"towards a concept of immaterial indestructibility"

CHAPTER THREE

FOR A CONCEPT OF IMMATERIAL INDESTRUCTIBILITY

MATTHEW BOWMAN

I

One particular scene of Batman (1989), directed by Tim Burton, presents The Joker—the archenemy of the eponymous hero—causing havoc in Gotham City Art Museum. Vicki Vale, a talented photographer, is at the museum for a dinner date with the billionaire Bruce Wayne. Wayne (Batman, of course) has made no such arrangement and the villain, played on this occasion by Jack Nicholson, has orchestrated a fiendish trap to draw out our hero. But rather than simply capture Vale, he preludes the trap by taking the opportunity to vandalize the museum’s rather impressive collection of paintings and sculptures. Without mercy, and to the beat of Prince’s music playing on a ghetto-blaster, The Joker and his gang of goons lob brightly-coloured paint at pictures by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Degas, while sculptures are knocked-over or redecorated. A marble bust has its hair repainted green and its lips bright red: the distinctive colours of The Joker. Only one painting, Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (1954) is permitted to survive the onslaught unscathed.

Something more or less similar happens in another movie, Tom Twyker’s The International (2009). Interpol agent Louis Salinger has tracked a top assassin to the prestigious Guggenheim in New York unaware that this assassin has been marked for death by the company he serves. A crack team of men arrives, equipped with automatic weapons, and an intense gun battle breaks out in the Guggenheim. Forced by the circumstances to momentarily work together, Salinger and the assassin engage in a reckless pitch battle that sees rapid hails of bullets fly across from one side of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic corkscrew spiral to the other. Bullet holes violently puncture the pristine modernist white walls. For the most part, the artworks remain unspoiled—not because the bullets

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fortuitously miss the artworks but rather because the works on display are mostly video projections upon the walls. Even if the projectors themselves are shot, there is no guarantee that the artwork is destroyed insofar as it is presumably connected to an unseen DVD player or computer. The exception to this non-destruction is a large piece which, hanging down the centre of the corkscrew, is comprised of numerous monitors in the manner of some kind of hi-tech mixed-media chandelier. Salinger shoots at it as a means of ensuring his escape; the destruction he rages upon it is as if agitated compensation for the artworks that survived the gunfire.

At face value, especially in regard to the first film clip mentioned, we are presented with incidences in which the so-called “civilizing rituals” that comprise the museum break down. Subverting one of the main functions of the museum, namely the protection of cultural artifacts from time and overuse, the characters wreck mayhem and destroy examples of the displayed collection. The scenes we are confronted with are, to be sure, fictional and perhaps merely enjoyable Hollywood fare, but for all that they are not beyond the realms of plausibility. As art historian Dario Gamboni’s classic study, The Destruction of Art, reminds us, artworks have long been victim to instances of wanton vandalism and socially-motivated iconoclasm.1 There are numerous cases evincing destruction in the museum or gallery that could be referenced here—from Pierre Pinoncelli’s notorious attacks on the reproductions of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to the more recent slashing of Andres Serrano’s controversial Piss Christ (1987). Both of these are deliberate attempts to do harm, however, we should not exclude accidental situations resulting in damage to the artwork. The parental dictum of “look with your eyes, not with yours hands” seeks, of course, to forestall such unhappy accidents within the gallery space. Following a similar trajectory, the Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art online project served as an archive forensically documenting the unfortunate fates of various 20th century artworks according to the categories of “Attacked”, “Destroyed”, “Discarded”, “Ephemeral”, “Erased”, “Missing”, “Rejected”, “Stolen”, “Transient” and “Unrealized”.2

Not all of these categories are directly germane to my immediate concerns, nor do I wish to explicate them in this present essay, but it is worth noting their overall tenor towards the destruction of art. There has, though, been a countervailing tendency that takes as its leitmotif destruction in art and is exemplified, for example, by the auto-destructive 1 Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). 2 Sadly, although appropriately, the Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art has since been erased, although traces of it remain here: http://galleryoflostart.com/.

