Boris Groys

Marx AfterDuchamp, orThe Artists TwoBodies

At the turn of the twentieth century, art entered anew era of artistic mass production. Whereas theprevious age was an era of artistic massconsumption, in our present time the situationhas changed, and there are two primarydevelopments that have led to this change. Thefirst is the emergence of new technical means forproducing and distributing images, and thesecond is a shift in our understanding of art, achange in the rules we use for identifying what isand what is not art. Let us begin with the second development.Today, we do not identify an artwork primarily asan object produced by the manual work of anindividual artist in such a way that the traces ofthis work remain visible or, at least, identifiablein the body of the artwork itself. During thenineteenth century, painting and sculpture wereseen as extensions of the artists body, asevoking the presence of this body even followingthe artists death. In this sense, artists work wasnot regarded as alienated work in contrast tothe alienated, industrial labor that does notpresuppose any traceable connection betweenthe producers body and the industrial product.Since at least Duchamp and his use of thereadymade, this situation has changeddrastically. And the main change lies not so muchin the presentation of industrially producedobjects as artworks, as in a new possibility thatopened for the artist, to not only produceartworks in an alienated, quasi-industrialmanner, but also to allow these artworks tomaintain an appearance of being industriallyproduced. And it is here that artists as differentas Andy Warhol and Donald Judd can serve asexamples of post-Duchampian art. The directconnection between the body of the artist andthe body of the artworks was severed. Theartworks were no longer considered to maintainthe warmth of the artists body, even when theartists own corpse became cold. On the contrary,the author (artist) was already proclaimed deadduring his or her lifetime, and the organiccharacter of the artwork was interpreted as anideological illusion. As a consequence, while weassume the violent dismemberment of a living,organic body to be a crime, the fragmentation ofan artwork that is already a corpse or, evenbetter, an industrially produced object ormachine does not constitute a crime; rather, itis welcome. And that is precisely what hundreds ofmillions of people around the world do every dayin the context of contemporary media. Asmasses of people have become well informedabout advanced art production throughbiennials, triennials, Documentas, and relatedcoverage, they have come to use media in thesame way as artists. Contemporary means of

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communication and social networks such asFacebook, YouTube, and Twitter offer globalpopulations the ability to present their photos,videos, and texts in ways that cannot bedistinguished from any post-Conceptualistartwork. And contemporary design offers thesame populations a means of shaping andexperiencing their apartments or workplaces asartistic installations. At the same time, thedigital content or products that thesemillions of people present each day has no directrelation to their bodies; it is as alienated fromthem as any other contemporary artwork, andthis means that it can be easily fragmented andreused in different contexts. And indeed,sampling by way of copy and paste is the moststandard, most widespread practice on theinternet. And it is here that one finds a directconnection between the quasi-industrialpractices of post-Duchampian art andcontemporary practices used on the internet aplace where even those who do not know orappreciate contemporary artistic installations,performances, or environments will employ thesame forms of sampling on which those artpractices are based. (And here we find ananalogy to Benjamins interpretation of thepublics readiness to accept montage in cinemaas having been expressed by a rejection of thesame approach in painting).

Guided tour at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1966.

Now, many have considered this erasure ofwork in and through contemporary artisticpractice to have been a liberation from work ingeneral. The artist becomes a bearer andprotagonist of ideas, concepts, or projects,rather than a subject of hard work, whetheralienated or non-alienated work. Accordingly, thedigitalized, virtual space of the internet hasproduced phantom concepts of immaterialwork and immaterial workers that have

