Year 1
Issue 1
Madrid
Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. From May 26 to August 29
Critical fetishes Residues of general economy Critical Fetishes. Residues of General Economy is the first installment of The Red Specter’s projects. The collection of interventions presented here are argued as an interpellation and a reply to the logic of the market, which has managed to assimilate the neo-avant-garde project of the dematerialization of the art work and the consequent formalization and reduction of Conceptual practices. We have taken it upon ourselves to excavate an alternative archive of poetic, theoretical and political strategies that recuperate, in a double movement, the ambivalence and complexity of the category of the fetish as the center of critical theorization of market society, and at the same time emphasize the fact that the notion itself emerges as a key concept of the relationship between Enlightenment thought and colonialism. Given that the
problem of the fetish occupies the intersection of a colonial imaginary with the production of different discourses and repertoires of analysis where a dislocated, spectral image of the economy is situated, we advance the premise that its displacement and radical inversion will conduct us to its theoretical nucleus and the possibility of undrawing the limits—both real and poetic—of its phenomenology; that is, of its experience with regards to theoretical and aesthetic fictions within art and capitalism. The show Critical Fetishes. Residues of General Economy brings together works and projects by more than twenty artists who pointedly, diversely and tentatively elaborate poetic investigations of economies founded in heterogeneity, both of exchange and of productive Page 3
From the Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
May 2010
$000
Pastures of the Underground Francesco Pellizzi
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Bataille, Documents and the Notion of Sacrifice Dawn Ades
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In Defense of the Fetish Cuauhtémoc Medina and Mariana Botey
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Vanished America Georges Bataille
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Georges Bataille and Documents
Karl Marx (1852) If any section of history has Dawn Ades been painted gray on gray, it is and Fiona Bradley Page 82 this. Men and events appear as reverse Schlemihls, as shadows Key texts on that have lost their bodies. The Fetishism revolution itself paralyzes its Page 86 own bearers and endows only Karl Marx its adversaries with passionate forcefulness. When the “red Communication: specter,” continually conjured Toward an up and exercised by the counterrevolutionaries finally ap- Architecture. pears, it appears not with the Post-Industrial Phrygian cap of anarchy on its head, but in the uniform of or- Anamorphosis. der, in red breeches. Après Salvador Dalí Page 96
The Red Specter
May 2010
This exhibition was organized by the Vice Ministry, Regional Ministry of Culture and Sports and Government Spokespersonship, General Office of Archives, Museums and Libraries of the Community of Madrid.
EXHIBITION
Vice-President, Regional Minister of Culture and Sports, and Spokesperson for the Government Ignacio González González Regional Deputy Minister of Culture Concha Guerra Martínez Managing Director of Archives, Museums and Libraries Isabel Rosell Volart Deputy Managing Director of Museums Andrés Carretero Pérez Fine Arts Adviser Carlos Urroz Arancibia Head of Press for the Regional Ministry of Culture Pablo Muñoz Press Office for the Regional Ministry of Culture Lara Sánchez Milagros Gosálvez Timanfaya Custodio CA2M CENTRO DE ARTE DOS DE MAYO Director Ferran Barenblit Collection Asunción Lizarazu de Mesa María Eugenia Arias Estévez Carmen Fernández Fernández María Eugenia Blázquez Rodríguez Production Ignacio Macua Roy Casilda Ybarra Satrústegui Laura Arroyo Fernández Diffusion Mara Canela Fraile Laura Hurtado Isabel García Gil Education and Outreach Pablo Martínez Carlos Granados del Valle Victoria Gil-Delgado Armada María Eguizabal Elías
2 Supervision and Production S consultores en diseño S.C.
Critical Fetishes. Residues of Printer General Economy Cobrhi S.L. Grupo Arvato CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo Print Ibérica May 26 - August 29, 2010 Curated by: The Red Specter (Through its Commissariat of Public Enlightenment: Mariana Botey, Helena Chávez Mac Gregor and Cuauhtémoc Medina)
[email protected] www.espectrorojo.com Curatorial Assistant Ángela Cuahutle Navarro Graphic Design and Exhibition Image S consultores en diseño S.C., Mexico · www.ese.com.mx Editorial Coordinator Ekaterina Álvarez Romero Participating Artists A Kassen, Maria Thereza Alves, Francis Alÿs, Martí Anson, Karmelo Bermejo, Mariana Botey-Cuauhtémoc Medina, Miguel Calderón, Duncan Campbell, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Andrea Fraser, Fran Ilich, Fritzia Irizar, Jota Izquierdo (in collaboration with Abel Carranza), Roberto Jacoby-Fernanda Laguna, Alfredo Jaar, Magdalena Jitrik, Teresa Margolles, M & X, Raqs Media Collective, Vicente Razo, Gustavo Romano, Bea Schlingelhoff, Guillermo Santamarina, Santiago Sierra, Judi Werthein and Federico Zukerfeld THE RED SPECTER Journal of Agitation and Enlightenment www.espectrorojo.com Editors of this issue 1 of The Red Specter Ekaterina Álvarez Romero Cuauhtémoc Medina Editorial Design S consultores en diseño S.C., Mexico · www.ese.com.mx
The Teatro Sincrético-Esotérico [Esoteric-Syncretic Theater], which serves as the masthead of this publication, Management and Administration is a work of multiple plagiaMar Gómez Hervás rism by S, based on the effigy Olvido Martín López of The Red Specter, originally Sonsoles Rubíes designed by Vicente Razo Media Collection Spanish Translations Beatriz García Rodríguez Manuel Hernández Jaime Soler Frost Av. Constitución 23 28931 Móstoles, Madrid English Translations +34 91 276 02 13 Christopher Fraga www.ca2m.org Lorna Scott Fox Revision and Correction of Texts Ekaterina Álvarez Jaime Soler Frost
“Pastures of the Underground” Copyright © 2008 by Francesco Pellizzi. Originally published in: The Bruce High Quality Foundation & Other Ideas, Brooklyn, NY. The Bruce High Quality Foundation University Press.
This publication was made in conjunction with the exhibition Critical Fetishes. Residues All texts are Copyright © of General Economy at the their authors CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in the Region of Madrid. The images of the works published in this number are Compilation (including the courtesy of the artists except selection, positioning and order of the texts and images) otherwise indicated First edition, 2010 Copyright © 2010 by CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Community of Madrid. Copyright © 2010 by The Red Specter [El Espectro Rojo]. Documents [Documentos] Copyright © 2006 by Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley. Originally published as the Introduction to Dawn Ades and Simon Baker (eds.), Undercover Surrealism , Cambridge-London, The MIT Press and Hayward Gallery. “L’Amerique disparue” [“Vanished America”] Copyright ©2010 by Julie Bataille.
All images are Copyright © their authors
All texts by Karl Marx and their respective translations are shared through a creative commons license. cc by-sa www.marxists.org Legal deposit: All rights reserved. This publication may not be photocopied nor reproduced in any medium or by any method, in whole or in part, without the written authorization of the authors.
Critical fetishes
acknowledgements The Red Specter wishes to express its gratitude to the people and institutions that, in one way or another, have made the many phases and incarnations of this project possible. To all the artists who have participated in this exhibition. To all those who, in many ways, contributed to the advancement of this project: Dawn Ades; Julie Bataille; Bruce High Quality Foundation; Irene Bradbury, White Cube; Jorge Camacho; Víctor Hugo Chacón Ferrey; Manuel Calvo Rojas; Claire Fontaine; Pilar García, curare, México; Jan Hendrix; Helena Hernández, former director of the Tlaxcala Museum of Art; Cristina Faesler, Mexico City Museum; Christiane Hajj, Mexico City’s Historic Downtown Foundation and Casa Vecina; Gabriel Hörner, Querétaro City Museum; Brian Jungen; Juan Pablo Macías; Inti Muñoz, Mexico City’s Historic Downtown Trust; Francesco Pellizzi, Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, Harvard University Press; Juan de Dios Ramírez Heredia; Pablo Torre de Alba;
Yassir Zárate Méndez, former head of Outreach at the Tlaxcala Museum of Art; Laura de la Colina, Danish Embassy Madrid. Biblioteca Social Reconstruir; Preiswert; des-bordes journal, Red de Conceptualismos del Sur; Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo, pac México; Maisterravalbuena Galería, Madrid; Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milán; Galería Oliva Arauna, Madrid; Kasey Kaplan, New York; hotel, London; Toni Tàpies Gallery, Barcelona; it (Imprenta de los Trópicos), Peter Kilchmann Galerie, Zürich; Sales del Centro. To the institutions that employ the curators, for authorizing their participation: cenidiapinba (Mariana Botey); University Museum of Contemporary Art, muac, unam (Helena Chávez Mac Gregor); and Institute of Aesthetic Research, unam (Cuauhtémoc Medina). To the participants in the Zones of Disturbance group, and to the Holy Blind Child of the Capuchins, Puebla, patron saint of critics, curators and historians of radical art.
May 2010
From Page 1 processes established within a logic of loss, expenditure or dilapidation. These works, which appeal to an apparent economic “irrationality,” form the spinal cord of an interrogation of the relationships between desire and production as well established notions of “development,” “underdevelopment,” and “efficiency.” As opposed to a reading of a capitalism in crisis, the artists and reflections in this anthology present and mount a mise-en-scène of the allegory of a savage, primitive capitalism that implodes and goes mad in its effort to commensurate desire with object: following the allegorical reading, desire’s inevitable overflowing of the object would escape all calculation and all symbolic transposition. The operations traced out here diagram a residual zone of disturbance wherein an “other economy” would seem to be transformed and to manifest itself as emergent and potentially dangerous to the system. In an open discrepancy with the melancholy character of contemporary reflection, Critical Fetishes seeks to exhibit the means by which a variety of recent artistic interventions have invoked a constant political and aesthetic transgression, wherein the notion of the fetish manipulates and rearranges the fictions of utility, equivalent exchange and the rationality of investment. All the interventions and works compiled in Critical Fetishes explore the complex, variegated economic system of capitalism, in the North as well as the South, as a system open to fractures and paradoxes, which art exploits in its poetic search for forms of practical and intellectual dissidence. Inspired in large part by Georges Bataille’s intuitions about a “general economy,” as this was inaugurated in “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933) and later developed in The Accursed Share (1950), as well as by reflections on the notion of the fetish by authors like William Pietz and Marx himself, Critical Fetishes seeks to overcome the abjectionist description of the effects of capitalism’s crisis, and to expose the way in which artistic work invokes moments of anti-production, de-activates the myths of development and puts the art object into operation as an object of desire and subversion. In this sense, the show takes a position against the identification of dematerialization with de-fetishization, as the dominant critical operation, in favor
of rescuing the power of contagion and dissemination of the contemporary art fetish-object. The exhibition thus creates a constellation of art objects that displaces and de-centers reason and calculation as the dominant way of thinking about the economy, in the hope of generating an as yet unknown political experience. We have pursued the intuition that a critical fetishism would be one that understands its compulsion as a perversion of heterogeneity that becomes metastasized as it aims to interrupt the circuits of symbolic transposition and that this activity would highjack and hamper their functioning
3 Flyer handed out in Mexico City, 2009
The Red Specter
du faubourg Saint-Antoine et la Scylla du faubourg du Temple»: «A un quart de lieue de là, de l’angle de la rue Vieille-du-Temple […] se dressait ce barrage qui faisait de la rue un cul-de-sac; mur immobile et tranquille; on n’y voyait personne, on n’y entendait rien; pas un cri, pas un bruit, pas un souffle. Un sépulcre. […] On sentait que le chef de cette barricade était un géomètre ou un spectre. […] La barricade Saint-Antoine était le tumulte des tonnerres; la barricade du Temple était le silence. Il y avait entre ces deux redoutes la différence du formidable au sinistre. L’une semblait une gueule; l’autre un masque.»
Sincerely,
Isabel Rosell Volart
Managing Director of Archives, Museums and Libraries Region of Madrid
PRESENTATION
The Red Specter Curator of Public Enlightenment Mexico City Statement: The Red Specter quotes and retrieves a figure from Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire (1852) that appeals to the phantasmal condition of revolution, which would seem to prevail from that moment on as an apparatus central to capital’s operations of hegemonic terror. But also—although somewhat more opaquely—The Red Specter recites Hugo and reminds us of the evidently continuous phantasmal condition of justice and violence: “A mile from there, at the corner of Rue du Temple […] rose this obstruction, which made of the street a cul-de-sac; an immovable and quiet wall, nobody could be seen, nothing could be heard, not a cry, not a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre […] the chief of the barricade was a geometer or a spectre […] The barricade St. Antoine was a tumult of thunders, the barricade du Temple was silence. There was between these two redoubts the difference between the terrible and the ominous. The one seemed a gapping mouth, the other a mask.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, «Partie 5. Jean Valjean. Livre 1. La Guerre entre quatre murs. V, 1, 1. La Charybde
The Regional Government of Madrid is delighted to present the exhibition Critical Fetishes. Residues of General Economy, which will be on display at the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo this summer. On its second anniversary, the Centre continues to programme events that explore the ways in which art interacts with other phenomena of modern society. While on previous occasions the narrative threads of exhibitions have invited us to reflect on the role of cars in contemporary culture or the relationship between the music and art of counterculture, the central theme of this new show is the economy. The current economic recession has affected our country’s entire productive and social structure, and it is against this backdrop that the exhibition curators invite us to engage in a profound reflection on the very meaning of our economic system. Through the work of approximately 20 artists from around the world, the exhibition analyses the operation and validity of the concept of rationality applied to economic exchanges. The work of many of these artists is somewhat surprising in that their strategies defy the most fundamental rules of utilitarian logic, offering instead proposals which, expressed in the language of art, confront us with unexpected realities. With its solid discourse shaped by a meticulous analysis of the
different art projects featured in the show, Critical Fetishes reinforces the lines of research pursued by the CA2M. The project has come to fruition thanks to the intense efforts of the three curators from the El Espectro Rojo collective: Mariana Botey, Helena Chávez and Cuauhtémoc Medina. The exceptional quality of their proposal and its development in the subsequent phases of the project, which will take place in Mexico, are a source of enormous satisfaction for all of us, and I am deeply grateful for all their work. Another notable aspect of this exhibition is the large number of new works that have been produced specifically for the show. Here at the Regional Government of Madrid, we believe that the construction of contemporary culture requires collaboration between creators and institutions, and encouraging the production of new works is one of our top priorities. I would also like to thank everyone who has made this exhibition possible and the participating artists in particular. Their extraordinary involvement and dedication to the project have greatly enriched the Centre and, naturally, all those who visit it.
The Red Specter
May 2010
4
Francesco Pellizzi
Pastures of the
Underground
This text, written for the installation Beyond Pastoral (in Exit Art, New York, 2008) of the artistic collective Bruce High Quality Foundation, was originally published under the pseudonym Z.L., in the book accompanying the retrospective exhibition of BHQF at the Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, May 2008 (The Bruce High Quality Foundation & Other Ideas, Brooklyn, NY: The Bruce High Quality Foundation University Press, 2008, pp. 149-151). It is published here for the first time revealing the authorship of Francesco Pellizzi.
There was once, in the mountains of Chiapas, the earth lord. People would sometimes dare to go visit him in the bowels of the earth, entering the darkness through remote caves and making offerings and sacrifices to him there. He was immensely rich, the owner of precious metals and the dispenser of agricultural bounty (water, as clouds, rain and springs—as well as thunder and lightning—did come from the mountains). Double-hearted people seeking extra-human powers would go so far as to sell him the souls of others— sometimes even close relatives—in exchange for his favor. Even in post-Colonial times, he was still, after all, the Yahval Balamil, once Lord of the Underworld, and one of the arbiters of life and death.
The journey to Him was dangerous, and neither a safe return nor the double-edged daytime consequences of the hypogeal visit were guaranteed by the gifts. In the present age of wholesale import of homogenized maize, he may still be there down below (nobody knows for certain), and if so, feeling rather lonely atop a heap of now worthless riches. The people, seeking wealth or survival, these days travel far to the North where the sun rises lower on the horizon half of the year, sometimes also never to return. A world of ups and downs, of ascent and descent between the peaks above and the abysses below, of trance and daring plunges into the depths of the mountains (and of the heart), has shifted for them to one of flatness, wandering and exile, of temporary closeness and unlimited horizontal remoteness, and to the world of virtual long-distance communication. But it is a world, though well Beyond Pastoral, still fueled from below by minerals (at astronomical human and natural cost), and the old hypogeal Mother/ Father of Wealth is now prodded to reveal and release them by sensitive instruments gauging electrical waves (like little bolts of lightning turned upside down) and intrusive drills, so that the wealth of the earth
The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Beyond Pastoral, 2007
has acquired a new mechanical (though no longer metaphysical) remoteness—foreshadowed by Jules Verne—and is only accessible through the control and manipulation of technical and privileged information (a parody of archaic esoteric knowledge) in which things-from-below have been stripped of their intrinsic value and have acquired instead a virtual and abstract (monetary) one. This surplus of abstraction is also attached to the nature and status of the modern art object—not a fetish any longer because it is devoid of any intrinsic power, i.e., of the capacity to scare—pace all the avant-gardes and their supposedly épatants exploits (all
lemons, no matter how energetic and enlightening)—quite unlike those extravagantly monstrous dancing masks, astonishingly earth-shaking these, whose harmlessness was only discovered, learned and conquered, by the trial of fright endured. We have come full circle, from the spirit-infested (and spirittransforming) claustrophobia of the primitive initiation hut to the desolate agoraphobia of busy urban installations and the aphasia of graffiti walls. It is again a medieval time of concepts and illustration (neoenluminures), transitions and transmutations, clerici vagantes (or ‘jet-proletariat,’ as one of them labeled himself) and corporate (globally) wandering knights, lime-lights and witch hunts, comforting terror and museo-graphic horror, crusades and letters-of-credit, unfathomable debts and invisible wealth, regionalism and universality. Can we now expect, from all this, the rise of a new (postpastoral) Renaissance? It would be the third for us, in the West— after the cave-dwelling Paleolithic one, that of the templebound smiling marbles of the 5th Century B.C., and the one we have invented to ennoble the pedigree of our modernity. But
May 2010
first, it would seem, the author— the one who once went into the cave, the temple, the chapel, or the palace, and then retreated into the squalor of the atelier (this counterpart of the asphyxiating parlor and salon)— is bound to vanish once more, this time in a flurry of collectivity of play, and un-sheepish pastoral anonymity. • In 1975, in Sesto San Giovanni (Milan), Gordon Matta-Clark, right after talking to a group of Lotta Continua sympathizers who had squatted in an abandoned factory, drew hammerand-sickles in his notebooks, as matrices for some future anarchi-tectural interventions. Shortly thereafter, Andy Warhol produced his own hammer-andsickle series, where sometimes the bond between the symbols of ‘work-that-sets-you-free’ is loosened and they become almost unrecognizable—like flow ers beyond fading. He then met with Joseph Beuys in Europe, and made a diamond-dust portrait of him. Half a decade later—as his fortunes reached the sky and not long before he left for greener pastures—Warhol pictured himself with his wighair standing on end, as if he had just seen the ghost of the Earth Lord himself while looking into his own mirror. Then, the year after Warhol’s demise, and shortly before his own, a distraught Jean-Michel Basquiat represented himself as some avatar of Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, crossing the wastelands of a uniform silver (plata) field as a transparent red Cyclops on a white skeletal horse (he called the painting, Riding with Death). At the other end of this transatlantic tale—sometime before Titian excruciatingly alluded to his old-artist condition, and tragic pride, in Prague’s Flaying of Marsyas— Michelangelo Buonarroti, also quite wealthy (as well as notoriously parsimonious) for an artist of his time, had already looked into the empty eye of the Underworld when he hung his own bodiless hide, in the guise of the martyr, St. Bartholomew, smack in the middle of the richest of his papal commissions, the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment.
Dawn Ades
5
Bataille, Documents and the notion of sacrifice Identifying and explaining a general ‘theory of sacrifice’ had been one of the goals of anthropology, ethnography and sociology since the late 19th century. In the pages of the magazine Documents (1929-30), Georges Bataille, together with writers and intellectuals such as Michel Leiris and Robert Desnos,
assembled an extraordinary range of materials, art and artefacts from every continent, from many cultures and from every epoch from the Neolithic to the present day and wrote about them in terms that violently disrupted the sober discourse of these relatively new social sciences. The nature and
meaning of sacrifice was a preoccupation that Bataille later explored in texts such as ‘Sacrifices’ and ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, and in his review Acéphale, as a basic human need, like fetishism, that was irreducible to notions of productive utility. Documents presented not only the ancient or distant examples studied by anthropologists but contemporary expressions in popular art and culture that witness its survival and distortions in modernity, whether as regressive superstition, as in Eisenstein’s The General Line, or in disguise, as in the offerings to the tinsel deities of Hollywood that Bataille described in ‘Les lieux de pèlerinage: Hollywood’ (Places of pilgrimage, Documents 5, 1929). ‘L’Amérique disparue’, (Extinct America), the first essay in which Bataille’s deep personal involvement in what he later called ‘the insubordinate function of full expenditure’ coloured his analysis of Documents, 1930, nr. 4
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May 2010
sacrifice, was published a year before Documents began, in L’art précolombien, a special issue of the Cahiers de la republique des lettres, des sciences et des arts. His contention that sacrifice in Aztec society was accompanied with expressions of joy and that death was a source of black humour was based on the vivid conjunction of flowery celebration and violence in Aztec descriptions and depictions of heart sacrifice, which resonated with his own perception of the combination of liberation and horror in the act of sacrifice, however mediated or truncated in a contemporary godless world. Bataille’s essay is strikingly out of key with the contribution to the Cahiers by the young ethnographer Alfred Métraux, ‘Ce qui
reste des grandes civilisations de l’Amérique’. Métraux eschews discussion of the spectacular and sensational practices of a ‘lost civilisation’ in favour of a more modern investigation of their material and literary remains, a discussion of the intellectual achievements of the codices and an assessment of the contemporary survival of independent languages and beliefs (‘Les vieilles races ne sont pas mortes…’). In ethnographic terms Bataille’s obsession with sacrifice seems outdated, but it evidently had more to do with his ongoing interest in the human impulses expressed by sacrificial acts than in an interest in Pre-Columbian civilisations per se. The real successor to ‘L’Amérique disparue’ is his essay in the last
Documents, 1930, nr. 4
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6 issue of Documents, ‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent van Gogh’, rather than Roger Hervé’s ‘Sacrifices humains du Centre-Amérique’ (Documents 4, 1930). The latter dismisses the exaggerated descriptions of human sacrifice by the 16th century Spaniards, and relates it, in line with contemporary theories of sacrifice in ‘archaic’ societies, to the widespread idea of reciprocal exchange between gods and man, the gift of blood in return for fertility and the continuation of the seasons. For Bataille the interest of sacrifice and ‘sacrificial mutilation’ such as van Gogh’s severing of an ear and other examples, across the centuries, of automutilation, lies in their searing evidence, even if now pathological, of
psychological needs that precede such accepted religious mechanisms as propitiation and exchange. In fact, seen from this perspective, the radical juxtapositions in Documents of popular culture, crime magazines, primitive masks and so on are concerned less with exposing the loss of a religious dimension to modern life, with the emptiness of heaven, than reciprocally with the evidence that apparently god-ridden societies fearful of the sacred were fundamentally powered by actions that emphasised the conundrum of human existence and its inescapable bodily frailty.
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Documents, 1930, nr. 4
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Cuauhtémoc Medina and Mariana Botey
In each of its motley materializations and theorizations, the fetish is the excessive conceptobject and the hyperbolic fragment that characterizes (in the constitutive exceptionality of “the paradigmatic”4) the desiring epistemology of the contemporary subject. Consequently, if “art” (or what occupies its place) resorts to the fetish as a critical apparatus, this is because it is possible for the subject to fall prey to a whole range of lures and interventions that André Breton designated as “solidified desires.”5
The authors would like to point out that a large part of the development of this work emerged while leading the “Zones of disturbance” seminar in 2009, a joint project of the Graduate Program in Art History at the Department of Philosophy and Letters, and of the “Expanded campus” program at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (muac), both part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (unam).
2. When the idol becomes obsolete The naturalness, vagueness and unstoppable abuse6 that the concept of the fetish suffers in the most diverse fields all bear a direct relationship to the form on which the mythology of Western rationality always depends —even if only residually, covertly, unconsciously— that is, on being reproduced in the representation of the “irrationality” of any heterogeneity: the savage, in the first instance, then the sexual, consumerist pervert, and finally the practitioner and activator of “the poetic.”
In defense of the fetish The majority of mankind has given its consent to the industrial enterprise, and what presumes to go on existing it gives the impression of a dethroned sovereign. It is clear that the majority of mankind is right: compared to the industrial rise, the rest is insignificant. Doubtless this majority has let itself be reduced to the order of things. But this generalized reduction, this perfect fulfillment of the thing, is the necessary condition for the conscious and fully developed posing of the problem of man’s reduction to thinghood. Only in a world where the thing has reduced everything, where what was once opposed to it reveals the poverty of equivocal positions—and inevitable shifts—can intimacy affirm itself without any more compromises than the thing.1
1. Concept-reflection Few concepts stalk modern thought as tirelessly as the fetish. And not without reason: no other concept, perhaps, ties together the relationships between critical thought, modern economies of desire and the network of the post-colonial condition as tightly as this concept-metaphor-story, traced in the space of transactions and desires that operate in relation to material objects, based on 1
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1989 [1973], pp. 93-94.
heterogeneous, irreducible codes. We could even assert that the fetish is, in good measure, the site of an imperfect and spurious cognition, enciphered in a subverted, hundred-year-old theology, accompanying the instability of the concepts of sexual, economic and aesthetic value, which brought about the violent confrontation of unequal economies and epistemologies, and which has continued to act decisively in each and every one of the phases of the capitalist world-economy for the past five centuries.2 2
In that sense, Michael Taussig’s use of the concept of fetishism is even more remarkable, in that he explored the figure of the devil in reactions among the South American peasantry, when indigenous communities found themselves wrapped up in the apparition of salaried relationships and, as “neophyte proletarians,” were required elaborate the profound changes of their living conditions, “in all their dialectical turmoil of truth and being,” a product of their accession to the logic of mercantile economy. Then, as Taussig would say, the fantastic, “mystic interpretations” of those societies were exacerbated, since “the magic of production and the production of magic are inseparable in these circumstances.” See
The fetish is a conceptual hinge that becomes apparent each time there is a need to refer simultaneously to the impossibility and the obligation to equilibrate need and production, utility and demand, rationality and value, sense and material. It is the name of the supposed generality that establishes equivalence and of the trans-valued object that subverts it. Thus, we aim here to defend the fetish in all its opacity as a necessary blind spot wherein “the religion of sensuous desire” (as Karl Marx precisely designated it as early as 1842) is played out, and which, although it is originally protected by the proto-ethnology of colonial commerce, continually unfolds in the everyday cult of the moderns and the modernized, who (more so than the savage) are those who operate as if “an ‘inanimate object’ will give up its natural character in order to comply with his desires.”3 Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980, pp. 17, 18, 21. 3 Karl Marx, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung” (1842), [Rheinische Zeitung, nr. 191, July 10 1842],
available online at: http://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1842/07/10.htm We are indebted to William Pietz for bringing this passage to our attention, as well as for many of the points we make in this article, and for his contribution to our perspective more generally. See: William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,” in: Emily Apter and William Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 133-134. 4 “Paradigm in the etymological sense: it is what is ‘shown beside’…” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, ed. W.H.D. E. Wellbey, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 22. 5 André Breton, “Surrealist situation of the object” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972 [1935], p. 261. 6 Venezuelan novelist and television host Boris Izaguirre offered a recent example of the laziness that the term has acquired when he employed it in his exploration of his own media indulgences and superficial obsessions, which range from Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz’s moustache to the simulation of nostalgia for the communist enemy. (See Boris Izaguirre, Fetiche, Madrid: Espasa, 2003).
