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Middle Class Hero: The True Revolutionary is Guided by Great Feelings of Love. Konzeptuelles Erzählen als Herausforderung für die Next Art Education

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:16:39 +0000

Social Surrealism
Mit seiner Arbeit „English Magic“ im Britischen Pavillon auf der Biennale 2013 kredenzt uns Jeremy Deller ein giftiges Bonbon. Der middleclass hero hat präzise ausgewählte Zeichen und Versatzstücke britischer Klasse, Gesinnung oder sozialer Mythen zusammengetragen; er arrangiert sie in fantastischen Collagen und lässt zeitliche Kontexte aufeinanderprallen. Deller¹ selbst hat seine Arbeitsweise als „Social Surrealism“ bezeichnet – ein Surrealismus, der einerseits verfremdet, andererseits aber durch eine mediale bricolage neue Erzählungen vom Englisch-Sein hervorbringt (und so nebenbei grundsätzliche Konstruktionsprinzipien von nationaler Identität und Tradition offenlegt²).
Zentral für Dellers Arbeit im Britischen Pavillon sind drei monumentale Wandmalereien. Da ist zunächst, vis-à-vis des mittigen Eingangs, ein überdimensionierter hen harrier, ein Greifvogel, der auf den Betrachter zufliegt. Er hat sich gerade einen roten Range Rover gegriffen; die Scheiben sind zerborsten, jetzt naht er mit ausgebreiteten Schwingen, sein Argusauge auf den eintretenden Besucher gerichtet. Dieser mythologisch überhöhte, vom Aussterben bedrohte Vogel und der Range Rover werden später in einem Film erneut sichtbar werden, dessen Sound den gesamten Pavillon durchdringt. Gleich gegenüber berichtet eine zweite Wandmalerei von einem Szenario aus dem Jahr 2017, als St. Helier, die Hauptstadt der britischen Steueroase Jersey, bei einem Protest der britischen Steuerzahler in nicht allzu ferner Zukunft in Schutt und Asche gelegt worden sein wird. Als vorweggenommene Relikte der eskalierten Demonstration flankieren zwei Flaggen das Gemälde, die sich auf den zweiten Blick als diagrammatische Schaubilder für Steuerhinterziehung entpuppen.
Auf dem dritten Wandgemälde findet sich William Morris, der als Gott Poseidon mit mächtiger Geste die Yacht des russischen Milliardärs Roman Abramovich in die venezianische Lagune schmettert: Die Yacht eines der Profiteure der Privatisierung kommunistischen Besitzstandes versperrte während der letzten Biennale den Fußgängern auf der Promenade Via Giuseppe Garibaldi vor den Giardini den Blick. Nun wird Morris, bekannt als Vertreter sozialistisch kommunistischer Gesinnung, als wiederkehrender Gott und Rächer des Unrechts am Gemeinwohl und der kapitalistischen Gier heraufbeschworen. Diese drei großen Wandbilder etablieren Grundmotive von Wut, Zerstörung und Hoffnung, wie sie aus Märchen der Popkultur vertraut sind – verorten diese aber in sehr sozialen, und surrealisierten Kontexten.

English Magic
Neben diesen Grundmotiven werden die Räume durch das Prinzip von zeitlich-räumlichen Gegenüberstellungen miteinander verzahnt: Fotos von David Bowies Ziggy-Stardust-Tour 1972 neben den damaligen sozialpolitischen Ereignissen im Königreich, Zeichnungen von straffällig gewordenen ehemaligen Soldaten in Afghanistan und dem Irak, die englische Politiker und Kriegsverantwortliche des Jahres 2007 porträtieren. Eine gestrichelte Linie aus echten sowie gefälschten steinzeitlichen Feuersteinen verknüpft wie die Gedankenspuren einer Bildgeschichte die Räume miteinander. English Magic³, der zentrale Film und Ankerpunkt des Pavillons, dokumentiert Passagen der Werkgenese und zitiert assoziativ weitere britische Kontexte an: karnevaleske Straßenparaden, Stonehenge als Hüpfburg mit wackelnden Monolithen und ein riesiges Stück Schinken – all dies ist abgestimmt auf den Soundtrack des Melodian Steel Orchestra, aufgenommen in den berühmten Abbey Road Studios. Dieser Soundtrack, der in Form der kupfernen Aufnahmematrizen für Langspielplatten auch zu sehen ist, fungiert für Deller als „Kleber“ und Weichzeichner. Die Banner in diesem Raum feiern mit „Ooh-oo-hoo ah-ha ha yeah“ den Beat, den Rhythmus, der unsichtbar, quasi magisch alles zusammenhält. Dieses Dispositiv aus mythischen Nationenkonstruktionen, zusammen mit ihnen eingeschriebenen Ambivalenzen und Widersprüchen, lässt sich kaum überbieten, und so schafft Deller im letzten Raum Platz für die Besucher selbst; er gibt ihnen einen Ort der Ruhe und des Sinnierens – und lädt sie alle, wie könnte es anders sein, auf der sonnendurchfluteten Veranda zu einer Tasse britischen Tee ein.

Tell me your story
Dellers Arbeit thematisiert nicht nur die „Magie“, die den nationalen britischen Mythen inne zu wohnen scheint, auch seine eigene künstlerische Herangehensweise funktioniert „magisch“. Er spürt im Tabuisierten das Besondere auf und bemächtigt sich der „mythical qualities of popular culture and its abilities to weave spells“.⁴ Indem bei ihm alles tendenziell mit allem zu tun hat, sich mehrdimensional erstreckt und verstrickt, entsteht die ganz besondere, transformative Energie seiner Arbeit – nicht nur im handwerklichen, tricktechnischen Sinn: „Magisch“ ist die Art und Weise, wie Deller immer wieder mit ungeahnten Analogien operiert, „sozial“ dabei, dass er nicht versucht, bestehende Differenzen zu glätten. Deller dehnt die Alltagswirklichkeit in unwägbares Terrain aus und manipuliert so subtil unsere Selbst- und Weltwahrnehmung (vgl. Bourriauds Postproduction)⁵Hierzu trägt Dellers „social surrealism“ bei, für den er eine ganz spezifische Weise des Erzählens etabliert. Zum einen ist diese partizipativ und performativ – die Narrative des Pavillons sind konsequent mit Handlungsoptionen angereichert.⁶ So ergibt sich insgesamt eine zwischen Homogenität und Heterogenität oszillierende Erzählung von Großbritannien, die erst durch die Partizipationen der Besucher mit dem Pavillon ihre Form findet: die Wege, die sie durch den Pavillon gehen, die Schwerpunkte, die sie durch ihr Verweilen setzen, die Blicke, die sie werfen, oder den kostenlosen Tee (ein -weiterer Teil des Mythos Großbritanniens), den sie gemeinsam konsumieren. Die Besucher werden auf der -ästhetisch reflektierten Metaebene selbst Teil der Erzählung – wichtiger aber: Sie partizipieren aktiv an der Erzählung, generieren sie erst durch ihren Besuch.
Zum anderen verweigern sich Dellers Erzählangebote traditionell linearen Erzählstrukturen. Bereits die abgeschlossene, symmetrische Anordnung der Räume des Pavillons vermittelt die Fiktion von Zeitlosigkeit, da in ihnen eine Reihe von Erzählangeboten neben- und miteinander existieren. Einzelne Erzählstränge arbeiten diesem Eindruck noch zu, da in ihnen konventionelle Zeit aufgehoben scheint: Eine Demonstration im Jahr 2017, deren Relikte bereits in Form von Bannern präsent sind – dies ist nur aus der Erzählperspektive der vorzeitigen Zukunft eines Futur II, also preposterous (Hal Foster),⁷ möglich. Auch der überall vernehmbare Beat des Films in seiner Endlosschleife erzeugt eine Präsentifikation; er bindet die einzelnen kleinen Erzählstränge konsequent an ein körperlich erfahrbares Hier und Jetzt. Hinter dieser Strategie steht ein Konzept: Die Kategorie „Zeit“ im britischen Pavillon ist nämlich nur mehr als Erzählzeit feststellbar, nicht als erzählte Zeit, wo sie zumeist im Mythos aufgehoben ist. An dieser Erzählzeit jedoch partizipieren die Besucher und bestimmen sie durch ihr Rezeptionsverhalten mit. Zeitsprünge, medial verschränkte Wirklichkeitsbezüge und eingebaute Handlungsaufforderungen münden in einer Erzählcollage polyvalenter Bedeutungsstränge, deren Ausbalanciertheit darauf hinweist, dass sie konzeptuell entworfen ist. Nach dem Besuch gerinnt die Ausstellung für die Besucher zu einer Metaerzählung, und die magischen Effekte werden in ein aesthetic magic verschoben.

