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Good Circulation

CRITICISM

Artists explore the space between production and

consumption: who is addressed and how?

A man and a woman sit at a table, rackin g their brains and not

saying much. Are they Conceptual artists, or curators, trying to

come up with the next idea? No; Monica Bonvicinis video

gradually reveals that they work in public relations and have been

asked to come up with an advertising campaign for Werbung statt

Kunst (Advertising Replaces Art, 2002), the artists contribution to

the public art project Aussendienst (Fieldwork) in Hamburg.

Finally, they make a conscious decision to dumb down, just for the

hell of it: they will put portraits of well-known artists with catchy

slogans on local buses, promoting art as if it were a household

appliance. Yet, they discover, art proves a particularly Hard Sell(2002).

Boris Groys declared that in recent decades artists have become

exemplary consumers, rummaging through cultures bargain

basement.1 In much the same vein, a nd equipped with Michel de

Certeaus assertion that consumption is a potentially subversive

tactic of selection and combination, Nicolas Bourriaud has

observed a fundamental scrambling of boundaries between

consumption and production.2 He argues that artistic practices

for which he has coined the term relational aesthetics establish

relations between people and the world, by way of aesthetic

objects,3 ultimately considering inter-human exchange an

aesthetic object in and of itself. The artist models and

disseminates disconcerting situations, Bourriaud continues, and

About this article

First published inIssue 90, April 2005

by Jrg Heiser

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strives to shatter the logic of the spectacle.4 But in whose name

does he or she act? And who gets involved in the ensuing inter-

human exchange? Is the relational artist a Modernist hero

fighting a lone battle against commercial culture, in relational

bond with s ome kind of support group of viewers that cheers him

or her on to the front?

Inter-human exchange suggests direct contact between artist and

viewer. One is reminded of the cons umer societys man tra

boosted by the advent of e-commerce telling people to cut out the

middleman: to establis h direct, unmediated trade. But both Groys

and Bourriaud, assuming the erasure of the distinction between

production and consumption, fail to mention what constitutes the

middle term in that classic economic triad: production, circulation

and consumption. They consider the relationship between artists

and the forms they propose (understood as the embodiments of

ideas), and the interactions between people and the world

triggered by it, but they seem to ignore the relation between these

forms and other forms. The term circulation is shorthand for the

ways i n wh ich the fluctuating relations between forms (from both

inside and outside art) co-define the relations between artists and

their audience. Of course, any kind of work from any period,

unless it exists in a black hole in outer space, can be looked at

from this perspective. But the point is that over recent decades

artists seem to have become increasingly aware of the issue of

circulation not only as a practical social and economic one,

external to their actual work, but an aesthetic one, at the core of it.

Originally circulation was a term for the metabolic distribution

and redistribution of fluids and matter, implying qualitative and

quantitative transformation via movement. As a metaphor, it has

been historicall y linked to urbanization, the flow of populace an d

traffic in the city. From about 1750 money begins to circulate the

likes of the Baron de Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau use

the term in connection with currency and labour; after the French

Revolution newspapers, ideas and gossip circulate; after 1880 so

do traffic, air and power.5 For Karl Marx circulation is the sphere

of supply and demand, where distribution organizes the exchange

of goods and money: in other words, the market. The kind of

circulation Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had in mind when, with his

1902 pamphlet, he confidently asked What is to be Done? was onethat involved newspapers and party apparatuses, in order to

spread the word and organize the working class. This emphatic,

forward-leaning, one-way will to circulation was perhaps most

vividly embodied in the spiral s tructure of Vladimir Tatlins

Monument to the Third International (1919). But in a tragic-ironic

way, tha nks to Lenins brusque rejection of their ideas, the

Constructivists were spared the fate of aesthetisizing the later

totalitarian regime.

Today the question what is to be done? can sound almost idiotic,

while a return to the idea of s preading the messag e seems

preposterous. Perhaps the contemporary offspring of what is to be

done? is a healthily doubtful what, for whom, and how? Yet the

question is not an innocent one: it goes against cultures supposed

exceptional status outside the market economy, and it could come

straight from the mouth of a marketing executive, scouting future

target groups. But, as Maurizio Lazzarato has pointed out, the

insistence on cultural exception ironically weakens the potential

of culture to resis t its subordination to economic imperatives.

