Archive for category: Articles

Terry Smith

Part One
Tactically, conceptualism is no doubt the strongest position of the three; for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists.

—Willard van Orman Quine

1
Philosophers often add “-ism” to a term in order to highlight a distinct approach to a fundamental question, that is, to name a philosophical doctrine. For example, when it comes to universals,

There are other definitions, but the point about the use of “-ism” to name a philosophical doctrine is clear. For art critics, curators, and historians, however, “-isms” have somewhat different purposes: they name movements in art, broadly shared approaches that have become styles or threaten to do so. During the heroic years of the modern movement, when critics, artists, or art historians first added “-ism” to a word, they usually meant what the suffix usually means in ordinary language: that The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy tells us that “Conceptualism is a doctrine in philosophy intermediate between nominalism and realism that says universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality.”2x is like y, even excessively so. Often with ridicule as their aim, they highlighted a quality twice removed from the source of that particular art, from its authenticity. Thus “Impressionism” and “Cubism,” neither of which names what is really going on in the art to which it refers: each takes up a banal misdescription and then exaggerates it into a ludicrous delusion on the part of the artists. The success of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes led to a plethora of “-isms” that gradually lost these negative connotations and become almost normal descriptors. By mid-century, anyone could generate an “-ism,” and too many artists did so in their efforts to link their unique, often quite individual ways of making art to what they, or their promoters, hoped would be market success and art historical inevitability. When Willem de Kooning, at a meeting of artists in New York in 1951, said: “It is disastrous to name ourselves,” his was a lone voice, quickly silenced by the tide that named all present Abstract Expressionists.
By the 1960s this kind of naming had become so commonplace, so obvious a move, and such a sure pathway to premature institutionalization and incorporation, that many artists rejected it, to avoid being comfortably slotted into what they regarded as an ossified history of modernist avant-gardism. In the 1970s, for example, artists driven primarily by political concerns consciously blocked efforts to designate their work as belonging to a “political art” movement. Yet for some artists, long excluded from any kind of historical recognition, this was a risk worth taking: feminist artists emphasized their feminism, for instance, precisely because it connected their practice to the broader social movement to vindicate the rights of women.

As the artists most acutely aware of the powers and the pitfalls of exactly these processes, conceptual artists refused to embrace the term “conceptualism” during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. They were, however, happy to use terms such as “conceptual” for their work, because questioning the concept of art was precisely the main point of their practice. As we shall see, they foresaw that the tag “Conceptual Art” would inevitably be associated with their work, and thus tie it too closely to art that had already resolved its problems. Their goal was to keep their art (practice) problematic to themselves by keeping it at a (critical) distance from Art (as an institution). They therefore sought to prevent the precipitous labeling of their art by adopting one or both of two strategies: insist that the term “conceptual” be applied so broadly (describing any art no longer governed by a traditional medium) as to be meaningless, or so narrowly (indicating only language-based art that dealt with Art per se) as to be offensive to almost everyone.

It is a nice paradox that the term “conceptualism” came into art world existence after the advent of Conceptual art in major centers such as New York and London—most prominently and programmatically in the exhibition “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s” at the Queens Museum of Art in New York in 1999—mainly in order to highlight the fact that innovative, experimental art practices occurred in the Soviet Union, Japan, South America, and elsewhere prior to, at the same time as, and after the European and US initiatives that had come to seem paradigmatic, and to claim that these practices were more socially and politically engaged—and thus more relevant to their present, better models for today’s art, and, in these senses, better art—than the well-known Euro-American exemplars. I explored a variant of this idea—that conceptualism was an outcome of some artists’ increased global mobility—in my selections for the “Global Conceptualism” exhibition, and in my catalogue essay, “Peripheries in Motion: Conceptualism and Conceptual Art in Australia and New Zealand.”3 Retrospection of this kind has also shone spotlights on what were once regarded as minor movements in Euro-American art (Fluxus, for example).

The question posed by the exhibition “Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965–1980,” presented at the University of Toronto Art Galleries in 2010, is whether a similar valuing structure might be applied to certain strands in art made in Canada from the 1960s to the present. Even though Canadian artists were conspicuously absent from “Global Conceptualism,” certain artists have since been valued as contributors to the international tendency. Thus the exhibition asks us to look in more detail at work of the time made throughout the regions of Canada and consider whether perhaps this valuing can be extended to them. There is no suggestion that this art was nationalistic—on the contrary, it was everywhere based on skepticism about official national culture-construction. The implication is that regional conceptualisms existed—that is, that conceptualist developments (in the broadest sense) occurred differently in each of the distinct regions of Canada. Again, the implication is skeptical: in every case it is about regionality in transition, not a self-satisfied parochialism.

Triggered by remarks made by some of the key artists back in the day, I wish to revisit the terms “Conceptual art” and “conceptualism” as indications of what was at stake in the unraveling of late modern art during the 1960s and in art’s embrace of contemporaneity since. I will do so by asking what conceptualism was before, during, and after Conceptual art, and I will show that there were at least one, usually two, and sometimes three conceptions of conceptualism in play at each moment—and that these were in play, differently although connectedly, in various places, at each of these times.

Josef Kosuth, Art as Idea as Idea (Meaning), 1967. Photostat on paper mounted on wood.

Let me begin with the question as seen from within orthodox art historical narratives, as a matter of the meaning of style, a concern of art historians. I start from before Conceptual art was named as a style, before the term “conceptualism” had any currency, to see what might count as Conceptual art in that circumstance.

Ian Burn, in conversation in late 1972, said of Joseph Kosuth’s Art as Idea works:“If they were made in 1965 like he claims, they are Pop Art. If they were made in 1967–8, when they were exhibited, then they are among the first conceptual works, strictly speaking.” In his 1970 essay “Conceptual Art as Art,” Burn gave these works this latter dating and characterized them as key examples of the “strict form of Conceptual Art” because they were analytic of the nature of art, their (minimal) appearance being of the most minimal relevance.4 Why did an artist with such a critical attitude toward orthodox art history’s puerile dependence on style terms apply such crude criteria to the work of a close colleague?5

Kosuth’s response was outrage at applying such anti-conceptual criteria to such work: he was an art student who had the ideas but not the resources to realize them; by the time he did have these resources a few years later, everyone (including Burn) was dating their work to the moment of conception—immediacy was the new currency.6

Josef Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965.

In one sense Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) is Pop-like in that its statement about what constitutes a sign is all there, all at once, and obvious, as in your face as Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, but without the fascinated irony that informs the British artist’s perspective. To an observer outside the US sphere of cultural influence—or, more accurately, at its waxing and waning borders—One and Three Chairs might seem to offer viewers an open choice as to which item seems the most attractive constituent of “chairness,” thereby reducing spectatorship to supermarketlike art consumption, and artmaking to the provision of competitive goods.7 To the extent that this is true, Conceptual art that turns on overt demonstration or the instantiation of an idea (as does much of the better known and easily illustrated work—think Baldessari, Acconci, or Huebler) shares something with what might be called ordinary language Pop art, that which recycles the visual codes of consumer culture.

But the matter does not end there. In my view, the invitation to look in One and Three Chairs is at least as subtle as it is in key works on this subject by Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol in its conceptual questioning of what it is to see, what an image might be, what an idea looks like. These artists regularly juxtaposed photographs and objects such as actual chairs (in Rauschenberg’s Pilgrim, for example), or evoked black-and-white photography and overtly displayed the tools that made them (Johns’s Periscope (Hart Crane), 1963, for example). Warhol’s Dance Diagram (“The Lindy Tuck-In Turn-Man”), 1963, is an appropriation of an illustration, but it is also a demonstration of what constitutes a visual sign, especially when displayed, as he preferred, on the floor. Indeed, Warhol now seems the most nakedly conceptual of artists (in this pre-Conceptual art moment), precisely in his instinct for setting out one visual idea at a time, in showing an image as an idea, in making artworks that plainly demonstrated how visual ideas achieved appearance in the culture, in the visual culture, in popular imagination, in unArt, in America. The idea-image, for him, was in David Antin’s brilliant perception, a “deteriorated image.”8

Warhol, Dance Diagram

Joseph Kosuth, Art as an Idea

Rauschenberg, Pilgrim

There were of course many others striving to picture the many dichotomies afforded by the idea-image interplay that was taking shape at the time: a random list must include Guy Debord, with his films such as Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) and his collaborations with Asger Jorn; concrete poets of all kinds; Jim Dine; Kaprow, with his early happenings; Ed Ruscha; and many others, all of whom converge with Pop in certain ways, although they, like the artists mentioned above, were on a track much more interesting than that which can be encompassed by that term. In Canada, Greg Curnoe’s work throughout the 1960s offers a fascinating instance of a figurative painter, alert to the stylistics of Pop and flat color abstraction, yet, like Kurt Schwitters, drawn irresistibly to the potency of words and texts as they occur in the flow and stuff of everyday life. Add to this a Wittgensteinian consciousness that we are all products of our language-worlds, and an interesting outcome is assured. Thus, in Westing House Workers (1962), the names of a group of laborers are stamped out on a sheet that seems taken from a factory cafeteria notice board, while Row of Words on My Mind #1(1962) stamps out a set of names of people, things, promises, and so forth, that seem as random as anyone’s everyday ruminations. By 1967, however, Curnoe had evidently seen tautology-based conceptualism (either through reproductions or via the agency of Greg Ferguson): Front Center Windows (1967) is a blue vertical rectangle stamped with black letters that describe a façade in the language of a builder’s report, while Non-Figurative Picture (1968) is a vertical column stamped with the letters of the alphabet.

