flsclcltnsprsdm.cc
,
,
15 21 2012
/ Moscow, 2012
C ATA L O G U E
Editors
Anastasia Ryabova
Dmitry Potemkin
V-A-C
(
)
,
,
,
textandpictures
THE EXHIBITION
I S O R GA N I S E D BY:
Curator
Anastasia Ryabova
V-A-C Foundation,
(Victoria
the Art of being Contemporary)
Teresa Iarocci Mavica, director
Katerina Chuchalina
Maria Mkrtycheva
Olga Sharkovich
Anna Bogdanova
Museum of Business
andPhilanthropy
Elena Kalmykova, director
BodoniGlobal
PragmaticaC
Texts by
Irina Alexandrova
Daria Atlas
Alex Buldakov
Sergey Guskov
Olga Zhitlina
Nicolas Audureau
Adam Leeds
Nikolai Ridnyi
Anastasia Ryabova
Maria Chekhonadskikh
Translations
Carleton Copeland
Inna Kushnareva
Vera Akulova
Lilia Lyubarsky
Design
textandpictures
Photography
Anastasia Ryabova
Photo editing
Maxim Gudkov
Proofreader
Larisa Zvyagintseva
Fonts
BodoniGlobal
designed by Elena Novoselova
PragmaticaC
Printed by
UP-Print
-
ISBN 978-5-4253-0351-6
/ Contents
10
17
26
68
M U S E U M O F C A P I TA L I S M
Anastasia Ryabova
72
LIVING WITH THE ECONOMY
Adam Leeds
78
T H E VA L U E O F A R T
Nicolas Audureau
86
RAMEAUS NEPHEW
Maria Chekhonadskikh
38
96
Nikolai Ridnyi
43
61
50
WORKS
57
ARTISTS
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56
ARTISTS
Ivan Brazhkin
Born in 1985 in Rostov-on-Don.
Lives and works in Moscow.
Ivan Brazhkin works in the genres of
sculpture, graphic art, video and artistic
actions. His work critiques the period of
capitalisms normalization, when new
market values cultivating individualism
and consumption were superimposed
on the old ways of life. A Soviet rug
(adust catcher in popular humor) is
turned from a symbol of petit bourgeois
comfort into a banner (Shame on the
Bourgeois Louses! a collaboration
with Anastasia Potemkina), while a
chest expander, formerly popular with
Soviet workers, becomes an expression
of strength (Fucking Strong). An urban
context is of paramount importance
for many of Brazhkins works: his
sculpture Sniper is left in a half-ruined
building near the fashionable art center
where the exhibition is being held, and
Homeless Person, asculpture in the
style of a bourgeois garden gnome,
sleeps in the bushes of an officially
refurbished Gorky Park. Brazhkin
demonstrates the schizophrenia of
post-Soviet consciousness: trendy
places for the leisure and cultural
pursuits of Moscow youth and the
middle class are cleansed of the
dclass majority. To live in such a
society, the majority have to act like
German garden gnomes. Brazhkins art
lays bare the absurd logic of life under
capitalism, where extreme poverty
coexists with cynical opulence, and the
remnants of Soviet aesthetics are found
alongside the post-Soviet nouveau. In
this new dialectic, the artist takes the
side of the oppressed. MC
historical experience of art with the current context, and the current context
with philosophical analysis. For a better
understanding of his work, we must turn
to the artists focus of investigation: the
phenomenon of error, regarded ontologically. The human being is a kind of
machine, but one that functions properly only when it doesnt work. This malfunctioning, this failure to work properly,
is sobering, shocking or disturbing. In
the video series Excess, ordinary Moscow cityscapes are turned into a surreal
nightmare: from his car window, a driver
sees a man hanging from a billboard. An
aerial view of standard high-rise buildings evokes monstrous futuristic forms.
In the project Design Correction, the
artist discloses the unbearableness of
being in a quiet, cozy world of offices
and bedroom communities. Standardized furniture a table, a chair, shelves
filled with binders is violently broken,
scratched, cracked and punctured.
Buldakovs restructuring of human life
begins with an aesthetic protest against
capitalisms petit bourgeois routine. In
his ontology, a mistake of nature (Urban
Fauna Zoo, a collaboration with Anastasia Potemkina and Dmitry Potemkin) or
a breakdown in communication (Mute)
is in the vanguard of subversive activity.
And the artist invites us to join this new
avant-garde. MC
Zachary Formwalt
Born in 1979 in Albany, Georgia.
Lives and works in Amsterdam.
57
Alice Joffe
Born in 1987 in Tashkent.
Lives and works in Moscow.
Today, when the means of producing
images have long since gone beyond
simple photography and incorporated
such notions now intrinsic to the
analysis of images as authenticity,
instantaneity (of production and dissemination) and ubiquity, Alice Joffes
decision to paint is practically a form
of resistance against contemporary
aesthetic criteria and the time and
ease of production. This can be seen
as a choice in favor of autonomous
production with its own economy, like
that of an artisan. From an aesthetic
point of view, Joffes pictures reveal an
affinity for the material of painting, an
approach always oscillating between
being and representation. It could
be called organic abstractionism or
geometric matierism. The corporality
of her painting comes through in the
human figure, in painting itself, in the
depiction of sexual organs and the color red. Female and male genitals, the
eroticizing of color and material, and
figurative abstraction suggest interlocking bodies: black in red on white, a
red vertical element on a curved white
surface against a black background,
etc. Her partiality for the body or a hint
of its presence is also apparent in a
series of corpses lone, motionless
bodies in abstract surroundings. Again
material takes the place of landscape.
But Alice Joffes canvases reveal many
aspects in addition to painting per
se, including dtourned motifs. The
artist restores an aesthetic dimension to administrative motifs used for
official documents watermarks on
Irina Korina
Born in 1977 in Moscow.
Lives and works in Moscow.
Irina Korina is one of the most recognizable artists of the early twenty-first century. Her monumental works have been
represented in every important exhibition in the last decade. This should be
a sign of fantastic commercial success,
but in fact the reverse is true. Her works
remain outside market relations, acting
as pure Platonic forms. Its frightening
even to think of the dimensions they
would have assumed, had they been
commercially successful. The scarcity
of means for their reproduction and dissemination is a kind of natural barrier,
and it may be that to cross that barrier
would mean the collapse of the contemporary art market itself.
In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,
Gilles Deleuze says that the characteristic of the baroque is the fold that goes
on to infinity. So it is with Irina Korina:
her works take the form of folds and
bulges that she tries to transplant to the
external world, but they only multiply
and overlay each other, reflecting an
infinity of internal curves.
