The Speculative Collectivity of The Global Transnational
The Speculative Collectivity of The Global Transnational
THE SPECULATIVE
COLLECTIVITY OF THE
GLOBAL TRANSNATIONAL, OR,
SOCIAL PRACTICE AND THE
INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF
LABOUR
Verónica Tello
151
Verónica Tello
refugees. In turn, ideas and gestures of solidarity arise, contingent on the potentiality of the social role
that contemporary art might play in such a context. As Eliasson states:
Eliasson’s comments are not, at least on surface level, very different to those of multiple other artists
and curators, who in working collaboratively with migrants and art institutions argue that art might
offer a form of resistance to the imposition of necropolitics and bare life in Europe and other Western
countries from ‘within’. Beyond the aforementioned projects, recent examples include Maria Hlavajova’s
collaborations with the We Are Here refugee collective at BAK, and Creative Time’s On Homelands and
The Stateless as the World Tilts Right (2017).
I want to posit that within the current political context, such art’s value, which is to say why it
generates resources and finance from art institutions or funding bodies, is its operative and perceived
autonomy. That is, its capacity to offer a space of critical distance from heteronomous forces (govern-
ments, the EU) and generate an aesthetic experience distinct from, yet in critical dialogue with, border
violence.
*
Historically, aesthetic autonomy has assumed the artist’s distance from external social, economic and
political forces and, in turn, the artist’s capacity for self-determination. The etymology of autonomy
reveals this – autos signifies ‘self ’ and nomos means ‘law’; autonomy is thus the act of determining your
own law for yourself. For Brian Holmes, following Hegel, this level of self-determination is always
mediated by the social; humans only exist as an ‘I’ in relation to others – ‘they’, ‘us’, ‘we’ – and shared
languages and cultures (2004). Yet, while this rings true, aesthetic autonomy has always been based on
undeniable individualism. It assumes that the products of the artist’s labour are unbound from other,
more common, namely capitalist, modes of production and the production of the proletariat – however
on their side the avant-garde may have been (Grindon 2011).
We could say that Eliasson’s Green Light project, for example, is founded on a fairly normative
assumption of the politics of aesthetic autonomy. Collaborators, or migrant workers, labour to produce
objects which gain their exchange-value, and symbolic-value, through the artist’s name, reflecting and
instituting a division of labour which ensures that the intellectual labour of the artist is inalienable from
the object, even if the object is the labour of others. If autonomy is based on a division of labour –
between the distinct labour of the artist and other kinds of labour – then what kind of solidarity with
those subjected to gendered and racialised bio and necro-politically managed life is possible within and
through art?
152
Speculative collectivity of global transnational
‘no alternative’, and the ‘end of history’ (take your pick), which have dominated understandings of time
and potentiality in the past three decades.
And so artists initiate projects to make concrete new possibilities of what our present and future
might be through collaborative social practice, These projects appear to be exemplary models for an
idea of forging collectivity in contemporaneity, shaped by globalisation and border politics. Yet, by
looking at Ögüt’s The Silent University, I want to posit that, while more complex than Eliasson’s Green
Light, such projects tend to function through similar modes of autonomy which rely on a division of
labour – between the mythologised, distinctive figure of the artist and the masses (participants, migrant
communities), effectively foregoing a convincing model of collectivity.
153
Verónica Tello
Politics of authorship
Perhaps anticipating the limitations of Eliasson’s Green Light, projects such as the Silent University,
Immigrant Movements International, and Victoria Square Project consistently attempt to critique the idea
of authorship (and its ties to concepts of ownership) by deploying the term ‘initiator’ instead (see,
for example, Bruguera and Kershaw 2016). The term is meant to imply that while such projects may
be conceptualised by an artist, they are designed to be maintained, and run by the migrant collec-
tives and/or communities for which such institutions/projects were initiated in the first place (other
projects include the Silent University, 2012-, discussed later). Following André Lepecki we might think
of ‘initiation’ as an attempt to energise, to set in motion, movements that elicit social ruptures – it
could be a ‘verb-event’ (2013: 32) which opens up space for responsive, dynamic movement between
different subjects, rejecting both tokenistic participation and ‘authoritative authorship’ (ibid.: 34) for
the purposes of forming political assemblages and structures. Yet, while promoted as an adhocratic
movement, the University operates via a hierarchal structure which designates fixed roles/tasks/jobs
for the ‘artist’/Ögüt, ‘faculty’/migrants, and, last but not least, the ‘coordinators’/female volunteers
who perform the bulk of the administrative and affective labour to maintain the University. In spite of
a rhetoric of ‘initiation’, the structure of the University preserves the figure of the author, positioning
this subject on the ‘exploiters’ side of the international division of labour, to quote Gayatri Spivak
(1988), in turn simultaneously preserving the Western subject in the name of building ‘platforms for
the subaltern to speak’.
