Miroslav Tichý

“If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”

 

Can we turn our idea of excellence to include other forms of excellence? What are ways we can show non-compliance, not to ‘fight’ against, but to withdraw from the pressures of a certain idea of action and to reach productivity from another side?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/08/cut-working-week-urges-thinktank

// ART WITHOUT WORK

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-without-work/

‘When a society is rich, its people don’t need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of spirit.  We have more and more universities and more and more students.  If students are going to earn degrees, they’ve got to come up with dissertation topics.  And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite.  Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Soul’s Day.  Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity..’

Gerhard Richter, Tate.

Gerhard Richter’s work shows us the many things that painting can be.  But an exhibition of his work does not have to expel energy proving wrong the idea ‘painting is dead’. His work has a plain strength that denies any discussion of this.

His retrospective at the Tate Modern, entitled Panorama and aiming to present the full visual range of Richter’s work, communicates from one ‘edge’ of painting to the other with photorealist works beside large-scale paintings of bold abstract gestures.

It is this – being unable to grasp him as an artist, and his consistent evasion – that gives Richter appeal when an inflated art market suggests to us bloated egos.

The colour grey appears throughout, and this stands too for his evasion of definition as an artist: ‘[grey] makes no statement whatsoever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations.. Grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape.’

It is clear, though, that the curating of the show works on the contradictions found in Richter’s work. Following the obvious oppositions of figuration and abstraction come others – erasing and revealing, colour against grey, past and present, structure and chance, and the double that is the reflected image shown in the painting as it is in the mirror.

It seems the deeper-running double is the consciousnesses of Richter’s work. Richter fled East Germany for Düsseldorf in 1961, months before the Berlin divided east and west.  Whilst remaining reluctant to speak about his work, he has spoken through his work on historical and political incidents, not with statements of opinion or evidenced emotion but with a quietness that is as provoking.

The other consciousness is the possibility of art referencing itself. A whole room shows Richter as influenced by Marcel Duchamp for example with Ema (Nude on a Staircase 1966) as following directly from Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase no.2. 1912.  Duchamp’s work itself can be understood as a kind of break in art, turning art in to look at itself and its conventions of making.  As well as his use of objects ‘becoming’ art in their presentation, he also treated colours as readymade commodities to be used.  This prefigured the attitude of many post-war artists that colour could not be used for meaning, instead being selected by chance or a process without ‘feeling’ or symbolism, and much of Richter’s work has resembled bought colour swatches as commodified colour.  In 4096 colours, 1024 colours were generated mathematically and painted in a square grid, with each colour re-produced four times.

Although reluctant with opinion, the paintings do not give off moral numbness as with some pop-art repetitions, but instead a feeling of the difficulty with art’s response. Prevalent in the exhibition is how Richter is situated as responding to these decades post-war, processing a changed world through his work – for example through aerial photographs of bombsites and the architecture that replaced them.

These two subtleties of his work are offered with clarity in Betty (1988). Both historical and personal, it offers a historical understanding with a self-referenced understanding of art itself. A daughter turning away from her father, and a generation turning away from the past, she is looking into his painting. In Richter’s understanding a painting acts like an image in a mirror – present, but not where we see it.

This way of seeing is reflected in the glass and mirror works exhibited with the paintings. 11 Panes (2004) is a glass structure that repeats the viewer’s image, and this blur has a visual likeness to his painting. In this repetition we cannot determine the ‘real’ image, a withholding and hesitance towards truth or responsibility that is a constant in Richter’s work.

The curating shapes the work to themes, giving some kind of story. But these paintings are part of a series, in no particular given order, and in their initial exhibition mirrors re-adjusted their arrangements in each viewing. The exhibition does not make the most of this shifting, operating by way of the – at times frustrating – dependable and digestible sequence of ‘bodies’ of work.  These opposites are the veins running through the works, yet a structure cannot be fitted so neatly over half a century’s worth of work and life.

Making sense is the danger of the retrospective.

In fact, the exhibition ‘ends’ in 2006 with a supposed reconciliation of the opposites structure and chance, through Richter’s admiration of John Cage’s work as setting up of structures in his music to produce chance. Richter’s silence throughout his career can be seen in relation to his recognition of John Cage’s silent music – perhaps we can see his most famous work 4’33’’ in Richter’s abstract paintings for their orchestrated randomness and for their abstraction that is silence as noise.

