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ecently read runo Latour s e Have ever

een odern, rom . d gotten the sense

rom talking to my more intellectually

conscientious riends that Latour had a lot to say

about the current moment, which eels generally

transitional; in particular, in art it seems an

in-between time descended a ter the economic

collapse, drawing to a close a period dominatedin my mind by, on the one hand, salable

neo ormalist work (however intellectually

 just i ied, howev er i mbric ated in c onsid erati ons o

process, however good and, on the other,

attempts to (re vivi y political action in art

(including the obsession with utopia and the

obsession with pedagogy . he book s aim is to

ind a way beyond the impasse that became clear

by the late s/early s between obviously

altering modernity and a seemingly dead-end

postmodernism. iven the passage o twenty

years, one would think we had moved beyond this

problem. ut in act the last decade s

reinvestigations o modernism in art have merely

served to reinscribe its visual lexicon. nd was

intrigued to ind parallels between Latour s

and our (the art world s , since the livelier

artwork have seen people making in attempts to

move orward recalls to me the late s/early

s, with ocuses on technology, the body and

their interactions—the ate o personhood

overall, in a mediatized age.

Latour seems to love breaking down knowledge

into visual ormats; e Have ever een odern

eatures numerous tables and diagrams. hile

perusing them realized that some o the

centrally important diagrams resembled those in

osalind rauss in ‘‘ culpture in the xpanded

ield ( , pr od uced in he r n ow -can on ical

attempt to account or the e orts o artists

ranging rom ol Le itt to obert mithson who

were developing work with new relationships to

rt and nature. rauss explicitly

or her diagramming method as

ommon in the ‘‘human sciences

Latour, who is a ‘‘human scienti

with the lein group, so amiliar

incorporated it into his own met

rauss and Latour, the goal is to

xpand upon a binary, and logicaway to move beyond the pair o

is to r angu a e . ( he lein grou

tack to orm our triangles, whe

t one. t s obvious when you th

terms o simple geometry, and i

baseline metaphor about the dev

ideas. wo points in opposition

et beyond them one adds a sec

the simplest structure o which

he methodology o this essay o

ollowing geometry: a circle with

rom every point along its edge w

dduces a new source. etapho

implies motion while, o course,

remaining static.

o then, today in art we ace a c

merge beyond a neomodernism

betted by the ctoberite art his

helped launch while avoiding a

pit alls o postmodernism, per s

numerates them—cynicism, de

mpirical act, a subjection o th

the technological, a play o sur a

imulacra without depth or being

language without meaning, an o

ollage as a mode o acture.

ut crises in art come and go; th

lways seems to be carrying on

ne crisis or another. To revisit

years in roughly chronological o

the death of modernism to which

responded, the growth of femini

rt, any o a number o deaths o

orrupt reigns o painting, the in

did earlier, without thinking o politics. he word

entered the meri can lexicon circa , when

resident ill linton success ully outwitted his

epublican opponents by plotting a course

between their right-wing positions and the

relatively le tward ones to which he had until that

time hewn. He ‘‘tacked toward the center, to

use another clich that seems to have been

minted at that time. nd so, given this history, it

is impossible to think o the term ‘‘triangulate in

the U. . in without thinking o the current

political circumstances, wherein the current

emocratic arty president, in a situation

seemingly very similar to one aced by the

previous emocrat in the hite House, appears

to be pursuing the same strategy: he is

triangulating, moving beyond a binaristic

opposition along (perhaps a new axis. ith

either a lein diagram or Latour s more

idiosyncratic ones, we Le t-leaning intellectuals

tend to view avorably the idea o myriad

in r igu ing ybri s appear ing a poin s be ween

polar viewpoin s. n con emporary poli ics,

owever—in e real wor l ra er an e

abstract—hybridity d/b/a compromise seems

abominable not just to us but to all parties

involved.

s much as the merican public loved linton,

they were always suspicious o him, to varying

degrees. he prominent presence o a hite

House cat, ocks, in addition to the customary

dog only rein orced the idea that he was a

sensualist or pervert, which you either ound

repellant or quietly cheered. either o his

successors has had a well-publicized cat, and ew

o his predecessors have. or me the only one

that rings a bell is my arter s iamese, isty

alarky ing ang.

eleuze, discovered recently, when inally

getting around to watching his abecedarian

inter view s ( – , b ro ad ca st p os th um ou sl y

– , hated pets. erhaps the main thingwas simply that, as he con essed, he did not like

being rubbed; his notoriously long ingernails

would seem to have been somehow related. ut

his stated objection was to the way that humans

interact with their dogs and cats; they typically

speak to them and otherwise treat them as i

they were human. n the other hand he was

clearly ascinated with wild animals; ‘‘becoming-

nimal is a cherished concept o his. nd he

pointed out in the ‘‘ or nimal interview that

it is possible or people to have a di erent kind

relationship with animals—to have animal

relationships with them.

