Being with the Cultists
Visitor browsing books in the Born Again Labor Museum’s Book Hanging Room (2022).
1.
THE QUESTIONS of installation art (IA) — and related questions of social practice art (SPA) and relational aesthetics (RA) — are mostly important in light of a current crisis of art installation (in general) and the contemporary performance of art’s social positioning overall. What is the unique art image, object or gesture’s function, purpose, and existential raison d'etre in a world of viral imagery that seems to constantly self-reproduce everywhere?
Claire Bishop notes a “difficulty in meaning”1 in IA. What exactly is it? At a practical level, she provides two definitions: “1. An arrangement of the artworks in an exhibition.. 2. A kind of art in which the space and the ensemble of elements within it are integral elements of the whole artwork.”2 To tease this out, however, all art installation is the construction and sculpting of cult performance that surrounds art objects, images, narratives, or gestures, as a singular or collective artwork.3 The cultic performance is what creates or elaborates auric value and meaning (in the Benjaminian sense). This auric value constitutes an “in real life” IRL montage where contextualization and human performances shift the meaning of the artwork, creating a larger artwork or broader meaning. For example, as Ben Davis notes, it was in no small part the touring of Picasso’s Guernica to raise money for the Spanish Republic that shaped the meaning of the painting as an anti-war and anti-fascist imagery.4 The meaning of the original Diego Rivera painting of Man at the Crossroads is forever inter-related to the site of its destruction at Rockefeller Center.
In contemporary art there is a crisis of auric value — and the cultic performance that shapes it. At first this was driven by the apparent end of the modernist avant-garde telos (the succession of formal and conception innovations in art). It is now driven by a total digital installation that is larger than the art institution itself — a global capitalist participatory digital gesamtkunstwerk.5 This totalizing installation — existing in almost every aspect of contemporary life — reshapes the cultic performance of the art space itself. The critical potential of installation art is that it can act as a counter-totality — a counter-narrative — to this ideological gesamtkunstwerk. At the same time, installation art can easily be another iteration of the larger reproduction of spectacle, another iteration of the total art of capitalism.
2.
AS WALTER Benjamin notes of art before the age of “technological reproducibility,” “the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult” — a more or less permanent siting in the church, in temples, buildings of state, and its relations to performances of church and state.6 “Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects,” Benjamin argues. The meaning of the devotional image, handmade book of hours, and icon were bound spatially and conceptually by social ritual, sculpting the distance between viewer and image/object. As art patronage shifted from church to the individual bourgeois, and easel painting became a craft industry in every European city and town, cult-value was, according to Benjamin, shifted to “exhibition value.”7 This eventually produced the salon; a jumbled market of images and objects for sale, reflecting the political economy of easel painting as a boutique market.8 This did not yet reflect a coherent bourgeois ideology. As Danica Radoshevich argues, that took the advent of the modernist “white cube” wherein each “individual” artwork, separated from context (economic, social, etc.) became unique objects of “genius” floating in space.9
We must note, however, that the salon and white cube are/were also cultic performances of the art object. The nature of the placement of the artworks and their organized interactions with patrons communicate meaning that is then re-embedded into the unique object. The public museum reflected both bourgeois ideology and a democratic ideal. Included art objects acted as both commodity fetishes and artistic fetishes.10 The modernist canonical art space was a contradiction; elevating individual subjectivity in a positivist manner — pinning dead subjectivity to the wall like preserved butterflies.
It is these contradictions that Ilya and Emelia Kabakov attempt to exploit in their “total installations,” manipulating the “auracity”11 of the art space to create narrative meaning for constrained subjects — using the contradiction between the secular and sacral aspects of the art space —for example, the absent protagonist in The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (see below).
3.
AS BENJAMIN famously argues, the mechanical reproduction of the image eradicates “auric value.” Two things must be noted. 1) Those who assume that Benjamin is making a positivistic argument for mechanically reproduced images in the service of communism are incorrect, as are those who think he is making a Romantic argument lamenting the loss of aura. He is doing both and neither. 2) This is because Benjamin sketches an ongoing dialectic (or contradiction) in capitalist culture.