Her shift in recent years from explicitly
artificial materials to the most purely
organic branches, leaves, logs
hints at mysterious internal processes in
Korinas work. Or perhaps its a personal obsession expressed in the perennial
struggle between nature and culture. IA
Camille Laurelli
Born in 1981 in Montreuil-sous-Bois,
France. Lives and works just about
everywhere.
Camille Laurelli fits the definition of an
artist as an unproductive investigator
and amateur. He is unproductive
mainly because his activities dont
58
Anastasia Potemkina
Born in 1984 in Moscow. Lives and
works in Moscow.
Nikolai Ridnyi
Born in 1985 in Kharkiv.
Lives and works in Kharkiv.
Its no exaggeration to say that Nikolai
Ridnyi has been a formative influence
on the Kharkiv art scene in recent
years. In 2005 he and Anna Kriventsova opened the artist-run space
SOSka in downtown Kharkiv a site
and environment for experimentation. Later they were joined by Sergey
Popov. Thats how the SOSka Group
was formed.
The theme of environment (or its
absence) and of contemporary art as a
universal export commodity is central
to Ridnyis work. In the Barter project, Ridnyi and other members of the
SOSka Group drove from village to village in a car packed with reproductions
of classic contemporary art. The artists
staged exhibitions for elderly villagers,
their dogs, chickens and other charges
and offered to trade prints for fresh
produce. Video recordings of how the
villagers made their selections suggest
an alternative system of evaluation and
pricing unobscured by convention.
59
Vladislav Shapovalov
Born in 1981 in Rostov-on-Don.
Livesand works in Moscow.
Anna Witt
Born in 1981 in Wasserburg.
Livesand works in Vienna.
Anna Witt works in the genres of performance art, living sculpture and urban
interventionism. Her works are most
often documented in the form of video
installations. But this genre classification is more conventional than anything
else, since the borders between the
media she employs are always open.
Each of Witts projects is an aggregate
composition. The artist seeks new
forms of social performance, combining choreography and the plastic arts
with the canonical methods of social
Alexander Verevkin
and political art: activist explorations,
Born in 1977 in Togliatti.
work with urban communities and
Lives and works in Samara and Togliatti. historical reconstruction. She tries to
involve various social groups in a perAlexander Verevkin is the embodiment formative act capable of deconstructof Joseph Beuyss idea that everyone ing stereotyped behaviors, gestures of
is an artist. Completely cut off from
violence and control, social rituals and
the contemporary art milieu due to the habits of everyday and professional life.
time and place of his birth, in the late
Witt has worked with security guards,
1990s Verevkin managed to carry on
soldiers, immigrants, women, blue-cola productive correspondence with the lar workers and people from rural areas.
majority of large Western museums
In her interventions, the artist tries to
and galleries. He sent out letters tellovercome the loss of public spirit and
ing a little about himself and including the retreat into private life, to open
a couple of his works and in return
up professional and ethnic ghettos.
received packages of catalogues with Her performances are often based on
encouraging comments. Perhaps that simple gestures that privilege nonverbal
supostat.org
was how he formed the conviction
language and body contact. Witts perthat an artist could be self-taught and formative interventions diagnose social
Supostat is a media project launched
didnt need anything else. He didnt
problems, but above all they transform
in 2011 by Anastasia Ryabova, Alex
need favors from the art scene
the subjectivity of their participants. MC
Buldakov, Sergey Guskov and Vladislav either.
Shapovalov. Supostats members
Verevkins graphic work is stylistiinitiate discussions and programs of
cally akin to early twentieth century
collective exploration involving artbook illustrations, and this conveys
ists, theorists, curators and cultural
acalm, contemplative mood, a sense
activists. The goal of this initiative is
of cool precision. The artist himself,
an understanding of the machinery
however, is extremely dynamic and
behind the Moscow art system, whose verbal. He lets his words flow as freely
workings remain veiled and obscure
as the originators of Zaum, mixing
due to a web of informal relations.
autobiographical elements, bizarre
Project participants are interested in
theories and striking observations on
cultural producers themselves, in the
the processes taking place in the art
sociology of the art environment and
community. Dismissing the very idea
the nontransparent, corrupt schemes
of financial dependence on cultural
of institutional politics. Supostat was
institutions and galleries, Verevkin
formed to battle the corporate style
experiments with how art can function
of post-Soviet cultural politics, to
outside of monetary relations, using
extirpate cabals and overturn the hier- the service getartworks.org, where any
archical pyramid in the art community. who wish can order free copies of his
Supostat functions as a discussion
work. Or they can simply take someclub, a laboratory, a kind of collective
thing of his at an exhibition and walk
research institute. The projects name out with it. IA
60
WORKS
by turning critical theory into a commodity. By opposing this way of capitalizing on Marx and by critiquing
critical art, the artist deliberately steps on his own tail
in a sly maneuver, a tour de passe-passe. DA
61
Alice Joffe. S a y I m t he M a s t e r, S a y Yo u Lo v e M e
2012 [19, 87] Oil and acrylic on canvas, 200300 cm
62
Say Im the master, say you love me is a conceptual and graphic synthesis of the history of painting.
Above all, its a history of paint. On a canvas of three
by two meters, red rectangles ascend stepwise from
lower left to upper right against a white background.
These rectangles were formed by applying oil paint
to a canvas coated with acrylic paint. The picture is
then unified and composed. But we notice subtle
differences between the ten red rectangles. This is
because the artist has used ten different tubes of
the same color, cadmium red light ten different
brands of paint, whose manufacturing quality and
price differ accordingly. The ten strokes of the same
shade of red are thus not identical and are ranged
from the least expensive brand (lower left) to the most
expensive (upper right). But this gradation isnt visible
yet and will take time to reveal itself.
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who turn to art, incorporating it in their everyday delusion of grandeur. Well aware of this, the institution of art
does all it can to let the illusion of ars longa spread like a
toxic agent through exhibit halls designed to capture the
imagination. Artists always keep this in mind.
Over a decade ago, Maurizio Cattelan inscribed all
the defeats of the English national football team on a
granite plaque. This is a blatant sacrilege, a parody
of a monument similar to the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington plus mockery of something
that may even be more sacred: football itself. Nikolai
Ridnyis Memorial Plaque would appear to deal with
less explosive themes. Currency exchange is hardly
the emotional bomb that a football match is, and monetary transactions lack the tragedy that is so palpable
whenever one takes up the matter of war. But Ridnyis
work is also more obscene, sneering at conventions
that have long been immune to criticism. The demonstrative nullification of currency values is an assault on
the very logic of the modern economy.
65
Maxim Spivakov. Py ra m i d B a g .
