Hands Without Shadow

 

Introduction

While refraining from an overtly economic analysis of the subject, this text is concerned with how a separation of cognitive and physical labour in the visual arts relates to shifts taking place in the workplace more generally. It attempts to trace how a foundational myth regarding the conceptualisation of twentieth-century art operates in relation to the uses of managerial delegation in these other fields. I contend that in a variety of institutional domains—ranging from the commercial art world, to publicly funded organisations, and to the art academy—a narrative of deskilled and dematerialised art practice has become closely intertwined with other, more utilitarian imperatives calling for bureaucratic detachment and the optimisation of production processes. The result of such an entanglement is that in a wide array of circumstances an artist’s gestural agency is often celebrated as a sign of their advanced understanding of the codes of contemporary art, while simultaneously being equated with a spirit of entrepreneurial professionalism more broadly valorised in contemporary working life.

The conflation and intertwining of these two strands of influence is the central axis around which this argument proceeds. What I propose is that a range of contextual factors now problematise an assessment of immaterial or otherwise deskilled gestures as an un-depletable source of vanguardist potential. And I suggest that, by continuing to privilege gestural agency as a desired characteristic, artists’ activities will inevitably be drawn further into a debate around the instrumentalisation of self-expression in a deregulated, neo-liberal economy. To address the subject, this text considers the optimisation of art-making in relation to strategies of delegation and prosthesis, before looking at the role such strategies play in the institutional domains outlined above. Finally, looking at how stages of production and consumption have merged under the proposed figure of the prosumer, it reflects on artistic production and its relationship to other forms of contemporary labour. This is done in order to assess the consequences these broader circumstances present to a conceived model of artistic subjecthood.

My intention is not to duplicate more thorough analyses of art as a form of labour, as that has already taken place elsewhere, but to more speculatively consider how an artist’s gestural agency functions as a performative act. What this implies is that an image of professionalised conceptualism does not only act as a central component of contemporary art production as it currently stands. It is, just as crucially, a means through which an advanced engagement with the dominant codes of an art world can be signalled by individuals wishing to construct an identity outwardly conducive to this climate. In this way, such a narrative not only plays a crucial role in various modes of artistic production; it has an equally important bearing on what we might consider to be the self-perpetuating or reproductive conditions of contemporary artistic practice. Or in other words, it does not only apply to those artworks already in existence. A myth of unimpeded artistic freedom exerts a determining influence of artworks that have yet to come to be.

It should also be stressed that the issue of contemporary art and labour pertains not just to artist’s utilisation of the labour of others, or what could be described as their employment of a “detached hand”. If Fordism can be understood as having honed the division of labour, and alienated the worker by denying them the ability to comprehend their efforts as a holistic activity, post-Fordism could be said to have produced new conditions of alienation through the obfuscation of the boundaries between productive and non-productive time. Another ramification of such developments is the way in which artists have internalised another set of divisions within their own working methods. In this way, discussions around an artist’s gestures and various forms of socially divided labour can be understood as a precursor to another, equally troubling issue to do with the bifurcation of an individual’s approach to their own art-making. As such, when talking about the production of contemporary art there remains a need to understand the dynamics that structure inter-personal relationships between artists, those they engage in the production of their artwork, and the institutions that validate such practices. In addition, however, there is also a need to understand how contemporary practitioners partition their own working time, and how this relates to a broader societal trend towards forms of self-management.

Optimisation and the Institutional Framing of Art

To approach these issues, we might begin by posing several questions. The first is whether a professionalised model of art-making complements, or is opposed to artist’s earlier adoption of “administrative” strategies as an innovative mode of expression. Conceptual art was considered paradigmatic when it emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s due to the challenge it posed to forms of “materialised” expression that were dominant until this point. But these developments also took place against the backdrop of a wider shift in Western society from industrialised to bureaucratic labour. Understood as a temporal manifestation (as opposed to an aesthetic one) these same formal strategies might not be so subversive half a century later, in a world where such technological shifts have become so thoroughly consolidated as to have become completely banal. The principles of conceptualisation foregrounded by conceptual art practices may well even have been subject to co-option and retooling to serve dramatically different purposes; purposes that more closely relate to the role “immaterial” or “cognitive” labour plays elsewhere.

