Image Description 1: In front of an information board detailing the times of sea themed summer film screenings, a thin lipped man (Old Haberdasher 59) offers his hand to Alexander Farquharson.
The opening sentence of the Tate’s Our Vision statement contains the sticky contradiction: We want to celebrate the art of the past and present in its complexity and diversity, supporting artistic risktaking and deep scholarship. {00:19}
We’d like to think it was Director General, Alex Farquharson himself that came up with this; stood in front of the mirror, running a flick comb through his hair, snapped back to the back pocket of his salmon pink Pakeman Catto & Carter chinos, marking a self-satisfied metaphorical full stop. A crotch level stain spreads to the rough shape of Merrie England, deepening from washed salmon to deep fuschia, evidence of the callow pleasure of a boy done good.“Nailed it Mummy! Please tell me that Pater sends hugs?” {00:52}
The sentence includes at least one contradictory pair of terms: the desire of the Tate to ‘celebrate’ art; and the desire of the Tate to support artistic ‘risk-taking'. Celebrating art in no way coheres, or is compatible with risk-taking in an artistic sense. If either of these terms are true, then the other is not. We’d suggest that it is conspicuously true that the Tate wants to celebrate art; and that it is inconspicuously false that the Tate has any interest in supporting artistic risk-taking in any meaningful sense. We’d also suggest that Farquarson and his ilk know it when writing this shit. {01:28}
Note on “What do we mean by ‘meaningful’?” [...] {01:33}
Anyone that has made any committed attempt to maintain an art practice, as opposed to pursuing an art career (whether institutionally celebrated or otherwise) knows that there is no risk-taking in the absence of criticism; and there is no criticism in any system functioning in celebration of itself. Celebrating art and supporting artistic risk-taking are antithetical, something along the lines of Shipman’s approach to palliative care or Saville’s mortuary practices... {02:05}
It is presumably easier to define the ‘celebration’ of art than it is to define ‘risk-taking’ in art. Within the art school environment one can imagine an utterance such as: ‘take more risks with your painting’, which might be spoken in relation to encouraging a student to paint on a larger or smaller canvas than they’re familiar with. But applied with regard to the Tate’s statement this usage seems unlikely. {02:29}
(Remember to define celebration at some point) {02:33}
The Tate operates in a culture, and indeed its purpose is promoting its celebration, where potentially anything whatsoever can function as art. This is a culture embracing the notion that anything can be an operative constituent of what it as an institution relies on in order to exist, itself. Although the Tate will have no relation whatsoever with the vast majority of the stuff produced to its template. This logically suggests that artists do not rely on the Tate’s existence. {03:03}
The only possibility of taking a risk within this culture is to reject, based on some premise or criterion some of these operative constituents that the Tate requires for its continuation, as constituting examples of art at all. To reject its own determination, which would render it indeterminate and random. {03:23}
The Tate in actual fact does make this rejection continually, albeit in accordance with an entirely different criterion, in the sense that it bases all its selection on the basis of its own conception of success: of entities having circulated within the middle level-middle life relations of distribution of art to a sufficient degree prior to their being selected and admitted access. That which holds as a constituent of what the institution requires to exist, becomes that, only once it has attained some requisite level of having operated around the suitable various strata of the institution beneath the likes of the Tate. For the Tate, although it cannot state this anymore than it can substantiate its denial, anything that has not attained the requisite level of institutional functionality is essentially not art. {04:13}
It is quite clear that the Tate, or for that matter any of its attendant bureaucrats, functionaries and supplicants would not admit to the truism described above, because the institution requires this surfeit weight of homogenised failure in order to produce its next crop of exclusive and privileged output. We will try to elaborate on this in a moment. This notion of success is of course based on the presumption of careerism, its prerogatives and its logic. Without the hope of careerism cultivated and transmitted by the institution through its drip-feed of contingent opportunity structures, the notion of artistic success might be formulated on a more substantive and productive criterion for the benefit of artists as opposed to art's administrators and managers. The strange incestuous reliance upon the commercial middleman as a source of their own validation and confirmation in regards to what art needs celebrating within the confines of the Tate. The insider dealings of dealer heavy Patrons clubs where the commercial galleries get given the wink of the Tate’s programming leading to a primitive cornering of the market in particular artists. {05:19}
Image Description 3: “Alexander Farquharson (Chatham 87) History of Art pupils were delighted to receive an invitation to a Q&A session at The University of Buckingham with Alex Farquharson (Chatham 87) who was appointed as Director of Tate Britain in Autumn 2015. After leaving Stowe, Alex studied at the University of Exeter where he read English and Fine Art followed by a Masters in Art Criticism at City University, London.
