Preface
1 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1998), 15.
2 See Karl Polanyi, “The Fascist Virus” (circa 1934, unpublished). Marx was as blistering about the lumpenproletariat as he was about Napoleon III: “This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase” (The Eighteenth Brumaire, 75). One definition of “Bonapartism,” relevant again today, is support for “a strong man” who comes to power once state institutions are weakened, only to weaken them further.
3 See Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit,” Raritan (Fall 1986), and “Paranoid Style” in this book.
4 Even as there is no end to shaming in the media, many bad actors carry on brazenly, with the belief that shame, like outrage, can be recouped to advantage.
5 A complement to Bad New Days (London and New York: Verso, 2015), the present book is part of a larger project concerning the art of the last century at times of emergency. I am grateful to the editors who published initial versions of many of these texts, especially Mary-Kay Wilmers and Paul Myerscough at the London Review of Books, Michelle Kuo and Don McMahon at Artforum, and my colleagues at October. I also thank Thatcher Bailey, Alex Kitnick, and Julian Rose for commenting on some of the pieces, and Sebastian Budgen and Jacob Stevens at Verso for publishing all of them. My appreciation of the artists and writers discussed here goes without saying.
6 See “Machine Images,” “Human Strike,” and “Smashed Screens” in this book.
7 “It was left to the bourgeoisie of the twentieth century to incorporate nihilism into its apparatus of domination,” Walter Benjamin remarked almost a century ago, and so it appears again with our neoliberal masters (The Arcades Project, eds. and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], J91, 5). Too often today the “paranoid libertarianism” of the Right is replicated on the Left. If Trumpism has taught us anything, it is that institutions are relatively difficult to conceive and maintain and relatively easy to denounce and destroy.
8 I borrow this phrase from Ben Lerner. See “Real Fictions” in this book.
9 In Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), Peter Bürger adopted the tragedy-farce pattern as a way to understand the prewar (“historical”) avant-garde and to undercut the postwar (“neo”) avant-garde. In The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), I attempted to revalue his negative assessment by recourse to the Freudian concept of Nächtraglichkeit (or deferred action). My model complicated the temporality of the avant-garde but still insisted on its coherence. This coherence is no longer self-evident, new models of art-historical time are needed, and some are available. See “Traumatic Trace” and “Conspirators” in this book.
10 Alexander Kluge has offered this allegory about Trumpism, which he ascribes, anachronistically, to the liberal sociologist Max Weber (who was the author of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution that allowed a state of emergency to be declared without the consent of the Reichstag, a provision that Hitler exploited): “Weber had never studied elephants at close range. In a London newspaper he came across a report claiming that certain herbs ferment within the coiled intestines of the huge beasts. It ‘must be a grand sight’ to witness the alcohol making the animals go berserk and thunder forth, breaking all obstacles. For Weber, this was akin to the way self-confident women, forced to live in servitude to their husbands, experience a build-up of mighty wrath. As in the elephants’ stomachs, this process may continue over multiple generations, and this wrath is passed on to their sons (usually the secondor last-born). This ‘innate’ courage or pride is a fury unrelated to any specific character trait, and manifests itself in essentially hideous men. It is recognized by the hate that wells up in the fermenting mental intestines of millions who no longer tolerate their oppression. The sudden drunkenness—the charisma—of their role model seems to be contagious. It takes hold of the masses that look to this essentially smaller man, uprooting trees like a charismatic monster, as their leader. With the light of millions of eyes, he becomes radiant.” See “Charisma of the Drunken Elephant,” Frieze (November 2016).
11 See MTL Collective, “From Institutional Critique to Institutional Liberation? A Decolonial Perspective on the Crises of Contemporary Art,” October 165 (Summer 2018). For a brilliant account of the new terms of such stakeholder activism, see Michel Feher, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (New York: Zone Books, 2018).
1. Traumatic Trace
1 Designed by Michael Arad, the memorial occupies about half of the sixteen-acre World Trade Center site and consists of two large waterfalls and reflecting pools on the footprints of the towers; Peter Walker and Partners conceived the landscape around them. The entry to the museum is a pavilion designed by the Norwegian office Snøhetta; David Brody Bond Aedas Architects conceived the exhibition spaces.
2 Jerry Adler, “Recovering History: The Story of Hangar 17,” in Francesc Torres, Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17 (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2011), 22.
3 One such ambiguity is the title of the book: is “remains” a verb or a noun? The former suggests that the title is affirmative, the latter that memory itself is a ruin.
4 Chris Ward quoted in Adler, “Recovering History,” 26.
5 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 36, and “Wild Things” in this book.
6 Consider the dispute that erupted in 2010, not long after the controversy about the plan for an Islamic center and mosque near the site (which was ditched under pressure). A seventeen-foot beam was found in the rubble that some saw as a cross and revered as such; in fact, a Franciscan priest began to hold Mass under the beam soon after 9/11, and for the next five years it stood outside a nearby Catholic church. It was to be part of the display at the September 11 Museum, but a group called American Atheists filed a lawsuit against this move. They charged that a religious symbol had no place in a museum supported by government funds, that this was a violation of the Constitution. Museum officials countered that it would be framed as a historical artifact and that its use as a religious symbol was part of the narrative of event and aftermath that it was mandated to tell. The old struggle for the American soul continued at Ground Zero.
7 Peter Eleey, “September 11,” exhibition statement (New York: MoMA PS 1), n.p.
8 Peter Eleey, “A Lollipop/Two Branches,” in September 11, ed. Peter Eleey (New York: MoMA PS 1, 2011); italics in the original.
9 Eleey, “September 11.”
10 Eleey, “A Lollipop/Two Branches,” 66. The reading of the Charlesworth image is troublesome also in the sense that the Tower victims were classified as homicides by the New York Police Department.
11 Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1946,” in The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies of Charles Baudelaire, ed. Jonathan Mayne (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 83. Ironically, Baudelaire thought Manet was too explicit in his citations of Spanish and French predecessors like Velázquez and Le Nain; he favored allusions that were more subliminal. See Michael Fried, “Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet,” Critical Inquiry 10: 3 (March 1984), 510–42, and “Underpainting” in this book.
12 See my “Preposterous Timing,” London Review of Books, November 8, 2012.
13 Eleey, “A Lollipop/Two Branches,” 61. This is another instance of the now familiar practice of the curator as artist. See “Exhibitionists” in this book.
