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Невольники Маркса: Бойс, Уорхол, Кляйн, Дюшан
Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, and Marcel Duchamp form an unlikely quartet, but they each played a singular role in shaping a new avant-garde for the 1960s and beyond. Each of them staged brash, even shocking, events and produced works that challenged the way the mainstream art world operated and thought about itself.
Distinguished philosopher Thierry de Duve binds these artists through another connection: the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy. Karl Marx provides the red thread tying together these four beautifully written essays in which de Duve treats each artist as a distinct, characteristic figure in that mapping. He sees in Beuys, who imagined a new economic system where creativity, not money, was the true capital, the incarnation of the last of the proletarians; he carries forward Warhol’s desire to be a machine of mass production and draws the consequences for aesthetic theory; he calls Klein, who staked a claim on pictorial space as if it were a commodity, “The dead dealer”; and he reads Duchamp as the witty financier who holds the secret of artistic exchange value. Throughout, de Duve expresses his view that the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy is a phenomenon that should be seen as central to modernity in art. Even more, de Duve shows that Marx—though perhaps no longer the “Marxist” Marx of yore—can still help us resist the current disenchantment with modernity’s many unmet promises.
An intriguing look at these four influential artists, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx is an absorbing investigation into the many intertwined relationships between the economic and artistic realms.
Distinguished philosopher Thierry de Duve binds these artists through another connection: the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy. Karl Marx provides the red thread tying together these four beautifully written essays in which de Duve treats each artist as a distinct, characteristic figure in that mapping. He sees in Beuys, who imagined a new economic system where creativity, not money, was the true capital, the incarnation of the last of the proletarians; he carries forward Warhol’s desire to be a machine of mass production and draws the consequences for aesthetic theory; he calls Klein, who staked a claim on pictorial space as if it were a commodity, “The dead dealer”; and he reads Duchamp as the witty financier who holds the secret of artistic exchange value. Throughout, de Duve expresses his view that the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy is a phenomenon that should be seen as central to modernity in art. Even more, de Duve shows that Marx—though perhaps no longer the “Marxist” Marx of yore—can still help us resist the current disenchantment with modernity’s many unmet promises.
An intriguing look at these four influential artists, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx is an absorbing investigation into the many intertwined relationships between the economic and artistic realms.
- GenresArtNonfictionPhilosophy
112 pages, Paperback
First published October 8, 2012
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About the author
Thierry de Duve
53 books24 followersThierry de Duve, son of Nobel Prize-winning cytologist and biochemist Christian de Duve, is a Belgian scholar of the history and theory of modern and contemporary art. He is a scholar of Immanuel Kant and has written several books on the artist Marcel Duchamp, including: Pictorial Nominalism; On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade (1991), The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (1993), and Kant After Duchamp (1998). Committed to a reinterpretation of modernism, much of his earlier work revolves around the challenges presented in Marcel Duchamp's readymades and their and implications for aesthetics. Thierry de Duve outlines an aesthetic theory of art to meet the requirements of our time, which mainly consists of three components: 1.) updating Kant's aesthetics by replacing the phrase "this is beautiful" with "this is art" as the paradigm for aesthetic judgment; 2.) reassessing Modernism in painting from Manet onwards with theory informed by Clement Greenberg, while at the same time acknowledging its failure; 3.) reflecting on the historical evolution of Fine Arts from the primacy of painting as a specific privileged avenue for art production to the general "art at large" espoused by later theorists and practitioners of contemporary art.
For Thierry de Duve there is no difference between modern, post-modern and contemporary art: the same logic rules from the beginning. Art has no essence; it is simply what we call by that name. Borrowing from Lacanian identity theory, Duve argues that the human brain develops prematurely, and the drive to create and consume art arises from neotenous desires that condition all humans. Thus for him, the enterprise of art remains utterly tragic: accounting for and responding to messianic desires of how life should be while at the same time informed by a postmodern weariness of modernism's naivety and inevitable failure.
With his colleague Jean Guiraud he co-founded the free institute of Fine Art, École de Recherche Graphique (ERG), in Brussels, 1972. He curated the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003. He has been a visiting professor at: the University of Lille III (France), the Sorbonne (France), MIT, and Johns Hopkins University, and was the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Distinguished Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art in Penn's History of Art Department. He was a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2000, he curated the exhibition "Here - 100 years of contemporary art," at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
For Thierry de Duve there is no difference between modern, post-modern and contemporary art: the same logic rules from the beginning. Art has no essence; it is simply what we call by that name. Borrowing from Lacanian identity theory, Duve argues that the human brain develops prematurely, and the drive to create and consume art arises from neotenous desires that condition all humans. Thus for him, the enterprise of art remains utterly tragic: accounting for and responding to messianic desires of how life should be while at the same time informed by a postmodern weariness of modernism's naivety and inevitable failure.