These examples tell us that the question “Is it Pop or Conceptual art?” is at best a provocation (as it was for Burn), and at worst a badly formulated misunderstanding of the deeper stakes of both kinds of work. Rather, we can see that various kinds of conceptualization inspired the most inventive artists of the late modern era, and that the conceptual qualities of their work were among its most important. This is the first, the most rooted, sense in which the three ideas of what it is for art to be conceptual could count as one idea: the term “conceptual” as an adjective is most fitting to this sense. Quite properly, this basic usage precedes any real usage of the terms “conceptualism” and “Conceptual art” in art discourse, as these are derivative from it. It permits us this proposition, the first part of a proposal that I advance—with full awareness of how paradoxical a gesture it is—as “a theory of conceptualism”:

1. At its various beginnings, conceptualism was a set of practices for interrogating what it was for perceiving subjects and perceived objects to be in the world (that is, it was an inquiry into the minimal situations in which art might be possible).9

Dan Graham, March 31, 1966.

These remarks combine elements from three recent lectures. The first was delivered on November 27, 2010, at the conference organized by Barbara Fischer, director of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto, in association with the exhibition “Traffic: Conceptualism in Canada,” shown at the University of Toronto Galleries during the preceding months. The second, dedicated to the memory of Charles Harrison, was delivered at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, on March 8, 2011, as part of a series on Global Conceptualism organized by Sarah Wilson and Boris Groys. The third was presented on April 14, 2011, as part of a conference titled “Revisiting Conceptual Art: The Russian Case in an International Context,” convened by Boris Groys and organized by the Stella Art Foundation, Moscow. I would like to thank all those concerned.

Terry Smith

is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. In 2010 he received the Franklin Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA) and the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate Award (Commonwealth of Australia). He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). He is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993; inaugural winner Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Prize, 2009),Transformations in Australian Art, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation, volume 2, The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002), The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011).
Footnotes:

1

Cited on a file card from the catalogue/exhibition by Gary Coward with Arthur Bardo and Bill Vazan, “45°30’N-73°36’W + Inventory ,” Williams Art Gallery, Montreal, 1971.

2

Simon Blackburn, ed.,

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1996.) Oxford Reference Online.

Oxford University Press, posted April 8, 2008.

3

Terry Smith, “Peripheries in Motion: Conceptualism and Conceptual Art in Australia and New Zealand,” in Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 87–95.

4

Ian Burn, “Conceptual Art as Art,” Art and Australia(September 1970): 167–70.

5

During the 1990s, Burn became acutely aware of what he saw as the growing disjunction between the histories of art written by art historians and what he saw as the historical work, on both art and history, being undertaken in certain works of art: “While any image or object can be fitted into many historical discourses, it cannot be at the expense of the historical discourse within the image itself.” (Ian Burn, “Is Art History Any Use to Artists?,” in Ian Burn, Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen &Unwin, 1991), 6.) To Burn, artists created that discourse less as picturing of it (as if it were a parade occurring at a representable distance), more in the way they composed their works, in the disposition of elements internal to each work. Sidney Nolan and Fernand Léger were prominent examples: in one of his essays, Burn showed that Nolan used some compositional ideas of Léger’s not to create a local modernism, nor to modernize his own art by imitation, but to negotiate a reconception of what landscape might mean in Australian art and history. “Sidney Nolan: Landscape and Modern Life,” in Burn, Dialogue, 67–85.

6

Conversation, New York, March 27, 2011.

7

An observation made by Boris Groys in a seminar at the Courtauld Institute, University of London, March 9, 2011.

8

“Before the Warhol canvases we are trapped in ghastly embarrassment. This sense of arbitrary coloring, the nearly

obliterated image and the persistently intrusive feeling. Somewhere in the image there is a proposition. It is unclear.” David Antin, “Warhol: The Silver Tenement,” Art News (Summer 1966): 58. Cited by Leo Steinberg, see Harrison & Wood , 953.

9

I first published these propositions, under the heading “A Theory of Conceptualism” in “Conceptual Art in Transit,” chapter 6 of Transformations in Australian Art, volume 2, The Twentieth Century – Modernism and Aboriginality

(Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002),127. They may be found in a nascent form, but applied to the Art & Language group only, in my essay “Art and Art & Language,” Artforum XII, no. 6 (February 1974): 49–52.

Geopolitics and Contemporary Art, Part I: From Representation’s Ruin to Salvaging the Real

Irmgard Emmelhainz

Source: E-Flux

In the 1960s and ’70s, politicization meant taking a position, establishing and following a political program, taking up armed struggle, putting one’s skills (including art) at the service of the revolution, fighting in the name of the horizon of state socialism, and acting in solidarity with anti-imperialist and decolonization struggles. Artists and militant networks were drawn together by political affinities, and Palestine, Vietnam, and Chile were symbols of anti-imperialism. This form of politicization translated into an aesthetic practice of international vanguardism, contestation, criticality, counterhegemony, and postcolonial memorialization and assertion, within the framework of a politics of representation. Since that time, however, this kind of politics has come to be perceived as a form of violent nationalism that led to authoritarian states and propagandist aesthetics. Politics has become inseparable from the neoliberalized political economy, as well as from culture.

Within representation’s ruin, what used to be “outside” of capitalism—like marginality, queerness, or race—has been symbolically incorporated and deprived of its capacity to disrupt and contest. Figures of otherness have disappeared and been subsumed into “lifestyle” options. The underclass is a blurry horizon disconnected from the flows of global capitalism; far from being a political figure, the underclass is sometimes subject to site-specific intervention, pacification, betterment, development, and community-building projects. Its emancipatory horizon lies in entrepreneurship. Moreover, in the twenty-first century politics is no longer representative, but what some theorists call “post-politics.” Following Jodi Dean, this means that politics now aspires to a superficial democracy that neutralizes antagonism and denies democracy’s limits and mechanisms of exclusion. “Post-politics” thus implies the disavowal of the fundamental division conditioning politics, as equality has come to mean inclusion, respect, and entitlement. “Post-politics” means consensual politics, the end of ideology, the neoliberal withering away of the state in some areas and its strengthening in other strategic ones, and the financialization of the economy.1

Insofar as democracy has become the goal of political action, visibility has become a key feature. This form of politicization presupposes that displacing signs may contribute to destabilizing or mobilizing people, providing tools for articulations that can enable specific political goals. As a consequence, cultural production has become inextricable from political action. We must also consider what was made evident by the 2011–13 worldwide mobilizations: the huge gap that exists between government (political parties, elections, institutions) and the actual forms in which we are being governed, which give shape to our lives and the ways we make a living—according to the interests of international trade organizations and corporations. “Que se vayan todos,” or “They all have to go,” has been the motto on the streets of Argentina since the early 2000s, even if “they” all eventually end up staying. In Egypt, Tahrir Square took Mubarak’s head, and the Tamarod (rebellion) movement took Morsi’s. Collective self-determination was reclaimed in the streets, and yet the people’s goal was not to get organized and take power because, first, power creates the fiction that gathering and protesting is enough to change things, and second, because politics no longer works as representation.

If traditional forms of power were representative and lodged in institutions and persons, power is now hidden in infrastructure (a highway, a supermarket, software, fiber optics, a data center, corporate providers of energy and water) and materialized as spatial arrangements. Post-representative forms of power manifest themselves as the organization, design, and configuration of the world; these forms of power are architectural and impersonal, as opposed to representative and personal.2 Moreover, politics is also post-ideological, which means that critical disposition, symbolic gesture, political position, and everyday life are completely dissociated. This dissociation leads to pervasive contradictions: denouncing hunger in Africa, but drinking coffee at Starbucks; expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, but consuming Israeli goods; protesting against violence, but exploiting one’s own employees; opposing slavery, but buying clothing manufactured by enslaved people in Southeast Asia; expressing concern about global warming, but buying food in supermarkets; applying for government and corporate funds to produce projects that critique them. Our post-political and post-ideological era is characterized by a sharp discrepancy between political position, political action, and symbolic gesture.

In what follows I would like to address the transformations in militantism in the context of the shift from representation to post-politics and post-ideology, as manifested in politicized art in recent decades. This shift embodies the passage from the ruin of representation to sensible politics: from internationalism to multiculturalism, antiglobalization, and recent artistic production that, aside from taking up the task of rendering visible the invisible, has proposed forms of salvaging reality, of self-organizing transient communities, bettering the conditions of living and working, and imagining new forms of communal organization, social therapies, and useful art. One of the questions that urgently needs to be asked concerns the role that contemporary art plays in geopolitics, if we consider the art world as an industry, as the harbinger of neoliberalism, and as a tool for pacification, normalization, and gentrification. Relatedly, can the nation-state can still function as a container for globalized struggles? What can the political art and militancy of the 1960s and ’70s contribute to these struggles?3

“Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault discussed the shifts in militantism and their implications in a public dialogue on March 4, 1972.”