14 For more on these terms, see “The Crux of Minimalism” in my The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
15 Eleey, “A Lollipop/Two Branches,” 48. Eleey wrote under the influence of an intervention by the Bay Area collective Retort titled Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London and New York: Verso, 2005). See my exchange with its authors in October 115 (Winter 2006).
2. Bush Kitsch
1 The latter period also saw a camping of Nazi iconography, which provoked Friedländer in particular, as well as a parody of Stalinist representation, as performed by “Sots” artists such as Komar and Melamid.
2 Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (New York: Universe Books, 1969), 63.
3 See Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Kitsch, 116–26.
4 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 239.
5 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 250, 244, 247. Apparently, just as it takes two events to make trauma traumatic, it takes two tears to make kitsch kitschy.
6 Ibid., 246, 250.
7 Even this pop source is shaky. As used today, the ribbons date only to the “hostage crisis” of 1979–80 when fifty-two Americans were held captive by Iranian militants, and the relevant source is a pop song about a paroled convict, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” (1972).
8 Trump has taken kitsch to a new level. See “Conspirators” in this book.
9 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 243.
10 Harold Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 45.
11 On mimetic exacerbation, see my Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London and New York: Verso, 2015).
3. Paranoid Style
1 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 40. As Graham Burnett has stressed to me, a proclivity for conspiracy theories can be understood as a symptom of an incapacity to think through, or to believe in, actual kinds of agency.
2 Ibid., 31.
3 As noted in “Bush Kitsch” in this book, this manner is one origin of kitsch.
4 Harold Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 32.
5 Ibid., 49.
6 Hart Crane as quoted in Ibid., 31.
7 Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytical Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” (1911), in Three Case Studies, ed. Phillip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 174.
8 Peter Lamont, “Secrets of Debunking,” in Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler (Zurich: Luma Foundation, 2015), 414. See also Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017).
9 Like Mike Kelley and John Miller, Shaw and Oursler were formed at California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s, yet they represent a group distinct from the Pictures artists also shaped at Cal Arts at that time, such as Jack Goldstein, David Salle, and Barbara Bloom. The former explored specific subcultures, while the latter drew on mass culture at large.
10 As film historians Karen Beckman and Tom Gunning both point out in Imponderable, a young woman was usually enlisted in the role of medium.
11 Why do these collections seem so salient now? This pertinence parallels that of outsider art, folk art, and the art of the insane. Might this be an art-world version of the anti-establishment wind that blows through the land today? Or, more locally, might it attest to a fatigue with art that is too savvy about inside moves and too mindful of audience participation? Certainly, like outsider art, much of the material in “The Hidden World” and Imponderable is not only produced without irony, let alone cynicism, but also driven by a conviction that borders on compulsion.
12 See Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit,” Raritan (Fall 1986). For obvious reasons, this essay has had a renewed life in recent years.
4. Wild Things
1 Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 17.
2 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8; italics in the original.
3 Ibid., 84.
4 Ibid., 85.
5 Ibid., 33, 32.
6 See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
7 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392.
8 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114.
9 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is a Camp?” (1994), in Means without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 45.
10 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 17.
11 See Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Bailey (London: Penguin, 1979), 93–106.
12 Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke/Benjamin/Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 22. Santner elides exception and emergency in a way that can be questioned: in emergency, law is suspended with the promise that it will be restored; in exception, there is no such pretense.
13 Ibid., 35, 12, xv.
14 Ibid., 15.
15 Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, 19.
16 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 52.
17 See “Asger Jorn and His Creatures” in my Brutal Aesthetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
18 Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, 301–2.
19 Santner, On Creaturely Life, 30.
20 In the 2009 movie-and-novel versions by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, the voyage to the land of the big shaggy beasts also comes just after Max falls out of his broken family.
5. Père Trump
1 Siegfried Kracauer, Mass Ornament, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 58.
2 See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
3 This saying is credited to different people, such as the Trumpists Peter Thiel and Corey Lewandowski as well as the journalist Salena Zito.
4 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1959), 54. Rightist personalities such as Milo Yiannapoulos like to call Trump “Daddy.”
5 Ibid., 59. In a short text titled “Toward a Real Revolution” (1936), Georges Bataille writes: “Under autocracy, it is authority which grows intolerable. In democracy, it is the absence of authority” (October 36 [Spring 1986], 35).
6 My brief analysis leaves out a huge piece of the electoral puzzle—why a majority of white women voted for Trump. But then they may also be subject to “the erotic tie,” or, rather, subjected to it.
7 Robert Smithson, “Response to a Questionnaire from Irving Sandler” (1966), The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 329.
8 What happens when the sovereign is the beast, or the king becomes the fool? (The opposite case is a moment of carnival within the court that upsets its order, only then to reestablish it.) Might Trump inadvertently de-sovereignize the Presidency in the process? And as the giant balloon figure of Trump suggests, might Père Trump double as Bébé Donald? (Recall that Senator Bob Corker described the Trump White House as an “infant daycare center.”)
9 See “Wild Things” in this book.
10 See MTL Collective, “From Institutional Critique to Institutional Liberation? A Decolonial Perspective on the Crises of Contemporary Art,” October 165 (Summer 2018). This vigilance can take on a minatory cast, as it does in the brilliant story “Now More than Ever” by Zadie Smith, The New Yorker, July 23, 2018.
11 Here is an extract from the “J-20 Proclamation” concerning the art strike on Inauguration Day 2017 that still holds today: “Despite its contradictions, the art world has significant amounts of capital–– material, social, and cultural––at its disposal. The time has come to imagine and to implement ways of redirecting these resources in solidarity with broader social movements leading the way in the fight against Trumpism.” The full text is reprinted in October 159 (Winter 2017).
6. Conspirators
1 Quotations of Chan are drawn from his Selected Writings 2000–2014 (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2014); his press release for Rhi Anima (2017); a new translation of the Plato dialogue Hippias Minor, introduced by Chan (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2015); and a conversation between Chan and the classicist Brooke Holmes in Liquid Antiquity, eds. Brooke Holmes and Karen Marta (Athens: Deste Foundation, 2017).
