Corner College Summer School 2009 Course Book

Texts by

David Hammons Ken Lum Artur Żmijewski Boris Groys Brian O’Doherty Andrea Fraser Wiesław Borowski Hanna Ptaszkowska Mariusz Tchorek Michel Foucault Jeff Wall Seth Price Jorge Luis Borges 1 Summer School Course Book 2009

In high school, college or university, students can enroll in 1. I CAN’T STAND ART ACTUALLY. I’VE NEVER, EVER MY KEY IS TO TAKE AS MUCH MONEY HOME AS POSSI- classes for credit to be taken into account in their grade LIKED ART, EVER. I NEVER TOOK IT IN SCHOOL. BLE. ABANDON ANY ART FORM THAT COSTS TOO point average or their transcript. Generally, this credit is in MUCH. INSIST THAT IT’S AS CHEAP AS POSSIBLE IS one of two categories: remediation or advancement. For 2. WHEN I WAS IN CALIFORNIA, ARTISTS WOULD WORK NUMBER ONE AND ALSO THAT IT’S AESTHETICALLY remediation, the summer school is used to make up credits FOR YEARS AND NEVER HAVE A SHOW. SO SHOWING CORRECT. AFTER THAT ANYTHING GOES. AND THAT lost through absence or failure. For advancement, the HAS NEVER BEEN THAT IMPORTANT TO ME. WE USED KEEPS EVERYTHING INTERESTING FOR ME. summer school is used to obtain credit for classes to TO CUSS PEOPLE OUT: PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT OUR accelerate progress toward a degree or in order to lessen WORK, DEALERS, ETC., BECAUSE THAT PART OF BEING 7. I DON’T KNOW WHAT MY WORK IS. I HAVE TO WAIT the load of courses during the regular school year. AN ARTIST WAS ALWAYS A JOKE TO US. TO HEAR THAT FROM SOMEONE.

In academia the term can also refer to a type of conference. WHEN I CAME TO NEW YORK, I DIDN’T SEE ANY OF I WOULD LIKE TO BURN THE PIECE. I THINK THAT Typically, established academics will give presentations on THAT. EVERYBODY WAS JUST GROVELING AND TOM- WOULD BE NICE VISUALLY. VIDEOTAPE THE BURNING advanced topics in a field to postgraduate students. This MING, ANYTHING TO BE IN THE ROOM WITH SOME- OF IT. AND SHOOT SOME SLIDES. THE SLIDES WOULD type of summer school is often organized at a national or BODY WITH SOME MONEY. THERE WERE NO BAD GUYS THEN BE A PIECE IN ITSELF. I’M GETTING INTO THAT international level, and no credits are awarded. In addition, HERE; SO I SAID, “LET ME BE A BAD GUY,” OR ATTEMPT NOW: THE SLIDES ARE THE ART PIECES AND THE ART a college or university sometimes offers a summer program TO BE A BAD GUY, OR PLAY WITH THE BAD AREAS AND PIECES DON’T EXIST. for teachers or other professional workers wishing to round SEE WHAT HAPPENS. out their professional or general education. 8. IF YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE THEN IT’S EASY TO 3. I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHY BLACK PEOPLE MAKE ART. MOST PEOPLE ARE REALLY CONCERNED http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_school WERE CALLED SPADES, AS OPPOSED TO CLUBS. ABOUT THEIR IMAGE. ARTISTS HAVE ALLOWED THEM- BECAUSE I REMEMBER BEING CALLED A SPADE ONCE, SELVES TO BE BOXED IN BY SAYING “YES” ALL THE AND I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANT; NIGGER I KNEW TIME BECAUSE THEY WANT TO BE SEEN, AND THEY BUT SPADE I STILL DON’T. SO I TOOK THE SHAPE, AND SHOULD BE SAYING “NO.” I DO MY STREET ART MAINLY STARTED PAINTING IT. TO KEEP ROOTED IN THAT “WHO I AM.” BECAUSE THE ONLY THING THAT’S REALLY GOING ON IS IN THE 4. I JUST LOVE THE HOUSES IN THE SOUTH, THE WAY STREET; THAT’S WHERE SOMETHING IS REALLY HAP- THEY BUILT THEM. THAT NEGRITUDE ARCHITECTURE. I PENING. IT ISN’T HAPPENING IN THESE GALLERIES. REALLY LOVE TO WATCH THE WAY BLACK PEOPLE MAKE THINGS, HOUSES OR MAGAZINE STANDS IN 9. DOING THINGS IN THE STREET IS MORE POWERFUL HARLEM, FOR INSTANCE. JUST THE WAY WE USE THAN ART I THINK. BECAUSE ART HAS GOTTEN SO....I CARPENTRY. NOTHING FITS, BUT EVERYTHING WORKS. DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK ART IS ABOUT NOW. IT THE DOOR CLOSES, IT KEEPS THINGS FROM COMING DOESN’T DO ANYTHING. LIKE MALCOLM X SAID, IT’S In 2007 I wrote a book about Art school called “I got an THROUGH. BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE THAT NEATNESS LIKE NOVOCAINE. IT USED TO WAKE YOU UP BUT NOW A+ in Art and You can Too.” It’s an opinionated book about ABOUT IT, THE WAY WHITE PEOPLE PUT THINGS IT PUTS YOU TO SLEEP. I THINK THAT ART NOW IS Art for Art school students. It calls attention to how the TOGETHER; EVERYTHING IS A THIRTY-SECOND OF AN PUTTING PEOPLE TO SLEEP. THERE’S SO MUCH OF IT educational system can bankrupt not only bank accounts INCH OFF. AROUND IN THIS TOWN THAT IT DOESN’T MEAN but also creativity. Today, Summer School arises out a ANYTHING. THAT’S WHY THE ARTIST HAS TO BE VERY feeling that Art can be instrumental in creating a better 5. THAT’S WHY I LIKE DOING STUFF BETTER ON THE CAREFUL WHAT HE SHOWS AND WHEN HE SHOWS planet. STREET, BECAUSE THE ART BECOMES JUST ONE OF NOW. BECAUSE THE PEOPLE AREN’T REALLY LOOKING THE OBJECTS THAT’S IN THE PATH OF YOUR EVERYDAY AT ART, THEY’RE LOOKING AT EACH OTHER AND EACH I have a feeling — and I feel it is shared by a growing EXISTENCE. IT’S WHAT YOU MOVE THROUGH, AND IT OTHER’S CLOTHES AND EACH OTHER’S HAIRCUTS. pop­u­lation — that Art is more than a pretty picture, more DOESN’T HAVE ANY SENIORITY OVER ANYTHING ELSE. than fashion and glamour, more than a career, more than a 10. THE ART AUDIENCE IS THE WORST AUDIENCE IN commodity. Truly, I feel, Art is an intoxicatingly powerful THOSE PIECES WERE ALL ABOUT MAKING SURE THAT THE WORLD. IT’S OVERLY EDUCATED, IT’S CONSERVA- alive energy. THE BLACK VIEWER HAD A REFLECTION OF HIMSELF IN TIVE, IT’S OUT TO CRITICIZE NOT TO UNDERSTAND, THE WORK. WHITE VIEWERS HAVE TO LOOK AT SOME- AND IT NEVER HAS ANY FUN. WHY SHOULD I SPEND Summer School is what Philippe Parreno describes as an ONE ELSE’S CULTURE IN THOSE PIECES AND SEE VERY MY TIME PLAYING TO THAT AUDIENCE? “alliance of aesthetics.” Rather than only teach you, I hope LITTLE OF THEMSELVES IN IT. to learn with you. I am organizing Summer School and I am DAVID HAMMONS, 1986 responsible for it but I feel both students and teachers must 6. ANYONE WHO DECIDES TO BE AN ARTIST SHOULD learn from one another. We all have knowledge and REALIZE THAT IT’S A POVERTY TRIP. TO GO INTO THIS insights to contribute and it’s arrogant — and impossible — PROFESSION IS LIKE GOING INTO THE MONASTERY OR to know it all and to have all the answers. It makes me think SOMETHING; IT’S A VOW OF POVERTY I ALWAYS that the punk rhetoric of do-it-yourself is somehow mis- THOUGHT. TO BE AN ARTIST AND NOT EVEN TO DEAL leading. Given the crisis of our global situation, in the new WITH THAT POVERTY THING, THAT’S A WASTE OF millennium our phrase perhaps could be: Let’s do it. TIME; OR TO BE AROUND PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT THAT. Antoni Wojtyra Zürich, Summer 2009 2 Corner College Zurich 3 Summer School Course Book 2009

of understanding of art by looking Visiting Poland in 1999, I saw many rules Poles were required to Ken Lum away from what I was accustomed to. an exhibition of Polish conceptual art abide by in their daily lives under I began to embrace an increas- in Warsaw entitled “Conceptual authoritarian rule. Something’s Missing ingly philosophical view of artistic Reflection in Polish Art: Experiences A salient feature of Polish purpose, one inscribed more in terms of Discourse: 1965–1975.” At the conceptualism was the insistence on of the artist’s life and less in terms of time, I was a contributor to ARTMar- audience interaction. In this way, it The Canadian artist Ken Lum delivered the keynote address opening the art world’s idea of the artist. I saw gins, a HTML-based publication of avoided the trap of metaphysical the 2006 Biennale of Sydney. The following is an excerpt. the necessity of letting go of the art the University of California, Santa formalism so endemic to Western world as I knew it in order to be more Barbara, concerned with issues of conceptual art. In Polish conceptual free, to rediscover the true purpose of contemporary Central and Eastern art, metaphysics was but the first step SEVERAL YEARS AGO, IN seen. The man had used the stick-fig- painted and the technical equipment art and to become re-enchanted with European visual culture. The exhibi- of a philosophical proposition, the DAKAR, Senegal, on the occasion ure motif to create a pattern that was older and more modestly scaled it by giving myself over to the world. tion had as its objective a realignment second being its application and of Dak’Art, the largest art biennial in could also seem abstract. The effect of than in the richer biennials of the I became increasingly interested of the field of conceptual art. From grounding in materialism. What is West Africa, I was on Gorée Island, a his works hovered between historical West. Leading critics and curators in initiating projects that could the perspective of the West, the remarkable is how this second step short ferry ride from Dakar, a place and aesthetic engagement. I stopped failed to recognize the degree of lack contribute to a wider understanding primacy of American and Western did not render the works didactic, nor developed during the 17th century as to talk and I asked him about his in a place such as Senegal. Even of contemporary art. In the mid- European conceptual art was de did it diminish any utopian allusions. an administrative post for the embar- work. He told me that they were immersed in the hard realities of West 1990s, I wrote an on-line column for a rigueur in any formulation of art-his- On the contrary, by underpinning kation of slaves destined for the paintings, works of art. I learned that Africa, the myth that all artists start leading English art magazine. In torical narrative and usually went as their art with an analysis of the Americas. For more than three he spoke several languages and had from the same place continued to be 1998, I was appointed project man- follows: Eastern European artists, political economy within which it was centuries, European nations fought worked for some time as a Russian perpetuated. ager for the exhibition “The Short yearning to be free from tyranny, produced, Polish conceptual artists for control of Gorée’s lucrative trade translator when Senegal was briefly a We like to believe that art Century: Independence and Libera- looked to Western artists and institu- expressed a utopianism that was all in human beings. At the former fort client state of the Soviet Union. He operates in a space separate from tion Movements in Africa 1945– tions for guidance. With its emphasis the more painful and fragile to and now museum known as Maison then asked me if I would be interested political economy. We even like to 1994.” In 2001, I organized a sympo- on dematerialized forms and meta- experience. des Esclaves, or House of Slaves, a in buying one of his paintings for a believe that this separation is neces- sium in Italy involving Palestinian physical critique, a Western-formu- This is but one example of the “door of no return” signals the thousand dollars. As I was about to sary in order to maintain a critical and Israeli artists that centred on the lated conceptual art imparted an insight I gained after my refusal to be threshold over which slaves would leave—not committing to a pur- distance from the social order. There question of how one makes art in an inherently democratic ethos that confined by the parameters set by the pass to begin their harrowing, often chase—he said that if I wanted a is some validity to this separation, in environment of great social and made possible an allegorized critique art world. Another comes from deadly transatlantic voyage, shackled painting as a scarf, he would be that critical distance from one’s own political distress. Last year, I co- of Poland’s authoritarian social teaching in Martinique in 1997. The to the low-ceilinged holds of wooden willing to sell it for ten dollars. presuppositions can allow for differ- curated two exhibitions, the first a environment. The lessons offered by Caribbean island is not far from slave ships. The slaves were forced to This story from Senegal is a ent epistemic perspectives. But I am historical project about China’s the West in terms of artistic strategy South America or, for that matter, lie on their backs, pressed up against poignant reminder of the relationship also wary of the ways in which this troubled relationship to modernism would inspire Polish artists to formu- Florida, yet Martinique television one another in head-to-toe and between political economy and art. By separation can be used in the service during the pre-communist period of late their own conceptually based aired only French stations and kiosks toe-to-head formation. On display in political economy, I am referring to of a neo-colonialist logic in the con- Republican rule. The second was the responses to their own subjugation. sold only French publications. The the House of Slaves were various the social determinants of production text of places like Senegal, where, seventh Sharjah International Bien- But this asymmetrical narrative entire media focus was directed to historical documents produced by that shape and place limitations on historically, cultural production has nial, the most serious and ambitious of conceptual art is but one example and from France. The art education colonial officials, including drawings art. The man outside the House of often been measured in imposed- art biennial in the Middle East. I saw of the many problems and contradic- of the students at the Institut régional that depict the organization of human Slaves saw himself as an artist and from-afar formalist or anthropologi- all of these projects as extensions of tions inherent in Western art-histori- d’art visuel reflected Martinique’s cargo on the ships in stick-figure profoundly understood the ways in cal terms, but seldom regarded in my artistic practice, as I no longer cal accounting. Important to consider outre-mer status as a department of form. These drawings were, in which he had been shaped by political terms that recognize indigenously saw artistic practice defined solely in is the specific political context from France. I was struck by their incerti- essence, what businesses today would economy. As I spoke to him, his derived criteria. terms of the production and exhibi- which Polish conceptual art emerged. tude regarding the problem of incor- call efficiency-analysis charts, as they poverty evoked in me the responsibili- There have been several occa- tion of my art. Such a consideration offers a more porating their own situation into their aided slave-trade officials in working ties so well formulated by Walter sions in my life when I contemplated I am constantly asking myself: is complex understanding of conceptual art; the students doubted that their out a ratio of the maximum possible Benjamin in his essay The Author as withdrawing from art in order to find this all there is to art? To ask such a art as a category. Western conceptual- lives could be valid content for art. human freight to the lowest accepta- Producer, in which he expressed his out what I did not know about art. question is to remain forever dissatis- ism used its connections to Polish They knew very little about ble number of deaths. While in the belief that it is incumbent upon the But my withdrawal was in the man- fied, a necessary condition for an conceptualism to dispel an agnostic contemporary art outside of France. House of Slaves, I saw many people artist tfo identify with the poor. He ner of a Heideggerian withdrawal of artist. To be an artist means to be in a ambivalence towards a positioning of They were familiar with Andy who had come to Gorée Island in an wrote that upon seeing a poor man, the withdrawal. The trip I made to constant search for meaning. This art in relation to realpolitik. And Warhol, of course, but a discussion of act of remembrance of their roots. It an artist must recognize “how poor he Dakar in 1998 was undertaken on my calls up Bertolt Brecht’s memorable Polish conceptualism needed Western Warhol would inevitably lead to was quite a moving sight: grown men is and how poor he has to be in order own initiative as a means of breaking two words from The Rise and Fall of conceptualism to push its allegory of Pierre Restany, Martial Raysse and and women sobbing uncontrollably at to begin again from the beginning.” out from the art system as I then the City of Mahagonny: “Something’s politics under the guise of an apoliti- the Nouveaux réalistes, not to Pop the magnitude of the historical Political economy is a constant knew it, an effort to deepen my missing.” In Brecht’s opera, cal universalism. manifestations in South America or trauma. yet largely unspoken referent in many understanding of how art could be Mahagonny is a city built on illusions. Polish conceptualism can only Britain, and certainly not the United Leaving the House of Slaves, I of the contemporary-art biennials that defined differently. This was a time It is “a hollow place” where the be understood by acknowledging the States. The collation of the school’s encountered a man selling what take place around the world. In when I felt great disillusionment promise of human happiness is always cruel absurdity of Poland’s political pedagogical program with Paris was appeared to be scarves. They were Dakar, I heard complaints from about art and great disappointment in tied to money and never met. I had and social environment. In a perform- reflected in the faculty. Almost all of made out of cloth and laid out like several visiting European and Ameri- myself, a crisis of being that I believe started to think of the art world as ance entitled Memorizing, by the the instructors were given bonus drying laundry in the sun. Painted on can critics and curators about how afflicts all artists from time to time. I such a hollow place, where something Polish art collective Druga Grupa, a isolation pay. And despite the paradi- the cloth were stick-figure patterns shoddy Dak’Art looked. Exhibition had a choice: I could either stop being was missing beneath the plenitude of mnemonic exercise of a fortuitously sical setting of Martinique, there was that echoed the drawings I had just walls were not always properly an artist or I could enlarge my frame display and consumption. chosen piece of text underlined the a palpable sense of humiliation among 4 Corner College Zurich 5 Summer School Course Book 2009 the instructors for having to be there. my students saw the world in simi- to be the soul of their city. Chandni Tangled webs of electrical cables I asked myself: how can art compete reflection. Nothing can take the place My students were not very larly bracketed terms. The art school Chowk is an utterly phantasmagoric could be seen overhead in thick and with what I have just experienced? of what I experienced at Chandni familiar with the work of Frantz in Martinique ran counter to my experience. As I was navigated unruly masses. I noticed a large knot How can art even come close to all Chowk, not even art. But what art Fanon, who wrote about the psycho- understanding of what art should do, through its crowded passageways, I of badly burned cables that had that I have seen, smelled, touched and can and should do is evoke Chandni logical effects of colonialism and the which is to raise one’s consciousness wondered what Walter Benjamin melted into a ball. Underneath this heard here? I realized that the ques- Chowk. internalization of racism, and is— of one’s place in the world, and to pro- would have had to say about such a ball I could see the charred surfaces of tion is not a fair one, for art cannot along with Aimé Césaire and Édouard duce expression at the borders of what place. In his discussion of 19th-cen- a former shop, barely visible under a compete. Life is infinitely more Winter 2006 Glissant—one of Martinique’s most can and cannot be said in any given tury Parisian shopping arcades, he skin of brightly coloured posters. A complex. celebrated thinkers. In Black Skin, social and historical context. describes the passageways within the man from the shop opposite noticed And yet art should be about life, White Masks, Fanon wrote: These experiences in Martinique arcades as spatialized pasts: me and shouted, “It was a terrible and draw from it sustenance and are never far from me, regardless of event, the fire.” I looked at the man relevance. The purpose of art should I am not a prisoner of where I am. I believe that the role of The bazaar is the last hangout of the and then up at the burned-out cables. be to offer a space for pause and history. I should not seek the artist is to give expression to his or flâneur. If in the beginning the street there for the meaning of my her experiences in a continuous act of had become an intérieur for him, now destiny. I should constantly self-definition. In a famous passage this intérieur turned into a street, and remind myself that the real from Proust’s Remembrance of he roamed through the labyrinth of leap consists in introducing Things Past, the fictional narrator merchandise as he had once roamed Artur Żmijewski invention into existence. describes the experience of eating a through the labyrinth of the city… In the world through which petite madeleine over lime-blossom The flâneur is someone abandoned in The Applied Social Arts I travel, I am endlessly tea: the crowd. In this he shares the creating myself. situation of the commodity. No sooner had the warm I felt that the students of the Institut liquid mixed with the But the Chawri Bazaar in régional d’art visuel did not question crumbs touched my palette Chandni Chowk is far more halluci- enough the world that produced than a shudder ran through natory in the breadth and depth of its DOES CONTEMPORARY ART HAVE ANY VISIBLE SOCIAL utable to art are now suspect; every visible change occasioned them. The problem was not compla- me and I stopped, intent sensory offerings. In contrast with IMPACT? Can the effects of an artist’s work be seen and veri- by its commitments has come under fire. The unseen authority cency, as is often the case with art upon the extraordinary Benjamin’s emphasis on the singular- fied? Does art have any political significance—besides serving that comes from the co-creation of symbolic realities lend struc- students from places of surfeit and thing that was happening ity of the flâneur’s experience in the as a whipping boy for various populists? Is it possible to engage ture to our shared world. whether we like it or not, even this privilege. Rather, they had not been to me... I put down the cup Parisian arcades, spectatorial embodi- in a discussion with art—and is it worth doing so? Most of all, is being challenged. That tangle of shame, fear of appropria- given the tools to critique their own and examined my own ment is completely broken down in why are questions of this kind viewed as a blow against the very tion, and the desire for influence has led to alienation. Shame situation. As a result, they were mind. the Chawri Bazaar. To enter this essence of art? has set in motion the mechanisms of repression and denial. unable to define themselves in relation space is to enter a maze of narrow Art had long struggled to gain autonomy, to free itself Instead of drawing enjoyment from the outcome of their to historical trauma in the context of The passage articulates the lanes teeming with people—from from politics, religion, authority, and everything else that sought actions, the visual and performing arts are content merely to the Caribbean. I sensed their sense of centrality of sensory experience to shoppers and urchin children to to use art for its own ends. Independence was to have made dream of such outcomes: fantasy has supplanted reality. isolation, their sense of “something’s artistic consciousness. Being an artist beggars and mendicants. Tiny shops art more important: every avant-garde movement saw art as The autonomy of art has therefore made it “inconsequen- missing.” entails the assumption that everything saturated with colour and flashing being equal in stature with such reality-shapers as science, tial.” The actions of art no longer have any visible or verifiable When I asked where they had in life is relevant. I have learned that lights compete for the attention of the knowledge, politics, or religion. Aleksander Lipski wrote: impact. The deficit that Peter Bürger once discerned in bour- travelled to, they said they had not the expression of experience need not throngs of people filling the narrow geois art has made its way into high culture: “the exaltation of been anywhere except Guadeloupe, be determined by the dictates of the passageways. The market is divided Non-figurative art has struck at the inviolable core art above day-to-day experience [is] typical for the status of a an island north of Martinique that is art system. This does not mean that I into different quarters, each specializ- of the traditional artistic paradigm requiring the work of art in a bourgeois society… Aestheticism is also a man- also an outre-mer department of have completely extricated myself ing in particular commodities and depiction of figures. The global artistic revolution ifestation of art’s failure to produce social consequences.”2 Nat- France. Asked where they would like from this system, only that I have services, from foodstuffs and fabrics is therefore the culmination of the emancipation of urally, social consequences have occurred, but not necessarily to travel, they unanimously responded re-evaluated what it means to be an to chemicals and industrial appli- art. The process whereby art severed all ties and the ones that were most desired. Over the last fifteen years or Paris. While most people would like artist. ances. Interspersed throughout are allegiance to externalities such as politics, religion, so, these consequences have included the following: to travel to Paris, their response In Delhi last year, I was part of a countless eateries engulfed in steam philosophy, technology and the mores of the day reminded me of a scene from Touki conference entitled “The Making of and filling the air with a plethora of was complete with the abandonment of one last 1. Scandals breaking out over the topics art pro- Bouki, a key film of the West African International Exhibitions: Siting smells. Barking voices from mega- principle—that of signification.1 posed to introduce into public debate. new-wave cinema of the 1970s, in Biennials,” organized by Geeta Kapur phones clash with music from loud- which the two protagonists inces- and Vivan Sundaram. The theme of speakers. There are mosques, Hindu The desire to be an active agent creating the social and politi- 2. The continuing brutalisation of public debate has santly sing the Josephine Baker song the conference had to do with what and Sikh temples and Catholic and cal environment came up against a hidden enemy, however. been attributed by Gazeta Wyborcza journalist “Paris, Paris.” Touki Bouki is about Kapur has described as a reimagining Protestant churches all in close That enemy was—and still is—shame. Politically committed art Anna Zawadzka to the violent language used by art the psychic persistence of colonialism of community that considers the proximity to one other. Little children has often come to a tragic end. Artists supporting totalitarian in the 1990s and the resulting media backlash. among the colonized; it persisted specificities of the developing world’s barely the height of my waist weaved regimes, like the Nazi sculptors Josef Thorak and Arno Breker, among my students in terms of where relationship to modernism. themselves around the adults, head- or filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, compromised the very possibil- 3. Players from the realm of politics “learning” how they desired to go. The film presents During an afternoon break, I ing for where I had no idea. Teams of ity of art becoming an instrument of politics. Polish art owes its to use subversive strategies that had once been the dream of going to Paris as a took a bicycle-cab ride through long-limbed, yellow-brown monkeys sense of shame to its fling with socialist realism. proper to art. Subversive strategies “are the best self-searching journey and makes Delhi’s busy streets to the Chawri darted from the shoulders of one Guilt and shame associated with the past alongside the example of Benjamin’s proposed shift of emphasis ironic the unfulfilled promises of the Bazaar in Chandni Chowk, a 17th-cen- person to the next, their sudden desire for art to be an active, contributing presence in public from ’content’ to ’apparatuses of production’ that post-colonial condition. In my view, tury market considered by Delhiites appearance surprising no one but me. life has produced a paradoxical effect. All consequences attrib- enable one to use ’foreign’ representations in mak- 6 Corner College Zurich 7 Summer School Course Book 2009

