Recessional Aesthetics:

An Exchange

Following the economic downturn of 2008, many participants in the “art

world” didn’t know whether to mourn or to celebrate. Literally millions of peo-
ple across the world had lost jobs or homes and had begun to experience a peri-
od of hardship that continues today. But there were nonetheless many shame-
faced comments among artists, critics, and art historians along the lines of,
“Well, maybe artists can concentrate on art again, now that the boom is over.”
Once the huge amount of money that had been pumped into the art market
(largely by the same people who pumped it into hedge funds) began to dry up,
the thinking went, there might be a new set of opportunities for making and
exhibiting art: a renewed purpose, even, for social engagement.
It was with this spirit in mind that October published a series of questions under
the title “Recessional Aesthetics?” in issue number 128 in the spring of 2009. These
queries, developed by Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois, and myself, were also presented live
at X Initiative, in New York, on March 26, 2009. On both occasions, we encouraged
responses. Two follow here, preceded by the original questions.

—DAVID JOSELIT

OCTOBER 135, Winter 2011, pp. 93–116. © 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hans Haacke. The Invisible Hand of the Market. 2009. Installation view,
X Initiative, New York. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery and X Initiative.
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange 95

Recessional Aesthetics?
1) What will the effects of the recession be on the social role of the artist? The recent crash
has done some damage to the prestige of the commodity and the spectacle alike,
not to mention the virtuality of the data-sphere. Will this reduce the influence of
these forms on art practice, and thereby open up other models, other spaces? At
the very least, might it relieve some of the pressure to conform to expectations
associated with entertainment?

2) Is the art museum of the neoliberal era sustainable? In the 1990s Thomas Krens and
colleagues developed the model of the museum that treats its collection primarily
as a financial asset or instrument; since that time, this has become accepted prac-
tice for many institutions. Is there now a break in this logic, and will the failure or
near failure of several museums, ranging from the Rose Art Museum to the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, lead to different modes of organiza-
tion? Might the current crisis present a new opportunity for the under-capitalized,
or, on the contrary, will figures like Eli Broad consolidate further art-world power?
What can be done to keep the production as well as the presentation of art sus-
tainable in New York and other centers?

3) Might art biennials (and related exhibitions) wither away? The globalized art world
sometimes seems synonymous with the institution of the biennial. Is the economic
model of local development and international commerce that sustained biennials
still tenable? Will emphasis be placed on other features of globalization, or will
there be a withdrawal to the local—a sort of art-world protectionism?

4) How will art schools adapt? One of the most significant changes in postwar art was
the shift to academic education for artists; in recent times the MFA has seemed
almost a prerequisite for commercial success, and many artists have pursued their
practices like professional careers. Will the decay of the art market cause a change
in this system and encourage different modes of training and practicing alike?

5) How might art criticism become relevant again? Since the early 1980s, the impact of
art criticism on the institutions of art has diminished drastically: in a period of
powerful dealers and collectors, the role of the critic as mediator has been all but
eliminated. But now that the art market is melting down, can critical discourse,
irrelevant as it has been for that market, regain some currency?

6) Does the art world bear any responsibility for the economic downturn? Since contempo-
rary art appeared to flourish alongside hedge funds and mega-banks, often by cre-
ating products with some of the same derivative strategies for dissemination as
those that created the virtual wealth of those financial entities, do we need to
96 OCTOBER

think about our collective complicity in this system and do anything about it? Or is
this to project an agency onto the art world that does not exist?

7) Whether the Obama stimulus package represents a break in the neoliberal regime, or sim-
ply a neo-Keynesian moment of public spending, might it reawaken a sense of a common
stake that might be extended, indeed insisted on, in other spheres like the artistic and the cul-
tural? In short, might we reclaim some aspect of the heuristic value of “the public
sphere”? And how might this affect the production as well as the reception of art?

8) Are there historical examples of socioeconomic crisis that might guide art-world responses
to the current one? Could artists demand a share of the stimulus package on the
order of the Federal Arts Project of the 1930s, which garnered a substantial per-
centage of funding for the Works Progress Administration? Are there aesthetic
models to be gleaned from such historical instances? These crises have often
prompted an emphasis on the real and/or the performative in art: one thinks of
the predominance of the social-realist and the documentary in the 1930s, the “as
found” aesthetic in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the body-intensive and site-specif-
ic practices in the early 1970s, and the concern with abject states in the late 1980s
and early ’90s. What modes of art-making might be anticipated??

