Art, Design and Capital since the 1980s

Production by Design

Bill Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429854743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

This book examines artists' engagements with design and architecture since the 1980s, and asks what they reveal about contemporary capitalist production and social life. Setting recent practices in historical relief, and exploring the work of Dan Graham, Rita McBride, Tobias Rehberger and Liam Gillick, Bill Roberts argues that design is a singularly valuable lens through which artists evoke, trace and critique the forces and relations of production that underpin everyday experience in advanced capitalist economies.

1 Introduction

Design’s Significance for Contemporary Art

What is the significance of art’s engagement with the world of design today? Why is design of such interest to contemporary artists? This book argues that design has in recent decades proven to be a singularly valuable lens through which artists have been able to evoke, to trace and to critique the forces and relations of production that underpin everyday experience in advanced capitalist economies. On this basis, contemporary artists’ explorations of design have opened onto an examination of the textures of that experience itself, turning ultimately on the relationship of the elite world of art’s production, exchange and exhibition to other aspects of culture and social life.

Through a series of four case studies, Art, Design and Capital since the 1980s: Production by Design investigates the ways in which artists’ concerns with aspects of design (including architectural design) explore production in three principal senses. For the artists considered here, design opens onto a critical exploration of the current conditions of artistic production and reception, as well as the global system of material and immaterial economic production at large, and the forms of contemporary subjectivity that are produced by, and which in turn sustain, this system. Attending to the intimate links between these concerns, the artists in question are thereby able to grasp and to track the nature of art’s singularity within the wider culture.

Dan Graham, Rita McBride, Tobias Rehberger and Liam Gillick interrogate the rich reciprocity between the production methods, abiding concerns and professional protocols of art and design. While they disclose many overlaps and similarities along these lines – even to the point at which any apparent differences between artistic and design disciplines become imperceptible – all four artists finally assert the enduring difference of artistic labour from the work of designers and architects.

In their very different ways, all of the practices examined in this book are ultimately aligned in a shared recognition that art’s exceptionalism – in the sense of art’s singular potential as critique – is hard-won within today’s consumer-capitalist society. Indeed, they are united in suggesting that this exceptionalism is by no means an inevitable dimension of contemporary art’s general condition of institutional autonomy, or of the relative autonomy of artistic labour, but rather that it is the ever-precarious outcome of art’s commitment to testing and probing its own conceptual, professional and technical-organisational conditions. As the art historian and theorist John Roberts explains, building on the historical-materialist aesthetics of Theodor Adorno,

autonomy is the name given to the process of formal and cognitive self-criticism which art must undergo in order to constitute the conditions of its very possibility and emergence [. . . in] a world which continually reduces the [. . .] complexities of art to the reconciliations of entertainment [and] fashion.¹

In the face of this continual reduction, the relative autonomy of art must consist in its targeted critique of its autonomy, which is to say its interrogation of the total set of conditions that have heretofore secured that autonomy.

As Roberts suggests here, and as I hasten to emphasise, this self-criticism must be understood as a process that is immanent to artistic practice itself, and that thereby redounds to the very character of this activity and to the work that artists produce. This endeavour persists, above all, by way of art’s sustained, self-critical encounter with extra-artistic practices and competencies of various kinds. The enormous rise in community-based, participatory and social-activist art of many stripes has been the most conspicuous way in which contemporary art has set about this sort of engagement over the last few decades.² While aspects of the practices examined in these pages resonate with this very broad field, Art, Design and Capital since the 1980s pursues a different line to argue that, in its proximity to art, and in the intractability of the question of the historical and contemporary relationship between the design and art worlds, design is an especially potent arena against and through which this self-critique may today unfold.

Art’s Others: Craft and Design

Where, and on what basis, must the disciplinary divide between art and design be drawn? This is a question that has vexed art historians, design historians and philosophers alike, and one that clearly resists an answer that would hold true for all times and places. As the design historians Grace Lees-Maffei and Linda Sandino have argued, framing the topic of ‘relationships between design, craft and art’ in their introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Design History in 2004, ‘[the] principles that define the differences and relations between design, craft and art are subject to historical change, and vary regionally and culturally’.³ Mercifully, then, this book is not concerned with trying to solve what is, in any case, more than likely an insoluble problem. Nevertheless, any attempt to address the current significance of art’s interface with design demands a provisional appraisal of the historical relationship between these spheres, that is, between both the work and the worlds of art and design. To adequately address this, however, will first require me to provide a little more clarity as to how the concepts on either side of this divide have been conventionally understood in Euro-American discourse, in the shape, firstly, of a brief sketch of the historical emergence of art’s autonomy in the modern period, and then of the historical and ontological relationship between the closely related notions of design and craft.