M e rc ha n d i s i n g S c he m e , 2012 [13, 97]
Print on plastic bag, 306020 cm,
www.flsclcltnsprsdm.cc/online-store
In this work, Maxim Spivakov draws on the classic
illustration Pyramid of Capitalist System, published
in 1911 in the Industrial Worker. The artist graphically
depicts the final victory of the workers movement by
turning the pyramid upside down on the outside of a
plastic bag. Thus, with a minimum of intervention, the
image is turned into an illustration of the victorious
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M U S E U M O F C A P I TA L I S M
Anastasia Ryabova
. / Alexander Verevkin. W o r k
Alex Callinicos
69
70
71
There is a widely shared sense today that there is something false about the economy. What
is not shared, however, are the very meanings of false and the economy. Falseness in the
straightforward sense that we are simply being lied to (by whatever villainous group you
choose or by some less concrete subject) does not hold up very long.
One sense in which it is right is that the global economy has been in crisis for the last several
years because the actions of many of the actors in the financial system turned out to be wrong,
to be based upon false premises, false calculations. The scale of the mistakes has been in some
cases mindboggling. The sharpest sense of falsity here is that of fraud and misrepresentation.
But such misrepresentation in the financial system, while historically large, and a reason why
the crisis was so severe, cannot receive the blame for the very fact of the crisis happening. Most
of the losses are the result of being wrong about the way that the future would go. But one
sense in which this understanding of the intuition can go astray is to take all finance as somehow based on lies. What it is based on is representations of the future, and the future is uncertain. Fundamentally, the distinction between speculation and investment is purely post hoc.
You only know that an investment was speculative after it begins to lose money. This makes it
hard unequivocally to call investment good and speculation bad, and to outlaw or restrict the
latter and not the former. While careful regulatory engineering can reduce risk-taking, and
thus speculation, some risks do in fact pay off and these too might be lost to regulation.
There is a further sense not directly tied to the crisis, but persisting even in times of relative
calm, in which something is felt to be wrong with the economy insofar as the financial sector
becomes more and more important. This is a complex issue. There are historical resonances
that get in the way of thinking about it. Lending at interest has been condemned in Western
culture at least since the birth of Christianity. It was only relatively recently that accommodation began to be made for it, with St. Thomas uneasy attempt to combine Catholic theology
with classical sources that did allow usury. The consequent association of lending with nonChristians persists in the recurrent anti-Semitic association of the evils of finance with those
of Jews. In Russian culture there is also a deeply rooted bias against trading arbitrage understood as speculation and in favor of production, and finance is easily assimilable to trading.
Aside from historical issues, there is a question as to whether the character of the economy
itself changes as finance becomes a larger proportion of the economy and/or as the types of
financial products become more and more abstracted. The basic purpose of finance is intermediation: moving money from savings to investors. The easier that is to do, the faster the
economy should grow, which is why finance is sometimes referred to as the accelerator of
the economy. As financial instruments layer, disaggregate, and re-aggregate into more and
more complex derivatives, this intermediary function becomes more and more difficult to
discover. And it is quite possible that this process facilitates speculation, increases informational problems, and makes crises both more likely and more severe. But it is a jump from
that to saying that it is speculation, that derivatives are in some sense lies (the contemporary
left term is fictitious capital). They are not called derivatives without reason: their value
72
. / Alice Nikitinov. Fa l l e n N o . 1
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74
. / Camille Laurelli. I n fl at i o n
is entirely derivative of that of the underlying productive asset, and no degree of derivation
ever makes that untrue. Unlike in Muybridges photographs of galloping horses (perspicaciously explored in Zachary Formwalts film), unsupported transit is an illusion. The collapse of the U.S. financial system when homeowners became less able to pay back their mortgages should be sufficient testimony to this.
Denying autonomy to finance also negates grand theories of present that see the post-70s
world order as increasingly founded upon non-material forms of labor and commodification. Beyond being a regression in Marxist theory, reopening debates that date to Isaak Illich
Rubins 1928 statement of the commodity form interpretation, there are obvious metaphysical
problems: what, exactly, can be said to be non-material? Leaving aside spectral speculations,
counting as an object, being able to participate in the logic of commodity production, is due as
much or more to the legal and regulatory frameworks that govern it and the technical systems
in which it is incorporated as it is due to the tactile qualities of the thing itself. And it is simply a fact that our societies are fully able to constitute objects such as interest rate swaps
in such a manner that they can be produced, bought and sold to the tune of trillions of dollars.
What more objectivity does one want? All of this is not to say that the global reach, instantaneous speed, and in some economies preponderant weight of finance does not necessitate
reflection on what is new with our world, but I would argue this newness lies not in ontology,
not at the level of mode of production, but in, for instance, a reconfiguration of class fractions,
the international division of labor, the financialization of everyday life, etc. That is, were still
dealing with the same old capitalism, though it is up to some new tricks. (Without getting too
much into a Marxian analysis, I would argue that most recent transformations have been in
the use value logics of capitalist society and culture, not the logic of value of capital itself.)
What we are taking about now is what the economy is, but also how or by what means the
economy appears. And what is certainly true is that finance is assuming an increasingly
autonomized status as the mode of appearance of not only the economy but the state of society as a whole.
Everyday discourse involves tremendous amounts of discourse about the economy and its
state, its moods and feelings, its degrees of mobility, its desires and urgings. The economy
appears in a variety of guises, in and by a variety of indicators. Let us take some of the most
popular, in progressive degree of fetishization (here I mean the process by which a partial
representation is taken to stand for the whole it represents). We move from a representation
of economic activity as a whole in GDP, to a representation of a portion of corporate investment in stock market indices, to the collective expectations of the progress of growth represented in at once the most fetishized and most real of indices, the interest rate yield curve on
government bonds. Depending on the context, other signs invoke the economy: the inflation rate, the unemployment rate. In Russia, as a legacy of productionist ideology and the
strange (non)functioning of money in the Soviet economy, it is often output figures for this
or that industry. And it should not be forgotten that the construction of these numbers is the
result of massive apparatuses of layered representation-making machinery, which include
things like cadastral surveys and censuses, bookkeeping techniques and accounting standards, transaction and income data, taxation schemes and their accounting and inspectorates, asset pricing formulas, demographic models, etc. An avalanche or cascade of numbers
and institutional means of producing and manipulating numbers.
