“There is an aesthetic dimension in the political and there is a political dimension in art… From the point of view of the theory of hegemony, artistic practices play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic order or in its challenging and this is why they necessarily have a political dimension… The real issue concerns the possible forms of critical art, the different ways in which artistic practices can contribute to questioning the dominant hegemony… According to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that forments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate… To grasp the political character of varieties of artistic activism we need to see them as counter- hegemonic interventions whose objective is to occupy public space in order to disrupt the smooth image that corporate capitalism is trying to spread, bringing to the fore its repressive character. Acknowledging the political dimension of such interventions supposes relinquishing the idea that to be political requires making a total break with the existing state of affairs in order to create something absolutely new. Today artists cannot pretend any more to constitute an avant-garde offering a radical critique, but this is not a reason to proclaim that their political role has ended. They still can play an important role in the hegemonic struggle by subverting the dominant hegemony and by contributing to the construction of new subjectivities. In fact this has always been their role and it is only the modernist illusion of the privileged position of the artist that has made us believe otherwise… A radical democratic politics calls for the articulation of different levels of struggles so as to create a chain of equivalence among them. For the ‘war of position’ to be successful, linkage with traditional forms of political intervention like parties and trade- unions cannot be avoided.”
((chantal mouffe, artistic activism and agonistic spaces))