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works of Gustav Metzger (who, of course, organized the Destruction in Art Symposium, DIAS, of 1966) or Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960). These works actively hunt for their own death—preferring, maybe, the afterlife—or take destruction as their theme. Whether in or of, however, destruction appears an immanent condition of art as such rather than some external potentiality; what destruction in art acknowledges and highlights, for its own part, is that inherent destructibility—an acknowledgment that is often displaced by the emphasis upon timeless values and by the artworks that have survived the ravages of history. By the same token, the museum is the protective environment that sustains the artwork over extended periods, thereby indicating the fragility of their existence, their innate liableness to destruction. All in all, then, the central point is that artworks are, perhaps seemingly almost by definition rather than merely contingently, precarious.

And yet, the second of the two films that I began this paper with, The International, conveys another possibility—albeit one that is unintended within the film and rather speculative on my own part—that emerges when set against Batman or, more generally and more pertinently, placed in relation to destructibility of/in art as such. It’s this speculative thought that I wish to broach in this paper. Simply put, the key contrast here amid these two films is between the predominant immateriality of the artworks that survive the shoot-out in The International versus the materiality of the paintings and sculptures damaged in Batman inasmuch as in the case of the former that survival is dependent upon immateriality and in the latter the destruction intrinsically stems from materiality. Generally speaking, the works shown in The International are video-based: photons organized by specific data configurations translated into immaterial images projected onto a wall. Whilst the wall and projector represents the material components of this set-up, these are largely extraneous to the artwork itself. Neither the bullets that puncture the wall nor any that might irrevocably damage the projector would constitute destruction wrought upon the artwork, which consists of an immaterial, virtual image. And in a similar fashion, the quotidian television monitors that comprise another artwork that are destroyed by gunfire does not indicate the destruction of the artwork tout court; the television monitors relays rather than contains information, and, being mass produced, are relatively easily replaceable. Presumably, the best chance of destroying such works rests upon destroying the component that holds the data itself—namely, the hard drive, USB, or compact disc. But even here destruction is not certain: data is reproducible and can be shared amongst numerous sources, and so


destruction would surely require the elimination of all those sources. Could such art, then, be considered indestructible?

II

The question raised is, as already admitted, speculative in form and might be regarded as a playful thought experiment. Nonetheless, it seems to me that this scene from The International can help us to reconsider well-established concepts within contemporary art history, especially when it comes to under-explored and hence under-discussed avenues in the critical-history of art practices and post-object movements since the 1960s. For example, if The International suggests that each artwork’s survival amid a hail of bullets stems from the immateriality of that artwork (i.e., the conceptually significant aspects of the artwork are to be found within its light-based projection of images rather than the technical supports that necessarily enable the projection of the image in particularized circumstances), then we might cast doubt on what could be termed the conventional aesthetic or historical attitude in which immateriality correlates—or, to state the matter more strongly, equates—with ephemerality or its cognates such as “precariousness” and “transience.” In other words, there appears to be a potential intersection between the immaterial and the indestructible that is not commonly noted within art-historical discourses.

Discussions around immateriality in relation to artistic practice largely take as their focal points Conceptualism and post-Conceptual Art strategies from the 1960s onwards. The key textual source here, of course, is curator Lucy Lippard’s influential 1973 anthology Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972, which extends from her earlier essay, “The Dematerialization of Art”, co-written with John Chandler and published in February 1968.3 Although her central term, “dematerialization”, is never—at least to my mind— sufficiently laid out in a theoretical manner and was thoroughly rejected from a philosophical standpoint by the artist-writer Mel Bochner, Lippard’s remarks upon dematerialization in Conceptual art nonetheless remains a useful place to proceed from even if one should not over-identify it with the notion of immateriality as such.4

3 Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 4 Bochner’s critical review was published in Artforum, v. 11, no. 10, June 1973, 74-75. It is reprinted in Mel Bochner, Solar Systems and Rest Rooms: Writings and

