Cuauhtmoc Medina and Mariana Botey Page 8

Francesco Pellizzi Page 4CritiCal fetishes residues of general eConomy

Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. From May 26 to August 29

Critical Fetishes. Residues of General Economy is the first installment of The Red Spec-ters projects. The collection of interventions presented here are argued as an interpellation and a reply to the logic of the market, which has managed to assimilate the neo-avant-garde project of the dematerialization of the art work and the conse-quent formalization and reduc-tion of Conceptual practices. We have taken it upon ourselves to excavate an alternative ar-chive of poetic, theoretical and political strategies that recuper-ate, in a double movement, the ambivalence and complexity of the category of the fetish as the center of critical theorization of market society, and at the same time emphasize the fact that the notion itself emerges as a key concept of the relationship be-tween Enlightenment thought and colonialism. Given that the

problem of the fetish occupies the intersection of a colonial imaginary with the production of different discourses and rep-ertoires of analysis where a dis-located, spectral image of the economy is situated, we advance the premise that its displace-ment and radical inversion will conduct us to its theoretical nu-cleus and the possibility of un-drawing the limitsboth real and poeticof its phenomenol-ogy; that is, of its experience with regards to theoretical and aesthetic fictions within art and capitalism. The show Critical Fetishes.Residues of General Economy brings together works and proj-ects by more than twenty art-ists who pointedly, diversely and tentatively elaborate poet-ic investigations of economies founded in heterogeneity, both of exchange and of productive

Page 3

In Defense of the Fetish

Pastures of the Underground

Key texts on FetishismKarl Marx Page 86

Page 96

Communication: Toward an Architecture. Post-Industrial Anamorphosis. Aprs Salvador Dal

May 2010Madridyear 1 issue 1 $000

Karl Marx (1852)If any section of history has been painted gray on gray, it is this. Men and events appear as reverse Schlemihls, as shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution itself paralyzes its own bearers and endows only its adversaries with passion-ate forcefulness. When the red specter, continually conjured up and exercised by the coun-terrevolutionaries finally ap-pears, it appears not with the Phrygian cap of anarchy on its head, but in the uniform of or-der, in red breeches.

From the Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Bataille, Documents and the Notion of SacrificeDawn Ades Page 5

Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley Page 82

Georges Bataille and Documents

Vanished AmericaGeorges Bataille Page 80

May 2010The red specTer 2 May 2010The red specTer 3

processes established within a logic of loss, expenditure or di-lapidation. These works, which appeal to an apparent economic irrationality, form the spinal cord of an interrogation of the relationships between desire and production as well estab-lished notions of development, underdevelopment, and effi-ciency. As opposed to a reading of a capitalism in crisis, the art-ists and reflections in this an-thology present and mount a mise-en-scne of the allegory of a savage, primitive capitalism that implodes and goes mad in its effort to commensurate de-sire with object: following the allegorical reading, desires in-evitable overflowing of the ob-ject would escape all calculation and all symbolic transposition. The operations traced out here diagram a residual zone of dis-turbance wherein an other economy would seem to be transformed and to manifest itself as emergent and poten-tially dangerous to the system. In an open discrepancy with the melancholy character of contemporary reflection, Criti-cal Fetishes seeks to exhibit the means by which a variety of recent artistic interventions have invoked a constant politi-cal and aesthetic transgres-sion, wherein the notion of the fetish manipulates and rear-ranges the fictions of utility, equivalent exchange and the rationality of investment. All the interventions and works compiled in Critical Fetishes explore the complex, variegat-ed economic system of capital-ism, in the North as well as the South, as a system open to frac-tures and paradoxes, which art exploits in its poetic search for forms of practical and intellec-tual dissidence. Inspired in large part by Georges Batailles intuitions about a general economy, as this was inaugurated in The Notion of Expenditure (1933) and later developed in The Ac-cursed Share (1950), as well as by reflections on the notion of the fetish by authors like William Pietz and Marx him-self, Critical Fetishes seeks to overcome the abjectionist de-scription of the effects of capi-talisms crisis, and to expose the way in which artistic work invokes moments of anti-pro-duction, de-activates the myths of development and puts the art object into operation as an object of desire and subversion. In this sense, the show takes a position against the identifica-tion of dematerialization with de-fetishization, as the domi-nant critical operation, in favor

of rescuing the power of conta-gion and dissemination of the contemporary art fetish-object. The exhibition thus creates a constellation of art objects that displaces and de-centers rea-son and calculation as the dom-inant way of thinking about the economy, in the hope of gener-ating an as yet unknown politi-cal experience. We have pursued the intu-ition that a critical fetishism would be one that understands its compulsion as a perversion of heterogeneity that becomes metastasized as it aims to in-terrupt the circuits of symbol-ic transposition and that this activity would highjack and hamper their functioning

Sincerely,

The Red Specter Curator of Public EnlightenmentMexico City

Statement:The Red Specter quotes and retrieves a figure from Karl Marxs Eighteenth Brumaire (1852) that appeals to the phantasmal condition of revolution, which would seem to prevail from that moment on as an apparatus central to capitals operations of hegemonic terror. But alsoalthough somewhat more opaquelyThe Red Specter recites Hugo and reminds us of the evidently continuous phantasmal condition of justice and violence: A mile from there, at the corner of Rue du Temple [] rose this obstruction, which made of the street a cul-de-sac; an immovable and quiet wall, nobody could be seen, nothing could be heard, not a cry, not a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre [] the chief of the barricade was a geometer or a spectre [] The barricade St. Antoine was a tumult of thunders, the barri-cade du Temple was silence. There was between these two redoubts the difference between the terrible and the ominous. The one seemed a gapping mouth, the other a mask. Victor Hugo, Les Misrables, Partie 5. Jean Valjean. Livre 1. La Guerre entre quatre murs. V, 1, 1. La Charybde

The Regional Government of Madrid is delighted to present the exhibition Critical Fetishes. Residues of General Economy, which will be on display at the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo this summer. On its sec-ond anniversary, the Centre con-tinues to programme events that explore the ways in which art interacts with other phenom-ena of modern society. While on previous occasions the narra-tive threads of exhibitions have invited us to reflect on the role of cars in contemporary culture or the relationship between the music and art of countercul-ture, the central theme of this new show is the economy. The current economic reces-sion has affected our countrys entire productive and social structure, and it is against this backdrop that the exhibition curators invite us to engage in a profound reflection on the very meaning of our economic system. Through the work of approximately 20 artists from around the world, the exhibi-tion analyses the operation and validity of the concept of ratio-nality applied to economic ex-changes. The work of many of these artists is somewhat sur-prising in that their strategies defy the most fundamental rules of utilitarian logic, offer-ing instead proposals which, expressed in the language of art, confront us with unexpect-ed realities. With its solid discourse shaped by a meticulous analysis of the

different art projects featured in the show, Critical Fetishes rein-forces the lines of research pur-sued by the CA2M. The project has come to fruition thanks to the intense efforts of the three curators from the El Espectro Rojo collective: Mariana Botey, Helena Chvez and Cuauht-moc Medina. The exceptional quality of their proposal and its development in the subse-quent phases of the project, which will take place in Mex-ico, are a source of enormous satisfaction for all of us, and I am deeply grateful for all their work. Another notable aspect of this exhibition is the large number of new works that have been produced specifically for the show. Here at the Regional Gov-ernment of Madrid, we believe that the construction of contem-porary culture requires collabo-ration between creators and institutions, and encouraging the production of new works is one of our top priorities. I would also like to thank everyone who has made this exhibition possible and the par-ticipating artists in particular. Their extraordinary involve-ment and dedication to the proj-ect have greatly enriched the Centre and, naturally, all those who visit it.

Critical fetishes

acknowledgements

From Page 1 du faubourg Saint-Antoine et la Scylla du faubourg du Temple: A un quart de lieue de l, de langle de la rue Vieille-du-Tem-ple [] se dressait ce barrage qui faisait de la rue un cul-de-sac; mur immobile et tranquille; on ny voyait personne, on ny entendait rien; pas un cri, pas un bruit, pas un souffle. Un spulcre. [] On sentait que le chef de cette barricade tait un gomtre ou un spectre. [] La barricade Saint-Antoine tait le tumulte des tonnerres; la barricade du Temple tait le silence. Il y avait entre ces deux redoutes la diffrence du formidable au sinistre. Lune semblait une gueule; lautre un masque.

Isabel Rosell VolartManaging Director of Archives, Museums and Libraries Region of Madrid

This exhibition was organized by the Vice Ministry, Regional Ministry of Culture and Sports and Government Spokesperson-ship, General Office of Archives, Museums and Libraries of the Community of Madrid.

