breaking the contract with the duchampian base

8/17/2019 Breaking the Contract With the Duchampian Base.

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Anton Vidokle and Brian KuanWood

Breaking the

Contract

1. The Contract

The Duchampian revolution leads not to theliberation of the artist from work, but to hisor her proletarization via alienatedconstruction and transportation work. Infact, contemporary art institutions nolonger need an artist as a traditionalproducer. Rather, today the artist is more

often hired for a certain period of time as aworker to realize this or that institutionalproject.

Ð Boris Groys1

Sanja Ivekovi!, Triangle, 1979. Performance, 18 min.

When his readymades entered the space ofart, Duchamp effectively rearranged the contractbetween the exhibition and the work of art intowhat we now accept as the status quo, liberatingthe artist from the laws of traditional taste bybreaking open a space within the exhibition forartists to work Ð or, more precisely, to think. In awily chess move, the presentation of industrialobjects as art freed the artist from manual laborand allowed simple spatial and temporal

arrangements within an exhibition to release adynamic cosmology in which the ontological and

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Arthur Bispo do Ros‡rio, Estandarte (Flagpole), date unknown.

epistemological foundations of art itself could besimultaneously made and unmade. Thisadvanced the position of the artist enormously;he or she became free to do and exhibit anything,and the institution was thus expected to respectthe will of the artist by staying out of the way. But there was a high price to pay for thetotal sovereignty Duchamp gained for the artist,and this is only becoming clear almost a century

after Duchamp exhibited his fountain:DuchampÕs liberated artist could only appearwhen sanctioned by an art institution. In otherwords, the basic condition allowing the artist toproduce whatever he or she pleased was that theliberated artistic gesture must only appear insanctioned spaces of art. This has likewise givenenormous authority to art institutions, which arein turn just as responsible for producing art asartists themselves. From a white cube in NewYork to a remote Nepalese mountaintop, thesanctioning forces of the art world are the sole

enabler of art, but also the artistÕs ball andchain.

2. Artistic SovereigntyAnd yet, an artist today nevertheless aspires to acertain kind of sovereignty, to the freedom towork as one pleases. Unlike artists, say, before

the French Revolution, who worked merely tosatisfy a commission from the church or thearistocracy, or to serve public taste and critics,artists today understand themselves as beingnot only capable of deciding what kind ofpractice they want to have, what subject matteris important to them, what form it may take, andso forth; they also understand themselves asfundamentally free to follow their own personal

interests or to respond to urgent events in theworld around them. And this fundamentalfreedom is understood as a basic condition ofany work of art, as the pillar that the content andform of any artwork rests upon.2

In fact, public exhibitions of art also startedat the time of the French Revolution, when theroyal palace was returned to the hands of thepeople in the form of the first fully publicexhibition of painting and sculpture bycontemporary artists of that day. The audiencefor this salon show at the Salon CarrŽ became, in

a sense, the first real ÒpublicÓ: a groupcomprised of new citizen-subjects who had justviolently gained political power and instituted arepublic in the name of popular sovereignty. Andwhile the exhibition did not include any explicitlypolitically or socially engaged art Ð but rathertraditional paintings of landscapes, nudes, and

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mythological and religious motifs Ð the actualexperience of being able to enter the royal palaceto view art was surely political in itself, for it wasintimately connected to the Revolution. The merefact of entering the palace-as-exhibitiondemonstrated, in a material way, the belief thatthe legitimacy of the state is created by theconsent of its people and that the state exists toserve the people, and not the other way around.

Michael Asher, Installation, 1970. Pomona College Museum of Art.

This situation created unprecedentedpositions and opportunities both for artisticpractice and for art institutions: the suddenpresence of a public offered artists the potentialto transform community through artÕs criticalfunction, to engage groups and influence public

opinion in a way that could in turn result (and didresult) in tangible social and political change. Itis in no way accidental that several decades latersaw the emergence of such figures as Courbet,Manet, and others who helped to institute theparadigm of critically engaged art practice westill aspire to follow today. For arts institutions,the emergence of an art-viewing public marked atransition from private collections to a muchmore meaningful social function. And it wasthrough this commitment to a public, to an ideaof popular sovereignty, that both the artist and

the institution suddenly managed to obtainsovereign positions for themselves as well.

Interestingly, all this was possible within aprocess of mere spectatorship: looking at artobjects and representations." Here it is

important to insist that, though we now live in amore complex time, art exhibitions still carry thispotential today. While itÕs tempting to assume that artisticand popular sovereignty are connected andinterdependent, this is not always the case.

