Michel Bauwens is one of the foremost thinkers on the peer-to-peer phenomenon. Belgian-born and currently resident in Chiang-Mai, Thailand, he is founder of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives.
It’s a commonplace now that the peer-to-peer movement opens up new ways of creating relating to others. But you’ve explored the implications of P2P in depth, in particular its social and political dimensions. If I understand right, for you the phenomenon represents a new condition of capitalism, and I’m interested in how that new condition impacts on the development of culture – in art and also architecture and urban form.
As a bit of a background, I’d like to look at what you’ve identified as the simultaneous “immanence” and “transcendence” of P2P: it’s interdependent with capital, but also opposed to it through the basic notion of the Commons. Could you elaborate on this?
With immanence, I mean that peer production is currently co-existing within capitalism and is used and beneficial to capital. Contemporary capitalism could not exist without the input of free social cooperation, and creates a surplus of value that capital can monetize and use in its accumulation processes. This is very similar to coloni, early serfdom, being used by the slave-based Roman Empire and elite, and capitalism used by feudal forces to strengthen their own system.
BUT, equally important is that peer production also has within itself elements that are anti-, non- and post-capitalist. Peer production is based on the abundance logic of digital reproduction, and what is abundant lies outside the market mechanism. It is based on free contributions that lie outside of the labour-capital relationship. It creates a commons that is outside commodification and is based on sharing practices that contradict the neoliberal and neoclassical view of human anthropology. Peer production creates use value directly, which can only be partially monetized in its periphery, contradicting the basic mechanism of capitalism, which is production for exchange value.
So, just as serfdom and capitalism before it, it is a new hyperproductive modality of value creation that has the potential of breaking through the limits of capitalism, and can be the seed form of a new civilisational order.
In fact, it is my thesis that it is precisely because it is necessary for the survival of capitalism, that this new modality will be strengthened, giving it the opportunity to move from emergence to parity level, and eventually lead to a phase transition. So, the Commons can be part of a capitalist world order, but it can also be the core of a new political economy, to which market processes are subsumed.
And how do you see this condition – the relationship to capital – coming to a head?
I have a certain idea about the timing of the potential transition. Today, we are clearly at the point of emergence, but also coinciding with a systemic crisis of capitalism and the end of a Kondratieff wave.
There are two possible scenarios in my mind. The first is that capital successfully integrates the main innovations of peer production on its own terms, and makes it the basis of a new wave of growth, say of a green capitalist wave. This would require a successful transition away from neoliberalism, the existence of a strong social movement which can push a new social contract, and an enlightened leadership which can reconfigure capitalism on this new basis. This is what I call the high road. However, given the serious ecological and resource crises, this can at the most last 2-3 decades. At this stage, we will have both a new crisis of capitalism, but also a much stronger social structure oriented around peer production, which will have reached what I call parity level, and can hence be the basis of a potential phase transition.
The other scenario is that the systemic crisis points such as peak oil, resource depletion and climate change are simply too overwhelming, and we get stagnation and regression of the global system. In this scenario, peer-to-peer becomes the method of choice of sustainable local communities and regions, and we have a very long period of transition, akin to the transition at the end of the Roman Empire until the consolidation of feudalism during the first European revolution of 975. This is what I call the low road to peer to peer, because it is much more painful and combines both progress towards p2p modalities but also an accelerating collapse of existing social logics.
That’s a less optimistic scenario… what form of conflict would this involve?
The leading conflict is no longer just between capital and labour over the social surplus, but also between the relatively autonomous peer producing communities and the capital-driven entrepreneurial coalitions that monetize the commons. This has a micro-dimension, but also a macro-dimension in the political struggles between the state, the private sector and civil society.
I see different steps of political maturation of this new sphere of peer power. First, attempts to create networks of sympathetic politicians and policy-makers; then, new types of social and political movements that take up the Commons as their central political issue, and aim for reforms that favour the autonomy of civil society; finally, a transformation of the state towards what I call a Partner State which coincides with a fundamental re-orientation of the political economy and civilization. You will notice that this pretty much coincides with the presumed phases of emergence, parity and phase transition.
Most likely, acute conflict may arise around resource depletion and the protection of these resources through commons-related mechanisms. Survival issues will dictate the fight for the protection of existing commons and the creation of new ones.
You often cite Marx, who of course also wrote at a time of conflict and social change provoked by technological and economic development. Does this tension you’re describing fit in his notion of contradictory forces conflicting – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – in other words, is this a historical materialist process?
I don’t quite use the same language, because I use Marx along with many other sources. I never use Marx exclusively or ideologically, but as part of a panoply of thinkers that can enlighten our understanding. My method is not dialectical but integrative, i.e. I strive to integrate both individual-collective aspects and objective-subjective aspects, and to avoid any reductionist and deterministic interpretations. Though I grant much importance to technological affordances, I do not adhere to technological determinism, and I don’t find that I pay much attention to historical materialism, since I see a feedback loop between culture, human intentionality, and the material basis. Technology has to be imagined before it can be invented.
My optimism is grounded in the hyperproductivity of the new modes of value creation, and on the hope that social movements will emerge to defend and expand them. If that fails to happen, then the current unsustainable infinite growth system will wreak great havoc on the biosphere and humanity.
As you say classical or Marxist economics don’t really suffice to describe the current situation. Is one aspect of this problem that the classical distinction between use and exchange doesn’t fit with a situation in which many of the “uses” are ludic, and have an exchange system built into them? I’m thinking of on-line gaming specifically. But it has always been difficult to place art in this simple use/exchange polarity. Do you see any revisions to that polarity today?
I’m not sure the ludic aspect is crucial, as use value is agnostic to the specific kind of use, just as peer production is agnostic as to the motivation of the contributors. However, our exponential ability to create use value without intervention of the commodity form, with only a linear expansion of the monetization of peer platforms, does create a double crisis of value. On the one hand, capital is valuing the surplus of social value through financial mechanisms, and is not restituting that value to labour, just as proprietary platforms do not pay their value producers; on the other hand, peer producers are producing more and more that can’t be monetized. So we have financial crisis on the one hand, a crisis of accumulation and a crisis of precarity on the other side. This means that the current form of financial capitalism, because of the broken feedback loop between value creation and realization, is no longer an appropriate format.
Regarding your ‘integrative method’, this is a much more sophisticated take on economics that places it in relationship to other, cultural, dimensions of human life. And the imagination is central to it. Given that, do you see any special role for art in this transition?
Art is a precursor of the new form of capitalism, which you could say is based on the generalization of the ‘art form of production’. Artists have always been precarious, and have largely fallen outside of commodification, relying on other forms of funding, but peer production is a very similar form of creation that is now escaping art and becoming the general modality of value creation.
My take is that commodified art has become too narcissistic and self-referential and divorced from social life. I see a new form of participatory art emerging, in which artists engage with communities and their concerns, and explore issues with their added aesthetic concerns. Artists are ideal trans-disciplinary practitioners, who are, just as peer producers, largely concerned with their ‘object’, rather than predisposed to disciplinary limits. As more and more of us have to become ‘generally creative’, artists also have a crucial role as possible mentors in this process. I was recently invited to attend the Article Biennale in Stavanger, Norway, as well as the artist-led herbologies-foraging network in Finland and the Baltics, and this participatory emergence was very much in evidence, it was heartening to see.
