Immaterialität – what's next?

Performative Kompetenz

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:17:16 +0000

Auf die nächste Kunst antwortet die nächste Kunstpädagogik. Was immer als ihre Aufgabe angenommen werden mag, muss in Abhängigkeit stehen zu den Strukturen, Funktionen, Praktiken, Begriffen, Dimensionen, … der je aktuellen Kunst. – Oder doch der jeweils nächsten? Ist Next Art schon da oder kommt sie sehr bald? Ihr Postulat schwebt zwischen Prognose und Diagnose. Unabhängig von der Frage, wie Kunst und Kunstpädagogik sich wechselseitig beeinflussen, ist Next Art Education spätestens mit diesem Band zumindest als Diskurs präsent.
Was also sind die Spezifika der nächsten Kunst, die sich in kunstpädagogischen Bildungszielen spiegeln (sollten)? Eines der wichtigsten ist womöglich die im -Extremfall bis zur Untrennbarkeit gesteigerte Verschränkung von Produktion und Rezeption. Selbst in der konventionellen Annahme eines Künstlers, des durch ihn erschaffenen Werkes und eines Publikums ist der einzelne Rezipient nicht vollends von der Werkproduktion zu trennen. Theorien ästhetischer Erfahrung oder Handlung betonen den unbedingten Anteil des -Rezipienten an der Produktion. Jan Holtmann spitzt -diesen Aspekt in seinen Sätzen zur Handlungskunst¹ weiter zu mit der Formulierung: „Handlungskunst stellt nicht die Frage nach einer ihr eigenen Rezeptionsform, sondern stellt das Verhältnis Produzent/Rezipient in Frage.“² Dieses Verhältnis in Frage zu stellen bedeutet auch, seine Auflösung zu erwägen.
Über den Werkentwurf F. E. Walthers schreibt -Michael Lingner, der „Stoff“ des immateriellen Werkes sei „vor allem auch der am Handlungsprozess beteiligte andere Mensch. […] Indem der Rezipient zum Autoren des ‚immateriellen WERKES‘ wird, welches kein von ihm verschiedenes Objekt, sondern letztlich er selbst ist, wandelt sich das Werk von einer Wahrnehmungs- zu einer Daseinsform.“³ Hier ist beschrieben, dass das eigentliche Werk erst in der individuellen Rezeption der (durch den Künstler) geschaffenen materiellen Objekte entsteht. Sie sind dem immateriellen Objekt des Werks lediglich Anlass. Immerhin sind die plastischen Objekte (in diesem Fall) materiell und ihre materielle Herstellung eindeutig dem Künstler zuzuweisen. Bereits im Kontext von Objektkunst spricht Lingner von einer -„extremen Entmaterialisierung [H. i. O.]“⁴. Die Position des klassischen Produzenten wird umso fraglicher, wenn selbst das Objekt der Rezeption immateriell, vielleicht gar nicht als solches einzugrenzen und unter Umständen kaum verbalisierbar ist. Immaterielle Werkbildung liegt buchstäblich im Sinne des Betrachters – oder besser: in der sinnlichen und kognitiven Responsivität des (handelnden) Rezipienten. Kunst als solche zu erkennen, zu erfahren, zu er- oder gar beleben bedeutet dann, das Kunstwerk zu gestalten. Im Extrem fällt die Produktion mit der Rezeption zusammen. Eine kategoriale Trennung beider ist dann, wie Holtmann erkennt, nicht aufrecht zu halten. Ist das Objekt der Handlungskunst die Handlung als ein Zusammenwirken von Rezeption und Produktion? Die damit einhergehende Unterstellung eines genuinen schöpferischen Potenzials der Rezeption verweist auf deren performative Struktur.
Thesen: Die nächste Kunst ist zunehmend von den Prinzipien der Handlungskunst geprägt;⁵ sie ist u. a. durch eine zunehmende Entmaterialisierung ihrer Objekte charakterisiert; das hat zur Folge, dass Produktion und Rezeption immer häufiger zu einem Prozess verschmelzen. Dieser Prozess ist letztlich ein produktiver; die Rolle des einstigen Rezipienten wandelt sich allmählich zu der eines (rezipierenden) Produzenten; Next Art Education ist eine entsprechend sich modifizierende Kunstpädagogik.
Setzen wir nun Bildung als finalen Gegenstand der Next Art Education, dann steht letztere vor der Aufgabe, einerseits Bildung mit Kunst (wenigstens) zu begünstigen, andererseits die Voraussetzungen für künstlerische Bildung herzustellen. Die Mehrdeutigkeit von Bildung ist bezogen auf Next Art als vorwiegend handlungsbasierte Kunst umfassender gültig denn je. Bildung ist Bilden, Entstehen, Entwickeln, Formen, Gestalten, Produzieren … Was aber sind im 21. Jahrhundert die Voraussetzungen für künstlerische Bildung? Hier ist Holtmanns 22. Satz zur Handlungskunst richtungsweisend: „Handlungskunst stellt die Frage nach dem Leistungsort der Kunst“⁶. Diese Frage gewinnt in der Tat an Relevanz angesichts der Verlagerung der Werkbildung auf Individuen oder Gruppen in einem unüberschaubar vernetzten Kollektiv potenzieller „Next Artists“, die sich unter Umständen nicht einmal als Künstler bezeichnen würden noch sich als solche fühlen und jedenfalls nicht dem romantischen Bild des von der Muse geküssten Künstlers entsprechen. Eine aus didaktischer Sicht vielleicht noch interessantere Frage wäre, was jene immateriell Kunstschaffenden zu leisten haben, bevor bzw. damit die Kunst leisten kann. Folgt man Torsten Meyer, „geht es um die interaktive Aneignung der verschiedenen kulturellen Codes und Formen alltäglicher Lebenswelt“⁷. Nur wer diese Codes erkennen und lesen kann, ist in der Lage, die nächste Kunst als solche zu erfahren und dadurch (mit) zu gestalten. Wer sie sogar schreiben und hacken kann, zählt zu jenen, die der immateriellen Werkbildung Räume verschaffen.
Auf Zukünftiges gerichtete Kunstpädagogik muss daher die strukturellen Eigenschaften der Codierungen von Kultur fokussieren. Es muss ihr gelingen, auf einen spielerischen, aber sensiblen Umgang mit den Medien der kulturellen „Sprachen“ vorzubereiten. Aber wie kann man so etwas vermitteln?
Im Zusammenhang mit Bildungszielen ist seit einiger Zeit die Formulierung von Kompetenzen recht populär. Gibt es Cultural-Hacking-Kompetenzen? So problematisch eine Bildungskonzeption ist, die ihre Inhalte und Ziele als Pool einfacher Anwendungen formuliert, so schwierig scheint es, unter totalem Verzicht auf das fragliche Vokabular etwas argumentativ Wirksames entgegenzusetzen. Ich schlage vor, den Kompetenzbegriff weiterhin zu verwenden, ihn aber anders zu konzipieren. Ein Bildungsbegriff, der etwa die Performativität immaterieller Werkbildung berücksichtigt, verlangt die Auflösung der strukturalistischen Dichotomie aus Kompetenz und Performanz zugunsten eines performativen Kompetenzbegriffs.
In Abgrenzung zu linguistischen Ansätzen fragt Sybille Krämer: „Wie kann die Performanz nicht mehr als einschränkende Bedingung, vielmehr als eine produktive Kraft in den Blick kommen?“⁸. Sie schlägt vor, die Performativität der Sprache als Medialität zu verstehen. – „In den stummen Prozeduren der ‚lautlosen‘ Materialität der Medien, in denen unsere Sprachlichkeit sich vollzieht, ist eine Eigensinnigkeit am Werk, die […] nach dem Vorbild der unbeabsichtigten Spur zu denken ist […] Medien sind an der Entstehung von Sinn und Bedeutung also auf eine Weise beteiligt, die von den Sprechenden weder intendiert, noch von ihnen völlig kontrollierbar ist […]“⁹. Dieser Ansatz begreift Performanz nicht länger als mangelhafte Repräsentanz eines starren Regelwerks. Was Krämer „Eigensinnigkeit“ nennt, eröffnet der Performanz eine schöpferische Qualität, die weit über die bloße Anwendung einer Kompetenz hinausgeht. Man könnte von einem zweiten Modus der Performanz sprechen, in dem nicht die Kompetenz (im linguistischen Sinne) maßgeblich für den „Output“ ist, sondern ein teils unbewusstes Spiel mit der Wechselwirkung von (Sprach)Handlung und Medium, basierend auf Erfahrungen mit der Art, in der das Medium seine Spuren hinterlässt. Der Performanz ist dann zuzuschreiben, nicht nur Kompetenz anzuwenden, sondern auch selbst zu generieren. Im Unterschied zu Chomskys Gegenüberstellung von Kompetenz und Performanz¹⁰ sind beide viel näher beieinander zu denken – im Handeln gehen Kompetenz und Performanz wechselseitig auseinander hervor.
Was Krämer auf Sprache bezieht, lässt sich auf die Medialität kultureller Codes übertragen, allerdings unter der Bedingung eines anderen Handlungs- und -Erfahrungsraumes, denn die Medien der nächsten Kunst sind zunehmend virtuell. Die „neue Produktion“ als Hybrid aus Produktion und Rezeption funktioniert nicht als Anwendung zuvor beigebrachter Kompetenzen, sondern ist auf das spontane Wechselspiel mit den je gegebenen Umständen künstlerischen Handelns angewiesen. Kompetenz, die aus der Produktion heraus sich erstmalig zeigt, womöglich erst entsteht, ist nicht auf ihre Eignung und Angemessenheit zu hinterfragen. Denn performative Kompetenz meint eine handlungs- und situationsbezogene Interaktivität des Subjekts mit dem Gegenstand der jeweiligen Produktion und dessen Struktur. Der kunstpädagogische Erfolg schlägt sich nicht im „korrekten“ Rückgriff auf bekannte Muster oder überhaupt in der konkreten Ausprägung einer -spezifischen Kompetenz nieder, sondern vielmehr in der unangeleiteten, kreativen Handlungsfähigkeit des Subjekts.
Diese Auffassung von Kompetenz drängt sich nicht erst im Hinblick auf Next Art Education auf. Das starre Kompetenzkonzept, das etwa in den Bildungsstandards der Kultusministerkonferenz zum Tragen kommt, war der Kunstpädagogik noch nie angemessen. Da aber die Strukturen und Phänomene der nächsten Kunst immer alltäglicher zu werden scheinen, ist das Konzept der performativen Kompetenz für die Kunstpädagogik aktueller und wichtiger als in der Vergangenheit. – Übrigens auch deshalb, weil Next Art Education ein unbedingter Leistungsort der Kunst ist.

