Luis Camnitzer
Art of the State
The national art Salon in Uruguay was a yearly event when I was an art student during the 1950s.1 It took place in one of the wings of the old theatre and opera house in Montevideo. The rooms were in the upper floor and one could only get to them climbing an endless marble staircase with a hardwood handrail. The Salon was very conservative. Controlled by the Ministry of Culture, it was run by a committee and a jury formed by very old people with an academic taste.
One day my schoolmates and I had a terrific idea. The afternoon before opening day we bought several pounds of chewing gum. We chewed over night and produced a soft pliable mound of little pellets. Then, some hours before the ceremony, we went to the marble staircase and stuck our work along the handrail. We were delighted with our clever sabotage of such a bourgeois elitist reactionary event. However, it was winter. The unheated staircase was even colder than outside. Most of the pebbles fell off to form a trail of what looked like rabbit droppings. And, the few units that remained were far removed from the word “viscosity.”
More than anything else, the operation reflected our opinion about the State and State sponsorship. However, looking back, I would say that we were blaming the wrong people. The State could be accused of a lack of imagination, but the low quality of the Salon was not the fault of the government, but of the artists. If the government was to be faulted for anything, it would be for its lack of investment in art education and, mostly, for not ensuring that artists could survive making art. The State should have bought work or subsidized artists in a serious way beyond some once-in-a-lifetime little prizes. We hadn’t understood the real problem.
There is a difference between “art of the State” and “art subsidized by the State” although both may overlap. “Art of the State” takes over and usurps the expression of a community. “Art subsidized by the State,” facilitates the expression of the community. In the first case, we think about how the powerful, who finance and sponsor art production, co-opt or coerce art to serve their interests. But, as soon as we recognize the exercise of power, we come to see that the structure we call the “State” is only one of the entities holding power. Reducing the topic of power over art to “art of the State” artificially limits inquiry. Moreover, posing the issue as “art of the State” encourages us to see “the State” as a uniform, monolithic event in human affairs, a natural event, an act of God. In this way, when we blame “the State” for its influence on art, we are basically saying that solutions lie outside “the State,” that our project should be about finding alternatives, but not all states are the same, particularly with respect to their relation to the arts. The degree to which the State usurps the art agenda can vary tremendously, depending upon the particular regime currently holding the levers of state power. During the chewing gum incident, the agenda of the Uruguayan regime was actually quite harmless and not much more than trying to look like France.
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About this Article
Art of the State was first published in Fillip 4 in Fall 2006. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Luis Camnitzer is a New York-based artist, writer, and curator.
Notes
The views expressed in Fillip are not necessarily those of the editorial board or the Projectile Publishing Society.
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