Hallucinating Networks and Secret Museums Hito Steyerl on Our Aesthetic Immiseration
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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 © 2019 Ryan Anthony Hatch PAJ 122 (2019), pp. 119–124. 119 doi:10.1162/PAJJ _r_00479 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.” 120 PAJ 122 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 aesthet- ics. 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. HATCH / Hallucinating Networks and Secret Museums 121 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.