ON A NATIONAL EXPRESS BACKSEAT TOUR DE ORDURE
Image Description: Retch and Kidney. Screen recording from an on-line talk about the art market. Does he really say ‘ classic’?
Half-way through what has recently been revealed to us as a coach trip around Arthood with our Auntie Pat, the epitome and most foul smelling of the middle-level institutions squats, back-lit by an evening sun on the South Downs, cresting a hill top. The commercial gallery sector constitutes the most conspicuous intermediary between the wider institution of art (and all its little institutions by the wayside) and the higher-level institutions of the art system; its only interest commodification, even if it insidiously sequesters that truism behind a symbolic capital of indeterminate things and a hard shouldered, chippy meaningless jargon. It probably means it when it talks of its ‘serious’, 'cutting edge', ‘important’ and 'risk-taking' commodities but only because it hasn’t had time to ask what such words mean, being permanently engaged in its own strained, squitting, pecuniary function. {00:56}
Commercial galleries align themselves with the wider institution in order to discredit themselves as mere intermediaries of the chief instruments of production for the purposes of their sullied interest bearing commodities. They select and track the lower-level’s cheap cuts, trim them, display them and hike their prices on the basis that some of them will end up on the master’s table. {01:24}
A nose to tail exhibitionism prevails. The standardized summer group exhibition, a nipples and anus sausage pulled from the very back of storage, cooked a la plancha. The tented art fair exhibition, the same sausage polished by spit and Cava, barely cooked, its consumption making even the most gullible, bilious. {01:41}
The wider institution of art keeps the individual in dependence by these little mid-level, middle-life institutions such as publicly funded galleries, art school departments, artists collectives (recently conspicuously opportunistically lauded by the Turner Prize shortlist1), artist-led initiatives, and the most profuse ingredient of the cesspit - commercial galleries. The system of art’s inherent centralism; that artificially imposed organisation from above-down which turns over the affairs of all, all production in one lump to a feckless minority, is always attended my mediocrity and dull routine; it crushes the individual, kills all personal initiative by bureaucratic ossification, and permits no freedom. {02:32}
Regarding the foregoing paragraph, it’s been pointed out to us recently that our approach, developed in the text of these crits, is often reductive, too broad and shows a tendency “to latch onto … clichés of art discourse or … bits of commonplace knowledge”. The foregoing paragraph and others are susceptible to the same criticism which we’ve attempted to address in this footnote.2 {02:55}
These little institutions, (sometimes referred to as ‘independent’) little coteries proliferate in direct relation to the higher-level institution of art in that they both determine and reproduce it; and function ‘independently’ only in the sense of being distinct administrative functionaries and intermediaries within the greater institution of art. Their awareness of the value of their own reflected symbolic capital remains mute until the real tax return is conveyed via the accountant. In the mean time between leases and rental agreements, they all exert their trite little authority. In the UK this is a class issue directly involved in those higher-level institutions, to a greater or lesser extent to their temporal contemporaneous value. Meaning the means in which they curtail the individual’s free agency and propagate the individual’s dependence on the institution may be asserted in language categorized by affectionate support or direct subjugation, amounting to the same thing: the heart-warming egalitarian distribution of the greater institution’s drip-feed of contingent opportunity structures, for the feathering of one's own bed, the artist regurgitating from both ends, distended orifices delivering a cheeky wink at 6.30-9.00pm, first Thursday each month. {04:26}
A person called Zavier Ellis who runs a commercial gallery and is apparently known to be an “acute talent spotter” neatly sums up the jumped-up little institution’s administrative function as intermediary and the exertion of its little authority when he writes: “There is an inherent irony in that even though galleries might be looking for artists they do not want to receive applications [...] I have observed that collectors enjoy the hunt [...] just as I do [the hunter-prey metaphor seems appropriate] We do not want to be told. [...] Artists and galleries need to put themselves in the shop window. [...] The galleries need to go to the right art fairs to meet the right collectors. The artists need to go to the right art schools and do well by being active.” Zavier doesn’t explain what he means by ‘active’ but Ant D’Offay casts a dark shadow over this kind of power relation. Zavier continues in his own inimitable style “at the earliest stages of an artist’s career self-motivated shows are a good idea [...] with a slim possibility that a buzz might start. Court galleries and press but be subtle; don’t be aggressive; don’t be desperate; don’t be arrogant and presumptuous. [here Zavier seems to advocate doing as he says rather than as he does...] enquire with the gallery as to how/if they like to be approached.” We would add that exiting the gallery backwards, fixing your gaze on the floor in semi-genuflection also leaves a lasting impression. Finally Zavier recommends applying for prize shows, whatever they are, as this means artists’ “work will be seen by important art world professionals who sit on committees”. {06:15}