We might see as opposed to that sort of grassroots participatory engagement, the entities you refer to as the “netarchies.” Their power lies in the ownership of the platform they exploit for harvesting user-originating information and activities. How hegemonic is this ownership? At what point does it become impossible to create a “counter-Google”?
The hegemony is relative, and is stronger in the sharing economy, where individuals do not connect through collectives and have weak links to each other. The hegemony is much weaker in the true commons-oriented modalities of production, where communities have access to their own collaborative platforms and for-benefit associations maintaining them.
The key terrain of conflict is around the relative autonomy of the community and commons vis a vis for-profit companies. I am in favour of a preferential choice towards entrepreneurial formats which integrate the value system of the commons, rather than profit-maximisation. I’m very inspired by what David de Ugarte calls phyles, i.e. the creation of businesses by the community, in order to make the commons and their attachment to it viable and sustainable over the long run. So, I hope to see a move from the current flock of community-oriented businesses, towards business-enhanced communities. We need corporate entities that are sustainable from the inside out, not just by external regulation from the state, but from their own internal statutes and linkages to commons-oriented value systems.
Counter-googles are always possible, as platforms are always co-dependent on the user communities. If they violate the social contract in a too extreme way, users can either choose different platforms, or find a commons-oriented group that develops an independent alternative, which in turn maintains the pressure on the corporate platforms. I expect Google to be smart enough to avoid this scenario though.
As you’ve said elsewhere, many of these issues are about a new form of governance. Do you see any of this as particularly urban in character — I mean, about organization at the smaller scale, regionally focused, as opposed to at the level of the nation state. Does propinquity matter at all to this — the importance of living together? This seems to relate to a — not a contradiction or tension exactly, but a complication of the P2P notion — that relationships are dispersed, yet a number of the parallels you draw with historical models (for example the Commons) connect with social situations in which people lived very close together. A fairly strong notion in urbanistic thinking is that propinquity is a good thing. In the past that was part of many artistic relationships also: cities as milieux of artistic production/creativity, artists’ colonies; working cheek by jowl with other creative people and breathing the same air. Is this notion in any sense undermined by dispersed networks?
I think we are seeing the endgame of neoliberal material globalization based on cheap energy, and hence a necessary relocalization of production, but at the same time, we have new possibilities for online affinity-based socialization which is coupled with resulting physical interactions and community building. We have a number of trends which weaken the older forms of socialization. The imagined community of the nation-state is weakening both because of the globalized market; the new possibilities for relocalization that the internet offers, which includes a new lease of life to mostly reactionary and more primary ethnic, regional and religious identities; but also because of this important third factor, i.e. socialization through transnational affinity based networks.
What I see are more local value-creation communities, but who are globally linked. And out of that, may come new forms of business organization, which are substantially more community-oriented. I see no contradiction between global open design collaboration, and local production, both will occur simultaneously, so the relocalized reterritorialisation will be accompanied by global tribes organized in ‘phyles.’ I think the various commons based on shared knowledge, code and design, will be part of these new global knowledge networks, but closely linked to relocalized implementations.
One interesting question is what forms of urbanism come out of p2p thinking. The movement is in the process of thinking this through, in fact a definition of p2p urbanism was just published by the “Peer-to-peer Urbanism Task Force” (http://p2pfoundation.net/Peer-to-Peer_Urbanism).
This promotes, in general terms, bottom-up rather than centrally planned cities; small-scale development that involves local inhabitants and crafts; and a merging of technology with practical experience. All resonant in various ways with p2p approaches. But this statement also provokes a few questions: It calls for an urbanism based on science and function; in fact it explicitly promotes a biological paradigm for design. At the risk of over-categorizing, isn’t this a modernist understanding of design — or if not, how is it different? This document also refers to specific schools of urban design: Christopher Alexander, and also New Urbanism. On the side of socio-economics though, New Urbanism has been criticized (for example in David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope); some see it as nostalgic and in the end directed at a narrow segment of the population. Christopher Alexander’s work on urban form has also been criticized as, being based on consensus, restrictive in its own ways. In fact, might not p2p principals call for creation of spaces that allow dissent and even shearing-off from the mainstream? Might there be a contradiction built into trying to accommodate the desires for consensus and for freedom? Contradiction can be a source of vitality, certainly in art; but it can raise some tensions when you get to built form and a shared public realm.
I cannot speak for the bio- or p2p urbanism movement, which is itself a pluralistic movement, but here’s what I know about this ‘friendly’ movement. I would call p2p urbanism not a modernist but a transmodernist movement. It is a critique of both modernist and postmodern approaches in architecture and urbanism; takes critical stock of the relative successes and failings of the New Urbanist school; and then takes a trans-historical approach, i.e. it critically re-integrates the premodern, which it no longer blankly rejects as modernists would do. I don’t think that makes it a nostalgic movement, but rather it simply recognizes that thousands of years of human culture do have something to teach us, and that even as we ‘progressed’, we also lost valuable knowledge. Finally, I think there is a natural affinity between the prematerial and post-material forms of civilization. The accusation of elitism is I think also unwarranted, given what I know of the work of bio-urbanists amongst slumdwelling communities. However, I take your critique of consensus very seriously, without knowing how they answer that. You are right, that is a big danger to guard for, and one needs to strive for a correct balance between agreed-upon frameworks, that are community and consensus-driven, and the need for individual creativity and dissent. Nevertheless, compared to the modernist prescriptions of functional urbanism, I don’t think that danger should be exaggerated.
Following on this track, I’d like to pose another question that relates to living together. The P2P concept depends on the difficulty of controlling the activity of peers on a network: i.e. it’s impossible to lock down the internet. Doesn’t this degree of freedom also eliminate those social controls that might be considered “healthy” – for example, controls over criminal activity. David Harvey (to bring him in again), in his paper “Social Justice, Postmodernism and the City”, lists social controls among several elements of postmodern social justice. When the grand narratives have been replaced by small narratives, there remains a need to limit some freedoms. How does p2p thinking deal with this?
I think we can summarize the evolution of social control in three great historical movements. In premodern times, people lived mostly in holistic local communities, where everyone could see one another, and social control was very strong. At the same time, vis a vis more far-away institutions, such as for example the monarchy, or the feudal lord, or say in more impersonal communities such as large cities, compliance was often a function of fear of punishment. With modernity, we have a loss of the social control through the local community, but a heightened sense of self through guilt, combined with the fine-grained social control obtained through mass institutions, described for example by Michel Foucault. The civility obtained through the socialization of the imagined community that was the nation state, and the educational and media at its disposal, also contributed to social control and training for civil behaviour.
My feeling about peer-to-peer networks is that they bring a new form of very real socialization through value affinity, and hence, a new form of denser social control in those specific online communities which also usually have face-to-face socialities associated with them. But this depends on whether the community has a real value affinity and a common project, in which case I think social control is ‘high’, because of the contributory meritocracy that determines social standing. On the contrary, in the looser form of sharing communities, say YouTube comments for example, we get the type of social behaviour that comes from anonymity and not really being seen.
