THE PRIMACY OF LANGUAGE:
Post-Fordism, Dematerialization,
Textualization and Disembodiment in
(Contemporary) Art)
Menno Vuister
Thesis Cultural Analysis
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Menno Vuister #10439536
Supervisor: Dr. J. de Bloois
Introductory Note i.
Acknowledgements ii.
Chapter 1. On Post-Fordism and Dematerialization 1.
- 1.1 Introduction 1.
- 1.2 Conditions of Post-Fordism 5.
- 1.3 Post-Fordism in the world of art and art education: a flat wet world 10. - 1.4 Complications: art-reception and the consequences of dematerialization 15. - 1.5 Cultural Analysis: Rikrit Tiravanija’s Supermarket within post-Fordism 22.
Chapter 2. On Art History and Textualization 29.
- 2.1 Introduction 29.
- 2.2 An Art History of Language: Marinetti, Tzara and Duchamp 31. - 2.3 Conceptualization, Dematerialization, Textualization 38. - 2.4 Post-Conceptual Contemporary Art and its Textualization 44. Chapter 3. On Disembodiment and a Biopolitics of Art 50.
- 3.1 Introduction 50.
- 3.2 New Materialism and a Biopolitics of Art 53.
- 3.3 The Art Object-as-Subject as Form-of-Life 57.
Chapter 4. Conclusion: On the Primacy of Language in (Contemporary) Art 63.
- 4.1 Final Remarks and Further Questions 70.
“Post-Fordism is the “communism of capital.” - Paolo Virno in A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 110.
“Burroughs on Language: “ . . . it might have been a virus.”” - William S. Burroughs in Kontexts 8, p. 11.
INTRODUCTARY NOTE
The work presented here, and which takes on the form of a thesis for the rMA in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, engages in the analysis of the current state of affairs of art within post-Fordist capitalism, and its inherent primacy of language. Within this thesis, I will discuss the meaning, effects, and inherent consequences of the processes that
have led art to become conceptually dematerialized, textualized, and disembodied, in order to provide a better understanding of the way art is conceptually understood today. While establishing how post-Fordist developments have altered the contemporary conceptual understanding of art, it has become evident that the primacy of language within post-Fordist capitalism appears to have completely eradicated the ability for the spectator to experience an art object outside of the framework of post-Fordist capitalism. Therefore, central to, and in addition of, my analysis of the post-Fordist developments in relation to the conceptual understanding of art today, the intention of my research is to put forward a theory of how an embodied, material, and essentially embodied relationship between the spectator and the art object can be re-established, and through which a new conceptual understanding of art could be created in which art can be considered a productive catalyst of knowledge particularly outside of post-Fordist, and consequently cognitive, capitalism.
It is important to note that the term ‘conceptual understanding’, which is used many times throughout this writing, signifies the understanding of art as a concept: that what it is considered to be, and how it functions. Even though such a conceptual understanding goes hand-in-hand with certain forms of art more so than with others, I specifically want to emphasize that within this thesis I discuss ‘art’ in very broad sense. In other words, then, I do not specifically raise the issue of art’s contemporary dematerialization, textualization and disembodiment in order to single out a certain type of art that is today produced. Much rather, it is my understanding that the developments that have caused art to dematerialize, textualize, and disembody, are effecting art, today, in a very general sense. It is precisely therefore, that I want to state that this thesis is not about a change in the ontology of art from one form to another, but about art that, in the way it is understood today, appears no longer to be able to ontologically define itself, as it is no longer understood by virtue of its material appearance at all, and consequently how this materiality can be restored. Therefore, the dominant perspective of this thesis is that of the spectator: the uninitiated man or woman that finds him- or herself in an encounter with a work of art.
Acknowledgements
As this thesis has not been produced and written within a short period of time, it is a certainty that I could not have done this work without the support of a number of people. First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Joost de Bloois, who not only supported me throughout the process of writing this thesis, but who was also the one to open up many new fields of theory through which my on-going research into the phenomenon of art could progress. Furthermore, I would like to thank Dr. Noa Roei for coming to my aid as second reader, my
parents, for their years of loving mental, and financial support, and, of course, Karlijne Lafort, who has been by my side throughout this incredible and exhausting journey.
THE PRIMACY OF LANGUAGE:
Post-Fordism, Dematerialization, Textualization and Disembodiment in
(Contemporary) Art
Menno Vuister
1.1 Introduction
In September 2014 the Rotterdam-based exhibition-space TENT opened an exhibition promptly titled The Value of Nothing, which marked the near-end of a research-trajectory (Current Values) that investigated the meaning of the concept of value through, and within, contemporary art.1 My initial response to this exhibition was that it was going to embody, and
express, exactly the concerns that I wanted to raise in my thesis at that time. However, rather than expressing these concerns through contemporary artworks – which would have made my writing irrelevant immediately – The Value of Nothing was a showcase of precisely the type of artworks that raised my concerns in the first place. Artworks that were, in short, research-based, and that appeared specifically produced on the occasion of the exhibition. More importantly, it appeared to me that most works in the exhibition expressed critique on the relationship between contemporary art, shifting notions of value, and current economics by imitating the aesthetics of these subjects. For example, the work of Jonas Staal, Monument for Capital (2013), which focuses on the simultaneity of global economic crises and the erection of skyscrapers as landmarks, came in the form of a double screen installation that looked nothing short of an info-graphic used in the world of corporate marketing. In the same room was also the work of Remco Torenbosch, who regulated an operational distribution-centre in the exhibition-space, titled Distribution (2014). Art-historically speaking, the stacks of water-jugs, printing-paper and other (seemingly everyday) supplies might be considered a large ready-made, or even a minimalist sculpture. However, within the context of the exhibition, the fully functional – and therefore transformative – installation was nothing different than a distribution-centre itself.
