On January 9, the special issue of the e-flux Journal entitled Experimental Publics will be published. Under the editorship of Mi You, this issue is dedicated to the question of how artistic and cultural practices can create space for realism and difference in a world characterized by geopolitical conflicts, the disintegration of liberal social contracts and growing value pluralism. The focus is on the possibilities and limits of experimental public spheres - and thus on those social actors and processes that question existing power structures without losing sight of the interactions between politics, business, science and art.
Art has always had a strange relation to power, whether in the service of royals and merchants or as a form for revolutionary vanguards’ imagination. Today the relationship has become even more complex, especially as the structures that have underwritten contemporary art shift beneath our feet—open markets close, soft power hardens into war, and populist sentiment becomes public life. One can say that, on a very high level, power itself has become highly unstable. In this special issue of e-flux journal, guest editor Mi You proposes that this instability is accompanied by a malleability, but also by a problem of representation that demands the immediacy of realism: a transfer of hopes and expectations to a calculus of means and ends. What would it mean to tactically revisit sites of oppression like capital and the state, but as fluid bodies that might be repurposed as levers? If art still corresponds to social progress, do notions like freedom and equality need new vision or should we rather prepare for what follows their ruin?
This issue is born out of recognizing a slow-burning yet unmistakable process that leaves in tatters what some perceive as a golden era of globalization. In the face of geopolitical fallout, the foreclosure of a liberal progressive social contract, and rising claims to value pluralism, the survival of art’s exceptionalism depends on realism. Questions immediately arise, such as: What concessions can be made without pulling the rug out from under one’s feet? How to make space for subtlety, while keeping the scale of politics and economics closely in sight? How to encourage cultural practices that differentiate political means and ends while celebrating debates that are not zero-sum games—or are purely representational? Can cultural practices even share space with the means and ends of science and technology?