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Discussion

Peter Wolfendale: Amanda, the task you outlined was that of a differentiation of a general notion of art from a twisted conception of art that developed in the twentieth century. And I think that’s a very crucial task we need to be focused on: it’s a great way of framing a lot of the important issues involved here. It’s like an attempt at a thinking of the general concept of art. I’d like to ask your opinion on this, but the intervention I’d bring in is that, in order to think that general concept, we have to get back to an even more general concept, and see art as a species of beauty, in a very literal sense. That also means rescuing the concept of beauty from a certain way in which it’s been conceived both recently, and throughout history. I think it’s important to see it as a very general notion which isn’t to be taken as denoting general ‘prettiness’. There’s an important sense in which the sublime artwork is beautiful. It doesn’t have to be pleasant, in that sense, to be beautiful. So, I thought I’d open that up as a potential way of thinking about the dialectic of redefining art.

Amanda Beech: Of course, I agree that the question is about the name ‘art’; but also, what art constitutes for us is crucial. Especially given that, as I said, all of the definitions of the paradigm of art itself are simply not good enough, or are logically suspect. I think that’s where my interest in realism has always come from: for a long time I’ve been asking these questions, and mainly it comes out of a frustration that art just doesn’t seem logical to me! It’s made up of certain propositions, and when I test them out, they seem contradictory. I’m not interested in contradictions. I’m very much interested in my work being noncontradictory. Whether I achieve that or not is another thing, but that’s what motivates my practice.

Now, the question of what kind of critical framework to use in order to ask what art could be in new terms is a difficult one, because one can easily lapse back into certain Kantian (as well as Duchampian) dynamics. Tom’s paper tried to think through the sublime in this way, and I fully understand that—and your example of understanding the sublime in terms of beauty is a strong way out of these problems. This has been captured as a mode of expressing a relation between the incomprehensible and the irrational as the site of aesthetics; a site that is required also to conjure some universal gestalt of the political. Art, and the issues facing art, were very much committed to questions of the sublime in the late 60s and 70s in terms of how aesthetic experience could correlate with social transformation. Central to this was the work of Lyotard, who associates the processual method of art with a sublime experience that can counter the dominance of social realism and its means-to-an-end allegorising. But as I said, my issue with that is that it resulted in practices, or theories of practices as experience, that attempt to articulate the ‘real’ as a condition of aesthetics; but that became quickly subsumed back into art’s self-reification. The sublime struggles to manifest beyond the fiction of abstract perception and the tradition of an intact subjectivity, held in contradiction. This contradiction preserves politics at the level of private experience and fails to transcend the subject of self-consciousness that ‘finds itself’ in this experience. I am also unsure of this distinction between aesthetics and unreason, given my interest in the ways in which art is rational.

PW: I agree, but the point was that, rather than see the sublime as an alternative to the beautiful, it has to be incorporated into a more general definition of beauty.

AB: Yes, absolutely, I agree with your attempt to think of a general modality of image-experience. But when we have had theories around that, they’ve struggled to think the generic nature of the image. I think people struggle with the point at which things are pictured and figured. As soon as the general becomes the specific, things break down. We can go into analytical philosophy and have a kind of systems theory or a language-based theory, of the kind that we encountered in structuralism and as also seen in artworks by Nauman, for instance, that explore the limits of language as infinite, hysterical and tragic repetition. A kind of dead end of language that reinstates the transcendental claim that is conjured in the sublime. Quine writes about the infinite regression that is encountered when one claims an ontology of language, since every claim is also a part of that language that it describes: we see the horror of the infinite before us as a form of the sublime, because there’s no way out of this entrapment of the everything and the particular, between reality and appearance and thought and image. I’ve been trying to think about how we deal with meaning, in a really simple way, so that we can hold on to the question of the generic and these modes of abstraction that we are dealing with in terms of the concept; that is, how images can operate without a standard aesthetics.

