Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism
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UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Delirium and Resistance: activist art and the crisis of capitalism Sholette, G.G. Publication date 2017 Document Version Other version License Other Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Sholette, G. G. (2017). Delirium and Resistance: activist art and the crisis of capitalism. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:10 Oct 2021 25 Section 1: ARTWORLD Introduction: Welcome to Our Artworld Figure 2. Protest placard from Occupy Wall Street, NYC,2011. (Courtesy Chris Kasper.) 27 Having died twice, the artist is neither modern nor postmodern, yet caught in the order of time conditioned by her relation to the symptom, her relation to the art world. Marc James Léger7 How does the growing embrace of socially engaged art practice by mainstream culture relate to unprecedented fiscal indebtedness among students and artists? And what do we make of provocative claims that Occupy Wall Street was in fact a contemporary art project? Part I examines these entwined issues through the common denominator of our art world, a term difficult to define, yet ubiquitous in use. For people directly involved in it, the art world is a familiar space (or system, or economy) that stands apart from the so-called real world, and yet is also increasingly entangled with the real world (which curiously appears less and less real itself of late). This introduction argues that the art world must be analyzed as a “totality” whose features are simultaneously more exposed and less exceptional thanks to the broader crisis of deregulated capitalism and erosion of liberal democracy at the start of the 21st century. City of God One phrase, the artworld, appears throughout this dissertation with great frequency and for two reasons above all. First it designates a field of cultural practice, and second it delimits my chosen area of critical enquiry. Most often the expression is used in a commonsensical way; appearing with adjectives such as “contemporary,” “mainstream,” “institutional,” or “elite” preceding it. It was not until after my early essays were completed that I further qualified what the art world actually means in this work. In 2007 I wrote: 7 Marc James Léger, Brave New Avant-Garde, Zero Books, 2012, 13. 28 By the term art world I mean the integrated, trans-national economy of auction houses, dealers, collectors, international biennials, and trade publications that, together with curators, artists and critics, reproduce the market, as well as the discourse that influences the appreciation and demand for highly valuable artworks.8 Two features of this definition color my subsequent research into contemporary art. First, is the implied lack of impartiality evident from the definition’s focus on the art world as a set of business relations within a capitalist marketplace. No doubt this bias has its roots in my own development as an artist, writer and activist lending all my writings a partisan, anti-capitalist tendency, but also an essayistic, at times polemical tone. Likewise, most of my writings engage with the absence/ presence of a countervailing sphere of invisible or overlooked art production and its history, a missing mass that makes the art world possible in the first place. Thus, my point of view has primarily been one constantly looking up, from down below, or looking in perhaps from a marginalized but parallel dimension of artistic dark matter. The second contention made here is that the art world is an integrated system of production, and not, as some post-modernist critics contend, merely a bundle of overlapping practices, discourses or subcultures with varying degrees of autonomy, connectivity and interdependence. For even though the art world may appear piecemeal, it is, as is capitalism, a totality that is typically visible only as localized phenomena or in a fragment, which is, Adorno cautions, “that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality”.9 Or, to place a bit of spin on a maxim by György Lukács, despite its fragmented semblance our art world is an objective totality of delirious social relations.10 To clarify this point, it is helpful to consider a famous definition of the art world, made by the philosopher Arthur Danto in a celebrated meditation on Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. As Danto put it, “the art world stands to the real world as the City of God stands to the Earthly city.” In order to gain admission, Warhol’s Brillo Boxes required an indiscernible difference to mark them out from other mass-produced commodities (although Warhol’s boxes were, in fact, built from wood and silkscreened, an issue that Danto overlooked). Danto’s solution is devastatingly simple: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art world”.11 8 Sholette, “Dark Matter, Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere”, in As Radical As Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century, M. Beaumont, A. Hemingway, L. Esther and J. Roberts, Peter Lang, eds., 2007, 429-457. 9 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Bloomsbury/Berg, 2013, 72. 10 György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, MIT Press, 1972. 11 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld” in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, Carolyn Korsmeyer, ed., Blackwell,1998, 33-43, 40. 29 This definition of the art world is very well known, but its full implications are rarely discussed. In the opening stages of his thought experiment, Danto introduces “Testadura,” the “philistine” who cannot see the artwork, just another object. It is helpful sometimes to remember that very few people are born speaking art theory, or reeling off the lineage of contemporary art. That is to say, we are all “philistines” at some point. It is art education that shows artists the City of God, though it doesn’t let them through the gates. Instead, perhaps, it reveals the art that seems now to be everywhere: in the underwhelming objects, in gatherings, even perhaps in an Occupy Wall Street (O.W.S.) protest. Stranger still, this art has been stripped bare, first via a long process of artists questioning the power relations that inhabit the theories that they inherit, and second by the myth-melting processes of capital. To understand these contradictions, it is necessary to view the art world with Testadura’s bluntness as I do, from “below.” The key axis of this section therefore, is between the art school, where everything is learned, and the museum, where initiates forget they ever had to learn anything as they perform the rituals of art.12 Danto’s Artworld thesis appeared in 1964, and since then these cultural rituals have been integrated into those of capitalism. Aarchitectural historian David Joselit has recently suggested, a new wave of museum construction seems to “function as the art world”s central banks.” Designed for cities “around the world by star architects like Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Jacques Herzog, and Pierre de Meuron”: in a time of economic instability, precipitated by world-wide financial failures since 2008, people now see art as an international currency. Art is a fungible hedge. [that] must cross borders as easily as the dollar, the euro, the yen, and the renminbi.13 Perhaps it was Haacke’s real estate mappings, real-time projects and critical provenance tracings of Monet and Seurat paintings in the early 1970s that first indicated all that what was once so solid, including works of art, were beginning to melt into thin air. “There is nothing so edifying,” writes W.J.T. Mitchel “as the moral shock of capitalist cultural institutions when they look at their own faces in the mirror”.14 And along with notions of cultural privilege the idea of artistic autonomy was also dissolving. Since then, these moments of break-down and 12 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside the Public Art Museum, Routledge, 1995. 13 David Joselit, After Art, Princeton University Press, 2012, 3. 14 W.J.T Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press, 2005, 137. 30 demystification have only accelerated. To this assault was added museum interventions by Art Workers’ Coalition and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, artistic deconstructions by Daniel Buren and Michael Asher, the cultural utilitarianism of Artists Placement Group, theories of institutional critique from Art & Language, museum maintenance performances by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and the dematerialization of art world privilege via Lucy R. Lippard’s copious writings. A bit later on came the critical practices of Martha Rosler, Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge, Mary Kelly, Allan Sekula, Fred Lonidier, Conrad Atkinson, Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (A.M.C.C.), Art Against Apartheid, the militant art journals Red-Herring and The Fox, and still further on P.A.D./D., Black Audio Film Collective (U.K.), Group Material, followed by John Malpede’s L.A.P.D.