Art is a place where the rules of engagement are open to question. Art is a history of doing nothing and a long tale of useful action. It is always a fetishization of decision and indecision—with each mark, structure and, engagement. This book’s challenge to contemporary practitioners, or current artists, is that “contemporary art” no longer accounts for what is being made; it no longer is connected to what we have all become rather than what we might propose, represent, or fail to achieve. The challenge made is that artists today, whether they like it or not, have fallen into a trap predetermined by their existence within a regime that is centered on a rampant capitalization of the mind.
The accusation is that artists are at best the ultimate freelance knowledge workers and at worst barely capable of distinguishing themselves from the consuming desire to work at all times; they are neurotic people who deploy a series of practices that coincide quite neatly with the requirements of the neoliberal, predatory, continually mutating capitalism of the every moment. Artists are people who behave, communicate, and innovate in the same manner as those who spend their days trying to capitalize every moment and exchange of daily life. They offer no alternative.
The notion of artists as implicated figures has a long history, one located in varied historical attempts to resolve the desire to examine high culture as a philosophical marker with the unresolvable problem that the notional culture examined is always out of sync with the function of a high-cultural projection. This means that the accusation that we are functioning within a milieu dominated by predatory neoliberalism is based on a spurious projection of high-cultural function in the first place and cannot account for the tensions in art that remain: the struggle for collectivity within a context that requires a recognition of difference. Theories of immaterial labor—an awareness of the informational aspect of the commodity and the cultural content of the commodity—have had a profound influence on the starting point of current artists, offering an awareness of the accusation framed by the doubts and consciousnesses that form the base of the work. As a result, the question What is the good of work? is the heart of the work—it is not a symptom or accidental proximity. It accounts for the doubts and confusions that exist and explains why there seem to be moments of stress and collapse within any current art structure. These moments of critical crisis are an expression of resistance to the structure—a constant restructuring in response to the desire to avoid work within a realm of permanently unrewarding work.
The question Why work? rather than What is the good of work? aligns dynamic current art with its critical potential. The fact that it is superficially hard to determine observable differences between the daily routines and operations of a new knowledge worker and an artist is precisely because art functions on a track closely parallel to the structures it is critiquing.
It requires precise and close observation of the production processes involved in order to differentiate between knowledge workers and current artists. If the question
Why work? is the original question of current art, then to counter the accusation that artists are in thrall to processes of capitalization that are beyond them it is necessary to look at a number of key issues around control and to address them in a fragmented way. The following negotiation of these key issues is necessary in order to replace a critical mirror with a window.
So what happened to the promise of leisure? Maybe this is what art can offer us now—a thing to use or reflect upon in a zone of permanent future leisure—as the arts as an instrumentalized deployment becomes a more refined and defined capitalized zone, a zone never geared toward artists alone but instead directed toward the population in general as a way of rationalizing and explaining away innovations within the workplace as part of a matrix of doubt and difference. Artists here are viewed as content providers for the leisure zone rather than exemplary of it or in a critical relationship with it; they are terminally cast as outsiders who are nevertheless providing exemplary lifestyle models by their very nature. Yet the existence of a leisure promise is not synchronized with artistic production. Modes of leisure have been adopted by artists as a way openly to counter notions of labor as sites of dignity and innovation and in order to critique, mock, or parody the notion of an artistic life as a role-play within the leisure zone. The withdrawal of labor or the establishment of structures where intentions and results are uneven are all markers that go beyond the promise of postlabor, a promise that was always nothing more than the projection of a neurotic nonstate.
So, are we left with the possibility of the good artist who fulfills the critical criteria? The artist who works—sort of permanently—and always finds a way to account for him- or herself within an ever-hungry context that demands more and more interpretation? It’s not leisure, but it’s not really work.
Within this subset we have to engage in a careful process of categorization, meaning that we have to look at the methodological groupings that emerge within the art context rather than at what is produced.
