Hallucinating Networks and Secret Museums Hito Steyerl on Our Aesthetic Immiseration

Ryan Anthony Hatch

BOOK REVIEWED: Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. New York: Verso, 2017.

f Art Review magazine’s “Power 100” rankings are to be heeded, Hito Steyerl is the most important person in the art world.1 Seeing Steyerl’s name occupy Ithe widely hyped list’s top spot, I was reminded that in what we call “the art world,” we are always confronted with at least two different notions of power, perhaps as inextricable as they are incommensurable. For whatever power the German artist and writer can be said to possess has everything to do with her peerlessly trenchant critical investigations of another kind of power subtending and shaping contemporary art—the sort of power whose abuse comes as no sur- prise, in so far as its exercise is coterminous with its abuse. Steyerl’s work maps the power of . . . well, the actually powerful, those who stand to profit from art’s metamorphosis into an “alternative currency” that screens out the horrors and launders the spoils of war, and on whose behalf contemporary media technologies are now being weaponized as so many apparatuses of surveillance and control. She is best known for immersive video installations like How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), Liquidity Inc. (2014), and her celebrated contribution to the 2015 Venice Biennale German Pavilion, Factory of the Sun (2015). In such densely narrative works, documentary fact and political analysis give way to flights of speculative fiction, perfectly reasonable paranoia, and hyperbolic zaniness, in an effort to render the extent of our subjugation and exploitation in the globalized neoliberal world order, as well as the critical roles aesthetic experience plays in this order’s operation.

Based in Berlin, Steyerl holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Akademie der Bil- denden Künste in Vienna, and currently teaches experimental video and film at

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_r_00479 by guest on 29 September 2021 the Universität der Künst Berlin. In the last decade, dozens of solo exhibitions mounted around the world have secured her reputation as one of the most acclaimed and radically contemporary artists of the twenty-first century, while publications like the essay collection The Wretched of the Screen (2012) attest to the development of an important new voice in aesthetic theory, media studies, and institutional critique. Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War gathers together fifteen of Steyerl’s texts, many of which began as talks before making their way to the pages of the vanguard art and theory journal e-flux. They range across an impressively eclectic expanse of problems: the collection’s eponymous essay, which takes the catastrophe of the Syrian Civil War and the development of tax-free art-storage facilities as occasions for rethinking the political respon- sibilities of the museum, is followed by a reflection on Spam (the mostly fake meat), spam (the mostly fake correspondence), and “Spam” (the legendary Monty Python sketch). Its topical diversity notwithstanding, Duty Free Art coheres around Steyerl’s unflinching commitment to accounting for how art really functions in a global landscape shaped by privatization, financialization, and militarization— how art’s instruments and institutions often work as accomplices, wittingly or not, to the forces of neoliberal stasis (which, citing the work of Giorgio Agamben, she reminds us means not only immutability but also civil war). Steyerl’s book figures as a crucial contribution to the discourse on contemporary art and media, and is all the more remarkable for the bone-dry, goofball wit with which she unfolds her decidedly bleak picture of contemporary art’s entanglements.

Perhaps the best way to gain entry to the sometimes dizzying textual labyrinth of Duty Free Art is via the narrow passage between two of the most alarming documentary images through which Steyerl indexes and diagnoses our “age of planetary civil war.” Indeed, such images play an overdetermined role in Stey- erl’s text: objects of her arguments, they are sometimes also the very medium in which an argument unfolds. The first, and the one with which the book’s first essay opens, is of a long-retired Soviet-era battle tank, part of a World War II memorial in Ukraine seen in 2014 just as pro-Russian separatists drive it off its pedestal and “back” into battle. Forcing an historical monument to serve as an instrument of contemporary reactionary violence—an extraordinary assault on historical memory itself—the militants attack a checkpoint, wounding and killing Ukrainians in the process. The second, less immediately horrifying image shows us Geneva Free Ports—a massive, armored storage facility located within a Special Economic Zone, sheltered by and exempted from the laws of the nation-state. This complex is said to house “thousands of Picassos” and, though lax documenta- tion and devised opacity have made it impossible for us to know what Geneva Free Ports contains, “there is little doubt,” Steyerl avers, “that its contents could compete with any very large museum.”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_r_00479 by guest on 29 September 2021 What are we meant to see inscribed in such forbidding images? What does Steyerl hear these scenes saying to us? Though each is certainly striking on its own, they gain their full significance, I think, when read in relation to one another. Thus, we might begin by pointing out a commonality: they show both the seizure and the instrumentalizing of what should be objects of common aesthetic experience to serve the interests of the powerful few. What we see, then, are assaults on the faculty of human vision itself, a kind of aesthetic immiseration that signals with particular clarity the cruel logic of neoliberalism. A tank advancing from the museum and a museum’s worth of Picassos retreating to their tax-free fortress are really each other’s inversion. On the one hand, the museum turns out to have been munitions storage all along; on the other, a storage facility happens to contain the greatest museum of art the world will never see. In this way, they signal one of the central concerns of Duty Free Art: to reveal the underside of the contemporary art world, to reconstruct the obscene structures of political and economic violence in relation to which, so her argument goes, our experience of contemporary art typically stands as a screen.

