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Conference in Rio de Janiero, Brazil - July 2001
A
Dis-operative Turn in Contemporary Art
by Stephen Wright
In
the following paper, I want to look at the position of art-and artworks-within
the global system of the symbolic and material economy of contemporary
capitalist society. And more specifically, to reconsider the extent
to which artistic work-and activity-like other social undertakings,
is affected by the generalization of immaterial labor and the place
of pride it occupies in post-Fordist capitalism. It is in this light
that I will focus on the question of the artwork. Generally considered
as value-laden, or value-incarnate, it is becoming increasingly
obvious that the notion of the artwork is less a descriptive than
a normative term, and as such, singularly inadequate for making
sense of the increasingly process-based propositions characteristic
of contemporary artistic production.
Aesthetics
will have made a decisive step forward when, coming into step with
the reality of artistic practices today, it has rid itself of its
presupposition that art can be apprehended only through the works
that mediate and embody it. In so doing, it will have freed itself
of a renaissance legacy, a paradigm that, by maintaining a misleading
contiguity between art and artwork-between what is perceived and
the aesthetic value it is assigned-fosters a hierarchical vision
of art, where process is depreciated to the benefit of the consummate
work. This persistent identification between art and artwork is
not without steep conceptual costs: not only does it condemn us
to producing necessarily convoluted descriptions of many contemporary
art propositions-where the work functions as a smoke screen
with respect to the veritable artistic activity-worse still,
it leads us to uphold the prevailing norms and hegemonic values
within the realm of art.
Artists
have had misgivings about works of art for some time. Art history,
like history in general, is punctuated by irreversible gestures
that, though contestable, cannot be ignored and remain determinant
today. Romanticist aesthetics were founded upon a celebration of
the fragment as opposed to the finished work; today, however, few
artistic propositions make any such implicit reference to some absent
totality. Conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth replaced the term
"work with the more value-neutral "proposition."
Indeed, objecthood was one of the hotly debated categories
in the art world in the 1960s, as avant-garde movements-notably
Fluxus-sought to ward off any form of reification-and any reification
of form-by categorically refusing the object. As early as
1964, Fluxus founder George Maciunas clearly stated, with preeminently
sixties zeal, that "Fluxus is strictly against the art object
as a useless commodity which is meant only to be sold."1 However,
although performance and happenings may have been devised as non-commodifed
forms of art, it has become all too obvious by now to what extent
the photographs, videotapes, and other documentary traces can be
substituted for what actually took place, and, furthermore, to what
extent they are introduced as veritable works themselves into an
economy of exchange, acquiring an exchange value that has nothing
to do with their initial value. But whereas the avant-garde attacks
were leveled primarily at the art object-what Marx referred to as
the "absolute commodity," inasmuch as it is the very image
of value-few artists today refuse the object, if for no other reason
than that its simple refusal would be tantamount to a sort of mannerism.
More
and more artists today, however, are deploying strategies
which undermine the defining parameters of the very notion of what
an artwork is by favoring an art which remains open and process-based,
showing scant concern for the usual criteria of showing and disseminating-in
other words, of promoting-artworks. Their strategies are
diverse: fostering a process of permanent modification; seeking
the intervention of external factors, thereby dramatically relativizing
the perennity of the proposition; soliciting more or less informal
collaborators, who become co-authors; exploiting chance occurrences
(and not the "domesticated" chance of which the Surrealists
were so fond, taking care to limit the harm sustained by the œuvre
itself); questioning the idea of embodied value, taking the symbolic
barter economy as material; and so on. Though these different artists
may have little or even nothing in common, they share, as French
sociologist Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat has argued, a common intent:
"to emancipate creation from its conclusive apparatus, and
to put forward another modulation, at once more intensive and more
extensive."2
Understanding
the Art being Done
In contemporary
usages, the term "artwork" designates immaterial as much
as material objects. But it always implicitly designates a finished
or accomplished proposition. The notion of work implies a causality
and a hierarchy between process and finality, a difference between
two stages, the former being subordinated to the latter. And it
is this temporality, specific to artworks, that is increasingly
thrown into question. Much of today's art is not deployed with the
sudden appearance of the work, but is coterminous with the creative
operation; its finality is coextensive with the process. This shift
from culminated works to process-oriented projects is paralleled
by art's increased inscription in time rather than space,
implicitly questioning the notion of public time rather than
the much bantered-about notion of public space. Which is one reason
why the modalities of spatial display typical of current art institutions
appear, in this respect, poorly adapted to current art production.