So the key challenge is to create real communities and real socialization. Peer to peer infrastructures are often holoptical, i.e. there is a rather complete record of behaviour and contributions over time, and hence, a record of one’s personality and behaviour. This gives a bonus to ‘good ethical behaviour’ and attaches a higher price to ‘evil’. On the other hand, in the looser communities, subject to more indiscriminate swarming dynamics, negative social behaviour is more likely to occur.
A key difference between contemporary commons and those of the past is that the new ones are immaterial and global. The model for P2P exchange seems to be of autonomous agents relating and forming new communities not based on membership in an originary cultural group. Given a global distribution, how do local, cultural factors play into the model of globalized distributed networks? How does P2P accommodate cultural specificity, especially specificity with deep historical roots; and how does that accommodate the development of new culture, art?
In my view, the digital commons reconfigure both the local and the global. I think we can see at least three levels, i.e. a local level, where local commons are created to sustain local communities, see for example the flowering of neighbourhood sharing systems; then there are global discourse communities, but they are constrained by language; so rather than national divisions, which still exist but erode somewhat as a limitation for discourse exchange, there is a new para-global level around shared language. At each level though, cultural difference has to be negotiated and taking into account. If there is no specific effort at diversity and inclusion, then affinity-based communities reproduce existing hierarchies. For example, the free software world is still dominated by white males. Without specific efforts to make a dominant culture, which has exclusionary effects, adaptive to inclusion, deeper participation is effectively discouraged. Of course, as the dominant culture may not be sufficiently sensitive, it is still incumbent on minoritarian cultures to make their voice and annoyances heard. Obviously, each culture will have to go through an effort to make their culture ‘available’ through the networks, but I think the specific role of artists, now operating more collectively and collaboratively than before, is to experiment with new aesthetic languages, so that non-conceptual truths can be communicated.
The innovation I see as most important though is in terms of the globa-local, i.e. a relocalization of production, but within the context of global open design and knowledge communities, probably based on language. I also see a distinct possibility for a new form of global organization, i.e. the phyle I mentioned earlier, as fictionalized in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and operationalized by lasindias.net. These are transnational value communities that created enterprises to sustain their livelihoods.
I see the key challenge, not just to develop ‘relationality’ between individuals, as social networks are doing very well, but to develop new types of community, such as the phyle, which are not just loose networks, but answer the key question of sustainability and solidarity.
In terms of culture, what I see developing is a new transnational culture, based on value and discourse communities, based on language, that are neither local, nor national, nor fully cosmopolitan, but ‘trans-national’.
And the creative relationships between artists can in some sense be a model for this?
Artists have been precarious in almost all periods of history, and their social condition reflects what is now very common for ‘free culture’ producers today, so studying sustainability and livelihood practices of artist communities seems to me to be a very interesting lead in terms of linking with previous historical experience. I understand that artists now have increasingly collaborative practices and forms of awareness. Unfortunately, my own knowledge of this is quite limited so this is really also an open appeal for qualified researchers to link art historical forms of livelihood, with current peer production. In some ways, we are all now becoming precarious artists under neoliberal cognitive capitalism!
Arriving at the homepage of Ten Thousand Cents, an Internet artwork by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, a mottled image of a one hundred dollar bill slowly fades into view. Ben Franklin looks out sedately. Mousing over the large image, the cursor is replaced with a small red rectangle. And here lays the beauty of the project; with the click of each rectangle, a zoomed in portion of the one hundred dollar bill is revealed. On the left side is a high-resolution photograph of that tiny portion of the bill. On the right side, a real-time moving image plays, revealing how the image was drawn by a human hand in a drawing program created by Koblin and Kawashima. There are, in fact, 10,000 such rectangles and each was created by a Turker through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace.
Over the course of five months (from November 2007 to March 2008) Koblin and Kawashima posted tasks, known as HITs, Human Intelligence Tasks, on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site. Having broken down an image of a one hundred dollar bill into 10,000 sections, Turkers were tasked with redrawing their assigned section. Each Turker was paid $.01 for the task, making the total payment of drawing a one hundred dollar bill one hundred dollars. (Prints of the project can also be bought for one hundred dollars. All proceeds are donated to the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project) Each Turker worked anonymously, unaware that what they were drawing was a section of a bill or that their work would eventually be combined with other Turkers’ work to create an art project. The variability is endless. Some Turkers methodically draw in the lines and painstakingly shade in boxes. Some quickly slash the paint tool across the page; one imagines they felt they had better things to do with their time. Some are cheeky, using the space for digital graffiti or messages like “I love U.” Most copy the image exactly. Yet, with the differing movements and tempos, every one suggests a different story and different person behind the tool. I suggest you take a few minutes and watch the unfolding scenes. They are oddly, satisfyingly banal and beautiful.
The project and its presentation on the website are undoubtedly elegant. Yet, the conceptual work behind the piece is a bit murkier. The project description states, “The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, ‘crowdsourcing,’ ‘virtual economies,’ and digital reproduction.” Big and important themes. What are the implications of crowd-sourcing for creative work? For any kind of paid work? Where is the distinction between work and play? Creativity and re-presentation? In this deeply networked age, what are the evolving relations between individual and collective action?
The Mechanical Turk, made by Wolfgang de Kempelen in 1769, caused a sensation in 18th and 19th century Europe, first for its existence as a seemingly intelligent chess playing automaton – one who could beat Ben Franklin and even Napoleon in chess – and subsequently, for being an infamous hoax. Inside of the automaton was in fact a man, a skilled chess player. The Mechanical Turk was no thinking machine. It was an elaborate performance of concealment and human skill.
In 2005, in an ironic (and some might say distasteful) turn of events, Jeff Bezos of Amazon named a new business venture, Amazon Mechanical Turk. The idea was to make a digital marketplace that capitalized on the unique intelligence of human agents. Broken down into microtasks, known as HITs, Mechanical Turk provides a means to accomplish those tasks that humans can do quickly but which would take computers much longer to do, for instance, tagging images, taking surveys or transcribing audio recordings. This Mechanical Turk is also a performance of human skill, one that revels in its basis in human intelligence – Bezos calls it “artificial artificial intelligence” – but one that also operates within a mode of concealment and indeed, alienation.
As Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon wrote about Mechanical Turk in 2006, “There is something a little disturbing about a billionaire like Bezos dreaming up new ways to get ordinary folk to do work for him for pennies.” Critics of Mechanical Turk abound, and their objections point to the insidious labor relations that Mechanical Turk enforces, implying that Mechanical Turk approaches a virtual sweatshop. The system was designed for employers, not employees. The earnings of Turkers fall within a gray area of digital labor, officially being classified as contractor work, subject to high self-employment taxes and no option for benefits. Although a rating system protects employers, in so far as employers can choose to reject a work offer from a Turker or refuse to pay a Turker if the work is completed unsatisfactorily, no such system protects Turkers. As advocates of a Turker Bill of Rights have pointed out, there is no effective outlet within Mechanical Turk for Turkers to voice grievances against employers. What does exist is a vibrant community forum, Turker Nation, where Turkers advise each other on known scammers.
