The year 1948 brings European nationalization of industry and the rise of the corporation, new relationships between the individual and the group, the application of advanced modernism and the emergence of containers for identity, and expressions of dystopia and material facts in the face of art’s deployment by capital and the social.
In Europe, extensive nationalization of industry was the predominant form of the reorganization of labor in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The nationalization of the UK railways was a highly visible example: the unification of a system under a graphic regime. Nationalization was part of the attempt to build a new European model in a unifying light following the devastating experiences of war. The collectivizing of industry under state control—and in the United States the supposed patrician tolerance of the mature corporation—took place for clear ideological reasons but was affected and enabled by the perceived success of state-controlled production during wartime. Nationalization was a collective container for bargaining between postwar labor movements and governmentalities—organized labor engaged in collective bargaining. A few people sat down in a room with politicians and corporate heads to decide the fate of entire industries. Various degrees of singularization were at work here, bringing people together under new codes. Single figures as points of resistance communicated with simple straightforward voices. The unification of systems under a contradictory political set of urgencies is central to our contemporary terrain of fundamental contradictions.
A process of decolonization and independence shook the emerging reconstruction of industrial nations. It is useful to look across from this time of nationalization and collectivization toward a moment of catastrophic symbolism that also related to the construction of a new unity. The assassination of Gandhi occurred in the course of a struggle for independence: the sacrifice of a single point of resistance who had worked peacefully toward an abstract national unity. Violent resistance had been constructed around a passive core in the context of many attempts to assassinate him. As with the nationalization of industry, people were being brought together to create contingent identities. With Gandhi’s death a single figure became embodied as a passive point of resistance toward the collective. Processes of singularization and collectivization would remain in permanent tension.
In 1948, the Soviet Union decided to jam the Voice of America radio station in order to prevent the communication of negation. Growing up in Europe in the 1970s, Voice of America and Moscow Radio were both on the air. They both presented soft propaganda that claimed to be reasonable and sober. They both used the language of peace and claimed to occupy the moral high ground. They both established and maintained a set of facades. They presented universal truths that were unresolvable. Their broadcasts were parodies of rationalism, excessive claims of deployed pseudorationality beyond the contingencies of everyday life. This set into play a situation where it might be possible to be profoundly insincere while utilizing the highest ideals toward the edge of human existence—to the verge of annihilation.
In the face of so much sacrifice, reformation, and presentation, some proposed new resistant collectivist ideas in precisely coded ways. The Hell’s Angels, a grouping of apparent outlaws, were founded in 1948 as an antidote to these processes of coming together. The Hell’s Angels were immune to the postwar founding of institutions and the reorganization of industry. “Hell’s Angels” was a term inspired by the cartoonish naming of planes during World War II—a pepping up of spirits through a graphic ecstasy of individuality, liberty, and autonomy, messages that could only be read while on the runway or after crashing to earth. The Hell’s Angels first appeared as rogue bands who were outside of the system, and they explicitly demonstrated their outsideness: their rejection of a bourgeois life, their literal disruption of a peaceful America through bluster and noise. Their appearance was frightening, their presence disruptive and ungrateful. They brought catastrophe and brotherhood back home from the front as a posturing, languid, motorized libido that had no function other than to be free and in opposition to everything but its own complex codes.
The deployment of radical machinery was not limited to the Hell’s Angels. In 1948 the Land Rover was introduced, and Porsche was refounded as a postwar sports-car company. These two events pointed toward the development of specific vehicles as tools, a clear specialization emerging from the war period and searching for a new distinction in peacetime. The Land Rover was soon to be used as a tool in the fading colonies as much as it was to be found on the farm; it presided over the processes of decolonization and mobilized the landowner. The Land Rover was perfect for new markets that desired reliable, flexible, useful control tools: the specialized deployed against the group. Porsche was a reestablishment and continuation of the prewar Volkswagen company rendered special, outcast, and now given a real family name, in order to work in the open and finally take responsibility. Specialization here was connected to emergent branding and for the first time disconnected from class identification in a traditional sense. These vehicles were primarily offshoots of militarization and the overdetermination of the racetrack; both were symbols of work and action. They both had a utilitarian, pared-down quality within clearly identifiable and defined forms. Shortly they would become the vehicles of TV naturalists and rebellious film stars.