PW: I have this dream that we can reclaim this sense of beauty in which we incorporate all of the ways in which it’s historically been figured. I think the theories may seem contradictory, but they are actually talking about different objects or different species of beauty, that are beautiful in their own subtle way. For example, Socrates says beauty is its use. So something is beautiful if it does what it’s supposed to do really really well.

AB: But the question of judgement keeps coming back, and we can’t seem to escape the production of value. That’s the kind of thing I was trying to work through with Laruelle: What happens to concepts of value in thinking equality? How we name something as art, and how we value something as art, and what structures are involved in that; and I think this question of judgement demands more than an archival relation to the beautiful; what might be called appreciation, and this notion of function that you mention. My key concern about the beautiful is its connection to a certain form of passivity.

Simon O’Sullivan: Because art has got a history, it’s got a set of problems, a certain pitch to it, it’s in a certain arena; you’re entering into something that, although it produces problems, also opens up solutions.

My question is for Tom, and it’s about the evacuation of the subject. One thing that seems quite apparent to me is that everything was once a subject, and Smithson made that remark—though, of course, he wasn’t an artist. And secondly, I feel that the subject/object distinction that you depicted is monolithic—there is this object, and then there is this subject, and this relation is fixed. But the thing about art is that it often pulls something out from the subject, demanding that it transform itself, presuming some sort of mutability of the subject. Indeed, that seems to be one of its achievements. If you just have these fixed categories, you miss all of that. Then, for me, the danger is that a lot of the baby does get thrown out with the bathwater.

Tom Trevatt: I don’t think I was eliminating the subject. What I was trying to do was to understand how subjectivity erupts from objectivity, rather than saying, let’s just get rid of subjectivity. As Catren says, we can’t jump over the shadow of the subject but instead, through a continual deepening of scientific labour, we can seek to locally absolve it from its transcendental limitations. I see this kind of jump occurring within attempts to reach the absolute through the sublime within Romanticism, for example. The vector that I propose at the end is precisely the idea of not trying to make that jump. It’s not a kind of evacuation, it’s an understanding of this continuum that includes the subject as part of it. This plasticity of subject and object you describe is precisely impossible when you think this distinction as definite. I’m suggesting that the Duchampian paradigm relies on a strong distinction between the two, with the final sublation of the object by the subject.

Alex Williams: I had a question for you Tom, and it’s related to Simon’s point. I’m on board with a lot of the theoretical influences you are trying to synthesize, but my question is, why talk about this in terms of art anymore? What is art still doing here? I think there is something interesting that art could do here, but I’m not sure where you end up with this. You said you wanted to get rid of the figure-ground element, or introduce something that will problematize it—I understand the resonance of that. But what does the particular ‘cut’ of art do within this sort of massive cosmic continuum?

TT: I’ve often asked the same question, why would I care about art? But coming from my position as a curator, I feel the responsibility to unpick this problem that we have inherited for art, rather than just saying, this is a problem for philosophy, etc. Let’s try to solve this. To answer the question of why I would care about art: because art has a certain capacity; a capacity to produce a type of subjectivity. If my claim is that, currently, art produces a dominant type of subjectivity, can we understand art as harbouring the possibility of producing another type of subjectivity too? This is to question the correlation. The reason why art might be at stake here is that, if it has produced certain types of subjectivity historically, how can we see that playing out in the kind of world in which we live today?

AW: Is there something in the angle you are taking, this kind of ‘true-to-the-universe thought’, that could offer not just a way of thinking the art that already exists, but could have a prospective element to it, offering normative criteria that could change the way artists make art?

TT: I very much see this as a challenge to, and within, practice. Within my curatorial practice I also see my role as being to challenge artists and art within that sort of relationship.