Another closely related question is whether art-making is now subject to the same neo-liberal working conditions as other forms of labour. Benjamin Noys has diagnosed our contemporary moment as one in which we are “torn” between two realities, being “neither able to move forward into a ‘streamlined’ future, nor return to the ‘stability’ of the Fordist past.”¹ What are the bearings of such circumstances on our conceptions of artistic subjecthood? Are artists likewise being denied the satisfaction of an absolute freedom from logistical constraints, and a more workmanlike engagement with their own physical prowess? Furthermore, given that the working practices of the artist so closely resemble what Franco “Bifo” Berardi has described as the labour carried out by a “cognitariat”—a class of individuals producing cognitive labour under a new form of “semio-capitalism”, for whose members digital technology has rendered free time and working time indivisible—can artistic labour maintain a clear distinction between itself and these broader developments? ²

As John Roberts has detailed, deskilling and accompanying strategies of delegation play an ongoing role in conversations around contemporary art. For him, the issue of identifiable skill or its apparent absence is closely linked to the conceptualisation of artistic practice. What such approaches have given rise to is a “gestural” economy of art-making; one that privileges an artwork’s initial ideation, or conception, over its subsequent materialisation, or production. As such, many working practices may share little or none of the aesthetic preoccupations that drove earlier forms of conceptual art, but could still be said to display the hallmarks of conceptualisation. This is due to the way in which they actively distinguish between the “attached” and “detached hand”.³

Deskilling, in this sense, is not so much the removal of skill from art so much as its apparent exteriorisation from the labour practices of the artist. Skill is never really absent, even in the most extreme manifestations of deskilled art, but is rather displaced, or shifted outside the domain of artistic labour proper. This is equally the case in practices that employ readymade or common source material as it is in an artist’s delegation of aspects of their production process to fabricators or trained, “in-house” assistants. In each instance, dramatically different as these forms of practices are in operational terms, specialised skills, collective resources and other technical apparatus become prosthetic extensions of an individual’s subjective engagement with the world around them. ⁴ Whether we are coming to terms with the impossibility of adequately conceiving of the labour that produces commodities issuing from the Global South, or dealing with specialised skills outsourced to others locally, in more convivial settings, the distinction remains largely the same. In this way a digital camera could be said to perform an analogous function to a welded and powder-coated sculptural armature. The employment of such objects acts to delineate between the potential of the artist’s own gestures, and the embodied labour of others: they serve to strengthen and extend the subjective reach of that individual.

Rendering a clear distinction between gestural agency and embodied labour is a way of giving mythical form to a rarefied form of artistic subjecthood. This myth suggests that artistic gestures are unencumbered by logistical constraints, irrespective of the conditions in which they have actually taken place. That is not to say that an artist’s own embodied labour has been eliminated, or even that the elimination of the embodied labour of the artist is the ultimate goal of a gestural economy of art-making. It is rather to suggest that the appearance of optimisation presides over many of the key decision-making processes underpinning the production of contemporary art. And it is to propose that in a wide range of circumstances artists consider it optimal to delineate between an artwork’s conceptual ideation and its subsequent materialisation. In such circumstances, the adoption of the detached hand inevitably appears both more efficient and more advanced, and as such is preferable to an attached one.

An authorial identification with one form of technical process, or an overt focus on discrete acts of material transformation, each act as a kind of logistical ballast for those artists who would seek to maintain administrative control over their workflow at all costs. Such an embodiment of labour acts as a burdensome weight upon the imagination, one which appears to limit or otherwise slow the movement of free thought. Manual processes linked to the attached hand assume a particular vulgarity in these instances. These appear to taint the semiotic purity of the artistic gesture and, in turn, as I aim to demonstrate, run counter to the operational principles of the institutions in which such gestures are rendered visible to a wider audience. As these institutions are bureaucratically administered, there is a line of reasoning that suggests that, in order to interface correctly with them, artistic practice needs to adopt a similarly administrative position.

