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Conference in Rio de Janiero, Brazil - July 2001

A Dis-operative Turn in Contemporary Art

by Stephen Wright
In the following paper, I want to look at the position of art-and artworks-within the global system of the symbolic and material
economy of contemporary capitalist society. And more specifically, to reconsider the extent to which artistic work-and activity-like
other social undertakings, is affected by the generalization of immaterial labor and the place of pride it occupies in post-Fordist
capitalism. It is in this light that I will focus on the question of the artwork. Generally considered as value-laden, or value-incarnate, it
is becoming increasingly obvious that the notion of the artwork is less a descriptive than a normative term, and as such, singularly
inadequate for making sense of the increasingly process-based propositions characteristic of contemporary artistic production.

Aesthetics will have made a decisive step forward when, coming into step with the reality of artistic practices today, it has rid itself
of its presupposition that art can be apprehended only through the works that mediate and embody it. In so doing, it will have freed
itself of a renaissance legacy, a paradigm that, by maintaining a misleading contiguity between art and artwork-between what is
perceived and the aesthetic value it is assigned-fosters a hierarchical vision of art, where process is depreciated to the benefit of the
consummate work. This persistent identification between art and artwork is not without steep conceptual costs: not only does it
condemn us to producing necessarily convoluted descriptions of many contemporary art propositions-where the work functions as a
smoke screen with respect to the veritable artistic activity-worse still, it leads us to uphold the prevailing norms and hegemonic
values within the realm of art.

Artists have had misgivings about works of art for some time. Art history, like history in general, is punctuated by irreversible
gestures that, though contestable, cannot be ignored and remain determinant today. Romanticist aesthetics were founded upon a
celebration of the fragment as opposed to the finished work; today, however, few artistic propositions make any such implicit
reference to some absent totality. Conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth replaced the term "work with the more value-neutral
"proposition." Indeed, objecthood was one of the hotly debated categories in the art world in the 1960s, as avant-garde
movements-notably Fluxus-sought to ward off any form of reification-and any reification of form-by categorically refusing the object.
As early as 1964, Fluxus founder George Maciunas clearly stated, with preeminently sixties zeal, that "Fluxus is strictly against the
art object as a useless commodity which is meant only to be sold."1 However, although performance and happenings may have been
devised as non-commodifed forms of art, it has become all too obvious by now to what extent the photographs, videotapes, and
other documentary traces can be substituted for what actually took place, and, furthermore, to what extent they are introduced as
veritable works themselves into an economy of exchange, acquiring an exchange value that has nothing to do with their initial value.
But whereas the avant-garde attacks were leveled primarily at the art object-what Marx referred to as the "absolute commodity,"
inasmuch as it is the very image of value-few artists today refuse the object, if for no other reason than that its simple refusal would
be tantamount to a sort of mannerism.

More and more artists today, however, are deploying strategies which undermine the defining parameters of the very notion of what
an artwork is by favoring an art which remains open and process-based, showing scant concern for the usual criteria of showing and
disseminating-in other words, of promoting-artworks. Their strategies are diverse: fostering a process of permanent modification;
seeking the intervention of external factors, thereby dramatically relativizing the perennity of the proposition; soliciting more or less
informal collaborators, who become co-authors; exploiting chance occurrences (and not the "domesticated" chance of which the
Surrealists were so fond, taking care to limit the harm sustained by the œuvre itself); questioning the idea of embodied value, taking
the symbolic barter economy as material; and so on. Though these different artists may have little or even nothing in common, they
share, as French sociologist Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat has argued, a common intent: "to emancipate creation from its conclusive
apparatus, and to put forward another modulation, at once more intensive and more extensive."2

Understanding the Art being Done

In contemporary usages, the term "artwork" designates immaterial as much as material objects. But it always implicitly designates a
finished or accomplished proposition. The notion of work implies a causality and a hierarchy between process and finality, a
difference between two stages, the former being subordinated to the latter. And it is this temporality, specific to artworks, that is
increasingly thrown into question. Much of today's art is not deployed with the sudden appearance of the work, but is coterminous
with the creative operation; its finality is coextensive with the process. This shift from culminated works to process-oriented projects
is paralleled by art's increased inscription in time rather than space, implicitly questioning the notion of public time rather than the
much bantered-about notion of public space. Which is one reason why the modalities of spatial display typical of current art
institutions appear, in this respect, poorly adapted to current art production.

