See →.
In the main and over time, the dissolution of art into life, though an obviously necessary (and highly commendable) initiative in the history of art, has been a bad thing for both art and life, and far too much has been allowed to happen in the name of that confusion already. The late Paul de Man, in considering the problematic status of (all statements about) art in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, noted something similar with regard to the following well-known nugget of Nietzschean wisdom: “Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world forever justified.” The famous quote, twice repeated in The Birth of Tragedy, should not be taken too serenely, for it is an indictment of existence rather than a panegyric of art.” Paul de Man, “Genesis and Genealogy in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy,” in: Diacritics II, 4 (Winter 1972): 50. In other words: art is not necessarily more interesting than life because art in itself is such a great thing, but rather because life is such an awful thing.
A tentative answer, and not just in the spirit of provocation: artists have come in its stead. So what we have here is not so much “art without artists” but rather “artists without art”—and ironically or not, this speculative observation partly corroborates the controversial opening salvo of E. H. Gombrich’s Story of Art, according to which “there really is no such thing as art, there are only artists.” Slightly less polemically, and to take up an idea first explored in a previous essay published in e-flux journal, one could also venture that the art world has come in its stead (meaning: the community of artists and producers around which the communities of collectors, critics, curators, gallerists, and others circle). See my “What is Not Contemporary Art? The View From Jena,” →.
“The artist is present”: if I seem to be devoting too much attention to the artist’s persona or personality in the present discussion of Enjoy Poverty’s reception, it is in part because the work is undeniably also a kind of self-portrait, at its most effective when capturing our artist-hero caught in the vise of contemporary ethical conundrums. “The artist is present” is also a reference, of course, to Marina Abramovic’s 2010 retrospective at MoMA, which was not only the biggest performance art extravaganza ever set up by the museum in its venerable 80-year history, but also one of last year’s biggest box office hits in the Western world’s postwar art capital—a powerful sign of the general audience’s thirst for the artist’s “presence” in these personality-starved, yet celebrity-obsessed, times.
Hence the appeal this work holds to viewers immersed in Lacanian and post-Lacanian (i.e. Žižekian) reading habits: it enjoins us to “to enjoy our symptom in case being a messy blend of real powerlessness, the guilty acceptance of such powerlessness, the frisson of intellectual sophistication afforded by the supremely self-reflexive gesture of gleefully accepting our powerlessness.
On a related note, I would like to suggest that the “commodification of everything” only comes to pass if we allow everything to be commodified. I’d like to think—perhaps “believe” is the more operative term—that some “things,” by their very definition and nature (such as, precisely, thoughts), resist commodification, and merely thinking that such pockets of resistance continue to exist may well be enough to contest the fatalist, cynical thesis of pan-commodification (some overtones of which also echo in Martens’s Enjoy Poverty, with its sarcastic proposal of the commodification and marketing of indigenous suffering). Indeed, the proof of the thought is sometimes just in the very act of thinking, as in the following historical anecdote, recounted in Hegel’s History of Philosophy: “It is known how Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic, quite simply refuted (the Eleatics’) arguments against movement; without speaking he rose and walked about, contradicting them by action.”
“There is no alternative” is Thatcherite, of course, for the slightly more metaphysical-sounding (but really anti-metaphysical) “there is no outside.” Margaret Thatcher most often used the phrase in connection with the presumed inevitability of the world’s gradual evolution towards a globalized model of free-market economic liberalism—the philosophical essence of which can likewise be condensed to the absurd assertion that “there is no outside,” that we are all shoppers shut inside the same exit-less supermall.
This historical qualification requires some clarification: 1989 is the year usually referred to as a landmark date in the recounting of recent political history, while the beginnings of contemporary art are customarily located in the early-to-mid sixties, in a politico-cultural climate that (in retrospect) appears light years away from that which became the dominant trend after 1989. It is abundantly clear, however, that most of the characteristics usually called upon to define not just contemporary art but also the contemporary art world—the conclusive conflation of both spheres has played a crucial role in this regard—only really started to act in paradigmatic concert around the late eighties and early nineties, a moment in culture that witnessed a whole range of revolutions and transformations in the economic sphere first and foremost: in this sense, taking into account the meaning of the date “1989” for world economic history, “post-1989” art is nothing other than “contemporary art market art.”
On December 11, 2010, at a conference organized in Berlin on the occasion of Texte zur Kunst’s twentieth anniversary last December, Italian political theorist Franco Berardi’s engaging, temperamental oration stood out, among other reasons, because of its refusal of the pervasive tenor of gloom and resignation that animated much of the other presentations, optimistically stating that a new era had just announced itself in the form of the rising tide of student protests against the dramatic increase of university tuition fees in the UK (one can only wonder now what the popular ousting of Egypt’s last pharaoh Hosni Mubarak would have led him to say). According to Berardi, this new spirit, not of capitalism this time, but of something a little more promising (Luc Boltanski was another speaker on Berardi’s panel), was not just connected to a financial crisis that had brought about the unexpected rebirth of certain economic measures—such as state intervention in the saving of major banks—most commonly associated with socialism (“socialism for the banks, capitalism for the poor,” as Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek put it in their preface to The Idea of Communism), but also with the exhaustion of what he called both “the rhetoric of integration” and the “matrix of inclusion as a new spectacle.” Interestingly, he also noted how art had played a hugely influential role in the establishment of this exhausted, crisis-ridden paradigm, stating that one of the major socio-political problems of the last two decades had been the “pervasiveness of art,” thus suggesting that the spectacular growth of the art world in the nineties and early 2000s was profoundly entwined with the crisis of popular political action and political consciousness more generally during those decades.
Coltan does not appear (at least not explicitly) in Renzo Martens’s Enjoy Poverty, but it does figure prominently in another art film, Steve McQueen’s Gravesend (2007)—a very different affair.
The Gnostic tradition refers to an unruly amalgam of early Christian belief systems, thoroughly influenced by various Neoplatonisms, that valued knowledge (gnosis) over faith (pistis), and, concomitantly, the individual experience of the divine as accessed by knowledge of self over the collective religious experience enabled by communal practices. Not surprisingly, gnosis was a big deal among the Desert Fathers and assorted hermits of the second and third century AD: the Gnostic is the quintessential outsider, ever suspicious of the “immersive” claims of a communal experience that does not believe such an “outside” can (or, much more importantly, should be allowed to) exist.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 111. De Certeau’s remarks on the metaphysics of train travel are especially relevant to the present discussion because of their investment in the dialectic of mobility and stasis, of dynamism and immobilization. Earlier on in the book, the gnostic paradigm is more explicitly linked to the experience of taking the elevator to the 110th floor of New York’s World Trade Center, “only the most monumental figure of Western urban development, the atopia-utopia of optical knowledge.” Ibid., 93.
Of Grammatology is also the book in which Derrida famously stated that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” so there seems to be a bit of a contradiction at work here. There is no outside-of-the-text, perhaps, but there can still exist such a thing as the text’s external surface—and this may be an interesting place for the scribe to bide his or her time…
This is a reference to the title of the last Berlin Biennial, curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, the English translation of which was “what is waiting out there.” The question of realism—which is also the question of Immendorff’s manifesto-like painting—had been an important one in the run-up to the exhibition’s actual realization, but opinion was ultimately divided as to whether this installment of the Biennial had succeeded in telling (or rather, teaching) us something new about art’s relationship to “what is waiting outside.”