Art/Social/Capital

ONE OF THE most obvious and pervasive aspects of modernism was 
its abiding suspicion of language. Many varieties of modernist visual 
art repeatedly challenged what it regarded as language’s serious communicative limits. Dada, futurism, cubism (on occasions), Fluxus:
 all seriously questioned language’s assumed base intelligibility founded 
on the assumption that there exist simple verbal equivalences for the
 more valorised and ephemeral ideal of ‘life experience’. As a challenge to language’s logocentricism, bound up as it was in the eyes of these cultural movements by a pervasive capitalist utilitarianism, avant-garde artists began to produce fractured urban poetry – often a declamatory phonetic gibberish – that was designed to complicate simplistic a priori understandings of communication while simultaneously questioning the sensible, self-satisfied language of a mercantile bourgeoisie. In literature, some time later, the writing of Samuel Beckett in particular (1), whose work subsequently influenced many visual artists, became especially well known for its reduction of language to minimalist basics and poetic guttural utterances. Even later, the film art of directors as diverse as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard (2), all evinced a rather bleak outlook regarding language’s communicative inability and the attendant failure of societies to achieve genuine sociality.

Not surprisingly, much postmodern discourse addressing such negativity sought to place language back at the centre of things (while simultaneously addressing its de-centred structuring) and at the forefront of contemporary culture, including visual art. Although a generalisation, many postmodern theorists made the point that without language,
 culture – or, indeed, society (in any guise) – could not exist. They criticised modernism for its denial of this fact; more so, they showed how modernism’s multiple denials – its nihilistically minimalist tendencies – ultimately extended language’s possibilities by creating new expressions and new genres, paradoxically articulated through linguistic compression. Either that, or such theorists illustrated how modernist ‘anti-language’ actually amplified the inescapability of the ‘sensible’ language that inextricably shadowed it. Today, in an age supposedly post-political and post-theoretical (perhaps even post-postmodern), there has been an accelerated burgeoning of multiple media and art forms whose primary emphasis is communication and social interactivity.

The present era 
has witnessed the flourishing exponential growth of technologies such as the internet, mobile phones and other televisual and virtual instruments that highlight instantaneity and a seemingly mandatory compulsion
 to communicate. Now it would appear that no number of words, no communicative excess, no amount of information could ever be enough
 to say what ‘needs’ to be said. At the end of the day, what lurks within 
the contemporary cultural and media landscape is a curiously unspoken imperative demanding speech at all times, no matter what about or when. The alternate clichés – ‘language is power’, ‘silence is death’ – are taken
 to be truer now more than ever. Language announces the undeniable presence of the social subject; silence is the silence of the speaking subject who, perpetually encouraged today to narcissistically self-reveal, is faced alternatively by a lingering sense of meaninglessness and threatened by a catastrophic self-disappearance.

The massive mediation of our contemporary cultural terrain obviously has a notable impact on the activities of contemporary art, particularly in a globalised context. In fact, what is especially noteworthy about much contemporary art impacted by this communicative imperative is its heightened emphasis on the value of communicability itself. Unending, and in some instances forced, communication is considered by many contemporary artists a prerequisite for career success. Interestingly, such a state of affairs has also had a crucial influence on cultural domains that would otherwise appear superficially antagonistic. On the one hand, large, highly visible institutions of ‘official’ contemporary culture – museums of modern art, biennales of contemporary art, high-profile commercial dealers – are impelled to communicate their philosophies and reasons for being at every instant. Each of these bodies is required, according to the demand for perpetual visibility generally considered necessary as a quantifiable marker of success, to reach out to the public, to the marketplace, to sponsors, both public 
and private, and to generally continue to inform their audiences about ‘what they are up to’ and ‘what they stand for’. On the other hand, artists who see themselves as ‘counter-cultural’ (even when participating in major institutional exhibitions like biennales) have utilised the ideal of communication, habitually in alliance with virtual social domains 
like the internet (frequently in the guise of blogs), to relay alternative visions of contemporary art and culture. This type of artist ideally sees him or herself as a participant in a genuinely alternative, more equitable social forum. Historically, their work has often been disregarded as trivial by ‘official’ institutional culture (usually because it is unsaleable), but is offered as a critical response to it.