Moreover, although anecdotally Mechanical Turk is understood as more game or past-time than employment, a recent study out of University of California, Irvine’s Informatics Department points out that almost a third of Turkers rely on Mechanical Turk as a source of income. Another study found that nearly half of Turkers report their motivation for working as income related. For this population of Turkers, it is troubling to consider the possibilities of exploitation and unfair labor practices.
In this light, I find the artists’ neat appropriation of the mechanisms of Mechanical Turk unsettling. The implications and the stakes of Mechanical Turk as an economic system are left untouched. And considering that the artists chose to create a representation of money and employ Turkers, these dimensions of economy and labor are present but disappointingly unaddressed.
Yet, the moments in the project that remain in my mind’s eye like lovely specters as I glance at the dollar bill that I traded for coffee this morning, are the movements of the individuals who drew each section. On this level, the project is like a fantastic cabinet in which each drawer opens onto a new wonder. Perhaps what Ten Thousand Cents effectively offers is not a statement about labor politics or late capitalism’s continuing ability to provide structures for domination and exploitation. Perhaps Ten Thousand Cents asks us to take a different step toward understanding “the circumstances we live in,” revealing the endless variability of individual expression. In this networked age, we often act collectively, that is, together, parallel, most often without knowledge of the larger directions toward which our actions will lead. Collaboration, laboring together, is notion whose meaning is expanding and changing in the 21st century. What remains, even among protocols and code, is individuality. Though we are subsumed by larger structures, we do have spaces for self-expression and self-formulation. Leave an exploration of the limits of these spaces to others – and I surely believe we must consider the limitations. Yet we must also explore and value the spaces of possibility and the domains where we are active agents. We are called to remember that every artifact is irreducible to its mere instance in the world – it is a sum of processes and individual actions.
Of course, “the circumstances we live in” also requires us to keep in mind the bottom line. It’s all about the Benjamins, as the phrase goes. In response to a HIT, no less, requesting an answer to the question, “Why do you complete tasks in Mechanical Turk” one Turker wrote, “I do it for the money!”
A conversation between G.H. Hovagimyan and Mark Cooley conducted through electronic mail – January 2008.
MC: Over the years, you’ve had experiences with various authorities that have tried in one way or another to censor your work. I’m interested if you could identify and comment on particular sites of censorship that exist in and around Art institutions and identify some the taboos that tend to generate negative responses from potential censors (curators, board members, sponsors, politicians, and other interested parties).
GH: The most blatant example was a piece called, Tactics for Survival in the New Culture. It was a text piece. I was going to put it in the windows of 112 Workshop (the first alternative space in New York City & the US) in 1974. Since 112 depended on grants from NYSCA and National Endowment for the Arts I was told I couldn’t do the piece because it would jeopardize their funding. I did do the piece later for another exhibition called the Manifesto Show for COLAB (an artists group I was a member of). When I first started working on the internet twenty years later in 1994 I put the piece up as a hypertext work. I have also updated it from a manifesto to an interactive textual maze http://www.thing.net/~gh/artdirect . The piece is not cute. It deals with the dark side of the American psyche. It is a meditation on the psychological states that would bring one to be an anarchist. It is a New York Punk Art piece. Punk was a rebellion against the fake hippy utopian art that was being produced at the time. That type of art is still being produced. It gets a lot of funding because it is uncontroversial.
There are of course several ways to censor artists for example the simplest is to not include the work in an exhibition or ask the artists to alter the work to make it more acceptable. This happens to me a lot in the US. Several of my artworks in particular my net.art works have sexual content. One of my first internet pieces Art Direct/ Sex Violence & Politics was always raising hackles because of the sexual content. It was not included in several major internet shows because the museums were afraid that children would come upon the images and they would be liable. In this case both the government and the institution censored the work. In France the same work was featured in a centerfold of Art Press magazine in a special issue on techno art.
People who censor are often corporations flexing their muscle. One of the pieces in Art Direct … called BKPC used Barbie, Ken and G.I. Joe dolls. At some point the isp host, *the thing* received a letter from Mattel toys demanding that the site be removed for violation of copyright. I had to get a lawyer and send them a letter saying it was fair use and for them to back off. Luckily the people at the thing were not intimidated by Mattel so the site stayed up. By the way BKPC is about interracial sex so it makes people uncomfortable or it’s titillating. When I showed the physical work in a Christmas showed called Toys/Art/Us, I was asked by the curators to make sure that children could not view the art work. I did this by mounting the works in glassine sleeves on a podium that could only be seen by standing adults. I was lucky the curator wanted to show the work and was willing to work through the problem with me. In other cases the curator would not be that imaginative and simply shy away from showing anything that was vaguely controversial.
Another case of censorship was the Whitney Art Port an online new media projects gallery. I did a piece called Cocktail Party that featured synthetic voices in conversations as if they were drunk and at a cocktail party. I was asked to remove three sequences because of their sexual content. I wanted so much to be included in this project and the curator was a friend that I altered the piece, removing the offensive parts. The curator was afraid that the corporation would stop funding the project if I offended them with my overt content.
This happens all the time to every artist and it’s quite a dilemma. If you do the work unaltered it often means that you are not ever selected again for exhibitions. But then again Michelangelo had to paint a fig leave on the Sistine Chapel.
MC: The funding issue is interesting to me and seems to come up in many of your experiences. Censorship stories, as rarely as they are covered in the news, seem to focus heavily on the ideological component of censorship and whether public money should be used to fund controversial art. I’m interested to hear more about how anxieties regarding funding (public or private) influence curatorial decisions inside art institutions. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this sort of economically determined censorship and its effects on art and public discourse around art. I’m also interested to know if these funding anxieties have worsened or changed as art institutions have switched over to the Arts management model and have made themselves so dependent on corporate sponsorship for programming?
GH: I did a large billboard piece called Hey Bozo… Use Mass Transit. It was five large billboards scattered around New York City to convince people to use mass transit. It was part of a competition put on every year by the MTA and Creative Time. I received an Honorarium of $500 and they produced the billboards. The piece caused such a stir that it was in the papers for a week straight and I was on TV on all the networks. One of the upshots was that conservatives wanted to know why public money was used to produce an artwork that insulted motorists and the other thing that happened was that Bozo the Clown tried to sue me for trademark infringement because I used the word Bozo. These are symptoms or indications of a deeper issue albeit a populist one. One the one hand you have a media figure (bozo the clown) who tries to sue anyone who uses the word Bozo. He’s got a sort of cottage industry. This is the way that corporations deal with the avant garde they can’t control. On the other hand you have mass media that tries to produce outrage in order to keep the attention of the population. This is also called delivering eyeballs and is a way to sell advertising. As you can see the main tool to attack an artist is money. either cut off funding or sue them. This is a way to stop them from getting their message out whatever that message might be. But there’s a flip side to this coin. We live in an information environment. There really is no way to stop information from coming out. It will be presented in a different venue for example the internet or in the case of art, alternative festivals, galleries etc.. So the idea of censorship is media specific or venue specific. It becomes a power game that is about who controls the venue and therefore controls the message. In this case it’s a reflection of the capitalist marketing system and art is a part of that system. But I see art as something beyond that system.