erhaps today what is necessary or art is or

rtists to have an ‘‘animal relationship with it,

n its own terms, whatever, mindbendingly, that

ould be. t would entail relating to the object as

n object, to a more social or process-based work

s a kind o system body or node. he endpoint is

loss o sel or dispersal o it. he two types o

hinking that thus seem to me most salient at the

moment are phenomenology, in particular that

hich might broach a continuity between

psychological human subjects and more purely

physical matter, and writing about how humans

relate to technology. t is on this latter point that

a our as seeme impor an , enying e

undamental modern segregation o human and

nature, promoting speci ic analyses o the

ec nological ly imbr ica e en i ies a move ou

long a di erent axis, taking light into a new

erritory.

n depression, the world seems a remote,

iagrammatic place, composed o numerous

repetitive arrangements that vary in

mani estation over time and across whatever

ield one chooses to examine; one sees nothing

new coming into existence outside the static

orms one already knows. bstraction as an

intellectual maneuver is abetted by despair, then,

nd this study, which abstracts abstractions

(diagrams, metaphors , may well be a product o

he postmodernity that Latour so derides. t

ould make sense, given my age.

o close, an epigraph. n the most eloquent line

rom the last paragraph o e Have ever een

odern, Latour writes:

‘‘ t is up to us to change our ways o changing.

 

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   M   e   t   a   p    h   o   r ,

    C   o   n   t   e   m   p   o   r   a   r   y   A   r   t

 

   o   m   e   n    i   c

 

   m   m    i   r   a

    i

   r   u   c   u   r   e ,

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   r

No. | Spring/Summer A Contemporary Art Journal US CAN

         . 6 

 8  |        /      2  01 1 

                   

Architecture Is Not Art

Mary Ellen Carroll

Berend Strik

Paula Hayes & Florian Idenburg

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crank, orming/de orming/re orming the object

passing through with pressure and teeth.

eaching the point ‘‘where art gutters into pure

ashion, think o a igure rom another book

read recently, or the third or possibly ourth

time, Lolita. n the a terward abokov claims its

inspiration was a zoo ape who, ‘‘a ter months o

coaxing by a scientist to communicate visually,

produced a drawing o a series o vertical

bands—the bars o its cage. his, rauss , and

Latour s devices—hell, even mine—seem to me

equally heuristic.

everal years ago read ared iamond s uns,

erms, and teel a bestseller rom . t

contains no diagrams that remember— only

re reshed my memory o a missing copy with an

attempt to watch a horrible ational eographic

-documentary adaptation—but it does contain

useful metaphors.

he book, a work on human history and prehistory

by a paleontologist, attempts to explain why some

s oc ie ies s ucce e e a n s pr ea , u su al ly a e

expense o others they squeezed out or

conquered; the title summarizes the key actors,

with ‘‘steel, the least literal term, signi ying the

ability to specialize, develop cra ts and ultimatelydevelop bureaucracies thanks to the ood

surpluses o success ul arming. he

domestication o animals plays a key role in

building society and culture, or a couple o

reasons. bviously, it s less exhausting and

uncertain to tend animals or their lesh, hide,

and strength than to track them and kill or

capture them every time you need one.

secondary, counterintuitive reason, no less

important or competitive advantage, is or the

diseases they carry; the passing o parasite,

bacterium and virus rom animal to human that

occurs so readily in husbandry turned out to yield

valuable biological weapons wielded,

unconsciously or otherwise, by societies who

possessed domestic animals against those thatdid not. iseases to which those with animals had

developed immunity killed o peoples with whom

they came into contact who had not.

ontemporary art is not in obvious competition

with other modes o cultural production; it does

not come to the territories o ballet, the novel or

rama to conquer. ut it is meg

believing it can be anything and

it wants; and genres, meanwhile

immortal. he a orementioned h

past i ty years, say, and in this

have become extinct—vaudeville

oo-wop. eanwhile, one could

has become more popular and p

be ore, judging rom measures l

museum attendance i gures, rec

prices, record numbers o art ga

numbers o degree-granting pro

tudents or them. o then, i ou

ociety, art, has succeeded, it m

omesticating the wild animal o isease o aesthetic mutability i

been inoculated against. ontem

nything—a eature-length ilm,

hour ilm, a pop song, a per orm

lecture, a piece o theater—and

mong these orms are easily pa

onstraints built into the novel,

ance genres, etc., pilot them in

ownward spirals, with the best

ff at a drastically lower height.

change is a domestic animal in

the art world, so too are all its m

turned to eeding the belly and d

the economy. Lapdog revolutio

won give you rabies. e gorillage bars, or draws them. here

that something rom outside art

omething wild—could really sin

which is why the ield s porousn

specially at the moment, wheth

el -aware return to op conten

ppropriation o its new orms.

