The Price of Liberation
The Price of Liberation by Dorothée Dupuis
Too sophisticated to be perfectly similar to each other, but probably not sophisticated enough to avoid imitating each other more or less consciously, they spent a large part of their lives swapping things. They felt irritated by that often enough; but even more often they found it amusing. Georges Perec, in Things: a story of the sixties, 1965
The access that you have to all points of history, through the internet, is a kind of haunting. The internet is full of ghosts. We don’t know what is substantial and what is not. Mark Leckey, in The Guardian, March 26, 2015
In the sixties, US youth in the rural parts of the country found themselves bombarded by the propaganda of mass consumerism through popular culture and advertisement. From movies to TV, magazines, billboards, and the radio, the PR industry accelerated the production and distribution of celebrity imagery, which skyrocketed the international promotion of beauty standards, life aspirations, and a pseudo-rebellious individualism that meant to defy current moralist and conservative tendencies.
The promoted ideal of the self was equally concerned with independence as it was pretentiously centered around itself. It was an advertised ideal of a self that was emancipated from the constraints of society, a constructed persona focused on appearance through image-making. This display of anti-conformism and freedom was carefully engineered by large corporations that attached their products to these narratives, only to instrumentalize them in order to sell an opportunity to take part in the collective experience of social trends. This promise, which became the material of innumerable hymns, was turned ubiquitous through technology, notably the wide distribution of popular music. It was and remains a recurring song about the liberation of body and mind, concurrent with the establishment of new spaces of leisure and conviviality, which promised alternatives to the stammering alienation of farm or factory work.
In consequence, young attractive adolescents felt the gravitational pull of the star machine towards urban American centers. Young women were made aware of the transiency of their beauty as they dreaded their looks to be scorned by an early marriage, as much as boys envisioned a possible career in the rapidly growing entertainment industry as a way out of the conservative responsibilities of family businesses. The greyhound bus to the big city was the easy way out—or inside, respectively. These young people arrived at Grand Central in New York or in front of Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, armed with a black and white headshot and a lot of desire in their luggage. Some of them ended up knocking on Andy Warhol’s Factory.
Debora Delmar Corp, A female touch, 2015 Exhibition view, Les Ateliers des Arques, Lot, France
Debora Delmar Corp, Care Concepts, 2015 Exhibition view at Mon Chéri, Bruxelles Courtesy of the artist and Valentin and Jean Roch Dard, Paris
In 2009, Mexican artist Debora Delmar adopted the name Debora Delmar Corp. She refers to this adopted identity as a tool to distribute her artworks as a reflection of Capitalist Lifestyle and Aspirational Aesthetics. Her projects included topics such as trending color schemes in branding, corporate merchandising techniques, class issues in producer and consumer relationships, home decor, and commercial interior design as contexts for consumption, business ideology, and generally the circulation of images from both high and low culture. Rooting the origins of her work, she reminisces about her respective adolescence in Mexico City in the nineties: “All of a sudden American brands and franchises were everywhere. McDonalds, Sears … and Starbucks a little later. Everyone wanted to own and consume these products. Because it felt cool and modern. We wanted the same as teenagers in the US.” This shift happened with the opening of the Mexican and US borders through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. This exchange was limited to capital and trade goods—benefiting mainly US products—and didn’t, as history keeps reminding us, include people.
Similar to what happened in the US in the sixties, this is a tale of commodity culture. It is a story of consumer products being sent on a crusade to conquer new markets and stimulate consumers’ incentives and necessities. The US corporations flooding their products into Mexico didn’t see the cultural modernization of the country as their main objective; it simply happened collaterally. While imported mass media and consumer goods helped to advance Mexico into a first grade capitalist nation, it also propagated American Individualism and Way of Life on a wide range. In the sixties, US corporations disguised such commercial strategies by the aid of the mass media and packaged them into popular culture; thirty years later they were just unloaded onto Mexico. An element of transparency in the neo-colonial nature of the economic relations between these neighboring nations.
The patriarchal Mexican society of the nineties had been dwelling in stagnation. In 1994, Mexico had been governed by the same Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) since its ascension to power over seventy years ago. The big wave of Americanism brought by NAFTA offered a way out of this rigid national identity constructed in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, by promoting a cool and contemporary idea of the self abetted by US products, previously defined as stand-ins for American Individualism and Way of Life. They simply put on the same old song of American emancipation that came hand in hand with the tease of social advancement. Status is gained by buying and consuming products of desire that act as signifiers of social elevation. The newly imported notion of independence of the self starts ineluctably to affect existing common values, such as general taste and sense of community.