There are essentially two economies for art. One is the market for objects this includes galleries, museums, magazines and all the ancillary services of art fairs etc.. The other is the academic economy, which trains artists, curators and all the people interested in art. These systems shape what art is seen and what the content and style of the work is about. Both systems have self perpetuating mechanisms. In the market it is about the object. If you don’t make art that has a physical object you can’t be in the market. There is a component that has to do with entertainment and ticket sales in museums. This allows for installation and performance art as well as digital art and screen based art. Indeed, the economies of temporary museum spaces are a reflection of corporate manager style art.
The academic system on the other hand allows for artists who don’t necessarily fit the market to have some financial patronage by teaching. The problem is that the artist’s work and creativity is all about getting students to attend the university and their own class. This is another form of marketing.
I believe in a different type of art, an experimental, anarchic art that shakes things up and operates outside the existing art economies. In many instances this has been confused with the idea of an alternative life style that is a sort of well of inspiration for entrepreneurs looking for new products, ideas and people to sell to. Anarchic art is about something different it’s about challenging and critiquing the existing systems. Why? because I believe that art is about seeing things clearly and is one of the few areas that has freedom. That form of art becomes dangerous because it is uncontrollable. It can’t be packaged and marketed. That is why there is always a move towards censorship of radical art works.
There is also fake censorship or more precisely using outrage as a way to manipulate the art market. This is used successfully by people like Maurice Saatchi who had a show of his Young British Artists at the Brooklyn Museum. This show was also shown in England and there was outrage in London as well. The outrage in the US was about Cris Ofili’s use of elephant dung in a virgin mary painting. A nice piece of art that was about his African roots. The outrage in London was about a photograph that portrayed a famous criminal child murderer in England. The public and the press demanded the works be “censored.” The works themselves went up in monetary value because of the outrage. The position is that of an artist that uses an epatez de bourgeois position in their art. This reinforces the patron’s sense of being better than the masses. It is an elitist position. I happen to like the art works but the content of the pieces are standard for the art world. The Ofili piece is multiculturalism and the other work is punk. Both styles were first presented in the late 1970’s and I view these latest pieces as stylistically conservative.
As you can see the notion of censorship is more of an unfulfilled demand by an outraged person in the street than any sort of actuality when it comes to the marketing of objects. Those works that are actually censored one never sees or hears about.
MC: I’m interested in what you call “fake censorship” or the use of public and media outrage as a marketing tactic. I’m reminded of an article – http://rtmark.com/rockwell.html – by Jackie Stevens concerning “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution,” a 2000 Exit Art show concerning biotechnology. The article points out that, though the show included some very hard hitting criticisms of the biotech industry, it was nevertheless sponsored by biotech companies – companies that would have much to lose if consumers in the U.S. had the same sorts of concerns about biotechnology as some of the artists in the show. The obvious question of why would the biotech industry sponsor exhibitions that are openly critical of the industry’s practices is answered with the help of interviews with the chief biotech investor behind the show. Stevens writes, “The reason is simple: art about biotechnology, especially with a critical edge, serves to reassure viewers that serious concerns are being addressed. Even more importantly, biotech-themed art implicitly conveys the sense that gene manipulation is a “fact on the ground,” something that serious artists are considering because it is here to stay. Grotesque and perverse visuals only help to acclimate the public to this new reality.” I am also reminded of a transcript I used in a piece once in which a Sara Lee Corporation executive, speaking of the corporation’s “gifts” of impressionist art to the Art Institute of Chicago, stated, “Sara Lee’s art collection has made a statement – a quality statement – about our company. Art is all about excellence and vision and striving for perfection – the same standards that we uphold for our portfolio of leading brands. We are quite certain that the ‘brand names’ of Monet, Renoir and Degas have been a great complement to Sara Lee and have become icons of excellence that reflect our approach to doing business.” It seems that the mythology of fine art or the aura produced around fine art itself (namely, mythologies concerning artists being prophetic or ahead of their time, that art is about transcendence, universals, timelessness and so on) is a very useful context for the deployment of marketing schemes. Cases like these I’ve mentioned could almost make one nostalgic for old school censorship – the kind in which an authority comes down on an artist for producing work that is perceived as being offensive. At least in these scenarios the content is working – the work is having an effect. All this raises a couple of questions that I’d like to know your thoughts on. Firstly, do you agree with Stevens’ assessment that the content of an artwork as intended by the artist can be eclipsed (effectively censored) by the curator, sponsors and institutional framework surrounding the show and fine art itself, and if so, should artists be trained (in academia and elsewhere) to be able to anticipate how their work is being used in a larger context and be prepared to engage in content production beyond the frame (so to speak)? What are the lessons you have learned over the years in these regards?
GH: This goes back to Wittgenstein’s Dictum, “the meaning of a word is its’ meaning,” and “The meaning of a word is its’ use.”
Look at it another way Steve Kurtz http://www.caedefensefund.org was creating some bio-art that was also political when he was arrested. The event caused the USGOV to come down hard claiming he’s a bio-terrorist. The art world has rallied around Steve and is doing what it can to stop his persecution. Steve’s artwork was in process and never exhibited so you can’t say that it was censored and yet the USGOV is trying to pin a terrorist label on him. The context here is fluid between a media occurrence, freedom of speech, and forces of unreasonable paranoia. Steve and the people around him now have an ongoing performance work that is a cause celebre about free speech. In the end it doesn’t matter if anyone ever sees the actual work, the censorship and repressive activity of the USGOV is the key factor. When realpolitik comes up against art, art always loses. On another level both sides of the Steve Kurtz dilemma are winning because they are using the event to create meaning for their separate actions.
Back to your initial question which is the context created by the venue and the funders. There is always a deal struck between the funders/patrons/venues and the artists that show in the venues or accept support from the patrons. The patrons are seen as progressive and open because of their support of the arts. The artists are seen as giving their support/approval of the patron and the gallery system by participating in it. That’s the simple deal. The complex deal has to do with the content of the artwork. When the church is your patron you do religious paintings. When the Dutch merchants are your patrons you do domestic scenes. When the government is your patron you do heroic art that glorifies the government and its programs. In America the market has become the patron or more correctly corporate marketing capitalism and its technocratic bureaucrats/ managers are the patrons. The content of art reflects that reality.
However, there are many forms of art that operate outside these realities. The notion of experimental art is an art that doesn’t function in established arenas. Maybe we can call this theoretical art because it posits an art that can function outside of the normal venues set up for art.
In terms of censorship it may be more of a case of power and control. If one chooses to work in theoretical art one can expect no support from the existing patrons of the arts. This is a very fundamental struggle about who controls the meaning of art (content). Who controls the how, when and where of art? That is one of the reasons that I choose to work with the internet and digital art. The venues are much freer. There is little or no market action attached to this type of artwork. Indeed, this very interview is an artwork that uses the internet as its vehicle. I can state that it is an information/meditation that comes from the use of the networks. In this case it is an outgrowth of all the other communication artists that have come before me such as Fred Forest or, Joseph Bueys or Allan Kaprow.
