The Museum of Conceptual Art: A Prolegomena to Hip

By Matthew Harrison Tedford April 12, 2011

A July 1986 People magazine article dubbed performance art the year’s “hippest form of expression,” and San Francisco as its home.1 The article mentions artist Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) as foundational to the initial nurturing of a San Francisco performance art scene. The museum, however, had closed down two years before the article was written, and performance art was nothing new to the city in 1986. The article represents one of the few mainstream references to one of San Francisco’s—and the country’s—most important and pioneering, but often forgotten, art institutions. Marioni states that as an artist he stopped making objects by 1968. Instead he began thinking about the body and working with sound. He sees a linguistic dimension to Conceptual art in New York at the time and an emphasis on light in Los Angeles, but sees a focus on the body in San Francisco. Marioni understands San Francisco’s perspective on performance as coming from “free speech, free love, the hippie era of drugs and rock and roll.”2 The art is tied to the land and the political turmoil and radicalism of the era. Also in 1968, Marioni became the curator at the Richmond Art Center. He started MOCA two years later out of a desire to do “more radical” things than he could do at the Art Center. The museum opened on 86 Third Street in the south of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, near the current confluence of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. MOCA is considered the first alternative art space in the country.3 As a first-of-its-kind institution, it forged the way for the many alternative spaces that would pop up in the city, such as New Langton Arts (1975–2009) and countless others across the United States. Central to the structure of MOCA was the fact that it was not a collecting institution. This lent itself to fostering Conceptual art that would be ephemeral and performative. Marioni says that everything that happened at MOCA in its first years was “action by sculptors.”4 In fact, the museum’s first public show was Sound Sculpture As. The April 30, 1970 performance included nine artists: Mit Arbeiten von Arlo Acton, Allan Fish (Marioni’s pseudonym), Terry Fox, Mel Henderson, Paul Kos, Peter Macan, Jim Melchert, Jim McCready, and Herb Yarno.5 Kos’ famous piece picked up the sound of two twenty-five-pound blocks of melting ice with eleven boom microphones. Henderson walked around the gallery space with a 30-caliber rifle, eventually firing a single shot at the image of a projected tiger. For McCready’s piece, four nylon-clad women walked down an ad hoc runway, rubbing their thighs together, creating a swishing sound.6 These abstract performances lacked any clear narrative, but they all took as their medium an embodied or physical aurality. Later that year, curator Willoughby Sharp put together a video show called Body Works. The October 18, 1970 show included thirty-minute black-and-white videos from Vito Acconci, Terry Fox, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Keith Sonnier, and William Wegman. Marioni claims that this was the first video-art show in California and the first body-art show in the country. Acconci’s video pictured him burning the hair from his nipples.7 Typical of his work, Nauman’s piece depicted the artist walking around his studio, exaggerating his movements and highlighting the way his body moves through the space. Jerome Tarshis of Artforum described this piece as “an exercise in challenging and possibly torturing the audience.”8 These works foregrounded the artist’s body as both paint and canvas. In doing so, they also utilized the relatively new form of video art, advancing a pairing that would stick around well into the digital age. By the end of 1970, Marioni decided to make MOCA a nonprofit corporation so that he could receive National Endowment for the Arts funding. The NEA granted MOCA its first grant of $5,000 in 1971.9 This would later serve as the entire budget for the museum in 1973. The museum then began accepting members and even had patrons. At the end of 1972, it moved to a large building across the street at 75 Third Street. Marioni convinced the building owner to give him the space rent-free. A year later, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency bought the building. Due to the agency’s policy of charging tenants the same price as they had been paying their previous landlords, the space remained free for the museum and sustained MOCA for the remainder of its years.10 One of MOCA’s more well-known shows, All Night Sculptures, took place April 20 to April 21, 1973. This show included nine artists, who were all given their own room in which to perform from sunset to sunrise. Visitors came and went as they pleased that night. Barbara Smith’s contribution, Feed Me, was a piece in which she sat on a mattress on the floor of a room, alone and naked. A tape recorder looped the words, “Feed me,” and Smith was surrounded by food, wine, and marijuana, with which visitors could follow this order. Smith states that when she ended her marriage she expected men to see her as something other than a sex object. Disappointed by the illusory nature of this optimism, she performed Feed Me as a means of flipping the male-female sexual dynamic. The artist spent the night eating, drinking, conversing, and having sex with the men that entered the room. She did all of this on her own terms, embracing her sexual vulnerability; she put her back against the wall—figuratively and literally. Smith commanded respect from those who might deny it to her in other settings.11 Kos’ piece in All Night Sculptures required visitors to march toward a red light to the beat of a typewriter. Bonnie Sherk trespassed into a nearby pigeon sanctuary, upsetting the nesting birds. Terry Fox, Joel Glassman, and Mel Henderson each created rooms in the museum that dealt with the manipulation of light. Steve Laub spent the night metamorphosing, leaving, and reentering his room as different identities. Frank Youmans worked as a craftsman, and John Woodall drew his shadow while rotating on his axis.12 The year of 1973 saw several other key performances and installations for MOCA, including the work of Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, and Dan Graham. MOCA’s Free Beer every Wednesday began in 1973; it was a simple social gathering in which beer was served while artist’s videos were shown. From 9 p.m. November 2 to 9 p.m. November 5, 1973, Linda Montano, with Marioni as a collaborator, performed her Handcuffed to Tom Marioni for 3 Days. As the title suggests, the two artists were handcuffed together for seventy-two hours. The two went about their lives as normally as possible, riding the bus, eating, and going to the movies together. That which occurred while the two were inside the MOCA building was documented on video.13 Montano stated that the work was an attempt to redefine marriage through art and that it stemmed from a tension of feeling the ability to be permissive in her work but not in her life.14 As a married woman in the ’70s, she would find herself bound—handcuffed—to the patriarchal institution. This work was a visual manifestation of that reality. The piece preceded the artist’s similar 1983–84 work One Year Performance, in which she spent the entirety of one year tied with a rope to fellow artist Tehching Hsieh. Beginning in 1974, MOCA saw a sharp decrease in activity. Notable shows included Actions by Sculptors for the Home Audience, broadcast on KQED on February 21, 1974; a 1975 installation and performance by Acconci; and A Tight 13 Minutes, a 1976 showing of thirteen one-minute videos by a variety of artists, including many MOCA regulars such as Fox, Henderson, Kos, and Marioni himself. In a 1976 interview, Marioni stated that the museum was in a “phasing out” period as a performance space.15 MOCA ceased activity in 1981, but did not officially close its doors until 1984, when it lost its use of the building.16 In his autobiography, Marioni laments the “death” of Conceptual art in the ’80s, claiming that it had become academic and institutionalized.17 In other words, it had become hip. In a way, it’s as if a reactionary Marioni gave up on conceptual performance because his involvement with it no longer situated him on the margins of the art world. Nonetheless, during its brief history, MOCA forged the way for future alternative art institutions. It served as an important space in the ’70s that allowed artists to experiment with the use of the body as a medium in-and-of itself. In fact, Marioni claims that the now-seminal performance artists Acconci and Burden both held their first California shows at MOCA.18 At times, important works of feminist performance art called MOCA home. But the museum can also be seen as a bit of an old boys’ club. During the golden era of feminist art, in a city known for its progressive politics, the vast majority of artists to grace its halls were male. The history written here pays special attention to Barbara Smith and Linda Montano, but, in fact, they are among the exceptions to the norm. It is interesting, and unlikely coincidental, that their works were among the most politically engaged performances at the Museum of Conceptual Art. ________ NOTES: 1. Michael Small, “Off the Wall,” People, July 14, 1986. 2. Tom Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy: A Memoir (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2003), 83. 3. Terri Cohn, “Circa 1970: The Evolution of the Alternative Art Scene,” Artweek, December 1999, 15-16. 4. Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, 94. 5. “MOCA/FM: Sound Sculpture As,” The Internet Archive, accessed March 27, 2011. 6. “Rumbles; The Museum of Conceptual Art,” Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970), 6. 7. Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, 97. 8. Jerome Tarshis, “San Francisco: Body Works,” Artforum 9 (February 1971), 85. 9. Carl E. Loeffler, “From the Body into Space: Post-Notes on Performance Art in Northern California,” in Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art, ed. Carl E. Loeffler and Darlene Tong (San Francisco: Last Gasp Press and Contemporary Arts Press, 1989), 376-77. 10. Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, 102-5. 11. Jennie Klein, “Feeding the Body: The Work of Barbara Smith,” A Journal of Performance Art 21, no. 1 (January 1999): 30-31. 12. A. Belard, “All Night Sculptures,” Artweek, May 26, 1973, 3. 13. Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, 106. 14. Linda Montano quoted in Hilary Robinson, ed. Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 362. 15. Loeffler, “From the Body into Space,” 377. 16. Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, 116. 17. Ibid. 18. Reyhan Harmanci, “Performance Art Finds New Audiences,” Bay Citizen, June 21, 2010.
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Excerpts From Speculation (1967-1970), Mel Bochner

For a variety of reasons I do not like the term “conceptual art.” Connotations of an easy dichotomy with perception are obvious and inappropriate. The unfortunate implication is of a somewhat magical/mystical leap from one mode of existence to another. The problem is the confusion of idealism and intention. By creating an original fiction, “conceptualism” posits its special nonempirical existence as a positive (transcendent) value. But no amount of qualification (or documentation) can change the situation. Outside the spoken word, no thought can exist without a sustaining support.

A fundamental assumption in much recent past art was that things have stable properties, i.e., boundaries. This seemingly simple premise became the basis for a spiraling series of conclusions. Boundaries, however, are only the fabrication of our desire to detect them . . . a trade-off between seeing something and wanting to enclose it. For example, what we attribute to objects as “constancy of size,” during their progressive diminution when we walk away from them, is not a set of snapshot images gradually blending together. Concentration produces the illusion of consistency. Sight itself is prelogical and without constants (out of focus). The problem is that surrendering the stability of objects immediately subverts any control we think we have over situations. Consider the possibility that the need to identify art with objects is probably the outgrowth of the need to assign our feelings to the things that prompt them.

The “history of art” and the “history of painting andsculpture” are not the same, but merely coincident at some points.