The Ruin of Representation

A century ago and up until the 1960s, political action was framed under unions, parties, and associations, and consisted in attending rallies and organizing strikes, meetings, and marches. In this context, militants delivered pamphlets and gave speeches—what is known as “agitation” work. For instance, Lucy Parsons was a member of the Communist Party and an indefatigable agitator who also belonged to the Chicago Working Women’s Union and joined the Socialist Worker’s Party in 1877. Parsons travelled throughout the United States and became a well-known labor leader and one of the main defenders of anarchism, Black people, and the rights of prostitutes.4 Another militant, French philosopher Simone Weil, sought to transcend the domain of politicized speech (although she was known to have given speeches at workers’ meetings in Le Puy, where she taught philosophy) and engaged in factory and peasant work as well as in armed struggle with the Republican Army in Spain. In the 1960s, a major shift took place in political engagement, especially after May ’68. Following in Weil’s footsteps—and in opposition to Jean-Paul Sartre, who kept militant action and philosophy as two separate activities—figures such as journalist Ulrike Meinhof, philosopher Régis Debray, and filmmaker Masao Adachi bypassed the party as the container for progressive politics and engaged directly in armed struggle, seeking to join theory and practice. Maoist students also rejected the party and worked alongside laborers and peasants, no longer seeking (as Lenin’s had prescribed in his text “What is to be Done?”) to militate ahead of them, but to learn from them.

Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault discussed the shifts in militantism and their implications in a public dialogue on March 4, 1972.5 They posed the question of the role of intellectuals in relation to the struggles of students, workers, and prisoners. In the discussion, Foucault defined two types of politically involved intellectuals: “outcasts,” who engage in actions that are regarded as subversive or “immoral” by bourgeois society (i.e., Jean Genet); and “socialists,” who use discourse to reveal particular truths (i.e., Rosa Luxemburg). Intellectuals had traditionally taken the latter role, serving as “the consciousness of the people.” The events of May ’68, however, marked the awareness that the masses no longer needed intellectuals to represent them or to describe their various forms oppression. For Deleuze, the role of the intellectual was no longer to situate himself ahead of workers, but to contest the very forms of power that position intellectuals as producers of knowledge. Thus, what was problematized by May ’68 was precisely the notion of the “representative consciousness.” Intellectuals had been rendered aware of how they propagate discourses of power disguised as “knowledge,” “consciousness,” and “truth.” For Foucault and Deleuze, there could be no representation, not because there wasn’t a signifier (“archaism”) that could bring together a given group based on common interests, but because in “speaking for others,” there is always an unconscious desire operating: to know, appropriate, and have power over the Other, denying him or her the right to self-consciousness.

Foucault and Deleuze thus gave intellectuals the task of organizing struggles beyond representation and “class consciousness.” They posited militantism as a matter of denouncing, speaking out, finding targets, and creating tools to fight different forms of power and oppression. This cleared a path for an array of different struggles beyond class consciousness, rooted in the cultural and social arenas, as well as for a politics of counter-information, which privileged the mass media as a site of militant intervention. New micropolitical struggles targeted the processes of subjectivation (subjectivation) and subjugation (assujettisement or sujétion), which assigned roles, functions, and identities to individuals subordinated by a given form of power. These struggles sought to use the logic of subjectivation to organize militant self-consciousness, constructing an active, politically constituted subject or subjectivity that could counter the process of subjugation. In the domain of art, after the shifts prompted by the ruin of aesthetic-political representation (manifested in philosophy as post-structuralist theory), artists developed conceptual art strategies that aimed to dematerialize the art object in order to resist its ever increasing status as a commodity. Through institutional critique they began to question the conditions of art production, and through a pedagogy of viewership, they made art (most notably video art) that sought to counter the spectacle.

From Anti-Imperialism to the Global Celebration of Difference

Parallel to student and worker struggles in Europe, anti-imperialism and decolonization battles were underway in the third world, seeking to establish alternatives to Western capitalism. Cuba, China, Palestine, Chile, and Vietnam were key referents in the 1970s. Communism was a “living hypothesis,” a horizon that mobilized the belief, passion, and will of a large part of the revolution and inspired solidarity from the Western world.6 The political figures brought about by anti-imperialism were the empowered peasant or slum-dweller and the colonized subject fighting for their own emancipation against empire. By the 1980s, however, the revolutionary anti-imperialist subject and project had been disavowed as a sort of aberration of decadent socialism, A new de-ideologized form of third-world emancipation, beyond the international division of labor and the figure of the worker as a politically self-defined subject, was foregrounded. Anti-imperialism had implied universalizing a cause or giving a name to a political wrong; the “wretched of the earth” emerged for a historically specific period of time as a new figuration of “the people” in the political sense. But a new ethical humanism took over, replacing revolutionary and political sympathy with pity and moral indignation, transforming the latter into political emotions within the framework of human rights.7

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Declaration of Poetic Disobedience, 2006. Video still. Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank.

This led to new figures of alterity in the 1980s and ’90s: the “suffering other”’ who needs to be rescued, and the postcolonial subaltern demanding restitution, presupposing that visibility would follow emancipation. These figures became the postcolonial, ethnically self-defined and self-represented subjects struggling for recognition and for a place from which to speak their own suppressed, unheard, or forgotten narratives: “I speak therefore I am,” utters performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña in his Declaration of Poetic Disobedience (2006). In order to avoid the representation of identities based on archaisms (or “essentialisms,” as Gayatri Spivak put it) that would perpetuate the discourses of Western society’s “Other” through nationalisms, myths, and other types of ethnic-specific narratives, in the 1980s postcolonial theorists posited a differential structure of identification, in which identity was conceived as always being in the process of formation, constructed through ambivalence and “splittings.”8 What became crucial politically, according to Homi Bhabha, was the articulation of “interstitial moments,” or processes produced in the articulation of differences. For Bhabha, “third spaces” can allow for an elaboration of “communal” representation, generating “new signs” of cultural difference as “sites of collaboration.”9 The concept of “difference,” however, came to be trivialized. By the late 1990s it manifested itself in the art world as biennials in marginal corners of the world, somehow fulfilling the multicultural utopia of globalization.

Under the site-specific intervention model of the biennial, space came to be regarded as epistemically rich; delivering experiences or intervening in everyday processes took over from representation. Site-specific art sought to infuse social criticism into the everyday. As a moral statement, however, site-specific intervention became the limit of its own political effect. Confined within the art world, it provided contrasts and pointed at potentials, yet fell short of modifying the background of political turmoil, and even caused epistemic violence to the site in question. Site-specificity had been liberatory insofar as it had enabled the displacing of essentialized nation-state identities and had introduced the possibility of multiple identities, allegiances, and new meanings. This was prompted by what Susan Buck-Morss described as a compensatory fantasy that responded to the intensified fragmentation and alienation of an expanded market economy.10 Thus, in the “biennialized” art world, multiculturalism, polyphony, and marginality actually came to affirm white hegemony, insofar as they expressed a moral struggle for recognition. Considering that fluid identities are made possible by the privilege of mobilization and thus bear a specific relationship to power, a new class division based on degrees of mobility was established: on one side, a transnational class of cultural workers with smooth access and safe passage, pondering the elsewhere of global processes; on the other, migrant workers and refugees crossing borders as “illegals” to survive.

Minerva Cuevas’s Mejor Vida Corp offers a student card to an exhibition visitor, 2012.

Globalphobic Aesthetics and Tactical Media

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the political horizon of communism as a promise, a utopia, an intellectual construct, and a political vision waned. Instead, it became a place and an event in actual history, a disastrous experiment manifested in totalitarian dictatorships.11 As neoliberal policies were implemented and free trade agreements were signed across the world, the antiglobalization movement arose in the mid-1990s, opposing neoliberal reforms and fighting for fair trade, sustainable development, human rights, and corporate accountability. Following Brian Holmes, this movement was the first attempt at a widespread, meshworked response to the chaos of the post-’89 world system. Within this framework, anticapitalists critiqued the failures of neoliberal governance from an array of different positions: democratic sovereigntists, anti-border libertarians, and the more traditional, union-oriented Keynesians.12 The antiglobalization movement conceived itself as a social base for criticizing corporate capitalism, globalization, and the growing political power of multinational corporations, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets.

Antiglobalization protesters converged at gatherings of world leaders, most notably in Genoa 2001, and at their own international conferences, like the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil that same year. The political subjectivity embodied by the movement was theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who, in line with May ’68 post-representational politics, sought to go beyond the worker-based identity of the “proletariat” and the homogeneity inherent in the concept of “the people.” They thus they coined the term “the multitude.” For Hardt and Negri, the multitude is a social being formed in the no-place of capitalism. It is a decentered network of singular cells within Empire immanently producing the “common,” which is also the substance of the multitude and the condition and end of production (the locus of surplus value). The multitude exists within the imperial rule of biopower, a form of social control that regulates and administers life from within, extending through consciousness, bodies, and the entirety of social relations. As opposed to taking over power and the means of production, as Marxism prescribed in the twentieth century, for Hardt and Negri the task of the multitude is to democratize the common(s), exploit networks of social production with the purpose of achieving autonomy, and undermine the sovereignty of biopower. The flesh of the multitude, however, embodies a series of ambivalent conditions that can become dangerous: social production can either lead to liberation, or be caught in a new regime of exploitation and control, feeding biopower.

