Marina Vishmidt, “Beneath the Atelier, the Desert: Critique, Institutional and Infrastructural,” in Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practices), ed. Maria Hlavajova and Tom Holert (BAK, 2017), 219.
For more on his manifesto and actions, see the exhibition pamphlet for “Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo,” organized by Sebastien Pluot at Artists Space, New York, September 10–October 16, 2011, available here: →. The statement was written with a marker by Cathy Weiner.
Jeffrey Deitch, “Christopher D’Arcangelo,” in Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo (1975–1979), exh. cat. (Artists Space, 2011), 17.
I use “speculate” here in the way Marina Vishmidt theorizes it in her book Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, 2018). In the book, she draws parallels between the processes of speculation in financialization and in art, arguing that neither financialized capitalism nor artistic production can be thought of as unproductive labor.
On this, see the introduction to Dave Beech, Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production (Pluto Press, 2019). Marina Vishmidt’s excellent way of countering art’s ostensible unproductiveness is to consider it socially reproductive, as argued in Speculation as a Mode of Production.
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (University of California Press, 1973).
In a recent discussion on these two terms, Vishmidt remarked succinctly: "all labor is material." Marina Vishmidt in conversation with Andreas Petrossiants, "Marina Vishmidt: Speculation as a Mode of Production," e-flux podcast, June 18, 2020, →.
The “rat” reference is to Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real (MIT Press, 1996), 56, where he writes that critics like Michael Fried were worried about minimal art presenting “a self-conscious position on art … but also to intervene in this discourse as art. Again, this is an avant-gardist recognition (Fried smelled the same rat as Greenberg: Duchamp and disciples) … only with minimalism does this understanding become self-conscious. That is, only in the early 1960s is the institutionality not only of art but also of the avant-garde first appreciated and then exploited.” For other discourses happening at the time in minimal dance and music that are also relevant, see the essays by Carrie Lambert-Beatty and Diederich Diederichsen in A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968, exh. cat. (Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with MIT Press, 2004).
See Julia Robinson, “John Cage and Investiture: Unmanning the System,” in John Cage, ed. Julia Robinson (MIT Press, 2011), and the catalog for the exhibition that Robinson organized: The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art, exh. cat. (MACBA, 2009). See also Branden Joseph Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2016).
Helen Molesworth, “Work Ethic,” in Work Ethic, exh. cat. (Baltimore Museum of Art, 2003), 42.
Martin Herbert, Tell Them I Said No (Sternberg, 2016).
Keti Chukhrov, Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism (e-flux and University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2020).
One outlier, of a few, is the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, central, in fact, for considering much of what is discussed in this text; specifically her residency at the Department of Sanitation of New York since 1977. See my "Mierle Laderman Ukeles' Maintenance and/as (Art) Work," View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, no. 21 (2018) →. Even the scope of her project, which brought attention to the underfunding and horrendous working conditions of sanitation workers, specifically from a materialist perspective, has been recuperated by the austerity government of New York City, which launched a residency program in 2018 to artwash over consistent cuts to social spending while invoking Ukeles' name.
Vishmidt, “Beneath the Atelier,” 220–21.
See Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California Press, 2009).
Alan W. Moore, Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City (Autonomedia, 2011), 26. Emphasis mine.
See Jean Toche’s statement at first AWC hearing printed in: AWC, Open Hearing on the Subject: What Should Be the Program of the Art Workers Regarding Museum Reform and to Establish the Program of an Open Art Workers Coalition (AWC, 1969), statement 1. Primary Information has made this available as a PDF on their website: →.
Nanni Balestrini, We Want Everything, trans. Matt Holden (Verso Books, 2016), 105.
David Foster Wallace, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 65.
Lieven de Cauter, “Notes on Subversion/Theses on Activism,” in Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization, ed. de Cauter, Ruben de Roo and Karel Vanhaesebrouk (NAi, 2011), 9, referenced in relation to Lawler's work by Roxana Marcoci in "An Exhibition Produces," in Louise Lawler Receptions exh. cat. (MoMA, 2017), 28.
