The Metamorphosis of Art and Money, Michael Howard

(2009)

Like many artists, I exhibit my work so that other people can experience it. Most artists also use an exhibition as a way to sell their work and thereby support themselves, or at least cover their expenses.

I have always shied away from selling my sculptures and paintings, not because I have any less need of financial resources for my work, but because the idea of ownership and attributing monetary value to art is so foreign to my experience. For me, a work of art is a meditation for inner contemplation, not an object to possess. Art is to be with, not to have.

In this short essay I outline why my drawings, paintings and sculptures are not for sale. More importantly, I explore an alternative way of thinking about art and money. In this context, I introduce my thoughts about a Community Art Association that would serve the artistic needs of the community in new ways by applying the principles of Community Supported Agriculture to Community Supported Art.

I offer these new ways of thinking about art as a stimulus to new ways of thinking about the dire social and economic challenges of our time. To all but the most entrenched they are a clear signal that we must begin in earnest to transform our economic thinking to serve the fullness of human life rather than the other way around in which human beings are expected to conform to the narrow demands of economic thinking.

The same inner spark that moves me to create new artistic forms also moves me to create new social and economic forms that are more in harmony with the spiritual intentions of my art.

*******

Natural artistic capacity is often referred to as a gift. For someone with an artistic gift it is unthinkable to not exercise it, for that would be to squander one’s gift.

One gift often inspires another gift. That is why those with an artistic gift have a deep need to share the fruits of their art with others. In the first instance, artists want nothing more than to share the spiritual experience of their creative work. Because of this, artists can be spiritually fulfilled simply in having other people show interest in their work-- authentic expressions of appreciation never hurt.

However, artists cannot live and work by appreciation alone; they must find ways to cover the costs of their materials and gallery expenses and to support themselves and their families. The idea of selling artwork is born from the simple chemistry of economic necessity and the fact that paintings and sculptures are physical objects. It is the union of these two factors that leads us to regard visual works of art as commodities.

Some artists see no problem in selling their work, while others, such as myself, feel extremely conflicted. This inner conflict seems to be rooted in the tension between the spiritual and physical dimensions of art. For much of my life I have assumed it was some shortcoming in me that blocked me from adapting to the ways of the world. The present economic upheavals embolden me to think that perhaps in reality the shortcomings lie more in the ways of the world, including the ways of the art market.

The convention of selling works of art assumes that there is some intrinsic relationship between their spiritual value and their monetary value. In reality, these are two distinct matters that have nothing to do with each other. We buy and sell a work of art, as with most other things, as a way to transfer the rights of ownership from one person to another. This transfer of ownership is facilitated by the exchange of an agreed upon monetary value. In order to determine the monetary value of an artwork both parties must quantify not only tangible factors, such as its size and materials, but also intangibles, such as spiritual quality and value.

There are two problems with this commonplace approach to selling works of art: the idea of ownership, and equating spiritual value with monetary value.

To understand this we need to take into account not only the perspective of the artist, but also the vital role of the viewer of art. It is widely recognized that the greatest masterpiece is incomplete as long as other people have not seen it. Simply by opening him- or herself to the spirit of an artwork, the viewer completes the creative activity of the artist. In contemplating a work of art the viewer both receives a spiritual gift and, at the same time, gives a spiritual gift to the artist.

A meaningful experience with a work of art, even when challenging, stirs in most people some feeling of gratitude and appreciation. Sometimes a work of art can so resonate in us that we may want to buy it so that we can experience it again and again. Most often we do not act upon this because our financial resources constrain us. However, even if someone can afford to buy a work of art, is ownership the only or best way to express our appreciation and support? Are there alternatives?

We do not readily apply the idea of ownership to a play, a musical composition, a poem or novel. If we enjoy a play, musical composition or a novel, we may see it performed a number of times, or buy a recording or printed copy. Often there is an original manuscript that someone owns, but usually this is approached in a spirit of public or communal stewardship. The idea of stewardship conveys better than ownership the sense that a performing or literary work of art is a spiritual gift belonging to human society as a whole and not a commodity to be owned by an individual.

