Political pyromancy or regurgitated autonomy? Ethical and Aesthetic Commitment of the Art Practice Arisen in the Wake of the 1993 Whitney Biennial

Abstract

This article searches for clues in order to define “political art” today, taking the 93 Whitney Biennial as a foundational moment from which a political wake of a contemporary deliberately activist art practice arises, and considering the presence in such event of two artists, American Daniel Joseph Martinez and Spanish Francesc Torres. Against revisions in which the voice of the involved artists is muted, this text focuses on their reflections, both about their art practice and about art’s commitment with society in general. As time passed, those revisions of the 93 show that blamed the excess with which the different pieces fingered the visitor as responsible of the social evils of the time had to assume such excess as a consistent and lasting tendency in contemporary art practice. In order to understand the emergence and validity of this trend this text will study the relation of the artists’ discourses, on the one hand, to the current diagnosis on political art Hal Foster had offered years before the biennial and, on the other, to the critical responses through which art theorists like Arthur C. Danto in The abuse of Beauty have tried to keep valid a certain residue of reactionary autonomy.