The Art System; Theory as Medium and the Crisis of the Image/Eshrat Erfanian

The Art System;
Theory as Medium and the Crisis of the Image

In an interview with Nina Powell for Frieze Magazine in October 2009, French Theorist Sylvère Lotringer diagnosed the current situation of the “Art System” as being embedded in relationships drawn between art, the market and critical thinking. Lotringer stated that academia has become a worldwide business, a money-making machine that the US have exported to the rest of the world like they have (violently or by other means) the concepts of democracy and of the free market. In his assessment regarding the link between art, the market, theory and education, he wonders cynically, “Why should not art have a go in this education market – if it is already part of a market anyways?” Lotringer’s assessment not only conveys a sound diagnosis about the current conditions of artistic production which perhaps need to be taken into account by producers of art within academia, but also, Lotringer makes us wonder: Should we be cynical with him and give up the idea of the critical potential of art and accept its subjection to the Culture Industry? And, since any critique of art’s and of artists’ complicity with institutions and the market appears to be futile, should we artists just ride the wave and make artistic work based on “applied theory”? Moreover, within academia, theory and the production of knowledge have become inextricable from artistic practice. Bearing this in mind, what are the consequences if we consider theory itself as having become the “medium” of art? Finally, what are the stakes if we oppose academic art production with recent trends prompting the collusion between contemporary art and the major industries of image-production (Hollywood, Television) –which also relies on theory to validate itself?
According to Lotringer, because there are so many things that are happening at the same time and in different places of the world, the avant-garde in art has ceased to exist. Another reason for this is because our current world is ruled by shallow individualism, cynicism and rapacity all of which are thriving in a complete vacuum that is ruled by market interests. Now when we think of the state of affairs in art, we realize that paradoxically, art has fulfilled its Dadaist avant-garde ideal insofar as it has become completely embedded into life by encompassing everything including society. In other words, art has grabbed anything it can to use it for its own purposes: from recycling garbage, to forming communities, to investigating political issues and perfumes, to playing with television, anthropology, biology and technology. This has allegedly given leeway, on the one hand, to the genre what we could call “research-art,” which along with theoretical elucidation, has become the operational basis for art education and art production within the academic domain. Moreover, the appropriation of theory by contemporary art and its having become the “medium” of the Artworld is tied for Lotringer to the market and constitutes a turning point in art production. Lotringer located this “theoretical turn in art” at the moment when a certain reception of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations by the New York Artworld made itself evident. In his introduction to Baudrillard’s polemical response to the New York Artworld’s appropriation of his theoretical work, “The Conspiracy of Art” (1995), he wrote:
The year 1987 happened to be a real turning point for the New York Artworld, throngs of young artists were flooding the art market desperately seeking Cesar, a “master thinker”, a guru, anything really to peg their career on they took Jean Baudrillard’s book, Simulations for an aesthetic statement (while it was an anthropological diagnostic) and rushed to make it a template for their art.” (“The Conspiracy of Art,” pp. 13, 14)
According to Lotringer, the power of theory lies in its potential to spare us disasters because it can give us a handle on the way in which contemporary society operates, how we occupy it, where we are going and how we can possibly affect it. Once appropriated by the Artworld, however, theory (especially post-structuralism) started to play a role in the Artworld’s need to project itself as something special separate from socio-economic relationships. 1987 is the year when the art market began to move toward becoming an industry like any other. Considering art’s subsequent dependence on Capital the question becomes: What is special about art? When this question arises, it is when art needs theory so it can claim a special privilege and to be a space for critical thinking outside of “everything else” within the Capitalist system.
On the other hand, insofar art has become an industry like any other it has been used as a platform for cross-marketing whose autonomy is precisely sustained by theory. What I have in mind here is the June 2010 event overseen by former Deitch Projects director, Jeffrey Deitch in his opening function as the new director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Deitchs’ event is reminiscent of the work of the Italian video-artist Francesco Vezzoli, whom in his work has collaborated with celebrities like Sharon Stone, Gore Vidal, Lady Gaga, etc.