Immediate experience will not cohere as an independent domain. Memories tend to be remains, not of past sensations, but past verbalizations. The discussion of much recent art has attempted the substitution of stimulus information for sensation (exterior vs. interiorization). This has not resolved discreteness with continuity. Perception of an object is generally preconceived as taking place within a point-by-point time. This disconnected time, a lingering bias of tense in language, restricts our experiencing the conjunction between object and observation. When this conjunction is acknowledged, “things” become indistinguishable from events. Carried to its conclusion, physicality, or what separates the material from the nonmaterial (the object from our observation), is merely a contextual detail. A structure that concerns the nonobject oriented artist is the language that he uses to formulate his thoughts. There is nothing inherently antivisual about this pursuit. Works of art are not illustrations of ideas.

If, as it has been said, time presupposes a view of time, perception also includes its presuppositions. Perception is geared to cancel out whatever is stray or unaccountable. “Back-ground” is characterized negatively as the unclear, indistinct, and nonarticulated. But background is neither the margin nor fringe of the implicit. It is only through the function of its “opening out” that we are presented with a passage to the density of things. The realm of ideas is the operative link preceding any of the forms of objectness: it is an expanse of directions, not dimensions; of settings, not points; of regions, not planes; of routes, not distances. Beneath materiality are not merely facts but a radiation spreading out beyond dimensionality, involvement, and signification.

What if we were to think only about the place from which works of art enter our consciousness? Five possibilities come to mind:
1) what we look up at
2) what we look down upon
3) what we see straight on
4) what we are surrounded by
5) what is not seen by looking
(One dividend of such an approach could be the erasure from our minds of all vestiges of the listless “object quality” of paintings, or the leaden “specific materials” of sculpture.) We could then simply concentrate on where we are looking. Consideration of “where” implies more than an ontology of position. It suggests that differentiations by style need not be made and then transformed into values. All art exists as it exists within its own described set of conditions. The only esthetic question is recognition . . . re-cognition . . . thinking it again.

A desire to eliminate “furniture” from art is not nihilistic. What does initially appear “sterile” is an attitude that establishes nothing, produces little, and by its very nature cancels out results. Also there is the gratuitousness of being unwilling to transform the world or accumulate in it . . .

At the risk of appearing self-contradictory, I do not believe art is understood through intellectual operations, but rather that we intercept the outline of a certain manner of treating (being in) the world.

Thinking via the constant intervention of procedures, one over another, filters out the arbitrariness of conventional thought patterns. Any sort of in-formation or re-formation can be diverted by externally maintained constants. The fascination with seriality and modular form (which continues, disguised, in the work of many artists) made it possible, at one point, to clarify and distinguish the processes involved in the realization of the work of art. Ordered proceduralism often led to an inversely proportional visual complexity. Suppression of internal relational concerns opened the way for the involvement with ideas beyond the concentricity of objects. It became apparent that the entire foundation of art experienced from a “point of view” was irrelevant to art of attenuated size or total surround, i.e., works without experienced centers. A case in point is the work made in and for a single place. Wall-works, for example, simply bypass double supports. Marks on the wall, here forward and in view, there only peripherally visible, held where they are by the wall’s mass . . . spread along the surface. They cannot be “held,” only seen. As such they are neither copy nor paradigm. Art of this nature is not secondly present. Its uniqueness (single placedness) is its coexistent unity with its own appearance.

Formalist art is predicated on a congruency between form and content. Any artist who considers this dichotomy either irreconcilable (or desirable) is no longer interested in formal relationships. For this artist the activity of making is not equivalent to the informing of content (a more appropriate word would be “intent”). Certain intents are capable of various equally viable realizations.

Imagination is a word that has been generally banned from the vocabulary of recent art. Associations with any notion of special power reserved for artists or of a “poetical world” of half-dreams seem particularly unattractive. There is, however, within the unspecified usage of the word a function that infuses the process of making and seeing art. The root word “image” need not be used only to mean representation (in the sense of one thing referring to something other than itself). To re-present can be defined as the shift in referential frames of the viewer from the space of events to the space of statements or vice versa. Imagining (as opposed to imaging) is not a pictorial preoccupation. Imagination is a projection, the exteriorizing of ideas about the nature of things seen. It reproduces that which is initially without product. A good deal of what we are “seeing” we are, in this sense, actually imagining. There is an overlap in the mind of these two dissimilar activities. We cannot see what we cannot imagine.

One does not frequently think with his eyes closed, although what one is thinking at any moment need not be directly concerned with what one is looking at. A nonvisual thought (one without background) seems highly unlikely.

Ultimately, description as a critical method fails. Pretending to a nonsubjective rendering of the object, it cuts off the peripheral pressures of experience. When visual data is accepted as the only basis of apprehension, there is no possibility for an account of intentions. At the same time, descriptive self-enclosure does not create itself as its own sole recipient.

Would anything change if sensible things were conceived of as “across” space, rather than “in” space? First, objects would cease to be the locus of sight. Then, no longer centers in themselves, they would demand to be perceived as the organization by everything around them. What might result from this conjecture is a sense of trajectory rather than of identity. What common sense has always presented as a unity (objects) become only the negatives in a field of determinants. Opaque, yet fragmented, what is seen is only what stops my view beyond . . . it is in front of me but without being in depth. Profiled in this way, matter surrenders its obstinate chunkiness to reveal only a position in a cross section of orientations and levels, these levels merge on but one plane into dimensional sense data. And even on this plane, thought can efface them.

A procedural work of art is initiated without a set product in mind. In a piece of this kind the interest is only in knowing that the procedures, step by step, have been carefully and thoroughly carried through. The specific nature of any result is contingent on the time and place of implementation, and is interesting as such. It is the “proceeding” that establishes it.

On approaching the threshold of nonenduring art, we can easily postulate an art of microseconds . . . but rarely see it. Why does art have to be any more distinct than peripheral vision? I do not mean this in the sense of “now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t.” I am imagining an art which by taking up all the expected requirements of our basic modes of perception would, in so doing, render itself invisible.

In the context of visual art what could the term “dematerialization” mean? I find that it contains an essential contradiction that renders it useless as an idea. The inherent weakness is revealed when the derivation of the term is examined. Tracing the origin of the idea leads one back to the basic confusion in the notion of “abstraction.” All “abstract art” is premised on the belief in a first-level reality composed of constituent and separate qualities. In order to arrive at a truer “reality,” the abstract artist must take apart this composite structure. The act of disjointure was to result in an intensification of the abstracted quality (color, shape, texture, etc.). This then became the material for further manipulation. The entire substructure of this concept is flawed. It simply is not possible to break things down into classifiable components, at least not without destroying the essential unity that is their existence. The blue of my typewriter is inseparable from its smooth surface. The blue-smooth surface was not created by combining a “blue” with a “smooth.” Abstraction is an analytical method and not a reversible equation. One further step along this same line of reasoning yields “dematerialization.” If all qualities are taken away, you have de(no)-materialization (components). But given the evidence that abstraction itself is without credible grounds, can one derive from it a second level . . . a completely nonontological art? My disagreement with dematerialization goes beyond a squabble with terms. There is no art that does not bear some burden of physicality. To deny it is to descend to irony. Words set up circumstances for understanding, and this particular one only perpetuates old confusions. It is misleading to the intentions of artists finding different ways for art to come into being . . . and both how and how long it stays there.


NOTES
Reprinted from Artforum (May, 1970).

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Under the Sign of Labor, Sabeth Buchmann

I. From the Dematerialized Object to Immaterial Labor

Anglo-American Conceptual art, which emerged in the mid to late 1960s, displayed a new interest in linguistics and information theory that clearly distinguished it from the industrially coded production aesthetics of Pop art and Minimalism. The thesis that went along with this was that replacing author-centered object production with linguistic or information-based propositions represented a challenge not only to any traditional “material-object paradigm” (Art & Language) but also to those aspects of craftsmanship within “production values” that are crucial to any claims to authorship and the “work,” and this perhaps helps to explain how and why the history of Conceptual art has mistakenly been written as a history of “dematerialization of the object.”(1) Without wishing to enter into any detailed critique of the concept of dematerialization, for this has already been sufficiently undertaken and documented,(2) I would still like to take this as a starting point, though not in order to discuss the status of the object in the context of postconceptual practice or to relativize the problems inherent to the discourse of dematerialization. Instead, I am interested in the inherent revaluation of “work” that the concept involves. Lucy Lippard was not alone in seeing one of Conceptual art’s main goals in replacing the traditional object with distribution-oriented sign systems in order to overcome the market logic of art production and anchor these distribution-oriented sign systems within noninstitutional, noncommercial public space.(3) Although this goal was not achieved, Conceptual art was still successful in establishing the idea that art’s symbolic value did not necessarily have to be judged on the basis of its material production, but could just as well be gauged in registers of social productivity. This means that whereas art was traditionally seen in terms of categories of objects (works of art), now there was a renewed call for art committed to the avant-garde and a form of communication capable of generating public space. As the work of the early Conceptual artists shows, this amounted to a new notion of public space that was projected onto such various interrelated spheres as urban space, social movements, the mass media, new technologies, libraries, etc.

We can assume, along with the philosopher Jacques Rancière, that at the basis of such a discourse of public space lies not only the avant-garde notion of transferring art to life, but also simple, classical images of the “emulating artist,” who in contrast to the “standard” worker, who is excluded “from participation in what is common to the community,” “provides a public stage for the ‘private’ principle of work.”(4) But as standard categories of material production become obsolete with the relativization of forms and notions of the work that are focused around the notion of the author, then the question arises as to the status of the artistic work that is to be exhibited in the public realm. If Maurizio Lazzarto’s idea of “immaterial labor,”(5) which refers to service activities in the realm of education, research, information, communication, and management, is taken as a starting point, then a possible answer to this question might lie in linking Chandler and Lippard’s discourse of dematerialization with the modes of representing labor in the neo-Conceptual movements of the 1980s and 1990s.