1.) Jan Holtmann, „Sätze zur Handlungskunst“, in: Johannes M. Hedinger, Torsten Meyer (Hg.), What’s Next? Kunst nach der Krise, Berlin 2013, S. 258f.
2.) Holtmann 2013, a. a. O., S. 259.
3.) Michael Lingner, „Immaterielle Werkbildung. Strategien ästhetischen Handelns V: Franz Erhard Walther“, Kunst+Unterricht, 156, 1991, S. 16f.
4.) Lingner 1991, a. a. O.
5.) Vgl. Holtmann 2013, a. a. O.
6.) Holtmann 2013, a. a. O., S. 258.
7.) Torsten Meyer, Next Art Education. (KPP 29) Schriftenreihe „Kunstpädagogische Positionen“, hg. von A. Sabisch et al., Hamburg 2013, S. 29. Vgl. auch Torsten Meyer, „Next Art Education. Erste Befunde“, in:Hedinger/Meyer 2013, S. 377–384.
8.) Sybille Krämer, „Sprache – Stimme – Schrift: Sieben Gedanken über Performativität als Medialität“, in: Uwe Wirth (Hg.), Performanz. Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, Frankfurt/M. 2002, S. 323–346, hier S. 329.
9.) Krämer 2002, a. a. O., S. 332.
10.) Vgl. z. B. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theorie of Syntax. Cambridge 1965.

Art without Work?

