Time, object, commodity

Diedrich Diederichsen
Texte fr kunst 82, diciembre 2012


From the time it takes to learn to make, to the time it takes to
make, to the time that an end product remains on exhibition or in
storage the organization of time around discrete works is an
essential element of value-formation in the field of art. Today,
everyone from exhibiting institutions to viewers to collectors have
come to accommodate dematerialized and time-based art forms.
And these are often based on some sort of contract be it a written
document commensurate to the work itself or a tacit agreement
leading to and determining the nature of a performative exchange.
As conceived by Diedrich Diederichsen, value is not only
determined by the amount of time invested in production, but also
in terms of the investment of our the art worlds time in
reception and participating. This is the social contract that we, as
acting members of this landscape with vested interests and time
invested in our own production as individuals, have entered into
with the subject of our attention. Works of value, however, must
also evade identification as a commodity, and thus easy
consumption, in order to retain purchase on our continued
attention.
Lets imagine an object, beyond its physical existence, as the more
or less durable recording or storage of all those processes in time
that were required for its production. When Robert Morris made a
technical recording of the sound of making an object and then
incorporated the recording in it, he limited himself to the acoustic
traces of the manual production of a wooden box (Box with the
Sound of Its Own Making, 1961). But of course, the time
someone spent learning the skills required for such craftsmanship
is likewise part of the time crystallized in the object. So an object
contains not only the time it took to produce, but also the time it
took to produce the producers and, if we want to be precise, even
the time it took to produce the institutions that produced the
producers, though prorated, needless to say, in proportion to the
time it took the producer to make this object as a fraction of all the
other time he or she spent applying the skills once acquired
elsewhere and to other purposes. For the present discussion, we
will limit ourselves to the time that people spent with material
and the material likewise has its historical and geological, its
biological and cosmic time. Our interest, however, is in the time
that may be exploited, and that is labor time.The arts know three
primary methods of making objects in this sense. The first would
be the technical recording of a practice such as music or dance
thats not in and of itself object-oriented. A sound or image
recording is taken that is, in a certain way, an object-like product
of a time-based artistic activity; beyond merely being contained in
the object, that activity may even reproduced or read out from it
(not without some degradation, needless to say). It has long been
possible to process these recordings further, to montage and layer
them. That would mean crossing back to the side of sculptural
operation, whose temporal dimension, as a time of montaging and
layering, doesnt lend itself to being read out.
Thats because, in the second method, the object is the end product
of a purposive activity that, unlike the sound recording or the video
documentary, cannot be brought back to life once production is
complete. One example would be a sculpture. Writing musical
scores is an activity of this sort as well, since its not its own
temporal dimension that will subsequently be read out; only the
temporal dimension of a performance implementing the
instructions of the score may be read out using the first method.
But one may spend a lifetime working on a ten-second
composition. The third and least object-like method is the
product of artistic learning processes in living people such as
musicians or actors body memory, memorization, mastery of
techniques, symbols, thought styles. This method, that is to say,
represents a sort of living abstraction: Acquired knowledge
abridges previously time-consuming activities, but only after the
individual has invested time in learning, time during which he or
she learned to abstract from the time-consuming activity. Only
institutions of the dissemination of knowledge and skills turn the
latter into something stable and object-like thats passed on.
Yet there is another, a fourth form of producing an object that
contains works of art and/or the time required for their production.
That would be the juridical form. I define a part of the time, or the
entire time, the work requires as the object of an agreement and an
action regulated by law or stipulation. More particularly, I define
by way of agreement and legally binding obligation the future
time, the possible fates of the recording of past time, however the
latter is made. It has turned out that even living people and fragile
situational constellations involving humans and other participants
may be contractually defined, represented, and determined in
forms that are fairly object-like. Needless to say, thats a popular
means of production in contemporary art from Yves Klein to
Tino Sehgal.
"Jugend musiziert" (german national competition for young
musicians), Stuttgart, 2012
All four types of objects or aggregations of past time and labor
time have in common that they are the ontological and material
basis making it possible for the time spent on their production to
become compatible with the commodity form. All four types of
transformed time may in turn be exchanged for money, which may
subsequently indeed be said to read out time. Its well known that
time may be bought, most immediately the time of others; our own
time we can buy only indirectly. Only then does the concept of
storage make sense; only money (and, with a great deal of
constructive effort, exchange) makes the storage medium render
back what was put into it: Time.
Time bought but not adequately paid for (which is to say, time paid
less for than the entrepreneur may subsequently realize by reselling
it in a different form) is a familiar part of everyday life in
capitalism: Surplus value would not come into existence without
this use of living people selling their time. Due to the relative
predominance associated with the commodity of the exchange
value over the use value in capitalist societies, certain methods of
transferring, aggregating, and storing time are superior to others in
the eyes of the exchange-value pragmatist methods, such as
money, that abstract as much as possible from differences between
the objects. Thats not to say that eccentric aggregate phases could
preclude exchangeability altogether; still, exchange-value
pragmatism by and large tends toward abstraction, and so has
generated not only money but also container ships and the white
cube. Both represent lesser stages of abstraction than money, but
they point in the same direction.