2 The “Rhi” in “Rhi Anima” evokes “Reanimators” as well as Rhianna. On that score “Breathers” might also allude to two other figures important to Chan: Samuel Beckett, whose super-short play “Breath” (1969) consists entirely of a long death rattle, and Marcel Duchamp, who once remarked (in a book published by Chan), “Oh, I’m a breather, a respirateur, isn’t that enough?” Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2013), 3.
3 On the challenge of this media ecology for contemporary artists, see David Joselit, After Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
4 Although Chan sees the breathers as a new development in his art, they are foreshadowed by The 7 Lights (2005–7), which consists primarily of six digital animations projected on floor and wall. Evoking the passing of a single day, each projection begins benignly enough, with telephone cables bending along the sky, say, or sunlight filtering through a canopy of leaves. But the mood quickly darkens as silhouetted images begin to pass by—objects that range from the mundane (for example, cell phones) to the portentous (for example, a flock of birds). Soon human figures also float past, and the memory of victims plummeting from the World Trade towers is difficult to suppress. Sometimes these images seem to descend, as if to an individual death, and sometimes they seem to ascend, as if in a collective rapture. The 7 Lights thus suggests an apocalypse that is equally catastrophic and beatific; at the same time, it evokes our everyday world as a precarious Plato’s Cave of flitting shadows without enlightenment.
5 Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper Collins, 1984), xv. Friedländer quotes Goebbels on p. 40.
7. Fetish Gods
1 Richard Hamilton, Collected Words 1953–1982 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 42.
2 Jeff Koons in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 334.
3 Ibid., 339.
4 Rabbit is talismanic in other ways too: on May 15, 2019, it was sold at Christie’s for $91.1 million, a record for a living artist. It was purchased for hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen by art dealer Robert Mnuchin, father of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
5 See “Model Worlds” in this book.
6 Jeff Koons in Jeff Koons (Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2012), 24.
7 Jeff Koons in Marga Paz, ed., Taschen Collection Art of Our Time (Los Angeles: Taschen America, 2005), 139.
8 Koons in Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, 339.
9 Ibid., 335.
10 Ibid., 356–57.
11 See Michel Feher, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (New York: Zone Books, 2018).
8. Beautiful Breath
1 See Jacques Lacan, “The Meaning of the Phallus,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).
2 See “Père Trump” in this book.
3 Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” in The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975).
4 Oewerdieck is remembered at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, for hiding one Jew in his apartment and helping others to escape.
1 Unlike the Duchamp appropriation, the Jorn détournement does not objectify the girl so much as it targets the viewer.
2 “‘In Life There is No Purity, Only Struggle’: An Interview with Claire Fontaine by Bart van der Heide,” Metropolis M 1 (February/March 2009). Unless otherwise indicated, the cited texts can be found on the Claire Fontaine website: https://www.clairefontaine.ws/. A volume of her writings is forthcoming from Semiotext(e).
3 Claire Fontaine, “The Glue and the Wedge,” Circa 124 (Summer 2008). She even proposes “the possibility of seeing the entire aesthetic field as a data bank of potential uprisings” (“Foreigners Everywhere” [2005]).
4 “‘Acts of Freedom’: Claire Fontaine Interviewed by Niels van Tomme,” Art Papers (September 2009).
5 “In Life There is No Purity, Only Struggle.” Carnevale and Thornhill add this note: “When we named Claire we were very interested in the pictures and drawings by Bruce Nauman titled Portrait of the Artist as a Fountain; we found there a germ of the idea of the artist as an objectified entity, the artist as a ready-made” (personal communication).
6 See “Beautiful Breath” in this book.
7 Claire Fontaine, “Statement pour l’exposition à la Meerrettich Galerie” (December 2004).
8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3.
9 “‘Macht Arbeit’: An Interview with Claire Fontaine by Stephanie Kleefeld,” Texte zur Kunst 73 (March 2009). See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2005), and “Exhibitionists” in this book.
10 “Claire Fontaine Interviewed by John Kelsey” (2006); Claire Fontaine, “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications” (2005). The classic text on the problematic notion of a general strike is Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1908), trans. T. E. Hulme (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1915). For its relevance in activist art today, see Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London and New York: Verso, 2016).
11 Claire Fontaine, “Statement pour l’exposition à la Meerrettich Galerie.” On “bare life,” see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), and on “whatever singularity,” see Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Also see “Wild Things” in this book.
12 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 45.
13 Claire Fontaine, “Notes on the State of Exception” (2005).
14 Agamben, The Coming Community, 80, 50. For another version of this siding with the object, see “Smashed Screens” in this book.
15 Ibid., 6.
16 See Franz Kafka, “The Cares of a Family Man” (ca. 1914–17), in The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). Claire Fontaine shares these interests (among others) with the French collective Tiqqun.
17 Agamben, The Coming Community, 1.
18 “Claire Fontaine Interviewed by John Kelsey” (2006).
19 Warhol was another avatar of whatever singularity, as Claire Fontaine acknowledges in her détournements of his Marilyn and Mao silkscreens. (She stencils the text “One is Not One” over them.)
20 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 326.
21 Fontaine, “The Glue and the Wedge.”
22 Jean-Paul Sartre, introduction to Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait d’un Inconnu (1957), reprinted in Portraits, trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 5–6. Sartre continues: “To appropriate [the commonplace] requires an act: an act by which I strip away my particularity in order to adhere to the general, to become generality. Not in any case similar to everyone, but, to be precise, the incarnation of everyone. By this eminently social adherence, I identify myself with all others in the indistinctness of the universal” (6). This reading of the common has less to do with Kant (who in The Critique of Judgment discusses “common sense” in the sense both of Gemeinsinn, which supports the supposed universality of judgments of taste, and of sensus communis, which governs the understanding) than with Marx, who, in the Grundrisse, speaks in passing of “the general intellect” as “a direct force of production” in its own right (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus [New York: Vintage Books, 1973], 706). Recently Paolo Virno has developed this notion as follows: “The contemporary multitude is fundamentally based upon the presumption of a One which is more, not less, universal than the State: public intellect, language, ‘common places’” (A Grammar of the Multitude [Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2004], 43). Virno acknowledges that contemporary aspects of this public intellect might be unsavory (he mentions opportunism and cynicism in particular), but insists that it is a key resource for the Left. This is also how Claire Fontaine views the general intellect, dialectically and strategically, as a repertoire both to question and to use. As she states in a smoke piece, “The Educated Consumer is Our Best Customer.”
