NICOLAS BOURRIAUD

POSTPRODUCTION
CULTURE AS SCREENPLAY: HOW ART REPROGRAMS THE WORLD
11 HAS & STERNBERG, NEW YORK
Nicolas Bourriaud
Postproduction
Publisher: Lukas & Sternberg, New York
2002 Nicolas Bourriaud, Lukas & Sternberg
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First published 2002 (0-9711193-0-9)
Reprinted with new preface 2005
Editor: Caroline Schneider
Translation: Jeanine Herman
Copy Editors: Tatjana Giinthner, Radhika Jones, John Kelsey
Design: Sandra Kastl, Markus Weisbeck, surface, Berlin /Frankfurt
Printing and binding: Medialis, Berlin
ISBN 0-9745688-9-9
Lukas & Sternberg
Caroline Schneider
1182 Broadway #1602, New York NY 10001
LinienstraBe 159, D-10115 Berlin
mail@lukas-sternberg.com, www.lukas-sternberg.com
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
INTRODUCTION
THE USE OF OBJECTS
THE USE OF THE PRODUCT FROM MARCEL DUCHAMP
TO JEFF KOONS
THE FLEA MARKET: THE DOMINANT ART FORM OF THE
NINETIES - -,.- - .
THE USE OF FORMS
DEEJAYING AND CONTEMPORARY ART: SIMILAR
CONFIGURATIONS
WHEN SCREENPLAYS BECOME FORM: A USER'S GUIDE
TO THE WORLD . .
THE USE OF THE WORLD
PLAYING THE WORLD: REPROGRAMMING SOCIAL FORMS
HACKING, WORK, AND FREE TIME
HOW TO INHABIT GLOBAL CULTURE
(AESTHETICS AFTER MP3)
69
69
I
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Since its initial publication in 2001, Postproduction has been trans-
lated into five languages; depending on the translation schedules in
various countries, publication either overlapped with or preceded that
of another of my books, Esthetique relationnelle (Relational Aesthetics),
written five years earlier. The relationship between these two theoret-
ical essays has often been the source of a certain misunderstanding,
if not malevolence, on the part of a critical generation that knows itself
to be slowing down and counters my theories with recitations from
"The Perfect American Soft Marxist Handbook" and a few vestiges of
Greenbergian catechism. Let's not even talk about it.
I started writing Relational Aesthetics in 1995 with the goal of finding
a common point among the artists of my generation who interested
me most, from Pierre Huyghe to Maurizio Cattelan by way of Gabriel
Orozco, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Vanessa
Beecroft, and Liam Gillick - basically, the artists I had assembled in
an exhibition called Traffic at the CapcMusee d'art contemporain in
Bordeaux (1996). Each of these artists developed strangely similar
themes, but they were not a topic of real discussion, since no one at
the time saw these artists' contributions as original and new. In search
of the common denominator, it suddenly occurred to me that there
was a new thematic framework for looking at their works. I realized that
every one of them without exception dealt with the interhuman sphere:
relationships between people, communities, individuals, groups, social
networks, interactivity, and so on. In its time, Pop Art was born of a
conjunction between the phenomenon of mass production and the
birth of visual marketing, under the aegis of a new era of consump-
tion. Relational Aesthetics was content to paint the new sociopolitical
landscape of the nineties, to describe the collective sensibility on
which contemporary artistic practices were beginning to rely. The suc-
cess of this essay, which - alas - has at times generated a sort of cari-
catured vulgate ("artists-who-serve-soup-at-the-opening," etc.), stems
essentially from the fact that it was a "kick start" to contemporary
aesthetics, beyond the fascination with communication and new tech-
nologies then being talked about incessantly, and above all, beyond
the predetermined grids of reading (Fiuxus, in particular) into which
these artists' works were being placed. Relational Aesthetics was
the first work, to my knowledge, to provide the theoretical tools that
allowed one to analyze works by individuals who would soon become
irrefutably present on the international scene.
Postproduction is not a "sequel" to Relational Aesthetics except insofar
as the two books essentially describe the same artistic scene. In terms
of method, the link between them is simple: both present an analysis
of today's art in relation to social changes, whether technological, ec-
onomic, or sociological.
But while the former deals with a collective sensibility Postproduction
analyzes a set of modes of production, seeking to establish a typol-
ogy of contemporary practices and to find commonalities. My first re-
flex was to try to avoid the artists extensively discussed in Relational
Aesthetics. Then, after a few pages, I realized not only that they fully
corresponded to this theory of production but also that I wanted to
delve more deeply into these works, which the notion of relational
aesthetics certainly did not exhaust. Postproduction therefore con-
tains more detailed, more analytical chapters on the work of Philippe
Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Liam Gillick, emblematic of the earlier
book, but also deals with the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, Mike Kelley,
Michel Majerus, Sarah Morris, Pierre Joseph, and Daniel Pflumm, art-
ists I had yet to write about. In short, the two books show the same
scene from two different angles, and the more recent is more cen-
tered on form, above all, because the artists in question have impres-
sive bodies of work behind them.
Regarding Postproduction, I have often heard the argument: "This is
nothing new."
It's true, citation, recycling, and detournement were not born yester-
day; what is clear is that today certain elements and principles are
reemerging as themes and are suddenly at the forefront, to the point
of constituting the "engine" of new artistic practices. In his journal,
Eugene Delacroix developed ideas similar to those in Relational Aes-
thetics, but the remarkable thing in the nineties was that notions of
interactivity, environment, and "participation" - classic art historical
notions - were being rethought through and through by artists ac-
cording to a radically different point of view. The critics who counter
my analyses with the argument that "this is nothing new" are often
the last to know that Gerald Murphy or Stuart Davis made Pop Art in
the thirties - which takes nothing away from James Rosenquist or
Andy Warhol. The difference resides in the articulation. The working
principles of today's artists seem to me to break with the manipula-
tion of references and citation: the works of Pierre Huyghe, Douglas
Gordon, or Rirkrit Tiravanija deeply reexamine notions of creation,
authorship, and originality through a problematics of the use of cul-
tural artifacts - which, by the way, is absolutely new.
In Postproduction, I try to show that artists' intuitive relationship with
art history is now going beyond what we call "the art of appropria-
tion," which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving
toward a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of
signs based on a collective ideal: sharing. The Museum like the City
itself constitute a catalog of forms, postures, and images for artists -
collective equipment that everyone is in a position to use, not in order
to be subjected to their authority but as tools to probe the contempo-
rary world. There is (fertile) static on the borders between consump-
tion and production that can be perceived well beyond the borders
of art. When artists find material in objects that are already in circula-
tion on the cultural market, the work of art takes on a script-like value:
"when screenplays become form," in a sense.
For me, criticism is a matter of conviction, not an exercise in flitting
about and "covering" artistic current events. My theories are born of
careful observation of the work in the field. I have neither the passion
for objectivity of the journalist, nor the capacity for abstraction of the
philosopher, who alas often seizes upon the first artists he comes
across in order to illustrate his theories. -" .-
I will stick, therefore, to describing what appears around me: I do not
seek to illustrate abstract ideas with a "generation" of artists but to
construct ideas in their wake. I think with them. That, no doubt, is
friendship, in the sense Michel Foucault intended.
INTRODUCTION
IT'S SIMPLE, PEOPLE PRODUCE WORKS, AND WE DO WHAT WE CAN WITH THEM, WE USE THEM FOR
OURSELVES. (SERGE DANEY)
Postproduction is a technical term from the audiovisual vocabulary
used in television, film, and video. It refers to the set of processes
applied to recorded material: montage, the inclusion of other visual
or audio sources, subtitling, voice-overs, and special effects. As a set
of activities linked to the service industry and recycling, postproduction
belongs to the tertiary sector, as opposed to the industrial or agri-
cultural sector, i.e., the production of raw materials.
Since the early nineties, an ever increasing number of artworks have
been created on the basis of preexisting works; more and more
artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others
or available cultural products. This art of postproduction seems to
respond to the proliferating chaos of global culture in the information
age, which is characterized by an increase in the supply of works
and the art world's annexation of forms ignored or disdained until now.
These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute
to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and
consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work. The
material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a matter
of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with
objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which
is to say, objects already informed by other objects. Notions of orig-
inality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something
from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked
by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have
the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new
contexts. - '
:
.
Relational Aesthetics, of which this book is a continuation, described
the collective sensibility within which new forms of art have been
I
inscribed. Both take their point of departure in the changing mental
space that has been opened for thought by the Internet, the central
tool of the information age we have entered. But Relational Aesthetics
dealt with the convivial and interactive aspect of this revolution (why
artists are determined to produce models of sociality, to situate them-
selves within the interhuman sphere), while Postproduction appre-
hends the forms of knowledge generated by the appearance of the
Net (how to find one's bearings in the cultural chaos and how to
extract new modes of production from it). Indeed, it is striking that the
tools most often used by artists today in order to produce these
relational models are preexisting works or formal structures, as if the
world of cultural products and artworks constituted an autonomous
strata that could provide tools of connection between individuals; as if
the establishment of new forms of sociality and a true critique of
contemporary forms of life involved a different attitude in relation to
artistic patrimony, through the production of new relationships to
culture in general and to the artwork in particular.
A few emblematic works will allow us to outline a typology of post-
production.
REPROGRAMMING EXISTING WORKS
In the video Fresh Acconci, 1995, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy re-
corded professional actors and models interpreting performances
by Vito Acconci. In Unfitted (One Revolution Per Minute), 1996, Rirkrit
Tiravanija made an installation that incorporated pieces by Olivier
Mosset, Allan McCollum, and Ken Lum; at New York's Museum of
Modern Art, he annexed a construction by Philip Johnson and in-
vited children to draw there: Untitled (Playtime), 1997. Pierre Huyghe
projected a film by Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, at the very
site of its filming (Light Conical Intersect, 1997). In their series Plenty
of Objects of Desire, Swetlana Heger and Plamen Dejanov exhibited
artworks and design objects, which they had purchased, on minimalist
platforms. Jorge Pardo has displayed pieces by Alvar Aalto, Arne
Jakobsen, and Isamu Noguchi in his installations.
INHABITING HISTORICIZED STYLES AND FORMS
Felix Gonzalez-Torres used the formal vocabularies of Minimalist art
and Anti-form, recoding them almost thirty years later to suit his
own political preoccupations. This same glossary of Minimalist art
is diverted by Liam Gillick toward an archaeology of capitalism, by
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster toward the sphere of the intimate, by
Pardo toward a problematics of use, and by Daniel Pflumm toward
a questioning of the notion of production. Sarah Morris employs the
modernist grid in her painting in order to describe the abstraction of
economic flux. In 1993, Maurizio Cattelan exhibited Untitled, a canvas
that reproduced Zorro's famous Z in the lacerated style of Lucio
Fontana. Xavier Veilhan exhibited La Foret, 1998, whose brown felt
evoked Joseph Beuys and Robert Morris, in a structure that recalled
Jesus Soto's Penetrable sculptures. Angela Bulloch, Tobias Rehberger,
Carsten Nicolai, Sylvie Fleury, John Miller, and Sydney Stucki, to
name only a few, have adapted minimalist, Pop, or conceptual struc-
tures and forms to their personal problematics, going as far as dupli-
cating entire sequences from existing works of art.
MAKING USE OF IMAGES
At the Aperto at the 1993 Venice Biennale, Bulloch exhibited a video
of Solaris, the science fiction film by Andrei Tarkovsky, replacing its
sound track with her own dialogue. 24 Hour Psycho, 1997, a work
by Douglas Gordon, consisted of a projection of Alfred Hitchcock's
film Psycho slowed down to run for twenty-four hours. Kendell Geers
has isolated sequences of weli-known films (Harvey Keitel grimacing
in Bad Lieutenant, a scene from The Exorcist) and looped them in his
video installations; for TV Shoot, 1998-99, he took scenes of shoot-
outs from the contemporary cinematic repertory and projected them
onto two screens that faced each other.
USING SOCIETY AS A CATALOG OF FORMS
When Matthieu Laurette is reimbursed for products he has consumed
by systematically using promotional coupons ("Satisfaction guaran-
teed or your money back"), he operates within the cracks of the pro-
motional system. When he produces the pilot for a game show on
the principle of exchange (El Gran trueque, 2000) or establishes an
offshore bank with the aid of funds from donation boxes placed at
the entrance of art centers (Laurette Bank Unlimited, 1999), he plays
with economic forms as if they were the lines and colors of a painting.
Jens Haaning transforms art centers into import-export stores and
clandestine workshops; Daniel Pflumm appropriates the logos of
multinationals and endows them with their own aesthetic life. Heger
and Dejanov take every job they can in order to acquire "objects of
desire" and rent their work force to BMW for an entire year. Michel
Majerus, who integrates the technique of sampling into his pictorial
practice, exploits the rich visual stratum of promotional packaging.
INVESTING IN FASHION AND MEDIA
The works of Vanessa Beecroft come from an intersection between
performance and the protocol of fashion photography; they reference
the form of performance without being reduced to it. Sylvie Fleury
indexes her production to the glamorous world of trends offered by
women's magazines, stating that when she isn't sure what colors to
use in her work, she uses the new colors by Chanel. John Miller has
produced a series of paintings and installations based on the aesthetic
of television game shows. Wang Du selects images published in
the press and duplicates them in three dimensions as painted wood
sculptures. . - - . - - . -
All these artistic practices, although formally heterogeneous, have in
common the recourse to already produced forms. They testify to a
willingness to inscribe the work of art within a network of signs and
significations, instead of considering it an autonomous or original form.
It is no longer a matter of starting with a "blank slate" or creating
meaning on the basis of virgin material but of finding a means of inser-
tion into the innumerable flows of production. "Things and thoughts,"
Gilles Deleuze writes, "advance or grow out from the middle, and that's
where you have to get to work, that's where everything unfolds."
01
The artistic question is no longer: "what can we make that is new?"
but "how can we make do with what we have?" In other words,
how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass
of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life?
Artists today program forms more than they compose them: rather
than transfigure a raw element (blank canvas, clay, etc.), they remix
available forms and make use of data. In a universe of products for
sale, preexisting forms, signals already emitted, buildings already
constructed, paths marked out by their predecessors, artists no longer
consider the artistic field (and here one could add television, cinema,
or literature) a museum containing works that must be cited or "sur-
passed," as the modernist ideology of originality would have it, but
so many storehouses filled with tools that should be used, stockpiles
of data to manipulate and present. When Tiravanija offers us the
experience of a structure in which he prepares food, he is not doing
a performance: he is using the performance-form. His goal is not
to question the limits of art: he uses forms that served to interrogate
these limits in the sixties, in order to produce completely different
results. Tiravanija often cites Ludwig Wittgenstein's phrase: "Don't
look for the meaning, look for the use." ;- .. -."
The prefix "post" does not signal any negation or surpassing; it refers
to a zone of activity. The processes in question here do not consist
of producing images of images, which would be a fairly mannered
posture, or of lamenting the fact that everything has "already been
01 GILLES DELEUZE, NEGOTIATIONS, TRANS. MARTIN JOUGHIN (NEW YORK: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
PRESS. 1995), P. 161.
done," but of inventing protocols of use for all existing modes of rep-
resentation and all formal structures. It is a matter of seizing all the
codes of the culture, all the forms of everyday life, the works of the
global patrimony, and making them function. To learn how to use
forms, as the artists in question invite us to do, is above all to know
how to make them one's own, to inhabit them. .. ,
The activities of DJs, Web surfers, and postproduction artists imply a
similar configuration of knowledge, which is characterized by the
invention of paths through culture. All three are "semionauts" who
produce original pathways through signs. Every work is issued from
a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework
of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly.
The DJ activates the history of music by copying and pasting together
loops of sound, placing recorded products in relation with each other.
Artists actively inhabit cultural and social forms. The Internet user may
create his or her own site or homepage and constantly reshuffle the
information obtained, inventing paths that can be bookmarked and re-
produced at will. When we start a search engine in pursuit of a name
or a subject, a mass of information issued from a labyrinth of data-
banks is inscribed on the screen. The "semionaut" imagines the links,
the likely relations between disparate sites. A sampler, a machine that
reprocesses musical products, also implies constant activity; to listen
to records becomes work in itself, which diminishes the dividing line
between reception and practice, producing new cartographies of
knowledge. This recycling of sounds, images, and forms implies in-
cessant navigation within the meanderings of cultural history, navi-
gation which itself becomes the subject of artistic practice. Isn't art,
as Duchamp once said, "a game among all men of all eras?"
