FloodNet, Electronic Disturbance Theatre, Web Screen Shot, 2012

Network Architecture and Electronic Civil Disobedience: Electronic Disturbance Theatre and Transversals of Rhizomatic Resistance

Dorian Batycka

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

-Henri David Thoreau[1]



http://www.intro.dizzy/insurrectionary/praxisfigga

Many have suggested that the iconic global force holding together the world today is the Internet. As a medium for human communication the Internet directly affects almost every aspect of our lives. From the instantaneous worldwide communication we enjoy with friends and family, to the way we seamlessly move through our spatial environment using GPS technology. Like it or not, cyber utopian or luddite, the Internet is a central aspect of twenty first century life.

This insurrectionary essay examines discursive practices of electronic civil disobedience (ECD), or lines of flight emanating from the art and activist collectives Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT) and Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Metaphorically, this essay forms conceptual constellations around art, activism and the Internet. The result of which is a foray into the invention of the Internet from a multitude of different perspectives, juxtaposing different theories, ideas and narratives, attempting to formulate an interdisciplinary and multiperspectival experimental inquiry into the past, present and future of the Internet. Indeed, as Walter Benjamin would have it, “out of infinite distance into infinite proximity;”[2] this polyvalent analysis will attempt to understand the Internet not as a homogenous isolated technological development of human communication, but rather contextualized within the development of electronic media more broadly, analogous to several other historical developments including the electric telegraph. This study then departs from traditional narratives addressing the Internet, and attempts to situate it within Karl Marx’s concept of the “general intellect”, found in the Grundrisse, connected to Marx’s notion of the machine in relation to surplus value and the accumulation of capital.

In so doing, this disobedient essay will argue that the Internet is best conceptualized both as a machine perpetuating the hegemony of the ruling capitalist class (through a concatenation of the “general intellect”), while simultaneously arguing that the Internet can also function as a discursive assemblage for spreading ideas counter intuitive to the ruling capitalist class. Some may consider this an argument for both sides, but this is incorrectly perceived. Rather, this essay articulates an ontological framework coupling man/machine a kin to Donna Haraway’s conception of the “cyborg”, representing a lack of distinction between natura (nature) and machina (machine). This ontological framework is largely informed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, explored in their magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus, applied and studied in contrast to Marx’s ontology of man as separate from machine. By comparing and contrasting these two separate and distinct ontologies, a thought experiment conducted in advance by philosopher Gerald Raunig, I hope to demonstrate that the Internet is manifestly material and immaterial, dually physical and nonphysical, equally electronic as well as visceral. A technology in perpetual intermezzo; analogous to the botanical rhizome: with no beginning and no end; a heterogeneous decentralized compositional arrangement of human communication; what William Gibson describes as a “mass consensual hallucination”, or more directly, a multiplicity of networks of immense communicatory complexity. This essay pertains to the concept of the Inter+(network).

http://www.PART1/holmes?brian/physcho*geo$graph*y.zapatistamovement.net&delusion.org

Author and cultural critic Brian Holmes has described the Internet using similar terms. In Drifting Through the Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure, Holmes argues that the labyrinth of Internet and satellite communications systems, such as GPS, are fraught with ambiguity in terms of their emancipatory potential, “in an era when civil society has been integrated to the military architecture of digital media.”[3]

However, it is well known that operating systems such as Linux are built on open source software, and today with web sites such as Bit Torrent and ISO Hunt and peer-to-peer file sharing systems, as well as the emergence of dissident groups such as Anonymous, Lulzsec and Wikileaks, or the introduction of electronic currency such as Bitcoin, or the reemergence of the concept of a Time/Bank (c/o e-flux) online, the Internet must dually be considered a frontier for revolutionary politics and subversive economic and communicatory potential, albeit developed on top of imperial infrastructure and securitized communications technologies. This is accomplished through a variety of hacking techniques, including, but not limited to, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) actions against web sites, ammounting to a form of digital occupation. Within this transversal model, echoing Manuel Castells’ claim that “in a networked culture, the topographical metaphor of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ has become increasingly untenable”[4], forms of networked virtual resistance emerge in stark opposition to governments and representational politics more generally. These networks of resistance have formed in opposition to the control and dominance of what Rem Koolhaas describes as “the world of €/$/¥.”[5] Or alternatively, globalization and the world economy built on the yen, the euro and the dollar, representing the three major establishments of international political economy. This is also what David Harvey and others refer to as “neoliberalism”, whereby the Internet represents the enigma and communications apparatus of transnational capitalism. Ironically, within this milieu, the Internet has developed packets of resistance to the world of €/$/¥. Against the backdrop of neoliberal political economic policy, characterized largely by privatization and what Harvey refers to as the “time/space compression of global capital through the emergence of a new kind of information society,”[6] several resistance movements have emerged. Among these, the Zapatista movement in the early 1990s is widely considered one of the first informational uprisings that made use of the Internet in conducting guerilla operations.

According to Manuel Castells, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico was “the first informational guerilla movement.”[7] Others including Graham Meikle agree, describing the movement as:

The first culture jamming guerilla movement, an ingenious detournement of the predictable—and hence controllable—imagery and rhetoric of insurgencies. Subcomandante Marcos’s ever present pipe and balaclava, his refusal to accept the label of leader, and the cryptic parables through which he communicates, make it hard for opponents to frame the Zapatistas on easily understood terms.[8]

The troops of Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN) rose up on January 1^st 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enforced, with direct negative economic implications for farmers associated with the large corn sector of the Chiapas region in Mexico. Meikle contends, “this erosion of local control over the economy carried nasty reverberations from Mexico’s colonial past,”[9] with the Mexican government reacting predictably and employing heavy military and police presence in response to the uprising. What followed was a media and electronic augmentation of civil disobedience and political engagement, whereby the “Zapatistas were able to set the media agenda, circumventing the governments attempts at crisis management.”[10] It can be argued that the Internet provided the Zapatista movement with a forum to not only spread information, news, bulletins and alerts, without the help of the mainstream media, but that it also enabled the movement to gain traction with NGOs and activists from all over the world and build physical networks of support. On December 22^nd 1997, 40 members of the Zapatista community were shot and killed at Acteal by state supported paramilitaries. This series of events in turn led Ricardo Dominguez, media artist and activist, to develop the concept of FloodNet and to build coalitions with others equally concerned with putting into praxis the idea of ECD.

According to Dominguez, CAE developed the theory of ECD while EDT developed the practice. ECD is a term that was first introduced by CAE, a five-member collective working in tactical media exploring the intersections between art, technology, critical theory and political activism. ECD was initially conceived in relation to more traditional forms of civil disobedience, and in 1995 CAE published a collection of essays, eventually put into circulation by Autonmedia, publisher of Hakim Bey’s seminal A Temporary Autonomous Zone, entitled Electronic Civil Disobedience. Influenced in part by Hakim Bey as well as Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown, CAE member Steve Kurtz and other members of the collective wondered, “what if this practice was radicalized” and used in the context of virtualizing resistance movements?[11] Shortly thereafter, EDT developed the idea of hacker actions against virtual institutions such as government websites, in response to what they perceived were direct military or civilian threats to oppositional movements and voices, initially in solidarity with the Zapatistas. As with traditional forms of civil disobedience, ECD initially employed the techniques of trespassing and blockading to garner attention and publicity for laws and institutions deemed socially unjust. With these ideas in mind, EDT initiated the development of FloodNet, software made specifically to facilitate these types of virtual insurgent activities and blockade and invade the websites of oppositional political parties and individuals. FloodNet was initially conceived as a yearlong project in 1998, although it has existed and actions channeling its aims have continued since then.[12] Dominguez claims that the first FloodNet action drew 18,000 participants over two hours, with reports that Mexican President Zedellio’s website was taken offline for several hours.[13] Essentially, FloodNet activity consisted of participants gathering in ‘FloodNets foyer,’ whereby they would be met with a series of instructions. These instructions consisted of browser configurations necessary for the software to work and a set of warnings: “this is a protest, it is not a game, it may have personal consequences as in any off-line political manifestation on the street.”[14] This accompanied a warning to participants that IP addresses could also be collected by government, in the same way that photographs of participants might be taken during a street protest.

There are those such as Evgeny Morozov, writer, researcher and author of The Net Delusion, who would argue that these types of actions scarcely have any real consequence. Morozov isolates two “delusions” in particular, “cyber-utopianism”, or the belief that the culture of the Internet is inherently emancipatory; and “Internet-centrism”, or the belief that every important question about society and politics can be framed in terms of the Internet. Morozov argues that these beliefs are deeply problematic in lieu of present transnational capitalism and the world of €/$/¥. This argument follows the logic of the Internet’s fundamental and underlying imperial architecture, now privatized and under the control of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and top-level domain distributors such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private corporation located in the United States, whose bylaw underscores its responsibility “for the coordination of the global Internet’s systems of unique identifiers and, in particular, ensuring its stable and secure operation.”[15] Meaning, the Internet is build on a network initially developed by the United States government, specifically the United States Department of Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA), pioneered by mathematician and researcher Leonard Kleinrock, and ultimately activists and dissident movements suffer from a “net delusion”, in particular, their faith in the emancipatory possibilities of virtual resistance tactics.

http://www.PART2/technological/determinants:themainframecomputer?/ARAPNET/packetswitching.org

According to Leonard Kleinrock, pioneer in digital communications and the mathematical mind behind the advancement of digital networks though a process known as packet switching, the Internet ‘originated’ in DARPA, and was developed during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Kleinrock’s major contribution to the development of the Internet came with his concept of queuing theory, which essentially functioned as the key mathematical foundation for what is known as packet switching, an electrical application allowing for bits of information to be transmitted between two or more computers in separate locations. Kleinrock describes the Internet as emerging from two distinct threads which eventually merged in the mid-1960s, coalescing and “creating the historical break” that led to the development of ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).[16] The first thread describes the role of some the Internet’s earliest protagonists at MIT – in chronological order – Kleinrock, Paul Baran and Donald Davies. These early researchers independently pursued data networking theory, architecture and it’s implementation in mechanical hardware contained within large mainframe computers. The second thread Kleinrock describes pertaining to the growth and creation of the Internet relates to ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency), the institution that funded and implemented packet switching into tangible communications applications, albeit without any early involvement from the private sector, with Kleinrock particularly critical of AT&T due in large part to the company’s shortsightedness when presented with an early opportunity to become involved with the wider dissemination of the Internet.[17] Thus, through a combination of social, political and economic circumstances, it was largely the U.S. military through ARPA who initially conceived of the Internet as a decentralized network conceptualized in order to avoid control by a vulnerable or possibly hostile or under attack centre, made up of autonomous computer networks that would have innumerable ways to connect and overcome electronic barriers and distant geographies in the event of a large scale attack on a nerve centre of communication. Shortly thereafter, ARPANET became the foundation of a global communication network that would later become known as the World Wide Web (by the early 1990s).

Those such as Janet Abbate draw a distinction between the Internet and the World Wide Web. Abbate asserts that the World Wide Web did not spring from DARPA, rather, that “it was a new set of actors, including computer scientists at CERN [with] the first incarceration of the Web created in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau.”[18] Berners-Lee and Cailliau were involved in the early hypertext system that would link files around the world, forming a “world wide web” that according to Berners-Lee, would create “a pool of human knowledge.”[19]

Indeed in ironic confirmation of the US Defense Department’s thinking, as the Internet grew rapidly and became the World Wide Web, it quickly escaped the direct control of the U.S. military and is now routinely used by all sorts of networks, including those whom the US Defense Department calls its ‘enemies’, such as ‘terrorist’ networks. Furthermore, echoing the central argument contained with this essay, Kleinrock is quick to point out that “the Internet did not suddenly appear as the global infrastructure it is today, and neither did it form automatically out of earlier communications.”[20] Kleinrock posits that the Internet as it has come to be understood, developed from a specific set of technological advancements in packet switching and network architecture, but even these were not isolated breakthroughs in science that emerged from some sort of isolated petri dish. Rather, the technological advancements utilized in the first incarnation of the Internet, also known as ARPANET, must be contextualized within the realm of electronic communication more broadly, with visible parallels arguably found in the development of the telegraph over a century earlier. The principal difference being that the architecture of the Internet developed along the lines of transferring bursts of large amounts of electronic data within a decentralized milieu, whereas the telegraph was principally developed as an electromagnetic device for human-to-human transmission of singular coded messages.

http://www.PART3/papyrs/electric/analogies?electromagnetic/telgraph.gov

The history and origins of the electric telegraph, or simply the telegraph as it is popularly known today, like the Internet, is equally hard to pin point to an exact date or moment in time.  Resulting from early studies of electricity, electrical phenomenon was discovered to travel at a very fast speed and applications were soon in development to transpose electricity and apply it to the realm of human communication. In 1825, British inventor William Sturgeon revealed the power of the electromagnet by lifting nine pounds with a seven ounce piece of iron wrapped with wires through which the current of a single cell battery was sent. In a matter of decades, electric telegraph networks permitted people and commerce to almost instantaneously transmit messages across continents, resulting in widespread social and economic changes.

According to Tom Standage, author of the Victorian Internet, the Internet was precipitated by the invention of the eclectic telegraph. Standage recounts the tale of Samuel F.B. Morse, who in 1842 demonstrated a working telegraph between two committee rooms of the Capitol in Washington to Congress, who in turn reluctantly voted to provide $30,000 for an experimental line to Baltimore, with a winning vote of 89-83, with 70 abstaining “to avoid the responsibility of spending public money for a machine they could not understand.”[21] By 1850, Standage states there were 12,000 miles of telegraph line in the US and twice that amount two years later. In 1858, according to Standage, news of the first transatlantic cable led to predictions of world peace and an end to old prejudices and hostilities.  Standage examines the parallels between the language used to describe the telegraph during it’s formative years, against the language used to describe the Internet during the late twentieth century, pointing to some interesting connections and conclusions. Furthermore, Standage resituates the uses of the telegraph – for instant message routing, social networking (between Morse operators – with gossiping and even marriage proposals sent via the telegraph), cryptography, text coding, abbreviated language slang, network security experts, hackers, wire fraud, mailing lists, spamming, e-commerce and stock exchange minute by minute reports (through the ticker tape invented by Edison) – as relatable to the Internet as it is known presently. These comparisons led Standage to refer to the 19^th century telegraphic network as the “Victorian Internet.”

It can therefore be argued that Internet in the twenty-first century solidified the image of the network as the dominant form of organization in the popular imaginary, arguably manifest over a century earlier with the development of the electric telegraph. Those such as Marc Tuters, of gpster.net and PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, suggests that this is also reflected in the architecture of Buckminster Fuller, well known for his geodesic domes, as well as within the ethos of the 1960s counter culture movement, articulated within Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Catelog.[22] For Tuters, the concept of the network in the popular imaginary led to developments in personal computing and a hacker culture that developed congruently with the official imperial infrastructure of the Internet. Still others including Brian Holmes have linked Situationist aesthetics with the concept of the network in the popular imaginary of the 1960s, “today, the sensory qualities of the derive are mimicked by hyper-linked voyages through the datascapes of the World Wide Web.”[23] What can therefore be deduced is there is no single unifying theory concerning the history or genealogy of the Internet, the World Wide Web, or whatever word or series of words one would like to attribute to this phenomenon of human communication and reality.

But can this be unpackaged even further? Can the Internet be conceived beyond the narrow confines of networked architecture and the World Wide Web? Or, more abstractly, what does it mean to question the very nature of language, be it in the transmission of electromagnetic currents or the very words you are reading on this page? Is there a metaphysics and ontology to communication that can be found microcosmically within Internet? To answer these questions it is important to move past the narrow definition of the Internet as noun, understood as a fixed and formal symbiosis of electrical technology and human interaction, instead describing the Internet as both noun and verb, a kin to its etymology within the word network; whereby the term ‘Internet’ resonates with deeper and more complex meaning in order to be considered a constituent ordering principal of reality. Within this milieu, or rhizomatic set of relations in which the Internet exists as both noun and verb, we can now turn to an analysis of Marx’s concept of the “general intellect”, and its relationship to the concept of machine found in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

http://www.PART4.networkarchitecture/”generalintellect”+machinic<assemblages>=control<society/≠freesociety?.gov

But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of the machinery […] set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.

-Karl Marx, Fragments on Machines

On the contrary, we think that the machine must be grasped in an immediate relation to a social body and not at all to a human biological organism. Given this, it is no longer appropriate to judge the machine as a new segment that, with its starting point in the abstract human being in keeping with this development, follows the tool. For human being and tool are already machine parts on the full body of the respected society. The machine is initially a social machine, constituted by the machine-generating instance of a full body and by human being and tools, which are, to the extent that they are distributed on this body, mechanized.

-Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

If we can accept that the Internet can be considered both as noun and verb, explicitly related to the word ‘network’, could the Internet then also be considered a machine? Taking as a point of departure Gerald Raunig’s section Machine Fragments, also where the two block quotes above appear, the question invariably arises: what then constitutes a machine? The commonplace concept of a machine refers to a technical object, which can be situated in time and space, as well as its usability towards a practical purpose. In general, Marx views the machine as specifically a “means for producing surplus value”[24] inextricably related to the exploitation of the working class. Indeed, the same can be said of the Internet as a discursive field of labour in the context of postfordist or cognitive capitalism. However, as Raunig points out: the concept of the machine, in Latin machina, underwent a change from approximately the 1200 – 1600, wherein the concept became alien to human labour:

The term entered into the German and the English languages through the influence of the French machine as a purely technical term alongside the still existent Latin machina concept and its derivatives. The enormous leap in the development of technical apparatuses and equipment in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, their dissemination and the knowledge about them in every possible field of society, was followed in the 19^th century by the development of an economic dispositif of technical apparatuses, in other words a dispositif of the economic functionality and the exploitation of these apparatuses to increase productivity.[25]

Writing in 1857-58, the Fragments on Machines by Karl Marx analyzes the negative aspects of historical development, at the end of which the machine, unlike the tool, encloses the knowledge and skill of workers, opposing the once scattered workers as a dominant power. Marx situates the division of labour as a precondition for the rise of machines. Here, it is only after human labour has become increasingly mechanized, that the conditions became favorable for the mechanized tasks of the proletariat to be taken over by machines. According to Gerald Raunig:

Marx indicates that the machine itself, in the final stage of the development of the means of labor, not only structuralizes and striates the workers as automaton, as apparatus, as structure, but it is also simultaneously permeated by mechanical and intellectual organs, through which it is successively further developed and renewed.[26]

Indeed for Marx in the Fragments on Machines, the machine does not appear limited to its technical aspects, but rather as Raunig describes as a “mechanical-intellectual-social assemblage.”[27] In effect, for Marx, although the technology and knowledge behind the machine has a negative effect on the workers, the concept of the machine must nevertheless be considered not only a concatenation of technology and knowledge, of mechanical and intellectual organs, but also related to social organs, to the extent that it mobilizes and organizes workers in streamlined coordination. Likewise, the same can be said of the Internet. As this essay has demonstrated, the Internet can dually be considered a sphere dominated by the interests and underlying architecture of €/$/¥, as well as a sphere of transversal rhizomatic resistance deterritorializing concepts of subject hood on and offline. A kin to the ways in which the printing press invented by Guttenberg subverted dominant class structures in the 15^th century by printing and disseminating Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, the Internet: as noun and verb, techne and machina, is what Marx referred to when he spoke of the “machine [as] the power of knowledge, objectified.”[28]

Marx’s short Fragments on Machines thus points to the conclusion that knowledge and skill are absorbed into fixed capital as “general productive forces of the social brain,”[29] but also as Raunig suggests, “refers beyond the technical machine and the knowledge objectified in it to social cooperation and communication,”[30]found within the concept of the “general intellect.” For Marx, the linear development from tool (understood as an extension of the human being) to machine (understood as independent and separate from the human being) isolates the productive forces from the social conditions of their application. Viewed from a Classical Marxist perspective, the Internet as machine, noun and verb, tool of human communication, must be seen as a negative technological development leading to workers’ alienation from their means of labour, the process through which machines externally determine workers, and finally the domination of living labour by objectified labour. According to Marx, “in machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him [the worker]; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour.”[31] The Internet as machine in a Classical Marxist sense thus isolates and subsumes individuals, contemporaneously interpolating them into computational control and surveillance societies. I suspect Evegeny Morozov would approve.

But, what about Marx’s concept of the “general intellect”, can this concept possibly point to an emancipatory conception of the Internet, apart from its negative connotations as alienating through Marx’s concept of the machine? Many Italian Marxist theorists including Paolo Virno have given attention to the importance of the section in the Grundrisse, the Fragments on Machines, the sole place in Marx’s entire oeuvre where the term ‘general intellect’ is used. In Notes on the General Intellect, Virno discusses the emergence of a new political potentiality; due to the fact general intellect does not primarily reside in the machinery but in the bodies of living subjects. Echoing this stance and in the Appendix to Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari not only develop a “Programmatic Balance for Wish Machines,”[32] but also write, in direct contrast to Marx, their own machine concept relating to the general intellect. What this involves is not a figurative or even metaphorical reissuance of the machine as concept; instead it is an attempt to reinvent the term at a distance from its everyday use as well as its use by classical Marxist scholars, according to Deleuze and Guattari:

We do not presuppose the metaphorical use of the word machine, but rather a (indistinct) hypothesis about its origins: the way in which arbitrary elements are made to be machines through recursion and communication.[33]

Here the general intellect takes on a different genealogy, inclusive of the pre-modern understanding of the Latin machina, in which the separation between the natural and mechanical is irrelevant. Imagined beyond this linear conception of the machine put forth by Marx, Deleuze and Guattari posit the term machine as no longer a mere function in a series imagined beginning with the tool, as it is for Marx. Rather, similar to the way the concept of techne was used in antiquity as both material object and practice, for Deleuze and Guattari the machine is in a similar vein not solely an instrument of work, through which the general intellect is absorbed or enclosed, as conceived by Marx. Instead of placing tool and machine in a linear series, Deleuze and Guattari seek a more nuanced definition. This conception of the machine put forth by Deleuze and Guattari opens up an entirely new discourse concerning the machine (understood in relation to the Internet within the concept of the general intellect and the breakdown of its verb/noun distinction), opening up different concatenations, connections and couplings: “There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together.”[34] Thus for Deleuze and Guattari the machine takes on a symbiotic role in relation to the human being, not something that simply extends or replaces the human being as for Marx, but rather indicative of a new man/machine ontology:

It is no longer a matter of confronting man and machine to estimate possible or impossible correspondences, extensions and substitutions of the one or the other, but rather of conjoining the two and showing how man becomes a piece with the machine or with other things in order to constitute a machine.[35]

Therefore the Internet should not be analyzed as an isolated homogenous linear historical development in communication, but rather is best conceptualized as indicative of the man/machine ontological symbiosis, the epitome of the general intellect in combination with techne, a network of decentralized computer nodes facilitating human interactivity.

