The year 1974 brings endless work in the context of the emergence of technologies that use a simple interface; contraction, limitation, and exit as negotiated by subcultural assertion; the absorption of other disciplines into art; the consolidation of contemporary art as a describable zone; the arrival of the curator; and the development of super-self-awareness of the artistic condition as a subject.
In 1974, Hiroo Onoda—a Japanese soldier who had been in hiding since 1945—finally surrendered. An isolated individual ignoring technology, development, and compromise, Onoda had refused to accept the emperor’s surrender at the end of World War II. In postwar Europe, implicated figures had smoothly moved into postwar roles, in an attempt by the victorious powers to keep bureaucratic structures functioning in the now-occupied Europe and prevent a repeat of the economic and social collapse of the 1920s. This smooth move in Europe was questioned and resisted with force and, more often, with public condemnation and exposure.
While Onoda was refusing technology, the passage of time, development, and compromise, a soft coup d’état had taken place in the midst of a collapse of Portuguese colonial authority in Africa, which had become overwhelmed by the proxy war games of East and West. Onoda’s refusal to believe the war was over was not entirely incorrect—his resistance mirrored a standoff that had become global and permanent. The Carnation Revolution was a soft revolution from the inside out. Long-haired soldiers appropriately used Zeca Afonso’s 1972 sentimental Portuguese country ballad “Grândola, Vila Morena” as a signal to action. It was time to give up and go home.
The introduction in 1974 of the first barcodes into a supermarket was a step toward self-administered consumption that would eventually lead to being able to check yourself out. Barcodes also enabled the distribution and monitoring of highly differentiated products—a way to track nuances. This led to the development of the consumer as a precise data flow. Barcodes were not only used to organize consumption; they were deployed to organize production. Barcodes had initially been developed to automate the organization of freight rail cars—a way to sort the movement of raw and finished materials. An advantage was that the barcode’s internal language allowed direct machine–machine communication, bypassing human accounting.
Parallel to the barcode was the introduction and rapid adoption of the pocket calculator, a device functioning as a personal interface that was simple, complex, and idiotic at the same time: whether summing 2+2, displaying the word HELLO when entering 07734 and holding it upside down, or solving hyperbolic inverse sines (arcsines) of a value or expression. This produced a shift away from a conception of arithmetic as being a mental space verified by approximation and prepared us for interaction with personal computers. The emergence of instant calculation prompted a desire for more interfaces. The potential of a personal interface that offered instant gratification operated as a lure and accelerant. This created a vision of new computer forms and their potential interfaces: an introduction to a straightforward engagement with complexity. You did not need to know how the calculator worked. The introduction of the microelectronic address book quickly followed the calculator as the next step toward personal computing. The emergence of the calculator alongside the digital watch and the electronic address book was the first atomization of technology, creating further bursts toward a distribution of interfaces. While the obsolescence of everyday arithmetic produced an educational anxiety, it also led to the immediate death of the slide rule as a technology, followed rapidly by further deaths of analogue devices.
A legislation-driven limitation of resources appeared with the crisis over the oil supply. This was particularly profound in the United States. The introduction of a fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit combined with the fear of extended slow suicide that had emerged through the increased focus on smoking, overeating, and health in general. An increasingly phantom free will was combined with a tradition of puritanism and contradictory economic rationalizations. The city was seen as a body that needed to slow down and that required triage. There was a reduction and concurrent assertion of American freedom in relation to the modern world in these attempts to control speed and health. Anxiety was expressed economically, forcing people to take control of their own bodies as economic entities in context. A dynamic contradiction was set into play between the body and the collective in terms of how to behave. A crisis of impingement with negative assertion became increasingly dominant.
