Body Techniques (2007) is a new series of eight photographs that considers the interrelationships between art and globalized commerce. The title of the series refers to a phrase originally coined by Marcel Mauss and developed by Pierre Bourdieu as habitus, which describes how an operational context or behavior can be affected by institutions or ideologies.
Set in the vast building sites of Dubai and Sharjah’s futuristic corporate landscape, we see Carey Young alone and dressed in a suit, her actions reworking some of the classic performance-based works associated with Conceptual art, including pieces by Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Dennis Oppenheim and Valie Export. In thus recasting earlier works centered around the physicality of the body in time and space, it is ambiguous whether the artist is molding herself to the landscape or exploring ways of resisting it.
http://www.careyyoung.com/past/bodytechniques.html
I was particularly intersted in Young’s series ‘Body Techniques’ because of how she so obviously references post modernist artists such as Richard Long and Bruce Nauman; artists that I personally feel were involved in the rejuvinated interest in Duchampian theories, that occurred in the 1960’s and onwards. Whereas these artists looked at the concept of labour and the interaction of the artists hand within work, Young seemingly looks at the effects of labour and how her body can then interact with this.
I have discussed that in order to understand ‘true beauty’, according to Kant, one must distance and become disinterested with the art or work. This distancing occurs when the labourer alienates himself from his products because as Marx suggests, he cannot own that of which he makes and therefore sees it as ‘outside of himself’.
‘But then a question arises. What happened to the artist’s body when the labor of art production became alienated labor? The answer is simple: the artist’s body itself became a readymade. Foucault has already drawn our attention to the fact that alienated work produces the worker’s body alongside the industrial products; the worker’s body is disciplined and simultaneously exposed to external surveillance, a phenomenon famously characterized by Foucault as “panopticism.”2 As a result, this alienated industrial work cannot be understood solely in terms of its external productivity—it must necessarily take into account the fact that this work also produces the worker’s own body as a reliable gadget, as an “objectified” instrument of alienated, industrialized work. And this can even be seen as the main achievement of modernity, as these modernized bodies now populate contemporary bureaucratic, administrative, and cultural spaces in which seemingly nothing material is produced beyond these bodies themselves. One can now argue that it is precisely this modernized, updated working body that contemporary art uses as a readymade. However, the contemporary artist does not need to enter a factory or administrative office to find such a body. Under the current conditions of alienated artistic work, the artist will find such a body to already be his or her own.’
Boris Groys ‘Marx after Duchamp, or the Artists Two Bodies’ 2010.
Groys speaks of alienation in a way in which the artists hand is completely absent, however I speak of alienation in the way in which the artist creates their work and then distances themself from their outcome. I still think Groys theory can be applied to what I am researching because although there has been physical interaction, the distancing in which I am discussing occurs because of a strong emotion that emerges after constant production; hatred.
I watched one of Hughes documentaries from his series ‘The Business of Art’ because I was interested in the idea of capitalism in contemporary art when it comes to actually buying and selling work. Damien Hirst is an obvious artist to look at where it concerns this issue as he pays particular attention to where, how and who his work his sold to, but Hughes discusses how this ‘frenzy’ for selling and buying art seemingly started with da vinci’s Mona Lisa.
At Sotheby’s on Tuesday an anonymous bidder bought a bull in a tank of formaldehyde for £10.3million. The world’s most expensive cut of beef was cooked up, inevitably, by the artist Damien Hirst, whose “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” sale of 223 new works fetched £111.5million, a record for an auction dedicated to one artist. The illustrious Australian art critic Robert Hughes, however, isn’t buying the hype.
This is partly because Hughes – who presents The Mona Lisa Curse, a one-off polemic broadcast on Channel 4 this Sunday – considers Hirst’s work flashy and fatuous. Indeed he has described one of the British artist’s sharks in formaldehyde as “the world’s most overrated marine organism”.
But Hughes’s central beef with Hirst’s headline-grabbing success is that it illustrates how today’s mercenary art market has made the price of a work of art more significant than its meaning.
“The idea that there is some special magic attached to Hirst’s work that shoves it into the multimillion pound realm is ludicrous,” Hughes says. “[The price] has to do with promotion and publicity and not with the quality of the works themselves.”
In The Mona Lisa Curse, Hughes traces the pernicious rise of the commercial art market back to 1963, when Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous portrait was exhibited in New York. The Mona Lisa, says Hughes, was treated “as thought it were a film star. People came not to look at it, but to say that they’d seen it.”
This “feeding frenzy” over a single painting marked the start of a process by which works of art became celebrities in their own right. And from the 1960s onwards, as Hughes recounts, acquisitive collectors started buying works of art not because they liked them, but because they expected a financial return.
Hughes’s film argues that art is the biggest unregulated market in the world apart from drugs. Contemporary art sales, such as Hirst’s, rake in £10billion a year. Modern art is dottily expensive to buy not, says Hughes, because it’s so good, but because investors believe it will yield quick profits.
“The commercial art market places too much emphasis upon novelty and trendiness,” he says, “because buyers expect that new work will get more valuable in the short-term.”
Of course, a work of art’s net worth – unlike a company’s – can’t be subjected to objective scrutiny. So those artists, such as Hirst, who attract controversy or have a flair for self-promotion are able to inflate the price of their work with some cleverly orchestrated PR. Moreover, collectors who have already invested in these artists would be fools not to play along, as Hughes explains.
“The market is manipulated by collectors who decide to bid up the work of an artist [they’ve already invested in],” he says. “So when artist X comes up on the auction block, the collectors all bid it up, so that they can then multiply the value of their existing holdings in artist X by the value of the inflated sale.”
The relentless upward surge in prices has two regrettable consequences. First, art becomes seen as a commodity, something to be owned as much as appreciated. Second, the only places ordinary people can experience celebrated works of art at first-hand – museums and public galleries ¬– are now priced out of the auction room.
“Instead of being the common property of humankind the way a book is, art becomes the particular property of somebody who can afford it,” Hughes says. “And when you have some Russian squillionaire who started buying art three minutes ago but has the GNP of Georgia in his pocket, how can museums compete? They can’t – which causes great social harm. Suppose that every worthwhile book in the world cost $1million ¬– imagine what a catastrophic effect on culture that would have.”
All this makes depressing reading for art lovers. But if on the same day that the world’s financial markets plummeted in panic, Damien Hirst’s art was selling for record sums, shouldn’t everyone be ploughing their savings into artificially preserved farm animals?
“One of the things that sustains the art market is an irrational faith in a continuous rise in prices,” says Hughes. “There was a 17th-century Italian painter called Guido Reni. Not a lot of people have heard of him but in the late 18th century many connoisseurs thought that Italy’s two supreme artists were Michelangelo and Reni. But by 1950 you could buy a 10ft painting by Reni for £300. People fall out of fashion quite rapidly. So this idea of the inviolability of the modern art market is a fantasy.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3560916/The-Mona-Lisa-Curse.html
September 2008
Andrew Pettie
I have read several essays now concerning marxist/capitalist theories and I was particularly interested in the essay by Chris Rasmussen from the University of Nabraska in 2006. He really focused on a subject that I had been drawn to and that was the Marxist theory that the labourer comes to hate his produce. The items en masse become somewhat ‘one’ entity and are an over whelming being that bare down on the labourer as he will never be able to ‘own’ what he constantly interacts with. As Chris Rasmussen then suggests, he distances and ‘alienates’ himself from his products, ‘seeing it as outside himself’.
I was particularly intersted in this idea of ‘distancing’ that apparently occurs between the labour and his work because Kant suggests that to ‘appreciate beauty, the subject must approach the work with a spirit of disinterestedness’.
Another thing that struck me is that the worker, or labourer, although subjected to the same procedures everyday, in fact comes to loathe the work they do because there is no element of ‘choice’. They are ultimately instructed.