The Red Specter
May 2010
Beginning with its origin in the paradoxical interactions between the merchants, theologians and “enlightened” philosophers of the colonial European metropolis with the traffickers and sovereigns of West Africa in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, the term fetish is the shadow that both shelters and expels the self-representation of “the modern.” A certain archaeology of the fetish as a colonial, capitalist category is necessary to make palpable its condition as a theoretical fiction that traverses the zone of disturbance wherein the economies of the heterogeneous, the perverse and the incommensurable are found. Only by way of such a detour would it become possible to activate its power as an obstacle to the illusion of grounding transactions and desires in natural needs and universal rationalities, when these are always populated by partial overlaps between incommensurable poles. In the first instance, we must regard the concept-metaphor of the fetish as a transcultural concept, and not as a category internal to any institutional, cultural or autochthonous subjective order.7 To put it more eloquently, this is one of the categories of colonial thought that is inscribed, with perfectly identifiable traits, as much in the everyday vocabulary as in the “scientific” one that constitutes the West, with words like zombie, apartheid, taboo, Oriental or Indian. We are indebted to William Pietz’s multiple and at the same time fragmentary critical studies for having drawn out the basic recurring themes in the broad semantic swath of the fetish: always emerging in relation to an irreducible materiality; designating a singular power that contains the repetition of a synthesizing and ordering event of desire for a thing; institutionalizing the social value of objects within consciousness, beyond the obsession with the good and bad “representations” of Platonism and Christianity; and finally, the notion of the operation of a material object as the power that establishes the actions of subjects as personified bodies. The originary denomination of this whole complex of the concept-word fetish depends on an extremely complex social interstice: namely, the mercantile space
of transvaluation and cultural crossing that resulted from the “abrupt encounter of radically heterogeneous worlds”8 in West Africa under the constraints of colonial commerce. As William Pietz has painstakingly demonstrated, the notion of the fetish appears as soon as (and every time that) Enlightenment thought needs to overcome the thematic of the “idol”—understood as a perversion of “representation” and “the religious”—to elaborate a psychology of primitive economy. If the modern concept of the fetish differs from a concept of idolatry as religion deformed by the Devil (such as was applied above all in the colonization of the New World9) this is because it is a category derived from the tales of seventeenth and eighteenth century merchants in Africa, who entered into economic and cultural transactions with societies that had previously been so illegible to Christians and Arabs alike as to seem to lack legal, religious and governmental institutions.10 When, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, merchants such as the Dutchman Willem Bosman attempted to explain the lack of a principle of equivalence in their transactions with the societies of equatorial Guinea, regardless of the fact that this capricious market was also the origin of their great profits, they resorted to the idea of the fetish as a transactional object. Seeking the gold found in African power objects, and concerned by the adulteration of this precious metal by materials that Europeans considered to be garbage, travelers like Bosman attributed the “irrational” behavior of their counterparts to superstition, instigated by covetous, capricious priests and kings, who supposedly exerted total control over their subjects by manipulating credulity in those deified ornamental objects.11 It
7
William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9, Spring 1985, p. 10.
8
Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” pp. 6-7. 9 See Serge Gruzinski and Carmen Bernand, De la idolatría: Una arqueología de las ciencias religiosas, trans. Diana Sánchez, Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995. 10 See for instance the concurrence of the descriptions of Africans by tenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Hawqual with those of sixteenth-century British captain Lok, cited in William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The origin of the fetish,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16, Spring 1987, pp. 36 and 42.
9 is thus that, in the discourses of European “Enlightenment,” the Portuguese word feitiço went from referring to the facticius or “artifact” of Medieval witchcraft to constructing a new materialist theory of primitive religion based on the assumption that Africans were afflicted by a capricious, sensual fixation with objects, which they practically deified whenever these crossed their paths12, in a way not entirely dissimilar to Sigmund Freud’s explanation of fetishism as “unsuitable substitutes for the Sexual Object” selected by “some sexual impression received as a rule in the early childhood.”13 At the moment, circa 1760, when the French philosophe Charles De Brosses coined the term “fetishism,” the category emerges clearly formed to distinguish the cult of the “African negroes” toward animals and inanimate objects such as amulets, oracles and talismans, from every other 11 Wiliam Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa. Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment theory of fetishism,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16, Autumn 1988, p. 120. 12 For a detailed archaeology of the concept of the fetish in transcultural interactions in West Africa—from Portuguese theologians’ arguments imbued with sixteenth-century Augustinian notions of idolatry and witchcraft (facticio-fetiço) to the emergence of the modern concept of the fetish among eighteenth-century French and Dutch merchants and theorists— see: William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II,” pp. 23-45. 13 Sigmund Freud. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, Berkeley, CA: Basic Books, 2000 [1905], p. 20.
kind of cultic or doctrinal apparatus that could have been submitted to procedures of “universal” interpretation of a mythological or allegorical order.14 De Brosses projected the idea of a primitive religion resulting from the mere correlation of material to desire, of object to whim, which grew out of singular personal experiences and which resulted in a sacred order lacking any logic whatsoever. The radical aspect of this interpretation was in its economic and colonial womb: he was interpreting territories of exchange that —with all violence and pillaging—connected notions of value and desire to incomparable social systems surrounding the transaction of objects. The heterogeneous elements involved in these exchanges were not, however, of a strictly material order: they were the construction of an economy over and above any contract economy. Thus, despite its ethnographically bastardized origin, the fetish would bear a crucial meaning for the construction of a theoretical materialism. It designates (on a commercial level as well as a sexual and aesthetic one) the site of a transaction where two or more codes of value intertwine without there being a true equivalence between them. It is the junction that sutures the absence of a general code, and nevertheless it refers 14 Charles De Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches ou parallèle de l‘ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de la Nigritie, 1757, pp. 10-11. A facsimile of this book is available online through the French National Library’s “Gallica” resource: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/bpt6k106440f.
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to an extremely wide range of transactions. Thus the fetish proposes, even today, the paradoxical norm of the process of globalization, which, counter to the propaganda that would understand it as the generalization of a social and cultural uniformity, needs to make capitalism out to be a system that details, with increasing speed, the synergy of an “unequal and combined” development in which poverty, polarization and socalled underdevelopment are not “negative effects produced by specific circumstances or mistaken policies” but rather the logical, permanent and immanent product of the system of the world-economy,15 and where the collisions and paradoxes of incomparable economies and systems of value are articulated around an apparatus of falsely shared needs and desires. 3. The “other secret” of commodity-fetishism In the classical sense, the narrative of fetishism has its nodal construction in the chapter on the commodity in Marx’s Capital (1867, 1872-73), and later in the synthesis of Kantian critique and Weberian sociology that Georg Lukács mobilized with his theory of reification in History and Class Consciousness (1919). With the exception of Hegel’s disquisition on the master-slave dialectic (which Susan Buck-Morss has also recently revealed as a figure to be approached in relation to the problem of the emancipation of modern slaves of African origin in the Haitian revolution of 180816), Marx’s text on “commodity-fetishism and its secret” is the most important epicenter in the theorization of the epistemological and aesthetic conditions of capitalism. It is this nucleus that has given rise to the central debates about a subjectivity derived from the progressive commercialization of social relations, and to the condition of the commodity no longer just as an object central to economic transactions, but as a cognitive model and the basis of a sensibility. And indeed, this thing that Marx postulates as an everyday metaphysics appears in the text of Capital under the ironic, polemical 15 Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization. The Management of Contemporary Society, New York: Zed Books Ltd., 1997, p. 16. 16 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.
figure of emerging as a sort of a priori of contemporary experience, in a line that does not hide its eagerness to draw the set of critical Kantian elaborations to itself: The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social.17
projection (which is none other than the terrain of projection of economic transactions in lived culture), Marx’s formulation resorted to the notion that this attribution to things deserved to be designated as a fetishism for modern people: It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of the men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.18
As is well-known, in the attempt to elaborate a formulation of this effect of ideological 17
Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 164.
We are not attempting 18
Ibid, p. 165.
perform an excessive unpacking of these all too well-known passages. It will be sufficient here to suggest a few critical points: a) Beginning above all with Georg Lukács’ intervention, the lineage of Marxist fetishism has tended to take this “analogy” as an epistemological description. Taking Marx’s irony of “the suprasensible thing” seriously, Lukács defined an entire current of critical Western thought when he derived from this analysis the idea that capitalist economy produces a “reified consciousness” where the Kantian categories of time and space—that is to say, the conditions of possibility of experience—are progressively fragmented and submitted to a rational order that results in a correlation between an “objectivity” and a series of “forms of subjectivity” of capitalist society. Commodities, in Lukács’ analysis, are converted into “the universal category of society as a whole,” and the world is transformed into a uniform field of alienated domination of things over human beings, whose principal subjective modality is the “contemplation”19 of a world alien to the relationship between desire, will, consciousness and experience. Submitted to a structure of reified, fragmented experience, and— following Weber—progressively submitted to a structure of calculation and abstraction, Lukács argues: “the attitude of the subject then becomes purely contemplative in the philosophical sense.”20 b) Without dismissing the way this analysis formulated the field of operation of the entire history of Leftist cultural criticism (from the whole Frankfurt School21 to the Situationist
19 Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” [1919], in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxists Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971, pp. 86, 89. 20 Ibid. p. 130. 21 It is crucial to note, even in passing, that the conjunction of Theodor Adorno’s critique of the “fetishism” of “industrial culture” and his recovery of the modernist work of art as a sort of heterogeneity folded into industrial society—as a “windowless monad”—is the attempt to accommodate, by another post-colonial detour (referring to the mimesis of the magical object), a critical exteriority to this oppressive totality of to capitalism’s apparent conceptual transparency. The mark
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May 2010
International, and the critique of persons, or social relationof everyday life by philosoships of objects. The first and phers such as Henri Lefebvre), most universal manifestation it is interesting to note that, in of the object as a social thing, one very specific regard, Lukács however, is the metamorphounconsciously undid the metasis of the product of labour phorical game in Marx’s elabointo a commodity. The mystiration. Indeed, although it is cism of the commodity arises, frequently omitted (in part betherefore, from the fact that the cause of its inaccessibility, in social determinations of the modern editions of Capital), the private labours of the privafigure of commodity fetishism te producers appear to them was not Marx’s first elaboration as social natural determinaon the theology of the commodtions of products of labour; ity, but rather a formula that he from the fact, that is, that the only later refined for the second social relationships of proedition of his book, published duction of persons appear as between 1872 and 1873.22 In the social relationships of objects first edition of Capital, in 1867, to one another and to the perMarx systematically resorts sons involved.24 (with just one exception23) to another analogical body: that of Reading closely, one might perthe “mysticism” of Catholic con- ceive in this passage an oscillation between the residues of a templation. humanist complaint against the Private producers only enmediation (or rather, we should ter into social contact for the say, intercession) of things and first time through their pripeople, and the task of describvate products: objects. The ing a social system where intersocial relationships of their actions among “agent-things” labours are and appear conestablish the territory of powsequently not as immediaer. That the interaction among tely social relationships of things should occur in the text persons in their labours, but as a “representation” in fact as objectified relationships harbours the residues of Christian theology, even though this is done in the opposing code left by an anti-fetishist fetish on Adorno’s aesthetics is to be of the Hegelian/Enlightenment found, perhaps, in the way that project of de-alienation.25 the expression of works of art as “second-order things,” as artifacts that are nevertheless beyond the grasp of sensible “intuition,” is an echo of the “suprasensible thing” in Marx. Contrary to the expectations of those who would attempt to trace a line of simple oppositions (instead of a grid of tensions, complementarities and debates) in the heart of the vanguard’s thought, Adorno’s vision approaches Bataille by understanding the need to defend art as a thing made against the reign of things: “The perennial revolt of art against art has its fundamentum in re. If it is essential to artworks that they be things, it is no less essential that they negate their own status as things, and thus art turns against art. The totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivation it would regress to an impotently powerless subjective impulse and flounder in the empirical world.” Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory [1970], ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: The Athlone Press, 1997, p. 175. 22 In fact, it is likely that only contemporary readers of the Spanish language edition, such as ourselves, have been able to take note of this detail, since the ambition of the editors at the publishing house Siglo XXI of annotating a “critical edition” of
Capital compelled them to include in their publication both the definitive and the original versions of the first chapter of the book. 23 Marx refers not to “commodity fetishism,” but to the “fetishism of classical economics.” Karl Marx, “The Commodity,” in Capital (first edition), trans. Albert Dragstedt. Available online at: http://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1867c1/commodity.htm. We have included the relevant passages of this text in this issue of The Red Specter, p. 90. This conception was carried through Marx’s text beginning with the so-called Grundrisse of 1857, where he used it with respect to classical economic theory, and not as an operator of the practical epistemology of the social system. See below, note 25. 24 Ibid. 25 On this point—a detail that seems to us to be crucial—we disagree with Pietz’s reading, which argues that Marx flatly reintroduces the discussion of the fetish in his reading of capitalism circa 1857 (Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism,” art. cit., p. 143). Nevertheless, the occurrence of the word “fetishism” in The Grundrisse refers strictly to the critique of David Ricardo’s oeuvre, which seems to
11 c) Beyond the evolution of the book 26—which is ultimately a scholarly problematic—the movement from mysticism to fetishism in Marx’s text involves precisely the problematic of the burden of the Enlightenment in the Marxist project, and the tension between that legacy and the interference from the postcolonial category of the concept of the fetish. As in Lukács’ project, which imagines liberation from “reified consciousness” through the understanding of the dialectics of historical Marx a “crude materialism” and an “idealism” that makes him “regard as the natural properties of things what are social relations of production among people and qualities which things obtain because they are subsumed under these relations.” That is, the use of the concept of “fetishism” in this arena is limited in asserting that the doctrines of classical economists suffer from a primitivist mentality: “a fetishism, since it imputes social relations to things as inherent characteristics, and thus mystifies them” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough draft ), trans. and ed. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin Classics, 1993, p. 687). In sum, the passage in question clarifies the same restriction into which Marx introduces the thematic of fetishism in the first edition of Capital, without unfolding a clear distinction between these theorists’ “fetishism” and the “mysticism” that, until 1867, serves Marx himself as a metaphor-category of his critique of the operation of money as a general equivalent in capitalist circulation. 26 In fact, the first formulation of “commodity fetishism” appears in an appendix added by Marx to
“process” when, in his first, 1867 elaboration, Marx postulates how the “mystical” relationship between the subject and the commodity might be turned around, his argument reiterates the Hegelian Left’s thematic of a “reappropriation” in consciousness of what had previously appeared as alienated modes of activity in an object that produces—like divinity in Christian mysticism— the affection of a permanent distance that nevertheless holds the promise of contemplative reunification: “The religious reflection of the real world can only disappear as soon as the relationships of practical work-a-day life represent for men daily transparently reasonable relationships to one another and to nature.”28 In this point it is possible to detect an attempt—in retrospect unsuccessful—to prophesy the statute of society and of future epistemology; as if this were a matter of the (proletarian) subject acquiring total dominion over nature, founding a reign of total administration that would come to be confused with emancipation. This line of Marxist thought brings 27
the first edition, made before the recognition that his initial text was not easily comprehensible and entitled “The value form” (available online at: http://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1867-c1/appendix.htm) We have included the relevant passages of this text in the English edition of this first issue of The Red Specter, pp. 94-95. 27 Lukács, op. cit., p. 164. 28 Karl Marx, “The Commodity”, op. cit. In fact, Marx retains this moment in his 1872-73 edition: Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 173.
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Hélio Oiticica “Render to God the things that are Caesar’s” Hélio Oiticica
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Magdalena Jitrik, Work Leisure Art, 147 x 88.5 cm. oil on canvas, 2006. Karmelo Bermejo. Solid gold hinges to hang artworks. The hinges are hidden by the works they hold in place, 1.8 x 5.4 cm. 18 carat gold, 2009
us to Friedrich Engels’ famous passage about the communist idea of the abolition of the State: “the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production.”29 Might it be possible to reduce the diagram of the activation of the fetish—by conjoining the double formulation of the Western/primitivist epistemology (and excluding, of course, the unrepresentable place of the Other)—to the promise of undoing “false consciousness” or “reified illusion” with the promise that the abolition of commodities would open the subject to the unmediated pleasure of a cognition and a control of production founded in pure transparency? This was in fact the explicit project of modern communism: the postulation in the social and economic order of the culmination of the Enlightenment, as a total control of scientific consciousness over material, history and nature.30 The reign of total Enlightenment ended with just over sixty
4. Beyond de-alienation, beyond theory33 When, in the early 1990s, Wi lliam Pietz finally came to explore the problem of the fetish in its Marxist version, he framed it in terms of a generalized critique of the semiotic-symbolic hegemony of the era, and in particular as a warning against conceiving the social field as an infinite space of post-structuralism’s homologies and analogies. Placing an emphasis on at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in the way in which the categoMexico City in 1934. That this ry of fetishism contained, as utopian communist superhero early as De Brosses himself, should appear in the person of a the originality of “offer[ing] an blonde, green-eyed Soviet atheological explanation of the technician, placed at the center origin of religion,”34 alien to the of the operations of material and logic of representation and lanhistory, is truly an Enlightenguage, Pietz indicated that the ment labyrinth. And that this use of the concept of the fetish
1931, and which, after its destruction, was newly installed
“socialist development” of the communist project: “The value of
million deaths31 uselessly committed to obtaining, by means of coercion, the solvency of an economic system in which “productive consumption” attempted to drive development, with the absolute deferral of enjoyment and pleasurable expenditure.32 Could it not be that the opacity of Marx’s construction of “fetishism” harbors the potential for another kind of critical operation?
in Marx was directed at completing a “critique of the territorial” in which the irreducibly material character of the religion of sensual desire would orient the materialist critique of contemporary society. In other words, Pietz emphasized that Marx was attempting to restore the primitivist formula of the fetish to the true fetishist: the subject of capitalist modernity. In that displacement, the fetish would, according to Pietz, have to shelter a limit to theorization and to the linguistic turn, since it would impose a need to return to a conception of the interactions among sensual, bodily, living beings, beyond the problematic of “ideology” and the criticism of thought. In its eagerness to make relevant the image should be described under non-transcendental elements of a white, Eurocentric model of ethnicity and epistemology is an art is counter to practical values, the social history of the world, irony of post-colonial knowledge. and is measured as their inverse. Marx’s fetishism would seek to Art is an invitation to expend reveal capital’s categories; that It constitutes the failed attempt energy without any precise end, is, “emerging universal forms of the post-colonial artistic apart from that which the as the material ‘power objects’ project, which reveals, at the spectator himself might bring to of organized social systems.”35 margin and in opposition to it. It is prodigality [...]” Asger In that sense, William Pietz hegemonic modernism, the infiltration of the project of total John, “La Fin de L’Économie et la suggests that Marx’s investigaRéalisation de l’Art,” InternaEnlightenment seen (and tion into the notions of capital tional Situationniste nr. 4, June therefore recoiled) from its and money must be understood 1960, p. 19. [My translation from 29 diametric opposite. Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: as the study of something that the French. T.N.] 31 Utopian and Scientific” (1880), operates as a general equivaR. J. Rummel, Lethal Politics. 33 One of us has explored the available online at: http://www. lent and, therefore, that we reSoviet Genocide and Mass thematic of this section in a marxists.org/archive/marx/ Murder since 1917, New Brunsalize that modern “fetishes” are concise, initial treatment, works/1880/soc-utop/ch01.htm wick and London: Transaction neither metaphors nor signs, relating it to a Native American 30 Publishers, 1990. It is worth noting that the but exist rather as material obcode in the work of Brian figuration of this idea is present, 32 As Asger John brilliantly Jungen. See Cuauhtémoc Medina, jects whose power is to estabperhaps better than in any other articulated during his Situation- “High Curios,” in: Diana Augatis lish control over human beings. image, in Diego Rivera’s mural El ist phase, clearly informed by In this reading, money-capital et al., Brian Jungen, Vancouver, hombre en la encrucijada [Man Bataille’s The Accursed Share Toronto and Berkeley: Vancouver is not a representation or an at the crossroads], commissioned and raising artistic development Art Gallery, 2005, pp. 27-38. idea that reifies consciousness, for the Rockefeller Center in in direct opposition to the 34 but rather the very power-object William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism,” p. 138.
35
Ibid., p. 145.
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May 2010
that produces and sustains the concept of fetishism as a “sensocial order: sual religion” in his reading of capitalism circa the 1840s, Marx The object that had been an had adopted a similar position accidental means to achieving for the project of a study of the some desired end becomes a proletariat: beginning with the fixed necessity, the very emsurprise of relating its own catbodiment of desire, and the egories about the savage back effective, exclusive power for to the Enlightened West, the gratifying it. The human truth movement of fetishism in Marx of capital is that, as a means embodied the possibility of unthat has become an end, it is a derstanding modern economy socially constructed, culturally as a structure of domination real power-object: it is the incentered on the operation of strumentalized power of commoney-capital as the contempomand over concrete humans in rary power-object: the form of control over their labor activity through investment decisions.36
The discussion, again, is much more than a problem of mere names. In his 1842 studies of the history of religion, Marx had cited a passage from De Brosses that referred to “indigenous Cubans,” attributed to gold the function of being “the fetish of the Spaniards.”37 Following this logic, by incorporating the Ibid., p. 147. “The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle around it and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages had been present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would they not have regarded wood as the Rhinelanders’ fetish? But a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of animals is connected with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the sea in order to save the human beings...” Karl Marx, “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Lawon Thefts of Wood,” Rheinische Zeitung 307, November 3rd 1842, available online at: http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1842/10/25. htm#p5. Pietz compares the citation to notes that Marx took from De Brosses’ book (Karl Marx, “Exzerpte sur Geschichte der Kunst und der Religion”, en: Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, 2:1, Berlin: Dietz, 1976,p. 322). Nevertheless, Enrique Dussel rightly identifies the history of Taino chief Hatuey’s resistance, related in the chronicles of Bartolomé de las Casas, as the ultimate source of the passage to which Marx alludes (Enrique Dussel, Praxis latinoamericana y filosofía de la liberación. Bogotá: Editorial Nueva América, 1983, p. 186. Available online at: http://www.ifil.org/Biblioteca/ dussel/html/17.html). We must point out, however, that our study of fetishism in Marx differs from Dussel’s on important points, which is marked constantly by a claim for the 36 37
And it is from the perspective (as evoked in Marx’s writing) that the bourgeois capitalist is perceived as himself, one whose fetish, capital, is believed as, by its deluded cultist to embody (super) natural causal powers of value formation, but which is recognized by the savage, expropriated through the capitalist accumulation process proper, as having no real power outside its social power to command the labor activity of real individuals.38
Pietz’s interpretation harbors a subversive gesture that underlines the operativity of a certain primitivism in Marx’s text that is not at all the affirmation of colonial hopes, but rather its ironical application as a mirror of production. In other words, William Pietz revealed a Marx who operated as a surrealist or a Bataillean avant la lettre: as the performer of one of the first inverted ethnographies39, in that he used the representation of the savage to illuminate the discussion of the modern subject by reflexively applying his own Eurocentric categories40 Christian contribution to Latin American liberation, instead of attending to the conditions of the interference of colonial categories in the same texts. 38 William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism,” p. 141. 39 The figure of an inverted ethnography has become central to this discussion and we could even argue that it has given form to contemporary academic discourse by defining the protocols of much of the work in Cultural Studies. The emblematic example of the articulation of this perspective as a key operation in the deciphering of the production of art and literature in modernity has been elaborated precisely and descriptively by James Clifford (see: The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
13 to himself, seeking to roost in the exteriority necessary to all criticism by means of the mirror of the fiction of fetishism: Human experience of material poverty and social oppression is here viewed as the source of a spiritually powerful moral authority that is the concrete subjective ground of a radically democratic emancipatory politics. The materialist subject of this radically human ground is twice located by Marx: in the maximally alien perspective of the primitive fetishist, a cultural other for whom material conditions are themselves spiritual values, who judges civil society from outside all civilization; and in the maximally degraded viewpoint of the proletarian, bourgeois society’s internal other, forced to the physical margin of subsistence, whose value judgments express the most fundamental needs of human life […] But after he had absorbed the lessons of the political events of 1848-1850, Marx returned to the discourse about fetishism in 1857 in order to articulate not so much the dis-illusioned class consciousness of the proletarian (its members’ self-conception as workers within the categories of civil society) as a communist imaginary that sees the fantastically inhuman anamorphosis of liberal political economy’s vision of human life as civil society. Marx evoked the “savage” subject of religious fetishism as a (potentially theoretical) viewpoint outside capitalism capable of recognizing proletarians in their objective social identity as the economic class owning no marketable private property other than their own embodied being […]41
The logical result of this is that the possibilities of escaping the apparatus of the magic of production would require some kind of operation at the heart of material interaction, one that would exceed the frame of that epistemology— especially from the perspective of a project, such as The Red Specter, that also follows the Marxian consideration of the experience of a reaction temporality that proscribes a fall into disillusioned melancholy.42
5. Dematerialization and its limits It is this dimension, the product of taking note of a “primitivist” description of capital in its totalizing immanence—however opaque its colonial structure might be—that makes the fetish into a necessary montage of fragments in which untranslatable codes of value and the residue of another, heterogeneous economy are framed as a constant subversion of the Western logic of rationalization and its politics. The continuous seduction of the notion of the fetish and the form in which contemporary art seems to point at mobilizing the production of particular, localized and paradoxical instances of economic “irrationality,” in the form of post-industrial anamorphoses, is evidence of the (subterranean and mostly unconscious) continuity of that project of the savage categorization of a critique from out of the fold of heterogeneity. Reactivating the fetish, once its critical potential as a primitivist category of and about modern society is re-established, is the basis for a diagram that allows for a whole range of intransigent operations that situate themselves in open opposition to the expectation of the dematerialization and transparency of social relations. That is, the concept of the fetish also poses 40 Antedated, perhaps, by Michel an obstacle to the temptation de Montaigne’s essay “On to challenge capitalism with Cannibals” y Jonathan Swift’s “A a program of total EnlightModest Proposal,” which enment, which has guided a projected the horror of cannibal- fundamental part of the postism onto the Western subject revolutionary automatism that (see: Michel de Montaigne, “On lurks phantasmagorically in Cannibals,” Essays [on-line contemporary art and culture. edition: http://oregonstate.edu/ Here we are referring, clearly, instruct/phl302/texts/monto the eminently unreflexive taigne/montaigne-essays-2.html] discourse with which critiand Jonathan Swift, “A Modest cal art has repeatedly come to Proposal For Preventing The imagine itself under the figure Children Of Poor People From Being A Burthen To Their Parents of “defetishization,” without recognizing that these formuOr Country, And For Making lations—“situated” in the pure Them Beneficial To The Public,” in: The Portable Swift, ed. Carl Van Doren, London: Penguin, 1986, pp. 549-559). 41 Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism,” p. 143.
