The Absolute Art Work Strikes* the Absolute Commodity
Presentation made for âFrom Art Strike to Self Abolitionâ, organised with Marina Vishmidt, 21 October 2015 at KĂźnstlerhaus BĂźchsenhausen
After Stewart Martinâs lecture on âThe Artistic Strikeâ, Marina and I led a seminar giving a slightly longer and broader historical view and looking at examples which might inform the strike from the perspective of art and art from the perspective of the strike. Stewart Martinâs work has foregrounded a critique of common understandings of artâs commodification, by exploring the apparent contradiction that:
art is a commodity, art is not a commodity
How do these critiques transform if oriented in terms of the âspecial commodityâ that constitutes labour power (or labour capacity)?
Artâs relation to work may, at first, appear only mimetic.
Art & Language, Ten Posters: Illustrations for Art-Language, 1977
Works Progress Administration
The New Deal arts projects provided work for jobless artists, but they also had a larger mission: to promote American art and culture and to give more Americans access to what President Franklin Roosevelt described as "an abundant life." The projects saved thousands of artists from poverty and despair and enabled Americans all across the country to see an original painting for the first time, attend their first professional live theater, or take their first music or drawing class.
There were four New Deal Arts Programs
⢠Public Works of Art Project
⢠Section on Painting and Sculpture
⢠Works Projects Administration Federal Art Project
The W.P.A. commissioned or built:
125,000 civilian and military buildings
800 airports and 700 miles of airport runways
900 million hot school lunches
225,000 concerts to audiences totaling 150 million
Plays and performances to audiences totaling 30 million
Artists, employed or otherwise directly dependent upon the state, began to identify as workers. Especially when the state threatened to take the work away. In a partial sense, the International Workers of the Worldâs dream of âone big companyâ vs âone big unionâ had, for this brief period, begun to take on the semblance of reality. But all roads led to war. The US policy of depression era pump-priming paid off when it became the largest capitalist producer in the world, rapidly overtaking France and Britain as Europe was decimated in the early 1940s. This also confirmed itâs role, as in the first world war, as the lender of last resort for all capitalist states globally.
In the highly charged political atmosphere of the Great Depression, left-wing project employees not only painted, acted, and wrote, they demonstrated, published newspapers, and led sit-in strikes to protest WPA personnel and wage cuts. Artists from many different leftist points of view also embraced causes such as industrial unionism, civil rights for black Americans, and support for the anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Â
Strikes in the arts in fact begin even earlier. A Music Hall strike commenced on 22 January 1907 at the Holborn Empire in London and lasted for two weeks. The dispute gained momentum owing to the support from popular entertainers including Marie Dainton, Marie Lloyd, Arthur Roberts, Joe Elvin and Gus Elen, all of whom were active on picket lines outside both London and provincial theatres. The strike seems to have been provoked indirectly by an attempt at closer regulation of the theatres and music halls on the behalf of the UK state, seeking to temper the strong language used on the stage, newly imposed managers from the other end of the class spectrum sought to intensify work and clean up the workers language both on stage and off. The strikes gained support of the wider workersâ movement, ended two weeks later and resulted in a rise in pay and better working conditions for both stage workers and artists.
The earliest explicit use I could find of the term âArt Strikeâ is in Alain Jouffroy's essay âWhat's To Be Done About Art?â (included in "Art and Confrontation," New York Graphic Society 1968):
The abolition of art can really occur in the actual time and space of a pre-revolutionary situation like that of May 1968. It is essential that the minority advocate the necessity of going on an 'active art strike' using the machines of the culture industry to set it in total contradiction to itself. The intention is not to end the rule of production, but to change the most adventurous part of 'artistic' production into the production of revolutionary ideas, forms and techniques.
The problem with Jouffroyâs proposal is that without ending the rule of production, avant-garde artists would simply swap one privileged role for another. Instead of providing entertainment for a privileged audience, artists are to form themselves into a vanguard providing ideas, forms and techniques for the masses. While such a role may be attractive to the artist, it does nothing to alter the oppressive domination of a so called creative elite over the rest of society.
Henry Flynt âDemolish Serious Cultureâ
Henry Flynt, one of several claimants to suggest they originated the term âconceptual artâ, staged a series of protests and performances proposing the demolition of âserious cultureâ and its supersession through new hybrid cultural forms, such as brend and veramusement. Flynt demands the end of bourgeois art so that a truer, livelier and more leisurely art can continue by other means.
My culture critique was the product of a philosophical posture, unique to me, which had been launched from logical positivism. The critique was also the product of intense experiences in practicing several of the arts, and in orienting myself among artists, in Cambridge and in New York from 1958 to 1963, approximately. Cultural authority had been seized by the avant-garde. A much-filiated "disintegration of art" was taking place in New York. This chapter in the career of art has been so misrepresented by art historians as to have become invisible.
I changed my term for the new modality which was meant to supersede art and entertainment several times: general acognitive culture[9] (May 1962); pure recreation; veramusement; brend (March or April 1963).