Another aspect of this scene in which communication is regarded as ‘critical’ is its conceptualising of the Social per se as the dematerialised locus of the artwork itself; its very nomination as ‘art’ (and therefore as a specialised discipline separated from the idea/l of ‘life’) is called into question. Common to such an attitude informing contemporary alternative culture is its self-conscious presentation as a kind of de-capitalised social work stressing communicative interaction over and above the production of mere artworks for display and sale. Nevertheless, what ‘both sides’ of the contemporary cultural spectrum share, arising from this communication-obsessed milieu, is their highlighting of the worth – taken to be unquestionable and fundamental – of sociality. In the first corporatised cultural instance, this stress on the social is framed by endless rounds of symposia, guest lectures, social-calendar events, advertising and self-promotion, and in the second ‘alternative’ instance, by equally incessant debates, forums, home and studio visits, parties, bake-offs, market stalls and, yes, self-promotion.

Unfortunately, contemporary art’s fixation with the Holy Grail of the Social actually masks the long-since passing of simple sociality under the oppressive weight of a pervasive, rampantly socialised (and equally virulently virtualised) Capital. As far as institutions of contemporary
art are concerned, this disturbing disappearance calls for continuous dissimulated self-representations of their indispensability to society and its artists and to the wider community. In terms of counter-cultural artists and allied activist groups, emphasis tends to fall on the ‘ideal’ of sociality at all costs; if the Social has vanished then it must be made to reappear, again and again. Therefore, many activities staged by a variety of these groups, are designed (often under the pretext of just having ‘fun’) to forcibly stress the continuity and presence of an alternative social reality in the face of depressingly insistent evidence to the contrary. More so, tensions that might arise within such groups, from attempting to force some kind of social cohesion among ultimately disparate individuals and interests, are downplayed or ignored and generally deemed suspiciously negative.

Indeed, the charge of negativity in relation to a refusal to socialise the artwork haunts both ‘official’ and ‘alternative’ visions of contemporary culture. Of course, silence and refusal (being apparently so aligned with actual and ego-bound death) are perhaps regarded most suspiciously of all. Far from the implicit and inescapable dialectical ‘no’ underlying twentieth-century critical theory, in the positivist realm of contemporary ‘post-social’ capitalist socialisation, ‘yes’ is the new ‘no’.

At this point it is worth considering a recent example of an official institutional occasion, the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Revolution: Forms that Turn, in which an alternative, counter-cultural attitude to communication was foregrounded under the thematic umbrella of ‘revolution’. In this case, insistent communication, presented mainly as a dematerialist gesture of radical culture, was highlighted by a number of artists and as an avenue by which a productive conversation could be forged between opposing camps: the institutionally favoured usual suspects and 
younger, socially savvy, institutionally critical or, rather, institutionally playful, artists. Curiously, this attempted productive partnership within the Biennale of Sydney began as a critique of the impact of just such a reinvigorated emphasis on the dominance of communication in contemporary art. In an interview the director of the 2008 Biennale, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, noted that:

Right now, we live in a society where the object of consumerism is communication itself. The last thing you want to do is repeat the problem of creating another communication. The problem that humanity is facing in a globalised world is that communication itself has turned into the ultimate object of consumer culture. Like the late stages of a dying society, it is now consuming itself. In this context, withdrawal is a revolutionary space (3).

Such a seemingly radical – if ultimately somewhat vague – statement from the Biennale’s director expressing a deep suspicion of the contemporary cultural value of communication is both highly telling and seriously ironic (4). In a contemporary art context we could take this statement to mean that the dematerialising anti-capitalist, broadly socialist emphasis – clearly associated with certain earlier avant-gardes, especially Dada and Fluxus – on mere unproductive sociality, has been so thoroughly recouped as to have become a prime capitalist fetish of the global present. If this is the case then it is an eminently ironic one, given that the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, and biennales in general, are especially structured to tirelessly ramp up their own communicative excesses through innumerable mediated self-representations via publicity, marketing and promotion.

Considering the amount of expense, time and artists invested in such ventures, the need for tireless communication operates unspokenly as
 an absolute command and as a complement to an economic system demanding returns. Naturally, this amplified emphasis on communication during the biennale in question will also necessarily engender multiple symposia, in which mainly similarly qualified ‘arts professionals’ come together to nod their heads in unison about the significance and relevance of the particular biennale theme at stake. This is not to say that disagreement is disallowed – on the contrary, it is actively encouraged as it is but another means of keeping the communicative event open and in perpetual motion.