Both works, among other ones present in the exhibition, to me, entailed the same concerns that I had previously raised in the work of British artist Sam Curtis. Curtis had, as part of his artistic practice, taken up a ‘residency’ in the shape of a regular job as fishmonger at Harrods.2 While his paycheck said ‘Sam Curtis – Harrods’ fishmonger’, he ‘secretly’ had
been researching the impact of certain types of fish-displays on people, for which he referred to himself as somewhat of a fish-display curator, and in a different work, Did anyone ever tell you that you’re beautiful when you’re following orders?, Curtis had made a compilation of found YouTube-footage of people doing regular jobs (driving a bus, cleaning at the airport
1
The exhibition The Value of Nothing ran from 4 September until 16 November 2014 at TENT Rotterdam, and was curated by Jesse van Oosten and Michel van Dartel. The website of TENT provides this short introduction: “TENT presents The Value of Nothing with five newly commissioned projects, a group exhibition, Fieldwork Residencies, and an in-depth public program in which local and international artists reflect on our current economies and value systems.” (Website TENT: http://www.tentrotterdam.nl/show/20140904_thevalueofnothing/).2
I specifically refer to Sam Curtis’ working period at Harrods as a residency, which in the world of art is an increasingly common term for the phenomenon of artists working in a different environment than the traditional studio-space. In most cases artists apply for such residencies in order to develop their practice within a specific field, during an a priori determined amount of time.etc.) while singing, dancing or otherwise joyfully expressing themselves.3 Both in his practice
as Harrods’ fishmonger, and as artist in general, Curtis is exemplary for a selection of contemporary artists that use labour, and in most cases traditional, simple and low-paid labour, as material property in their practices. Or, in the bigger picture, it appears that these artists’ practices no longer have anything to do with the material property of what they produce: the work is subordinate to the practice, and if actual objects are produced this is either to present results of, or to further conduct, an on-going research. Furthermore, it appears that the objects produced in these practices are increasingly constructed of non-art properties – such as supplies in the case of Torenbosch’ ‘Distribution, or hard labour in the work of Curtis. These developments, among others, have led me to think that current contemporary art is dematerialized, but not in the way this happened under the virtue of the Conceptual Art movement in the 1960s: where the Conceptual artists of the 1960s attempted to dematerialize the art object in order to unlock art’s true potential, fuelled by the believe that the material of the artwork merely camouflaged the actual ‘art’ within it, the dematerialization of art in the 1960s refers to the artistic process of dematerializing the artwork or art object. For art today, however, it appears that the concept of dematerialization is not one of an artistic process, but refers to the conceptual dematerialization of art: art, the artwork or art object, appear no longer to be understood through their material presentation, but rather through an immaterial discourse that projects that ‘art’ onto the material from the outside.
When reviewing the works of Staal, Torenbosch, and Curtis, the art historian inside of me would ask the question: how did art come to be like this? And: what are the implications of such a development in the history of art? As cultural analyst, however, it is a given that this development is both part of, and takes place in, a larger cultural shifting. Therefore, I would rather ask what underlying structures move art towards this fundamental dematerialization, what the consequences of this development actually are for how art is understood today, and, given the presumed impact of these consequences, how they might ultimately be limited or averted. Obviously, the first two questions could also belong to those asked within Social Art History, but rather than embedding the mentioned artworks in the cultural framework of their time of production, I will focus on the friction between that what is: the object, and that to which it relates immanently: the concept. In addition to this methodology I would like to point out that in the context of artists’ works that I discuss, I opt for the use of the terms ‘practice’ and ‘ art object’, rather than ‘artwork’. The reason for this is that, as mentioned before, the original work of art is decreasingly produced from the artist’s intention exclusively, as the exhibited ‘objects’ rather function as demarcations of on-going artistic and research-based practices.
3
Sam Curtis, Did anyone ever tell you that you’re beautiful when you’re following orders? http://www.scurtis.co.uk/fspartone2.htmlSo, what underlying structures move art towards its complete subsumption and dematerialization, to the point that it becomes impossible to speak of works and only of practices (and objects)? What are the consequences of this development at large? And, perhaps more important at this moment, how to analyse and assess this situation in the first place? In order to address the complete subsumption and dematerialization of art, as well as their underlying structures and consequences, it is important to note that an interdisciplinary approach is needed to not exclusively address the historical developments of the conceptual dematerialization of art, but also to be able to frame these developments within the wider context that they belong to, and move in, in the first place because art history, or any other singular disciplinary perspective, itself does not suffice to solve such a puzzle. Cultural Analysis provides such an approach through the engagement with a concrete object, which, according to Mieke Bal “ostensibly refuse[s] to be locked up in an approach limited to a single discipline” (65).4 In this sense, the urgency of an interdisciplinary approach appears
naturally when looking at the way the work of Torenbosch, Staal, and Curtis, among others, is amounting in a conceptual understanding of art that is dematerialized. To provide a productive and fruitful analysis of the current dematerialized ‘situation’ in which art finds itself today, I will discuss the (soon to be revealed) object in relation to a concept that I consider both relevant and explanatory in the context of art’s current situation: post-Fordism, and to which I was introduced through the work of art-sociologist Pascal Gielen.
Post-Fordism can be coined as a term in order to express the current economical conditions in which art, and its production, today, are framed. However, apart from this conclusion, post-Fordism itself appears as a rather vague concept – one that could be added to a list including capitalism, neoliberalism, globalization, individualization, and many other terms that at some point emerged as valuable nominators to explain the developments of western civilization, but that from an analytical perspective are thrown around without a concise definition at hand. Therefore, in order to clarify the matter, and before carefully mapping what post-Fordism means in both its economic-theoretical, and art-related way, let me briefly mention that post-Fordism is not a singular concept. Rather, it appears as a summarizing term for all forms of conditions of labour deriving from Fordism, and therefore
4
In order to dissect the contemporary conceptual understanding of art in relation to the dematerialization of the art object, it is important to realize that this ‘operation’ quickly moves into the socio-economical situation in which art today is embedded. Therefore, as Mieke Bal states, “in order to understand this object [the object of my analysis, ed.], to engage with it on its own terms [to see it, clearly, for what it is, ed.], we [scholars, in general, but myself in this particular case, ed.] must cross the boundaries we have been trained to respect” (65). In this sense, the object is leading me to ask questions about the contemporary conceptual understanding of art, and its dematerialization and subsumption, has, as will be made clear, in order for me to engage with it on its own terms, forced me out of the confinements of art history. I do however have to point out that it has been the interdisciplinary environment of Cultural Analysis that has motivated me, in the first place, to reflect on art across the respective fields of art history and theory.the concept is always under development. Furthermore, in order to produce a useful, applicable definition of post-Fordism, which consequently both shows the drastic effects of post-Fordism on the contemporary conceptual understanding of art, and provides ground for a way to deal with these effects, I will map its theoretical definitions while comparing them to my theoretical object: Rirkrit Tiravanija’s installation Supermarket, a full-scale and fully functioning supermarket built within the Migros Museum for Contemporary Art in Zürich, Switzerland in 1998. I do however not pick Supermarket randomly, or merely as exemplary object for the assumed dematerialization of art today. Supermarket, in being a functional supermarket functioning as work of art (or perhaps the other way around), and therefore astutely symbolic for the subsumption within contemporary art, provides simultaneously the right question and problematizes that framework in which it can be seen: how is it that something like a supermarket today is allowed to produce an experience of art, and, consequently, how can a work of art in the form of a supermarket produce an emancipatory experience that ultimately lies outside of the capitalist or consumerist operation of a generic supermarket? Ironic as it is, it must be said that a supermarket itself is perhaps not the best object to discuss the conceptual definition of post-Fordism, as the supermarket represents a market- and labour-model that precedes post-Fordism by far. Therefore it is important to keep in mind that I did not choose Supermarket as the object of this analysis because it mimicks the operations of a generic supermarket, but because its operation, framing, and discursive position are, as will become apparent, rather post-Fordist in itself.