It is
difficult to grasp the art being done today if one takes as one's
yardstick a concept as thoroughly-albeit insidiously-normative as
the work of art. Contrary to the strongly normative aesthetic theories
which predominated the Twentieth century from Bataille to Deleuze,
from Benjamin to Adorno-that conceived of art as a veritable barometer
of the human condition, a surrogate and sublimated form of social
activism-aesthetic theory is obliged to maintain a principled neutrality
if it wants to be able to grasp artistic production as a whole.3
Which is why Nicolas Bourriaud's recent and influential book, Relational
Aesthetics, is not so much an aesthetic theory as a partisan
theorization of a tendency within art today, abounding with intuitions
on contemporary practices. In the face of avant-garde movements'
penchant for upping the ante, the definition of the artwork was
progressively relaxed throughout the Twentieth century, and the
revisions that Bourriaud proposes are but the most recent. He seeks
to preserve the notion by extending it to the whole range of conceits
and contrivances that the artist has devised to manage the contingencies
of his or her project, from start to finish. Bourriaud's basic postulate
is that "the sphere of human relations [constitutes] the site
of the artwork," the work's meaning stemming both from the
"movement which links the signs emitted by the artist, as well
as from the collaboration of the individuals in the exhibition space."4
Bourriaud can scarcely have failed to notice that what is conceivably
understood by the concept of the artwork is seriously shaken by
the very practices that he defends. He nevertheless sets out to
salvage the concept of the artwork, watering it down and complexifying
it at the same time: "the work of an artist is a binding element,
a principle of dynamic agglutination. A work of art is point on
a line."5 One might well wonder what accounts for such conceptual
contortionism to defend a "point" if it is the meanders
of the "line" which are of importance for the artist,
what accounts for his reticence to simply do away with the artwork
concept altogether. Of course, as co-director of the soon-to-be-opened
Palais de Tokyo art museum, Bourriaud is keenly aware that he has
to exhibit something. . . .
Breakdown
of the Material Artwork
What
is behind this "dis-operative" turn in contemporary art?
It probably has little to do with the exhaustion of traditional
forms. There are, after all, many artists who continue and will
continue to produce works, neither entirely through occupational
routine, nor strictly under the (admittedly immense) pressure of
the market and the institutions, but rather in order to resolve
issues left unexplored in art history. But, for the artist today,
producing works has become one option among others. The mistake
is to confuse an occasional contiguity between art and artwork
for a necessary identity. The artwork has become one type of artistic
proposition amongst others-a sort of "meta-genre," as
it were, comprising other genres including painting, installation,
and so on.
The explanation
for this dis-operative turn lies more profoundly in the position
occupied by art within the global system of the symbolic and material
economy. As Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat has argued in his thought-provoking
study of artistic activity in what he calls an age of "diffuse
creativity," "artistic activity has developed in unison
with other sectors of employment and is no less affected by the
ongoing restructuring of the mode of production."6 Whereas
twentieth-century theorists like Adorno and Greenberg assigned a
premonitory role to artworks with regard to the society at large,
it is clear today that artistic activity has forfeited its pole
position, and often appears almost stagnant in comparison with the
dynamic flux of the dematerialized economy. In any case, the artistic
economy could scarcely remain unaffected, both in its constitution
and its phenomenology, by the growth of immaterial activities so
massively present within the general economy. Artistic activity,
like other social undertakings, is structured through and through
by the new anthropological composition of labor, in other words
by the generalization of dematerialized labor, and the place of
pride which it has secured for itself within post-Fordist capitalist
society.