AB: Going back to Simon’s question, I was saying at the end of my talk how important it is for art to be assertive, and not to hide away from its mediating faculty, as I’ve seen it often do historically and as it still does in its attempt to evacuate itself into the problem of politics and philosophy: Art imagines itself as not being art because it has a hangup about not being useful enough in terms that it can recognise and measure; or because it identifies itself as frivolous or decorative in relation to philosophy, perhaps. What art in this case forgets is that politics and philosophy share these problems. These disciplines are no more free, no more direct, than art. So for me, when I make my work, it’s equally important that my work passively destroys all other art, and sets itself up as the art that should be called art.

Mark Fisher: I feel that the expectations when entering an art gallery are disappointed as you enter it. As the level of inflation goes up for expectation, the satisfaction decreases greatly. If a Hollywood film was as bad as the level of aesthetic texture that we find in most art galleries these days, you would walk out, you’d be furious, and rightly so! So why bother with the pretence that it’s about aesthetic texture at all. It’s all about consumerism these days, money. But there has to be this pretence, because it’s part of what art is, the context of art. But there have always been tedious arguments about what art is, and we should try to keep it interesting. So why not invest in design, and not art?

TT: That’s hard, but I’d go harder than that actually. Not only is art used to money-launder, it provides the conditions under which it’s possible for those kinds of subjectivities to exist that want to money-launder. But it’s not the only game on the table, and I think to abandon it somehow says that we’ve lost that game. The reason I say that the answer to the question is to stay within the game, is to try to change that possibility. If art can take account of the ways it actually produces those types of subjects, then it can possibly change the game.

PW: In my opinion art is all about this excess, and there’s this wonderful word from philosophy of value, supererogation, which basically means being better than it needs to be. Its value lies in its being beyond what’s expected. For me this is an interesting way of thinking about beauty. Design is about producing something that is more than is required. Finding those potentialities that you aren’t sure how they are going to be exploited yet, but which open up further possibilities of further action. Which also maximises freedom, to be frank.

Benedict Singleton: If you look at how the Western concept of ‘the artist’ took shape in the Renaissance, it was a straight-up hustle. People hyping the importance of things regarded then as craft, like doing paintings, so as to inveigle their way into royal courts and get in with patrons and so on. We should remember that, maybe, when we talk about ‘the artist’ as that figure appears today—not just that successful contemporary artists are hustlers, which, okay, but that the whole idea of ‘art’ was hatched as a sort of really great con.

That history aside, I tend to see design and art as continuous to some extent. In any event, I came to design late and knowing nothing about it; I knew nothing about art either; and so I had no conception of a gap between the two fields. I’m more aware of it now, but I ignore it as far as I can. Although needless to say, while design might be appealing in terms of budgets and effecting changes in how people live everyday and so on, it’s very difficult to pursue some kinds of ideas—you have to justify what you do to people who, let’s say, are interested in achieving what’s required according to quite specific goals, and are not much swayed by speculative possibilities.

AB: There’s loads of stuff that you said that I totally disagree with, Mark, so I don’t know where to begin! Artists go and shoot a video on location, and get to know the locals and they do some anthropology. And then they bring it back and show it, they go visit an archive, and there’s the bit of archive they visited; it’s presented as ‘here is evidence of all the research that I do’…. I find these to be hideous modes of practice in art. The word ‘research’ has really made that difficult. But then there’s another side to what you were saying which is, to quote Robin, the ‘intellectual jewellery’ that goes on with art talks—if you’re running a public space and you want to add gravitas to some exhibition, you invite certain people to do the talk. No one listens, they’re not bothered about what you say, it’s just the presence that matters. It’s a form of review or validation.

I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a whole set of problems going on in the art world and I think it’s unfair to say that it’s because the art’s crap. I go around art studios all the time and there’s great art. I also think it’s wholly unfair to say that curators are crap. One of the things I really want to try to address is that there is something wrong with the bottom-line nature of the belief systems we go to work with. Somehow there’s something wrong with the overall framework, with the way that we actually operate everyday in terms of the structure of ‘let’s show another black and white video of people suffering—that’s political’; and, you know, ‘let’s have another long drawn-out video because that’s how we portray the labour through the lens, which equals politics’. There are certain correlations that are made between image and meaning that have habituated the definition of good art and good politics. I think that these are the responsibility of all of us, but at the same time, they’re sort of beyond the modes of the belief systems themselves. They’re in it but they also go beyond it.

