Ruben Ostlund, The Square
Some people don't like this film. They think that the criticism it aims at the art world is silly and reactionary. I think it is an interesting meditation on the art world and the relationship of art to social problems, and to chaos and transgression.
It concerns the travails of an art museum director, a certain perhaps aptly named Christian. His museum has a piece that involves a square etched in the pavement outside the museum and a little plaque with an inscription that reads, “The square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.” Or in my translation, after the Souxsie and the Banshees song, "This is a happy house. We're happy here....Don't say no, or you'll have to go."
To Christian difficulties happen. He must deal with the social world, crisis, chaos, difficult people including homeless beggars, an angry Arab boy, and a woman he sleeps with and who seems to want something more. The film's question is, Can the art world, or its managerial personnel, deal with shit that happens?
The square's announcement of equality and fraternity is problematized from the outset by its being a figure with a boundary. This delimitation could make us Americans think of college campuses where students have established “safe zones.” It may also suggest Swedish and sometimes European liberal and social democratic ideals. It is a figure of possible transgression simply because it is bounded. It has a frame, like all artworks and for that matter films. But this artwork largely is its frame. This all means that it is an inclusive space that inevitably is also exclusive. And that means that some people must be excluded from it. In the modern human rights ideology, which stems largely from the French Revolution and its Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, there is a problem with the identification of universality and particularity that partly define the modern republican state's claim to legitimacy, and this problem is indeed that of the border or boundary. There must be people who are included only by being excluded and excluded as included. This could include the film's many beggars and (their status as part of Swedish society being questioned) its Arabs.
Indeed, the art world understands exclusion as includable by way of transgression. And a space that has a boundary has a boundary that can be crossed.
But some lines should not be crossed, it seems. In fact, it's never quite made clear why the decisive event is so troubling. It is part of the way the Square will be marketed, though this strategy certainly becomes an event that displaces the place so that now it is what is discussed. Apparently, many people are offended.
If the film is less successful than it could have been, I think that can only be because the misadventures of this Christian are not thematically tied in as closely to "aesthetic" problems proper to the art world as they might be. It also partly turns on the performance of the actor who plays him, with a certain aura of power and smartness, who is reluctantly pulled into making some concessions.
The Square with its definitional mots d'ordre telling local citizens how to behave is a space ripe for transgression because it appears to suggest the absence thereof, in a parodic statement of perfect order. It is an example of what Jacques Rancière calls the governmental or police as opposed to the truly political. In fact, it's a funny art object, and most of us if we saw a plaque with this demand would think it comically ironical.
The film also asks, Can the art world really deal with the world outside its walls and borders? When it tries to, it does so by representing that border. And it translates unmanageable problems into transgressive statements, which are political and not merely managerial on that account. Could the art world deal with the kinds of problems Christian encounters? Sure, though perhaps it need not.
Some critics, including Richard Brody of New Yorker magazine, seem to think the film articulates a criticism of the art world that is trite and reactionary. Brody doesn't mention Trump by name or his followers, but I don't know why not. It would surely be interesting if the film were taken to demand to be read in such a way that that very question seems germane. It's true enough that the art world could have been presented as having more staying power than it seems to have in this film. It portrays a man who is really caught between the worlds inside and outside of the museum.
To exclude no one, guarantee peace, and solve every problem is a a dream worthy of bureaucracies. And of course this question of exclusions at least is very germane in Europe and America right now. When social criticism succeeds best in the world of art and its imaginary museums, the art world itself may become the site of anxieties linked to forces it cannot manage. Could it be that art itself should succeed less and, as Beckett put it in Worstward Ho, "fail better"?