Certain temporal stresses point forward from 1820 and indicate genealogical strands toward an understanding of contemporary art. By “stresses” I mean moments that cause a shift in the underlying structures that shape behavior (and vice versa) in the self-identification of people in relation to other people. Some of these stresses are public and function as part of a legislature, a politics, and other mediated governmentalities. Some are technological; others are personal. All are moments where events take place that later will have general and specific influences, influences that will become more clear as I apply the issues at hand to the way an artist might consider their role both consciously and subconsciously within our contemporary framework. Taking the year 1820 as a pivot, I will outline stresses related to enclosure and the rise of national identity, specialization in the light of new technologies, the development of parallel histories in tension with simultaneous realities, the emergence of the rebel who provokes commentary within a search for settings, and the emergence of places of thought in tension with the appearance of places of display.
The year 1820 sits between the late eighteenth-century republican revolutions and the apparently limited revolutions of 1848. It was a period of partial political autonomy for parts of Latin America and saw a division of powers in Europe following Napoleon’s failed attempt to create a unified continent. There was constant upheaval among the emerging and historic European states, regions, and countries within countries. Prussia, Bavaria, and the Rhineland vied for position. Further east, various city-states, nationlets, and ancient feudal monarchies existed within what was to become the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was into this context that Friedrich Engels was born in 1820 to a wealthy family of textile producers and evangelical preachers. Larger entities were superseding the feudalist structures that had relied upon the use of common land to sustain peasant life. Engels was an atheist and the future financial supporter of Karl Marx. Before their collaboration they both wrote for newspapers, campaigning toward increased awareness via the press, common land and workers’ rights being a particular focus at the
Rheinische Zeitung, to which Engels contributed early anonymous articles. This was a period that saw the emergence of a new political consciousness requiring communication to fragmented territories just at the moment when the peasants were becoming the workers. An activated press began to campaign, investigate, and challenge authority, whether that was an emerging bureaucratic, industrial, or military authority—or the God-given authority of the State, the King, the Prince, and the aristocracy. This was an developing discourse with a voice that attempted to rouse consciousness and address the enclosure of the commons. The proliferation of contradictory territories countered by processes of technology and theories of resistance is central to an understanding of the contemporary cultural terrain.
In the United States, institutionalized relativism was the result of a desire for expansion and enclosure—geographical and interpersonal—a process of growth that extended the territorial logic of a continent as country. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 led to a massive geographical expansion of the nation and further realized its potential for growth achieved through concession and limitation at the same time. The Missouri Compromise created a larger United States and continued a progress of expansion and enclosure at the expense of any universal moral standard. The country at that time was already politically split between the North and the South, a rift balanced by the equal number of states that supported or opposed slavery. The Missouri Compromise allowed the inclusion of the Missouri territory—which had been part of the Louisiana Purchase—without disturbing this balance. In return for slave-state Missouri becoming part of the nation, antislavery Maine also joined in order to ensure a continuation of injustice via a numerical balance of representatives in Congress.
Missouri was one of the many compromises that took place between the American Revolution and the American Civil War and that contributed to an acceptance of different values in different geographies, territories, and mentalities within a notional unity. The compromise reinforced a North-South divide. The Missouri Compromise wrote into law the idea that there are fundamental social, political, and geographical identities that are trapped within territories: the idea that in some places the slaver was the essence of the way things are, the way things have always been, and the way things will have to be in the future. The slaver was against unity yet accommodated by unity, and he was an exception to universality given his use of human beings as possessions and tools. The accommodation of moral relativism within a contradictory legalistic framework had been set into play.
This sense of mapping expansion with caveats can be traced in other ways. The HMS
Beagle was launched in 1820. Certain materiel—shipping, weapons, and new control equipment—continued to be produced in the lull following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the emergence of an idealized balance of states. The ocean-going ship was an example of excess production, something temporarily beyond requirements. The emergent amateur scientist appealed for the use of that excess. So it was repurposed—deployed for a new role of research and exploration—with Charles Darwin sailing on its second major voyage in 1831. Exploration and research are the scientistic forms of colonization. The ship sat at the heart of exploratory scientific work and was the carrier of new forms of British empirical scientific development. The ship as excess provided a home, location, set of tools, and vehicle for the notionally amateur. The scientific explorer was involved both in a series of breakthroughs and functioned as a new model of soft imperial vanguard, one interested in the understanding and exploitation of natural systems and armed with collection nets and boxes. It was no longer a question of sailing off in search of someone else’s land and planting a flag. Instead, scientists arrived and engaged in activity that appeared nonpossessive but was complete in its desire to catalogue, collect, and comprehend. Systems were being created. Specimens were collected and the land examined in detail—all masking the deployment of overt power structures. The idea of research as an empirical activity relied upon repurposed tools of authority yet was to produce insights that obliterated accepted hierarchies.