Aesthetic Magic in der Schulpraxis
Inwiefern nun kann Dellers konzeptuelles Erzählen die Arbeit des Kunstpädagogen verändern? Wie könnte eine solche Metaerzählung in Form eines aesthetic magic in der Schule aussehen?
(1) Dellers Arbeitsweise des „social surrealism“ in das Dispositiv Schule zu integrieren würde zunächst bedeuten, vermeintliche schulische „Tatsachen“ als Erzählungen zu demaskieren. Auch in der Schule gilt es, polyvalente Erzählungen herauszuschälen und zu inszenieren. Dies ist nicht abwegig: Ohnehin werden von allen Akteursgruppen der Schule im Modus einer intertextuellen und medialen bricolage ständig neue Erzählungen, Handlungsskripte, Szenarien entworfen.⁸ Sie entfalten „unbewusst bildende Wirkungen“⁹; in ihnen ist eine „Spannung von Realem, Symbolischem und Imaginärem in der Schulkultur“ angelegt. Insofern könnten solche Erzählungen, Handlungsskripte und Szenarien genutzt werden, um das monolithische System Schule gewissermaßen „gegenzulesen“. Aus einer kulturtheoretischen Perspektive würde dann ein Blick auf „Schulen als akteursgenerierte, strukturelle, symbolische Ordnungen von Diskursen, Praktiken und Artefakten“ möglich.¹⁰(2) Deller spürt als Akteure Helden des Alltags auf. Nicht alle diese Akteure sind jedoch in traditionellen Bildungsdiskursen präsent. Unterrepräsentiert ist beispielsweise das Milieu der sog. „hedonistischen Jugendlichen“ (Begriff aus der Sinus-Studie)¹¹ welches immerhin ein Viertel der analysierten Lebenswelten ausmacht. Sie sind „v. a. im Bereich der geringen bis mittleren, teilweise auch hohen Bildung angesiedelt und [orientieren] sich zwischen fortgeschrittener ‚Modernisierung‘ und ‚Neuorientierung‘ […]. Der Zurückweisung bürgerlich-konventioneller Werte und Stile entspreche die Ablehnung hochkultureller Äußerungen, wogegen sie ihre stark affektive Beziehung zur Popkultur setzten.“¹² Die Erzählungen dieser Jugendlichen, aber auch der Sekretärinnen, Lehrer, Hausverwalter, Eltern und anderer Schüler, gilt es, im Ort „Schule“ zu akkommodieren und für sie partizipative Erzählräume zu schaffen. Als exemplarischer „social surrealism“ könnten diese Erzählungen dann dort ineinander greifen und zum Dispositiv werden, wo Schule weniger als Ort von curricularem Wissen und Nichtwissen, sondern als Ort des Zusammentreffens konkreter differierender Lebenshaltungen – milieu-, alters- und rollenübergreifend – begriffen wird, und zwar bis ins Lehrerzimmer hinein.
(3) Dellers Arbeit wirkt „magisch“ aufgrund der inszenierten Verschiebung von Diskursordnungen und wird als Metaerzählung dann zu einem aesthetic magic. Erzählentwürfe materialisieren sich in einem begehbaren Pavillon und treffen in Erzählräumen zusammen, die Deller in einer Mischung aus Realität und Fiktion bereitstellt. Hier zeigt sich gemäß Saltz eine „Post-Art“, die auch im Schulkontext entstehen könnte,¹³ wenn der Blick auf bestehende schulische Diskursordnungen verschoben wird und im schulischen Raum materialisiert wird. Um Dellers Wandmalerei der Popmärchenfigur William Morris aufzugreifen: Wen würden jugendliche Schüler als „Poseidon“ an die Schulwände malen, der die Insignien etablierter Machtstrukturen bzw. erlebter Ohnmacht in eine „Lagune“ schmettert? Imagination bleibt nur durch reges Übermalen ausgedienter Wandpaneele aktuell. Bei Deller zeichnen die straffällig gewordenen Ex-Soldaten ihre Minister – wen zeichnen die Schüler? Statt eines bloßen Nachvollzugs von vorerzählten Strukturen in traditionellen Narrativen könnten in der Schule nicht-lineare und räumlich/zeitlich offene Erzählperspektiven eingenommen und präsentifiziert werden.¹⁴Dellers ästhetische Kontrastmittel – karnevaleske, ans Absurde grenzende Straßenparaden, ein aufblasbares Stonehenge oder ein riesiges Stück Schinken – fordern die Wahrnehmung in English Magic heraus. Wird diese Energie auch in der Schule aufgegriffen und als „social surrealism“ sichtbar, könnte sie den Lernort als Resonanz- und Möglichkeitsraum alltäglicher Lebenswelt in Spannung halten.¹⁵ Ein Dispositiv von Schule zwischen Fiktion und System kritisch aufzuspannen ist gerade deswegen wichtig, weil in einem curricularen Alltag, der von Bewährungsdynamik, Wiederholung, Kontrolle und Verwaltbarkeit geprägt ist, Bedeutungsüberschüsse schlicht nicht willkommen sind. Diese sind aber erzählgenerierend und diskursbildend, und sie bilden jeweils spezifische Formen eines „social surrealism“ im konkreten Schulalltag aus. Resümierend bedeutet dies: Eine konzeptuell-partizipative Erzählstruktur in die Schule zu integrieren kann Sinn stiften, wenn Narrative unterschiedlicher Akteursgruppen konsequent mit Handlungsperspektiven angereichert, als Meta-ebene etabliert und perspektiviert werden.¹⁶