In parallel with the antiglobalization movement, artistic production veered toward anticapitalist politics, characterized by interdisciplinarity and the adoption of an array of countercultural positions and political affiliations, with the goal of creating autonomous zones, albeit symbolically. Examples include art collectives producing counter-informative, didactic, and symbolic interventions or actions against capitalism in the public sphere: REPOhistory, Group Material, Guerrilla Girls, WochenKlausur, Colectivo Cambalache, Las Agencias (Yomango, Prêt à Revolter, and so forth), Ne Pas Plier, Haha, the Yes Men, Superflex, Mejor Vida Corp., the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Atlas Group, Raqs Media Collective, and Chto Delat. At the same time, tactical media emerged, with strategies like attacks on servers as digital “sit-ins.” But while this form of creative activism lasted only until a globally integrated system of electronic surveillance was implemented after September 11 (as clandestinity became impossible and this form of attack was criminalized), antiglobalization art and activism have been criticized for having no political program, or for having the vague program of using imperialism against itself.13

For Hardt and Negri, the multitude has the desire for world equality, freedom, and a global democratic society, and it has the power to achieve them; but it has no discernible goals or agenda beyond opposing capitalism and appropriating production. The limitations of the antiglobalization agenda are illustrated by one of the actions performed within the framework of Yomango, a Spanish artistic project of social disobedience. The Yomango project involved disseminating instructions on how to appropriate goods available in globalized stores, followed by gatherings in which the goods were shared. Designed to facilitate the redistribution of the commons, the action, however, obscured the international and thus imperial division of labor and the conditions of production surrounding the goods that the participants appropriated for themselves.

Following Brian Holmes, the antiglobalization movement ultimately faltered due to the cultural consequences of globalization, that is to say, the global success of American mass culture, which extinguished local cultures only to resurrect them in a Disneyfied form. The antiglobalization movement was also defeated by the very neoliberal program that launched it in the first place, which manifested itself as a military, moral, and religious return to order, a massive expansion of capital, and a worldwide clampdown on civil liberties.14 In the realm of “high culture,” the expansion of American mass culture went hand in hand with the globalization of Western modernism as the lingua franca of contemporary art, derived from an emptying-out of postmodernity as a critical and temporal category, and its replacement by a singular and internally differentiated global modernity.15

Suzanne Lacy, Annice Jacoby, and Chris Johnson, The Roof is On Fire, 1994. Performance, Oakland, California.

Relationality and Salvaging Art

In parallel with the antiglobalization agenda, a current in art production sought to experiment with different forms of collectivity and community beyond identity and processes of identification. Relational art of the 1990s was the catalyzer for transient communal gatherings that sought to revive social relations and counter the alienation brought about by the spectacle. This form of art, described by Nicolas Bourriaud, envisioned the audience as a community and unfolds in the realm of human interactions, elaborating meaning collectively. Instead of having a “utopian” agenda, relational artists sought to find provisional solutions in the here and now; this is why relational artworks insisted on being used rather than contemplated.16 Another current of this participatory aesthetics was described by Claire Bishop, who put antagonism at its core in the creation of situations in which the members of a collectivity are confronted, thus drawing the limits of society’s ability to fully constitute itself.17 There were also “dialogical” practices, exemplified by the work of Suzanne Lacy, which brought together an array of different people (i.e., high school students, the police, the media) and dispositifs, repurposed for the creation of transversal spaces for dialogue.18 In Lacy’s piece The Roof is On Fire (1994), part of her Oakland Projects, 220 public high school students took part in unscripted conversations about family, culture, race, and education while sitting in one hundred cars on a rooftop garage, with Oakland residents listening to them. Lacy’s work combines institutional and social apparatuses with educational workshops, mass media, and policy development.

We can regard relational, participatory, and dialogical art practices as experiments with new models of social and political organization. These experiments emerged in the face of the fragmentation, the destruction of social bonds, and the alienation brought about by globalization. These practices also evidenced how art has become a form of experimental activity that overlaps transversally with the world through its flight into other disciplines, dispositifs, and regimes, with the purpose of addressing sociopolitical concerns. Participation, however, has its limits, as it is one of the forms of neoliberal governance and power. Following Eyal Weizman, at the horizon of participation there is collaboration, “the tendency to forcefully, or willingly, align one’s actions with the aims of power, be it political, military, economic or a combination thereof.”19 The problem is that the options from which we are allowed to choose cannot themselves be challenged, and thus participation ends up forcing the subject into compliance with power. This form of power has been conceptualized by Wendy Brown as “neoliberal governance,” and its focus is creating incentives to negotiate goals in common.20

Governance in this regard implies the creation of systems that enable administered or controlled inclusion through the fetishization of democracy. Via integration, individuation, and cooperation, democracy is reduced to “participation,” yet divorced from justice. Discontent is placated.21 Participation thus raises political and ethical dilemmas, demanding that the power relations enabling participation be urgently questioned. Participatory art, however, can be understood as an effort to experiment with ways to restore community links that have been destroyed or threated by neoliberal policies. Similar to Jean-Luc Godard, who has posited the image as a form of “salvaging the real,” W. J. T. Mitchell has posited site-specific or relational art as a form of “salvaging,” digging out things, recovering ruins, and rescuing neighborhoods by involving art and collaboration between institutions and communities.22

Art is expected to “save” reality by reviving the singularity of places and persons—here we can recall the use of locality and site- or cultural-specificity in the 1990s. It is not that the world or reality has been lost, but rather that our connection to and belief in them have been destroyed, and thus need to be saved. Art can help. For Mitchell, art’s new vocation is to remake the world both literally and symbolically as a way of constructing social solidarity and forms of imagining together (e.g., Pedro Reyes’s repurposing of guns as musical instruments, or Theaster Gates’s Dorchester Project, which involved the renovation of formerly abandoned buildings in Chicago’s South Side). The role of this kind of art has been to experiment with ways to restore vital contact with the real, highlighting the current crisis of presence due to extreme alienation in the West.

The group Yapi Sanat places a protest statue in front of the Istanbul Biennale at Istanbul Modern.

Politics of the Art World and Politics of Resistance

Antiglobalization, relational, and interventionist forms of aesthetic practice exemplify the different ways in which art and politics have related to each other within politicized aesthetics. But there are other ways in which politics and aesthetics converge. There is, for instance, a politics of the art world, as exemplified by Hito Steyerl’s video Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013). In this video-performance, which is also a kind of documentary, Steyerl eloquently connects a shell casing found on a battlefield in Turkey to the military-museum-industrial complex, revealing the ties between the weapons industry, transnational corporations, “starchitecture,” and global biennials. The genealogy of Steyerl’s video can be traced back to the institutional critique of 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, which aimed to elucidate the discourses behind exhibition practices and raise concerns about art sponsorship.

Taking institutional critique even further, recently there have been mobilizations that transcend the domain of art production to become direct political action within museums. For instance, last June members and allies of the group Gulf Labor temporarily occupied the Guggenheim in New York to protest the working conditions of laborers building the new Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi. The group Liberate Tate has also engaged in various direct actions to shed light on British Petroleum’s sponsorship of the museum. Artists are less and less keen to separate creativity, exhibition venues, and the sponsors that support them. They are reluctant to give credibility to sponsors that fund art in order to whitewash their own crimes.23 These political acts—which involve taking a position, issuing demands, and boycotting—are different from the politically engaged practices I elucidated above, which have used the art world as a strategic space for political discussion and experimentation.

Through disruptive actions, groups Gulf Labor and Liberate Tate protest against labor exploitation, the capture of public space, climate injustice, and gentrification. They denounce the art world as “a spectacular subsystem of global capitalism revolving around the display, consumption, and financialization of cultural objects for the benefit of a tiny fraction of humanity, the 1%.”24 Artists at the 2015 Istanbul Biennial organized a “productive disruption” to highlight the escalation of violence in Turkey, demanding a return to peace negotiations between the Turkish government and the Kurdish PKK.25 At the 2015 Venice Biennale, artists issued a “Letter for Palestine” that called attention to the campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel.26 Also expressing solidarity with Palestine, at the 2014 São Paulo Biennial 176 of 199 participating artists signed an open letter opposing Israeli “cultural sponsorship” of the event. The curators supported the letter, and in response the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo agreed to “clearly dissociate” Israeli funding from the overall sponsorship of the exhibition.27 Artists are now raising awareness about the epistemic and physical violence committed in sites of art production elsewhere. They are trying to restore contact with the political real by investigating and denouncing labor exploitation and new forms of enslavement: the figure of the worker as a site for politicization is returning to the fore.