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To a certain degree, “dematerialization” was a relational term that made sense insofar as the art it categorized was in contrast to the medium-specific works answerable to art critic’s Clement Greenberg’s theory of modernism, on the one hand, and to the literalist or objecthoodness of Minimalism, on the other.5 That is to say, both tendencies—whether comprehended as an opposition or as significantly convergent—were the aesthetic ground upon which Conceptualism turned against, although Conceptualism was historically and intellectually more proximate to Minimalism than Colour Field painting. As Lippard writes, in place of the focus upon objects as the artwork, in Conceptualism “the idea was paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized’” and this was evident in mediums such as “video, performance, photography, narrative, text [and] actions”.6 The contention that the medium was secondary to the idea can, of course, be found in multiple regions of the field of Conceptual art and intersected with the rejection of art as commodity item. Again, in Lippard’s own words: “The artists who are trying to do non-object art are introducing a drastic solution to the problems of artists being bought and sold so easily, along with their art. (…) The people who buy a work of art they can’t hang up or have in their garden are less interested in possession. They are patrons rather than collectors.”7

In stating the material was secondary, however, Lippard doesn’t seek riddance of materiality as such; rather, from her list of examples of Conceptual mediums, it’s notable that each medium is, in principle, reproducible. The photograph issues from a negative, the text could be reprinted, and the performance is often theoretically repeatable—as long as each reiteration tries to copy the original or previous reproduction fairly closely, then it’s uncertain that any minimal differences would be of significant consequence. While these serve as instances of dematerialization, Lippard is also well aware of artworks that push the process of dematerialization all the way towards its logical conclusion: immateriality. Examples abound here, too, but we could mention Yves Klein’s (in)famous Le Vide (1961), currently installed in Krefeld, in which

Interviews, 1965 – 2007, foreword by Yve-Alain Bois (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: MIT Press, 2008). 5 For a strong account of Minimalism’s “objecthood”, see: Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 6 Lippard, Six Years, xi. 7 Ibid., xiv.


an empty space was set aside in order to become a void.8 Interestingly for our purposes, the integrity of that void is not ruined when visitors are occasionally permitted access to the room. Her focus upon the immaterial, then, very much operates to create a space for an oppositional practice that interrogates and even refuses the patronage system of the art market as well as capitalism more generally—matters that were of especially great concerns for artists at the tail end of the 1960s. Here we might push this almost utopian thought further: could it be imagined that the link between immateriality and indestructibility could lead to artistic practices safe from the encroachment of the market? That immaterial art’s indestructible qualities are not simply an indestructibility against vandals, but against capitalism, too? Could immateriality be political?

To think in these terms is admittedly somewhat utopian and Lippard’s contention had already been problematized prior to the publication of Six Years. Of particular importance here is Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959-62) in which he sold—in exchange for gold—various immaterial spaces above the Seine. To demonstrate the buyer’s permanent ownership over a particular immaterial zone, the buyer would receive a certificate signed by Klein. The transformation of common immaterial space into purchased commodity evinces a near-alchemical process, as the function of gold in the exchange suggests. However, in order to complete the transaction, and thus own part of the sky, the buyer was contractually obliged to destroy the certificate. While Lippard saw immateriality, the shift towards post-objects artistic practices, as an “escape attempt” from the increasingly dominant post-war consumer culture, Klein suggests that even the immaterial can now become available for commodity exchange.

In discussing all this, there is a coincidence—at once theoretical and historical—that we cannot avoid. While Lippard initially comprehended dematerialization as a means for challenging the art market, and the way it commodifies both artwork and the artist’s career, writers such as Alexander Alberro point to how conceptualism became enmeshed in what it nonetheless sought to avoid and counter.9 In the same year that Lippard’s anthology was published, sociologist Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society which served as a prognostic analysis of economic,

8 For a useful discussion, see: Denys Riout, “Exaspérations 1958”, in Voids: A Retrospective, ed. Mathieu Copeland with John Armleder, Laurent le Bon, Gustav Metzger, Mai-Thu Perret, Clive Phillpot, and Philippe Pirotte (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2009). 9 See: Alexander Alberro, ed., Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: MIT Press, 2003).