II. From “The faking of” …

If the dematerialization discourse is interpreted in the sense of superimposing “material” with “symbolic” production, it can be seen as corresponding to a social process: “the reconfiguration of labor relations in the major industrial nations” that began in the early 1970s.(6) In their book The Labor of Dionysus, Toni Negri and Michael Hardt write: “The most important general phenomenon of the transformation of labor that we have witnessed in recent years is the passage toward what we call the factory society… All of society is now permeated through and through with the regime of the factory, that is, with the rules of specifically capitalist relations of production.”(7) The two authors conclude that “the traditional conceptual distinction between productive and unproductive labor and between production and reproduction … should today be considered completely defunct.”(8) Negri and Hardt thus broaden prevailing concepts of value to such an extent that “immaterial” or self-utilizing forms of labor can be included.(9)

Although these discourses were not yet public in the 1980s-at least not in the art context-comparable revisions of the traditional concept of labor and production can be detected, albeit in an entirely different theoretical realm. These included above all Jean Baudrillard’s proposition-put forward as early as the 1970s-that “production” (which went along with the industrial age) had been replaced by “simulation” (in the age of information).(10) Backed up by discourses on the “immaterial” (Lyotard),(11) postmodern media theory was increasingly to take on the role of a social theory(12) and as such be able to find its way into those (neo-)Conceptual forms of thought and praxis that overlapped with the approaches of poststructuralism, deconstruction, and cultural studies that were emerging at the time. In contrast to the focus on linguistics that still determined the discourse on the dematerialization of the object, here semiotics enhanced by cultural criticism came onto the scene, no longer measuring the “real” as a fact of material production, but rather as an effect of a process of “de-realization” driven forward by media technology. Concepts often used at the time, such as “simulacrum,” “surrogate,” and “fake,”(13) as well as the founding of fictional “corporate identities,” provide a sense of how references to ideas like “labor” and “production” have undergone a form of virtualization, and, even if only “simulated,” a form of corporate privatization.

The fact that the playful analogy of artistic self-organization and fictional “corporate identities” was to turn into economic reality in the 1990s could be one of the reasons why postmodernist media theory slowly went out of fashion. So-called reality had returned to the art world, and not as a result of the crisis in the art market that took place in the interim. Political and economic discourses around post-Fordism, service culture, and neoliberalism, including the concepts they used for capital, labor, and production such as “flexibilization,” “deregulation,” and “mobilization,” became key terms within those post-Conceptual developments that took recourse to approaches from the 1970s (such as site-specificity, identity, and institutional critique) and thereby positioned themselves against the ongoing demand of the art market for “good craftsmanship” and quantifiable “production values.” Parallel to this, the economic situation of those institutions and artists dependent on public funding became more drastic, as the cultural sphere was increasingly hit by cuts, meaning that budgets for production formats not adequate to the art market became more scarce and new forms of “aggressive sponsoring”(14) found their way into museums and art associations. Thus, any talk of “fictional corporate identities” became hopelessly obsolete when, due to a mix of voluntary and forced self-determination, artists saw themselves confronted with the necessity of organizing their own financial means for production, work spaces, exhibition sites, contacts, possibilities of distribution, and publics. Hence, the discourse on the “mobilized relation between capital and labor”(15) became increasingly obsolete with the increasing entanglement of self-organized, institutional, corporate, and state economies. This was a process that became a major issue and also a subject in their work for artists who sought to integrate into their works the changing conditions of labor and production and the discourse on the public and the private that these conditions engendered.

III. The making of

In the following I will explore the 1998 exhibition The making of, organized by the artist Matthias Poledna at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, in which the artist himself, together with Simon Leung, Dorit Margreiter, and Nils Norman participated. This exhibition both explicitly and implicitly addressed the problems sketched above. For example, it was concerned with the transformed modes of presenting and publishing artistic work within the tradition of Conceptualism, as related to “low-capital, labor intensive industries,”(16) as a characteristic of the economics of post-Fordism marked by mass unemployment. In The making of, this included critical revisions of techniques of site specificity, identity critique, institutional critique, postproduction, and cultural research, and hence revisions of conceptual notions of the work that intended to historically illuminate the blind spots of modernist art discourse-its overlapping with phenomena of everyday life, commodity and media culture, architecture, and design. The making of was framed by an exhibition design that contained references to Michael Asher’s 1977 solo show in Eindhoven’s Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Daniel Buren’s exhibition Frost and Defrost (1979, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles)(17) and information on the corporate design of the Generali Foundation itself. Asher’s concept had been to dismantle fifteen glass ceiling panels from one of the exhibition spaces of the Van Abbemusuem, and to then determine the duration of the exhibition as the time required for the installation team-working to a fixed schedule-to reinstall the glass panels.(18) Poledna then cited this idea by also taking down the ceiling panels and having them placed in the entryway of the Generali Foundation’s exhibition space. Instead of reinstalling them, as Asher did, Poledna gave them a new function as bearers of information with passages from a handbook of the Generali Foundation on questions of design and quotations from the building design of the architects Jabornegg & Palffy. In this way, the works presented became legible in the context of a highly charged contemporary debate on the autonomy of commissioned art.(19) It was, of course, inevitable that this debate would also affect the Generali Foundation itself, as it is publicly seen to be a private art institution funded by an insurance company, and also especially since the Generali Foundation was especially interested in the tradition of Conceptual art and its associated forms of institutional critique. This show made reference to a paradigmatic work of institutional critique and to Poledna’s own involvement as a graphic artist in the corporate design of the Generali Foundation, references which mutually influenced each other, and the selected form of exhibition design clearly showed that the relationship between the two can hardly be limited to a polarized view of critique, on the one hand, and affirmation on the other.(20) For it was precisely from his position of involvement that Poledna formulated a position of critical distance that is seldom encountered in what are otherwise generalizing attacks on art as service. As Poledna explained in the interview for the exhibition catalog: “Interestingly, the Generali Foundation-as far as I know-voluntarily subscribed to the corporative aesthetics of the Generali, in that the logo, typefaces, colors, etc., correspond to a great extent to the logic of representation of the Generali Insurance Company. At the same time, the terms that appear in this text-position, identity, form, content, style, format-are constantly applied in art contexts. This reciprocal saturation of different rhetorics becomes particularly virulent when the language appears to indicate that the artists of the exhibition are speaking for themselves.”(21) Thus, in his eyes, the differences between “‘free’ and contractual artistic work are generally less than assumed. Precisely because artistic projects are considered non-determined, one is confronted more with implicit expectations and general assumptions, that-consciously or not-inscribe themselves into the respective approaches.”(22)

In light of the reference to Asher, Poledna’s statement can help to explain further aspects of the exhibition design that affect the relationship between public and private work discussed above. For what category does corporate identity belong to, and can its thematization, like Asher’s intervention, allow the distinctions between “visible” and “invisible,” “standardized” and “flexible,” “physical” and “intellectual” labor and their proper evaluation to become evident? By using the ceiling panels as an exhibition display and as a bearer of information with the aim of making architecture the object of the exhibition (allowing it to block the lines of vision in the exhibition space), Polenda modified Asher’s reflection of the shifting relationship between artistic and institutional labor economy in the sense of an overview of “architecture, corporate design, and institutional self-portrayal.”(23) Using Asher’s design as a point of departure, the distinction between private labor, which is private because it is usually invisible, and public, or usually visible labor, was expanded by an implicit reference to the equivalence of symbolic and corporate capital.(24) In this way, the exhibition also addressed the various institutional, social, and art critical evaluations of the role of the artist and the role of the service provider.

The combination of historical and site-specific, topical reference to labor’s (self-)representation staged in The making of carried yet another discourse with it-the discourse rooted in the avant-garde tradition that claims that making production visible amounts to turning art into social productivity. According to the standard view, this takes place only when the limits of the institution of art are transgressed and other social fields are entered. As the art and culture critic Christian Höller writes in his catalog contribution: “In symbolic-political production, therefore, working with overlapping and permeating contexts is inherent. Contexts understood as ‘institutional’ require, though, a more complex positioning than the following alternatives suggest for the moment; direct linkage (for instance onto the exhibiting institution) or unbound ‘outer’ orientation.”(25)

In the light of the polarization of institutional and social fields, as problematized by Poledna and Höller, the exhibition design for The making of offered a starting point at the end of the 1990s for reworking apparently stagnating institution-critical practices-including criticism of these practices themselves-by virtue of a broadly framed discourse on the reciprocal relationship between processes of corporatization and shifting modes of labor and production. As far as the visibility of nonartistic, that is, industrial and standard “labor” in the context of the Generali Foundation is concerned, here, too, a link can be made to what Poledna envisioned as the “interrelations between architecture, corporate design, and institutional self-portrayal.”(26) In the interview quoted above, the artist noted that the ceiling “actually displays an outside of this relatively hermetic space” of the Generali Foundation: “After the dismantling of the ceiling panels the room evokes the image of an industrial shed, or backyard industry. On the lot where the foundation is now situated, there was originally a shed in which hats were produced. My concern was to advance other images against the original appearance of an architecture which oscillates between a supposedly pragmatic understanding of classical modernity and a certain late eighties look.”(27)

That means that just a few years after the reconstruction of the building, the basic design principle-the avoidance of “irregular contours” to create a “clear image”(28)-surfaces in The making of as a historically determined motif. The proposition implicit in this intervention, that this image could already soon prove to be something worthy of revision, also resonates in Nils Norman’s contribution Proposal 10. Corresponding to the symbolic reconstruction of a history of industrial production eradicated by the architecture of the Generali Foundation, the contribution foresaw “the radical redevelopment of the Generali Foundation, Vienna. Consisting of various architectural, bureaucratic, environmental, and psychological interventions.”(29) Nils Norman’s proposal of an alternative foundation that issued from the interest he noted in “alternative economic forms”(30) as a consequence of the closure of industrial companies and the resultant mass unemployment thematized at the same time the possibility that the Generali Group might someday turn to marketing concepts that are socially more productive and invest its money in ecology and related socio-technological projects-things that themselves have in the meantime become a feature of a deregulated variant of “do-it-yourself” culture.(31)

The idea that a new understanding of work and production could have an influence on the respective relations of visibility of “standard” private labor and “artistic” public labor is one of the subtexts of Dorit Margreiter’s spatial and video installation Into Art. Analogous to the exhibition design, here, too, cultural and corporate forms of capital are related to the material and symbolic value of those fields of labor and activity in which institutional and social contexts as well as “autonomous” and service-oriented forms of labor overlap in terms of their compatibility with media-effective image functions. In an interview that I held with Margreiter for the catalog to The making of, she explains, that “the art-place itself already presents a medial construction … a site of production and reproduction of the symbolic …”(32) Here, we again see a typical argument of media theory approaches in the 1980s, which considers the notion of production as an effect of technologically supported processes of “de-realization.” On the other hand, the notion of the “social factory” is also apparent here, coined to refer to the de-differentiation and immaterialization of realms of production and reproduction.