42 See the fragment from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire that gave rise to the image of The Red Specter, in this volume, p. 1.
Salvador Dalí, "Communication: visage paranoique", Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, nr. 3, December, 1931
The Red Specter May 2010 14
The Red Specter
May 2010
“institutional critique” of minimal displacements—already lack the motor force to take into consideration any economy other than that which is proper to the luxury market’s limpid dematerialized gestures, which are not even conscious of their condition of objects and subjects of exploitation. We are certainly in a moment at which categories, to use Gayatri Spivak’s felicitous expression, have come to pervert themselves in an omelette of theory and practice, in which, as in some of Tino Sehgal’s actions or “constructed situations,” everything is dematerialized except the price, like worthy examples of an innocuous post-Enlightenment, sensibly architectural and without any cultural substrate.43 Re-establishing the genealogy and practice of the fetish may consist, at most, of re-establishing some sort of relationship in which theory is anchored in the problematic of an egg.44 It is no coincidence that the fetish should explicitly recuperate the sharp edge of antiWestern primitivism in the
field of theorization parallel to the activation of the surrealist object and sacrificial subversion —i.e., in the murky territory of a study of “the sacred” by Bataille and his circle. It was then that the semantic field of the fetish exploded, impelling its critical impulse toward an anti-colonial and anti-modernist reading by framing the bodily, localized, material, and overrun relationship of fetishism as a horizon unreachable in (and at the same time indispensable to) the artistic game. That is what Bataille’s oft-cited aphorism entails: “I defy any amateur of paintings to love a canvas as much as a fetishist loves a shoe.”45 When, in the journal Documents, Michel Leiris reflected on Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures from the period of inverted ethnography, he was suggesting a search for a distinction between the “true fetishism which remains at the base of our human existence,” and those works of art which, by way of a material and bodily intervention, are capable of responding to him in terms of “a piece of furniture [meuble, a movable property] which we can use in that strange, vast room 43 “This surplus of abstraction is called space.”46 also attached to the nature and It is possible, within the zone status of the modern art object— of confusion and disturbance of not a fetish any longer because it contemporary art, that the feis devoid of any intrinsic power, tish should be turned inside i.e., of the capacity to scare— out by framing the exaltation pace all the avant-gardes and and celebration of the mistheir supposedly épatants exmatch of object and desire, as ploits (all lemons, no matter how well as the game of the death energetic and enlightening)— drives (destruction-negation) quite unlike those extravagantly which are the logical itinermonstrous dancing masks, ary of consciousness in its beastonishingly earth-shaking coming like an alienated body these, whose harmlessness was (thing-body, animal-body) and only discovered, learned and which are suspended and/or conquered, by the trial of fright congealed in the useless charendured.” Francesco Pellizzi, acter of art. Indeed, its role is “Pastures of the Underground,” to pursue the completion of see p. 4 in this volume. 44 the project of inversion of the The citation from Gayatri Spivak refers to one of her many Hegelian dialectical game, and the founding of an effective moments of lucidity and ironic base materialism that would clarity in the classroom. In the seek explanations in a “horri“Theory of translation” seminar (University of California - Irvine, ble and perfectly illegitimate Spring 2005), Spivak provoked a principle” in which “being and memorable explosion of laughter its reason can in fact only subwhen she answered a student’s mit to what is lower, to what
question (about the notion of “the multitude” elaborated in Hardt and Negri’s famous volume Empire) with the joke that theory on the contemporary Left was like an “omelette made after the eggs were broken”. This description of the fascination with “non-hegemonic,” “horizontal,” purely messianic politics of the religious-activist expectation is crucial for The Red Specter, since it sounds the warning, of which Spivak constantly reminds us, not to assume the post-structuralist legacy innocently, without first understanding its confluence with the Marxist tradition.
45 Georges Bataille, “L’Espirit moderne et le jeu des transpositions,” Documents, 1930, nr. 8, pp. 50-51. (Translation taken from: Denis Hollier, Against Architecture. The Writings of Georges Bataille, tr. Betsy Wing, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 1989, p. 112. See Hollier’s relevant commentary on this passage in ibid., pp. 112-113). 46 Michel Leiris, “Alberto Giacometti,” Documents, vol. 1, nr. 4, 1929, p. 209. Cited in Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” p. 11.
15 can never serve in any case to ape a given authority.”47 In a radical turn, the materialist-artistic operation would seek to overturn the fetish, to arrive at its power of non-dialecticized (non-idealized, non-sublimated, non-theologized) materiality, capable of pillaging the practical rationality stowed away in the hegemony of marginalism, where desire and consumption are ordered around the arousal of capital’s utility. Like an operation whose central framework presumes, as Bataille proposed with his radical a-theology, not to be the emancipation of consciousness, but rather the excess of the economic object: It is a return to the situation of the animal that eats another animal, it is a negation of the difference between the objects and myself or the general destruction of objects as such in the field of consciousness if I did not give my destruction its consequences in the real order. The real reduction of the reduction of the real order brings a fundamental reversal into the economic order. If we are to preserve the movement of the economy, we need to determine the point at which the excess production will flow like a river to the outside. It is a matter of endlessly consuming—or destroying—the objects that are produced.48
of a perverse or un-hinged subject. This reinscribing of the primitivist moment of theory and the avant-garde requires the activation of the circulation of quasi-modernity of the work of art as a prosthesis of desire. The excavation that we unpack here (the opening of the fetish’s crypt) conducts us to a multiple operation of territorialization by which the historical field is imagined as an experience, a failure, a transaction, a deceit, an opaque fold and not as the memory of an incomplete or crippled Enlightenment. It is, in a way that could also be translated to the effective political field, an instance of that enlightening catastrophe of failed modernity that Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski named “the terrible material resistance.”49 As we understand it, the fetishist operation is reification carried to its limit, and not its containment. It is thus only by arriving at the limit of the process of reification that ideological critique is dislocated to give way to truth of the dictionary of the ideas received from colonialism, the place where any reference to the “Other”—beyond being the language attached to genocide—is the distorted dictionary of a critical residue. 49 Ryzard Kapus´cin´ski, The Soccer War, trans. William Brand, London: Granta Books, 1990, p. 106. The passage in question is in fact one of the most brilliant theorizations of the devilish dialectic of power in the so-called Third World, where violence and the failure to modernize the state have nothing whatsoever to do with any criterion of morality on the part of leaders and politicians.
To come out today in defense of the fetish consists of carrying to its limit the resistance to any Franciscan criticism of the economic system that would reiterate the form in which socialism deepened, miming capitalism, the idea of restriction and calculation. This means Translated by Christopher Fraga rescuing the “primitivist” moment of modernism as the excess that allows the intensification of the notion of artistic practice as an immanent critique of the work of art as fetish—that is to say, as an irreducible materiality in which the subject bears the axis of sensuous desires without taking cover in rationalism, to the point of discovering the desire 47 Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 19271939, trans. J. Allan Stoekl. with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, pp. 47, 50. 48 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1992, p. 103.
A Kassen
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Damaged by water, financed by insurance, 2008
Damaged by water, financed by insurance. Waterdamaged book by art collective A Kassen containing four projects. 32 pages. Published by Space Poetry in 2008. A Kassen is an artist collective established in Copenhagen in 2004 by Christian Bretton-Meyer (1976), Morten Steen Hebsgaard (1977), Søren Petersen (1977) and Tommy Petersen (1975).
Maria Thereza Alves
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Fair Trade Head, 2008
BREAKING NEWS! France to return Maori heads Aljazeera, Wednesday, May 05, 2010 13:56 Mecca Time 10:56 gmt
stored in several French museums, will be returned within the coming year.
(Source: http://english.aljazeera. net/news/asia-pacific/2010/05/ France has decided to return 16 20105574721701652.html) mummified heads of Maori warriors to New Zealand, ending Note of The Red Specter: Close years of debate over the human to 200 heads remain in other remains acquired long ago by collections around the world. French museums. Only eight leg- (Source: http://www.guardian. islators in the 577-seat National co.uk/culture/2010/may/04/ Assembly voted against return- maori-heads-france-newing the heads on Tuesday. The zealand) tattooed heads, which have been
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Francis Alÿs
Francis Alÿs. Politics of Rehearsal. In collaboration with Performa, Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina, 2004, video (30 minutes). Voice-over fragments
Rethinking the implication of the rehearsal as a comment on modernity, what becomes immediately obvious is the notion that modernity is pornographic. I mean, there’s this sort of representation of something that looks incredibly appealing, incredibly exciting, but even as it displays itself, it’s impossible to appropriate it, it’s like an exercise in mere arousal, not of coupling or encounter. Somehow, the piece is a constant postponement, what it does is to show that what the spectator wants is precisely to maintain this arousal, not really to arrive anywhere but to keep oneself aroused, which is in some way what the stripper seeks to do, and more so in this case, where time has kind of been diluted and extended.
In the everyday life of society what you have is a combination of falling for the illusion of development and discovering its falsity every so often. That provokes an experience notion of history as a Sisyphean punishment. That is, no sooner do you start a task, no sooner has there been some type of effort, or the sacrifices called for by the elite to be carried out over years, than you have to go back to the original starting point. It always makes me think of a game of snakes and ladders. You advance through the game and suddenly instead of the little ladder they promised you there’s a snake that sends you back to the starting square. And what that produces, in effect, is the notion of a sort of time that—even though there are a multitude of historical
moments, a multitude of phenomena, a multitude of changes—is crossed with the notion that history is not advancing, that history is always repeating itself and getting lost. There are two considerations on the temporality of the rehearsals that I think are interesting to touch on. One is that the rehearsals deal with the territory that isn’t altogether intended, the time of production, as opposed to the time of the product. In other words, they place emphasis on the task more than on the result. And that distinction has a lot to do with the distinction between work and labor that Hannah Arendt formulated in The Human Condition. Namely that one of the characteristics of the modern world is that we probably
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no longer know what work is, that is, work as production related to the creation of a definitive and permanent object. What we have instead is a constant reproduction, which is the constant daily labor to maintain the economic system that is always discarding the product so that nothing ever remains. So there’s a constant exhaustion. And the moment of the rehearsal seems interesting to me because one could probably say metaphorically that it’s processing this aesthetic of labor, that it’s very involved in much of the work that you’ve done, that is, a work that sees production in relation not to the achievement of a result but rather to the question of what is taking place and what intervenes and what establishes the form and the
Politics of Rehearsal, 2004
time of “to be making,” of the organic relation of being}. It also seems important to me to pose the question of why labor is connected here with inefficiency. Because basically the difference between labor and work is that sometimes well-finished work makes one forget whether it was efficient or not. But in effect one of the characteristics of this situation—in which everything is labor, as Arendt thinks that it’s the modern world in which there’s no longer any authentic work—is that the only question that comes up is whether the process was efficient or not. Whether it’s possible to reduce the effort, whether it’s feasible to shorten the time in order to lower the price and increase the production.
But in general terms, the rehearsals have a sort of role in clarifying that what we call labor is the definition of how temporality is experienced; a sort of schema of temporality. While work can be like accumulated time, it seems to be contained, so to speak, in a product; what the experience of labor formulates is a structure of temporality. That is, basically the phases of work, its prolongation, its interruptions, its achievement, what they create is time.
Modelo 036. Discharge in the census of businessmen, professionals. Ministry of Economy and Estate. The company: Pinturas Jiménez, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Toni Tàpies
Martí Anson Modelo 036, 2009 22
Beep-Beep-Splot. Furniture for Museums. The bench is a part of the equipment of the Museum, 2010
23 Beep-Beep-Splot. Furniture for Museums, 2010
Karmelo Bermejo
Tickets of books by Bakunin. Color photograph, 120 x 160 cm.
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3000 Euro of Public Money Spent Buying Books by Bakunin in Order to Burn Them in a Public Square, 2009
Courtesy of maisterravalbuena Galería and the artist
Color photograph of the ashes taken the following morning of the night in which the action was realized, 120 x 160 cm. Las Vistillas, Madrid
Vitrine with ashes, 8 x 120 x 120 cm.
Karmelo Bermejo
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Mexico City, February 23, 2010 will participate in the exhibition Critical Fetishes. Residues of General Economy, commissioned by "The Red Specter". Dear Director of the May 2nd Art Center: The idea you propose—to substitute a part from an I write to present to you my proposed project for electrical appliance for its facsimile in gold and the exhibition Critical Fetishes, commissioned by exhibit said object in the CA2M—seems feasible. "The Red Specter", which will take place in the I am able to carry out a photographic report of Art Center next May. the appliances that my family and I see as reason My project consists of completing a site-specific able for this objective and send it to you so you can decide which is best suited to your ideas. work in the home of the Art Center’s director. The proposed operation will be to replace a In your note you said that both parties shall part from inside one of the electric appliances establish the limitations of the appliance’s real at the home of the Art Center’s director with an and commercial uses. I implore you to clarify equivalent part cast in 18-carat solid gold. The both to me and to the organizer, Cuauhtémoc Meinstructions to carry out this exchange of the dina, what you mean by this. As we understand it, piece for its gold replica are: there should be no limitations. Following your intervention and your exhibition at the CA2M, the appliance will be my property, both as an appli• Disassemble the casing of the appliance to ance and as a piece of art by Karmelo Bermejo. gain access to its interior. Therefore I would ask you to give me the perti• Select the part to be replaced. nent documentation—a certificate of authentic• Disassemble this part and send it to a jewity—which I imagine you will want to coordinate eler, who shall create its replica in solid through your gallery in Madrid. In this way I gold. will be able to continue utilizing it as an use• Place the solid gold part in the original’s ful object or, if my family and I so decide, I place. • Close the casing of the appliance. The appli- will be able to use it as a piece of art and even sell it on the secondary market. ance shall continue to function as normal. Cordially, FB These actions may be performed either by the di*** rector of the Art Center himself, or by a technician. The production of the solid gold part must Mexico City, March 10, 2010 be performed by a jeweler. The piece to be exhibited in the halls of the Dear Director of the Art Center: Art Center during the exhibition Critical Fetishes shall be the appliance from the house of the director of the Art Center, with its casing Allow me to clarify first of all that the limitaclosed. The gold part shall therefore be hidden tions of real and commercial use of the appliance to which I referred are the following: from the viewer. At first glance the piece deals Indeed, the appliance will at all times continue with the ready-made. Once the exhibition has finto be your property, as well as the gold part, ished, the appliance along with the incorporated which shall remain inseparably attached to it. gold part shall return to occupy the domestic The price at which the piece shall be offered, in space proper to it in the home of the Art Centthe event that you so desire, shall under no cirer’s director. The appliance shall at all times continue to be cumstance be less than the gallery’s public price of similar pieces. property of the director of the Art Center, and my intervention shall remain inseparably attached Likewise, in the event that this piece should to the appliance. be sold commercially, this sale may not have any Both parties shall establish the limitations of other purpose than the enrichment of yourself and your family, any and all charitable purposes bethe appliance’s real and commercial uses. The appliance shall be selected by mutual agree- ing strictly prohibited. ment of both the artist and the director of the Nor may the piece be donated to any institution Art Center, as shall the exact title of the to such ends. piece, which, a priori, shall be entirely explan- In regards to the use of the appliance, under atory, in accordance with the titles of my previ- no circumstance may the internal solid gold comous work. The artist shall propose this title to ponent be exhibited or images of it distributed. the director of the Art Center during the produc- It is the responsibility of its owner to keep the tion process and once it has the approval of both image of the solid gold part hidden under these parties, it shall become valid. terms. In the event that the piece is exhibited, Karmelo Bermejo the entire, closed appliance shall be exhibited. *** In regards to the choice of the internal component, I would also like to supervise its selection. Madrid, March 5, 2010 In regards to the selection of the internal component I shall impose only two conditions: Dear Karmelo Bermejo: the part must be functional and not, for example, meant for fastening. That is, a screw, for Thank you very much for your February 23 letter, example, would not be valid. Nor should the part wherein you proposed the piece with which you require a ridiculous quantity of gold. In any
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Internal Component of the Vacuum Cleaner of an Art Center Director Replaced by a Solid Gold Replica with the Funds of the Center he directs, 2010 mechanism can be extracted for maintenance. It should not be difficult to open it and find a suitable piece for replacement. I can do so following your instructions and send you photos of all visible moving parts (fan blades, axels, etc.). Regards, Madrid, April 7, 2010 FB ***
event, let’s start opening up appliances and we’ll find the solution. Cordially, Karmelo Bermejo ***
Dear Karmelo Bermejo,
Following a long reflection with my family, we believe that the most suitable appliance is the vacuum cleaner. Our reasons are: We can live without it for the three months of the exhibition. It is an object I find attractive in itself. • It appears more like a fetish than a cleaner. • It is neither too big nor too small. • It is already several years old and functions impeccably. It would continue to function for decades more, I believe, with the proper maintenance. (The same cannot be said of other appliances: in my experience they are designed to break down after five years.) • Its mechanics should not be too complicated. As you can see in the attached images, the motor
Mexico City, April 9, 2010 Dear Ferran Barenblit, I find the motives you expose in your letter about using your vacuum cleaner completely appropriate. As my conclusion, I send you the title of the piece and the technical information: “Internal Component of the Vacuum Cleaner of an Art Center Director Replaced by a Solid Gold Replica with the Funds of the Center he directs” Technique: 18-carat gold Size: Secret I take this opportunity to inform you my express waiver to receive any type of fee for the work done. Regards, Karmelo Bermejo
Miguel Calderón
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Testamet, 2009
Courtesy kurimanzutto
Miguel Calderón 30
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Testamet, 2009
On the 13th of December 2007 the artist Miguel Calderón made his testamet before the notary No. 173, Lic. Francisco Xavier Arredondo Galván. In the deed Number 44900 Miguel Calderón assigns: First: Institution of Heir. Miguel Calderón institute as his sole and universal heir of all his patrimony, assignment of rights and obligations, presents and futures to: Carlos Slim Helú. Second: Institution of Executor. Miguel Calderón institute as executor of his succession to: Carlos Slim Helú Third: Revocation. Miguel Calderón affirms that his desire is that this will is obey as his last and delivered will, and revoke any other before this one. With this open public will the artist legatee Carlos Slim, Telecom tycoon who pounced on privatization of Mexico’s national telephone company in the 1990s, his only and universal heir. Slim has been designate by Forbes the world’s richest person in 2010 with 53.5 billions of dollars made, as it reads, by a “self-made” fortune.
Duncan Campbell
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Courtesy of hotel, London
33 Make it New John, 2009
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© The artists. Photo: Stephen White. Courtesy White Cube
Jake & Dinos Chapman
Jake & Dinos Chapman CFC76249559.3, 2002 Painted bronze 36 1/4 x 16 1/8 x 3 9/16 in.
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© The artists. Photo: Gareth Winters. Courtesy White Cube
Works from the Chapman Family Collection, 2002
Jake & Dinos Chapman Drawing V from the Chapman Family Collection, 2002 Black and white etching 58 1/2 x 50 5/8 in. (inc. frame)
Jake & Dinos Chapman Drawing IV from the Chapman Family Collection, 2002 Black and white etching 58 1/2 x 50 5/8 in. (inc. frame)
Jake & Dinos Chapman Drawing VI from the Chapman Family Collection, 2002 Black and white etching 58 1/2 x 50 5/8 in. (inc. frame)
Presented at White Cube the exhibition Works from the Chapman Family Collection comprised an extraordinary assemblage of rare ethnographic and reliquary fetish objects that subsequent generations of the Chapman family have diligently added to over a period of seventy years. With the exception of a very few isolated works generously exhibited in Africa: The Art of a Continent at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the collection has never before been displayed in its shameless entirety. Highlights of the Chapman Family Collection include virtually unknown primitive trophies and initiation masks from the former colonial regions of Camgib, Seirf and Ekoc, and as such are recognised by accredited experts as being the most noteworthy in the whole wide world. In terms of the genealogy of our own contemporary culture, the Chapman Family Collection traces the latent influences impressing upon it—those mute voices found simmering in the ritualistic embers of a primordial dawn. In its monolithic stoicism it reverberates with the history of a culture pillaged by industrial colonialism. However, its beauty
remains both intact and contagious. In fact, ever since twentieth-century colonialism began to rake virgin soil for essential minerals and discovered in the objects of primitive art a seam of rich and untouched treasures, its own lineage was irrevocably altered by the unwitting destructive interruption of paradise. The Chapman Family Collection shows how fruitful economic endeavour ignited the artistic passions of Picasso, Matisse and Braque, whose interest in ethnographic art began to dissipate the long shadow cast over it by Western culture. Through the visionary sight of these untimely artists ethnographic art was both reconciled and fused with Modernism, creating timeless forms and enabling Global culture to harmonise in a singular poetic language. To this unfathomable end The Chapman Family Collection enables the viewer a palpable and clear-sighted passage to appreciate their inner and outer experience—to witness the core emotive force shared by primitive analogue and technological artist alike. In its bountiful breadth the Chapman Family Collection is capable of showing art forms crystallised into
their purest and simplest intensity and sensuality—where the voices of the deceased and living crave, like us, for the divine while fearing the powerful riddle of infinity. The primitive naive artist, like the modern, knows fully well that the world runs on power. Power from water, wood, wind, petroleum, and nuclear power heats our homes and carries us from one place to another. It cooks the village food and takes the philanthropist to distant lands and helps him carry back the elegant artifacts that enrich our understanding and appreciation of beauty. We know that political and economic power organises, motivates, and runs the societies in which we live, but spiritual power is perhaps the most potent of all, because it provides humankind with the ability to order our world and to understand Nature in the fateful elaboration of our wellbeing and our disease, our safety and disaster. The Chapman Family Collection is an embodiment of skillful control that demonstrates that the divine manipulation of spiritual power is one of the principle functions of ethnographic art.
Andrea Fraser
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Untitled, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ANDREA FRASER Untitled JUNE 10
– JULY 23, 2004 OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 6-8 PM Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce Untitled, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Andrea Fraser. The exhibition will be comprised of two works, Untitled, 2003, and Don’t Postpone Joy, or Collecting Can Be Fun, 1993. Untitled, 2003 was initiated in 2002 when Andrea Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission were to include a sexual encounter between Fraser and a collector, which would be recorded on videotape, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited, sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera and existing lighting. Untitled is a continuation of Fraser's twenty-year examination of the relationships between artists and their patrons. Known for her performances in the form of gallery tours and analyses of collecting by museums, corporate art institutions, and private collectors, Untitled shifts the focus of this investigation from the social and economic conditions of art to a much more personal terrain. The work raises issues regarding the ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships as well as the contractual terms of economic exchange. This exhibition is the United States premiere of Untitled. It was first presented publicly in Andrea Fraser, Works: 1984-2003, a mid-career retrospective organized by the Kunstverein in Hamburg, in the fall of 2003. It is currently on view at the second venue of Fraser's retrospective, the Dunkers Kulturhus in Helsingborg Sweden. …. The exhibition will open on June 10, with a reception from 6 - 8 p.m., and will remain on view through July 9. A concurrent solo exhibition of new work by Fraser will be on view at American Fine Arts. Co, 530 West 22nd Street. For further information, please contact Friedrich Petzel Gallery at 212.680.9467 or
[email protected].
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Fran Ilich
[email protected] Almost as soon as I put the autonomous cooperative server PossibleWorlds.org into orbit online, I created a corporation that would accompany it from the outset: SpaceBank.org. I recall one of the first arguments with my support base was because one of these projects was a political body and the other an economic body. We asked ourselves which would prevail over the other, or if it were possible for there to be a functional balance in which each of the two would play its proper role without interfering in the competencies of the other: for economy to be political and for this not to become a business like all others that carry in their dna the profit motive above all else. The first of these two was like a territory, a tiny island on the Web occupied by individuals, collectives, associations and businesses, growing to a point at which it literally became overpopulated. This created an economy that allowed us to maintain a kind of solvency, encouraging us to generate content (podcasts, soap operas, animation series and texts) directed at those who had settled on the server. The second one was, at first, a small collection box in which we deposited coins and withdrew bills, and which we soon learned to control in ways that taught us not only to administer or multiply, but to create an economic model that has to a certain degree allowed us to abandon the traditional confines of the virtual economy of the gift—a form in which the majority of cultural projects on the Internet are structured—to go deep into a hybrid economic system that oscillates between what we will call “internal economy,” in which exchange occurs between investing partners (who construct and control their own infrastructure and institutions), and “external economy” (what can be consumed or downloaded online), which, even though it may appear to function as a gift cooperative, generates sufficient wealth to allow us collectively to promote connections in global markets like the Mexican Stock Market as well as marginal markets of ideologically correct commodities, allowing the collective involved in these operations to come closer to their objectives without damaging others. And thus, little by little, both projects continued growing and generating other initiatives, until three years later, these in turn were consolidated in the paradigmatic body of our times: a corporation. What follows are some excerpts from the operational reports of Diego de la Vega Corp.