ing one’s own work.”3 One instance of such sub- The consequence of the trauma of “being used” is refusal. Guilt Since the 1990s, art has been growing increasingly insti- hermeneutics of the “socially evident.” With her action where versive action was when right-wing deputies to the and shame have been encoded in art as a “flight from”—an tutionalised. Institutional critics, now in charge of defining the she peeled potatoes in Warsaw’s Zachęta gallery, Julita Wójcik Polish parliament Witold Tomczak and Halina ongoing process of inner negotiation well-expressed in the title remit of art, have been moving to mitigate art’s “ideological encouraged us to read that commonplace activity as a state- Nowina-Konopczyna removed the stone (meteor) of an exhibition Grzegorz Kowalski and Maryla Sitkowska turpitude.” Fantasies about the alleged “needs” of the market- ment about the shifting battlefield and a nod at things that are from the prone figure of pope John Paul II (Mau- mounted on the centenary of the Academy of Fine Arts in War- place are also discouraging more radical forms of expression. really hidden outside the pale of high culture. Wójcik contrib- rizio Catellan’s La Nona Ora) during an exhibition saw: Duty and Rebellion.4 Even though the exhibition con- Defiance can only be taken so far nowadays, and besides: the uted to changing the protagonist: the nature of reality is deter- in Warsaw’s Zachęta gallery in December 2000. cerned the academy as an institution, its title was indicative of art market will also commodify rebellion. Art is becoming more mined by an “invisible majority,” rather than exotic exceptions. Tomczak and Konopczyna demonstrated they could a split present within art. This split allows art to “work for” the and more anodyne. Critique along these lines can involve either artistic identifica- “read and understand” the strategies of art, and state and the national economy, and serve society as a shaper Shame constitutes a deep emotional substratum of art. tion with “the causes of evil” or interventionist and remedial were capable of using them. Once Tomczak and of environments, producer of visual information systems, Shame at having been implicated in power relations and endors- action insofar as that is possible. These are the constituents of Konopczyna learned how to perpetrate a transgres- designer of interiors and industrial goods, in short—to do its ing totalitarian regimes prevents it from engaging in politics or a paradigm shift involving explicit support for processes of mod- sion, and violate the taboo associated with gallery duty. On the other hand, art is kept from lapsing into depend- explicitly creating discourses of knowledge. Anything political ernization or discourses of knowledge, sometimes even agree- spaces, they simply responded “in kind,” using the ence on the authorities by its rebelliousness, because it insist- and scientific can only be a by-product of art. Owing to this ing to undertake topical intervention and negotiate on behalf language of gestures and visual action, or the lan- ently challenges the taboo, nurtures dreams, proliferates free- reluctance to “take ownership of knowledge,” attempts to call of vulnerable groups. One can say that this has partly helped guage of performance. In 1997, Katarzyna Kozyra dom, and produces social knowledge, (art can be said to be an attention to social problems or discuss areas society would oth- overcome the alienation of art, its shying away from conse- used a hidden camera to film women in a Budapest open university of knowledge). Art constantly offers and denies erwise be indifferent to are accompanied by opposition and even quence, and its refusal to exert any real and verifiable influence. bathhouse, and did the same in a men’s establish- its services to the powers that be. In doing its duty it usually hostility towards discourses appointed to handle these problems But there is more at stake: regaining control over the ideology ment two years later. The resulting film was shown does not cross a certain line marked out by shame. The dead- and issues, i.e. science and politics. Autonomy in art has gone that leads to the unthinking generation of autonomy and is the at the Venice biennale, causing the inevitable uproar lock between duty and rebellion does not permit identification so far as to become a measure of ideological purity, an acid test cause of continual regress, and limiting the audacity and scope in the Polish press. Repetition and media coverage or affinity with other discourses that are somehow associated of “artistic integrity.” Symbolic power, strength through knowl- of artistic action. helped bring this “denunciatory” strategy into the with authority. At most, art can impersonate or lampoon them: edge, openly political attitudes are simply rejected. One of the reasons for the alienation of art is that it relies mainstream. In 2002, newspaper editor Adam imitate the language of politics and religion, lampoon (differ- On top of it all, one has to contend with the ignorance on the language of images. Despite their immediacy, images Michnik secretly recorded film producer Lew Rywin ent word) the language of the media, go for the grotesque. A of artists. As Marcin Czerwiński wrote back in the 1970s, art- remain unclear to representatives of other disciplines. Pictures when the latter came asking for a bribe, while in sense of duty attenuates all attempts at rebellion, while outward ists do not have “the ability to translate intuition into discursive are not texts. Rather, they are read “all at once,” and all their 2006 member of parliament Renata Beger filmed rebellion compromises duty. This sets the frame for art, con- language” and thus rely on “the germs of truth scattered across meanings are taken in with a single glance. Such a suspension her privately conducted negotiations with other fined within the bounds of duty and subject to an ethics of, reality that have the potential to develop into either ideas or of linear reading, and the fact that meaning reveals itself in a politicians and released the recordings to the media. necessarily noble, rebellion delimited by shame. Thus does art images.”6 That is one of the reasons why art has been called a flash, opening up a whole range of associations is tantamount Kozyra, Michnik and Beger all engaged in similarly erect a cognitive barrier for itself. Shame acts as an inner social symptom. The euphemism refers to the unwitting, intu- to “cognitive violence.” There is less scope for “proprietary questionable behaviour while emphasising the ends “parole officer” making sure rebellion is not taken too far. Art itive way it performs an assigned task. Artists as creative indi- images” than reading a text provides. Texts stimulate the imag- justifying their choice of means. Transgression has may be political as long as it stays away from politics—it can viduals are, according to this view, unwitting mediums of social ination: when we read we see images—a mosaic of visualisations thus become a valid political strategy. Since then, a act politically in galleries but not in real-life debates unfolding processes. Willingly or not they visualise its crucial junctures in emerging from the memory and “superimposed onto” the text. whole series of “negative” transgressions or viola- in a different communal space, such as the media. It may be a perfectly mindless way. That makes the artist an idiot savant Therein lies the blankness of words: a word is not the things it tions of democratic taboos have been perpetrated social as long as it does not produce social consequences. In of sorts: someone with interesting and important things to say names. Images are bolder in the way they refer to the object by education minister Roman Giertych. the Nieznalska affair, for instance,5 the accusations in the media, but no idea how these things came to them or what use to put depicted. “In a picture the object surrenders itself entirely and the indictment, the hearings in court, were treated by Dorota them to. Czerwinski calls such a state “ideological abstinence,” its image is sure—as opposed to text and other perceptions that 4. Violating one set of taboos leads to the emer- Nieznalska and her circle as a calamity rather than an opportu- while Joanna Tokarska-Bakir has this to say on the subject: render the object blurred and debatable, and as such cause me gence of other taboos (Joanna Tokarska-Bakir); per- nity to practice art “by other means.” They baulked at the to mistrust what I seem to be seeing.”8 haps art contributed to redrawing the map with its prospect of exerting social impact. The artists of today might in a somewhat 19th cen- Confronted with a picture, the imagination works not to focus on some parts of the body politic, as a result Having an effect implies some kind of power, and having tury way be perceived as secularised high priests fill in the blankness of words, but to determine, “What is it that of which others became taboo. Art has therefore power is what art fears the most. The problem is that it already who, acting ’through the symbolic medium that is I see?” Yet what else can the thing I see be, since it is already, struggled to retain its power to act, but it should has power. Art has the power to name and define, to intervene the physical human body,’ try to act out ritually a “Everything there is?” The inability to read images is surely a have remained as perpetually neutral as Switzerland in the workings of culture, exert pressure on elements of the certain form of unexplored social relations that has form of illiteracy, and experts from other fields could do with in its exercise. And what would constitute fair use social structure by turning them into artefacts (art works). And come to dominate the world. The problem being a few remedial classes. The ignorance here is twofold: artists of that power? Let me quote an exhibition invita- every artefact is after all an apparatus for actively modelling that the relations they want to express through art are seen as ignorant by experts in other fields and vice versa: tion sent out over the Web: “A profound interest fragments of reality. If politics is the power to name things, art are understood neither by themselves nor by the experts in the field of, say, science or politics are as helpless as in the physical and mental limitations of human has that power—perhaps even in spite of itself. Even a love societies they want to reveal them to.7 children when it comes to “reading” images. Anthropology, for beings has become the wellspring of Żmijewski’s story is an agent of cultural power because it can induce or one, holds the view that art’s involvement in various kinds of artistic inquiries, leading to questions his bewildered channel emotional needs. It might, in fact, be in the interest of society to keep art- social criticism brings unclear effects: viewers ineffectually seek to answer.” The forego- Let’s get back to the freedom associated with rebellion. ists ignorant to some extent. The cognitive procedures of art ing provides a simple definition of what artists Is rebellion in art a manifestation of freedom? No, because it based on risk and intuition seem threatening. The lameness of Documentary practice has come to resemble fine should make viewers: bewildered recipients ineffec- is limited by duty. Rebellion has its limits; these are reached theoretical education in art schools might be a symptom of arts photography—by drawing on the more subtle tually looking for answers. Evidently, art produces much earlier than the ones laid down by civil and criminal law. unconscious reluctance on the part of the community to and abstract forms of photographic expression—at states of helplessness and generates questions to Rebellion has been harnessed to achieve a dialectical rupture. enhance the intuitive tools of art. a time when photography as an art form is evolving which there are no answers. The word “ineffectu- Where there is no rebellion, duty reigns, and art is reduced to Is there a way out of this trap? Is it possible to stop defin- into some kind of fuzzy social criticism, ambiguous ally” bespeaks the alienation art has unknowingly the ancillary function of satisfying social needs and supporting ing what does and does not befit a client of the authorities, of rather than straightforward and literal: a function lapsed into. Asked what made him become an the authorities. Rebellion must be present to offset the perform- business, and even a rebel? Art has already made a step towards of how photographers perceive society than of sys- actor, Jeremy Irons, known for his portrayal of ance of shameful duties. That is why it is part of the package doing away with this dialectics. It has assumed the position of tematic analysis.9 tragic lovers (Swann’s Way, Lolita) answered that with its illusion of autonomy. Rebellion is, so to speak, “a duty.” a judge, an evaluator—the paradoxical position of an “involved he wanted to be “outside of society.” observer.” It has elaborated strategies of social critique—a 8 Corner College Zurich 9 Summer School Course Book 2009

