What is customarily called ‘reality’ has no more consistency than a montage. Starting from this observation, one may view…

“What is customarily called ‘reality’ has no more consistency than a montage. Starting from this observation, one may view artistic practice as a kind of software permitting action to be performed on communal reality in order to produce alternative versions of the same. That is, contemporary art post-produces social reality: by formal means, it illuminates the montages constituting it – which are formal, too. Thus, one of the essential elements of contemporary art’s political programme is that of bringing the world into a precarious state – in other words, constantly affirming the transitory and circumstantial nature of the institutions that structure social life, the rules governing individual and collective behaviour. After all, the ideological apparatuses of capitalism proclaim the very opposite. They declare the political and economic framework in which we are living to be immutable and definitive: a scenario in which the décor and props undergo perpetual (and superficial) transformation – but nothing else changes. The central political task of contemporary art does not involve denouncing any current ‘political’ fact in particular. Instead, the point is to bring precarity to mind: to keep the notion alive that intervention in the world is possible, to propagate the creative potential of human existence in all its forms. It is because social reality constitutes an artifact through and through that we can imagine changing it. Art exposes the world’s non-definitive character. It dislocates, disassembles and hands things over to disorder and poetry. By producing representations and counter-models that underscore the intrinsic fragility of the standing order, art bears the standard of a political project that is much more efficient (in the sense of generating concrete effects) and much more ambitious (inasmuch as it concerns all aspects of political reality) than it would be if it simply relayed a watchword or ideology.”

–From The Exform by Nicolas Bourriaud (Verso 2016). (viajuhavantzelfde)