Readers familiar with the state of contemporary art criticism and aesthetic theory know only too well how commonplace questions concerning the politics of art, or of aesthetic experience more broadly, have become. Even (perhaps especially) where not explicitly articulated, the question of what art does in the face of power operates implicitly as the horizon of a great deal of critical discourse on contemporary art. It in fact seems to exert a normative pressure on this discourse, which is to say that asking how art confronts power is very often a way to not ask if art confronts power, to presume that it does—in which case the writer’s task is simply to determine how to do discursive justice to the politics of aesthetics. One would therefore be forgiven for assuming that, with a subtitle bringing together art and war, Duty Free Art might too observe this piety, and foreground the politics of the aesthetic.

In fact, Steyerl’s book intervenes powerfully on this disciplinary norm in a number of ways. For one thing, it insists that in order to effectively think art’s political capacity, one will have to begin “further back,” so to speak, and confront the material realities of its production and circulation. Foremost among these is the fact that, in its present state, contemporary art’s basic condition of possibility is its status as an “alternative currency” by means of which the 1 percent shelter their wealth not only against the instabilities of global markets, but from taxa- tion, as well. As an “industry,” then, contemporary art is implicated in the very machinery of neoliberal violence that many writers allege the artwork exists to contest, or at least reveal.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_r_00479 by guest on 29 September 2021 This is all to say that Steyerl is interested in an altogether different inflection of “the politics of aesthetics,” which has led her to catalogue the many ways that contemporary forces of political and economic domination have weaponized not only the rarefied domain of high art, but also the entire apparatus of mass media and visual culture that structures our ordinary, daily experience. Hence “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition,” one of the stronger texts in the collection, considers the implications of Google’s notorious “Deep- Dream” experiment, in which researchers trained artificial neural networks to recognize certain common objects and then applied these networks to fields of pure noise, where they ended up perceiving what they had been taught—even though nothing was there. Machinic vision saw in mere visual static a paisley river of lidless eyeballs; in a plate of spaghetti, a hideous tangle of puppy faces melting into one another. This forced machine-apophenia ultimately yields its own aesthetic—call it corporate-posthuman surrealist kitsch. For the reader to whom this situation seems too bizarre, too remote an anomaly to take seriously, Steyerl has a warning:

The creature that stares at you from your plate of spaghetti and meatballs is not an amphibian beagle. It is the ubiquitous surveillance of networked image production, a form of memetically [sic] modified intelligence that watches you in the shape of the lunch that you will Instagram in a second if it doesn’t attack you first.

The larger point, then, is that those technologies sold to us as instruments of our perception, as means for navigating the expanded sensorium of the twenty-first century, are now themselves being taught to perceive, transforming them into the subjects of a new kind of sensory experience in which we have become the objects. It would perhaps be easier to dismiss Steyerl’s concern as Sci-Fi alarm- ism had we not already learned from a previous essay how the techno-dystopian vanguardism of DeepDream trickles down. “Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise” opens with a reflection on “computational photography,” an emergent paradigm for the production of images that dispenses almost entirely with photography’s indexical function and replaces it with algorithmic speculation. Because the “rub- bish” smartphone lenses with which the vast majority of photographs are now shot in fact capture just as much noise as information, an algorithm is enlisted to instantaneously “clean the noise” and thus “discern the picture from inside the noise.” What makes this new anti-photographic paradigm truly distressing is how the algorithm comes to filter noise so as to see what the shoddy camera- eye could not:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_r_00479 by guest on 29 September 2021 But how can the camera know how to do this? Very simple: It scans all other pictures stored on your phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. . . . By comparing what you and your network have already photographed, the algorithm guesses what you might have wanted to photograph now.