The findings that artists put forward are seen as too ambiguous tradictions and anxiety, mistakes and hopes, good and ethical like other tools. Autonomy would then once more become use- tangle of its ambiguity, stature, and immunity. Opponents find and not verifiable in any scientific way. But this only shows how deficiency, authoritarianism and timidity, it is all of these things ful for the carrying out of plans and would no longer be a means this knot nearly impossible to disentangle; it perpetuates the prone to “cognitive fundamentalism” science is when faced with at once. In order to know reality, art does not patronize but of controlling our (the artists’) “ideological purity.” Instrumen- symbolic violence encoded in art. Usually there is no dialogue an intuitive medium.The result is another ideological debate in becomes one with it. “Impossible,” science would protest, “the talization is a “choice of dependency.” Art could once again in the first place. There is only a monologue where the artist which opposing arguments are derided as being unclear, vague, observer must be external with respect to the object under serve as an instrument of knowledge, science, and politics. provides a single canonical interpretation. If there are any bat- ambiguous, etc. The passage quoted above also tells us that sci- observation. S/he is placed outside by the very act of observa- tles at all, they are waged to maintain the supremacy of that ence has learned “more subtle and abstract forms of photo- tion.” Art, meanwhile, claims that this need not be the case. 2. The second way would be to encroach upon other fields, interpretation. graphic expression” from art. Now that it has “become aware” The bracket and its observer intermesh in a total cognitive expe- such as science or politics, as a way of proving oneself. The of the cultural ubiquity of images, does science not want to rience. The observer emerges out of it through the image which point is to work with people who are not in awe of art. Stature 3. It is also worth trying to keep statements by reviewers from dominate over the ways they are read just as it has dominated becomes both the gateway to knowledge and its source—a ref- is what protects artists and critics from being “called.” There being treated as decrees. Since the turn of the century we have our thinking about knowledge, by peremptorily persuading us erent, an address, a hotlink. Images as an extremely capacious is the famous story about Duchamp submitting a urinal he been witnessing a clear ideological asymmetry—the voice of it is the only credible source of that knowledge? form of writing in which contradiction and incoherence may be signed R. Mutt for an exhibition. The qualifying committee artists is growing fainter. It is being drowned by successive teams Furthermore, the knowledge that emerges as the product inscribed without detriment to the discourse, convey total rejected the work, with only Duchamp himself voting in favour. of reviewers proclaiming the emergence or obsolescence of cer- of artistic activity is obstinately reduced to the status of a merely knowledge—everything there is to know. But there are, in that The piece could only be shown once Duchamp admitted it was tain subjects in art. Such was the case with the new banalists; aesthetic proposition by experts from other fields. Even though simultaneity, orders of reading, layered like a theatre stage: his work. What made the difference was the stature of the with art meant to be helpful; with art addressing issues of glo- art literally “shows” what it has come to know, and its knowl- upstage, centre-stage, downstage, wings, etc. author. balization. The most notorious statement to that effect was edge is discursive and lends itself to reasoning, the cliché that The problem has to do with the language of critical prac- The stature and immunity that protect art are unknown made by Magdalena Ujma on the website of the Bunkier Sztuki art is merely a producer of aesthetics is so ingrained that it pro- tice whose associations make it possible for art to be defined in sciences such as, say, anthropology or sociology. There, an gallery, when she said that taking an interest in power has duces an “indifference effect” among experts from other fields. as inimical to society. One example is the language used to artist’s statement is a verifiable hypothesis that can be refuted become “passé.” The following year sociologist Jadwiga Stan- The knowledge art has generated remains inaccessible to them define the concept of an “artistic virus.” Art, it claims, pro- with the aid of other, more convincing arguments. Experts from iszkis published O wladzy i bezsilnosci13 [“On Power and Pow- – they are unable to read it. Meanwhile it was none other than duces artefacts: social and cultural events that “infect” various other fields are substantively better prepared to debate the erlessness”], a book taking up the issue of new forms of power, an anthropologist who wrote the following passage: parts of the social system just like viruses infect an organism. claims art makes. Since art is interested in social issues, what its changing image and means of control, and last but not least They “damage” or “alter” it. The infected system must change: better interlocutor for it than a sociologist or social psycholo- its networked nature. Would Staniszkis also regard an [aca- In this language [of film] individual images/frames heal or be cured. The problem is that the associations produced gist? I do not want to overestimate specialists in other disci- demic] interest in power as being “passé?” In a world where are words, shots and camera angles are the inflec- by the word “virus” are all negative: poison, disease, parasite, plines—they too are limited by the invisible assumptions of their the authorities fall back on “the terrorist threat” in order to tional elements, while editing provides the syntax. enemy. The concept of art as a virus infecting and operating in fields. Nonetheless art reviewers lack competence. They need reassert their prerogatives, where the government eavesdrops […] A series of images, arranged—organised— various parts of the social system leaves no room for verifica- sociological, philosophical and psychological expertise. Karol on law-abiding citizens, and changes the meaning of language, according to a certain convention (the grammar of tion—what is the impact of the infection? Does it ever occur Sienkiewicz in Sekcja, an Internet magazine run by Art History can power be so naively dismissed? Magdalena Ujma’s com- cinema) into a collection of takes directly linked to at all? How do we check what an “artistic virus” has done? Can students at Warsaw University, sums up the discussion around ment brought out a crucial problem, that of the loss of an one another in terms of meaning, makes up a the impact be anything other than just infection? Infection Repetition as follows: acquired competence. Encroaching upon the study of power phrase of editing. […] Depending on the way which is in itself an achievement because it sets in motion fan- relations gave art valuable competence in that field. But such images and shots are spliced together, on the phrases tasies of change and influence. Less relevant are the artistic merits of the competence has no chance of holding its own against the asym- used in editing, the idiom of film may be used to Why must we talk about viruses, and not algorithms for project— “project” because it cannot be brought metry of strength and frequency that obtains between state- construct ’epic phrases’ declarative sentences of instance? In mathematics, computing, linguistics, and related down to a forty-odd minute long film. I am not ments by critics and artists. Artists “keep quiet”—they are sorts, depicting a slice of life, an action sequence, disciplines, an algorithm is a procedure (a finite set of well- referring to the editing, the aesthetic categories or reluctant to defend and explain their actions, and leave that fragments of an event. One can also compose (edit) defined instructions) for accomplishing some task which, given whether this or that critic was bored during the task up to reviewers. What art will and will not be interested in so-called ’reasoned phrases’—through the skilful an initial state, will terminate in a defined end-state. “In math- screening—such categories are irrelevant when try- can be determined by the skillful management of fads, by term- arrangement of semantically unrelated visual and/ ematics and computer science algorithms are finite, orderly sets ing to judge or interpret Repetition. Perhaps art his- ing this or that “passé,” and by alternately praising and wound- or sonic (verbal, musical) fragments—thus evoking of clearly defined actions necessary to perform a task in a lim- tory and criticism with all their tools are still help- ing the narcissist within every artist. This is where something I associations, bringing out analogies, and even con- ited number of steps… Algorithms are to guide a system from less in the face of [the work]. An art historian want- would call ideological amnesia and the amnesia of competence structing metaphorical sentences. In effect, a cine- a certain initial state to a desired final state.”11 Such rigorous ing to take part in a discussion among sociologists come in. Art becomes skilled in carrying out certain cognitive matic text may assume forms resembling discourse, procedures would, of course be dysfunctional when applied to and psychologists can only assume the role of a procedures; when these become useful and universally applied, and thus satisfy the basic requirement made of a art. But if a virus can be a metaphor for action, so can an algo- homespun connoisseur.”12 they are compromised. This is what leads to ideological amne- scientific language.”10 rithm. Algorithms imply something operational and positive, a sia, or the loss of an acquired competence. Just as art accumu- mode of purposeful action. I am not proposing that we artifi- Critics often do not know enough; this lack of knowledge lates knowledge about modes of visual action: composition, As I have indicated, art has, of its own accord, rejected conse- cially replace one term with another, but that we change the can lead art back to aestheticising. In the archaic, circular mode colour, spatial relations, so could it, in theory, verbalize and quences, and turned its back on effects. Nonetheless, it still meanings of language; that the new meanings would allow us of communication where critics mediate between the artist and accumulate knowledge about the cognitive and critical proce- manages to come up with useful cognitive procedures. Existen- to consider the possibility of impact, to see art as a “device that the viewer, lack of knowledge on the part of critics “forces” art- dures it applies. tial algorithms, the use of which makes it possible to “keep your produces impact” and operate as guides for systems from a ists to simplify their message and return to a reduced art— one Does that mean that extending the scope of freedom in eyes open” when exploring social structures, and to enter into certain initial state to a desired final state. that is restricted to the bounds critics have set for it. With this art is not merely an illusion? “The decrees of reviewers” have hidden places and true relations. In the cognitive equation we Neither the immunity of art nor its stature has any effect art, their competence is able to “handle.” For what the critic left us with an internal hegemonic discourse where pluralism construct out of known and unknown qualities so that we may, on science, and neither science nor politics are afraid of art. cannot understand cannot be expressed and never makes it into shoud have been. A true area of freedom could be obtained in solving it, make the world a more transparent place, art has What ought to be done, now that too much autonomy has led the circuit of knowledge. It is not revealed within the work. by simply using the plural: for example, if we had areas, fields replaced speculation with existence. Existence speculates, to the alienation of art, so that it is “not heard” and most of That, too, is one of the effects—and causes—of alienation. of freedom. A variety of fields of interest and, above all, if we thinks, and comes to know itself. Rather than drawing graphs, the knowledge it generates is being squandered? It would be interesting if a work of art were “defeated” kept and developed the competencies we had once acquired. art becomes involved in real situations. Its cognitive strategies in the course of a genuine discussion or a clash of arguments. Instrumentalization of autonomy makes it possible to use do not place reality in brackets like science does. It goes beyond 1. The first way could be for art to instrumentalize its own At the moment, a discusssion with such an ending is not pos- art for all sorts of things: as a tool for obtaining and dissemi- the bracket—knowledge emerges within life, springs out of emo- autonomy and thus regain control over it. Instrumentalization sible: art overwhelms its opponents. You could say that the abil- nating knowledge and as a producer of cognitive procedures tion, visions, sensations, and real experience. Suffused with con- would mean reducing the role of autonomy to that of a tool ity to defeat opponents is embedded in a work of art or the relying on intuition and the imagination and serving the cause 10 Corner College Zurich 11 Summer School Course Book 2009 of knowledge and political action. Naturally, art may still per- exercises in thinking and discovering the world. There is doubt- form its classical function and express “the most poignant less some political interest in keeping art weak by forcing it to Boris Groys moments of the human condition.” Control over autonomy is flounder between ignorance and knowledge and having it per- not the only kind of control that should be achieved. There is petuate seemingly useful clichés regarding beauty and the artsy Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility still the problem of originality and opaqueness. These too types who produce it. In the collective circuit of power, art is should be tools that can be used freely when the need arises. never “charged” as its “inventions” are not accepted. Arrested One would have to strip originality of its judgmental function, on the verge of the rational, it makes its actions out to be noth- that is its propensity for control and exclusion. ing more than vivid yet irrational fantasies. In the 1990s it I think that art could try and restore the original mean- played the rube, paying its share of the bill for the changes hap- ings of words. The term autonomy would then mean the right pening in the country (that would partly account for the scan- to choose a sphere of freedom instead of being an extreme per- dals around art in recent years) – knocking on a weak discourse These days, almost everyone seems to media automatically covers their artwork than to be an artist. Of course, sonality trait. Originality would be a sign of creativity and not pays off in the economics of national frustration. In any strug- agree that the times in which art tried activities. In the past, the division of becoming an artwork not only pro- novelty at all costs. And, finally, opaqueness would be indica- gle for power somebody has to play the useful idiot – and art to establish its autonomy—success- labor between politics and art was vokes pleasure, but also the anxiety of tive of the difficulty of a message, not its illegibility and inabil- with its naivete and lack of defensive strategies was often used fully or unsuccessfully—are over. And quite clear: the politician was respon- being subjected in a very radical way ity to communicate. for such a purpose, notably by the LPR15 . We all lost out on yet this diagnosis is made with mixed sible for the politics and the artist to the gaze of the other—to the gaze of Will dependence on other discourses: politics and science our the failure to use the cognitive procedures developed by feelings. One tends to celebrate the represented those politics through the media functioning as a super-art- not lead to an ideological reduction of content to what is use- art to any greater extent. These procedures are based on intu- readiness of contemporary art to narration or depiction. The situation ist. ful from the standpoint of a group’s political interests, for ition and imagination, denying one’s righteousness and giving transcend the traditional confines of has changed drastically since then. instance? Such a risk does exist but there are at least two rea- up judgementalism. the art system, if such a move is The contemporary politician no longer I would characterize this anxiety as sons why it should be taken up: Intuition and the imagination embrace repressed and dictated by a will to change the needs an artist to gain fame or inscribe one of self-design because it forces denied fantasies, desires and needs, and help search for ways dominant social and political condi- himself within popular consciousness. the artist—as well as almost anybody 1. Art manages very well in risky areas, while the to satisfy them. Renouncing the role of judge will reveal our tions, to make the world a better Every important political figure and who comes to be covered by the “uselessness” artists feel can encourage risky behav- collective and individual complicity in the injustices of the sys- place—if the move, in other words, is event is immediately registered, media—to confront the image of the iour. Wilhelm Sasnal said he sometimes feels like a tem. Then it will no longer be “them” but us who will share ethically motivated. One tends to represented, described, depicted, self: to correct, to change, to adapt, to “gallery louse” in collaborating with an art world responsibility for the way our shared reality looks. deplore, on the other hand, that narrated, and interpreted by the media. contradict this image. Today, one often that produces tautological references. Dependence attempts to transcend the art system The machine of media coverage does hears that the art of our time functions Notes on clearly “utilitarian discourses” is in all likelihood never seem to lead beyond the aes- not need any individual artistic inter- increasingly in the same way as a subconscious desire on the part of artists expressed 1 A. Lipski, Elementy socjologii sztuki. 9 D. Harper, “On the Authority of the thetic sphere: instead of changing the vention or artistic decision in order to design, and to a certain extent this is Problem awangardy artystycznej XX Image: Visual Methods at the Cross- in fantasies of change that could occur through the wieku [Elements of the Sociology of roads” in Antropologia obrazu world, art only makes it look better. be put into motion. Indeed, contempo- true. But the ultimate problem of agency of art. Art. Issues of the Artistic Avant-garde of [Anthropology of the Image], ed. K. This causes a great deal of frustration rary mass media has emerged as by design concerns not how I design the the 20th Century] (Wroclaw: Atla 2, Olechnicki, (Warszawa: Oficyna within the art system, in which the far the largest and most powerful world outside, but how I design 2001). Naukowa, 2003). 2. Politics, science, and religion can do what art no predominant mood appears to almost machine for producing images—vastly myself—or, rather, how I deal with the longer can: achieve a connection with reality by 2 P. Bürger, Theory of the Avant- 10 R. Vorbrich, “Tekst werbalny i perpetually shift back and forth more extensive and effective than the way in which the world designs me. Garde (Minneapolis: University of niewerbalny” [“Verbal and Non-verbal producing useful tools: tools for the implementa- Minnesota Press, 1984). Text”] in Antropologia wobec fotografii i between hopes to intervene in the contemporary art system. We are Today, this has become a general, tion of power and of knowledge. By becoming once filmu [Anthropology and Photography world beyond art and disappointment constantly fed images of war, terror, all-pervasive problem with which 3 Ł. Ronduda, “Strategie subwersywne and Film], (Poznan: Biblioteka Teglte, again dependent, art may learn how to be socially w sztukach medialnych” ["Subversive 2004). (even despair) due to the impossibility and catastrophe of all kinds at a level everyone—and not just politicians, useful, even at an operational level (it already knows Strategies in the Media-based Arts"], of achieving such a goal. While this of production and distribution with movie stars, and celebrities—is con- how to challenge reality and can count on support http://www.exchangegallery.cosmosnet. 11 Wikipedia, http://pl.wikipedia.org/ failure is often interpreted as proof of which the artist’s artisanal skills fronted. Today, everyone is subjected pl/subwersywne_text.html wiki/Algorytm. for its proliferation of rebellion). art’s incapacity to penetrate the cannot compete. to an aesthetic evaluation—everyone 4 Powinnosc i Bunt. Akademia Sztuk 12 K. Sienkiewicz, “Bezradność krytyka. political sphere as such, I would argue is required to take aesthetic responsi- Pieknych w Warszawie 1944 – 2004 Uwagi na marginesie dyskusji o A good example of an artistic activity not afraid of entering [Duty and Rebellion. The Academy of Powtórzeniu Artura Żmijewskiego” instead that if the politicization of art is Now, if an artist does manage to go bility for his or her appearance in the into various forms of dependence is film. Film is literally “used” Fine Arts in Warsaw] (Galeria Zachęta, ["The Helplessness of the Critic. seriously intended and practiced, it beyond the art system, this artist world, for his or her self-design. Where 2004). Comments on the Discussion about mostly succeeds. Art can in fact enter begins to function in the same way it was once a privilege and a burden by various discourses. Film is a way to intervene, fight for some- Artur Żmijewski’s Repetition"], http:// thing, inform, educate, update knowledge, tell fairy tales, per- 5 In 2001, Dorota Nieznalska showed www.sekcja.org/miesiecznik.php?id_ the political sphere and, indeed, art that politicians, sports heroes, terror- for the chosen few, in our time self- suade, call attention to problems, critical junctures, etc. And a cruciform lightbox at the Wyspa artykulu=107. already has entered it many times in ists, movie stars, and other minor or design has come to be the mass gallery in Gdańsk. In the centre of the film is very close to the realm of art. Today, the camera is the cross was placed a photo depicting male 13 J. Staniszkis, O władzy i bezsilności the twentieth century. The problem is major celebrities already function: cultural practice par excellence. The artist’s best friend. genitalia. The object was accused of [On Power and Powerlessness] (Kraków: not art’s incapacity to become truly through the media. In other words, the virtual space of the Internet is primarily offending religious sentiments, and a Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006). In a text about Elżbieta Jabłońska critic Dorota Jarecka lengthy court case ensued. political. The problem is that today’s artist becomes the artwork. While the an arena in which MyFace and asked: “Whom should art serve today, and for what pur- 14 D. Jarecka, “To już fanaberia political sphere has already become transition from the art system to the MySpace are permanently designed pose?”... [Should it] engage in political discussion that will 6 M. Czerwinski, Samotnosc sztuki Jabłońskiej” [“A Bee in Jabłońska’s aestheticized. When art becomes political field is possible, this transition and redesigned to be presented on [The Solitude of Art] (Warszawa: PIW, Bonnet”] , Gazeta Wyborcza, April 7, always be inadequate when placed against the discourse of phi- 1978). 2006. political, it is forced to make the operates primarily as a change in the YouTube—and vice versa. But likewise losophers and sociologists?”14 Yes, it should engage in such dis- unpleasant discovery that politics has positioning of the artist vis-à-vis the in the real—or, let’s say, analog— 7 J. Tokarska-Bakir, “Energia 15 The League of Polish Families is a cussion. Art will enhance that discussion with its ability to use odpadków” ["The Energy of Waste"] political party established in 2001 already become art—that politics has production of the image: the artist world, one is expected to be responsi- different strategies, its familiarity with intuition, imagination, Res Publica Nowa, no. 3 (2006). following the merger of several already situated itself in the aesthetic ceases to be an image producer and ble for the image that he or she Catholic-national factions. and premonition. Unfortunately, art also has severe weaknesses 8 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: field. becomes an image himself. This presents to the gaze of others. It could and tends to dismiss its own importance. It has infused its dis- Reflections on Photography (New York: transformation was already registered even be said that self-design is a course with self-compromising, amnesia, and recurring igno- Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981). In our time, every politician, sports in the late nineteenth century by practice that unites artist and audi- rance. Theoretical subjects in art school are taught as if they hero, terrorist, or movie star generates Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously ence alike in the most radical way: were merely a device for expanding the memory rather than Source: www.artmargins.com/content/feature/zmijewski.htm a large number of images because the claimed that it is better to be an though not everyone produces art- 12 Corner College Zurich 13 Summer School Course Book 2009