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labour, and socio-economic transformations within advanced capitalist nation states, with America being his core example.10 Bell forecasted that the half-century from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s would witness an unprecedented structural change, with developed countries shifting towards post-industrial labour models as becoming central to their economies. In principle, this means that rather than supporting the country economically through agriculture or industry (which constitute the primary and secondary forms of labour, historically), the economy would be dominated by the tertiary sector, which is typified by service provision. Bell writes: “if we group services as personal (retail stores, laundries, garages, beauty shops); business (banking and finance, real estate, insurance); transportation, communication, and utilities; and health, education, research, and government; then it is the growth of the last category which is decisive for post-industrial society”.11 Unifying these areas is their deemphasizing of materiality; money is not invested in the production of consumable objects, but instead in fleeting intersubjective exchanges and experiences.

While Bell’s writings have somewhat, it seems, fallen out of fashion as a reference point—perhaps largely because his social forecasting almost naturalized the post-industrial as an evolutionary step within Western economies—the sense that the beginning of the 1970s reflect a significant transformation is to be found in more critical thinkers. For instance, Marxist theorist David Harvey points to 1973 as the approximate moment in which the economy partly placed the socio-industrial regime of Fordism to one side and entered a new era of flexible accumulation that saw, for instance, the intensification of finance capitalism and ultimately the de-regulatory “Big Bang” of 1986 which was linked with “a highly integrated global system co-ordinated through instantaneous telecommunications”. In consequence, Harvey notes that “while industrial, merchant, and landed capital [has] become so integrated into financial operations and structures that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where commercial and industrial interests begin and strictly financial interests end”.12

The burgeoning field of studies examining post-Fordism has largely picked up on these issues within the contemporary socio-political context. Within the context of this book, post-Fordism, which is typified in part by precarious employment (short-term contracts, for example, and part-time

10 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1999 [1973]). 11 Ibid., 15. 12 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 161.


work) and immaterial labour, is especially relevant to the discussion. Constraints of space preclude a full analysis here, but it’s worth mentioning that the emergence of post-Fordism connects with the rise of computer-based technologies and what sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello see as a crisis in capitalism after the May 1968 riots.13 Significantly, they view the transition into post-Fordism as bringing artistic critique—defined by notions of individuality, creativity and radicalism—into managerial practices. Along these lines, art becomes the model for a “new spirit” of capitalism, and Conceptualism entwines with the new immaterial forms of commodity production. To suggest that immaterial art forms conjoin with a potential indestructibility, then, shouldn’t be taken as a utopian claim. On the contrary, this conjunction may also negatively propose that the commodification of immateriality under post-Fordist capitalism exhibits a desire, and perhaps even a strategy, for attaining its own indestructibility. In other words, if the economic shift towards immateriality was a step taken in order to rescue and preserve capitalism, then the links between immateriality and indestructibility may hinder any attempts to formulate a genuinely egalitarian society. The critical question, then, becomes how to produce immaterial art forms that retain a degree of oppositionality rather than reflect the new spirit of capitalism.

III

For the moment, this question may have to remain unanswered, but in drawing towards an end I wish to consider two artists who have implicitly addressed some of the themes of this paper, such as the link between conceptual art’s dematerialization and the dematerialization of labour in contemporary post-Fordist society. But if immateriality has become one of the key aspects of value creation today, meaning that conceptual art is going to struggle to escape from the structural logic of the market, then I’m interested in how in the works there is an impure immateriality that arguably seeks to redeem the critical potentiality of materiality. The work of Irish artist John Gerrard is very interesting in the complex relationships it draws between the immaterial and the material. At first glance, we are presented with computer animations, often but not always projected on a large scale. Some of these works depict isolated agri-industrial units, mostly devoid of people, which are animated in real time throughout the

13 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London and New York: Verso, 2005 [1999]).

