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Is Accelerationism a Gateway Aesthetic to Fascism? on the Rise of Taboo in Contemporary Art

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Is Accelerationism a Gateway Aesthetic to Fascism? on the Rise of Taboo in Contemporary Art 26 NAMN PÅ SKRIBENT Is Accelerationism a Gateway Aesthetic to Fascism? On the Rise of Taboo in Contemporary Art DORIAN BATYCKA “We live in a moment of profound cultural deceleration.” Mark Fisher 1 There is a specter haunting contemporary art, the specter Emerging in the early 2000s, a cadre of artists began of accelerationism. It is often said that art provides a populating and congregating online, creating in the window in which to look at the present. Today, with the process new digital forms that would later be described rise of reactionary populism and neoconservatism all over as ‘post-Internet’ art.4 In contrast to the rise of Net Art in the world, we have seen a concomitant rise in techno- the 1990s, post-Internet practices tend to use both online futurism, an emergent paradigm within contemporary and offline media to underscore the immense impact that art adopting right-wing metaphysics, science fiction, the internet has on our lives. Whether through digital fantasies of social collapse, doom, and the failings of the culture, corporate culture, or the effects of machine status quo. Over the last decade or so, life online and learning and artificial intelligence today, the term Post- offline has changed considerably. Together with the rise Internet initially emerged from discussions between of the alt-right, taboo forms of culture have started to Maria Olson in 2008 and elaborated further by critic circulate in obscure corners of the internet, entering the Gene McHugh in 2009.5 While the term post-Internet pantheon of biennales and museums all over the world. continues to evolve, and in some cases even devolve, it According to cultural critic Brian Holmes, the laby- is primarily associated with artists and collectives like rinth of the Internet and mass communication systems AIDS-3D, Petra Cortright, Lucky PDF, Jon Rafman, are today fraught with ambiguity in terms of their Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, Harm van den Dorpel, emancipatory potential, “in an era when civil society has Artie Vierkant, and Addie Wagenknecht. been integrated to the military architecture of digital However, the paradox of the internet is that while media,”2 there is today an increasing presence of taboo it has given marginalized voices a space in which to forms and aesthetics online. However, according to the secure access to speech and community, disobedience author and communications researcher, Stefan Wray: and nonconformity, it has also given platform to taboo ideas, fascist and far-right literature and memes, canni- Resistant Internet use follows a lineage of earlier forms balizing extremist views into a cornucopia of half-truths of resistant media application. All types of mediated and anti-establishment conspiracy theories. Exhibitions communication technology – print, telegraph, telephone, such as the 9th Berlin Biennale curated by DIS in 20166; radio, film, television ­­­– have at times been instruments and the 6th Athens Biennale7, curated by Stefanie for collective acts of resistance. Resistant media use in Hessler, Kostis Stafylakis and Poka-Yio, both come to moments of revolutionary social upheaval ranges from the application of the printing press in the 1525 German mind, the latter was billed as an “opportunity to put Peasant War to the use of the fax machine in the 1989 our values forth.” Values, it seemed, that sought to over Chinese student movement.3 identify with images, ideas, and politics of the far-right, brimming with tokenistic, deliberately un-woke “LOL On top of the imperial infrastructure of the Internet, nihilism,” satirical modulations of post-Internet art, there are taboo arenas where hate speech takes form. deliberately and disdainfully trolling identity politics Such phenomena are nothing new, take 4chan and and the progressive values of the art world writ large. 8chan for example, image boards that served as the Related to the rise of recent taboo in contemporary breeding ground for mass shooters, memes, and far-right art, a relatively more recent catch phrase dubbed “cancel Euripides Laskaridis / OSMOSIS thirío, 2018. Performance 6th Athens Biennale ANTI. Foto: Nysos Vasilopoulos. messages, trolls, and symbols. culture” has taken root. Cancel culture relates to the 28 DORIAN BATYCKA IS ACCELERATIONISM A GATEWAY AESTHETIC TO FASCISM? 