a point of increased interest among Western art scholars in recent decades. Conducted in the early 2010s, the interview points to the interconnectedness between global capitalism and contemporary art, Europe as a “fortress of racism,” the “war-state,” and modernism.
While the present moment betrays many of the characteristics she describes—indeed, in an intensified manner, considering the ongoing genocides and wars on the continent and worldwide—her answers set the stage for an approach to art, the art market, and art institution criticism that takes the global shift towards necropolitics and the unchecked violence of neoliberal capitalism as its starting point. At the heart of such considerations is the persistent differentiation between the center and the periphery that seeps over any geographical divisions to create an all-encompassing heterogeneity through the workings of ideology and capital—we can sit in a fancy café and still rub shoulders with the margins; the system of production sustains it, as she explains.
The setting then shifts to the nation-state and its last bastion of power—culture. What is its role today, and how has it also been mobilized by global capital? Necropolitics has taken over this sphere as well, with different forms of “racialization, segregation, and discrimination” at play, both at the level of knowledge production and curation. The present focus on and push towards further segregation through various identity politics sets the stage for the dictate of art form over content, while obfuscating the ideological moment. By filling the prescriptions of Western modernism, concepts turn into empty signifiers, and ideological fidelity depoliticizes. From the Eastern European context to a globalized moment, art seems—more than ever—to be at a crossroads of meaning and significance against the demands of the (Westernized) art market. The interview opens up avenues for consideration that continue to evolve beyond (Eastern) geographical determinants within our necropolitical present.
From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Marina Gržinić in conversation with Maja and Reuben Fowkes