The only explanation I see for our treating a visual artwork as a commodity for individual ownership is our inclination to attend to its physical properties more than its spiritual qualities. If the spiritual qualities of a painting or sculpture were our primary focus--and their physical properties were secondary--then we would regard a visual work of art as a kind of performance similar to a concert or play. As our experience of visual works of art focuses more on their spiritual quality then their physical properties, we are likely to feel more disposed towards stewardship then ownership of artwork.

One of the main advantages of stewardship is that it allows the spiritual and physical dimensions of art to be brought into harmony.

If an individual or community expresses interest and appreciation in a work of art, it is conceivable that the artist--or a representative of the artist--would give them the artwork for an agreed upon period of time. Such an arrangement would be founded on the understanding that their transaction concerns the transfer of spiritual stewardship and not physical ownership.

Clearly the artwork cannot be given away indiscriminately; therefore the artist or artist’s representative would retain the freedom to decide who will or will not receive the artwork and for how long. But having determined that an individual or a community is worthy of such stewardship, the significant aspect of this transaction is not so much in the outer arrangements as in the thoughts and feelings brought toward it. As one steward to another, each will experience the transfer of the artwork as freely given by the artist and freely received by the art recipient. The giving and receiving of the artwork are done in the spirit of a gift exchange.

If, for any reason, economic support were not an issue, then the transfer of the artwork would be complete through this purely spiritual gift exchange. This would be the case even if there were reason for both parties to sign a contractual agreement defining the parameters of the loan. However, if economic support is an issue, how can this be addressed, if not by selling the artwork? How does the idea of stewardship help us in this regard?

The transfer I described above can be understood as a form of lending rather than selling an artwork. The idea of loaning works of art gives both the artist and the art recipient more flexibility about agreeing to a temporary transfer of the artwork rather than a permanent one. It also suggests a familiar economic structure. Friends may loan something without introducing any economic considerations, but as strangers we usually expect to pay something. We call this renting. We pay not only to purchase and own a house or car; under certain circumstances we are prepared to pay a rent for their temporary use. So instead of selling or loaning it is conceivable to rent a work of art.

While renting art is a workable alternative, it does not adequately harmonize the economic exchange with the spiritual exchange. For this we must explore the feasibility and desirability of approaching the spiritual and economic exchanges as two distinct matters rather than bringing them together as we do when selling or renting a work of art.

The idea of stewardship guided us with the spiritual exchange of the artwork; it can also lead us to a new possibility when it comes to the economic exchange. When taking up the economic side of an art exchange, it is not helpful for the artist and art recipient to discuss the spiritual value of the artwork. The spiritual value of the artwork was implicit to and resolved in the spiritual exchange—where, by the way, economic considerations should not play a part. Now, however, it is appropriate for the art recipient to inquire about and for the artist to share a picture of the material costs, the amount of time spent in creating the work and other similar factors. The artist might also ask about the financial parameters that the art recipient is working within. Such a conversation could lead the artist to propose a level or range for the economic exchange.

Based on some variation of such interest in the actual costs involved in creating the art, including the artist’s livelihood, the art recipient who is motivated and guided by the idea of stewardship could regard making a financial contribution to the artist’s on-going work as part of that role. Rather than paying a certain sum in order to buy a work of art, through stewardship the art recipient could approach the economic side of the exchange also in the free spirit of gifting. A truly enlightened steward could offer economic support with the insight that he or she is not paying for the artwork already completed but is supporting the creation of new work. In this sense, the economic support is a gift into the future without regard for personal enrichment.

To outer appearances such an exchange of artwork and money may not seem so different from selling or renting. However, the inner shift from the attitude of ownership to stewardship is of the greatest significance because it allows both parties of the exchange to participate in an entirely different spirit.

Stewardship allows the artist to freely transfer the spiritual gift of his or her art to someone else. Likewise, stewardship allows the art recipient to freely receive the spiritual experience of the artwork and to freely give back their appreciation for its spiritual value.

Through stewardship the artist freely dedicates the physical and economic resources needed to create the work of art, and the art recipient freely contributes to the artist’s economic costs and livelihood.

When the spiritual give and take is treated independently from the economic give and take, the spiritual and physical dimensions of any art exchange are harmonized by being given and received in freedom.

