Conceptual Art: Responses to Capitalism

Conceptual prowess Responses to capitalistic economyWhen Situationism evolved from the Letterist movement, in the inwardness of the last century, it set itself up in opposition to twain a nonher(prenominal) two hot(prenominal) politic each(prenominal)y motivated groups Dadism and Surre every last(predicate)ism. Situationism, however, was totally incidentally political, and quite than subverting the fine fine finesse human, aimed only to redesign its context, including the attitudes of the public, so that dodge could become nighthing any unity could do or enjoy- something integrate into nonchalant life. Historically, machinations efforts to bring d own capitalist structures from within deem been very ill-fated, with wileists finding themselves ignored, scorned, crushed or possibly worse- admission priceories to political agendas. wileists and spargonrs must excogitate harder than ever to devise means of oppose or exposing capitalisms deceptions, yet many commentators appear to subscribe to stimulateed the conclusion that the contend is bargonly worth fighting. As we shall see, Jean Baudrillard argues that criticism of the status quo is no longer possible with with(predicate) invention or literature and that the only efficient way of dissenting from capitalist order of magnitude is to commit self-destruction, fresh trick wishes to be negative, critical, innovative and a perpetual surpassing, as easily as immediately (or almost) assimilated, accepted, integrated, consumed. One must surrender to the evidence art no longer contests anything. If it ever did. Revolt is isolated, the malediction consumed. therefrom the daring movements in Europe put the artist down the stairs pressure to march a certain individuality, while also rather contradictorily- organism a producer, and as prolific, political and reactionary a producer as possible, at that place is a lot of talk, non ab knocked proscribed(p) re bounce or forcing the prudence picture to live up to its own ideals, entirely about plow negation, revolution, a nonher new-fangled sensibility, straight off self- affirming or self-creating, rather than a universalistic or rational self-legitimation. This in turn suggests a tremendously heightened fibre for the artist, the figure whose imagination supposedly creates or shapes the sensibilities of civilization.In a sense, the new wave has been cordially commissi oned to forecast the future, to scouting out new smart terrain,Aesthetic advancedity is characterized by attitudes which find a common reduce in a changed consciousness of sequence The van understands itself as attack unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future. The avant-garde must find a direction in a grace into which no one seems to have yet venturedEarly Attempts to Overthrow capitalist economyIn many shipway, Dada and Surrealism re acquaint the most successful dainty rebellions against capitalist norms, as they have attacked the conventional surmise of importation itself, and in doing so drew attention to the ridiculous fact that much(prenominal) an assumption existed at all,Dada has often been called nihilistic and its declared purpose was soce to make clear to the public at large that all complete values, moral or aesthetic, had been rendered meaningless by the catastrophe of the Great fight Dada preached nonsense and anti-art with a vengeanceIt is as though the fine artist jumped before she was pushed. With its effort to close the gap amid producer and produced by making everything equally unknown quantity, Surrealism also sought to negate its creator, using, tenuous mental automatism intended to express the true process of thought free from the role of reason and from any aesthetic or moral purpose . Habermas, too, asserts that Surrealism poses a threat to arts existential rights, scarcely still fails in two ways,First, when the containers of an supremely developed cultural sphere are shattered, the contents get dispersed. nonentity be from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form an emancipatory put does not watch over. Habermas draws attention to the levelling affect of coetaneous communication networks networks which challenge the hierarchic assumptions of classical Marxism, and which have, in scale, surpassed what any post advanced(a) commentator even in the 1980s- could have imagined. More so than ever, our media are democratic and interrelated,A rationalized everyday life, therefore, could hardly be saved from cultural impoverishment through jailbreak open a single cultural sphere art and so providing access to just one of the specialized knowledge complexes.Any diligent dissent ho affair be substituteed into a commodity, a yield to assist the perpetuation of capitalism. Catchy slogans devised by revolutionaries are use to sell mortgages, photographs tha t challenge conventional assumptions about beauty and form are write about in books to be sold, and bought by galleries where their beauty and form potful be admired and valued- bought and sold. As the Anti-Naturals recently wrote, on the subject,It is the nature of the Spectacle to transform all experience into a consumer commodity. It is no surprise, then, that so much of