Alexander is an established curator of British art and before joining Nottingham Contemporary he co-curated the British Art Show 6 (2005-6). Alex co-curated Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions shown recently at Nottingham Contemporary and currently at Tate Liverpool. British and UK-based artists he has worked with on solo exhibitions over the last twenty years include Pablo Bronstein, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Jeremy Deller, Gary Hume, Mark Leckey, Richard Long, Gustav Metzger, Bridget Riley and Gillian Wearing.
It was a great evening and Stoics were engaged and enthused by Alexander’s journey through the curating world. We might have a future Director of the Tate in our midst.
Elizabeth Chubb, Head of History of Art, Stowe School.
Parallel to the fact of the Tate operates entirely as a self-confirming celebration of what it orchestrates as being defined as art; it also operates in, and again celebrates and perpetuates a culture where a criterion for establishing a distinction between good and bad examples of what is declared as art is insidiously and forcefully discouraged. The institution has no definition to offer of the distinction between the wealth of failure, that the institution itself defines by not celebrating it but that it wholly relies on; and that considered, again by the institution to be successful, in its own terms of what constitutes art. [Terry A Turner P text] The institution’s apparent lack of ability to indicate this distinction, which pervades all art, would if acknowledged publicly by the institution only have a negative, potentially destructive effect on itself, and so only a positive effect on some notion of art not under the coercive managerial structures of the institution. The institution simply perpetuates the continuation of the distinction, without acknowledging it; whilst maintaining that the distinction does not exist. The institution (by the way, the terms ‘Tate’ and ‘institution’ are interchangeable functioning synecdoches) celebrates all art while in actual fact ignoring anything that has not been validated by its own entirely fatuous covert criterion; by the institution of art itself. It takes the contingent nod from the requisite number of lavish celebrants: curators, managers, collectors, critics, successful artists before the institution’s subsequent marketing-speak is initiated, such as ‘risk-taking’. If you’re going to treat us like complete cunts at least define the term operatively. {07:09}
The only other form of risk is the artist having been validated by the institution, to subsequently reject that validation. This can only be achieved by the artist putting themselves in opposition to the institution; the formulation of an alternative. {07:24}
The institution draws a distinction between successful and failed art by way of its grading and selecting. It subsumes successful art, failed art, as well as work produced as criticism of the institution, which applying the institution’s covert criterion is also unsuccessful. Failing art is subsumed by the institution without ever engaging with it. In this sense it is alienated. The distinction between failed and successful work is marked by artists themselves operating as administered functionaries. Managing the artwork as a special, distinct type of object that is worth celebrating by default, as opposed to criticising it, determines bureaucratic art. To reiterate, criticism being operative within the wealth of failure might constitute an attempt to negate this to some degree. {08:14}
The art object is then upgraded from its status as special to the status of a privileged type of object; a special-privileged type of object, thats own privilege is manifest in the image of the bureaucratic/administrative privilege that selects or manages or curates (or whatever) the relations of its consumption. And in so doing celebrates it. Think of Alex Farquharson’s buttered and cunty fingered1, the smug face reflected in Art & Language’s, Tate owned ‘Mirror Piece’. Faquharson’s school2 motto Persto et Praesto ("I stand firm and I stand first") is transposed onto the upgraded idealist object distinct by its lack of dialectic eradicated by the institution; snuffed out like a working class child's aspirations in the face of incomparable privilege and advantage. {09:09}
The distinction between work engaged in the relations of the institution’s notion of success; and work engaged in the relations of the institution’s projection of failure, creates a structure of positioning within the hierarchy of the system of art. This structure relies on what Terry Atkinson refers to as an “act of placement”, writing on the subject of the Turner Prize “it places [...] by virtue of those who are on it [...] those who are not on it. In this way the TP subscribes to perhaps the widest and most rampant fundamental capitalist formation - competition.” Similarly Mel Ramsden refers to ‘grading’ discussing ‘art-criticism’ as “a celebration of the world as diverse but neutral spectacle” that “provides us with a paradigm case of what art-world bureaucracy really is.” Although Ramsden is talking about criticism the comments seem relevant to the Tate’s purpose, on the basis that the function of criticism in its current inert form; and the Tate’s function seem entirely interchangeable.3 {10:15}