Gestural agency, pictured as a form of frictionless engagement with the world around us, could be described as a form of “exploit” or indicator of societal prowess, whereas embodied labour comes to represent a form of menial “drudgery”.⁵ This implies a social hierarchy in which the former is valorised and the latter is subordinated. Such subordination can be achieved through the outsourcing of labour, or the adoption of a dematerialised approach to art-making. It can, however, also be internalised through the schizoid division of one’s own working methods, and the use of oneself as a form of administrative prosthesis. This second form of internal partitioning is crucial to the present discussion, as it now seems quaint to think that artistic sovereignty could be safeguarded through something as rudimentary as the delegation of tasks, or that we can only regard manual labour as the sole form of drudgery. Self-management or self-bureaucratisation, operating in the guise of professionalism and willing collaboration with institutional frameworks, presents as much a logistical hindrance to gestural freedom as any form of physical toil. The sheer quantity of other cognitive labour that is required to maintain an appearance of artistic freedom also needs to be accounted for.

On a practical level, it could be argued that the seductive appeal of optimisation applies to artistic producers regardless of their status. This vision of frictionless transaction is equally attractive to an artist able to subsist on financial returns from their own practice, as it is to the artist who relies on being paid for work carried out elsewhere. Whereas the former seeks to maximise their productivity through the streamlining of the resources available to them, the latter looks to best use their available time when not otherwise gainfully occupied. The motivations for optimising one’s working practices vary, as do those artist’s relationships to the institutional frameworks that confer visibility on their work. What connects them is the way in which operational effectiveness is considered necessary, not only to cope with the perceived pressures of a contemporary working environment, but also to outwardly signal an ability to do so. In this way, a spirit of professionalism is not just instilled in those able to maintain professional artistic practices, it becomes a necessary component of the practices of those who wish to demonstrate their ability to work professionally, but have yet to be afforded such an opportunity. If anything, the outward appearance of professionalism is something only the already validated can afford to eschew.

While it is self-evident that certain artworks are more conceptual than others, and that some artworks visibly foreground characteristics of gestural agency less detectable in other artworks, all artists have to interact with some institutional system or another in order to make their efforts visible. What such interactions in turn necessitate is an objective detachment from the embodied process of producing the artwork itself. This detachment is evident in correspondence regarding the fabrication of elements of artworks, the drafting of grant applications, the information verbally conveyed during a studio visit, coordinating the transportation of oneself and one’s artwork to and from venues, and so on. Certain artworks can be stored as ideas until they are afforded the chance to be exhibited. Logistical pressures, such as storage space and the financial burden of production costs can even lead to artists limiting the production of artworks to such moments when opportunities emerge.

It would be fallacious to imagine any historical situation in which artists did not have to administrate aspects of their own practice, or respond to the pressing realities of their economic situation. The fantasy of a non-mediated form of artistic expression is itself a product of the modern era, and is closely linked to the self-image of gestural freedom this text is attempting to outline. Nor is it a novel point to highlight the role such determining conditions play in art-making. The dependence of subjective decisions on logistical factors, and the consensual agreements that validate artists’ practices are integral to the “institutional theory of art”, a cornerstone of any sociological approach to the subject. If there is something to add to this longstanding debate, it would relate to the way in which a combination of factors, including the ongoing critical and market recuperation of twentieth century, “pre-net” art, as well as the democratisation of self-expression in digital culture, have come together to make viable forms of artistic practice “outside” institutional settings increasingly difficult to picture.

Optimisation and Institutional Frameworks

One common counterargument to such charges of art’s complicity with the broader operations of capital is that a proximity to such forces is maintained not just out of necessity, but as a means of subverting dominant frameworks from within. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this stance is particularly prevalent within debates around painting, a medium perceived to have a privileged relationship to the marketplace as a form of asset. Claims of the discipline’s subversive potential occur cyclically, and, with equal regularity, are responded to with accusations of its neo-vanguardism. Of late there have been claims for a “provisional” sensibility in painting, through which painters are able to maintain a gestural detachment from their own products by attempting “to rest lightly on the earth”.⁶ Elsewhere, a host of other approaches to painting have been gathered together under the banner of “network” thinking. Once more, what we see is one of the most self-contained and technologically primitive of artistic media being rebranded as an optimised vehicle for transactional exchange. To follow Isabelle Graw’s argument, a painting is no longer just an object: it is, additionally, a “node” through which art world discourse can be accessed.⁷

In certain quarters, the formal tropes associated with such developments have been criticised as a cynical utilisation of painting’s particular properties as a portable commodity. For example, artworks that have been dubbed as “zombie formalism” can be regarded symptomatic of such cynicism. Appealing against the speculative strategies of art investors and a brand of process-based abstraction seemingly tailored to investment, commentators have bemoaned the “frictionless” nature of such an alliance, and the largely online means devoted to the sale of these material artefacts.⁸ Through the use of digital documentation as their primary means of visibility, the values attributed to such paintings are not necessarily to be located on or in the canvases themselves, but elsewhere, in the socio-economic fields that surround them. An aesthetic of “sameness”, grounded in the serial nature and patented production techniques favoured by many of these artistic practitioners, appears as a method of standardising investment opportunities, and ruthlessly commodifying gestural agency.