One answer over the past few years was the formation of communities of practice forming new leisure/work modes. Artists are often creating new life in opposition to lifestyles. A complete reorganization of relationships may occur, where relationships themselves become the subject of the work and discursive models of practice become the founding principle rather than a result or product.
On the opposite extreme, there is deliberate self-enforced isolation and a concurrent lack of accountability, which is used as a structural game within a context where notional support structures are mutable and dynamic. The two main tangents of current art both attempt to release us from the accusation. Restructuring life (ways to work) and withdrawing from life (ways to free work).
Categorizations of art in this case can superficially appear to mirror attitudes to work. It is quite appropriate for artists to co-opt working models and turn them to their own ends, from the factory to the bar, or even to the notion of the artist’s studio as a specific site of production that either apes or mimics established daily structures or deliberately avoids and denies them. Categorizations of art are not limited to what is produced but are connected more deeply to how things might be produced. It is the requirement to understand a focus on production rather than consumption (including the new formalism of responsible didactic criticism) that unlocks art’s potential and permits a recasting of the accusation.
A marker for the accusation is the creation of your own deadlines versus the apparent creation of acquired deadlines. The notion of a deadline is a crucial applied structure that links the accused with the flexible knowledge worker. Deadlines increase exponentially and are created by the producer as much as they are applied. A possession of consciousness of the constructed deadline permits engagement and disengagement in order to create a zone of semiautonomy.
Working for a long time with only some deadlines is a prerogative of the artist and the occasional worker who functions within a job description of unbearable tedium but hard-won rights over terms of employment. It is the tension between the notion of applied flexibility and a critique of flexibility that permits a projection of potential.
Observing versus living is the most profound difference here. The notion of endlessly observing rather than taking part links the artist with the ethnographer and the alien. It is this continual flow between states of engagement and disengagement that provides the potential. It is in this gap that we can understand why it is produced rather than what is produced.
Relationship with others is crucial. The constant daily casting of roles—alone together—alone together over and over again. For artists do not operate in isolation. And artists can only function in complete isolation. The acquisition or rejection of relationships is a crucial marker in an art production that defines an artistic practice over and above a superspecific knowledge-producing activity peppered with deadlines. This means that the entry of the artist into the apparently undifferentiated territory of infinite flexibility is made critical by a recognition of a series of encounters, borders, humps, and diversions.
The identification of ethical barriers emerges when making art under the stressed circumstances of the accusation. Circumstances and subjects appear as moral zombies—undead and relentless victims—which artists reject or accept in tension with the creation or rejection of ethical barriers. Ethics are not stable or easy to reach, feed, or kill off. Under these stressed circumstances there is an assumption that art extends memory forward and backward. In other words, art is not necessarily synchronized to the present. What appears to be a methodology linked to present works is an illusion. Art deploys flexibility in order to account for the moral zombie—in order to navigate the terrain of ethical mutability. Art extends and reduces memory using tools that were only developed to shorten memory, that is, capitalize the near future and recent past. As there are no limits to work, there are also no limits to not working. The idea that artists find a way to work is a defining characteristic of current art, but it is an idea that always takes place as a setting for postlabor anxieties and the creation and dismantling of ethical barriers.
Research and reading as activities are not accounted for in the accusatory model. Artists working in a research mode as a primary method of production are assumed to be the good workers. To research in a directed way and then present this as a final work is not a leisure pursuit.
But accounting for things and relationships in the world leads to displaced work—the creation of structural subjects. There is a sense in which all new art made accounts for all the other work made. This awareness is not necessarily accompanied by full knowledge of all the other work but by a sense that there are all the other works.
Even in documentary work there is a sense of questioning the nature of art as well as a sense of creating didactic structures or replacing a super-self-conscious and worn-out fourth estate. The pursuit of documentary strategies is also a critique of the flows and capitalist logics that are applied to the commodification of art.