YVE-ALAIN BOIS
HAL FOSTER
DAVID JOSELIT
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange
To the Editors:
Almost t wo year s have passed
since you posed this set of questions.
Since then, the crisis has only acceler-
ated, with entire economies and sectors
collapsing or teetering on the verge of
collapse. A recent meeting of G8 lead-
ers confirms a deepened agenda of
austerity policies that will undoubtedly
plunge the global economy further into
recession, with the result of intense
hardship, exploitation, and new global
distributions of wealth and poverty
underwritten by imperialism and war. Is
it possible, however, that these basic
economic facts are fundamentally inad-
equate to an aesthetics and politics of
invention? A common vernacular of
recession, and an art that would be
equal to them, relies on depictions of a
normal st ate of act ivit y visited by
momentary disturbances. Yet nothing is
further from the reality of capitalism,
whose difficult secret is the self-moving
commotion of permanent crisis. Insofar
as art is self-moving commotion of a dif-
ferent sort, could it be that these two
forms are today at the height of their
incompatibility?
1) What will the effects of the recession be
on the social role of the artist?
A collective politics could never
t ake t he form of an emergency
response to a particular crisis of capital
accumulation. Equally, artists are not
generated by the difficulties of profit
making. Rather, artists become active
through a subjective decision. Such a
decision is not an occurrence along
the way, but an act in spite of the
97
world. Not a symptomatic prompting
by the world, but a decision against its
automaticity. Exceptional decisions are
always subtracted from objective deter-
minants: reality, economy, state. The
“social role” of the artist is grounded
in the decision to work on the creation
of a new possibility inexistent within the
coordinates of t he contemporar y
world, no less the art world.
2) Is the art museum of the neoliberal era
sustainable?
Faced with ever-increasing cuts
to funding, combined with the exorbi-
tant costs of exhibiting, art museums
are increasingly driven to find fund-
ing, and art itself, elsewhere. We are
caught in the era of ready-made shows
where art is pulled off the shelves of
philanthropist s or any one of the
t r ansnat ional banks—JP Morgan
Chase, UBS, Deutsche Bank. In other
words, the art institutions’ financial
instability becomes a pretext for collu-
sion with a colony of dest abilizing
financial powers. Rather than being
recognized as the agent whose daily
prerogative is to flatten the world and
t ake greatness out of circulat ion,
“great” wealth becomes the benevo-
lent facilitator for the circulation of
“great” works. A few rarely circulated
masterpieces become cultural bar-
gaining chips in a philandering that
amounts to nothing more than the
thoughtful legitimation of thought-
less consumption.
In an environment where institu-
tions such as Bank of America annually
produce a variety of ready-made shows
for “temporary lending” (mirroring the
98
chrematistics of its everyday lending
practices1), it might appear liberating,
almost archaically so, that curators
may still exercise a bit of autonomy.
For instance, at the height of the BP
oil disaster in June last year, the Tate
held a party celebrating twenty years
of BP’s “instrumental” sponsorship, as
they put it on their website, since “the
income generated through corporate
partner ships is vit al to the mixed
economy of successful arts organiza-
tions and enables each of us to deliver
a r ich and v ibrant cultural pro-
gramme.” Just as t he “mixed
economy” is the preferred means for a
society dominated so thoroughly by
capital, the neoliberal art museum is
sustained by its very unsustainability.
For us, it is not a question of find-
ing an alternative model of funding
latent somewhere within the current
neoliberal one, or even making the pre-
sentation of art more “economical” or
“sustainable” within late capitalism. On
the contrary, it is a matter of discovering
an inoperative model vis-à-vis the neolib-
eral art museum. Collectively run artist
spaces should and must thrive. This is a
fundament al point to hold on to.
Studios and other communal art spaces,
threatened not only by funding cuts but
also by the rising cost of rent and the
inexhaustible pressures of gentrifica-
tion, should be nurtured, supported,
and defended through collect ive
means—squatted if necessary.
By extension, public institutions
1. Aristotle defined chrematistics as the art
of acquiring wealth simply for the sake of acquir-
ing wealth. For Aristotle’s discussion of economics
and chrematistics, see chapters 8, 9, and 10 in
Book I of the Politics.
OCTOBER
should not be reflexively defended.
With respect to museums in particular,
the concept of the “public” today has no
particularly redeeming qualities. An
inst itut ion cannot be defended by
employing the antique distinction of
“public” versus “private.” Rather, the
debate should be re-articulated in the
fundamental tension between the “pub-
lic” (co-dependent with the “private”)
and the common. For us, the question
today is how to turn a public museum
into an artistic space for the common.
The notion of “public” is at once
bulky and miniscule—basically uninter-
esting. The “common,” on the other
hand, is a rich and captivating concept.
It suggests both the intensity of “being-
together” as well as something that is
vulgar, profane, and everyday. The two
meanings belong to the “commons” or
“common wealth” of the mater ial
world—air, water, food—as well as the
“results” of social production necessary
for further product ion, including
knowledges, languages, codes, informa-
tion, affects, and so on. There is no
doubt that in all of these, the “common”
is indelibly connected to that excep-
tional word “communism.” Grafted onto
communism—the word that designates
the potential for the suspension of the
logic of class in the name of equality
and justice—the common is both a sep-
arat ion and a being-together that
alienates the museum’s privation in the
service of wealth and power.
3) Might art biennials (and related exhibi-
tions) wither away?
All too often in conver sat ions
we recede to the naturalized exis-
tence of biennials, art fairs, and other
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange
such art-world events. Indeed, this is
the world that many of us live in. But
there is also a difference here between
actuality and possibility. The uncritical
acceptance of reality as such—including
“critical” theoretical positions—has led
to an unfortunate acquiescence that we
might one day look back upon with
bemusement . Should art biennials
wither away? Yes. Will they now? Not
necessarily, but remain hopeful, they
will soon! There are other forms of pre-
sentation that, by their very being,
render commercial and touristic modes
of artistic presentation inoperative.
4) How will art schools adapt?
Adaptation is the logic of survival-
ism. Against the general consensus, the
question we face today is not how to
continue teaching as such. Survival is a
state of being that can only be secured
negatively, by treating it as something
to be taken for granted. To preoccupy
ourselves with survival is both to narrow
the realm of the possible and to endan-
ger it s proper virtue: per sistence.
Namely, the persistence of the Idea.
Adaptation is exceeded not by a logic of
hoarding or managing whatever comes
in our direction, but rather by recuper-
ating the power of the Idea with its
inherent generosity. Against survival-
ism, the point is to re- evaluate our
pedagogy so as to effectuate subjectivity
with respect to an Idea, or depending
on the situation, a unique culmination
of great ideas.
A collective revision of pedagogy
is possible at a distance from today’s
constant threat of imminent demise.
By extension, to teach is to teach some-
thing immortal. In keeping with this
99
theme, adaptation should be strictly
contrasted with a dedicated defense of
re-invention. Trusting in the power of
an Idea amounts to working through
its logic in every new historical situa-
t ion, somewhat in t he way Alain
Badiou admires Pascal’s abilit y to
“invent t he modern forms of an
ancient conviction, rather than follow
the way of the world.”2
A great moment of this kind
occurred recent ly at Middlesex
University. When the University’s man-
ager s announced the impending
closure of the philosophy program at
the Centre for Research in Modern
European Philosophy the student s
responded by occupying Manor House,
the main building on the North
London campus. During the occupa-
tion, the students—similar to their
comrades in California, Essex, and else-
where at the time—attempted to revise
the university in a liberated form. The
students held introductory discussion
on calculus, Spinoza, the legacy of
Marxism, and Walter Benjamin’s con-
cept of t ime. To use their own
language, they constructed a “transver-
sal” space—a displacement of Manor
House in situ and in time. Philosophy
was carried out in the exact same space
as before, only now under the touch of
a world turned about unexpectedly,
illuminated, transformed on the spot.
How else could friends and strangers
find themselves awake at 3 a.m. debat-
ing the nature of Justice?3
2. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans.
Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), p.
222.
3. We would like to thank Jan Sieber, Ali
Azadeh, Vijak Hiddadi, Hammam Aldouri, Larne
100
In the shadow of the students’
own idea of the university, the adminis-
trat ion’s pro -business emphasis on
“applicability” and verified “impact” was
rendered obsolete, strange, and incom-
patible. An altered space teaches that
the threat of survival cannot produce
truths: the displacement effected at
Manor House, for instance, was already
present, perennially incompatible before
with the managers’ decision to shut
down CRMEP after the fact. The minimal
existence of a radical pedagogy that was
present before the occupation was made
maximal during the occupation, but
precisely in the sense of a potentiality
rather than as a conditionality.
Within the framework of adapta-
tion, conditions become primary and
are credited with a capacity to generate
invention. This version of necessity comes
to grow directly in proportion to our
inability to trust what is inherent in our
own creativity. In place of rational cre-
ativity that positions itself squarely
against reality, what emerges from a mis-
placed emphasis on conditions is a lost
potentiality. The logic is this: “If we win
against our adversary, our ability to be
inventive will be exhausted. So let us
preserve our potential, let us merely
dance with the adversary.” What we have
to grasp is that potentiality only exists as
self-realization, in which the actualiza-
tion of potentiality is the construction
of a new frame of possibility. As Antonio
Negri posits in an interview with Cesare
Casarino in In Praise of the Common, “far
from being mortified, potentiality thus
becomes more powerful precisely by
Abse Gogarty, and Adam Lane for sharing these
events with one of the authors.
OCTOBER
actualizing itself.”4 The lesson is that we
need not fear victory in our struggles.
If artists become indebted to their
situat ion they become finite — im-
potential. If they lose potentiality, they
become grateful rather than generous
with respect to their situation—they
may even thank the situation for giving
them the opportunit y to resist it!
Survivalism is tautological: it is that
which celebrates the conditions of mere
survival. Debt to the situation translates
into a sense of “responsibility,” like the
artist who today finds him/herself in
the midst of a capitalism in crisis—
nothing new there!—and is compelled
to make art out of a sense of pathos and
guilt rather than affirmation. Aesthetic
production becomes hopelessly deriva-
tive and mimetic in the worst sense of
the operation. It becomes positivist
rather than appropriative. And it is
against this general weakness that we
have thought of a fundamental ques-
tion for artistic pedagogy—naturally,
many others remain buried beneath
the surface.
The question is: how to change
the classroom so that it will produce
subjects (artistic, political, scientific)?
Answers to this question could never
rest on a blueprint for their realiza-
t ion. Only wit hin t he situat ion,
through struggle, will their means be
realized. There are however t wo
invariants upon which we can justifi-
ably rely: 1) The struggle is guided by
a commitment to the elevat ion of
4. Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri,
“Vicissitudes of Constituent Thought,” in In Praise
of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and
Politics (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press,
2008), p. 160.
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange
ideas over opinions, including the
interrogation of received opinions in
favor of emergent ideas and practices;
2) the central a priori pedagogical
axiom is the following: all meaningful
education presupposes an intellectual
equality of all students—and profes-
sor s— wit hout any recour se
whatsoever to statistics, guarantees,
“proofs,” or experiential data.
5) How might art criticism become relevant
again?
Art criticism departs, if anything,
from a point of extreme precarious-
ness, an empt y point in knowledge
that requires receptive and conscious
humility. Rather than educate us about
the existence of a work of art, the role
of the critic is to disseminate the oper-
ations of the work itself. The existence
of these operations may come as a sur-
prise to many critics. Regardless, they
are there, await ing our attent ion.
Works of art produce t heir own
thoughts, affects, and operations, all
of which place a demand on writing
that can only be equaled by a sus-
t ained, r igorous, and committed
encounter with the work over time.
Criticism is increasingly becom-
ing a corrupted and dreary practice
precisely because of how many arbi-
t rar y master s and ser v ant s are
required to carry out its superficiality.
For us, a profession that derives its
legit imacy from the except ionless
enclosure of the art world becomes
nothing but contempt ible when it
report s this - or-that predetermined
banality, this-or-that off-hand gesture
of some curator, or this-or-that scan-
dalous fact of bourgeois politics. Part
101
of being humbled by a work, or even
being awed by it, involves the decision
to turn away from t he impulse to
interpret and “locate” it within a dis-
t inct and tot alizing narr at ive. In
order to think an exceptional artistic
practice, criticism should instead sub-
tract itself from the status quo. In a
word, it should st r ive to become
unbound. We must “t hink art’s
thought,” to use Badiou’s formulation
(penser une pensée). We must enter the
work and think what happens in it. At
t imes we will be confronted wit h
something unexpected.
This aleatory aspect should not be
understood in terms of a revived opti-
mism in which the alternat ive to
negative critique becomes the affirma-
tion of the hidden Good, nor as some
kind of vitalism in which we sponta-
neously accept every unexplainable shift
in perception. The production of the
sublime, i.e., the good, and not the pro-
duction of falsehood, is the overarching
task of the bourgeois mass media; it
should not be reproduced by those who
commit critique. It is not a matter of
verifying—or debunking—a particular
line of thought within capitalism, even
if the critique of capitalism is a com-
mendable and informative practice.
Simply put, it is only in our struggles
that we may verify thoughts, and draw
on their novelty to choose our strategies
and indeed our battlegrounds. To para-
phrase our friend Bahram Norouzi: the
truly critical writer neutralizes the sub-
lime, constitutes the world as mundane,
and seeks truths, love, passion, joy and
eventality in this mundane world. The
challenge of the critic is to serve an
indispensible role as a mapmaker of
102
innovation, which of course can include
a rigorous analysis of what there is and
what hazards may exist, but should
remain open to the gathering of truths,
the possibility of creative innovation,
the thinking of collective emancipation,
positive affirmation, and the enrich-
ment of humans’ senses for their
capacit y to present themselves. All
forms of writing that support notions of
justice, emancipation, equality, and,
especially, profanation.
6) Does the art world bear any responsibili-
ty for the economic downturn?
Insider trading, money launder-
ing, private sponsorship, speculation,
public-private partnerships, brand pro-
mot ion, arms dealing, hyper-
consumerism, professionalized theft,
predatory practices of all kinds—the
fact that all of these propel the existing
art world is enough to demonstrate for
ever yone the internal relat ionship
between art and the recent downturn.
When art is produced and used to legit-
imize our elites and invest them with
the necessary cultural capital for ongo-
ing dominat ion, we should not be
surprised, nor necessarily attracted by
the temptation to analytically “decon-
struct” the process. The point is to
create exceptional practices that, by
their own logic, overturn the decadence
we are today being forced to endure.
7) Whether the Obama stimulus package
represents a break in the neoliberal regime,
or simply a neo-Keynesian moment of public
spending, might it reawaken a sense of com-
mon stake that might be extended, indeed
insisted on, in other spheres like the artistic
and the cultural?
OCTOBER
A collective politics is the sharing
of a common stake. This quality alone
places it at odds with the maneuverings
of the Keynesian state, i.e. the circuit
manager who rescues only itself from the
imbalances of capit al. We disagree,
above all, with the way in which the
emergency redistribution of funds by
the treasur y have become a crude
means for secur ing order, with no
democratic content. Giorgio Agamben,
in St ate of Except ion, has shown
Keynesianism to be less noble than
“hope” and much closer to a heightened
police operat ion. The ineffect ive
attempts by the Obama administration
to rescue America’s system of thought-
less domination and extreme privilege
should not be celebrated. If the State’s
circuit management is its means of sur-
vival, its productivity is only opposed to
the production of the commons. What
is produced in collective action, at a dis-
t ance from the St ate, is the actual
creation of new possibilities—this is the
form-of-life of the common.