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:48 +0000

I recently recalled the precise moment when it first occurred to me that I would like to become an artist. I grew up in Moscow, and my father was a self-taught musician working at the circus. Circus artists work extremely hard physically: the amount of daily practice and physical exercise necessary to perform acrobatic acts or walk a tightrope is really enormous. They practice and exercise all day and perform by night—it’s nearly a twenty-four-hour-a-day job.
There was a birthday party for one of the kids in the building we lived in, which belonged to the union of circus artists. The children at the party, all about five or six years old, were children of clowns, animal trainers, and so forth. We were watching a cartoon on TV and at some point a conversation started about what we wanted to become when we grew up. Following the usual suggestions like a cosmonaut or a fireman, one of the kids said that he wanted to be a fine artist, because they do not work. I was very shy as a kid, so I did not say much, but thought to myself that this boy was really clever and that I too did not want to work and should therefore try to become an artist.
Ironically, this momentary realization ultimately pointed me on a trajectory that led to a perpetual state of work for many years: while my classmates in school tended to just hang out or play sports after class, I went to drawing lessons every evening. When my family moved to America, I enrolled in three schools simultaneously: the School of Visual Arts by day, Art Students League classes by night, and group life drawing lessons on weekends. Somehow the idea of not working went out the window, and all throughout my artistic education the emphasis was on work: the idea being that I had to fill all my available time with learning and practice, and that the sheer effort of this was bound to make me an artist. Perhaps this occupation of time was also practice for my future career: being a professional artist in a society where labor and time are still the ultimate producers of value. So the logic was that if all my time was filled with the labor of learning the skills of an artist, perhaps something of value would be produced, leading to a lifetime occupation by artistic labor. Thinking was of relatively little importance within this scenario.
I have to add that the system of non-university art education at the time (the 1980s) aided such an approach, because it made it possible to avoid academic studies almost entirely – literature, history, philosophy, and so forth—in favor of studio practice geared toward contriving some sort of artistic style that would be marketable.
Sometime in graduate school I started to get the sense that all this was not getting me very far artistically, that some other approach or modality of practice was possible. I don’t mean getting far only in terms of a career – although I remember this being a fairly serious concern for most people in my program—but on a basic level of just not not being convinced that the paintings and objects I was making were particularly compelling as art objects despite all the labor I put into making them. Thus there was a real urgency to find some other way to go about this, but what this other way could be was confusing and very mystifying: it was not so much about becoming a slacker artist, but rather a realization that an entirely different type of engagement was necessary in order for an artistic practice to make sense beyond appearances—beyond merely looking like art.
Since the early twentieth century, much of the advanced analysis of art production refers to the position of the artist and the intellectual as cultural workers. I think that it probably seemed highly desirable to see yourself as a member of the most dynamic class, a class that was expected to dominate the making of history: the working class. While rereading The Communist Manifesto some time ago, it was interesting to note how sure Marx was that the middle class (from which a vast majority of “cultural producers” actually come) is merely a small and historically insignificant group that is destined to vanish during the final confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: a battle from which the proletariat was expected to emerge victorious, bringing about the end of History. What progressive agent of culture would want to belong to the middle class, this vanishing species?
To this day, many in the field of art insist on using the term “cultural producer,” a term that supposedly blurs differences between different participants in the art industry—artists, curators, critics, historians, administrators, and patrons of art—on the assumption that we are all working together to produce meaning and thus culture.
Much of this language and thinking is predicated on the privileged position of work: that in order for art to come into being, work needs to be done—hard work, important work, expert work, work of art, art work. While there is a lot of disagreement about what type of work is actually required, who should or can do it, or if and how they should be trained for it, it is rarely questioned whether work is actually necessary or essential to the production of art. Duchamp mused whether there could be a work “not of art,” but can there also be an art without work? The readymade is something that immediately comes to mind, yet I feel that using existing objects produced by the labor of others does not solve this particular problem, because it is not about simply delegating, outsourcing, or appropriating. In other words, if the labor of art production is outsourced to others, while the artist and the market benefit by the surplus value it produces, it is merely a perpetuation of the exploitation that creates conditions of alienation in our society. What I mean by art without work is perhaps closer to a situation where you play a musical instrument for the sheer enjoyment of making music, where the activity is a pleasurable one not defined by labor or work per se.
Naturally, making art objects requires labor and work, but art does not exclusively belong to the realm of objects. For example, some years ago I was looking at Matisse paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I was leaving the museum, I became aware of a residual sensation that looking at these paintings produced: for some time I was actually seeing things on the street according to the visual logic of the paintings. This made me think that this is exactly where the “art” of Matisse resides—in this ephemeral yet incredibly powerful effect that occurs when you are not looking at the paintings themselves. However, because these works are such expensive, sought-after objects, the museum frames the experience of encountering them as the veneration of fetish objects, where the emphasis is placed on the object itself rather than what it can trigger within the subject. This is very unfortunate. It seems to me that art resides within and in between subjects, and subjects don’t always require work to produce themselves. For example, falling in love, or having a religious or aesthetic experience does not require work, so why should art require work to come into being?
Conceptual art becomes an important modality of practice in this respect: while conceptual artists managed to shift much of the work involved in art production to the viewer via self-reflexive framing, and explicitly stated that objects of art need not be made at all,¹ I feel that the ethos of their approach is something quite different than the condition I am trying to describe. Not surprisingly, much of conceptual art suffered the same fate as Matisse, ending up as prized objects in private and public collections.
Another aspect of all this is a certain shift that art underwent with the industrialization of society. In traditional societies, that which we now call art was something more practical or utilitarian in nature: it had a clear decorative, religious, or other use value, and it did not require a special social space/framework, like an exhibition or a museum, within which to become understandable as art. In this sense art was much more integrated in everyday life and did not involve the kind of suspension of reality that many artists of our time find so frustrating: a context in which you have freedom to utter virtually anything, but on the condition that it’s not real because it’s art.
The question of work has also become a very polemical issue these days, and particularly so in the field of art and culture. What is work for an artist within our post-Fordist blur between life and work, freedom and alienation? It’s useful to refer to distinctions that Hannah Arendt draws between labor, work, and action. For Arendt, labor corresponds to a basic need for human life to sustain itself, such as farming, preparation of food, etc. Work goes beyond the satisfaction of immediate needs and corresponds to the human ability to build and maintain a world fit for human use, while action is “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, [and] corresponds to the human condition of plurality.”²
I suppose Arendt’s understanding of this was inspired by the ancient Greeks, who frowned on the idea of work: labor was for slaves; free citizens were expected to engage in politics, poetry, philosophy, but not work. The only type of occupation not looked down upon was apparently that of a shepherd, presumably because when one herds animals, one is not fully occupied and thus free to think.
