Henrik Schrat, 2002
Artistic positions dealing with the corporate world between 1970
and now.
1. Hans Haacke’s Freedom
is now simply going to be sponsored – out of petty cash.
In 1990 the German-born artist Hans
Haacke participated in a show in Berlin. The Wall had come down, but the city
was still divided into two sectors. The so called death strip between West
Berlin and East Berlin still existed, although it no longer functioned. Haacke
had the searchlight on top of a communist police watch tower in the death strip
replaced by a slowly rotating Mercedes star. Two inscriptions, in bronze
letters, 'Art will always remain art' and 'The readiness is all' were mounted
to the wall of the tower. They where taken from Mercedes ads. The star on top
of the tower glowed at night, and was protected by a wire cage, similar to the
cages that protect the windows of riot police cars. The work quoted a similar
Mercedes star (without wire cage), that had already been rotating for years on
top of the so called Europa Centre in the centre of West Berlin. The title of
his piece was Freedom is now simply going to be sponsored – out of
petty cash.
In this time of chaos Mercedes Benz
had used the lack of any orientation on the east side to buy a large chunk of
land in the centre of Berlin, paying just a fragment of the expected value. As
Mercedes Benz is the largest corporation in Germany and plays a central role in
definitions of German self identity, this purchase was a symbolic act of
considerable significance. To put it simply: The Wall had come down, communism
was defeated, and capitalism had won. In general, anybody who was familiar with
the ways of capitalism knew what would happen to the eastern part of Germany.
Picture 1
1.2. Being autonomous
The decision to work within the
symbolic network of meanings between history, politics and corporations which
existed in this example is typical of Haacke's approach to his practice. In
numerous pieces he has dealt with the mingling of corporate interest and political
power. By unveiling hidden relationships and interests Haacke focuses on
problematic issues. One would usually say that his position is critical. Yet,
for the most part – as is the case with the aforementioned piece –
his gesture appears neutral, he's just showing something, placing things in a
new configuration, and leaving it to the observer to judge. This strategy is
familiar from what we might see on the news: What one chooses to mention, and
what one leaves out, which message is placed besides which message and so on.
This creates the information and generates potential meanings. This is a
strategy Haacke is using as well. Being something of a good realist in his
style, he makes his choice, and then presents the material straight away. He
seems to propose that the artist's position should be neutral, to be merely an
observer, detached from the material engaged with – that is at least in
the moment that it is presented as artistic output. To quote Frederic Jameson
’Hans Haacke’s work has a kind of impersonal necessity and
inevitability about it.’[1]
There is just a rotating Mercedes Star, there is the watchtower, there are two
inscriptions and there is a title: Freedom is now simply going to be
sponsored – out of petty cash. This strategy is stated even more overtly in a
piece like A Breed Apart (1978). Seven images of British Leyland ads, exchanging just the
original car images with images of Leyland cars that had been used as police
cars in South Africa in suppressing apartheid riots.
Picture 2
Haacke seems to be saying that he is
just showing something, that these things are already there, that he is just
the one to do the job that somebody has to do. He assumes authority by doing
so, implying a kind of truth and with this a suggestion of judgement, hence
constructing an ethical position to be taken by the observer. Haacke produces
his work in the name of moral truth. At least this seems to be his claim. He
refers to a given totality for which he is the representative. This totality
empowers him, giving him the right to adopt a position and criticise. Yet this
totality turns out to be a complex set of beliefs, based upon the moral
foundations of western society as it was defined by the enlightenment. It is
this that provides him with the basis for a position from which to define and
then criticise deplorable states of affairs. In the very core of the evil he
identifies, there is one word: profit. Profit is the driving force behind the
companies - and behind all the atrocities committed through the strings of
power - whose activities are unveiled by Haacke’s work.
1.3 . Corporations into humanity
In Freedom is now simply going to
be sponsored – out of petty cash, he emphasises a fundamental idea - Freedom - which has been always at the core of idealistic
thought and action, and which was one of the three catchwords of the French
revolution: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. In 1990, it
seemed that the people in the east had won that freedom. From the given
capitalist framework, socialism had been denounced as not free, in order to
claim the idea of freedom for the capitalist system. However free or not free
capitalism might be in the end, I'd suggest that the people of the former GDR
had won a relative freedom, a freedom Haacke is referring to, one that gets
sponsored. The corporate logo dominates the communist state power, like the
flag of the victor on top of the castle. But it could be that only the flag is
replaced, and the watchtower is still in use. Two worlds get mixed, with ideas
and human rights on one side, and the world of corporations on the other.
Haacke uses the title of his work to
suggest the complex interrelated nature of these two worlds. Freedom is
going to be sponsored
-Sponsoring is one of the public relation tools of corporations, which clearly
indicate an expected return for the company for giving money. The company gets
something back for the support of this kind of political freedom, whether it be
the raising of a company's profile, or a sort of freedom of its own - a freedom
for the company to start new ventures and open new markets. That petty cash
supports political freedom introduces yet another negative aspect: Big money
gets used elsewhere to address serious questions, business questions. Freedom
itself is only important enough to warrant the spending of petty cash. Yet I'd
argue that it seems wrong to blame everything on the supposedly evil
corporation. In fact, it is doubtful whether it is right to blame anything on
the corporation at all. Rather, what should be addressed is a far bigger
question about the nature of greed and the driving forces that lie behind
civilisation and human evolution.
The language Haacke is using in this
piece is a language of power. The tower consists of signs of power –
different in their origin - and hard materials. Geometrical shapes dominate the
picture, it is as if a minimalist sculpture had been loaded with the power of
political symbols. The tower is made of concrete, raw concrete, it is grey with
the full force of the uncovered material, the joints between the sections are
not even hidden. As the tower does not have windows - except for those at the
top - and the ground plan is a square, it has got a massive sculptural volume.