Appropriating the genre of a trailer for a TV soap, Into Art simulates the self-representation of a private art institution according to the standards of the “creative industry.” Following the sketch printed in the exhibition catalog:

[Zitat] The series begins with a director being appointed to the institution which at the time had been in existence for three years. At this time there was a restructuring not only of staff but also of programmatic orientation. The newly constructed museum building is supposed to reinforce the role of art as an image bearer for the corporation, at the same time the new institution is supposed to develop its own profile within the context of international art discourse.(33)

The accompanying storyboards, which were installed in the exhibition as user-friendly text panels on the rear of the wall construction, included fragmentary information on the life and work of the actors. These were characterizations of functions within the institution and also of “freelance” jobs as well as information on individual preferences in terms of fashion and leisure activities, cultural habits, social activities, and sexual and family relations. In line with the principles of the “social factory,” professional and personal worlds as depicted here oscillate, as in the case of “Peter,” who defines himself as “someone who works in ‘art-related’ contexts. Growing up in a working class family he gained early experience in political work at the grass roots level. At the institution he works to make a living in the development team. Here he is not recognized as an artist. In a different scene, however, he is a well-known, important figure. At the beginning of the series, he organizes an exhibition and a panel on ‘minority politics.’ He has tried repeatedly to change the institutional exhibition program from ‘below,’ but has had only limited success.” The “possible topics” attributed to him are “‘class,’ political activism, institutional recognition, alternative spaces, economic situation, etc.”(34) As can be deduced not only from the figure of Peter, but also from the other roles sketched, they not only illustrate structural characteristics, but also individual and psychological aspects. This not only distinguishes Margreiter’s work from classical forms of institutional critique, but could also indicate that the category of the institution is here seen as a category of the “social factory.” Seen in this way, the exhibition title-The making of-proves to be a “making of the self,” where the issue is a post-Fordist intersection of institutional, cultural, and private spheres of life and work.

Even if limited to a few brief selections, the locations and staging of roles presented suffice to make comparisons to the Generali Foundation, the location being visited while viewing The making of. The reflection of and on the corporate design of the Generali Foundation that the exhibition design engenders is varied in Into Art by representing realms of labor and production such as project development, communication, design, the making of exhibition displays, exhibition assembly, and control. As such they affect management, image design, “internal and external means of communication,”(35) and therefore those activities where Maurizio Lazzarato’s definition of “immaterial labor” could be applied. In Into Art, we become aware of this by way of fragmentary scenes from daily activity, intercut with staged snapshots and documentary material from the archive of the Generali Foundation. The intersplicing of “real” and “fictional” material-found footage, artistic documentation, and fictional elements of plot-serves on the one hand to counter the fiction that institutional structures can simply be made legible by way of critical reflection; at the same time, an implicit de-differentiation of real and fictional characters is enacted here, with a view to making intelligible the transformed relations of the visibility and representation of private and public labor.(36) Employees play themselves, in both public and private moments. Institutional stagings of roles, including an actress miming the role of the artist-which could also be her own role-take on the character of a soap opera, which in turn allows the de-differentiation of public, private, and media spheres of (re)production and labor to become “reality.” In this way, what Margreiter intends with her definition of the art institution as a “media construction” and “production and reproduction of the symbolic” becomes visible: that is, (re)gauging the relationship between “autonomous art” and “service-oriented art” in the context of an institutional logic that seeks to integrate artistic labor’s media-effective publicity potential in the sense of “corporate identity.” In her function as a graphic designer, she is, as she explained to me in the above quoted interview, “involved with the make up of the institution … with the image it imparts and wants to impart.”(37) That means that Into Art not only sharpens this image by way of thematizing the production and design of catalogs, posters, and invitations-but also sets this against the value system that still sees art as the opposite of “function.”

But in the context of the exhibition design for The making of, Into Art reverses the opinion of critics at the time, according to which “paid institutional critique” forced the artists into the role of affirmative service providers. In contrast, by way of restaging corporate identity, it became clear that it was the key intention to allow the institution to come to the foreground as a site of artistic production. The institution cannot do without the autonomy of the producer if it wants to “bring sense into these [its] rules, to make them alive.”(38) These rules are fictionalized in Into Art in the form of ready-made plot lines that, by way of a casual camera technique and sometimes blurry visual aesthetic, evoke a pseudo-unprofessional image that could let Into Art pass as an artistically well-versed form of corporate self-representation. But it is precisely this that lends the video trailer the appearance of a “real” production, as is typical of media formats that suggest authenticity. All the same, Into Art’s editing, which combines various levels and forms of representation, makes it possible to experience the “real” as the result of visual-technological “de-realization.” For instance, Margreiter’s staging of a “real” institution presents a link between site-specificity with media-supported techniques of postproduction, allowing for reflection on the fictionalized representation of labor and production as corporate image. While this might sound like the practical application of the theory of the spectacle, it is given a particular twist in Into Art to the extent that it measures the image function of artistic labor as public labor within the economic morality that demands the production of social values under the conditions of publicity. If the actors who appear are characterized by various social origins, cultural and institutional positions, forms of private and professional life, and emotional and psychological positions, they also allow the art institution presented to appear as a representative social structure, while making it clear that it consists of subjects and subjectivities that cannot be depicted in a merely structural conception of the institution. Instead, the people involved are service providers on a freelance basis and salaried employees whose activities in the meantime hardly differ from artistic labor, a state of affairs that Poledna describes as the “hipness-phantasma of deregulated labor.”(39) This idea can serve to name an essential aspect of Margreiter’s staging of roles, to the extent that the presented mix of work and labor effuses the impression of a creative, vivid dynamism. This impression is amplified by the sound samples from television series such as Dallas, Melrose Place, Tatort, etc., which short-circuit the figures represented with the consumption and temporal structure of media formats. The layers of image, text, and sound are sampled and disassociated from one another in an avant-garde manner, thus counteracting the construction of simplifying, totalized images; this is then complemented by the suggestion of flexibilized attitudes of reception, amplified by the inserted zapping noises of a remote control. The open beats and bass mixed into the soundtrack suggest the question as to “our” relationship to corporate patterns of identification: do we see ourselves in a relationship based on free choice (corresponding to spaces for free expression as they are projected onto artistic autonomy), or in a relationship of enforced choice (corresponding to the “self-determined” acceptance of economically determined circumstances)? That we become “fictional authors” of fictional series can be interpreted as a reflection of the increasing influence of participating consumers and fans in the product design of the culture industry-a phenomenon that shows the totalizing function of the cultural imperative to be creative.(40)

In that Into Art allows this distinction to appear questionable by means of the chosen methodological-thematic and technological-formal structure, it marks a further characteristic of the “social factory,” as according to Negri and Hardt, to the extent that freedom of choice presents itself here as a version of the dominant credo of production. From the corporate executive to the freelance graphic designer who is “really” an artist, all of us are subjected to this credo, even the beholder participating by way of an imaginary zap function.

Thus Into Art can be seen to imply both a distance to the idealistic equation of art and autonomy and the cultural-pessimist equation of art and entertainment or service industry-whereby the pessimist view is often used a way of legitimizing the idealist. This distance is apparent because the conflictual interest in art’s (critical) potential for publicity here does not take place along clearly defined front lines, but rather in the midst of a general reconfiguration of social labor relations, of which it is a constitutive element. This position was ultimately presented by Into Art’s spatial installation itself, to the extent that it placed the represented fictional location and the real space that was used by the visitors, and also the museum wardens and cashier staff, in a relationship with the usually invisible administration. The notion of surveillance that resonates here can be seen as the extension of the decision to let the employees play their own roles, as “real” as if the camera were always there. The control-society implications of video technologies find their correspondence in the double-wall construction that Margreiter had placed in the exhibition space, as a reference to Poledna’s intervention in the sense of a reflection on the determination of artistic freedom by way of architectural conditions. The height of the two walls was conceived so that they could not fit into the exhibition space without dismantling the ceiling.(41) As the artist explained to me in our interview: “The ways and means in which both walls stand with relation to one another, lets them appear cast aside and also suggests the possibility that they could, potentially, stand in a different way to each other or could be duplicated.”(42) The decision to insert the walls as simultaneously site-specific, flexible, and performative spatial elements-as wall, presentation surface, and backdrop at the same time-placed them in a structural and metaphorical relationship to the technical apparatus installed in the space between the two walls, which could only be seen from one side. The stills showing technical equipment, such as a camera lens, electric cables, volume and remote controls that were included in the video trailer suggest that the selected form of visualization was based on principles from avant-garde or apparatus theory. But perhaps it is not merely what has become a standard unveiling of the process of production (if you can afford transparency, you must be doing honest and good work) that lies at the heart of this observation of the intersection of display and technology in the installation, but the inherent relationship between autonomous and corporate production, and thus the relationship between public and private labor. Here, techniques of visualization cannot automatically be short-circuited with a reflexive critique of the fetish, but contain for their part mechanisms of corporate image formation. Seen in this way, Into Art’s operative dramaturgy thus works with both public and institutional as well as private and individual modes of production and reception. “Corporate identity” thus appears as an externalized as well as internalized relationship, into which the “average” media consumer is structurally and mentally integrated.

Margreiter’s fictional (self-)representation of a private art institution takes the goal of experimental film and alternative video-to reach an extra-institutional audience-and transforms it into the “thesis” of the reciprocal penetration of avant-garde (public), ordinary (private), and corporate (private-public) forms of labor and production. In contrast to Asher’s intervention-which places generally invisible physical labor on the stage of artistic work, thereby thematizing the hierarchical relationship of difference between the positions of the commissioning institution, the “delegating” artist, and the worker charged with carrying out the task — Into Art deals with the erosion and partial reversal in the evaluation of visible, public, and invisible, private labor.