Der Kunstpädagoge als True Revolutionary Guided by Great Feelings of Love¹⁷Werden jene Erzählsituationen in der Schule geschaffen, erhält schließlich auch die Lehrfigur eine andere Rolle. Aus dem middle class hero¹⁸ wird im besten Falle ein true revolutionary, angetrieben von great feelings of love.¹⁹ Deller zeigt uns, wie sich mit Hilfe der entsprechenden Erzählung aus schrägen Leidenschaften das Potenzial einer Kultur der Wertschätzung, des Gebens und Nehmens, eine Perspektivierung von Lerninhalten und Bedürfnissen entwickeln lässt – und zwar weniger in (selbst)ironischer Distanznahme als im Wagnis, solchen Gedanken auch materielle Form und Raum zu geben. Eingebettet in den social surrealism der Schule nimmt sich der Kunstpädagoge nicht als unterlegene oder abhängige Verkörperung eines objektivierten Bildungsstandards wahr, sondern als Lehrkünstler, der konzeptuelle Erzählungen mitentwirft²⁰ und dabei auf das Potenzial seiner Mitakteure mit angewiesen ist.
Natürlich kann Dellers Strategie den Alltag in der Schule nicht ersetzen. Er kann aber zumindest immer wieder Perspektivwechsel ermöglichen. In der Metaerzählung eines aesthetic magic wird das (schulische) Alltagsdrama Teil von Erzählungen; es wird formbares Material und kann damit zugleich als Reflexionspotenzial des „Schule-Seins“ dienen.
Als Lehrkünstler könnte der Kunstpädagoge die Maschinerie der Bewährungsdynamik unterbrechen und stattdessen die Sicht auf die Schule mit ihren je unverwechselbaren Subjekten verschieben und vielleicht auch erheitern – und, laut Saltz, selbst als Künstler handeln:²¹ „things that aren’t artworks so much as they are about the drive to make things that, like art, embed imagination in material […] Things that couldn’t be fitted into old categories embody powerfully creative forms, capable of carrying meaning and making change.“

1.) Deller: „I went from being an artist that makes things to being an artist that makes things happen.“, Zitat 054, whtsnxt.net/bookauthor/deller-jeremy, bzw. in: Jörg Schöller, „High Trash und das Avantgardeske“, in: Johannes M. Hedinger, Torsten Meyer (Hg.), What’s Next? Kunst nach der Krise, Berlin 2013 (im Folgenden abgekürzt als: What’s Next), S. 201.
2.) Vgl. dazu: Stuart Hall, „Jeremy Deller’s Political Imaginary“, in: Jeremy -Deller, Joy in People, London 2012, S. 81–89, sowie What’s Next, Text 135, S. 491 ff.
3.) www.jeremydeller.org/EnglishMagic/EnglishMagic_Video.php [4.1.2014].
4.) Deller zitiert in: Hal Foster, „History is a Hen Harrier“, in: The British Council/Jeremy Deller (Hg.), English Magic, London 2013, S. 7.
5.) Vgl. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, New York, 2002, S. 9: „In Postproduction, I try to show that artists’ intuitive relationship with art history is now going beyond what we call ‘the art of appropriation,’ which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving toward a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing.“
6.) Nora Sternfeld, „Das gewisse Savoir/Pouvoir. Möglichkeitsfeld Kunstvermittlung“, in: What’s Next, Text 153, S. 547ff.
7.) Hal Foster, „History is a Hen Harrier“, in: The British Council/Jeremy Deller (Hg.), English Magic, London 2013.
8.) Jerome Bruner, „The narrative construction of reality“, Critical Enquiry, 18 (1), 1991, S. 1–22.
9.) Karl-Josef Pazzini, „Berge versetzen, damit es was zu erzählen gibt“, in: Franz Billmayer (Hg.), Angeboten. Was die Kunstpädagogik leisten kann, München 2008, S. 157–163.
10.) Werner Helsper, „Schulkulturen – die Schule als symbolische Sinnordnung“, Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 54 (1), 2008, S. 63–80.
11.) Milieus der U27 Sinus-Studie: experimentalistische, postmaterielle, hedonistische, konsum-materialistische, traditionelle, bürgerliche Jugendliche, sowie Moderne Performer, siehe www.sinus-institut.de/loesungen/sinus-milieus.html [20.2.2014]
12.) Ansgar Schnurr, „Weltsicht im Plural. Über jugendliche Milieus und das ‚Wir‘ in der Kunstpädagogik“, online Zeitschrift Kunst Medien Bildung | zkmb, Text im Diskurs, 2011, www.zkmb.de/index.php?id=42 [20.2.2014]
13.) Vgl. Battle of Orgreave, 2001: Insgesamt 800 Teilnehmer, zusammengesetzt aus Gemeindemitgliedern von Orgreave, professionelle Re-enactors, damals involvierte Polizisten, Minenarbeiter, Vertreter der National Union of Mineworkers, der Women’s Support Group. Zum Konzept vgl. „Post Art“ in What’s Next, Zitat 061, 103, 173.
14.) Eine über das Imaginäre gesteigerte bewusste Fiktionalität schließt gerade nicht die Lücke, die die Uneindeutigkeit schulischen Handelns evoziert, sondern lässt zu, dass diese sich als (konzeptueller) Erzählraum bildet: „committed but not judgemental“ (Deller); vgl. „In Conversation: Matthew Higgs and Jeremy Deller“, in: Deller 2012, a. a. O., S. 185–191.
15.) Vgl. Helsper S. 66ff., bzw. Hans-Christoph Koller und Rainer Kokemohr, Lebensgeschichte als Text. Zur biographischen Artikulation problematischer Bildungsprozesse. Weinheim 1994.
16.) Uwe Wirth, „Logiken und Praktiken der Kulturforschung als Detailforschung“, in: Ders., Logiken und Praktiken der Kulturforschung, Berlin 2008, S. 11–30.
17.) Zitat nach Matthew Higgs, „Unconvention, A True Revolutionary is Motivated by Great Feelings of Love”, in: Mark Wallinger and Mary Warnock (Hg.), Art for All; Their Policies and Our Culture, London 2000, S. 49.
18.) Ralph Rogoff, „Middle Class Hero“, in: Deller 2012, a. a. O., S. 9–21.
19.) Wirth 2008, a. a. O., S. 11–30.
20.) Andrea Sabisch, „Entwerfen oder Die Welt aus der Sicht einer Fliege“, in: Klaus-Peter Busse (Hg.), Kunstdidaktisches Handeln, Norderstedt 2003, S. 414–427.
21.) In: Jerry Saltz, „A Glimpse of Art’s Future at Documenta“, Vulture, 16.6.12; www.vulture.com/2012/06/documenta-13-review.html [22.4.2013]; vgl. zu „Post Art“ in What’s Next, Text 103.

Zombies of Immaterial Labor: The Modern Monster and the Death of Death

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:41 +0000

Undead and abject, the zombie is uncontrollable ambiguity.¹ Slouching across the earth, restlessly but with hallucinatory slowness, it is a thing with a soul, a body that is rotten but reactive, oblivious to itself yet driven by unforgiving instinct.
It follows that if the zombie is defined by ambiguity, it cannot be reduced to a negative presence. In fact, it could be a friend. So why does it lend itself so easily as a metaphor for alienation, rolling readily off our tongues? Resorting to the zombie as a sign for mindless persistence is unfair to this particular monster, to be sure, but also apathetic and facile in the perspective of the historical space we inhabit.
My proposal, perverse or braindead as it may be, is that the zombie begs a materialist analysis with a view to contemporary culture. Such an analysis is necessarily double-edged. The zombie is pure need without morality, hence it promises a measure of objectivity; we know exactly what it wants – brains, flesh – because this is what it always wants. Abject monstrosity is naturally impossible to render transparent, but abjectness itself harbors a defined function that promises instrumentality (of a blunt and limited kind, admittedly). In this way we may proceed to address contemporary relations of cultural production, at the same time as we reflect on the analytical tools we have for doing so.
Thus the following is an attempt at a sociological reading of the zombie that draws its necessity from the pressure that the capitalization of creativity has exerted on artistic practice and spectatorship in the recent decade. But it is also the inevitable subversion of the conclusions of such an analysis, as we begin to return to artistic thinking.