Debora Delmar Corp, Upward Mobility, 2015 Exhibition view, Modern Art Oxford Courtesy of the artist
Today, Mexico can still be considered as an emerging, non-Western country at the edge of the Western world, with an ongoing ambivalent relationship with its northern sibling, the United States of America. The art scene there is relatively segmented. Artists that emerged in the nineties come predominantly from wealthier backgrounds. Before it was possible to access a wealth of information on the internet, artists had to travel to relate to what was going on in the rest of the world, and to experience and reflect upon the prevalent canon of Western art and its history. This mobility was mainly reserved for people with certain amount of resources. Many of these artists underwent education abroad, which is costly itself, allowing them to obtain a broader perspective on the global production of contemporary art, a perspective that permitted them to establish a critical distance towards the historicity of art that shaped their own artistic landscape. In some cases this resulted in the somewhat problematic situation in which artists from wealthy backgrounds concerned themselves with the political situation and social disparity of their struggling societies while indulging themselves in a comfortable bohemian way of life. This raised questions of legitimacy voiced by artists that didn’t belong to the elite social class themselves.
This reminds us of many Western observers—as noted by New York-based writer Adam Kleinman—who were caught off guard by the political outcome of the Arab Spring movements, only because they were mainly analyzing the feedback and news from members of the local bourgeoisie and elite, which led them to believe in the emergence of new systems. This belief was ultimately very far from the concerns of the majority of the Arab population. Thus, it came as a surprise to some, that one of the first acts after the Egyptian revolution was an attack on the American University of Cairo, which was well known for its establishment of Western progressive visions implemented in their programs. These events illustrate the global phenomena that is the discrepancy between members of different classes when it comes to the implementation of social and cultural realities.
Francisco Cordero-Oceguera, Three ducks paintings, 2014 Oil based paint on raw canvas, 50 x 60 cm each Courtesy of the artist
Francisco Cordero-Oceguera, Theres always truth behind just kidding a little emotion behind I don't care a little pain behind it's okay a little I need you behind leave me alone and lots of words behind the silence.(I-III), 2014 Print on metallic paper, blue acrylic, custom frames, 30 x 36 cm each Courtesy of the artist
As part of the urban French middle class, I was able to advance socially through the free education system that most European countries offer, which allows its students to ascend socially. But However, in Mexico, where I arrived in 2012, I realized how exceptional this path is. Here, I spoke to many artists who have found ingenious sideways to access international networks of art education without coming from a particularly privileged background. These are emblematic case stories of young artists like the one of Francisco Cordero-Oceguera who was born in 1989. He graduated with a Bachelor of the Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with the help of several US scholarships, and then decided to move back to Mexico as a tactic to participate in a predominantly white art world that has internalized a brown is beautiful attitude for quite some time. Francisco Cordero-Oceguera indeed trusts his acquired knowledge and intuitive handling of visual codes and the circulation of imagery, synthesized by online content, to ensure him enough global visibility through the exoticizing of his native home. He then relocated Lodos, an alternative exhibition space he founded in Chicago, to a tiny garage in the neighborhood of la San Rafael, which is being quickly gentrified. “I can’t identify with artists who come from the high bourgeoisie and decide to tackle social and political problems of my country,” he tells me. “My goal is to become part of an international dialogue about art in a very classic way. Most of my work is informed by the idea of appartenance. It deals with content that takes part in a larger narrative of shared signs that are borrowed from popular culture, ambient consumerism, and cultural references that we share as as part of a generational community and that connect us. This includes movies and cartoons that were seen by children everywhere, high-definition aesthetics enabled by graphical processing power, lifestyle promoting brands, generic landscapes, clothing trends, détournement of iconic corporate logos, an affiliation with historical traditions that see or treat an art object as a commodity like painting on canvas that can be associated with industrial and minimal art aesthetics and that are able to flatten any content in order to have them circulate swiftly and easily. All of these notions, attributes, and methods connect with one other, making a statement on what art is today.” Through gestures like reproduction, appropriation, pattern-making, working in series and stuttering, these artworks function more like occurrences than unique entities. If the idea of originality stays present, it is to support a specific quest for identity seen as an elected, constructed notion within a given set of parameters framed by ideas of style and conformity. It is an art that can be associated with the idea of identity, yet detached from the identity politics art movement that saw its inception in the seventies. Identity politics aimed to make room for the representation of communities that had little visibility in society in general.The point here is to justify one’s own ability to be part of an existing landscape, rather than claim the right for diverse individuals to be represented equally in mainstream visual culture.