works, everyone is an artwork. At the throughout the whole history of to be a catastrophic one, because we the politicians look trustworthy, one seem primarily to benefit the artist, taste, a good deal of the art held in same time, everyone is expected to be modernity: the modern artist has suspect something terrible to be going must create a moment of who shows himself to be an active museums today would have landed in his or her own author. always positioned himself or herself as on behind the design—cynical manip- disclosure—a chance to peer though individual in opposition to a passive, the trash a long time ago. Communal the only honest person in a world of ulation, political propaganda, hidden the surface to say, “Oh, this politician anonymous mass audience. Whereas participation within the same eco- Now, every kind of design—including hypocrisy and corruption. Let us briefly intrigues, vested interests, crimes. is as bad as I always supposed him or the artist has the power to popularize nomic practice also weakens the self-design—is primarily regarded not investigate how the production of Following the death of God, the her to be.” With this disclosure, trust in his or her name, the identities of the radical separation between artist and as a way to reveal things, but as a way sincerity and trust has functioned in conspiracy theory became the only the system is restored through a ritual viewers remain unknown in spite of audience, encouraging a certain to hide them. The aestheticization of the modern period in order to charac- surviving form of traditional metaphys- of symbolic sacrifice and self-sacrifice, their role in providing the validation complicity in which the public is politics is similarly considered to be a terize the way it functions today. ics as a discourse about the hidden stabilizing the celebrity system by that facilitates the artist’s success. forced to respect an artwork for its way of substituting substance with and the invisible. Where we once had confirming the suspicion to which it is Modern art can thus easily be miscon- high price even when that artwork is appearance, real issues with superfi- One might argue that the modernist nature and God, we now have design necessarily already subjected. Accord- strued as an apparatus for manufac- not well liked. However, there still cial image-making. While the issues production of sincerity functioned as a and conspiracy theory. ing to the economy of symbolic turing artistic celebrity at the expense remains a significant difference constantly change, the image remains. reduction of design, in which the goal exchange that Marcel Mauss and of the public. However, it is often between an artwork’s religious value Just as one can easily become a was to create a blank, void space at Even if we are generally inclined to Georges Bataille explored, the individ- overlooked that in the modern period, and its economic value. Though the prisoner of his or her own image, one’s the center of the designed world, to distrust the media, it is no accident uals who show themselves to be the artist has always been delivered up price of an artwork is the quantifiable political convictions can be ridiculed eliminate design, to practice zero- that we are immediately ready to especially nasty (e.g., the individuals to the mercy of public opinion—if an result of an aesthetic value that has as being mere self-design. Aesthetici- design. In this way, the artistic avant- believe it when it tells us about a who demonstrate the most substantial artwork does not find favor with the been identified with it, the respect paid zation is often identified with seduc- garde wanted to create design-free global financial crisis or delivers the symbolic sacrifice) receive the most public, then it is de facto devoid of to an artwork due to its price does not tion and celebration. Walter Benjamin areas that would be perceived as areas images from September 11 into our recognition and fame. This fact alone value. This is modern art’s main deficit: by any means translate automatically obviously had this use of the term of honesty, high morality, sincerity, and apartments. Even the most committed demonstrates that this situation has the modern artwork has no “inner” into any form of binding appreciation. “aestheticization” in mind when he trust. In observing the media’s many theorists of postmodern simulation less to do with true insight than with a value of its own, no merit beyond what This binding value of art can thus be opposed the politicization of aesthet- designed surfaces, one hopes that the began to speak about the return of the special case of self-design: today, to public taste bestows upon it. In ancient sought only in noncommercial, if not ics to the aestheticization of politics at dark, obscured space beneath the real as they watched the images of decide to present oneself as ethically temples, aesthetic disapproval was directly anti-commercial practices. the end of his famous essay “The Work media will somehow betray or expose September 11. There is an old tradition bad is to make an especially good insufficient reason to reject an artwork. of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro- itself. In other words, we are waiting in Western art that presents an artist decision in terms of self-design Their statues were regarded as For this reason, many modern artists duction.” But one can argue, on the for a moment of sincerity, a moment in as a walking catastrophe, and—at (genius=swine). embodiments of the gods: they were have tried to regain common ground contrary, that every act of aestheticiza- which the designed surface cracks least from Baudelaire on—modern revered, one kneeled down before with their audiences by enticing tion is always already a critique of the open to offer a view of its inside. artists were adept at creating images But there is also a subtler and more them in prayer, one sought guidance viewers out of their passive roles, by object of aestheticization simply Zero-design attempts to artificially of evil lurking behind the surface, sophisticated form of self-design as from them and feared them. Poorly bridging the comfortable aesthetic because this act calls attention to the produce this crack for the spectator, which immediately won the trust of the self-sacrifice: symbolic suicide. made idols and badly painted icons distance that allows uninvolved object’s need for a supplement in allowing him or her to see things as public. In our days, the romantic image Following this subtler strategy of were in fact part of this sacred order, viewers to judge an artwork impartially order to look better than it actually is. they truly are. of the poète maudit is substituted by self-design, the artist announces the and to dispose of any of them out from a secure, external perspective. Such a supplement always functions that of the artist being explicitly death of the author, that is, his or her would have been sacrilegious. Thus, The majority of these attempts have as a Derridean pharmakon: while But the Rousseauistic faith in the cynical—greedy, manipulative, busi- own symbolic death. In this case, the within a specific religious tradition, involved political or ideological design makes an object look better, it equation of sincerity and zero-design ness-oriented, seeking only material artist does not proclaim himself or her- artworks have their own individual, engagement of one sort or another. likewise raises the suspicion that this has disappeared in our time. We are profit, and implementing art as a self to be bad, but to be dead. The “inner” value, independent of the Religious community is thus replaced object would look especially ugly and no longer ready to believe that mini- machine for deceiving the audience. resulting artwork is then presented as public’s aesthetic judgment. This value by a political movement in which repellent were its designed surface to malist design suggests anything about We have learned this strategy of being collaborative, participatory, and derives from the participation of both artists and audiences communally be removed. the honesty and sincerity of its design- calculated self-denunciation—of democratic. A tendency toward artist and public in communal reli- participate. When the viewer is ing subject. The avant-garde approach self-denunciatory self-design—from collaborative, participatory practice is gious practices, a common affiliation involved in artistic practice from the Indeed, design—including self- to the design of honesty has thus the examples of Salvador Dalí and undeniably one of the main character- that relativizes the space between outset, every piece of criticism uttered design—is primarily a mechanism for become one style among many Andy Warhol, of Jeff Koons and istics of contemporary art. Numerous artist and public. becomes self-criticism. Shared inducing suspicion. The contemporary possible styles. Under these condi- Damien Hirst. However old, this groups of artists throughout the world political convictions thus render world of total design is often described tions, the effect of sincerity is created strategy has rarely missed its mark. are asserting collective, even anony- By contrast, the secularization of art aesthetical judgment partially or as a world of total seduction from not by refuting this initial suspicion, Looking at the public image of these mous authorship of their work. Moreo- entails its radical devaluation. This is completely irrelevant, as was the case which the unpleasantness of reality but by confirming it. This is to say that artists we tend to think, “Oh, how ver, collaborative practices of this type why Hegel asserted at the beginning with sacral art in the past. To put it has disappeared. But I would argue, we are ready to believe that a crack in awful,” but at the same time, “Oh, how tend to encourage the public to join in, of his Lectures on Aesthetics that art bluntly: it is now better to be a dead rather, that the world of total design is the designed surface has taken true.” Self-design as self-denunciation to activate the social milieu in which was a thing of the past. No modern author than to be a bad author. a world of total suspicion, a world of place—that we are able to see things still functions in a time when the these practices unfold. But this self- artist could expect anyone to kneel in Though the artist’s decision to relin- latent danger lurking behind designed as they truly are—only when the reality avant-garde zero-design of honesty sacrifice that forgoes individual front of his or her work in prayer, quish exclusive authorship would surfaces. The main goal of self-design behind the façade shows itself to be fails. Here, in fact, contemporary art authorship also finds its compensation demand practical assistance from it, or seem primarily to be in the interest of then becomes one of neutralizing the dramatically worse than we had ever exposes how our entire celebrity within a symbolic economy of recogni- use it to avert danger. The most one is empowering the viewer, this sacrifice suspicion of a possible spectator, of imagined. Confronted with a world of culture works: through calculated tion and fame. prepared to do nowadays is to find an ultimately benefits the artist by liberat- creating the sincerity effect that total design, we can only accept a disclosures and self-disclosures. artwork interesting, and of course to ing his or her work from the cold eye provokes trust in the spectator’s soul. catastrophe, a state of emergency, a Celebrities (politicians included) are The modern state of affairs in art can ask how much it costs. Price immu- of the uninvolved viewer’s judgment. In today’s world, the production of violent rupture in the designed sur- presented to the contemporary audi- be described easily enough: the artist nizes the artwork from public taste to a sincerity and trust has become every- face, as sufficient to allow for a view of ence as designed surfaces, to which produces and exhibits art, and the certain degree—had economic con- one’s occupation—and yet it was, and the reality that lies beneath. And of the public responds with suspicion public views and evaluates what is siderations not been a factor in limit- still is, the main occupation of art course this reality too must show itself and conspiracy theories. Thus, to make exhibited. This arrangement would ing the immediate expression of public Source: www.e-flux.com/journal/view/68 14 Corner College Zurich 15 Summer School Course Book 2009

and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are idea, the integrity of the wall is as often reinforced by Brian O’Doherty not — or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannekins for struts of painted architecture as denied. The wall itself is further study. This Descartian paradox is reinforced by always recognized as limiting depth (you don’t walk Inside the White Cube: Notes on the one of the icons of our visual culture: the installation shot, through it), just as corners and roof (often in a variety of sans figures. Here at last the spectator, oneself, is elimi- inventive ways) limit size. Close up, murals tend to be Gallery Space, Part I nated. You are there without being there, one of the major frank about their means- illusionism breaks down in a services provided for art by its old antagonist, photogra- babble of method. You feel you are looking at the under- phy. The installation shot is a metaphor for the gallery painting and often can’t quite find your “place.” Indeed space. In it, an ideal is fulfilled as strongly as in a Salon murals project ambiguous and wandering vectors with painting of the 1830s. which the spectator attempts to align himself. The easel A recurrent scene in sci-fi movies shows the earth with- mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single Indeed, the Salon itself implicitly defines what a picture on the wall quickly indicates to him exactly where drawing from the spacecraft until it becomes a horizon, a picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art. gallery is, a definition appropriate for the esthetics of the he stands. For the easel picture is like a portable window beachball, a grapefruit, a golf ball, a star. With the changes And it clarifies itself through a process of historical inevi- period. A gallery is a place with a wall, which is covered that, once set on the wall, penetrates it with deep space. in scale, responses slide from the particular to the general. tability usually attached to the art it contains. with a wall of pictures. The wall itself has no intrinsic This theme is endlessly repeated in northern art, where a The individual is replaced by the race and we are a pusho- The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues esthetic; it is simply a necessity for an upright animal. window within the picture in turn frames not only a ver for the race a mortal biped, or a tangle of them spread that interfere with the fact that it is “art.” The work is Samuel F. B. Morse’s Exhibition Gallery at the Louvre further distance but confirms the windowlike limits of the out below like a rug. From a certain height people are isolated from everything that would detract from its own (1833) is upsetting to the modern eye: masterpieces as frame. The magical, boxlike status of some smaller easel generally good. Vertical distance encourages this generos- evaluation of itself. This gives the space a presence pos- walIpaper, each one not yet separated out and isolated in pictures is due to the immense distances they contain and ity. Horizontality doesn’t seem to have the same moral sessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved space like a throne. Disregarding the (to us) horrid con- the perfect details they sustain on close examination. The virtue. Far away figures may be approaching and we through the repetition of a closed system of values. Some catenation of periods and styles, the demands made on the frame of the easel picture is as much a psychological anticipate the insecurities of encounter. Life is horizontal, of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the court- spectator by the hanging pass our understanding. Are you container for the artist as the room in which he stands is just one thing after another, a conveyer belt shuffling us room, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins to hire stilts to rise to the ceiling or to get on hands and for the viewer. The perspective positions everything within toward the horizon. But history, the view from the depart- with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics. knees to sniff anything below the dado? Both high and low the picture along a cone of space, against which the frame ing spacecraft, is different. As the scale changes, layers of So powerful are the perceptual fields of force within this are underprivileged areas. You overheard a lot of com- acts like a grid, echoing those cuts of foreground, middle- time are superimposed and through them we project chamber that once outside it, art can lapse into secular plaints from artists about being “skied” but nothing about ground and distance within. One “steps” firmly into such a perspectives with which to recover and correct the past. status — and conversely. Things become art in a space being “floored.” Near the floor, pictures were at least picture, or glides in effortlessly, depending on its tonality No wonder art gets bollixed up in this process; its history, where powerful ideas about art focus on them. Indeed the accessible and could accommodate the connoisseur’s and color. The greater the illusion, the greater the invita- perceived through time, is confounded by the picture in object frequently becomes the medium through which “near” look before he withdrew to a more judicious tion to the spectator’s eye; the eye is abstracted from an front of your eyes, a witness ready to change testimony at these ideas are manifested and proffered for discussion — distance. One can see the 19th-century audience strolling, anchored body and projected as a miniature proxy into the the slightest perceptual provocation. History and the eye a popular form of late modernist academicism (“ideas are peering up, sticking their faces in pictures and falling into picture to inhabit and test the articulations of its space. have a profound wrangle at the center of this “constant” more interesting than art”). The sacramental nature of the interrogative groups a proper distance away, pointing with For this process, the stability of the frame is as we call tradition. space becomes clear, and so does one of the great projec- a cane, perambulating again, clocking off the exhibition necessary as an oxygen tank to a diver. Its limiting security All of us are now sure that the glut of history, rumor tive laws of modernism: as modernism gets older, context picture by picture. Larger paintings rise to the top (easier completely defines the experience within. The border as and evidence we call the modernist tradition is being becomes content. In a peculiar reversal, the object intro- to see from a distance), and are sometimes tilted out from absolute limit is confirmed in easel art up to the 19th circumscribed by a horizon. Looking down, we see more duced into the gallery “frames” the gallery and its laws. the wall to maintain the viewer’s plane; the “best” pictures century. When it curtails or elides subject matter, it does so clearly its “laws” of progress, its armature hammered out A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as stay in the middle zone; small pictures drop to the bottom. in a way that strengthens the edge. The classic package of of idealist philosophy, its military metaphors of advance those for building a medieval church. The outside world The perfect hanging job is an ingenious mosaic of frames perspective enclosed by the Beaux-Arts frame makes it and conquest. What a sight it is — or was! Deployed must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls without a patch of wasted wall showing. possible for pictures to hang like sardines. There is no ideologies, transcendent rockets, romantic slums where are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. What perceptual law could justify such (to our eyes) suggestion that the space within the picture is continuous degradation and idealism obsessively couple, all those The wooden floor is polished so that you click along a barbarity? One and one only. That each picture was seen with the space outside it. troops running back and forth in conventional wars. The clinically or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting as a self-contained entity, totally isolated from its slum- This suggestion is made only sporadically through campaign reports that end up pressed between boards on the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as close neighbor by a heavy frame around and a complete the 18th and 19th centuries as atmosphere and color eat coffee-tables give us little idea of the actual heroics. Those the saying used to go, “to take on its own life.” The dis- perspective system within. Space was discontinuous and away at the perspective. Landscape is the progenitor of a paradoxical achievements huddle down there, awaiting the creet desk may be the only piece of furniture. In this categorizable, just as the houses in which these pictures translucent mist that puts perspective and tone/color in revisions that will add the avant-garde era to tradition or, context a standing ashtray becomes almost a sacred object, hung had different rooms for different functions. The 19th opposition, because both contain, among other things, as we sometimes fear, end it. Indeed tradition itself, as the just as the firehose in a modern museum looks not like a century mind was taxonomic, and the 19th-century eye opposite interpretations of the wall they hang on. Pictures spacecraft withdraws, looks like another piece of bric-a- firehose but an esthetic conundrum. Modernism’s transpo- recognized hierarchies of genre and the authority of the begin to appear that put pressure on the frame. The brac on the coffee-table — no more than a kinetic assem- sition of perception from life to formal values is complete. frame. archetypal composition here is the edge-to-edge horizon, blage glued together with reproductions, powered by little This, of course, is one of modernism’s fatal diseases. How did the easel picture become such a neatly separating zones of sky and sea occasionally underlined by mythic motors and sporting tiny models of museums. And Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is wrapped parcel of space? The discovery of perspective beach with maybe a figure facing, as everyone does, the in its midst, one notices an evenly lighted “cell” that devoted to the technology of esthetics. Works of art are coincides with the rise of the easel picture, and the easel sea. Formal composition is gone, the frames within the appears crucial to making the thing work: the gallery mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby picture, in turn, confirmed the promise of illusionism frame (coulisses, repoussoirs, the braille of perspective space. surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. Art inherent in painting. There is a peculiar relation between a depth) have slid away. What is left is an ambiguous The history of modernism is intimately framed by exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is mural- painted directly on the wall- and a picture that surface partly framed from the inside, by the horizon. that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be lots of “period” (late modern), there is no time. This hangs on a wall; a painted wall is replaced by a piece of Such pictures (by Courbet, Caspar David Friedrich, correlated with changes in that space and in the way we eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to portable wall. Limits are established and framed; minia- Whistler and hosts of little masters) are poised between see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the have died already to be there. Indeed the presence of that turization becomes a powerful convention that assists infinite depth and flatness and tend to read as pattern. The art but the space first. (A cIiche of the age is to ejaculate odd piece of furniture, your own body, seems superfluous, rather than contradicts illusion. The space in murals tends powerful convention of the horizon zips easily enough over the space on entering a gallery.)An image comes to an intrusion. The space offers the thought that while eyes to be shallow; even when illusion is an intrinsic part of the through the limits of the frame. 16 Corner College Zurich 17 Summer School Course Book 2009

These and certain pictures focusing on an indetermi- maker of Impressionism is always pointed out, but not that new conventions without a consensus- color codes, signa- Impressionists stuck their pictures cheek by jowl, just as nate patch of landscape that often looks like the “wrong” the subject is seen through a casual glance, one not too tures of paint, private signs, intellectually formulated ideas they would have hung in the Salon. Impressionist pictures subject introduce the idea of noticing something, of an eye interested in what it’s looking at. What is interesting in of structure. Cubism’s concepts of structure conserved the which assert their flatness and their doubts about the scanning. This temporal quickening makes the frame an Monet is “looking at” this look — the integument of light, easel painting status quo; Cubist paintings are centripetal, Iimiting edge are still sealed off in Beaux-arts frames that equivocal and not an absolute zone. Once you know that a the often preposterous formularization of a perception gathered toward the center, fading out toward the edge. (Is do little more than announce Old Master — and monetary- patch of landscape represents a decision to exclude every- through a punctate code of color and touch which remains this why Cubist paintings tend to be small?) Seurat under- status. When William C. Seitz took off the frames for his thing around it, you are faintly aware of the space outside (until near the end) impersonal. The edge eclipsing the stood much better how to define the limits of a classic great Monet show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, the picture. The frame becomes a parenthesis. The separa- subject seems a somewhat haphazard decision that could formulation at a time when edges had become equivocal. the undressed canvases looked a bit like reproductions tion of paintings along a wall, through a kind of magnetic just as well have been made a few feet to left or right. A Frequently, painted borders made up of a glomeration of until you saw how they began to hold the wall. Though the repulsion, becomes inevitable. And it is accentuated and signature of Impressionism is the way the casually chosen colored dots are deployed inward to separate out and hanging had its eccentric moments, it read the pictures’ largely initiated by the new science — or art — devoted to subject softens the edge’s structural role at a time when the describe the subject. The border absorbs the slow move- relation to the wall correctly and, in a rare act of curatorial the excision of a subject from its context: photography. edge is under pressure from the increasing shallowness of ments of the structure within. To muffle the abruptness of daring, followed up the implications. Seitz also set some of In a photograph, the location of the edge is a primary the space. This doubled and somewhat opposing stress on the edge, he sometimes papered all over the frame so that the Monets flush with the wall. Continuous with the wall, decision, since it composes- or decomposes- what it sur- the edge is the prelude to the definition of a painting as a the eye could move out of the picture — and back into it — the pictures took on some of the rigidity of tiny murals. rounds. Eventually framing, editing, cropping- establish- self-sufficient object — a container of illusory fact now without a bump. The surfaces turned hard as the picture plane was “overlit- ing limits- become major acts of composition. But not so become the primary fact itself, which sets us on the high Matisse understood the dilemma of the picture plane eralized.” The difference between the easel picture and the much in the beginning. There was the usual holdover of road to some stirring esthetic climaxes. and its tropism toward outward extension better than mural was clarified. pictorial conventions to do some of the work of framing- Flatness and objecthood usually find their first anyone. His pictures grew bigger as if, in a topological The relation between the picture plane and the internal buttresses made up of convenient trees and knolls. official text in Maurice Denis’ famous statement in 1890 paradox, depth were being translated into a flat analog. On underlying wall is very pertinent to the esthetics of surface. But the best early photographs reinterpret the edge with- that before a picture is subject matter it is first of all a this, place was signified by up and down and left and right, The inch of the stretcher’s width amounts to a formal out the assistance of pictorial conventions. They lower the surface covered with lines and colors. This is one of those by color, by drawing that rarely closed a contour without abyss. The easel painting is not transferable to the wall, tension on the edge by allowing the subject matter to literalisms that sounds brilliant or rather dumb depending calling on the surface to contradict it, and by paint applied and one wants to know why. What is lost in the transfer? compose itself, rather than consciously aligning it with the on the zeitgeist. Right now, when we’ve seen the end-point with a kind of cheerful impartiality to every part of that Edges, surface, the grain and bite of the canvas, the edge. Perhaps this is typicaI of the 19th century. The 19th to which nonmetaphor, nonstructure, nonillusion and surface. In Matisse’s large paintings we are hardly ever separation from the wall. Nor can we forget that the whole century looked at a subject- not at its edges. Various fields noncontent can take you, the zeitgeist makes it sound a conscious of the frame. He solved the problem of lateral thing is suspended or supported- transferable, mobile were studied within their declared limits. Studying not the little obtuse. The picture plane, the everthinning integu- extension and containment with perfect tact. He doesn’t currency. After centuries of illusionism, it seems reasona- field but its limits, and defining these limits for the purpose ment of modernist integrity, sometimes seems ready for emphasize the center at the expense of the edge, or vice ble to suggest that these parameters, no maker how flat the of extending them, is a 20th-century habit. We have the Woody Allen, and has indeed attracted its share of ironists versa. His pictures don’t make arrogant claims to stretches surface, are the loci of the last traces of illusionism. Main- illusion that we add to a field by extending it laterally, not and wits. But this ignores that the powerful myth of the of bare wall. They look good almost anywhere. Their stream painting right up to color field is easel painting, by going, as the 19th century might say in proper perspec- picture plane received its impetus from the centuries tough, informal structure is combined with a decorative and its literalism is practiced against these desiderata of tive style, deeper into it. Even scholarship in both centuries during which it sealed in unalterable systems of illusion. prudence that makes them remarkably self-sufficient. illusionism. Indeed these traces make literalism interest- has a recognizably different sense of edge and depth, of Conceiving it differently, in the modern era, was an heroic They are easy to hang. ing; they are the hidden component of the dialectical limits and definition. Photography quickly learned to move adjustment that signified a totally different world view, Hanging, indeed, is what we need to know more engine that gave the late modernist easel picture its energy. away from heavy frames and to mount a print on a sheet which was trivialized into esthetics, into the technology of about. From Courbet on, conventions of hanging are an If you copied a late modernist easel picture onto the wall of board. A frame was allowed to surround the board after flatness. unrecovered history. The way pictures are hung make and then hung the easel picture beside it, you could a neutral interval. Early photography recognized the edge The literalization of the picture plane is a great assumptions about what is offered. Hanging editorializes estimate the degree of illusionism that turned up in the but removed its rhetoric, softened its absolutism and subject. As the vessel of content becomes shallower and on matters of interpretation and value, and is uncon- faultless literal pedigree of the easel picture. At the same turned it into a zone rather than the strut it later became. shallower, composition and subject maker and metaphys- sciously influenced by taste and fashion. Subliminal cues time the rigid mural would underline the importance of But one way or another, the edge as a firm convention ics all overflow across the edge until, as Gertrude Stein indicate to the audience its deportment. It should be surface and edges to the easel picture, now beginning to locking in the subject had become fragile. said about Picasso, the emptying out is complete. But all possible to correlate the internal history of paintings with hover close to an objecthood defined by the “literal” Much of this applied to Impressionism. where a the jettisoned apparatus- hierarchies of painting, illusion, the external history of how they were hung. We might remnants of illusion- an unstable area. major theme is the edge as umpire of what’s in and what’s locatable space, mythologies beyond number- bounced begin our search not with a mode of display communally The attacks on painting in the ’60s failed to specify out. But this is combined with a far more important force, back in disguise and attached themselves, via new mythol- sanctioned (like the Salon), but with the vagaries of private that it wasn’t painting but the easel picture that was in the beginning of the decisive thrust that eventually altered ogies, to the literal surface which had apparently left them insight- with those pictures of 17th and 18th century collec- trouble. Color field painting was thus conservative in an the idea of the picture, the way it was hung, and ultimately no purchase. The transformation of literary myths into tors elegantly sprawled in the midst of their inventory. The interesting way, but not to those who recognized that the the gallery space: the myth of flatness, which became the literal myths — objecthood, the integrity of the picture first modern occasion, I suppose, in which a radical artist easel picture couldn’t rid itself of illusion, and who rejected powerful logician in painting’s argument for self-defini- plane, the equalization of space, the self-sufficiency of the set up his own space and hung his pictures in it, was the premise of something lying quietly on the wall and tion. The development of a shallow literal space (contain- work, the purity of form — is unexplored territory. With- Courbet’s one-man Salon des Refuses outside the Exposi- behaving itself. I’ve always been surprised that color field- ing invented forms, as distinct from the old illusory space out this change art would have been obsolete. Indeed its tion of 1855. How were the pictures hung? How did or late modernist painting in general — didn’t try to get containing Unreal” forms) put further pressures on the changes often seem one step ahead of obsolescence, and to Courbet construe their sequence, their relationship to each onto the wall, didn’t attempt a rapprochement between the edge. The great inventor here is, of course, Monet. that degree its progress mimics the laws of fashion. other, the spaces between? I suspect he did nothing star- mural and the easel picture. But then color field painting Indeed the magnitude of the revolution he initiated is The cultivation of the picture plane resulted in an tling. Yet it was the first time a modern artist (who hap- conformed to the social context in a somewhat disturbing such there is some doubt his achievement matches it, for entity with length and breadth but no thickness, a mem- pened to be the first modern artist) had to construct the way. It remained Salon painting; it needed big walls and he is an artist of decided limitations, or one who decided brane which, in a metaphor usually organic, could gener- context of his work and therefore editorialize about its big collectors and couldn’t avoid looking like the ultimate on his limitations and stayed within them. Monet’s land- ate its own self-sufficient laws. The primary law, of course, values. in capitalist art. Minimal art recognized the illusions scapes often seem to have been noticed on his way to or was that this surface, pressed between huge historical Though pictures may be radical, their early framing inherent in the easel picture and didn’t have any illusions from the real subject. There is an impression that he is forces, could not be violated. A narrow space forced to and hanging usually is not. The interpretation of what a about society. It didn’t ally itself with wealth and power, sealing for a provisional solution; the very featurelessness represent without representing, to symbolize without picture implies about its context is always, we may and its abortive attempt to redefine the relation of the artist relaxes your eye to look elsewhere. The informal subject benefit of received conventions. generated a plethora of assume, delayed. In their first exhibition in 1874, the to various establishments remains largely unexplored. 18 Corner College Zurich 19 Summer School Course Book 2009