A true work of art can be born only as a free creative deed. When the possessiveness inherent in ownership and the quantification of spiritual value into monetary value are layered onto a work of art, an unfree element is introduced. For a work of art to fulfill its spiritual service and find its rightful place in human life, the economic support of art must also be born as a free creative deed.

As a practical matter, it may prove burdensome for artists to negotiate the transfer of stewardship in every case. For this, it would be desirable for individuals who have the capacities and interest to take on the administrative activities related to the circulation and funding of the artwork within the community. This could be accomplished through a Community Art Association based on the principles of Community Supported Agriculture.

Such an association could come into being only if there is an unmet need living in the community from two sides:

Artists who are looking for new ways to serve the cultural/spiritual needs of the community. Individuals in the community who want to cultivate a deeper relationship with art and artists.

Artists who want to explore new social/economic forms for circulating and funding their work. Individuals in the community who want to explore new ways of supporting the arts.

I am hopeful that the time is ripe for exploring new ways for art to serve community life. I have every reason to believe there is a mutual interest and need living in non-artists as much as artists to make the arts a more vital and essential part of human life.

The prospect of forming a Community Art Association provides the immediate opportunity for artists and friends of the arts to come together for open and heartfelt conversation about the place of art in their lives. This would surely lead to an on-going collaboration in the sphere of art that would enrich the community as a whole.


Above copied from: http://www.livingformstudio.com/Livingformstudio-Michael_Howard/The_Metamorphosis_of_Art_and_Money_.html

Against Competition, Marc Fischer

Blunt Art Text (B.A.T.) #2, April 2006

Recently I received an email from a student in Ireland. He had discovered an interview in which I discussed an old project that sounded extremely similar to something he had been working on for a year and was about to exhibit. This discovery sent him into a “mini-crisis” and he wrote to see if I might share my thoughts on the situation.

I sent this student printed materials from my work, as I strongly feel that artists who are doing similar work should make an effort to know each other, share knowledge and perhaps even work together. There is no reason why two variations of the same idea can’t happily co-exist. So much of the way that the art world is structured favors competition. Grants are competitive. Art schools stage student competitions. Students compete for funding. Hundreds compete for a single art school teaching position. Professors compete with other professors. Artists compete with artists – stealing ideas instead of sharing them, or using copyright laws to guard against thoughtful re-use. Artists compete for shows in a limited number of exhibition spaces instead of finding their own ways to exhibit outside of these competitive venues. Artists conceal opportunities from their friends as a way of getting an edge up on the capital-driven competition. Gallerists compete with other gallerists and curators compete with curators. Artists who sell their work compete for the attention of a limited number of collectors. Collectors compete with other collectors to acquire the work of artists.

This is a treadmill made from decomposing shit that is so devoid of nutrients that even its compost won’t allow anything fresh to grow. We need something better to run on. Some artists are bypassing competitive approaches in their practice, suggesting possibilities for a different cultural climate. Since the 1960’s, numerous artists have made works that take the form of strategies, proposals, gestures and instructions. While these works are not usually presented as invitations for others to reinterpret, making variations in a similar spirit still has the potential to yield rewarding results. Ideas are not necessarily used up just because they have entered the art historical canon (and many good projects remain unfamiliar to most audiences). This older soil remains fertile for new plantings.

More art projects could be created with the built-in understanding that they can be freely re-made or given a new twist by others in the future – like classical music compositions that still get played two hundred years after the composer died. Take the example of the late composer John Cage’s three movement composition “4’ 33””. It was first performed by David Tudor in 1952. This work has since been given many reinterpretations over the years by artists as diverse as Frank Zappa, The BBC Symphony Orchestra and The Melvins. The work finds new meaning with different performers, contexts, times and places. Redundancies, repetitions and overlaps are often neglected because they complicate the bigger picture and show art to be the much larger social mess that it really is. We don’t have to run away from repetitions.

