Third Text, Vol.

23, Issue 5, September, 2009, 515526

Third Text

ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2009)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820903184559

Notes on Globalisation

The Work of Art in the Age
of Shoe-Throwing

Victor Tupitsyn

1

I started writing this article unexpectedly, on the train, because freaks like
me always travel with laptops and books (time-killers). This time I had
Chantal Mouffes

The Return of the Political

, Jacques Rancires

On the
Shores of Politics

, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes

Typography: Mimesis

,

Philosophy, Politics

, Alain Badious

The Century

, and David Harveys

The Limits to Capital

. However insightful, each of them can only be used
as a structural or tuning device, as well as a reminder that all is not yet
lost (Pyotr Chaadaev). For, even if your own thinking is resistant to
someone elses ideas, it nonetheless gets re-energised by the sheer power
of an encounter be it reading, viewing or a political action. In December
2008, one such action was carried out by Muntadar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi
journalist, who paved the way for whatever gets parked in a gallery space
to be regarded as The Work of Art in the Age of Shoe-Throwing.
However advisable (academically or otherwise), a tendency to chal-
lenge global ambitions with something extensive and all-encompassing
may well be read (or diagnosed) as psycho-mimetic reciprocation. To
avoid this, I use fragmentation as a tool to confront globalisation, which
is precisely the reason why the following text consists of relatively short
fragments.

2

Regardless of the nature of our pursuits, we are always on stage, and it
would be naive to think that aesthetic practices are any exception. The
difference between regimes of spectacle, peculiar to past and present, lies
in the fact that today (through electronic media) we are already moving
swiftly, if not instantaneously, from one theatre to another and, more-
over, that the arena for spectacularisation is first and foremost our own
consciousness. It is in fact structuring itself in the likeness of the theatre.
516

Stphane Mallarms phrase theatre of the mind best captures the
present state of affairs.
Todays political spectacle is fuelled by the imperial ambitions of
power brokers whose dream is to monitor the whole world from atop
an oil rig. The latter is the twenty-first centurys Mount Olympus the
theatrical lodge from which politicians and corporate executives enjoy
watching battle scenes, executions and other horrors they inflict upon
peoples lives. Bordering on this theme, Saddam Husseins execution
(the murder of a murderer) has exposed not only the shocking theatri-
cality of score settling but also the ways in which our innocent addic-
tion to oil plays into it. Irrespective of time span, death converts organic
life into hydrocarbons. Deaths exhibitability (Golgotha, mass funerals,
lying in state, public executions, etc) is a well-known phenomenon; its
oil-related nature does not discriminate between those who prey and
those who fall prey, thereby turning all of us into connected vessels,
linked by oil pipelines whether symbolic or real. Death by hanging
evokes Lenins portrayal of a typical capitalist who in order to make
a profit supplies his executioners with a rope while knowing it will be
used to hang him. Ironically, this low-tech execution is no longer
compatible with the American Dream: in the States we have long
entered the new age the era of high-tech death. No one has a right to
deprive a man of his death, said Sartre. Perhaps we have taken this
statement too literally.
Andrei Monastyrskys illustration for his novel Kashirsky Highway, 2007, mixed media, photo: courtesy
Andrei Monastyrsky
517

3

In

Oriental Despotism

(1957) Karl Wittfogel argued that the develop-
ment of Egypt, Mesopotamia, pre-Columbian societies and imperial
China had been decelerated because of the need to irrigate vast territo-
ries, which paved the way for hydraulic economies managed by despotic
regimes and bureaucracies that were deeply hostile to change. In imperial
China, known for its dependence on rice cultivation, the hierarchy of irri-
gation officials included important poets and artists who regardless of
their brilliance bear at least partial responsibility for the sociocultural
and economic stagnation of their country. Engrossed in the metaphysics
of time-freeze and inertia, they aestheticised resistance to change and in
this capacity can be referred to as the precursors of the Moscow Concep-
tualists. According to the latter, the isolation they experienced during
Brezhnevs reign (the so-called era of stagnation) was a fertile environ-
ment for creative meditation. Given that total irrigation was a concep-
tual project, the phrases hydraulic economy and hydraulic order of life
should have been adopted by Andrei Monastyrsky in his

Dictionary of
Terms of the Moscow Conceptual School.