23 “Claire Fontaine Interviewed by Dessislava DiMova” (2008).
24 Such pieces suggest that the interests of the common are now so pushed to the margins that their very expression appears vandalistic or anarchistic.
25 “Love, real love,” she adds, “can only be communist.” See “Claire Fontaine Interviewed by Anthony Huberman,” Bomb 105 (Fall 2008).
26 Claire Fontaine, “Notes on the State of Exception.”
27 Ibid.; “Foreigners Everywhere” (2005).
28 Claire Fontaine, “Nous sommes tous des singularités quelconque” (2006); “‘Macht Arbeit’: An Interview with Claire Fontaine by Stephanie Kleefeld,” Texte zur Kunst 73 (March 2009). Also see “Smashed Screens” and “Machine Images” in this book.
29 “Grêve Humaine (interrompue): Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation,” MAY Magazine 3 (Spring 2010); “Claire Fontaine Interviewed by Anthony Huberman,” Bomb 105 (Fall 2008). Also see “Bush Kitsch” in this book.
30 Claire Fontaine, “Readymade: Genealogy of a Concept,” Flash Art (January/February, 2010).
31 “Grêve Humaine (interrompue).” Claire Fontaine comes to this notion from Walter Benjamin by way of Giorgio Agamben. “The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything will be just as it is,” Benjamin wrote in 1932. “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.” See Walter Benjamin, “In the Sun,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1931–34, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 664. Also see his final thesis in “On the Concept of History” (1940), in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) and “Real Fictions” in this book.
32 I owe this term to Natalie Herren, who used it in a lecture on La Cédille qui sourit, a small store staged by the Fluxus artists George Brecht and Robert Filliou in a fishing village in southern France from 1965 to 1968. Claire Fontaine also looks back to Fluxus.
33 “Interview with Claire Fontaine by Chen Tamir,” C Magazine 10 (Spring 2009). Also see Tom McDonough, “Expropriating Expropriation,” in Claire Fontaine: Economies (Miami, FL: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2010).
1 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), 136. Some leaders of early twentieth-century movements were unabashed showmen, F. T. E. Marinetti and Tristan Tzara chief among them. Accounts of contemporary curating have recently appeared from Terry Smith, Paul O’Neill, and David Balzer, among others.
2 “Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Art of Curation,” The Guardian, March 23, 2014.
3 “Conversation with Robert Smithson on April 22nd 1972,” in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 200.
4 An excellent counter to this tendency is the work of the curator Anselm Franke and his collaborators at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.
5 Obrist, Ways of Curating, 139. I attempt to account for this “hunger for live experience” in Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London and New York: Verso, 2015), 126–40.
6 Obrist, Ways of Curating, 148.
7 Ibid., 143.
8 See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2007). Luc Boltanski is the brother of the artist Christian Boltanski.
9 For an incisive critique of this regime, see Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London and New York: Verso, 2013).
10 Jean-François Lyotard quoted in Ways of Curating, 158.
11 On this language, see “Smashed Screens” in this book. Obrist resembles Peyman, the protagonist of the brilliant novel Satin Island by Tom McCarthy: “Peyman, for us, was everything and nothing. Both individually and severally, our scattered, half-formed notions and intuitions, fields of research which would otherwise have lain fallow, found no bite and purchase on the present moment—he connected all these to a world of action and event, a world in which stuff might actually happen; connected us, that is, to our own age … And, at the same time, he was nothing. Why? Because, in playing this role, he underwent a kind of reverse camouflage (some anthropologists do speak of such a thing). The concepts he helped generate and put in circulation were so perfectly tailored to the age on whose high seas they floated, their contours so perfectly aligned with those of the reality from which they were drawn and onto which they constantly remapped themselves, that you’d find yourself coming across some new phenomenon, some trend—in architecture or town planning or brand strategy or social policy, in Europe, the States, India, it didn’t matter what or where—and saying: Oh, Peyman came up with a term for this; or: That’s a Peyman thing. You’d find yourself saying this several times a week—that is, seeing tendencies Peyman had named or invented, Peymanic paradigms and inclinations, movements and precipitations, everywhere, till he appeared in everything; which is the same as disappearing.” Satin Island (New York: Knopf, 2015), 45.
12 Obrist, Ways of Curating, 79, 169.
11. Gray Boxes
1 See Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space,” Artforum (March, April, May 1976).
2 This problem was anticipated by the longtime MoMA curator William Rubin in “The Museum Concept Is Not Infinitely Expandable,” Artforum (October 1974).
3 Serra disputes this claim in Richard Serra and Hal Foster, Conversations about Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 242.
4 I address some of these problems in The Art-Architecture Complex (London and New York: Verso, 2011). The last one—too much capital put into the architecture, not enough thought put into its use—can lead to financial difficulties, as it did at the American Folk Museum in New York and the American Center in Paris.
5 For a critique, see Claire Bishop, “Palace in Plunderland,” Artforum (September 2018).
6 See B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business Is a Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999).
7 Nicholas Serota, Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997). On the demand for presence and participation in contemporary art, see my Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London and New York: Verso, 2015), 126–40.
8 There is even a cultic dimension in the necessary pilgrimage to these distant museums, which is also true of many site projects, such as the Walter de Maria Lightning Field in New Mexico and the Donald Judd complex in Marfa, Texas.
9 Some of these private museums will fail over time, as endowments shrink and families fall out: what happens then?
10 See Elizabeth Kolbert, “Gospels of Giving for the New Gilded Age,” The New Yorker, August 27, 2018.
1 This remains a commitment: “Nothing can change our expectations of art more than museums loaded with unruly representations of ‘black’ figures”: Kerry James Marshall, “Just Because” (2010), in Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, ed. Helen Molesworth (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016), 245. For Marshall there is no “burden of representation,” and “positive images” are very much the point. An initial version of the present text was published in Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting (New York: David Zwirner Gallery, 2019).
2 Marshall quoted in Griselda Murray Brown, “Kerry James Marshall: ‘You Don’t See Black People in Trauma in My Work,’” Financial Times, October 3, 2018; and Marshall, “Young Artist to Be” (2006), in Kerry James Marshall, 237. Marshall continues: “Synthesize, synthesize, synthesize. Force relationships between forms that may seem incompatible” (237).
