ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO SLUSH

Mathew Abbott

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For Agamben, the problem on which Grandville riffed was the ‘bad con­science with respect to objects’ arising alongside the consumer society getting into gear in his France. But what is this bad conscience, and from where does it come? Our relation to the objects we buy and sell, consume and produce changes because of the historically unprecedented increase in productive capacities brought about by capitalism, with rapidly increasing technological develop­ment,­an­ever-intensifying­division­of­labour,­and­rising­efficiency­created by the growth and reinvestment of capital. The process of production becomes more anonymous and geographically distributed, with products tending to appear as though they have arrived for our

We are familiar with the claim that capitalism exploits and alienates workers. But what has it done to objects? In Stanzas, his early psycho­analytic study of melancholia and commodity fetishism, Giorgio Agamben refers to Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville’s satirical drawings in Petites misères de la vie humaine as he develops a theory of capitalist object relations. He writes:

In a series of genially perverse illustrations, Grandville gave us one­of­ the­first­representations­of a phenomenon that would be come increasingly familiar to the modern age: a bad con­science with respect to objects. In a leaky faucet that cannot be turned off, in an umbrella that reverses itself, in a boot that can be neither completely put

on nor taken off and remains tenaciously stuck on one foot, in the sheets of paper scattered by a breath of wind, in a coverlet that does not cover, in a pair of pants that tears, the prophetic glance of Grandville discovers, beyond the simple fortuitous incident, the cipher of a new relation between humans and things (47).

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consumption ‘out of nowhere’; they emerge from a highly abstracted, rationalised production process and so are relatively unencumbered by the organic connections to everyday life that characterised them in pre­capitalist society, in which the members of a single village may have presided over the farming and shearing of sheep, the spinning and plying of yarn, and the creation and sale of woollen textiles, to take just one example; products become reducible to their exchange value and thus interchangeable, the bearers of an abstract quantity that deprives them of their distinctness and idiosyncrasy; they are cheaper to make and so worth less to us. As a result objects become less solid, both literally (think of­Ikea)­and­figuratively­(less­trustworthy,­serious,­reliable,­substantive,­etc., which is why ‘they don’t make ‘em like they used to’). This is what Georg Simmel means when, in “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, he writes of how capital “hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific­values­and­their­uniqueness­and­incomparability...”­(110).­It­is part of what Adorno has in mind in Aesthetic Theory when he writes of an “eclipse of concretion”, of how the “marrow of experience is sucked out” (40).

Look at the difference between a still life from early modernity, such as Francisco de Zurbarán’s Bodegón, and the 1962 Natura Morta by Giorgio Morandi, the late modern master of the genre. If in the former a goblet, two plates, and three earthenware vessels are presented in all their solidity, clarity, and distinctness, indeed as radiantly unique (notice how they do not cast shadows on each other), then in the latter a similar set of objects becomes­blandly­anonymous,­flattened,­and­washed­out.­The­objects­in­ the Zurbarán catch the light dramatically, and each glows out from the background; the objects in the Morandi are huddled together sheepishly, seeming about to fade into each other (notice how some of them share outlines) and threatening to merge amorphously with the background. The comparison indicates what capitalist modernity does to things. As it produces and distributes them in historically unprecedented quantities,

Figure 1: Frontispice from Petites misères de la vie humaine.

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Figure 2: Francisco de Zurbarán, Bodegón, ca. 1660 (Mueseo del Prado, Madrid).

it­makes­them­more­ephemeral.­For­the­flatness­in­Morandi­is­not­only­ the result of an experiment with perspective or an acknowledgment of the two-dimensionality­of­the­canvas:­this­flatness,­this­sense­that­things­have­lost their depth and distinctness, is one of the experiential features of the modern­as­we­know­it.­Yet­this­is­also­a­‘deep’­or­rippled­flatness,­a­flat­- ness riven by hugely complex economic, political, and social conditions, passionate attachments, disavowals, and affective ambivalences. Things in­capitalism­are­marked­by­new­ambiguities;­their­flattening­is­also­an­enchantment. We aren’t always sure what they mean or where they’ve come from, or who has made them or under what conditions, or how and sometimes why; we amass stuff only to feel oppressed by it; we take joy in not only accumulating but also in chucking things away.