Creating assemblages that link actors from the art world to projects oriented toward political action, these actors seek to create subjectivities and terrain for political acts by locating power struggles (instances of subjectivation), and are sometimes linked to social and political movements, autonomous collectives, and alternative media. Following Gregory Sholette, however, these forms of art tend to be characterized by the problematic absence of any ideological counternarrative to capitalism and by the belief (ever diminishing) that “cultural producers can bring something extraordinary to the underprivileged masses via the benefits of serious art.”28 Many of these practices described so far do not constitute political acts in themselves: images and symbolic gestures have served as back-ups to help activists gain political influence and visibility. While art and the art world have indisputably served as a self-reflexive site, and elucidated on global processes of oppression and expropriation, experimental laboratories or platforms for communal organization, collective therapies, speculative politics, yet as vehicles for visibility, politicized aesthetics these formats are not in and of themselves, a means to resist. Moreover, we must consider that critiques of capitalism need a social base, as well as forms of organization to resist against the neoliberal destruction of forms ways of life and common experiences. We must also take into account that nowadays, power is embedded in everyday objects and environments, that power is the order of things itself: it is not only infrastructure, but the way in which it works, is controlled, and built.29 These forms of power make the nation-state deaf to any demands we might make of it. The nation-state today legitimizes itself not through democratic processes, but by neutralizing citizen demands through governmentality, and by governing its populations differentially, as we will see in the following part of this essay.

****
Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Mexico City. Her work about film, the Palestine Question, art, cinema, culture, and neoliberalism has been translated to Italian, French, English, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and Serbian, and she has presented it at an array of international venues. She is member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal, and has recently finished a book on neoliberalism as a sensibility and common sense embedded in urban planning, work and life, culture, social movements, mourning, and women’s struggle.

1 Jodi Dean, “Politics without Politics,” Parallax 15.3 (2009): 20–36.

2 See Comité Invisible, A nos amis (Paris: La fabrique, 2014), 72–83.

3 These were some of the questions posed at the Sharjah March Meeting in May 2015.

4 See Angela Y. Davis, Mujeres, raza y clase (Madrid: AKAL, 2004), 157–159.

5 Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

6 See Maurizio Lazzarato, “From Knowledge to Belief, from Critique to the Production of Subjectivity,” Transversal, April 2008 →

7 See Irmgard Emmelhainz, “From From Third Worldism to Empire: Jean‐Luc Godard and the Palestine Question,” Third Text 23.100 (Fall 2009): 649–656.

8 See Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representations of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 43.

9 Homi Bhabha, “Frontlines/Borderposts,” in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed. Angelika Bammer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 269.

10 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso, 2003), 64.

11 See Boris Groys, “The Post-Communist Condition” →

12 Brian Holmes, “Continental Drift: Activist Research, From Geopolitics to Geopoetics,” framework X ephemera 5.X (2005): 741.

13 See Gregory Sholette, “Art Out of Joint: Artists’ Activism Before and After the Cultural Turn,” The GULF: High Culture/Hard Labor, ed. Andrew Ross (New York: OR Books, 2015), 80.

14 Holmes, “Continental Drift,” 741.

15 See Peter Osborne, “The Postconceptual Condition or, the Cultural Logic of High Capitalism Today,” Radical Philosophy 184 (March-April 2014): 19. This singular modernity is akin to what Nicolas Bourriaud termed the “Altermodern” in his Altermodern (London: Tate Publishing, 2009).

16 See Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79.

17 As in Santiago Sierra’s confrontations or in Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002), which was part of Documenta 11. Ibid.

18 See Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).

19 Eyal Weizman, “The Paradox of Participation,” introduction to Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation (Frankfurt: Sternberg Press, 2011), 9.

20 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015),

21 Ibid., 129.

22 Mitchell delivered these remarks in a lecture at the 2015 Sharjah March Meeting. The voice-over in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema (1998) says the following: “Même s’il est bondé d’égratignures au point de ne plus être utilisable, un petit rectangle de 35 millimètres est capable de sauver l’honneur de la réalité toute entière” [Even fatally scratched, a small rectangle of 35 millimeters is capable of saving the honor of the whole of reality].

23 See Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), “On Direct Action: An Address to Cultural Workers,”in The GULF, 134.

24 “Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) Manifesto,” June 25, 2015 →

25 See “Artists at Istanbul Biennial plan ‘Productive disruption’ to demand resumption of peace talks,” e-flux conversations, September 1, 2015 →

26 See Hrag Vartanian, “Artists Launch Letter for Palestine Campaign at Venice Biennale,” Hyperallergic, August 13, 2015 →

27 See Guy Mannes-Abbott, “The Emergent Wave of Artworld Activism,” The GULF, 98.

28 Sholette, “Art Out of Joint,” 83.

29 Comité Invisible, A nos amis, 84–86.

By Maya Baraona

In recent years, in celebration of the Persian New Year, the Tehran Municipality and the Organization of Tehran Beautification have been organizing an annual spring urban art event comprised of art exhibits and installations in public spaces around the city. With each coming year the event has grown larger with a greater number of participating artists and encompassing a wider range of art forms.

This year, Tehran’s spring urban art event was officially named “Baharestan”, meaning “spring garden”; it included mural painting, sculpture, graphic design, installation and environmental/urban art, with a special section dedicated to Norouz “egg painting”.

The event was organized as a competition and the Municipality received an overwhelming number of proposals from artists in all fields. In the sculpture and environmental art sections, 1’431 proposals were submitted by 532 artists out of which 160 artists were invited to participate in the event.

The artworks started going on display in public spaces around the city before the arrival of the New Year and will be exhibited through the end of Farvardin (April 18).The installations are quite varied with each artist marking the cityscape with their own unique style and imagination. The exhibits can be viewed along Vali’asr Ave. from Rahahan to Tajrish; along Enghelab St. from Meydaneh Enghelab to Ferdowsi and also on Keshavarz Blvd.

Fantasy, imagination, humor, nature, and the playful transformation of everyday city objects are prominent themes throughout the artwork. Concrete bollards transformed into mini-people, winged chairs floating on tree tops, pink ladders crossing bubble clouds, trees dressed in colorful yarn, walls with big ears and large imaginary creatures seated on city walls are just a few examples.

In the Norouz “egg painting” section, 694 artists submitted 2’122 proposals, out of which approximately 119 proposals were selected as finalists. In addition to the winning artists, a number of well-known established artists such as Mahnoush Moshiri, Parviz Rastegar and Jamshid Haghighat Shenas were also invited to participate in the event and thus a total of 250 eggs were painted and displayed in 5 major parks: Mellat, Laleh, City Park (ParkehShahr), Ferdows Garden and Abbasabad Norouz Garden.

The concept behind the “egg painting” section was to use the eggs as a canvas for painters and illustrators to showcase their art rather than create merely decorative objects. In addition to being one of the important elements of the “Haft-seen” spread (2), the eggs are a symbol of spring, fertility and birth.

In the murals section of the event, 94 artists created new mural paintings on the walls of Tehran where they will remain as permanent art pieces.The graphic design section of Baharestan showcased work by 44 designers on billboards across the city.

Such public art events are not a novelty throughout the world; New York, Paris Berlin and many other great cities stand as precedents to Tehran. The main question here is how does Tehran’s Baharestan compare to events organized by other cities?

Two major differences stand out in comparison to other cities and these have to do with the quality and quantity of the artwork presented through the event. In comparison to other cities, the number of participating artists and artworks created during this year’s Baharestan event is absolutely mind boggling! To think that in such a short period, 160 installations, 94 murals, 250 eggs and a large number of billboards were created and set up for exhibition throughout the city is both amazing and alarming. It is amazing because no other event has produced so much work in so little time; and alarming because it seems that in the minds of the curators the question of concept, thought and careful execution was forfeited by the idea of “the more the merrier”.

Tehran’s Baharestan may not be an exhibit of the finest and most sophisticated examples of Iranian contemporary art but it has certainly been a huge success in terms of providing an opportunity and platform for the younger generation of Iranian artists who cannot easily find venues for their creativity and constantly face an uphill battle in the world of elitist galleries and art shows. And while more is not necessarily better, in this case it has certainly been “merrier”. With large numbers of young enthusiastic artists painting, sculpting and setting up installations throughout the city, a wave of joy and creativity has engulfed the mega-city, bringing vitality and creating a spirit of renewal. This spring cultural event has been so well received across the social spectrum that in addition to the many renowned artists, actors, filmmakers and city planners who have made positive comments, individuals such as Ali Parvin -the popular Iranian athlete- have also shown their support.

One of the most important aspects of public art is that it is accessible to a wide range of social groups. According to Penny Balkin Bach, the founder of America’s first non-profit organization dedicated to the integration of art and urban planning “public art occupies a unique position within the art world. In comparison with big-name gallery shows, public art is often “under-appreciated” much like landscape architecture is. But there’s lots to applaud: “It’s free. There are no tickets. People don’t have to dress up. You can view it alone or in groups. It’s open to everyone.” As Bach points out, bringing art to urban spaces is a major step towards raising social consciousness and unlike museum exhibits and gallery shows which are visited by a very select social group, urban art reaches out to all layers of society.

Finally, as a socio-cultural event, Baharestan should be praised for two major achievements: firstly for providing an opportunity for young artists to exhibit their work and secondly for promoting art and creativity by exposing art to all layers of society.

To participate in the Baharestan photo competition please visit:
http://zibasazi.ir/fa/calls/item/7804

Sources:
http://zibasazi.ir/fa/urban-arts/

http://www.fardanews.com/fa/news504745/

http://www.iscanews.ir/news/619727

“Why Public Art is Important”, dirt.asla.org/2012/10/15/why-public-art-is-important/

By David Hodge & Hamed Yousefi

June 20th 2015, E-flux online journal 56th Venice Biennale

“CLOUD”, Installation by Canadian artists Caitlind R.C Brown and Wayne Garret.