Vice-President, Regional Minister of Culture and Sports, and Spokesperson for the Government Ignacio Gonzlez Gonzlez

Regional Deputy Minister of Culture Concha Guerra Martnez

Managing Director of Archi-ves, Museums and Libraries Isabel Rosell Volart

Deputy Managing Director of Museums Andrs Carretero Prez

Fine Arts Adviser Carlos Urroz Arancibia

Head of Press for the Regional Ministry of Culture Pablo Muoz

Press Office for the Regional Ministry of Culture Lara Snchez Milagros Goslvez Timanfaya Custodio CA2M CENTRO DE ARTE DOS DE MAYO Director Ferran Barenblit

Collection Asuncin Lizarazu de Mesa Mara Eugenia Arias Estvez Carmen Fernndez Fernndez Mara Eugenia Blzquez Rodrguez

Production Ignacio Macua Roy Casilda Ybarra Satrstegui Laura Arroyo Fernndez

Diffusion Mara Canela Fraile Laura Hurtado Isabel Garca Gil

Education and Outreach Pablo Martnez Carlos Granados del Valle Victoria Gil-Delgado Armada Mara Eguizabal Elas

Management and Administration Mar Gmez Hervs Olvido Martn Lpez Sonsoles Rubes

Media Collection Beatriz Garca Rodrguez

Av. Constitucin 23 28931 Mstoles, Madrid +34 91 276 02 13 www.ca2m.org

EXHIBITION Critical Fetishes. Residues of General Economy CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo May 26 - August 29, 2010

Curated by: The Red Specter (Through its Commissariat of Public Enlightenment: Mariana Botey, Helena Chvez Mac Gregor and Cuauhtmoc Medina) espectrorojo@gmail.com www.espectrorojo.com

Curatorial Assistant ngela Cuahutle Navarro

Graphic Design and Exhibition Image S consultores en diseo S.C., Mexico www.ese.com.mx

Editorial Coordinator Ekaterina lvarez Romero

Participating Artists A Kassen, Maria Thereza Alves, Francis Als, Mart Anson, Karmelo Bermejo, Mariana Botey-Cuauhtmoc Medina, Miguel Caldern, Duncan Campbell, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Andrea Fraser, Fran Ilich, Fritzia Irizar, Jota Izquierdo (in collaboration with Abel Carranza), Roberto Jacoby-Fernanda Laguna, Alfredo Jaar, Magdalena Jitrik, Teresa Margolles, M & X, Raqs Media Collective, Vicente Razo, Gustavo Romano, Bea Schlin-gelhoff, Guillermo Santamarina, Santiago Sierra, Judi Werthein and Federico Zukerfeld THE RED SPECTER Journal of Agitation and Enlightenment www.espectrorojo.com

Editors of this issue 1 of The Red Specter Ekaterina lvarez Romero Cuauhtmoc Medina

Editorial Design S consultores en diseo S.C., Mexico www.ese.com.mx

The Teatro Sincrtico-Esotri-co [Esoteric-Syncretic Thea-ter], which serves as the masthead of this publication, is a work of multiple plagia-rism by S, based on the effigy of The Red Specter, originally designed by Vicente Razo

Spanish Translations Manuel Hernndez Jaime Soler Frost

English Translations Christopher Fraga Lorna Scott Fox

Revision and Correction of Texts Ekaterina lvarez Jaime Soler Frost

Supervision and Production S consultores en diseo S.C.

Printer Cobrhi S.L. Grupo Arvato Print Ibrica This publication was made in conjunction with the exhibi-tion Critical Fetishes. Residues of General Economy at the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in the Region of Madrid.

Compilation (including the selection, positioning and order of the texts and images)

First edition, 2010

Copyright 2010 by CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Community of Madrid. Copyright 2010 by The Red Specter [El Espectro Rojo].

Documents [Documentos] Copyright 2006 by Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley. Originally published as the Introduction to Dawn Ades and Simon Baker (eds.), Undercover Surrealism , Cambridge-London, The MIT Press and Hayward Gallery.

LAmerique disparue [Van-ished America] Copyright 2010 by Julie Bataille.

The Red Specter wishes to ex-press its gratitude to the peo-ple and institutions that, in one way or another, have made the many phases and incarna-tions of this project possible. To all the artists who have participated in this exhibition. To all those who, in many ways, contributed to the advancement of this project: Dawn Ades; Jul-ie Bataille; Bruce High Quality Foundation; Irene Bradbury, White Cube; Jorge Camacho; Vc-tor Hugo Chacn Ferrey; Manuel Calvo Rojas; Claire Fontaine; Pi-lar Garca, curare, Mxico; Jan Hendrix; Helena Hernndez, former director of the Tlaxcala Museum of Art; Cristina Faesler, Mexico City Museum; Chris-tiane Hajj, Mexico Citys Historic Down town Foundation and Casa Vecina; Gabriel Hrner, Quer-taro City Museum; Brian Jungen; Juan Pablo Macas; Inti Muoz, Mexico Citys Historic Down-town Trust; Francesco Pellizzi, Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, Harvard Univer-sity Press; Juan de Dios Ram-rez Heredia; Pablo Torre de Alba;

Yassir Zrate Mndez, former head of Outreach at the Tlaxcala Museum of Art; Laura de la Coli-na, Danish Embassy Madrid. Biblioteca Social Reconstruir; Preiswert; des-bordes journal, Red de Conceptualismos del Sur; Pa-tronato de Arte Contemporneo, pac Mxico; Maisterravalbuena Galera, Madrid; Prometeogal-lery di Ida Pisani, Miln; Galera Oliva Arauna, Madrid; Kasey Ka-plan, New York; hotel, London; Toni Tpies Gallery, Barcelona; it (Imprenta de los Trpicos), Pe-ter Kilchmann Galerie, Zrich; Sales del Centro. To the institutions that em-ploy the curators, for authoriz-ing their participation: cenidiap- inba (Mariana Botey); University Museum of Contemporary Art, muac, unam (Helena Chvez Mac Gregor); and Institute of Aes-thetic Research, unam (Cuauht-moc Medina). To the participants in the Zones of Disturbance group, and to the Holy Blind Child of the Capuchins, Puebla, patron saint of critics, curators and historians of radical art.

Pastures of the Underground Copyright 2008 by Francesco Pellizzi. Originally published in: The Bruce High Quality Foundation & Other Ideas, Brooklyn, NY. The Bruce High Quality Foundation Univer-sity Press. All texts are Copyright their authors

The images of the works published in this number are courtesy of the artists except otherwise indicated

All images are Copyright their authors

All texts by Karl Marx and their respective translations are shared through a creative commons license. cc by-sa www.marxists.org Legal deposit: All rights reserved. This publication may not be photocopied nor reproduced in any medium or by any method, in whole or in part, without the written authoriza-tion of the authors.

PResentatIon

Fly

er h

and

ed o

ut

in M

exic

o C

ity,

200

9

May 2010The red specTer 4 May 2010The red specTer 5

Francesco Pellizzi

PastuRes of the undeRgRound

There was once, in the moun-tains of Chiapas, the earth lord. People would sometimes dare to go visit him in the bow-els of the earth, entering the darkness through remote caves and making offerings and sac-rifices to him there. He was immensely rich, the owner of precious metals and the dis-penser of agricultural bounty (water, as clouds, rain and springsas well as thunder and lightningdid come from the mountains). Double-heart-ed people seeking extra-human powers would go so far as to sell him the souls of otherssometimes even close rela-tivesin exchange for his favor. Even in post-Colonial times, he was still, after all, the Yahval Balamil, once Lord of the Un-derworld, and one of the arbi-ters of life and death.

This text, written for the installa-tion Beyond Pastoral (in Exit Art, New York, 2008) of the artistic col-lective Bruce High Quality Foun-dation, was originally published under the pseudonym Z.L., in the book accompanying the retrospec-tive exhibition of BHQF at the Su-san Inglett Gallery, New York, May 2008 (The Bruce High Quality Foundation & Other Ideas, Brook-lyn, NY: The Bruce High Quality Foundation University Press, 2008, pp. 149-151). It is published here for the first time revealing the au-thorship of Francesco Pellizzi.

lemons, no matter how energetic and enlightening)quite unlike those extravagantly monstrous dancing masks, astonishingly earth-shaking these, whose harmlessness was only discov-ered, learned and conquered, by the trial of fright endured. We have come full circle, from the spirit-infested (and spirit-transforming) claustrophobia of the primitive initiation hut to the desolate agoraphobia of busy urban installations and the aphasia of graffiti walls. It is again a medieval time of concepts and illustration (neo-enluminures), transitions and transmutations, clerici vagantes (or jet-proletariat, as one of them labeled himself) and cor-porate (globally) wandering knights, lime-lights and witch hunts, comforting terror and museo-graphic horror, crusades and letters-of-credit, unfathom-able debts and invisible wealth, regionalism and universality. Can we now expect, from all this, the rise of a new (post-pastoral) Renaissance? It would be the third for us, in the Westafter the cave-dwelling Paleo-lithic one, that of the temple- bound smiling marbles of the 5th Century B.C., and the one we have invented to ennoble the pedigree of our modernity. But