8) Are there historical examples of socioeco-
nomic crisis that might guide art world
responses to the current one?
We have been born during a per-
plexing, possibly indiscernible era. First,
we are too young and know too much of
the world beyond our border s to
remember anything except recessions,
crises and catastrophes. As youth, we
were asked to be in waiting, perhaps in
the way Dipesh Chakrabarty once said
the colonized are placed in a perpetual
“wait ing room of histor y.” Wait for
what?—For it to get worse? It is already
worse. For it to get better?—It was already
better. It was definitely good for them,
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange
and they continue to be prosperous dur-
ing times of “relative stability.” For
everyone else: mere crumbs, if not out-
right drudgery. The same eight-hour
day we fought for in the 1850s, only now
with ten times more debt and fewer ben-
efits than half a century ago.
Recently we came across an arti-
cle that Felix Gonzalez-Torres wrote for
the Roni Horn exhibition Earths Grow
Thick, held at the Wexner Center for
the Art s in 1996. Gonzalez-Torres’
short essay, “1990: L.A., ‘The Gold
Field,’” begins with a cascade of facts
detailing the trenchant austerity, finan-
cial speculat ion, bailout s, polit ical
immobility, social fragmentation, and
cynicism of the early ’90s. Nothing, in
other words, that could contribute to
an adequate affective reading of Roni
Horn’s Gold Field:
Already ten years into trickle-
down economics, a rise in cyn-
icism, growing racial and class
tension, and the widening gap
between the very rich and the
rest of us. Los Angeles before
the riots of 1992. A time of
defunding v it al social pro-
grams, the abandonment of
the ideals on which our coun-
try was supposedly founded.
The erasure of histor y. The
savings and loan bailout with
our tax dollars. The “econom-
ic boom” of t he Reagan
empire thanks to the tripling
of the national deficit . . . 5
5. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “1990: L.A., ‘The
Gold Field’” (1996), in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ed.
Julie Ault (Göttingen: Steidldangin, 2006), p. 147.
103
Throughout the next six para-
gr aphs, t he water fall of fact s is
delir iously extended, det ailing not
only one interconnected crisis after
anot her—housing, banking, mili-
tary—but also an analogous crisis in
our own collective ability to construct
meaning.6
When we first read this, there was
something eerie, something surprising
(not-too-surprising): we could barely
remember the ’90s, but it all came
back to us. Above all, we came to
understand that the symptoms of our
own contemporary era are not symp-
toms of any part icular “era” at
all—instead, they are the transcenden-
tal symptoms of that irrational system
of organized inequality: capitalism.
After sketching the economic
reality, Gonzalez-Torres recalls, of all
things, a chance encounter with Roni
Horn’s Gold Field (1980 – 82) at the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los
Angeles. The work was, according to
Gonzalez-Torres, “nothing more than a
thin layer of gold.” Yet it was also an
offering, an act of grace that enabled
Gonzalez-Torres and his partner to see
and feel differently. Gonzalez-Torres’
reading latched on to the possibility of
Gold Field doing two things: firstly, it
produced a displaced field of vision.
Secondly, it offered a paradigm of
fidelity. The first induced the displaced
sense required to transform the world.
The second was a means to guide and
maintain fidelity in spite of the over-
whelming challenge and apparent lack
6. “ . . . this explosion of information,
which in reality is an implosion of meaning.”
Interview with Tim Rollins in Felix Gonzalez-Torres
(New York: A.R.T. Press, 1993), p. 13.
104
of potentiality in the given situation.
It is thus out of Horn’s Gold Field that,
in spite of it all, Gonzalez-Torres comes
to declare the persistence of a desire
for truth and justice.
Yes, it was very depress-
ing, and very hard to sus-
tain any sense of hope in
such a bleak social land-
scape. How is one sup-
posed to keep any hope
alive, the romantic impe-
tus of wishing for a better
place for as many people
as possible, the desire for
just ice, t he desire for
meaning, and history?7
Persistence is a tricky quality, since
it is also a question of perseverance, i.e.
how to hold onto a point of truth and
rest there “against the flow,” against
thoughtless circulation. For Gonzalez-
Torres, Horn’s Gold Field offered up a
means to displace his own perspective
ever so slightly, a displacement onto “a
new landscape, a possible horizon, a
place of rest.” And it is here that we can
conclude, at a resting point. Let us
merely add a passage of Paul Celan’s,
the one that gives us “the most exact
image of what we must understand by
‘justice’” (Badiou):
On inconsistencies
Rest:
two fingers are snapping
in the abyss, a
7. Gonzalez-Torres, “1990: L.A., ‘The
Gold Field,’” p. 150.
OCTOBER
world is stirring
in the scratch-sheets, it all
depends
on you.8
—ANDREW WITT AND
NATHAN CROMPTON
To the Editors:
Isn’t the current crisis actually a
moment of opportunity?* The opti-
mism expressed in this suggestion that
seems to produce the “Recessional
Aesthetics” questionnaire is representa-
t ive of a larger tendency in the
discourse of contemporary art ever
since “the crisis” started: while in soci-
et y at large the economic decline
generally meets discontent—to say the
least—and is associated with job losses
and wage cuts, in the art world, it has
sparked quite some euphor ia. As
Holland Cotter put it in the New York
Times: “The Boom Is Over. Long live
Art!” 1 The “Recessional Aesthet ics”
questionnaire elaborates this sugges-
8. Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and
Politics” Infinite Thought, ed. Oliver Feltham and
Justin Clemens, (London: Continuum Press,
1998), p. 77.
* The ideas and questions formulated
here spring from intensive exchange and col-
laborat ion with fr iends. I wish to especially
acknowledge and thank Philipp Kleinmichel for
many formative discussions and his essay “The
Unknown Artist” in particular. I would also like
to thank Er ic Angles, Chad Elias, and Tom
Williams.
1. Holland Cotter, “The Boom Is Over.
Long Live Art!” New York Times (February 12,
2009).
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange
tion in the form of eight questions. The
true question raised, however, is a differ-
ent one: why this euphoria about the
crisis? What assumptions found this idea
that the socio-economic decline we are
witnessing must be a moment of oppor-
tunity? And how does this very discourse
itself, this discourse around “crisis” and
“opportunity,” function? What interpre-
tations of the present condition does it
allow for and privilege—at the expense
of others? These questions, I believe,
have to be addressed if we want to
understand the current situation and
truly consider the possibilities for social
change. In order to approach these
questions, I want to turn to an example
that the questionnaire evokes.
What will the effects of the recession be
on the social role of the artist . . . the art
museum . . . art biennials . . . art schools . . .
art criticism . . . ? The very same ques-
t ions were presented at X, a
“not-for-profit initiative of the global
contemporary art community” some
months before their publicat ion in
October.2 And, similar to the gesture of
opening up the pages of October to the
voices of its readers, the form and per-
formative dimension of the discussion
seemed well considered to provide, or at
least point toward, a possible answer.
Besides presenting the eight questions,
the interventions by the two hosts at the
X event, Hal Foster and David Joselit,
were extremely minimal; they both
made a point of withdrawing as authori-
2. On March 26, 2009, Hal Foster and
David Joselit hosted a discussion ent it led
“Recessional Aesthetics: New Publics or Business
as Usual?” at X. For mission statement and further
information, please see http:/x-initiative.org
/blog/board/ (accessed April 25, 2010).
105
ties and leaving it up to the audience
to take charge. 3 Instead of engaged
discussion, however, this move pro-
duced a huge void. When, halfway
through the questions, a member of
the audience fainted and fell off the
chair, seemingly intoxicated, this dis-
ruption almost felt like a relief—the
t wo host s called it a night and the
crowd took off. While the issues raised
had surely been on everyone’s mind,
the setting apparently wasn’t favor-
able to t he emergence of a “new
public” as was called for in t he
announcement.
And this despite the fact that X,
one would think, is in it self living
proof for—and a great example of—
the “new opportunity” that the crisis
supposedly presents: in the face of the
recession, the owners of the building
provided “the global art community”
with four stories of prime real estate at
no rent.4 A great opportunity indeed.
3. This gesture, as well as the title of the
talk, evokes the figure of the “recessional” as
developed by artist Paul Chan in a talk entitled
“The Spirit of Recession,” published in the issue
of October following the one that included the
quest ionnaire: Paul Chan, “ The Spir it of
Recession,” October 129 (Summer 2009), pp.
3–12. For a critical reading of this text, see:
Jakob Schillinger, “Recessional Aesthet ics:
Art ist ic Pract ice and t he Chrono -logic of
Capit alism,” in Time Out of Joint: Recall and
Evocat ion in Recent Art, ed. Luigi Fassi, Lucy
Gallun, and Jakob Schillinger (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009), pp. 85–105.
4. An earlier version of this letter, given to
Cecilia Alemani, stated: “Forced by the recession
to put on hold the plans to transform the aban-
doned site of the Dia Art Foundation into luxury
condominiums and galleries, the developer of the
building decided to provide ‘the global art com-
munity’ with not just a space—four stories of
prime real estate at no rent—but with a budget of
106
A great opportunit y, but for
whom? X was founded and spear-
headed by gallerist Elizabeth Dee; the
advisory board reads like a who’s-who
of the art world: gallerists, top-selling
artists, faculty of the most prestigious
art history and curatorial studies pro-
grams, and chief curators of major
museums.5 With very few exceptions,
these are hardly “the under-capital-
ized.” 6 And yet , X is, after all, a
“not-for-profit” institution, whose stated
goal, furthermore, is “to inspire and
challenge us to think about new possi-
bilit ies for exper iencing and
producing contemporary art.”7 Now,
this sounds very much like the “other
models, other spaces” asked for in the
questionnaire, that would “reduce the
influence of these forms [of the com-
modit y and t he spect acle] on art
practice.”8 But while X has certainly
been presenting cutting-edge shows,
these have largely been conventional
one million dollars on top of that.” This informa-
tion was not confirmed, however, by X; Alemani
denied that they were given an additional budget
by the owners of the building, and confirmed
only that X did not have to pay any rent. As
sources of funding she lists: “a European founda-
tion in the very beginning,” a benefit, production
and sale of an artist edition, and the hosting of
several external events.
5. See http:/x-initiative.org/blog/board/
(accessed April 25, 2010); Piper Marshall, “X
Init iat ive Contends with Cultural Change,”
www.art inamer icamagazine.com (March 11,
2009), http://www.art inamer icamagazine.
com/news-opinion/finer-things/2009-03-11/x-ini-
tiative-elizabeth-dee/ (accessed April 25, 2010).
6. Y ve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, and David
Joselit, “Recessional Aesthetics,” p. 95 of this issue.
7. X, mission statement, online: http://
x-initiative.org/blog/board/ (accessed: April
24, 2010).
8. “Recessional Aesthetics,” p. 95.
OCTOBER
exhibitions of widely recognized and
exhibited artists (Keren Cytter, Tris
Vonna-Michell, and Luke Fowler, mak-
ing up t he summer shows, for
example, were all on view at the same
time at the New Museum’s exhibition
Younger Than Jesus.)
On the more unconvent ional
side was No Soul for Sale. For five days,
between installation cycles, X divided
its exhibition spaces into small parcels
and made these “booths” available for
free to non-profits from all over the
world. This extension of the art-fair
model to the non-profit sector cer-
tainly came off as “tongue-in-cheek,”
but at the same t ime didn’t fail to
establish a spirit of market competi-
t ion. The t arget audience clearly
wasn’t a general public; the event was
prett y much treated like a profes-
sional convention, whose set-up while
v isually invoking an art fair—had
more in common with a residency
program promising high-profile stu-
dio visits. Cramming more than forty
institutions onto three floors to com-
pete for attention did not really make
a formula against “spectacle,” though,
and neither did it “relieve some of the
pressure to conform to expectations
associated wit h entert ainment .” 9
(One of the reported highlights, for
example, was t he “Forgotten Bar
Project,” commended for serving free
drinks.10) But not just expectations—
the st akes were high as well: while
space was provided for free, partici-
pating institutions had to cover all
9. Ibid.
10. Holland Cotter, “Restoring the ‘Eek’
to Eking Out a Living,” New York Times ( June 24,
2009).
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange
addit ional cost s t hemselves. One
would t hink t hat for a non- profit
enterprise from Europe flying in and
putting up their complete staff might
be a serious investment—unless the
st aff were supposed and willing to
cover these costs themselves, treating
t hem as a career-investment . The
prospect of presenting oneself in one
of the world’s art center s and of a
week of enhanced networking oppor-
tunities was more than worth it, as I
was assured in conversations.
While “not-for-profit,” X is a huge
operation, backed by considerable cap-
it al, which cert ainly does generate
value. Operated by an alliance of key
figures of the art world, the only differ-
ence to “business as usual” seems to be
that, at a moment when the market is
down, the focus is shifted from the
accumulation of financial to that of cul-
tural capital—to be cashed in later,
when the market is up again, or else-
where, in the commercial endeavors of
many of X’s advisors. (The very first
exhibition at X, for example, was of the
work of Derek Jarman, whose work had
also been exhibited by X-founder
Elizabeth Dee.11)
11. Asked in an interview how she balances
her role as a gallery owner and board member of
X, Dee responds: “My advisory role at X feels, in
some ways, like an extension of my role as an
active member of the art world. To me, the origi-
nal boundaries that once existed in the art world
became irrelevant long ago. . . . My involvement
with X—engaging the 50 person board of advisors
to think about the mission of X and to explore
these shifting positions and their impact—very
much feels like an extension of what I do at the
galler y.” Kat y Donoghue, “Elizabeth Dee,”
Whitewall, http://www.whitewallmag.com/2009/
04/29/elizabeth- dee- on-x- and-her- galler y/
(accessed April 24, 2010).
107
This in itself is nothing much new.
What is interesting, however, is how the
accumulation of (cultural and financial)
capital is here coupled with a rhetoric of
“crisis” and “opportunity.” From the
start, X presented itself as an answer to
the kind of questions that had been in
the air and have now been formulated
in the “Recessional Aesthetics” question-
naire; it presented itself as a fulfillment
of their promise, or at least an attempt
to put them into practice.12 X is exem-
plary for a mode of operating whose
success depends on the kind of dis-
course that conceals the fact that, unless
we actively change things, things stay
the same.
I certainly don’t mean to equate
the “Recessional Aesthetics” question-
naire with X. The latter is merely an
example—and a paradigmatic one at
that— that allows us to see how the
structures of the discourse in which the
questionnaire participates relate to insti-
tut ional, economic, and polit ical
structures.13 This discourse is organized
around two central moments: economic
determinism and kairos, a qualitative
concept of time which interprets the
12. “None of this could be possible had
we not had such a global economic crisis and
dramatic recession,” says Dee in an interview.
The initial e-flux announcement of X speaks of
“this unique and defining moment in our cul-
ture” and “this time of overwhelming change
and transition” and states: “X is about looking
forward and empowering the community to
take action and to define this new age for our-
selves and each other.” e-flux (March 1, 2009),
http://www.e-flux.com/shows/ v iew/6472
(accessed April 24, 2010).
13. For a related account, see Jennifer
Williams, “Hard Work, No Pay,” New York Times,
October 3, 2009. I thank Ilya Lipkin for bring-
ing this article to my attention.
108
present as a moment of opportunity or
cr isis, as a potential turning point.
These implications define the question-
naire and produce the not ion of
“Recessional Aesthetics,” which, in its
conflation of economics and aesthetics,
presents both the questionnaire’s provo-
cation and its main insight. What is left
out, however, is the political. To inter-
pret “the recession” as a systemic
anomaly, a “crisis,” a moment of excep-
tion that is an emergency but also a
moment of opportunity, is extremely
problematic. The economistic sugges-
tion that the recession will—in and of
itself—lead to social change is mislead-
ing.14 Unless social change is effected
through political action, it will not
occur. In the questionnaire, however,
the political figures only as a mere
reflex of economics. The rhetoric of
“crisis” and “opportunity,” then, while it
does imply a need for action, partici-
pates in a discourse that serves to foster
compet it ion rather than solidar it y,
knee-jerk actionism rather than analysis,
self-exploitation rather than critique.
It is the temporary displacement,
at a moment when the art market is
down, of financial onto cultural capital,
manifesting itself in endeavors like X,
and the rhetoric of “crisis” and “oppor-
tunity” that surrounds it, which help
both to conceal a system of expropria-
tion and increase its efficiency. The
majority of people in the art world are
those un- or little-known artists, critics,
14. “The recent crash has done some dam-
age to the prestige of the commodity and the