Postproduction is the contemporary form of this game. : ':;_..-
When musicians use a sample, they know that their own contribution
may in turn be taken as the base material of a new composition.
They consider it normal that the sonorous treatment applied to the
borrowed loop could in turn generate other interpretations, and so
on and so forth. With music derived from sampling, the sample no
longer represents anything more than a salient point in a shifting car-
tography. It is caught in a chain, and its meaning depends in part on
its position in this chain. In an online chat room, a message takes on
value the moment it is repeated and commented on by someone else.
Likewise, the contemporary work of art does not position itself as the
termination point of the "creative process" (a "finished product" to be
contemplated) but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of
activities. We tinker with production, we surf on a network of signs,
we insert our forms on existing lines.
What unites the various configurations of the artistic use of the world
gathered under the term postproduction is the scrambling of bound-
aries between consumption and production. "Even if it is illusory and
Utopian," Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster explains, "what matters is
introducing a sort of equality, assuming the same capacities, the pos-
sibility of an equal relationship, between me - at the origins of an
arrangement, a system - and others, allowing them to organize their
own story in response to what they have just seen, with their own
references."
02
In this new form of culture, which one might call a culture of use or
a culture of activity, the artwork functions as the temporary terminal
of a network of interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends
and reinterprets preceding narratives. Each exhibition encloses within
it the script of another; each work may be inserted into different
02 DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER, "DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER, PIERRE HUYGHE AND PHILIPPE
PARRENO IN CONVERSATION WITH JEAN-CHRISTOPHE ROYOUX" IN DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER,
PIERRE HUYGHE, PHILIPPE PARRENO, EXH. CAT. (PARIS: MUSEE D'ART MODERNE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS,
1998), P. 82.
19
programs and used for multiple scenarios. The artwork is no longer
an end point but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions.
This culture of use implies a profound transformation of the status of
the work of art: going beyond its traditional role as a receptacle of
the artist's vision, it now functions as an active agent, a musical score,
an unfolding scenario, a framework that possesses autonomy and
materiality to varying degrees, its form able to oscillate from a simple
idea to sculpture or canvas. In generating behaviors and potential
reuses, art challenges passive culture, composed of merchandise and
consumers. It makes the forms and cultural objects of our daily lives
function. What if artistic creation today could be compared to a col-
lective sport, far from the classical mythology of the solitary effort?
"It is the viewers who make the paintings," Duchamp once said, an
incomprehensible remark unless we connect it to his keen sense of
an emerging culture of use, in which meaning is born of collaboration
and negotiation between the artist and the one who comes to view
the work. Why wouldn't the meaning of a work have as much to do
with the use one makes of it as with the artist's intentions for it?
THE USE OF OBJECTS
The difference between artists who produce works based on objects
already produced and those who operate ex nihilo is one that Karl
Marx observes in German Ideology: there is a difference, he says, be-
tween natural tools of production (e.g., working the earth) and tools
of production created by civilization. In the first case, Marx argues,
individuals are subordinate to nature. In the second, they are dealing
with a "product of labor," that is, capital, a mixture of accumulated
labor and tools of production. These are only held together by ex-
change, an interhuman transaction embodied by a third term, money.
The art of the twentieth century developed according to a similar
schema: the industrial revolution made its effects felt, but with some
delay. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited a bottle rack in 1914 and
used a mass-produced object as a "tool of production," he brought
the capitalist process of production (working on the basis of accu-
mulated labor) into the sphere of art, while at the same time indexing
the role of the artist to the world of exchange: he suddenly found
kinship with the merchant, content to move products from one place
to another. Duchamp started from the principle that consumption
was also a mode of production, as did Marx, who writes in his intro-
duction to Critique of Political Economy that "consumption is simul-
taneously also production, just as in nature the production of a plant
involves the consumption of elemental forces and chemical materials."
Marx adds that "man produces his own body, e.g., through feeding,
one form of consumption." A product only becomes a real product
in consumption; as Marx goes on to say, "a dress becomes really a
dress only by being worn, a house which is uninhabited is indeed
not really a house."
01
Because consumption creates the need for new
production, consumption is both its motor and motive. This is the
primary virtue of the readymade: establishing an equivalence between
choosing and fabricating, consuming and producing - which is
01 KARL MARX, A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, TRANS. S.W. RYAZAN!IKAYA,
ED. MAURICE DOES (NEW YORK: INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS, 1970), PP. 195-96.
difficult to accept in a world governed by the Christian ideology of
effort ("working by the sweat of your brow") or that of the worker-hero
(Stakhanovism).
In The Practice of Everyday Life, the astonishing structuralist Michel
de Certeau examines the hidden movements beneath the surface of
the Production-Consumption pair, showing that far from being purely
passive, the consumer engages in a set of processes comparable
to an almost clandestine, "silent" production.
02
To use an object is nec-
essarily to interpret it. To use a product is to betray its concept. To
read, to view, to envision a work is to know how to divert it: use is an
act of micropirating that constitutes postproduction. We never read
a book the way its author would like us to. By using television, books,
or records, the user of culture deploys a rhetoric of practices and
"ruses" that has to do with enunciation and therefore with language
whose figures and codes may be catalogued.
Starting with the language imposed upon us (the system of produc-
tion), we construct our own sentences (acts of everyday life), there-
by reappropriating for ourselves, through these clandestine micro-
bricolages, the last word in the productive chain. Production thus
becomes a lexicon of a practice, which is to say, the intermediary
material from which new utterances can be articulated, instead of rep-
resenting the end result of anything. What matters is what we make
of the elements placed at our disposal. We are tenants of culture:'
society is a text whose law is production, a law that so-called passive
users divert from within, through the practices of postproduction.
Each artwork, de Certeau suggests, is inhabitable in the manner of
a rented apartment. By listening to music or reading a book, we pro-
duce new material, we become producers. And each day we benefit
02 SEE MICHEL DE CERTEAU, THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE, TRANS. STEVEN RENDELL (BERKELEY:
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1984).
from more ways in which to organize this production: remoie : ; - r ol s,
VCRs, computers, MP3s, tools that allow us to select, r ecc' s^ct ,
and edit. Postproduction artists are agents of this evolution, re =oe-
cialized workers of cultural reappropriation.
THE USE OF THE PRODUCT FROM MARCEL DUCHAMP
T
O
JEFF KOONS
Appropriation is indeed the first stage of postproduction: the ss_^
is no longer to fabricate an object, but to choose one among : ~: ; e
that exist and to use or modify these according to a specific inter.:; -
Marcel Broodthaers said that "since Duchamp, the artist is the ai.~~_r
of a definition" which is substituted for that of the objects he or sne
has chosen. The history of appropriation (which remains to be written)
is nevertheless not the topic of this chapter; only a few of its figures,
useful to the comprehension of the most recent art, will be mentioned
here. If the process of appropriation has its roots in history, its nar-
rative here will begin with the readymade, which represents its first
conceptualized manifestation, considered in relation to the history
of art. When Duchamp exhibits a manufactured object (a bottle rack,
a urinal, a snow shovel) as a work of the mind, he shifts the prob-
lematic of the "creative process," emphasizing the artist's gaze brought
to bear on an object instead of manual skill. He asserts that the act
of choosing is enough to establish the artistic process, just as the act
of fabricating, painting, or sculpting does: to give a new idea to an
object is already production. Duchamp thereby completes the defini-
tion of the term creation: to create is to insert an object into a new
scenario, to consider it a character in a narrative.
The main difference between European New Realism and American
Pop resides in the nature of the gaze brought to bear on consumption.
Arman, Cesar, and Daniel Spoerri seem fascinated by the act of con-
sumption itself, relics of which they exhibit. For them, consumption is
truly an abstract phenomenon, a myth whose invisible subjec: seems
irreducible to any representation. Conversely, Andy Warhol, Claes
Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist bring their gaze to bear on the
purchase, on the visual impetus that propels an individual to acquire
a product: their goal is less to document a sociological phenomenon
than to exploit new iconographic material. They investigate, above all,
advertising and its mechanics of visual frontality, while the Europeans,
further removed, explore the world of consumption through the filter
of the great organic metaphor and favor the use value of things over
their exchange value. The New Realists are more interested in the
impersonal and collective use of forms than in the individual use
of these forms, as the works of "poster artists" Raymond Hains and
Jacques de la Villegle admirably show: the city itself is the anony-
mous and multiple author of the images they collect and exhibit as
artworks. No one consumes, things are consumed. Spoerri demon-
strates the poetry of table scraps, Arman that of trash cans and sup-
plies; Cesar exhibits a crushed, unusable automobile, at the end of its
destiny as a vehicle. Apart from Martial Raysse, the most 'American"
of the Europeans, the concern is still to show the end result of the pro-
cess of consumption, which others have practiced. The New Realists
have thus invented a sort of postproduction squared: their subject is
certainly consumption, but a represented consumption, carried out
in an abstract and generally anonymous way, whereas Pop explores
the visual conditioning (advertising, packaging) that accompanies
mass consumption. By salvaging already used objects, products that
have come to the end of their functional life, the New Realists can
be seen as the first landscape painters of consumption, the authors
of the first still lifes of industrial society.
With Pop art, the notion of consumption constituted an abstract theme
linked to mass production. It took on concrete value in the early
eighties, when it was attached to individual desires. The artists who lay
claim to Simulationism considered the work of art to be an "absolute
commodity" and creation a mere substitute for the act of consuming.
/ buy, therefore I am, as Barbara Kruger wrote. The object was shown
from the angle of the compulsion to buy, from the angle of desire,
midway between the inaccessible and the available. Such is the task
of marketing, which is the true subject of Simulationist works. Haim
Steinbach thus arranged mass-produced objects or antiques on
minimal and monochromatic shelves. Sherrie Levine exhibited exact
copies of works by Miro, Walker Evans and Degas. Jeff Koons dis-
played advertisements, salvaged kitsch icons, and floated basketbaTs
weightlessly in immaculate containers. Ashley Bickerton produced
a self-portrait composed of the logos of products he used in daily 'ffe.
Among the Simulationists, the work resulted from a contract stip^ a-
ting the equal importance of the consumer and the artist/purveyc.
Koons used objects as convectors of desire: "In the system I was
brought up in - the Western, capitalist system - one receives objects
as rewards for labour and achievement. ... And once these objects
have been accumulated, they work as support mechanisms for the
individual: to define the personality of the self, to fulfill desires and ex-
press them."
03
Koons, Levine, and Steinbach present themselves as
veritable intermediaries, brokers of desire whose works represent sim-
ple simulacra, images born of a market study more than of some
sort of "inner need," a value considered outmoded.The ordinary
object of consumption is doubled by another object, this one purely
virtual, designating an inaccessible state, a lack (e.g., Jeff Koons).
The artist consumes the world in place of the viewer, and for him.
He arranges objects in glass cases that neutralize the notion of use
in favor of a sort of interrupted exchange, in which the moment of
presentation is made sacred. Through the generic structure of the
shelf, Haim Steinbach emphasizes its predominance in our
mental
03 JEFF KOONS, FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH QIANCARLO POLITI IN FLASH ART, NO. 132. F== = _-,- . - = C-
1987, QUOTED BY ANN GOLDSTEIN IN A FOREST OF SIGNS: ART IN THE CRISIS OF REP^ESzT--Z> EZ
CATHERINE GUDIS (LA: MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AND CAMBRIDGE, MA: THE MIT PRE3= "9i 9. = 5
universe: we only look at what is well-presented; we only desire what
is desired by others. The objects he displays on his wood and Formica
shelves "are bought or taken, placed, matched, and compared. They
are moveable, arranged in a particular way, and when they get packed
they are taken apart again, and they are as permanent as objects
are when you buy them in a store." The subject of his work is what
happens in any exchange.
THE FLEA MARKET: THE DOMINANT ART FORM OF THE
NINETIES
As Liam Gillick explains, "in the eighties, a large part of artistic produc-
tion seemed to mean that artists went shopping in the right shops.
Now, it seems as though new artists have gone shopping, too, but
in unsuitable shops, in all sorts of shops."" The passage from the
eighties to the nineties might be represented by the juxtaposition of
two photographs: one of a shop window, another of a flea market
or airport shopping mall. From Jeff Koons to Rirkrit Tiravanija, from
Haim Steinbach to Jason Rhoades, one formal system has been
substituted for another: since the early nineties, the dominant visual
model is closer to the open-air market, the bazaar, the souk, a tem-
porary and nomadic gathering of precarious materials and products
of various provenances. Recycling (a method) and chaotic arrange-
ment (an aesthetic) have supplanted shopping, store windows, and
shelving in the role of formal matrices.
Why has the market become the omnipresent referent for contem-
porary artistic practices? First, it represents a collective form, a dis-
ordered, proliferating and endlessly renewed conglomeration that
does not depend on the command of a single author: a market is
not designed, it is a unitary structure composed of multiple individual
signs. Secondly, this form (in the case of the flea market) is the locus
04 SEE LIAM GILLICK IN WO MAN'S TIME, EXH. CAT. (NIZZA: CNAC VILLA ARSON, 1991). ' .
28
of a reorganization of past production. Finally, it embodies and makes
material the flows and relationships that have tended toward disem-
bodiment with the appearance of online shopping.
A flea market, then, is a place where products of multiple prov-
enances converge, waiting for new uses. An old sewing machine
can become a kitchen table, an advertising poster from the seventies
can serve to decorate a living room. Here, past production is re-
cycled and switches direction. In an involuntary homage to Marcel
Duchamp, an object is given a new idea. An object once used in
conformance with the concept for which it was produced now finds
new potential uses in the stalls of the flea market.
Dan Cameron used Claude Levi-Strauss's opposition between "the
raw and the cooked" as the title for an exhibition he curated: it in-
cluded artists who transformed materials and made them unrecog-
nizable (the cooked), and artists who preserved the singular aspect
of these materials (the raw). The market-form is the quintessential
place for this rawness: an installation by Jason Rhoades, for example,
is presented as a unitary composition made of objects, each of
which retains its expressive autonomy, in the manner of paintings
by Arcimboldo. Formally, Rhoades's work is quite similar to Rirkrit
Tiravanija's. Untitled (Peace Sells), which Tiravanija made in 1999,
is an exuberant display of disparate elements that clearly testifies to
a resistance to unifying the diverse, perceptible in all his work. But
Tiravanija organizes the multiple elements that make up his instal-
lations so as to underscore their use value, while Rhoades presents
objects that seem endowed with an autonomous logic, quasi-indif-
ferent to the human. We can see one or more guiding lines, structures
imbricated within one another, but the atoms brought together by
the artist do not blend completely into an organic whole. Each object
seems to resist a formal unity, forming subsets that resist projec-
tion into a vaster whole and that at times are transplanted from one
I
structure to another. The domain of forms that Rhoades is referencing,
then, evokes the heterogeneity of stalls in a market and the meander-
ing that implies: ". . . it's about relationships to people, like me to my
dad, or tomatoes to squash, beans to weeds, and weeds to corn,
corn to the ground and the ground to the extension cords."
05
As ex-
plicit references to the open markets of the artist's early days in
California, his installations conjure an alarming image of a world with
no possible center, collapsing on all sides beneath the weight of
production and the practical impossibility of recycling. In visiting them,
one senses that the task of art is no longer to propose an artificial
synthesis of heterogeneous elements but to generate "critical mass"
through which the familial structure of the nearby market metamor-
phoses into a vast warehouse for merchandise sold online, a mon-
strous city of detritus. His works are composed of materials and
tools, but on an outsize scale: "piles of pipes, piles of clamps, piles
of paper, piles of fabric, all these industrial quantities of things ..."
6
Rhoades adapts the provincial junk fair to the dimensions of Los
Angeles, through the experience of driving a car. When asked to ex-
plain the evolution of his piece Perfect World, he replies: "The really
big change in the new work is the car." Driving in his Chevrolet Caprice,
he was "in and out of [his] head, and in and out of reality," while the
acquisition of a Ferrari modified his relationship to the city and to his
work: "Driving between the studio and between various places, I am
physically driving, it's a great energy, but it's not this daydream wan-
dering head thing like before."
07
The space of the work is urban space,
traversed at a certain speed: the objects that endure are therefore ne-
cessarily enormous or reduced to the size of the car's interior, which
takes on the role of an optical tool allowing one to select forms. -.-
05 JASON RHOADES, PERFECT WORLD, EXH. CAT. (COLOGNE: OKTAGON/DEICHTORHALLEN HAMBURG,
2000), P. 15.