Conceiving of the Internet within the framework of Deleuze and Guattari is not a novel or original idea. George Landow’s 1994 book Hyper/Text/Theory, contained several chapters that apply Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome model to hypertext theory and ideas concerning the Internet. As well, Stuart Moulthrop’s Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture borrows ideas from A Thousand Plateaus on “The Smooth and the Striated.” Moulthrop’s piece includes a section called “Smooth and Striated Writing Spaces”, in which striated space is defined as:

The domain of routine, specification, sequence, and causality. Phenomenologically, it consists of the world of perception as processed by the coordinate grid or some other geometric structure into a set of specified identities. Socially, striated space manifests itself in hierarchical and rule-intensive cultures, like the military, the corporation, and the university.[36]

For Moulthorp, smooth space, on the other hand, is associated with:

(…) defined dynamically, in terms of transformation instead of essence. Thus, one’s momentary location is less important than one’s continuing movement or line of flight; this space is by definition a structure for what does not yet exist. Smooth social structures include ad hoc or populist political movements, cooperatives, communes, and some small businesses, subcultures, fandoms, and undergrounds.[37]

“Smooth space and striated space – nomad space and sedentary space,”[38] are decisively termed by Deleuze and Guattari and applied to technological, musical, maritime, mathematical, physical and aesthetic models of enablement. As a model of transversal rhizomatic resistance, the work of CAE and EDT can be considered microassemblages of nomadic poesis, traversing the striated space of the ‘imperial infrastructure’ with the smooth space of electronic civil disobedience, back and forth, back and forth.

In Rhizomes, Nomads, and Resistant Internet Use, author and communications researcher Stefan Wray observes:

Resistant Internet use follows a lineage of earlier forms of resistant media application. All types of mediated communication technology print, telegraph, telephone, radio, film, television – have at times been instruments for collective acts of resistance. Resistant media use in moments of revolutionary social upheaval ranges from the application of the printing press in the 1525 German Peasant War to the use of the fax machine in the 1989 Chinese student movement.[39]

Wray elucidates on the influence of Deleuze and Guattari within the praxis of CAE and EDT, suggesting the duo’s conception of smooth and striated space as principally influential. Indeed, it can be argued that their influential text Electronic Civil Disobedience, exists principally to put forth tactile possibilities for nomadic resistance against the suffocating encroachment of €/$/¥. Wray states, “this second work [Electronic Civil Disobedience] by CAE focuses less on an explanation of nomadic power and more on the tactics of nomadic resistance.”[40] Several passages contained within Electronic Civil Disobedience pertain to this at length:

One essential characteristic that sets late capitalism apart from other political and economic forces is its mode of representing power: What was once a sedentary concrete mass has now become a nomadic electronic flow. Before computerized information management, the heart of institutional command and control was easy to locate [….] Even though the monuments of power still stand, visibly present in stable location, the agency that maintains power is neither visible nor stable […] Blocking the entrances to a building, or some other resistant action in physical space, can prevent reoccupation (the flow of personnel), but this is of little consequence so long as information-capital continues to flow.[41]

http://www.c?nclu$ion/2konc&ual.dizzy

In conclusion, this essay has examined several discursive threads of the Internet and forms of ECD. It is my hope that this essay appears as a map of transversal multiplicities channeling Deleuze and Guattari and further situating the praxis of Critical Art Ensemble and Electronic Disturbance Theatre within an activist/interventionist/nomadic paradigm of artistic production. In so doing, this essay has attempted to provide contrasting views where possible. Namely, those belonging to Karl Marx and Evgengy Morozov, in order to provide the reader with proper context and information in which to formulate his or her own opinion on the nature and existence of the Internet. Questions the reader may invariably consider: does the Internet serve the dominant transnational capitalist class? Or does the Internet serve the working/proliterariat/99% class? Or is the question best situated pluarlistically intermezzo, as I would argue. Furthermore, with recent pieces of proposed legislation including SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) in the United States, as well as Bill C-30 in Canada, and multinational policy proposals including ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), there is, as Sara Bannerman suggests, an “increasing importance to remain vigilant and cognizant of issues concerning net neutrality.”[42] Against these issues, one might ponder an ethics of engagement pertaining to different forms and contexts of ECD. Indeed as Edward Said – forever the humanist – rightfully considered, “what is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?”[43] These lines of flight could include a reexamination of the work of Henry David Thoreau, abolitionist, philosopher and author of Civil Disobedience, published in 1849. Finally, this essay is a step forward in bridging the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari and applying them to the discursive fields of Communication Studies, as well, through a detailed analysis of Critical Art Ensemble, the study of Art History. More work could be developed bridging subjects of analysis in Communication Studies and Art History with the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly, forms of artistic practice in relation to deterritorialized nomadic striated spatial excerises of electronic civil disobedience. Art History + Communication Studies ÷ Deleuze and Guattari.

-Peace to all the Lumpenproletariats, unite.

Dizzy F Richard, Hamilton, Ontario, 2012

Auction Of Hirst’s Work “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” At Sotheby’s 2008

Art as an Autonomous Commodity within the Global Market

Dan Zimmerman

Art as a commodity embodies intangible concepts and ideas by transforming them into material goods, capable of being marketable, sellable, and collected. Art constantly operates outside of itself interacting with outside sources of investment. By interacting with the global economy art subjects itself to external value measurements via monetary value, celebrity capital, redefinition through criticism, the specifics of purchase, sale, government grants and any other manner by which it perpetuates itself.

Artistic autonomy does not occur as a result of detachment from the market but from its unique position as a sub-market within the global economy. The art market is comprised of commodities embodied by culturally specialized qualities that are often problematic in that they resist being measurable. However, as soon as artworks assume financial value within the art market, it cannot claim to be completely separate from the broader economy in terms of systems of production, promotion and criticism. Jennifer Thatcher argues that the “financial crisis of the past [three] years jump-started the art world’s interest in the economy, and revealed just how much fortune of the art world is tied to financial markets. Collectors and sponsors were melting away… [and] state grants could no longer be taken for granted (Thatcher, 2009/2010, p. 5). Furthermore the ‘invisible hand’ of the market along with Alan Greenspan’s deregulatory policies from the first half of the decade, had noticeable effects on the relationship between art and the market. The acknowledgement that the economy and art are interconnected is an assertion that has enormous implications on art as an entity of self-governance.

The economic system assigns monetary value to instruments that through general consensus, are considered to be of  ‘worth.’ The art market, similarly, is a system that revolves around inanimate objects given a degree of legitimacy, often by the monetary price an art object assumes by its transactions within the economic sphere. Through these transactions the object may immediately attach to itself ‘selling points’ of intellect, of reputation, of cultural relevance, and even resistance; qualities that are difficult, if not impossible to define under any system of measurement. Cultural theorist, Terry Eagleton offers insight into the idea that art may transcend systemic titles of value such as money, by “…suspending itself between life and death. The work of art seems full of vital energy, but is no more than an inanimate object. The mystery of art is how black marks on a page, or pigments on a canvas, or the scraping of a bow on a catgut, can be so richly evocative of life”(Eagleton, 2010, p. 71). Isabelle Graw (2009) in her publication “High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture” further reinforces the increasingly explicit role of the economy in art. Duchampian declarations of something ‘being art’ or simply just the utterance of the word itself “…evoke(s) a category loaded with value judgments, at the same time as bestowing a seal of quality. And valuation is an essential feature of the economic. As a concept, then “art” is not an economy free zone. Consequently, the notion of art and economy as a pair of polar opposites is untenable” (Graw, 2009, p. 66).

What must be examined is the notion that; if arts value is determined and defined by the economy then in the event of a market collapse, does the value of art also decrease? If the market value becomes the great arbiter of what is valuable within art and what is not, does the work become worth less, or even worthless? The 2008 credit crunch created an economic climate that resulted in the crash of markets worldwide and decreased spending in many sectors, including areas of culture. Thatcher (2009/2010, p. 5) references Tate Triennial curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s assertion “… that we have entered a new ‘altermodernist’ era. [Bourriaud] even went as far as claiming that 2008, the year of the Lehman Brothers collapse, marked the symbolic end to Post-modernism, just as the 1973 oil crisis, according to his argument, prompted the end of Modernism.” Investment in art as a stable commodity has often occurred during periods of recession. The deregulation of oil prices in 1979 by the Carter Administration, and the subsequent energy crisis saw dependable growth from the art market. The art market was considered

“somewhat rigid…[which made it a] …preferred target for many investors, as it assure(d) a great protection against financial crashes. During the oil crisis of 1979, the prices of antique coins and other collections raised substantially. As a result of the stock market’s crash from 1987, the Dow Jones indicator needed 15 months to fully recover. At the same time, the art market recorded one of the most flourishing periods ever. In 2009, art represented 25 % of the total ‘emotional investments’ of the persons with high incomes” (“Art as an investment,” 2011)

A report by the European Fine Art Foundation entitled “The International Art Market 2007-2009, Trends in the Art Trade during Global Recession,” prepared by Dr. Clare McAndrew, a cultural economist specializing in the fine and decorative art market, and founder of Arts Economics, has indicated that “a change in luxury spending habits caused by the recession has helped the international art and antiques market weather the global economic storm” (From Yachts…, 2010). Concrete material goods such as works of art, especially  “…recognized ‘masterworks’ of classical modernism (Matisse, Picasso)…” (Graw, 2009, p. 26) are seen as favorable assets that are capable of outliving [oneself]. In this palpability art may be likened to gold. However, although gold has a materiality with long-term perceptible value, arguably similar to paintings for example, there are fundamental distinctions between each as an instrument of value. The context of art as a commodity must first be understood within its own fluid environment.

Said ‘value judgments’ within art are influenced by informalities within the market. These may include idle chitchat, secret agreements, rating systems and top ten lists of who’s hot and who’s not, among other attempts to measure value. It may be convenient to argue that artistic autonomy may occur as a form of elitism and privilege, where these value measurements designed to distinguish the merit of work from each other are dripping with specialized language perhaps mistaken, perhaps not, as irrelevant, and even indecipherable. A monetary value then may become a default to the assumed value of art and a common denominator upon which one assigns varying degrees of worth. Can art have a  ‘price’ that is capable of being arrived at by some sort of mathematical formula? How then does art assert its worth in an increasingly globalized world where currency is the most prominent and most understood form of value measurement?

The notion of celebrity is a reoccurring concept within art markets. Celebrity artists are notable examples of brands within the art marketplace. Multimillion-dollar brand names such as Damien Hirst already have value assertions attached to their names, by virtue of their reputations and their careers. Hirst’s celebrity image is autonomous in its exclusiveness, yet nevertheless remains a shark floating within the formaldehyde of its own container, frozen by an economy that is anything but still. This was made exceedingly clear by the symbolic coincidence of the Lehman Brothers collapse, which was announced on the same day as the Hirst Sotheby’s auction. This collapse would foreshadow the effect the credit crunch would have on the sale of Hirst’s work the following year. “ By 2009 Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93% from just over $270 million to $19 million” (The Art Market…, 2010, p. 99). Hirst’s Sotheby’s Auction “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” was an inventive and innovative approach that bypassed the primary market of galleries by providing material “straight out of Mr. Hirst’s studio; some of it not yet dry” (The Art Market…, 2010, p. 99). This model of artistic and economic integration was independent of the gallery market, and independent in its breakthrough. The circumvention of the gallery by Hirst may usher in a new era of how art is sold, not just in terms of how the work actually transfers from the artist to the collector, but also in the role of criticism and its traditional impact on the association of art and value. Did the bypass of the gallery by Hirst, and the financial success of the auction, negate the value of the critic?

Art criticism, and promotion has converted much of the ambiguity around the value of specific artworks and artists into valuable creative assets by turning symbolic capital into financial capital, and emerging artists into celebrity brands.

“There are…ways, and means to avoid this “maximum uncertainty on the issue of value. Dealers especially are extremely inventive when it comes to rendering this price plausible. One popular method is to refer to the production costs, making the price appear justified in objective terms. For modern painting, a ‘coefficient’ has been invented for this purpose, taking age, size, artist’s reputation and other factors into account in order to calculate the price in such a way as to avoid the question of value” (Graw, 2009, p. 30).

Where then is the critic’s role? Is it to consider the coefficients of artists, and compare them against the art historical canon, and against their contemporaries, to crown the next celebrity artist, the next affluent cultural producer? Is it to navigate the social openings and events with amazing aptitude; art world Warren Buffet’s who can predict and determine who will be stars and whose time in the limelight is finished? What must be determined in order to accurately assess these questions is ‘who is actually the voice of art criticism in Bourriaud’s ‘altermodernist’ state’? Jennifer Allen seems acutely aware that she may be writing her own eulogy as she examines recent conversations on the “…demise of art criticism. In fact, magazine rankings of top players in the art world almost never list critics. In the popular press, spectacular auction prices trump critics’ opinions. You never read: ‘Koons breaks own record despite Saltz bashing’” (Allen, 2008). Allen (2008) asks is“…criticism still relevant? Has the curator replaced the critic? Or is the collector the new critic?” Hirst’s Sotheby’s auction saw the general exclusion of the traditional critic, the entrance of the collector as the critic, and the auction house as the curator. Thatcher further supports her claim of a market influenced art world by commenting on a deficiency in clear intellectual, and artistic criticism.

“The robust and radical critique of capitalism and neo- liberalism from the traditionally leftist art world… “that might be expected from the art world has-been not necessarily missing but has been “narrowed to such an extent that critique and endorsement of recent economic strategies have been difficult to distinguish” (Thatcher, 2009/2010, p. 6).

In the instance that art was simply a material commodity such as gold, and the collector, as the critic, decided what was most valuable by what had the most “gold-like “ physical qualities, Thatcher’s aforementioned statement would not necessarily raise cause for alarm. However, although Sotheby’s could auction gold bricks just as they can auction off paintings, the status of art as a primary commodity directly associated to its producer, the artist, enables art to claim a certain degree of independence from other material goods.

“Paintings and sculptures remain the locus of yet another kind of value. A painting is in principle the singular physical product of an individual artist’s hand and mind. Its complex textures and color gradations will likely make it impossible to trust the accuracy of any reproduction. As we see it today, “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” is, down to exquisite detail, exactly what it is because of Picasso’s skill and expressive power. In this respect, the painting is a perfect, intricate and utterly irreplaceable record of a historic artistic achievement” (Dutton, 2010)

Picasso is an artist, whose celebrity namesake has been attributed to enormous symbolic significance, particularly among art investors. His formal style, historical reputation, ‘expressive power and skill’ are all factors within his ‘coefficient’ which transfer into highly viable assets. The intellectual value of artwork, associated with ideas, imagination, and perception among other discerning attributes become selling points for contemporary works. The conversion of ideas into capital is a concept that is applicable within other industries, but which is not as directly attributed to the maker as within art making.

As art is essentially considered to be priceless, regardless of the price exchanged on the market, if the collector becomes the authoritative critic then there is immediately a conflict of interest in determining the symbolic relevance of the artwork in question. There is a need within art to maintain a degree of accountability within its own market to ensure that the value is not only determined by those collecting the physical artworks. By balancing the arbiters of value judgment, art may be more successful in maintaining its own autonomy during market fluctuations comparable to those recently experienced by decades of deregulation. As a result the autonomy of the art model, although inevitably subject to complications by financial instruments, may become stronger as a market, and industry, within a larger, global economy.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Me and Mom’s Boyfriend Mr. Art. 2005

Specters of Art

Yates McKee

“Art is now defined by its disidentification with the discipline of art.”

-Kelly C. Baum

Introduction

Over the past decade, much of the most interesting contemporary art in the United States has been involved in some form or another with the cultivation of spaces, circuits, and publics that are relatively autonomous from the traditional gallery-museum nexus of the artworld, and which self-consciously claim some sort of “social” rather than narrowly “aesthetic” agenda. Though there are of course avant-garde and neo-avant-garde precedents for the developments I have in mind, the latter can be heuristically traced to the work of two groups from the preceding decade which I see as having operated in dynamic tension: Group Material and Critical Art Ensemble. The two groups set into motion a wide spectrum of important work being done in the contemporary artistic field, but they also set a certain precedent for art and criticism alike that tends to variously deemphasize, disavow, or displace art a relevant category altogether. After noting a few contemporary tendencies that have navigated this dual legacy, I will conclude with a brief examination of the work of an emerging artist named LaToya Ruby Frazier. Her work, I will argue, brings questions of photographic medium-specificity to bear on the urgent biopolitics of neoliberalism, staging an aesthetics of “precarious life” that at once resonates with and complicates the affirmative discourses surrounding so-called “social projects” in contemporary art.

Dewey/Debord

Group Material was among the first groups in the United States to programmatically relativize the institutions of the artworld. I use the latter term to distinguish their project from both two other stances. The first is the trajectory of institutional critique running from Michael Asher to Andrea Fraser, which reflexively focuses its critical attention on the very space it parasitically depends upon and inhabits qua art. The second would be the outright rejection of hegemonic artistic institutions in the manner of ABC No Rio, a stance inflected by a certain countercultural or bohemian history. While in political terms Group Material was closer to the latter, the group did not consider either the critique or the refusal of the artworld as an end in of itself, developing instead a flexible, pragmatic, and tactical orientation with respect to artistic intuitions and the resources, opportunities, and visibility they offered. Group Material treated artistic institutions as one potential node in a horizontal network of other platforms through which new modes of publicity, partnership, and collaboration might be developed around a particular “discursive site” such as homelessness, AIDS, or U.S. foreign policy.[1]Group Material thus sought to reframe “art” as one set of competencies within what Brian Wallis called “an expanded notion of cultural production”[2]concerned with constructing and sustaining a progressive counter-public sphere involving a wide range of actors and voices. A crucial term for Group Material in their multifaceted counter-exhibitions, town-hall meetings, and publications was “education,” understood in the broad sense given the term by John Dewey: cultivating the active, critical capacities of a citizenry presumably rendered passive by capitalism and its atomizing impoverishment of cultural life and political institutions alike. Rather than a top-down transmission of knowledge from a privileged expert to an ignorant, infantilized mass, education–or better pedagogy–was understood as a horizontal, multivocal, mutually transformative encounter in which art might play a catalyzing role. By extension, the pedagogical role of art began to be rethought along the lines of organizational and research activities concerned with the production of new kinds of knowledge in concert with architecture, planning, critical theory, social science, and activist advocacy. In other words, Group Material prefigured what might be called the “para-academic” turn seen in contemporary groups as diverse as 16Beaver, Center for Urban Pedagogy, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Overlapping historically and ideologically with the late activities of Group Material in the early 1990s was the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), the theoretical touchtone for whom was less the civic pragmatism of Dewey than the vanguardist militancy of Guy Debord. Originally presenting themselves as radical theoreticians above all else, CAE was concerned with articulating the possibilities of cultural and political opposition to the accelerating globalization of capitalism in the aftermath of the Cold War. Rather than participatory democratic dialogue exemplified by the somewhat nostalgic figure of the town meeting put forth by Group Material, the exemplary figure of politics was militant anti-capitalist resistance. The category of art was explicitly rejected by CAE, in favor of the following principle: “by any media necessary.”[3] Restoring the militant Situationist heritage whose faint residues could be found in Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life, CAE formulated the principle of tactical media. Tactics were defined by De Certeau as the resistant counterpoint to strategies. Strategies involve the top-down projection of long-term plans, and are associated by de Certeau with the authority of the State, and in particular official urban planning. They aim to make space and time regular, homogenous, and manageable for capitalist circulation. Tactics, on the other hand, are the “arts of the weak”–they take advantage of the cracks, blindspots, and vulnerabilities of strategic planning. Tactics are temporary, provisional, flexible, and must operate within the very spaces and structures of the system they endeavor to challenge or resist. Like a street battle between protestors and police in May ’68, tactics have a game-like or playful quality, constantly testing the unforeseen possibilities of a given system before retreating to plan another attack.

Infamously, CAE declared that, given the globally networked nature of capitalist power, “the streets are dead capital” and that any tactical interventions worthy of the name would now take place in cyberspace. In this scheme, the anarcho-vanguardist figures of the hacker, the digital saboteur, and the reverse-engineer were given pride of place. The key example of tactical media often cited at the time was the 1998 Zapatista Floodnet, @rtmark/Electronic Disturbance Theater’s globally-coordinated denial-of-service attack on the website of the Mexican government  in the aftermath of the Acteal massacre in Chiapas.[4]

CAE’s end-of-the-street narrative was of course complicated by the massive street demonstrations against the institutions of global capitalism that took place at the turn of the century, especially in Seattle. Though fundamentally bound up with new digital media, these protests revivified the imaginary of the street and became an historical watershed for a certain “return of the political” in US artistic discourse. The street was newly imagined as a site for tactical interventions and artistic experiments concerning the symoblic, mediatic, and bodily dimensions of protest activity, often undertaken by groups identifying themselves as detourned research units or counter-official agencies such as the Bureau of Inverse Technology, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, the Department of Land and Space Reclamation, and the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. In a sympathetic but critical assessment, I identified this phenomena in terms of a “neo-situationist impulse on the part of many young artists to ‘realize art by abolishing it’ through the relocation of their practice within the expanded networks of activist counter-publicity associated with the alter-globalization movements.”[5] Exemplary in this regard was The Gift of Masks, a project designed for the protests against the FTAA in Quebec involving the free distribution of bandanas emblazoned with a carnivalesque grin to be worn simultaneously as protection from tear gas and as a dis-idenficatory defiance of an emergency law outlawing the wearing of masks in the urban center.[6]

As militant neo-situationist discourses were heating up in the United States and around the world at the turn of the century, what I am calling the “Dewyeian” discourse of civic participation, pedagogy, and research pioneered by Group Material was also developing and (mutating) apace, exemplified by the work of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). Founded by a group of experimental architects, planners, and sociologists in the historical crux of Williamsburg in the late 1990s, CUP presented itself as a professionalized, non-profit consultancy-agency devoted to making “educational projects about places and how they change. Our mission is to use design and art to improve public participation in shaping the places where we all live.”[7] CUP organized dozens of event-laden exhibitions in sites ranging from the Storefront for Architecture, to the Queens Museum, to Parsons School of Design, to community centers and outdoor kiosks in Brooklyn and the Bronx on often-overlooked economic, social, and political dimensions of the city in economic, social, and political terms highlighting questions of zoning, infrastructure, and urban government. With titles like Code City, Garbage Problems, The Water Underground, and City Without a Ghetto, these multi-platform exhibitions involved consulting with other artists and designers, NGOs, community groups, and policy-oriented academics, and often revolved around projects designed in collaboration with urban youth via programs such as City as School. Importantly, these collaborations involved not only photographic documentation and informational display of urban data using well-designed maps, graphs, and timelines, but also experimental, utopian and often fantastical proposals for alterative urban environments informed by the speculative architectural projects of groups such as the Constant, Archigram, and Ant Farm. “Our work grows from a belief that the power of imagination is central to the practice of democracy, and that the work of governing must engage the dreams and visions of citizens. CUP believes in the legibility of the world around us. What can we learn by investigation? By learning how to investigate, we train ourselves to change what we see.”[8]

While eschewing the militant rhetoric of anti-capitalist disruption and shock put forward early on by a group such as CAE, CUP has been subtly but rigorously insistent about the politics of race and class in the contemporary American city: City Without a Ghetto, for instance, is a show that examines the history of real-estate redlining and the defunding of public housing over the past twenty years, but it also highlights the extent to which (mostly white) artists, designers, and other members of the so-called “creative class” have played a major role in neoliberal gentrification of formerly neglected zones of working-class residency.