January 5, 2009 Righteous Rage The ceo of Diego de la Vega Corp. unexpectedly participated in the panel of a magisterial conference on “Other communications, other cultures,” at the First Global Festival of Righteous Rage, where he shared the table with various commanders of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, including Commander Zebedeo (who moderated the table) and his official spokesman, Insurgent Sub-commander Marcos. Basically, our participation involved an analysis of the proposed other culture, but we could not miss the opportunity to publicly invite the attendees to participate in the production cooperative Radio Latina am. February 26, 2009 Our business is cooperation The saying goes that in every crisis there is an opportunity. Such was the case for Diego de la Vega Corp. with Tijuana Media Lab, since, in order to forestall its imminent bankruptcy (the result of organizational problems, poor administration and debt) in an act of human warmth and kindness, on February 14 (Valentine’s Day) we resorted to acquiring and privatizing the whole project with the objective of re-structuring it and thus advancing the cause of digital Maoism to its next level, thereby maintaining programs like Cinema P2P afloat. Because Gaia matters to us, we make revolution a part of our everyday practice. March 6, 2009 SpaceBank at 100% The current economic crisis did not hit SpaceBank directly, since immediately before it could have affected the Sabotage Fund owing to its stocks in the Mexican Stock Market, these were liquidated to invest the money in the Commodities Market of Zapatista coffee as well as in the money market PW.Inf, which made a note of buying infrastructure for PossibleWorlds.org—specifically, to generate sufficient resources for a server for the Radio Latina am project, which itself became a reality with the help of various parties (another important part was the 33% from a loan from SpaceBank.org, which was then liquidated). In other words, the investments have occurred within the virtual community itself, or point toward the secret agenda that ‘another world is possible.’ A small amount has also been invested in precious metal reserves and in foreign currency, as well as in Cuban cigars. An important point is that the loan department was renegotiated. All that said, the bank finds itself without liquid
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Fragments. Diego de la Vega Corp. Annual Report, 2010
capital, since everything has been invested, such that even if it is not necessarily at risk of bankruptcy, future projects depend almost 100% on the punctual delivery of weekly payments for the next 44 weeks. April 26, 2009 Spacebank’s survival in trouble SpaceBank is basically at a standstill and without access to money, making it possible that it may cease to exist, since Luis Humberto Rosales Lara (aka cybercholito), the guy to whom we loaned money from the fund so that he could finish medical school and get out of call center hell, after 4 or 5 payments of less than 15 dollars, decided not to continue his payments and is basically partying. He no longer answers our letters or telephone calls, but he does have a very active social life on his MySpace page. Has the collectivity been betrayed once again by the individual needs of a person to whom nothing matters besides his own benefit? For the moment SpaceBank announces that the loan department will be closed until further notice. Even if the money could be recuperated, the doubt remains whether it is possible to provide loans without collateral. Thus, surely after obtaining the money again, this service will still be in suspension. If anyone would like to write him so we all might recoup our money, I can supply his email address. Otherwise, SpaceBank is virtually without funding and since we are unable to communicate with him (since he does not return any of our calls), one possible option to recuperate the money would be to proceed with a lawsuit. For the moment, the money of all accountholders is in his hands. May 31, 2009 Crisis of solidarity May is the month in which the famous economic crisis finally hits Diego de la Vega Corp. with all the force of the word impetuousness. On one hand the Tijuana Media Lab continues to focus above all on the R&D projects in narrative media that are their bread and butter, as well as projects such as the relationship with the Procomún Mexico Lab. In any case, it is surviving principally thanks to the Cooperative Store and its sale of ideologically correct products like Chinese beer, Cuban cigars and Zapatista coffee, as well as the Friday functions of Cinema P2P. Nevertheless, it is in this month that the crisis of solidarity, caused by the economic crisis, gave Diego de la Vega Corp. a severe beating, to such a degree that the majority of its operations were put in a state of emergency, principally the continuity of
projects like the cooperative server PossibleWorlds (which, as a result of the crisis, continues to lose subscribers who abandon their projects, or have debts—the largest being nearly $1500 usd—or ask for credit, or move to cheaper commercial servers) and the internet radio signal Radio Latina am, whose production cost is too high. We considered the possibility that some of the projects might disappear, and we decided that for the wellbeing of the executive and the shareholders, any initiative that is not economically sustainable will have to disappear. In spite of everything, we forge onward, with all our hope resting on the nascent project Collective Intelligence Agency. We also considered focusing on a rebel sea bass commercialization project in the Sea of Cortéz, to support the indigenous Cucapah community from El Mayor in Baja California. Said project, although it requires a considerable amount of logistics and no small risk, could also offer important dividends for the shareholders at SpaceBank. Unfortunately the money from the Sabotage Fund is still frozen as a result of the loan that was given to Luis Humberto Rosales. In any case, despite the climate, the decision was to continue the long march toward the future, even though this might imply crossing a desert that seems interminable. June 30, 2009 Painful change We are facing a severe liquidity problem, which is putting the continued existence of the project in danger. We have reached the point of considering the painful decision of dismantling the Tijuana Media Lab. As a first step we began with the urgent and necessary liquidation of available hardware, to ease debts. As a sign of hope, after a fortuitous accident in a first meeting with the ex-director and founder of the Chiapas-ezln Concord and Pacification Commission, there appeared a possibility that, through the advisement of a cultural organ, the funds necessary for rescuing and maintaining Diego de la Vega Corp. might be obtained, giving us enough time at least to consider a Plan B. As a first step, we approached the SpaceBank.org debtor (Luis Humberto Rosales) again, who has committed to resuming payment in weekly amounts of $100 Mexican pesos ($7.50 usd) to move forward in the short term. The implications of this, clearly, are that it would take at least two years to settle his debt. July 31, 2009 Advisement & externalization The month of July could be reduced to an alchemical equation, since it demanded
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Fran Ilich
the rapid formation of the operatives of Diego de la Viega, Corp., which, beginning this month, will place greater emphasis on immaterial work (if not in immaterial economy), since from now on the ceo will be dedicated full time to advising the management of literature at a cultural institution within the flowchart of the Mexican Federal Government. A new process is beginning. It remains to be seen what kinds of projects recommended by a digital Maoist who supports the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle might be concocted and negotiated within a semipublic cultural enterprise focused on the public administration of cultural goods and services for the benefit of the population in the Tijuana-San Diego region (Baja California and California), in the middle of the era of the reality show war against drug trafficking and neoliberal privatization. August 31, 2009 Saturation At Diego de la Vega Corp. we began the month of August by trying to recover from the crisis, but focusing now on full time advising with a Federal Government semipublic cultural enterprise, through which we carried out a workshop on networks and open communication infrastructures with Efraín Foglia of guifi.net. A few days later we organized a book swap along with a conversation about informal economy and networks of exchange that do not use money with the Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo. In the middle of all this, nevertheless, the cooperative server PossibleWorlds was set aside to pawn its future, and even in an absolute state of insolvency it refused to go bankrupt and took on a completely unreal debt. And as a result of these debts and a lack of sustainability, at least one of its essential projects can no longer occupy space in online orbit, since it has been carrying a debt for over a year. Many of the other projects we were hosting (not all of them Zapatista) have abandoned the server or disappeared from the Web completely. But this is nothing compared to what was about to happen. First, we discovered that a great friend and collaborator, who had furthermore been one of the people to solicit the Hope protocol of social and clinical security on SpaceBank, had been kidnapped, tortured, brutally murdered and later beheaded, a victim of the wave of violence from the war between President Calderón, the police, soldiers and drug traffickers who are mixed up with each other as if they were all the same thing. We made the decision that the Tijuana Media Lab should disappear, since the idea of a media lab as such is not the best
suited to the projects on which Diego de la Vega Corp. tries to focus, and at the moment, with the crisis, there exists neither the capacity nor the human or material resources to move ahead with the project. Even when there was an interest that this might be one of two American projects to join a European network of media labs, for the moment we decided to focus on other formats of production. At the same time the World Bank reiterated its invitation for SpaceBank to work on a project at its offices in Washington, D.C. And to close out the month, the hard drive storing all of the project’s foundational information from the period prior to Delete.tv in the 1990s broke. September 29, 2009 Our first cdo We had a good sale on eBay. The first auction, a Hart Communicator that we put on sale for $200 usd sold, if I’m not mistaken, for upwards of $1095 usd, which was no doubt good news for those who were supporting this sale as an investment in Diego de la Vega Corp., and had a profit of 550%. We also promoted the Bi-national Meeting of Dramaturgy at the Centro Cultural Tijuana with the idea of generating all sorts of cultural exchanges, as well as thinking about a bi-national market focused on the production of dramatic texts. In addition we have great news for all who have invested in SpaceBank’s Sabotage Fund: we were finally able to confiscate from our debtor an asset worth the total value of his debt ($10 000 Mexican pesos), which had been broken down into 500 ious with a unit value of $20 Mexican pesos, which was then constituted as a cdo (collateralized debt obligation) with the aim of continuing to invest in the market. The deadline for this is January 1, 2010 at midnight, at which point it will be put up for auction on eBay. The collection consists of a total of 500 comic books and includes issues that are highly soughtafter by collectors. Thus those who hold an investment in the Sabotage Fund and who do not liquidate their shares will be able to benefit from this. October 30, 2009 The burgeoning relationship between cia and Diego de la Vega Corp. In October we publicly announced the existence of the Collective Intelligence Agency, a collaborative information initiative in which Diego de la Vega Corp. participates 50% as conspirator and co-founder. The agency was founded on April 15, 2009 by Jennifer Flores Sternad and Fran Ilich, in the unincorporated community of
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Fragments. Diego de la Vega Corp. Annual Report, 2010
Greenland, Colorado. The first line of research that has been pursued since that time is called “America: 200 years in dependence” and is in the charge of Nuuk Commission Directorate 2010, which is an initiative of the bicentenary of the independence of Spanish America, to share with the Greenland House of Representatives information referring to the post-colonial experience of Latin America, so that this new nation of Greenland, recently independent from the Kingdom of Denmark, will not commit the same errors as Latin American nations, which generated chains of dependence and external debt, beginning with the wave of independences in 1810 and from which today, nearly the year 2010, it has been impossible to free themselves. With the cia project, Diego de la Vega Corp. seeks to encourage control over access to confidential information and share it with its partners around the globe to conceive and nourish initiatives related to the Sixth Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle, among others. November 30, 2009 Intra-institutional To reaffirm our commitment, in November we found a way to project the film Corazón del tiempo by Alberto Cortés and Hermann Bellinghausen at the vii Northeast Literature Festival, which stars residents of the Zapatista Autonomous Rebel Community and members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Bataclán, the company that produced it, will donate the total sum from the rent of the dvCam to an autonomous community. December 31, 2009 Self-critique A year of this exercise has gone by. The project began with $50 Mexican pesos and even though things grew and achieved a certain level of development, there were also important stumbling blocks and even an emotional and economic bankruptcy, with the Tijuana Media Lab. Despite everything—above all the global financial crisis—we have been able to consolidate determined processes within this coinoperated cooperative media conglomerate, so we won’t focus on the idea of retreat. In the middle of the year, with the threat of an imminent bankruptcy that would have definitively ended the PossibleWorlds server, we had to make the emergency decision to enter into a process of externalization: the ceo had to accept employment so as to subsidize through his work a series of expenses that were then unsustainable. What’s done is done. The storm passed and the ship is still afloat. Not only that, but it has also
grown and shown signs of development, even savings and surpluses in the petty cash box that will allow new phases of the project to be negotiated, even concentrating on the liquidation of certain investments in the Treasury. Thus the decision has been made that the ceo will end his current work relationship—as had originally been planned and communicated to the board of directors of said cultural enterprise at the beginning of October—to re-focus on the activities of Diego de la Vega Corp. full time, beginning January 15, 2010. During the final phase of the month almost all stocks in SpaceBank were liquidated on the Mexican Stock Market and the Fiction Department finished the text of a mise-en-scène called Mujeres y bombas (Women and Bombs). Before the close of the year, we also began the newspaper El Zorro de la Mesa (The Table Zorro). • Diego de la Vega Corp. is a coin-operated cooperative media conglomerate that works with the secret agenda that ‘another world is possible,’ with the goal of functionalizing and creating common goods.
Fritzia Irizar
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Deterioration, 2010
About deterioration Currently, speed constitutes a very important factor in the development and efficacy of any activity. Therefore, a culture of substitution of objects of common use has been imposed, correspond not so much to personal needs as to the impositions of market systems and their traps. This situation not only allows the obsolescence of consumer goods to be defined by trends, but also mandates that some products that would otherwise endure be discarded at the slightest indication given by advertisers. In the midst of this epidemic of the ephemeral and at the same rate with which objects are substituted, the use of new technologies also causes many other activities to be replaced; activities in which the physical aspect of the human being takes part directly, and stops being one of the basic gears of global economy. This situation has unleashed futuristic ideas about its eventual disappearance and sees the human side of labor vanishing between words, conceding to a reflection in the shape of figures from reports about its daily activity. In developing countries, where most people still seem to interpret great technological advances as distant events from out of science fiction, physical labor still bears a huge cultural burden in exalting, honoring and celebrating the capacities of those that carry out the daily work that will economically support the group. This celebration of work, demonstrated even in subtle domestic rituals, tells us, without saying much, about the symbolic significance of work, not just as an economic tool, but also as an ingredient to achieve and maintain the collective psychological balance. Cautiously observing the work experience of endangered trades, but bearing in mind that too much information often confuses or hinders clear codification when one tries to decipher or to question the “benefits of progress” or the transformation of everyday life while still living within it, I find a thematic and methodological exit for these jobs in the simple presentation of facts, disguised a bit as science, to give them the appearance of truth, and also dissimulated a bit as poems, playing with the idea that they are possible. These pieces are exercises that test and evaluate memory, intending to capture the disappeared essence of worn things, their story seen through what is already invisible, performing an imaginary recovery of the energy that laborers from different areas invest in what is about to be thrown away, trying to recover with space the constitutive material that has been worn away through use. I seek to find prostheses for activities that have prematurely been deemed hopeless, to find tributes, or just to transform that insignificant imperfection into a meaningful gesture. Fritzia Irizar
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Fritzia Irizar
Notary Public
Place the diamond in the salt Salt
Diamond
In order to establish a reflection about general schemes of value used through history by different social groups, I intended to confront two elements that are similar in form and color, but which nowadays differ greatly in function and exchange value. These two elements, salt and diamond, will be subjected to a game, in which the viewer will also participate with his curiosity, but above all activating the emotions derived from being exposed to the temptation of guessing his good or bad fortune.
Sacks of polypropylene with a capacity of 3 kilos
333 full and sealed sacks
Fill 333 sacks with 3 kilos of salt
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Fe de azar (Chance faith), 2010
The sacks are put to sale during the exhibition for a price of €3 euros
The piece consists on a ton of salt placed directly on the ground, in which a real diamond valued in at least one thousand dollars will be planted at random. This act will be held before a Notary Public, who will witness the authenticity of the diamond placed inside the salt. During the exhibition, three-kilo sealed sacks of salt will be sold at €3 euros, and there is the possibility that one of them contains the diamond. The piece goes on when the buyer of each salt sack is notified, through a document, that the art work will lose its value as an artistic product—namely, that it will cease to be of my authorship—once the sack is opened. A third value is put into discussion: the value of art.
The buyers are notified that in case of opening or breaking the safety stamps, the sack has no artistic value
Bea Schlingelhoff
Mal wieder was fürs Bildungsbürgertum tun, 2009-2010 [Once Again Looking After the Intellectual Bourgeoisie]
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Detach here
Bea Schlingelhoff, Fuck the Flâneur!, 2009
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Bea Schlingelhoff
Through the Internet, a worldwide movement began to develop in opposition to the doctrines of neoliberalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-globalization_movement 1. The question: “How can we resist? How do we not reproduce the power structures we seek to destroy, critique, abolish?” For some time now, the consistent appropriation, popularization and commodification of revolutionary thinking and struggle has created a semi-cynical vacuum in the Western post-discourse network, where many artists could either react with violently infantile attempts to fuse Balenciaga and Foucault or helpless attempts to use the mass-intellectualization, which newly replaces a modernist class of the intellectual bourgeoisie, as a serious legitimation of cultural (re)production. First the factory was replaced with the city in the 60’s, which was later replaced with everyday life, which was replaced with the adjective cultural. Commodity, maps, ephemerabilia, race. If Marx believed fetish means something along the lines of giving a product, an object value or meaning per se, divorced from its production or use value, then the demystification of cultural commodity production for artists meant to find and proclaim themselves outside of the attempted a priori production of meaning and enqueue their production as part of the apparatus they wished to criticize. 2. Despite of the intelligent notion that resistance to the oppressive structures and endless control-dispositive (that which links discourse, objects, subjects and reality of control) of our sexual, social and communal desire must be an unpredicted and unpredictable one, as well as cyclical, and without producing or affirming aesthetic or theoretical conditions of commodification and without an estate of citizenship, we cannot reach a state without exception unless we end thinking about the internet as a tool. We must stop thinking about the internet in utilitarian terms. Unless you are a CEO at Cisco the internet can never be useful for you. You want to fucking email parrhesia1? Google dérive2? Internet use turns desire, libido, experience, and analysis into a pseudo-cyclical unpaid internship. Good were the times when the flaneur was only apathetic in the hallways of MIT Press and Verso. Within the internet dispositive there is no contradiction —there is no fetish— there only is feedback and feeding codes to the information-myth (i.e. full text archives like Jstor are not accessible to the mass) and again feedback and the project to perfectly control, forecast, anticipate and evaluate. It is the most radical socioanthropological project of the far right, the most efficient structure where we freely contribute daily to the monetary and symbolic surplus of a tight, not quite so netted, not quite so global monopoly. The internet is the oligarchic tyranny, the state of exception; neo-liberalism is not even its prosthesis. Diary: The world wide web is not an abstract auto-poetic machine, nor a non-for-profit platform, nor resource; co-operating corporations dominate, control, develop and own it. 3. The superstructure that the internet connects merely subsidizes neo-liberalism. A tongue for parrhesia, a hand to write, a dick to fuck. If sentimentality is used to describe a decadent or ill-proportioned emotional reaction to a specific situation, this is it. The internet is certainly more dangerous than sects were in the 70’s. Its lousy messianism is the promise to share a whole lot of free binary codes instead of sharing land, houses, power, means of production, orgasms, freedom. 4. That internet-use leads to alienation, consumption and conspiratorial abuse is a part of the fine print that can be willingly ignored or appropriated. I am not concerned here with the gross boredom that we feel after spending 3 hours online not knowing why, nor with the aspects of surveillance immanent in internet use. I want to critique that we labor without wage or with merely a symbolic wage. When we use the internet, we do not only produce a sentimental surplus, we work for free. We labor. To labor for free is a sentimental form of labor, the state of emergency, a reaction we are made to believe has a value per se, namely that it exists in spite of the value we give it and in spite of the use-value and exchange-value that is produced and in spite of us. Women know a good deal about this.
Internet use is complicit to cyber-capitalism
5. Using the internet we consistently labor for the war industry, pharma industry, currency industry, relationship industry, sex industry, communication industry, intellectual industry and for journalism. We labor for differentiation within a system that we do not differentiate. Every time we start a search, look for an example, send an email, post a blog, post a video, compare internet news and weather forecasts on the internet we produce value, unskilled, third world labor, traditionally referred to as abstract labor, we are the continuous reproduction of unskilled laborers. Further we produce use-value, traditionally considered the result of concrete labor, i.e. when we shop, respond to ads —or when we penny-labor (i.e.”mechanical turks”). “Crowdsourcing” makes exploitation look like a lottery win online, an open call for exploitation. And we produce use-value providing “informational and cultural content”.3 Your computer is not a typewriter, one would be naïve to think so, for you it is not a tool. 6. Our resistance to voluntarily work for and confirm cybernetic capitalism will be the perfect coup d’internet. This resistance is not jeopardized by its realize-ability or by its predictability. The use of the internet for sales, shopping, communication, dissertations must immediately stop. We take back our communication and control knowledge ourselves. We resist to voluntarily and automatically submit to the instrument of regulation. If you cannot relinquish the use of the internet, you are not with us. You are excluded. You are not the Left. You will have no part of the “mystique of the total revolution”. 7. To believe using the internet will give you access to democracy or information, knowledge or friends or will offer you succor for your ADD teenage son, is equivalent to believing you will own a new Audi A8 because you are working at the Audiassembly line. 8. The cybernetic control mechanisms do not re-surface metaphorically within art production (i.e. the fascist über-monitored boot camps used for ”Open Space Conferences” or “Open Space Technology”), they are the means of production, only this time the dictatorship of the proletariat will not strive to acquire and control them. The proletariat will be those who resist to use the internet, it will be their dictatorship.
“For, as we shall see, the commitment involved in parrhesia is linked to a certain social situation, to a difference of status between the speaker and his audience, to the fact that the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk, and so on. […] It is because the parrhesiastes must take a risk in speaking the truth that the king or tyrant generally cannot use parrhesia; for he risks nothing.” Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres, 1983
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2 Dérive: literally “drift” or “drifting.” “One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.” Guy Debord, “Théorie de la dérive,” published in Les Lèvres nues, nr. 9, December 1956, and Internationale Situationniste, nr. 2, December 1958, p.19.
“CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are widespread security measures on the World Wide Web that prevent automated programs from abusing online services. They do so by asking humans to perform a task that computers cannot yet perform, such as deciphering distorted characters. Our research explored whether such human effort can be channeled into a useful purpose: helping to digitize old printed material by asking users to decipher scanned words from books that computerized optical character recognition failed to recognize. We showed that this method can transcribe text with a word accuracy exceeding 99%, matching the guarantee of professional human transcribers. Our apparatus is deployed in more than 40,000 Web sites and has transcribed over 440 million words.” Luis von Ahn, Benjamin Maurer, Colin McMillen, David Abraham and Manuel Blum, “recaptcha: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web Security Measures”, Science,
v. 321, nr. 5895, September 2008, pp. 1465-1468. 3
Jota Izquierdo
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The Work of Art in the Age of Pirate Reproduction, 2010
Fernanda Laguna and Roberto Jacoby
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We act in relation to two spaces: The Ernesto de la Cárcova Museum of Copies and Replicas, a dependency of the National University Institute of Art (the only official university art institution in Buenos Aires), located on the city’s South Promenade; and a cultural center in Villa Fiorito, one of the most famous, populous suburbs in Greater Buenos Aires, since [soccer star Diego] Maradona was born there. We successfully proposed our project to Professor Carlos Molina, the director for the Museum of Copies, which consisted of: a) Creating a Museum of Copies and Replicas in Villa Fiorito, at a venue located in a high traffic area at the entrance to the Villa. b) The Fiorito Museum will show copies produced by the Ernesto de la Cárcova Museum of Copies. c) At the entrance to the Fiorito Museum, a replica of the left foot from Michelangelo’s David was mounted on a pedestal constructed by a group of local residents. d)������������������������������������� At the same time, the Museum of Copies accepted into its holdings a donation from us. This is a replica of Marcel Duchamp’s piece Feuille de vigne femelle (1954), which, as is well-known, is a mold of a vagina. That is, we donated the replica of the Duchamp piece to the Museum of Copies
Donations, 2007
so that it would be displayed as part of the collection. This would be the first piece of modern art to become a part of the Museum of Copies, which, considering the destruction of Argentine art from the 1960s and other periods, could also become the recipient of new replicas. e) On November 29, 2009 an action was carried out in the Ernesto de la Cárcova Museum of Copies, during which the donations were given over to the residents of Fiorito and to the authorities of the Ernesto de la Cárcova Museum of Copies. f) The director of the Cárcova Museum of Copies signed an agreement for these donations with F. Laguna and R. Jacoby. What we proposed with this project “Donations” was to play with the notion of “museum” and its possible extension ad infinitum. According to Didi-Huberman, in reference to the technical reproducibility of the work of art, Feuille de vigne femelle is a still more relevant reference than the celebrated text of Walter Benjamin and not simply with the respect to twentieth century art, but also to the problem of the work of art in general. The author radically asks whether it is still possible to exhibit and contemplate Feuille de vigne femelle, and responds in the negative:
“Whether implicit or explicit, the reduction of Duchamp’s work to an idea—a term that legislates, a conceptual “intention”— excuses us from the obligation to look at it.” Further still, he maintains that “there is nothing to see, in terms of the work of art, because there is nothing more than a trace—the non-work par excellence.” Thus, affirms Didi-Huberman, Feuille de vigne femelle—an object-trace of the female reproductive apparatus, a moldobject of the human mold, an object produced from a mold—is excluded not only from the gaze, but also, according to contemporary legislation, from the benefit of copyright1. We may conclude therefore that it becomes an object of public property, excluded from commodity fetishism. The question that remains is whether these qualities deprive it of its fetish character, or whether they constitute it as such, in the form of a “black hole.” 1
Georges Didi-Huberman, “El punto de vista anacrónico”, trans. C. Salvatierra, Revista de Occidente, Madrid, Fundación José Ortega y Gasset, núm. 213, febrero de 1999, pp. 25-40. [The quotations have been translated from the Spanish version. T.N.]