Cultural knowledge is not a form of merchandise like any other,

although the market consistently tries to reduce it to fiscal and

product exchange. However, the values co-regulating the

immaterial production of this knowledge aesthetic potential and

political gravity both charm and disrupt the economys thirst for

inventiveness. Lazzaratos conclusion is that the strategy of

cultural ex ception must be turned on its hea d cultures ethics

must be not exempted from, but applied to, economics.6 The

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downside is obvious: the ethics of culture applied to economy are

not inevitably beneficial idealism in one sphere can be

exploitation in another. But for better or worse, in order to move

beyond the trench wa rfare between, on the one h and, the

autonomy of art and, on the other, its fusion with the

entertainment industry, the question of how, and to whom,

aesthetic and intellectual knowledge circulates becomes central.

Hans Haackes work marks the shift of circulation from physical

phenomenon to economic metaphor: from water in transparent

cubes (Condensation Cube, 19635) and tubes (Circulation, 1969)

to the provenance the history of circulation of a painting in

relation to de-Nazified patrons of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum

in Cologne (Manet-Projekt74, 1974). The latter work was a

frontal attack on the shielding of economic and historic relations

within a n art in stitution a nd resulted in the cancella tion of its

display. In order to circulate the revealing information Haacke

used Conceptual means of display rather than, say, documentary

film or newspaper reportage ironically resulting in the works

dissemination anywhere but on the gallery walls for which it had

been intended.

Robert Barrys Invitation Piece (19723) constructs the

distribution of information as literally circular. First an invitation

was sent from the Paul Maenz Gallery in Cologn e to an ex hibition

at Art & Public in Amsterdam; there another invitation card in turn

advised the recipient to go to London, and so forth until Torontosent avid Barry viewers back to Cologne. The referential merry-go-

round dissolved art into the means of its own mediation. Barrys

piece resides as much in the invitation cards themselves as in the

attempts to visit any of the named destinations, where nothing

was to be found but a semiotic loophole. According ly, circulation

designates not simply the A-to-B distribution of objects and ideas

but also the wa y these gain a life of their ow n a s they pass from

hand to hand, house to house, mouth to mouth including the

possibility of alterations and the dangers of exploitation. Its like

deliberately turning hard fact into rumour, for the sake of allowing

the unforeseen to happen.

In Gianni Mottis 2004 retrospective at the Migros Museum,

Zurich, his work was not actually present but was recounted in the

form of stories. Tour guides wore T-shirts with the slogan

Plausible Deniability (2004), the title of the exhibition and a

biting hin t at the fact that everything they said about Motti

staging his own funeral, or infiltrating a UN session as a fake

Indonesian delegate could plausibly be denied. Of course, this

circulation of anecdotes and tales functions only as long as the

artist simultaneously withholds the circulation of proper

documentation (a key element also in Tino Sehgals actions during

exhibitions).

Withholding one lin e of circulation wh ile using another seems a

common dialectical method. Katya Sanders Monument for Image

Production and Image Consumption (2004) testifies to this in

regard to the mass media. Asked to propose a contemporary

monument in Copenhagen, she produced a piece in collaborationwith the secon d-largest na tional dai ly newspaper, Pol itiken. One

day last summer a second version of the paper, purged of

everything but the pictures and the front-page logo, was given

away free with any purchase of the original, with no prior

announcement or explanation. The piece can be read as a pious

lesson about the mindless production and consumption of images,

but its first and foremost a monument to their fleeting, extensive

circulation.

On 11 September 2002 her birthday New-York-based

Aleksa ndra Mir published a tabloid newspaper, D aily News . She

had asked more than 100 friends to contribute a piece of their

choice, from crossword puzzles to political manifestos and recipes.

The project reclaimed Mirs date of birth (the banner headline


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screamed Happy Birthday!); moreover, at a time when it had

become unpatriotic to dissent, it celebrated freedom of speech in

the sense of circulating every response. The fact that the paper

appeared as a free, one-off edition of 1,000 copies reflected the fact

that this vision of free circulation was Utopian, a daydream come

true at grassroots level.

Jens Haaning plastered his poster Arabic Joke (2002) across city

centres including Aarhus in Denmark, Houston in the US, and

Geneva in Switzerland. White Arabic letters against a strident

combination of red and green created the impression for those

who ca nt read Arabic that it must be Islamic propagan da in

fact, it tells a joke about a man who thinks hes a grain of wheat.

