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New York-based Mexican artist Pablo Helguera recently initiated an artist-led expeditionary project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest” (2006), in the hope of generating connections between the different regions of the Americas through a variety of events–discussions, performances, screenings, and collaborations–by means of a nomadic forum that will cross the hemisphere by land, from Alaska to Argentina. As Helguera describes:

This hybrid project will include a collapsible and movable
architectural structure in the form of a schoolhouse, as well as a
video collection component inside a van that will make the journey.
The project, which seeks to involve a wide range of audiences and
engage them at different levels, offers alternative ways to understand
the history, ideology, and lines of thought that have significantly
impacted political, social and cultural events in the Americas. (1)
I begin with this project because it is free of the formalist conventions that impair the production of use value, and thus, at face value, it shares many of the features of a socially engaged art initiative. In some respects, the project has clear affinities with the “expeditionary aesthetics” that we are seeing more of in contemporary art practice. Helguera is sincere about attaining those high-minded objectives and is loathe to unwittingly fall prey to the tendency to merely colonize the lifeworld–as such projects are wont to do, bringing back remnants and artifacts in the form of images and video footage for exhibition purposes. Yet, his description of the project implies that it be understood and seen as art, which given the dramatically skewed distribution of symbolic and artistic capital in society, cannot have invisible parentheses placed around its generous attempts at inclusion: art is a system of exclusion.

Before embarking on his journey, Helguera wrote, by way of explaining his motivations, that “the role of art in society has become ever more important in a post 9/11 world.” (2) What a counterintuitive statement! What sort of empirical reason could he, and countless other politically concerned artists, have for believing such a thing? On the contrary, is it not far more plausible that art, per se, has more or less ceased to have any role in determining the destiny of the public sphere where it is deployed? I say “art per se” because what might be referred to as “artistic competence” (encompassing both image-making skills and such artistic attitudes as autonomy, creativity, inventiveness, acceptance of nonmonetary remuneration, and strategic exploitation of discrepancies in talent) have been co-opted and harnessed by the strategic rationality of contemporary capitalism. Over the past decade, art has seen much of what used to be specific to it sublimated into business models, individualizing labor relations and advertising strategy–meaning that, in this sense, art’s role is indeed important. Even amateur videomakers like Osama Bin Laden have made very subtle use of image-making techniques grounded in recent art history. And indeed, Russian art historian Boris Groys has recently scrutinized the Al-Qaeda leader’s aesthetic choices in his various video clips, using art-critical tools and conceptual vocabulary to analyze the framing, background, decor, and so on–though admittedly, such videos are not autonomous artworks, despite their apparently universal entertainment value.