Archive for category: Articles

Alan Gilbert

Source: e-flux Journal, January 2013

1. Shifting the Landscape

Politics without the imagination is bureaucracy, but the imagination is never a neutral category.

The shantytowns built on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, are the product of civil war, economic turmoil, ethnic struggle, and ecological crisis. Populated by underemployed laborers from the city and displaced peasants from the Andes, frequently of indigenous descent, a number of these shantytowns were originally constructed in the 1970s.1 In 2002, one of these shantytowns, named Ventanilla, was home to more than seventy thousand people without plumbing, electricity, paved roads, or other basic infrastructure. The surrounding landscape is desert. To move a mountain on this landscape, Francis Alÿs gave each of five hundred volunteers from Ventanilla a shovel and asked them to stand side by side and slowly work their way up the dune, or as he described it in an interview published in Artforum: “This human comb pushed a certain quantity of sand a certain distance, thereby moving a sixteen-hundred-foot-long sand dune four inches from its original position.”2 This combination of poetic vagueness and precise instruction is central to Alÿs’s storytelling approach to artmaking.

Many of Alÿs projects are about leaving a rumor, a story, or even a myth in the landscape as opposed to fashioning an object. In a piece from 1997 entitled The Rumor, Alÿs went into a town in Mexico and told a story about a man who disappeared from a local hotel. The rumor quickly spread through the town. However, once a police sketch was made—i.e., an accompanying object created—Alÿs ended his involvement in the piece. In The Green Line(Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic) from 2005, he casually carried a can of green paint with a hole in the bottom and walked the now-erased original boundary line of the state of Israel following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

A Belgian living in Mexico who travels often, freedom of movement is an important component in Alÿs’s artwork. However, his brand of itinerancy—determined as it is by financial resources and post-September 11th legal circumscriptions—is in marked contrast with forced exile and involuntary migration. What interests me about When Faith Moves Mountains is the line that Alÿs’s disenfranchised workers drew in the sand. If anything, it reminds me of the line in Santiago Sierra’s 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People … (2000). Unlike dominant strategies in socially engaged art, Sierra’s material practices don’t aim to draw audiences into a vague consensual sociability.3 Rather, viewers are strongly provoked to recognize systems of economic, social, and representational exploitation in which they—meaning, you and I—likely participate, however
indirectly.

Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002.Performance, Ventanilla, Peru.

Upon entering a large room at Sierra’s exhibition in 2000 at Ace Gallery in New York, I saw a set of oversized cardboard boxes, possibly for shipping appliances. Boxes in grids of any sort signal Minimalist art, and particularly the work of Donald Judd, but before I could get very far along this art-historical tangent, the back of my neck began to tingle. It was clear that I wasn’t alone in the room, even though I appeared to be alone in the room. At a certain point, and without it being indicated by noise or movement, I realized that there were people inside those boxes. Sierra’s title for the piece summarizes it succinctly: Remunerated People to Stay in the Interior of Cardboard Boxes. On the way out, I asked the gallery attendant for more information, and she said that Sierra had solicited unemployed immigrants in various situations of financial duress to sit inside the boxes for money, and that some did, but others found the work too degrading, and so only about half the boxes were occupied at any given time. Information, stories, rumors are always unreliable. Nevertheless, the point of my implication in vast systems of exploitation, however inadvertent in this instance, had been made in a way that was both metaphorical and totally real, i.e., more than skin deep.

Santiago Sierra, “Remunerated People To Stay In The Interior Of Cardboard Boxes”, 2000, Ace Gallery, New York.

Perhaps in response to the antagonisms and absolutisms of political strife—from the war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian government to the misnomered “clash of civilizations” in the wake of the September 11th attacks, six months or so before the opening of the Lima Bienal, which commissioned When Faith Moves Mountains—what’s notable about Alÿs’s piece is that while it may be a line drawn in the sand, it’s a shifting one, and one influenced by both environmental and human-social forces. In this sense, it would be interesting to revisit the location of the work in the way scholars, conservators, and art tourists have done with Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), which itself has been the subject of its own set of environmental and human-social forces. Specifically, Spiral Jetty has been threatened with the construction of solar evaporation ponds that would drain the water surrounding it, and also with the proposed building of nearby oil wells, which would potentially spoiled its “viewshed.”4 In other words, the art-world institutionality that Smithson and other Land art practitioners tried to escape by going deep into the American West—that most mythic of places—has been redrawn on a much larger canvas to include multinational corporations and global ecology.