29 idea that identity politics has become firmly situa- negate to consider the ways in which politics may instru- ted within the privileged terrain of art: in galleries, mentalize art that overidentifies with far-right symbols. museums, biennales and institutions all over the world. Yet art has always been rife with examples of artists And with it the idea that art can and should run anathema who flirt with taboo and/or controversy. Toying with to popular or progressive ideas. This taboo, let’s call morality and free speech in ways that are deliberately it “contrarian aesthetics,” has led to a divisive battle of provocative, artists tend to feel at home with rebellio- ideas within contemporary art practices and discursive usness and disobedience. Think of Gustave Courbet’s fields like literature, cinema and theater. Against calls for toppling of the Vendome column, for example. Courbet greater parity in the art world, identity politics has led was an anarchist in the spirit of Proudhon, and many to a hyper-polarized state within the art world at large. artists today who identity with some form of anarchism Satire and irony aside, parafiction and over identification tend to delight in the toppling of social norms, creating have all had various roles to play within this milieu, so the basis for contrarian aesthetics and taboo. too various artists associated with post-Internet art. But like Courbet’s toppling of the vendome column While critics of cancel culture propagate a myth in the 19th century, contrarian aesthetics today can be that being cancelled is akin to a form of censorship or read through the prism of ideas that emanated from an attack on free speech, cancel culture is voluntary the early 20th century. Between 1927 and 1940, when withdrawal of attention, be it through a public Benjamin wrote the fragments that would later become re-reading or harsh critique. A variant of the term The Arcades Project9, he envisaged how, during the late “call-out culture”, cancel culture describes a form of 19th century, European ideas relating to technology and boycott in which someone (usually a celebrity) who consumerism were beginning to lead to extreme social has shared a questionable or an unpopular opinion, regression, which he connected to industrial capitalism, or has had behaviour in their past that is perceived the First and Second World Wars, totalitarianism, and Panos Sklavenitis, Cargo, 2018. Performance, installation. 6th Athens Biennale ANTI. Foto: Nysos Vasilopoulos. to be either offensive or problematic, is called out genocide. In his ambitious and unfinished project, which on social media and subsequently “canceled” by way can be applied not just to the 19th century but also to of a blanket and near total boycott. Cancel culture is the present day, including, perhaps most importantly, The technological determinism that once fuelled and difficult to define. According to Arns, this is “because not, as Jonty Tiplady argues, “being redesigned as the to the 9th Berlin Biennale curated by DIS, Benjamin the Futurists doctine of progress bound to modernity, it (the ‘alt-right’) seeks to mask precisely these political cancellation of culture itself.”8 Instead, cancel culture mapped out how modernity was bound to mythical ideas has instead given way to nuanced forms of parafiction, beliefs; namely, Islamophobia, antisemitism, racist natio- functions like a system of checks and balances on art, of progress fuelled by a technological determinism, a third-positionism and overidentification, prompting nalism and contempt for the constitution” as a means of a check and balance on taboo. Critics of cancel cul- utopian way of thinking about technology and mass renewed debate about the constant digital feedback of creating confusion and sowing dissent. Arns’s exhibition ture, such as Tiplady, recycle a myth that free speech communication that presupposes technology will deliver the Internet and whether or not the technological and helped shine light on how the alt-right manifests online, is in crisis. Inflated fears of censorship have, conversely, social emancipation. In short, the techno-futurism social freedoms upon which the Internet functions is but it did so in a way not entirely critical of post- Internet marshalled in new forms of hate speech including the ushered in by artists of the post-Internet generation instead being debased by throngs of trolls and right-wing art. In fact, the exhibition largely platformed many artists gas lighting and/or silencing of minorities, leading to has created a chasm within contemporary art, bound conspiracy theorists. associated with the movement, as well as artists who new forms of taboo and disobedience. When nudged not to progressive ideas of identity politics and cultural The arcades and boulevards of Paris once illuminated simply make use of digital anthropology as a means of against a society that is under increasing political threat freedom but, rather to insidious ideas involving a slick by streetlights from above now pulsate down an studying the morphology of fascism online.10 from right-wing, neo-fascist elements, critics of cancel blending of cyber-utopian thinking and acceleratio- information superhighway lined with social media, Art and alienation have always been uneasy bedfel- culture retort to the age old argument that society is in nism, an impulse to think that humanity’s problems will online shopping, the sharing economy, leisure, games, lows, yet the recent uptick in bluntly fascist taboo cultural danger of Orwellian derailment, and with it artists have magically be solved through technology, science and and more frequently, digital alienation, hate and trol- forms is today fuelled by artists interested in cheaply a responsibility to act in a taboo manner.
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