MC: Earlier, you spoke of an anarchistic art practice that would function in opposition to the status quo. I’m assuming that this art practice would take on the political economic structure of an anarchist community. What might this look like? Are there examples of art subcultures that operate on anarchistic principles like anti-authoritarianism, free association, nonhierarchical organization, consensus decision making, egalitarianism, etc? I’m also interested in your estimation of online communities and new media art portals (like Rhizome.org for instance) who seem to reference some of these concepts in their mission statements yet seem to fall short in their editorial structure and policies. Perhaps, the concepts that sites like Rhizome imagine – decentralized and nonhierarchical – and indeed the internet itself seems to offer – would work in such stark contrast with what the dominant values of the fine art establishment (and our dominant political economic systems) that it becomes impossible to maintain funding, affiliations etc. Do you think the openness and opportunity for alternative systems and practices that electronic networks offer(ed) is now closing up, or do you see as much opportunity now as in the mid-to-late 90’s when it comes to networked art practice?
GH: There are many artists groups that are functioning at the moment. There is always a struggle and a dynamic where groups are involved. Rhizome has set up a sort of blog/news reporting website that has a brand name and a loose community around it. They have a mailist that functions somewhat as a place for critical discussion but the fundamental question is how does one move from discussion to action. The answer for rhizome is to be techno-centric and highlight emerging artists and technologies. They also spend a lot of time fundraising. The original project of rhizome by Mark Tribe was a simple anarchic mailist. This was also happening with nettime and thingist lists. There is one functioning now that is called [empyre] that comes out of Australia. Empyre was one of several list/communities that was featured during the documenta 6 in Kassel. I was actually involved in the discourse. My position was that I wanted to have my thoughts presented at the documenta http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=1718 .
There’s a back and forth flux on the internet that has some onerous aspects of fake digital democracy and fake creative freedom. This is web 2.0 where everyone can be creative and be content providers ala blogs and youTube etc.. This is the corporate bullshit of Facebook and Second Life. There’s an interesting piece in the Guardian about facebook that has be re-published on post.thing.net http://post.thing.net/node/1883 .
In any case, I am involved with three very vital digital art groups that have online/offline communities. One is called [PAM] http://perpetualartmachine.com – this is a video-artists community that has a physical kiosk presentation mode that is very much about non-hierarchical presentation. Another is locus sonus http://locusonus.org in France – that is an experimental sound art lab. I’ve also organized an artists group called Artists Meeting http://artistsmeeting.org that is just beginning to pick up steam. Part of what these groups are about is using the technology to create a media space for group interactions to occur. The funding model is pooling resources. I maintain the server nujus.net that Artists Meeting and locus Sonus use. The sysadmin is an engineering student in Split Croatia who is donating his services. Locus Sonus is funded by the French Cultural Ministry as an experimental lab. [PAM] got its’ start by being included in the SCOPE art fair and artists Meeting is bootstrapping it at the moment.
What these groups have in common is the notion of doing projects together rather than having an individual artists’ voice. I like to engage in both positions, that is, I do individual pieces and I do group works. Two previous projects are accessible on the web right now. One is called rantapod http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod and is a series of performance/meditations that is downloadable to ipod. The other is called Art Dirt Redux http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt, which is a podcast/sound art piece. These all challenge the art market in some way because they exist and are seen by large numbers of net audiences without any artworld support whatsoever. So I can say that the internet does still function as a good venue for experimental anti-hierarchical art.
MC: In preparing this conversation for publication I noticed that in one of your initial emails to me – before we actually started the interview – you stated that you’d been censored for not using particular software or hardware in the production or display of your work. I think this ties in nicely with our discussion concerning corporate funding, but something that seems more of an issue in new media art then anything else (I can’t imagine a paint company sponsoring a show and requiring the artists to only use their brand of paint). Perhaps you have some thoughts on this.
GH: There’s a lot of net.art and digital curators who set up defining parameters for new media shows. These often focus on a piece of hardware or a type of coding as an organizing principal. This plays into or is a symptom of the computer/technology scene where there are *platform* wars such as internet explorer vs. netscape or mac vs pc. There are software wars such as Dreamweaver vs GoLive. These competitions are about dominating a market. This also happens in digital art where a group of artists insist that for example they are the only net.art artists that exist and try to corner the market with the willing help of a number of curators. Often artists working in new media believe that you must write your own code in order to be a digital artist or you must use JAVA or you must use open source software or …. You get the idea. I remember once speaking at a panel where there was a net artist who was using perl and php and Peter Sinclair and I were using Max MSP. The other artist talked only about the coding structure. Our piece used custom built software as well but we were interested in the content and the user interactions. This happens all the time where a person mistakes writing code for art or insist that digital art is only code. It’s a rather boring discussion about hardware and software.
The original interview with G.H. Hovagimyan by Mark Cooley in 2008, can be seen here: http://flawedart.net/conversations/hovagimyan
G.H. Hovagimyan – nujus.net
Mark Cooley – FlawedArt.net
Main top image is from ‘A Soapopera for Laptops- A Soapopera for iMacs – Exercises in Talking’. A collaboration between Peter Sinclair and G.H. Hovagimyan. http://nujus.net/~nujus/html/soapopNu-2.html
This interview is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported
“Postmodernism is dead” declares Nicolas Bourriaud in the opening line of his manifesto for our new global cultural era – the ‘altermodern’. As a preface to the latest Tate Triennial exhibition of the same name, the French curator and theorist sets about defining what he sees as the parameters of our contemporary society and offering paradigms for artistic approaches to navigating and negotiating them.
This essay aims to identify what the birth of this new era tells us about our culture’s relationship to time. It will explore how we choose to define the periods in which we live and how our relationships with the past, present and future seem to constantly evolve. As a central focus, it brings together two examples of cultural events from 2009 which have both, in semi-revolutionary ways, attempted to define our current age. The Altermodern exhibition and its accompanying Manifesto (Bourriaud 2009b) launched at the Tate Britain on 4th February provides the first, and the second is provided by The Age of Stupid – a feature film and accompanying environmental campaign launched in UK cinemas on 20th March.
Set in the year 2055, The Age of Stupid focuses on a man living alone in a world which has all but been destroyed by climate change. In an attempt to understand exactly how such a tragedy could have befallen his species and the society and culture which they created over the course of several millennia, he begins to review a series of ‘archive’ documentary clips from 2008. His aim is to discover how his ancestors – the one generation of people who had the power to prevent the impending disaster – could have demonstrated such disregard or contempt for the future.
By focusing on two central texts – Bourriaud’s Altermodern Manifesto and a faux encyclopedia entry from the future which retrospectively defines ‘the Age of Stupid’ released as promotional material for the film (Appendix One) – the essay aims to explore the disturbing continuities between these two perceptions of our current times and the drastic consequences these could have, if left unchecked, for the future of humanity and indeed the future of art.
Defining the eras in which we live through phrases such as ‘modernity’, ‘postmodernity’ and now ‘altermodernity’, allows us a tangible way of assessing our place within the far less tangible, metaphysical concept of ‘time’. In fact, it could be argued that ‘history’ itself has been invented, documented and perpetuated as a way of helping human beings to get a purchase on their own existence and to define how they should approach their relationships to their past, present and future.