06 IBID., P. 22.
07 IBID., P. 53.
30
Thomas Hirschhorn's work relies not on spaces of exchange but
places where the individual loses contact with the social and becomes
embedded in an abstract background: an international airport, a
department store's windows, a company's headquarters, and so on.
In his installations, sheets of aluminum foil or plastic are wrapped
around vague everyday forms which, made uniform in this way, are
projected into monstrous, proliferating, tentacle-like form-networks.
Yet this work relates to the market-form insofar as it introduces el-
ements of resistance and information (political tracts, articles cut out
of newspapers, television sets, media images) into places typical of
the globalized economy. Visitors who move through Hirschhorn's envi-
ronments uneasily traverse an abstract, woolly, and chaotic organism.
They can identify the objects they encounter - newspapers, vehicles,
ordinary objects - but in the form of sticky specters, as if a computer
virus had ravaged the spectacle of the world and replaced it with a
genetically modified substitute. These ordinary products are presented
in a larval state, like so many interconnected matrices in a capillary
network leading nowhere, which in itself is a commentary on the
economy. A similar malaise surrounds the installations of George
Adeagbo, who presents an image of the African economy of recycling
through a maze of old record covers, scrap items, and newspaper
clippings, for which personal notes, analogous to a private journal, act
as captions, an irruption of human consciousness into the misery
of display.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the term "market" moved av.a..
from its physical referent and began to designate the abstract process
of buying and selling. In the bazaar, economist Michel Henochsberg
explains, "transaction goes beyond the dry and reductive simplifica-
tion in which modernity rigs it," assuming its original status as a nego-
tiation between two people. Commerce is above all a form of human
relations, indeed, a pretext destined to produce a relationsship. Any
transaction may be defined as "a successful encounter of histories,
1
affinities, wishes, constraints, habits, threats, skins, tensions."
08
,
Art tends to give shape and weight to the most invisible processes.
When entire sections of our existence spiral into abstraction as a
result of economic globalization, when the basic functions of our daily
lives are slowly transformed into products of consumption (including
human relations, which are becoming a full-fledged industrial concern),
it seems highly logical that artists might seek to rematerialize these
functions and processes, to give shape to what is disappearing before
our eyes. Not as objects, which would be to fall into the trap of reifica-
tion, but as mediums of experience: by striving to shatter the logic
of the spectacle, art restores the world to us as an experience to
be lived. Since the economic system gradually deprives us of this
experience, modes of representation must be invented for a reality
that is becoming more abstract each day. A series of paintings by
Sarah Morris that depicts the facades of multinational corporate head-
quarters in the style of geometric abstraction gives a physical place
to brands that appear to be purely immaterial. By the same logic,
Miltos Manetas's paintings take as subjects the Internet and the
power of computers, but use the features of physical objects situated
in a domestic interior to allow us access to them. The current suc-
cess of the market as a formal matrix among contemporary artists
has to do with a desire to make commercial relations concrete once
again, relations that the postmodern economy tends to make imma-
terial. And yet this immateriality itself is a fiction, Henochsberg sug-
gests, insofar as what seems most abstract to us - high prices for
raw materials or energy, say - are in reality the object of arbitrary
negotiations.
The work of art may thus consist of a formal arrangement that gen-
08 MICHEL HENOCHSBERG, NOUS NOUS SENTIONS COMME UNE SALE ESPECE: SUR LE COMMERCE ET
L'ECONOMIE (PARIS: DENOEL, 1999), P. 239.
32
erates relationships between people, or be born of a social process;
I have described this phenomenon as "relational aesthetics," whose
main feature is to consider interhuman exchange an aesthetic object
in and of itself.
With Everything NT$20 (Chaos minimal), 2000, Surasi Kusolwong
heaped thousands of brightly-colored objects onto rectangular
shelves with monochromatic surfaces. The objects - T-shirts, plastic
gadgets, baskets, toys, cooking utensils, and so on - were produced
in his country of origin, Thailand. The colorful piles gradually dimin-
ished, like Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "stacks," as visitors of the exhibition
carried away the objects for a small sum; the money was placed
in large transparent smoked-glass urns that explicitly evoked Robert
Morris's sculptures from the sixties. What Kusolwong's arrangement
clearly depicted was the world of transaction: the dissemination of
multicolored products in the exhibition space and the gradual filling
of containers by coins and bills provided a concrete image of com-
mercial exchange. When Jens Haaning organized a store in Fribourg
featuring products imported from France at prices clearly lower than
those charged in Switzerland, he questioned the paradoxes of a
falsely "global" economy and assigned the artist the role of smuggler.
THE USE OF FORMS
IF A VIEWER SAYS, "THE FILM I SAW WAS BAD," I SAY, "IT'S YOUR FAULT; WHAT DID YOU DO SO THAT
THE DIALOGUE WOULD BE GOOD?" (JEAN-LUC GODARD)
THE EIGHTIES AND THE BIRTH OF DJ CULTURE: TOWARD A
FORMAL COLLECTIVISM
Throughout the eighties, the democratization of computers and the
appearance of sampling allowed for the emergence of a new cul-
tural configuration, whose emblematic figures are the programmer
and the DJ. The remixer has become more important than the in-
strumentalist, the rave more exciting than the concert. The suprem-
acy of cultures of appropriation and the reprocessing of forms calls
for an ethics: to paraphrase Philippe Thomas, artworks belong to
everyone. Contemporary art tends to abolish the ownership of forms,
or in any case to shake up the old jurisprudence. Are we heading
toward a culture that would do away with copyright in favor of a
policy allowing free access to works, a sort of blueprint for a com-
mmunism of forms
In 1956, Guy Debord published "Methods of Detournement:" "The lit-
erary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan
propaganda purposes. ... Any elements, no matter where they are
taken from, can serve in making new combinations. ... Anything
can be used. It goes without saying that one is not limited to correct-
ing a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works
into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of these fragments in
any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation
of 'citations.'"
01
With the Lettrist international, then the Situationist International that
followed in 1958, a new notion appeared: artistic detournement
01 GUY DEBORD, "METHODS OF DETOURNEMENT" IN SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL ANTNGLOG- ED
AND TRANS. KEN KNABB (BERKELEY: BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS, 1981), P. 9.
(diversion),
02
which might be described as a political use of Duchamp's
reciprocal readymade (his example of this was "using a Rembrandt
as an ironing board"). This reuse of preexisting artistic elements in
a new whole was one of the tools that contributed to surpassing
artistic activity based on the idea of "separate" art executed by spe-
cialized producers. The Situationist International applauded the
detournement of existing works in the optic of impassioning every-
day life, favoring the construction of lived situations over the fabri-
cation of works that confirmed the division between actors and
spectators of existence. For Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and Gil Wolman,
the primary artisans of the theory of detournement, cities, buildings,
and works were to be considered parts of a backdrop or festive and
playful tools. The Situationists extolled la derive (or drift), a technique
of navigating through various urban settings as if they were film sets.
These situations, which had to be constructed, were experienced,
ephemeral, and immaterial works, an art of the passing of time resis-
tant to any fixed limitations. Their task was to eradicate, with tools
borrowed from the modern lexicon, the mediocrity of an alienated
everyday life in which the artwork served as a screen, or a consola-
tion, representing nothing other than the materialization of a lack.
As Anselm Jappe writes, "the Situationist criticism of the work of art
is curiously reminiscent of the psychoanalytical account, according to
which such productions are the sublimation of unfulfilled wishes."
03
The Situationist detournement was not one option in a catalog of
artistic techniques, but the sole possible mode of using art, which
represented nothing more than an obstacle to the completion of
the avant-garde project. As Asger Jorn asserts in his essay "Peinture
02 IN SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, DEBORD'S TRANSLATOR, DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH, LEAVES
DETOURNEMENT IN FRENCH, OCCASIONALLY INTERCHANGING IT WITH "DIVERSION.- DETOURNEMENT
CAN ALSO MEAN HIJACKING, EMBEZZLEMENT AND CORRUPTION - TRANS.
03 ANSELM JAPPE, GUY DEBORD, TRANS. DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH (BERKELEY: UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1999), P. 70.
36
detournee" (Diverted Painting, 1959), all the works of the past must be
"reinvested" or disappear. There cannot, therefore, be a "Situationist
art," but only a Situationist use of art, which involves its depreciation.
The "Report on the Construction of Situations...," which Guy Debord
published in 1957, encouraged the use of existing cultural forms by
contesting any value proper to them. Detournement, as he would
specify later in Society of the Spectacle, is "not a negation of style, but
the style of negation."
04
Jorn defined it as "a game" made possible
by "devalorization."
While the detournement of preexisting artworks is a currently employed
tool, artists use it not to "devalorize" the work of art but to utilize it. In
the same way that Surrealists used Dadaist techniques to a construc-
tive end, art today manipulates Situationist methods without targeting
the complete abolition of art. We should note that an artist such as
Raymond Hains, a splendid practitioner of la derive and instigator of
an infinite network of interconnected signs, emerges as a precursor
here. Artists today practice postproduction as a neutral, zero-sum
process, whereas the Situationists aimed to corrupt the value of the di-
verted work, i.e., to attack cultural capital itself. As Michel de Certeau
has suggested, production is a form of capital by which consumers
carry out a set of procedures that makes them renters of culture.
While recent musical trends have made detournement banal, artworks
are no longer perceived as obstacles but as building materials. Any
DJ today bases his or her work on principles inherited from the history
of the artistic avant-garde: detournement, reciprocal or assisted ready-
mades, the dematerialization of activities, and so on.
According to Japanese musician Ken Ishii, "the history of techno music
04 GUY DEBORD, SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, TRANS, DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH (NEW YORK: ZEC
BOOKS, 1994), P, 144. -
;
- '
:;
'''->?-=-
resembles that of the Internet. Now everyone can compose musics
endlessly, musics that are broken down more and more into different
genres based on everyone's personality. The entire world will be filled
with diverse, personal musics, which will inspire even more. I'm sure
that new musics will be born from now on, unceasingly."
05
During a set, a DJ plays records, i.e., products. The DJ's work con-
sists both of proposing a personal orbit through the musical universe
(a playlist) and of connecting these elements in a certain order, pay-
ing attention to their sequence as well as to the construction of an
atmosphere (working directly on the crowd of dancers or reacting to
their movements). He or she may also act physically on the object
being used, by scratching or using a whole range of actions (filters,
adjusting the mixing levels, adding sounds, and so on). A DJ's set is
not unlike an exhibition of objects that Duchamp would have described
as "assisted readymades:" more or less modified products whose
sequence produces a specific duration. One can recognize a DJ's
style in the ability to inhabit an open network (the history of sound)
and in the logic that organizes the links between the samples he or
she plays. Deejaying implies a culture of the use of forms, which con-
nects rap, techno, and all their subsequent by-products.
Clive Campbell, alias DJ Kool Here, already practiced a primitive form
of sampling in the seventies, the "breakbeat," which involved isolating
a musical phrase and looping it by going back and forth between two
turntables playing copies of the same vinyl record. .
As DJ Mark the 45 King says: "I'm not stealing all their music, I'm
using your drum track, I'm using this little 'bip' from him, I'm using
your bassline that you don't even like no fucking more."
06
-^ / >
05 GUILLAUME BARA, LA TECHNO (PARIS: LIBRIO, 1999), P. 60.
DEEJAYING AND CONTEMPORARY ART: SIMILAR
CONFIGURATIONS
When the crossfader of the mixing board is set in the middle, two
samples are played simultaneously: Pierre Huyghe presents an inter-
view with John Giorno and a film by Andy Warhol side by side.
The pitch control allows one to control the speed of the record:
24 Hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon.
Toasting, rapping, MCing: Angela Bulloch dubs Solaris by Andrei
Tarkovsky.
Cutting: Alex Bag records passages from a television program;
Candice Breitz isolates short fragments of images and repeats them.
Playlists: For their collaborative project Cinema Liberte Bar Lounge,
1996, Douglas Gordon offered a selection of films censored upon
their release, while Rirkrit Tiravanija constructed a festive setting for
the programming.
In our daily lives, the gap that separates production and consumption
narrows each day. We can produce a musical work without being
able to play a single note of music by making use of existing records.
More generally, the consumer customizes and adapts the products
that he or she buys to his or her personality or needs. Using a remote
control is also production, the timid production of alienated leisure
time: with your finger on the button, you construct a program. Soon,
Do-lt-Yourself will reach every layer of cultural production: the musi-
cians of Coldcut accompany their album Let us play (1997) with a
CD-ROM that allows you to remix the record yourself.
The ecstatic consumer of the eighties is fading out in favor of an intel-
ligent and potentially subversive consumer: the user of forms.
06 S.H. FERNANDO JR., THE NEW BEATS: EXPLORING THE MUSIC, CULTURE AND ATTITUDES OF HIP-HOP
(NEW YORK: ANCHOR BOOKS/DOUBLEDAY, 1994), P. 246. [THE FRENCH EDITION WAS PUBLISHED IN PARIS
BY KARGO IN 2000.] ' ::.. v
;
- v\ ; ~" X' . ' ' ' > ' - . ^ - ' ' : %
DJ culture denies the binary opposition between the proposal of the
transmitter and the participation of the receiver at the heart of many
debates on modern art. The work of the DJ consists in conceiving
linkages through which the works flow into each other, representing
at once a product, a tool, and a medium. The producer is only a trans-
mitter for the following producer, and each artist from now on evolves
in a network of contiguous forms that dovetail endlessly. The product
may serve to make work, the work may once again become an ob-
ject: a rotation is established, determined by the use that one makes
of forms.
As Angela Bulloch states, "when Donald Judd made furniture, he said
something like: 'a chair is not a sculpture, because you can't see it
when you're sitting on it.' So its functional value prevents it from being
an art object, but I don't think that makes any sense."
The quality of a work depends on the trajectory it describes in the cul-
tural landscape. It constructs a linkage between forms, signs, and
images.
In the installation Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to
Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses, 1999, Mike Kelley en-
gages in a veritable archaeology of modernist culture, organizing a
confluence of iconographic sources that are heterogeneous to say the
least: Noguchi's sets for ballets by Martha Graham, scientific experi-
ments on children's reaction to TV violence, Harlow's experiments on
the love life of monkeys, performance, video, and Minimalist sculpture.
Another of his works, Framed & Frame (Miniature Reproduction
"Chinatown Wishing Well" built by Mike Kelley after "Miniature Repro-
duction Seven Star Cavern" built by Prof. H. K. Lu), 1999, reconstructs
and deconstructs the Chinatown Wishing Well in Los Angeles in
two distinct installations, as if the popular votive sculpture and its
touristic setting (a low wall surrounded by wire fencing) belonged
to "different categories."
07
Here again, the ensemble blends hetero-
geneous aesthetic universes: Chinese-American kitsch, Buddhist and
Christian statuary, graffiti, tourist infrastructures, sculptures by Max
Ernst, and abstract art. With Framed & Frame, Kelley strove "to render
shapes generally used to signify the formless," to depict visual con-
fusion, the amorphous state of the image, "the unfixed qualities of
cultures in collision."
08
These clashes, which represent the everyday
experience of city dwellers in the twenty-first century, also represent
the subject of Kelley's work: global culture's chaotic melting pot, into
which high and low culture, East and West, art and nonart, and an
infinite number of iconic registers and modes of production are poured.
The separation in two of the Chinatown Wishing Well, aside from
obliging one to think of its frame as a "distinct visual entity,"
09
more
generally indicates Kelley's major theme: detourage,
10
which is to say,
the way our culture operates by transplanting, grafting, and decon-
textualizing things. The frame is at once a marker - an index that
points to what should be looked at - and a boundary that prevents
the framed object from lapsing into instability and abstraction, i.e.,
the vertigo of that which is not referenced, wild, "untamed" culture.
Meanings are first produced by a social framework. As the title of
an essay by Keliey puts it, "meaning is confused spatiality, framed."
High culture relies on an ideology of framing and the pedestal, on the
exact delineation of the objects it promotes, enshrined in categories
and regulated by codes of presentation. Low culture, conversely,
develops in the exaltation of outer limits, bad taste, and transgression
07 MIKE KELLEY, 'THE MEANING IS CONFUSED SPATIALITY, FRAMED" IN MIKE KELLEY, EXH. CA" 3=E\ -: S_
LEMAGASIN, 1999), P. 62.