3 See Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
4 See Leo Steinberg, “Velázquez’ Las Meninas,” October 19 (Winter 1981).
5 Marshall quoted in Murray Brown, “Kerry James Marshall.”
6 Marshall has spoken of “the sense of grandeur that comes with monumental images,” asking himself, “Is that available to you too?” (Ibid.). In the early 2000s he switched to a new support for his paintings, Plexiglas or PVC sheets framed with white-plastic molding, which Carrol Dunham understands as “an update of the tradition of panel painting in Northern Europe”: “The Marshall Plan: Kerry James Marshall’s ‘Mastry,’” Artforum (January 2017), 187.
7 See Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
8 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 3–16; and Louis Marin, “Toward a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds,” in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan Suleiman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 310. See also Craig Owens, “Representation, Appropriation, and Power,” Art in America (May 1982).
9 Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies by Baudelaire, ed. Jonathan Mayne (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 83. Marshall comments on this notion in “Mickalene’s Harem” (2008), in Kerry James Marshall, 239.
10 Jordan Kantor, “Kerry James Marshall,” Artforum (January 2011).
11 Marshall, “Just Because” (2010), in Kerry James Marshall, 246.
12 “To me there really [was] a necessity to see more images of black figures in paintings that find their way into museums” (Marshall quoted in Murray Brown, “Kerry James Marshall”).
13 For the first two instances, see Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
14 See Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992).
15 Marshall: “For people of color, securing a place in the modern story of art is fraught with confusion and contradictions about what and who they should be—black artists, or artists who happen to be black” (“Shall I Compare Thee … ?” [2016], in Kerry James Marshall, 73).
16 Foucault, The Order of Things, 307.
17 Marshall, “Mickalene’s Harem,” 241.
18 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Books, 2012), 5.
19 Ibid. Du Bois continues: “He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”
20 See Dunham, “The Marshall Plan,” 188.
21 For Fanon “the fact of blackness” was brought home by a white child on a bus who objectified him with his gaze, exclaiming, “Look, a Negro!” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [1952], trans. Charles L. Markmann [New York: Grove Press, 1967], 84). Marshall works to challenge, open up, and mollify this gaze all at once. As for Ellison, Jeff Wall has associated Marshall with his “well-known definition of American realism as a hybrid blending of reportage, folklore and vernacular speech with elements of dream and fantasy in a framework of high modernist literary form” (Jeff Wall, “Introduction,” Kerry James Marshall [Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2010], 15).
22 Marshall quoted in Murray Brown, “Kerry James Marshall.” With its rainbow head scratched out of a multicolored ground painted over in black, Black Boy, included in “History of Painting,” succeeds brilliantly in this regard.
23 See Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” (1784), in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60.
24 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 62–97.
25 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 44, 38, 57. Morrison continues: “I want to suggest that these concerns—autonomy, authority, newness and difference, absolute power—not only become the major themes and presumptions of American literature, but that each one is made possible by, shaped by, activated by a complex awareness and employment of a constituted Africanism. It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity” (44). For a compelling account of these concerns in relation to recent American art, see Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
26 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. Might there be an allusion in Underpainting to the racist slogan recently found beneath the ur-modernist Black Square (1915) of Malevich?
27 See in particular MTL Collective, “From Institutional Critique to Institutional Liberation? A Decolonial Perspective on the Crises of Contemporary Art,” October 165 (Summer 2018).
28 Marshall quoted in Murray Brown, “Kerry James Marshall.” For Marshall the artist must engage significant predecessors: “One of the things an artwork must do is show the way one’s painting builds upon the innovations of others” (Kerry James Marshall, 252).
29 Marshall, “Shall I Compare Thee … ?,” 79.
30 See Lisa G. Corrin, ed., Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson (Baltimore: The Contemporary; New York: The New Press, 1994). Here, as in the Wilson work, mining connotes exploring, extracting, and reclaiming all at once.
31 Marshall, “Just Because,” 242.
32 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), 110.
33 Ibid., 31.
34 Marshall quoted in Murray Brown, “Kerry James Marshall.” In the first sentence of “The Case of Blackness” (2008), a reflection on Fanon, Moten writes, “The cultural and political discourse on black pathology has been so pervasive that it could be said to constitute the background against which all representations of blacks, blackness, or (the color) black take place” (Criticism 50: 2, 2008, 177).
35 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 26. “This will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is, at the same time, the only possible act” (28).
36 Murray Brown, “Kerry James Marshall”; Marshall, “The Legend of Sun Man Continues” (2010), in Kerry James Marshall, 249. For Marshall such scenes are associated, historically, with the church; in his paintings he aims to capture similar scenes in secular activities in the present.
37 Wall, introduction to Kerry James Marshall, 18.
38 In effect, Marshall plays forward the revision that Homer had already visited on Watson and the Shark (1778) by John Singleton Copley.
39 Marshall, forward to Kerry James Marshall, 227, and “The Legend of Sun Man Continues,” 249.
40 In Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger associates the globe in The Ambassadors with the advent of the racial violence of colonialism and imperialism.
41 See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 85–89.
42 Marshall, “Just Because,” 243.
43 Marshall, “The Legend of Sun Man Continues,” 249.
44 This portal might be related to the magic-realist apertures in recent novels such as The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead and Exit West (2017) by Mohsin Hamid: when historical events become too much to bear, an opening appears in the narrative like a fantastic escape hatch. Far from a fixating on trauma, this is also not a forgetting of trauma but an imagined passing through it. Finally, what if white visitors were to go through such art galleries with these black children of Underpainting in mind, with the museum experienced as a bardo?
13. Player Piano
1 William Gaddis, “Agapē Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano,” in The Rush for Second Place, ed. Joseph Tabbi (New York: Penguin, 2002), 142.
2 William Gaddis, Agapē Agape (New York: Viking, 2002), 1–2; unless otherwise specified, all other quotations are from this work.
3 Gaddis, “Agapē Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano,” 142.
4 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, eds. Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 210.
5 Mary Beth Eddy quoted in The Rush for Second Place, 147.
6 Gaddis, “Agapē Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano,” 143.
7 Ibid., 143–44.
8 Ibid., 143.
9 Theodor Adorno, letter of March 18, 1936 to Walter Benjamin, in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetic and Politics, trans. Ronald Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977), 123.
10 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936), in Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, eds. Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 115. See also my The Art-Architecture Complex (London and New York: Verso, 2011).
