EPHEMERAL PROJECTION OF ARTWORK LIVESTREAMED
VIA INSTAGRAM FOR 14.07 MINUTES, 2.50PM 25/04/2020

Multi-media sculptural kinetic installation; microwave, various cigarette tobacco pouches (14 total), Sellotape, aluminium tape, brass, stainless steel screws, washers, gold-powder-coated Sanyo Solid State Cadnica 5-TC1 Portable Television with antennae protruding through microwave ceiling, roofing screws, book; Baudrillard for Beginners by Chris Horrocks, reflective Photax Chrome Glazing Plate (appropriated as a mirror), SONY SRS-55 speaker with auxiliary cord plugged into iPod playing Dean Blunt - Jill Scott Herring OST (2011).mp3 looped infinitely, studio fan, nylon, Pioneer audio/visual programmed remote control unit, nails, copper, TEAC CRT TV, two plinths retrieved from the Victoria University Faculty of Architecture & Design repaired and repainted white, white-painted studio interior wall, power cords, multi-box, extension lead REPRESENTED THROUGH MULTIFACETED LAYERS AND EXHIBITED TO THE WORLD VIA LIVESTREAM

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Nicholas Lane is currently finalising his written essay informed by this artwork. This writing will be published on this webpage and also in our soon-to-be-printed publication, 'Beauroquip'.

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Coinciding with the production and livestream of Baudrillardian Transmitter, my friend Remy Copeland wrote his essay Spectacular Art and Culture: Discussing the Impact of the Spectacle on Art and Culture which contains relevances to Baudrillardian Transmitter. I have gone through his essay and highlighted particular paraphrases which I believe speak to the artwork. This essay is published with the permission of Remy Copeland. NB: sections highlighted are bold.

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Remy Copeland

Spectacular Art and Culture:

Discussing the Impact of the Spectacle on Art and Culture

Contemporary society is invaded by notions of the spectacle, whether that is a dazzling landscape or a high budget film. It is a source of awe, amazement and bewilderment, that can create a moment of catharsis for the individual. Guy Debord’s 1967 text Society of The Spectacle however, posits that the spectacle dominates our human reality as it is a social relation mediated through images. For Debord, the spectacle is the underlying basis of the individual’s relationships to all facets of the social world. Our social life is ordered by the accumulation of these spectacles; an incessant circulation of images that subconsciously impinge upon our individual understanding of reality.The text itself has had a large scope of influence, providing a systematic framework to understand and scrutinise various forms of social phenomena. One such area is art and culture. Debord’s theory on the spectacle provides a way to view art and culture, which in turn impacts the way we understand and perceive it. This is a consequence of the close alignment between the spectacle and art and culture, as it “tends to become the star commodity (Debord, 1992, 107)” in spectacular society. Therein lies the paramount issue in understanding art and culture through the spectacle: it is spectacular society itself that facilitates the consumption of art and culture, severely restricting its ability to be an independent entity.

Firstly, it is necessary to outline Debord’s spectacular system that he presents in Society of the Spectacle. Debord asserts (1992, 7) that “in societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles.” According to Debord (1992, 7), these spectacles are the mediators of social relationships. They are not merely a form of visual deception from mass media but in fact, a worldview that has been materialised into something objective, becoming the nonliving’s autonomous movement creating a total inversion of life. We are caught within a situation where the spectacle is all-encompassing and all around us, it is not something that we can easily distance ourselves from. For the spectacle is at once simultaneously presented “as society itself, as a part of society and a means of unification (1992,7).” Thus, its presence is one that can seemingly never be questioned due to its pervasive nature. The spectacle is always around us but never open to us, it is a “vast inaccessible reality (1992, 9).” It represents the dominant model of life and is an affirmation of the conditions and goals of the existing system, justifying the choices already made under the current sphere of production (1992, 8). Therefore, what Debord is truly arguing is that the spectacular system is actually a reflection of the current social system, so by engaging with the spectacle, we are actively endorsing the values of said system. However, due to the pervasive nature of the spectacle, often we engage with it unknowingly. This is because one of the characteristics of spectacular society is that it keeps “people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence (1992, 14).” Our reality though is constantly invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle (1992, 8), even if not inherently acknowledged since the spectacle itself is a uniting force between people. The unification, however, is between the separate based upon their separateness, for in the spectacle “a part of the world presents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation (1992, 16).” We are taught to think in terms of the spectacle, resulting in an alienation of sorts to ourselves, as the social forces that shape our own individual realities are framed by the spectacular system. Debord himself (1992, 11) states that our individual reality is entirely dependent on these social forces. This loss of independence stems from the development of the spectacle which can be traced to the processes of commodification.