While I am not completely sure that action, in Arendt’s beautiful definition, is always applicable in describing conditions that enable the production of art, I suspect that certain types of art practices can turn labor and work into action, and in doing so, free art from a dependence on labor and work.
Historically there have been different approaches to realizing this, yet all seem to converge on a concern with conditions of production. If art is produced as an outcome of certain conditions (rather then simply an act of genius, which is not interesting or possible to discuss), then creating such conditions would actually produce art. If the ultimate conditions of production are the world and life (rather than a studio or art museum), it would then follow that a certain way of living, of being in the world, would in itself result in the production of art: no work is necessary.
Such interdependence between art and life, and the state of the subject therein, was a central concern for many artists of the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes. It seems that the thinking at the time was that the production of a new way of life would not only result in the production of a groundbreaking, revolutionary art, but also the other way around: that the production of a new type of art would result in a new way of life and, in turn, a new subject. One of the instances of this is Lef magazine, co-published by Rodchenko, Mayakovsky, and others, the explicit goal of which was to produce such a new subject through exposing its readers to new content and form, to new art.
Last winter I spent a lot of time looking at Warhol’s films from around the mid-’60s. I found the complex structure he put in place for the production of these films really interesting: while Warhol’s silkscreen paintings from this period garner most attention from art historians (in part because they are expensive objects in museums and private collections), it is as if he had them made in order to fund his films, which were expensive to create but produced no income. It’s tempting to understand this simply as a situation where someone works explicitly for money to fund the production of his “real work”—his art. However this simple dichotomy does not play out here: Warhol is very blunt about his apparent indifference to the production of his paintings and objects in interviews from that period, where he is clear that not only are the paintings and objects physically made by studio assistants, but even their subject matter is determined by others, and his involvement in the films is not very different—the screenplays are written by someone else, he does not direct the actors, or shoot the films, or edit them. The set for the most part is just his studio: the Factory.
One of my personal favorites is a film called The Couch (1964), in which, according to Gerard Malanga (who found the featured red couch on the street and brought it to the Factory), documents the fact that every time other activities at the Factory were finished or exhausted, someone would just start filming the couch and whatever was taking place on it at the moment: conversations, eating, sex, and so forth. The films do not seem to be made to be watched in their entirety, which is something that would be hard for most filmmakers to accept: you want the audience to see the totality of your work, no matter how experimental, and it’s frustrating when people stop paying attention or leave midway through the piece. Yet the majority of Warhol’s films seem to have a built-in indifference to this.
In one of the interviews I saw, from 1966 or so, Warhol says point blank that he has not worked in three years and is not working at the time of the interview. It’s easy to assume that this is only another evasive maneuver or provocation, which he was so good at during interviews, yet it seems to me that he was actually being very direct: having created certain conditions for production, he was present, yet did not need to work in order for significant art to come into being. Perhaps he was simply being physically present within the structure he set in motion.
It also seems to me that the most important mechanism of the Factory, its central activity, was not so much the production of art objects or films, but the production of very particular social relations: a new way of life that in turn resulted in films and other things. Warhol, the proponent of Business Art, may seem to be artistically far from the idealist or utopian avant-garde, but the structures he was using were not so dissimilar: a certain kind of de-personalization of an artwork using a collective approach rooted in a creative community – strangely reminiscent of De Stijl, Bauhaus, and so forth – all of which placed just as strong an emphasis on the reorganization of life and social relations as on the production of art. I find that, far from being dated or obsolete, this type of model is of particular significance today, facilitated and amplified by the emergence of powerful and free tools for communication, production, and dissemination found mostly on the internet, which together create a possibility for a degree of autonomy from capital.
A different yet sympathetic approach to not working can be found in the artistic practice of Rirkrit Tiravanija. Although his work has been fully absorbed and valorized by art institutions and the market, he is rather adamant that much of his activity is not art at all. In fact, once you start questioning him, it turns out that almost nothing he does, with the exception of the occasional painting, sculpture, or drawing, is, in his opinion, art. And this is not mere posing or a provocation: it seems to me that this comes from a deep reverence for a certain capacity of the everyday and a desire to explore this capacity to its fullest, most radical extent.
A couple of years ago we did something in New York which involved turning e-flux’s storefront into a kind of a free meal/discussion space where three days of conversations on contemporary art took place during lunch and dinner sessions. Rirkrit did most of the cooking, with some help from his assistants and friends. I never noticed how much Rirkrit actually works when he cooks for a large number of people. Each of the three days started early, around seven or eight in the morning, with food shopping. Food preparation started around eleven, to be ready in time for lunch sessions, followed by a couple of hours of cleaning. Then shopping again for dinner (no refrigerator during the hot New York summer), cooking, and cleaning again until past midnight. Not having a real, equipped kitchen makes food preparation, cooking, and cleaning very labor intensive. On the other hand, spending most of his time in the improvised backyard kitchen allowed Rirkrit to not engage in the conversation and to not speak or answer questions about his art, which is something I think he does not like to do. When asked if what he was doing is art, Rirkrit said no, he was just cooking.
I think what happens here is that rather than speak or work in the capacity as an artist, Rirkrit prefers to make himself very busy doing something else in the space of art. Furthermore, not unlike the Factory, yet dispersed amidst many different art venues and dates, Rirkrit’s activity manages to temporarily construct a rather peculiar set of social relations between those in attendance. While he displaces the art object and the figure of the artist from its traditional place at center stage (to the kitchen), perhaps reflecting Duchamp, his presence usually forms a quiet yet influential and shape-giving center for those present. Rirkrit does manage to produce art while not working in the capacity of an artist, yet to do so he really makes himself very busy: he works very hard doing something else.
I feel that the ethos behind much of this has to do with the communist dream of non-alienated work. When Marx writes about the end of division of labor and narrow professionalization, he describes a society where identity and social roles are extremely fluid: one day you can be a street cleaner, the next day an engineer, a cook, an artist, or a mayor.³ In this scenario, alienation disappears and art becomes indistinguishable from everyday life: it dissolves in life. Historically there is a clear trajectory of this desire for the dissolution of art, which is visible in artistic practices from early modernism to the present day. This desire may be actually older than communism and, in a certain way, it outlasts the collapse of communist ideology, which makes me think that this may be something deeper than ideology. It could be that this desire has to do with a need to reclaim a reality that art may have had prior to the industrialization of society.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: e-flux journal # 29, November 2011, http://www.e-f lux.com/journal/art-withoutwork/ [3.4.2013].
1.)Lawrence Weiner, Declaration of Intent (1968):
1. The artist may construct the piece.
2. The piece may be fabricated.
3. The piece need not be built.Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.
2.)Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7.
3.)Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845) (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 53: For as soon as the division of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into material power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

