Image & Narrative , Vol 10, No 2 (2009) 177 The Intangibilities of Form. Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade
Mieke Bleyen
John Roberts
The Intangibilities of Form. Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade London-New York: Verso, 2007
ISBN-13: 9781844671670
In The Intangibilities of Form. Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, John Roberts proposes a challenging model for everyone dealing with contemporary art, both theoreticians and artists. In his rereading of twentieth century art and avant-garde art more in particular, he takes an overtly left-wing, not to say Marxist stand, contributing in a spectacular way to what, he says, is needed in scholarship today: a labour theory of culture.
As the title of the book suggests, Roberts finds this model in Marcel Duchamp‟s readymade, not so much in its form - which has become commonplace in the art world from the early 70s on, as in its function as a site of reflection and conflict. Hence the first part of The Intangibilities of Form is devoted to the readymade and provides the reader an insight into the key principles of the book.
Central to Roberts‟s understanding of Duchamp is his stimulating observation that the early readymades such as Fountain or Bottle rack are rendezvous of different kinds of labour, namely alienated/productive/non-artistic labour (the urinal as a factory produced commodity) versus non-alienated/non-productive/artistic labour (the reinscription of this commodity as an art work by selecting, placing and naming it). As such, they become sites where the dialectic of skill - deskilling – reskilling is at work, a dialectic, in which the redefinition of the artist‟s hand plays a crucial role. For according to Roberts, in his early readymades Duchamp overtly shows what had been largely hidden since the decline of the old studio-system: that every artist must start from readymade things (for example in the use of industrial paint), and consequently that all art relies on the collaboration of artist‟s hands and non-artist‟s hands. Moreover, in the stripping out of the traditional artisanal base for art Duchamp aligns his readymades (to) with the general historical process of deskilling as the result of the division of labour under capitalism and the law of the value-form.
This alignment with general deskilling notwithstanding, Duchamp‟s withdrawal from traditional skill simultaneously represents a qualitative break with it. Indeed, his transformative gesture opens the way for a new set of artistic skills: immaterial skills (reskilling). As such, the readymade as a product of unfree, operative hands is transformed into art by the independent action of the artist‟s hand. This transformation is crucial to Roberts, who, drawing on evolutionary theory, underlines the importance of the “totipotentiality” of the hand for the development of human language, cognition and consciousness. In post-Fordist labour-processes, however, this totipotentiality of the hand is severely restricted, made repetitive and predetermined. This is exactly why for Roberts the emancipatory content of Duchamp is to be found in his intrusion of artistic subjectivity into
Image & Narrative , Vol 10, No 2 (2009) 178 simple labour. And although the hand‟s function radically changes in the skill-deskilling-reskilling dialectic, with tasks as placing, ordering and selecting, adopted from Cubism, taking priority over the expressive manipulation of the pencil, its totipotentiality is not affected in the process.
Precisely this reading of the readymade proves to be one of the greatest strengths of the book and demonstrates that “new” approaches, in this case a labour theory of culture, generate new views. For Roberts comes to the conclusion that we should understand Duchamp primarily as an artist of production who aligned himself with mass production in his choice of commodities of everyday functionality and not so much as an artist of consumption who is associated with the shop-window as argued in the new Duchampian scholarship. A provocative thesis which complements, or at least opens the debate on the current interpretation of new Duchampian scholars such as Joselit and De Duve.
The second part of the book is devoted to the question of authorship after the readymade, more specifically since its recovery in the sixties. In line with the above, Roberts is less concerned with the decentred author as such –he is very critical for what he calls the autistic, formal intertextual critique of authorship represented by Kosuth and appropriationist artists such as Sherrie Levine or Richard Prince- than with the exploration of “expanded” authorship, and more in particular artist collaboration as a space of reflection on the division of labour. Looking for forms of collaboration in art, he makes a clear distinction between the laboratory model of for example Bauhaus and Russian constructivism and the “workshop” model as exemplified by Andy Warhol‟s Factory.
In his analysis of both systems he clearly prefers the former over the latter, as in the Factory, although its name seems to suggest differently, he, in many ways, sees a modernized version of the old artisanal model of teamwork in which collaborative authorship is at the service of the singularly named author. The laboratory-activity of for example Bauhaus or Russian constructivism on the other hand, could be seen as early models of group research and discussion, encouraging artists to become involved in social technique and bringing forth a redefinition of the artist as a hybrid or composite figure: the artist-engineer/ artist-constructor. Roberts casts a highly critical glance at new types of this composite artist figure like the so-called artist-curator or artist-archivist. In no respect this intra-professional identification, due to an increasing interdependency of artists and museums, possesses for him the critical, transformative potential of those earlier laboratory practices that were actively seeking for an incorporation of “proletarian” labour.
It becomes clear that for Roberts, the real challenge for contemporary artists does not primarily lie in the appropriation of the readymade or the composite-artist-identity, but in the critical interpretation of the skill-deskilling-reskilling dialectic in changing times (both economically as technologically/culturally). Hence he highlights new questions posed by informational economy regarding the problem of deskilling - no longer only to be understood in terms of the assembly line, but also in terms of the “all-round” skills proper to informational economy – and the role played by network culture in redefining collaborative authorship. He therefore points to interesting possibilities of digital “collective” authorship
Image & Narrative , Vol 10, No 2 (2009) 179 of rhizomatic many-to-many communication in cyber space and of collaborative artistic practices that are facing the problem of invisibility due to their dissolution in social practice. However, in The Intangibilities of Form, (Roberts tackles the issue more profoundly in his article devoted to this topic in Third Text (vol. 18, Issue 6, 2004: 557-564)) the question of what a critical collaborative art practice today should look like, remains largely unanswered. Here it seems that the argument is slightly burdened by the strength of the Duchampian model, as Roberts doesn‟t really succeed in finding convincing examples in contemporary art practice equivalent to the early avant-gardes.
Another reason why the second part of the book risks falling slightly short of the expectations run high in the first chapters are the many detours in non-art disciplines such as evolutionary science or artificial intelligence. This widening of the scope has of course the major advantage of continuously inviting the reader to see the close interconnection between art and labour, technology and science. Nevertheless, obscuring sometimes more than clarifying, their relevance to the general argument is not always made clear, and the book would have gained more cohesion with a profounder integration within the main line of reasoning. A same kind of indecisiveness could be found in Roberts‟s criticism on new Marxist colored theoreticians (such as Hardt, Negri and Bourriaud), touching upon very interesting questions, but never convincingly formulating alternatives. But these are all minor criticisms which do not detract from the overall value of this publication.
All in all, The Intangibilities of Form should be understood as a normative account of twentieth century and contemporary art. It is both a plea for a rereading of avant-garde art by scholars, and Roberts‟s lecture of Duchamp shows how his call for a labour theory of culture could have far-reaching consequences, and a plea for an art practice that chooses to be engaged into the technological relations of its time instead of concealing its relationship with it.
What the new „Duchampian readymade‟ for the twenty-first century could or should be, largely remains without a clear answer. Herein lies Roberts‟s appeal to his readers.
Mieke Bleyen is research fellow at the Faculty of Arts (Cultural Studies & Lieven Gevaert Centre for Photography) at the KU Leuven and prepares a PhD on Cobra photography. Email: mieke.bleyen@arts.kuleuven.be