With his colleague Jean Guiraud he co-founded the free institute of Fine Art, École de Recherche Graphique (ERG), in Brussels, 1972. He curated the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003. He has been a visiting professor at: the University of Lille III (France), the Sorbonne (France), MIT, and Johns Hopkins University, and was the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Distinguished Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art in Penn's History of Art Department. He was a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2000, he curated the exhibition "Here - 100 years of contemporary art," at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
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August 14, 2023کتاب خوبی بود از این جهت که تونسته بود نه از نوشتههای مختصر مارکس دربارهی هنر بلکه از نوشتههای اقتصادی و نقد اقتصاد سیاسیاش تطبیق بده مطالب رو و هنرمندها رو با اون متر بسنجه. از این جهت متفاوت بود و میشد دید که راهکارها و افقهای جدیدی رو برای سنجش هنر از دیدگاه مارکسیستی ارائه میکنه. مطالبش دربارهی بویس و وارهول هم خیلی جالب بود. خوانشی که از کار وارهول انجام میداد کمتر انجام گرفته بود و دربارهی ایو کلاین هم دیدگاهی جسورانه داشت که البته مثکه خودش بعدا راجع به نوشتهاش شک کرده.
January 13, 2018
В какой-то момент автор начинает так хорошо разбираться в Марксе, что я перестаю разбираться в чём-либо. Но нужное ощущение от каждого "обзора" творчества остаётся и в единую картинку с тем, что я уже знала о творчестве этой четвёрки, складывается. Всё ещё подтверждается мысль о том, что совмещение эстетики и социальных наук (Де Дюв много говорит о наложении эстетического поля на политэкономическое, имеет ли он в виду социальные поля в понимании Бурдьё или просто что-то своё - непонятно) даёт интересные результаты. И главное - глава о Дюшане так хороша, что подталкивает прочитать остальные труды автора о Дюшане (на самом деле, я почти ничего не поняла, но очень впечатлилась тем, что разобрала, поэтому 4, а не 5).
December 4, 2016
Way too much marxism, repetitive as well, and skims the surface for the most part, however there are some great lines. And the bashing of Klein seems more than justified.
Quotes:
[Beuys]: legislator and outlaw, shaman and sham, utopianist of the future and embalmer of the past
The name of this country--where flaneurs and dandies cross paths with peddlers and ragpickers; where rapins and carabins (would-be painters and medical students) thumb their noses at philistines; where the sins of the streetwalker are redeemed by the love of a young poet; where humanity is more humane in the brothel than in the church or palace; where the underworld is the true aristocracy, tuberculosis the pardon for syphilis, and talent the only riches--the name of this country that rings with all the cries of injustice and where the only one radically denied a visa is the bourgeois, that name is of course bohemia.
It is a literary and imaginary country where in a deformed image at once tragic and ideal, there was dreamed a humanity to replace the real humankind that peopled 19th century Europe, and that industrial capitalism had pitilessly set against itself by dividing it into two new antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The real name of bohemia, or better, the name of its correlate in the actual world, is the lumpenproletariat: a no-man's-land into which there fell a certain number of people incapable of finding a place within the new social divisions--expropriated farmers, out-of-work craftsmen, penniless aristocrats, country girls forced into prostitution.
all social relations are, in the last instance, reduced to relations of production. These will be free and autonomous only with the advent of class- and stateless society, the communist society of which the proletariat is the avant-garde.
But all the will to emancipation and the desire for disalienation the 19th/20th centuries have carried have always meant that everyone is an artist, but the masses don't have the power to actualize this potential because they are oppressed, alienated, and exploited; only those few whom we stupidly call professional artists know that in reality their vocation is to incarnate this unactualized potential.
Joseph Bueys, Raum 90,000 DM
Beuys based art on will and thus on a principle of production, and Warhol based art on desire and thus on a principle of consumption. Beuys believed in creativity and Warhol did not. For Beuys art was labor while for Warhol it was commerce.
AW: "I started out as a commercial artist and I want to end up as a business artist."
To desire fame--not the glory of the hero but the glamor of the star--with the intensity and lucidity that Warhol did is to desire to be nothing, nothing of the human, the interior, the profound, nothing but image, surface, a bit of light on the screen, a mirror for the fantasies and a magnet for the desires of others--a thing of absolute narcissism. And to desire to outlive these desires as a thing, that is, not to be consumed.
