John Kelsey, “Escape from Discussion Island” in Meaning Liam Gillick, ed. Monika Szewczyk et al. (Boston, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 69. Kelsey is a writer, an artist, and one of the agents behind the discursive life form that is Reena Spaulings, as well as the New York–based independent organization, Bernadette Corporation. In creating a virtual life and in running a corporation with anti-corporate claims, he embodies a Deleuzian and Situationist attitude, distinguished by attempts to free up time. That this existence appears to embrace commercial activity (for instance, Bernadette Corporation is active as a commercial gallery in a Lower East Side space and at art fairs), makes it an emblem of sorts of what I observe to be contemporary critical attitudes of (strategic?) affirmation with respect to the capitalist system that such activity nonetheless purports to critique. Liam Gillick (the deliberately unnamed subject of Kelsey’s essay) is another interesting case in point, as much of his artistic activity in the past five years has centered around an evolving scenario of a car factory, where workers are left to imagine an existence outside of Fordist notions of work on a production line, for hourly wages. The scenario itself contrives to enact an infinite deferral of the replacement of this space of limbo with measurable production. As I edited Kelsey’s essay it made me consider to what extent Gillick’s discursive practice is an attempt to align art (which is increasingly seen in galleries established in disused factories) with the reality of factory work.
Of course, this is not new; we could recall on the one hand the whole tradition of dandyism (exemplified by artists like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol); on the other, Hannah Arendt’s low estimation of work in her division of the fundamental human activities into labor, work, and action.
Here I am thinking of the honored nineteenth-century realist tradition—especially the work of painters like Gustave Courbet, or later painters like Robert Koehler, Winslow Homer, Ford Madox-Brown, and the sculptor Constantin Meunier, the latter two being of particular inspiration for Sekula, as has been discussed by the art historian Hilde van Gelder in several texts, amongst them, “Allan Sekula: The Documenta 12 Project (and Beyond),” A Prior 15 (Summer 2007). We could also think of socialist realism, which produces a fiction of happy workers—a highly stigmatized form of representation because it was favored by Stalin and Mao, each of whom failed to make this fiction a reality.
It is reprinted from James H. Westbrook’s Your Future in Restaurants and Food Services (New York: Arco, 1971).
Tempted to single out the photonovel’s provocative last phrase in the press release, I receive the following note from Allan: “As for the quotes, I think it should be reduced to the ‘truth and fiction in class struggle.’ We can leave defeat out of it. When Zhou En Lai was asked his opinion of the French Revolution, he replied ‘it is too soon to tell.’”
If you’re reading this online, have a look: →. Some of the lyrics are (perhaps badly) translated as: “Vietnam burns and me I spurn Mao Mao / Johnson giggles and me I wiggle Mao Mao / Napalm runs and me I gun Mao Mao / Cities die and me I cry Mao Mao . . .” In 1972, Andy Warhol made a print of the Chinese chairman, as the most famous man of the year.
Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 157.
See Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 75–88. The quote from Barthes is taken from Hayot’s chapter on Brecht (102). In a section titled “Alienation and Estrangement,” Hayot explains a distinction between Verfremdung (alienation) and Befremdung (strangeness) and argues against the fusion (by scholars such as Renata Berg-Pan, in her 1979 study Bertolt Brecht and China) of feelings of strangeness (simply experiencing a different culture) with the feeling of alienation. For Brecht, then, alienation (which denies empathy and prevents misinterpretations of the truth mechanisms of theatre) must be produced both by actors and audience. Hayot argues that Brecht’s consistent study of Chinese theater and poetry sharpens his critique of authenticity, and in turn refuses the projection of an “authentic” China.
Hayot, 121. Sollers characterized the Cultural Revolution as “the battle of a long-repressed thought, of mass revolutionary practice now consolidated in the light of day” (cited in Hayot, 118–119). This emphasis on China as the repressed of the West is also traced in Julia Kristeva’s contributions to the same issue.
Hayot, 123.
Hayot, 125.
This is the same year that the entire Tel Quel group, including Roland Barthes, went to China. Hayot’s chapter on the journal opens with a lengthy quote, which we will find out is from Julia Kristeva’s Des Chinoises (Of Chinese Women). Immendorff’s Komm runter is likely a nod to Mao’s call to urban intellectuals to come down to the countryside for reeducation.
The online press release of a recent exhibition of his works from the period at the Michael Werner Gallery in New York (October 9–December 19, 2009) recalls: "In 1970 Jörg Immendorff joined the League Against Imperialism, pledging henceforth to direct his creative endeavors to the service of the German Maoist party. Disillusioned by the outcome of European political events of the late nineteen sixties, and increasingly dissatisfied with his role as an artist, Immendorff sought to produce paintings for and about the working masses."
On this point, see Hayot, 60.
Allan Sekula, “...The Red Guards Come and Go, Talking of Michelangelo,” in Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge: Class Works, ed. Bruce Barber (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2008), 45–50. In this text, Sekula cites examples from the Canadian press, especially the writing of the influential conservative critic John Bentley Mays, to illustrate the dismissive tone that has tended to obscure serious attention to Condé and Beveridge’s work. As a student, I spent quite some time with these images while doing conservation and archival work at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, on the campus of the University of British Columbia, which has an important collection of Condé and Beveridge’s work; and though I cannot say I have resolved my misgivings about Condé and Beveridge’s didactic aesthetics, they did make me laugh. And this in turn always called up for me Brecht’s anti-romantic dictum: “spasms of the diaphragm generally offer better chances for thought than spasms of the soul.” See Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 100.
Sekula, “The Red Guards,” 49.
See Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: Mao Tse-Tung: The Marxist Lord of Misrule,” in Mao: On Practice and Contradiction (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 11–21 (especially).
Alfred Jarry, “Preface” to Ubu Roi, trans. Beverly Keith and Gershon Legman (Mineola, NY: Dover Press, 2003), 3. On page 9 of this Dover edition, the play’s title is Ubu Roi or The Poles. It should be noted that on the date Jarry spoke his preface Poland was still partitioned and therefore had no sovereign territory, was indeed nowhere. Sekula’s new series weaves images of and text from the Polish community in Chicago with furtive shots inside Poland of the outskirts of areas rendered inaccessible because of secret US military activities, purportedly the transport and torture of unlawful combatants. The quote from Ubu Roi was reproduced in vinyl on the wall of the Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw, where Polonia and Other Fables is installed for Sekula’s eponymous survey, curated for this venue by Karolina Lewandowska.
As such, he also ventures to reform his own approach. I am reminded of an image from This Ain’t China, of the cook with his eyes almost insanely crossed. Here, the motif of “incorrect vision” already surfaces, but the particular, performative heroism of many of the photographs in This Ain’t China is not operating in the new transparency. The image departs from the Brechtian complicity of subject, camera, and audience present in Godard’s films and Sekula’s earlier photography. Sekula’s interest in “performance under working conditions” (to paraphrase the title of his Generali Foundation retrospective and the title of an early, never-exhibited video) remains.