The selection of work from the wealth of failure by the institution produces a distinction between work vindicated and reified as officially constituting an artwork and declared to be successful and; an environment, still internalised within the system of art, of surplus failed or unsuccessful art. This is a secondary distinction. The works of art constituting the wealth of failure are no less works of art. They are simply not successful, based upon the institution’s arbitrary distinction.4 A challenge to the wealth of failure’s status as constituting artworks would be counterintuitive to the institution because it would reduce its ability to dangle hope. It would also bring the institution dangerously close to what is, we would argue a hypothesis less at odds with experience: that the wealth of failure, does in fact, due to its lack of proximity to the relations of distribution, constitute some reasonable formulation of examples of art - a distinct form of commodity less explicitly produced to engage in exchange; whereas the stuff in such close 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, but merely arthood; as opposed to them constituting some type of object dependent on having been produced directly for exchange. {11:39}
[note on our inability to define ‘reasonable’...?] {11:45}
Image Description 4: A photograph of a receding perspective, viewed down the length of a barrel vaulted sewer. Bin bags, rubbish and effluent cover the bottom of the tunnel. Somewhere a curator alights upon an untapped resource.Without the primary distinction produced by the declaration of an artwork, that draws a distinction between the internal artwork and its system; and the external environment, that of the real world, the institution would have no means of reproducing its relations of privilege and hegemony. The institution supports the surplus wealth of failure in a latent condition of reproduction, enough to incite no insurrection upon the institution’s hegemony. The institution disseminates the requisite amount of contingent opportunity structures enough to keep the notion of success perpetually alive. {12:20}
An art practice in receipt of the Tate’s support would soon become hamstrung by, and devoted to, and consequently devoured by, something other than art. It would become devoted to, as with all authority, its own eternal continuation by rendering its contribution to the reproduction of the Tate, in reciprocating its apparent benevolence, even more stupid and consequently ever more reliant on its authority and direction. {12:47}
The Tate attaches to its own authority a mystic absolute meaning. The Tate’s authority is not initiated by miraculously revealing any hidden truth or even any attempt to rigorously and objectively demonstrate it. Instead everything is celebrated. Even the idea of “supporting artistic risktaking” is celebrated. The Tate’s definition of what it exhibits is absolute and based on quasi-philosophical reason, usually operative as reference or neatly packaged-up theory. It is based most significantly on vague mystic, subjective assumptions, to a large extent also on sentiment. This sentimentality manifests itself most conspicuously in the figure of the artist as a self-confirming centre of truth. The Tate operates in the belief that cultural ideas and output, in order to exercise greater authority, must be invested with a distinct, absolute but ever recherché sanction. How is this abstruse sanction manifested? Not by objective demonstration but by the very especial and absolute nature of the ideas and output themselves. Whatever is presented, whatever is beautiful, whatever is realised, whatever is named is considered divine rather than as something that can end or be replaced. In this cultish self-serving system every person inspired by these ideas, by this output in other words the entire coterie of arthood, becomes priestly directly consecrated by the autotelic system itself. And the proof? None is required beyond the very ideas and output themselves. This constitutes a sort of metaphysical sentimentalism or pietism. The system of art is doctrinal and leads in its mystic sentimentality - hidden under the intangible vagueness of this output, to the same disastrous results of the complete negation of human liberty and dignity. {14:45}
The purpose of maintaining an art practice in conditions constituted on capital seems most worthwhile when conceived as criticism of maintaining an art practice in the current conditions of artistic production; a sort of dialectical utopian version of the emancipated artist that remains open to change in its pursuit of inherent contradictions. The current conception (contradiction) of artistic production pretends that there is the potential of freedom and liberty in artistic production that can be achieved through engaging in a system that precludes freedom and liberty. The go-to response within the system is, as ever, to produce more output and more social relations for the production of more output. The Tate’s principle function as, what Terry Atkinson calls “the high temple and centre of the relations of distribution”, is to maintain the preclusion of freedom and liberty in artistic production. {15:42}