1

Even though the Russian
Conceptualists have been repeatedly criticised for their contemptuous
attitude toward socially engaged art, I am fully aware that to reproach
them for equating political reality with newspaper headlines and media

1. Andrei Monastyrsky,

Dictionary of Terms of the
Moscow Conceptual
School

, Ad Marginem,
Moscow, 1999
Andrei Monastyrsky, Pagan-Gosargo, 2008, installation shot, photo: courtesy
Andrei Monastyrsky
518

junk is nearly as futile as passing judgement on the Chinese Terracotta
Army or Egyptian mummies for safeguarding their hydraulic mentality.

Andrei Monastyrskiis illustration for his novel

Kashirsky Highway

, 2007, mixed media, photo: courtesy Andrei Monastyrsky Andrei Monastyrskii,

Pagan-Gosargo

, 2008, installation shot, photo: courtesy Andrei Monastyrsky

Although in todays Russia the hydraulic order of life is not water-
related, its oil-irrigated economy (closely linked to the state-controlled
production and sale of hydrocarbons) is the main source of money for the
whole country. In this sense post-Soviet Russia aptly fits Wittfogels defi-
nition of hydraulic society. As for the rest of the world, its enormous
appetite for oil has turned the US and other Western democracies into
liquid (read hydraulic) democracies. Thus, Russia is not the only country
that builds its domestic and foreign policies on an imperial model.
During violent conflicts, the term hydraulic can be extended to any
bloodshed and throughout financial crises to the loss of liquidity.

4

In America, where the power of corporate capital has reached an impe-
rial state, democracy is an empty canister set to be filled with oil. It
(democracy) was once a utopian word; now, it is a souvenir one. To
restore it to the status of political utopia, which it has lost, one needs to
understand that autonomous discursive fields and aesthetic activities no
longer exist. Everything, including art, has to be embedded into some
system much larger than itself, so that the autonomy of art does not in
any way preclude its openness to such expansion. Yet, there should be
negative gestures as well selective bracketing, so to speak. What is
remarkable about such negative gestures is that they (unlike affirmative,
signature-style gestures) are capable of self-negation but they negate
themselves in the name of utopia, as it were.

5

Today, artists, as well as politicians, who darken their palette with oil
should extend the notion of an other as a constitutive outside to
everything that once gave off fragrance, roared, twittered and sang
before being converted to hydrocarbons for instance, the voices of
animals and birds slaughtered by other animals and birds. For some it is
a blessing, for others a curse handed down to us as

temps perdu

time
lost millions of years ago. Such messages are sent not by mail but
through oil-pipes and no one feels like going to the police when the curse
starts to take effect. Curses composted into the energy of humus provide
us with agricultural products. Curses extracted from the bowels of the
earth create conditions for comfort, warming our homes and allowing us
to move in space. Plus curses obtained from the sale of curses and used
to procure new curses. Minus curses spent on conquering new markets
for trade and territories rich in oil reserves.

6

To use an example, I will comment on Andrei Molodkins installation,

Guts la Russe

, in Paris (Orel Gallery, 2008). Guts means willpower,
519

as well as internal organs specifically, the bowels. In this case oil
bowels, since the works included in the installation are mostly texts
enveloped in transparent minimalist boxes and connected with hoses
that channel oil to letters and words. At the gallery entrance visitors
were greeted by an oil-filled Fuck you, while in the next room oil
pumps rhythmically pumped black gold from text to text from

Das
Kapital

to the

PutinMedvedev

horizontal of power. On the floor
between them is the word Oligarch, an oil demon that has crashed, like
the demon in Mikhail Vrubels painting. The fallen demon is Patroclus
and the fact that he appears under the name of

Oligarch

in oil discourse
is a result of recontextualisation. Homer is transformed into Marx, the
Trojan War into control over resources, and Priam and Agamemnon
(Names-of-the-Father in Lacan) into the heroes of newspaper chroni-
cles. The battle over the body of Patroclus is something that is

always
already

(toujours dj) happening in any conditions on every spiral
of symbolisation.

