Lead and Felt
Obviously, the pandemic has changed our relationship to both public space and the internet. This helps bring into focus how the internet had already changed our relationship to space. As Drew Austin argues here, “the perceptual logic of the internet has always been a nonspatial, atemporal universe in which everything feels always already available for instrumental use.” It was offered as a screen-based alternative to physical space that appeared amenable to individual, unilateral control.
The myth of “cyberspace” was that you could be anywhere with anyone on your own terms, unconstrained by the inherited burdens of identity and history. You could supposedly represent yourself online with autonomy; you could be “who you really are,” and not how society sees you, as if those were not inextricably linked. At the same time, the always-on nature of connectivity would mean that time constraints and coordination problems would be overcome by everybody essentially being ever-present everywhere. The other people who were always “there” online were reified as “the internet”; you could “ask the internet” and it would seem to answer, and not particular people with particular intentions and biases of their own. Information came from a “hive mind” mediated by search engines and other forms of algorithmic sorting that structured our relationship with the world as an individual user (you) confronting a dedifferentiated mass (the internet) that was there to serve you.
Tech companies represented all this as the apotheosis of personal convenience, which in practice meant being able to use screen interfaces to screen out other people, to use them instrumentally. Now with the pandemic seeming to take the freedom of movement in physical space away, the on-demand instrumentality of screen space no longer seems as liberating. The apparent power it affords, the many little acts of willfulness, no longer register as a higher form of freedom than, say, meeting someone at a café for coffee.
Being “online” was never actually an alternative to “real life,” as the recent efforts to live more of “real life” online has made plain. And the “convenience” of treating other people as means and not ends may no longer seem like such a great compensation for the isolation and atomization implicit in a life conducted entirely on the principles of “user interfaces.”
The instrumentalization of “living online” not only applies to how we treat distanciated others; it also extends to ourselves. Self-representation online can appear to be more straightforward and unilateral. It can seem that you can control what other people will think about and do with your self-presentation by curating it carefully, which entails a kind of alienation from oneself, thinking of oneself as a detached, manipulatable object. The self is externalized and becomes a brand rather than the inviolate vehicle through which one experiences being alive. The self is construed as an abstract, flexible space, akin to the feeds we manage on media platforms, a place we fill with representative objects and also a place where others can come and be seen — a white-cube gallery.
Since everyone has social media space to fill, everyone has come to operate like a museum, “curating” experiences and memories as images of their lives as a deliberate, unfolding story of artistic progress. One’s life, ones self, is no longer conceived a mere work of art (as Foucault was describing in his later work) but as a collection — the trajectory of the self articulated through the images one makes and assembles to represent it.
People acting as though they were art museums has upended the conventional role of actual art museums: They function less as repositories of precious works grounding efforts to periodize and regionalize the history of cultural production and more as places where visitors can stage their interactions with that history and appropriate it in various ways that museums could ideally profit from. Museums have had to reorient themselves to become more photogenic, to announce themselves as iconic and immediately recognizable tourist attractions, in order to maximize the potential value in images that visitors would take and circulate of their visits.
Museums have become staging grounds for visitors' self-representations; the collected artworks function as props. The “works” that visitors make become more significant than the ones they see there. And the kind of pieces that museums must foreground need to lend themselves to being backdrops; they need to be legible without upstaging the visitor’s sense of self with an autonomous meaning of their own. Every art work should “mean” nothing but what the viewer chooses to reappropriate it for, to represent something about themselves. (Look! I went to the Louvre!)
But this development was not solely and abruptly triggered by the advent of phone cameras, anymore than instrumentalizing logic was invented for the internet. It can be seen as an extension of the adjustments capitalism had been forced to make, both to address postwar threats to its justifying logic and to find new forms of labor to exploit, more aspects of life to commodify.
In the 1990 essay “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” Rosalind Krauss examined this with respect to art institutions, pointing out the “bizarre Gestalt-switch from regarding the collection as a form of cultural patrimony or as specific and irreplaceable embodiments of cultural knowledge to one of eying the collection's contents as so much capital — as stocks or assets whose value is one of pure exchange and thus only truly realized when they are put in circulation.”
