Sociopolitical Aesthetics: Art, Crisis and Neoliberalism 9781350008748, 9781350008731, 9781350008717, 9781350008700

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SOCIOPOLITICAL AESTHETICS

RADICAL AESTHETICS – RADICAL ART Series editors: Jane Tormey and Gillian Whiteley (Loughborough University, UK) Promoting debate, confronting conventions and formulating alternative ways of thinking, Jane Tormey and Gillian Whiteley explore what radical aesthetics might mean in the twenty-first century. This new books series, Radical Aesthetics – Radical Art (RaRa), reconsiders the relationship between how art is practised and how art is theorized. Striving to liberate theories of aesthetics from visual traditions, this series of singleauthored titles expands the parameters of art and aesthetics in a creative and meaningful way. Encompassing the multisensory, collaborative, participatory and transitory practices that have developed over the last twenty years, Radical Aesthetics – Radical Art is an innovative and revolutionary take on the intersection between theory and practice. Published and forthcoming in the series: Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11, Jill Bennett Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe, Uros Cvoro Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change, Malcolm Miles Civic Aesthetics: Militarism in Israeli Art and Visual Culture, Noa Roei Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugees, Contemporary Art and the Politics of Memory, Veronica Tello Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism, Danielle Child Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks, Maria Walsh Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer, edited by Jane Tormey and Gillian Whiteley For further information or enquiries please contact RaRa series editors: Jane Tormey: [email protected] Gillian Whiteley: [email protected]

SOCIOPOLITICAL AESTHETICS Art, Crisis and Neoliberalism

Kim Charnley

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Kim Charnley, 2021 Kim Charnley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: London, England, March 26, 2011. The Ritz hotel after an anarchist paint bomb attack during a protest march. (© Steve Keall / Alamy Stock Photo) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0874-8 PB: 978-1-3500-0873-1 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0870-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-0872-4 Series: Radical Aesthetics – Radical Art (RaRa) Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Imogen, Gabriel and Agnes.

CONTENTS

List of figures  viii Series editors’ preface  xii Acknowledgements  xiv

Introduction: Crisis and the social turn  1 1 The art collective as impurity  21 2 The temporality of institutional critique  51 3 Relational aesthetics and collectivity  87 4 Social practice  123 5 Slogans and militancy  151 Conclusion: The uses of crises  181

Notes  191 Bibliography  228 Index  243

FIGURES

1.1 Art & Language. Index 01, 1972. Eight file cabinets, texts and Photostats. Dimensions variable. Installation ‘Too Dark to Read: Motifs Rétrospectifs, 2002-1965’, Musée d’art modern de Lille Métropole, Villeneuve d’ascq. Collection Daros, Zurich 30 1.2 Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. Image from It’s Still Privileged Art!, 1975. Ink drawing. Courtesy of the artists 32 1.3 Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. Image from It’s Still Privileged Art!, 1975. Ink drawing. Courtesy of the artists 44 2.1 Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971 (detail) 142 black-and-white photographs, 142 typewritten cards, 2 excerpts from city map, and 6 charts. Photograph and map, each pair: 8 1/8 x 12 1/4 in. (20.5 x 31 cm); excerpts from map, each chart: 24 x 20 1/8 in. (61 x 51 cm) © Hans Haacke / VG Bild-Kunst. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Installation view: 38th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, June 1978 54 2.2 Hans Haacke. Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971 (detail) 142 black-and-white photographs, 142 typewritten cards, 2 excerpts from city map, and 6 charts Photograph and map, each pair: 8 1/8 x 12 1/4 in. (20.5 x 31 cm); excerpts from map, each chart: 24 x 20 1/8 in. (61 x 51 cm) © Hans Haacke / VG BildKunst. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 55 2.3 Hans Haacke. On Social Grease, 1975 (detail). 6 photoengraved magnesium plates mounted on aluminum with dull finish. 30 x 30 in. (76.2 x 76.2 cm) Photo: Walter Russell © Hans Haacke / VG Bild-Kunst. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 68 2.4 Hito Steyerl. November, 2004 DV, single channel, sound 25 minutes Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl Image courtesy of the

2.5

3.1

3.2

3.3

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Artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin 78­ Hito Steyerl. Is the Museum a Battlefield?, 2013 Two channel digital video, sound 39 minutes, 53 seconds. Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Image courtesy of the Artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin 81 Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ‘Untitled’ (Passport), 1991 Paper, endless supply. 10 cm at ideal height x 60 x 60 cm (original paper size) (4 inches at ideal height x 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches (original paper size)). Installation view: Como viver junto (How to Live Together). Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo (Cicillio Matarazzo Pavilion), 27th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. 8 Oct. – 17 Dec. 2006. Cur. Lisette Lagnado, Christina Freire, Rosa Martínez, Adriano Pedrosa, José Ignacio Roca. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation 94 Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ‘Untitled’ (Placebo), 1991. Candies in silver wrappers, endless supply. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Ideal weight: 1,000-1,200 lb. Installation view: Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form. MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany. 28 Jan. – 14 Mar. 2011. Cur. Elena Filipovic; 18 Mar. – 25 Apr. 2011. Installation cur. Tino Sehgal (shown). (Second installation at third of three venues. Additional venues: Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Belgium. 16 Jan. – 2 May 2010; Fondation Beyeler, Basel Switzerland. 21 May – 29 Aug. 2010.) Photographer: Axel Schneider. Image courtesy of MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation 98 Hans Haacke John Weber Gallery Visitors’ Profile 2, 1973 cardboard box, paper questionnaire: 6 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. (16.5 x 19.1 cm) cardboard box of processed key punch cards © Hans Haacke / VG Bild-Kunst. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 100 Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991. Wood, light bulbs, acrylic paint, and go-go dancer in silver lamé bathing suit, sneakers, and personal listening device. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Platform: 21 1/2 x 72 x 72 inches (54.6 x 182.9 x 182.9 cm). Installation Figures

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View: Every Week There is Something Different. Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY. 2 May – 1 Jun. 1991. (A four-part project by Felix Gonzalez-Torres). Photographer: Peter Muscato. Image courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. From left to right: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ‘Untitled’ (Natural History), 1990; ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991. © Felix GonzalezTorres, Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation 105 Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ‘Untitled’, 1987. Framed photostat. 8 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches. Edition of 1, 1 AP with 2 additional Aps. Photographer: Oren Slor. Image courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation 108 Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991. Wood, light bulbs, acrylic paint, and go-go dancer in silver lamé bathing suit, sneakers, and personal listening device. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Platform: 21 1/2 x 72 x 72 inches (54.6 x 182.9 x 182.9 cm). Installation view: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Serpentine Gallery, London, England, United Kingdom. 1 Jun. – 16 Jul. 2000. Cur. Lisa G. Corrin. (With satellite venues: Camden Arts Centre, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Royal College of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Royal Geographical Society, London, England, United Kingdom). Photographer: Stephen White. Image courtesy of Serpentine Gallery. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation 116 Tania Bruguera. Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008. Performed as part of UBS openings live – The Living Currency, Tate Modern, 26-7 January, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Tate Modern 139 Tania Bruguera. 10, 148, 451. Hyundai Commission 2018. Tate Modern. Turbine Hall. Courtesy of the artist and Tate Modern 140 Baa Baa Baric: Have You Any Pull? Mark Storor with communities of St Helens. Photograph by Stephen King (2017). Produced by Heart of Glass 146 Baa Baa Baric: Have You Any Pull? Mark Storor with communities of St Helens. Photograph by Stephen King (2017). Produced by Heart of Glass 147

F  igures

5.1 Freee art collective. Advertising wants to convert our desire for a better life into a desire to buy something, (bandana), Freee 2008, DOT Arena Festival, Leicester. Photograph Freee 156 5.2 Freee art collective. The neo-imperial function of public art is to clear a path for aggressive economic expansion, BirminghamGuangzhou- Birmingham, Freee, billboard posters, 2005. (Site 1: Barford Street, Digbeth, Birmingham UK November 2005. Site 2 Guangzhou City & the second Guangzhou Triennial, December 2006. Site 3: Barford Street, Digbeth, Birmingham UK December 2005). Photograph Freee 157 5.3 Freee art collective. Manifesto Choir, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2017. Photograph Freee. Photo: Emma Mahony 163 5.4 Tim Etchells Revolution, 2010. Neon. Image courtesy of the artist 166 5.5 Tim Etchells Mirror Piece, 2014. Neon. Image courtesy of the artist 169

Figures

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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

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he Radical Aesthetics – Radical Art (RaRa) series explores what aesthetics might mean in the twenty-first century by integrating practice and theory and firmly embedding the discussion of artworks in the social. The idea for the series arose from debates within contemporary art theory about the problematic relationship between art and politics within the context of emergent ‘socially engaged’, ‘relational’, ‘participatory’ and ‘collaborative’ practices. Of course, all of these terms had historical precedents, yet the coming together of the social and the political in the context of a contemporary global artworld invited us to look afresh at new perspectives on aesthetics. Kim Charnley’s examination of the infamous ‘social turn’ of the 1990s and, as he describes it, the ‘strange phenomenon’ of sociopolitical aesthetics, therefore, makes a foundational contribution to the RaRa series. Sociopolitical Aesthetics: Art, Crisis and Neoliberalism contributes significantly to debates about the social production of art. It provides an examination of the conditions of art as a reflection of a particular current moment, focusing on collaborative strategies and institutional critiques. While the book draws on the resources of Marxist art history and aesthetics, the primary intellectual tradition in which the sociopolitical dimension of art has been explored, it extends beyond to re-evaluate that lineage. Looking back through a lens of economic turbulence, with particular references to the financial ‘crash’ of 2007–8 and the rise of new ‘social movements’, Charnley interrogates the conditions of critical art under late capitalism. Opening with references to recent and periodic moments of crisis – the migrant crisis, Black Lives Matter, the political crisis of Brexit – the book identifies ‘crisis’ as a motivating focus which runs through the course of the various case studies he addresses. Written at the time of the Corona pandemic that is set to invoke the most severe

worldwide economic recession since the 1920s, an examination of the social production of art in the context of crisis could not be more apt. As such, the book’s concerns lie very much within the territory of the RaRa series, and it makes a significant addition to the range of current titles that address some of the most pressing issues of our time. RaRa series editors Jane Tormey Gillian Whiteley

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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any people have supported the writing of this book, either directly or indirectly. At the beginning of my research, between 2011 and 2013, discussions with members of the Contemporary Marxism Collective at Chelsea College of Art had a formative influence on my approach to this topic. Special thanks are due to Dave Beech and Mark Hutchinson in this regard. My understanding of problems of sociopolitical aesthetics has been greatly enriched by conversations with Gregory Sholette and John Roberts, as will be clear from the treatment of their writings in this book. Of course, I bear responsibility myself for any errors that are found in the uses to which I put their work. I am grateful to the School of Arts and Humanities and department of Art History at the Open University for supporting this project with research funds that made possible the inclusion of images. In the process of developing material on The Fox, I was able to interview artists who are or were members of Art & Language. Mel Ramsden, Michael Baldwin, Carole Condé, Karl Beveridge and Mayo Thompson, all gave generously of their time. I am particularly grateful to Carole Condé, Karl Beveridge, Michael Corris and Nigel Lendon who also made available documents from their archives. Thanks are also due to Mark Storor and Emily Gee from ‘Heart of Glass’ for discussing their work with me. Holly McHugh at the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation was extremely helpful in regard details of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work. I am grateful for her comments on early drafts of Chapter 3. An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published in Art & the Public Sphere volume one number three in 2011. Some of the material in Chapter 5 was part of review of Tim Etchells’s exhibition ‘For Now’ included in Art & the Public Sphere volume five number two, 2016. Parts of Chapter 4 appeared previously in The Large Glass, combined issue 25 and 26 in 2018 and in Field: A Journal of Socially-engaged Criticism, also in combined issue 12 and 13 in 2019. I thank the editors and publishers of these journals for their permission to republish this material.

Throughout the process involved in writing this book, my family have provided enormous encouragement, support and practical help. Many thanks to Bernard who read and gave indispensable editorial advice on drafts of the manuscript. To Judith and Kevin for unstinting support and encouragement throughout the decade in which I have worked on this project. To Ben and Alex for very different, but equally inspiring, examples of militancy. Most of all, Imogen made this book possible with her intelligent and thoughtful advice, her determination and patience.

Acknowledgements

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INTRODUCTION CRISIS AND THE SOCIAL TURN

The Venice Biennale of 2015, the 56th edition in its 120th year, was titled ‘All the World’s Futures’. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, the exhibition was framed as an investigation of ‘the current disquiet that pervades our time’.1 Intended to respond to the imperialism and colonialism that shaped the Venice Biennale at its inception in the nineteenth century, and also to the protests against racial oppression associated with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement of 2014, this was a politicized exhibition. For its entire duration, readings from the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital initiated a daily programme of ‘songs, librettos, readings of scripts, discussions, plenaries, and film screenings devoted to diverse theories and explorations of Capital’.2 The 14th Documenta quinquennial of 2017, entitled ‘Learning from Athens’ was also pitched as a meditation on crisis. In this case, the framing referred to the Eurozone bond crisis, which had resulted in Greece and other Southern European countries being forced to accept restructure of their economies in exchange for financial aid. At the same time, the so-called migrant crisis was close to its peak, with thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Africa in camps on the southern borders of the European Union and thousands dying each year in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean. Reflecting on these intertwined tragedies, and the wave of authoritarian nationalist leaders elected in recent years, the curator Adam Szymczyk wrote in the essay accompanying the exhibition: This crisis of any conceivable political idea of togetherness, cynically dismissed in favor of constant ‘othering’ of enemies and opponents,

has become our permanent eclipse, darkening and encroaching on places seemingly as far apart as India, Brazil, South Korea, and South Africa, to name but a few recent examples. It is the crisis of democracy and ‘old’ binaries constituting the distribution of power, the gradual exhaustion of natural resources, the destruction of human habitats, and human crimes against their own and other species, that motivate us to speak from within the artistic field today.3 In 2019, it was announced that the Turner Prize would be shared by the four nominees, Tai Shani, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. The shortlisted artists explained that they had formed a collective to prevent the different social and political concerns of their individual works from being pitted against one another. In their statement to the jury they wrote ‘This year you have selected a group of artists who, perhaps more than ever before in the Prize’s history, are all engaged in forms of social or participatory practice. More specifically each of us makes art about social and political issues and contexts we believe are of great importance and urgency.’4 At the ceremony Cammock, acting as spokesperson, expanded on the meaning of their intervention: At this time of political crisis in Britain and much of the world, when there is already so much that divides and isolates people and communities, we feel strongly motivated to use the occasion of the prize to make a collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity – in art as in society.5 The reference to ‘political crisis’ was intended to point to the divisive struggle in the UK election of 2019, the denouement of years of political turmoil. This election was the third to take place in four years, inheriting the disorder caused by the referendum of 2016, which provided a mandate for Britain to leave the European Union. Deeper tensions in British society conditioned this entire period, fostered by years of austerity after 2010 and decades of deindustrialization before that. In this context, the political implications of culture took on a new significance. As the artists accepted their award, Shani wore a large necklace reading ‘TORIES OUT’ and Murillo a red ‘vote Labour’ sticker on his white t-shirt. These three examples, though many others might have been chosen, show the extent to which a response to crises plays a prominent role in contemporary art in recent years. Indeed, they suggest that the perennial 2

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problem of the relationship between art and politics is now bound up with responses to the political, economic and social instability of this period. This book asks what is radical about these developments: What does this new prominence for critical and politicized work suggest about the direction taken by contemporary art? Contemporary art is often said to be so heterogeneous that the first critical task is to make some minimal sense of its diversity. Globalized and elusive, art seems to ‘float free of historical determination, conceptual definition and critical judgement’.6 Cuauhtémoc Medina writes that the ‘global art calendar has more to do with the hope of keeping up with the frenzy of time than with any aesthetic pursuit or interest’.7 The artworks which supply this frenzy form part of ‘post- and neo- or crossbreed movements’, as critic Jörg Heiser describes them, which lack the critical definition that was attained by the era-defining ‘isms’ of the sixties: pop art, minimalism and conceptual art.8 For philosopher Peter Osborne, contemporary art is shaped by its incorporation into a new regime of capitalism; he writes that under neoliberalism ‘the integration of the different aspects of the culture industry’ means the ‘appropriation and standardization of new artistic forms occurs with ever-increasing speed’.9 Ironically, this incorporation of contemporary art into the routines of global capital accumulation coincides with increased visibility for politicized artwork. Since 2008, and especially since 2016, neoliberalism, still the hegemonic form taken by global capitalism, is rocked by systemic shocks which are the product, in part, of a long period of secular economic decline. Although periodic crises, the so-called business cycle, are part of the normal functioning of the capitalist system, the repercussions of these recent crises are far-reaching. At the time of writing, the Coronavirus pandemic is set to initiate a new period of economic devastation, predicted to be more severe in its global consequences than even the Great Depression of the 1920s. Politicized art is contradictory. As the acclaimed artist and theorist Martha Rosler has observed, art is inevitably a ‘niche production’, which means that artists are always vulnerable, when they intervene in politics, to the accusation that they are hypocritical.10 Critical art depends upon an ‘umbilical cord of gold’, as Clement Greenberg observed.11 It is funded, directly or indirectly, by those who are invested in the ruling order. Sometimes, this has meant that the meaning of critical art is distorted by its reception, or that it is marginalized, if it ‘exhibits an imperfect allegiance to the ideological structures of social elites’.12 At other times, I NTRODUCTION

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as Rosler puts it ‘dissent and dissidence that fall short of insurrection and unruliness are quite regularly incorporated into exhibitions, as they are into institutions such as universities in liberal societies’.13 Artists negotiate between adherance to the prevailing order and criticism of it, though their criticisms seem always to reinforce the status quo. For Rosler, this means that it is only the ‘gap between the work’s production and its absorption and neutralization that allows for its proper reading and ability to speak to present conditions’.14 Rosler’s position on the place of critical art is a nuanced one. Even so, it assumes that the political order will always be able to absorb cultural dissent. Events of the last decade suggest that a systemic disorder now affects neoliberalism; it seem reasonable to ask whether this disorder will alter, or has already altered, the process of radical art’s ‘absorption and neutralization’.

Sociopolitical aesthetics The term ‘sociopolitical aesthetics’ is a problematic one. It is used in this book to identify the interweaving of socially engaged, collaborative or participatory art practices and debates about aesthetics since the turn of the millennium. Whereas once aesthetic questions were assumed to belong to the domain of traditional, or at least medium-specific art, they are now discussed in relation to ‘post-object’ artworks that address political matters. The messiness of the term ‘sociopolitical aesthetics’ – which lumps together the social, the political and the aesthetic – is appropriate to depict the messiness of this development, which involves many sub-categories: relational aesthetics, dialogic art, institutional critique, art activism and social practice, to name only some of them. Although this work often invokes political issues, I will argue here that there is no easy transition from social concerns to political significance. But the increased attention paid to the relationship between the social and the political by artists is worthy of investigation, nonetheless. This book tries to make sense of it in relation to the logic of crisis that now seems to dominate the social order. The salience of politicized art is a legacy of the ‘social turn’, a term coined by critic and art historian Claire Bishop to describe a shift in art since the 1990s. The ‘turn’ is a vague, but useful, metaphor to describe artistic developments which are widespread, but not as coherent as a movement nor as pervasive as period style: in this case, naming a vogue 4

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for artworks ‘made’ of open-ended encounters and social interventions.15 Understood narrowly, the social turn refers to a debate about the political implications of relational aesthetics, the influential curatorial manifesto of Nicolas Bourriaud, which introduced a new way of approaching the social dimension of art.16 Understood more broadly, the social turn describes a longer process where overtly politicized art came to become increasingly prominent within the contemporary art world. It is the widespread recognition achieved by socially engaged and interventionist artists and collectives that is of interest here. My intention is not to identify a hitherto overlooked tendency in the social turn nor to carve out a new niche within it. The debates that initiated the social turn are no longer current, precisely because socially engaged artistic strategies are now incorporated into the normal repertoire of contemporary art, hybridized with all sorts of other practices, including painting, artists’ moving image and performance. Instead, this book revisits the social turn to trace within it the twists and turns of ‘absorption and neutralization’, but also to consider a latent instability that it introduced. This instability becomes increasingly significant as the social and political order itself becomes unbalanced, disrupted by regular systemic shocks since 2016. The position that I take here is intended to address two explanations of recent artistic developments. One argues that the boundary between art and politics has fundamentally altered in recent times. A signal claim of this position is that ‘artistic strategies have taken centre stage in political protests, informal urban planning, and community building projects’.17 As a result, it is argued, these practices ‘escape from the aesthetic tradition that has determined the expectations and evaluation of art for centuries’.18 The evidence to support these claims usually comes from striking creative innovation in the politics of social movements. Social movements have always depended on aesthetic means to amplify their arguments and to rally their members – posters, murals, photography and street theatre have played this role since at least the 1960s. After the turn of the millennium this repertoire expanded. Shields painted to represent books of critical theory, projections on buildings and direct-action tactics of occupation are just some of these strategies that continue to evolve in global insurrections. In Chile and Hong Kong, lasers have been used to temporarily blind riot police, road cones to control the spread of tear gas and umbrellas to provide protection to protestors. I NTRODUCTION

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These tactics have recently spread to the United States, where they are used in Black Lives Matter protests. These new approaches to protest are undeniably creative responses to militarized policing. It is also true that artists are sometimes involved in these actions. Even so, this does not mean that the problematic boundary between art and politics is consigned to the past. These are not ‘artistic strategies’, precisely because they largely take place outside of the art institution, independently of the professional identity of art. Throughout this book I will identify the limitations that result from the idea that art and politics have somehow merged into one another. On the other hand, it is important acknowledge that a wide variety of practices now do occupy the growing border zone between art and politics. Another line of argument tends to disparage these developments in favour of art that creates critical interventions within ‘the white cube’.19 This position is equally problematic because it seems to disavow the fact that the boundary between art and politics has become increasingly fuzzy. The social turn is a long-running and vital development because the art institution has changed its character under neoliberalism. To address these two opposing positions, I will explore through the artworks discussed in this book pressures that are reshaping and, in a sense, disorganizing the art institution. Although there is no easy transition from social engagement to political significance, the strategies associated with the social turn do play an active role in reorganizing the ideological implications of art. In a period when many of the institutions of the status quo seem to be disrupted, and as a result the social order seems to reproduce itself imperfectly, socially engaged art may take on new significance. This argument, as we shall see, is based on a different account of the art institution than the one that is usually found in debates about contemporary art. Before explaining this approach to the art institution, it is first necessary to say something about the way neoliberalism is understood in this study.

Neoliberalism and crisis Used to describe the central features of a form of global political and economic governance that has prevailed since the 1980s, neoliberalism is a contested term. It is typically used to name a phase of capital accumulation, which is marked by the increased importance of finance, insurance and 6

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real estate (the so-called FIRE economy) and by a coordinated assault on social protections and union movements, designed to create ideal conditions for unfettered markets. Based in an ideological project that has achieved global hegemony, neoliberalism’s demise has been predicted more than once prematurely: first, in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008; then, when Donald Trump became president of the United States and most recently, with the enormous state spending undertaken to cushion the economic shock of the Covid pandemic.20 The title of a recent publication notes that neoliberalism has ‘nine lives’ in recognition of its durability.21 Although it is unwise to predict neoliberalism’s end, it is self-evident that crises increasingly disrupt its ideological coherence. Rather than attempt a comprehensive survey of the literature on this subject, which is vast, I will stress features of the political, economic and ideological character of this system which are most relevant to the social turn. In so doing, I am preparing the ground for an argument about the relationship between sociopolitical aesthetics, the art institution and the instability of the capitalist order. The philosopher Nancy Fraser describes the geopolitical lurch rightwards since 2016 as a ‘breakdown in the authority of established political classes and political parties’.22 This ‘general political crisis’ is fuelled by growing wealth inequality and economic insecurity, which is seen in the disparity between the Global North and the Global South, but also in wealth inequality within nations, even in the heartlands of capitalism, in the United States and the United Kingdom. The slogan ‘We are the 99%’ which was used by the Occupy movement is perhaps the most succinct political demand to have emerged from this situation. Fraser identifies this political rupture as an expression of a ‘general crisis’ of neoliberalism, the result of ‘blockages’ that have accumulated over the last thirty years, although they have only recently caused a breakdown of trust in governance itself: those blockages include the metastasis of finance; the proliferation of precarious service-sector McJobs; ballooning consumer debt to enable the purchase of cheap stuff produced elsewhere; conjoint increases in carbon emissions, extreme weather, and climate denialism; racialized mass incarceration and systemic police violence; and mounting stresses on family and community life thanks in part to lengthened working hours and diminished social supports. Together, these forces have been grinding away at our social order for quite some time I NTRODUCTION

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without producing a political earthquake. Now, however, all bets are off. In today’s widespread rejection of politics as usual, an objective system wide crisis has found its subjective political voice.23 For Fraser this ‘subjective political voice’ is divided between the political formations which have emerged as right-wing or left-wing versions of populism, which share a common hostility to elites and the globalized system of capitalism, though in alliance with quite different political perspectives and social attitudes. Among the varieties of populism aligned with the left, Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders in the United States were both defeated after challenging the status quo. At the time of writing, the most successful in gaining electoral power have been Right-wing populists and ethno-nationalists: Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi and Boris Johnson. For Fraser, the challenge is to create an electoral coalition of forces between socially conservative and socially progressive opponents of neoliberalism. This has been an argument of the democratic left, exemplified also in Chantal Mouffe’s call for an electoral project of ‘left populism’, though it seems now to be a distant prospect.24 The social turn is linked to the same ‘blockages’ that Fraser identifies. The critical preoccupations of collaborative and participatory art and art activism are with anti-hierarchical forms of cultural expression which resonate strongly with left populist themes. Art activist groups, which emerged alongside the alterglobalization movement of the early years of the millennium, the ‘movement of the squares’ and the Occupy movement, found niches within the art world because their work was clearly responding to present conditions with great urgency. As the social turn gained in visibility, it even seemed that the legacy of the avant-garde was merging with a new movement of global insurrection.25 This is the basis of the argument that there has been a fundamental shift in the relationship between art and politics. The broad hypothesis of this book is that the same fault lines, or ‘blockages’, that created this recent phase of political instability made possible the increased institutional presence of sociopolitical aesthetics. Clearly though, there are complex mediations involved: art is quite different to electoral politics and street protest. Even so, it is important to note this connection because it affects the way that contemporary art is situated within neoliberalism. Often the enormous expansion of the art market, feverish museum building and a multiplication of global 8

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biennials is used as evidence of the absorption of art within a neoliberal paradigm. I will propose throughout this book that this narrative is increasingly unsuited to the demands of a moment when the economic logic of neoliberalism has become detached from its formerly hegemonic ideological justification. Although it is true that art has been remodelled by its relationship to capital flows over the last forty years, the outcome of this transformation is uncertain. In key areas, it has not resulted in a financialized wonderland, but an increasingly contested cultural space. Social conflict has emerged within the art system, as this system has been reshaped to neoliberal ends. Artists are simultaneously lauded as model creative entrepreneurs and ruthlessly exploited in a sector where it has been common for institutions to ask for unpaid work in return for ‘cultural capital’.26 A marketized higher education system, where art education has been professionalized, is funded by the expansion of student debt. Art collectives like W.A.G.E and Precarious Workers’ Brigade have exposed the inequity and the exploitative reality of this situation, while integrating advocacy work into critical art practice.27 These social realities feed directly into cultural debates, which have been preoccupied with questions to do with artistic labour for much of the last two decades.28 Spanning the visual arts, avant-garde performance and experimental urbanism, an activist milieu has played an important part in the social turn, feeding militant theory and practice into the art world. Rather than simplifying the relationship between art and politics, this has made it more complex. Creative interventions in urban space, intended to disrupt the ideological cohesiveness of the system, have been repurposed to play a role in the ‘spatial fix’ of neoliberal capitalism, as David Harvey has described it.29 Imaginative and low-cost interventions in everyday life are now a routine part of urban regeneration planning. Shrewd developers even employ artists to add value to exclusive real estate projects while artist-run initiatives form an essential part of the ambience of gentrification. In these examples, art seems to be incorporated into new strategies of capital accumulation. Recognition of this problem in art activist practice goes back at least forty years, to the beginning of the property speculation boom that is well-documented in histories of global cities like London and New York.30 Although these tendencies seem to undermine the political significance of art, they also raise questions about its critical purpose and feed opposition to neoliberalism. It is often observed that neoliberalism is ideologically driven. Neoliberal ideologues saw their role as winning a ‘struggle for ideas’ so that they would I NTRODUCTION

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be capable of steering the direction of policy in moments of crisis. The words of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are often quoted to illustrate this point, and there is an extensive literature which identifies the role of the Mont Pelerin Society and associated think tanks in disseminating a neoliberal ‘common sense’ among policy makers.31 Neoliberal ideology is flexible, but it usually emphasizes the sanctity of the individual and private property and the free market as the pre-eminent mechanism for establishing an equilibrium between supply and demand. It argues against state intervention in markets, which was the defining characteristic of postwar ‘embedded liberalism’ and against the compromise between capital and labour which secured important social protections in that period. In practice, however, neoliberal reforms are unpopular. They are typically achieved not by democratic means but by being forced through in periods of crisis, sometimes crises that are deliberately orchestrated, as in the case of the economic transformation of Chile after the US-backed coup against President Allende in 1973.32 In Stuart Hall’s summary, a central tenet of neoliberal ideology is the ‘free possessive individual’.33 Under neoliberalism, ‘freedom’ is imposed on reluctant populations, whether they like it or not. For this reason, there is a large literature which explores the cultural transformation which has taken place under neoliberalism as a massive ideological project which has helped change the terrain of subjectivity. Within this literature, it is emphasized that everyday experience has been financialized: so that all valuations are gradually assimilated to an economic calculus, where the financial cost/ benefit analysis is given primacy over any other consideration.34 This stress on ideology perhaps explains why, under neoliberalism, creativity has been represented as a central ingredient of entrepreneurial wealth generation.35 The social turn, by contrast, has seen the widespread influence of artistic strategies which emphasize collaboration, participation and social intervention: all of them tending to downplay individualism and emphasize collectivity. It seems counterintuitive, therefore, that the social turn should have achieved such widespread prominence within contemporary art, during a period when a newly militant form of neoliberal ideology is ascendant. An emphasis on individual liberty and the sanctity of property is not a characteristic of neoliberalism exclusively; on the contrary, it has been a core tenet of liberalism since it cohered as a political ideology. It forms an integral part of the political and legal structure that emerged from 10

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the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The modern form of art’s social organization – the institutions of the museum, art education, the art market and art criticism, that emerged alongside the formation of the liberal democratic state – are permeated by the ideological premise of liberalism. If art is ideologically predisposed to individualism and has been increasingly assimilated to an economy of luxury, why has the social turn achieved such a pervasive influence, so that institutions like the Turner Prize have come to recognize its importance? There is no simple answer to this question, obviously. Even so, the legacy of the social turn has placed problems of collectivity at the centre of artistic debates. Here, I argue that it is ‘the collective’ that is the dominant theme of the social turn and that participatory artworks provide an insight into the ideological tensions that exist under neoliberalism. It is in the contradictions of this term ‘collectivity’ that the relationship between contemporary art, crisis and neoliberalism may be identified.

Collectivity and art It has already been noted that ‘sociopolitical aesthetics’ is a messy phenomenon. Some socially engaged artworks are attributed to the authorship of a single artist, though they are dependent on audience collaboration; others are produced by collectives where artists and non-artists create the piece anonymously. The goal of this book is not to provide a comprehensive survey of such works. Here the ‘collective’ is examined as a term where emancipatory implications and sharp contradictions form the horizon of sociopolitical aesthetics. The direct antecedents of the social turn are usually traced to the 1960s and 1970s, in Fluxus, feminist art, conceptualism and the new media activism of that period. Art collectives have an even more venerable lineage because of the close ties between modernism and Marxism, especially in constructivism, productivism, Berlin Dada and early surrealism.36 In recent years, there has been greater recognition of the historical role of art collectives in response to the increased number of artists who use this form of organization. In politics, the collective is a motif with rich polemical histories, describing sometimes the spontaneous coordination of a group and at others, the conscious process of shaping networks or institutions which might sustain political struggle. The idea of collectivity seems I NTRODUCTION

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to create an important point of connection between art and politics, but it remains elusive on a conceptual level, nonetheless. References to the collective often drift among supra-individual bodies – classes, institutions, communities and nations – before returning to an essential contradiction. In one sense, collectivity is always present, implicit in the relationship and quotidian routines of social existence. In another sense, a politically urgent experience of collectivity is comparatively rare. It may arrive in moments of spontaneous action or in long-term work towards shared goals. In either case, its political meanings point beyond language or, more precisely, towards action. Art collectives and participatory art works are situated within this interval. They are proposed as art, while seeming to point beyond it by calling into question art’s conventional boundaries. In this respect, sociopolitical aesthetics typically confuses distinctions made between artworks and their social context. There is enormous variety in the way strategies of collectivity are employed in art, as I have already noted. The interrelated terms socially engaged art, participatory art, community art, and ‘art collective’ attest to this diversity. They have in common their engagement with and subversion of a pre-existent organization of social roles and relationships. In visual art where the classical organization of roles is so familiar, it is usually taken to be natural or self-evident: the artist creates an object, the artwork, which is experienced by a spectator. The triad of artist, object and spectator forms a relationship, which is the foundation of a collective entity, the art public. The logic of this interrelationship has often been thought by critical artists to form the basis of art’s ideological function, which is why they have used participatory strategies to disrupt it. Although the artist’s creativity is supposed to be free, and the spectator’s experience of the artwork likewise, this model of social organization is, in fact, hierarchical and ideologically freighted. Whereas the relationship between artist, work and spectator is normally accepted as the basic unit of art’s public dissemination, supervised by art criticism, the art collective challenges this order by confusing the roles which underpin art’s ideological coherence. Typically, this challenge involves several identifiable points of attack. These may include a blurring of the boundary between the artist and the spectator; identification of the artwork not with an object, but with social processes or interactions and a destabilized relationship between the artist and the critic, where the interpretative authority of a distanced observer is challenged. These characteristics are found in diverse combinations across the social turn 12

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and throughout the histories of politically engaged art practice which have fed this development. The social turn has produced a rich literature, but there is not yet a sustained examination of this development alongside the trajectory of crises that has come to define the last two decades.37 Although the term ‘crisis’ appears frequently in writing about contemporary art, its implications for art’s cultural politics are rarely subject to sustained examination. The social and political conditions which crystallized after 2016 are the culmination of tendencies that have been at work since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s. On an ideological level, neoliberalism seems to have triumphed, having shifted the ground of political action, in a way that has disoriented resistance to it. Contemporary art is an aberration within this dominance, increasingly permeated by leftist theoretical motifs, as the liberal democratic state veers towards authoritarian populism. Socially engaged, critical and art activist works form only one small part of global art production, but they are disproportionately visible within it. Most of the existing literature on the social turn frames it within the political legacy of the avant-gardes and their rich histories of failure. Claire Bishop argues, for example, that key tendencies of the social turn ‘dovetail . . . perfectly with neoliberalism’s recent forms (networks, mobility, project work, affective labour)’.38 The activist critic Brian Holmes also evokes art’s absorption into capitalist sociality: far more so than in the days of the Situationists, art is the ultimate commodity, the one that sells all the rest. Because it mobilizes you, it plugs you into a transnational communications loop, it gets you to adhere, to commit, to do your part, to play your role, to burn the midnight oil, it makes you part of a dynamic society.39 For Holmes, this domination is the spur to an aesthetic practice of autonomy outside the art institution, though drawing on its resources. Peter Osborne, whose writings reinterpret Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy for a contemporary milieu, also stresses that contemporary art is shaped by capital’s global itineraries. As he writes about the multiplication of biennials: They are the Research and Development branch of the transnationalization of the culture industry. For currently, it is only capital that projects the utopian horizon of global social I NTRODUCTION

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interconnectedness, albeit in the ultimately dystopian form of the market . . . It is a distinctive feature of the new trans- and international art spaces that art appears within the culture industry, as part of distinctively capitalist constructivism.40 Osborne places the complicity between art and capitalism at the centre of his argument, as Holmes does, but he draws very different conclusions from this problem. Whereas Holmes argues for activism, Osborne advocates for the critical autonomy of art, judging art activism to be an ‘ironic mimesis of the autonomous artwork’ whose ‘separation from  .  .  .  prevailing forms of social practice makes the exercise of any such positive freedom impotent’.41 Evidently, these opposing positions share a pre-existing intellectual tradition: aporias of Marxist aesthetics have returned to hold a prominent position in debates about the social turn. The saliency of socially engaged art has encouraged artists to excavate the legacy of Marxist and social movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s. This orientation towards politics has paralleled the re-emergence of left militancy as a political force, in response to the deepening inequalities created by neoliberal capitalism. At stake in the three positions advanced by Bishop, Holmes and Osborne are old questions about the relationship between art and politics, and questions of art’s relationship to freedom. These longstanding aporias of political aesthetics have re-emerged to encounter new historical conditions. It will be a central assumption of this book that, though the art institution may still neutralize dissent, it is destabilized by the social conditions created by the neoliberal project, so that this neutralization is less effective than it once was. The period since the 1970s has seen the emergence of growing pressures within an economic situation which is evoked as a ‘long downturn’ by economic historian Robert Brenner. Declining profit-rates justified the severity of the neoliberal medicine, but, in the long run, it has only intensified disorder, which now spans the globe and reaches into the institutions of the state. Brenner, in his introduction to the 2005 edition of The Economics of Global Turbulence – that is, before the financial crisis of 2007–8 – notes that, in 1997, rates of pay in the private business economy and manufacturing were at the same levels as 1967; by contrast, between 1890 and 1973, the average annual rate of real wage growth was 2 per cent and even in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, it did not fall lower than 1.2 per cent. Although 14

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the symptoms of crisis do not seem to have reached the level of the 1930s, the economic indicators are far worse from the point of view of wage growth.42 At the time of writing, the economic impact of the global pandemic is predicted to be worse than the Great Depression and the enormous fiscal stimulus of central banks is the only thing staving off a collapse of global markets. There is clear evidence that the economic and the institutional fabric of the social order is fraying. This raises a question about how this disruption might affect art. The revolutionary project launched by the historical avant-garde in the 1920s, which sought to transform the relation between art and life, failed. Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde, established a foundational explanation of the transition from a revolutionary project to assimilation and integration into an enduring bourgeois institution.43 In the process, avant-garde artists contributed to reshaping the accepted norms of the art institution and, most vividly, the forms of ‘commodityaesthetics’: providing the means by which the sensorium of capitalism was reimagined, in architecture, design and advertising. Art theory tends to assume that the fundamental mechanism for the absorption of dissent remains in place, unchanged or even refined in its functioning. For example, Peter Osborne writes in this vein that ‘there are . . . grounds for believing that this system itself has an increased need for autonomous art, with which to feed its need for “the new”. Hence the search for new social “heterogeneities”, to transform into artistic materials, that has been characteristic of the expansion of the international art world over the last two decades’.44 Here, I explore the possibility that the absorption of dissent by the art system might not follow the same pattern in a long period of stagnation and tendential decline, from the 1970s to the present, as it did during a period of vigorous economic expansion, from the early twentieth century until the 1960s. It is evident that during the period since the 1970s, the social base of the art institution is transformed beyond all recognition from that of the first half of the century. The education of artists; the apparatus of display and distribution and the relationship between the art market, public institutions and speculative finance have all been revolutionized. It is not clear, however, that these changes result in the neutralization of political energies. In fact, the globalization of the artworld, which has taken place under neoliberalism, has tended to increase the status of work that addresses the legacy of colonialism and the continuing inequalities that support the international order. I NTRODUCTION

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There is no easy correspondence between the economic and the cultural, even though a key line of argument after postmodernism has identified late capitalism, or neoliberalism, with a fusion of, or confusion between these levels.45 Even so, it is an essential feature of Marxist art theory that an analytic relationship is posited between the political economy of capitalism and cultural phenomena, even if it is mediated in complex ways. Typically, reference to the ‘commodification’ of art is used to evoke a nebulous but pervasive relationship between the economic and the cultural. As Dave Beech has argued, however, this shorthand is not coherent in a strictly economic sense. Beech emphasizes that art’s social relations of production, the conditions under which artworks are produced, have never been and still are not organized along capitalist lines. There is a ‘lack of evidence of the economic transformation of artistic production by commodity exchange’.46 Although art may have been reshaped by its relationship to capitalist society, taking on characteristics of a luxury consumer good, this change has not penetrated the organization of art’s production: If artists have ‘internalised’ capitalist techniques, then the result – namely, art’s commodification – has come about through non-market mechanisms. There is, therefore, a conflict between the result and the process of the historical incorporation of art within capitalism: paradoxically, art has been commodified without being commodified.47 Beech places pressure on a convention that is widely used to gloss the relationship between the cultural and the economic. In doing so, he makes space for alternative models of the correspondence between art and politics. Although the data that Brenner provides to evidence the secular crisis of the economy since the 1970s does not show how art mediates economic realities, it does provide the basis for a hypothesis: the neutralization of political energies may proceed, in a period of vigorous capitalist expansion, in a different way than it does in a period of extended relative decline. Rather than a refinement of co-option, these conditions might see this process begin to break down. This hypothesis is enough to open perspectives which have been impeded by the routine explanations of art’s politics. One might even go so far as to say that co-option, though it was once a powerful weapon of militant polemic, tends now to block attempts to situate art in the political currents of the present.

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The globalization of art since the 1990s is a consequence of the expansion of capitalist markets and networks of communication. It is not, however, necessarily a sign of the subjugation of art to neoliberal logic. This expansion exposes art to sharper contradictions and, as a result, political energies that are more difficult to contain. From this perspective, the resurgence of sociopolitical aesthetics since the turn of the millennium does not so much demonstrate the art system neutralizing dissent, as it does an institutional apparatus approaching a limit of its ability to contain contradictions upon which it is founded. This does not mean that art can, all at once, fulfil its emancipatory promise. It does mean, however, that scripts used to interpret art’s politics need to be reevaluated. In each of the chapters that follow, this task is attempted. *** This book draws on the resources of Marxist art history and aesthetics, an intellectual tradition in which the sociopolitical dimension of art is of central importance. Writing about the social turn, however, involves problems that force a re-evaluation of this inheritance. A Marxist approach to art history is flexible enough to address artworks which are not artefacts, as is the case for much of the line of practice from conceptualism through to the social turn. It does, however, come under pressure when works are founded in ephemeral encounters, social processes or reflexive attention to the social context of art. The elusiveness of such works is programmatic: since the 1960s, artists have created contingent artworks as a strategy to disrupt the hierarchical production of meaning in the art world, in which art history plays an important role. To write about sociopolitical aesthetics means also exposing the institutional investments of this method of enquiry, its limitations and lacunae. Writing about ‘post-object’ socially engaged art typically draws heavily on art theory in order to compensate for the difficulty involved in approaching artworks whose form, or formlessness, stands in the way of interpretation. It is possible to write about this kind of work, just as it is about other anti-art traditions, but the ground needs to be staked out. This is perhaps why the social turn includes such a wealth of competing critical terms and polemical exchanges between art critics, curators and artists. The field itself bears the mark of the shifting institutional

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landscape of the professionalized art world. To address this challenge, I have adopted what may seem a disjunctive or unstable compound of historical and theoretical resources. I will argue throughout that this instability is integral to the subject at hand. The first chapter stakes out a theoretical approach to the art collective. I assume here that collectivity is a central and enduring preoccupation of sociopolitical aesthetics, typically as a critique of existing social relations or an attempt to model, in microcosm, an alternative social order. In either case, the art collective is antagonistic to the privileging of individualism in the normal functioning of art. This opening chapter lays out key theoretical arguments that situate the avant-garde in relation to the art institution, while drawing on analysis of the dynamic implications of the art collective under neoliberalism, which are found in the work of two key theorists of the social turn, Gregory Sholette and John Roberts. These frameworks are considered in relation to debates that were undertaken by the collective Art & Language in the mid-1970s, in the short-lived journal The Fox. Art & Language provide here a case study of an art collective that engaged rigorously with problems of art’s politics that emerged during the economic crisis that inaugurated the shift from a Keynesian to a neoliberal global consensus. Chapter 2 examines the tendency for ‘institutional critique’ to exist simultaneously in an exalted and denigrated form, both as an exemplary mode of politicized art and a threshold to absorption by the canon. In this chapter, I trace the earliest recorded instance of the term ‘institutional critique’ in the journal The Fox in 1975 and 1976, examining the stakes involved in a term that has become integral to discussion of politicized art. Here, the 1970s are once again a point of reference, but this time in order to point to the transformation undergone by the art system under neoliberalism. I argue that institutional critique is a practice which identifies contradictions in the relationship between art and a rapidly changing social reality. I refer to the artist Hito Steyerl to demonstrate a practice which construes the institution in a way that is sensitive to its unstable characteristics. The third chapter explores collectivity through the optic provided by ‘relational aesthetics’, a term which played a key role within the social turn, something like that of a ‘vanishing mediator’. The pervasive influence of this idea, derived from the writings of curator Nicolas Bourriaud, helped to bring about a renewed interest in art’s politics. Relational aesthetics revived the idea of an artwork of social encounter, 18

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which is reminiscent of the happening, Fluxus and the work of Latin American conceptualists of the 1960s. As many commentators have observed, Bourriaud’s framework does not describe particularly well the work of the artists he advocated for in the mid-1990s. Even so, the work of critics who purport to move beyond relational aesthetics struggle to escape its influence. Relational aesthetics is used here to examine a key question for debates of the social turn: the relationship between collective artworks and the commodity form. To explore this issue, I turn to the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which provides a model of sorts for Bourriaud’s ideas. An iconic artist of the 1990s, Gonzalez-Torres may be read as deeply involved in problems of collectivity and the commodityform under neoliberalism. Chapter 4 focuses on a term which has recently gained great currency in discussion of socially engaged art: ‘social practice’. Becoming widely used after 2011, alongside an increasingly politicized art discourse, this term is one that has a long history in Marxism and social theory more generally. This chapter brings its account of social practice into dialogue with recent political upheaval through discussion of two works undertaken since the UK became involved in political turmoil caused by Brexit. In this chapter Tania Bruguera’s turbine hall commission at Tate Modern in 2019, entitled 10,148,151, is compared to Mark Storor’s artwork Baa Baa Baric: Have You Any Pull, which is funded by Arts Council England, to show the distribution of social practice among different constituencies of art, and also its increased orientation to the effects of crises. The final chapter examines collectivity through the politicized language of the slogan. Once again, the argument takes the organic crisis of the state during Brexit as its setting. The place of language within crisis is increasingly unstable and provides a compelling space in which to examine the aesthetic implications of the social turn, where the slogan is situated as a vector of activism, which plays on the shifting boundary between art and politics. Three practices that work with slogans, or polemic, are used to stake out the problem of the boundary between art and politics: these are the collective Freee, the work of the artist Tim Etchells and the internet activist Artist Taxi Driver, Mark McGowan. These case studies seek new ways into the social turn and its contexts. A different theoretical term is foregrounded by each chapter, though there are thematic issues that link them together. This emphasis on a theoretical lexicon allows the study to reflect on the shifting ideological stakes involved in the relationship between the collective and the I NTRODUCTION

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institution. A limitation of this project, however, is that it focuses on artworks created in the Global North, in the United States and the United Kingdom. Although the social turn is a global phenomenon, with important traditions of collective practice in Latin America, Asia and Africa, it has proved easier to address the ideological dynamic of the art institution by using case studies that are proximate to power centres of the art world. This is because the crises signalled by the Brexit referendum and the election victory of Donald Trump in 2016 form an important part of the background to this study and its re-evaluation of the social turn. As a result, this book only touches upon the rich diversity of political aesthetics, social experimentation and artistic practice created outside of the Global North. I hope that the underlying political impetus of this work will make clear, nonetheless, that it is a project of social art history that is sensitive to the demands now made upon art by ‘epistemologies of the South’.48

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1 THE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

The social turn is often discussed as a return of the avant-garde. This is not only because this artistic development is politicized but also because it experiments with collectivity. The constructivists and productivists, Berlin Dada and the surrealist international all form important reference points in debates about socially engaged art; these movements all owed allegiance to the utopian possibilities that were associated with the Russian revolution, which were expressed through rejection of individualism and embrace of collectivism. The aesthetic syntax established by these utopian avant-gardes recurs through the twentieth century and forms a key reference point for contemporary art. This latent collectivism has always contained the potential to tip over into political activism. The Situationist International allied experiments in the ‘construction of situations’ with a revolutionary analysis which had a direct influence on the insurrection in Paris in May 1968. Other groups, existing on the margins of art, experimented with the idea of cultural revolution.1 The collectivism of the social turn carries with it something of the mystique of revolution because of this history. The avant-gardes of the 1920s were normally formed as collectives, and this organizational strategy recurs in subsequent avant-garde movements. Even so, it is difficult to build a case for the political efficacy of the art collective. Avant-garde groups were generally organized around manifestos, group exhibitions and journals. It is far from clear that they have had political effects in their immediate contexts that match their powerful polemic, however. Although the idea of a ‘collective’ suggests unity, collectives manifest in fragmentary ways, in programmes and statements of purpose, in texts and events, and in disputes and splits. Although this activity tended to be chaotic, avant-gardes certainly transformed art, though not necessarily in the way that that they intended.

Collectivism is habitually associated with unity and solidarity. In the words of the curator Maria Lind, ‘through its stress on solidarity, the word “collective” offers an echo of working forms within a socialist system’.2 In this chapter, I will set the scene for a discussion of the social turn by arguing that fragmentation and impurity are more revealing as characteristics of art collectives. As Claire Bishop notes ‘collective works are more difficult to market than works by individual artists . . . and less likely to be “works” than a fragmented array of social events, publications, workshops or performances’.3 This chapter expands upon this observation to argue that a collectivized art tends to disorganize artistic norms, resulting in an elusive and even a divisive identity. The art historian and critic Grant Kester, an important contributor to critical debates within the social turn, argues that the term ‘collective’ is subject to ‘ethical undecidability’ because it elicits both positive and negative connotations. For Kester, this ‘undecidability’ shapes the political ambivalence of the social turn: ‘there is no art practice that avoids all forms of co-option, compromise or complicity. It seems wiser to openly acknowledge this impurity than to assume it can be somehow defeated at the level of terminology.’4 The problem can be phrased more sharply still. As Gregory Sholette has formulated it: ‘can there be a revolutionary art without the revolution?’ seems to be a decisive question for sociopolitical aesthetics.5 What is the significance of art which experiments with its social form with no revolution in sight? Co-option, absorption into a status quo, seems to be an inescapable problem for all politicized art. The essential point in Kester’s argument about the ‘impurity’ of the art collective is that it contains an amalgam of utopian, pragmatic and strategic impulses. In this chapter, I want to alter the terms of this argument, by emphasizing the contradictions that are found in art collectives and collectivized art forms. In so doing, I will use this idea of impurity to explore the problems that arise when sociopolitical art attempts to become political activism. The aim here is to problematize the idea that art can merge with politics and, in the process, to frame problems that will be examined in subsequent chapters. A case study is used to do this preliminary work. The chapter discusses debates that took place in The Fox, a journal that existed for three issues between 1975 and 1976, in which members of the collective Art & Language argued about the political role of their collectivized art practice. Although this historical moment falls well outside the normal periodization of the social turn, it anticipates problems 22

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that are discussed in more recent art and coincides with the economic crisis that inaugurated neoliberalism. The Fox is interesting because, although it resulted in an acrimonious split, it failed in a way that reveals problems that beset attempts to realize the political potential of a radical social art. The participants in the journal reflected on these problems in a Marxist idiom that continues to play a central role in critical art theory. Although the immediate political context for their activities was shaped by the militancy of the 1970s, it provides a revealing comparison to the instability that exists around socially engaged art in the present.