11 Joseph Tabbi, “Introduction,” in The Rush for Second Place, xi. His great legatee in this regard is George Saunders.
12 Gaddis, letter to George Comnes, quoted in Tabbi, “Introduction,” xiii.
13 This is one of the idées reçues that Flaubert lists in his dictionary of the same.
14. Robo Eye
1 Volker Pantenburg, “Visibilities: Harun Farocki between Image and Text,” in Harun Farocki, Imprint/Writings, eds. Susanne Gaensheimer and Nicolaus Schafhausen (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2001), 18. Farocki made no fewer than three films on the Vietnam War.
2 Farocki edited and contributed to Filmkritik until its demise in 1984; he also wrote for die tageszeitung and Jungle World, among other publications. Even as he examined industrial methods, he practiced them as well: “In my work, I try to make a composite according to the model of the steel industry, where every waste product flows back into the production process and hardly any energy is lost. I finance the basic research with a radio show; books studied during the research period are dealt with in shows on books, and some of what I observe while doing this work appears in television shows” (Imprint/Writings, 32). His move into image installations was also in keeping with the industrial fate of cinema: as it passed in part into history, it moved in part to the art gallery and museum.
3 Farocki was skeptical of the category of the essay film. The term “is quite unsuitable,” he remarked, “just like ‘documentary film,’ which is also not particularly appropriate. In television, when you hear a lot of music and see landscapes—nowadays that’s called an essay film, too. Lots of atmosphere and fuzzy journalism is essay” (2000 interview with Rembert Hüser, quoted in Imprint/Writings, 38).
4 This is not to say that they are not partisan, more on which below.
5 Farocki, Imprint/Writings, 38.
6 See especially Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). In “What Is a Camera?, or: History in the Field of Vision” (Discourse 15: 3 [Spring 1993]), Kaja Silverman draws an extensive comparison between Farocki and Crary. The films ramify with other critical projects, such as those of Paul Virilio, Vilém Flusser, Manuel DeLanda, and Samuel Weber. The literature on Farocki is large; for key texts in English, see Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), and Nora M. Alter, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
7 Thomas Elsaesser, “Introduction: Harun Farocki” (2002), www.sensesofcinema.com. See also Elsaesser, ed., Harun Farocki: Working the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). This conjuncture is much studied in film theory; see especially Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
8 Farocki, in a 1998 interview with Rolf Aurich and Ulrich Kriest, quoted in Farocki, Imprint/Writings, 24. Also Brechtian is his interest in the particular expression or gestus that signals a specific social formation.
9 Farocki on Images of the World, quoted in Ibid., 26. This approach also guides his criticism; a text from 1982 begins: “A photograph from Vietnam. An interesting photo. One has to read a lot into it to get a lot out of it” (Ibid., 112).
10 See “Real Fictions” in this book.
11 Farocki co-authored a probing book on Godard with Kaja Silverman: Speaking about Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
12 In part, Farocki refers this failure to the sheer profusion of images evident even then: “more pictures of the world than the eyes of the soldier are capable of evaluating.”
13 Farocki follows these images with footage of a Western woman made up in a cosmetic salon. Again, such dis/connection is the principle of his montage.
14 Walter Benjamin discusses training in industrial culture in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936) and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), among other texts—an aspect of his work brilliantly elucidated by Miriam Bratu Hansen in Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Contemporary testing is also taken up by Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen; see “Smashed Screens” and “Machine Images” in this book.
15 See Avital Ronell, Test Drive (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
16 As the title of the Elsaesser collection suggests, Farocki “works on the sight-lines.” On seeing-as-targeting, see Samuel Weber, “Target of Opportunity: Networks, Netwar, and Narratives,” Grey Room 15 (2004).
17 Again, see “Smashed Screens” and “Machine Images” in this book.
18 Benjamin gives the ur-formulation of this fascist sublime at the end of his “Work of Art” essay: The “self-alienation” of mankind “has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, eds. Michael Jennings et al. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002], 122). I discuss a contemporary version of this effect in Chapter 7 of The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
19 See Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, eds. Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),
20 I elaborate this point in “Smashed Screens” and “Machine Images” in this book. An indispensable guide to surveillance is Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds., CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
21 Elsaesser, “Introduction: Harun Farocki.” “Films about work or workers have not become one of the main genres,” Farocki commented, “and the space in front of the factory has remained on the sidelines. Most narrative films take pace in that part of life where work has been left behind” (Imprint/Writings, 232). Another artist who consistently worked against this lack of representation is Allan Sekula; see, among other projects, his Fish Story (1988–94). If work rarely appears in movies, its representation is also very limited on television, where it tends to be restricted to police, lawyers, and doctors (or some nastily forensic combination of all three).
22 I return to these questions in “Machine Images” in this book.
23 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 1951), 437–59.
24 Carl Schmitt quoted in Farocki, Imprint/Writings, 160.
15. Smashed Screens
1 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, eds. Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 512.
2 Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 47.
3 Ibid., 148, 145.
4 The four terms here are adopted from Thomas Elsaesser, Rem Koolhaas, Harun Farocki, and Steven Shaviro, respectively.
5 Ibid., 159. At least our old frenemy, the table-turning commodity, aspired to be human and assumed that we were too.
6 Ibid., 49, 56.
7 See “Robo Eye,” “Machine Images,” and “Real Fictions” in this book.
8 The historians of science Robert Proctor and Jimena Canales have argued that such agnotology is now a necessary aspect of epistemology.
9 Steyerl, Duty Free Art, 169. If this sounds “accelerationist,” it is.
10 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 42, 32.
11 Ibid., 42. Like David Joselit in After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), Steyerl sees the possibility of a renewed intervention here. Clearly, she is more sanguine about her lumpen prole than Marx was about his.
12 Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 99.
13 Ibid., 120.
14 Siegfried Kracauer, Mass Ornament, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75–86; and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 21. The Communist version of this position was sketched by Sergei Tret’iakov in “The Biography of the Object” (1929), October 118 (Fall 2006).
15 Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 52, 50.
16 See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); see also Emily Apter et al., “A Questionnaire on Materialism,” October 155 (Winter 2016), 3–110.
17 Steyerl, Duty Free Art, 57.
18 Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 56.