Claims to artistic sovereignty are often found inthe works of artists who are in the most unfreecircumstances. Much like popular sovereignty,artistic sovereignty is perpetually contained,contested, recuperated, or co-opted. While as anartist you may think you are free to do as youplease, in order for your work to be economicallysustainable, critically acknowledged, or evensimply brought into contact with the art public, itneeds to conform to certain network protocolsthat dictate the forms of art production thatcirculate. With the ever-increasing

professionalization of artists, curators, and otherpractitioners in the field of art, it seems that theindustry of contemporary art is actually movingtowards a certain restoration of a moreprescriptive position vis-ˆ-vis the artist. Thisreality necessitates a more focused positioningof liberated artistic work within, against, andbeyond the contextual superstructure thatenables and envelops the sovereign artisticgesture.

3. What Is Contemporary Art?

Politics and biography have merged. We areall tolerant of art that is rooted in specificstories. This is the inclusive zone where theartist plays his or her own perspective for acollective purpose. The drive is towardsunhooking from who you are whilesimultaneously becoming only yourself.Some people can sleep with their eyesopen.

Ð Liam Gillick3

After Duchamp, the artist can now addressthe politics of the exhibition, but itÕs equally truethat the artist can never produce outside ofthese politics. After all, is this not whatprompted many artists, primarily centered in andaround Yugoslavia, from Mladen Stilinovi! to

NSK, to auto-institutionalize themselves in orderto produce legitimacy as they simultaneouslyproduced work? Artists now continue to producetheir own self-defined institutions, but thistactic is quickly becoming insufficient for gaining

the freedom to work. Just as social networks arerapidly auto-institutionalizing everyone by

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Goran #or $evi!, Salon de Fleurus, a fictionalized reconstruction of Gertrude Stein and Alice ToklasÕ Parisian salon. #or $evi! has maintained amicrocosmic alternative history of modernism for more than twenty years in a private apartment only a short distance from the the Museum ofModern Art.

introducing a common protocol for makingindividual people visible to each other acrosslong distances, even the artist seeking a totalexit from the art system must paradoxically notventure too far in order for such a heroic gestureto exist within the frame of art. There are nolonger any artist unions worth mentioning, forwhy should they be necessary when artist andinstitution alike are inextricably bound together

by the supra-institution of Contemporary Art?4

Carl Schmitt famously wrote, ÒSovereign ishe who decides on the exception.Ó But anexception from what? What is the implicitcontract Ð the constitution that grantscontemporary art its legitimacy as a strongsystemic power? What is the contract that a newDuchamp in our time must break? And howwould this break be made apparent? For decades now many have looked topolitically or socially engaged art to provide themeans of breaking through, and for many years

this kind of work did succeed in doing so. Now,however, the enclosure of contemporary art hasaccounted for this work in its calculations, for wehave come to see the insertion of political art inmuseum spaces as a zombie-like caricature ofsocial commitment, a walking dead of social lifeand artistic currency that masks a total

confusion with regard to the question of how torender artistic form relevant and challenging.The vast number of artists filled with genuinesocial commitment are wisely secretive of thefact that they must inhabit a double life, knowingthat the social relevance of their work is trappedin their own subjectivity and even in theirprocess of developing their work. These sameartists tend to be increasingly uncomfortable

and elusive at their own openings as they watchthe exhibition context hermetically seal the verycontent of their works into the forms they use topresent it. This is not because political consciousnesshas become irrelevant to art, but because theconcrete social conditions that these artistsaddress in their work have been overshadowedby the much more pressing politics of whatconstitutes contemporary art in the first place Ðthe question of why this or that work is evenbeing shown in a given space. Recent biennials

and documentas have evaded thematizationspecifically under the banner of a vague andrelativistic, open-ended idea of heterogeneousplurality. But this is possible only as the mastertheme becomes increasingly clear: morecontemporary art. Paradoxically, this has produced an entire

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Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Khiam, 2000. Video, 52Õ

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generation of amazing artists who opt for ahyper-formalism that borders on the arcane,because they know that the only option availableto them is to advance the enclosure of the artcontext by adopting a museological formatwithin their very own exhibition-ready works Ðemploying plinths, shelves, and vitrines asartistic forms par excellence.5 They know, likeDuchamp perhaps did, that their freedom must

be bought using the currency of the regime thatgoverns them. The exceptions tend to be artistsworking in video, because video allows a windowinto a world that does not concern the artinstitution.

FrŽdŽric Bruly BouabrŽ, Connaissance du Monde, 1992. Colored penciland ballpoint pen on cardboard.