1. Marxploitation of the Gothic
The zombie as a figure of alienation is the entranced consumer suggested by Marxian theory. It is Guy Debord’s description of Brigitte Bardot as a rotten corpse and Frederic Jameson’s „death of affect“; and of course what media utopianist Marshall McLuhan called „the zombie stance of the technological idiot.“² Thus zombification is easily applied to the notion that capital eats up the body and mind of the worker, and that the living are exploited through dead labor.
When Adam Smith invoked the moral operations of the „invisible hand of the market“, he had something else in mind than an integrated world economy that recalls Freud’s unheimlich: „Severed limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm, feet that dance by themselves – all of those have something highly uncanny about them, especially when they are credited with independent activity.“³ Under the globalized reinforcement of capital, the independent activity of ghost limbs is increasingly only apparent, yet no less gratuitous and unsettling.
Economy and production have in this way often been dressed up in Gothic styles; just think of William Blake’s „dark satanic mills“ of industrialization. It is doubtful, of course, that Marx would have endorsed the zombie as a figure of alienation, inasmuch as it incarnates a collapsed dialectics (between life and death, productivity and apathy, etc.) that can only be recaptured with great difficulty. However, leafing through The Communist Manifesto of 1848 one finds rousing Gothic metaphor. The power of class struggle is famously likened to a ghost that is haunting Europe – the „specter of Communism“; we are also told that with the proletariat, the bourgeoisie has produced „its own gravediggers,“ and that modern bourgeois society „has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange“ that it is like „the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.“⁴ The Gothic, understood as the revival of medieval styles in the seventeenth century and since, is the theatrical representation of negative affect that emanates from a drama staged around power; a pessimistic dialectic of enlightenment that shows how rationality flips into barbarism and human bondage. Thus it is puzzling (or populist, agitational) that Marx and Engels employ Gothic metaphor related to the middle ages „that reactionists so much admire.“⁵ The Gothic contraband in progressive politics is the notion that fear can be sublime. It is as if the reader of the manifesto cannot after all rely on the „sober senses,“ but needs a little extra rhetorical something to compel her to face her „real conditions in life.“⁶ How did the excess of counter-enlightenment tropes come to prominence in processes of political subjectivation? As Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, „Marx does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do. He does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else. … He believes he can oppose them, like life to death, like vain appearances of the simulacrum to real presence.“⁷ Once it becomes clear that Marxist ghost-hunting is already corrupted by a Gothic impulse, it allows for a reconstruction of Marxist critique; a new „spirit of Marx,“ as discussed by Derrida. In terms of traditional aesthetic hierarchies, the Gothic definitely belongs amongst the underdogs of genres, to the embarrassing aesthetic proletariat. Maybe this is what spoke through Marx, like spirits inhabiting a medium, and helped shaped his formidable literary intuition?
In this perspective there is no political reason to exclude the Gothic. The New York artists collective Group Material were among the first to establish a link between the Gothic and a Marxist line of cultural critique, before the former became a curatorial trope.⁸ The flyer for their 1980 show „Alienation“ mimicked advertising for Alien, and the film program included James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). In their installation Democracy (1988), a zombie film was continuously screened throughout the exhibition: Dawn of the Dead, „George Romero’s 1978 paean to the suburban shopping mall and its implicit effects on people.“ The film was „an especially significant presence …, one which indicated the pertinence of consumer culture to democracy and to electoral politics.“⁹
Franco Moretti makes it clear that you can’t sympathize with those who hunt the monsters. In his brilliant 1978 essay „Dialectic of Fear“ he notes that in classic shockers such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein „we accept the vices of the monster’s destroyers without a murmur.“¹⁰ The antagonist of the monster is a representative of all that is „complacent, stupid, philistine, and impotent“ about existing society. To Moretti this indicates false consciousness in the literature of fear; it makes us side with the bourgeoisie. But by passing judgment on the literature of fear through a dialectic of reason and affect (Stoker „doesn’t need a thinking reader, but a frightened one“), Moretti’s ideology critique joins the ranks of the destroyers of the monster and thereby, on a cultural level, of those fictitious characters he criticizes. In fact, Moretti kills the monster twice: he doesn’t question its killing in the text, and he has no need for it outside the text.
George Romero analyzes the conflict between the monster and its adversaries in a similar vein. Crucially, however, his trilogy Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985), reverses Moretti’s conclusion, thereby turning cultural space inside out. In Romero, antagonism and horror are not pushed out of society (to the monster) but are rather located within society (qua the monster). The issue isn’t the zombies; the real problem lies with the „heroes“ – the police, the army, good old boys with their guns and male bonding fantasies. If they win, racism has a future, capitalism has a future, sexism has a future, militarism has a future. Romero also implements this critique structurally. As Steven Shaviro observes, the cultural discomfort is not only located in the films’ graphic cannibalism and zombie genocide: the low-budget aesthetics makes us see „the violent fragmentation of the cinematic process itself.“¹¹ The zombie in such a representation may be uncanny and repulsive, but the imperfect uncleanness of the zombie’s face – the bad make-up, the failure to hide the actor behind the monster’s mask – is what breaks the screen of the spectacle.
Brian Holmes writes in „The Affectivist Manifesto“ (2009) that activism today faces „not so much soldiers with guns as cognitive capital: the knowledge society, an excruciatingly complex order. The striking thing … is the zombie-like character of this society, its fallback to automatic pilot, its cybernetic governance.“¹² Holmes’s diagnosis gets its punch from the counterintuitive tension between the notion of control and the zombie’s sleepwalking mindlessness. Even our present culture’s schizophrenic scenario of neoliberal economy and post-democratic reinforcement of the state apparatus cannot be reduced to evil. But if Holmes uses the monster trope to define a condition of critical ambiguity, he follows Marxist orthodoxy by setting this definition to work dialectically vis-à-vis an affirmative use of the manifesto format. The manifesto is haunted by its modernist codification as a mobilization of a collective We in a revolutionary Now. This code, and the desire it represents, is invariably transparent to itself, as opposed to the opacity of the zombie.