Spectacular society is a direct product of the existence of a society rife with commodification; it is impossible for it to exist without the other. Debord (1992, 17) famously wrote that “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.” As established earlier, it is these images that structure our social relationships and colour our individual realities of the social world. Yet these images are semiotic entities, existing as something deeper than just their mere appearance. They are representations of the commodified world. This is symptomatic of the commodity’s colonisation of social life, thus resulting in spectacular society (1992, 21). Consequently, we experience an over-saturation of these spectacles as the images have been commodified to a point so far beyond their initial purpose. Development is the only focus for the spectacle; there is no regard for goals. It aims at nothing other than itself (1992, 10). With its sheer focus on development, the spectacle is then able to use this to pass its own abundance threshold. The commodity form reduces every developing commodity into a standardised form, which the spectacle exploits by recognising, then accumulating all existing knowledge on that commodity.Effectively, it is in a state of perpetual growth, continually eating itself until it achieves its aim of transcending above a simple commodity into an image realised within society, colouring our understanding of the social processes it impacts. This cycle occurs for all commodities. The result: over-saturation. For the spectacle is “money one can only look at. It is an abstract general equivalent of all commodities (1992, 24).” Because of this, we think in terms of the spectacle, as in spectacular society, the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making. Commodities are presented to us as they are realising their spectacular form, subconsciously shaping our understanding of our social relationships and the social world in the process. The spectacle adequately fulfils our insatiable consumeristic desires.  

In his subsequent book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord outlines three different categories of the spectacle: the concentrated spectacle, the integrated spectacle and the diffuse spectacle (1998, 24). The predominant form of the spectacle is dependent on the structure of the wider society that the spectacular society is placed within. In Western Capitalist societies, the spectacle is almost always found in its diffuse form. The diffuse spectacle is hidden in plain sight. Its pervasive nature means that its power is located everywhere, informing our understanding of the world, as it is subliminally placed in our products, networks of circulation and the behaviours that belong to the daily renewed ideas of success perpetuated within capitalist systems (Taylor, 2016, 100). Thus, we experience the spectacle as a loosely defined, yet omnipresent construct; something that has managed to permeate social life, subliminally structuring our lives in the process. It is the culmination of the moment in which we are caught (1992, 9), the point where all existing social forces intersect. This can lead to the creation of a moment of absolute catharsis for the individual, which is the arresting effect of the spectacle when fully realized, yet far more often than not, we do not experience it in this form. We experience spectacular society, however, in its developmental stages as a thing unto itself, always looking to progress. The spectacle then is a direct consequence of the latent commodification that takes place within capitalist societies. Herein lies the context in which art and culture in contemporary western societies is built upon, thus impacting our understanding of art and culture.

Now, having outlined Debord’s spectacular system, we need to analyse art and culture’s engagement with the spectacle through analysing its function within society. As established earlier, the spectacle is found all around us, structuring how we relate to and understand the social world. It is no different within art and culture; in fact, spectacularisation is even more pronounced in this sector of society. That is because art and culture rely upon spectacular society for its transmission and consumption. As Marx wrote (1947, 1) “the mode of production in material life determines the social, political, and intellectual life processes.” It is economic development that dictates artistic development due to the assertion of economic necessity (Engels, 1947, 9). Thus, art and culture participates within an economic framework where commodity development takes centre stage. These circumstances premeditate spectacular society as it encourages growth above all else, so our understanding of art and culture takes place within that context, and its exposure is dependent on this very fact. The spectacle is not only on the precipice of totally assimilating itself with art and culture, but dominating it (de Leij, 2017). Theodor Adorno (2001, 106) argues that the culture industry acts in a manner that “fetters consciousness” and impedes the development of autonomous thought among individuals. The spectacle accentuates this characteristic of art and culture by reducing it to images. Consequently, this simplifies art and culture by allowing these images to shape our experience and form the basis of our understanding. As a result, the images of art and culture that spectacular society creates possess social significance because a “prime mode of socialisation (Hemmens and Zacarias, 2020, 153)” occurs through our interaction with these images. So, rather than the art itself being the basis of our lived experience, it is actually the images created by the spectacle which assume that role. Essentially, the images are reference points to the artwork: they adequately summarise its nature by decontextualising it, enabling it to be encountered in a supposedly more accessible form. It is from these images where the social significance is held, a result of the accumulation of capital that came from the development of the artwork into an image. The primary perpetrators of this cycle of spectacularisation within art and culture are public art institutions and museums.