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exhibition. Works such as Grow Finish Unit (Near Elkhart, Kansas) (2008) and Lufkin (Near Hugo, Colorado) (2009) are real-time simulations of existing agri-industrial architecture that intersect the natural world and machines. Gerrard’s Oil Stick Work (Angelo Martinez/Richfield, Kansas) (2008) was his first computer animation to feature a human character. In this case, the solitary figure of Angelo Martinez paints a single square of his barn with an oil stick; this activity takes the entire time from dusk to dawn. As an ongoing real-time computer simulation, covering the whole barn will take thirty-eight years in total.

While computer animation evokes the leisurely fun of contemporary games consoles, its origins actually derive from real-time simulation software used by the army as part of its training operations. Here, immaterial virtual experiences are intended as preparation for concrete real experiences, which is to say, the virtual precedes the actual, and the immaterial is in advance of the material. Along these lines, it’s also worth mentioning—admittedly rather vaguely—a project Gerrard is presently working on in Norway for the Kistefos Museet. The work is due to be in a former hydro-powered paper mill and would consist of a real-time simulation piece that would itself be powered by the adjacent river. Gerrard’s piece, however, will not simply be a simulation but also be designed so that it automatically continuously produces “information” that would take the form of immaterial bytes of memory. The river, in effect, would be producing immaterial information that would accumulate and eventually fill hard drive space in a manner analogous to its former role in producing realms of paper. Once the hard drive is filled with information, it would be removed from the computer simulation and another put in its place. As the exhibition progresses, it is expected that filled hard drives would also permanently occupy the pavilion alongside the computer animation, thereby demonstrating how the materiality of the river becomes the immateriality of computerized information which, in turn, is reliant upon the material support of hard drives.

I would like to consider one more work very briefly in order to cogitate how the immaterial sphere created by technology potentially enables an indestructible, temporally endless artwork. The work in question is titled Permanent Vacation (2008) by North-American artist Cory Arcangel. Arcangel’s practice has been based around using and modifying computer programs that are occasionally given open access status. His Photoshop-based works, such as Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Spectrum”, mousedown y=1098 x=1749.9, mouse up y=0 x=4160 (2008), use the popular program’s functions to generate abstract compositions; with each composition he


publishes online the details of how that composition was created so that other people with Photoshop can reproduce that very image. Permanent Vacation utilizes two computers which are set so that their email accounts are on “out of office” mode; one account emails the other, thereby automatically initiating that second account to reply with an “out of office” message—this is received by the first account which replies with its own “out of office” message, thus triggering another message, and so on and so forth. As with the other examples, the immateriality constituted by the virtual space exists in relative disjunction to the computers and suggests that physically destroying them wouldn’t be enough to destroy the work as such. Indeed, one might well imagine that the email accounts would continue ping-ponging auto-responses to one another, thereby prolonging their pattern of failed communication, in the absence of any actual hardware. The concluding examples of Gerrard and Arcangel evince, to my mind,

something resembling a dialectic between materiality and the immaterial, which, to paraphrase Mel Bochner, no virtuality or immateriality exists without a sustaining material support. Without denying the necessity of those material or technical supports, their significance is somewhat secondary to the immaterial realms they enable to be shown when it comes to the question of indestructibility. Indeed, it’s unclear how we might determine if destruction had been carried out even if, say, The Joker had popped over and highly visibly daubed bright-green all over the monitor. Since the advent of Conceptualism during the 1960s, it has become commonplace to link dematerialization with the ephemeral. This correlation isn’t wrong in general, arguably, but hopefully I have done enough to suggest that ephemerality and precariousness are the logical outcomes of the artwork’s materiality. The immaterial proposes as a potentiality the indestructible.