It was not only the future use of a surplus ship that embodied apparently soft action and revelation in isolated locations. In 1820, Joseph Smith had his first vision toward the establishment of the Mormon Church. By creating a founding myth to match the emerging confusion over political and interpersonal control systems, Smith found a way to materialize a commune that would follow a new direction given by God. A vision was at the center of his conceit, and thus it was crucial in the context of examination and impartial scientific exploration to describe the vision. A mixture of the empirical and the visionary went together—they were both modes of discovery. They shared their languages of discovery, breakthrough, and revelation. Both created a crisis of evidence, faith, and belief. Those dismissing the vision could be accused of believing in science, with circular arguments positing science as an opinion and the existence of faith as a fact:
there are people who believe. At the same time, the Darwinian researchers struggled to accommodate their discoveries within the framework of the 1801 draft of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith. The
Beagle, the Missouri Compromise, and Joseph Smith’s first vision were different aspects detailing the construction and control of domain—territorial, scientific, and divine. The creation of unique behavioral codes would be determined by context.
As Smith was having his visions, the
Venus de Milo was found in a field. Unearthing at this point was already linked to scientific research. Literal unearthing was a way to be astounded and confirmed by the past. The unearthing of the
Venus de Milo is a miraculous material vision—it established a relationship between the peasant laborer on the land and the potential legitimacy of the emerging modern state. The peasant farmer who unearthed beauty brought it to the attention of cultural/military agents of the state for advice and safekeeping. The militaristic cultural agent was the relative of the Darwinian researcher—claiming, removing, and redistributing models of antiquity rather than information to the centers of power. The
Venus de Milo and many other nineteenth-century discoveries produced a battle over the future location of the antiquities that had been unearthed by the humble act of tilling and plowing. Propaganda value vied with monetary value during the battles over the possession of simple discovery. An increasing recognition took place around the value of heritage and the nationalistic capital of those working the land—people destined to unearth their patrimony and thereby reinforce an emerging set of values that heightened the legitimacy of emerging postfeudal states. There is a link here to the tension in the Missouri Compromise, and this is a skepticism of any given nation’s ability to care for the implications of its emergence. Cultural battles developed between different states. The invasion and reinvasion of a country was no longer restricted to rough plundering but became a developed scientistic version of the same—the removal of something through intellectual scientific justification framed by claims for better care and knowledge production. This was contextualized by the development and consolidation of geographical societies and various other research organizations interested in preserving antiquity—in tension with their emerging construction of national power. Particular objects would became associated with philosophies of national identity.
In 1820, some technologies were enacted, and others were restricted. It was the beginning of a recognizable understanding of the dangers and potentials of progress within a context of rapid development and discovery. There was an increasing understanding that something would work in practical application at some future point, given the correct materials. There was a growth in the ability to perceive the slow development of applied science and to demonstrate that something will be applicable on a general level once a practical solution can be found. The first light bulb using a vacuum tube dated from 1820, predating Edison by sixty years. The problem was the necessity of using platinum parts to create the filament, and this made no financial sense in broad application. Yet objects were reaching forward: they were proven to work. They just had to wait for parallel developments. This created a new sense of certainty in the direction of technology and the emergence of development itself as a trajectory. There was an increasing faith that there would be another way at some point. The breakthrough was increasingly reassured by projection, development, and application of an idea. Technology could now be viewed as moving in incremental steps and jumps. Patent law—drawn up by the U.S. Congress in 1790—would protect work while creating motivations for breakthroughs. A tension within the idea of protected development caused an infinite splitting of innovation. Multiple protected strands of technology started to appear, all functioning in parallel. Tiny steps protected by patents combined with the expectation of future growth, application, and profit (at some point); in tandem developed the motivation to innovate
and a desire to control patents for original work as something valuable in their own right. The notion that an innovator has a specific language and history that requires analysis, protection, and understanding in context had arrived.
Incremental development was shattered by moments of revolt. This was particularly true in hotspots of technological application, such as Glasgow. The year 1820 saw the Radical War, also known as the Scottish Insurrection. This was the last true armed uprising in Scotland against English domination. An awareness of inequality was masked by contradictory drives that claimed fidelity to nationalist identity and outward respect for the center of British power in London—a desperate appeal to the reasonableness of indulgent strength. The Radical War carried a number of mixed messages, some of which were connected to the emergent idea of nationalism as an ancient identification in tension with acknowledgment of the God-given authority of Empire and Union. The revolt was caused by the economic depression following the Napoleonic wars yet was viewed as simple treason against the enclosing state. This uprising in Scotland against the union masked a struggle for workers’ rights. Strikes took place in the newly dynamic industrial contexts of the Clyde River area and in parts of Edinburgh. The rhetorical devices deployed by the radicals were the same ones to be used over and over again during the subsequent thirty years leading up to 1848: rights, liberty, or death. Uprising and radical war was connected to the development of mass labor organizations in opposition to the central militarized bureaucracy and industrial production. The collective struggle of these very early industrial workers may have been masked by broad appeals to nationalism, liberty, and universal rights, but at the center of research, compromise, and revolt was the emergence of the conscious radical and the romantic ideal of a doomed figure as the political agent within temporal stress.