Each window at the top is nearly a square. The proportions are favourable in
terms of a modernist architecture. On top of the tower another cube, this time
transparent and made of wire, which looks a bit like a work by Susanna Solano.
The cage on the roof does not contain birds; it contains a slow revolving
circle. All the basics for a minimalist work are there: circles, cubes,
squares, and purist material: wire, concrete and copper. But there are also the
symbols: A logo of a corporation and an bronze inscription. And that’s
what twists the whole thing. The symbols seem to hijack the formal attitudes of
the tower. The intensity of the forms and what could be called the beauty of
the materials vanishes, and it is hard to bring them into focus. It’s
more than obvious that this is not the job of the piece, even if Haacke is well
aware of these aesthetic concerns. It is not even necessary for him to avoid
this kind of formalism. He plays with it, and it is easily taken hostage by the
symbols of power. The formal coherence which could be detected within the work
declares itself as accidental somehow, and the parts of the piece become a
patchwork, stitched together. The work is not defined by its formal logic but
by context. And that dilutes the aesthetic dimension, declares this dimension
irrelevant. As Haacke himself has said on the occasion of his piece Isolation
Box ‘When I
read about the isolation boxes used in Grenada in the New York Times, I
immediately recognized their striking similarity to the standard minimal
cube.…You see, one can recycle ‘minimalism’ and put it to a
contemporary use.’[2]
The reasons for decisions are not aesthetic, at least not in a traditional
sense. It would be worth to follow the question if it might be aesthetic in
terms of an ‘information sculpture’ or a ‘social
sculpture’, and I think, that’s a point, where it might relate to
younger artists I am going to talk about later on. But in traditional modernist
formal terms, Haacke's pieces have certain clumsiness to them. That might be
less of a concern regarding each single work, but it becomes more apparent if
one sees a number of them besides each other. They are all very professionally
made, they are made with a high degree of consciousness of art and its forms in
general. Haacke knows what he's doing and decides to ignore the ways of
decision making which are normally prioritised in art. His decisions, what
material to use, what shape to use etc. stem from another level. And by
introducing political, social or corporate discourses as a set of criteria for
decisions making - which include a formal aspect - a certain formal discomfort
accompanies his work. And there is no formal consistency within his practice,
so that his works do not relate visually to one another. So this clumsiness
becomes one of their most important features, referring to their aesthetics and
how they relate to reality.
2. The
discourse
Haacke’s understanding of his role as an
artist stands in a tradition. Art and corporations had already been connected
theoretically in a special case, setting the tendency for his operations: The
term ‘Culture Industries’ stems from
Theodore Adorno, and was notably developed in his collaboration with Max
Horkheimer, published in 1947 in the Dialectic of the Enlightenment. This influential text placed the power of business in the
neighbourhood of fascism, and argued very strongly for a separation between
culture and business, predicting and describing culture industries as an evil and destructive appropriation of culture through
capitalism, destroying all true art. Enlightenment was at stake, as was the proposed
role that art might play. In the case of art, the ideas can be traced back to
Friedrich Schiller, and his essays on moral education through art. The
antagonism between art and economy had been very sharply defined by Horkheimer
/ Adorno, and for a long time it had been impossible to think about this
relationship without ideological indoctrination. The Frankfurt School and other
Marxist traditions dominated the cultural discourse for a long time, and to
some extent still do.
A
remarkable 'update' of this position was suggested by Guy Debord in 1967 with
the book La societé du Spectacle. It took up the idea of the
commodification of art from Adorno, and described Capitalism as a society in
which everything has become a commodity, alienating the individual from their
own gestures, words and actions, turning them into consumers. In this move, art
and culture found death, and only survived in a kind of frozen state within the
spectacle. I quote from the book, which seems to refer the process I am dealing
with in this text, even if I don’t share Debord's valuation of this
process. At the begin of the chapter Negation
and Consumption Within Culture he says: ‘By gaining its
independence, culture begins an imperialist movement of enrichment which is at
the same time the decline of its independence. The history which creates the
relative autonomy of culture and the ideological illusions about this autonomy
also expresses itself as history of culture. ... Culture is the locus of the
search for lost unity. In this search for unity, culture as a separate sphere
is obliged to negate itself. [3]
Haacke is located in this tradition and I take
his way in defining the corporate world and dealing with it as an exemplary
position. To quote Jameson again, ‘Haacke’s ‘solution’
– to transform the 'extrinsic' determinants of art into the 'intrinsic'
content of a new artistic text – is best evaluated as a response to these
dilemma and to the wider situation we have attempted to outline here.’ [4]
(establishing a relation between the 'aesthetic ideology' and the 'general
ideology')… The questions he asks, the issues raised by his work, seem to
me typical for a position held by many artists and cultural producers. But he
has made them a subject, and makes them transparent. He was a pioneer,
transforming something into art which had been present as a position among
cultural producers, but not really present in contemporary art production, thus
reclaiming something which seemed (and seems) to have been lost to contemporary
art. People like John Heartfield spring to mind, using posters with a very
direct and common symbolical language, still managing to maintain a relation to
a formal aesthetic tradition, and inserting a symbolic context. Sometimes it is
not really clear what the bigger challenge for artists is, and where their
interests lie: Communicating content to a wider public, or inserting the
context into the art world. It is Haacke’s aim to find a language to talk
about and engage with a politicised corporate world, with a new global
perspective. It is still not possible to talk about it with the existing
traditional icons of high culture. But still he tries to develop this language
within the framework of museums and galleries, trying to get rid of the problem
by including a radical critique of exactly that institutional framework.
To summarise what I have tried to
say so far about Haacke: He insists on autonomy of his position as an artist in
society, giving him the possibility to criticise states of affairs. Haacke
believes in the possibility of critique as such, and that it is not only his
right but also his duty to engage critically. The position of critique is
established by a set of beliefs, an ideological meta discourse, which empowers
its promoter – the artist. The interest of corporations in generating
profit is by its nature bound to endanger the values of humanity. Profit
corrupts humanity and produces corrupted people, hence deal only with
corporations in a critical way, and keep a distance.