These mid-level institutions reproduce the relations of the higher-level institution merely as a means of dressing up their own usurious commodity-shifting puerility as apparent credibility. This ‘credibility’ is based on undefined notions such as ‘serious’, 'cutting edge', ‘important’, 'risk-taking' etc., which are based on an equally undefined and unsubstantiated notion of the artwork as a special type of object, and the artist as a special type of person. The persistent surfeit of commercial galleries feed back and supply the institution with the most pliable scum rising to the surface, in exchange they remain the recipients of their drip-feed of thin, trivial, authority. {07:04}
The commercial gallery constitutes a useless parasite. By accepting these terms of success, which inclusion authorises and exclusion reifies, the individual artist is engaging in the drip-feed of the institution’s contingent opportunity structures. Here the artist is unwittingly coerced into the distribution of power exerted from above. The art system’s participants comply primarily for the promise of cultural mobility. What they may consider to be pulling themselves up by the bootstraps is in actuality pulling the ladder up behind them; perpetuating and securing the hierarchical structures, further preserving themselves and those beneath them as subjugated under the pretext of autonomous freedom - confirming themselves as bureaucratic functionaries while consolidating the institution’s authority. Should not artists cultivate and maintain a tendency to react to systems of domination, hierarchy and authority by at least asking: is it legitimate? {08:09}
Even more generally the middle-level institution consists of artworld participants defined by middling success; those in direct receipt of (or at least held comfortably enough in hope-baited anticipation) contingencies such as those dangled in the form of the institution’s drip-down opportunities. Simultaneously, while being in receipt of contingencies operative above them, they serve to distribute the institution’s authority to those retained beneath them: failing practitioners that constitute a generally ignored reserve of excess capital that operate, as with the art system, under the institution’s distant, vicarious tutelage. Middle-level participants are fettered in their need to sustain themselves through waged slavery (probably more conspicuously than the lower-level, whose subsistence is automatically more estranged from their artistic wants) within the sphere of the bureaucratic functionary, as a means of pursuing some form of artistic endeavour. Artists as tutors, artists as curators, artists as writers, artists as academics, artists as managers, artists as gallery staff etc., distribute and reproduce the relations of the higher-level institution because the alternatives seem inextricably remote. This sense of remoteness as propagated by the institution holds limitations in place. {09:46}
A challenge by the institution to the failing lower-level’s status as constituting art-artists-artworks, in the form of doubt or by drawing a distinction between the middle-level’s artworks and the failing lower-level’s ‘output’, would be counterintuitive as it would reduce the institution’s ability to dangle hope and that the criterion of judging artworks doesn’t have a lot to do with the artworks. It would also bring the institution dangerously close to exposing the idea that the lower-level does in fact, due to its lack of proximity to the relations of distribution, constitute some reasonable formulation of examples of art; whereas the stuff in closer proximity to the relations of distribution to the point of having their relations of production enacted within the relations of their distribution, do not constitute any reasonable formulation of art; as opposed to them constituting some range of objects dependent on a form of commodity determined economic privilege. {10:52}
But is the hope dangled, but ultimately suppressed as far as the lower-level is concerned, a potential means of initiating an alternative means of maintaining an art practice? Distinct and capable of obviating the institution in its entirety? {11:07}
The limits of agency within the structures described are essentially controlled by the institution. The agency of the middle-level of the art system is reproduced individually through replicating the relations of the institution. This agency with its focus on the individual also contributes towards the production of the institution's content. Individually, participants operate in direct competition within the entire agency of the middle-level. “All strife directed towards obtaining advantages independently of other men, and in opposition to them, contradicts the social nature of modern man, and tends to lead back to a more animal condition.” (Malatesta) Nick Serota and Alex Farquarson’s turns as Napoleon and Snowball respectively. What is characterised within the middle-level of the art system and distributed throughout, as ‘original, innovative, cutting-edge, important, groundbreaking’ constitute mere forms of competition, exhibition and territorial assertions of faux intellectual prowess that are essentially superficial and amount to rearranging contexts, materials, professionalism, references etc., in order to appear distinct. This distinction between what is supposed to be ‘original’ and other examples in the form of its unsubstantiated but constantly implied historical progeny is purely superficial. Nothing distinct is in fact offered in any way. All that is possible is that this work might enter the institution in some reproductive, self-describing way. {12:50}