Thus, in Margreiter’s sketch of a Generali-like institution, corporate image intermingles with social modes of experience; such a transparent view of the realm in which one’s staff operates is normally only entrusted to a target group considered trustworthy. And the capacity to represent oneself as a “whole person” is part of the repertoire of “immaterial labor.” As shown for instance in Harun Farocki’s film Die Schulung (1987), training for managers not only focuses on “rhetoric” and “dialectic,” but also, in the form of Brechtian role playing, it attempts to teach the participants the ability to assess themselves, for a good atmosphere can only be disseminated by those who have both themselves and their private lives well under control. If “I” feel well in my role, there is a good chance that the person opposite me will do the same: and precisely this can be decisive for a sales talk or successful service.

Seen in this light, Into Art can be considered a topical reenactment of those versions of historical institutional critique that have integrated labor both in a material as well as a performative sense into artistic work, that is, not just by “representing.” In the context of the Generali Foundation’s collecting strategy, which takes an expanded view of sculpture and above all focuses on work formats that include media such as photography, television, video, and digital technologies, Silvia Eiblmayr describes the “peformative” as the “pivotal point in the dialectic of the link between the artistic conception of the artwork and the way it is perceived. … Here the ‘theatrical’ aspect typical of all of these expanded forms in the visual arts merges with linguistic dimension.”(43) But this also means that the “space or the location where the artwork takes place, is exhibited, or performed is integrated into its own conception in a reflexive manner.”(44)

I certainly do not intend to reproduce here the misleading equation of theatrical performance and linguistic performativity, but nonetheless Margreiter’s installation seems to me to be mobilizing both of these categories. This occurs on the one hand in reference to the way in which labor is represented both as real and symbolic production, and, on the other, the way in which the visitors are addressed as both clientele and participating actors. Performance and performativity are not limited to their “social significance,” which is attributed primarily to “signifying or discursive forms of practice.” Instead, “we use labor to focus on value-creating practices.”(45) To this extent, Into Art counters those dominant economic trends according to which the semiotic representation of work is equated with the fact of production. But the latter includes in the sense of the “factory society” not just material “hardware,” but also nonmaterial “software.”

This means that the ability of contemporary capitalism to “give subjectivity itself a value in its various forms as communication, engagement, desires, etc.,”(46) compels us to redraw the traditional boundaries between private and public categories and spheres of labor and production. This necessity also surfaces in Simon Leung’s contribution for The making of. In Squatting Project Wien he literally squatted in front of buildings that belong to Generali and had himself photographed. As he explained in an interview conversation with Nicholas Tobier, published in the exhibition catalog, “the body works structurally in several ways: through repetition, through the semiotics of squatting, but also pictorially — it’s figure and ground.”(47) When Leung then explains that it is decisive “what kind of photographic object you think it is,”(48) we can assume that he is driving at the de-differentiation immanent in performative and conceptual art of subject/object, reality/representation, image/copy, production/reproduction.

Reproduced using the code of architectural photography, the body here takes on a productive semiotic function within an indexical system that can be interpreted according to linguistically and visually formalized rules. In Squatting Project Wien this system can be read as positing an equation between nonproductive real estate ownership and self-utilizing performative work, which makes the characteristics of contemporary capitalism presented by Paolo Virno legible on and through the body of the artist. According to Leung’s interpretation, the artist’s (invisible) capital-communication, commitment, desire-proves to be a literally “incorporated” mechanism in the logic of corporate value creation. But ironically, the analogy suggested by the title of the work and the photographed pose between squatting as a bodily gesture and squatting as taking possession of property raises the question of whether the photographs are a quasi-private act of the reproduction of corporate self-representation or a public staging of the “unemployed” (private) body, whose incompatibility with a corporate logic of valuation surfaces precisely in the claim to semiotic equivalence.

That artistic involvement in an institutional and corporate structure as a “site of symbolic and material production and reproduction” stands in a relationship of both compatibility and incompatibility with the dominant economy of the sign can also be seen as the subtext of Mathias Poledna’s exhibition contribution at that time, Fondazione. This was a semi-documentary video on the archive of the history of the labor movement and socialism founded by the radical left-wing publisher, millionaire, and Generali stockholder Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. That Poledna playfully employed the genre of the documentary film to portray an institution far from the art world that can be vaguely linked to the Generali Foundation might be explained in terms of the documentary film’s synthesizing function. The “connection between architecture, corporate design, and institutional self-representation” made in the exhibition design of The making of becomes legible by virtue the kind of film montage selected as a syntax of heterogeneous elements, where it is not a specific institution or a specific genre, but the aesthetic and scientific method of the production of signs that comes to the fore within a concrete thematic context. This way of proceeding can also be verified by way of the bench designed as a “bulletin board” that was placed before the film screen, since its double function as a piece of furniture and a bearer of information clearly relates, in a manner that is charged with information aesthetics, to the historical discourse on the “dematerialized object.” With this reference to kinds of works that focus on presentation, reception, and distribution-and with the addition of techniques of postproduction, the combination of symbolically interrupted documentation and furniture thus presented a site-specific relationship to media information landscapes. On an abstract level, this can be seen as a recourse to both linguistic-semiological and also identity and institutional critique traditions in Conceptualism, which “can be drawn from design, architecture, media all the way to political resistance.”(49) Before this backdrop, the decision to integrate a film narrative on an archive of the history of the labor movement and socialism into the context of an exhibition whose subtext was the (reciprocal) relationship of autonomous art and service-oriented, corporate and commissioned work, represents-on the level of content-the historicization of the methods and procedures used. The selected genres that were combined with one another — documentary, narration, and fiction — were well-suited to deconstruct the monolithic topos of artistic production, and the sound design composed of well-known film music by Luciano Berio, Giorgio Gaslini, and Nino Rota made it legible as (medial and) cultural knowledge, albeit knowledge excluded by art history. As a reflexive structural element, the soundtrack was associated with images of high voltage wires; the function of these wires as recurring “title-design”(50) was both that of a narrative abstraction and a point of intersection between the assembled forms of representation. By including reports from the media on Feltrinelli’s eventful life, the motif of the high voltage wires is given a historic charge, in that the spectators learn that the millionaire lost his life in 1972 attempting to explode a power pole near Milan.

In the figure of Feltrinelli as a vibrant and emblematic figure of the New Left, various narrative lines meet that condense to form a fragmentary and associative and also anecdotal reflection on the construction of (political) history. In this way, the abstract narrative logic of Fondanzione avoided a coherent, significant recourse to the Generali Foundation as a concrete institution. Instead, this was an attempt at an artistic epistemology that declared the archive a “workplace,” and therefore a location where the avant-garde claims that still reside in the self-image of institutional critique underwent a historical revision. On the one hand, the archive founded in 1961 by Feltrinelli can illuminate methods of the historical and academic study of industrial labor and its forms of organization that can be implicitly or explicitly linked to both the historical and the postwar avant-gardes. This means that they can be related to the history of collective interest groups such as the trades unions, works councils, political parties, organized and spontaneous or “wild” strikes, etc. On a second level that is mediated here, Poledna’s contribution can also highlight the significance of publications by authors from the circle of the Italian Autonomia Operaia labor group in the German art context in the 1990s, including Negri and Hardt’s The Labor of Dionysus, or Lazzarato’s treatment of “immmaterial labor,” which appeared in 1998 in Negri und Virno’s volume Umherschweifende Produzenten: Immaterielle Arbeit und Subversion in the same year as The making of. In this way an analogy is drawn between the topos of media technology that resonates here and the historicization of proletarian or Fordist labor, whose transformation to a “social factory” as claimed by the above-named authors has since become an frequently cited subject within cultural and art discourse engaged in a critique of capitalism.(51) This means that here reflections on the historicization — according to Jacques Rancière’s definition — of private forms of labor were presented on the stage of an institution whose interest is to integrate the public character of artistic labor into its own corporate identity. But in Poledna’s design, the question of whether and to what extent such a discourse of labor justifies comparing the two institutions recedes behind the more fundamental question of the methods with which “history” or cultural significance is produced. This question is tellingly posed in Fondazione by an art critic, “played” by Matthias Dusini, who in the role of a television reporter does an interview with the library director David Bidussa. His task is to produce an image of the self-understanding of the Fondanzione Feltrinelli. The camera shows him talking about the library’s function and its collection, as well as transformed methods of bibliography. In this context, he points to the original 1835 manuscript of Charles Fourier’s La fausse industrie; the fact that the library owns it is due to the “accumulation of sources,” as embodied in the initial “work ethic” of the library.(52) Or we are informed about files on the “the structure of the CUB-Communitati Unitari di Base-forms of representation of factory workers who belonged to the extreme left.”(53) Answering the reporter’s question about how one gets hold of such material, Bidussa explains that, in “Italy the courts throw away files after twenty five years if they are no longer necessary for cases. In this way the authorities who are responsible for public security have become information agencies for political extremism.”(54) By this point at the latest, we get the distinct impression that Bidussa maintains a distanced relation to the history represented by this archive. This impression is underscored when he contradicts the supposition that the Fondazione Feltrinelli “belongs to the left, if not the far left.”(55) He then points to seminars that have taken place there where “assistants and researchers” have participated “whose political spectrum extends from the left to the extreme right, including a position which one could call post-fascist.”(5)6

The fact that Feltrinelli, expecting a state coup on the part of the fascist Right, propagated the militant struggle of the Left and was ultimately forced to go underground where he sought to continue to organize his social-revolutionary struggle,(57) can give a sense of the Fondazione’s changed self-understanding. Bidussa’s indifference as to the political interests of the users of the archive is shown again when he claims that an analysis of treatments of worker organization and representation in a sewing machine factory is formally no different than the analysis of the catechism for first communicants.

As in Poledna’s study Scan (1996), a two-part video on questionable methods of the historicization of pop culture and punk design, using the Jamie Reid Collection at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum as an example, the issue is methodological and ideological processes of revaluing historical material. Similarly, Fondanzione focuses on the question of the forms of categorization and the constitution of the storage media in the way they influence the status of the archived material. In Scan, Poledna argues by way of the example of the God Save the Queen album cover that what was “originally conceived of as mass-cultural and serially produced, suddenly emerges as dadaist collage-an extremely bibliophile artefact”(58); equally, Fondazione can demonstrate how methods of archiving ultimately distort and destroy what they claim to preserve and historicize. This is also true, on a structural level, of the research medium chosen by Poledna. For example, Franco Berardi, a political fellow traveler of Toni Negri, explains in an interview with the newspaper Jungle World that the late 1970s, when the “classical factory conflict” approached its end, was also the beginning of an era when “the costs of communication technologies dramatically sank: video tape, radios, offset printers, photocopiers, later desktop publishing, all of that eased the access to the production of signs to an extent never before known.”(59) In other words, the dissociation from the material fact of production that resonates in the topos of the dematerialized object surfaces as a phenomenon of a techno-linguistic turn that corresponds with the increasing importance of information and knowledge production that Lazzarto describes with the concept of “immaterial labor” — ultimately a form of labor that, as has been shown, can be applied to The making of.