3. Change of perspective: the economy.
3.1 The corporations: From Fordism to
Post–Fordism.
Haacke’s counterpart in the
Berlin piece, as it is so often, the corporate world. In order to understand
that better, I am going to give some background for the development of how
artists deal with corporations. This means thinking about what actually are the
corporations doing? I’ll try to show how corporations have changed in the
last 30 years, and how that might have effected the way how they deal with art
and artists, and how that might have influenced how artists deal with them. It
is well worth changing perspectives, and not to remaining on the culture theory
side, to understand the phenomenon. I would call it a necessity – even if
this essay is too short and probably not the place to do it – to also use
a corporate rhetoric and point of view. What is art and culture doing for them,
why are they interested or not in that field at all? The influence that unfolds
from this direction within the art sector can not be overvalued. Mostly this influence
is a somehow hidden, it works like Foucault’s internalised power. By
unveiling this influence and relation, the structure of what art is doing and
could do develops more clearly, and the function and use of art comes into
focus.
Corporate structures developed from
Fordist, independent, monolithic industrial entities into highly connected,
international networks. The Post–Fordist restructuring of the economy in
the sense of Neoliberalism in the 80s and 90s started under Thatcher and Regan
changed the face and understanding of capitalism. Deregulation of the markets
was widely introduced as a purely structural instrument for freeing formerly
regulated market forces. Nobody was in doubt that it stemmed from a
conservative, ideological source. But the structural change itself had a
certain neutrality to it, in an odd way comparable to the kind of neutrality
Haacke’s pieces seem to have.
In the 70s economic structures started to change from what we call now Fordism to Post–Fordism. The classical Fordist approach tried to measure everything. A former CEO of General Motors, Frederic G. Donner puts the classic fordist approach very good in words: ‘To be able to cope with the challenges the market confronts us with, we have to realise on time the changed needs of the customers, in order to be able to offer the right products on the right place in the right amount at the right time.’[5] The assembly line with a certain amount of time for every movement of a worker is the best example for the classic Fordism, stemming from the Ford car factories, which where the first to introduce the assembly line and automated production. The change from these fixed, mechanistic structures to more flexible and integrative structures went along with the upcoming Neoliberalism, and was ultimately forced by the dawn of the information age and globalisation. But Fordism and Post-Fordism are understood as an extension of social and political omnipresence of corporations as well. Whilst Fordism relied on corporate agreements between government, capital and labour, focused still on domestic markets, and followed largely the Keynesian structure of welfare and regulated market, Post-Fordism broke this mutual agreements down, hollowed out the nation, and focused on international and global ownership, distribution and production. Automatisation and the shift of labour to third world countries led to a shift from blue collar to white collar workers. The Factory as image for the economy disappeared, and the office took its place. The worker was replaced by the employee, and the machine by the computer.
This development is connected with a
change in interpretation and evaluation of economy and economic ways of dealing
with the reality. That leads us to the other point of changed influence on
artists, which is maybe much more important than the factual changes, even if
it is not possible to separate it. Economy seems to have expanded in the last
30 years in a new way, what I would call the ideologisation of economy.
Economic exchange has always been a key of any social existence. Without
economic exchange, social development would have not been possible. With Adam
Smith, and the invention of the political economy as a subject as such, it
started to enter a new significance. Its ideal market, the free flow of offer
and demand, was understood as a tool to free people from structures which went
along with status, lineage, kinship and religion. Market as a structure did not
only help to execute exchange but also gained a broader, ethically based
importance with the early – especially British – liberal and
utilitarian thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Smith and Hume. They understood the
market as a tool, to foster individual freedom whilst ensuring a form of order.
The market was also the tool to fight the older structures. This contradiction
still exists and could be formulated in the binary ‘community versus
corporate order’. The market became a vehicle for achieving a society of
peaceful co–operation. It is the classic Smithsonian thesis that the
market is the field of competing private interests, reconciled through
agreements. Now for Adam Smith the understanding of the market was still a
holistic idea embedded in the political economy. The private economic interests
conduce to the moral and general good; it goes towards a ‘harmony of
interests’. In “The Wealth of Nations” he says: ‘Give
me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want.’[6]
Once the market was in place, these ideas behind the structure got overpowered
relatively quick by the force of the profit to be made there. The market and
its shape – free, regulated or government ruled – remained a tool
within political and ideological contexts. It took as long as to the eighties,
of the 20th century, that this relationship started to be questioned
– who is master and who is slave. The markets where pretty depressed in
the 70ies, the oil crisis, the highpoint of economic slowness where reached in
1980 with a peak of the gold price at 850 Dollar an ounce gold. People trusted
in gold, but not in economic power. That pushed the development over the brink
and lead to the introduction of a change which was rather significant and forms
in a way the basis of what we have now and hence the basis of my argumentation.
After Thatcher and Reagan, in 1982
Kohl came to power and they introduced a strong economy-driven policy, and a
radical deregulation of the markets. (The Big Bang of the LSE in London, 1986
for instance) The Keynesian idea of a welfare state with a partly regulated
market was abandoned. Large global economic conferences in the eighties lead to
international trade agreements. The market – the sleeping giant –
got untied. So the market was already quite powerful in 1989, and its last big
external function – to be an ideological tool against communism –
broke down together with the iron curtain. The market was there, running hot,
and signifying only itself. From 1981 to March 2000 the global markets had the
longest upswing in recorded history. That formed the backdrop for bringing
economic structures into an ideological position themselves. This position
seems to have replaced for now the fragmented ideological and religious
superstructures, which become quite openly tools for the economy.
