Yesterday in Graz I figured I’d stay away from theatre and stick with art. My first stop therefore had to be Kunsthaus Graz. Mention that you are going to Graz to pretty much anyone in the London art world and they’ll bring up the Kunsthaus. Not that this piece of architecture is universally liked by London art world insiders – many view it as too flashy and tending to overshadow the art it shows – but nonetheless it can’t be ignored! The building was designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier. The former was a founder member of London based 1960s utopian architecture group Archigram. The designs made by members of Archigram remain popular with a certain curators but the group’s plans were never really realised – so it isn’t unusual to come across people in London who view the Kunsthaus as the nearest thing there is to a ‘finished’ Archigram project (and some use it to illustrate the argument that it’s just as well that Archigram weren’t able to see their ideas translated into built structures). I found the plonking of what Cook and Fournier’s call the “Friendly Alien” amongst a bunch of baroque buildings a great visual pun  – but then neither baroque nor blob architecture really groove me, since I much prefer the more ‘classic’ modernist forms Archigram were reacting against.

Given that Archigram were pro-consumerist and worked on the assumption that there were infinite resources in the world, Kunsthaus Graz seemed like an appropriate venue to host Romauld Hazoume’s Beninese Solidarity with Endangered Westerners. Hazoume is well known for the use of items such as petrol canisters in his works, and has said about this: “I send back to the West that which belongs to them, that is to say, the refuse of consumer society that invades us every day.”� Money too is an essential of consumer society and it is of course only a representation of wealth; we’ll all be far richer once money is abolished! The short English language text explaining Hazoume’s take on aid covers some of the essentials – more than 40% of this money is spent on NGO administrative costs and endemic corruption creams off more, with the result that aid rarely goes where it is actually needed. Not mentioned in the material accompanying the show is that the world belongs to everyone and the poor should not have to rely on ‘charity’ from the rich. Aid is simply one of the many ways in which the bourgeoisie attempts to buy off those who might otherwise expropriate their expropriators (and rather than supply the readies themselves, the bourgeoisie often merely campaign for working class ‘westerners’ to cough up dosh in the form of donations)! Likewise the disparities in wealth between rich and poor individuals dwarf the disparities between rich and poor nations. There are rich and poor everywhere and aid for poor westerners from rich Africans makes every bit as much – or as little (depending on your perspective) – sense as the reverse.

Without leaving the building I was able to boogie along to Camera Austria for the exhibition Unexpected Encounters. I certainly wasn’t expecting the talk in the supporting textual material of the ‘restoration of capitalism’ and ‘the period of real socialism in the former Yugoslavia’. Like everyone else on the left – and by left I mean those with the type of views denounced by Lenin in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder – I see Yugoslavia and the whole of the former Eastern bloc dominated by the USSR as capitalist. Of course people do argue about whether to call this historical empire capitalist or state capitalist (with those opting for the former denouncing those who chose the latter for fetishising the notion of bureaucracy); but even ultra-leftists who disagree with aspects of Amadeo Bordiga’s analysis of the agricultural question in the Russian revolution (the basic argument being that the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital takes place when you reduce those employed in agriculture to 10% or less of the work force, and this is what Bolshevism achieved) generally agree with the conclusion that while there was a revolution in Russia, it was a bourgeois and not a communist revolution.

Then there are all the old arguments about whether workers’ control was capitalist or communist. The Bordiguists, of course, argued that if the workers in a specific factory controlled that factory, they in effect owned it, and that therefore relations between one factory and another would inevitably have to be commercial, and so rather than having communism, you’d still have capitalism! These debates -which I first found myself involved in more than 30 years ago – seemed to have a lot of bearing on the material presented in Unexpected Encounters. But to reuse words I first read in a text by Jacques Camatte, one might say of the Camera Austria curators: “it is as if they’d never encountered left-communism in all its originality, nor understood the nature of its break with the Third International…”

Next I moved on to Close Link by Barbara Hoelbling and Mario Hoeber at Ex-Zollant/Halle. The installation looked at those in isolated or vegetative states of consciousness due to illness, and according to the blurb confronted ‘visitors with their own very personal, unexplored relationships.’ All the medical equipment in the show made me realise I’d never explored the forms of sexual fetishism connected to doctors and hospitals; that said, even if there’d been a rubber nurse on hand to give me a quick enema, I’m not sure I’d have gone for it – since dominance and submission isn’t really my thing! In a different part of the same building I also checked out Economic Factor Closet Clutter, where it was possible to swap fashionable clothing instead of buying it (that said ‘proletarian shoppers’ tend to favour stealing it). The items were either too high fashion or too bohemian for my tastes, and there was no sign of the type of low class sportswear I favour among the items, although the event was clearly popular with locals – to the extent that there were even a couple of uniformed cops checking it out, yikes!

To top off my cultural OD for the day I decided to go and see My Name Is Janez Jansa (2012, directed by Janez Jansa – born 1964 as Emil Hrvatin) again – I’d seen it earlier in the year at Transmediale in Berlin and thought it sucked big time, but I decided to give it one last chance. Viewing it for a second time I liked it even less. Basically it is a TV-style documentary about three artists who in 2007 all legally changed their names to Janez Jansa, also the public name of the then prime minister of Slovenia (although his legal name was and is Ivan Jansa).

A lot of academic talking heads are used to give the documentary an appearance of gravitas – but only, of course, if you haven’t yet realised that academic study is yet another manifestation of pointless bourgeois ideology. Whether the individuals in question are genuine academics or just presented as such doesn’t make much difference, since academia is beyond parody and the hierarchical effect is the same regardless of whether the bozos on camera are real professors or just actors. One interviewee even suggests the art world doesn’t like the Janez Jansa name change performance because it is literal rather than a simulation – which left me wondering what century this twerp was living in since the rhetoric about simulation associated with Jean Baudrillard was popular in art world centres such as New York and London during the rise of post-modernism in the 1980s, but is now considered terminally unhip. That said, the three artists engaged in the Janez Jansa performance are simulating political activism – but they don’t by this means escape the political, rather they remain as conservative as the SDS party of Ivan Jansa, which all three joined.

What came across in the film, but even more strikingly in a post-screening talk given by its director Janez Jansa and his two Janez Jansa collaborators (born respectively as Davide Grassi in 1970 and as Ziga Kariz in 1973), was their obsession with their own position within the institution of art. Noticeable by its absence from the film is any discussion of the collective use of names and identities among those critical of the institution of art starting with the Christ Society Ltd of the Berlin dadaists, and continuing even more thrillingly with the Luther Blissett Project of the 1990s. What I Am Janez Jansa does is produce a weak and conservative version of these earlier multiple identity projects that involved thousands of people using the same name.

While those initially behind the Luther Blissett Project invited anybody who wanted to do so to use the name, the elitist Janez Jansas seek to generate media and art world interest in themselves by a far more restricted usage of multiple identity concepts. But more than anything else what came across from watching the director Janez Jansa and his two associates speak was just how insufferably dull art world elitists always are! While those involved in the Luther Blissett Project were upfront about their equalitarian political intentions, the three men promoting themselves and their art as Janez Jansa play at refusing to explain their actions. And like every other deluded elitist they don’t seem to realise that they aren’t outsmarting their audience, who on the whole are perfectly capable of reading their actions as well as their words.