Contemporary art and left-wing populism: the Artist Taxi Driver as working class ideology

ABSTRACT

Philosophical aesthetics is routinely grounded upon a binary opposition separating art, a reflective and contemplative activity, from popular culture, the brute and philistine cultural expressions of the masses. While art is expected to have a broadly conceived educational mission, it has to simultaneously denounce such popular culture forms that involve propaganda, didacticism and immediacy in order to legitimize itself socially. This paper explores the social and political implications of art and left-wing populism through the work of the British artist and taxi driver Mark McGowan and his project Artist Taxi Driver. Employing a direct language and an aggressive anti-neoliberal rhetoric grounded on widespread populist binaries, such as the ‘elites’ and the ‘people’, McGowan enacts a militant artistic persona in his series of YouTube videos. His daily commentary on subjects such as the Greek crisis, the Scottish referendum and the Jeremy Corbyn election both challenges the split between art and popular culture and mobilizes this split as a populist negation of prevalent forms of governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• political art
• popular culture
• contemporary art
• aesthetics
• activism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Panos Kompatsiaris is Assistant Professor of Art and Media at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He holds a PhD in art theory from the University of Edinburgh (2015). He has published on art, culture and politics in journals including the European Journal of Cultural Studies and Social Identities. His first monograph The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Art and Theory (Routledge, 2017) looks at the politics of contemporary institutions in the context of neoliberalism and its crisis.

ORCID

Panos Kompatsiaris http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2452-6109

Notes

1 As Artist Taxi Driver, McGowan has produced rants against the YBA’s and personally to Damien Hirst referring to them as the mirror image of commodity culture. The video titled ‘Damien Hirst Tate Modern exhibition Review’ can be found at the following address https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAtg90yvwNk.

2 In turn, he proclaimed the continuation of his protest by opening taps in unidentified locations in London, a threat made to further intensify the controversy and annoy the company (and which he reportedly never materialized).

3 He wished to stage the re-enactment inside the Stockbridge metro station in London, the same tube in which the unarmed man was shot by the police. The intended performance, described by the magazine Londonist as a ‘rather confused and distasteful attempt to treat the public’s post-traumatic stress disorder’, was eventually forbidden by the police and was relocated to take place in the outside area of the tube. The full article can be found at the following address http://londonist.com/2008/11/reeneactment_of_de_menezes_shooting.

4 Foster (2015).

5 One can find this video, titled ‘Frieze’, in which he also states that he wears sunglasses to show support to the ‘Chilean miners’, at the following address https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK7W5UTTvvo.

6 His 2014 talk at the Glasgow School of Art can be found at the following address in full http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDTtlKRuC54.

7 These can be found in his official YouTube page https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGThM-ZZBba1Zl9rU-XeR-A.

8 Brecht famously declared that ‘a theatre which makes no contact with the public is nonsense’ (2002, 183–185) and his materialism was seen by Adorno and Horkheimer as ‘vulgar and simplistic’ or ‘his notion of class struggle and faith in the working class as a historical revolutionary force dated and undialectical’ (Glahn 2014, 168).