Spy art: infiltrating the real.

That, of course, is a moral issue that relational aesthetics rarely attends to, and indeed there is no point being righteous about such things. Art is in no way responsible for the endemic injustices and inequalities within our society and is by no means duty-bound to help resolve them. Indeed, art may well be about exacerbating social tensions; however, there is widespread ambiguity in the relational aesthetics community about where art's use value does actually lie. To talk about use value with regard to art at all is to acknowledge that criteria of efficiency have to be taken into account. It may be considered inefficient to set up such a project if the real point is to hand out running shoes; conversely, if the point is to attract media attention to this issue, it is inefficient, as well, to do it in the form of an art project, which can be dismissed as "just art." In this particular case, given that border crossing is based on identity control, it strikes me as inappropriate that art proclaims its true identity so overtly, rather than seeking a more mimetic relationship with the plight of the clandestine border crossers and, like them, dissimulating its own identity. Stealth art is a clandestine border crosser, like the secret agent. So why then does art so adamantly refuse to forsake its artistic visibility--even though doing so would have the explicit advantage of giving it more use value and even make it better art (providing adequacy between form and content)? I suspect it is because the reliable signature (attesting to the artist's occupational identity), and the artworld recognition it provides, is the ultimate art commodity still valued by enterprise culture.

I have considerable intellectual empathy for art-informed practices that sacrifice their coefficients of artistic visibility in hope of gaining greater corrosiveness in the public semiotic realm. Ultimately, however, my approach is descriptive, not prescriptive. There are more stealth practices going on than the artworld ever acknowledges, or even knows about. This is for the self-evident reason that they are, by definition and by design, hard to see let alone recognize, but also because they subvert mainstream artworld values, for there is nothing to exhibit and thus, nothing to sell. Stealth practices tend to be written off as non-art, if not quite nonexistent. The art-critical challenge is to draw attention to them in an appropriately elusive way, both for their intrinsic worth and because they obey a certain art-historical logic. Stealth and spy art practices have become a viable way of pursuing art at a historical moment when art has withdrawn from the world--though that may appear grossly counterintuitive to anyone whose only sources are the official organs of the artworld like Flash Art or Art Forum. In the face of the omnipresence of the cultural and consciousness industries, art has withdrawn from the world and has hidden before our very eyes--the only place it is safe from artworld recuperation, the only place left where the artworld is not looking for it.

Each year, thousands of artists simply quit the artworld, choosing to pursue art in a different mode, in the mode of competence rather than in the mode of performance, to adopt a Chomskian distinction. And the mode of competence--more precisely, reflexive competence in this case--is by no means premised on the regime of spectator-ship. The challenge for art criticism, and the toolbox of sophisticated conceptual tools it has developed, is to conceptualize and discuss all these symbolic "spy" practices that simply fly beneath the radar of artworld recognition.

STEPHEN WRIGHT is a Paris-based art writer and curator whose work focuses on the prospect of an art without artworks, authorship, or spectatorship.

NOTES

1. The development of this text owes much to my exchanges with Pablo Helguera and an earlier version was first presented at his invitation at the conference "Trans-specific Americas: Site Specificity and Art Outside of Art" held at the Americas Society, New York, May 5, 2006. See www.panamericanismo.org/index.php.

2. Ibid.

3. I am drawing upon what art critic Patrice Loubier has described as "furtive art."

4. Jacques Ranciere, La Mesentente (Paris: Galilee, 1995), 52; my translation.

5. See "Centre de Recherches," UniversiteTangente, http://utangente.free.fr/index2.html; http://ut.ut.10.or.at/site/index.html.

6. See www.theyesmen.org.

7. Amy Isackson, "State-of-the-Art Shoes Aid Migrants," BBC News (November 17, 2005), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4445342.stm.

8. Pablo Helguera, loc. cit.