This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

In early September, members of the Pissed Off Trannies (POT) group ceremonially dispensed more than 60 bottles of (you guessed it) piss outside the offices of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. One activist in particular, Jamie (a.k.a. “biogal”), poured the liquid over his torso and masked head, later affirming via a video that “the EHRC has blood on its hands and piss on its streets”. 

The protest sought to address the government watchdog’s policy regarding single-sex service providers and guidance for access to public facilities. In short, conceptual piss was poured in an attempt to contest how we really piss.

The charming eccentricity of performance art can quickly become obnoxious as it steps on the toes of political discourse. But although the role of spectator has been forced upon us, it doesn’t need to be a passive one. In good Brechtian fashion, we the audience must fight back by asking how we should treat such gestures — as failed art, inept politics, or both?

Today, “artistic” performances that saturate the public square are justified by their authors on the basis of the “message” they carry, their “impact” and the “vision” they defend. This makes it more difficult for commentators to dismantle their discourse: the artistic vacuity is buttressed by their putative humanitarian claims. It is impossible to criticise one without disputing the other. And if most people might not care too much about sharing their opinions on contemporary art, they are certainly much more concerned about being called a “bigot”.

The alliance of politics and performance art is nothing new

The alliance of politics and performance art is nothing new. Many artists, at least during the modern period, have nurtured a romantic inclination for standing “on the right side of history”, and putting their gifts, such as they are, at its service. The practice of using art as a beacon of activism mushroomed in the late twentieth century predominantly, though not exclusively, through American postmodern dance and theatre. The dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Yvonne Rainer were among the trailblazers, along with The Living Theatre’s Julian Beck and Judith Malina and art performers such as Marina Abramovic. They have in common a sort of panegyric to the mundane and the disruptive, using everyday, awkward gestures wrapped in theoretical discourses about “performativity”, “enactment” and the “representational”.

Later generations followed with rare successes, many terrible failures and plenty of others inbetween. Their aesthetics have become a new sort of progressive scholasticism — a framework for those whose imagination and talents fall short of actual ability or creativity. Hacks thrust themselves forward for media attention, while trading off lame political claims dressed up in hackneyed, ultra-sexualised, pseudo-transgressive art. Indeed, their schtick rests on their performance sparking enough remembrance of past artists to gain minimal forms of legitimacy.

The obsession with odorous and symbolic material such as urine and seafood (which oscillates between a mockery of female genitalia and coded lingo in queer circles for drag queens and males “passing” as women) has raised indignation from detractors. Marion Calder, from For Women Scotland, has criticised the recent use of piss in front of the EHRC as a “kink” that shows why women-only spaces need protection.

Performers related to the POT group, for example, reveal their disturbed relationships with the world around them in a variety of repulsive ways. One of Jamie-the-pisser’s performances, Self administration, consists of him putting a dripping condom full of “esteromilk”, into his mouth under the label “ceremonial induction to HRT”. The performance Prayer for the Pearl Oyster conflates gender therapy with transubstantiation. Meanwhile, the installation Invisible Ketamine Vapour Threads Across Space and Time addresses “transxenoestrogenesis” [sic], “mind shifting” and “perception altering” through the smell of (yet again) piss.

But what about canonised contemporary art, the sort by professionals, which supposedly elevates all this into legitimised art? The list is long. Take a look at Angélica Liddell who, in part fascinated by the cannibal crime of Issei Sagawa, requested that eight young blond girls whipped and rubbed themselves with squids in Qué haré yo con esta espada? (2016). Or consider Steven Cohen whose complex ceremony in Put your heart under your feet … and walk (2017) involves the swallowing of his late lover’s ashes. 

Or the 24-hour theatrical orgy Mount Olympus by Jan Fabre (2015) that features a full-frontal erection scene. What makes them fundamentally different from the EHRC protest? The accent put on a genuine quest for beauty or the mere presence of a stage certified by the artistic authorities?

These questions matter because meaningful criticism of bad politicised art is directly linked to our system of artistic incentives (and behind that, the government). Shall we look at separating the good art from the bad or the actually not-art-at- all? Or shall we destroy malfunctioning state patronage of “art” in the first place? These are two radically different options but they have in common a shared concern. And behind our inability or unwillingness to decide, it’s also where piss-poor political activists like the POT group merrily hide.

Merely disagreeing with their political claims is not enough when it’s wrapped into layers of “artistic” nonsense. But denouncing their “art” involves a much bigger criticism of the publicly-funded cultural system, as well as a positive model for replacing it, which few people attempt to do properly.

Where such activists have outsmarted the public is that their “art” is literally uncritical. We cannot attack their dubious creations on the basis of its absence of quality precisely because quality isn’t a common base for judgement any more. Instead, we are left with a diffuse sense of iconoclasm in which gestures towards to most consensual things have been turned into salutary actions of grace. False subversion, the grotesque and disdain of fruitful labour all stand against beauty and poetry. It is now impossible to say, like industrial designer Raymond Lœwy, that “ugliness doesn’t sell”.

The currently fashionable mantra “Go Woke, Go Broke” no longer makes sense in a culture that actively encourages and defends bad art, shite art and non-art.

Take qween amor, who performs “as a means to promote positive body image, freedom of expression and to blur the lines between gender and what people think is right and wrong”. Daringly, imaginatively, provocatively (if narcolepsy-inducing predictability amounts to courage) Qween does this by queering Christ, twerking, and demonstrating in favour of abortion and Palestine. In other words, this is a living Norman Rockwell print for most modern academics.

The malaise in political art stems directly from its domination by identity politics and the alliance between establishment and faux-rebellious poseurs. Activists don’t perceive (or are voluntarily oblivious of) the paradox behind the fact that their “daring” moral crusades are nothing more than them being the choir of the establishment that hires them. 

Many of those with cultural capital nowadays agree that art, like knowledge, serves to “speak truth to power”

Many of those with cultural capital nowadays agree that art, like knowledge, serves to “speak truth to power” even when they stand at the heart of the power structure. They value art in terms of “impact”, welcome a state of permanent protest and acclaim the work of artists such as Qween rather than damn it. Thus nominally anti-capitalist grievances are funded by selling t-shirts and other “merch” online, as Qween does. These rebels are hirelings of corporate PR men who get the tame pap they pay for.

Worse, the malaise at the heart of the art world is changing our perceptions of and relationship with the real world and, in particular, to politics. The use of aesthetically-loaded rhetoric and gestures in politics has come to echo that of activist performance and similarly serves only as a form of camouflage that aims to disguise failure. This becomes a vicious circle. If all politics is predominantly performance, then performance is a legitimate form of politics. 

The POT group’s piss action might seem gimmicky, but nothing can stand against it as long as the art establishment and its political paymasters fail to stand up against so-called “art” that in essence represents an existential threat against our society. For it is, and is meant to be, an assault on meaning.

We live in a world that has bent the knee to the artistic experiments of aged, spoilt children, as endless retrospectives and revivals of “key” performance works from the post-WWII period attest. The same shapeless, “interpretative” dance, literal or figurative, is just a channel for posh grievance, be it Extinction Rebellion protests or attacking the rights of women to be women. 

Part of the problem is that we undoubtedly give these “artists” far more importance than they deserve. We brand them as “activists” when they are really failed performers. We read their gestures as politically relevant when they are little more than personal psychological crises bursting into the public space. And they flourish because a political class, devoid of any cultural vision and ambition, remains inactive.