(Counter)Institutionalization?

The Deweyian and Debordian poles of the developments in question–heuristically exemplified by CUP on one hand and the Gift of Masks on the other–were brought together in Nato Thompson’s ground-breaking exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere at MassMoCa in 2004. Thompson overtly claimed inspiration from the world-historical watershed of the Seattle demonstrations and their aftermath, and indeed included a number of artists and groups involved with expanded networks of alter-globalization counterpublicity such as Reclaim the Streets, Institute for Applied Autonomy, Las Agencias, the Yes Men, and Critical Art Ensemble. Yet alongside such work Thompson also highlighted pedagogically-oriented groups concerned with producing alternative forms of knowledge such as Spurse, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and 16Beaver Group. Thompson framed the latter phenomena as “The Experimental University,” and brought them into the capacious spectrum of what he called “interventionism,” in which “artists use techniques of art to engage real-life situations.”[9] Rather than the mere creation of “images” interventionists artists “intervene directly in life,” creating situations, disrupting expectations, and activating the spectator in such a way as to potentially facilitate social change. In a synthesis of CAE’s militant injunction “by any media necessary” and Dewey’s pragmatist concern with action over contemplation in the educational cultivation of subjectivity (“learn by doing”), Thompson describes the interventionist artist as a “tactical tool maker” who shifts the criteria of judgment from the tiresome, predictable aesthetic question “But is it Art?” to the instrumental demand “What does it do?” in an expanded realm of politicized visual culture.[10]

Leaving aside for the moment the crucial question of what it meant for the Interventionists to more or less dispense with aesthetic criteria involving the formal qualities typically of interest to critics and historians, two major problems dogged The Interventionists in its own terms. The first problem, often posed most vociferously by artists who felt snubbed at not having been included in the show, was the predictable if legitimate concern about what it means to place “activist” works in the space of a major museum. If an object is designed for or documents a street protest, for instance, does it not negate and neutralize the political capacities of the latter to have it raised to the status of “art”? Does the museum not automatically aestheticize, freeze, reify, lending the institution an air of radicalism while in fact making the object safe for the status quo? While acknowledging this tension, Thompson convincingly rebuffed knee-jerk cynics by demonstrating that while the museum is obviously not a substitute for a social movement, and should not be expected to be, it can nevertheless be tactically reprogrammed (under certain conditions) and drawn into a network of other times, places, and constituencies irreducible to that institution or even to the artistic field itself. Thus, the institution, depending on the calibration of ideological, bureaucratic and financial factors in a given context,  can in principle take on a role as archive of past activities, incubator of future activities, and a present-tense laboratory for public education, provocation, and dialogue.

The second major question surrounding The Interventionists concerned precisely the temporality and the sustainability of an interventionist tactic, particularly given that the term itself implies an event-like, ephemeral existence, and was indeed originally imagined in such terms by a group such as CAE in their appeal to guerilla hackers and their “molecular shocks to the system.” “What is gains, it cannot hold,” wrote De Certeau in his discussion of tactics.[11] Indeed, Interventionists co-editor Greg Sholette and critic Gene Ray edited an entire issue of Third Text in 2008 pondering the potential obsoleteness of tactical media due to its self-described weakness, contingency, and ephemerality as a paradigm of cultural politics modeled around the one-off guerilla strike, asking “is it necessary for anti-capitalists to move in the direction of sustainability and confederacy, even if that demands a degree of institutionalization abhorred by adherents of tactical media?” [12]

Even for the less guerilla-like, more pedagogically-oriented para-academic groups such as Spurse, 16Beaver, CLUI, or CUP, the question of how such groups can sustain themselves in financial, organizational, and institutional terms has always loomed large.

Most such groups have had no or extremely minimal contact with the commercial art market, which has meant that hand-wringing about the evils of the market on the part of older generations of artists and critics (a dialectic that culminates most rigorously in the work of Andrea Fraser) has often seemed somewhat perplexing if not debilitating from this vantage-point.[13] A much more pressing realm of concerns than the financial obscenities of Damien Hirst, for such artists, is the multifaceted institutional field they must navigate encompassing grants, residencies, state agencies, artists-run spaces, community groups, and especially nonprofit organizations and universities.

A significant if somewhat exceptional development in this regard concerns the trajectory of the Yes Men. Emerging out of the neo-situationist discursive milieu of CAE the late 1990s, the Yes Men became famous in left art-cultural circles for their highly mediagenic “identity correction” projects targeting the WTO in the run-up to Seattle, and made their first major appearance in an art-setting in The Interventionists at roughly the same time as they began work on their high-profile commercially released film The Yes Men Save the World. Until the mid-2000s, most of the Yes Men’s tactical interventions had been one-off, DIY pranks; but at this point they began to carefully plan and coordinate their activities with particular campaigns of activists groups such as Greenpeace, Rainforest Actions Network, or the Katrina Survivor’s campaign in New Orleans.[14] Thus, rather than a mere blip on the media radar, current Yes Men interventions are designed to feed back into the long-term strategy of a campaign, and are often sympathetically re-mediated in the progressive media infrastructure (which now prominently includes the left-oriented programming of MSNBC, especially that of Rachel Maddow, a former ACT-UP organizer). The Yes Men have formalized their collaboration-process in the form of the Yes Lab, a specially-funded research unit at The New School that advertises itself as a kind of partnership or consulting agency for progressive NGOs. In keeping with the tactical orientation–”by any media necessary”–the specific aesthetic qualities of Yes Men projects vary from campaign to campaign, given that their mode of operation is of para-fictional mimicry and detournement of the very entity that they aim to subject to political shaming.[15]

Another major development emerging out of the Dewey/Debord synthesis projected by Thompson in The Interventionists is his own shift from a museum-based curator at MassMoca to “curator of public art” at the non-profit group Creative Time. Over the past four years, Thompson has has moved his attention from small-scale DIY tactial interventions to a series of long-term, meticiuosly coordinated, well-funded and savily publicized artistico-political collaborative projects that arguably rank among the most significant artworks of the past decade. Chief among these are Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans,  Jeremy Deller’s It is What it Is: Conversations About Iraq, Tania Brugera’s Immigrant Movement International, and Sharon Hayes’ Revolutionary Love, which was staged at the RNC and the DNC as part as the nation-wide network of activities headquartered at the Armory for the Democracy in America megaexhibtion in the months preceding the 2008 elections. The Democracy in America headquarters also functioned as the platform for the first annual Creative Time summit, devoted to discussing and building links between artists, critics, curators, and activists working on a broad array of matters of political concern. Significantly, Democracy in America made an explicit intergenerational reference to Group Materials’ Democracy project of 20 years earlier, even reprinting the mission statement of the latter in the Creative Time catalogue.[16]

The spectrum of new institutions, para-institutions, and counter-institutions encompassing phenomena such Center for Urban Pedagogy, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the Yes Lab, Creative Time, and smaller, less professionalized alternative spaces such as 16Beaver and Not an Alternative gallery are all encouraging developments for those of us concerned with “changing forms of artistic resistance and critique,” in the words of Art & Education. Informed in varying degrees by the dual legacies of Group Material and the CAE and operating as experimental universities or nongovernmental organizations, they in large part bypass the old negative-dialectical agonies of institutional critique. In the latter, the artistic institution was often taken for granted to be a hegemonic, legitimizing force to be questioned, exposed, or destabilized in some form or another, with such an act often becoming a (dead) end in and of itself. With the developments in question however, the institution–whether a nonprofit organization or a provisionally sympathetic gallery, museum, or bineale rubric– deliberately decenters traditional aesthetic criteria (which becomes moot as a target of critique) and works to host, facilitate, and publicize dissensual public engagement around a particular matter of political concern. Obviously it is important not to be blithe about the developments I have mentioned, all of which are based in New York City and to some extent sustain one another through the exchange of cultural capital and professional networks that are clearly inseparable from the broader worlds of galleries, museums, and donors that make up an important portion of the artworld. Further, the facilitation of politically engaged projects at Creative Time is to some extent a biographical anomaly made possible the ideologically sympathetic figures involved in the organization in recent years. Finally, the disparity in financial security and media visibility between something like Creative Time and 16Beaver is immense. However, they function as parts of a progressive artistic infrastructure or ecology that is relatively autonomous from the baggage of the market and the museum, at least as trafitonally concieved. This is not to say of course that they are “autonomous” from the dynamics of the broader economy and the rippling crises associated with neoliberal deregulation–state and university budget cuts, donor dry-up, rent-hikes, unemployment, and gentrification are all forces that such institutions are effected by and implicated in various ways. The point, however, is they relate to the economy in ways other than say, a gallery selling million-dollar paintings or a block-buster museum exhibit, to cite two traditional targets of institutional critique.

Specters of Art

All in all then, the past decade has witnessed the emerging, provisional institutional consolidation of what Thompson once called an “infrastructure of resonance” for politically engaged work. A problem that haunts this unambiguously encouraging development, however, is that of art. It is remarkable to note that over the past decade much more ink has been spilled by sympathetic critics and curators concerning the sociological and organizational dynamics of these developments than with any sustained attention to particular artistic practice emerging from within them (a fault which the present essay admittedly shares). However, if in the early 2000s at the height of the neo-situationist renaissance it was something of a taboo to discuss art and aesthetics, the encounter between the progressive intellectual strands of the artworld and the work of Jacques Ranciere has stoked an encouraging demand for a revisiting of the aesthetic, understood not as a transcendental contemplation or disinterested pleasure, but rather as the dynamic tension of freedom and heteronomy, singularity and universality,  private and public, identification and disidentification, staged by an artwork at the level of its form and appearance.[17] This remains an open challenge to be extended to works of art that articulate their political concerns through their formal operations and historical resonances. Exemplary in this regard would be Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot In New Orleans, which, while often celebrated as the pinnacle of the new “social work” in all of its site-specific, organizational, and collaborative complexity, ultimately involves the restaging of an enigmatic, noncommunicative play that Adorno famously cited as the anathema of “committed” political art such as that called for by Brecht and Benjamin![18]

Though the main purpose of this paper has been to historically trace certain strands of thought and activity that have gone into enabling some of the most dynamic “socially engaged” projects in the contemporary field, I would like to end with a brief reference to an emerging artist named LaToya Ruby Frazier whose work resonates in a different way with the problem of “deregulation” as posed by the Art & Education 2011 call for papers. [19] If, as Kelly C. Baum has argued, much of the most compelling contemporary art “is now defined by its disidentification with the discipline of art,”[20] including the discipline of medium-specificity, Frazier stages a highly generative resistance to this overall trend.  Frazier identifies herself not as an organizer, a researcher, a cartographer, or an archivist, but rather, in deceptively simple terms, as an “art photographer.” Frazier has recently become known for a remarkably intimate series of images concerning what she calls the “intergenerational transference” between herself, her mother, and her now-deceased grandmother living together in a single household in the de-industrialized, largely black suburb of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Most of the photographs are self-portraits of Frazier, but she never appears as simply herself; her “own” image is always haunted by doubles that proliferate throughout the domestic interior in which the photographs are taken–mirrors, uncanny figurines, other photographs, set into motion a whole series of psychic confusions and phantasms, including the presence/absence of the mother herself. Frazier’s mother functions as both a beloved mirror image and disturbing specter who seems to constantly combine with and divide from the artist in both psychic and formal terms. In one image, for instance, Frazier’s mother sits in profile while Frazier sits frontally, the outlines of their differently positioned faces features aligned in such a way as to create the impression of both a loving kiss and a kind of unsettling disjuncture. In another image, this ambivalence is expressed through an oscillating undecideablity between figure and ground. There, the artist and her mother appear in a square mirror set off from the wall, framing them as a kind photograph within a photograph. Mother and daughter are posed on either side on a tripod, which partitions the scene in such a way as to induce a subtle confusion as to which of the figures is closer to the image, a sensation which is turn doubled by the receding series of frames created by doorway in front of which the mother stands. Both figures look into the anthropomorphic gaze of the camera as reflected in the mirror, which in turn impossibly targets “us” as subjects in the process of being-photographed, the anachronic moment at which, according to Roland Barthes, an image is created that says “this will have been.” Barthes was himself writing in Camera Lucida about the delirious temporality of love and mourning surrounding a photograph of his own mother, an analysis that belongs to a history of thinking about the relationship of the camera to maternity going back to Julia Margaret Cameron.[21] Cameron imagined the photograph as a kind of indexical umbilical cord to both herself and to the body represented, a trace of presence that simultaneously speaks to the inevitability of absence and loss: “she will have vanished,” to paraphrase Barthes as he looks at the famous Winter Garden photograph.[22]

Recalling the recoding of Surrealist photography by Francesca Woodman and the psychological domestic tableau of Carrie Mae Weem’s Kitchen Table Project, Frazier conjugates her interest in the uncanny psychic economy of the domestic household (oikos) with an interrogation of the figure of the picturesque post-industrial ruin.  This is a figure that has dominated visual representations of landscapes such as Braddock in art, journalism, and increasingly advertising in landscapes in recent years. Ten miles outside of Pittsburgh, Braddock was during the 1950s a thriving steel-town with a population of 30,000 made up of black and ethnic-white communities. With globalization and the departure of the steel industry over the seventies and eighties, Braddock suffered from massive white flight, depleting the towns tax base and making the town an exemplary site of “redlining” by investors and lenders. Braddock was wracked with drugs, violence, and negligence by local and state government, and by 2009, the population of the city had declined to just over 2,000 people (among whom were Frazier and her matrilineal family). The physical index of this destruction of the town are the streets upon streets of abandoned, overgrown structures, many of which has disappeared into the vegetation like so many ancient ruins.

Braddock is thus an exemplary “ghost-town,” strewn with piles of trash and rubble that lend themselves perfectly to what Wolfgang Kemp once diagnosed as the penchant of photographers for the “images of decay” created by the destructive dynamics of capitalism.[23] Though Kemp cites primarily 19th century photographers and later modernists such as Walker Evans, his diagnosis could be extended to the concern  Surrealist fascination with outmoded structures, as well as to Robert Smithson’s attraction to ruins of all sorts. As Kemp notes, the picturesque ruin in photography has typically telegraphed an absence of people, a kind of depopulation of the image in favor of a sublime vacuity, with the occasional exception of “ruined people”– vagabonds, orphans, prostitutes at once threatening and intriguing to the middle-class viewer.

Frazier’s photographs of herself and her family resists the effacement of lives from the “picturesque” landscape, a visual or aesthetic process that frames the environment as uninhabited and uninhabitable, and legitimizes in material ways the ongoing neglect and abandonment of the life-support systems of those who do in fact remain. In combining photographs of the derelict exterior landscape of Braddock and the photographing the inner psychic economy of the matrilineal household, Frazier suggests that both kinship networks and images are themselves essential conditions to the survival of otherwise precarious lives in the sense of the word developed by Judith Butler: “An obligation emerges from the fact that we are, social beings from the start dependent on what is outside of ourselves, on others, on institutions and on sustained and sustaining environments.”[24] While for Butler this is a generalized condition of precarity that we all share from infancy–and is thus bound up with questions of maternity, parenthood, and childcare–precarity is always bound up with uneven access to the conditions that make it possible for life to flourish. For Butler, the socially uneven distribution of precarity encompasses both exclusion from material infrastructures of life-support, but also the “representability of life: what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness and its needs for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way. The problem concerns the media, at the most general level, since a life can only be accorded a value on the condition that it is perceivable as a life.”[25] For Butler, “the media” is a question of the aesthetic and the affective, as when she writes that “to encounter the precariousness of another life, the senses must be operative, which means that a struggle must be waged against those forces that seeks to regulate affect in a certain way. “[26]

Far from a straightforward “humanization” of an otherwise abjected body, Frazier’s photographs stage precisely this complexity of perceiving the precarity of lives in both material and psychic terms, implicating us as viewers in their affective economies while thwarting any simple identification. At the same time, through the textual materials surrounding her photographs, Frazier notes the economic and ecological histories inscribed invisibly in the structures and bodies of Braddock that appear in her images. For instance, we learn that her grandmother, who features prominently in many of the images, soon died of pancreatic cancer, one of many health afflictions disproportionately effecting the Braddock population due almost certainly to massive amounts of air, water, and soil pollution left behind by the steel industry and never remediated by either the departing companies or the government. Barthes’ “she will have died” thus becomes a matter of both psychic economies and material ecologies, linking the formal problems of photography to the biopolitics of environmental racism in a specifically feminist iteration of what Emily Apter has called “the aesthetics of critical habitat.”[27]

Braddock is in many ways a kind of “ground zero” for neoliberal deregulation, having suffered the worst effects of not only deindustrialization but every subsequent recession and crisis, which are always amplified due to the historically sedimented precarity of the town’s residents.[28] However, over the past few years, as the town’s population sank to 2000 people, Braddock suddenly began to appear as a media image on lifestyle and art blogs, television programs, and newspapers due to the unlikely election of a new mayor. A thirty-something, tattooed, white hipster with a Harvard degree, John Fetterman began to promote the otherwise invisible, forgotten town as an experimental laboratory in artist-led, environmentally sustainable redevelopment. Fetterman has purchased numerous derelict structures, and transformed them into galleries, studio spaces, and extremely cheap living quarters for any artists brave enough to the rise to the challenge of being what he calls a “new urban pioneer” in repopulating the forsaken city. Striking in his down-to-earth disposition and entrepreneurial charisma Fetterman has sponsored public art workshops for local children, organic urban farming, communal kitchens, and graffiti murals by artists such as Swoon all in an effort to gain “visibility” for the town.[29] These efforts culminated in an multimedia advertising campaign for the Levis brand designed by the art-fashion photographer Ryan McGinley, which depicts punky young people of all colors engaged in the art and work of “revitalizing” Braddock, framed by a voice-over of the Walt Whitman poem “O Pioneers.”[30]

Frazier’s newest project addresses this spectacular new visibility of Braddock through a series of annotated images that alternate between photographs of a political demonstration in Braddock and images rephotographed from the Braddock Levis’ campaign (including one appearing on a giant billboard in SoHo). The demonstration images feature a small group of 5-6 mostly black people, among whom are included children and the elderly. They face the camera, standing in front a massive pile of rubble that seems to grow sky high atop an elevated concrete platform, the neck of a backhoe visible on the horizon like a kind of pre-historic creature of the sort that would preoccupy Smithson. Facing the camera and bearing placards, their direct address to the imagined audience of the photograph is echoed by a traffic arrow painted on the ground that points towards us, weathered and fractured but still standing out against the asphalt. The placards read “Health Care Not Wealth Care,” “Shame on You, UPMC” and “Fetterman/Oronto: Where is Emergency Care for Braddock?” Handwritten onto the photographic print are Frazier’s annotations, in this case explaining that the demonstration pertains to the closing of the single emergency room geographically accessible to Braddock residents in 2009, which had been owned and operated by the nonprofit University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the CEO of which earns 4. 5 million dollars a year. Legitimized with reference to the state’s budget crisis–even as a new UPMC facility was being built in a nearby wealthy suburb–the closing of UPMC Braddock exemplified what Butler calls the “uneven allocation of precarity” involved under neoliberal conditions, in which an entire town is more or less written off as unworthy of even the most basic, minimal access to life-support services.

That the placards take aim not only at UPMC but also the great urban pioneer Fetterman speaks to the fact that despite the spectacular visibility, his art and development “policies” have in fact largely undertaken in an unaccountable fashion under the rubric of his own non-profit organization, which he has used to bypass the (largely black) city council.[31] While Fetterman himself protested the closing of UPMC, the fact that his highly mediagenic, arts-driven creative-class paradigm of redevelopment could coexist with such a radical undermining of the heath of long-time residents of the town has further heightened tensions between the handful of artists and anarchists living otherwise in the downtown, and those who have survived there for decades.

Along with the images of the UPMC demonstration, others in this new series by Frazier are comprised of rephotographed images from the Levis Braddock campaign. In one such image,  we see a white anarchist with a shovel in what is presumably an urban garden, above which we read the phrase “Everybody’s Work Is Equally Important: Go Forth.” Instead of a factographic caption such as that attached to the image of the demonstration, here Frazier inscribes commentary directly onto the image, as if she were editing advertising copy in a design office albeit in an often illegible, uneven script of different sizes. On first read, the Levi’s slogan has been “corrected” and extended to read:

“If Everybody’s Work is could not ever be Equally Important…then why weren’t local residents and businesses allowed to profit from the bricks, aluminum, and windows from the demolition process of UPMC Braddock?”

Highlighting–if one can call it that, given the tiny scale of the inscription–such a micropolitical struggle over even the ruins of the ruins of the hospital functions to de-romanticize the imagery of ruins on their way to revitalization put forth by the Levi’s campaign, and by Fetterman’s booster imaginary more generally. In a playful yet sardonic detail, we also read in almost invisible black ink against a dark portion of the photo a comment pertaining to”Everybody’s Work is Equally Important” the following “copyedit”: “This slogan is a misguided, misused, misappropriated text; it is a trusim that belongs to Jenny Holzer.” This remark speaks to the dialetics of simulation and  “authenticity” involved in the images and discourses surrounding artist-led redevelopment, nicely reactivating Holzer’s critical-postmodernist attention to what Barthes famously called the “mythic” operations of language.[32] The reference to Holzer serves here as an  antidote to self-satisfied sloganeering, even, or especially when made in the name of benevolent progress if not outright radicality of the very sort that some proponents of socially-engaged art practice are often wont to make (including certain Interventionist contributors such as Swoon, who has also done a number of projects in Braddock.)