This can be seen in the ways that
economic language leak into every area of daily life. The ‘bulls’
and the ‘bears’ of the stock market are familiar symbols for ups
and downs and, we invest energy in something, expecting a return, and we are managing the family. But that reaches much
deeper than just words in everyday language. In his text Thinking
Economically About Culture, Michael Mueller describes the phenomenon, and sees it as the
‘ideologisation of a descriptive system’. For him the transfer of
the descriptive system of economy to areas this system was not originally made
for, is the process of ideologisation, similar to Communist or Christian
systems. ‘Just as the medieval mind viewed everything from social life to
art and from music to cosmology from a religious perspective, so do we today
tend to view everything from an economic perspective.’ [7]
I am not sure, that the takeover of a descriptive system can be called already
an ideologisation, I rather understand this takeover as just the sign of a much
deeper change of the paradigm. However, this change in the governing system of
references within a society gives artists a changed pool of references as well.
The whole economic backdrop I tried to describe, along with the earlier
mentioned changed in the corporate self understanding and understanding of its
attitude towards art, is able to changed artists approach to economy, or to
offer new kinds of interaction.
3.2. How the role for art in the corporation
did change
The corporations where looking for a
changed identity, if not for any identity at all, in order to fill the gap left
by this virtualisation. New strategies where needed, new ways of management and
customer relationships. Team work, low hierarchies, a much higher degree of
flexibility, came along with the deregulation of the 80s, driven by conservative
governments. Art was introduced on a large scale for the image construction and
PR of companies. Most corporate collections were founded in the 70s, and
financed on a large scale during the 80s. There are just a few earlier examples
of corporate collecting in the sense we understand it today. (notably the first
corporate collection was started by IBM in 1939. It is not just of interest,
that this was much earlier than most of the other companies, it is also very
interesting, that it is a company which became later the leader of the future
information industry). JP Morgan Chase, the other famous early example, was
started in 1959 by David Rockefeller.
Art and its function to represent power and to give the powerful organisation or person an image, to bring it into being within a certain cosmos of images, that has a long tradition, and has always been a function of art. Culture, contemporary culture has become not only fashionable, but a tool, that succeeded by far the traditional role as being a tool for representation. Art also appeared in other forms within the corporation. ‘Creativity’, ‘Innovation’, ‘Change’ were the buzzwords – and they still are – and led to a wide range of books, and courses for managers of all kinds. Now in 2002, if you type in at the book search engine amazon.com the words Management & Creativity, it brings up 423 hits. – books, which have this words in the title…
One of the many titles does (in
this case recently published) illustrate it very well: Lead Your Staff To
Think Like Einstein, Create Like Advance, and Invent Like Edison: Powerful Real
World Techniques That Work! (published by Irwin, Burr Ridge IL, USA. Note the
exclamation mark at the end of the title.) by Don Blowhoiak, who also wrote the
much acclaimed bestseller Mavericks!.
There are many human resources
development activities involving creative activities – from making play
writes (for instance Unilever 2000 –2002 in cooperation with the Royal
Court Theatre in London),
performing theatre plays, making together paintings etc. In Berlin, the artist
Jörg Reckheinrich works in workshops together with the middle and the high
management of DaimlerChrysler. Workshops include, for instance, the group
production of a large scale painting. Before doing so, Reckheinrich talked
about painters, showed examples, and as group they tried to develop criteria
for quality, find strategies for the production of paintings, and ways to work
as a group on one painting. In the last chapter about new artistic strategies,
I will come back to that.
It is possible to
distinguish four basic ways, how corporations and art interact. There is the
traditional role of art creating representations of power, making impressive or
large or expensive images. This got extended to art in the corporate collection,
where it is used as a PR tool, that works on the image making and branding of
the corporation. Art gets traditionally associated with eternity, eternal
value, elitist attitudes and so on, and these attributes are transferred to the
product or the company. Sponsoring of events and institutions is the next form
of interaction, and repeats certain effects of the collection, but extends it
to a social engagement within society, (which also applies to sponsoring of
sport or social events). And finally, there is the most interesting but
hardest-to-define interest in creative structures and ways of working,
innovation and change. Here art is probably seen as a kind of tool for the
critical optimisation of the system. The corporation seems to say: ‘We
are interested in the future, we even include the critique in the
system’. Art as the visibility of the ability of the system to digest
critique – hence to improve – is ironic as well, as on one hand
very little art really engages with this critique, and corporations have always
the need to self criticise and improve – using consultancies and other
tools – but again: they are not visible to the public. As Norbert Bolz,
puts it: ‘The cultural program of a corporation is for them a kind of
nature preservation program for the Second Nature, hence the world of spirit.
And this engagement is today not at all anymore humanistic and cosy.’[8]
I quote Alain-Dominique
Perrin, the CEO of Cartier in the 80s 'Culture is in fashion, all the better.
As long as it lasts, we should use it.' and 'The effectiveness of this strategy
of communication (the use of culture) is not limited to creating the event, it
is also necessary to make it known: the media have to be a partner. Patronage
is media orientated...It is part of the media and it uses media as support' [9]
All that creates a general interest in the arts, one that is not philanthropic
engagement, but suggest a very clear interest in what can be done for the
corporation with the use of art – or what is thought to be art. Now I take
this kind of interest as an interesting move, to return certain functions to
art that it was about to lose. A good deal of artists see it as a chance to
interact and develop, and I am going to show a few examples of them.
