Published at the catalogue of Chto Delat? solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden
(see here: http://www.kunsthalle-baden-baden.de/kaufen/publikationen/)
[…] one must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its most “living” part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, or the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition between life and death. This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary. Such a reaffirmation would be both faithful to something that resonates in Marx’s appeal – let us say once again in the spirit of his injunction – and in conformity with the concept of inheritance in general. Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. It remains before us just as unquestionably as we are the heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be, and, like all inheritors, we are in mourning. In mourning in particular for what is called Marxism.1
– Jacques Derrida
“What is Communist art”? This straight, but strange, question is asked in the midst of a recent Chto Delat? performance at Smart Project Space in Amsterdam, instigating a collective discussion on artistic methods, forms and aims. The question is straight forward in the sense of its relation being object and method, communist art – although this might lead to a number of complications, as is evident in the ensuing discussion itself – but perhaps also slightly strange due to its specific injunction of time, placing the method and object in the present tense – what is communist art – and deliberately not the past, indicating communist art as something actual rather than historical. The question thus has an untimely timeliness, only accentuated by the title of the event in the context of which it is posed: WHERE has communism gone?, which certainly implies a past tense, if not a passing, then the least a transposition, and clearly echoes the work of mourning proposed by Jacques Derrida in his meditation of the withering of Marxism in his book Specters of Marx – The State of the Debt, the work of Mourning, & the New International from 1994.