As it develops, Frazier’s work will no doubt continue to negotiate the poles of photography as a psychologically and affectively charged mnemonic index (as in the deconstructed family portraits and landscape images) and a critical-factographic operation on the other (such as the coupling of protest-documentation and reinscribed  advertisements on the other). In any event, her work, while sharing the broad political aspirations of the interventionist, tactical, and pedagogical projects described earlier nevertheless involves a certain level of aesthetic complexity, political specificity, and ethical discomfort that is often missing from the encouraging but all-too-affirmative “truisms” surrounding art as “social work.”

Medium Specificity in our Midst

Farrah Karapetian

J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan introduces the immortality of its title character through his shadow, which he needs, but which he has lost to the protective jaws of Nana, the dog. In the Disney version, the shadow, liberated from Peter’s body, has found its own posture, and only conforms again to his movements when Wendy sews it onto him. One of the realities of my perspective, is that despite a determination to speak roundly about mediums in terms of a generalizing tendency, my attention was, years ago, captured by one medium and it is to one medium that I return, again and again. I admit this right away in case I, like Peter Pan, seem to be soon trying to glue the shadow of the medium of photography onto its body with soap after others have understood it as inexorably freed.

In the early twentieth century, an artist would be most likely have been fluent with the deployment of one medium and literate in its technical matrices: Brancusi’s photographs supported his sculptural practice, even if through the lens of history, these stand on their own. Today, an artist more likely than not makes use of more than one material or technique, even in the making of one piece, let alone throughout the bulk of his or her practice. An artist is, in today’s context, fluent in the deployment of more than one medium, literate in the technical matrices of more than one medium, and aware of how the conversation surrounding one medium affects another. This is true even for those artists whose work is fairly consistently presented, say, as a photographic print, a video, or a painting; performance, sculptural installations, or any number of other strategies can be understood as an important part of the processes. Each of these mediums is to be understood in terms of what it means, ontologically as well as art-historically, in order that any one medium might be effectively borrowed and used.

Although a concerted focus on the parameters of any one medium is not a trend within contemporary art, medium-specificity exists broadly as a practice of election and narrowly as a practice of investigation, especially within the lens-based practices of photography and video.

This is an effect of modernism, even as it resists it (or need not bother resisting it anymore): the election of affinity towards any one particular medium as the appropriate vehicle for content or concept is a recognition of that medium’s (questionably evolving) capacities as well as of its (questionably evolving) reception. Today, such election occurs most frequently with respect to the lens-based practices of photography and video, suggesting an implicit acceptance of these mediums’ (or, as I will treat it, this medium’s) identities. When an artist—even one enrolled in the interdisciplinary or new genres department of some MFA program—chooses to confine a fruit of their project in the product that is a photograph or video, he or she tacitly acknowledges that product’s capacities, both presently and historically. This might seem strange, given the rejection of ontology that an interdisciplinary perspective might suggest. Decidedly interdisciplinary artists are not working on The Photograph, but they may choose The Photograph to communicate their work, and their work works upon it. Within photography departments (at schools, museums, and other institutions), the same practice might be identified, although there is more likely in this case a consciousness of working on The Photograph, even if other motivations—through references to other media and through content—are important. Either way, a consciousness of medium exists that is different from a mid-twentieth century medium specificity, but that relies upon recognition of the codes of the particular medium employed. Despite half a century, then, of the assumption of a deregulated field of practice, there appears to be a kind of natural law to the idea of the medium: something of which even artists who would not subscribe to a primacy of the medium in any way make use.

To suggest that artists today recognize, honor, and perpetuate the codes of any one medium takes this writing naturally back to medium specificity as it stood fifty years ago, with the sorting out of the particular natures of each medium, per Clement Greenberg’s declaration in Modernist Painting that each art has to “determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself”.[1] To his mind, he said this not to “subvert” production, but rather to cultivate reflexive practice within each medium, using Kant as an example: “Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic” and “was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism.” This way of thinking often addressed essential material conditions, but not when his attention turned to photography. Unlike the characteristics that essentialize the medium and practice of painting, photography’s concerns for Greenberg were literary above all else: photography’s “triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial,” ‘form’ in photography is reluctant to become ‘content,’ “the purely formal or abstract is a threat to the art in photography” and the most egregious of such work “has never been anything but abortive as art”.[2] If this might discourage the development of a photography along its material codes, it does not depart from the way photography had been and did develop over the course of the next fifty years and is an ontology that remains largely at play in the way the medium operates today.

Photography was not Greenberg’s focus, nor was it the focus of Michael Fried at the time, whose thinking in Art and Objecthood (1968) embodied modernism at its height. In fact, through paintings and sculptures were the products Fried discussed in that essay, no specific medium was the object of Art and Objecthood, nor was medium-specificity, per se. In this text, Fried identified the protagonist of minimalist (literalist) work—and the antagonist of modernist work—as theatricality: a concern “with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work”.[3] Of the more immutable characteristics in theatrical work is a sense of presence— through which the work demands to be taken seriously—and a “persistence with which [an] experience presents itself”, making the beholder into a subject and establishing “the experience itself as something like that of an object.” This latter condition Fried drew from Tony Smith’s account of an experience on a turnpike: a special experience that for some (such as Fried) might encourage artmaking, but that for Smith suggested the “end of art”. At stake in this essay was not any one medium or abstraction versus figuration, despite the work Fried championed otherwise at the time. At stake in this essay was the role of the beholder: is the work dependent on the beholder—“incomplete without him”—or is the work something that, as Fried says of Tony Caro’s work, “essentialize[s] meaning as such—as though the possibility of meaning what we say and do alone makes” the work exist as art? [4] Does the work stand on its own, embodying a clear sense of the author’s intention, or does it depend upon its reader to function?

This point of philosophy—rather than of art history or of criticism—manifests forty years later, for Fried, in one medium in particular: photography (and video.)[5] Fried’s text of 2008, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, outlines the ways in which art photography of the contemporary period asserts its authorship and by extension, its completeness, its to-be-looked-at-ness, its lack of existential need for a beholder. That this is today a photographic phenomenon is clear, but that it is not a phenomenon of other mediums seems not to be quite the point; it is a turning point for the Picture that perhaps only photography could achieve. Fried cites Walter Benn Michaels as saying that photographers have made efforts to establish their work “as pictures” and therefore photographers in particular have picked up a thread previously knitted to painting—per Fried’s own scholarship through Manet and Courbet. Although Fried discusses the artistic strategies of Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall, Thomas Demand, Thomas Struth, and other photographers in ways specific to their practices of photography and in fact says (in his conclusion, of the practice of Thomas Struth’s family portraits) that some of this work is “inconceivable outside the medium of photography”[6], the essential point of Fried’s scholarship in this case seems to re-establish the relevance of the question of authorship to the particular technique of photography (a phrase I borrow from Michel de Certeau’s definition of the philosopher.) The ontology at issue here is that of the Picture; the Photograph is an evolved Picture.

Asked to respond to Fried’s book on photography, curator emeritus at the Getty Museum Weston Naef, expressed a belief that medium-specific study should begin with a study of the individual medium’s materials:

“The interpretive method that Fried championed for studying painting and sculpture of the 1960s was first to understand artists’ materials and how they behave, then to think about what this means for the resulting work. …The early writing would have been a good model to follow [in Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before], since creative decisions about materials and process are as fundamental to the art of photography as they are for the art of painting.”[7]

The problem with Naef’s perspective here, which he goes on to remedy by listing the material processes behind some of the photographers whose work is unpacked in Fried’s book, is not just that he misstates the object of Fried’s championship as an interpretive method instead of as this essential issue of the beholder, but that he presumes a material identity for the photograph that is not widely shared. When an interdisciplinary artist borrows the Photograph for use in a project, he or she does not borrow a type of film, a length of exposure, or the idea of cameralessness; he or she borrows the philosophical question of authorship in a posture specific to the loaded history of mediatic depiction.

I too believe that it is important to understand an artist’s materials and that photography has at its disposal many magics that go beyond content and composition. I do not, though, believe that these materials and processes are what the medium widely represents to those within its exclusive practice or to those who elect to use it but who operate outside of photography’s exclusive practice. That is not to say that the medium cannot evolve to represent more than the Picture in the hands and imaginations of artists, but it is to say that within and without the discipline, the Photograph is used to depict. Jeff Wall has said that the photograph “cannot find alternatives to depiction”, that “it is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things”, that photography through reportage “elaborates its version of the Picture, and… is the first new version since the onset of modern painting in the 1860s, or, possibly, since the emergence of abstract art”.[8] This idea comes not just from Wall’s experience as a photographic artist nor his research and thought on the subject, but from Greenberg and from John Szarkowski. It is an idea that translates into the far reaches of how photographs are used in sculpture and how they are written about. It is how photographs are seen and used, even when their concerns appear abstract, and even in a deregulated field of interdisciplinary practice.

In 1964, MOMA mounted the exhibition, the Photographer’s Eye, and the catalogue essay by John Szarkowski notes that “to quote out of context is the essence of the photographer’s craft. His central problem is a simple one: what shall he include, what shall he reject?” For Szarkowski, this is a question of authorship, not of journalistic editing, although he did not look down upon journalism: “the factuality of [the photographer’s] pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, [is] a different thing than the reality itself” [9]Throughout the 160 exhibitions John Szarkowski produced for New York’s MOMA between 1962 and 1991, it is the “unadulterated” act of “visual editing” that characterized the medium as he saw it. In a time during which materials—paint, flatness, rectangularity—might have characterized the essential components of painting, the likewise material components of photographs were not to be understood as the essential components of the photograph. “You’re not supposed to look at the thing,” said Szarkowski. “You’re supposed to look through it. It’s a window” (2006).  In terms of Greenberg’s “effects exclusive” to the medium, Szarkowski, and the work of artists he championed, including that by Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and William Eggleston, suggest that a) the photograph is uniquely transparent, materially, as an object and that b) the practice of photographing is uniquely one of inclusion and exclusion—i.e. of intentionality, despite the effects of chance, which also uniquely define (for Szarkowski, and, in 1980 in Camera Lucida, for Roland Barthes) photographic practice.

This faith in the photograph as simultaneously fact and fabrication, plus this conviction that the photographic object is transparent, is what enables artists throughout the Conceptual period of the 1960s and ‘70s to elect the photograph as the medium through which they could communicate. The photograph’s role “in, or as, Conceptual Art” (per Jeff Wall’s essay of 1995), the photograph’s participation in reportage before and after the period of the 1960s and ‘70s to which Wall refers, and the solid footing that the photograph gained at MOMA under Szarkowski as a product like reportage but not of reportage: Each of these roles, for the Photograph, provides it with an identity that artists both working and not working on the Photograph borrow.

This same period during which Fried established authorship as a central issue of artmaking and during which Szarkowski sanctioned an unadulterated—but still highly authored—photograph at the Museum of Modern Art saw the development of the question of artist as author in a different respect as well. Roland Barthes, in his essay of 1967, “Death of the Author”, writes that any “text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” He goes on to explain that these multiple citations come into “dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation” and then locates the one place in which the “multiplicity is collected” as the reader—not the writer: “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.” One kind of artist working with the Photograph, at this time, became a reader, and in so doing, did not represent the death of authorship, but in enacting a certain kind of self-reflexive photographic phenomenon, re-represented mediatic imagery. The Pictures generation was of course named for the interest of the artists involved in reworking media culture. Cindy Sherman shot film stills starring herself; her film stills were acquired in 1995, following Szarkowski’s departure from MOMA, when Peter Galassi turned the attention of the museum’s photo department—and the institutionalized identity of the Photograph—towards more and more explicitly authored photographs. This does not represent a turn away from Szarkowski’s “unadulterated” photograph, but a building of the understanding of the intentionality of the photographer as author.

If an artist today works with photography or video, they work from inside the logic of lens-based mediums; an awareness of this logic and the historical contexts of lens-based mediums is key to each of these projects. The notion that medium specificity still exists in the multiplicity of today’s art practices may or may not be surprising. Certainly, our institutions preserve departments for the various mediums, even as they speak of their shows or students in interdisciplinary terms. It should also be fairly comfortable to think of interdisciplinary artists as electing affinities with particular mediums. Work across a spectrum of mediums is made possible by the turn toward fabrication and paid labor initiated in the 1960s; part of the luxury of such election is validated by an understanding of the medium as an institution with its own identity and regulatory matrices within which meaning is made. Why is a photograph an appropriate means of communicating this idea? Why fiberglass? Not only the material itself becomes a part of the metaphorical underpinning of the piece, but the fabricator him or herself: Why must I employ this kind of commercial craftsman or another? What does his or her particular skill represent on a cultural level?

Even those artists who choose to work in one primary medium must by needs of our contemporary supply chain employ others in their process who are more familiar with the minutiae of the medium’s matrix. A photographer who chooses to work with film trusts a lab to develop it and sometimes to print it. A painter may not mix his or her own pigments. A sculptor in the Unmonumental tradition of the last ten years might use materials that are inexpensive so as to be able to manipulate them his or herself, but, as Charles Ray put it, “Does fabrication begin with the materials an artist selects? Is an artist who uses plywood alone in his studio working with unseen fabricators?”[10] Surely, the plywood was made by someone in a factory and bears with it its own commercial connotations that are part of the meaning of the final piece. The artists in these cases are making use of the skills of others whose lives are closer to the materials qua materials.

It is possible to regard and test a medium from within that medium, and yet in doing so to regard and test its equals and opposites: a photograph, showing sculpture, is not sculpture, and a photograph showing performance is not performance. The nature of a Modernist photograph is to show, and so the photograph of sculpture or performance is still a photograph. What of a photograph that behaves like sculpture? What if it knocks about on the floor or changes in time? Relationships between mediums are useful, even when an artist is trying to suss out the identity or particular nature of the primary one at hand. Photography’s fairly simultaneous origin by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England is an example; “lacking other ways to make understandable their prodigious discovery, both inventors described their creations as types of drawing”.[11]Part of what drove these men towards capturing imagery photographically was the choice they had between it and the act and results of drawing, just as part of what drove Moholy Nagy to experimentation in photography was the alternative it presented to painting. Sculpture drove Thomas Demand to photography. There is a difference between where these artists and others came from, mediatically, and where they arrived; in that very difference and in that election is the specificity of a medium.

Although there are other specificities to contemporary artmaking, not the least of which are responsive attitudes toward site, viewer, or market, medium specificity is necessarily still at play. It is at times liberated from the body of the individual artist—one may not be necessarily a photographer or a painter—but the mediums themselves bear with them as much specificity if not more than ever before. Deregulation of the practice of art has ostensibly meant the removal of critical rules that constrain the operation of individual artists, reducing institutional control of how art is made and shown. This has not necessarily been the case, though; a natural law of each medium guides the election of that medium by individual artists, whose practice is no longer constrained by positive (man-made) law.

‘The Secretary’, Steven Shainberg, Motion picture, 2002

The mimicry of artistic practices in not a novelty – why art institutions still lack a method to support this phenomenon?

MPhil. Nada Prlja

The artist as a secretary—an interlude

I can clearly remember the ‘Former West‘ conference in 2010 and attempts by numerous speakers to engage the audience with the topics of institutional critique in the now apparently ‘Former’ West. I recall the heated discussion directed by various audience members involved in education or curatorship, but I also remember the artists’ disengaged silence, broken by the occasional scribbling down of notes, of names mentioned during the presentations. This particular conference was not a one-off situation where the topics of institutional critique, education as a methodology, etc – resulted in disengaging the artist audience.

This prosaic moment of the artists’ alienation during conferences, leads me to examine the power structure of the art world, as a way of examining the wider issues of contemporary art and artists’ own relation to it. We can clearly see that the marionette’s threads are being pulled by the curators/educators/institutions. It is they, rather than the artists, who are providing the marionette (the artists) with a voice and directing its movements, in their desired directions.

In these power relations, I should openly ask – are the art institutions fully interested in supporting the artistic exploration, or do they limit their support to a particular amount of finite time, effort and expenses? I should furthermore ask: do curators understand and support artists at all, or do they instead seek a reflection of their own concepts in the work realised by artists? Can the artist contribute to a structured methodology or critique of the art system?

By listening to the speakers at the ‘Former West’ conference, I felt like a secretary typing, taking notes, without fully understanding the topics, making numerous spelling mistakes in the attempt not to make any. In those moments of my increasing dis-interest in the what the moderator may have to say, I found myself making parallels, with the secretary (acted by Maggie Gyllenhaal) in Steven Shainberg’s film entitled ‘The Secretary’ (2002). The role of the secretary, within her world of self-humiliation, degradation and masochism – in comparison to the artist within his/her own world of the institutional contemporary art world.

I could argue that the only difference, in this ‘saucy’ comparison, between the actual secretary in the film and the artist, lies in the form of pleasure received by the afore mentioned secretary, as this pleasure is (unfortunately) taken away from the artists’ masochistic experience. In this thrilling and pleasant longing for a pleasurable spank on the bottom, the secretary submits herself voluntarily to her boss, the director (the institution of pain). Spanks received by the artists are instead filled with a sense of guilt, a guilty conscious – a confusion and fear derived from not having the appropriate vocabulary or terminology, or the inability to answer the curator’s/ institution’s selected interests. The artists respond to the demand for their submissiveness, but it is fulfilled without a moment of pleasure.

However, we cannot argue that all artists are in the same position. Artists that base their work on knowledge, on a multiplicity of visual and verbal information—practices such as The Otolith Group or Hito Steyerl—receive legitimation and are rewarded by the curators and the institutions. Those art practices communicate ‘appropriately’, they speak the curator’s ‘language’. Their work is a fertile land for the curators ‘plow’, as their works offer the curators an opportunity to do their job well— enabling them to make references to parallel works of art and or historical events on which these works are clearly predicated upon. Such art practices and their methodologies enable the curators to represent themselves as properly  knowledgeable—both as curators and theoreticians. Those rare art practices and their submissiveness could reach the point of enjoying a reward, a ‘grass and flower bed for the wedding’ (as in ‘ The Secretary’). Other forms of artistic practice that do not perform the ritual of mutual legitimation, instead survive ongoing lashings, scars, and a sense of suffocating strangulation that, for the most part, leaves them voiceless.

How, in this position of internal and physical bleeding and pain, can the artist find a way to comment on or critique the art system or art institutions, without being penalized or even expelled from the same? Even the artist who resists being institutionalized and engages instead with attempts to address society itself, can find himself even more limited by a system in which any attempts of ‘good-doing’, are strictly prohibited. Not only could the artist risk sacrificing his/her own carrier, it could also sacrifice the well being of others.

The essay will address the incapacity of both systems: society and the art system that fails to address the artists’ true intentions. In other words, this essay explores ways in which artistic production evaluates and intervenes with social reality. It questions the ability of cultural institutions to accept, delegate and produce artistic projects that may aim beyond representational artistic goals.

Designed to fail

Cynthia Weber argues that ‘modern liberal citizenship is a failing design’ [1]. This is due to the fact that it is not transparent and implemented well within society. Conditions that can be described as ‘designed to fail’ can be found in all components of social life, especially within the spheres of politics, economy and law.

In Britain, for example, educational cuts steadily continue. This decision, an obvious ‘designed to fail’ situation, will result in the inevitable rise of the educational standards of the upper middle and upper classes, followed by the (seemingly unintentional) strengthening of already existing social polarities and class differences within British society. The cuts in education and culture are consequences of an attitude characterized by the ‘designed to fail’ principle. The cuts function as a veiled insult to notions of democracy and ideals social equality in contemporary society.

Over several decades, many art practices have developed a sensitivity toward such circumstances and the varied consequences of ‘designed to fail’ conditions. Those situations have been recorded and documented through different artistic mediums. In this essay, I review two modes of artistic work:

a.) The first mode is observational and representational

b.) The second mode is oppositional and initiative.

What structurally motivates these differing artistic methodologies? Let us examine how the acceptance of the artists’ work (by the artworld/ institutions) relates to the mode of artistic activity employed in their creation.

Mode 1 – The notion of reflecting temporality

Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson amalgamate their interest in avant-garde videography/cinematography and documentary practice in the video ‘Caregivers’ (2008), (a methodology since appropriated by the artists for a series of new video projects conceived and produced for the Manifesta 7, Italy). The narrative content of the ‘Caregivers’ video, is based on a newspaper article found by the artists, reflecting on the recent phenomenon of migration of Eastern European care-givers to Italy. The content of this newspaper article becomes the matrix for Karólína Eiríksdóttir’s contemporary classical music composition, composed for Castro and Ólafsson’s ‘Caregivers’ video. The video portrays the relations between four women: Eastern European migrant care-givers and their elderly clients from the area of Rovereto, during the course of their daily activities.  Through this work of art, the artists represent a particular form of ‘designed to fail’, focusing on the migrant care-givers’ daily struggle, their departure from their country of origin, their sense of loneliness, etc.

The video ‘Sans Papiers – Illegalized People’ (2004) introduces the viewers to the shocking realities, conditions and treatment that illegal citizens receive, upon being caught in-between state and statelessness the law and the system of bureaucracy.

In their documentary, Tanja Ostojić and David Rych describe the shocking position of unwanted foreigners in major deportation jails in Germany (Berlin-Köpenick), thereby directly illustrating the concept of the ‘threshold of the law’ in contemporary society (one of the main characteristics of the ‘designed to fail’ system), as stated by Ostojic [2]́:

“… EU state governments do everything to give as little asylum as possible. Refugees are deported and removed, and pushed over EU borders….

Upon release, the absolute majority is without resources and without work permits, forced into the black labor market to pay off their debts, and become targets for more stringent production still…”

There are numerous other recent art practices, such as Hito Steyerl, Oliver Ressler & Dario Azzellini, all of whom use inventive artistic methods to observe situations illustrating the notion of ‘the design of failure’. For most of politically driven or socially engaged art practices today, if the artistic project is stripped of its ‘intellectual’, visual and textual qualities, the work’s main aim will consist of informing a mainly art-world audience about certain conditions or situations of political/social/judicial injustice. This kind of artistic activity resembles the straightforward, media model of communication, characteristic of journalistic reportage. Despite the various forms of intricacy and delicate artistic qualities involved, such practices risk becoming a form of aesthetic reportage. Extensive description of this model of work can be found in Alfredo Cramerotti’s book Aesthetic Journalism, in which, Cramerotti speculates upon the potential and limits of a mutual convergence of art and media into a new cross discipline of Aesthetic Journalism.[3]

If we go back a few decades, we can identify the work of numerous practices involved with a similar concept of dealing with the social or political realities of their times.