With a light comic touch the piece brings out the xenophobia

latent even among the well-meaning. For his contribution to the

exhibition Publicness in London, Haaning transported all the

chairs from the ICAs caf to a street in Karachi, where they could

be taken aw ay for free by passers-by (Redistribution London

Karachi, 2003). Its easy to get lost in cloudy references to

globalization and cultural exchange, but whats really interesting

is the concrete when and where of this piece: since Karachi is

where journalis t Daniel Pearl wa s murdered and wh ere many Al-

Qaeda terrorists have been captured, for many in the West the city

has become virtually synonymous with fear. Without directly

referring to it, Haaning eloquently plays on this fear, yet counters

it by practically turning a theft into a gift.

A video piece by Bulgaria n artist Nedko Solakov reflects the

desperate, and cruelly comic, economic aspects of so-called

cultural exchange. Invited to make a project in Denmark, Solakov

changed a 1,000-Krone note into dollars, then converted the

dollars back into Krone and so on, until the money was eaten up

in exchange rates and commission (The Deal, 2002). In Eastern

Europe large parts of the population, not least intellectuals and

artists, are forced to earn their living by travelling every weekend

by bus and train to sell stuff out of suitcases a t markets in faraw ay

towns; often they have to bribe customs officers and Mafia types

along the way. This suitcase economy marks the shift from

socialism to neo-plutocratic capitalism.

Like Solakov, Matthieu Laurette discovered a s trategy for

confusing the principle of value, this time for a family game show.

From an art project budget in Bilbao, La urette devised a

programme for Basque TV, El Gran Truque (The Great Exchange,

2000): the idea was that in a kind of phone-in auction people

could offer objects n exchange for a car offered by Laurette the

highest offer would be accepted, and then in turn be presented the

following week for another exchange, and so on. After a few

months the series of swaps finished with the presentation of six

blue glass es. The economys demand for growth ha d been turned

on its head: what started with a car worth a small fortune ended

with something you might find at a ca r boot sale. This strategy of

turning rules of circulation against themselves also informs

Laurettes Citizenship Project (1998 ongoing), in which he

investigates the requirements for obtaining passports of countries

all over the world, and then makes this information available on a

website. The experiment ultimately is a wa y to test the limits of the

ideological foundations on which the laws governing access to

citizenship are based.

Issues of access and nationality were also brought into play in

Santiago Sierras closing of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice

Biennale in 2003, when only holders of a Spanish passport were

allowed to enter the pavilion through a back door (Wall Enclosing

a Space, 2003). As rigorous as the gesture was, it distorted the

political realities it so boldly seemed to refer to: while there is no

situation in which only owners of a Spanish passport would be

allowed into the country, people really are drowning in the straits

of Gibraltar as they try desperately to enter the territory of the


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European Union. One might expect referential precision from

Sierra, as passports and visa regulations not least relate to

peoples value as labourers a value central to his concern. His

usual strategy is to divert, for the duration of a piece, people who

are desperate enough to do anything for money (uneducated

workers, il legal i mmigrants, junkies , prostitutes) in to the white

cube: he stains it with the concrete reality of obscene

exploitation, while consciously taking advantage of it. He seems

adamant about the issue of payment: it should not be substantially

more (but could in fact be less) than usual. In 1999 Sierra had an

employment agency hire 465 male mestizo (mixed-race) workers

to stand in the gallery space a number calculated to create adensity of five people per square metre for three hours during an

opening at a museum in Mexico City (465 Paid People, 1999). The

official description of the piece on the artists website mentions

that apparently the agency actually might not have paid anyone,

but asked friends and a battalion of s oldiers to attend for free.

The redistribution of people into the wh ite cube freeze-frames on e

of the characteristic effects of market circulation: while making

objects appear almost like living beings, it also turns living beings

into objects. Luis Camnitzer has pointed out that Sierras idea of

involving low-paid workers has a historical precedent in

Argentinian artist Osca r Bonys La Familia Obrera (The

Proletarian Family, 1968)7: to exhibit a son, mother and father on

a pedestal in a gallery, Bony paid the latter exactly twice his hourly

rate as a die-cutter. The payment was conceptually ethical: the

workers family wa s commodified, as a nyone who enters the

labour market is to some extent, but as the family were doubled in

the act of being exhibited, so was the payment. By contrast, Sierra

prefers to double the exploitation.