These are the most immediate exit pointswe have available at the moment. Withoutdelving too deeply into Duchamp scholarship, we

still look forward to something that can escapethe enclosure of the present time Ð not as a

messianic hope for total rupture, but simply as ameans of articulating a form of agency that doesnot lean entirely on the professionalsuperstructure of art in order to come into beingas art. It is the implicit drive behind the amplifiedpitch of a great deal of art writing, because manypractitioners in art, and almost all artists, stillbelieve, in spite of their cynicism, that a similarbreak is still possible, and that this break can

align itself with a cohesive social project. In themeantime, we function more and more like NGOemployees who are alcoholic yet naivelyidealistic. The first step is perhaps to recognizethe scale of the system of enclosure that needsto be broken, then its structure, then itsopenings. The systemic enclosure of contemporary artis much larger than a consensus aroundexhibition codes, curatorial sensibility, andrelevant artists, because the very function ofcultural spaces themselves has been

superseded or redeployed by a politicalsuperstructure. Over the past decade,contemporary art has merged increasingly withthe sensibilities of actual, concrete politicalstructures, which have discovered incontemporary art and culture a means ofexhibiting liberal, enlightened, globallyconscious moral values.6 The artistic field ishappy to serve in this diplomatic capacity,because expanding its rule allows it to bury itsown ontological crisis. To create moreinstitutions, more artists, in more places allowsartists and institutions alike to escape thequestion of what is actually happening. There is alot of money in this game, for it is in many casesfinanced by municipalities, monarchs, andoligarchs who have discovered in the culturalfield a new, advanced form of social capital.Many well-intentioned artists can cash in for thefirst time in their careers and still have their workexhibited in flattering spaces and celebrated bysome of the greatest critical minds of our time,who are flown in and hosted for this very reason.Many of the same artists worry that they cannotdeviate from the path, as the stakes have

suddenly become very high. The paradox comes in the fact that theinstrumentalization of art as a tool to promoteliberal and democratic values coincides in somany ways with the actual history of art, fromthe modern period back to the FrenchRevolution, the Enlightenment, and theRenaissance. This produces an even moreconfusing effect for those who see the role of artcompromised by its deployment in a broaderfield of cultural politics, because it also appearsthat it may not be the art system per se that is

expanding, but the very liberal tradition thatundergirds it. As if rescuing art from the industry

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of contemporary art were not difficult enough,moving one level higher, even contemporary artitself becomes harder to disentangle fromcultural diplomacy and municipal and statemarketing. But it is also here that contemporaryart becomes almost hysterical in its structuralinstability.

Installation view of Projects 96: Haris Epaminonda, 2011. Photo:Jonathan Muzikar. © MoMA.

As a product of the so-called postmodernera, the classification of art as ÒcontemporaryÓemerged as a convenient means of playing twosides of a paradigmatic shift simultaneously.Contemporary art distances itself from theperiod of modernity and its culturally sitedhumanistic project by casting a more modesttemporal rather than ideological signifier Ð amomentary distraction from liberal humanismthough an articulation of a more fluid andinclusive project that could encompass artisticpractices supposedly less readily integrated intothe Western humanistic worldview, simply forbeing made in the current moment. But just aswe now know postmodernity to have been anextension or expansion of modernity, and not abreak with it, so does contemporary art sustainits link to the Western liberal tradition whilesimultaneously claiming a cultural exteriority

that has allowed for its enormous lateralmovement across the world in the period ofglobalization. Inherent in the DNA ofcontemporary art is this drive to cover the worldand draw complex artistic localities into acontext and format that renders them coherentand available to other localities, within acomprehensive discourse. It is prematurelyalarmist to say that this is always a colonialproject, even if it often moves in parallel withsoft and neo-colonial economic colonization,always in search of capital for more spectacle.

But we can say with some certainty thatcontemporary art has a very peculiar way of

distancing itself from the universalizing impulsesof modernity by replacing these impulses with amuch more concrete, actual universal format fordrawing art from all corners of the globe togetherinto a single, massive container.7