Alfredo Jaar
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Skoghall Konsthall, 2000 In the year 2000, Alfredo Jaar constructed a gallery made of paper for the small Swedish community of Skoghall, using the material that serves as the basis of the regional economy. For an entire day, Skoghall had an exhibition space that showed work by emerging artists from Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg, the metropolitan centers of Swedish art. But beyond referring to the economic base of the show’s host city, exactly 24 hours after its inauguration the Skoghall Konsthall was burned down by the artist himself in an act of vandalism that was nevertheless conducted according to all regulations and the city’s strict security protocols. A multiple redundancy specifies the action of creation and destruction of public cultural space that Alfredo Jaar produced in Sweden. By tying the source of wealth of a capital of the global paper industry to participation in the symbolic economy of the global proliferation of specialization in art, Jaar introduced the insatiable race for prestige that defines cultural globalization to a margin of the extreme North. By destroying the promise of this space of visibility at the end of a single day, returning the museum’s edifice to the ephemeral object of a permanent artistic economy, Jaar assured that the demand for insertion in the global artistic circuit would operate by exception under the rules of emission of true symbolic capital: the destruction of values and unproductive consumption, which hopes for expenditure without accumulation, the transformation of market goods into the socialization of an aristocratic gesture. Through this exercise in critical anti-architecture, Jaar de-materialized, at least in a specific locale, the originary structure of artistic accumulation that presides over the economy of investment in museum infrastructure at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a context plagued by episodes of erection of spaces for art exhibitions, in an era when emblematic buildings are typified as much by the Bilbao Guggenheim, London’s Tate Modern, or peripheral cultural centers in suburbs like Mósteles in Spain or Ecatepec in Mexico, the Skoghall Konsthall inscribes its host city with the ashes of the gallery. Rather than instrumentalizing contemporary art as a method of post-industrial urban planning and integrating it to the economy of spectacular services and real estate speculation, the construction and dematerialization of the Skoghall Konsthall symbolizes an insolent search for an effective rhetoric of state and corporate patronage, which has serialized the “gift” of so-called “philanthropy” as an industry parallel to industrial publicity, a weapon for the promotion of tourism and a strategy of real estate speculation. The volatile paper architecture of Skoghall Konsthall configures a deferral of equivalence similar to the classic model of production of prestige that Marcel Mauss and, following his example, Georges Bataille identified in the North American Indian potlatch: the destruction of accumulated wealth that would establish a challenge that could only be matched through an ever-increasing gesture of destructive competition. Here there is an attempt to achieve art’s redemption as the establishment of a social symbolic debt. Alfredo Jaar’s Skoghall Konsthall arises as a political critique of art’s symbolic capital, the invention of a space for a culture that is only practiced out of conviction in an abundance without investment, and as an exercise of true luxury within which the “gift” of sacrifice and the “return” of antagonism take place. The Red Specter
Magdalena Jitrik
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From the series First of May, 2004-2010
Teresa Margolles
Courtesy of Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
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To Whom Does Not Belive it Sons of a Bitch, 2010
Fabric used to collect the residues from the streets of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where violent events took place. This fabric was embroidered in gold with a phrase taken from a message left by organized crime next to one of its victims. Both processes of the piece's construction were carried out by residents of this border city.
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M&X
Black Monday (Remittance) M&X On September 9, 2008, we—M & X—traveled to Washington DC in order to carry out an exhibition. When the event was over (on September 15, 2008), we headed for New York City, seeking fun and some catching up with friends. In this stage, the idea arose of making a joint project, based on the character Jesús Malverde (a Mexican avenging from early 20th-century, best known nowa days as patron saint of drug traffickers). That night we went looking for a bar called Xicala, owned by a Mexican friend; we had no luck finding it. We found it the next day, on our way back home, and decided to go in and have a few drinks. Our friend was there, drinking mezcales with the owner of a taquería, they invited us to join them at their table, and a conversation started that lasted till the early hours of the morning. They made a lot of questions about us: what where we doing in the Unites States? What did we do for a living? Were we painters? We answered we were mural painters, and an agreement arose to paint a mural in his taquería. The mural is based on Jesús Malverde, accompanied by a desert landscape and decorative motives of the U.S. flag. It was painted on the façade of “El Paso Taquería”, in the Spanish Harlem neighborhood. The night we got the money we had a few drinks to celebrate. In between them, we conceived the piece we now present for consideration. Black Monday is a succession of fortunate events, which led to the formulation of an art piece that comes with a symbolic charge in synchrony with historic actual events constituted by chance (serendipity). It consists of a wad of bills, summing up to 2,000.00 USD, which were obtained by the work and work force of Mexicans living in the United States. The piece is a paradox: the intention of Mexican Muralism is based on the criticism of the modern system (Marxism): capital. In this case, the contradiction resides on the fact that the artistic object is not the mural, but the capital. The piece was conceived to be activated at the moment in which the money entered Mexico as a remittance. Coincidentally, on the day it did (September 29, 2008), the New York Stock Exchange plummeted, in an event considered to be a new Black Monday—after the first one, on October 24, 1929—for the world economy. References Money plays the role of a symbol representing all the merchandise that you can get for it, it is interchangeable and because of this, it too is merchandise, just as gold was for a period of time. Bills substituted the real value of gold and what it symbolized. Until the 20th-century you could trade almost everything for gold but then the bill appeared as the legal representation of the metal. This occurred in a very specific context. The social and economic panorama before World War I showed progress to global industrialization and continuous economic growth but also in a very unequal way. After the war, the massive unemployment and the cessation of the migratory fluxes to America, especially to the USA, created a devastating scenario for the international economy. In the interwar period, the widespread unemployment in central Europe, plus the expansion of credit and the economic dependence on the USA (specially for Germany), provoked a series of social movements and cracks that triggered off (from the 1929 depression onwards) Nazi Germany, the modern systems of social security, the development of the mass media as an entertainment strategy (the politics of consumption), the USSR’s rejection of capitalism, and many other political insurrections. The interwar period empowered the dollar in the international economy. At the end of 1933 the gold standard was abolished for bills, which became the legal tender. Today that means that the real value of paper money depends on how much of it is physically in circulation. It is an object with no real value. This being so, the power to regulate the amount of cash circulating is also the power to regulate its value.
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The Great Depression exiled economic liberalism and created a division into hegemonic politics and intellectual ideas: Marxist communism, Social Democrat politics, ultra conservative Fascism. This dilemma culminated in the intellectual and political system that prevailed during the 20th-century, which was divided between left, center and conservative, and this crisis ended with the creation of neo-liberalism as the hegemonic system of the Western economy. The development of neo-liberalism coupled with the end of the communist era had created new practices on how to conceive the economic, technological, social and cultural interchange models on a global level. Such is the development of this system that it is currently common to see big corporations involved even in matters such as leisure activities. This intervention is visible in museums, sports and cultural events, movies, public venues, art fairs, the creation of foundations, etc. The corporations are also looking forward to creating media phenomena, leaving behind the development of the basic social needs in order to earn huge profits. Using the postmodern postulate about the relative interpretation of history, today the concept of art (that is supposed to be the model for creation and question the values of collective knowledge and of the development of humanity) has been diversified onto a global scale, placing it within a complex range of specialized institutions of development, production, diffusion and the commercialization of it. However, the whole system works under neo-liberalist political interests, so generating a flow of specialized and over-valued merchandise. The fact of proposing a wad of bills as an artistic object brings us to speculate on its aesthetic, conceptual and financial valuations. Like in Duchamp’s ready-mades, the object suffers a semiotic transformation that poses the question: How can a wad of bills be considered art? On turning the bills into art, they are out of circulation, and with it they cannot become capital. However, their transformation has only been symbolic, and for that reason they can also not be the symbol of a paper exchangeable for merchandise—they are in fact still money, albeit out of circulation. That transference generates a lot of different interest in the wad. The amount of money contained in the wad can be valued with artistic speculative parameters. But even if this set of values triggers a chain of financial exchanges, the total amount of money could became a representative amount of money capable of producing a small crisis on an economic and symbolic level. The exchange rate from September 29th 2008 was 10.78 pesos to the dollar. The art piece will then have to be acquired at 10.78 times more than the real amount contained in the wad (2,000 USD). The physical money will be exhibited as part of the piece and it can only be sold under the same principles, in this way creating an exponential chain of financial exchanges. This means that if the piece is sold for 21,560.00 USD, this amount of money (bills) will be exhibited as the art piece and it will be sold for 232,416.80 USD and so on. The serial numbers of the 100 bills contained in the wad have to be legally registered and this rule also applies to any sale of the piece. The acquisition of the piece implies its intact preservation; it cannot be used for any other purpose. Every transaction will be carried out under the above legal terms.
Black Monday (Remesa), 2008
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Raqs Media Collective
Capitalism expresses possibilities in the language of investment. At the same time it administers our attempts to deal with the idea of risk through the rhetoric of insurance. Successful investments generate the climate that makes it possible to generate extraordinary amounts of wealth in record time. This requires a speeding up and intensification of production, an uprooting of obstacles and the rapid and radical transformation of societies and environments, usually accompanied by tremendous violence and disruption. The higher the investments, the greater the damage to
extant patterns of life. Buy a stock option, get a disaster free. This is where insurance comes in. You can be insured against any damage to your life and environment caused by the forces unleashed by investments. Insurance and investment come calling hand in hand. Insurance and investment share a common vocabulary of premiums and returns, though geared towards diametrically opposite ends. When you invest in something, you are hoping that your bet on the likelihood of the success of a venture will be borne out by the future. You may in fact
be insuring yourself against the likelihood of bad investments, as much as attempting to garner some security for yourself and your dependents in the event of being discarded from a productive life. Insurance companies are able to promise the returns that they do, because they invest the money that people make available to them. Investment options lay claim to the dream of making your future work for you. Insurers invest. Investors insure. Raqs Media Collective
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investment % insurance, 2007
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Raqs Media Collective
Fragments from a Communist Latento* Raqs Media Collective
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*A latento, meaning an elaboration of that which is latent or hidden, is the antonym of a manifesto, an assertion of that which is clearly evident.
The spectre of abundance haunts the empire of scarcity. Who can ration breath, laughter, thought, desire or madness?
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The diversity of the commons challenges the singularity of property. There is only one way to possess something, but there can be countless ways to share it.
We will wait for the time when the socially necessary labour time to make something can be debated socially. Until then, restlessness will remain the best antidote to exhaustion.
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Fragments from a Communist Latento, 2009-2010
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It is not desirable that the future be captive to the present, just as it is unthinkable that the present be held hostage by the future. Neither the arrow, nor the boomerang of time!
A million ways to make things rough is better than one way to make things smooth. From each according to their generosity, to each according to their pleasure.
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The collective transformation of the world requires the continuous networking of an infinite array of otherwise impossible choices.
Take care as you make the transition from bondage to freedom. Even social relations worth fighting for are fragile.
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Vicente Razo
Rules to make a Public Address
•All materials are acquired for free.
•All materials are requested online.
•All materials must be mailed to the artist’s residence.
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From the series Public Adress, 2009
Gustavo Romano
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The project Time Notes consists of a series of actions in public spaces carried out between 2004 and 2010, using a new system of money based in temporal units (denominations of one year, 60 minutes, etc.). Proposing a reflection on the system of social exchange and our preconceptions about the value of time and money, different actions were carried out in cities like Berlin, Singapore, Rostock, Vigo, Buenos Aires, Silicon Valley, Munich and Madrid. In each case the actions developed were the product of observation of different local problematics related to the system of exchange, the experience of time (as one’s own or as belonging to another), over-employment and unemployment, the growing virtualization of the economy, financial bubbles , or the uncertainty of whether or not we are the owners of our own lifetimes.
Time Notes, 2004
I Buy-Sell Time Monte de Piedad Street, Mexico City June 2009 Next to the Metropolitan Cathedral, mimicking those who offer their services as plumbers, construction workers, or plasterers, I offered the service of buying and selling time around Monte de Piedad in Mexico City.
Time Release Silver Pearl, Rostock June 2007 This action took place in Rostock during the G8 summit, an annual meeting that is carried out in enclosed places inaccessible to land travel. A copy of each bill handed in at the Lost Time Refund Office was tied to a balloon, which was later released to the sky.
Continuous Present Santo Domingo Plaza, Mexico City June 2009 Counting time in bills with a denomination of one second, in Santo Domingo Plaza in downtown Mexico City.
Losing Time Orchard Road, Singapore August 2006 This action consisted of walking down a pedestrian street in Singapore’s commercial district, dropping time notes.
Time Loan Office Florida Street, Buenos Aires March 2009 Time Notes presented its credit line for the realization of desires that had been deDescription of actions carried out ferred. At the office, passersby were invited to share those things that they had I Buy-Sell Time wanted to do but which they had been unPuerta del Sol, Madrid able to achieve as a result of having misFebruary 2010 spent their time, and they were given a Wearing a reflective vest that mimics the loan in the form of time notes. advertisement men who offer to buy or sell gold, I offered to buy or sell time around Lost Time Refund Office Puerta del Sol. Principe Street, Vigo October 2007 Mobile Office The office offered itself as a place for the Madrid receipt and classification of time given February 2010 over involuntarily, under duress, or for Mounted on a tricycle and with a wireless arbitrary reasons (working at an unwantinternet connection, the office left each day ed job, lost in a bad relationship, serving from its base at Casa de América, travers- in the army, etcetera). ing the streets of Madrid and offering the service of “Refunding Lost Time.” Time Waves Praia de Patos, Nigran, Vigo e-Time October 2007 Ludwigstrasse, Munich This video documents the action of reOctober 2009 peatedly throwing a one year bill into the Launch of Time Credit Card. If you had an sea, answered by the action of the sea, extra hour, day, year in your life, what which carried it anew to the shore. would you do with it? Lost Time Refund Office Buy & Sell Time (from Silicon Valley) Kröpeliner Strasse, Rostock Hamilton Ave, San Jose June 2007 September 2009 In a mobile office, a representative of Time Online buying & selling of time offered Notes took down the description of how dethrough eBay, from the lobby of the main ponents had lost their time, refunding them building of this auction site in Silicon with a note equivalent to the correspondValley. ing amount of time, on whose reverse side was printed the cause of time lost.
Exchange Office Orchard Road, Singapore August 2006 This action took place setting up a stand in front of the city’s largest shopping mall, where passersby were asked what they thought about the new monetary system. They were invited to exchange a bill for what they considered to be an equivalent value (in time). Launching Event Karl Marx St., Berlin August 2004 The campaign was carried out in the plaza of the mayor’s office in Neukölln, Berlin, where passersby were invited to give their opinions about this system of money, how they imagined these bills would be useful, and how to save or to spend them. Official website of Time Notes bank: http://www.timenoteshouse.org/ Online documentary about the actions: http://www.gustavoromano.com.ar/ timenotes
Guillermo Santamarina
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8 pages from artist's book. Pen on paper, intervention in the Hans Richert book Schopenhauer, Seine Persönlichkeit, seine Lehre, seine Bedeutung, 1905. Verlag von B.G. Teubner in Leipzig-Berlin.
73 Lisarb and Atrabal. Work in progress, 2010
Santiago Sierra
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vaste, katar pesko organizisav amen, katar na te bitchavav intreges an khonik, katar te thav an praktika jèkhi keripen direktni ja jèkhi demokràtsia direktni etimològike arakerindòj: jekh raipen katar narodo orthoardo vash-o narodo so si i pesko organizatsi katar le butare, bi te bitchavav intreges an khonik. Okoja si i pilipen ekonomikani ke isi adatsire, jèkhi pilipen ekonomikani daranes nakrisàki so rintchibarel pe an miliona katar mul‚ per maripe, bokhati thàj nasalipe, jekhia vàshe, sòske akaia pilipen katar i ke sam arakerindòj na perel katar jekh trùpo bibutvarno, akaia pilipen ke sam arakerindòj bichindel pe an jekh pashe politikàko, jekh pashe ekonomikano, jekh pashe sotsialno, kulturikano, mandèsko thàj xelado thàj ètiko.
TRANSLATION OF A CONVERSATION 3 (Caló) Courthouse and Jail buildings, Vigo, Spain. May 1st, 2009. José Luis Velasco’s found conversation with the title “THERE IS ALWAYS CRISIS FOR LABORERS”
Okova pashe politikàko and-o ke bichindel pe si jekh Them sat jekhia fòrme katar shtisipen, okova pashe ekonomikano and-o ke bichindel pe akaia pilipen si jekh sistèmo ekonomikano bushlo Kapitalipen an lèske trin rigate, Kapitalipen katar bikinlin, Kapitalipen katar Them ja Kapitalipen katar sotsial democratsia kaj hamisipen o Them thàj o bikinlin.
Okova pashe skrankono ja mandèsko and-o ke del pe si le skrànke an lèske kavere fòrme, okova pashe kulturikano and-o ke del pe, si jekh pashe orthoardo ende le buta katar mothipen sares dilarno, thàj okova pashe ètiko and-o ke del pe si jèkhi moral katar i srànko so kamen te kerav te patchav ke si purnardi vekheder an jekhe keripe opral naturàle sos butshinen ke si les DUITI ULAVERIPEN ke te avav lakre thàj brakengere, ke butshinel ke si les ke te Na arakeras katar okoja barabaripen politika so si jèkhi barabaripen fòrnalno, nùma arakeras katar i barabaripen realo, thàj avav jekh rài, jekh Devel perdal katar sa thàj kongòdi so te sikel temelutnes i barabaripen reàlo si te terelav hakaj ka i traipen, te okola sombeshne thàj te avel o patchalo bitchavaro katar okova shtisav te baravav amari traipen, na te sinav savaxt ka kutchipe, Devel and-i phuv, thàj ke vekheder kòva na te avel diskùtsio, te na te sinav savaxt samardo katar is shaj te kerav buti ja na shaj avel so von phenen lav katar Devel. keràva buti , is avàva buti ja na avàva buti, is avàva kher ja na avàva kher, nùma ke shaj te baravav amen sar dyene, thàj okoja Broxares le vàshe katar trinchi nabarsani thàj trinchi tragèdia manushikani si okova Them, okoja fòrme katar shtisipen -hisi i tchatchi barabaripen katar te sinav manushikano, i barastorikes o Them si kadial- si okova Kapitalipen sar mòdo katar baripen ekonomikani thàj sotsialno, thàj i barabaripen katar i mestipen katar te gindarav sa per barabaro, na katar te bitcha- keripen somvaxtuno ke maj anglal sas les avere anava, feudalimos, trekegimos, robipen, si okoja fòrme mandaipèski ke si i vav amari shajnipen katar detsìtsia an okola burokràtsie polisrànko thàj i muxaripen katar le buta katar mothipen, okola si tikàke, sindikarèske, xelade ja skrankena, nùma te sinav goge katar amari traipen thàj te lav amari traipen an amare vaste, te le vàshe katar i pilipen somvaxtuno: Devel, Them, Lovelin, ke vi sinav ame le direcktòre katar amaro pèsko krìsuro, te dyamavav diskavdas thàj makardas Bakunin: ni Devel ni Them ni Gadyano, ke te avèlas i glasipen so o Anarkismo chantel ka okoja pilipen amare shtikaripe katar pesko organizatsi, te thav an praktika i ekonomikani sat okola vàshe, jekhe kerelipe, le kerelipe si i gadyikani tchel gadyonèski pesko organizisindòj, te lav amen an seròzo an lètsti amari traipen, sòske odola sos si orthoindòy ulaveripen katar i gadyikani tchel an tipa, jekhe gindaren thàj o lùma adatsire si anindòj katar jèkhi fòrme gindarardi ka jekh avere kanden, jekhe keren buti thàj avere bukurisen katar okova mudarlin, jekh mudarlin ekonomikano, jekh mudarlin ekològiko, buti, jekhe si len o dyanipen thàj k-o te avav kulturikano thàj avere si and-i bidyanelimos, jekhe trajin and-i plaguripen thàj mandèsko thàj an sa le dikkipe. avere and-i barbalipen thàj savaxt sam le butare sos sam and-i ulaveripen khino sar tipo sotsialnes radyini, plagurda, dilini, Adatsire ka le gadyikani tchela anglunarda katar Europa thàj bidyanelkero thàj ke dukhavel le tchorimàta, EE.UU. garavdi pe lènge i tchatchipen, si pe lènge kerindòj jekhe ‘mitos’ thàj jekhia ilaripe purnarda temelutnes an elemènte dilarne sar shaj te sinav o tùtbol, sar shaj te sinen le dikhipe Sòske sam i mas katar bruchardo thàj i mas katar butilin katar okola tiknida favorde ke trajin ka okasilli amari, thàj i glasipen katar i televizia, sar shaj te sinen le prijasipe mashkar phirne diskavdi ende o mùko katar dikhipen katar chantipen anarkisno thàj na phirne, si te phenav ramblipe ke temelutnes madyuten si jèkhi glasipen katar jekh nevo zakòno ètiko thàj sotsialno, vash te dilarav, te zalisav thàj ke tchatches na te samas katar amare problemora kraliseske, amare problemora ekonomikane, jekh nevo zakòno ètiko sòske si i purnipen katar i teginipen katar so sa le manùshe manushikane sam barabare, si jèkhi ètisotsialne, politikàke, sindikarèske, kulturikane thàj moral, thàj ka so utch na parnel pe an okoja srànko thàj an okova Devel, si pa sa vash ke na te samas katar te lav amari traipen an amare RINTCHIBARIPEN KATAR JÈKHI SVÀTO. Phurikano kher katar le kriseline thàj katar i shtaripen katar vigo, España. Yekhto katar maj katar 2009. Svàto katar José‚ luis velasco tel o naman katar “VASH LE BUTARE SAVAXT ISI KRISIS”.
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jèkhi ètika so parnel pe and-i Ajsarimos, and-i sotsialmos, and-i adyutisipen enredùj, and-i zolarimos sar kerelaro katar evoluvipen katar le narode, si jèkhi ètika purnardi and-i Ajsarimos so pa sa butshinel i demnipen katar te sinav manushikano, si jèkhi ètika so pa sa si o poshno mashkardyenutno, o timugipen katar sotsialmos, o timugipen katar te trajav an gadyikani tchel, an jèkhi tchatchi gadyikani tchel, an barabaripen katar hakaja thàj musipe, si jèkhi ètika purnardi and-o shirdipen katar i mestipen thàj katar i godornipen kaj o te sinav manushikano naj les ke te sinav aneldo ni orthoardo intreges per khonik sòske si amen shajnipen vash te godisarav, te gindarav thàj te kriyav per ame ikane, thàj si jèkhi ètika purnardi an jèkhi kultùra katar ke sa si amen ke te terelav stilipen ka i kultùra sòske si o dyanipen, o janipen, i labaripen katar i dyantripen sar porùnko katar diskipen vash te glasav na korkores le problemora dyantre thàj nùma vash te glasav le problemora ekonomikane thàj sotsialne, Sòske avillindòj papse k-o arakhadjipen katar i pilipen ekonomikani thàj katar le vàshe, is te labarav amen ÿÿ o porùnko dyantripnuno katar diskipen ekonomikano, kàna von kamen te kerav te patchav ke i krisis ekonomikani somvaxtuno, -ke nivar prindyarèna ke si nùma ke si bi sigaripe vòrte thàj vaxtes, divàno an lètsti- arakhadjel katar jèkhi krisis katar le shimeripe subprime an EE.UU. ke ka lèsko var jagel jèkhi krisis lovikani, ke le timine katar petròleo ushten sòske isi Thema hanikine sos akàna xalen màj, sòske le timine katar petròleo ushtile sòske akàna isi Thema sos xalen màj gadja isi sos te bitchav bio jagèske ka i keripen katar zor sat so savo butshinel ke nikabas germe katar i parvaripen thàj le anas ka te kerav o petròleo sat so savo ushten le timine katar le dyemetche parvarne sos ka lèsko var jagen akala bokharipe thàj ke samen lènge le bokharipe thàj kava si but vasno, na vash-e bokharipe an va, nùma sòske phenarde ke then an tsòlo katar hakajipen thàj an nasulimos i childarimos demokratisarèski thàj sotsialno katar okola Thema, si te phenav, so butshinel kòva, then an tsòlo katar hakajipen lèske haznipe ekonomikane politikàke thàj sotsialne, si per so samela lènge, thàj ke dyal mamui le demokratsie anglunarda, ke sat so savo gadja ke te plastarèlen nakhindòj bokh, ke na te ushten le timine. Ami is thodas o porùnko dyantripnuno ka komòni katar akala divàne von phenen amènge thàj ka sako anglidipen te das amen jèkhi putchipen thàj ka sako putchipen averi anglidipen te dikhàsas so telaluno, kamen amènge te kerav te patchav ke i krisis ekonomikani katar EE.UU. si dyemetcho katar i krisis katar le shimeripe gunoji. ¿So butshinel kòva?, gadja ke aveldel jekhia institutsie lovikana, ke sar utch o pachandi sas màj ke tchukniardo gindarden te buxjarav o paruvimos ka kon dènas le pachande thàj kerdisarde ka te dav pachande ka dyene sat jèkhi pilipen ekonomikani bipatchani, si te phenav, shimeripe gunoji sòske kon chimerèlas le shimeripe, na dyanas is putcharen pen gunoji ka le dyene ja sòske le shimeripe sas len jekh nivo katar shimeripen tikno, thàj dudano, okola dyene sos lije okola shimeripe katar yeskotres mukjen katar te pokinav le shimeripe sat so savo le bànka sas len ke te kerav pe tovàro katar okola shimeripe, nashti te kinelar o love so sas len dino thàj die andre an jèkhi krisis katar love somvaxtuno so buxlardas pe per sa o lùma.