The participants of the middle-level of arthood operate as the institution’s bureaucratic functionaries in that they replicate the institution’s relations of production by the very agency of their own relations of production. They reproduce the institution’s relations but as stated the middle-level also contributes significantly to the production of the institution. In this sense the institution controls the relations of production of the middle-level of arthood; as well as learns and expands from its autotelic but superficial content of the relations that its coercive drip-feed of its contingent opportunity structures is fuelled by. Both the higher-level and the middle-level of the art system benefit: the higher institution by expanding, art becoming even more ubiquitous and accessible, constituting a spectacle or tourist attraction; for the middle-level other than an increase in opportunities for culture industry wage slavery its benefits are symbolic, becoming ever more individual and egotistic. The institution controls the means or instruments of production asserts power, which it co-opts by enfranchising the middle-level to reproduce its own relations. These conditions, characterised as balanced between the pervasive nature of the institution; and the artist’s motivation to fulfill the individual ‘necessity’ of exhibitionism, comes at the cost of art’s ability to do anything beyond the parameters of these conditions, being potentially precluded. The decision to assert some form of creativity, such as to produce a picture, or to produce a text in response to the public display of a picture cannot exist prior to some engagement within the institution - predominantly the middle-level, as epitomised by the commercial gallery or one of its imitating offspring in the form of the artist-led space. {14:51}
The motivation determining the conditions described above, which subsume all artists, art writers etc., failed or otherwise is cultural mobility. Upwards, accumulating an ever expanding portfolio of exhibitions, articles etc. All practitioners want to operate like someone higher up the food chain, or once at the apotheosis of career to operate even more like themselves; to get up every morning and do what you did yesterday; distributing, objectifying, reifying themselves; to propagate ‘that’ kind of authority; to operate ‘that’ close to the light of the institution. In art education one is invariably directed towards other artists’ careers and told to let ‘their’ work inform ‘your’ work, essentially to propagate, emulate and reproduce them. Art School is the embryo of the institution, whose essential categories it replicates and reproduces. The artists’ talk is a brief opportunity for the middle-level practitioner to bask in the institution’s light, to function like a celebratory beacon to the attendant congregation. We know from Millgram that agency is highly susceptible to authority and it is through the bait of cultural mobility that the institution exerts authority and limits the potential for free creativity anywhere within the system. An alternative sphere of production could obviate these conditions but what constitutes an alternative sphere of production within arthood? {16:24}
It is here from this perspective that the middle-level’s premium bureaucratic functionary: the commercial gallery is conspicuous. It is also not by any means clear whether the middle-level public gallery is in any way distinct from the commercial variant. While commercial galleries continue to form an equal amount of links along with art education in the chain of cultural mobility, nothing of the current conditions of artistic production will be dismantled. No genuinely free cultural production will come to pass. Art educational institutions will continue to prepare adherents who want to exhibit in commercial galleries. Clearly if we want art to exist beyond the coercive power of the institution the links of this chain will require being broken apart. {17:15}
Criticism does not and cannot operate within or in relation to, the commercial gallery. Even if you provide your own the commercial gallery will wrest it from you and appropriate it to its own ends. External criticism directed inwardly at the commercial gallery is subsumed into the middle-level of arthood. In the commercial gallery there is little of what Wilhelm von Humboldt described as “the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” Because for such a state of development to emerge and be sustained, requires criticism coexistent with a wholesale obviation of authority. {17:59}
Institutions that constrain such creativity and human development - the commercial galleries only being the more conspicuous (the public galleries and the artist-led initiatives having disguised and concealed their hierarchical priorities more rigorously under the pretext that their art is somehow more special, in order to secure their higher-level institutional support) - are illegitimate. They are illegitimate from the point of view of art, if art is supposed to be something distinct somehow from commodification and economic privilege. They are wholly legitimate, of course, from the point of view of capitalism. If one accepts this legitimacy one rejects criticism. The acceptance and celebration of capital, alongside criticism cannot coexist. The logical outcome of both lead only to the destruction of the other. We are not aware of any artists who are not operating on the side of the institution - its authority - and therefore directly and proactively against criticism. {19:04}
The overarching question that prefigures any attempt at criticism within the art system is: does the entity that constitutes ‘art’, ignoring for now what that means, justify the swollen bureaucratic institutional infrastructure that has emerged, become entrenched and continues to expand up and around it? Criticism comes eventually to this question, or something like it. If the answer is ‘yes’ the status quo prevails; if ‘no’ the purpose of the institution is precluded. The reticence of the institution at both the middle and higher levels towards initiating or encouraging any form of criticism is clearly understood in these terms. {19:49}