But interestingly, quoting Cage’s famous sentence ‘I have nothing to say, and I am saying it’, the wall-text, and perhaps Richter himself, does not finish Cage’s sentence – ‘and that is poetry’.

It’s clear then that Richter’s ability to say is in sureness of uncertainty, and in not wanting to offer too much self-professed significance. Richter said around 1964 ‘Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures.’

Whilst we are taken through descriptions and insights by the curators, Richter’s works are powerful without fuss.  They do not claim too much for themselves – with reticence, silence, and grey.

‘the roots of opportunism lie in an outside-of-the-workplace socialisation marked by unexpected turns, perceptible shocks, permanent innovation, chronic instability. Opportunists are those who confront a flow of ever-interchangeable possibilities, making themselves available to the greater number of these, yielding to the nearest one, and then quickly swerving from one to another. This is a structural, sober, non-moralistic definition of opportunism. It is a question of a sensitivity sharpened by the changeable chances, a familiarity with the kaleidoscope of possibilities, an intimate relationship with the possible, no matter how vast.  In the post-Ford era mode of production, opportunism acquires a certain technical importance. It is the cognitive and behavioral reaction of the contemporary multitude to the fact that routine practices are no longer organised along uniform lines; instead they present a high level of unpredictability.  Now, it is precisely this ability to maneuver among abstract and interchangeable opportunities which constitutes professional quality in certain sectors of post-Fordist production, sectors where labour process is not regulated by a single particular goal, but by a class of equivalent possibilities to be specified one at a time… Opportunism gains in value as an indispensable resource whenever the concrete labour process is permeated by a diffuse ‘communicative action’..

Paolo Virno [the Grammar of the Multitude]

