Re-enactments versus Re-enactments: European Artists Tackle Populist Aesthetics

Populist movements have assimilated the practices of anti-establishment artists and made use of both performance and détournement-based practices. Faced with populist re-enactments, what can artists sensitive to the disintegration of national imaginaries and determined to resist the vulgarity and violence of populist images do? After examining populist re-enactments, specifically those of the Northern League and the Tea Party, I will outline the direction taken by some artistic research in Holland and Flanders.

Populist Replays Versus the Memory of Emancipating Struggles

Populist leaders are engaged in a systematic reversal of the historical symbols of national emancipation. The process is now so common that it has become a kind of political tactic. Such techniques of cultural struggle were developed in the protest movements of the 1970s: one intervenes in the symbolic order in order to expel one’s opponent from its symbolic space and strip it of its attendant values. The spaces reclaimed by the radical right thus lose their emancipating dimension and take on a new meaning that is inverted or displaced in relation to the original historical significance of events. It is important, therefore, to distinguish subversion from counter-subversion when the latter is used in the place of the former; it invents nothing but reclaims forms of action developed to resist oppression and turns them to the opposite end. It is actually an act of subversion aimed at the political imaginary of one’s opponent. Such uses accentuate the crisis in moderate parties, which are not always clear on their opponents’ modus operandi.