In Terms Of

Tag: Capitalism

  • Needle on the Record

    Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution with Michael Denning
    Friday, September 4, 2015
    Interference Archive, Brooklyn

    “You might say that a people or a movement must be constituted musically before it can be constituted politically.” This was one argument among many declared by Michael Denning, a professor of American studies and English at Yale University, during a talk for his new Verso book, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. Denning, however, made it clear that the music culture during the brief period of time studied in his book—from the widespread use of electrical recording in 1925 to the early years of the Great Depression—was not revolutionary politically.

    Denning’s words were well suited for the summer exhibition at Interference Archive, if a song could be freedom … Organized Sounds of Resistance, which explored intersections of music and politics through record covers, song books, and music memorabilia, all with a predilection for insurgency. Most prominent were three walls of record covers, some from popular music, such as Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire, Meat Is Murder by the Smiths, and Bikini Kill’s self-titled EP. Revolutionary-minded jazz players Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk were represented, as were obscure proletariat titles like They’ll Never Keep Us Down: Women’s Coal Mining Songs.

    Drawing from the first chapter of his book, Denning provided ten instances of early electrical sound recordings from around the world. Before this technology, singers and musician performed live in front of a machine that cut grooves into a platter—the master recording of the session was a record. In the mid-1920s, engineers developed a more advanced method using microphones and amplifiers to electrically inscribe sounds onto a cylinder, disc, or film, which could be taken elsewhere for manufacturing. A son band was recorded in Havana in October 1925, followed by Louis Armstrong’s bands in New Orleans and Chicago a month later. In Cairo the legendary vocalist Umm Kulthūm recorded songs for a set of ten 78 RPM records in May 1926, and the Jakarta singer and dancer Miss Riboet laid down the kroncong classic “Krongtjong Moeritskoe” in November. Other recordings were made in Honolulu, Zanzibar, Accra, and Johannesburg—and Django Reinhardt in Paris. Denning played twenty to thirty seconds of each example to give the audience a taste of the explosion of music from back them. He also created a Spotify playlist for the book.1

    Michael Denning describes the early electrical recordings of Louis Armstrong (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Denning could not overstress the importance of colonial port cities, connected by steamships. After the invention of electrical recording, companies such as Gramophone in the United Kingdom, Victor in the United States, and Pathé in France, sent engineers around the world, usually twice a year, to port cities—Manila, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Tunis, Bombay—to record the locals in order to sell products back to the local markets. It was a commercial enterprise relatively unconcerned with preservation. One British music reviewer, Denning said, noted that even though England produced the physical records, they were imported quickly and therefore hard to find. In the United States, homegrown music was marketed as “race records” and “hillbilly” music, often become trendy in the metropolitan cities. Though the recordings of the electrical era came from all over the world, they were mislabeled as jazz, a catchall term for syncopated music that might actually be tango, rumba, or rebetika.

    In those port cities lived professional musicians who could read music, as well as those learned by ear. “You see it in Havana, you see it in New Orleans, you see it in Shanghai,” Denning said. “The mix of these two sets of musicians” produced localized—I hesitate to say indigenous—music outside the formal, orchestrated scenes in London, New York, and Berlin. Creating makeshift studios in hotel rooms, engineers would sometimes put up a sign that essentially said “We are recording and need musicians.” Other times they would locate performers on the edge of musical culture—those musicians who were trained but were part of the community—who would become musical directors that recruited from the local scene and even registered (or assigned) a recording’s copyright. In colonialism, he remarked, a class of subordinate elites served as intermediaries between the ruling class and the general population, and musicians could be found there. These musicians, Denning revealed, are the “key protagonists or heroes” of Noise Uprising.

    Installation view of one wall of if a song could be freedom … Organized Sounds of Resistance (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While some might see exploitative capitalism at play here, Denning took a deeper look. “These musics are best understood not as an emergence of the music industry,” he said, “nor was it simple popular music.” Instead, “it was a vernacular revolution,” not unlike the effect of the invention of the printing press on language. The author called the emergence of these records a “decolonization of the ear,” sparking a political unconscious in music that later would become conscious. The young intellectuals in port cities, he said, were drawn to their local music. Denning stated, “Political decolonization—the decolonization of territories, of legislatures—depended on a cultural revolution.” The creation and circulation of records from the late 1920s onward supported enfranchisement, he claimed, serving a role that books and newspapers once did. Denning commented that the record covers on the wall of Interference Archive, such as those by the politicized Nigerian bandleader and politician Fela Kuti, exemplify the evolution.

    In Trinidad, a song by the calypsonian Raymond Quevedo, better known as Atilla the Hun, called “Commission’s Report” responded earnestly to the official government report on the Butler riots. After the British cracked down on dissent, he recorded two more songs that were sympathetic to the replaced colonial leaders, and a third, called “The Strike,” that cheekily avoided direct commentary. The knowing wink became powerfully prevalent. “Often the most innocuous songs,” Denning said, “carry anticolonial and nationalist connotations in the eyes of the authorities and in the population.” In Hawaii, “the romantic lyric tribute to the land, built on the simple musicality of place names,” was a form a resistance. “What some understood as tourist picturesque actually signified colonial dispossession.”