The videos of Darcy Lange are freed from electronic editing equipment, which results in a process-based, unfinished product, encouraging the development of what could be called the ‘process video’. His video works, as for example ‘Works’ (1971-73) and ‘Work Studies’ (1973-75) aim directly towards being a simple representation of the real situation, with a realistic time frame and  environment. This method reinforces ‘research’ as the artist’s method of working, where the ‘research’ is the observation of everyday activities. With this type of work, the artist reinforces experimentation within the artistic medium (video) while at the same time informing the art-viewing public (visitors to the galleries) about the life of factory workers, workers in the coal-mines, post offices, etc …

The artistic representation of harsh realities cannot only be seen in relation to the practices emerging from conceptual art and the years to follow. Since the development of the photographic medium, the representational image serves as a sharp commentary on contemporary conditions. In one of Walker Evans’ photographs, an older woman appears carrying a plate tied around her neck. On the plate, in bold black letters, is inscribed the word ‘BLIND’ [4]. In this specific document of a particular time and social condition, we are aware that this document belongs to the past and is no longer relevant to us (pointing out someone’s disability in such a manner would today be seen as offensive and unacceptable).

From this point of view, all the aforementioned art works were a direct representation of its own temporality, but we must remain aware that they are purely representational reminders, which are all too easily consumed and metabolized by an institutional art-world. This is evident by way of the frequency of invitations of this type of work to be exhibited or screened and promoted.

Mode 2 – Is it possible to redesign the ‘designed to fail’?

In Slavoj Zizek’s numerous public presentations, he points out that the contemporary politician/president should be a maker of the impossible. Analogous to this concept – could art practices contain a similar prospect?

Is it possible to react to and potentially redirect policies, laws and the actual systems that seem to be predestined or ‘designed to fail’? Can artists influence or possibly change the course of affairs? Can we act against this preconceived ‘failure’ while being in the process of failure itself? Could we demand of the artistic activity to use its own inherent potential to ‘go further’, beyond artistic representation, to search and adopt one or more methodologies that derive from other parallel disciplines in order to achieve the modification/alteration/change of the subject examined? Must artists and art works be seen as passive citizens of an art-world, or could they be seen as leading?

Again, looking at Darcy Lange’s practice from the ’70s, the attempt to alter the course of development for such ‘conditions of failure’, can clearly be sighted in his 1977 work entitled ‘Work Studies in Schools’, where he compares the realities and methodologies of teaching environments in comprehensive and public schools in the UK. Lange’s comparative observations and research later became a platform for discussion by the staff members and the pupils themselves.

Darcy Lange’s practice is not interested purely in representation or conveying given information to the audience (like in the works exemplified by Mode 1); his work served as a research tool for the schools. Darcy Lange’s projects re-initiate some of the traditional ideas about photography/filming, reinforcing thereby the factual and documentary power of the image, by referring to the work of Walker Evans, Eadweard Muybridge, etc. But more importantly, Lange’s video project aims beyond representation— he uses the footage to initiate an action/reaction to given conditions (in this case, an existing design which represents failure in the educational system), in order to activate the potential of improved and innovative education by the subjects themselves.

As Guy Brett [5] points out, in regards to Lange’s project entitled ‘Work Studies in Schools’,”… Lange uses the video as a means of involving himself with real people and real problems of life, by engaging a potential to solve the problems.”

Lange provides a solution in this particular situation, by use of micro-actions with the purpose of achieving a specific goal. This early attempt to shift artistic practices from pure representational methods into methods with the potential of influencing social structures, has been and remains in practice by numerous artists today.

Artistic initiatives are not set up as applicable and transferable; they affect particular situations and are solutions to a local problem, resolved by the engagement of local participants. Their implementation usually require a long time and are usually without a clear ending; their success to a large degree relies on the artist’s involvement and élan.  Most of these works are based on self initiated projects developed in collaboration with other non-art groups, supported by individuals or organizations often only marginally related to art and not supported directly by the local art community.

The potential of ‘micro-activities’ are not often explored by contemporary institutions of art education. In the following excerpt from a press release which describes the Visual Arts Department at IUAV in Venice [6]’, we can conclude that the aforementioned artistic methodology (based on micro-actions) lacks the potential of being a ‘global initiative’ and could not become generalized.

‘… Students and leading artists, curators and scholars in various disciplines have over the years joined a department where art and curating workshops are equally open to all students, where art practices maintain a relationship to art history as much as to other fields—and means—of knowledge such as aesthetics, theoretical philosophy, semiotics, philosophy of language, psychology of perception, anthropology, sociology and literature, and where the teaching and learning of art take place in close proximity to those of theater, design and fashion design. Conceived beyond any hierarchical distribution between theory and practice…’

Contemporary institutions of art education instead prioritize more global activities – institutional criticism, focused on art institutions, education, art representation and production. ‘Blockbuster’ art education, takes on a different, extended and all encompassing form (theatre, fashion, etc.) and engages with consumption, marketing and distribution as one of the crucial activities within post-democratic globalization.

The attitude adopted by IUAV’s Visual Arts Department, propagates interdisciplinarity as a merger between the economies of art practice, cultural discourse and life-style goods. Transforming the potential for artistic activity to intersect with social needs into increasing alignment with luxury and a perception of culture as a perverse indulgence.

Epilogue – could art institutions support ‘shifters’ practices?

The following artistic action can be taken as a concrete description of micro-aimed artistic processes and illustrates the significance of such actions. The following action was orchestrated in Zagreb, Croatia, where the tax on books (25%) was notably higher than tax for other goods (15%). Due to this economic deregulation – and while consumerism was in full progress – books were not being acquired by the citizens. Artist and activist, Igor Grubic, in collaboration with a group of local anarchists, organized a system of regular theft of books from the bookshops, reading and subsequently returning the books to the bookshops. After their perseverance with this action, intended as a form of protest and communicated as such to the media – the tax on books was lowered. This exemplary project shows, in a direct way, the possibility of disrupting the government tax policy and disrupting the conditions that had been ‘designed to fail’.

This action relied on an implementing an immoral/illegal act, using theft as a methodology, in order to oppose and ultimately ‘break’ a more advanced, ‘legalized’ system of manipulation. This artistic action is thereby placed into a problematic relationship with any given art institution. However, could one imagine a similar artistic action / methodology to be actively supported by an art institution? And could we again pose the same (unsolved) questions:

Despite the common fetishization of ‘political art’ one is left wondering what kinds of possibility and support art institutions could offer practices going beyond experimentation within artistic representation of the social—how would institutions support practices that directly engage with compositions in the social field. Is there a real possibility for the art world to become interested in supporting art practices that go beyond the propagating safe discourses of critical theory or artistic activity that do not resemble the simplistic media model of communication?

Act Up (Gran Fury), Neon Sign (Silence = Death) from “Let the Record Show,” 1987, New Museum

Something out of Nothing: Marcia Tucker, Jeffrey Deitch and the De-regulation of the Contemporary-Museum Model

Nizan Shaked

“Who needs yet another anthology about Andy Warhol”!? The question came to mind upon seeing, in 2010, the October special issue devoted to an artist for which there seems to be a constant abundance of critical attention.[1] A satisfactory answer did not fail to arrive soon thereafter in an interview with the former dealer and newly appointed director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Jeffrey Deitch. “For Jeffrey Deitch, Andy Warhol is a longtime influence,” wrote Jori Finkel in her tellingly entitled interview “His Pop Idol,” which, one sentence after another unraveled Deitch’s layman understanding of Warhol’s practice, stripping the work of its subversive, radical, and queer complexities. Deitch’s translation of Warhol’s artwork, actions and intensions shifted the artist’s infamous proclamations just enough to seemingly remain felicitous to their original context, but in fact left the Warholian operation flat by taking its highly contrived words literally. As Finkel cited Deitch:

‘Andy loved American establishment institutions like Citibank, the same way he loved kids who just graduated from Princeton dressed in their preppy clothes,’ Deitch says of the self-proclaimed ‘business artist’ who once quipped, ‘Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.’[2]

Clearly, this is an a-historical reading of Warhol’s performative opposition to expressionism and its suppression of art’s relationship to money. To take Warhol at face value seems convenient, especially for all the art dealers who are raking in record amounts set by the trade in his work, as they scurry to sell it sans its campiness and often to collectors steeped in homophobic culture. But if art dealers care to devalue the work’s meaning for gain there is probably not much that we can do about it—commerce in art in the United States has never been regulated.  However, mandated to self-regulate are museums, whose guidelines do in fact suggest that they have an advanced understanding of art and adhere to ethical standards.[3]

Herein lay the stakes of the corporatization of museums that has been escalating in the U.S. since the 1970s. The increasing sway of a power/money nexus over the operation of museums has been rapidly turning into control over content executed by individuals who are unprepared for the task and hence substitute opinion for knowledge. Acquisition, scholarship and curatorial work in museums should not only be in the hands of specialists, but should also adhere to the ethical guidelines—there to ensure that institutions holding patrimony in public trust are capable of making decisions for posterity. [4] I argue that this is particularly important in the case of contemporary art as we lack the perspective of time to determine significance. Given our proximity to the subject matter it is only sensible that, in order to make sound decisions about acquisitions and programming, leaders should either have an understanding of historical processes or be versed in theoretical frameworks to help guide decisions that will impact the future.[5]

Deitch was recruited from New York to Los Angeles by Eli Broad, a patron well known for his insistence on control in return for his gifts.[6] On the one hand there is nothing new under the sun when a businessman has sway over cultural issues, as Jennifer Donnelly explains about the U.S. context:

The link between business and museums is evident in the profiles and policies of directors, as well as in the contents of the collections themselves. In a country without the tradition of royal, religious, or federal patronage the cornerstone of the first European museums, it has been private individuals, often businesspeople, who have stepped in to help fund buildings, donate artworks, and fill leadership positions as board members and presidents. U.S. museums still receive far less public funding than their counterparts abroad. As a result, American art museum directors have long had to maintain links with private business, in order to fulfill the fundamental objectives of acquiring, exhibiting, and interpreting works of art.[7]

On the other hand, the degree of control exercised by patrons has varied historically, and also varies according to individual institutions. Yet, what has become increasingly problematic in the atmosphere of deregulation, escalating since the 1970s, is the return to a model Vera Zolberg has characterized as the: “pre-professional era,” where businessmen controlled the function and content of museums.[8] Most recently, blatant undemocratic practices have been openly exercised, becoming practically permissible.[9] It seems that anyone footing enough of the bill can institutionalize their personal taste while exploiting the benefits of tax deduction. For example, rather than choosing to strengthen one of the city’s existing institutions, Broad, other wealthy Americans before him, opted to add another museum that will carry his name, taking control over urban-scale design decisions while receiving rebates from public monies.[10] Like many of the other private museums, decisions are made autocratically, oblivious to appropriate democratic processes that were specifically outlined to sustain a self-regulating system. As successful as they may be in boosting or dealing, Broad or Deitch each have a very different set of expertise than scholars, or other professionals, who have the depth and breadth to foresee what will matter for future generations.[11] Being a successful collector or dealer does not qualify one to make substantial decisions towards our collective cultural patrimony. The problem is not with their taste per se—both figures have a proven track record in collecting or the business of art. The setback is that they have not the critical capacity to understand the facts of their limitations, and it is in these hands that decisions about acquisition, and more dangerously de-accession, will be placed. I claim that having failed to absorb the critical lessons of the postmodern period, the corporate model today can be compared not only with the U.S. pre-professional model, but even with an early framework of Renaissance collecting and classification.

This paper imagines a future where there exists a distinction between opinion and knowledge, and that museums remember that it is their job to evaluate quality outside market considerations and programing driven by ratings. Since in the U.S. the reality is a dependency on private and corporate funds, it is there that the need for a scholarly approach should be impressed, and it is museum professionals that have to advance this imperative. Change can only happen if we continue to press for a cultural shift in values, and it is the onus not only of professionals but also scholars and intellectuals to exercise their knowledge and positions ethically and to resist the “networking imperative” highlighted by Isabel Graw.[12] A model for a better money/art relationship exists already, particularly appropriate for the medium-sized contemporary art museum. The unprecedented structure developed by Marcia Tucker, the founding director of The New Museum, was a non-corporate contemporary art museum in the U.S. context that emerged at the same time as a new market structure is emerging, with Deitch largely at the helm.

Given the influence of the New Museum and its importance in defining and sustaining artistic practices that matters now, this paper highlights the unique relationship set up by Tucker between institutional practices and programs, urging a return to her museum structure.[13] Putting her writing and lectures into context I outline a position within a history of perspectives and debates regarding the appropriate expertise and ethical guidelines of museums and collecting. It examines the waning of museum self-regulation in the context of the escalation of the global art market and asks what it may mean to attempt objectivity and scientificity in an age that challenged these modern notions, and what kind of guidelines we may set to insure that our museums mount substantial exhibitions and collect significant and representative work.

An Abridged History of Curatorial Expertise

It is perhaps best to first ask what is the museum’s scholarly framework and how has it evolved? The development of collecting and classification between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment can be generally described as a gradual and highly flawed stride towards the “scientific,” ending with doubt of the latter’s methods with the advent of postmodernism. In the 16^th and 17^th century collecting and classification relied on the categories of the curious and the marvelous inherited from the medieval emphasis on wonder as the organization principle of the world.[14] For the most part, princely and aristocratic collections strove for some scheme of order based on poetic or literary structures, and were more formal than didactic. It was scholars, Jesuits and professionals (such as botanists) that began building private collections of natural and artificial objects as depositories of resources, refining their encyclopedic impulse into the early methods for scientific classification.[15] Scholars still debate whether and to what degree those methods were indeed scientific, as they were of course tied to contemporaneous belief systems, their knowledge often subjected to ideologies in support of networking and the perpetuation of commerce, self-aggrandizing or religious proselytizing.[16] Notwithstanding, the point here is that scientificity became a value, a form of authority that necessitated either being a specialist or hiring one, significant for example in the case of the Medici family, as Giuseppe Olmi writes:

The need to legitimize the Grand Duke and his dynasty meant that the glorification of the prince, the celebration of his deeds and the power of his family had constantly to be exposed to the eyes of all and to be strongly impressed on the mind of every subject.

This transition from private to public also entailed a new arrangement of the collection. Works of art and antiquities gradually came to be seen as status symbols and instruments of propaganda, while grand-ducal policy increasingly brought scientific research under state patronage.[17]

As Olmi concludes, it was ultimately a turn to specialty knowledge that influenced the reorganization of museums in the 18^th century.

During the Enlightenment period the earlier connoisseur and gentlemanly hang of the fine arts eventually gave way to classification by national schools and chronological installation. These methods then served to promote the ideology of the nation state, while museum treasures came to be considered as the heritage of the entire nation.[18] Based in the rational and reformative intentions of the Enlightenment progress paradigm scientificity and scholarly approaches became the articulated means for the organization of materials, also supporting the architectural scheme and the design of the space.[19] Throughout the Modern period museums engaged in gradual self-correction, advancing through dialectical criticism of former methods. Two major philosophical underpinnings underlie the resulting models. A depoliticized Hegelian contemplative museum and the didactic one, both nevertheless relying on authority derived from scholarship.[20]

In the U.S. context the establishment of art historical departments in universities propelled the professionalization of museums in the early 20^th century and curatorial and managerial roles from the late 1920s and on, mostly under the influence of Paul Sachs’s “museum course” at Harvard. A generation of museum professionals became his legacy, forming such strong art historical positions as Alfred Barr’s at the MOMA. Between the late Modern age and postmodernism, advancement of social, political and philosophical critique culminated with the discrediting of scientific certitude and curatorial method became an arena for political debate. From the late 1960s into the 1990s a wave of protest followed by subsequent scholarly analysis challenged museums, and in the 1980s and 1990s focused on the questions of representation in the institutional context. Institutional ideology and methodologies were analyzed, examining in detail how they framed and contextualized the meaning of objects.[21] The demand that museums change their administrative structure and content was voiced strongly by women and minorities, such that it practically characterizes the period. These insights were so significant that they manifested publically, demonstrations commencing with the campaign against the Metropolitan Museum’s Harlem on My Mind (1968), followed by protests against the Whitney Museum for American Art (where Marcia Tucker had worked until 1976) and the Museum of Modern Art, leading to the formation of new alliances between different minority groups, and also Leftist artist groups, demanding that museums better serve the public by changing administrative approaches.[22]

When museums began responding to these public demands, the process was dialectical. When well-intended display and exhibitions were found to have been based in inherited historical biases that replicated structures of social injustice, they were then followed by attempts at correction, and so on the cycle repeated.[23] My point here in presenting this complex history in its abridged form is to underscore a development towards an ideal of social justice. For the most part today museums are still operating between the two historical poles of the didactic versus the contemplative, which can be said have been replaced by an opposition between the political and the experiential. It is widely acknowledged that political work can be easily subsumed into the experiential model, but there still exist a difference between art that associates human development and progress with social justice, and that which is concerned with market value and profit.

Spinning the Loophole: the Monetization of the Art Object

In 1970s U.S. financial decline and inflation drove museums to heavy dependence on corporate sponsorship, which in return influenced content in direct and indirect ways. As Hans Haacke observed:

Certainly, shows that could promote critical awareness, […] have a slim chance of being approved—not only because they are unlikely to attract corporate funding, but also because they could sour relations with potential sponsors for other shows. Consequently, self-censorship is having a boom.[24]

Led by a way of thinking exemplified by the Guggenheim’s director Thomas Krens, attitudes shifted in the late 1980s and early 1990s when museums themselves began to assume a corporate logic, to a greater degree of consequence, as Rosalind Krauss outlined:

This bizarre Gestalt-switch from regarding the collection as a form of cultural patrimony or as specific and irreplaceable embodiments of cultural knowledge to one of eying the collection’s contents as so much capital—as stocks or assets whose value is one of pure exchange and thus only truly realized when they are put in circulation—seems to be the invention not merely of dire financial necessity: a result, that is, of the American tax law of 1986 eliminating the deductibility of the market value of donated art objects. Rather, it appears the function of a more profound shift in the very context in which the museum operates—a context whose corporate nature is made specific not only by the major sources of funding for museum activities but also, closer to home, by the makeup of its boards of trustees.[25]

Krauss traces the process by which the bonds issued by the Guggenheim to fund their expansion were ultimately leveraged by the collection.[26] In effect placing what was entrusted to them for safekeeping at a risk of falling into private hands, this move directly violated the public trust for the sake of what Marcia Tucker termed the: “mindless expansion in American museums.”[27] Indeed, why would growth, the logic of the so-called free market, even be an ideal for museums? Doesn’t sustainability seem more appropriate? The automatic adoption of the model of growth was part and parcel of the overall atmosphere of deregulation, as Philip Weiss wrote: “To a great extent the museum community’s crisis results from the free-market spirit of the 1980s. The notion of the museum as a guardian of the public patrimony has given way to the notion of a museum as a corporate entity with a highly marketable inventory and the desire for growth.”[28]

Initially, other museum directors criticized the overall direction the Guggenheim was taking.[29]Yet soon thereafter the MOMA and the Metropolitan began emulating some of what their directors initially criticized, mounting what are termed “fluff” exhibitions—populist and easily funded. In an article named after a remark made by then director of the Metropolitan Museum, Philippe de Montebello: “A museum is not a business. It is run in a businesslike fashion,” Andrea Fraser observed the extent to which this structural shift has further taken over every aspect of the museum:

The continuing rise in corporate sponsorship and decline in public spending is only a small part of this trend. Much more striking are the changes in the structure, organization, and orientation of institutions themselves, as well as within art as a professional field.[30]

In our contemporary situation the blatant conflicts of interest are so extreme such that the authority of our institutions of public trust become questionable. As Isabel Graw writes:

This kind of mix-up occurs, for example, when museum trustees try to influence the institution’s acquisition policy in such a way as to enhance the perceived value of works they themselves own. Another example is the now-pervasive figure of the “collector-dealer,” who tends to claim the additional function of a curator or publicist. He collects and deals in art, speculating on the appreciation of his purchases, which he buys at attractive prices, possibly splitting resulting resale profits with the gallerist. Practices that in other fields would be denounced as criminal or insider-trading are commonplace in the art market.[31]

The corporatization of museums ran parallel to an unprecedented growth of the art market, which I hypothesize is the direct result of the establishment and promotion of the art-advisory departments by major banks and auction houses.[32] The art-advisory department at Citibank, in association with Sotheby Parke Bernet, was modeled after a program developed by the British Rail Pension Fund, which ceased its operation because of the clear conflict of interest created when specialist advice came from the same source as the sale. As Lee Rosenbaum writes: “[l]ike the British Rail Program, Citibank’s program is rife with conflict of interest and will not necessarily benefit the people is purports to serve.”[33] In the U.S. the art advisory service was devised primarily by Jeffrey Deitch and according to him aimed to bring “stability and liquidity to the art market.”[34] Liquidity and its aftermath were indeed introduced, but stability not. Following the 1970s recession there was a perceived notion of art as boom/bust resistant and thus more stable than other investment vehicles, but this was partially refuted in the 1990s when art prices fluctuated dramatically. The selective elite services, expanded later to other banks and auction houses, provided uninitiated investors with information and assistance with art collecting, artificially growing the market and creating inflation of prices.[35] The services expanded internationally, targeting and exploiting open markets such as Japan during its real-estate boom.[36] In effect, the status of the art object had been reformulated as asset, with mortgage-type deals offered by banks and auction houses.[37] The influx of new collectors, a globally expanding market, and the new system, drove prices to unprecedented peaks, followed by dramatic fluctuation.[38] Art turned into big business, pushing museums out of the market. Unable to purchase art at bubble prices dependency on collector gifting increased. The consequential current reign of the philanthropist effect is a throwback to the pre-professional condition of the late 19^th century.

Today, where there is miniscule governmental support of the arts, in the U.S. cultural institutions are so bound to private interests that the prevailing sense is that there exists no way out.[39] In 2006 the threat on fractional giving evoked a massive outcry from museums fearing the loss of their major acquisition avenue.[40] Letter-writing campaigns were effective, and the law changed in part in 2008. It seems that this is the extent to which museum professionals can have a say in the system, begging the government to retain tax-deductions that grants advantages to wealthy individuals and is thus glaringly unequal.[41] This creates a paradoxical situation where in this late age museums are still servicing class discrimination. Of course, fighting partial giving would be detrimental to museums within the existing system, demonstrating the powerlessness of these institutions to support any kind of broader structural change, and underscoring how they are confined to serve the existing socio-economic order.

