Josh Kline, Cafe Gratitude (detail), 2012, mixed media, 38 x 32 x 12".
THE WAY IN WHICH this meme migrated—from gallery to screen to gallery, between artists on different continents, continuing into more recent exhibitions such as “New Pictures of Common Objects” at MoMA PS1—was a consequence of the specific technical apparatus that hit critical mass around 2011. But not all of its effects are as transparent. This cycle, still slow in many respects, is only increasing in speed, and its quickening produces other categorical shifts: Nicolas Ceccaldi’s cyberpunk surveillance-camera feeds, installed at group exhibitions such as “Grouped Show” and featured on Contemporary Art Daily, for example, emblematize the global art system’s unprecedented ability to monitor itself in near real time. This acceleration has already produced a new intensity of self-observation on both the systemic and the individual levels. The near-instantaneous feedback of visual trends creates an efficient system in which all information about art is almost immediately incorporated into the production of future work. The art system, in an expanded sense, becomes a kind of self-monitoring security apparatus—autopoietically regulating images and affects into precisely the categories described above. The circulation of the meme through these bodies and works arises out of a condition of constant observation and feedback. Since this feedback is beyond both verbal discourse and context, with image begetting image, the art mirrors the very Web formats that support or produce it, just as they transitioned from a text-based blog format (Blogspot) to an image-based one (Contemporary Art Daily and Tumblr) around the end of the past decade.
The press release for “Grouped Show” described the exhibition as a hive mind, concretizing a “near-instantaneous peer-to-peer sharing of image, text, media and knowledge content between artists.” But while it might seem that the constitution of such a network through the circulation of informational units is comparable to the way that the circulation of artistic references has historically defined and circumscribed social groups of artists, the actors in this contemporary form of network do not constitute their artistic subjectivities through the traditional form of sociological positioning described by Pierre Bourdieu, in which the artist uses references to position herself discursively and differentially in relation to her peers.
In fact, artists today do almost the opposite. A quantitative acceleration produces qualitative effects. If Contemporary Art Daily, for instance, can be understood as a meta–group show, the groupings it generates are based not on the individual practices of specific artists in specific contexts, but on the site’s own operations as a self-generating system that is, in turn, linked to a larger system of phones and sites. Whereas Bourdieu’s analysis was centered on the nineteenth century, contingent on the ways in which the rhythms of print media defined the operations of the dealer-critic system, the rapid feedback of art trends today is actually eliminating the lag time necessary for the artist to constitute herself as an artistic subject. As media historian Bernhard Siegert has demonstrated, the individual subject is a dependent variable in the development of communications infrastructure, contingent on delays in transmission.3 Without such delays, or lags, there can be no subject. And the subject’s asymptotic disappearance amid the effects of acceleration can be linked to the diagnosis made by Giorgio Agamben in the mid-2000s, that contemporary capitalism does not produce subjects so much as non-subjects, through what he calls the “desubjectifying” effects of apparatuses.4
What would such a non-subject look like? In the wide-ranging reception of Agamben’s work in the art context during the past decade, such depletion of subjectivity was still understood via fairly traditional models of alienation. And his notion of biological life was curiously marginalized in favor of a definition of life in social terms. The networks implicated in the concept of “life” were seen above all as social networks, shifting the concept of biopolitics into a form of post-Marxism that simply extended the concept of the institution to encompass every aspect of the social life of the subject.
But at this point, it has become impossible to ignore that these networks are technical before they are social, and that the life in question is both biological and informatic, as Foucault and others predicted long before Agamben. Instead of institutions producing subjects, we have apparatuses capturing organisms. Both the informational form and the affective content of contemporary art are optimized for an apparatus that is increasingly dominated by feedback between the iPhone interface, the feed, and the aggregator, not the institutional structures of the gallery and museum. This shift is part of the long history of aesthetics as applied physiology—a history in relation to which the physiological-technical systems of contemporary art today have only begun to be understood.
Michael Sanchez is an art historian and critic based in New York.
NOTES
1. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1976).
2. Emily Glazer, “The Eyes Have It: Marketers Now Track Shoppers’ Retinas,” Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2012.
3. For Siegert, this supersession of the subject occurred with real-time signal processing after World War II. See Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 12 et passim.
4. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 20.