Looking back on twentieth century modernism from the standpoint of today, it seems that its major aesthetic component was actually provincialism. Across the world, different forms of social and economic modernization emerged, leading artists to develop new practices that broke from tradition to engage with these shifting circumstances. However, the early canonization of “modern art” in Western Europe, followed by the transfer of power to New York towards the middle of the century, meant that most practitioners were inevitably forced to benchmark themselves against external examples. This produced major power imbalances between artists from different nations.
One key text on this issue is the Australian critic Terry Smith’s 1974 essay “The Provincialism Problem.” Smith argued that modernists from outside the international centers were constantly pulled between

“two antithetical terms: a defiant urge for localism (a claim for the possibility and validity of “making good, original art right here”) and a reluctant recognition that the generative innovations in art, and the criteria for standards of “quality,” “originality,” “interest,” “forcefulness,” etc., are determined externally.”
Smith insisted that this was the condition of “most artists the world over,” and that even practitioners living in New York were largely provincial, since “the overwhelming majority of artists here exist in a satellite relationship to a few artists, galleries, critics, collectors, museums, and magazines.”

Nonetheless, the situation was undoubtedly very different for non-Western artists living in colonial and post-colonial situations. Smith remarked that while Jackson Pollock could be internationally accepted as a “great artist,” outside his home country, Sidney Nolan could only ever be received as “a great Australian artist.” This would only be exacerbated in the case of artists from less economically developed nations.

Consequently, the many assertions of defiant local modernity that emerged from the “peripheries” throughout the twentieth century demand to be read as critical attacks on colonialism and uneven development.

But in what ways has provincialism altered since 1989? Contemporary art is characterized by aesthetic pluralism, with a great multiplicity of styles constantly sharing the stage. This overwhelming diversity is inseparable from globalization, which sees artists from different sides of the world frequently exhibiting together through an international circuit of institutions and events. Furthermore, as Peter Osborne, Miwon Kwon, and others have argued, contemporary art is largely “contemporary” by virtue of its being international. As Kwon explains, contemporary art is:

the space in which the contemporaneity of histories from around the world must be confronted simultaneously as a disjunctive yet continuous intellectual horizon, integral to the understanding of the present (as a whole).
This can make it appear as if the provincialism problem has been solved, with the structural disconnect Smith identified between local and global having disappeared.Because the international scene thrives on diversity and valorizes cultural difference, in some cases non-Western artists are even permitted entry precisely because they demonstrate their local identities.

However, contrary to being solved, the provincialism problem has actually been neoliberalized. To explain this, we will particularly emphasize three things: continuing disparities in institutional and educational access; the peculiarity of contemporary art’s aesthetics, which can largely only prosper in the very specific educational environment offered by Western art schools; and the shifting “social form” of art practice, which is now primarily structured as an agonistic competition between individualized agents, undermining the formation of collective solidarities.

While the international art world may have no stylistic lingua franca, entry into this arena does require a certain kind of formal complexity. As James Elkins claimed in 2009, there is a “persistence, in current art, of late-modernist values, aesthetic judgments, and assumptions about quality.”

Despite the absence of necessary materials, techniques, or traits, this question of quality still primarily turns on something profoundly formal: the fostering of a certain auto-reflective, self-critical torsion within the work. Artworks are expected to induce a kind of “dissensus,” deferring the closure of meaning and opening space for reflection.

Far from a “natural” component of art practice, this is a very specific type of formal complexity, which can only be cultivated amongst significant numbers of practitioners through a particular form of education. Indeed, this is precisely what most Western art schools teach—students are encouraged to undertake independent research (to deepen and specify their work), but are also taught to develop rich connections between theory and practice, as well as process and product. The overwhelming concentration of this particular form of education in Western art schools means that while in principle artists can hail from anywhere, in practice they usually have to pass through certain key geographical hubs.

Bernard Khoury/DW5, “Catherine Wants to Know” Lightbox, 2009

This great migration of contemporary artists is also due to the connections with galleries and other institutions that students are able to foster in “global cities.” While it would be untrue to say that young artists in London or Berlin have an easy passage into the upper echelons of the international scene, the opportunities available to them are entirely at odds with those encountered by practitioners in most other locations. Particularly illustrative of this disparity are the visits that curators commonly make to different countries while preparing an international show. These gatekeepers inevitably receive a partial and highly contingent view of any given scene, primarily directed by recommendations from acquaintances and local guides. The suggestions they rely on are rooted in a whole range of personal, political, and artistic factors of which the curator can only be dimly aware. For a whole generation of artists in this city, such occasions are among the few real opportunities for being “beamed up” into the international circuit, despite the fact that this is probably already the primary “imagined community” for which their work is intended. While some will indeed be mystically transubstantiated from local artists into international artists, most will be overlooked.

The other major factor behind the ongoing unevenness of the international scene stems from the way in which it blocks off collective movements by turning practitioners into individualized competitors. The art world’s endless production of difference is not only due to the cohabitation of diverse national identities, but also a consequence of the way that artists, writers, and curators are forced to jostle for positions within the field. Consequently, while the biennial has so often been discussed as the exemplary site for international contemporary art, the global circuit’s underlying logic is arguably much more fully represented by the culture of residencies. As most artists will only very rarely be able to actively participate in biennials, residencies form a core stage in the development of many young practitioners, often compensating for the lack of infrastructure at state level (although some are also increasingly beginning to charge hefty fees). Residencies offer artists time and space to develop their practices, as well as opportunities to meet people and experience new places, but they are also inevitably temporary. In order to string opportunities together, artists must perennially apply for further places or grants, and while the enforced migrations of the residency circuit might broaden horizons, they also militate against the formation of lasting collective bonds.
Consequently, residency culture exemplifies a general trend within the international scene toward the internalization of precarity, opportunism, and especially individualization into art practice. While twentieth-century modernism was so often characterized in its different national guises by the formation of avant-garde movements, the sociality of contemporary art is that of a dispersed network of competing individuals who never cohere into a historical subject with the capacity for collective resistance. The word “network” is here most productively read in relation to the career-building strategy of “networking.” Individuals certainly come into contact with each other, work together, and engage in critical discussion, but they do so at points of transition along decidedly individual trajectories.

The political significance of this shift in the social form of art practice is enormous. In recent times it has commonly been argued that the globalization of the art world, combined with its aesthetics of critical “dissensus,” have turned the international art circuit into a highly valuable political platform. As Okwui Enwezor and Caroline Jones have suggested, by fostering direct contact between art from different continents, the international scene opens a window onto the contradictions of globalization, allowing the realities of conflict and contestation to emerge from under the illusion of smooth progress.
It is easy to imagine why the apparent openness and criticality of the international circuit might appeal to politically committed artists, especially those who lack local platforms for free dissemination and discussion. In this sense the global circuit can be envisioned as a new form of artistic autonomy that is enabled by globalization, but also provides the means to take up arms against this process. However, while the aesthetics of contemporary art may make it a privileged site for critical projects, the socio-economic structure of the international scene means that artists lack any shared political horizon to concretize their affirmations of difference into a strong attack on hegemonic conditions. Without strong solidarities, they are inevitably encouraged to seek individual progress over collective emancipation, leaving very few opportunities to produce structural change.

Far from having been solved, then, the provincialism problem has actually been neoliberalized in two key respects. Firstly because the unevenness of contemporary art is now hidden by the illusion of individual freedom.

In the twentieth century, it was clear that most artists were barred from international success as a result of institutional discrimination. Today, in contrast, it can seem as if artists who do not succeed in gaining a global reputation are either just unlucky or (more likely) let down by their own personal failings.The reality is that the vast majority lack necessary structural amenities, and the global circuit does nothing to provide them. Its principle of stylistic openness operates as a meritocracy, obscuring its own failure to provide infrastructural support with the promise of individual betterment.
Secondly, because so many practitioners are now able to imagine themselves as participants within the seemingly open field of international contemporary art, many take their place in a constant stream that passes through continual rounds of grant applications, residencies, and MFAs, even though it is universally understood that most will never gain entry to the art world’s higher chambers. The individualized career trajectories demanded by this grueling process detract from the formation of regional or transnational solidarities that might provide the basis for infrastructural change. This second form of neoliberalization cuts much deeper than the first. Rather than simply failing to level the playing field, it perpetuates unevenness, catalyzing greater class divides rather than encouraging redistribution. Consequently, ongoing inequalities of institutional access must not be written off as temporary problems that can progressively be ironed out by the movement of globalization. In reality, the international “supercommunity” continues to elbow the sub-communities of local scenes into peripheral status. The conduits connecting the provinces to the global hubs still largely transmit value in only one direction.

Boris Groys

Source: E-Flux Journal
The relationship between art and money can be understood in at least two ways. First, art can be interpreted as a sum of works circulating on the art market. In this case, when we speak about art and money, we think primarily of spectacular developments in the art market that took place in recent decades: the auctions of modern and contemporary art, the huge sums that were paid for works, and so forth—what newspapers mostly report on when they want to say something about contemporary art. It is now beyond doubt that art can be seen in the context of the art market and every work of art can function as a commodity.