Robert Smithson,”Spiral Jetty”, 1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah.

Plenty of artists, designers, and architects are parachuted into sites in order to create works meant to engage with the surrounding landscape (Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao being among the most famous examples), but Alÿs turns the landscape into an allegory that is local, global, and—the only thing that might be more powerful than both—climatological. As he says in the Artforum interview: “When Faith Moves Mountains is my attempt to deromanticize Land art … Here, we have attempted to create a kind of Land art for the land-less, and, with the help of hundreds of people and shovels, we created a social allegory.”5 Work and workers are in a battle with the elements, which, again, are never exactly natural—be they economic or environmental. It’s not a coincidence that the words “economy” and “ecology” share the ancient Greek word oikos [οἶκος], or “house.”

Santiago Sierra, 160 cm Line Tattooed on Four People, 2000.

2. Poetry

In a world where a fundamental strategy of ruling ideologies is to make themselves appear natural, the absurd can be its own form of critique. “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things,” Walter Benjamin writes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.6 Allegories need time to unfold, but all time is scented with death—to use a description in the spirit of Benjamin’s analysis of the German baroque. The danger with allegory is that it so easily turns into myth when lifted out of time and history. Hence Benjamin’s desire to keep allegory directed toward death and ruins.

In a post to the Verso blog about the then-burgeoning Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, McKenzie Wark wrote: “So what the occupation is doing is taking over a little (quasi) public square in the general vicinity of Wall Street in the financial district and turning it into something like an allegory.”7Wark goes on to equate allegory with the abstract, but that’s not quite right if, per Benjamin, allegories are deeply temporal phenomenon. Wark then compares the occupation to symbols, which, as Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality” instructed those of us raised on deconstruction in the late 1980s, are definitely not the same as allegories.8 What Wark might mean instead is “poetic,” though there are very few words in the English language as misunderstood as this one. From the Greeks and Romans until the rise of Romanticism, poetry was inseparable from the category of rhetoric, which, among other things, meant that poetry was understood to have a social impact. Since Romanticism—and here I’m speaking of a specific European-US tradition—the “poetic” has come to signify the opposite of that. This historical situation—after all, any aesthetics is a product of a particular history, as is the concept of aesthetics itself—was ironically confirmed by the twentieth-century avant-garde’s obsession with non-instrumental art and language. Everything else is kitsch, or so the story goes.

But what deconstruction taught is that all texts are rhetorical constructs—pre- and post-Romantic. This insight is both a blessing and a curse—a blessing because it teaches a rigorous mode of analyzing the internal contradictions, and therefore inherently self-defeating authority, of any text, by which is meant much more than just writing; a curse because when I watch someone like Glenn Beck pontificating, I can’t help but think it’s all a ridiculous rhetorical performance, and that Beck himself knows this.9 This is what used to be meant by rhetoric. And this is also related to what Occupy Wall Street does so well: it builds a self-deflating authority into its own ideology and organizational modes. Its signifiers slide. It foregrounds rhetorical performance in a self-conscious way that at the same time is deadly serious. It believes that bodies are material signs. In other words, it might be a kind of poetry.

People get impatient with the poetic. I’m a poet, and I get impatient with the poetic, as I got impatient with deconstruction for its endless discursive hairsplitting. At this point, I may be something of a reformed Foucauldian, because the only thing left to be privatized is our bodies. Yet if police responses to Occupy encampments around the United States prove anything, it’s that beneath all the soft power is a powerful police arsenal, much of it overfunded in the wake of September 11th, waiting, even eager, to be deployed, however clumsily.

The way in which we are subjects, the way in which we are governed, is more intensely personal now, which both Foucault and second-wave feminism realized almost simultaneously. The slogan “We are the 99%” is an attempt to elude this intensely scrutinized subjectivity, or to put it in the words of the French anarchist collective Tiqqun: “There is no ‘revolutionary identity.’ Under Empire, it is instead non-identity, the fact of constantly betraying the predicates that THEY hang on us, that is revolutionary.”10 In seeking this anonymity, Occupy Wall Street has stirred up debates within the Left between broad-based social movements and identity-oriented political struggle, a dialectic perhaps impossible to resolve. But as anyone who went to Zuccotti Park during the two months that Occupy Wall Street had a physical presence there might have noticed, the core group of protesters did diversify, even if the encampment itself was eventually riven with social, cultural, and class tension to the point that a few of the lead organizers were actually grateful for New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s heavy-handed, middle-of-the-night clearing of the park.