What has proved so offensive to those who have formulated a critique of the zombie economy of painting is that financial transactions appear to have assumed precedence over the acts of material transformation that have, up until this point, constituted painting’s primary value as an art form. This is a comparatively rare instance when the performative adoption of optimised labour practices has been met with critical resistance. It is no coincidence, however, that such accusations of callous venality have been laid at the feet of younger artists attempting to engage with an existing economic system, as opposed to those older individuals already well-ensconced within it.

The visible presence of pressures to optimise transactional exchanges are not only evident in artistic practices that seek to primarily engage with a commercial art market, they are equally detectable in the work of artists who would look to embed themselves within other institutional frameworks, such as academia and a publicly funded network of contemporary art spaces, museums and biennials. Distaste for the operations of a marketplace has certainly given rise to a class of artist for whom academia and publicly funded institutions constitute their primary method of communicating with an audience. Similarly, there is no doubt that there are also forms of artistic practice that actively signal their non-commercial status through the use of media closely associated with the conceptualisation of artistic gesture.

A situation may hypothetically evolve in which two distinct categories of artists emerge: those who wish to only produce vendible commodities, and those who look to speak only through public institutions and biennial exhibitions in the form of discrete, non-commercial projects. At present, while this schism has yet to occur—it is in fact currently rendered impossible by the thoroughly intertwined nature of public and private support upon which cultural organisations rely worldwide. What is nonetheless evident is a series of tribal identifications, and accompanying artistic methodologies that appear to speak to the social realm or the marketplace. What the growing polarity of aesthetic products appearing in different forms of institutions has meant is that artists of these imagined camps may no longer be able to recognise themselves as belonging to the same species. This has occurred despite their common roots in the same pressurised societal conditions, and their collective ownership of the same teleological account of art’s development over the last century.

In public art institutions, the scaling back of governmental infrastructure has led to increased competition for cultural subsidies. This has in turn necessitated a greater evidencing of art’s societal utility, while requiring a greater degree of entanglement with private concerns. Publicly funded institutions now often operate as “creative hubs”, stocked with “cultural tenants” who act to offset the operational costs of mounting exhibitions and events. This same logic of offsetting has meant that those commissioned to produce such exhibitions and events are now required to assume a portion of the administrative burden associated with its realisation.⁹ It is now commonplace for artists to author funding applications to meet the costs of working within such public institutions, and to assume an intensive role in the logistical planning of these projects. For those who lack a commercial gallery with sufficient largesse to contribute administrative support, these demands can occupy significant portions of their working lives.

The production of the artwork itself is only one facet of an artist’s role in these situations. A substantial amount of other cognitive labour accompanies the core activity of art-making. An artist’s operative performance in this environment can be regarded as subject to the pressures of optimisation, in that they are required to segue continuously between these two modes of labour: project management, and the manifestation of their artistic gestures proper. The issue becomes compounded when the artistic gesture is dematerialised, or makes deliberate use of an administrative aesthetic. In doing so, the artistic gesture itself aesthetically resembles a form of project management. Current institutional requirements—requirements that are in part borne out of the financial pressures those organisations face—that an artist contributes to actual administration of their projects—adds another dimensional layer to the perceived role of the conceptual artist. If we allow that conceptualised art of many kinds prioritises a form of cognitive activity, there is a very real threat that conceptual exploit—the source of what makes various forms of highly conceptualised art-making vital modes of artistic expression—will become hopelessly entangled with, and potentially overwhelmed by cognitive drudgery.