1.2 Conditions of Post-Fordism
The installation of a fully functioning supermarket within an art space itself is rather self-explanatory for how art, in course of the 1990s, started to become harder to recognize as an independent phenomenon. As explained by Rein Wolfs, curator of the previously mentioned exhibition of Tiravanija’s works at the Migros Museum, Supermarket was part of a number of installations that “functions reflexively as a situational project, as a metaphor for a service-oriented society, in which processes may be more important than products” (19). However, while depending on the framework of the museum to create a space of reflection, installing an operational supermarket in the museum rather destroys the possibility to produce such a reflexive situation. When, for instance, I leave my job in order to do groceries, both working and doing groceries are activities that take place within the same framework of consumerism. Money I make on the job is spent to buy the ingredients for my dinner. In a similar way, I can also visit a museum or gallery after work, and while I have to pay for an entrance-fee at the museum or find myself in an apparent commercial space in the gallery, the confrontation with works of art is sure to provide an experience that finds itself outside of the consumerist
framework.5 Unfortunately, however, when I leave my job to visit Tiravanija’s Supermarket it
is no longer possible to determine whether or not I experience something that is outside of a consumerist, and in that sense capitalist, framework.
Initially, the example of the merging consumerist and non-consumerist experiences was a concern for me, as it no longer provided me with the certainty that art (and contemporary art) would provide an experience outside of the framework of consumerism, but the flipside of this concern is the realization that Tiravanija’s Supermarket marks, perhaps, the influence of post-Fordism on the existence of art itself. In order, then, to map this influence of Fordism on art, I will start by giving the definition of the concept of post-Fordism from the field through which it emerged originally: economics.
In order to explain post-Fordism, I should first explain under what kind of conditions the term can be considered. Economic geographer Ash Amin describes eight new ages (as formulated by Ernest Sternberg in 1993), which signify changes in the economy and together lay way for what can commonly be referred to as ‘advanced capitalism’, and of which post-Fordism can be considered a model for conditions of labour (Amin 1). The first is the beginning of the information age, which signifies the commodification of information, and which is marked by the increase of information technologies (1). The second age is the age of post-modernity, which gives way for consumerism to get increasingly entangled with private and social life, through which it might be, like the first age, considered a catalyst for cognitive capitalism (1-2). Thirdly, the age of global interdependence, which does not so much refer to globalization as a culturally effective development, but rather as the emergence of a global network that shapes the economic future of nation states (2). The fourth is new mercantilism, signifying the emergence of industry-government-labour relations as basis for national wealth and prosperity (2). The fifth marks an age of ‘new corporate control’, in which multinational corporations themselves create patterns of consumption, and which gave way to a new “global class [elite, ed.] of executives and professionals living in select world cities” (2). However, even though this newly shaped elite still very much exists, it might be assumed that this corporate control is somewhat in dispute since the global economic crisis that started in 2007.6 The sixth age, which, together with the birth of the
5
The certainty of an art-exhibition delivering an experience outside of consumerism is perhaps not as true as I claim it to be here, as both the art institution and the regular commercial space determine the everyday conditions of everyday life in western culture. However, for the sake of keeping a sane line of argument, I have claimed this certainty here as a way of reflecting on the changing sphere of influence and experience of the art institution.6
From my point of view, the word ‘elite’, as well as the large capitalist corporations they seemingly control, are surrounded by disliking, distrust, and cynicism. It should not, however, be said that this corporate elite is disappearing. Rather, the negative sentiments surrounding this elite show a demise of, or shift away from the old cultural and financial elite under modernism, as well as a changing attitude towards large corporations. Furthermore, to me, the negativity is also sign of an apparent polarization of western capitalist society – the rich grow richer while the poor grow poorer.executive and professional is a significant property of post-Fordism, is the age of flexible specialization, which causes decentralized managements and “new principles of production, including specialist units of production” (2). Seventh is the age of new social movements that seek to establish a social economy, in which rights of minorities and women, basic human needs, and environmental friendly production are maintained and incorporated (2). Amin claims that these movements operate mainly “in the name of capitalist or anti-establishment goals” (2), although it could be said that at this point these goals are already part of the dialectics of advanced capitalism.7 With the eighth age, Amin is discussing an
interesting aspect of Sternberg’s model when stating that Sternberg identifies the “rise of an age of fundamentalist rejection of . . . consumerism in the information age, in defence of territorial or ethnic identities rooted in pre-enlightenment religious or communitarian traditions and values” (2). What this ‘age’ shows is that, within Sternberg’s prediction of the economic world future, reverse mechanisms are already at work. On the other hand, as said above, the rejection of information age consumerism might itself already be part of advanced capitalist dialectics.
What is apparent about Sternberg’s eight ‘stages’ is that, although these stages were developed no later then 1993, all of the eight are still operational today. This in itself shows that post-Fordism occurs in an economic framework that is versatile and ambivalent, and also enables the claim that the ambivalent nature of this framework simultaneously lies at the basis of post-Fordism. As mentioned earlier, post-Fordism can be seen as a concept that summarizes the way conditions of (paid) labour have developed within these stages of economic change. First of all, the emergence of the information age, together with global interdependency and new types of specialized and executive labour, as well as a new sense of professionalism, gave birth to a heightened flexibility among workers. In relationship to the information age this flexibility is mainly locational: the access to information, as well as information itself, has become an increasingly important commodity, but does at the same time no longer require workers to be present at a specific location as long as access to the internet (or other networks of information and communication) is guaranteed. Labour can increasingly be done in the private sphere, or in public spaces outside of the workplace. Obviously, this locational flexibility has also raised the flexibility in a temporal sense: the ability to work from another place than the workspace has enabled working outside of the nine-to-five routine, and on the other hand the internet has provided a marketplace that is no longer limited by business hours.
What however must be acknowledged is that this increasing flexibility did not only transform the dependency on the workspace, but also is part of a larger shift in types of work.