new ‘‘postmodern —that is, t

nother ossi ied cultural ormat

ontinuing modern age—seems

he inherent risk is that it is ar

n artistic practice o expedition

territories o exotic subcultures

s . nd in the end, despite

process rather than product, pre

oal-oriented ways o being, andenuine decadence, no artist k

make work that seems easy.

t is impossible, at least writing

United tates, to use the term ‘‘

identity-based work and identity politics, the

crisis in criticism, the enslavement to the market

and now the market s crash.

his sequence, seemingly endless, put me in mind

o the book currently on the loor next to my

girl riend s bed, he hock octrine by aomi

lein. only read the introduction, but ve heard

lein on the radio and read a ew interviews and

pro iles that detail her ideas, and my girl riend

explained the rest. he book s thesis is that, to

denude the state and create new economic

opportunities, corporatist cabals will take

advantage o any opportunity to implement their

so-called re orms, and that the state o disorderbrought about by disaster o ers rich and

explicitly sought-a ter ground or such societal

reengineering. Logically, then, a state o

permanent crisis, and the authoritarian measures

it justi ies, would be the ideal expression o this

particular harmony o state and business.

hough he hock octrine is only four years old,

it paradoxically seems archaic because of its

reactive and semijournalistic nature. ts ties to

‘‘the real,’’ the specific, the concrete are what

m os a e i — an a re a ls o w a ma e i s ee m

practically immoral to adduce its discussions o

e lec ros oc experimen s, or ure in

rgentina, etc., in a discussion o transitions in

aesthetics in the less-dire arena o the art world.ut what the uck. key notion o the arxian art

theory that ed the last decade s boomlet in

institutional critique is that our microcosmic

society, art, holds within it all the traits and

pathologies o the macrocosm (rather like the

way interpersonal psychotherapy launched by

Henry tack ullivan ocuses on the interaction at

hand, that o therapist and patient, as the site o

modeling and changing behavior . Ultimately,

lein s book rests on the uncontroversial notion

that upheaval produces economic opportunity, a

corollary o the amiliar idea that capitalism and

revolution are intertwined. erhaps the perpetual

state o revolution that the modern era ushered

in, with its view o time and history as

progressive and innovation as the societalmetabolism, is an expression o its economic

substrate. r perhaps the two exist independently

to mutually rein orce. egardless, art s segue

rom one crisis and revolt into the next igures

the state o permanent crisis that represents

capitalism s highest dream o itsel .

n recent times—the last twenty or thirty years,

ay—art has used crisis in a particularly well-

omesticated way; it harnesses it or the long

run. ads prove brie ly dominant but don t kill o

ny single mode o expression, thanks in part to

he ba ling maneuvers o irony and its m se-en- 

byme  re ractions—ironization, deironization and

reironization, to bastardize illes eleuze and

lix uattari s housand lateaus (or

bugger it, as eleuze would have it . he wild

pro usion o styles deemed legitimate working

modes in contemporary art—one can today ind

masters and champions o monochromatic

painting and expressionistic painting, art engag

nd comedic/scatological per ormance andbstract philosophizing brunted in material,

extual or other orm—ensures that new

piphenomena are consistently available on the

basis o which new microrevolutions can always

ccur.

he ‘‘permanent crisis o contemporary art is

holly logical, then, and its diagnosis familiar.

hen one severs innovation from the idea of

progress, a shimmering array of styles comes

into being, all of them equally legitimate; it’s the

xcrucia ingly nic e con emporary consumer

mar e place. e are bac a e cynical, collage

impasse o Latour s loathed postmodernism,

here art gutters into pure ashion, subject to

easona l varia ion an no ing more .

should be embarrassed to admit this, but it had

never occurred to me prior to this writing to see

‘‘ culpture in the xpanded ield as propounding

kind o structuralism; rom a student s

perspective, its contribution seemed its reportage

history, and on subsequent reads admired its

rigor and clarity. oday, to me it seems explicitly

o be the imposition o yet another abstract

rganizational device on yet another ormless

body or span, with the ultimate goal, seemingly,

being ‘‘understanding or the production o

knowledge. rauss igure is the lein diagram;

Latour s are triangulations and bi urcated spaces.n a passage o this essay have since cut, my

imagination ran to reek myth, cylla and

harybdis, to produce the image o artists

traiting today s impasse. his image runs very

imilar to one o the machine age—the extrusion

matter rom between two gears turned by a

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   M   e   t   a   p    h   o   r ,

    C   o   n   t   e   m   p   o   r   a   r   y   A   r   t

 

   o   m   e   n    i   c

 

   m   m    i   r   a

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