Avant-gardes, revolution and impurity The reorganization of artistic production around collectivity is one of the most important features of the avant-garde of the early part of the twentieth century, especially the so-called historical avant-garde. Although this period is most famous for aesthetic innovations that shaped subsequent art and filtered into visual culture in complex ways – the readymade, collage and montage – there is a strong argument that the social organization of the production of art has proved to be an enduring legacy of equal importance. It is helpful to recount some key positions in debates about the avant-gardes, to set the scene for the relationship between key terms in this study – especially, ‘art’, ‘collective’ and ‘revolution’. For Theodor Adorno, the social dimension of the avant-garde was fundamentally a defensive reaction against the social characteristics of monopoly capitalism. As ‘programmatic, self-conscious and often collective art movements’, the ‘isms’ required organization in order to survive.6 It is capitalist society that ‘compels artworks to become organized in themselves and requires as well an external organization for the artworks to the extent that they want to survive in a monopolistically fully organized society’.7 In this interpretation, the art collective is a defensive organizational move which creates conditions through which authentic art can exist. The avant-garde is the bearer of this authenticity because it identifies with the new in all of its contradictions, in a society structured by pervasive instrumental rationality. The collective allows critical art to exist despite the entropic cultural forces that push it towards neutralization and banalization in the culture industry. For Adorno, art has a critical potential because it can maintain distance, however illusory, from the forces that structure capitalist society. T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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The theorist Peter Bürger provides an alternative view, which remains one of the most widely quoted and contested positions on the avant-garde legacy.8 For Bürger, the distance between art and life has an ideological function. He follows Marcuse, arguing that it is part of the function of art in bourgeois society that it is ‘set apart from the struggle of everyday existence’.9 The reality of art is ideological in a complex way: it offers fulfilment, or ‘imagined satisfaction of individual needs that are repressed in daily praxis’, but it does so in a way that is without ‘tangible effects’.10 The freedom that is available in art cannot be integrated into a daily life which is founded on alienation and exploitation. For Bürger, these characteristics of art support ‘the neutralization of critique’ or ‘the neutralization of impulses to change society’.11 Bürger’s argument states that the ‘historical avant-garde’ of the 1920s – he means Dada and surrealism primarily – attempted to overcome the separation between art and the praxis of life. The historical avant-garde tried to actualize the freedoms granted to art, to give them a transformative, social existence. This project took diverse forms, including hostility to the conventions of easel painting, attempts to reform art education, rhetorical attacks on museums and production of works that used aesthetic innovations like collage, and the readymade, which subverted the idea of a unified organic artwork. As we have seen, these experiments were often explicitly allied to radical politics. Bürger suggests that this attempt to overcome the boundary between art and life failed. There was no destruction of the art institution and no enduring transformation of social praxis through art. Instead, the insights of avantgardes served to refine the capitalist sensorium, shaping commodity aesthetics through design, architecture and fashion. The close relationship between the avant-garde and modernist architecture, or between surrealism and fashion photography, is emblematic of this process.12 The works created by avant-gardes were absorbed into the museums that they sought to destroy. Bürger argues that there cannot be another avant-garde challenge with the same effect as that of the historical avant-garde. The avant-garde revivals of the 1950s and 1960s, which Bürger called the ‘neo-avant-garde’, turn a revolutionary impulse into a domesticated artistic style in this view. He insists that this outcome, irrespective of the intentions of the artists involved, is determined by the logic of the art institution: To the extent that the means by which the avant-gardistes hoped to bring about the sublation of art have attained the status of works of 24

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art, the claim that the praxis of life is to be renewed can no longer be legitimately connected with their employment. To formulate more pointedly: the neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions. This is true independently of the consciousness artists have of their activity, a consciousness that may perfectly well be avant-gardiste (original emphasis).13 Many valid objections have been made to Bürger’s argument. The thing to note first, however, is that it is a lucid account of the ideological function of art. It implies that the separation between art and life persists, reinventing itself as it absorbs new challenges. This is a persuasive position because it seems to explain how seemingly iconoclastic avantgarde moves – Duchamp’s use of the readymade is the most famous example – have come to form a basic syntax for contemporary art. Commonly, the term ‘art institution’ is identified with the gallery and the museum, which we might term the ‘matrix’ where the market, display and the archive intersect. For Bürger, the institution names the entire complex of determinants that govern the appearance of art during a given historical epoch. Although the sites that mediate the distribution of art – a gallery, a museum and a publisher – each play a distinctive role within the institution, they form part of a larger network, or structure. As Bürger puts it in Theory of the Avant Garde: ‘The concept “art as institution” . . . refers to the productive and distributive apparatus and also to the ideas about art that prevail at a given time and that determine the reception of works.’14 A central implication in Bürger’s work, therefore, is that the entire edifice of art after the historical avant-garde is shaped by this absorption of a failed revolution. Every aspect of art, including its conventions of display, its conventions of language and interpretation, are marked by this neutralization. Bürger was writing in the early 1970s and his assessment of the neoavant-gardes of that time, including Pop, minimalism and conceptualism, was not well-informed. In more recent times, he has himself acknowledged that he was not knowledgeable about the ‘neo-avant-garde’ at the time he wrote Theory of the Avant-garde, though he defends the broad scope of his thesis.15 The most common charge laid against Bürger is that his analysis is melancholic, because it argues that the revolutionary challenge of the avant-garde could only occur once, before it became derivative. Although this counterargument is an important one, and it is broadly accepted by this study, the accusation of melancholy is misleading.16 Bürger only T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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argues that it is not possible for social revolution to be achieved by artists alone, which is surely an uncontroversial point. It can only be perceived as melancholy by someone who maintains, perhaps unconsciously, the hope that art might have the capacity to transform the world. Although Bürger is criticized, his argument about art’s neutralization of political impulses is often adapted by theorists who disagree with the details of his assessment of the neo-avant-garde. Bürger is clear that the historical avant-garde, though it failed to close the gap between art and life, did transform the art institution: After Duchamp, not only can the everyday artefact claim the status of an artwork but the discourse of the institution is molded by the avant-gardes to a degree that no one could have predicted. Avantgarde categories such as rupture and shock gain admittance to the discourse of art, while at the same time concepts such as harmony and coherence are suspected of conveying a false appearance and a reconciliation with a degraded status quo.17 The art institution is reorganized by its absorption of a revolutionary challenge. This idea is reprised by the philosopher Peter Osborne, for example, in his account of conceptualism, a global development of the late 1960s, which lasted until the early 1970s as an influential neoavant-garde faction. Osborne sees conceptualism as having led to a pervasive ‘mutation of the ontology of the artwork’ and modification of the relationship between the art work and art criticism, which had such a transformative effect that contemporary art can be described simply as ‘post-conceptual’ art.18 He also adapts the basic claim of Bürger’s argument – that revolutionary art can only revolutionize the art institution – to explain the influence of conceptualism. Conceptual art challenged the orthodoxy of its own period, by subverting conventions governing the production of artworks and their visual consumption. Osborne writes of early attempts to polemicize for conceptual art, and against the high modernism of Clement Greenberg, by the artists Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth: ‘This campaign against a certain “aesthetic” institution of spectatorship was at once anti-institutional and the bearer of an alternative institutionalization, following the temporal logic of artistic avant-gardes established at least a century before.’19 This hypothesis retains the broadly functionalist account of the art institution that Bürger advanced. I place the argument at the beginning of this discussion because it presents a very strong challenge to any claim that 26

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art may lead to political transformation. It is by exploring this argument that it will become possible to suggest a hypothesis of the art collective. Bürger does not treat in any sustained way questions of the collectivized production of art works, which formed part of the experimental practice of the historical avant-garde. The reorganization of the social production of art seems to offer a different way into the problem of the ideological function of art that is posed by The Theory of the Avant-garde. In principle, the art collective challenges the individualism enshrined in the figure of the ‘artist’ and aims at a non-exploitative ground for participation between artists and non-artists. Art collectives since the 1960s are like after-images of the revolutionary project of the historical avantgarde in these respects. Equally, though, it is a strategy which is legible as art because the art institution has a long tradition of absorbing shocks. The mystique of revolution has an ambiguous meaning. It speaks not only to an emancipatory impulse of the avant-garde but also to the containment of that impulse. This might be said of all the key avant-garde innovations which, after Duchamp, have defined the aesthetic of contemporary art. The subversion of individual authorship by art collectives and participatory artists is of a piece with the celebration of contingency, suppression of the ‘beholder’ and other avant-garde motifs, in that it inherits unresolved tensions from the emancipatory project of avant-gardism. Bürger’s argument is a durable one because it explains in an efficient way a puzzle of the avant-garde, which is the relationship between its revolutionary claims and their incorporation into a stable social continuum. The social dimension of the collectivization of art, as a strategy inherited from the historical avant-gardes, is used to undermine the prevailing conventions within which artworks are made. These conventions are well described in the work of art historian Carol Duncan, whose work on the museum has carefully anatomized norms of the display and appreciation of art, their ideological implications and their historical origins.20 Duncan analyses the museum as a ‘civilizing ritual’ where the museum is interpreted as a key site for a liminal experience, which is a prerequisite of a well-appointed nation state. Here, the idea of art as a ‘secularized transcendence’, as Adorno termed it, is given an anthropological inflection. The practices involved in aesthetic appreciation are the material expressions of ideology, sedimented in the rituals and conventions of the art museum. In this interpretation ‘conventions of the display and appreciation of art’ are means by which ‘the relationship between the individual as citizen T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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and the state as benefactor is enacted’.21 Duncan notes that in Western Europe art took on its modern forms alongside liberal democracy, as an important secular expression of community. The paradigmatic example of the emergence of the modern museum is the Louvre, which became the first ever national museum when the private art collection of the Bourbons was transferred to the newly formed French republic.22 Conventions which stress the individualized production and consumption of artworks have proved to be among the most stubbornly embedded in art. The social turn can be understood as a return to avant-garde principles, in part, because it has rediscovered an aspect of their challenge to the embedded individualism of art. In a sense, then, sociopolitical aesthetics are impure because they represent a limit point. Where artworks are made collectively, authorship becomes difficult to ascribe, the relationship between artistic and other forms of labour becomes confused and an artistic organization shades over into political organizing. The collectivized production of art cannot, by itself, close the gap between art and life, because the ideological function of art is durable. Rather, collective practice involves a multiplication of unresolved contradictions. To illustrate this point, I will now discuss in detail an example of art collectivism from the 1970s, in the journal The Fox.

The Fox The collective Art & Language has its origins in Coventry in the UK, where the journal Art-Language was first published in 1969.23 The founders, Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell and David Bainbridge, produced conceptual art as two distinct artistic collaborations for some years before the journal and the collective were established. The New York wing of Art & Language was founded in 1971, when an existing collaboration between Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden was incorporated into the group.24 Burn and Ramsden joined Joseph Kosuth who had already established a position as the ‘American editor’ of ArtLanguage.25 At its origin, then, Art & Language, New York (A&LNY) was not formed as a single affinity group, but rather as a collaboration (Burn and Ramsden) and an individual’s art practice (Kosuth) brought into relationship with a pre-existent collective that was based in the UK. Art & Language illustrates how an art collective may contain geographically dispersed membership, which is organized around collaboratively realized outputs, such as journals or exhibitions. 28

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The journal The Fox was produced by A&LNY. The first issue was published in 1975, initially funded by Joseph Kosuth, but latterly from grants provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and Robert Rauschenberg’s foundation, Change Inc.26 It was conceived as a publication that would contest the power of Artforum within the New York art scene, and which would provide another forum within Art & Language, distinct in its tone from Art-Language. Equally though, it was a continuation of the Art & Language project, which conceived conceptual art as an intensive research dialogue, a subversion of the conventional separation between art objects and art language. The centrality of group research was implicit in the founding of ArtLanguage, but the methods involved became progressively refined as the collective practice developed. Between 1972 and 1976, Art & Language’s output was identified with an extended research dialogue between the members. This period was inaugurated by a collaborative project initiated in a dialogue between Kosuth and members in the UK: Index 01, also known as the ‘Documenta’ Index because of its inclusion on the 1972 Documenta, curated by Harald Szeemann (Figure 1.1). This work collected formal and informal writings by contributors to Art-Language, which had been produced over the preceding six years. These texts were contained in eight file cabinets placed on four plinths and surrounded by wall displays indicating a taxonomy of logical relationships connecting the arguments explored in the pieces of writing. For Art & Language, indexing became a model for collective work within an art context, a means ‘to dramatize the social nature of thinking’ in Charles Harrison’s terms.27 The installation at Documenta 5 conformed to the classic ‘aesthetic of administration’ of conceptualism, presented as an arrangement of filing cabinets and stark tabulation.28 The presentation is intentionally uninviting: the meaning of the work is not supposed to be comprehended by merely looking at it, as one might have learned to look at a modernist artwork. Instead, the work imposes a choice on its viewer: either to engage in reading or to fail entirely to understand what is presented. By reading, the spectator becomes potentially, though not necessarily, an interlocutor in a shared dialogue. This dialogue was conceived as inherently openended and dissensual: the artwork attacks the social convention that the consumption of art is a private moment of aesthetic contemplation. In this model of conceptual art, beholders are addressed as dialogic participants. T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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FIGURE 1.1  Art & Language. Index 01, 1972. Eight file cabinets, texts and Photostats. Dimensions variable. Installation ‘Too Dark to Read: Motifs Rétrospectifs, 2002-1965’, Musée d’art modern de Lille Métropole, Villeneuve d’ascq. Collection Daros, Zurich.

In a publication from the same period as The Fox, Art&Language Australia 1975, the project of Art & Language is described in this way: In contrast to the personal subjectivity (‘I speak with my own voice’) which prevails in the artworld, and to the impersonal suprasubjectivity of groups and committees (‘We speak with one voice’) the Art & Language world of discourse searches for a personal intersubjectivity (‘I speak with many voices’). The constructions of ‘talking to each other’ are projections from the surface of our discourse, experimentally embedded.29 Art & Language incorporated art theory into art practice as a selfinterrogative enquiry which is neither defined by artistic individualism nor the collectivism that speaks ‘with one voice’. In this way, the group developed a ‘praxis-like’ strategy within conceptual art which had fuzzy boundaries. It existed equally in the social immediacy of discussions, which were sometimes recorded, in theoretical texts which were 30

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edited and sometimes authored collectively and in public exhibitions and performances. Viewers of the works were understood as potential interlocutors primarily through their engagement in reading. After 1972, the membership of A&LNY began to grow as Mel Ramsden and Ian Burn explored the implications of indexing and sought a larger social base in New York. This phase of work revolved first around an ‘annotations project’, where short ‘blurts’, brief pieces of theoretical reflection or speculation, were circulated and compiled with the responses that they elicited. These ‘blurts’ were collected as Blurting in Art & Language in 1973, annotated with two types of relations that might indicate divergent pathways of reading through the ‘blurts’. In New York, indexing became a way of framing the sociality of a group of artists as a space of resistance against the art institution, its specific ideological relations and the social order that they sustain. In the introduction to Blurting in A&L, Mel Ramsden described it as a kind of ‘handbook’: ‘in the end the handbook is concerned with developing a kind of learner environment; there has to be that sort of elbow room as is implied by pandemonium’.30 ‘Pandemonium’ was a term that Ramsden used at this time to try to evoke the kind of theoretical openness that he envisaged as an implication of intersubjective enquiry. This project was extended in 1974 in A Draft for an Anti-Textbook published in Art-Language, which comprised of edited transcripts of conversations that had taken place between Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn and Terry Smith. One of the key themes of the Anti-Textbook was of a struggle to articulate a space, a shared language, that would free itself from ‘bureaucracy’: ‘Even . . . or first of all . . . language is made into a bureaucracy . . . to presuppose my language is a deviant form of official language is to degrade my language, make it unreal, separate it from me.’31 Art & Language saw formalist modernism, the American-type abstract painting advocated by Clement Greenberg, as a ‘paradigm’ that had been superseded.32 The ambition of the group was not to replace modernism with a new dominant order but to establish in its place a ‘learning situation’ or ‘sociality’. Although it is not possible to engage with the entire range of themes in the Anti-Textbook, these excerpts demonstrate the extent to which the interpretation of indexing by A&LNY involved a rejection of notions of artistic success. Rather than celebrate an avant-gardist overcoming of past forms of art, the project aimed at creating openness that was grounded in the pragmatics of the dialogue between members of a group, conceived as a community. T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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This articulation of a different space of language, meant that the dialogic ‘learning situation’ or ‘pandemonium’ of A&LNY needed to be a space where values might be transfigured: ‘Rational’ is the ideology of the status quo . . . we feel uncomfortable with things that ‘don’t fit’, that’s the way things are set up and this is astonishing – What I’m talking about is that a shift to doing things that (wilfully) don’t fit is not a prelude to getting better fits, but a kind of heuristic for being self-conscious . . . it’s where we take seriously the notion of failures – A&L as a ‘history of failures’ . . . if professionalism is knowing how to succeed, then forget about it.33 Failure was proposed in A&LNY as an important condition for an art practice that was, fundamentally, involved in working on epistemological frameworks for experiencing reality. This point is relevant to any attempt to understand The Fox, which collapsed as an enterprise after three issues under the pressure of the contradictions that it exposed in the practice of the group. The failure was not intentional, but it was a result of the uncompromising motivation of the enquiry, which was to acknowledge and reject the strategies required to construct an institutionally validated artistic identity (Figure 1.2). The move towards an idea of ‘praxis’ in the work of Art & Language after 1974 is described in Art&Language Australia 1975:

FIGURE 1.2  Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. Image from It’s Still Privileged Art!, 1975. Ink drawing. Courtesy of the artists.

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‘Theory-trying’ and ‘intersubjectivity’ continue . . . but exploring the pragmatics of your language-use rubs your nose in the ‘real world’ contextuality of it. You want to be able to cash in your research, upfront its cultural embeddedness; you want to be able to act in specific situations.34 By the mid-1970s, A&LNY had a membership of up to seventeen people.35 The decision to publish The Fox was in part an attempt to expand the social base of their conversation and to create a more effective form of resistance to the forms of alienating sociality that the group perceived in the New York ‘Kunstwelt’, as Mel Ramsden described the art world. However, this strategy raised an obvious problem: How was a political critique of the dominating social structure of the artworld to be mounted from within it? Mel Ramsden framed this problem in this way in an internal communiqué: The question remains: who do we direct our activism at and who is it for? Do we simply assail ‘the art establishment’? Our very own privileges? In which case, who listens? . . . The greatest subversion of the privileged Kunstwelt would be to refuse to make art for that Kunstwelt whilst making art as ambitious as that usually seen in the Kunstwelt. I have no idea of course how to do this. (original emphasis)36 These interrelated questions might be said to identify the tensions which existed within The Fox, which were to create an extraordinary vitality and urgency of theoretical debate. Key lines of argument explored by The Fox, illustrate the difficulties that emerge in an attempted transition from social experimentation as art to political engagement.

Community A central preoccupation of The Fox was ‘community’: indeed, the publication was initially conceived as the basis for a community which invited contributions from its readers. The editorial statement in The Fox 1 emphasized participation: ‘It is the purpose of our journal to try to establish some kind of community practice. Those who are interested, curious, or have something to add (be it pro or con) to the editorial thrust . . . the revaluation of ideology . . . of this first issue are encouraged, even urged, to contribute to following issues.’37 The editorial statement in The Fox 2 emphasizes participation once again, though in a more militant register: ‘If you are concerned with trying to reclaim art as an instrument T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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of social and cultural transformation, in exposing the domination of the culture / administrative apparatus as well as art that indolently reflects that apparatus, you are urged to participate in this journal.’38 The statement of purpose is sharper, the journal’s ‘editorial thrust is ideological: it aims at a contribution to the wider movement of social criticism / transformation’.39 Even so, the ‘Correspondence and Notes’ section of the second issue includes a strange collection of praise and invective from contributors. One reprinted letter begins: Dear Fox, We hope one day you’ll eventually wise up and receive the knowledge of Guri [sic] Maharaj Ji and begin an actual alternative instead of dithering around epistemological banalities, red herrings, partial critiques and domestic absurdities.40 Another short missive asks: ‘How many of you are under contract to an art gallery? How many of you have accepted grants from those “allembracing cultural institutions?”’41 The space granted to these submissions by the editors reads as an attempt to create ‘pandemonium’ in Ramsden’s sense. These heterogenous contributions indicate an attempt to build connections with a wider community and to integrate The Fox into a wave of politicized countercultural activity that was then moving through the art world. As in much of their work, Art & Language valued discordant contributions as highly as supportive ones. Perhaps because of this openness to conflict, the editorial group produced a wide variety of prescient work that, viewed in retrospect, seems to register changes that were then emergent in the art world. The diversity of The Fox’s simultaneous lines of enquiry is impressive, seeming to evidence the rigorous, yet contradictory and expansive, dynamism that is possible in collective work. Ian Burn’s essay ‘Pricing Works of Art’, for example, contains an incipient analysis of the contemporary art market, which makes reference to the emergence of ‘art investment funds’: ‘corporate-like organizations whose sole aims are to buy art, hold it for appreciation, then sell at a profit’.42 These were the prototypes of the securitized global art market which is now prima facie evidence of art’s economic transformation under neoliberalism.43 Michael Corris and Terry Smith contributed articles addressing the relationship between the social, or the collective, and art history.44 Joseph Kosuth produced an essay periodizing conceptual art and laying claim to

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the mantle of the ‘art of the Vietnam era’.45 The journal included rebarbative critique and ad hominem attacks on well-known artists and critics of the US and the British art world.46 Contributions from Paul Wood and David Rushton in the UK presented an unsparing analysis of the ideological role of art education. Mel Ramsden, whose essays and reviews are particularly caustic, seems to have been the first to have used the now ubiquitous term ‘institutional critique’ in print, as I will discuss in Chapter 2.47 The vitality of this ‘impurity’ is evident when one spends time unravelling the arguments which were proposed or engaged within the pages of the three issues of the journal. Here, I track one line of debate through the intersecting dialogues. It is a particularly important one, because it treats the intractable question of the political place of the art collective and the limits to the claims that can be made for political significance by an organization of this kind. Michael Baldwin and Philip Pilkington were at this time the central collaboration in Art & Language in the UK. Their contribution to The Fox 1 entitled ‘For Thomas Hobbes’ is an attack on the political pretensions of the editorial group of The Fox and of the New York art world. Baldwin and Pilkington write: ‘New York’s artistic community approaches the condition of a lumpen-bourgeoisie.’48 Their specific reference point is the ‘community’ celebrated by The Fox 1, which they point out is divorced from any recognition of the social reality of class. In the New York art world ‘Even the plumbers and carpenters are off-duty artists. The only non-artists (or art-pundits) are more economically (etc.) powerful than the artists. Before anyone reaches mistakenly for a handkerchief, it should be noted that many artists are rich.’49 This reference to a ‘lumpen-bourgeoisie’ is a withering conceptualist joke, linking Marx’s category, the ‘lumpenproletariat’, to the artists’ colony then growing in the abandoned loft spaces of the formerly light-industrial district of SoHo, downtown New York. First introduced as a concept in Marx’s political writings, the lumpenproletariat is a declassed reactionary group, which is described memorably in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon as: vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged criminals, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, confidence tricksters, lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleightof-hand experts, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel-keepers, porters, penpushers, organ-grinders, rag-and-bone merchants, knife-grinders,

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tinkers and beggars: in short, the whole indeterminate fragmented mass, tossed backwards and forwards, which the French call la boheme.50 It is possible to situate this critique in a debate that took place at that time between members of A&LNY and Art & Language, UK. In an essay published in Artforum in 1975, ‘The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation’, Ian Burn wrote that ‘impending economic crisis . . . has forced many deeply lurking problems into the open’.51 This essay refers to the economic crisis of the middle of the 1970s, caused by a combination of high inflation and low productivity, and worsened by the oil crisis of 1973. The evidence of this economic malaise was clear in New York at the time, which was on the brink of bankruptcy.52 In his essay, Burn attempts to read the transformed role of art within this economic context. His focus is the artists’ colony in SoHo, which was then home to thousands of artists living and working cheaply in loft apartments and warehouse spaces. Referring to these repurposed spaces, he writes: the development of a ‘factory-like’ community, which sustains and encourages an exploitative market, also creates uniquely different social conditions for that community and in turn may lead to social and political awareness of the power of the community.53 Burn tends to read the emergence of the artistic district in SoHo as a sign of the increasing hold of capitalism over art, but also the potential for new social and political organization within the art system, led by artists. Burn argues that the New York art world is experiencing a shift that comes from an encounter between artistic production dominated by ‘atomized’ competition between artists, which Burn describes as an ‘earlier or lower stage of capitalist production’ and an emergent ‘art marketing system’ which reflects the conditions of monopoly capitalism.54 Artists are allowed a formal freedom from capitalist exploitation, in the sense that they are not wage labourers, but this freedom turns out to be illusory, because artists’ work is directed and manipulated by an expanding art bureaucracy. Amid this illusory individual freedom, the ‘factory-like’ spaces, according to Burn, may create conditions in which art might become meaningfully collectivized. There is a sense in this argument that Burn is modelling the experience of artists on the dynamic of exploitation described in classical Marxism, where the proletariat is conceived as a force for transformation because it 36

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is exploited by industrial capitalism. This motif was identified in a reply to this essay by Michael Baldwin of Art & Language, UK. For Baldwin, Burn’s argument rested on a naïve insensitivity to the role of art and artists in the wider capitalist system. In Art-Language volume 3 no. 2, the point is made in an anonymously written text: ‘To use the language of proletarian class struggle is to sink into fantasy. Co-op galleries are not “worker-controlled factories”; their various forms of support, public, private and communal, in no way correspond to any industrial situation.’55 In characteristically baroque and sarcastic, theoretical prose, Baldwin reiterates and expands the point: ‘Suddenly, horribile dictu, he (etc.) has become a sort of prole. The tacit implication emerges that he’s not become a prole – a sort of prole suggests a lumpenproletarian. It seems appropriate that a delusory proletarianization is devoid of class consciousness’ (original emphasis).56 The objections made by Baldwin and others in Art-Language hit home in important respects. This was a moment in which the New York art world had become radicalized, with Artforum, previously known as a high modernist bastion, now publishing texts providing revisionist interpretations of American modernism. For Art & Language, UK, the appropriation of Marxian theoretical motifs was revealing of the strange social situation of the artists’ colony in SoHo: ‘They are cut-off from the rest of the community but threatened by it, actually physically threatened. They dare not wear expensive clothes on the street because someone might think they are rich. But is it not a fact that they often are rich and that this a middle-class ghetto surrounded by the threatening mob of the “have-nots”?’57 The idea of a ‘lumpenbourgoisie’ emerged from this exchange, initially as criticism. Burn, in an article in The Fox, defended himself against the accusations. His reply makes two key points. First, he argues that a theoretically ‘correct’ understanding of a Marxian account of class might stand in the way of working through actual social contradictions: a few of the less lofty articles in The Fox, while perhaps riddled with some theoretically unforgiveable ‘experiences’, might be partially defensible because of their crude and often clubfooted attempts to reappropriate some of the more ‘abstract’ questions into concrete cases.58 Burn also points out that the contradictions that were to be found in his own work might also be found in the work of Art & Language, UK. All T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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art that aspires to be radical encounters the same problem: ‘how to be “radical” and not lose your place in the professionaldom of art’.59 Burn drives home the point: ‘How do you “defect” from your own class? or even, can you? or do you just end up isolating yourself within your own class (the malaise of modern art)? This is always the trouble with paper solutions, ours or anyone else’s.’60 The practice of A&LNY afterwards came to be defined by these problems. A transcript of the meetings undertaken by the group included in Fox 3 is entitled ‘The Lumpenheadache’, reflecting the fact that the accusation made by Baldwin and Pilkington, and its ironies, were incorporated into the dialogue of the group.61 A poster for Fox 3 includes a manifesto statement that adopts the accusation of lumpen-ness: ‘we are the lumpenbourgeoisie with the lumpen-destiny of perpetuating the privileged “reality” of snobs whilst at the same time being intoxicated by our own real contacts with living social reality – people’. Other works produced at around this time are preoccupied with the problem of finding a way for art to be allied in some significant way to political transformation. Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, who were members at this point, contributed a section to the film Struggle in New York, made by Yugoslavian artist Zoran Popovic in 1976, with voice-overs from the artists as they reflect on the gender coding of their domestic lives. Beveridge speaks over film of him sleeping on the sofa with a collected works of Lenin resting on his chest: The exercise of oppression is more subtle than putting people to sleep in front of a television. By the steady reduction of all meaning to that of style, by reducing content to formal incident, don’t we eventually turn politics into aesthetics? We revolutionize the artworld not the real world, the real world is left unchanged. Social revolution becomes cultural avant-garding.62 Their focus on the contradictions involved in experimental art continues a line in Condé and Beveridge’s work which began in the series of It’s Still Privileged Art (1975). In illustrated and captioned panels, these artists reflected on their effort to move beyond their immediate social experience as artists. This was an attempt to work through tensions in the relationship between art and class, in a moment of intense economic crisis, alluded to in writings produced by members of the collective at the time.63 This period in the activity of Art & Language is brief. The ‘Lumpenheadache’ meeting in February 1976 resulted in a split within 38

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the group, when an attempt to establish ‘principles of unity’ which would have involved sharing income from artwork sales resulted in Joseph Kosuth and Sarah Charlesworth leaving. Kosuth was the most successful artist in the group in market terms, at this time. In June of 1976, another meeting was held, which resulted in a second split. A group including Michael Corris, Jill Breakstone, Preston Heller, Andrew Menard and briefly Ian Burn worked together on a publication called Red-Herring, which was published for two issues. Mel and Paula Ramsden returned to the UK, where Ramsden continued to work in Art & Language in collaboration with Michael Baldwin. Ian Burn returned to Australia. Michael Corris, in an account of this period, notes that the psychodrama that surrounded The Fox as it disintegrated included the proposal of distinctively different models of politicized art. The ‘impurity’ of art collectivism, as it is explored here, is closely linked to what Corris calls the ‘limit of the social’ in art.64 He observes that in the 1970s, there emerged a host of art-political organizations, including the Art Workers Coalition, Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG) and Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, whose activities explored the social and political implications of conceptual art. As Corris puts it, ‘practices and interventions aimed explicitly at the social and institutional supports of art have haunted “mainstream” Conceptual Art throughout its history’.65 In Corris’s terms, The Fox explored the tension that emerged within a distinctively ‘activist’ formulation of conceptual art: It was reasoned that the pragmatic dimension of language would enable a Conceptual Art with socializing potential – a form of art (perhaps leading to a generalized social practice, whatever that may be) that not only questioned the spectator position presupposed by late Modernist art, but actively contributed to the constitution of a new type of spectator for art. (original emphasis)66 Corris’s argument that this represented a ‘limit’ is persuasive. Reaching this limit, the members split in different directions, pursuing the problems raised in The Fox in different ways. Art & Language continued, still engaged with problems of art’s politics, as a collaboration between Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin. This route is the easiest to trace, in that it can be tracked through an artistic career marked by exhibitions, publications, retrospectives and so on. Condé and Beveridge pursued a modified version of this strategy. From the 1980s onwards, their art practice focused T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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on the creation of artworks in dialogue with union members, a practice that was often funded by unions. This project to develop an alternative social base for art, and an alternative audience for it, was shared by many activist artists of the early 1980s.67 Ian Burn chose not to continue an artist career, but instead to contribute to a different kind of working-class public sphere, by establishing Union Media Services in his native Australia, with collaborators Ian Millis and Nigel Lendon. The Fox seems to exemplify the tensions that arise when a revolutionary art is proposed in the absence of a revolution. In one sense, it is ‘impure’ because Art & Language explored a collective strategy that was not only very productive, but also conflictual and difficult to hold together. In another sense, it is impure because it struggled with the problem of the art institution, seeking a way beyond the impasse created by a practice which would not easily find an audience beyond a self-selecting group interested in experimental art. If conceptualism developed a new form of institutionalization, as Peter Osborne argues persuasively, The Fox represents a moment where the passage through to that reformulated institution was contested. In the next section, I will try to show that comparable issues arise in more recent debates, where experimental socially engaged art becomes increasingly politicized.

Collective/Institution According to some definitions, an institution is a collective entity because it involves the cooperative interaction of individuals whose activities are coordinated. The philosopher John Searle, for example, makes no distinction between museums, banks, armies, art collectives or government departments in this respect. Searle’s position expresses a basic methodological individualism that misses what seems to be radical in the art collective.68 Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that the art collective exists, in part, through ambiguities in the concept ‘collectivity’, which shifts between descriptive and prescriptive meanings. In one sense, social experience is always collective; in another, collectivity is a special, antagonistic, coordinated effort to change social practice and its meanings. It is helpful to recognize this ambiguity because of confusion that arises now that collectives no longer present a stark contrast to a high modernist art institution which champions the heroism of an individualized, white male artist. Although art is still residually identified with a Western account of 40

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history and still stands in need of being decolonized, it has also become part of the art world’s professional ‘common sense’ that all art is created collectively. In 2005, the curatorial collective ‘What, How and for Whom?’ helped shape this emergent perspective with an exhibition ‘Collective Creativity’ held at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel. The exhibition surveyed the activities of diverse collectives including Art & Language, General Idea, Neue Slowenische Kunst and Oda Projesi, alongside artists whose works require audience collaboration to be realised, such as Artur Zmijewski. The curator and theorist Paul O’Neill in The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) comments on what he perceives to be problems raised by this exhibition. O’Neill is critical of the identification of the collective with ‘emancipatory forms of work and collaborative production’: The packaging of the various groups as generically ‘collective’ translated into a flattening out of each group’s specific differences. Group Material becomes interchangeable with General Idea; Gilbert and George with Irwin; and so on . . . Why, then, is there a need to view ‘collectivity’ as a single, unified ‘creative’ body? . . . amalgamated group research is part of any curatorial process, which, like artistic production, is a cooperative endeavour and one that is curtailed by the measure of access to the means of production.69 O’Neill makes a good point that collectives are misrepresented when they are conceived as unified entities. As the activity around The Fox demonstrates, collectives are often marked by the simultaneous coexistence of disparate or even conflicting lines of activity. His argument tends, however, to suggest that collectivity is a banal and self-evident strategy, as though art collectives protest an individualism that is no longer significant. If ‘amalgamated group research is part of any curatorial process’, then collectivity is ubiquitous in art, but without political significance as a result. O’Neill’s is a position where the emancipatory agency of collectivism is erased, because it is identified with the existing social form of art. A comparable problem is found in an opposing position, where experiments in collectivity are accused of being permeated by the malign logic of capitalist sociality. In Brave New Avant-Garde, Marc James Léger suggests that the ‘promise of devolution of hierarchy’ in art that privileges community and collaboration, has ‘not resulted in the dismantling of institutionalized protocols’.70 For Léger, the social turn is determined by the logic of ‘market-oriented neoliberal thinking’, which cynically deploys T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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an effect of community to ensure ‘the greatest amount of exploitation on the part of individuals, defined as units of capital’.71 In Léger’s account, the increased prominence of socially engaged art and its appeal to collectivity is symptomatic of tendencies in post-Fordist capitalism: ‘If the neoavant gardes were sublated by the culture industry, social aesthetics are embedded in neoliberalism’s precarisation of life and labour.’72 This argument is encountered in many different variants in debates about the social turn. In the advanced capitalist economies, neoliberalism is associated with a reconfigured relationship between culture and work. This space was just beginning to become apparent in the 1970s, in artists’ colonies like SoHo, where Baldwin and Pilkington mocked the ‘lumpenbourgoisie’. Léger argues for a politically militant avantgardism which explores the contradictions involved in this moment, in a way that is reminiscent of the project of The Fox. Whereas O’Neill sees emancipatory collectivism everywhere, for Léger it exists only as a false semblance, except in antagonistic political interventions. This polemical move tends also to erase the possibility of the art collective as a strategy, however, by idealizing its political form. These arguments might be said to stand as opposing poles in the debates accompanying the social turn: on one side, an affirmative celebration of new forms of social exchange and networks and, on the other, an argument that sees art as having been instrumentalized by a neoliberal revolution. These poles are interesting because they seem to have a relationship to arguments that focus not only on the institutional form of art, but the structure of social experience under capitalism itself. In one sense, capitalism is a social system which depends upon collective action. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels affirm ‘capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion’.73 At the same time, capitalism produces value in a way that presupposes social alienation and subsists on exploitation. Peter Osborne in his writings on contemporary art emphasizes that art collectives are fictional, because capitalist sociality is alienated: [T]he social’ in its distinctively capitalistic sense (as opposed to the communal, for example) is not a ‘collective’ form in any positive politically meaningful sense. Capitalistic sociality (the commodity / value form) produces ‘individuals’ who are united only in the mutual alienation of their sociability.74 42

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As was evident from debates in The Fox, however, the art collective arrives at a point where social practice is seen as forming a communal space which might resist the alienating power of capitalist social experience. In a sense, this is a revolutionary problematic which inherits the Marxian formulation of the potential for social relations to mediate a new form of society. The 1859 preface to Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy includes a classical statement of this potentiality: New, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.75 Marx’s argument, in summary form, is that changing social conditions create new political demands, which represent at an ideological level tensions that exist between ‘the productive forces’ and the ‘relations of production’. For an art collective like Art & Language, this idea expresses one of the preconditions of a problem that seemed insoluble. The transformative practice modelled by the group did not correspond to the relations of forces that exist within society. In fact, art seemed to have no necessary relationship to social reproduction whatsoever. As Ian Burn observes in an essay in the final issue of The Fox: A steelworker understands the necessity of his labor to both capitalist society and socialist society. His labor remains necessary, though the social relations of his production may undergo revolutionary change. The necessity of his labor thus provides the basis of his struggle. We have no such basis. The ‘necessity’ of our work is superstructurally maintained and a matter of cultural-political expedience. Our social relations are ‘cultural relations’. A cultural radicalization may contribute to changing society but it is not a decisive factor . . . on the other hand, it inevitably will serve equally well the conservative forces in society.76 Burn’s argument formed part of a reflection on class which highlighted the difficulty involved in making good on the social implications of conceptualism. This problem is also tied to the term ‘social practice’ in artworks by Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge made in the mid-1970s. In T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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this usage, ‘social practice’ suggests a contest between emancipatory, or revolutionary tendencies, and the habitual forms of experience through which capitalist social relations are reproduced. The series of works, It’s Still Privileged Art, which was produced by Condé and Beveridge in 1975, during the time they were part of Art & Language, is a series of illustrations inspired by Mao-era Chinese posters. The series shows the artists working on their practice, producing art works and then selling one of them to a collector. It is an attempt to reflect on the social practices which formed the milieu of the New York art world at that time. One image depicts the artists about to initiate their series of illustrations (Figure 1.3). Drawn in black and white ink, they stand close together in a quasi-heroic pose, both looking to the left of the picture. Condé holds in her hand a brush and Beveridge lifts a sheet of paper, as though about to begin, or at the point of completion of an image. In the foreground, a table is covered with tubs of ink and pots containing long brushes. The caption to the image reads: The poster on which it is based depicts two artists concerned with a social practice rather than ‘self-expression’. We use ourselves as subjects to make the work specific, rather than abstract, or universal.

FIGURE 1.3  Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. Image from It’s Still Privileged Art!, 1975. Ink drawing. Courtesy of the artists.

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When making these works, Condé and Beveridge would share between them the task of drawing the image: there are subtly different drawing styles across the series.77 In this panel, ‘social practice’ is counterposed both to self-expression and to abstraction. In its ideal form, social practice might be understood as a conscious collective orientation towards concrete political struggle as a basis for correct understanding, which is what it means in Mao Tse-Tung’s essay, ‘On Practice’.78 Condé and Beveridge’s caption suggests that this picture records an attempt to attain the ‘social practice’ represented in the Chinese poster to which their illustration pays homage, which is depicted affixed to the wall behind and to the left of the artists. The reflexive operation within the image reveals social practice as an elusive problem. It is the ground of artistic activity, it presupposes it, but it is constituted by ideology. As a result, it is beyond reach as a revolutionary basis for action. The title of the series, It’s Still Privileged Art! suggests the paradox of an attempt to reach beyond the contradictions of art, as an elite practice and institution. Comparable tensions are present in the return to collective practice since the social turn of the 1990s.

The art collective since the turn of the millennium The return to prominence of the art collective since the turn of the millennium takes place in a historical context that is quite different to that of The Fox in the mid-1970s. Even so, it is beset by tensions that exist in any attempt to create political art by emphasizing its social basis. At the same time, the art collective has become an important site for enquiry into the changing material and ideological context created by the art institution under neoliberalism. Two theorists working in this area, Gregory Sholette and John Roberts, provide a particularly important insight into the tensions involved in the art collective and its relationship to a changing art institution. Gregory Sholette was a member of two important art collectives of the 1980s and 1990s, PADD (Political Art Documentation / Distribution) and REPOHistory, and has subsequently written important historical and theoretical work on art collectives. John Roberts is a theorist of avantgardes and a cultural philosopher who has written extensively about the

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social turn. Both Sholette and Roberts see the increased importance of the art collective as a symptomatic development that reveals the political implications of the relationship between art and neoliberalism. As Roberts put it, the art collective exists in the ‘gap between the relative decline of industrial labour and the rise of a new global proletariat comprising all those who are excluded or partially excluded from wage-labour’.79 Each theorist stresses different political and aesthetic implications of this situation, however. These differences of emphasis are important, I will suggest, because they indicate the stakes involved in resurgence of interest in collectivity in the social turn. Both Roberts and Sholette explore the art collective in relation to its sociopolitical context, emphasizing the aggressive reorganization of social experience under neoliberalism. One aspect of this reorganization has been the crisis of organized working-class institutions, and of Marxism itself, which collapsed as a political force in Western Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall announced the end of actually existing socialism in Europe. During this period, free market ideology has been ascendant, violently imposed as the common sense of global capitalism. Published in 2011, Sholette’s book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture proposed a powerful model for thinking about art and collectivity in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008.80 ‘Dark matter’ is Sholette’s term for the dependence of the art institution on a disavowed surplus of artists. The book identifies that under neoliberalism increasing numbers of people self-identify as artists, according to US census information, perhaps an unintended consequence of the centrality of value-producing entrepreneurial creativity in neoliberal ideology. Whereas a select few artists achieve international fame, an enormous number work in obscurity either by choice, because they choose to contribute to political struggle, or because their activity is simply surplus to the requirements of the art system. Drawing on ideas from post-Operaist and autonomist Marxism, Sholette fashions a distinctive reading of the political tensions that exist within the art institution: Almost as if a long forgotten crypt had split open, the dead, the redundant laborers, the excess population, is now speaking, visualizing itself, asserting a new form of collectivism that is also an old form of collectivism. Its visibility is dependent not only on the rise of global communication technology necessary to the deregulated enterprise 46

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economy, but also on its own sheer abundance and precariousness in relation to that economy.81 Here the boundaries of the art institution have become fuzzy in an era of digital communication, which provides ‘the strange mix of bathos and voyeurism, inventiveness and resentment that dominates the visual and material culture of neoliberal risk society’.82 Roberts’ account of the art collective developed in writings about art, labour and the social turn across the early years of the millennium. Throughout this work, there is a distinctive interplay of themes from Adornian and post-Autonomist Marxism.83 In the most recent publication in this line of research, Roberts takes a cue from Sholette to situate the art collective within an account of crisis tendencies within neoliberalism: ‘the exponential rise of the artists’ group or collective as “research units”’ to ‘art’s “second economy”’.84 The ‘second economy’ is the ‘precarious realm of under-monetized and unwaged artistic activity that the majority of artists now operate within’.85 This account of the art world ‘from below’ in the work of Sholette and Roberts forms an important line through key debates of the last two decades, which have addressed the relationship between aesthetics and politics and between art and work.86 In this context, the art collective is not analysed as a discrete ‘object’, but as a manifestation of tensions that are symptomatic of wider social processes. Indeed, it is a characteristic feature of art collectives that they confound methodological distinctions which are typically made in the study of art between author, artwork and social context. It is to this ambiguity of the collective that I will now turn, in order to explore the significance of the differences and similarities between these two theorists’ works. Both John Roberts and Gregory Sholette focus on art collectivism as it re-emerged in the project of the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s. Roberts sees the defining characteristic of the art collective since conceptualism, as a multifaceted critique of the social organization of art: The interchange and melding of the function of the artist and the non-artist, the breakdown of the division between manual skills and intellectual skills, the critique of collaboration as aestheticized interdisciplinarity, the idea of art as social research, have formed the horizon of various collective models of collaboration since Conceptual art.87 T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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Strongly critical of the closure of Peter Bürger’s account of the avantgarde, Roberts emphasizes it as a project which has been taken up and reinvented by artists under changing socio-economic conditions: ‘a kind of non-official, heterodox, illicit, denatured, dissensual research programme’.88 Roberts argues that the most radical tendencies of the social turn represent the persistence of an emancipatory project of the avant-garde in circumstances that are shaped by the foreclosure of political emancipation. Gregory Sholette’s writings on the art collective interpret the tensions involved in an appeal to revolution in a slightly different way, informed by Sholette’s own participation in collectives and a wide network of connections among other groups. In the essay ‘Counting on your Collective Silence’, Sholette argues that art collectives are caught between a utopian image of social relations, which they attempt to prefigure, and an excess of social energies that they are unable to contain: Overdetermined and discontinuous, the collective assembles the needs, affiliations, differences and even afflictions of others in a space suddenly open to the possibility of social equality and selfmanagement. Even under the best circumstances the collective is fuelled by these differences as well as destabilized by them.89 The art collective, from this perspective, prefigures an alternative sociality. Although art collectives sometimes mimic corporate identities, this external form is a camouflage for an unruly subjective existence. The ‘overdetermination’ of the collective involves working methods where ‘too much is attempted, rejected, brought to the table and left off the table and where sudden accelerations of enthusiasm are followed by equally unexpected plunges in spirit’.90 This instability is framed, by Sholette, as a means of rejecting the administered collectivism that ‘hides in plain sight’ in every transaction, networked encounter or leisure activity under neoliberalism.91 In this essay, the inherent instability of the art collective is understood by Sholette through Antonio Negri’s concept ‘destructuration’, deriving from the autonomist debates of the late 1970s on the sabotage of the state.92 These conceptual models of the art collective represent two complementary perspectives, both situated within the shifting social and economic context of neoliberal capitalism. In both cases, art collectivism is understood as a survival from an emancipatory project which can be 48

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traced to the example of the historical avant-garde. The differences in emphasis are suggestive, however. Roberts views the art collective as a space where the agency of artists, their ‘aesthetic thinking’, subverts the prevailing social relations linking work, art and subjectivity. Within this space, Roberts emphasizes limits to the political agency of art. Roberts tends to articulate the impurity of the art collective, resisting what he terms ‘a strange mirroring’ where ‘political theory borrows from an artistic language of flow, affect, interaction and cooperation, just as artistic and cultural practice and theory borrow from the mediation of this artistic language in the new political theory’.93 Sholette, by contrast, frames the impurity as a surplus of emancipatory energy which is contained and exploited by the art system. In both cases, the problem posed by Peter Bürger, of the absorption of revolutionary perspectives by the art institution, is addressed. Roberts tends to stress the importance of art’s relative autonomy and the need to understand limits to art’s political agency. Sholette tends to emphasize the failure of the art institution to contain the unstable political energies that he identifies with ‘dark matter’. These poles help to call attention to the tensions that are actualized in art collectives. The proliferation of art collectives and collaborative art strategies during the social turn raises a question about the nature of the limit that has been reached by contemporary art. Within this development, there are tendencies that explore participation and social engagement as art. There are also tendencies that stress the need to go beyond art and become immersed in politics, oriented towards interventionist activism. These debates are not conducted in quite the same Marxist phraseology as was employed by contributors to The Fox, but there is a clear reprise of the impasse that was encountered by this group in its activist conception of conceptual art. The impurity of the art collective, perhaps, is not that it will inevitably be co-opted, but that it actualizes unresolved and perhaps unresolvable tensions. Sholette argues that the art world has achieved a state of unresolved tensions which he describes as ‘bare art’, where the polarized extremes of a financialized art world and militant art practice combine to demystify art.94 Roberts argues for the continued importance of avant-gardism that, though it cannot achieve its emancipatory promise, attests to revolutionary futures past, and keeps alive emancipatory perspectives in the present. The Fox exemplifies Sholette’s idea of a hyperactive and conflictual art collective but it also grappled with the problem of autonomy that Roberts identifies. These theorists seem to approach the limit represented in the T HE ART COLLECTIVE AS IMPURITY

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failure of The Fox from two related but alternative paradigms. Roberts has written extensively on Art & Language but tends to stress the importance of the period prior to the split in 1976.95 Sholette’s narrative of the emergence of a politicized art activist milieu in the New York art world of the 1980s is often traced to the group around Red-Herring.96 The most interesting thing about the events surrounding The Fox is the sense that the impurity of the art collective was forced to a decisive point of fracture, producing alternatives which continue to be relevant and have returned, though in a different context, during the social turn. The impurity of the art collective is formed at a limit that may be understood in several ways. In one sense, it is an ideological limit of the art institution, whose conventions of display and scholarship tend to reify the individual. The experiments with collectivity undertaken by Art & Language intended to subvert these conventions. At the same time, tensions multiply around art collectives. The ‘community’ enacted within an art practice seems to suggest political potentiality, though it is difficult to realize it. The passage from social experimentation to political engagement is not a straightforward one. The art collective and related strategies like participatory or socially engaged art occupy a zone of transition and contradiction. The social turn is worthy of attention, in part, because it shows institutional structures being problematized and sometimes reshaped by collective and emancipatory strategies that themselves respond to wider social conditions. Although there is no ‘revolution’, there also seems not to be a ‘neutralization’ either. There is an unresolved contest which offers an important perspective on the ideological dimension of art. In the next chapter, I will explore this point in relation to the politics of the artistic strategy known as ‘institutional critique’.

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2 THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

‘Institutional critique’ is a term used to name a set of critical methods and a genealogy of practices that emerged from conceptualism.1 According to the most familiar narrative, a ‘first generation’ of artists – usually identified as Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher and Marcel Broodthaers – developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s strategies for exposing the ideological function of the modernist art museum and gallery. By exploring the art museum’s conventions of display, these artists exposed the relationship between art and socio-economic fields of power, often by challenging ideological claims upon ‘the eternal and apolitical Man’ to use Buren’s terms.2 Although this group has an identity and a canonical membership, it is not a movement in the usual sense. When Haacke, Buren, Asher and Broodthaers made their key works, these artists did not think of themselves as working with a shared artistic programme. The name ‘institutional critique’ was bestowed retrospectively on them by art critics and art historians. This chapter explores the art-historical narrative of institutional critique and the tensions it contains. The focus is not simply historical, however, because institutional critique remains a strategy used to expose the politics of contemporary art. Coinciding with the social turn, critics identified a new wave of institutional critique undertaken by activists who make use of artistic methods in settings which are no longer identified with the museum, even in an expanded sense. Other artists have staged unauthorized interventions in the museum space, especially in the years since the Occupy movement of 2011. These performances, usually undertaken by collectives to highlight issues including the complicity

of museums in the exploitation of labour and of the environment, have been undertaken by Occupy Museums and Global Ultra Luxury Faction (GULF) in the United States, Liberate Tate in the United Kingdom and, most recently, groups associated with campaigns to decolonize the museum.3 In all these cases, tactics are used which sometimes directly cite campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, by groups including the Art Workers’ Coalition and the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG).4 In the first chapter, the discussion focused on the art collective and its relationship to the art institution, using the example of The Fox. As we have seen, this collective interrogated a limit of the social as art and exposed contradictions that affect the relationship between art and politics. Mel Ramsden was the first to use the term ‘institutional critique’ in print, in his contributions to these debates. The fact that this term was first used in the context of debates about the politics of the art collective seems significant, especially so because at this time it had not yet come to take on its canonical meaning. There is an interesting resonance between the collective practice of Art & Language in the mid-1970s and the proliferation of institutional critique, often practised by art collectives, since the turn of the millennium. My purpose here is to disentangle some puzzles of institutional critique by reading its reception history in relation to this early use of the term. This enquiry is of interest because institutional critique enjoys a pervasive but confused influence over the politics of contemporary art. It is a living set of strategies with a lineage connecting contemporary practice to the radicalism of the 1960s and its legacy in art theory. It is also a label used to describe a canonical group of artists whose works are widely held to be foundational in the development of contemporary art. Because of this dual identity, institutional critique is conflicted: although it intends to expose art to sociopolitical actuality, it also acts as a gateway into the canon.5 The term ‘institutional critique’ has come to describe an exemplary form of self-critical, politically conscious art practice, but it also represents an exemplary form of art’s co-option. This relationship between a politicized canon and co-opted resistance is integral to contemporary art’s politics. Here, I will try to examine it through the secular crisis of neoliberalism, its tendency towards economic stagnation, social disorder and increasing polarization of wealth. The discussion will begin with Hans Haacke, whose famous work Shapolsky et al: A Real-Time Social System established the credentials of institutional critique because it was censored by the Guggenheim before it could be 52

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put on display in 1971. Some observations on the temporality of Haacke’s works will introduce the question of the reception of institutional critique and prepare the ground for discussion of Mel Ramsden’s use of this term. An important issue here is failure: How is the success and failure of politicized art to be judged in relation to the paradoxes of its relationship to the art institution? The chapter concludes with a discussion of the work of artist and theorist Hito Steyerl, who has written on institutional critique since the mid-2000s. Steyerl’s work, which explores the contingencies of global interconnectedness through the circulation of digital images, is seemingly quite distant from the concerns of either Haacke or Ramsden; however, these artists all create work that disrupts the temporality of the institution. For this reason, their work can be used to explore the elisions and aporias in the narratives of institutional critique. Throughout this chapter, I will try to explore precisely how it is that co-option is supposed to operate in relation to this sociopolitical art form.

Institutional critique, temporality and ‘real time’ Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a RealTime Social System as of May 1, 1971 is one of the most famous projects of institutional critique and, as such, it sets the scene for a re-evaluation of the temporality of this practice (Figure 2.1.) Created for a survey of Haacke’s career scheduled to be held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, this work analysed publicly available records of the Manhattan property holdings of a group of landlords and the complex network of companies used to control these assets. The information that forms the substance of the work is organized around a series of photographs of the buildings in question, most of which are New York tenements. The photographs are simple documentation: composed in such a way that the frontage of each building may be viewed looking up from street level. They follow a standard format, but they are not uniform: incidental details of shopfronts and passers-by creep into them, as though to emphasize their situatedness in the contingencies of a specific place and time (Figure 2.2). The title of this work is important. Haacke was known at this time for system-based artworks, especially works that engaged with natural systems, which he conceived as dynamic, living artworks. He intended THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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FIGURE 2.1  Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real-Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971 (detail) 142 black-and-white photographs, 142 typewritten cards, 2 excerpts from city map, and 6 charts. Photograph and map, each pair: 8 1/8 x 12 1/4 in. (20.5 x 31 cm); excerpts from map, each chart: 24 x 20 1/8 in. (61 x 51 cm) © Hans Haacke / VG Bild-Kunst. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Installation view: 38th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, June 1978.

Shapolsky et al. and a related work, Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, to develop this approach by shifting focus from natural to social systems. The crucial issue for these works, however, as far as their history and reception is concerned, is that they were not displayed in 1971. Thomas Messer, then the director of the Guggenheim, objected to Haacke’s project and refused to exhibit it. Although the information Haacke proposed to show was all publicly available, Messer wrote that it was ‘an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism’.6 Rather than consent to these works being removed from the retrospective, Haacke chose to withdraw from the show and to publicize Messer’s act of censorship. Haacke’s work is an appropriate starting point because, among the artists of the apocryphal ‘first generation’ of institutional critique, his approach to making art was the one that tended to provoke an institutional reaction. Haacke’s Manet-Projekt ’74 was also censored. This work detailed the provenance and ownership of Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus, 54

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FIGURE 2.2  Hans Haacke. Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971 (detail) 142 black-and-white photographs, 142 typewritten cards, 2 excerpts from city map, and 6 charts Photograph and map, each pair: 8 1/8 x 12 1/4 in. (20.5 x 31 cm); excerpts from map, each chart: 24 x 20 1/8 in. (61 x 51 cm) © Hans Haacke / VG Bild-Kunst. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

1880, and in so doing revealed the Nazi-era career of the owner of this work, Hermann Josef Abs, the then chairman of Deutsche Bank. Haacke’s work was rejected by Museum Ludwig because Abs was a patron of the institution who had allowed them to display the painting on permanent loan. Neither Marcel Broodthaers nor Michael Asher experienced this kind of institutional reaction. Although Daniel Buren engaged in a fierce critique of the art world, his work was not subject to censorship.7 For this reason, Haacke’s work holds an important position in the legend of institutional critique. Although Buren initiated his critique of the museum slightly earlier and many artists of the 1960s intervened in, or otherwise disrupted the institution, Haacke’s interventions seemed to elicit the strongest reaction, despite their neutral presentation.8 For Haacke, it mattered that his works were undertaken in ‘real time’, that is, presupposing a social process that would evolve. In Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System as of May THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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1, 1971, the word ‘real’ appears twice, in relation to time but also to space and property, as in ‘real estate’. The real time of this work now represents a poignant historical document because the property speculation that Haacke mapped has developed into one of the key preoccupations of global finance. Waves of gentrification have reshaped New York and every other global city in the decades since Haacke compiled evidence of the tactics of landlordism, which involved strategies intended to unleash the potential for real estate to accrue value. Equally, the real time of this work might be thought to include its reception, because it is now a canonical work of institutional critique. Though Haacke did not intend this, it has developed a comparable structure to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which also became famous after having been denied exhibition.9 It is in relation to the initial success of Shapolsky et al., which was expressed paradoxically in its failure to be displayed, that the subsequent limitations of institutional critique are usually measured. The initial failure of this work, equally ironically, guaranteed its success. Haacke claimed that Messer’s decision to censor his exhibition formed an integral part of the work, because this response shaped its visibility as a social system. On this point, Haacke is insistent: From experience, we know that a process, as much as a painting, can be elevated to the realm of art. On the other hand . . . such benediction cannot stop the process from continuing . . . Any repercussions that it might have had and might still have beyond West 23rd Street, including those that might derive from this report, are part of the work. This demonstrates that works operating in real time must not be geographically defined, nor can one say when the work is completed. (emphasis added)10 This argument that social processes are impossible to delimit is one that will be found repeatedly in the critical debates around the social turn. Although in Shapolsky et al. the work focuses on the presentation and analysis of information, Haacke’s understanding of social experience is not defined by this positivistic presentation. As Julia Bryan-Wilson has noted, the meticulous objectivity of Haacke’s work is ‘a strategic neutrality’.11 Haacke stated in the essay that publicized the censorship of this work: ‘Social phenomena are as real as physical or biological ones; we all participate in any number of social systems and are affected by them. Their verifiability however, seems to be limited because they often 56

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elude the measuring stick.’12 Seemingly, this is a standard academic acknowledgement of the limitations of social research, where the researcher ‘influences the object of investigation’.13 The distinctiveness of Haacke’s conception of social processes arrives in the next conceptual move: ‘in fact, it is precisely the exchange of necessarily biased information between the members of a social set that provides the energy on which social relations evolve’.14 This is a considered statement which evokes a vitalistic image of social processes developing in real time, through a kind of dynamic intersubjective misapprehension. The point is derived from a reading of systems theory, used here to suggest conflict amid the implied cohesion of a ‘social set’. It is also an image of the work which imagines social processes as unfolding immanently through communicative exchange, not in a condition of self-contained, self-reflexive autonomy. In an essay of 1985, the art theorist and critic Rosalind Deutsche played an important part in introducing Shapolsky et al. into the canon of contemporary art. It was at just the same time that the retrospective canon of institutional critique began to be formed. Written to accompany the first retrospective of Haacke’s work in New York, given the cancellation of the 1971 Guggenheim show, ‘Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate and the Museum’ grappled with the problem of historicizing an intervention which had succeeded only in so far as it was denied entry into the museum. Deutsche, conscious that her essay might play a part in erasing the work’s original political success, justifies her intervention as one that defends the legacy of the 1960s in the midst of ‘a climate of artistic reaction’ and ‘neoconservative reconstructions of contemporary art history’.15 Deutsche also situates Haacke’s work in the rampant property speculation of the era, at which point the spatial politics of neoliberalism were transforming the urban fabric of New York. This becomes the political focus of Deutsche’s argument, which revolves around the spatial relationship between the museum and rent profiteering which is exposed by Haacke’s work: Ultimately, the work highlighted the fact that the museum building, too, is no isolated architectural structure, container of static aesthetic objects, but a social institution existing within a wider system, a product and producer of mutable power relations.16 Deutsche’s reading locates the ‘spatial politics’ of Haacke’s work, but, in another sense, this essay continues the real-time process of Shapolsky THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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et al. in its historical representation of institutional critique. The return of this work to the museum, after its expulsion from the museum, creates a puzzle in the historicity of institutional critique, which it is not easy to resolve. The argument that is most commonly heard is that institutional critique has been co-opted by the institution, or that it now belongs to a lost time, when the lines of opposition between progressive and reactionary forces were more clearly drawn. Artist and theorist Andrea Fraser writes in an essay of 2005, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique’, of ‘a certain nostalgia for Institutional Critique as a now-anachronistic artefact of an era before the corporate mega-museum and the 24/7 global art market, when artists could still conceivably take a position against or outside the institution’.17 In order to explore this puzzle, it is necessary to move backwards and forwards in time, to understand some of the ramifications of the art institution as a social system and the changes it has undergone over the last halfcentury.