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Lets say right away and without further adue that, as noted by Ernst Gombrich, There
really is no such thing as art1, same as there is no really such thing as money. Definition of
art, similar to the definition of money, has been changing with time: art, just like money,
is constantly benign redefined, reinterpreted, affected by fluctuation, speculation, etc. At
the same time, relationship between art and money has formed quite recently. This is certainly due to the fact that prior to nineteenth century art was much closer intertwined with
power: before the Renaissance with religious and spiritual authority, after with political
power, economic influence of bourgeois and of the free market. With the French Revolution
of 1789 that ignited invention of museum by confiscating cabinets of curiosities formerly
belonging to aristocracy; with first industrial revolution and invention of tubes of paint
by Lefranc in 1859 that allowed the impressionists to come out of their studios; with invention of daguerreotype in 1839; with Lumiere brothers Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat in 1896;
with Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending a Staircase in 1912; with speed and fragmentation
of movement; in other words, with industrialization and arrival of capitalism art acquired
tools for self-reflection and, consequently, for economic and political independence. And yet,
art did not deviate from its context in history, and this uninterrupted timeline stretching
throughout history brings us to reflecting on so-called critical autonomy of art. How does art
interact and interacted throughout the twentieth century with the engine of its liberation
power of capital, i.e. with money and value?
Lets look at the artwork that lays foundation for capitalist understanding of works of
art, Marcel Duchamps Bottle Rack (1914), which is believed to be his first real readymade.
By expanding limits of existing reality, i.e. liberating the artistic gesture and the status of an
artist, Duchamp demonstrates that symbolic added value of an object determines its minimal scientific definition as a work of art. Thus, any object may be elevated to the status of a
work of art. But this is not all. Duchamp also proves that only an artist can attach this symbolic added value to an ordinary object, therefore, only an artist has the magic power to
transform non-art into art.2 Duchamp creates a new paradigm of art, where art itself defines
its added value a priori, independently of esthetic canon. A priori indeed, because creation
of this symbolic added value depends on cooperation of the third party, the viewer, same as
in monetization of capital. The viewer creates a work of art, i.e. validates and gives credit
to the esthetic judgment made by the artist. What are implications of this formula from the
point of view of capitalism? Duchamps work of art is fully integrated in speculative values
of capitalism, which in itself becomes the definition of a work of art. From now on, it is first
and foremost a speculative object in theoretical, esthetical and, most importantly, financial
senses. Obviously, Duchamp himself did not think about financial approach to art, but it is
present in the very definition of readymade.
1 Ernst Gombrich The Story of Art 1950.
78
T H E VA LU E O F A RT
Nicolas Audureau
79
80
In order to understand relationship between money and art, lets try first to understand
what money is. A German economist Rainer Willert gave it following definition in 1991:
Money is everything that fulfils three functions: a means of payment, a means of storing value, and a unit of calculation.3 Similar to Duchamps definition of art, this is a modern interpretation. And, as if to stress the analogy with art, Rainer Willert answered the
questions What is money? with words Nothing, this is the only possible answer.4 Similarly to Duchamps creations, money do not have objective value other than the value that
is assigned to them. Therefore, purchasing and symbolic value of money are one and the
same. Aristotles definition is even more generous: he believed that Everything that has
value of money is money. This is a truly duchampian definition could easily be applied to
the readymade.
Nevertheless, Duchamp is more avant-garde than the economics, which itself went through
a process of dematerialization after 1931 London Economic Conference that obliterated the
gold standard. It lead to self-sufficiensy of finance: bank notes became a legal tender and a
common denominator, i.e. they became self-referential just like Duchamps works. Consequently, for art and for money the question of agreement is at the core of their value. Stability of markets depends on peoples trust in them. The same can be said about art.
Ontological transformation of a work of art and tension between art and money will truly
rise only after the World War II, with Pop art. This tension arose during the Les Trente Glorieuses, The Glorious Thirty, and the second industrial revolution, transfer from tools to
technology, onslaught of mass-produced modern comforts, Andy Warhols Brillo Box (1964),
Claes Oldenburgs The Store (1961), and after art as an object of mass consumption. You can see
here legacy of the readymade an ordinary object intended for mass consumption triumphs
over the original. But Pop art created one important distinction: it is not enough to by a box
of brillo to own a Warhol. Pop art did not critique consumerist values, it just increased them.
Besides, neither the question nor the value of money has been central to Pop art.
If you want to find critical interpretation of the notion of value in artistic work, you should
look toward David Hammons. This African-American artist, born in 1943, his whole life has
been avoiding the system of art galleries. In winter of 1983 he held a performance at the Cooper Square in New York called Bliz-aard Ball Sale: standing among street vendors he was
selling snowballs ($1 each). Hammonss work contains references to perception of blacks in
the US, but it also critiques art market and fetishization of an art object. The object of his art,
the snowball, starts disappearing as soon as it is sold.
Another example from another artist Robert Filliou (19261987). Filliou, a French artist associated with Fluxus movement, had worked for Coca-Cola and served as a UN representative in Korea, prior to becoming an artist, at the age of 34. In his work Filliou was very passionate about Japan and zen philosophy constant avoidance of firm criteria and values. In
1969 he develops Equivalency Principle: Well-made badly-made not-made artwork
with infinite potential, expanding to permanent creation of the Universe, an instrument
that makes us doubt status of a work of art or making it impossible for us to appreciate, judge
or value art. The artist builds his whole work around three principals: Permanent creation,
3 Joseph Beuys What is money? A discussion,
Paris : LArche, 1994
81
4 Ibid.
82
. / Anastasia Ryabova. Tr i l l i o n s
Eternal Network, and Constant Feast. In the same year, 1969, Filliou questions value
through humor in yet another work: a bucket, a mop, and a banner with the works name,
Gioconda on the Stairs.
But lets come back to money. Karl Marx saw in money common denominator. However, today we see creation of monetary products derivative from money that change role of
money from the unique common denominator to a mere product, undistinguishable from
other goods. Since the mid-90s Asian markets crisis, fall of hedge funds and dot.com bubble
this product became volatile, but it still remains a product. Currencies market, derivatives
market, stock and bond markets, labor market, commodities market, annual proceeds from
criminal activities and, to a much lesser extent, art market they are all money, because
they all can be converted to money through market mechanisms.
In the 80s, during the art market boom that flourished in the West because of the idea that
art in the end is a commodity like any other, a French artist Philippe Thomas (19511995)
developed together with group IFP (Information Fiction Publicite) a different approach.
He was engrossed in an unusual activity fictionalization of the art world. He also was
interested in disappearance of the artist. In 1987 Thomas created an agency Les ready-made
appartiennent tout le monde (Readymades belong to everyone) with the purpose of
diffusing the notion of authorship. Everybody who had anything to do with the works gallery owners, collectors, art critics and others were invited to become co-authors of the
works and to become a part of the history of art. They adjusted Duchamps definition of
artwork to the new market realities. Philippe Thomass collective, unlike Andys Warhols
Factory, was interested in presenting art objects as consumer products in part that was
achieved by integrating bar codes, the commercial element of the works, into the paintings.