“By conviction Alone:” Marcia Tucker’s New Museum, the Self-Regulating Institution

Yet the sense of helplessness in regards to bettering the system is false. One feasible project that worked against the grain took place simultaneously with the corporatizing of museums and at the same time when art advisory boards were artificially expanding the commerce in art. There exists a concrete model worth revisiting and foregrounding as an option. From 1977 to 1998 Marcia Tucker theorized and implemented an unprecedented experimental approach to exhibiting contemporary art, and brought the museum and its program to international prominence. Her decision to open yet another museum in an already culturally rich city aimed to fill a gap created by the limited attention paid to the work of living artists, as well as address discrimination of women and minorities by existing New York institutions. Tucker based her administrative structure on an academic rather than a corporate system, implementing peer-reviewed selection processes and committee-based decision making. Importantly, many of the boards and committees consisted of artists and took diversity as its primary criteria. An experimental model of a rotating, rather than a permanent collection, was in constant consideration. Tucker developed a working model for a contemporary museum, persuading her trustees and donors to allow the museum its intellectual freedom, effectively mediating between the radical ideas of artists and scholars and the mainstream reality of the museum as an institution. Unfortunately, it has been all but displaced since her departure from the museum in 1998, its feasibility as a system has not been considered in the planning, building, or expansion, of a host of recent contemporary museums (including the New Museum itself), all of which follow corporate models and seem to address first and foremost the concerns of private and corporate donors.[42] The New Museum was far from perfect during Tucker’s tenure, riddled with internal conflicts and multiple crises. Yet as experimental and difficult to sustain as it was, it nevertheless offers the best case study for thinking and rethinking the administrative structure, the program and their inter-connectedness in the American museum dedicated to contemporary art.

In the museum’s nonprofit proposal Tucker outlined the mission and structure of the museum:

It will focus on work which does not have sufficient outlet in the present museum or gallery structure of New York, and/or work which is not being presented within a critical and scholarly context. […] It is intended as a forum for the kind of visual and verbal exchange between artists and the public that existed in the 1920’s and 1930’s when the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Studio Club were first formed.

The New Museum’s projected scope would cover the area between the small, non-historically oriented “alternate spaces” which deal with the work of younger and lesser known artists, and the larger, bureaucratically top-heavy museums. […] Establishment of a permanent collection, while not an immediate priority, is intended to provide an extension of the historical framework offered by critical essays and documentation.[43]

The description of the planned exhibition program also discussed: large solo exhibitions for artists whose work has not been shown in depth in NY; group exhibitions covering themes in contemporary art which have not yet been examined in depth; a regional exchange program; circulating NY artists around the U.S. and visa versa; small solo shows for artists with no NY representation; and community access exhibitions of modest scale, showcasing visual material which is not generally considered to be within the aesthetic mainstream. The museum intended to collect slides of exhibitions as scholarly materials, and expressed a strong commitment to forming a depository of scholarly resources that could also support artists and collectors interested in artists working outside the gallery system. The intent was to reach as large audience as possible through multiple programs that would cross audience, as well as offering free admission.

“I know how ambitious the project is, and how impossible it must seem to those who do not feel that a museum can be created by conviction alone. I believe otherwise. I am convinced that the best and the most difficult art of our time is essential to human development.”[44] Passion, and the tenacity to sustain it, drove Tucker to continue and fight for what she believed was right. Her letters, minutes from boards meetings, and lectures, all show her working relentlessly to persuade her trustees rather than allowing them to dictate content. Describing her administrative and programming vision as an “egalitarian mode,” Tucker was nevertheless not anti-corporate by any means, for she understood very well the realities within which she was operating. Instead, her actions reveal a persistent attempt to change the ways in which the relation of corporations to museums was established, and to convince corporate entities and private donors that it is ultimately in their best interest to allow museums to function through a cultural and not a free-market logic. Talking to a group of corporate collectors in Toronto in 1985 Tucker emphasized that: “we show work, ideally, which is experimental, difficult, challenging, intellectually provocative.”[45] Through the structure and style of her presentation Tucker issued a gentle yet forceful criticism of the relation of corporations and museums, culminating a list of negative trends with:

6. Museums only doing funded shows.

7. Museums only planning shows, which can be funded.

8. Museums doing post-opening receptions at discos like the palladium.

9. The Palladium doing shows that museums should be doing.

And about three dozen other examples of expediency, conflict of interest, exploitation, showmanship, and decadence. Sort of a fall of the Roman Empire scenario…[46]

Instead Tucker offered examples of collaborative or performative practices and those that are not market-driven or even based in the art-world, also giving concrete examples for how corporations could support these modes of art-making and contribute to art and education without exercising direct or coercive control. She detailed how and why content control would in fact prevent museums from supporting practices most likely to retrospectively become significant. As the very essence of contemporary art lies in the unknown and not in what is already known or expected, museums should be given the room to facilitate what is radical, or at that point may seem radical.

In her notes for a talk entitled “The New Museum and its Programs,” Tucker discussed bringing to the New Museum various exhibitions that subverted her own taste, that were incredibly difficult for the trustees, or that deliberately juxtaposed multiple points of view on truth and history—all of which caused her: “a lot of problems with trustees, who remember ‘the good old days’, i.e., the days when the value of art had to do with its appearance.”[47] Nevertheless, her ability to communicate to her board that a moment’s present will be the future’s past gained her the freedom to program controversial materials, some of which of course became important in retrospect. Leading trustees to allow for artistic speech with which they disagreed, Tucker facilitated a democratic structure. Giving the Hans Haacke Retrospective as an example, she explained how: “the Museum was not a political platform in and of itself, but […] many artists were making art which was socially committed.”[48] This way of thinking and her ability to “sell” political art to a board of trustees was key to her vision.

In a letter to her board in 1993 Tucker emphasized how the relation of program and structure was facilitated through participatory management, various kinds of advisory groups, and housing a semi-permanent collection. [49] She discussed the museum’s aspiration to be multicultural and multi racial not only in exhibitions, but also in staff and governance on all levels, describing how the radicalism of the late 70s and early 80s has by then been accepted and emulated by institutions. Detailing the programming focus on specific socio-political concerns; on interdisciplinary work that collapses media divisions; on the underrated work of women and minority artists; the critical exploration of popular culture; and the intersection art and life, Tucker underscored that the museum aimed to create a lab organization where curators could experiment. This was achieved by inviting independent curators to create exhibitions un-supervised, co-curating with other institutions, paying honoraria to artist, commissioning major work, and placing a strong emphasis on education by incorporating viewer response into exhibitions as well as training on site staff to interact with the public. Citing the publications and grants as evidence of the museum’s strong commitment to scholarship, she summarized how highly regarded it has come to be as a model of radical pedagogy. Nevertheless, she mentions accessibility of the materials as one of the challenges to the museum. Pointing to how artwork today is done not only for the sake of aesthetics but within a social context, she mentions how challenging it is in terms of display and the flexibility required in order to exhibit it. Aware of the shortcomings of her idealistic structure, Tucker also responded to the board’s expressed concern regarding the reduction of the original ambitions plans, cut down due to budget and staff shortage. She explained that, sixteen years after the opening, people are no longer willing to work for low wages or for free for the sake of a cause.

Tucker worked relentlessly to convince publics about her way of thinking. In a lecture entitled “The Fight for the Right to be Wrong: Museums and the ‘Cutting Edge,’” delivered at the Aspen Design Conference in 1988, she framed the historical structure of museums as institutions frozen in time, proceeding to elaborate upon recent changes, while highlighting the paradox of contemporary art museums that institutionalize the present.[50] Identifying that the restructuring of institutions was gradually following the corporate model, she contrasted the corporate model’s constant aim for success with the idea that contemporary art museums should be allowed to fail. Her humorous example of how Hilton Kramer’s bad reviews of her work have helped her built a successful career gave realistic traction to her argument. She then continued to emphasize why it is so important to constantly question the concept of cutting edge, as otherwise it can so easily be co-opted as a commodity, fashion, or style of the new.

In “The Ten Most Pressing Issues for Contemporary Art Museums Today, and Some Uncommon Solutions,” delivered at the MOCA in 1988, Tucker discussed Museum Ethics stating that: “[…] museums today are clearly not simply motivated by pure scholarship (if there even were such a thing). All of us are struggling competitively for funds (and some for survival), and we’re differentiated only by the extent to which we understand our complicity in the process.”[51] This sober proclamation serves as a reminder that running a museum based on scholarship, and governed by an intentionally and actively democratic structure, is in no way impossible or utopian.

Perhaps for larger museums a cultural change in values seems out of bounds, but for the medium-sized contemporary art museum it is possible to imagine that a sustainable ethical structure and an emphasis on scholarship are not impossible. Under Marcia Tucker the New Museum gained momentum as one of the world’s most important centers of contemporary art. Following Tucker’s track record I assert that in order to remain relevant as a museum of contemporary art it cannot be controlled by corporate interests, for the logic of business is always too conservative to be able to facilitate what art may need for its future. While historically the establishment of U.S. museums has always been by the wealth of private money, those that were museums of contemporary art at their time of inception have not managed to sustain their viability as such, and it is precisely into this gap that the New Museum had stepped in 1977.

Conclusion

Above and beyond Tucker’s model respected the intelligence of her audience as well as that of corporate entities.[52] Confusing populism and accessibility, the logic of the corporate model attempts to make everything easy rather than consider the possibility of education seems condescending in contrast. Deitch’s invocation of Andy Warhol neglects to distinguish between popular culture, that can be subversive and political, and mass appeal, which is closer to entertainment and its focus on attendance as rating symptomatic. Art as celebrity culture fosters identification rather than critical distance and foregrounds experience over thinking. This content is echoed in the administrative structure, where dominant figures lead according to what they think is right—after all, they can always “prove” their success by showing attendance numbers. As such, debate and dialogue are rendered moot, denying museums of their societal role as arenas for scholarly experimentation and the development of consciousness.

Museums should be democratic, not autocratic, using peer-review and committee based systems to assure good practices and the sustainability of the symbolic value of their collections. Drawing from centuries of improvement as well as from recent scholarship that has refined its positions through endless debate, professional associations have developed guidelines, which in the U.S. today are simply not followed. Keeping with the guidelines of regulatory bodies not only contributes to their accumulative knowledge, but also has a proven track record for better chances of success. No system is perfect, nor can it make guarantees, but by facilitating broader perspectives it is most likely to have a healthier outcome. For example, observing diversity guidelines such as those outlined by the AAM, is more likely to yield a well-rounded program that will not in retrospect disappear into the sea of mediocrity. Democracy is not just an umbrella under which things happen, and it is the role of its institutions to practice it constantly in order to uphold it. What kind of culture are we facilitating if decisions about cultural heritage are made behind closed doors (as do those about deaccessioning) or for the direct benefit of an amateur elite? We have historically surpassed this structure, and should fight to resist this retrograde trend.

The recent shift to the autocratic museum is potentially unsustainable, as we may very well see a cultural shift that will render their criteria extraneous. With the recent budget crisis and its aftermath, the growing public mistrust of banks and corporations, and the invigoration of the left, it is possible to imagine a cultural shift that will devalue the spectacular and the populist, where much of the overpriced contemporary art will eventually take an unrecoverable dip. What would it take for curators, critics, scholars and intellectuals, to devise ways to work within and in between the system to affect such a change? Can we at least encourage self-regulation amongst ourselves?

The seed is still there. Some of the corporate museums harbor positive elements within them. At the (new) New Museum, projects such as Museum as Hub—a collaboration between five international organizations focused on intellectual exchange—has been facilitating sophisticated and timely forums.[53] As for the L.A. MOCA time will tell, for some of the museum’s future plans still hold scholarly remnants from the past.

This article is written in hopes that not only will museum directors and personnel push to rethink their institutions considering Tucker’s model, but that they will also encourage their patrons to direct their energies towards self-education and leave decision making processes to professionals. As for the professionals, again, they too should practice a greater degree of self-regulation.

Interior view of La Cédille qui Sourit, ca. 1968. Photo © Jacques Strauch and Michou Strauch-Barelli. Courtesy Estate of Robert Filliou and Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris.

La cédille qui ne finit pas: Robert Filliou, George Brecht, and Fluxus in Villefranche (deregulation version)

Natilee Harren

In the summer of 1965, George Brecht and Robert Filliou, with the support of their partners Donna and Marianne, opened a shop at 12 rue de May in Villefranche-sur-Mer, a seaside village just east of Nice, France. The space, 36 meters square, with a canary yellow awning and chalkboard sign in the window, was called La Cédille Qui Sourit, or “The Cedilla That Smiles.” Conceived first as an English bookshop “under the sign of humor,” it was actually, as Filliou has recounted, “a sort of workshop and of shop, of nonshop would we say now, for we were never commercially registered, and the Cédille was always shut, opening only upon request of visitors to our homes.”[1]

The artists, both associated with the international, neo-avant-garde Fluxus collective, called their shop a “Center of Permanent Creation,” for they were continually producing research, letters, jokes, puzzles, games, recipes, poems, drawings, and events. Yet there were few unannounced visitors to the Cédille, or at least ones who were successful in visiting, since the shop did not have a telephone and Brecht and Filliou seemed not to spend much time there. The artists presided more often at one of the nearby cafés, devising more of the visual gags they called “One Minute Scenarios,” “dis-inventing” objects, adding to their “Anthology of Misunderstandings,” or talking with their friends Alfred the bricklayer, Antoine the fisherman, Fernand the plumber, or anyone else who happened to drop by. [2]

The Cédille carried materials from a variety of artists associated with Fluxus, including books from Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press as well as interactive multiples published by Daniel Spoerri’s MAT Editions and the Fluxus imprint, organized by George Maciunas.[3] However, none of Brecht and Filliou’s works initiated there seemed to come to fruition; or, their material structure emphasized the possibility of endless reconfiguration. The Cédille’s haphazard, almost anti-retail display made its wares indistinguishable from the surrounding works-in-progress, an appropriate set-up for the sale of editions whose openness to change and alteration belonged to a nonconventional trajectory of artistic objecthood indebted to the readymades of Duchamp and the indeterminate compositions of John Cage. More like an atelier than white cube gallery, the Cédille was an extrapolation of the Fluxus model of the artwork-in-flux into an artist-run economy of production, distribution, and exchange that would, to borrow language from Maciunas’s 1963 manifesto, “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art.”

Given recent economic and political events, I am now encouraged to think of the transformations on the art object enacted by various Fluxus practices in terms of a deregulation of the art object, for that very term first came into use in the early 1960s in relation to emerging federal policy changes to the rail and truck transportation industries. These historical facts seem fitting, for what I am about to narrate is a story of the deregulation not only of the art object but also of its movement through certain art networks, motivated by artists’ frustration and disgust at networks’ paradoxical tendency to consolidate power.

The Cédille was a shop that kept no regular hours and had no tidy, reliable stock of merchandise. Still, it subsisted until 1968, when in March, Brecht and Filliou realized they could no longer afford to pay rent. By October, they had defaulted on a contract that should have carried the project into 1974. And thus we must admit that the Cédille, if indeed it was meant to function as a store, failed as a commercial venture.[4]

Yet each of the ways in which Brecht and Filliou’s project supposedly “failed” was deliberate. The Cédille playfully critiqued the expanded commodification and capitalization of art in the 1960s, which coincided with the economic boom of the immediate postwar decades. The demands of a growing collector base had instigated the invention and promotion of multiples, a new art product that adopted the forms, materials and techniques of mass production and distribution. In 1964 and ’65, multiples began to be promoted heavily through exhibitions like The American Supermarket at Bianchini Gallery and newly founded ventures like Mass Art, Inc. and Marian Goodman’s Multiples, Inc., which specialized in the production and sale of artist editions that catered to the expanding market for Pop art.[5]

Meanwhile, Brecht and Filliou, disillusioned by their experiences working with commercial galleries in New York and Paris, willfully abandoned the creative and economic centers of the art world for provincial Villefranche, where they continued to develop formats of a tenuous and transmutable materiality and object status, a strategy that was being advanced across the scene of Fluxus. Following the first European concert tour between September 1962 and summer 1963, Fluxus activity had become concentrated in New York around Maciunas and his fervent organizational efforts but retained, in ideal if not in reality, shifting international outposts such as Willem de Ridder’s “European Mail-Order Warehouse” in Amsterdam, Ben Vautier’s storefront in Nice, and Brecht and Filliou’s shop in Villefrance. The Cédille was not antipodal to Fluxus; rather, it advanced the Fluxus project in ways that exceeded Maciunas’s initial conceptual and productive frameworks.

If Fluxus artists endeavored to propose an alternative to the high-market art commodity along with its attendant notions of uniqueness, material integrity, and cultural and monetary value, then the Cédille represents a key moment within this project given its array of activities designed for this very task. Brecht and Filliou’s venture was not simply a flippant dropping-out from an art system with which they had become disillusioned; it was a concerted effort to construct other models for the art object and its distribution, a move with important ramifications for artistic labor. Brecht and Filliou, already dropouts from the fields of chemistry and economics, pursued anti-instrumental non-work leading to non-objects, which were sometimes available and sometimes not through their non-shop. Their goals were achieved largely through gestures that—to adopt Hannah Arendt’s epistemological categories, to which we will later return—aimed at escaping work and labor, tending rather toward action. For in Arendt’s schema, it is the artwork that as an object most closely resembles action in the political sense. The artwork is an object that exists beyond work, beyond instrumentalized production oriented around the creation of useful things. It was the artwork’s tendency—or in the operative sense, art work or labor—toward political action that Brecht and Filliou pursued through their activities at the Cédille. Their efforts to cultivate an artistic practice as near as possible to the realm of action threatened to depart from the realm of work altogether and, subsequently, that of the art object too, threatening the visibility of their practice.

The Cédille’s founding principles were perhaps best emblematized by its curious name. In the French language, a cédille, or cedilla, is the hook-like orthographic sign that attaches to the bottom of a c in order to transform its phonetic value to that of an s. The cedilla is thus a transformational grapheme, emerging onto the scene of language to cause a subtle but meaningful alteration. This curlicue form figures inconspicuously but centrally in perhaps the only lucrative object-centric activity Brecht and Filliou undertook at the Cédille: the suspense poems. Filliou, who identified foremost as a poet, invented the format in Paris in 1961 under the title “Study in dispatching poems at low speed,” and potential subscribers were identified with the aid of Daniel Spoerri’s address book. [6]

The works were referred to also as “object-poems” in reference to surrealist works that played with material and symbolic relations between language and objects. Notions of suspense were evoked in the poems’ materiality and mode of circulation, for the works were in fact editioned assemblages that subscribers would receive one piece at a time by mail, in a purposeful disruption of the typically instant gratification of the purchase. Each verse-object was typically a wooden support bearing a small object and text label, its top and bottom equipped with metal hooks and eyes allowing successive verses to be suspended below.

Take, for instance, a model object-poem created by Filliou, whose six components successively read: “the mussel is alone / the egg is alone / the snail is alone / the dog is alone / the cactus is alone / end of poem: the man is alone.”[7]

The phrases are labels for a series of found objects concluded by the image of a man’s face, which underscores the ambivalence between the melancholic solitariness of the individual parts and their anticipation of a connection to come. Besides containing the phrase “fin du poème,” the poems were end-marked by the final piece’s lack of connecting apparatus, but since they were designed to hang from an uppermost catch, there was always the suggestion that they could be added onto from above, a sense confirmed by the seemingly random accumulation of objects to which any number of others might be added. The suspense poem is a signifying chain through which meaning oscillates, unwilling to settle—is suspended, we should say—a phenomenon further emphasized by its openness to rearrangement. This logic would suggest that the surface from which it hangs is part of the work too and, therefore, that what we see here is merely the concluding verse to a visual poetry extending to the space around it, and beyond. Meaning continues to unravel. If the surrealist object-poem’s equivalent treatment of language and objects indicated an expansive, associative model of thought wherein the adjacency of words and things would form an expanded system of signification, Brecht and Filliou enlarged this purview yet further to address the field of reception, encouraging the viewer to identify in the immediate environment connections between ever more disparate things. The poems thus effect a kind of semiotic deregulation, following upon that of the Fluxbox, in which everyday objects are released from their conventional meaning and use-value by being set into relation with other, seemingly unlike things.

Filliou’s biographer Pierre Tilman has remarked upon another poignant resonance for the cedilla other than the hooks of the suspense poems and the curl of a smile: “They resemble question marks,” he writes, “and question marks upside-down resemble cedillas.” [8] The interrogative, common to the artists’ favored discursive forms of jokes, puzzles, and misunderstandings and visually resembling a hook or an extended hand, creates an opportunity—a demand, even—for connection.[9] This idea was signified on the address stamp designed by Brecht that served as the Cédille’s logo. Below the shop’s address, replacing the typical dadaist manicule favored by Maciunas, is a graphic of two clasped hands, an image reiterated in Brecht’s favored closing salutation in correspondence at the time: “Handshakes, George.”

Experiments with the cedilla as a morphological trope, especially by Filliou, reveal additional resonances. Filliou’s Poème invalide (or Disabled poem), published in the Belgian literary journal Phantomas during the months leading up to the Cédille’s opening, includes an image of a body composed of three numbered blocks with cedilla-like appendages. The image might not read as a body at all if not complemented by a text in the form of a list of things which, as the French manquer richly evokes, the writer both lacks and feels a longing for: a hope, an idea, a meal, a shoe, a love, a home, etc. The catalog of loss is punctuated by the melancholic refrain, “it’s YOU that I miss.” Accompanying the poem is an altered photograph of a man on a bicycle, whose arms and left leg have been severed from his body. The missing limbs appear on the facing page, suspended ridiculously in mid-air. This man who lacks gets fulfilled, if only in delayed fashion. A turn of the page confronts the reader with the geometricized figure, under which the poem arrives at its conclusion:

I’m missing a beginning

I’m missing a middle

I’m missing an end

An end?

End of poem:

I THINK ONLY OF YOU WHO IS WHAT I MISS

The cedillas of the abstract figure now clearly transform into legs and arms, connectors or receptors that reach for the toi called for in the poem. The cedilla-body of the cedilla-man is defined by what it lacks, what it misses, and that for which it waits: a hope, an idea, a meal, a shoe, a love, a home, you.

