Issue 155: “Theory & Art”

This summer issue of e-flux journal examines the shifting relationship between theory and art over the past thirty years. On the issue’s cover, a satirical ode to aesthetic obedience under socialist realism provokes the question: When the horizon of emancipation once promised by critical reflection becomes merely the contours traced by the muse, what shadows are we now retracing when we make, curate, or write about art? Across the issue, contributors explore how theoretical frameworks have been mobilized—at times fruitfully, at times cynically—within contemporary artistic practices. As dominant paradigms of critique have waned, “theory” has come to stand in for politics, history, mediation, and even form itself.

To make art has always been to engage in a constant play between intuition and intellect, to disrupt artificial separations between “mental” and “manual” labor, productive and reproductive, fine arts and craft, and to engage in theoretical practice. It is with global, financialized capitalism, however, that we more clearly see forms of production become part of “creative” capitalist populism. When contemporary art is research-based or relates to concrete political relationships, it often relies on theoretical modes that are strained in the face of the contradictions of artistic discourse—for example, by institutional demands to be both accessible and challenging, familiar yet vanguardist. In place of a robust theoretical framework or an effective model for concrete action, we may encounter a rote reliance on familiar jargon, names, and claims vaguely referencing bodies of critical work. Is the wall label its own type of theory, or just a caption to a post? Is contemporary art post-historical, or one of the few locations where history can be named beyond enemy lines? Are we (still) working too much, and (still) doing so under regimes of “creative” production? 

More than two decades after “Global Conceptualism,” Luis Camnitzer reflects on the landmark 1999 exhibition that he curated with Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, examining what it revealed about the distinction between conceptual art as aesthetic style and conceptualism as survival strategy—particularly in authoritarian contexts where communication might take precedence over contemplation. For Camnitzer, the task that the exhibition set out to accomplish remains unrealized: How can conceptualism serve as a pedagogical tool to navigate the current conditions of algorithmic control and information overload? Conceptual art, as Eunsong Kim argues, is often the modality through which contemporary art exploits labor and perpetuates class warfare. Using Maurizio Cattelan’s recent gimmick of artist as “comedian”—exemplified by his work in which he taped a banana to a wall, which sold for $6.2 million—Kim reflects on how symbols (like bananas) become evacuated of their colonial histories within the art sector to serve aesthetic domination, arguing that aesthetic autonomy cannot exist without labor autonomy.

Postcolonial theories are made mainstream through academic and art institutions, writes Francisco Godoy Vega, but in the process they become filtered and domesticated. Looking at Indian subaltern studies, French négritude, and Latin American colonialism and how they’ve been translated and circulated in Spain, Vega argues that decolonial artistic practice emerges from the tension between institutional validation and community knowledge. Yet rather than remain stuck in the morass of a praxis that is yet to arrive, writes Jaleh Mansoor, we must push through, even if on the other side similar problems remain unsolved. Surveying how art and theory have been “entwined if not mutually constitutive” since at least the late nineteenth century—from Alphonse Allais and the Incoherents to recent conceptual experiments—Mansoor argues that artists have worked to theorize a social field that was otherwise difficult to conceive. 

Also in this issue, we excerpt Marina Vishmidt’s forthcoming book Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition, an engagement with the relations between artistic and theoretical production as they relate to political struggle. Acting from the perspective of infrastructure rather than a singular institution, argues Vishmidt, is about conditions of possibility. “For the time being,” she writes, “the reflective shimmer of a politically radicalized art necessarily feeds off what it critiques, until, I would propose, it can learn to operate transversally with struggles in the infrastructure.” Dominique Routhier makes the case for a communist or abolitionist theory of art against shortsighted takes which confuse reactionary compliance for critical engagement. Against vexingly persistent elitist and transhistorical conceptions of art as existing outside the material conditions of its production, Routhier offers a “categorical” critique of art via abolitionist theory. 

Silvia Federici is best known as an activist and theorist of radical feminism and the commons. But as Stevphen Shukaitis writes, it is little known that her PhD thesis was a profound engagement with György Lukács’s aesthetics. Written in the years following mass repression in Italy, when a cycle of revolutionary movements came to a close awaiting the next, Federici’s critique of Lukács serves as a “reminder that theory is not born fully formed but forged in struggle, often against the disciplines it seeks to inhabit,” writes Shukaitis. Isadora Neves Marques begins her text with a question begging for an answer: How to be responsible irresponsibly? She traces how the onus has been placed on artworks and the artists who make them to answer for financialized capitalism, biopolitics, and the turn to what Anna Kornbluh has theorized as “immediacy.”

Raqs Media Collective considers the hunger of the senses to reach outward and touch what cannot be seen, see what is beyond our reach, and theorize what is not yet known. Measurement becomes ecstatic and lyrical, a matter of tastes and bodies experimenting amidst the elasticity of time. Zairong Xiang looks at the modern toilet as the panoramic sign of our regular and fundamental functions. Both a founding gesture of conceptual art and among the many registers available to bodies in space, Xiang opens the aperture even further, until the universalizing gestures of modern fetishes cross progress with our own backsides. Finally, Liam Gillick hits the bars to debate the prompt for this issue, taking a night out in Midtown Manhattan as a measure of distances and collisions between labor and leisure, fed through art-historical territorial disputes and a phantasmagoria of attention.

—Editors

Raqs Media Collective—Cosmic Glow, Dissenting Tongues: A Practice with Paradoxes and Silences
Time is a gift that the subjective observer gives back to an objectively existing universe that contains and simultaneously does not contain a distant star—a celestial object we can see from our perspective here and now, even when it has ceased to exist in the time its light has taken to reach our eyes. As artists, we look to the cosmos, to the substances that enable life, to our bodies and their sensations, to the entries recorded in archives, to the stories that pass between generations, and to our own reading of the data we receive and sieve between ourselves, all to furnish materials between our thinking and our practice.

Luis Camnitzer—Global Conceptualism Revisited
Much of the art in “Global Conceptualism” came from areas under de facto authoritarian rule, making clear to me the reality that in a repressive state, the ownership of time is taken over by the government. Contemplation becomes secondary to communication. The constraints that accompany this shift in ownership force engagement with new issues. Two of these are the avoidance of the erosion of information and the efficiency of passing on messages. Much of the work was extremely direct, sometimes mere slogans, and easily and quickly absorbed. The attempt to reappropriate time becomes a subversive activity, and works happen or are placed in the interstices that are left open or overlooked by repressive control.

Dominique Routhier—Art and Abolition: A Proposal 
What is the role of theory in relation to “art”—traditionally positioned in philosophical discourse as a sort of placeholder for creative resistance and even emancipation? And how does this role change when the historical coordinates for theorizing art—modern, avant-garde, or contemporary—reveal themselves, as Eunsong Kim details in her recent book The Politics of Collecting, to have been fundamentally tethered to the legal fiction of white property? 

Eunsong Kim—No Aesthetic Autonomy Without Labor Autonomy
The categories separating artists from artisans who labor on behalf of museums for brands like Cattelan remain fixed through a reactionary system and a colonial legal regime that continues to insist that ideas can be divided from their execution, and that context can be stripped away from those assigned to its making.

Jaleh Mansoor—W/hither Theory: Notes on the Status of “Theory” in the Arts
It is impossible lately to read descriptions of exhibits and events at any given museum or gallery and not be presented parcels of language clogged with catchphrases and sound bites that fall flat as empty signposts advertising notions that bear no relation to either the necessary emergence or stakes of the theory under citation. This widening gap between aesthetic propositions in closed recirculation and dynamism in the social field from which they are first generated as the surplus of lived struggles symptomatizes only that the moment to seize and realize the artistic or theoretical proposition has passed. The remainder, the finished “work,” becomes a mere shell of an evaporated content—outliving, vampire-like, the contingencies from which it sprung. 

Liam Gillick—Are You Now Foxes?
How to understand the ecstasy of one’s own freedom to be in control of one’s own means of production as generative source material? In this sense, doesn’t the use of theory also serve as a proxy or de facto escape from class struggle? A space of movement for something that is felt but not yet understood by the masses? A way to avoid conversation by whatever means are available?

Marina Vishmidt—Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition
The institutions of art have often served as consensus-building mechanisms in this totality, structurally and ideologically laundering the imperative to extract profit while offering avenues of representation of alterity that remain notional on the whole so far as their own conditions of possibility are not at stake. For the time being, the reflective shimmer of a politically radicalized art necessarily feeds off what it critiques, until, I would propose, it can learn to operate transversally with struggles in the infrastructure—both in the arts and elsewhere.

Stevphen Shukaitis—Totality and Feminist Life: Reading Silvia Federici on Lukács’s Aesthetics 
This orientation feels especially important because the questions Silvia Federici raises in her PhD thesis on Lukács’s aesthetics remain unresolved. What is the relationship between aesthetics and political thought? Can there be a Marxist theory of art that does not fall into idealism? How do moments of crisis—political, philosophical, economic—shape and destabilize our understanding of the world? 

Francisco Godoy Vega—Postcolonial/Decolonial/Anticolonial Theories in Translation
From academic and activist spheres, thinkers have experimented with ways to reverse and respond to this repressive system, generating a body of active thought that questions both the hegemonic historical narrative and current forms of colonialism. The central question emerges: How do postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial theories get translated, transformed, and sometimes betrayed when they encounter the constraints of cultural institutions? In Spain, the debate over colonial history remains an unresolved problem precisely because it cannot be resolved through institutional means alone.

Isadora Neves Marques—How to be Responsible Irresponsibly: On Art Beyond Immediacy
Being responsible irresponsibly means letting go of the fundamental divide between imagination and politics. It means being faithful to imagination, blindly and fearlessly, otherwise it will deflate uninspiringly or pop from too much pressure, like an overinflated balloon. But it also means being conscious of imagination's context. This is the responsible side of irresponsibility. Imagination is not God-given or rent-free, but rather emerges from pasts, presents, and futures: embedded in reality, as it was, as it is, as it could be. Imagination is not self-indulgent reverie; it has its anthropological scriptures, artistic preconceptions, and socially tested waters.

Ben Davis—Artspeak After Social Media
As for art writing, the speed and connectivity of digital media has created pressure that it be shorter, faster, more visual, more topical, more general interest. The takeover of interpersonal communications by digital technology has flooded the sensorium; in the US, the specter of post-literacy was coming on fast at just the moment that Bosker wrote “never read the wall text” as her major takeaway from observing art spaces. In major parts of cultural production, cachet has moved from the hipster obscurity of the late-Gen X, early millennial era of the 2000s and towards relatable transparency, from familiarity with intellectual references and towards responsiveness to current events.

Zairong Xiang—Everyone’s (a) Toilet
After Joseph Beuys proclaimed that “everyone is an artist,” there is nothing scandalous in claiming that art can be anything. The complaint that “nowadays it seems everything can be art!” elevates the layperson to a critic or a theorist, a gatekeeper who determines inclusion and exclusion. “It’s not art!” might further strengthen the complainer’s otherwise precarious authority. If the complaint were made more explicit—“It’s not art! It’s shit!”—our lay critic might face a conundrum acknowledged by Piero Manzoni: it is art and it is shit, merda d’artista.