Page - 21 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

21 introduction answer I pursue here focuses on local cultural production that is both historically and politically aware. The role of artists vis-à-vis radical politics is, as J. Keri Cronin and Kirsty Robertson discovered in editing Imagining Resist- ance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada, “fraught” and “cut across with complexities, disagreements, and debates” (Cronin and Robertson 2011, 1), and not only in Canada. Because radi- cal cultural practitioners of all kinds find themselves “without a relation to an existing political project (only to a loosely defined anti-capitalism)” (Bishop 2012, 284), as Claire Bishop, Irene Grüter, and others have persuasively argued, they keep “being assigned a political task that society has failed to accomplish” (Grüter 2007) and so internalize “a huge amount of pressure to bear the burden of devising new models of social and political organisation,” something they “are not always best equipped to undertake” (Bishop 2012, 284).4 Director Ivo van Hove identifies a “crucial dividing line” between politics and art, with politics concerning itself with order and art with chaos; however that line, like so many in postmodernity, is blurring as politics be- comes increasingly chaotic and art all the more orderly in com- parison. If van Hove can nevertheless still claim that “in a soci- ety in which many question whether living together peacefully is still a viable option, the theatre and other forms of art can play a crucial role” (van Hove 2018, xxii), it is because he recognizes that the task of the work of art, to echo Gilles Deleuze echoing Walter Benjamin’s understanding of translation, is not to com- municate but to resist: “A work of art has nothing to do with 4 To give but one example of this kind of pressure, W.J.T. Mitchell has writ- ten that “[f]rom the earliest moments of my aesthetic research I had been convinced by William Blake’s claim that the function of art is to ‘cleanse the doors of perception’ and to overturn the hierarchies of sensibility, as well as of wealth and power, that separate people into classes” (Mitchell 2009, 134). I agree with Bishop’s assessment that the solution is not to col- lapse art and ethics but rather to “produce a viable international alignment of leftist political movements and […] support the progressive transforma- tion of existing institutions through the transversal encroachment of ideas whose boldness is related to (and at times greater than) that of artistic imagination” (Bishop 2012, 284).