In the late 90s French artist Matthieu Laurette (born 1970) frequently participated in contests
and game shows, he also created a manual on products that could be returned to manufacturer
for a full refund if you did not like them. Theoretically, it would allow one to live without spending a cent, passing the cost on brands and commercial firms. Thus, the artist turned the culture
of mass consumption against itself, bringing it to a logical impossibility. In 2000 he organized
El Gran Trueque, his own game show broadcasted by a local TV channel in Bilbao, where he was
trading and gradually devaluing objects for several days. For example, a car would be exchanged
for an object of lesser value, and in the end it all came down to objects that had no value at all.
Czech artist Swetlana Heger (born 1968) and Bulgarian artist Plamen Dejanov (1970) cooperated from 1994 till 2003. One of their mail project consisted of finding some work (house
cleaning, dishwashing, etc.) and buying artworks of other artists for the earnings. They would
then exhibit the works at their own shows. By doing this they redefined the process of acquisition and valuation of artworks (Still life Objects of Desire, 1997). They reinterpreted workforce, labor market and, consequently, The Principal of Equivalency of different forms of
labor. This project also reflected on the role of artist as creator of objects.
Nevertheless, these examples did not prevent the phenomena of monetization of art. In September of 2008, right in the midst of the financial crisis, we witnessed that works of a British artist Damien Hirst (born 1965) were sold at the auction house Sothebys bypassing the
galleries at astronomical prices, that had absolutely no relation, either rational or esthetical, to the real object. This is due to the fact that art market does not any longer deal in real
objects, only with symbolic objects, designed for skyrocketing added value, created by the
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principles of algorithm trading, where one can receive unbelievable profits through speculation on microscopic market fluctuations. Pittacus of Mytilene, one of the Seven Sages of
Greece already said this important postulate over five centuries B.C: Gain is insatiable.
Is at this stage speculative value of artworks still a question for artists and art? Yes, to
the degree to which we are planning to understand and change world through art. Yes, to
the degree to which reorganization of artistic activity creating valuables is no longer supported by theoretical instruments necessary for its proper understanding. Yes, to the degree
to which context should not only increase added value to art, but most importantly, should
make the world more valuable. Maybe it is time again to practice economical art (in the original Greek meaning of this word as organization of household) as well as ecological (also
in the original Greek meaning study of household). Maybe it is time to burn art values
again. For art without value!
PS: Come back to this in five years!5
85
R A M E AU S N E P H E W
AND HIS MODERN BROTHERS
Maria Chekhonadskikh
86
Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1996, 151156.
Capitalism is as outdated as the forms of life1 it produces. This is true of the creative milieu
as well, whose genealogy can be traced back to hordes of gypsies, street musicians, actors
and circus performers who migrated from city to city. This form of life was problematic from the point of view of official morality and lacked legitimacy. Those who neither
belonged to the upper class nor worked with their hands, who had no property or permanent residence, were of no use to society, since they produced nothing but their own idleness. Itwasnt until the nineteenth century that the category of city oddballs and social
parasites was labeled bohemian. The means and tactics of survival developed by these
vagrants ultimately crystallized into the way of life of an independent creative milieu that
soon lost all memory of its predecessors.
Diderots philosophical satire Rameaus Nephew, written in the late eighteenth century,
contrasts two forms of life: the asceticism of the philosopher and the bohemian hedonism of
a marginalized musician. Philosopher and musician meet by chance in a caf, and the engaging debate that ensues between these two representatives of what we would now call immaterial labor ranges from a discussion of the nature of genius and the latest works of music to
issues of education and upbringing and the forms of life most appropriate to the free creative individual.
The musician is a prototypical idler, a clown and jester, who plays up to the powers that be.
Hes talented but has no achievements to his name. He frequents the opera, is a connoisseur
of music and a nephew of no less than the celebrated composer Rameau. Marginalized by
class society, he is forced to improvise ways of surviving and moving up the career ladder. As
a witty jester, Rameaus nephew moves in aristocratic circles, ingratiating himself, scheming,
playing to his audience, deceiving and intriguing in the hope of eventually getting ahead and
then devoting himself to music.
His daily routine includes searching for the means of subsistence, and here, it must be said,
he is a true virtuoso: private music lessons, work in minor orchestras, asking for handouts,
service at court these are but a few of the entries in his long rsum. Rameaus nephew
provides a veritable encyclopedia of the odd jobs a bohemian city dweller could do to make
aliving in early capitalist Europe.
His life is unstable, to say the least, and his prosperity depends on the vagaries of
chance virtuosity, wit, a knack for striking up a conversation with the right person
at the right time. He has perfected every imaginable survival technique a beggars
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. / Anna Witt. Mo ne y t o F in d
pantomime2 aiming, however, only at momentary success: how to wear a shabby old suit
to a high-society affair, how to ingratiate oneself with the host at the right moment, when to
laugh approvingly, when to play the fool and when to act serious, at what point to comment
on a joke, tell a sensational piece of gossip and so on.
His portrait illustrates the dialectics of feast today, fast tomorrow and even today describes
the life of the bohemian gentleman of fortune: Sometimes he is thin and haggard, like an
invalid in the final stages of consumption. You can count his teeth through his cheeks. Youd
say hed spent several days without a meal or had just left a Trappist monastery. The next
month, hes sleek and plump, as if hed been eating steadily at a bankers table or had been shut
up inside a Bernadine convent. Today, in dirty linen and torn trousers, dressed in rags, almost
barefoot, he slinks along with his head down. One is tempted to call to him to give him a hand
out. Tomorrow, he marches along with his head high, powdered, his hair curled, well dressed,
with fine shoes. He shows himself off, and youd almost take him for a gentleman.3
On the face of it, we have a classic example of the didactic literature of the Enlightenment,
with the philosopher instructing a degenerate idler who makes the rounds of aristocratic
houses in search of easy money and connections. Moral censure here is supported by a contrast between the depravity of high society and an ascetic and spiritual life. The debate,
however, wont end in victory for the philosopher. It would be more accurate to say that both
sides lose.4 In the end, philosophical axioms about a virtuous life succumb to the beggars
pantomime; they dont apply in a new world where virtue has degenerated into scholastic
disputes on the nature of good and evil, where words dont match deeds, and each merely acts
out his role as dictated by social ritual. The only lesson, then, that Rameaus nephew takes
from the literature of the Enlightenment is the following: So when I read LAvare, I say to
myself: be a miser, if you want to, but be careful not to talk like a miser. When I read Tartuffe
I tell myself: be a hypocrite, if you like, but dont talk like a hypocrite. Keep the vices which
are useful, but dont assume a tone or an appearance which will make you ridiculous. In order
to be sure about this tone and appearance, you have to know them. Now, these authors have
provided excellent portraits of them.5
Diderot ultimately takes a critical view of the philosopher and, more broadly, of the intellectuals of his time, who produce only words, discourse removed from practice and action, and
whose virtue finds no application: The World in which he [the intellectual] lives is a world
where each is dissatisfied with himself and all are dissatisfied with everything; values are constantly revalued. But in the real World, these words change nothing. The object of criticism is
the content of the world, not the world itself.6 Rameaus nephew is a disheartening figure. All
the philosophers attempts to counter his criticism of everyone and everything with the old
morals meet with failure, and the philosopher loses the debate. Vitalism and the truth of the
empty stomach versus the philosophers form of life these are the opposed positions.