Government imposition of a limited industrial working week in Britain in 1974 confused the traditional industrial battle over time. What was quickly named the Three-Day Week was imposed upon the industrial workforce by the government as a way to limit production in light of the politically generated energy crisis and production battles between the government and the unions. The removal of control over time from industrial workers contributed to a profound undermining of organized labor over the subsequent fifteen years. A last-ditch battle began in advance of the introduction of the permanent part-time, displaced, and outsourced labor. All of this was further confused by the accelerating use and abuse of former European colonial subjects by bringing them to their various “mother countries” and deploying them as a marginalized workforce—just in advance of long-term redundancy.
While the workers fought over time and headed toward permanent temporary status, 1974 also saw the birth of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, which created permanent connection, boredom, banality, and anxiety regardless of the events covered. The twenty-four-hour news cycle had to create breaking stories in order to feed itself. Twenty-four-hour news created anticipation toward the imminent event. At some point, there will be a new shared crisis, and, as a result, the anticipation of crisis accelerated. Anticipation became overwhelming yet numbing in its repetition, producing alienation from profound emotion and experience. Constant news provoked fight-or-flight instincts and boredom while giving the newly redundant workers something to watch.
The Volvo 240 was introduced in 1974, marketing safety and edging toward a postconsumerist symbol of eco-choice. Notwithstanding the former attractions of cars—style, performance, and newness—the postconsumer started to make choices that were part of the contradictions of ecoconsciousness. The idea of the long lasting and reliable was viewed as something that might be able to counteract an excessive consumption of fossil fuels or at least symbolize that desire via the possession of a boxy symbol of Swedish good taste and Lutheran responsibility. Each person leaves behind a potentially devastating trace, but now the individual could attempt to be responsible for things they could not control.
Despite attempts to the contrary, Hiroo Onoda could not control the war by refusing to surrender. Despite control of the army, the Portuguese government could not prevent its own soldiers from engaging in their soft revolution. The barcode led toward self-consumption—the consumer had become a dividual. The pocket calculator pointed toward the interface—a simple personal interface with technology that now exceeded the speed of the human brain. The slide rule had revealed contextual answers. It had demonstrated potentials on either side of a result. The calculator, however, offered a single answer that might as well be trusted. The awareness and legislated limitation of resources led toward postconsumer choices that were concerned about the contingencies of an emerging ecological consciousness. A battle over time was being won by government and corporate power. The twenty-four-hour news cycle would be consumed by the very people who were to become increasingly redundant and self-managing—yet full of information. Permanent work and permanent education were the only answers to this breakdown of time. Time became the key: the battle over time replaced the battle over the body.
There are a number of crucial bounding ideas that can be said to have emerged in 1974 and that point forward to a set of concepts that might help us understand the position of the contemporary artist and what he or she produces. The final stand of the worker in the battle over the possession of time coincided with the rise of cognitive labor in the framework of technological acceleration. The introduction of robot control in complex industrial production happened by 1978 with the Fiat Strada in Italy. This level of sophisticated automation required a new form of cognitive labor capable of programming both the machines and the context of redundancy to come.
The emergence of the soft, velvet, and flower revolutions from the 1970s to the 1990s emerged in opposition to the waning, parodic, deluded, and self-policing travesties exhibited by the standoff between NATO and the Eastern Bloc. These revolutions were guided by identity politics and the resistant potential of popular culture’s informal and apparently more human means of communication. Identity consciousness was deployed as a way to challenge authority. Everyone could become a dissident. Common ground could be found through individual readings of popular culture, and resistance could be created through indirect posturing. A set of resistant positions was accentuated by nonconformist appearances and recognitions that produced a flowering of desire. Such identifications were not immune from capitalization. By 1974, youth markets had consolidated. First-generation youth markets had started to feed off themselves. We began to see the emergence of pseudosports for the annihilation of time—and an expression of subjective testing. Skateboarding, riding tiny bikes, learning tricks: all to demonstrate the mastery of the body over a specialized commodified pursuit. There was a revolt against the repetitive techniques of earlier youth movements. Former tribal youth battles became cross-generational, confused, and compressed, producing a breakdown of unity and confrontation. The fragmentation of experience was emphasized in the emergence of the mixtape: the creation of infinite contexts for personal narrative. This was the origin of the curation of nostalgia and of the every moment.