Such circularity is assured, particularly when it usually results in participants politely ‘agreeing to disagree’ – a perfect example of the closed communicative circuit Christov-Bakargiev has criticised. Communication as formulated in this sense is doubly appropriate in light of the subtitle of the 2008 Biennale: Revolution: Forms that Turn. That is, if we consider the cyclical motion indicated by the title as metaphorically internalising Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ (5) while transposing it onto a global capitalist present in which we are forever faced with the eternal return of the same; communication as representation as communication, and so on, and on and on (6).

Christov-Bakargiev’s critique of the exaggerated value of communication in contemporary culture is lent further irony when
 we realise that, rather than criticising this value, numerous artists she
 has included in the 2008 Biennale explicitly engage communicative practices – reworked according to avant-garde dematerialist ideals – as the prima materia of their art. A small selection of the many practitioners in the Biennale who work in this way are the artists Darius Mikšys from Lithuania and the Australians Ross Gibson and Tony Schwensen. Through their actions each of these artists self-consciously considers what it is to speak as an artist in an eminently public and publicised realm in ways that evoke the conundrums sketched in the opening paragraphs.

Darius Mikšys staged an action at Sydney’s Artspace during the opening week of the Biennale, the aim of which was to introduce the parents of Australia’s participating artists to the Biennale’s director. The hope was 
to instigate a broad conversation among all who attended. At play here was the basic notion that through this staged but ‘casual’ interaction by the visiting artist, Mikšys would ‘empower’ non-artist parents into realising that ‘they too have become artists in the Biennale, alongside their own creations – their children’ (7). The emphasis on communication here is paramount: the action is ostensibly presented as equal and as aiming to break down the barrier between professional art and domestic familiarity. What is extremely problematic however, is the nature of the communicative exchange.

As a key participant in this charade the Biennale’s Director, regardless of what she actually says or how unaffectedly she behaves, is being proposed as a kind of Oracle. At no point is her authority as director or, indeed, her aptitude for ‘informing’ parents, called into account, and neither is the hierarchical structure of the Biennale of Sydney. After all, this is just an informal chat, right? Overall, the parents are abstractly considered as a kind of ‘standing reserve’ waiting in the wings eager to hear from the Biennale’s boss what their kids have been up to (irrespective of the parents’ age, qualifications or general relationship with their children or, in fact, whether or not they are still alive). Furthermore, this dynamic assumes that artists’ parents would not know or, if they did know, would surely not understand the obscure career paths chosen by their children, they being mere parents. Behind Mikšys’s proposal, a quietly revolutionary proposition, is a rather literal approximation of what communication – particularly as it is framed inside an extensively, albeit invisibly, mediated institutional apparatus – actually is or might mean.

At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in an action somewhat aligned with Mikšys’s, the Australian artist and writer Ross Gibson invited Biennale-goers to book a discussion with him loosely framed by topics arising as the event gathered momentum. According to the associated Biennale press statement, Gibson was interested in ‘some humble revolutions: the back-and-forth rhythm of courteous argument, the turn of thinking that can excite a generous exchange’ (8) while intending, ‘with a naive impulse: to grow a world of thinking and feeling and talking, a turning world that, with each uttered transaction, grows richer than the sum of its individual speakers’(9).

Put forward here is an idea of communication based on ‘courteous argument’. Communication is preordained as basically polite, presaged
 on the institutional consensus and goodwill demanded by the exceedingly public-conscious outlook of an organisation like the Biennale of Sydney, even if its theme is ‘revolution’. Likewise, ‘to grow a world of thinking and feeling and talking, a turning world that, with each uttered transaction, grows richer than the sum of its individual speakers’, indicates a communication revolution that is, in the end, utilitarian and dully cyclical. This is a vision of communication for its own sake as ‘the ultimate object of consumer culture’, a culture from which the Biennale of Sydney is
 not exempted despite its director’s argument that ‘the last thing you
want to do is repeat the problem of creating another communication’; 
that is, another object for consumption.