Other specific technologies emerged in 1948. The long-playing record was intended to be the ideal replacement for the clumsy collections of short-running, fragile, 78-rpm discs of classical music. The LP record had originally developed as a technology for film—being the same length as a single movie spool—but it quickly moved into a widely distributed medium, its cover becoming a popular container that would be central in the development of youth culture and various subcultural identities. Quickly the cover began to float free from the record. People would soon spend a lot of time browsing and reading the covers alone, which is how the albums were displayed in stores. The cover was a place of design and identification. This was a period when the container was becoming as important as the content. The year 1948 also saw the development of products that would later be associated with the container of the industrial-military combine—including NASA. The myth is that these products were brought to us as a result of innovation within the military. Velcro—for example—was simply an attempt to use petrochemical products to replace simple consumer items. Making the easy easier. It was not the military that invented Velcro. This innovation was merely purchased in large quantities by the U.S. Army. It was this bulk ordering that created a link in the minds of people between consumerism and militarization; military spending was a consolidator of innovation, not a producer. This was a period of crossover between minor innovations—fixings, fittings, and surfaces—and the industrial-military complex. All started to connect in the mind of the consumer from this point onward.
If the temporal stresses under consideration here primarily relate to the tension between the singular and the general—the individual and the group—it is unsurprising that behaviorism was a key area of study and development in 1948 both feeding and analyzing these processes. There were many attempts to examine, control, and apply ideas from psychiatry and psychology to large groups of people, both to investigate individual desires and to try to account for these desires in relation to larger populations—B. F. Skinner and his book
Walden Two being the most widely distributed.
1 Yet accusations of utopian thinking had particular resonance in a period that had suffered so heavily in the recent past from war—perverted, accelerated attempts to reach utopia had resulted in mass slaughter. Soon after a conflict that had revealed fascism and state communism as mutant utopias we saw in Italy the first and last rise of electoral communism in Western Europe. Yet in contradiction to the agonies of war, this was an attempt at a rapid activation of incremental utopias rather than totalizing systems—nevertheless, the CIA thought it prudent to fund the opposition Christian Democrats.
The project of the prewar Bauhaus and other European forms of modernism restarted in this immediate postwar period. Places had to be rebuilt—Rotterdam, Coventry, Dresden—and they required new forms of organization. Europe had to be reimagined, and the connection between modernist architecture and planning was crucial to this process, with planning moving into a primary position. This shift was profound in relation to contemporary art’s genealogy. The object was no longer operating in isolation. The application of modernism was once more connected to planning as much as to the attempt to produce an autonomous object. This was a dynamic time for the development of social models intended to give people a better life. Architecture was seen as a way to achieve this. A process was instigated that could be described as the Ulmization of the Bauhaus legacy—an accommodation between the utopian legacy of the Bauhaus and the contingencies of the emerging nationalized industries and corporations with the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm—the Ulm-based industrial design school researching and developing new efficient buses, graphics, and structures.
As modernist architecture and design shifted toward planning as part of a necessity, it also became integrally linked to an emergent corporate environment as the state began to function as a corporation and as the corporation as an applied idea increasingly matured into something too big to fail—but that could see you through to retirement via a promise of leisure toward a peaceful and rewarding death. Both the corporation and the state turned to modernism for architectural answers. Both turned toward a related set of aesthetic values embodied within applied modernist thinking in order to project ideas. This created a fundamental rift within modernism relating to how it could be deployed against the ravages of modernity as an ethical or resistant tool. Late modernism was being used both negatively and positively. The object in itself was no longer the most important thing. The act of clearance—how things are cleared away, the necessity to clear things away—became as important as the idea of actually building specific technologies.
There was a drive to create a better society—or a society in the first instance. Society became a subject in itself, society as defined by its social programs. An expansion of democracy was part of this process. Varied attempts to eradicate poverty and create
a society through the combination of consumerism and social programs vied for dominance in the noncommunist states. In this context art became increasingly symbolic of an escape from such tense developments but also became its backdrop, not only for advanced progressive social programs but also for the emerging consumer figure. At this point art remained primarily idealized, but it left us with a paradoxical legacy. Art was something for society on one hand; it was connected to the idea of society as a development, but at the same time art began to operate as a backdrop to new forms of advanced consumerism. The advanced postwar corporation started to exhibit good will, taste, and agreement with the idea of social development via the deployment of art as an acceptable backdrop for varied activities. Culture became something to be invested in without question.
The project of creating a postwar society involved an examination of behavior and attempts to mold behavior through planning, schooling, and architecture. A key aspect of behaviorism was its connection to the emergence of ecoconsciousness. A link began to form between the individual as an active subject and the ecology. Part of the process of general education became the changing of behavior toward creating better places. This process was connected to the collectivization of people within nationalized industry, corporate life, and the interface between the individual and the new state/corporate identities. The education of the subject/pupil within the new modernistic architecture of schools, clinics, and kindergartens started to produce a generation of children whose role was to educate their parents—an inversion of education. The responsibility was to be conscious. A reorganization of individual behavior went hand in hand with industrial production and with finding ways for the war economy to be extended beyond conflict. The state control and corporatization of industry created the new union dynamic of collective bargaining, where everyone was in the union and where everyone was fought for under the same terms. At the same time, we saw the continued attack on union power as it became a singular entity balanced by the corporate/state opponent. The unions’ solidarity became a problem. And outside these simply drawn binarisms we were left with art as a massive liberatory field to play in: a set of expressions, a massive terrain of creativity and truth marks that could grow to include almost anything overlooked by these monolithic concerns.