08 IBID., R 64. , - ~
09 IBID.
10 DETOURAGE IS THE PROCESS OF BLOCKING OUT THE BACKGROUND (OF A PROFILE. ETC4 MI H J K V
GRAPHY OR ENGRAVING - TRANS.
41
- which does not mean that it does not produce its own framing
system. Kelley's work proceeds by short-circuiting these two focal
points, the tight framing of museum culture mixed with the blur that
surrounds pop culture. D&ourage, the seminal gesture in Kelley's
work, appears to be the major figure of contemporary culture as well:
the embedding of popular iconography in the system of high art, the
decontextuaiization of the mass-produced object, the displacement of
works from the canon toward commonplace contexts. The art of
the twentieth century is an art of montage (the succession of images)
and detourage (the superimposition of images).
Kelley's "Garbage Drawings," 1988, for example, have their origin in
the depiction of garbage in comic strips. One might compare them to
Bertrand Lavier's "Walt Disney Productions" series, 1985, in which the
paintings and sculptures that form the backdrop of a Mickey Mouse
adventure in the Museum of Modem Art, published in 1947, become
real works. Kelley writes: "Art must concern itself with the real, but it
throws any notion of the real into question. It always turns the real into
a facade, a representation, and a construction. But it also raises ques-
tions about the motives of that construction."
11
And these "motives"
are expressed by mental frames, pedestals, and glass cases. By cut-
ting out cultural or social forms (votive sculptures, cartoons, theater
sets, drawings by abused children) and placing them in another con-
text, Kelley uses forms as cognitive tools, freed from their original
packaging.
John Armieder manipulates similarly heterogeneous sources: mass-
produced objects, stylistic markers, works of art, furniture. He might
pass for the prototype of the postmodern artist; above all, he was
among the first to understand that the modern notion of the new
needed to be replaced with a more useful notion as quickly as possible.
11 MIKEKELLEY.OP.Cn.
42
After all, he explains, the idea of newness was merely a stimulus.
It seemed inconceivable to him "to go to the country, sit down in front
of an oak tree and say: 'but I've already seen that!'"
12
The end of
the modernist fe/os (the notions of progress and the avant-garde)
opens a new space for thought: now what is at stake is to positivize
the remake, to articulate uses, to place forms in relation to each other,
rather than to embark on the heroic quest for the forbidden and
the sublime that characterized modernism. Armieder relates acquiring
objects and arranging them in a certain way - the art of shopping
and display - to the cinematic productions pejoratively referred to
as B-movies. A B-movie is inscribed within an established genre
(the western, the horror film, the thriller) of which it is a cheap by-
product, while remaining free to introduce variants in this rigid frame-
work, which both allows it to exist and limits it, For Armieder, modern
art as a whole constitutes a bygone genre we can play with, the
way Don Siegel, Jean-Pierre Melville, John Woo, or Quentin Tarantino
take pleasure in abusing the conventions of film noir. Armleder's
works testify to a shifted use of forms, based on a principle of mise-
en-scene that favors the tensions between commonplace elements
and more serious items: a kitchen chair is placed under an abstract,
geometrical painting, spurts of paint in the style of Larry Poons run
alongside an electric guitar. The austere and minimalist aspect of
Armleder's works from the eighties reflect the cliches inherent in this
B-movie modernism. "It might seem that I buy pieces of furniture
for their formal virtues, and from a formalist perspective," Armieder
explains. "You might say that the choice of an object has to do with an
overall decision that is formalist, but this system favors decisions
that are completely external to form: my final choice makes fun of
the somewhat rigid system that I use to start with. If I am looking
for a Bauhaus sofa of a certain length, I might end up bringing back
12 JOHN ARMLEDER IN CONVERSATION WITH NICOLAS BOURRIAUD AND ERIC TRONCY, D0CUW&(T5
SUR L'ART, NO. 6, FALL 1994.
y :
a Louis XVI. My work undermines itself: all the theoretical reasons
end up being negated or mocked by the execution of the work."
13
In Armleder's work, the juxtaposition of abstract paintings and post-
Bauhaus furniture transforms these objects into rhythmic elements,
just as the "selector" in the early days of hip-hop mixed two records
with the crossfader of the mixing board. "A painting by Bernard
Buffet alone is not very good, but a painting by Bernard Buffet with
a Jan Vercruysse becomes extraordinary."
14
The early nineties saw
Armleder's work lean toward a more open use of subculture. Disco
balls, a well of tires, videos of B-movies - the work of art became
the site of a permanent scratching. When Armleder placed Lynda
Benglis's Plexiglas sculptures from the seventies against a back-
ground of Op-art wallpaper, he functioned as a remixer of realities.
Bertrand Lavier functions in a similar way when he superimposes a re-
frigerator onto an armchair (Brandt on Rue de Passy) or one perfume
onto another (Chanel No. 5 on Shalimar), grafting objects in a playful
questioning of the category of "sculpture." His TV Painting, 1986,
shows seven paintings by Jean Fautrier, Charles Lapicque, Nicolas De
Stael, Lewensberg, On Kawara, Yves Klein, and Lucio Fontana, each
broadcast by a television set whose size corresponds to the format of
the original work. In Lavier's work, categories, genres, and modes
of representation are what generate forms and not the reverse.
Photographic framing thus produces a sculpture, not a photograph.
The idea of "painting a piano" results in a piano covered in a layer of
expressionistic paint. The sight of a whitened store window generates
an abstract painting. Like Armleder and Kelley, Lavier takes as ma-
terial the established categories that delimit our perception of culture.
Armleder considers them subgenres in the B-movie of modernism;
Kelley deconstructs their figures and compares them with the practices
1 3 B I D . - . . . - . . .
:
- . . . - . . . - . - . - ; - . . - . - - - , - : r > : j o 4 . . : - - . " . ' . . ' - . , ' ._
14 IBID. - - . - . : , '
44
of popular culture; Lavier shows how artistic categories (painting,
sculpture, photography), treated ironically as undeniable facts, pro-
duce the very forms that constitute their own subtle critique.
It might seem that these strategies of reactivation and the deejaying
of visual forms represent a reaction to the overproduction or inflation
of images. The world is saturated with objects, as Douglas Huebler
said in the sixties, adding that he did not wish to produce more.
While the chaotic proliferation of production led Conceptual artists to
the dematerialization of the work of art, it leads postproduction artists
toward strategies of mixing and combining products. Overproduction
is no longer seen as a problem, but as a cultural ecosystem,
WHEN SCREENPLAYS BECOME FORM: A USER'S GUIDE
TO THE WORLD
Postproduction artists invent new uses for works, including audio or
visual forms of the past, within their own constructions. But they also
reedit historical or ideological narratives, inserting the elements that
compose them into alternative scenarios.
Human society is structured by narratives, immaterial scenarios, which
are more or less claimed as such and are translated by lifestyles,
relationships to work or leisure, institutions, and ideologies. Economic
decision-makers project scenarios onto the world market. Political
authorities devise plans and discourses for the future. We live within
these narratives. Thus, the division of labor is the dominant employ-
ment scenario; the heterosexual married couple, the dominant sexual
scenario; television and tourism, the favored leisure scenario. "We
are all caught within the scenario play of late capitalism," writes Uam
Gillick. "Some artists manipulate the techniques of 'prevision' so as to
let the motivation show."
15
For artists today contributing to the birth of
a culture of activity, the forms that surround us are the materializations
of these narratives. Folded and hidden away in all cultural products
as well as in our everyday surroundings, these narratives reproduce
communal scenarios that are more or less implicit: a cell phone, an
article of clothing, the credits of a television show, and a company
logo all spur behaviors and promote collective values and visions of
the world.
Gillick's works question the dividing line between fiction and fact
by redistributing these two notions via the concept of the scenario.
This is seen from a social point of view, as a set of discourses of fore-
casting and planning by which the socioeconomic universe and the
imagination factories of Hollywood invent the present. "The produc-
tion of scenarios is one of the key components in maintaining the level
of mobility and reinvention required to provide the dynamic aura of
so-called free-market economies."
16
M r.-, "s H'V.-^-K: ^:.
;
v-
Postproduction artists use these forms to decode and produce dif-
ferent story lines and alternative narratives. Just as through psycho-
analysis our unconscious tries, as best it can, to escape the presumed
fatality of the familial narrative, art brings collective scenarios to con-
sciousness and offers us other pathways through reality, with the help
of forms themselves, which make these imposed narratives material.
By manipulating the shattered forms of the collective scenario, that is,
by considering them not indisputable facts but precarious structures
to be used as tools, these artists produce singular narrative spaces
of which their work is the mise-en-scene. It is the use of the world
that allows one to create new narratives, while its passive contempla-
tion relegates human productions to the communal spectacle. There
is not living creation, on the one hand, and the dead weight of the
15 LIAM GILLIOK, "SHOULD THE FUTURE HELP THE PAST?" IN DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER, PIERRE
HUYGHE, PHILIPPE PARRENO, P.17. REPRINTED IN FIVE OR SIX (NEW YORK: LUKAS S STERNBERG, 1999), P. 40.
16 IBID., p. 9. " {; : '. -'::' Xx'
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46 ' .
I
history of forms, on the other: postproduction artists do not make a
distinction between their work and that of others, or between their own
gestures and those of viewers.
:
.
RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA - - - > -
In the works of Pierre Huyghe, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-
Foerster, Jorge Pardo, and Philippe Parreno, the artwork represents
the site of a negotiation between reality and fiction, narrative and
commentary. The viewer of an exhibition by Rirkrit Tiravanija such as
Unfitted (One Revolution Per Minute), 1996, will spend some time
trying to distinguish the border between the artist's production and his
or her own. A crepe stand, surrounded by a table filled with visitors,
sits at the center of a labyrinth made of benches, catalogs, and tap-
estries; paintings and sculptures from the eighties accentuate the
space. Where does the kitchen stop, and where does the art begin,
when the work consists essentially of the consumption of a dish,
and visitors are encouraged to carry out everyday gestures just as the
artist is doing? This exhibition clearly manifests a will to invent new
connections between artistic activity and a set of human activities by
constructing a narrative space that captures quotidian tasks and
structures in script form, as different from traditional art as the rave
is from the rock concert. -; ':-: *x :;%:. ;
The title of a work by Tiravanija is nearly always accompanied by the
parenthetical mention of "lots of people." People are one of the com-
ponents of the exhibition. Rather than being limited to viewing a set
of objects offered for their appreciation, they are invited to mingle
and to help themselves. The meaning of the exhibition is constituted
by the use its "population" makes of it, just as a recipe takes on
meaning when a tangible reality is formed: spaces meant for the per-
formance of everyday functions (playing music, eating, resting, read-
ing, talking) become artworks, objects. The visitor at an exhibition by
Tiravanija is thus faced with the process that constitutes the meaning
of his or her own life, through a parallel (and similar) process that
constitutes the meaning of the work. Like a movie director, Tiravanija
is by turns active and passive, urging actors to adopt a specific atti-
tude, then letting them improvise; helping out in the kitchen before
leaving behind a simple recipe or leftovers. He produces modes of
sociality that are partially unforeseeable, a relational aesthetic whose
primary characteristic is mobility. His work is made of temporary
campsites, bivouacs, workshops, encounters, and trajectories: the
true subject of Tiravanija's work is nomadism, and it is through the
problematics of travel that one can clearly envision his formal universe,
In Madrid, he filmed the trip between the airport and the Reina Sofia
Center where he was participating in an exhibition (Untitled, para
Cuellos de Jarama to Torrejon de ardoz to Coslada to Reina Sofia,
1994). For the Lyon Biennial, he presented the car that brought him
to the museum (Son Voyage, Monsieur Ackerrnann, 1995). On the
road with Jiew, Jeaw, Jieb, Sri and Moo, 1998, consisted of a cross-
country road trip from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, the exhibition
site, with five students from Chiang Mai University. This long drive was
documented with video, photographs, and a travel diary on the
Internet; it was presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and re-
sulted in a catalog on CD-ROM. Tiravanija also reconstructs the
architectural structures he has visited, the way an immigrant might
take stock of the places he has left behind: his apartment on the
Lower East Side rebuilt in Cologne, one of the eight studios at Context
Studio in New York rebuilt at the Whitney Museum of Art ("Rehearsal
Studio No. 6"), the Gavin Brown gallery transformed into a rehearsal
space in Amsterdam. His work shows us a world made up of hotel
rooms, restaurants, stores, cafes, workplaces, meeting places and
encampments (the tent of Cinema de ville, 1998). The types of spaces
Tiravanija proposes are those that shape the everyday life of the up-
rooted traveler: they are all public spaces, with the exception of his
own apartment, whose form accompanies him abroad like a phantom
from his past life.
Tiravanija's art always has something to do with giving, or with the
opening of a space. He offers us the forms of his past and his tools
and transforms the places where he is exhibiting into places access-
ible to all, as during his first New York show (in 1993), for which he
invited the homeless to come in and eat soup. This immediate gen-
erosity might be likened to the Thai culture in which Buddhist monks
do not work but are encouraged to accept people's gifts.
Precariousness is at the center of a formal universe in which nothing is
durable, everything is movement: the trajectory between two places
is favored in relation to the place itself, and encounters are more im-
portant than the individuals who compose them. Musicians at a jam
session, customers at a cafe or restaurant, children at a school, audi-
ence members at a puppet show, guests at a dinner: these tempor-
ary communities are organized and materialized in structures that are
so many human attractors. By bringing together notions of commu-
nity and ephemerality, Tiravanija counters the idea that an identity
is indissoluble or permanent: our ethnicity, our national culture, our
personality itself are just baggage that we carry around. The nomads
that Tiravanija's work describes are allergic to national, sexual, and
tribal classifications. Citizens of international public space, they tra-
verse these spaces for a set amount of time before adopting new
identities; they are universally exotic. They make the acquaintance of
people of all sorts, the way one might hook up with strangers during
a long trip. That is why one of the formal models of Tiravanija's work
is the airport, a transitional place in which individuals go from boutique
to boutique and from information desk to information desk and join
the temporary micro-communities that gather while waiting to reach
a destination. Tiravanija's works are the accessories and decor of a
planetary scenario, a script in progress whose subject is how to in-
habit the world without residing anywhere.
PIERRE HUYGHE
While Tiravanija offers us models of possible narratives whose forms
blend art and everyday life, Pierre Huyghe organizes his work as a
critique of the narrative models offered us by society. Sitcoms, for
example, provide a mass audience with imaginary contexts with
which it can identify. The scripts are written based on what is called
a bible, a document that specifies the general nature of the action and
the characters, and the framework in which these must evolve.
The world that Huyghe describes is based on constraining narrative
structures, whose "soft" version is the sitcom; the function of artistic
practice is to make these structures function in order to reveal their
coercive logic and then to make them available to an audience likely
to reappropriate them. This vision of the world is not far removed
from Michel Foucault's theory of the organization of power: from top
to bottom of the social scale, a "micropolitics" reflects ideological
fictions that prescribe ways of living and tacitly organize a system of
domination. In 1996, Huyghe offered fragments of screenplays by
Stanley Kubrick, Jacques Tati, and Jean-Luc Godard to participants
in his casting sessions (Multiple Scenarios). An individual reading the
screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey on a stage only amplifies a
process that traverses the entirety of our social life: we recite a text
written elsewhere. And this text is called an ideology. The challenge,
then, is to learn to become the critical interpreter of this ideological
scenario, by playing with other scenarios and by constructing situation
comedies that will eventually be superimposed on the narratives
imposed on us. Huyghe's work aims to bring to light these implicit
scenarios and to invent others that would make us freer: citizens
would gain autonomy and freedom if they could participate in the
construction of the "bible" of the social sitcom instead of deciphering
its lines.
By photographing construction workers on the job, then exhibiting this
image on an urban billboard overlooking the construction site for
i
the duration of the project (Chantier Barbes-Rochechouart, 1994).
Huyghe offers an image of labor in real time: the activity of a group
of workers on a construction site is seldom documented, and the rep-
resentation here doubles or dubs it the way live commentary would.
In Huyghe's work, delayed representation is the primary site of social
falsification: the issue is not only to restore speech to individuals but
also to show the invisible work of dubbing while it is being done.
