Take 1. No longer only art

Thinking with Art methodologies by Matthew Fuller. Fuller’s argument is that art cannot be contained in the categories where it has been traditionally exhibited, experienced and discussed. Art has hybridized and is no longer only art.

“Art is no longer only art. Its methods are recapitulated, ooze out and become feral in combination with other forms of life.” [1]

Fuller doesn’t offer a formal definition of art, instead through various stages he gradually introduces what this concept may mean in terms of methods. The dissolution of art into everyday life (see Lund) is not presented as a problem of objects (objects of art becoming indistinguishable from everyday objects). What Fuller has in mind is more abstract, “ways of seeing the world and doing things'':

“To take the British Isles, if we assume that most graduates from art schools since the 1960s are largely still alive that means that there are several tens of thousands of people around with some kind of art training. Clearly not all of them are now artists or designers in a way that is recognized by art systems. What then happens to the ideas, ways of seeing the world and doing things that art allows for and entrains?” [2]

This situates the question very differently than to consider the dissolution of art into everyday life as the last stage of a movement that would follow a sort of teleological evolution of the avant-garde where artists envisage the ultimate goal of their work as the dissolution of borders between art and life (in a way that elevates life to art). It is on the contrary the proliferation of “failed” artists or artists not recognized as such that creates the condition for such a shift. If art overspills its assigned context, it is because the logic of the art world limits access to status and recognition. By granting the status of artist to only a handful, the system that regulates visibility (and grants etc) also provokes what, evoking an organic diffusion, Fuller describes as “flocculation”, “diffusion”, making cultures and media ecologies “conveyors of heat”. Art is not only art and its methods proliferate outside of its traditional remits under the constraint of an external factor. The art school inundates the art world and a majority of trained artists are excluded from the art market (or who refuse to join it or abide by its rules, a combination of all that). This population is not just an army of reserve for the art world or art education. They learn other professions, they are “reconverted”. Fuller invites us to think beyond the idea of “transferable skills” and insists on paying attention to the methods, a more abstract understanding of what is learned through art practice and education. There is something latent about these methods, awaiting to be used. A whole cohort of “sleeping agents” infiltrate society as the result of the overproduction of aspiring artists.

Take 2. The redundants.

If art is no longer only art, it doesn’t mean that the binary artist/non-artist has lost its currency. In his book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, the artist and activist Gregory Sholette postulates that the art world depends on a distinction between “real” artists and the “dark matter”, the unnamed mass of cultural workers whose labour is never recognised officially [3]. Building on an analogy with the notion used by physicists to describe the invisible gravitational mass of the universe, the author emphasises the necessary relation between the existence of a glut of grey creative labour and the few elected individuals whose works are exhibited and sold in legitimate environments such as art institutions and galleries. Exclusion and precariousness are not the unfortunate byproducts of a natural process of selection but the necessary conditions that structurally define the logics of production of the art world where risks and benefits are highly unevenly distributed. For each successful artist, there is a disproportionate counterpart of others who are dismissed as repetitive and redundant. In Sholette’s thinking, redundancy is an operative term. It refers to the surplus of creative labourers who remain invisible, treated as mere quantities whereas the bona fide artists are considered qualitatively. It also refers to the artificiality of the distinction between the elected few and the others. Sholette insists that there must be enough similarity between the recognized artists and their counterparts so that the latter can assume the various tasks that sustain the activities and status of the former. To make a living, the aspiring and failed artists constantly accomplish tasks that require a deep affinity with the works of the successful: they teach, they make guided tours, they prepare canvases, they manage the production process, they sometimes even create the objects that will be signed by the authors. Redundancy therefore indicates the high degree of imbalance and invisibility entailed in the artworld dynamics. At the same time, it always suggests a potential crisis as the redundants are never different enough from the bona fide artists for the distinction to remain stable. In this, redundancy can become a site of contestation. For Sholette, the key question is then: how to politicise the dark matter?