The journey to Him was dan-gerous, and neither a safe return nor the double-edged daytime consequences of the hypogeal visit were guaran-teed by the gifts. In the present age of wholesale import of ho-mogenized maize, he may still be there down below (nobody knows for certain), and if so, feeling rather lonely atop a heap of now worthless riches. The people, seeking wealth or survival, these days travel far to the North where the sun ris-es lower on the horizon half of the year, sometimes also never to return. A world of ups and downs, of ascent and descent between the peaks above and the abysses below, of trance and daring plunges into the depths of the mountains (and of the heart), has shifted for them to one of flatness, wan-dering and exile, of temporary closeness and unlimited hori-zontal remoteness, and to the world of virtual long-distance communication. But it is a world, though well Beyond Pastoral, still fueled from be-low by minerals (at astronomi-cal human and natural cost), and the old hypogeal Mother/Father of Wealth is now prod-ded to reveal and release them by sensitive instruments gaug-ing electrical waves (like little bolts of lightning turned up-side down) and intrusive drills, so that the wealth of the earth

has acquired a new mechanical (though no longer metaphysical) remotenessforeshadowed by Jules Verneand is only acces-sible through the control and manipulation of technical and privileged information (a paro-dy of archaic esoteric knowledge) in which things-from-below have been stripped of their in-trinsic value and have acquired instead a virtual and abstract (monetary) one. This surplus of abstraction is also attached to the nature and status of the modern art objectnot a fetish any longer because it is devoid of any in-trinsic power, i.e., of the capac-ity to scarepace all the avant-gardes and their sup-posedly patants exploits (all

The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Beyond Pastoral, 2007

first, it would seem, the authorthe one who once went into the cave, the temple, the chapel, or the palace, and then retreated into the squalor of the atelier (this counterpart of the as-phyxiating parlor and salon)is bound to vanish once more, this time in a flurry of collec-tivity of play, and un-sheepish pastoral anonymity.

In 1975, in Sesto San Giovanni (Milan), Gordon Matta-Clark, right after talking to a group of Lotta Continua sympathizers who had squatted in an aban-doned factory, drew hammer-and-sickles in his notebooks, as matrices for some future anarchi-tectural interventions. Shortly thereafter, Andy Warhol produced his own hammer-and-sickle series, where sometimes the bond between the symbols of work-that-sets-you-free is loosened and they become al-most unrecognizablelike flow-ers beyond fading. He then met with Joseph Beuys in Europe, and made a diamond-dust por-trait of him. Half a decade lat-eras his fortunes reached the sky and not long before he left for greener pasturesWarhol pictured himself with his wig-hair standing on end, as if he had just seen the ghost of the Earth Lord himself while look-ing into his own mirror. Then, the year after Warhols demise, and shortly before his own, a distraught Jean-Michel Bas-quiat represented himself as some avatar of Rembrandts Pol-ish Rider, crossing the waste-lands of a uniform silver (plata) field as a transparent red Cy-clops on a white skeletal horse (he called the painting, Riding with Death). At the other end of this transatlantic talesome-time before Titian excruciat-ingly alluded to his old-artist condition, and tragic pride, in Pragues Flaying of MarsyasMichelangelo Buonarroti, also quite wealthy (as well as no-toriously parsimonious) for an artist of his time, had already looked into the empty eye of the Underworld when he hung his own bodiless hide, in the guise of the martyr, St. Bartho-lomew, smack in the middle of the richest of his papal com-missions, the Sistine Chapels Last Judgment.

Dawn Ades

BataIlle, Documentsand the notIonof sacRIfIceIdentifying and explaining a general theory of sacrifice had been one of the goals of anthro-pology, ethnography and soci-ology since the late 19th century. In the pages of the magazine Documents (1929-30), Georges Bataille, together with writers and intellectuals such as Mi-chel Leiris and Robert Desnos,

assembled an extraordinary range of materials, art and ar-tefacts from every continent, from many cultures and from every epoch from the Neolithic to the present day and wrote about them in terms that vio-lently disrupted the sober dis-course of these relatively new social sciences. The nature and

meaning of sacrifice was a pre-occupation that Bataille later explored in texts such as Sac-rifices and The Notion of Ex-penditure, and in his review Acphale, as a basic human need, like fetishism, that was irreducible to notions of pro-ductive utility. Documents pre-sented not only the ancient or distant examples studied by anthropologists but contempo-rary expressions in popular art and culture that witness its survival and distortions in mo-dernity, whether as regressive superstition, as in Eisensteins The General Line, or in disguise, as in the offerings to the tinsel deities of Hollywood that Ba-taille described in Les lieux de plerinage: Hollywood (Places of pilgrimage, Documents 5, 1929). LAmrique disparue, (Extinct America), the first es-say in which Batailles deep personal involvement in what he later called the insubordi-nate function of full expendi-ture coloured his analysis of

Doc

um

ents

, 193

0, n

r. 4

May 2010The red specTer 6 May 2010The red specTer 7

sacrifice, was published a year before Documents began, in Lart prcolombien, a special issue of the Cahiers de la re-publique des lettres, des sci-ences et des arts. His contention that sacrifice in Aztec society was accompanied with expres-sions of joy and that death was a source of black humour was based on the vivid conjunction of flowery celebration and vio-lence in Aztec descriptions and depictions of heart sacrifice, which resonated with his own perception of the combination of liberation and horror in the act of sacrifice, however medi-ated or truncated in a contem-porary godless world. Batailles essay is strikingly out of key with the contribution to the Cahiers by the young ethnog-rapher Alfred Mtraux, Ce qui

reste des grandes civilisa-tions de lAmrique. Mtraux eschews discussion of the spec-tacular and sensational prac-tices of a lost civilisation in favour of a more modern inves-tigation of their material and literary remains, a discussion of the intellectual achieve-ments of the codices and an assessment of the contempo-rary survival of independent languages and beliefs (Les vie-illes races ne sont pas mortes). In ethnographic terms Batailles obsession with sacrifice seems outdated, but it evidently had more to do with his ongoing in-terest in the human impulses expressed by sacrificial acts than in an interest in Pre-Co-lumbian civilisations per se. The real successor to LAmrique disparue is his essay in the last

issue of Documents, Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent van Gogh, rather than Roger Hervs Sacrifices humains du Centre-Amrique (Documents 4, 1930). The latter dismisses the exaggerated de-scriptions of human sacrifice by the 16th century Spaniards, and relates it, in line with con-temporary theories of sacrifice in archaic societies, to the widespread idea of reciprocal exchange between gods and man, the gift of blood in return for fertility and the continua-tion of the seasons. For Bataille the interest of sacrifice and sacrificial mutilation such as van Goghs severing of an ear and other examples, across the centuries, of automutilation, lies in their searing evidence, even if now pathological, of

psychological needs that pre-cede such accepted religious mechanisms as propitiation and exchange. In fact, seen from this perspective, the radical jux-tapositions in Documents of popular culture, crime maga-zines, primitive masks and so on are concerned less with ex-posing the loss of a religious di-mension to modern life, with the emptiness of heaven, than re-ciprocally with the evidence that apparently god-ridden societies fearful of the sacred were fundamentally pow-ered by actions that empha-sised the conundrum of human existence and its inescapable bodily frailty.

Doc

um

ents

, 193

0, n

r. 4

Doc

um

ents

, 193

0, n

r. 4

May 2010The red specTer 8 May 2010The red specTer 9

Cuauhtmoc Medina and Mariana Botey

In defense of the fetIshThe authors would like to point out that a large part of the deve-lopment of this work emerged while leading the Zones of distur-bance seminar in 2009, a joint project of the Graduate Program in Art History at the Department of Philosophy and Letters, and of the Expanded campus program at the University Museum of Con-temporary Art (muac), both part of the National Autonomous Univer-sity of Mexico (unam).

The majority of mankind has given its consent to the in-dustrial enterprise, and what presumes to go on existing it gives the impression of a de-throned sovereign. It is clear that the majority of mankind is right: compared to the in-dustrial rise, the rest is insig-nificant. Doubtless this majority has let itself be re-duced to the order of things. But this generalized reduc-tion, this perfect fulfillment of the thing, is the necessary condition for the conscious and fully developed posing of the problem of mans reduc-tion to thinghood. Only in a world where the thing has re-duced everything, where what was once opposed to it reveals the poverty of equivo-cal positionsand inevitable shiftscan intimacy affirm itself without any more com-promises than the thing.1

1. Concept-reflectionFew concepts stalk modern thought as tirelessly as the fe-tish. And not without reason: no other concept, perhaps, ties together the relationships be-tween critical thought, modern economies of desire and the network of the post-colonial condition as tightly as this con-cept-metaphor-story, traced in the space of transactions and desires that operate in relation to material objects, based on

heterogeneous, irreducible codes. We could even assert that the fe-tish is, in good measure, the site of an imperfect and spurious cognition, enciphered in a sub-verted, hundred-year-old theolo-gy, accompanying the instability of the concepts of sexual, eco-nomic and aesthetic value, which brought about the violent confrontation of unequal econo-mies and epistemologies, and which has continued to act deci-sively in each and every one of the phases of the capitalist world-economy for the past five centuries.2

The fetish is a conceptual hinge that becomes apparent each time there is a need to re-fer simultaneously to the im-possibility and the obligation to equilibrate need and pro-duction, utility and demand, rationality and value, sense and material. It is the name of the supposed generality that establishes equivalence and of the trans-valued object that subverts it. Thus, we aim here to defend the fetish in all its opacity as a necessary blind spot wherein the religion of sensuous desire (as Karl Marx precisely designated it as ear-ly as 1842) is played out, and which, although it is originally protected by the proto-ethnol-ogy of colonial commerce, con-tinually unfolds in the everyday cult of the moderns and the modernized, who (more so than the savage) are those who oper-ate as if an inanimate object will give up its natural charac-ter in order to comply with his desires.3

In each of its motley materi-alizations and theorizations, the fetish is the excessive concept-object and the hyperbolic frag-ment that characterizes (in the constitutive exceptionality of the paradigmatic4) the desir-ing epistemology of the contem-porary subject. Consequently, if art (or what occupies its place) resorts to the fetish as a critical apparatus, this is because it is possible for the subject to fall prey to a whole range of lures and interventions that Andr Breton designated as solidified desires.5

2. When the idol becomes ob-soleteThe naturalness, vagueness and unstoppable abuse6 that the concept of the fetish suffers in the most diverse fields all bear a direct relationship to the form on which the mythology of Western rationality always depends even if only residu-ally, covertly, unconsciously that is, on being reproduced in the representation of the irrationality of any heteroge-neity: the savage, in the first instance, then the sexual, con-sumerist pervert, and finally the practitioner and activator of the poetic.