    But what about the commercial exploitation and appropriation of the music? Many of the recordings were a mingling of Western and non-Western instruments, a hybrid evolution of styles that differed from music from isolated, rural locations, which relied on the oral tradition. Even though the folklorists find commercialism suspicious, Denning said, leading figures such as Alan Lomax came to realize the cultural and historical significance of the recordings. In a letter to the Library of Congress, Lomax claimed that the commercial companies did more of a service than the folklorists, who sometimes repackaged the old commercial recordings as indigenously authentic. Denning noted that much of Harry Smith’s celebrated collection , Anthology of American Folk Music, was drawn from early electrical records produced for the market.

    The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók sought pure folk music, Denning said, not the popular music played by gypsies for money. The search for authenticity or purity is short sighted, if not misguided, I think, because it fetishizes tradition and allows no room for development and change. In the early phonographic era, Denning said that the song was considered more important than the performance—improvisation was secondary. This attitude reversed. (Reinhardt, for instance, listened to and learned Armstrong’s improvisations.) In addition, a reliance on Western interpretations of exotic music declined. Before 1925, American listeners got Tin Pan Alley renditions of Hawaiian music. Folks no longer needed W. C. Handy’s written notations of the blues because, ten years later, they had the immediate gratification of listening to Armstrong and Bessie Smith. There may have been better trumpet players in New Orleans twenty or thirty years before Armstrong, Denning said, but we don’t have the recordings to prove it.

    Michael Denning gives the thumbs up (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While some may prize the work of the anonymous collective over the individual or stars, the early electric recordings featured individuals who were stars. Denning argued that the cult of the popular bandleader was not dissimilar to those for charismatic political figures in the decolonization era. The leaders of newly free nations often sponsored the work of musicians to establish not only a national identity but also a national industry. Import substitution is the concept of manufacturing and selling goods within your own country to obviate the need to buy from others. Some musicians were even encouraged to sell their records in New York and London, not just in Lagos.

    Denning pointed out the social and sexual contradiction in music. The division of labor was traditional: men are instrumentalists and women are singers. At the same time, he said, women were able to perform in public for the first time. From 1925 to 1930, Denning told us, musicians were not trying to revolutionize music for politics. Records reinvented daily life, making music regular, not occasional. At the time, he continued, music was associated with vice (drinking, drugs, prostitution), with carnival and military marching bands, and with vaudeville and theater. In the port cities, Denning noted, working-class musicians played for working-class people.

    Denning compared the early electrical period to the dot com boom of the late 1990s: internet companies had no idea how to make money, but investors poured millions into ideas for websites. In the mid- to late 1920s, record companies recorded anything and everything, because the technology to produce and consume music was so new. Ten to fifteen years later, and after the Great Depression, they knew how to market music and make money. Denny, though, reminded us to focus on the music, not on the industry. The energy of labor precedes capitalism’s capture, Denning said. He urged us to transcend the leftist critique of industry and get to the powerful human impulses to make music—and also to have it heard and shared.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 During the audience Q&A, an attendee was curious about Denning’s relationship to archives. “In many ways I feel like my archives have been that world of collectors and discographers on the internet,” citing the blogs Excavated Shellac and Haji Maji. Record collectors are the true archivists, he said. Those who collected Robert Johnson records in the 1960s found that, by the 1980s and 1990s, these became too expensive. The collectors turned elsewhere, to the world music that Denning’s book is about.

  • Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

    Gendered Expectations: The Representation of “Girls” in Contemporary Art
    Sunday, June 7, 2015
    NEWD Art Show, Brooklyn, NY

    Cindy Hinant, Celebrity Grid (The Rich Kid), 2013, ink, Mylar, and magazine page, 11 x 8½ in (artwork © Cindy Hinant)

    The artists Alex McQuilkin and Cindy Hinant and Kathy Battista, director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York and senior research fellow at the University of Southampton in England, met at the NEWD Art Show, a small art fair that coincided with Bushwick Open Studios, to discuss art that deals with “girly” aesthetics. The panel’s teaser offered this: “From makeup to celebrity culture, these artists mine “girly” motifs—often ignored or dismissed as flippant and unserious by the art world—to explore issues of gendered expectations and pressures women face through representations of women in the media and culture at large.”

    But what exactly is a “girly” aesthetic, anyway? On a casual level, Hello Kitty and Holly Hobbie come to my mind, as do princesses, pink dresses, tea parties, heart-shaped cupcakes, fruity cocktails, playing dress-up—and actually dressing up. I’m sure you could come up with your own list. Yet for a panel that implicitly set out to challenge stereotypes, the speakers didn’t try hard to debunk this aesthetic ghetto or even define it. It would have been enlightening if they had pointed out when images of stereotypes are innocuous or dangerous, but they didn’t I suppose we can use Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s helpful rule of thumb of “I know it when I see it,” but such an approach can reinforce faulty preconceptions. Instead, McQuilkin and Hinant gave brief presentations of their work, followed by a discussion about feminism with Battista.