It is difficult to grasp the art being done today if one takes as one's yardstick a concept as thoroughly-albeit insidiously-normative as
the work of art. Contrary to the strongly normative aesthetic theories which predominated the Twentieth century from Bataille to
Deleuze, from Benjamin to Adorno-that conceived of art as a veritable barometer of the human condition, a surrogate and
sublimated form of social activism-aesthetic theory is obliged to maintain a principled neutrality if it wants to be able to grasp
artistic production as a whole.3 Which is why Nicolas Bourriaud's recent and influential book, Relational Aesthetics, is not so much an
aesthetic theory as a partisan theorization of a tendency within art today, abounding with intuitions on contemporary practices. In
the face of avant-garde movements' penchant for upping the ante, the definition of the artwork was progressively relaxed
throughout the Twentieth century, and the revisions that Bourriaud proposes are but the most recent. He seeks to preserve the
notion by extending it to the whole range of conceits and contrivances that the artist has devised to manage the contingencies of
his or her project, from start to finish. Bourriaud's basic postulate is that "the sphere of human relations [constitutes] the site of the
artwork," the work's meaning stemming both from the "movement which links the signs emitted by the artist, as well as from the
collaboration of the individuals in the exhibition space."4 Bourriaud can scarcely have failed to notice that what is conceivably
understood by the concept of the artwork is seriously shaken by the very practices that he defends. He nevertheless sets out to
salvage the concept of the artwork, watering it down and complexifying it at the same time: "the work of an artist is a binding
element, a principle of dynamic agglutination. A work of art is point on a line."5 One might well wonder what accounts for such
conceptual contortionism to defend a "point" if it is the meanders of the "line" which are of importance for the artist, what accounts
for his reticence to simply do away with the artwork concept altogether. Of course, as co-director of the soon-to-be-opened Palais
de Tokyo art museum, Bourriaud is keenly aware that he has to exhibit something. . . .

Breakdown of the Material Artwork

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What is behind this "dis-operative" turn in contemporary art? It probably has little to do with the exhaustion of traditional forms.
There are, after all, many artists who continue and will continue to produce works, neither entirely through occupational routine, nor
strictly under the (admittedly immense) pressure of the market and the institutions, but rather in order to resolve issues left
unexplored in art history. But, for the artist today, producing works has become one option among others. The mistake is to confuse
an occasional contiguity between art and artwork for a necessary identity. The artwork has become one type of artistic proposition
amongst others-a sort of "meta-genre," as it were, comprising other genres including painting, installation, and so on.

The explanation for this dis-operative turn lies more profoundly in the position occupied by art within the global system of the
symbolic and material economy. As Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat has argued in his thought-provoking study of artistic activity in what he
calls an age of "diffuse creativity," "artistic activity has developed in unison with other sectors of employment and is no less
affected by the ongoing restructuring of the mode of production."6 Whereas twentieth-century theorists like Adorno and Greenberg
assigned a premonitory role to artworks with regard to the society at large, it is clear today that artistic activity has forfeited its
pole position, and often appears almost stagnant in comparison with the dynamic flux of the dematerialized economy. In any case,
the artistic economy could scarcely remain unaffected, both in its constitution and its phenomenology, by the growth of immaterial
activities so massively present within the general economy. Artistic activity, like other social undertakings, is structured through and
through by the new anthropological composition of labor, in other words by the generalization of dematerialized labor, and the place
of pride which it has secured for itself within post-Fordist capitalist society.