Since 2001, the Philadelphia-based collaborative group Basekamp has been doing lectures, discussions, events and project planning around the theme of redundancy in the visual arts. Late last year they co-organized an event series titled “Making Room for Redundancy” with Lars Fischer (no relation to the author). They have been dreaming up and building models for terminals where the viewer could enter an idea and see all of the overlapping permutations of how it has been explored before. Basekamp recently gave a lecture titled simply “I am a Collaborative Artist” at the Infest: Artist-Run Culture conference in Vancouver. For artists who are open to working with others, such conferences can be a good place to strengthen or develop new friendships, fueling new collaborations or broader inclusion in pre-existing projects.

Another mutually-supportive practice: the French artist Céline Duval enjoys a prolific collaboration with the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann, who is about thirty years her senior. This began when Céline contacted him wanting to help with raw material for his work and now they publish books together. They collaborate on equal footing despite large differences in age, experience and success in the art world. The viewer must untangle the mingling voices in these co-authored works, ask questions, or just accept the hybrid and enjoy the resulting complexity.

Making participatory artworks can open up your practice and build a loose community in the process. Since 1997, Chicago-based artist Melinda Fries has been running the website ausgang.com. Ausgang is essentially an artwork in web form that contains the work of various contributors (many of whom are not artists). Melinda creates categories that are of personal interest (examples: “Living Situations”, “Things In The Road”, “Bus Stories”). Contributors then flesh out these themes by submitting stories, images, or projects that are suitable for the web. The site is updated seasonally. Melinda’s project is enriched and expanded by others and the contributors get a platform for their work that will be seen by many viewers. The people who participate often send out emails promoting the site and their contributions that are included. The site is not a flimsy catch-all for anything and everything. Melinda functions as an editor, but she allows a very broad range of ways for one to participate. In the interest of disclosure, I contribute to ausgang.com regularly, but perhaps you should too?

While there is a joy in finding people with shared affinities, establishing communication and friendships with artists who have shared interests and ideas is not a retreat from the challenge of making tough critical art. Who better to kick your ass a little than your collaborators? The disposable, vague, or one-liner qualities in so much recent art reveals a lack of sufficient peer-to-peer ass-kicking. Collaborative projects by their nature insist on constant feedback and criticism
Arguing against competition is not necessarily a vote in favor of an idealized world of shiny happy people holding hands - some of the most productive collaborations can have a lot of tension and disagreement. The fascinating documentary “Some Kind of Monster” shows Metallica band members and co-founders James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich in exchanges that are sometimes so lacking in civility that at one point Ulrich is reduced to getting in Hetfield’s face and screaming: “FUUUUCCCKKKK!!!” In an additional scene on the DVD, Ulrich admits: “I’m afraid of changing what has worked. Twenty years of hatred sold one hundred million records.” One of the great tempestuous working relationships in film history was that of director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski. In Herzog’s documentary “My Best Fiend”, Kinski’s behavior on the set during one film was so angering that the director seriously contemplated murdering him. When Klaus Kinski wrote his autobiography, he reportedly gave Herzog advance notice that he was going to trash the director in the book because he felt that attacking his friend would lead to increased sales. The two even collaborated in their mutual infuriation with each other but clearly, and more importantly, they pushed each other to perform better and make more ambitious and passionate films.
How can we build a stronger network among people with shared interests and values? In a recent talk that we hosted at Mess Hall in Chicago, curator Nato Thompson brought up the impressive and widespread networks that the hardcore punk music scene has crafted, where a band has a place to play and crash in nearly every major town. This is something he longs to see happen for experimental art and cultural practices in every part of the U.S. - particularly those areas that are culturally under-served. An audience member noted, however, that part of what enabled the hardcore scene to do this so effectively is that there is a shared language that is easier to understand. People seem able to grasp the terms and aesthetics more easily. Music can circulate quickly and simply. It often has a bracing, visceral and emotional power; heady forms of art and critical theory are generally a little less catchy. You could listen to eight hardcore songs in the time it takes to read this essay.

