metropolis m

Form, in today’s art world, is no longer primarily the result of assuming a position. Not in the corridors of art fairs, or in the corridors of museums or art academies that engage in research. One reason for the contemporary reluctance to engage in a rigorous politics of form is the demise of modernism and its sense-culture, and the erosion of historicity that characterized the postmodern sentiment.

After this relative senselessness, however, came a new sense-culture, which now operates by the milieu and systemic environments. No longer just a ‘field’, the art world is now one of these environments. Within its largely implicit set of rules, there is no need for justification and legitimization of hardly anything. Here, it is no longer the labour of articulating a position that matters, but it is in- or exclusion and visibility within the systemic environment. It hardly makes any sense anymore to contest a position (or lack thereof) on the level of form. In the ever-growing realm of the art world that caters to, or co-invents, the lifestyles of the worlds new ultra-rich elites, it is precisely this disconnect between form and position that characterizes the condition of the new mainstream and its meagre canon of available forms.

For the contemporary artist it has become disadvantageous to articulate a position, a possible stumbling block fixing oneself unnecessarily in a field whose primary demand is real-time availability, access and mobility – a mobility both material and immaterial that promises ultimate transformability, the dream of power. The complexity of positions endangers the demand on the transparent subject – after all, positions take time to engage with, they are resistant and incommensurable. Positions make mediation specific and increase its complexity indefinitely, while the phantasmatic mobility within the milieu generalizes mediation as a condition and promises universal conversion and accessibility.

The art pertaining to the latter enacts this mobility by appropriation. How else could we possibly explain that in contemporary art it is accepted to appropriate quite literally everything without adhering even to the minimum standards of the object appropriated? Thus contemporary art, on a micro-scale, came to enact what characterizes capitalism at large – the law of appropriation. It represents the extraction of value on the level of images – images that as a result are as empty and inconsequential as they promise a kind of omnipotence and hypervisibility. Surely, representation has always been married to power; there is nothing essentially new about the alliance between power and images. Yet in the neo-feudal world that we are currently sliding into, art has become the quasi-metaphysical justification not of symbolic authority, but of the religion of appropriation and alchemic production of value ex nihilo.

The aesthetics currently celebrated in art fairs exploits and masks this disconnect between position and form. What changes is the ability to tell the difference – whether a particular form closes, or opens up an ideological universe. And in the current age of systemic environments, this difference is collapsing increasingly. The result of the collapse of critical difference is that it is increasingly impossible to tell the ‘critical’ from the ‘affirmative’. It is those works that inhabit these points of indistinction best that are the quickest to climb on the short-lived ladders of the markets hit lists.

It is urgent to defend the arts as a territory of position-making. And I think that this is what the growing ‘research’-bound field ought to concentrate on. Not the production of knowledge, but of an understanding of the world that implies assuming non-compromised positions, positions that are able to discern the limits of the new systemic frame, the limits of the filter bubbles, and the limits of that terrain where the most recent capture has taken place: the self.

A certain dis-identification with one-self is a pre-condition for the ability to uphold a critical difference today, a certain distance from the celebrity-bound affective economy of the art world. We have to insist that form is always a form of consciousness, and that it can, and must be critiqued and interrogated. What is needed under the conditions of this ‘new frame’ is a critical language that allows us to exit from the behavioural scripts that we are caught in, and that have made our very moves predictable, and hence have profoundly altered our position and agency in this world. Perhaps we need less ‘object-oriented’ and even ‘ecological’ thought, and more of what I would call a ‘critical mediumism’ – a reflection on what it means: ‘to-be-framed’.