Art serves the masses by abolishing itself

By Angelo V. Suarez

May 19, 2017

https://www.facebook.com/notes/angelo-v-suarez/art-serves-the-masses-by-abolishing-
itself/10156238677644899/

Mel Ramsden: “[I]nstitutional dismantling now also involves dismantling myself; I am part of
the problem[.]”

In 1988, 2 decades after Amiri Baraka invoked the desire for “Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
/ Guns,” Guy Debord claimed “one can now publish a novel in order to arrange an assassination.”
Yet fast forward to these days, in the face of the avant-garde insistence on the materiality of
language, conceptualists have barely scratched the surface, literally—from erasing extant text to
inscribing in detail the act of inscription. Given how Andre Breton considered shooting blindly
into a crowd the supreme surrealist act, we vanguards sure know how to retreat. If there’s a skill
we’re even better at than stepping back, it’s theorizing stepping back, hobbling homeward
clutching theory for a crutch. Instead of taking to the streets, we’ve scribbled metaphors for taking
to the streets, patting ourselves on the back for being souls made beautiful by failing at the fantasy
of weaponized literature. How convenient is it that many of us can fetishize failure into a
monetizable practice?

Good for us it was an indistinct bottle rack Marcel Duchamp took as a preliminary readymade; his
so-called “visual indifference” cldn’t have illustrated clearer that the infrathin, his heurism for
institutionality, was as valid a drape on 1 object as it was on another. It was this indifference that
wld art-historically become the license for turning measured silence into a 3-part musical
performance, a bubble-making machine into kinetic sculpture, the serial re-tweeting of a celebrated
racist novel to get its estate to own up to its racism into a poem. But too bad for us it wasn’t a
bottle rack specifically for bashing a capitalist’s head in. Fact is, it was this same visual
indifference that cld’ve turned hurling Molotov cocktails rather than representing hurling Molotov
cocktails into art, & instead of a revolution overthrowing the bourgeoisie taking that slot in art
history—wasn’t it Vladimir Lenin who said, “[A]t the present moment it is impossible to remain
loyal to Marxism, to remain loyal to the revolution, unless insurrection is treated as an art”?—it’s
a bottle rack. Artists looking for the easy way out have been duped by wishful thinking: Duchamp
turned out to be less license than limit, more marker of what’s done than what to do. While in 1914
exhibiting a bottle rack as an art gesture was a step forward, it wld’ve been a leap had the art
gesture been, say, seizing the means of production.

Not that there haven’t been attempts to move on from Duchamp. It’s been a rocky path, but artists
have made great strides w/ the infrathin, less thru dematerialization than expanding what the object
in ‘art object’ can be—strides made straight, unfortunately, into the pockets of oligarchs, enemies
from the ranks of the comprador bourgeoisie in cahoots w/ imperialists & feudal landlords. An
edition of the bottle rack itself that had been bought by Robert Rauschenberg in 1959 has been
deaccessioned by the Rauschenberg Foundation for sale last year thru a dealer who values it
between $8 million & $12 million—an amount he considers pretty low. Between Joseph Beuys
sculpting society & Rirkrit Tiravanija cultivating land, social & relational art practices have
emerged like so many corporate-funded advertisements peddling commodities to catch up w/
global overproduction—w/c they are, considering these gestures are measures of conferring
legitimacy on the production of saleable luxury objects thru the reproduction of patron-artist
relations. When mediated by national museums, festivals, & residencies, they cld also be state-
funded mechanisms for soft diplomacy between states to ease the plunder of 3rd world resources
& the gentrification of 3rd world communities into markets by 1st world empires—w/c might as
well be corporate-funded advertisements peddling commodities to catch up w/ overproduction.
Looking for exceptions, one might be tempted to raise the Soviet Union as the gesamtkunstwerk
par excellence, but that was just Boris Groys being cavalier w/ his art/non-art categories to examine
Stalinism thru an aesthetic lens; just as tempting to raise wld be Augusto Boal’s invisible theater,
but even he has tended to disavow its art status to sharpen its propagandistic-agitational edge aimed
no less than at revolutionary goals, & admirably so.