Dubbing, 1996, a video in which actors dub a film in French, plainly
illuminates this general process of dispossession: the grain of the
voice represents and manifests the singularity of speech that the im-
peratives of globalized communication force one to eradicate. It is
the subtitle versus the original version, the global standardization of
codes. This ambition in some ways recalls Godard of the militant
years, when he planned to reshoot Love Story and distribute cameras
to factory workers in order to thwart the bourgeois image of the
world, this falsified image that the bourgeoisie calls a "reflection of the
real." "Sometimes," Godard writes, "the class struggle is the struggle
of one image against another image and one sound against another
sound."
17
In this spirit, Huyghe produced a film {Blanche Neige Lucie,
1997) about Lucie Dolene, a French singer whose voice was used
by the Disney studios for the dubbed version of Snow White, in which
Lucie tries to obtain the rights to her voice. A similar process governs
the artist's version of Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon.
in which the protagonist of the original bank robbery (to which Lumet
bought the rights) finally has the opportunity to play his own role
one that was confiscated by Al Pacino: in both cases, individuals reap-
propriate their story and their work, and reality takes revenge on fic-
tion. All of Huyghe's work, for that matter, resides in this interstice
that separates reality from fiction and is sustained by its activism in
favor of a democracy of social sound tracks: dubbing versus redubbing.
1 7 J E A N - L U C G O D A R D , GODARD PAR GODARD. DES ANNEES MAO AUX ANNEES i . " = - = . -_
Fiction's swing toward reality creates gaps in the spectacle, "The
question is raised of whether the actors might not have become inter-
preters," says Huyghe, regarding his billboards of workers or passers-
by exhibited in urban space. We must stop interpreting the world, stop
playing walk-on parts in a script written by power. We must become
its actors or co-writers. The same goes for works of art: when Huyghe
reshoots a film by Alfred Hitchcock or Pier Paolo Pasolini shot by
shot or juxtaposes a film by Warhol with a recorded interview with
John Giorno, it means that he considers himself responsible for
their work, that he restores their dimension as scores to be replayed,
tools allowing the comprehension of the current world. Pardo ex-
presses a similar idea when he states that many things are more in-
teresting than his work, but that his works are "a model for looking
at things." Huyghe and Pardo restore works of the past to the world
of activity. Through pirate television (Mobile TV, 1995-98), casting
sessions, or the creation of the Association des Temps liberes (Asso-
ciation of Freed Time), Huyghe fabricates structures that break the
chain of interpretation in favor of forms of activity: within these setups,
exchange itself becomes the site of use, and the script-form becomes
a possibility of redefining the division between leisure and work that
the collective scenario upholds. Huyghe works as a monteur, or film
editor. And montage, writes Godard, is a "fundamental political notion.
An image is never alone, it only exists on a background (ideology) or
in relation to those that precede or follow it."
18
By producing images
that are lacking in our comprehension of the real, Huyghe carries
out political work: contrary to the received idea, we are not saturated
with images, but subjected to the lack of certain images, which must
be produced to fill in the blanks of the official image of the community.
Fenetre sur cour (Rear Window), 1995, is a video shot in a Parisian
apartment building that repeats the action and dialogue of Hitchcock's
18 IBID.
52
film shot by shot, reinterpreted in its entirety by young French actors
and set in a Parisian housing project. The "remake" affirms the idea of
a production of models that can be replayed endlessly, a synopsis
available for everyday activity.
The unfinished houses that serve as sets for Incivils, 1995, a "remake"
of Pasolini's Uccellacci e uccelini, represent "a provisional state, a
suspended time," since these buildings have been left unfinished in
order for their owners to avoid Italian tax laws. In 1996, Huyghe
offered visitors of the exhibition Traffic a bus ride toward the docks
of Bordeaux. Throughout their nighttime trip, travelers could view a
video that showed the image of the route they were following, shot in
the daytime. This shift between night and day, as well as the slight
delay due to red lights and traffic, introduced an uncertainty concern-
ing the reality of the experience: the superimposition of real time and
the mise-en-scene produced a potential narrative. While the image
becomes a tenuous link that connects us to reality, a splintered guide
to the lived experience, the meaning of the work has to do with a
system of differences: the difference between the direct and the
deferred, between a piece by Gordon Matta-Clark or a film by Warhol
and the projection of these works by Huyghe, between three versions
of the same film (L'Atlantique), between the image of work and the
reality of this work (Barbes-Rochechouarf), between the meaning of
a sentence and its translation (Dubbing), between a lived moment
and its scripted version (Dog Day Afternoon). It is in difference that
human experience occurs. Art is the product of a gap.
By refilming a movie shot by shot, we represent something other than
what was dealt with in the original work. We show the time that has
passed, but above all we manifest a capacity to evolve among signs.
to inhabit them. Reshooting Hitchcock's classic Rear Window in a
Parisian housing project with unknown actors, Huyghe exposes a skel-
eton of action rid of its Hollywood aura, thereby asserting a conception
of art as the production of models that may be endlessly repeated,
scenarios for everyday action. Why not use a fiction film to look at con-
struction workers erecting a building just outside our window? And
why not bring together the words of Pasolini's Uccellacci e uccelini
and a few unfinished buildings in a contemporary Italian suburb?
Why not use art to look at the world, rather than stare sullenly at the
forms it presents?
DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's "Chambres" series, home movies
and impressionist environments, sometimes strike the critic as too
intimate or too atmospheric. Yet she explores the domestic sphere
by placing it in relation with the most burning social questions; the
fact is that she works on the grain of the image more than on its
composition. Her installations set in motion atmospheres, climates,
inexpressible sensations of art, through a catalog of often blurry or
unframed images - images in the midst of being focused. In front
of a piece by Gonzalez-Foerster, it is the viewer's task to blend the
whole sensorially, the way a viewer's eye must optically blend the point-
illist stipplings of a Seurat. With her short film Riyo, 1998, it is even
up to the viewer to imagine the features of the protagonists, whose
faces are never presented to us, and whose phone conversation fol-
lows the course of a boat ride on a river across Kyoto. The facades
of buildings filmed in a continuous shot provide the framework of the
action; as in all of her work, the sphere of intimacy is literally projected
onto common objects and rooms, souvenir images, and floor plans
of houses. She is not content to show the contemporary individual
grappling with his or her private obsessions, but instead reveals the
complex structures of the mental cinema through which this individual
gives shape to his or her experience: what the artist calls automon-
tage, which starts with an observation on the evolution of our ways
of living.
:
The technologization of our interiors," Gonzaiez-Foerster writes,
"transforms our relationship to sounds and images,"
19
and turns the
individual into a sort of editing table or mixing board, the programmer
of a home movie, the inhabitant of a permanent film set. Here again,
we are faced with a problematic that compares the world of work
and that of technology, considered a source of the re-enchantment
of the everyday and a mode of production of the self. Her work is a
landscape in which machines have become objects that can be ap-
propriated, domesticated. Gonzalez-Foerster shows the end of tech-
nology as an apparatus of the state, its pulverization in everyday life
via such forms as computer diaries, radio alarm clocks, and digital
cameras used as pens. For Gonzalez-Foerster, domestic space rep-
resents not a site of withdrawal into the self but a site of confrontation
between social scripts and private desires, between received images
and projected images. It is a space of projection. All domestic in-
teriors function on the basis of a narrative of the self; they make up
a scripted version of everyday life as well as an analysis: recreating
the apartment of filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (RWF, 1993),
rooms that have been lived in, seventies decor, or a walk through a
park. Gonzalez-Foerster uses psychoanalysis in numerous projects
as a technique that allows the emergence of a new scenario: faced
with a blocked personal reality, the analysand works to reconstruct
the narrative of his or her life on the unconscious level, allowing the
mastery of images, behaviors, and forms that, until then, have eluded
him or her. The artist asks the visitor of the exhibition to trace the
floor plan of the house he or she inhabited as a child, or asks the
gailerist Esther Schipper to entrust her with childhood objects and
memories. The primary locus of experience for Gonzalez-Foerster is
the bedroom: reduced to an affective skeleton (a few objects, colors),
she materializes the act of memory - both emotional and aesthetic
19 DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER, "TROPICAUTY" IN DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER, piR==
HUYGHE, PHILIPPE PARRENO, R 122. V -'
memory, referencing Minimalist art in her aesthetic organization.
Her universe composed of affective objects and colored floor plans
is similar to the experimental films and home movies of Jonas Mekas:
Gonzalez-Foerster's work, which is striking in its homogeneity, seems
to constitute a film of domestic forms on which images are projected.
She presents structures where memories, places, and everyday facts
are inscribed. This mental film is the object of more elaborate treat-
ment than the narrative structure, itself sufficiently open to accommo-
date the viewer's lived experience, indeed, to provoke his or her own
memory, as in a psychoanalytical session. Should we, in the presence
of her work, practice the floating gaze, analogous to the floating
listening through which analysts facilitate the flow of memories?
Gonzalez-Foerster's works are characterized by this vagueness -
at once intimate and impersonal, austere and free - that blurs the
contours of all narratives of everyday life.
LIAM GILLICK
Liam Gillick's work presents itself as an ensemble of layers (archives,
stage sets, posters, billboards, books) from which he produces pieces
that might make up the set of a film or the materialization of a script.
In other words, the narrative that constitutes his work circulates around
and through the objects he exhibits, without these objects being merely
illustrative. Each work functions as a folded scenario that contains
indexes from areas of parallel knowledge (art, industry, urbanism,
politics, and so on). Through individuals who played a major role in
history while remaining in the shadows (Ibuka, the former vice chair-
man of Sony; Erasmus Darwin, the libertarian brother of the evolution-
ist; Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during the Vietnam War),
Gillick fabricates tools of exploration that target the intelligibility of
our era. A part of his work aims to destroy the border between the
narrative arrangements of fiction and those of historical interpretation,
to establish new connections between documentary and fiction.
A sense of the artwork as analytical of scenarios allows him to sub-
stitute the historian's empirical succession ("this is what happened")
with narratives that propose alternative possibilities of thinking about
the current world, usable scenarios and courses of action. The real,
to really be thought, must be inserted into fictional narratives; the work
of art, which inserts social facts into the fiction of a coherent world,
must in turn generate potential uses of this world, a mental logistics
that favors change. Like the exhibitions of Tiravanija, those of Gillick
imply the participation of the audience: his work is composed of
negotiation tables, discussion platforms, empty stages, bulletin boards,
drawing tables, screens, and information rooms - collective, open
structures. "I try to encourage people," he writes, "to accept that the
work of art presented in a gallery is not the resolution of ideas and
objects." By maintaining the myth of the artwork as a problem re-
solved, we annihilate the action of the individual or groups on history.
If the forms Gillick exhibits closely resemble the decor of everyday
alienation (logos, elements from bureaucratic archives or offices,
conference rooms, specific spaces of economic abstraction), their
titles and the narratives they refer to evoke decisions to be made,
uncertainties, possible engagements. The forms he produces always
seem suspended; there is an ambiguity to how "finished" or "unfin-
ished" they are. For his exhibition Erasmus is late in Berlin, 1996, each
wall in the Schipper & Krome gallery was painted a different color,
but the layer of paint stopped midway, the brushstrokes obvious.
Nothing is more violently foreign to the industrial world than incomple-
tion, than quickly assembled tables or abandoned paint jobs. A man-
ufactured object cannot be incomplete in this way. The "incomplete"
status of Gillick's works raises the question: at what point in the
development of the industrial process did mechanization destroy the
last traces of human intervention? What role does modern art play
in this process? Modes of mass production destroy the object as
scenario in order to assert its foreseeable, controllable, routine char-
acter. We must reintroduce the unforeseeable, the uncertainty, play:
It:
thus certain of Gillick's pieces may be produced by others, in the
functionalist tradition inaugurated by Laszio Moholy-Nagy. Inside now,
we walked into a room with Coca-Cola painted walls, 1998, is a wall
drawing that must be painted by several assistants, according to pre-
cise rules: the object is to approximate the color of the famous soda,
brushstroke by brushstroke; the soda's mode of production follows
exactly the same process, since it is produced by local factories based
on the formula provided by the Coca-Cola Company. For an exhibi-
tion he curated at Gio Marconi Gallery in 1992, Gillick asked sixteen
English artists to send him instructions so that he could produce their
pieces himself on site.
The materials Gillick uses are derived from corporate architecture:
Plexiglas, steel, cables, treated wood, and colored aluminum. By con-
necting the aesthetic of Minimalist art with the muted design of multi-
national corporations, the artist draws a parallel between universalistic
modernism and Reaganomics, the project of emancipation of the
avant-gardes and the protocol of our alienation in a modern economy.
Parallel structures: Tony Smith's Black Box becomes Gillick's "pro-
jected think tank." The documentation tables found in Conceptual art
exhibitions organized by Seth Siegelaub are used here to read fiction;
Minimalist sculpture is transformed into an element of role playing.
The modernist grid issued from the Utopia of Bauhaus and Construc-
tivism is confronted with its political reprocessing, i.e., the set of
motifs by which economic power has established its domination.
Weren't Bauhaus students the ones who conceived of the "Atlantic
Wall" bunkers during World War II? This archaeology of modernism
is particularly visible in a series of pieces produced on the basis of
Gillick's book Discussion Island Big Conference Center (1997), fiction
that presents a "think tank on think tanks." Indexing Donald Judd's
formal vocabulary and installed on the ceiling, these pieces bear titles
that refer to functions carried out in a corporate context: Discussion
Island Resignation Platform, Conference Screen, Dialogue Platform,
Moderation Platform, and so on. The phenomenology dear to Mini-
malist artists becomes a monstrous bureaucratic behaviorism, Gestalt
an advertising procedure. Gillick's works, like those of Carl Andre,
represent zones more than sculptures: here, one is meant to resign,
discuss, project images, speak, legislate, negotiate, take advice, direct,
prepare something, and so on. But these forms, which project pos-
sible scenarios, imply the creation of new scenarios.
MAURIZIO CATTELAN
In Untitled, 1993, the canvas is lacerated three times in the shape of
a Z, an allusion to the Z of Zorro in the style of Lucio Fontana, In
this apparently very simple work, at once minimalist and immediately
accessible, we find all the figures that compose Cattelan's work: the
exaggerated detournement of works of the past, the moralist fable,
and, above all, the insolent way of breaking into the value system,
which remains the primary feature of his style and which involves tak-
ing forms literally. While the laceration of a canvas for Fontana is a
symbolic and transgressive act, Cattelan shows us this act in its most
current acceptation, the use of a weapon, and as the gesture of a
comic villain. Fontana's vertical gesture opened onto the infiniteness
of space, onto the modernist optimism that imagined a place beyond
the canvas, the sublime within reach. Its reprise (in zigzags) by
Cattelan mocks the Fontana by indexing the work to a Walt Disney
television series about Zorro, quasi-contemporary to it. The zigzag
is the most frequently used movement in Cattelan's work: it is comic
and Chaplinesque in its essence, and it corresponds to errancy, or
waywardness. The artist as slalom racer may be tricky, his uncertain
bearing may be laughable, but he encircles the forms he brushes
up against while dispatching them to their status as accessory and
decor. Untitled is certainly a programmatic work, from the view-
point of form as well as method: the zigzag is Cattelan's sign. If
we consider the artist's numerous "remakes" of other artists' works,
we notice that the method is always identical: the formal structure
seems familiar, but layers of meaning appear almost insidiously, radi-
cally overturning our perception. Catteian's forms always show us
familiar elements dubbed, in voice-over, by cruel or sarcastic anec-
dotes. In Mon Oncle by Jacques Tati, a man sees a concierge pluck
a chicken. He then imitates the cackling of the animal, making the
poor woman jump as she is persuaded that it has come back to life.
Many of Catteian's works produce an analogous effect, when he cre-
ates "sound tracks" for works - Zorro's song for a Fontana, the Red
Brigade for a work that evokes Robert Smithson or Jannis Kouneiiis,
tomblike reflection before a hole in the style of the earthworks of the
sixties. When he installed a live donkey in a New York gallery beneath
a crystal chandelier in 1993, Cattelan indirectly alluded to the twelve
horses that Kouneiiis exhibited at the Attico gallery in Rome in 1969.