2 Denis Diderot, Rameaus Nephew, translated by
IanC. Johnston, released October 2002,
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700101h.html
3 Ibid.
4 The satire includes a third character, the narrator
(the author of the work, Diderot himself), who sums
up the debate between the lines. See Allen Speight,
89
Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 8488.
5 Diderot, Rameaus Nephew.
6 Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of
Hegel, St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2003, 165.
The forms of life of musician and philosopher correspond to two types of subjectivity:
bohemian unreason7 and bourgeois rationality. In the Hegelian interpretation of Rameaus
Nephew, bohemian unreason corresponds to a torn consciousness with its characteristic
contradictions and self-criticism: To be conscious of its own distraught and torn condition
and to express itself accordingly, this is to pour scornful laughter on existence, on the
confusion pervading the whole and on itself as well: it is at the same time this whole confusion
dying away and yet apprehending itself to be doing so.8 In this scheme, torn consciousness
is a synthesis of the masters noble consciousness and the slaves base consciousness. One
who is so conscious is critical of himself and others, but cannot recognize himself as a part of
the universal and so remains inactive.9
The instability of his position gives Rameaus nephew a plastic, pliable nature: The man in
need doesnt walk like another man he jumps, he grovels, he wriggles, he crawls. He spends
his life taking up and carrying out various positions.10 It is this plasticity that prevents him
from rising above himself and constituting himself as a subject of history. But Rameaus
nephew leads an unstable life in another sense as well: his life is a thin line between being and
nonbeing, existence and survival, reason and madness. This is the aspect that Foucault brings
out in his analysis of the nephews torn consciousness in The History of Madness: To be
oneself that noise, that music, that spectacle, that comedy, to realize oneself as both a thing
and an illusory thing, and thus to be not simply a thing but also void and nothingness, to be
the absolute emptiness of the absolute plenitude that fascinates from the outside, to be the
circular, voluble vertigo of that nothingness and that being, to be at once the total abolition
that is an enslaved consciousness and the supreme glory that is a sovereign consciousness
that no doubt is the meaning of Rameaus Nephew.11
The nephew says: Id be quite happy to be someone else, on the off-chance Id be a genius,
a great man,12 but in order to become someone else, he has to overcome the tyranny of the
empty stomach. The trap into which Rameaus nephew falls, however, is that he wants to be
an Other (a Master with all the attendant money, fame and comfort) that he negates by his
very existence. That is to say, if he becomes Other assumes a position of power he ceases
to be himself: the fact is that the life Id live in their place is exactly the life they lead.13 Not
only do new conditions of life not liberate him from his traditional mode of subjectification
(identification with the Other, the Master), he regards these conditions as the only possible
road to success for an artist: Its been said that a good reputation is more valuable than a
golden belt. However, the man with a good reputation doesnt have a golden belt, but I see
that nowadays the man with the golden belt rarely lacks a good reputation.14 Rameaus
nephew isnt deterred even by the philosophers penetrating remarks: Im afraid youll never
get rich.15 He sees the attributes of the great man as identical with those of the ruling class
7 Here we use Foucaults concept of unreason. His
analysis of Rameaus Nephew is similar to Hegels
treatment of the torn consciousness, to be discussed
below. See Michel Foucault, The History of Madness,
St. Petersburg: Universitetskaya kniga, 1997, 343352.
8 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology
of Mind, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/
hegel/works/ph/phc2b1a.htm
90
and is unable to think past this mode of subjectification. This is the paradox of torn consciousness, incapable of conceiving of itself as a subject of change and action.
II. The Sense of Idleness
The bohemian lack of self-awareness and inability to act were later examined by Marx from the
standpoint of class analysis. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte begins with a direct
reference to Hegel and Rameaus nephew: Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy,
the second time as farce. Caussidire for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne
of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle.16 In this work Marx
shows how all the buffoons, gamblers, conjurers, rag-and-bone men, organ grinders and hack
writers who had flooded France and that he calls la bohme helped to prop up the reactionary
Bonapartist regime. This motley lumpen proletariat is Bonapartes own mirror that is to say,
it identifies itself with the Master and says, along with Rameaus nephew, the fact is that the
life Id live in their place is exactly the life they lead. Marx depicts this life as that of a comic
actor: he [Bonaparte] conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of
state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words,
and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.17 This passage can be read as an allusion to Hegels analysis of the beggars pantomime.18 Marx and Hegel concur that the affective
and virtuoso game played by Rameaus nephew only strengthens the prevailing order.
This classic critique of la bohme as a class of social parasites would outlive Marx to be elaborated in our own era of immaterial labor, when affect and plasticity have become integral
to the work process. Where the impoverished urban and rural masses are concerned, early
capitalist society recognizes only physical labor. A social parasite is someone who is poor and
doesnt work with his hands, while the aristocracy (and later the grande bourgeoisie) has a
right to idleness and leisure. Where Rameaus nephew only dreamed about upsetting this
scheme of becoming a master and enjoying the right to be idle his modern brothers have
gone further and demanded that right.
Bohemians denounce the slavery of heavy manual labor, demanding autonomy and independence from the world of status, hierarchy and exploitation. That may be why they hail
idlers and loafers as the new aristocrats of the spirit. Thus Rimbaud proclaims his hatred of
the century of hands. He has a horror of all trades and crafts. For him only idleness opens
the way to freedom and creativity.19
Paradoxically, idleness and the refusal to work are allied with the affective labor of the new
creative class labor that recognizes neither bohemians nor their criticism. Better for the
artist to say hes unemployed than to admit that the jobs he has to do from time to time are
16 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
17 Ibid.
18 On the issue of comedy and theatricality
inHegeland Diderot, see Allen Speight, Hegel,
68117.
19 Quoted in Pierre Saint-Amand.
91
really his labor. It is these jobs that have become the dominant form of productive relations
in the sphere of art and culture. Bohemians couldnt conceive of themselves as workers at the
dawn of the capitalist era, but the paradigm they developed of non-action and non-work has
become the prevailing mode of aristocratic conduct in the cynical world of the free market.
Here we should see not only how the beggars pantomime gave rise to the art market, but
also how the artist progressively rejected the burden of manual labor. Rameaus nephew
was concerned about how to find time for his music, how to put his life in order and end
the tyranny of the empty stomach. The only answer he could find was to be the Master.
