There is an alternative: Thinking through art and anticapitalism

This research is in the beginning stages of examining the relationship between art and anticapitalism to think through existing art histories beyond being tethered to patronage relationships or as alienated products of state mandate. Recent manoeuvres by contemporary artists and exhibitions are increasingly seen as sites to critique, contradict and intervene in social and economic cycles of capital. Through a transhistorical and transcultural global approach,centring a dialectical relationship between Europe and Southeast Asia, this research considers how artistic movements in both areas intersect by being politically united against imperialism and are artistically cognisant of issues around equality and antiracism as tenets of anticapitalism. Can art with anticapitalist intent meaningfully intervene in capitalism, as a means of ‘throwing stones in the machine’?

This talk discusses some provisional research which seeks to look at the relationship between art and anticapitalism, starting with the present discontent exhibited by contemporary artists towards capitalist structures for producing and experiencing art. They are also increasingly disenfranchised from being considered among what anthropologist David Graeber considered 'the caring classes'  - those whose work requires care and emotion as part of their reproductive labour. On the converse of alienation from the artistic object of production, is the mobilisation of exhibitions and artwork that serve as catalysts for aesthetic and social engagements that neither fit neatly within institutions of social outreach nor are they easily defined as commodified goods. We can perhaps even consider these aesthetic gestures within the realm of what anthropologist Keith Hart called 'informal economies', driven by a demand for cooperative futures beyond capitalist models of exchange. In the past twenty years, artists have demonstrated a noticeable resistance towards their exploitation as producers and complicity within an unfair and biased market, which has been linked to the abuses of ‘racial capitalism’.  

Image: Taring Padi, Memedi Sawah/Scarecrow Installation, 2024, mixed media, dimension variable at the Busan Biennale 2024.