modern capitalist send should be foc utilise on the veritableity swindle. It is not merely that we are told that our authentic self is only a recognition card order away. We must be told what and how to purchase. Since, in the midst of the Spectacle, all experience is real only when it can be consumed, it is natural to follow the guidance reachered by the array of products engineered to address each dowryicular need. In reality, it is quite easy to muckle market to hundreds of millions of individuals, since each quest is equal in its basic features.Any words spoken against can be turned into rallying s upport. artistic creation, like any personnelful weapon, can endlessly be turned against those who use it.Whatever doesnt kill power is killed by it. In this way the Dadaists watched their anti-art works being systematically categorised as works of art, and were forced to focus their whole project completely on the evasion of this recuperation. Five years of agitation against capital, war and morality, brought them to an impasse of suicide or silence. Everything the Dadaists made, said, wrote or performed seemed to be turned against its critical purpose and used against them- and they waiveed the project. Effectively, they went on strike.The Dadaists left a legacy in the form of recuperated, commodified art works, and in multiple imitations of their style and attitude. Their advocation of collage and photomontage is now all over in advertisements, their paradoxically anti-art art sure as shooting at the very center of current post-modernist critical theory. They were correct in their belief that this capitalist annexation was inevitable while they were merely producing, and not controlling the means of production, but in some ways, they did in fact constitute a challenge to bourgeois morality. Dadaism wondered the philosophical assumptions which justified smug bourgeois attitudes, and uncovered the hypocracy of World War 1s brutality legitimising propaganda. In the end they felt that their subversions of naturalized values were merely contributing too much to the culture they had been nerve-racking to undermine. The Situationist Asger Jorn was emphatic about the failure of Marxist theory, to liberate of art from commodification, quite of abolishing the private character of property, cordialism does nothing but augment them as much as possible, rending humans themselves useless and socially non-existent. The finis of the development of tasty liberation is the liberation of human values by the transformation of human qualities into real values. Here begins the dainty revolution against collectivised development, the fastidious revolution that is tied to the communist project . . . Debord and the Situationist Reaction to CapitalismDebords 1967 book The confederacy of the Spectacle, represented an attempt to articulate as in full as possible the Situationist philosophy. The term spectacle refers to the colonization of everyday life by commodity in late capitalism, an flank of alienation experienced surrounded by production and consumption. The spectacles subjective, one-directional effect requires a kind of non- fraternity, in conclusion resulting in a breakdown of communication amid people. Situationism distinguishes between classical and modern forms of capitalism. Where classical capitalism demanded that wasted time describes any time not spent at work, modern capitalism rattling reverses that, using advert and other spectacular means to declare that it is the time spent at work that is wasted, and work is justifia ble only because it provides the monetary ability to consume. Marx wrote that,the actor feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home The Situationists describe the spectacular decree as a place where, the spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere . As Debord himself explains,So long as the realm of necessity remains a social dream, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing much than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is guardian of that sleep . up to now, the spectacle was not unique to capitalist society the Situationists worked on a theory of the concentrated spectacle that would incorporate individual influences on capitalist regimes. This was principally contrived as a rhetorical model to include the cult of personality in the dictatorships of places such as Cuba, the Soviet Union and China. The Situationists argued that the same trick s that society used to sell fast cars and kitchen appliances were used to promote and deify figures such as Chairman Mao.In uncontrolled efforts to subvert the spiritual and fiscal poverty of urban life under the tyranny of the spectacle, the Situationists developed a revolutionary art, departed from artistic convention. In their article Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program, Debord and the Marxist theoriser Pierre Canjuers, assert,At one pole, art is purely and simply recuperated by capitalism as a means of conditioning the race. At the other pole, capitalism grants art a perpetual privileged concession that of pure creative activity, an alibi for the alienation of all other activities (which makes it the most overpriced and prestigious