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Efficiency is a driving force of these scenarios discussed. If the artist’s question is ‘how can we make do with what we have?’ (Bourriaud) further to this might be doing this in the most efficient way possible. This is being aware of what is profitable; how affect can be achieved, particularly for young artists currently: ‘The underlying concern and point of departure young artists have long since realised they can make more lucrative use of their skills and knowledge by producing video clips or operating new programmes.. than by situating themselves within the confines of the exclusive and regulated art system. New platforms for innovative artistic creation are more readily available on the Web.. than in opera houses, theatres and museums.’ Whilst more platforms might desirable, we can identify this as part of a general shift towards production out of multiple lines of activity/means that can be sourced freely, behaviour that may be traced to past attitudes and movements of thought foregrounding this scenario. One such thing is mentioned by Thierry de Duve, speaking in 1994 about attitudes in art school: ‘Many of us have grown to praise the subversive students who do not behave as if they tapped the unspoilt creativity with which they are endowed, but who, instead, tap the pop culture with which they are equipped’.  Opposed to the artist as working introspectively, this is accessing and taking advantage of something already existent.  Of course a supposed crisis in production has been discussed for some time and de-skilling seems to have become a condition for art’s production, or more that exploring a practice requires its simultaneous confrontation and interrogation: that we must unlearn in order to learn, de-know in order to know. The ‘de-skilling’ of the artist has in fact become a re-skilling from another angle. It is the case that skill has shifted to become a skill in a different sense, and, considering again the conversational in art, one aspect of this might be tied to an ability to ‘talk’. A concern is to reconcile what one could say about the art with what that art would actually be in an environment of non-production: ‘There was a feeling you were part of an open experiment but production wasn’t part of it.. That was a good lesson in some respects of.. the future that we’re now in the present of, which is this feeling of crisis within the idea of production and actually making art work.. about how you’re supposed to actually apply the knowledge and technique to the actual physical manifestation of an artwork itself.’ The productivity spoken of here is of the ‘physical manifestation’. Forming a large part of the activity is the knowledge that that physical manifestation will transmit. But that knowledge is being articulated and produced before the ‘physical manifestation’ if we use in this case the word ‘apply’. It is therefore happening somewhere prior, and might explain the interest in talking as integral to current art events (as well this coming from a general interest in conversation as a profession of democracy and as a societal norm enabled by global information sharing). It is to say that this existence has a potential that is parallel to that which the work conceives. But also the conversational situation as productive is recognisable in the consideration of talking about the work as being a crucial, if not formative, part of the work. This is not just a case of being able to articulate the activity verbally in order to explain it but to utilise this within the activity. Part of this utilisation is the continuation of the practice, and if this performs a conversation whereby interruptions are necessary to its movement we might also understand the productive space of interruptions as non-understandings, confusions, and pauses. We could identify this in saying that continual stumbling and questioning is preferred to offering definite answers and methods. Here inconsistency is a preferred mode of behaviour- and conversation, also as an activity of non-production, seems to resist definition associated with skill. Interrogation of the medium finds a comparison with the conversational as ‘seeking to understand’, and with the ‘acknowledgement of non-knowledge’ which drives this investigation. We must always be working towards something. Our project will never be and never can be finished. This might amount to a pervading uncertainty and the feeling that nothing is permanent. Projections are the deferral of knowledge but this space of waiting might be the potential for knowledge-production. Whilst there is a projection into an uncertain future it seems it is impossible not to look back, which is very much tied up with these scenarios of production out of that which already exists. Thierry De Duve continues in When Form Has Become Attitude.. ‘..when the absence of models to be imitated begins to be felt as a loss and no longer as a liberation, this can only mean that this culture’s capacity to invent without looking back has dried up. Once this point is reached (and God knows it has been reached: look at all the neo- and the post-movements; look at the endemic practices of quotation, second- or third-degree self-referentiality, replicas, and the like) then it is no longer enough to say that the imitation repeats and the invention makes the difference. The very concepts of repetition and difference ought to be thought anew, transversally, so to speak.’ The ‘condition’ of criticality and deconstruction resulted in a stagnant situation because, de Duve argues, the triad of creativity-medium-invention was in place with an added suspicion which operated prior to the establishment of any activity to critique. If this is typical to art-school, writing in 2009 de Duve says that knowledge is ‘transmitted’ in various accessible sites of cultural production, which might even be the primary source of this acquisition: ‘We are living in a paradoxical situation, where an increasingly specialised art culture is transmitted by the most general channels and circulates in places where all publics, including the ‘general public’, are blended. It is from within this heterogeneous public that what we call the artworld (written as a single word) emerges.. And it is a the heart of the milieu, this scene and its institutions, that art schools exist today.’ The ‘best schools’ are those that are considered part of the ‘artworld establishment’. In the context of the multitude as a source of cultural knowledge, it is dubitable whether the kind of conversation and community we might argue exists in an art school does not account for more than the transmission that occurs in other places. However, what is crucial here is the ‘specialised’ and its relationship to the ‘general’, and the circulation of a culture within a place formed of multiple publics. If the methods of transmission occur in this heterogeneous place, what is the potential for these ‘alternative’ sites to fully take on this capacity? Some discussions have deemed this as latent in these institutions: “The book shows the huge potential that exists for art institutions to be laboratories and places of knowledge production’. It is interesting that this is an association with experimentation as if this capability in art-school is absent after its exhaustion- it is perhaps no longer a potentiality. Whilst the aforementioned potential for institutions has yet to be fully achieved it is the case that moves have been made towards pedagogical formats. Indeed this agency is much to do with curating as having pedagogical responsibility, and perhaps negates any suspicion ‘learnt’ in art school. The potential of this is described in an interview between Daniel Buren and Wouter Davidts; when asked Do you think it is possible to distance curating from any kind of pedagogical programme? Daniel Buren replies: ‘..In a group show.. it is really the curator who is there to fabricate the exhibition. I have a feeling that the curator, in that sense, is by definition doing something didactic, either by explaining his or her own point of view, or by communicating something that everyone more or less knows which has received a new and special shape, or by thematising something the curator believes to have been more of less discovered within the work of fifteen different artists. Both huge group shows.. and more restricted shows elsewhere become didactic by the mere fact that they receive a title.. Maybe your question deals more precisely with shape.. the ambition to offer something that comes closer to a pedagogical model such as the university.. with the attempt to present and approach artworks not only by juxtaposing them but by installing a room and explaining why it is like this instead of like that- similar to the kind of things that can be taught at university. So it involves the objective to more of less transfer such an attitude into the museum, which is, of course, a different context.’ Buren links the curator’s shaping, a fabrication, to a method of teaching and reception. But we might question the limits to curatorial activity in this sense, i.e. how these forms are related and what is at stake.

“They discovered that knowledge was tradable”

It can be confusing as fine art undergraduate to consider the relationship of what I do now and what I will do.   Or how this learning could equip me for any job that I might attempt to find. Perhaps we supplement part-time work with our ‘creative practice’; perhaps in a collective with an air of an ‘organisation’ or of a structure half-achieved. But it might still be unclear as to who does what.