7
I am operating in the assumption that anti-capitalist tactics are becoming increasingly popular marketing tools within the capitalist economy. This becomes visible, for example, when looking at the way ecological and fair-trade foodstuffs are being marketed.Flexible working conditions have emerged simultaneously with jobs that are increasingly flexible by nature, most of them taking place in the growing creative industry. A good example of this change in labour is the increase in freelance contracts, as well as the rise of jobs that can be done from a freelance basis, which means that flexibility does not exclusively extends to the type of work and the workspace, but to employer-employee relationships as well.
Secondly, the post-modernity that Amin and Sternberg describe has expanded the consumerism exceedingly to the private sphere, for which the Internet might also be greatly responsible. For me, however, this moving of consumerism should not be seen as separate from the side of production. As mentioned before, this means that working moves more to the private sphere, but what this has caused also comes down to an issue of temporality. Where workers could have left their work in the workspace, and return home to take a rest, the increased notion of flexibility has managed to disturb this relationship to working. Increasingly, workers are asked (or confronted) with dealing with work-related activities in their private environment, meaning that working no longer takes place on a nine-to-five basis, but rather ‘all-day everyday’.
Furthermore, the types of jobs that emerge within post-Fordism (although I must insist here that the concept of post-Fordism is as much a signifier of these types of jobs as it is the cause for them) are focussed on discussion and reflection, instead of taking part in an actual process of production. What this means might best be explained by an example. Before Fordism, a carpenter would solemnly build a piece of furniture, and live of the profits received from selling this furniture. This could be considered an honest work-for-pay situation, as the carpenter was rewarded for each finished product. In Fordism, there is the insertion of a production line. The carpenter is tasked to perform his special set of skills in a team of other specialists, all of whom are responsible for the production of a piece of furniture. In this situation it becomes more likely that the carpenter works on fixed times, in shifts, and is paid with the profits the team (or the company) makes from selling the products. Under post-Fordism, however, the carpenter is required to become a more flexible worker. No longer is he the master of a single part of the furniture, but rather is tasked to perform a number of different tasks within the production process. Not only does this mean that the carpenter has to become more all-round, it also means that he no longer sells his part of the finished product, but rather gets paid because he sells his labour skills. In order to maintain a production line based on flexible workers with flexibly applicable skills, management is necessary, and it is here that discussion and reflection become part of labour. No longer are individual workers responsible for (parts of) the delivering of a finished product, they are players in a large organization, and large organizations with diversely employable workers are in need of control. Work increasingly needed to be planned, and companies started to
grow into brands, with inherent structures and concepts, while simultaneously all aspects of labour were increasingly theorized. What this change in labour and economy gave birth to was a way of working in which the anticipation on, and development of future scenarios for a company became increasingly important, and for which managerial jobs were created.
In a way, the manager might be the archetypical labourer of post-Fordism: operating in a sphere of work that is always different, for which the manager must be flexible when it comes to his skill-set, not confined to a specific office or workspace as the job takes place in conversation between many different parties of the company, and ultimately the job is more concerned with communication about the right line(s) of development than with the actual production of marketable commodities. It should however be mentioned that the manager is not ‘conceived’ through post-Fordism. Instead, the manager, or the managerial job, has gradually changed within the post-Fordist economy. Where the manager, in Fordism, might have been the day-to-day leader of a single production line, in post-Fordism companies started to develop an entire layer of management in their corporate structure. Instead of direct control from the direction down to the workspace, a range of executives was employed in order to communicate and regulate the targets from the direction to the workers, as well as the development of strategies of how these targets could be met. It is in this last aspect that managerial jobs are the most different from Fordist or pre-Fordist jobs, as they are no longer concerned with the actual material production, but exclusively concentrate on enabling and improving this production. On the other hand, when considering an economy based on the supply of information and services, it might be said that the production of actual goods is also no longer of any importance to certain types of businesses, and, consequently, when considering an economy based on flexibility, freelance contracts, and immaterial production, it might be taken into account that, as George Caffentzis recognizes, “new knowledge-driven labo[u]r is no longer dependent upon machines and other forms of fixed capital (e.g., office buildings, fiber optics networks, and management personel)” (103). What this means is that, in accordance to the decentralized forms of management that Amin and Sternberg endorse, the rise of the flexible, freelance worker inherent to post-Fordism, might already cause the role and dominant presence of the manager to decline.
Marxist theorist Stuart Hall came to a comparable definition of post-Fordism, deriving the following characteristics:
A shift to the new ‘information technologies’; more flexible, decentralized forms of labour process and work organisation; decline of the old manufacturing base and growth of the ‘sunrise’, computer-based industries; the hiving-off or contracting-out of functions and services; a greater emphasis on choice and product differentiation, on
marketing, packaging and design, on the ‘targeting’ of consumers by lifestyle, taste and culture rather than by the Register General’s categories of social class; the rise of the service and white-collar classes and the ‘feminisation’ of the workforce; an economy dominated by multinationals, with their new international division of labour and their greater autonomy from nation-state control; the ‘globalisation’ of the new financial markets, linked by the communications revolution; and new forms of the spatial organisation of social processes. (24)
In comparison to Amin, Hall does not frame post-Fordism strictly in association to conditions (or conceptions) of labour. Instead, Hall is more concerned with the wider perspective, relating post-Fordist labour to cultural changes at-large:
’Post-Fordism’ is also associated with broader social and cultural changes. For example, greater fragmentation and pluralism, the weakening of older collective solidarities and block identities and the emergence of new identities associated with greater work flexibility, the maximisation of individual choices through personal consumption. (24)
With similar intentions, then, Pascal Gielen discusses a number of defining properties of post-Fordism in relation to the way art, as a subject, is taught at universities in Europe, and how this art-education is limited by a number of cultural developments at-large. Although it might, at this point, appear somewhat random to look into the relationship between post-Fordist developments, and shifts within art-education, it is my understanding that exactly within the framework of art as a subject at universities and academies the effects of the post-Fordist operation can be made clear, as it shows the shift from the artist to entrepreneur, and the shift from emancipatory and culturally cultivating knowledge, to knowledge as commodity within cognitive capitalism.
1.3 Post-Fordism in the world of art and art-education: a flat wet world
Crucial to understanding Gielen’s application of post-Fordism as concept is his idea of flatness. Flatness is Gielen’s conceptual backbone for all operations he describes, and in which a large number of conceptions and developments are mentioned that appear to overlap with those described by Amin, with the exception that Gielen rather ascribes them to a rapid neoliberalisation of western culture under advanced capitalism, and all within the framework of art-education (the passing-on of knowledge) within renowned art institutions (art academies and museums). To summarize, flatness means the transition from a horizontal culture into a vertical one, but this process can only be explained properly when addressing Gielen’s entire conception of post-Fordism. Before doing so, however, I would
like to point out that Gielen’s writing emerges twenty years after Amin formulated his conceptions of post-Fordism, which naturally entails that Gielen is no longer in the position to analyse these conceptions, but rather that he is reflexive and critical towards the developments that have taken place since Amin’s writing.