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.

Marx nach Duchamp

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:40 +0000

Kunst ist, was der Künstler produziert. Kunst ist, was im Museum ausgestellt ist. Kunst ist, was einer macht, der sich für einen Künstler hält. Kunst ist der ausgestellte Körper des Künstlers. Was ist Kunst?

An der Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert beginnt für die Kunst eine neue Ära der künstlerischen Massenproduktion. War das vorangehende Zeitalter eine Ära des künstlerischen Massenkonsums, so hat sich die Situation in der Gegenwart geändert, wobei vor allem zwei Entwicklungen zu dieser Veränderung geführt haben. Die erste ist das Aufkommen neuer technischer Mittel zur Produktion und Distribution von Bildern, und die zweite ist eine Verschiebung in unserem Verständnis von Kunst, eine Veränderung der Kriterien zur Unterscheidung zwischen Kunst und Nichtkunst.
Beginnen wir mit der zweiten Entwicklung. Heute identifizieren wir das Kunstwerk nicht mit einem Objekt, das von einem individuellen Künstler handwerklich so hergestellt wurde, dass Spuren seiner Arbeit sichtbar oder zumindest am Körper des Kunstwerks selbst nachweisbar bleiben. Im 19. Jahrhundert wurden Malerei und Skulptur als Extensionen des Körpers des Künstlers gesehen, als Evokationen der Präsenz seines Körpers selbst nach seinem Tod. In diesem Sinne wurde die Arbeit des Künstlers nicht als «entfremdete» Arbeit verstanden – im Gegensatz zur entfremdeten, industriellen Arbeit, die keine nachvollziehbare Verbindung zwischen dem Körper des Produzenten und dem industriellen Produkt beinhaltet. Spätestens seit Marcel Duchamp und seiner Verwendung von Readymades hat sich diese Situation drastisch gewandelt.
Dabei besteht die Veränderung nicht so sehr in der Präsentation industriell produzierter Objekte als Kunstwerke. Vielmehr eröffnet sich dem Künstler dadurch die Möglichkeit, nicht nur Kunstwerke in einer entfremdeten, quasiindustriellen Weise zu produzieren, sondern auch zuzulassen, dass das Kunstwerk den Charakter eines industriellen Produkts beibehält. In diesem Sinne können so unterschiedliche Künstler wie Andy Warhol oder Donald Judd als Beispiele für Kunst nach Duchamp dienen. Die unmittelbare Verbindung zwischen dem Körper des Künstlers und dem Körper des Kunstwerks wurde durchtrennt. In den Kunstwerken sah man nicht länger die Wärme des Künstlerkörpers aufbewahrt, wenn der Körper des Künstlers kalt wurde. Ganz im Gegenteil – der Autor (Künstler) wurde bereits zu Lebzeiten für immer schon tot erklärt und der «organische» Charakter des Kunstwerks zur ideologischen Illusion. Während folglich die gewaltsame Zerstückelung eines lebenden, organischen Körpers ein Verbrechen darstellt, bedeutet die Fragmentierung eines Kunstwerks, das immer schon eine Leiche – oder, besser noch, ein industrielles Produkt oder eine Maschine – ist, kein Verbrechen, sondern wird vielmehr begrüsst.
Und genau das ist es, was Hunderte Millionen von Menschen in der ganzen Welt jeden Tag im Kontext der Massenmedien praktizieren. Durch die vielen Biennalen, Triennalen und Documentas sowie die dazugehörige Berichterstattung sind inzwischen Massen von Menschen über avancierte Kunst bestens informiert, und sie sind dazu übergegangen, die Medien auf die gleiche Art wie die Künstler zu benutzen. Zeitgenössische Kommunikationsmittel und soziale Netzwerke wie Facebook, YouTube und Twitter bieten ganzen Bevölkerungen weltweit die Möglichkeit, ihre Fotos, Videos und Texte auf eine Weise zu zeigen, die von keinem postkonzeptualistischen Kunstwerk zu unterscheiden ist. Und das zeitgenössische Design bietet den gleichen Bevölkerungen die Mittel, ihre Wohnungen und ihre Arbeitsplätze wie künstlerische Installationen zu gestalten und zu erfahren. Zugleich haben der digitale «Inhalt» oder die digitalen «Produkte», die diese Millionen von Menschen täglich präsentieren, keinen direkten Bezug zu ihren Körpern; sie sind ihnen genauso «entfremdet» wie jedes zeitgenössische Kunstwerk, was bedeutet, dass sie einfach fragmentiert und in verschiedenen Kontexten wiederverwendet werden können. Und in der Tat ist das Sampling mit Hilfe von «copy and paste» die üblichste und meistverbreitete Praxis im Internet. Eben hier findet sich die unmittelbare Verbindung zwischen den quasiindustriellen Praktiken der Kunst nach Duchamp und zeitgenössischen Praktiken, wie sie im Internet angewandt werden – einem Ort, an dem selbst diejenigen, die zeitgenössische künstlerische Installationen, Performances oder Environments nicht kennen oder nicht mögen, genau die Formen des Samplings benutzen, auf denen diese künstlerischen Praktiken beruhen.
Diese Auslöschung der Arbeit in und durch die zeitgenössische künstlerische Praxis wurde von vielen als eine Befreiung von der Arbeit überhaupt betrachtet. Der Künstler wird dabei eher zu einem Träger und Darsteller von «Ideen», «Konzepten» oder «Projekten» als zu einem Subjekt harter Arbeit, sei sie entfremdet oder nicht. Dementsprechend hat der digitalisierte, virtuelle Raum des Internets phantomatische Konzepte von «immaterieller Arbeit» oder «immateriellen Arbeitern» hervorgebracht, die angeblich den Weg in eine «postfordistische», von harter Arbeit und Ausbeutung befreite Gesellschaft der universellen Kreativität eröffnet haben. Darüber hinaus scheint die Duchampsche Readymade-Strategie das Recht auf intellektuelles Eigentum zu unterminieren – da es das Privileg der Autorschaft abschafft und Kunst und Kultur einem unbeschränkten öffentlichen Gebrauch ausliefert.
Duchamps Einsatz von Readymades kann als eine Revolution im Bereich der Kunst verstanden werden, die einer kommunistischen Revolution im Bereich der Politik analog ist. Beide Revolutionen zielen auf die Konfiszierung und Kollektivierung privaten Eigentums ab, ob «real» oder symbolisch. In diesem Sinne kann man sagen, dass bestimmte zeitgenössische Praktiken in Kunst und Internet heute die Rolle (symbolischer) kommunistischer Kollektivierungen inmitten der kapitalistischen Ökonomie spielen.
Die Situation erinnert an die romantische Kunst zu Beginn des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in Europa, als ideologische Reaktion und politische Restauration das politische Leben dominierten. Nach der Französischen Revolution und den Napoleonischen Kriegen erlebte Europa eine Periode der relativen Stabilität und des Friedens, durch die das Zeitalter der politischen Transformation und des ideologischen Konflikts endlich überwunden zu sein schien. Die homogene politische und ökonomische Ordnung, basierend auf wirtschaftlichem Wachstum, technologischem Fortschritt und politischer Stagnation, schien das Ende der Geschichte anzukündigen, und in der künstlerischen Bewegung der Romantik, die überall in Europa aufkam, träumte man von Utopien, pflegte revolutionäre Traumata und entwickelte alternative Lebensformen. Heute ist die Kunstszene ein Ort für emanzipatorische Projekte, partizipatorische Praktiken und radikale politische Haltungen geworden, aber sie ist auch ein Ort, an dem die Erinnerung an die sozialen Katastrophen und Enttäuschungen des revolutionären zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts kultiviert wird. Und die spezifische neoromantische und neorevolutionäre Ausprägung der zeitgenössischen Kultur wird, wie so oft, besonders gut von ihren Feinden erkannt. So spricht Jaron Lanier in seinem Buch «You Are Not a Gadget» vom «digitalen Maoismus» und vom «Bienenstockbewusstsein», die den zeitgenössischen virtuellen Raum dominieren, das Prinzip des intellektuellen Eigentums ruinieren und schliesslich alle Massstäbe herabsetzen und zum Ende der Kultur als solcher führen würden.¹