So what is the edge of the container of thecontemporary Ð what is not contemporary? Formany artists, it is very literally history . And herewe start to see that many of the young

museological artists whose serenely arcane oranachronistic forms serve to absorb the space ofthe museum into their work also attempt toescape the enclosure of the present byproducing work in a way that stretches back ifnot to high modernism or the Soviet era, theneven further. For them, it is a contact with thepast that can break the imperative to be in thepresent time, and it is through this that theyassert their sovereignty and regain theirsubjectivity. But to return to Duchamp, what hisreadymades produced was not just an

exceptional space for his own works, but arupture at the most vulnerable point in theepistemological and systemic foundation of art.He did something that the field of art was forcedto come to terms with somehow, even byproducing a new tradition, for there areinnumerable artists today, in contemporary artand not, who do not recognize DuchampÕs breakand continue to work in a way that extends fromthe nineteenth century, or simply an era that didnot need to come to terms with the structuraland systemic edges he exposed. In this sense, DuchampÕs break becomessuch a tantalizing moment to return to preciselybecause he was able to unravel a system bymaking works out of its very edges, by using thelimits of the system that validated it as the verymaterial for his work. It is not unlike RobertBressonÕs A Man Escaped (1956), in which aprisoner liberates himself using the debris foundin his prison cell Ð a material and metaphysicaldemand for freedom. This is arguably not anaspect of Duchamp that carried into the era ofinstitutional critique, which notoriouslyfunctioned firmly within the confines of the

contemporary art system to, so to speak,redecorate the prison canteen or rearrange thefurniture.8 On the other hand, institutionalcritique was absolutely crucial for recognizingthe integration of contemporary art within aglobal system of power Ð and this constitutesthe core challenge facing any Duchampian breaktoday in a way that did not concern Duchamp inhis own time. Could it be, then, that if we are totake the lessons of institutional critique to heart,that a Duchampian break today wouldnecessarily have to take into consideration not

only the aesthetic field and its logics ofmuseological enclosure, but would also have to

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Ilya Kabakov, The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1984. Installation.

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identify the weak points and systemicinconsistencies of the meta-museum of globalliberal democratic capitalism that has absorbedit?9

4. The Task of the CuratorIn a 1995 film by Wayne Wang and Paul Austerentitled Smoke, Harvey Keitel plays the partof Auggie. Auggie runs a Brooklyn tabacco shop

and has a personal project: he photographs thesame intersection at the same time every day,not unlike photoconceptual practices such asthose of Ed Ruscha. There is some ambiguity asto whether Auggie sees this as explicitly an artproject, and perhaps this is because the filmmarks a point when contemporary art practiceshad become so assimilated into the popularimaginary that everyone Ð shopkeepers andaccountants, junior stock brokers and Kurdishmilitants Ð was expected to have a conceptualart project, or something like it, in their daily life.

Everyone is an artist indeed. But the earlynineties also mark the ascendance and rapidproliferation of the figure of the curator, and twodecades later, with the rise of the internet andsocial media platforms, it is arguably curatingrather than artistic methodology that has cometo dominate the popular imaginary as theprimary creative act. Self-design accomplishedthrough selective aggregation of friends, images,words, brands, and so forth takes the place ofthe act of artistic creation. As Kyle Chayka hasrecently written:

Today, the verb ÒcurateÓ can be applied to just about anything. The rise of socialmedia, with ascendant platforms likeFacebook, Tumblr, Svpply, and Pinterest,has lead to an increased awareness of howwe present the things we like and theobjects and brands we associate ourselveswith. We now carefully choose just the rightimage and just the right product to display,building up an aggregate identity of small

judgments. Choice as a creative orintellectual act was before the province of

the curator. Now, itÕs possible to curateeverything from a Facebook photo album toa Pinterest fashion moodboard, bookshelfselection, or pop-up shop of artisanal foodproducts. It was not always thus.10

But curating does not limit itself to socialplatforms and biennials. Take Soho House forexample, a boutique hotel and members-onlyclub with branches in more than a dozen cities.Soho House hosts curated screenings, temporaryexhibitions, artist talks, workshops, and even

has its own art collection. It also organizes arttours and publishes a monthly magazine Ð

designed to look very much like an artpublication Ð in which the word ÒcuratedÓ is usedliberally. Soho House is not the only enterprise toprofitably deploy a curatorial model as businessmodel. While DuchampÕs readymade grantedenormous sovereignty to artists, it also endowedcurators with an awesome power to decide whichartworks could become comprehensible as art by

being exhibited; in this way, the production of artwas subordinated to the realm of exhibition-making and curation. And yet, over the pastdecade or so we find a similar process underwayin the contextual framing of our experience of lifeitself Ð now formed by curatorial decision-making processes that arbitrate between a massof goods and experiences based on theiraesthetic effects. When artists confronted theadvent of mechanical reproduction, theirresponse brought about the invention of anentirely new kind of art Ð abstract art. Today,