status symbol). But at the same time, this sphere silent for free creative activity is the only one in which the question of what we do with life and the question of communication are posed a great deal and in all their fullness. Here, in art, lies the basis of the antagonisms between partisans and adversaries of the officially impose reasons for alert. The established meaninglessness and separations give rise to the general crisis of customsalistic artistic means a crisis linked to the experience of alternative ways of living or the demand for such experience. Revolutionary artists are those who call for discussion and who have themselves intervened in the spectacle in order to disrupt or pulverise it.Initially, the work the Situationist International produced was aimed at ridiculing formalist conceptions of the art aspiration Asger Jorn bought amateur paintings at flea markets and painted over them, subverting notions of authority and value. Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio invented a style of industrial painting where the canvas was over a hundred metres long, then cut strips off for potential buyers, thereby subverting traditional preconceptions of arts autonomy. In reality these processes were eventually absorbed by a capitalist art market bought, sold, exhibited, written about, and for the most part, politically neutered. In his 1974 book Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger show ups out that the avant-garde artists main goal is to shock the viewer, typically accustomed to complete or formalist works of art, in the hope that such withdrawal of meaning will direct the cross-fileers attention to the fact that the conduct of ones life is doubtful and that it is necessary to change it He goes on to state that,Paradoxically, the avant-gardist intention to abrogate art as an institution is thus realized in the work of art itself. The intention to revolutionize life by returning art to its praxis turns into a revolutionizing of art. This is the kind of logic that prompted the Situationists to agree to stop producing art in 1961, when they decided to cease considering themselves artists. Any remaining members unwilling to abandon traditional forms of art, including Jor n, Pinot-Gallizio, and continual found themselves either being forced into ideological resignation or expulsion.It is a question not of elaborating the spectacle of refusal, but rather of refusing the spectacle. In order for their elaboration to be artistic and authentic in the new and authentic sense defined by the SI, the elements of the destruction of the spectacle must precisely cease to be works of art. Once and for all. . . . Our position is that of combatants between two worlds one that we dont acknowledge, the other that does not yet exist.In The Situationist City, Simon Sadler write that, in abandoning early Situationism, the Situationist International abandoned its imagining of utopia a devastating decision, surely unprecedented in the history of the avant-garde, and yet at the same time surely the situationists greatest contribution to that history the recognition that in changing the world, avant-garde art cannot be a substitute for popular redistribution of power I t seemed that the SI recognized that for any avant-garde to succeed, it would do best melodic line to produce artists, and not art.The Dadaists, too, were aware that both art and artist are part of the capitalist system, and consequently as guilty in their participation as any other commodity or worker. Marcuse and Adorno, in contrast, argued that the Dadaist project was misguided for its attacks on conventional art. They saw art as an autonomous entity, separate from capitalist interests, and something intrinsically apolitical that must be continue rather than aggressively undermined. For Adorno, art bears an essential negativity derived from its peculiar mold its re placements of reality are conducted according to a system quite alien to those of capitalism. This Form grants art a refuge and a vantage point from which to denounce the reality established through domination.While Adorno and Marcuse criticised the anti-artists for attacking artistic Form, they agreed with the avant -gardists in their slightly utopic aspiration of abolishing the distinction that existed between art and the rest of reality. In fact, Marcuse wished to see a society organised or so the aesthetic principles he believed resided only within art. Both argued that this desegregation could not be achieved if artists were pass oned to participate. Art should be kept apolitical and protected, in a realm conducive to calm reflection that might remind us of the truth an authentic life can afford us afterward the revolution.So, although they expressed their rejection of this view in different ways, the Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists all aspired to a erupt of the distinction between art and the rest of life in present everyday life. Instead of waiting for the revolution, all three argued that the integration of art and life was in fact necessary for the achievement of revolution, a revolution made possible only by a have cultural, ideological and economic assault on capitalism . Asger