While some might argue that political indoctrination occurs via the state and its affiliate apparatuses, and others might claim that it happens through the corporate media, it’s clear that what’s been hijacked aren’t our thoughts per se but our desires. The service industry is predicated on capturing desire in a way that a manufacturing economy, with its checklist of items to buy, never was. It’s why design is superseding manufacturing (or outsourcing the latter), and why interactivity precedes content, especially in digital media, but increasingly in more traditional commodity culture as well.11The most perverse part is that these developments will be hidden behind the façade of interactivity, of choice, of guided desire. If that sounds depressing, it’s not. There’s an aimlessness and entropy and creative wisdom that even the most efficient systems can never account for or contain. Occupy Wall Street was instigated by what can only be considered an advertisement published in Adbusters,an anti-corporate magazine that doesn’t take ads. By not formulating a set of clear talking points, Occupy Wall Street has allowed people to project their own desires onto it. There’s something poetic in this too.

Placing a story into a landscape has the potential to make a difference, and maybe that difference occurs to the extent that the story resembles a poem. Think of the significant impact made on artistic practice this past decade by WalidRaad’s imaginary and fictional documentaries of the Lebanese Civil Wars. The allegory that Occupy Wall Street tells is still unfolding, even if its archive has become an important concern for preservation. In its very structure, allegory is a combination of critique and hope. I want my physical interfaces to be seamless, but not my intellectual and ideological ones. I’m skeptical of poetry by design because it always has something to sell, even if poetry itself doesn’t sell.

Steve Lambert and Andy Bichlbaum (The Yes Men), A Celebration, 2008. False New York Times newspaper issue. This periodical was a collaboration which included, besides the two authors, thirty writers, fifty advisors, around 1000 volunteer distributors, CODEPINK, May First/People Link, Evil Twin, Improv Everywhere, and Not An Alternative.

3. Public Space

Another favorite recent artwork of mine also involved a story inserted into a landscape. On the morning of November 12, 2008, commuters in various US cities, though mostly in New York City, were handed 80,000 free copies of a special edition of the New York Times with the banner headline “Iraq War Ends”—except that it was dated July 4, 2009, was only fourteen pages long, and the Gray Lady’s famous motto had been changed from “All the News That’s Fit to Print” to “All the News We Hope to Print.” Otherwise, it looked identical to the New York Times, right down to the layout, typeface, and ads. Article titles included “Nationalized Oil to Fund Climate Change Efforts”12on the front page, “National Health Insurance Act Passes”13 in the “National” section, and “New York Bike Path System Expanded Dramatically”14 in the “New York” section. Ads that carefully replicated the look of their real New York Times counterparts included ones for De Beers diamonds, HSBC, and Exxon Mobil, but with modified text so that, for instance, the De Beers ad read: “Your purchase of a diamond between now and 2026 will help fund the creation, fitting, and maintenance of a prosthetic for an African whose hand was lost in one of that continent’s brutal conflicts over diamonds.”15

Produced by social-art/activist group the Yes Men in collaboration with many other individuals and organizations, this fake New York Times might be understood as a public art project for the information age and its pervasive mediascape. The Yes Men have spent a decade inserting into this fuzzy public sphere sometimes absurd though always historically specific and corporate-focused counter-narratives, which have targeted Dow Chemical, the World Trade Organization, Chevron, and so on. These counter-narratives are frequently performance-based, more interested in concrete as opposed to abstract social bodies, and sometimes involve a subtle camping of male heteronormativity. “Site-specific” used to mean how deeply something was embedded in a place; now it refers to how thoroughly you’re being data-mined. It’s very difficult to define public art when there’s so little public space anymore, and the general public itself seems like an increasingly outdated concept. At the very least, following Nancy Fraser and feminist critiques of Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, it might be more useful to think in terms of many publics, alternative publics, and counter-publics.16 In any case, public space is becoming indistinguishable from a contested mediascape; similarly, the commons is becoming virtual as part of the internet era’s version of expropriation.