Since, according to Bidussa, the documents collected by the Fondazione Feltrinelli are merely holdings of information with a purely academic value, they become emblematic of a politically no longer accessible history of the labor movement and socialism-a history that has been recoded through methods of archiving. But taking into account the debates of the late 1990s on the dominance of immaterial labor in the context of the service industry and corporate culture, in which there was often a clear sense that an attempt was being made to set aside post-Conceptualism and institutional critique as a failure, then The making of, working eight years later from a perspective that could almost be called historical, provides arguments why methodological and political reflection on the history of modern art and cultural institutions as a form of work based on the (material) conditions of public labor and the (immaterial) signs produced in its name should not be abandoned (including “the faking of”).

1 Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” in Art International, Vol. 12, no. 2 (1968): 31-36. See also Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973).

2 See for example Charles Harrison, “Einleitung,” in Art & Language: Terry Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell, Joseph Kosuth, ed. Paul Maenz and Gerd de Vries (Köln: DuMont, 1972), 11-17; and Pamela M. Lee, “Das konzeptuelle Objekt der Kunstgeschichte,” in Texte zur Kunst, Vol. 6., no. 21 (March 1996): 120-129.

3 Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art, eds. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 16-39.

4 Jacques Rancière, “On Art and Work,” in The Politics of Aesthetics (New York/London: Continuum), 42-43.

5 See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterielle Arbeit: Gesellschaftliche Tätigkeit unter den Bedingungen des Postfordismus,” in Toni Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Paolo Virno, Umherschweifende Produzenten: Immaterielle Arbeit und Subversion (Berlin: ID Verlag, 1998), 39-52.

6 Michael Willenbücher, Migration-Illegalisierung-Ausnahmezustände: Der Illegalisierte als Homo Sacer des Postfordismus, unpublished Magister thesis (Heidelberg: Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, 2005).

7 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 9-10.

8 Ibid., 10.

9 Negri und Hardt, for instance, take recourse to the Marxist concept of “general intellect,” according to which knowledge and intellectual capacities are accumulated and mobilized in the sense of labor’s self-amortization. But in the way that the authors take account of social and symbolic forms of value production, they differ from the Marxist theory of value. They affirm the networks of producers that, according to their depiction, refuse control by capital and thus have greater connection to value creation and production. All the same, this could be criticized as an idealistic option, since companies also absorb such projects to promote the abolition of all wage guarantees. It has for example been pointed out a number of times that this process, which Negri and Hardt consider a positive development, leads to a more extensive exploitation, to new forms of control in the lowest-wage service economy, and finally contributes to corporations penetrating more and more into the social realm.

10 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage Pablications, 1993).

11 Consider in this context the 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

12 Katja Diefenbach, Theorien der neuen Technologien: Zur Bedeutung der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien im Spätkapitalismus, unpublished Magister thesis (München: Ludwig-Maximillian-Universität, 1992).

13 See Stefan Römer, Künstlerische Strategien des Fake: Kritik und Original und Fälschung (Köln: DuMont, 2002).

14 See Walter Grasskamp, Kunst und Geld: Szenen einer Mischehe (München: Beck, 1998); Hans Haacke, “Der Kampf ums Geld: Sponsoren, Kunst, moderne Zeiten,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (11 October, 1995); Dierk Schmidt, “Sponsorenstress: Ein Beitrag zur politischen Kampagne,” A.N.Y.P. 9 (1999): 32-33; Hubertus Butin, “When Attitudes Become Form Philip Morris Becomes Sponsor,” in The Academy and the Corporate Public , ed. Stephan Dillemuth (Bergen: Kunsthøgskolen, Köln: Permanent Press Verlag: 2002), 40; Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, “Sponsoring and Neoliberal Culture,” in ibid., 58.

15 See Willenbücher, “Migration-Illegalisierung-Ausnahmezustande”.

16 See “Substituting one fungus for another: Nicolas Tobier in conversation with Nils Norman,” in The Making Of, ed. Mathias Poledna (Wien: Generali Foundation, Köln: Buchhandlung Walther König, 1998), 207.

17 “In this site-specific work the ceiling panels in both gallery rooms were removed and covered with striped paper. The panels were reinstalled by units of seven per day per room to their original place in the ceiling. At the same time objects left in room B used for installation were put back a piece at a time in the storage room. The evolution of the work was documented in the catalog.” See Daniel Buren, Frost and Defrost, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Otis Art Institute, 1979). Quoted from http.//percept.home.cyberserve.com/percept/exhibitions-html.

18 See Michael Asher’s description of his exhibition concept: “I propose that before the exhibition opens on August 3, all the glass ceiling panels in rooms 1, 2, 3, and 4, plus all the glass panels in one half of the museum shall be removed, which would leave rooms 10, 9, 8, 7, and part of rooms 5 and 6 open for exhibition. Starting August 3 and working 4 hours every morning during each day of the work week, an exhibition crew will replace the ceiling panels.” Quoted in Michael Asher, “August 3-August 29, 1977 Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, Netherlands,” in Writings 1977-1983 On Works 1969-1979, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 174-83, here: 178.

19 See the debate on Andrea Fraser’s Project in two phases (1994-95).

20 See Helmut Draxler’s contribution in this volume.

21 “Blanks and side effects: Sabeth Buchmann in conversation with Mathias Poledna,” in Poledna, The Making Of, 223-24.

22 Ibid., 220.

23 Ibid., 225.

24 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

25 Christian Höller, “The making of … political contexts? Preliminary work on a symbolic political context understanding,” in Poledna, The Making Of, 173.

26 Buchmann/Poledna, “Blanks and side effects”, 225.

27 Ibid.

28 See “Exhibition design”, in Poledna, The Making Of, 85.

29 Norman, “Proposal 10,” 128.

30 Ibid.

31 See Tobier/Norman, “Substituting one fungus for another,” 208.

32 See “Definitions of a building site: Sabeth Buchman in conversation with Dorit Margreiter,” in Poledna, The Making Of, 204.

33 See Dorit Margreiter, “Into Art,” in Poledna, The Making Of, 109.

34 Ibid., 114.

35 “Exhibition design”, in Poledna, The Making Of, 85.

36 See on this Rancière’s argument in favor of fiction, in “On Art and Work”.

37 Buchmann/Margreiter, “Definitions of a building site,” 196.

38 “Exhibition design”, in Poledna, The Making Of, 85.

39 Buchmann/Poledna, “Blanks and side effects,” 225.

40 See Marion von Osten and Peter Spillman, eds., Be Creative-Der kreative Imperativ (Zürich: Museum für Gestaltung, 2003).

41 See Buchmann/Margreiter, “Definitions of a building site,” 197.

42 Ibid.

43 Silvia Eibelmayr, “Schauplatz Skuptur: Zum Wandel des Skulpturbegriffs unter dem Aspekt des Performativen” in White Cube/Black Box, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1996), 89.

44 Ibid., 87.

45 Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 8.

46 See Willenbücher, Migration-Illegalisierung-Ausnahmezustände on Paolo Virno’s A grammar of the multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004) and Sandro Mezzadra’s “Taking Care: Migration and the Political Economy of Affective Labor,” working paper for Center for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP), Goldsmith’s College, University of London, March 2005.

47 “Or Is This Nothing: Nicholas Tobier in Conversation with Simon Leung,” in Poldedna, The Making of, 179.

48 Ibid.

49 Buchmann/Poledna, “Blanks and side effects,” 227.

50 Ibid., 228.

51 See Stephan Geene, money aided ich-design: techno/logie. subjektivitaet. geld (Berlin: b_books, 1999); Marion von Osten, ed., Norm der Abweichung (Zürich: Edition Voldemeer, 2003); Arbeit*, ed. Silvia Eiblmayr, exh. cat. (Innsbruck: Galerie im Taxispalais, 2005); Beatrice von Bismarck and Alexander Koch, ed., Beyond Education: Kunst, Ausbildung, Arbeit und Ökonomie (Frankfurt a. M.: Revolver, 2005).

52 See Mathias Poledna with Matthias Dusini, “Fondazione,” in Poldena, The Making of, 145-163, here 152.

53 Ibid, 156.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., 155.

56 Ibid.

57 See Henner Hess, “Feltrinelli und die Gruppi di Azione Partigiana (GAP),” in Poledna, The Making Of, 161-62.

58 Buchmann/Poledna, „Blanks and side effects,” 230.

59 “Vom Subjekt zum Superorganismus: Ein Gespräch von Stephan Gregory mit Franco Berardi über seinen Weg von Operaisten zum Cybernauten, die mentale Arbeit und die virtuelle Macht,” Jungle World 24, 7 June, 2000. http://www.nadir.org/nadir/periodika/jungle_world/_2000/24/15a.htm.

Dr. Sabeth Buchmann
akademie der bildenden künste wien
Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften | Institutsvorständin
Kunstgeschichte der Moderne und Nachmoderne
Schillerplatz 3 | A-1010 Wien
http://www.akbild.ac.at

Above copied from: http://turbulence.org/blog/2009/11/28/under-the-sign-of-labor-by-sabeth-buchmann/

Art and Repugnance: Form as Anti-Form, Art as Anti-Art, Market as Anti-Market, F.E. Rakuschan

Art is an élite affair. The ability to decipher the relevant codes and to understand the tacit agreements underlying art needs a good deal of learning. Those who are late trying to acquire this knowledge will remain perplexed fools all their lives when confronted with art. Buying works of art requires considerable resources. The usual hefty sums are spent by people wishing to display their elevated status over the less privileged social classes. What they get is known as distinction gains. A kind of "mega version" is the case of an insurance company sponsoring an art foundation in order to camouflage its actual, rather mundane, activities via its corporate design. The increment in symbolic capital is used to "culturalise" the company's normal field of action, which has little to do with cultural endeavours in the traditional sense. With this going on, all the talk about artistic freedom amounts to nothing but profound contempt for both creative artists and their public, considering that the social justification of art mainly rests on the emergence of flourishing markets and that the role of artistic genius is just some ideological wrapping around the product called art.

