Staged Art Encounters and Artists on Pedestals

Art galleries – in particular ones that stage encounters between those who consider themselves to be artists and those who do not – often pose as a cultural laboratories in which the boundaries between 'common-sense' worlds are drawn and challenged. However, gallery art encounters are still culturally and geographically segregated from day-to-day life and as such are a problematic field for political action. For Bourriaud however, the simple act of facilitating such encounters is enough. The gallery becomes a liminal zone in the ‘arena of representational commerce’, which has the capacity to transform both art and the everyday by generating ‘free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life’ (Bourriaud, 2002: 16). But this in itself is not enough. It’s the equivalent of saying that going on holiday once in a year is enough to transform life back home. Whilst, the 'free' experiences we have on tour might influence our perspectives on everyday life, what can two weeks away in the sun really do to transform the structures of everyday life? The answer, for Bourriaud at least, lies in the notion that the ideal of a wholesale transformation of society is illusionary, and that we must therefore deal with a micro-political process of 'tiny revolutions'. However, this too would seem to limit the potential for action in everyday life if we are expected to attend relational art exhibitions and artist’s workshops in order to know how to escape the alienating demands of consumer capitalism! The very idea that the artist knows better than the rest of us is absurd. Can art encounters alone really help us to lift the sheer weight of capitalism's oppression within the structures of everyday life? Indeed, the mythologies that venerate the post-YBA, artist as a kind of guru or touchstone of 'good' living, seem to be a crass perpetuation of the cult of the artist and indeed, the cult of the self. Something Marina Abramović's 512 Hours (2014) is testimony to. The preconception that artists are the only people with the privilege to stop time, or at least view it from afar in a practice akin to mindfulness meditation, suggests that the fundamental rift between work and leisure, has not gone away, and that romantic notion of leisure (and art) as 'time to stand and stare' as expressed by the poet W.H. Davies in 1911, still haunts our worldviews and convinces us that art practice is an activity of the leisure classes. Yet, despite the fact that the 'freedom' leisure is everywhere, the structures of today’s leisure still suggest that liberation is found elsewhere and if we want 'freedom' in everyday life, then we have to be either rich or unemployed, or to earn it through resourcefulness or entrepreneurialism. Thus, the artist is imagined as either aristocratic dilettante or subversive layabout, which perhaps accounts for why artists are rarely paid for their time, and that their work can only be evaluated in terms of productivity and output. Yet conversely, if we are to judge the power of artists to transform the world on basis of their actions rather than products, then aren’t we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Actions, in the case of Situationism, amount to, at best de Certeau’s pin-prick tactics and at worst, distractions akin to fascist propaganda or the very image of spectacle. Likewise, actions do not challenge the productivist logic of neoliberalism – that the pursuit of freedom is the catalyst of immaterial labour and biopolitical production (Hardt and Negri, 2011). Rather than considering the art object to be the enemy of social transformation, perhaps it is better to suggest that the root of the problem is the notion that being an artist is a specialised activity, distinct from everyday life, in the same way as being a tourist. Indeed, both have equally negative connotations, depending on one’s perspective!

Living Under the Tourist Gaze

'a high price for emotional labour';subtle and covert modification; under the representational demands; playing 'tour-guide' for others; navigating the objects, interests and values that made up 'home'; the devolution of our shared life and an opening out to change and flux; oscillation between private and public, ontological meaning and representational meaning; “we love playing host and welcoming guests into our home”; the desire to go backstage, to penetrate the heart of their host’s everyday life; “before long we were feeling very at home”; something was eating away at the 'staycation' dream; a hub of transient sociality; “we hadn't realised that we shared the bathroom with the hosts”; “records, bands and DJs are an important part of our life”; “we spent some quality time with Bev who was kind enough to mix some '80s music for us”; mutability was key to our success; “Bev's paintings are all over the place and give it a very personal feeling”; emotional selling point; the fallout of aesthetic rhetoric; art becomes commerce, place becomes space, home becomes homelessness; staged authenticity concealed the essence of human sadness... 

What is leisure?

Q.
Are the situationists at the vanguard of leisure society?

A.
Leisure society is an appearance that veils a particular type of production/consumption of social space-time. If the time of productive work in the strict sense is reduced, the reserve army of industrial life works in consumption. Everyone is successively worker and raw material in the industry of vacations, of leisure, of spectacles. Present work is the alpha and omega of present life. The organization of consumption plus the organization of leisure must exactly counterbalance the organization of work. “Free time” is a most ironic quantity in the context of the flow of a prefabricated time. Alienated work can only produce alienated leisure, for the idle (increasingly, in fact, merely semi-idle) elite as well as for the masses who are obtaining access to brief periods of leisure. No lead shielding can insulate either a fragment of time or the entire time of a fragment of society from the radiation of alienated labor, because that labor shapes the totality of products and of social life in its own image.

(Situationist International)

Taken from “Le Questionnaire”, which originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #9 (Paris, August 1964). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006).