MF: See, I’m not saying art is crap because artists or curators are; but curators are certainly more interesting than the art they curate. I meet a lot of artists, and I have nothing against them or any artists. But, as interesting as they are, their work is not as great. It seems there is an obligation for it to not be that great.

Robin Mackay: Firstly, I would disagree that contemporary art is about aesthetic texture or lack of it. The interplay between the conceptual and the aesthetic is far more complex and diverse across different artists’ work. Nevertheless I do agree that the experience on the whole is a disappointing one. Tom, you said that you believe in art because you believe it has the power to transform subjectivity, or to produce new types of subjectivity. But isn’t that precisely one of these articles of faith that Amanda is attacking? The key distinction I would make is between art as a set of institutions, in its social role—whether transformative or merely symptomatic—the increasingly mystifying role that it plays in mediating subjectivity and shaping popular culture, which does indeed have an importance in the production of subjectivity; and the actual encounter with specific artworks, which does vanishingly little in terms of the transformation of subjectivity or even in terms of simple affect. I agree with Mark that the kind of force we are taught to expect from art is entirely absent from the experience of contemporary art shows; it lies elsewhere, in other cultural forms. The institutional logic of contemporary art does indeed have effects, insidious effects, but not on the level of that direct aesthetic experience. So what is the link (if any) between the institution of art and the way it produces certain types of subjectivity and a certain type of enthralled audience, and the aesthetic dimension of artworks themselves­­?

Nick Srnicek: Ben, hearing your paper, I’m thinking of things like behavioural economics. It’s the idea of nudging behaviour slightly and nudging it in the proper direction. There are also things like neuro-marketing. And one of my favourite stories, I think it was a New York Times article, is about this young girl who got pregnant, and was buying some stuff online, and the marketers recognised her behavioural patterns and started sending her material for pregnancy, coupons and these sorts of things. Her parents saw these coupons and were pissed off, like ‘you’re not pregnant, why are the companies sending this to you?’—and then they found out that she actually was! It seems like a lot of modern capitalism is using this as a means to seek profit. My question would be, would you consider design as mêtis to be a weapon of the weak?

BS: Yes, I’ve used that phrase before. Classically, it’s the intelligence at work in hatching courtly intrigues, daring military stratagems, and so on, as much as in the design of artefacts—this is, of course, why it constitutes a link between the design of human behaviour and design more generally, as I said. But what it labels is design as performed within a hostile environment that you can’t control directly, it’s a way out of being overwhelmed—like pulling a trap door from the air. The few people who have even mentioned it in the last few decades have totally romanticised it, so it becomes ‘the way the little man can stand up for himself against the boss’, or something like that. A sort of minor heroism, very humble. Michel de Certeau, for instance, insists that what mêtis wins, it doesn’t keep. Where does that come from? How does that follow? It’s complete fantasy on his part to think that it’s limited to these harmless little ruses, or to identify ‘the weak’ as the huddled masses. Sure, it’s the weapon of the weak, but when you have the board of directors meeting up with marketing to orchestrate a campaign, you’re talking about a tiny group of people who are using a technological apparatus to manipulate an entire field of activity to their benefit. They’re ‘the weak’ too.

PW: This idea of mêtis as designing behaviour, and the idea of mêtis as self-manipulation, is quite interesting in the context of Metzingerian positions with regard to the illusion of subjectivity.1 Self-conception and self-deception: Self-deception isn’t a bad thing, it’s this really productive thing where we have to deceive ourselves to make ourselves.