The video that resulted in the collaboration with Lady Gaga was interestingly enough, filmed and launched at MoCA LA in November 2009. In it, Lady Gaga plays a Damien Hirst grand piano wearing a Prada outfit and a Frank Ghery hat, performing a real-fake spoiler of “the shortest musical you’ll ever see.” Along similar Vezzolian trans-mediatic lines, the event hosted by Deitch last June involved filming a series of scenes for the soap opera “General Hospital” at the museum. The actor James Franco had appeared in the show as the character “Franco,” a contemporary artist who has an exhibition at MoCA. Operating within a complex trans-institutional schema and for ambiguous conceptual reasons, the actor declared that his appearance in the show was a “guerrilla performance art piece” in an attempt to “smuggle conceptual art into middle-American living rooms.”
If already former gallerist Jeffrey Deitch’s appointment as the raise-founder and director of MoCA had erased the boundaries between directing museums, fund raising and selling art, Franco’s (and Vezzoli’s) cross-intervention in “General Hospital” and the Contemporary Artworld has too erased, the boundaries between the culture and entertainment industries. (The intervention is, by the way, suspected to be authored by New York based artist Kalup Linzy, who also appeared in “General Hospital” in the episode in which Franco’s character had his show at MoCA). The event at MoCA, which consisted on taping Franco’s final “General Hospital” episodes became a live meta-performance staged before an audience of invited art-world guests, the soap-opera camera crew and “General Hospital” fans. The Artforum reviewers (from their online “Scene and Heard” journal) described the massive image of Franco’s face that was projected all night in front of the museum collapsing the figure of the “actor-image” with the “contemporary artist-big brother character;” they also saw it as a Warholian encounter between pop culture and vanguard art. And we may add, all met at the mythical intersection of “celebrity” culture. New York Times’ reporter Randy Kennedy’s article on Deitch’s appointment to MoCA points at this fusion between Artworld and celebrity culture when he describes Deitch’s transfer from New York to Los Angeles:
[…] He has given up his New York apartment on the Upper East Side, a studio rental that became famous in the artworld because it was so tiny, spartan and completely devoid of art. He now lives in a rambling Spanish revival house, also rented, that once belonged to Cary Grant in the trendy Los Feliz neighborhood here, with a kidney-shaped pool. From his balcony he can see the Hollywood sign to the north and, to the south, the tennis courts of his new neighbors, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Deitch’s transition from New York to Hollywood fantasy invites us to make an interesting opposition to characterize two current operative arenas of Contemporary Art: Hollywood (and thus, the celebrity and jet-set worlds) and academia. The problem is that in both realms, the Artworld has become a black hole that sucks up theory getting clogged up by half-truths; the half-truths part is also tied to the fact that, artists and theorists have been replaced by publicists busy building the own careers within the Culture Industry all the while falling short in creating theories and practices that could help us understand the world, diagnose the future or operate in communities at the local level (in spite of Internet, which has the negative effect of ostracizing individuals creating a state of “hyper-communication”). For these reasons, in Lotringer’s view, art has become unable to digest any more data causing it to become ambivalent and indeterminate. Art’s ambivalence is due to its increased dissemination through the Internet and people’s mobility across the world. And even though Artworld figures like “independent curators” or “nomadic artists” may seem to embody or put into practice “radical” theoretical concepts (radical in the 1970s’!) such as “rhizomatic networks,” the Art System has reached a stage in which we cannot think of art as separate from the point of view of the Art System. The problem is that the Art System feeds upon itself like capitalism, absorbing critique for its own benefit and growth and so far, nothing has proven that the systemic elements of the Art System could be undermined. The consequence being: Art has metastasized in every possible direction it occupies. In this light, contemporary art for Baudrillard art is not just insignificant but null: obsolete, worthless, without merit or effect. Furthermore:
Art has confiscated banality, waste and mediocrity to turn them into values and ideologies… The New Art Order [is all about] power and glamour, which have managed to entice, subdue and integrate any potential threat. Criticizing art, in fact, has become the royal way to an art career... (“The Conspiracy of Art,” p.10)
Moreover, the ambivalence and indeterminateness of contemporary art have nothing to do with individual works of art and whether they’re good or bad, or whether they possess “singularity” in the sense Thierry de Duve defines it as art’s “trueness” which resides in aesthetic judgment. On the one hand, the indeterminateness of art is due to the change of scale in production, circulation and consumption of art at the international level. The Art System has taken monstrous proportions, having expanded exponentially since the 1980s. This situation makes us wonder as well, what does it mean for example to read Rosalind Krauss on the “post-medium condition” in Guatemala, Jacques Rancière on aesthetics and democracy in Poland, Gayatari Spivak on the subaltern in Paris or Gilles Deleuze on the time-image in Johannesburg, beyond the homogenizing trend in global cultural production? After Baudrillard, contemporary art’s ambiguous status is “half-way between a terrorist critique and de facto cultural integration.” (“The Conspiracy of Art,” p. 11) On the other hand, art’s ambivalence may be linked to the fact that today, “art is free to morph everywhere, even into politics, as the aesthetization of politics isn’t a sign of fascism anymore, nor is politization of aesthetics a sign of radicalism for that matter, they are rather means of integrating art into the economy, into the media.” (“The Conspiracy of Art,” pp. 11-12).