Francisco Cordero-Oceguera, Reduced moments (with contents), 2015 Wet cardboard box, tape, bubble wrap, foam, polyeurethane, air cushions, and coal, Dimensions variable Box constructed by curator Franklin Melendez to transport work from New York City to Vienna. Courtesy of Andreas Huber Galerie, Vienna and the artist
Francisco Coredero-Oceguera, Reduced moments (necklace), 2015 Wet cardboard box, tape, steel rope, ceramic shard, ceramic duck head, HDTV antenna purchased on the street, Deep Impact Blu-ray disc with packaging, carabiners, and coal. Dimensions variable Courtesy of DarkArts International and the artist
It is then interesting to observe how Debora Delmar’s and Francisco Cordero-Oceguera’s artistic practices demonstrate a highly integrated awareness of how art production can influence social matters as well as their own lives. They consider the option to become an artist as a refuge — to sustain one’s position by claiming your own individual production. Furthermore, they see art as motor or drive which can accelerate social integration and advancement. Perhaps they consider art as a promise. While these might be old tropes in Europe, these ideas come somewhat as a novelty in countries where the middle class lacks the perspective and hope that characterized the post-war era in Europe. The wish to join the current individualist ideology promoted by triumphant capitalism happens on a clear, strategic, and lucid level. As Andy Warhol’s Factory hosted figures like Joe Dallessandro—superstar in many of Warhol’s underground flicks and gay icon—who came from a working class background next to Edie Sedgwick—another Warholian superstar and quintessential it-girl—who was the offspring of an elite dynasty of political power and industrial wealth, in a Post-Internet art world young artists of modest or second generation immigrant backgrounds mingle with the rich white kids. They only differ in their social aspirations. While the white kids might want to free themselves from the chains of a patriarchal system they’re brought up in and become artists instead of housewives or investment bankers, the “brown kids” simply want to jump up the ladder and test the limits of bohemian life, charging in any direction that leads them out of the stinginess of middle class life. Both scenarios seem to be master plans for social emancipation.
Art then ratifies an ultra libertarian system of thinking that promotes a total disengagement of the common and politics, emancipating the individual from the humanist duty to produce a better world. On the other hand —although selfish—given the withdrawal that being an artist nowadays seems to constitute, should we prefer the commitment of a career as drug dealer, fanatical djihadist or evangelist pastor? The line is thin between those who can consider working in the culture entertainment, and recreation industry as an escape, and those for whom this option remains unimaginable. Soon, even the last factory jobs available will disappear, and most production will be realized by machines that are predicted to become fully intelligent as early as 2040. Will human beings become simple social interfaces of distribution channels and care services? These problematics actually haunt the work of many Post-Internet artists. By appropriating imagery of health, sports, and military industries that rely on technology to expand the physical possibilities of the body, harking back to cybernetic theories, they question the ineluctable fusion of mechanics and flesh as well as the ghostly nature of our syncretic, future beings.
The New Museum’s Triennial which opened its doors in February, affirmed the intersection of the compulsive use of digital medias and technology, appropriation of corporate imagery and-although questionable persistence of activist and political agendas as important characteristics of current emerging artistic practices. The actual lifestyles of contemporary artists, as Francisco Cordero-Oceguera suggests, might incarnate a radical further step of fusion between these concerns, where life becomes more important than an art compelled to maintain a certain ideological status quo. Art serves as a transitional artifact that allows the individuals producing it to emancipate their private lives from traditional patriarchal values such as commitment, security, responsibility, and so on. As opposed to other times of social change, such as the seventies, nowadays it doesn’t seem that the awareness of the outsider comes with a will to fight the system they escaped from.