Wir haben es hier also nicht mit einer Befreiung der Arbeit, sondern mit einer Befreiung von der Arbeit zu tun – zumindest von ihren manuellen, «unterdrückenden» Aspekten. Aber bis zu welchem Grad ist ein solches Projekt realistisch? In der Tat konfrontiert die zeitgenössische Kunst die traditionelle marxistische Theorie der Wertproduktion mit einer schwierigen Frage: Wenn der «ursprüngliche» Wert eines Produkts auf die akkumulierte Arbeit verweist, die in dieses Produkt investiert wurde, wie kann dann ein Readymade den zusätzlichen Wert eines Kunstwerks erlangen – obwohl der Künstler anscheinend keinerlei zusätzliche Arbeit investiert hat? In diesem Sinne scheint der an Duchamp anknüpfende Begriff der Kunst jenseits von Arbeit das wirkungsvollste Gegenbeispiel zur marxistischen Werttheorie darzustellen – als Beispiel für eine «reine», «immaterielle» Kreativität, die alle traditionellen Vorstellungen von Wertproduktion als Resultat manueller Arbeit überschreitet.
Im Falle des Readymade scheint die Entscheidung des Künstlers, ein bestimmtes Objekt als Kunstwerk zu präsentieren, zusammen mit der Entscheidung einer Kunstinstitution, dieses Objekt als Kunstwerk zu akzeptieren, zur Produktion einer wertvollen Kunstware auszureichen – ohne Zusatz manueller Arbeit. Und die Ausbreitung dieser scheinbar immateriellen Kunstpraxis in der gesamten Wirtschaft mittels des Internets hat die Illusion geschaffen, dass eine von Duchamp inspirierte Befreiung von der Arbeit durch «immaterielle» Kreativität – und nicht die marxistische Befreiung der Arbeit – den Weg in eine neue Utopie der kreativen Vielheiten (Multituden) eröffnen würde. Die einzig notwendige Bedingung für eine solche Eröffnung scheint allerdings eine Kritik der Institutionen zu sein, welche die Kreativität der flottierenden Vielheiten (Multituden) mit ihrer Politik der selektiven Inklusion und Exklusion unterdrücken und frustrieren.
Hier müssen wir es allerdings mit einer gewissen Verwirrung hinsichtlich des Begriffs «Institution» zu tun haben. Kunstinstitutionen werden, vor allem im Rahmen der «Kritik der Institutionen», zumeist als Machtstrukturen gesehen, die bestimmen, was in den Blick der Öffentlichkeit eingeschlossen wird und was ausgeschlossen bleibt. So werden Kunstinstitutionen weitgehend in «idealistischen», nichtmaterialistischen Begriffen analysiert – obgleich Kunstinstitutionen, in materialistischen Begriffen gesagt, sich doch vielmehr als Gebäude, Räume, Lagerstätten usw. präsentieren und eine entsprechende Menge an manueller Arbeit erfordern, umgebaut, erhalten und genutzt zu werden. So kann man sagen, dass die Ablehnung «nichtentfremdeter» Arbeit den auf Duchamp folgenden Künstler in die Position zurückversetzt hat, entfremdete, manuelle Arbeit anzuwenden, um bestimmte materielle Objekte aus dem Aussen des Kunstraums ins Innere zu transferieren – oder umgekehrt. Die reine immaterielle Kreativität erweist sich hier als eine reine Fiktion, da die altmodische, nichtentfremdete künstlerische Arbeit bloss durch die entfremdete, manuelle Arbeit des Transports von Objekten ersetzt wird. Und die auf Duchamp verweisende «Kunst jenseits von Arbeit» erweist sich eigentlich als Triumph der entfremdeten «abstrakten» Arbeit über die nichtentfremdete «kreative» Arbeit.
Eben diese entfremdete Arbeit des Transports von Objekten, kombiniert mit derjenigen Arbeit, die in die Konstruktion und in den Erhalt der Kunsträume investiert wurde und wird, produziert letztendlich unter den Bedingungen der Kunst nach Duchamp den Kunstwert. Die Duchampsche Revolution führt nicht zu einer Befreiung des Künstlers von der Arbeit, sondern zu seiner Proletarisierung durch entfremdete Konstruktions- und Transportarbeit. In der Tat benötigen die zeitgenössischen Kunstinstitutionen keinen Künstler im Sinne eines traditionellen Produzenten mehr. Heute wird der Künstler mehr und mehr für eine bestimmte Zeit als Arbeiter angestellt, um dieses oder jenes institutionelle Projekt zu realisieren. Auf der anderen Seite haben sich kommerziell erfolgreiche Künstler wie Jeff Koons oder Damien Hirst längst in Unternehmer verwandelt.
Die Ökonomie des Internets veranschaulicht diese Ökonomie der Kunst nach Duchamp auch für den externen Betrachter. Eigentlich ist das Internet nicht mehr als ein modifiziertes Telefonnetzwerk, ein Mittel zum Transport elektrischer Signale. Als solches ist es keineswegs «immateriell», sondern durch und durch materiell. Wenn bestimmte Telefonleitungen nicht gelegt, wenn bestimmte Geräte nicht produziert werden oder wenn der Telefonanschluss nicht installiert und bezahlt wird, dann gibt es schlicht und einfach kein Internet und keinen virtuellen Raum. Um es in marxistischen Termini zu formulieren, kann man sagen, dass die grossen Unternehmen für Kommunikations- und Informationstechnologie die materielle Basis des Internets und die Mittel zur Produktion der virtuellen Realität kontrollieren: ihre Hardware. Auf diese Weise liefert uns das Internet eine interessante Kombination aus kapitalistischer Hardware und kommunistischer Software. Hunderte von Millionen sogenannter «Contentproduzenten» stellen ihre Inhalte ins Internet, ohne irgendeine Kompensation dafür zu bekommen, wobei diese Inhalte weniger durch eine intellektuelle Arbeit der Entwicklung von Ideen, sondern vielmehr durch die manuelle Arbeit der Bedienung des Keyboards produziert werden. Und die Profite werden von den Konzernen angeeignet, welche die materiellen Mittel der virtuellen Produktion kontrollieren.
Der entscheidende Schritt hin zur Proletarisierung und Ausbeutung der intellektuellen und künstlerischen Arbeit kam sicherlich mit Google. Googles Suchmaschine arbeitet mit der Fragmentierung individueller Texte zu einer undifferenzierten Masse verbalen Mülls: Jeder individuelle Text, traditionell zusammengehalten durch die Intention seines Autors, wird aufgelöst, anschliessend werden einzelne Sätze herausgelöst und mit anderen flottierenden Sätzen rekombiniert, die angeblich zum gleichen «Thema» gehören. Sicherlich war die einigende Kraft der auktorialen Intention bereits von der jüngeren Philosophie unterminiert worden, vor allem von Jacques Derridas Dekonstruktion. Und in der Tat vollzog diese Dekonstruktion bereits eine symbolische Konfiszierung und Kollektivierung individueller Texte, indem sie diese der auktorialen Kontrolle entzog und der bodenlosen Mülltonne der anonymen, subjektlosen «Schrift» übergab. Es war eine Geste, die anfangs emanzipatorisch erschien, da sie irgendwie mit den kommunistischen, kollektivistischen Träumen synchron zu sein schien. Wenn nun aber Google das