A fundamental rethinking of education emphasized the idea of the kindergarten as a model, creating a mixture of health and education. At the other end of schooling was an increasing universalization of secondary education in industrial countries, which started to produce mass identities and shared concerns. Some concerns were internationalist and universal, for example, ecology and consumerism. All of this emerged just after twenty million people had walked home all over Europe. There had been a massive displacement. These unifications and singularizations were confronted by the return of wanderers—the return of the dead, in some cases. The people who returned were ready for something better. Those walking home were met by trials over the recent horrors, public trials involving the unraveling of information and ideas via the seemingly rational depositions of the participants, trials held in order to have a deeper understanding of the behavior of the recent past—to find out who was responsible and who could be accommodated.
These bounding ideas were extremely deep rooted and left strong traces in the way art can be understood during the postwar period. The constant struggle with the idea of utopia—utopia as an accusation and the necessity of the artist to reveal utopia for what it is: a warning and an endless desire. Art started to function as a process that reveals the dystopian. At the same time, it presented an illusion of what could be. Something that might evade hierarchies—evade claims to the auratic—somehow merely posit objects, materials, and activities in space and make simple universal claims. Art became connected to a democratization of society where an individual’s work was the product of some work and nothing more. Art as a process of making art. Art as a part of society: society as a developing idea and art as part of that developing idea. Yet, of course, this is the point when art started to become something that was literally a pile of contradictions sitting between consumerism and social programs. Yet we are left with traces that suggest that art is a product of behaviorism. That the behavior of the artist—his or her role and function—is connected to some sense in which we understand that the artist is revealing something about a constructed notion of society: he or she is showing us how to see how things go together and what remains once everything is accounted for.
The reorganization of industrial production left strong markers within contemporary art—the idea of fabrication in relation to Taylorist practices combined with the notion that in order for art to deal with the present it also had to take into account new modes of production, modes that today extend beyond the industrial fabrication of objects and toward the production of new systems that critique, affect, and influence behavior and desire. Art has been taunted by the idea of collective bargaining; contemporary art can be understood psychologically as a form of collective bargaining. A pile of differences operating under a general system. The rethinking of education with the kindergarten as a model affected everything in the sense that it changed the way artists speak. It altered their modes of expression, forms of communication, and types of organization. The artist became a person who must be an exceptional citizen who speaks a rare truth of sorts to the quiet breakdowns engendered by managed societies. Transgression was for the service of society as a whole—it pointed out hubris—and put the idea of society on trial.
The film
A Matter of Life and Death2 is a key example of the confrontation between modern technology and utopic humanist desire. Airman Captain Peter Carter, played by David Niven, is going to have a brain operation following the crash of his flak-damaged plane into the English Channel; simultaneously he is experiencing a dream/vision of a heavenly trial that parallels the surgery. In the trial we see him fighting to stay in a very human, flawed, and mortal world with all its failings yet with many potentials as a postwar applied utopia where things need to be done following lessons learned. It is this doubling and flickering where we find the idea of the artist as someone obliged to posit new zones of moral confrontation within a dream space but also obliged to deal with realities and understand psychology, behaviorism, and the creation of aesthetic pathways—materialities. All this was linked to new understandings about how the brain operates and how it could be operated upon. The visual was something that artists began to point out. They made you aware that you were looking at something, but at the same time they were taking you to a psychological trial such as the one we see in
A Matter of Life and Death: a battle between the dream state and the material.
When you point forward from 1948, one of the first things pushed into place is the use of art as a location for discussion and action. Specific settings proliferate. Art can be used to take over any space and make use of any place in order for discussion and action to emerge. Everything is being renewed, and therefore art can move in and reoccupy the spaces that have been left behind or abandoned. We start to have a feeling that art can move freely through time; it is not bound to its moment. It can be a manipulation of the present in the form of projection both forward and backward, with an understanding of an increasing capitalization of every moment. With the rapid development of industry, the application of military attitudes and organization to peacetime, and a focus on behaviorism (trying to produce better people), there follows a manipulation of time—a desire to become more authentic and more synthetic simultaneously.
Art continues the prewar process of looking at historical models and starts to project both forward and backward, studying elemental cultures—spiritual, humanist fundamentals—but also yearning forward toward the creation of backdrops for new forms of human behavior. Art deployed things that worked alongside the collective consciousness rather than in advance. It was no longer avant-garde; it now sought out applied utopian settings. The first edition of the
documenta exhibition in 1955 was a good example, where a whole city became the venue for artistic events, including a proud turning of attention toward the work that had been included in the Nazi Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich during 1937.
