How can one think of art institutions in an age defined by planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital technology? The boundaries of such institutions have grown fuzzy. They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of “neurocurating,” in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity.
In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age.
What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world’s most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.
Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War
By Hito Steyerl, Verso, £16.99 (hardcover)
Publisher’s website: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art
Hito Steyerl Drill
Reviewed by Carol Breen
Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War is a collection of short essays and public talks from filmmaker and theorist Hito Steyerl. Reading Duty Free Art at times feels like surfing the web with no objective. This in part is due to the structure, a collection of articles and lectures, but mainly as a result of the frantic connections between philosophy, art, pop-culture, military and economy. It’s easy to get lost in the wormhole like effect that these hyper connections of separate concepts in time and space create. The multiple, fragmented lines of thought mimic the proliferation of media-channels in the new media landscape that Steyerl explores. Discussing a diverse range of phenomena – video games, WikiLeak files, freeports and Internet spam – seemingly disparate facts are bound together into a range of illuminating political accounts of digital artefacts, such as cat videos, lorem ipsum and twitter bots. It is the combination of acerbic wit, poetic play on paradox and the eccentric assemblage of references taken from high theory and low culture that makes Duty Free Art a joyful read.
A Tank on a Pedestal is the first of fifteen chapters and offers an insightful proposition; museums are in fact lavish storage systems, and history is “partial, partisan and privatized”(2). This idea sets up questions about the now fuzzy boundaries between art institutions and planetary civil war. The main theme Steyerl explores is time, which according to Steyerl is a loop of historical repeats. The author explores looping in relation to Agamben’s analysis of stasis; something potentially dynamic but at the same time immutable. Stasis in the contemporary presents itself as conflicts fought through game gear and bank sponsored bot armies, and is “the curving back of time into itself” (p3). Steyerl presents a pretty bleak conclusion; the future cannot happen if the past leaks into the present, and history only exists if there is a tomorrow. Unless instruments of warfare are rendered useless before they take their place in museum displays, the museum is just another instrument of war, and prolongs stasis. Museums allow the tanks to pause momentarily before carrying the past back into the present.
“Duty Free Art” by Hito Steyerl offers a highly original and useful philosophy of art in the age of inequality. Professor Steyerl is an acclaimed writer and video artist who lives in Berlin. This incredibly enlightening, entertaining and timely collection of essays will.
Her Name Was Esperanza is a particularly poignant examination of Internet fraud, whereby Steyerl provides a sensitive and nuanced exploration of online romance scams. Drawing from Benjamin’s reflections on translation, Steyerl examines the fragmented and collaged together language of email scam correspondence to explore how the epistolary mode is affected by digital technology (117). Through an examination of this somewhat garbled, badly translated, part automated, scam dialect, Steyerl builds on what Derrida describes as the conundrum of the script and its connection to absence and presence. Harris (2014) is one of many writers who explore absence (or what he calls the loss of lack). Steyerl has a more nuanced approach. Harris (2014) argues absence makes the heart grow fonder; alternatively, Steyerl speaks of a new type of absence – an absense. Harris (2014) suggests absence has been replaced with constant intimacy. Steyerl adds more thought to what this replacement might actually be; affective rhythms, flows and sounds, which connect to our physical selves. These affective flows perform the function of a mechanical understudy, almost effective enough to replace somatic engagement, with only the real-time memory of another body present; actual presence is absent.
In International Disco Latin, Steyerl examines “International Art English”. Alix Rule and David Levine (2013) coined the phrase to refer to a specific type of art vernacular, or what they refer to as ‘a technical vocabulary’, used mostly in contemporary art press releases (1). International Art English refers to a skewed language, full of verbose and empty jargon, containing misplaced, misunderstood quotations from continental philosophy. Instead of picking apart Rule and Levine’s analysis adverb by adverb, Steyerl scorns their failure to acknowledge an important causal factor; the free labour at the root of IAE’s creation. Steyerl maps the economic underbelly of phenomena and the influence that capital has on circumstance. Steyerl brings ideas on long walks, in what appear to be attempts at tracing chains of affect. This is another example of how underlying economic factors are highlighted: for example, Stereyl links the rise in romance scams to the Nigerian debt crisis and, here, International Art English to overworked underpaid interns; in Proxy Politics her discussion of badly paid tech workers deciphering violent imagery for $4 dollars per hour poses questions regarding the value we place on ‘unskilled’ labour, and the political implications of such decisions. Steyerl proclaims that IAE is not the language of interns and non-native English speakers, but the vernacular of unpaid conditions, and is indicative of class tensions surrounding language, distribution and gendered invisible labour. The Carrot workers humorously explore these circumstances in their comic Compromise, the secret to a goodrelationship: “Hi sweetie how are you settling in?! Would you mind sorting out the catalogue today, the designers called in sick and we’re a bit tight with time…” (p14).