Beginning with its origin in the paradoxical interac-tions between the merchants, theologians and enlightened philosophers of the colonial European metropolis with the traffickers and sovereigns of West Africa in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, the term fetish is the shadow that both shelters and expels the self-representation of the modern. A certain archaeol-ogy of the fetish as a colonial, capitalist category is neces-sary to make palpable its con-dition as a theoretical fiction that traverses the zone of dis-turbance wherein the econo-mies of the heterogeneous, the perverse and the incommensu-rable are found. Only by way of such a detour would it become possible to activate its power as an obstacle to the illusion of grounding transactions and desires in natural needs and universal rationalities, when these are always populated by partial overlaps between in-commensurable poles. In the first instance, we must regard the concept-met-aphor of the fetish as a tran-scultural concept, and not as a category internal to any insti-tutional, cultural or autochtho-nous subjective order.7 To put it more eloquently, this is one of the categories of colonial thought that is inscribed, with perfectly identifiable traits, as much in the everyday vocabu-lary as in the scientific one that constitutes the West, with words like zombie, apartheid, taboo, Oriental or Indian. We are indebted to William Pietzs multiple and at the same time fragmentary critical studies for having drawn out the basic recurring themes in the broad semantic swath of the fetish: always emerging in relation to an irreducible materiality; designating a singular power that contains the repetition of a synthesizing and ordering event of desire for a thing; insti-tutionalizing the social value of objects within consciousness, beyond the obsession with the good and bad representations of Platonism and Christianity; and finally, the notion of the operation of a material object as the power that establishes the actions of subjects as per-sonified bodies. The originary denomination of this whole complex of the concept-word fetish depends on an extreme-ly complex social interstice: namely, the mercantile space

of transvaluation and cultur-al crossing that resulted from the abrupt encounter of radi-cally heterogeneous worlds8 in West Africa under the con-straints of colonial commerce. As William Pietz has pains-takingly demonstrated, the no-tion of the fetish appears as soon as (and every time that) Enlightenment thought needs to overcome the thematic of the idolunderstood as a perversion of representation and the religiousto elabo-rate a psychology of primitive economy. If the modern con-cept of the fetish differs from a concept of idolatry as religion deformed by the Devil (such as was applied above all in the colonization of the New World9) this is because it is a category derived from the tales of sev-enteenth and eighteenth cen-tury merchants in Africa, who entered into economic and cul-tural transactions with societ-ies that had previously been so illegible to Christians and Ar-abs alike as to seem to lack le-gal, religious and governmental institutions.10 When, at the be-ginning of the eighteenth cen-tury, merchants such as the Dutchman Willem Bosman at-tempted to explain the lack of a principle of equivalence in their transactions with the so-cieties of equatorial Guinea, regardless of the fact that this capricious market was also the origin of their great profits, they resorted to the idea of the fetish as a transactional ob-ject. Seeking the gold found in African power objects, and concerned by the adulteration of this precious metal by ma-terials that Europeans consid-ered to be garbage, travelers like Bosman attributed the irrational behavior of their counterparts to superstition, instigated by covetous, capri-cious priests and kings, who supposedly exerted total con-trol over their subjects by ma-nipulating credulity in those deified ornamental objects.11 It

is thus that, in the discourses of European Enlightenment, the Portuguese word feitio went from referring to the fact-icius or artifact of Medieval witchcraft to constructing a new materialist theory of prim-itive religion based on the as-sumption that Africans were afflicted by a capricious, sensu-al fixation with objects, which they practically deified when-ever these crossed their paths12, in a way not entirely dissimilar to Sigmund Freuds explanation of fetishism as unsuitable sub-stitutes for the Sexual Object selected by some sexual im-pression received as a rule in the early childhood.13 At the moment, circa 1760, when the French philosophe Charles De Brosses coined the term fe-tishism, the category emerg-es clearly formed to distinguish the cult of the African negroes toward animals and inanimate objects such as amulets, oracles and talismans, from every other

kind of cultic or doctrinal ap-paratus that could have been submitted to procedures of universal interpretation of a mythological or allegorical or-der.14 De Brosses projected the idea of a primitive religion re-sulting from the mere correla-tion of material to desire, of object to whim, which grew out of singular personal experienc-es and which resulted in a sa-cred order lacking any logic whatsoever. The radical aspect of this interpretation was in its economic and colonial womb: he was interpreting territories of exchange that with all vio-lence and pillagingconnect-ed notions of value and desire to incomparable social sys-tems surrounding the transac-tion of objects. The heterogeneous elements involved in these exchanges were not, however, of a strictly material order: they were the construction of an economy over and above any contract econ-omy. Thus, despite its ethno-graphically bastardized origin, the fetish would bear a crucial meaning for the construction of a theoretical materialism. It des-ignates (on a commercial level as well as a sexual and aesthetic one) the site of a transaction where two or more codes of val-ue intertwine without there be-ing a true equivalence between them. It is the junction that su-tures the absence of a general code, and nevertheless it refers

1 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1989 [1973], pp. 93-94.

2 In that sense, Michael Taussigs use of the concept of fetishism is even more remarkable, in that he explored the figure of the devil in reactions among the South American peasantry, when indigenous communities found themselves wrapped up in the apparition of salaried relationships and, as neophy-te proletarians, were required elaborate the profound changes of their living conditions, in all their dialectical turmoil of truth and being, a product of their accession to the logic of mercan-tile economy. Then, as Taussig would say, the fantastic, mystic interpretations of those socie-ties were exacerbated, since the magic of production and the pro-duction of magic are insepara-ble in these circumstances. See

available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/07/10.htm We are indebted to William Pietz for bringing this passage to our attention, as well as for many of the points we make in this article, and for his contribution to our perspective more generally. See: William Pietz, Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx, in: Emily Apter and William Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 133-134.4 Paradigm in the etymological sense: it is what is shown besi-de Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sa-cer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, ed. W.H.D. E. Wellbey, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 22.5 Andr Breton, Surrealist situa-tion of the object in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972 [1935], p. 261.6 Venezuelan novelist and televi-sion host Boris Izaguirre offered a recent example of the laziness that the term has acquired when he employed it in his explora-tion of his own media indulgen-ces and superficial obsessions, which range from Olympic swi-mmer Mark Spitzs moustache to the simulation of nostalgia for the communist enemy. (See Boris Izaguirre, Fetiche, Madrid: Espa-sa, 2003).

7 William Pietz, The Problem of the Fetish, I, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9, Spring 1985, p. 10.

8 Pietz, The Problem of the Fe-tish, I, pp. 6-7.9 See Serge Gruzinski and Car-men Bernand, De la idolatra: Una arqueologa de las ciencias religiosas, trans. Diana Snchez, Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1995.10 See for instance the concurren-ce of the descriptions of Africans by tenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Hawqual with those of sixte-enth-century British captain Lok, cited in William Pietz, The Pro-blem of the Fetish, II: The origin of the fetish, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16, Spring 1987, pp. 36 and 42.

11 Wiliam Pietz, The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa. Bosmans Guinea and the Enlightenment theory of fetishism, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16, Autumn 1988, p. 120.12 For a detailed archaeology of the concept of the fetish in transcultural interactions in West Africafrom Portuguese theologians arguments imbued with sixteenth-century Augus-tinian notions of idolatry and witchcraft (facticio-fetio) to the emergence of the modern concept of the fetish among eighteenth-century French and Dutch merchants and theoristssee: William Pietz, The Problem of the Fetish, II, pp. 23-45.13 Sigmund Freud. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, Berkeley, CA: Ba-sic Books, 2000 [1905], p. 20.

14 Charles De Brosses, Du culte des dieux ftiches ou para-llle de lancienne religion de lEgypte avec la religion actuelle de la Nigritie, 1757, pp. 10-11. A facsimile of this book is availa-ble online through the French National Librarys Gallica resource: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k106440f.

Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Chapel Hill: The Uni-versity of North Carolina Press, 1980, pp. 17, 18, 21.3 Karl Marx, The Leading Arti-cle in No. 179 of the Klnische Zeitung (1842), [Rheinische Zeitung, nr. 191, July 10 1842],

The Red Specter informs its friends and collaborators

of the lamentable dematerialization of

Hlio oiticica

May 2010The red specTer 10 May 2010The red specTer 11

The Red Specter informs its friends and collaborators of the still more lamentable rematerialization of

Hlio oiticicaRender to God the things that are Caesars

Hlio oiticica

to an extremely wide range of transactions. Thus the fetish proposes, even today, the para-doxical norm of the process of globalization, which, counter to the propaganda that would un-derstand it as the generalization of a social and cultural unifor-mity, needs to make capitalism out to be a system that details, with increasing speed, the syn-ergy of an unequal and com-bined development in which poverty, polarization and so-called underdevelopment are not negative effects produced by specific circumstances or mistaken policies but rather the logical, permanent and im-manent product of the system of the world-economy,15 and where the collisions and para-doxes of incomparable econo-mies and systems of value are articulated around an appara-tus of falsely shared needs and desires.

3. The other secret of com-modity-fetishismIn the classical sense, the nar-rative of fetishism has its nod-al construction in the chapter on the commodity in Marxs Capital (1867, 1872-73), and lat-er in the synthesis of Kantian critique and Weberian sociolo-gy that Georg Lukcs mobilized with his theory of reification in History and Class Con-sciousness (1919). With the ex-ception of Hegels disquisition on the master-slave dialectic (which Susan Buck-Morss has also recently revealed as a fig-ure to be approached in relation to the problem of the emancipa-tion of modern slaves of African origin in the Haitian revolution of 180816), Marxs text on com-modity-fetishism and its secret is the most important epicen-ter in the theorization of the epistemological and aesthetic conditions of capitalism. It is this nucleus that has given rise to the central debates about a subjectivity derived from the progressive commercialization of social relations, and to the condition of the commodity no longer just as an object central to economic transactions, but as a cognitive model and the ba-sis of a sensibility. And indeed, this thing that Marx postulates as an everyday metaphysics appears in the text of Capi-tal under the ironic, polemical

figure of emerging as a sort of a priori of contemporary experi-ence, in a line that does not hide its eagerness to draw the set of critical Kantian elaborations to itself:

The mysterious character of the commodity-form con-sists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity re-flects the social characteris-tics of mens own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural proper-ties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social rela-tion of the producers to the sum total of labour as a so-cial relation between produc-ers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time su-prasensible or social.17

As is well-known, in the at-tempt to elaborate a formula-tion of this effect of ideological

projection (which is none other than the terrain of projection of economic transactions in lived culture), Marxs formulation re-sorted to the notion that this attribution to things deserved to be designated as a fetishism for modern people:

It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the hu-man race. So it is in the world of commodities with the pro-ducts of the mens hands. I call this the fetishism which atta-ches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are pro-duced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.18

We are not attempting to

perform an excessive unpack-ing of these all too well-known passages. It will be sufficient here to suggest a few critical points: a) Beginning above all with Georg Lukcs intervention, the lineage of Marxist fetishism has tended to take this anal-ogy as an epistemological de-scription. Taking Marxs irony of the suprasensible thing se-riously, Lukcs defined an en-tire current of critical Western thought when he derived from this analysis the idea that cap-italist economy produces a reified consciousness where the Kantian categories of time and spacethat is to say, the conditions of possibility of experienceare progressively fragmented and submitted to a rational order that results in a correlation between an ob-jectivity and a series of forms of subjectivity of capitalist so-ciety. Commodities, in Lukcs analysis, are converted into the universal category of soci-ety as a whole, and the world is transformed into a uniform field of alienated domination of things over human beings, whose principal subjective mo-dality is the contemplation19 of a world alien to the relationship between desire, will, conscious-ness and experience. Submit-ted to a structure of reified, fragmented experience, andfollowing Weberprogressively submitted to a structure of cal-culation and abstraction, Lukcs argues: the attitude of the sub-ject then becomes purely con-templative in the philosophical sense.20 b) Without dismissing the way this analysis formulated the field of operation of the en-tire history of Leftist cultural criticism (from the whole Frank-furt School21 to the Situationist

International, and the critique of everyday life by philoso-phers such as Henri Lefebvre), it is interesting to note that, in one very specific regard, Lukcs unconsciously undid the meta-phorical game in Marxs elabo-ration. Indeed, although it is frequently omitted (in part be-cause of its inaccessibility, in modern editions of Capital), the figure of commodity fetishism was not Marxs first elaboration on the theology of the commod-ity, but rather a formula that he only later refined for the second edition of his book, published between 1872 and 1873.22 In the first edition of Capital, in 1867, Marx systematically resorts (with just one exception23) to an-other analogical body: that of the mysticism of Catholic con-templation.

Private producers only en-ter into social contact for the first time through their pri-vate products: objects. The social relationships of their labours are and appear con-sequently not as immedia-tely social relationships of persons in their labours, but as objectified relationships

of persons, or social relation-ships of objects. The first and most universal manifestation of the object as a social thing, however, is the metamorpho-sis of the product of labour into a commodity. The mysti-cism of the commodity arises, therefore, from the fact that the social determinations of the private labours of the priva-te producers appear to them as social natural determina-tions of products of labour; from the fact, that is, that the social relationships of pro-duction of persons appear as social relationships of objects to one another and to the per-sons involved.24

Reading closely, one might per-ceive in this passage an oscilla-tion between the residues of a humanist complaint against the mediation (or rather, we should say, intercession) of things and people, and the task of describ-ing a social system where inter-actions among agent-things establish the territory of pow-er. That the interaction among things should occur in the text as a representation in fact harbours the residues of Chris-tian theology, even though this is done in the opposing code of the Hegelian/Enlightenment project of de-alienation.25

c) Beyond the evolution of the book26which is ultimately a scholarly problematicthe movement from mysticism to fe-tishism in Marxs text involves precisely the problematic of the burden of the Enlightenment in the Marxist project, and the ten-sion between that legacy and the interference from the post-colonial category of the concept of the fetish. As in Lukcs proj-ect, which imagines liberation from reified consciousness through the understanding of the dialectics of historical

process27 when, in his first, 1867 elaboration, Marx postu-lates how the mystical rela-tionship between the subject and the commodity might be turned around, his argument reiterates the Hegelian Lefts thematic of a reappropriation in consciousness of what had previously appeared as alien-ated modes of activity in an object that produceslike di-vinity in Christian mysticismthe affection of a permanent distance that nevertheless holds the promise of contem-plative reunification: The re-ligious reflection of the real world can only disappear as soon as the relationships of practical work-a-day life rep-resent for men daily transpar-ently reasonable relationships to one another and to nature.28 In this point it is possible to de-tect an attemptin retrospect unsuccessfulto prophesy the statute of society and of fu-ture epistemology; as if this were a matter of the (proletar-ian) subject acquiring total do-minion over nature, founding a reign of total administration that would come to be con-fused with emancipation. This line of Marxist thought brings

15 Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization. The Mana-gement of Contemporary Society, New York: Zed Books Ltd., 1997, p. 16.16 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pitts-burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

17 Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 164.

19 Georg Lukcs, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat [1919], in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxists Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971, pp. 86, 89.20 Ibid. p. 130.21 It is crucial to note, even in passing, that the conjunction of Theodor Adornos critique of the fetishism of industrial culture and his recovery of the modernist work of art as a sort of heterogeneity folded into industrial societyas a win-dowless monadis the attempt to accommodate, by another post-colonial detour (referring to the mimesis of the magical object), a critical exteriority to this oppressive totality of capitalisms apparent concep-tual transparency. The mark

left by an anti-fetishist fetish on Adornos aesthetics is to be found, perhaps, in the way that the expression of works of art as second-order things, as artifacts that are nevertheless beyond the grasp of sensible in-tuition, is an echo of the supra-sensible thing in Marx. Contrary to the expectations of those who would attempt to trace a line of simple oppositions (instead of a grid of tensions, complementari-ties and debates) in the heart of the vanguards thought, Adornos vision approaches Bataille by understanding the need to de-fend art as a thing made against the reign of things: The peren-nial revolt of art against art has its fundamentum in re. If it is essential to artworks that they be things, it is no less essential that they negate their own status as things, and thus art turns against art. The totally objec-tivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivation it would regress to an impotently powerless subjective impulse and flounder in the empiri-cal world. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory [1970], ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: The Athlone Press, 1997, p. 175.22 In fact, it is likely that only contemporary readers of the Spanish language edition, such as ourselves, have been able to take note of this detail, since the ambition of the editors at the publishing house Siglo XXI of annotating a critical edition of