3 Andrei Molodkin,

Oligarch

, Chechen oil in acrylic box, 2008 Andrei Molodkin,

Oligarch

, Chechen oil in acrylic box, 2008, photo: courtesy Andrei Molodkin

An empty form is a prop for mimesis. Vacant forms are easily filled
with equally vacant content, including any ideology and any discourse.
They are all free agents. In the case of the objects (boxes), I am discuss-
ing here, the minimalist props are related to the aesthetics of the funeral.
Andrei Molodkin, Oligarch, Chechen oil in acrylic box, 2008, photo: courtesy Andrei Molodkin
520

Every one of these objects is a glass coffin in which the sleeping princess
awaits her prince that is, in effect, the viewer. The princess stands for
the content packed into the coffin. There is some kind of hidden expres-
sion resting within it and in order to make it apparent the viewer must
smash the glass coffin with his gaze, free the content imprisoned inside
and start interacting with it.

7

In the arts, the unconscious (eg, political unconscious) often plays the
role of autopilot. Accidents and incidents are a part of the artists
journey. Especially when hidden urges and intentions are not pushed off
into the unconscious. Or, if they are, it is not into the part of the uncon-
scious where they are squashed under a flatiron. This means any poten-
tial possibility has a chance to break free. It is interesting that, while
some critics love to unmask artists, others are guided by the prescription
of Edgar Allan Poe: You dig the tunnel, Ill hide the soil.

5 Kabakovs shoes at his door, Hotel Balchug, September 2008, photo: courtesy Victor Tupitsyn

8

In Michel Foucaults view, the

heterotopia

of the mirror is constitutive
of a situation in which anyone can be an artist and anything can be art.
Caused by the erasure of contextual frames under the banner of globali-
sation, everything has become creative: work and leisure, trust and fear,
Andrei Molodkin, Glamour, mixed media, 2008, photo: courtesy Andrei Molodkin
521

violence and retribution, exchange and deceit. Our perception, not only
of the outside world, but of our own selves is hopelessly artified not to
mention the fact that the mentality and terminology of art have taken
root in every sphere of life, without exception. Art has replaced itself
with creativity and creativity at present has no

other

. If given the
circumstances one were to imagine a person who, from the moment of
birth, was known to be completely devoid of the creative reflex, such a
mythical character would undoubtedly become an important cultural
phenomenon. The media would follow every moment of his or her life,
attesting that, as months and years go by, he or she never sets out to
paint a painting, or write a poem or novel. Merely by lying on the couch,
this person would be seen as engaged in a struggle for the liberation of
humanity from a bad habit creativity while the couch itself would
become a laboratory for achieving the non-creative state. The question
then arises: how would such a character be substantively different from
all those whose principal pastime is doing nothing? Since the heterotopia
Kabakovs shoes at his door, Hotel Balchug, September 2008, photo: courtesy
Victor Tupitsyn
522

of the mirror provides no such distinction, this entire situation should be
regarded as purely hypothetical, if not hallucinatory. Nonetheless, if
someone among us could attract attention as a bearer (or creator) of the
non-creative condition, not only that persons biography, but the person
him- or herself would become absorbed into the culture industry.

9

In the 1970s and 1980s, the theoretical text became a commodity. The
expansion of commodity fetishism into the sphere of text production,
the realm of knowledge, ideas and documentation, has reached a point
where the dichotomy of object vs text is hardly a

diffrend

. True or
false, its litigation (litigation of a

diffrend

) is often performed by re-
contextualising

it

within the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
However deceptive, this kind of re-contextualisation is commonly used
in critical and theoretical texts to mediate irresolvable conflicts. Given
that art is sociohistorically specific, the existing appetite for its re-
contextualisation within the Symbolic network may still be reacted upon
as largely counterproductive, unless we agree that the Unconscious is the
only common context we are left with in the age of globalisation. In this
respect, I agree with Rasheed Araeens assertion that a grand spectacle
of globalisation has nothing to do with a true universalism. Moreover,
it looks like a balloon, artfully inflated by the corporate money machine
and flattened during the ongoing financial crisis.