â Henry Flynt, âAgainst âParticipationâ A Total Critique of Cultureâ 1994, http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/totcritcult.html
Minimalism and the Art Workers Coalition
Robert Morris at work at the Whitney Museum, 1970
âMy first principle for political action, as well as art action, is denial and negation. One says no. It is enough at this point to begin by saying no.â
â Robert Morris, Notebook, circa 1970, quoted in Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era, University of California Press, 2009.
The New York Art Strike Against War, Repression and Racism was a coalition of artists, dealers, museum officials and other members of the art community. Among other things, it called for a one day closure of galleries and museums on 5/22/70, with optional continuance for two weeks.
On that day the Whitney, the Jewish Museum and a number of galleries closed, while the museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim suspended their admission charges. While some of the aims of the New York Art Strike were laudable (such as protesting against the war in Vietnam), its supporters also used it as a vehicle for strengthening the privileged position artists occupy within contemporary society. However, the New York Art Strikers soon broke into dissenting factions and their movement was moribund before the end of 1970.
The Art Strike, reliant upon the spaces of the art institution, is a sign of how the art workers had moved away from thinking that âworkâ consisted of physical making in the studio to understanding that âworkâ occurred when the art was on display, in the realm of viewership. As much as the Strike was a rhetorical gesture, it was also meant to signal alliances with the conventional strikes as well as the student strikes that were energizing the anti-war movement. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era, University of California Press, 2009. p.117
Lee Lozanoâs âGeneral Strike Pieceâ and âDrop-Out Pieceâ involved determinate negations of elements of the artistâs social reproduction as a particular kind of artist. Whilst gesturing, perhaps ironically, toward a personalist form of solipsism, Lozanoâs works were made very much in dialogue with the political debates taking place within the AWC.
Adrian Piper, like several other conceptual artists made gallery works specifically addressing the viewer in order to enact a form of withdrawal from the site of art. Her âCalling Cardsâ however bring this mode of refusal and withdrawal directly into the general social field -- the theatre of discomfort.
Gustav Metzger Art Strike 1977-1980
Gustav Metzger, writing in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition "Art Into Society/Society Into Art" (ICA, London 1974), called upon artists to support a three year Art Strike which was to run between 1977 and 1980. The idea was to attack the way in which the art world was organised rather than to question the status of art. However, Metzger was unable to rally support for his plan, presumably because most artists lack any sense of the mutual self-interest which would enable them to act in solidarity with others.
Before advocating an art strike, Metzger was involved in staging a series of public demonstration of âAuto-destructive Artâ, here, in Waterloo, spraying acid onto stretched cloth sheets.
During a New York City refuse workersâ strike in 1968, pro-situ group Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers began collecting uncollected rubbish from their local neighborhood in the Lower East Side and redistributing it uptown at the Lincoln Center. The strike is a blockage and redistribution of social roles, private and public spaces and things.
Paying tribute to Henry Flyntâs protests at a Stockhausen concert in the 1960s, Neoists, including Stewart Home protested against the re-staging of a Stockhausen work at Brighton Pavillion,
On Saturday 15 May 1993 at 2pm in protest against Ian Stuart's performance of Stockhausen's Harlequin, the Neoist Alliance will attempt to levitate the Pavilion Theatre, Brighton. âWe object to Stockhausen because his music and theoretical writings are elitist and imperialist,â explains Stewart Home, spokesperson for the Neoist Alliance. âUsing techniques passed down to us from secret societies such as the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati, weâll attempt to levitate the Pavilion Theatre. This is the most effective and least violent way in which we can disrupt the concert.â
After the 1990-93 Art Strike Stewart Home exhibited the bed upon which he claimed to have spent the three years of the strike reading Hegel and drawing the dole. This drew attention to the proximity between unemployment and the economic inaction of strike activity, as well as the structural unemployment of the Thatcher years as a material precondition for artists and musicians cultural practices.
Artist collective Claire Fontaine pose the very construction of the self as âproductiveâ for capitalism. Drawing on examples of critical negation and self-negation within political currents and the historical avant-garde they propose jamming and deconstructing the self as site of capitalist discipline â a veritable human strike.
Away from Strikes of Affirmation
Precarious Workers Brigade posters for London Cleaners for a Living Wage Campaign c.2012
Towards Strikes of Negation
Noise musician Mattinâs performances often revolve around staging disappointment for his audiences. At a performance as part of a two day noise festival in London in c.2004 Mattin stood still in front of the microphone for 15 minutes recording the sound of the audience, which consisted of jeering, laughter and spitting. For the subsequent 15 minutes the recording of the first 15minutes was played back to the audience. Doing ânothingâ brings out the violence of âpassiveâ social relations.
Art & Language, Index 02 (Bxal): Indexical Fragments 6, 1974
At the end of summer 1911 after a long wave of strikes in docks and mines across the country, children all over the UK went on strike.