The museum doesn’t operate outside the logic of capital but within it; it creates “value” not on the level of aesthetics but in the economic exchanges it facilitates. It is supposed to “grow” (much as the “self” is supposed to grow, not emotionally or spiritually, but as human capital). Getting people to look at art is only important insofar as it increases the economic value of the underlying assets that are thereby “circulating.”
Under “late capitalism” in the 1980s, a museum’s “capital” was understood primarily as the works themselves, seen as appreciating assets. Now, under what I guess must be “later capitalism,” a museum’s capital also includes its status as a destination and the touristic images it can facilitate — the “experiences” it can commodify for the “experience economy.” This shift plays into what art gets displayed, and what sort of person you are ideally expected to be when going to a museum — a collector of images of your visit, but not a participant in the art market itself.
Drawing on Ernest Mandel (if only everyone who mentioned “late capitalism” had to do this) Krauss argues that “overcapitalization (or noninvested surplus capital)” is “the hallmark of late capitalism,” and suggests that art museums became sinks for that noninvested surplus. They enlarge their real estate portfolios, they expand their collections, they “revitalize” mill towns like Beacon and North Adams. (In the essay, she is writing in part about the genesis of MassMoCA.) This process, Krauss writes, will “demand the increased control of resources in the form of art objects that can be cheaply and efficiently entered in to circulation” as well as “a larger and larger surface over which to sell the product in order to increase … ‘market share.’” I think that now takes the form not of traditional artworks but of social media posts made by visitors that are set in museums, and that larger surface is not merely gallery space but the expanded field of social media.
Museums are thereby complicit in inculcating a particular kind of subjectivity in visitors — the consumerist subjectivity that valorizes itself by trading in brand value, enriching itself by hyping other things. This is obviously very different from teaching visitors how to bow down before the great works of history. Krauss is suspicious of this, and echoes Jameson’s critique of postmodernism, claiming that “the industrialized museum has a need for the technologized subject, the subject in search not of affect but of intensities, the subject who experiences its fragmentation as euphoria, the subject whose field of experience is no longer history, but space itself.”
Looking back, we can now see how “postmodernism” was in many respects a misrecognition of neoliberalism. The “technologized subject” that has emerged from the trends Krauss is complaining about is not so much “fragmented” as entrepreneurialized, “responsiblized”; it is not euphoric in its dissolving but tactical. It is discontinuous and flexible out of economic necessity. It must be capable of anything, and it must be continually asserting its own value, its own “creditworthiness” (as Michel Feher, in particular, has argued). The technolgized subject is now concretized mainly by our traversing the "space" of the internet and its individuating interfaces, its ability to let us blot out the points of view of others as if they didn't exist, didn't have to affect us — even as constant connectivity can make us acutely aware of how little we are seen.
Krauss feels particularly betrayed by Minimalism — she mentions Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, James Turrell, artists who made lots of giant, space-consuming objects that were being taken up as the pretense for museums’ vast expansion programs. Minimalism as an art movement purportedly aimed to rescue viewing subjects from the consumerist mentality and re-center them in the uniqueness of their autonomous bodily perceptions of an object. (This again prefigures the "convenience" of accessing reality through the internet.) Yet it came to be the pretense for art museums’ conversion into massive Disneyland-like spaces devoted to art commodities. What went wrong?
Minimalist art, in Krauss’s account, was devoted to an “idea of a perception that would break with what it saw as the decorporealized and therefore bloodless, algebraicized condition of abstract painting.” It hoped to exist in some space beyond commodification, where the works were protected by being site-specific and devoid of semiotic content. By making viewers participants in the work, activating it by recognizing their limits in perceiving it, minimalist art supposedly restored an “immediacy of experience” in a world full of phony mass culture and programmed laugh-track responsiveness.
This move is, we could say, compensatory, an act of reparations to a subject whose everyday experience is one of increasing isolation, reification, specialization, a subject who lives under the conditions of advanced industrial culture as an increasingly instrumentalized being.