10

Any text regardless of its nature describes the indescribable inasmuch
as it refers to some elusive textual entity, a deferred object that escapes
description description identical to such an entity. The latter is often
mistaken for something else, for art or democracy. Their deferral is due
to the fact that art and democracy are typically utopian objects which
are (in turn) caused by deferral. Any effort to establish a one-to-one
correspondence between such deferred objects and their descriptions/
definitions is what T W Adorno attributes to identitarian thinking and
Jacques Derrida to logocentrism. In this respect negative dialectics and
deconstruction are quite in tune with one another. Both would be
equally at odds with the possibility of knowing exactly what art is and
with claiming that democracy is a fact of life in democratic countries.

11

The loss of generic identity that Alain Badiou mourned poses the ques-
tion: Are people still political animals whose will to change is the rally-
ing force? Or is it the case, as Jacques Rancire argues in

Aux bords du
politique

, a mass out of which so few elite players emerge is even more
unfit to change the perception of the game. Given the ghettoised
status of the intellectual who criticises the system while being unable to
exert any influence upon it, it is totally unclear whether in addition to
523

these self-estranged critics there are other groups of people who are
capable of acting together as an embodiment of cumulative negation.
And if so, who are the proletarians of today? Would they be able to
export what they have in stock (including their frustration and anger)
from one country to another? Apparently, the answer is yes otherwise
the Global economy would not be Global. Perhaps, labourers drying
coca leaves in Colombia can be ranked among the proletarians. After all,
they produce a use-value of pleasure for those losers and beneficiaries
of the Global economy who are acutely aware of the mystical character
of [such] commodities. The same is probably true of the terrorists: they
sacrifice their lives to supply us with real-life horror and suspense which
partially attests to the fact that we

do

live in a society where death and
suffering are spectacularised to the degree that we somehow (in spite of
fear and outrage) get a kick out of it. As for the perpetrators, whose
crime and punishment contribute to the production of entertainment
value, one can definitely regard them as proletarians of a nether econ-
omy, considering that the latter is an integral part of Global capitalism.
One may wonder if this nether proletariat is susceptible to Marxist tele-
ology, particularly to the transcending of all estrangement beyond the
entertainment industry, ie, beyond the realm of representation and
media frenzy.

12

The return of the political, which now seems more inevitable than
before, poses the problem of the asymmetry observable in an accumula-
tion of wealth at one pole and an accumulation of misery, agony of toil,
ignorance and brutality at the opposite pole. As it turns out, a finance-
led process of globalisation linked to a deregulated free-market economy
and dubbed (by several theorists, including David Harvey) as neo-
liberal has already provided a political shift the restoration and
reconstitution of class power.

2

While the US is running a debt-economy
on a scale never before envisaged in human history, its financial elite
still aims at expanding itself worldwide at the expense of its middle class,
which appears to be shrinking. On the other hand, vampires are not
guilty of anything. For, it is not they who latch onto us, but we who
suction them onto ourselves

13

The reason why postcolonial discourse has lost its radicalism is because
it has been re-colonised by the academic milieu. In the West, in addition
to the orientalism of the admirers of art, there is the orientalism of cura-
tors for whom non-European culture and non-Western art are distin-
guished only through the lens of an ethnographic vision. So, for
example, it is permissible for the French art hanging in the Louvre or
Muse dOrsay to have two or three levels of mediation. But with East-
ern European, Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern or African art this
receives different treatment, if only because academic consciousness is no
less clichd than mass consciousness.

2. David Harvey,

The Limits
to Capital

, Verso, London,
2007
524

14

Whenever we watch acts of violence on TV screens in London, Paris or
New York and witness human suffering caused by genocide, poverty and
diseases in Third World countries, our craving for visual consumption
of such entertainment items becomes shamefully reminiscent of the
Olympic gods fascination with ancient reality shows, such as the
Trojan war, the blinding of Cyclops or the beheading of Medusa. This
audience (ie, Zeus and other immortals) is the prime source from which
most Europeans draw their voyeurism. If Saint John (the evangelist) had
been Greek or Roman, he would probably have been more inclined to
admit that in the beginning was sight, not the word.

15

There is no metalanguage appropriate to eternity. Nor is it appropriate
to artistic production, unless art is an Aphrodite, born from the foam of
metalanguage. The linkage between these two statements is not acciden-
tal here: it traverses the century.