The American dream is a weak utopia in comparison with that of emancipation.
Warhol was asked if he wanted to be a great artist, and he replied, "No, I'd rather be famous."
Beuy's double tomb was both royal and wretched, a dramatization of last rites for the bohemian, a vanishing historical type that the artist understood himself as embodying.
Beuys worked and wanted, in working, to actualize a creative potential present in every human being, not to produce exchange value. That his work had a price would have to disappear with the coming of his economic system. His artistic fame, far from being a privileged status, was meant to point the way of liberation for all to become fully what they already were.
Warhol, too, worked but in wanting to act like a machine, revealed the fact that in reality no artist works (i.e., produces exchange value), and that the status of all artists is to exist as prized but valueless commodities, that their fame, far from being a proof of personal talent or the emergence of a universal creativity, is the price that their signatures will fetch when their work, over which their dealer has a monopoly, is in demand.
"Klein sells wind!" runs the headline of the newspaper.
* Nothing says that everyone is endowed with a productive faculty that is presently alienated but that defines or will define humanity in its generic essence. And nothing proves that it is just, as a matter of principle, that everyone be an artist, or liberating that everyone will someday become one. *
Is is as if he had watched Beuys play the pere Ubu of creativity and had understood that at the moment when the artist-proletarian saw himself brought home to a bohemia as unreal as Jarry's Poland, the congruence of the aesthetic field with that of political economy had been perfect, complete, accomplished. Etant donne this lesson, only one question remained: how to make art out of that?
"And I added Richard," Duchamp said. "That's not a bad name for a pissotiere. Get it? The opposite of poverty." The signature acknowledges the double status of the nobody who proclaims himself an artist in becoming a member of the society. On the one side there is the manufacturer, Mutt or Mott, who stands in for the artisan, and on the other Richard, the capitalist, the stockholder.
Those who made the urinal neither made art nor tried to do so; they were the workers whose creativity (read: labor power) Mott bought on the labor market.
Their situation--and whatever they may do, whether they paint, write, compose, or are content to put the air they breathe in vials or to can other secretions of their labor power--is to lead, against all odds, the life of an independent artisan.
Those who find it intolerable to be divided will identify with the proletarian in themselves without seeing that the capitalist is to be found there as well, and will look for the reconciliation outside, for example in "social sculpture" (as did Beuys). Or if they are masochists they will identify with the capitalist, without seeing that they exploit the proletarian in themselves (as did Klein). And if they are really clever they will take their stakes out of the game by making themselves into a machine (as did Warhol).
At the end of the story Mutt has sold the "faucet" under a new label to Arensberg for a price virtually without a ceiling. Mott, who has gotten wind of the affair, just can't believe it. He gets after his workers with a prod, yet never can he extract such surplus value out of them. He shakes his head, muttering that even if he knows something about production, he understands nothing of Phynance [Jarry's Pataphysics].
Yes, everyone is an artist; no, artists don't work; yes, the wish to proclaim oneself an artist is only a wish. Yes; the proletarians are alienated; yes, the relations of production are reified.
Duchamp could recall that his only utopia had been to "establish a society in which the individual has to pay for the air he breathes," and now leaves to his creditors the bother of "cutting off the air in case of nonpayment."
Quotes:
[Beuys]: legislator and outlaw, shaman and sham, utopianist of the future and embalmer of the past
The name of this country--where flaneurs and dandies cross paths with peddlers and ragpickers; where rapins and carabins (would-be painters and medical students) thumb their noses at philistines; where the sins of the streetwalker are redeemed by the love of a young poet; where humanity is more humane in the brothel than in the church or palace; where the underworld is the true aristocracy, tuberculosis the pardon for syphilis, and talent the only riches--the name of this country that rings with all the cries of injustice and where the only one radically denied a visa is the bourgeois, that name is of course bohemia.
It is a literary and imaginary country where in a deformed image at once tragic and ideal, there was dreamed a humanity to replace the real humankind that peopled 19th century Europe, and that industrial capitalism had pitilessly set against itself by dividing it into two new antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The real name of bohemia, or better, the name of its correlate in the actual world, is the lumpenproletariat: a no-man's-land into which there fell a certain number of people incapable of finding a place within the new social divisions--expropriated farmers, out-of-work craftsmen, penniless aristocrats, country girls forced into prostitution.
all social relations are, in the last instance, reduced to relations of production. These will be free and autonomous only with the advent of class- and stateless society, the communist society of which the proletariat is the avant-garde.
