According to the psychoanalYSL collective “Criticality’ (which is a word that doesn’t even really make grammatical sense) has become the necessary smokescreen for art’s absorption into capital” (‘The High Weiwei To Hell’ 2011)
Concluding that; “Whilst the cult of Ai Weiwei is a uniquely spectacular phenomenon, it represents the quintessence of a central problem of our hyper-financialised art system: that perhaps resistance is futile in the ‘Age of Complicity’ and maybe there is no simple oppositional solution.”
So, with this in mind I read an article ‘Art scene- Control Machine’ by Pascal Gielen in ‘Art and Activism in the Age of Globalisation’ (2011)
Gielen’s argument goes something like this (very abridged):
· *POST FORDISM: fluid working hours, high mobility, hyper-communication, interest in creativity= scene florishes
· **‘alternative scene’ has become quality label in social centre
· ***Local scenes: London/Chongqing provide just enough intimacy for global nomad
· ****Foucauldian panoptic décor: control of seeing and being seen, theatricality
· Can artists subvert this use of creativity?
YES! Creative labour is immaterial, and individualised therefore one may
1) “play with it unseen” (make labour/ art invisible)
2) Work lazily/ slowly
3) Destroy brain with drugs
PsychoanalYSL tick two of the three boxes above. They work too hard.
Gielen’s forth type of subversion is ‘reflection’ and this is the territory which the collective occupy most comfortably.
Geilen gives the literal and astute example of Michealangelo Pistoletto’s Twenty-two, less two at 53rd Venice Biennial; reflection of media hive. “The attention given by other media decides the “spectacularity” of an event…media are constantly seeking confirmation from other media to decide the importance of an event…the artist uses the channels of the media to expose it’s own mechanisms”. Of course as Geilen points out this action is especially pertinent in Italy where Berlusconi has control of much of the press.
This art has been deemed “the art of over-identification” and I would add to this category the work of Damien Hirst, specifically For the Love of God. Hirst wanted to push the art market to it’s limits by producing the most expensive artwork ever. Pushing a system to it’s limits is the operation of “the art of over-identification”. The artwork cost 10m to produce and Hirst aimed to sell it for 50m. The artist decided to make the work in 2005, before the financial crisis and when the art market was an ever-expanding bubble. By the time he got to selling it, eighteen months later the market had crashed and he ended up buying the artwork himself- a reflection of the need for artists to keep the price of their work stable, so the system is self feeding. This artwork perfectly reflects the system in which it operates.
PsychoanalYSL compare Damien Hirst’s For The Love Of God to Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds, claiming “Just like Hirst’s diamond skull, Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds simply re-presents financial might over existing labour and trade relations by employing an excess of materiality to produce money as spectacle.” Whilst I would agree with this statement, I take issue with the following “Neither Hirst nor Weiwei problematise the role of labour in their work, unlike Santiago Sierra, for example, who specifically foregrounds the economic realities within which art functions.” To my mind Sierra, Hirst and Pistoletto’s works all do the same job of reflection.
A future post will look at the ‘scene’ which Geilen talks about, something very close to the hearts of the collective and of course very relevant to the concept of a residency.
References:
‘Art scene- Control Machine’ by Pascal Gielen in ‘Art and Activism in the Age of Globalisation’ (2011 NAi Publishers, Rotterdam)
‘The High Weiwei To Hell’ For the psyschoanalYSL free school press, Christopher Thomas, 2011 (pamphlet for Goldsmiths interim show)