British artist Michael Landy recently proposed an incisive and singular reflection on the fate of the artwork-and the work of the artist-
and its place within this economy, by literally and systematically breaking down the totality of his material possessions. The artist
spent one year drawing up an exhaustive inventory of every single thing he owned. It seems that he owned exactly 7,006 different
things, which he classed in ten different categories: artworks, clothing, furniture, electric appliances, perishables, motor vehicle, and
so on. All 7,006 items were plastic-bagged and tagged with the same registration number under which they had been logged onto a
data base. The last and public phase of this existential audit-the phase that explains the project's rather poignant title, Break Down-
took place, with the same diligent rigor, in a large disused department store in the heart of London's shopping district.7 There,
Landy set up an assembly line where, during the two weeks of the installation, a team of "operatives" dressed in coveralls proceeded
to methodically disassemble the objects. Every day, a fresh batch of items was loaded onto the conveyors. The operatives set about
taking them apart and generally breaking them down into their component parts, sorting the pieces according to their material
(paper products, ceramics, metals, etc.). These were then shredded, ground up, and so on. On the last day, Landy's stereo and
record collection (which until then had provided a musical background to the ambient breakdown) was in turn released onto the
disassembly line, dismantled, and pulverized. Of the 7,006 things that, to some extent, had hitherto defined the artist's identity and
materialized his memory, there remained only a data base, cataloguing their weight, color, and so on.

If Marcel Duchamp's readymades raised the question of the artwork at the dawn of the Fordist era, Michael Landy's disassembly line,
symbolically transforming manufactured objects into a computerized stocklist, raises it once again on the basis of the new
productive modalities which characterize contemporary capitalism. Landy produced no work; the performative installation itself was
but the tangible aspect of a process. It was, moreover, a collaborative project, of which the artist was merely the manager. In this
respect, Landy's project is exemplary of artistic activity today, which has more to do with the efficient management of contingency
than with the production of artworks. "What is specific to the laborers of the immaterial," writes Nicolas-Le Strat, "is that they carry
their work tools within themselves, because these 'tools' are directly related to their intellectuality and their creativity, to their
inspiration and their sensibility."8 Artists have become entrepreneurs of the self and of signs-in short, managers of the contingencies
which arise in a process without purpose and without end, whose meaning-all its meaning-is immanent.

It was not so long ago that the artwork embodied a surplus value conferred upon it by the artist. But in an era of "diffuse creativity,"
the production of quality images and objects is no longer the exclusive purview of artists, and the axis of artistic activity has shifted
from a conclusive logic (aimed at producing works) toward more open-ended processes. This poses a genuine problem for both
museum managers and art dealers who, respectively, have to show and sell something: for what indeed are we to exhibit in our
museums and galleries once we acknowledge that the sometimes cumbersome, sometimes trifling material components of art
projects are mere by-products of an activation which took place somewhere else?

Already in 1967, in an endeavor to relativize the gestures of avant-garde movements, art-historian Robert Klein raised the following
two questions in the hope of squelching any fancies about what he saw as an imminent dis-operative turn in art:

Can one imagine a state of affairs where art could do without

works? Or can one imagine works which are not the embodiment of
values and the solidification of experience? For us to be sure
that the eclipse of the art object is nothing but an eclipse,
one has to be able to exclude a priori both these eventualities.9

Events the following year revealed the obsolescence of this normative rhetoric of solidity and embodiment. Artists today are
contemporary with a society that suffers from no lack of political proposals and projects, but rather which is struggling desperately
to find the forms needed to channel them; to advocate the "solidification" of experience is to run the risk of foreclosing political
visions of the future. The creative experiments being carried out by contemporary artists merely sketch a horizon, stopping short of
fleshing out what lies beyond and thereby setting limits to our imagination. And that, no doubt, is their use value.

Footnotes:

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1.Hans Belting provides a compelling account 1960s hostility to objecthood in The Invisible Masterpiece, trans. Helen Atkins (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 384-404.
2. Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Une sociologie du travail artistique (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), 55.
3. Twentieth-century aesthetic theories were, on the whole, exorbitantly normative. Conflating art criticism with aesthetic philosophy, the practice of philosophy involved
talking about certain artworks-the only ones that mattered, the only ones that were truly art-which was in turn an ersatz for social activism.
4. Nicolas Bourriaud, L'esthétique relationnelle (Dijon: les presses du réel: 1998), 85. Of course, Bourriaud's book lays claim to being an aesthetic theory: "The relational
sphere. . . is to today's art what mass production was to Pop Art and minimal art."
5. Bourriaud, 20 - 21.
6. Nicolas-Le Strat, 85.
7. Break Down, produced by Art Angel, took place from February 10Ð24, 2001 at the C&A Department Store, London.
8. Nicolas-Le Strat, 87.
9. Robert Klein, La Forme et l'Intelligible (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 410.

©2001 Stephen Wright

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