Like Mikšys’s staging, Gibson’s concept barely denies any self-critical challenge to the art-institutional context in which he pursues an unadulterated but essentially bureaucratic information-gathering form of communication. In any case, do not the sort of communicative operations the artist seeks to collect already take place outside the walls of the Art Gallery of New South Wales on a daily basis as the very essence of social interaction, making his an oxymoronic quest as the world he imagines already exists? Only it is not ‘art’. Of course, it is the artist who makes ‘art’ just as it is implied that the artist, at least from a cultural platform, communicates ‘revolution’. The problem with this model is that while inviting the ‘open’ participation of the general public, it considers the audience to be lacking critical agency. Perhaps Gibson, through his continuing capacity to entice conversation, has proven just this point; surely the most revolutionary response of his audience would have been silence, to refuse to live up to the role programmed for it by the artist or the Biennale? In this way, the artist’s authorial role, as well as that prescribed by the biennale structure, as the initiator of a communicative scenario, would be thrown into irresolvable crisis; the individual artist rendered static and mute (and bored) while his audience is mobile and free. Naturally, Gibson’s work is accompanied and archived online by a blog: a ‘sub-blog’ of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney’s own, aptly, if ironically titled, website revolutionsonline, the underlying premise of which, like many blogs, is that genuine democracy - its expression in ‘real life’ being generally disappointing and scarce - might be better enacted via electronic communication; everyone included, everyone an artist.

Lastly, and a long way from the un-selfconscious utopianism of Gibson’s work, is Tony Schwensen’s Fundrazor (Fuck you Pay me) Or
; who gets to sit at the pointy end of the plane? (2008), in which the artist communicated with his audience by way of that classic Australian staple – the ‘sausage sizzle’ or barbeque – held, in this case, in the very public context of the lawn outside Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Performed as a mock (or genuine?) fundraiser for the (far from being named) artists of the next Biennale of Sydney in 2010, Schwensen’s work, unlike those previously mentioned, turns the ideal of communication against itself. His is a forlorn and humorous critique of the very idea of using an institutional, corporate-sponsored exhibition like the Biennale of Sydney as either an effective or transparent platform to engage 
the ‘general public’, whose actual existence the artist simultaneously implicitly questions (10). At the same time, refusing to pretend that the institutional parameters of the Biennale do not exist, the artist instead calls specific attention to the manner in which artists – despite their significant productive capacities – are habitually placed, unless they are institutionally certified ‘stars’, on the ‘B-list’ of global contemporary culture.

Theoretically, the effect of this critique was further wryly enhanced by the artist’s inclusion of his partner, herself a well-known artist, dressed coyly in an apron, serving sausages. Once more, the power imbalances
– everywhere apparent in a pumped-up contemporary art world – are revealed, but in a singularly droll and unspectacular way. Through such tactics, Schwensen also subtly indicates the inherently exclusionary dimension of biennales. His piece was certainly one of the very few truly subversive works among the Australian artists represented. Schwensen’s performance, although excessively ‘Australian’ and significantly differentiated, aligned itself with the institutionally critical performances of international artists like Andrea Fraser, Coco Fusco or Guillermo Gómez-Peña: artists for whom communication is a means of making uneasy rather than pretending to unite.

Far from the supposedly anti-social premise of much modernism – at least in its frequent suspicion of the value of communication – many contemporary artists have become enamoured of the essential need to continue to communicate their actions at all times. This contemporary emphasis on free, instant and never-ending communication, however, is often nowhere near as free and easy as it seems. In fact, propelled by the interests of huge telemedia corporations, this resurgent stress on continuous participation in a networked society repeatedly conceals the dystopian dimensions of the very communicative tools – the internet and its associated products, mobile phones – that they so conveniently sell. At worst, these tools transform the endlessly networked Self into 
a type of mobile panopticon forever monitoring its actions according
to the demands of others. The narcissism they frequently engender is, in fact, a highly effective mechanism of social control that is regularly transferred to the contemporary art world, and appears also in cases where an artist’s intention is socially honourable.

Nevertheless, it would be deeply misguided, not to say inherently reactionary, to decry outright the growth of new communicative and socially interactive technologies. After all, such technologies do retain a subversive potential when aimed against the corporate intentions of their makers, and when the technology is made to reveal its social impoverishment at the same time as indicating its interactive possibilities under the radar. Equally misguided is the automatic dismissal of artists convinced of the present need for a greater socialisation of contemporary art in both the circumstances of
 its production and exhibition. This is particularly so in a global ethos so often beholden to transparent exercises in bland careerism and severely restricted by a vision of culture determined almost purely by unrestrained self-promotion, the excesses of which at times literally substitute the need for thinking about art altogether.