Some online communities show promise. For the past couple years I’ve been frequenting a particularly hyperactive online music discussion group for obscure loud rock. The number of times the distant feel of the Internet breaks out into the real world on some of these sites is uncountable. When people attend concerts together often the next morning one person will write about it and another will post the photos they took and it all gets shared with thousands who couldn’t be there. I’ve been offered places to stay in numerous cities based purely on my taste in music, received un-requested packages of CDs and have been loaned books through the mail. A band had their van and equipment stolen, so one forum member named Foetuscide quickly set up a Paypal account that people could donate to. When Foetuscide was left homeless by Hurricane Katrina, people started sending her money at the Paypal account she originally created for the band. There has been endless support for a board member named EvilFanny who had to undergo brain surgery. A discussion thread about the merits of old Slayer and Celtic Frost records can happily share space with a thread where EvilFanny asks other board members if they know anything about going on Long Term Disability.

While these big online communities are messy and filled with more than their share of knuckle-draggers, sexists, homophobes and right wing morons, the generosity of participants can be breathtaking. The challenge for artists who want to build supportive networks like this is to find communication strategies that can help them connect to each other with the passion that music fans across the globe excel at. We need to make our emails to strangers whose art and ideas we care about resonate with that obsessive nerdy excitement that music geeks generate in their sleep. Art blogs are popping up all over Chicago but I have yet to see any become a truly action packed, socially dynamic online community where artists, curators, viewers, writers and every other kind of participant mixes it up and generates ideas that take real hold in the world. One of the oldest Chicago-centric discussion forums, Othergroup.net, sometimes goes for a month without a single post.

In order for critical and experimental art networks to become stronger, and for audiences to grow, artists need to expand the range of ways we operate. When artists work with others, they complicate their practice and these collaborations often enrich everything they do. They organize shows and events that include other artists, write about other people’s work and assist people with their creative endeavors. There is no reason why more artists – including those who have comparatively solitary studio practices, can’t cultivate those skills in order to work more effectively with other people. In the process, they learn to write, organize, publish, curate, educate and do anything else necessary to bolster support and dialogue for the ideas they value. More than anything, they learn to take the initiative and build something larger than themselves. In the 1970’s, 80’s and early 90’s, artists could do this work on the government’s dime at NEA-funded not-for-profit Alternative spaces. Now that the money is gone and most of those spaces are no longer in existence, new methodologies need to be worked out. We need each other more than ever.

Working with others not only opens the individual artist to the resources, skills, criticisms, and ideas of their collaborator(s), but also frequently to those of the collaborator’s peer group or network. This inevitably creates a larger audience for the finished work and sows the seeds for future collaborations with an even greater variety of people. Creating opportunities for others always results in more personal opportunities. When it becomes clear that you operate from a place of generosity, people become more generous with you -- sometimes offering things like free use of equipment, huge discounts on printing and even free use of a storefront in Rogers Park (the location and arrangement that has kept Mess Hall going for over two years now). This approach may not result in a vacation home in Malibu or the opportunity to snort lines of coke off of prostitutes’ asses with Jörg Immendorf, but is that really the reason you became an artist in the first place?

Working toward a global network where one creates opportunities and, in turn, can respond to limitless opportunities without the pressure to compete, allows for a more generous, diverse and open art practice. In these ways, one can break the isolation of being alone, defending a head-full of secret studio realizations that some kid in Ireland has probably already figured out anyway.

Note: In the spirit of this essay, a number of collaborators provided feedback. Thanks to: Brett Bloom, Melinda Fries, Terence Hannum, Brennan McGaffey, Scott Rigby and Dan S. Wang.

Above copied from: http://www.temporaryservices.org/against_competition_mf.pdf

The Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement (1971), Seth Siegelaub

Introduction to the Agreement made by Siegelaub in Leonardo, vol. 6, 1973.

1. The Agreement

The three-page Agreement on the following pages has been drafted by Bob Projansky, a New York lawyer, after my extensive discussions and correspondence with over 500 artists, dealers, collectors, museum people, critics and others involved in the day-to-day workings of the international art world.

The Agreement has been designed to remedy some generally acknowledged inequities in the art world, particularly artists' lack of control over the use of their work and participation in its economics after they no longer own it.

The Agreement form has been written with special awareness of the current ordinary practices and economic realities of the art world particularly its private, cash and informal nature, with careful regard for the interests and motives of all concerned.

It is expected to be the standard form for all transfer and sale of all contemporary art and has been made as fair, simple and useful as possible. It can be used either as presented here or slightly altered to fit your specific situation. If you have questions as regards any part of the agreement, you should consult your attorney.