16

Tiresias lost his sight as payback for staring at Athena while she was
swimming naked. The lesson he learned was that eternity could not be
experienced in one shot. Is globalisation broad enough to compensate?
Can spectacle culture and the condition of spectacle make it look all-
inclusive?
During the Second World War Stalin plotted military operations
across a spinning

globe

and Charlie Chaplin played with one in the film

The Great



Dictator

(1940). While different, both acts of spinning were
still tied up with singularity the singularity of a distorted real. This is
what globalisation seeks to eliminate: its triumph is a death-sentence to
eccentric art and a not guilty verdict for the culture industry. For, as
long as globalisation succeeds in positing itself as eternal, it will continue
to follow the path of the avant-garde by re-inventing a future for the
present of its production.

17

When an estranged individual takes responsibility only for his or her
own well-being it constitutes a barrier to the creation of oppositional
solidarities. Yet, the removal of such barriers is rife with the imperative,
as well as the necessity, of seeing through the eyes (or on behalf) of we
a vacancy to be filled by an authoritarian will to power. After all, one
should not forget that authoritarian intertexts (buried alive underneath
any cultural heritage) are powerless without the corrupt eye of the
beholder. Now, in the post-proletarian age, Marxs insistence on the
positive transcendence of all estrangement mimics the exemplary rheto-
ric of the Oprah Winfrey show. But to see these things clearly one needs
525

to abstain (at least temporarily) from de-realising alienation and concen-
trate instead on the repossession of the negative in order to retain its crit-
ical potential which has been outlawed by affirmative culture, or, better
yet, hijacked by the terrorists. Thus, in order to fight globalisation we
need to embrace (or reinvent) alienation. With all forewarning against its
limited understanding, alienation is still a negatively defined concept: it
cannot be de-realised unless we know how to transfigure negativity into
positive being. If

zero degree alienation

is a plausible concept, it can be
attributed to mimesis, for it engenders (in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes
opinion) pleasure and reconciliation when terrible experiences (real or
fictional) are endlessly duplicated and commemorated. The reason why
this mimetologism can undo alienation is because the latter becomes
mimetically re-presented and thus loses its autonomy; its ability to
estrange without inflicting alienation upon itself. Such self-estrangement
would be synonymous with de-realisation, unless we disagree with the
theory of no escape from the world of mimetic impulses and mimetic
representations. But does not this theory remind us of medial practices,
also recognisable as the organised control of mimesis?

18

T W Adorno predicted the corruption of autonomous art by the culture
industry back in the 1960s. And he turned out to be right: art, fashion,
finance, the stock market, the media, the entertainment industry, poli-
tics, sex, even war have all turned into glamour. Some artworks are
distinguished from other works by their interest in surplus symbolisa-
tion. The reality principle loses its dominance, while the pleasure princi-
ple conversely gains more weight. This surplus pleasure generates
surplus symbolisation, which most politically engaged artists tend to
avoid. However, in some cases it is not detrimental to the achievement of
the needed effect, but actually helpful.

19

Today art and politics are completely stuck on glamour. If it were
possible to mount a glamour-free exhibition, it would still be glamorous
by virtue of contradiction. I know a woman who refused to attend the
opening of her friends exhibition to avoid the fate that befell the Holy
Virgin Mary when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to her and the
Immaculate Conception happened. Apparently, it could have happened
differently from the Botticelli painting not orally but visually. Should
we all put on condoms to avoid immaculate conceptions? Artists on their
eyes, we on our tongues

20

Globalisation comprises not only the sphere of financial and political
manipulations, but other spheres as well the sex industry, the culture
industry, etc. It also facilitates mimetic reciprocation between these
526

spheres, thereby importing such notions as primacy or secondariness
from the sphere of sports or commerce into culture. As a cultural enter-
prise, globalisation can be equated with an effort to present an

overall
picture

of contemporary art. Even if such a

picture

were a displayable
concept, the installation paradigm would have to become reflective of
the non-Euclidean nature of

contemporaneity

, a phenomenon that has
been hopelessly flattened by both institutions and individuals. Finally,
globalisation is a vehicle that spreads insteads; idiocy instead of idio-
syncrasy, glamour instead of amour (where gl- is short for glossy).
Glossy love, the name of the promised land.