In a preliminary sketch that may have been Filliou’s first articulation of Poème invalide, we witness the limbs of a figure transform from hermetic protuberances into cedillas, one by one. The image suggests a fully relational model of subjectivity that, while individual, desires to be fulfilled or made able by connecting to others. It was a model lived by the artist himself, who depended for his survival upon the kindness and generosity of friends, who simply reflected the kindness and generosity of their friend Robert back to him. Well aware that this had become his habitual approach to working and living, he remarked: “The real talent I have is for friendship. Ninety-nine percent of my work is not visible.” [10]

And so connectivity, generosity, and friendship became the operative ethic of the Cédille too. In July 1967 Brecht and Filliou cobbled together what extra money they had in order to purchase a ticket for the artist Joe Jones to travel from New York to Villefranche, where he would join Brecht and Filliou, Donna and Marianne, and Takako Saito for the rest of the summer. Jones responded with a touching dadaesque diagram of his transit, imagined as a series of vectors linked and energized by a “love connector” that would facilitate the passage of a wilted flower into the company of five companions, among whom it could blossom again.

That gift was not all. For Christmas 1966, Brecht and Filliou invited artists to contribute to the shop’s inventory of “objects that could be given to friends as gifts, not in the form of small versions of their personal works, but rather things that would be more difficult to present by conventional means.” [11] “It is very difficult to offer these gifts,” Filliou admitted, “various factors coming into account, but we would like…to convince our fellow artists that such exchanges are possible. In order to accomplish this it would be enough for each of us to ‘sacrifice’ one of our works, in order to reduce the purchase price. That is possible and we hope very much to arrive at such a result.” [12]

The twenty-nine participants included Alison Knowles, Ben Vautier, Emmett Williams, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri, Arman, Jean-Jacques Lebel, François Dufrêne, Mimmo Rotella, and Jacques Villeglé, who offered items such as portable holes, linen sacks, hieroglyphs, pudding and neckties, hardly objects for aesthetic glorification—at times, hardly even objects. Brecht and Filliou saw the gift as an object category capable of evading not only capitalist speculation but also the conventional modes of display that facilitate the translation of cultural value into pure exchange value. Moreover, to create an artwork-as-gift would set off a chain of giving that is potentially endless, like the connective hooks of the suspense poems or the cedilla-body whose cupped hands signify a gesture not only of entreaty but of offering as well.[13]

To reconceive the artwork as a gift rather than simply as a commodity (although, of course, the two categories are not mutually exclusive) instigated a deregulation of value similar to the semiotic deregulation of the suspense poems, inasmuch as the purchase of one of these works marked only the first of countless future exchanges to be made. Rather than a precious object to be purchased and possessed in finality, the artwork imagined according to the logic of the gift would assume the gifting gesture’s quality of infinite extension; the work’s material form thus becomes incidental in relation to its greater significance as the momentary proxy of a gesture to be reciprocated evermore.

Such schemes were ultimately not enough to keep the Cédille afloat, but for a time Brecht and Filliou seemed successful in establishing a provisional, non-instrumental “poetic economy,” as Filliou would call it, to counter the art market’s “economics of prostitution,” which the artists saw as “wholly dependent upon publicity, self-advertising and door-to-door salesmanship” and representative of a kind of “pretention, aggressiveness, arrivisme” carried over from the bourgeois art culture of the 19^th century.[14]

The artists preferred to meditate on failure and its relationship to creativity and artistic production. They enthusiastically revived the tradition of the “café-genius,” the model of the artist who sits about all day in the public forum of the café, inventing ideas but realizing few or none of them. [15] Filliou glorified the café-genius in a manifesto titled “Poetical Economy: Towards a New Standard of Value”:

People used to make fun of wild, picturesque, tortured artists sounding off in drinking places, and leaving their work unattended. Some still do. They don’t know yet that all of us now are sorts of café-geniuses. Not only do we have more ideas than possibilities of realizing them…But many of us don’t even try any more. Better, they think, to make my life consistent with my ideals, than to trade them up for some money and illusory fame. So it is high time to rehabilitate the Génies de Café.[16]

Filliou’s prescient embrace of “idea art” already recognized the impossibility of an artistic creation that could evade the fetish economy of art. So better not to create anything at all. Better to sit in the café and chat with Alfred, Antoine, Fernand, or whoever else happened to drop by. The café-genius rejected not only the enduring ideal of the artist’s solitary studio practice but also the production models of pop and minimalism, in which the artist would be either a socialite/promoter/producer or an industrial/technological worker.[17] Filliou, trained as an economist, could recognize that these innovations in artistic production were not liberating paradigm shifts but merely a next step in the late capitalist economy’s commodification and capitalization of creative labor. For Fluxus artists in New York, these developments were harder to ignore. In one of many dispatches to the Cédille, Robert Watts wrote, “The thing now is ‘primary structures’ a show of sculpture at the Jewish Museum—Morris, Judd…It all sort of looks like bad playground sculpture of the housing projects (not quite) but you should read the words and manifestos, just another hard sell. Maybe Kaprow is right—just go out in the woods and forget it.”[18]

Now, to understand an art that does not prioritize consummate objecthood and its attendant values, Hannah Arendt’s theory of the relation between labor, work, and action is helpful, for mapped against the additive and incomplete nature of the Cédille’s activities, it makes sense of the shop’s over-arching goal—to provide a counter-model to capitalist forms of artistic labor and exchange—and allows us to see the project’s ethical and political nature. In her 1958 text The Human Condition, Arendt discerns a tri-partite hierarchy of human activity characterized by labor, work, and action.[19] Labor maintains the necessities of existence; cyclical and eternal, it is strictly instrumental, and for this reason Arendt likens it to slavery. Work, also instrumentally motivated, concerns the fabrication of functional objects and structures, and thus it has a definitive end. The last and most valued form of activity for Arendt is Action, which occurs immaterially in the speech and interactions between multiplicities of individuals. As a counterpart to work, Action is world-creating in a non-material, cultural sense, and it is integral to Arendt’s understanding of the true experience of politics. She pays special attention to artworks, whose conventionally material nature (remember, she is writing in the late 1950s just before the object-critical practices of the early 1960s were to coalesce) would tie them to the category of work; yet more than any other kind of object they withstand the vicissitudes of use and time, and so they maintain “a closer relationship to politics than other objects, and their mode of production has a closer relationship to acting than to any other type of occupation.”[20] It is in this sense that artworks can be thought to engender a world outlasting the life span of any individual, able to communicate across great expanses of time and space.

Criticisms of the idealist, even anti-materialist nature of Arendt’s articulation of politics has not invalidated its relevance for aesthetics; rather, this quality has made it particularly useful for understanding ephemeral art forms.[21] For Brecht and Filliou’s objects, which were almost not objects, and their artistic work, which was almost not work, threatened to collapse the distinction between work and action. The suspense poems were made from found objects and bits from the hardware store. All that remains of the gifting project is an inventory list. Another initiative, the Non-School of Villefranche, survives only in the form of a letterhead bearing this motto: “Carefree exchange of information and experience / No student, no teacher / Perfect license, at times to talk, at times to listen.”[22] The lessons shared by its non-masters have vanished like spoken words dissipate into air and silence. In all the activities of their Center of Permanent Creation, the artists seemed systematically to refuse to advance beyond the phase of ideas and processes. To remain in the to-and-fro of process was to perpetuate the exhilaration of possibility as much as it was an allegiance to productive dysfunction, a courting of failure. At the price of losing their tangible worldliness, the activities in the brief life of the Cédille moved ever closer to the domain of true politics as envisioned by Arendt without, however, departing from the immanent here-and-now of the shop’s highly localized day-to-day existence.

Following the Cédille’s bankruptcy, Brecht moved to London and began to mount conceptual projects with the artist Anna Lowell, while the Fillious relocated with the support of Spoerri and Dieter Roth to Düsseldorf, where Robert worked in Roth’s studio and occasionally taught at the Kunstakademie. Yet even when the Cédille closed, it did not quite end; it rather dispersed as a new creation called La Fête Permanente, translated into English as “The Eternal Network.” To announce the Cédille’s closure, the artists sent out a poster whose text is strung together by ellipses: “There is always someone making a fortune, someone going…broke (us in particular)/La Cédille qui Sourit turns the page once more, as…La Fête est Permanente announces the next realization of The Eternal Network/manifestations, meanderings, meditations, microcosms, macrocosms, mixtures, meanings…”[23]

As a dominant punctuation, the ellipses signaled that the end of the Cédille was in fact not an end but rather the continuation of the artists’ energies in other projects. The announcement linked the Cédille to the next realization of the Eternal Network, a conceptual framework devised to connect the collective production of like-minded artists internationally. Like an ellipsis or a cedilla-esque hook, the Eternal Network operated according to a principle of addition, with each node signifying the possibility of continuation rather than the finitude signaled by the singular period at the end of a sentence. And despite the fact that Brecht and Filliou’s poster was the first announcement of the Eternal Network, the rhetoric of its language seemed to suggest not only that the Cédille was part of a larger structure that would proceed indefinitely into the future, but also that the shop was part of something that had always been. It was merely one instantiation, one point, of a poetic project onto which a proliferating, infinite network of activities could be added. This (in)conclusion of the Cédille project was akin to Arendt’s idea that, whereas the meaning of a material thing is fundamentally contained within that thing, “the meaning of an activity can exist only as long as the activity continues.”[24] The world of action is “a world that never comes to an end and that—although spun of the most ephemeral stuff, of fleeting words and quickly forgotten deeds—is of such incredible enduring tenacity that…it can outlive by centuries the loss of a palpable manufactured world.”[25] The inauguration of The Eternal Network was Brecht and Filliou’s final effort to extend the boundaries and life of the Cédille despite the very real limits and restrictions in the face of which, it must be admitted, the shop ultimately failed in its goals.

In the ensuing years, Filliou would continue to develop a series of interlocking theories of alternative economics, while Brecht would continue to devise arrangements of objects that called attention to subtle perceptual shifts in everyday life. For all this, the Eternal Network functioned as a conceptual underpinning, automatically uniting these diverse activities with those of sympathetic artists without, however, neutralizing their differences. Brecht communicated this attitude in a letter to Maciunas wherein he ascribes the same vision to Fluxus: “GLOBAL ASPECT: Fluxus seems to me a situational…phenomenon, a network of active points all equidistant from the center. These points can proliferate, new points arise, at any place on the earth where there is life.”[26] Brecht seems to suggest that Fluxus could be a code name for the Eternal Network, or vice versa—that the logic of Fluxus was that of a network, the whole of which could be activated by anyone from anywhere. If the Fluxus editions coming out of Maciunas’s New York workshop could only perform, over and over again, a critical drama of disappointment and futility, the Eternal Network, with its total deregulation of collective artistic practice, offered perhaps a more viable artistic-political model.

Now, consider for a moment the present. There have been mounting arguments that the Internet and Internet art are the inheritors of Fluxus and of projects like the Eternal Network. To counter such claims, I would point out that the Internet and the social media tools that we use to engage with it are transforming digital space into a network that is less and less democratic and horizontal (if it ever was), and more and more algorythmic, organized by hidden abstract codes that guide us into segregated ideological cul-de-sacs—filter bubbles, they have been called.[27] It was such consolidation of knowledge and power that Fluxus activities sought to contravene. The deregulation of the art object from an autographic, unique, precious masterwork of material integrity coincided by the late 1960s with the establishment of a counter-network and counter-economy against not only the commercial and hierarchical aspects of the art economy but also efforts led by Maciunas himself to copyright and regulate Fluxus production for the sake of its revolutionary collective program. What has become apparent to me, in light of the American Fall of 2011 and the ongoing movement to occupy our financial and political centers, is that for Brecht and Filliou a strategy of occupation was simply not enough—it would have to be paired with a fleeing to the periphery, where the establishment of a completely alternative artistic culture still seemed possible.

And yet—to return to the object of our concern—the utopian desire to forgo material execution for the sake of furthering an artistic program committed to the to-and-fro of exchange and communication could not be fully achieved by Brecht and Filliou, for a critique of the fetishization of objects could not but be made through precise manipulations of material forms. The underlying tension animating the Cédille was thus the artists’ effort to occupy the putative opposition between material and immaterial, work and non-work (or leisure or play). This would explain their occasional participation, from afar, in mainstream art networks: the temporary staging of the gifting project at Galerie Ranson in Paris in winter 1966-67, for instance, or the postmortem resurrection of the Cédille at the Stadtisches Museum Mönchengladbach, Germany, in 1969, at the request of curator Johannes Cladders. Such a tension parallels the one Arendt sensed between art and politics. To operate in the register of politics, Brecht and Filliou would not have needed to make anything at all, and yet this would not have been a proper way to critique mimetically the instrumentalization and institutionalization of art or to propose an alternative economic and aesthetic model for it.

Ultimately, it must be admitted that the Cédille exceeded the Arendtian schema, throwing up a series of questions in its wake: Does situating one’s work in the dynamic to-and-fro of process inevitably lead to a form of incessant artistic labor, a kind of slavery to an ideal? Doesn’t the logic of the Cédille detailed here—the logic of unceasing addition and non-finitude, of infinite expansion and growth—mirror perhaps too closely the logic of the capitalist economy of prostitution? Jones’s vision of the Cédille activating so many “love connectors” points us to the initiative’s crucial yet tenuous difference. Initiated as a utopian gesture of disavowal, the Cédille embodied a set of irresolvable contradictions that ensured its temporariness. Only the questions it raised remain, promising nothing but to remain unresolved. And so it is that the Cédille proposes in the final instance only a series of productive questions. But then again, a cedilla is also a question mark, inverted.

Short Circuits: Finance, Feedback and Culture

Benedict Seymour

‘There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.’ So said John Cage in his 1958 lecture, ‘Experimental Music’. This article argues that the aesthetic or cultural transformation of absence into presence, the revelation, by subtraction, of new raw materials or free inputs, bears a relation to the logic of accumulation in an era of financialised capitalist self-cannibalisation. What Cage valorised in the aesthetic sphere, developing concepts of feedback and self-regulation formulated in cybernetics, anticipated the innovations of modern finance and the production – by subtraction – of empty/full spaces of accumulation.
The term ‘feedback’ originates from the inter-disciplinary science of cybernetics. Cybernetics is concerned with regulation within closed systems. It looks for and exploits circular causal relationships, ‘feedback’, within these systems. Negative feedback is a process in which action and its effects are fed back to the actor in order to better coordinate aim and result. The loop proceeds from action (e.g. firing a machine gun at an enemy plane in order to shoot it down), to sensing (how is the target affected?), to comparison with the desired goal (has the plane been shot down?), to action (shoot again, a degree to the right), and so on. The circle of action, monitoring, correction and further action, integrates error in order to regulate and improve performance. Incorporating indeterminacy and recursive logic enables an automation and expansion of control. On the other hand, as we will see, this virtuous circle of negative feedback can also invert into its opposite. ‘Positive feedback’, from the perspective of control, is not positive at all, but represents a spiralling disorder or perturbation of the system. A vicious circle.

It is no accident that the circular causality of the feedback loop resembles the cycle of capital accumulation described by Marx (Money – Commodity – more Money). Information feedback has played an increasingly important role in the larger loop of capital accumulation for decades, if not centuries. The cybernetic revolution simply radicalises solutions to capitalist crisis proposed by Ford, Taylor and Keynes, expanding the ambit of control by flattening the world into a single dimension of information. Tiqqun claim in their essay ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis’, that the internet has become a global cybernetic system, enabling capital to manipulate and monitor consumer preferences. Consumer behaviour, for example, is subject to the management of financial markets: ‘Each actor in capitalist valorization is a real-time back-up of quasi-permanent feedback loops.’

We may disagree that the information society has brought about a new form of value creation in which information is wealth. Nevertheless the rise of the information society certainly coincides with the installation everywhere of feedback loops which monitor and regulate consumption, production and distribution. Capital strains to reduce its overheads by outsourcing labour to consumers – witness the rise of social networking – and subjects all social processes to measurement and quantification. Through privatisation, marketisation and the destruction of earlier modes of welfare, society is subsumed under the commodity form. Like good students of cybernetics, New Labour set about installing forms of performance measurement and modification across the public sector, primarily in health and education, imposing value as a dominant metaphor on all areas of social reproduction. This indexed a need to generate growth, no doubt, to find substitutes for industrial production and to increase the pressure on workers of all kinds. The deepening penetration of informational feedback loops contributes to an extension of the working day and a breakdown of limits to exploitation. The ‘efficiency’ of this process was predicated on another order of feedback, however: the continued rise of the UK as a global centre for the creation and retail of fictitious capital. The production of a specific form of ‘information’, credit and debt, is crucial. The UK’s health and education sectors, not to mention the UK’s other ‘unproductive’ services, could only deliver a facsimile of ‘growth’ in relation to the City’s siphoning off of the global value product.

To understand the larger feedback loop in which the circuits of ‘information society’ function, then, we need to look at the feedback loops of finance capital. An increasingly large proportion of this information represents claims on non-existent value, i.e. credit and debt, as well as the plethora of financial instruments – derivatives, Collateralised Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps, etc. – that dominate the global finance market. In this process information does indeed become hegemonic – not as value, but as fictitious capital. This does not amount to an actual process of valorisation, merely the ever-increasing generation of claims on future, as yet non-existent (or no longer existent) value. In order for these claims on value to be made good, supported and sustained, an anterior process of valorisation and expropriation remains necessary. As in Marx’s day, there remains no substitute for the expenditure of human labour in the creation of value.

Fictitious capital comes to function as a kind of effective, but precarious, surrogate for value which both depends on and is undone by the financial feedback loops that constitute it. In David McNally’s excellent 2008 essay, ‘From Financial Crisis to World Slump’, he describes how the becoming-pervasive of value as the form of measurement of all social activity coincides precisely with its becoming tenuous and volatile as a measure of… value. Its absolute triumph is predicated on its increasing shakiness as a claim. McNally writes, ‘With the end of dollar-gold convertibility in 1971 and the move to floating exchange rates (rates that literally fluctuate all day each and every day according to values determined on world markets), currency values, especially for the dollar, became much more volatile. As a result, the formation of values at the world level became much more uncertain and less predictable.’

The growth of finance is predicated on an actual decommodification of (world) money. To put it another way, the commodification of everything else stems from the decommodification of the dollar as global reserve currency: ‘The measure of value property of money – the capacity of money to express the socially necessary (abstract) labor times inherent in commodities – was rendered highly unstable.’

The suspension of value as measure is, paradoxically but logically, expressed in a new over-accumulation of forms of measurement, beginning with those most influential forms of measure – the financial instruments called derivatives.

In essence, derivatives set out to measure and price risk. As McNally says, the increased uncertainty of value relations put an increased emphasis on risk assessment and monitoring for all capitalists, but especially those who, in a globalised market, have to deploy multiple currencies. These currencies themselves became more volatile because of the suspension of dollar-gold convertability. The basic loop of financialisation is thus the movement from the suspension of dollar-gold convertability to the increase in volatility of currencies to the proliferation of mechanisms (derivative contracts) for monitoring and insuring against these fluctuations. But a further cybernetic spiral immediately arises from the growth of derivatives as risk measure and hedge. Derivatives become themselves a source of risk. Because one can buy insurance against risks to assets one doesn’t actually own they can function instead as forms of financial speculation. For instance, a Credit Default Swap [CDS] against the risk of GM defaulting can be purchased even if one owns none of GM’s stocks or bonds. Speculators can win by shorting the circuits of value they feed on.

Whether gambling on currency movements or exploiting value gaps between markets (arbitrage), the same logic applies. Tools originally conceived as a way to measure and so more precisely price risk, and so master volatility, become themselves a source of fluctuations in prices as their use en masse gives rise to new forms of financial feedback. As well as impacting on the material world immediately through the devaluation of currencies and drastic price changes, the diffusion and networking of risk enabled by derivatives displaces risk from the local to the systemic level. The virtuous circle (‘negative feedback’) of debt creation, becomes ever more likely to invert into a vicious circle (‘positive feedback’) of depreciation. Guaranteed returns based on risk-managed revenue streams prove to be fictitious.

There isn’t space here to properly go into the workings of Value at Risk (VaR) and other measures and models of risk. It should be noted, though, that such forms represent the repetition at a higher power of the basic reifications of capital. Homogenising and objectifying particular socially and politically determined risks as ‘abstract risk’, they are the financial sphere’s cognate of ‘abstract labour’ in the sphere of production. Markowitz’s ‘Portfolio theory’ of risk management and the VaR measure depend on this abstraction of risk to automate and autonomise the assessment of specific investments. Once achieved this becomes an industrial process. Human oversight and investigation of particulars is displaced by ‘black boxes’ computing homogenised variables.

These phenomena are not alone sufficient to explain the systemic crisis of capital, however. The growth of speculative finance is inseparable from the larger process of social reproduction and the productivity of capital as a whole. To put it crudely, a crisis of over-production and under-consumption arising from massively increasing technical productivity dictates the expanding destruction of both exchange and use values in order to reproduce the conditions for capital accumulation.

If information does not produce as much value as is claimed, then not only fictitious claims but also productive assets must be cancelled for accumulation to continue. As fictitious values, previously treated as if they were real assets, went into freefall during the credit crunch, real capital began to be wiped out, too. McNally: ‘factories are mothballed, corporations go bust and sell off their buildings, machines, land, customers lists and so on at bargain basement prices.’ This process of destruction is still in its early stages, with many more forms of financial feedback yet to begin unwinding.

Here we see the real signature of cybernetic capitalism: not infinite growth through deregulated feedback but rather an intensified and expanding destruction of value. The zero growth ideology was first enunciated in a report, ‘The Limits to Growth’, by a group of MIT cyberneticians commissioned by the capitalist think-tank the Club of Rome in 1972. From this set of scenarios for capitalist ‘sustainability’, published at the very moment the dollar was being decoupled from gold, to Thatcher-era deindustrialisation and privatisation, the feedback loops of finance have been intimately linked to the driving down of social reproduction (the sustenance of humans, infrastructure and environment) at a global level. As McNally notes, the imposition of the value form – ‘value logics’ – across every sphere of social existence simultaneously reflects unprecedented financial volatility and impels an epochal attack on proletarian reproduction through dismantling of subsidies to subsistence goods, removal of wage protections, welfare and privatisation of public services, etc. All this contributed to the further rise of financialisation, and such accelerated value destruction is visibly the telos of ‘cybernetic’ capital again now that the financial feedback loops have begun to unwind, in our current phase of aggressive and open austerity.

Before and After Feedback: Culture, Politics and Finance

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
- John Cage

What then of culture, not to mention politics, in this by no means completed era of financialisation and cybernetic self-regulation? Long before the rise of derivatives, feedback was being explored as key to new artistic forms and practices. If, as Tiqqun claim, network society is a kind of massive global cybernetic system, and the social/cultural structures of feedback (internet, social networks, workplace monitoring of performance, logistics, meta-finance, etc.) possess distinctive political and economic characteristics, how does culture anticipate, reflect or resist these?