But the title of the work (Warning! Enter at your own risk. Do not
touch, do not feed, no smoking, no photographs, no dogs, thank you)
radically reverses the work's meaning, ridding it of its historicity
and its vitalist symbolism to turn it toward the system of representation
in the most spectacular sense of the term: what we are seeing is a
burlesque spectacle under high surveillance whose outer limits are
purely legal. The live animal is presented not as beautiful, or as new,
but as both dangerous for the public and incredibly problematic for
the gallerist. The reference to Kouneiiis is not gratuitous, as it seems
clear that Arte Povera represents the principal formal matrix of
Catteian's work, with regard to the composition of his images and
the spatial arrangement of readymade elements. The fact is that he
rarely uses mass-produced objects, or technology. His formal register
is composed of more natural elements (Jannis Kouneiiis, Giuseppe
Penone) or anthropomorphic ones (Giulio Paolini, Alighiero Boetti).
It is not a matter of influences, much less an homage to Arte Povera,
but a sort of linguistic "hard drive" that is quite discrete and that re-
flects Catteian's Italian visual education.
n 1968, Pier Paolo Calzolari exhibited Untitled (Malina), an installation
n which he presented an albino dog attached to the wall by a leash
n an environment that featured a pile of earth and blocks of ice.
One might think again of Catteian's menagerie of horses, donkeys,
dogs, ostriches, pigeons, and squirrels - except that his animals do
not symbolize anything or refer to any transcendent value, but merely
embody types, personages, or situations. The symbolic universe
developed by Arte Povera or Joseph Beuys disintegrates in Catteian's
work under the pressure of a troublemaker who constantly com-
oares forms and their contradictions and violently refuses any positive
v a l u e . ' " - . ? . - " - "
:
- ; -
:
: > ' . - - - " - - > . - -
This way of turning modernist forms against the ideologies that saw
them emerge - the modern ideologies of emancipation, of the sub-
lime - as well as against the art world and its beliefs, testifies more
to Catteian's caricatured ferocity than to a so-called cynicism. Some
of his exhibitions might at first glance evoke a Michael Asher or Jon
Knight, insofar as they reveal the economic and social structures of
the art system by centering on the gallerist or the exhibition space.
But very quickly, the conceptual reference gives way to another,
more diffuse impression, that of a real personalization of criticism,
which refers to the form of the fable as well as to a real will for nui-
sance. In 1993, Cattelan produced a piece that occupied the entire
Massimo de Carlo gallery in Milan; it could only be viewed from the
window. After explaining his idea in an interview, the artist concluded
by admitting: "I also wanted to see Massimo de Carlo outside the
gallery for a month." A troublemaker, the eternal bad student skulking
at the back of the classroom. We have the impression that Cattelan
considers his formal repertoire as piles of homework to be completed,
a set of imposed figures, a sort of detention which the artist/dunce
takes pleasure in turning into a joke. One of his earliest significant
pieces, Edizioni dell'obligio, 1991, was composed of schoolbooks
whose covers and titles had been modified by children, a sort of
scornful revenge against any agenda. As for the draperies and fabrics
of Arte Povera and the Anti-form of the sixties, they were used to
escape from the Castello di Rivara, where he was participating in his
first important group show in 1992: "I enjoyed watching what the
other artists were doing, how they reacted to the situation. That work
was not only metaphorical, it was also a tool. The night before the
opening, I let myself down from the window and I ran away." The work
presented was nothing other than a makeshift ladder made of knotted
sheets, hanging on the facade of the exhibition site. Following the
same principle, during Manifesta II in Luxembourg in 1998, Cattelan
exhibited an olive tree planted on an enormous diamond of earth.
A hurried observer might have thought it a remake of Beuys or Penone;
yet this vegetal element ultimately had nothing to do with the mean-
ing of the work, which was articulated around the offensive syntax
developed by the artist: to pinpoint the physical and ideological limits
of individuals and communities, to test the possibilities and patience
of institutions. . , , . . : . . .-.- .-, .-.-... :-
Felix Gonzalez-Torres used historicized forms to reveal their ideological
foundations and to construct a new alphabet to struggle against
sexual norms. Cattelan pushes the forms that he manipulates toward
conflict and comedy: seeking out conflicts with operators of the art
system through works that are ever more embarrassing, constricting,
or cumbersome, and highlighting the comedy that underlies the
power relations in this system through the intermediary of narratives
that derail the recent history of art toward the burlesque. In a word,
his behavior as an artist involves guiding the forms he manipulates
toward delinquency. . , - . . . ,-,-,
;
-.-.,....-.. -.
0
.
PIERRE JOSEPH: LITTLE DEMOCRACY - - - - - -
;
;-^;
Our lives unfold against a changing background of images and amid
a flux of data that envelops everyday life. Images are formatted like
products or are used to sell other objects; masses of data circulate.
D
ierre Joseph's artistic project consists of inscribing meaning within
:his environment: it is not another critical position, but a productive
oractice, analogous to one that makes its way through a network,
establishes an itinerary, and surfs. Joseph deals primarily with the
conditions of the appearance and functioning of images, starting
-'om the postulate that, these days, we reside within an enormous
mage zone, rather than in front of images: art is not another specta-
cle but an exercise of detourage. He develops a playful and instru-
mental relationship with forms, which he manipulates, samples, and
adapts to new uses, establishing different processes of reanimation.
Minimalist art thus serves as a set for Cache cache killer, 1991.
Abstract art decorates an exhibition in the form of a treasure hunt
(La chasse au tresor ou I'aventure du spectateur disponsible [The
Treasure Hunt or the Adventure of the Available Spectator], 1993),
and the works of Robert Delaunay and Maurizio Nannucci are recy-
cled as backdrops for new scenes in a film in which Joseph's "reani-
mated characters" wander about. In 1992, he remade pieces that'
interested him by Lucio Fontana, Jasper Johns, Helio Oiticica, and
Richard Prince. This instrumentalization of culture does not stem
from a casual attitude in relation to history; quite the contrary, it estab-
lishes the conditions for free behavior in a society of managed con-
sumption. In Joseph's work, the recycling of forms and images con-
stitutes the basis of an ethics: we must invent ways of inhabiting the
world. In the political sphere, submission to form has a name: dic-
tatorship. A democracy, on the other hand, calls for constant role
play, endless discussion, and negotiation. That Joseph chose the
title Little Democracy to refer to the set of live "reanimated characters"
seems completely logical. These characters, the first of which ap-
peared in 1991, are presented in the form of an outfit worn by an
extra. They are "installed" in the gallery or museum like any other
work, on the evening of the show's opening: then they are replaced
by a photograph, an index allowing the future owner to "reanimate"
the piece at his leisure. These characters come from the image-system
of mythology, video games, comic strips, movies, and advertising:
Superman, Catwoman, "color stealers" from a Kodak commercial,
a paintballer, Casper the Ghost, or a replicant from Blade Runner.
Sometimes, a slightly macabre element causes a shift: the surfer is
dead, an injured character wears a bandage around his head, the
ground where Superman stands is littered with cigarette butts and beer
bottles, the cowboy lies face down. Some are presented against
their true backgrounds: the blue of a bluescreen used for video super-
imposition, manifesting at once the characters' unreality and their
potential for displacement onto various backgrounds and into endless
scenarios. Others are presented as actors in an iconographic role
play, wandering around the museum or the space of a group exhibi-
tion, surrounded by other works: after Duchamp, who intended to
"use a Rembrandt as an ironing board," Joseph places his characters
amid modern art that has become decor. His work always aims for
the horizon of an exhibition in which the audience is hero: the art be-
comes a special effect in an interactive mise-en-scene. The process
of reanimating the figure is twofold: it reanimates the works next to
which the characters appear, and it makes the entire world a play-
ground, a stage, or a set. :-.. .- :.--. -, -.
This system is also a political project: the artist speaks of the intelligent
cohabitation of subjects and the backgrounds against which they
move about, of the intelligent coexistence of human beings and the
works they are given to admire. The reanimation of icons, which char-
acterizes the gallery of stock characters that make up Little Democracy,
represents a democratic form in its essence, without demagogy or
ponderous demonstration. Joseph is suggesting that we inhabit pre-
existing narratives and unceasingly refabricate the forms that suit us.
Here the goal of the image is to introduce playacting into systems of
representation to keep them from becoming frozen, to detach forms
from the alienating background where they become stuck if we take
them for granted. A superficial reading of the characters might lead
3ne to believe that Joseph is an artist of the unreal, of popular enter-
:ainments. Yet the fairy-tale figures, cartoon characters, and science
"ction heroes that populate this democracy do not call for a flight
from reality but urge us to experience our reality through fiction. In a
complex stage management of live characters, Casper the Ghost,
3upid, and the fairy function as so many images embedded in the
system of the division of labor: these imaginary beings, Joseph ex-
ciains, obey "a cyclical, controlled, and unchanging program," and
:neir functional status hardly differs from that of an assembly line
.'/orker at Renault, or a waiter in a restaurant who takes an order,
serves a meal, and brings the bill. These characters are extremely
Typecast; they are robot-portraits, images perfectly associated with
a model-character, with a defined function. The true mythology from
.vhich they arise is the ideology of the division of labor and the stan-
dardization of products. The realm of the imaginary, indexed to the
'egime of production, indiscriminately affects plumbers and super-
heroes. The fairy illuminates things with her magic wand, the auto
.vorker adjusts parts on an assembly line: work is the same every-
.vhere, and it is this world of unchanging processes and potential dead
ends that Joseph describes; images provide a way out.
~he images Joseph offers must be experienced: they must be appro-
oriated and reanimated and included in new arrangements. In other
.vords, meanings must be displaced. And tiny shifts create enormous
movements. Why do so many artists strive to remake, recopy, dis-
mantle, and reconstruct the components of our visual universe?
What makes Pierre Huyghe reshoot Hitchcock and Pasolini? What
3ompels Philippe Parreno to reconstruct an assembly line intended
for leisure? To produce an alternative space and time, that is, to rein-
troduce the multiple and the possible into the closed circuit of the
social, and for this, the artist must go back as far as possible in the
collective machinery. With the help of installations that affect the exhi-
Dition site, Joseph offers us experimental objects, active products.
and ar t wor ks t hat suggest new ways of appr ehendi ng t he real and
new t ypes of i nvestment in t he art wor l d. Little Democracy is some-
t hi ng we can inhabit. ..-...-; .- . , - . . . ; . , ,- ~ - - -
THE USE OF THE WORLD
I
ALL CONTENTS ARE GOOD, PROVIDED THEY DO NOT CONSIST OF INTERPRETATIONS BUT CONCERN
THE USE OF THE BOOK, THAT THEY MULTIPLY ITS USE, THAT THEY MAKE ANOTHER LANGUAGE WITHIN
ITS LANGUAGE. (GILLES DELEUZE) T'~:s ' : ' - ' : > -.-" : '
PLAYING THE WORLD: REPROGRAMMING SOCIAL FORMS
The exhibition is no longer the end result of a process, its "happy
ending" (Parreno) but a place of production. The artist places tools at
the public's disposal, the way Conceptual art events organized by
Seth Siegelaub in the sixties placed information at the disposal of the
visitor. Challenging established notions of the exhibition, the artists
of the nineties envisaged the exhibition space as a space of cohabi-
tation, an open stage somewhere between decor, film set, and infor-
mation center.
In 1989, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Bernard Joisten, Pierre Joseph,
and Philippe Parreno presented Ozone, an exhibition in the form of
"layers of information" on political ecology. The space was to be tra-
versed by visitors in such a way that they could create their own
visual montage. Ozone was offered as a "cinegenlc space" whose
ideal visitor would be an actor - an actor of information. The follow-
ing year, in Nice, the exhibition "Les Ateliers du Paradis" was present-
ed as a "film in real time." For the duration of the project, Joseph,
Parreno, and Philippe Perrin inhabited the gallery space - which was
fitted out with artworks from Angela Bulloch to Helmut Newton,
gadgets, a trampoline, a Coke can that moved to the beat of music,
and a selection of videos - a space in which they moved about ac-
cording to a schedule (English lessons, a therapist's visit, and so on).
On the evening of the opening, visitors were to wear a one-of-a-kind
T-shirt on which a generic word or phrase figured (Good, Special
Effect, Gothic), allowing the producer Marion Vernoux to drat a screen-
play in real time. In short, it was an exhibition in real time, a browser
launched in search of its contents. When Jorge Pardo produced his
Pier in Munster in 1997, he constructed an apparently functional object,
but the real purpose of this wooden jetty had yet to be determined.
Although Pardo presents everyday structures (tools, furniture, lamps),
he does not assign them specific functions: it is quite possible that
these objects are useless. What is there to do in an open shed at
the end of a jetty? Smoke a cigarette, as the vending machine affixed
to one of its walls encouraged? The visitor-viewer must invent func-
tions and rummage through his or her own repertory of behaviors.
Social reality provides Pardo with a set of utilitarian structures, which
he reprograms according to artistic knowledge (composition) and a
memory of forms (modernist painting).
From Andrea Zittel to Philippe Parreno, from Carsten Holler to Vanessa
Beecroft, the generation of artists in question here intermingles
Conceptual art and Pop art, Anti-form and Junk art, as well as certain
procedures established by design, cinema, economy, and industry:
it is impossible to separate the history of art from its social backdrop,
The ambitions, methods, and ideological postulates of these artists
are not, however, so far removed from those of a Daniel Buren, a
Dan Graham, or a Michael Asher twenty years earlier. They testify to
a similar will to reveal the invisible structures of the ideological appar-
atus; they deconstruct systems of representation and revolve around
a definition of art as visual information that destroys entertainment.
The generation of Daniel Pflumm and Pierre Huyghe nevertheless dif-
fers from preceding ones on an essential point: they refuse metonymy,
the stylistic figure that involves referring to a thing by one of its con-
stituent elements (for example, to say "the rooftops" for "the city").
The social criticism in which Conceptual artists engaged passed
through the filter of a critique of the institution: in order to show the
functioning of the whole of society, they explored the specific site in
which their activities unfolded, according to the principles of an ana-
lytical materialism that was Marxist in its inspiration. For instance,
Hans Haacke denounced the multinationals by evoking the financing
of art; Asher worked with the architectural apparatus of the museum
and the art gallery; Gordon Matta-Clark drilled through the floor of
the Yvon Lambert gallery {Descending Steps for Batan, 1977); Robert
Barry declared that the gallery showing him was closed (Closed
Gallery, 1969).
While the exhibition site constituted a medium in and of itself for
Conceptual artists, it has today become a place of production like
any other. The task of the critic is now less to analyze or critique this
space than to situate it in vaster systems of production, with which it
must establish and codify relations. In 1991, Joseph made an end-
less list of illegal or dangerous activities that took place in art centers
(from "shooting at airplanes" [cf. Chris Burden] to "making graffiti,"
"destroying the building," and "working on Sunday"), which made it a
"place for the simulation of virtual freedoms and experiences." A model,
a laboratory, a playing field: whatever it was, it was never the symbol
of anything, and certainly not a metonymy. ::--. -,
:
. ..
It is the socius, i.e., all the channels that distribute information and
products, that is the true exhibition site for artists of the current gen-
eration. The art center and the gallery are particular cases but form
an integral part of a vaster ensemble: public space. Thus Pflumm
exhibits his work indiscriminately in galleries, clubs, and any other
structure of diffusion, from T-shirts to records that appear in the cata-
log of his label Elektro Music Dept. He also produced a video on a
very particular product, his own gallery in Berlin (Neu, 1999). Therefore,
the issue is not to contrast the art gallery (a locus of "separate art,"
and therefore bad) with a public place imagined as ideal, where the
"noble gaze" of passersby is naively fetishized the way the "noble
savage" once was. The gallery is a place like any other, a space imbri-
cated within a global mechanism, a base camp without which no
expedition would be possible. A club, a school, or a street are not
"better places," but simply other places.
More generally, it has become difficult for us to consider the social
body as an organic whole. We perceive it as a set of structures de-
tachable from one another, in the image of the contemporary body
augmented with prostheses and modifiable at will. For artists of the
late-twentieth century, society has become both a body divided into
lobbies, quotas, and communities, and a vast catalog of narrative
frameworks.
What we usually call reality is a montage. But is the one we live in the
only possible one? From the same material (the everyday), we can
produce different versions of reality. Contemporary art thus presents
itself as an alternative editing table that shakes up social forms, re-
organizes them, and inserts them into original scenarios. The artist
deprograms in order to reprogram, suggesting that there are other
possible uses for the techniques and tools at our disposal.