2. Monster of Mass and Multitude
What most informs metaphorical applications of the zombie is perhaps the functional dimension that its abjectness seems to lend to it. According to Julia Kristeva’s definition, the abject is what I must get rid of in order to be an I.¹³ The abject is a fantasmatic substance that must be expelled – from the body, from society – in order to satisfy a psychic economy, because it is imagined to have such a likeness or proximity to the subject that it produces panic or repulsion. This, Hal Foster writes, echoing critical preoccupations in the art of the 1980s (the abject) and of the 1990s (the „return of the real“), qualifies the abject as „a regulatory operation.“¹⁴ The obverse of the abject is a hygienic operation that promises a blunt instrumentality of getting rid of – of expulsing, excluding, severing, repressing. As we have seen, things are not so clear. The abject sneaks back in as a supplement, subverting attempts at establishing hygienic categories.
I will therefore hypothesize that the zombie’s allegorical (rather than merely metaphorical) potential lies in trying to elaborate and exacerbate the zombie as a cliché of alienation by using it to deliberately „dramatize the strangeness of what has become real,“ as anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff characterize the zombie’s cultural function.¹⁵ Why would one want to do such a thing? As Deleuze and Guattari had it, the problem with capitalism is not that it breaks up reality; the problem with capitalism is that it isn’t schizophrenic and proliferating enough.¹⁶ In other words, it frees desire from traditional libidinal patterns (of family and religion and so on), but it will always want to recapture these energies through profit. According to this conclusion, one way to circumnavigate capitalism would be to encourage its semiotic excess and its speculation in affect. Capitalism is not a totalitarian or tyrannical form of domination. It primarily spreads its effects through indifference (that can be compared to the zombie’s essential lack of protagonism). It is not what capital does, but what it doesn’t do or have: it does not have a concept of society; it does not counteract the depletion of nature; it has no concept of citizenship or culture; and so on. Thus it is a slave morality that makes us cling to capital as though it were our salvation – capitalism is, in fact, what we bring to it. Dramatization of capital through exacerbation and excess can perhaps help distill this state of affairs.
The zombie isn’t just any monster, but one with a pedigree of social critique. As already mentioned, alienation – a Marxian term that has fallen out of use – is central to the zombie. To Marx the loss of control over one’s labor – a kind of viral effect that spreads throughout social space – results in estrangement from oneself, from other people, and from the „species-being“ of humanity as such.¹⁷ This disruption of the connection between life and activity has „monstrous effects.“¹⁸ Today, in the era of immaterial labor, whose forms turn affect, creativity, and language into economical offerings, alienation from our productive capacities results in estrangement from these faculties and, by extension, from visual and artistic production – and from our own subjectivity. What is useful about the monster is that it is immediately recognizable as estrangement, and in this respect is non-alienating. Secondly, we may address alienation without a concept of nature; a good thing, since the humanism in the notion of „the natural state of man“ (for Marx the positive parameter against which we can measure our alienation) has at this point been irreversibly deconstructed. In other words: the natural state of man is to die, not to end up as undead.
Franco „Bifo“ Berardi describes how Italian Workerist thought of the 1960s overturned the dominant vision of Marxism. The working class was no longer conceived as „a passive object of alienation, but instead the active subject of a refusal capable of building a community starting out from its estrangement from the interests of capitalistic society.“¹⁹ For the estranged worker, alienation became productive. Deleuze and Guattari were part of the same generation of thinkers and overturned a traditional view of alienation, for example by considering schizophrenia as a multiple and nomadic form of consciousness (and not as a passive clinical effect or loss of self). They put it radically: „The only modern myth is the myth of zombies – mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.“²⁰
The origin of the zombie in Haitian vodoun has an explicit relationship to labor, as a repetition or reenactment of slavery. The person who receives the zombie spell „dies,“ is buried, excavated, and put to work, usually as a field hand. In his book The Serpent and the Rainbow, ethnobotanist Wade Davis tells the story of a man called Narcisse, a former zombie:
[Narcisse] remembered being aware of his predicament, of missing his family and friends and his land, of wanting to return. But his life had the quality of a strange dream, with events, objects, and perceptions interacting in slow motion, and with everything completely out of his control. In fact there was no control at all. Decision had no meaning, and conscious action was an impossibility.²¹
The zombie can move around and carry out tasks, but does not speak, cannot fend for himself, cannot formulate thoughts, and doesn’t even know its own name: its fate is enslavement. „Given the colonial history“ – including occupation by France and the US – Davis continues:
the concept of enslavement implies that the peasant fears and the zombie suffers a fate that is literally worse than death – the loss of physical liberty that is slavery, and the sacrifice of personal autonomy implied by the loss of identity.²²
That is, more than inexplicable physiological change, victims of voodoo suffer a social and mental death, in a process initiated by fear. The zombie considered as a subaltern born of colonial encounters is a figure that has arisen then out of a new relationship to death: not the fear of the zombie apocalypse, as in the movies, but the fear of becoming one – the fear of losing control, of becoming a slave.
In pop culture the zombie is a twentieth-century monster and hence related to mass phenomena: mass production, mass consumption, mass death. It is not an aristocrat like Dracula or a star freak like Frankenstein; it is the everyman monster in which business as usual coexists with extremes of hysteria (much like democracy at present, in fact). The zombie also straddles the divide between industrial and immaterial labor, from mass to multitude, from the brawn of industrialism to the dispersed brains of cognitive capitalism.
With its highly ambiguous relationship to subjectivity, consciousness, and life itself, we may hence consider the zombie a paradigm of immaterial labor.²³ Both the zombie and immaterial labor celebrate logistics and a colonization of the brain and the nervous system. The living dead roam the world and have a genetic relationship with restlessness: they are „pure motoric instinct,“ as it is expressed in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead; or they represent a danger „as long as they got a working thinker and some mobility,“ as one zombie hunter puts it in the novel World War Z by Max Brooks.²⁴ The latter, counterintuitive reference to the zombie’s intellectual capacity may be brought to bear on the terms „intellectual labor“ and „cognitive capitalism,“ used to denote brain-dead – and highly regulated – industries such as advertising and mass media. Or, the „working thinker“ in the zombie’s dead flesh is an indication of the Marxist truth that matter thinks. As Lenin asked: What does the car know – of its own relations of production? In the same way, the zombie may prompt the question: What does the zombie’s rotting flesh know – of the soul? As Spinoza said: what the body can do, that is its soul.²⁵ And the zombie can do quite a lot.
In Philip Kaufman’s 1978 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a space plant that duplicates people and brings them back as empty versions of themselves spreads its fibers across the Earth as if it were the World Wide Web. The body-snatched don’t just mindlessly roam the cities in search of flesh and brains, but have occupied the networks of communication and start a planetary operation to circulate bodies, as if proponents of the great transformation from industrialism to immaterial labor, in which production is eclipsed and taken over by a regime of mediation and reproduction. This is our logistical universe, in which things on the move are valorized, and in which more than ever before the exchange of information itself determines communicative form. The nature of what is exchanged recedes in favor of the significance of distribution and dissemination. Exigencies of social adaptation, by now familiar to us, also appear in Invasion. Somebody who has clearly been body-snatched thus tells the main character, played by Donald Sutherland, to not be afraid of „new concepts“: imperatives to socialize and to reinvent oneself, shot through with all the accompanying tropes of self-cannibalization (self-management, self-valuation, self-regulation, self-consume, and so forth). Thus the body snatchers are a caricature of ideal being, incarnating mobility without nervousness.²⁶