19 Steyerl, Duty Free Art, 114.
20 Ibid., 135.
21 Ibid., 141.
22 Kimberly Bradley, “Hito Steyerl is an Artist with Power. She Uses It for Change,” New York Times, December 17, 2017, AR 21. On this mutation in language, see also “Exhibitionists” in this book.
23 Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” Semeia 23 (1982): 67–68.
16. Machine Images
1 Implicitly, Michel Foucault defined the regime of surveillance in contradistinction to the society of spectacle articulated by Guy Debord. Today, however, we see how the orders can be combined—and intensified in the process.
2 Trevor Paglen, “The Expeditions: Landscape as Performance,” TDR: The Dance Review 55: 2 (2011): 3. I have benefited from the texts in John P. Jacob and Luke Skrebowski, Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2018), and in Lauren Cornell, Julian Bryan-Wilson, and Omar Kholeif, Trevor Paglen (London: Phaidon, 2018).
3 Trevor Paglen quoted in Jonah Weiner, “Prying Eyes: Trevor Paglen Makes Art out of Government Secrets,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2012, 60.
4 Trevor Paglen, “Trevor Paglen Talks About ‘The Other Night Sky, 2007–’,” Artforum (March 2009): 228. Might his own targeting be implicated in this logic?
5 Trevor Paglen, “New Photos of the NSA and Other Top Intelligence Agencies Revealed for the First Time,” The Intercept, February 10, 2014.
6 See Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
7 See “Real Fictions” in this book.
8 According to Jacob, 89 Landscapes (2015), a two-channel video of such choke points, conjures up “the picturesque of the Terror State” (“Trevor Paglen: Invisible Images and Impossible Objects,” in Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen, 57). His subjects are not restricted to extralegal black sites and outside–inside spaces; in some of his photos Paglen suggests that the opaque structures of our surveillance regime and “everywhere war” can be found in the banal office parks all around us, hidden in plain sight.
9 On second nature, see Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 63–64. On third nature, see “A Conversation Between Alexander Kluge and Thomas Demand,” in Thomas Demand (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006), 51–112.
10 See David Bridle, Citizen Ex: Algorithmic Citizenship, http://citizenex.com/citizenship.
11 Trevor Paglen, “Operational Images,” e-flux 59 (November 2014). See also “Robo Eye” in this book.
12 “The logics of invisible images turns those of secrecy inside out,” Jacob argues. “No map can chart the circulation of invisible images. They respond neither to the geographer’s rule nor to the artist’s look” (“Trevor Paglen: Invisible Images and Impossible Objects,” 73).
13 Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You),” The New Inquiry, December 8, 2016. One can quibble here—analogue representations can have performative effects too, and it was the mission of modernists like Moholy-Nagy to make photography and film actively productive, not passively reproductive—but one understands the point.
14 Paglen, “Operational Images.”
15 Paglen, “Invisible Images.”
16 Ibid.
17 The camera transformed the human repertoire of gestures—in what ways might these programs do the same?
18 Paglen, “Invisible Images.”
19 See “Smashed Screens” in this book.
20 The media theorist and psychoanalyst Ben Kafka suggests this revision of “Cogito ergo sum”: “I lack self-understanding, therefore I am human.”
21 John P. Jacob, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Kate Crawford, “A Conversation with Trevor Paglen,” in Sites Unseen, 215.
22 Ibid., 217.
23 Paglen, “Invisible Images.”
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Paglen also confronts linguistic opacity. Each new war seems to degrade language further (for example, “pacification” in the Vietnam War, “rendition” in the Iraq War), and so it is again in the everywhere war on terror. In his three-channel video Code Names of the Surveillance State (2015), first projected on the Houses of Parliament in London, Paglen reviews 4,000–plus secret terms for covert groups and actions derived from the Snowden files.
27 In The Last Pictures (2012), Paglen selected one hundred photos, many of disasters both natural and manmade, inscribed them on a disc, and placed them in a satellite. He sees these pictures as future artifacts “from ancient aliens (ourselves),” ones that suggest that “the future already exists even though we haven’t caught up with it yet” (“A Conversation with Trevor Paglen,” 222–23).
17. Model Worlds
1 “Okwui Enwezor in Conversation with Sarah Sze,” in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh et al., Sarah Sze (London: Phaidon, 2016), 24.
2 For an excellent account of the art-historical resonances of the work, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Surplus Sculpture,” in Ibid., 41–91.
3 Sarah Sze, “Interview with Jeffrey Kastner” (2003), in Ibid., 134. Buchloh asks pertinently here: “Does their formal structure restitute the object’s function and use value, or does repetition only expand its manifest devalorization?” (“Surplus Sculpture,” 73).
4 See “Mimetic” in my Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London and New York: Verso, 2015).
5 In this way her sculptures also invite a meditative intimacy, one related to the engagement solicited by relational art but without the overt participation on which such work often depends.
6 Sarah Sze, “Interview with Rikrit Tiravanija” (2013), in Sarah Sze, 144.
7 Sarah Sze, “Interview with Phong Bui” (2010), in Ibid., 140. One might term this state “definitively unfinished,” as Duchamp designated his great glass piece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), after it was shattered, except that there is little evidence of such accident here.
8 Sze, “Interview with Jeffrey Kastner,” 134.
9 On this crucial point, I disagree with Buchloh in his account in “Surplus Sculpture.”
10 Gilles Deleuze describes this simulacral effect in ways pertinent here: “The simulacrum implies great distances, depths, and distances which the observer cannot dominate. It is because he cannot master them that he has an impression of resemblance. The simulacrum includes within itself the differential point of view, and the spectator is made part of the simulacrum which is transformed and deformed according to his point of view”: “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October 27 (Winter 1983), 49.
11 Sarah Sze, “Conversation with Phong Bui,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 6, 2010, brooklynrail.org. The two modes of installation art mentioned above, the pictorial and the immersive, render us immobile by comparison. In some of her concerns (for example, with scale and simulation), Sze is affined with Vija Celmins.
12 Sze, “Interview with Rikrit Tiranvanija,” 144.
13 The poem is “XLIV,” reproduced in Sarah Sze, 113.
14 Sze, “Interview with Phong Bui,” 138.
15 Ibid., 140.
16 See Arthur C. Danto, “Scientific and Artistic Models in the New Work of Sarah Sze,” in Sarah Sze at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, ed. Marion Boulton Stroud (Philadelphia: Fabric Workshop, 2014).