3.3 Case Study: DaimlerChrysler
It was never
Daimler’s main focus, to engage in contemporary art. With a desirable,
very visible product on the market, its cars, Daimler does not have the
problems of non – visibility as they have for instance financial
institutions. But yet: A collections was started, and loads of other activities
followed. Daimler Benz[10]
began in 1977 to collect art. The focal point of this collection was to be
abstract, constructive artworks, and the collection had a strong affinity with
southern Germany. That got quickly extended to other works of international
contemporary art. The collection contains around 1000 works and is accessible
by appointment for external visitors. In 1999 Daimler opened its own
public gallery in Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, at the very same site which was
bought as Haacke made his piece. There have been other involvements in the arts
for Daimler before, for instance the Busch–Reisinger Museum of Harvard
University has since the early nineties had a special ‘Daimler-Benz
Curator’. In Japan, "Art Scope," by
DaimlerChrysler to support cultural activities, is a program to give Japanese
young artists opportunities to stay and work on art creation, and present their
work. Originally, Mercedes Benz Japan Co, started this in 1991. In 2001 a new
award was founded, the DaimlerChrysler Prize for Contemporary Art in South
Africa, an extremely prestigious award which includes the making, mounting and
cataloguing of a large scale exhibition, travelling from Stuttgart to Berlin,
Pretoria, and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. Over the years,
Daimler has given a few commissions to artists, including a commission to Andy
Warhol in 1986 to do portraits of Mercedes cars. The series was not completed
because of Warhol’s deaths, and consists of 35 paintings and 12 drawings.
A remarkable project was
started in the late nineties. The artist Mathis Neidhard began to work for and
with Daimler as free consultant, as artist consultant, who gets brought in on
special projects. He says about himself that he ‘accompanies
processes’ within DaimlerChrysler. This process orientated, integrative
practise in operating with artists within a business is the newest way of
interaction, and leads to new ideas – in a way the logical follow up to
former developments – for artists. To quote the corporation's web page on
why these art activities came into being, and what the aim of DaimlerChrysler
might be, it reads as follows: ‘reflects commitment to art as an inherent
element of the corporation's social self-concept and cultural profile. The mutual exchange of knowledge and expertise benefits
both sides: the competencies of artistic activity, for instance in the fields
of globalization, identity and value definition, can add to the spectrum of
problem-solving options within the corporation and enrich the corporate
approach by alternative solutions and the more intensive consideration of
"soft" factors.’[11]
4. The discourse, part 2
In their cynical way the
Chapman Brothers, two British artists, said: ‘This is not the age of
enlightenment, this is the age of light entertainment.’[12]
Now even if this was issued as more of a PR catchphrase, there is something to
it: Who does actually say that art needs to follow a historical construction
forever, which came into being with Schiller and the enlightenment? To see art
as autonomous in some way in order to establish a critical point of view, if
resistance and an emancipatoric claim in a modernist tradition proves more
hampering than progressive? The process described by Debord earlier in this
text is well under way. For Debord this is the end of culture as such, the
transgression into a borderless show of consumption without any sense other
than to reproduce itself.
Artists have reacted in
facing this new situation, and developed strategies and theories in analysing
the situation. In the 90s, there was a revival of politically engaged critical
fine art practice. But as quickly as it came, it disappeared. Wochenklausuren, one of the most active
groups on the continent and based in Vienna still works in socio-cultural
projects. Botschaft e.V. and Museum für Zukunft were active in Berlin, Bank are still active in
London, to mention a few of them. Clubbing and Launching - as it was exercised
par excellence on the Documenta X in 97 in the ongoing party/discussion in the
Orangerie in den Karlsauen - provided an atmosphere. The Techno as music/style
and the internet and the activists around that tie in.[13]
It seemed like a struggle, to find ways to establish a critical position, which
then proved either to be not working, or were appropriated very quickly.
‘On the other hand, the methods (models of participation, self
organization, critique of institutions) and thematic agenda (urban politics,
pop, feminism, critique of technology and economy) that characterized critical
art practice in the 90s seem to have undergone the usual transition from
critique to affirmation of the new service economies and their mythology of
communication.’[14]
Andreas Siekmann and Alice Creischer, two artists and writers, who have been
engaged in exactly this practice in the 90s, wrote this desperate denial of any
fatalism. This desperate attempt to revitalise a critical discourse has
experienced its permanent failure, and learned from the strategies it was
facing. That seems to have forced cultural activists and artists again into an
engagement with the subject, the ‘dubious, but in fact operational
position of autonomy’[15]
was abandoned and it was and still is looked for positions within the system.
Norbert Bolz puts it
very clearly: ‘ Only in the comparable short period of time between
Baudelaire and Beckett, the Philanthropist was not only a supporter that
helped, but also the problem for the artist. The critical avant-garde had
themselves defined polemical contra the market… Everything else had been
denounced as affirmative aesthetics and self-centeredness protected by the
power. … But today we have left critical modernity far behind us. The
place of the artist has changed from the ivory tower into the control tower.
The artistic Avant-garde is no longer the conscience of society, but rather the research and development dept. of
the economy.‘[16]
5. Meanwhile in the art world
5.1. Haacke’s work as
pivotal point
Haacke’s work pictures a pivotal point between two positions. In his understanding of autonomy, he abandons aesthetic autonomy, but sticks to the social autonomy of the cultural producer. He understands corporations as politicised entities in a general ideological meta-discourse. The artist, as part of the society, and as player in the same ideological discourse, has to keep distance and autonomy. He claims its own position. My thesis is that this position of the cultural producer has vanished after the 1970s. Something like a position which would enable critique as such is to be questioned, and many artists, especially dealing with the corporate world, work in a different way.
The ideology Haacke is referring to – as mentioned stemming from the Frankfurt School - has largely disappeared. But the attempt to get rid of an ideological superstructure at all has proved to be a mistake. After the collapse of the communist countries, and the fragmentation of all leading ideological driven superstructures we witness a phenomenon, which kind of shifts the levels. Corporations were talked about as if the ways they might be acting were bad or good in moral terms within a given ideology. Now economic structure itself turns ideological. The thought of places outside of economic structure could be seen to disappear, making it clear that there is no ground elsewhere anymore. The idea of cultural autonomy vanishes, positioning the cultural producer amidst the society and herewith also amidst the economic system. It is a bit like realising that you have an alien also inside yourself, after having tried to fight them; if you try to kill the alien, you have to kill yourself. Die or live with it.
