Between 15 September and 12 November 2000, the group exhibition Protest and Survive was mounted at Whitechapel Gallery by curators Matthew Higgs and Paul Noble, who sought out “the possibility of identifying a radical ‘community’ of artists” between America and Europe. Containing some forty artists spanning multiple generations, the exhibition measured both the ideological parallels and distinctions between these artists assembled as part of a – supposedly cohesive – ‘radical’ chorus.

Swiss-born artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s contribution to the show was an architectural intervention. Hirschhorn constructed The Bridge, which, as its title suggests, was a bridge connecting what was then Whitechapel Gallery’s café with the anarchist bookshop Freedom Press, which remains adjacent to the Gallery in Angel Alley. Hirschhorn sought to foreground and communicate the relationship between art and politics, championing a view of art wherein the two are indivisible from one another. Insofar as The Bridge enabled visitors to walk directly from the Gallery into the bookshop, the political thrust and meaning of this work is obvious: that an inalienable kinship exists between art and radical leftist thinking. However, that this bridge had to be constructed in the first place and only lasted for the duration of the exhibition, unearths questions around the politics of impermanence and the role of supposedly radical art more broadly: To what extent can art institutions foster robust relationships between radical leftist spaces and the broader public? Does any radical trace remain of The Bridge today, or might its intentional transience reveal a weakness in Hirschhorn’s conceptions of radical politics?

Following the opening of Protest and Survive, the artist and writer Stewart Home leveraged a vehement critique against The Bridge which one might distil into three parts. Firstly, Home argued that the kinship Hirschhorn fashioned between art and anarchist politics is “anything but” a divergent or avant-garde gesture; but rather, a prosaic and uninspired reflection of the “idealist claptrap[s]” of artists (and everybody else not in the ruling classes) pursuing “‘freedom’ and ‘individual creativity’” in lives which have gotten incommensurably worse “after the ascent to power of the bourgeoisie.” Secondly, Home pulls into focus various anti-Semitic tendencies in the founding fathers of historical anarchism – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin – whose portraits are prominently displayed on the outside wall of Freedom Press, problematising how Whitechapel Gallery’s collaboration with the bookshop, through The Bridge, might have “lent credence to an operation promoting as heroes men who helped lay the ideological foundations for Nazi genocide.” Thirdly, Home is resolute that galleries and cultural institutions are inherently politicised spaces and “anything but socially progressive” given their deep complicity with capital, and thus, the dissemination or refining of political ideas and all their contradictions might be more generative outside of the art ecosystem.

At the heart of Home’s argument lies an extremely clear demarcation of what the limits of art and artistic labour are in civic life. Put differently, how much can artists and institutions do to offer audiences serious and substantive engagements with so-called progressive politics? For Home and his comrades, overtly political – which is to say, didactic – artworks such as The Bridge surpass the parameters of the artistic and transgress into the world of political insult. A temporary bridge between a café and an anarchist bookshop reads as an obvious and clumsy gesture, and what Home identifies in the work as prosaic and problematic returns to a question of rigour – both artistic and curatorial – that is lacking. However, to expect artists and curators writ-large to engage in meticulous research and thinking as to how their exhibitions might go beyond purely aesthetic engagements with leftist politics and adequately deal with the complex histories of the ideologies in which they supposedly champion is a fantasy. For Home and many others, to expect this intellectual and political complexity of cultural producers is impossible given their institutional preoccupations with the art market and, of course, the necessary flattening of nuance that comes with being able to sell a narrative or object under capitalism. On this particular superficiality, Home writes, “I am pleased to see the physical bridge between the Whitechapel Gallery and the Freedom bookshop disappear – but if the disappearance of The Bridge is its strength, then the fact that it was built at all must be its primary weakness.”

Both Whitechapel Gallery and Freedom Press have endured as discrete entities since the disappearance of Hirschhorn’s bridge. What remains of this project is a book – Material: Public Works − The Bridge 2000 – published by Whitechapel shortly after the exhibition, in partnership with BookWorks. Modelled on a French government document, the book documents the correspondence between the exhibition curators, Hirschhorn, Freedom Press, and various other interlocutors, revealing how the construction and artistic conceptualisation of The Bridge was a collaborative activity. Through reproducing the correspondence between these parties, the book makes transparent, on one hand, the unseen support systems of The Bridge’s production. Alternatively, one might consider that the bureaucracy laid bare in this publication might evince the structural conditions which actively obstruct the level of rigour Home expects of artists and institutions. In a system so ossified by and beholden to bureaucracy, one must wonder whether these are, in fact, the apposite conditions for radical politics to flourish.

Written by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow, Whitechapel Gallery, 2023

Image: Thomas Hirschhorn, The Bridge, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2000.  Archive material, Whitechapel Gallery Archive. Material : public works – the bridge 2000, compiled and co-edited by Thomas Hirschhorn, Anthony Spira and Graig Martin, to accompany the exhibition ‘Protest and Survive’, Whitechapel Gallery, 15 September – 12 November 2000.