allegedly opened the way to a post-Fordistsociety of universal creativity free from hardwork and exploitation. In addition to this, theDuchampian readymade strategy seems toundermine the rights of intellectual privateproperty abolishing the privilege of authorshipand delivering art and culture to unrestrictedpublic use. Duchamps use of readymades can beunderstood as a revolution in art that isanalogous to a communist revolution in politics.Both revolutions aim at the confiscation andcollectivization of private property, whetherreal or symbolic. And in this sense one can saythat certain contemporary art and internetpractices now play the role of (symbolic)communist collectivizations in the midst of acapitalist economy. One finds a situationreminiscent of Romantic art at the beginning ofthe nineteenth century in Europe, whenideological reactions and political restorationsdominated political life. Following the FrenchRevolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europearrived at a period of relative stability and peacein which the age of political transformation andideological conflict seemed to have finally beenovercome. The homogeneous political andeconomic order based on economic growth,technological progress, and political stagnationseemed to announce the end of history, and theRomantic artistic movement that emergedthroughout the European continent became onein which utopias were dreamed, revolutionarytraumas were remembered, and alternative waysof living were proposed. Today, the art scene hasbecome a place of emancipatory projects,participatory practices, and radical politicalattitudes, but also a place in which the socialcatastrophes and disappointments of therevolutionary twentieth century are remembered.And the specific neo-Romantic and neo-communist makeup of contemporary culture is,as is often the case, especially well diagnosed byits enemies. Thus Jaron Laniers influential bookYou Are Not a Gadget speaks about the digitalMaoism and hive mind that dominatecontemporary virtual space, ruining the principleof intellectual private property and ultimatelylowering the standards and leading to thepotential demise of culture as such.1Thus what we have here does not concernthe liberation of labor, but rather the liberationfrom labor at least from its manual,oppressive aspects. But to what degree is sucha project realistic? Is liberation from labor evenpossible? Indeed, contemporary art confrontsthe traditional Marxist theory of value productionwith a difficult question: if the original value ofa product reflects the accumulation of work inthis product, then how can a readymade acquireadditional value as an artwork notwithstanding

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Marina Abramovi and Ulay,Imponderabilia, 1977,performance, 90 min., GalleriaCommunale d'Arte ModernaBologna, Marina Abramovi.Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery,New York.

the fact that the artist does not seem to haveinvested any additional work in it? It is in thissense that the post-Duchampian conception ofart beyond labor seems to constitute the mosteffective counter-example to the Marxist theoryof value as an example of pure, immaterialcreativity that transcends all traditionalconceptions of value production as resultingfrom manual labor. It seems that, in this case,the artists decision to offer a certain object asan artwork, and an art institutions decision toaccept this object as an artwork, suffice toproduce a valuable art commodity withoutinvolving any manual labor. And the expansion ofthis seemingly immaterial art practice into thewhole economy by means of the internet hasproduced the illusion that a post-Duchampianliberation from labor through immaterialcreativity and not the Marxist liberation oflabor opens the way to a new utopia of creativemultitudes. The only necessary precondition forthis opening, however, seems to be a critique ofinstitutions that contain and frustrate thecreativity of floating multitudes through theirpolitics of selective inclusion and exclusion. However, here we must deal with a certainconfusion with respect to the notion of theinstitution. Especially within the framework of

institutional critique, art institutions aremostly considered to be power structuresdefining what is included or excluded from publicview. Thus art institutions are analyzed mostly inidealist, non-materialist terms, whereas, inmaterialist terms, art institutions presentthemselves rather as buildings, spaces, storagefacilities, and so forth, requiring an amount ofmanual work in order to be built, maintained, andused. So one can say that the rejection of non-alienated work has placed the post-Duchampian artist back in the position of usingalienated, manual work to transfer certainmaterial objects from the outside of art spacesto the inside, or vice versa. The pure immaterialcreativity reveals itself here as pure fiction, asthe old-fashioned, non-alienated artistic work ismerely substituted by the alienated, manualwork of transporting objects. And post-Duchampian art-beyond-labor reveals itself, infact, as the triumph of alienated abstract laborover non-alienated creative work. It is thisalienated labor of transporting objects combinedwith the labor invested in the construction andmaintenance of art spaces that ultimatelyproduces artistic value under the conditions ofpost-Duchampian art. The Duchampianrevolution leads not to the liberation of the artist

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from work, but to his or her proletarization viaalienated construction and transportation work.In fact, contemporary art institutions no longerneed an artist as a traditional producer. Rather,today the artist is more often hired for a certainperiod of time as a worker to realize this or thatinstitutional project. On the other hand,commercially successful artists such as JeffKoons and Damien Hirst long ago convertedthemselves into entrepreneurs.

Jeff Koons' design for collector Dakis Joannous personal yacht.