Art galleries and other cultural institutions are primarily responsible for the dissemination of art and culture to the wider public, facilitating its circulation and consumption within society. These are the spaces where we go to experience the immersion that art and culture provides. What we are actually immersing ourselves in though is the spectacle, as it is spectacular society that provides the foundation for the operation of these exact spaces. As mentioned earlier, culture becomes a star commodity within spectacular society. Debord (1957) attributes this to culture’s ability to reflect the possible organisations of life in a given society. Thus, art and culture is used to mediate our social relationships and our understanding of the world, even though it is not presented as doing so. Art and cultural institutions implement spectacularisation to achieve this, in doing so they dilute the maker’s authority over their work by transferring that responsibility to themselves. Yves-Alain Bois et. al. (2004, 434) trace the development of this tactic among these institutions to the period following the Second World War, as postwar culture centred around enforced consumption and submission to the spectacle; focus solely on the development of commodities. For these institutions, their commodities are the work in their collections and the exhibitions or shows they stage. They are the assets from which the institution accumulates capital wealth and growth as a corporate entity (Krauss, 1990, 5). The need for these institutions to generate their own capital escalated during the postwar period. In America, the National Endowment for the Arts was established in 1965, allocating large sums of money to the arts sector annually which continues to this day[1]. The effect of this funding resulted in art galleries and museums needing to hold large scale and big-budget shows and exhibitions to increase revenue on their admissions (2004, 576). The impact of these shows, however, is that they fostered an environment for the spectacle to become an art and cultural subject. The spectacle was now inherently a part of the works housed within these institutions and displayed in their exhibitions, yet always lurking underneath the surface; never visibly apparent. Exhibitions were held aiming to amaze, dazzle and entertain the spectators, actively participating in what Krauss (1990, 8) categorises as a culture of commodity production. Spectacular society guides this process as it creates a medium through which to convey: visual imagery. As such, a show at an art gallery takes existing works and makes them mere visual representations of themselves, their meaning recontextualised and reconfigured by the exhibition itself. The exhibition then renders these works as a series of images, which we then use to construct how we understand our social relationships and our social world, creating a unifying experience among those that saw the show. This cycle of spectacularisation occurs incessantly in art and culture as that is the prevailing mode of its facilitation within Western society. Gradually, the spectacle results in the erosion of “the autonomous spaces of cultural representation,” as Benjamin Buchloh (2004, 673) argues. This means that the spectacle is able to completely colonise our perception of art and culture due to its hegemonic weight within contemporary society (Alberto, Herschmann and Pereira, 2004, 293). Consequently, the spectacle entirely frames our understanding of art and culture. Thus, we no longer see art and culture as an independent entity but rather a product of the latent commodification that gave rise to spectacularised subjects.

Spectacular society impacts art and culture by assimilating itself to the point where art and culture is governed by the constraints of the spectacle. This, however, goes against the idea that art and culture is a higher, independent power. Many philosophers have commented upon art’s ability to inspire and provoke beauty. Jakob Burckhardt (1943, 179) claims that art and culture’s central impulse is imagination, something that is always considered divine, enabling it to be a faculty of innate power and creation. This idea is extended upon by Herbert Read (1969, 24), who asserts that art is the result of the artist’s search to attain a higher level of individual sensibility and perception. This then allows art to be the binding, energizing and fusing force of society as it vivifies the ideas that permeate society by showcasing the individual’s triumph (1969, 16). For Burckhardt and Read, art and culture is a higher independent entity that is the culmination of the artist’s creativity. Debord himself agrees that art is autonomous, however, only when evoked by memory as that is when its inherent beauty becomes clear. Thus art’s true greatness and independence “emerges at the dusk of life (1992, 104).” Spectacular society is to blame for this as it takes art and culture away from its original purpose of showcasing the artist’s imagination and creativity into a marvel held in public art institutions, which developed into a spectacularised object, shaping our understanding of the social world.