See Anne Rorimer, “Michael Asher: Kontext als Inhalt,” available in English here: →; and Martha Buskirk, “Interviews with Sherrie Levine, Louis Lawler, and Fred Wilson,” October, no. 70 (Autumn, 1994): 98–112.
Louise Lawler, in 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years, ed. Claudia Gould and Valerie Smith (Artists Space, 1998), 100–101.
This was another way of “dropping out,” perhaps, though this time he participated in a sanctioned exhibition. In a twisted turn of events, when a retrospective of his work was mounted at Artists Space four decades later, rather than including the title Anarchism Without Adjectives on the banners outside their Tribeca space, the gallery opted for D’Arcangelo’s name, stating that the neighborhood would not take kindly to anarchist sentiments. I thank Sébastien Pluot for bringing this to my attention.
The image has been re-presented in multiple ways: as a gelatin silver print, along with “Pollock and Tureen” printed in red on the image’s mat; as a traced image drawn by the illustrator Jon Buller, printed on paper or on a wall, produced at any size “to scale.” Lawler first exhibited the “traced” works in her 2013 survey at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. See Louise Lawler: Adjusted, ed. Phillip Kaiser, exh. cat. (Museum Ludwig in cooperation with Prestel Verlag, 2013). Most recently, Lawler has developed another “adjusting” mechanism: “distorted” versions of her images, titled (adjusted to fit, distorted for the times). See Louise Lawler, “Distorted for the Times,” October, no. 160 (Spring, 2017), 152.
“Louise Lawler: Pollock and Tureen (traced),” MoMA.org →.
Ed Halter, “The Centaur and the Hummingbird,” in Free, exh. cat. (New Museum, 2011), 43. Accessed online: →.
One clear and distressing example among many: the New Museum hiring a union-busting firm to intimidate organizing workers, and then firing most of those successful unionists with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, soon after exhibiting the work of Hans Haacke, who has long championed the rights of workers.
Jill Magid, “Becoming Tarden—Prologue,” e-flux journal, no. 9 (October, 2009) →.
Jill Magid, “The Spy Project,” Jillmagid.com →.
Jill Magid, Becoming Tarden (New Museum, 2010); excerpts quoted in Halter, “The Centaur and the Hummingbird.”
I would be remiss not to bring up Marcel Broodthaers’s Pense-bête (1964), in which he exhibited the remaining unsold copies of his book of poetry of the same name affixed in plaster, making the book unreadable. Pense-bête set an early precedence for this type of conceptualist work, which strikingly resembles Magid’s work, if only formally. In Broodthaers’s work, he performatively “quit” his prior work as a poet, and declared himself an artist. If his books wouldn’t be read, he sarcastically asked, perhaps they would be looked at. In Magid’s piece, the book is also unreadable because of its censure by state intelligence.
Yazan Khalili, in interview with David Kim, “I, The Artwork: A Conversation with Yazan Khalili,” e-flux journal, no. 90 (April 2018) →.
Vishmidt, “Beneath the Atelier,” 235.
Cody Delistraty, “The Whitney’s Choice: Can a Museum for ‘Progressive Artists’ Have an Arms-Manufacturer Vice-Chairman?” Frieze, April 12, 2019 →. This is not to single out Frieze, but is just one example of the approach many art magazines took to covering the events.
Statement shared with author via email on September 24, 2019 and released on social media the previous day.
MTL+, “The Art of Escalation: Becoming Ungovernable on a Day of City-Wide Transit Action,” Hyperallergic, January 31, 2020 →.
My gratitude goes to the many exceptional friends and comrades who read this piece at various stages of completion, too numerous to list. Among them: Christian Xatrec, with whom I am conceptualizing an event to emerge from the text; Louise Lawler and Cathy Weiner for reading a late draft and confirming the historical facts. Thanks as well to Julia Robinson for inviting me to read a very early draft of this text for her class at NYU. Nicholas Martin graciously searched through the Fales Library collection while the archive remains closed. I'm grateful to my colleagues at e-flux journal for their support and for all they've taught me. I thank Elvia Wilk for editing this piece and thinking through critique with me; without her thoughts and work, the formation of a coherent essay would have been impossible.