Occupy Wall Street’s lack of a traditional political platform is directly related to its role as a media intervention, as a meme, as an ideological contagion. This isn’t at all to deny the necessity of more conventional forms of activism or to ignore the fact that it was Occupy Wall Street’s physical presence at Zuccotti Park, its willingness to fill New York City jails, and videos of its bodies being billy-clubbed and pepper-sprayed that significantly raised the movement’s profile. But to then demand from it a coherent political program is to somewhat miss the point of its political imagination and frustration with business as usual writ large across the US political and economic system. The Occupy movement is proposing a different paradigm of viral politics and radical, participatory democracy. At another level, as Glenn Greenwald and others have pointed out, protesters simply want to see the law upheld and enforced, particularly around financial practices.17 Those who think Occupy Wall Street should be the Left equivalent of the Tea Party are welcome to line up some billionaire backers, start their own influential news outlet to serve as a mouthpiece, and handpick some candidates.

David Hammons, Concerto in Black and Blue, 2002. Installation view with artist.

I probably wouldn’t have said this ten years ago, or maybe even five, but it’s important to recognize imagination as a social and political force to reconfigure the real. We need to acknowledge how much innate creativity, and its direct relationship to desire, is challenged and threatened by the products of the culture industry, which includes parts of the art world. Confronted with the latest Hollywood blockbuster or Katy Perry release or Damien Hirst dot painting, it sometimes seems difficult to compete.

But of course, it does occur: we make cultures, and the culture industry dips into us as much as we dip into it. According to one report on the earliest days of Occupy Wall Street, it was “‘artistic activities’ that ultimately jump-started the occupation—yoga practices, poetry readings, and the like.”18 Perhaps the first of the Occupy Wall Street occupations was organized by a proto-arts and culture committee, and included poetry and music near the New York Stock Exchange. This took place on September 1, 2011, seventeen days before the initial main protest march. About a dozen people attended, most of whom were arrested.19Topics such as the elimination of student debt, the right to assemble, and freedom of speech were discussed. In other words, the stage had been set.

As a form of public art, as a kind of social sculpture, Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains, the Yes Men and affiliate organizations such as CODEPINK’s fake New York Times, and Occupy Wall Street each combine critique with a durational, progressive, and performative sense of hope. These projects understand that all art is public, even when it’s not public art. With the relentless privatization of everyday life, whether shared or solitary, the idea of a public going to a public space to see a public work of art is obsolete, and may, in fact, have never been more than a dream. Combined with recent threats to the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble, there’s a paradigm shift occurring in how to reconceive the public sphere. Nevertheless, the public is everywhere, even if many of its physical gathering places have been taken away (especially in the so-called Western “democracies”). Moreover, new publics arise all the time when a previously silenced or disenfranchised group seizes the opportunity to speak, which oftentimes takes a cultural form as much as a traditionally political one. Usually more so. This is part of the politics of the imagination.

A critique of present conditions; the imagination of alternative realities; and collective, sustainable methods seem like a good approach to grounding current artistic, political, and pedagogical practice. At the same time, it’s necessary to continue examining, and self-examining, to find internal contradictions: in critique (for instance, our complicity with power even as we confront it), in hope (the disappointment lodged in every hope, the unhappiness fastened to every joy), and in just how sustainable our practices really are and to what degree they instigate new social formations as opposed to replicating community as exclusion. Any solutions will be temporary, any spaces transitory. Publics are constantly morphing, and the battles they wage with those seeking to contain them are now over technology as much as over territory. This is part of the politics of transmission, in which art and poetry have always played a role.

1 With their complex, precarious, and improvisational approach to architecture and infrastructure, as well as their alternative economies, shantytowns around the world are increasingly being studied by urban geographers, social theorists, and architectural scholars alike. Some see these communities as creative in their employment of recycled materials, sustainable practices, and new modes of social relations, while others—and here I’m thinking specifically of Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006)—view these expanding metropolises of the poor as excrescences of global neoliberalism and creative mostly in the unimaginable systems of brutality and exploitation existing within them.
2 Saul Anton, “A Thousand Words: Francis Alÿs Talks about When Faith Moves Mountains,” Artforum Vol. 10, No. 40 (Summer 2002): 146–147.

3 Claire Bishop similarly contrasts Bourriaud and Sierra in her influential essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79.

4 See →.

5 Saul Anton, “A Thousand Words,” ibid.

6 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 178.

7 McKenzie Wark, “How to Occupy an Abstraction,” Verso blog, October 3, 2011. See →.

8 Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228.