17 Sze, “Interview with Phong Bui,” 138.
18 For the notion of Umwelt, see Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934), trans. Joseph D. O’Neill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
19 Alexander R. Galloway, “Networks,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, eds. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 281, 291. Sze seems to adopt the more benign view of networks articulated by Bruno Latour in his actor-network theory. See Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
20 Sze draws from many disciplines, but her sculpture is also affined with the diagram, which is often ambiguous in effect, a line of flight that is also a mode of tracking or, in the terms offered by Galloway, a chain of triumph that is also a web of ruin. In “Surplus Sculpture” Buchloh points to a similar paradox in the “New Babylon” schemes of Constant.
21 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1952), reprinted in Sarah Sze, 114–18.
22 Ibid., 118.
23 Stephanie Cash, “The Importance of Things: Q+A with Sarah Sze,” artinamericamagazine.com, October 12, 2012; Sarah Sze, quoted in “Interview with Phong Bui,” 138.
24 See Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse, Parts 1 and 2,” October 12 and 13 (Spring and Summer, 1980).
25 Franz Boas, quoted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 13.
26 Ibid., 17, 19. This account has its critics, most importantly Jacques Derrida in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
27 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 21, 18.
28 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” The Journal of American Folklore 68: 270 (1955).
29 See Louis Althusser, “Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971).
30 Buchloh, “Surplus Sculpture,” 62.
31 I mean to signal here the various concerns, in recent philosophy, with the object—from “the social life of things” (Arjun Appadurai), “thing theory” (Bill Brown), and “vital materialism” (Jane Bennett) to “speculative realism” (Quentin Meillassoux) and “object-oriented ontology” (Graham Harman). Jeffrey Kastner considers Sze in terms of an “object-oriented epistemology” in his excellent “Point of Order,” in Stroud, Sarah Sze at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. For an overview of these concerns, see October 155 (Winter 2016).
18. Real Fictions
1 See Paul Ricoeur, Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 34. In fact, Ricoeur uses the exact phrase only later, in a retrospect on this text. Critiques of critique now abound, but see in particular Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
2 Brecht quoted in Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2: 1931–1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 526. Benjamin doubles down on this attack in “The Author as Producer” (1934). In both cases, the main target is Albert Renger-Patzsch, yet his work is more differentiated than either Benjamin or Brecht allows. See Michael W. Jennings, “Agriculture, Industry, and the Birth of the Photo-Essay in the Early Weimar Republic,” October 93 (Summer 2000): 23–56.
3 Roland Barthes, “Change the Object Itself,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 166–67.
4 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 141–48.
5 This phrase is drawn from Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970).
6 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 55.
7 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26.
8 See the title essay of my The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). For good and for bad, Camera Lucida long dominated theoretical reflection on photography; certainly its emphasis on traumatic subjectivity distracted many of us from the social-historical field of photography. Barthes acknowledges this field, which he calls the studium, but his heart belongs to the punctum. (He sees the studium as a collection of conventional signs.) So, too, his traumatophilic reading of photography restricts its temporality to the past, one that affects us but which we cannot touch in turn. This view limits photography as a means of historical reflection; it also reduces its potential for critique as well as for construction—both of which were foregrounded in the photo debates in interwar Europe, not to mention in the work of the late Allan Sekula (among others).
9 Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the ’60s,” in The 60s Without Apology, eds. Sohnya Sayres et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 200.
10 Again, it is this condition that abject art and fiction evoked with their own version of realism. My allusion here is to Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
11 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 2004): 246. See also “Post-Critical?” in my Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London and New York: Verso, 2015).
12 The title of her well-known photo-text work from 1974–75 is The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (London: Afterall Books, 2012).
13 See “Smashed Screens” in this book.
14 See Yve-Alain Bois, Michel Feher, and Hal Foster, “On Forensic Architecture: A Conversation with Eyal Weizman,” October 156 (Spring 2016): 120–21. See also Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017). This shift from testimony is only partial, as evidenced by a recent project of Forensic Architecture that models, with the aid of survivors, the Saydnaya Prison, a “black hole” site where, according to a new Amnesty International report, the Syrian government has tortured or murdered about 13,000 Syrians since 2011. See forensic-architecture.org.
15 Paglen calls his practice experimental geography. A cousin of forensic architecture, it involves the indexing of space that cannot be documented positively or that is otherwise removed from representation; often, in his photographs, it is registered in the (non)form of a blur. See “Machine Images” in this book.
16 See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 55. See also Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley, “The Manifesto of the Necronautical Society,” The Times (London), December 14, 1999, p. 1.
17 For more on reenactments in contemporary art, see the coda to Bad New Days.
18 See “A Conversation Between Alexander Kluge and Thomas Demand,” in Thomas Demand (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006), n.p. Sometimes with Demand, as often with Gerhard Richter, it is the blur, not the detail, that takes on a punctal quality. In his sui generis writing, Kluge can be counted as an early practitioner of the real fictions at issue here. On this point, see Alexander Kluge and Ben Lerner, “Angels and Administration,” Partisan Review (blog), theparisreview.org/blog.
19 Benjamin, “In the Sun” (1932), in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2: 1931–34, 664. See also the final thesis in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007), 264.
20 Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Macmillan, 2014), 18. Lerner practices autofiction, but he puts the auto in autofiction under erasure; the ego is refracted, splintered, even dispersed under fictional pressure. In my view, for all the transformations they might undergo, other subjects in autofiction are often more egonauts than Argonauts. On another front, “parafictional” practice, whereby an artist might contrive an avatar or an archive, seems to be largely voided in our present posttruth political culture. Also relevant here is the tendency in recent fiction (for example, Exit West, Underground Railroad, Lincoln in the Bardo) to confront a history that is so traumatic, a reality so impossible, that it seems to open up a fantastic (almost magic realist) hole in the fabric of things.
21 Ibid., 9.
22 Ibid., 54. The Surrealists were interested in this “ultimate collapse” too; in fact, André Breton defined “the marvelous” in these very terms. Yet the narrator of 10:04 is concerned to detach the “convulsive beauty” of the Surrealists from the uncanny with which it was bound up, that is, to redirect coincidence away from a traumatic past and toward an unforeseen future.
23 This line is a quotation from Robert Filliou.
24 Joseph Vogl has called this development a “raid by the future on the rest of time”; see The Specter of Capital, trans. Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 3.