Hiscolleagues a century later would answer the question differently: Dont make anything; think and act.
Until the nineteenth century, artistic production was regarded as brute physical labor:
sculptors and painters molded, carved and applied paint. Thats why women were long
barred from artists guilds: art was thought of as mans work.20 Artists were equated with
artisans, capable of preserving the secrets of their craft. Out of habit more than anything else, they passed skills rather than knowledge from generation to generation. In an
unstable capitalist world with its demand for novelty and invention, techniques must be
continually updated. Inventiveness and virtuosity become far more important than inherited tradition. Technique is no longer understood as something developed over years, as a
general proficiency or skill, a craft that the artist must learn.21 In the last analysis, it takes
too much time to learn a craft, and the long-term investment doesnt pay off in fast-changing market conditions. Thus, by rejecting brute labor (molding, carving, precise technical
work), the artist demonstrates his readiness to become an aristocrat of the spirit toproduce knowledge instead of skill.
Now we must jump ahead another century to see the extent to which these ephemeral attributes of artistic creation, this beggars pantomime, define the art of our time and how fragile and vulnerable the artist is under its power. How can the secret of Beuyss performances
be passed on to another artist? And what sense would there be in recreating Duchamps urinal? Beuyss performance is a gesture, and Duchamps urinal is an intellectual sleight of hand.
We can speak about the production of knowledge that can be utilized (interpreted, critiqued
and appropriated), but not about the production of skills.
The social marginalization of Rameaus nephew, his insecure forms of life and tragic torn
consciousness, his criticism of everyone and everything, acquire a new social sense when
nineteenth-century bohemia rejects the mimetic function of art in favor of social and political criticism (production of knowledge about society). It should be understood that the
nephews situation also differs from that of his contemporaries in that his status and occupation are impossible to codify, which is why his labor remains invisible.
His nomadism and instability are normalized in modern society, and his way of life rationalizes new techniques of power and control. Rameaus nephew finally acquires a name:
theprecarious worker. The status of worker is his only temporarily, assumed only because he
still wants to eat. The tyranny of the stomach, after all, hasnt gone anywhere. But he knows
20 See Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great
Women Artists? ARTnews (January 1971): 2239,
6771.
92
that the production of knowledge and affect, like the production of useful connections and
relations, will one day free him from the need for even temporary work. He also knows that
virtuosity and wit are his trump cards on the road to success.
These norms and modes of existence of the independent artist arose along with the very
concept of modern art, which has since been understood as criticism of the relations and
norms prevailing in society: In other words, ... as artists begin to define their interests in
open opposition to the academy and salon when a gap opens up between art as a bourgeois
profession like law or medicine and its nascent, undefined, unofficial social role as a
critic of bourgeois culture. Artists were faced with a crucial choice, then: to continue to throw
their lot in with the official culture and its traditional (although weakening) forms of patronage and, as a consequence, see their art suffer or work independently in alliance with the
newly-emergent private market for art, in order to defend and continue the possibility of the
achievements of the past.22
To be modern, then, also means to establish a form of life that is autonomous and independent of power structures: idleness. The modern brothers of Rameaus nephew are those
very critics of everyone and everything. Except that today this criticism has a specific emancipatory function: to subvert the ruling culture, social relations and in some cases even the
political system. Above all, it is the artist himself who is emancipated, gaining autonomy
from the prevailing order. Artistic bohemia, once it is caught in the cage that the new market
structures have set aside for art, launches a campaign to expand its walls. The logic of expansion doesnt destroy the cage, but only extends it to include all social institutions and structures. The artists unique critical optic links him to the solitary figure of Rameaus nephew
and his closed form of life autonomous and disengaged from the world.
III. Capitalism and Idleness
Bohemian idleness has been transformed into an industry of cognitive production, immaterial labor, of which analysis (intellectual production) and affect (performance) are an
integral part. Flanerie, contemplation, conversation, gesture all this has a direct bearing
now on art. The best example here is the readymade a strategy of the found object and
intellectual choice on the part of the artist, who transplants an everyday object from one
context to another and so problematizes these contexts. Maurizio Lazzarato interprets
Duchamps gesture as a radicalization of the artists rejection of work: he quite literally
does nothing. Duchamp uses things made by the hands of others, by factory workers. His
intellectual trick, or minimum of action, allows him to evade the competence of the contemporary artist, who is embedded in market relations, to avoid producing things (material values) or being forced to work in order to survive. These are equally unworthy, so he
prefers to do nothing.23
Duchamp operated within the old modernist logic, deluding himself that his intellectual
critique could put an end to the fetishism of commodities (i.e., commercial art). Not wanting
to be exploited, he discovered a new paradigm of cognitive production: non-work, non-action.
22 Roberts. Art after Deskilling, 79.
93
23 Maurizio Lazzarato, Art, Work and Politics in Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Security, Radical
Philosophy 149 (May/June 2008): 2632.
But what do we do then with the fact that in contemporary culture, thanks to Duchamp, even
doing nothing is work work that often earns nothing and involves the exploitation of others (workers, managers, assistants)? It means that an artist who cant exploit others has to
exploit himself. In order to feed himself, he has to look for yet another job, and so its time to
revisit Rameaus nephew and dust off his encyclopedia of odd jobs.
Of course, idleness wasnt particularly good at feeding nineteenth-century bohemians.
Wemight say that it amounted to a refusal to eat, sleep and consume. Today, however, even
this emancipatory sense has been co-opted by capitalism. Duchamps project has been
turned into an industry complex, diversified production in which the artists immaterial labor is but part of the production cycle. And so we again find ourselves in the place of
Rameaus nephew, or, to be more precise, his clones, who have populated the expanses of
our global world. They earn a living by producing criticism. The art system has developed
its own hierarchy, its own allocation of roles and obligations. This system is too abstract to
be easily described.
When Mladen Stilinovic extols idleness and inactivity in his manifesto The Praise of Laziness,24 he means the right not to produce anything a right he enjoyed under socialism
and has been deprived of under capitalism. In socialist society there was a strict division
of work and leisure. Anyone could be an idler, an aristocrat of the spirit, but only after
work. Factory workers, engineers, janitors and professors could engage in creative pursuits
without any expectation that their efforts would ever be recognized. Stilinovic stresses
that art is impossible under capitalism, since it has become part of the whirl of production,
the routines of distribution, promotion and exhibition.25 Ultimately, he insists on doing
away with the institution of capitalist production in favor of the non-work and non-action
of a new communist project.
In a museum setting, Stilinovics Artist at Work26 ceases to be a metaphor: a sleeping artist
is also a worker. And so Rameaus nephew gazes at us from the depths of history. Our intellectual tricks no longer work, and the tyranny of the stomach still holds sway. Far from being
subverted by idleness, capitalism is in a sense even strengthened by it. Today idleness is filled
with a new content an endless economy of affect, analysis and reflection.