The role of the gallery, in all its various public and private manifestations is to propagate structures of hierarchy, domination and authority. The function of the gallery is to constrain human development. The gallery has evolved merely as a means of economic privilege. In the gallery you will not find art or artists that are overly concerned if the gallery represents an imposition of private profit. What you will find is, what are considered to be significant artworks; significant according to the authority of the institution. What you will find is evidence of the reflexive adoption of conventions. Artists in sniffing distance of ‘success’ don’t function as if they’re subjugated. {20:38}
Of all the little institutions commercial galleries are in the ascendency as they contribute to maintaining the stagnation of art most effectively. If by some unlikely event artist-led initiatives took the ascendency they too would reorganise to maintain the homogeneity and contribute to the reproduction or maintenance of the system to varying degrees of subjugation. Artist-led initiatives offer no distinct alternative. They are equally suppressed and distorted within institutional structures designed to assume obedience and subordination, aimed squarely at the middle-level institution, populated by whoever, and so would replicate and propagate the same relations of authority. Within the sphere of arthood criticism is hard-pressed, within the middle-level of the institution it is non-existent. What determines the sphere is twofold: the economic movement of goods; and the promotion of a form of capital reified as ‘significant’ etc., that imbues value upon those goods - as if the transition from non-pecuniary to pecuniary is not contingent and is merely a secondary accident, perogative or after-thought. This perceived lack of contingency is itself contingent on authority. Among social theories criticism is indisputably the most complete because it removes and deprives of value everything that separates people, in a word, authority. Art school administrators have already successfully negated criticism and purged it from their curriculums. Emancipation from these strictures will not come from a rearrangement of the form of the institution but the wholesale dissolution of all of its forms. {22:33}
Artists do not recognise they’re operative within a closed system that permits no development; that their contribution to the system is merely one of self-maintenance. They consider themselves to be developing their work within some distinct social and cultural harbour of free production which marks them with the ability to change the world simply by either referencing it or not referencing it. We perceive this from our own harbour, within the harbour of the middle-level, of reducing all artists to one type. We don’t recognise it either, if we did we’d knock the practice on its head. The institution creates conditions for innumerable antagonisms, distinctions like ‘political art’ versus ‘formalism’, but more significantly the hierarchical, career orientated distinction between ‘failure’ and ‘success’; the distinction between the middle-level institution and the lower-level, proliferated by failed practitioners, creates the essential condition for the institution’s continuance. The institution exactly corresponds to the immutable limit of mere self-maintenance. {23:47}
The decision to maintain an art practice, aimed at producing art (is it possible to maintain an art practice that does not produce art?) can only develop, as subsequently can the entire sphere develop, properly and effectively in the system’s terms when it grows out of the artist's sense of personal freedom, not when, having capitulated and compliantly received modes of production contingent on allegedly essential prescribed notion of public distribution facilitated by the institution. {24:24}
The middle-level of the art system, as epitomised by the commercial gallery as an administrative functionary and intermediary maintains the state of the things that constitute artworks as consistently mediocre, homogenous and limited within the confines of the system’s boundaries. ‘Limited’ in the sense that the wares constitute art in ways already prescribed by the system. Anything that passes through this middle-level, no matter how laudable it was in the head or studio, stagnates by association. The organisation of the commercial gallery sector is only a means to a pecuniary end. When the sector becomes an end in itself, it kills the spirit and the vital initiative of its participants and sets up that domination by mediocrity which is the characteristic of all bureaucracies; all illegitimate institutions. Some middle-level functionaries may do this intentionally with a focus on what sells and encouraging the production of more; the rest do it unintentionally with a ludicrous lack of interest in what constitutes their limits. The verification of what informs them enough to identify the things they peddle as constituting art either comes from the higher-level institution as influence or authorisation propagated over the wider system; or it originates in the middle-level and is propelled upwards in the form of individual practitioner’s career trajectories. Artists as board members, advisors, consultants; Zavier’s ‘important art world professionals’. But however this authority is initiated it can only variegate components of what is already preordained, produced by artists who’ve had their impulse to mutual co-operation and self-help destroyed by the middle-level inculcating them with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from up above. {26:40}
Image Description: A placeholder image-cum-diagram to be filled later with a video clip.