Gillian Wearing and Pierre Huyghe have each produced videos based
on surveillance camera systems. Christine Hill created a travel agency
in New York that functioned like any other travel agency. Michael
Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset set up an art gallery in a museum during
Manifesta 2000 in Slovenia, Alexander Gyorfi has used forms from
the studio and the stage, Carsten Holler those of laboratory experi-
ments. The obvious point in common among these artists and
m a n y o f t h e m o s t c r e a t i v e t o d a y r e s i d e s i n t h i s c a p a c i t y t o u s e e x i s t -
i n g s o c i a l f o r m s . ' - -." :. -!. r .-: ' . ..-.' -:._... ,
All cultural and social structures represent nothing more than articles
of clothing that can be slipped on, objects to be experienced and
tested, Alix Lambert did this in Wedding Piece, a work documenting
her five weddings in one day. Matthieu Laurette uses newspaper
classified ads, television game shows, and marketing campaigns as
the media for his work. Navin Rawanchaikul works on the taxi sys-
tem the way others draw on paper. When Fabrice Hybert set up his
company, UR, he declared that he wanted "to make artistic use of
the economy," Joseph Grigely exhibits messages and scraps of paper
which he uses to communicate with others due to his deafness: he
reprograms a physical handicap into a production process. Showing
the concrete reality of his daily communication in his exhibitions,
Grigely takes as the medium of his work the intersubjective sphere
and gives form to his relational universe. We "hear the voices" of his
entourage. The artist makes captions for the remarks. He reorganizes
human words, fragments of speech, and written traces of conver-
sations, in a sort of intimate sampling, a domestic ecology. The written
note is a social form that is paid little attention, generally meant for
home or office use. In Grigely's work, it is freed of its subordinate sta-
tus and takes on the existential dimension of a vital tool of com-
munication: included in his compositions, it participates in a polyphony
that is born of a detournement.
In this way, social objects, from habits to institutions through the most
banal structures, are pulled from their inertia. By slipping into the
functional universe, art revives these objects or reveals their absurdity.
PHILIPPE PARRENO & ...
The originality of the group General Idea, formed in the early seventies,
was to work with social formatting: corporations, television, maga-
zines, advertising, fiction. "In my view," Phiiippe Parreno says, "they
were the first to think of the exhibition not in terms of forms or ob-
jects but of formats. Formats of representation, of reading the world.
The question that my work raises might be the following: what are
the tools that allow one to understand the world?"
01

Parreno's work starts from the principle that reality is structured like
a language, and that art allows one to articulate this language. He
01 PHILIPPE PARRENO, "GENERAL IDEA" IN DOCUMENTS SUR L'ART, NO. 4, OCTOBER 1993. PR 21-26.
also shows that all social criticism is doomed to failure if the artist is
content to plaster his or her own language over the one spoken by
authority. To denounce or "critique" the world? One can denounce
nothing from the outside; one must first inhabit the form of what
one wants to criticize. Imitation is subversive, much more so than dis-
courses of frontal opposition that only make formal gestures of sub-
version. It is precisely this defiance toward critical attitudes in con-
temporary art that leads Parreno to adopt a posture that might be
compared to Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is the unconscious, Jacques
Lacan said, that interprets symptoms, and does so much better than
the analyst. Louis Althusser said something similar from a Marxist per-
spective: real critique is a critique of existing reality by existing reality
itself. Interpreting the world does not suffice; it must be transformed.
It is this process that Parreno attempts, starting with the realm of
images, which he believes play the same role in reality as symptoms
do in an individual's unconscious. The question raised by a Freudian
analysis is the following: How are the events in a life organized? What
is the order of their repetition? Parreno questions reality in a similar
way, through the work of subtitling social forms and systematically
exploring the bonds that unite individuals, groups, and images.
It is not by chance that Parreno has integrated the dimension of col-
laboration as a major axis of his work: the unconscious, according
to Lacan, is neither individual nor collective; it exists in the middle,
in the encounter, which is the beginning of all narrative. A subject,
"Parreno &" (Joseph, Cattelan, Gillick, Holler, Huyghe, to name a few
of his collaborations), is constructed through exhibitions that are
often presented as relational models, in which the copresence of vari-
ous protagonists is negotiated through the construction of a script
or story.
Thus, in Parreno's work, it is often the commentary that produces
forms rather than the reverse: a scenario is dismantled so that a
new one can be constructed, for the interpretation of the world is a
symptom like any other. In his video Ou (Or), 1997, an apparently
banal scene (a young woman taking off her Disney T-shirt) generates
a search for the conditions of its appearance. We see displayed on-
screen, in a long rewind, the books, movies, and conversations that
led to the production of an image that lasted only thirty seconds.
Here, as in the psychoanalytical process or in the infinite discussions
of the Talmud, commentary produces the narratives. The artist must
not leave the responsibility of captioning his images to others, for cap-
tions are also images, ad infinitum.
One of Parreno's first works, No More Reality, 1991, already posited
this problem by linking the notions of screenplay and protest. An im-
aginary sequence shows a demonstration composed of very young
children armed with banners and placards, chanting the slogan "No
more reality." The question was: what are the slogans or subtitles of
the images that stream past today? The goal of a demonstration is
to produce a collective image that sketches out political scenarios for
the future. The installation Speech Bubbles, 1997, a cluster of helium-
filled balloons in the shape of comic-book speech bubbles, was pre-
sented as a collection of "tools of protest allowing each person to
write his own slogans and stand out within the group and thus from
the image that would be its representation."
02
Parreno operates here
in the interstice that separates an image from its caption, labor from
its product, production from consumption. As reportage on individual
freedom, his works tend to abolish the space that separates the pro-
duction of objects and human beings, work and leisure. With Werk-
tische/L'etabli (Workbench), 1995, Parreno shifted the form of the
assembly line toward hobbies one might engage in on a Sunday; with
the project No Ghost, Just a Shell, 2000, made with Pierre Huyghe,
02 PHILIPPE PARRENO, "SPEECH BUBBLES", INTERVIEW BY PHILIPPE VERGNE, ART PRESS, NO. 264,
JANUARY 2001, PP. 22-28.
he bought the rights to a Japanese manga character, Ann Lee, and
made her speak about her career as an animated character; in a set
of interventions gathered under the title L'Homme public (Public Man),
Parreno provided the French impersonator Yves Lecoq with texts to
recite in the voices of famous people, from Sylvester Stallone to the
Pope. These three works function in a way similar to ventriloquism
and masks: by placing social forms (hobbies, TV shows), images
(a childhood memory, a manga character), and everyday objects in
a position to reveal their origins and their fabrication process, Parreno
exposes the unconscious of human production.
HACKING, WORK, AND FREE TIME
The practices of postproduction generate works that question the use
of work. What becomes of work when professional activities are
doubled by artists?
Wang Du declares: "I want to be the media, too. I want to be the jour-
nalist after the journalist." He produces sculptures based on media
images which he reframes or whose original scale and centering he
reproduces faithfully. His installation Strategie en chambre (Armchair
Strategy), 1999, is a gigantic, voluminous image that forces the viewer
to traverse enormous piles of newspapers published during the con-
flict in Kosovo, a formless mass at the top of which emerge sculpted
effigies of Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and other figures from press
photos of the period, as well as a set of planes made of newspaper.
The force of Wang Du's work stems from his capacity to give weight
to the furtive images of the media: he quantifies what would conceal
itself from materiality, restores the volume and weight of events, and
colors general information by hand. Wang Du sells information by the
pound. His storehouse of sculpted images invents an arsenal of
communication, which duplicates the work of press agencies by
reminding us that facts are also objects around which we must circu-
late. His work method might be defined as "corporate shadowing," i.e.,
!
mimicking or doubling professional structures, tailing and following
them.
When Daniel Pflumm works with the logos of large companies like
AT&T, he performs the same tasks as a communications agency.
He alienates and disfigures these acronyms by "liberating their forms"
in animated films for which he produces sound tracks. And his work
is similar to that of a graphic design firm when he exhibits the still iden-
tifiable forms of a brand of mineral water or a food product in the
form of abstract light boxes that evoke the history of pictorial mod-
ernism, "Everything in advertising," Pflumm explains, "from planning
to production via all the conceivable middle-men, is a compromise
and an absolutely incomprehensible complex of working steps."
03
According to him, the "actual evil" is the client who makes advertising
a subservient and alienated activity, allowing for no innovation. By
"doubling" the work of advertising agencies with his pirate videos and
abstract signs, Pflumm produces objects that appear cut out of their
context, in a floating space that has to do at once with art, design,
and marketing. His production is inscribed within the world of work,
whose system he doubles without caring about its results or depend-
ing on its methods. He is the artist as phantom employee.
In 1999, Swetlana Heger and Plamen Dejanov decided to devote their
exhibitions for one year to a contractual relationship with BMW: they
rented out their work force as well as their potential for visibility (the
exhibitions to which they were invited), creating a "pirate" medium
for the car company. Pamphlets, posters, booklets, new vehicles and
accessories: Heger and Dejanov used all the objects and materials
produced by the German manufacturer in the context of exhibitions.
Pages of group exhibition catalogs that were reserved for them were
03 DANIEL PFLUMM, "ART AS INNOVATIVE ADVERTISING," INTERVIEW BY WOLF-GUNTER THIEL, FLASH ART,
NO. 209, NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1999, PP. 78-81.
77
occupied by advertisements for BMW. Can an artist deliberately pledge
his work to a brand name? Maurizio Cattelan was content to work
as a middleman when he rented his exhibition space to a cosmetics
manufacturer during the Aperto at the Venice Biennale, The resulting
piece was called Lavorare e un brutto mestiere (Working is a Dirty Job),
1993. For their first exhibition in Vienna, Heger and Dejanov made
a symmetrical gesture by closing the gallery for the duration of their
show, allowing the staff to go on vacation. The subject of their work
is work itself: how one person's leisure time produces another's em-
ployment, how work can be financed by means other than those of
traditional capitalism. With the BMW project, they showed how work
itself can be remixed, superimposing suspect images - as they are
obviously freed from all market imperatives - on a brand's official im-
age. In both cases, the world of work, whose forms Heger and
Dejanov reorganize, is made the object of a postproduction.
And yet, the relations Heger and Dejanov established with BMW took
the form of a contract, an alliance. Pflumm's untamed practice is
situated on the margins of professional circuits, outside of any client-
supplier relationship. His work on brands defines a world in which
employment is not distributed according to a law of exchange and
governed by contracts linking different economic entities, but in which
it is left to the free will of each party, in a permanent potlatch that
does not allow a gift in return. Work redefined in this way blurs the
boundaries that separate it from leisure, for to perform a task without
being asked is an act only leisure affords. Sometimes these limits
are crossed by companies themselves, as Liam Gillick noted with
Sony: "We are faced with a separation of the professional and the
domestic that was created by electronic companies ... Tape re-
cording, for example, only existed in the professional field during the
forties, and people did not really know what they could use it for in
everyday life, Sony blurred the professional and the domestic."
04
In
1979, Rank Xerox imagined transposing the world of the office to the
:graphic interface of the microcomputer, which resulted in icons for
"trash"," "files," and "desktops." Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, took up
this system of presentation for Macintosh five years later. Word pro-
cessing would from now on be indexed to the formal protocol of the
service industry, and the image-system of the home computer would
be informed and colonized from the start by the world of work.
Today, the spread of the home office is causing the artistic economy
to undergo a reverse shift: the professional world is flowing into the
domestic world, because the division between work and leisure con-
stitutes an obstacle to the sort of employee companies require, one
who is flexible and reachable at any moment.
1994: Rirkrit Tiravanija organized a lounge area in Dijon, France, for
artists in the exhibition "Surfaces de reparation" (Penalty Zone) that
included armchairs, a foosball table, artwork by Andy Warhol, and a
lefrigerator, allowing the artists to unwind during preparations for the
show. The work, which disappeared when the show opened to the
oublic, was the reverse image of the artistic work schedule.
With Pierre Huyghe, the opposition between entertainment and art
is resolved in activity. Instead of defining himself in relation to work
("what do you do for a living?"), the individual in his exhibitions is con-
stituted by his or her use of time ("what are you doing with your life?").
Ellipse (Ellipsis), 1999, features the German actor Bruno Ganz doing
a pick-up shot between two scenes in Wim Wenders's My American
Friend, shot twenty years earlier. Ganz walks a path that was merely
suggested in the Wenders film: he fills in an ellipsis. But when is
Bruno Ganz working and when is he off? While he was employed
as an actor in My American Friend, is he still working twenty-one
years later when he films a transitional shot between two scenes in
:* JAM GILLICK, "WERE PEOPLE AS STUPID BEFORE TV?," INTERVIEW BY ERIC TRONCY, DOCUMB.TS
mUAPT, NO, 11, FALL-WINTER, 1997/1998, PP. 115-121. " -'.
I
Wenders's film? Isn't the ellipsis, in the end, simply an image of
leisure, the negative space of work? While free time signifies "time
to waste" or time for organized consumption, isn't it also simply a
passage between two sequences?
"Posters," 1994, a series of color photographs by Huyghe, presents
an individual filling in a hole in the sidewalk and watering the plants
in a public square. But is there such a thing as a truly public space
today? These fragile, isolated acts engage the notion of responsibility:
if there is a hole in the sidewalk, why does a city employee fill it in,
and not you or me? We claim to share a common space, but it is in
fact managed by private enterprise: we are excluded from that scen-
ario by erroneous subtitling, which appears beneath images of the
political community,
Pflumm's images are the products of an analogous micro-utopia, in
which supply and demand are disturbed by individual initiatives, a
world where free time generates work, and vice versa, a world where
work meets computer hacking. We know that some hackers make
their way into hard drives and decode the systems of companies or
institutions for the sake of subversion but sometimes also in the
hopes of being hired to improve the security system: first they show
evidence of their capacity to be a nuisance, then they offer their
services to the organism they have just attacked. The treatment to
which Pflumm subjects the public image of multinationals proceeds
from the same spirit: work is no longer remunerated by a client, con-
trary to advertising, but distributed in a parallel circuit that offers
financial resources and a completely different visibility. Where Heger
and Dejanov position themselves as false providers of a service for
the real economy, Pflumm visually blackmails the economy that he
parasites. Logos are taken hostage, then placed in semi-freedom,
as freeware that users are asked to improve on themselves. Heger
and Dejanov sold a bugged application program to the company
whose image they propagated; Pflumm circulates images along with
the "pilot," the source code that allows them to be duplicated.
When Pflumm makes a video using images taken from CNN (CNN,
Questions and Answers, 1999), he switches jobs and becomes a
programmer - a mode of production with which he is familiar through
his activity as a DJ and musician.
The service industry aesthetic involves a reprocessing of cultural pro-
duction, the construction of a path through existing flows; producing
a service, an itinerary, within cultural protocols. Pflumm devotes him-
self to supporting chaos productively. While he uses this expression
to describe his video projects in techno clubs, it may also be applied
to the whole of his work, which seizes on the formal scraps and bits
of code issued from everyday life in its mass media form, to construct
a formal universe in which the modernist grid joins excerpts from CNN
on a coherent level, that of the general pirating of signs.
Pflumm goes beyond the idea of pirating: he constructs montages of
great formal richness. Subtly constructivist, his works are wrought
by a search for tension between the iconographic source and the ab-
stract form. The complexity of his references (historical abstractions,
Pop art, the iconography of flyers, music videos, corporate culture)
goes hand in hand with a great technical mastery: his films are closer
to industry-standard videos than the average video art. Pflumm's work
currently represents one of the most probing examples of the en-
counter between the art world and techno music.
Techno Nation has long distorted well-known logos on T-shirts: there
are countless variations on Coca-Cola or Sony, filled with subversive
messages or invitations to smoke Sinsemilla. We live in a world in
which forms are indefinitely available to all manipulations, for better
or worse, in which Sony and Daniel Pflumm cross paths in a space
saturated with icons and images.
As practiced by Pflumm, the mix is an attitude, an ethical stance more
than a recipe. The postproduction of work allows the artist to escape
the posture of interpretation. Instead of engaging in critical commen-
tary, we have to experiment, as Gilles Deleuze asked of psycho-
analysis: to stop interpreting symptoms and try more suitable arrange-
ments.
HOW TO INHABIT GLOBAL CULTURE
(AESTHETICS AFTER MP3)
THE ARTWORK AS A SURFACE FOR DATA STORAGE
From Pop art to Minimalist and Conceptual art, the art of the sixties
corresponds to the apex of the pair formed by industrial production
and mass consumption. The materials used in Minimalist sculpture
(anodized aluminum, steel, galvanized iron, Plexiglas, neon, and so
on) reference industrial technology and particularly the architecture of
giant factories and warehouses. The iconography of Pop art, mean-
while, refers to the era of consumption and particularly the appear-
ance of the supermarket and the new forms of marketing linked to it:
visual frontality, seriality, abundance.