    Alex McQuilkin, Sweet Sixteen, 2003, C-print, 20 x 24 in. (artwork © Alex McQuilkin)

    McQuilkin made her video Fucked (2000), a three-minute clip of the face of a young woman—the artist herself at age 19—putting on makeup while (apparently) being fucked from behind. The work caused a sensation when the gallery Modern Culture showed it at the 2002 Armory Show. (I was among those who saw it there.). Explaining the piece, the artist said that Fucked demonstrates how physical appearances alienate a person from the world, and how an image can be greater than the experience. Ironically, she always gets asked if the sex in Fucked is real or simulated, a fact that for me is ancillary, and not integral, to the work’s meaning. That didn’t matter when Fucked was pulled from an exhibition in the Netherlands for being child pornography. The edition sold well at the Armory, McQuilkin said, and one creepy collector even permanently installed it in his bedroom. She knows this because he showed her the room.

    Alex McQuilkin describes the motivations behind her work (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    More recently McQuilkin has been drawing the likenesses of Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve in their prime, but with blank spaces where their faces should be. “They’re made for us to project ourselves onto,” she explained. McQuilkin noted that Bardot felt that she had scored her first serious role as an actor when cast for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, but the American trailers pimped her babeness instead her professional chops, offering sexy shots of Bardot that were not in the film.

    Another recent work is Magic Moments (Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl) (2013), a video comprising appropriated clips of young, white fashion models from television commercials and online advertisements, moving in slow motion to the soundtrack a woman singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”1 We are comfortable looking at the women, McQuilkin observed, adding that she gets the “feeling of ‘I want what they have.’” It’s the classic male gaze. Combining ubiquitous images with national pride and naturalizing both, Magic Moments is not dissimilar from what you might see on a billboard-sized television screen in Times Square or in a display in a retail clothing store—delightfully blurring the division between art and commerce. The lack of a clear position—critical or complicit—seems to be McQuilkin’s point.

    Hinant admitted having a love/hate relationship with popular culture and cosmetics. For The Sephora Project (2012), she visited branches of the cosmetic-and-perfume chain store across Manhattan, filling out comment cards that detailed her interactions with staff and other shoppers. Her exhibition Aesthetic Relations at Joe Sheftel Gallery in 2012 addressed the right of publicity and agency: celebrity sex tapes, up-skirt photography, and revenge porn—what Hinant succinctly called the “aesthetics of violation.” Another body of her work reacts to paparazzi photos and Instagram feeds that show celebrities without makeup, with the former genre mocking their looks and the latter resisting the beauty myth. She explained that “‘without make-up’ is code language for ugly,” though it seems as if the famous are trying to dispel that thought. Inherent in Hinant’s conception of celebrity is a process of identification with, and rejection of, both yourself and the object of your fascination. Whether or not this experience is just part of growing up, she didn’t say.

    Hinant screened an early work, The Kissy Girls (2006), a kind of home movie that interviews her 11-year-old sister, who admitted to kissing at least ten boys. The video also showed Hinant’s sister—who perhaps exemplifies the sexually precocious “knowing child”—teaching the artist how to dance to a Missy Elliot song. In another series of works, Hinant overlaid grids of ink and Mylar on pages taken from trashy magazines like Us Weekly, pages that show photographs of the former child stars Tori Spelling, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, and Amanda Bynes, as well as the those of television personalities Kourtney and Khloé Kardashian. “The grid is a utopic space,” Hinant said mysteriously, “where one line does not have more value than another.”

    Cindy Hinant, one image from Women, 2011, C-print, 5 x 7 in. (artwork © Cindy Hinant)

    As moderator, Battista tried to create a conversation around art, gender, and fashion, and on the body as a site for consumption. In the mass media “we see images not of girls,” she said, “but of capitalism.” McQuilkin’s students at New York University believe that we live in a postgender time, but she still finds images as problems, which she attributed to being older and wiser. Hinant pointed out sexism in measures of artistic success: “If Carolee Schneemann wasn’t a babe, she wouldn’t have made it in the art world.” (In 2011 Hinant made C-prints of cropped appropriated images of the bare breasts of artists such as Schneemann, Yoko Ono, and Hannah Wilke.) Battista argued that male artists Richard Phillips and Richard Prince make work about female celebrity and noted that the singer and producer Pharrell Williams organized an exhibition called G I R L for Galerie Perrotin in Paris, on view when his “date rapey” song with Robin Thicke, “Blurred Lines,” became a smash hit. Though Williams publicly calls himself a feminist, Battista said, he practices “strategic misogyny” elsewhere.

    Kathy Battista (left) moderates the conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the audience Q&A, someone said that, when understanding feminism, some take a strictly economic view, which demonizes mothers who stay at home to raise children. An audience member made a comment that I interpreted as “It’s 2015—what the fuck.” Battista said that having children takes years off the lives of artists and academics, based on anecdotal, personal experience. Both artists recoiled at the term “girl” when asked to participate on today’s panel, but in 2006 interview McQuilkin was much more forthcoming with her attraction to adolescence—but she also said that she has moved on.2 The only time the “girl versus women” debate surfaced what when McQuilkin said she had no problem referring to a male-dominated art world as a “boy’s club” because the power dynamic is different.

