Let’s speak to odd old ghost for a moment—the ghost of the readymade, yet to make its exit from the stage of art. Or is it that art has yet to exit the readymade, that the avant-gardist gesture constitutes an unsurpassable horizon of the art of our time? Exit ghost, exit stage: that would be the proposition. For the readymade is not simply one aesthetic strategy among others. It has for some time been regarded as a classic, a localised response to transnational curiosities taught as universal history, a recognisable sign within the system of legitimations according to which a given practice might be defined as ‘contemporary art’. But let’s give the readymade its due. Almost a century on from its stage debut – it was never anything other than a ghost, taking the form of the most modern and infantile of sanitary conveniences – the readymade maintains its significance. Indeed, its meaning seems to have accumulated over time. Whatever role its classical status may have played in this, in sustaining the audience’s attention, it is the readymade’s ghostly aspect that continues to harrow the world with fear and wonder.
The readymade is the afterlife of the commodity, that base unit of capitalist society, which, brought to exchange, obscures the conditions of its production by arousing in its audience extraordinary desires. It is not for nothing that Marx spoke of séances and Benjamin phantasmagoria when their studies of the capital came to the commodity and the cities and worlds built on its fetish. But if the commodity specializes in enchantment, the readymade operates through disenchantment. In death, the commodity becomes its own weird parody. The real rupture effected by the readymade was the introduction of a rhetorical dimension into a field formerly limited to the contemplation of autonomous objects. This was the category of the performative. The discovery of meaning in the relationship between the artistic gesture and the frameworks of interpretation, effectively the alteration of space over time, queerly mimicked the process by which ordinary objects of sensuous human production assume values far in excess of their simple usability.
Burn what you cannot steal is a preliminary sortie into this territory shared by the readymade and the commodity, one of the points at which art and topographies of the social intersect. Its gallery-based manifestation brings together the work of six artists, all of whose practices developed in the Asia Pacific region. This part of the world may be far from the cultural centres of Western Europe and North America, but its conceptions of the contemporary in art and the avant-garde in art history remain in thrall to their hegemonies. Contemporaneity has yet to divest itself of the expansionist and exoticising logics of modernity. Culture, in this sense, appears as another ghost of capital, here to remind us that the world is certainly not flat, that the flow of goods, information, finance and labour facilitated by so-called globalisation remains subject, as ever, to access and proximity to instruments of power. The structural barbarism of this process should not bear repeating, but still does. On this, Gene Ray is most eloquent: ‘We have not yet seen a world worthy of the name “postcolonial”, but nothing today is more urgent than our need to bring it into existence.’
The project’s title refers to the critique in acts that ensues when the complex of forces that the commodity structure holds in tension are brought to the point of explosion. As liberal responses to the recent London riots have shown, burning and looting is often read as the mindless destruction and reappropriation of property by a mass blissfully unaware of its own subjectivity, a tragically misdirected expression of social and economic isolation at best, a warts and all enactment of the values of system based on greed at worst. Without discounting the very real terror that accompanies such violence, it is possible to read the riots as a critique in acts of an urban geography constructed around the circulation of commodities. Looting is simply the logic of fetishism and abundance taken to its natural conclusion, desire held in abeyance for so long by separation from the means of its realization that the force of its inevitable explosion circumvents the niceties of exchange. Those who have read Debord properly will know that: ‘Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence.’
Naturally, the privileged stage of contemporary art, no matter how marginalized it might find itself in its geographic dispersal and in the creeping Bolognafication of the world, cannot match the poetic immediacy of burning and looting. But then the ghost of a warrior king serves a purpose other than extending and fortifying the borders of his land. This exhibition is aimed squarely at teasing out the contradictions of the commodity fetish, and in the process proposing new modes of production, circulation and exchange. The afterlife of the avant-garde, for all its own internal contradictions, provides fertile ground for a range of aesthetic strategies that may be applied to questions of authorship, agency, the production of value and the propriety of space, time objects and ideas. In the process it takes in geographical and linguistic authority, the still-problematic realms of representation, sexuality and race, proposing the body, the city and the symbolic field as objects ripe for reframing, reinterpretation and reuse.
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