In this sense, the ‘modern’ era could be characterised as encouraging a forward-thinking outlook. According to Jurgen Habermas, its last living prophet:
“modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun: it is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future.” (Habermas 2004, p.5)
At the very start of the Enlightenment in the mid-17th century the French philosopher and scientist Blaise Pascal portrayed an inspiring vision of humanity as progressing throughout time, by likening the development of human innovation over the course of history to the learning of one immortal man (Stangroom 2005). Scientific knowledge could be advanced by new generations building on what had been discovered before them. The humanist belief held by philosophers, and others alike, was that ‘man’ was the centre of everything; that man could control nature and could master his own destiny.
This optimistic idea was so new, compelling and widespread that it assisted in propelling the project of modernity as it ploughed relentlessly through the centuries – the French Revolution, American Independence, the Industrial Revolution, the rapid expansion of capitalism and the birth of bourgeois society. It was rational, logical and, as though guided by an ‘invisible hand’, was the way things were meant to happen. At the start of the 19th century, Hegel was still convinced; we were getting somewhere, history was progressing through a dialectical process towards its logical conclusion – towards perfection. People’s relationship with the future was one of hope; as though things could only get better.
Reason, however, appeared to have its downsides and catastrophic human developments of the 20th century, such as the holocaust and the atomic bomb, led to a loss of faith in the humanist approach. Towards the end of the twentieth century, a general consensus developed among cultural theorists (Habermas aside) that modernity was no longer working. Its ‘metanarratives’ had resulted in authoritarianism, totalitarianism and terror; minorities had been victimised or marginalised; the ‘differends’ of society smoothed over (Malpas 2003). And so, ‘postmodernism’ was born and with it began a systematic deconstruction and disownment of what were now considered the somewhat embarrassing ideals of its predecessor. The reaction was severe; inciting a series of symbolic revenge killings: the ‘death of man’ (Foucault 1994), the ‘end of humanism’ the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992), the ‘death of painting’ and even the ‘end of art’ (Danto 1998). It was as though catharsis could be gained by the ridding of a past which had failed to live up to promise. In the wake of all this destruction, however, came a deep uncertainty of what would come to fill the gaps.
Just as modernism had done before, postmodernism “alluded to something that had not let itself be made present” (Lyotard 1993, p.13), only this time that ‘something’ felt more menacing. The decentralisation of ‘man’ from the story of history may have unearthed a hidden fear of the future. If we were no longer in control of nature or masters of our own destinies, then we could be less optimistic about what the future had in store and far more uncertain of the potential consequences of 350 years of rampant ‘progress’ that we may have to face.
The rejection of the past coupled with this uncertainty about the future gave the postmodern era a feeling of limbo within which time itself was “cancelled” (Jameson 1998, p.xii). In his critique of the historical momentum of the 1980s, Jan Verwoert refers to the “suspension of historical continuity” which resulted from the overbearing stalemate politics of the Cold War. Only when it finally ended could “history spring to life again” (Verwoert 2007) and begin accelerating away from postmodernism and into the new cultural era.
In terms of assessing the birth of altermodernism, this specific point in history appears pivotal. Firstly, the end of the Cold War meant that:
“the rigid bipolar order that had held history in a deadlock dissolved to release a multitude of subjects with visa to travel across formerly closed borders and unheard histories to tell.” (Verwoert 2007)
And, according to CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), not only did 1990 see the reunification of Germany, but it also witnessed “a revolution that changed the way we live today” – the birth of the World Wide Web (info.cern.ch). These were the nascent beginnings of an a priori globalised society in which, as Bourriaud describes, “increased communication, travel and migration affect the way we live.”
What is most interesting about this point in time, however, are discoveries referred to in the definition of ‘the Age of Stupid’. As argued in the final paragraph of the encyclopædic entry, 1988 also marked the point at which humanity had amassed sufficient scientific evidence to “become aware of the likely consequences of continuing to increase greenhouse gas emissions”. The uncertainty about the future which had characterised the postmodern era was suddenly replaced by a real-life certainty, but it was not one which we were prepared to face up to.
Rather than taking heed of these warnings when we still had plenty of time – slowing down and reassessing our lives; curbing our consumption and production – throughout the 1990s we actually did the opposite. As Verwoert suggests, the pace quickened – the population grew, we travelled more, consumed more and wanted more. Life in the new globalised world was more chaotic and less controllable. Before we knew it twenty years had passed and we had still failed to accept the facts and to act in order to avert the course of history and “prevent the deaths of hundreds of millions of people” (Armstrong 2009a) in the future.
As we stand, in the present day, we are still firmly on course to see the devastation envisaged in the film The Age of Stupid, become a reality. At the end of March 2009, a conference on ‘sustainable populations’ organised by the Optimum Population Trust took place in London. In its coverage of the issues raised, The Observer described the future which the overwhelming scientific evidence claims awaits us:
“by then (2050) life on the planet will already have become dangerously unpleasant. Temperature rises will have started to have devastating impacts on farmland, water supplies and sea levels. Humans – increasing both in numbers and dependence on food from devastated landscapes – will then come under increased pressure. The end result will be apocalyptic, said Lovelock. By the end of the century, the world’s population will suffer calamitous declines until numbers are reduced to around 1 billion or less. “By 2100, pestilence, war and famine will have dealt with the majority of humans,” he said.” (McKie 2009, p.9)
As depressing as it sounds, the message of the film The Age of Stupid is one of hope – that it is not quite too late. According to their predictions, we still have until 2015 to make the changes required in order to prevent us reaching the tipping point which would trigger ‘runaway’, irreversible climate change. These corrective measures are huge, they are global and they need to start being implemented now.
What is most terrifying about Bourriaud’s Manifesto therefore, is its absolute lack of acknowledgement of the real and dangerous future that we face. Rather than speaking out and demanding the dramatic changes that are necessary, it seems to support a continuation of the status quo of the last twenty years. In his video interview on the Tate website, Bourriaud describes the purpose of the altermodern as the “cultural answer to alterglobalisation” (Bourriaud 2009a). However, rather than questioning the carbon-heavy lifestyles that a globalised world promotes he seems to complicitly buy into them, insisting that “our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe”.
In the film The Age of Stupid ‘archive’ footage from 2007 presents the Indian entrepreneur Jeh Wadia as the ignorant villain, as he goes about launching India’s first low-cost airline GoAir. His mission is to get India’s 1 billion plus population airborne. Although an extreme example, Bourriaud’s fervent support of internationalism is not dissimilar to Wadia’s in its level of denial. He continues to encourage the movement of artists and curators around the world (clocking up substantial air miles bringing in speakers for his four Altermodern ‘prologue’ conference events alone).
What makes Bourriaud’s case worse however is his apparent betrayal of the purpose of cultural theory in providing counter-hegemonic ideas and alternatives. The theorists of postmodernism overthrew the project of modernity in an attempt to save humanity from further nuclear extermination or genocide which had proved the ultimate conclusions of reason. Their cultural vision for postmodernism was also to provide an alternative or an antidote to the new ways of life dictated by post-industrial society. Not only does the vision for altermodernism fail to provide an alternative to the devastating path to future down which ‘alterglobalisation’ is dragging us, but it also remarkably promotes the idea that we turn our backs on and ignore this future altogether. One of the paradigms for artistic approaches Bourriaud suggests is that artists look back in time rather than forward claiming that “history is the last uncharted continent” and therefore should be the focus of artistic attention.