IV

As a paper given at the 39th Association of Art Historians conference, it was content to rest with the notion that seeing immateriality as being linked with the indestructible rather than the ephemeral offered a worthwhile shift in our art-historical narratives of conceptual art and its aftermath. And yet, the political implications of proposing disturbing interconnections between immateriality, indestructibility, and post-Fordist economies ultimately continued to haunt the ongoing reflection that accompanied the expansion of the original paper into a chapter. Could one, after all, redeem the counter-market strategies that conceptual artists once

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hoped to instantiate through moving beyond materiality and medium specificity? Or was conceptualism, and the artistic practices it developed, condemned to appear as mirror images of the regime of immaterial flexible accumulation that grew in the wake of 1973? Returning to the objecthood of artworks—even under the banner of Object-Orientated Ontology, associated with philosopher Graham Harman—seems insufficient here as it appears from this viewpoint, perhaps, as simply as a retreat to the historical moment when the relationship between the objectness of artworks and their commodity character became too difficult to parse. Meanwhile, hoping that immaterial art can subvert an immaterial capitalism through the resources and dynamics common to both may smack too much of optimism. Neither objecthood nor immateriality, it seems, provide significant solutions to the problem. Perhaps, though, posing the issue as an opposition between materiality

and immateriality is the incorrect theoretical step to take. Indeed, the examples of Gerrard and Arcangel indicated there was a crucial dialectic between materiality and immateriality that has uncertain consequences for the question of indestructibility. This dialectic, although important, was almost an afterthought in the original paper in that respect, noted, but not worked through. The untimely death of American artist Allan Sekula led me to looking back at the catalogue for Fish Story, his major work of photo-documentary critical realism that was carried out as a long-term project from 1989 to 1995. Rereading his essay “Dismal Science” after a gap of a few years, I was struck by the following fundamental contention:

My argument here runs against the commonly held views that the computer and telecommunications are the sole engines of the third industrial revolution. In effect, I am arguing for the continued importance of the maritime space in order to counter the exaggerated importance attached to that largely metaphysical construct, “cyberspace”, and the corollary myth of “instantaneous” contact between distant spaces. I am often struck by the ignorance of intellectuals in this respect: the self-congratulating conceptual aggrandizement of “information” frequently is accompanied by peculiar erroneous beliefs: among these is the widely held quasi-anthropomorphic notion that most of the world’s cargo travels as people do, by air. This is an instance of the blinkered narcissism of the information specialist: a “materialism” that goes no farther than “the body”. In the imagination, e-mail and airmail come to bracket the totality of global movement, with the airplane taking care of everything that is heavy. Thus the proliferation of air-courier companies and mail-order catalogues serving the professional, domestic, and leisure of the


managerial and intellectual classes does nothing to bring consciousness down to earth, or to turn it in the direction of the sea, the forgotten space.14

Sekula is worth quoting at length here insofar as he points to the continuing necessity of materiality within capitalism—the slow-moving ship carrying physical commodities or resources within its heavily-wrought containers from one geographical location to another—as well as the potential misprision that may stem from the identification between cognitive worker and post-Fordism. With the growing interest in immateriality within the economy, one wonders if the cognitariat has displaced the old proletariat as the revolutionary subject of history.15 Yet the key thing here is Sekula’s reminder of the presence of materiality within an informational economy, which we may emphasize as a dialectic. For, if the new spirit of capitalism has sought its indestructibility within the immaterialized economy, then it might be prudent to hold onto the dialectic of immateriality and materiality: the immaterial possesses vestiges of utopian possibility while the material may serve as a grounding principle that points to the limits and potential corruptions of immateriality. Through their conceptual interdependency we might situate a thoroughgoing political analysis within the field of art.

14 Allan Sekula, “Dismal Science, part 1”, in Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 50. 15 The concept of the “cognitariat” refers to the section of labour force defined by forms of work in which intellectual activity is paramount rather than manual labour. In that sense, the notion of the cognitariat is associated with the category of “white collar work”—typically, the office worker. Yet, the categories are not wholly identical: the concept of the cognitariat updates that of the white collar worker through its relation to changes in Information Technology, the spread of intellectual labour beyond the office into other spheres, and the increasingly precariousness of such work.

"towards a concept of immaterial indestructibility"

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