Spy art: infiltrating the real.

As art's actual purchase on public life steadily diminishes, artworlderers make certain assumptions, perhaps in an unconscious reaction to the ongoing erosion of its social role; they tend to come up with increasingly emphatic claims about art's political wherewithal--as if art-making were somehow inherently political. This brash self-delusion, clad in the rhetoric of self-evidence, has gone rather uncontested for two reasons: artists' actions are written off as "just art" outside the artworld, and inside the artworld, it is relatively easy for critics like myself to come up with sophisticated and logically persuasive arguments to prove that creation is about bringing something new into the world and thus, is intrinsically subversive of the status quo. However, if we step back for a moment, it becomes clear that if this were the case in any substantive sense, we would surely know it by now. Surprisingly, a lack of any evidence that art may have inflicted damage on the dominant semiotic and symbolic order has scarcely abated the artworld's appetite for contriving new and daring strategies to accompany its pretensions.

The one thing, however, that art never seems to question is whether its political inefficacy is due to the fact that it is art and is perceived as such. In other words, it appears virtually true by-definition that art, if it is to be an effective political force at all, must enjoy the highest coefficient of artistic visibility. I hold just the opposite to be the case: that if it is sincere about its political engagement, art must sacrifice its coefficient of artistic visibility altogether, operating under the radar, to gain the value to which it has so long aspired. I speak here about use value, and the conditions under which art may be genuinely able to produce it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

New York-based Mexican artist Pablo Helguera recently initiated an artist-led expeditionary project, "The School of Panamerican Unrest" (2006), in the hope of generating connections between the different regions of the Americas through a variety of events--discussions, performances, screenings, and collaborations--by means of a nomadic forum that will cross the hemisphere by land, from Alaska to Argentina. As Helguera describes:

This hybrid project will include a collapsible and movable

architectural structure in the form of a schoolhouse, as well as a

video collection component inside a van that will make the journey.

The project, which seeks to involve a wide range of audiences and

engage them at different levels, offers alternative ways to understand

the history, ideology, and lines of thought that have significantly

impacted political, social and cultural events in the Americas. (1)

I begin with this project because it is free of the formalist conventions that impair the production of use value, and thus, at face value, it shares many of the features of a socially engaged art initiative. In some respects, the project has clear affinities with the "expeditionary aesthetics" that we are seeing more of in contemporary art practice. Helguera is sincere about attaining those high-minded objectives and is loathe to unwittingly fall prey to the tendency to merely colonize the lifeworld--as such projects are wont to do, bringing back remnants and artifacts in the form of images and video footage for exhibition purposes. Yet, his description of the project implies that it be understood and seen as art, which given the dramatically skewed distribution of symbolic and artistic capital in society, cannot have invisible parentheses placed around its generous attempts at inclusion: art is a system of exclusion.

Before embarking on his journey, Helguera wrote, by way of explaining his motivations, that "the role of art in society has become ever more important in a post 9/11 world." (2) What a counterintuitive statement! What sort of empirical reason could he, and countless other politically concerned artists, have for believing such a thing? On the contrary, is it not far more plausible that art, per se, has more or less ceased to have any role in determining the destiny of the public sphere where it is deployed? I say "art per se" because what might be referred to as "artistic competence" (encompassing both image-making skills and such artistic attitudes as autonomy, creativity, inventiveness, acceptance of nonmonetary remuneration, and strategic exploitation of discrepancies in talent) have been co-opted and harnessed by the strategic rationality of contemporary capitalism. Over the past decade, art has seen much of what used to be specific to it sublimated into business models, individualizing labor relations and advertising strategy--meaning that, in this sense, art's role is indeed important. Even amateur videomakers like Osama Bin Laden have made very subtle use of image-making techniques grounded in recent art history. And indeed, Russian art historian Boris Groys has recently scrutinized the Al-Qaeda leader's aesthetic choices in his various video clips, using art-critical tools and conceptual vocabulary to analyze the framing, background, decor, and so on--though admittedly, such videos are not autonomous artworks, despite their apparently universal entertainment value.

Contrary, then, to what Helguera and others believe, it would appear that art has either been thoroughly integrated into mainstream symbolic production or no less thoroughly marginalized by it. And it has, to be honest, put up little resistance to this co-optation; it has sought to protect its symbolic privileges in society, and thus, it either rejects use value as extrinsic to art or accepts what boils down to mere contemplative use value. Most importantly, it has sought to protect its ontological privileges in the symbolic order. Art today, by and large, is performative--that is, it is art because the artworld proclaims it to be such, despite it being perceptually identical to the "mere real thing," as analytical philosophers like to say. And this is the crux of what might be called the use value dilemma: by proclaiming "this is art," one is also acknowledging that "this is just art"--not the corrosive, censorship-deserving real thing. Therefore, as many artists have come to conclude, to have use value, art must renounce art, or at least sacrifice its visibility as art; art must sunder itself from itself.

Despite Helguera and others' concerns with diversifying audiences, audience-geared art is as far as one can possibly get from use value laden art (in this sense). I am referring to an art without artwork, without authorship (not signed by an artist) and above all without a spectator or audience. It is visible, public, and indeed, it is seen--but not as art. In this way, it cannot be placed between invisible parentheses--to be written off as "just art," that is, as a mere symbolic transgression, the likes of which we have seen so often, whose principal effect is to promote the artist's position within the reputational economy. Significantly, more and more of this kind of use value laden art is being produced. I call it stealth art, or spy art--art under the radar. (3) It is the work of both secret agents (working simultaneously in different ontological landscapes: that of the real and of the fictional) and poachers, who by definition, never sign their work.

Of course, envisaging an art without artwork, without authorship, and without spectatorship has an immediate consequence: art ceases to be visible. For practices whose self-understanding stems from the visual arts tradition--not to mention for the normative institutions governing it--the problem cannot be wished away. If it is not visible, art eludes all control, prescription, and regulation--in short, all "police." In a Foucauldian perspective, one might argue that the key issue in policing art is the question of visibility. As French philosopher Jacques Ranciere put it in his now classic definition:

The police is, in its essence, the law which, though generally

implicit, defines the part or lack of part of the parties involved....

The police is thus above all a bodily order that defines the partition

between means of doing, means of being and means of saying, which

means that certain bodies are assigned, by their very name, to such

and such a place, such and such a task; it is an order of the visible

and the sayable, which determines that some activities are visible and

that some are not, that some speech is heard as discourse while other

speech is heard as mere noise. (4)