spectacle alike. . . . Will this reduce the influence
of these forms on art practice, and thereby open
up other models?” “Recessional Aesthetics,” p. 95.
OCTOBER
and curators who depend on selling
their labor in order to be able to make
their living—and their work—and who
are now supposed to work for free—in
the hope to increase their employability
and at least in the future to attain a posi-
tion to sell their labor.
If we are looking for art practices
less influenced by the forms of “the
commodity and the spectacle,” why not
look amongst those unknown artists?15
What if there were artists, writers, and
curators to whom working as art han-
dlers, carpenters, bartenders, etc. was
not a brief episode until they reach a
sufficient level of success within the art
world? What if these unknown artists,
15. The “unknown artist” might be some-
one who intends to succeed in the system we
refer to as “the art world,” i.e., someone who
tries to be recognized as an artist within the
present episteme, but who is not (yet) recog-
nized and valorized accordingly. The “unknown
artist” could, however, also be an individual or
group whose practice cannot be recognized as
art within the present episteme because he or
she “acts . . . from beyond the legitimized realm
of art.” This is how Philipp Kleinmichel puts it in
his brilliant essay “The Unknown Artist,” in
which he relates Heidegger’s considerations of
art to the Marxist concepts of ideology and
hegemony. Considering the question of the crit-
ical potential of art under the post-communist
condition, “the absence of Marxism’s dimension
of promise,” Kleinmichel establishes that the
market is no longer merely the material, but also
the symbolic condition of artistic practice, and
thus neutralizes any intended critical or opposi-
tional meaning of a work of art to replace it with
it’s own meaning: (potential) exchange value.
Thus “critical” and “oppositional” works of art,
i.e., works that are being discussed as such within
the discourse of contemporary art, are in reality
not in opposition to the market and the neo-lib-
eral capitalist regime it symbolizes, but only to
other commodit ies on that market . Philipp
Kleinmichel, “The Unknown Aritst,” in Landings
1, no.1 (April 2009), pp. 6–15.
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange
writers, and curators work these jobs
permanently, in order to keep their art
independent from, and outside of the
art world? What if they form their own
audiences, develop t heir own dis-
course, their own exhibition formats,
even their own educational structures?
What if all of this has been hap-
pening all along? Does the answer to
our question—to our wish for “other
models, other spaces,” for art practices
beyond “the commodity and the specta-
cle”16—then have less to do with current
economic developments than with our
own perspective, with the way we priori-
tize, categorize, and evaluate; with the
influence of the commodity and the
spectacle on our own thinking and act-
ing? For these other pract ices are
happening; these other spaces do exist.
And yet, we tend to ignore them, as they
don’t register within established jour-
nals, institutions, etc. It seems we rely on
these institutions, and we tend to trust
the established criteria they reproduce
and perpetuate. Why would someone
who is doing interesting work not have
an exhibition record, not have regis-
tered in the different iated web of
institutional structures? But wasn’t this
the point? Didn’t we start from the con-
clusion that these very structures are
largely conditioned by the forms of the
commodity, the spectacle, and enter-
tainment? That they exert a “pressure to
conform to [such] expect at ions,” 17
which any artist (or writer, curator, etc.)
who wants to succeed within them has
to conform to? So why indulge in specu-
lations about the possibility for some
16. “Recessional Aesthetics,” p. 95.
17. Ibid.
109
mysterious transformation of the art
world to occur? Why not just abandon it
and turn to the other models, other
spaces, and new publics?
The question is whether that’s
possible. Aren’t we ourselves so caught
up in the established structures that
our very turning toward such practices
would mark the end of their indepen-
dence, t heir “ot her”-ness and t he
moment of their “recuperation” as a
popular “Neo-SI” stance has it? And
isn’t this hunger for that which is dif-
ferent, other, new, and its subsequent
integration precisely the mechanism
that keeps this whole system alive? And
doesn’t our shared understanding of
this mechanism stain our initial excite-
ment about all these “other” practices
with the suspicion that they might in
fact not be so independent and other,
but the result of strategic calculation,
producing the spectacle of the new,
the radical, the other? That those
unknown artists working as art han-
dlers, etc. in order to be able to make
their art , are in fact doing so only
because t hey under st and it as an
investment, as a temporary phase until
t hey climb up t he hierarchy— an
investment just like the tuit ion for
their MFA? And what would be the
alternative? Who can afford to self-
fund their artistic practice without the
prospect of future redemption?
A truly “other” model of artistic
practice would only be possible within a
radically different society; within the
existing socio-economic structure such
an “independent” practice, such an
“other space” can merely be part-time—
a part-time that one has to be able to
110
afford. The threat of “recuperation,”
implying the existence of an “innocent”
original state, is often invoked to back
up a demand for purity, a call to resist.
But what is the efficacy of such an ethi-
cal approach to a political problem?18
Even if we manage to maint ain an
“independent” practice and establish a
private heteronomous sphere, in order
to sustain it, we would still have to func-
tion within larger socio-economical
structures.19 Small circles might turn
18. There has been a conjuncture recently
within the discourse of contemporary art of ethics,
as theorized by Alain Badiou or Simon Critchley,
to name two prominent examples. The ethical
structure of “fidelity” (Badiou) or “commitment”
(Critchley) seems to speak to precisely this prob-
lem: the desire for agency within a situation that is
perceived to compromise a priori our every move.
In this regard, the art world’s recent embrace of
the anarcho-communist pamphlet The Coming
Insurrection, which draws heavily on Badiou, seems
symptomatic. As opposed to the October question-
naire’s economistic model, this ethical model
acknowledges the need for action; while the for-
mer projects these “new spaces” into the prevail-
ing world as ready-made results of the economic
cycles themselves, the latter conceives them as
coinciding with the very act (or “event”) of ethical
commitment and as co-extensive with the subject’s
“fidelity to the event.” See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An
Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter
Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001); Alain Badiou,
St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray
Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003); Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding. Ethics
of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso,
2007); The Invisible Committee, The Coming
Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009).
19. In this regard, our historical moment
differs fundamentally from the one in which
Walter Benjamin could conceptualize an “other
model,” in the words of the questionnaire, of
artistic practice precisely because the historical
situation in which “the author as producer” was
to emerge was an “other space,” at least for
Benjamin, who saw in Soviet Communism the
unified revolutionary struggle that the artist as
OCTOBER
into movements, we might abandon
loose networks to form communes, and
these communes might multiply; the
question remains whether a strategy of
withdrawal can have political efficacy.
Instead of answers, then, I can
only propose a different set of ques-
tions in response to this questionnaire.
I’ve tried to point at the problem that
within the current episteme and its
institutional embodiments, within “the
neoliberal regime,”20 it is difficult to
imagine a pract ice which would be
committed to a truly different politics
(to a different socio-political order
that would mean an epistemic break.)
I’ve hinted at strategies of ethical com-
mitment that seem to present answers
to this problem, not without raising
further questions regarding their polit-
ical efficacy. These are, in my mind,
the problems and questions that we’re
confronting. A change of the system in
and of itself (as is suggested by the
questionnaire) is not just implausi-
ble — t his ver y suggest ion is it self
highly problematic. In order to con-
ceive of an aesthetics that is not simply
the expression of economic relations,
we need to consider a politics that is
not simply a reflex of market cycles.
—JAKOB SCHILLINGER
producer could align, identify, and integrate her-
self with completely. Walter Benjamin, “The Author
as Producer” (1934), trans. John Heckmanin, New
Left Review 62 (July/August 1970).
20. “Recessional Aesthetics,” p. 96.
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange 111

