Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture

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Gregory Sholette Presentation - YouTube youtube.com2009년 11월 19일 - 8분 - 업로더: creativetimenewyork Gregory Sholette gives a brief overview of artists community organizations during his introduction to ...

Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture

$29.50

By Gregory Sholette
New York, NY: Pluto Press. 2011
Pages: 304
Dimensions: 5.9" X 9"
Cover: softbound
Binding: perfect-bound
Process: offset
Color: black and white
Edition size: unknown
ISBN: 978-0745327525

We are thrilled to be offering this great book by our dear friend and sometimes collaborator Gregory Sholette. And we are honored that he wrote quite a bit about Temporary Services, Half Letter Press, Mess Hall, and Public Collectors (a project of Marc Fischer from Temporary Services). From the back cover:

"Art is big business, with some artists able to command huge sums of money for their works, while the vast majority are ignored or dismissed by critics. This book shows that these marginalized artists, the "dark matter" of the art world, are essential to the survival of the mainstream and that they frequently organize in opposition to it.

Gregory Sholette, a politically engaged artist, argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate thrive in the non-commercial sector shut off from prestigious galleries and champagne receptions. This broader creative culture feeds the mainstream with new forms and styles that can be commodified and used to sustain the few artists admitted into the elite.

This dependency, and the advent of inexpensive communication, audio and video technology, has allowed this "dark matter" of the alternative art world to increasingly subvert the mainstream and intervene politically as both new and old forms of non-capitalist, public art. This book is essential for anyone interested in interventionist art, collectivism, and the political economy of the art world."

Some reviews:

“Sholette offers us an archival history of art in and as activism, drawing on his own experiences in New York City and Chicago, but with an impressive awareness of related activity worldwide. Still, this is a much more significant project than the recuperation of fascinating details about radical collectivity. Drawing on Italian Marxist theories of autonomy, Sholette shows that neoliberalism is “wholly dependent upon the presence/absence of that which it excludes, an ever-present oversupply of cultural production that is mechanically encircled and expelled.” [Sholette argues that] there is a systemic need to overproduce culture, whose capacity to “mobilize excess” is precisely what “makes it an attractive model.” The “shadow economy” of cultural labor [by contrast including] —all those adjuncts with PhDs, actors working as waitstaff, classical musicians performing at children’s birthday parties—sustains and stabilizes the “high culture industry” from which it is excluded.

Far from being a pessimist, however, Sholette discerns in a range of new cultural practices the old goal of turning “art into life” —that is to say, the attempt to erase the distinctions between culture as a commodity and the practices of everyday life. At some points, he seems to suggest that the “dark matter” is “coagulating," perhaps offering a different social formation.

His conclusion points more to “flashes of defiance," ranging from workplace resistance to artistic performance and interventions. Almost as soon as Dark Matter was published, the current revolutionary wave began spreading across North Africa and the Middle East—a refusal by youth to maintain the precariousness of neocolonial labor under dictatorial regimes, making use of networked tools and defiant street performance." --Afterimage, 38:6 2011 “What Matters,” review by NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF who teaches at New York University and is the author of The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011).

"With great verve and urgency, Gregory Sholette explores the economics of contemporary art production in an era of neoliberalism, and outlines the promises and pitfalls of various tactics of resistance. Dark Matter is a salient call-to-arms to all cultural laborers." -- Julia Bryan-Wilson, author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era


"An important and necessary intervention. What's striking about the book is that it is less a set of reflections on 'art and politics' than a critique of art's very place within political economy, something that even erstwhile radicals rarely address….Dark Matter is well placed to shift the debate on art's utility back within the domain of labour and value, where it has long been missing." --John Roberts, author of The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade

"Focusing primarily on the anti-institutional, collective and politically critical artists that often willingly reject the light of the mainstream galleries and academies, Sholette both highlights a vast array of important contributors to art of the last decade and also challenges the ahistorical assumptions that ground the capitalist art market." - Paul B. Jaskot, Professor of Art History, DePaul University