when artists seeking the freedom to work as theyplease do so by employing curatorialmethodologies in their work, and when curatorsthemselves seem to be the proven beneficiariesof DuchampÕs contextual break, should it not bethe task of the curator to pose these questionsconcerning sovereignty and contextual freedom?If we accept that the artistÕs compromisedposition within the exhibition and within thestrategic deployment of global contemporary artis primarily a contextual problem of politicalcontainment, whereby artworks are reduced toscraps of content, then perhaps the curator is ina position to slice through this knot. But how? The most immediate solutionwould be to look affectionately to the figure ofAuggie, whose project documenting the everydaylife of his local street corner blurs the linebetween a personal hobby and a fully-formedartistic practice. He has the appearance of anartist whose sovereignty is so absolute that hehas no need for contemporary art, and it istempting to think that valorizing a practitionerworking at the very border of contemporary artwould be enriching for all. This might make for a

wonderful exhibition, but as we have establishedalready, such a contextually inclusive gesturewould accomplish little in merging the worlds ofart and life, because the expansionary impulse ofcontemporary art has already injected art intodaily life, just as it has enclosed art practitionerswithin a particular life-world known as the artworld.11 If the curator is indeed the inheritor ofDuchampÕs contextual break, then how preciselydo we thematize the enclosure of contemporaryart that curators themselves have been taskedwith maintaining and expanding?

!

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Anton Vidokle andBrian Kuan Wood are editors of e-flux journal.

1Boris Groys, ÒMarx AfterDuchamp, or The ArtistÕs TwoBodies,Ó e-flux journal no. 19(October 2010). Seehttp://www.e-flux.com/journal/marx-after-duchamp-or-the-artist%E2%80%99s-two-bodies/ .

2Some readers will notice that,while the formulation may soundeerily similar, we found it

necessary in this essay to steerclear of the long twentieth-century debate over artisticautonomy, fraught with aparadox that reached its peak ininstitutional critique. Whereasdiscussions of artistic autonomydepart from a fundamentaldistinction between art and lifethat the avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes were tasked withresolving, this essaypresupposes such a resolutionto be an ominous fait accompliestablished by a regime ofcontemporary art that absorbsart and life in equal measure. Weinvoke Duchamp here as a figureof paradoxical escape in order to

ask whether it is possible tothink beyond contemporary artas a de facto End of (Art) History.

3Liam Gillick, ÒContemporary artdoes not account for that whichis taking place,Ó e-flux journalno. 21 (December 2010). Seehttp://www.e-flux.com/journal/contemporary-art-does-not-account-for-that-which-is-taking-place/.

4But there are new unionsattempting to protect artistsfrom exploitation. However, theyfight an uphill battle against an

idea of artistic freedom thatprecludes cohesive organization.Among these groups arePrecarious Workers Brigade,ArtLeaks, and WAGE (WorkingArtists and the GreaterEconomy).

5See Dieter RoelstraeteÕs epictext on melancholic retreatentitled ÒThe Way of the Shovel:On the Archeological Imaginaryin Art,Ó e-flux journal no. 4(March 2009). See http://www.e-flux.com/journa l/the-way-of-the-shovel-on-t he-archeological-imaginary-i n-art/.

6See Hito SteyerlÕs ÒPolitics ofArt: Contemporary Art and theTransition to Post-Democracy,Ó ashort text to which this essayowes a lot, in e-flux journal no.21(December 2010). Seehttp://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-art-contempora ry-art-and-the-transition-to -post-democracy/.

7For an amazing analysis ofliberal democracy as totalizingcontainer, see Elizabeth A.Povinelli, ÒAfter the Last Man:Images and Ethics of Becoming

Otherwise,Ó e-flux journal no. 35(May 2012). See http://www.e-

flux.com/journa l/after-the-last-man-images- and-ethics-of-becoming-other wise/.

8As has been famously pointedout by Andrea Fraser in her 2005essay ÒFrom the Critique ofInstitutions to an Institution ofCritique,Ó in Artforum 44, no. 1(September 2005): 278Ð286.

9On the triumph of logistics and

containerization, see AlbertoToscanoÕs ÒLogistics andOppositionÓ in Mute Magazine 3,no. 2 (Autumn/Winter2011Ð2012): 30Ð41. Seehttp://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/logistics-and -opposition.

10Seehttp://www.artinfo.com/news/story/817400/how-the-art-worlds-lingo-of-exclusivity-too k-root-branched-out-and-then -rotted-from-within.

11Stephen Wright often speaks

eloquently about the Òdoubleontological statusÓ of manyartists who straddle andnegotiate this division. What wetake for granted here, however,is a more sinister prospect of artand life having already mergedinto a monolithic singularity.

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