The solution that accepts the alien,
maybe with a certain fatalist gesture, but to vote for life, is the position I
am looking for in the work of other artists. They vote for doing research on
the alien inside yourself, to negotiate with it, and to make a contract. To
take him on, and to use the forces accessible to you through him. They
don’t try to kill him, but to learn through him. And in this understanding
of the Other
inside yourself, to manage to establish a distance and separation. This is not
a critical position, even if it involves certain characteristics that may be
found in a critical position. But to stick with the example of the alien, I
would even go one step further: That the alien is an alien seems to be a
cultural construction. Seen in a much broader view, it is part of a an
evolutionary process. Critique as a result of enlightenment is one of the most
established constructions, a holy grail of the culture, dangerous to touch.
Dangerous in two ways: You get deleted by the cultural elite, who are defending
their positions and usually use critique to establish and reproduce an
ideological structure of power – a structure they usually condemn as
such. But this is more of a social risk, the real risk is indeed that by giving
up the necessity of a critical position, culture looses everything it has
gained through Modernism. Though, it seems to me, that this is the only way to
go, to leave the safe land of critique, and to venture into other ways of
dealing with the world. And the ways in which art deals with economy could play
a key role in this. Let's have a look at some examples of artists trying to
find their ways through this jungle.
Lucy Kimbell is a
London-based artist. If she gives a talk, it says on the blurb: 'Lucy Kimbell,
Consultant & Artist'. Her CV is a mixture of a lot of things, including
working in an Internet advertising and branding agency, journalism and art. She
operates in an art context as well as in a business context. Talking about the
economic descriptive system, she pushes it to the edge by inventing the LIX
– index, an index, similar to the FTSE or Dow Jones Index. The LIX,
instead of measuring corporate data, measures her personal data. On the blurb
it says: 'It goes up (the LIX Index) if she is busy on her own creative
projects or spends time with close friends, and it goes down if she has a bad
dream or her credit card bill is too high. The LIX is therefore a contemporary portrait
for the real-time economy.'[17]
The art world has in different ways started to involve corporate thinking and
economic structures in their thinking and acting.
Picture 3
5.2
Again: The Culture Industries. The system.
The pragmatic use of
corporate strategies and management to improve the organisation, PR and sales
in the arts and other cultural fields began to increase massive during the 70s.
That includes the artist themselves as well as the art system and market. A
professionalisation took place which is hard to believe. The profession of the
curator was not yet in existence in the 1970s, cultural managers did not exist
in the huge number they do today, and the whole Event Business appeared out of
a traditional understanding of exhibition and museum. So business strategies
came into the art business and developed it into a business themselves. Sure,
it has been business for a long time now, probably since the famous picture by
Watteau, the painted shop sign for an art dealer, and earlier. But what happened
recently brought it to a completely new stage. The turnover of the complete
culture industries has multiplied. The studies and data I’m referring to, concern especially Germany,
but these studies indicate a comparable development in other countries of the
western world. (For instance the total financial turnover of the culture
industry – Museums, Theaters etc. - increased in the German district
Nordrhein – Westphalen between 1980 and 1996 about 214%, ca 8.000.000.000
€ in 1996[18]). The other way of approaching economy and the corporate
world is to use it as subject, and the corporations as field of intervention.
Picture 4
5.3. Critique? Autonomy?
Artists – the content providers.
5.3.1. Artists could remain artists
There are a
wide range of positions artists take in relation to economy. It is even
difficult to talk about ‘old’ and ‘new’ positions, as
they have existed for a long time alongside each other. There is the critical
tradition– stemming from the Frankfurt School, and there is a tradition
of trying to appropriate the corporate world and the consumer. During the
described development in the economy, for the second position a lot of
possibilities of interaction appeared, which had not been there before. I am
starting off with an example of a young artist, taking on the issue of economy
and working in the tradition of a critical engagement. Carey
Young, a British artist, deliberately calls herself an artist, insisting on
this perspective. She introduces corporate language and strategies into art.
The language of business and economy – graphs, charts, and the whole
cosmos of communication, selling, production, motivation and training. The ways
to act and to engage in business are used as a language of art. She gets closer
to the alien than many artists did before her, by commercially working for
corporations. Her desperate desire to keep up with a critical position,
claiming the same autonomy Hans Haacke is claiming, becomes clear, as she says:
‘Inspired by the fact that there seems to be nothing that now remains
outside of capitalism, my projects trace an often ironic, performative search
for critical distance by going deep inside contemporary business
structures’[19].
Young is always linking her work back to the discourse of art, and it is
somehow risky, as her activity of importing things from the business world into
the art world could become just a new stylistic feature within a given
discourse, missing the chance to develop into a real change of paradigm.
Picture 5
I use again Haacke and
one of his pieces as a springboard to different ways of approaching the issue,
and even more interesting, different target groups to communicating it to. At
first we find ourselves in the centre of the traditional art discourse, the
Documenta. In Documenta 8, Hans Haacke showed a piece called Continuity. Under the headline
‘Contemporary art in the Deutsche Bank Frankfurt’, it shows a large
logo of the Deutsche Bank, in the centre showing black people marching with a
coffin. Underneath is a text, which says: '"We are not willing and not in
a position to make political demands, because if we were to do so in the case
of South Africa, we would have to do so with many, many other countries and
business partners as well. This cannot and must not be our job. "Werner
Blessing, Member Managing Board of Directors, Deutsche
Bank.'
This fine example of the afore described position and tradition had a kind of a
corresponding piece on Documenta [20].