First and foremost to Gielen’s turn to flatness, and his conception of post-Fordism, is the turn from quality to quantity, which goes hand-in-hand with a more market-oriented directive of universities. Gielen explains that:
After the 1999 Bologna Agreement, not only did the educational arena become highly uniform and rational, it was also redefined as a market space where educational institutes fiercely compete for students . . . Within this system, students are treated like little entrepreneurs, while the relationship between teacher and pupil takes the form of a contract . . . What was once regarded as highly functional for educating articulate citizens, creating ‘cultivated’ people, now fades into dysfunctionality under the dogma of profitability. (17-18)
As Gielen continues to explain, this shift from a model of qualitative education to the quantitative nature of cognitive capitalism entails that universities, much like any other business, are, in the words of Peter Sloterdijk, “focussed exclusively on the norms of their own management” (18). This internalizing is a significant feature of post-Fordism for two reasons. In the first place, because the pressing concern with the operation irrevocably speaks to an attitude that is focussed on process (and progress) rather than product, and, secondly, because this focus on process itself has led to the increase of managerial jobs within educational institutions. What this means is that the dogma of profitability, the flattening of university education, as well as the dominance of their respective market-orientations, are leading to a more dominant role (if not the most dominant) for the directive of universities. More time and money are spend on managing the institute, than on actually educating, or ‘cultivating’ citizens. It is this flattening of university education that can instantly be connected to the way that Amin describes that post-Fordist labour is no longer concerned with the material quality of production, and also appears fitting to the notion of fragmentation and pluralism that Hall endorses.
Where post-Fordism can be signalled in the shifting operations and attitudes of educational institutions, the effects this apparent flattening of society has (had) on the artist and his practice is both significant and strikingly comparable to the flexibilization of the worker and decentralization of management that both Amin and Hall describe. According to Gielen, art-education has been subjected to a ‘professionalization’, which should be read as the turnover of creative and educatory processes into a managerial and entrepreneurial
operation, and which implies that both the work of the art-student and the artist is starting to look increasingly similar to all other forms of post-Fordist labour. Gielen explains:
. . . students rapidly switch from one specific skill to a completely different area of knowledge. Such ‘pedagogic jungles’ thus often have the opposite results of what was intended and result in the professionalization of the creative profession. The aim of all this is to deliver ‘broadly employable’ or ‘polyvalent’ students, multi-purpose individuals who follow just one important imperative: that of adaptation and anticipation. ‘Adaptivity’ and ‘flexibility’ are after all the highest goods in a flat network world . . . Educational institutes become organizations that no longer deliver a surplus of autonomous personalities and idiosyncratic skills . . . On the contrary, schools obligingly follow the demands of the market to be more closely linked to the [generic, ed.] professional practice. (19)
It is in the previous quote that Gielen starts to profoundly show how art-labour is, through the way artists are educated, rapidly subsuming into other generic forms of post-Fordist labour. Both the notions of adaptivity, with anticipation as its watchword, and flexibility are certainly core properties of the post-Fordism that Amin and Hall describe. Gielen does however not stop here, because the developments discussed also alter the creative practice, and their education systems, in regards to the concepts of quality and time. For instance, Gielen directly ascribes the earlier mentioned shift in attitude to “the hegemonical shift from the museum to the biennial and the symbolic displacement of the artist by the so-called ‘independent’ curator” (20). Both these shifts have a significant influence on the way the artist is enabled to imagine himself and his role within society: “Artists who still aim for immortality, and who take up a position as bohemians outside of society, hoping for recognition in the hereafter, are today ridiculed for their conviction. It is only the here and now that counts . . . The artist can no longer stand outside of or above the world” (20).
It is this loss of the possibility to take a reflexive distance from the world that appears both problematic for the way in which art can offer an experience outside of a capitalist framework, and strikingly similar to the inherency of labour in managerial jobs, meaning that both the manager and the independent curator are symbolic for forms of labour that exclusively deal with the processes of that particular labour itself. In the case of the manager this is the improvement and enhancement of, as well as the ability to guarantee, a future prospective process of production, while for the curator this inherency is to be found in the fact that the curatorial practice always deals with further developing the conceptual properties of art from within.8 According to Gielen, however, the combination of a flattening
8
Even though the work of the manager and the curator might appear similar in what they aim to achieve, I have to be clear on the fact that their jobs are quite different in terms of output and profit. Onculture, a more flexible and anticipating artist operating within the here and now, and the professionalization of art-labour signify the shift from the artist into a creative worker, who
. . . today is not so much a trapeze artist but more of a (social) networker. In the world of visual art, the latter coincides wonderfully well with the ‘independent’ curator mentioned earlier. He mingles with the audience, wanting both to show and be seen. Sloterdijk calls it the shift from “art as production power . . . to art as exhibition power”. (20)
The shift Gielen describes in the words of Sloterdijk is an incredibly important one when measuring the effect of post-Fordist mechanisms in the art-world, because it perfectly describes, within this context, how artists today are increasingly concerned about opportunities of exposure, rather than with producing relevant and qualitatively sound works. This in itself is very well notable in what Gielen calls creative industrialization, the fact that even ”time, labour and even love have become liquid. . .” (21). This ‘liquid’ is not only used to imply the commodification of anything materially and immaterially produced within art, but is also a reference to Alessandro Barrico’s conception that the flat world is also a wet world – that it is a pool (21). According to Gielen the art-world thus is a ‘flat wet world’, that can be characterized by “[mobility, ed.] and networking . . .”, and in which the “best functioning units . . . are not large, unwieldy cruise ships . . . not unions, social classes, groups, political parties, institutions or families . . . but entrepreneurial individuals” (23). Consequently, however, the promise of a horizontal, flat economy based on the success of every individual as entrepreneur in fact is a false one, as a flat, wet, network-based economy still ultimately is a vertically dictated situation of exploitation, or perhaps is even more vertical than the preceding vertical capitalist exploitation prior to post-Fordism, considering that the rise of freelance-based labour, and the shift from the artist into a creative, freelance worker and entrepreneur, has raised a precarity among artists and art-students alike, as they are, now more than ever, in an vertically exploitable position.9
This flat wet network world, then, as Gielen continues, is “controlled by competition. This is why project-like thinking is so dominant in the current order” (22). Indeed, the structure of the project enables the competition of artists for an exhibition opportunity, or the other hand, it might also be argued that both the manager and the curator are, within the framework of post-Fordist labour, specifically concerned with the effective re-arrangement of existing processes (be it in business, or in art) for the sake of successfully moving into a new process.