Cecilia Alemani responds: mission of this new art space, but back
then we all thought it would be better
I’m wr it ing t his response in
to start working rather than be stuck
April 2010. X Initiative closed in the
trying to formulate a formal mission.
ver y beginning of Februar y 2010,
We believed our ident it y would be
after t welve months of exhibit ions
shaped throughout the very process of
and activities.
exhibition making and we trusted that
X Initiative was born out of the
the mission would be defined by its
recession that hit the world during the
own audience.
fall of 2008. As the result of one of the
I appreciate the criticism coming
most dramatic downturns in recent eco-
from Mr. Schillinger, but I think it is also
nomic histor y, many buildings and
import ant to say that fir st of all X
storefronts remained vacant for several
Initiative wanted to create new spaces
months, especially in New York City’s
and new platforms for contemporary
Chelsea district, which relies above all
art. We didn’t think of how to address
on commercial art galleries for its viabil-
political agendas or theoretical needs:
ity. 548 West 22nd Street, a massive
we wanted to show the art we believed
building that for many years had housed
in, and do it at its best and with very lim-
the Dia Center for the Arts, remained
ited resources. We weren’t even so
dormant after Dia’s departure in 2004.
preoccupied with deconstructing the
Our endeavor was indeed a child of the
recession and its myth: we wanted to
recession: I am not connoting this as an
show art that we weren’t seeing around,
economic opportunity or political ges-
or at least show it with a depth and in a
ture: it is simply a fact that the recession
manner we weren’t seeing elsewhere.
hit, many buildings were left unrented,
(For example, yes, Keren Cytter, Tris
and a few art enterprises temporarily
Vonna-Michell, and Luke Fowler were
occupied these buildings (There are
shown in Younger Than Jesus, but their
many other examples of similar ges-
exhibitions at X Initiative qualified as
tures, see Exhibition in Soho and the
early career surveys—their extension
organization No Longer Empty).
and complexity was much richer than
When we opened X Initiative in
just one art work within a larger group
March 2009 we didn’t quite know what
show). All this is to say that in the heat
to expect. It is still hard at the present
of the moment, and concerned as we
to think what the role of a new institu-
were with art and artists, we didn’t dwell
tion is, especially in a city like New
on terminology or theoretical positions.
York, in that specific moment in time,
Of course you could claim that never-
with a forceful competition from pow-
theless we had a political agenda, but
er ful commercial galler ies on one
our politics were verified in our pro-
hand, and the public visibility of well
gram and in our support to artists,
est ablished museums on the other.
audiences, and all the part icipant s
Our main struggle was to define in
involved in our project.
words what X Initiative was about to
This is another important ele-
be: retroact ively we are st ill in the
ment that I think the letter from Mr.
process of labeling the identity and
112
Schillinger fails to understand: yes,
many people worked for free at X
Init iat ive, and, yes, many people,
myself included, worked like crazy and
for many days straight, but we all did so
because we believed very much in the
importance of this project. We were
not being exploited by the machine of
the market; I doubt anyone felt that way
when we were all throwing the garbage
out at three in the morning or installing
beautiful drawings at twelve in the after-
noon. I think we all felt part of a project
in which we were all sharing our ener-
gies and our enthusiasm to put
something out there, something that
simply didn’t exist before and about
which we were passionate and that we
believed was worth sharing and show-
ing to other people. Really, it was as
simple and genuine as that.
From the beginning we conceived
of X Initiative as a platform for dia-
logue and exchange, a site where
members of the art community could
get together informally, present their
work and share ideas. X Initiative was
all about making things happen spon-
t aneously, by aggregat ing t he
knowledge and the t ime of diver se
people with var ied exper iences. X
Initiative was open to everybody, with
no entrance fee and a much easier
accessibility than traditional institu-
t ions. Our models were European
Kunst halles and Kunstverein–like
structures that emphasize dialogue
and close relationships with artists and
highlight exhibitions as ongoing discur-
sive practices. X Initiative was to be a
place that was less concerned with the
general public and more focused on
artistic communities and engaged view-
OCTOBER
ers: less about spectators and more
about participants. We wanted to be
underground but to maintain a certain
institutional voice, to be poor but not
scruffy, to be D.I.Y. but with a certain
elegance.
We opened t he space on
March 6, 2009. Having to manage an
enormous space with a very limited
budget1 we divided the year-long pro-
gram into three distinct phases: exhibi-
tions (of well-known as well as fairly
unknown artists) would run for about
three months each and events (all of
which were proposed to us by the
board and by people who were exter-
nal to X and approached us with pro-
posals) would t ake place ever y
Thursday night. Our ready acknowl-
edgment from t he out set t hat X
Initiative would exist for only one year
provided us with a sense of urgency
that informed all of our decisions. We
thought of ourselves as a type of count-
down operation.
During our twelve months of exis-
tence, we put together a ver y
mult ilayered program, one that
included well-known artists, emerging
artists, overlooked artists, and totally
unknown artists. Along with the more
traditional exhibitions, we organized
many events that activated the space in
1. I don’t know where Mr. Schillinger gets
the idea we had a budget of one million dollars,
but it is simply and clearly untrue: our limited
resources consisted of extremely limited private
funding and an open guerrilla form of fundrais-
ing that we carried on during the twelve months
of our existence, e.g., we organized a benefit, we
produced an artists’ edition, we rented the space
for a few external events: this is of course nothing
new, assuming Mr. Schillinger is familiar with how
a non-profit organization works.
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange
a different way, by establishing a less for-
mal atmosphere and a very different
group of people. One of these events
was No Soul For Sale, a festival of inde-
pendent spaces, art ist s’ collect ives,
non-profit organizations, and curatorial
offices from all over the world. The idea
behind the festival was fairly simple: we
conceived a format that could stand as a
symmetrical alternative to the art fair.
Instead of commercial galler ies we
invited non-profit organizations; instead
of financial exchanges we tried to initi-
ate dialogues and forums; and instead of
booths or walls we constructed the
whole architecture of the event as an
open space. The goal was to br ing
together non-commercial realities in an
informal and spont aneous way: we
thought of No Soul For Sale as a festival or
a reunion—the model was actually that
of fans’ conventions, in which it is the
public participation that really defines
the program. No Soul For Sale was meant
to be a celebration of the spirit of inde-
pendence that animates the initiatives
and programs of institutions and groups
existing outside the market. While we
all wish, together with Mr. Schillinger,
that X Initiative and all institutions in
the world could financially assist the par-
ticipants of initiatives such as this, that
was simply unrealistic: like its colleagues
invited to the Festival, X Initiative too
was run with nearly zero budget, and
had to make virtue out of necessity: we
could only provide the space for free.2
2. Mr. Schillinger doesn’t seem to have a
clear vision of how non-profit organizations
work. Throughout his letter he often goes back
to a financial criticism, by attacking the fact that
we used volunteer interns at X Initiative, that we
didn’t pay for the travels of the organizations
113
I would like to quote art critic
Ben Davis, who in an article about X
Initiative on Artnet.com about our
closing event , “Br ing Your Own
Art,” 3 commented: “The fact that
even a gesture of maximum possible
curatorial generosity generates such
recr iminat ions seems to indicate
that the institution can’t win; you
can’t get around the reality of the
very unequal world we live in with a
clever programming choice.”4 It is
clear from Mr. Schillinger’s letter
that no matter what we did, from
institutional shows to more experi-
mental events, we would have not
been able to accomplish anything
taking part in No Soul For Sale, and that even
our staff wasn’t paid (which is untrue). Mr.
Schillinger seems to ignore that the system of
unpaid internships exists in all fields of human
culture: we have all been interns in our life! X
Initiative relied on a very small, paid staff,
which included myself, our deputy director, the
assistant director, one curatorial assistant, our
team of art installers, and all guards. The rest
of the staff was composed of volunteers, which
is a normal thing considering many of them
were still students and saw in that a chance to
earn experience and credit.
3. Bring Your Own Art was our last
event: a twenty-four-hour marathon during
which X Initiative opened its doors to anyone
who wanted to come and exhibit artworks on
the premises. It was a celebration of the chaot-
ic energies of art and a joyful subversion of
hierarchies. Inspired by Walter Hopps’s experi-
mental Thirty-Six Hours, an event that the leg-
endary curator organized in Washington in
1978, during which he installed anything any-
body brought that would fit through the door,
BYOA was a festive occasion that fostered
unusual collaborations between artists, art pro-
fessionals, and dilettantes, while offering an
alternative to curated group shows.
4. “X Out,” http://www.artnet.com/
magazineus/reviews/davis/bring-your-own-
art2-19-10.asp.
114
good: he has his prejudices and he is
welcome to hang on to them, but he
shouldn’t judge other people’s inten-
t ions based on his own per sonal
agenda.
There is a passage in an earlier ver-
sion of the letter from Mr. Schillinger (it
is hard to keep track of his various
drafts!) that I find particularly interest-
ing: as he described the frustration of
one of our incredibly bitter and brutally
exploited colleagues, Mr. Schillinger
mentions en passant that he was trying
to hang a poster in the lobby of X
Initiative to promote an event of his
own.5 X Initiative opened its doors for
free and invited everyone to come along
and offered itself, its program, and “its”
5. As Schillinger put it in the earlier version
of the letter: “While at a regular gallery, just like
at any museum or Kunsthalle, the staff can still
expect to be paid for their work, here a whole
army of volunteers is doing the job. ‘I’ve been
working for free for the last two weeks—almost
around the clock!—to make this happen,’ says a
(former) employee of a major New York art insti-
tution who approaches me at an event at X. (He
doesn’t say so, but the fact that he has this much
time available suggests that he lost his job in the
course of the recession.) This may sound like
great team spirit and true devotion. Only that
he is yelling at me while he tells me this, on the
verge of physical violence in response to my
attempt to post an announcement for a perfor-
mance on one of the walls. His exhaustion and
frustration erupt—but not turned against the
very structures and hierarchies that produce a
constant pressure to improve one’s employabili-
ty by exploiting oneself, but in their defense
against a would-be infr ingement . A few
moments later and two levels up, I run into a
friend who is volunteering for X as well, build-
ing seating for the rooftop cinema. A recent
graduate from one of the most prestigious BFA
programs in the country, she feels she has ‘no
career prospects’ and can't afford to turn down
‘a good entry level position.’ (She can afford not
to turn it down due to a graduation gift initially
intended for a new computer but now repur-
posed to sustain herself without paid work.)”
OCTOBER
artists to open criticism. To this gesture
of hospitality Mr. Schillinger replies first
by trying to post promotional materials
about his own work in the building, and
then by attacking the premises of our
activities and describing us either as vol-
untary slaves of the market or naïve
accomplices of the system. I believe
things are at the same time much sim-
pler and more complex than that. X
Initiative was run by people who were
tired of having to go to other people’s
homes to talk about art and to promote
the artists they believed in. X Initiative
was meant to be a temporary home for
people who shared some ideas and dis-
agreed about other s. It was run by
people who thought for one year to
invest (or shall we say “put” so we don’t
get accused of being capitalists?) time
and energies in giving space and
resources to artists and people they
believed in. Was this the product of the
recession? Was this a discourse with a
hidden agenda? Frankly I am more
interested in the fact that I and the visi-
tor s got to see art they would have
otherwise missed; they got to take part
in panels and discussions they would
have otherwise not have heard about
and participate in a wider dialogue
about art.
X Initiative was an experiment,
an exercise, an attempt to fill a gap we
all felt was present in a city like New
York. We tried to do something mean-
ingful and fun at the same time, and
above all we respected the artists and
gave them space and resources to have
the freedom of doing what they really
wanted to do. We didn’t want to create
an innovative model for contemporary
art nor introduce a new revolutionary
Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange
system: we had received a gift and we
tried to share it with others. We are
particularly glad that our gift also pro-
vided Mr. Schillinger with some food
for thought.
Elizabeth Dee responds:
X Initiative was conceived at a
moment of unprecedented uncertainty,
one that prompted the art world to
reconsider its every aspect. On an inti-
mate front, this climate furthered my
own ongoing reappraisal of my role as a
commercial gallerist. X Initiative was
the first project to physically expand my
practice as a gallery owner beyond the
walls of the gallery, an abstract direction
I have believed for some time promises
the most growth for artist/gallery rela-
tionships in the future. The building at
548 West 22nd Street was the perfect
complement to X Initiative’s concept:
monumental but not monolithic, its
current function indeterminate and yet
its history vital. As the former home of
the Dia Center for the Arts, its legacy
framed but did not constrain the cre-
ative gestures that took shape within,
which were enacted by the exhibiting
artists and the curatorial think tank
gathered to steer the project. Contrary
to what one might expect of an organi-
zation with so much real estate at its
temporar y disposal, the financial
resources behind X Initiative were small
and the team necessarily nimble.
When the project began there
was much speculat ion regarding X
Initiative’s prospects for success or fail-
ure. Its very assertion of a new model
for collaborating with artists to pro-
duce programming of the scale and
115
quality of a museum, but with the
elasticity and prescience of a gallery,
was immediately called into ques-
t ion. So too were the mixing of
realms traditionally recognized as
private and public, and of the inter-
ests assumed to be independently
vested in each. The truth is that
these domains mix all the t ime,
especially in the art world, and often
for the good of innovation. Plenty
of exploitation comes of these cross-
ings, too, but that typically leads to
bad art. Our intention was not to
inst igate a paradigm shift; t he
“model” that we created is an exam-
ple of one solution, which worked
for a particular group of people in a
certain time and place.
X Init iat ive was never com-
pelled to develop an institutional
agenda that would undermine the
freshness of it s progr amming,
because the organization’s life was
strategically short— too finite to
exist in any t ime or space other
than the present. The goals of the
exhibitions were to generate open
experiences, not measurable out-
comes. This is also more in keeping
with the artists’ approach to mak-
ing work, reaching closer into the
heart of creative practice.
One could argue that in addi-
t ion to being an administ rat ive
activity, running a gallery is also a
creative one, in dialogue with the
artists. A way for galleries to repro-
duce the strengths of X Initiative in
the future would be for them to do
a better job of merging the man-
agement of artists’ careers and the
present at ion of exhibit ions with
116 OCTOBER