The French artist Ange
Leccia showed a piece called La seduccion. Again the corporation Daimler is
brought into focus. But this time not the corporation as such, but the product,
the myth. A Mercedes 300 CE, a desirable object is on show. And Ange Leccia
gets sponsored by Daimler. Daimler installs one of their usual presentations
from car fairs, a slow revolving platform, glossy, with a brand new car on it.
And Ange Leccia brands the brand, by calling this piece an artwork by him. But
on the other hand he is giving his ‘space’ in Documenta away to
advertise a car. It is a work by Ange Leccia, and it is a business
presentation. This simple but very effective gesture cracks open a way to deal
with economy, which has rarely be seen before. The corporation embraces the
artist. The evil monster has got him. What does he do? Scream, fight run away?
Use the classical strategy formulated by Haacke: Take the money and run? No. The
artist also embraces the corporation. And this is a stunning moment. The artist
nearly takes the corporation by surprise, a very elegant move, making
connections visible, deconstructing but not judging. Ange Leccia could drive a
Mercedes in his private life.
Picture 6
It does not mean that
artist and corporation fall into one, that the artist somehow disappears. Both
sides still exist, even more so than before: Their profiles become sharper,
crystal clear, and a highly reflective power comes into play. This work is a
kind of a relief: ‘Finally let go, don’t be so pretentious all the
time, let go, and even more will come back to you’ it seems to say. The
work surely includes a critical approach: The glamorous seduction, the ideology
of consumption, fetishisiation and the god ‘car’, the god
‘brand’. A Mercedes 300 CE. What is with the commodification of the
art work? Leccias answer is: What, if the commodity becomes an artwork? It is a
commodity is an artwork is a commodity. The Readymade comes into play, the
placed object, offered to be judged by the public, put on display. On a slow
revolving one. That’s what art is usually. Something put on a display, to
be more desirable. That’s what Haacke’s piece in the museum is as
well. Haacke knows it, reflects on it, and does it. No other choice, and Leccia
does the same with the Mercedes 300CE, and a whole generation does it now in
direct interaction with economic structures. They are dealing in rather
ambivalent ways with the issue. For example, the Swedish artist Lars Ramberg,
who had his own business consultancy, making himself into a corporation. Then
there's Swetlana Heger and Damen Plejanoff, somehow taking Leccia's work
further. They decided to rent all available
exhibition spaces and catalogue pages available to them during 1999 to BMW. As
quid pro quo they got a Z3 Roadster, a brand new Cabrio.
5.3.2. Artists might become
something different. Direct interaction
The next logical step,
and most promising approach – if in most cases very unripe as yet –
seems to be found in the real interaction with corporations, and the change of
the targeted audiences of art practice. A broad approach to this issue was
discussed at a conference held in London in November 2001 called Ways of
Working - placing artists in
business contexts[21].
It
brought together a couple of interesting examples of artists engaging directly
with the business world. It draws basically on Artists in Residence projects in
corporations, with different goals and ideas behind it, but usually get paid
for it by the company itself. Unavoidably, The Artist Placement Group springs
into mind, having invented this idea already in the mid 60s. Even if it came
from a quite different background, believing in the improvement of society by
having artists as advisers in corporations, institutions and politics: The APG
already believed absolutely in the potential of artists to create a return,
which is not only valuable in art contexts, but also in corporate contexts (and
others). John Latham's ideas and theories – and his practical attempts to
realise them - are a great and mostly undervalued source. But his holistic
approach seems to belong to another age, even if on the other hand he was
already able to really shift the paradigm.
Now, in the 90s the
companies expect a clear return for themselves, and ‘the whole society
and the good within a philosophical framework’[22]
– as Latham was putting it - does not come into play anymore.
Interestingly enough: none of the artists in Ways of Working have a problem with
that. They try to find the best ways of showing competence and know-how which
could be brought into the network of the corporation, and help them in various
ways. They do a job which is comparable to a ‘Change Agent’, a new
job type which popped up during the Dotcom hype. And interestingly enough, at
this conference, (in other contexts it is different) it became a kind of a
consensus that it would be better to call yourself Change Agent or something
similar, but not artist, in order to establish more effective communication.
Richard Layzell, a UK artist, did a residency at AIT, a software company, which
developed into a permanent job for him. He now has a budget of his own, and is
the companies ‘visionair’. 'They see me as adding another dimension
to the working life of the organisation – adding visual cultural things
but also adding the unexpected. It broadens the dimensions of what being a
software developer means. My involvement has contributed to the company’s
success through staff moral, retention, and brand. I think it is fair to say
that nowadays I run the quarterly company meetings, and help make them amusing
an quirky, events that people want to come to instead of being obliged to. The
way I measure success is when mild anarchy is accepted and people want more of
it.' [23]
One can’t help thinking that it sounds a bit like the traditional role of
the clown on the court. But that might not be as dull as it sounds: attitudes
and techniques to be found in the role of the clown could be a part of what
actually is of interest to a corporation. Now I am not sure if John Latham
would be happy with this placement, but it definitely fulfils one condition: it
addresses not the art business nor the culture industry. It addresses the
company. Probably just the company, not the company as an example of an active
asset of the society, as – again – Latham would have intended it.
However, in the
mentioned conference, Lucy Kimbell suggests a list of potential uses for the
corporation which an artist can provide:
Value of residency to the
host:
- Stimulation
from an intelligent creative outsider being bought into the business and
adding perspective
- Being
exposed to new ideas and new thinking that may be of commercial value.
- Being
able to take a creative risk by responding to the artist
- Providing
a talking point for employees across the organisation thus building the
team.
- Being
visible from marketing and PR about the artist residency.’[24]
The question of whether is it good
or bad is basically, but not completely, left behind. If projects like those
residencies are undertaken, it is clear, that they have to produce benefits for
both sides, otherwise, they would not agree on it. With processes like that,
the more the artists focus on their work in a corporate surrounding, the less
it gets seen and communicated within the art world. Their focus shifts away
from the traditional art discourse and the other way round.