Within my own practice, I take these mundane everyday procedures that are often repetitive and ‘workplace dependent’ but I answer to myself, setting my own rules and targets. A distancing thus occurs because I am subjecting myself to the same routines, however, I think that a true distancing occurs when I take on the role of the capitalist; looking at the results of my instruction - and as Kant suggests, after this distancing has occured I can see the beauty in that of which I have created.
worker from his labor must be equated with the alienation of that
artist from his. According to the Marx, labor in the capitalist order
became external to the worker, an activity he performed away from
his home and in which the core of his being did not participate. His
labor was forced, that is, the worker worked not because he received
satisfaction from his labor, but to satisfy the needs of his body, from
which he became alienated as well. Th e worker thus avoided all labor,
seeing it as outside himself, something alien and hostile. Labor, and
by extension art, in capitalism was not a spontaneous activity or an
expression of life, instead it was something that belonged to someone
else; work led to a “loss of self,” and “mortifi cation.”5 All activities
and relationships in such an inhuman system became tainted,
vulgar and, most importantly, ugly"
(PDF File) Ugly and Mostrous; Marxist Aesthetics
University of Nebraska
Chris Rasmussen 2006
Art has played a most important role in human society, practically since the birth of our species. This role will not only continue, but be greatly enhanced under socialism, when art will lose its special, exclusive character and become the possession of all. In the second place, there is no way out for art under capitalism.
Under capitalism the worker is not considered as a human being with human tastes and needs. For the bourgeois he is a mere abstraction: a “factory hand”, a “factor of production” or a “consumer”.
"http://www.marxist.com/ArtAndLiterature-old/marxism_and_art.html
Marxism and Art by Alan Woods 2000
In my most recent work I have been researching marxist and capitalist theories in my attempt to discover more about art as labour or even vice versa. I came across this essay online which I found extremely helpful. Although it seems an obvious thing to do, I haven’t actually researched into labour and art as a combined unit, but instead investigated them individually. This essay and its broken down paragraphs discusses how a labourer is effected by the ‘fruits of his labour’ and how this can also be applied to the artist and his work.
Richard ForsterOptimism and Future(2003)
Forsters sculptures question this commonly supposed split between representation as surface and the object as a literal, self identical presence. It’s a split that art since minimalism has grown to accept, acknowledging that the sculpture might easily be composed of already existing objects, and consequently limiting the transformative intervention of the artist to the more distanced role of planning and execution. These were conventions comfortably installed in much contemporary art by the beginning of the 1990’s. The object of sculpture had become the mere vehicle for a significant image, and the more complex questions of how an object might aspire to some other order of knowledge outside of what it ‘literally’ appeared to be, became eclipsed.
In clear contrast to these, establishing itself in the mid 1990’s Forsters work returns to sculpture in the classic sense, the reformation of existing prosaic material into something that is of, about, and more than the world it inhabits.
Forsters use of the term ‘prototype’ suggests this ‘out of time’ quality his sculptures aspires to. Prototypes are real objects caught in limbo; more embodied than a concept or an idea, they nevertheless hover over literal reality, their only function to announce the arrial of the truly ‘real’, mass produced version to come. Forsters sculptures are then in some way about how our imagination starts to kick in when the easy recognition of an object is unsettled. Objects we though we knew step away fom us, into a space poised between objective visual reality and the imaginary world it dialogues with; a world inhabited both by rational archetypes as much as art - historical jokes, visual linguisitic puns, and a purely irrational, sensual enjoyment of colours, surfaces and forms.
When manipulating my cellophane structures and then using them as a medium to draw from, I am very concious of the fact they are becoming more and more unfamiliar as they pass through these stages. I am not entirely sure whether they are meant to be recognised, but I do know that I want them to investigated and I want the viewer to become intimate with them in they in which they approach. Like Forsters work, in a way I do want the viewers imagination to kick in and start to question what they are being confronted with.