We can begin by considering how the cultural and social structures of feedback, like the financial ones, today mesh with capital’s major feedback loop. Capital is now compelled by its own logic to destroy an increasing amount of the means of production it commands. It needs to devalue labour-power and avoids paying for reproduction of other forms of capital. So today we see expanding forms of ‘non-reproduction’, including: the annexation of labour-power outside the advanced capitalist countries through globalisation; the bolstering of profits by paying workers less than the cost of their reproduction; the non-maintenance of infrastructure; the non-replacement of natural resources, etc.

Considered from this perspective, feedback – both financial and cultural – is not just about abstraction. Rather the growth of the network form, and the measuring and monitoring of all areas of social existence, extends the scope of non-reproduction exponentially. The annexation of ‘free inputs’ – environmental, infrastructural, and re/productive – is enabled by the network. At the theoretical level cybernetics’ collapse of the distinction between man and nature, between states (and between States) subsumed under a universal set of feedback loops, anticipates the unified field of (self-)regulation and ‘self-reproduction’ to use editorial collective Midnight Notes’ term, imposed in neoliberal capitalism.

Cybernetics’ higher order of abstraction implies an expanded field of increasingly ‘extractive’ accumulation, in which both waged and unwaged labour are available. Readers will no doubt be familiar with the idea of ‘free labour’ as precondition of the social network. Both fictitious claims (finance) and social networks (culture) require ‘free inputs’ – unpaid labour and unpaid for assets – to perform. Derivatives’ performativity as claims on value assumes and commands unpaid and non-reproductive labour – for example, through their effect on the price of commodities and labour in ‘low GDP’ countries. Networked cultural production solicits ‘plabour’ and ‘prosumer’ activity and individual capitals are able to reduce their overheads, if not increase their rate of exploitation, by the outsourcing of content production to the end-user. ‘Paying attention’ may not create value directly but clearly the formerly ‘passive’ consumer has been activated. Both terms – culture and finance – are increasingly interchangeable; finance is aestheticised as it claims become absurdly fictitious, culture is reduced to finance as its fictions become absurdly monetised.

I would like to suggest here that the rise of such a culture of ‘free inputs’ and financial feedback is anticipated and prepared – if not foreseen or desired – in the neo-avant-garde of the ’50s and after. Seeing feedback as a route to a more autonomous and egalitarian cultural and social existence, a way of dissolving the hierarchical structures of a bureaucratised mass society, the pioneers of cybernetic and network culture generally failed to target the Ur-form of feedback, that is, the value form per se.[1] Both counter- and corporate culture converged on a more ‘liberated’, technocratically enlightened, form of circulation (and re/production), which, ironically, presupposed the deregulation of money and the looting of those subject to the diktats of decommodified wealth.

John Cage’s ethos of impersonality in artistic production shares, by no means accidentally, something of cybernetics’ flattening of the man/nature (organism/environment) distinction.[2]  Conceived as an aesthetics of Buddhist self-abdication, the shift from subjective intention to aleatory process has structural similarities to the outsourcing of evaluation and decision later seen in black box trading and other forms of financial feedback. Rather than creating finished works, the (post-)cybernetic artist or composer becomes a programmer of cultural software, setting up self-regulating, ideally self-executing systems or processes. From La Monte Young to Phillip Glass, Sol LeWitt to Hans Haacke, the implications of processual feedback as form are manifold but an overall shift in orientation is apparent. The Duchampian readymade, the ultimate, or rather foundational ‘license to loot’ already implicit in Fordist artistic production (and productivism), becomes ‘for-itself’ with the post-Cageian phenomenologists of feedback.[3]  Cage makes the audience into producers with 4’33″, his own production being confined to a minimal instructional score. La Monte Young seeks ways to let the untreated raw sonic material resonate without intervention – ‘we must let the sounds be what they are’. Rather than working on the world in instrumental fashion to shape it, we must find ways to give it back its independence and listen to it better. This may be a higher-level ‘reskilling’ of the deskilled listener set free from their traditional interpretive duties, but it could also be read as a miniature manifesto of non-reproduction.

The composer’s (non-)work shifts from the creation of teleological musical narrative to the precipitation and harvesting of psycho-acoustic ‘free inputs’. These are catalysed by the creation within interacting streams of sound-data, of virtual or ‘gestalt’ musical lines (Young’s ‘combination tones’, Steve Reich’s ‘resulting patterns’, etc.). Phillip Glass, whose additive compositional process eschews a goal-directed temporality or offers ‘recombinant teleologies’ (in Robert Fink’s phrase) discovered a similar unplanned qualitative ‘plus’ while listening to a performance of one of his works in a concert hall, deciding to consciously incorporate such psycho-acoustic effects in future works. Unplanned outputs become new inputs within an infinite, responsive, musical feedback process. Notoriously, musical Minimalism synced opposing temporalities to a single pulse, in the process becoming ‘crossover music’. As in financial derivatives, which align existing revenue streams to produce more than the sum of their parts, it is enough to bring two repeating musical patterns into coordination to produce a virtual third. The temporality of the derivative is also anticipated in the split or schizoid time of minimalist composition, in which ceaseless activity at the molecular level produces stasis and stability on the macro scale, simultaneous acceleration and deceleration.

Both financialisation and Minimalism can be described as ‘machines for the suppression of (historical) time’, and with some justice have been criticised as exhibiting the positivist/mystic drive to master and suspend temporal succession, to preempt and overcome history by application of self-correcting models. (Stockhausen is overtly anti-historical in his pronouncements, while Glass and Reich seem to want to tap into a secular eternity that mirrors the reticulated flow of advertising and TV). Musical feedback can signify as a dream of perpetual motion, as growth without excess, as a regained cosmic balance. Whatever the ideological orientation or intentions of the individual composers, many aspects of systems-influenced music seem to dream capital’s subsequent involutions as a utopian exit from it. The creation of musical feedback loops yields a form of sonic (sometimes spiritual) ‘added value’ that is attributable to neither composer nor performers, but depends on their environment (the concert hall or studio) and the reverberations released, or captured, by the unfolding musical material. In this magical aesthetic gift economy there is nevertheless an echo of the larger restructuring of production, and contraction of social reproduction, in which such cultural forms were discovered and developed. Call it ‘unmediated adjacency’, but Downtown New York Minimalism was certainly born somewhere between Madison Avenue and Wall Street. The suspension of dollar-gold convertibility and of linear musical development in Minimalism certainly occur at the same point on the historical score. As does the bankruptcy, and then gentrification, of New York…

Whatever one makes of this brief exercise in cultural-economic isomorphism, it does seem worth urgently asserting the currency (or rather, bankruptcy) of certain post-cybernetic conceptions of culture. An ethos of self-limited and self-sustaining activity, freed from the hubris of modernist telologies of growth, linked to a notion of ‘generosity’, ‘gift economy’ and ‘DIY’ emancipation may (still) seem appealing. Yet, however militant the refusal of instrumental reason, linear time, progression, etc., this ethos predominantly operates by bracketing out the dull compulsion of the value form. This leaves it hostage to the kind of reappropriation now being conducted by the capitalism of the Big Society. In many counter-cultural products and processes the commitment to dissolution of the work into the flow of negative feedback and free-floating (non-consumerist) desire coexisted with a project for the creation and replication of enclaves or islands outside the sphere of consumerism or ‘capitalism’ conceived as a bureaucratic regime of unfettered development. Today we see the reductio ad immiseration of this larger trajectory into an ethics of ‘doing more with less’ (famously dissected in season 5 of The Wire‘s extended montage of the restructured institutions of news and policing). Architects and theorists such as Rem Koolhaas and artists such as Marjetica Portc encourage us to embrace the self-organising, self-regulating ‘creativity’ and ‘improvisation’ of the ‘entrepreneurial’ slum dweller, hymning the efficiencies of outsourcing former state services to the absolutely destitute. Policy wonks such as Charles Leadbeater eulogise the mendicant refuse collectors of Recife Brazil, with their supermarket trolleys and contract-free labour. Networked creativity can be read as a euphemism for the harvesting of ‘free inputs’, which the eulogists assume will add up to sufficient savings and value creation to keep the financialised system in motion.

All this is the consummation of the cybernetic capitalist tendency to ‘activate’ potential by removing means of support and subsistence, letting the raw (human) materials resonate to the newly opened up environment of non-reproduction. The dead hand of the state or over-arching structure of welfare and services is withdrawn to facilitate the free play of the system’s molecular constituents. Capitalism as open system is increasingly dependent on the annexation of the ‘outside’ in all its forms, and where this outside is definitively assimilated it must be recreated endogenously by the subtraction of existing social reproduction.

Rather than recycling forms of cultural feedback developed more or less consciously as a subversion of the (Fordist, statist and bureaucratic, etc.) social order – a project that was always, at best, ambivalent in its implications for the majority of the population – perhaps we should shift our focus, both culturally and politically, to the ways financial feedback has laid the ground for today’s era of struggles around subsistence in a society subsumed under an ever more volatile value form. As an expanding global proletariat confronts contracting social reproduction, the question for cultural producers is whether one (solely) serves an extended programme of value destruction or (at least) contests it.

Revolts catalysed by Twitter and Facebook, alongside the offline networking of all those put into contact with, and forced ever closer to slavery by, financialised systems are the positive feedback loops beginning to resonate after years of controlled deregulations and informatisation. The accelerating repetition of ineffective financial moves generates an ever greater financial contradiction which is transposed across the social scale from banks to states to populations. As subsidies are withdrawn and barriers to capital dismantled, this contradiction is translated into food and fuel price inflation, in turn triggering riots and a proletarian music of revolt ripping through once stable states. With the socialist – and now fundamentalist – control circuitry torn out or severely compromised by financialised capital itself, perhaps an unregulatable feedback will ensue.

An unprecedented coordination of class decomposition and social non-reproduction has made systemic risk, in every sense, far greater than it has been for decades, greater than in the entire history of capitalism, perhaps. If the spiral of feedback leading from financial bubble to insurrectionary wave that now seems possible is fulfilled, then we may yet have to revise our opinion of the long era of financialisation. It will have been more than just a fiction of wealth – the imposition of the value form as a volatile but empty claim to value creation. In a final spiral of cyber-capitalist feedback, finance may prove to have been the amplifier par excellence of the noise that abolishes the capitalist signal, that is of the signal which is value – the one, supremely abstract, supremely material thing it always must communicate, send and receive. An exponential positive feedback in class struggle should not be assumed, however, any more than the teleological projections of cybernetics (e.g. inevitable planetary death by overpopulation, etc.). But one would have to be more myopic than a risk analyst, or middle-eastern CIA operative, to miss the current potential for the destructive cycle of financial feedback to invert into an unprecedented global cycle of struggles against capital per se.

Give me the time (For an aesthetic of desistance)

Federica Bueti

In Neoliberal Western Democracies, participation has transformed into the daydream of politicians and the nightmare of precarious cultural workers. The latter is consistently prompted to invent and collaborate with others to survive the current economic system, the lack of resources, and the acceleration of time. In this context, participation is ripe for experiments with alternative strategies for collective action that can concurrently reiterate forms of neoliberal democratic consensus. Participatory practices have the potential to oppose the logic of a neoliberal society while donating novel forms of regeneration and development to society.

For a long time now, modes of participation have been shaped on the terms of the rhizomatic, anti- hierarchical, anti-dialectical, anti-representative, libertarian, non-anarchistic, and ideologically open since the 1960′s and 70′s. They were loosely organized by small groups of people in order to avoid structures and to work more effectively as an open network. The desire to permeate a totally open reality had manifested in artistic production that refuted the limitations of both traditional media and the institutional setting. For instance, Umberto Eco’s essay “Opera Aperta“1 -Open Work- (1962) presented a rubric for the structural analysis of the artwork that challenges its single trajectory and favors the concord and “openness” of contemporary art.

The new paradigm of contemporary art has been extensively explained by art historian Miwon Kwon’s assessment of site-specific practices. Kwon found the best reasons for experimenting with new formats to be “the epistemological challenge to relocate meaning from within the art object to the contingencies of its context; the radical restructuring of the subject from an old Cartesian model to a phenomenological one of lived bodily experience; and the self conscious desire to resist the forces of the capitalist market economy.”2

These new expectations demanded opposition and critical dissociation from a system based on rigid structures and roles. Artists came to terms with social inequality and distance from more agreeable living conditions. Artistic production was influenced by this detachment from both the motherland and the art system. Dematerialization, institutional critique, and aggressive anti-visuality registered as procedural responses to the multifaceted disassociation.

Assorted discourses penetrated art transversally. Analytical practices often used language and direct experience as counter-performative elements. The opposition of this definitive language and the counterattack of critics against the intrusiveness of power encouraged a self-reflective, distanced practice. Language was the site for the analysis, de-construction, and re-definition of sensible space.

The institutionalization of critical practices, i.e. practices that confront the role of art and art institutions, trapped these artists within an exhausting loop of self-reflection and the eager expectation of idiosyncratic output. Tethered to the advancement of the global liberal capitalism, their aesthetic of resistance was inhibited. Rather than discover a new space of experience, these processes have perpetuated the sense of free floating like a hot air balloon with a direction yet no definitive landing ground and a necessary postponement of expanding horizons.

The obstruction of practice evokes disorientation accompanied by an outwardly constrained representation of the world. Critical practices are plagued by the rapid integration into institutions they are supposed to problematize. Since the advent of the second generation of Institutional Critique, there has been a continuous attempt to exceed consensus by supplementing it with presence, meanings and a massive dose of self-reflectivity.

The rhizomatous, anti-hierarchical operative model of social and cultural dissensus has been transformed into a fragmented and dispersed political machine. This mutation ensures the sustenance of biased conditions of production and neoliberal logic. It accommodates a distorted notion of time and motion, and prompts the creation of an immanent state of exceptions that restrains resistance. Existential meditation serves capitalism’s exploits, obscuring the laboring bottom-feeders and blinding the lucid eyes of the cognitivat.

The breaking point has been on hand for over a decade, which could ostensibly subvert the purportedly shallow existence. We are trapped in the here and now of an artificial existence, where satisfaction of temporary desires falsify experience. There is a constant push to affirmatively respond to incessant requests for participation or some other notion of intervening and performing in the world. The performativity of “I can” can fester amid frustration and exhaustion. “I can” sustains a distorted notion of what may be physically possible in the real world.

The sense of exhaustion produced by “performing” is certainly linked to the overlap of leisure and work. The late 1960′s called for coincidence and the integration of life and art while the modern interpretation is fixated on pathology. Private and leisure time is a unique type of labor, dictated by consumption, enjoyment, status-building, and maintenance. Culture is thus adapted to the web of capitalism’s economic and social relations.

It is possible to individuate in the idea of “inclusiveness” the ambiguous terrain where critical art is operating today. Integration and overlap between different spheres like work and leisure or public and private fabricates a space of social and political ambiguity. This uncertainty is reflected in critical practices, which endanger opposition to systems in society through neutralization. The claim that art must enter the space of social and political reality should not be embraced without reservations. As Jacques Rancière put it: “Although we no longer share early twentieth-century dreams of collective rhythmics or of Futurist and Constructivist symphonies of the new mechanical world, we continue to believe that art has to leave the art world to be effective in “real life”: we continue to try to overturn the logic of the theatre by making the spectator active, by turning the art exhibition into a place of political activism or by sending artists into streets of derelict suburbs to invent new modes of social relations.”3

Should art become one with the social and political reality, how could ulterior regimes of representation exceed existing ones? One must preserve the imaginative power of art. When it enters into the hierarchy of reality, the risk lies in assuming art can dictate what can and cannot be. Art, like capitalism, straddles the line between reality and virtuality, abandoning the material reality for the nebulous space of immateriality. The paradoxical situation created by the current opposition to the autonomy of art and the claim for art to inevitably enter the social and political space of action has bounded the very possibility for art to be effective and to establish an alternative space for thinking about reality. The economic and social evolution of society has facilitated the optimistic embrace and drive for the “new” and “potential.” By entering the space of socio-political reality art has also been victim of a natural postponement of changes. If we are constantly leaning forward such potential and new future, then we are pushed to perform and convulsively act in order to make this future possible. But then, it is endlessly postponed. The only thing such feeling makes possible is that you have to perform at all cost, in order for the neoliberal machine to be perpetuated and for any turning point to be endlessly postponed. If critical practices disclose a particular space of consciousness within the incessant flux of reality, we should welcome such insights into a warm home.

We took on the idea of deconstructing and re-thinking reality with enthusiasm. The socio-political system, clearly totally dependent on the economic system, injected us with speed. Every aspect of our life is accelerated, like a mouse running around in a maze without finding the ‘Exit’ gate. The whirl of modern reality is bound to imminent presages and potential motions, encapsulating citizens within the socio-cultural system despite its predictability. Participation in neoliberal scenarios is performance. You have to act seemly within the space where, as Jacque Rancière put it, “everyone’s speech is determined in terms of his or her proper place.”4

The persistent need to perform and the high level of competitiveness preoccupies the notions of social-relations and participation. In art the idea of critical participation or the use of other forms of critical practices have been integrated into the very same system they are vividly trying to escape. Participation, for example, has been consistently linked to the consensual model of contemporaneous democracy. Each opposition is a new opportunity for the neoliberal system to propose a novel solution. Democratization can thus nullify the attempt to escape the present reality by re-appropriation into the larger society. Today artists are asked to perform for an audience at infinite panel discussions, symposia, lectures, book launches, and other opportunities to “share” with the globe. You do not have an exhibition without having a lecture. What kind of participation is based upon a forty-minute reading of a statement and ten minutes for questions from the audience? In the end it is always too late. The moderator comes up and says: “Sorry, time is up, we have to leave. Thank you for coming and thanks to the speakers for their time and interesting insight.” Where is this “sharing of knowledge?” Is it meant to be a multitudinous and unilateral process? Why should I enable the production and reproduction of such models? Here the problem we are facing is of methodological nature.

Maintaining the performative sway of participation, we constrain collaboration to a mantra that serves the purpose of the already existing apparatuses. Substantial changes, and an altered concept of participation, can only be brought about by a deliberate fracture. Participation revolving around disinterested participation would revitalize the degree of intensity and investment to transform the performative experience of the collective. Unbiased dialogue can produce shared creative time and a space of social interaction. It facilitates a prismatic social environment of surplus relations, encouraging a break from the calculated logic of current artistic production.

Art participation should be considered not as a political choice or strategy, but more as a methodology that aims to preserve the autonomy of the artistic and cultural production from the attack of the neoliberal all-encompassing logic. For participatory practices preserve the autonomy of art mean to use the potential of collaborations to create a more sustainable economy for artists and cultural producers. Modes of Participation can create the conditions for an economy that is not totally dependent on the needs and wills of the current market. They can generate practical interventions that preserve and sustain the autonomy of cultural productions and by doing so, creating the conditions for art to envision different possibilities of existence.

But in order to establish a different meaning for participation, we should perhaps reconsider current cultural attitudes and social behaviors. Time, for example, needs to be re-introduced into current artistic, critical and curatorial production. Not as an oscillation of time, but as a “spatialization of the subject”. Against the backdrop of contemporary virtual and physical progress, one could oppose the necessity of durational experience and the sense of prolonged time that resists rapid consumption. Experience is comprised of time spent as well as a space of experience and shared intensities. Time is an essential element in participatory practices. Diverse knowledge and exchanges, and fruitful long-term relations require not just physical time but steadfast consistency. Endured duration is particularly vital in the context of virtual-communications. The reason is quite simple: people don’t share the same level of understanding or sensitivity, and a model of learning, exchanging and developing relationships varies extensively. Speed of pace is different for everyone. We cannot wish for the contrary without surrendering to the trap of authoritarian vision.

Adopting a creative model based on collaboration does not only mean maximizing outcomes or saving economic resources. People should revel in the space and allow for participation, discussion, and confrontating beliefs and modes of thinking. Only then can operative possibilities for transforming the acquired knowledge into operative models of actions unfold. A space of conflict where dissimilarities can play out and subsequently be used rather than liquidated at the first mention of a discrepancy is essential.

We should not forget that collaborations have become a necessity for the growth and implementation of profits in the capital industry. Today managerial agendas abide by more complex yet malleable democratic models. Groups can be identified through their representative members, for example, which spurs homogenization and the dissolution of the individuals ultimately relied upon for the decision. Participation, under the guise of performance, is constantly compromised. It accepts the conditions for the benefit of others, further perpetuating the current illusory, consensual democratic trend. Any partnership in this context becomes a tool for pursuing individual interests at the expense of potentially collective achievements.

Participation should be regarded as an opportunity to escape quantitative time and the correlation between its passing and imminent “results” and successes. Participation can create a genuine place for growth and education by first of all embracing a different sense of time. Genuine in the sense that a collaborative project channels energies, feelings and emotions into an event of intensities. It is an experience of proximity and materialized distance. Participation is like the paradox of Zeno’s tortoise in Plato: the tortoise’s movements are slow and often imperceptible, but they are firm and have a precise direction. Although Achilles is faster, he reaches where the tortoise has been and still has farther to go.

The potential of participatory practices indeed lies within the distribution of time and of duties. Pressure, competitiveness, and the anxiety over the ‘right’ performance must dissolve. Subjectivities, both individual and collective, should be fostered while those involved remain responsible for honesty to themselves and the Other. Participation is more than a funny way of doing and making things; it is a painful process of human and professional investment. It is an exercise in adjustments, in detachment from a system that obliges us to become a mechanism in a broken machine.

New labor conditions have entangled the current society, leaving millions of young people unemployed, self-employed or simply precarious. The trap is thus set for those who cannot envision their future, be it unrealized projects or the fulfillment of ambitions. A job is not only a way to earn money but a means of independence. The current situation is frustrating because we are unable to overcome the limits of the implemented system to envision different ones. In this sense participatory practice functions as a mode of resisting social annihilation by exceeding the limitations of the space and overcoming the logic of economic value.

Participation can resist the acceleration and optimization of performance. It can resist both consensual models and homogenization. Its polyphonic conflicts and manifold nature are reasons for both inclusion in and optimistic exclusion from the neoliberal system. It could be a motif for changing the way we understand what is possible.

Modes of Participation in this context have the capacity to explore new forms and new meanings. Rather than romanticize a concept of community or the bodily personification of the abstract concept of ‘multitude,’ participation is best served as an operative to produce an innovative, breathing place and an emancipated space of production.