A wall in Paris covered in posters during the mass protests of the French May (1968).
The author at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2016).
As auric value is made up of distance (and the cultic performance of distance) the mechanically reproduced image recuperates auric value over time. Similarly, the newly created unique artwork becomes fodder for reproduction. A poster on the street during the French May of 1968 has a different meaning than a poster from the French May in the Centre Pompidou in 2016. A polaroid of a grandmother in front of the Louvre in 1963 means something different in 1963 than it does when discovered in an attic by her granddaughter in 2021. The Internet of 1997 bulldozed auric value, but its images have since acquired new auric value. Think of the cultic performance of “going to the movies” compared to streaming a movie. Moreover, this dialectic is related to the hauntological.
4.
IN THE 19th century, with photography, the material basis of easel painting as an industry was undermined. The rich and middle-class no longer needed painters to produce portraits. Artists salvaged the exceptions — the extraordinary moments of easel painting’s expressiveness — of their profession (see Berger) as they created modernist aesthetics and forms.12
5.
MANY MODERN artists had some consciousness of the intermixing of cultic and exhibition value — although it was oftentimes in an intuitive intervention. Notable for us — as Marxists in an irrealist tradition — the Berlin Dada Art Fair of 1919, and the Paris Surrealist Exhibition of 1938. Each of these assaulted the positivism of the bourgeois exhibition space — re-enchanting relations between discrete elements and re-asserting social relationships between those elements. In Berlin, Dadaist slogans in solidarity with the German Revolution and workers movement were scrawled on the wall, a German soldier's uniform was placed on a dummy with a pig’s mask and hung from the ceiling, while paintings, photographs, and assemblages surrounded it. In the Paris exhibition, coal bags stuffed with newspaper were hung from the ceiling in dimly lit roots —which meant patrons had to strain their eyes to see the works as coal dust drifted above their heads, dry leaves covered the floor, a web of string crossed artworks. Criticality and marvelousness —in a Surrealist sense — were constructed.
Paris (1938)
Berlin (1919)
Two things should be noted/underlined. 1. In both cases, the patronage/viewership was largely bourgeois and middle-class, albeit relatively diverse within those limits (German expatriates in Paris, declasse aristocratic refugees, various outcasts, etc.). While the Berlin exhibition got several of its organizers arrested, the Paris exhibit was a “smash hit.” This is not a criticism. It is noted because, as the modernist project waned, the class nature of the art audience became a bigger part of the meaning of art itself. A well-heeled audience in 1938 means one thing. It takes on another meaning after art’s fusion with finance capital and gentrification. 2. Nevertheless, the Berlin and Paris exhibitions challenged modes of bourgeois art exhibition on both the social and existential terms of art.
6.
ONGOING ATTACKS on bourgeois modes of art installation were woven throughout the happenings of the 1960s, Fluxus, the works of Joseph Beuys, the idea of conceptual art as a “dematerialization of the art object,” in Arte Povera’s installation of “poor materials,” etc. As Lucy Lippard notes of dematerialization, however, the attempt to escape the commodity form in conceptual art was unsuccessful over time. Capital rematerialized and commodified conceptual and ephemeral art,13 prefiguring the present-day commodification of the seemingly immaterial digital realm. Eventually, overtly “political” art-world art was defanged of its revolutionary and Marxist character, in what I’ve called “situationism without soviets” in reference to writers like Sadie Plant.14
7.
THE KABAKOV’S strategy of countering an official “total installation'' — in their case the Stalinism of the USSR — with a counter-total installation made of irrealist narratives, offers a potential model for rehabilitated criticality. In The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1989-1991), a working-class resident of a communal apartment building has assembled diagrams for an escape into the cosmos, using a Coyote-Road-Runner-like-slingshot device, suspended in the center of the room. Surrounding it are images of the Soviet space race. False Soviet collectivity is repurposed and sublated toward personal escape and liberation. In Russian, the word for “space” is the same for “cosmos,” giving the piece a more philosophical aspect, especially in light of Russian Cosmism (the late 19th and early 20th century esoteric philosophy that sought to abolish death through space exploration).15
While reading Alain Badiou’s Rhapsody for the Theatre, it occurred to me that combining the Kabakovs’ method of “Total Installation” with Bertolt Brecht’s concept of alienation in “Epic Theater,” could not only rehab existential meaning (the primary concern of the Kabakovs) but also enable criticality against dominant “installations” and “performances” of capitalist ideology; creating a Brechtian total installation against the total installation of capitalism.
