Political art – democracy on uphazers

Jürgen Habermas on a white background. There is no sign of the factory-new sneakers, which the Habermas biographer Philipp Felsch admired during his home visit to the philosopher in his bungalow in Bavaria. And also not the flowering landscapes that colored after the last Bundestag election in East and West Blau-Braun. The head of the philosopher is exempted and drawn into the picture without context or background. He looks down from the top left corner as if he were in silence. The belt gesture of the intellectual does not reveal what thought may hide behind it.

There is no direct eye contact with the viewers who hung deeper to the portrait piece, meet just above the baseboard. In the exhibition “The casual compulsion” by Alex Wissel in the Kunstverein Bielefeld, the democratic theorist Jürgen Habermas, who became 95 last June, is the focus of the identity policy of right -wing populism, which is becoming increasingly successful. The visual artist, stage designer and actor Wissel continues his many years of dealing with the roots of anti -democratic politics.

The curved wallpaper is stoically stuck, glued to shock, in horizontal lanes over the scene and breaks the illusion of a deep image or the room in which you could put yourself in. Over the head of the philosopher, the wallpaper points the picture to the home. It is still the household on which every government is justified or breaking it. At the same time, the reduced image economy of the representation is also exhibited. The choice of painting underground is no coincidence, as the artist likes to reveal. Raufaser was a wallpaper from several layers of paper with incorporated wood chips and therefore particularly popular in the post -war period to hide construction defects and uneven walls. It is particularly cheap. This appeared to him to match the picture subject.

Habermas criticized the economic structure of Germany after the Second World War like no other, in which a profound social and political process of National Socialism largely failed – despite all national culture of remembrance and ratios. The national house was habitable, albeit in trouble. Architecture as an identity policy, as Philipp Ostwalt recently described using the example of the Berlin city palace. A symbolic form for the economic miracle and the West integration – first the economy, then morality, as can be read at Quinn Slobodian.

In his “theory of communicative action” published in 1983, Habermas argued that all truth is based on a social consensus that has to be reoriented again and again. The prerequisite for this is the hypothesis of a “rule -free discourse”, in which the best argument prevails through rational conviction and without external compulsion, provided that it endeavors. This should form the rules of the game for a democratic society that is legitimized on the basis of a fair constitution. If you can come to terms with it, you can play, if you don’t, you are free to go. This is the simple truth of the liberal “constitutional patriotism” that Habermas has always demanded. He himself recognized the enormous challenge of his social theory based on consensus that a new “structural change in public”, as an older book of him, has long been observed. He diagnosed a fragmentation of the public, which results in a deliberative policy, one of the discussion and weighing up.

Communicative action in ideological echo chambers does not need a constitutional patriotism and replaces rational argumentation with libertarian masculinity. The right-wing-libertarian anarcho capitalist and Habermas student Hans-Hermann Hoppe has long been sure that democracy should be replaced by unleashed capitalism today, which is based exclusively on private property. Freely according to Louis XIV can then be said again: “The state, that’s me.”

The elephant in the room wears a morphsuit in Wissel’s art of real and has already said goodbye to Haberma’s communication room from the narrow image boundaries. It hovers in the lotus seat over the nostalgic piece of flat goods and the Habermas picture. His posture communicates meditative serenity and is reminiscent of the esoteric core, which combines some lateral thinkers with right -wing extremists and libertarian anarchocalists.

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Morphsuits serve as traps in the dream factories of the film. Whoever wears them becomes invisible, indispensable from the surrounding area – and goes to the visual surfaces. In this case, the anonymous shape bears the colors black, red, gold and thus becomes a personalized national flag. But who do we have to deal with here? Does the ideal representative*look in the self -proclaimed “silent majority”, who are confident “We are the people” because they no longer feel represented by the elected representatives of the people? Or is it the post-digital avatar of a new constitutional patriotism?

But I can’t get rid of the spirits I called. Ultimately, the black, red and gold phantom also remains an excellent projection surface for the fantasms of the folk theater of ambitious conspiracy theorists and hardly differs from the good old racking wallpaper. Unfortunately, these stories still get caught too often in the provincial Germany of these days.

In his art, Alex Wissel manages to get the magical realism of the political presence in a nutshell with a pointed character. In any case, art hardly comes after the reality. But maybe humor will at least help a little so as not to fade away from faith and lose the mind.

“The casual compulsion”, Kunstverein Bielefeld, until 27.4.