Translation of a Conversation 3 (caló), 2010
Mishto, gadja dyen ka te kerav jèkhi putchipen, ¿per so okola dyene ka le ke dias pe jèkhi shimeripen an lèski chive mukjen katar te pokinav i shimeripen? is kerdisarde pokinindòj la, ¿per so ka le trin, shtar, pantch tchone jekh berg mukjen katar te pokinav i shimeripen? Avèla varekoni halaripen, but bipharimos, mukjen katar te pokinav i shimeripen sòske le nive potchibèske xuline, mukjen katar te pokinav i shimeripen sòske o nivo katar bikeramos butjurdas. Ami latcho, avèla ke te kerav pe i telaluno putchipen, ¿per so xuline le potchibe thàj per so butjurde le nive katar bikeramos? Pòske okova si jekh godsveripen halno dyantripnuno thàj godsverisko; ka sako putchipen jèkhi anglidipen thàj ka sako anglidipen jèkhi putchipen ¿per so kerdisarda ka te avav màj bibutipen an EE.UU., per so le nive potchibèske xuline an EE.UU?, sòske sas pe diñindòj jèkhi pilipen katar ke bare tchaveripe ekonomikane katar EE.UU. utch na dyalènas tchines k-o mashkeripen katar EE.UU., utch na dyalènas k-o andripen katar EE.UU. ka te kerav keripe gadyikane, sotsialne, adyutisipe ekonomikana thàj adyutisipe katar sa glindo ja k-o baravipen katar i laburimos gadyikano, sas man jèkhi barèder koboripen katar tchaveripe ke inklènas katar EE.UU. ka te oklagitav jèkhi maripen so sas i maripen katar petròleo katar Irak, ka jekhe nive kekàve ke kerdisarda ka te jagav le butjuripe katar bikeramos thàj le tikne potchibe an EE.UU. sòske o tsiklùso ekonomikano katar i orrixipen katar sa okova lovo utch na dyalèlas ka andre katar EE.UU. nùma ke dyalèlas ka te marav Irakine vash te tchorav les o petròleo, thàj i fòrme and-i ke irinèlas pe leske okova petròleo ka EE.UU. nas an fòrme katar lovo, simas an fòrme katar bare astalipe xelade, bare astalipe katar i laburimos shastrin‚ski thàj bare kinemaskere vash i laburimos petrolera so na so orrixèlas papse an EE.UU. nùma an te palyerav keserindòj le nive katar sarbaripen katar i maripen katar kushval. Doleskes i putchipen thàj i anglidipen anel ka ke i krisis katar le shimeripe gunoji si jèkhi yekhti anglidipen ka jèkhi tapardo katar putchimàta sos anen papse ka i maripen katar kushval, thàj le maripe gavutnèske isi ke te pokinav len, le maripe imperine sar sara le maripe isi ke te pokinav len, thàj okoja si i halaripen katar ke EE.UU. mashkar an jèkhi sikipen darano, sòske okola astalipe tran baròder an anglaginipe katar ferisipen thàj and-i laburimos shastrin‚ski inklen katar sogòdo than thàj le maripe sar phenel pe le pokinel savaxt o narodo, le pokinel an traipe manushikana thàj an tchaveripe dogèske, okoja si i godsveripen katar i krisis ekonomikani katar EE.UU. ke buxlevel ka sa o lùma sòske akàna o timin katar petròleo, jèkhvar ke ushtilas o timin katar petròleo logel and-e dyemetche parvarne sòske sa le butaripe kereske labaren petròleo, logel an ke bitchen pen màj dyemetche katar i parvaripen vash te kerav petròleo sòske o timin katar petròleo buterdas pe per desh ta logel an ke sari i orrixipen reàlo, i orrixipen gadyikano, thàj i orrixipen katar i ke trajin le narode mashkar an jèkhi adìnki baknasipen sòske si pe davindòj sari vash jèkhi maripen vash kinemaskeri katar i laburimos shastrin‚ski thàj vash kinemaskeri katar le buteselenke katar petròleo so ka lèsko var si i famìlia bush so trajel katar petròleo thàj le famìlie katar le thagarimata katar Dishorig Pashutno.
Judi Werthein
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In her short film, This Functional Family (2007), Judi Werthein stages an impossible and contradictory reconstruction of the utopian impulses of modernism. Commissioned in part by the Netherland Architecture Institute and performed at the site of The Sonneveld House—considered an emblematic historic example of Nieuwe Bouwen, that is the Dutch branch of functionalism—Werthein’s film displaces both, the normative representation of modernist architecture and its mode of perception, by reenacting an un-eventful day in the living of the original family at the comfortable house designed to best accommodate the needs of his users and the comforts of modern living. The intervention of Werthein inhabits the house as a paradox: as the mise-en-scene of the irresoluble tension marked by the discourse of progress and freedom within modernist movements and the key role that the practice of slavery had in the ascendancy of Western nations within the early modern global economy.
This Functional Family, 2007
An uncanny dislocation emerges when the family of immigrants in the Netherlands born in Surinam, Curacao and South Africa impersonate the original Sonneveld family. With dignified presence and measured gestures their “use” of the functional and luxurious house affects a fracture in the order of representation which in turn plays unto the gaze as a ghostly scene. It is know that one of the most excellent of modern cultural historians, Simon Schama, describes the Golden Age of Dutch culture as a dialectical movement between being rich and being good: that is, as the Embarrassment of Riches. It is also evident that within this narrative the central role of slave trade, colonial rule and the presence of black slaves in the domestic life of the bourgeois households of the Dutch Republic are both, invisible and disavowed.1 This is a generalized paradox, where national histories are conceived as self-contained allowing for the construction of Western histories as coherent narratives of human
freedom. The history of modernism and modernist architecture is wrap with the same logic. This Functional Family reverses roles and works by undoing the suture—opening the wound to our gaze as a ghostly structure that unravels the rationality of functionalism, modernism and its utopian impulse. The Red Specter 1
Susan Buck-Morss in her book Hegel, Haiti and Universal History provides a detailed and critical discussion of the Dutch Republic and the symptomatic erasure of any account of slave trade, or for that matter, any images of blacks in the revisionist history of Simon Schama famous volume Embarrassment of Riches. See, Buck-Morss, Susan, 2009, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 22-26.
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Federico Zukerfeld
The day the ex-Minister of Economy announced the devaluation of the Argentine peso against the American dollar he gave up, after a ten year vigil, on the model that had been initiated following the application of measures recommended by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as the plan of convertibility: 1 Argentine peso = 1 American dollar. Faced with the imminent imbalance this would produce in the local economy, the government took the decision to with hold access to savings, regulating the withdrawal of currency and converting funds in dollars de facto into national coin. This was called the “freezing of financial assets” and it provoked a state of collective panic in the community. Two possibilities were proposed by international organizers: the dollarization of the Argentine economy, replacing national currency in circulation for the use of the American dollar (as was done in Ecuador) or a devaluation of national curency of over 30%. The government of ex-president Fernando de La Rúa eventually chose the latter measure, giving way to a most profound social and economic crisis, with disastrous consequences for the lives of the populace and implementing a new model. At the time, the crisis of representation and the vacuum of power resulted in the
successive falls of five presidents over the course of four months. The notion of the value of the money-object was then destabilized and soon people were using coupons and even rehabilitating methods such as barter in order to ease the crisis. In itself, the absence of money or the absence of what money represented as value would provide in the following years a territory that would open the possibility of bringing about experiences such as the following project. The idea of Making Money is to make money The Making money project is a combination of different disciplines: counterfeit, performance (installation), and urban intervention. The piece consists of the production and distribution of “money.” Two-faced bills: one side is a 100 dollar bill, while the other is a zero peso bill. The structure of the action was shaped by a series of performances and urban interventions, successive and simultaneous, in public spaces in Buenos Aires, where thousands of bills were distributed by actors who roamed the streets carrying briefcases full of money, which was allowed to fall as a result of “bumping randomly” into passersby. Among other misdeeds, bills rained down from high buildings; others were stashed away in
hidden places to provoke surprise upon their casual discovery. To carry out the experience, a subsidy for artistic creation was requested from the Buenos Aires Cultural Fund; the application was completed out of a sense of irony, as one fills in forms when one participates in a contest or solicits a merit scholarship. If the artist had received a positive response to his need to be Making money, he would have obtained a sum that serves effectively as money. But what would happen if this money were used to produce more money? This would be false as money-object, but true as art-object, being in itself the very same object. The experience began in a clandestine printer’s workshop, seeking a high quality in the finish and the details, followed by an actor’s training in downtown Buenos Aires, observing the movements in the doors of financial entities for hours, and finally the surprise actions in which the money was handed out en masse. The piece is completed with the installation of the video along with some of the elements used in the performance. Oh, great hypnosis! The power that dominates us in contemporary existence plays out over the whole of society. This is a power through which humanity has transferred the physical
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and spiritual potentialities of its essence to a materialist domain based in illusion. As if it by magic, reality has been changed around beginning with the effect of a collective acceptance of the legitimacy of the substitution of all the elements of life through exchange value, represented objectively in money. Here there is a powerful suggestion that operates beyond borders at all points on the planet. This suggestive state resides in the conviction in the transference of the notion of value to the money-object, representing the unique, absolute medium of all fulfillment in objective life. As money has the property of buying everything, of ownership over all objects, it becomes the object par excellence. This property is universal and corresponds to the omnipotence of money, that is, of its possessors. What a human being is and can be is not determined by his or her individuality or personal qualities, but rather by his or her economic possibilities. Money composes the essence represented by power. This mechanism of objectification determines the order of comprehension of reality, in which being can only be attained in having. This reduces reading to a quantitative plane, promoting greed in every bond. The power of money is the power of absolute belief in money.
Making Money, 2004
But what is money, really? Observing it, forgetting for a few seconds the notion of value, we find ourselves before a few small pieces of paper, sequentially numbered and printed with illustrations and colors that distinguish among them. Just ink and paper! So where do we find the attributes that bestow it this power? The mechanism of this “great hypnosis” finds its starting point in the place where money is located with respect to all objective reality of human life: in the middle. Money mediates between needs and their fulfillment, placing itself as the absolute intermediary, and in overcoming the individual order it becomes a human mediator. This hypnotic system is signed by a suggestion that operates in the substitution of the true elements of reality with abstract representations. Money “comes to life,” nourished by the belief deposited in its object form. It is made independently of people and makes people dependent on it. But the entirety of this great trick is based in a property that acquires money as an external object, a “magical” property: the power of transforming representation into reality and reality into representation. We can constantly appreciate this replacement in everyday life and the permanent mise-en-scène of commerce. The origin of the deepest confusion lies in
this alchemy, where representation and reality are confused, along with one of the starting points of the contradictions that we live. The power of money currently represents universal power, force transformed and made owner of destiny, of the possibility of the development and formation of every human being. Let us think for a moment how to determine whether a banknote is false. What is false? Is not every banknote false? What difference is there between one piece of paper and another? Who grants truth to a piece of paper? Here is where the game appears: to reveal the irony of this system. One form of making evident these contradictions is to destabilize belief through the production of money, transporting the truthful properties of money to an indiscriminate creation and distribution.This re-distribution would contribute to the generation of an effect of response to the “great hypnosis,” regarding the confused relationship between reality and representation. In an artistically illicit action, fake money invading fake reality, piercing within these contradictions, motivating the coming to consciousness of this powerful suggestion that dominates us, promoting the poetic forms of resistance before the critical current situation.
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Georges Bataille
Vanished America Les Cahiers de la République des Lettres, des Sciences et des Arts, XI: L’Art Précolombien. L’Amérique avant Christophe Colomb, Paris, [1928], pp. 5-14.
The life of the civilized peoples of America before Columbus seems wondrous to us, not only because of its instantaneous discovery and disappearance, but also because no human derangement, surely, has ever given rise to a more sanguinary excentricity: ceaseless crimes committed in full sunlight for the sole satisfaction of deified nightmares and terrifying phantasms! The cannibal gorging of the priests, the corpse-strewn ceremonies and rivers of blood speak to us less of historical adventure than of the dazzling debaucheries described by the illustrious Marquis de Sade.
This observation applies chiefly to Mexico, of course. Peru may well represent a singular mirage, an incandescence of solar gold, a flash, a perturbing wealth; but the reality does not match up to such an image. The capital of the Incaic empire, Cuzco, was set on a high plateau at the foot of a kind of fortified acropolis. The city’s character was one of massive, ponderous grandeur. Tall, thatched houses made of great squares of stone, without external windows or ornamentation, lent to the streets a somewhat bleak and sordid air. The architecture of the temples that towered over the roofs was no less stark: only the pediments were entirely clad in a sheet of beaten gold. To this gold must be added the vivid hues of the robes worn by rich and elegant notables, and yet nothing was sufficient to dispel the impression of drab uncouthness and, above all, of numbing uniformity. Indeed, Cuzco was the seat of one of the most rule-bound and
orderly states ever instituted by men. In the wake of important military conquests, thanks to the meticulous organization of a vast army, the power of the Inca extended over a sizeable area of South America, including Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and the north of Argentina and Chile. Within these dominions, penetrated by roads, a whole people obeyed orders like troops in a barracks. Work was assigned and marriages were decided by state officials. The land and its harvest belonged to the state. Any rejoicing was to mark the
state’s religious festivals. Everything was pre-ordained in this airless existence. Such a regimentation should not be confused with that of present-day communism: the essential difference was that it rested upon heredity and class hierarchy. In these conditions, it is not surprising that there are so few shining details to report about Incaic civilization. Even the horrors were unremarkable at Cuzco. Occasional victims were strangled with cords in these temples, in that of
Sun, for example, whose solid gold statue, promptly melted down by the conquerors, retains nonetheless an aura of magical prestige. While the arts achieved some distinction, they remain of secondary interest; the textiles, and the vases in the shape of human or animal heads, are very fine. But it is elsewhere than amongst the Inca that we must seek a production truly worthy of interest. At Tihuanaco, in northern Bolivia, the famous Gate of the Sun bears witness to an exceptional architecture and art which hark back to a far more distant era. Some ceramic fragments are stylistically connected to this thousand-year-old gate. Even during the Incaic period, it was the coastal peoples, with their more ancient civilization, that fashioned the most arresting objects.
At the time of the conquest, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and the Caribbean also possessed highly developed civilizations whose artistry astonishes us today. A significant portion of the fantastical statuettes and oneiric faces which make pre-Columbian art so relevant to contemporary concerns are due, in fact, to the peoples of those regions. However, let us say without more ado that nothing in these long-gone Americas can rival, in our opinion, with Mexico. And here we must distinguish between two very different civilizations, that of the Quiché Mayans and that of the Mexicans proper. The Maya-Quiché civilization is generally reputed to be the most glittering and compelling of all those that flourished in vanished America. Its productions are probably the ones that most closely approximate to what the archaeologists are
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wont to put forward as outstanding. This culture developed a few centuries before the Spanish conquest, in the eastern regions of Central America and the south of present Mexico, more precisely in the Yucatan peninsula. By the time of the Spaniards’ arrival, it was in wholesale decline. Mayan art is certainly more human than any other in the Americas. Although no influence was of course involved, we cannot help comparing it to the arts of the Far East at a similar date, for example the Khmer, whose heavy, luxuriant frondiness it shares: both evolved, after all, under leaden skies in overheated and insalubrious lands. Mayan bas-reliefs depict gods in human form, stolid and monstrous, highly stylized and above all repetitive. These designs can be regarded as mainly decorative, being integrated into prestigious architectural ensembles which were the first to justify placing American civilizations on a par with the great classical models. In ChichenItza, Uxmal and Palenque, one can still explore the impressive and often richly wrought remains of temples and palaces. Furthermore, we know a great deal about the religious myths and social organization of these peoples. Their development undoubtedly influenced and largely determined the later civilization of the high plateaus; and yet their art seems somehow stillborn, flatly hideous, for all the elaborate perfection of its craftsmanship. But if air and violence, poetry and humour are what we seek, these can only be found among the Central Mexican peoples which attained a peak of civilization shortly before the conquest, that is, during the fifteenth century. The Mexicans encountered by Cortés were probably little more than recently refined barbarians. Coming down from the north, where they had led the wandering life of Red Indians, they did not even integrate with any genius the elements borrowed from their predecessors. Thus their writing system was similar, but inferior, to that of the Maya. No matter: of the various American Indian groups, the Aztec people, whose mighty confederation seized in the fifteenth century almost all of present-day Mexico, was nevertheless the most alive, the most seductive—even in its demented violence and somnambulistic vagaries. On the whole, historians who have dealt with Mexico have
signally failed to understand it beyond a certain point. When attempting to account, say, for the literally extravagant way of representing the gods, their explanations are disconcertingly weak. “In casting an eye,” writes Prescott, “over a Mexican manuscript, or map, as it is called, one is struck with the grotesque
The Mexicans were fully as religious as the Spaniards, but their religion included a powerful sense of horror and dread, allied to a kind of black humour that was more frightful still. Most of their gods were fierce, or malevolently whimsical. Tezcatlipoca seemed to take an unaccountable delight in peculiar “hoaxes”. His adventures
caricatures it exhibits of the human figure; monstrous, overgrown heads on puny, misshapen bodies which are themselves hard and angular in their outlines, and without the least skill in composition. On closer inspection, however, it is obvious that it is not so much a rude attempt to delineate nature as a conventional symbol, to express the idea in the most clear and forcible manner; in the same way as the pieces of similar value on a chessboard, while they correspond with one another in form, bear little resemblance, usually, to the object they represent.” This interpretation of the ghastly or grotesque deformations found disturbing by Prescott strikes us today as inadequate. If we go back to the time of the Spanish conquest, on the other hand, we will find a genuinely intriguing explanation of this point. The monk Torquemada attributed the ghoulishness of Mexican art to the demons that possessed the Indian mind: “The faces of their gods,” he wrote, “were like the faces of their souls, due to the perpetual sin in which they lived.” Clearly, an analogy suggested itself between the Christian representation of devils and the Mexican representation of gods.
as related by the Spanish chronicler Sahagún offer a curious counterweight to the Golden Legend. The honey of Christians contrasts with the bitter aloes of the Aztecs, the healing of the sick with cruel pranks. Tezcatlipoca appears in the midst of a crowd, frolicking and dancing with his drum: the people become a dancing mob, capering absurdly towards chasms where their broken bodies are turned into rocks. Another evil trick played by the necromancer god is reported as follows by Sahagún: “A shower of stones rained down and after them fell a large rock called techcalt. From then on an old Indian woman journeyed through a place called Chapultepec cuitlapilco, peddling small paper flags and crying ‘Flags for sale!’ Anyone who wanted to die would say, ‘Buy me a little flag,’ and once it was bought he went to the place of the techcalt and was slain, and nobody ever thought to ask, ‘What has come over us?’ It seemed they all had lost their wits.” The Mexicans obviously took a murky pleasure in this type of mystification. It is probable such nightmarish disasters actually made them laugh on some level. This helps us to an understanding of hallucinations no less outlandish than the gods of the codexes.
Sandman or Bogey are names that can be linked to these violent figures, sinister tricksters full of a wicked sense of fun, like the god Quetzalcoatl who loved to slide down mountains on a little board ... The sculpted fiends of European churches, too, might be comparable (they certainly spring from essentially the same obsession), yet they display none of the power and grandeur of the Aztec phantoms, the bloodiest that ever rode the clouds of this world. Literally bloody, as is well known. Not one of them failed to be periodically spattered with human gore on the occasion of his feast day. Although estimates vary, it is thought that the annual number of victims ran to at least several thousand in Mexico City alone. The priest had a man held down on his back, arched over a kind of large boundary stone, and punctured his chest with a violent blow from a glittering dagger of stone. The ribs thus broken, the heart was grasped with both hands plunged into the welling aperture and ripped out with such skill and speed that the bloody mass continued to palpitate for a few seconds above the scarlet coals: after this the corpse was sent tumbling heavily to the bottom of the steps. By nightfall all the bodies had been skinned, jointed and cooked for the priests to eat. These officiants were not always content with drenching themselves, the temple walls, the idols, and the flowers brightly piled on the altar, in blood; some sacrificial rites prescribed the immediate flaying of the wounded man, for the ecstatic priest to cover his face with the bloody skin of the face and his body with the skin of the body. Clothed in this unbelievable garment, he prayed in wild delirium to his god. But here we must insistently point out the startlingly cheerful character of such atrocities. Mexico City was not only the most gruesome of human abattoirs, it was also a prosperous city, a veritable Venice criss-crossed with canals and footbridges, with many ornate temples and, above all, flower gardens of great beauty. Even on the waters, flowers were tended with a passion. Altars were smothered in blooms. Before they were sacrificed, the victims were made to dance “decked in floral wreaths and necklaces. They also held flowered shields and perfumed reeds, which they alternately smoked and smelled.”
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One can imagine the swarms of flies that must have hummed around the steaming rivulets in the sacrificial chamber. Mirbeau, with similar visions for his Torture Garden, writes that “in this haven of flowers and perfumes it was neither repugnant nor terrible.” Death, to the Aztecs, meant nothing. They asked their gods not only to let them welcome it with good cheer, but also to help them see its positive charms. They were determined to look on swords and arrows as if on delicacies. These ferocious warriors were at the same time amiable, gregarious fellows like any other, fond of meeting together to drink and talk. At Aztec banquets, people commonly became inebriated by one of the various drugs that were taken as a matter of course.
Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley
It seems that this extraordinarily courageous people was too much in love with death. They surrendered to the Spaniards as though in a crazed hypnotic trance. Cortés’s victory was not the triumph of force, so much as that of an utter bewitchment. As though the people had obscurely sensed that once this degree of euphoric violence had been reached, the only way out, for them as for the victims with whom they had placated their frolicksome gods, was an abrupt and appalling death. They insisted to the very end on providing a “spectacle” or “theatre” for those fantastical beings, so as to “entertain” them and be their laughing-stocks. Because that was how they made sense of their strange agitation. Strange and fragile, since they perished in an instant, like a bug squashed underfoot.
Georges BatailLe and Documents Originally published as the Introduction to Dawn Ades and Simon Baker (eds.), Undercover Surrealism , Cambridge-London, The MIT Press and Hayward Gallery, 2006.
Georges Bataille (1897-1962) —numismatist, scholar, pornographer, social critic and idiosyncratic philosopher—remains a profoundly influential and controversial thinker and writer. Described by his friend Michel Leiris as “Bataille the impossi ble,”1 he represented in the late 1920s an intellectual, internal opposition to André Breton’s Surrealism, which attracted many of the best non-conformist poets, artists and writers of his age. Bataille’s most visible contribution to contemporary thought was in the form of the review Documents, which ran for fifteen issues through 1929 and 1930. 2 Conceived as a “war machine against received ideas,”3 Documents drew in several dissident surrealists such as Michel Leiris, Joan Miró, Robert Desnos and André Masson. Never himself a member of the movement, Bataille later, at a time when Jean-Paul Sartre was leading the post-war attack on Surrealism, expressed a fundamental if critical sympathy with it as ‘genuine virile opposition—nothing conciliatory, nothing divine—to all accepted limits, a rigorous will to insubordination.’4 As, in his own words, Surrealism’s ‘old enemy from within,’5 Bataille was nonetheless uncompromising in his disdain for art as panacea and substitute for human experience, his problem 1
Translated by Lorna Scott Fox
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Michel Leiris, “De Bataille l’impossible à l’impossible ‘Documents’,” Critique, nr. 195-6, 1963, p. 689. 2 The final issue was actually published in 1931. 3 M. Leiris, op. cit., p. 689. 4 G. Bataille ‘On the Subject of Slumbers’, in Troisième convoi, no. 2, January 1946; see Michael Richardson’s introduction to G. Bataille, The Absence of Myth, Writings on Surrealism, p. 49. 5 Ibid.
remaining ‘the place that Surrealism gave to poetry and painting: it placed the work before being.’6 6
Ibid. In Bataille’s only contribution to an official surrealist journal (apart from the Fatrasies, 13th-century nonsense poems in La révolution surréaliste, nr. 6, March 1926), “Le bleu du ciel,” in Minotaure, nr. 8, 1936, he describes the paradox of ecstatic experience for modern man: ‘a vertiginous fall in the void of the sky.’ The anonymous note to Fatrasies was already wholly characteristic of Bataille: ‘those [nonsense poems] from which the following extracts are taken escaped the scorn of generations as they escaped the mind of those whom a burst of laughter will one day blind.’
Documents’ approach to the visual opposed that of Breton at every turn. Breton and the surrealists had proposed various ways of achieving immediacy of expression: through automatic writing and drawing they had tried to circumvent the conscious control of imagemaking, while Sigmund Freud’s theories had provided a symbolic code through which dreams and the workings of the unconscious mind could be noted and interpreted. In the heterogeneous visual material included in Documents Bataille and his colleagues, Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos and Carl Einstein engaged with and challenged such ideas which, they claimed, far from confronting the base realities of human thought and
Documents, 1930, nr. 6
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the violent nature of desire, actually idealised and sublimated them. Instead, Documents utilised strategies of de-sublimation, allowing an unblinking stare at violence, sacrifice and seduction through which art was “brought down” to the level of other kinds of objects. Although Surrealism is not openly discussed in its pages, the implied critique of Breton’s movement, the constant harping on a ‘base materialism’ as opposed to the elevation of poetic thought, as well as the flagrant play with the surrealist principle of cultural collage, the juxtaposition of ‘distant realities’, was sufficiently provocative for Breton to react furiously in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929), one of the very rare occasions when he names Bataille, and to whom he devotes several pages of well-aimed invective, dubbing him an “excremental philosopher.” Documents encompassed art, ethnography, archaeology, film, photography and popular culture, with discussions of jazz and music hall performances beside the work of major modern artists, and illuminated manuscripts and sacred stone circles alongside an analysis of the big toe. It was also the home of a “Critical Dictionary,”
to which Bataille and his closest colleagues contributed short essays on, among other things, ‘Absolute’, ‘Man’, ‘Abattoir’, ‘Eye’, ‘Factory Chimney’, and ‘Dust’. A dictionary would begin, Bataille wrote in his entry ‘Formless’ (Informe), when it provided not meanings but the tasks of words.7 This short text alone has had a remarkable afterlife as a critical tool for the analysis of contemporary art. The exhibition Informe at the Centre Pompidou in 1997 attacked the unity of modernist readings of art by proposing a set of alternative and unstable ‘operations’ by which works were discussed not in terms of meanings but in relation to ‘horizontality’, ‘base materialism’, ‘pulse’ and ‘entropy’.8 • Documents’ unlikely cradle was the Cabinet des Médailles at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where Bataille was following a (promising) career as a numismatist together with the journal’s co-founder Pierre
Documents, 1929, nr. 4
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The term ‘Critical’ was dropped in issue 4, 1929. 8 See Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: a user’s guide, Zone Books, 1997 (catalogue of the exhibition Informe at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, May-August 1996).
83 d’Espezel. Another colleague, Jean Babelon, was also on the editorial board. The magazine’s financial backer was Georges Wildenstein, whose Gazette des beaux-arts was one of the longest established art reviews in Paris. The various expectations of the new review on the parts of its founder, of the editorial board and of Bataille himself did not cohere. Bataille’s approach grated with Wildenstein and the more conservative members of the board from the very start. What he meant by his title was not what they had expected, and d’Espezel wrote after the first issue: The title you have chosen for this review is barely justified only in the sense that it gives us “Documents” on your state of mind. That’s a lot, but not quite enough. It’s essential to return to the spirit which inspired us in the first project for the review, when you and I talked about it to M. Wildenstein.9
• Bataille’s essay ‘The Academic Horse’ (Le cheval academique) had flouted scholarly academic traditions of objectivity and was a foretaste of what was 9
Letter from d’Espezel to Bataille, 15 April 1929. See
to come. Presumably Wildenstein had expected another luxurious version of the Gazette des beaux-arts with the addition of “primitive art.” However, Bataille’s choice of rubric for Documents: Doctrines, Archéologie, Beaux-arts, Ethnographie (Doctrines, Archaeology, Fine Arts, Ethnography) already distances it from the primitivist aesthetic then fashionable in Paris. “It announces that Documents is not another Gazette des beaux-arts and above all not as a Gazette des beauxarts primitifs.”11 Three of the subjects on Documents’ cover remained constant: Archaeology, Fine Arts and Ethnography. For the first three issues ‘Doctrines’ headed the list; from the fourth issue this disappeared and was replaced with Variétés (Variety). These five subjects define the ostensible coverage of material in the journal. ‘Doctrines’ was a more unusual term in the context of the avant-garde 10
Hollier, “La valeur d’usage de l’impossible”, preface to facsimile Documents, Jean-Michel Place, 1991. Bataille took the title “general secretary” but was in effect the editor. See Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes xi, p. 572. 10 Documents 1, 1929. 11 Hollier, op. cit., p. viii.