various forms of conceptual dialogue,

so that these parallel dimensions of
creat ive work can be drawn more
closely in line. One can visualize terri-
tor ies in which t hese synergist ic
practices expand, pressing on their
boundaries to force open new spaces.
This organism becomes exponentially
more involved when other spaces and
sites—the internet, film, television,
newspaper s and magazines— enter
the conversation.
Uncertainty and spontaneity are
valuable in any creative practice. It is
impossible to say what will happen with
the future of X Initiative, if it might
reincarnate in a new form or perpetuate
as a template for new experiments.
Many artists that interest me are eschew-
ing formalized contexts for presenting
their work in favor of those that pro-
duce dialogue embracing the expansive
dimensions of time and space and of
collaboration. Their ideas of how to per-
ceive our new world will cert ainly
develop this tendency further, and there
will be a continued reorganization of
our systems around artistic production.
We are obligated to respond with all
forms of curating, organizing, represen-
tation, collection, and overall patronage
and support of artists. Independent cul-
tural producer s such as galler ist s,
publishers, non-profit organizations,
and art advisors are in a unique and
unfettered place to bring these conver-
sat ions about new models of
collaboration forward. The great chal-
lenge will be in finding ways to make
these developments viable in the long
term, to sustain the actuality of these
transformative ideas.
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