3 There was a strong desire to create flexibility and to seminarize the spaces of art. This was connected to immediate postwar collectivization on one hand and the extension of behaviorism on the other. At the base was the idea of education as a permanent component of an artistic practice. Whether that was the self-education of the artist, including unlearning, or the education of the public—teaching them processes of unlearning. Art was no longer a question of enlightenment. The exhibition was a location of seminarizing and education. This was intimately connected to the rise of statements and phrases. The rise of statements by artists and curators and their introduction into education has become formalized today in the constipated self-accounting statements and phrases artists are expected to deploy in order to contextualize and educate about their own practice—both educate themselves and others—but they began with good reason and were deployed toward the construction of a new society. The desire for universal education of the individual led toward the idea of being included or excluded, and this became a strong ethical component of contemporary art: the power of the silent member or the passive participant within the group who examines the idea of inclusion and exclusion. The artist became someone who functions in order to take part in rather than to proceed toward. A sense of taking part in something rather than proceeding toward something is a factor of contemporary art. Participation is articulated through a desire to create spaces of subjectivity, a desire to expose the studio and the studious alongside the seminar, coupled with an awareness of the difference between an audience and a public.
In the face of attempts to overwrite differences there was a necessity for the artist to demonstrate his or her artistness through his or her working method and ability to self-educate. This desire to create spaces of subjectivity was linked to an urgent need to build a better society straightaway. Having seen the failure of the totalitarian utopian, it was necessary to create various applied utopias that might transcend the decision-making limitations of politicians, committees, and groups—proposing instead excessive articulations of subjectivity. The artist in this case was primarily the person with a studio rather than the person who produces A, B, or C. In the twenty years after 1948 we were faced with a constant battle over the studio, including the studio that cannot be seen; the studio that remains permanently hidden; Duchamp’s studio on Fourteenth Street, which remains unknown; the studio as an escape; the studio as a fabricators’ workshop; the studio as a factory; the studio as a place where not much happens; the studio as an occupation of territory; and, most important of all, the studio as an assertion that one is still an artist.
There was a pressure to account for work. This had to do with the idea that art was about self-improvement but that it was also connected to social shifts: the sense that there would have to be change. That it might be necessary for the artist to account for his or her work in advance of other people’s understanding. That there would be no fundamental understanding without the statement. And now we end up with a defense of art as a place for the creation and dissemination of content and a hyperfocus on nuanced ideological claims. This defense of art as a place for the dissemination of content is not the same as the acceptance of art as a thing in its own right. A visit to a museum or gallery is now a time to find out something even as we experience something—the two notions have merged. There are many ideological claims in any given exhibition, but these must be viewed in light of a situation where explicatory claims will only lead to more questions around the construction of the social. Within this sense of the social—within this sense of responsibility and subjecthood—come many different nuances, and it is these nuanced ideological claims that are synthesized in contemporary art. Contemporary art became the ultimate site for detailed desires. It became the ultimate site for a fragmented creation and dissemination of content. Art is the production of sites for collective microexpression. Even the space of the advanced journal and of the resistant collective comes from this melding and muddling up of the humanist, behaviorist, and educational as inextricably linked to artistic practice. Whenever the artist tries to escape such a warm cage, further education will be required to explain how they have escaped. Meanwhile, artists who refuse to take responsibility find plenty of others to explain how their “new outside” actually furthers the process of understanding the machinations of society—and, therefore, they too are absorbed within contemporary art.
This dynamic moment of social rebuilding, planning, and clearing led to the idea of an artist’s mode of work being variable potential places of work. New models of how to do something became central, including the improvised takeover of any space temporarily. The exhibition became the any space. The idea of the artist as someone who openly demonstrated the desire to retain spaces of subjectivity in places that ran in parallel to other production methodologies led to something akin to the production studio of cinema and television—of a small factory—or a place for casting characters. The work itself became the characters who needed to be deployed toward the population of the gallery, the museum, and history. Following this period of behaviorism and social rebuilding—and what in Europe can be thought of as the period of social democracy—we were left with the sense of an artist as someone who deploys stresses that define differences, difficulties, and apparent contradictions. The endurance of the studio as a place to escape to and from demonstrated to society that it had room for such activity. By the 1960s, we saw the legislated provision of artist’s studios from London to New York. The fight over the studio as an idea and whether it was the right place to be included a testing of other models of production within the artistic sphere. The studio itself became a site for and subject of experimentation and a designated protected zone for a practice, a place for the creation of permutations—questioning desire and behavior and assumptions through the filter of a practice within the microutopia of the artist’s working place: a trap and a semiautonomous potential. Something to be escaped to and from.