1
[see unwritten Crit 8]
2
Footnote in the form of notes as an apology for idiocy...
Michael Corris quotes a “typical excerpt” from Crit 4 before going on to explain his doubts: Within the institution of art the artist’s word is considered to be sacrosanct, no matter how inane its individual utterances (for innumerable examples see Crit 3). The critic's word is equally held to be sacrosanct, no matter how inane its content. If the artist’s word is held to be sacrosanct, the critic’s word also must be held to be sacrosanct - as it is the critic that publicly holds and validates the artist’s word from above, to be sacrosanct. (JCHP, ‘Crit Four and the Extended Footnote’)
“...I can't see how you can write this and consider it to be an adequate and accurate picture of artists' writings and critical reflection on art. In whose world, I wonder, are the jottings of artists and critics "sacrosanct"? This is a straw-person, to say the least because it takes seriously the kind of earnest dribble about art disseminated by journalists and is the last refuse of the "scoundrel" art historian/critic, professional-exhibition-catalogue-author-type.
“The sanctity of the artist's pronouncements has been questioned by some art historians and some critics; my book on Ad Reinhardt explicitly goes against the grain of previous scholarship that was in thrall to the artist's pronouncements and writings. But I can see how, in the absence of adequate art criticism, at least the artist's statement seems a safe epistemic harbor.
“I am more interested in the multi=point framework for adequate critical commentary you cite. It reminds me of Lenin's "questions" to a lecturer, in his tract on empirico-criticism. But the list could be more concrete, and that's worth exploring.
“In general, it's best to avoid reductive thinking, and sometimes I find your characterizations a bit broad and note an eagerness to latch onto what I would identify as a cliché of art discourse or a bit of commonplace "knowledge". Even there, one must be careful to distinguish what is plainly wrong from an attitude that has been termed "epistemic injustice" by Fricker. It's an interesting claim that puts the "professional" in their place, but should not become an apology for idiocy.”
It’s difficult to disagree with the content of Michael Corris’ comments but in the sense that it is considerably easier to say ‘we wants to pursue a discursive art practice’ than it is to actually pursue one, his comments offer a welcome example of criticism that are for us conspicuously few and far between. They have initiated the following thoughts.
If we did want to disagree we would have to show that an erroneous statement can be justified. Or more specifically show that the quoted excerpt can be seen to be correct in the sense that jottings produced in a subordinate world that does not take artists’ and critics’ jottings to be sacrosanct can be subsumed into, and appropriated by a dominant world where artists’ and critics’ jottings are taken to be sacrosanct; where it would then function as a statement that did take artists’ and critics’ jottings to be sacrosanct, although literally it would state the opposite. This would amount to stating that the sentence “Artists’ and critics’ jottings are not sacrosanct”, operative within the context of a world where artists’ and critics’ jottings are taken to be sacrosanct, functions as, in actual fact, meaning (though not stating) that artists’ and critics’ jottings are taken to be sacrosanct. This would constitute a world where the use of language did not necessarily cohere with the interior beliefs of the population, and seems at best unlikely.
Terry Atkinson in a short text titled Predicament included in the catalogue to accompany his 1987 exhibition BRIT ART at Gimpel Fils Gallery uses a quote by Martin Jay as its epigraph: “For, so the Frankfurt School always insisted, it was only by the refusal to celebrate the present that the possibility might be perceived of a future in which writing poetry would no longer be an act of barbarism.”
Terry Atkinson goes on to state:
“The possibility of making an affirmative culture today seems to me to be equally absurd. The world’s dominant political systems are prurient, self-regarding and barbarously repressive. Any cultural work that celebrates such a world - intentionally or not - that holds uncritically to the status quo of the relations of production and relations of distribution can be seen to have, on rudimentary historical reflection, a carefree charlatanism or - in a harsher judgement - a grotesque negligence.