Alongside such humanist resistance, the deployment of technology accelerated. Every year, future tools arrived but became less and less remarkable. In the early 1970s there were still television programs about the technology of the near future. But as these various tools and technologies actually appeared—personal computers, mobile phones, and television sets housed in crappy plastic casings—the incremental nature of their arrival and the feeling that these were less-than-remarkable surplus tools created a diminished relationship to the notion of the future, a capitalized, contingent, provisional vision. The future was no longer a place where objects and devices could transform society through their liberatory potential. It became clear very quickly, as predicted, that these objects would become traps. They did not even rise to the level of a poorly articulated science-fiction dystopia; they were mere Radio Shack throwaway disappointments that would require more effort to use than they would offset—until the next development was released to great anticipation. As technologies were refined, a crisis of human interaction and knowledge production would take place. While it is true that these devices would become fetish objects, simultaneously they would control time and become a key component of self-management.
The introduction of future tools operated in tandem with the arrival of a permanent neoliberal crisis and the oppressive cycle of neoliberal logic. The capitulation of the left seemed on the horizon. There would now be permanent belt tightening, and former anxieties about asset stripping—the taking over and shutting down of companies while making people redundant—moved from industry toward abstract capital. Abstract capital became the new site of asset stripping. Abstraction eviscerating abstraction. Asset stripping operated in advance of reduced control. Asset stripping had already rendered control and limitation toothless. Business had already committed suicide via the complete destruction of its established structures and relationships. Reduced controls over financial exchange, banking rules, and movement of capital in general now did not precede but followed hard behind the total destruction of these established structures and relationships.
Lack of control is central here. Lack of control was not limited to finance; it was embedded in interface design. Controls via various interfaces were simplified. There were fewer requirements to read a manual. There was more focus on the idea that controls themselves would be self-evident and therefore fade. There was an acceleration of self-management in the face of globalization. This coincided with an increase in surveillance and a maturing of oppression. Control was atomized and rendered infinite. The interface bypassed complexity. Bypassing became something to be achieved—the bypassing of controls, bypassing congestion, speeding things up, and rendering the interface or experience smooth to the point where it became impossible to distinguish work, labor, and life.
The consolidation of corporations followed the breakdown of nationalized industries. After the Second World War countries all over Europe had drawn together disparate and disorganized companies into large nationalized operations. When these concerns were privatized in the United Kingdom during the 1980s, they were often put into the hands of the recently retired ministers who had privatized them. This pattern was repeated across the developed world. There was a standard capitalist shift toward consolidation and “efficiency,” but now in a globalized frame. Such processes were made easier by the increasing alienation of capital and profit from the place, moment, and location of production. An abstraction of abstraction swirled around and intoxicated capital.
Concerted attacks on the welfare state began as did the first breakdowns of the postwar drive toward universal advanced education. The universal became synonymous with fascistic concepts of an underclass. The universal was for them, not us. Postwar social housing was aging. The first renovation cycle of social housing had silently passed by, leading to abandonment, destruction, and decay. In Europe, there had been a failure to provide a bounding and punctuating context of shops, bars, and social centers. Where they did exist, they were the first to go. The aging of postwar social housing went alongside attacks on the welfare state. Attempts would now be made to break it down completely and suggest the idea that a social service should function like a market.
Everything was connected to battles over work, life, and labor. The logic of the soft revolutions involved new relationships to consumption. The acceleration of technology made political control into a complex framed by personal devices offering the lure of bypass via the interface. Bypassing became a desire. Attempts to break down control created a permanent neoliberal crisis. Asset stripping had already set everyone up for a final deregulation of capital. Business had already committed suicide in its rapid desire to break itself down in pursuit of shareholder value.
