Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 33

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
not yet recognized or witnessing an injustice in the existing state of right” (Rancière
2013:189). Instead of “saving our lives” through consuming disposable pop songs, we
could reflect on and elaborate new forms of transnational political struggles for social
justice and collective emancipation.
Afterword by Stephanie Weber 9
It was after a couple of months of pondering on how to actually go about this exhibition
dedicated to current propaganda that we had set out to organise that I came across
Luis Velasco-Pufleau’s work on music and propaganda. Happening upon his text Reflections
on Art and Propaganda, which should later lend its title to the video work shown
at Lenbachhaus, was a crucial moment in deciding that the whole endeavor, which was
just about driving us nuts, made some sense after all. The intent of the exhibition After
the Fact was twofold: firstly, to depart from a political term that is heavily connoted and
generally regarded as problematic in relation to art (other than say “activism”) in order
to think the intertwinement of art and politics from this angle, and secondly, to posit
propaganda in a wider sense as a diffusive neoliberal political strategy rather than a crude
and obvious rant or a thing of the past.
One of the recurrent criticisms that the exhibition has received was that we had seemingly
not understood what real propaganda was since there was no mention of Putin’s
bot farms or the terror of ISIS. Luis Velasco-Pufleau’s and Sergio Santamaría Borges’s
two-channel video installation exemplified the reason for which we chose to omit these
and other cases of blatant propaganda. We were trying to take a look, through the lens of
the works of art united for this occasion, at a specifically Western capitalist propaganda
and the nationalisms and global hegemonies it has helped to bolster throughout the past
decades. The video was, at first sight, a surprise to many viewers: why was it bad to raise
money for starving or sick kids in Africa? But the form of the work, the ways in which the
artists edited the appropriated footage into a catchy, poppy, but ultimately nauseating
chain of images was self-explanatory (an important criterion for effective propaganda
which the artists consciously exploited). The aesthetics of charity that humanitarian pop
is relying on and that Velasco-Pufleau and Borges cast into relief in their work�images
of underfed and seemingly helpless people from “Africa” filmed outdoors, juxtaposed
with takes of white pop starlets in recording studios�serves to negate colonial history
and political contingency in favor of an apolitical, yet deeply ideological narrative of
Western generosity and philanthropy.
9 Stephanie Weber has been a curator of contemporary art at Lenbachhaus in Munich since 2014.
In recent years, she has organised the exhibition, publication, and conservation project Lea Lublin:
Retrospective (2015, Justus Bier Award for Curators), the exhibition Rochelle Feinstein: I Made a
Terrible Mistake (2016, AICA Germany Award “Special Exhibition”), the film series Normalzustand.
Underground Film Between Punk and Art Academy (2017), as well as After the Fact. Propaganda in the
21 st Century (2017), an exhibition and events project probing the dialectical relationship between
current Western propaganda and art.
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