“Since there is art which does affirm the present state of our culture, the situation is alarming. I however take it to be the case that a life-affirming art is ridiculous; further that from an historically productive position, to make art is a predicament where the difficulties thrown up direct all other operations. One source of my perception is that ‘artistic authenticity’ can now be seen not to be what it was once thought to be. [...]
“In the last analysis, if it is possible at all to be succinct with such a story, the idea of the individual as transcending the social conditions of production has become a structural myth of modernism. It is Kantian in one respect in holding that ‘authenticity’ runs from given person to given person above historical conditions. An abstract transcendentalism.
“In a longer treatment of the matter care would have to be taken to make the necessary differentiations required. For example an historical materialist practise will share with Kant a common element of humanity informing every aesthetic aspiration and act, and this does constitute a kind of supra-individual subject.
“Belief in an historical materialist practise, like Adorno’s, will part company with Kant in that the latter’s ‘supra-individual’ is thought to be historically formed and not transcendental. The aesthetic rationale of ‘expression’ (and consequently ‘expressionism’) still lying at the core of modernism holds tenaciously, unself-consciously to this idea of a transcendental practice.
“[...] Over the entire panoply of ideological manoeuvres art can be seen increasingly now to have been nothing but cultural strategy serving some set of interests. This, contrary to the view of the earlier mentioned ‘transcendentalists’, does not lessen the importance of art practise; on the contrary it focuses it as an arena of struggle.”
It is likely that our enthusiasm to pursue an art practice that adheres to the foregoing sentiments and our over-exuberance to be constantly guarded against any slip towards celebrating either the output of the current art system or the conditions that determine its output, results in producing the kind of erroneous sentences written by ourselves and called-out by Michael Corris.
We find ourselves also taking Max Stirner’s advice: “I say: Liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively: not to every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours. Who has ever succeeded in tearing down even one limit for all men?”
This kind of liberation is not going to be achieved by us struggling to engage in a range of examples. This would for us constitute contributing more self-description to an already self- describing system. This is not to say that significant progress could not be made in this regard by someone else. We more or less know our weaknesses and thus allow ourselves the freedom of an experiment, freedom from pressure as perfection as seen or expected by others of present or future generations, freedom from the pressure of packaging and delivering the written product to a public, a market. Why should we not allow ourselves an incommensurable product written only out of a need for self-understanding?
What the criticism might suggest is an acceptance of the status quo - to tolerate it within the parameters of the art system as opposed to attempting, probably in futility, to breach the system’s boundaries in order to assert some form of ‘pure’ criticism. It is more in this regard that we are concerned with the ‘inadequacy’ of our art practice. Operating distinctly from arthood, beyond its parameters would require ‘turning the art audience into an object; arthood into an exhibit, the museum into a mausoleum, ourselves into a memorial, and creating a neutron bomb, the dream-weapon of criticism, and the end product of humanism’ to paraphrase Heiner Müller. Faced with these difficulties being wrong and reductive seems to be an occupational hazard.
Jamie Sutcliffe has also pointed out to us that “from the few texts of yours that I’ve read, I’m not sure you have a particularly adequate understanding of the ecology of art writing as it currently exists”. We’re not entirely sure what ‘adequate’ is intended to mean in this context. For the word itself to be considered adequate criticism, some explanation or elaboration on what constitutes inadequate or adequate in this context is neccessary. We don’t want to deny that within the system of art there is a broad range of art writing including conventional art production ranging from the extremely trite to the extremely significant (for the interior of the system), but we do want to lump it all into the context of arthood to suggest that even the significant stuff is subsumed within an overbearing, overarching self-describing system; it is equally subsumed and reduced to function only within the parameters of the system. We don’t want to produce a morphology of the range. On the contrary our primary aim is to continue with maintaining an art practice in conditions where it makes considerably more sense to terminate the practice. Not to produce art in response to the system it is subsumed by seems to us to lead directly to producing work as self-description of the system in the form of an affirmative culture. Putting to one side for now what purpose the practice will have if it is successfully maintained. Although this is crude and might appear like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, it just isn’t enough to make us reject and terminate our own practice. Its crudity in some sense offers the justification to continue with the practice, i.e: that it is artists who consider an art practice to be a predicament or dilemma that constitute the nut.