9
One way to address the false horizontality of the post-Fordist, flat network world, is through the consideration of the freelancer, or entrepreneur, who functions both as employee and employer. Consequently, this entails that for the freelancer the social safety net is no longer provided by a company, but has to be taken care of individually. Simultaneously, then, it is no longer the company or corporation that takes an apparent risk of hiring an employee, but rather the freelancer is responsible for his own sense of social, and financial, security.exposure, much more than traditional structures such as being part of a museum collection, and, simultaneously, this project-based network world requires artists to be multi-specialized, polyvalent, and flexible ‘nomad-labourers’, who are capable to fend for themselves (even when they, perhaps, are not). At the same time, this project-like thinking focussed on exhibition rather than production also both stimulates and forces artists to work increasingly in a project-like structure. This, in one way, leads to an increase in site-specific art production, but it rather entails that artists are no longer depended on producing a finished work that is to be exhibited. Instead, the artist has to rely increasingly on an artistic practice that can be utilized on any given occasion. In other words, the emergence of a flat wet world in which the artist is solemnly depended on creating opportunities to exhibit a part of an on-going artistic practice is symptomatic for post-Fordist conditions of labour, and marks the dematerialization of labour in the art world. Furthermore, similar to the example of the post-Fordist carpenter rather selling his labour force than his initial product, the artist can no longer depend on the works that he produces through his practice. Rather, the artist is held accountable exclusively for his (continuous) artistic additions within the multitude of projects he can make himself part of.
Unfortunately for Pascal Gielen, who appears rather pessimistic about all the developments he discusses, the post-Fordist operation does not stop at dematerializing labour in the art world. As he himself explains “[i]n the flat world, [the, ed.] space of digging deep, of reflexivity and ‘slowness’, but also of isolation and dealing with materiality, is predictably exchanged for an immaterial discourse that is all about mobility, and the institution dissolves in a network structure” (20). Obviously, this explanation appears to be a simple repetition of the processes discussed previously, but I would like to pay significant attention to the fact that Gielen speaks specifically to the material properties of artistic practices, which he claims have been replaced for an immaterial discourse. Earlier, through the flat wet word, it was viable to explain that the artist was less concerned with producing a material work of art in order to create a better market-position in a project-oriented environment. However, as Gielen explains here, the artist is no longer concerned with the material properties of the work of art at all, and art has fallen to immaterial discourse all together.10 For example, the mentioned shift from production power to exhibition power
symbolizes how, within the confinements of post-Fordism, the production of art works has made place for the commodification of expression and knowledge. In other words, under conditions that can be described as post-Fordism, both the work of the artist as labour, and
10
The term immaterial discourse is itself somewhat of a pleonasm, because a discourse by nature is immaterial. However suiting this concept is for explaining the current conceptual nature of art, the concept immaterial discourse also signifies a discourse that is based on immateriality, and which therefore rules out any form of material agency: this agency does not at all exist or is subjected to the conceptual, immaterial, understanding of the work of art within the discourse.the work of the artist as a work of art are completely subsuming into regular forms of immaterial post-Fordist labour, while simultaneously the conceptual understanding of both artistic labour and artworks is entirely independent of any material property of the work. It is through the dematerialization and subsumption of both the work of art, and art-labour as form of knowledge production within cognitive capitalism, that it also becomes evident how post-Fordist developments have complicated the possibility to consider the objects produced within art-labour precisely outside of the framework of cognitive capitalism, instead of considering them from their material (and hence sensory) appearance as objects.
1.4 Complications: art-reception and the consequences of dematerialization
Pascal Gielen’s analysis of post-Fordism shows that shifts in conditions of labour have had a significant effect in the art world, as well as on the conception of what art is. Where a market-oriented attitude, and a mentality focussed on profitability rather than quality, forced the artist to become a creative worker, a polyvalent and nomadic labourer that can quickly adapt to working in a project-based environment, the material properties of the work of art rapidly have made place for what Gielen describes as an immaterial discourse. Art-labour, the artistic practice, and the conceptual understanding of what art is, thus no longer depend on a material understanding of the work, but on being able to comprehend the discourse that exalts any form of practice, under the right set of circumstances, and from the outside, to an artistic practice. Inherently, this dematerializing shift towards an immaterial discourse appears to disrupt, or even eradicate, the possibility to consider the art object from a material and sensory perspective. However, before determining what exactly are the properties of this immaterial discourse, I will first draw out some of the major complications that the subsumption and dematerialization of art under post-Fordism have (had) for the reception of art. The reason for doing so is that while the developments summarized in post-Fordism rapidly produced a different art and artist, they also caused the role of the spectator to change just as heavily, and it is specifically the spectator, the one who appears at the receiving end of art-production, whose position is complicated by works such as Tiravanija’s Supermarket.
Within a system of labour-conditions determined by post-Fordism, it is important to note that one of the most significant developments has taken place surrounding the concept of (surplus) value. One of the virtues of post-Fordism is that every labour operation – be it art or non-art, if such a distinction can still be made today – is explicitly subjected to the amount of traditional surplus value that it creates. I intentionally speak of traditional surplus value, because both the so-often mentioned notions of exchange and use value appear significant pillars for a culture determined by profitability, or at-large: capitalism. In this sense, any labour operation is thus recognized purely for the amount of exchange value (what it is worth,
financially) or use value (how is it useful, and therefore will amount in a bigger exchange value) that it produces. To similar effect, Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt describe value as “the capitalist category par excellence – the category and lens through which every thing, every object and all social relations are viewed” (54). The concerns about the subsumption of art into generic post-Fordist labour that Iles and Vishmidt address do however not emerge from the fact that the artist has changed into a creative worker, but rather stem from the conclusion that the distortion in the relationship between labour and art is causing art to lose its reflexive and emancipatory abilities, or its moment of communization: the way in which art is enabled to offer an experience that is particularly not capitalist, for which it creates a reflexive distance from that capitalism (Iles and Vishmidt 54).