Mainly the exponents of "art without works" are painfully aware of this situation. Many generations of them have suffered from it. They share their knowledge about the crux in art with other critical artists who - it is claimed - are incorruptible by society and institutionalised art. The drop-out rate among them is very high, though; only few become famous and even fewer get rich. However, if they keep going long enough, they may indeed acquire some renown beyond their small circle of personal fans while still alive. If an artist becomes a historical figure, there is a possibility of rediscovery, reappraisal, etc., also many years after he or she has passed away.



1.

Contradictions are not reserved to art. As soon as the various protagonists in production, interpretation and marketing grasp that precisely the contradiction between autonomy (self-determination) and heteronomy (being determined by others) has made modern art so successful, they can live with this without qualms. It had transpired long ago that it was not consensus but the clash between redundancy and differentiation that was propelling communication processes. The attitude expressed by the followers of "art without works" is part of a long artistic tradition going back to the period after the second world war, when classical avant-garde concepts and semantics diversified into branches like the "fluxus movement", actionism and material art, concept art, and various other expressions of institutional critique. Several generations of artists have made productive use of their occasional disgust or guilty conscience about the social conditions of art production by employing precisely the logic and methods of art to analyse and depict this situation.

Marcel Duchamp is something like the ABC in this kind of art production. With his "absolute thing", the bottle dryer of 1914, he introduced deconstruction of the art object through "historical transgression" to artistic discourse. The thing called bottle dryer is, in fact, a bottle dryer that simply has been moved from its traditional to an artistic context. The thing stays completely outside the historic art context, and outside the normal conception of this context; it is therefore a "historic transgression". The shock of perceiving this thing, ie the simultaneous experience of difference, ideally triggers learning and thought processes, such as wondering what it is that transforms a given thing into art. By the late 1970s, Duchamp's "ready-mades", as he called those objects, had of course deteriorated into avant-garde clichés.

Duchamp had considerable influence on the generations of artists after 1945. Décollages, ie pictures which so-called "decollagists" like Raymond Hains and Mimmo Rotella made out of paper snippets usually torn off billboards, represent fragments of reality similar to Duchamp's "ready-mades". His way of incorporating the trivial in everyday reality lived on in the manifestations of pop art produced by people like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg or Richard Hamilton. Duchamp contributed to the development of kinetic art by experimenting with the phenomenology of perception in works like his rotating glass discs of 1920/1925 or the Rotoreliefs of 1935, and he also paved the way for what later became known as op art. From 1945, he had duplicates made of his works, so that by 1967 there were more reproductions than extant originals. In the evolution of ideas within art, this duplication amounted to an attack on the fetish of the original. Because of his strategy of removing the aura from the art object, Duchamp also became a forerunner of the multiple-print and silk-screen print hypes that began to appear in the 1960s. This demonstrates that the demands and postulates of the 20th-century artistic avant-garde have been fulfilled completely - but in a way compatible with capitalism.



2.

Marcel Duchamp, who challenged painting in 1913, fell into oblivion for a long time. When he was 40, ie in 1927, he stopped artistic production altogether for 20 years. Or so the myth has it. In 1959, when he was 72 already, a first big monograph appeared on him. In 1966, the Tate Gallery organised a retrospective that brought him international recognition. At the same time, the institutional acknowledgement of his works sparked off productive controversies among another generation of young artists.

In the 1960s, Duchamp's successors behaved like struggling adolescents. One the one hand, they eagerly continued the ideas of their overwhelming father figure, on the other hand they condemned Duchamp as bourgeois. Quite apart from any psychoanalytical aspects, it is indispensable to distinguish oneself from the previous generation when constructing one's own position, and to assert it over other positions held by contemporaries. Uniqueness also weighs heavily in competition. Duchamp's life is an example. His rise did not start in his native France, nor elsewhere in Europe, but in the USA, in New York, at the legendary Armory Show of 1913. This date also marked the beginnings of so-called "non-retinal art". The term did not mean there wasn't anything to see any more. The distinguishing feature of "non-retinal art" over "retinal art", ie art as traditionally conceived, is that "non-retinal art" is not understood to be part of some linear development of forms. Its essence is thinking about art and about the implications of art; thus it appeals more to the cognitive abilities of the recipients.

A particular problem for Duchamp's successors after 1945 was his relationship with society in general. In spite of having shaken the foundations of art, he stayed within the culture of the privileged classes, he produced art for snobs and dandies, his systemic criticism did not go beyond the boundaries of art. Thus the main accusations of his critics. For example, Duchamp undeniably allowed the wealthy collector Walter Arensberg to keep a studio for him in New York and he shared all the privileges of his patron. In the home of the Arensberg couple, at West 76th Street near Central Park, he had the opportunity of meeting intellectuals and leading personalities of the sciences and the arts, such as Francis Picabia, Albert Gleizes, Man Ray, Mina Loy, Edgar Varése, Arthus Davis and Beatice Wood. No doubt, it was an attractive alternative to slaving away with one's art if, for example, Baroness Elsa of Freytag-Loringhoven removed her clothes in order to act as a "ready made"; or if the poetess Mina Loy, accompanied by Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, Arlene Dressler and Charles Demuth took leave of an evening party in order to engage in group sex at Duchamp's next-door studio.

I owe the above information to Joan Richardson's article "Another Reality Club". Other passages in that text are even more pertinent to my theme. For example, Richardson describes the circle of friends around the Arensbergs to which Duchamp belonged as individuals who endeavoured "to change the images of themselves within the world that persons create". This, according to Richardson, also meant "creating connections through works of art, worlds within other worlds, to realise through works of art... what it means to live in a continually changing present, near the fringe of experience". (Richardson 1990:239). The circle of friends around the Arensbergs not only discussed avant-garde positions in art, they were also interested in current scientific issues. They talked about Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity, about Max Planck's quantum theory, or about Robert Goddard's rocket experiments. In short: the persons who regularly met at the Arensbergs' home during 1914 to 1921 were determined to discard a world view that had arisen in the specific context of 17th-century Europe, to leave behind its Cartesian-Newtonian foundations. This world view began to crumble at the turn to the 20th century, mainly due to new developments in physics. In New York, by the way, Walter Arensberg was considered to be the founder of something later called DADA. This was before a group or artistically-minded people gathering at Café Voltaire in Zürich adopted that name. The DADA movement was the next step in the evolution of "art without works" reaching back to Romanticism, ie to the second half of the 19th century.



3.

The controversy among young artists about Duchamp's role in the 1960s had, in fact, been a major generator of discourse on modern art much earlier. Proof of this, after 1945, were the many references by the neo-avant-garde to positions taken by the classical avant-garde during the first three decades of the 20th century. This can be fully appreciated if one conceives conflicts from a systems-theory perspective as instrumentalised contradictions, ie contradictions that have turned into communication. "Being social systems, conflicts are autopoietic, self-reproducing units. Once they are formed, their continuation, not their end, is to be expected". (Luhmann 1987:537).

At this point I would like to emphasise that art can only be understood as one social system that is connected with other systems of society. When analysing developments in art it is therefore indispensable to consider, at the same time, socio-cultural changes in communication and in the communications media. The dynamic and complex processes involved in producing, distributing, circulating, consuming and reproducing culture must be taken into account. Art as a system reproduces itself auto-poietically within operative borderlines defined by the difference between this system and its embedding environment, so both self-organising closedness and energetic openness are possible. The circular inter-relationship between system and environment acts as a mutual source of perturbations (disturbances, turbulence). In the words of the founding father of constructivism, Heinz von Foerster, this follows the "order from noise principle". (Foerster 1960:31 ff)

Even if one conceives art as evolution of ideas, it will not further our understanding of its complex role if we simply celebrate the various heroic figures among artists and praise their "formal and historic transgressions". From a systems-theoretic point of view, the perturbations - ie the disturbances arising from interactions between system and environment - influence the reflexive processes of differentiation and recombination present in the mechanisms of diversification, selection and stabilisation. Interaction with a social system's environmental factors, eg the physical and psychological resources present in specific actors, leads to structural changes in the social system via recursive loops. In this connection, the term "structure" must encompass the necessity of self-reproduction, ie auto-poietic practice. Changes in the system's basic structure are semantically expressed as dissolution or recombination variants of art medium and art form - the two being loosely correlated with each other - like seismic vibrations, as it were. This, of course, also applies to so-called innovations. As a consequence of this point of view, neither changes within society nor changes in the semantics of art can be analysed in terms of "the human being" as basic element. At the societal level, only the evolution of society as a whole is productive in the sociological sense. Social structures are both results and conditions, they form the framework for permanent social conflict which continuously re-shapes the different spheres of reality.

The question what social systems consist of has been answered as follows: "... they consist of communication acts and their attribution as actions. The one could not evolve without the other". (Luhmann 1987:240) "Communication is the elementary unit of self-constitution, action is the elementary unit of self-observation and self-description by social systems". (Luhmann 1987:241) The ultimate elements, ie the communication acts, are not phenomenological units of any kind whatsoever, and they do not become units through selective attribution by an observer; they are nothing but instances of the ways in which the system recursively refers to itself.



4.

Art is just one cultural principle besides others and interacts with all other cultural techniques. It is possible to describe the way in which art may contribute to the human being's existential nexus, how art participates in generating subjectivity, inter-subjectivity and each individual's particular world view. Art does not contradict reality, rather, with its specific logic and methods, it contributes to the production of reality by society as a whole. Following Bourdieu's approach based on the analysis of struggles and on a theory of conflict, art is also a weapon in society's everyday power struggles. However, as such, it is not very useful for artists opposing hegemonic positions in society; rather, art serves persons who have already accumulated a certain amount of the different kinds of capital (cf. Bourdieu 1987; Laclau/Mouffe 1991), who are, in other words, representatives of hegemony. For, in spite of the importance of economic capital, the use of cultural and symbolic capital may decisively influence the way in which competition for legitimation power is resolved. The term symbolic capital covers things like prestige, renown, or social recognition. Bourdieu characterises symbolic capital as a sometimes overwhelming force that is able "to enforce certain meanings and get them accepted as legitimate by covering up the actual underlying power relationships sustaining this force". (Bourdieu/Passeron 1973:12)

We may also conceive art as an ensemble of disciplines that process cultural data in their specific ways. These disciplines may thus be equated with different notations (Aufschreibesysteme; this expression for storage media is due to Friedrich Kittler). Viewed this way, we may look upon art as a medium for storing its continuously relationship-forming stocks of data. Throughout the ages, a kind of "groomed semantics" (Luhmann) evolved, perpetuated by the differentiation and recombination of evolutionary functions and mechanisms. Luhmann defines a society's semantics as "its semantic apparatus, the stock of rules available on the processing of meaning". (Luhmann 1993:19)



5.