This leads us to the equation: “just another citizen in the room” versus “everything I do is a special perspective on the specificity of others.” At the heart of this artistic persona is the assertion of citizenship combined with an invitation to view the extraordinary ordinary.
This makes the biographical a locus for meaning. As art became more specific, the biographical became both more generic and more special, a way to present the specific in a form that would encourage more specificities and more difference. Art now is an assertion of difference, not an assertion of flexibility. Artists function in microcommunities of discourse that are logical and contingent within their own contexts. These are often generation related. Current artists are caught within generational boundaries.
The notion that artists are a perfect analogue for the flexible entrepreneurial class is a generational concept that merely masks a lack of differentiation in observation of practice and the devastating fact that art is in a permanent battle with what came just before. That is the good of work: replacing the models of the recent past with better ones.
The notion of the withdrawal of production or limiting production is the key to decoding the anxiety about work. One of the enduring powers of art and devices used by the contemporary artist to consolidate specificity once he or she has attained a degree of recognition is a withdrawal of labor or a limiting of supply. Doing the opposite—that is, operating freely, openly, and on demand—is viewed as a problem within the gallery structure and resists the simple commodification of art. This shift to production consciousness by current artists and away from reception consciousness by contemporary artists is a form of active withdrawal.
This notion of withdrawal can be understood in relation to the following: Are there answers or questions in the work? This is central to the defense against the accusation. A postmodern understanding is that the current artist asks questions of the viewer while standing beside them. It is this sense of art as something that asks questions of the viewer that is misunderstood in the knowledge-worker accusation. The shift of position from confrontation to proximity is a category shift in practice. Within the realm of the knowledge worker the new consumer is always activated and treated as a discriminating individual who can be marketed to directly—spoken to face to face. Documentary practice moves the user and the producer alongside each other. The exhaustion created by the continual capitalization of the recent past and the near future is based upon a sense in which the knowledge worker is trying to account for every differentiation, whereas the artist is producing every differentiation alongside the recipient of the work.
This is linked to a play with control over the moment of completion. The moment of judgment is not exclusive to an exterior field in the case of current art. This sense of control or denial is the zone of autonomy within a regime of excessive differences.
The documentary is permanently working off other fields and gives the potential of being arrested while thinking about art. This is not possible while working as a knowledge worker.
Current work undermines a sense or possibility of infinite leisure. Infinite leisure is only one form of religiously based utopia. A nightmare full of virgins and mansions. Will there be dogs? Oh, I hope there are dogs! To be a clerk would be heaven for some people. A breakdown of the barriers between work, life, and art via direct action is a rather more rewarding potential. Art appears to be result based, but it is generally action and occupation based. It is toward something. It reaches out. It only has meaning within a context, and that context will always determine what activities might be necessary to improve the context.
This leaves us explaining everything while suffering from a total communication anxiety about differentiation. Art viewed as a generalized terrain of collectivity and difference operates within a regime of anxiety that is merely a reflection of multiple, apparently contradictory moments of differentiations chiming simultaneously. Anxieties about too many artists, over production, and over a lack of ability to determine quality are all ideologically motivated statements that defer to a defeated series of authorities who would prefer either the attainment of a neoutopian consensus, a market consensus, or at least the consensus of the regime of a Big Other. All of these things are attacked and permanently defeated within current art. Otherwise things will default toward authority and control. The entropic quality of art’s structural and critical trajectory is its resistance.
This is because the relation between the development of creative tools for decentralized production and art production is also a historical coincidence. It is necessary to look at what is produced only through the primary defensive mesh against predatory capitalization—its structural approaches to tools that may well have been developed for other purposes.
Art is not a zone of autonomy. It does not create structures that are exceptional or perceivable outside the context. Therefore current art will always create a sequence of problems for the known context. One of those context sets is the undifferentiated flexible knowledge worker who operates in permanent anxiety in the midst of a muddling of work and leisure. Art both points at this figure and operates alongside it as an experiential phantom of the context.