Capital compelled them to include in their publication both the definitive and the original versions of the first chapter of the book.23 Marx refers not to commodity fetishism, but to the fetishism of classical economics. Karl Marx, The Commodity, in Capital (first edition), trans. Albert Dragstedt. Available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/commodity.htm. We have included the relevant passages of this text in this issue of The Red Specter, p. 90. This concep-tion was carried through Marxs text beginning with the so-called Grundrisse of 1857, where he used it with respect to classical economic theory, and not as an operator of the practical epistemology of the social system. See below, note 25.24 Ibid.25 On this pointa detail that seems to us to be crucialwe disagree with Pietzs reading, which argues that Marx flatly reintroduces the discussion of the fetish in his reading of capitalism circa 1857 (Pietz, Fetishism and Materialism, art. cit., p. 143). Nevertheless, the occurrence of the word fetish-ism in The Grundrisse refers strictly to the critique of David Ricardos oeuvre, which seems to

Marx a crude materialism and an idealism that makes him regard as the natural properties of things what are social relations of production among people and qualities which things obtain because they are subsumed under these relations. That is, the use of the concept of fetishism in this arena is limited in asserting that the doctrines of classical economists suffer from a primitivist mentality: a fetishism, since it imputes social relations to things as inherent characteris-tics, and thus mystifies them (Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Founda-tions of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough draft ), trans. and ed. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin Classics, 1993, p. 687). In sum, the passage in question clarifies the same restriction into which Marx introduces the thematic of fetishism in the first edition of Capital, without unfolding a clear distinction between these theorists fetishism and the mysticism that, until 1867, serves Marx himself as a metaphor-category of his critique of the operation of money as a general equivalent in capitalist circulation.26 In fact, the first formulation of commodity fetishism appears in an appendix added by Marx to

the first edition, made before the recognition that his initial text was not easily comprehensible and entitled The value form (available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/appendix.htm) We have included the relevant passages of this text in the English edition of this first issue of The Red Specter, pp. 94-95.27 Lukcs, op. cit., p. 164.28 Karl Marx, The Commodity, op. cit. In fact, Marx retains this moment in his 1872-73 edition: Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 173.

18 Ibid, p. 165.

May 2010The red specTer 12 May 2010The red specTer 13

us to Friedrich Engels famous passage about the communist idea of the abolition of the State: the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production.29 Might it be possible to reduce the diagram of the activation of the fetishby conjoining the double formulation of the Western/primitivist epistemol-ogy (and excluding, of course, the unrepresentable place of the Other)to the promise of undoing false consciousness or reified illusion with the promise that the abolition of commodities would open the subject to the unmediated plea-sure of a cognition and a con-trol of production founded in pure transparency? This was in fact the explicit project of mod-ern communism: the postula-tion in the social and economic order of the culmination of the Enlightenment, as a total control of scientific consciousness over material, history and nature.30 The reign of total Enlighten-ment ended with just over sixty

million deaths31 uselessly com-mitted to obtaining, by means of coercion, the solvency of an economic system in which pro-ductive consumption attempt-ed to drive development, with the absolute deferral of enjoy-ment and pleasurable expendi-ture.32 Could it not be that the opacity of Marxs construction of fetishism harbors the po-tential for another kind of criti-cal operation?

4. Beyond de-alienation, be-yond theory33When, in the early 1990s, Wi-lliam Pietz finally came to ex-plore the problem of the fetish in its Marxist version, he framed it in terms of a generalized cri-tique of the semiotic-symbol-ic hegemony of the era, and in particular as a warning against conceiving the social field as an infinite space of post-structur-alisms homologies and analo-gies. Placing an emphasis on the way in which the catego-ry of fetishism contained, as early as De Brosses himself, the originality of offer[ing] an atheological explanation of the origin of religion,34 alien to the logic of representation and lan-guage, Pietz indicated that the use of the concept of the fetish

in Marx was directed at com-pleting a critique of the terri-torial in which the irreducibly material character of the reli-gion of sensual desire would orient the materialist critique of contemporary society. In other words, Pietz emphasized that Marx was attempting to restore the primitivist formula of the fetish to the true fetish-ist: the subject of capitalist mo-dernity. In that displacement, the fetish would, according to Pietz, have to shelter a limit to theorization and to the linguis-tic turn, since it would impose a need to return to a conception of the interactions among sensual, bodily, living beings, beyond the problematic of ideology and the criticism of thought. In its eagerness to make relevant the non-transcendental elements of the social history of the world, Marxs fetishism would seek to reveal capitals categories; that is, emerging universal forms as the material power objects of organized social systems.35 In that sense, William Pietz suggests that Marxs investiga-tion into the notions of capital and money must be understood as the study of something that operates as a general equiva-lent and, therefore, that we re-alize that modern fetishes are neither metaphors nor signs, but exist rather as material ob-jects whose power is to estab-lish control over human beings. In this reading, money-capital is not a representation or an idea that reifies consciousness, but rather the very power-object

that produces and sustains the social order:

The object that had been an accidental means to achieving some desired end becomes a fixed necessity, the very em-bodiment of desire, and the effective, exclusive power for gratifying it. The human truth of capital is that, as a means that has become an end, it is a socially constructed, culturally real power-object: it is the in-strumentalized power of com-mand over concrete humans in the form of control over their labor activity through invest-ment decisions.36

The discussion, again, is much more than a problem of mere names. In his 1842 studies of the history of religion, Marx had cited a passage from De Bross-es that referred to indigenous Cubans, attributed to gold the function of being the fetish of the Spaniards.37 Following this logic, by incorporating the

29 Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch01.htm30 It is worth noting that the figuration of this idea is present, perhaps better than in any other image, in Diego Riveras mural El hombre en la encrucijada [Man at the crossroads], commissioned for the Rockefeller Center in 1931, and which, after its destruction, was newly installed

concept of fetishism as a sen-sual religion in his reading of capitalism circa the 1840s, Marx had adopted a similar position for the project of a study of the proletariat: beginning with the surprise of relating its own cat-egories about the savage back to the Enlightened West, the movement of fetishism in Marx embodied the possibility of un-derstanding modern economy as a structure of domination centered on the operation of money-capital as the contempo-rary power-object:

And it is from the perspective (as evoked in Marxs writing) that the bourgeois capitalist is perceived as himself, one whose fetish, capital, is be-lieved as, by its deluded cult-ist to embody (super) natural causal powers of value forma-tion, but which is recognized by the savage, expropriated through the capitalist accu-mulation process proper, as having no real power outside its social power to command the labor activity of real in-dividuals.38

Pietzs interpretation harbors a subversive gesture that under-lines the operativity of a cer-tain primitivism in Marxs text that is not at all the affirmation of colonial hopes, but rather its ironical application as a mirror of production. In other words, William Pietz revealed a Marx who operated as a surrealist or a Bataillean avant la lettre: as the performer of one of the first inverted ethnographies39, in that he used the representa-tion of the savage to illuminate the discussion of the modern subject by reflexively applying his own Eurocentric categories40

to himself, seeking to roost in the exteriority necessary to all criticism by means of the mirror of the fiction of fetishism:

Human experience of mate-rial poverty and social op-pression is here viewed as the source of a spiritually power-ful moral authority that is the concrete subjective ground of a radically democratic eman-cipatory politics. The materi-alist subject of this radically human ground is twice locat-ed by Marx: in the maximally alien perspective of the prim-itive fetishist, a cultural other for whom material conditions are themselves spiritual val-ues, who judges civil society from outside all civilization; and in the maximally de-graded viewpoint of the pro-letarian, bourgeois societys internal other, forced to the physical margin of subsis-tence, whose value judgments express the most fundamen-tal needs of human life [] But after he had absorbed the lessons of the political events of 1848-1850, Marx returned to the discourse about fetishism in 1857 in or-der to articulate not so much the dis-illusioned class con-sciousness of the proletarian (its members self-conception as workers within the cat-egories of civil society) as a communist imaginary that sees the fantastically inhu-man anamorphosis of liberal political economys vision of human life as civil society. Marx evoked the savage subject of religious fetishism as a (potentially theoretical) viewpoint outside capitalism capable of recognizing prole-tarians in their objective so-cial identity as the economic class owning no marketable private property other than their own embodied being []41

The logical result of this is that the possibilities of escaping the apparatus of the magic of pro-duction would require some kind of operation at the heart of material interaction, one that would exceed the frame of that epistemology especially from the perspective of a proj-ect, such as The Red Specter, that also follows the Marxian consideration of the experience of a reaction temporality that proscribes a fall into disillu-sioned melancholy.42