It by no means contradicts the ideas just expressed to draw attention to the usually quite limited number of individuals whose ideas and manifestations explicitly prompt new communication acts: in other words, there are very few individuals who profoundly influence artistic discourse. In connection with the neo-avant-garde movement "art without works", George Macuinas and Henry Flint must certainly be named. Among the wider circle of protagonists of the "fluxus scene", those two were the main exponents of its marxist-leninist faction. In 1964, at the first performance of "Originals" by Karlheinz Stockhausen in New York, they openly opposed the majority of the group who leaned towards Duchamp's line. In his well-known letter to fluxus member Tomas Schmit dated February 1, 1964, Maciunas wrote that the aims of fluxus were social, and not aesthetic. Exactly as the LEF group before him ("Left Front in Art" in the Soviet Union in the 1920s), Maciunas argued that artists should spend their talents "on socially constructive aims". In applied art, for example, this should be "industrial design, journalism, architecture, engineering, graphic design and printing, etc.", which "are all closely related to the fine arts and offer artists excellent opportunities to change their job". (Maciunas 1965:36) Vow! This fits in nicely with the neo-liberal concept of Creative Industries. To be sure, Maciunas made his recommendations in the hope that capitalist society could be revolutionised and turned into a socialist paradise this way.

More radical-democratic forms of political emancipation were attempted by Joseph Beuys who replaced Duchamp's anti-art principle by the concept of "social sculpture", in order to widen his artistic activity to the sphere of practical politics. In 1964, during an Action in Düsseldorf recorded for television, Beuys wrote the following sentence on a white board: "Marcel Duchamp's silence is over-estimated". This must be considered as a programmatic event regarding Beuys's work. In 1967 he founded the German Student Party (Deutsche Studentenpartei), followed in 1971 by the Organisation for Direct Democracy (Organisation für Direkte Demokratie) and in 1972 by the Free International University (Freie internationale Universität). No doubt, Joseph Beuys in his roles as teacher and artist, who also showed great talent in making use of the mass media, substantially contributed to furthering critical thinking and action by many of his fellow human beings. At the same time, Beuys also reached the highest rankings on the art charts during his lifetime. His objects, sometimes just parts preserved from some Action, were soon traded like relics and ended up in exhibitions and museum collections all over the world.

Obviously, today no one would claim that a master of "art without works" has left behind no work. The creative activity of Beuys is a perfect example for form as anti-form, art as anti-art and market as anti-market. His manifestations, which were intended to resist any kind of evaluation or utilisation, finally also became promising investment targets kept by famous collectors. In spite, or perhaps because of this, Beuys as an exemplary figure is still very popular with present-day exponents of "art without works".



6.

The fate of musealisation caught up with all important members of the fluxus movement, of arte povera, of various forms of junk art as well as process and concept art, to name just a few branches of the neo-avant-garde. Even the most minute souvenir from an Action, or even documents about happenings that had taken place during this era, found their way to the art market. However, what has really remained were genuine artistic achievements, the determination to pursue thought about traditional conflicts to a radical conclusion. Yet, the effects beyond the sphere of art were minimal, if discernible at all. It remains sheer fantasy to believe that the art system could penetrate other social systems. Systems-theoretically, we are only dealing with penetration if one system's complexity - ie indefiniteness, dependence, selectivity - becomes available for building-up another system. At best, art may be guided by emancipatory politics, it cannot become a hegemonic bloc itself. Art would be incapable of that.

However, if the social conditions are right, it is quite possible for art to have an impact on the political sphere - not on politics itself. A case in point were the student revolts of the 1960s and 1970s. There is evidence that theories of art and aesthetic strategies developed by the so-called Situationist International (SI) did in fact exert a certain influence. The main spokesman of SI, Guy Debord, called for a cultural revolution as early as in 1958. For this purpose, he developed a theory of situationist action, mainly in order to put an end to the misery of certain forms of culture, not least the "rotten cadaver of art", that had decayed long ago. The marxist-leninist factions of the protest movement remained suspicious of SI ideas. While the marxist-leninists wanted to abolish capitalism, SI was content with the aim of "pursuing the beautiful confusion of life to its perfection". (Cf. Ohrt 1990) In a way, this is another demand that has since been realised by society as a whole.

Since the founding of SI, a wide spectrum of youth cultures ranging somewhere between art-culture and socio-culture have made their appearance. What developed were patterns of action and forms of artistic expression that oscillate between the criteria of symbolic and social profitability. The minimum common consensus in all their undertakings is revolt against "the cultural grammar". As this term implies, it structures the different kinds of social space and is an expression of societal power and dominance relationships. Famous precursors with proven links to the present were the surrealists and dadaist. The long line of forerunners and successors of SI includes, inter alia, the beatniks (recalling the theory of cut-ups by William S. Burroughs); Gruppe Spur/Subversive Aktion; Kommune 1; the Enragés (the enraged ones), who created many of the slogans, posters and wall newspapers in May 1968; also, the Provos, the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO); the Yippies; Indiani Metropolitani (recall Radio Alice, a remarkable early example of a free radio station outside the reach of advertising pressure); not to forget Agentur Bilwet and the Neoists. This list of names is incomplete. Most of those groupings wanted to sever their ties with art and are yet linked to it in a reflexive way. Clearly, they are part of the tradition named "art without works".



7.

There is proof that the evolution of ideas shaping modern literature and art corresponds to modern developments in the human and natural sciences and in technology. The correlation between social semantics and social structure in turn explains that all those developments are related to changes in the structure of society as a whole. In retrospect, the so-called cultural revolution of the 1960s turns out to have been an adaptive movement which, after the decline of bourgeois ways of life and thought, put Western societies on their track to mass democracy. It is probably not totally off the mark to believe that post-1945 neo-avant-garde productions, compared with those of the classical modernists whose tradition they share, are mostly avant-garde turned into kitsch: art kitsch whose increasing use of pop codes reconciled art culture with the pluralistic tastes of mass democracy even before the 1980s.

Whatever the criticism levelled against the fine arts in their traditional shapes, the most important reason for discarding panel paintings or sculptures are changes in apperception brought about by the new standards of media-driven communication. Art in general, but above all "art without works" can only be properly understood if it is related to the expansion of the mass media. This was even the case before so-called media art appeared on the scene in the 1950s and it was not accidentally called "cybernetic art" in the early stages. The history of this art form shows that the intention of the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, who meant to combine engineering and the humanities in cybernetics, was put into practice in the art sphere - through application of the logic of art - by media art. Development from the use of video technology by the fluxus movement up to today's complex, dynamic network projects on the Internet illustrates that Wiener's conception has indeed been an important guiding principle of media art. The increasing sophistication of so-called observer-settings in art are moving the relationships among the different actors to the centre of artistic discourse. Explicitly communication-oriented works are created and are emerging within socio-technological ensembles consisting of human beings and telematics machines located in a cybernetic-media world.

Since the 1990s, a tendency has reappeared among the circles of young people making up the art scene: the art object which, in the 1980s experienced its - so far - last zenith as pastiche or text, is being replaced by various services. Even if those practices are intended to be acts of opposition against the instrumentalisation of art by cultural representation, one cannot fail to notice that this kind of art is structurally determined by and linked with processes taking place in society as a whole. On the one hand, this trend is analogous to the neo-liberal economic policy of outsourcing production to low-wage countries and of increasing investment in services. On the other hand, many of those artistic practices can clearly be interpreted as criticism of neo-liberalism. This is the case, similarly to what happened during the 1960s and 1970s, when exponents of "art without works" join various social movements and take up their demands. For example, they adopt political demands regarding democracy, incorporating theoretical positions critical of capitalism, or in favour of feminism, or supporting cultural and ethnic pluralism; or they bring in topics like the meaning of gender, class, race, ethnic origin, nationality, sexual preferences, etc. All such artistic practices are based on a certain conception of art expressed by Judith Butler in "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity": "The 'unthinkable' therefore is completely part of culture; but it is completely excluded by dominant culture". (Butler 1991:121)



8.

Looking back, "art without works", like modern art as a whole, has proved very successful. Its theories and forms of practice live on in a multitude of ego-constructs, eg among so-called life aesthetes whose connection with art is often just marginal. Life aesthetics has nothing to do with classical aesthetic sensitivity, taste, style, etc; rather, it has to do with an attitude, the concern of individuals for successful integration of their actions in their individual aesthetic ego-constructs within scaleable lifeworlds. Thus, behaviour which in the past used to be restricted to artists or the occasional eccentric, today is the most common form of socialisation for individuals aged 18 to 40. Different as they may be from each other, they have in common their diversity and complexity regarding attitudes and self-images, breaks and contradictions in their thinking, indiscriminate recycling: sample, mix and remix. De-territorialised communication and de-contextualised information, the sign of all kinds of current literary-artistic avant-garde (recall the techniques of collage or cut-up that continue as samples in digital culture) - all this has become quite commonplace for today's life aesthete and Internet user.

A crucial concept in understanding social structure and semantics is complexity. Therefore, functional analysis in systems theory is concerned with complexity rather than with the problem of preserving what exists. (See Luhmann 1987:90) If we follow Niklas Luhmann in analysing the way in which different media and forms have historically coped with complexity, then this development is also a succession of successful semantic inventions. This of course also applies to the development of modern art, and consequently also to "art without works". Viewed in this way, it becomes clear that the methods of coping with complexity have undergone change in the past few decades: from reductionism (centralisation, hierarchisation) to abduction (decentralisation, dispersion and networking).


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Abovie copied from: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0601/rakuschan/en