Image Description 5: Tate Tanks. “On the occasion of the opening of The Tanks, Tate has announced a group of major individual donations. These include gifts to support The Tanks, new galleries, learning spaces and other areas of the new building. The donors include Lord Browne, Mala Gaonkar, Maja Hoffmann, Elisabeth Murdoch, Franck Petitgas and John Studzinski as well as other individual donors including Christina and John Chandris, James Chanos, Ago Demirdjian and Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian, George Economou, Lydia and Manfred Gorvy, Noam Gottesman, Catherine Lagrange, Pierre Lagrange, Allison and Howard W. Lutnick, Barrie and Emmanuel Roman and others who wish to remain anonymous.”The Tate effect, the Tate machine, the Tate thing exists to maintain the congealed conditions in which art is currently produced and consequently reproduces that form of production. It does this under the pretext that it constitutes a disinterested depository of the culture that just happens to be taking place. The majority of artists are identified as having failed. Those identified as having succeeded have done so only on the institution’s terms. The Tate functions to legitimise art as it is currently produced. Because the Tate constitutes such a conspicuous dump of capital (in its material manifestations and in its symbolic legitimation of commodities for the capital class to invest in) its own legitimacy is accepted on the basis that its excessive consumption of capital indicates it is representative of a wholly worthwhile and valid system. This legitimacy is responded to by the participants of the system, in the same way that the participants of all capitalist systems respond in the face of doubt, by producing more output; the proliferation of more parasitic middle-level institutions, public and private galleries, university departments etc. {16:56}
The Tate promotes a system where the highly inspired must be listened to and obeyed by the less inspired, and the less inspired by the uninspired. This stratification of the art system is important for generating value. Establishing measurements of value between different art works is not objectively possible within the system of art, as no accepted criterion for validation of what are always going to be subjective preferences or proclivities exists. Value is then consequently allowed to flow internally within the boundaries of the system itself, dictated by equally arbitrary factors such as the artist’s profile and public perception, their representing gallery’s reputation and relationship to institutions such as the Tate. These factors, that help to generate value, are just as spurious in their immateriality as subjective responses are but they are effective and produce monatery results. The Tate is essentially parasitic but it constitutes a parasite that promotes only a particular paradigm of art. It is a paradigm so embedded that for artists to think of alternative forms of practice becomes reductively difficult. {18:05}
The autonomy of the artist is taken away by the art system. At least the aspect of autonomy that might offer the artist some form of individual or collective control over the relations of production is taken away. The nature of artistic autonomy is split. The artist is left with an incalculable and ever expanding amount of aesthetic autonomy, that the system of art renders as non-autonomous forms of luxury commodity fetish; an endless potential of production, as long as the outcome of that production is wholly geared towards the system’s relations of distribution, relations that the vast majority of artists’ output will never engage with. The artist’s output must fit the shape of the institution’s relations of distribution in order to allow the institution to celebrate and reproduce itself. The artist is admitted no form of autonomy that would preclude the system or negate its relations of distribution. The artist is afforded no autonomy in this respect but is simply expropriated and rendered bland. {19:04}
The artist becomes an appendage to the system and is alienated from their own output in a corresponding way to how Marx describes the worker as an appendage of the machine in nineteenth century Manchester. Gone is the notion of the artist having the potential to take control of their social spaces and give them a flavour. The artist is turned into an appendage of the institution even if their only material relation to the institution remains only that of a visitor. They shift from being in control of their means of production to being controlled by the means of production. For the capitalist class to benefit art has to be validated and sanctioned by some form of institution, no matter how spurious, otherwise the commodity status of art would be devalued; as if indium became as abundant as soil. {19:50}