The institution and neoliberalism Institutional critique is a legacy of the 1960s and 1970s. As an approach to art’s politics, it is charged with significance because it has been shaped by a period in which the art institution – the overlapping network of museums, galleries, publications, markets and art education – has changed almost beyond recognition. Art’s internationalization, or globalization, entered a new phase in the 1960s, when conceptualism developed an international network, facilitated by cheapening air travel and art works which could be easily transported. This process really gathered pace after 1989, however. The fall of the Soviet Union and the triumph of liberal democracy meant a more intimate connection between art, speculative investment and deregulated markets. In simplified terms, the globalization of art is one of the most striking cultural innovations of the phase of capitalism that is known as neoliberalism. As discussed in the previous chapter, the term ‘institution’ means more than the material infrastructure of museum buildings and gallery spaces; it refers to the ideological and socio-economic factors that determine the production, distribution and reception of art. In Benedict Anderson’s famous analysis of nationalism, the museum is a site where the ‘imagined community’ of the nation state is articulated, through the codification and 58

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mythification of its origins. This imagined community is only possible because of the synchronized space-time that is created by the circulation of information in print capitalism.18 Although Anderson refers primarily to postcolonial states of South East Asia, the implications of his argument are wide-ranging. The museum is the cultural infrastructure through which antiquity became invested with meanings convenient to the state (though these meanings are sometimes contested or appropriated by liberation movements). The museum of contemporary art obviously focuses on a more recent past. The works that it includes achieve a wide circulation and become integrated into a gradually evolved taxonomy of categories. That ‘institutional critique’ is now one of those stable categories is the most compelling evidence to support the idea that artists who hoped to subvert the museum contributed to its reinvention. For Peter Osborne, institutional critique is an artistic strategy that ‘helps the institution to survive its own critique’.19 This is a pithy formulation of an irony that is often observed of the self-reflective ambition of artists who sought to expose the social determinations of their own practice. Osborne expands upon it in this way: The very existence of this critique within the institution – the institution’s acceptance of institutional critique – negates the practical function of that critique, although not its intellectual value. Institutional critique thus strengthens and develops the art institution.20 This argument suggests an updated version of Adorno’s dictum that ‘all efforts to restore art by giving it a social function . . . are doomed’21 and perhaps the expanded version of this judgement: ‘The unsolved antagonisms of reality return to artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society.’22 It focuses on the centrality of the problem of ‘co-option’ in sociopolitical aesthetics, and a related ubiquitous concept: which is ‘failure’. The weakness of this idea, however, is that it suggests an instantaneous or punctual assimilation of institutional critique. The example of Haacke shows, however, that the works that were not assimilated, at least at first, set the standard by which all institutional critique is judged to have fallen short. Osborne, in his assessment of institutional critique, tends to see the failure of institutional critique as having been redeemed by its critical reception. As he puts it: ‘the irony of the ironic failure of institutional critique as a political practice is that it thereby succeeds as critical art.’23 THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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But the fact remains that the reception of institutional critique must have something to do with its assimilation into the institution, and reception is a process that unfolds over time. Osborne’s argument bears comparison to that of the artist Andrea Fraser. Fraser suggests that there never was a position outside of the art institution. She rightly observes that the artists who have come to be known as the first to practise ‘institutional critique’ did not use the term to describe their own work. It was in the mid to late 1980s, through the writings of several artists and critics, including Fraser herself, Joshua Decter, Gregg Bordowitz and Mark Dion, all of whom studied with the critic Benjamin Buchloh at the Whitney Independent Study programme, that this term became widely used. Fraser tends to emphasize artists’ complicity with the institution, stating that ‘the institution is inside of us, and we can’t get out of ourselves’.24 There is no outside to art, because art is a social field ‘internalized in the competencies, conceptual models, and modes of perception that allow us to produce, write about and understand art, or simply to recognize art as art’.25 The partial redemption of this condition arrives in the form of an ‘institution of critique’, which makes it possible to recognize the limitations of avant-gardism and, indeed, to defend art against its instrumentalization and ‘against its mythologies of radicality and symbolic revolution’.26 Like Osborne, Fraser tends consistently to represent the virtue of institutional critique as intellectual, arguing that it is better to identify the limits to art’s political ambition, than it is to use art to change the terms through which culture is understood. This seems to be what Fraser means by ‘an institution of critique’: a self-contained space where the limits to art’s political ambition are theorized. But, as already noted, recent debates identify institutional critique with activism. This tendency is not driven by intellectual fashion so much as it is a response to a revival of political militancy. In the face of this tendency, Fraser’s argument, that the proper role of art’s critical politics is to accept its own limitations, begins to seem merely polite. Perhaps in recognition of the need to understand institutional critique in a more expansive way, Alexander Alberro, writing in the wake of the financial crash of 2008, redefined institutional critique to respond to new forms of artistic militancy. His historical survey draws connections back to a wide range of artists’ protests against the art institution from the 1960s and 1970s, including those of activist groups already mentioned like the Art Workers’ Coalition, the GAAG and the agitation against the 60

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museum undertaken by Argentinian avant-garde artists like Julio Le Parc and Eduardo Favario. He traces the legacies of these practices through to the ‘exit strategies’ of more recent art activist collectives, including the Guerrilla Girls, Critical Art Ensemble, The Yes Men, Repo History and Raqs Media Collective. Some of these groups no longer attempt to reform the institution, but instead try to elude it entirely, ‘finding ways to get out of the frame altogether, evading the official art world and the attendant professions and institutions that legitimate it, and developing practices capable of operating outside of the confines of the museum and art market’.27 Alberro reads the wide-ranging agitation against the museum in the 1960s as a critique that attempted to renew the institution by using strategies that ‘juxtaposed in a number of ways the immanent, normative (ideal) self-understanding of the art institution with the (material) actuality of the social relations that actually formed it’.28 In this account, institutional critique was an attempt to reform the museum, by pressuring it to adhere to the Enlightenment claim to universality which is central to institutions of liberal democracy. The pressure was sometimes applied using artworks and sometimes using protests, which tried to expose the material interests of the museum hierarchy, the governors and trustees or the conventions which compel artists to repress these underlying interests. Blake Stimson follows a similar line of argument, although he places more emphasis on the contradictions contained in the political upheaval of the 1960s, reading the period as a crucible of forces that would go on to mark the emergence of postmodern culture. He evokes the antiinstitutional tendencies in the New Left through the famous graffito of May ’68, ‘Je suis marxiste: tendance Groucho’ (‘I am a Marxist: Groucho tendency’). This anti-institutional fervour resisted the established communist party in France and the state. It was a Leftist orientation which found expression at the time in the counterculture, but also in the Situationist International and in Maoism. He contrasts this antiinstitutionalism to a ‘tendance Karl’, which was found in institutional critique as an attempt to force the art institution to live up to its universalism. The anti-institutional tendency of the New Left, Stimson argues, inadvertently contributed to the neoliberal sociopolitical order that would emerge in the 1980s.29 To support this claim, Stimson draws on the work of sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello and their influential book The New Spirit of Capitalism.30 Boltanski and Chiapello argue that the THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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rejection of alienation which was to be found in the New Left, which they term ‘artistic critique’, was absorbed into new conceptions of management and deregulated working practices as capitalism reorganized itself in response to the turbulence of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The ultra-left ‘virulent anti-statism’, they suggest, merged with the neoliberal project to roll back the social protection which had been established during the years of post-war Keynesian consensus.31 For Stimson, the anti-authoritarian currents of the 1960s fuelled the ‘incredulity’ to metanarratives of postmodernism, and a new form of capitalist consensus. Institutional critique looked back to an older, Enlightenment-era ideal of public representation: a modernist idea of ‘negation’ which was not ‘negation for negation’s sake’ or ‘negation as a means of stepping outside institutionality altogether’ but insisted that the institution should ‘live up to its founding ideals’.32 For this reason, institutional critique is interpreted by Stimson as ‘modernist’: he presents the attempt to return the institution to its Enlightenment project as anachronistic because it took place at a time when anti-institutional politics began to call these ideals into question. On the other hand, where Stimson traces the legacy of institutional critique in interventionist practices of the present, he proposes that these ‘exit strategies’ are different in kind to the ‘modernist’ forms of institutional critique. Because there is no longer a viable art institution to reform, these artists create proto-institutional collectives. In this way, Stimson’s account tends to harmonize with arguments that suggest that the art world is now impervious to institutional critique. For Stimson, institutional critique is a memory of political integrity: ‘a reminder of what the bourgeois project and its proletarian offshoot once promised, in a world that tries to rid us of its memory’.33 In Stimson’s account, the New Left critique of alienation has been thoroughly co-opted by a neoliberal world order that has also eroded the institutions of liberal democracy. The exit strategies of recent art collectives are read as a defensive attempt to recapture the liberal democratic ideal by eluding the art world’s total complicity with neoliberal capitalism. There seems to be a contradiction in this account, because Stimson also argues that institutional critique contributed to the re-enforcement of the art institution.34 In effect, Stimson covers some of the same ground as Peter Osborne, but views the art institution as entirely subsumed within a capitalist global order, so that art may only be continued outside of the market and museum nexus. 62

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Alberro and Stimson bring institutional critique into dialogue with liberal democracy, as a political system that depends upon institutions of civil society, including art. Others simply see it as a sign of the total absorption of political challenge by the art institution. For example, theorist Isabelle Graw, writing in 2005, suggests that the canonization of institutional critique is ‘so profound’ that ‘it is hard to imagine how its precepts can be regenerated and its forms and significations reworked’.35 For Graw, the influence of institutional critique has been not only to ensure that critique is highly esteemed by contemporary art but also to incorporate critique into art’s ‘promotional value’.36 Most contemporary art claims to be political as a result. This issue is noted by theorists and philosophers with different conceptions of art’s politics, including Brian Holmes, Peter Osborne and Jacques Rancière.37 They each, in different ways, argue that the political significance of art is misrecognized.38 Any attempt to develop a political role for contemporary art runs into this problem of the proliferation of references to art’s politics. Politics has become a convention of contemporary art, even as contemporary art has become increasingly implicated in neoliberal capitalism. As Gregory Sholette has argued, art is now ‘bare’: its relationship to economic speculation and exploitation is undisguised.39 Sholette’s point is that this process has been answered by artists who point to exploitative practices which sustain this vertigo: the precarity of the vast majority of artists, critics and curators whose labour services the cultural infrastructure. Increasing numbers of artists respond both to economic and political instability using strategies inspired by artists of the 1960s. During this period, institutional critique has become identified with increasingly vital and militant interventions. Nonetheless, institutional critique continues to be freighted with confusion about the social and political realities that impinge on art. This is, in large part, due to the difficulties that beset any attempt to make sense of the destabilization of the art institution by neoliberalism.

Steyerl: Institutions in crisis The theme of crisis – in art, representation and the socio-economic order – is explored in a convincing way by the artist and theorist Hito Steyerl. The characteristic form of Steyerl’s artwork is the video-essay, drawing on a tradition of politically engaged, critically reflective film-making, THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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which may be traced in the works of Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and Alexander Kluge. Steyerl’s artistic practice combines text and image juxtaposition and montage with narrative voice-overs in a format that interrogates the relationship between documentary and representation. It is complemented by her critical and theoretical writings, which examine the conditions within which critical art may now be produced. A recurrent subject-matter of this writing has been institutional critique.40 In an essay from 2006, entitled ‘the Institution of Critique’, Steyerl historicizes institutional critique as a cultural effect of neoliberalism. Rather than begin with a canon of artists, Steyerl emphasizes the relationship between critique and the construction of subjectivity, an interrelationship which may be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s account of critique as a reflexive engagement with the conditions of possibility of thought. Steyerl derives two parallel lineages from this starting point: first, the critique that draws a clear boundary between private dissent and public discourse. Second, the critique that became allied to revolutionary praxis and which provided the intellectual basis for attempts to overcome the liberal political order. This is a more satisfying starting point than those provided by either Alberro or Stimson because it makes a distinction between reformist and revolutionary interventions in the art institution. The ‘tendance Marx’ of the 1960s, that Stimson alludes to, cannot be simply understood as a project of institutional reform, even if institutional reform was its historical legacy. Steyerl argues that political insurgency within art became gradually reshaped by changes taking place in art’s wider political context. The first phase of institutional critique was a ‘new social movement within the art scene, propelled and inspired by social movements outside of the art field’.41 Steyerl seems to be thinking in terms of the developments that coalesced in the Art Workers Coalition that were aligned with feminism and black liberation. The Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee and Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) included the artists and critics Faith Ringgold, Lucy Lippard and Nancy Spero, among others. This institutional critique might be aligned with the feminist alternative space movement and the diversification of representation within contemporary art. As such, this broad wave ‘functioned like the related paradigms of multiculturalism, reformist feminism, ecological movements, and so on’.42 The next wave of institutional critique arrives in the 1990s, identified with the internationalization of art and the weakening of the relationship between the art institution and the nation state. Steyerl sees this period 64

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of art’s globalization as one where the art institution participated in the weakening of the public sphere: no longer required to function within civil society, the art institution was understood to represent it symbolically. At the same time, the production of a national culture and heritage was no longer oriented towards the inner coherence of the state, as in Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the museum, but rather became an outer-directed production of a national image that might attract investment from ‘an increasingly globalized economy’.43 It is in this conjuncture that Steyerl identifies the ‘cultural or symbolic’ integration of institutional critique into the professional identity of the museum: ‘without any material consequences within the institution itself ’.44 This process, Steyerl argues, mirrors the symbolic celebration of cultural diversity during the same period which coexisted with the hardening of ‘political and social inequality’.45 Taken as a whole, this period created ‘an overall “spectacle” of difference – without effecting much structural change’.46 In the third wave of institutional critique, Steyerl cites Allan Sekula’s Fish Story as an exemplary project because of the way that it is able to trace the effects of the institution, in this case the Guggenheim Bilbao, in an international network of relations, ‘to walk the tightrope between the local and the global without becoming either indigenist and ethnographic or else unspecific and snobbish’.47 In this phase, the art is situated within an art institution which is itself caught within a new kind of antagonism. Steyerl suggests that contemporary art museums, increasingly dependent on private patronage and exposed to new economic pressures, seek to return to the protection of the nation state. But this protection is illusory, because the state is caught between ‘the ruins of a demolished welfare state’ and the conservative critics who would prefer culture to be ‘a sort of sacralized ethnopark’.48 Even where it attempts to resuscitate a genuine public sphere, the art institution is held in economic constraints which tend to draw cultural workers – artists and critics – into precarity, ‘into flexibilised working structures within temporary project structures and freelancer work within cultural industries’.49 This analysis presciently identifies labour politics as a key tension within cultural institutions, one which has become ever more prominent in the decade or so since Steyerl’s text was written. Steyerl seems to anticipate the forces that, as we will see in subsequent chapters, have pressured art as the liberal democratic state has begun to lose its coherence. THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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Steyerl’s account has the important merit of being one of the few that attempts to sketch the dialectical relationship between evolving critical practices and an art institution which itself is changing because of the interaction of economic, technological and cultural forces. The general sense of the foreshadowing of crisis tendencies found in this piece may be connected to Steyerl’s recent writings, which diagnose the intensification of these problems into an increasingly provocative blurring of the boundaries between the museum and war. This intensification of the effects of crisis is at once rhetorical and linked to the weird symptomology of the present, where the interconnection between disparate global experiences creates a kind of millenarian or apocalyptic urgency. In the essay ‘A Tank on a Pedestal’, for example, Steyerl relates the true story of an IS3 Soviet Battle Tank, which was driven off the pedestal of a Second World War memorial in eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian separatists to be used in the civil conflict that beset Ukraine since 2015. This strange example of a museum artefact being returned to active service in war, for Steyerl becomes a means to reflect on the condition of the institution, where ‘history is a shape-shifting player, if not an irregular combatant’.50 The crucial feature of this phase, for Steyerl, is ‘stasis’, which she interprets using the work of Giorgio Agamben in its original Greek sense, to mean both immobility and ‘civil war’. For contemporary culture, in this account, is involved in a kind of historical mimicry that maintains the unsustainable contradictions which mark the decline of a stable global order, though it is instability that neoliberalism thrives upon. In the current stage of neoliberalism contradictions are not disguised and no attempt is made to overcome them. Rather, they are simply integrated into a system which exploits the opportunities created by dysfunction. Planetary civil war is the means by which globalized capitalism ensures that opportunities for its expansion continue to be created, through a managed instability. No human suffering is so great that it would impinge upon these considerations. The dynamic structure of Steyerl’s texts, which search always to find relationships between apparently disparate phenomena, to evoke them through the weird causal chains which form the logic of crises, is highly distinctive. It seems gratuitous, as a result, to represent her approach to institutional critique as the most recent instalment in a self-reflexive reenforcement of the institution, as Osborne’s account suggests. Her work is 66

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an attempt to identify institutional critique with the crisis tendencies that are dismantling the art institution from within. In this regard, Steyerl’s work runs parallel to Sholette’s discussion of ‘bare art’. In what follows, I hope to show that the identification of institutional critique with crisis is not only a project of the most recent phase of neoliberal disorder. In fact, the orientation of political artists towards the internal contradictions of the bourgeois institution may be seen also in some of the very earliest debates around the term ‘institutional critique’. For this reason, it is problematic to suggest that institutional critique has strengthened the art institution or that art has neutralized resistance. Rather, it seems to be that in moments of general crisis it becomes possible to locate and place pressure on the categories that the art institution uses to stabilize art. A historical vignette will be used here to displace the canon of institutional critique and, at the same time, to further embed institutional critique in the experience of crisis.

Institutional critique, The Fox and art criticism Hans Haacke is normally cited as one of the founders of institutional critique, but the works that he made in the 1960s and 1970s were not called institutional critique at that time, as we have already noted. The idea of a first generation of institutional critique, and subsequent generations, was arrived at in the mid-1980s, by critics associated with the influential journal October and artists associated with the Whitney Independent Studies programme. The historical identity of institutional critique is based on a reception of the 1960s, which tidies up the conflicts, redundancies and exuberance of the neo-avant-gardes. Arguably, it was the messiness of politics in the 1960s that constituted its radicalism, however. This point is important because it casts doubt on the idea that institutional critique, somehow, automatically strengthened the art institution. Institutional critique became incorporated in a new concept of art through its reception, and it is by examining the gaps in its reception history that it may be possible to see this strategy in a new way. It has already been noted that recent histories of institutional critique are able to find many other candidate works by artists of the 1960s. Clearly, hostility or scepticism towards the museum and the ideological function of art was widespread at the time and, though some artists explored this in THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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an exemplary way, it would be misleading to single out only a few artists as originators: this was a ‘structure of feeling’ in Raymond Williams’ terms. And although these artists did recognize their complicity in the art institution, the form in which they investigated this complicity is not necessarily that which is attributed to them in their critical reception. In 1975, Hans Haacke showed his exhibition On Social Grease for the first time at John Weber Gallery in New York (Figure 2.3). The work consists of six plaques, photoengraved magnesium plates mounted on aluminium. Each plaque records a short statement concerning the relationship between art and business by a notable figure with connections both to the corporate and museum hierarchy of the United States. The one exception is a statement from Richard M. Nixon, then recently resigned as president of the United States, for whom no affiliation to a museum is recorded.51 Haacke was careful to shape the form of his work in relation to the content; the plaques suggest a carefully reproduced corporate aesthetic: the font is Helvetica, the archetypal modernist typeface that was at that time the staple of large corporations.

FIGURE 2.3  Hans Haacke. On Social Grease, 1975 (detail). 6 photoengraved magnesium plates mounted on aluminum with dull finish. 30 x 30 in. (76.2 x 76.2 cm) Photo: Walter Russell © Hans Haacke / VG Bild-Kunst. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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In his account of the work, Haacke acknowledges that the name On Social Grease was suggested by a ‘remark from Carl Andre’.52 Most likely, Andre’s suggestion was in response to the statement of Robert Kingsley of Exxon Corp which reads ‘EXXON’s support of the arts serves the arts as a social lubricant. And if business is to continue in big cities, it needs a more lubricated environment.’53 The ‘grease’ also suggests the lubricity of the recent Watergate scandal, which had resulted in Nixon’s downfall. This implication forms a background to the most obvious message of On Social Grease: that art has been instrumentalized by corporate interests, exemplified by those figures who occupy exalted positions in the art institution. In the words of David Rockefeller, a trustee at MOMA: ‘From an economic standpoint, such involvement in the arts can mean direct and tangible benefits. It can provide a company with extensive publicity and advertising, a brighter public reputation, and an improved corporate image.’ Images of the six plaques from On Social Grease were reproduced in Fox 3 at the end of a review by Mel Ramsden of Framing and Being Framed: 7 works 1970–1975, a survey of Haacke’s work published by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.54 Ramsden, a conceptual artist himself and a member of the collective Art & Language, mentions Haacke’s work a number of times in the writings he contributed to the three issues of The Fox. For the most part, his criticism is quite ruthless. In the review ‘Perimeters of Protest’ he writes: ‘It’s normally assumed that Haacke’s work has political content. It doesn’t. It has political subjectmatter. The content isn’t really all that controversial. Here again politics isn’t internalized, it’s illustrated. This isn’t merely caused by bad strategy, it’s a reflection of the way art is muzzled today’ (original emphasis).55 Although Ramsden’s assessment is harsh, he does not condemn Haacke’s work out of hand. Rather, he seems to be struggling with the question of what it might mean to create political artwork that would expose its own connection to the interests of socio-economic elites and, most importantly, what it might mean to shape the critical reception of this work.56 In the same review, Ramsden relates this problem to Walter Benjamin’s writings and the critical requirement to ‘make co-workers not only out of our fellow producers, but also make co-workers out of the consumers, out of readers and spectators’. Although Ramsden offers no citation for this remark, it is clear enough from his precis that he refers to Benjamin’s ‘Author as Producer’ essay, which had been available in translation since 1970.57 THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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Ramsden never refers to Haacke’s work as ‘institutional critique’, because it was not known by this name at the time. Ramsden notes that Haacke is grouped with Daniel Buren and Carl Andre as a ‘political artist’, although he does not endorse this label, which he attributes to the activities of ‘treacherous movement-dubbing pundits’.58 Ramsden’s scepticism is aimed at art criticism and art history, which he judges to be the domain of avoidance and misrepresentation of the fundamental problems of politically engaged art. It is also directed at artists themselves, who might simply illustrate politics or use political ‘commitment’ to make their own work more visible. The mid-1970s were marked by an intense interest in politics among artists and critics. This was perhaps an expression of a moment in which institutions of liberal democracy, in the United States, were experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, driven by economic problems, defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, as well as the recent memory of social upheaval in the anti-Vietnam and Black Power movements of the late 1960s. This was a period in which revolutionary Marxist groups, inspired by Che Guevara, Mao Tse-Tung and others, experienced a surge of membership in the United States.59 Britain and Europe experienced intense political activity at the same time, a ‘left shift’ as the art historian John A. Walker has described it.60 At this point, Artforum, which had been a bastion of high modernist criticism, became briefly a home to social critique under the editorship of John Coplans and Max Kozloff.61 Political engagement was, it seemed, fashionable within art and this, too, forced Ramsden into self-reflexivity: a critique of critique. Nothing can be straightforward for Ramsden precisely because the location from which he speaks, and the language used to formulate critique, is under suspicion. Ramsden’s criticism of political art, or ‘New-Left Radical Kunst’ as he terms it, is that it exudes ‘a kind of smug security in being in possession of what’s wrong – i.e. that the whole world is up shit creek and capitalism’s to blame’ (original emphasis).62 Ramsden concedes that this point is ‘patently true’ but argues that it is also meagre politics for an artwork to remind ‘left-liberals of what left-liberals know already and tease the rich when the rich love to be teased’(original emphasis).63 This was perhaps a fairly common objection to Haacke’s work at that time. Ramsden in ‘Perimeters of Protest’ acknowledges that Carl Andre had also censured Haacke’s work Solomon R. Guggenheim Board of Trustees (1974) in these terms.64 Objection to Haacke’s work could also take a more generically liberal form. The review of On Social Grease in Artforum by Susan Heinemann 70

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suggested that the presentation of the corporate statements might reinforce ‘art world snobbery’ and prevent viewers from recognizing their own implication in the situation described: ‘My point is that one shouldn’t ridicule or disclaim, be “appalled” by these statements. The villain might not be the businessman . . . Such attitudes seem quite compatible with the system supported by artists, critics and dealers alike.’65 In this argument, one sees a kind of incipient version of an argument about complicity used to mitigate any polarizing effect of political artworks. Artists, dealers and critics are equally culpable, so why draw attention to conceptions of art held by captains of industry? Of course, what Heinemann overlooks is that Haacke is attempting to instigate a polarization of views: the plaques are signals of the incorporation of art into corporate strategies and they mean to elicit a reaction. In this sense, the work is a defence of the art institution in the way that Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson have described it. But it is also true that the antagonism involved in Haacke’s work is capable of being amplified, as it is in Ramsden’s review of Framing and Being Framed. Although Ramsden draws attention to what he sees as the weaknesses in Haacke’s position, he is not content to simply dismiss the work. He writes: ‘But then that may not be all there is to what Haacke does. What makes a person’s work political – yeecchhh [sic] or, perhaps, activist, isn’t subject matter or theme – obviously’ (original emphasis).66 Ramsden argues that his own ‘complaints’ might, paradoxically, be evidence of the success of Haacke’s strategy. As he puts it: ‘Complaining is, or should be, precisely the point! It is here that the irresolutions, the stress points, the potential gaps in “rational” capitalist consciousness occur. It is just here, if anywhere, that Haacke’s work “succeeds”’(original emphasis).67 This move in Ramsden’s argument is particularly important, I think. Criticism of the political ‘subject-matter’ of Haacke’s work segues into an argument for what Ramsden calls ‘epistemological activism’: an attack on the ‘“common sense” of society itself ’.68 Ramsden is attempting to reevaluate the question of failure in this passage. Importantly, he associates art critical appraisal of politicized art with reification of art’s politics. Therefore, he seems to reassess his own critical appraisal of Haacke’s work: he is unwilling to contribute to neutralization of a political challenge by assigning it a value as art, successful or otherwise. Neither, though, can he simply address it as a political statement. Instead, he insists on disrupting the categories through which Haacke’s work might be understood. THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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Attacks on art criticism were a distinctive feature of the work of conceptual artists, especially those who were associated with Art & Language. Ramsden regarded the institutional role of the art critic as a paradigmatic example of ‘art bureaucracy’.69 Nonetheless, his own art practice at this point looked very like art criticism. In ‘On Practice’, he raises an obvious question: ‘Could a critique of adventuristic New York art involve me in acting like an art-critic?’.70 His answer is that it must not, because ‘contrary to seeking some sort of uncovering of ideology, the critic veils it’. This veiling is part of the ‘neutrality’ of criticism, its unwillingness to address its own market function. It also reflects the ‘role dogmatism’ which assumes that the natural movement of criticism is from critics to art works: ‘But suppose the artist should criticize the critic? If so, it is mostly written off as sour grapes  .  .  .  Almost all art criticism, especially the hack trade journal kind, is incapable of reflexively acknowledging . . . [its] market function as epistemologically, not to say morally, at all problematic.’71 The relationship of art practice to art criticism and art history was a central concern of Art & Language, not only because the group included both artists and art historians.72 Art criticism and art history were seen as part of an art discourse whose ideological parameters had the power to shape practice, and by implication subjectivity, if left unexamined. As discussed in the previous chapter, within the group, mutual criticism was understood as part of a practice that exposed embedded ideology. The identification of criticism with one institutional role only – the art critic – was a powerful way of formalizing and regulating its power.73 By the mid-1970s, although Artforum had moved leftward, the market for recent art had also begun to quicken. Indeed, the journal Artforum had become influential upon the market value of artists. John Coplans, then editor of Artforum, suggested that the October 1974 issue of the magazine caused Brice Marden’s work to jump in price from $7,000 to $30,000 per painting after it was featured on the cover.74 This febrile atmosphere informed the satirical intensity of Ramsden’s attack on Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s Artforum essay ‘Brice Marden’s Painting’ in Fox 2. Ramsden’s essay is scathing: ‘The constant refuge taken in the sponge of art-historical niche-making which occurs all through “Brice Marden’s Painting” is a specialism for mystification. It is the treacherous language of management. The criticism of Gilbert-Rolfe, however innocent it may seem, fulfills its function of stabilizing the parameters of this alienating and mad society.’75 72

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This position goes some way towards explaining why Ramsden does not want to assume and impose straightforward criteria of success in his examination of Haacke. He wants to achieve a transvaluation of artistic success. Failure might be a form of success if it provokes realization of the criteria that underpin judgement, acting as a kind of ‘epistemological activism’. The object of Ramsden’s criticism is not just Haacke’s work but the art critical framework that would deactivate Haacke’s political challenge by assigning it the mere status of successful art. By doing something that looks like art criticism, Ramsden attempts to reveal the way that critical appraisal tends to stabilize the meaning of art.76 Art criticism has a hand in turning art, even political art, into an object of ‘alienated infatuation’.77 To approach Haacke’s work in this way would be to misrepresent it: ‘Traditional appreciative criticism requires a certain discrete “distance” – a distance which just renders Haacke’s results meaningless . . . What Haacke’s work seems to imply is that the critic becomes a participant in the work itself and hence ceases to be “a critic” as we understand it traditionally.’78 This recognition that Haacke’s institutional critique demands the participation of the critic is important. Ramsden’s reading is, no doubt, coloured by the collaborative emphasis of Art & Language’s own artistic activities. Even so, Ramsden is right that works like Haacke’s MOMA poll (1970) and John Weber Gallery Visitor’s profile (1973) are participatory because an interaction with the audience is integral to each work: the visitors to these works were required to cast a vote or to identify their residence on a map of New York. Shapolsky et al. was also, in an important sense, a participatory work, a social process which included Thomas Messer’s intervention. Haacke ultimately frames the work as a kind of collaboration with Messer: By cancelling the show, Mr Messer furnished one of the vital elements of a real-time social system, as complex and possibly more consequential than those he tried to avoid. The complementary element was my own decision to prefer having the exhibition not take place rather than submit to his ultimatum that I abandon three works. However, there would have been no consequences to speak of had I pulled in my tail and not immediately issued a public statement and assured its widest possible circulation (a copy of Mr Messer’s letter giving his reason for the cancellation was attached) . . . Unwittingly, Mr Messer is playing the role of protagonist in a large-scale real-time social system.79 THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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Haacke is clearly interested, through his conception of a real-time social system, in revealing ideology as an effect of immanent social interactions. Ramsden emphasizes that this kind of work creates great problems for any attempt to criticize it as art, as though from a distance. As we have seen, one of the most important factors in Haacke’s work was its attempt to posit a ‘real time’ of the present in which social relationships might be rendered dynamic and exposed to contingency. This feature of Haacke’s work, and the work of Art & Language, was emblematic of the ‘suppression of the beholder’ in conceptual art, but it also implies a radical redefinition of criticism.80 Ramsden reads Haacke as proposing the intolerable immanence of the problem of the art institution. But this is not complicity as a world-weary invocation of the inevitable neutralization of once radical gestures. It is complicity as an unpredictable reflexive mutuality of social interactions. Against a traditional model of art criticism, Ramsden has in mind an expanded understanding of art as ‘practice’ or indeed praxis. He writes: The production of a work of art AND the reception (reception—see how ‘natural’ it is to use a passive term) of a work of art must be active, a question of practice, and never just a matter of ‘acquiring the right taste’ in order to ‘consume the right things’.81 Ramsden identifies art criticism with passivity: it disseminates a contemplative attitude and inculcates a regimen of taste. He identifies Haacke’s work as stressing participation in an immanent or ‘real-time’ political situation. Ramsden seems to be suggesting that Haacke’s work has praxis-like characteristics, but that they are suppressed by the incorporation of Haacke’s intervention into art criticism. It is a historical irony that Ramsden does not use the term institutional critique to describe the work of Hans Haacke, because he does use the term and seems to have been the first to do so in print. For Ramsden, institutional critique is a description of the collective practice of Art & Language, the group responsible for the publication of The Fox. In the essay ‘On Practice’, Ramsden suggests that critique that is not embedded in specific concerns might work against itself: To dwell perennially on an institutional critique without addressing specific problems within the institutions is to generalise and sloganize. It may also have the unfortunate consequence of affirming that which 74

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you set out to criticize. It may even act as a barrier to eventually setting up a community practice (language . . . sociality . . . ) which does not just embody a commodity mode of existence.82 The point is prescient, obviously. But it is also striking because it shows that all of the accounts which suggest institutional critique has been absorbed were anticipated before institutional critique even existed in the way it is now understood.83 Ramsden’s emphasis on ‘community practice’ demonstrates that for Art & Language the ideological effects of the art institution might be addressed within collective social interaction. For Art & Language, New York, it was in the immanence of ‘group practice’ that the reification of critique might also be held at bay. This group practice was always in the course of being enacted and examined as an identity in process. Ramsden does not use the term institutional critique to describe the work of Hans Haacke or Daniel Buren. Instead institutional critique is used to name the distinctive space provided by the art collective. The art collective is a praxis that opposes the separation of roles that underpins art bureaucracy. It is also compelled to identify the reification of art, the separation implied by its autonomy: The politicization of the category [art] means it must be related to ‘the whole,’ that is, the class-cultural struggles in the rest of society. Either it means solidarity with these struggles or, as far as I can see it means cynicism, politikkunst opportunism, in short, very little . . . The social reality is bizarre. Since the seat of ultimate authority now lies less with a particular class iconography and more with its institutions, the problem now is to forge an institutional critique. (original emphasis)84 What is noticeable about this reference to institutional critique is that it adopts an expansive frame of reference, to bourgeois institutions, rather than only to the art institution. In this regard, this early reference to institutional critique anticipates many of the more recent practices, often realized by art collectives, which have envisaged their practice in these terms. Ramsden in these discussions, which formed part of a wider reflection among the group about the nature of collective practice, also pinned down the problem of ‘affirming that which you set out to criticize’, which became the central paradox of the practices that later came to be known as institutional critique. THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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The usefulness of this originary example is that it disrupts and displaces the historical logic of institutional critique. Rather than institutional critique being represented by a narrative which emphasizes the gradual absorption of radical energies, this example proposes the immanence of social collectivity, of real time, as a militant category. Rather than complicity being understood as a routine aporia it is deployed as an incitement to activism. Rather than institutional critique being cited as the cause of the weakening of art’s politics, it is proposed as a response to fashionable gestures of political radicalism. Ramsden is not an originator of attacks on the institution, which have their collective origin in the opening of art to political energies; however, his work does disrupt, in advance as it were, the reception history of institutional critique.

A problem of periodization It would be tempting to stress the historical context of Mel Ramsden’s writing about institutional critique: New York in the mid-1970s at a point when the city was bankrupt and about to become a testbed for a policy of disinvestment and the deliberate undermining of working class institutions, which would become standard practice for neoliberal governments in the subsequent decade. As David Harvey observes, after New York was pushed into technical bankruptcy in 1975, the city became a testing ground for the garnering of consent for policies that would undermine the power of unions and roll back social protections.85 From this vantage point, it might be possible to identify a subterranean interrelationship between institutional critique and crisis: after all, both have thrived through the period of neoliberalism. The ‘austerity’ which followed the financial crash of 2008 was merely a doubling-down on a strategy that saw market freedoms as axiomatic, whatever the risks that accompany them. After 2008, these strategies became joined to the novel practices of bank bailouts and quantitative easing, which directed state support at the financial industry. From this perspective, institutional critique is a practice that is not ‘modernist’, as Blake Stimson would have it, but embroiled in a problem which emerges in the period of neoliberalism. It does not protect the art institution, so much as it seeks the stress points created by crisis within it. The target is always the stabilizing function of art, its ability to refract the urgency of any challenge into a vague transcendent temporality. 76

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The problem with this line of argument is, obviously, that artists’ works are very rarely punctual responses to political and economic events. The origin of institutional critique is not in one or another artist’s work but, more accurately, in an entire conjuncture, mediated by the anti-institutional perspectives which circulated through the New Left. One might also identify it with the effect of the tension that experimental artists perceived between their aesthetic innovations and the political upheaval in the streets. But the important thing about Ramsden’s writings about institutional critique is that they occupy an ambiguous place between conceptual art, political engagement and critical reception. It is the instability that Ramsden builds into his reading of Haacke’s work that is its most important feature. Here, one of Hito Steyerl’s best-known video essays November (2004) provides a useful point of comparison. This work involves a characteristic dislocation of linear time which, as we have seen, plays a part in her thinking about institutional critique. At the same time, it resonates with the temporal politics of social actuality that formed a key aesthetic device for Haacke’s artwork of the 1970s, as well as Ramsden’s reading of it through the concerns of the collective Art & Language. Steyerl, I will suggest, depicts the institution in such a way that something of its unstable immediacy is recovered, though by way of a reflective account of the overwhelming forms of mediation which structure contemporary experience (Figure 2.4.). The essay-film November (2004) tells the true story of Andrea Wolf, a friend of Steyerl who participated in Steyerl’s first, unfinished film project in the early 1980s and subsequently went on to become involved with the German radical left. We discover that Wolf ultimately became a fighter for the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), a Kurdish militant organization that operates in the Kurdish region of Turkey. Here, Steyerl seems obliquely to reference the radical leftist origins of institutional critique through Wolf, a person who committed her life to revolutionary ideals. Using the name Rohani and, according to earwitness accounts, Wolf was murdered by Turkish security forces in the late 1990s. Steyerl reveals this story through her voice-over narration. As TJ Demos has noted, this work explicitly signals its reflection on the relationship between documentary and truth, or actuality.86 At the same time, it is an allegory of the exposure of culturalist militancy to the brutal realities of power that constitute the euphoric narratives of globalization. The title of the film is, we discover halfway through it, intended as a kind THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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FIGURE 2.4 Hito Steyerl. November, 2004 DV, single channel, sound 25 minutes Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl Image courtesy of the Artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin.

of periodization. The voice-over, performed by Steyerl herself, explains that we are no longer in October, the month of heroic revolution, but November. In an intertitle we read ‘In November the Berlin Wall came down’, immediately after an excerpt from Eisenstein’s film October, which includes a montage of bullets being loaded into a rifle, along with an intertitle in German: ‘Proletarian, learn to Master your Gun!’ We are first introduced to Wolf through footage of her acting in Steyerl’s unfinished first film, in the fight scenes, which were the only ones that were completed. Here, Wolf is fiercely charismatic, as Steyerl observes in her voice-over: wearing a leather jacket, a cigarette hanging from her mouth as she finishes beating up her male adversary and rides a motorcycle, firing up clouds of dust, out towards the horizon. This staging has a distinctive effect. It provides, via the fragments of an incomplete film, a glimpse of a collective endeavour which looks like exuberantly youthful, non-commercial punk film-making, very like the ‘no-wave’ practices of the late 1970s, where subcultural networks created no budget pastiches of genre film-making which celebrated, at the same time, an underground urban milieu. 78

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Steyerl never imparts the plot of her film, but she does insist upon its naivety. The motif of a band of women honourably beating up men, she suggests, was inspired by Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill, the cult film in which large-breasted protagonists are shown preying on men in an obviously salacious pop cultural fantasy. Rather than suggest that her effort was an ironic appropriation of this model, Steyerl observes that the bodily gestures that she and her fellow performers used were learned from and defined by these misogynistic and patriarchal representations. This self-criticism seems questionable, however. Is it really the case that the film-makers were this critically naive, at a high point for feminist theory? Or is this retrospective account required to explain the transition from an artistic field of politics to a real one? Steyerl’s juvenilia is not simply an unconscious mimicry of gestures preferred by the male gaze: it is also a prefiguration of Wolf ’s subsequent history, the struggle of a committed Leftist against oppression, which ultimately led her to fight in an all-female unit of the PKK and to her murder and mutilation by the members of the Turkish security forces. The film as a childish game, conditioned by the representational violence of the sexualized and quasipornographic imagery, becomes the actual violence involved in the repression of a national liberation struggle and in the murder of Wolf. Steyerl stages a relationship here between fiction and truth, which is perhaps also a transition between the youthful naivety and brutal reality of politics. But this does not provide the end point or resting place of the reflective journey of November either. Once again, the real is invoked through Steyerl’s own attempt to explore the fate of her friend. She visits Turkey and finds a poster celebrating the martyrdom of Wolf in a cinema alongside posters advertising soft porn films, presumably in a cinema in the Kurdish region of Turkey, though the location is unstated. This discovery prepares another twist where Steyerl discovers video footage of Wolf from the period in which she first joined the PKK. She is older, dressed in military fatigues, but seemingly much less self-possessed than when depicted in footage from Steyerl’s film. At this point, the reality of Wolf ’s death is known to the viewer and Steyerl’s discovery of the footage is, inevitably, also charged with the tragic irony of what we know of the way her life ended. And yet this death, though it permeates the film, does not dictate its narrative closure. The self-reflexivity of this work is integrated into its narrative, because images of Wolf are followed from Kurdistan back to Germany, in footage of a vigil where Wolf features on posters and is hailed as a martyr. At THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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this point, also, Steyerl signals the issue of complicity: by her inclusion of images of her participation in a protest carrying an image of her friend, alongside a voice-over that reveals that this sombre moment is performed for the camera, confirmed by the termination of the sequence in a moment where Steyerl’s face breaks from introspection into a laugh, as though she could not continue the subterfuge any longer. The complicity is signalled not to invalidate the various truths of the work but rather to sharpen their political meaning. Wolf is shown to survive her death as an image, though it is an open question whether the meaning of her life is preserved or traduced in this explicit propaganda; Steyerl is clearly sympathetically aligned to the cause of Kurdish independence, but she does not offer a partisan endorsement of the PKK. As Steyerl notes ironically, the image of Wolf on a motorcycle riding, as though into the sunset, is the preferred fiction of the German and Turkish authorities, who have never acknowledged that she is, in fact, dead, but rather that she has eluded capture. This official insistence on freedom is perhaps the most succinct indictment of the repressive operation of the state; the viewer may judge from the ear-witness testimony included in the film that Wolf clearly was murdered. Though, in keeping with the instability of the film, it is also true that her image is free in a radical sense, if in an entirely different way than was imagined in the motorbike denouement or in the struggle for national independence. In November, the temporality of the work is one of the prefiguration of truth by fiction, though this point is not made in a mystical way, but as a kind of bleak joke. The movement backwards and forwards in time is represented as the consequence of a transition from October to November, away from revolutionary certainties into the strange freedom of the image. In a subsequent, related artwork, a lecture film entitled Is the Museum a Battlefield? created for the 13th Istanbul Biennial in 2013, Steyerl revisits the story of Andrea Wolf. In this later work, a film of Steyerl’s visit to the location of Wolf ’s death forms part of a meditation on the connection between the museum and war, in an era in which the museum has become a monument for the display of oligarch wealth, housed in ‘starchitect’ buildings such as those designed by Enzo Piano and Frank Gehry, which feature in the film. In the footage of the battlefield, we hear the account of the battle in which Wolf died, where the forces of the PKK came under sustained assault from helicopter gunships before they surrendered. When she was captured, Wolf claimed to be a journalist, but the commander and militiamen 80

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killed her anyway. After she was murdered, the male interviewee relates, her breasts were cut off. In a split screen format, the left-hand image shows detritus from the battlefield displayed on an iPhone and the righthand image shows Steyerl herself standing in front of the Brandenburg gate with an iPhone raised up to obscure her eyes, which the viewer infers that she is looking at. (Figure 2.5). From the battlefield remnants, which include the ragged remains of hip scarves worn by female fighters, Steyerl locates shell cases which she determines to trace back to their origin. This work is impossible to summarize because it uses Steyerl’s characteristic form of vertiginous didacticism, more intense than November in its use of the resources of text and image to subvert the ideal of argument via documentary evidence, and its play with causality. The connection between museum and battlefield is proposed through a ramifying para-logical exposition, whose central motif is sometimes provided by the image of an actual shell casing, sometimes by the invisible bullet that Steyerl tells us is present, held between her finger and thumb, as she traces its route with her words. Steyerl insists that the bullet is invisible when it traverses the museum, although she notes that the exhibition is sponsored by companies, including Siemens and other multinationals, who are involved in the manufacture of weapons. The entire circuitous route of connections explored by Is the Museum a Battlefield? takes in data clouds, the iPhone, Angelina Jolie’s film Wanted and the flick of the wrist that allows Jolie’s character to curve bullets, the movement of photons which can be in two places at once, our targeting by art spam, the Lockheed Martin building which is designed by Frank Gehry and the systems used in targeted surveillance of digital communication. Rather than attempt to follow each connection, which in any case is made impossible by the deliberately sophistic transitions

FIGURE 2.5  Hito Steyerl. Is the Museum a Battlefield?, 2013 Two channel digital video, sound 39 minutes, 53 seconds. Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Image courtesy of the Artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin.

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that Steyerl employs in her meditations on truth, here I will focus on a concluding passage of the work. Having demonstrated the connection between the museum and battlefield by listing them among the funders of art events by defense contractors and by listing them among the funders of the 13th Istanbul Biennial for which her work was created, Steyerl undercuts the entire exposition by observing that, in any case, the museum was invented as a battlefield. Presenting the image, Pris du Louvre, Le 29 Juillet 1830: massacres des garde suisse by JeanLouis Bezard, Steyerl notes that the Louvre was stormed in the revolution of 1830, but also in 1832, 1848 and it was destroyed in 1871, during the Paris Commune. Indeed, the Louvre, which was the first public art museum, was founded after the massacre of Swiss guards in 1792, after which the royal collection was opened to the public. From this history, Steyerl implies the lesson is that to establish the art museum and to keep it open, it was, and perhaps is, necessary to make revolutions. In the context of the film itself, this observation seems to make immanent the sense in which the battlefield of the museum is a question of revolutionary importance, at a point when the public status of the museum is slipping back into a neo-feudal status as a container for ruling class wealth. The tone of this work is more militant, as a result, than November. In the earlier film Wolf, it is implied, pursues a kind of anachronistic militancy which belonged to an era of certainties that may no longer be reclaimed. In Is the Museum a Battlefield?, though the regime of control is shown to have become ever more extensive through the technological expansion figured in the ubiquity of the iPhone, Steyerl emphasizes that partisanship is necessary after all. This advocacy comes through the speculative example of the museum founded by revolutions, but also in Steyerl’s argument that we need to become data to reverse the trajectory of the bullet. To become data, we need only to take a photograph of ourselves, although as she says in an aside ‘I bet a cloud of tear gas would do it too’. This is significant because this work was shown while the protests sprang up against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Gezi park, where millions of protestors combined to hold the square against riot police for two weeks in June of 2013.87 *** The point of this drift through the canon of institutional critique represented by Hans Haacke and the first use of the term ‘institutional 82

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critique’ by Mel Ramsden, and on through Hito Steyerl’s theoretical and artistic work has been to show the limitations of a conventional theoretical exegesis and art-historical narration in this area. As an art theoretical term, ‘institutional critique’ is freighted with historical content which goes unexamined; as art history, institutional critique often disavows the effects of critical reception. The tendency to represent institutional critique as confirmation of the power of the institution is, I think, particularly problematic given that institutional critique is a strategy that continues to be employed. According to Peter Osborne’s argument, all possible instances of this practice result in the endless reenforcement of the institution and by extension, of liberal democracy. But this idea is made problematic because institutional critique may be an attempt to join itself to the social processes which expose social contradictions. Rather than an attempt to achieve critical distance, institutional critique may be understood as a staging of social conflict from within the privileged space granted to art. Or, to formulate this point more clearly, critical distance emerges not simply as intellectual recognition, but in a social praxis. This is what it seems to be in the work of Haacke, Ramsden and Steyerl, even though these practices are in many respects quite different to one another. In each case, the strategy of institutional critique is proposed to force connections to appear between social phenomena that otherwise might seem unrelated. In summary form, Haacke enforced a ‘real-time’ relationship in his display of Shapolsky et al. that was extended to include the intervention of Messer and which he envisaged as continuing spatially to an unspecifiable extent through its ramifications ‘in real time’ through social actuality. Ramsden, in his reflection on Haacke’s works, insisted on the participation between the artist and the critic, preferring epistemological activism to any routine appraisal of the work. In Steyerl’s work, a reflexive film-essay form and the use of para-didactic exposition is used to expose the continuity between the museum and war. This is not a question of artistic influence, though it is obvious that Steyerl knows Haacke’s work and that of Art & Language. The impetus of institutional critique is not defined by the history of this practice; in fact, institutional critique in this form is only possible once the accretion of narrative history, which invariably stresses the failure of revolutionary ambition, is disrupted. This is surely one of the implications of Steyerl’s THE TEMPORALITY OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE

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consistent motif of the disruption of the causal sequence of temporality, the elementary relationship between before and after: found both in November and Is the Museum a Battlefield? This is also why this work is discussed here via a displacement of the putative origin of institutional critique. As Jacques Rancière has succinctly noted, ‘time is the best medium of exclusion’.88 With this statement, Rancière means to say that any representation of time requires the idea of transition from one time to the next, which requires that change is staged in terms of a contrast between new or continuing possibilities and things that are no longer possible: ‘Times have changed’ means: this is no longer possible. And that which a state of things readily declares impossible is, quite simply, the possibility to change the state of things. That impossibility thus works as an interdiction: there are things you can no longer do, ideas in which you can no longer believe, futures you can no longer imagine. ‘You cannot’ clearly means: you must not.89 Throughout the history of institutional critique, description of a changed state of the institution, its inclusion in the changing cultural and material realities of neoliberalism, is joined to the idea that some things are no longer possible. This argument continues into Hito Steyerl’s November, but it alters in Is the Museum a Battlefield? Once again, in this latter work a challenge to the ruling order is endorsed. The failure of institutional critique is linked to the failure of movements that aim at radical social change more generally. The problem with the reception history of institutional critique is that it tends to be insulated from the political energies that occasionally return to the field of art. Although it is certainly true that art institutions have internalized the ‘lessons’ of institutional critique, as I will discuss more fully in Chapter 4, what institutional critique means here is more fundamentally an attempt to disrupt the ideological coherence of the institution by exposing the way it enacts depoliticizing categories and divisions. By insisting on connections between art and material interests, the work of the artists discussed in this chapter projects a certain kind of connectedness, of collectivity, onto the art institution. The endlessness of real time in Haacke’s work does something like the para-logical connections imposed

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by Steyerl: both reject compartmentalization and identify with the heteronomous connectivity of social experience. The next chapter examines a comparable preoccupation in another term that has been centrally important to the social turn, ‘relational aesthetics’. Although relational aesthetics is sometimes seen as quite different to institutional critique, I will propose that it involves a comparable appeal to collectivity, though it is achieved in a different way.

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3 RELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

A simple working definition of participatory art is that it involves its primary audience in the process of realizing an artwork, whereas the traditional role of the spectator in visual art is to contemplate an already completed artefact. As discussed in the introduction, participatory art alters the way that the social dimension of art is conceived. The spectator’s relationship to the participatory artwork is not one of private consumption, but of active creation. Some participatory works are produced as an anonymous collaboration under the name of a collective, whereas others are conceived by a named artist and realized by an audience. Although authorship is acknowledged in different ways by these different approaches, collectivity remains a key reference point for both of them, because the work is held to come into existence through a social encounter. This chapter examines an idea that catalysed the prominence that participatory art has achieved through the social turn, a development known as ‘relational aesthetics’. The French curator Nicolas Bourriaud first used the term ‘Esthétique relationnelle’ in an essay to accompany ‘Traffic’, an exhibition held at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in 1996. This term became the title of a collection of essays published in a French edition in 1998, and was translated into English in 2002 as Relational Aesthetics.1 A transnational group of artists provided the immediate context for Bourriaud’s curatorial writings of the 1990s: Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Vanessa Beecroft, Pierre Huyghe, Maurizio Cattelan and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, among others, have developed stellar careers that are entangled with Bourriaud’s success as a curator. The influence of relational aesthetics went far beyond this group, however.