3. „Solipsistic and asocial horror“
The necessity of a sociological reading of the modern monster derives, for our purpose, from the pressure that the capitalization of creativity has in the past decade exerted on artistic practice and thinking. Art has become a norm, in a different way than it was under the cultural order of the bourgeoisie. In short, within the „experience economy,“ art’s normative power consists in commodifying a conventional idea of art’s mythical otherness with a view to the reproduction of subjectivity and economy.
Ten years ago, management thinkers James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II launched the concept of the experience economy with their book The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Here they describe an economy in which experience is a new source of profit to be obtained through the staging of the memorable. What is being produced is the experience of the audience, and the experience is generated by means of what may be termed „authenticity effects.“ In the experience economy it is often art and its markers of authenticity – creativity, innovation, provocation, and the like – that ensure economic status to experience.²⁷
Gilmore and Pine advise manufacturers to tailor their products to maximize customer experience, thus valve manufacturers could profitably increase the „pumping experience“; furniture manufacturers might correspondingly emphasize the „sitting experience“; and home-appliance manufacturers could capitalize on the „washing experience,“ the „drying experience,“ and the „cooking experience.“²⁸ The „psychological premise“ of being able to „alter consumers’ sense of reality“ is a central theme.²⁹ Gilmore and Pine’s mission is to highlight the profitability of producing simulated situations. Their arguments will not be subverted by simply pointing out this fact: the experience economy is beyond all ideology inasmuch as it is their declared intention to fake it better and more convincingly. In the experience economy’s ontological displacement towards an instrumentalized phenomenology, it becomes irrelevant to verify the materiality of the experienced object or situation. Memorable authenticity effects are constituted in a register of subjective experience. In other words, one’s own subjectivity becomes a product one consumes, by being provided with opportunities to consume one’s own time and attention through emotive and cognitive responses to objects and situations. Similarly, when the experience economy is applied to cultural institutions and the presentation of art works, it revolves around ways of providing the public with the opportunity to reproduce itself as consumers of cultural experiences.
It is difficult not to see the consequences of the experience economy as the dismantling of not only artistic and institutional signification but also of social connections. Thus the syllabus for the masters-level experience economy course offered by the University of Aarhus explains how consumers within an experience economy function as „hyper-consumers free of earlier social ties, always hunting for emotional intensity,“ and that students of the course are provided with „the opportunity to adopt enterprising behaviours.“³⁰
Cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen calls such self-consume Eigenblutdoping, blood doping. Just as cyclists dope themselves using their own blood, cultural consumers seek to augment their self-identity by consuming the products of their own subjectivity. According to Diederichsen, this phenomenon is a „solipsistic and asocial horror,“ which reduces life to a loop we can move in and out of without actually participating in any processes.³¹ Inside these loops, time has been brought to a halt, and the traditional power of the cultural institution is displaced when audiences are invited to play and participate in an ostensible „democratization“ of art. In the loop, audiences ironically lose the possibility of inscribing their subjectivities on anything besides themselves, and are hence potentially robbed of an important opportunity to respond to the institution and the exhibitionary complex where art is presented.
The zombie returns at this point, then, to stalk a new cultural economy that is necessarily already no longer current; nor is it ever outdated, because it cancels cultural time measured in decades and centuries. The time of the experience economy is that of an impoverished present.³²

4. The Death of Death
There are several reasons why we need a modern monster. Firstly, it can help us meditate on alienation in our era of an immaterial capitalism that has turned life into cash; into an onto-capitalist, forensic culture in which we turn towards the dead body, not with fear, but as a kind of pornographic curator (as testified to by any number of TV series about vampires, undertakers, and forensics). As Steven Shaviro writes, „zombies mark the rebellion of death against its capitalist appropriation … our society endeavors to transform death into value, but the zombies enact a radical refusal and destruction of value.“³³ Shaviro sharply outlines here the zombie’s exit strategy from that strangest of scenarios, the estrangement of death itself. But at the same time, one wonders whether it can be that simple. Immaterial capitalism’s tropes of self-cannibalization render it more ambiguous than ever whether the abject is a crisis in the order of subject and society, or a perverse confirmation of them. In other words, beyond the destruction of value that Shaviro discusses, it all revolves around a riddle: If, during our lifespan as paying beings, life itself has become capital, then where does that leave death?
One answer is that, in a world with no outsides, death died. We are now witnessing the death of death, of which its overrepresentation is the most prominent symptom. For the first time since the end of the Second World War there are no endgame narratives. Apocalyptic horizons are given amnesty. A planet jolted out of its ecological balance is a disaster, but not something important. In art, the mid twentieth century’s „death of the Author“ and „death of Man“ are now highly operational, and the „death of Art,“ a big deal in the 1980s, is now eclipsed by the splendid victory of „contemporary art.“ This in spite of the obvious truth that art, considered as an autonomous entity, is dead and gone, replaced by a new art (a double?) that is directly inscribed on culture; a script for social and cultural agency. There is nothing left to die, as if we were caught in the ever-circling eye of the eternal return itself. As the blurb for George Romero’s Survival of the Dead (2009) goes: „Death isn’t what it used to be.“ This ought to be a cause for worry. Endgame narratives have always accompanied new paradigms, or have negated or problematized the reproduction of received ideas.
The zombie is always considered a post-being, a no-longer-human, an impossible subject. But can we also think of it as a pre-being? Can we turn it into a child; that most poignant embodiment of the monster and the ghost (the „child-player against whom can do nothing,“ as Spinoza put it), or at least allow it to indicate a limit of not-yet-being?³⁴ That is, the lack incarnated by zombie is also present at the level of enunciation in the zombie narrative. In Romero’s films, the zombie apocalypse gradually recedes into the background and other – inter-human, social – problems become prominent during the unfolding of the plot. The zombie, always mute, is never at the center of the plot the way Dracula or Frankenstein are, hence its presence cannot be explained away as a mechanism for reintegrating social tension through fear. It is a strange, tragicomic monster that displaces evil and its concept: the zombie isn’t evil, nor has it been begot by evil; it is a monstrosity that deflects itself in order to show that our imagination cannot stop at the monster. It is irrelevant if you kill it (there will always be ten more rotten arms reaching through the broken window pane). The zombie pushes a horizon of empty time ahead of it; whether that time will be messianic or apocalyptic is held in abeyance. Or, the zombie represents the degree to which we are incapable of reimagining the future. So the question becomes: How can we look over its shoulder? What future race comes after the zombie? How do we cannibalize self-cannibalization? The only way to find out is to abstract the zombie condition.
Sooner or later, the opacity of our fascination with the zombie exhausts sociological attempts at reading of it. There is ultimately no way to rationalize the skepticism the zombie drags in. A similar mechanism is at work in art. Whereas sociology is based on positive knowledge, art is based on the concept of art and on culture’s re-imagining of that concept. Beyond the experience economy, and beyond sociological analysis of these, there lie new artistic thinking and imagining. Thus we can witness how it all falls apart in the end: sociology, zombie as allegory, even the absence of the end that turns out to be one. What is left are material traces to be picked up anew.

“Zombies of Immaterial Labor” was originally presented in the Masquerade lecture series, organized by the curatorial platform “If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution”, at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, January 25, 2010.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: e-flux journal # 15, April 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/zombies-of-immaterial-labor-the-modern-monster-and-the-death-of-death/ [29.5.2013].