This is why the characters Grandville satirises are taunted by the stuff they own: in the image included above, a gentleman’s clothes and access ories are in the process of being snatched and/or destroyed by a gang of small malevolent creatures; his hat, coat, stick, shoes and watch have become demoniac. It’s a fanciful scene, but we all know how he feels. Think of the weird guilt of spending too much money on something that turns out to be less than useful: the way it sits in its box in the cupboard, making you feel bad every time you catch a glimpse of it. Think of the souvenirs you have likely bought on your travels: you can’t throw them out because of the memories you’ve attached to them, and yet they are most of them cheap and insubstantial, kitsch touristic detritus produced, probably, in third­world factories (as I write this, I am being watched by a small tarsier made of plastic and fake fur). Think of collectors, who pride themselves on their struggle to establish a different relation to their objects. Think of so­called ‘hoarders’, who refuse to relinquish them. Hoarding and collecting are two opposing but connected ways of confronting what capital does to objects, strategies of resistance failing madly. When Walter Benjamin unpacks his library, he acknowledges that the collector is outmoded: always “behind

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the times” (491). For Benjamin, a true collection is always anachronistic. Yet anachronism is not nostalgia, and a collection is also an attempt at establishing a certain kind of relation with the future. Hence the essential “heritability” of true collections: they are attempts at transmitting some­thing. The hoarder, on the other hand, refuses this relation with the future, and cannot conceive of passing on his collection. When the collector dies, he is survived by something relatively solid, ordered, and transmissible. When the hoarder dies, he and his hoard are condemned to merge with the capitalist slush they were originally trying to resist. These are strategies for combating what Morandi’s still lifes and Grandville’s drawings deal with: the sense that things have turned their backs on us. They are responses to the malady capital has introduced into our relations with the things of our world.

The Communist Manifesto describes the situation like this: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” (38 – 9). If Marx and Engels had written ‘slush’ instead of ‘air’, they would have given us the perfect motto for this show. For one way of under ­ standing the predicament in which Marian Tubbs, Sarah Contos, Jonny Niesche, Charles Dennington, and Justin Balmain are working is in terms of­slushification.­More­specifically,­it­is­in­terms­of­the­particular­slush-ification­of­being­that­capital­has­achieved­in­this,­its­(very)­late­(or­post-)­modern phase. If in Zurbarán things are clear and distinct enough for us to trust them, then in Grandville this trust is evaporating: objects are taking on lives of their own; they have started turning away from us. If in Morandi this process is nearing its end as things begin to fade into each other, threat­ening­to­flatten­out­entirely­as­the­background­creeps­forward,­then­for­these­artists,­this­slushifying­flatness­has­already­arrived­on­the­scene,­and there really is no going back. Their question is not quite – as it is for hoarders and collectors – how to resist the slushiness of being, how to hold

Figure 3: Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta, 1962 (Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen).

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onto objects such that they remain substantial, ordered, trustworthy or solid. It is not about how to escape the slush, but how to get into it in the right way. Unlike hoarders and collectors, these artists are pro ducers. Yet they are not quite producers in the traditional sense. For what they are exhibit­ing are events: installation, processes, collaborations, dialogues. Many of these events involve mundane objects ripped from their quo tidian contexts and presented in distorted form, like grabs of text that have been run between languages on Google Translate; some, such as the small paintings that have been tacked onto larger works, force crises in the notions of singularity and separateness we (used to) associate with the concept ‘artwork’. These events are serving up the bread and butter of con temp ­ orary experience: distinctness losing its grip; the everyday be coming incomprehensible (and vice versa); the humdrum so enchanted, so mystified­that­even­something­as­mundane­as­a­doorframe­can­confront­ as a strangely threatening puzzle. They are ambiguous paeans to, criticisms of, engagements with, commentaries on, and participants in the becoming­slush of being that marks our moment. They are wavering on the very edge of slush; they are themselves metaphysical problems, problems that are also always already political and economic. The aesthetic and ontological status of these wavering problematic events is ambiguous, which is only­fitting­considering­the­historical­novelty­of­the­situation­unfolding­(melting) around us. It’s slushy out there; are we sobering?

REFERENCES1. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot­Kentor (London: Continu um, 1997)2. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, trans. Ronald Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)3. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library,” trans. Harry Zohn in Selected Writings Volume Two,

Part Two: 1931 – 1934 (Caambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 486 – 4934. Paul Émile Daurand Forgues and Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville, Petites misères de la vie

humaine (Paris: H. Fournier, 1843)5. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Verso, 1998)6. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, trans. Edward Schils in G. Bridge and S. Watson

(eds), The Blackwell City Reader (London: Blackwell, 2010), 103 – 110

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