The contractual and administrative aesthetic of Conceptual art marked
the beginning of the service economy. It is important to note that
Conceptual art was contemporary to the decisive advance of com-
puter research in the early seventies: while the microcomputer ap-
peared in 1975 and Apple II in 1977, the first microprocessor dates
from 1971. That same year, Stanley Brouwn exhibited metal boxes
containing cards that documented and retraced his itineraries (40
Steps and 1000 Steps), and Art & Language produced Index 01, a
set of card files presented in the form of a Minimalist sculpture. On
Kawara had already established his system of notation in files (his
encounters, trips, and reading materials), and in 1971 he produced
One Million Years, ten files that kept an account that went well be-
yond human bounds, and thus came closer to the colossal amounts
of processing required by computers.
:
These works introduced data storage - the aridity of index card
classification and the notion of the filing cabinet itself - into artistic
practice: Conceptual art used computer protocol, still at its begin-
nings (the products in question would not truly make their public ap-
pearance until the following decade), In the late sixties, IBM emerged
as a precursor in the field of immaterialization: controlling seventy
percent of the computer market, International Business Machine
rechristened itself IBM World Trade Corporation and developed the
first deliberately multinational strategy adapted to the global civilization
to come. A runaway enterprise, its productive apparatus was literally
unlocalizable, like a conceptual work whose physical appearance
hardly matters and can be materialized anywhere. Doesn't a work
by Lawrence Weiner, which may be produced or not produced by
anyone, imitate the mode of production of a bottle of Coca-Cola?
All that matters is the formula, not the place in which it is made or
the identity of the person who makes it. ... - . . . . . . . . - - . . - -,
The configuration of knowledge that IBM ushered in was embodied
in Tony Smith's Black Box (1963-65): an opaque block meant to
process a social reality transformed into bits, through inputs and out-
puts. In his presentation folder, he pointed out that the IBM 3750,
a silicon Big Brother, allows branches of a company in the same region
to centralize all information indicating who has entered or exited which
of the company's buildings, through what door, and at what hour...
THE AUTHOR, THIS LEGAL ENTITY --, i. --.;. . " ..--.
Shareware does not have an author but a proper name. The musical
practice of sampling has also contributed to destroying the figure
of the Author, in a practical way that goes beyond theoretical de-
construction (the famous "death of the author" according to Barthes
and Foucault). "I'm still pretty skeptical about the concept of the
author," says Douglas Gordon, "and I'm happy to remain in the back-
ground of a piece like 24 Hour Psycho where Hitchcock is the domi-
nant figure. Likewise, I share responsibility for Feature Film equally with
the conductor James Conlon and the musician Bernard Herrmann.
... In appropriating extracts from films and music, we could say, ac-
tually, that we are creating time readymades, no longer out of daily
objects but out of objects that are a part of our culture."
0
' The world
of music has made the explosion of the protocol of authorship banal,
particularly with "white labels," the 45s typical of DJ culture, made in
limited editions and distributed in anonymous record jackets, thus
escaping industry control. The musician-programmer realizes the ideal
of the collective intellectual by switching names for each of his or
her projects, as most DJs have multiple names. More than a physical
person, a name now designates a mode of appearance or production,
a line, a fiction. This logic is also that of multinationals, which present
product lines as if they emanated from autonomous firms: based
on the nature of his products, a musician such as Roni Size will call
himself "Breakbeat Era" or "Reprazent," just as Coca-Cola or Vivendi
Universal owns a dozen or so distinct brands which the public does
not thi nk to connect.. v : " y - - .-_ - : -
The art of the eighties criticized notions of authorship and signature,
without however abolishing them. If buying is an art, the signature of
the artist-broker who carried out the transactions retained all its value,
indeed guaranteed a successful and profitable exchange. The pres-
entation of consumer products was organized in stylized configura-
tions: Jeff Koons's Hoovers were immediately distinguishable from
Haim Steinbach's shelves, the way two boutiques that sell similar
products distinguish themselves by their art of display. .
Among the artists directly questioning the notion of the signature are
Mike Bidlo, Elaine Sturtevant, and Sherrie Levine, whose works rely
on a common method of reproducing works of the past, but via very
different strategies. When he exhibited an exact copy of a Warhol
painting, Bidlo entitled it Not Duchamp {Bicycle Wheel, 1913). When
Sturtevant exhibited a copy of a Warhol painting, she kept the orig-
inal title: Duchamp, coin de chastete, 1967. Levine, meanwhile, got
rid of the title in favor of a reference to a temporal shift in the series
"Untitled (After Marcel Duchamp)." For these three artists, the issue
01 DOUGLAS GORDON, "A NEW GENERATION OF READYMADES," INTERVIEW BY CHRISTINE VAN ASSCHE,
ART PRESS, NO. 255, MARCH 2000, PP. 27-32.
87
is not to make use of these works but to re-exhibit them, to arrange
them according to personal principles, each creating a "new idea"
for the objects they reproduce, based on the Duchampian principle
of the reciprocal readymade, Bidlo constructs an ideal museum,
Sturtevant constructs a narrative by reproducing works showing
radical moments in history, while Levine's copyist work, inspired by
Roland Barthes, asserts that culture is an infinite palimpsest. Con-
sidering each book to consist of "multiple writings, proceeding from
several cultures and entering into dialogue, into parody, into protest,"
Barthes accords the writer the status of scriptor, an intertextual oper-
ator: the only place where this multiplicity of sources converges is in
the brain of the reader-postproducer.
02
In the early twentieth century,
Paul Valery thought that one might be able to write "a history of the
mind as it produces or consumes literature ... without ever uttering
the name of a writer."
03
Since we write while reading, and produce art-
work as viewers, the receiver becomes the central figure of culture
to the detriment of the cult of the author.
In the sixties, the notion of the "open work" (Umberto Eco) opposed
the classic schema of communication that supposed a transmitter
and a passive receiver. Nevertheless, while the open work (such as
an interactive or participatory Happening by Allan Kaprow) offers the
receiver a certain latitude, it only allows him or her to react to the initial
impulse provided by the transmitter: to participate is to complete the
proposed schema. In other words, "the participation of the spectator"
consists of initialing the aesthetic contract which the artist reserves
the right to sign. That is why the open work, for Pierre Levy, "still re-
mains caught in the hermeneutic paradigm," since the receiver is only
invited "to fill in the blanks, to choose between possible meanings."
02 ROLAND BARTHES, "THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR" IN THE RUSTLE OF LANGUAGE, TRANS. RICHARD
HOWARD (NEW YORK: HILL AND WANG, 1986). P. 54.
03 PAUL VALERY, CAHIERS, VOL. 1 (PARIS: BIBLIOTHEQUE DE LA PLEIADE, EDITIONS GALLIMARD, 1973).
Levy contrasts this "soft" conception of interactivity with the enormous
possibilities that cyberspace now offers: "the emerging technocultural
environment encourages the development of new types of art that
ignore the separation between transmission and reception, compo-
sition and interpretation."
04
ECLECTICISM AND POSTPRODUCTION
The Western world - through its museum system and its historical ap-
paratus as well as its need for new products and new atmospheres
- has ended up recognizing traditions thought doomed to disappear-
ance in the advance of industrial modernism as cultures in themselves,
accepting as art what was once only perceived as folklore or sav-
agery. Remember that for a citizen at the start of the century, the his-
tory of sculpture went from Ancient Greece to the Renaissance and
was restricted to European names. Global culture today is a giant
anamnesis, an enormous mixture whose principles of selection are
very difficult to identify. -
How can we prevent this telescoping of cultures and styles from end-
ing up in kitsch eclecticism, a cool Hellenism excluding all critical
judgment? We generally describe taste as "eclectic" when it is uncer-
tain or lacks criteria, a spiritless intellectual process, a set of choices
that establishes no coherent vision. By considering the adjective
"eclectic" pejorative, common parlance accredits the idea that one
must lay claim to a certain type of art, literature, or music, or else
be lost in kitsch, having failed to assert a sufficiently strong - or, quite
simply, locatable - personal identity. This shameful quality of eclec-
ticism is inseparable from the idea that the individual is socially assimi-
lated to his or her cultural choices: I am supposed to be what I read,
what I listen to, what I look at. We are identified by our personal
04 PIERRE LEVY, LINTELLIGENCE COLLECTIVE. POUR UNE ANTHROPOLOGIE DU CYBERSPACE (PARIS: LA
DECOUVERTE, 1994), P. 123. : " ' . "
strategy of sign consumption, and kitsch represents outside taste, a
sort of diffuse and impersonal opinion substituted for individual choice.
Our social universe, in which the worst flaw is to be impossible to
situate in relation to cultural norms, urges us to reify ourselves. Ac-
cording to this vision of culture, what each person might do with what
he or she consumes does not matter; so the artist may very well
make use of a terrible soap opera and form a very interesting project.
The anti-eclectic discourse has therefore become a discourse of
adherence, the wish for a culture marked out in such a way that all
its productions are tidily arranged and clearly identifiable, like badges
or rallying signs of a vision of culture. It is linked to the constitution
of the modernist discourse as set forth in the theoretical writings of
Clement Greenberg, for whom the history of art constitutes a linear,
teleological narrative in which each work is defined by its relations to
those that precede and those that follow. According to Greenberg,
the history of modern art can be read as a gradual "purification" of
painting and sculpture and the contraction of their subject to their
formal properties. Piet Mondrian thus explained that neo-plasticism
was the logical consequence - and suppression - of all art that pre-
ceded it. This theory, which envisages the history of art as a dupli-
cation of scientific research, has the added effect of excluding non-
Western countries, considered "unhistorical" and unscientific. It is this
obsession with the "new" (created by this vision of historicist art cen-
tered on the West) that one of the protagonists of the Fluxus move-
ment, George Brecht, mocked, explaining that it is much more difficult
to be the ninth person to do something than to be the first, because
then you have to do it very well.
In Greenberg and in many Western histories of art, culture is linked to
this monomania that considers eclecticism (that is, any attempt to
exit this purist narrative) a cardinal sin. History must make sense. And
this sense must be organized in a linear narrative.
In an essay published in 1987, "Historisation ou intention: le retour
d'un vieux debat" (Historicization or Intention: The Return of an Old
Debate), Yve-Alain Bois engaged in a critical analysis of postmodern
eclecticism such as it was manifested in the works of the European
neo-expressionists and painters such as Julian Schnabei and David
Salle. Bois summed up these artists' positions as such: Being freed
from history, they might have recourse to history as a sort of entertain-
ment, treating it as a space of pure irresponsibility. Everything from
now on had the same meaning for them, the same value. In the early
eighties, the trans-avant-garde struggled with a logic of bric-a-brac
and the flattening of cultural values in a sort of international style that
blended Giorgio de Chirico and Joseph Beuys, Jackson Pollock and
Alberto Savinio, completely indifferent to the content of their works
and their respective historical positions. At around the same time,
Achille Bonito Oliva supported the trans-avant-garde artists in the
name of a "cynical ideology of the traitor," according to which the
artist would be a nomad circulating as he pleased through all periods
and styles, like a vagabond digging through a dump in search of
something to carry away. This is precisely the problem: under the brush
of a Schnabei or an Enzo Cucchi, the history of art is like a giant
trash can of hollow forms, cut off from their meaning in favor of a cult
of the artist/demiurge/salvager under the tutelary figure of Picasso.
In this vast enterprise of the reification of forms, the metamorphosis
of the gods finds kinship with the museum without walls. Such an art
of citation, practiced by the neo-fauves, reduces history to the value
of merchandise. We are then very close to the "equivalence of every-
thing, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the insignificant
and the distinctive" which Flaubert made the theme of his last novel,
and whose coming he feared in Scenarios pour Bouvard et Pecuchet
Jean-Frangois Lyotard could not bear the confusion between the post-
modern condition such as he theorized it and the so-called post-
modernist art of the eighties: to mix neo- or hyper-realist motifs on
the same surface with abstract, lyrical, or conceptual motifs was to
signify that everything was equal because everything could be con-
sumed. He felt that eclecticism solicited the habits of the magazine
reader, the needs of the consumer of mass produced images, the
mind of the supermarket shopper.
05
According to Yve-Alain Bois, only
the historicization of forms can preserve us from cynicism and a level-
ing of everything. For Lyotard, eclecticism diverts artists from the
question of what is "unpresentable," a major concern, since it is the
guarantee of a tension between the act of painting and the essence
of painting: if artists give in to the eclecticism of consumption, they
serve the interests of the techno-scientific and post-industrial world
and shirk their critical duties.
But can't this eclecticism, this banalizing and consuming eclecticism
that preaches cynical indifference toward history and erases the
political implications of the avant-gardes, be contrasted with something
other than Greenberg's Darwinian vision, or a purely historicizing
vision of art? The key to this dilemma is in establishing processes and
practices that allow us to pass from a consumer culture to a culture
of activity, from a passiveness toward available signs to practices of
accountability. Every individual, and particularly every artist, since he
or she evolves among signs, must take responsibility for forms and
their social functioning: the emergence of a "civic consumption," a
collective awareness of inhuman working conditions in the production
of athletic shoes, for example, or the ecological ravages occasioned
by various sorts of industrial activity is each an integral part of this
notion of accountability. Boycotts, detournement, and piracy belong
to this culture of activity. When Allen Ruppersberg recopied Oscar
Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray on canvas (1974), he took a liter-
ary text and considered himself responsible for it: he rewrote it.
05 SEE JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD, THE POSTMODERN EXPUKINED, TRANS. DON BARRY, ETAL.
(MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 1993}.
92
When Louise Lawler exhibited a conventional painting of a horse by
Henry Stullmann (lent by the New York Racing Association) and
placed it under spotlights, she asserted that the revival of painting,
in full swing at the time (1978), was an artificial convention inspired
by market interests.
To rewrite modernity is the historical task of this early twenty-first
century: not to start at zero or find oneself encumbered by the store-
house of history, but to inventory and select, to use and download.
Fast-forward to 2001: collages by the Danish artist Jakob Kolding
rewrite the constructivist works of Dada, El Lissitzky, and John
Heartfield while taking contemporary social reality as their starting
point. In videos or photographs, Fatimah Tuggar mixes American
advertisements from the fifties with scenes from everyday life in Africa,
and Gunilla Klingberg reorganizes the logos of Swedish supermarkets
into enigmatic mandalas. Nils Norman and Sean Snyder make cata-
logs of urban signs, rewriting modernity starting with its common
usage in architectural language. These practices each affirm the im-
portance of maintaining activity in the face of mass production. All
its elements are usable. No public image should benefit from impunity,
for whatever reason: a logo belongs to public space, since it exists
in the streets and appears on the objects we use, A legal battle is
underway that places artists at the forefront: no sign must remain
inert, no image must remain untouchable. Art represents a counter-
power. Not that the task of artists consists in denouncing, mobilizing,
or protesting: all art is engaged, whatever its nature and its goals.
Today there is a quarrel over representation that sets art and the
official image of reality against each other; it is propagated by adver-
tising discourse, relayed by the media, organized by an ultralight
ideology of consumption and social competition. In our daily lives, we
come across fictions, representations, and forms that sustain this
collective imaginary whose contents are dictated by power. Art puts
us in the presence of counterimages, forms that question social forms.
In the face of the economic abstraction that makes daily life unreal,
or an absolute weapon of techno-market power, artists reactivate
forms by inhabiting them, pirating private property and copyrights,
brands and products, museum-bound forms and signatures. If the
downloading of forms (these samplings and remakes) represents impor-
tant concerns today, it is because these forms urge us to consider
global culture as a toolbox, an open narrative space rather than a uni-
vocal narrative and a product line. Instead of prostrating ourselves
before works of the past, we can use them. Like Rirkrit Tiravanija
inscribing his work within Philip Johnson's architecture, like Pierre
Huyghe refilming Pier Paolo Pasolini, works can propose scenarios
and art can be a form of using the world, an endless negotiation
between points of view.
It is up to us as beholders of art to bring these relations to light. It is
up to us to judge artworks in terms of the relations they produce in
the specific contexts they inhabit. Because art is an activity that pro-
duces relationships to the world and in one form or another makes
its relationships to space and time material.