Some may see Sierras work as staring unflinchingly into the abyss

of art: as if he was forcing the privileged to endure the sheer

presence of the fierce exploitation from which they ultimately

benefit. But if that is the case, he lets hi s a udience off very lightly

he makes not the slightest effort to point out, or to incorporate into

his work, the concrete reasons for peoples exploitation. He makes

poverty look like a dark, brooding, mysterious fate, as inescapable

as waste. This could not have been made more literal than in his

recent project at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover. Sierras Haus

im Schlamm (House in the Mud, 2005) was to fill the ground floor

of the building with mud from the nearby Maschsee, an artificial

lake created between 1934 and 1936 by thousands of workers

employed by the Nazis for just a few pence per hour. The press

release cited Walter De Marias Earth Rooms (196877) by way

of art-historical credentials. But compared to the silent presence of

the latter, Sierras instalment was a thunderous theatrical event.

The mud was shaped into canyons, and shovels and a

wheelbarrow w ere stuck in it, a s if the w orkers employed by the

Nazis had just popped out for a cigarette. Visitors were allowed to

enter and spread their muddy footprints on the beige carpeting on

the first floor, especially laid out for the occasion.

What w as Sierras point? If it was a purely aesthetic one, it did

indeed create an impressive vista you dont often see the whitecube so literally swamped. But reference-wise, Sierra couldnt have

been more wrong. Th e Kestnergesellscha ft was closed by the

Nazis in 1936: until shortly before that time its Jewish director,

Justus Bier, had shown works by artists who a year later were

stigmatized in the Nazis Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art)

exhibition. Sierras redistribution of the mud once moved by cheap

labour and Nazi propaganda felt not like a gesture of respect to

Bier and his legacy, but like a drunken insult thrown at it. (It is

ironically appropriate that because of bacteriological risks, mud

from the Maschsee could not actually be used and had to be

replaced with gunk from another lake.)

When it comes to the delica te subject of the circulation of people

in terms of their labour value the most important point is whether


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the artist remains aloof or prefers to put him or herself on the same

level as those who are his or her material. There is no doubt

about what kind of rift opens up in this respect between Sierras

display of poverty (and Vanessa Beecrofts display of luxury, for

that matter) on the one hand, and the practices of artists such as

Laurette, Mir or Haaning on the other. While the former appear as

superior manipulators in the background, concerned chiefly with

formal shock and awe rather than conceptual consistency, the

latter mingle with their subjects as if incessantly reminding

themselves, in a humble, cant-help-it way, of the crucial question:

whats for whom, a nd how?

Classic Modernism was dominated by a notion of production that

focused attention on artistic authorship (corresponding to the rise

of mass industrial production); Postmodernism described the

artist as an eclectic bricoleur (corresponding in turn to the rise of

consumer society); currently we find ourselves in a period of

capitalism where the key factor shaping both economics and

culture is circulation. These are shifts not of substance but of

accent; of course, production and consumption havent vanished.

But the decisive question is what regulates the distribution, the

patents, the what for whom (from the availability of AIDS

medication to online copyrights). The Internet and air travel are

technological ciphers for the beautiful illusion that everything is

accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere while we all know only

too well that this is not true.

In Bonvicinis video we finally see the outcome of the PR peoples

struggle to isolate the key product message of art. As a provincial

brass band plays to celebrate the ina uguration, buses drive off with

the larger-than-life ads emblazoned on them: one of the slogans

reads Kunst schmeckt (Art tastes good) and features a smiling

Rirkrit Tiravanija holding up a chocolate Easter bunny.

1 Boris Groys, Der Knstler als Konsument (The Artist as Consumer), in

Max Hollein and Christoph Grunenberg (ed.), Shopping, Hatje Cantz,

Ostfildern, pp. 5560

2 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2002, p.

13

3 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du Rel, Paris, 2002,

p. 42

4 Bourriaud, Postproduction, p. 26ff.

5 Erik Swyngedouw, Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and

(Cyborg) Cities, http://www.ru.nl/socgeo/n/colloquium/science.pdf

6 Maurizio Lazzarato, European Cultural Tradition and the New Forms of

Production and Circulation of Knowledge, 1998,

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9810/msg00113.html

7 Luis Camnitzer, Art & Economy, Hamburg (review), ArtNexus, no. 45 (July

2002), http://www.artnexus.com/servlet/NewsDetail?documentid=8830

Jrg Heiser

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