[Sorry this is so late; it took me a while to sign on…]
Greetings,
Greg Sholette has sent me much of this recent interesting string depending
from Charles Green’s response to a text posted by Brian Holmes, and I am
emboldened to comment on some issues arising. (My diss. “Collectivities:
Protest, Counterculture and Political Postmodernism” tracked artists’
collectivity from Art Workers Coalition to Group Material, 1969-1984; in art
history, City University of NY, 2000.)
Brian’s text extends the terms of activist political philosophy to the art
institution, to the position of the critic within the institutional frame.
Why is he there (at the Tate)? Speaking from where? His work, with which I’m
somewhat familiar, describes the implications of broadscale changes in the
neoliberal economy from his perspective as an expatriate in France. (Dig
those freedom fries, baby!) Particularly he has picked up the thread of
immaterial labor, posited in Hardt & Negri, and examined what kind of
working persona is required to meet the new conditions of intellectual and
white collar work. Of course these new conditions of labor require new
conditions of management. The entrepreneurial dot com explosion generated
many new forms, which have been wiped away by American capital through a
stock market bust and a reassertion of the labor discipline of extractive
and military industry. What we are dealing with on a cultural level, then,
is the recent expunging of a new mode of capital, a new mode of labor
organization. Pseudo dot com is the ghost in today’s media machine...
To understand as it seems does Nicolas Bourriaud in “Relational Aesthetics”
a plurality of artistic modes within social relations is to put the emphasis
where capital must pay attention. Art adumbrates coming conditions of
immaterial production, and in its commercial forms is in itself a large
sector of that economy. (This isn’t Greg’s “dark matter” of amateur artists,
but Walter Pach’s Anaxias – the false artist, the mercenary of the
spectacle, whose training I’ll wager is in the hands of most of those on
this list.)
The stake for a progressive political art today is not to behave in a more
convincingly negational manner but to model a new world – a possibility
unmoored from the global injustice of untethered global capital.
Artistic collectivity I believe is part of the economy of artistic
production. Institutional critique is an aspect -- negatively conceived
under the sign of Saturn (or Yves Klein) -- of the imbrication of artistic
collectivity and institutional formation and maintenance. That is, artistic
collectivity is part of the provenance of most art exhibition instututions.
A movement of artists changes the conditions of both institution and market
– e.g., NYC’s Soho, East Village and Williamsburg. This social historical
aspect of artistic postmodernism has been almost entirely left to
sociologists of culture, or to artists’ rumor. There is an immense empirical
debt here which must be paid – e.g., to community art which has positioned
itself continuously within the working joints of social processes –
government, labor, education, etc. Explication of these and other historical
situations and trajectories of art work will help in the recovery for
neoliberal governance of new strategies that bear on social organization –
so it must happen. That’s why Brian feels uneasy in the Tate – it’s because
of the audience. While the team manager may not be at the game, his scouts
are watching the plays. “Beware of the recuperators,” reads an “enraged”
graffito in the Paris of ’68. The Situationists have been carefully
recuperated by architects and urban planners, and their fluidity will be
written into hard urban form. The relation between public artists and the
state may be somewhat like that between anthropologists and colonial
governors in the high imperialist age.
Anarchist urban planners study shantytowns.
Which leads me to the historically shadowy political force of action within
the modernist field. Anarchism was deeply involved in the generation of
theory and cultural provision during the Neoimpressionist era in France. For
the anarchists – grandchildren of Feneon and Pisarro -- Lenin was a
betrayer, and Stalin was a disaster, a worse assassin than Hitler. Anarchist
politics and process leads the white global justice movement in the street
today, just as they led radical labor in the western U.S. a century ago.
Here is another research debt owed by an art history which presumes to speak
of the politics of modernism.
It is problematic to link avant gardes with totalitarian movements. Palming
off– Russian futurism on Stalin, even Beuys onto Hitler (as Saul Ostrow did
in an essay 30 years ago) – seeks to consolidate and discredit complex
movements. It is far easier to link the postwar neo-avant garde with Fordist
capitalism, because it is economically dependent upon it. Besides, those
collectors are not being rounded up and sent to camps.
Finally this dispute is over the legitimacy of historical lineages, and what
can be said of, and argued for the significance of collective formation in
artistic production.
To identify cultural intentionality with terror is to explain why Goebbels
wanted to reach for his gun when he heard the word “culture” – civilized
capitalists should reach for their checkbook. Maybe this term of
authoritarian violence entered the string through Brian’s citing IRWIN, Neue
Slowenische Kunst. It is after all their project to digest and reflect this
frightful artistic intentionality. (McDermott and McGough recently tried
something similar at American Fine Arts when it was called P.H.A.G.,
although their work was an insertion within rather than an entering into the
Nazi spirit of homicidal homophobia.) This art is cathartic if it works,
nauseating if it doesn’t.
Still, Professor Green’s analysis of fear strikes me, as Louis Menand would
say, as an artifact of the bipolar world. I thought the point of Utopia
Station and the many exhibitions that ran up to and out of that “roundhouse”
was to recover and reexamine the utopian aspects of the project of state
socialism, now that it has largely passed from the scene in Europe. To
collapse the totality of the movement for the social into the figure of the
death-dealing Stalin is like a new verse on that old song, “That’s what you
get”: I mean, in this scenario the only possible consequence of falling in
love is Lustmord, with artist as “final girl” in the horror movie. In a duel
between Hobbes and Fourier, I’ll put my money on the people with the
colorful clothes.
The political muscle requires exercise – it has never been still. Now it is
needed more than ever, as neoliberal policies and governance loses
authority. This I take from Brian Holmes, who gets it from [Habermas? Negri?
legitimation crisis], the crisis of authority – a significant advance on
what in the ‘60s was colloquially called the “credibility gap” between
government pronouncements and what was plainly to be seen.
Why do elites pay attention to political art? When it’s backed by a mass
movement it is the voice of their children. It is reproving youth as well as
the dispossessed and desperate. Courtly bourgeois youth listen and repeat
the voices in the street and the forest.
To construct identity politics as solipsism is to posit it as a new
orientalism for the empire of the new world order. Rather than providing a
cogent theme for exoticism within Bush Jr.’s Trajanic reign, what Yasmin
Ramirez called “strategic essentialism” among artists of color is the
consistent emergence of the suppressed voice. Those whose ancestors were
commoditized and have a particular stake in examining contemporary
conditions of human sale, and exploitative labor practices.
From a U.S. context, critical reflections on, and tactics within
collectivity in art are urgently needed from historically oppressed peoples.
Indigenous modes of political organization have been – are being –
methodically suppressed by states and gangster capital. We need to think
both opportunistic and political collectivism together with the remarkable
structures of collective artistic production in aboriginal acrylic painting.
Young abo artists are using contemporary “relational” forms in their work,
as are Native American artists. A key missing voice in the string here – not
for long, I hope – is feminist, where the analysis of cultural labor is deep
(e.g., Meirle Ukeles), based again on historical conditions of oppression
which have changed. I mean not so much the progress, but that the oppression
has reconstituted itself in different forms.
--Alan Moore

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