But all the will to emancipation and the desire for disalienation the 19th/20th centuries have carried have always meant that everyone is an artist, but the masses don't have the power to actualize this potential because they are oppressed, alienated, and exploited; only those few whom we stupidly call professional artists know that in reality their vocation is to incarnate this unactualized potential.
Joseph Bueys, Raum 90,000 DM
Beuys based art on will and thus on a principle of production, and Warhol based art on desire and thus on a principle of consumption. Beuys believed in creativity and Warhol did not. For Beuys art was labor while for Warhol it was commerce.
AW: "I started out as a commercial artist and I want to end up as a business artist."
To desire fame--not the glory of the hero but the glamor of the star--with the intensity and lucidity that Warhol did is to desire to be nothing, nothing of the human, the interior, the profound, nothing but image, surface, a bit of light on the screen, a mirror for the fantasies and a magnet for the desires of others--a thing of absolute narcissism. And to desire to outlive these desires as a thing, that is, not to be consumed.
The American dream is a weak utopia in comparison with that of emancipation.
Warhol was asked if he wanted to be a great artist, and he replied, "No, I'd rather be famous."
Beuy's double tomb was both royal and wretched, a dramatization of last rites for the bohemian, a vanishing historical type that the artist understood himself as embodying.
Beuys worked and wanted, in working, to actualize a creative potential present in every human being, not to produce exchange value. That his work had a price would have to disappear with the coming of his economic system. His artistic fame, far from being a privileged status, was meant to point the way of liberation for all to become fully what they already were.
Warhol, too, worked but in wanting to act like a machine, revealed the fact that in reality no artist works (i.e., produces exchange value), and that the status of all artists is to exist as prized but valueless commodities, that their fame, far from being a proof of personal talent or the emergence of a universal creativity, is the price that their signatures will fetch when their work, over which their dealer has a monopoly, is in demand.
"Klein sells wind!" runs the headline of the newspaper.
* Nothing says that everyone is endowed with a productive faculty that is presently alienated but that defines or will define humanity in its generic essence. And nothing proves that it is just, as a matter of principle, that everyone be an artist, or liberating that everyone will someday become one. *
Is is as if he had watched Beuys play the pere Ubu of creativity and had understood that at the moment when the artist-proletarian saw himself brought home to a bohemia as unreal as Jarry's Poland, the congruence of the aesthetic field with that of political economy had been perfect, complete, accomplished. Etant donne this lesson, only one question remained: how to make art out of that?
"And I added Richard," Duchamp said. "That's not a bad name for a pissotiere. Get it? The opposite of poverty." The signature acknowledges the double status of the nobody who proclaims himself an artist in becoming a member of the society. On the one side there is the manufacturer, Mutt or Mott, who stands in for the artisan, and on the other Richard, the capitalist, the stockholder.
Those who made the urinal neither made art nor tried to do so; they were the workers whose creativity (read: labor power) Mott bought on the labor market.
Their situation--and whatever they may do, whether they paint, write, compose, or are content to put the air they breathe in vials or to can other secretions of their labor power--is to lead, against all odds, the life of an independent artisan.
Those who find it intolerable to be divided will identify with the proletarian in themselves without seeing that the capitalist is to be found there as well, and will look for the reconciliation outside, for example in "social sculpture" (as did Beuys). Or if they are masochists they will identify with the capitalist, without seeing that they exploit the proletarian in themselves (as did Klein). And if they are really clever they will take their stakes out of the game by making themselves into a machine (as did Warhol).
At the end of the story Mutt has sold the "faucet" under a new label to Arensberg for a price virtually without a ceiling. Mott, who has gotten wind of the affair, just can't believe it. He gets after his workers with a prod, yet never can he extract such surplus value out of them. He shakes his head, muttering that even if he knows something about production, he understands nothing of Phynance [Jarry's Pataphysics].
Yes, everyone is an artist; no, artists don't work; yes, the wish to proclaim oneself an artist is only a wish. Yes; the proletarians are alienated; yes, the relations of production are reified.
Duchamp could recall that his only utopia had been to "establish a society in which the individual has to pay for the air he breathes," and now leaves to his creditors the bother of "cutting off the air in case of nonpayment."
April 11, 2020
A provocative work, in a good way with no doubt. Requires one to be familiar with De Duve’s writing. Klein chapter was particularly good. Yet, comparing to his other works, appears circular in terms of working off the argument; it felt the way that argument is going around and does not seem to be “blooming” in itself. Still, a must read as it makes the reader ask further questions.
July 22, 2019
испытала те же эмоции, как и когда услышала о зелёных занавесках и их роли в произведениях Пушкина.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews