End of year roundup: book reviews, book in progress

Reviews of Idols of the Market have recently been published in Metropolis M, Open, and Texte zur Kunst. This is always a strange sensation – especially when there is the inevitable text by a latter-day Ahab for whom the book functions as his own personal White Whale, and when well-meaning reviews seem to be rather devoid of interesting insights. I know from personal feedback that that the book has had stimulating effects on a number of people, and hopefully some of that will filter into writings at some point. Delayed and unexpected effects can often be more interesting than instant reviews.

Meanwhile, aside from a grant application for a big project, I’m working on another book called, tentatively, History in Motion. This quotation from a film by Harun Farocki gives an idea of its point of departure: “Camera and event. Since its invention, film has seemed destined to make history visible. It has been able to portray the past and to stage the present. We have seen Napoleon on horseback and Lenin on the train. Film was possible because there was history. Almost imperceptibly, like moving forward on a Moebius strip, the side was flipped. We look on, and have to think: if film is possible then history, too, is possible.”

Which consequences did the rise of moving images (film and video) have for the representation and the production of history? If film was destined to “portray the past and to stage the present”, as Harun Farocki states, History in Motion wants to focus on the interconnection between these two activities—not only in relation to film, but also in relation to other time-based media, including live performance and its afterimages. If it was traditionally a fleeting presence, the stuff of elusive memories, in modernity the moving image became storable. How does this influence the relation between representation and event, between the time of the image and historical time, and between past history and the history-in-progress of a contested present?

The book’s analysis is mainly aimed at the past few decades, at the post-Fordist phase and its temporal specificities: flexibility, the erosion of the distinction between work and leisure, permanent media presence. However, the temporal transformations of society and culture associated with post-Fordism, dominated by the permanent presence of television and then the internet, but haunted by the afterlife of cinema, will be related back to earlier shifts, in particular to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century capitalism—the early years of film.

This probably gives a highly inadequate impression. Analog, concrete thinker that I am, I’m notoriously bad at giving a priori summaries of what work in progress will end up being like. Although I’ve already done a lot of groundwork with various articles—tagged "history in motion" on this blog—things crystallize, dissolve and coalesce during the (re)writing process, and if I knew beforehand what I would end up with, I couldn’t muster the energy to actually do it. Admittedly, this is something of a handicap in a society in which you rarely get credit on the basis of your history – only on the basis of meticulously drafted, carefully planned futures.

Image: Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986, installed at Witte de With in 1994.

A few quotations for the holidays

When I was rereading Debord and Sanguinetti's 1972 Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time shortly after the meltdown of the Copenhagen climate conference, I came across some passages that simply demanded to be posted:

"The recent appearance in the spectacle of a flood of moralizing speeches and pledges of retail solutions to what governments and their mass media call pollution, seeks to hide, at the same time that it must reveal, this obvious fact: capitalism has finally delivered proof that it cannot develop productive forces any further. It is not however quantitatively, as many people thought it necessary to understand, that capitalism will have proved incapable of pursuing this development, but qualitatively."

"The society that has every technical means to modify the biological foundations of the whole of life on earth is also the society that, thanks to the same separate technical and scientific development, has every means of control and of mathematically incontrovertible forecasting to measure in advance exactly what the growth in alienated productive forces of class society can lead to - with dates, according to a best- or worst-case scenario - in terms of the catastrophic break-up of the human environment."

"Pollution and the proletariat are today the two concrete aspects of the critique of political economy."

Oh yes, and happy holidays.

Return of Religion Reader

The final installment of the three-part project I did at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht: the publication of The Return of Religion and Other Myths: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, co-edited with Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder.

Co-published by BAK and post editions, Rotterdam, the reader contains contributions by Jan Assmann, Christina von Braun, Paul Chan, Boris Groys (an interview by Maria Hlavajova), Arnoud Holleman, Marc De Kesel, Kenan Malik, Maria Pask, Dieter Roelstraete and Jorinde Seijdel.

As well as completing the BAK project, which also included a lecture series and my exhibition The Art of Iconoclasm, this publication can also be seen as a companion piece to my recent book Idols of the Market.

http://www.bak-utrecht.nl
http://www.post-editions.com

Bug report: It seems that at some point, someone decided to turn the title of Arnoud Holleman's text from On ne touche pas into On ne touché pas. It's French, so there should be plenty of accents, oui? My apologies to Arnoud for this faux-pas.

Attending to Things Online

The group Chto delat has put online a PDF of my article Attending to Abstract Things from New Left Review no. 54 (November/December 2008), making it available for those who don't have a NLR subscription. Here it is:

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=694%3Asven-luetticken-attending-to-abstract-things&catid=203%3Amagazine&Itemid=300&lang=en

The site also contains the contents of various issues of the Chto delat newspaper. The discussion in issue 01-25 in particular resonates with some of my present and nascent concerns, but there's more stuff that is well worth checking out - including texts by Peio Aguirre, Gene Ray and others on dialectical method in issue 03-27.

Texte zur Kunst no. 75: Thomas Hirschhorn review

Texte zur Kunst no. 75 (September 2009) contains my review of The Bijlmer Spinoza Festival, a project that took place in the Bijlmer (Amsterdam) during the summer of 2009, which involved daily lectures and performances taking place in a pavilion that also included a Spinoza exhibition and a library. The location, the Bijlmermeer or Bijlmer, is a post-war banlieue of Amsterdam with a large Surinamese population. The review discusses this piece in relation to previous Hirschhorn works, such as his 1990 Spinoza Monument and the Bataille Monument at Documenta 11, as well in the context of the contemporary socio-political situation in the Netherlands.