British
artist Michael Landy recently proposed an incisive and singular
reflection on the fate of the artwork-and the work of the artist-and
its place within this economy, by literally and systematically breaking
down the totality of his material possessions. The artist spent
one year drawing up an exhaustive inventory of every single thing
he owned. It seems that he owned exactly 7,006 different things,
which he classed in ten different categories: artworks, clothing,
furniture, electric appliances, perishables, motor vehicle, and
so on. All 7,006 items were plastic-bagged and tagged with the same
registration number under which they had been logged onto a data
base. The last and public phase of this existential audit-the phase
that explains the project's rather poignant title, Break Down-took
place, with the same diligent rigor, in a large disused department
store in the heart of London's shopping district.7 There, Landy
set up an assembly line where, during the two weeks of the installation,
a team of "operatives" dressed in coveralls proceeded
to methodically disassemble the objects. Every day, a fresh batch
of items was loaded onto the conveyors. The operatives set about
taking them apart and generally breaking them down into their component
parts, sorting the pieces according to their material (paper products,
ceramics, metals, etc.). These were then shredded, ground up, and
so on. On the last day, Landy's stereo and record collection (which
until then had provided a musical background to the ambient breakdown)
was in turn released onto the disassembly line, dismantled, and
pulverized. Of the 7,006 things that, to some extent, had hitherto
defined the artist's identity and materialized his memory, there
remained only a data base, cataloguing their weight, color, and
so on.
If Marcel
Duchamp's readymades raised the question of the artwork at the dawn
of the Fordist era, Michael Landy's disassembly line, symbolically
transforming manufactured objects into a computerized stocklist,
raises it once again on the basis of the new productive modalities
which characterize contemporary capitalism. Landy produced no work;
the performative installation itself was but the tangible aspect
of a process. It was, moreover, a collaborative project, of which
the artist was merely the manager. In this respect, Landy's project
is exemplary of artistic activity today, which has more to do with
the efficient management of contingency than with the production
of artworks. "What is specific to the laborers of the immaterial,"
writes Nicolas-Le Strat, "is that they carry their work tools
within themselves, because these 'tools' are directly related to
their intellectuality and their creativity, to their inspiration
and their sensibility."8 Artists have become entrepreneurs
of the self and of signs-in short, managers of the contingencies
which arise in a process without purpose and without end, whose
meaning-all its meaning-is immanent.
It was
not so long ago that the artwork embodied a surplus value conferred
upon it by the artist. But in an era of "diffuse creativity,"
the production of quality images and objects is no longer the exclusive
purview of artists, and the axis of artistic activity has shifted
from a conclusive logic (aimed at producing works) toward more open-ended
processes. This poses a genuine problem for both museum managers
and art dealers who, respectively, have to show and sell something:
for what indeed are we to exhibit in our museums and galleries once
we acknowledge that the sometimes cumbersome, sometimes trifling
material components of art projects are mere by-products of an activation
which took place somewhere else?
Already
in 1967, in an endeavor to relativize the gestures of avant-garde
movements, art-historian Robert Klein raised the following two questions
in the hope of squelching any fancies about what he saw as an imminent
dis-operative turn in art:
Can one imagine a state of affairs where art could do without
works? Or can one imagine works which are not the embodiment of
values and the solidification of experience? For us to be sure
that the eclipse of the art object is nothing but an eclipse,
one has to be able to exclude a priori both these eventualities.9 Events
the following year revealed the obsolescence of this normative rhetoric
of solidity and embodiment. Artists today are contemporary with
a society that suffers from no lack of political proposals and projects,
but rather which is struggling desperately to find the forms needed
to channel them; to advocate the "solidification" of experience
is to run the risk of foreclosing political visions of the future.
The creative experiments being carried out by contemporary artists
merely sketch a horizon, stopping short of fleshing out what lies
beyond and thereby setting limits to our imagination. And that,
no doubt, is their use value.
Footnotes:
1.Hans Belting provides a compelling account 1960s hostility to
objecthood in The Invisible Masterpiece, trans. Helen Atkins
(London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 384-404.
2. Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Une sociologie du travail artistique
(Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), 55.
3. Twentieth-century aesthetic theories were, on the whole, exorbitantly
normative. Conflating art criticism with aesthetic philosophy, the
practice of philosophy involved talking about certain artworks-the
only ones that mattered, the only ones that were truly art-which
was in turn an ersatz for social activism.
4. Nicolas Bourriaud, L'esthétique relationnelle (Dijon:
les presses du réel: 1998), 85. Of course, Bourriaud's book
lays claim to being an aesthetic theory: "The relational
sphere. . . is to today's art what mass production was to Pop Art
and minimal art."
5. Bourriaud, 20 - 21.
6. Nicolas-Le Strat, 85.
7. Break Down, produced by Art Angel, took place from February
10Ð24, 2001 at the C&A Department Store, London.
8. Nicolas-Le Strat, 87.
9. Robert Klein, La Forme et l'Intelligible (Paris: Gallimard,
1967), 410.
©2001
Stephen Wright |