Apart from color field, late modernist painting laws. We enter the era where works of art conceive the luxurious about the way the pictures and the gallery reside image of that wall delivers a work of art right into the zone postulated some ingenious hypotheses on how to squeeze a wall as a no-man’s land on which to project their concept in a context that is fully sanctioned socially. We are aware where surface, mural and wall have engaged in dialogues little extra out of that recalcitrant picture plane, now so of the territorial imperative. And we are not far from the we are witnessing a triumph of high seriousness and central to modernism. In fact, this history was the theme dumbly literal it could drive you crazy. The strategy here kind of border warfare that often Balkanizes museum hand-tooled production, like a Rolls-Royce in a showroom of these paintings, a theme stated with a wit and cogency was simile (pretending), not metaphor (believing): saying group shows. There is a peculiar uneasiness in watching that began as a Cubist jalopy in an outhouse. usually absent from our written clarifications. For me, at the picture plane is “like a.” The blank was filled in by flat artworks attempting to establish territory but not place in What comment can you make on this? A comment least, the show had a peculiar after-effect; when the things that lie obligingly on the literal surface and fuse the context of the placeless modern gallery. has been made already, in an exhibition by William Anas- paintings came down, the wall became a kind of ready- with it, e.g. Johns’s Flags, Cy Twombly’s blackboard All this traffic across the wall made it a far from tasi at Dwan in New York in 1965. He photographed the made mural and so changed every show in that space paintings, Alex Hay’s huge painted “sheets” of lined paper, neutral zone. Now a participant in, rather than a passive empty gallery at Dwan, noticed the parameters of the wall, thereafter. Arakawa’s “notebooks.” Then there is the “like a window support for the art, the wall became the locus of contend- top and bottom, right and left, the placement of each shade,” “like a wall,” “like a sky” area. There’s a good ing ideologies and every new development had to come electrical outlet, the ocean of space in the middle. He then Copyrighted 1976 by Brian O’Doherty. comedy of manners piece to be written about the “like a” equipped with an attitude toward it. (Gene Davis’s exhibi- silkscreened all this data on a canvas slightly smaller than Brian O’Doherty shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery under the name of Patrick Ireland. solution to the picture plane. There are numerous related tion of micro-pictures surrounded by oodles of space is a the wall and put it on the wall. Covering the wall with an Source: http://www.societyofcontrol.com/whitecube/insidewc.htm areas, including the perspective schema resolutely flat- good joke about this). Once the wall became an esthetic tened into two dimensions to quote the picture plane’s force, it modified anything shown on it. The wall, the dilemma. And before leaving this area of rather desperate context of the art, had become rich in a content it subtly wit, one should note the solutions that cut through the donated to the art. It is now impossible to paint up an picture plane (Fontana’s answer to the Gordian surface) exhibition without surveying the space like a health Andrea Fraser until the picture is taken away and the wall’s plaster inspector, taking into account the esthetics of the wall attacked directly. which will inevitably “artify” the work in a way that May I Help You? Also related is the solution that lifts surface and frequently diffuses its intentions. Most of us now “read” edges off that Procrustian stretcher, and pins, sticks or the hanging as we would chew gum- unconsciously and drapes paper, fiberglass, or cloth directly against the wall from habit. The walls’ esthetic potency received a final to literalize even further. Here a lot of Los Angeles paint- impetus from a realization that, in retrospect, has all the ing falls neatly — for the first time! — into the historical authority of historical inevitability: the easel picture didn’t mainstream; it’s a little odd to see this obsession with have to be rectangular. surface, disguised as it may be with vernacular macho, Stella’s early shaped canvases bent or cut the edge dismissed because of geographical misplacement as according to the demands of the internal logic that gener- provincial impudence. ated them. (Here Michael Fried’s distinction between All this desperate fuss makes you realize over again inductive and deductive structure remains of one of the what a conservative movement Cubism was. It extended few practical hand tools added to the critic’s black bag).

f , f n 1 w s f o ee ke

o 9 o the viability of the easel picture and postponed its break- i The result powerfully activated the wall; the eye frequent- a r i l t er 0 r 9 t t h

i S 0 t 1 s

down. Cubism was reducible to system, and systems, being b

lywent searching tangentially for the wall’s limits. Stella’s 1 You? ks i e u e cen o y o r o u Th easier to understand than art, dominate academic history. show of striped U-, T- and L-shaped canvases at Castelli in a el l exh

t n

ck f

i t a t e a o ce Systems are a kind of P.R. which, among other things, 1960 “developed” every bit of the wall, floor to ceiling, a l Help

n m h a t b I

er p xi wh co f

push the rather odious idea of progress. Progress can be s

corner to corner. Flatness, edge, format and wall had an b

o . o

ve l r e h

m l l n t a p defined as what happens when you eliminate the opposi- unprecedented dialogue in that small uptown Castelli e g o h er p i t n wi May

m t wa a i

i

s tion. However, the tough opposition voice in modernism is space. As they were presented, the works hovered between f d e b ch

i o r i cen y” n

a

h a s h

o that of Matisse’ and it speaks in its unemphatic, rational an ensemble effect and independence. The hanging here n e x

o u n , w o e h i i

t n

t - b ,

“b way about color, which in the beginning scared Cubism was as revolutionary as the paintings; since the hanging i o e s g i o b er h t n t i e t ct t i

u r s gray. Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture reports on how was part of the esthetic, it evolved simultaneously with the e b y f j h a

i a

l o b exh .

e

p s o the New York artists sweated out Cubism while casting pictures. The breaking of the rectangle formally confirmed wa

l r l n ey ,

l exh l a a e e

t e er , Th shrewd eyes on Matisse and Miro. Abstract- Expressionist the wall’s autonomy, altering for good the concept of the i h wa wa h h t

Th

t

.

ed ”

. h k . wh t paintings followed the route of lateral expansion, dropped gallery space. Some of the mystique of the shallow picture r wi

f t es

y’s f a f u k es ea a w, o o t a k er ed off the frame, and gradualIy began to conceive the edge as plane (one of the three major forces that altered the gallery p at

l o s l S s o l l l m

g

o es

a a e o e l a a structural unit through which the painting entered into a t

space) had been transferred to the context of art. t d d

g

h

s rro t a n d o s e n

t h a n i n dialogue with the wall beyond it. At this point the dealer This result brings us back again to that archetypal h

i g “Th i Su s t s s

y n i f n e n eh eg o i t o and curator enter from the wings. How they — in collabo- i installation shot — the suave extensions of the space, the er l er y b b t

u l

a t l eg i er d ee as a es t l ration with the artist — presented these works contributed, pristine clarity, the pictures laid out in a row like expensive b en k r n l

s g m d r Pl h a a n

t es

a d e o in the late ’40s and ’50s, to the definition of the new g bungalows. Color field painting, which inevitably comes to i t d

r h d i co t f ’s

h t

s

r n ver

a m s d o a painting. s mind here, is the most imperial of modes in its demand for u o

vi

u n

R o d l es k er l r a e r t E ks n wh n

Through the ’50s and ’60s, we notice the codification lebensraum. The pictures recur as reassuringly as the l i a i h

,

S t s s s en s

Yo t eh u

A s cCo p of a new theme as it evolves into consciousness: How much columns in a classic temple. Each demands enough space wa a er r

b b A a ,

o M

m m ew y p t FR

r i space should a work of art have (as the phrase went) to so that its effect is over before its neighbor’s picks up. u wr N e ed s n

o

er t t ce. A f t l s a i e l vi a l a “breathe?” If paintings implicitly declare their own terms E

Otherwise the pictures would be a single perceptual field, l

et er a ea p h R A s t g Th wh p g S A

of occupancy, the somewhat aggrieved muttering between frank ensemble painting, detracting from the uniqueness D them becomes harder to ignore. What goes together, what claimed by each canvas. The color field installation shot N A doesn’t? The esthetics of hanging evolves according to its should be recognized as one of the teleological end-points own habits, which become conventions, which become of the modern tradition. There is something splendidly 20 Corner College Zurich 21 Summer School Course Book 2009

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Wiesław Borowski, Hanna Ptaszkowska & Mariusz Tchorek An introduction to the general theory of place

© Paweł Althamer 28 Corner College Zurich 29 Summer School Course Book 2009 30 Corner College Zurich 31 Summer School Course Book 2009

Michel Foucault Of Other Spaces 32 Corner College Zurich 33 Summer School Course Book 2009 34 Corner College Zurich 35 Summer School Course Book 2009 36 Corner College Zurich 37 Summer School Course Book 2009

tion that art could evolve only by breaking out of the canoni- canvas, but that has not thereby created another object. The The Readymade critique is therefore both a profound suc- Jeff WallDepiction, cal forms, turned precisely to the movement arts. I am think- depiction is an alteration of the surface of an object. In order cess and a surprising failure. It seems to transform everything ing here of Allan Kaprow, John Cage, or George Maciunas. They that the alteration be effected, the object, the support must and yet it changes nothing. It can seem ephemeral and even sensed that the depictive arts could not be displaced by any pre-exist it. Therefore any selection of a Readymade in this case phantom. It obliges nobody to anything. Duchamp himself re- Depiction,Object, Object, Event more upheavals from within, any more radical versions of depic- could concern only the object that pre-existed any alteration or turns to craftsmanship and the making of works, and there’s tion or anti-depiction. They came to recognize that there was working of its surface. The presence of this second element— no problem. Everything is revolutionized but nothing has been Event something about the depictive arts that would not permit an- the depiction—cannot be relevant to the logical criteria for an made to disappear. Something significant has happened, but other art form or art dimension to evolve out of them. The new object’s selection as a Readymade, and in fact disqualifies it. the anticipated transformation does not materialize, or it ma- challenge to western art would be advanced in terms of move- Duchamp never selects any object bearing a depiction as a terializes incompletely, in a truncated form. The recognition of Jeff Wall ment and the arts of movement. Cage’s piano concert, 4’33”, first Readymade. Any time he chose objects bearing depictions this incompleteness was itself one of the shocks created by the presented in 1952, can be seen as the first explicit statement of (these are usually pieces of paper), he altered them and gave avant-garde. That shock was both recognized and not recog- this challenge. them different names. The three most significant examples are nized between 1915 and 1940. This was, of course, opposed by proponents of the canon, Pharmacie, a colour lithographic print of a moody landscape, The failed overthrow and the resulting reanimation of paint- pre-eminently Clement Greenberg. Greenberg published his es- selected in 1914, and the pair of stereoscopic slides, Stereoscopie ing and sculpture around 1940 set the stage for the more radical say Towards a Newer Laocoon in 1940, twelve years before Cage’s à la main (Handmade Stereoscopy), from 1918, both of which are attempt inaugurated by Cage, Kaprow, and the others and cul- Modern and modernist art is grounded in the dialectic of depic- concert. In it he wrote, “There has been, is, and will be, such a designated as ‘corrected’ Readymades; and the famous LHOOQ minating in conceptual art, or what I will call the ‘conceptual tion and anti-depiction, depiction and its negation within the thing as a confusion of the arts.” He argues that, in each era, from 1919, which Duchamp called a ‘rectified Readymade’. But reduction’ of the depictive arts. This is the second element con- regime of depiction. The self-criticism of art, that phenomenon there can be, and has been, a dominant art, one all the others these terms have little meaning. The works in question are sim- cealed within Art and Objecthood. we call both ‘modernist’ and ‘avant-garde’, originated in terms tend to imitate to their own detriment, perversion, and loss of ply not Readymades at all. They are drawings, or paintings, or ‘Reduction’ was a central term at the origins of conceptual art; of the arts of depiction and, for the hundred years beginning in integrity. From the early 17th century to the last third of the some hybrid, executed on a support that already has a depiction it emerged from the new discourses on reductivism set off by 1855, remained within their framework. 19th, he says that the dominant art was literature. What he on it. Pharmacie, for example, could stand as a prototype for the Minimal art in the late 1950s and early 60s. Painting and sculp- The forms of the depictive arts are drawing, painting, sculp- calls modernism is the effort on the part of artists to reject that paintings of Sigmar Polke. ture were both to be reduced to a new status, that of what Don ture, the graphic arts, and photography. These of course are mimesis and work only with the unique, inimitable characteris- Since a depiction cannot be selected as a Readymade, depic- Judd called ‘specific objects’, neither painting nor sculpture but what were called the ‘fine arts’ to distinguish them from the tics of each individual, singular, art. He says that this emphasis tion is therefore not included in Duchamp’s negation. This is not an industrially produced model of a generic object that would ‘applied arts’. I will call these the ‘canonical forms’. on uniqueness is central to the creation of the best and most to say that the depictive arts are not affected by the subversion have to be accepted as the new essential form of ‘art as such’. The depictive arts do not admit movement. Movement in them significant art of the period between 1875 and 1940—in paint- carried out in the form of the Readymade; far from it. But any Now, 40 years later, we can see that Judd, along with his col- has always been suggested, not presented directly. The quality ing, from Cézanne to the advent of Abstract Expressionism. effect it will have on them is exerted in terms of their exemp- leagues Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, are clearly sculptors, despite and nature of that suggestion has been one of the main criteria For Greenberg and his generation—and at least one further tion from the claims it makes about art, not their inclusion. their rhetoric. Others—Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Terry of judgment of quality in those arts. We judge the depictive arts generation—the confusion was confusion within the depictive They are exempt because their legitimacy as art is not affected Atkinson, Mel Ramsden, Michael Baldwin, Sol Lewitt—took up on how they suggest movement while actually excluding it. arts. Even if literature or theatre were the models for paint- by the discovery that any object, justly selected, cannot be de- that rhetoric, and were more consistent. They pushed the argu- Movement is the province of other arts—theatre, dance, mu- ers and sculptors, the imitations were executed as paintings or nied the status of ‘instance of art’ that was previously reserved ment past ‘specific objects’—or ‘generic objects’—to the ‘generic 12 13 16 17 sic, and cinema. Each of these arts also has its own avant-garde, sculptures. A painter did not put on a play in a gallery and claim exclusively for the canonical forms. This new ‘inability to deny instance of art’, a condition beyond objects and works of art, its own modernism, its own demands for the fusion of art and it was a ‘painting’, or a ‘work of art’. The painter made a paint- status’ adds many things to the category art, but subtracts none a negation of the ‘work of art’, the definitive supercession of life, and its own high and low forms. But in the 1950s, those ing that, unfortunately, suppressed its own inherent values as from it. There is addition, that is, expanded legitimation, but both object and work. Object and work are superceded by their who took up and radicalized the pre-war avant-garde convic- painting in trying to create the effect a staged scene of the no reduction, no delegitimation. replacement with a written explication of why the written ex-