5. Dematerialization and its limitsIt is this dimension, the product of taking note of a primitivist description of capital in its to-talizing immanencehowever opaque its colonial structure might bethat makes the fetish into a necessary montage of fragments in which untranslat-able codes of value and the res-idue of another, heterogeneous economy are framed as a con-stant subversion of the Western logic of rationalization and its politics. The continuous seduc-tion of the notion of the fetish and the form in which contem-porary art seems to point at mobilizing the production of particular, localized and para-doxical instances of economic irrationality, in the form of post-industrial anamorphoses, is evidence of the (subterra-nean and mostly unconscious) continuity of that project of the savage categorization of a critique from out of the fold of heterogeneity. Reactivating the fetish, once its critical poten-tial as a primitivist category of and about modern society is re-established, is the basis for a diagram that allows for a whole range of intransigent operations that situate them-selves in open opposition to the expectation of the dema-terialization and transparency of social relations. That is, the concept of the fetish also poses an obstacle to the temptation to challenge capitalism with a program of total Enlight-enment, which has guided a fundamental part of the post-revolutionary automatism that lurks phantasmagorically in contemporary art and culture. Here we are referring, clearly, to the eminently unreflexive discourse with which criti-cal art has repeatedly come to imagine itself under the figure of defetishization, without recognizing that these formu-lationssituated in the pure

at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1934. That this utopian communist superhero should appear in the person of a blonde, green-eyed Soviet technician, placed at the center of the operations of material and history, is truly an Enlighten-ment labyrinth. And that this image should be described under a white, Eurocentric model of ethnicity and epistemology is an irony of post-colonial knowledge. It constitutes the failed attempt of the post-colonial artistic project, which reveals, at the margin and in opposition to hegemonic modernism, the infiltration of the project of total Enlightenment seen (and therefore recoiled) from its diametric opposite.31 R. J. Rummel, Lethal Politics. Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917, New Bruns-wick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1990.32 As Asger John brilliantly articulated during his Situation-ist phase, clearly informed by Batailles The Accursed Share and raising artistic development in direct opposition to the socialist development of the communist project: The value of

art is counter to practical values, and is measured as their inverse. Art is an invitation to expend energy without any precise end, apart from that which the spectator himself might bring to it. It is prodigality [...] Asger John, La Fin de Lconomie et la Ralisation de lArt, Interna-tional Situationniste nr. 4, June 1960, p. 19. [My translation from the French. T.N.]33 One of us has explored the thematic of this section in a concise, initial treatment, relating it to a Native American code in the work of Brian Jungen. See Cuauhtmoc Medina, High Curios, in: Diana Augatis et al., Brian Jungen, Vancouver, Toronto and Berkeley: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2005, pp. 27-38.34 William Pietz, Fetishism and Materialism, p. 138.

35 Ibid., p. 145.

36 Ibid., p. 147.37 The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle around it and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages had been present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would they not have regarded wood as the Rhinelanders fetish? But a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of animals is connected with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the sea in order to save the human beings... Karl Marx, Proceed-ings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Lawon Thefts of Wood, Rheinische Zeitung 307, Novem-ber 3rd 1842, available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/10/25.htm#p5. Pietz compares the citation to notes that Marx took from De Brosses book (Karl Marx, Exzerpte sur Geschichte der Kunst und der Religion, en: Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, 2:1, Berlin: Dietz, 1976,p. 322). Nevertheless, Enrique Dussel rightly identifies the history of Taino chief Hatueys resistance, related in the chronicles of Bartolom de las Casas, as the ultimate source of the passage to which Marx alludes (Enrique Dussel, Praxis latinoamericana y filosofa de la liberacin. Bogot: Editorial Nueva Amrica, 1983, p. 186. Available online at: http://www.ifil.org/Biblioteca/dussel/html/17.html). We must point out, however, that our study of fetishism in Marx differs from Dussels on impor-tant points, which is marked constantly by a claim for the

Christian contribution to Latin American liberation, instead of attending to the conditions of the interference of colonial categories in the same texts.38 William Pietz, Fetishism and Materialism, p. 141.39 The figure of an inverted ethnography has become central to this discussion and we could even argue that it has given form to contemporary academic discourse by defining the protocols of much of the work in Cultural Studies. The emblematic example of the articulation of this perspective as a key operation in the deciphering of the production of art and literature in modernity has been elaborated precisely and descriptively by James Clifford (see: The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

40 Antedated, perhaps, by Michel de Montaignes essay On Cannibals y Jonathan Swifts A Modest Proposal, which projected the horror of cannibal-ism onto the Western subject (see: Michel de Montaigne, On Cannibals, Essays [on-line edition: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/mon-taigne/montaigne-essays-2.html] and Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children Of Poor People From Being A Burthen To Their Parents Or Country, And For Making Them Beneficial To The Public, in: The Portable Swift, ed. Carl Van Doren, London: Penguin, 1986, pp. 549-559).41 Pietz, Fetishism and Material-ism, p. 143.

42 See the fragment from Marxs Eighteenth Brumaire that gave rise to the image of The Red Specter, in this volume, p. 1.

Magdalena Jitrik, Work Leisure Art, 147 x 88.5 cm. oil on canvas, 2006. Karmelo Bermejo. Solid gold hinges to hang artworks. The hinges are hidden by the works they hold in place, 1.8 x 5.4 cm. 18 carat gold, 2009

May 2010The red specTer 14 May 2010The red specTer 15

institutional critique of mini-mal displacementsalready lack the motor force to take into consideration any economy oth-er than that which is proper to the luxury markets limpid de-materialized gestures, which are not even conscious of their condition of objects and sub-jects of exploitation. We are certainly in a moment at which categories, to use Gayatri Spiv-aks felicitous expression, have come to pervert themselves in an omelette of theory and prac-tice, in which, as in some of Tino Sehgals actions or con-structed situations, every-thing is dematerialized except the price, like worthy examples of an innocuous post-Enlight-enment, sensibly architectural and without any cultural sub-strate.43 Re-establishing the genealogy and practice of the fetish may consist, at most, of re-establishing some sort of relationship in which theory is anchored in the problematic of an egg.44 It is no coincidence that the fetish should explicitly recu-perate the sharp edge of anti-Western primitivism in the

field of theorization parallel to the activation of the surrealist object and sacrificial subversion i.e., in the murky territory of a study of the sacred by Bataille and his circle. It was then that the semantic field of the fetish exploded, impelling its critical impulse toward an anti-colonial and anti-modernist reading by framing the bodily, localized, material, and overrun relation-ship of fetishism as a horizon unreachable in (and at the same time indispensable to) the artis-tic game. That is what Batailles oft-cited aphorism entails: I defy any amateur of paintings to love a canvas as much as a fe-tishist loves a shoe.45 When, in the journal Documents, Michel Leiris reflected on Alberto Gia-comettis sculptures from the period of inverted ethnography, he was suggesting a search for a distinction between the true fetishism which remains at the base of our human existence, and those works of art which, by way of a material and bodi-ly intervention, are capable of responding to him in terms of a piece of furniture [meuble, a movable property] which we can use in that strange, vast room called space.46 It is possible, within the zone of confusion and disturbance of contemporary art, that the fe-tish should be turned inside out by framing the exaltation and celebration of the mis-match of object and desire, as well as the game of the death drives (destruction-negation) which are the logical itiner-ary of consciousness in its be-coming like an alienated body (thing-body, animal-body) and which are suspended and/or congealed in the useless char-acter of art. Indeed, its role is to pursue the completion of the project of inversion of the Hegelian dialectical game, and the founding of an effective base materialism that would seek explanations in a horri-ble and perfectly illegitimate principle in which being and its reason can in fact only sub-mit to what is lower, to what

can never serve in any case to ape a given authority.47 In a radical turn, the materialist-ar-tistic operation would seek to overturn the fetish, to arrive at its power of non-dialecticized (non-idealized, non-sublimated, non-theologized) materiality, capable of pillaging the prac-tical rationality stowed away in the hegemony of margin-alism, where desire and con-sumption are ordered around the arousal of capitals util-ity. Like an operation whose central framework presumes, as Bataille proposed with his radical a-theology, not to be the emancipation of conscious-ness, but rather the excess of the economic object:

It is a return to the situation of the animal that eats ano-ther animal, it is a negation of the difference between the objects and myself or the ge-neral destruction of objects as such in the field of cons-ciousness if I did not give my destruction its consequences in the real order. The real re-duction of the reduction of the real order brings a fun-damental reversal into the economic order. If we are to preserve the movement of the economy, we need to deter-mine the point at which the excess production will flow like a river to the outside. It is a matter of endlessly con-sumingor destroyingthe objects that are produced.48

To come out today in defense of the fetish consists of carry-ing to its limit the resistance to any Franciscan criticism of the economic system that would reiterate the form in which so-cialism deepened, miming cap-italism, the idea of restriction and calculation. This means rescuing the primitivist mo-ment of modernism as the excess that allows the intensi-fication of the notion of artis-tic practice as an immanent critique of the work of art as fetishthat is to say, as an ir-reducible materiality in which the subject bears the axis of sensuous desires without tak-ing cover in rationalism, to the point of discovering the desire

of a perverse or un-hinged sub-ject. This reinscribing of the primitivist moment of theory and the avant-garde requires the activation of the circula-tion of quasi-modernity of the work of art as a prosthesis of desire. The excavation that we unpack here (the opening of the fetishs crypt) conducts us to a multiple operation of territori-alization by which the historical field is imagined as an experi-ence, a failure, a transaction, a deceit, an opaque fold and not as the memory of an incomplete or crippled Enlightenment. It is, in a way that could also be translated to the effective po-litical field, an instance of that enlightening catastrophe of failed modernity that Ryszard Kapuscinski named the ter-rible material resistance.49 As we understand it, the fetishist operation is reification carried to its limit, and not its contain-ment. It is thus only by arriving at the limit of the process of reification that ideological cri-tique is dislocated to give way to truth of the dictionary of the ideas received from colonial-ism, the place where any ref-erence to the Otherbeyond being the language attached to genocideis the distorted dic-tionary of a critical residue.