Extending the reach of “filter bubble” logic beyond the terrain of media consump- tion and into the realm of its production, computational photography involves an unprecedented fusion of human and machine vision. It is exemplary of the age of planetary civil war because it “makes seeing unforeseen things more difficult.”

One of the weightier claims in Duty Free Art is that “secret museums” such as the above-mentioned Geneva Free Ports constitute the single most important type of contemporary art space. They are, Steyerl writes, “the most important contemporary active form for art,” the “dystopian backside” of the biennial, con- fronting the latter’s fever dream of an art world without borders and the waking nightmare of millions of works sequestered at the limit of inaccessibility. It is a grim diagnosis, and readers impatient for a pivot to redemptive affirmations of art’s promise will find little in this book to satisfy them.

The picture darkens the further in we go, as Steyerl presents the reader with increasingly dispiriting answers to the question what is contemporary art? It is, we read, a “proxy . . . for the lack of any common ground . . . providing a common surface where there is none,” “a space of civil wars that trigger art-market booms a decade or so later through the redistribution of wealth by warfare.” It is what “happens . . . when this or that regime decides it needs the PR equivalent of a nip and tuck procedure.” A “must-have accessory for tyrants and oligarchs,” contemporary art “is just a hash for all that’s opaque, unintelligible, and unfair, for top-down class war and all-out inequality.” (I found the “just” in that last declaration particularly hard to stomach.) As though unsure about the ability of her own bleak rhetoric to convey the severity of art’s situation, Steyerl turns to Marx, appropriating a well-known formulation from Capital, simply replacing his object of inquiry with hers: “Whatever comes into the world through the global production and dispersion of contemporary art is dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” These are just some of the points at which Stey- erl’s argumentation veers dangerously close to the edge of a fatalism that would simply designate duty-free storage as the destiny of contemporary art. This is not to charge her with undue hyperbole; to be sure, the art world itself dances very near the same edge. And yet, apocalyptic tone notwithstanding, the fact is that Steyerl’s whole critical project—not only as in the essays and talks that make up

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_r_00479 by guest on 29 September 2021 Duty Free Art, but also in her practice as a video and installation artist—is staked on a certainty that the situation of contemporary art could be otherwise.

Steyerl knows that there is nothing necessary about how things stand, and that change depends on the art world’s deciding on a real rupture with its current configuration, for “to expect any kind of progressive transformation to happen by itself . . . would be like expecting the internet to create socialism or automa- tion to evenly benefit all humankind.” And so, whereas Duty Free Art renders the ugly realities of art in the age of planetary civil war in sometimes nauseating detail, it (rightly) refrains from filling in what an alternative to these realities will look like. The one point on which Steyerl insists is that this alternative will have something to do with the reinvention of artistic autonomy. The real problem with duty free art, it turns out, is that it is not duty free enough:

Duty free art ought to have no duty—no duty to perform, to represent, to teach, to embody value. It should not be indebted to anyone, nor serve a cause or a master, nor be a means to anything. . . . Even the duty free art in the Freeport storage spaces is not duty free. It is only tax free. It has the duty of being an asset.

The promise of a radical alternative to art’s neoliberal present, Steyerl’s remarkable book posits, ultimately hinges on a new conception of artistic autonomy. This new sense of autonomy (“essentially what traditional autonomous art might have been, had it not been elitist and oblivious to its own conditions of production”) would not only free art from its duty to stock-in-trade bromides about the politics of aesthetics, but also from its duty to a global economic system for which nothing is more beautiful than the profit margins of planetary civil war.

NOTE 1. At least, this was the case when I began work on this text. Since then, the 2018 list has been released, with mega-gallerist David Zwirner taking the top spot.

RYAN ANTHONY HATCH is an assistant professor and the director of graduate studies in the English department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His book project, Anyone Who Trembles Now: Antitheatricality as a Political Factor, reimagines the concept of antitheatricality beyond the phobic and prejudicial terms in which it has historically been cast, as a relational structure intrinsic to the event of emancipatory (communist) politics. He lives in Los Angeles.

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