Celebration in a time of apocalypse

To say that we are beset by the apocalypse is not to overstate the condition of the world. The condition of the world has long been in crisis: current genocides have historical precedents and lineages; climate catastrophe is inscribed into a bourgeois economic order. But it is the confluence of these miserable components—genocide and a climate catastrophe—that necessitates a rubric of an apocalypse. In this context then, the only way to approach any biennale is to ask: what function is it performing during this sorry time?

In the 24th iteration of the Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, the curators Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero explicitly rejected the apocalyptic condition, instead presenting optimism as a provocation. In their curatorial vision, celebration is ‘both a method and a source of joy,’^[1] a way to counter the despondency and resignation produced by a world in perpetual crisis. The curators evoked a multiplicity of cultural resistance, and offered many ways art making has summoned collective joy and power. In this orientation towards legacies of resistance, the Biennale had a strong archival impulse,^[2] bringing together art across time periods and geographies.

This respect for art history’s archive was most vividly felt in the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney. Many of the works exhibited here were produced during the AIDS epidemic and the ascendancy of the neoliberal world order, when queer artists were searching for a robust, political aesthetic that could intervene in a world-shattering crisis.^[3] A large-scale digital screen of Chemehuevi and Anishinaabe poet Diane Burns’ Alphabet City Serenade (1988) was positioned upon the entrance to the gallery space. Ostensibly a wry critique of gentrification, Burns traces the lineage of displacement across its political forms and many permutations (when they built the railroad / the buffalo split…) (but here I am on Avenue D / sacrifice of Manifest Destiny…). Her cadence was audible in all corners of the gallery, becoming the leitmotif for the viewing experience (Hey man, can you spare a cigarette? / Do you know of a place to sublet? / Do you know where I can cash this check? Do you know, do you know that / I hate Doris Day / I hate Chevrolet / I hate Norman Bates /  I hate the United States). Despite the bleak political conditions Burns' poem articulates, her delivery is sing-song and melodic, thus sonically life-affirming and defiant.

On the back wall of the gallery space, Martin Wong’s paintings from 1982–1997 held prominence, depicting racialised bodies and desire in an urban cosmos. Wong’s canvases exude a quiet refusal of the status quo, his subjects slipping out of the established order and offering refuge for others willing to do so. Wong reinscribes splendour and romance onto red-brick tenements and confined city spaces, with the effect that urban dwellings suddenly brim with possibility.^[4]Nearby, William Yang’s photographs from 1976 of celebrated activist Malcolm Cole and other First Nations dancers offered a sense of immediacy and buoyancy, while documenting pivotal cultural and political moments. Taken together, the presentation of these works was a study of the unfinished, heterogenous past^[5] and how cultural legacies can inspire us to build anew. In this way, the Museum became a portal, channelling revolutionary energies from one crisis to the next. But in the intervening years between these crises (and all the other crises that dot the decades), neoliberalism has entrenched, and while ACT UP and other AIDs activists made significant cultural and political gains, queer communities suffered profound loss. Works of love, generosity and joy were produced in ruins, yes, but is that alone a sufficient battle tactic for this moment?

On the closing day of the Biennale, I woke to a bright and clear morning. It was 9:00am on Sunday 9 June, and I was planning my visit to the final Biennale site, Artspace (one of six Biennale sites in the harbour, inner-east and inner-west pockets of Gadigal land). As I was planning this journey, visual material was circulating online of the massacre at Nusreit Refugee camp, where 270 people had ascended to martyrdom and more than 700 people had been wounded 14 hours earlier. It feels salient to interject here that this continent’s cultural institutions—usually adept at emphasising their civic and social conscience—have remained deathly silent during the Palestinian genocide. It has been up to the precarious arts working class—individual artists, collectives, and artist-run-initiatives— to organise activism and stand in solidarity with Palestinian people.^[6] The Board/donor class have largely deflected, sidelined, or actively sabotaged the Palestinian solidarity movement.^[7] I was thinking about this form of class warfare, of the ironic though not unpredictable institutional silence, as I entered Artspace. Ukrainian painter Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s unstretched canvases immediately called me to attention. In fluid oil paint and brushstrokes, Tanska conveys the kinds of dreams and nightmares that linger decades after the experience of war—the psychic debris that endures long after the materiality of violence has passed. Painting, like all art forms, is an insufficient substrate to communicate the material horrors of war, but her work clearly renders war’s psychic haunting.

As I viewed Tanska’s paintings, I thought about another form of class: the martyr class, that is, the way all victims and survivors of war are bound together in class relation. The martyr class is in stark opposition to what French cultural theorist, Paul Virilio, termed the ‘cannibalistic class,’ i.e. the merging of the bourgeoisie and military classes in pursuit of war (“bourgeois power is military power even more than economic”).^[8] To extend a class schema further, there is the fossil fuel class, excising collective resources for private sale on world commodity markets (while boiling our planet alive), the settler-imposed property class transforming Country into an economic inflationary unit, etc etc etc. All of this is to say, given the evidence, I would argue that it is neither psychically nor strategically counterproductive to acknowledge that we are living in the apocalypse in the midst of vast class warfare. To disavow the apocalyptic condition is to radically underestimate the scale of the crisis. For a biennale to respond to this moment comprehensively, it needs to tackle the crisis not only through visual and thematic components, but via the model itself,^[9] and the infrastructure that accompanies it. How effective can artistic resistance be when the host institution(s) refuse an ethical framework through which to oppose existing apartheids and genocides, while simultaneously condemning and mining the historical? How effective can artistic resistance be when the host institution(s) are reliant on and reproduced by fossil fuel capital? I ask these questions not to dampen artistic and curatorial demands but to escalate them.

“For those who feel only a deadening numbness or constant depression, militant rage may well be unimaginable,” writes Douglas Crimp in his seminal 1989 essay Mourning and Militancy. “As again it might be for those who are paralysed with fear, filled with remorse, or overcome with guilt.”^[10] In opposition to angst and despair, joy is a reparative psychic force. The decision to offer celebration-as-method is compelling on this level and a formidable curatorial tactic, but is it sufficient? What is celebration if it is not coupled with militancy? To evoke Crimp again, “we don’t need a cultural renaissance…we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle.”^[11] Celebration and militancy.