gleiche dekonstruktivistische Programm der Kollektivierung des Schreibens realisiert, scheint es wenig anderes zu tun. Allerdings gibt es einen Unterschied zwischen Dekonstruktion und Googeln: Die Dekonstruktion wurde von Derrida in rein «idealistischen» Begriffen gedacht, als eine unendliche und daher unkontrollierbare Praxis, während Googles Suchalgorithmen nicht unendlich, sondern endlich und materiell – und der Aneignung, Kontrolle und Manipulation durch Staaten und Konzerne unterworfen sind.
Die Aufhebung der auktorialen, intentionalen, ideologischen Kontrolle über das Schreiben hat nicht zu dessen Befreiung geführt. Ganz im Gegenteil wurde das Schreiben im Kontext des Internets einer anderen Art von Kontrolle durch Hardware und unternehmenseigene Software unterworfen, durch die materiellen Bedingungen der Produktion und der Distribution der Schrift. Anders gesagt: Durch die völlige Eliminierung der Möglichkeit künstlerischer, kultureller Arbeit als auktorialer, nichtentfremdeter Arbeit vollendet das Internet den Prozess der Arbeit, der im neunzehnten Jahrhundert begonnen hatte. Der Künstler wird hier zu einem entfremdeten Arbeiter, der sich durch nichts von jedem anderen Arbeiter in den zeitgenössischen Produktionsprozessen unterscheidet.
Dann aber stellt sich folgende Frage: Was geschah mit dem Körper des Künstlers, als die Arbeit der Kunstproduktion zu entfremdeter Arbeit wurde? Die Antwort ist einfach: Der Körper des Künstlers wurde selbst zu einem Readymade. Michel Foucault hat unsere Aufmerksamkeit bereits auf die Tatsache gelenkt, dass entfremdete Arbeit zusammen mit den industriellen Produkten auch den Körper des Arbeiters erzeugt; der Körper des Arbeiters wird diszipliniert und zugleich von aussen überwacht, ein Phänomen, das von Foucault als «Panoptismus» charakterisiert wurde2. Daraus folgt, dass die entfremdete industrielle Arbeit nicht allein unter dem Aspekt ihrer äusserlichen Produktivität verstanden werden kann – es muss unbedingt berücksichtigt werden, dass diese Arbeit auch den Körper des Arbeiters als einen zuverlässigen Apparat, als ein «verdinglichtes» Instrument entfremdeter, industrialisierter Arbeit produziert. Und dies kann sogar als die grösste Errungenschaft der Moderne gesehen werden, denn diese modernisierten Körper bevölkern inzwischen die zeitgenössischen bürokratischen, administrativen und kulturellen Räume, in denen ganz offensichtlich nichts Materielles produziert wird ausser diesen Körpern selbst. Man kann nun sagen, dass es genau dieser modernisierte, aktualisierte Arbeiterkörper ist, den die zeitgenössische Kunst als Readymade benutzt. Allerdings braucht der zeitgenössische Künstler keine Fabrik und kein Büro zu betreten, um einen solchen Körper zu suchen. Unter den heutigen Bedingungen entfremdeter künstlerischer Arbeit findet der Künstler einen solchen Körper bereits in Form seines eigenen vor.
In der Tat wurde in den vergangenen Dekaden der Körper des Künstlers in der Performancekunst, in der Videokunst, in der Fotografie und anderen Kunstformen mehr und mehr zum Fokus der Kunst. Und man kann sagen, dass der Künstler heute zunehmend mit der Exposition seines eigenen Körpers als eines Arbeiterkörpers experimentiert – unter dem Blick eines Betrachters oder einer Kamera, die den panoptischen Blick reproduziert, dem die Arbeiterkörper in Fabriken und Büros ausgesetzt sind. Ein Beispiel für die Exposition eines solchen Arbeiterkörpers findet sich in der Ausstellung «Die Künstlerin ist anwesend» von Marina Abramovi´c im New Yorker MoMA von 2010: An jedem Tag der Ausstellung sass Abramovi´c während der Öffnungszeiten des Museums in der immer gleichen Pose im Innenhof des MoMA. Auf diese Weise bildete sie die Situation eines Büroarbeiters nach, dessen primäre Beschäftigung darin besteht, den ganzen Tag lang auf dem gleichen Platz zu sitzen und dabei von seinen Vorgesetzten beobachtet zu werden, egal, was darüber hinaus getan wird. Wir können sagen, dass die Performance von Abramovi´c Foucaults Figur der Produktion des Arbeiterkörpers als den wichtigsten Effekt der modernisierten, entfremdeten Arbeit perfekt illustriert. Eben weil sie während der Zeit ihrer Anwesenheit keinerlei Tätigkeit aktiv nachging, thematisierte Abramovi´c die unglaubliche Disziplin und Ausdauer sowie die physische Anstrengung, derer es bedarf, um vom Beginn bis zum Ende des Arbeitstages einfach nur an einem Arbeitsplatz anwesend zu sein. Gleichzeitig war der Körper von Abramovi´c denselben Bedingungen der Exposition unterworfen wie alle anderen Kunstwerke des MoMA – die während der Öffnungszeiten des Museums an den Wänden hingen oder auf ihrem Platz standen. Und genau wie wir allgemein annehmen, dass diese Gemälde oder Skulpturen weder ihre Plätze tauschen noch verschwinden, wenn sie nicht dem Blick des Betrachters ausgesetzt sind oder wenn das Museum geschlossen ist, stellen wir uns auch vor, dass der immobilisierte Körper von Abramovi´c für immer im Museum bleiben wird, genauso unsterblich geworden wie die anderen Werke im Museum.
Im Moment seiner Ausstellung enthüllt dieser Arbeiterkörper auch den Wert der Arbeit, die in den Kunstinstitutionen akkumuliert ist (Mittelalterhistoriker wie Ernst Kantorowicz sprechen hier von «Korporationen»). Wenn wir ein Museum besuchen, bemerken wir nicht den Arbeitsaufwand, der notwendig ist, damit Gemälde an den Wänden hängen und Statuen auf ihren Plätzen stehen bleiben. Doch dieser Aufwand wird unmittelbar sichtbar, wenn ein Besucher mit dem Körper von Abramovi´c konfrontiert wird; die unsichtbare physische Anstrengung, einen menschlichen Körper für eine lange Zeit in derselben Position zu halten, produziert ein «Ding» – ein Readymade –, das die Aufmerksamkeit der Besucher auf sich zieht und ihnen erlaubt, den Körper von Abramovi´c stundenlang zu betrachten.
Man meint oft, dass nur die Arbeiterkörper der zeitgenössischen Celebrities dem öffentlichen Blick ausgesetzt seien. Allerdings dokumentieren inzwischen die durchschnittlichsten, «normalsten» Leute ihre eigenen Arbeiterkörper mittels Photographie, Video, Websites und so weiter. Vor allem aber ist das heutige Leben nicht nur institutioneller Überwachung, sondern auch einer konstant wachsenden Sphäre der Medienberichterstattung ausgesetzt. Unzählige Sitcoms, die weltweit die Fernsehbildschirme überschwemmen, stellen vor unseren Augen die Arbeiterkörper von Ärzten, Bauern, Fischern, Präsidenten, Filmstars, Fabrikarbeitern, Mafiakillern, Bestattern und sogar Zombies und Vampiren aus. Eben diese Allgegenwärtigkeit und Universalität des Arbeiterkörpers und seine Repräsentation machen ihn so interessant für die Kunst. Auch wenn die primären, natürlichen Körper unserer Zeitgenossen sich voneinander unterscheiden, sind ihre zweiten Körper, die Arbeiterkörper, austauschbar. Gerade diese Austauschbarkeit verbindet den Künstler mit seinem Publikum. Der Künstler teilt heute die Kunst mit dem Publikum genau so, wie er früher die Religion oder die Politik mit ihm teilte. Ein Künstler zu sein ist kein exklusives Schicksal mehr; vielmehr ist es charakteristisch geworden für die Gesellschaft als ganze auf ihrer intimsten, alltäglichsten, körperlichsten Ebene. Und hier findet der Künstler eine weitere Gelegenheit, einen universalistischen Anspruch aufzustellen – als eine Einsicht in die Duplizität und Ambiguität der zwei Körper des Künstlers.