Proxy Politics focuses on computational photography and the monumental political shifts that have come about as a result. Digital technology is continuously erasing the boundaries between public and private space; Steyerl explores this new age of computational imagery and examines the consequences of image proliferation. Increasingly, algorithmic methods are used in image making, which means that, instead of being made by chemical reactions, images are produced through calculations, data processing and automated reasoning. Steyerl gets to the heart of what this means for image censorship and control. Images are part of how we orient ourselves in the world, which means our orientation is at the mercy of automation and random interpretation. Censorship is not applied after the image; it is in the image. Noise on screen is the new film negative. The traditional darkroom methods of developing and burning film are replaced with sifting and organizing data. The main question Steyerl poses is who decides what noise is worthy of conversion? This new photographic paradigm is at the mercy of all networks connected to smartphones via the world-wide-web. Our capacity to document is threatened by political interference, movements tracked, copyrighted material detected and erased, unconscious bias hidden in code. Steyerl paints a bleak picture. “The smartphone is not so much premeditating your pictures but premediating them” (32).
Duty Free Art is not only concerned with image studies, in Medya: Autonomy of Images, cameras of war are explored; in Sea of Data, contemporary machinic perception; in How to KillPeople, Steyerl exposes filmic transitions as powerful visual political symbols; and, as already mentioned, Proxy Politics discusses relational and computational photography. It is clear Steyerl’s work is in dialogue with post-photographic theory, and there are parallels between Steyerl’s ideas and debates by artists and scholars such as Fontcuberta (2011), Moreiras (2017) and Seppänen (2017). Post-photography is “the age of the inorganic image” (Moreiras, 2017: 57), and although Steyerl discusses the shift from traditional photography to machinic imagery, the failure to give more weight to, or challenge some of, the key theoretical debates surrounding the ontology of the photograph post-internet at times leaves some of Steyerl’s chapters feeling more like commentary rather than argument.
Hito Steyerl Duty Free Art
Duty Free Art draws unusual connections between art, digital phenomena and their political attachments. The tendency for one concept to be explored as it passes through disciplines, cultures and timeframes at times creates a black comedic feel. Some chapters need a lot more room for expansion so that the quirky, yet complex, interactions Steyerl has set up can be developed further, such as Derrida’s ideas on the conundrum of the script and digital writing, Kant’s theories on time and space, and the state of contemporary art criticism or Ranciére’s mythical story about the separation of signal and noise. These connections beg for more explanation in relation to her hypotheses. The main issue with Duty Free Art is that Steyerl neglects to acknowledge her own subjectivity, separating herself from the main philosophical questions posed; we are left wondering how she manages to remove herself from all this affect! Complex subject-object questions stay unresolved, Steyerl’s own philosophical uncertainty seeps into the book and is demonstrated by her indecisiveness regarding human autonomy and agency. At times she appears to assert that the public can prevent technology from disrupting human agency; elsewhere there is no hope for man versus machine as they are already one.
Carol Breen is a practice-as-research PhD candidate at C-DaRE, The Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University. She has presented her work at The International Conference of the Image, Faultlines Irish Design Conference, Lightmoves Symposium and most recently completed artist residencies at Red Clay Studios in Canada and The Leveld Art Centre in Norway. Carol is currently a member of Black Hole Club, a development programme at Vivid Projects for artists in the West Midlands.
References
Fontcuberta, J. (2011) Studium 36 – Por Um Manifesto Pós-Fotográfico [online] available from <http://www.studium.iar.unicamp.br/36/7/> [14 March 2018]
Harris, M. (2014) The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. Harper Perennial
Hito Steyerl Art
Moreiras, C. (2017) ‘Joan Fontcuberta: Post-Photography and the Spectral Image of Saturation’. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies [online] 18 (1), 57–77. available from <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14636204.2016.1274496> [12 January 2018]
Seppänen, J. (2017) ‘Unruly Representation : Materiality , Indexicality and Agency of the Photographic Trace’. Photographies [online] 10 (1), 113–128. available from <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2016.1258658>
Hito Steyerl Lovely Andrea
The Carrot Workers Collective (n.d.) Surviving Internships: A Counter Guide to Free Labour in the Arts [online] Hato Press. available from <https://carrotworkers.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/cw_web.pdf> [14 March 2018]