Now began the gradual spreading of the strike-fever among school children. The very next day a strike broke out in the Edgehill district of Liverpool. It was here the children began to show their initiative and remembering how their fathers had been organised they elected a strike committee which presented demands to the school teachers; that there should be abolition of the cane, and an extra half-day holiday per week. 'Having demanded sufficient on the destructive side they turned to the constructive policy. Monitors were called upon to perform certain work. Why should they not be paid?'7 The strikers marched around the Edgehill schools, calling on other boys to come out and support them in their demands. Several of the loyal pupils said they were attacked and beaten with sticks when they refused to join the strikers.
The youngsters in their mad conduct have the open connivance at least of their parents. The facts suggesting this are that truants are parading the streets, declaring their intention not to return to school, and that school board officers going about the district have been stoned and compelled to abandon their work. Police protection has been invoked' for the teachers, and measures to eradicate the trouble are being taken both by the police and education authorities. The lads have various fancied 'grievances' which they air in boyish fashion. They apparently fail to realise that the trouble will have only one ending, an unpleasant interview with parent, teacher, or the police flagellator, Sergeant White with his terrible birch.
â Dave Marson, âThe Childrenâs Strikes of 1911â, https://libcom.org/history/childrens-strikes-1911
In Europe they are carrying on this sort of limitation of product: they are saying, "Not only will we limit the product in the factory, but we are going to limit the supply of producers. We are going to limit the supply of workers on the market." Men and women of the working class in France and Italy and even Germany today are saying, "We are not going to have ten, twelve and fourteen children for the army, the navy, the factory and the mine. We are going to have fewer children, with quality and not quantity accentuated as our ideal who can be better fed, better clothed, better equipped mentally and will become better fighters for the social revolution." Although it is not a strictly scientific definition I like to include this as indicative of the spirit that produces sabotage. It certainly is one of the most vital forms of class warfare there are, to strike at the roots of the capitalist system by limiting their supply of slaves and creating individuals who will be good soldiers on their own behalf.
-- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sabotage, 1916
Jeremy Deller is famous for re-staging The Battle of Orgreave several years after the historic defeat of the UKâs miners by Margaret Thatcherâs police force, but previously, at the beginning of the 20th century, the âcultural lagâ was a little shorter. During the Paterson Silk Strike in 1913, IWW union organisers, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn quoted above, invited the New York artists to work with 1000 striking workers creating one night pageant re-enacting the strike in Madison Square Gardens. Despite the extraordinary nature of this experiment, the cultural strike was a notable failure, losing the strikers a significant portion of their strike fund and ending in conflicts between workers and their artistic choreographers.
Aristophanes Lysistrata is a notable anti-war play. In it a sex strike is initiated by the women of Athens in order to compel the âcitizensâ, men, to vote against continuing a war. As above, the strike serves to make visible previously invisible forms of compulsion, labour and dependence. Relations are turned on their head, and the social fabric unstitched in order for us to see the truth from another perspective.
There are a lot of things about us women   That sadden me, considering how men   See us as rascals.      Â
 CALONICE:        Â
In Stewart Martinâs essay, âThe Absolute Artwork meets the Absolute Commodityâ, the translation of the sentence:Â âdas absolute Kunstwerk trifft sich
mit der absoluten Wareâ from Adornoâs Aestheic Theory, from which the essayâs title is drawn, is put into question. Adornoâs âtrifftâ has been variously translated as âmeetsâ, âconverges withâ (Hullot-Kentor), and âcoincides withâ (Jameson). Martin opts to stick with âmeetsâ, but notes that treffen also carries the meanings: âto hitâ, âto strikeâ, âto hurtâ. From Stewart Martin, âThe Absolute Artwork meets the Absolute Commodityâ, Radical Philosophy, No.146, November/December 2007, pp.24-25, footnote 18:
This contradictory relation of recognition is not grasped by the existing English translations of Adornoâs proposition. Hullot-Kentor has: âthe absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodityâ (ibid.) Lenhardt has: âHere the absolute work of art merges with the absolute commodityâ (Aesthetic Theory, trans. Lenhardt, Routledge, London and New York, 1984, p. 32). Lenhardt modifies Adornoâs text, making the phrase into a single sentence and breaking the paragraph after it. This is crude, but has the virtue of emphasizing its significance. The immediate context of Adornoâs proposition is to draw attention to an affinity that is otherwise counter-intuitive, and both translations are justified in this sense. But âmeetsâ is preferable both idiomatically and philosophically. Adornoâs words are: âdas absolute Kunstwerk trifft sich mit der absoluten Ware.â The reflexive use of treffen here might be exaggerated to allow the translation: âthe absolute artwork meets itself with the absolute commodityâ. But Adorno could have used âsich selbstâ if he wanted this sense, and the formulation he chooses is best captured by a simple âmeetsâ. âTreffenâ also has meanings of âto hitâ, âto strikeâ, âto hurtâ, which resonate with the counter-intuitive and contradictory relation of recognition at stake here. This remains implicit in âmeetsâ, but is lost in âconvergesâ or âmergesâ. This is also lost in Jamesonâs rendering, âcoincides withâ (Late Marxism, p.167). (Thanks to Andrew Fisher and Britta Eickholt for discussion of this point.)