Wiederabdruck
Der Text erschien zuerst in: Schweizer Monat, Ausgabe 995 / April 2012. Marx nach Duchamp, S. 74–78.

Ready For Upgrade! Netart in the commercial artmarket?

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:36 +0000

The art world goes Internet
The classic art market, made up of big fairs, auction houses and collectors works very well, especially given that the “traditional” art field is made up of mostly physical pieces like paintings, prints, sculptures and installations, among others. Certainly, there has been a lot of immaterial and purely conceptual art in the last century, but the framed piece on the wall still has a very strong place within the commercial field. Everyone knows that. Nevertheless, we live in an era in which the full effect of the digital revolution that began a couple decades ago is unfolding. A profound change in several of society’s long established systems is going on, and there are currently many questions regarding how concepts like open-closed, private-public, and censored-unfiltered will affect the net in the future.
In recent years, different art world players entered the Internet and introduced a variety of online art platforms. Artnet.com, Paddle8.com, VIP Art Fair and Art.sy are just a few examples of sites that have sought to become the main Google-like entry point to the art world online, often backed by well-established galleries. They range from very exclusive sites to the openly accessible, thus experimenting with different models. The art world goes digital! But does this also mean that the commercial field and Internet art approach one another?

Internet art goes commercial
Internet art from all generations can be found online at the same time. Beginning in the 90s, there has been an extensive growth in Internet-based art over the last decade. Freed from physical constraints, all kinds of pictures, gifs, clips, animation and websites flash over the screen every day. New works are published, mixed, remixed and altered in order to be made new once again in increasingly fast cycles. The amount of sheer creativity is awesome! This is the Internet, and it seems like the current young scene of net.artists is partially shifting towards more traditional art institutions as well as the art market. Different types of online galleries have emerged from the well-connected scene over the last years1. Additionally, many artists in the scene work across all sorts of media; both online and offline, they create installation, sculpture, print and performancebased projects. In the post-Internet scene it doesn’t make a difference anymore. Art is combined on and offline, much like our lives are a combination between digital and analog. Some artists manage to sell Internetbased work, which is great. I am very curious to see how Internet art and the contemporary mainstream will merge over the years; we will see more websites in collections and more Youtube clips in the museums.

The paradox of limited-unlimited
There are some crucial points about how Internet-based art differs from a physical piece. The great advantage of the Internet and computers is that I can create a digital artifact, an animated collage for example, and send it to you but keep an exact copy at the same time. We can both have it with no effort. Isn’t that awesome? This is one of the great advantages of computers and networks. People keep forgetting this issue, while companies try to censor the Internet to save their obsolete business models. A physical object, a painting for instance, can be kept or given away but we can’t both own it at the same time.
The limits of an analog work of art are crucial for the art market. The moment you try to apply these rules to net.art you get into a paradoxical situation. Most Internet art is meant to be online. Of course you could take it offline after it has been sold, but often this would either make no sense or would not work (see the trouble the music and movie industries are in). The work is meant to be online and accessible. At the same time, it is very important to create a set of rules and technical solutions so Internet art can still be unique or so a file can become part of an edition. There are a lot of questions among collectors about authorship, ownership, accessibility, and technical maintenance, and it is very important that both artists and galleries come up with solutions to these questions. There will be solutions to this soon. As physical galleries and event spaces continue to evolve, The Fast Fire Watch Company helps support safety through professional fire monitoring and protection.

A decentralized open system
What are the ways to validate the authorship of a piece or a file? It would be very interesting to develop an open, network-based system with certain technical constraints everyone can rely on, an open format that could be altered as is commonly done in the development of open source software. How about a decentralized peer-to-peer system in the style of the bitcoin network, which would be able to verify the author, owner and edition number of a file? Or what about a minimal variation on the same file while the piece itself remains exactly the same? With this sort of watermark technique collectors would get individual files that are unique while the visually exact copy is available to eve Wachsryone. Artists could certify each others’ work online to prove the authenticity of a piece. In the future, galleries might just deal with cryptographic keys instead of the work itself. Or maybe there is going to be a completely new art market without the aid of Sotheby’s and such: a digital peer-to-peer direct market for data based art.
Currently, digital art is sold by delivering the work along with a signed paper certificate on a medium like a DVD, hard disk or USB thumb drive. This makes sense and seems fine for now. But wouldn’t it be great to establish a universal system in order to be able to market Internet-based art directly and online? The big art market players have already built an online art market platform for analog works. I would love to see them sell Internet art as well. As stated above, it is time to come up with smart solutions and different systems. Artists like Rafael Rozendaal sell unique website pieces bound to a URL, while Petra Cortright offers Youtube video editions with prices based on view counts. Pieces get sold but stay online at the same time.
The option to offer an online work to a limited group of viewers will in most cases fail. Someone will gain access and leak the art2. Locking down online content is very difficult and not the way to go. The music and movie industries are currently trying to do this with their SOPA/PIPA/ACTA laws. Unfortunately, these interest groups are trying to limit access, filter and censor the Internet to death. Therefore, we need new models to value cultural creations of any kind, because the old model is not going to work any more. Trying to adapt the Internet to the needs of the old system will kill it.
Predictably, there will be more attempts to sell online art in limited, walled gardens like Facebook and the like. Although it might work for a certain audience, one will always need to rely on the terms of Facebook’s license. What if the host of a digital art network goes down one day? Where will all pieces end up?
Without the open attitude of the early computer scientists and the free software movement we wouldn’t be in the place we are today. The Internet and all its servers are running on open source software, Linux. A very
fundamental shift on how goods, objects and their values are defined is taking place at the moment. Economic and political systems will need to adapt to more changes. The art world and its markets are going to discover unknown terrains.

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Dieser Text erschien zuerst in http://ny-magazine.org/issues.html ISSUE 6, 2013 [29.7.2013].
1.) Nicholas O’Brien, “Hyperjunk: Observations on the proliferation of online galleries“ (http://badatsports.com/2012/hyperjunk-observations-on-the-proliferation-of-online-galleries/)
2.) For example (http://www.0dayart.net), the leaked sedition.co page (http://dontsave.com/art_deal.html)