Writing in 2006, Stewart Martin described Relational Aesthetics as ‘the focus of a generation of artists, curators and critics . . . offering a new characterization and collectivization of contemporary art practices and a new configuration of its political terms and conditions’.2 Although Bourriaud’s work is no longer current in art world debates, its influence is found throughout artistic developments of the first decade of the millennium. At issue in this chapter are the political stakes involved in the ‘collectivization’ that Martin identifies in relational aesthetics. Bourriaud’s ideas represent a case study that helps to make sense of the increasingly politicized art that is a legacy of the social turn. The informal sociality that became the hallmark of relational works was interpreted by Bourriaud as a strategy of resistance against the alienation of contemporary experience. As many critics of Bourriaud have emphasized, however, open-ended social encounters do not necessarily have critical content. Relational art works have been criticized for mimicking service labour and the fetish of networking that is integral to neoliberal society. In Martin’s terms, relational aesthetics is accused of being a ‘naive mimesis or aestheticisation of novel forms of capitalist exploitation’.3 How is it that this approach to art provided impetus to ‘a new conception of art’s relation to radical politics’, as Martin put it, if it merely rode a wave of social innovation that was adapted to the needs of a new regime of capital accumulation? This is the question that animates this chapter. These seemingly irreconcilable perspectives on relational aesthetics indicate more than just a difference of critical opinion; they expose tensions involved in the evaluation of politicized art. We see here a different form of the question explored in the previous chapter through discussion of institutional critique: whether art contributes to systemic social change or unwittingly stabilizes the status quo. This question is posed in a thought-provoking way by relational aesthetics, because it is an artform that conceives social encounters as a material, rather than merely a context for art making. This shift of perspective is not Bourriaud’s invention; his work synthesizes a diverse avant-garde inheritance, assembled from elements of situationism, conceptualism and feminist art, as well as the theoretical writings of Félix Guattari. The idea that social encounters can be artworks is now taken for granted by audiences of contemporary art. Even so, it contains a nucleus of problems that remain unresolved. This chapter will focus on one of these problems: How is the social encounter as artwork distinct from 88

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social experience more generally? The indiscernible difference between participatory art and other kinds of social interaction plays an important role in the social turn, making possible new ways of thinking about the relationship between art and society. Bourriaud’s writings use this indiscernible difference to construct an idea of the collective artwork which has had an important influence on many critics associated with the participatory or dialogic art. To get at the fundamental issues involved in participatory art, Bourriaud’s conception of collectivity will be compared to that of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the American artist, born in Cuba, who died of AIDS in 1996. In Relational Aesthetics Bourriaud builds his conception of a collective artwork from an interpretation of GonzalezTorres’s distinctive participatory works. A comparison between the curator’s and the artist’s approach to collectivity provides opportunities to examine the elusive politics of relational art.

Relations and form Bourriaud argues that relational artworks have critical implications because they create a space of free social relations in art, set apart from the alienation of contemporary experience. Drawing on a legacy of Marxist theory, especially elements of situationism, he suggests that social life has become increasingly commodified, where generalized alienation creates a ‘society of extras’.4 An ‘art of encounter’ avoids reification in different ways: by its embrace of conviviality, or through mimicry of professional services, or through the staging of ephemeral appointments as artworks. Sometimes, Bourriaud represents this as a radical project, which reprises the historical avant-garde without its utopian errors.5 Within his argument, however, the avoidance of errors leaves the ‘rich loam for social experiments’ only quite muted goals.6 Where the reification of social life meets art, Bourriaud grants relational aesthetics the task of ‘learning to inhabit the world in a better way’.7 The docility of this political programme seems a long way from the activist and interventionist work that has garnered attention since the 2010s. Relational Aesthetics claimed to change everything, though in such a way that nothing would change. In a revealing passage, Bourriaud writes: Nobody nowadays has ideas about ushering in the golden age on Earth, and we are readily prepared just to create various forms of R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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modus vivendi permitting fairer social relations, more compact ways of living, and many different combinations of fertile existence. Art, likewise, is no longer seeking to represent Utopias; rather, it is attempting to construct concrete spaces.8 This is a project of moderation, which absorbs remnants of the revolutionary ambition of avant-gardes into ‘services rendered . . . that fill in the cracks in the social bond’.9 Even so, this gesture towards the avant-garde, and towards social experimentation, opened up a politicized trajectory. The development of Bourriaud’s own positions seems to register this shift, with his most recent writings explicitly oriented towards politicized art.10 The emphasis upon the social in relational aesthetics contained a potentiality that allowed different connections between art and politics to be made. The problem here is to anatomize and understand this latent potential. Bourriaud revived earlier avant-garde conceptions of the relationship between aesthetics and social immediacy. There are passages of Relational Aesthetics that recall the writings of Alan Kaprow, the artist who first wrote of ‘happenings’. This resonance is especially clear when Bourriaud uses the term ‘form’ to blur the boundary between the aesthetic dimension of art and life.11 He writes: ‘What do we mean by form? A coherent unit, a structure, (independent entity of inner dependencies) which shows the typical features of a world’ (original emphasis). Alan Kaprow’s theories of the happening also spoke of form, deriving the term ‘form’ from John Dewey’s aesthetics, where any experience whatsoever can have formal, thus aesthetic, qualities. Jeff Kelley has emphasized the important influence that Dewey had upon Kaprow’s ideas, situating him as a strange kind of ‘formalist’.12 As Judith Rodenbeck puts it: ‘This essentially ecological notion of “form”, which Kaprow developed from the 1950s onward, echoes developments in other realms, from urbanism to second-order cybernetics to poststructuralist philosophy, and clearly underpins advanced ideas in the arts.’13 The revival of this ‘ecological notion’ of form in relational aesthetics tends to open an indiscernible difference between the social encounter as art and social ‘forms’ more generally. Here form is a dynamic, rather than a static, principle: it represents social experience as made up of interacting processes that may be appropriated as artworks. There are clear resonances with the system theory that influenced Hans Haacke’s sociopolitical works, as discussed in the previous chapter. The emphasis 90

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on development that is found in Haacke’s approach to real-time processes offers a challenge to the seeming stability of the art institution, as we have seen. Bourriaud’s account of form that ‘shows the typical features of a world’ tends to play on a boundary between social immediacy and totality, for example when he speaks of relational artworks as ‘micro-utopias’. This appeal to form has proved to be very influential, recurring in the work of critics and curators who explore a far more politicized frame of reference. Discussed more fully in Chapter 4, Nato Thompson curated a survey of socially engaged art in 2011 titled ‘Living as Form’ and wrote a theoretical essay which emphasizes experimental dimension of art’s engagement with life as form.14 Claire Bishop, in her book Artificial Hells states: ‘participatory art demands that we find new ways of analyzing art that are no longer linked solely to visuality, even though form remains a crucial vessel for communicating meaning.’15 Stewart Martin identifies the question of social form as essential to Bourriaud’s work. Framing this problem in a Marxist register, he asks ‘how the form of relational art relates to or opposes the commodity form or the value form’.16 In another definition, Bourriaud defines ‘form’ in relational aesthetics quite explicitly as: ‘Structural unity imitating world. Artistic practice involves creating a form capable of “lasting”, bringing heterogeneous units together on a coherent level, in order to create a relationship to the world.’17 Martin notes that appeals to form seem to underpin Bourriaud’s distinctive account of an encounter as somehow autonomous: set apart from everyday social relations. Martin emphasizes, however, that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism. Whereas Bourriaud seems to think that an art of elusive social encounters might avoid commodification because it does not create an art object, this is a vulgarization of Marx’s analysis of the commodity form. In Capital, commodities are never necessarily objects, because labour is itself sold as a commodity by workers who own nothing else: The commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the phantasmagorical form of a relation between things.18 R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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A social encounter that involves no exchange of objects may still involve a commodity logic. Indeed, service work, when it produces profit, is the paradigm case of this kind of social relation. As value theorist Michael Heinrich puts it: In the case of a service (whether we are talking about a taxi ride, a massage, or a theatre performance), the act of production is concurrent with the act of consumption (as the taxi drive produces a change of place, I consume it). The difference between services and physical objects consists of a distinction of the material content; the question as to whether these objects are commodities pertains to their social form, and that depends on whether the objects or services are exchanged.19 Bourriaud himself alludes to service work in Relational Aesthetics and the analogy to this kind of labour provides a ready reference point for art criticism, even twenty years later. It is often said that relational aesthetics coincided with a cultural shift, dated to the 1990s, reflecting the expansion of service work and novel forms of production and distribution under post-Fordist capitalism. Recently, the theorist Jesper Bernes has used the same argument to locate the experiments of the 1960s themselves in a period of the transformation of work in the United States, as it became increasingly deindustrialized.20 For Bernes, Allan Kaprow’s famous happening Fluids, first performed in 1969, is an emblematic response to the transition to service work. This happening coincides with the period in which art objects famously became ‘dematerialized’, in practices like those developed by Kaprow and in conceptual and performance art. For Bernes, Fluids, which involved the construction of a building from ice blocks by a group of volunteers, underlines the materiality of service work: ‘the point then is that the shift to service work is not immaterialization at all (indeed, many services involve backbreaking labour: custodial work for instance, or restaurant work) but a different arrangement of materiality, a liquefaction of materiality, one that aims at different results’.21 These ideas explore a very suggestive relationship between histories of participatory art and the changing forms of work identified with neoliberalism. The analogy between art and service labour has its limitations, however. As Heinrich notes in Capital, Marx describes a social form that derives from an economic relationship, where capital is invested and exploits 92

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labour power to accumulate more capital.22 This movement of capital accumulation, though it determines the social process under capitalism, is rarely found in artworks themselves.23 Participatory artworks sometimes involve participants who are paid a wage to undertake certain roles. These works are also sometimes ‘sold’. However, they are not typically subject to capital investment, where more efficient ways of delivering goods or services, or of exploiting labour, are developed in search of profit. Participatory art may create experiences that are analogous to service work, but art is still different to wage labour. Although it has provided many useful insights, the analogy between participatory art and service labour is now too familiar.24 To find a different path into participatory art, this chapter examines a discrepancy in Bourriaud’s account of the artists he proposes as exponents of relational art. Many commentators have observed that the artists included in Bourriaud’s curatorial manifesto are not particularly well described by it. This point is made in different ways by Stewart Martin and Miwon Kwon, for example.25 This discrepancy is noteworthy because Bourriaud’s ideas have become so influential. Of all the artists discussed in Relational Aesthetics, the one that seems most important for the evocation of collectivity that it contains is Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Gonzalez-Torres was already an established figure by the time Bourriaud was writing about him and is the only artist who is the subject of an entire chapter in Relational Aesthetics.26 It is by revisiting Gonzalez-Torres’s work that I hope to identify the distinctive interest and limitations in Bourriaud’s representation of a collectivized artwork.

Norms and collectivity Before his premature death in 1996, Felix Gonzalez-Torres developed a distinctive repertoire of works that can include the direct participation of their audience. Perhaps the best known of these are the ‘candy spills’ and ‘paper stacks’: the candy spills are typically made of sweets scattered or piled up, in a kind of homage to post-minimalist sculptural conventions; the stacks are normally displayed as a pile of individual sheets, recalling the cuboid forms of minimalism (Figure 3.1). The viewer of one of these works may simply look or participate by taking a piece.27 Another level of participation is signalled in the presentation of each work, which is different at each iteration. The owner or authorized borrower of R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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FIGURE 3.1  Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ‘Untitled’ (Passport), 1991 Paper, endless supply. 10 cm at ideal height x 60 x 60 cm (original paper size) (4 inches at ideal height x 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches (original paper size)). Installation view: Como viver junto (How to Live Together). Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo (Cicillio Matarazzo Pavilion), 27th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. 8 Oct. – 17 Dec. 2006. Cur. Lisette Lagnado, Christina Freire, Rosa Martínez, Adriano Pedrosa, José Ignacio Roca. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

each ‘stack’ or ‘candy spill’ is permitted to interpret it, within specified parameters, each time it is displayed. The aesthetic form of these works is adaptable as a result, determined by an interaction between the curator, or owner, and the viewer. At the same time, the social relationship that is manifested in these works is contextual and mutable. The works seem to pivot on the decisions that they require to be made. Miwon Kwon interprets Gonzalez-Torres’s stacks and spills as a kind of ‘gift exchange’ because of the way they pointedly invoke but avoid commodity relations: in her reading, solidarity between artist and audience, and a relationship of obligation, is created by the bestowing of a gift.28 The problem for Kwon’s reading is that Gonzalez-Torres’s works do not create a personal obligation or strengthen social bonds in the way that is normally understood to be a characteristic of gift exchange. Kwon even acknowledges this point, by discussing visitors to the 1995 Whitney exhibition of his work leaving posters stuffed in the bins in the lobby.29 94

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The stacks and candy spills are presented in such a way that each audience member has a choice about how they complete the work, rather than an obligation to participate in it. They might simply contemplate it, as already noted, or they might interact unpredictably with it, as Joe Scanlan notes of an occasion at MOMA when visitors added the wrappers from sweets that they had eaten to the artwork, altering its appearance.30 (Joan Kee suggests, however, that the same thing happened in 1995 and Gonzalez-Torres intervened to request that the wrappers be left as part of the work).31 This question of participant behaviour is one that occurs often in reception of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, because the stacks and candy spills thematize collectivity as an enquiry into behavioural norms. Social norms are classically conceived as internalized rules that resolve the contradiction between a supposedly free individual and the maintenance of a stable social system.32 They explain the persistence of a social order not in terms of overt coercion, but as an internalized idea of behaviour that affects subjective preferences and freely made decisions. First developed in functionalist sociology, this account of social cohesion is controversial, because it sometimes implies advocacy for a supposedly healthy social equilibrium. Needless to say, racism, homophobia, sexism and misogyny have had, and often still do have the status of social norms, so that objections to these abuses of power are viewed as transgression. For example, the Republican administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior in the 1980s and early 1990s were identified with the aggressive promotion of traditional values, especially of the nuclear family and motherhood. These powerful ideological messages were mobilized even as the AIDS pandemic was killing hundred of thousands of people worldwide, predominantly homosexual men and people of colour. As a gay man, and as a theoretically astute artist, Gonzalez-Torres was sensitive to the implicit violence involved in social norms and the ideal collective order that may provide a pretext for social exclusion, discrimination and othering. In the stacks and candy spills, the basic premise is the subversion of a norm – of the contemplative spectator – not through confrontation but through an invitation. The freedom either to look at the work or to take something from it is uncomfortable because it raises a question about the correct way to behave, in a gallery space where behaviour is typically monitored carefully. In Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud relates an occasion where he saw ‘visitors grabbing as many candies as their pockets could hold’ from one R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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of these works.33 For Bourriaud, this behaviour shows these spectators unsure of how to react to the licence the work gives them. It reflects the participants’ character by way of their decisions: ‘they were being referred to their social behaviour, their fetishism and cumulative conception of the world’.34 This becomes, in turn, one of Bourriaud’s most forceful claims about art and collectivity: ‘What nowadays forms the foundation of artistic experience is the joint presence of beholders in front of the work, be this work effective or symbolic’ (original emphasis).35 I will explore the implications of this definition of the relational work carefully, because a great deal seems to rest on Bourriaud’s idea of joint presence. For Bourriaud, the most important motif in GonzalezTorres is the ‘double’, which he sees as a kind of abstract representation of homosexual love, as it is emblematically in ‘Untitled’ (Perfect Lovers) (1991), where two identical wall clocks, side by side, are set at the same time and allowed to slip, in an imperceptible process, out of synchronization. This motif, for Bourriaud, suggests a series of associations, which rest on the idea of the inclusion of the other, ‘homosexuality as a paradigm of cohabitation’ as he puts it, but also an ethics of the beholder. Bourriaud emphasizes the motif of the double in this work, over the poignant way the clocks fall out of time with one another. This is telling, because Bourriaud tends to insist on presence as a criterion of a relational work. It is easy to see why Bourriaud saw in Gonzalez-Torres’s work a model of a social interstice that is not subject to commodity relations. The stacks and candy spills dramatize norms associated with consumerism, by giving things away. Simultaneously, they seem to be experiments in social cohesion and social conflict. Gonzalez-Torres referred to these works as public art, subverting a convention that, in the early 1990s, associated public art with outdoor sculpture. The works also play subtly on the association between art and freedom: the ideal of freedom traditionally associated with art is presented in the somewhat deflated, but accessible form of the ‘free gift’. The experimental form of the works hinges on the suspension of norms on the boundary between art and consumer behaviour. As a result, it is quite common for the stacks and candy spills to be interpreted as didactic, in a similar way to Bourriaud’s reading. Writing in the early 1990s, for example, the artist Terry Atkinson interpreted the candy spills as works that criticized the infatuation of their audience with popular culture.36 There is an alternative view that rejects this interpretation, however. The queer theorist Simon Watney described 96

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Atkinson’s as an ‘old Leftist’ reading which he read as implying an ethics of ‘production’ rather than ‘consumption’.37 For Watney, the celebration of pleasure and consumption in these works is integral to their politics. The critical dispute here is one that hinges on valuations of freedom and of art’s relationship to the pleasures of consumption. GonzalezTorres seems to have been careful not to fall into any binary oppositions in this area, however. He used the candy spill motif in different ways, with various implications, resulting in a situation where Atkinson’s and Watney’s interpretations, although they seem to contradict one another, may both be legitimate. For example, the work ‘Untitled’ (USA Today) (1990) which features red, white and blue candies does seem to link consumption to the dissemination of ideology in a well-known American tabloid newspaper. The work ‘Untitled’ (Placebo) (1991) Gonzalez-Torres described as ‘mean’ in an interview from 1991, because it equated the beauty of a silver carpet of candies with a kind of false promise of healing or redemption. In this work, political implications are stressed by the artist: ‘Beautiful things can be very deceiving. That’s how most things operate in our culture. They make you feel good for a little while. The pristine, family-oriented government looks nice’38 (Figure 3.2). The candy spills, or paper stacks, alter their significance between works, and even between manifestations of the same work, so that interpretations multiply. Each work creates a versatile network of meanings using a limited range of signature materials. They are openended in a way that invites viewers to invest them with polemical interpretations. The freedom to decide inscribed in the works is such that it permeates the critical debate about their meaning. There is a normative aspect to Bourriaud’s reading of Gonzalez-Torres, for example, as he creates a contrast between the idea of joint presence – signalled by the double and by the staging of encounters in front of the work – and the ‘fetishism and cumulative conception of the world’ evident in the behaviour of some participants. Bourriaud’s interpretation tends to represent collectivity as an immediate and intersubjective experience, a ‘joint presence’. Gonzalez-Torres himself tended to stress the importance of distance in his works, however. The paper stacks and candy spills are conceptual, though the term ‘concept’ is elusive: it is perhaps best to say that these works involve rule or instruction-based parameters (often termed R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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FIGURE 3.2  Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ‘Untitled’ (Placebo), 1991. Candies in silver wrappers, endless supply. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Ideal weight: 1,000-1,200 lb. Installation view: Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form. MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany. 28 Jan. – 14 Mar. 2011. Cur. Elena Filipovic; 18 Mar. – 25 Apr. 2011. Installation cur. Tino Sehgal (shown). (Second installation at third of three venues. Additional venues: Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Belgium. 16 Jan. – 2 May 2010; Fondation Beyeler, Basel Switzerland. 21 May – 29 Aug. 2010.) Photographer: Axel Schneider. Image courtesy of MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

‘specific but open-ended parameters’) to provide a framework where an ensemble of participation may evolve. Similar flexible parameters can also be applied to others of Gonzalez-Torres’s manifestable works, including the Curtains, Lightstrings, Billboards, Portraits and the works comprised of clocks. The ensemble created by these manifestable works includes, in principle, the viewers of each work but also the owner, or institution responsible for displaying it. For example, many of the candy spills and stacks indicate an ideal height or weight, which is reproduced in the information about the work. The certificates of authenticity that accompany these works do not require their owner or curator to replenish them, though they may choose to do so. In a mirror image of the decision required of the viewer, the paper stacks and candy spills ask for a decision of the owner or curator, about how they will manifest the work in relation to its ideal form. The works 98

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inevitably fluctuate around this ideal so that depletion becomes an index of participation. Visitors take pieces of the work away with them and, in so doing, create a new relationship to the work’s ideal form. In these complex artworks, we might consider the instruction to be the concept, but we might also see the ‘ideal’ character of the work, and the changing form of the work in relation to this ideal, to be the concept too. Or, yet again, the concept might be that these works exist only through their fluctuation and dispersal. Although Gonzalez-Torres allowed freedom of interpretation of these works in terms of their configuration and display, he was always very clear that individual sheets, or candies, are not by themselves artworks. The work is in principle collective, made of the whole set of relationships it sets in motion. This means that each work resides not in any one moment of its process, or any tangible object (an individual sheet or a candy), or even in a given manifestation of the work, but in the totality of these objects and manifestations. This is a very important point, because it establishes each work’s unity from a heterogenous array of objects and decisions. This unity is also a process: the works are usually designated ‘endless supply’ or ‘endless copies’.39 These characteristic features of Gonzalez-Torres’s works indicate the nature of the discrepancy involved in Bourriaud’s reading. For Bourriaud, collectivity is identified with co-presence, which is contrasted to the individualistic and uncontrolled behaviour of consumerism. In the stacks and candy spills, by contrast, social relationships are simultaneously present and absent. The evocation of collectivity in the stacks and candy spills depends on the relationship between what is encountered, or seen, and what is invisible. Each work, though it is made up of objects that are assembled and dispersed through the decisions of participants, is considered a unity because of the way that its parameters are constructed. This conceptual, or anti-visual dimension of Gonzalez-Torres’s work is arguably more important than any accidental encounter with other visitors in front of the work that might affect a participant’s experience of it. The implications of this point are brought out by a comparison to the work of Hans Haacke. In Haacke’s MOMA poll, visitors were required to mark their presence by the simple participatory act of voting, thereby contributing to the visibility of a political issue: the support of Nelson Rockefeller for President Nixon’s policy in Vietnam. In John Weber Gallery Visitor profile, participants completed questionnaires that asked for personal information and political views to gain insight into the R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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FIGURE 3.3  Hans Haacke John Weber Gallery Visitors’ Profile 2, 1973 cardboard box, paper questionnaire: 6 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. (16.5 x 19.1 cm) cardboard box of processed key punch cards © Hans Haacke / VG Bild-Kunst. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

visitors to the show40 (Figure 3.3). Gonzalez-Torres, by contrast, presents the viewer with a decision that has to do with desire, with the negotiation of norms, and a fragile kind of interconnectedness. This comparison suggests, at first, differing sociopolitical implications. When contrasted to Haacke’s work, which has an exoteric, civic politics, Gonzalez-Torres’s strategies suggest a beholder’s encounter with the micro-decisions through which desire intersects with the social system, or community. Whereas Haacke emphasized the class distinctions that exist within the supposed universalism of art, Gonzalez-Torres takes a different tack: the artwork is conceived as a single entity, even though it is made up of an array of disconnected private encounters. It is in this sense that I read these works as experiments with norms of behaviour.

Neoliberalism, norms and culture war Although one connotation of the stacks and candy spills is generosity, there is also an ambivalent implication which may be understood in relation to their ‘endless supply’.41 Do endless supplies of candies, or 100

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copies of images, function as a promise of abundance, or an unremitting cornucopia that erodes social solidarity? In Gonzalez-Torres’s interviews and writings, there appears a question of the scale and penetration of consumer culture under neoliberalism. A stack which has now taken on new meaning, in the light of events since 2016, is ‘Untitled’, 1990, which includes two news excerpts. On one side of each print: ATLANTIC CITY, April 3 (AP) – Thousands of gamblers, angered when the opening of the gaming floor was delayed for six hours, milled about outside Donald Trump’s new Taj Mahal Casino today, clogging hallways and chanting, ‘Tell Donald Trump to open the door!’ And on the other side: The enormous scale of the problem makes it difficult for people to grasp. ‘Small corruption is easy to understand and, for politicians, usually fatal’, said Ted Van Dyk, a longtime Democratic strategist. ‘Big corruption is seldom fatal because it is beyond most people’s comprehension. People can’t understand a $200 billion loss.’ Reproduced at actual size in the centre of large sheets, these news clippings indicate an explicit political framing. The ‘endless copies’ that constitute this work evokes the expansion of fictitious capital and the erosion of democratic accountability. The excerpts refer to the Taj Mahal casino that Donald Trump built at a cost of an estimated $1 billion dollars, largely financed by junk bonds. Their juxtaposition asks a question about meaning in the context of the expansion of finance capitalism, rampant property speculation and populism: a neoliberal spectacle that was, even then, gathering momentum. In his writings Gonzalez-Torres returned to these issues repeatedly. In an essay published in 1996, the artist draws up a political balance sheet of 1990: A time of defunding vital social programmes, the abandonment of the ideals on which this country was supposedly founded. The erasure of history. The savings and loan bailout with our tax dollars. The ‘economic boom’ of the Reagan empire thanks to the tripling of the national deficit. The explosion of the information industry, and at the same time the implosion of meaning. Meaning can only be formulated when we can compare, when we bring information to our daily level, to our ‘private’ sphere. Otherwise information just goes by . . . The American R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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family doesn’t know how to get upset, how to understand a bill of $500 billion. But it can get extremely interested in a ten-thousand-dollar grant from the NEA. Five-hundred billion is unthinkable. The amount is unthinkable. On the other hand, ten thousand dollars is the down payment for a small home, a trailer. Now that’s meaning.42 Here and in other texts and interviews, Gonzalez-Torres refers to the Savings and Loan crisis which, at the time, was the largest since the 1929 crash. Savings and Loans were co-operatives created to finance house purchases for the working classes, as depicted in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, dir: Frank Capra). During the 1980s, partly because of economic pressures and partly because of their deregulation, these organizations became increasingly involved in property speculation. By the early 1990s, several Savings and Loans collapsed, leading to a bailout at an eventual cost to Federal budgets of $130 billion. This crisis, in its essentials, anticipated the bank bailout strategy that followed the crash of 2008, though on a smaller scale. Gonzalez-Torres also refers to a ‘ten-thousand dollar grant from the NEA’, the National Endowment for the Arts. Beginning in the late 1980s, there was a concerted campaign against this federal body, initiated by conservative religious groups including the American Family Association (AFA) and supported by Republican senators Alfonse D’Amato and Jesse Helms. The campaign focused initially on a $15,000 grant received by the artist Andres Serrano that supported a national tour of a show that included a work entitled Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix suspended in a vat of the artist’s urine. In 1989, the Corcoran gallery in Washington D.C. cancelled an exhibition by Robert Mapplethorpe, who would die of AIDS soon afterwards, for fear that explicit homoerotic content would cause offence. The campaign led by the AFA initiated a period that became known as the ‘Culture Wars’ and included attempts to defund the NEA and populist attacks on artists whose works were considered threats to a traditional way of American life.43 Gonzalez-Torres refers to this conjunction of ‘American Family’ and economic crisis again in a talk from 1992, ‘Practices: The Problem of Divisions of Cultural Labor’, where he cites Althusser in relation to the role of art as an ideological state apparatus: [T]ell the audience – the American family – that perhaps we should be addressing ourselves to the more than $500 million with which 102

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the government is subsidizing the Savings & Loan orgies of the 1980s (for every dollar spent on social programs, we now spend six on the savings and loan bailout. So, this is no longer the welfare state but the savings and loan bailout state).44 The aesthetic appeal of Gonzalez-Torres’s work often means that its relationship to social conflict is not addressed in its reception; at least, the reception via relational aesthetics tends to mask the important historical context of the culture wars period. Although they are not defined by this historical moment, the emphasis on collectivity and participation in the paper stacks and candy spills seems to be informed by the convergence of reactionary populism and economic crisis. At a point when these recurrent elements of the neoliberal order coincide once again to warp the transmission of cultural meaning, the renewed relevance of this history is apparent. It is an important characteristic of neoliberalism as a hegemonic global order that it was established by a populist movement of the conservative right, which asserted itself as a political force in the 1980s. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher radicalized the Conservative Party and installed a new narrative of society on the basis of an appeal to an alliance of socially conservative working class and lower middle class voters.45 In the United States, Ronald Reagan revived the ultra-conservative Republican platform of Barry Goldwater, supported by the mobilized ‘moral majority’ of evangelical Christians. Angela Mitroupolos argues that rather than being defined by an economic agenda focused on deregulation and free markets, as it is often represented, neoliberalism is dependent on its appeal to ‘traditional family values’, ‘law and order’ and the war on drugs. These policies are part of neoliberalism’s foundational narrative: a natural economic order and equilibrium that will be achieved once the free market can assert itself.46 Mitroupolos’s point is that narratives that blame President Trump’s success in 2016 on a post-truth politics, miss the point; Trump represents a return to essential characteristics of the neoliberal project. Nancy Fraser, in her account of neoliberalism, identifies this early phase as ‘reactionary neoliberalism’, which was supplanted with the Democrat victory of President Bill Clinton in 1994. President Clinton and, then in the UK, Prime Minister Tony Blair, a few years later, were the face of what Fraser terms ‘progressive neoliberalism’. This new political bloc ‘won the day by talking the talk of diversity, multiculturalism and women’s rights, even R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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while preparing to walk the walk of Goldman Sachs’.47 Beside continuing the economic project established in the 1980s, progressive neoliberalism also continued the rolling back of social protections, playing upon hostility to migrants, and expanding militarized policing. In a sense then, the recent turn to national-populist governments is a vengeful return or intensification of an atmosphere of social crisis that prevailed in the 1980s and early 1990s. Gonzalez-Torres’s works may be read as an exploration of the instability of subjectivity and sentiment that accompanies the circulation of images and commodities under neoliberalism. Rather than emphasizing co-presence, as Bourriaud argued, these works are metonymic of a struggle over norms and an exploration of the way privacy and desire are concatenated in a culture of intensified consumerism. Rather than resist or elude the social form of commodity aesthetics, Gonzalez-Torres poses a question about social relations, and their fragility, within it.

Communism and Go-Go Dancing In functionalist social theory, norms are classically represented as unconscious internalized conditioning. The social theorist Barry Barnes provides a helpful corrective to this idea. Although he acknowledges that norms do often constrain action, as he puts it, ‘for there to be a coherent public practice, in which it can be said that norms are routinely being followed, it is necessary for people continually to redefine and renegotiate what the following consists in and hence what norms imply’.48 Norms are not a cause of social cohesion that is beyond the reflective comprehension of social actors. In fact, norms are ‘intensely self-referential’.49 Indeed, norms are consciously followed because they seem to be followed by others: To know that a practice exemplifies a norm is to know that most people take the practice to exemplify the norm. For example, to know that driving on the left is a norm is to know that most people do regard it as normative. A collective will make the claim that driving on the left normative into a true claim by coming to believe it (collectively). Thus, in a perfectly clear and straightforward sense, knowing norms is knowing what is generally known. And thus knowledge of norms is ‘about’ itself. A normative order exists as a distribution of self-referring 104

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and self-validating knowledge. It exists, therefore, just as long as it is (collectively) known to exist.50 This passage is useful because it provides a way of thinking about the reflexivity and the instability of social norms. A norm is a collective behaviour that can quickly fall away once it loses collective consent. In Gonzalez-Torres’s works, too, norms are never stable, they are subject to revision. The collectivity of the work rests always on an individual decision. The emancipatory implications of this idea may be seen in the work ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform) by Gonzalez-Torres that was first displayed as part of the exhibition Everyday There Is Something Different shown at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York in 1991 (Figure 3.4). Integral to ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform) is the stipulation that, for approximately five minutes each day that the gallery is open, the work is

FIGURE 3.4  Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991. Wood, light bulbs, acrylic paint, and go-go dancer in silver lamé bathing suit, sneakers, and personal listening device. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Platform: 21 1/2 x 72 x 72 inches (54.6 x 182.9 x 182.9 cm). Installation View: Every Week There is Something Different. Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY. 2 May – 1 Jun. 1991. (A four-part project by Felix Gonzalez-Torres). Photographer: Peter Muscato. Image courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. From left to right: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ‘Untitled’ (Natural History), 1990; ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy of the Felix GonzalezTorres Foundation.

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used as a dancing platform by a dancer wearing silver lamé shorts and a ‘personal listening device’. For the rest of the time it is installed, the work is a podium whose top edge is studded with electric light bulbs. In this form, it is a ‘queered’ minimalist sculpture. Painted blue, it recalls minimalist works by Donald Judd or Robert Morris, but the austere, masculinist coding of the minimalism is disoriented by lightbulbs that are reminiscent of an illuminated dressing-room mirror. The minimalist object, severe and geometrical, implied techniques of industrial production in its standardized appearance, though it was intentionally useless. Gonzalez-Torres includes many references to minimalism and conceptualism in his work, as though invoking the sequence of transgressions that formed the ‘isms’ of the 1960s from which contemporary art now derives its norms. With the periodic introduction of the dancer, the artefact is provided a social use as a dancing podium. It is significant that this work, when it was first displayed, was originally flanked by images from the work ‘Untitled’ (Natural History), photographs of words carved on the Theodore Roosevelt memorial at the Museum of Natural History in New York, reading ‘Soldier’, ‘Explorer’ and ‘Naturalist’. These acclamatory terms become subversive reinscriptions, presenting a celebration and a memorialization of the courage involved in queer selfexpression in a moment of reactionary pressure and of the AIDS-crisis. ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform) has been analysed by Claire Bishop as an instance of ‘delegated performance’ because the dancers are paid to participate in the work. Bishop groups this work with others that, as she puts it, ‘reify precisely in order to explore reification’ (original emphasis).51 This reading emphasizes physical subjection, and masochistic identification with power through the motif of ‘BDSM sex’ and Pierre Klossowski’s reading of De Sade in his text La Monnaie Vivante. It is interesting to note that, in Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud tends to read this work in similar terms. Bourriaud writes, of the work: ‘it is impossible not to avert the eye, enmeshed in its aesthetic designs, which reifies, no precautions taken, a human being by assimilating it to the artworks surrounding it’.52 These interpretations overstate the transgressive dimension of this work while missing the nuance in its reflective engagement with behavioural norms. Although the subjugation of the dancer’s body is an implication of the work, the dancer also stages alternative uses for an art object: where the echoes of the minimalist fetish for industrial production are supplanted by the libidinal, affective intensity of the nightclub. Of 106

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course, this has been one of the most obvious areas of social change under neoliberalism in the ‘advanced’ capitalist economies, where warehouses and factories are retooled as expensive living spaces, night clubs and art museums. Although reflecting different kinds of economic activity, these are different articulations of use-value, and different relationships to the commodity form. Minimalism’s enigmatic balancing between object and sculpture is satirized, reduced to the most traditional sculptural category, acting as a plinth for a figure that suggests the Western tradition of statuary and its disavowed homoeroticism. Rather than a reifying it, the work allows the dancer’s body to suggest an emancipatory movement beyond geometric facticity and the cloying phenomenology of the white cube. But this horizon is run up against the social conventions of art experience. Audiences might sometimes take a piece of an art work, but they don’t usually dance. There is the potential here to shift the norms of passive and detached spectatorship, which are contingent but strangely durable. Gonzalez-Torres often suggested that the key concern of his work was to confuse the relationship between public and private, a theme that can be construed as part of his inheritance of feminist art.53 The Walkman, in cultural studies discourse, was understood as a technology that interrupted the conventional distribution of public and private space. It was also featured in Gonzalez-Torres’s early dateline work, ‘Untitled’, from 1987, where a seemingly arbitrary sequence of names and dates is concatenated, as though to implicate the personal and the historical in a disordered temporal sequence (Figure 3.5). For these reasons, the Walkman serves as an appropriate entrance point into this aspect of Gonzalez-Torres’s project.54 This technology was famously identified with the new ubiquity of popular culture in the 1980s, and as an emblem of postmodernism. Iain Chambers published a classic analysis of the Walkman in 1990, contemporaneously to Gonzalez-Torres’s work.55 This essay provides a useful frame through which to examine GonzalezTorres’s use of the personal listening device in ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform). Chambers’s essay is characteristic of its theoretical moment in its fusion of sophisticated analysis and postmodernist cultural populism. The dialectic of public and private that he reads in the Walkman tends to be upbeat, even ecstatic. Although the device seems to ‘signify a void’, it is at the same time a ‘pregnant zero . . . the crucial digit in a particular organization of sense’.56 The isolation implied by the experience of R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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FIGURE 3.5  Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ‘Untitled’, 1987. Framed photostat. 8 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches. Edition of 1, 1 AP with 2 additional Aps. Photographer: Oren Slor. Image courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

listening to the device is only apparent: ‘in the apparent refusal of sociability the Walkman act nevertheless reaffirms participation in a shared environment. It directly partakes in the changes in the horizon of perception that characterized the late twentieth century’. Chambers invokes this ‘mutable collage’ that the Walkman accesses through a familiar populist avant-garde motif of production and consumption practices: the ‘DJS, rap crews, dub masters, recording engineers’ and our consumption of their work, ‘we put together our personal play-lists, skip some tracks, repeat others, turn up the volume to block out the external soundtrack’.57 In this way, the reading of the Walkman builds towards a dialectical reversal of the relationship between private and public space. As Chambers puts it: If the Walkman so far represents the ultimate form of music on the move, it also represents the ultimate musical means in mediating the media. For it permits the possibility, however fragile and however transitory, of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural 108

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environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment it can all be brought under the stop / start, fast forward, pause and rewind buttons.58 The urban flux is mediated by the soundtrack, which is imagined as a technological emancipation through control. Urban space is ‘domesticated’, made private and reordered according to a new soundtrack, as a kind of resistance to its pre-existent saturation with media. For Chambers, the device is both a ‘mask and a masque’, a subcultural technology for the ‘nomads of modernity’. In this utopian vein, postmodern cultural theory elaborated the avant-gardist potential in the early stages of the convergence of media technologies into miniaturized and portable forms, a process that obviously continues beyond the 1990s.59 Chambers concludes with a strikingly romantic evocation of Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines and the lost plenitude of its world sung into being by indigenous Australians. This ‘religious aura’ perhaps ‘continues to echo inside the miniaturized headphones of modern nomads as the barely remembered traces of a once sacred journey’.60 This kind of euphoric riff is very much of its time. But it is also a response to the tensions that became apparent in culture in the 1980s and 1990s. Chambers writes of the confusion of place implied by the soundscapes provided by the Walkman, which he relates to a deeper ‘semantic and political crisis’ caused by the irruption of a politics of identity in the 1980s: A previous order and organization of place, and their respective discourses, has had increasingly to confront an excess of languages emerging out of the histories and languages of feminism, sexual rights, ethnicity, race and the environment, that overflow and undercut its authority. Is the Walkman therefore a political act? It is certainly an act that unconsciously entwines with many micro-activities in conferring a different sense on the polis . . . In producing a different space and time, it participates in rewriting the conditions of representation61. The dancer and his Walkman in ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform) are legible in multiple ways, as in all of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, though they seem to evoke Chamber’s emancipatory jouissance at least as much as they do the ruthless exploitation and reification of the body. The dancer represents a performance of queer identity as a spatial and time-based R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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intervention, but suggests, at the same time, the mediation of identity by the commodity form. The inclusion of a personal listening device in the work connects the representation of identity to the image world that accompanied the emergence of the Walkman. The decision to stipulate that the dancer wears ‘sneakers’, another item that became fetishized in the 1980s, seems to support this reading. On the other hand, the implied nomadism of the dancer’s unexpected arrival in the gallery is not so romantic as it is in Chambers’s account of the Walkman. The individualistic connotations of ‘nomadism’ becomes apparent in the solitary appointment of the dancer. The Walkman and dancer seem to interrogate the losses and gains in a world shaped by commodity aesthetics: the configurations of freedom and constraint that is created when ‘all that is solid melts into air’ under pressure of technological and social change. In this way, Gonzalez-Torres superimposes the social form of the commodity and an ideal aesthetic community which extends beyond the immediate encounter between the work and the audience. The impossibility of this encounter is part of its pathos: it is legible as a kind of ‘artistic communism’, a term that I borrow from Stewart Martin. Martin discusses artistic communism as intertwined with ‘artistic capitalism’ in a way that is suggestive of Gonzalez-Torres’s staging of the commodity form in his stacks and candy spills. As Martin puts it ‘Communism historically proposed to overcome the distinction between work and leisure, labour and play or life, established by commodity production. Contemporary capitalism is typified by a parallel overcoming of these distinctions, but through commodification.’62 Viewed from this perspective, the emancipatory claim of art is interwoven with the effects of the commodity. Gonzalez-Torres’s work is a complex reflection on the nature of community, which is participatory though not in a way that requires the presence of spectators. The next section picks up the thread of Bourriaud’s reading of this work as an art of ‘co-presence’ and the resonance of this idea in the social turn.

The absent work of post-relational art In their evocation of collectivity, the stacks, candy spills and ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform) are not dependent upon co-presence but 110

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on a subtle interrelationship of presence and absence. The political implications of this formal characteristic become clear when it is placed in the context of a ‘culture war’. Gonzalez-Torres creates a politicized, but not a confrontational, work. The stacks and candy spills negotiate a subversive conciliation, where the ‘moral majority’ seems to get what it wants: easily comprehended motifs and beautiful atmospheres. This conciliation is not what it seems: the collective work subjects all norms to a destabilizing freedom. The works require decisions of the viewer. As though modelling a social crisis and its redemption, the works also generate contested definitions, which proliferate through the reception of the work. In its ‘formal’ characteristics, this work is not well described by Bourriaud’s idea of ‘co-presence and availability’. Bourriaud’s reading of Gonzalez-Torres stabilizes it: an ideal of community when it is contrasted to possessive individualism becomes a kind of norm.63 Although a redemptive community is an implication of Gonzalez-Torres’s subversive conciliation, as I describe it here, the work only insists on decisions, it does not insist on the actual togetherness of its participants. The collective identity of the work has a conceptual, or speculative, rather than an intersubjective basis. Bourriaud’s reading removes the play of presence and absence that creates in the stacks and candy spills a dynamic relationship between privacy and community. I stress the importance of this discrepancy in Bourriaud’s reading because it has an afterlife in the criticism of the social turn. Two critics have been particularly important in post-relational critical debates and attempts to move beyond the limitations involved in Bourriaud’s ideas. Claire Bishop became known for her engagement with elements of Jacques Rancière’s account of aesthetics and her writings about relational aesthetics and coined the term ‘the social turn’.64 Grant Kester developed an idea of ‘dialogic aesthetics’ that draws upon the practices of activist and community art. These two writers construe aesthetics in very different ways, though both emphasize the interrelationship of aesthetics and politics in their analysis of socially engaged art. Normally, these post-relational debates are said to place more emphasis on political issues than relational aesthetics did. This is sometimes signalled in the tendency for post-relational artworks to be situated outside the gallery space, rather than within it; the latter location is said to be characteristic of relational works. The distinction also derives from an influential critique of relational aesthetics, written by Claire Bishop. In ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, Bishop identifies in R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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Bourriaud’s work an idea of ‘community as immanent togetherness’ that fails to address the sense in which community involves dissent and disjuncture. She alleges that Bourriaud conceives community exclusively as ‘something held in common’.65 Bishop advocates, by contrast, art that is located by its relationship to ‘discomfort and frustration . . . along with absurdity, eccentricity, doubt and sheer pleasure’.66 She stresses the importance of participatory art that dramatizes, or even exacerbates social conflict, in the work of artists including Thomas Hirschorn, Artur Zmijewski, Santiago Sierra and Christoph Schlingensief, all of whom have produced controversial works, which are accused of exploiting their participants.67 Bishop’s critique of Bourriaud’s ideas does seem to hit home, identifying within them a subtly normative ideal of community. What is less certain is whether the works that Bishop advocates are more ‘political’ than those created by Gonzalez-Torres, although they are certainly more confrontational. In the passage from relational to post-relational art, the political implications of the social turn are usually said to arrive at two options: an attempt to exacerbate social tensions or to establish spaces for ethical dialogue and connectedness. Whereas Bishop advocates confrontation, Grant Kester theorizes dialogue. In Kester’s account of dialogic art, the artist is required to create legible work, refusing the hierarchical opacity of modernism.68 The artists associated with this position include the Austrian collective Wochenklausur, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, as discussed in Chapter 1, and collectives like Ala Plástica and Park Fiction. The activist works that Kester has advocated for have tended to have a more lasting influence that the provocative interventions that Bishop championed. As we will see in Chapter 4, this is perhaps because confrontational artworks may seem gratuitous in a period when instability is seemingly everywhere. The debate between Bishop and Kester is worth revisiting, because it tended to polarize the politics of the social turn. Bishop argued that activist works have an ‘ethical imperative’, ‘drawn from a tacit analogy between anticapitalism and the good Christian soul’.69 Kester replied to this attack with similar robustness.70 In a reply to Bishop’s article, published in Artforum he writes: What Bishop seeks is an art practice that will continually reaffirm and flatter her self-perception as an acute critic, ‘decoding’ or unraveling a given video installation, performance, or film, playing at hermeneutic 112

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self-discovery like Freud’s infant grandson in a game of ‘fort’ and ‘da’. In addition to naturalizing deconstructive interpretation as the only appropriate metric for aesthetic experience, this approach places the artist in a position of ethical oversight, unveiling or revealing the contingency of systems of meaning that the viewer would otherwise submit to without thinking. The viewer, in short, can’t be trusted.71 Rather than adjudicate between these arguments, it is more interesting to see them as symptomatic of long-standing tensions in sociopolitical aesthetics. At issue in this dispute are problems that were also part of Gonzalez-Torres’s response to the Culture Wars of the early 1990s. Indeed, the struggle between legibility and avant-gardism was a topic throughout the entire 1980s, most famously in the dispute about the removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc from Foley Federal Plaza in 1989. The question of desire and conflict that Bishop poses and the problem of legibility and of art’s hierarchical address, which Kester emphasizes, are both present in public art debates throughout the period of neoliberalism. In the paper stacks and candy spills, Gonzalez-Torres incorporates these tensions in different kind of synthesis, before they re-emerge in the debate about post-relational art. Theoretical debates are defining of the social turn because the artworks themselves are typically ephemeral. In the book Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop suggests that participatory art ‘tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness’.72 Intersubjective qualia of this kind are not easily available to a critic’s reflective judgement, of course. Even where the critic participates in a work themselves, it is difficult for a single individual to give an authoritative account of a collective work. Much participatory art may only survive in the testimony of ‘the artist, the curator, a handful of assistants, and maybe some of the participants’.73 Bishop acknowledges that, often, even the artists themselves are not present for the duration of the work.74 This idea of a collective work seems to be inaccessible to critical reflection: one may participate but even then not consider the work in its entirety, because the work is created by all participants’ different contributions. In practice, of course, there are elements of the structure, or script, of participatory artworks which do provide material for critical reflection at a distance. In fairness to Bishop, one of her key arguments is that participatory works need to include a mediating ‘object, concept, image or story’ to engage with a secondary audience unable to participate in the project itself.75 This only defers the problem, however, because R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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any art work whatsoever may claim to derive from a social context or to have social effects. Bishop’s implicit conception of the artwork situates collectivity as a kind of metaphysical immediacy that coincides with the original participants although these participants may not have simultaneously experienced the work. In fact, it is only documentation and critical commentary that provides this fragmentary situation with any cohesion at all. As I have already noted, the disagreement between Kester and Bishop is based on different political valuations: Kester’s work emphasizes an ‘ethical’ engagement between artists and non-artists; for Bishop a confrontational or destabilizing relationship is more important. This is a dispute about how artwork might create a significant political intervention, but the social encounter that forms the basis of the work is fragmentary and elusive. One of the side-effects of aesthetics in the work of Bourriaud, Bishop and Kester, ironically, is that the location of the artwork becomes deeply uncertain. In Kester’s work, the imperative issue is to do justice to the dialogic encounter that he sees as essential to a collectively realized artwork. Kester emphasizes that this element ought not to be subsumed by routine art critical readings of works. An ideal criticism would focus on observing the changes that occurred in the social organization of the project over time, the modulations of agency, the movements of critical insight and stasis, and the ways in which the participants accommodated or challenged the authority of state or public authorities and [the artist] herself76 In a dialogue with Kester on this proposal, the critic and art historian E. C. Feiss asks how a critic might even begin to engage with the collective social reality of a work in the terms Kester proposes. There are significant problems involved in the idea that it might be possible to critically evaluate ‘modulations of agency’, as Kester calls them, in a participatory work. Who recognizes these micro-political shifts, and how does the observer confirm their interpretation of events? These epistemological questions are the subject of extended and unresolved debates in the social sciences, which casts doubt on the idea that concepts or methods borrowed from other disciplines might somehow make dialogic works transparent to criticism. The tensions in this debate seems be tied up with an idea of the work as collective co-presence. In these respects, both Kester and 114

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Bishop work with this motif established in Bourriaud’s account of relational aesthetics. The problem is that, once this idea is taken up as an organizing principle for art criticism, the artwork vanishes. In practice, many participatory artworks do not actually depend on the participants being continually present. Even more challenging, it is difficult to identify what is significant about collective co-presence, except by reference to ephemeral intersubjective qualities. In contrast to the dynamic interaction between presence and absence that exists in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work, there seems in the debate between Bishop and Kester to be a critical stand-off where participation and dialogue are idealized because the works discussed are so radically ephemeral. Once again, some insight into this strange problem of the social turn comes from a comparison to Gonzalez-Torres’s works. The paper stacks and candy spills avoid this problem of the elusiveness of the collective artwork because they contain objects. The decisive issue in the form of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s works is that they use objects to investigate the indiscernible boundary of the social encounter. Each work is proposed in such a way that it can manifest at different times in different ways, or even manifest in more than one place simultaneously. Each time the work is displayed the owner or institution licensed to display it is also given an opportunity to interpret it within the parameters set by the work’s description, as laid down in its certificate of authenticity. The consequences of this freedom become apparent when one compares the documentation from iterations of a work. At different times, the parameters of works are interpreted in divergent ways. For example, because ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform) does not specify the gender of the dancer, this role has been taken on by a woman (Figure 3.6). Each iteration of the work creates a new permutation of its potential meanings. Gonzalez-Torres’s works are not multiples; as we have seen, the unity of each work is non-negotiable. Equally though, they are not ‘one off ’ works, constrained by their location in time and place. The movement of the works, their ability to ‘manifest’, interacts dynamically with the changeful heteronomy of social reality. By contrast, Bishop and Kester both tend to conceive of the post-relational artwork originating in an intersubjective encounter. This identification of the post-relational work with an original encounter tends to idealize immediate experience, either as dialogue or antagonism. The ‘endless supply’ that forms the horizon of the stacks and candy spills, better evokes the fragmentation that is implicit in collectivity. R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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FIGURE 3.6  Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991. Wood, light bulbs, acrylic paint, and go-go dancer in silver lamé bathing suit, sneakers, and personal listening device. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Platform: 21 1/2 x 72 x 72 inches (54.6 x 182.9 x 182.9 cm). Installation view: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Serpentine Gallery, London, England, United Kingdom. 1 Jun. – 16 Jul. 2000. Cur. Lisa G. Corrin. (With satellite venues: Camden Arts Centre, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Royal College of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Royal Geographical Society, London, England, United Kingdom). Photographer: Stephen White. Image courtesy of Serpentine Gallery. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

In his lectures on sociology, Adorno likens the social to the Hegelian ‘bad infinity’, an indeterminate endlessness. He writes that ‘there is nothing under the sun, and I mean nothing, which, being mediated through human intelligence and human thought, is not also sociallymediated’.77 Whereas Gonzalez-Torres turns this bad infinity into a poetic device, for post-relational art it becomes an unresolvable difficulty. Given that it is so difficult to say what the social basis of participatory art is, how is it possible then to say whether it involves critique of or complicity in capitalism? This question may be explored by turning to a discussion of the reception of Gonzalez-Torres’s work.