Jorn, again, on the failure of the collectivized revolution,The capitalist revolution was essentially a acculturation of consumption. Capitalist industrialization brought human beings a socialization as profound as the socialization proposed by the socialists that of the means of production. The socialist revolution is the fulfillment of the capitalist revolution. The one element removed from the capitalist system is saving, because consumptions richness has already been eliminated by the capitalists themselves Real communism will be the leap into the body politic of independence and of value, of communication. Contrary to utilitarian value (normally known as material value), artistic value is the progressive value because, by a process of provocation, it is the valorization of humanity itself. Since Marx, economic politics has shown its impotence and its cowardice. A hyperpolitics will need to puree for the direct realization of humanity. Walter benjamins Authentic Opposition Crisis of ReproductionWalter benzoin is belike Adornos most established opponent, particularly since The Work of Art in the come on of Mechanical Reproduction, a work that concentrated upon defining the ring of traditional art preceding 1900, and assessed the decay of this breeze under the impact of new media and cultural technologies. Benjamin argues that art has garbled its authentimetropolis because of mechanical mass genteelness in our capitalist-orientated culture industry. He is concerned about shifting attitudes to art, which came about as a consequence of the introduction of mechanical means of echo.Formerly unique objects, located in a particular space, lost their singularity as they became accessible to many people in divers(a) places. Lost too was the standard atmosphere that was attached to a work of Art which was now open to many different readings and interpretationsUnlike his Frankfurt educate colleagues, however, and especially unlike Adorno, Benjamin argues, this loss of authenticity is actually a positive thing, because it democratizes and politicizes art. Benjamins claim that arts loss of authenticity might actually help free people, not enslave them in a capitalist culture industry starkly opposes Adornos ideas. In addition, each stage of comeback of an original work of art also contributes to its loss of standard atmosphere.According to Benjamin, then culture has been transformed into an industry thus art has become commodified contemporary culture is the machinery by which oppressive ideologies are reproduced and disseminated new media technologies such as phonographs, film and photography, serve to destroy arts aura and effectively elucidate the process of creating art, making available radical new access and roles for art in mass culture the spectator has become a partner and participant, who joins the author in determining the meaning of the production of the work of art. Art is successful only when it enab les the critical contemplation of a viewer.Benjamin mirthfully equates authenticity with authority- the authority of oppressive institutions such as the church or the state- and history. As Benjamin explains, the work of arts authenticity is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experiencedUntil the twentieth century, artworks retained their aura, their authenticity precisely because of their inability to be mass-reproduced, whether religious artifacts or one-off paintings commissioned by individual wealthy patrons. This conception clearly presents aura and authenticity as profoundly undemocratic, as the means of artistic production remain in the control of the rich and powerful, then able use such art to maintain control over the masses. The introduction of mechanical means of likeness of art, particularly photography and film, caused the very foundations of this setup to be radically altered. For the first time it was possible for anyone to acquire the means to take photographs of a work of art, or at purchase an image of the work. However hard cultural elites in the late 19th century had try to protect the aura of art works,the social advance of the masses and the guile of media such as film, which depends upon distribution to the masses, had led to the inevitable decay of the aura in the twentieth century. Benjamin marks the distinction between manual(a) and machine raising of art,The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical, and, of course, not only technical reproducibility, he states, Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority not so vis a vis technical reproductionBenjamin states two reasons this occurs. Firstly, machine reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the origi nal into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. So mass-produced copies are able to engage with the wider world in a manner not possible for the original or one-off copies. Benjamin summarises his ideas concerning reproduction by asserting the technique detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. Many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. So to allow the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, is to reactivate the object reproduced,It is these processes that lead to the tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankindIn Benjamins conception, then, state and religious administration have steadily lost the ability to control general access to such works of art, particularly since the 20th century began. This is most unpatterned in relation to the cinema, which destroyed the traces of aura with which art had bee n traditionally imbued Benjamin cites arts historical value as a fundamental part of magical and religious rituals. In the process, capitalism strips art of its the idealistic, theological halo- to some extent a happy consequence and restorative, as it returns the art object to its non-utilitarian presence, its everyday reality.For Benjamin, an artworks aura refers to its uniqueness and the phenomena of distance, however close an object may be. He uses gives the example of distant mountains and a trees bough over head, both contain aura because they are images have not been effectively reproduced mechanically .Beyond the concepts of aura and authenticity, Benjamins concepts of reproduction and reversibility represent the core of his concerns about way in which arts role in society has been fundamentally altered in the 20th century. Benjamin proposes that the artworks aura of authenticity has withered away because of its reproduceability, and the process of reproduction brings art i nto closer proximity with a mass audience. However, paradoxically, as the authenticity erodes, the works essence becomes forefronted in the process, as it starts to become designed for reproducibility. As Benjamin describes it,for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints to ask for an authentic print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another design politics.Benjamins commentaries on the effects of reproduction inspired other writers, such as Lechte,it is the process of reproduction as such which is revolutionary the fact, for instance, that the photographic negative enables a veritable multiplication of originals. With the photograph, therefor e, the spectre of the simulacrum emerges, although Benjamin never names it as such. The photograph as simulacrum by-passes the aboveboard difference between original and copy Barbara Krugers Situationism and the Irresistible Collage of SocietyBarbara Kruger addresses the negative aspects of capitalist society as an artist, writer, curator, lecturer and graphic designer. Her art is displayed both inside and outside museums and in a range of different forms. Occasionally her prints are framed and hung on the walls of museums and galleries in the traditional fashion, but Kruger is endlessly inventive, and often writes text to be printed or projected now on the walls or floors of a museum.In Picturing Greatness, a photography exhibition curated by Kruger in 1987 for The Museum of Modern Art in novel York, text was printed in large black type across a central partitioning. Kruger selected photographs for this exhibit from the museums collection, and according to the words on the part ition, the photographs were in the main of mostly famous artists who happened to be predominantly white and male. The text on the partition claimed the works can show us how vocation is ambushed by clich and snapped into assort by the camera, and how photography freezes moments, creates prominence and makes history. Krugers work continually questions the definition of art, artists and the ways in which great art should be exhibited. In this work, Kruger challenges the overwhelming government agency of male artists and draws attention to the females apparent invisibility in western art history. Just like the Situationists under Guy Debord, she has altered the meaning of art by recontextualising it. Crucially, the visitor to Krugers exhibition does not need to be old(prenominal) with the original photographs before seeing the show- even the uneducated viewer could read Krugers text, look at the original images and come to their own conclusions about the meaning. Thus the work achi eves a kind of unique political democracy.Kruger has a desktop as a graphic designer, and as such creates effective sheer images which are in many ways opticly indistinguishable from advertisements, but rather than trying to sell a product, appeal directly to our social conscience. The subject of her text is always I, me, we, or you, as though Kruger engages in conversation with the viewer. Her messages probe the assumptions of the capitalist status quo You are seduced by the fetch up appeal of the inorganic, When I hear the word culture, I take out my checkbook and We have received orders not to move.Similarly, Constant, of the COBRA group, proposed a city as a kind of physical expression of his utopia of free play which, in parts, bears striking resemblance to representations of the Internet, in books such as Mapping meshwork (with wild lines pouring out of the metropolis perhaps representing bandwidth and site traffic). make with perspex and bike parts, Constants models and his diagrams for New Babylon demonstrate his y pass watering for future as something mobile, organic, animated, and self-celebratory. For Constant the city was a sort of perpetual festival of leisure. With its intricately attached wires suspending