To finish with a longer
case study, I would like to come back to DaimlerCrysler, and to Mathis
Neidhart, the artist who works as a consultant for them. His method, which he
calls IMEX, contains four parts. First, he provides tools to support a process.
He illustrates that with a meeting of engineers, which he accompanies by making
little drawings and icons, according to the flow of communication, the words
which pop up frequently, and pins this drawings to the wall during the meeting.
They serve later to organise the discussion, and to formulate results. Second
is a method of documentation, third he works within this process with the images
in the heads of the people and last, he aims to draw conclusions and solutions
out of this context. So Neidhard sees his activities as artistic process, but
does not like to see spin offs of this process (in the mentioned case drawings)
as art works. 'Drawing is a methodical tool', and he calls them 'plain-air
drawings in a corporation.'[25]
So it is clear from the very outset on, that he cooperates with the
corporation, that this is his intention and his job. It is also his field of
interest and research. He can provide creative interruptions, input, and change
of perspective. Understanding the corporation as a functional sculpture, he
performs within that sculpture and influences processes, in order to improve
the function. Neidhart states that he understands himself as entrepreneur,
service provider and artist, having started as artist, drawing his motivation
and experiences from that background.
A lot of differences to
Haacke’s way in dealing with Daimler spring to mind. I would like to
avoid the most obvious, which would be to focus on the ideological difference
and try to approach the question through the back door. The frame in which they
see their counterpart and operate within is very different. Haacke approaches
the corporation as a figure within a complex political and economical structure
of power. He deals pretty much with the corporation as such, and in order to
focus global connections and chains he has to neglect details within the
corporation. The factor of humanity in the mentioned tradition of the
enlightenment is very important for him, in a very global understanding. He
looks not for a solution but for the solution. Neidhart's complexity lies within the
corporation. He pretty much skips the question of whether Daimler is a good or
a bad corporation or if it is good or bad to cooperate with them. It might be
even better to say that this question occurs on another level. So if Neidhart
addresses questions of humanity in that sense, he addresses them on a much
smaller scale, within an already given framework. It is more of an interieur he is interested in.
As much as Haacke
understands himself as a consultant for the function of society as such,
Neidhart sees himself as a consultant within one unit. He states: ‘
It can’t be my
goal, to intervene in the large contexts. If it is possible to insert
some human component
within the hard world of business, a human component which would usually
disappear, something has moved in the right direction. …But I believe,
that there is a real added value in my work, which is useful to the
corporation: The solution, which was maybe only reachable through this process.[26]
Now besides the difference in the
size of the frame, in relation to humanity, there is also the obvious
difference in being part of a unit, serving the corporation to improve, and
denying the possibility to engage at large. There is a certain lack of trust in
metaconsructions, there is not even in interest in them. I quote again
Neithart, because I think he is a very good case study: Question: ‘Do
ethical questions play a role, stemming from aesthetical questions?’
Answer: ‘I am not a specialist in ethics, but ground my aims within an
artistic vocabulary.’[27]
Now is this naivety or irresponsibility? After Enlightenment, and the project
of Modernism, after all that, not to forget Haacke himself? Yes and no. I
think, that Haacke’s perspective is not of interest anymore for a lot of
artists, associating it with dinosaurs, which are rather dangerous in that they
might step on something rather than be able to deal with large matter. They are
interested in the inner structure of their subjects in a way that Haacke would
generally disapprove of. Know your enemy, might be an appropriate statement,
but that does not fit either, because the category ‘enemy’ has
somehow disappeared. The borders and groupings become much more fluid. Artists
are interested in generating something like local truth, instead of an
ideological metaconstruction. Neidhart seems to say: How can I know what
Daimler does, and if I know, who am I to judge if this is good or evil? And anyway, why should I be interested
in that? The processes within the corporation are complicated enough, to master
them, to dissect the congruencies and differences between artistic practice and
management practice, to develop and sharpen tools to deal with that.
6. Conclusion
An approach to
corporations without adopting a distance and a resistance does not necessarily
destroy any reflective quality of the work. The critical tradition moves on
from being the structure to be in to one possible structure of research. An
external position was made possible in the recent years, through a process in
which the economy was a driving force. This external position allows one to see
critique as a historical construction. A construction which has proved to be one
of the most effective in social evolution, but includes in its function as such
the use of a set of beliefs which are thought to be superior. This supposition
has become problematic. The changed constellation between Economy, Art and
Ideology suggests that changing or at least developing this method is essential
for moving on, to open a new chapter in culture. I call the change of the
method a change of paradigm. In fact, I think, that this chapter has already been open for a while, we just lack the
rhetoric to describe it. And, even if I don’t like saying so, I sense
that the method of critique in the tradition of Frankfurt School is blocking
other perspectives and preventing certain ways of understanding. That’s
the right of a ruling system, to activate self-defences. To detect and develop
the first very unstable and undeveloped steps in the new direction is quite
complicated though, more so because it needs to except that the sounding board
for artists is changing and moving away from the art business. The art business
as such will not disappear, but it is about to develop in an even more
self-referential system than it has already become through Modernism.
What seems to be treason
to a modernist critical position could be its development. And sure it includes
certain aspects of the Enlightenment tradition. But in this essay I am more
interested in showing, that it IS TREASON on the modernist critical position,
because it is basically not interested in discussing this position anymore. And
this treason is a possibility to move on. In a way the dream of art to have a
function in society is allowed to return. Although the engagement with
corporations seems in most cases not to destroy the reflective quality of what
artists are doing, it is the other way round: They seem to learn and improve in
knowledge and differentiation about society in general and economy especially.
But it is absolutely essential to keep the critical tradition in mind, and to
stay aware of its reflective tools. Its like: OK, the tool making stage of
Modernity is over, now lets use them. But they need to be kept sharp and
developed.
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