1.) I am grateful to Brian Kuan Wood for the title of this essay.
2.) “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,“ Playboy, March 1969, available at http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan. I am grateful to Jacob Lillemose for this reference.
3.) Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (1899; London: Penguin Books, 2003), 150.
4.) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (1848; London: Penguin Classics, 1967), 78, 94.
5.) Ibid.
6.) Ibid., 83.
7.) Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (1993; New York: Routledge, 2006), 57.
8.) I am thinking of Mike Kelleys The Uncanny (1993; Cologne: Walther König 2004), Christoph Grunenberg’s Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late-Twentieth-Century Art (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1997), and Paul Schimmel’s Helter Skelter: L. A. Art in the 1990s, ed. Catherine Gudis (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), which had the subtitle Art of the Living Dead).
9.) David Deitcher: „Social Aesthetics,“ in Democracy: A Project by Group Material, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: DIA Art Foundation, 1990), 37. (Deitcher erroneously states that Dawn of the Dead appeared in 1979; the correct year is 1978. I have corrected this in the quotation.)
10.) Franco Moretti, “Dialectic of Fear,“ in Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1983), 84.
11.) Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (1993; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 91.
12.) Brian Holmes, „The Affectivist Manifesto: Artistic Critique in the 21st Century,“ in Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum; Zagreb: What, How & for Whom, 2009), 14.
13.) See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
14.) Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 156.
15.) Jean and John L. Comaroff, „Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millennial Capitalism,“ South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 779–805. I am grateful to Kodwo Eshun for this reference. The allegorical impulse behind bringing the zombie back to the Marxian concept of alienation derives from the dynamics of the zombie’s ruinous (lack of) existence. Thus George Romero’s famous trilogy is a sequence of allegorical variation: a critique of racist America (Night), a critique of consumerism (Dawn), and a critique with feminist overtones (Day).
16.) See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (1972; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
17.) See also my introduction in the exhibition guide A History of Irritated Material (London: Raven Row, 2010).
18.) Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,“ in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm.
19.) Franco „Bifo“ Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Mecchia Giuseppina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2009), 23.
20.) Deleuze and Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 335.
21.) Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 80.
22.) Ibid., 139.
23.) See also my article “Brains“ in Muhtelif no. 4 (2008).
24.) Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Gerald and Duckworth, 2007), 96.
25.) See Berardi, The Soul at Work, 21.
26.) In the Spanish translation the body snatchers are ultracuerpos: ultrabodies, as if particularly well-adapted mutations.
27.) See also my „Kunst er Norm“ (Aarhus: Jutland Art Academy, 2008).
28.) James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 16.
29.) Ibid., 175.
30.) See the Aarhus University, Faculty of Humanities website, http://studieguide.au.dk/kandidat_dk.cfm?fag=1062.
31.) Diedrich Diederichsen, Eigenblutdoping: Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008).
32.) Zˇizˇek discusses the zombie in terms of suffering. Of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, he writes: „The „undead“ are not portrayed as embodiments of pure evil, of a simple drive to kill or revenge, but as sufferers, pursuing their victims with an awkward persistence, colored by a kind of infinite sadness.“ The dead make their melancholic return because they haven’t been properly buried – just like ghosts, zombies return „as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt.“ Zˇizˇek points out that „the return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition,“ an insight that we can use for our own sociological ends. Similarly, the experience commodity cannot find its place in the text of tradition and culture, inasmuch as this is what the experience economy is undoing. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 22-23.
33.) Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 84.
34.) Quoted from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1991), 70.

Contemporary Extracts

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:39 +0000

On this occasion I will simply quote from several of the responses I received to a questionnaire – subsequently published in October magazine – about “contemporary art.” First, my questions:

The category of “contemporary art” is not a new one. What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment. Such paradigms as “the neo-avant-garde” and “postmodernism,” which once oriented some art and theory, have run into the sand, and, arguably, no models of much explanatory reach or intellectual force have risen in their stead. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, “contemporary art” has become an institutional object in its own right: in the academic world there are professorships and programs, and in the museum world departments and institutions, all devoted to the subject, and most tend to treat it as apart not only from prewar practice but from most postwar practice as well.
Is this floating-free real or imagined? A merely local perception? A simple effect of the end-of-grand-narratives? If it is real, how can we specify some of its principal causes, that is, beyond general reference to “the market” and “globalization”? Or is it indeed a direct outcome of a neoliberal economy, one that, moreover, is now in crisis? What are some of its salient consequences for artists, critics, curators, and historians – for their formation and their practice alike? Are there collateral effects in other fields of art history? Are there instructive analogies to be drawn from the situation in other arts and disciplines? Finally, are there benefits to this apparent lightness of being? ¹
As you can see, the questions are directed at critics and curators based in North America and Western Europe; I hope they do not appear too provincial as a result. I have arranged the extracts with an eye to connections that exist between them. My purpose here is simply to suggest the state of the debate on “the contemporary” in my part of the world today.
First from Grant Kester, a historian of contemporary art, based in southern California:
The problem of “the contemporary” is rooted in a tension that emerged when Western art history was first formalized as a discipline. The generation of European historians that helped establish the discipline in the mid-nineteenth century found itself confronted by a vast range of new and unfamiliar artifacts that were circulating throughout Europe as a result of colonial expansion into Africa, Asia, and the Americas, as well as early archaeological excavations in Italy and Greece. Historians and philosophers raised the question of how contemporary viewers could transcend the differences that existed between themselves and very different cultures whose works of art they admired – cultures whose shared meanings were inaccessible to them due to distances of time or space.
Then from James Elkins, a meta-theorist of art history, based in Chicago:
From the perspectives of “world art history” and its critics today, “the contemporary” would appear to be either exempted from the discipline of art history, because of its position outside or before art histories, or exemplary of the discipline, because of its newfound universality (i. e., by definition “the contemporary” exists everywhere).
Next from Miwon Kwon, a contemporary art critic and historian based in Los Angeles:
Contemporary art history sits at a crossroads in the uneven organization of the subfields that comprise the discipline of art history. Within most university art history departments, one group of subfields covering Western developments is organized chronologically, as periods (i. e., from Ancient to Modern, with Medieval and Renaissance in between). Another group of subfields that covers non-Western developments is identified geographically, as culturally discrete units even if they encompass an entire continent (i. e., African, Chinese, Latin American, etc.) The category of contemporary art history, while institutionally situated as coming after the Modern, following the temporal axis of Western art history as the most recent period (starting in 1945 or 1960 depending on how a department divides up faculty workload or intellectual territory), is also the space in which the contemporaneity of histories from around the world must be confronted simultaneously as a disjunctive yet continuous intellectual horizon, integral to the understanding of the present (as a whole). Contemporary art history, in other words, marks both a temporal bracketing and a spatial encompassing, a site of a deep tension between very different formations of knowledge and traditions, and thus a challenging pressure point for the field of art history in general.
For instance, what is the status of contemporary Chinese art history? What is the time frame for such a history? How closely should it be linked to Chinese art, cultural, or political history? How coordinated should it be with Western art history or aesthetic discourse? Is contemporary Chinese art history a subfield of contemporary art history? Or are they comparable categories, with the presumption that the unnamed territory of contemporary art history is Western/American?
Then from Joshua Shannon, a historian of postwar art, from the mid-Atlantic area near Washington, D.C.:
In the last twenty-five years, the academic study of contemporary art has grown from a fringe of art history to the fastest-developing field in the discipline. It is not so long ago that dissertations on living artists were all but prohibited, while statistics published this year by the College Art Association confirm that job searches in contemporary art history now outnumber those in any other specialization, with almost twice as many positions in the field, for example, as in Renaissance and Baroque combined. We might wonder whether a discipline too long afraid of the present has now become besotted with it.
Next from Richard Meyer, a theorist of “the contemporary,“ based in Los Angeles:
Recently, I have put to my “contemporary” students several questions that are at once straightforward and aggressive. Why are you studying art history if what you really want is to write about the current moment? Where are the archival and research materials on which you will draw – in the files of a commercial gallery, in a drawer in the artist’s studio, in the works of art themselves, in a series of interviews that you intend to conduct with the artist, in a theoretical paradigm that you plan to apply to the work, or in an ideological critique of the current moment? What distinguishes your practice as a contemporary art historian from that of an art critic? And how does the history of art matter to the works you plan to write about and to the scholarly contribution you hope to make?
Then from Pamela Lee, a scholar on postwar art, based in San Francisco:
Call it “the moving target syndrome.” At what point does a stack of press releases turn into something like a proper reception history? How do you write about a contemporary artist whose work shifts radically in mid-stream? And what does one do when the topics that seemed so pressing and so critical just a few short art-world seasons back lose that sense of urgency? There is, then, a paradoxical way we might characterize the problem: contemporary art history is premature because it is always in a perpetual state of becoming, one that alternates endlessly between novelty and critical (as well as commercial) exhaustion.
Next from Mark Godfrey, a young curator of contemporary art at Tate Modern in London:
If it is correct that no “paradigms” have emerged in the place of those such as “the neo-avant-garde” and “postmodernism,” then one should first look precisely to the success of those discourses to understand why. The critical discourse of postmodernism caused most historians and critics to distrust any overarching and monolithic model that would account for what is most compelling about contemporary art. At the same time, following the impact of postcolonial theory and a simple widening of our horizons, American and European art historians and curators have become far more attentive to contemporary art as it emerges across the world. Most acknowledge that serious art is being made in China, Latin America, South Africa, and so on, but few have the opportunities to see what is being made. With this situation, who would presume to name a new paradigm? A new name would assume a totalizing explanatory power and be akin to a hubristic, neocolonial move. One also begins to distrust the presumptions of the previous paradigms. How useful are the terms “neo-avant-garde” or “postmodernism” when we think about the art that emerged in centers away from North America and Western Europe where modernism and the avant-garde signified quite differently?
Then from Terry Smith, an Australian art historian with special expertise on the contemporary, based in Pittsburgh:
How has the current world-picture changed since the aftermath of the Second World War led to the reconstruction of an idea of Europe, since decolonization opened up Africa and Asia, with China and India emerging to superpower status but others cycling downwards, since the era of revolution versus dictatorship in South America led first to the imposition of neoliberal economic regimes and then to a continent-wide swing towards populist socialism? As the system built on First-, Second-, Third-, and Fourth-world divisions imploded, what new arrangements of power came into being? Now that the post-1989 juggernaut of one hyperpower, unchecked neoliberalism, historical self-realization, and the global distribution of ever-expanding production and consumption tips over the precipice, what lies in the abyss it has created? Above all, how do we, in these circumstances, connect the dots between world-picturing and place-making, the two essential parameters of our being?
Next from Alex Alberro, a Canadian historian of postwar art, based in New York:
The contemporary is witnessing the emergence of a new technological imaginary following upon the unexpected and unregulated global expansion of the new communication and information technologies of the Internet. For one thing, technological art objects have increasingly come to replace tangible ones in art galleries and museums, which have seen an upsurge in high-tech hybrids of all kinds, from digital photography, to film and video installations, to computer and other new-media art. The “white cube” has begun to be replaced by the “black box,” and the small-screen film or video monitor by the large-scale wall projection. For another thing, the image has come to replace the object as the central concern of artistic production and analysis. In the academy, the rise of visual studies in this period is symptomatic of the new preeminence of the image. Furthermore, the imaginary of this shift from analog to digital has had a number of unpredictable effects. One of the most striking of these is the proliferation of artworks that employ fiction and animation to narrate facts, as if to say that today the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought, that the real is so mind-boggling that it is easier to comprehend by analogy.
Then from Tim Griffin, editor-in-chief of Artforum, based in New York:
The potential irony of contemporary art is that by signaling its stand apart, this art actually articulates itself as another niche within the broader cultural context – as just one more interest among so many others. Such a development is paradoxical in its implications. It becomes increasingly important for art to assert its own distinctiveness in order to exist – often by reinscribing itself within its various histories, projecting previous eras’ interpretive models onto present circumstances – at the same time that such an assertion makes art resemble current mass culture all the more.
Next from Yates McKee, a young activist/critic based in the Midwest:
The multiple institutionalizations of contemporary art entail new modes of affiliation, possibility, and complicity for artistic and critical activity. Without disavowing the urgency of macro-systemic analysis, assessing these entanglements is a matter of close, site-specific reading rather than blanket celebration or denunciation. This means refusing to reduce contemporary art to a flavor-of-the-month novelty either as peddled by art-market boosters, on the one hand, or as preemptively dismissed by guardians of art-historical authority on the basis of melancholic – and often hypocritically self-exculpating – narratives of “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” on the other. Following the example of curator and critic Okwui Enwezor, the increasingly transnational scope of contemporary art in discursive, institutional, and economic terms needs to be recognized as a productive intellectual challenge to entrenched artistic, critical, and historical traditions, requiring the latter two to engage artistic practice in light of the ongoing contradictions of what Enwezor has called the “postcolonial constellation.”
Then from T. J. Demos, a historian of contemporary art, based in London:
One risk is to fall victim to the ultimately patronizing multicultural “respect” for difference that disavows any criticality whatsoever. The latter potentially disguises a neocolonial relation to the Other, as Slavoj Zˇizˇek argues, for whom multiculturalism may disclose “a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’ – it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position.”²
Next from Kelly Baum, a young curator of contemporary art at my home institution, Princeton University:
What if art’s heterogeneity signals possibility instead of dysfunction? What if heterogeneity is art’s pursuit instead of its affliction? What if, in its very heterogeneity, art were to productively engage current socio-political conditions – conditions that are reducible to neither neo-liberalism nor globalization?
I think what we are seeing today is art miming its context. I think we are witnessing art performing “agonism,“ “disaggregation,“ and “particularization.“ Heterogeneity isn’t just contemporary art’s condition, in other words; it is its subject as well.
Finally from Rachel Haidu, a young historian of postwar art, based in upstate New York:
Why – other than for the narcissistic pleasures related to knowing – do we want a relationship to history? Your questions frame the relevance of history to our critical relationships to art, but what about those desires, fantasies, and displacements of which criticism is made? Certainly they are wedged into our criticism of art’s relation to history. When art forces us to examine them in specific and productive ways, we are lucky: otherwise, what is the point of asking art (let alone the institutionalization of art) to find historical complexity or weight? For the sake of weight alone? To reassure us of our relations to a history without which we would feel … guilty? Irrelevant?

1.) Hal Foster for the Editors, “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary,’” October 130 (Fall 2009): 3.
2.) Slavoj Zˇizˇek, “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,”New Left Review 225 (Sept/Oct 1997): 44.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien unter http://www.e-flux.com/journal/contemporary-extracts/ [15.3.2013].