On the other hand, contemporary art also functions in the context of permanent and temporary exhibitions. The number of large-scale, temporary exhibitions—biennials, triennials, Documenta, Manifestas—is constantly growing. These exhibitions are not primarily for art buyers, but for the general public. Similarly, art fairs, which are supposedly meant to serve art buyers, are now increasingly transformed into public events, attracting people with little interest in, or finances for, buying art. Since exhibitions cannot be bought and sold, the relationship between art and money takes here another form. In exhibitions, art functions beyond the art market, and for that reason requires financial support, whether public or private.

I would like to stress a point that is often overlooked in the context of contemporary discussions about exhibitions. These discussions often suggest that art can exist even when it is not shown. The discussion of exhibition practice thus becomes a discussion of what is included and what is excluded by a certain exhibition—as if excluded artworks can somehow still exist somewhere, even when they are not shown. In some cases artworks can be stored or hidden from the public view and still exist as they wait to be exhibited later. But in most cases, to not show an artwork simply means not allowing it to come into being at all.

Detail of Susan Hiller, Measure by Measure , 1973-ongoing. Paintings burnt annually, in glass burettes, on shelf.

Indeed, at least since Duchamp’s readymades, artworks that only exist if they are exhibited have emerged. To produce an artwork means precisely to exhibit something as art—there is no production beyond exhibition. Yet when art production and exhibition coincide, the resulting works can very rarely begin to circulate on the art market. Since an installation, by definition, cannot circulate easily, it would follow that if installation art were not to be sponsored, it would simply cease to exist. We can now see a crucial difference between sponsoring an exhibition of, let’s say, traditional art objects and sponsoring an exhibition of art installations. In the first case, without adequate sponsorship, certain art objects will not be made accessible to the wider public; nevertheless, these objects will still exist. In the second case, inadequate sponsorship would mean that the artworks, understood as art installations, would not come into being at all. And that would be a pity at least for an important reason: artistic and curatorial installations increasingly function as places that attract filmmakers, musicians, and poets who challenge the public taste of their time and cannot become a part of the commercialized mass culture. Philosophers, too, are discovering the art exhibition as a terrain for their discourses. The art scene has become a territory on which political ideas and projects that are difficult to situate in the contemporary political reality can be formulated and presented.

Public exhibition practice thus becomes a place where interesting and relevant questions concerning the relationship between art and money emerge. The art market is—at least formally—a sphere dominated by private taste. But what about the art exhibitions that are created for wider audiences? One repeatedly hears that the art market, distorted by the private taste of wealthy collectors, corrupts public exhibition practice. Of course, this is true in a sense. But then what is this uncorrupted, pure, public taste that is thought to dominate an exhibition practice that surpasses private interests? Is it a mass taste, a factual taste of wider audiences that is characteristic of our contemporary civilization? In fact, installation art is often criticized precisely for being “elitist,” for being an art that the wider audiences do not want to see. Now this argument—especially because it is so often heard—deserves careful analysis. First of all, one has to ask: If installation art is elitist, what is the elite that is assumed to be the natural audience for this art?

In our society, if we speak about the elite, we understandably refer to the financial elite. Thus, if somebody suggests art to be “elitist,” it would seem to imply that this art is made for spectators coming from the affluent and privileged classes of our society. But, as I have already tried to show, the contrary is true in the context of installation art. Affluent, privileged art collectors buy expensive art objects that circulate in the international art market, and are not as interested in installation art, which functions primarily as part of public art exhibitions and cannot be easily sold. And it is usually the case that, after stating that advanced installation art is elitist, the responsible authorities will invite wealthy collectors to show their private collections inside a public space. The notion of the elite thus becomes completely confusing, for no one can understand who this “elite,” implied by accusations of elitism, is actually supposed to be.

In an attempt to clarify what people could mean by the word “elitist,” let us turn to Clement Greenberg’s essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), a text that became a well-known example of the so-called elitist attitude to art. Today, Greenberg is mostly remembered as a theoretician of modernist art who coined the concept of flatness, but “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” deals with another question: Who can financially support advanced art under the conditions of modern capitalism?

According to Greenberg, good avant-garde art tries to reveal the techniques that old masters used to produce their works. In this respect, an avant-garde artist can be seen as comparable to a well-trained connoisseur concerned less with the subject of an individual artwork—as Greenberg states, this subject is dictated to the artist mostly from the outside, by the culture in which the artist lives—than the artistic means through which the artist treats this subject. The avant-garde in this sense operates mainly by way of abstraction—removing the “what” of the artwork to reveal its “how.” Greenberg seems to assume that the connoisseurship enabling the spectator to be attentive to the purely formal, technical, and material aspects of the artwork is accessible only to members of the ruling class, to the people who “could command leisure and comfort that always goes hand-in-hand with cultivation of some sort.” (1) For Greenberg, that means that avant-garde art can only hope to get its financial and social support from the same “rich and cultivated” patrons that have historically supported art. Avant-garde art thus remains attached to the bourgeoisie “by the umbilical cord of gold.” (2) These formulations stuck with many of Greenberg’s readers, and defined the reception and interpretation of his text.

François Pinault posing in front of his art collection.

But what makes Greenberg’s essay still interesting and relevant today is the fact that after stating his belief that only the “wealthy and educated”—that is, the elite in the traditional sense of the word—can be capable and willing to support avant-garde art, Greenberg immediately rejects this belief and explains why it is wrong. The historical reality of the 1930s brings Greenberg to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie is unable to provide a social basis for avant-garde art through its economic and political support. To maintain its real political and economic power under the conditions of modern mass society, the ruling elite must reject any notion or even any suspicion of having “elite taste” or supporting “elite art.” What the modern elite does not want is to be “elitist”—to be visibly distinguishable from the masses. Accordingly, the modern elite must erase any distinction of taste and create an illusion of aesthetic solidarity with the masses—a solidarity that conceals the real power structures and economic inequalities. As examples of this strategy, Greenberg cites the cultural policies of the Soviet Union under Stalin, of Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy. But he also suggests that the American bourgeoisie follows the same strategy of aesthetic solidarity with mass culture to prevent the masses from being able to visually identify their class enemy.

In applying Greenberg’s analysis to the current cultural situation, one can say that the contemporary elites collect precisely the art that they assume to be spectacular enough to attract the masses. This is why big private collections appear “non-elitist” and well-adjusted enough to become global tourist attractions whenever they are exhibited. We are living in a time in which elite taste and mass taste coincide. One should not forget that, in the current moment, significant wealth can only be gained by selling products with mass appeal. If contemporary elites suddenly become “elitist,” they will also lose touch with mass expectations in their business practices and, accordingly, lose their wealth. Thus, the question arises: How is something like “elitist” art possible under these conditions?

The same essay by Greenberg suggests an answer to this question. If the avant-garde is nothing other than an analysis of traditional art from its productivist side, then “elitist” art is the same as “art for artists”—that is, art made primarily for the producers of art and not exclusively for the consumers of art. Advanced art wants to demonstrate how art is made—its productive side, its poetics, the devices and practices that bring it into being. Greenberg gives avant-garde art a definition that casts it beyond any possible evaluation by taste, wither popular or elite. According to Greenberg, the ideal spectator of avant-garde art is less interested in it as a source of aesthetic delectation than as a source of knowledge—of information about art production, its devices, its media, and its techniques. Art ceases to be a matter of taste and becomes a matter of knowledge and mastery. In this sense, one can say that, as a modern technique, avant-garde art is, generally, autonomous—which is to say, independent of any individual taste. Therefore, artworks should be analyzed according the same criteria as objects like cars, trains, or planes. From this point of view, there is no longer a clear difference between art and design, between an artwork and a mere technical product. This constructivist, productivist point of view opens the possibility to see art not in the context of leisure and informed aesthetic contemplation, but in terms of production—that is, in terms that refer more to the activities of scientists and workers than to the lifestyle of the leisure class.

Fernand Léger, Ballet Mécanique, 1924. Film still of the mechanized, animated Chaplin which opens and closes the film.