same subject might have had. For Greenberg, this was a severe the depictive arts. Yet it has an unusual relation to depiction, plication itself cannot be denied status as a generic instance it is more concerned with this social and cultural modelling confusion. one not often commented upon. of art—and furthermore why logically and historically, this than it is with artistic innovation as such. Concern with artis- But if that was a severe confusion in 1940, or 1950, or even The Readymade did not and was not able to address itself to text not only cannot be denied such status, but is in fact the tic innovation presumes that such innovation is required for a 1960, it is not a severe confusion after that. After that we have depiction; its concern is with the object, and so if we were to only entity that can authentically possess it, since it alone has reinvention of the lifeworld, but the conceptual reduction has a new order of confusion of the arts, a new dimension of it, be- classify it within the canonical forms it would be sculpture. But become, or remained, art while having ceased to be a specific shown that this is no longer the case, since the era of meaning- cause the mimesis, the blending and blurring of distinctions, is no-one who has thought about it accepts that a Readymade is ‘work of art’. This reduction renders everything other than it- ful artistic innovation has concluded, probably with the death not confined to occurrences within depiction, even though they sculpture. Rather it is an object that transcends the traditional self a member of a single category, the category of less histori- of Jackson Pollock in 1956. are taking place on the terrain called ‘contemporary art’, a ter- classifications and stands as a model for art as a whole, art as a cally and theoretically self-conscious gestures—mere works of Therefore, the argument continues, those people who would rain discovered, settled, and charted by the depictive arts. historical phenomenon, a logic, and an institution. As Thierry art. From the new judgment seat of strictly linguistic concep- have been artistic innovators in the past now have a new field The development of this dispute was at the centre of critical de Duve has so well demonstrated, this object designates itself tual art, all other modes or forms are equally less valid. All are of action and a new challenge. They are no longer obliged to discourse between the early 1950s and the later 1960s, at which as the abstraction ‘art as such’, the thing that can bear the equivalent in having fallen short of the self-reflexive condition relate to the lifeworld via the mediation of works of art; they point the proponents of the new movement-based forms become weight of the name ‘art as such’. Under what de Duve calls the of the reduction. are now liberated from that and placed directly before a vast dominant. In 1967, Michael Fried radicalized Greenberg’s argu- conditions of nominalism, the name ‘art’ must be applied to any The substitution of the work by a written text stakes its claim, range of new possibilities for action. This suggests new, more ments and staged the last and best stand in defense of the object that can be legitimately nominated as such by an artist. however, under very specific conditions. The text in question inventive, more sensitive forms of cultural activity carried out canonical forms. This was of course his famous essay Art and Or, to be more circumspect, it is the object from which the name can concern itself with only a single subject: the argument it in real lifeworld contexts—the media, education, social policy, Objecthood, where he introduced the term ‘theatricality’ to ex- art cannot logically be withheld. The Readymade therefore makes for its own validity. The text can tell us only why and urbanism, health, and many others. The ‘aesthetic education’ to plain the condition brought about by the rise of the new forms. proved that an arbitrary object can be designated as art and under what conditions it must be accepted as the final, defini- be undergone by these people will impel them beyond the nar- The term made explicit the fact that the radical breach with the that there is no argument available to refute that designation. tive version of the ‘generic instance of art’ and why all other row confines of the institutions of art and release their creativ- canonical forms is not effected by some unheralded new type Depictions are works of art by definition. They may be popular kinds of art are historically redundant. But it cannot say any- ity in the transformation of existing institutions and possibly of art but comes with brutal directness from theatre, music, art, amateur art, even entirely unskilled and unappealing art, thing else. If it does, it becomes ‘literature’; it becomes ‘post- the invention of new ones. This of course is very close to the dance, and film. Fried’s argument may have had its greatest ef- but they are able to nominate themselves as art nonetheless. conceptual’. ideas of the ‘counterculture’ generated at almost the same mo- fect on his opponents rather than his supporters, for it revealed They are art because the depictive arts are founded on the mak- I am only going to note in passing here that, of course, this ment, and the conceptual reduction is one of the key forms of to them with an unprecedented intensity and sophistication ing of depictions, and that making necessarily displays artistry. attempt at delegitimation was no more successful than the pre- countercultural thinking. both the stakes in play and the means by which to play for The only distinctions remaining to be made here are between vious one. But that is not what is significant about it. The con- them. The development of the new forms exploded and acceler- ‘fine’ art and ‘applied’ art, or ‘popular’ art and ‘high’ art, between ceptual reduction is the most rigorously-argued version of the And yet, despite the rigour of the conceptual reduction and the ated just at this moment, amidst the clamour of criticism of Art ‘amateur’ art and ‘professional’ art, and, of course, between long critique of the canonical forms. All the radical proposals of futuristic glamour of the challenge it posed, few artists crossed and Objecthood. good art and less good art. Selecting a very poor, amateurish, the avant-gardes since 1913 are summed up in it. that line it drew in the sand, few left the field of art to inno- Fried’s accomplishment is founded on his close reading of the depiction (say a businessman’s deskpad doodle) and presenting All those proposals demanded that artists leap out of what vate in the new way in other domains. From the early 70s on, it internal structure of painting and sculpture. His contestation it in a nice frame in a serious exhibition might be interesting, has always been called ‘art’ into new, more open, more effec- seems that most artists either ignored the reduction altogether, with Minimal Art is framed in those terms. Yet implicit within but it would not satisfy the criteria Duchamp established for tively creative relationships with the ‘lifeworld’, to use Jürgen or acquiesced to it intellectually, but put it aside and continued his argument are at least two other aspects, two moments of the Readymade. The doodle is already nominated as art and the Habermas’ term for it. This leap necessarily involves repudiat- making works. But the works they made are not the same works 14 15 18 19 transition between the criteria of the depictive arts and those operation of the Readymade in regard to it is redundant. ing the creation of high art, and inventing or at least model- as before. of the emergent movement. Moreover, a depiction—let’s say a painting—cannot simply ling new relations between the creative citizen—who is now Since there are now no binding technical or formal criteria The first of these is of course the Readymade. The Readymade be identified with an object. It is the result of a process that not an artist—and the lifeworld. The neo-avant-garde of the or even physical characteristics that could exclude this or that is the point of origin in the history of the attempt to displace has taken place upon the support provided by an object, say a 1950s distinguishes itself from the earlier avant-garde in that object or process from consideration as art, the necessity for art 38 Corner College Zurich 39 Summer School Course Book 2009

to exist by means of works of art is reasserted, not against the argue that it is one that can also have a radical and utopian into the crowded and popular domains of mass entertainment along the boundary, negotiating the patronage provided by the conceptual reduction, but in its wake and through making use dimension, as a space of activity that can resist the progressive and celebrity, the engines of conformity. This is why he has art economy, or the art world, in combination with probing the of the new openness it has provided, the new ‘expanded field’. refinements of the division of labour in constantly-modernizing been identified as the radical antithesis to artistic radicalism. actual effects of their mimesis in the world nearly outside the The new kinds of works come into their own mode of histori- capitalist and anti-capitalist societies. The process of blurring the boundaries between the arts, be- art world, they are attempting gently to erase that line, or even cal self-consciousness through the acceptance of the claim that The proliferation of new forms in the post-conceptual situ- tween art and life, and between high and low, takes place as a to move it slightly on the institutional terrain. This is the art of there is a form of art which is not a work of art and which leg- ation is unregulated by any sense of craft or métier. On the struggle between two equally valid versions of the neo-avant- the global biennales—the art of prototypes of situations, of an islates the way a work of art is now to be made. This is what the contrary, it develops by plunging into the newest zones of the garde and countercultural critique—the radical, emancipatory institutionalized neo-situationism. term ‘post-conceptual’ means. division of labour. Anything and everything is possible, and version, and the Warhol version. So it is not surprising that we The biennales and the grand exhibitions—now among the The reduction increased the means by which works can be this is what was and remains so attractive about it. can see aspects of the challenge set by the conceptual reduction most important occasions on the art calendar—are themselves created and thereby established the framework for the vast pro- By the middle of the 1970s the new forms and the notion of operating in both. becoming prototypes of this potentiality, events containing liferation of forms that characterizes the recent period. The the expanded field had become almost as canonical as the older Warhol’s mimesis of a media conglomerate is a model not just events, platforms inducing event-structures—tentative, yet depictive arts were based upon certain abilities and skills and forms had been. Video, performance, site-specific interventions, for lifting the taboo on the enjoyments of conformism in a pros- spectacular models of new social forms, rooted in community those who did not possess either had little chance of acceptance sound works, music pieces, and variants of all of these evolved perous, dynamic society. Partly because it was so wildly suc- action, ephemeral forms of labour, critical urbanism, decon- in art. The critique of those abilities, or at least of the canonical with increasing rapidity and were rightly enough considered to cessful, it was also a model for any sort of mimetic relationship structivist tourism, theatricalized institutional critique, an- status of those abilities, was one of the central aspects of the be serious innovations. The innovations appeared not as music to other institutions, popular or otherwise. archic interactive media games, radical pedagogies, strategies avant-garde’s attack on the depictive arts, and conceptual art or theatre properly speaking but as ‘an instance of a specificity If Warhol could imitate a media firm, others coming after him of wellness, hobbies and therapies, rusticated technologies of took this up with great enthusiasm. The Readymade had already within the context of art’. They were ‘not music’, ‘not cinema’, could imitate a museum department, a research institute, an shelter, theatres of memory, populist historiographies, and a been seen as rendering the handicraft basis of art obsolete, and ‘not dance’. archive, a community service organization, and so on—that is, thousand other ‘stations’, ‘sites’, and ‘plateaus’. conceptual art extended the obsolescence to the entire range The other arts make what I will call a ‘second appearance’ one could develop a mimesis, still within the institution of art, This is a new art form and possibly the final new art form of depictive skills. The de-skilling and re-skilling of artists be- then, not as what they have been previously, but as ‘instances of any and every one of the potential new domains of creativ- since it is nearly formless. It promises the gentle, enjoyable dis- came a major feature of art education, which has been trans- of (contemporary) art’. It appears that in making this second ity suggested by the conceptual reduction, but without thereby solution of the institution of art, not the militant liquidation formed by two generations of conceptual and post-conceptual appearance they lose their previous identity and assume or gain having to renounce the making of works and abandon the art threatened by the earlier avant-gardes. artist-teachers. a second, more complex, or more universal identity. They gain world and its patronage. I am not here to make predictions. But, through the gentle The reduction enlarged the effect of the Readymade in vali- this more universal identity by becoming ‘instances’, that is, Since the early 1970s, a hybrid form, an intermediary struc- process of mimesis and modeling, the prototypes may become dating a vast range of alternative forms that called for different exemplars of the consequences of the conceptual reduction. For, ture, has evolved on the basis of the fusion of Warhol’s factory more and more mature, more complex, and more stable. They abilities, different skills, and probably a different kind of art- if any object (or, by obvious extension, any process or situation) concept with post-conceptual mimesis. Artists were able to re- will still be called ‘art’, since there is no means to deny them ist, one that Peter Plagens recently called the ‘post-artist’. In can be defined, named, considered, judged, and valued as art by main artists and at the same time to take another step toward that name if they elect to be known by it. But they may begin keeping with the utopian tenor of avant-garde categories, this means of being able to designate itself as a sheer instance of the line drawn in the sand. Instead of disappearing from art to function as autonomous nomads, moving from festival to fes- new kind of artist would not suffer the limitations and neuro- art, then any other art form can also be so defined. In making into therapy, communitarianism, anthropology, or radical peda- tival. Whatever purpose they might have may become institu- ses of his or her predecessors, trapped as they were in the craft its ‘second appearance’, or gaining a second identity, the art gogy, they realized that these phenomena, too, can make their tionalized. The resulting institution could have an ‘art look’: if guild mentality of the canonical forms. form in question transcends itself and becomes more significant own second appearance within, and therefore as, art. Within a gallery can resemble a wellness centre, then a wellness centre 20 21 24 25 The closed guild mind values the specifics of its métier, its than it would be if it remained theatre or cinema or dance. the domain of second appearance, artists are able to try out this may come to look like an installation piece, and even be expe- abilities, skills, customs, and recipes. The proponents of the or that mimesis of extra-artistic creative experimentation. rienced as one. Then it would not be as if anyone renounced distinction and singularity of the arts always recognize métier The visual arts was the place where the historical process and In the past 15 or 20 years, they have refined and extended the art, but that art itself became diffuse, and lost track of its own as an essential condition of that distinction, and they might dialectic of reduction and negation were taken the furthest, reflection on the challenge to abandon art. It is as if, in moving boundaries, and lost interest in them.

where the development was most drastic and decisive. The flow as representation. They can only be sensed, or repeated, or The critique of the depictive arts has always concentrated mocratized public sphere, the post-colonial polis, the ‘other’, or avant-gardes of the movement arts were more subdued. There made visible as some form of event, in which their contingency on the question of the autonomy of art, and the corollary of the ‘multitude’. But as long as the dispute took place within the are many reasons for this; suffice for the moment to say that and unpredictability are preserved, possibly intensified, pos- autonomy—artistic quality. Autonomous art has been mocked boundaries of the depictive arts, it was impossible to dispose of none of them had any internal need to reach the same point sibly codified. as something ‘outside of life’ and indifferent to it. The avant- the principle of artistic quality. Subversions of technique and of self-negation as did the depictive arts. The negation-pro- The advent of the movement arts has also been a major factor gardes’ critique cannot be reduced to this mockery—but in de- skill are permanent routines by now, and they are just as per- cess of the depictive arts established a theoretical plateau that in the project of blurring the boundaries between high art and manding the breaching of the boundedness of the canonical manently bound by the criteria they challenge and with which could not be part of the landscape of the other arts. Each of mass culture. This is normally identified with Pop Art, as if the forms, the avant-gardes have failed—or refused—to recognize they must all eventually come to terms. And the most irritating the performing arts was closed off by its own structure from depictive arts themselves had the means to carry it out. But that autonomy is a relation to that same world outside of art. It thing about these subversions is that the most significant of the extension, radicalization, or aggravation, of self-critique. the depictive arts do not have those means because they have is a social relationship, one mediated, it is true, by our experi- them are accomplished by artists who cannot but bring forward They can be said to remain inherently at the pre-conceptual-art no distinct mass cultural forms. Mass culture produces millions ence of a thing, a work of art, but no less social therefore than new versions of autonomous art, and therefore new instances level. This is no criticism of them, simply a description of their of depictions of all kinds, but they are just that—depictions a get-together at a community hall. Defenders of autonomous of artistic quality. The canonical forms of the depictive arts own characteristics. functioning in different contexts. They are not a different art art—‘high art’—claim that when works of art attain a certain are too strong for the critiques that have been brought to bear Still, aspects of the dynamic of self-negation made their pres- form, just a different level or register of the depictive arts. Pop level of quality, their practical human utility expands exponen- on them. As long as the attempts to subvert them are made ence felt in the movement arts from the beginning of the 1950s artists were obviously not the first to recognize this; what they tially and becomes incalculable, unpredictable, and undefinable. from within, they cannot be disturbed. As soon as the artist in at least. This process brought the movement arts closer to the did was to emphasize more strongly than anyone had previously They argue that it is not that autonomous art has no purpose, question makes the slightest concession to the criteria of qual- avant-garde of what was then still the depictive arts and opened that audiences and even patrons of art in a modern, commercial something that is commonly said about it, but that it has no ity, the criteria as such are reasserted in a new, possibly even passages through which influence and ideas could move, in both society may very well prefer the popular and vernacular ver- purpose that can be known for certain in advance. Not even radical way. directions. Almost all the new phenomena between 1950 and sions of depiction to the more complex, more introverted, forms the greatest scholar of art can know what the next individual This was the dilemma faced 50 years ago by those who, for all 1970 are involved in this crossbreeding. As the movement arts of ‘high art’. Pop Art restaged the threatening possibility of the is going to discover in his or her experience of even the best- their by now famous reasons, were determined to break what are affected by radical reductivism—and Cage’s concert displays popular forms of depiction overwhelming the high ones, some- known work of art. He could not have predicted that Duchamp they saw as the vicious circle of autonomy, subversion, achieve- this clearly—their forms are altered enough that they begin to thing Greenberg had warned about in Avant-Garde and Kitsch in would want to deface the Mona Lisa as he did. The autonomy of ment, and reconciliation. They recognized that their aims could resemble, at least in some vague, suggestive way, radical works 1939. But, despite this, Pop Art, as depiction, is irrelevant to art is grounded on the quality it has of serving unanticipated, never be achieved within the métiers and the canon. Once again of depictive art. The silence of Cage’s concert resembles, in this the development of new forms of neo-avant-garde art and of a undeclared, and unadmitted purposes, and of serving them dif- they attempted the complete reinvention of art. They cannot sense, the blankness of Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings new fusion of high art with mass culture. And this is true of ferently at different times. be said to have failed, since they discovered the potential of from the same years. even the most extreme version of Pop, Warhol’s. This is frustrating for those who have purposes, no matter how the second appearance of the movement arts, the movement These affinities brought out the notion that an event could Anything new in this regard is imported from the movement significant those purposes may be. Often, the more compelling arts recontextualized within contemporary art as if they were have the same kind of artistic status as an object; in this pe- arts and from the creative or organizational structures of the the purpose, the greater the frustration and the more intense Readymades. riod the notion of the event as the essential new form of post- movement arts and the entertainment and media industries the objection. But for there to be works that can be depended In this recontextualization, the aesthetic criteria of all the conceptual art crystallized and became decisive. And the event based upon them. Warhol’s mimesis of a media conglomerate was on to serve a known purpose, the quality that makes the works métiers and forms could be suspended—those of both the move- is, by nature, an ensemble of effects if not a ‘confusion’ of them. more significant here than were his paintings or prints. Warhol autonomous must disappear and be replaced with other quali- ment arts and the depictive arts. The criteria of the movement Movement outside the frame of depiction, out from the atelier, did not cross the line drawn by the conceptual reduction, but he ties. And there are thousands of other qualities. Just as there arts are suspended because those arts are present as second ap- 22 23 26 27 gives new possibilities of form to the domain of momentary oc- moved laterally along it, and did so at the moment the line was are now thousands of works displaying those qualities. pearance; those of the depictive arts, because they could never currences, fugitive encounters, spontaneous flashes of insight, being drawn, or even before it was drawn. But he wasn’t very For 100 years, the programmes of critique have targeted the be applied to the movement arts in any case. and any other striking elements caught up in the flow of the interested in extending his practice into the realms advocated ‘problem of autonomous art’ in the name of those wider domains So ‘performance art’ did not have to be ‘good theatre’; video everyday and of no value or effect when abstracted from that by the radical counterculture. Quite the opposite. Warhol moved of creativity, whether called the proletarian revolution, the de- or film projections did not have to be ‘good filmmaking’, and 40 Corner College Zurich 41 Summer School Course Book 2009

could even be better if they were not, like Warhol’s or Nauman’s record of the past century, it is not likely. It is more likely that around 1967. There was, and is, something exhilarating about artists will continue to respond to the demand to transcend Seth Price that. The proliferation of new forms is limitless since it is stim- autonomous art with more of their famous hedging actions, in- ulated by the neutralization of criteria. The new event-forms venting even more sophisticated interim solutions. We are prob- might be the definitive confusion—or fusion—of the arts. An ably already in a mannerist phase of that. This suggests that Dispersion event is inherently a synthesis, a hybrid. So the term ‘confusion ‘interim mimetic heteronomy’—as awkward a phrase as I could of the arts’ seems inadequate, even obsolete. Now art develops manage to produce—has some way to go as the form of the New. by leaving behind the established criteria. The previous avant- It may be the form in which we discover what the sacrifice of gardes challenged those criteria, but now they do not need to aesthetic criteria is really like, not as speculation, but as expe- The definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution. be challenged; they are simply suspended, set aside. This de- rience, and as our specific—one could say peculiar—contribu- Marcel Broodthaers velopment may be welcomed, or lamented, or opposed, but it is tion to art. happening, is going to continue to happen; it is the form of the New. This is what artistic innovation is going to continue to be, this is what artists want, or need, it to be. This shows us that the canonical forms are no longer the site Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, where he currently of innovation. Moreover, in comparison to the new forms, it lives and works. He studied art history at the University of British now appears that they might never really have been, at least Colombia in Vancouver (1964–70) and undertook postgraduate stud- not to the extent claimed by the familiar histories of the avant- ies at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (1970–3). Since the mid garde. seventies, he has acquired international recognition with his trans- Burdened by their own notions of quality, the depictive arts parent colour photographs mounted in lightboxes. In these works he have been able to question their own validity only in order to deconstructs the pictorial traditions of Western painting, cinema affirm it. To practice these arts is to affirm them or fail at them, One of the ways in which the Conceptual project in art has and documentary photography, while acknowledging the heritage even though that affirmation may be more dialectical than most been most successful is in claiming new territory for prac- of conceptual art and other critical movements. Parallel to his stu- negations. The emergence in the past 30 to 50 years, of a con- tice. It’s a tendency that’s been almost too successful: today dio practice, Jeff Wall has become known as the author of many temporary art that is not a depictive art has revealed the depic- it seems that most of the work in the international art system influential essays on art, such as Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel (1984), tive arts as restricted to this negative dialectic of affirmation. positions itself as Conceptual to some degree, yielding the This is the price paid for autonomy. ‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual “Conceptual painter,” the “DJ and Conceptual artist,” or the Contemporary art, then, has bifurcated into two distinct ver- Art (1995), and Monochrome and Photojournalism in On Kawara’s Today “Conceptual web artist.” Let’s put aside the question of what sions. One is based in principle on the suspension of aesthetic Paintings (1996). criteria, the other is absolutely subject to them. One is like- makes a work Conceptual, recognizing, with some resigna- wise utterly subject to the principle of the autonomy of art, tion, that the term can only gesture toward a thirty year-old 28 the other is possible only in a condition of pseudo-heteronomy. historical moment. But it can’t be rejected entirely, as it has We can’t know yet whether there is to be an end to this interim an evident charge for artists working today, even if they condition, whether a new authentic heteronomous or post-au- aren’t necessarily invested in the concerns of the classical tonomous art will actually emerge. Judging from the historical moment, which included linguistics, analytic philosophy, and a pursuit of formal dematerialization. What does seem to hold true for today’s normative Conceptualism is that the project remains, in the words of Art and Language, “radically incomplete”: it does not necessarily stand against objects or painting, or for language as art; it does not need to stand against retinal art; it does not stand for anything certain, instead privileging framing and context, and constantly renegotiating its relationship to its audience. Martha Rosler has spoken of the “as- if” approach, where the Conceptual work cloaks itself in other disciplines (philosophy being the most notorious example), provoking an oscillation between skilled and de-skilled, authority and pre- tense, style and strategy, art and not-art.