In academic settings, a similarly bureaucratic conception of artistic practice has also taken hold. From the perspective of working in Higher Education in the United Kingdom, visual art made within the academy seems in danger of metastasising into an entirely self-referential field of discourse, one cut off from the greater art world. Using the optic of academic research, which functions to retrospectively attribute value to activity through the use of periodic surveys, or “research exercises”, the validity of artistic gestures are determined by their correlation to a set of ideological principles governing Higher Education as a whole. To openly identify with the principles that situate art-making as a form of academic research is to consider one’s efforts as correlating not only to the plurality of different forms of art-making, curatorial activity, art historical and critical enquiry, design and architecture practices that constitutes an open field of discourse within an art school. They also have to appear ideologically compatible with far-flung discussions taking place elsewhere in the humanities, and further still in the sciences. To use the current definition, an artwork’s ability to embody “a process of investigation, leading to new insights, effectively shared” is the means through which value is ultimately attributed to it in this environment.¹⁰ Artistic activity not deemed to correspond with these principles is discounted.

In his reflections on fundamental changes that have occurred within the body politic, Berardi has traced a shift, or “mutation”, from what he calls “conjunctive” to “connective patterns of concatenation” that mark our everyday interactions. For him, this mutation has been brought about by an increased need to subject differing forms of self-expression to the levelling effects of computational thinking. Older forms of conjunctive concatenation required a “sensibility” to be able to interpret, and are syntactic in nature. Newer forms of connective concatenation seek to produce an optimised equivalence between different forms of speech, and are considered by Berardi to be semiotic in nature. The primary difference between these methods of communication is that whereas the conjunctive worldview is reliant on empathy and inherent compromise, the connective worldview is founded on the dehumanising principles of automation.¹¹

To apply this model to the present example, it would appear that the academic research exercises that confer value on artworks still require a large amount of conjunctive interpretation in order to function, not least because of the gulf of expectations that exists between different academic cultures.¹² But that does not discount the fact that such exercising of academic oversight is profoundly connective in its purpose. The goal to unite and to equalise various modalities of knowledge is, using Berardi’s interpretation, a means to challenge art’s assumed exceptionalism, and to overwrite a foundational myth of sovereign activity with a vision of its seamless integration within an overarching, economically competitive system.

Tailoring a “research profile” is the most efficient way of conforming to the expectations of the academy. A defined area of investigation and effective means of sharing are central elements to consider determining the value of one’s own gestures with this institutional framework. As a means through which value is generated, the corporate mantra “a process of investigation, leading to new insights, effectively shared” is also a generative principle, as it has a determining effect on bodies of artwork that have yet to take form. It effectively demands forward planning, and in doing so charges individuals with the task of self-censure. Of course, these individuals are always free to make artwork that does not conform to these pre-established criteria, or that will prove harder to correlate to them, but these will run counter to the effectiveness of their performance as an academic. To achieve this, the apparent freedom of “practice”, and the open-ended, speculative basis on which it operates, needs to be segmented into the discrete apportioned time of the “project”, to serve as optimised components of an overarching “profile”.¹³

What is equally concerning is the way in which these principles, incumbent on those members of staff who are financially remunerated for their research activity, are surreptitiously transferred to other staff and students who are not. One example that could be pointed to is the now common delivery of professional practice sessions to undergraduate students. These sessions are a means of imparting “transferable skills”, and contributing to their general “employability”. These transferable skills apply not just to the world of non-artistic labour, but to later careers within academia as well. Twinned with the historical overviews students receive of visual art’s conceptual turn in the latter half of the twentieth century, this foregrounding of professionalism acts to interleave and harmonise two narratives; narratives that up until this point could be argued to have been in direct competition with one another.¹⁴ One is a vision of aesthetic freedom, unconstrained by material constraint, the other is a vision of administrative accountability; a compact with determining forces.

It was with a degree of dismay that Charles Harrison, one of the most uncompromising progenitors of conceptual art in the late 1960s, surveyed its academic corporatisation. “Nobody should be deluded”, Harrison said, speaking on the topic of doctoral studies and accredited artistic research in 1999, “that they can now reproduce as matters of institutional convenience those exotic and highly contingent circumstances under which it made sense thirty years ago for Art Theory to be pursued as a critical form of art practice.”¹⁵ Harrison’s point was that academic “self-bureaucratisation”, whether or not it resembles the bureaucratic strategies employed by previous forms of conceptual art, takes place for dramatically different purposes and in an altogether different context.¹⁶ Twenty years on, the practice of self-bureaucratisation he diagnosed has been steadily consolidated and normalised within the academy, and will exert increasing control over what is collectively understood to constitute exemplary artistic practice.