With the white cube, objects of the second type, which is to say,
spatially extended things of all sorts, may be symbolically stacked
on its inside, just as the containers of the container ship make it
possible to stack the contents of the containers. In one case as in
the other, the contents become equivalent in a sense. But its only
with the extended model of the objectivation of time in art
production, which, just as material objects aggregate past time,
turns the past and future time stipulated in juridical objects into
stackable art, that the current expansion of the commercial
exploitation of artistic production appears on the horizon. There is
still money in the private-sector economy of the visual arts, and
those who spend this money just as privately have gradually
learned to recognize and appreciate non-object-like objects as no
less suitable and exchangeable storage media of living labor time.
By contrast, the business model of the multiplicative reproduction
of recordings has distinctly suffered from the digitalization of its
environment. The physical storage media of skills and abilities, for
their part, suffer from the scarcity of government dough and the
consequent devitalization of the educational institutions and
venues for music, dance, performance art, theater, and so on. So
both forms of objects will probably play diminished roles in the
future, whereas the white cubes including those white cubes
camouflaged as something else called a project and the binders
with contracts look forward to a great future, because they
assemble objects on which private individuals spend money (and
which they may also liquidate again, perhaps to spend on
prestigious urban architecture that bears their own name) and
because they depend neither on paying audiences nor on technical
reproduction or public funding. Thats true even though works of
art that take the form of a contract rarely reveal their status as
objects or do so at most with a nostalgic nod to Conceptual Art,
to whose administrative aesthetic we indeed owe several
techniques of the contractual form.
It may be objected that collectors collect what is rare or of rare
quality, and not what took a lot of work to make. But no they
collect what took a great deal of work, qualitatively and
quantitatively to make, with the right mixture between good
artistic work and the work of classifying good art. Value comes
into being through human labor. Thats no less true of the value of
the rare object. Nothing is absolutely rare; what is rare is so as
something that must be regarded as culturally relevant. The idea of
rarity conceived as absolute merely covers up another activity, one
thats highly specialized and therefore used to be expensive; the
activity of ascribing relevance of distinguishing relevant from
irrelevant rarity. Because everything is rare, even the dirt under my
fingernails, only rich Mr. Suckercleaner, PhD, the highly educated
waste manager, doesnt know yet that he needs a contract that
assures him of the rights to this dirt; because no ascriber of
relevance, or even better, chain of ascribers of relevance, has
explained it to him. What Im getting at isnt the old Philistinism
that the status of art is nothing but a scam in which intellectual
gasbags sell lemons to credulous well-heeled clients. On the
contrary. This selling of lemons and this ascription of relevance are
not haphazard operations. They must refer to qualities that are
verifiably present. But by bringing some meaningful order to the
confusing mass of objects being produced, they put a sort of
finishing touch on these art commodities. And this operation is
becoming ever more important and more expensive; its ultimately
responsible, even more than the activities of the notorious
assistants, for ensuring that prices rise and profit margins rise
faster still because this highly specialized operation is something
you and I almost always do for free. Not primarily when we write
an article or give a lecture, thats merely the official fringe of our
relevance-ascribing production, but most importantly in the places
where, and to the degree to which, we are the art world. Its not so
much the experts who ascribe relevance to the art objects, but
much rather the visible presence of beautiful, important, authentic,
and otherwise desirable living people at parties and in social
networks associated with the production and presentation of art. In
the age of the contract, our activity is becoming even more
significant, because, like so many components of contemporary
production, and contemporary cultural production in particular, its
deregulated. Contracts can capture the results of deregulated
relations without having to determine the processes themselves.
Within the arts, higher degrees of abstraction are known by another
name progress. Thats not just a fallacy. With the contractual
form, infinitely complex and far-reaching objects or processes may
be defined as coherent entities that no physical format, no form
could ever contain. But what is crucial is that works of art add
something, a counterweight, to their compatibility with the
commodity form, however inevitable the latter of course always
also is; add a counterweight to in that they cannot be read out at
will, that there is something concrete about them that dialectically
recaptures the abstraction. This concrete something must relate to
the recipients and to their time. Money may in most cases be read
out only as the time of others, whose labor and time spent on it is
being bought. Aesthetic experience, by contrast, relates to its own
time and its openness, and not to the openness of a juridical form
thats moreover increasingly losing its other storage formats. Once
these other models of time storage will have been utterly devalued
and liquidated, the temporal forms of reception will atrophy as
well. Nothing will then remain of the great artistic freedom the
contractual form seems to afford but the juridical framework and
the coherency it enables the task of lending it relevance will
ultimately be up to its dry parsings, on the one hand, and on the
other hand to grand DeMille-style productions staging as much
human and art world material as possible.
Thanks to Tom Holert for a conversation on contracts.