Modest Proposals: Joe Scanlan on Artistic Production
Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #273: Lines to points on a grid, 1975, water-soluble crayon on wall. Installation view, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2007. Photo: Bill Jacobson.
This is just so totally brilliant -- a must read:
via ARTFORUM, April Issue:
[additional linkage via newsgrist]
Industry, commercialism and the bourgeois are very much with us. This whole notion of trying to form a cult that transcends all this strikes me as a kind of religion-in-drag, you might say. I'm just bored with it, frankly. - Robert Smithson
AS THE LAWRENCE WEINER RETROSPECTIVE at the Whitney Museum fades to white under multiple coats of Kilz and latex paint, and his various exuberant ephemera take up residence at LA MoCA before wending their way back to their rightful property owners; as Tate Modern and the ICA London emerge from momentary spells of whispered headlines, random sketching, streams of consciousness, and face slapping; as New York's New Museum concludes its vestigial assault on the Work of Art, not to mention the etiquette of proper spacing, and as visitors to the new building experience the worst case of buyer's remorse since the reopening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; as the Metropolitan Museum's Dutch paintings readjust to the staid organizing principles of artist’s name, date, and genre rather than hanging according to who bought what from whom (on whose advice) and resold it to so-and-so, who then donated it to the Met; and as the scent of modesty - prosaic, charcoal filtered, crystalline - emanates from the 2008 Whitney Biennial, now is as good a time as any to talk about money.
Not money in the massive, toxic sense that characterizes most mentions of it in the context of art, but money in the modest, expansive, nurturing sense that allows artists to pursue their work in its variegated forms. Any discussion of the global economy as a whole would be practically useless if it started from the assumption that General Electric and Sony and Microsoft were the only entities worth talking about, so one has to wonder how illuminating discussions of artists and money can be when they are almost always limited to superlative cases like Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons - limited that is, to whatever artworks accrue the most zeros in the preproduction, postauction universe. These artists, like Microsoft, are what an economist would call mature companies in established markets, meaning that everything that might be dynamic about them, and the effect that dynamism had on the market, has already happened. The bulk of their efforts are now dedicated to protecting their brands and inserting them into all available markets, from key chains to plaza sculptures. As in art, in economics the perpetual discovery and implementation of new materials, new technologies, and new business strategies - he sum effect of which Austria-born economist Joseph Schumpeter termed creative destruction - have a ruthless, catalytic effect on all businesses, regardless of their age and size. In Schumpeter's characterization, young, nimble, and/or eccentric enterprises present greater growth opportunities than do older, established firms because they are better positioned to adapt to the changes that their very existence brings forth. Key to Schumpeter's vision of annihilating progress, though, is his observation that the race does not always go to the biggest or most capitalized competitor; rather, exclusive businesses like corner grocers and custom snowboard manufacturers can thrive no matter their size or technical prowess, simply because their operations are too small and incremental to bear the brunt of creative destruction’s perennial force. Schumpeter writes: "A system - any system, economic or other - that at every given point of time fully utilizes its possibilities to the best advantage may yet in the long run be inferior to a system that does so at no given point of time, because the latter's failure to do so may be a condition for the level or speed of long-term performance." This notion of long-term, inefficient, but ultimately superior performance applies exactly to the kind of artists I want to discuss. Not artists who, at every moment, maximize their capitalization and production and exposure, but artists who manage to make a living by minimizing those things, thereby expanding the value system of art and, by extension, the aesthetic of what "making money" looks like- the kinds of actions it might embody and the forms it might take.
In the course of doing so, however, I will need to loosen up several myths that have stunted many recent discussions of artists and money: (1) that art produced in factories is more explicitly (and critically) about money because it expends materials and labor in more obvious ways than art produced in a studio or on a laptop; (2) that money is only interesting in large sums; and (3) that if production only happens in factories and money is only interesting in large sums, then any less than spectacular pursuit of money by an artist must be a kind of death (not worthwhile, a self-imposed drudgery, etc.) or pornography (a willingness to do anything for a little money, no matter how degrading) or both, clearly distasteful and beneath the nobler pursuits of beauty and politics and thought.
Obviously, we can attribute the first myth to Warhol. Now, I admire Andy Warhol, but I think there is little about his oeuvre or his approach to making art that is of use to profit-minded artists now. The idea of art being made in a factory might have been a radical concept in the '60s, but we would do well to remember that corporations at that time were already in the process of making Warhol-type factories obsolete, as labor pressures, environmental regulations, and supply-chain logistics rendered archetypal factory production untenable. Factories require preplanning, capitalization, operation, security, and maintenance. In a word, overhead: costs to be borne by the factory owner, be it General Electric or Takashi Murakami. Minimizing overhead is essential to creating the physical and mental spaces - the margins - from which an artist's delightful, unforeseen profits can spring. Conceptual art exemplified this break from factory production in that, wittingly or not, its various approaches entailed such radical (and profitable!) new business strategies as mass customization, data mining, value adding, and inventory velocity. Conceptual art traded the efficiency of manufacturing as many identical things as possible up front (and then transporting, displaying, storing, and insuring them until people could be persuaded to buy them) for the efficiency of not making anything until somebody wants it and will assume production costs. There is no better example of this than the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt.