The Artist as Prosumer

For the most part, the origins of gestural exploit lie in the teleological arc that historians of post-war art trace from a technocratic model of formalist abstraction to a dematerialised model of conceptual art. Such teleology can be contextually mapped onto technological developments of the period, mirroring a shift in emphasis from physical hardware to programmable software.¹⁷ Art’s attempts at self-definition can in turn be cast as a technocratic pursuit, aligned, or in extreme occasions even synonymous, with broader ideological forces at play within the industrial complex. It is worth noting that the utilisation of technology in this art is less frequent than an apparent identification with its operational principles. Integrated circuitry, homeostatically regulated systems produced with the end goal of creating Artificial Intelligence, the development of telematic communications networks, and vehicles capable of supersonic travel are more often an allegorical presence in visual art than items on a materials list. They are in such cases reference points that help us construct a collective understanding of the paradigmatic development of artistic agency: one in which form, in an attempt to match the speed of technological developments taking place around it, is delaminated from concept.

A persistent historicisation of this era of post-war art—particularly that of an American variety—may well be due to something other than the iconic status of a select group of artists that have come to embody such a history. It may be just as much to do with the way in which those artists were positioned on a socio-economic fault-line running between industrialised production and a dawning information age. An ongoing fixation with this period of artistic production could potentially be re-cast as a continuing attempt to process the ramifications of art and its relationship to this societal watershed. This suspicion might be confirmed in continuing attempts to critically recuperate (and marketise) overlooked artistic practices that emerged during the 1960s; a project that continues to dwarf any other mapping of post-war art. Understood in such a manner, the innovative strategies that defined such artistic practices anticipated both a move away from manual labour in the workforce, but additionally a decentralised and agile approach to production by corporate interests.

One of the primary reasons artistic practice is often equated with post-Fordist models of manufacturing is the way in which it could be interpreted as having a prototypical attitude to the scalability and responsiveness now widely sought as operational characteristics within industrial processes. The organisational skills required to produce fluctuating amounts of artworks for particular venues, often within dramatically varying timescales, are logistical demands that appear linked to the pressures that have given birth to “just in time” or “demand flow production” in industry. Analysed with any level of detail, though the comparison is more of an aesthetic affiliation, as even the most commercially facing example of artistic practice lacks the practical means to be considered truly corporate. Its scale and economic ambition displays at least as much commonality with the “self-starting” economies inhabited by Etsy sellers, and other cottage industries proliferating online.

In his survey of art and its relation to the development of economic theory, Dave Beech asserts that there is little economic basis for a comparison between art-making and capitalist production, even under current conditions. Beech argues that the increasing resemblance of everyday labour to the artist’s historically precarious position in society does little to alter the dramatically different sets of relations that continue to separate artistic economies from mainstream capitalism.¹⁸ While I would concur for the most part with this economic distinction, what this does not account for is the way in which art inevitably reflects its environment as subject matter and in doing so serves as its mimetic embodiment. Whether art is functionally separate as an economic activity or not, there is no denying that artists remain citizens, and as citizens are subject to the same environmental conditions as other, non-artistic subjects. A hallmark of debates around art made since the emergence of modernism is whether it is critical of, or complicit with the dominant ideological concerns of the day. The latest episode in this ongoing discussion necessarily centres on art’s supposed role as a blueprint for current forms of precarious labour, and its relationship to free time more generally. An accurate grasp of changes to artistic standards—or its operation as an ideological enterprise as opposed to an economic one—also hinge upon comprehending the growing number of non-credentialed and otherwise unvalidated forms of creative endeavour that surrounds it. What, for example, beyond an affiliation with particular institutional frameworks, differentiates credentialed art-making from other forms of creative activity enabled by increasingly affordable equipment, and the rise of online platforms for its dissemination?