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Candy spills and neoliberalism In ‘The Uses of Disorder’, an essay from 2010, the artist and theorist Joe Scanlan reflects on the intimate relationship between Relational Aesthetics and Gonzalez-Torres’s reputation. As Scanlan puts it, Bourriaud’s ‘serial treatises on relational aesthetics, postproduction and precariousness ostensibly all have Gonzalez-Torres – his politics, working methods, and formal instability – at their bases’. He suggests that Gonzalez-Torres’s work was never subject to critical challenge, or ‘it never had to convince skeptics over an extended period of time that it was worth looking at, thinking about, or participating in’. He goes on: ‘In retrospect, it seems that his billboards, light strands, paper stacks, and candy spills were so ingenious and viscerally affective that they could only be embraced, almost immediately and without question, as a kind of egalitarian salvation.’78 The strong implication of this argument is that Bourriaud’s curatorial advocacy is the cause of this critical failure. Scanlan suggests that Bourriaud’s reading ‘represses the covetous side of the artist’s publicprivate dialectic’ in favour of the ‘pragmatic decorum of the institutional practice and the utopian social interactions that the time and space of a given exhibition might allow’.79 To address this deficit, he advances a counter-reading that emphasizes the ‘dark side’ of Gonzalez-Torres’s work, arguing that it anticipates a neoliberal instrumentalization of community. Scanlan’s case in outline is that the ‘style and persona of GonzalezTorres . . . mark an important transformation in the style and atmosphere of power, from the ordinal authority of modern capitalism to the pseudocommunitarianism of today’.80 What minimalism was to the ‘militaryindustrial complex’ in the 1960s, the ‘flexibility, organicism, accessibility, eloquence’ of Gonzalez-Torres’s work is to contemporary formations of power.81 Scanlan acknowledges that Gonzalez-Torres’s works are beautiful, occupying ‘the outer reaches of having: to have memories, to have someone, to have desires’, but he insists that they also embody the recognition that ‘the most expansive, pervasive way to amass power is to not seem powerful at all’.82 The upshot of this reading is the suggestion that Gonzalez-Torres somehow anticipated the networked sociality of web 2.0 and the market for online data-mining, where group behaviour is tracked and used to develop new kinds of market intelligence. In this account, the choice R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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that Gonzalez-Torres stages is one that is something like an experiment, which produces data on human behaviour. Scanlan notes that GonzalezTorres’s works, which are endorsed by certificates issued by his gallerist Andrea Rosen, have become a ‘chameleonic kind of artwork, one that is able to adapt to whatever power and money might accrue to the idea of an artwork being able to adapt – a perfect fiduciary tautology!’83 This argument provides a very clear example of an attempt to situate Gonzalez-Torres and relational aesthetics squarely within a symptomatic reading of neoliberalism. It should be clear that Scanlan’s is an uncharitable reading, because it entirely fails to register the artist’s own interest in the cultural and psychosocial characteristics of neoliberal culture, as I have already outlined. It makes the case that the open-endedness of GonzalezTorres’s works, and their success, renders them defenceless against cooption. Indeed, in Scanlan’s interpretation, Gonzalez-Torres’s work has manipulative characteristics, which anticipate and, perhaps even, contribute to the emergence of the neoliberal project of the ‘pseudocommunity’. Scanlan’s argument is worth considering because it is typical of attempts to explain relational works in relation to the instrumentalization of community by neoliberal discourse, or the remodelling of neoliberal labour practices around the ideal of a highly motivated and poorly remunerated creative worker.84 These ideas are used to stage an unveiling of the exploitative reality behind the motif of collaboration, and the co-option of the emancipatory drives in art of the 1960s. Lane Relyea suggests that an increasingly networked and project-oriented art world conforms to the diagnosis offered by Chiapello and Boltanski. Jasper Bernes puts the co-option of artistic critique at the centre of his study of the models of work exploring experimental poetry and conceptual art since the sixties.85 No longer emblematic of an intersubjective aesthetic experience, as it is for Bourriaud, Gonzalez-Torres’s work becomes, in Scanlan’s reading, symptomatic of protean elitism and the loose projectbased identity required by contemporary service workers. Seemingly critical, Scanlan’s thesis results in an account of social agency that is far cruder than that the modelling of behaviour that is present in Gonzalez-Torres’s works themselves. Participatory works, it seems, are quite easily misrepresented by art criticism that seeks to quickly diagnose their relationship to a social order. The art theorist Ina Blom has advanced an account of the relational artwork that it is useful to bring into play at this point. Blom does not discuss Gonzalez-Torres, 118

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but rather treats works by Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravinaja. Her broad thesis is that a distinctive feature of 1990s art is its engagement with problems of ‘style’, specifically the way that stylistic features of design combine to create atmospheres that shape collective subjectivity. Blom describes works that treat social experience in this way as working on the ‘style-site’ and uses the lamp as a motif through which to examine the interplay between design, atmosphere and sociality. This reframing of 1990s art seems appropriate to capture the aesthetics of Gonzalez-Torres’s work, bound up with his subtle investigation of identity. For the purposes of this argument the most important aspect of Blom’s analysis is that it understands the social as a space of competing definitions. Blom cites theorist Bruno Latour to support this interpretation: A new vaccine is being marketed, a new job description is offered, a new political movement is being created, a new planetary system is discovered, a new law is voted, a new catastrophe occurs. In each instance, we have to reshuffle our conceptions of what was associated together because the previous definition has been made somewhat irrelevant . . . Thus, the overall project of what we are supposed to do together is thrown into doubt. The sense of belonging has entered a crisis. But to register this feeling of crisis and to follow these new connections, another notion of the social has to be devised. It has to be much wider than what is usually called by that name, yet strictly limited to the tracing of new associations and to the designing of their assemblages.86 This statement of purpose for Latour’s ‘Actor–Network Theory’ diagnoses the social as the realm of a kind of epistemological crisis. Here, I will read it as a useful indication of the conditions which have made possible the social turn: the condition of not really knowing what the social is, or what it might be, because of the rapidity of its reorganization. This chapter has avoided discussing in detail the works advocated for by Claire Bishop and Grant Kester, or others whose works might be understood in relation to the social turn. This is because each work seems to demand such a comprehensive treatment that it would be impossible to compare them. Whereas image-based and object-based works are available for comparison, even though they are open to different interpretations, works of socially engaged art are encompassing; the works created by Santiago R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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Sierra, or Wochenklasur, do not really have in common a ‘social’ form or substance. They envisage entirely different worlds. When Sierra creates a work where people are paid to sit all day in large cardboard boxes, this work is so presented that it suggests a model of social experience more generally. This is also the case when Wochenklasur creates a dialogue between sex workers and city officials to try to make possible better social provision. The importance of the social turn is perhaps that it has introduced a proliferation of social models as artworks; this diversity has only been crudely represented thus far in critical debates about participatory and dialogic art. The expansiveness of social experience, its immensity, is an insistent problem for attempts to contextualize socially engaged art.87 *** This chapter set itself the task of trying to understand how it may have been that relational aesthetics made way for a new way of thinking about art and politics, while at the same time naively reproducing the social forms of capitalism. This question has been addressed through an extended reflection on the role that collectivity plays in critical debates about social turn. The solution to this question, as presented here, is that the diversification of socially engaged practice is too easily misrepresented by crudely drawn diagnoses of new tendencies in capitalism. The emergence of new political concerns in art is not caused by relational aesthetics but by the sense that the social could be modelled and contested in art beyond the narrow theoretical frameworks that had been inherited from critical postmodernism. Bourriaud’s writings provide a useful jumping off point because, as I have tried to show, they are influential, even upon their detractors. A detailed reading of some of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s works has been used to find a way in to theoretical accounts that helped to define the social turn. The paper stack and candy spill works have a strange and compelling structure, which is explored here as a response to the social conflict of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The subversive conciliation, as I have termed it, that is found in a work like ‘Untitled’ (Placebo) results in a work that is entirely transparent in its meaning, though it frames a meditation on the relationship between individual and group, which activates the affective charge of behavioural norms. 120

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Given that the divisiveness of culture war rhetoric has returned, and it is in some ways intensified by the communications networks that were only at an early stage in the early 1990s, it is tempting to think that Gonzalez-Torres may have crystallized in these works a tension that is recurrent within neoliberalism. He certainly found a compelling resolution, as though before the fact, of the polarized demands made of participatory art in the debate between Claire Bishop and Grant Kester. A work like ‘Untitled’ (Placebo) is both about the resolution of desire within collective social existence and a transparent dialogue with its participants, if not a discursive one. Although this is only one reading among many that are possible, Gonzalez-Torres did think carefully about capitalism and the relationship between culture and the commodity form. The role of norms in social behaviour is useful in this interpretation of Gonzalez-Torres’s work to speak about the way that ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform), for example, seems to be acutely sensitive to social change, playing with the remnants of previous artistic transgression to stage the possibility of an emancipatory movement shaped by the commodity form. The paper stacks and candy spill works stage a speculative togetherness within the circulation of objects, which is quite possibly all that remains of community under neoliberalism. The enigma of co-presence, which is a foundational idea for the critical debates about the social turn, offers only a limited account of the challenge that these works present. Whether this co-presence is understood as a confrontational exposé of social contradiction, or as a dialogue between an artist and a community, its basis is not so much in a shared intersubjective experience, as it is in a speculative model of a social world. It may be that this characteristic of socially engaged art, which tends to demand immersion in its categories and experiential effects, is a reaction against the tendencies to social disintegration and solipsism coded into consumer culture. This logic is also perceptible in GonzalezTorres’s works, where the structure is held on the brink of fragmentation, by the terms laid down in its statement of authenticity. The artistic experiments that constitute the social turn are signals of a more wide-ranging cultural sensibility that recognizes social forms as radically contingent. This contingency may be experienced as an emancipatory sense of possibility or as a deeply troubling anxiety about the extent to which structures will be able to hold and what will replace them if they do not. Arguably, these are anxieties that permeate the R ELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND COLLECTIVITY

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entire period of modernity; however, they find a distinctive expression under neoliberalism, in the dynamics of culture wars. The exploitation, wealth disparity, racial and gender inequality that are intrinsic features of capitalist society mean that, when the social order begins to seem contingent or impermanent, the most powerful and well-organized groups step in to protect their interests. This is the scenario of crisis that I will begin to examine in the next chapter, which explores debates that have coalesced around the term ‘social practice’ and the social conflict that has emerged since 2016 in the UK.

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4 SOCIAL PRACTICE

The term ‘social practice’ became widely used after 2011 to refer to an interdisciplinary convergence of visual art, performance, theatre, experimental urbanism and art activism. It coincided with an effort to align socially engaged art with a longer history of avant-garde strategies that sought the activation of their audience by shifting the spectator into the role of participant.1 Performance theorist Shannon Jackson is one of the first to have used the term ‘social practice’, though she emphasizes that it is ‘resolutely imprecise’.2 For this reason, it is sometimes used as an umbrella term to address many different varieties of socially engaged art. Even so, social practice can be said to represent a distinctive phase in the evolution of the social turn. Whereas relational aesthetics staked its claim on the ephemeral collectivity of the encounter, social practice is identified with the idea that a collectively realized artwork ought to have beneficial and enduring effects. It is for this reason that social practice coincides with debates about ‘use’ in art and with the platform Arte Útil (useful art), introduced by Tania Bruguera alongside the slogan ‘put Duchamp’s urinal back in the restroom’.3 Typically, works of social practice take place outside the gallery space, though they remain closely linked to the art institution as we shall see. Although social practice seems to reverse the strategy of the ‘readymade’, it nonetheless plays on the indiscernible difference between practices that have been designated art and those that have not, reproducing the dynamic explored in relational aesthetics in Chapter 3. There are well-known works of social practice that take the form of a political campaign (Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, 2010–15), a community housing project (Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses, 1991–) and even a fast food outlet (Conflict Kitchen created by Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski).

The difficulty involved in identifying the boundary of an artwork ‘made’ of collective social experience, discussed in the previous chapter, remains a central motif of social practice.4 Although, seemingly, social practice moves beyond the art institution, in its play of indiscernible differences it is, as Arthur Danto wrote, constituted by ‘an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld’.5 A key difference from the readymade, however, is that social practice foregrounds political questions. It inherits from art activism and community art a critique of ideology and hierarchy and a positive valuation of everyday creativity. Social practice is oriented towards social justice, addressing inequalities of power and opportunity that exist within society. Though heavily theorized, social practice is also egalitarian in its focus on art that might improve the world. Whereas art activism and community art were marginalized, social practice has achieved mainstream recognition in recent years. The Turner Prize was awarded to the collective Assemble in 2015, for architectural work with Granby4Streets project in Toxteth, Liverpool, for example. In large part, an emphasis on usefulness has come to permeate artistic debates and the engagement programmes of large institutions. Kirstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt succinctly state a key criticism of this development, arguing that ‘the “disappearance” of the distinction between art and life has . . . become the central legitimating authority of a bureaucratic and “affirmative” cultural practice’.6 Here, we encounter another in the family of arguments that highight the co-option of art’s critical potential.7 Vishmidt and Stakemeier’s argument gives a reasonable explanation of the facts. Social practice is affirmative, in the sense that it normally intends to make a positive difference. It does seem to ‘close the gap between art and life’, in a way that recalls the project of the avant-garde. It has also increasingly become a practice that is adopted by large institutions or funded by the state. This chapter engages with Vishmidt and Stakemeier’s assessment of social practice, and similar arguments made by other critics, by exploring the distinctive conditions under which this convergence of avant-garde and institution has taken place. Distinctive financial and social pressures caused by neoliberalism explain key characteristics of social practice and its relative prominence in recent years. Here, I will try to show that the instability of this juncture means that social practice may offer, potentially, a chance to reflect upon the crises that permeate social experience under capitalism. In order to make 124

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this argument, I will examine in detail two works – one by Tania Bruguera and the other by Mark Storor – made in the UK since the referendum to leave the European Union in 2016, a period of great political upheaval.

Social practice and crisis Social practice is a ‘post-object’ artistic strategy that inherits the ambiguous fiction of collective presence provided by relational aesthetics, as discussed in the previous chapter, though now oriented towards utilitarian questions. The relationship between utility and utopia was important for the historical avant-garde, which entered modernism via the influence of the arts and craft movement. It was reshaped by the experiments of the productivists, who sought to embed art in industry, and by the constructivist avant-garde and the Bauhaus.8 In social practice, this legacy is joined to communitarian and activist currents that radicalized the implications of relational aesthetics. The resultant hybrid of discourses is, in its ideal self-image, one that conveys the distinctive agency of collective creativity to effect positive change. Equally, social practice typically contains critical perspectives that register the dysfunction which exists within the normal operation of the neoliberal state. Interventions that address crises form an important part of this genre. One of the first exhibitions where the term ‘social practice’ became widely used was the survey Living as Form, curated by Nato Thompson, which sampled works from 1991 until 2011. A sense of a watershed is associated with this exhibition because the New York iteration of ‘Living as Form’ coincided with the Occupy protests in Zuccotti Park. Though Thompson himself referred to ‘socially engaged art’ in his catalogue essay for this exhibition, two of the curators who contributed essays, Maria Lind and Shannon Jackson, described the field as ‘social practice’. Living as Form includes a wide variety of artwork, which is not easily reduced to a single categorization; however, an important tendency among the work collected in this exhibition makes explicit reference to crisis. Although Thompson’s evocation of social form emphasizes the collective agency involved in discovering ‘new forms of living’, many of the works in Living as Form seemed to respond to the contingencies of natural disaster, social malaise or war. The ‘Traditional Art and Culture S OCIAL PRACTICE

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Programme’ of Cemeti Art House, based in Yogyakarta in Indonesia, supported local groups to organize parades, performances and carnivals, working also with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as part of a cultural response to the devastation caused by an earthquake in the region. The Rwanda Healing Project, a project undertaken by a US-based group called Barefoot Artists since 2004, works with groups in Rwanda to acknowledge and address the legacy of genocide in that country. A number of the works selected responded to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, including Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans from 2007, Mel Chin’s Operation Paydirt/Fundred Dollar Bill Project from 2006 and the project Uprooted: The Katrina Project by the collective Alternate Roots, which developed a range of artistic responses based on conversations with members of Gulf communities between 2006 and 2008. In a different register, the project ExArgentina, by Berlinbased Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekman, examined the depiction of the Argentinian economic collapse of 2001. After moving to Buenos Aires, the artists worked on this project between 2002 and 2005 to identify ways of representing the crisis that did not make use of stereotypical media tropes but addressed the lived experience of the process of overcoming an economic disaster. The responses to crisis in these projects were not confined to discrete events but extended to address the processes of ecological damage caused by globalized capitalism as well. Interventions that address environmental concerns included the Argentinian group Ala Plástica, the artists Silvina Babich and Alejandro Meitlin, whose project Magdelana Oil Spill documented the effect of an oil spill in the wildlife refuge of Magdelena and the Parque Costero del Sur between 1999 and 2003 as part of an activist campaign designed to pressure the corporations responsible to fund a response to the ecological catastrophe caused by the spill. Work oriented more closely to urban planning included the collective Basurama, Residuos Urbanos Sólidos (Urban Solid Waste). This project from 2008 made use of waste materials to create spaces of recreation, as a basis for rethinking our relationship to a material and social world. It is a characteristic feature of these works that they address social inequality, including the effects of austerity on housing or public services, the prevalence of gentrification, or the consequences of the climate crisis, which affect the most economically insecure most severely. Social practice also addresses issues of gender inequality, racial inequality and the experience of indigenous peoples.9 These concerns, and the meta-framing 126

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in terms of crisis, are explicit in the survey publication, Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, published by the New Museum of Contemporary Art as a reader on social practice. In this work, published in 2016, the context of neoliberalism as an agent of social dysfunction is more prominent than in Nato Thompson’s Living as Form exhibition. Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson and Dominic Willsdon signal this central concern in the introduction to the volume, asking ‘when and how are cultural institutions, or cultural producers, asked to compensate for the effects of a dismantled public sector?’10 One of the fundamental themes of their essay is the way in which social practice has been ‘a catalyst in the creation of newly integrated labor models across curatorial and educational wings of arts organizations, reframing more traditional art forms, recasting those organization’s sense of their public purpose, and changing the funding rubrics of the governmental councils and foundations that support them’.11 This shift is particularly evident in relation to the emphasis on ‘usefulness’ as a central criterion for social practice. The Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), under the directorship of Alistair Hudson, championed useful art.12 The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven was designated the ‘Museum of Arte Útil’ during an exhibition in 2013.13 The Associacion de Arte Útil website indicates an impressive array of institutional partners.14 Critics of this development see it as embracing a neoliberal logic, which hides behind a moral screen of usefulness and egalitarianism. Larne Abse Gogarty notes that Hudson seeks to break away from the legacy of the modernist art museum, reorienting the programming of MIMA so that it is focused on ‘making a difference’, celebrating everyday practices. Whereas the public museum was founded as a space of self-improvement for the poor, Hudson hopes to create an egalitarian museum, which is focused on the practices of its users. Gogarty is critical of the ideological coordinates of this ambition. Noting that Hudson celebrates YouTube as a model of usership, and imagines a museum which would be created by its participants, Gogarty senses ‘a blind spot with regards property relations’. Equally, an ambition to make the museum socially useful by engaging with questions of social provision, such as healthcare, schools and education, naturalizes an ‘exclusionary notion of citizenship’, which is predicated on ‘racialisation and property ownership’.15 The fundamental charge against Hudson, and Arte Útil more generally, is that they naturalize the state by emphasizing values of citizenship and fetishize what Gogarty S OCIAL PRACTICE

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calls ‘subsistence scenarios’, situations of relative deprivation where art is introduced as a tool of empowerment. The criticisms that Gogarty makes do not all hit home, especially the claim that Arte Útil is insensitive to questions to do with state coercion and the enforcement of border regimes. Indeed, as we shall see, questions of state power, migration and statelessness are central to Tania Bruguera’s art practice. Though some projects of social practice are more politically astute than others, a critique of the neoliberal state and its modes of spatializing and racializing power plays an integral role in this artistic development. The state is regarded ambivalently, in some works potentially as a guarantor of social provision, in classically social democratic terms, but in others as a coercive apparatus of division and exclusion. These incompatible perspectives form the central point of discussion in Burton, Jackson and Willsdon’s Public Servants: The Crisis of the Common Good. They also reflect their political moment, where calls for the state to redress the damage caused by neoliberalism exist alongside recognition that the state, through its prison-industrialcomplex, its militarized policing and border regimes, was not founded to provide sanctuary. The strength of Gogarty’s critique is its identification of an ‘impoverished’ ideal of use in Arte Útil, a focus on bare social reproduction which aligns with ‘the logic of austerity’. Gogarty notes that the tension between ‘utopianism and utilitarianism’ which animated the avantgarde tends to be reduced, via the celebration of use, to an ideological adjustment to subsistence measures. The theorist Marina Vishmidt explores a related perspective in her writings on social practice. For Vishmidt, a defining feature of contemporary art is that it is permeated by models of entrepreneurial creativity that are part of the ideological justification for and lived reality of neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, creativity is often recoded as an entrepreneurial trait or as an aspect of ‘human capital’: ‘a springboard for capitalist populism, assuring every exploited worker and discontented artist that their interests are no different from those of capital’.16 As a result, artists have sometimes been regarded as paragons of value creation, while demonstrating through total subjective investment in their work new models and intensities of self-exploitation. The question that animates Vishmidt’s work is how this form of subjectivized ‘speculation’ has become entwined in the philosophically speculative space of art. Structured by its engagement with Adornoian aesthetics, Vishmidt’s project is a rigorous 128

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attempt to identify the grounds for critical art and resistant subjectivity under these new conditions. Vishmidt addresses social practice as a mutation of entrepreneurial ideology, which is introduced into crisis situations as a means of legitimating an orthodox position of neoliberalism: that market-based interventions provide optimal solutions to humanitarian problems. Her key example is the work of Theaster Gates, an African American artist who rose to stardom in the years after the financial crash of 2008 with an art practice based on an ingenious ‘circular ecosystem’.17 Gates’ project began with materials salvaged from the renovation of community spaces in the south side of Chicago, which were then used to create artworks. The funds raised by selling these works are channelled back into regeneration of community spaces. The entire process is conceived as the art practice, fronted by the charismatic artistic persona of Gates himself, who frames his work ambivalently, between a subversive project and a theological mission. The first of Gates’ redevelopment works was Dorchester Projects (2008), two buildings located on the same street that have been converted into community spaces and archives. Gates trains and employs local people to work on these projects through his ‘Rebuild Foundation’, which has been responsible for The Stony Island Arts Bank, a former bank building redeveloped into a community space and archive, as well as other similar projects. In the words of art historian Huey Copeland, Gates is a ‘business artist for the new millennium’. Copeland invokes here Andy Warhol’s deadpan statement ‘being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and business is the best art.’18 For Vishmidt, the defining feature of Gates’s work, and of social practice more generally, is the way that it envisages a pragmatic solution to social crisis via entrepreneurialism: Given the current social and economic decline in many parts of the world, with escalating concrete misery and stagnation a reality even in the ‘rich countries’, it is not surprising that activism and business pair up in a utopian vision of social desire that is, at bottom, a vision of money brokering intimate and meaningful exchanges that can have actual ‘empowering’ effects.19 The strength of Vishmidt’s critique is its identification of an ideological current within social practice which sits comfortably within the ruling ideologies of neoliberalism. Its weakness, however, is that Theaster S OCIAL PRACTICE

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Gates’s work is not typical of social practice, because it engages with the art market directly to raise funds for its regeneration projects. It is far more characteristic of social practice that it is funded via the state, or by art institutions, and that it is not traded on the art market. Even so, ideologies of social entrepreneurialism do overlap with social practice at multiple levels. To complete a sketch of this debate, I will address one more perspective before introducing my argument on the relationship between social practice and crisis. The theorist Irit Rogoff argues that NGOs provide a potential model for ‘emergent art institutions’, which seek to operationalize the political discourses that now circulate within art. Like Gogarty and Vishmidt, Rogoff attacks the logic of neoliberalism and its ‘formulaic insistence on “provision”, “satisfaction” and “credit attainment”’.20 The key difference is that Rogoff seems to provide a justification for the institutionalization of social practice. Looking to the example of Raqs Media Collective that created a literacy project in the slums of Delhi, Rogoff advocates for an NGO model for art practice, which might ‘understand the scope and scale of possible cultural intervention within crisis situations’.21 For Rogoff, the NGO provides a compelling model for cultural institutions, because ‘an NGO always begins its involvement with recognition of a problem: not with recognition of a target audience, niche market, or leisure economy, but of an urgency in the world’.22 Equally, the work of NGOs, whose humanitarian mission exists in a space that is not part of the state, is connected to the grassroots but not part of that either, offers a way to conceptualize the effectiveness of social practice: ‘the NGO model allows us to think about the relation between the kinds of informal sociabilities that we see within the art world and their possible link to an emergent model of effectiveness’.23 The institution might conceive itself as a speculative kind of intervention: ‘a hallmark of NGO culture is its ability to fluidly connect spheres within a situation confronting crisis – a moment of criticality that crystallizes a set of problems viewed from both official and entirely informal sets of perspectives’.24 Rogoff ’s argument is very interesting on more than one level. First, it demonstrates how far the debate about social practice has moved from simple ‘co-option’. It is a position that attempts to pre-emptively change the art institution from within to resist the encroachment of neoliberal agendas. The institutional dimension of Arte Útil represents a similar impetus, demonstrating the extent to which an avant-gardist frame of reference is shared by artists and museum professionals in contemporary 130

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art settings. Equally, though, Rogoff ’s argument is based on an idealized view of NGOs and, seemingly, a limited awareness of the extent to which radical NGOs have formed an institutional backdrop to activist art throughout the 2000s. In Rogoff ’s account, NGOs have ‘little preoccupation with allocating the blame for who created the problem or who is blocking the possibilities of resolving it and, instead, begin to reshape the landscape through an active network of micro-gestures’.25 In fact, the history and practice of NGOs is highly contentious.26 It could hardly be otherwise, because the NGO is an organizational form which is closely identified with the management of humanitarian crises under neoliberalism. In Planet of Slums, an analysis of the enormous increase of impoverished, precarious urban slums since the 1970s – where at least one billion of the world’s population now live – Mike Davis identifies the proliferation of NGOs in the 1990s with the expansion of neoliberal ideology. NGOs work within a ‘tiered system’ where large donors work with international organizations, which work in turn with groups embedded in cities in the developing world. The explicit mission of NGOs is one of empowerment and synergy, though these ideals are shaped in terms of a neoliberal entrepreneurial ideal. Under the presidency of James Wolfenshohn in the 1990s, upper levels of NGOs tended to be incorporated into the institutional networks of the World Bank and global finance.27 The NGO is an important vehicle for operationalizing the entrepreneurial ideology discussed by Vishmidt. Critics of NGOs see them as a bureaucratic layer that draws energy out of self-organized movements among the dispossessed. Even so, as sociologists Feyzi Ismael and Sangeeta Kamat note, the NGO is an ambiguous institutional form: although it is favoured by neoliberal global governance, it is also ‘capable of building alliances against neoliberalism, particularly in times of polarisation and crisis’.28 The World Social Forum, which was an important focus of the ‘movement of movements’ that animated alterglobalization protests in the early 2000s, was built around radical NGOs. This milieu forms an important backstory for the activist strand of social practice, because it was closely related to antiWorld Trade Organization protests and anti-Iraq war actions. In Nato Thompson’s account of art activism, these protests formed a key context for aesthetic and performative experimentation which fed into the survey Living as Form.29 The NGO is, therefore, a natural institutional accompaniment to social practice. Social practice is embroiled in the legacy of the avantS OCIAL PRACTICE

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garde, but it is also part of the disarticulation of the art institution under neoliberalism. A central theme in social practice is the refashioning of sociopolitical aesthetics to respond to crisis situations. This approach to crisis is driven by the actual and undeniable instability of the global order. It has received an enthusiastic reception from museums because it offers an opportunity to resolve an intractable contradiction between the reduction of art to financial imperatives, accountability measures that stress popular engagement and a world in which social crisis is ever more apparent. At one level, social practice is a way of reinventing in a cost-effective way the universalist civic mission of the museum for a period of political instability and upheaval. Social practice, from this perspective, crystallizes an institutional response to the contingencies of the current neoliberal order. Although it may become allied to bureaucracy, to return to Vishmidt and Stakemeier’s characterization, it is a bureaucracy that is increasingly disarticulated. The spectrum of political positions identified with social practice, including broadly social democratic and anti-statist impulses, exists within the institution, but uncomfortably, resulting in a more exposed relationship to political questions. The critical potential of this situation should be understood in relation to this complex balance of forces as I will now illustrate.

Social practice after Brexit Two artworks will be used to situate this discussion of social practice and its relationship to the art institution in the complex cross-currents in the phase of neoliberal crisis that emerged after 2016 in the United Kingdom. First, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s 2018 Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission entitled 10, 146, 058. In it, Bruguera contextualizes the socalled migrant crisis, which saw many thousands of people lose their lives by drowning in the Mediterranean, en route to the European Union. The second work, Baa-Baa Baric: Have You Any Pull? by Mark Storor, was commissioned by the agency Heart of Glass as part of the UK Arts Council ‘Creative People & Places’ programme in St Helens, a town in the north-west of England. Storor’s is a long-term work, which began in 2015 and which is set to last for twelve years. It is remarkable because of the extent to which it incorporates the social effects of austerity and Brexit into an evocation of community in a deindustrialized and economically deprived town. 132

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Both Bruguera and Storor, though in different ways, demonstrate the extent to which social practice has become embedded in the art institution at its various levels of operation. Whereas Bruguera works with a famous contemporary art museum, Storor’s work is identified with a single town and funded via the Arts Council. Despite their differences, these works register interrelated crises. Whereas 10, 146, 058 addresses the invisibility of migrants, whose experience is obscured by official attempts to rationalize their exclusion from the state, Baa-Baa Baric: Have You Any Pull? addresses economic deprivation and anomie experienced by citizens of a town that has been bypassed by the economic benefits of globalization. The inter-related crises addressed by these works co-exist and play a part within the political and constitutional upheaval caused by the Referendum to leave the European Union. Read alongside one another, these works provide a way to understand the convergence of local and global effects of policies associated with neoliberalism: austerity, interventionist wars and militarized border regimes. These two works will be used to demonstrate that social practice may provide a distinctive insight into the fragility of institutions of civic life now. Tania Bruguera’s practice is shaped by geopolitical displacements that have taken place since 1989, felt in a distinctive way in her native Cuba. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba lost in the region of 87 per cent of its foreign trade and entered its worst-ever period of economic crisis, exacerbated by a strict trade embargo imposed by the United States, which included a ban on any aid being sent to the island. The Cuban government put in place the policy known as ‘The Special Period in Time of Peace’ to manage this economic shock. Verónica Tello notes that one of the effects of this period of crisis was to bring Cuba into a different relationship of cultural exchange with Europe and Latin America. Contemporary art, at this point, became part of foreign policy as a means to construct networks of support to replace the country’s former economic dependence on the Soviet Union.30 This geopolitical shift made it possible for Bruguera from the mid-1990s to exhibit and attend residencies throughout the world. Bruguera continues to live in Cuba and make work there, but she refuses to abide within the ideological boundaries set by the Cuban government. Neither does she celebrate the supposed freedoms of the West. Instead, her work has typically involved passionate advocacy for insurrectionary and utopian social movements against the orthodoxies of liberal democracy. Bruguera maintains a position that is in contact with the classical dilemma of the Cold War avant-garde: advocating S OCIAL PRACTICE

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for emancipatory revolution but in continual conflict with the political form that is taken by one of the few remaining states that is avowedly Marxist. Far from being insensitive to problems of art’s relationship to the state, as Gogarty suggests, Bruguera’s experience shows her to be highly sensitive to the ruses and blind spots of state power. Bruguera’s involvement with Tate Exchange was even interrupted because she was placed under house arrest in Cuba, because of her opposition to Decree 349, a proposed law that would require Cuban artists to be registered by their government. Bruguera’s work has been deeply concerned with questions to do with the experience and representation of migrants from early in her artistic career. Immigrant Movement International, which was undertaken between 2010 and 2015, is among her best-known works of social practice. As Verónica Tello notes, a series of earlier works also deals with the dehumanization of migrants, including Homenaje a Ana Mendieta (Homage to Ana Mendieta, 1985–96) and La Memoria de la postguerra (Postwar memory, 1993–7).31 In these works, the explicit focus is migration from Cuba. It is estimated that around a million people have migrated from Cuba since the revolution in 1960. Although this migration is tolerated, migrants are mocked and dehumanized by official Cuban discourse. Key waves of migration are associated with the economic depression of the 1980s, known as the Mariel boatlift, and the subsequent economic crash of the ‘special period’. These details are important because they establish that the politics of Bruguera’s work is not superficial, or naïve, but engaged with the shaping of lived reality by state power and geopolitical conflict. Bruguera has developed a distinctive lexicon of theoretical terms, which establish her approach to political aesthetics. She emphasizes that her work is a ‘dialogue with power’, for example. She sometimes also stresses that her works are governed by a reflective engagement with their context, described as ‘political timing specificity’, which means something like an analysis of the political conjuncture. In this reading of Arte Útil, I will stress this aspect of Bruguera’s thinking by using her work 10, 146, 058 as a way into the crisis conditions experienced in the UK at the time it was shown at Tate Modern. I will try to demonstrate that, in this example, social practice is more complex, and less affirmative, than it is represented by its critics. Bruguera’s Hyundai commission in Tate Modern Turbine Hall, which was exhibited between October 2018 and February 2019, is a project that 134

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focuses on the ‘migrant crisis’ that emerged on the borders of Europe after 2014. Migration has become a key theme in contemporary art over the last two decades, with the experience of refugees figuring prominently in social practice. Some of these works have included participants who are themselves refugees. In an essay examining ‘contemporary art as NGO’, Verónica Tello suggests that contemporary art is ‘tentatively postdevelopmental’ because it ‘does not easily forego the value systems and logic of Western culture which creates hierarchies and divisions between subjects of the Global North and South’.32 She cites, as an example, The Silent University (2012), a project initiated by Turkish, Amsterdam-based artist Ahmet Ögüt. This project, which has campuses across Europe and in the Middle East, is supported by many art institutions, including Tate Modern. The project employs highly educated refugees to lecture to audiences, and is intended to create spaces of ‘commoning’ that ‘contest the erasure of Southern knowledge by Western neoliberal universities and immigrant policies’.33 Tello is scathing in her criticism of this work, however, which she describes as a kind of ‘necro-art’ offering ‘images of solidarity and collectivity while being dependent on the exploitation and alienation of the labour of both volunteers (coordinators) and those subjected to and attempting to flee death-worlds’.34 Tello argues that social practice represents a privileged space of deliberation on border violence because of its detachment from the legal and ethical questions of the nation state’s responsibilities regarding the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. In an argument that draws on Peter Osborne’s conception of contemporary art, Tello sees social practice as an autonomous space of ‘speculative collectivity’.35 This seems particularly appropriate to the way that Bruguera explores questions of community in 10, 146, 058, which is something like an interrogation of the way that this community might have meaning in the context of an art institution. On publicity materials, Bruguera’s Hyundai commission is called 10,  146,  058, but throughout the duration of the work the title changed. The titular number is the sum of the number of people who migrated across national borders since 2017 added to the number of migrants who were known to have died in 2018.36 This calculation was stamped onto the hand of each visitor to one section of the exhibit, a ‘crying room’ where chemical compounds were released to induce tears in spectators, and with the number growing larger on a daily basis. Evidently, the work protests the relative indifference with which the refugee crisis has been addressed, S OCIAL PRACTICE

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its normalization of dehumanizing language and extreme suffering at the borders of Europe. More obliquely, the work challenges the xenophobic sentiment which fuelled the referendum campaign of 2016. These are important aspects of what Bruguera has termed its ‘political timing specificity’ but so is the emphasis of the work on questions of empathetic engagement and civic responsibility in response to crisis. The emphasis on community in 10, 146, 058 is most obvious in its attempt to reframe the art institution which contains it. Tate Neighbours, composed of twenty-one groups or individuals who either live or work in the same postcode as Tate Modern, formed an integral part of the project. At the request of this group, the Turbine Hall was renamed in honour of local community activist Natalie Bell, and this change was integrated into all Tate’s communication networks for the duration of the project and through the subsequent year of programming. Tate Neighbours’ manifesto for civic action appears on the login page to the Wi-Fi throughout the institution. Tate Exchange, the education programme for the institution, is designated an integral part of the artwork, breaking down the usual boundary between art and education within the museum. Responding to the theme ‘movement’, and in dialogue with Bruguera, art educational institutions from across the UK took up short residencies on the fifth floor of Tate Modern.37 In 10, 146, 058, the abstraction of a changing number is counterposed to the connections based on empathy that might be formed in the context of the migrant crisis. This context is well known, but it bears repeating. According to the Missing Migrant project, over 3,000 migrants died crossing the Mediterranean in 2014, over 4,000 in 2015, peaking in 2016 with over 6,000 deaths. At the time of writing, it is still the case that around half of global recorded deaths of migrants are located on the borders of Europe.38 These numbers do not include ‘ghost ships’ which have sunk attempting to cross the Mediterranean without coming to the attention of border authorities. The calculation that Bruguera uses to create the changing titular number to her Turbine Hall commission is a vertiginous sum of displaced and subtracted lives. There seems to be a question embedded within it not only about the representation of a tragedy on this scale but also about the representation of migrants themselves: their experience demands to be represented, but they are constantly under threat of being depicted as passive representatives of the ‘death worlds’ that they have experienced, as Tello puts it. The ambivalent status of numbers is an obvious point of connection between this work and its context in Britain in 2018 when it was first 136

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exhibited. In a strategy reminiscent of Hans Haacke’s ‘real time’ works, as discussed in Chapter 2, Bruguera suggests that her ‘dialogue with power’ is designed to fit a definite political context. One of the central characteristics of the referendum to leave the European Union had been a focus on ‘unsustainable’ migration to Britain from the European Union.39 This obsession was certainly intensified by years of xenophobic rhetoric, which had been integral to the political address from both centre-ground parties during the period of what Nancy Fraser has termed ‘progressive neoliberalism’ in the UK, under the administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.40 An emblematic feature of the period in which Brexit has dominated the political agenda has been the net migration target, which was the ‘centrepiece’ of the British government’s migration policy from 2010.41 This figure was calculated as the difference between the number of people who enter into and migrate away from Great Britain in a given year, a calculation that envisages the nation state as a container, which might be ‘full’. It does not distinguish between different kinds of immigration, the relationship of migration to economic factors or even to any rationale regarding the ethical responsibilities incumbent upon member states of an international community. The Conservatives claimed to be able to reduce this figure to tens of thousands. This target, which has been repeatedly missed, seems to have done little more than act as a signal of the idea that the state is overcrowded, thus fuelling racist and antimigrant attitudes.42 The public debate about the UK’s relationship to the European Union, and the referendum which decided the decision to leave it, included many such explicit and coded references to migration as a threat to the integrity of the nation. Perhaps the most infamous of these was the billboard advert produced by Leave.EU, fronted by Nigel Farage that read ‘Breaking Point: the EU has failed us all’ alongside a long queue of nonwhite refugees. A banner across the bottom of the advert read ‘We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders’. In this political advertisement, which was widely condemned, anti-migrant rhetoric was conflated with the need to shore up the integrity of the UK, imagined to be threatened by external forces.43 The target for net migration is keyed into these xenophobic ideologies. The net migration target formed an idée fixe for the administration of Prime Minister Theresa May, who had also served in the Home Office with responsibility for migration in the Cameron government between S OCIAL PRACTICE

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2010–15. The methods used to determine the net migration figure bears comparison to the algorithm that forms the changing title of 10, 146, 058. Whereas the state is reified by the migration target, represented as a container, Bruguera’s calculus emphasizes the invisible group who are excluded from citizenship. Farage’s explicit anti-migrant rhetoric is scandalous only in the sense that it is a blunt reinterpretation of policies that have long been pursued by liberal democratic governments.44 Seen in this light, Bruguera’s 10,146, 058 involves a distinctive reflection on the theme of collectivity, at the level of data, the national state and the interpersonal encounter. In the artwork, the invisibility of migrants, their existence as numbers, derived from strange algorithms, becomes a factor in the wider problem of imagined community that is revealed by Brexit. In keeping with principles of Arte Útil, Bruguera stipulated that the institution itself should alter its practices in support of the project. Participants in Tate Neighbours and Tate Exchange were encouraged to raise political questions, that is, issues or concerns that derived from their engagement with the institution. As mentioned previously, the inclusion of Tate Neighbours resulted in the name of the Turbine Hall being changed in honour of the activist Natalie Bell. This is an anti-hierarchical gesture that addresses both the semiotic environment of the museum and its relationship to a specific locale, that of the London Borough of Southwark. Signage is a familiar feature of the museum environment, in that it includes the names of sponsors, whose contributions and bequests are acknowledged in signage and naming practices. Elevation of the status of Natalie Bell also draws attention to the other names with which the museum is inscribed. The tone of 10, 146, 058 is unlike many of Bruguera’s earlier works. The question of behaviour is posed in this work very differently to, for example, Tatlin’s Whisper #5, which was performed in the Turbine Hall in 2008, where mounted police demonstrated crowd control techniques to the visitors to the museum (Figure 4.1). Tatlin’s Whisper#3 (2006), which took place in the Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid, also suggests a more confrontational framing, in that it provided its audience a lesson in how to make a Molotov Cocktail. In these works, politics is conceived as the affective activation of the participants, through their direct experience of resistant or repressive social techniques. Bruguera’s practice has often concerned itself with the way that images repress political experience. In these works, the aim seems to be to use experience to break through the false familiarity with insurrection which is provided by its documentation. 138

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FIGURE 4.1  Tania Bruguera. Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008. Performed as part of UBS openings live – The Living Currency, Tate Modern, 26-7 January, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Tate Modern.

Affect in 10, 146, 058 plays a different role, as an interface between technology and physical signifiers of emotion: sound, tears and the warmth of bodies. In 10, 146, 058, a sound system filled one part of the space with sub-bass designed by Steve Goodman (Kode9), intended physically to unsettle spectators.45 A heat-sensitive floor took impressions from bodies and body parts pressed against it and, if enough people lie on it together, it was reported that the floor would reveal the portrait of a young Syrian migrant named Yusef, who came to the UK and is now studying medicine46 (Fig. 4.2). Somatic experiences are induced or recorded using technological means in a way that seems to problematize a link between embodiment, affect and collective action. What, we might ask, would be the result if 300 visitors coordinated their actions to reveal Yusef ’s image? What would the cooperation involved in this activity mean, using body heat to reveal the face of migrant? The conceptual dimension of this work problematizes collective action in a world that is formed by new configurations of affect and technology. The gestures to behaviourism in the work suggest the difficulty involved in coordinating action and the uncertainty of the result of this cooperation. It also seems to demonstrate an inversion of the formal relationship S OCIAL PRACTICE

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FIGURE 4.2  Tania Bruguera. 10, 148, 451. Hyundai Commission 2018. Tate Modern. Turbine Hall. Courtesy of the artist and Tate Modern.

to the image that is found in Bruguera’s earlier participatory works. Whereas collective participation in Tatlin’s Whisper #5 is intended to unlock the political potential of experience, which is suppressed by the documentation of riots, in 10, 146, 058 a notional collective action is proposed as a means of revealing the image of a migrant who has been accepted into the ‘imagined community’ of the state.47 These speculations point towards the symptomatic limitations of a work like 10, 146, 058. It is important to consider these limitations precisely because they reveal the complexity of the ‘political timing specificity’ of the artwork, to use Bruguera’s terminology. For example, the representation of ‘Tate Neighbours’ inevitably suggests a wider community in Southwark, which is the immediate locale of Tate Modern. Southwark council has become notorious for engaging in regeneration schemes whereby working-class council estates have been replaced by new units that, responding to London’s febrile housing market, inflate prices entirely out of the reach of local residents.48 The redevelopment of the Heygate Estate in the Elephant and Castle area since 2010 has been fiercely resisted by residents and activists, as members of this community were ‘decanted’ to new homes, with leaseholders even forced to sell properties at prices well below the market rate.49 Opposition to the 140

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Aylesbury Estate regeneration and many other similar schemes is ongoing at the time of writing.50 Professor Loretta Lees, based at the University of Oxford, suggests that since 1997 a ‘conservative estimate’ of 135,658 council tenants and leaseholders have been displaced by this kind of gentrification.51 Typically, tenants are rehoused in cheaper accommodation far from their communities and support networks, sometimes even outside of London, causing them stress and psychological injury. How do these numbers of people internally displaced by gentrification figure in relation to the questions raised by 10, 146, 058 about emotion, visibility and migration? The question contains political implications of great complexity. There are likely to be many former migrants included in this number of the internally displaced. Displaced people are further displaced on their entry into the state, because they are economically and socially marginalized. Since the millennium, so-called creative cities policies have integrated art into strategies designed to attract investment into economically deprived areas. The opening of Tate Modern at Bankside in 2000 was an early sign of changes that would come to Southwark, for example. Activist groups document the ‘artwashing’ that has proliferated alongside urban redevelopment, and argue for a radical cultural policy that would be shaped ‘from below’.52 This speculation-driven boom has created a dystopian situation where luxury developments often lie empty, banked for investment purposes, while homelessness and insecure housing have reached levels that have prompted a report from the UN about the damaging effects of austerity policies in the UK.53 Nor is this exclusively a problem in the UK. Rather, it is a problem of ‘global cities’, including New York, San Francisco and Melbourne to name only some of them. London is emblematic of a global tendency for property speculation to radically reduce access to affordable housing. I contextualize 10, 146, 058 in this way not to undermine its humanitarian message nor to set up a false opposition between migrants and economically disadvantaged residents of Southwark. Rather, I point to an implication of the work and perhaps a limitation of the idea of community that is often part of social practice. It is impossible now to ignore the context of rampant gentrification in austerity-era London, especially for artworks that are community oriented.54 The dilemmas of gentrification have intensified since 2008, as regulation has been loosened to encourage property speculation S OCIAL PRACTICE

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and quantitative-easing policies adopted as remedies to the financial crash created an enormous supply of cheap money to be invested in real estate.55 Bruguera and some of the groups and individuals in Tate Neighbours are clearly aware of this problem, though it was not part of the explicit framing of the project. Instead, it is an implication of the work that opens out into the multifaceted social crisis which is its context. In 10, 146, 058, Bruguera explores community within the frame of the migrant crisis, which is symptomatic of the uncoordinated condition of global capitalism. The number, which appears as the title of the work, signals not only an escalating human tragedy but also the representation of the state as an overfull container under threat of being overwhelmed. When read in the context of rampant gentrification, it also implies the vertiginous pressure of capital accumulation. Although 10, 146, 058 evokes civic participation in its reference to ‘neighbours’, for example, there is an element of doubt in the work regarding the political dimension of community. This hesitation is appropriate given the context of Brexit debates, where the ‘will of the people’, an authoritarian-populist rallying cry, is routinely invoked by the British government to justify immigration controls after the vote to leave the European Union.

Social practice and gentrification Social practice is a category that has thrived under neoliberalism, even as the infrastructure of social protection and social solidarity has been dismantled.56 Austerity has indirectly shaped the debate about social practice; indeed, a debased version of this approach to participatory art contributes to gentrification, as Larne Abse Gogarty has observed.57 A cynical abuse of ‘place making’ results in what Stephen Pritchard has described as a divisive form of ‘social capital art’.58 It would be wrong, however, to suggest that this is only a problem for artists working with social practice. In fact, rampant gentrification in major cities mean that all kinds of art can become drawn into property speculators’ ruses. The post-conceptual artist Ryan Gander, for example, has created ‘doormats, door numbers and doorbell sounds’ for Balfron Tower in East London.59 Designed by Ernö Goldfinger and completed in 1967, the rediscovery of this building as a brutalist classic led to its original social housing tenants being ‘decanted’ to allow for luxury redevelopment, complete

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with neo-conceptualist fittings.60 This kind of enmeshing of the status of post-conceptual art and attempts to market the newly rediscovered gems of modernist public housing is increasingly common. The key issue to bear in mind is that ethical demands form the infrastructure of social practice, in a way that they do not for other kinds of contemporary art. Social practice, which draws upon legacies of community art and art activism, set itself apart from the hierarchical structures of the art world, precisely because it claimed to make interventions that would have substantive social and political effects. All the more reason for contemporary art institutions, who find themselves in a vulnerable position in a moment of reactionary populism because they represent elite culture, to commission art that is both anti-elitist and informed by sophisticated theory. Jair Messias Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump have both made attacks on the arts part of their ‘culture war’ strategy. The visibility that social practice enjoys in this context is not without risks. At the same time, social practice deals in community, and it often suggests that community might be shaped around a palpable, rather than an abstract, social bond. Socially engaged artists tend to question the hierarchical values associated with art, and they develop, as a result, a nuanced understanding of the complex social barriers created by art’s social position. At the same time, these artists risk bearing the brunt of raw social contradiction and of being attacked from both the left and the right because their work acknowledges, but cannot resolve, the deep divides of class, race and gender that are disavowed in official culture. As social practice has achieved greater recognition, it has been exposed to different kinds of criticism. The critic Ben Davis, who is based in the United States, has been prominent in this regard, arguing that social practice involves a ‘vague aesthetics of progressive uplift’ and, further, that it may be used to disguise class interests through philanthropy or act as the ‘beach head’ of gentrification.61 Davis proposes several different arguments in his critique of social practice, all of them useful in that they have helped to focus on the actual political content of this tendency. His concluding point is that: ‘the genre of social practice art raises questions that it cannot by itself answer’.62 While this is certainly true, it is necessary to pause and consider the implications of this point. Rather than identifying a limitation of social practice, as Davis seems to think, this is better understood as a strength. In social practice, an

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attempt to create community reveals its dysfunctional context, as in the case of Tania Bruguera’s Hyundai commission for Tate Modern. Though the context is very different, it is appropriate to echo Mel Ramsden’s reflection on institutional critique which was discussed in Chapter 2: a criterion of the success of social practice is its failure. It should ask questions that it cannot answer, and that the role of criticism is to identify those questions and trace their implications into the dysfunctional social terrain which makes them urgent. To suggest that social practice is somehow more complicit in exploitation and social decline than other kinds of contemporary art is to misrepresent the nature and complexity of the art institution and, also, to malign a genre which takes ethical questions seriously, while providing a free pass to those sectors that are blasé about their market involvement. While Davis does not quite go this far, this is a tendency within the arguments found in his wider writings.63 All sectors of contemporary art are affected, though in different ways, by the contradictions of a social system that is structured so that the accumulation of capital is its overriding aim. These contradictions have been exacerbated in the period since 2016 due to a political crisis where questions of imagined community are centrally at issue.

Baa-Baa Baric: Have You Any Pull? Crises are always causally over-determined, but it is certain that savage cuts to funding for social provision at all levels, enacted under the rubric of ‘austerity’ in the wake of the financial crisis and credit crunch, prepared the ground for Brexit. The effect of these neoliberal ‘reforms’ has been disastrous. To cite one recent example, government statistics show that around a third of children in the UK live in relative poverty, with numbers rising by around 100,000 a year.64 This explanation should not be understood as the sole cause of discontent: the coalition supporting Brexit includes relatively well-off socially conservative voters, as well as voters who would be classified as working class.65 The composition of this political grouping suggests to some that its essential characteristic is nostalgia for British nationalism and imperialism. Others point to the relative economic neglect of post-industrial towns in the North of England during a period in which the South East has flourished, buoyed up by the wealth generated by the global financial centre in London. This kind of generalization is problematic, however. As the example of the 144

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Heygate and Aylesbury estates shows, the wealth concentrated in London is itself polarizing. The decanting of residents to make way for profitable urban redevelopment is a corollary of economic success. There is a generational divide in support for Brexit, which was reflected in the Conservative vote in the election of 2019, which shows the division between the South and the North of England in another light. In the North, wages are low but so is the cost of housing, so a route to home ownership is still achievable. By contrast, university graduates who flock to cities to compete for relatively high-paying jobs pay astronomical rents, which make buying property at vastly inflated prices, without access to capital loaned by parents or other family members, impossible to achieve, however good the jobs may be. All these contributory factors simply demonstrate that the social upheaval that became crystallized in the Brexit debate is many-sided, and that it has its origins both in long-term economic tendencies and deepseated cultural narratives. Any attempt to represent this situation finds itself faced with the inadequacy of routine accounts of social agency, of class and identity. The issues involved are linked both to rapidly changing economic factors and to scripts of nationalism. Under such circumstances, lines of division become visible within cultural politics and art becomes embroiled in the state and the economy. The functionalist idea that art absorbs dissent becomes problematic as it emerges that disequilibrium is the rule, rather than the exception. In the UK, the Arts Council’s ‘Creative People and Places’ programme has included work that is alert to the contradictions that affect social practice. One example is the ‘Social Making’ conference run by the Community Interest Company Take-a-Part in Plymouth in June 2017 (the conference indicates both the vitality and professionalization of this field). Patrick Fox, the director of commissioning agency Heart of Glass, spoke of the need for solidarity with those whose important communityoriented work has been defunded. ‘Creative People and Places’ is a largescale initiative run by Arts Council England focused on areas of the country where there is evidence of particularly low engagement with arts and culture. As with other Arts Council initiatives, it has multiple goals: to bring people into decision-making processes in the creation of work, to support local arts ecologies and to form partnerships between artists and other kinds of cultural organizations. Based in St Helens, a large town in the north-west of England, Heart of Glass commissions social practice art that imaginatively reinvents S OCIAL PRACTICE

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communal identity in a ‘post-industrial’ setting. The work that has been produced reflects, in Fox’s words, an ‘unapologetic civic mission’.66 Mark Storor’s Baa-Baa Baric: Have You Any Pull? began in 2015 as a twelve-year residency, commissioned by Heart of Glass, working with generationally defined groups of St Helens residents. In a first iteration of the work, a ‘Council of Wisdom’ made up of older men have been photographed as mythic figures and put on public display in the town; an ‘army of beauty’, primary and secondary school children, have processioned through St Helens giving out posies of flowers at the town hall and read their Children’s Charter to local dignitaries.67 The allusive, participatory character of this work is linked closely to the civic institutions of St Helens. It involves, for example, police whose participation is considered an integral part of the artwork. The army of beauty, in its procession, was accompanied by mounted officers, their horses’ manes decorated with flowers. Police also served free chips to residents at another event included in the project to highlight the problem of child poverty in the area (Figure 4.3). Storor states the central question of the work to be: ‘Is the most brutal act of barbarism civilisation?’ The question is suggestive of a Rousseauan critique of society and a project of cultural renewal. Indeed, social practice often has these implications because of its emphasis on grassroots community participation. In this work, the drama comes from the staging of this epic theme in a regional town. The project, which began in 2015,

FIGURE 4.3  Baa Baa Baric: Have You Any Pull? Mark Storor with communities of St Helens. Photograph by Stephen King (2017). Produced by Heart of Glass.

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lasts twelve years because it means that by the end of it all the members of the ‘Council of Wisdom’ will be older than the average lifespan of male residents of St Helen’s. In the UK, the average life expectancy for males is roughly seventy-nine years, though this figure disguises great disparities between regions.68 St Helens falls within the 20 per cent of most deprived areas of the UK, and in its most disadvantaged areas, the life expectancy for men is ten years lower than in the wealthiest, with a similar discrepancy in the figure for women.69 With these statistics as its context, Baa-Baa Baric is intended to allow members of the ‘Council of Wisdom’ to become ‘a voice from beyond the grave’ in Storor’s words.70 A striking feature of this project is that it is both a creative reimagining of the imagery and regalia of community, especially through the inclusion of the council and the mayor, and at the same time an acerbic commentary on social decay, which the various institutions of the state at a local level seem powerless to prevent (Figure 4.4). Storor reports that participants in the project have been generally accepting or even positive about the centrality of death to the project, even the members of the Council of Wisdom whose lifespan may now be defined by their involvement in it. Representatives of the police and other social agencies have seen Baa-Baa Baric as an opportunity simply to speak about the challenges of their roles, acknowledging the realities of social deprivation

FIGURE 4.4  Baa Baa Baric: Have You Any Pull? Mark Storor with communities of St Helens. Photograph by Stephen King (2017). Produced by Heart of Glass.

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and even malnourishment, which have become by default part of the remit of policing, as social protections have been defunded under austerity measures.71 An interesting feature of this artwork is that it addresses utilitarian issues, such as policing, within a fantastical retelling of the reality of social deprivation. In this way, the civic regalia of the mayor is tied into a form of theatrical spectacle represented by the children and their costumes and the flowers woven into the manes of police horses as the children read out their Children’s Charter for the town. One of the risks involved in this representation of community is that it should become mythic in a regressive sense, evoking a world where identity is fixed and immutable. In the case of Baa-Baa Baric, the social factors which determine the vulnerability of life are placed at the centre of the project, to head off this problem. The text of the Children’s Charter, read out on the steps of the council building, includes these words, which affirm social justice and celebrate individuality: I am the vivid and vibrant image of those who look upon us. I am also the presence of craziness, swirling in different directions . . . I am the fire speaking my mind and sticking up for other people’s rights. Also, I am the swirls of democracy . . . I am the jagged angles of a blue triangle which make me imperfect and human, not like a robot.72 This celebration of individuality is not as straightforward as it may seem, however. The ‘swirls of democracy’ and ‘craziness swirling’ recall here the disruptive effects of political representation, seen most vividly in the referendum to leave the European Union, and the polarizing constitutional crisis that it created. Represented in Baa-Baa Baric as the voice of youth, these metaphors suggest the generational divide that emerges in Brexit, through its ill-defined attempt to remake a national community. St Helens itself voted to leave the European Union by a ratio of 58 per cent to 42 per cent remain.73 In a sense, this is a northern town which has become emblematic of the complexities of Brexit in recent debates: a leave-voting Labour seat, which returned a Labour MP in the election of 2019, though with a significantly reduced majority because of a large swing towards the Brexit party. In this context, Storor’s question, ‘Is the most brutal act of barbarism civilisation?’, takes on another level of meaning, as does the fantastical reinscription of community onto a post-industrial landscape. Although Storor’s work is resolutely humanist in its tone, it nonetheless sets this positive vision against a resurgence 148

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of fantasies, which seek to re-enchant a nationalist imagination: with festivals of Brexit planned and campaigns to have Big Ben strike at the stroke of Britain’s departure from the European Union. This may be why, although Arts Council funding is in decline overall, Brexit has made social practice more visible. In the wake of the vote to leave the EU, a larger proportion of funding has been oriented towards projects that promise to include or address the demographic groups that made themselves heard in the referendum. Brexit made self-evident the political instability created by the democratic deficit of neoliberalism. Although intended to counter elitism, this remains a vaguely paternalistic form of artistic intervention, for the most part. Certainly, cultural policy needs to be pushed further in the direction of participatory democracy in Britain, as the Movement for Cultural Democracy’s manifesto has recently proposed.74 Social practice seems to promise that challenging work might be created in such a way that it overcomes the divisions that are enshrined in the art institution. Of course, there is no guarantee that it will be able to deliver on this promise. And, indeed, it is important to note that Storor himself does not regard his work to be social practice, certainly not in the sense in which this term is often used to refer to the subordination of an aesthetic to a useful intervention.75 Though this work is oriented to a very different context from 10, 146, 058, it shares in common with Bruguera’s work a utilitarian conception of art that is not straightforward but rather is displaced or problematized from within the work. *** It is ironic that social practice has achieved unprecedented institutional recognition at the same time as a right-wing insurgency has taken hold of liberal democracies in Britain and America, with the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump in 2016. It is clear that this period involves a weakening of the political institutions of liberal democracy. Arguably, these institutions were never dedicated to their founding ideals in any case, but rather to the more or less coherent justification of an irrational order.76 Even so, the crisis of liberal democracy has reached a new level of intensity. The institutional prominence of social practice I propose here is a more complex story than a simple co-option or absorption of radical or avant-gardist strategies. Although the criticisms of social practice advanced by Vishmidt, Gogarty and Tello are telling in some respects, S OCIAL PRACTICE

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especially where they point to problems with the institutionalization of this form and its complicity with neoliberal ideology, they underplay an important feature of this development in the social turn. Social practice is symptomatic of the disarticulation of the art institution, a longrunning tendency under neoliberalism. It is an attempt to reorient the art institution in response to the mounting evidence of social crisis, which often seems to appropriate elements of the model of the NGO. On one level, it may be seen as an attempt to preserve the traditional role of the arts within liberal democracy, as a guarantor of community and values, at a time when the art institution becomes increasingly threatened by antielitist feeling and by its absorption into the routines of global financial management. The humanitarian advocacy of art as ‘use’ may also be an attempt to resist the increasingly blunt utilitarianism of national-populist governments. Social practice represents an unresolved tension between the art institution’s assimilation of radical aesthetic tendencies and the emergence of crises which threaten the integrity of the art institution and the liberal democratic state. It sometimes seems to be, as a result, an avant-gardism which proposes to defend or shore up the art institution by reinventing its civic mission. In Bruguera’s and Storor’s work, social practice also sheds light on the nature of social malaise under capitalism. The ideological terrain from which Brexit emerged is often represented as an antagonism between privileged and mobile elites and ‘left behind’ traditional communities. In fact, mobility is not necessarily freedom, as the experience of migrants and the displaced tenants from redeveloped London estates demonstrates. The requirement to stay in one place is being ‘left behind’ only because of the limited options created by economic disadvantage and neglect. Neoliberalism, whether on a global or local level, means diminished access to the security that allows people to choose between movement and rest. The secular crisis and disequilibrium exposes society to increasing levels of insecurity seen in border violence and the precarity faced by the economically insecure. Social practice, when it is an affirmative representation of community, risks becoming an opportunity to conceal the scale of this disorder. It is when it fails, or points beyond the limits of its own effectiveness, that it becomes most effective as a sociopolitical aesthetic. The next chapter will investigate more closely what kind of relationship exists between art and politics now, in the generalized crisis conditions of the press.