Among existing art forms, poetry has had the distinct privilege of posing the most roadblocks to
its own monetization, from its ties to the medium of the book whose appeal springs from its
reproducibility (undermining the accumulation of value that comes w/ rarity) to its roots in oral
tradition (undermining the protection of private property thru communal sharing). Kenneth
Goldsmith was right to insist on Charles Bernstein’s belief that a blank piece of paper was more
valuable than a piece of paper w/ a poem on it, but he was wrong to sidestep qualifying what sort
of poem it was; it can’t be said, after all, that his career amounts to less than the value of a blank
piece of paper—unless the blank piece of paper were all the world’s variants of Tom Friedman’s
1,000 Hours of Staring stitched together. A poem may not edify mechanisms of patronage directly
the way the commodities of the visual art world routinely do, but it sure can indirectly—whether
by cementing its reception in an increasingly privatized ecosystem for education (as in the case of
poets who make a living as teachers whose labor value is increased by poetic production credited
as academic accomplishments provided they are validated by bourgeois institutions), by serving
as a cost-efficient apparatus for sustaining a monetizable institution’s prestige (as in the case of
galleries who confer legitimacy on the luxury objects they peddle to oligarchic clientele thru the
supposedly charitable gesture of making their assets—whether printing networks or spaces for
hosting readings—available to unprofitable art practices such as that of poets), or by the inevitable
intersection of the history of literary production w/ that of the production of luxury collectibles
marauding to be art.

Poetry has so often invoked autonomy in pursuing innovation, but rarely has innovation been
invoked for pursuing autonomy. While I agree with Vanessa Place’s aesthetic pursuit of Beckettian
failure because of its ability to direct attention towards the insufficiency of existing social
conditions to assert artistic autonomy (“the poem is the platform”), this otherwise radical
modernist self-negation has often deteriorated into fetishistic complicity—an unreflexive, even
damningly faux-reflexive, promotion of the art market in its deployment of the rhetoric &
vocabulary of activism too willing to fail. Philippine art history, for instance, is rife with social
realists as decorated as they are decorative, whose works, peddled by state-endorsed art fairs by
the overpriced square inch, are presented in the households of landlords resisting the distribution
of their haciendas to the farm workers who till them; & Philippine literary history is riddled with
the opportunistic progressivism of liberals whose excoriation of the Marcos dictatorship in the ‘80s
has earned them respect in the face of their reproduction of neoliberal market logics Marcos
himself pushed, if not pioneered. There are visual artists who call for agrarian reform but express
little to no hesitation accepting commissions from the scions of dead fascists, & poets who align
themselves w/ the cause of nat’l democracy yet find no betrayal in representing as fellows the
imperialist agenda of CIA-backed literary institutions. That is to say, an art practice can feign
activism thru the appropriation of the rhetoric of liberation struggles, but its activist posturing
becomes no more than petit-bourgeois opportunism when it obscures, as Walter Benjamin had
demanded, its own position in the relations of production.

Yet failure remains at the heart of an emancipatory art practice. In talking about the task of serving
the people thru the popularization of a proletarian art practice, Mao Zedong has made a rough
outline at the Yenan Forum 75 years ago to guide us in gauging at what point a work of art fails:
"Since our literature & art are basically for the workers, peasants, & soldiers, ‘popularization’
means to popularize among the workers, peasants, & soldiers, & ‘raising standards’ means to
advance from their present level. What should we popularize among them? Popularize what is
needed & can be readily accepted by the feudal landlord class? Popularize what is needed & can
be readily accepted by the bourgeoisie? Popularize what is needed & can be readily accepted by
the petty-bourgeois intellectuals? No, none of these will do. We must popularize only what is
needed & can be readily accepted by the workers, peasants, & soldiers themselves.” From this,
one can sketch out a formulation that art readily accepted by the feudal landlord class, by the
bourgeoisie, & by the petit-bourgeois intellectuals will not do. It is opposed to the interests of
workers & peasants.

The world’s longest protracted people’s war has been going on in the countryside for almost half
a century, waged by the armed peasants & workers of the New People’s Army of the Communist
Party of the Philippines. This Maoist legacy of an emancipatory armed struggle encircling urban
centers creates a unique set of conditions for an uncompromising art practice—one that, ironically,
exposes its history of compromise as its formal horizon by encircling the institution of art it
partakes of. Such a practice of institutional critique becomes genuine in its intent to dismantle the
institution of art, but only by arguing that the actual dismantlement of bourgeois institutions is
carried out not by art but by activism—from organized rights-based mobilizations geared at social
justice, to support for & direct participation in the Party-led armed struggle. After all, “power
grows” not from poetry, but “from the barrel of a gun.”