Art is a place where the rules of engagement are open to question. The knowledge worker also appears to challenge rules of engagement but can only do so within the context of preexisting software tools or within a set of new fragmented relationships. The artist can create alienated relationships without these intricacies.
A different sense of super-self-conscious commodity awareness is at the core of current art’s desire to come close to the context. Projection and speculation are the tools reclaimed in order to power this super-self-conscious commodity awareness. Artists project into the near future and the recent past to expose and render transparent new commodity relations. The surplus value that is art is not limited to its supposed novelty value but is embedded in its function as a system of awareness.
Art is a series of scenarios/presentations that create new spaces for thought and critical speculation. The creation of new time locations and shifted time structures actually creates new critical zones where we might find spaces of differentiation from the knowledge community. For it is not that art is merely a mirror of a series of new subjective worlds. It is an ethical equation where assumptions about function and value in society can be operated upon. There is no art of any significance in the last forty years that does not include this as a base-level differentiating notion.
The idea of the first work or the development of ideas is not toward the total production of all work in the future any longer. This creates anxiety within the culture in general and leads a search toward analogous structures that also appear to function temporarily with contingent projection. A sense of constant returns to ideas or structures by choice rather than intuition is this aspect of contemporary art that defies the logic of capital. The notion that an artist is obsessed by a structure or an idea’s context is sometimes self-perpetuated. The apparent work is no more than a foil or mask to a longer deferral of decision making. The art becomes a semiautonomous aspect of lived experience for the artist as much as the viewer.
Working alone but in a group is a contradiction at the heart of current art practice. It is always an activated decision to give up the individual autonomy of the artistic persona toward working together. Within the flexible knowledge community, the assertion of individual practice has always to be subsumed within the team-worked moments of idea sharing.
Art as a life-changing statement is always a specific decision that is connected to entering moments of judgment that cannot be controlled exclusively by the artist but are also operated upon by all other artists. The them and us is me and us and us and us and them and them. Not thinking about art while making art is different than not thinking while preparing a PowerPoint presentation on the plane. Of course I am working, even when it looks as if I am not working. And even if I am not working, and it looks as if I am not working, I still might claim to be working and wait for you to work out what objective signifiers actually point toward any moment of value or work. This is the game of current art.
Art production/work methods are not temporally linked or balanced because the idea of managing time is not a key component of a personal or objective profit motive for artists, unless they decide that such behavior is actually part of the work itself.
The assumption that there is a they or them is part of the problem in understanding how artists function within society. Artists are also they or them who have made a specific decision to operate within an exceptional zone that does not necessarily produce anything exceptional. Adherence to a high-cultural life is a negotiated concept within the current art context.
This critical community is subject and audience simultaneously. Therefore, we have the situation where an artist will propose a problem and then position it just out of reach precisely to test the potential for an autonomy of practice.
Reporting the strange in the daily: what cannot be accounted for is at the heart of artistic practices—yet not for purposes that can be described outside of the work itself. And still, working less can result in producing more. The rate of idea production within art is inconsistent—which is a deliberate result of the way art is produced and how it can become precise and other—even while it too flounders and proudly reports back to us within the self-patrolled compound masquerading as a progressive group think-tank.
Near the beginning of his 1993 film Caro Diario [Dear Diary], Nani Moretti is sitting in a cinema watching a bourgeois dinner party peopled by weary disillusioned couples. They are talking about where it all went wrong from a perspective of success and authority.
One dinner guest turns to another.
“You shouted awful, violent slogans. Now you’ve gotten ugly.”
Moretti has finally had enough and angrily addresses the cinema screen.
“Why all? Why this fixation with us ‘all’ being sold out and co-opted!”
He continues.
“I shouted the right slogans, and I’m a splendid forty-year-old.”
“Even in a society more decent than this one, I will only feel in tune with a minority of people. I believe in people, but I just don’t believe in the majority of people. I will always be in tune with a minority of people.”