Hermann Hugo. Pia Desideria. 1659. 42 Corner College Zurich 43 Summer School Course Book 2009

Duchamp was not only here first, but staked out the problematic virtually single-handedly. His question “Can one make works What would it mean to step outside of this carefully structured system? Duchamp’s which are not ‘of art’” is our shibboleth, and the question’s res- Rotorelief experiment stands as a caution, and the futility of more recent attempts olution will remain an apparition on the horizon, always reced- to evade the institutional system has been well demonstrated. Canonical works sur- ing from the slow growth of practice. One suggestion comes vive through documentation and discourse, administered by the usual institutions. from the philosopher Sarat Maharaj, who sees the question as “a Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, for example, was acquired by (or perhaps it was in fact ‘gifted marker for ways we might be able to engage with works, events, to’) the Dia Art Foundation, which discreetly mounted a photograph of the new hold- spasms, ructions that don’t look like art and don’t count as art, but ing in its Dan Graham-designed video-café, a tasteful assertion of ownership. are somehow electric, energy nodes, attractors, transmitters, conduc- tors of new thinking, new subjectivity and action that visual artwork in the traditional sense is not able to articulate.” These concise words call That work which seeks what Allan Kaprow called “the blurring of art and life” work for an art that insinuates itself into the culture at large, an art that does not Marcel Duchamp. Rotorelief. 1935. which Boris Groys has called biopolitical, attempting to “produce and document life go the way of, say, theology, where while it’s certain that there are practi- itself as pure activity by artistic means,” faces the problem that it must depend on a tioners doing important work, few people notice. An art that takes Rosler’s record of its intervention into the world, and this documentation is what is recouped as-if moment as far as it can go. as art, short-circuiting the original intent. Groys sees a disparity thus opened between the work and its future existence as documentation, noting our “deep malaise towards documentation and the archive.” This must be partly due to the archive’s deathlike appearance, a point that Jeff Wall has echoed, in a critique of the uninvitingly “tomb- Not surprisingly, the history of this project is a series of false like” Conceptualism of the 1960s. starts and paths that peter out, of projects that dissipate or are absorbed. Exemplary among this garden of ruins is Duchamp’s Agreement! A paragraph of citations, a direction, the suggestion that one is getting failure to sell his Rotorelief optical toys at an amateur inven- a sense of things. What these critics observe is a popular suspicion of the archive of tor’s fair. What better description of the artist than amateur high culture, which relies on cataloguing, provenance, and authenticity. Insofar as inventor? But this was 1935, decades before widespread fame there is a popular archive, it does not share this administrative tendency. Suppose an would have assured his sales, and he was attempting to wholly artist were to release the work directly into a system that depends on reproduction transplant himself into the alien context of commercial science and distribution for its sustenance, a model that encourages contamination, borrow- and invention. In his own analysis: “error, one hundred per- ing, stealing, and horizontal blur. The art system usually corrals errant works, but how cent.” Immersing art in life runs the risk of seeing the status of could it recoup thousands of freely circulating paperbacks? art—and with it, the status of artist—disperse entirely.

Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty. 1970.

These bold expansions actually seem to render artworks increasingly vulnerable. A painting is manifestly art, whether on the wall or in the street, but avant-garde work is often illegible without institutional framing and the work of the curator or historian. More than anyone else, artists of the last hundred years have wrestled with this trauma of context, but theirs is a struggle that necessarily takes place within the art system. However radical the work, it amounts to a proposal enacted within an arena of peer-review, in dialogue with the com- munity and its history. Reflecting on his experience running a gallery in the 1960s, Dan Graham observed: “if a work of art wasn’t written about and reproduced in a magazine it would have difficulty attaining the status of ‘art’. It seemed that in order to be defined as having value, that is as ‘art’, a work had only to be exhibited in a gallery and then to be written about and reproduced as a photograph in an art magazine.” Art, then, with its reliance on discussion through refereed forums and journals, is similar to a professional field like science. “Clip Art,” 1985. 44 Corner College Zurich 45 Summer School Course Book 2009

Dan Graham. Figurative. 1965.

The radical nature of this work stems in part from the fact that it is a direct expression of the process of production. Market mechanisms of circulation, distribution, and dissem- ination become a crucial part of the work, distinguishing It is useful to continually question the avant-garde’s traditional romantic opposition to such a practice from the liberal-bourgeois model of produc- bourgeois society and values. The genius of the bourgeoisie manifests itself in the cir- tion, which operates under the notion that cultural doings cuits of power and money that regulate the flow of culture. National bourgeois culture, somehow take place above the marketplace. However, of which art is one element, is based around commercial media, which, together with whether assuming the form of ad or article, much of this technology, design, and fashion, generate some of the important differences of our day. work was primarily concerned with finding exhibition These are the arenas in which to conceive of a work positioned within the material and alternatives to the gallery wall, and in any case often used discursive technologies of distributed media. these sites to demonstrate dryly theoretical propositions 2000. rather than address issues of, say, desire. And then, one Distributed media can be defined as social information circu- imagines, with a twist of the kaleidoscope things resolve lating in theoretically unlimited quantities in the common mar- themselves. ket, stored or accessed via portable devices such as books and magazines, records and compact discs, videotapes and This points to a shortcoming of classical conceptualism. Benjamin Buchloh points out that DVDs, personal computers and data diskettes. Duchamp’s “while it emphasized its universal availability and its potential collective accessibility question has new life in this space, which has greatly and underlined its freedom from the determinations of the discursive and economic fram- expanded during the last few decades of global corporate ing conventions governing traditional art production and reception, it was, nevertheless, sprawl. It’s space into which the work of art must project perceived as the most esoteric and elitist artistic mode.” Kosuth’s quotation from Roget’s itself lest it be outdistanced entirely by these corporate inter- Thesaurus placed in an Artforum box ad, or Dan Graham’s list of numbers laid out in ests. New strategies are needed to keep up with commercial an issue of Harper’s Bazaar, were uses of mass media to deliver coded propositions to a specialist audience, and the impact of these works, significant and lasting as they distribution, decentralization, and dispersion. You must fight Ant Farm, 1960s. something in order to understand it. were, reverted directly to the relatively arcane realm of the art system, which noted these efforts and inscribed them in its histories. Conceptualism’s critique of representation ema- Mark Klienberg, writing in 1975 in the second issue of The Fox, poses the question: nated the same mandarin air as did a canvas by Ad Reinhart, and its attempts to create “Could there be someone capable of writing a science-fiction thriller based on the inten- an Art Degree Zero can be seen as a kind of negative virtuosity, perhaps partly attribut- tion of presenting an alternative interpretation of modernist art that is readable by a able to a New Left skepticism towards pop culture and its generic expressions. non-specialist audience? Would they care?” He says no more about it, and the question stands as an intriguing historical fragment, an Certainly, part of what makes the classical avant-garde interesting and radical is that it evolutionary dead end, and a line of inquiry to tended to shun social communication, excommunicating itself through incomprehensibility, pursue in this essay: the intimation of a categori- but this isn’t useful if the goal is to use the circuits of mass distribution. In that case, one cally ambiguous art, one in which the synthesis of must use not simply the delivery mechanisms of popular culture, but also its generic forms. multiple circuits of reading carries an emancipa- When Rodney Graham releases a CD of pop songs, or Maurizio Cattelan publishes a mag- tory potential. azine, those in the art world must acknowledge the art gesture at the same time that these products function like any other artifact in the consumer market. But difference lies within This tendency has a rich history, despite the lack of these products! Embodied in their embrace of specific work along the lines of Klienberg’s proposal. the codes of the culture industry, they contain Many artists have used the printed page as medium; a utopian moment that points toward future an arbitrary and partial list might include Robert transformation. They could be written accord- Smithson, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, ing to the code of hermeneutics: Lawrence Weiner, Stephen Kaltenbach, and Adrian Piper, and there have been historical watersheds “Where we have spoken openly we have actu- like Seth Siegelaub and John Wendler’s 1968 show ally said nothing. But where we have written Xeroxbook. something in code and in pictures, we have concealed the truth…”

A. Eleazar. Ouroboros. 1735. 46 Corner College Zurich 47 Summer School Course Book 2009

If distribution and public are so important, isn’t this, in a sense, a debate about “public art”? It’s a useful way to frame the discussion, but only if one underlines the historical deficiencies of that discourse, and acknowledges the fact that the public has changed.

Let’s say your aesthetic program spans media, and that much of your work does not function properly within the institutionalized art context. This might include music, fashion, poetry, film- The discourse of public art has historically focused on ideals of universal access, but, rather than making, or criticism, all crucial artistic practices, but practices which are somehow stubborn and considering access in any practical terms, two goals have been pursued to the exclusion of others. difficult, which resist easy assimilation into a market-driven art system. The film avant-garde, for First, the work must be free of charge (apparently economic considerations are primary in determin- instance, has always run on a separate track from the art world, even as its practitioners may ing the divide between public and private). Often this bars any perceptible institutional frame that have been pursuing analogous concerns. And while artists have always been attracted to music would normally confer the status of art, such as the museum, so the public artwork must broadly and and its rituals, a person whose primary activity was producing music, conceived of and present- unambiguously announce its own art status, a mandate for conservative forms. Second is the direct ed as Art, would find ‘art world’ acceptance elusive. The producer who elects to wear several equation of publicness with shared physical space. But if this is the model, the successful work of hats is perceived as a crossover at best: the artist-filmmaker, as in the case of Julian Schnabel; public art will at best function as a site of pilgrimage, in which case it overlaps with architecture. the artist as entrepreneur, as in the case of Warhol’s handling of Interview magazine and the Velvet Underground; or, as with many of the people mentioned in this essay, artist as critic, per- Puppy, after Jeff Koons. S. Price. haps the most tenuous position of all. This is the lake of our feeling.

The problem is that situating the work at a singular point in space and time turns One could call these niches “theatrical,” echoing Michael Fried’s insistence that it, a priori, into a monument. What if it “what lies between the arts is theater… the common denominator that binds… is instead dispersed and reproduced, its large and seemingly disparate activities to one another, and that distinguishes value approaching zero as its accessibility these activities from the radically different enterprises of the Modernist art.” A rises? We should recognize that collective practice based on distributed media should pay close attention to these activi- experience is now based on simultaneous ties, which, despite lying between the arts, have great resonance in the national private experiences, distributed across culture. the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing debate, publicity, promotion, and discussion. Publicness today has as Some of the most interesting recent artistic much to do with sites of production and activity has taken place outside the art market reproduction as it does with any supposed and its forums. Collaborative and sometimes physical commons, so a popular album anonymous groups work in fashion, music, could be regarded as a more successful video, or performance, garnering admiration instance of public art than a monument within the art world while somehow retaining tucked away in an urban plaza. The album their status as outsiders, perhaps due to their is available everywhere, since it employs preference for theatrical, distribution-oriented the mechanisms of free market capitalism, history’s most sophisticated distribution system to date. modes. Maybe this is what Duchamp meant by The monumental model of public art is invested in an anachronistic notion of communal appreciation his intriguing throwaway comment, late in life, transposed from the church to the museum to the outdoors, and this notion is received skeptically by that the artist of the future will be underground. an audience no longer so interested in direct communal experience. While instantiated in nominal public space, mass-market artistic production is usually consumed privately, as in the case of books, CDs, videotapes, and Internet “content.” Television producers are not interested in collectivity, they are interested in getting as close as possible to individuals. Perhaps an art distributed to the broadest possible public closes the circle, becoming a private art, as in the days of commissioned portraits. The analogy will only become more apt as digital distribution techniques allow for increasing custom- ization to individual consumers. 48 Corner College Zurich 49 Summer School Course Book 2009

A good example of this last distinction is the phenomenon of the “Daniel Pearl Video,” as it’s come to be called. Even without the label Ettore Sotsass. Lamiera. Pattern design, Memphis collection. 1983. PROPAGANDA, which CBS helpfully added to the excerpt they aired, it’s clear that the 2002 The monumentality of public art has been challenged before, most successfully by those for whom video is a complex document. Formally, it the term ‘public’ was a political rallying point. Public artists in the 1970s and 1980s took inter- presents kidnapped American journalist Daniel ventionist praxis into the social field, acting out of a sense of urgency based on the notion that Pearl, first as a mouthpiece for the views of his there were social crises so pressing that artists could no longer hole up in the studio, but must kidnappers, a Pakistani fundamentalist organi- directly engage with community and cultural identity. If we are to propose a new kind of public zation, and then, following his off-screen mur- art, it is important to look beyond the purely ideological or instrumental function of art. As Art and der, as a cadaver, beheaded in order to under- Language noted, “radical artists produce articles and exhibitions about photos, capitalism, corrup- line the gravity of their political demands. tion, war, pestilence, trench foot and issues.” Public policy, destined to be the terminal as-if strategy of the avant-garde! A self-annihilating nothing.

An art grounded in distributed media can be seen as a political art and an art of communicative action, not least because it is a reaction One of the video’s most striking aspects is not the grisly, to the fact that the merging of art and life has been effected most though clinical, climax (which, in descriptions of the tape, successfully by the “consciousness industry”. The field of culture is has come to stand in for the entire content), but the slick pro- a public sphere and a site of struggle, and all of its manifestations duction strategies, which seem to draw on American political are ideological. In Public Sphere and Experience, Oscar Negt and campaign advertisements. It is not clear whether it was ever Alexander Kluge insist that each individual, no matter how passive a intended for TV broadcast. An apocryphal story indicates component of the capitalist consciousness industry, must be consid- that a Saudi journalist found it on an Arabic-language web- ered a producer (despite the fact that this role is denied them). Our site and turned it over to CBS, which promptly screened an task, they say, is to fashion “counter-productions.” Kluge himself is an excerpt, drawing heavy criticism. Somehow it found its way inspiration: acting as a filmmaker, lobbyist, fiction writer, and televi- onto the Internet, where the FBI’s thwarted attempts at sup- sion producer, he has worked deep changes in the terrain of German pression only increased its notoriety: in the first months after media. An object disappears when it becomes a weapon. its Internet release, “Daniel Pearl video,” “Pearl video,” and other variations on the phrase were among the terms most frequently submitted to Internet search engines. The work seems to be unavailable as a videocassette, so anyone able to locate it is likely to view a compressed data-stream transmitted from a hosting service in the Netherlands (in this Anonymous. sense, it may not be correct to call it “video”). One question is whether it has been relegated to the Internet, or in some way created by that technology. Does the piece count as “info-war” because of its nature as a proliferating computer file, or is it simply a video for broadcast, forced to assume The problem arises when the constellation of critique, publicity, and discussion around the work is digital form under political pressure? Unlike television, the at least as charged as a primary experience of the work. Does one have an obligation to view the net provides information only on demand, and much of the work first-hand? What happens when a more intimate, thoughtful, and enduring understanding comes debate over this video concerns not the legality or moral- from mediated discussions of an exhibition, rather than from a direct experience of the work? Is it ity of making it available, but whether or not one should incumbent upon the consumer to bear witness, or can one’s art experience derive from magazines, choose to watch it—as if the act of viewing will in some way the Internet, books, and conversation? The ground for these questions has been cleared by two enlighten or contaminate. This is a charged document freely cultural tendencies that are more or less diametrically opposed: on the one hand, Conceptualism’s Computer Technique Group. Cubic Kennedy. 1960s. historical dependence on documents and records; on the other hand, the popular archive’s ever- available in the public arena, yet the discussion around it, sharpening knack for generating public discussion through secondary media. This does not simply judging from numerous web forums, bulletin boards, and dis- mean the commercial cultural world, but a global media sphere which is, at least for now, open to cussion groups, is usually debated by parties who have never the interventions of non-commercial, non-governmental actors working solely within channels of dis- seen it. tributed media. 50 Corner College Zurich 51 Summer School Course Book 2009