8.
IF THE art space becomes, in a Brechtian sense, a theatrical space, do the artworks become “flats” for theatrical action? What is the action? How is the cult value performed? This raises questions of SPA and RA. I tend to agree with Claire Bishop’s criticism of SPA as placing “an ethics of interpersonal interaction” above “a politics of social justice.” Much SPA reproduces ideology. An “installation” in which artists distribute food to upper middle-class Brooklynites simply reinforces gentrification and the displacement of workers and people of color while appearing to be “social.”16
At the same time there are instances of SPA/RA that have overcome this problem. For example, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) in the Forest Houses public housing estate in the Bronx, and the gestures of the late Félix González-Torres. One of the ways these works tended to avoid the problem identified by Bishop was by creating a collaboration of radical meaning. The Gramsci Monument provided much needed communicative and other resources for a poor working-class community while avoiding the problem of gentrification, becoming a hub of neighborhood self-activity. The overdetermination of its aesthetics were limited to the DIY ethos of its structure, the mural of Gramsci painted on plywood outside, etc. Felix González-Torres’s minimalist inspired “take a candy” pieces recuperated meaning that had been eradicated from those dematerialized aesthetics by imbuing the work with social and personal tragedy. The individual candies become (became) something like transubstantiated eucharists, democratized in the volume of their tragic being.
My partner, Tish Turl and I, have applied aspects of these works in our methods, in our ongoing distribution of certain materials — creating a contradiction between reproduced and unique image, and the Born Again Labor Museum in Carbondale, Illinois. In both cases, attempting to recuperate meaning in a social and existential sense, through conceptual as well as narrative gestures.
***article continues after images***
Adam and Tish Turl, The Slow Apocalypse Room (Born Again Labor Museum) (2021-present).
Emila Kabakov, The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apartment (1989-1991)
Félix González-Torres, Untitled, candy installation at the Renaissance Society, Chicago (1995).
Tish and Adam Turl, The Barista Who Disappeared at Artspace 304, Carbondale Illinois (2018).
Adam Turl, Revolt of the Swivel Chairs at The Cube Gallery, Las Vegas, Nevada (2018).
Félix González-Torres, patrons taking candy.
Félix González-Torres at the Renaissance Society (1995).
Tish and Adam Turl, stickers at The Born Again Labor Museum.
Born Again Labor Museum (2022).
Thomas Hirschorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013).
9.
IN HINDSIGHT, the broader popularity of Nicolas Bourriaud’s version of RA prefigured the crisis of the canonical art space. His erratic 1998 book, Relational Aesthetics, struggles empirically with the shifting meaning of the unique art experience/object at the end of the 20th century. While recognizing that the “viewer” has become an “intrinsic part” of the art, he argues that Benjaminian aura has fused with “the public.”17 The viewer/patron, however, has always been central in Benjaminian aura. Similar category errors are reproduced elsewhere.18 At RA’s core, however, is a shift in the point of view of arts administration from art space as a repository of “art for art’s sake” toward art space as attraction, presented as turning the art space into a kind of social laboratory.
In other words, Bourriaud imagines against the white cube sans the radical politics that critiqued it. Claiming the historic mantle of Berlin (1919) and Paris (1938), art museums presented themselves as open “works in progress.” In and of itself, this would be a good thing. What was happening, however, is that the museum was being aligned to “postmodern values” — i.e. an absence of non-financial value in neoliberal capitalism. This began a process that later produced the decontextualized spectacles of van Gogh immersions and Meow Wolf installation theme parks.19 Instead of telegraphing “future utopias,” Bishop argues, recalling Fluxus, the museum created “micro-utopias.”20 As the patrons who participate in RA experiences are mostly petit-bourgeois and bourgeois persons already living in their own utopias, it is just another private Elysium in the art space.
