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)

If it does not look like art, what does spy art look like? When the French collective Bureau d'Etudes produces cognitive maps detailing information, power, and influence networks (which they distribute in contexts where such autonomizing cartographic information may be empowering such as demonstrations, social forums, etc.), there is nothing indicating that the maps have anything to do with art. (5) Of course, if one thinks about the extraordinary intricacy--and no less remarkable legibility--of the map design, one cannot help but concede that they are informed by graphic design skills. Yet, situated outside the legitimating frame of the artworld, from which they have freed themselves financially and ideologically, they lay no claim to artistic status and as such are diametrically opposed to Emmanuel Kant's "purposeless purpose" of aesthetic delectation: their use value is clearly the production of autonomous knowledge. It would be a mistake to reduce Bureau d'Etudes' work to graphic design alone; the maps are not an end in themselves, but an art-informed contribution to a far broader resistance to the transnational production line. Unfolding the map, one is confronted with an almost dizzying accumulation of information; however, bewilderment quickly yields to fascination and--thanks to the index of proper names on the back of the map--the desire to investigate these unnoticed ties of power more carefully.

The maps designed by Bureau d'Etudes have often been compared to the wonderfully detailed maps hand-drawn by the late New York artist Mark Lombardi. The information presented is indeed comparable, but after all, the information is all publicly available and verifiable and appears seditious only because the links are seldom explicitly drawn. The difference lies in the contrasting artistic status of the two projects, and the entirely different gaze to which that status leads: while Lombardi produced unique artworks whose coefficient of artistic visibility was consequently maximal, Bureau d'Etudes batch-print and distribute their maps by the thousands, inviting an entirely different perception.

A group like the Yes Men, too, owe their efficacy to their deliberately low coefficient of artistic visibility and what might be referred to as their delayed disclosure tactics. By closely mimicking the rhetoric and style of the corporate and bureaucratic institutions they wish to infiltrate and expose--through the creation of fake-functional Web sites and fictional press releases--they are able to gain ephemeral access to the corridors, just as a spy would, where they are able to engage in what they refer to as "tactical embarrassment." The most spectacular example of this type of embarrassment to date is their four-minute live interview on the BBC World News on December 3, 2004, where Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum impersonated Dow Chemical spokesman Jude Finisterra on the twentieth anniversary of the catastrophic industrial accident in Bhopal, India. (6)

A number of other examples of spy art could be mentioned, but they inevitably give rise to the objection that its coefficient of art is simply too low. As an art critic, I am not unfamiliar with the idea that art can have use value without concealing its art status or impairing its visibility as art. Indeed, for people who like that sort of thin--like the hermeneutical spectators who spend their time in museums and galleries, a strong case can be made that the highly self-reflexive and carefully composed works put on display in those spaces truly do produce use value by shifting the partition lines of sense-based cognition. This particular line of thought has been pursued persuasively by Ranciere, who believes that it is misguided to try to give art efficacy (use value) by having it infiltrate into the real as something it is not. Art does not need to be politicized, he contends, any more than politics needs to be aestheticized or indeed artialised, because both art and politics are about shifting partition lines between, for instance, music and noise. However, while this may be true for the elite, if art were able to do much damage to the dominant order of signs without leaving its autonomous spaces, we would be aware of it. It was a major conquest for art to eke out within the public sphere autonomous spaces and times (museums, etc.) for its deployment; however, today these spaces have become a way of bracketing off art, effectively de-fanging it. It is on this basis that I feel art needs to avoid artworld framing devices. I also sense that many artists today feel that intuition, although many shy away from taking the necessary steps toward a genuine stealth art practice--one that requires forsaking artwork, authorship, and spectatorship.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Helguera raised a telling counterexample, which is worth considering in some detail. In 1995, at the last "in-Site" (a public art project on the Tijuana, Mexico/San Diego, California, border), artist Judi Werthein, in a project entitled "Jump/Brinco," produced a running shoe called Brinco. They were distributed at no cost to border crossers and at the same time sold in expensive San Diego stores. (7) The shoe was publicized as an art project, which at a practical level served a purpose for border crossers who used the shoes to cross the border, and at the symbolic level calling attention to migration issues. As Helguera wrote,

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[the] fact that it was "just an art project" did not seem to deter the

press from taking an interest in the event, nor did it dampen the

enthusiasm of the immigrants that got the shoes. Most likely it did

not succeed commercially, but I would argue that it still had quite an

effect without relinquishing its identity as art. For the crossers I

would assume it did not make a difference whether the shoe was art or

not--I bet all they cared about was that they were getting useful,

free sneakers. While I believe you are right in saying that art tends

to paint itself into a corner ... don't you think that the use-value

of art lies not on whether it hides or publicizes its identity as art,

but in the actual responses of the external public? Don't you think

that art as we understand it in the conventional sense, and the art

that may only operate at the symbolic realm can still have real

effects without adopting a secret identity? (8)

Werthein's project is an intriguing but somewhat pedestrian hybrid of art and interventionism, for it seems as if art were duty-bound to uphold its coefficient of artistic visibility--keeping one foot in the artworld--while at the same time seeking to satisfy its aspiration to intervene in the real. As I see it, this approach inevitably has a number of pitfalls, all of which are due to the dramatic discrepancies in the balance of power between the institution of art and the institution of state power, and between the symbolic capital of artists and that of immigrants.

Fundamentally, the project is a classic case of consciousness raising--using art's symbolic means to draw attention to an unfair situation. It has little to do with art assuming the sort of duplicitous ontological identity I am talking about: its self-sustaining economy was unreal and could only be sustained by an injection of capital from the artworld. And though media attention may lead people to talk about the event and the issue, their conclusion will inevitably be: this artist and doubtless others like her are against United States border policy and have empathy for poor migrants--scarcely something liable to shake any extant semiotic order. But it is potentially worse still, in that the real winner in this relational aesthetic contrivance is inevitably the artist; she is the only one whose name is mentioned (the immigrants are anonymous), the only one in a position to accumulate more symbolic capital by having the artworld rave about her social engagement. In that respect, the shoes she "gave" the border crossers were no "gift" at all--they were a calculated investment on her part, part of a symbolically lucrative exchange economy that she initiated, managed, and in which the shoe-recipients merely played, all too literally, a walk-on part.

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.