In a later essay, “The Plight of Culture” (1953), Greenberg insists even more radically on this productivist view of culture. Citing Marx, Greenberg states that modern industrialism has devaluated leisure—even the rich must work, and are more proud of their achievements as they enjoy their leisure time. This is why Greenberg simultaneously agrees and disagrees with T. S. Eliot’s diagnosis of modern culture in his book from 1948,Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. Greenberg concurs with Eliot that the traditional culture based on leisure and refinement came into a period of decline when modern industrialization forced all people to work. But at the same time, Greenberg writes: “The only solution for culture that I conceive of under these conditions is to shift its center of gravity away from leisure and place it squarely in the middle of work.” (3) Indeed, the abandonment of the traditional ideal of cultivation through leisure seems to be the only possible way out of innumerable paradoxes that were produced by Greenberg’s attempt to connect this ideal with the concept of the avant-garde—the attempt that he undertook and then rejected in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” But even if Greenberg found this way out, he was too careful to follow it. He writes further about the proposed solution: “I am suggesting something whose outcome I cannot imagine.” (4) And further again:
Beyond such speculation, which is admittedly schematic and abstract, I cannot go. … But at least it helps if we do not have to despair of the ultimate consequences for culture of industrialism. And it also helps if we do not have to stop thinking at the point where Spengler and Toynbee and Eliot do. (5)

It becomes obvious that when saying avant-garde art is “elitist,” what one actually means by the word “elite” is not the ruling and wealthy but the art producers—the artists themselves. It would follow that “elitist” art means that art which is made not for the appreciation of the consumers, but rather that of the artists themselves. Here we are no longer dealing with a specific taste—whether of the elite or of the masses—but with art for the artists, with art practice that surpasses taste. But would such an art that surpasses taste really be an “elitist” art? Or, put differently: Are artists really an elite? In a very obvious way, they are not, for they are simply not wealthy and powerful enough. But people who use the word “elitist” in relation to art produced for artists do not actually mean to suggest that artists rule the world. They simply mean that to be an artist is to belong to a minority. In this sense, “elitist” art actually means “minority” art. But are artists really such a minority in our contemporary society? I would say that they are not.

Perhaps this was the case in Greenberg’s time, but now it is not. Between the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, art entered a new era—namely, an era of mass artistic production following an era of mass art consumption. Contemporary means of image production, such as video and cell phone cameras, as well as socially networked means of image distribution such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter give global populations the possibility of presenting their photos, videos, and texts in a way that cannot be distinguished from any other post-conceptual artwork. And contemporary design gives the same populations the possibility of shaping and experiencing their own bodies, apartments, or workplaces as artistic objects and installations. This means that contemporary art has definitively become a mass cultural practice. Furthermore, it means that today’s artist lives and works primarily among art producers—not among art consumers. Or, to use Greenberg’s phrase, the artist is finally put squarely into the context of production. This places professional contemporary art outside the problem of taste, and even outside the aesthetic attitude as such.

Under these new social and economic circumstances, the artist should have no shame in presenting him- or herself as being interested in production and not consumption—as being an artist today means to belong not to a minority but to a majority of the population. Accordingly, an analysis of contemporary mass image production has to substitute the analysis of the art of the past as Greenberg theorized it. And this is precisely what contemporary professional artists do—they investigate and manifest mass art production, not elitist or mass art consumption.

Claes Oldenburg, VitelloTonnato, 1962. Muslin on painted glazed clay on a dish.

The aesthetic attitude is, by definition, the consumer’s attitude. Aesthetics, as a philosophical tradition and academic discipline, relates to and reflects on art from the perspective of the art consumer—the ideal art spectator. This spectator expects to receive the so-called aesthetic experience from art. At least since Kant, we know that the aesthetic experience can be an experience of beauty or of the sublime. It can be an experience of sensual pleasure. But it can also be an “anti-aesthetic” experience of displeasure, of frustration provoked by an artwork that lacks all the qualities that “affirmative” aesthetics expects it to have. It can be an experience of a utopian vision that leads humankind out of its present condition to a new society in which beauty reigns; or, in somewhat different terms, it can redistribute the sensible in a way that refigures the spectator’s field of vision by showing certain things and giving access to certain voices that were earlier concealed or obscured. But it can also demonstrate the impossibility of providing positive aesthetic experiences in the midst of a society based on oppression and exploitation—on a total commercialization and commodification of art that, from the beginning, undermines the possibility of a utopian perspective. As we know, both of these seemingly contradictory aesthetic experiences can provide equal aesthetic enjoyment. However, in order to experience aesthetic enjoyment of any kind the spectator must be aesthetically educated, and this education necessarily reflects the social and cultural milieus into which the spectator was born and in which he or she lives. In other words, the aesthetic attitude presupposes the subordination of art production to art consumption—and thus the subordination of art theory to sociology.

In fact, the aesthetic attitude does not need art, and it functions much better without it. It is often said that all the wonders of art pale in comparison to the wonders of nature. In terms of aesthetic experience, no work of art can stand comparison to even an average beautiful sunset. And, of course, the sublime side of nature and politics can be fully experienced only by witnessing a real natural catastrophe, revolution, or war—not by reading a novel or looking at a picture. In fact, this was the shared opinion of Kant and the Romantic poets and artists that launched the first influential aesthetic discourses: the real world is the legitimate object of the aesthetic attitude (as well as of scientific and ethical attitudes)—not art. According to Kant, art can become a legitimate object of aesthetic contemplation only if it is created by a genius— understood as a human embodiment of natural force. The professional art can only serve as a means of education in notions of taste and aesthetic judgment. After this education is completed, art can be, as Wittgenstein’s ladder, thrown away—to confront the subject with the aesthetic experience of life itself. Seen from the aesthetic perspective, art reveals itself as something that can, and should be, overcome. All things can be seen from an aesthetic perspective; all things can serve as sources of aesthetic experience and become objects of aesthetic judgment. From the perspective of aesthetics, art has no privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject of the aesthetic attitude and the world. A grown person has no need for art’s aesthetic tutelage, and can simply rely on one’s own sensibility and taste. Aesthetic discourse, when used to legitimize art, effectively serves to undermine it.

Stephen Willats, Metafilter, 1973-5, Painted wood, Perspex, computer, slide projector and problem book. Collection of Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris

Our contemporary world, though, is primarily an artificially produced world—in other words, it is produced primarily by human work. However, even if today’s wider populations produce artworks, they do not investigate, analyze, and demonstrate the technical means by which they produce them—let alone the economic, social, and political conditions under which images are produced and distributed. Professional art, on the other hand, does precisely that—it creates spaces in which a critical investigation of contemporary mass image production can be effectuated and manifested. This is why such a critical, analytical art should be supported in the first place: if it is not supported, it will be not only hidden and discarded, but, as I have already suggested, it would simply not come into being. And this support should be discussed and offered beyond any notion of taste and aesthetic consideration. What is at stake is not an aesthetic, but a technical, or, if you like, poetic, dimension of art.

A good object and example of such an investigation can be found in the poetics of the internet—the dominant medium of mass production in our time. The internet often seduces the average spectator—and even some serious theoreticians—to speak about immaterial production, immaterial workers, and so forth. And indeed, for someone sitting in an apartment, office, or studio looking at the screen of his or her personal computer, this screen presents itself as an opening, as a window into the virtual, immaterial world of pure, floating signifiers. Apart from the physical manifestations of fatigue that are inevitable after a few hours in front of the screen, the body of a person using the computer is of no consequence. As a computer user, one engrosses oneself in solitary communication with the medium; one falls into a state of self-oblivion, an oblivion of one’s body that is analogous to the experience of reading a book. But one is also oblivious to the material body of the computer itself, to the cables attached to it, the electricity it consumes, and so forth.

But the situation changes drastically if the same computer is placed in an installation, or, more generally, in an exhibition space. An art exhibition extends the attention and focus of the visitor. One no longer concentrates upon a solitary screen but wanders from one screen to the next, from one computer installation to another. The itinerary of the visitor within the exhibition space undermines the traditional isolation of the internet user. At the same time, an exhibition utilizing the web and other digital media renders visible the material, physical side of these media: their hardware, the stuff from which they are made. All of the machinery that enters the visitor’s field of vision thus destroys the illusion that the digital realm is confined to the space of the screen.

The standard exhibition leaves an individual visitor alone, allowing him or her to individually confront and contemplate the exhibited art objects. Moving from one object to another, this visitor necessarily overlooks the totality of the exhibition space, including his or her own position within it. An art installation, on the contrary, builds a community of spectators precisely because of the holistic, unifying character of the space produced by the installation. The true visitor of the installation is not an isolated individual, but a collective of visitors. The art space as such can only be perceived by a mass of visitors—a multitude, if you like—and this multitude becomes part of the exhibition for each individual visitor, and vice versa. The visitor thus finds his or her own body exposed to the gaze of others, who in turn become aware of this body.

An exhibition that uses and thematizes digital equipment stages a social event, one that is material and not immaterial. The installation is frequently denied the status of a specific art form because it is not obvious what the medium of an installation actually is. Traditional artistic media are all defined by a specific material support: canvas, stone, or film. The material support of the installation medium is the space itself—though this is not to say that the installation is somehow “immaterial.” On the contrary, the installation is material par excellence, because it is spatial—for being in space is the most general definition of being material. The installation transforms the empty, neutral public space into an individual artwork—and it invites the visitor to experience this space as the holistic, totalizing space of an artwork. Anything included in such a space becomes a part of the artwork simply because it is placed inside this space. One might then say that installation practices reveal the materiality and composition of the things of our world. Turning back to the beginning of my discussion, here lies the critical, enlightening character of truly contemporary art: while the commodities produced by our civilization circulate on the global markets according to their monetary and symbolic value—with their pure materiality manifesting, at best, through their private consumption—it is contemporary art alone that is able to demonstrate the materiality of the things of this world beyond their exchange value.

(1) Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art in Theory 1900-1990, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 543.

(2) Ibid., 542.

(3) Clement Greenberg, “The Plight of Culture,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 32.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ibid., 33.

Boris Groys (1947, East Berlin) is Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. He is the author of many books, includingThe Total Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Art Power, The Communist Postscript, and, most recently, Going Public.

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