So “theoretically” we were embarking on a quick shuffle around some midtown bars. In “practice” it was a dysfunctional pub crawl without the being “on a bender” bit. Too early or too late for that. I suppose we were caught in the endless flicker of “intuition” and “intellect.” I “felt” like having an argument, but “knew” that this wouldn’t work without an ever-shifting context. Fueled at the beginning by cans of beer and tiny plastic shot glasses of something stronger. Starting in the “punk bar” I was already shouting towards N. He was nodding but really wanted to talk about something else. So we moved on. Is it too early for a sing-along? Moving along to the old standby on 3rd we just listened to the piano player for a while and waited for the barman to work on his receipts and tips and chits and little chats while transitioning to the next shift. A further pause as Laurie now needed to sort out her bottles and bits and bobs, and glasses, and wits, and banter. That’s the wait I’m used to over here. Others don’t seem to appreciate it, even writing of it with bile and spite online, but it’s OK to wait. Allows some pause before storm. And Laurie merges mental and manual labor like a pro. My theory is that they water “up” the drinks here—it’s that good. N got some words in and it was time for me to listen. He spoke of a time—I would have been about twelve years old—when the adoption of French theory in an art context was something novel. Oft-despised or mistrusted by those more precisely aligned with notions of class struggle as the true task for an artist. The Anglo-Saxons—although N didn’t call them that—were particularly pissed off. “The French Disease” they used to call it.1
And now I was off again, nodding towards the proffered two-liter bottle of sauvignon blanc as Laurie overfilled as is here wont. Whatever you might say, she has a memory that works overtime—I hadn’t been there for a year or more but she remembered my loathing of chardonnay. The drunken boat was briefly tied up at its mooring. I shouted again. Completely unnecessarily. It was Laurie’s birthday so she waved in recognition from the other end the bar, not realizing I was shouting about Gallic Pox and Anglo-Saxon empiricism. “Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas!” I yelled back at her. I had gotten something off my chest. She gave me the brush-off from afar. From now on I would keep my head down, hunched towards N. A bit more attention and comprehension might be required on my part. Maybe we were not talking at cross-purposes after all. I was stage-whispering now. “e-flux, the email they sent.” Surely we’ve been over this one before? Remember the old October questionnaire from 2008?2 The one where they worried about “professionalism” in question three—and some of us had to explain that we were too working class to be amateurs? Or meant to explain but forgot to put it so clearly. It was ostensibly about the war in Iraq. But necessarily we were forced to respond to the statement “Can we speak of the ‘professionalization’ of the artist (as a highly paid and market dependent provider of infotainment) as having reduced or eliminated political consciousness from cultural production?” And now it’s our fault all over again. The bold dilettantish gentrifiers of the academy with our research and discourse. Isn’t this what we are reduced to? Accused in an earnest form? N, is this an accusation coming from a class of people who have decided to meditate and provide critique on behalf of others? Are they now asking artists to deal with problems that are not of their own making? I was growing hoarse now. “Are they not Foxes?” N replied. I had to think about it for a minute. Laurie graced my glass with a few more golden ounces of “The Blanc.” On the house.
I couldn’t find my response to October on my phone. But I found some of it later on at home:
Even then we cannot be sure that the supposedly “professional” artists are apolitical. Would a world of “amateur” artists be better? The assumption that “professional” is linked with “infotainment” is incorrect. “Professional” may actually be a better synonym for “middle-brow concern” … One thing we can be sure of is that the notion of political consciousness is not synchronized in terms of the critical flows of production and analysis within the cultural field.3
Time to move on. The bar crawl was stumbling into the concrete bollard that was this whole e-flux thing. Damned if it hadn’t reared its head at the most inopportune moment, occupying my thoughts and guilts and self-consciousness at every turn. Protein and a gas grill might clear the head. We bounded up the stairs into the Japanese barbecue place. Sitting face to face for the first time that evening our beers were different volumes. Mine small. N’s supersized. When we cheers-ed they looked the same size from my glazed perspective but his head was tiny by comparison—in fact our faces seemed strange to each other after so many hours side by side in contemplation of the “flux.” N was now talking of the breakdown that happened between Art & Language UK and USA and the tension within Art-Language (the 1969–85 journal of conceptual art) following the 1975 arrival of The Fox—produced by the New York faction of Art & Language but soon the subject of rift and accusation and scorn from within and without. Was this also a Fox-like plea—this whole e-flux thing? A desire for “community” and self-critique within the “system”? I was still grinning from the scale-shift but my thoughts were darkening.
The Fox. Issue One. Sarah Charlesworth wrote:
What is called for is … the gradual creation of a community, a discourse, an art, which is not so much the reflection of our competitive and antagonistic pursuits as it is a common vehicle through which we might continually examine not only our own values and assumptions, but those of the culture of and to which we ideally speak.4
As a rapid follow-up, the text “Utopian Prayers and Infantile Marxism” was published in Art-Language (UK). The British ones were now attempting to corner The Fox (the Americans and an Australian or two probably) for lacking “any recognition of an historical materialist conflict within ideology,” without which “it would be difficult to suggest a de facto dysfunction—condition wherein ‘learning’ may take place.”5 Are you following me?
The Fox, no. 2, 1975. Art & Language Foundation.