Take 3. Secondary orders

This leaves us with a series of interrelated questions regarding this grey legion of artists. With Fuller, what happens when people instructed with art methods are excluded from the art world and join the ranks of the workers operating in other sectors of society? And with Sholette, what happens to those who are invisibilized but still working as the dark matter of the art world? [How do these questions inform our understanding of the vexed notion of art autonomy?] How do they inform an understanding of the ways art functions in relation to society? They certainly problematize the view that political art/ socially relevant art is art that makes a commentary on society/politics. To occupy the artist’s position is already a politically loaded act. Regardless of what an artist has to say about society, their embrace of the artist’s status already legitimises to a certain extent the relations of power, exclusion and privilege that this status entails. This doesn’t mean that all artists endorse unreflexively this position. Some develop strategies to subvert or resist the mechanisms of purification and invisibilization. What it means is that when the artist posits society as outside of the art world, as an object out there, they create an ideological fiction regardless of the relevance of the work’s content and the opinions it conveys. There is a secondary order of politics at play when we discuss the social impact of art. I am well aware that addressing this issue raises methodological questions. In particular the relation between this writing and the sociology of art. Am I reducing art to its social dimension? For me, it means that as commentators/thinkers/writers/composers our task is also to elucidate the relation between these two orders. If sociology unveils a secondary order politics in art, it doesn’t mean that it reduces art to a mere effect of an external cause. It means that there is a secondary order aesthetics to be found that matches the secondary order politics. And a sound understanding of the composition of the art world that includes its dark matter and its feral diaspora in the different layers of society is a pre-requisite for this. We need to look differently into what happens in museums but more importantly we need to look outside of them differently too. For in fact, if art has oozed out and the population of creative redundants has multiplied below the radar, the art world is outside itself. We need to look beyond Becker’s art worlds [4] to see the “no longer art” worlds and try to understand how these worlds are entangled.

Interlude The writings of Nathalie Heinich

A host of texts of French sociologist Nathalie Heinich concentrate incisively on the crossing of a threshold, le passage à l’art, or how something such as an object becomes an object of art, or someone is considered an artist or assimilated to one: how hip hop becomes choreography, how heritage objects become art works, how exhibitions are treated as oeuvres de l’esprit [5]. The main figure through which these cases are approached is Marcel Duchamp whose legacy according to Heinich radicalized the idea that an artist is not an artist because they create artworks, but instead an artwork is recognized as art because it is created by an artist. That somehow the artist status is primary and that the work is a prop among others in a strategy to gain and maintain this status. In that, Heinich pushes to its extreme consequences theories such as Dickie’s first version of his institutional theory of art where the definition of art cannot be obtained internally: an artwork is what an institution considers art. The aesthetic act is a means in a social strategy from the part of the actor who hopes to secure a status. Artists are inventors of status and the art institution a sociology lab [6]. This leads Heinich herself to an uncomfortable territory and the crossing of another threshold: sociology cannot write about art without writing about itself as Duchamp has already subverted the concept of art through sociology. Her writing is highly symptomatic of the difficulty to write about art from the outside. Despite her constant calls to sociologists not to substitute themselves to art historians and aestheticians, she can’t help but venturing in aesthetic theory and art history. To consider Duchamp as the pivotal figure of the 20th century is by all means a theoretical move that sociology cannot support on its own.

Take 4. Conditions for separation

Returning to the imbrication of the art world and the no longer art world. As soon as the word entanglement is used, we need to think about how cuts are made. If separation doesn’t come first, which are the principles and forces that produce it? As T.J. Demos points out in a discussion with Sholette, we cannot observe the delineation of territories in the art world according to pre-given coordinates:

This also points to a problem with institutional critique at its worst, when the institution at stake is reduced to a single entity, as if it weren’t instead an internally diverse regulatory mechanism for a broad range of practices and categories. [7]

Demos suggests that the task is double: to acknowledge and trace the diversity in say an institution whilst at the same time identifying what is specific to the regulatory mechanisms in place. If an institution cannot be expected to dictate the terms in which its components must behave, mechanisms such as those of coordination clearly produce borders and conditions of inclusion and exclusion. Entanglement doesn’t mean dissolution but a more complex set of conditions for separation. More, this means that we need to go beyond the acknowledgement of a multiplicity of agents, a form of actors’ pluralism. We need to identify what makes it possible in the first place for an agent to become discernible as one. Before being recognized as “part of the game”, how can they come to be acknowledged as present in the first place?