The economy of the internet demonstratesthis economy of post-Duchampian art even foran external spectator. The internet is in fact nomore than a modified telephone network, ameans of transporting electric signals. As such,it is not immaterial, but thoroughly material. Ifcertain communication lines are not laid, ifcertain gadgets are not produced, or if telephoneaccess is not installed and paid, then there issimply no internet and no virtual space. To usetraditional Marxist terms, one can say that thebig communication and information technologycorporations control the material basis of theinternet and the means of producing of virtualreality: its hardware. In this way, the internetprovides us with an interesting combination ofcapitalist hardware and communist software.Hundreds of millions of so-called contentproducers place their content on the internetwithout receiving any compensation, with thecontent produced not so much by the intellectualwork of generating ideas as by the manual laborof operating the keyboard. And the profits areappropriated by the corporations controlling thematerial means of virtual production. The decisive step in the proletarization andexploitation of intellectual and artistic workcame, of course, in the emergence of Google.Googles search engine operates by fragmentingindividual texts into a non-differentiated mass ofverbal garbage: each individual text traditionallyheld together by its authors intention isdissolved, with individual sentences then fishedout and recombined with other floatingsentences allegedly having the same topic. Of

course, the unifying power of authorial intentionhad already been undermined in recentphilosophy, most notably by Derrideandeconstruction. And indeed, this deconstructionalready effectuated a symbolic confiscation andcollectivization of individual texts, removingthem from authorial control and delivering theminto the bottomless garbage pit of anonymous,subjectless writing. It was a gesture thatinitially appeared emancipatory for beingsomehow synchronized with certain communist,collectivist dreams. Yet while Google nowrealizes the deconstructionist program ofcollectivizing writing, it seems to do little else.There is, however, a difference betweendeconstruction and googling: deconstructionwas understood by Derrida in purely idealisticterms as an infinite, and thus uncontrollablepractice, whereas Googles search algorithms arenot infinite, but finite and material subjected tocorporate appropriation, control, andmanipulation. The removal of authorial,intentional, ideological control over writing hasnot led to its liberation. Rather, in the context ofthe internet, writing has become subject to adifferent kind of control through hardware andcorporate software, through the materialconditions of the production and distribution ofwriting. In other words, by completely eliminatingthe possibility of artistic, cultural work asauthorial, non-alienated work, the internetcompletes the process of proletarizing work thatbegan in the nineteenth century. The artist herebecomes an alienated worker no different thanany other in contemporary production processes.

But then a question arises. What happenedto the artists body when the labor of artproduction became alienated labor? The answeris simple: the artists body itself became areadymade. Foucault has already drawn ourattention to the fact that alienated workproduces the workers body alongside theindustrial products; the workers body isdisciplined and simultaneously exposed toexternal surveillance, a phenomenon famouslycharacterized by Foucault as panopticism.2 Asa result, this alienated industrial work cannot beunderstood solely in terms of its externalproductivity it must necessarily take intoaccount the fact that this work also produces theworkers own body as a reliable gadget, as anobjectified instrument of alienated,industrialized work. And this can even be seen asthe main achievement of modernity, as thesemodernized bodies now populate contemporarybureaucratic, administrative, and cultural spacesin which seemingly nothing material is producedbeyond these bodies themselves. One can nowargue that it is precisely this modernized,

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updated working body that contemporary artuses as a readymade. However, thecontemporary artist does not need to enter afactory or administrative office to find such abody. Under the current conditions of alienatedartistic work, the artist will find such a body toalready be his or her own.

Gillian Wearing, Everything in life, 1992-1993, from the series Signsthat say what you want them to say and not signs that say whatsomeone else wants you to say, color coupler prints.

Indeed, in performance art, video,photography, and so forth, the artists bodyincreasingly became the focus of contemporaryart in recent decades. And one can say that theartist today has become increasingly concernedwith the exposure of his or her body as a workingbody through the gaze of a spectator or acamera that recreates the panoptic exposure towhich working bodies in a factory or office aresubmitted. An example of the exposure of such aworking body can be found in MarinaAbramovis exhibition The Artist Is Present atMoMA in New York in 2010. Each day of theexhibition, Abramovi sat throughout theworking hours of the museum in MoMAs atrium,