The possible benefits, therefore, of a reinvigorated emphasis on
the social in contemporary art lies in the fact that such emphasis can successfully undermine – yet only partially – the implosive dominance 
of a global situation in which contemporary art is viewed primarily as an elite trade controlled by market and career experts. On this point, what
 is finally most compromised about the globalised art world’s sudden intensified interest in the social, is its simultaneous and disingenuous tendency to deny and dissimulate its habitual foundation in the structural imperative of incessant expansion. Such expansion is endemic to global capitalism and indicates an imperative fundamentally attuned to self-interest not socialism.

This self-interestedness affects both ‘institutional’ and ‘alternative’ (for want 
of better descriptors) art worlds. In the first instance, the institution is founded to varying extents upon a need to a sell an image of itself to an abstract, ideally imagined public. In the second instance, the ‘socially aware’ artist needs to find personal affirmation by, once again, attempting to evaporate the distinction between art and life, avoiding theory in order to transform everything into an ‘art life’ (11). Unfortunately, because of their size and bureaucratic responsibilities, institutions have comparatively little flexibility regarding their social function, while radical artists offering prosaically pre-existing social scenarios as art do little to forward or challenge art or life. In fact, the positivist outlook of the ‘social artist’ in avoiding self-criticism may end in their assuming an equally inflexible and narcissistically conservative role as simply promoters of their own intrinsically uncommodifiable personality.

In the end, an antidote to this art/world ceaselessly demanding communication and almost total visibility might precisely be to embrace silence and ‘withdrawal as a revolutionary space’ – just as the director of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney has (ironically) suggested. Naturally, once the potential radicality of withdrawal has appeared on Channel Seven (12), it ceases to be either radical or withdrawal (13). This is not to suggest, however, some kind of tedious contemporary reformulation of the artist as isolated, uncommunicative studio-hermit; after all, what could be more self-defeating? Nor is it to dumbly imagine that there is an alternative to communication; even silence communicates. As an artist, the point would be to consider the options of silence and refusal as a means of critically communicating a redirected focus on the question of art over and above art’s current exaggerated desire for constant self-revelation, its furtive clamouring for maximum media visibility and repetitiously enervating self re-presentations.

Alex Gawronski

Originally published in Broadsheet vol. 37 no. 3, Sep, Oct, Nov, 2008. CACSA, Adelaide, Australia.

1. Beckett was referred to in some quarters (somewhat portentously) as the ‘last modernist’.

2. Although Godard’s films are invariably full of talking, rarely do his characters actually connect.

3. Zanny Begg, ‘Confusion, a trip to the dentist and the Biennale of Sydney: in conversation with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Michael Rakowitz’, Broadsheet, vol. 37, no. 2, 2008, p. 93.

4. At no point does the Biennale’s director qualify exactly what she means here by ‘communication’.

5. See Friedrich Neitzche’s The Gay Science (1882) and Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–85).

6. This is precisely how the dollar ‘communicates’; its communicative value is precisely the same in a million different contexts.

7. See Darius Mikšys’s artist profile in the 2008 Biennale of Sydney Guide, p. 85: http://issuu.com/biennalesydney/ docs/16bos-guide-web [accessed 9 July 2008].

8. See Ross Gibson’s artist profile on the Biennale of Sydney website: http://biennale.sitesuite.cn/app/ biennale/artist/142 [accessed 9 July 2008].

9. ibid.

10. In this regard, Schwensen’s skepticism about the concept of a ‘general public’ recalls Jean Baudrillard, especially his book In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1982).

11. I am referring here to the long-running blog The Art Life. Alternately humorous, witty and informative, The Art Life is also nonetheless framed according to the user-friendly post-theory notion of contemporary art as primarily an interesting lifestyle choice. Contemporary art’s discussion here is determined first and foremost by personal opinion – as opposed to genuine critique – and is considered as worthy of personality-fixated bitching as a popular television series like Sex in the City. See http://theartlife.com.au/.

12. Arguably Australia’s most politically reactionary and crassly commercial TV station.

13. Consider the global phenomenon of the television show Big Brother, which, in Australia, is screened on the commercial Seven network. In this show, real people artificially withdraw from the daily circumstances of their lives only to have such withdrawal (for money and minor fame) televised to thousands (if not millions) of anonymous viewers.