When the term Post-Internet was coined, there were questions about whether artists who used the visual and rhetorical vocabulary of corporations as material for their work had a critical stance towards it and were actually politicized. The posture of these artists is far more ambiguous, oscillating between lucidity and indifference. First, collective stance is not the priority: each artist’s relationship to politics is shaped by their personal history and concerns. Biographic elements here are used as signs emitted in the direction of the other members of the group, in order to show the possible integration to its specific narratives. In a paradoxical way, one could see in the Post-Internet artists’ refusal of voicing unified views as a common denominator that links otherwise quite disparate practices. Fed up with traditional power structures, these young artists can be compared to a group of cynical teenagers who do not want to age but to remain part of an irresponsible system maximizing their personal enjoyment as an anarchist strategy in itself. If in the sixties, economic prosperity led society to instrumentalize the figure of the successful Pop artist as a heroic, anti-conformist one, maybe the precarious 2010s just realistically ascribe the artist as a contemporary proletarian whose success is already inscribed in the privilege to escape social déclassement.
Juliana Huxtable, Frank Benson Exhibition view, New Museum Triennial, NY, 2015
Last Christmas Day, the New York Times invited experts to reflect on young adults who refuse to grow up, to obtain property, to reproduce, and who continue to consider transgression and partying as the only options possible. These are adults who see work just as a way to earn enough money to survive. Novelists like Tai Lin or media outlets like Vice have emerged as the spokespeople of this ”no future” generation: post-individualistic, yet highly gregarious, gathering as a community through a paradoxical mix of rejection of traditional values and unconditional adherence to consumerism. “No future” is marked as a generation that privileges another type of consumption — drugs, which feeds the alternative capital economy that is the global drug trade, legal dystopian Doppelgänger of the Capital, generating the liquidity for the necessary corruption that needs the latter. Can a lifestyle be a political position? Is Post-Internet political in itself through an attitude of cynicism? Like a middle finger to the system? A “take the money and run” gesture? What does Post-Internet tell us about the aesthetic of the art object, on what art should be nowadays, which is the only issue we art critics, curators, and artists should be concerned about? Post-Internet seems to announce a shift of a phenomenological paradigm - a shift supported by the recent critical success of philosophical theories such as Speculative Realism, for instance, that is invested to eliminate human subjectivity from the picture.
Aesthetic notions discussed in this text, like pattern repetition, sameness, and seriality, are not affirmed as markers of originality but rather of artistic/creative class affiliation. These notions can be analyzed according to a formal methodology that seeks to avoid superficial debates—and notably around the name of the movement itself: Post-Internet seems to be foremost the name of an art interested by its existence both off screen and online, a mode of existence rendered possible through the tools offered by the internet in its current shape and that can be dated back to the launch of Facebook in 2004. Artistic production is immediately dependent on the social, historical, and technological phenomena at work in the society that generates it. As voices in radical leftist philosophy, like the ones of Slavoj Zizek or Alain Badiou are currently pleading to rethink Communism via its pre-Russian revolution version, it is important to comprehend contemporary artistic trends from a Post-Marxist perspective, rather than continuing to nurture a Greenbergian quest for originality that only supports the liberal fantasy inherent to the myth of self-expression and an ongoing heroification of the male genius. Appropriation and awareness of reproducibility as novelty in itself are powerful tools inherited from Feminism and Conceptualism in the seventies. Is Post-Internet an ideological Trojan horse? Can we use it as a framework to make the current art world more transparent? Can it be a tool of emancipation for certain categories of artists and producers? Is this freedom, and can it be turned into true power? What is exciting about Post-Internet art is its tangibility, the fact that it is the perfect current embodiment of the speed of liberation, an idea coined by Paul Virilio twenty years ago, the moment when energy eases effortless into incarnation and when the stream becomes visible. The Post-Internet art movement extends the age-old debate about incarnation and substance, sneaking its place into art history. Exciting new contexts and perspectives offer a range of powerful critical tools to analyze, discuss, and support the art being made at this very moment, and what greater fantasy for an art critic of the post-postmodern era than to be told that positivism is not dead, that history is indeed progressing everywhere. Let's then, wearing our comfortable fake Nike sneakers purchased under the cloak in San Cosme, Marrakech or Sumatra, walk there together.
Written between November 2014 and February 2015. Translated by Dorothée Dupuis and Suzy Halayan. Copy editing Tenzing Barshee.