An initial point to note here is that the wresting of a modern sense of art’s autonomy from a broader span of material practices in eighteenth-century Europe is, in the longue durée, a remarkably recent development. While the elevation of painting and sculpture to the status of ‘liberal arts’ is, of course, a development of the Renaissance, the modern autonomy of ‘fine art’ enters a new phase with its diversification from the ‘decorative’, ‘applied’ or ‘minor’ arts, amid the Enlightenment emancipation of art from ecclesiastical and aristocratic authority in the late eighteenth century. Since that time, Immanuel Kant’s insistence upon aesthetic judgement as the product of the unconstrained operation – or free play – of the faculties of imagination and understanding in the absence of conceptual thought, and hence as constitutively disinterested, has proven uniquely influential upon subsequent theories of the aesthetic experience of fine art, especially as it falls under the Kantian categories of the sublime and the beautiful.⁴ However, Kant himself did not exclude the possibility that experience of the beautiful may be provoked by objects of utility – in fact he retained a special category of ‘adherent beauty’ to accommodate this.⁵ Moreover, for Kant it was nature, rather than art, that provided the key archetype of the beautiful. Only in the modern period, for instance in the thought of early twentieth-century aestheticians such as Clive Bell and R. G. Collingwood, does Kantian aesthetics harden into an insistence upon fine art alone as the province of genuine aesthetic experience, on the basis that it is only in the encounter with fine art that the subject is truly unencumbered by worldly concerns and ‘lifted above the stream of life’, in Bell’s memorable phrase.⁶

For Bell, art releases us from ‘human interests’ and ‘transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation’, and insofar as it does so it offers a glimpse of a state of total freedom.⁷ The promise of transcendence inherent in the authentic experience of fine art, and the societal adulation of the unconstrained labour of the fine artist him- or herself, combine to ensure that art becomes a beacon for broader ideals of (social, political, juridical and economic) autonomy emergent with the rise of the bourgeoisie. As such, the emergence of the modern idea and ‘system of the fine arts’ is fundamental to the development of the bourgeois culture of European modernity.⁸ Still, as the philosopher Larry Shiner asserts, concluding his landmark account of the historical ‘invention of art’, ‘(fine) art, as we have generally understood it, is neither eternal nor ancient but a historical construction of the eighteenth century’, and one that has ever since met with a ‘parallel tradition of resistance’ to fine art’s distinction among its others.⁹

Of these others, firm lines between the spheres of design and craft are especially difficult to draw. In their everyday sense as verbs, and hence in practice as operations, ‘design’ and ‘craft’ are of course complementary, rather than opposed terms: if to design is to plan, then to craft is to execute. However, notions of craft and design are also differently inflected historically – and, accordingly, institutionally – and charged with differing social and cultural, as well as gendered, resonances.

Craft is conventionally identified, then, with work in particular media, especially labour-intensive fields employing traditional artisanal methods, such as textiles, glassmaking and ceramics. Textiles, for instance, has been the focus of some of the most significant discussions of craft within recent contemporary art scholarship, in texts on the contentious place of fibre-based practices within art since the 1960s and 1970s by Elissa Auther and Julia Bryan-Wilson.¹⁰ Craft as a set of practices – as a noun – is inflected in these texts, as elsewhere, by its sense as a verb, denoting an intimate and, importantly, a manual engagement with materials.¹¹ In her book String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art, Auther has demonstrated the persistence of the association of craft with the privileging of the hand over the intellect in twentieth-century art and craft criticism alike, and that this association has mostly been cast in gendered terms. For Auther, this sense of craft practice’s inherent tactility becomes key to th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Design’s Significance for Contemporary Art
• 2 The Proliferation of Dan Graham’s Pavilions
• 3 Rita McBride’s Sculpture of Flows
• 4 Tobias Rehberger’s Exquisite Corp.
• 5 Liam Gillick’s Flights of Flexibility
• 6 Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index