From this standpoint it is possible to synthesize Place & Beckett with Mao, the gun w/ Alexei Gan,
the conceptualist w/ the communist horizon: Till the overthrow of imperialism, feudalism, &
bureaucrat capitalism thru liberation struggles for national democracy & socialism, art in its bid
for autonomy can only fail thru the sheer, default acceptance by class enemies. The incredible
extent of what they can monetize is a testament to the radicality of their opportunism. The only
valid art practice as a response is a resort to “strategies of failure” in the social formalism of
institutional critique’s injunction to “fail better”—a new constructivism whose faktura
demonstrates the plasticity of the institution of art, whose tectonics emerge from laying bare the
device of the infrathin as institutionality, whose construction tips its hat to poetry’s tradition of
privileging the commons & refusing co-optation thru a poetics of hysteria. Its foremost
compositional impulse is of a reflexive revelation of institutional complicity so deftly vulgar no
imperialist, no feudal landlord, no bureaucrat capitalist will want to have anything to do w/ it.

Such hystericizing makes a clearing, an “empty zone” akin to the Collective Actions Group’s
conceptualization of it as “extra-demonstrational time in the flowing of events.“ If in CAG’s
practice the action draws the attention of the participants to the temporal & spatial demarcations—
the paratext—where action & non-action meet & split off, a new constructivist poem unveils the
institutional ramparts that reveal its poeticity as much as its complicity, makes the demarcations
as the site of action, foregrounds the paratext as text. This has been the goal, for instance, in the
long & unfinished work Leisure, w/c I have described in a literary journal as “an ongoing collage
of excerpts from Filipino poets’ bios from various published books, in which they disclose what
jobs they hold for the accumulation of capital other than the writing of poetry.” Desiring to unpack
the production of poetry as work that insists on becoming not-work, I describe the poem as “a
work about work, forever a work in progress.”

A trilogy in progress aims at the same hystericization more intensely, bringing myself on the brink
of authorial self-immolation. Forthcoming from an online publisher among whose interests is
conceptualism, Conflict is a collection of episodic drafts for a novella submitted to the marketing
department of a brand of cheese, releasing in public corporate documents that document not only
the cultural prejudices that shape any communication material designed to peddle a commodity,
but the very commodification of the novella as a genre that gets produced on the condition that it
contribute to commodification. The next work is a collection of BuzzFeed quiz outcomes answered
daily using an office-issued laptop & only w/in office hours—whose title is determined by the
amount the composition of the work is worth in pesos computed against my daily rate as a creative
director in the office where I worked running a team of writers, art directors, & animators
producing content for an app in development. The last is a series of erasures from Benjamin’s
essay “The Author as Producer,” in w/c I leave unerased words that, strung together, reveal the
very process of the work’s production—that it has been assembled at the office where the author
makes a living, printed on office paper via the office printer, bound w/ the office stapler using
office staple wires. These are not novels that “arrange an assassination” as Debord might have
fantasized, but as instruments of self-sabotage they “dismantle myself” as a step toward
“institutional dismantling”—w/c might as well be part of the assassination of the bourgeoisie. But
as much as these works render precarious my status as a knowledge worker in the creative
industries, there is no doubt capital will catch up w/ these works & turn them into failures, art
refunctioned into artifacts for the accumulation of social & cultural capital. This essay alone
embodies such a class contradiction.

“Whenever we are engaged in radical emancipatory politics,” Slavoj Zizek advises, “we should
never forget as Walter Benjamin put it almost a century ago that every revolution is not only, if it
is an authentic revolution, directed toward the future, but it redeems also the past failed
revolutions.” All hystericizing we accomplish in art—doomed to failure by the inevitability of co-
optation by imperialism, feudalism, & bureaucrat capitalism—will be redeemed by the justice
served by AK-47s. If we are to construct a proletarian literature & art that are, as Mao wld have
them, “powerful weapons for uniting & educating the people” even as the unfinished revolution
takes place, then we must do so in view of their complicity w/ the bourgeois institutions of
literature & art, & consequently their inevitable limitations in “attacking & destroying the enemy.”
The liquidation of the bourgeoisie, no thanks to Duchamp, may no longer be compositionally
viable as a poem, but it remains necessary for poetry’s advance into self-abolition.