    If I were moderating the discussion, I’d ask the artists about authenticity, imaginative play, and feelings of immortality, among other topics. For instance, can older men to portray girls in contemporary art without being total creeps? Are depictions of girls by women the only acceptable kind of representation? Growing up, McQuilkin lived in a bedroom “curated “by her mother, like a dollhouse. By contrast, her brother taped Metallica posters to his walls. “The maid didn’t go in there,” she said, without irony. How are gender roles inscribed across race, class, and nations?

    Adolescent studies in disciplines like psychology and sociology are rich, and so is literature—Lewis Carroll’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955) are touchstones. But the subject has been little examined in visual art apart from a collection of essays in Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art (2011), edited by Catharine Grant and Lori Waxman. The book argues that the art world’s fascination in girls peaked in 1999, the year in which a photography exhibition called Another Girl, Another Planet took place at the gallery Lawrence Rubin-Greenberg Van Doren, yet interest in young women in popular culture—from songs by the Beatles (“I Saw Her Standing There”) and the Rolling Stones (“Stray Cat Blues”) to the Larry Clark film Kids (1996) to Lena Dunham’s television show Girls—is decades old and continues to grow.

    Anna Gaskell, untitled #26 (override), from the series wonder, 1997, chromogenic print, 19 3/8 x 23 ⅝ in (artwork © Anna Gaskell)

    I would argue that the same is true in the art world, but the panelists neglected to discuss other artists making work about girls, such as Anna Gaskell (who once assisted Sally Mann), Laurel Nakadate, Collier Schorr, and Sue de Beer (for whom McQuilkin has worked). There’s something repulsive in how Erin M. Riley cranks out tapestries of scantily clad teen girls taking selfies in the bathroom mirror, but images of them are hugely popular on Instagram. What about historical figures such as Balthus and Edgar Degas, or contemporaries like Ryan McGinley and Richard Kern? As an artist who specializes in nude pictures of young (but legal) women, Kern practically lives Matthew McConaughey’s famous line in the movie Dazed and Confused: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older; they stay the same age.” Should why is the representation of “girls” in contemporary art a subject stuck in perennial adolescence?

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 McQuilkin cited the book Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999), written by a collective of French artists and activists under the name Tiqqun, as an influence.

    2 Ana Finel Honigman, “Overwhelming Life,” Artnet Magazine, March 29, 2006.

  • Much Detachment, Very Labor, So Painting

    The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness
    Thursday, June 4, 2015
    Jewish Museum,     Scheuer Auditorium, New York

    Isabelle Graw speaks on “The Economy of Painting” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    A well-attended lecture by Isabelle Graw, a professor of art theory and a founding editor of the journal Texte zur Kunst, was titled “The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness.” Jetlagged from a flight from Germany, Graw framed her talk as an eight-step analysis of the naturalization of painting in the contemporary moment. In the late 1990s, she said, painters “felt pressured to justify themselves,” but this anxiety fell away by the early 2000s, because of social, economic, and historical reasons. Probably most important is that artists since then have absorbed the critique of painting and consequently renewed the primacy of the medium.

    Step One

    Graw’s term for the renewal of painting is “vitalist projection.” Her point of departure was Hubert Damisch’s ideas about the indexical signs traditionally associated with painting, such as the brushstroke, which imply subjectivity. Brushstrokes suggest “the traces of an activity to the eyes,” Graw explained, and act as a finger pointing to the absent or ghostlike author. That a painting isn’t actually alive but, because it exists in a material form, offers an illusion that it can think and speak—this is vitalist projection. The labor and lifetime of the artist are seemingly stored in the painting, she told us, but they are not reduced to it. And what a painting actually depicts, Graw argued, is irrelevant to this concept.

    Sigmar Polke, The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!, 1969, lacquer on canvas, 59 1/16 x 49 7/16 in. (artwork © Estate of Sigmar Polke)

    One would expect Graw to provide examples from Western painting, from the Renaissance to modern times, to give us an idea of the kind of work that projects vitality. Instead she jumped to the late 1960s, when the German artist Sigmar Polke ironically staged subjectivity as a display of affect. Paintings such as Polke as Astronaut (1968) and The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black! (1969), Graw said, invoke the presence of the author but mock it. And based on its title, the latter work even suggests it painted itself.

    Step Two

    Graw stated that she spent a year scratching her head over the question “What is painting?”1 For her, painting is not just a picture on canvas but also an art that transgresses boundaries. Painting is revitalized, she said, when it pushes boundaries, like when the French artist Francis Picabia tacked a stuffed monkey to cardboard and painted words around it to create Natures Mortes (1920). Incorporating spheres of labor, consumer goods, and written text into the work, Graw said, breathed new life into painting. Similarly, Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968), a painting inscribed with German curses and insults, combined fashion, art, and design—the artist wore the canvas as a gown before hanging it on the wall. The Large Cloth thus becomes a discursive object that appears to be alive—it can speak to us. But apart from the abusive language, what does it say? Probably not much. As Raphael Rubenstein wrote in his review of the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “It would be hard to find an artist in recent times who was less forthcoming than Sigmar Polke (1941–2010). He almost never gave interviews, and on the rare occasions when he did so, his responses either mocked or otherwise frustrated the interviewer’s quest for information.”2

    Installation view of Sigmar Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968) at the Museum of Modern Art (photograph by Jill Krementz)

    Graw cited other historical artists who revitalized painting (El Lissitzky, Yves Klein, Niele Toroni) and added a few newer ones (Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rachel Harrison) whose work addresses ideas about painting but usually does not incorporate any kind of paint. “It seems tempting to have a highly elastic definition of painting,” Graw said, “to detect it everywhere,” but she didn’t commit to going that far. Nevertheless, the medium can “push beyond the edge of the frame,” she said, “while still holding onto the specificity of the picture on canvas or to variations of this format.” I nodded my head to all of this—elastic definitions of art are good—but still had one major question: When exactly did painting exhaust itself? Why did the medium need to be renewed in the first place? How did painting become moribund? Graw failed to establish the norms against which her exceptions rebel. If academic approaches or religious iconography were to blame, I wanted to know how vitalist projection worked in them, or not.

    Step Three

    Graw discussed the narrow bond between person and product, in which the artist and his or her creation overlap. In performance art, she said, this congruity is achieved through the persona, a staged version of the artist. In the work of Andrea Fraser, who was Graw’s example, the character invoked by the artist can be separated from the artist herself. The identity of a painting and its creator diverge: the painting “cannot be reduced to its maker because it’s material,” Graw said, making the relationship metonymic. If I can discern a difference between painting and performance, according to Graw, it’s that a performed character is immaterial, brought to life by a person, whereas a painting is a physical object that has a separate physical presence. But since painting appears to be lifelike but really isn’t, what is she even going after? I began to suspect that Graw was proposing a theory of painting based on the lack of an idea. What a strange thing to do.

    Step Four

    Graw reviewed painting’s specific indexicality to the ghostlike author (which doesn’t exist, right?), starting with Charles Pierce’s notion that a sign must have a physical connection to an object, corresponding point by point. Pierce cited photography, which has a factual connection to the world and, in Graw’s words, “gives an automatic inscription of the object without presupposing an author.” Do people still take this nostalgic if not ancient view of photography—this it is mechanical, neutral, objective, and descriptive—seriously?

    Isabelle Graw at the Jewish Museum (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Step Five

    Graw decreed that an artist doesn’t have to touch a painting for it to have subjectlike power—a power that she  repeatedly nullified as being an illusion. Like the work of Andy Warhol and Wade Guyton, a painting could be made mechanically or by an assistant. Through this, she said, imperfections can become improvements, which I took to mean a revitalization. At this moment Graw acknowledged the primacy of painting over other forms of art, such as sculpture, to express subjectivity, but her argumentation was neither clear nor convincing. She pointed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s preference of painting over sculpture in his writing on aesthetics, to the power given to painting historically, and to painting’s familiarity to us. Her defense (because other people said so) was on shaky ground.

    Step Six

    The American artist Frank Stella once said that painting is handwriting, Graw went on, and some have understood Stella’s work as undermining the signature style—despite him creating his own. The more artists erase themselves from their work, Graw said, the more their subjectivity appears in it. “So there’s no way to get rid of it, right?” she joked. Here Graw recognized that an artist uses a mechanical process—like when the German artist Gerhard Richter drags paint across a canvas with a squeegee—doesn’t signify detachment. Why can’t she apply the same logic to photographers?

    Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1992, oil on canvas, 180 x 150 cm (artwork © Martin Kippenberger)

    Step Seven

    A painting’s value is not its price, Graw said, but rather is “a symbolic and economic worth that is attested to it once it circulates as a commodity.” (She explored this idea in her enlightening 2010 book High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture.) Valuable art, she continued, must be attributed to an author—this in spite of millions of art objects in museums worldwide (including paintings) whose makers have not yet been identified, or never will be. As in steps one and two of her talk, Graw cited only a contemporary example: Martin Kippenberger’s series of Hand-Painted Pictures (1992), which satirized the desire to see the artist’s personal touch in painting. (Kippenberger often had assistants or hired guns make his work—sometimes too well, to the artist’s displeasure.) Graw explained that this desire becomes a fantasy in collecting: when buying an artwork, a collector also buys into a fantasy that he or she has now become part of the artist’s life. This idea was the most compelling in her talk, and I would like to see Graw develop it.

    After Steps

    The Q&A session was scattered, with conversation between Graw and several audience members revolving, in an uninteresting way, around the production of digital images, and around Karl Marx’s definition of value and labor. Graw summarized her argument again: liveliness is apparent in painting from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century—though she never established when, how, and by whom—and twentieth-century avant-gardes redefined that vitality as they integrated art and life, something we usually understand as emancipatory. Yet the new spirit of twenty-first-century capitalism, she began to conclude, has a similar strategy: control subjectivity by transforming life into a currency, if not a product to be bought and sold. Taking an autonomous, conversative view of the function of art, Graw said that painting today fulfills the connection between art and life. In fact, she said, it’s one of the last places for people to find fulfillment. I am reminded of that quote attributed to Henri Matisse: painting should be “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Her exact queries were: What do I mean when I say painting” and “What is my notion of painting?”

    2 Raphael Rubinstein, “Polke’s Plenitude,” Art in America (June/July 2014), 110.

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  • A Better Everyday Life for the Many People

    Sara Kristoffersson: Design by IKEA
    Tuesday, February 24, 2015
    INSIDE (hi) STORIES Lecture Series
    New School, Glass Corner, Parsons East Building, New York

    “IKEA is huge,” stated Sara Kristoffersson, professor of design history and theory at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden.1 Who could argue with her? Founded in 1943, the immensely popular seller of affordable furniture, utensils, and fabrics for the home has spread across the globe and brings in billions of dollars a year. A more intriguing proposition was this: “IKEA has made Swedishness a virtue in itself.” But scratch deep enough, Kristoffersson warned, and hierarchies begin to appear within a company that many people believe mitigates consumerism and capitalism with an egalitarian touch.

    The slender, stylish Kristoffersson, dressed in the requisite black sweater, skirt, and tights of a European historian of modern design, her blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, delivered an hour-long lecture derived from her 2014 book Design by IKEA: A Cultural History. Because IKEA’s brand is synonymous with its mother country, she argued, the company sells abstract notions of modernity, democracy, and social justice, which become problematic when looking closely at its history. According to Kristoffersson, promotional slogans such as “beauty in homes” and “design for everyone” are a “mass-produced version of Swedish design history.”

    The story of IKEA’s ascent is well established. The name is an acronym consisting of the initials of the company’s founder, Ingvar Kamprad; the name of the farm on which he grew up, Elmtaryd; and the name of his hometown, Agunnaryd (in the southern region of Sweden called Småland). Born in 1926 to a family of German immigrants, Kamprad entered business at an early age—he was five—by selling matches. As he grew older he offered fountain pens, Christmas cards, and garden seeds, among other merchandise, in his town and eventually via post. Entering the furniture business, Kamprad developed a mail-order catalogue before opening his first showroom in the small and relatively remote town of Älmhult. People traveled there, saw the products, and ordered what they liked; the manufacturer then shipped the goods directly to them, using a flat pack of unassembled parts to minimize costs.

    A young Ingvar Kamprad in front of the IKEA store in Älmhult

    Operating on the family farm in its early years, IKEA grew tremendously after World War II, becoming known for offering good design at low prices. According to an authorized history of the company by the journalist Bertil Torekull, the Swedish economy grew nearly 4 percent a year, on average, between 1950 and the early 1970s.2 Swedish social democracy also thrived during this time, and the postwar housing boom catapulted IKEA to the upper echelon of the furniture industry, though not without resistance from the national trade associations, which forbid manufacturers from selling materials to Kamprad, and in spite of his absence from industry trade shows, from which he was banned. For many years capitalist competition went toe-to-toe with the planned economy—though Kamprad did order materials from factories in communist Poland.

    In 1973 IKEA opened its first store outside Sweden, in the Swiss town of Spreitenbach, near Zürich. In order to give his company a profile during the European expansion, Kristoffersson said, Kamprad borrowed from the Swedish cultural image bank, using moose and Vikings to strengthen his brand. By the 1980s the national markers disappeared, she told us, which marked a shift from a representational to conceptual association to Sweden. Even though IKEA changed its logotype color from red to the blaring yellow and blue of the Swedish flag, Kristoffersson has detected subtle national visual markers in the company’s visual culture. The arrangement of a dining room in one advertising photograph, for instance, recalls the work of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century painter Carl Larsson. I imagine most people without knowledge of Swedish modern art wouldn’t catch the reference.

    Carl Larsson, Flowers on the Windowsill, ca. 1844, watercolor, 32 x 43 cm (artwork in the public domain)

    Another key decision linking IKEA to its home country, Kristoffersson revealed, was keeping the indigenous names for its products. The Hästveda armchair—named for a small town in southern Sweden—is sold under that title from the United States to Saudi Arabia. Similarly, the scholar continued, IKEA has claimed the traditional food it sells in its restaurant and on its shelves—meatballs with white sauce, mashed potatoes, and lingonberries—as its own. IKEA often sells the romantic idea of nature, Kristoffersson pointed out, with advertising images of beautiful landscapes with red houses. The company has even poked fun at its domestic consumers, acknowledging the stereotype that people from Småland are frugal, “famous for working hard and living on slender means,” Kristoffersson said. IKEA’s promotional strategies have also played on a notion embodied in a hard-to-translate Swedish word, lagom, which means “just enough” and generally emphasizes moderation and equality.

    Kamprad has made a fortune based on the meaning of this concept and on the belief that his management style is not learned but rather just who he is. He favors jeans and sweaters to suits, which give him a folksy, friendly, down-to-earth vibe, and he avoids luxury hotels and flies coach—though he can easily afford both. While Kamprad drove a Porsche as a successful young man, he now gets around in a trusty late-model Volvo. In 1976 he wrote a manifesto, The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, that embodies his business philosophy, explicating nine core ideas for IKEA workers such as “Reaching good results with small means,” “Simplicity is a virtue,” and “Profit gives us resources.” Kristoffersson compared the Testament’s language to religious or political speech. Yes, and I can imagine a union leader, avant-garde artist, or motivational speaker also writing these same words. In keeping with his folksy style, Kristoffersson said, Kamprad kept the awkward Swenglish phrase “the many people” to demonstrate how IKEA is unconcerned with appearing too tight or polished in the formal business world.

    Kristoffersson compared IKEA’s story to that of Apple, whose two founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, building an empire out of a garage in California. But IKEA’s narrative positions itself as driven not solely by financial interests but also with a higher purpose, an ideal to fulfill. (IKEA developed its chronicle, Kristoffersson pointed out, before the idea of making a story became a marketing strategy.) Yet the falsification isn’t important, she said. IKEA has successfully risen about mere consumerism, and any bad press—regarding a perceived association with social democracy, embarrassing personal scandals, and questionable business and environmental practices—has failed to negatively impact the company in the long run.

    Images from IKEA catalogues for different Middle Eastern countries (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    So is IKEA beyond critique? Hardly, but Kristoffersson’s list of criticisms against the company felt weak. In politically conservative circles in the United States and Great Britain, she said, IKEA was attacked for its perceived alliance with the nanny state, with a dystopian welfare system in which individuality is relinquished. As evidence, she offered the Swedish financial crisis of 1992, which she claimed eroded the country’s famously cushy lifestyle. IKEA also has a reputation for being a chameleon, Kristoffersson said, using the cultural and political climate to sell products: a 2009 advertising campaign, for instance, exploited the Barack Obama moment with the slogan “Change begins at home.” And in the Middle East, IKEA altered a photograph from its catalogue, digitally removing a woman from a bathroom scene that also showed a man and two children. IKEA’s most damning moment came in 1994, when a journalist uncovered evidence that Kamprad, as a teenager in the 1940s, was affiliated with fascist groups and openly admired the pro-Nazi intellectual Per Engdahl.3

    A diagram of IKEA’s complex business structure (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Comprising two foundations based in the Netherlands and commercial divisions in Denmark, Belgium, and Luxembourg (among other countries), the privately owned IKEA possesses an “extremely complex business structure,” Kristoffersson said, which was designed to avoid taxes. A chapter in Torekull’s book explains this intricate arrangement of power, money, and control, but the structure is nearly impenetrable to those unfamiliar with international trade (like me). Yet, she argued, we don’t view IKEA as a shrewd, parsimonious multinational whose main purpose is to maximize profits—though few would deny this status. I was reminded of people’s surprise when they discover that the cofounder and co–chief executive officer of Whole Foods, John Mackey, is an audacious libertarian capitalist. (He also helped to establish a movement called Conscious Capitalism and, with Raj Sisodia, authored the book Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business (2013).

    So, whether to shop at IKEA or Whole Foods or wherever, or to buy Apple products, is entirely up to the consumer. This is not to diminish the crucial role played by government regulators, nongovernmental organizations, and consumer advocates around the world. We need them to serve as watchdogs, keeping corporations like IKEA from unscrupulous labor-related activities. And multinational corporations have slowly improved their business ethics. In The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, Kamprad emphasized IKEA’s adherence to Möbelfakta standards. Apple has been responsive, perhaps grudgingly so, to improving labor rights and workplace safety for employees of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn.

    Kristoffersson noted a few of IKEA’s positive environmental decisions over the last twenty years, such as minimizing fiberboard products and pushing LED light bulbs.4 IKEA is one of the largest foundations in the world, she said, so a certain percentage of its profits go to good causes—as they should. Yet with low prices that stimulate consumption, yielding throwaway products, Kristoffersson asked rhetorically, “Isn’t it more ecologically friendly to not buy at all?” An audience member agreed, pointing out the low- to no-resale value of IKEA products. For me, the disposable nature of the company’s goods is highly overrated. Looking around my apartment, I see IKEA shelves, cookware, curtains, and more—some bought nearly fifteen years ago—that function well and don’t need replacing.

    A 1948 advertisement for Ford trucks

    “IKEA hardly needs Sweden,” Kristoffersson said as she began concluding her talk. “IKEA hardly needs the image of Sweden and Sweden’s welfare state. It is largely outdated and challenged.” That may be true, but how does her scholarly subject compare to other brands that are inextricably tied to their native origins? Ford trucks, Budweiser beer, Coca-Cola drinks, and McDonalds hamburgers are all products with strong American identities that don’t reflect the diversity of national demographics—we’re not a nation of cowboys, just like Sweden isn’t crawling with blond-haired, blue-eyed babies. Kristoffersson said that Swedish knowledge of American life comes from popular culture, such as the television show House of Cards, but reminded us that such images reflect real standards in society and affect our conception of the world.

    While Kristoffersson’s parallels between brand (IKEA) and country (Sweden) were insightful, and the historical background of the company was interesting, the stakes of the subject of her talk felt low. IKEA appears to be a sensible (but far from perfect) multinational corporation with some degree of social and environmental responsibility that matches its aesthetic ideals and its benevolent reputation. While the firm’s finance and governance structure is far from transparent, IKEA largely delivers on its promise “to create a better everyday life for the many people,” to quote Kamprad’s Testament. Criticisms of the ubiquity of bland knockoff modern design notwithstanding, the biggest issue for your average consumer is having too much IKEA product in your home. After all, you don’t want to live in a showroom.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Konstfack is also known as the University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design.

    2 See Bertil Torekull, Leading by Design: The IKEA Story (New York: Harper Business, 1999).

    3 Both Kristoffersson and Torekill cover this episode in their books.

    4 For more official information, see IKEA’s annual sustainability reports from 2009 to 2012 and the publication The IKEA Way on Purchasing Products, Materials, and Services.

  • In Defense of Democracy

    Chantal Mouffe
    Thursday, March 27, 2014
    Columbia University, Avery Hall, Wood Auditorium, New York

    Chantal Mouffe, intellectual activist (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “People have lost faith in traditional democracy,” said the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe. “They have a vote but not a voice.” But rather than call for revolution, she emphasized the need for better, more inclusive representation within institutions of power, such as when which leaders “come to power through election in order to implement a set of radical reforms.” Mouffe, a professor at the University of Westminster in London, is a hero in certain circles, and this lecture, presented in collaboration with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, offered her the chance to elucidate her views for a diverse crowd of students, professors, art workers, and activists.

    Mouffee summarized recent philosophical challenges to neoliberalism, running through the basic ideas of theorists such as Nicholas Bourriaud and Paul Virilio, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, especially concepts from Hardt and Negri’s book Empire (2000), such as “multitude,” the new term for the proletariat, Mouffe said. She posited that we’ve gone from disciplinary society of hospitals and jails to a society of control, that is, one of biopolitics, immaterial labor, and communications. The multitude uses communications to express itself freely: these subjects are active, not passive—a concept in which neoliberals and capitalists, whose globalization efforts have liberated them from modernity, would delight. In an absolute democracy, according to Hardt, Negri, and friends, minorities in the multitude would never aspire to form a majority or a state, but rather a common. This is liberation, not emancipation, Mouffe said, and it denies a hegemonic structure’s role in power.

    Mouffe reaffirmed her ideas about agonism—a political philosophy she has long promoted—by emphasizing that change comes from working with and within institutions, transforming and improving them over time. (Agonism posits that political struggle based on difference and diversity can be passionate, constructive, and respectful, in short, confrontation is good.) This is a passive revolution and organic change, to borrow concepts from the twentieth-century Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci. Even though the idea of swift revolution is enticing, representative democracy should not be abandoned or replaced. One gets to choose real alternatives, Mouffe said, in agonistic debate, which engages institutions instead of rejecting, resisting, or replacing them. “Pluralist democracy cannot exist without representation,” she said, expressing a point of view that, according to Slavoj Žižek, presupposes democracy is an idealized, optimum political form that cannot be questioned.1

    Chantal Mouffe at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Mouffe generalized about the role of aesthetic practices, stating that art which transforms political identity and modernizes affect is good. So is art that allows for other voices. Radical breaks in art and the tabula rasa, she continued, ignore the importance of incubation and deny the function of influence. Transgressive art, Mouffe declared, is not the most radical kind, and harboring the illusion of art being subversive has inevitably caused the avant-gardes to fail. For her, art should contribute to a multiplicity of sites and—leaving arguments about framing, context, and validation aside— take place both inside and outside the museum. During the audience Q&A, the art historian Terry Smith requested examples of such works of art. Mouffe was hesitant to offer names but eventually gave two: an unfamiliar name [pronounced “eh too jahr”] and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

    As one would expect, the Q&A session was a mess of convoluted comments disguised as questions. A man dressed like a Trader Joe’s cashier bloviated for several minutes about episodes in twentieth-century global politics before blurting out, “It’s not cool to talk about the communist party.” Mouffe responded by asking him where and when a communist revolution has succeeded. There are failures but also hope: “We have to keep trying,” she encouraged. “It’s a long process.” Indeed, I often think about how, in the United States, one hundred years elapsed between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mouffe said that progressive political heroes of the past probably never realized how the “social rights of the welfare state could be dismantled,” as they have during the past couple decades under neoliberalism. Taking an agonistic stance, she fears that protest movements won’t succeed because they’re contesting existing institutions with the goal of deposing them. While I tend to agree overall that real change happens slowly, radical points of view—such as Occupy Wall Street—serve a crucial function of yanking political conversation into a certain direction. And some institutions—especially in the art world—would better serve their constituents if they were gutted completely.

    In Terms Of count: 9.

    1 Slavoj Žižek, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism 13, no. 3/4 (2001).

    Read

    Ayesha Ghosh, “GSAPP Lecture Addresses Architecture’s Role in New Democratic Systems,” Archinect, March 31, 2014.