BS: Yes. A trap doesn’t have to damage anything, it can just…structure the environment, and that fixity can be used, quite literally, for leverage. You might say that one of the most interesting targets to consider trapping is your future self, in order to ensure that you act the way then that, right now, you want yourself to, then…. And this sort of thing is one of the reasons why it’s worth resurrecting these old concepts about cunning that no one speaks about these days. At the same time, historically this sort of cunning has been largely characterised as immoral, in all different kinds of cultures, but always for the same kind of reasons. If it’s how the weak prevail over the strong, it’s totally indifferent to the question of which party is the more sympathetic. And so it’s really at odds with any moral project decided in advance. I mean, you conceive of a world that would be good to live in, and then you try to bring it about, but you need to use mêtis to do so, which has its own logic and…you’re not going to get the world you want, you’re going to get the world mêtis gives you. And its whole logic is that of sedition against established structures, which of course some people may be rather fond of. Its only policy is absolute insubordination against the given, really. Strictly speaking, though, cunning isn’t immoral, it’s amoral. Amoral not in the sense that people think psychopaths are amoral, because they aren’t—they just have a moral compass that diverges profoundly from the norm, one that’s highly idiosyncratic and inflexible. It’s enormously difficult to imagine what actual, persistent amorality would be like. Something totally alien, I suspect. Like a trickster figure. We don’t really have those in the West anymore. Con artists and such, yes, but not really intense and disturbing ones like Coyote.

AW: It’s a form of rationality though, so surely it does have a set of norms. It is still a form of practically mediating practice.

BS: Yes, that’s true. The question for me is, though, what kind of normative angle does it have? Mêtis yields a sort of aesthetics of ‘how to get things done’, and the harder a thing is to do, and the more intelligence that goes into it, the ‘better’ it is. It possesses its own sort of very self-contained dynamic. It sees everything as material that might be recomposed, and there’s no kind of limiting mechanism. I mentioned before the trickster, and there are a lot of myths about how a trickster invents the first trap. Usually it’s something like: the trickster’s hungry, and only has a bit of food, but in this moment of empathy without any sentimentality, he realises that other creatures are hungry as well…so the concept of bait is born. And once the trickster does that for the first time, it’s a hairline crack in the order of things that quickly begins to ramify. You can’t rise above traps, you can’t just say ‘I, for one, shall not be trapped’; it doesn’t work that way. Being pure of heart makes you predictable, and that’s not a good thing here. You’re locked into a system where the only way you can avoid being trapped is to engage this world on its terms, i.e. the logic of the trap. The normative schema glimpsed in that escalation is, well, terrifying.

Matthew Poole: What I wanted to ask Tom relates, through Duchamp, to the idea of trapping, to Smithson with the spirals that he makes, and the amorality of it that Benedict mentioned as well. I wanted to ask you, Tom, why you were pitting Duchamp against Smithson, as if Smithson’s works reveal greater, more cosmic truths than Duchamp’s?

The problem I have is that, firstly, in art-historical terms, Smithson, in his writings and in the ‘design’ of his artworks, acknowledges the debt to Duchamp many times. Both of their practices as artists and writers are highly allegorical. So it was the allegorism of Duchamp’s ironism that Smithson writes about, and this is where I was worried you had slipped a little on the banana skin that Duchamp sometimes puts down, particularly in the writings, which appear to be sober and reflective when they are not—they are highly charged allegorical vectors that are, at the very least, ambivalent. So, when he writes about the coefficient of art, I always consider that to be a trap. It’s a highly metaphorical interpretation, which in some ways is impossible. It’s an icy ground that he writes on. Duchamp brings you in as a subject in the horizon of the semblance of what might be the constituency of your subjectivity, but at the same time you are brought into it, and you feel that vector of force, of being brought to that horizon.

RM: I was wondering whether you’d say something about Duchamp here, Matthew. It’s interesting to make the distinction between design as a distressed practice (as Benedict suggested, necessity as the mother of invention) and art as a practice centred around an axiom of indeterminacy, as Suhail Malik has argued.2 But it’s rather more porous than that, since most design today is not produced as the outcome of an urgent situation; and equally, design, like advertising, draws increasingly on the supposedly indeterminate aesthetics and conceptual devices of art.

