Estética y antiglobalización / Aesthetics and anti-globalisation

Nonetheless, it is important to point out that the politisation of art applied to the anti-globalisation movement is an approximate, unstable, shimmering formula that always seems about to pass the baton to a certain aesthetisation of politics , although this time it would be the opposite of the aesthetisation performed by fascism and its heirs since it does not aim to strengthen the power, the centrality and the verticality of the State, but to cancel it, dissolve it or surpass it from an assembly and self-managed perspective. This perspective is manifested directly and immediately in many of the most provocative and fecund actions performed by anti-globalisers, which albeit having an open political content opposed to the established power are inspired by or prolong the tradition of events started by Dadaism and Futurism and furthered by happenings and performances. I am referring to, for example, the actions performed by Reclaim the Streets, an English group with a genuinely seminal role in the promotion of the cosmopolitan gatherings that experienced their height with the aforementioned protest demonstrations in Seattle. The group's leit motiv is the fight against automobiles, considering them both omnipotent invaders on the streets and arguments and pretexts to continue opening motorways and highways that devastate environment and annihilate the habitat and the small-scale places that represent memory and human coexistence. The most characteristic actions they organised during the first stage of their activity were the street-parties that commenced in summer 1995 and consisted in, according to Javier Ruiz, "illegal street raves in which the asphalt became the dance floor, a beach for children -thanks to lorries full of sand- both displaying art and being art displayed. (...) in July 1996, ten thousand people took London's m 41 motorway, despite the police's efforts to stop them, turning it into an orgy of colour and music. During the party/protest some women appeared wearing three-metre-long skirts, with activists hidden underneath them and carrying pneumatic hammers. They planted trees recuperated from the construction of the m11 in the fast lane of the motorway. " [ 9 ]

Yet, beyond these experiences and other similar ones staged by the anti-globalisation movement, there is a conceptual, programmatic even, dimension that attempts to articulate a thought and a political culture in the heart of the movement in line with its unique demands, and does so appealing to categories that evidently stem from the aesthetic sphere. Probably the clearest text in this sense would be an essay by Paolo Virno entitled precisely Virtuosity and Revolution , in which the symbol, or more precisely, the image of the discourse is embodied in the figure of the virtuous musician, whose output cannot be objectified or separated from the effective execution of the same. Obviously, that vindication of the performer's activity against the fetishisation of the work echoes the attitudes and theses of John Cage and, even more resolutely, of Joseph Beuys, for whom all men are artists: the importance lies in knowing what kind of artist one is. Furthermore, what is even more significant is that these echoes, these evocations, are not at all removed or estranged from the main guidelines set out by Virno in this crucial essay, which explicitly aims to theoretically establish the nature and the conditions and means of antagonistic political action in the context of the post-Ford society. For Virno, the main figure of that society, the figure that encompasses the possibilities of that transgressor and refreshing action, is the virtuoso, i.e. the worker who has taken over from the industrial proletariat and is consequently autonomous, mobile, rootless and capable of making his knowledge and abilities more important than his hypothetical skill to produce objects or things. This arises precisely as a result of the crisis of the Ford production model and also of the law of value dominating the initial stages of capitalism, when the value of goods was established by the amount of work socially needed to produce it. Virno goes on to add that in the post-Ford society, based on Marx's Grundisse... more than on his Das Kapital , the crisis of the law of value results in the fact that what really matters when considering the production of goods is the direct intervention of the General Intellect , an expression also coined by Marx to designate that host of socially forged knowledge, linguistic competences and wisdom of which nowadays the virtuosos are the clearest agents, carriers or subjects. Virno concludes by saying that political action currently becomes possible when the virtuoso, instead of merely bowing down to the demands of the capital, decides to play his own score, defined by a free relationship that is not subjected to the General Intellect .

Marcelo Expósito, following the guidelines set out by Virno, presented a video-installation at this year's Berlin Biennial entitled Entre sueños: Primero de Mayo (In dreams: Mayday) , which combines historical images of the Ford city, including especially powerful images depicting the Fiat factory in Lingotto, Turin, with the protest actions staged in a mall in Milan by the Chainworkers , an organisation that encompasses workers with precarious employments from Italy and other parts of Europe. The protest consisted in an audacious and imaginative siege of the mall which, perfectly coordinated with supporters in the media, gave notice of how multinationals seize and privatise public spaces, even denying the right of expression to citizens who, when inside, are reduced to mere consumers, and also of the fact that the precarious workers are the virtuosos par excellence in the current social and political situation. In fact that Mayday - the vindication of a supposedly or genuinely mediocre Mayday by the unions and traditional left-wing groups in Barcelona last May the first- attributed the leading role to the "precarious workers," then considered the replacement of the historical proletariat.