Public Address
Preliminary Thoughts on Alternative Systems of Distribution
- Kelly Baum -
For many years now, I have been interested in the relationship between art and the public—specifically, I am curious to understand how art addresses (and, in so doing, actually creates) its audience. I do not think that we, as viewers, come to art fully formed. I believe that the way art looks at us, talks to us, and engages us, as well as the places that it finds us, all go a long way towards constructing us as subjects.
There are groups of artists that have actively exploited this ability of art to literally make subjects. Take, for example, the artists associated with Russian Constructivism and the Situationist International (SI). Although working at very different moments in history, both movements sought to instrumentalize art—that is, they not only put art in the service of promoting radical political change and modeling a postrevolutionary society, they also used it to prepare subjects for precisely these changes by reconstituting them as subjects. Indeed, the production of subjects—specifically political subjects—might be said to have been the primary goal of both the Russian Constructivists and the SI. One of their common strategies for (trans)forming society as well as consciousness, moreover, involved circumventing conventional channels of distribution.
In 1921, four years after the October Revolution, the Russian Constructivists gradually abandoned their previous experiments in non-objective painting and sculpture because they had come to believe these contravened the imperatives of a Communist society. Working closely with industry and state officials, they entered a self-declared “productivist” phase and began to create goods whose use value and ideological value far outweighed their exchange value. Some of the Russian Constructivists designed theater sets, workers’ clubs, textiles and clothing, while others created books, posters, propaganda kiosks and “factographic” photographs and photomontages that were destined for both journals and trade shows. According to Benjamin Buchloh, this extraordinary paradigm shift in the production and distribution of art was motivated by a desire to address and, by extension, enlighten as broad an audience as possible—that is, it was the corollary of an effort to fundamentally redefine the relationship between art, artists and their public.1
The Situationists too experimented with an alternative system of distribution, but this meant something quite different to them than it did to the Russian Constructivists. Unlike the latter, who worked in postrevolutionary Russia, the SI operated out of Paris in the 1950s and ’60s at a moment when advanced industrial capitalism was consolidating its power in Europe and a large middle class comprised of avid consumers was starting to materialize.2 For a group such as the SI, steeped as it was in Marxist theory, these particular historical circumstances demanded that they disavow themselves of the existing cultural, political and economic system—not collaborate with it.
Indeed, although they exhibited (and sold) their work in galleries on a handful of occasions, when it came to distribution, the Situationists more often than not utilized a precommercial, premonetary mode of exchange called the potlatch. The potlatch was a practice common among American Indians indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. During a potlatch, the leader from one tribe would bestow a gift of considerable value on the leader of another tribe, who was then obligated to reciprocate with a gift of even greater value. In cases of extreme competition, leaders would sometimes destroy the very goods they would have otherwise circulated amongst the tribe or conferred on a rival leader. Here the ultimate objective of the potlatch was not the assertion of power and prestige but rather the nonproductive expenditure of wealth.
The potlatch held great appeal for the Situationists, who put it into practice on many occasions. In 1959, for instance, Guy Debord and his fellow Situationist Asger Jørn published Mémoires, a book comprised entirely of found materials. In lieu of selling it for a profit, they gave copies of the book away for free, asking only that their recipients (as in an actual potlatch) “give something even more extreme in return.” In the preface to the 1993 edition, Debord described Mémoires as a “sumptuous gift” whose celebrity over the course of its thirty-five-year existence had been “spread only on the mode of the potlatch.”3
We should not be surprised by the Situationists’ enthusiasm for the potlatch. On the one hand, members of the SI assiduously strove to insulate themselves from commodity culture, the subversion of which was the very task assigned to their artistic practice. Yet they also wanted to secure a place for themselves in political culture and create an expansive public for their art and ideas: the potlatch, as a system of distribution that operates in complete opposition to a market economy, was ideally suited to both of these imperatives.
Zoe Sheehan Saldana, Faded Glory Ruched Shoulder Tank (China Red), 2003
Originally purchased on June 18,2003 for $9.77 from the Wal-Mart store in Berlin, Vermont. The clothing was duplicated by hand, matching pattern, fabric and embellishments. The tags from the original item were sewn into the duplicate. The duplicate was returned to the rack in Wal-Mart for potential sale at $9.77.
LEFT: Purchased item
RIGHT: Photograph of duplicate
Courtesy the artist
The two case studies above act as a preface as well as a foil to the last part of my discussion, which considers the role that alternative systems of distribution play in contemporary art. It would be an understatement to say that artists today demonstrate as much enthusiasm for unconventional distributive techniques as their predecessors in the historical and neo avant-gardes. Generally speaking, though, the source of this enthusiasm cannot be traced back to concrete, revolutionary ambitions. It also varies from project to project. Some artists might be driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, others by their discontent with capitalism and the mass media. Still others might desire to expand the reception of art beyond galleries and museums; deconstruct (but from a position of complicity as well as critique) the global economy in which art currently operates; mitigate social inequities and expose political injustice; or level the playing field, as it were, in the realm of human and financial exchange.
The innovative methods of distribution embraced by contemporary artists are just as disparate as their reasons for doing so in the first place. For example, we might find an artist attempting to sell a sculpture of a Pontiac GTO through auto trader magazines (Conrad Bakker), dropping hand-sewn articles of clothing into Wal-Mart stores (Zoë Sheehan Saldaña), designing a perfume and an accompanying advertising campaign (Daniel Bozhkov), starting a business venture that provides goods and services to the public (Christine Hill), republishing antiwar messages from the 1960s in magazines and newspapers (Ben Kinmont), asking Palestinians to place personal ads in the Village Voice seeking Jewish mates and, by implication, the right to utilize Israel’s “Law of Return” (Emily Jacir) or circulating videos and compact disks, which are comprised of material pilfered from the Internet and other forms of “distributed media,” through these same channels (Seth Price).4
As their different projects suggest, these artists carefully synchronize the production and distribution of art, which is to say they mobilize distributive systems that are appropriate to the type of work they produce. This, in turn, is indicative of their shared interest in stripping art of some of its legibility as art—that is, in creating works that, because of the way they look and the place they occupy in the public sphere, “pass” (even if just for a moment) as the very things they represent, which are frequently objects and activities with correlates in our everyday lives.
All of this has bearing on the projects’ mode of address as well. Because they find us in places not typically designated as forums for artistic consumption, the works described above speak to us as auto enthusiasts, readers, or consumers first and as viewers of art second. This momentary dissimulation—followed by surprise, epiphany, and understanding—serves an important function. First, it allows artists to more expeditiously “smuggle art into areas of life devoid of content,” as Bozhkov said to me several months ago. Just as importantly, it denaturalizes artistic reception, making viewers acutely aware of their role as viewers, of their expectations for and relationship to art and of the social, political and economic context in which this activity occurs.
1 Benjamin Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October, no. 30 (Fall 1984): 83–118.
2 There is much more to say about the use of alternative systems of distribution in the 1960s. Instead of the SI, I could have discussed projects by Robert Barry, Lynda Benglis, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Ray Johnson, Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper, Robert Smithson, or Lawrence Weiner, among others. For more information, see Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003).
3 Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, Mémoires (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1993).
4 Along with Cildo Meireles and Eugenio Dittborn, these artists will be featured in Transactions, an exhibition I am curating at the Blanton Museum of Art in September 2007.