Art possesses no unique formula that renders it distinct from capital. It constitutes a more or less identifiable category of fetishised commodity form of capital. That its surplus value is used as a means of absorbing surplus capital is enough to identify its status. Equally it is not produced distinctly from capital in its cosseted relations of production, the studio is not capable of repelling commodification prior to its erstwhile contents being misused. Its production takes place entirely within the relations of its distribution. It is all produced to anticipate and fit the shape of the ever available space of capital accumulation. For art to function successfully for the capitalist class as an opportunity for investment it needs to produce arbitrary or immaterial forms of value. In other words the system needs to be programmed to distinguish. For the requisite amount of scum to rise to the surface a correspondingly disproportionate (in terms of quantity although wholly proportionate in terms of quality) mass of failed, rejected but always significant surplus needs to ever stagnate beneath the bobbing turds. {21:01}
Here the Tate’s true function emerges. Because its selections are taken seriously it offers a means of competition between these commodities; a survival of the fittest between these various practitioners. The scum ever rising to the surface of the system is validated, or rather given validation by being distinguished from the mass accumulated below of failed surplus, that secures and maintains the surplus value of the scum skimmed off as a means of absorbing surplus capital, off-setting etc. The resulting reproduction of bolting ever more concrete, steel and glass together to accommodate the scum enables the dumping of ever more surplus capital. It is not an insignificant quantity of liquid required to make a turd float. The Tate constitutes both a parasite in that it extracts value created by artists - the vast majority of which it condemns to remain unsuccessful; and a dump of surplus capital in that it legitimises an immaterial, arbitrary value. {22:01}
The capitalist class can be assured in their choices of investment when the Tate legitimises, validates and most importantly inflates the value of a given artist's work through their collections and exhibitions. In this context the echo of the inane mouthings of Joseph Beuys from the grave that ‘every man is an artist’ neglects to elaborate on its authorial-cum-institutional assumption that it means ‘unsuccessful’ artist, consequently rendering his own successful output forever impossible to avoid; every institution worth its salt having access to some variant on his apparently endless, posthumous supply of stone, lard, felt and sledges. It is the middle-level that holds that the majority of men are unsuccessful artists. The risk for the capitalist class is that logically it isn’t long before we arrive at the notion that every object is an artwork. Putting to one side the handful of epistemological inconsistencies, such as the free gifts of nature. Presumably then, the inevitable consequence is a wholesale devaluation and the negation of any market for art at all. This is of course circumvented by the ever compliant art education system to supply and promote entrepreneurial style art colleges that teach that all objects are artworks but some are arbitrarily better than others. The ones the students get to experience being better by the very reason that they got to experience them; the inevitable artistic capitulation to capital. Art schools function to ensure a constant stream of failed unsuccessful participants are continuously enlisted, that are just valid enough. Their status is more than, say, a potato farmer who declares her entire annual yield to be an artwork, but generic enough not to pose any imminent, significant threat to the rising scum. {23:55}
The mass of surplus production that constitutes a ‘wealth of failure’ constantly expands while the successful (institutionally) circulating commodity, that constitutes a ‘poverty of success’ remains quantitatively constant, while apparently becoming qualitatively enriched or condensed, congealing as value in commodity form. There is the implication of some vague, arbitrary notion of improvement here. Does the nought point nought, nought something of art that becomes successful improve over time? If it does its improvement takes place so tortuously slowly (by the time someone thinks to ask if ‘this now’ is better than ‘that then’, ‘that then’ becomes inevitably fetishised in relation to ‘this now’) or it is obscured and rendered incomprehensible in some other way, as are all attempts to identify and rationalise qualitative discriminations within arthood. Perhaps the only potential rationale of identifying the merit of an artwork circulating in arthood is to consider it in relation to, or as a product of the wealth of failure. {25:03}