Take 5. How to be present?

The question of presence in the art world cannot be elucidated without analysing its relations to the culture of metrics that are propagated by digital technologies and platforms. To be sure, presence never came unmediated. The long political history of representation testifies to this. However, with the increasing discretization of all things digital, representativeness comes to complicate representation. Representativeness frames the question of representation as a problem of sampling method and relies on likeness as a logic of political representation. Statistics, metrics and more pervasively quantification introduce a dimension of formalism as statistical modelling implies a large degree of flatness as well as a dependency on a very material infrastructure. With Jara Rocha, we ventured the expression “the active composition of presence” [8] which are the kinds of interventions and strategies that operate in the ambiguous relations between representation and representativeness and that are testing the infrastructural and ecological dependencies of the computation of presence. Paying attention to the active composition of presence dramatically increases the number of actors that are potentially making up the art world. Let’s list a few examples.

Bacteria. How does bacteria become discernible in an art institution? [9] How does it become a member of an artworld? How is it selectively included and excluded as part of an art work and an art institution? In official collections, many works are made of ephemeral and perishable materials. For the specialists taking care of their conservation, bacterias are crucial agents that need to be dealt with. This requires a technical infrastructure such as fridges, sensors or microscopes, legal compliance with various norms, availability of expertise either in house or through subcontractors and the constant development of an ad hoc knowledge as new materials are regularly incorporated into new art works. Art works such as ephemeral installations that are preserved in museums, when displayed, offer a spectacle of liveliness and suggest a link to nature. They only offer this appearance because they are heavily technologically monitored and taken care of. Their presence to the visitors is the result of an active composition that requires metrics and computation as well as the monitoring of air quality or the intensity of light. In many ways, the bacterias developed in the materials of the art work define the conditions of its “sociality”. For instance, it becomes risky to show a piece inhabited by bacterias too close to another artwork that would suffer from the presence of microbes or that exhibit certain fragilities. Or a museum can refuse to lend the art work to another for the reason that the latter cannot deploy the measures required for the presence of the object or secure the specific conditions needed for its transportation. If the apparatus for “presencing” the bug is not available, or if the measurements that demonstrate the optimal condition for the bacteria’s containment cannot be produced, then the artwork won’t travel.

The Facebook family. With the spread of online marketing tools and extensive CRM suites, sponsors and administrations are increasingly asking to cultural institutions statistics that go beyond the generic categories of the population such as those inferred from postcodes or mere footfall aggregates. As Katrina Sluis explains in a recent interview [10], the Facebook family is one of the categories defined by the Arts Council of England in the second decade of the century to conceptualise the audience of cultural institutions. Their aim was to leverage the granularity of digital data to align the institution’s data collection with marketing segmentation to increase their productivity. The name of the category testifies to the intimate relation the institutions began to cultivate with social media as means of outreach as well as epistemic tools. The gathered statistics promised new knowledge about the visitors at the condition of assimilating it to a customer. It also transformed into a mechanism of accountability as the visitors' data had to be reported to the funders. In different ways, the Facebook family epitomizes the confluence of epistemic production, control mechanism, visitors management all the way from social media to museum shop.

To narrate and investigate the aesthetic encounter in a museum, one must also find a vocabulary to talk about the meeting of a Facebook family with a bacteria inhabited work and account for the models, metrics and socio-technical networks that compose their presence.