This work is part of an ongoing collaborative project involving several artists who make paintings for display in outdoor public spaces. We are pursuing a means of making, exhibiting and distributing art that is non-hierarchical, context-specific and accessible to people in their everyday lives. We eschew the gallery system, and other established institutions of art in favor of a more pedestrian experience of painting, inviting others - both artists and viewers - to participate in a project that does not involve the gatekeepers of the market, academy, museum or press.
The work is made in the studio, and then displayed outdoors on public infrastructure using a removable adhesive backing, which allows people to take the paintings home with them. The paintings are always free, and are not intended to be an advertisement for something else that is for sale; there is a generosity inherent to the work and its distribution that we hope is contagious. Aesthetic decisions are informed by existing visual information on the ground, and the work is almost always designed with a particular location in mind, so the paintings have a destination that is immediate, near-at-hand, and highly visible. We look for opportunities to use painting to converse with the preexisting urban palimpsest. Layers of stickers, pealing advertisements and paint, hand-drawn graffiti, and haphazard attempts to remove or paint over graffiti are some contexts where the work is particularly at home.
Simply walking around the city is the main component of both the preparation for, and also the eventual display of the work. During our walks we follow meandering paths, talk, look, and install paintings. Thus, the work is a visual record of our somewhat aimless travels in an increasingly instrumentalized and privatized urban environment. And while we regard this project as an open-ended endeavor with no predefined form in mind, we are generally guided by a steadfast desire to challenge the commodification of the art object/form, to assert our autonomy outside of the market, and to resist the very real currents of authoritarianism, coercion and domination running through all aspects of late capitalist society.
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The walk starts when I recognize my friend from across the street, usually near a subway exit/entrance. We smile and greet each other, the day fully upon us. Previous hours have been spent finishing up objects at our disposal, taping and sanding. Only now does the active synthesis begin. Immediately we start to survey the landscape, scanning but focusing on details at the same time. The light, colors and textures of street lamps and their bases. Fire dept call boxes that are in various states of functionality. Their paint is either fresh or flaking, uniform or multihued. Everywhere we look is fair game, walls designated for us, prepped platforms all around, our application has been accepted, the grant has finally come though!
The city is ours and the installed objects, yours. Each object is system specific, not site specific. The palette is influenced by what we have seen over the last few years, but not exactly matched, textures that influence but not completely replicated. The things we hold in our hands are not bourgeois art objects, but not their antithesis either. There is a foot in art history and an arm simultaneously grabbing a street pillar. Then there is the consideration of how these things are to live in the world. Are they to remain up if possible, perhaps “landmarked” by fresh paint applied by a city worker? or are they to be taken down quickly by some basic recognition of aesthetic interest, resulting in an individual possession of this recognition?
As we walk we see commercial possession and private property everywhere. Signs that denote boundaries and people in various states of perception. Our activity goes either unnoticed or is met with confusion. The gaze matters especially in this realm. To install an object is to put it in another world, to transform it from a personal object to a public one. The installer is temporarily at the mercy of the onlookers gaze, back turned and vulnerable. A friend can serve as a buffer to this, as a lookout for enforcers of legality, or to meet the gaze of a curious or perplexed passerby, disarming it by competing with it.
The partner can also give perspective to the aesthetics that arise in each installation, is it level, does it blend too much? Once a passerby intervened as we both discussed the task at hand, “too similar” she said. Point taken. It’s a group project after all and criticism will find its way to us. Another day an observer wondered what we were up to, why were we looking at concrete pillars and electrical boxes? Our suggestion of an art project was met with hostile confusion and requests to do it in our “own neighborhood”. Assuring him that we did in fact do that and that one of us had previously lived close to the area in question did little to convince him, a hostile gaze was projected at us, along with the more impersonal digital lens of documentation.
Speaking of the digital, we use ours to depict the offered objects that are introduced to the landscape. It’s a practice that sits somewhat uneasily. Should we be contributing to the spectacle by adding to a world of shouting images, or is it an acceptable compromise, a justifiable entry point? Rhetorical questions aside, participation with the status quo is of course unavoidable. What is possible as an entry point to a different daily activity? One that can be done despite dominant norms and power structures?
So we walk, for at least a few miles, gathering information and dispersing physical objects, building the momentum of another ethos and talking about all that comes up.
After a few hours, exhaustion creeps in and we stop for food and drink. So much to critique and process, mental notes to make and aesthetic problems/solutions to come up with.
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The very conception of art, image and object alike, is bound by ideology. It toes the line of a rule structure set by current institutions, which in turn are bound and shaped by the evolving programming of capital. Be it an oil painting on a white wall or a viral video with ideas beyond its station, there are formats and expectations to be followed, expectations determined by existing or developing superstructures. This is medium as massage at a level of Geist, the spectacle as incorporated into an individual mindset which goes well beyond supporting superstructures, but to the construction and maintenance of what we call the self.
