Not For Sale
Not For Sale
Economic Reconnaissance in Tough Times
In the aftermath of the economic crisis, a generation of artists is investigating the economy and the various shapes it takes, both in theory and practice. People are seeking new alternatives, but not without first attempting to understand what the economy was – and is.What is the added value of culture? It is the big question today, in the aftermath of the economic crisis, as art and culture are the first to come under siege. European governments feel that art must depend less on governments and more on private money. In his essay On (Surplus) Value in Art (2008), cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen consulted the economic theories of Karl Marx. ‘In the case of art, however, the legendary artistic Mehrwert is not – or at least does not seem to be – created under the sway of any globally dominant law. Instead, it refers to the temporary or exceptional suspension of laws.’ Diederichsen believes that, on the one hand, this has to do with the autonomous position of art in society, and on the other, it concerns the fact that art is seen as an ally of desire or greed, of powers that do not want to bend to established relationships in society. According to this theory, art is a maverick, as, ‘It is also demanded of art that it, unlike the rest of life, be particularly full of meaning.’1 In order to earn the space that art enjoys in society, something is expected of it in return. In this context, and following Duchamp, Diederichsen refers to the pointe, or the ‘punch line’ of art, actually the key, or the code of the work, which takes on economic value in the form of ‘that one critical manoeuvre’, or ‘that little extra inspiration’.2 Contemporary art has become an industry, one that never stops producing images and meaning for the benefit of the market economy. According to Diederichsen, the pointe forms the core of the selling power of a gallery, or the civil servants or project developers who want to get creative people and financial backers interested in their projects. In her book High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (2010), Isabelle Graw agrees. She describes how the monetary value and the symbolic value of works of art are today almost impossible to distinguish from one another, and points to the need to disentangle them. Because of the confusion between these values, with the collapse of the banks and stock markets, the art world has been thrown into a state of crisis not only in the economic sense. The same is intrinsically true as well, in terms of content and substance.3
Critical Approach
Many of the recent articles and exhibitions that reflect on the consequences of the credit crisis emphasize the economic and social position of artists and the question of how they can detach themselves from this encapsulation. This is in sharp contrast to the enthusiastic exchange between the domains of art and the ‘new’ economy that took place in the 1990s, which produced a whole range of new goods and services that sooner embraced the capitalist economy than criticized it. What were then frequently seen artistic mimicries of corporate identity, such as the business world interventions by the Orgacom artists’ initiative, have now become virtually unthinkable, at least in the optimistic form they took at the time.More characteristic of today is the work Creative Destruction (2008) by the American artist Joe Scanlan, offering a cynical commentary on the economic situation in today’s art. This textual work, as installed in a gallery and in the office of an Austrian hedge fund, is based on a quote from the economist Joseph Schumpeter. In his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter claimed that it is not the endless investing of capital, but continual technological innovation that is the source of economic growth. Innovation means doing away with old models (including capitalism itself) and outdated companies, on behalf of new enterprises that are actually profitable. Scanlan’s installation is made up of a wall-sized text fragment from Schumpeter, in which he added corrections in blue to make it apply to art (and consequently to the process of artistic innovation). Artistic innovation, according to the revised text, is not driven by any avid artistic tendency towards originality, but rises from the economic question of how art can once again be made profitable.
Manipulation and Obfuscation
Many artists of the past who focused on economic issues worked with money and paper securities, ranging from Duchamp’s Tzanck Check (1919) and Warhol’s first silkscreens (1962) to Maria Eichhorn’s Aktiengesellschaft (2002), a project in which the German artist officially distributed shares. It is a genre in its own right, one that held its significance for years. In recent years, however, using tangible money to represent the economy has become inadequate. ‘Money’ that has now been reduced to a series of digital ciphers has made a superlative degree of commodification possible: derivatives, based on chance calculations of possible risks in global trade, have given even reporting the weather a lucrative exchange value. With the digitalization of financial transactions, traditional ideas and images of economics became deficient. In a certain sense, the financial market has literally become an unimaginable economy, one that has removed itself from all our powers of imagination and with that, from usable forms of control. It simply accepts the defective impressions that are made of it: charts and tables that depict nothing more than trends are accepted as objective fact. The obfuscation of this segment of the economy connects to how labour and societal relations, which as producers of goods are a fundamental factor in the production of value, have slowly fallen completely out of sight. The first-world economy does not want to hear about the slash-and-burn exploitation that it is inflicting elsewhere in the production of its commodities. It is this discrepancy between the economy and its visual representations that artist Zachary Formwalt, a former Rijksakademie resident living in Amsterdam, investigates in much of his work. In Reading the Economist, published in 2010 in association with his exhibition at Casco, Utrecht, he connects the rise of economic reporting with the start of photojournalism, a few decades thereafter. The book is made up of facsimiles of three kinds of images: the photograph that people generally assume was the first photographic image to be reproduced in the mass media (a newspaper); pages from one of Karl Marx’s notebooks, in which Marx comments on reports published in The Economist; and more recent images from that same weekly newspaper. Formwalt suggests