The ability of art to “morph everywhere” diagnosed by Baudrillard somewhat echoes Rosalind Krauss’ argument of art’s “post-medium condition.” According to her, this condition emerged from a critique of the corrupt alliance between the capitalist valorization logic and the modernist ideal of the autonomy of the artistic sphere. This critique relies therefore, on the “medium’s performativity” on which much Conceptual art is based on. This performativity is exemplified by Jeff Wall’s appropriation of the lightbox format in advertising, Dan Graham’s taking up of the genre of photo-reportage in Homes for America (1966-67) or Sophie Calle’s use of arbitrariness to trigger her projects. The “post-medium condition” refers, moreover, not only to “non-medium specificity” but to the inclusion in art-production of discourses, institutions, physical support structures and their technological implications as well as other factors that contribute to the individuation of works of art. Other examples of “post-mediatic artists” discussed as such by Krauss are: Marcel Broodthaers, Ed Ruscha, Christian Marclay, William Kentridge and James Coleman. For Krauss, artists who work on the “post-medium condition” contribute to the invention of new apparatuses or assemblages for art. We can oppose Krauss’ notion of the “postmedium” in art to Baudrillard’s negative assertion that art has “morphed everywhere.” Where can the line be drawn, however, between art’s autonomy as self-referentiality based not on the medium but on the creation of its own medium and art becoming indistinguishable from other domains, insofar as the creation of new apparatuses or discourse and image-dispositifs is not exclusive to art?
Perhaps the midway point between Baudrillard’s negative take on contemporary art as “morphing everywhere” and thus as null, and Rosalind Krauss’s modernist vouching for a constant reinvention of the medium is found in Thierry de Duve’s redefinition of medium-specificity based on his reading of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. De Duve’s implies a notion of the medium that relies on the “found object” and on the indexical and thus nominalist operation of declaring: “this is art,” an address that invites the viewer to judge aesthetically with the artist whether “this is art.” De Duve however, noted in a lecture in 2007 that the situation of contemporary art has become that of a dubious “aesthetic liberalism.” By this he means, not the pejorative and clichéd “anything goes” assessment in art since Duchamp but rather, an “anything is allowed liberalism” that is tied to today’s “post-ideological” cultural battles, a new form of “respect” based on the mutual recognition of differences and identities that implies: “I shall not infringe on your private domain so don’t mess up with mine.” De Duve’s diagnosis of the problem goes well beyond the current status of medium-lessness of art and displaces the question of the medium to the level of ideology. Because of this “aesthetic liberalism,” artworks tend to exacerbate idiosyncracies promoting a kind of fake singularity that one should expect of “true works of art.” In an era in which art mirrors the liberal claims of being post-ideological and in which politics mean politically correct visibility, the task at hand being, to assert one’s or someone else’s identity, theories and critical thinking become not only the validating medium of art (within academia, the market, Hollywood) but also an alibi to art’s simulation of the political. “Simulation” according to Baudrillard characterizes our era, which is invaded not by copies of the real but by the real on its own right: the “hyperreal,” which is a world of images without referents. This takes us to the crisis of representation and of the image and art’s and artists’ inability to re-conceptualize the image in the faces of Spectacle and of the digital explosion.
For Lotringer, the avant-garde is merely a Modernist concept whose elements can still be applied, however, to creative political groups and social movements (for instance, the Italian Autonomia movement from the 1970s). For him, these movements can be potentially opposed to the Art System insofar as they are an attempt to bring out the communal part of the creative social impulse that is absent from our world today. As much as the conceptualization of social movements – and their form of visibility – are at stake here, so is an urgent reconceptualization of the image in the intersecting domains of the academic, culture and entertainment industries, well beyond applying theory to art (or using theory as a justification of art, or to sell it) and the question of art’s autonomy, medium specificity or its medium-lessness.

Eshrat Erfanian, August 2010






References and Sources:

• Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art (New York: Semiotext(e), 2009).

• Thierry de Duve, “Theory and Practice,” Frieze Art Fair, October 2007; Podcast available at: www.friezeartfair.com/podcasts/.../theory_practice_thierry_de_duve/.

• Jaltenco’s Invisible Committee Manifesto, “Fear of Animals” (February 2010) available online: http://comiteinvisiblejaltenco.blogspot.com/2010/02/fear-of-animals.html.

• Randy Kennedy, “Jeffrey Deitch and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles,” New York Times (June 29th, 2010) Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/arts/design/04deitch.html?_r=3.

• Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea« – Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1999).

• Sylvère Lotringer interviewed by Nina Power, “Intelligence Agency,” Frieze no. 125 (September 2009) Available online: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/intelligence_agency/.

• Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Jeff Hassay, “Publicity Stunt,” Artforum Online (Scene and Heard section), June 30th, 2010, available online: http://www.artforum.com/diary/id=25923.