Just because we are apologetically claiming that all this, every aspect of our output, is done only from the perspective of artists attempting to continue with their practice, it does not mean that being on thin ice, reduced to excuses, isn’t in fact a preferable position for us to take. We acknowledge we’re wrong from the perspective of maintaining art writing as an identifiable convention, but the priority is rather the continuation of a discursive sort of practice trying to negate the reproduction of the stultifying conditions that determine it. This is clearly uncomfortably close to becoming an apology for idiocy and more worryingly a justification for relativism, but the purpose of maintaining the practice requires us getting a firm enough footing somewhere. The important question for us is not what we are not or are apologetic about but whether we’re moving the practice on, and all this, these crits haven’t initiated that as yet. But reducing everything that is shit into one generality, even if it takes things with it that are not shit, seems intuitively the better position to take currently, in the sense that, at least, it is unlikely to be taken as a celebration of current cultural production or of a ‘life-affirming practice’.
What could we do with the component parts of the self-describing system of art? Organising the various contents of arthood into ones that criticise ‘artist's pronouncements and writings’ and ones that don’t; or by some means arranging ‘somehow significant’ and ‘less than significant’ examples, in order to portray, by our own culturally and socially contingent points of view, an adequate and accurate assertion, seems to us to be functioning the same as the processes of selection, based on subjective decisions as competition carried out by the system of art and most conspicuously celebrated by institutions within the institution, such as the Turner Prize.
Although these crits may not, as yet have moved the practice on in a more productive direction, we would claim that they have at least contributed to precluding the practice’s immediate dissolution.
As long as a force is blind, it remains a force. As soon as it has a programme, a perspective, it can be integrated. It can be internalised and subsumed into the system to become a contribution to the system’s self-description. We don’t particularly want to commodify our attempt at maintaining our art practice by getting it apprehended and categorized; although it is true that this website does exactly that. Our intention with these Crits is, above anything else, concerned with maintaining our practice; which requires getting it to continue from within the self-describing system of art that is bent on the neutralisation of dissent. Our text within these Crits may be proliferated with art clichés and commonplace knowledge but they’re not concerned with formulating a completed product which might require being proliferated with adjectives aimed at obfuscating their purpose in order not to appear reductive. You might well wonder at this point, as do we: why then write it publicly?
Michael Corris asks “In whose world, I wonder, are the jottings of artists and critics "sacrosanct"?” We don’t know, not particularly in our world. But equally we wonder in whose world are the jottings of artists and critics substantively criticised and questioned? It isn’t conspicuous in the world of the publications mentioned in the main text of Crit 4, one of which was explicitly referenced in the protracted two-part footnote. We accept the excerpt is wrong in the sense that much writing on art doesn’t set great store in the words that artists utter or write, focusing more on society as opposed to autonomous authorisation as a source of understanding. But it is true there is far less evidence of the utterances and jottings of artists being taken proactively and productively apart. It is due to our experience that the artist’s voice, in terms of criticism, remains stated, referenced, avoided etc., rather than annotated with criticism, that we’ve dumped and reduced the artist’s and critic’s voice into the sludgefest of arthood. Although it's possible we’re constructing a delusional, overstated description of a system exemplified only by our reductive sentences. But nevertheless doing so gives a footing, theoretically at least, as we’re yet to give it a try but which will rely, as ever, on drawing from the lessons of past failures and successes.
Must do better… or a car crash of a practice...
We’re not much concerned with making a series of immutable products out of these crits, even if the act of publishing them on a website contradicts that lack of intention. Rather they function as stages in the development of the practice. To offer another excuse: what is necessarily reductive now may get broken up and regurgitated later in a more irreducible form.
It might be overtly negative, vastly exaggerated, simplified and just plain wrong to assert that the system of art is, for example, a coercive institution; that all the middle-level coteries that form further intermediary institutions that form the sludge of arthood, are equally coercive. But for our purposes just one instance is enough to contaminate, and therefore enough for us to condemn, the rest. We acknowledge that if we were attempting to produce a morphology of arthood this would be lamentable. The most significant point, for us, remains that the causes of the coercion and the constraints in which artists function are to be sought, not in the form of the institution, but in its very existence.