9 Glenn Beck is an American conservative, television network producer, political commentator, and host of the radio talk show the Glenn Beck Program in the United States.

10 Tiqqun, This Is Not a Program, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).

11 Design has become less about objects and more about funneling people toward experiences. In this process, data-mining and the designed environment will become fused to shape people’s movements through space in a way that will make architecture’s historically predominant role in doing this seem feeble in comparison.

12 Steve Lambert and Andy Bichlbaum, A Celebration, 2008. Quoted from page A1 of the publication.

13 Ibid., A7.

14 Ibid., A12.

15 Ibid., A2.

16 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 109–142.

17 Glenn Greenwald, “Immunity and Impunity in Elite America: How the Legal System Was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land,” TomDispatch.com, October 25, 2011. See →.

18 Sean Captain, “The Inside Story of Occupy Wall Street,” FastCompany.com, October 7, 2011. See →.

19 Ibid.

Boris Groys

Source: E-Flux Journal
At the turn of the twentieth century, art entered a new era of artistic mass production. Whereas the previous age was an era of artistic mass consumption, in our present time the situation has changed, and there are two primary developments that have led to this change. The first is the emergence of new technical means for producing and distributing images, and the second is a shift in our understanding of art, a change in the rules we use for identifying what is and what is not art.

Let us begin with the second development. Today, we do not identify an artwork primarily as an object produced by the manual work of an individual artist in such a way that the traces of this work remain visible or, at least, identifiable in the body of the artwork itself. During the nineteenth century, painting and sculpture were seen as extensions of the artist’s body, as evoking the presence of this body even following the artist’s death. In this sense, artist’s work was not regarded as “alienated” work—in contrast to the alienated, industrial labor that does not presuppose any traceable connection between the producer’s body and the industrial product. Since at least Duchamp and his use of the readymade, this situation has changed drastically. And the main change lies not so much in the presentation of industrially produced objects as artworks, as in a new possibility that opened for the artist, to not only produce artworks in an alienated, quasi-industrial manner, but also to allow these artworks to maintain an appearance of being industrially produced. And it is here that artists as different as Andy Warhol and Donald Judd can serve as examples of post-Duchampian art. The direct connection between the body of the artist and the body of the artworks was severed. The artworks were no longer considered to maintain the warmth of the artist’s body, even when the artist’s own corpse became cold. On the contrary, the author (artist) was already proclaimed dead during his or her lifetime, and the “organic” character of the artwork was interpreted as an ideological illusion. As a consequence, while we assume the violent dismemberment of a living, organic body to be a crime, the fragmentation of an artwork that is already a corpse—or, even better, an industrially produced object or machine—does not constitute a crime; rather, it is welcome.

Guided tour at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1966.

And that is precisely what hundreds of millions of people around the world do every day in the context of contemporary media. As masses of people have become well informed about advanced art production through biennials, triennials, Documentas, and related coverage, they have come to use media in the same way as artists. Contemporary means of communication and social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter offer global populations the ability to present their photos, videos, and texts in ways that cannot be distinguished from any post-Conceptualist artwork. And contemporary design offers the same populations a means of shaping and experiencing their apartments or workplaces as artistic installations. At the same time, the digital “content” or “products” that these millions of people present each day has no direct relation to their bodies; it is as “alienated” from them as any other contemporary artwork, and this means that it can be easily fragmented and reused in different contexts. And indeed, sampling by way of “copy and paste” is the most standard, most widespread practice on the internet. And it is here that one finds a direct connection between the quasi-industrial practices of post-Duchampian art and contemporary practices used on the internet—a place where even those who do not know or appreciate contemporary artistic installations, performances, or environments will employ the same forms of sampling on which those art practices are based. (And here we find an analogy to Benjamin’s interpretation of the public’s readiness to accept montage in cinema as having been expressed by a rejection of the same approach in painting).