Or perhaps we intern in a communications role in the cultural sector – if we can afford to work for peanuts. It is from these ‘creative desgrees’ that many of us will go into the cultural industry as creative mediators in an organisation. We will use the promise of our creative personality, and the ‘transferable skills’ gleaned from our degree.  With the added expectation that ‘creatives’ can and love to network, most of our work will involve nothing we can make, but rather do.  This will be in a linguistic capacity.

This kind of immaterial labour will often mean the precariousness and uncertainty of unstable work.  These activities, formed on connectivity and based in ‘knowledge, information and association’, are productive through positioning or strategies of ‘marketing’. As Virno says, ‘it is not so much “what is said” as much as the pure and simple “ability to say” that counts’.  It is the cultural industry that is ‘an industry of the means of communication’.  It seems that communicativity can exist in itself, and be culturally productive.

Writing in 1999 towards a predicted art-world in 2009, Anthony Davies and Simon Ford make predictions that are strangely accurate. The reason for my confusion here is that this situation arises from the increase of possible occupations and ways to define one’s activity – that there is a space for anything depending on how and where you maneuvre. This is through thinking of these activities as being formed on connectivity alone, and that the services offered by a ‘culturepreneur’ might be exchangeable, and ‘can be packaged and sold to a range of clients’ by a ‘hybrid’ professional.  In the speculative 2009, Davies and Ford predict that with these multiple and diverse positions and platforms, it is hard to determine what has any weight: ‘criticism became just one of many competing discourses and the least affective tool for unraveling the complex structures that cultural brokers inhabited.’

Whilst this an immaterial and ungraspable thing, it is in its practice part of an assumption that cultural knowledge can be quantified and therefore traded.  This is capital, and places importance on this worker to gather information, add value to that information and redistribute it.  Studying for a degree in a creative subject therefore might, through its definition as a degree, promise to provide packaged knowledge with a tradable outcome.  But this supposed clarity of a kind of entitlement – in that you have ‘bought’ your education – seems at odds with the reality of the multitude of indeterminable and insecure occupations.

And of course more confused arises when we think that most of us have not even ‘bought’ our education.  The inflated ‘price’ of higher education means that a responsibility of paying for it has shifted (to our future qualified and supposedly financially stable selves) so that studying towards a degree costing in the region of £10,000 or more is firstly diminutive to its ‘worth’ i.e. that what is being secured is, due to its inflated ‘price’ and deferred ‘payment’, essentially some kind of phantom.  This is a dematerialisation process; the move from debt to supposed credit.

Secondly the feeling of being in debt is enough alone to complicate our attitude towards what we learn, how we learn and what we do with that. Of course this pessimism isn’t always present if we think of the fulfillment that on a social level studying art facilitates, specifically what is achieved when not thinking about how to work (and it is perhaps a question of drawing this out more).  But of course this is rarely compatible with modules and assessment requirements, learning and examination criteria that are required to complete the course.  It is telling that those in their third year are called ‘finalists’.

This closing off to the degree, and the suggestion that it can have an identifiable completion (partly suggested in its financialisation) does not account for the fact that education is ongoing, and at times immeasurable. I’m not supporting a non-university education by ‘other means’, but wondering whether this set-up can find in its means a way to take into consideration the varying intensities and rates of artistic knowledges and productions that are inevitable over time.  And how a price on this is negotiated. Of course it is possible to continue studying only to concede that you still ‘don’t know’.  An interest in art and qualification in art are not distinct.

These situations and behaviours are part of a leveling of culture- a shift to flatter networked forms of organisation. The financialisation of education can deem it quantifiable and “transferable”, and feeds an idea of the cultural worker that makes up this flexible area of ‘production’. The areas of opportunity, in the fictional 2009, are in playing these ‘cross-sector games’, not with any criticality, and in the current 2011 this seems much the same.

It might be interesting to add that perhaps now we don’t look to the future as much, more to a present – and its relation to a past that supposedly accomplished everything.  In this way it therefore only remains to deal with accumulation – in a sense, to work across. Much of our consideration of the ‘present’ is an attempt to construe what made and makes this situation.  Perhaps this is a lack of a particular perseverance making it hard to ‘look into’ the future, but the realisation of this situation is perhaps the beginning of that forward thinking.

