Post-capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age
• –—•, Luxembourg 2 October – 16 January
Draped over the battered, dirt-encrusted, corroded fuselage of a i-21 – its detached wings trussed alongside its body and parked unceremoniously in the pinkish postmodern marbled atrium of – is a loop of heavy, translucent silicone hose. The murky liquid being pumped through it, we’re informed, is liquidised pizza.
By turns absurd and obscene, this is Roger Hiorns’s The Retrospective View of the Pathway (2017–), and it hints at the historical transformation in capitalism that curator Michelle Cotton’s succinct survey (featuring the work of 21 artists or artist groups) of postcrash, pre- art otherwise takes as given. In the title words of Mckenzie Wark’s 2019 book (an extract of which appears in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition), ‘Capital is dead: is this something worse?’ Post-capital is largely preoccupied with the social and individual wreckage of life in the postindustrial, serviceoriented, hyperfinancialised attention economy of the twenty-first century. Capitalism may have triumphed over communism, hints the Soviet-era MIG, but a homogenised, denatured, generic culture of consumerism, commodified subjectivity and endless informational circulation is the result.
Post-capital presents a world in which digital culture progressively subordinates the experience of materiality, while work has become atomised and individuated, performed by individuals captured somewhere between service-sector intangibility and the logistics of the distribution depot. The digital gig-workers of Liz Magic Laser’s dismally funny five-channel video
In Real Life (2019) are co-opted into a fictious self-improvement © gameshow, where a benignly smiling life-coach helps them better handle the stresses of their isolated, globalised, proletarian existence. Nearby stands the ghostlike form of Simon Denny’s Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual Aquatic Warbler cage ( 9,280,157 2: “System and method for transporting personnel within an active workspace ”, 2016) (2020), a lifesize mockup of a vehicle Amazon designed for its warehouse workers – a motorised steel cage on wheels with robotic grabber. It’s where the unlucky among us might get to sit all day, picking stock to send to those of us chained to our laptops designing websites.
The fulfilment centre is also the site of the wryly surrealist sci-fi of Cao Fei’s video
Asia One (2018), with its bored young workers
attending to the otherwise automated world of stacked product shelves and conveyor belts, shadowed by a creepy little helper robot. Cao’s expansive video simultaneously captures something of the arrested emotional life of millennial existence – the two protagonists never quite manage to form the romantic connection for which they seem to long – and an unease regarding the lack of purpose of the contemporary (now Chinese-driven) capitalist world. Like a bad conscience, the ghosts of history erupt within this droning torpor, with the unexplained appearance of a troupe of young dancers who seem to have dropped out of Mao-era propaganda cinema, soundtracked by antique revolutionary songs extolling the virtue of industrialisation and increased production.
With its ambiguous nostalgia for the propagandistic exuberance of the Great Leap Forward, Asia One is the show’s pivot, articulating how the vanishing sense of a better future has produced a listless culture of introverted subjects, subordinated to labour empty of meaning. Even inner life, as other artists here realise, is now commodified by ‘a±ective’ capital. It underpins the hollowedout bodies of Black people that figure in both Martine Syms’s chatbot work Mythiccbeing and Sondra Perry’s multiscreen ’ ¡ ¢£ ¤£ ‘18 or Mirror Gag for Projection and Two Universal Shot Trainers with Nasal Cavity and Pelvis (both 2018). The latter ruminates on Perry’s brother’s experience as a college basketball player, and how his biometric data was sold by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to the game company ³ Sports, to become the parameters for an in-game version of himself. Elsewhere, performance artist Ei Arakawa, unable to perform (and make a living) during the pandemic, presents a fabric ´³ screen whose pixelated version of euro coinage represents the equivalent of the honorarium for a performance at the ninth Berlin Biennale, divided by the hours he spent preparing and performing it. It amounts to a modest 72 eurocents per minute – a double-edged comment on low pay for artists, and on how contemporary art has become a part of capital’s appropriation of culture.
It’s not so much that capitalism is dead, but rather that today its subjects (us) seem so completely drained of agency. That the human subject is subordinated to technology and economic transaction has become a pervasive critique in recent years, and perhaps ironically, Post-capital’s very focus on works that address this raises the question of whether art can truly criticise or otherwise escape it. What, after all, can art – and we – really do, if our lives are now so captured by the systems of a global capitalism that has no definable centre or purpose beyond its own reproduction? Post-capital o±ers no answers. Still, if there’s some agency in looking at these works about our collective loss of agency, it might lie in provoking a further reflection on the selffulfilling fatalism of this sense that nothing can be done. J. J. Charlesworth