Now, many have considered this erasure of work in and through contemporary artistic practice to have been a liberation from work in general.
The artist becomes a bearer and protagonist of “ideas,” “concepts,” or “projects,” rather than a subject of hard work, whether alienated or non-alienated work. Accordingly, the digitalized, virtual space of the internet has produced phantom concepts of “immaterial work” and “immaterial workers” that have allegedly opened the way to a “post-Fordist” society of universal creativity free from hard work and exploitation. In addition to this, the Duchampian readymade strategy seems to undermine the rights of intellectual private property—abolishing the privilege of authorship and delivering art and culture to unrestricted public use. Duchamp’s use of readymades can be understood as a revolution in art that is analogous to a communist revolution in politics. Both revolutions aim at the confiscation and collectivization of private property, whether “real” or symbolic. And in this sense one can say that certain contemporary art and internet practices now play the role of (symbolic) communist collectivizations in the midst of a capitalist economy. One finds a situation reminiscent of Romantic art at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe, when ideological reactions and political restorations dominated political life. Following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe arrived at a period of relative stability and peace in which the age of political transformation and ideological conflict seemed to have finally been overcome. The homogeneous political and economic order based on economic growth, technological progress, and political stagnation seemed to announce the end of history, and the Romantic artistic movement that emerged throughout the European continent became one in which utopias were dreamed, revolutionary traumas were remembered, and alternative ways of living were proposed. Today, the art scene has become a place of emancipatory projects, participatory practices, and radical political attitudes, but also a place in which the social catastrophes and disappointments of the revolutionary twentieth century are remembered. And the specific neo-Romantic and neo-communist makeup of contemporary culture is, as is often the case, especially well diagnosed by its enemies. Thus Jaron Lanier’s influential book You Are Not a Gadget speaks about the “digital Maoism” and “hive mind” that dominate contemporary virtual space, ruining the principle of intellectual private property and ultimately lowering the standards and leading to the potential demise of culture as such.(1)
Thus what we have here does not concern the liberation of labor, but rather the liberation from labor—at least from its manual, “oppressive” aspects. But to what degree is such a project realistic? Is liberation from labor even possible? Indeed, contemporary art confronts the traditional Marxist theory of value production with a difficult question: if the “original” value of a product reflects the accumulation of work in this product, then how can a readymade acquire additional value as an artwork—notwithstanding the fact that the artist does not seem to have invested any additional work in it? It is in this sense that the post-Duchampian conception of art beyond labor seems to constitute the most effective counter-example to the Marxist theory of value—as an example of “pure,” “immaterial” creativity that transcends all traditional conceptions of value production as resulting from manual labor. It seems that, in this case, the artist’s decision to offer a certain object as an artwork, and an art institution’s decision to accept this object as an artwork, suffice to produce a valuable art commodity—without involving any manual labor. And the expansion of this seemingly immaterial art practice into the whole economy by means of the internet has produced the illusion that a post-Duchampian liberation from labor through “immaterial” creativity—and not the Marxist liberation of labor—opens the way to a new utopia of creative multitudes. The only necessary precondition for this opening, however, seems to be a critique of institutions that contain and frustrate the creativity of floating multitudes through their politics of selective inclusion and exclusion.

However, here we must deal with a certain confusion with respect to the notion of “the institution.” Especially within the framework of “institutional critique,” art institutions are mostly considered to be power structures defining what is included or excluded from public view. Thus art institutions are analyzed mostly in “idealist,” non-materialist terms, whereas, in materialist terms, art institutions present themselves rather as buildings, spaces, storage facilities, and so forth, requiring an amount of manual work in order to be built, maintained, and used.
So one can say that the rejection of “non-alienated” work has placed the post-Duchampian artist back in the position of using alienated, manual work to transfer certain material objects from the outside of art spaces to the inside, or vice versa. The pure immaterial creativity reveals itself here as pure fiction, as the old-fashioned, non-alienated artistic work is merely substituted by the alienated, manual work of transporting objects. And post-Duchampian art-beyond-labor reveals itself, in fact, as the triumph of alienated “abstract” labor over non-alienated “creative” work. It is this alienated labor of transporting objects combined with the labor invested in the construction and maintenance of art spaces that ultimately produces artistic value under the conditions of post-Duchampian art. The Duchampian revolution leads not to the liberation of the artist from work, but to his or her proletarization via alienated construction and transportation work. In fact, contemporary art institutions no longer need an artist as a traditional producer. Rather, today the artist is more often hired for a certain period of time as a worker to realize this or that institutional project. On the other hand, commercially successful artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst long ago converted themselves into entrepreneurs.

Jeff Koons’ design for collector Dakis Joannou’s personal yacht.

