In everyday usage, it stands for a misguided inner idea, a chimera or delusion based on misrecognizing reality.īut phantasm is not the opposite of the real, but the thing that brings every idea of reality forth in the first place, as a suppressed wish for the absolute and for control. In contrast, the term “phantasm”, as Jacques Lacan coined it, coming from Sigmund Freud’s concept of fantasy, seems extremely suitable to describe exactly this ambiguity of forms in cultural politics. Anyone who does away with getting entangled in power and capital – which should indeed be named, analysed, resisted as cognitive dissonance, and made productive for cultural practice – can all too easily set in gear a self-communication now purified from doubt and contradictions. In the cultural industry today, the political often serves as the ultimate promise of meaning, which not only seeks to abrogate the deep ambivalences of artistic productivity, but fundamentally promises to elude their own conditions and privileges.
PHANTASMIC ARTS SERIES
The series “Phantasm and Politics”, conceived by Helmut Draxler and Christoph Gurk, does not seek to discredit the desire for the real as such, but rather is interested in pushing the question of what needs get articulated in this longing, and not least also what institutional conditions and interests and at play in each case, when art addresses the sphere of politics. HAU Hebbel am Ufer would like to look into the claims that the spheres of art and of politics make on one another, and to work out perspectives on whether and how we can get beyond the traditional antagonism between autonomy and engagement. It seems as if artists, curators, and cultural managers are downright obsessed with finding the right formula to diagnose our times and to deal with the crisis, and thus to represent the truly political. In view of the multifarious catastrophes in financial and job markets, in technology and ecology, there has been a loud cry for an art that would not only make it possible to describe these developments, but also would intervene as an agent of social change in a “reality” perceived as in crisis.Ĭurrent editions of cultural events such as the “Berlin Biennale”, the “Berlinale” or “documenta” are symptomatic of this longing for the real, as is the sustained interest on the part of theatre in documentary techniques, in “re-enactments” of significant historical events, and investigations of urban space, but also in the return of the protest song.
Whether the visual arts, in theatre or in popular culture: nearly every area of cultural production is currently experiencing a boom in projects that sense a certain insufficiency in sticking to the frames of reference created by aesthetic articulations and actions.
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