Formal concerns today do not stop at the edge of a canvas or the boundary of the screen. None of this is news, or a concern for most, as long as instantaneous choice is on offer as continuous activity, reflection forever pushed down the road. Artist and audience alike are mostly aware that fine art institutions have transformed into autonomous zones where capital to sets the aesthetic terms and aids financial extraction beyond the legality of nations (see duty free art, Hito Steyerl). Side note regarding a willingness to participate in our current system: I was talking to an acquaintance about his small but growing career at a mid-tier gallery in New York. He was unaware of much of the Freeport system that Steyerl documents. After a brief summary including how states use the flow of liquidity unleashed by freeports and museum incorporation to finance state violence/terror, his initial reaction to this zooming out of perspective was, “I am excited to be a part of it.” This quote is not quite fair to the individual in our totalizing structure, and anecdotal to be sure, but this reality has clearly not put any meaningful moral block towards contemporary success in terms of MFAs (its own superstructure now) lining up to participate. This is not surprising, or a cast of moral indignation on my part, as there is transhistorical precedent to institutions setting the terms for the individual, specific ideology aside. It’s important to bring up in order to make the case for the power of systemic power, and the ideology that drives it. Commercial success at any level is the primary goal now, no worries of selling out anymore, replaced by an understandable anxiety about missing out. Moments of rupture, where we get a glimpse of the extent that this financialized totality has been naturalized in our psyches, have not become the wakeup people like Bresson and Brecht hoped would create solidarity. It is just more currency to be developed, another business idea, critique well beyond crisis. A market of dissatisfaction sold back to us at wholesale prices. This is culture now for what I can only believe used to contain an avant-garde. Irony weaponized as self-defense against nihilism. We have a shared recognition of our cultural, even human limits and a paralysis that has set in due to this recognition.
If a clear deformation has set in, and I argue that the above described is deformation, could a more sustainable rupture be possible? One that exposes something substantial underneath and becomes another activity, perhaps a fatal strategy towards the state of things that leads us out of capture and servitude. No mere slave morality reacting but an emerging morality with a fluid genealogy.
What prevents a shift of this sort seems in large part a problem of superstructures. As scientific institutions are in many ways captured by the same overriding societal ethos that shapes our imaginations and the changing conception of our individual selves. Science is now something to be "believed in" not discussed, only quoted by brand ambassadors like Degrasse Tyson, Fauci and the reciprocal folks like Joe Rogan and Malone. A secular religion of sorts for some and a tool of domination for others, where everyone has lost agency and input. Worldviews, art included, are defined by one's immediate opposition and much seems to be lazy agitprop. See Barbera Kruger's work go from an enlightening reveal of advertising ideology, to being “anti” Trump on a magazine cover.
If science, along with art, has in fact been recuperated and partially subsumed, could art instead become a terrain of inquiry? Not as science traditionally functioned to gain a logic of knowledge but as a process to stake a claim in the ever decreasing commons. Culture’s dialectical nature under modernism has been largely abandoned in whatever we call this contemporary terrain. An aesthetic inquiry could reappear, not as a conservative past reanimated, but activity conceived of as a shared daily pursuit. One that builds on itself with accessible and repeatable daily activity. An activity that compounds, if only engaged with. The super-egoic forces, aka ideology, that keep us in a holding pattern would need to be shown transparently by any process for this reenchantment to happen. Current forces that stand in for this activity function in one part as a scolding and guilty morality that can never undo what has been done. Nor can it shift the future trajectories of a radical system like capital for the current hegemony, for it enacts its quite paternal discipline post facto. A system that feeds vampirelike on the whatever counter that could render it obsolete. An example here would be 70s graffiti that actually staked the commons as a counter ideology. Together with oppressive state apparatus per Althusser, the gallery museum system helped to establish a less violent but more tempting enclosure, to fold art inwards and to use it as a farm system of sorts. A pressure valve that forever prevents any shift. Here, we can only attempt to build micro empires as expression, and hyper individual brands (yes this future was probably built into graffiti from the outset as its inherent risk and attack on norms prevents a more mass participation).
Lessons could be learned here, a collective effort done by proper bourgeois individuals, not kids looking to make a name, could avoid the previous traps. Individuals who consciously nullify the current conceptions of what makes us individuals. Identity as bourgeois that refuses the limits of that identity and moves to nullify it. To go with Marx, this is only materially possible as worker labor, but our imaginations have taken such a hit, have been so captured, constrained, enclosed, that culture could be a powerful tool to begin some sustained rupture. One that wouldmake such material solidarity a visible one.