The economy of the internet demonstrates this economy of post-Duchampian art even for an external spectator. The internet is in fact no more than a modified telephone network, a means of transporting electric signals. As such, it is not “immaterial,” but thoroughly material. If certain communication lines are not laid, if certain gadgets are not produced, or if telephone access is not installed and paid, then there is simply no internet and no virtual space. To use traditional Marxist terms, one can say that the big communication and information technology corporations control the material basis of the internet and the means of producing of virtual reality: its hardware. In this way, the internet provides us with an interesting combination of capitalist hardware and communist software. Hundreds of millions of so-called “content producers” place their content on the internet without receiving any compensation, with the content produced not so much by the intellectual work of generating ideas as by the manual labor of operating the keyboard. And the profits are appropriated by the corporations controlling the material means of virtual production.

The decisive step in the proletarization and exploitation of intellectual and artistic work came, of course, in the emergence of Google. Google’s search engine operates by fragmenting individual texts into a non-differentiated mass of verbal garbage: each individual text traditionally held together by its author’s intention is dissolved, with individual sentences then fished out and recombined with other floating sentences allegedly having the same “topic.” Of course, the unifying power of authorial intention had already been undermined in recent philosophy, most notably by Derridean deconstruction. And indeed, this deconstruction already effectuated a symbolic confiscation and collectivization of individual texts, removing them from authorial control and delivering them into the bottomless garbage pit of anonymous, subjectless “writing.” It was a gesture that initially appeared emancipatory for being somehow synchronized with certain communist, collectivist dreams. Yet while Google now realizes the deconstructionist program of collectivizing writing, it seems to do little else. There is, however, a difference between deconstruction and googling: deconstruction was understood by Derrida in purely “idealistic” terms as an infinite, and thus uncontrollable practice, whereas Google’s search algorithms are not infinite, but finite and material—subjected to corporate appropriation, control, and manipulation. The removal of authorial, intentional, ideological control over writing has not led to its liberation. Rather, in the context of the internet, writing has become subject to a different kind of control through hardware and corporate software, through the material conditions of the production and distribution of writing. In other words, by completely eliminating the possibility of artistic, cultural work as authorial, non-alienated work, the internet completes the process of proletarizing work that began in the nineteenth century.
The artist here becomes an alienated worker no different than any other in contemporary production processes.

Gillian Wearing, Everything in life…, 1992-1993, from the series Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say, color coupler prints.

But then a question arises. What happened to the artist’s body when the labor of art production became alienated labor? The answer is simple: the artist’s body itself became a readymade. Foucault has already drawn our attention to the fact that alienated work produces the worker’s body alongside the industrial products; the worker’s body is disciplined and simultaneously exposed to external surveillance, a phenomenon famously characterized by Foucault as “panopticism.”2 As a result, this alienated industrial work cannot be understood solely in terms of its external productivity—it must necessarily take into account the fact that this work also produces the worker’s own body as a reliable gadget, as an “objectified” instrument of alienated, industrialized work. And this can even be seen as the main achievement of modernity, as these modernized bodies now populate contemporary bureaucratic, administrative, and cultural spaces in which seemingly nothing material is produced beyond these bodies themselves. One can now argue that it is precisely this modernized, updated working body that contemporary art uses as a readymade. However, the contemporary artist does not need to enter a factory or administrative office to find such a body. Under the current conditions of alienated artistic work, the artist will find such a body to already be his or her own.

Indeed, in performance art, video, photography, and so forth, the artist’s body increasingly became the focus of contemporary art in recent decades. And one can say that the artist today has become increasingly concerned with the exposure of his or her body as a working body—through the gaze of a spectator or a camera that recreates the panoptic exposure to which working bodies in a factory or office are submitted. An example of the exposure of such a working body can be found in Marina Abramović’s exhibition “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA in New York in 2010. Each day of the exhibition, Abramović sat throughout the working hours of the museum in MoMA’s atrium, maintaining the same pose. In this way, Abramović recreated the situation of an office worker whose primary occupation is to sit at the same place each day to be observed by his or her superiors, regardless of what is done beyond that. And we can say that Abramović’s performance was a perfect illustration of Foucault’s notion that the production of the working body is the main effect of modernized, alienated work. Precisely by not actively performing any tasks throughout the time she was present, Abramović thematized the incredible discipline, endurance, and physical effort required to simply remain present at a workplace from the beginning of the working day to its end. At the same time, Abramović’s body was subjected to the same regime of exposure as all of MoMA’s artworks—hanging on the walls or staying in their places throughout the working hours of the museum. And just as we generally assume that these paintings and sculptures do not change places or disappear when they are not exposed to the visitor’s gaze or when the museum is closed, we tend to imagine that Abramović’s immobilized body will remain forever in the museum, immortalized alongside the museum’s other works. In this sense, “The Artist Is Present” creates an image of a living corpse as the only perspective on immortality that our civilization is capable of offering its citizens.