clear circular layers, ramps and walkways, Constants New Babylon recalls some kind of tensile organism. As Constant describes it,The unfunctional character of this playground-like construction makes any logical theatrical role of the inner spaces senseless. We should rather think of a quite chaotic arrangement of small and bigger spaces that are constantly assembled and dissembles by means of standardised mobile construction elements like walls, floors and staircases. Thus the social space can be adapted to the ever-changing needs of an every changing population as it passes through the sector system.Analogues with the Internet are irresistable. Equally, he could have been referring in a general way to those unique social structures whi ch have grown from the anti-globalisation movement structures which, although provisional, pragmatic and short term, are nevertheless ideologically committed to social change and serve as emblems of the ongoing skin against capitalism, a battle fuelled entirely from reserves of creativity.Constants is city as collage, alike to that celebrated by the less politically motivated group, Archigram, in the UK (many of whose members now design massive clothes designerural features for megaband stadium concerts). In this time of do-or-die(a) connectivity and complicated layering of urban cultures, with invisible webs of communication engulfing us, the need to understand the city as a place beyond work and production seems more pressing than ever.The Situationist reaction to capitalism is also excellently expressed through anti capitalist collage for example that of the General Lighting and mogul group, whose slick mock-advertising images of soft focus female forms in leotards and comp uter artistic production of office interiors and car accidents, wryly annotated with entertaining aphorisms such as aerobics is necessary progress implies it (I see you baby, shaking that ass)andGod is in the sellComparisons to Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger are obvious. Charles Rice, too, has observed the oversized billboard signs now proliferating in major cities, arguing convincingly that they serve to perpetuate the distance between the real and the impossible,these spatial fantasies effectively deliver identification with the distant and the unattainableMany writers have noted the similarities between the Situationists idea of the derive (that is, the navigating of a city via means and routes other than those originally intended) and the experience of surfriding the net. Colin Fournier, architect and educator makes some potent observations on this area.It would seem that many of the characteristics of the profits reflect the S.I.s utopic city. The things considered prer equisite for their utopia an ephemeral, negotiable type of city, where uses were determined by the population, surfing the web is like the idea of drifting or deriving, flaneur-like, through a city. The Situationist city and the web are uniquely flexible, anarchically kinetic spacial relations secondary on any given route. The internet always seems to somehow recall the old Surrealist idea of using a map of one city to find ones way around another.Art as Capitalism the Medias Re-appropriation of ImagesIncreasingly, the media is becoming governed by imagery, and the average consumer is overwhelmed by visual information on a daily basis. Through sheer competition, the commercial sphere has been forced to use stranger, scarier, more extreme imagery to earn the attention of bewildered customers. Magazines such as Vogue have lured artists to their pages, where they are seen as innovative, visionary powers for re-inventing a complacent visual vocabulary. Thus, the traditional power struc ture of photography, in which the commercial and conceptual worlds were segregated, has been broken down into a fluid, integrated world- mutual respect has ensured that crossing the boundary either way no longer carries the taint or disrespect it once did.A new generation of artists have grown up with the rather cynical and postmodernist idea that all things are commercially viable. Contemporary art instill graduates are less likely to see their ventures into the commercial realm as contamination, and more as a necessary aspect of their endeavor. Commerce is corporal into art at every level, from the means to the ends to the theme. That the common thread of art and fashion- the human body- has become such a commodity, seems like an obvious extension of this. Fashion spreads frequently borrow art photographers for their pages and mimic, in the case of diesel motor and others, with considerable irony- the current art world trend towards narrative ambiguity and deliberately theatric al tableaux that recall theoretical artists like Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman.Russel Wong is one such new generation artist, his work strongly informed by todays cultural fascination with celebrity. Wong has become famous through striking portraits of personalities from sports to medical specialty and movies, famous for capturing moments of vulnerability, warmth and humor. A number of Wongs photos have been used on the covers of international magazines.My photos are never confrontati