Most RA artists cited by Bourriaud, Bishop argues, don’t form a “coherent and distinctive transformation of space [in the manner of Ilya Kabakov’s ‘total installation,’ or the absurd and surreal theatrical mise-en-scenes of 1919 and 1938],” instead, “most relational art works insist upon use rather than contemplation.”21 This is a direct contradiction to both Romantic and bourgeois modern conceptions of art that heralded art’s lack of utilitarian purpose.22 There is a long-standing left and utopian desire to “activate” the viewer as artist (in happenings, Fluxus, in performance art, in Beuysian practice, in Benjaminian criticism, in Brechtian theater, in Barthes, etc.). However, most RA produces a kind of “ubiquitous polysemic reification,” a reduction of social relationships to the level of service or storefront experience, i.e. “literal interactions” without “content.”23 The antidote to this problem, Bishop intimates, is the participatory construction of cultic value: “at its best, delegated performance produces disruptive events that testify to a shared reality between viewers and performers…”24
10.
BEN DAVIS argues that social and digital media produce a crisis of “substitutability” in contemporary art similar to the problem posed by film to theater in the early 20th century.25 This dynamic has sometimes presented in the schematic of bazaar vs. cathedral, where digital media presents itself as “anti-elitist” vs. the “church-like atmosphere” of the historic art space. But this turn to “democratic form” exists without “democratic content.”26 The postmodern assault on “high culture” turned out to be indifferent to the dictatorship of capital, being more hostile to dead poets than living bankers. Art world responses to this substitutability crisis are divided, Davis argues, into 1) Integrating galleries and museums into social media platforms as much as possible (Instagram traps, etc.) 2) Creating spaces of reflection (similar to the “slow food” movement, rarefied experiences outside the digital). 3) Continuing with “Big Fun Art/Relational Aesthetic” “attractions.” Regardless, instead of the “modern museum nominating what is important culture,” Davis writes, “the museums compete to get viewers/participants on social media to nominate them as important culture.”27
The digital hunt for the Mona Lisa at the Louvre (2016).
11.
IF THE digital platforms call into question the raison d'etre of the art space, AI generation calls into question the whole concept of art itself.28 Getting into this problem is beyond our ken here, but I will examine it as possible in future writing. For now, it is important to note that this is part of the general pattern of alienation facing artists who would valorize labor and/or self-expression.
12.
WE ARE all outsiders now. I argued this in 2019, borrowing from the ahistorical art-world concept of “outsider art:” “Academically-trained working-class artists who pretend their hard earned knowledge, their BFAs and MFAs, make them immune from[being fodder for an imploding financialized art world fused with real estate interests] are fooling themselves... We do not want to think of ourselves as art world dark-matter, permanent adjuncts, and stalking horses for gentrification. But this is what the art world is making of us, and what we must break from as workers, as artists, and as socialists.”29 I argued that we should turn from the art world toward sculpting the cultic performance of our work with our working-class siblings and comrades, far from the circuits of gentrification. As I put it, “It is time for artists to reject the weak avant-garde, to borrow from the Narodniks, and their proto-avant-garde echo, Peredvizhniki, and ‘go to the people.’ Not as an act of liberal charity, or middle-class adventurism, but because it is in our own material interests, and it is in the interests of art itself.”30
The cultic organization of work structured by installation, and the human performance that surrounds it, is part of the meaning of the work. Do we want that meaning to be the meaning of rich persons drinking wine and displacing our working-class siblings from Boyle Heights, Humboldt Park, or the latest “art district” real estate colony? Or do we want that meaning to be the self-activity of the class — in its own liberation and daily being — fused in solidarity with our own self-expression?
The nature of our IA is the narrative conceptualization of class struggle and being. Unlike the Kabakovs’ total installations, it is, like the class struggle itself, an evolving process. Our SPA and RA are mutually constructed by the cult. The cult is the working class and its most conscious elements. Its ritual is the process of being the class as is and becoming the class as it will be.
Lyn Rye performing at a No Shelter Film Collective event on ongoing ICE detention of immigrant children by the Biden Administration at BALM (2022).