Battles between generations took new synthetic forms. Earlier youth identities claiming new ones were parodic or insincere. A revolt against earlier youth movements used similar tools to those that had been used before. This was particularly profound in relation to art and its tendency toward extended adolescence. Art began to mirror rather than critique popular culture—through the way it was realized rather than by what it produced. A cycle of restarts began to move with increasing speed from 1974 onward: capitalizations of the recent past and near future.
So what are the application effects that point forward from 1974? Art as pseudodocumentary became an extension of self-commentary. An increasing mockery and parody of authority developed alongside endurance as a marker—endurance as a last-ditch attempt to force difference into play. A combination of self-awareness was being reported by the artist alongside the rise of parodic documentary strategies to replace a weakened and increasingly absurd fourth estate, which was devastated by the development of a twenty-four-hour news cycle and the proliferation of communication. The enduring idea of tribal youth identities had led to a continued mockery of authority, including the sobriety of recent neo-avant-gardes. Endurance was the key—endurance as an artist—endurance as a marker of something that stood in disinterested tension with earlier certainties and modes of analysis. So we saw the introduction of the voice of the artist as a self-commentator. This was initially accelerated through feminism and challenges to heteronormativity. It was necessary to provide explanations of difference. The work became a demonstration of difference. Work became a representation of outsideness and otherness. The voice of authority was replaced by a proliferation of voices providing communication, explication, and the narration of self-awareness. This was combined with the rise of the supersubjective and with the celebration, appreciation, and redirection of traditional means of expression. Craft became a marker of resistance and a celebration of historically marginalized activities. Design—the everyday introduced into the space of art—became an antihierarchical marker of the eviscerated present bypassing the truth claims of earlier avant-garde groupings. What had been excluded became what is subjectively true. Posturing became important within the frame of collective protest. Playing up and parodying as performance connected to the rise of the artist as an acritical presence within and outside protest simultaneously. The artist danced around the edge of other people’s certainty and demonstrated self-consciousness and affected distance in a super-self-aware manner.
The year 1974 left us with a profound skepticism of organization, not just earlier attempts to collectivize, organize, or even unionize artists but the rejection of structures completely. The skepticism of structures involved replacement by temporary inclusion in events. This led to the consortium or cartel model. Artists began working together when necessary. Anything dynamic had to accommodate differences that could never truly be understood or resolved. A commitment to collectivity without collective values—all connected to the notion of an artist as one part of a larger body. The artist was an individual who had no obligations or ethics outside the body of art. Feelings of exclusion from the body and separateness from the contemporary produced the conditions for a contingent swarm.
The use of technology as a form of production was critical here. The replacement of artistic innovation with the deployment of new tools. Constantly revealing new mechanisms to break down mediation. Tools appeared in the process of their description. The unpacking and collaging of technology began. Technology became a form of production—it was not a tool toward production. Technology was deployed—technology did not produce. Art became a commentary not on its own materiality but on the conditions of exchange around production technologies—including painting. From 1974 onward, we saw a reduction in the authority of labor and a concurrent increase in discussion about the reception and social value of work, a constant dilemma and flow of meanings. There was a reduction of significance of any single work in and of itself. These awarenesses moved permanently in relation to one another. Art’s limits could be acknowledged by demonstrating a consciousness of its limits, leading to the rise of new formalisms via process as a means of articulating defeat without surrendering. This led to the production of infinite familiar advanced art forms through the adoption and corruption of processes that might produce their own deskilled aesthetic. The artist was no longer in control of unlearning: the bad painting was not a record of truth or nirvana.
Art was no longer a willful rejection of craft or skill or the suppression of the same for democratic or horizontal reasons. Traditional distancing devices were of no use either, for no distancing was possible any more. Distancing always revealed hidden power codes and lingering authorities. You could no longer create a distance from anything. The more distance you tried to create, the more hidden power codes would be revealed. Artists turned to other models, parallels, and relations as a way out. Contemporary art took over other disciplines and attempted to render them subdisciplines of contemporary art. Everything is consumed, and everything is produced.