It is hard to read of a "subject whose everyday experience is one of increasing isolation” without thinking of quarantine conditions and our current renegotiations of space. If Minimalism was conceived as a rejection of relational aesthetics, as Morris claimed and Krauss notes, then I can’t think of a less suitable kind of art for this moment, when people seem desperate for ways to relate to one another.
Minimalism was meant to work by returning viewers to the “lived bodily perspective,” but the body it supposedly “returned” you to was a seemingly unmarked, abstract body, unconditioned by social realities, inequalities, the identity markers and the horizons on one’s perception that one brings with them into a museum. The Minimalist work made you just a dehistoricized body orbiting a shape to see it from different points of view. It negated “relational aesthetics” by asserting that there need not be anything intrinsically social in our ways of looking. But if you are on the receiving end of objectifying gazes, it you are excluded from hegemonic points of view, if your lives are often seemingly invisible to the culture at large, Minimalism’s insistence on abstract vision may read not as liberatory but as an insult, a grotesque evasion. It becomes a refusal to see the consequences of seeing only as an individual, or of choosing to value only certain “neutral” perspectives.
For Krauss, Minimalism undermined itself not by its post-political posturing, but by the fact that it used industrial processes to fabricate work. That maneuver presupposes an ability to manufacture any number of pieces on the same specifications, making them copies without “originals” — they have no aura, which allows them to function as commodities, as tradable assets rather than “irreplaceable embodiments of cultural knowledge.” This apparently returns viewers to consumeristic being from the exaltation of Minimalist “pure perception.” Krauss dubs this a "cultural reprogramming" into "the utterly fragmented, postmodern subject of contemporary mass culture."
Minimalism was always a form of “cultural reprogramming,” but not to the extent that it failed to lock viewers in to a desocialized, depoliticized subjectivity but to the degree that it succeeded. The possibility of a subject who could by force of will extract their mode of perception from the social context that structured it is essentially what market relations promise — a blank-slate meeting of “equals” for “fair exchange.” You are in a room with nothing but long strips of felt and lead, and your vision is cleansed of its pre-existing conditions at the site of contact. On the internet, no one knows you are a dog.
In reality, Minimalist objects didn’t isolate viewers in their perceptions. They also convened people in a space, serving as a striking background in which attendees posed themselves for others. The pieces were conspicuous places to people-watch and to frame yourself as being seen, as being seeable.
I think now it is clear that Minimalist works were early harbingers of the Instagrammable installation art that is prevalent now. It reminds me of the contemporary turn to crypto-minimalism that Kyle Chayka describes in The Longing for Less, which is also playing out as a misguided and ultimately elitist attempt to purify consumerism. Minimalism today is understood as a kind of control-freakery aimed at contrived effortlessness; the instantaneous autonomous gaze has become culturally reprogrammed as a signifier of being able to segregate oneself from other people’s mess.
Krauss suggests that Minimalism failed because it constructed the museum as “hyperspace” and the viewer as a postmodern subject incapable of “real” experience, unable to maintain a sense of identity with any depth or continuity. The post-postmodern condition seems different. The problem is not a subject who has traded “affect” for “intensity” in a vast field of surfaces and signs. The Minimalist project hasn’t been betrayed by the decentered subject’s vertiginous fall into commodification and commercialization. Minimalism now succeeds on its own terms too well: The “perceiving subject” that it aimed to foreground has become the self-documenting subject that populates social media feeds. The phone camera has given viewers the ability to reify their own gaze, the particularity of their perception, and circulate it as a commodity. Minimalist art has become Instagram cliché.
In other words, the problem with postmodernism was not the decentered subject but the kinds of media that were invented to reconsolidate the subject under the sign of a rising neoliberalism, creating the possibilities for image-driven “human capital.” When Krauss’s essay ran in October, it was illustrated (presumably with a heavy dose of irony) with an image of a Turrell light installation, the main point of which is its experiential unphotographability. The work is not the light itself but how your eyes adjust to it. Now, of course, Drake can make a video inside a copy of a Turrell work, and no one can doubt that he is in earnest. Two frames from that video have become a resilient meme template, to convey in a standardized, formulaic way what we want and what we refuse.