—
THE INTANGIBILITIES
OF FORM
Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade
JOHN ROBERTS
VERSO
London» New York20 THE INTANGIB! OF FORM
ONE
THE COMMODITY, THE READYMADE
AND THE VALUE-FORM
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prodiuer as such has entered consumption. Only as excrement of tis consumption,
fas residuum and product ofthe consumption process, can it then go into & new
production sphere as means of production.
Kadi Marx’
‘The nomination of found objects and prefabricated materials as ‘ready-
‘made? components of art is the crucial transformative event of early
‘wentieth-century art. This much is self-evident and is reflected in the
extensive literature on the readymade in art criticism, art history and
philosophy since the r960s. Indeed, the readymade looms vast over
‘wenticth-century art carrying all before it, invoking both feelings of
horror (at the supposed loss of artistic value), and of sanguine relief (of
having the burden of academic naturalism finally lifted). But in a sense we
‘ean only see this now. It was only with the theorization of the importance
‘of Duchamp's works from 1910-40 in the r9ses and 1960s, coupled with
| the recovery of the revolutionary content of Constructivism, Productivism
‘and Surrealism in the 1960s and 1970s, thatthe readymade has been able to
| work its retrospective and prospective power on the development of
‘wentieth-century art. In other words, the occluded but dominant ten-
dencies of twentieth-century art had to be brought into practice again for
their criticality to become visible. The European New Objectivism andtheory of the readymade fer se. A number of conceptual artists were
vehemently opposed to the Duchampian tradition because ofits perecived
ted” readymade as an enfecbled anti-art
sgesturalism.* However by installing the readymade within an unfolding
theoretical reflection on practice, Conceptual art was also the point where
the imation of the readymade was reopened to a new set of historical
‘demands and conditions, Hence, there is a way of se
and art a experience. Through this gap between art and
aesthetics rushed the readymade-ideology which has underwritten art
since the late 1960s.
‘Yet, despite the extensive literature on the readymade, there has been
artists and their representatives and presented to an artworld pul
This is because the analysis of artistic value in these discourses
mative use-values of the readymade into correspondence with technical
THE COMMODITY, ‘THE READYMADE AND THE 'VALUE-FORM
for Benjamin the readymade is constitutive of the interrelationship be-
‘tween art and technology. Yet today Benjaminian discourse on the ready-
made is largely divorced from the labour theory of culture. His primary
the Benjamin scholarship of the moment, it is distinguished by its
indifference to the relationship between the readymade and labour theory.
‘Thus, the issue here is not just that the ‘deskiling” imposed by the
readymade on the artwork dissolves the residual artisanal content of
modernist painting and sculpture, or that the dissolution of the category
scholarship is certainly correct: the
readymade has been crude and reduc
that the abandonment of painterly sl
‘nomination and transformation of found and prefabricated mate-
tials represents a technical and cognitive readjustment on the part of the
artist to the increasing socialization of labour. By presenting, a discrete
commodity, ora constellation of fragments of commodities, in the form of
‘a montage as a meaningful artistic act, the modernist artist insists on a point
‘of mimetic identification between artistic production and social produc-
tion. Art and social production (mechanization, reproducibility) become
conjoined. The technical and cognitive demands of the readymade, then,
derive from the perceived phenomenological inadequacy of painting, The
dabbing, pushing and smoothing of paint actoss a surface is held to be
utterly residual, a process that can no longer be made to seem homologous
with the experience of modemity, of living in a world of hard, reified
things. Consequently, what these cognitive and mimetic demands intro-
duce into att in this period is a very different relationship between the eye
the artist's hand is able to act on intellectual decisions in a qualitatively