The effect of immortality is only strengthened by the fact that this performance is a recreation/repetition of a performance Abramović did with Ulay in her younger years, in which they sat opposite each other throughout the working hours of an exhibition space. In “The Artist Is Present,” Ulay’s place opposite Abramović could be taken by any visitor.

This substitution demonstrated how the working body of the artist disconnects—through the alienated, “abstract” character of modern work—from his or her own natural, mortal body. The working body of the artist can be substituted with any other body that is ready and able to perform the same work of self-exposure. Thus, in the main, retrospective part of the exhibition, the earlier performances by Marina and Ulay were repeated/reproduced in two different forms: through video documentation and through the naked bodies of hired actors. Here again the nakedness of these bodies was more important than their particular shape, or even their gender (in one instance, due to practical considerations, Ulay was represented by a woman). There are many who speak about the spectacular nature of contemporary art. But in a certain sense, contemporary art effectuates the reversal of the spectacle found in theater or cinema, among other examples. In the theater, the actor’s body also presents itself as immortal as it passes through various metamorphic processes, transforming itself into the bodies of others as it plays different roles. In contemporary art, the working body of the artist, on the contrary, accumulates different roles (as in the case of Cindy Sherman), or, as with Abramović, different living bodies. The artist’s working body is simultaneously self-identical and interchangeable because it is a body of alienated, abstract labor. In his famous book The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Ernst Kantorowicz illustrates the historical problem posed by the figure of the king assuming two bodies simultaneously: one natural, mortal body, and another official, institutional, exchangeable, immortal body. Analogously, one can say that when the artist exposes his or her body, it is the second, working body that becomes exposed. And at the moment of this exposure, this working body also reveals the value of labor accumulated in the art institution (according to Kantorowicz, medieval historians have spoken of “corporations”).(3) In general, when visiting a museum, we do not realize the amount of work necessary to keep paintings hanging on walls or statues in their places. But this effort becomes immediately visible when a visitor is confronted with Abramović’s body; the invisible physical effort of keeping the human body in the same position for a long time produces a “thing”—a readymade—that arrests the attention of visitors and allows them to contemplate Abramović’s body for hours.

Marina Abramović and Ulay, Imponderabilia, 1977, performance, 90 min., Galleria Communale d’Arte Moderna Bologna, © Marina Abramović. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

One may think that only the working bodies of contemporary celebrities are exposed to the public gaze. However, even the most average, “normal” everyday people now permanently document their own working bodies by means of photography, video, websites, and so forth. And on top of that, contemporary everyday life is exposed not only to institutional surveillance, but also to a constantly expanding sphere of media coverage. Innumerable sitcoms inundating television screens around the world expose us to the working bodies of doctors, peasants, fishermen, presidents, movie stars, factory workers, mafia killers, gravediggers, and even to zombies and vampires. It is precisely this ubiquity and universality of the working body and its representation that makes it especially interesting for art. Even if the primary, natural bodies of our contemporaries are different, and their secondary working bodies are interchangeable. And it is precisely this interchangeability that unites the artist with his or her audience. The artist today shares art with the public just as he or she once shared it with religion or politics. To be an artist has ceased to be an exclusive fate; instead, it has become characteristic of society as a whole on its most intimate, everyday, bodily level. And here the artist finds another opportunity to advance a universalist claim—as an insight into the duplicity and ambiguity of the artist’s own two bodies.

1 See Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

2 See Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995).
3 Ernst H Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3.

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, including The 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.

Related Articles:

Boris Groys, Art and Money
Anton Vidokle, Art Without Artists?
Boris Groys, The Weak Universalism
Boris Groys, Comrades of Time
Boris Groys, Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility
Omnia El Shakry, Artistic Sovereignty in the Shadow of Post-Socialism: Egypt’s 20th Annual Youth Salon
Zdenka Badovinac, What Will the Next Revolution Be Like?
Boris Groys, Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Simon Sheikh, Positively White Cube Revisited
Boris Groys, Politics of Installation
Boris Groys, The Obligation to Self-Design