Jeh Wadia’s excuse is easy to fathom – he is in it for the money, but Bourriaud’s seems harder to discern. He is driven by a burgeoning ego no doubt, but alongside this there seems to be a wider problem. A nostalgia for the good times and a refusal to give up privileges and luxuries appear to be endemic in the art world’s attitude to facing up to the realities of climate change. At Frieze Art Fair last year, cultural theorist Judith Williamson delivered a keynote lecture on what she called ‘the Culture of Denial‘. She outlined a view of the world not dissimilar to the definition of ‘the Age of Stupid’ (and indeed altermodernism) that this essay has been discussing, in which a denial of the impending future or perhaps an impossibility to comprehend its severity, prevents us from acting.
What was most interesting about her introduction, however, was the discussion of her deliberate decision not to mention ‘climate change’ in the material promoting the talk, but instead to refer to it more ambiguously as an exploration of “the skewed relationship between what we know and what we do” (Williamson 2008). She identifies the persistent ‘stigma’ attached to directly addressing this issue, describing the common perception of it being “annoying, gauche or over the top to bang on about climate change”. So she was forced to revert to covert tactics in order to sneak this pressing discussion onto the Frieze agenda – in the hope of inciting the beginning of a widespread realisation that the art world is walking the path towards its own destruction.
There seems no doubt that Bourriaud’s altermodernism is the cultural side-kick of ‘the Age of Stupid’. To write a Manifesto of our times at such a crucial make-or-break point in the history of humanity and not to mention the possibility of an impending disaster or offer any suggestions as to what artists and society in general can do to combat it, is not just denial – it’s stupidity.
The truth is that all the ‘ends’ and ‘deaths’ that postmodernism faced on hypothetical grounds are now fast approaching our generation as a reality. Foucault’s famous conclusion to the seminal postmodern text ‘The Order of Things’, now seems all the more poignant:
“If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility… were to cause them to crumble… then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” (Foucault 1994, p.422)
The main character in the The Age of Stupid is an archivist. In 2055, he sits alone in an expansive tower known as the ‘the World Archive’, which houses all the works of art, books, images, film etc ever produced by the human race. It is at this point that you realise this preservation is futile. Art is, after all, a human creation – it relies on humanity to provide its meaning. Without this crucial element it may as well cease to exist. Should it not, therefore, be art and culture that lead the way for the rest of society? To be the first to snap out of this ‘culture of denial’; to overcome the ‘stigma’; to do everything in its power to save humanity, and itself in the process.
Future Encyclopedia Entry: The Age of Stupid
The Age of Stupid constitutes the period between the ascent of the internal combustion engine in the late-19th century and the crossing of the 2c threshold to runaway global warming in the mid-21st.
This era was characterised by near-total dependence on energy from fossil hydrocarbons, together with exponentially increasing consumption based on the destruction of finite natural resources.
The institutionalised lack of foresight regarding future human welfare that held sway during this time earned the period its popular name, but scientists know this era as the Anthropocene: the period during which human activities came to be the dominant influence on the Earth’s biosphere and climate. The end of the Age of Stupid is marked by the sixth major mass extinction event, with the fifth being the K-T asteroid impact which ended the Age of the Dinosaurs. The abrupt loss of the majority of plant and animal species between 2020 and 2090 was followed by a crash in the human population, to just 7.4% of the 9 billion people alive at its peak.
Some historians argue that the Age of Stupid more properly refers to the narrower period between 1988 and 2015, during which humanity had become aware of the likely consequences of continuing to increase greenhouse gas emissions and still had time to avert catastrophe, but largely chose to ignore the warnings.
This article can also be found at:
Original text at Ellie Harrison’s web site – http://www.ellieharrison.com/index.php?pagecolor=7&pageId=press-summerreading
Edited version at The Nottingham Visual Arts web site – http://www.nottinghamvisualarts.net/writing/jun-09/altermodernism-age-stupid
Featured image: printed out photographs of the streets, pasted them back onto the surfaces where they were taken, and then rephotographed them
When we visited New York this spring, we met in Willamsburg, Brooklyn with Christina Ray, founder of Glowlab, multimedia arts lab for experimental psychogeography. According to the article ‘Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation’, in Situationniste Internationale No. 1 (1958), psychogeography studies ‘the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’.
We wandered the streets, chatting and observed the effects of the emotions and behaviour of the local communities on the streets of Brooklyn. Christina described for us the significance of various tags, stickers and stencils and told us about the brewing turf wars between the recent influx of middle class artists and disgruntled locals whose families have lived in the area for generations, but who were facing the consequences of creeping gentrification and the threat of fast-rising rents. The diverse concerns of the local community were spelt out in frenetically pasted, posted, taped and painted signs, tags, images and messages of all sorts. Every wall, every piece of street furniture shares its surface with an accretion of eye-catching stickers, advertising local bands, spray painted decorations, tags and statements of protest, like ‘more yuppie bullshit’.
The Graffoto project divides into three distinct parts. Graffoto 01 documents the richly textured expressivity of the Brooklyn communities. The social commentary mixes with exuberant, colourful and stunningly executed murals and sometimes inexplicable expressions of appreciation for the absurdity of life, such as ‘saving to buy air conditioner- saving to buy a bike (written and illustrated on 2 strips of masking tape stuck to a wall heavy with graffiti). These images draw you to spin out narratives. Sometimes further clues to the complete story lie in the details of the surroundings, whilst other accounts are completely opaque to the outsider but suggest a connection of great significance to individuals, groups or events in the locality.
In Graffoto02, MOTC (man of the crowd) has printed out photographs of the streets, pasted them back onto the surfaces where they were taken, and then rephotographed them in situ. I guess that in the streets these images act as a mirror of sorts for the street artists of Brooklyn. Also as a sign that the guttural and wonderfully articulated expressions of protest, humour, threat and joie de vivre can be both appreciated and participated in but also consumed by the world of mediation. These second stage images do evoke a strange threat of surveillance.
The final layer of the Graffoto project invites us to participate by sending in images of our streets for others to print out and post in their own public localities. Alternatively we can download and print an image from the collection and paste it onto the lamp-post outside our own doors.
We can only imagine these images so rich with local texture and information will start to appear in all the lands of the world; turning up like tourists, marked out by their strange dress, stranger cultural values and the blind spots afforded them by their communities. Or perhaps more like illegal immigrants, their language will be foreign, their deepest and most obvious narratives veiled, their protests displaced and irrelevant to the communities amongst which they find themselves.
MOTC offers a strategy for border crossing. OK, we loose much of the texture, the information and with these, many pieces of the narrative but something equally important is facilitated here. The photographs and printouts of the graffiti are a sign of something foreign, mediated, stuck and mingling in a community that isn’t sure why it’s there, whether it’s any of their business and whether they like it.
August 2003
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