Documents, 1929, nr. 6
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magazines than ‘Documents’ itself, and what it signified for Bataille is unclear. Doctrines are defined by and define ‘moral communities’ and religions, and later Bataille insisted on thus describing Surrealism.12 Perhaps ‘Doctrines’ was intended to stand both for those beliefs held by declared religions and for those of more occult communities, such as Surrealism. For the first five issues of Documents an editorial board of 11, including scholars and museum professionals as well as Wildenstein, Carl Einstein and Georges-Henri Rivière, was named, with Bataille taking the title of ‘general secretary.’ Subsequent issues omit the editorial board and credit Bataille alone as ‘general secretary,’ which indicates a more managerial or administrative position, leaving the absorbing question of editorial control unresolved. However, Bataille 12 See for example ‘The Surrealist Religion’, in G. Bataille, The Absence of Myth, Writings on Surrealism, p. 71; ‘Surrealism from Day to Day’ (surviving chapter of a book Bataille planned on Surrealist Philosophy and Religion), ibid., p. 34.
85 de-constructed—them, and work ed them into a series of challenges to those disciplines that were implied by its rubric. Documents differed from other magazines of the period in its treatment of its heterogeneous subjects. The interaction between text and image, and between image and image, is complicated an unexpected. Whereas Variétés made a game, very simply decoded, of comparing or contrasting pairs of images, especially art and popular culture (Charlie Chaplin beside Jean Crotti’s painting-relief Clown) sometimes via a title (a Magritte painting beside the fictional detective Nick Carter, under the heading ‘Mysteries’), Documents’ use of ‘resemblance’ drew visual and thematic parallels, hilarious and shocking, that undermined categories and the search for meaning. Not infrequently Documents picked the same topic as one just discussed in another magazine but wholly subverted the spirit of the original article. Take, for example, Lotar’s notorious photographs of the Abattoir at La Villette, and Bataille’s critical dictionary entry on “Abattoir.”16 This text links the slaughterhouse to temples of bygone eras and “the ominous grandeur typical of those places in which blood flows”; photos and text relate to Bataille’s interest in sacrifice and suspile temps. Parallels between cion of the modern religion of German and French cross-cultural hygiene, which are consistent studies and their origins in concerns within Documents. 19th-century comparative studies But it cannot be coincidental of religion could have an that Cahiers d’art in 1928 had interesting bearing on Docupublished as part of its series ments’ approach. 15 on modern architecture a seBataille was haunted by a photograph of this horrific scene quence of striking photographs of the 1907 abattoirs at Lyon. given to him by his analyst, culture in Europe at the time. Most spiced their covers with the promise of a range of subjects of contemporary interest. The Belgian Variétés, which was regularly advertised in Documents, announced “les images/ les documents/les textes de nôtre temps” (the images, documents and texts of our times), offering in other words “documents” of the present day. Popular art, pin-ups and celebrity mug-shots figured in publications like the German magazine Der Querschnitt. Cahiers d’art, in the late 1920s, covered “Painting-sculpture-architecturemusic-theatre-discs-cinema.” In terms of content the journal closest to Documents was Jazz, a monthly review dedicated to ‘l’actualité intellectuelle’ (current ideas), founded and edited by a remarkable woman explorer, Titaÿna. Not only did Jazz reproduce, like Documents, Eli Lotar’s abattoir photos but in its second issue (January 1929) it included a horrific sequence of photos of Chinese executions, including public beheadings and the notorious killing by a ‘thousand pieces.’15 Documents did more, however, in its pages than chart the interesting discoveries and materials, modern and ancient, Western and non-Western, considered relevant to contemporary society. It constructed—or
Documents, 1929, nr. 6
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later wrote that he ‘really edited [Documents] in agreement with Georges-Henri Rivière … and against the titular editor, the German poet Carl Einstein.’13 Although Einstein continued to contribute to Documents until the end, his ambitions to draw in German scholars and in particular to establish a link with the Warburg Institute in Hamburg Adrien Borel, in c. 1925, although 16 Documents 6, November 1929, were only partially realised.14 he did not publish it himself p. 329. Documents’ title was both until much later. camouflage and challenge. It was not, in itself, so out of line with the flush of new journals dealing with art and contemporary 13 “Notes on the publication of ‘Un Cadavre’,” ibid., p. 31. 14 See C. Joyce, Carl Einstein in Documents and his collaboration with Georges Bataille, XLibris, 2003. Einstein’s respect for Aby Warburg’s research methodology, expressed in a letter to the Institute’s director Fritz Saxl (reprinted in Joyce), soliciting contributions to the new journal, opens the intriguing possibility of the influence of Warburg’s Memory Atlas, the screens covered with photographs of images from different civilisations constantly rearranged, on Documents. G. Didi-Huberman has mentioned connections between Einstein and Warburg in Devant
The North is Lost
A generous reward is offered to anyone with information that leads to its prompt recovery The Red Specter. December 2009
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These “model edifices,” in Zervos’s words, “correspond absolutely to their purpose and fulfil their role according to the most recent requirements of economy and hygiene.”17 Bataille’s reference by contrast to the “chaotic aspect of present-day slaughterhouses” together with Lotar’s repulsive photos of bloody floors and indistinguishable lumps of flesh and fur directly confront the modernist efficiency lauded by Cahiers d’art, whose photographs of the clean structures of the buildings are unpeopled and unsullied. • In the 1978 Hayward Gallery exhibition Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, the section devoted to Documents undeniably stood spectacularly apart as an alternative to orthodox surrealism.18 The very inclusion of Documents in Dada and Surrealism Reviewed was much debated and finally sealed on the advice of Michel Leiris, one of Bataille’s closest collaborators.19 Leiris, previously himself a member of the surrealist movement and participant in the bitter exchanges between the dissident surrealists gathered round Bataille’s Documents and the orthodox group led by the founder André Breton, may well have anticipated the ensuing critical revision of Surrealism which has seen the darker counter-currents of Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ as a favoured alternative to Breton’s ‘idealism.’ Although the 1978 exhibition took the dada and surrealist reviews as its structuring principle, it followed a fairly consistent tripartite mode of display, separating works of art, chosen objects and documents (journals, books, letters etc). Here, the aim has been to reflect the visual aesthetic of the review itself, juxtaposing different kinds of objects to cut across conventional hierarchies, grouping paintings, ethnographic objects, films, photographs, sculpture or crime magazines in relation to the key strategies and ideas in Documents. The magazine was, itself, a ‘playful museum that simultaneously collects and reclassifies its specimens.’20 Rather than simply amassing as many as possible of those things, reproduced in the
pages of its fifteen issues, we want to represent the magazine itself as an active force, relying on its core ideas as a means of presenting the objects they made extraordinary in the context of an exhibition.
17 “Marché aux bestiaux et abattoirs de la mouche à Lyon”, Cahiers d’art, nr. 8, 1928, p. 343. 18 D. Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, ACGB, 1978. 19 Conversation with the author and David Sylvester, Paris, 1977.
20 J. Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’, in The Predicament of Culture, 1988, p. 132.
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Karl Marx: Key texts on fetishism
Documents 1929, nr. 5
The genealogy of Karl Marx’s theory of fetishism is extremely revealing. If the drive of his final rendition of “commodity fetishism” in the second edition of the Capital (1872-73) involved redirecting the colonial category of “a religion of sensuous desire” to capitalism and its subjects, in an inversion of the normalcy of everyday perspective that William Pietz defined at one point as an “anamorphism”, the origin of the argument is far from linear or simple. We have decided to offer the English reader a number of texts and fragments which,
put together, compose a small drama of the Enlightenment: the difficult task of mobilizing, between public specific polemics and theoretical text, the attempt to primitivize and transmogrify both the political discourse and the social science of his times. However, these fragments also attest to the episodic and variegated way in which the concept of the fetish emerges and disturbs Marx´s project. In general terms, everytime Marx denounces his adversaries as the true fetishists between 1842 up to 1867, the work of the fetish is to contribute in one or other way to an ideology critique of “theories”. All of those interventions, are marked within elements coming from the Hegelian “critique of religion” which was still somehow framed under the critique of the categories of christianity. It is remarkable that, in the first writing of Marx’s chapter on “The Commodity” of the Capital in 1867, his whole deployment of the relation between subjects and commodities used the catholic figure of “mysticism” rather than the fetish. In such text, as in his drafts of the 1850s, “fetishism” is not yet a means to capture the effects of the structure of desires and exchanges envolved in the universalization of commodity but a rhetorical tool aimed at the classics of political economy like David Ricardo for their unability to differentiate their views from the ordinary commonplaces of public opinion and pollitical maneuvering. It is not until Marx added to the first volumen of Capital a didactic text titled “The Value form” that the example of “the savages in Cuba” who described westerner colonizers as fetishists, that Marx had quoted in 1842, became fully deployed as a general operation where he primitivized the modern economy as a “religion of sensous desire” involving the mediation of things in the relationships between subjects. The Red Specter
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more pleased to offer some Karl Marx (1842) the spirits to our Northern guest because in the meal itself, in the
very “ailing” [leitender] article in nr. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung, we find no trace of spirit. Therefore we present first of all a scene from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods, which we give here in a “generally comprehensible” translation,” because among our readers there is Source: MECW, Volume 2, p. 184. bound to be at least one who Written: between June 29 and July is no Hellene.
The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung
4, 1842. First published: Supplement to Rheinische Zeitung nrs. 191, 193 + 195, July 10, 12 + 14, 1842. http://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1842/07/10.htm This article was occasioned by attacks on the trend of the Rheini sche Zeitung on the part of the influential Kölnische Zeitung, which defended the Catholic Church in the 1840s. In 1842 the Kölnische Zeitung, under the editorship of Karl Hermes, a secret agent of the Prussian Government, took an active part in the campaign against the progressive press and progressive philosophical trends, the Young Hegel’s in particular.
Rheinische Zeitung No. 191, July 10, 1842, Supplement Up to now we have respected the Kölnische Zeitung, if not as the “organ of the Rhenish intelligentsia” at any rate as the Rhenish “information sheet” [Intelligenz]. We regarded above all its “leading political articles” as a means, both wise and select, for making politics repugnant to the reader, so that he will the more eagerly turn to the vitally refreshing realm of the advertisements which reflects the pulsating life of industry and is often wittily piquant, so that here too the motto would be: per aspera ad astra, through politics to the oysters. However, the finely even balance which the Kölnische Zeitung had hitherto succeeded in maintaining between politics and advertisements has recently been upset by a kind of advertisements which can be called “advertisements of political industry”. In the initial uncertainty as to where this new genus should be placed, it happened that an advertisement was transformed into a leading article, and the leading article into an advertisement, and indeed into one which in the language of the political world is called a [Anzeige] “denunciation”, but if paid for is called simply an “advertisement”. It is a custom in the North that before the meagre meals, the guests are given a drink of exquisitely fine spirits. In following this custom, we are
Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods xxiv hermes’ complaints Hermes. Maia Hermes. Is there, dear Mother, in all heaven a god who is more tormented than I am? Maia. Don’t say such things, my son! Hermes. Why shouldn’t I? I, who have such a lot of things to attend to, who have to do everything myself, and have to submit to so many servile duties? In the morning I have to be among the very first to get up, sweep out the diningroom, and put the cushions straight in the council chamber. When everything is in order I have to wait on Jupiter and spend the whole day as his messenger, going to and fro on his errands. Hardly have I returned, and while still covered with dust, I have to serve ambrosia. Worst of all, I am the only one who is allowed no rest even at night, for I have to lead the souls of the dead to Pluto and perform the duties of attendant while the dead are being judged. For it is not enough that in my daytime labours I have to he present at gymnastic exercises, act as herald at meetings of the people, and help the people’s orators to memorise their speeches. Nay, torn between so many duties, I must also look after all matter concerning the dead.
Since his expulsion from Olympus, Hermes, by force of habit, still performs “servile duties” and looks after all matters concerning the dead. Whether Hermes himself, or his son, the goat-god Pan, wrote the ailing article of No. 179, let the reader decide, bearing in mind that the Greek Hermes was the god of eloquence and logic. To spread philosophical and religious views by means of the newspapers, or to combat them in the newspapers, we consider equally impermissible.
87 tedious litany of oracular pronouncements. However, I curbed my impatience, for ought I not to believe this discerning man who is so ingenuous as to express his opinion with the utmost candour in his own house, and I went on reading. But— lo and behold!—this article, which, it is true, cannot be reproached for any philosophical views, at least has the tendency to combat philosophical views and spread religious views. What are we to make of an article which disputes the right to its own existence, which prefaces itself with a declaration of its own incompetence? The loquacious author will reply to us. He explains how his pretentious articles are to be read. He confines himself to giving some fragments, the “arrangement and connection” of which he leaves to the “perspicacity of the reader”—the most convenient method for the kind of advertisements which he makes it his business to deal with. We should like to “arrange and connect” these fragments, and it is not our fault if the rosary does not become a string of pearls. The author declares: A party which employs these means (i. e., spreads philosophical and religious views in newspapers and combats such views) shows thereby, in our opinion, that its intentions are not honest, and that it is less concerned with instructing and enlightening the people than with achieving other external aims.
This being his opinion, the article can have no other intention than the achievement of external aims. These “external aims” will not fail to show themselves. The state, he says, has not only the right but the duty to “put a stop to the activities of unbidden charterers”. The writer is obviously referring to opponents of his view, for he has long ago convinced himself that he is a bidden charterer. It is a question, therefore, of a new intensification of the censorship in religious matters, of new police measures against the press, which has hardly been able to draw breath as yet. In our opinion, the state is to be reproached, not for excessive severity, but for indulgence carried too far.
The leader writer, however, While the old man chattered on has second thoughts. It is danin this way, I became well aware gerous to reproach the state. that he intended to deliver a Therefore he addresses himself
to the authorities, his accusation against freedom of the press turns into an accusation against the censors. He accuses them of exercising, ”too little censorship”. Reprehensible indulgence has hitherto been shown also, not by the state, it is true, but by ‘individual authorities’, in that the new philosophical school has been allowed to make most disgraceful attacks on Christianity in public papers and other publications intended for a readership that is not purely scientific.
Once again, however, the author comes to a halt; again he has second thoughts. Less than eight days ago he found that the freedom of the censorship allowed too little freedom of the press; now he finds that the compulsion of the censors results in too little compulsion of the censorship. That again has to be remedied. As long as the censorship exists it is its most urgent duty to excise such abhorrent offshoots of a childish presumption as have repeatedly offended our eyes in recent days.
Weak eyes! Weak eyes! And the weakest eye will be offended by an expression which can he intended only for the level of understanding of the broad masses.
If the relaxed censorship already allows abhorrent offshoots to appear, what would happen with freedom of the press? If our eyes are too weak to bear the “presumption” of the censored press, how would they be strong enough to bear the “audacity” [Übermut] of a free press? “As long as the censorship exists it is its most urgent duty.”And when it ceases to exist? The phrase must be interpreted as meaning: it is the most urgent duty of the censorship to remain in existence as long as possible. But again the author has second thoughts. It is not our function to act as public prosecutor, and therefore we refrain from any more detailed designation.
What heavenly goodness there is in this man! He refrains from any more detailed “designation”, and yet it is only by quite detailed, quite definite signs that he could prove and show what his view aims at. He lets fall only vague,
The Red Specter half audible words intended to arouse suspicions; it is not his function to be a public prosecutor, his function is to be a hidden prosecutor. For the last time the unfortunate man has second thoughts, remembering that his function is to write liberal leading articles, and that he has to present himself as a “loyal friend of freedom of the press.” Hence he quickly takes up his final position: We could not fail to protest against a course which, if it is not the consequence of accidental negligence, can have no other purpose than to discredit the freer movement of the press in the eyes of the public, to play into the hands of opponents who are afraid of failing to achieve their aim in an open way.
The censorship—we are told by this defender of freedom of the press, who is as bold as he is sharp-witted—if it is not the English leopard with the inscription: “I sleep, wake me not!, has adopted this “disastrous” course in order to discredit the freer movement of the press in the eyes of the public. Is there any further need to discredit a movement of the press which calls the attention of the censorship to “accidental negligences”, and which expects to obtain its renown in public opinion through the “penknife of the censor”? This movement can he called “free” insofar as the licence of shamelessness is also sometimes called “free”, and is it not the shamelessness of stupidity and hypocrisy to claim to be a defender of the freer movement of the press while at the same time teaching that the press will at once fall into the gutter unless it is supported under the arms by two policemen? And what need is there of censorship, what need is there of this leading article, if the philosophical press discredits itself in the eyes of the public? Of course, the author does not want to restrict in any way “the freedom of scientific research”.
May 2010 can only gain, and what lies outside the limits of scientific research.
Who is to decide on the limits of scientific research if not scientific research itself? According to the leading article, limits should be prescribed to science. The leading article, therefore, knows of an “official reason” which does not learn from scientific research, but teaches it, which is a learned providence that establishes the length every hair should have to convert a scientist’s beard into a beard of world importance. The leading article believes in the scientific inspiration of the censorship. Before going further into these “silly” explanations of the leading article on the subject of “scientific research”, let us sample for a moment the “philosophy ofreligion” of Herr H., [Hermes] his “own science”! Religion is the basis of the state and the most necessary condition for every social association which does not aim merely at achieving some external aim. The proof. In its crudest form as childish fetishism it nevertheless to some extent raises man above his sensuous desires which, if he allowed himself to be ruled exclusively by them, could degrade himto the level of an animal and make him incapable of fulfilling any higher aim.
The author of the leading article calls fetishism the “crudest form” of religion. He concedes, therefore, what all “men of science” regard as established even without his agreement, that “animal worship” is a higher form of religion than fetishism. But does not animal worship degrade man below the animal, does it not make the animal man’s god? And now, indeed, “fetishism”! Truly, the erudition of a penny magazine! Fetishism is so far from raising man above his sensuous desires that, on the contrary, it is “the religion of sensuous desire”. Fantasy arising from desire deceives the fetishworshipper into believing that In our day, scientific research an “inanimate object” will give is rightly allowed the widest, up its natural character in ormost unrestricted scope. der to comply with his desires. Hence the crude desire of the But how our author conceives fetish-worshipper smashes the scientific research can he seen fetish when it ceases to be its from the following utterance: most obedient servant. In this connection a sharp distinction must be drawn between the requirements of freedom of scientific research, through which Christianity
In those nations which attained higher historical significance, the flowering of their national life coincides with the highest development of
88 their religious consciousness, and the decline of their greatness and their power coincides with the decline of their religious culture.
To arrive at the truth, the author’s assertion must be directly reversed; he has stood history on its head. Among the peoples of the ancient world, Greece and Rome are certainly countries of the highest “historical culture”. Greece flourished at its best internally in the time of Pericles, externally in the time of Alexander. In the age of Pericles the Sophists, and Socrates, who could be called the embodiment of philosophy, art and rhetoric supplanted religion. The age of Alexander was the age of Aristotle, who rejected the eternity of the “individual” spirit and the God of positive religions. And as for Rome! Read Cicero! The Epicurean, Stoic or Sceptic philosophies were the religions of cultured Romans when Rome had reached the zenith of its development. That with the downfall of the ancient states their religions also disappeared requires no further explanation, for the “true religion” of the ancients was the cult of “their nationality”, of their “state”. It was not the downfall of the old religions that caused the downfall of the ancient states, but the downfall of the ancient states that caused the downfall of the old religions. And such ignorance as is found in this leading article proclaims itself the “legislator of scientific research” and writes “decrees” for philosophy. The entire ancient world had to collapse because the progress achieved by the peoples in their scientific development was necessarily bound up with a revelation of the errors on which their religious views were based.
According to the leading article, therefore, the entire ancient world collapsed because scientific research revealed the errors of the old religions. Would the ancient world not have perished if scientific research had kept silent about the errors of religion, if the Roman authorities had been recommended by the author of the leading article to excise the writings of Lucretius and Lucian? For the rest, we shall permit ourselves to enlarge Herr H.’s erudition in another communication.
Karl Marx (1842) Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood (Fragment) Written: October 1842; First published: in the Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung, nrs. 298, 300, 303, 305 and 307, October 25, 27 and 30, Nov. 1 and 3, 1842; Translated: by Clemens Dutt. Signed: a Rhinelander; Transcribed: by director@ marx.org, November 1996. http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/ 1842/10/25.htm#n1
Rheinische Zeitung, nr. 307, Supplement, Nov. 3 1842 The pirates of Tidong1 break the arms and legs of their prisoners to ensure control over them. To ensure control over wood thieves, the Provincial Assembly has not only broken the arms and legs but has even pierced the heart of the law. We consider its merit in regard to re-establishing some categories of our trial procedure as absolutely nil; on the contrary, we must acknowledge the frankness and consistency with which it gives an unfree form to the unfree content. If private interest, which cannot bear the light of publicity, is introduced materially into our law, let it be given its appropriate form, that of secret procedure so that at least no dangerous, complacent illusions will be evoked and entertained. We consider that at the present moment it is the duty of all Rhinelanders, and especially of Rhenish jurists, to devote their main attention to the content of the law, so that we should not be left in the end with only an empty mask. The form is of no value if it is not the form of the content. The commission’s proposal which we have just examined and the Assembly’s vote approving it are the climax to the whole debate, for here the Assembly itself becomes conscious of the conflict between the interest of forest protection and the principles 1
Tidong is a region in Kalimantan (Borneo).
The Red Specter of law, principles endorsed by our own laws. The Assembly therefore put it to the vote whether the principles of law should be sacrificed to the interest of forest protection or whether this interest should be sacrificed to the principles of law, and interest outvoted law. It was even realised that the whole law was an exception to the law, and therefore the conclusion was drawn that every exceptional provision it contained was permissible. The Assembly confined itself to drawing consequences that the legislator had neglected. Wherever the legislator had forgotten that it was a question of an exception to the law, and not of a law, wherever he put forward the legal point of view, our Assembly by its activity intervened with confident tactfulness to correct and supplement him, and to make private interest lay down laws to the law where the law had laid down laws to private interest. The Provincial Assembly, therefore, completely fulfilled its mission. In accordance with its function, it represented a definite particular interest and treated it as the final goal. That in doing so it trampled the law under foot is a simple consequence of its sash, for interest by its very nature is blind, immoderate, one-sided; in short, it is lawless natural instinct, and can lawlessness lay down laws? Private interest is no more made capable of legislating by being installed on the throne of the legislator than a mute is made capable of speech by being given an enormously long speaking-trumpet. It is with reluctance that we have followed the course of this tedious and uninspired debate, but we considered it our duty to show by means of an example what is to be expected from an Assembly of the Estates of particular interests if it were ever seriously called upon to make laws. We repeat once again: our estates have fulfilled their function as such, but far be it from us to desire to justify them on that account. In them, the Rhinelander ought to have been victorious over the estate, the human being ought to have been victorious over the forest owner. They themselves are legally entrusted not only with the representation of particular interests but also with the representation of the interests of the province, and however contradictory these two tasks may be, in case of conflict there should not be
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From The Red Specter to the OECUMENE of consciousness We promote the canonization of the Capuchins’ miraculous Holy Blind Child from Puebla, Mexico, as the patron saint of curators, critics and art historians.
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a moment’s delay in sacrificing representation of particular interest to representation of the interests of the province. The sense of right and legality is the most important provincial characteristic of the Rhinelander. But it goes without saying that a particular interest, caring no more for the province than it does for the Fatherland, has also no concern for local spirit, any more than for the general spirit. In direct contradiction to those writers of fantasy who profess to find in the representation of private interests ideal romanticism, immeasurable depths of feeling, and the most fruitful source of individual and specific forms of morality, such representation on the contrary abolishes all natural and spiritual distinctions by enthroning in their stead the immoral, irrational and soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a particular consciousness which
is slavishly subordinated to this object. Wood remains wood in Siberia as in France; forest owners remain forest owners in Kamchatka as in the Rhine Province. Hence, if wood and its owners as such make laws, these laws will differ from one another only by the place of origin and the language in which they are written. This abject materialism, this sin against the holy spirit of the people and humanity, is an immediate consequence of the doctrine which the Preussische Staats-Zeitung preaches to the legislator, namely, that in connection with the law concerning wood he should think only of wood and forest and should solve each material problem in a non-political way, i.e., without any connection with the whole of the reason and morality of the state. The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle
around it and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages had been present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would they not have regarded wood as the Rhinelanders’ fetish? But a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of animals is connected with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the sea in order to save the human beings.2
Karl Marx (1867) The Commodity (Fragments)
This is an English translation by Albert Dragstedt of the first chapter of the first German edition of Capital (1867). Modern editions of Capital have a first chapter based on the second or subsequent 2 An allusion to the debate of the editions.
Source: Albert Dragstedt, Sixth Rhine Province Assembly Value: Studies By Karl Marx, New on a bill against violations of Park Publications, London: 1976, game regulations, which deprived pp. 7-40.