People playing games and listening to music at the Southern Illinois Reproductive Justice (SIRJN) Halloween Party at BALM (2022).
Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) comrades making anti-debt and BLM protest signs at BALM (2022).
YDSA movie night at BALM (2022)
YDSA comrades and others making abortion rights protest signs at BALM (2022).
Fat JackRabbit performing at Carbondale Tool Library/BALM fundraiser (2022).
Endnotes
1. Claire Bishop, Installation Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 5
2. Bishop and Gemma Arguello, “Towards a Philosophy of Installation Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78(3), 333-338
3. “Cult performance” here refers to Watler Benjamin’s conception of cult-performance of the situated art object.
4. Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 52-53
5. I’ve made this argument several times, based on Boris Groys’ understanding of the Soviet Union as Stalin Gesamtuknstwerk in Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (New York: Verso, 2011). My article that first makes this argument is Adam Turl, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” Red Wedge Magazine (May 1, 2019): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/digital-reproduction
6. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” version on Marxists.org (1936): https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
7. Benjamin and John Berger, Ways of Seeing. This is a partial history that tends to leave out other modes of artistic production such as folk arts that were not thusly situated.
8. John Berger
9. Danica Radoshovich, “Zombie Gallery? The German Ideology and the White Cube,” Red Wedge Magazine (February 8, 2015): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/commentary/the-white-cube-and-the-german-ideology-gallery-space-as-bourgeois-farce
10. See Adorno on the dual nature of the art commodity/fetish.
11. Ilya Kabakov, Margarita Tupitsyn and Victor Tupitsyn, “About Installation,” Art Journal Vol. 58 No. 4 (Winter 1999), 65 and Wendy Koenig, “The Heroic Generation: Fictional Socialist Realist Painters in the Work of Ilya Kabakov,” Southwestern Art Conference Review Vol. 10 Issue 4 (2009), 448-455
12. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1972)
13. Lucy P. Lippard, Six Years: THe Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Also see Adam Turl, “Forty Years After the Dematerialization of the Art Object,” Red Wedge Magazine (January 5, 2016): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/evicted-art-blog/forty
14. Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Post-Modern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 111-112. See also Adam Turl, “Against the Weak Avant-Garde,” Red Wedge Magazine (April 5, 2016): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/weak-avant-garde
15. See Boris Groys, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (London: Afterall, 2006); and Boris Groys, ed., Russian Cosmism (Boston: MIT Press, 2018)
16. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 25-26
17. Bourriaud, 58-59
18. Bourriaud, 29-33
19. Bishop, 54-55
20. Bishop, 55
21. Bishop, 56
22. Bishop, 58
23. Bishop, 62
24. Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October (Spring 2021), 112
25. Ben Davis, “Chapter 3: The Art Work and the Culture Network,” Art in the After Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (Chicago: Haymarket, 2022), 55-90
26. Davis, 63-69
27. Davis, 73-78
28. Ben Davis, “Chapter 4: AI Aesthetics and Capitalism,” Art in the After Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (Haymarket, 2022), 91-112
29. Adam Turl, “We Are All Outsiders Now,” Red Wedge Magazine (May 1, 2019): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/alloutside
30. Adam Turl, “No More Art Districts,” Red Wedge Magazine (December 20, 2018): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/no-more-art-districts
Adam Turl is an artist and writer from southern Illinois — by way of Wisconsin, Chicago, upstate New York and Las Vegas. They are an artist and editor at Locust Review, a quarterly irrealist journal of art and literature, and a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective (LALC). They have had solo exhibitions at the Brett Wesley Gallery (Las Vegas), the Cube (Las Vegas), Project 1612 (Peoria, Illinois), and Artspace 304 (Carbondale, Illinois). In 2016 Turl was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France. They received their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and a BFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (SIUC). Turl is working on an evolving conceptual and visual art project, Born Again Labor Museum, with their partner Tish Turl, a writer and fellow LALC member. They host the monthly podcast Locust Radio along with Tish Turl and LALC member Laura Fair-Schulz. They are PhD student in media arts and a graduate assistant at SIUC.