Art Futures [Anthony Davies and Simon Ford]

Articles that look into the future, predict trends and propose strategies are rarely found in art journals – in the world of business it’s a thriving industry and for many a matter of survival. In ‘Art Futures’ we speculate on what form the art world might take in the new millennium and what kind of role artists might play. As everybody knows, there is only one thing certain about predictions, they rarely come true. So a word of warning: no responsibility is accepted for any inaccuracy or error or any action taken or not taken in reliance on the contents of this article.

It’s 2009 and the gallery system has been absorbed into the many consortium type structures that have emerged over the last few years. This has brought about a complete reconfiguration of the art world – with new terms and occupations (prosumers, culture-brokers, corpoculture, provisional consortiums, pro-am circuits, starists, and culturepreneurs) and new economies. These operate on many levels, from grass roots hobbyists to the professional international art stars (or starists). Signs of this new professionalism can be traced back to the late 1990s when the art world was drawn into the creative industries of fashion, design, architecture, and music. Art as a distinct and separate autonomous ‘world’ was no longer perceived as sustainable or necessary. While many artists, cultural commentators and public institutions were ‘blurring boundaries’, promoting ‘the everyday’ and ‘accessing broader audiences’, the business community was busy assessing the economic potential of cross sector activities and partnerships. It was the convergence of these sectors (principally business and culture) that changed the role of public institutions, the education system, and other institutions associated with art.

Companies have now moved on from the contentious sponsorship and collaborative models to an integrated partnership strategy. As predicted, the economic clout of big business is now greater than the ability of governments to enforce regulations. With rapidly increasing power and influence, many businesses have used corpocultural partnerships to appear more open, accessible, attractive, and mainstream and thus attempt to stem the increasing flow of criticism. This strategy is often referred as Total Role in Society (TRS), where companies develop cultural missions in order to build up an ethical public image. It was TRS that shaped the many mergers and take-overs in the creative industries that led to the close synergy between banks, auction houses, advertising companies, and galleries. Perhaps most insidiously it also opened up public institutions and the education sector as sites for further corporate influence. In the modern economy entrepreneurship is considered the key factor in education. Culture, meanwhile, is now packaged and sold to a range of clients and is serviced by a hybrid professional – the culturepreneur.

During the initial period of European economic convergence and the introduction of the Euro, Berlin was heavily promoted as the European International Art Centre and ‘it location’ for doing business. With the UK outside the European Union and it’s cultural policies looking increasingly outdated and in conflict with European cultural and economic integration, Berlin temporarily became the symbolic cultural capital of Euroland. With no economic and strategic interest in promoting national identity, artists based in Berlin (like most companies) were primarily defined as pan-European. These new European artists (nEas) were the cultural paragon of a fully integrated European Union, defined by location rather than nationality. The nEas were linked to centres servicing the global interests of business clusters, the European parliament and regional governments. This move to redefine cultural difference was also behind the reorientation – after economic and cultural integration – of formerly national cultural institutions, which are now supported and subsidised through multi-national corporations and the Central European parliament.

The more successful nEas (the Champions’ League) were not rooted to any particular location (or gallery) and were able to follow capital wherever it went, tapping into local networks, setting up partnerships and identifying trends for a variety of clients. Their bridging role, between communities working on the cutting edge of culture and business, provided the knowledge, information, and association vital to companies requiring local association for competitive global strategies. An information gap appeared and they were early beneficiaries of a new economy.

Some nEas dispensed with the artist tag altogether and started trading information services as culture-brokers. Artists were not the only group in this category – it included many other members of the creative communities that made up the thriving inner-city cultural centres. During this period the terms artist, curator, critic and gallerist came under increasing pressure as they no longer reflected the activities and professional occupations of individuals working in these areas. For culture-brokers art production was simply part of the package. The music, drug, fashion, design, club, and political scenes could be brought together and mixed and matched in a range of formats, from exhibitions and websites to corporate parties and annual reports. As a result, art criticism became just one of many competing discourses and the least effective tool for unravelling the complex structures that culture-brokers inhabited.

Many galleries found it impossible to represent the range of activities that culture brokers were engaged in (whose points of contact and exchange could be achieved elsewhere). In addition to which the client base for most galleries no longer provided the principle source of revenue or for that matter, focus for culture-brokers. In this climate a split developed between those galleries that aligned themselves to provisional consortiums and those that continued on a traditional role of representing artists within the pro-am circuit.