One answer seemed to be the recuperation and reiteration of earlier modernist certainties. Starting in 1974, reiteration and recuperation became necessary in the face of shifts in criticism and critical consciousness away from the object and toward the structures of meaning and exposition that surround the object. Artists turned to the recuperation and reiteration of other forms and structures in order to become part of these processes of analysis. Contemporary critical practice therefore created alternative and parallel histories. Art became a recuperation of its own forms and reiterations in solidarity with both the self and the infinite other. Art now sought, with increasing speed, what had been overlooked or misunderstood. From 1974 onward, there was an attrition of conceptualism into degraded forms. Conceptual art had not merely been based on the sharing of an idea; it was a regime of self-consciousness and a possession of critique. Yet it soon became merely the forming of an idea, with a reduced presence of artist or object. The attrition of pure conceptualism was attributable to the fact that it excluded histories and identities. Its claims to universality led to a complete rupture in contemporary art and the inability of the contemporary to survive as a coalition in the face of the crisis of criticism and the emergence of the curator. The artist was left standing while a parallel tension between the critical and the curatorial became the dynamic engagement. Contemporary art had reached its recognizable form. There was a total break in terms of its potential. It could not work anymore as a coalition; it had become a swamp. There were too many stresses between the critical and the curatorial. The framing language around art fractured. While from 1974 we saw the beginnings of concerted attempts to evade contemporary art—a push to avoid inclusion within the overwhelming amoebal mush—each attempt was swamped, celebrated, or included into an ever-broader lexicon of the possible.
Art at this point became a recognizable reflection of critical, philosophical, and social misreadings. These misreadings defined the artist’s starting point, yet they were also the artist’s conclusions. Art became a compression and constant flipping of starting points and endgames, a constant exchange of misunderstandings of what is an inference, a projection, a reflection, a reiteration, and a recuperation. By 1974, there was to be a conception of contemporary art history. This generated stress that imploded inside contemporary art and moved it closer to its own legacy as a series of distracted self-awarenesses. Contemporary art history studies itself often creates a battleground of the pseudoethical in lieu of anything else to describe. A series of misreadings are now layered on a series of art practices, and vice versa. This takes place in tension with the curator as a maker and coproducer. The superaware curator is conscious of all other curators in the world. Finding out—in itself—has become curating. The contemporary curator at their highest point is in a permanent state of finding out. Finding out things that no single artist can know. Making connections that no single artist can make. Curators now connect artists, who cannot link to one another. We are in a period of competing speeds. As with the automation of production and the battle over time between the state, organized labor, and industry, we have competing speeds of production, consumption, and analysis. Considering curating, academic flow, and artistic production, curating is fast and everywhere, and academic flows are speeding up, whereas artistic production functions at multiple contradictory speeds—being contingently useful at points of convergence. All are heading in different directions and looping back over the others. Three distinct tempos operate with multiple contradictory meandering trajectories. Nothing can be resolved, but there are moments of intersection. The fast and everywhere, the slow and distanced, and the alone together meet one another at multiple points, for fleeting moments and toward flashes of comprehension.
The curator, historian, and critic are super-readers of positive critical presence within a disinterested frame. An ethical battle has replaced liberatory drive. Disappointment is articulated on a grand scale. The desires of the curator, the historian, and the critic point toward something that they cannot imagine and that they explain cannot be produced. Gatekeepers are everywhere. We are on an eighteenth-century middle European toll road. But gatekeepers can be bypassed: you can sneak past in the night, you can distract them, or you can induce them to turn a blind eye. Gatekeepers demonstrate new routes by default, through their claiming and marking of territory. A proliferation of states swamped by an increasing pile may only appear legible as a series of signs poking out of the mire—but the borders are down there, too deeply sedimented to define.