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5 SLOGANS AND MILITANCY

This chapter takes up a theme that has recurred through the case studies addressed in previous chapters, which is the relationship between the social turn and the dynamic changes undergone by the art institution under neoliberalism. As discussed in Chapter 1 and throughout this book, the art collective is misconceived when it is treated as a unified or univocal social form. The case studies addressed so far have demonstrated that interesting perspectives arise from an alternative view: that the art institution under neoliberalism is in crisis and that the art collective, in its various manifestations, is one symptom of its unresolved contradictions and antagonisms. The social turn has seen a proliferation of collective and participatory strategies that, in different ways, interrogate and shift the practice and ideologies embedded in the institution. Collective and participatory art works derive their political urgency from the instability that affects the art institution under neoliberalism. In this chapter, this volatile situation is examined through art works that make use of slogans, a linguistic device where the stakes involved in collective action and the reproduction of the social order are particularly clear. The slogan is the paradigmatic example of politicized language through which social movements are catalysed. Slogans like ‘We are the 99%’, ‘Black Lives Matter’ or ‘Take Back Control’ are recent examples, representing very different ideological and political demands. In another incarnation, the slogan stands for what Adorno and Horkheimer termed the ‘culture industry’, where calls to ‘Just Do It!’ (Nike) or that ‘Impossible is Nothing’ (Adidas) reduce subjectivity to the terms dictated by consumer society.1 Seen in this way, the slogan is a site where the mobilization, or neutralization, of political energies is at stake. In recent times, economic pressures, revolutions of communication technologies and polarizing political strategies have created an

increasingly politicized cultural field. Here, I will try to trace the implications of this instability for the politics of art. In the UK, the years since the referendum to leave the European Union have been permeated by new political lines of contestation, which are framed by the contradictions created by democratic mandate to pursue a course of action, to leave the European Union, that seems to have no economic rationale. In the shadow of the constitutional crisis, new fault lines have opened. The symptoms of Brexit are local to the UK context, but they also participate in a global reorientation of politics in a populist direction in the aftermath of the financial meltdown of 2008. This dual identity of the slogan is examined in artworks created by the collective Freee, the artist Tim Etchells and the media activist and artist Mark McGowan, who is also known as Artist Taxi Driver. These artists all work with language, using it to examine the boundary between art and politics. The aim is not to arrive at a static account of these artists’ works, where they are explained in relation to a pre-established theoretical framework. Rather, it is to proceed from the fact that each of these artists addresses emergent tendencies within social experience. The crisis situation that now overtakes the political institutions of liberal democracy is one where pre-established explanations are all called into question: for this reason, artists’ investigations provide an important means to gain provisional understanding of a situation that is still in process. More concretely, I argue that the way that these artists use language, and especially slogans, provides insight into two issues relevant to this enquiry into the social turn. First, they show how the boundaries of the art institution become diffuse, and as a result, the stakes involved in the relationship between art and politics change. Second, these artists provide an insight into the militancy that plays an increasingly salient role within cultural debates. The crisis that has overtaken many of the institutions of the public sphere, including the press and art, results in polarization. The aim of this chapter is not to lament this cultural division or to provide constructive solutions to resolve it. Instead, these conditions are treated as a recurrence of tendencies that seem to be embedded in cultural discourses of neoliberalism. In the United Kingdom and in the United States, there is a return to conditions of ‘culture war’, discussed in Chapter 3, where progressive positions are represented in a stereotyped opposition to conservative values. With the advent of new media technologies and the effect of years of austerity, the effects of culture war permeate cultural 152

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discourse to an unprecedented degree. The insurrectionary tactics of the far right have also become more sophisticated and destabilizing. In this context, it no longer makes sense to interpret the stabilizing role of the institution as a process of co-option. Rather than neutralizing political energies, agents of the status quo now seem to intensify and redirect them. It is now rarely possible for the state to entirely control the flow of information, so techniques are used to ensure that it remains a disorganized noise of activity and does not resolve into a more dangerous collective rallying point. The techniques used to manage and exploit crises have become sophisticated. This is the terrain of communication that the slogan now operates in and which is treated in different ways by the artworks addressed in this chapter.

Autonomy and Freee art collective The collective Freee, composed of Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan, was active between 2006 and 2017, creating a wide range of textbased and participation-oriented works. Much of Freee’s output has involved slogans and manifestos – the Freee Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-Hegemonic Art, The Freee Manifesto for Guerrilla Advertising and Fuck Globalization: The Freee Manifesto for the Alterglobalization of Art – reflecting on the relationship between art, communication and militancy.2 Freee’s practice is a starting point here because it involves a self-conscious interrogation of the legacy of the revolutionary project of the avant-garde and its translation into contemporary art. Freee is, in a sense, a research project that reflects on the issues raised in Chapter 1 about the possibility of a revolutionary art in the absence of revolution. The irreverence indicated by the misspelling of ‘free’ itself suggests a kind of slogan. It might be understood as a gesture that deflates the pretensions involved in a discourse of freedom. It might also indicate an attempt to reach towards the actual meaning of freedom, beyond the constraints of the language that falls short of achieving it. Another word for freedom is ‘autonomy’, a word that is used in art theory to indicate how the problem of freedom translates into relationships between art and politics. This is a complex debate, and it is easiest to explore its stakes using concrete examples. An important tendency within the social turn argues that art cannot create freedom S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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unless it leaves art behind. Autonomy is seen as a space of political subjectivity: where a group realizes first that it is not free and then begins to understand what can be done about this.3 A text, produced in the midst of the UK student protests against fee increases in 2010, expresses this position succinctly, accusing art of acting as a ‘cool cultural mask over the catastrophe which is capitalism’.4 Truly politicized art, it states, must ‘escape the prisons of the art world . . . forget its name, drop its starlit ego and become a collective movement of creativity applied to the materials of everyday life’.5 A counterargument is that the autonomy of the artwork, its freedom, exists only because it is set apart from politics, just as it is set apart from the immediate problems involved in running a large company, or a school or a household. From this perspective, the ‘cool cultural mask’ is, potentially at least, a good thing. Art’s autonomy makes it possible to gain perspective, or critical distance, and to gain understanding about the way that our subjectivity is shaped by the social conditions that prevail under capitalism. The fact that this is an enduring problem is clear because it is recognizable in the fraught debates that took place in The Fox in the mid-1970s, discussed in Chapter 1. Indeed, it is a problem that was also present in the project of the historical avant-garde of the 1920s. Some contemporary critics go so far as to argue that art activism erases, or only mimics, the autonomy that art provides, without arriving at any real political significance. This, for example, is the position maintained by the philosopher Peter Osborne.6 Freee approach this problem as an art collective from a standpoint that draws on theories of the public sphere. Derived from the work of critical theorist Jurgen Habermas, theories of the public sphere attempt to understand the role that communicative exchange plays in liberal democracy. The ‘public sphere’ might be said to include institutions including the press, the arts, and education, where ideas and issues that affect a community are debated. In principle, this communicative exchange is supposed to feed directly into the decisions that shape a given community, through political institutions, including deliberative bodies like councils, or parliaments.7 The right to engage in protest, which is protected in democracies, also forms part of the public sphere: protests articulate demands that then become part of the deliberation that shapes the polity. Without going too far into the critical debate about Habermas’s ideas, a central problem is whether this ideal form of communicative exchange is ever actually realized by liberal democracy. Historically, the 154

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‘public sphere’ developed in such a way that it marginalized the working class, women and people of colour, and even rationalized their continued repression and exploitation.8 For Freee, a central problem for politicized art is one of communication. They write: If the problem with the modernist concept of the artist as author was that it was exemplified by an expressive mode of engagement with the public (i.e. that the artist had things to say or gave form to certain feelings to which others were meant to be receptive), the problem with the contemporary non-author artist is that it separates the artist off from the public through the opposition between the refusal to make meaning (the artist) and the necessity of making meaning (the public).9 This statement touches upon an issue that is also addressed in the work of Grant Kester and Nato Thompson, because it is a foundational one for art activism.10 It is that avant-gardes have typically created works that are opaque. The critical legacy of the avant-garde is sometimes even identified with its challenge to the production of meaning. This project then contributes to a situation where experimental art is basically incomprehensible to most people, resulting in it being an elitist pursuit, a small and privileged enclave. This problem has not been resolved by the social turn, even where artworks seem to be entirely accessible because they are made from audience participation. Participatory works are still mediated by a complex theoretical apparatus. As indicated in Chapter 4, this theoretical apparatus is, in a sense, the ‘art world’. Rather than attempt to leap over the gap between art and politics, Freee argues that this gap should be the focus of critical and artistic enquiry. For Freee, this gap between art and political action shows the institutional and ideological character of the public sphere, in which artistic and political freedoms are segregated and thereby neutralized. The project investigates the boundaries that guarantee the separation between political and supposedly apolitical communication. Politicized art requires an analysis that proceeds negatively to unpick this separation from within. As Freee puts it: Politicizing practices and the process of art has to be done in relation to the Art world, the history of the avant-gardes, of Conceptual art S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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and more generally the debates that organize the art world. There is no sense in having a political practice of art that would take place anywhere but in the art world. That would consist merely in a reinforcement of what is wrong in the art world, which is its excessive autonomy and specialization.11 Slogans are used by Freee in a way that brings these contradictions to a head: statements which have a clear political reference are used as pieces of text art, or contextualized by longer writings and manifestos, for example, in the text piece Protest Drives History (Installation in the ICA bar 2008–9) or in Advertising Wants to Convert Our Desire for a Better Life into a Desire to Buy Something (2008) where the slogan is embedded in a billboard image, embroidered onto bandito-style handkerchiefs that cover the faces of the members of Freee, Mel Jordan, Andy Hewitt and Dave Beech (Figure 5.1). In each case, the slogan seems to be intended to signal and subvert art’s detachment using language: the communication is intended to be partisan, though it is displaced through the layering of the material location of the words themselves, often found on t-shirts, balloons, badges or re-embedded in images that document performance.

FIGURE 5.1  Freee art collective. Advertising wants to convert our desire for a better life into a desire to buy something, (bandana), Freee 2008, DOT Arena Festival, Leicester. Photograph Freee.

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Sometimes slogans are employed in a way that emphasizes the ability of language to reorient context, even to the extent that the meaning of its location is altered. An early work, The Neo-Imperialist Function of Art Is to Clear a Space for Economic Expansion (2006), is a useful example of the alternating current of Freee’s enquiry between art and the public sphere (Figure 5.2). This text piece, written in Mandarin Chinese, was exhibited on a hand-painted billboard in Guangzhou, China, while a photograph of the billboard was placed in the gallery exhibition of the Second Guangzhou Triennial. Meanwhile, the same text, also in Mandarin, was displayed on a billboard in Birmingham. Here, a text piece reflecting on the globalization of art neatly juxtaposes communication and incomprehension. This message speaks plainly about the assimilation of art into a market system and of China into the global consensus of capitalism. The directness of the slogan exists alongside an implied satire of art’s discourses of self-justification, discourses that are opaque to non-initiates. It also recognizes that no public sphere is unified: the display in Birmingham would be

FIGURE 5.2  Freee art collective. The neo-imperial function of public art is to clear a path for aggressive economic expansion, Birmingham-GuangzhouBirmingham, Freee, billboard posters, 2005. (Site 1: Barford Street, Digbeth, Birmingham UK November 2005. Site 2 Guangzhou City & the second Guangzhou Triennial, December 2006. Site 3: Barford Street, Digbeth, Birmingham UK December 2005). Photograph Freee.

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comprehensible to Mandarin speakers, for whom the reference to art, even so, might not make much sense. Many of Freee’s works exist as photographic documentation, where the slogans are carried on banners or worn as t-shirts. For example, the text piece Don’t Let the Media have the Monopoly on the Freedom of Speech (2007) appears on a billboard poster, where it is written across three t-shirts worn by members of Freee. This emphasis, on the material location of language in Freee’s iconography, intends to confuse a distinction that is routinely made between DIY politics and the public discourse of advertising. Words have power because they move between these contexts. Freee’s practice also drifts between language, image and strategies of social engagement and participation: for example, in the dialogue with shop owners, who were asked to choose a slogan to display in the shows Spin (Freee) oza and When Guests Become Hosts, or in the exhibition The Carracci Institute Yearbook in Northampton, where one of Freee’s kiosk works was used by the Forum for Democratic Practices to survey passers-by about their reasons for voting to leave the European Union. Freee’s members have described their practice as one that is ‘twice political’, in terms of its process as well as its content, and this position is important for understanding their work. This idea of the ‘twice political’ is advanced in contrast to art activism, which, they argue, fails to interrogate the social order that separates art and politics. For Freee, art activism ‘neutralizes’; it seizes upon art ‘in the misty realm of strategic opportunism’, as another means of making a political demand visible.12 Rather than a partisan attack on art activism, this argument is best understood as a call to recognize and investigate the division between art and politics, in service of a genuinely politicized public discourse. Freee argues that the division between art and politics, because it has an institutional and material basis, will always re-establish itself. It is possible to demonstrate this logic of division and re-emergence in a debate about the relationship between Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and art. In the book Strike Art! the theorist Yates McKee argues that Occupy Wall Street marked the end of ‘socially engaged art’ and the beginning of a new approach to art activism.13 McKee recounts the experience of going from a talk which was part of the programme of Nato Thompson’s 2011 exhibition Living as Form to join the protest in Zuccotti Park. This experience dramatized for him the difference between the speculative avant-gardism of socially engaged art and an actual spontaneous social movement. For McKee, OWS was the ‘culmination’ and ‘completion’ of 158

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socially engaged art: ‘a kind of self-immolation on the part of Living as Form’ as he puts it.14 In McKee’s narrative, the early planning of Occupy New York involved artists, especially those associated with the collective 16 Beaver Group.15 McKee makes the argument that the OWS camp at Zuccotti Park might even be read as a distinctive kind of collective artwork. He observes that many commentators did interpret it in these terms: Martha Rosler, for example, saw OWS as a ‘grand public work of process art with a cast of thousands’ and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri who, speaking of occupations more generally, write that ‘an occupation is a kind of happening, a performance piece that generates political effects’.16 These comparisons between OWS and art are suggestive, in that they seem to show avant-garde ideas that were given a new platform by relational aesthetics, manifesting themselves in a political protest. OWS could be interpreted in this way because it was characteristic of Occupy that it was a protest without demands. Seemingly, this occupation of public space was itself opaque: it did not aim to communicate anything beyond its own existence. McKee theorizes the process that unfolded in Zuccotti Park as a ‘biopolitical assemblage’, a theoretical term used to speak of the dynamic relationship between ‘living subjects, physical space, material infrastructure, technological devices, cultural forms and organizational practices that simultaneously stage dissent against the status quo while prefiguring “alternative worlds”’.17 In this reading, OWS exists in an unstable relationship between a site-specific work, commanding a real space, and nomadic ‘memes’. The call to occupy Wall Street began as a meme, communicated by the magazine Adbusters. The camp also saw a proliferation of handmade signs, bearing slogans, that were in turn photographed and shared on social media. Many of these slogans were painted on cardboard from pizza boxes that were phoned into the protest by sympathizers. They were also laid out in what came to be known as ‘sign gardens’, a ‘highly photogenic collective creativity of handmade signs’ as McKee puts it. These elements and the famous human assembly, in which OWS participants spoke and deliberated on proposals, amplified by the ‘human megaphone’, where the crowd repeated back the words of an individual speaker, are interpreted as artistic forms by McKee. McKee’s ‘formal analysis’ of the camp is strategic, in that it intends to evoke a maelstrom of creative activity that gave inspiration and impetus to a new wave of art activist practices, including Occupy Museums, Arts S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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and Labor, Strike Debt and Global Ultra Luxury Faction. It also tends to situate OWS as an authentic spontaneous politics by comparison to the weak gestural politics of art. This point is stressed through McKee’s reading of the aesthetics of cardboard as a sign of precarity, which is a signature material in the work of the artist Thomas Hirschorn. The ‘sign garden’ recalls Hirschhorn’s work, but McKee stress that ‘Hirschhorn’s work is best understood as an artistic simulacrum of precarity produced . . . to the turn of hundreds and thousands of dollars’. In OWS, by contrast, ‘bodies and structures alike were exposed to the weather, to physical exhaustion, and ultimately to the violence of the police’.18 This reading seems to misfire, however, precisely because it discusses OWS in relation to artistic developments. As a result, OWS is reified, separated off from the interrelationship with the wider political significance of the global Occupy protest and the political process that these events emerged from. It is instructive to compare McKee’s depiction of OWS to the account provided by the poet and communist theorist Joshua Clover in his book Riot-Strike-Riot. Clover’s book provides a theory of the riot which is also ‘a theory of crisis’, that is, a theory of the interrelationship between the socio-economic instability of the capitalist system and riot as ‘a leading tactic in the repertoire of collective action’.19 Here, the riot is construed as a revolutionary tactic and, potentially, an incubator for a mass movement that would overthrow capitalism. Eschewing the classical revolutionary theory of the party and the state, this is a position that is influenced by communization theory, which is a tendency in ultra-left communism that understands revolution as emerging from an organic collective movement, prepared by the contradiction in the capitalist system itself. Clover observes that until the 1970s, there was a widespread assumption that the riot had been replaced by the strike as the modern expression of the collective agency of workers. He dates the return of the riot to the emergence of ‘the long downturn’, using Robert Brenner’s concept, and links it to a shift in economic conditions that has resulted in the weakening of the trade union movement, increases in automation and a new emphasis on the circulatory form of capital – in logistical supply chains and transport infrastructure – over production. These economic conditions undermined the power of strikes and channelled the energies of the dispossessed into riots: in Watts, Tiananmen Square, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Gezi Park and other places and times ‘too many to count’.20 These riots, in Clover’s analysis, are linked to the crisis tendencies of capitalism as theorized by Marx in Capital, in particular the tendency 160

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for capital to ‘throw off ’ workers and to create surplus populations: masses of people living precariously because their labour is not required, or only intermittently required, for the purposes of capital accumulation.21 The surplus manifests itself in different ways in different social contexts: it is found in the proliferation of insecure work in the wealthiest economies but also, in the United States, in the ‘prison-industrial-complex’, which profits from mass incarceration. At the periphery of global capitalism, the surplus is found in slums and informal settlements occupied by an estimated billion people, usually in the vicinity of pollution, waste and other hazards, on the outskirts of cities in the southern hemisphere.22 Clover analyses the Occupy movement as an example of what he terms ‘riot-prime’, the reconfigured riot tactic that has become available as a spontaneous response to the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. He represents OWS not as a protest but ‘an issueless democratic urge’, which settled upon occupation of Zuccotti Park because others of its initial goals – for example, to interrupt the working of Wall Street itself or to protest directly against the financial oligarchy – were found either to be impossible or a threat to the fragile internal unity of the protest itself, which brought together disparate groups and interests.23 In this reading, OWS is not an expression of insurrectionary imagination, as it is for McKee, but a fragile compromise. In the absence of any political programme, ‘the camp becomes “its own demand”, at once a call for recognition of the lived misery of austerity and an imagined prefiguration of future self-management’.24 Clover notes that Occupy and subsequent protests, including those in Ferguson and Baltimore which explicitly protested racist violence by the police, divide into ‘two impulses’: one which peels off in the direction of ‘respectability politics’ and is drawn ‘without fail into the electoral arena’ in an attempt to make sense of the uprising and translate it into electoral gains; the other is concerned with ‘practicalities’: ‘Looting, controlling space, eroding the power of the police, rendering an area unwelcome to intruders and destroying property understood to constitute the rioters’ exclusion from the world they see always before them.’25 For Clover, it is the latter of these two options that actually points the way to a form of social life that rejects entirely the pervasive forms of capitalist social organization. It is not the public sphere but the activity of riot-prime, as a kind of tacit collective work, that might allow the gestation of new social relationships. S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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This comparison shows some of the stakes involved in attempts to understand recent mass mobilizations in relation to art. McKee advocates for art activism, but he tends to reify OWS by treating it as an artwork. Clover, by contrast, examines the movement as a symptom of shift in the wider economic and political regime. The riot expresses a surplus of energy, which breaks through the conditions of normality: ‘the ceaseless social regulation that had seemed ideological and ambient and abstract is in this moment of surplus revealed as a practical matter, open to social contest’.26 It is a non-discursive, collective dialogue with power, which intervenes materially and spatially. Against moralizing criticisms of the riot, Clover emphasizes its collective intelligence. Looting, in this analysis, is a form of collective ‘price-setting’, which insists that the price of goods should be set to zero, for example. Freee represents a third position in relation to OWS. It criticizes art activism because it does not respect the difference between art and mass contestation. Their work is militant in political terms, nonetheless. One of the slogans used by Freee, which appears on badges that are sometimes used in their participatory works, reads ‘riots are miracles’. A key premise of these slogan works focuses on the decisions we make in relation to the text that we advocate for with our voices and our bodies. Often, Freee’s works invite participants to select from a choice of slogans those which they agree with and want to wear and, therefore, share. In Freee’s Manifesto Choir works, participants stand in a circle with the artists as a manifesto is read out (Figure 5.3). Freee includes in its manifestos militant statements that Beech, Hewitt and Jordan collectively agree upon and read in unison. Participants in the choir are asked only to read those statements that they can also agree with. The performances are preceded by participants reading the manifestos individually and underlining the statements that they will join in with during the performance. Then, during the choir, the manifesto is read aloud by all members: the chorus louder or quieter depending on the number in agreement. This is an approach to participatory art that allows disagreement and disunity to register in the volume of the recital. It is intended to acknowledge that collectives are not univocal but are made up of different perspectives, which may develop in dialogue with one another. Indeed, Freee has explicitly contrasted this work to the assembly made famous by OWS.27 The OWS assembly was ideally supposed to work towards consensus by establishing a means of amplifying voices and displaying feedback that would allow decisions to emerge from 162

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FIGURE 5.3  Freee art collective. Manifesto Choir, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2017. Photograph Freee. Photo: Emma Mahony.

a large group of people. This was an idealized representation of direct democracy and collective deliberation, which allowed no mediation of disagreement, except by veto.28 Freee’s manifesto performances and its text-based works approach the same problem: the fracturing of the public sphere and the confinement of political communication to segregated, pre-defined topicalization of political issues. In order to counter this segregation, militant ideas are introduced into a space where disagreement becomes part of the material of the work. The slogans and the material forms that allow them to circulate – on t-shirts, scarves, balloons or billboards – advocate political engagement and point to the possibility of a public sphere that is not one of ‘false universalism and hegemonic distortion’ but of dynamic and conflictual egalitarianism.29 The ‘process’ in Freee’s work is an enquiry into art’s separation from itself. It is the process of dismantling assumptions about art’s specialization and a testing of art’s limits through advocacy of political engagement. Freee’s approach usefully resists the idea, which is suggested by McKee’s narrative, that activist art is more politically authentic because it leaves behind the space of the museum and gallery. The problem of S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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autonomy is more complex than this. The self-reflexivity Freee brings to it is both subtle and, in its own term, ‘philistinic’: it works as art while refusing to be the type of art that owes its exclusivity to ‘the institutionalized forgetting of the acquisition of cultural capital’.30 Part of the intellectual background to this project is provided by the idea of ‘philistinism’ as a critical category: an idea derived from Dave Beech’s early work and developed, in collaboration with John Roberts, into essays that formed an important debate in the pages of New Left Review in the late 1990s.31 Theoretical ‘philistinism’ radicalizes the idea of the philistine that is the excluded spectre of culture, including of art and theory, to act as a counter-hegemonic force within art in the name of the equality that preexists ‘knowing’, or being able to negotiate the claims and precedents of contemporary art practice. This idea involves a negative dialectic: it is a theoretical discourse that acknowledges the social division that shadows all culture. As Beech and Roberts emphasize in the essay ‘The Philistine and the Logic of Negation’, this position is not simply intended to exalt that which is unformed, incoherent or debased. Instead, it is an attempt to identify the aporias, the occlusions, that exist within cultural politics: ‘The “primitive”, the unschooled, the “dumbed down” and so forth are not in themselves philistine; rather, they appear to be philistine – or related to philistinism – only when they come into contact with the issues of cultural division that confer on the term its controversy.’32 An emphasis on cultural division seems prescient and an important diagnostic tool for understanding the polarizing debates that have emerged since 2016. In the UK, the key marker here is the referendum to leave the European Union. The public discourse that has emerged in the shadow of Brexit is increasingly militant across the political spectrum. A list of explanations is ready to hand to explain this militancy: online filter bubbles, a decline in civility, the spread of ‘fake news’, a reaction against metropolitan elites and so on. These explanations contain, of course, the idea that the nation may once have been united, which is itself a tendentious historical claim. Even so, it is true the militancy of these political debates does seem to be novel. These moments are accompanied by heightened focus on language and, at the same time, a kind of insistent silence: caused by an unwillingness to broach divisive issues or just by mutual incomprehension. In the UK, Brexit has created a multiplication of divisions, not simply those between ‘leave’ and ‘remain’, but also fundamental disagreements about what 164

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‘progressive’ might actually mean.33 In other words, the division between art and politics examined by Freee is only one fracture among those that have emerged in the public sphere. It is to this disorienting resurgence of militancy that this discussion will now turn.

Start a revolution In the UK, the left–right political continuum has been disrupted by a new dividing line created by the referendum result of 2016. The result of this referendum was unexpected: experts assumed that a population would not vote for something that all commentators agreed would economically harm them. The outcome of the referendum disrupted preexisting political affiliations. Not only has militancy emerged where it is typically expected, in the supporters of the decision to leave, but also it has coalesced in the supposed political centre.34 The ‘remain’ cause has mobilized large protests and online activism. Mainstream political parties have changed their composition, resulting in internal battles over control of the party infrastructure.35 New formations, such as the ‘Brexit party’ and ‘Change UK’ emerged, with varying levels of success. A work by the artist Tim Etchells will be used here as an opportunity to reflect on these conditions. Etchells, like many contemporary artists, works across more than one field. He is a founder member of the experimental theatre group Forced Entertainment, a novelist and a theorist of theatre and performance art.36 His text art is informed by sensitivity to the performative dimension of language. The work Revolution (2010) consists of eight slogans in coloured neon, each reading ‘Start a Revolution’, displayed alongside one another. The configuration of the slogans can change, but I will refer to the version that I first saw, where the slogans were mounted in a column of text on the exterior of Plymouth Art Centre between November 2015 and January 2016 (Figure 5.4). In this version, the neon signs were fixed on the side of an early nineteenth-century end terrace, at the top of a cobbled street that leads from the shopping district down towards an historic quay, the Barbican. Plymouth is a small, regional city in the south-west of the UK. The work has something of the character of a prophesy in this iteration. It appeared a few months before the upheaval of politics caused by the referendum of 2016, in which Plymouth voted to leave the European Union by a proportion of 59.1 per cent leave to 40.1 per cent remain.37 S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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FIGURE 5.4  Tim Etchells Revolution, 2010. Neon. Image courtesy of the artist.

Obviously, Etchells’s artwork did not incite citizens of Plymouth to transgress the expectations of political commentators, and financial markets, to deliver the ‘leave’ result. To suggest that this slogan might have played this role would be absurd, not because slogans are ineffective but because artworks do not communicate at a scale that allows them to have such an influence. Even so, the power of slogans to shift political realities when they are distributed in memes and via the press, seems not to be in doubt. A symptomatic feature of Brexit has been the return to prominence of the political slogan. Vote Leave’s slogan in the referendum of 2016, ‘Take Back Control’, is widely credited as an important factor in the success of the leave campaign. Journalist Steve Richards described it in 2016 as ‘the slogan of the year, and perhaps the century’.38 Three years later, political scientists still discuss the resonance of this slogan which goes well beyond the UK to affect other European political movements critical of the European Union.39 The political consequences of Brexit are unlikely to be empowering for the British electorate or its sovereign democratic institutions, an irony that is often wearily noted by British commentators.40 But this is not the key issue; slogans are not supposed to predict the course of events but to open up a polemical world, which frames and motivates action.41 When V. I. Lenin wrote his essay ‘On Slogans’ in 1917, he argued that a slogan must be ‘correct’, that is, based on an accurate analysis of 166

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the relations of force defining a given historical conjuncture.42 Slogans that are correct might serve the goal of revolution but those that are not risk becoming an obstacle to it. The same slogan ‘All Power Must Be Transferred to the Soviets’ was correct in February but no longer in July 1917: in the meantime, the balance of forces changed, and a new demand was required. As Dave Beech has observed, Lenin was extremely strict in his assessment of political slogans and he did not hesitate to draw attention to the flaws he found in them.43 In Lenin’s terms, the slogan is an intervention in language that unlocks the conjuncture, focusing the revolutionary potential of the masses: an incorrect slogan dissipates those energies.44 The fact that this slogan ‘Start a Revolution’ is somehow too generalized to incite action seems to be significant to the meaning of this work.45 The repetition in Revolution is an equivocation in the form of a revolutionary slogan, or perhaps a staging of this form that suspends its effectiveness. It also suggests the double life of the slogan, which operates in politics and in advertising, somewhere between revolution and distraction. The colours of Revolution are too saccharine to be suggestive of political agitation although the work contains echoes of this tradition. Repetition is used to reinforce the message of agitational propaganda but also it empties phrases of meaning. It is this balancing act between agitation and indifference that seems to be characteristic of Etchells’s work, and it is even more striking when it is placed in the context of the changing perception of politicized language that is characteristic of recent times. Given that capitalism is driven towards revolution of ‘the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society’, Revolution might be read as a remark upon this anarchic rhythm of development.46 Famously, Marx and Engels themselves placed the revolutions in production at the centre of their analysis of capitalism and its social effects, where all traditions and cultural differences become subjugated to the market, as ‘all that is solid melts into air’.47 This dematerialization is evoked, as a kind of metaphysical principle, in the ethereal self-containment of neon light in Revolution. A digression via the neon sign is relevant because it is one of the routes by which contemporary art came to engage with the exacerbation of language in modernity: the incursion of text into the spatio-temporal confusion of the city and its diversification into the mass media. Although conceptualism is often discussed as a ‘dematerialization’ of the art object, after the influential critical intervention of Lucy Lippard S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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and Jon Chandler, conceptual artists were involved in the distribution of language in material forms, including on billboards, via xerox machines, in magazines and self-published books and as neon signs.48 As Peter Osborne has observed, this diversification of language within art that took place first in cubism, then in conceptual art, parallels the growing appearance of language in the built environment, which the anthropologist Marc Augé identifies with radical transformation of the experience of space.49 Neon signs first appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century and began to be used in art in the 1960s, just as they were beginning to disappear from city streets. In these works the visual power of the sign tended to be used to evoke the nullification of meaning. A famous example of a neon art work, Kosuth’s Neon (1965) explores emptiness as a tautology. Bruce Nauman’s early neon signs stage a nihilistic juxtaposition of seductive colour and succinct communication in, for example, the neon work Run from Fear/ Fun from Rear (1972), which offers a laconic diagnosis of the psychosexual appeal of mass culture. Robert Barry’s work, Inert Gas Series/Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon/From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion (1969), imagines neon’s emptiness in another way again. The work proposes a relationship between the ‘inert’ and ‘indefinite expansion’ that links neon to an ‘abstract universal’, which may have had many counter-cultural resonances at the time, of global connection and transformation of consciousness.50 In Revolution, the emptiness seems to scrutinize the artwork as a proxy for militancy or even the possibility of a militant politics in a public sphere that is terminally distracted. Equally, it may be that the emptiness of the injunction ‘Start a Revolution’ anticipates an upheaval of meaning of the kind that can only come from outside of the work. Social change is the corollary to all consumption: in consumer capitalism, the urgency of changes to fashion, cuisine, interior design, technology, self-development, alcohol and every permutation of the lifestyle industry is a familiar background to all our interactions. All these changes may also be an anticipation or absorption of revolutionary energies to hold them in check. Ironically, the demand for change becomes an important stabilizing factor in modernity. Although Walter Benjamin saw in fashion an insurrectionary potential, what Adorno and Horkheimer termed ‘the culture industry’ contains the temporality of revolution in a deeper logic of identity, a cultural expression of the concentration of capital accumulation.51 The advertising industry, or consciousness industry, sprang up in the chasm between the vendor and purchaser to incite demand and, 168

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simultaneously, to counter the efforts of competitors to do the same. Behavioural science, psychology and sociology refine the operations that take place at this strategically crucial moment in the reproduction of the status quo. This was the case in the 1960s, but it has reached a new stage of refinement with the emergence of digital platforms since the turn of the millennium. Another of Etchells’s neon works, Optic​al-Il​lusio​ns-Po​litic​al-De​lusio​nsPo​etica​l-Con​fusio​ns, seems to address this problem of social change and continuity. In this work, Etchells plays with phrases that are apparently mirrored but slightly different (Figure 5.5). This work emphasizes the experience of reading, its lacunae and anticipatory leaps, in a way that is relevant to the politics of a speeded up news cycle. The militancy that is generated by divisive political debates is amplified by social media and its short circuit of subjectivity and the public sphere. Through that interface, consumption of political news develops an urgent temporality that, though it is mediated by text, depends on the scanning of headlines, tweets or memes, pressured by the transience of the feed and the affective intensity of the strange interface between public and private that the screen represents. Interactions via social media are rich in potential for misinterpretation based on misreading, which spread virally. In a sense, distraction seems to feed militancy.

FIGURE 5.5  Tim Etchells Mirror Piece, 2014. Neon. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Distraction and militancy The demands upon human attention are now more intensive and carefully designed than they have ever been, but it is rare that design is entirely in control of its consequences. The recent transformation of the media sensorium derives from the convergence of media forms whose effects have long been entwined with the experience of modernity.52 Now, film, telephony, television, photography and publishing platforms are all handheld and posts are shared immediately, from anywhere. The interrelation of public and private that was evoked through the Walkman in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go Dancing Platform) , discussed in Chapter 3, has arrived at a new level of intensity. This situation tends towards the intensification of the effects of technologies of distraction, but it is based on the democratization of access to technology; it has resulted in a reconfiguration of important aspects of social experience as a result. It is not entirely ‘new’: since at least the 1960s, perhaps even earlier, political movements have been compelled to hold the attention of their audiences via a dialogue with the mass media. Slogans form an integral part of this dialogue, focused and compressed into a form capable of being disseminated easily: ‘We are the 99%’, ‘Take Back Control’, ‘For the Many Not the Few’ or ‘Get Brexit Done’. The critic Richard Seymour uses Paul Klee’s painting The Twittering Machine to evoke the distracted overproduction of writing, the scripturience, which he sees as characteristic of social media and its interaction with contemporary politics. Framing himself as a ‘neoLuddite’, Seymour emphasizes that addiction is designed into social media. The enormous communicative capacity that social media contains is harnessed to commercial objectives, as a ‘social industry’, intended ‘through the production and harvesting of data, to objectify and quantify social life in numerical form’.53 This has become the most widely accepted diagnosis of our relationship to social media, that it is a form of exploitation of our attention. As Seymour puts it ‘This is about the industrialization of writing. It is about the code (the writing) that shapes how we use it, the data (another form of writing) which we generate in doing so and the way in which the data is used to (shape) write us’.54 Where Seymour’s diagnosis of contemporary conditions in The Twittering Machine is strongest is its emphasis on the materiality of writing, ‘that writing is matter, and that the way the texture of our writing materials shapes and contours what can be written makes all the 170

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difference in the world’.55 Also, Seymour’s account is compelling in its evocation of the way that the industrialization of writing as social media creates weird psychosocial effects that derive from the ‘massification of individual voices’. Here, Seymour emphasizes the frenzies that derive from the behaviouristic design of social media, where celerity and topicality are driven to intensify engagement, and production of more data, ‘the more chaos, the better’.56 Yet the weakness of his account is its one-sided analysis of the effects of social media, which results in an emphasis on exploitation and the idea that users of social media are tricked, their subjectivities ‘written’ by the design of the digital platform itself. Although it is true that social media operates in the way that Seymour describes, there are unintended consequences of its behaviouristic quest for data. Social media is also one of the technological conditions of possibility of new forms of resistance, allowing the rapid convergence of protest movements and solving of the logistical problems that mass protest involves.57 Etchells’s slogan works Revolution and Optic​al-Il​lusio​ns-Po​litic​alDe​lusio​ns-Po​etica​l-Con​fusio​ns address public space, but they examine politics in a way that seems to mimic or anticipate its neutralization. In Anywhere or Not at All, Peter Osborne provides a way to understand this. He suggests that boredom and distraction have played a dual role in shaping what we now recognize as contemporary art. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writing on cinema, he argues that since the avantgardes of the 1920s, art has been locked into a dialectic of attention and distraction: attention to art is also distraction from distraction or ‘distracted attention’ as Benjamin put it.58 Critical spectatorship must be salvaged from the ever more intense clamour of visuality that fuels a culture of consumption. Boredom, Osborne suggests, forms the basis of a critical response, an attempt to create a distraction from these distractions, or to propose attention that is an artistically and politically distinctive form of distraction: ‘there is both an art of boredom, as the practice of producing boredom, and a politics to boredom, as part of the production of possibility as such’.59 Osborne uses this argument to make a political case for distinctive characteristics of contemporary art: the impassivity of display and the impossible endurance required of the spectator, especially by video installation. It is interesting to read this politics of boredom in relation to militancy, which also depends on distraction from distraction to maintain the coherence of its political demand. Militancy operates by intensifying S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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and redirecting the methods of distraction. The neo-behaviourist design of social media has the unintended consequence of intensifying militancy in response to a complex interaction of economic and social factors. In the political crisis of Brexit, these factors are in play because of the longterm decline of rates of profit and investment, intensified by the near collapse of the financial system in 2008. Art does not operate in the same temporal register as political militancy and the forms of communication that construct and maintain it. In its engagement with politics, which includes language, art seems often to interpose a kind of distance, perhaps it might sometimes even be boredom. For Osborne, this boredom is important: it has a generative potential. In Etchells’s Revolution, it takes the form of a performed indifference. Etchells’s call to ‘Start a Revolution’ has no basis in a ‘definite political situation’; it does not speak to the present, and it performs the long wait for a conjuncture where its call to action might be activated. Between the present and the future, the artwork is seemingly hermetically sealed, but perhaps capable of altering its meaning as forces rearrange themselves. It is this aleatory factor, which depends as much on misreading as it does on translation, that seems to be intensified in the ambiguous space between art and politics.

Artist Taxi Driver In contemporary art, militancy is most often assumed to be located in the domain of activist art that, in the words of Boris Groys, ‘tries to make art itself useful’.60 Groys contrasts contemporary art activism to the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, which he argues tended to attack the political uselessness of art, rather than to ‘use’ art politically. Groys’s distinction is overly simplistic. As touched upon in the previous chapter, questions of utility may be traced back to the Arts and Crafts movement and its influence on the historical avant-garde. The productivists explored new interrelationships between art and industry. Use was also an important category in the work of Bertolt Brecht, for example. Though he did not propose that art might directly intervene in everyday life, Brecht thought that formal experimentation was justified if it attempted to find techniques with ‘the power to transform our societal world’.61 In a comparable way, activist artists and collectives tend to work in an ambivalent space between the art world and political engagement. An 172

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interesting question may be whether the boundary between art and life has altered, not because of the actions of artists but because of changes in the institutional arrangement of the public sphere. One of the lines from conceptualism to art activism goes via tactical media, a politicized form of media engagement that emerged in the early 1990s and attempted to turn art’s sensitivity to communication and context to directly political effect. Tactical media has been an important influence on the social turn, especially through its theoretical engagement with the potential to disrupt the power invested in the mass media via interventions including pranks, hoaxes and fictions.62 For these avant-gardist disruptions, the ‘spectacle’ was assumed to be pervasive and stabilizing. Tactical media interventions drew especially on the work of Michel de Certeau, who contrasted the ‘tactics’ of the weak, with the strategy of powerful institutions, the state and corporations.63 The term ‘users’ is salient in de Certeau’s work and is clearly an influence upon more recent debates about ‘useful art’.64 One of the strangest things about the period since 2016 has been the fact that these tactics, which were once assumed to be left-wing, are now reproduced by the alt-right insurgency, and credited with helping Donald Trump to the White House. During the US presidential election of 2016, it became clear that alt-right accounts used pranks, fictions and other tactics to spread disinformation or to mobilize a conservative coalition in support of Trump. Social media has altered the relationship between communication and action to the extent that irregular groups of hackers and state actors both make use of its disruptive potential.65 As though in response to this situation, since 2016, mainstream political communication has increasingly taken on what seems to be a calculatedly destabilizing role, whether via Trump’s Twitter diplomacy, or by way of the language used in Trump’s inauguration address, which intentionally broke with convention by its use of a divisive reference to ‘American carnage’.66 These changes signal that factions in the ruling classes no longer have an investment in the stability of any communicative framework but instead look to gain strategic advantage through disruption. An avantgardist aesthetics of disruption is now generalized, not only in the art institution but also in the institutions of political representation. As revelations surrounding the events of 2016 show, the interface between social media and electoral politics depends on the manipulation of affect, where supporters are mobilized, and the opposition is suppressed, confused and divided. Psy-ops campaigns do not necessarily S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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need to advocate for the victory of one side or another, but rather they thrive on a disorder that ensures that there is no stable resolution possible. In this situation, tactical media strategies have been appropriated, a point that is acknowledged by David Garcia, who co-wrote with Geert Lovinck the original tactical media manifesto in the late 1990s.67 In both the United States and the United Kingdom, anxiety about fake news forms an integral part of this ‘organic crisis’ of the state, to use the term used by Antonio Gramsci. An organic crisis is one where the established political apparatus is no longer perceived by the people to be a legitimate means to represent their concerns. As a result, ‘representation’ becomes an intensely problematic question, in both political and aesthetic registers of meaning. During periods of profound unrest, language crystallizes the terms through which a political struggle emerges. Whereas once the institutions of the press regulated access to information, and forms of public discourse, the decline of print and the rise of social media now creates new conditions for political mobilization. No longer stabilized by the conventions of the news media, the multidimensional character of language is revealed: it drifts between fact and fiction, between description and prescription. The anxiety created by this instability is often expressed in the call to return to ‘facts’. This is also an ideological demand, a kind of denialism that disguises the malaise in institutions of liberal democracy and mutates into a new ideological ruse of authority, when governments themselves take upon themselves to define what facts are – where Trump declares criticism to be ‘fake news’ – and right-wing groups identify themselves with dispassionate ‘reason’. There are economic, technological and institutional factors expressed in this instability of meaning. Social media has provided the means for the amplification of discontent caused by, in the United Kingdom, a decade of austerity measures, which have removed key infrastructures of social protection. Political energies are manifested in language in a more unstable way than they were previously. This is perhaps why slogans have achieved a renewed importance in the political struggle over state power, after a long period of seemingly ‘postpolitical’ entropy.68 In the United States, the ‘Make America Great Again’ and in the United Kingdom the ‘Take Back Control’ slogans crystallized a nationalist political constituency. The slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’, used by the Conservative Party in the election of 2019, was pitched to mobilize the exasperation of Brexit supporters and their perception that their 174

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democratic mandate would be stolen by parliamentary manoeuvring. A paradox of democratic process emerged from the conflict between the result of the referendum and a system where parliament is sovereign. This was a pivot point, where a fluid balance of forces crystallized in favour of the right of the Conservative Party. It was a revolution in the sense that a politically unthinkable solution, a ‘hard Brexit’, where the departure from the European Union would arrive without a trade deal in place, a situation that would be likely to inflict severe economic damage, became the preferred policy. At a moment like this, it is important to remember the contingencies that have made this situation possible. Even when reactionary movements succeed, this does not mean that underlying crisis tendencies are resolved or that digital tools are entirely co-opted and neutralized. The remarkable result of the snap election called by Prime Minister Theresa May in 2017, for example, suggested an entirely different horizon of possibilities. At this point, the Conservatives hoped to turn a 20-point lead in the opinion polls over the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, into a commanding majority in Parliament to make it easier to push through legislation on Brexit. In the course of a five-week election campaign, a 20-point lead in the polls was cut to a near tie, an entirely unprecedented shift of the polls in such a short space of time. This result was all the more remarkable given that the Conservative Party invested millions of pounds in targeted social media campaigns, identifying key swing voters and placing political advertisements into their newsfeeds that were calculated either to suppress or incite action and/or shift political opinion.69 Crucially important to the Labour Party’s success was a coalition of online news outlets and activists who worked tirelessly and voluntarily to counter the government’s attack lines and share alternative perspectives. Current fears about the decline of the mainstream media and the rise of ‘fake news’ often fail to take account of this knife-edge situation, in which both dangerously reactionary and progressive forces have flourished. Mark McGowan, who is known as Chunky Mark or as ‘Artist Taxi Driver’ (ATD), operates within this space. With approximately 100,000 followers on Twitter, his is one among many voices on left-wing social media outlets in the UK that made possible Labour’s transformation of fortunes in the 2017 election. Many of these followers will not be aware that ATD is an artistic creation, in the sense that McGowan qualified with a bachelor’s degree in painting from Camberwell college of art and S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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is known for his career as a performance and media artist. The artistic provenance of ATD originated in a protest at the Frieze Art Fair in 2010 and is the self-conscious inversion of a comic stereotype in Britain: the reactionary, opinionated taxi driver who imposes his views on passengers. ATD’s rants are virtuosic in their performance of a struggle over language, forming baroque neologisms to describe and re-describe the social destruction wreaked by austerity. McGowan has previously undertaken performances that thematize endurance, such as The Withered Arm for Peace, where he performed for two weeks outside the Brick Lane Gallery over Christmas in 2006 with his arm attached to a lamp post. In a comparable feat of endurance, the persona of ATD posts a commentary on news events on an almost daily basis. To illustrate the character of these interventions, I will focus on an event during the 2017 election. During a televised debate with Jeremy Corbyn, Prime Minister Theresa May asserted that there was no ‘magic money tree’ to pay for all the promises made in the Labour manifesto. This was clearly an attack line that had been deliberated over by media strategists working with the Conservative campaign. It was a piece of text well suited to being amplified through the print press to disparage as fantasy the idea that it might be possible to invest significantly more in education, the NHS and social welfare and to demand more tax to be paid by wealthy individuals and large corporations. Jacques Rancière has written powerfully of the political implications of imagery in a commentary that includes both the visual and the textual image. He states: the image is not exclusive to the visible. There is visibility that does not amount to an image; there are images which consist wholly in words. But the commonest regime of the image is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible, a relationship which plays on both the analogy and the dissemblance between them. This relationship by no means requires the two terms to be materially present. The visible can be arranged in meaningful tropes; words deploy a visibility that can be blinding.70 The ‘magic money tree’ metaphor was intended to blind, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, by its imposition of a framework for understanding the Labour Party’s campaign. In ATD’s filmed response, released immediately after the debate, the metaphor is subjected to multiple re-inscriptions. He 176

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begins by laughing and recounting that ‘nobody knows’ where the ‘Tory magic money tree’ is to be found. Then he answers, ‘You’ve got it’ (to Theresa May), or ‘it’s in the Cayman Islands, it’s in Panama’, (referring to the ‘Panama papers’ revelations). Then, in a culminating tirade: The Tories’ magic money tree is called the public – you – your zerohours contract – you get less, the boss gets more – the magic money tree – rents go up, the Tory landlord gets more – you get poor – the magic money tree – your kids get debt – the City of London? – they get Lamb-er-fuckin-ghinis – the magic money tree. Your library, your fire station, your community centre, your police station – get shut down. Tory vulture capitalist property speculators get the keys – the magic money tree. Google, Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, the biggest companies in our lives pay no tax – the Tory magic money tree. Banks, credit cards debt, you can’t sleep at night worrying about work, feed the kids, paying the rent – that’s the Tory magic money tree, like a fucking giant triffid, spreading.71 A transcription cannot quite capture the subtle aesthetics in ATD’s work, where the primary visual dimension is filmed on a dashboard-mounted camera, deskilled and seemingly devoid of aesthetic interest. ATD appears, usually wearing sunglasses, framed by his car interior. The visual interest of the image is suppressed, but the power of words is thematized. ATD’s practice is an endless series of reports, a kind of social media reinvention of the ‘living newspaper’, the theatrical form used by the Federal Theatre Project in the 1930s to address issues of topical concern. It reinvents this project as a kind of ‘poor image’, in Hito Steyerl’s terms: ‘a copy in motion . . . an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution’.72 This itinerancy quickly resulted in ‘Theresa May’s Tory Magic Money Tree’ being remixed with ‘Shutdown’, a track by the UK Grime artist Skepta.73 In this work, a circuit is implied between an anonymous audience of media producers and the space of precarious work. Interviews with McGowan, including in The Guardian, have indicated that he does actually work as a minicab driver: his art practice is structured by the space between fares.74 Given his history of creating media hoaxes as artworks, there is reason to be sceptical about this. (When asked he has replied evasively: ‘everyone always says are you really a taxi driver, never are you really an artist’.)75 S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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This ambivalence about work and art has been built into ATD’s art practice, with the short one- or two-minute rants becoming a potentially endless serial communication, tracking and reinscribing the political news cycle. When read as an art practice, ATD pushes at the outer boundary of the form of endurance work that played a key role in Mark McGowan’s early practice. This is in marked contrast to the ideal form of tactical media works, which have tended to be understood as nomadic interventions, hit-and-run hacks and pranks. In ‘The ABC of Tactical Media’, David Garcia and Geert Lovinck’s ‘manifesto’ from 1997, they describe a ‘quick and dirty aesthetic’, which was characterized by its ‘mobility’: ‘The desire and capability to combine or jump from one media to another creating a continuous supply of mutants and hybrids.’76 Although Artist Taxi Driver has varied the formula of his posts slightly over time, it is a long way from tactical media’s flexible mutation. Instead, ATD seems to dramatize a capacity for endurance within the affective rollercoaster of social media and the saturation of news coverage. This endurance is linked to the serial production of ATD’s films, suggestive of the spaces that are left over from his work, though perhaps this is part of the fiction. ATD’s endurance is located in the temporal interruptions that are part of our interactions with capital, in what the collective Endnotes have discussed as the ‘double-moulinet’ of the value form, where the reproduction of capital intersects with the reproduction of labour through waged work.77 Whether this work is actually as a taxi driver, or as an internet celebrity, is immaterial. At the time of writing, ATD’s online reports continue, most often in the form of newspaper reviews, where ATD’s characteristic embodied language reframes the ideological emphasis of newspaper headlines. In ATD’s posts, distraction and militancy find themselves juxtaposed in a relationship with labour and its circulation within the city. Names, catchphrases, litanies and expositions are embedded in each rant, which spontaneously generates slogans, sometimes reinscribing or subverting newspaper headlines. Although ATD signals his role as an artist and a taxi driver, his work is outside the normal frame of the art institution. His key audience is provided by social media, and this is also a kind of marketplace. ATD produces watercolours, which he sells to his followers in editions that help fund films and other politically engaged activities. The watercolours of animals combine with slogans in the kind of kitschconceptualist hinterland that can be found on greetings card stands in every shopping centre. These works slip between slogan and desiderata, 178

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embracing the sentimentalism of the animal and landscape imagery, as though in contrast to the exhausting energy of his filmed tirades, selling them as low-cost editions to Twitter and Facebook followers. This kind of proto-artwork, creates income, obviously. But it also seems to be an intentional barrier against assimilating ATD into an artistic identity. Considering these elements of his practice, ATD might be read through John Roberts’s category of the ‘suspensive avant-garde’ that is situated outside the institution of art. ATD might certainly be understood as an investigation of subjectivity under the regime of late capitalism, however, which is where Roberts places the activity of the suspensive avant-garde most explicitly.78 The endurance work that ATD produces is part of the reorganized social relations that are made possible by digital tools and digital architecture. This space is part of capitalist society – it is not ‘virtual’ but real – reaching into and reorganizing the social practice of work, providing new markets for low-cost multiples and providing a different kind of relationship between language and affect. *** When the reproduction of the social order is in doubt, it is far more difficult to make judgements about which information is useful and which can be discounted. Hence, the explosion of conspiracy theories in recent years. Proposals that once seemed naively utopian now seem at least as likely as any other outcome when set against the spectacle of a dysfunctional system. In the period since 2016, there are economic, technological and institutional factors at work in this instability. Whereas once the institutions of the press controlled access to information and the forms of public discourse, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media create new temporalities and intensities of public discourse. The slogan captures the dynamism of this situation and poses interesting questions in relation to art’s autonomy. In Freee’s work, slogans shift between contexts, ultimately used to dramatize, as in the case of the Manifesto Choir, disagreement in a ritualized form. Their practice recognizes that it is not consensus but conflict that allows an active political culture. Mapped as a fluctuating relationship between silence and speech, around militant arguments, the spoken choir seems to indicate the possibility for political views to change. In other works, the materiality of language is emphasized: its distribution in space, its scriptovisual character and its transitions between material S LOGANS AND MILITANCY

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states. This sensitivity to the material forms of language is a legacy of conceptualism that provides an important insight into the nature of ideology. Tim Etchells’s work seems to recognize the obstinacy of language, the sense in which radical ideas may survive the processes of their neutralization, to be reanimated by a new balance of forces. Although the works discussed in this chapter are involved in political questions, they are also distanced from them. The call to revolution is seemingly inert, as though waiting for language to be reanimated. This may be true of emancipatory ideas but, sadly, also of reactionary and racist beliefs. One of the defining features of the present phase of crisis is that the affective intensity associated with language is amplified by digital architecture. The prominence of a neo-behaviourist relationship to subjectivity in digital design is focused especially on technologies of communication, where ‘likes’, endless scrolls and prompts shape social interaction. An avant-gardist ethos of disruption seems to shape platform capitalism as it attempts to reconfigure service industries like food delivery and taxi rides and as political messages that attempt to game electoral systems. No longer confined to the institution of art, as Peter Bürger once argued, this ideology now permeates the design of communication. As a result, it becomes more difficult to see society as a system that tends to work towards equilibrium, as it is envisaged in functionalist social theory. The destructive potential of capitalism has developed a kind of ideological avatar, in the anti-institutionalism that is operationalized through technological networks. This does not mean that our social system is entirely dismantled. Governments and other groups are rapidly evolving strategies to maintain their control over information and its dissemination. The change seems to be such that crisis management and projects require more forceful intervention to maintain social cohesion. The neutralization of politics seems to have receded, to be replaced by strategies that deliberately intensify political energies, so as to redirect them. Even so, speech retains its powerful ability to mediate and reconfigure meanings, which is the point that ATD reiterates again and again in his daily performances. His media activism dramatizes the exhausting intensity now associated with participation in the public sphere.