Prophesising the rise and consolidation of post-Fordist conditions of labour in 1980, the technologist Alvin Toffler divided human labour into three distinct stages, or “waves”. Here, a first wave, represented by a localised, agrarian economy is largely superseded by a second wave of industrialised activity. The titular “third wave” in Toffler’s account moves beyond the linear dynamics of an industrialised second wave of commodity production by blurring the boundaries between producer and consumer. Central to Toffler’s description of a decentralised third wave of society is the figure of the “prosumer”. “The customer will become so integrated into the production process” he wrote, “that we will find more and more difficult to tell just who is actually the consumer and who is the producer.”¹⁹ The signs of prosumption are diverse—the home pregnancy test and home DIY are two of many examples provided—but each are tied to an increased agency afforded to an individual. Paradoxically, Toffler saw the technological age of prosumption as inaugurating a return to pre-capitalist conditions, by removing the “invisible wedge” driven between production and consumption during the industrial revolution, while working to heal a “dual personality” disorder that the mechanisation of labour had inflicted upon the modern subject.²⁰

Discussions around the blurring of the artist’s role as producer and as a consumer existed long before Toffler first theorised the third wave, but these have always been closely linked to the same technological conditions that would give rise to the prosumer. In 1961 the British art critic Lawrence Alloway linked the artist’s choice to overtly identify as a consumer to the “explosion of communications” taking place at the time.²¹ For Alloway—who was preoccupied with an expanding range of technological media and the ways in which these forms of communication were proliferating globally—our transactions with culture are already transformational, in that these cultural identifications are themselves selective decisions. The artist, already enmeshed in capitalist spectacle, is left with little option but to interact with it. In his opinion, it is better that they are a “knowing consumer”, as opposed to a “bad” one.²² Such an attitude was central to the development of a nascent Pop sensibility Alloway sought to encapsulate.

Just as Toffler enthusiastically embraced an obscured distinction between the stages of production and consumption, Alloway’s technophilic interpretation promised to reward the artist who actively sought to work within these new parameters, albeit by surrendering their previous distance from mainstream culture. It should be noted though that this position is arrived at in reverse to the process outlined by Toffler. Alloway’s artist is modelled as a producer who increasingly comes to see themselves as a consumer, while Toffler’s average citizen is imagined as a consumer who increasingly comes to see themselves as a producer. As such, it could be inferred that any current shared state of prosumption is arrived at from opposing ends of the producer/consumer axis.

As we now know, Toffler’s pronouncements did not lead to a newfound freedom for citizens, but rather a new form of social contract that has repurposed technocratic idealism as an innovative form of exploitation. The increased autonomy afforded to us as prosumers in the digital era has instead been employed by the state as a means of abdicating regulatory responsibilities, and has contributed to the erosion of welfare, the growth of precarious labour, and the widespread privatisation of civic infrastructure, including cultural institutions. In these circumstances, a citizen’s conception of their own freedom is used a means of control. Self-expression has become, in the words of Byung-Chul Han, a form of “auto-exploitation”, leading not to heightened self-realisation, but to a situation where “privatization now reaches into the depths of the soul itself”.²³ These are the existential conditions that contemporary art can confront, embody, and also risk being subsumed by.

In commodity manufacture a range of mid-range consumer electronics are often branded as prosumer goods, so as to appeal to the quasi-professional status envisaged by their intended user. Artists are one of the demographic audiences to whom these goods are marketed: as individuals who believe their efforts merit high production values, but who often lack the financial means for a more substantial capital investment in equipment. But the credentialed artist class are not alone in wanting to employ such apparatus as a means of self-expression. They have been joined by a great many other “makers” and “creatives” working across a variety of platforms. With the explosion of online cottage industries, there has been, if anything, an increased reliance on institutional frameworks to distinguish accredited artistic activity from a wider pool of self-expression found elsewhere. Rather than standing in solidarity with other forms of creative labour, the artist is driven back onto ground where their efforts are demarcated as hierarchically superior. “Knowingness”—in this case partly a distinction conferred on artistic labour by various forms of institutional validation—is necessary to avoid becoming, to borrow from manufacturing terminology, another “end user”.

More recently, McKenzie Wark, like Toffler, has constructed a tripartite model in their mapping of the economic changes brought about by digitisation. Wark distinguishes between an initial “pastoral” economy based on the ownership of land, giving way to a “capitalist” economy controlled by those who own the means of production, which then develops into a “vectoralist” economy, controlled not through the ownership of the means of production, but rather the “vectors” or channels through which information travels.²⁴ Perhaps most emblematic of these vectoralist entities are those global corporations that specialise in the online distribution of goods. But the rise of what has elsewhere been termed “platform capitalism”, is only a way of conceiving of the vectoral system at a macro-economic level.²⁵ According to Wark, it is the “hacker” who gives rise to “new abstractions”, or innovative forms of expression generated at the micro-scale of the individual, that are only then expropriated by ruling interests.²⁶ The hacker is a trans-historical figure in their account, having been present in every technological iteration of society, and the hack is always an action conducted against the interests of hegemonic forces.