"Based on a multitude of examples from the heterocosmos of invisible art practices, Dark Matter is the ultimate companion to contemporary activist art. In his exquisite and theoretically informed style Gregory Sholette investigates the problematic functions of art practices in the processes of neoliberal appropriation, but above all the wild explosive, and deterritorializing lines that are drawn in the dark matter between art and politics." --Gerald Raunig, philosopher and art theorist and author of Art and Revolution

Contents:

Series Preface
Acknowledgments

Exordium: An Accidental Remainder
(Sets the scene through a brief meditation on an all but forgotten artists' collective that the author once belonged to: Political Art Documentation/Distribution aka PAD/D, and its missing presence in contemporary art history.)

Introduction: The Missing Mass
(Who is the author and how did this book come about followed by a concise description of each chapter in the volume.)

1 Art, Politics, Dark Matter: Nine Prologues
(An overview of the book's key themes and arguments.)

2 The Grin of the Archive
(A critical journey into the PAD/D Archive now housed in the Museum of Modern Art is used to examine the shifting politics of the 1980s as neo-conservativism, economic deregulation, gentrification, and the remnants of the New Left clashed in New York City and elsewhere.)

3 History That Disturbs the Present
(Public art projects about history's missing narratives produced by the artists' group REPOhistory are described in relation to both the concept of the shadow archive, and in terms of the ultra-gentrified New York City of the 1990s.)

4 Temporary Services
(Chicago's informal artists' group Temporary Services is discussed and contrasted to what might be described as the rise of a dark matter Ressentiment exemplified by groups like the Minutemen Border Patrol vigilantes, and the Tea Party.)

5 Glut, Overproduction, Redundancy!
(A journey into the dark matter of the art world's invisible political economy with its hidden dependency on the unremunerated productivity of the majority of artists.)

6 The Unnamable
(Why did Steve Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble became a targets of the George Bush Department of Justice (sic)? The answer put forth here is that the Tactical Media group openly reverse-engineered power relations dear to the neo-liberal corporate state, all the while doing so as an ambiguously structured collective that, like dark matter, challenged centralized authority.)

7 Mockstitutions
(Art collectives, groups, and informal communities reinvent institutional forms for the 21st Century by skeptically imitating the very function of institutional power itself: dark matter embraces its own redundancy to become functional in the world.)

8 Conclusions: Nights of Amateurs
(So-called dark matter creativity is only the most recent expression‎ of a far longer cultural history "from below".)

Notes Bibliography Appendix: Artists' Groups Survey 2008 Index

http://halfletterpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=20_4&products_id=253 

 

Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture

Pluto Press, 256pp, £17.99, ISBN 9780745327525

reviewed by Theo Reeves-Evison

For 2011’s annual charity gala at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary art, Maria Abramovic hired six female performers to re-enact her signature work Nude with Skeleton (2002). In contrast to the original, filmed performance, in which Abramovic lies under a replica skeleton made to the dimensions of her body, for the gala event performers were hired as decorative table centrepieces under strict instructions to ‘remain in the performative’ even if that meant enduring physical or verbal abuse. For many, the most troublesome aspect of the event was not the price that tickets fetched (as much as $100,000 each), or even the museum’s insensitivity to shifts in context and meaning, but that 800 women, mostly artists, put themselves up for audition.

The configurations of value and cultural capital that make possible such self-willed exploitation is one of the principal targets of Gregory Sholette’s Dark Matter. Using a raft of Marxist and post-structuralist theoretical resources, Sholette unpacks the issues embedded in his chosen case studies, ultimately asking what would happen if the bottom of the pyramid were to be removed: if hobbyists stopped buying art-supplies, amateurs stopped taking classes, and if the tens of thousands of art-students graduating each year started to set up alternative systems of symbolic exchange, instead of propping up the star system that guarantees only a select handful success.