This led me to thinking about Duchamp and his chess game: what’s always insidious and endlessly fascinating about Duchamp is that his work doesn’t seem to be indeterminate. That is to say, the figure of the game means that it doesn’t fall squarely within this ‘uselessness’ that is today understood to form the indeterminate ‘space of freedom’ of art—even if in a certain sense it inaugurates that space. Duchamp seems to be playing a game with you, you actually don’t have much choice about your place in it, and you’re never sure what it is. But there is a pervasive sense that there is some purpose, even if it’s hidden, and indeed cunning.

BS: Most of the stuff that goes on in design studios and engineering labs around the world is, in a way, less creative than recreative, or at least it’s concerned with minor modifications to what exists performed in a pretty stable environment. Mêtis is present there, but not, as it were, in full flight. Which is not to say that it has to announce itself loudly or be dramatic. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the cliché goes—yes, but an assault on a constraint that is perceived as ‘necessary’ doesn’t have to be done under the gun in any sort of overt way. Getting out of Earth’s gravity, for instance: Nikolai Tsiolkovski a hundred or so years ago designs the multistage booster rocket, which works by successively jettisoning stages as it ascends, when the fuel in each is gone. This allows the final stage to achieve escape velocity far more easily than the whole thing could, but it goes against every intuitive engineering principle—seriously, the thing falls to bits in the air, it doesn’t sound so promising, does it? But it’s incredibly ingenious, and the process of putting together the designs was a quiet one involving a lot of thought, not a spectacular improvisation. Anyway, as to purpose, I think launch technology is actually a good example of design exceeding a specific purpose; we don’t have to go to space, we got by fine without it…. But you do it precisely because it explodes the possibilities of what we might do next; that’s the central contention of what has been called Cosmism, the philosophical school of thought that insists on just this principle in regard to going to space.

AB: But isn’t one of the key distinctions between art and design, as we have been discussing here, that it’s about purposiveness? Although art enjoys its crisis so much, it also enjoys the self-conscious knowledge of its own limitations. There’s an almost smug claim there. So it’s not about art having a lack of purpose; what we are discussing are just different purposes. Maybe we need to be more clear about that: my whole problem here was the fact that art certainly does have a purpose, but it’s simply not the right one!

BS: Certainly there’s a degree of continuity between art and design. A lot of senior design people, who basically get to set their own briefs, have the creative autonomy one might typically associate with artists—though they might not be seen as good ones—and on the other hand, you could say that art is a subcategory of design. I mean, it might be tricky to argue when you get into the details…but it’s viable to suggest that art is a form of design that aims to have a function in a very particular environment, a space bracketed from ‘everyday’ encounters with objects, in the form of the gallery. When you take art out of a place specific to presenting it, it has to contend with all the design that’s already out there. I’m biased, of course, but I find it faintly monstrous that it’s socially acceptable to put so much concerted creative labour into things that are bound for a gallery, yet so little goes into so much that’s outside. It feels…not modern, to me.

AB: If you think about the rise of ‘the curatorial’ over the last twenty-five years (I know it’s been going on for longer than that, but especially in the last quarter century), just as we have all these names for curators—organisers, facilitators, etc.—‘designer’ is also an easy word to use: there are BAs now in ‘Designing Life Experiences’, which are basically curating BAs; you have ‘Experience Design’ and stuff like that, but it’s a form of curatorial design. In the sense of the whole organisational turn in art which moves towards choreographing experiences, and which came out of the happenings of the 60s, I would see the curatorial as being evidence of the collapse of art and design.

BS: Or the collapse of art into events management!

 

1. See T. Metzinger, Being No-One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

2. S. Malik, On the Necessity of Art’s Exit from Contemporary Art (Falmouth: Urbanomic, forthcoming 2015).