By 1820, an emergent class of innovators and entrepreneurs had already intermarried with early industrialists who also came from nonconformist religious backgrounds and deployed scientific work toward applied production. This intermarrying allowed innovations to flip back and forth between production—for example, the ceramics produced by the Wedgwood company—and scientific research. Production was a site of development and created capital to fund amateur exploration and research. There was an interlinking of theories of human development and the progress of industrialization. This was combined with attempts at a practical scientific philosophy in order to understand descent and progress and the way these two concepts might feed into the development and growth of capital, innovation, production, technology, and exchange. The visionary, the entrepreneur, the antiestablishment figure, and the scientist were increasingly linked.
What are the bounding ideas and concepts that these temporal stresses secrete into contemporary art? First, the development of parallel histories in tension with simultaneous realities. Parallel histories allow competing narratives to be understood without being resolved. Parallel histories operate on top of one another and appear to intersect from some perspectives but actually function as curled strands rather than fixed trajectories. A tension between simultaneous realities and parallel histories is already visible in 1820. Parallel histories tend toward the discursive rather than toward a cataloging of objects. What becomes possible is a necessary paradox involving the acceptance of the simultaneous existence of things at any given moment in tension with the trajectory of ideas cross-sectioned at any given moment. Where things sit versus how they relate to one another. Parallel histories require an awareness of how people use people, and this was heightened by emerging forms of life, labor, and work and the tension created between people coming together with collective interests and in resistance to the progress of industrialization. The mapping of how people use people was part of a growing set of awarenesses. There was a development of humanist empathy, brother and sisterhood, and the construction of various societies in the gap between the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. The notion of inclusion and exclusion within a process of apparent liberation and expansion was being reflected and operated upon by new semiautonomous groupings. The idea of strategy emerged within these nascent societies, organizations, collectives,
and calls to revolt.
Closely related to parallel histories was the rise of the secondary individual, those who escaped the limitation of
their place within the hierarchy, in relation to the family or emerging constructions of the social in order, to engage in science and development. The arrival of advisors and assistants included those who carried out specialized tasks and were to become part of a broader think-tank of secondary specialists. The secondary individuals were the ones who actually did the detailed work. Free thinking drove them. A structure was constantly sought out. Free thinking also required locations, places where it could be, places either imagined or posited just out of reach: an architecture, a locale, or a sense of association. This search for a location emphasized the fact that free thinking could not be stabilized but would constantly require relocation and reassertion. It was not possible to imagine sites of free thinking separate from their unstable architectural coding. Architecture had started to carry ideology in flux. The relationship between architecture and emerging technologies was stressed and disguised. We were at the beginning of a camouflaged architectural anxiety, where the certainties of classical references started to break down in the face of the requirement to accommodate new technologies and control systems. Classical references were beginning to be stretched over pragmatic diagrams—later toward an attempt to submerge all iron in a Gothic overcoat. As we reached forward into the Victorian period, architecture floundered to find the right historical reference points to make sense of technological development, so it showered it in references instead.
Protosociological research ran alongside this emerging class of secondary specialists. The Malthusian worry about the planet and human survival expanded via an increasing understanding of conflicting trends and directions among humans—parallel histories versus simultaneous realities—all connected to developing political philosophies in tension with early industrialization. Technological development faced the desire for rights despite the God-fearing and sometimes indulgent capitalist in tension with progress and efficiency and the increasing use of workers as human machines. The secondary individual quietly spearheaded development and technological advance. Free thinking and the endless search for its locations produced a protosociological domain worried about the future and starting to plan and think about the city and its occupants as aspects that might be improved in line with emerging political philosophies. The struggle for rights was moving toward the universal through the articulation of specific grievances.
But not everything was locked into an urban frame. Discovery and tour were part of the larger control framework that included peasants moving toward industrial centers and the new specialists leaving in pursuit of early humanity and ancient art. This search for beauty and the classical ideal continued at great pace. Archaeological finds were displaced to the new centers of power, where they could be emblematic of the potential of democracy and culture as profound constructions. The focus on the unearthed as the epitome of the human ideal left the processes of the present free to carry out masked upheavals. One set of people claimed and decoded ancient cultures, and at the same time there was an equal movement in the opposite direction, toward the city—toward the factory and the imminent grind of human against machine: a constant tension between the desire to find sublime beauty and ideals in the ancient world and a necessity to reflect upon the upheavals of the time.