"If Spinoza is currently something of an event in Holland, it is mainly because he is seen as a philosopher of tolerance and democracy. Ironically, in the current Dutch culture wars the accusation that Muslims cannot be proper democrats because they believe in the edicts of a radically transcendent God has become a favorite weapon for Pim Fortuyn’s heirs; right-wing populists like Geert Wilders, who are intent on aggravating oppositions and tensions as much as possible, are not above demanding a ban on Qur’an or the deportation of Muslims. Little wonder that Spinoza has been embraced by Amsterdam’s mayor, Job Cohen, who routinely gets flack from Holland’s strong right-wing populist front for not being “tough” enough on immigrants, especially Muslims. Cohen has been much maligned by right-wingers for stating that when his aim was simply “to keep things together” (“de boel bij elkaar houden”), i.e. to prevent the city from imploding or exploding socially. It almost seems as if Hirschhorn translated this into literally making sure that things do not fall apart: every day, his signature brown tape was used to make sure that things (and, by implication, people) stick together.

"During the Q&A following his talk, [Toni] Negri was asked his opinion about Hirschhorn’s “precarious aesthetics”: Can such an esthetique de précarité bring art and politics together? The issue of the political connotations – let alone possible political efficacy – of Hirschhorn’s formal means is too complex for a succinct answer, which Negri consequently did not give. One the other hand, when arguing that from a Spinozist perspective the state is an expression of un pouvoir that comes from among us, Negri pointed around to the pavilion and said “comme ici.” Things are perhaps not quite as clear-cut. Dutch public art ideology is based on the quasi-Schillerian desire to mediate between the abstract logic of the state and the realm of sensuous being, of people’s lives; however, critics argue that in the end public art often merely functions as symbolic flag that is draped over social problems, in lieu of an actual political engagement with them. That the state and its organs initiate so many public art projects seems to suggest that this state is precisely not “comme ici”, that it suffers from its lack of immanence. Seen in this light, Hirschhorn acts as the outsider who, as a free agent, helps the Dutch cultural bureaucracy to fulfill its fantasy—and who, in realizing the fantasy, goes beyond it."

http://www.textezurkunst.de

e-flux journal no. 8: Viewing Copies

Issue no. 8 of the e-flux journal contains my short essay "Viewing Copies: On the Mobility of Moving Images." These are the opening paragraphs:

"An artist once paid a critic back for lunch by handing him a viewing copy of a video work, adding that this should be more than enough—after all, the piece was worth 25,000 Euro. Both were in on the joke, of course; both knew that a DVD viewing copy of an art video is worth even less than an empty new DVD. In a way, viewing copies do not really exist—their spectral status is owed to the art world’s economy of artificial scarcity and the severe limitations it imposes on the movement of images. Aby Warburg once called Flemish tapestries—early reproductive media that disseminated compositions throughout Europe—automobile Bilderfahrzeuge. Later media have proven to be rather more powerful “visual vehicles” capable of being produced on a Fordist assembly line. But rather than have the work travel to the viewer—an increasing tendency throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in the case of video or film pieces in contemporary art the viewer has to travel to the work, installed in a gallery or museum.

In contemporary art, even pieces produced in media that allow for infinite mass (re)production are executed only in small editions. In the age of YouTube and file-sharing, this economy of the rarified object becomes ever more exceptional, placing ever-greater stress on the viewing copy as a means of granting access to work beyond the “official” limited editions and outside of the exhibition context. The viewing copy is the obverse of the limited edition: as a copy given or loaned to “art world professionals” for documentation or research purposes, it can never be shown in public. The viewing copy thus widens the reach of the work of art, but confidentially and in semi-secrecy. It is precisely this eccentric status of the viewing copy within the economy of art—which itself has an equally exceptional status within contemporary capitalism—that makes it an exemplary object, a theoretical object par excellence."

The complete text is here: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/75

Image: one half of a viewing copy of Omer Fast's four-channel projection The Casting.

Proletarian Acting

From September 15, Argos in Brussels will show the exhibition Actors & Extras: "The concept of the exhibition is based on the contrast between the actor and the extra. The dividing line between both is the difference between cognisance and ignorance, pre-eminence and insignificance. An actor represents a process of embodiment, vocality, and the ability to give direction to an activity. An extra is a voiceless figure in a background crowd: a body without embodiment. If the extra, in contrast, embodies anything at all, it is a conflict of location. The tension area between background action as abstract, modulative, and manipulatable human material on the one hand, and the consciously acting individual on the other, motives the exploration of social relations of power and the place of collectivity. Works that have the figure of the extra as their subject often have to be read as social and/or political allegories."

For the accompanying publication, I wrote an essay titled "Proletarian Acting." The starting point for this text is as follows:

"The focus in some recent art on the extra, who is called “the silent proletarian of the cinema” in Mark Lewis’s video The Pitch, thus has to be seen as one aspect of a wider questioning of film performance and an exploration of liminal states in performance. In the end, the interest in alternative modes of performance is aimed at transcending the dichotomy between the actor—especially the star—and the extra, and thus abandoning the category of the extra itself. Such a project clearly is of more than merely academic interest in an economy in which work is increasingly redefined in performative terms: rather than selling abstract labour-power, the worker is supposed to sell himself by enacting his or her subjectivity. No longer a classic proletarian, and certainly not silent, this self-performer is the actually existing form of avant-garde models of performance."

The text goes on to discuss a number of films and performances, including work by Allan Kaprow, Augusto Boal, Jeff Wall, and Dora Garcia, in the context of a discussion of the post-Fordist focus on play and self-performance.

http://www.argosarts.org

Image: Dora Garcia, Instant Narrative (2006/2007).