The range of settings you find in the pro-am artworld are broad and complementary: from night classes in draughty community halls through to the glittering and glamorous openings of prestigious museum shows. In the former ‘prosumers’ (producer/consumers) are encouraged to exercise their creativity. In the latter the ‘beautiful people’, including pop stars, writers, aristocrats, royalty, architects and journalists, network furiously. The pro-am circuit embraces the wide consumer base necessary to keep the arts industry growing. In 2009 this system is underpinned by the retail, merchandising and marketing sectors and while starists continue to work the media, public institutions service the prosumer markets.

At the turn of the century many public institutions, with their fixed programmes, budgets and deadlines, were beginning to look vulnerable and unable to respond to the pace of change and expectations of their audience, clients and sponsors. In a broad and still largely inaccessible area like culture, where many clients are uncertain and lack knowledge, where gauging the pace of change can be a matter of survival, culturepreneurs emerged to trade access to social networks and capitalise on programming lacunae in both the public and private sectors. As much a product of the drive to professionalise entrepreneurialism as they were of converging sectors, culturepreneurs helped created the new information supplier economies. Their key skills were communications based and included the ability to process large amounts of information and think strategically. They discovered that knowledge was tradable. As players in the image business they were also well aware of the value of product differentiation and branding across a range of formats and media.

Having dispensed with older models of artistic practice these pioneers achieved sustainable professional status through either the one person consultancy or the registered limited company. Fully branded, logo’d up and with their Certificates of Incorporation proudly displayed these companies set about establishing themselves in the emerging markets (not least of which was intellectual property). Culturepreneurs also managed the temporary link ups between a number of sectors to exploit the cross-promotional and marketing potential of cultural presentations. These provisional consortiums brought together business and customers through communication in the media. Opportunities were to be had by those who changed the rules of the game rather than those that persevered with outmoded practises.

Culturepreneurs and the new companies operated as chameleon organisations speeding ahead of bureaucratic dinosaurs and providing the economic and legal framework absent from older ‘independent’ artist run spaces and gallery system. ‘Artist run’ was never anything more than a testing ground for the gallery system and a euphemism for ‘no money’ collaborations with the business sector. The systematic withdrawal of public funding, sponsorship and media interest helped cause the collapse of this area. It was not so much that artists, galleries, curators, and commentators disappeared, the system that had come to define their professional and economic relationships collapsed and in some cases converged with other sectors.

Of course these changes have not occurred without their being some casualties – the demise of the avant-garde perhaps being the most significant. Rumours of the death of the avant-garde have haunted art criticism since the 1960s, but it was not until the turn of the century that its demise was confirmed. With the confirmation of the destruction of an idealised autonomous public culture (fully incorporated as it is with corporate culture, or the corpoculture, of the business world) the avant-garde ceased to have a function. Critical autonomy now lies within the economic structures and cross-sector games played by culturepreneurs – these are the principle battlegrounds of the future.

Anthony Davies and Simon Ford [4 January 1999]

Previously published in Art Monthly. (223), February 1999, pp 9-11.

“It’s sort of erm it’s sort of floating somehow”

 

” We spoke a lot about this odd territory inbetween things.

And it’s about things being out of focus, things being about hanging around, things being about erm..

trying to find those aspects of culture that are, that are.. like it’s sort of hard to grasp in a way, they’re like

the sparkles or like the.. the er erm er starting point often.  I’m I’m and when I do this kind of sub-teaching

thing I end up trying to talk to people about the possibility of what you do if you don’t have any ideas but

you still want to be an artist.”

 

Liam Gillick

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The speaker’s virtuosity is two-fold: not only does it not produce an end product which is distinguishable from performance, but it does not even leave behind an end product which could be actualised by means of performance.

In fact, the act of parole makes use only of the potentiality of the language, or better yet, of the generic faculty of language: not of a pre-established text in detail.  The virtuosity of the speaker is the prototype and apex of all other forms of virtuosity, precisely because it includes within itself the potential/act relationship, whereas ordinary or derivative virtuosity, instead, presupposes a determined act…

It is enough to say, for now, that contemporary production becomes ‘virtuosic’ (and thus political) precisely because it includes within it a linguistic experience as such.  If this is so, the matrix of post-Fordism can be found in the industrial sectors in which there is “PRODUCTION OF COMMUNICATION BY MEANS OF COMMUNICATION”; hence, in the culture industry.

 

Paolo Virno

 

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