The sci-fi space Nazis film Iron Sky is about to be released across Europe. Meanwhile, across Europe capital continues with its waves of cuts. 'From now on the battle for earth is going to get Nazi', declares the film trailer. Every week the news brings further evidence of the truth and much broader applicability of this statement
This week it's the burning of art by the State. However, here the analogy grows rapidly more complex. This immolation is not a punishment of supposed artistic decadence. Rather the burning is being undertaken by a curator of a regional museum in protest against devalorisation (defunding by the State). 'Degenerate art' aint what it used to be, but perhaps there is some continuity here, if one can work through the convolutions.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17754129
So, what is this auto da fe? A few possibilities to think through, in no particular order:
- The belated liquidation of outdated artistic product which was only ever made and sold because of the bubble conditions and 'non-reproduction of productive forces' in the art market; an index of the weakness of criticism and the indifference of the market (and everyone else) to artistic 'use value'? If so - then the museum and artists are just doing what the market should have done long since, making their product unsaleable; and the State is, ironically, forcing the deskilling and reskilling that the producers should have undertaken longsince.
- Burning as a salta mortale (Marx) in which the artworks, at the point of death achieves realisation, begin to approach something adequate to the venom and negativity of the commodity form, something sufficiently incendiary, or impersonal, burnt out enough to confront and oppose it (Adorno). Ironically, realisation as use-value here coincides with extinction as exchange-value. These artworks default at the point where they nearly become Art (in Adorno's sense), entering a 'zone of indistinction' which is neither riot nor art nor State organised liquidation, but resembles aspects of all these.
- The symbolic destruction of work that however ostensibly conservative (eg paintings, sculpture, anything), might be construed as fighting some kind of rearguard action against the terms of the contemporary art market/art system; ie having already taken on the dematerialisation of the art work, painting must make yet another effort if it would be funded, and undergo dematerialisation itself (like St Joan, stripped bare by her sponsors, even).
- Some of the work looks like it was made to burn and contains a 'valorised' ephemerality as one of its defining features; it is only 'realised' when consumed (by fire); as such it preemptively downgrades its own extinction (as CDS soften the 'credit event'?) - it was always already transient, so setting fire to it is no great loss, it's all part of the 'process', the commodity IS process, afterall... here it becomes apparent that art has already come to reside in the not necessarily infinitely reproducible gap between existence and non-existence, leading a lot of other commodity production behind it. Its precariousness is simply emblematic of all other commodities' (especially labour-power?), and the obsolescence of being anything in particular, of being sufficiently reified to sell, is palpable in the act of burning it. Art already burns if it is any good at all, and so the protest against defunding might be better read - against its authors, but with Metzger? - as a protest against art's continued existence (reproduction), not to mention capital's?
- An abbreviation of the modernist moment (i.e. modernist work confronts an increasingly right wing State and is destroyed as degenerate) such that the work has to be burned by its guardians and with the consent of its authors since those who 'oppose' it only do so as a cost, not as a symbolically powerful act. The current 'Nazi-ism 2.0' (die Neue Asthetik?) is technocratic, it attacks via the bottom line, there's no such thing as an 'ideological cut', or rather the ideological is inextricable from and concealed by the economic. At best the forces of devalorisation DO know that the defunded art is antagonistic to them (as in the UK, Holland, etc - punishment of 'a left-wing hobby' etc). But they would never overtly move to censor or destroy it as object since they remain nominal advocates of freedom of expression, (especially when this can be used against Muslims etc, cf Holland again) and staunch defenders of property. So today the State destroys art by defunding while defending its ideological right to exist; 'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.'
– A destruction of relatively 'advanced' intellectual productive forces that simply, but ironically and indignantly, reflects the retrogressive destruction of use-values being undertaken universally by the State and capital. Here a somewhat fictitious capital manages to function as a critic of the wider value destruction insofar as it retains a critical dimension elsewhere extinguished; it protests the destruction of use values (services, culture) and exchange value (wages, benefits, subsidies - thus access to the former) which is undertaken to maintain the value of fictitious capital: the Italian economy is destroying productive and reproductive capital to maintain its over-valued values. Read as such, this display is one of the best things to come out of the Italian artworld since Piero Manzoni.
Anyway, it's definitely one of the more interesting art actions of the crisis, the left turn of the lovvie 'cut us don't kill us' plea from a while back, getting closer to art terrorism! Whatever next?
http://www.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/files/2011/07/gm_322973EX1_d.jpg