By this point N was snorting with derision at the way I was flailing around but continued adding color to the conversation while we over-ordered and added sake to the blend. His command of all this stuff was off the charts AND he knows all about what led into and out of the 1990s. I kept my head close to the open flame and the sizzling tongue. And I came off the Art & Language for a minute and went straight into Barbara Ehrenreich and the Professional Managerial Class. We should have stayed a little longer at the place we had just left—the music would be in full flow by now. “2 for 1” drinks would be poured even if we made excuses and tried to leave. There would have been plenty of time for a sing-along. N continued to lay out the entire problem and difficulty of the e-flux prompt while I dreamed of Laurie and her glorious chutzpah.
How to Understand!
Yes!
How to Understand!
Yes!
The mire of one’s own deadlocks!
Deadlocks!
(Altogether now.)
How to Overcome!
Yes!
How to Overcome!
Yes!
The mire of the cultural PMC.
The mire of the cultural PMC!
Oi!
There was more likelihood of finding some of that fabled Professional Managerial Class in the bar we had just left. Sucking up the martinis no doubt. It would have been a better place for giving a pep talk to the mediating class with their identitarian sophistication and whiff of carefully crafted class solidarity—within limits of course. The same mediating class that now finds itself under so much stress from the current regime—who saw that coming? Apart from Barbara Ehrenreich in 1977 of course. What about them? What about us? The PMC are the “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”6
With a nod to AnnMarie Perl, who first linked analysis of Art & Language and the PMC—I think N was a little faster than me by this point.7 N and his radical weave. Moving through the mire of our own deadlocks. We were guffawing as we tried to work out what had motivated this invitation to consider the way we use and abuse theory. Where was the politics? Where was bloody Joshua Reynolds and his bloody Discourses for Christ’s sake? Why all this talk of communities? What if art has nothing to do with the tension between mental and manual labor? Or a constant play between intuition and intellect? N was looking grave by the time the pork belly arrived. It was really just raw bacon on a plate. Maybe he was worried about me.
The restaurant was emptying out. And we needed to go to the top of the building around the corner where the hi-fi speakers are enormous and the chairs are impossible. We had barely touched the surface of the prompt. To be fair to N, he hadn’t thought much about the prompt until this short run around town. And probably couldn’t work out what all the fuss was about.
“The Science of Signs (sic) is managerial, not historical. The management of capitalist culture is isomorphous with the management of capitalist industry. ‘Men’ once used to negotiate with their ‘masters.’ Now they negotiate with ‘the management.’ Management is more abstract and implies disinterested criteria—which is a mystification, of course.”8
Surely the “problem” is somewhere else completely? We puffed up the fire stairs and back down again when we realized that the Japanese jazz bar was on the second floor but always feels like it’s on the top floor. Inside, the whole thing suddenly felt a bit pointless. Soothed by advanced jazz and defanged whisky we dangled and smirked. Maybe this whole thing had nothing to do with us. In this bar it might well be illegal to reach for lucid replies to the problems of “theory” “jargon,” and “vague references.” In fact, I was starting to take this whole thing personally. Were we facing an elegant and endless paradox here? A prompt designed to keep us busy during a period of actual, concrete, political, and by extension, class crisis?
I walked home alone. I’m starting to think that every time we meet, N just doubles back and starts the whole bar crawl again from the beginning without me. I would have done that too, once upon a time. As I walked alone past the Hungarian consulate I tried readdressing the question to myself in my own words, pace e-flux comrades:
To make art has always been to engage in a constant play between class consciousness and bourgeois sensibilities, to disrupt artificial separations between “elite” and “the workers,” productive and reproductive, fine arts and craft. However, when contemporary art is research-based or relates to concrete political relationships it often relies upon primarily French theoretical modes that are strained in the face of the contradictions of class struggle—for example, by institutional demands to be both populist and dumb things down, make art simultaneously inaccessible yet with a whiff of the market. In place of a robust theoretical framework or an effective model for concrete action, we may encounter a rote reliance on familiar galleries, artists, and claims vaguely referencing bodies of critical work by French and Italian theorists who don’t know much about art.
At the same time, it remains evident that many artists and thinkers need to be part of a smaller community and to protect themselves from disparate contexts or mediation, disciplinary gatekeeping and control. 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?
I dropped my keys. They nearly fell down the gap between the elevator door and my hallway carpet. Apparently you can just ask the engineer to go down into the pit and get them. My father always told me that the best alternative to being an artist was to be a wringer-outer for a one-armed window cleaner. The dignity of labor squared.
Art & Language, “The French Disease,” Art-Language 3, no. 4 (October 1976).
Liam Gillick, “In What Ways Have Artists, Academics, and Cultural Institutions Responded to the US-Led Invasion and Occupation of Iraq?” October, no. 123 (Winter 2008).
Gillick, “In What Ways Have Artists.”
Sarah Charlesworth, “A Declaration of Dependence,” The Fox, no. 1 (1975): 1.
Art & Language, “Utopian Prayers and Infantile Marxism,” Art-Language 3, no. 2 (May 1975); quoted in Robert Bailey, “Art & Language and the Politics of Art Worlds, 1969–1977” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2012).
AnnMarie Perl, “From Art & Language to October,” nonsite.org, no. 38 (February 28, 2022) →.
Art & Language, “The French Disease.”