maintaining the same pose. In this way,Abramovi recreated the situation of an officeworker whose primary occupation is to sit at thesame place each day to be observed by his or hersuperiors, regardless of what is done beyondthat. And we can say that Abramovisperformance was a perfect illustration ofFoucaults notion that the production of theworking body is the main effect of modernized,alienated work. Precisely by not activelyperforming any tasks throughout the time shewas present, Abramovi thematized theincredible discipline, endurance, and physicaleffort required to simply remain present at aworkplace from the beginning of the working dayto its end. At the same time, Abramovis bodywas subjected to the same regime of exposure asall of MoMAs artworks hanging on the walls orstaying in their places throughout the workinghours of the museum. And just as we generallyassume that these paintings and sculptures donot change places or disappear when they arenot exposed to the visitors gaze or when themuseum is closed, we tend to imagine thatAbramovis immobilized body will remainforever in the museum, immortalized alongsidethe museums other works. In this sense, TheArtist Is Present creates an image of a livingcorpse as the only perspective on immortalitythat our civilization is capable of offering itscitizens. The effect of immortality is onlystrengthened by the fact that this performance isa recreation/repetition of a performanceAbramovi did with Ulay in her younger years, inwhich they sat opposite each other throughoutthe working hours of an exhibition space. In TheArtist Is Present, Ulays place oppositeAbramovi could be taken by any visitor. Thissubstitution demonstrated how the working bodyof the artist disconnects through the alienated,abstract character of modern work from hisor her own natural, mortal body. The workingbody of the artist can be substituted with anyother body that is ready and able to perform thesame work of self-exposure. Thus, in the main,retrospective part of the exhibition, the earlierperformances by Marina and Ulay wererepeated/reproduced in two different forms:through video documentation and through thenaked bodies of hired actors. Here again thenakedness of these bodies was more importantthan their particular shape, or even their gender(in one instance, due to practical considerations,Ulay was represented by a woman). There aremany who speak about the spectacular nature ofcontemporary art. But in a certain sense,contemporary art effectuates the reversal of thespectacle found in theater or cinema, amongother examples. In the theater, the actors body

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also presents itself as immortal as it passesthrough various metamorphic processes,transforming itself into the bodies of others as itplays different roles. In contemporary art, theworking body of the artist, on the contrary,accumulates different roles (as in the case ofCindy Sherman), or, as with Abramovi, differentliving bodies. The artists working body issimultaneously self-identical andinterchangeable because it is a body ofalienated, abstract labor. In his famous book TheKings Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval PoliticalTheology, Ernst Kantorowicz illustrates thehistorical problem posed by the figure of the kingassuming two bodies simultaneously: onenatural, mortal body, and another official,institutional, exchangeable, immortal body.Analogously, one can say that when the artistexposes his or her body, it is the second, workingbody that becomes exposed. And at the momentof this exposure, this working body also revealsthe value of labor accumulated in the artinstitution (according to Kantorowicz, medievalhistorians have spoken of corporations).3 Ingeneral, when visiting a museum, we do notrealize the amount of work necessary to keeppaintings hanging on walls or statues in theirplaces. But this effort becomes immediatelyvisible when a visitor is confronted withAbramovis body; the invisible physical effort ofkeeping the human body in the same position fora long time produces a thing a readymade that arrests the attention of visitors and allowsthem to contemplate Abramovis body for hours.

One may think that only the working bodiesof contemporary celebrities are exposed to thepublic gaze. However, even the most average,normal everyday people now permanentlydocument their own working bodies by means ofphotography, video, websites, and so forth. Andon top of that, contemporary everyday life isexposed not only to institutional surveillance,but also to a constantly expanding sphere ofmedia coverage. Innumerable sitcoms inundatingtelevision screens around the world expose us tothe working bodies of doctors, peasants,fishermen, presidents, movie stars, factoryworkers, mafia killers, gravediggers, and even tozombies and vampires. It is precisely thisubiquity and universality of the working body andits representation that makes it especiallyinteresting for art. Even if the primary, naturalbodies of our contemporaries are different, andtheir secondary working bodies areinterchangeable. And it is precisely thisinterchangeability that unites the artist with hisor her audience. The artist today shares art withthe public just as he or she once shared it withreligion or politics. To be an artist has ceased to

be an exclusive fate; instead, it has becomecharacteristic of society as a whole on its mostintimate, everyday, bodily level. And here theartist finds another opportunity to advance auniversalist claim as an insight into theduplicity and ambiguity of the artists own twobodies.

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Boris Groys (1947, East Berlin) is Professor ofAesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at theCenter for Art and Media Karlsruhe and GlobalDistinguished Professor at New York University. He isthe author of many books, including The Total Art ofStalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Spacefrom His Apartment, Art Power, The CommunistPostscript, and, most recently, Going Public.

1See Jaron Lanier, You Are Not aGadget: A Manifesto (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

2See Michel Foucault, Discipline& Punish: The Birth of the Prison(New York: Vintage, 1995).

3Ernst H Kantorowicz, The KingsTwo Bodies: A Study in MediaevalPolitical Theology (Princeton:Princeton University Press,1997), 3.

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