A sustained and accelerated process of generalized depletion of meaning is taking place at present time. After Trump’s victory, politics can hardly claim any meaningful legitimacy for its processes bearing the affinity to result in such a tragedy. Austerity measures, dispossessing the most vulnerable of our societies in the name of a financial system run by banks, can hardy point to any economic principle worth maintaining a single day more. And what does art do when it does art in these times?
Historically, crisis in art have played the role of a warning for the upcoming political and social crisis. The current production of art, in the modes labeled contemporary, is not one presentation of art in crisis, it rather represents the most sophisticated material mechanism of the re-production of social crisis. Capitalism, the grindhouse of the social, still lacks behind in borrowing and adapting the tools for value extraction from contemporary art.
In the last days of the Welfare State we saw the birth of conceptualism as an attempt to gasp the upcoming problems of the virtual financial world and the dictatorship of the algorithm to come. This attempt to engage in social commentary and political activism was supposed to mark the developing tendencies for a deep general crisis we experience today. In doing so it serviced the contemporary art production with its own crisis. This was the crisis of a location for art. The departure from the aesthetics was marked initially with strong acts of cursing its historical dominance. The idea, the machinic processes, manuals and theoretical frameworks gave art the access to new territories. The multiple fields of the social and political were to serve as a form of mediation towards the new location of the art-in-departure. Instead, the crisis of the location for art, became its praised quality, the lack was inaugurated as a positive charge. When Badiou, the living philosopher, attributes to art one of the locations for the procedures of truth, it is clearly not possible to maintain this attribution for the contemporary art. The potential for a truth procedure is always confined in a particular situation.
Instead of dealing with its own crisis, we saw the birth of a completely new phenomenon: the claiming of the crisis as a positive content. While the crisis of capitalism is in a constant state of demanding dispossession, the crisis of contemporary art works through extraction. Thus, contemporary art production relies on the combination of the key components of: crisis, the social, the political and extraction. The crisis, instead of being exposed to an array of attacks from all sides, has been normalized, internalized and finally positivized. The social and the political remain the ambiguous specific object of the beyond-aesthetical art process. The interaction of these three components resorts to extraction, as the only possible relation of art to social practice, given its base composition components.
Instead of providing a procedure of truth, the contemporary art hoovers over the society as an extraction drone. Nothing of the social practice escapes the extraction processes embedded within the contemporary conceptual art. The flesh of the society is the medium of extraction, and the exhibition space is the medium of its self-legitimation. Contemporary art legitimizes itself for its own purposes. If it had been embedded in the social practice, it would have eaten up itself until now. The process of the installation represents a report of the recording of the act of extraction. Its presentation exhibits the accumulated, appropriated value of the social practice. Without a location, art exploits endless autonomous motives, globalizes its thirst and hinders the very potential of the emergence of truth as an act of fidelity in a given situation – social practice. Everybody can be an artist now! If a democratic claim to concepts is the starting point of every egalitarian practice, then conceptual art is everywhere, it is everything. Everything that exists and that ever existed and will exist. Why can’t we simply call this an absolute realism? A capitalist realism.
The invention of the curator comes as a historic necessity of the gradually becoming visible of the act of social attrition performed by contemporary art. The duty of the curator is to perform the gesture of embedding of the act of contemporary art within the social practice. The curator, lacking a proper space of action, resorts to violating other’s actions. It (the curator) intervenes by way of re-affirming the extraction processes. It’s ambiguous questions, disturb and attempt to confuse the separate, still converging, social practices. It is neither an artist neither a social organizer. It deploys theory in a space of objects that are conceptually forced to reference a social or political issue. This is the inherent source of antagonism within the contemporary art process. Objects depleted of aesthetic design, in their muteness and failure to represent a design of theory, cling to textbook theoris in order to enter the realm of the social and the political. So, these object’s necessity is one of marketing for theory. A curator is nothing else than a marketing agent.
After we have evaluated our experience with the contemporary art, we can claim the need for ‘A great leap forward’. The solution for the crisis of the art, that is one of location, is thus to be pursued in the domain of space. The space for art, not the space of art. A space for art is to be found in the very social practice. Living in the end times, the times of the depletion of meaning requires a new social practice. One that can be inaugurated from within the different locations of truth. We need a new political conception of actions in the society. A new valorization. The repetition of old models will only lend our societies in the realm of new dispossessions. In order for art to generate its own conditions of societal embedment it must deliver a definite break with its extraction machine. If the only successful break with the cancer is the dissolution of the body that maintains it, the only end to the crisis of contemporary art is its dissolution. Herein lies the very riddle. That is, lacking a concrete location, contemporary art has left us without means, inherent to situated locations, to deploy a sustained attack. We can only witness of its aerial exhibitionism over the material reality of the society. Its exhibitionism is nonetheless material in the effects it re-produces. Its objects deprive the latent objectivism of its materiality, of the invested labor. Objects that are used in contemporary art exhibitionism escape the materialist coding. They are forced to play the role of intermediary concepts. It is so because they mediate the access to real existing concepts in the domain of the social and political. The gesture of conceptualization by way of objects, inaugurates a historically novel perversion: the installation deterritorializes real objective materiality in order to exploit the space occurring in the locus of object presence/absence as a tool for extraction from the social practice. Therefore, the theorization on the irrelevance of the aesthetic value of the object completely misses the point. Kosuth’s claim that ‘an aesthetic consideration of an object existing in the realm of art means that the object’s existence or functioning in an art context is irrelevant to the aesthetic judgment’ only offers us a negative reference to an irrelevant position. The true inherent relation of an object is, and will always remain, its relation to the contradictions involved in the process of material condensation of un-manifested labor relations. Its latent exhibition is the manifest form of contemporary predicament of the labor. Nowadays art exhibition is built on the basis of absolute negation of this relation.
The space for art is crucial for the material practice of art itself. The birth of a new ideal of art, one that creates, through reorganization of references, its own space of action, is possible only through the dialectical act of destruction/creation from within the contemporary art processes of current times. The acceleration of suicidal, nerve wrecking, exploitative, anxious experiences of the contemporary artist can provide a path for the definitive break with the demands of the extraction processes. Not the self-subverting strategies, self-abolition method and the becoming its own inherent cure, but the total dispersion through the social and political to the point of becoming invisible, untraceable, inexistent. Only when we reach that point of dissolution, we can than embark on the process of valorization of the social practices that we decide to name as art practices. And this process of naming is not a definitive one. It depends on the potentiality of the given situation in which the naming will take place, whether the new space of art will be accommodated as a mode of social practice with its own location. The delimitation of the space is thus contingent on the success of this process of naming, identifying references and enabling (not extracting) of productive social value.
The end of the end of the twentieth century is near. The algorithmic processes have generated a new episteme. One that is concealed from the human access to it. It exists on its own, in its own self-generated territory of unlimited autonomy. The virtual process has generated a truth, beyond our common interpretative Nietzschean qualifications. Nietzche is dead. We need a social practice of art to break the limits of our understanding and knowledge. The reflective theory can only exhibit the limitations at hand struggling around the terrain of its own references like a mad dog inside a cage. The location of the new space for art, in its definitive break with theory, can be defined as a social practice that colonizes the terrain of the algorithm. Only after the colonization takes place, theory can be deployed to interpret the fluxes in the new domain of truth. Not the Art after philosophy, as Kosuth claims, but the philosophy after the artistic intervention through the society, can give birth to a new social.
~Brick Shithouse
machinesloops 