43 This surplus of abstraction is also attached to the nature and status of the modern art objectnot a fetish any longer because it is devoid of any intrinsic power, i.e., of the capacity to scarepace all the avant-gardes and their supposedly patants ex-ploits (all lemons, no matter how energetic and enlightening)quite unlike those extravagantly monstrous dancing masks, astonishingly earth-shaking these, whose harmlessness was only discovered, learned and conquered, by the trial of fright endured. Francesco Pellizzi, Pastures of the Underground, see p. 4 in this volume.44 The citation from Gayatri Spivak refers to one of her many moments of lucidity and ironic clarity in the classroom. In the Theory of translation seminar (University of California - Irvine, Spring 2005), Spivak provoked a memorable explosion of laughter when she answered a students question (about the notion of the multitude elaborated in Hardt and Negris famous volume Empire) with the joke that theory on the contemporary Left was like an omelette made after the eggs were broken. This descrip-tion of the fascination with non-hegemonic, horizontal, purely messianic politics of the religious-activist expectation is crucial for The Red Specter, since it sounds the warning, of which Spivak constantly reminds us, not to assume the post-structur-alist legacy innocently, without first understanding its conflu-ence with the Marxist tradition.

45 Georges Bataille, LEspirit moderne et le jeu des transpo-sitions, Documents, 1930, nr. 8, pp. 50-51. (Translation taken from: Denis Hollier, Against Architecture. The Writings of Georges Bataille, tr. Betsy Wing, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 1989, p. 112. See Holliers rele-vant commentary on this passa-ge in ibid., pp. 112-113).46 Michel Leiris, Alberto Giacom-etti, Documents, vol. 1, nr. 4, 1929, p. 209. Cited in Pietz, The Problem of the Fetish, I, p. 11.

47 Georges Bataille, Base Ma-terialism and Gnosticism, in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. J. Allan Stoekl. with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., Minneapolis: Universi-ty of Minnesota Press, 1985, pp. 47, 50.48 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1992, p. 103.

49 Ryzard Kapuscinski, The Soc-cer War, trans. William Brand, London: Granta Books, 1990, p. 106. The passage in question is in fact one of the most brilliant theorizations of the devilish dia-lectic of power in the so-called Third World, where violence and the failure to modernize the state have nothing whatsoever to do with any criterion of mo-rality on the part of leaders and politicians.S

alva

dor

Dal

, "

Com

mu

nic

atio

n: v

isag

e p

aran

oiq

ue"

, Su

rra

lism

e a

u s

ervi

ce d

e la

Rv

olu

tion

, nr.

3, D

ecem

ber

, 193

1

Translated by Christopher Fraga

16 17

Damaged by water, financed by insurance. Waterdamaged book by art collective A Kassen containing four projects. 32 pages. Published by Space Poetry in 2008. A Kassen is an artist collective estab-lished in Copenhagen in 2004 by Chris-tian Bretton-Meyer (1976), Morten Steen Hebsgaard (1977), Sren Petersen (1977) and Tommy Petersen (1975).

Damaged by water, financed by insurance, 2008A Kassen

18 19 Fair Trade Head, 2008 Maria Thereza Alves

stored in several French muse-ums, will be returned within the coming year.

(Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2010/05/20105574721701652.html)

Note of The Red Specter: Close to 200 heads remain in other collections around the world. (Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/may/04/maori-heads-france-new-zealand)

BREAKING NEWS!

France to return Maori headsAljazeera, Wednesday, May 05, 2010 13:56 Mecca Time10:56 gmt

France has decided to return 16 mummified heads of Maori war-riors to New Zealand, ending years of debate over the human remains acquired long ago by French museums. Only eight leg-islators in the 577-seat National Assembly voted against return-ing the heads on Tuesday. The tattooed heads, which have been

20 21 Politics of Rehearsal, 2004Francis Als

Rethinking the implication of the rehears-al as a comment on modernity, what be-comes immediately obvious is the notion that modernity is pornographic. I mean, theres this sort of representation of something that looks incredibly appeal-ing, incredibly exciting, but even as it dis-plays itself, its impossible to appropriate it, its like an exercise in mere arousal, not of coupling or encounter. Somehow, the piece is a constant postponement, what it does is to show that what the specta-tor wants is precisely to maintain this arousal, not really to arrive anywhere but to keep oneself aroused, which is in some way what the stripper seeks to do, and more so in this case, where time has kind of been diluted and extended.

In the everyday life of society what you have is a combination of falling for the il-lusion of development and discovering its falsity every so often. That provokes an ex-perience notion of history as a Sisyphean punishment. That is, no sooner do you start a task, no sooner has there been some type of effort, or the sacrifices called for by the elite to be carried out over years, than you have to go back to the original start-ing point. It always makes me think of a game of snakes and ladders. You advance through the game and suddenly instead of the little ladder they promised you theres a snake that sends you back to the starting square. And what that produces, in effect, is the notion of a sort of time thateven though there are a multitude of historical

moments, a multitude of phenomena, a multitude of changesis crossed with the notion that history is not advancing, that history is always repeating itself and getting lost. There are two considerations on the temporality of the rehearsals that I think are interesting to touch on. One is that the rehearsals deal with the territory that isnt altogether intended, the time of produc-tion, as opposed to the time of the product. In other words, they place emphasis on the task more than on the result. And that dis-tinction has a lot to do with the distinction between work and labor that Hannah Ar-endt formulated in The Human Condition. Namely that one of the characteristics of the modern world is that we probably

no longer know what work is, that is, work as production related to the creation of a definitive and permanent object. What we have instead is a constant reproduction, which is the constant daily labor to main-tain the economic system that is always discarding the product so that nothing ever remains. So theres a constant ex-haustion. And the moment of the rehearsal seems interesting to me because one could probably say metaphorically that its pro-cessing this aesthetic of labor, that its very involved in much of the work that youve done, that is, a work that sees pro-duction in relation not to the achievement of a result but rather to the question of what is taking place and what intervenes and what establishes the form and the

time of to be making, of the organic rela-tion of being}. It also seems important to me to pose the question of why labor is connected here with inefficiency. Because basically the difference between labor and work is that sometimes well-finished work makes one forget whether it was efficient or not. But in effect one of the characteristics of this situationin which everything is labor, as Arendt thinks that its the mod-ern world in which theres no longer any authentic workis that the only question that comes up is whether the process was efficient or not. Whether its possible to reduce the effort, whether its feasible to shorten the time in order to lower the price and increase the production.

But in general terms, the rehearsals have a sort of role in clarifying that what we call labor is the definition of how tem-porality is experienced; a sort of schema of temporality. While work can be like ac-cumulated time, it seems to be contained, so to speak, in a product; what the experi-ence of labor formulates is a structure of temporality. That is, basically the phases of work, its prolongation, its interruptions, its achievement, what they create is time.

Francis Als. Politics of Rehearsal. In collaboration with Performa, Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtmoc Medina, 2004, video (30 min-utes). Voice-over fragments

22 23 Beep-Beep-Splot. Furniture for Museums, 2010Mart Anson

Bee

p-B

eep

-Sp

lot.

Fu

rnit

ure

for

Mu

seu

ms.

Th

e b

ench

is

a p

art

of t

he

equ

ipm

ent

of t

he

Mu

seu

m, 2

010

Mod

elo

036.

Dis

char

ge i

n t

he

cen

sus

of b

usi

nes

smen

, pro

fess

ion

als.

Min

istr

y of

Eco

nom

y an

d E

stat

e. T

he

com

pan

y: P

intu

ras

Jim

nez

, 200

9. C

ourt

esy

of t

he

arti

st a

nd

Gal

eria

Ton

i Tp

ies

Modelo 036, 2009

24 25

Tickets of books by Bakunin. Color photograph, 120 x 160 cm. Color photograph of the ashes taken the following morning of the night in which the action was realized, 120 x 160 cm. Las Vistillas, Madrid

Vitrine with ashes, 8 x 120 x 120 cm.

3000 Euro of Public Money Spent Buying Books by Bakunin in Order to Burn Them in a Public Square, 2009Karmelo Bermejo

Cou

rtes

y of

ma

ist

er

ra

va

lb

ue

na G

aler

a a

nd

th

e ar

tist

26 27

Mexico City, February 23, 2010

Dear Director of the May 2nd Art Center:

I write to present to you my proposed project for the exhibition Critical Fetishes, commissioned by "The Red Specter", which will take place in the Art Center next May. Myprojectconsistsofcompletingasite-specificwork in the home of the Art Centers director. The proposed operation will be to replace a part from inside one of the electric appliances at the home of the Art Centers director with an equivalent part cast in 18-carat solid gold. The instructions to carry out this exchange of the piece for it