Over the years art has taken many forms. Paintings, videos, performances, even a dinner party. These changes have often reflected the emergence of new technologies and larger transformations in social relations. Yet, even as the art market stands at a staggering $50 billion every year, and collaborations between brands and artists has never been more prolific, there is something about the business world that has always seemed antithetical to what we think of as art.The rise of Post-Fordist societies and the resulting shifts in economic infrastructures — most recently the shift into ‘platform capitalism’ and the gig-economy — has led to a new style of business to emerge. Uber, TaskRabbit, Deliveroo, AirBnB. The rise of start-up companies has changed the landscape of capitalism; our relationship between buying and selling products has ostensibly undergone a dramatic ‘democratisation’ — now anyone can simply sign-up, create a profile and start selling.Unfortunately, these models rely upon a structural shift in the economy to increasingly precarious forms of labour and an even deeper rooting of the monopolies that control the flow of goods and services. It’s slick brand-centrism and polished Photoshop aesthetics obfuscates the eroding boundaries between public and private, culture and commerce, work and paralysis.
Briefly introduced by Marx in Capital, and further elaborated upon by political theorists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, our current era of ‘real subsumption’ has led us to a situation where:
Everything in life must now be seen as a kind of labor: we are still working, even when we consume, and even when we are asleep. Affects and feelings, linguistic abilities, modes of cooperation, forms of know-how and of explicit knowledge, expressions of desire: all these are appropriated and turned into sources of surplus value.[1]
Unlike avant-gardism of the last half-century, which pitted the worlds of subjectivity, aesthetics and social life as antagonist to, and ‘outside’, of capital, our current generation of artists are grappling with the reality that every molecule of life is now produced, defined and parasitized by structures of capitalism. Our bodies, our labour, our emotions and our thoughts. All have been ruthlessly captured and instrumentalised by the territorialising powers of capital.
In this context, it begs the question, where left is there for artists to take their refuge? Is it not, perhaps, in the innovative world of capitalism itself? Why not make Art, a Start-up?
DullTech™, created by its CEO, artist Constant Dullaart, is a crowd-sourced hardware start-up producing a media-player that makes it easy to install single and multi-channel video installations. The idea came about after Dullaart started a 2012 residency in Shenzhen, “The Silicone Valley of Hardware”, and wanted to observe the working conditions of Chinese labourers. To do this, the idea of DullTech was created as a foot in the door. However, after international interest from artists about the (fake) product, Dullaart decided to actually go ahead with making it. (It is important to note here, that whilst his motivation was expose illegal working conditions, the company eventually responsible for producing the DullTech media-player was RealTek, which currently has no history of workplace violations.)
DullTech media-player
What the sleek branding, polished corporate aesthetics and cute, clip-art style animations of the start-up’s Kickstarter video highlighted — when incongruously, yet quite subtly pitted against footage of the Chinese factories, their workers, the Shenzhen smog and its e-waste — was the deep relationship between creatives, digital production, and myriad forms of modern-day slavery; in many cases hopelessly dependent, and at their worst, actively complicit. Perhaps even more perversely, it showed that in order to critique and render transparent the processes of global labour flows, human rights abuses and staggering ecological harm that go into making something like, say, a media-player, you first have to enter into its own systems of production.
But what about distribution, rather than production? What if the question were about what to do with what we already have, rather than things we need?
New Eelam is an artwork-start-up launched at the 9th Berlin Biennale last year by artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Envisioned as a neological ‘post-capitalist’ alternative to the demands of the housing market, New Eelam acts as a ‘platform’ for a world-wide, socialist housing coop; amalgamating a crypto-communistic disavowal of private-property with the contemporary globalised ‘sharing-economy’, it uses new technological infrastructures to broaden the horizon for socialist alternatives to the onslaught of capitalist globalisation. For a flat-rate subscription charge (your rent), subscribers will live and move between New Eelam’s global portfolio of chic urban properties — expanded through both a closed-loop system of reinvestment and speculative real estate ventures taken on by the company.
New Eelam, Installation views, 11th Gwangju Biennale
Whilst the actual administrative policy of the company remains somewhat shallow — questions such as how will you administer & enforce the length of time anyone can stay at one property, or where the great majority of people whose lifestyle regularly flirts between London, Berlin and Los Angeles will come from, remain wholly unanswered — the project does hint toward the growing possibility of technology to reconfigure ideas of citizenship, housing and property ownership in a time when “capitalism accelerates its way out of its own sustainability.”
Now, whilst many artists who have taken the if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them mantra to its more puerile and exhibitionist depths have been rightfully critiqued by more established forms of leftist commentary, it seems that there is definitely something worth exploring in these more speculative absorptions of capitalist infrastructure, and what they could present as future options in a post-capitalist society: one in which the ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’ moniker takes on a wildly different flavour.
[1] Steven Shaviro, “Necessary Inefficiency in times of Real Subsumption,’ in e-flux, 46. http://www.e-flux.com/issues/46-june-2013/
No comments:
Post a Comment