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CONCLUSION THE USES OF CRISES

The historian Reinhart Koselleck, writing in the 1980s, observed that the term ‘crisis’ is subject to ‘inflationary usage’ and that the proliferation of the term can be traced back at least to the nineteenth century.1 Janet Roitman, in a survey of reports on the financial crash of 2008, notes that ‘crisis texts are a veritable industry’.2 References to crisis are found everywhere in cultural debates, and this is not a new phenomenon by any means.3 Even so, this does not mean that crisis is merely a script, or a narrative construct. At the time of writing coronavirus is resurgent, Black Lives Matter protests have continued for months in the United States, supporters of the bizarre ‘Qanon’ conspiracy theory demonstrate alongside neo-Nazis in anti-lockdown protests and wild fires turn the sky deep orange in California as ice-sheets crumble in record arctic temperatures. Some of these crisis conditions are directly produced by neoliberal governance – such as militarized policing in the United States – others are indirectly related. In either case, the coherence of liberal democratic institutions is threatened by an accumulation of shocks. This book has examined the prominence of politicized contemporary art, which was initiated by the social turn, in the light of these tendencies towards crisis. By way of conclusion, it will be useful to reflect on the implications of this argument and its limitations. In the book Anti-Crisis, based on her analysis of reporting upon the crash of 2008, Janet Roitman argues that crisis narratives constrain interpretation of events by imposing a teleology onto them. The narration of a crisis always prepares the way for emergency measures. Crisis rhetoric constructs ‘narrative forms’ that have real consequences.4 It has already been noted that neoliberalism is associated with deliberately engineered

market shocks. It is by now a well-known strategy of neoliberalism, to use crisis as a justification for stringent remedies which extend the reach of the market. The pattern has played out many times over the last fifty years: in Chile under Augusto Pinochet, in the United Kingdom and the United States under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union and in Iraq after the invasion of 2003.5 In 2008, talk of crisis prepared the way for austerity, the bailout of banks and large industry and for years of ‘quantitative easing’. Roitman notes that crisis narratives often rule out alternative responses. In the United States, she points out, there was no space in public discourse to express abhorrence at the idea of mass foreclosures on mortgages, and mass evictions, for example.6 Roitman is clearly right to observe that crisis is always instrumentalized; this has also been a striking feature of more recent events. In the UK, for example the Johnson administration uses emergency powers, granted because of the pandemic, to hasten the privatization of NHS infrastructure. Roitman seems also to make a more fundamental point, however: that narratives of crisis tend toward intellectual conformism. This book has examined a functionalist account of the art institution that continues to play a key role in art theory, expressed most clearly in the idea that the art institution neutralizes or co-opts radical artistic politics. Cooption is itself a kind of crisis narrative, one that intends to acknowledge the resourcefulness of capitalism and the durability of its cultural forms. In the early reception of the avant-garde, and in the hands of groups like the Situationist International, this idea had militant implications. More recently, it has been incorporated in routine diagnoses of cultural malaise. A comparable pattern of argument is found in accounts of the neutralization of the avant-garde (Chapter 1), in narratives of institutional critique (Chapter 2), in the idea that relational aesthetics is commodified (Chapter 3), in readings of social practice as ‘bureaucratic’ (Chapter 4) and in contentions over the relationship between autonomous art and art activism (Chapter 5). Has this narrative become a shibboleth of art theory? Certainly, it is reasonable to argue that the art institution plays a role in cultural processes that absorb contradictions. A problem arises when the system is imagined to function so efficiently that no trace of resistant potential survives art’s incorporation into it. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the norms of art were transformed by avant-gardes, as Peter Bürger argues. At the same time,

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the reach of the culture industry was also revolutionized to lay the groundwork for consumer capitalism and its pacifying routines. Art theory draws upon classic aesthetic debates of Western Marxism that reflect on and analyse this period of transition. As a result, an influential current in art theory has assumed that the pattern of co-option and commodification that was identified in the 1930s has been repeated in the period since the 1960s, though in a more intensive and extensive process. This assumption deserves to be questioned because of the distinctive economic and social conditions that have emerged with the onset of neoliberalism. The art institution now responds to a combination of economic, political and demographic pressures, quite different to those that were at work in the 1930s. It is this point that is made forcefully in the writings of Gregory Sholette and John Roberts, as discussed in Chapter 1. The art collective is an organizational form that reveals the pressures that are at work symptomatic of an art institution that becomes disarticulated, unable to contain contradictions. This is not simply an abstract social theoretical point; it has consequences for how the politics of art is understood. During the ‘long downturn’ since the 1970s, political horizons have tended to be framed by the gradual erosion of social protections imposed during ‘the long boom’ of the immediate post-Second World War period. The financial crash of 2008 brought the global financial system close to collapse. Although it is not yet possible to predict the long-term consequences of this situation, even after more than a decade, it is possible to trace its aftershocks in rhythms of insurrection, and in artists attempt to keep time with them. It is by enquiring into works produced within this cultural situation that it may become possible to access one of the few positive benefits of uncertainty, which is the intellectual openness that it demands. Rather than looking back to the brief period of post-war social democracy, it is necessary to look forward. Albeit in a confused way, the social turn has been part of a broadly expansive investigation of the conditions that shape the present. Political upheaval, which has installed right-wing national-populist governments in the largest democracies in the world, and the pandemic, which has revealed economic and racial inequality by imposing a new spatial politics of risk, demand a re-envisioned cultural politics. Crisis narratives shape the meaning of events and their political consequences: on this score, Roitman is right. It is important to stress,

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however, that this is because the material and social conditions of crisis, though always present under capitalism, periodically intensify. Crisis is not merely a rhetorical motif nor is it an undifferentiated background noise of cultural development; it is a violent latency. What we call crises are moments where contradictions that are typically masked by the quotidian structures of social and political experience under a capitalist order are revealed as economic exploitation, institutionalized racism, patriarchal violence and discrimination. These conditions, formed by the logic of capital accumulation, are now brought more vividly into public consciousness. This is a result of collective political action, on the one hand, but also a tendential weakening of the institutional apparatus that guarantees the social order in its current form. An altered relationship between art and politics is one outcome of this conjuncture. Although the crises of the present are different to those of the 1930s, the intellectual work of that decade laid down a groundwork for Marxist aesthetics. This investigation of the role played by narratives of co-option in contemporary art does not dispense with this legacy. Interlocutors in these debates included key figures of Western Marxism: Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.7 As Fredric Jameson has noted, the disputes between these thinkers were marked by ‘internal dynamism by which all the logical possibilities are rapidly generated in turn’.8 The positions in this debate articulate problems that are still live: the relationship of art to political commitment, the place of art in relation to popular culture and media technology, the cultural politics of aesthetic experimentation and mass communication in a changing social world. While they remain relevant, these problems are not immutable. As cultural and political conditions have changed, art has arrived at different configurations of its relationship to society, though still within the parameters created by the imperatives of capitalist accumulation. Walter Benjamin’s allegorical reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the new as ‘angel of history’, written shortly before the author’s death, is one of the most famous accounts of crisis in Marxist aesthetics from this period. Repeatedly invoked, it retains its force nonetheless: His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls 184

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it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them . . . This storm is what we call progress.9 This extended metaphor continues to be reworked in recent attempts to come to grips with the character of global instability. For Benjamin, the prevalence of crisis conditions under capitalism is masked by the liberal attachment to the idea of progress. This idea is wryly updated by the artist and theorist Hito Steyerl. In her version, the banal dual meaning of the term ‘spam’, as processed meat and digital communication, becomes the metaphoric fulcrum of our present state of emergency. The excess of digital communication and the tragedy of ‘surplus’ populations are fused in this image: Spam has been through the meat-grinder of industrial production. This is why its fabrication resonates with the equally industrial (or post-industrial) generations of populations worldwide, who endured the mincer of repeated primordial accumulation. Several cycles of debt bondage, subsequent exodus, draft into industrial labour and repeated rejection from it force people back into subsistence farming, only to see them reemerge from fields as post-Fordist service workers. Like their electronic spam message counterpart, these crowds form the vast majority of their kind but are considered superfluous, annoying and redundant.10 The idea of a surplus population, a precarious and marginalized collectivity whose labour is no longer required by the process of capital accumulation, is an important one in recent art theory. Those who are imprisoned in insecure service work; or migrants displaced by war, environmental catastrophe and economic hardship; or the millions who simply eke out an informal existence in vast slums – these lives have come to take on a central place in theoretical writing about tendencies aggravated by the financial crisis of 2008. They also form an important concern of social practice, as discussed in Chapter 4.11 If the social has been colonized by capitalism, this is not simply to be understood in terms of alienation and spectacle. It is more like a reinvented colonial rationale of divide and rule, where resentments are encouraged in a fragmented CONCLUSION

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population so that it becomes easier to control. The surplus populations are consigned to a precarious and super-exploited existence at the margins of capital accumulation, margins which are present in different ways in the capitalist heartlands and the periphery, in public and domestic spaces and in divisions enforced along racial and gender lines. Since 2011, the social turn has increasingly taken its bearings from the new forms of protest that have emerged to recognize this stark reality, the ‘movement of the squares’, more recent uprisings in France, Chile and the global Black Lives Matter protests. How exactly do these events interact with art? There is no simple answer to this question, but it is important to pre-empt the idea that the problems in the relationship between art and politics are reconciled, as some have argued. Although artists do contribute to protests, this does not make them inheritors of an avant-garde legacy. The weakness of this argument is that it tends to assume that avant-garde strategies are by default socially progressive or emancipatory. Disruptive aesthetic strategies are employed across the ideological spectrum by conservatives as well as radicals, by social movements and by representatives of the state. If this is an inheritance of the avant-garde, it is so pervasive – shared by tech entrepreneurs and communist militants – and so ideologically flexible that it constitutes all the struggles that now overtake the public sphere. It does not seem to make sense to describe this situation in terms of cooption and neutralization of political energies. Rather, it is characterized by the adoption of subversive aesthetic strategies and resistant positions across the ideological spectrum. Conservatives and the alt-right argue for ‘traditional’ values using tactics that were developed to agitate for social change. This is not strictly a new phenomenon: it can be traced back to the right-wing reaction to the social movements of the 1960s, especially in the United States. Anti-abortion campaigners, the Tea Party movement and the movement in support of Trump exemplify this mobilization, which is funded and organized by networks of neo-Conservative patrons. It is, nonetheless, an unprecedented situation because of the intensification of this struggle and its generalization through new communication networks. The body of theoretical work that approach art’s politics through problems of the relationship between artistic labour and the commodity has provided an important insight into the situation of art and culture under neoliberalism as discussed in Chapter 3. Even so, this debate is not always well equipped to capture the importance of the cultural-political dynamic 186

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that has emerged as the boundaries of the art institution have become increasingly diffuse. The economics of new communication technologies and platform capitalism directly shape the architecture of communication that feeds instability. Although capitalist society is ultimately determined by economic interests, the militant contestation of questions to do with social and cultural change is muted when it is explored only through economic categories. The weakening of institutions across civil society is an important determining factor within this situation. Writing of the rise of populism in electoral politics, political theorists Anton Jäger and Arthur Boriello argue that ‘populism both expresses and reshapes the relationship between state and society in an era of neoliberalism’.12 Long-term trends of declining involvement in civil bodies, including trade unions, churches, associations and clubs has resulted in a ‘hollowing out of party democracy’ that ‘has progressively eroded the mechanisms of representation characteristic of the postwar model’. Their point is that this complex ecology of social forms once acted as ‘mediating agents between citizens and the state’ but does so no longer. Hence, political parties become increasingly siloed from a wider polity, opening a space that new populist party formations can exploit, aided by the emergence of powerful digital organizing tools of social media. This account provides context for what I have termed the ‘disarticulation’ of the art institution. Under neoliberalism, the free movement of capital seems to have hastened the globalization of art. Although one feature of this situation is the expansion of the art market, contemporary art is receptive to the demands of social movements, incorporating into itself a kind of lip service to feminism, racial equality and LGBT+ rights since the 1970s. The social turn tests the limits of this incorporation of emancipatory concerns into the existing order. This situation is rich in antagonisms, which it is not possible for institutional capture to neutralize. This is especially so, as I have already noted, because many political and business institutions now advocate for ‘disruption’ as a strategy for managing, or benefitting from, the volatility of the global order. Contemporary art, in its theoretical references and its aesthetic conventions, is shaped by the residues of revolutionary ambition. There is a latent militancy in the strategies of avant-gardes, even though they have been institutionalized, which takes on a different meaning in a period of social and political instability. This is a sketch of an overdetermined situation which, in its actual manifestation, is more various CONCLUSION

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and more complex, responding to the diverse global contexts in which art now operates. It is not a definitive theory of the disarticulation of the art institution but a hypothesis to make sense of the prevalence of the ‘social turn’, understood in the expanded sense in which this term is used here. The role of sociopolitical aesthetics within this situation is also complex. Although the collective is a central thematic focus of these artistic strategies, the result is not consolidation or unification, but fragmentation. Art collectives are inherently conflictual, actualizing contradictions that exist in the relationship between art and politics. In The Fox, a dialogue focused on the revolutionary implications of the art collective reached an impasse around the problem of the relationship between art and class. The institutional critique of Hans Haacke and, in a different way, Hito Steyerl explores tensions involved in institutions of the museum and art criticism to show connections between art and a larger social apparatus. In Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s stacks and candy spills, the private decisions that the work imposes on its viewers are held together by a ‘concept’ that asserts their collective unity as an endless process. An enquiry into the relationship between norms and desires becomes a subversive ideal of aesthetic community. In social practice, the idea of a collective work of co-presence becomes a model of cooperation that can never quite resolve the social crises that it makes visible. The slogan in public art is used by Freee to consider the way that the tensions involved in political communication are mediated. Georg Lukács, in the essay ‘Realism in the Balance’ offers a diagnosis of the paradoxical logic of crisis that seems relevant to this situation. Although his explicit purpose was to delegitimize the modernist avant-garde, Lukács evokes the contradictory movement of crisis in a compelling way: when capitalism functions in a so-called normal manner, and its various processes appear autonomous, people living within capitalist society think and experience it as unitary, whereas in periods of crisis, when the autonomous elements are drawn together into unity, they experience it as disintegration.13 Read through Lukács’s account of crisis, the art collective may be imagined as a kind of bringing together of autonomous elements which is experienced as ‘disintegration’ or fragmentation of the pre-existing conventions through which art is experienced. The art collective manifests as fragmentation, conflict and contradiction precisely because it attempts 188

SOCIOPOLITICAL AESTHETICS

to overcome the common-sense individualism that is embedded within cultural experience. As discussed in Chapters 1, 2 and 4, socially engaged art often addresses questions of how it is possible to evaluate the difference between success and failure. At times it seems that the failure of sociopolitical art is its only route to success: its failure as a political intervention, or its failure as art, is necessary to reveal the dysfunctional and destructive mechanisms which reproduce capitalist society. The tangle of problems that surround the evaluation of politicized art is evidence of the durability of the social organization which requires a boundary between art and life to exist. Even so, the interrogation of this form of social organization is important because it affirms the possibility of an alternative. Indeed, increasingly it seems as though the frailty of the art institution means that the art collective becomes an ideal of independence, or a strategy with which to acknowledge a polarizing situation. Benjamin’s Angelus Novus surveys a crisis that exceeds any articulation, whose redemption may only be found once the routine of consensual reality, the ‘chain of events’ or ‘continuum of history’, is inundated and ruptured. Benjamin evoked the revolutionary implications of this inundation in another image: The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action . . . In the July revolution, an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired upon independently and simultaneously from several different locations in Paris.14 Benjamin’s image shows the undifferentiated continuity implicit in clock time to be the enemy of social transformation. Even though the art institution is oriented towards stability, there is reason to question the idea that ‘co-option’ is a process of mechanical certainty of this kind. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the automatic diagnosis of co-option guarantees, as though in a weird negative incantation, the continuum of history that Benjamin describes. Although the present is currently defined by the mobilization of reactionary forces, the most energizing feature of crisis is that no one is entirely sure what will be its outcome: all the schemas used to explain events become questionable because they cannot disguise their origin in a dispute between polarized interests. Despite the dangers CONCLUSION

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involved in this moment, of the resurgence of reaction and ‘calls to order’, this is a period of great political opportunity. The social turn, in all its confusing manifestations, provides a way to apprehend the practical and ideological stakes involved in this moment of transition. It is difficult to predict the future direction of the disarticulation of the art institution at the time of writing. The global economic crisis that has been triggered by the coronavirus pandemic and the shutdown has, potentially, devastating implications for the economic networks that support contemporary art. No doubt the art market will survive intact, buoyed by yet more quantitative easing. The prospects for sociopolitical art are less certain. Universities and museums, which form an important part of the institutional apparatus that supports these kinds of work, are threatened by funding crises in many parts of the world. Right-wing governments may adopt a policy that gradually defunds the arts and humanities because these disciplines are perceived to foster dissent, rather than economic productivity. On the other hand, the scale of the social and economic crises are so great that it may be necessary to return to an interventionist strategy, funding culture to preserve some shred of legitimacy for the state. Both these possible lines of development suggest a continuing interrelationship between cultural and economic politics and the intensification of the crisis tendencies that created the social turn.

190

SOCIOPOLITICAL AESTHETICS

NOTES

Introduction 1 Okwui Enwezor, ‘Angelus Novus’, La Biennale de Venezia, 2015: https​://ww​

w.lab​ienna​le.or​g/en/​art/2​015/i​nterv​ento-​di-ok​wui-e​nwezo​r

2 Ibid. 3 Adam Szymczyk, ‘Iterability and Otherness – Learning and Working from

Athens’, in Adam Szymczyk and Quinn Latimer, eds, The Documenta 14 Reader (Munich, London and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2017), 17–42, 32.

4 Quoted in Mark Brown, ‘Turner Prize Awarded Four Ways after Artists’

Plea to Judges’, The Guardian online, Tuesday 3 December 2019: https​://ww​ w.the​guard​ian.c​om/ar​tandd​esign​/2019​/dec/​03/tu​rner-​prize​-2019​-lawr​ence-​ abu-h​amdan​-hele​n-cam​mock-​oscar​-muri​llo-a​nd-ta​i-sha​ni-sh​ared

5 Ibid. 6 Hal Foster, ‘Contemporary Extracts’, in Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood

and Anton Vidokle, What Is Contemporary Art? (Berlin: Sternberg, 2010), 141–51, 142.

7 Cuauhtémoc Medina, ‘Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses’, in Aranda, Wood

and Vidokle, What Is Contemporary Art?, 10–21, 15.

8 Jörg Heiser, ‘Torture and Remedy: The End of -isms and the Beginning

of the Hegemony of the Impure’, in Aranda, Wood and Vidokle, What Is Contemporary Art?, 80–103, 83.

9 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art

(London and New York: Verso, 2013), 167.

10 See Martha Rosler, ‘Take the Money and Run: Can Political and

Sociocritical Art “Survive”’, e-flux 12 (2010): https​://ww​w.e-f​l ux.c​om/jo​urnal​ /12/6​1338/​take-​the-m​oney-​and-r​un-ca​n-pol​itica​l-and​-soci​o-cri​tical​art-​survi​ve/

11 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch,’ in Pollock and After: The

Critical Debate (London: Harper & Row, 1985), 24.

12 Rosler, ‘Take the Money and Run’. 13 Ibid., np.

14 Ibid., np. 15 For useful reflection on this point in relation to a putative ‘pedagogic turn’

in curating see: Irit Rogoff, ‘Turning’, e-flux 00 (2008), online: https​://ww​w. e-f​l ux.c​om/jo​urnal​/00/6​8470/​turni​ng/

16 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza

Wood (1998; Dijon: les presses du réel, 2002); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012); Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Arts, Supporting Publics (New York and London: Routledge, 2011).

17 Karen van den Berg, Cara M. Jordan and Phillipp Kleinmichel, ‘Introduction:

From an Expanded Notion of Art to an Expanded Notion of Society’, in Karen van den Berg, Cara M. Jordan and Phillipp Kleinmichel, eds, Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019), vii.

18 Ibid., viiii. 19 See: Peter Osborne, The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays (London

and New York: Verso, 2018) especially, Chapter 4 ‘Theorem 4. Autonomy. Can It Be True of Art and Politics at the Same Time?’, 61–72.

20 Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe trace the earliest commentary

predicting the end of Neoliberalism to the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe, ‘Introduction’, in Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski, Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 1–17, 1. One of the most often cited examples came with the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, at which point Cornel West announced that neoliberalism had ended with a ‘neofascist bang’,. Cornel West, ‘Goodbye American Neoliberalism: A New Era Is Here’, Guardian online, Thursday 17 November 2016: https​://ww​w.the​ guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​6/nov​/17/a​meric​an-ne​olibe​ralis​m-cor​ nel-w​est-2​016-e​lecti​on

21 Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski, Nine Lives of

Neoliberalism (London and New York: Verso, 2020).

22 Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot be Born (London and

New York: Verso, 2019), 7.

23 Ibid., 8–9. 24 Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London and New York: Verso, 2018). 25 Peter Weibel, ‘People, Politics and Power’, in Peter Weibel, ed., Global

Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century (Karlsruhe and Cambridge, MA: ZKM and MIT Press, 2014), 29–61.

26 Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Cultural

Industries (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015); Andrew Ross, Nice Work If

192

NOTES

You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 27 W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) was founded in 2008.

The website for the organization can be found here: https://wageforwork. com/home#top; Precarious Workers Brigade is an artists’ organization addressing questions to do with labour and solidarity: https​://pr​ecari​ouswo​ rkers​briga​de.tu​mblr.​com/t​exts

28 The debate on art and labour is extensive and spans almost twenty years,

developing in parallel with the social turn. Key texts include: Helen Molesworth, ed., Work Ethic (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2003); John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (London and New York: Verso, 2007); Jesper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017); Danielle Child, Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019).

29 David Harvey uses the term ‘spatial fix’ to describe the spatial expression

of the logic of capital, where tensions caused by the over accumulation of capital are projected, reorganizing in the process existing boundaries and demarcations of space. David Harvey, Limits to Capital. Second edition (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 431–8.

30 For example, see Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and

the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2017), especially Part II ‘Cities without Souls’, 81–150.

31 See, for example: Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the

Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2018); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London and New York: Verso, 2013).

32 For discussion of the neoliberal project under General Pinochet in Chile,

see: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5–37; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2008).

33 Stuart Hall, ‘The Neoliberal Revolution’, Sally Davison and Katherine Harris,

The Neo-Liberal Crisis: A Soundings Collection (London: Lawrence&Wishart, 2015), 13–29, 13.

34 See, for example: Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).

35 This is covered in Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It. 36 Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, eds, Collectivism after Modernism: The

Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

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37 A selection of key texts include: Bishop, Artificial Hells; Grant Kester, The

One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011); John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 2015); Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson and Dominic Willsdon, Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2016); Sholette, Delirium and Resistance. Of these books, those which touch most upon questions to do with crisis are those by Gregory Sholette and John Roberts.

38 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 277. 39 Brian Holmes, ‘Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society’, in

Holmes, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2008), 104–5.

40 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 164–5. 41 Peter Osborne, The Postconceptual Condition (London and New York: Verso,

2018), 71.

42 Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London and

New York: Verso, 2006), 2–3.

43 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (1973;

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

44 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 167. 45 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

(London and New York: Verso, 1991).

46 Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical,

Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 2.

47 Ibid., 12. 48 Buonaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against

Epistemicide (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).

Chapter 1 1 Sven Lütticken, Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy

(Berlin: Sternberg, 2017).

2 Maria Lind, ‘The Collaborative Turn’, in Brian Kuan Wood, ed., Selected

Writing (Berlin: Sternberg Press, (2007) 2010), 177–204, 185.

3 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of

Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 2.

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NOTES

4 Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a

Global Context (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.

5 Greg Sholette, ‘Interventionism and the Historical Uncanny: Or; can there

be Revolutionary Art without the Revolution?’, 2004. Available at: http:​//16b​ eaver​group​.org/​shole​tte/m​assmo​ca.pd​f

6 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London:

Continuum, (1970) 1997), 31.

7 Ibid., 32. 8 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

9 Ibid., 12. 10 Ibid., 12–13. 11 Ibid., 13. 12 For a famous account, see Manfredo Tarfuri, Architecture and Utopia:

Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1976). Chapter four, ‘The Dialectic of the Avant-Garde’, 78–103.

13 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde, 58. 14 Ibid, 22. 15 Peter Bürger, ‘Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer

Certain Criticism of Theory of the Avant-Garde’, New Literary History 41, no. 4 (2010): 695–715.

16 The accusation of ‘melancholy’ is often repeated. First appearance in

Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996). See also: Gene Ray, ‘Toward a Critical Art Theory’, in Marc James Léger, ed., The Idea of the Avant Garde and What It Means Today (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2014), 131–7; John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 2015).

17 Bürger, ‘Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde’, 705. 18 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art

(London and New York: Verso, 2013), 48.

19 Ibid., 37. 20 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and

New York: Routledge, 1995).

21 Carol Duncan, ‘Art Museums and the Rituals of Citizenship’, in Susan M.

Pierce, ed., Interpreting Objects and Collections (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 279–86, 283.

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22 Cited in the Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, chapter one, ‘The Art Museum as

Ritual’, 7–20.

23 Art & Language was founded in 1968 by the merging of two established

collaborative partnerships – between Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin, and between Harold Hurrell and David Bainbridge. Baldwin was a student in Coventry before being expelled in 1967. The others worked at the then Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry. Charles Harrison and Fred Orton, A Provisional History of Art & Language (Paris: Editions E. Fabre, 1982), 15–16.

24 Robert Bailey, Art&Language International: Between Art Worlds (London

and Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

25 Joseph Kosuth is credited as the American Editor in Art-Language volume

1 number 2, February 1970.

26 The name, according to Alexander Alberro, was chosen by Kosuth in

reference to an essay of Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’: the Fox ‘knows many things’ rather than the hedgehog’s ‘one thing’. Alexander Alberro, ‘One Year under the Mast: Alexander Alberro on the Fox’, Artforum, 41, no. 10 (2003): 162–4. Members of Art & Language based in the UK tend to characterize the founding of The Fox as a bid for power by Kosuth who had been criticized by British members during the Projekt ’74 exhibition in Cologne. Harrison and Orton describe it as a ‘kind of political alternative to Artforum’ Harrison and Orton, A Provisional History of Art & Language, 42.

27 Charles Harrison, Essays on Art&Language (Cambridge, MA and London:

MIT Press, 1991), 68.

28 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of

Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43.

29 Art & Language in Terry Smith, ed., Art & Language Australia 1975

(Banbury: Art&Language Press, 1976), 19.

30 Mel Ramsden, ‘Introduction to Blurting in A&L (Print Version 1973)’:

http:​//con​taine​r.zkm​.de/b​lurti​ng/in​trodu​ction​.html​. This is an online version of Blurting in A&L that was developed in 2001 by Thomas Dreher. Accessed 01.10.2020.

31 Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden and Terry Smith, ‘Draft for an Anti-Textbook’, Art-

Language 3, no. 1 (September 1974): 20.

32 Around 1970 or 1971 Art & Language became interested in Thomas Kuhn’s

description of paradigm change in science as a way of understanding transitions in modern art. This led to a significant amount of reading in the philosophy of science, understood as a better explanatory system than modernist theory for describing the avant-garde.

33 Burn, Ramsden and Smith, ‘Draft for an Anti-Textbook’, 21. 196

NOTES

34 Art & Language in Smith, ed., Art & Language Australia 1975, 19. 35 The membership of Art & Language, New York in 1975 and 1976 included

Ian Burn, Avril Burn, Mel Ramsden, Paula Ramsden, Joseph Kosuth, Sarah Charlesworth, Michael Corris, Andrew Menard, Preston Heller, Jill Breakstone, Carol Condé, Karl Beveridge, Nigel Lendon, Christine Kozlov, Mayo Thompson, Terry Smith and briefly Kathryn Bigelow.

36 Mel Ramsden cited in Michael Corris, ‘Inside a New York Art Gang:

Selected Documents of Art & Language, New York’, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), 470–85, 474 original emphasis.

37 ‘Untitled’, The Fox, no. 1 (1975): np. 38 ‘Untitled’, The Fox 2, no. 2 (1975): np. 39 Ibid. 40 Art Research, ‘Correspondence & Notes’, The Fox, no. 2 (1975): 58. 41 N.B.B.B., ‘Correspondence & Notes’, The Fox, no. 2 (1975): 65. 42 Ian Burn, ‘Pricing Works of Art’, The Fox, no. 1 (1975): 53—9, 59. 43 Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial

Market (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2011). See Chapter 3 ‘Art Investment Funds’.

44 Terry Smith, ‘Doing Art History’, The Fox, no. 2 (1975): 97–104. Michael

Corris, ‘Historical Discourse’, The Fox, no. 1 (1975): 84–95.

45 Joseph Kosuth, ‘1975’, The Fox, no. 2 (1975): 87–96. 46 For example, Mel Ramsden, ‘Review: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s As-Silly-As-

You-Can-Get “Brice Marden’s Painting”’, The Fox, no. 2 (1975): 8–14, which attacks the critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe; Art & Language, UK, ‘The Worst of All Allies’, The Fox, no. 3 (1976): 78–80, which attacks a number of then well-known figures in the UK artworld including critic Richard Cork and artist Richard Hamilton.

47 See Chapter 2 of this book. 48 Michael Baldwin and Philip Pilkington, ‘For Thomas Hobbes’, The Fox, 1,

no. 1 (1975): 8–17.

49 Ibid., 8. 50 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’, in Surveys from

Exile: Political Writings Volume Two, trans. David Fernbach (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 197.

51 Ian Burn, ‘The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation’, in Alexander

Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambrige, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), 320–44, 320.

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52 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University

press, 2005), 44–8. Harvey argues that the New York city fiscal crisis of 1975 saw new neoliberal tactics established. The punitive terms of the bailout of city finances saw civic power and union power removed.

53 Burn, ‘The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation’, 329. 54 Ibid., 321. See also: Dave Beech, Art and Value (Chicago: Haymarket Books,

2016), 10–14. Beech expands upon Burn’s argument that ‘no productive capitalist plays a part in the production of art’, 11.

55 Art & Language, ‘To Begin With, While I am Clearly a Marxist

Sympathiser…’, Art-Language, 3, no. 2 (May 1975): 15.

56 Art & Language (Michael Baldwin), ‘A Conversation between Professor

Norman Trotsky and Petrichenko’, Art-Language 3, no. 2 (May 1975): 73.

57 Art & Language, ‘To Begin With, While I am Clearly a Marxist

Sympathiser…’, 15.

58 Ian Burn, ‘Review: “Art-Language” Volume 3 Number 2’, The Fox 2 (2015):

52–7, 55.

59 Ibid., 56. 60 Ibid., 57. 61 Petr Benchley (Mel Ramsden), ‘The Lumpen-Headache’, The Fox, no. 3

(1976): 1–38.

62 Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge in the film Struggle in New York/Borba u

Njujorku (New York, Dir: Zoran Popovic, 1976).

63 For example, Mel Ramsden, ‘On Practice’, The Fox 1, issue 1 (1975): 66–83;

Burn, ‘The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation’.

64 Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004).

65 Ibid., 9. 66 Ibid., 8. 67 The work of Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge is treated at length in a Grant

Kester’s writings, focusing on their artworks developed in dialogue with union members in their native Canada, especially Oshawa: A History of Local 222 United Auto Workers of America, CLC (1984). This image-based work, in its methods, is basically dialogic and suggests a clear relationship to the dialogic practice undertaken in the mid-1970s. Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Second edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California press, (2004) 2013).

68 John Searle, ‘What Is an Institution?’, in J. C. Welchman, ed., Institutional

Critique and After (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2006), 21–52.

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69 Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s)

(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2012), 109.

70 Marc James Léger, Brave New Avant-garde: Essays on Contemporary Art and

Politics, Kindle edition (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books). Chapter three.

71 Ibid. 72 Marc James Léger, Vanguardia: Socially-Engaged Art and Theory

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 1.

73 Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel

Moore (Harmansworth: Penguin, 1967), ‘Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists’, 97.

74 Peter Osborne, ‘Imaginary Radicalisms: Notes on the Libertarianism

of Contemporary Art’, in Peter Osborne and Marta Kuzma, eds, ISMS: Recuperating Political Radicality in Contemporary Art: 1 Constructing the Political in Contemporary Art, Verksted, 8 (Wergelandsveien: Office for Contemporary Art Norway, 2006), 9–37, 13.

75 Karl Marx quoted in Bruno Bosteels, ‘The Leftist Hypothesis’, in Costas

Douzanis and Slavoj Zizek, eds, The Idea of Communism (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 33–66, 45.

76 Ian Burn, ‘For Your Reference’, The Fox, no. 3 (1976): 93–6, 94. 77 Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, skype interview, 2013. 78 ‘Before Marx, materialism examined the problem of knowledge apart from

the social nature of man and apart from his historical development and was therefore incapable of understanding the dependence of knowledge on social practice, that is, the dependence of knowledge on production and the class struggle’, Mao Tse-Tung, ‘On Practice: On the Relation between Knowledge and Practice, between Knowing and Doing’, 1937. Marxists.org: https​://ww​w.mar​xists​.org/​refer​ence/​archi​ve/ma​o/sel​ected​-work​s/vol​ume-1​/ mswv​1_16.​htm

79 Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, 2015, 28. 80 Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise

Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2011).

81 Ibid., 16. 82 Ibid., 97. 83 Roberts’ work is very wide-ranging, taking in philosophy, photographic

theory and writing on the avant-garde. Central to the discussion here is his work on the avant-garde and artistic labour. See Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde; John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling after the Readymade (London and New York: Verso,

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2007); Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art, “Enclave Theory” and the Communist Imaginary’, Third Text 23, no. 4 (2009): 353–67; Roberts, ‘Productivism and Its Contradictions’, Third Text 23, no. 5 (2009): 527–36. 84 Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, 22. 85 Ibid., 7. 86 A selection from this wide-ranging debate would include Marina Vishmidt,

Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019); Beech, Art and Value; Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007).

87 John Roberts, ‘Collaboration as a Problem of Art’s Cultural Form’, Third Text

18 no. 6 (2004): 557–64, 559.

88 Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, 117. 89 Gregory Sholette, ‘Counting on Your Collective Silence’, in Delirium and

Resistance (1999; London: Pluto, 2017), 182–3.

90 Ibid., 175. 91 Ibid., 168. 92 Ibid., 175; for discussion of ‘destructuration’, see Antoni Negri, ‘Capitalist

Domination and Working Class Sabotage’, Lib.com, undated translation of the 1977 Italian text, online: https​://li​bcom.​org/l​ibrar​y/cap​itali​st-do​minat​ ion-w​orkin​g-cla​ss-sa​botag​e-neg​ri

93 Roberts, ‘Productivism and Its Contradictions’, 535. 94 For discussion of ‘bare art’, see Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance:

Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 128–36.

95 Roberts has written frequently about Art & Language. For discussion which

treats the mid-1970s see Roberts, Intangibilities of Form, 122–33; Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, 124–64.

96 Gregory Sholette discusses Red-Herring as a precursor to Political Art

Documentation/Distribution, a collective founded in New York in 1980. Issues of Red-Herring form part of the archive collected by the group discussed in Sholette, Dark Matter: Art in the Age of Enterprise Culture, 55.

Chapter 2 1 See: Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the

Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43.

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2 Daniel Buren, ‘The Function of the Museum’, in Alexander Alberro and

Blake Stimson, eds, Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (1970; Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2009), 102–9, 105.

3 Some of these practices will be discussed in Chapter 4. See: Yates McKee,

Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London and New York: Verso, 2016); Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2017) especially ‘Part III: Resistance’, 151–234.

4 See: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War

Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009).

5 For extended discussion of this paradox and its relationship to politicized

art more generally, see Stefan Nowotny, ‘Anti-canonization: The Differential Knowledge of Institutional Critique’, in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, eds, Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (London: Mayfly Books, 2009), 21–8.

6 Messer cited in Hans Haacke, ‘Provisional Remarks’, in Alberro and

Stimson, eds, Institutional Critique, 126–32, 127.

7 In 1971, Daniel Buren’s work Peinture-Sculpture, a 32-foot-wide, 66-foot-

long banner, was removed from a show at the Guggenheim because other artists complained that it interfered with their work by blocking the view across the rotunda. In this example, the objection came from artists, not the institution. Buren expressed a militant critique of art in the late 1960s, but this position did not interfere with his exhibition practice. For example, in the essay “Is Teaching Art Necessary?” of 1968, he writes: ‘Art is inevitably allied to power . . . The artist, if he wants to work for another society, must begin by fundamentally contesting art and assuming his total rupture with it. If not, the next revolution will take over his responsibility.” Buren cited in Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (1973; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 53.

8 Haacke’s institutionally focused works postdate his engagement with the Art

Workers’ Coalition in 1969. For discussion of this point, see Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, chapter 5 ‘Hans Haacke’s paperwork’, 173–214.

9 See: Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA and London:

MIT Press, 1996).

10 Haacke, ‘Provisional Remarks’, 124. 11 Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 206. 12 Haacke, ‘Provisional Remarks’, 123. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.

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15 Ibid., 163. 16 Ibid., 182. 17 Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of

Critique’, Artforum 44, no. 1 (September 2005): 278–85, 284.

18 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition (1983; London: Verso, 2006). See chapter 10 ‘Census, Map, Museum’, 163–86.

19 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art

(London: Verso, 2013), 159.

20 Ibid. 21 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor

(London: Continuum, 2003), 1.

22 Ibid., 7. 23 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 159. 24 Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique’,

278–85, 278.

25 Ibid., 136. 26 Ibid., 134. 27 Alexander Alberro, ‘Institutions, Critique and Institutional Critique’, in

Alberro and Stimson, eds, Institutional Critique, 2–19, 15.

28 Ibid., 3. 29 Blake Stimson, ‘What Was Institutional Critique?’ in Alberro and Stimson,

eds, Institutional Critique, 20–42, 23.

30 Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans.

Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2007).

31 Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello cited in Stimson, ‘What Was Institutional

Critique?’, 39.

32 Ibid., 30. 33 Ibid., 37. 34 Ibid., 24. ‘The great irony and great surprise, for our purposes, is that . . .

..that institution would come to be most powerfully defended, articulated, and renewed by the art development that presumed the greatest degree of institutional self-reflexivity–that is, what we have come to call “institutional critique”.’

35 Isabelle Graw, ‘Beyond Institutional Critique’, in John C. Welchman, ed.,

Institutional Critique and After (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2006), 137–52, 148.

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36 ‘One only has to look through almost any example of the myriad press

releases sent out these days by galleries, museums, and other institutions to learn the lesson that the more seemingly self-evident critical functions that can be attached to a work of art, the better its promotional value.’ Ibid., 141.

37 See: Brian Holmes, ‘Liar’s Poker: Representation of Politics, Politics of

Representation’, in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2008), 15–28; Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). Especially ‘Problems and Transformations of Critical Art’, 45–60; Peter Osborne, ‘Living with Contradictions: The Resignation of Chris Gilbert’, Afterall, Autumn/Winter 2007.

38 Osborne addressed these issues in an article about the resignation of

Chris Gilbert, a curator who abandoned art entirely in 2007 to move to Venezuela. Osborne chides him for ‘the fantasy of a pure and true, yet worldly, “outside”’ and concludes by stating: ‘there is no pure outside from the standpoint of which judgement on contradictory social processes can be pronounced. There are only passing opportunities in the deepening maze of contradictions’. ‘Living with Contradictions: The Resignation of Chris Gilbert’, np.

39 Sholette, Delirium and Resistance, 8–13. 40 Hito Steyerl, ‘The Institution of Critique’, in Alberro and Stimson, eds,

Institutional Critique, 486–92; Hito Steyerl, ‘A Tank on a Pedestal’, in Duty Free Art (London: Verso, 2019), 1–8.

41 Steyerl, ‘The Institution of Critique’, 488–9. 42 Ibid., 488. 43 Ibid., 489. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 490. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 491. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 492. 50 Steyerl, ‘A Tank on a Pedestal’, 2. 51 The six statements are by C. Douglas Dillon, then president of the

Metropolitan Museum (among other corporate affiliations); Nelson Rockefeller, a trustee of MOMA; Frank Stanton, a Rockefeller foundation trustee; David Rockefeller, MOMA trustee; Richard M. Nixon, the former

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president and Robert Kingsley, the Manager of Urban Affairs in the Department of Public Affairs, Exxon Corp. 52 Hans Haacke, Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-1975, ed. Kasper

Koenig (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 113.

53 Hans Haacke, On Social Grease, 1975. Six plaques, 30”x30”, photoengraved

magnesium plates mounted on aluminium with dull finish. First exhibited in a one-man show at John Weber Gallery in New York. Ibid., 120.

54 The works are reproduced in Fox 3, 69–74. Mel Ramsden, ‘Framing and

Being Framed or, Are We Going to Let Barbara Rose Get Away with “Dialectics” This Year?’, The Fox, no. 3 (1976): 64–74. See also: Haacke, Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-1975.

55 Ramsden, ‘Perimeters of Protest’, The Fox 1, no. 1 (1975): 133–5, 134. 56 Ramsden also writes in Fox 1: ‘Haacke’s work, too, interests me, though

it often comes close to alluding to politics as a kind of alienated subjectmatter. That is, he always presents us with other people’s “politics” (Guggenheim Trustees etc.)’. Ramsden, ‘On Practice’, The Fox 1, no. 1 (1975): 79.

57 Ramsden, ‘Perimeters of Protest’, 133. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as

Producer’, trans. John Heckman, New Left Review 1, no. 62 (July–August 1970): 83–96.

58 ‘This has led, to use the terminology of the trecherous [sic] movement-

dubbing pundits, to the label “political artist” . . . Carl Andre, presumably because of a lot of his cloth-cap art-worker capering, is “political”. Daniel Buren is political and so is Hans Haacke.’ Ramsden, ‘On Practice’, 79.

59 Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao

and Che. Second edition (London: Verso, 2018). The politicized moment in the New York art world coincides broadly with the high point and the beginning of the decline of the New Communist movement. Max Elbaum notes that a forum on party-building associated with the long-standing left New York-based publication The Guardian weekly, attracted 1,200 attendees in the mid-1970s, 108.

60 John A. Walker, Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain (London and

New York: I.B. Taurus, 2002).

61 Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: SoHo

Press Inc., 2000). See: ‘Culture Wars 1: Context, Feminism’, ‘Culture Wars II: Modernist Imperialism’, ‘Culture Wars III: Art World Institutions’, 365–85, for discussion of this moment by a number of those involved. In summary, John Coplans became editor in 1971 and rescued the magazine from a perilous economic position. He simultaneously opened it up to a wider range of art world debates and made it increasingly profitable as an enterprise. In 1975, he published Eva Cockrofts ‘Abstract Expressionism:

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Weapon of the Cold War’, which caused embarrassment to the publisher Charles Cowles and angered staff at the Museum of Modern Art because it alleged that MOMA was part-funded by the CIA in order to promote abstract expressionism internationally. John Coplans and Max Kozloff were sacked by Charles Cowles in 1976. 62 Ramsden, ‘Framing and Being Framed or, Are We Going to Let Barbara

Rose Get Away with “Dialectics” This Year?’, 64.

63 Ibid., 65. 64 ‘The Perimeters of Protest’. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Board of Trustees

(1974) listed the corporate affiliations of the board of trustees of the Guggenheim Museum.

65 Susan Heineman, ‘Hans Haacke at John Weber Gallery’, Artforum 14,

no. 1 (September 1975): 75. See also Luke Skrebowski, ‘Systems, Contexts, Relations: An Alternative Genealogy of Conceptual Art’, unpublished PhD (University of Middlesex, September 2009), 218. Skrebowski notes that Charles Harrison makes a similar objection to Haacke’s work in a review of Projekt 74 in Studio International. Also: Kirsi Peltomäki, ‘Affect and Spectatorial Agency: Viewing Institutional Critique in the 1970s’, Art Journal 66, no. 4 (2007): 36–51. Peltomäki addresses Heineman’s review of Haacke as well as similar criticisms raised by Bruce Boice in 1973 to the John Weber Gallery Visitors’ Profile.

66 Ramsden, ‘Framing and Being Framed or, Are We Going to Let Barbara

Rose Get Away with “Dialectics” This Year?’, 65.

67 Ibid., 65–6. 68 Among Ramsden’s list of ‘complaints’ against Haacke’s work is that it is

‘counter-cultural’ because it exists ‘in the same space as the institutions it apparently is fighting . . . he not only serves the institutions veneer of freedom, he disappears when the institution disappears’. Ibid., 65.

69 ‘What does an apparent buzz-word like “bureaucracy” mean? Briefly, by

bureaucracy, I do not allude to massive centralized organization but to the fact that major cultural decisions . . . lie out of our control and are now all basically directed through the impersonal operations of market institutions (e.g. commercial galleries) and private administrative control (e.g. here Artforum, the MOMA etc.)’. Ramsden, ‘On Practice’, 70.

70 Ibid., 70. 71 Ibid., 70–71. 72 In 1975, Charles Harrison and Terry Smith, both critics and art historians

were part of the group. Paul Wood, Nigel Lendon and Michael Corris are among the artists who became noted art historians who were at some point members of, or were closely associated with Art & Language. N OTES

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73 See also, Michael Corris, ‘Historical Discourse’, The Fox, no. 1 (1975):

84–93. This article is notable because Corris explores the idea of re-reading art history from the point of view of the art collective. He also writes: ‘criticism is as much interpretive history (current) as history is historical interpretation. At any rate, both criticism and history proceed from their closed-set of learning conditions/praxis (the discipline) outward, towards the objects of their scrutiny’, 94.

74 See Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974, 529 n.138. Newman

cites an unpublished interview with John Coplans by Paul Cummings: ‘Coplans claimed that after Artforum published the article on Brice Marden and placed his work on the cover in October 1974, prices for Marden’s work “went from $7,000 to $30,000”. Bykert gallery had been charging $7,000. But European dealers wanted “in on Marden” and offered him $30,000 per painting’.

75 In this essay Ramsden uses the ad hominem to expose the sleight of

hand in Gilbert-Rolfe’s puff-piece on Marden, but also to insist on political commitment to counteract it: Mel Ramsden, ‘Jeremy GilbertRolfe’s Silly-as-You-Can-Get “Brice Marden’s Painting”’, The Fox 1, no. 2 (1975): 12–15, 13.

76 ‘Art criticism has relied to an enormous extent on a theoretical system of

acquiring the right taste in order that an object be correctly or profitably consumed. It is not incidental that the work of art as an isolated object just happens to very conveniently determine the passivity of the critic’s public’, Ramsden, ‘Framing and Being Framed -or, Are We Going to Let Barbara Rose Get Away with “Dialectics” This Year?’, 66.

77 Ibid., 66. 78 Ibid., 67. 79 Ibid. 80 On the ‘suppression of the beholder’, see Charles Harrison, Essays on

Art&Language (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), 29–61.

81 Mel Ramsden, ‘Framing and Being Framed or, Are We Going to Let Barbara

Rose Get Away with ‘Dialectics’ This Year?’, 67.

82 Ramsden, ‘On Practice’, 69. 83 See for example: Graw, ‘Beyond Institutional Critique’. 84 Mel Ramsden, ‘Review: “City Arts Workshop: People’s Art in New York

City”’, The Fox, no. 2 (1975): 44–6, 45–6.

85 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2005), 45.

86 T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during

Global Crisis (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 74–89.

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87 For discussion of Gezi park in relation to the digital tools of new social

movements and the Turkish context, see Zeynep Tufecki, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Global Protest (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 32–48.

88 Jacques Rancière, ‘In What Times Do We Live?’, in Marta Kuzma,

Pablo Lafuente and Peter Osborne, eds, The State of Things (Oslo and London: Office for Contemporary Art Norway and Koenig Books, 2012), 9–38, 11.

89 Ibid., 12.

Chapter 3 1 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza

Wood (1998; Dijon: les presses du réel, 2002).

2 Stewart Martin, ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, in Peter Osborne and

Marta Kuzma, eds, Verksted 8: Isms Recuperating Political Radicality in Contemporary Art (Oslo: Office of Contemporary Art Norway, 2006), 97–131, 98.

3 Ibid., 99. 4 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 8. Also: ‘So here we are, summoned

to talk about things around a duly priced drink, as a symbolic form of contemporary social relations. You are looking for shared warmth, and the comforting feeling of well-being for two? So try our coffee . . . The space of current relations is thus the space most clearly affected by the general reification’, ibid., 9.

5 ‘The role of the artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian

realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.’ Ibid., 13.

6 Ibid., 9 7 Ibid., 13. 8 Ibid., 45–6. 9 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 36. This quotation comes from chapter 2,

‘Art of the 1990s: Participation and Transitivity’. Read in context, it is referring to one category of a loose typology of works, under the heading ‘Professional Relations: clienteles’, and referring to a wide range of artists including Christine Hill and Liam Gillick, but also those less closely linked to relational aesthetics’ reception, including Peter Fend, Mark Dion and even Mark Kostabi.

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10 Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform, trans. Erik Butler (London and New

York: Verso, 2016). In this text Bourriaud writes, for example: ‘The proletariat – the social class that capital has at its full disposal – is no longer found only in factories. It runs through the whole of the social body and comprises a people of the abandoned; its emblematic figures are the immigrant, the illegal and the homeless’, 4. This represents a clear change in tone from his earlier writings, which mirrors an increasingly politicized debate about art.

11 Kelley writes: ‘Though Kaprow was less interested than Dewey in esthetics

per se, the idea that experiences could have shapes, beginnings, and ends, “plots”, moods, patterns – meanings – must have influenced him deeply, leading him as a practicing artist to a philosophical inquiry into the given natural and/or social “forms” of common experience. It is in this sense that Kaprow is a formalist’, Jeff Kelley, ‘Introduction’, in Jeff Kelley, ed., Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life by Allan Kaprow (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2003), xvii. The happening, and Kaprow’s attempts to theorize the ‘un-artist’, depended on this theoretical reframing.

12 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 19. 13 Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of

Happenings (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2011), 26.

14 Nato Thompson, ‘Living as Form’, in Nato Thompson, ed., Living as Form:

Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 (Cambridge, MA and New York: Creative Time and MIT Press, 2012), 16–33. See Chapter 4.

15 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of

Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 7.

16 Martin, ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, 99. 17 Bourriaud cited in Ibid., 99. 18 Marx cited in Ibid., 101. 19 Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s

Capital, trans. Alexander Locascio (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 44.

20 Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 2017).

21 Ibid., 24. 22 Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital. This point

is treated in Chapter three ‘Value, Labour, Money’, in particular 39–46. Heinrich’s exposition makes clear that commodities produced for exchange have the social form of commodities, which is to produce value. I cite Heinrich here, rather than Marx, because there is no space to address the

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many controversies about the meaning of book one of Capital, and because Heinrich’s is a particularly lucid exposition. 23 The question of art’s relationship to the commodity is treated exhaustively

in Dave Beech’s book, Art and Value. Beech emphasizes that though art is affected by the social organization under capital it is not produced under the same conditions as capitalist commodities: ‘art’s means of production remained largely untouched by industrialisation and the transformation of handicraft into wage labour that was the bedrock of capitalist commodity production’, Dave Beech, Art and Value (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 10. Beech addresses this problem by arguing that art is ‘commodified without being commodified’. Ibid., 12.

24 An early example is Andrea Fraser, ‘How to Provide an Artistic Service: An

Introduction’, in Alexander Alberro, ed., Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, (1994) 2005), 153–62.

25 This point is made in, for example, Martin, ‘Critique of Relational

Aesthetics’, 129 (in reference to Felix Gonzalez-Torres) and Miwon Kwon, ‘The Becoming of a Work of Art: FGT and a Possibility of Renewal, a Chance to Share, a Fragile True’, in Julie Ault, ed., Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Second edition (1996; Gottingen: Steidl, (2006) 2016), 281–315, 286.

26 Gonzalez-Torres had achieved international prominence by the mid-1990s,

including solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1994, and the Guggenheim Museum in 1995.

27 I will use the US English usage ‘candies’ here, as it is the most widespread in

description of Gonzalez-Torres’s work.

28 Miwon Kwon, ‘Exchange Rate: On Obligation and Reciprocity in Some

Art of the 1960s and After’, in Helen Molesworth, ed., Work Ethic (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press and Baltimore Museum of Art, 2003), 83–97.

29 Kwon reads the rejection of the work as evidence of the unequal

power-relations that exist in a gifting relationship. By giving a gift the artist apparently devolves power over a work, but actually reinforces their superiority, due to the logic of gift exchange first developed by anthropologist Marcel Mauss: ‘The trashing of the gift is akin to rejection of the solidarity that the artist/ artwork proposes. Through the repudiation of a work’s (and by extension, an institution’s) generosity an audience/receiver can assert its “superior” position’, Kwon, ‘Exchange Rate’, 93.

30 Joe Scanlan, ‘The Uses of Disorder: Joe Scanlan on the Art of Felix

Gonzalez-Torres’, Artforum 48, issue 6 (February 2010): 162–70, 166.

31 Joan Kee, ‘Nobody Owns Me’, e-flux, no. 96 (January 2019): https​://ww​w.e-f​

lux.c​om/jo​urnal​/96/2​45908​/nobo​dy-ow​ns-me​/

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32 Barry Barnes, The Elements of Social Theory (London and New York:

Routledge, 1995). Barnes gives a useful account of functionalism and its internal tensions as a social theory, 36–60. Of particular interest here is functionalism as a theory of ‘system integration’.

33 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 56. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Terry Atkinson, ‘Rites of Passage’, A&D 1, no. 2 (January/February 1994): 23–7. 37 ‘What is “good” about “good” art from this perspective would be precisely

its capacity to somehow transform the viewer into a good, productive socialist subject, rejecting the culture and values of Late-Capital. It would be closely akin to a religious conversion’, Simon Watney, ‘In Purgatory: The Work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’, in Imagine Hope: AIDS and Gay Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 154–62, 157.

38 Robert Nikas, ‘Felix Gonzalez-Torres: All the Time in the World’, in Julie

Ault, ed., Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Second edition (Gottingen: Steidl, (1991) 2016), 39–51.

39 Here, I draw upon insightful research by Miwon Kwon, but come to different

conclusions. Kwon argues that Gonzalez-Torres’s works ‘do not result in the subsuming of the audience into a “temporary collective form”’. As a result she argues that Bourriaud misrepresents them. They do not involve a convivial encounter, but ‘a clearing of sorts in which the particularity of each person’s gesture retains its irreducible, un-generalizable, un-abstractable, un-collectivizable singularity’, Kwon, ‘The Becoming of a Work of Art’, 288. I think Kwon is broadly right, but I argue that the concept of these works does retain for the works a speculative collective identity, that plays between participation and the form of the multiple.