In order to draw out the diminishing reflexive and emancipatory possibilities of art, Iles and Vishmidt operate from the perspective of Marxist aesthetics, in which “art must maintain its difference from capitalist life in order to exert a critical purchase on it” (55). In terms of value, then, this means that (at least) the consumption of art – the viewing, or experience of of it – should produce an emancipatory surplus value that operates separately from both exchange and use value. In a similar way, however, the experiences produced in labour should also be ultimately different from life in the private sphere, but while under post-Fordism labour increasingly relocates to the private sphere, and while art is subsuming towards forms of post-Fordist labour, labour, art, and life in the private sphere are increasingly dissolving into one another. Not only does this lead to apparent forms of art, such as Relational Aesthetics11 (of which Rirkrit Tiravanija is claimed to be part of), which Iles
and Vishmidt call “an epiphenomenon of the current phase of real subsumption in capitalism” (55), it also leads to a situation that no longer provides “a position to distinguish capitalist forms from their unadulterated contents, i.e. work and capitalist work, art and commodity art, life and capitalist life, and even use-value and exchange-value” (55).12 Furthermore, while
this might eventually provide art with new opportunities, in the sense that the “dissolution of
11
French curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, when writing a publication on a series of artistic practices that appeared, in his vision, similar on a conceptual level, first initiated the term ‘Relational Aesthetics’ (In French: Esthétique Relationnelle) in 1998. In this publication, which was translated in English in 2002, Bourriaud gives two definitions of this type of art. “Relational (aesthetics): Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations they represent, produce or prompt” (112). And, “Relational (art): A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space” (113). In my experience both Relational Aesthetics and Relational Art are used interchangeably to signify artist’s practices that operate on the conceptual basis of both definitions.12
Iles and Vishmidt, in their analysis of value, still perceive use value to be a non-capitalist category of value, because use value does not necessarily speaks to added surplus in any financially profitable way. Rather, the use value is determined by the addition it has on a (communist) society. However, within the confinement of the advanced capitalism in western society, it appears to me that use value is only another nominator for why something should, eventually, lead to a higher exchange value. Therefore, opposed to Iles and Vishmidt, I consider both use and exchange value part of the value that Iles and Vishmidt call the capitalist category par excellence (Iles and Vishmidt 54).art into life not only presents new content for commodification, but a new form of it in so far as art or culture has become a key medium through which commodification has been extended to what previously seemed beyond the economy” (55), art in fact becomes, to put it in Gielen’s vocabulary somewhat, the agent of the flattening of culture all together.
While various forms of contemporary art, among Relational Aesthetics, can be considered as symbolic for a flattening, or a horizontally structured culture, the developments of post-Fordism from a market-oriented, or rather quantitative, perspective provide the relationship between the artist, his practice, and the possible audience with a double bind. Through subsumption and dematerialization, artists, as well as art institutions such as the museum, gallery and exhibition-space, are losing the grounds on which they can provide a framework in which art can create a reflexive distance to everyday (and post-Fordist, capitalist) life – art, in this sense, loses its ability to provide a third, emancipatory, surplus value outside of use and exchange value. Further along these lines stands the fact that this subsumption and dematerialization have pushed art towards a method of self-legitimation that is exclusively depended on an immaterial discourse, which also entails that art-labour is increasingly concerned with the properties of this labour itself. In other terms, then, artists are increasingly producing work that can only be legitimately understood as art – and therefore in the ability to produce an emancipatory surplus value – by those who are already operative within art-labour; art-students, curators, artists, critics, etc.. Simultaneously, however, the attitude towards quantitative results and profitability has lead art institutions to reinvent themselves in order to draw bigger audiences, and to develop proportioned education-systems that can provide a wide access to how these post-Fordist forms of art can and should be understood.
For the audience, the visitor or spectator, then, this double bind also has significant consequences, and certainly not exclusively from the perspective of how the conceptual understanding of art itself has changed. As artist and philosopher Hito Steyerl explains: “Today the traditional work of art has largely been supplemented by art as a process – as an occupation” (Steyerl 2012: 107). However, as has already been made apparent by both Amin and Hall, this transformation of work into occupation did not only take place within the realm of art or artistic practice. Much rather, through the flexibilization, locational independence, mobility, and dematerialization of labour that post-Fordism has come to represent, most forms of labour have turned silently into occupations. This turn from job to occupation does not only affect conditions of labour, of production, but also influences consumption in the same way. As art theorist and philosopher Keti Chukhrov explains, within the terms of Paolo Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude (2009):
. . . post-Fordism has annulled or complicated the traditional Marxist correlation between the worker’s labor time and the degree of his or her exploitation. As labor is dematerialized and the division of labor in industrial production erodes, capital not only occupies the working hours during which products or goods (and its surplus value) are produced; it absorbs all the worker’s time, as well as his or her existence, thoughts, and creative desires. Products or goods are produced not to be consumed, to be swallowed directly, but as a set of new modes of communication, knowledge, languages, or even worlds. (95)13
In this sense, the main objective of consumption is no longer the “production of goods, but the multiplication of new conditions and variations for production itself. The prerogative of immaterial industry becomes the production of subjectivities and worlds – and these are cultural and creative categories, not economic ones” (95), which in itself shows how the dematerialization of labour itself causes the categorical boundaries between art-labour and generic art-labour to dissolve, while the balance between production and consumption has also been replaced by a process-over-product attitude. In Chukhrov’s terms, the dominance of the process “gives rise to a new consumer who does not merely devour, but communicates, is ‘creatively’ engaged. In this way, production activates and occupies life, social and societal space, the intellect, the ‘soul’” (95).
The turn from labour into occupation signifies the dissolving of labour and life as no other, meaning that through post-Fordist conditions of labour people are required to work all the time. This does however not mean that people have to be at their jobs constantly, but rather that in order to be a consumer, one must be a producer as well. Whether the consumer notices this shift is in itself not important, because in every way the consumer is giving back something in terms of production. From a process-over-product perspective, this simply means that the consumer is a producer in the sense that he represents the necessary link between the production of a single product, and the production line. The consumer, in this sense, is an essential part of the production process, and not just at the receiving end of it.
The idea of the consumer fulfilling an important part in the production process is nothing new within art. Already since the emergence of performance art, along with a performative concept of art, in the 1960s, the consumer – the spectator – has been considered an important factor within the constitution of works of art. What is however new, within the context of post-Fordism, is the shift from the spectator as consumer to the spectator as producer-consumer in terms of the level of engagement and work required.
13
As the Keti Chukhrov article, from which I quote here, is published in American, rather than British English, the word labor is spelled different as opposed to my use of labour. Conceptually however, they are exactly the same.Since the legitimation of labour as art-labour is no longer depended on material property, the spectator can no longer lean on any material agency, or a sensory experience, of the work of art in order to recognize it as such. Similarly, art-labour, and the artistic practices that it produces, is increasingly produced within a framework that, by means of being an occupation, only is accessible, and comprehensible immediately to those who work within that framework: the art world. In this sense the, in a lack of a better term, ‘neutral’ spectator, that already faces the reality of a job that functions as an occupation, will be required to keep himself updated constantly in order to stay in check with the developments that emerge from within, and determine, the immaterial discourse in which art is understood.