the existence of more bilateral interdependencies between photography or journalism and the economy, which he partly bases on the fact that from the beginning, both seem to have profited from manipulation. Formwalt shows in detail how the first photographic images in newspapers had no intention of conveying any truth, but were instead idealized images created from several separate images.In Formwalt’s video In Place of Capital (2009), the discrepancy between reality and the way it is depicted is even more poignant. He zooms in on a series of four photographs taken by Henry Talbot in 1845, of the Royal Exchange in London. The classical building has a temple-like façade adorned with allegorical depictions of commerce that were already out of date when it was built. There are no people to be seen in the photographs, despite the fact that the Exchange has always been a lively place. At that time, photographs were not yet able to capture movement because of the long shutter times involved in producing the pictures. In an interview in Mousse Magazine, Formwalt mentioned that Talbot was annoyed by the inability of photography to do more.4 Nonetheless, the incomplete image is certainly a perfect depiction of Marx’s claim that capital has a tendency to forget the movement – the productive forces – that is its very cornerstone. There is also a connection to Formwalt’s own series of photographs of streets along the Amsterdam Zuidas business district, which are named after famous economists. Formwalt also went in search of representations of earlier economic crises. That took him to the 1920s and 1930s, when hyperinflation was rife in Germany. In the video At Face Value (2008), he uses postage stamps from the 1920s to show how the state tried to keep up with inflation by overprinting ever larger values onto the same stamps. The difference between the world depicted on the stamps and the world in which they circulated became ever greater. Formwalt supplies the video with commentary and contemporary, ominous quotes from, amongst others, Walter Benjamin. Speaking at the start of the video is a stamp collector (Formwalt’s father). When he discovered that the stamps had very little investment value, he decided to get rid of them by simply using them. For Formwalt, the stamps are a good means of representing the exchange between money and commodities, in the way that Marx had once described it. Marx demonstrated how commerce leads to commodities and vice versa. At the point when they are again primarily seen as money, the valuables acquired with money will cause their owners to trade with them, even in an archaic manner, and even in a time when messages can also be sent rapidly and at no cost, by e-mail.
Economizing as Art
Remco Torenbosch is another artist who is looking back at old theories about the economy, and in various works reaches back to texts that can be seen as pillars of economic theory. His work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (2011), realized in March with the help of Stroom, in The Hague, comprises a performance by two people who read aloud conflicting theories by economists Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, which have been reworked into dialogue form.The title of another performance, from 2010, About Non-Value-Adding Activity (Reading), is also of interest. In business terms, a non-value-adding activity refers to an action that does not contribute to the satisfaction of the client, and therefore does not increase the value of the product – such as storage and administrative activities. As art, in the form of performance, the concept of the non-value-adding activity takes on an extra dimension and becomes linked to the production of value in art, where because of its immaterial and temporary character, performance has always been a form of art that does not conform to the usual laws regarding trade in art.In his work, Torenbosch establishes a direct connection between the capitalist pursuit of perpetual growth and the idea of continuous innovation in modernism – both of which are utopian projects that he examines in critical detail. Torenbosch’s contribution to the exhibition Oh Crisis 2 at the Huize Frankendael in Amsterdam this year, for example, consisted of leaving open one of the sliding windows of this eminent ‘country’ villa. Aside from the fact that a fresh breeze was allowed into the exhibition, the work suggests that there is also an alternative framework for observing the world.Torenbosch has a preference for reduced forms and inexpensive materials. His sculptures, simply titled 3, 5, 7, 11, 16, 17, 18 and 19, for example, which are blocks of chipboard and MDF fibreboard, are the result of a verbal agreement with carpenters, whom Torenbosch commissioned to make something with no exact measurements. Torenbosch asks himself how he can be an artist with as minimal means as possible. In doing so, he examines retrenchment, also in the economic sense, as an artistic procedure, and consequently reveals at least some relationship to Tino Sehgal, whose immaterial sculptures are traded or exchanged by way of verbal contracts, cash payments and statements by eyewitnesses.
Uncertainty
Scanlan, Formwalt and Torenbosch, like many contemporary artists, are indebted to the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, and its effort to dematerialize the work of art. As such, they are aware of the importance of Diederichsen’s pointe, or ‘punch line’, albeit that today, the punch lines of the economic relationships of our time are also at issue. Through their work, we become witnesses to the search for a new understanding of the situation, now that the economic, ecological and social political crisis has meant that many professional assumptions have lost their validity, and art as well is quite uncertain of its earlier position.In his key work The Great Transformation (1944), economist Karl Polanyi, who did not believe in the market economy or capitalist thinking, claimed that there are three kinds of systems in order to organize an economy: reciprocity, redistribution and exchange. Exchange (of which the free market or market economy is a consequence) and centralized redistribution (Communism and the welfare state) both seem increasingly out of date. Only the principle of reciprocity, the informal exchange of services between (groups of) individuals, still recognizes the human dimension of the economy. Art is in an ideal position to make this contemporary, complex world visible and tangible on this individual, humane level. The temporary, also in artistic form, can be seen as a quality that perfectly suits the precarious conditions in which we find ourselves. Nils van Beek is a curator for SKOR, Amsterdam
Nils van Beek