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Abstract
Dominant notions of contemporary art are being overturned not by some radical avant-garde theory or movement, but instead by an “uprising” from within the confines of the “art factory,” as well as by newly embodied instances of informal everyday creativity that high culture has long overlooked. Theorists Negt and Kluge might have described this insurrection as the partial unblocking of a counter-public or proletarian sphere: a realm of fragmented identities and working class fantasy generated in response to the alienating conditions of capitalism. A more specific cultural interpretation suggests this mutiny from within and assault from below is the irrepressible brightening of “creative dark matter:” that marginalized and systematically underdeveloped aggregate of creative productivity, which nonetheless reproduces the material and symbolic economy of high culture. The results are explosive, or at least potentially so as this long, pent-up shadow archive spills out into the once forbidden dwelling place of mainstream law and order and high cultural privilege. Meanwhile, a new wave of socially engaged art is thriving on the margins of the art world. Like an enormous production warehouse this “post-public” creativity is developing sustainable farming, reenacting historical labor demonstrations, providing public services lost to decades of deregulatory economic policy, and initiating local bartering systems and environmental cleanups. Its vitality is something Joseph Beuys could have only dream about. And not surprisingly even this “autonomous” and “Interventionist” art is selectively becoming part of the mainstream culture industry through what Gilles Deleuze describes as an “apparatus of capture.” Nevertheless, one result of this new confrontation reveals this vibrant imaginary “from below” is pushing artistic production, pushing also discourse, pedagogy and cultural institutions into radically re-thinking definitions and possibilities not only involving the possibilities of contemporary avant-garde art practices, but also about the very nature of creativity, democracy, and political agency more broadly.
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Note on contributor
Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), REPOhistory, and Gulf Labor Coalition. His publications include Delirium & Resistance: Art Activism & the Crisis of Capitalism (forthcoming Pluto Press, 2017 with a preface by Lucy R. Lippard and intro by Kim Charnley), It’s The Political Economy, Stupid co-edited with Oliver Ressler (2014), Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (2010). His recent installations include Imaginary Archive at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania and Zeppelin University, Germany, as well as the Precarious Workers Pageant performance procession in Venice, Italy, 2015. Sholette is a PhD candidate in the department of Heritage of Memory Studies, University of Amsterdam, is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program and an Associate Professor in the Queens College Art Department, CUNY, where he helped establish the new MFA Concentration SPQ (Social Practice Queens).
Notes
1 An earlier version of this article was originally printed in Proximity Magazine, Issue 001 May/June (2008), 35–45.
2 Negt and Kluge (Citation1993, 32).
3 Description is from the website of the Worcester Art Museum for Tony Feher's April 26-August 11th 2002 exhibition: http://www.worcesterart.org/Exhibitions/Past/feher.html.
4 Taylor (Citation1995, 153).
5 Beech and Roberts derive their notion of the distracted viewer from Walter Benjamin’s (1969) discussion regarding how the masses view cinema in what he describes as an almost tactile manner of perception, see Beech and Roberts (Citation2002) and Benjamin (Citation1969a).
6 This does not mean that artists are becoming computer literate using Photoshop instead of canvases and paint, but, rather, that many fine-art programs barely teach computer skills, and students must pursue these as an elective.
7 Roberts (Citation2007, 159).
8 The Pro-Am Revolution. https://www.demos.co.uk/files/proamrevolutionfinal.pdf.
9 “Women’s Unpaid Work: Some Statistics,” The Guardian, March 7, 2000, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/07/gender1, see also a more recent piece by Bryce Covert “It’s Not Just Us: Women Around the World Do More Housework And Have Less Free Time,” Thinkgprogress.org, March 14, 2014: https://thinkprogress.org/its-not-just-us-women-around-the-world-do-more-housework-and-have-less-free-time-588457dd1b14“\l”.6uxsupog8
10 Charlie Leadbeater, The Pro Am Revolution. http://charlesleadbeater.net/2004/11/the-pro-am-revolution/.
11 Howkins (Citation2002), cited from promotional synopsis: http://www.livrariacultura.com.br/p/the-creative-economy-858211.
12 Benkler (Citation2006, 117).
13 Caffentzis (Citation1999, 154).
14 Moore (Citation2004, 472–73).
15 Duncan (Citation1983, 172, 180).
16 McCarthy et al. (Citation2005).
17 W.A.G.E.: http://www.wageforwork.com; Debtfair: http://www.debtfair.org; BFAMFAPHD: http://bfamfaphd.com
18 “Creative dark matter is neither fully contiguous with, nor symmetrical to the products, institutions, or discourse of high art. However, it is possible to imagine a thought experiment that would measure its aggregate impact on the art world – if, say, one were to organize an art fabricators strike, or a boycott of international art magazines demanding these journals cover creative work made by the glut of artists who go unobserved in the art world, or if art students and faculty walked out of classes and refused to attend exhibitions at The Tate, the Reina Sophia, or the MoMA, or, worse yet, collectively stopped purchasing art supplies until everyone associated with cultural production was in some way recognized by the system, including regional watercolor and sketch clubs. Needless to say, the obvious economic disruption would be inseparable from the simultaneous symbolic disruption of aesthetic valorization.” Sholette (Citation2010, 41).
19 Rosler (Citation1997).
20 Many of these artists and collectives have fallen into the equivalent of a dark-matter archive. See Sholette (Citation2010).
21 Santiago Sierra’s Línea de 160cm Tatuada sobre 4 Personas (160cm Line Tattooed on 4 People) was exhibited at El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo, Salamanca, Spain, in December 2000.
22 “Having a tattoo is normally a personal choice. But when you do it under ‘renumerated’ conditions, this gesture becomes something that seems awful, degrading – it perfectly illustrates the tragedy of our social hierarchies.” Santiago Sierra quoted in Spiegler (2003).
23 Sierra’s work is only more evidence that the global art world is incapable of reestablishing its historic alliance with emancipatory politics, defaulting instead to an altogether different and far less ambitious precedent, épater la bourgeoisie.
24 Miriam Hansen writing in the Foreword to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's book Public Sphere and Experience (1993, xxxii).
25 “Even so-called unproductive labor is then understood as unproductive only of and for capital, from the point of view of capital. In this reality this ‘unproductive’ labor often relates to essential social needs.” Hansen from Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, ibid.
26 Gulli (Citation2005, 66).
27 Denning (Citation2004, 40).
28 Benjamin (Citation1969b), 254.
29 Ibid.