2. Enforcement

First, let us put this question in perspective: most people will honor the Agreement because most people honor agreements. Those few people who will try to cheat you are likely to be the same kinds who will give you a hard time about signing the Agreement in the first place. Later owners will be more likely to try to cheat you than the first owner, with whom you or your dealer have had some face-to-face contact but there are strong reasons why both first and future owners should fulfill the contract's terms.

What happens if owner No. 2 sells your work to owner No. 3 and does not send you the transfer form? (He is not sending you the money, either.) Nothing happens. (You do not know about it yet.)

Sooner or later you do find out about it because it takes a lot of effort to conceal such sales and the 'grapevine' will get the news to you (or your dealer) anyway. To conceal the sale, owner No. 3 has to conceal the work and he is not going to hide a good and valuable work just to save a little money. And if he ever wants to sell it, repair it, appraise it or authenticate it, he MUST come to you (or your dealer). When you do find out about such a transaction-and you will-you sue owner No. 2, who will owe you 15% of the increase based on the price to owner No. 3 or on the value at the time you find out about it, which may be higher. Clearly, a seller (in this case No. 2) would be extremely foolish to take this chance, to risk having to pay a lot of money, just to save a little money.

As to falsifying values reported to the artist, there will be as much pressure from the new owner to put a falsely high value as from the old owner to put in a low value. There are real difficulties inherent in getting two people to lie in unison, especially if it only benefits one of them-the seller. In 95% of the cases the amount of money to be paid to the artist will not be enough to compel the collectors to lie to you.

You will note that in the event you have to sue to enforce any of your rights under the Agreement, article 19 gives you the right to recover reasonable attorney's fees in addition to whatever else you may be entitled to.

3. Summation

We realize that this Agreement is essentially unprecedented in the art world and that it just may cause a little rumbling and trembling; on the other hand, the ills it remedies are universally acknowledged to exist and no other practical way has ever been devised to cure them.

Whether or not, you, the artist, use it, is of course up to you; what we have given you is a legal tool that you can use yourself to establish ongoing rights when you transfer your work. This is a substitute for what has existed before-nothing.

We have done this for no recompense, for just the pleasure and challenge of the problem, feeling that should there ever be a questions about artists' rights in reference to their art, the artist is more right than anyone else.

-Seth Siegelaub, 1973.

The Agreements and the corresponding statement appear courtesy of The Siegelaub Collection & Archives at the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam.

Above copied from: http://www.primaryinformation.org/index.php?/projects/siegelaubartists-rights/

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).


Bibliography:


Butler, Judith (1991): Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter, Frankfurt/Main.
Bourdieu, Pierre; Passeron, J.C. (1973): Grundlagen einer Theorie der symbolischen Gewalt, Frankfurt/M.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1987): Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft, Frankfurt/M.
Foerster, Heinz von (1960): On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments, in Yovits/Cameron (Hg.), Self-Organizing Systems, Oxford.
Claus, Jürgen (1985): ChippppKunst: Computer - Holographie - Kybernetik - Laser, Frankfurt/M., Berlin.
Laclau, Ernesto; Mouffe, Chantal (1991): Hegemonie und radikale Demokratie, Zur Dekonstruktion des Marxismus, Wien.
Lebel, Robert (1972): Marcel Duchamp, Von der Erscheinung zur Konzeption, Köln.
Luhmann, Niklas (1987): Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie, Frankfurt/M.
- (1993): Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, Bd. 1. Frankfurt/M.
Maciunas, George (1965): Brief an Tomas Schmit vom 1. Februar 1964, in Jürgen Becker/Wolf Vostell (Hg.), Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Noveau Réalisme, Hamburg.
Ohrt, Roberto (1990): Phantom Avantgarde, Eine Geschichte der Situationistischen Internationale und der modernen Kunst, Hamburg.
Richardson, Joan (1990): Ein anderer Reality Club, in John Brockman (Hg.), Neue Realität, München.
Richter, Hans (1978): Dada, Kunst und Antikunst, Köln.
Stachelhaus, Heiner (1989): Joseph Beuys, Leipzig.

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