Image & Narrative , Vol 10, No 2 (2009) 177

The Intangibilities of Form. Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade

Mieke Bleyen

John Roberts

The Intangibilities of Form. Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade

London-New York: Verso, 2007

ISBN-13: 9781844671670

In The Intangibilities of Form. Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, John

Roberts proposes a challenging model for everyone dealing with contemporary art, both

theoreticians and artists. In his rereading of twentieth century art and avant-garde art more in

particular, he takes an overtly left-wing, not to say Marxist stand, contributing in a

spectacular way to what, he says, is needed in scholarship today: a labour theory of culture.

As the title of the book suggests, Roberts finds this model in Marcel Duchamp‟s

readymade, not so much in its form - which has become commonplace in the art world from

the early 70s on, as in its function as a site of reflection and conflict. Hence the first part of

The Intangibilities of Form is devoted to the readymade and provides the reader an insight

into the key principles of the book.

Central to Roberts‟s understanding of Duchamp is his stimulating observation that the

early readymades such as Fountain or Bottle rack are rendezvous of different kinds of

labour, namely alienated/productive/non-artistic labour (the urinal as a factory produced

commodity) versus non-alienated/non-productive/artistic labour (the reinscription of this

commodity as an art work by selecting, placing and naming it). As such, they become sites

where the dialectic of skill - deskilling – reskilling is at work, a dialectic, in which the

redefinition of the artist‟s hand plays a crucial role. For according to Roberts, in his early

readymades Duchamp overtly shows what had been largely hidden since the decline of the

old studio-system: that every artist must start from readymade things (for example in the use

of industrial paint), and consequently that all art relies on the collaboration of artist‟s hands

and non-artist‟s hands. Moreover, in the stripping out of the traditional artisanal base for art

Duchamp aligns his readymades (to) with the general historical process of deskilling as the

result of the division of labour under capitalism and the law of the value-form.

This alignment with general deskilling notwithstanding, Duchamp‟s withdrawal from

traditional skill simultaneously represents a qualitative break with it. Indeed, his

transformative gesture opens the way for a new set of artistic skills: immaterial skills

(reskilling). As such, the readymade as a product of unfree, operative hands is transformed

into art by the independent action of the artist‟s hand. This transformation is crucial to

Roberts, who, drawing on evolutionary theory, underlines the importance of the

“totipotentiality” of the hand for the development of human language, cognition and

consciousness. In post-Fordist labour-processes, however, this totipotentiality of the hand is

severely restricted, made repetitive and predetermined. This is exactly why for Roberts the

emancipatory content of Duchamp is to be found in his intrusion of artistic subjectivity into

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simple labour. And although the hand‟s function radically changes in the skill-deskilling-

reskilling dialectic, with tasks as placing, ordering and selecting, adopted from Cubism,

taking priority over the expressive manipulation of the pencil, its totipotentiality is not

affected in the process.

Precisely this reading of the readymade proves to be one of the greatest strengths of

the book and demonstrates that “new” approaches, in this case a labour theory of culture,

generate new views. For Roberts comes to the conclusion that we should understand

Duchamp primarily as an artist of production who aligned himself with mass production in

his choice of commodities of everyday functionality and not so much as an artist of

consumption who is associated with the shop-window as argued in the new Duchampian

scholarship. A provocative thesis which complements, or at least opens the debate on the

current interpretation of new Duchampian scholars such as Joselit and De Duve.

The second part of the book is devoted to the question of authorship after the

readymade, more specifically since its recovery in the sixties. In line with the above, Roberts

is less concerned with the decentred author as such –he is very critical for what he calls the

autistic, formal intertextual critique of authorship represented by Kosuth and appropriationist

artists such as Sherrie Levine or Richard Prince- than with the exploration of “expanded”

authorship, and more in particular artist collaboration as a space of reflection on the division

of labour. Looking for forms of collaboration in art, he makes a clear distinction between the

laboratory model of for example Bauhaus and Russian constructivism and the “workshop”

model as exemplified by Andy Warhol‟s Factory.

In his analysis of both systems he clearly prefers the former over the latter, as in the

Factory, although its name seems to suggest differently, he, in many ways, sees a

modernized version of the old artisanal model of teamwork in which collaborative

authorship is at the service of the singularly named author. The laboratory-activity of for

example Bauhaus or Russian constructivism on the other hand, could be seen as early

models of group research and discussion, encouraging artists to become involved in social

technique and bringing forth a redefinition of the artist as a hybrid or composite figure: the

artist-engineer/ artist-constructor. Roberts casts a highly critical glance at new types of this

composite artist figure like the so-called artist-curator or artist-archivist. In no respect this

intra-professional identification, due to an increasing interdependency of artists and

museums, possesses for him the critical, transformative potential of those earlier laboratory

practices that were actively seeking for an incorporation of “proletarian” labour.

It becomes clear that for Roberts, the real challenge for contemporary artists does not

primarily lie in the appropriation of the readymade or the composite-artist-identity, but in the

critical interpretation of the skill-deskilling-reskilling dialectic in changing times (both

economically as technologically/culturally). Hence he highlights new questions posed by

informational economy regarding the problem of deskilling - no longer only to be

understood in terms of the assembly line, but also in terms of the “all-round” skills proper to

informational economy – and the role played by network culture in redefining collaborative

authorship. He therefore points to interesting possibilities of digital “collective” authorship

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of rhizomatic many-to-many communication in cyber space and of collaborative artistic

practices that are facing the problem of invisibility due to their dissolution in social practice.

However, in The Intangibilities of Form, (Roberts tackles the issue more profoundly in his

article devoted to this topic in Third Text (vol. 18, Issue 6, 2004: 557-564)) the question of

what a critical collaborative art practice today should look like, remains largely unanswered.

Here it seems that the argument is slightly burdened by the strength of the Duchampian

model, as Roberts doesn‟t really succeed in finding convincing examples in contemporary

art practice equivalent to the early avant-gardes.

Another reason why the second part of the book risks falling slightly short of the

expectations run high in the first chapters are the many detours in non-art disciplines such as

evolutionary science or artificial intelligence. This widening of the scope has of course the

major advantage of continuously inviting the reader to see the close interconnection between

art and labour, technology and science. Nevertheless, obscuring sometimes more than

clarifying, their relevance to the general argument is not always made clear, and the book

would have gained more cohesion with a profounder integration within the main line of

reasoning. A same kind of indecisiveness could be found in Roberts‟s criticism on new

Marxist colored theoreticians (such as Hardt, Negri and Bourriaud), touching upon very

interesting questions, but never convincingly formulating alternatives. But these are all

minor criticisms which do not detract from the overall value of this publication.

All in all, The Intangibilities of Form should be understood as a normative account of

twentieth century and contemporary art. It is both a plea for a rereading of avant-garde art by

scholars, and Roberts‟s lecture of Duchamp shows how his call for a labour theory of culture

could have far-reaching consequences, and a plea for an art practice that chooses to be

engaged into the technological relations of its time instead of concealing its relationship with

it.

What the new „Duchampian readymade‟ for the twenty-first century could or should

be, largely remains without a clear answer. Herein lies Roberts‟s appeal to his readers.

Mieke Bleyen is research fellow at the Faculty of Arts (Cultural Studies & Lieven Gevaert

Centre for Photography) at the KU Leuven and prepares a PhD on Cobra photography.

Email: mieke.bleyen@arts.kuleuven.be