It appears from a brief nose around in arthood that the contents of the art system barely, if ever, touch the environment beyond the parameters of the system itself; something like ‘real-life’ (what potentially fleetingly does is effectively subsumed into the system). The contents of the system does reflect, in a significantly reduced form, the structures of the real-life environment beyond its boundaries, such as real-life in capitalist societies and of institutions that function to destroy the artist’s impulse to freedom; self-imposed organisation and co-operation of the producers by ‘inclucating with ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above.’ Just like the worker - beyond the esoteric, shifting and omnipotent boundaries of art - coerced into wage-slavery (including the art sectors own workforce), the artist, whether functioning only on the weekends, evenings or seven days a week, is suppressed and distorted within the institutional structures designed to assume obedience and subordination.
We agree with the criticism that there are statements made within the text of these Crits that are accurately (we wouldn’t say pedantically) described as ‘wrong’ but we believe there is merit or we are justified in our choice to include and use these erroneous statements as a means of getting a footing in which to maintain and continue the practice, in what is for us a productive and discursive way. Committing the level of detail necessary for making the quoted statement “to be an adequate and accurate picture of artists' writings and critical reflection on art” would not make it useful to us. We acknowledge that it might turn out that we’re wrong about that, and subsequently that aspect of the development of the practice would have proved to have been as erroneous as the excerpt is. We are though aware that this is done at the expense of a form of writing that is academically accurate, epistemologically rigorous, correct etc., but which is not ours. We are also aware that we are on increasingly shaky ground, but at the moment it still feels more or less worth including this footnote in this Crit.
Our thinking as it stands, after having responded to Michael Corris’ comments and consequently considered some aspects of our practice in more detail, leads us back to the quotes included above from Terry Atkinson, regarding an affirmative culture. Three basic options seem to us to be available as regards to maintaining a practice:
(1) To hold that the art system in its current form is an inherently positive entity; it may have its highlights and lowlights but as a sphere of cultural production it is essentially life-affirming and generally accepted as worthwhile.
(2) To hold alternatively that the art system, as it currently exists is inherently problematic; it may have its highlights and lowlights but to pursue and maintain an art practice constitutes something like a fundamental predicament or dilemma. Its output is adiaphorous; whether it is good or bad is secondary to its function as problematic, problem-solving, questionable etc.
(3) To hold that the system of art constitutes a squatting, bastardised combination of the two; in this formation it doesn’t merely have its highlights and lowlights, but the relativism it inspires literally forms its purpose. An oxymoron such as ‘critically affirmative’ might be used to describe it. This option could function as a general characterisation of current art practice.
We will dismiss option (3) out of hand on the basis that, although it likely constitutes the most accurate and prevalent approach, in terms of the majority of current art practice, a practice taking its lead from this option (such as those emerging from CSM) will find itself constrained by innumerable restrictions and preordained conditions, defined by halfness. At best it will function as the reforming, revising, compromising functionary-type; at worst the blind celebrant functionary-type. In terms of a practice that idealistically sees the dissolution of the system of art as its motivation, this is a redundant option.
Option (1) although temptingly idyllic would preclude even any attempt at criticism. Any meaningful justification for the purpose of collaboration would be equally dissolved. Practice would be reduced to either a purely - potentially pleasurable, but ultimately vacuous passing-of-one’s-time; or otherwise a kind of menial, subservience of carrying-out the institution’s ideological bread and butter - one thinks here of someone like Liam Gillick.
Option (2) by process of elimination is the only tenable option. All output produced from this point of view constitutes something less than positive. Less ‘significant’ or ‘important’ and more a kind of persistent, inconvenient obstruction. This output is adiaphorous; questions of whether it’s good or bad constitute only forays into (1) and (2)’s territory resulting in variably better or worse results (all of which the middle-level excels in) but are supplanted in (2) by questions of purpose, use, intention - generally what to do to justify the continuation of the practice.
If the maintenance of an art practice consistent with (2) is dependent on seeing the conditions the practice is determined by as problematic, the purpose of the practice becomes a predicament concerned with problem-solving, of precluding, negating or at least avoiding the problem rather than contributing to its redescription. The dissolution of the problem - realistically in Stirner’s terms quoted above, at an individual level - functions as a footing in the sense of us at least knowing what it is we don’t want to reproduce.