Speculative collectivity
One could argue that in contemporary art, in spite of ‘collaborative’ social practice, collectivity – as
opposed to authoritative authorship – is speculative, or futural; it remains on the horizon as some-
thing to aspire to. Indeed, as Osborne argues, contemporary art is a privileged catalyst for exploring
the ‘geopolitically diverse forms of social experience that have only recently begun to be represented
within the parameters of the common world’ (2011: 115). Further, as a practice, labour and as a form
of capital, contemporary art ‘projects the utopian horizon of global social interconnectedness, in the
ultimately dystopian form of the market’ (ibid.). This means that it is simultaneously animating the spirit
of ‘contemporaneity’ – the co-presence and conviviality of the disjunctive unity subjects – and working
through the global art system which privileges subjects of the global North (it advances a dystopian
market form which stubbornly holds onto the modern regime of authorship as opposed to the collec-
tivity of contemporaneity). The question thus remains, how can art convincingly articulate or institute
a space reflective of the speculative collectivity of contemporaneity, constituted by disjunctive social
relations rather remain within the aesthetic regime of modernity?
It may be less a matter of ‘initiating’ projects which pursue normative concepts of autonomy and
which all the while offering an image, a rhetorical gesture to collectivity/collaboration, and more a
matter of creating a space through which both the ‘author-function’ is rigorously deconstructed and the
interdependencies (rather than division) of labours are embraced as core to the advancement of collectivity
(even if it is never constituted by equivalent subjects). This is not permitted by maintaining and valu-
ing art practices that adhere to normative concepts of autonomy, and which extract labour from the
reserve army of refugees, and the reproductive and unwaged labour of precarious subjects. Autonomy
must instead seek to register and critically engage with its relation to capital – including its relations to
‘solidarity’ as a commodity niche – and forge a path that maintains the radical aspects and potentiality
of art as a site of resistance, while refusing to insist on the avant-gardist notion of the hero/author, the
‘I’. Autonomy, as the feminist materialist theorists Marina Vishmidt and Kerstin Stakemeier argue, ‘can
only be achieved with the destruction of the system that denies autonomy to everyone who lives in it’
(2016: 65).
154
Speculative collectivity of global transnational
Note
1 Deathworlds are liminal zones where life becomes the life of the ‘living dead’, subjected to both the nation-
state’s penal border policies (in the name of the sovereignty) and the ‘management’ of life through global capital
and corporations who operate camps (such as Broadspectrum, formerly Transfield, which ran Australia’s offshore
detention centres for a $1.2 billion contract).
References
Bağcıoğlu, N., 2016, ‘Artistic Labour: Seeking a Utopian Dimension’, Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia. 5(1), pp.117–133.
Bishop, C., 2012, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Specatorship.Verso, London and New York.
Bruguera,T. & Kershaw, A., 2016, ‘An Interview with Tania Bruguera: Immigrant Movement International: Five Years
and Counting’, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art. Viewed 29 June 2018, from: http://field-journal.com/
issue-1/bruguera.
Eliasson, O., 2017, Design Boom. 11 May 2017. Viewed 11 October 2017, from: www.designboom.com/art/
olafur-eliasson-green-light-venice-art-biennale-05-11-2017/.
Francke, A. & Jardine, R., 2017, ‘Bureaucracy’s Labour: The Administrator as Subject’, Parse. 5 (Spring), pp. 24–33.
Grindon, G., 2011, ‘Surrealism, Dada and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism, and Social Participation in the
Radical Avant-Garde’, Oxford Art Journal. 34(1), pp. 79–96.
Holmes, B., 2004, ‘Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society’, Third Text. 18(6), p. 548.
Lepecki, A., 2013, ‘From Partaking to Initiating: Leading following as Dance’s (a-personal) Political Singularity’,
Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity, Seiten, Broschur, pp. 21–38.
Mbembe, A., 2003, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture. 15(1), pp. 11–40.
Osborne, P., 2011, ‘The Fiction of the Contemporary: Speculative Collectivity and Transnationality in the Atlas
Group’, in ed. Armen Avanessian and Luke Skrebowski, Aesthetics and Contemporary Art. Sternberg Press, Berlin.
Smith, T., 2015, ‘Defining Contemporaneity: Imagining Planetarity’, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. 24(49–50),
156–174.
Spivak, G., 1988, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, in ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture. University of Illinois Press, Illinois.
Tan, P., 2014, ‘The Silent University: Alternative Pedagogy as our Commons’, Migrazine. Viewed 29 June 2018, from:
www.migrazine.at/artikel/silent-university-alternative-pedagogy-our-commons-english.
Vishmidt, M. & Stakemeier, K., 2016, Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art. Mute Books,
Berlin.
155