The figures of the prosumer and Berardi’s description of the cognitariat are linked in that they blur the previous discrete acts of transformation and transaction attached to production and consumption respectively. But whereas Toffler’s imagined figure was imbued with utopian potential, Berardi’s is rooted in pessimistic appraisal of present-day circumstances. Wark’s hackers are likewise enmeshed in their surroundings, but their actions are less distinguishable by their inherent nature than their contextual use. Here, an action’s value as a form of individual freedom, or exploit, is largely contingent on its relation to privatising interests. The conceptualisation of art, understood as a series of strategies implemented in response to a broader societal turn towards digitization, could be classified as vectoralist. However, if art’s conceptualisation is to qualify as a form of hacking, it would have to constitute an individual action that has yet to be subjected to the instrumentalising urges of a dominant ruling class. To do so it would have to, under Wark’s terms at least, “produce production of a new kind.”²⁷

Conclusion

A deliberate effort has been made here to avoid the attribution of specific values to certain forms of art-making. At the very real risk of appearing nebulous, this is an attempt to speak beyond specific modes of production, and even the various forms of institutional validation that they rely upon. My position is based on the belief that contemporary art, heterogeneous as it appears, remains subject to a set of shared assumptions about the gestural freedoms that serve to underpin advanced practice. What is at stake is the sustainability of such a collective vision of model behaviour, and what needs to be done to defend it. It’s not so much that other forms of contemporary labour, which mirror the conditions in which artists have historically operated, present a threat to the operational functioning of an art world or art worlds. What these broader living conditions, which offer empowerment through prosumption, instead provide is a method for understanding how the appearance of individual freedoms has elsewhere been employed as justification for the abdication of governing responsibility. We might ask, given the new-found level of commonality between these two forms of labour, whether the foundational narratives of contemporary art practice are not susceptible to similar treatment.

This is not to advance some retrograde notion of artisanal practices, or to call for a renewed focus on manual skill as a criterion of artistic value, neither has there ever been such as a thing as a non-mediated mode of artistic expression. The ennoblement of physical labour and the private time it contains within it may be one method of slowing the mission creep of cognitive drudgery into the creative psyche, but it is not necessarily a solution either. At the other end of the spectrum it has been suggested that bureaucratic activity can itself function as a means of “protecting” sovereign artistic labour from the debasing influence of the market. In his speculations on art and value production, Diedrich Diederichsen has argued that forms of the “contract” presents one way in which labour can be “valorised but not translated into experience”.²⁸ By withholding the sensual object, such contractual arrangements act to preserve the artist’s intentions by preventing them from being arbitrarily accessed.

In either of these instances, what is being proposed is a means of interacting with prevailing institutional frameworks that serves to insulate forms of self-directed artistic activity from determinism from external forces. The formations of such strategies are wholly necessary, as institutions remain crucial to the functioning of artistic practices as they presently stand. My purpose here has not necessarily been to directly critique the cultural imperatives that drive contemporary institutions. Nor has it been my intention to discount the significant amount of energy that the field of curatorial studies has devoted to reimagining the institution and its broader socio-political role. The point I want to conclude with, made from my own position as an artistic practitioner, is that so long as art relies on institutional frameworks that are subject to the same economic pressures as other aspects of social infrastructure, we must entertain the prospect of a second conceptualising tendency in contemporary art that is bereft of the humour, poetry and pathos foregrounded by earlier forms of conceptual—and more broadly conceptualised—art.

If we are unable to defend the foundational myths that we have from expropriating influences seeking to sell us exploitation packaged as autonomy, we may have to propose our own changes to them or to produce altogether new narratives of friction to replace them; narratives that valorise non-productive time. Or that somehow conceal a kernel of sovereign, unalienated activity within a professionalised outer shell. By continuing to accept cognitive drudgery as conceptual exploit, we are demonstrating a preparedness to ignore the hands hard at work inside our heads, and are failing to acknowledge the role that this activity exerts on our conceptions of art’s generative principles.