None of this can be understood without including the growth of ecstatic new religions and institutional superstitions. The desire to create parallel histories—new ancient parallel histories—may have produced completely fictional accounts, but they inspired faith by appearing no less incredible than any other discovery—no stranger than the artifacts that were being dug up as a result of tour and discovery. An apparently endless set of stories was waiting to be revealed. Claims might not be verifiable, yet they nevertheless were brought back to the center and structured into fabricated superstitions that would inspire new faiths to match new territories. This was a time of competing claims for textual authenticity—where the stresses of the Republic and The Rights of Man came into conflict with an adherence to new supernatural texts.
How can these traces be found in the persona of the contemporary artist; their support structures, both critical and physical; and how the work itself is produced? Using 1820 as a point of departure, where do I see the application effect of these various ideas, and how did they become embedded in the culture over nearly two hundred years? What legacy, what framework, did it leave? How did it shape the way contemporary art is currently formed, and how does it demonstrate its various permissions and structures?
Beginning in 1820, structures were set up where people began working at different speeds toward different ideals. Forms of emancipation opposed development and technology, setting up a conflict between various techniques of control and expression. In the struggle to realize various nation-states, a growth of critique, criticism, collaboration, and the discursive both produced and resisted these processes of enclosure and establishment. Production, the production of conditions, potentials, and desires, was more developed than consumption. Consumption was already an awareness, but its mass function could not be realized in a postfeudal environment. Production was countered by the defense of the commons—of common land in particular—rather than by a developed critique of consumption. The journalism of Marx and Engels campaigned in favor of the right to maintain the use of common land and against the appalling conditions of early industrialized textile workers. All this was connected to new understandings of the way a set of objects or ideas might be put into action and find a use, a sense of looking toward how technologies will be ameliorated rather than how they will be consumed.
New developments in production required demonstration and display. The exhibition became a site for presenting both artifacts and technologies. The early museum and trade exhibition were both linked to the transcendent and timeless aesthetic values of the fine arts. No technology was divorced from a desire to associate with notionally high aesthetics, and the emerging exhibition linked technology and architecture to beauty, creativity, and rationality, combining examples of fine art with the appropriated discoveries of the ancient world. The exhibition was soon to become an entity in its own right, one that would need to be filled by new forms of production. The exhibition was an emerging demonstration of national desire and something for which artists started to produce work. It was not merely a place of display for what had already been made. The object of art would become integrally linked to the new sites where it could be enacted and considered in its own context.
This consciousness of display was connected to the continued development of sites for free thinking. The artist required a special set of places. The rise of the secondary individual within an awareness of how people used people contributed to the establishment of these settings and places of free thinking—including the continued proliferation of societies of specific groups or specializations. This socializing took place in tension with the improvised zones of the revolutionary and the rebel in relation to the broader strains within emerging industrial states. The rebel mob no longer operated alone and without commentary but instead engaged sets of people who started to gather and theorize emerging radicalities beyond the limits of religion, although often with its formal languages and references. The establishment of settings and places for free thinking operated in parallel to the development of the exhibition. Convivial places of exchange—the café and the beer hall—were locations where the secondary individual started to roam free of all structure outside of the contingent self. They could not be separated from a political consciousness or radicality in their sites of thought. This dichotomy between sites of free thinking and technologies of display resonates and leaves an embedded set of values within contemporary art. The battle between free thinking—or emerging criticality—and modes of display had been enacted.
Populating these contradictory zones were characters rather than objects—figures who worked in tension with one another and who fluctuated in dominance. It takes an understanding of this gathering together of a series of characters—a band, a troupe, a grouping, a confederation of people—in order to understand later developments. Ideas emerged from contradictory groupings. This has led to a permanent population of the spaces of art with historical phantom artists rather than verifiable historical reference points. The contemporary artist is always joined by a series of characters who emerge just before the uprisings and revolutions of 1848. The notion of playing out the role of an artist has become deeply embedded in this historical scenario. To be an artist is to be convivial with history; it is not a branding of the self in relation to the production of objects.
The act of looking backward toward antiquity to justify the sense of the state as a true preserver of history was countered by the rebel, the loose group, and the underground society: the free thinker and the protoartist working in parallel with the secondary individuals who would do the collating and close reading. These were the specialists who would operate under, within, and onboard the surplus production of an Empire, specialists presented as permanent amateurs cowering in fear of their own concepts. The year 1820 creates new settings and creative populations all capable of infinite potential actions, populations caught between preserving ancient rights and resisting new technical trajectories of modern life. The artist as a contemporary figure has not yet been produced, but the support structure for his or her social function has been set out, and various potential parallel trajectories are mapped and waiting. A casting session is under way to find a character who can function in the spaces between faith, reason, and desire.