Intellectual pantomime can only deceive or evade the system. Today there are too many
such pantomimes. It might be said that nothing else remains, but it should be added that
the abstract logic of cognitive production still rests on the exploitation of real bodies. Rameaus nephew returns to the center stage of history not as an exception, but as the norm.
Thearmy of workers engaged in immaterial labor, of which contemporary art forms a part,
are his brothers.
If idleness has been turned into work, what then is creative activity? Today it could probably be thought of as everything that the worker engaged in immaterial labor does: writing,
speaking, moving about, exhibiting, seeking a livelihood the process inevitably leading to
a new round of writing, communication, movement, representation. But do we really want so
much creative activity?
24 Mladen Stilinovic. The Praise of Laziness,
Moscow Art Magazine, no. 22 (July 1998),
http://www.guelman.ru/xz/english/XX22/X2207.htm
94
25 Ibid.
26 During his performance Artist at Work (1978),
Stilinovic simply slept on a couch.
Our reflections shed new light on the history of the struggle for autonomous artistic creation. The world today is caught in a logical impasse: liberalism social democracy neoliberalism. The last link in the chain throws us back to the nineteenth century, even though the
world has changed dramatically since then. An insecure life, total exploitation, the transformation of everything into labor this was the lesson of early capitalism and its liberal
doctrine. Modern capitalism uses the main ideas of that time to measure the monstrous body
of our global world. We continue to be squeezed into an old garment that is coming apart at
the seams. Today the key question is how to return to the emancipatory creative potential of
the abstract world of criticism and aesthetic production. How to regain our ability to act, our
right not to work or, more accurately, not to produce anything. And this right should not
be ours alone. We must find a way for everyone to enjoy it.
95
The modern economic system doesnt always solve the problem of poverty and so comes into
conflict with the declared principles of democracy, freedom and equality. The injustice that
compels some segments of society to struggle for their very survival is aggravated during
periods of crisis. The impact of a crisis widens the gap between rich and poor, virtually eliminating the small middle class. Such cataclysms, however, have next to no impact on the welfare of the political and business elites that jointly run the economy with the aid of the invisible hand of the market and under the aegis of state authority. The prevailing economic view
promulgated by liberals and social democrats alike essentially reduces any discussion of economic policy to a choice between these two models. The problem is that the advocates of both
models overlook the real existence of moneyless forms of economy.
In the first post-Soviet decade an era of shock therapy and sharply declining production that the state was unable to control the experience of basic survival not only involved
new exploitation and humiliation, but also gave rise to alternative practices of production
and exchange. Barter, as the basis of an alternative mode of exchange, took unethical and
amoral forms. When a brick factory lost a regular customer, for example, wages would be paid
in bricks at market value. In a time of crisis, this was absurd, but the luckier workers managed to turn themselves into private entrepreneurs by selling small batches of construction
materials. There were also more dramatic cases, when, for example, a plant manufactured not
bricks but ballpoint pens. This often forced workers to hawk their wares in subway corridors
and door to door in order to earn their ballpoint wages. Of course, these examples dont
suggest any alternative to existence in the economic chasm of wild capitalism and merely
describe a situation of panic and desperation.
There are also effective economic alternatives involving independent production. Very
instructive in this regard is home food production, which took on massive proportions in
the 1990s. Many blue-collar workers found themselves unemployed after the collapse of
Soviet heavy industry, and those trained in the humanities found their professional skills
devalued. In this situation, store-bought groceries became unaffordable for many, turning consumers into producers. Urbanites streamed into the countryside, where fields left
vacant by collective farms were subdivided into garden plots. As a rule, gardeners joined
together in regional communities, sharing the responsibilities of security and harvesting.
A field of garden plots is the image of a society built on principles of friendship and solidarity, where being neighbors means helping one another. It isnt surprising, then, that people
caught stealing were expelled from these communities. Summer, once a vacation period,
became the busiest time of the year. The quantity of planted and harvested food was calculated by the year, since vegetables were preserved and stored over the winter months in
root cellars. These storage spaces had their own history, often having been built as bomb
shelters during the Cold War. The tension created by Soviet and American propaganda led
to the creation of spaces that would provide shelter in the event of a real war. One social
phobia related to war the fear of hunger was fueled by the historical memory of the
96
A S O C I E T Y O F GA R D E N P L O T S
Nikolai Ridnyi
97
98
. / Ivan Brazhkin. Wo rd s o f G o l d
Second World War and Stalinist repressions. Turning a bunker into food storage thus made
sense from a historical perspective.
In time, independent food production was commercialized and ceased to be an option. Land
prices rose, and those selling produce from garden plots had to compete with stores. Today
only pensioners living outside of town continue to plant gardens. Still, if we make allowances
for the changing times, post-Soviet gardeners communities may be regarded as a real alternative to modern consumer society.
The modern economic system has another area of parallel actions involving the economy of
free. Official statistics dont reflect the widespread transactions of exchange, donations for
secondhand use, voluntary labor and free services based on game principles. One such game
is hospitality exchange, which involves the free exchange of accommodations through Internet communities. In the past, such exchange was widely practiced by hippies and was associated with life on the road. Anyone can register anywhere in the world, provided that he or
she wont refuse anyone else the same service. It should be noted that this system has at times
been exploited for criminal purposes, since virtual communication is anonymous, and anyone can pose as a guest. Also, hospitality exchange is largely a game of the middle class, which,
unlike the proletariat, has something to lose. Its symptomatic that the modern economy of
free is more like a new form of consumption. One way or another, someone always pays for
free consumption. An example is the popular phenomenon of suspended menus at snack bars,
cafes and restaurants, where you can leave an anonymous order to be collected by the next
customer. In such a system, the actors are quickly typecast as givers or receivers and never
plan to change places. Such practices are far removed from the fight for survival and function
more as private compensatory therapy. Retirees get meager pensions, but can still have a free
cup of tea donated by a mysterious stranger. Hospitality exchange through the Internet is
attractive only until guests become too frequent and the host has to do a cost-benefit analysis.
Games dont create solidarity and community in the way that a real social need can,
although, from a utopian perspective, we can posit the convergence of these practices at some
point in the future. Uncertainty about tomorrow, anxiety and social and economic instability have become the existential foundation of modern society. In the capitalist systems permanent crisis, this anxiety gradually pervades all layers of society except for the super-elite.
Thepotential combination of a natural economy with the exchange of accommodations and
food (bypassing the real estate market and value-added tax) could be thought of as a new,
independent system of social relations. But the eternal question as to whether private gain
can be foregone in favor of social equality and justice remains open.
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Texts Authors, 2012
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