An entire artistic program could be centered on the re-release of obsolete cultural arti- This example may be provocative, since the video’s facts, with or without modifications, regardless of intellectual property laws. An early deplorable content is clearly bound up with its extraor- example of this redemptive tendency is artist Harry Smith’s obsessive 1952 Anthology dinary routes of transmission and reception. It is evi- of American Folk Music, which compiled forgotten recordings from early in the century. dent, however, that terrorist organizations, alongside Closer to the present is my own collection of early video game soundtracks, in which transnational corporate interests, are one of the more audio data rescued by hackers and circulated on the web is transplanted to the old vigilantly opportunistic exploiters of “events, spasms, media of the compact-disc, where it gains resonance from the contexts of product and ructions that don’t look like art and don’t count as art, the song form: take what’s free and sell it back in a new package. In another example, but are somehow electric, energy nodes, attractors, one can view the entire run of the 1970s arts magazine Aspen, republished on the art- transmitters, conductors of new thinking, new subjec- ist-run site ubu.com, which regularly makes out-of-print works available as free digital tivity and action.” A more conventional instance of files. All of these works emphasize the capacity for remembering, which Kluge sees as successful use of the media-sphere by a non-market, crucial in opposing “the assault of the present non-government organization is Linux, the open-source on the rest of time,” and in organizing indi- computer operating system that won a controversial vidual and collective learning and memory first prize at the digital art fair Ars Electronica. Linux After an anonymous cameo, circa 18th century. S. Price under an industrialist-capitalist temporality was initially written by one person, programmer Linus that works to fragment and valorize all expe- Torvalds, who placed the code for this “radically incom- rience. In these works, resistance is to be plete” work on-line, inviting others to tinker, with the aim of polishing and perfecting the operating found at the moment of production, since it system. The Internet allows thousands of authors to simultaneously develop various parts of the work, figures the moment of consumption as an act and Linux has emerged as a popular and powerful operating system and a serious challenge to profit- of re-use. driven giants like Microsoft, which recently filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to warn that its business model, based on control through licensing, is menaced by the open-source model. Collective authorship and complete decentralization ensure that the work is invulnerable to the usual corporate forms of attack and assimilation, whether enacted via legal, market, or technologi- cal routes (however, as Alex Galloway has pointed out, the structure of the World Wide Web should not itself be taken to be some rhizomatic utopia; it certainly would not be difficult for a government The Blind Man. 1917. agency to hobble or even shut down the Web with a few simple commands). It’s clear from these examples that the readymade still towers over artistic practice. But this is largely due to the fact that the strategy yielded a host of new opportunities for the commodity. Dan Graham identified the problem with the readymade: “instead of reducing gallery objects to the common level of the everyday object, this ironic gesture simply extended the reach of the gallery’s exhibition territory.” One must return to Fountain, the most notorious and most interesting of the readymades, to see Both of these examples privilege the Internet as medium, that the gesture does not simply raise epistemological questions about the nature of mostly because of its function as a public site for storage art, but enacts the dispersion of objects into discourse. The power of the readymade and transmission of information. The notion of a mass is that no one needs to make the pilgrimage to see Fountain. As with Graham’s maga- archive is relatively new, and a notion which is probably zine pieces, few people saw the original Fountain in 1917. Never exhibited, and lost philosophically opposed to the traditional understanding or destroyed almost immediately, it was actually created through Duchamp’s media of what an archive is and how it functions, but it may be manipulations—the Stieglitz photograph (a guarantee, a shortcut to history), the Blind that, behind the veneer of user interfaces floating on its Man magazine article—rather than through the creation-myth of his finger selecting surface—which generate most of the work grouped under it in the showroom, the status-conferring gesture to which the readymades are often the rubric “web art”—the Internet approximates such a reduced. In Fountain’s elegant model, the artwork does not occupy a single position structure, or can at least be seen as a working model. in space and time; rather, it is a palimpsest of gestures, presentations, and positions. Computer Technique Group. Return to a Square. 1960s. Distribution is a circuit of reading, and there is huge potential for subversion when dealing with the institutions that control definitions of cultural meaning. Duchamp With more and more media readily available through this unruly archive, the task becomes one of pack- distributed the notion of the fountain in such a way that it became one of art’s pri- aging, producing, reframing, and distributing; a mode of production analogous not to the creation of mal scenes; it transubstantiated from a provocative objet d’art into, as Broodthaers material goods, but to the production of social contexts, using existing material. Anything on the internet defined his Musée des Aigles: “a situation, a system defined by objects, by inscrip- is a fragment, provisional, pointing elsewhere. Nothing is finished. What a time you chose to be born! tions, by various activities…”

i-D Magazine. 2002. 52 Corner College Zurich 53 Summer School Course Book 2009

A similar strain of disbelief greeted the construction of his own house, produced for an exhibition with a good deal of the exhibitor’s money. It seems that the avant-garde can still shock, if only on the level of economic valorization. This work does not simply address the codes of mass culture, it embraces these codes as form, in a possibly quix- The last thirty years have seen the transformation of art’s otic pursuit of an unmediated critique of cultural conventions. “expanded field” from a stance of stubborn discursive ambi- guity into a comfortable and compromised situation in which we’re well accustomed to conceptual inter- An argument against art that addresses contempo- ventions, to art and the social, where the impulse rary issues and topical culture rests on the virtue to merge art and life has resulted in lifestyle art, a of slowness, often cast aside due to the urgency secure gallery practice that comments on contem- with which ones work must appear. Slowness works porary media culture, or apes commercial pro- against all of our prevailing urges and requirements: duction strategies. This is the lumber of life. it is a resistance to the contemporary mandate of Iakov Chernikhov. Constructive Theatrical Set. 1931. speed. Moving with the times places you in a blind spot: if you’re part of the general tenor, it’s difficult This tendency is marked in the discourses of architecture and design. An echo of Public Art’s cher- to add a dissonant note. But the way in which media ished communal spaces persists in the art system’s fondness for these modes, possibly because of the culture feeds on its own leavings indicates the para- Utopian promise of their appeals to collective public experience. Their “criticality” comes from an doxical slowness of archived media, which, like a engagement with broad social concerns. This is why Dan Graham’s pavilions were initially so pro- sleeper cell, will always rear its head at a later date. vocative, and the work of Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, and Gordon Matta-Clark before him: these The rear-guard often has the upper hand, and some- were interventions into the social unconscious. These interventions have been guiding lights for art of times delay, to use Duchamp’s term, will return the the last decade, but in much the same way that quasi-bureaucratic administrative forms were taken investment with massive interest. up by the Conceptualists of the 1960s, design and architecture now could be called house styles of the neo-avant-garde. Their appearance often simply gestures toward a theoretically engaged position, Let’s not overreach. The question is whether every- such that a representation of space or structure is figured as an ipso facto critique of administered thing is always the same, whether it is in fact possi- Michael Green. From Zen and the Art of Macintosh. 1986. society and the social, while engagement with ble that by the age of forty a person has seen all that design codes is seen as a comment on advertis- has been and will ever be. Must I consult art to understand that identity is administered, ing and the commodity. One must be careful not power exploits, resistance is predetermined, all is shit? to blame the artists; architecture and design forms are all-too-easily packaged for resale as sculpture and painting. However, one can still slip through the cracks in the best possible way, and even in the largest institutions. Jorge Pardo’s radical Project, an overhaul of Dia’s ground floor which successful- ly repositioned the institution via broadly appealing design vernaculars, went largely unremarked in the To recognize…the relative immutability of historically formed discursive art press, either because the piece was transparent artistic genres, institutional structures, and distribution forms as obstacles that are to the extent of claiming the museum’s bookstore ultimately persistent (if not insurmountable) marks the most profound crisis for the and exhibiting work artist identified with a model of avant-garde practice. by other artists, or Benjamin Buchloh because of a cynical incredulity that he So the thread leads from Duchamp to Pop to Conceptualism, but beyond that we must turn gets away with call- our backs: a resignation, in contrast to Pop’s affirmation and Conceptualism’s interrogation. ing this art. Such a project is an incomplete and perhaps futile proposition, and since one can only adopt the degree of precision appropriate to the subject, this essay is written in a provi- sional and exploratory spirit. An art that attempts to tackle the expanded field, encompass- ing arenas other than the standard gallery and art world-circuit, sounds utopian at best,

Liam Gillick. Post Legislation Discussion Platform. 1998. Ettore Sottsass. Design of a Roof to Discuss Under. 1973. 54 Corner College Zurich 55 Summer School Course Book 2009

Jorge Luis Borges The Library of Babel

and possibly naïve and undeveloped; this essay may itself be a disjointed series of naïve propositions lacking a thesis. Complete enclosure means that one cannot write a novel, compose music, produce television, and still retain the status of Artist. What’s more, artist as a social role is somewhat embarrassing, in that it‘s taken to be a useless position, if By this art you may contemplate of pious hands to throw me over the and latrines for the seated librarian, not a reactionary one: the practitioner is dismissed as either the producer of over-valued the variations of the 23 letters … railing; my grave will be the fathomless can only be the work of a god. To decor, or as part of an arrogant, parasitical, self-styled elite. The Anatomy of Melancholy, air; my body will sink endlessly and perceive the distance between the

But hasn’t the artistic impulse always been utopian, with all the hope and futility that part 2, sect. II, mem. IV decay and dissolve in the wind gener- divine and the human, it is enough to implies? To those of you who decry the Utopian impulse as futile, or worse, responsible ated by the fall, which is infinite. I say compare these crude wavering sym- for the horrible excesses of the last century, recall that each moment is a Golden Age (of The universe (which others call the that the Library is unending. The bols which my fallible hand scrawls on course the Soviet experiment was wildly wrong-headed, but let us pretend—and it is not Library) is composed of an indefinite idealists argue that the hexagonal the cover of a book, with the organic so hard—that a kind of social Dispersion was its aim). The last hundred years of work and perhaps infinite number of hexag- rooms are a necessary form of abso- letters inside: punctual, delicate, indicate that it’s demonstrably impossible to destroy or dematerialize Art, which, like it or onal galleries, with vast air shafts lute space or, at least, of our intuition perfectly black, inimitably symmetri- not, can only gradually expand, voraciously synthesizing every aspect of life. Meanwhile, between, surrounded by very low of space. They reason that a triangular cal. we can take up the redemptive circulation of allegory through design, obsolete forms and railings. From any of the hexagons one or pentagonal room is inconceivable. Second: The orthographical historical moments, genre and the vernacular, the social memory woven into popular cul- (The mystics claim that their ecstasy symbols are twenty-five in number. 1 ture: a private, secular, and profane consumption of media. Production, after all, is the can see, interminably, the upper and excretory phase in a process of appropriation. lower floors. The distribution of the reveals to them a circular chamber This finding made it possible, three galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, containing a great circular book, hundred years ago, to formulate a five long shelves per side, cover all the whose spine is continuous and which general theory of the Library and solve sides except two; their height, which is follows the complete circle of the satisfactorily the problem which no the distance from floor to ceiling, walls; but their testimony is suspect; conjecture had deciphered: the scarcely exceeds that of a normal their words, obscure. This cyclical formless and chaotic nature of almost bookcase. One of the free sides leads book is God.) Let it suffice now for me all the books. One which my father to a narrow hallway which opens onto to repeat the classic dictum: The saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen another gallery, identical to the first Library is a sphere whose exact center ninety-four was made up of the letters and to all the rest. To the left and right is any one of its hexagons and whose MCV, perversely repeated from the first of the hallway there are two very small circumference is inaccessible. line to the last. Another (very much closets. In the first, one may sleep There are five shelves for each of consulted in this area) is a mere standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s the hexagon’s walls; each shelf con- labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last fecal necessities. Also through here tains thirty-five books of uniform page says Oh time thy pyramids. This passes a spiral stairway, which sinks format; each book is of four hundred much is already known: for every abysmally and soars upwards to and ten pages; each page, of forty sensible line of straightforward state- remote distances. In the hallway there lines, each line, of some eighty letters ment, there are leagues of senseless is a mirror which faithfully duplicates which are black in color. There are cacophonies, verbal jumbles and all appearances. Men usually infer also letters on the spine of each book; incoherences. (I know of an uncouth from this mirror that the Library is not these letters do not indicate or prefig- region whose librarians repudiate the infinite (if it were, why this illusory ure what the pages will say. I know vain and superstitious custom of duplication?); I prefer to dream that its that this incoherence at one time finding a meaning in books and polished surfaces represent and seemed mysterious. Before summariz- equate it with that of finding a mean- promise the infinite … Light is provided ing the solution (whose discovery, in ing in dreams or in the chaotic lines of by some spherical fruit which bear the spite of its tragic projections, is one’s palm … They admit that the name of lamps. There are two, trans- perhaps the capital fact in history) inventors of this writing imitated the versally placed, in each hexagon. The I wish to recall a few axioms. twenty-five natural symbols, but Albrecht Dürer. Melencolia I. 1514. light they emit is insufficient, inces- First: The Library exists ab maintain that this application is sant. aeterno. This truth, whose immediate accidental and that the books signify Like all men of the Library, I have corollary is the future eternity of the nothing in themselves. This dictum, we traveled in my youth; I have wandered world, cannot be placed in doubt by shall see, is not entirely fallacious.) in search of a book, perhaps the any reasonable mind. Man, the imper- For a long time it was believed catalogue of catalogues; now that my fect librarian, may be the product of that these impenetrable books corre- eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the sponded to past or remote languages. am preparing to die just a few leagues universe, with its elegant endowment It is true that the most ancient men, from the hexagon in which I was born. of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of the first librarians, used a language Once I am dead, there will be no lack inexhaustible stairways for the traveler quite different from the one we now 56 Corner College Zurich

speak; it is true that a few miles to the catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of always arrive extremely tired from their hexagon (men reasoned) there must dhcmrlchtdj I have just written the word “infinite.” I right the tongue is dialectical and that Basilides, the commentary on that journeys; they speak of a broken exist a book which is the formula and have not interpolated this adjective ninety floors farther up, it is incompre- gospel, the commentary on the stairway which almost killed them; perfect compendium of all the rest: which the divine Library has not out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is hensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but commentary on that gospel, the true they talk with the librarian of galleries some librarian has gone through it and foreseen and which in one of its secret not illogical to think that the world is four hundred and ten pages of inalter- story of your death, the translation of and stairs; sometimes they pick up the he is analogous to a god. In the lan- tongues do not contain a terrible infinite. Those who judge it to be able MCV’s cannot correspond to any every book in all languages, the nearest volume and leaf through it, guage of this zone vestiges of this meaning. No one can articulate a limited postulate that in remote places language, no matter how dialectical or interpolations of every book in all looking for infamous words. Obviously, remote functionary’s cult still persist. syllable which is not filled with tender- the corridors and stairways and rudimentary it may be. Some insinu- books. no one expects to discover anything. Many wandered in search of Him. For a ness and fear, which is not, in one of hexagons can conceivably come to an ated that each letter could influence When it was proclaimed that the As was natural, this inordinate century they have exhausted in vain the these languages, the powerful name end — which is absurd. Those who the following one and that the value of Library contained all books, the first hope was followed by an excessive most varied areas. How could one of a god. To speak is to fall into tautol- imagine it to be without limit forget MCV in the third line of page 71 was impression was one of extravagant depression. The certitude that some locate the venerated and secret hexa- ogy. This wordy and useless epistle that the possible number of books not the one the same series may have happiness. All men felt themselves to shelf in some hexagon held precious gon which housed Him? Someone already exists in one of the thirty does have such a limit. I venture to in another position on another page, be the masters of an intact and secret books and that these precious books proposed a regressive method: To volumes of the five shelves of one of suggest this solution to the ancient but this vague thesis did not prevail. treasure. There was no personal or were inaccessible, seemed almost locate book A, consult first book B the innumerable hexagons — and its problem: The Library is unlimited and Others thought of cryptographs; world problem whose eloquent solu- intolerable. A blasphemous sect which indicates A’s position; to locate refutation as well. (An n number of cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to generally, this conjecture has been tion did not exist in some hexagon. suggested that the searches should book B, consult first a book C, and so possible languages use the same cross it in any direction, after centuries accepted, though not in the sense in The universe was justified, the universe cease and that all men should juggle on to infinity … In adventures such as vocabulary; in some of them, the he would see that the same volumes which it was formulated by its origina- suddenly usurped the unlimited letters and symbols until they con- these, I have squandered and wasted symbol library allows the correct were repeated in the same disorder tors. dimensions of hope. At that time a structed, by an improbable gift of my years. It does not seem unlikely to definition a ubiquitous and lasting (which, thus repeated, would be an Five hundred years ago, the chief great deal was said about the Vindica- chance, these canonical books. The me that there is a total book on some system of hexagonal galleries, but order: the Order). My solitude is of an upper hexagon 2 came upon a tions: books of apology and prophecy authorities were obliged to issue shelf of the universe; 3 I pray to the library is bread or pyramid or anything gladdened by this elegant hope. 4 book as confusing as the others, but which vindicated for all time the acts severe orders. The sect disappeared, unknown gods that a man — just one, else, and these seven words which which had nearly two pages of homo- of every man in the universe and but in my childhood I have seen old even though it were thousands of years define it have another value. You who Translated by J. E. I. geneous lines. He showed his find to a retained prodigious arcana for his men who, for long periods of time, ago! — may have examined and read it. read me, are You sure of understand- wandering decoder who told him the future. Thousands of the greedy would hide in the latrines with some If honor and wisdom and happiness ing my language?) Notes lines were written in Portuguese; abandoned their sweet native hexa- metal disks in a forbidden dice cup are not for me, let them be for others. The methodical task of writing 1 The original manuscript does not contain digits others said they were Yiddish. Within a gons and rushed up the stairways, and feebly mimic the divine disorder. Let heaven exist, though my place be in distracts me from the present state of or capital letters. The punctuation has been limited to the comma and the period. These two century, the language was established: urged on by the vain intention of Others, inversely, believed that it hell. Let me be outraged and annihi- men. The certitude that everything has signs, the space and the twenty-two letters of a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of finding their Vindication. These pil- was fundamental to eliminate useless lated, but for one instant, in one being, been written negates us or turns us the alphabet are the twenty-five symbols Guarani, with classical Arabian inflec- grims disputed in the narrow corridors, works. They invaded the hexagons, let Your enormous Library be justified. into phantoms. I know of districts in considered sufficient by this unknown author. (Editor’s note.) tions. The content was also deci- proferred dark curses, strangled each showed credentials which were not The impious maintain that nonsense is which the young men prostrate 2 Before, there was a man for every three phered: some notions of combinative other on the divine stairways, flung the always false, leafed through a volume normal in the Library and that the themselves before books and kiss hexagons. Suicide and pulmonary diseases have destroyed that proportion. A memory of analysis, illustrated with examples of deceptive books into the air shafts, with displeasure and condemned reasonable (and even humble and pure their pages in a barbarous manner, unspeakable melancholy: at times I have variations with unlimited repetition. met their death cast down in a similar whole shelves: their hygienic, ascetic coherence) is an almost miraculous but they do not know how to decipher traveled for many nights through corridors and along polished stairways without finding a These examples made it possible for a fashion by the inhabitants of remote furor caused the senseless perdition of exception. They speak (I know) of the a single letter. Epidemics, heretical single librarian. librarian of genius to discover the regions. Others went mad … The millions of books. Their name is “feverish Library whose chance vol- conflicts, peregrinations which inevi- 3 I repeat: it suffices that a book be possible for it fundamental law of the Library. This Vindications exist (I have seen two execrated, but those who deplore the umes are constantly in danger of tably degenerate into banditry, have to exist. Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book can be a ladder, although no thinker observed that all the books, no which refer to persons of the future, to “treasures” destroyed by this frenzy changing into others and affirm, negate decimated the population. I believe I doubt there are books which discuss and negate matter how diverse they might be, are persons who are perhaps not imagi- neglect two notable facts. One: the and confuse everything like a delirious have mentioned suicides, more and and demonstrate this possibility and others whose structure corresponds to that of a ladder. made up of the same elements: the nary) but the searchers did not remem- Library is so enormous that any divinity.” These words, which not only more frequent with the years. Perhaps 4 Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that this space, the period, the comma, the ber that the possibility of a man’s reduction of human origin is infinitesi- denounce the disorder but exemplify it my old age and fearfulness deceive vast Library is useless: rigorously speaking, a mal. The other: every copy is unique, single volume would be sufficient, a volume of twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He finding his Vindication, or some as well, notoriously prove their authors’ me, but I suspect that the human ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type, also alleged a fact which travelers treacherous variation thereof, can be irreplaceable, but (since the Library is abominable taste and desperate species — the unique species — is containing an infinite number if infinitely thin have confirmed: In the vast Library computed as zero. total) there are always several hundred ignorance. In truth, the Library includes about to be extinguished, but the leaves. (In the early seventeenth century, Cavalieri said that all solid bodies are the there are no two identical books. From At that time it was also hoped thousand imperfect facsimiles: works all verbal structures, all variations Library will endure: illuminated, superimposition of an infinite number of planes.) these two incontrovertible premises he that a clarification of humanity’s basic which differ only in a letter or a permitted by the twenty-five ortho- solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, The handling of this silky vade mecum would not be convenient: each apparent page would deduced that the Library is total and mysteries — the origin of the Library comma. Counter to general opinion, I graphical symbols, but not a single equipped with precious volumes, unfold into other analogous ones; the inconceiv- that its shelves register all the possible and of time — might be found. It is venture to suppose that the conse- example of absolute nonsense. It is useless, incorruptible, secret. able middle page would have no reverse. combinations of the twenty-odd verisimilar that these grave mysteries quences of the Purifiers’ depredations useless to observe that the best volume orthographical symbols (a number could be explained in words: if the have been exaggerated by the horror of the many hexagons under my which, though extremely vast, is not language of philosophers is not these fanatics produced. They were administration is entitled The Combed infinite): Everything: the minutely sufficient, the multiform Library will urged on by the delirium of trying to Thunderclap and another The Plaster detailed history of the future, the have produced the unprecedented reach the books in the Crimson Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. archangels’ autobiographies, the language required, with its vocabular- Hexagon: books whose format is These phrases, at first glance incoher- faithful catalogues of the Library, thou- ies and grammars. For four centuries smaller than usual, all-powerful, ent, can no doubt be justified in a sands and thousands of false cata- now men have exhausted the hexa- illustrated and magical. cryptographical or allegorical manner; logues, the demonstration of the gons … There are official searchers, We also know of another super- such a justification is verbal and,ex fallacy of those catalogues, the dem- inquisitors. I have seen them in the stition of that time: that of the Man of hypothesi, already figures in the Library. onstration of the fallacy of the true performance of their function: they the Book. On some shelf in some I cannot combine some characters