In practical terms, the turn from consumer to producer-consumer means that, in order for the spectator to understand how, for instance, a functioning supermarket within a museum can function as a work of art, and how a work of art as such can be enabled to communicate an emancipatory surplus value outside of use and exchange value, the spectator must constantly be in knowledge of the conditions, trends, and developments of the immaterial discourse that renders practices into art practices. What this also means is that the position of the spectator in the institutional triangular relationship between artist, art institute, and audience does not drastically change, but rather that to fulfil a role as spectator within this institutional triangle requires a lot more work. This also entails, as Hito Steyerl explains, that the existence of the immaterial discourse makes the art world, the understanding of what art is, and ultimately also the emancipatory surplus that art is supposed to communicate, much more exclusive, because those without either the time, money or skills to stay in the loop are rapidly losing the possibility to experience art in a meaningful way (Steyerl 2012: 108-109). In a similar way, then, this marginalization of the spectator’s possibility to experience an emancipatory surplus value through art serves as a good example of how the horizontal promise of post-Fordism in fact amounts into a heightened sense of inequality.
What stands out in the developed theories of Iles and Vishmidt, Steyerl, and Chukhrov is that they all move beyond their respective positions towards the influence of post-Fordist conditions of labour. Not only do they all, from their own angle, consider the effects of post-Fordist conditions of labour to be of immediate consequence for the way the spectator is enabled to understand art practices in the context of post-Fordism, but they all describe how the dissolving, or subsumption, and dematerialization of art within post-Fordist conditions are, or have been, changing the relationship between art and its economic status. Whereas Pascal Gielen solemnly explains how post-Fordism, along with its market-driven operations, has caused a flattening of culture, a flexibilization of the creative worker, and an immaterial discourse, it is only fair that Vishmidt, Iles, Steyerl and Chukhrov consider this relationship to be more mutual. In this way, as previously mentioned, Iles and Vishmidt touch
on the new potential that art-labour has provided in the creation of new forms of commodification (55). No longer is the existence and conceptual understanding of art stretched and problematized by the economical conditions that surround it, but rather art is taking up an increasingly influential position in the creation of new forms of commodities, new economies, and thus new forms to generate profit. Chukhrov continues in the same direction. Firstly, by drawing on the post-industrial ideas of French researcher André Gorz, she explains that “[a]dded value and profit depend on an immaterial, imaginary dimension of goods involved” (97). Rather than producing actual material goods, companies (much like today’s post-Fordist art-labour) produce a ‘philosophy’ of a product, thereby generating surplus value and profit strictly based on the immaterial dimensions of the goods they sell (97). With this notion of immaterial labour in mind, Chukhrov then continues to explain that “under the conditions of a late post-Fordist economy, we would have to acknowledge that immaterial labor today generates more surplus value than material labor . . .” (100). Looking at it from this perspective, it does not appear strange to claim that the subsumption and dematerialization of art has, to a similar effect, led to an ‘artification’ of labour, and not solemnly because the dissolving of art and labour logically works two ways.
Steyerl’s stance towards this ‘artification’ of labour is perhaps more programmatic than that of Iles and Vishmidt, or Chukhrov, in the sense that her writing on this topic takes a form nothing short of a manifesto. Therefore, she does not fail in taking a clear critical stance against the way post-Fordism is influencing art today, and consequently against the way that art is turning (or perhaps has already turned) into the most dominating form of capitalist aesthetics (Steyerl 2011: 31). Instead of starting from scratch, however, Steyerl considers the subsumption of art as a given when stating that “[c]ontemporary art is no unworldly discipline nestled away in some remote ivory tower. On the contrary, it is squarely placed in the neoliberal thick of things” (31), much like any of the post-Fordist conditions that have been discussed here. This consideration is however not just a profound analysis of the subsumed and dematerialized state of art today, but rather Steyerl describes contemporary art as:
. . . a brand name without a brand, ready to be slapped onto almost anything, a quick face-lift touting the new creative imperative for places in need of an extreme makeover, the suspense of gambling combined with the stern pleasures of upper-class boarding school education, a licensed playground for a world confused and collapsed by dizzying regulation. If contemporary art is the answer, the question is: How can capitalism be made more beautiful? (31)
Striking to the conception of art as an agent of the aestheticisation of capitalism that Steyerl discusses, is that she positions art within today’s capitalist society with a clear function. Art is not, in terms of producing an emancipatory surplus value outside of other notions of capitalist value, without an apparent function, but can rather be seen as signifier of how forms of art-labour and generic labour have dissolved into one another to serve the purpose of a society bend on profit and quantifiable results. Under these terms, then, Steyerl continues to explain that art today is a very effective ‘tool’ for, for example, the upgrading of poor, or underdeveloped, neighbourhoods (Steyerl 2012: 109). Furthermore, Steyerl approaches the emergence of art-as-occupation not solemnly from the post-Fordist perspective in which the labourer is required to turn a job into an occupation, but also explains what is on the flipside: art occupying life by exactly being the driving force behind the aestheticisation of capitalist society (110-111). And as Steyerl rightfully concludes, this new and apparent omnipresent circulation of art entails that while “artistic occupation completely invades life, it also cuts off much art from circulation” (111).
Besides the fact that artistic occupation cuts off a lot of forms of art from circulation, either because these practices do not fit within a project-oriented attitude, or because these forms of art cannot find an apparent function as aestheticizing agents within capitalism, what also can be read in Steyerl’s words is that the notion ‘contemporary art’ is being hollowed out from the inside. Therefore the conceptual understanding of what kind of practices are art-practices is not only determined by an immaterial discourse, but also the term contemporary art has become a watchword for the aestheticisation of capitalist commodities and operations. This apparent ‘abuse’ of the notion, then, can only lead to the fact that art is even harder to recognize as art, and that the possibility to create a moment communization, a reflexive space, and an emancipatory surplus value, as well as a material and sensory consideration of the art object outside of post-Fordist capitalism, is pushed even further away than ever. For the spectator not operative within the art world, then, the task is not only to be up to date on the current status of the conditions of the immaterial discourse that determines the conceptual understanding of what art is, but also to be able to distinguish the contemporary art that, under the conditions of the immaterial discourse, produces an emancipatory surplus value, from the label ‘contemporary art’ that is used as brand name for aestheticized forms of capitalist production.
1.5 Cultural Analysis: Rikrit Tiravanija’s Supermarket within post-Fordism
While assessing the properties of the concept of post-Fordism and its apparent effects on and operations within the art world, it has become clear that the developments that can be categorized as post-Fordism have caused a situation in which both the conceptual understanding of art, and its (material) existence are heavily disputed. Simultaneously, the