The disproportionate mass of the wealth of failure legitimises, by producing value for the nought point nought, nought something that constitutes the poverty of success. Psychologically a stockholm syndrome-esque reaction is engendered: if the means of production, for example the Tate, can be so developed, significant and conspicuously a bastion of culture, the poverty of success that it houses must be equally significant in its circulation. It is by the shear pressure exerted within the wealth of failure, of an ever expanding, distended mass of surplus that value comes to congeal in the form of a relatively small amount of circulating impoverished ‘successful’ art. This production of value is transformed from failure to success, finding the easiest route, flowing to whatever means of production, relations of distribution become available, usually in the form of the institution’s contingent opportunity structures. For example, the mother is an established, successful artist and the son miraculously, seamlessly reproduces the success. This and innumerable other examples of privilege constitute the easiest routes by which value flows. It is the nature of capital that privilege inevitably becomes corrupted. Corruption produces the requisite conditions for the reproduction of like conditions. Inevitably the artist that comes to congeal in the poverty of success is unlikely to criticise the system of art but merely reproduce its conditions. {26:39}
It is in the differentiation between the expanding reserve of surplus, the wealth of failure; and the stagnant nought point nought, nought something reserve of arbitrarily identified poverty of success, that defines arthood. The Tate constitutes a mere parasite; merely a more conspicuous parasitical cog in the machine of arthood. Arthood constitutes the confluence of art and capital. {27:03}
In the light of the above we offer a corrected version of the opening words of the Tate’s Our Vision statement that gets closer to the truth, in that it is less at odds with the experience of artists: “We want to celebrate the art of the past and present in its complexity and diversity, while reproducing conditions and means of artistic production that constrain artists within the circulation of capital; while, also facilitating artists with contingent opportunities - in that capital engages in the production and reproduction of what artists want. We do this while perpetrating the false notion that capital and art constitute two distinct realms of human agency. We’d have you believe the former has no influence over the freedom of the latter and that there exists no insidious consolidation of the both.” {27:59}
Image Description 7: Viewed from above an open manhole, the same white hazmat suited man from image 2 is descending a ladder to the sewer. The feet of his companion can be viewed top left with the manhole cover. The man's head torch is on and a safety cable is attached to his back.
Image Description 2: A methane monitored head torch lit man offers a shovel full of shit to be inspected.1
“I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: ‘Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.’ I saw the book in a flash.”
2
Throughout Farquharson’s time at Stowe he adopted the nickname ‘Fonzie’. This seems to have been determined, both by the suitable alliteration and by his habit of running a comb through his hair prior to reading out loud from his Latin reciter. It also seems likely it was determined by the boys’ social conditioning: poking fun at the entire working classes through a synecdoche figure of the alienated, uneducated greaser-mechanic.
3
Ramsden characterises criticism as the “activity of grading [that] derives its sense from both the commodity treatment of persons as well as from the unreflexive, unproblematic and entrenched commodity use of language. [...] [I]ts task is to keep order by singling out individuals (creating hierarchies) and judging the worthiness of things.” Criticism (and we suggest the Tate also by association of their shared lack of involvement in anything critical) “has no programme, no method, and makes no declaration of principles and commitments - indeed, to do so would be to destroy its specious “neutrality”. It thus appears, since it makes none of its premises explicit but relies on being a bureaucratic functionary, as unassailable.” [p.70]
4
For one of multitudinous examples of the institution’s lack of commitment to define premises, according to Louisa Buck and Daniel McClean in their Thames and Hudson publication: Commissioning Contemporary Art: A Handbook for Curators, Collectors and Artists “...the most exciting artworks are often those that have been specially commissioned for a specific site or event.” Clearly for this statement to mean something the words ‘exciting’ and ‘artworks’ need more commitment in terms of making them operatively meaningful.
Image Description 6: A jowly Farquharson (Tate 14), the matching tie and glasses combination of a childrens entertainer, fingers awkwardly a microphone with one hand [more the look of someone politely drinking a cup of tea, little finger akimbo] , the other holds a glass of water. His hair looks like it might need his comb.