Transcribed: by Steve the peasants of the right to hunt Palmer. even hares. http://www.marxistsfr.org/ archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ ch01.htm#S1
Announcement for the people Theory is not a venereal disease. Clinical evidence provided by previous generations show that its dissemination is not detained by mechanical means, nor is it contagious through the exchange of fluids. Public Health Commitee
The wealth of societies in which a capitalistic mode of production prevails, appears as a “gigantic collection of comodities” and the singular commodity appears as the elementary form of wealth. Our investigation begins accordingly with the analysis of the commodity. The commodity is first an external object, a thing which satisfies through its qualities human needs of one kind or another. The nature of these needs is irrelevant, e.g., whether their origin is in the stomach or in the fancy. We are also not concerned here with the manner in which the entity satisfies human need; whether in an immediate way as food—that is, as object of enjoyment —or by a detour as means of production. Each useful thing (iron, paper, etc.) is to be considered from a double point of view, in accordance with quality and quantity. Each such thing is a totality of many properties and is therefore able to be useful in different respects. The discovery of these different respects and hence of the manifold modes of utility of things is an historical act. Of such a kind is the invention of social measurement for the quantity of useful things. The diversity of the commodity-measurements arises partly from the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, and partly from convention. It is the utility of a thing for human life that turns it into a use-value. By way of abbreviation let us term the useful thing itself (or commoditybody, as iron, wheat, diamond, etc.) use-value, good, article. In the consideration of use-values, quantitative determination is always presupposed (as a dozen watches, yard of linen, ton of iron, etc.). The use-
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values of commodities provide the material for a study of their own, the science of commodities. Use-value realizes itself only in use or in consumption; use-values form the substantial content of wealth, whatever its social form may be. In the form of society which we are going to examine, they form the substantial bearers at the very same time of exchange-value. Exchange-value appears first of all as quantitative relationship, the proportion in which use-values of one kind are exchanged for use-values of another kind, a relationship which constantly changes in accordance with time and place. That is the reason why exchangevalue appears to be something accidental and a purely relative thing, and therefore the reason why the formula of an exchangevalue internal and imminent to the commodity (valeur intrinsique) appears to be a contradictio in adjecto (contradiction in terms). Let us examine the matter more closely. A single commodity (e.g., a quarter of wheat) is exchanged with other articles in the most varied proportions. Nevertheless its exchange-value remains unchanged regardless of whether it is expressed in x bootblacking, y soap, z gold, etc. It must therefore be distinguishable from these, its various manners of expression. Now let us consider two commodities: e.g., wheat and iron. Whatever their exchange relationship may be, it is always representable in an equation in which a given quantum of wheat is equated with some particular quantum of iron; e.g., one quarter of wheat = a cwt of iron. What does this equation say? That the same value exists in two different things, in one quarter of wheat and likewise in a cwt of iron. Both are equal, therefore, to a third entity, which in and for itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of the two, insofar as it is an exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third entity, independent of the other. Consider a simple geometrical example. In order to determine and compare the areas of all rectilinear figures, one reduces them to triangles. One reduces the triangle itself to an expression which is entirely different from its visible figure—half the product of its base by its altitude. Likewise, the exchange-values of commodities can be reduced to a common-entity, of which they represent a greater or lesser amount.
The fact that the substance of the exchange-value is something utterly different from and independent of the physical-sensual existence of the commodity or its reality as a use-value is revealed immediately by its exchange relationship. For this is characterized precisely by the abstraction from the use-value. As far as the exchange-value is concerned, one commodity is, after all, quite as good as every other, provided it is present in the correct proportion. Hence, commodities are first of all simply to be considered as values, independent of their exchange-relationship or from the form, in which they appear as exchange-values. Commodities as objects of use or goods are corporeally different things. Their reality as values forms, on the other hand, their unity. This unity does not arise out of nature but out of society. The common social substance which merely manifests itself differently in different use-values, is labour. Commodities as values are nothing but crystallized labour. The unit of measurement of labour itself is the simple average-labour, the character of which varies admittedly in different lands and cultural epochs, but is given for a particular society. More complex labour counts merely as simple labour to an exponent or rather to a multiple, so that a smaller quantum of complex labour is equal to a larger quantum of simple labour, for example. Precisely how this reduction is to be controlled is not relevant here. That this reduction is constantly occurring is revealed by experience. A commodity may be the product of the most complex labour. Its value equates it to the product of simple labour and therefore represents on its own merely a definite quantum of simple labour. A use-value or good only has a value because labour is objectified or materialized in it. But now how are we to measure the quantity of its value? By the quantum of the valueforming substance (i.e., labour) which is contained in it. The quantity of labour itself is measured by its temporal duration and the labour-time in turn possesses a measuring rod for particular segments of time, like hour, day, etc. It might seem that, if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantum of labour expended during its production, the more lazy- and incompetent a man the more valuable
91 his commodity is, because he needs all the more labour-time for its completion. But only the socially necessary labour-time is labour-time required for the constitution of some particular use-value, with the available socially-normal conditions of production and the social average-level of competence and intensity of labour. After the introduction of the steam-driven loom in England, for example, perhaps half as much labour as before was sufficient to change a given quantum of yarn into cloth. The English hand-weaver needed in order to accomplish this change the same labour-time as before, to be sure, but the product of his individual labour-hour now represented only one half a social labourhour, and sank accordingly to half its earlier value. So it is only the quantum of socially necessary labour, or that labour-time which is socially necessary for the constitution of a use-value which determines the quantity of the value. The single commodity counts here in general as average sample of its own kind. Commodities in which equally large labourquanta are contained, or which can be produced within the same labour-time for that reason have the same quantity of value. The value of a commodity is related to the value of every other commodity, as the labour-time necessary for the production of the one is related to the labour-time necessary for the production of the other. All commodities, as values, are only particular masses of coagulated labour-time. The quantity of value of a commodity accordingly would remain constant if the labourtime required for its production were constant. The latter, however, changes with each change in the productive power of labour. The productive power of labour is determined by manifold conditions, among others by the average grade of competence of the workers, the level of development of science and its technological applicability, the social combination of the process of production, the scope and the efficacy of the means of production, and by natural relationships. The same quantum of labour manifests itself after propitious weather in 8 bushels of wheat, but after impropitious weather, in only 4, for example. The very same quantum of labour provides more metals in richly laden mines than in poor ones, etc. Diamonds are rare on the surface of the earth, and their discovery therefore costs on
the average much labour-time. Consequently, they represent much labour in a small volume of space. Jacob doubts that gold has ever paid its complete value. This holds true even more for diamonds. According to Eschwege, by 1823 the complete yield of the eightyear old Brazilian diamonddiggings had not yet amounted to the value of the 1½ year average product of the Brazilian sugar or coffee plantations. Given more richly laden diggings the same quantum of labour would be represented by more diamonds and their value would sink. If one succeeds in converting coal into diamonds with little labour, then the value of diamonds would sink beneath that of paving stones. In general: the greater the productive power of labour the smaller is the amount of labour-time required for the production of an article, and the smaller the mass of labour crystallized in it, the smaller is its value. And on the contrary, the smaller the productive power of labour, the greater is the labour-time necessary for the production of an article, and the greater its value is. The quantity of value of a commodity varies directly as the quantum, and inversely as the productive power of the labour embodying itself in the commodity. Now we know the substance of value. It is labour. We know its unit of measurement. It is labour-time. We have yet to analyse its form, which precisely stamps the value as an exchange-value. Before we do that we must develop the determinations which have already been discovered in somewhat greater detail. A thing can be a use-value without being an exchangevalue. This is the case wherever the human relevance of the thing is not mediated by labour. So air, virgin land, brush in a wild state, wood growing in wild conditions, etc. A thing can be useful and be the product of human labour without being a commodity. A man who satisfies his own need through his product creates use-value, to be sure, but not a commodity. In order to produce a commodity, he must produce not merely use-value, but use-value for others—social use-value. Finally, no entity can be a value without being an object of use. If it is useless, then the labour contained in it is also useless, does not count as labour and, hence, does not form a value. Originally, the commodity appeared to us as a two-sided entity, use-value and exchange-
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value. As we consider the matter more closely it will appear that the labour which is contained in the commodity is two-sided, also. This aspect, which I am the first to have developed in a critical way, is the starting point upon which comprehension of political economy depends. […] A commodity seems at first glance to be a self-evident, trivial thing. The analysis of it yields the insight that it is a very vexatious thing, full of metaphysical subtlety and theological perversities. As mere use-value, it is a sensual thing in which there is nothing portentous, whether I happen to consider it from the viewpoint that its attributes satisfy human needs or that it obtains these attributes only as product of human labour. There is absolutely nothing of a riddle in the fact that man changes by his activity the forms of natural matter in a way which is useful to him. The form of wood, for example, is changed if one makes a table out of it. Nevertheless, the table remains wood, an ordinary, sensual thing. But as soon as it steps out as commodity, it metamorphoses itself into a sensually supersensual thing. It does not only stand with its feet on the ground, but it confronts all other commodities on its head, and develops out of its wooden head caprices which are much more wondrous than if it all of a sudden began to dance. The mystical character of the commodity thus does not arise in its use-value. It arises just as little out of the value-determinations, considered in themselves. For in the first place, however different the useful labours or productive activities may be, it is a physiological truth that they are functions of a specifically human organism as distinguished from other organisms, and that every such function, whatever its content and its form, is essentially expenditure of human brain, nerve, muscle, organ of perception, etc. In the second place, if we consider that which lies at the basis of the determination of the amount of value (the duration of time of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour), it is clear that the quantity is distinguishable from the quality of labour in a way which is even perceptible with the naked eye. In all conditions, it was the time of labour which the production of necessities costs that had to be of concern to man, although not to the same degree at different levels of development. Finally,
as soon as men work for one another in any manner, their labour acquires in addition a social form. Let us take Robinson Crusoe on his island. Modest as he naturally is, nevertheless he has various needs to satisfy and must therefore perform useful labours of various sorts, make tools, build furniture, tame llamas, fish, hunt, etc. We do not refer at this time to praying and other such activities, since our Robinson derives enjoyment from them and regards such activity as recreation. Despite the variety of his productive functions, he knows that they are only various forms of activity of one and the same Robinson, and thus are only different modes of human labour. Necessity itself compels him to divide his time exactly between his various functions. Whether the one takes more space and the other takes less in the totality of his activity depends upon the greater or lesser difficulty which must be overcome for the attainment of the intended useful effect. Experience teaches him that much, and our Robinson who saved watch, diary, ink and pen from the shipwreck begins to keep a set of books about himself like a good Englishman. His inventory contains a list of the objects of use which he possesses, of the various operations which are required for their production, and finally of the labour-time which particular quanta of these various products cost him on the average. All relationships between Robinson and the things which form his self-made wealth are here so simple and transparent that even Mr. Wirth1 can understand them without particular mental exertion. And nevertheless all essential determinations of value are contained therein. If we now put an organization of free men in Robinson’s place, who work with common means of production and expend their many individual labour-powers consciously as one social labour-power, all the determinations of Robinson’s labour are repeated: but in a social rather than an individual way. Nevertheless, an essential difference emerges. All Robinson’s products were his exclusively personal product, and were thereby immediately objects of use for him. The total product of the organization is a social product. One part of this product serves again as means of production. It remains social. But another 1
Hack economist of Marx’s day.
92 part is used up by the members of the organization as necessities. This part must be divided up among them. The manner of this division will change with the particular manner of the social production-organism itself and the comparable historical level of development of the producers. Only for the sake of the parallel with commodity-production do we presuppose that each producer’s share of necessities of life is determined by his labour-time. In such a case, the labour-time would play a dual role. Its socially planned distribution controls the correct proportion of the various labour-functions to the various needs. On the other hand, the labour-time serves at the same time as the measure of the individual share of the producer in the common labour, and thereby also in the part of the common product which can be used up by individuals. The social relationships of men to their labour and their products of labour remained transparently simple in this case, in production as well as in distribution. Whence comes the puzzling character of the labour-product as soon as it assumes the form of commodity? If men relate their products to one another as values insofar as these objects count as merely objectified husks of homogeneous human labour, there lies at the same time in that relationship the reverse, that their various labours only count as homogeneous human labour when under objectified husk. They relate their various labours to one another as human labour by relating their products to one another as values. The personal relationship is concealed by the objectified form. So just what a value is does not stand written on its forehead. In order to relate their products to one another as commodities, men are compelled to equate their various labours to abstract human labour. They do not know it, but they do it, by reducing the material thing to the abstraction, value. This is a primordial and hence unconsciously instinctive operation of their brain, which necessarily grows out of the particular manner of their material production and the relationships into which this production sets them. First their relationship exists in a practical mode. Second, however, their relationship exists as relationship for them. The way in which it exists for them or is reflected in their brain arises from the very nature of
the relationship. Later, they attempt to get behind the mystery of their own social product by the aid of science, for the determination of a thing as value is their product, just as much as speech. Now as far as concerns the amount of value, we note that the private labours which are plied independently of one another (but because they are members of the primordial division of labour are dependent upon one another) on all sides are constantly reduced to their socially proportional measure by the fact that in the accidental and perpetually shifting exchange relationships of their products the labour-time which is socially necessary for their production forcibly obtrudes itself as a regulating natural-law, just as the law of gravity does, for example, when the house falls down on one’s head. The determination of the amount of value by the labour-time is consequently the mystery lurking under the apparent motions of the relative commodity-values. The producers’ own social movement possesses for them the form of a motion of objects under the control of which the producers lie instead of controlling the motion. As far as concerns the value-form finally, we note that it is just exactly this form which objectively veils the social relationships of private workers and consequently the social determinations of private labours, instead of laying them bare. If I say that coat, boots, etc. relate themselves to linen as universal materialization of abstract human labour, the insanity in such a way of putting things leaps into view. But if the producers of coat, boots, etc. relate these commodities to linen as universal equivalent, then the social relatedness of their private labours appears to them in exactly this insane form. Such forms as these constitute precisely the categories of bourgeois economy. They are the socially valid—thus objective—forms of thought, for relationships of production of this particular historically determined social mode of production. The private producers only enter into social contact for the first time through their private products: objects. The social relationships of their labours are and appear consequently not as immediately social relationships of persons in their labours, but as objectified relationships of persons, or social relationships of objects. The first and most universal
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manifestation of the object as a social thing, however, is the metamorphosis of the product of labour into a commodity. The mysticism of the commodity arises, therefore, from the fact that the social determinations of the private labours of the private producers appear to them as social natural determinations of products of labour; from the fact, that is, that the social relationships of production of persons appear as social relationships of objects to one another and to the persons involved. The relationships of the private workers to the totality of social labour objectify themselves over against them and exist, consequently, for them in the forms of objects. To a society of commodity producers whose universally social relationship of production consists in their behaving toward their products as commodities (hence as values) and their relating their private labours to one another in this objective form as equal human labour, it is Christianity that is the most appropriate form of religion, with its cult of the abstract man—especially in its bourgeois development, Protestantism, Deism, etc. In the ancient Asian, antique, etc. modes of production, the metamorphosis of the product into a commodity and accordingly the existence of man as commodityproducer plays a subordinate role, which, however, becomes greater the more the communities enter upon the stage of their decline. Genuine commercial people only exist in the interstices of the ancient world, like the gods of Epicurus or like the Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are extraordinarily much more simple and transparent than the bourgeois organism, but they are based either on the immaturity of the individual man who has not yet torn himself free of the umbilicus of the natural species-connection with other men or are based upon immediate master and slave relationships. They are conditioned by a low level of development of the productive powers of labour by correspondingly restricted relationships of men within their material process of the constitution of life, and consequently to one another and to nature. This actual restrictedness reflects itself in an idealist mode in the ancient natural and popular religions. The religious reflection of the real world can only disappear as soon as the relationships of practical work-a-day life
represent for men daily transparently reasonable relationships to one another and to nature. But relationships can only represent themselves as what they are. The form of the social process of life (i.e., of the material process of production) will only cast off its mystic veil of fog once it stands as a product of freely socialized men under their conscious, planned control. For that to happen, however, a material
93 basis of society is demanded or a row of material conditions of existence which are themselves again the primordial product of a long and painful history of development. Political economy has by now, to be sure, analysed value and amount of value, even if incompletely. It has never even so much as posed the question: Why does labour manifest itself in value and the measure of labour by its temporal
duration manifest itself in amount of value? Forms upon whose foreheads it is written that they belong to a social formation wherein the process of production masters men but not yet does man master the process of production—such forms count for their bourgeois consciousness as just such a self-evident natural necessity as productive labour itself. Pre-bourgeois forms of the social productive organism are
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accordingly treated by Political Economy roughly like preChristian religions are treated by the Fathers of the Church. Just how drastically a section of the economists is deceived by the fetishism which sticks to the world of commodities (or by the objective illusion of the social determinations of labour) is proved among other things by the tediously pointless contention about the role of nature in the formation of exchangevalue. Since exchange-value is a determinate social style of expressing the labour which has been applied to a thing, it can no more contain natural matter than the rate of exchange, for example. The commodity form was still relatively easy to see through as the most universal and most undeveloped form of bourgeois production, which for that reason appears even in earlier periods of production, although not in the same prevailing (and hence characteristic) way. But as for more concrete forms like Capital, for example? The fetishism of classical economics here becomes palpable. In order not to anticipate, however, let another example concerning the commodity-form itself suffice. It has been observed that in the relationship of commodity to commodity (e.g., of shoe to shoe-shine boy) the use-value of the shoe-shine boy (i.e., the utility of his real, material properties) is completely irrelevant to the shoe. The shoeshine boy is of interest to the commodity, shoe, only as form of appearance of its own value. So if commodities could speak, they would say: ‘Our use-value may be of interest to a man. But it does not inhere in us insofar as we are things. It is our exchange-value that inheres in us as things. Our own circulation as commodity-things proves that. It is only as exchange-values that we relate ourselves to one another.’ Now just listen to how the economists speak forth from the very soul of the commodity: ‘Value (exchange-value) is a property of things, riches (use-value) of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.’ (Anonymous, 1821) ‘Riches (use-value)
are the attribute of man; value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich; a pearl or a diamond is valuable... A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or diamond.’ (S. Bailey) Up to now, no chemist has discovered exchange-value in pearl or diamond. Our authors, who lay claim to special critical depth find, nevertheless, that use-value inheres in objects independently of their material properties, but their exchangevalue on the other hand inheres in them as objects. The remarkable circumstance that the usevalue of things realizes itself for men without exchange (thus, in the immediate relationship between thing and man), but their value on the other hand realizes itself only in exchange (that is, in a social process) is what strengthens them in their belief. Who is not reminded here of that excellent Dogberry who teaches the night-watchman Seacoal, ‘To be a well-favoured man is the gift of Fortune, but to write and read comes by Nature.’ (Much Ado About Nothing, Act III, Scene 3.) The commodity is immediate unity of use-value and exchange-value, thus of two opposed entities. Thus it is an immediate contradiction. This contradiction must enter upon a development just as soon as it is no longer considered as hitherto in an analytic manner (at one time from the viewpoint of use-value and at another from the viewpoint of exchange-value) but is really related to other commodities as a totality. The real relating of commodities to one another, however, is their process of exchange.
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Karl Marx (1867) The Value-Form (Fragments) The Value-Form
Appendix to the 1st German edition of Capital, Volume 1, 1867. First published in German in 1867 and in English in 1978; Source: Capital and Class, No.4 Spring 1978, pp.130-150. Thanks to the Conference of Socialist Economists, publishers of Capital and Class journal for permission to make this translation available;
Translated: Mike Roth and Wal Suchting;
Transcription: Paul Hampton;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons, Attribute & ShareAlike;
Markup: by Andy Blunden for the Marxists Internet Archive. http://www.marxistsfr.org/ archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ appendix.htm
Fourth peculiarity of the equivalent form: the fetishism of the commodity-form is more striking in the equivalent form than in the relative value-form The fact that the products of labour—such useful things as coat, linen, wheat, iron, etc. —are values, definite magnitudes of value and in general commodities, are properties which naturally pertain to them only in our practical interrelations (in unserem Verkehr) and not by nature like, for example, the property of being heavy or being warming or nourishing. But within our practical interrelations, these things relate to one another as commodities. They are values, they are measurable as magnitudes of value, and their common property of being values puts them into a value-relation to one another. Now the fact that, for example, ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat’ or ‘20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat’ only expresses the fact that: 1. The different types of labour necessary for the production of these things count equally (gleichgelten) as human labour; 2. the fact that the quantity of labour expended in their
production is measured according to definite social laws;
3. that tailors and weavers enter into a definite social relation of production.
It is a definite social relation of the producers in which they equate (gleichsetzen) their different types of labour as human labour. It is not less a definite social relation of producers, in which they measure the magnitude of their labours by the duration of expenditure of human labour-power. But within our practical interrelations these social characters of their own labours appear to them as social properties pertaining to them by nature, as objective determinations (gegenständliche Bestimmungen) of the products of labour themselves, the equality of human labours as a value-property of the products of labour, the measure of the labour by the socially necessary labour-time as the magnitude of value of the products of labour, and finally the social relations of the producers through their labours appear as a value-relation or social relation of these things, the products of labour. Precisely because of this the products of labour appear to them as commodities, sensible-supersensible (sinnlich übersinnliche) or social things. Thus the impression on the optic nerve brought about by the light (Lichteindruck auf den Sehnerv) from something is represented, not as a subjective stimulation of the optic nerve itself, but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. But in the case of seeing, light from a thing, from the external object, is in fact thrown upon another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between physical things. As opposed to that the commodity-form and the value-relation of products of labour have absolutely nothing to do with their physical nature and the relations between things which springs from this. It is only the definite social relation of people (der Menschen) itself which here takes on for them the phantasmagoric form of a relation of things. Hence
Le Monde, 16/02/2009 Guy Debord érigé en trésor national… L’État français vient de refuser que les archives personnelles du fondateur de l’Internationale situationniste quittent la France. L’arrêté du 29 janvier, signé de la ministre de la Culture Christine Albanel, et publié jeudi dans le Journal officiel, stipule que ces archives revêtent «une grande importance pour l’histoire des idées de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle et la connaissance du travail toujours controversé de l’un des derniers grands intellectuels français de cette période». Une décision majeure et symbolique. «Ce classement comme trésor national s’interprète comme une reconnaissance par l’État de ce que représente Debord dans la vie intellectuelle et artistique du siècle écoulé», souligne Bruno Racine, président de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), qui a largement œuvré pour que les archives restent en France.
The Red Specter in order to find an analogy for this we must take flight into the cloudy region of the religious world. Here the products of the human head appear as independent figures (Gestalten) endowed with a life of their own and standing in a relation to one another and to people. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of the human hand. This I call the fetishism which clings to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities and which is therefore inseparable from commodityproduction. Now this fetish-character emerges more strikingly in the equivalent-form than in the relative value-form. The relative value-form of a commodity is mediated, namely by its relation to another commodity. Through this value-form the value of the commodity is expressed as something completely distinct from its own sensible existence. At the same time it is inherent in this that existence as value (Wertsein) is a relation which is alien to the thing itself and hence that its value-relation to another thing can only be the form of appearance of a social relation hidden behind it. Conversely with the equivalentform. It consists precisely in the fact that the bodily or natural form of a commodity counts immediately as the social form, as the value-form for another commodity. Therefore, within our practical interrelations, to possess the equivalent-form appears as the social natural property (gesellschaftliche Natureigenschaft) of a thing, as a property pertaining to it by nature, so that hence it appears to be immediately exchangeable with other things just as it exists for the senses (so wie es sinnlich da ist). But because within the value-expression of commodity A the equivalentform pertains by nature to the commodity B it seems also to belong to the latter by nature outside of this relation. Hence, for example, the riddle (das Rätselhafte) of gold, that seems to possess, by nature, apart from its other natural properties, its colour, its specific weight, its non-oxydisability in air, etc., also the equivalent-form, or the social quality of being immediately exchangeable with all other commodities.
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COMMUNICATION: Toward an Architecture. Post-Industrial Anamorphosis. Après Salvador Dalí
We all know the mode of production cannot be represented. Especially after capitalism has reached its dematerialized phase, to hope that a concrete scene would make present a nomadic, fragmentary, global, uneven process is a robinsonade. Nevertheless, its resistance to the subject’s comprehension, its technically sublime quality, does not prevent the specter of capitalism from materializing on occasion, but only by means of a visual collaboration that accumulates violence. In March 2007 the Mexican police seized the greatest quantity of currency in history. A presumed methamphetamine trafficker, Chinese businessman Zhenli Ye Gon, had stuffed his pantries and cupboards with just over 205 million dollars. To that fabulous mass of semiotic paper, the Mexican police added his talents in the area of installation, thus evoking the image of an impregnable building of capital. The Red Specter deserves only the merit of having evoked the paranoid, oblique gaze of he whom, prophetically, Breton excommunicated with the anagram Avida Dollars.
Year 1
Issue 1
May 2010
A Kassen
Fran Ilich
M&X
Damaged by water, finanPage 16 ced by insurance
Maria Thereza Alves Fair Trade Head
Page 18
Francis Alÿs
Politics of Rehearsal Page 20
Martí Anson
Beep-Beep-Splot. Furniture for Museums Page 22
Karmelo Bermejo
3000 Euro of Public Money Spent Buying (...) Page 24 Internal Component of the Vacuum Cleaner (...) Page 26
Miguel Calderón Testamet
Page 28
Duncan Campbell Make it New John
Page 32
Jake & Dinos Chapman
Untilted
Fritzia Irizar Deterioration Fe de azar
Page36
Page 38 Page 42 Page 44
Bea Schlingelhoff
Mal wieder was fürs Bildungsbürgertum tun Page 46 Internet use is complicit to cyber-capitalism Page 51
Jota Izquierdo The Work of Art in the Age of Pirate Reproduction
Donations
Alfredo Jaar
Page 52
Page 54 Page 56
Magdalena Jitrik From the series First of May
Black Monday (Remittance)
Page 58
Teresa Margolles
To Whom Does Not Belive it Sons of a Bitch Page 60
Page 62
Raqs Media Collective investment % insurance Page 64 Fragments from a Communist Latento Page 66
Vicente Razo From the series Public Address
Page 68
CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo Av. Constitución 23 28931 Móstoles, Madrid + 34 91 276 02 21
[email protected] www.ca2m.org
Gustavo Romano
Tuesday to Sunday 11 am to 9 pm
Guillermo Santamarina
Free admission to the center and all its activities
Time Notes
Roberto Jacoby y Fernanda Laguna Skoghall Konsthall
Works from the Chapman Family Collection Page 34
Andrea Fraser
Diego de la Vega Corp. Annual Report.
www.espectrorojo.com
Page 70
Santiago Sierra
By suburban train (Cercanías): C5 Móstoles (23 min from Embajadores) By subway: L12 Pradillo
Judi Werthein
Visits to the exhibition Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 6:30 pm
Lisarb and Atrabal
Page 72
Translation of a Conversation 3 (caló) Page 74 This Functional Family
Page 76
Federico Zukerfeld Making Money
Page 78
During August Wednesday and Saturday 6:30 pm Thematic visit Sunday, 12:30 pm