Art and culture, however, can provide an escape to the spectacle’s all-encompassing nature. The key to this is found in the act of spectatorship. In Society of the Spectacle, Debord states that culture can get away from the spectacle by negating itself, in fact, it is obliged to do so in order to maintain its values (1992, 114). Through negation, art and culture can remove itself from spectacular society and no longer be considered in terms of the spectacle, regaining its autonomy. For this process to occur though, it must go through the spectator. French Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne argued that when viewing an artwork, the spectators ‘must render the image of what we see, forgetting everything that existed before us.’[2] This, however, goes against our preconceived notions of what it means to be a spectator. We are inherently taught that spectatorship means that we cannot interfere or question what we are viewing; the spectator’s behavioural code is one of passive watching (2016, 77). In order for art and culture to achieve its independence, spectators need to scrutinise it to come to their own perceptions about the meaning of the work. Autonomous thought among spectators prevents spectacular society from determining how art and culture is transmitted within society and the spectacle dictating the societal understanding of art and culture. That is because seeing is a deliberate action; it is a form of movement. Our individual movements are indicators of our own inner thoughts or emotions at a given time. They are the “language in which our most fundamental inspirations are expressed (von Laban and Lawrence, 1974, 74).” As such, by spectating we are actively participating in the work because we are refashioning and understanding it in our own way (Rancière, 2010, 13). Spectacular society’s pervasive nature, however, dilutes our ability to view art and culture in this way as the spectacle’s integration with the work disorients the spectator’s perception of their own individual reality.

Minimalism, an art movement that emerged around the 1960s, highlights art and culture’s difficulty in being separate from the spectacle. Building on from Malevich’s Suprematism and Duchamp’s Readymades, Minimalism aimed to create works of maximum immediacy and a renewed reality (Morphet, 1976, 762). The artists’ emphasis was on the structure and form of the work, as they believed that art could impose rational order on the mind (Gablik, 1994, 245). To paraphrase Ad Reinhart (1960, 285), a deformulated art must be rigidly formulaic in nature. This philosophy guided Minimalist art practice. At its very core Minimalism was trying to approach art in a different manner, using works such as Duchamp’s Fountain (fig. 1) and Malevich’s Black Square (fig. 2) as the foundations for highlighting that art and cultural practice can be more than an arrangement of forms to create something aesthetically beautiful. As a result, Minimalist artists are actively challenging the spectator to question their own perception of art. Take Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (fig.3) as an example. The work is an organisation of 120 bricks into a rectangle in a two-by-six-by-ten form. Here, Andre is repurposing an ordinary object and reformulating it into an art subject, a common practice within Minimalism. Rosalind Krauss (1990, 9) classifies this reformulation as a utopian gesture. Minimalism, however, became subject to and a victim of spectacular society. Art institutions commodified the radical nature of the movement to stage Minimalist works in a market-driven spectacular space, one that advocated for pure presentness (Bishop, 2011, 1). Spectacularisation of Equivalent VIII reduced the work to an image of shocking absurdity; the fact that bricks could be art had to be seen to be believed. Thanks to the spectacle, it is possible for the gallery and museum to swallow the works they house (2004, 656), suffocating their ability to be independent entities. Equivalent VIII is often considered one the most important Minimalist works, however its circulation and transmission is thanks to spectacular society. As such, we refer to the work in terms of the spectacle rather than a work that shatters our ideas of what art and culture can be, highlighting art’s struggle for independence from the thing that facilitates its consumption, circulation and transmission within contemporary society: the spectacle.

Our lives are infiltrated by notions of the spectacle constantly. They mediate our social world and the relationships which take place within it. Art and culture is subject to the same cycle of spectacularisation that occurs in all facets of contemporary society. The spectacle is found within and is an inherent part of, the works of art and culture that we see. It shapes our understanding causing us to think in terms of the spectacle, because that is actually what we are seeing, its presence ingrained into our consciousness. As a result, it is the spectacle that dictates how we understand art and culture, as its consumption and transmission is reliant upon spectacular society. Art and culture, however, does possess the ability to be an independent entity and reduce the impact of the spectacle; but the spectacle’s pervasive presence within society means it struggles to achieve autonomy.

[1] In its first ten years of existence, the NEA allocated over $260 million USD to the American arts sector. For more information see: https://www.arts.gov/open-government/national-endowment-arts-appropriations-history

[2] Quoted by Herbert Read in ‘Art and Alienation: The Role of the Artist in Society’, p.25.

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