40 For discussion of the participatory dimension of Haacke’s works, see Kirsi

Peltomäki, ‘Affect and Spectatorial Agency: Viewing Institutional Critique in the 1970s’, Art Journal 66, no. 4 (2007): 36–51.

41 Gonzalez-Torres’s ‘stack’ and ‘spill’ works are typically designated ‘endless

copies’ or ‘endless supply’, though there are exceptions. There are several stacks from which visitors are not permitted to take individual sheets, for example ‘Untitled’ (Implosion), 1991.

42 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ‘1990: L.A., “The Gold Field”’, in Julie Ault, ed., Felix

Gonzalez-Torres. Second edition (Gottingen: Steidl, (1996) 2016), 147–51, 147.

43 See Brian Wallis, ‘Democracy and Cultural Activism’, in Brian Wallis, ed.,

Democracy: A Project by Group Material (Seattle: Bay Press and Dia Art Foundation, 1990), 5–12.

44 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ‘Practices: The Problem of Divisions of Cultural

Labor’, in Julie Ault, ed., Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Second edition (Gottingen: Steidl, (1992) 2016, 128–33, 133.

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45 Stuart Hall, ‘Gramsci and Us’, in Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal:

Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 161–74.

46 Angela Mitroupolos, ‘“Post-Factual” Readings of Neoliberalism, Before and

After Trump’, Society and Space, 5 December 2016: https​://ww​w.soc​ietya​ ndspa​ce.or​g/art​icles​/post​-fact​ual-r​eadin​gs-of​-neol​ibera​lism-​befor​e-and​-afte​ r-tru​mp

47 Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born (London and

New York: Verso, 2019), 15.

48 Barnes, The Elements of Social Theory, 59. 49 Ibid., 60. 50 Ibid. 51 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 239. 52 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 39. 53 Feminist art in the 1970s often attempted to disrupt the boundary

between the private – the space of domestic labour, motherhood and subjectivity – and the public discourse of art. See: Helen Molesworth, ‘Housework and Art Work’, in Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann, eds, Art after Conceptual Art (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2006), 67–86.

54 ‘While earlier electronic media such as radio and television had been

similarly chastised for their privatizing effects by encouraging home-based consumption, the Walkman was different precisely because it allowed that privatized pleasure to be taken into the public domain’, Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda James and Hugh Mackay, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage Publications and the Open University, 1997), 113.

55 Iain Chambers, ‘A Miniature History of the Walkman’, in Paul du Gay, Stuart

Hall, Linda James, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus, Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (1990; London: Sage Publications and the Open University, 1997), 141–2.

56 Ibid., 141. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. For a critique of this position within aesthetic discourse see Dave

Beech and John Roberts, ‘Tolerating Impurities: An Ontology, Genealogy and Defense of Philistinism’, in The Philistine Controversy (London: Verso, 2002), 125–60.

60 Chambers, ‘A Miniature History of the Walkman’, 142.

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61 Ibid. 62 ‘This is but one of the senses in which we need to understand artistic

capitalism as a subversion of artistic communism. Thus, the re-imagination of communism cannot be fulfilled by a recovery of its past formations, even if these tell us more than might be imagined about the present. What is needed is a critique of artistic communism from the standpoint of the present, its entwinement with an artistic capitalism’, Stewart Martin, ‘Artistic Communism–a Sketch’, Third Text 23, no. 4 (2009): 482–3.

63 Once again refer to Miwon Kwon here. 64 Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Conversation in Modern

Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, Artforum 44, no. 6 (February 2006); Claire Bishop, ‘Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?’, in Thompson, ed., Living as Form, 34–45.

65 Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (Fall

2004): 51–79.

66 Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, 180. She

writes: ‘There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond. While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such works critically as art’ (original emphasis).

67 Ibid. and Bishop, ‘Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?’ 68 Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art;

Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

69 Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, 183. 70 The dispute dates to Bishop’s criticism of Kester in “The Social Turn” from

2006. It continues in more recent publication and has been discussed widely. The initial exchange: Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’; Grant Kester, ‘Another Turn’, Artforum 44, no. 9 (May 2006): 22.

71 Kester, ‘Another Turn’, 22. 72 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 6. 73 Ibid. 74 ‘An in-house conversation with the curatorial and education staff at the

Walker Art Centre at Minneapolis brought up many instances where artist(s) went away to work on other exhibitions, leaving the education department to keep their community project going.’ Ibid., 288 n9.

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75 Ibid., 9. 76 ‘Instead of taking the time to examine the IMI project in some detail,

observing the changes that occurred in the social organization of the project over time, the modulations of agency, the movements of critical insight and stasis, and the ways in which the participants accommodated or challenged the authority of state or public authorities and Bruguera herself, the critic reduces the critical act to a kind of syllogism’, see Grant Kester, ‘The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism’, e-flux, no. 50 (2013): np: https​://ww​w.e-f​l ux.c​om/jo​urnal​/50/5​9990/​the-d​evice​-laid​-bare​ -on-s​ome-l​imita​tions​-in-c​urren​t-art​-crit​icism​/

77 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott

(Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 17.

78 Scanlan, ‘The Uses of Disorder’. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 165. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 165–6. 84 See for example: Sven Lütticken, ‘On Cultural Revolution’, New Left Review

87 (May–June 2014): 115–31; Bishop, Artificial Hells; Lane Relyea, Your Everyday Art World. Kindle edition (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2013).

85 Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization, 2017. 86 Latour cited in Ina Blom, On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture

(Berlin: Sternberg, 2007), 136. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5–6.

87 This is a point that is made by Grant Kester. Where I differ from him is that

the careful work of reconstruction of these works cannot have access to the aesthetic experience of participants: rather, it reconstructs the work in so far it is able to, as a kind of model of a world. Once the work is reconstructed, it can be examined in relation to its context as I will discuss in the next chapter. Kester, ‘The Device Laid Bare’.

Chapter 4 1 The term was in use earlier, particularly in debates about performance. See

Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Arts, Supporting Publics (New

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York and London: Routledge, 2011). In Claire Bishop’s book Artificial Hells published in 2012, the author alludes to the recent coinage of the term ‘social practice’: ‘socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, interventionist art, participatory art, collaborative art, contextual art and (most recently) social practice’. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012),1. 2 ‘Social practice celebrates a degree of cross-disciplinary in art making,

paralleling the kind of cross-media collaboration across image, sound, movement, space and text that we find in performance’, Jackson, Social Works, 13.

3 Bruguera laid out the idea of Arte Útil in a discussion that took place as

part of her project Immigrant Movement International in Queens, New York, which was funded by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art. Bruguera acknowledges that the term Arte Útil was first used by Argentinian artist Eduardo Costa in 1969 in his ‘Manifiesto de Arte útil’. As part of this project, Bruguera actually installed a replica of Duchamp’s Fountain in the rest room of the Queens Museum. http:​//tan​iabru​guera​ .com/​cms/5​28-0-​Intro​ducti​on+on​+Usef​ul+Ar​t.htm​

4 This tendency is clear in Nato Thompson’s 2011 survey of socially engaged

art, Living as Form, which coincided with increased popularity of social practice as a terminology. Thompson included in the ‘projects’ in this survey, some which were obviously not art, such as the protests in Tahrir square, the whistleblowing site Wikileaks and the street parties that took place in Harlem after President Obama’s victory in 2008. Nato Thompson, ed., Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Creative Time, 2012).

5 Arthur Danto, ‘The Art World’, in Carolyn Korsmeyer, ed., Aesthetics: The

Big Questions (Oxford and Malden: Backwell, 1998), 33–43, 41.

6 Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt, Reproducing Autonomy: Work,

Money, & Contemporary Art (London and Berlin: Mute, 2016), 76.

7 That they refer to social practice as part of their criticism is clear in

the context. In an earlier passage on the same page, they write of ‘the professional imprimatur of art which provides the access to the material and human resources which allow it to register as such and not as, e.g. social work, i.e., labour’ (original emphasis). Ibid.,76.

8 Nick Aitkins, Thomas Lange, Jorinde Seijdel and Steven ten Thije,

eds, Whats the Use? Constellations of Art, History, and Knowledge (Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Hildesheim: Valiz and Van Abbemuseum, 2016).

9 Thompson, Living as Form. Shannon Jackson’s writings tend in this

direction. See: Jackson, Social Works, 109; Johanna Burton, Shannon

214

NOTES

Jackson and Dominic Willsdon, ‘Plight of the Publics: An Introduction to Public Servants’, in Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson and Dominic Willsdon, eds, Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2016), xv–xxvi. Also: Gregory Sholette, ‘Delirium and Resistance after the Social Turn’, in Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Kim Charnley (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 210–34. 10 Burton, Jackson and Willsdon, ‘Plight of the Publics’, xviii. 11 Ibid., xvii. 12 Alistair Hudson, ‘Alistair Hudson on Art for Social Change’, Tate etc. 38

(Autumn 2016): https​://ww​w.tat​e.org​.uk/t​ate-e​tc/is​sue-3​8-aut​umn-2​016/a​ lista​ir-hu​dson-​on-ar​t-soc​ial-c​hange​

13 Van Abbe Museum, ‘Museum of Arte útil’, 07 December 2013 to 30 March

2014: https​://va​nabbe​museu​m.nl/​en/pr​ogram​me/pr​ogram​me/mu​seum-​ofar​te-ut​il/

14 The Association is co-directed by Tania Bruguera and Alistair Hudson.

Partners include ‘Grizedale Arts, Van Abbemuseum, Liverpool John Moores University and the Internationale confederation of European museums, Tate Liverpool, Ikon Gallery Birmingham and MIMA as part of the five-year project “The Uses of Art: The Legacies of 1848 and 1989”’, according to Asociacion de Arte útil website: https​://ww​w.art​e-uti​l.org​/ abou​t/act​iviti​es/

15 Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘“Usefulness” in Contemporary Art and Politics’, Third

Text 31, no. 1 (2017): 117–33, 122.

16 Marina Vishmidt, ‘Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated: Social Practice

as Business Model’, e-flux 43, March 2013.

17 Huey Copeland, ‘Dark Mirrors’, Artforum (October 2013): 222–9, 227. 18 Ibid. 19 Vishmidt, ‘Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated: Social Practice as

Business Model’, 2013.

20 Irit Rogoff, ‘Starting in the Middle: NGOs and Emergent Forms for Cultural

Institutions’, in Burton, Jackson and Willsdon, eds, Public Servants, 465–79, 466.

21 Ibid., 467. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 472. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 468.

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26 Rogoff bases her account on the work of the philosopher Michel Feher.

In Feher’s account of the ideological divisions, which mark the practice of NGOs, a category which includes secular humanitarian organizations, activist and faith-based organizations is far more nuanced than Rogoff ’s interpretation of it. Feher’s position attempts to ‘complicate’ our understanding of politics, by interrogating the positions adopted by the diverse organizations which hold governmental power to account. See: Michel Feher, ‘The Governed in Politics’, in Michel Feher, ed., Nongovernmental Politics (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007), 12–27.

27 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 77. 28 Feyzi Ismael and Sangeeta Kamat, ‘NGOs, Social Movements and the

Neoliberal State: Incorporation, Reinvention, Critique’, Critical Sociology 44, nos. 4–5 (2018): 569–77, 569.

29 See: Nato Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century

(London and New York: First Melville House, 2015).

30 Verónica Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics (London and New York:

Bloomsbury, 2016). See chapter 2: ‘Arte de Conducta and the manipulation of memory: Tania Bruguera’s biopolitical ambitions in postwar Cuba’, 37–70.

31 Ibid., 39. 32 Verónica Tello, ‘Is Contemporary Art Postdevelopmental?: A study of “art

as NGO”’, in Elise Klein and Carlos Eduardo Morreo, Postdevelopment in Practice: Alternatives, Economies, Ontologies (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 306–20, 309.

33 Ibid., 311. 34 Ibid., 318. 35 Verónica Tello, ‘The Speculative Collectivity of the Global Transnational, or,

Social Practice and the International Division of Labour’, in Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan, eds, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 151–5.

36 ‘The work’s title is an ever-increasing figure: the number of people who

migrated from one country to another last year added to the number of migrant deaths recorded so far this year – to indicate the sheer scale of mass migration and the risks involved.’ Hyundai commission, Tania Brugueraa 10, 146, 058. Tate website: https​://ww​w.tat​e.org​.uk/w​hats-​on/ta​te-mo​dern/​ exhib​ition​/hyun​dai-c​ommis​sion-​tania​-brug​uera

37 Plymouth College of Art, the institution where I worked at the time of the

event, used Tate exchange as an opportunity to stimulate dialogue around migration and decolonization among the student body.

38 Missing Migrants Project: https://missingmigrants.iom.int/

216

NOTES

39 BBC online. UK net migration level ‘unsustainable’ says David Cameron’,

9 December 2015: https​://ww​w.bbc​.co.u​k/new​s/uk-​polit​ics-3​50553​55

40 Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born (London and

New York: Verso, 2019), 11–18.

41 Dr Carlos Vargas Silva and Robert McNiel, ‘The Net Migration Target and

the 2017 Election’, The Migration Observatory at Oxford University, 04 May 2017: https​://mi​grati​onobs​ervat​ory.o​x.ac.​uk/re​sourc​es/co​mment​aries​/net-​ migra​tion-​targe​t-201​7-ele​ction​/

42 Jamie Grierson, ‘UK Government Misses Net Migration Target for 37th

Time in a Row’, Guardian online, Friday 24 May 2019: https​://ww​w.the​ guard​ian.c​om/uk​-news​/2019​/may/​24/uk​-gove​rnmen​t-mis​ses-n​et-mi​grati​ on-ta​rget-​for-3​7th-t​ime-i​n-a-r​ow.

43 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/po​litic​s/201​6/jun​/16/n​igel-​farag​e-def​ends-​

ukip-​break​ing-p​oint-​poste​r-que​ue-of​-migr​ants

44 ‘Throughout the period of Thatcher, New Labour and post-2010 Tory

rule, the British state has been tightening its grip on the function of the border and ratcheting up the punitive assemblage of security, welfare/ workfare, immigration and imprisonment to stratify and discipline the working class in Britain. This process has seen the further securitization of society, particularly after 9/11, and the demonization of “Muslims”, “illegal immigrants” and “bogus asylum seekers” by politicians, the press and many others in society.’ Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley, ‘Race, Class and Borders’, Base Publication, 2 May 2018: https://www.basepublication. org/?p=665

45 Adrian Searle, ‘It Didn’t Make Me Cry but It Cleared the Tubes’, Monday

01 October 2018: https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/ar​tandd​esign​/2018​/oct/​01/ ta​nia-b​rugue​ra-tu​rbine​-hall​-revi​ew-ta​te-mo​dern

46 Steven McIntosh, ‘Tania Bruguera Explains Tate Modern’s New Turbine

Hall Installation’, BBC News, 2 October 2018: https: https​://ww​w.bbc​.co.u​k/ new​s/ent​ertai​nment​-arts​-4570​8599

47 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition (1983; London: Verso, 2006). See discussion in Chapter 2 of this volume.

48 Southwark Council, ‘Elephant and Castle’, 04 Decemebr 2019: https​://ww​

w.sou​thwar​k.gov​.uk/r​egene​ratio​n/ele​phant​-and-​castl​e

49 Ian Steadman, ‘Look to the Heygate Estate for What’s Wrong with

London’s Housing’, New Statesman, 6 November 2013: https​://ww​w.new​ state​sman.​com/p​oliti​cs/20​13/11​/look​-heyg​ate-e​state​-what​s-wro​ng-lo​ ndons​-hous​ing

50 George Turner, ‘What the Aylesbury Estate Ruling Means for the Future

of Regeneration’, Guardian, Thursday 20 September 2016: https​://ww​w.the​ N OTES

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guard​ian.c​om/ci​ties/​2016/​sep/2​0/ayl​esbur​y-est​ate-r​uling​-futu​re-re​gener​ ation​-saji​d-jav​id 51 Loretta Lees, ‘Challenging the Gentrification of Housing Estates in London’,

Urban Transformations, ESRC Research on Cities, 16 March 2018: https​:// ww​w.urb​antra​nsfor​matio​ns.ox​.ac.u​k/blo​g/201​8/cha​lleng​ing-t​he-ge​ntrif​i cati​ on-of​-coun​cil-e​state​s-in-​londo​n/

52 For example: Artists Against Social Cleansing (founded by Dr Stephen

Pritchard and Emily Jost): http://colouringinculture.org/aasc/

53 Robert Booth and Patrick Butler, ‘UK Austerity has Inflicted ‘great misery’

on Citizens, UN Says’, Guardian, Friday 16 November 2018: https​://ww​w.the​ guard​ian.c​om/so​ciety​/2018​/nov/​16/uk​-aust​erity​-has-​infli​cted-​great​-mise​ ry-on​-citi​zens-​un-sa​ys.

54 Art activism has a long history of highlighting the role of art in

gentrification, as in Martha Rosler’s famous exhibition at Dia New York If You Lived Here (1989) and earlier New York-based projects including ‘Not for Sale!’ (1984) by Political Art Documentation/Distribution and ‘The Real Estate Show’, by the collective Colab (1979).

55 See: Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and Capitalist

Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2017), especially Part II ‘Cities without Souls’; for an early analysis of this phenomenon, see Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988).

56 Gregory Sholette, ‘Delirium and Resistance after the Social Turn’, Field, issue

1, Spring 2015: http:​//fie​ld-jo​urnal​.com/​issue​-1/sh​olett​e See also: Sholette, Delirium and Resistance.

57 Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘Art & Gentrification: The Uses & Abuses of Social

Practice’, Art Monthly 373 (February 2014): 7–10.

58 Dr Stephen Pritchard, ‘Artwashing: Social Capital & Anti-Gentrification

Activism’, 17 June 2017: http:​//col​ourin​gincu​lture​.org/​blog/​artwa​shing​socia​ lcapi​talan​tigen​trifi​catio​n

59 Jonathan Bell, ‘London’s Brutalist Balfron Tower Is Brought Back to Life’,

Wallpaper, July 2018: https​://ww​w.wal​lpape​r.com​/arch​itect​ure/b​alfro​n-tow​ er-br​utali​sm-lo​ndon-​londo​newca​stle-​studi​o-egr​et-we​st-br​ody-a​ssoci​ates

60 See: James Butler, ‘Social Cleansing in Tower Hamlets: Interview with Balfron

Tower Evictee’, Novara Media, 2013: http:​//nov​arame​dia.c​om/20​13/08​/20/s​ ocial​-clea​nsing​-in-t​ower-​hamle​ts-in​tervi​ew-wi​th-ba​lfron​-towe​r-evi​ctee/​

61 Ben Davis, ‘A Critique of Social Practice Art: What Does It Mean to be a

Political Artist?’ in Burton, Jackson and Willsdon, eds, Public Servants, 423–36, 430.

62 Ibid., 433.

218

NOTES

63 See Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Chicago: Haymarket Books,

2013). In this book, Davis lays out his view of the class character of contemporary art. But, strangely, much of his invective is directed at politicized artists, especially in ‘Collective Delusions’ (51–62) and ‘How Political Are Aesthetic Politics?’ (63–74). For criticism see Kim Charnley, ‘9.5 Theses on Art and Class, a Review’, Historical Materialism 24, Issue 3 (2016): 179–96.

64 Mary Bulman, ‘Number of Children in Poverty Surges by 100,000 in a Year,

Figures Show’, Independent, Thursday 22 March 2018: https​://ww​w.ind​ epend​ent.c​o.uk/​news/​uk/ho​me-ne​ws/ch​ild-p​overt​y-inc​rease​-chil​dren-​famil​ y-ben​efit-​house​holds​-a826​8191.​htm

65 See for example Lorenza Antonucci, Laszlo Horvath and Andre Krouwel,

‘Brexit was not the Voice of the Working Class nor of the Uneducated - It was of the Squeezed Middle’, LSE British Politics and Policy blog, undated: https​://bl​ogs.l​se.ac​.uk/p​oliti​csand​polic​y/bre​xit-a​nd-th​e-squ​eezed​-midd​le/; Danny Dorling and Sarah Tomlinson, Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire (Biteback Publishing, 2019).

66 Patrick Fox, ‘Post-industrial Place Making and the Contemporary Artist’,

Take-a-Part, Social Making Conference, Devonport Guildhall, Plymouth, 08 June 2017.

67 Baa Baa Baric, Have You Any Pull? Heart of Glass website: http:​//www​.hear​

tofgl​ass.o​rg.uk​/thou​ght-p​rovok​ing-a​cts-i​n-baa​-baa-​baric​/

68 Office for National Statistics, ‘National Life Tables UK: 2016 to 2018’,

25 September 2019: https​://ww​w.ons​.gov.​uk/pe​oplep​opula​tiona​ndcom​ munit​y/bir​thsde​athsa​ndmar​riage​s/lif​eexpe​ctanc​ies/b​ullet​ins/n​ation​allif​ etabl​esuni​tedki​ngdom​/2016​to201​8

69 Public Health England, ‘St. Helens Unitary Authority, Health Profile’, 4 July

2017: https​://ww​w.sth​elens​ccg.n​hs.uk​/medi​a/144​9/hea​lth-p​rofil​e.pdf​

70 Mark Storor (artist) and Emily Gee (producer). Skype interview. 23 July

2019.

71 Jack Welsh, ‘People Congregate in Shop Fronts to Catch a Glimpse of the

Spectacle’, The Double Negative, 19 October 2017: http:​//www​.thed​ouble​ negat​ive.c​o.uk/​2017/​10/pe​ople-​congr​egate​-in-s​hop-f​ronts​-to-c​atch-​a-gli​ mpse-​of-th​e-spe​ctacl​e-mar​k-sto​rors-​baa-b​aa-ba​ric/

72 The charter is reproduced on this page. St Helens Unlimited, ‘Baa Baa Baric

– Have You Any Pull’, 29 September 2017: https​://ww​w.sth​elens​unlim​ited.​ co.uk​/2017​/09/2​9/baa​-baa-​baric​-have​-you-​any-p​ull/

73 BBC News, ‘EU Referendum: Local Results’: https​://ww​w.bbc​.co.u​k/new​s/

pol​itics​/eu_r​efere​ndum/​resul​ts/lo​cal/s​

74 The Movement for Cultural Democracy manifesto: https://

culturaldemocracy.wordpress.com/

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75 Mark Storor and Emily Gee. Skype interview. 23 July 2019. 76 For a critique of the liberal democratic tradition, see for example:

Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2014).

Chapter 5 1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edward Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

2 Freee manifestos and publications include Freee Art Collective, The

Carracci Institute Yearbook (Northampton: NN Contemporary Art, 2017); Freee Art Collective, Changing Things with Words and the Free Manifesto for Guerilla advertising (After the Revolution), 2nd edn. Published on the exhibition Abstract Cabinet at Eastside Projects (Free Publishing, September 2009); Freee Art Collective, Revolution Road: Rename the Streets! 2009; Freee Art Collective, Fuck Globalization: The Freee Manifesto for the alterglobalization of Art, 2nd edn (Freee Publishing, March 2010); Freee Art Collective, Revolution Is Sublime, or What Are Going to Do with the Rich? (Freee Publishing, 2009).

3 Brian Holmes, ‘Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society’,

in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2008), 99–114.

4 Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, A User’s Guide to Demanding

the Impossible (London, New York and Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2010), 4. Pdf available online via www.tacticalmediafiles.net. See: http:​// www​.tact​icalm​ediaf​i les.​net/e​vents​/4766​/A-Us​er_s-​Guide​-to-D​emand​ing-t​ he-Im​possi​ble

5 Ibid. 6 For a critique of art activism, see Peter Osborne, ‘Theorem 4. Autonomy:

Can It Be True of Art and Politics at the Same Time?’ in Peter Osborne, The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays (London and New York: Verso, 2018), 61–72.

7 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An

Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991).

8 Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the

Critique of Actually-Existing Democracy’, Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 56–80; Nancy Fraser et al., Transnationalizing the Public Sphere,

220

NOTES

ed. Kate Nash (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2014); Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Pater Labanyi, Jamie Own Daniel and Assenka Oksiloff (London and New York: Verso, (1972) 2016). 9 Freee Art Collective, The Freee-Carracci Institute Yearbook, 11–12. 10 Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Conversation in Modern

Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); Nato Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (New York and London: First Melville House, 2015).

11 Freee Art Collective, The Freee-Carracci Institute Yearbook, 11–12. 12 Freee Art Collective, The Freee Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-

Hegemonic Art (Freee publishing, 2007), 25.

13 Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition

(London: Verso, 2016), 81.

14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 101. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 107. 19 Joshua Clover, Riot-Strike-Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso,

2016), 3.

20 Ibid. 21 For a contemporary discussion of this ‘immiseration thesis’ focused on

crisis tendencies since 2008, see Endnotes collective.

22 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London and New York: Verso, 2006). See also

Endnotes, ‘Misery and Debt’, Endnotes 2 (April 2010), especially under the subtitle ‘Surplus Populations under Deindustrialization: Service Work and Slums’, 37–42.

23 Clover, Riot-Strike-Riot, 178. For Clover, the riot is an antechamber of the

commune, and the commune a threshold to social relations which are no longer governed by the imperatives of production and exchange, which are expressions of capitalist accumulation.

24 Ibid., 178. 25 Ibid., 185. 26 Joshua Clover, Riot, Strike, Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso,

2016), 2.

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27 Freee Art Collective, ‘The Freee Art Collective Interviewed by Charles

Esche’, in The Carracci Institute Yearbook, 51.

28 McKee and Twitter and Tear Gas. 29 Freee Art Collective, ‘The Freee Art Collective Interviewed by Charles

Esche’, 51.

30 Freee Art Collective, The Freee Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-

Hegemonic Art, 19.

31 The debate is collected in Dave Beech and John Roberts, The Philistine

Controversy (London and New York: Verso, 2002).

32 Dave Beech and John Roberts, ‘The Philistine and the Logic of Negation’, in

Beech and Roberts, The Philistine Controversy, 273.

33 Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot be Born: From

Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond (London and New York: Verso, 2019).

34 Daniel Cohen, ‘Loud, Obsessive, Tribal: The Radicalisation of Remain’,

Guardian online, 13 August 2019: https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/po​litic​ s/201​9/aug​/13/b​rexit​-rema​in-ra​dical​isati​on-fb​pe-pe​oples​-vote​

35 The two parties that have dominated British electoral politics have both

undergone this reshaping, in different ways. After the election of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, the Labour Party experienced a surge of membership, stabilizing at around 500,000 members. This prompted a leftward shift in policy and repudiation of austerity policies to which the Labour Party supported between 2010–15. It also resulted in ongoing internal battles with the Labour Party bureaucracy and Parliamentary Labour Party, who resisted these changes. The Conservative Party experienced a smaller surge in membership in 2017, prior to the election of Boris Johnson as leader, this time absorbing membership from UKIP and the far right.

36 Etchells is Professor of Performance and Writing at Lancaster University

and art director of Forced Entertainment. This group, based in Sheffield, UK, was founded in 1984 and played a key role in UK experimental performance. https​://ww​w.for​ceden​terta​inmen​t.com​/abou​t/

37 Data on leave result by city or region is available here: https​://ww​w.the​guard​

ian.c​om/po​litic​s/ng-​inter​activ​e/201​6/jun​/23/e​u-ref​erend​um-li​ve-re​sults​ -and-​analy​sis

38 Steve Richards, ‘Take Back Control - The Slogan the Left should Make Its

Own’, The Guardian online, 19 December 2016: https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​ om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​6/dec​/19/t​ake-b​ack-c​ontro​l-slo​gan-l​eft-p​ower-​right​ -stat​e-int​erven​tion

39 Joe Humphreys, ‘Take Back Control: Why the Slogan Resonates across

Europe’, The Irish Times online, 19 March 2019: https​://ww​w.iri​shtim​es.co​

222

NOTES

m/cul​ture/​take-​back-​contr​ol-wh​y-the​-brex​it-sl​ogan-​reson​ates-​acros​s-eur​ ope-1​.3824​393 40 Toby Helm and Nosheen Iqbal, ‘Taking Back Control? Brexit Seems to Offer

Exactly the Opposite’, Guardian online, 13 January 2019: https​://ww​w.the​ guard​ian.c​om/po​litic​s/201​9/jan​/13/t​aking​-back​-cont​rol-b​rexit​-seem​s-to-​ offer​-exac​tly-t​he-op​posit​e

41 So effective was the Vote Leave message considered to be in these respects

that it was subsequently appropriated by the organization ‘The World Transformed’ for a series of events addressing the concerns of leave voting areas. Julia Rampen, ‘Momentum’s The World Transformed to launch “Take Back Control” Brexit Events’, The New Statesman, 25 November 2016: https​ ://ww​w.new​state​sman.​com/p​oliti​cs/st​agger​s/201​6/11/​momen​tums-​world​ -tran​sform​ed-la​unch-​take-​back-​contr​ol-br​exit-​event​s

42 The essay was written in mid-1917. V. I. Lenin, ‘On Slogans’, The Marxists

Internet archive: https​://ww​w.mar​xists​.org/​archi​ve/le​nin/w​orks/​1917/​jul/1​ 5.htm​

43 Dave Beech, ‘“The Reign of the Workers and Peasants Will Never End”:

Politics and Politicisation, Art and the Politics of Political Art’, Third Text 16, no.4 (2002): 387–98.

44 Jean-Jacques LeCercle, ‘Lenin the Just, or Marxism Unrecycled’, in Sebastian

Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Zizek, eds, Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 269–82.

45 See: Susie Pentlow, ‘Swimming against the Tide: An Interview with Tim

Etchells’, Corridor 8 (15 August 2018): https​://co​rrido​r8.co​.uk/a​rticl​e/ swi​mming​-agai​nst-t​ide-i​nterv​iew-t​im-et​chell​s/ Etchells states: ‘The big difference for me is between anything involving speaking or voice and anything that involves a physical manifestation of text – whether that’s a neon sign or a book. When you speak, it’s temporary, it’s provisional, and it’s socially triangulated. Whereas when you make a book, a neon sign or a drawing, the object persists in one’s absence. It’s still a fluid thing of course – objects are still in time, albeit in a different way – but they don’t have the same ephemerality that speech usually has.’

46 Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel

Moore (London: Penguin books, 1967), 83.

47 Ibid. 48 Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, (1973) 1997).

49 ‘There is an “invasion of space by text” here, within art itself, that

parallels quite precisely the invasion of space by text that Augé takes to be constitutive of non-places’, Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All:

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Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 139. 50 Zoe Sutherland writes of this work: ‘This may be taken as emblematic

of a tendency to toy with the abstractly universal as both content and form, gesturing towards an infinity of potential inclusion at the level of communication, ideas, even physical reality: the many negatives – inertia, invisibility, non-presence, unconfinement, desert – may be read together positively as conjuring an abstract globality’, Zoe Sutherland, ‘The World as Gallery: Conceptualism and Global Neo-Avant Garde’, New Left Review 98 (March/April 2016): 81–111.

51 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 97. 52 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern

Culture (Cambridge, MA and London, 1999).

53 Richard Seymour, Twittering Machine (London: The Indigo Press, 2019),

Kindle edition. Loc 119.

54 Ibid. Loc 128. 55 Ibid. Loc 91. 56 Ibid. Loc 154. 57 Twitter and Tear Gas 58 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 178. 59 Ibid., 179. 60 Boris Groys, ‘On Art Activism’, e-flux 56 (June 2014): https​://ww​w.e-f​lux.c​

om/jo​urnal​/56/6​0343/​on-ar​t-act​ivism​/

61 ‘[N]ew methods for criticizing ideas are to be deployed, and new ideas are

to be constructed which are legitimized by their usefulness (weapons do not need to be charming for the person who needs them), and their use is to be measured in terms of their power to transform our social world’, Bertolt Brecht, ‘Use of Truth’, in Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles, eds, Brecht on Art and Politics, trans. Laura Bradley, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2003), 111.

62 A useful overview of the influence of tactical media is provided in the

September 2008 issue of Third Text. See: Gregory Sholette and Gene Ray, ‘Introduction: Whither Tactical Media’, Third Text 22, no. 5 (September 2008): 519–24.

63 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

64 Ibid., xi–xii. Compare Steven Wright, Toward a lexicon of Usership

(Amsterdam: van Abbemuseum, 2013): https​://mu​seuma​rteut​il.ne​t/wp-​ conte​nt/up​loads​/2013​/12/T​oward​-a-le​xicon​-of-u​sersh​ip.pd​f

224

NOTES

65 ‘Since these [digital] tools inception, many governments have come a

long way in understanding and learning how to control the new public sphere and its digital ecology. Governments have learned how to respond to digitally equipped challengers and social movements – and have even adopted portions of their repertoire. Governments sometimes organize protests to oppose social movements . . . governments or powerful groups also make rhetorical attacks on bona fide experts by positioning these movements as authorities to be resisted, portraying the media as tools of elites’, Zeynep Tufecki, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Global Protest (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 225–6. Chapter nine in its entirety is relevant: Chapter nine ‘Governments Strike Back’, 223–60.

66 Sidney Blumenthal, ‘Trump’s “American Carnage” Speech Resembled an

Extended Tweet’, Guardian online, 21 January 2017: https​://ww​w.the​guard​ ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​7/jan​/21/t​rumps​-amer​ican-​carna​ge-sp​eech-​ resem​bled-​exten​ded-t​weet

67 David Garcia, ‘Dark Jesters Hiding in Plain Sight’, in Jon K. Shaw and

Theo Reeves-Evison, eds, Fiction as Method (Berlin: Sternberg, 2017), 73–102.

68 Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press,

2003).

69 The Conservative Party spent twice as much as the Labour Party on social

media marketing in the 2017 election. Joey D-Urso, ‘Who Spent What on Facebook during 2017 Election Campaign?’, BBC News, 31 March 2018: https​://ww​w.bbc​.co.u​k/new​s/uk-​polit​ics-4​34873​01

70 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (London and New York: Verso,

2009), 7.

71 Chunkymark, ‘Theresa May’s Tory Magic Money Tree’, YouTube, 01 June

2017: https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=HxM​0swbu​xQo

72 Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux 10 (November

2009): https​://ww​w.e-f​lux.c​om/jo​urnal​/10/6​1362/​in-de​fense​-of-t​hepo​or-im​age/

73 The remix of ATD can be found here: http:​//grm​daily​.com/​video​/shut​down-​

chunk​y-mar​k-rem​ix

74 Dawn Foster, ‘Mark McGowan: The Artist Taxi Driver with a Rear-View

Manifesto’, The Guardian, Wednesday 28 January 2015: https​://ww​w.the​ guard​ian.c​om/so​ciety​/2015​/jan/​28/ma​rk-mc​gowan​-arti​st-ta​xi-dr​iver-​rear-​ view-​manif​esto

75 Mark Mcgowan. Email communication with the author. 6 July 2020. 76 David Garcia and Geert Lovink, ‘The ABC of Tactical Media’: https​://ww​

w.net​time.​org/L​ists-​Archi​ves/n​ettim​e-l-9​705/m​sg000​96.ht​ml

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77 Endnotes, ‘Crisis in the Class Relation’, Endnotes 2 (April 2010): 2–19. 78 John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (London and

New York: Verso, 2015).

Conclusion 1 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History

of “Crisis”’, in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 236–47, 236.

2 Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham and London: Duke University Press,

2014), 3.

3 Koselleck cites a source in the 1840s, complaining of the ubiquity of

the term ‘crisis’ to underline the fact that social change is described no differently now. Koselleck’s point is that crisis is a foundational concept for historical narration. Koselleck, ‘Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History of “Crisis”’, 236.

4 Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 4. 5 Obviously, this is and always has been the underlying imperative of

capitalism. The point here is that during the post-Second World War Keynesian consensus, it was generally accepted that chaotic excess of capitalism ought to be curbed.

6 Roitman notes of the commentary on the subprime mortgage crisis that

both expert and lay commentary alike ‘serve not radical change, as expected with crisis, but rather the affirmation of longstanding principles, thereby precluding certain thoughts and acts, such as the outright refutation of the very idea of foreclosure as a germane or valid concept or action’(original emphasis). Ibid., 6.

7 Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg

Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics with an afterword by Frederic Jameson (London and New York, 1980).

8 Frederic Jameson, ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, in Theodor Adorno, Walter

Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics with an afterword by Frederic Jameson (London and New York, 1980), 196.

9 Walter Benjamin, ‘These on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt,

ed., Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257–8.

226

NOTES

10 Hito Steyerl, ‘Digital Debris’, in Steyerl, Duty Free Art (London and New

York: Verso, 2017), 106.

11 This book draws in particular on the writings of the collective Endnotes,

whose communization theory is particularly influential and has tended to capture the development of the social and political crisis since 2008. Endnotes writings are available here: https://endnotes.org.uk/

12 Anton Jager and Arthur Borriello, ‘Making Sense of Populism’, Catalyst 3,

Issue 4 (Winter 2020): https​://ca​talys​t-jou​rnal.​com/v​ol3/n​o4/ma​king-​sense​ -of-p​opuli​sm

13 Georg Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance’, in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and

Politics, 28–59, 32.

14 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 262–3.

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INDEX

10, 146, 058 (Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission)  132–42, 149 activism art  4, 8, 14, 123–5, 131, 143, 154, 158, 162 epistemological  71–3, 83 political  21–2 Adorno, Theodor  23–4, 59–61, 128–9, 151, 168, 184 Alberro, Alexander  60–4, 71 American Family Association (AFA)  102 Anderson, Benedict  58 Andre, Carl  69–70 Angelus Novus  184–5, 189 ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’ (Bishop)  111–12 antagonisms  59, 65, 71, 150–1, 187 anti-institutional  60–3 Anywhere or Not at All (Osborne)  171 art activism  4, 8, 14, 123–5, 131, 143, 154, 158, 162, 218 n.54 aesthetics in  4 (see also relational aesthetics; sociopolitical aesthetics) autonomy of  14, 153–65 and capitalism, complicity between  14 collectives  9, 11–18 (see also art collectivity) commodification of  16 contemporary  3, 13, 135 critical  3–4 criticism  67–76

education  9 globalization  17, 58–9, 64–5, 157, 187 participatory  87–9, 91–3, 112–15, 142, 151, 162 and politics  6, 151–80 social conflict within  9–10 social practice  5, 19 (see also social practice) social relations in  89–93 art collectivity  11–18, 40, 52 avant-gardes  21, 23–8 banal and self-evident strategy  41 community  33–40 as ethical undecidability  22 fictional  42–3 Fox, The  22–3, 28–33 as impurity  21–50 institution  40–5 political experience of  12, 46–50 relational aesthetics and  87–122 revolution  23–8 Roberts, John views on  46–50 Sholette, Gregory views on  46–50 social existence and  12, 46–50 strategies  12 Arte Útil (useful art)  123, 127–30, 134, 138, 214 n.3 Artificial Hells (Bishop)  91, 113 art institution  25–7 Artist Taxi Driver; see McGowan, Mark Art & Language  18, 28–44, 50, 52, 196 n.23, 196 n.32 Draft for an Anti-Textbook, A  31 indexing  29–31 membership  33, 197 n.35

pandemonium  32 project  30–1 ‘Art Market: Affluence and Degradation, The’ (Burn)  36 art marketing system  36 art museum  51–2 Art Workers’ Coalition  52 artworks, social practice in  43–5 Asher, Michael  51 Atkinson, Terry  28, 96–7 Augé, Marc  168 austerity  76 ‘Author as Producer’ (Benjamin)  69 authorship  87 autonomy, artwork  153–65 avant-gardes  8, 15, 21, 23–8, 89–90, 155 Baa-Baa-Baric: Have You Any Pull? (Storor)  19, 132–3, 144–9 Babich, Silvina  126 Bainbridge, David  28 Baldwin, Michael  28, 35, 37 bare art  49, 63 Barnes, Barry  104 Barry, Robert  168 Beech, Dave  16, 153, 156, 164, 167 Beecroft, Vanessa  87 Benjamin, Walter  171, 184–5 Berlin Dada  11 Bernes, Jasper  118 Beveridge, Karl  38, 43–5, 112 biopolitical assemblage  159 Bishop, Claire  4–5, 13, 22, 91, 106–7, 111–14, 119 black liberation  64 Black Lives Matter protests  6, 182 Blair, Tony  103, 137 Bloch, Ernst  184 Blom, Ina  118–19 Blurting in Art & Language  31 Bolsonaro, Jair  8, 143 Boltanski, Luc  61–2 Bordowitz, Gregg  60 Boriello, Arthur  187 244

I ndex

Bourriaud, Nicolas  5, 18–19, 87–99, 104, 106, 110–20 Brave New Avant-Garde (Léger)  41 Breakstone, Jill  39 Brecht, Bertolt  184 Brenner, Robert  14, 160 Brexit  144–5, 148–50, 152, 164–5, 174–5 referendum  19–20 social practice after  132–42 ‘Brice Marden’s Painting’ (GilbertRolfe)  72 Broodthaers, Marcel  51 Brown, Gordon  137 Bruguera, Tania  19, 123–5, 128, 132–44, 149–50 Bryan-Wilson, Julia  56–7 Buchloh, Benjamin  60 Buren, Daniel  51, 55, 70, 201 n.7 Bürger, Peter  15, 24–6 Burn, Ian  28, 31, 34, 36–7, 39, 43–4 Burton, Johanna  127 Bush, George Senior  95 candy spills  97–9, 117–20 Capital  92, 160–1 capitalism  3, 8, 36–7, 42, 160–1 Cattelan, Maurizio  87 Chambers, Iain  107–10 Chan, Paul  126 Chandler, Jon  168 Charlesworth, Sarah  39 Chatwin, Bruce  109 Chiapello, Ève  61–2 Chin, Mel  126 Clinton, Bill  103 Clover, Joshua  160–2 communism  104–10, 160, 212 n.62 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels)  42 community  33–40, 112, 136 conceptualism  26, 29, 40, 43, 47, 51, 58, 106, 167–8, 180 Condé, Carole  38, 43–5, 112 Conservative Party  174–5, 222 n.35

constructivism  11, 21–2; see also art collectivity contemporary art  3, 13, 135, 187–8 market  34 museum of  58–9 as niche production  3 politics of  51–3 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx)  43 co-option  16, 22, 52–3, 189 of artistic critique  118–19 of avant-gardist strategies  149–50 as crisis narrative  182–4 Gonzalez-Torres’s work and  118–19 in sociopolitical aesthetics  59–60 Copeland, Huey  129 Coplans, John  70, 72 Corbyn, Jeremy  8, 175 Coronavirus pandemic  3 Corris, Michael  34, 39 ‘Counting on your Collective Silence’ (Sholette)  48 Creischer, Alice  126 crisis  6–11 Eurozone bond  1 institutions in  63–7 migrant  1–2, 132, 134–6, 142 neoliberalism  6–11, 13, 181–2 (see also neoliberalism) organic  174 political  7 and social practice  125–32 usage  181–90 critical art  3–4 Critical Art Ensemble  61 Cuba  133–4 cultural revolution  21 culture industry  151 political implications  2 Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (O’Neill)  41 D’Amato, Alfonse  102 Danto, Arthur  124

Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Sholette)  46 Davis, Ben  143–4 Davis, Mike  131 de Certeau, Michel  173 Decter, Joshua  60 Demos, TJ  77 Deutsche, Rosalind  57–8 Dewey, John  90 dialogic aesthetics  111 Dion, Mark  60 distraction  170–2 ‘Documenta’ Index  29–30 Don’t Let the Media have the Monopoly on the Freedom of Speech (Freee)  158 Dorchester Projects (Gates)  129 Draft for an Anti-Textbook, A  31 Duchamp, Marcel  56 Duncan, Carol  27–8 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon  35 entrepreneurialism  129–30 Enwezor, Okwui  1 Etchells, Tim  19, 152, 165–71, 180, 222 n.36 Eurozone bond crisis  1 Farage, Nigel  137 fashion photography  24 Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill  79 Favario, Eduardo  61 Feiss, E. C.  114 feminism  64 FIRE economy  6–7 Fish Story (Sekula)  65 Fluids  92 form, relational aesthetics  89–93 Fountain (Duchamp)  56 Fox, The  22–3, 28–33, 49–50, 67–76, 188 Fraser, Andrea  58, 60 Fraser, Nancy  7–8, 103 freedom  10–11; see also autonomy

Index

245

Freee art collective  153–65 ‘From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique’ (Fraser)  58 Gander, Ryan  142–9 Gates, Theaster  129–30 general political crisis  7 gentrification, social practice and  142–9 Gilbert, Chris  203 n.38 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy  72 Gillick, Liam  87, 119 globalization art  17, 58–9, 64–5, 157, 187 euphoric narratives of  77 Gogarty, Larne Abse  127–8, 142 Go-Go Dancing  104–10 Goldfinger, Ernö  142 Goldwater, Barry  103 Gonzalez-Foerster, Dominique  87 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix  19, 89, 93–122 Gramsci, Antonio  174 Graw, Isabelle  63 Great Depression  14–15 Greenberg, Clement  3, 26, 31 Groys, Boris  172 Guattari, Félix  88 Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG)  52 Guerrilla Girls  61 Haacke, Hans  51–9, 67–75, 77, 82–5 John Weber Gallery Visitor’s profile  73 Manet-Projekt ’74  54–5 MOMA poll  73, 99 Shapolsky et al: A Real-Time Social System  52–6 On Social Grease  67–71 social processes, conception of  57 Solomon R. Guggenheim Board of Trustees  70 Habermas, Jurgen  154–5 Hamdan, Lawrence Abu  2

246

I ndex

Hardt, Michael  159 Harrison, Charles  29 Harvey, David  9, 76 Heinrich, Michael  92–3 Heiser, Jörg  3 Heller, Preston  39 Helms, Jesse  102 Hewitt, Andy  153, 156 Hirschorn, Thomas  160 Höller, Carsten  87 Holmes, Brian  13–14 Homenaje a Ana Mendieta (Tello)  134 Hudson, Alistair  127–8 Hurrell, Harold  28 Huyghe, Pierre  87 Immigrant Movement International  134 impurity  23–8 individualism  10–11, 18, 21, 27–8, 30, 40 Inert Gas Series/Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon/From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion (Barry)  168 institutional critique  18, 51–85 art historical narrative of  51–2 artistic strategy  59–60 canonization  63 Fox, The  67–76 influence  63 periodization, problem of  76–82 politics of contemporary art and  51–3 Ramsden’s views on  69–75 real time  53–8 temporality of  53–8 ‘Institution of Critique, the’ (Steyerl)  64 institutions  40–5 in crisis  63–7 cultural  64–5 neoliberalism and  58–63 Ismael, Feyzi  131 IS3 Soviet Battle Tank  66

Is the Museum a Battlefield?  80–2 It’s a Wonderful Life  102 It’s Still Privileged Art (Condé and Beveridge)  38, 44–5 Jackson, Shannon  123, 125, 127–8 Jäger, Anton  187 Jameson, Fredric  184 Johnson, Boris  8 John Weber Gallery Visitor’s profile (Haacke)  73, 99–100 Jordan, Mel  153, 156 Judd, Donald  106 Kamat, Sangeeta  131 Kaprow, Alan  90–2 Kelley, Jeff  90 Kester, Grant  22, 111–15, 119, 121, 155 Kingsley, Robert  69 Klee, Paul  170, 184 Klossowski, Pierre  106 Koselleck, Reinhart  181, 226 n.3 Kosuth, Joseph  26, 28–9, 34, 39 Kozloff, Max  70 Kunst, Neue Slowenische  41 Kwon, Miwon  93–5 Labour Party  175–7, 222 n.35 La Memoria de la postguerra (Tello)  134 Laycock, Ross  97 Lees, Loretta  141 Léger, Marc James  41–2 Lendon, Nigel  40 Lenin, V. I.  166–7 LeWitt, Sol  26 Lind, Maria  22, 125 Lippard, Lucy  64, 167–8 Living as Form  91, 125, 214 n.4 looting  161–2 Lukács, Georg  184, 188 lumpenbourgoisie  35, 37–8, 42 McGowan, Mark  19, 152, 175–9 McKee, Yates  158–60, 162

Magdelana Oil Spill  126 Manet-Projekt ’74 (Haacke)  54–5 Mapplethorpe, Robert  102 Marden, Brice  72 Martin, Stewart  88, 91, 93–4, 110 Marxist art theory  16 May, Theresa  175 media  173 Medina, Cuauhtémoc  3 Meitlin, Alejandro  126 Menard, Andrew  39 Messer, Thomas  54 Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA)  127 migrant crisis  1–2, 132, 134–42 militancy  170–2 Millis, Ian  40 minimalism  106–7 Mitroupolos, Angela  103 Modi, Narendra  8 MOMA poll (Haacke)  73, 99 Mont Pelerin Society  10 Morris, Robert  106 Morris, William  125 Mouffe, Chantal  8 Murillo, Cammock  2 Murillo, Oscar  2 museum  27–8, 51–2, 58–9 nationalism  58–9 Nauman, Bruce  168 necro-art  135 negation  62 Negri, Antonio  159 neo-avant-garde  24–6, 47, 67 Neo-Imperialist Function of Art Is to Clear a Space for Economic Expansion, The  157 neoliberalism  3, 6–11, 42, 46–7, 58, 127 candy spills and  117–20 creativity in  128–9 crisis  6–11, 13, 181–2 freedom and  10–11 ideology  9–10 institution and  58–63 Index

247

progressive  103–4 reforms  10 relational aesthetics  100–4 social practice  127–33, 137 Neon (Kosuth)  168 neon works  168–9 New Spirit of Capitalism, The (Boltanski and Chiapello)  61–2 Nixon, Richard M.  68 non-governmental organizations (NGOs)  126, 130–1, 216 n.26 November  77, 79–82 Occupy Wall Street (OWS)  158–60 October  78 Ögüt, Ahmet  135 O’Neill, Paul  41 ‘On Practice’ (Tse-Tung)  45, 74 ‘On Slogans’ (Lenin)  166–7 On Social Grease  68–71 Operation Paydirt/Fundred Dollar Bill Project (Chin)  126 Optical-Illusions-Political-DelusionsPoetical-Confusions (Etchells)  169, 171 organic crisis  174 Osborne, Peter  3, 13–15, 26, 40, 42–3, 59–60, 154, 168, 171–2 pandemonium  31–2 Parc, Julio Le  60–1 Parreno, Philippe  87 participatory artwork  87–122; see also relational aesthetics Peinture-Sculpture (Buren)  208 n.7 ‘Philistine and the Logic of Negation, The’ (Beech and Roberts)  164 philistinism  164 Pilkington, Philip  35 Piss Christ  102 PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê)  77 Planet of Slums  131 political crisis  2

248

I ndex

Popovic, Zoran  38 populism  8, 101, 103, 107, 128, 143, 187 post-relational art, absent work of  110–16 ‘Pricing Works of Art’ (Burn)  34 Pritchard, Stephen  142 productivism  11 Projesi, Oda  41 public art  96 Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good  127–8 public sphere  40, 65, 154–5, 157, 161, 163–5, 168–72 Ramsden, Mel  28, 31–4, 39, 52, 69–75 Rancière, Jacques  84, 111, 176 Raqs Media Collective  61 Reagan, Ronald  95, 103 ‘Realism in the Balance’ (Lukács)  188 Red-Herring  39 relational aesthetics  4–5, 18–19 art collectivity and  87–122 candy spills and  97–8, 117–20 collectivity  93–100 communism  104–10 culture war  100–4 form  89–93 Gonzalez-Torres’s work on  93–122 as micro-utopias  91 neoliberalism  100–4, 117–20 norms  93–104 post-relational art, absent work of  110–16 relation  89–93 Relational Aesthetics  87–90, 95–6 Repo History  61 Residuos Urbanos Solidos  126 revolution  23–8, 165–9 Revolution (Etchells)  165–6, 168–72 Ringgold, Faith  64 riots  160–2 Riot-Strike-Riot (Clover)  160

Roberts, John  18, 45–50, 164, 179, 183, 199 n.83 Rockefeller, David  69 Rockefeller, Nelson  99 Rodenbeck, Judith  90 Roitman, Janet  181–3 Rosler, Martha  3–4, 159 Run from Fear/Fun from Rear (Nauman)  168 Rushton, David  35 Sanders, Bernie  8 Scanlan, Joe  95, 117 Searle, John  40 second economy  47 Sekula, Allan  65 Serra, Richard  113 Serrano, Andres  102 service labour  92–3 Seymour, Richard  170–1 Shani, Tai  2 Shapolsky et al: A Real-Time Social System (Haacke)  52–6 Sholette, Gregory  18, 22, 45–50, 63, 67, 183 Siekman, Andreas  126 sign gardens  159–60 Silent University, The (Tello)  135 slogans  151–80 Smith, Terry  34 social capital art  142 social inequality  126–7 social justice  124 social media  170–1, 173–4 social practice  123–50, 214 n.2 after Brexit  132–42 art activism  124 artworks  43–5 community art  124 and crisis  125–32 as entrepreneurial ideology  129 and gentrification  142–9 neoliberalism  127–33, 137 reinventing, way of  132 social inequality  126–7

social justice  124 as speculative collectivity  135 social relations, in art  89–93 social turn  4–5, 8–13, 19–20 collectivism  21 market-oriented neoliberal thinking for  41–2 participatory art and  87–122 sociopolitical aesthetics  4–6, 188 art activism  4–5, 8, 14, 123–5, 131, 143, 154, 158, 162 ‘co-option’ in  59 dialogic art  4 institutional critique  4 (see also institutional critique) relational  4–5, 18–19 (see also relational aesthetics) social practice  4 Solomon R. Guggenheim Board of Trustees (Haacke)  70 spatial fix  193 n.29 Spero, Nancy  64 Spin (Freee) oza and When Guests Become Hosts  158 Stakemeier, Kirstin  124 Steyerl, Hito  18, 53, 63–7, 77–82, 185 Stimson, Blake  61–3, 71, 76 Storor, Mark  19, 125, 132–3, 146–50 Strike Art! (McKee)  158 Struggle in New York  38 surrealism  11, 24 Szymczyk, Adam  1–2 Szeemann, Harald  29 ‘Tank on a Pedestal, A’ (Steyerl)  66 Tate Exchange  134–8 Tate Neighbours  136, 138–40, 142 Tello, Verónica  133–5 Thatcher, Margaret  103 Theory of the Avant-garde (Bürger)  15, 25, 27 Thompson, Nato  91, 125, 155 Tilted Arc (Serra)  113 Tiravanija, Rirkrit  87, 119

Index

249

Trump, Donald  7, 101, 143, 173 Tse-Tung, Mao  45 Turner Prize (2019)  2 Twittering Machine (Klee)  170–1 UK election of 2019  2 Union Media Services  40 ‘Untitled’ (Go-Go dancing platform)  105–9 ‘Untitled’ (Natural History)  106 ‘Untitled’ (Perfect Lovers)  96 ‘Untitled’ (Placebo)  97–8, 120–1 ‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)  97 ‘Untitled’ (USA Today)  97 Uprooted: The Katrina Project  126 ‘Uses of Disorder, The’ (Scanlan)  117 Venice Biennale of 2015  1 Vishmidt, Marina  124, 128–32

250

I ndex

Vote Leave’s slogan  166, 223 n.41 W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy)  193 n.27 Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (Chan)  126 Walker, Richard A.  70 Walkman  107–10, 211 n.54 Watney, Simon  96–7 Williams, Raymond  68 Willsdon, Dominic  127 Wolf, Andrea  77–82 Wood, Paul  35 World Social Forum  131 Yes Men  61 YouTube  127 Zmijewski, Artur  41

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