The idea of dark matter is variously defined in the context of creative production as an ‘obscure mass of failed artists’, ‘an unseen accretion of creativity’, and a ‘mark or bruise within the body of high art.’ Despite the obvious, and in some ways constitutive fuzziness of the term, Sholette mobilizes it to probe the political economy of contemporary art and enterprise culture in general. For readers familiar with the work of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière the idea of dark matter as an ‘internal exile’, or ‘a part with no part’ declaring itself to be visible will not seem like much of a theoretical innovation. In fact, it could be argued that the apparent influence of these authors on Sholette’s argument is the subject of a foreclosure in its own right. Concepts that have a properly ontological grounding in the work of Badiou and others are either assumed as axiomatic or reduced to motifs. The pay-off for such an approach is that the artworks discussed are given more granular attention, and analyses are expanded to take in a broader sweep of relevant philosophical and social critique.

On a less abstract basis, Dark Matter is also a book about innovation itself and its relation to adaptability. For Sholette - as for many of the Marxist scholars that inspire his approach - it is not simply that the majority of ‘emerging’ artists are willing to work for free, happy to make do without employment rights, pensions, or a guaranteed income; often working second or third jobs to support their practices, but that this paradigm is increasingly becoming the norm in other spheres of economic activity as well. The figure of an artist as a flexible, creative entrepreneur; self-promotional and at ease with instability, has become a model for employees in general under what Boltanski and Chiapello call the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ in their book of the same name. The freedom to transform, to re-train, to remain in perpetual motion, today takes the form of an imperative. For the author of Dark Matter, the guiding question is how to make critical art in a world that welcomes it with open arms.

In search of answers, Sholette assumes the role of an archaeologist in order to unearth artworks and instances of informal creativity that he sees as antagonistic to the forces that seek to co-opt them. The works discussed range from an impromptu collage of detritus pieced together by a group of factory workers in Pennsylvania to sophisticated forms of tactical media and culture jamming that mimic existing organizational structures in order to disrupt and infiltrate them. Uniting these two poles is the idea that it is still possible to create something outside of the symbolic hierarchies of the official art-world, a construct that the author eyes with justified suspicion. Moving chapter by chapter through various case studies, Sholette lingers on art-works made collaboratively by groups such as Temporary Services and The Critical Art Ensemble, reserving praise for projects that seem to have the capacity to disrupt while disengaging with the forces that would seek to recuperate them.

Structured more or less in a chronological fashion, Dark Matter opens with a lengthy discussion of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), a project that archived, and – as the name suggests – distributed politically engaged artworks and ephemera between 1980 and 1989. In this chapter, and at later points in the book, this archive is drawn upon as a means of reactivating historical sediment and allowing its material to disturb the present. Other case studies allow Sholette to engage with a range of issues from Major Giuliani’s ‘clean sweep’ of New York City in the 90s to the various efforts by groups like the Art Workers Coalition and the Artist Pension Trust to secure employment rights for artists. Bringing his analysis up to the present day, Sholette ends with an appraisal of the now widespread turn towards tactical media, pedagogical forms of intervention, and the mock-institutionalism of groups such as The Yes Men, the Bureau of Inverse Technology and the Critical Art Ensemble.

The fact that Sholette devotes two lengthy chapters to artist groups of which he himself was a part may strike some readers as rather opportunistic for a book devoted to the subject of enterprise culture. Is Sholette really landing a punch on the body of high art or is he trying to make sure his name gets into its history books? A more generous way to look at this would be to consider Dark Matter as a textual extension of these projects, or as a kind of self-appraisal, no less committed to the activist ideals than the work it draws upon. In any case, Dark Matter is not a book that could have been written by an outside observer or by the recipient of a three-year research grant. Within its pages there lie insights that speak of a lived engagement with political art stretching over thirty years. Sholette describes his book as ‘an attempt to infect the “lawfully” embodied systems of exclusion and visibility’. As well as achieving a great many of its aims, the most infectious aspect of Dark Matter proves to be its author’s passion and commitment to the issues at stake.

Buy this book at Amazon.co.uk by clicking here.

http://review31.co.uk/article/view/19/innovations-in-exile